Search

This research paper is an inquiry into the inclination of the two principal characters in Shubhangi Swarup's debut novel Latitudes of Longing to relate their own lives with the components of their respective ecological environment(s) that they come into contact with in the narrative. The plight of immigrants from India and Burma in the colonial Andaman Islands that the novelist implicitly and explicitly touches upon has prompted this research to be carried out through the perspective of postcolonial ecocriticism. Given that the Karen1 are a relatively recent population to be recognized as a separate community, another aim of this paper is to bring to light the sort of representation found by the Karen in contemporary novels, with respect to their treatment and perception of nature through the years of resettlement, rebellion and seeking an identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the introduction of trained female nurses for the British army men in colonial India between 1888 and 1920. It discusses the genesis of the Indian Nursing Service (INS), including the background and negotiations leading up to its formation, terms of employment, duties and working conditions of the nursing sisters. The memoir of Catharine Grace Loch, who served as the first Chief Lady Superintendent of the service is used extensively to trace the early experiences and challenges of the nursing sisters. The paper primarily argues that the INS being a new service, the colonial government maintained tight control over its functioning, and extreme conservatism in spending, thus retarding the growth of professional army nursing in India. Secondly, in examining the relations between the sisters and the (male) nursing orderlies, sub-medical and medical officers, the paper argues that the inadequate delineation of the nursing sisters' position in the military medical hierarchy was an important reason for the undermining of their expertise and status. Thirdly, the paper contends that as an all-women service, nursing constituted an important avenue of female agency within the patriarchal colonial establishment, which subjected the sisters to scrutiny both professionally and socially. The paper analyses the resultant conditions and regulations imposed on the sisters – most of them determined by gender and class notions. Finally, the paper discusses the gradual establishment and recognition of the service as an important cornerstone for the health of the army, while highlighting the shortcomings that yet persisted up until 1920. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Ártemis: Estudos de Gênero, Feminismo e Sexualidades is the property of Revista Artemis and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper traces the history of a widening distance and constructed difference between Hindi and Urdu, and their communal identification in colonial and post-colonial India. It examines how majoritarian politics has shaped the language related issues in independent India. Finally, based on limited fieldwork in the Indian city of Mumbai, this paper tries to find out what language does common people speak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greenough's large-scale geological map of India (1854) represents a significant landmark in the history of geological cartography in India, it being the first geological map of the entire Indian sub-continent. This paper attempts to provide an account of the production, distribution, variants and survivorship of this pioneering map. The geological information contained on the map is based almost entirely on published data sources, Greenough never having visited India, yet the map is far more than a mere compilation. Its construction required the preparation of a topographic base map, geological interpolation over large swathes of unmapped territory, the organizing of mainly lithological descriptions into a unified chronostratigraphic order, and the integration of palaeontological information. By modern standards the delineation of strata on the map is imprecise, stratigraphic resolution is poor, and structural data are entirely lacking, yet it remained unrivalled as the only available geological map of all-India until the Geological Survey of India produced a smaller-scale map some twenty-four years later. In terms of areal coverage and paucity of reliable information, Greenough's India map represents a far more ambitious and pioneering undertaking than his more famous geological map of England and Wales. 202 copies of the map were produced, sixty of which were purchased by the East India Company, while a further forty or so were gifted by Greenough to various public institutions and distinguished geologists. Edward Stanford acquired publishing rights to the map in 1855 and continued to offer copies for sale until at least 1898. A recent survey has identified three variant states of the map and has confidently located thirty-four surviving copies. For reasons outlined here, Greenough's India map has languished in obscurity since its publication. It deserves to be better known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The De-notified tribes are tribal communities that were notified under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) 1871 in colonial India. Although the Act was repealed after independence, the tribes declared as 'criminals' continue to remain labeled and are still living with stigma. Tribes notified under the CTA became De-notified in Independent India. The De-notified tribes in India continue to remain as one of India's most excluded and marginalized communities, excluding opportunities and deprived of resources. There are 198 De-notified tribes in India. After the repeal of the act post-independence, some of the declared tribal communities were included among the Scheduled tribes' population in different states; some yet continue to remain enlisted as the 'De-notified' tribes in India. The De-notified tribes comprise a significant population in India, and they are classified under a separate category as DNTs or DNCs. These tribal groups, although were "de-notified" they continue to face discrimination in their everyday life. These tribes do not have access to basic resources and livelihood opportunities; they are treated differently by people from other castes. They also face discrimination at the hands of the police. Their stigmatized spoiled identity due to ancestral labeling influences their present critically. They are subject to atrocities in the hands of the police and power groups in the village. The incidences of atrocities in the case of the De-notified tribes are not acknowledged under the Prevention of Atrocities Act by the state, which protects the marginalized communities and tribes. Their complaints remain unnoticed, and they are subject to false suspicion. The tribe remains in poverty and is subject to stigma and exclusion; their situations have not changed. The government has made no notable attempt to create provisions for upliftment of these communities and safeguard their rights. The absence of uniformity in the reservation policy