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Colonialism is a dehumanizing experience for all those at the mercy of its power structures. The officers of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) were no exception. This book focuses on the role of ICS in World War II and engages in a wider debate about colonialism’s impact on its administrators and subjects. The author looks at the events of World War II specifically in the province of Assam in India’s North-East. It is here that the British and American troops were stationed as they attempted to retake Burma following Japan’s invasion in 1942 and supply the Allied Chinese by road and air. The volume also focuses on how radio broadcasting was used to manufacture the Indian public’s consent for the war effort and explores the horrors of the Bengal Famine and the controversies surrounding the British responses to it. The central character in the book’s narrative is Sir Andrew Clow who was a career civil servant in India. He was the Minister for Communications during the late 1930s and early 1940s before he became the Governor of Assam in 1942. The book is partly a biography of his fascinating career.

Most people imagine the period between Timur’s sack of Delhi and the arrival of the Mughals to be one of unrelenting darkness and disorder. The first major compendium of essays on the ‘long’ fifteenth century, this book presents a very different picture: one of intense cultural ferment, innovations in literature and language choice, and new forms of religious organization and expression. These cultural developments are set against a backdrop of political transformation. Once Timur returned to Samarkand in 1399, new kings and chieftains jostled for power, making new alliances and calling upon far-flung networks that stretched from Afghanistan to Bengal. Alongside the old capitals rose new towns inhabited by merchants and professionals, where long-standing local, cultural, and political forms were offset by transregional conversations wrought by increasingly mobile poets, preachers, and warriors who travelled widely in search of employment and adventure. A generation ago, the eighteenth century was revealed to be a period of innovation and entrepreneurship. In a similar vein, this book rehabilitates the fifteenth century through the interdisciplinary research of leading scholars of premodern South Asia, revealing foundational political and literary currents that have hitherto been obscured by empire-centred narratives of history.

This book interleaves the history of post-Independence archaeology in India with the life and times of Madhukar Narhar Deshpande (1920–2008), a leading Indian archaeologist who went on to become the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India. Spanning nearly a century, this is a tale about the circumstances which brought men like Deshpande to this career path; what it was like to grow up in a family devoted to India’s freedom; the watershed moment that created a large cohort that was trained by Mortimer Wheeler, the doyen of British archaeology who headed the Archaeological Survey in the twilight years of the British Raj; the unknown conservation stories around the Gol Gumbad in Bijapur and the Qutb Minar in Delhi; the forgotten story of how the fabric of a historic Hindu shrine, the Badrinath temple, was saved; the chemistry shared by the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the archaeologist, Deshpande at historic cave shrines like Ajanta and Ellora, and; the political and administrative challenges faced by director generals of archaeology. The story is told through a main character—Deshpande himself—some of whose writings have been included here. Equally, there are others who figure in the narrative as it reconstructs and recounts the story of Indian archaeology after 1947 through those lives as also through the institutional history of the Archaeological Survey and the processes that were central to the discoveries it made and the challenges it faced.

The archives are generally sites where historians conduct research into our past. Seldom are they objects of research. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya traces the path that led to the creation of a central archive in India, from the setting up of the Imperial Record Department, the precursor of the National Archives of India, and the Indian Historical Records Commission, to the framing of archival policies and the change in those policies over the years. In the last two decades of colonial rule in India, there were anticipations of freedom in many areas of the public sphere. These were felt in the domain of archiving as well, chiefly in the form of reversal of earlier policies. From this perspective, Bhattacharya explores the relation between knowledge and power and discusses how the World Wars and the decline of Britain, among other factors, effected a transition from a Eurocentric and disparaging approach to India towards a more liberal and less ethnocentric one.

The Arthur Crawford Scandal explores how nineteenth century Bombay tried a British official for corruption. The presidency government persuaded Indians, government officials, to testify against the very person who controlled their career by offering immunity from legal action and career punishment. A criminal conviction of Crawford’s henchman established the modus operandi of a bribery network. Subsequent efforts to intimidate Indian witnesses led to litigation at the high court level, resulting in a political pressure campaign in London based on biased press reports from India. These reports evoked questions in the House of Commons; questions became demands that Indians witnesses against Crawford be fired from government service. The secretary of state for India and the Bombay government negotiated about the fate of the Indian witnesses. At first, the secretary of state accepted the Bombay government’s proposals. But the press campaign against the Indian witnesses eventually led him to order the Government of India, in consultation with the Government of Bombay, to pass a law ordering those officials who paid Crawford willingly, to be fired. Those whom the Bombay government determined to be extorted were not to be fired. Both groups retained immunity from further actions at law. Thus, Bombay won a victory that almost saved its original guarantee of immunity: those who were fired were to receive their salary (along with periodic step increases) until they reached retirement age, at which time they would receive a pension. However, this ‘solution’ did little to overcome the stigma and suffering of the fired officials.