keeps them away from the government benefits. This paper attempts to highlight the issues and problems faced by the de-notified tribes in Maharashtra India, narrating their experiences of spoiled identity and stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Comparative Education / Revista Española de Educación Comparada is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Looking at the interplay of law and revenue as a means of understanding colonial practices and policies towards diaras, this paper addresses a relatively neglected field in the agrarian-ecological history of South Asia. The constant formation and disappearance of lands due to river shifts raised several issues. Among the most important from the viewpoint of the colonial state were secure revenue extraction and the fixation of proprietorial rights. Using a number of case-studies, the paper argues that, although maximisation of revenue did not necessarily mean the dilution of the idea of the Permanent Settlement, the state throughout the nineteenth century failed to arrive at a standardised set of practices because of its own structural (bureaucratic) incoherency, ideological underpinnings and the ecological settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper proposes the furtherance of a rational choice explanation for the caste system. Using ethnographic and qualitative evidence on the history of institutional changes in the caste structure of India, I show that caste has been used in India by invaders and power-vying local rulers as a way to systematically exert administrative, political, and economic control over a populace. I also use instances of caste in other parts of the world throughout time as well as how caste has changed since a ban on discrimination based on caste three years after the end of British occupation over India to provide further evidence. While I do not make claims that my theory is mono-causal, I make the much milder claim that it has worked in tandem with other theories of the origins, continuance, and structure of caste systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the colonial North India of the late 19th century, the cow emerged as a powerful symbol of imagining the nation. The present paper explores how the image of the sacred cow was reinterpreted in the new sociopolitical context and subsequently employed in the Hindi novel, the development of which coincided with massive campaigns for cow protection. To this end, I study one of the earliest Hindi novels, Nissahāy hindū, written by Rādhākr̥ṣṇadās in 1881 and published in 1890. The novel can be read as a documentary evidence of polemics surrounding the process of identity formation and circumstances attending it, as articulated in the Hindi vernacular during the last decades of the 19th century. The agitation for cow protection is the novel's leitmotif revolving around the theme of Hindu-Muslim unity, framed in an original and unconventional way. It introduces the bold idea of a Muslim agitating for cow protection and sacrificing himself for the movement. The analysis of the novel, alongside Bhāratendu Hariścandra's seminal speech of 1884, reveals growing concerns regarding the Hindu-Muslim-British relations at the time of momentous religious, social and economic changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is dedicated to reconstructing the image of the British colonial rule in India in modern Hindi cinema. The main stress in the analysis is laid upon the depiction of the political and cultural impact of the British rule on common Indian people, as well as the colonizers' attitude towards the independence movement. Consequently, the author intends to enquire, how movies made after 2000 - among which Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001), Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005), Water (2005) and Rang De Basanti (2006) are given special attention - deal with the difficult colonial past from an over 50-year-long perspective. Moreover, the author explains, how modern Hindi cinema shapes Indian viewers' opinions on the British rule, intending to strengthen their patriotic feelings and national pride. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Passage to India is a seminal source, which has a clinical approach at the colonial outrages, racial traumas, and the multifarious ramifications of racism that the Anglo Indians perpetrated on the locals. The novel socially and psychologically explores the unhealthy dimensions of the colonizer-colonized relationships. The disgusting attitudes of the English expatriates as well as the hatred of the Indians, is the primary foundation of the racial tension between the two races. The antagonistic relationships between the two extreme communities made the social life in India unbearable and miserable. The miserable situation in colonized India deteriorated due to the violations of the values and rights of the indigenous Indians. In A Passage to India, the average Indian individual seems to consider mistrust and suspicion as his/her best guide. However, Indian citizens are exploited by the colonizer's rude demeanors and racial, condescending and frustrating attitudes which eat into the vitals of the Indian community, In A Passage to India, E. M. Forster, highlights these biased and prejudiced racial attitudes. E.M. Forster in the novel clinically excoriates the patronizing British ruling caste. He also condemns the intolerance of the Indian community represented by Dr. Aziz, who is guided by his intuitions, imagination and emotions rather than his sense of intellect and reasoning. This racial tension in the colonized Indian society can be condensed by adopting a sensible attitude based on adopting human values, such as interracial love, peace, harmony and understanding. This paper delineates how racism and its different multiple manifestations have an effect on the relationships between the characters of different races. Forster furthermore underscores various human values such as interracial tolerance, love and understating. The violations of these values, however, is considered as the root cause of the racial tensions in the British Raj. Forster channels his biting satire and harsh criticism against the British rulers due to their unbearable racist discriminations against indigenous natives. This study, therefore, critically highlights race relations and the traumatic effects of the British colonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Anglo-Indian modernist architect and city planner Walter Sykes George and his influence from British architect Edwin Lutyens, who also worked in Delhi and New Delhi, India. The author examines George's letters with his family friend Anne Shearer and architectural theorist Hope Bagenal and offers an overview of George's career. Specific topics include George's appreciation for Classical architecture, his work for architect Herbert Baker in New Delhi, George's integration of Indian culture into his designs such as Kashmir House and St. Stephen's College, and his work in India after it gained independence from Great Britain.

This paper follows the careers of ‘outlawed’ Indian Muslim subjects who moved outside the geographical and political space of British India and located themselves at the intersection of nineteenth century trans-Asiatic politics: Hijaz, Istanbul and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and Burma and Acheh in the East. These areas were sites where ‘modern’ Empires (British, Dutch, Ottoman and Russian) coalesced to lay out a trans-Asiatic imperial assemblage. The paper shows how Muslim ‘outlaws’ made careers and carved out their transnational networks by moving across the imperial assemblages of the nineteenth century. British colonial rule, being an important spoke in the imperial wheel, enabled much of this transnationalism to weld together. Webs of connections derived from older forms of Islamic connectivity as well: diplomacy, kinship ties, the writing of commentaries on Islam and its sacred texts in unique ways, oral traditions, madrasa and student contacts. These networks were inclusive and impacted by the tanzimat-inspired scriptural reformist thought in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. They were not narrowly anti-colonial in tone as they derived from a complex inter-play of imperial rivalries in the region. Rather, they were geared towards the triumph of reformist Islam that would unite the umma (community) and engage with the European world order. The paper shows how this imperially-embedded and individual-driven Muslim transnational network linked with Muslim politics rooted within India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

History of tense relations between India and Pakistan dates back to the time of independence of both the states from the British Raj in 1947. Nonetheless, attempts have been made to pave the way for peace and trust building but in vain. This study looks at idiosyncrasy in policy making by looking at three different attacks that took place in India and the response of New Delhi to each. It further explores the personality of Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi vis-à-vis his religious and ideological beliefs and also analyses the extent to which these factors sway Modi in formulating policy particularly towards Indian minority (Muslims) and neighbours like Pakistan. Employing content analysis of the daily Dawn with the timeline of 2001 to 2019, the paper methodologically looks at three significant attacks in Indian administered territories till the Pulwama bombing. To have a perspective of the latter, this paper raises the question why the attack on the Indian parliament and Mumbai attacks failed to generate similar response as the Pulwama attack did. The paper argues that the Pulwama attack generated a different response due to idiosyncrasy, personality traits, religious and nationalistic tendency of the current administrator of India. More importantly, the season of election is always sensitive; meanwhile incumbent government is always scouting for event(s) to be exploited as political capital for election victory. Premised on the theoretical underpinnings of personality traits, religious ideology and an event such as the Pulwama attack, Modi has managed to change the playbook of India-Pakistan relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period of British rule from 1757 to 1900 is marked by major sociopolitical changes and scientific breakthroughs that impacted medical systems, institutions, and practitioners in India. In addition, historians have debated whether the colonial regime used Western medicine as a tool to expand and legitimize its rule. This paper reviews the secondary literature on this subject with emphasis on the individual physicians. During this period, the practice of "Doctory" or Western medicine gained momentum in India, buoyed with the support of the British as well as Western-educated Indians. Many Indians were trained in Western medicine and employed by the administration as "native doctors" in the subordinate medical service, and the superior medical service by and large comprised Europeans. The colonial regime gradually withdrew most of its patronage to the indigenous systems of medicine. The practitioners of these systems, the vaidyas and the hakims, suffered significant loss of prestige against Western medicine's claims of being a more rational "superior" system of medicine. Some of them became purists and defended and promoted their systems, while others adopted the methods and ideas of Western medicine into their education and practice. European doctors now rarely interacted with practitioners of Indian systems, but seriously pursued research into medicinal plants and tropical diseases. There is no mention of specialist physicians in this period, and all physicians and surgeons were generalists. Folk practitioners continued to be popular among the masses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is a short presentation on the most popular historical films produced in Bollywood after 2000, which proved to be a great success both in India and abroad, and which represent not only the era of British domination in the Subcontinent but also the subsequent independence. This time was rather traumatic for India, because of the division of the country and the accompanying violence, which was on an unprecedented scale, making it unappealing material for a mainstream movie. This paper presents some common ways in which filmmakers in India introduce every uncomfortable historical fact and show victory in a particular way without revealing the dark and uncomfortable aspects of the times in question. The purpose of this article is to present the observed basic methods employed by filmmakers in manipulating the audience, rather than to be historical research, or detailed discussion of all historical films about the era of British domination in the Subcontinent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the turn of the twentieth century