This book investigates the history of the Muslim communities in Delhi from the conquest of the city by Lord Lake in 1803 to the end of the First World War. It is based on a large range of sources in English, Urdu, and Persian—from government records to novels, from Sufi writings and fatwas to genealogies, from maps to miniatures, from handwritten newsletters to women’s journals. The book follows two main questions. One, Muslims have long been defined, first and foremost, by their religious identity. This study takes religion not as a given but asks about the universe of alternative identities—gender, territorial, class, descent, and language, which all shape a person’s sense of belonging to a specific community. It is only the interaction between the different identities, the book argues, which permits a re-evaluation of religious identity and a response to the question of when and under what circumstances it gains or loses predominance. Two, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the category of ashraf, marking out the respectable families, brought together the nobility and the educated and distinguished them from the trading communities, which were classified under the common people. This changed from the middle of the century: the new ashraf distinguished themselves not only from the commoners but also the nobility, held responsible for the disaster of 1857. At the same time, their new emphasis on work and achievement brought them nearer to the merchants. Thus the two-tiered social structure gave way to a three-tiered one, and the ashraf were transformed into middle classes.

This volume is about the history of the decline of the Mauryan dynasty in ancient India and the reign of Aśoka Maurya. It describes the sources of information for this study and Aśoka's early life, and his accession to the throne. It discusses the social and economic activity, internal administration, and foreign relations in Mauryan India and evaluates the role of Aśoka's policy of Dhamma in bringing social order. It highlights the weaknesses of the Mauryan rulers who followed after Aśoka's death and suggests reasons for the subsequent decline of the Mauryan dynasty.

More than a century ago, Atiya Fyzee, a Muslim woman of the renowned Tyabji clan, set out from colonial Bombay to study in Edwardian London. As she rode the steamboat, she began writing her daily experiences in a diary that would later appear as serialized entries in an Urdu women’s magazine published from the Punjab. Despite the magazine’s small circulation at the time, Atiya’s travelogue drew enough attention and gave the fledgling author her first taste of fame. In the years to come, she also became well known for her friendship with Maulana Shibli Numani and Muhammad Iqbal, two of South Asia’s most prominent Muslim intellectuals. Atiya and her husband Samuel Rahamin gained popularity worldwide in the early twentieth century in the fields of music, dance, theatre, the visual arts, and literature. Atiya Fyzee became a key figure in the cultural and intellectual history of South Asia. Atiya’s legend, sometimes contradictory and often exoticized, was formed in the last years of her life when she lived in Karachi after the Partition. This is a fascinating account of a Muslim women’s experience of ‘everyday’ in Edwardian Britain.

This book investigates the deeper area of class antagonism between the privileged and underprivileged classes as they faced the colonial state and its different ideas of legality and sovereignty in colonial Bengal. It examines the ambiguity in the bhadralok — the educated middle class — response to courts and jails. The author argues that the discourse of superior ‘bhadralok’ ethics and morals was juxtaposed against the ‘chhotolok’ — who were devoid of such ethical values. This enabled the bhadralok to claim for themselves the position of the ‘aware’ legal subject as a class — a ‘good’ subject obedient to the dictates of the new rule of law, unlike the recalcitrant and ethically ill-equipped chhotolok. The author underlines the development of a new cultural language of morality that delineated the parameters of bhadralok public behaviour. As the ‘rule of law’ of the British government slid unobtrusively into the public domain, the criminal courts and the jails turned into public theatres of infamy — spaces that the ethically bound bhadralok dreaded occupying. The volume, thus, documents how the colonial legal and penal institutions streamlined the identities of some sections of the lower castes into ‘criminal caste’. It also examines the nature of colonial bureaucracy and highlights the social silence on gender and women's criminality.

The book is an attempt at understanding the complex issues of identity formation in the relatively unexplored region of Northeast India. The work adopts the methodology of historical anthropology to make sense of a particular ethnic group, namely the Mizo, one of the many such groups in the region. While taking into consideration presentist self-perceptions of who the Mizos are, the study engages with their history as well as social practice to show the contours of identity-shaping and identity-making. Following from identity studies elsewhere, the author engages with the ideas of ‘difference’ and how it plays an important role in the creation of identity. She examines mainland India’s views about the Northeast and argues that the notion of ‘difference’ is deeply embedded in the politics of domination and hegemonization. Another thrust in the book is to look for patterns in social organization that impinge on identity-making that are not far removed from self-ascribed notions about the ‘ethnic self’. Such self-ascribed notions are seen as instruments of agency that defy the views of the ‘other’, while also organizing the ‘ethnic self’. In this, the community’s engagements with Christianity, which is ‘localized’, and its practices surrounding death are seen as prime organizers. ‘Praxis’, especially in the context of Christianity and death, are thus seen not only as chief organizers of Mizo identity, but also as the boundary markers around which notions of belonging and exclusion are invoked.