a distinct ‘social domain’ – along with its constituent parts, problems and internal dynamics – was turned into a political entity, and a concern for state bureaucracies existed across the industrializing world. Specific motivations for this trend may have varied from location to location, but included arguments for higher industrial productivity and less political discontent, often intertwined with a humanitarian impulse in calls for better housing, expanded public health or improved working conditions. As has been well documented, the politicization of the social domain in early twentieth-century Britain owes much to the consolidation of British sociology as a distinct discipline. Yet while the link between the rise of social politics and sociology has been established with regard to Britain, little has been said about the occurrence of this coupling elsewhere in the twentieth-century British Empire. This article aims to rectify that omission by showing the interplay between newly raised social concerns of the colonial administration in the Bombay Presidency, Western British India, and the establishing of sociological research within the borders of the Presidency around the time of the First World War. The article will explore how the colonial administration in Bombay planned to meet new demands for sociological knowledge in colonial state policy, how sociology was subsequently introduced into the Presidency as a research subject, and how new sociological methods were applied in actual colonial government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a ‘uniform civil code’ which would override the existing ‘personal laws’ or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of ‘religious laws’, then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the Indian state claims to be secular. This paper, by discussing the history of the lesser-known Christian personal law, demonstrates that this conundrum is of considerable heritage. From the earliest days of British imperial rule in India, the quest to establish a universal body of law conflicted with other legal principles which upheld difference: that of religion, as well as race. It was the historical role of Indian Christians to occasion legal dilemmas regarding the jurisdictions of British and ‘native’ law, and concurrently about the identity of people subject to those different laws. In trying to discover who the Indian Christians were, and what laws ought to apply to them, British judges had perforce to reflect on who the ‘British’ were, whilst also dealing with conflicting collective claims made by Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians themselves about their own identity and religious rights. The Indian Christian personal law was an unintended by-product of this process, a finding which throws light both on the dynamics of colonial legislation, and on the essentially modern nature of Indian personal laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares economic outcomes across areas in India that were under direct British colonial rule with areas that were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation using a specific policy rule, I find that areas that experienced direct rule have significantly lower levels of access to schools, health centers, and roads in the postcolonial period. I find evidence that the quality of governance in the colonial period has a significant and persistent effect on postcolonial outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the telegram and its impact upon meaning and language, including Indian nationalist strategies subverting imperial control. After 1860, the British Indian Empire emerged as a crucial strategic element in the telegraph network of the globe. It included countries outside present-day India and the larger sphere of 'informal empire.' The paper uses the terms India and the Indian Empire in this broader sense. Changes in time and shortening of distance, allowed messages to be sent and received rapidly but permitted multiple interpretations of what telegrams meant. It was a world of electronic communication where codes and ciphers and mistaken meanings were recurrent: a world of shadowy meanings. This paper analyses the technological and interpretative dimensions of this asymmetrical world of transnational electronic communication flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our article is based on the diaries of Joseph Stephens, a 19th century Swedish railway contractor in British India. The Stephens' diaries, discovered in 2008, are the only one of their kind, offering an insight into the life of a railway contractor from that era. The diaries reveal a web of networks and relationships that helped Stephens achieve success as a small-scale railway contractor. We use the theoretical lens of Gummesson's entrepreneurial relationship marketing to analyse Stephens' network of social and work relationships and find a connection between his networks and Gummesson's framework. We contribute to literature by presenting a different perspective on railway contractors from that period and propose that business practices of the past can be studied vis-à-vis contemporary theories of entrepreneurship and marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial education and missionary discourse of modernity intensified struggles for continuity and change among the followers of Hinduism and Christianity in nineteenth century India. While missionary modernity was characterised by an emphasis on sociocultural changes among the marginalized women through Christian norms of decency, orthodox Hindus used traditional cultural practices to confront missionary modernization endeavours. This article posits that the discourse of missionary modernity needs to be understood through the principles of Western secular modernity that impelled missionaries to employ decent clothing as a symbol of Christian femininity. It argues that missionary