This book explores the contours of print production in Goa as an extension of the questions that had prompted the studies on print in colonial India. It looks into the nature of and principles guiding Portuguese colonialism in Goa. The discussion of print as the locus of the formation and contestation of polities rests on certain assumptions about the functioning of the colonial state, its relation with the colonial elite, relations within colonial society, dissemination and bilingualism. The book initially draws on the representations of the Catholic elite, who were historically situated by colonial policy to occupy that public realm in which representations from elite and the state circulated among a limited public. The basic determinants of the colonial print sphere, such as language, the price and availability of print, and the Portuguese colonial state’s stance towards indigenous culture and the colonial elite were manifest in this interaction. This book examines how publications such as newsprint, novels, and pamphlets were printed in Goa during the nineteenth century.

Halide Edip (1884–1964) once observed that Turkey is an ideal cross-section of the human world. Her own life was no less eclectic. A prolific novelist, teacher, erudite scholar, and political activist, Edip preserved her objectivity throughout her odyssey on the left-of-centre. Building on Edip’s connections with the Indian national movement and Mahatma Gandhi, this volume analyses her description of India and its bearing on her life. It explores several aspects of Edip’s career in India including the questions she confronts on gender, modernity, freedom movement, Gandhian movement, participation of women in the freedom struggle, religion and politics, and everyday life. At another level, the volume identifies common currents of history and experience between India and Turkey. It explores a number of issues of tremendous significance for the histories of liberation struggles and nation building in the Third World in general and Muslim/Islamic world in particular.

‘City of Gold’, ‘Urbs Prima in Indis’, ‘Maximum City’: no Indian metropolis has captivated the public imagination quite like Mumbai. The past decade has seen an explosion of historical writing on the city that was once Bombay. This book, featuring new essays by its finest historians, presents a rich sample of Bombay’s palimpsestic pasts. It considers the making of urban communities and spaces, the workings of power and the nationalist makeover of the colonial city. In addressing these themes, the contributors to this volume engage critically with the scholarship of a distinguished historian of this frenetic metropolis. For over five decades, Jim Masselos has brought to life with skill and empathy Bombay’s hidden histories. His books and essays have traversed an extraordinarily diverse range of subjects, from the actions of the city’s elites to the struggles of its most humble denizens. His pioneering research has opened up new perspectives and inspired those who have followed in his wake. Bombay Before Mumbai is a fitting tribute to Masselos’ enduring contribution to South Asian urban history

Caught in the web of global economic fluctuations, Bombay experienced a cataclysmic financial crisis in the 1860s. Before the crash the city’s economy was heavily dependent on the trade in cotton. By 1865, with the end of the American Civil War, the price of cotton plummeted, and with it the fortunes of Bombay’s people. Even people not directly involved in the cotton trade were affected. Thousands declared themselves insolvent and sought the protection of the Bombay High Court. Drawing on almost twenty thousand petitions of insolvents, Asiya Siddiqi explores a crucial phase of transformations in Indian economy and society. Situating her study in the early colonial period of constant negotiations between local, colonial, and global relationships, Siddiqi maps patterns of income, literacy levels, and connections between religion and occupation. She not only analyses the finances of the wealthy and the powerful but also of working people. Among the people who made an appearance in the insolvency petitions were artisans, traders, courtesans and dancing girls, managers, homemakers, domestic servants, and labourers. The documents tell us about types of professions, modes of self-identification, kinds and degrees of literacy, and income levels. The study also illuminates certain features of colonial law. People whose conduct was grounded in customary codes of practice that were relatively flexible and informal had to negotiate the streamlining and codification of practices that the colonial government undertook. From this scrutiny is revealed the workings of the complex and dynamic economic and social relationships among Bombay’s people in the late nineteenth century.

For over two and a half millennia Āyurveda was the mainstream healthcare programme in the Indian subcontinent. However, what was once seen as indispensable, is now often officially described as ‘alternative medicine’. Moreover, there seems to be a lack of proper understanding of the specific culture from which Āyurveda emerged. This is because existing works on the subject have mostly been mere compilations of Āyurvedic practices and focused on classical texts. This book studies the stages of development in the system of Āyurveda and its practice from proto-historic times until British colonization. Using original Pāli and Sanskrit works, archaeological artefacts, as well as oft-neglected medieval epigraphic documents, M. R. Raghava Varier highlights how centuries of privileging Western knowledge has resulted in the sidelining of indigenous learning—a process that accelerated with the advent of colonialism. Further, he makes use of Jain and Buddhist sources to question the assumption that Āyurveda is a purely Hindu or Brahmanical system, thus providing a historiographical frame for conceptually establishing the notion of Āyurveda.

The work attempts to show how the shadow of Partition continues to fall over the society and politics of the state of Assam and how issues such as immigration, demographic change, language, and identity as well as citizenship that occupied the centre stage in the years immediately before and after the Partition have not only retained their relevance but have also gained an extra sense of urgency in the contemporary politics of the region. It is interesting to note that in the archive of the colonial state, the reader is often confronted with the region’s colonial past. The quest to define the Assamese identity still continues as it did in the 1940s and 1950s, and the historical effects of Partition have certainly had a long afterlife in the region. Not only did the Partition radically transform the political geography of the region and turn it overnight into a landlocked one, its aftereffects continued to be felt in the socio-political and economic life of the region in diverse ways. This book focuses primarily on the issues of immigration, land, language, and identity, which are seen as the unresolved issues of Partition politics. It attempts to show how after seven decades of Independence, the issues that almost exclusively engaged the public mind in the pre-Partition days continue to do so in today’s Assam. It is as if Assam has been caught in a rather eerie time warp.

Rarely do Indian environmental discourses examine nature through the lens of caste. Whereas nature is considered as universal and inherent, caste is understood as a constructed historical and social entity. Mukul Sharma shows how caste and nature are intimately connected. He compares Dalit meanings of environment to ideas and practices of neo-Brahmanism and certain mainstreams of environmental thought. Showing how Dalit experiences of environment are ridden with metaphors of pollution, impurity, and dirt, the author is able to bring forth new dimensions on both environment and Dalits, without valourizing the latter’s standpoint. Rather than looking for a coherent understanding of their ecology, the book explores the diverse and rich intellectual resources of Dalits, such as movements, songs, myths, memories, and metaphors around nature. These reveal their quest to define themselves in caste-ridden nature and building a form of environmentalism free from the burdens of caste. The Dalits also pose a critical challenge to Indian environmentalism, which has, until now, marginalized such linkages between caste and nature.

This is a short yet critical biography of a major religious figure from Hindu Bengal, Krishna Chaitanya (1486–1533), based on extant hagiographical sources from medieval Bengal as also recent scholarly studies. It relies on both Bengali and English language sources, creating a dialogic and dynamic relationship between the two. The book primarily addresses graduate students and interested general readers in an easily accessible and intelligible manner, without taking recourse to copious notes and citations. The intention of this project was to produce a narrative that was both gripping and enjoyable. However, there is also ample material in this book that will interest and motivate the researcher as well. A significant part of this work is a critical evaluation of just how Chaitanya has been perceived and understood after his time, particularly in colonial Bengal where he has come to assume the place of an iconic figure. Interested readers will find the painstakingly compiled appendices quite useful.

As the administrative and commercial capital of British India and as one of the earliest experiments in modern urbanization in the sub-continent, Calcutta proved enormously challenging to both its residents and its architects. In this imaginative study of colonial Calcutta, Anindita Ghosh charts the history of its urbanization from below—in its streets, strikes, and popular urban cultures. Claiming the City offers a close-up view of the city’s underbelly by drawing in a range of non-archival sources—from illustrations and amateur photographs to street songs, local histories, and memoirs—which show that Calcutta was not just a ‘problem’ to be disciplined and governed, as the colonialists would have us believe. Instead, the city emerges as a lively and crucial site for the shaping of the discourse on claims to urban spaces and resources by various marginal groups. Ghosh uses the everyday as a prism for exposing the wide spectrum of political and social imaginaries that shaped the city and shows how the once proverbial ‘City of Palaces’ slowly turned into a city of endemic unrest and strife.

What can war tell us about empire? Climate of Conquest is built around this question. Pratyay Nath eschews the conventional way of writing about warfare primarily in terms of battles and technologies. Instead, he unravels the deep connections that Mughal war-making shared with the broader dynamics of society, culture, and politics. In the process, he offers a new analysis of the Mughal empire from the vantage point of war. Climate of Conquest closely studies the dynamics of the military campaigns that helped the Mughals conquer North India and project their power beyond it. In the first part, Nath argues that these campaigns unfolded in constant negotiation with the diverse natural environment of South Asia. The empire sought to discipline the environment and harness its resources to satisfy its own military needs. At the same time, environmental factors like climate, terrain, and ecology profoundly influenced Mughal military tactics, strategy, and deployment of technology. In the second part, Nath makes three main points. Firstly, he argues that Mughal military success owed a lot to the efficient management of military logistics and the labour of an enormous non-elite, non-combatant workforce. Secondly, he explores the making of imperial frontiers and highlights the roles of forts, routes, and local alliances in the process. Finally, he maps the cultural climate of war at the Mughal court and discusses how the empire legitimized war and conquest. In the process, what emerges is a fresh interpretation of Mughal empire-building as a highly adaptive, flexible, and accommodative process.