modernity not only emboldened the marginalized women to challenge their ascribed sociocultural standing but also solidified communitarian consciousness among the followers of Hinduism and Christianity substantially. Even though Travancore state defended the entrenched customary practices, including women's attire patterns, with all its potency through authoritative proclamations, it could not dissuade missionaries from converting the marginalized women to missionary modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the long-term impact of Protestant missions in colonial India on present-day literacy, education, and gender equality in human capital outcomes. We combine contemporary administrative and survey data with archival information on the spatial distribution of missions and the gender composition of missionaries in early 20th-century India. We document a positive long-run link between Protestant missions and human capital today. The relationship is particularly strong for women and for missions with higher female presence. While the data to fully explore the underlying mechanisms are limited, we show that exposure to Protestant missionaries may have induced shifts in gender attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of what might be termed embodied experience in generating knowledge about climate - specifically by focusing on conversations about the effects of climate on the body in late nineteenth-century India. Central to the story is the question of how race maps onto ideas about the body's capacity to register or perceive its environment, and how this question articulates with concerns about standardization and judgement in scientific practice. Focusing on tropical heat, I argue that the British body became figured in late colonial scientific discourse as a kind of sensing technology, one that was transformed by the heat that it registered. However, determining the effects of heat on the body was not always straightforward; the sensation of heat was, at moments, attributed not to heat but instead to light. At stake in this partial displacement from heat to light was not the sensation itself, nor the bodily effects it produced, but rather the mechanisms that produced these sensations and effects. Nevertheless, observing these racialized bodily effects was a way to know climate, arguably as important as recording data from thermometers. Along these lines, pigmentation became a powerful, if imperfect, marker of racial difference that was also thought to confer specific sensory capacities on some and not on others. And it was through these capacities, through the perceived ability of certain bodies (and not others) to register the effects of heat and light, that knowledge of climate became intimately tied to ideas about race and biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Civil Disobedience Movement in India from 1930-1932, the article explores how British Imperialism and colonial violence were depicted in the British press and how such reports shaped the public opinion of Great Britain regarding its colonial administration. It considers local accounts written by witnesses of the British Raj's violence against peaceful Indian demonstrators, the writings of investigative journalists covering the events, and compares such information with published press accounts in Great Britain. Other topics include the Indian National Congress, political accountability, and British journalist H. N. Brailsford.

Recent scholarship has explored the process by which modern commercial and property law came into being in the non-western world, and has emphasized the role played by colonialism and conquest in this process. Using a case study from colonial India, this article suggests that the coding of commercial law was influenced more by commercialization than by the nature of the state, and was an endogenous response to the failure of local custom and common law to secure frictionless trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration into the history of the British silver trade in India in the late 18th century. Details are given citing and criticizing prevailing historical views that silver was not a major sector of British commercial interest. It is asserted that the British export of silver was conducted on a large scale after 1785 for trade, debt-relief and military finance. An overview is given of several British firms in India, particularly the East India Company from the late 18th century into the early 19th.

The article uses data from India during its British colonial era from 1875 to 1919 to consider the impact of industrialization and the creation of infrastructure on famine and agricultural productivity. During the period considered, farms in India typically relied on rainfall, having not adopted irrigation techniques at the time. The authors use economic models to consider the relationship between the expansion of railroads within the country and the intensity of famines experienced as a result of droughts. The findings of the research are applied to contemporary developing countries with issues of food security and famine intensity.

The article examines a debate surrounding the establishment of a medical research institution in the 1900s during a period of growing Indian nationalism in colonial India. Particular attention is paid to how members of the medical community imposed the political identities of nationalism on British colonial practices of medical science. How doctors drew from emerging ideas of social welfare and health to help shape the national identity of a changing Indian nation is explored. The influence of the Indian Medical Service as a dominant force and institution of colonial medicine is assessed. The proposal for a Central Medical Research Institute facility is discussed.

The article looks at British India's Burma campaign of 1941–45 and asks why the decisive battles of Imphal and Kohima appear to be virtually invisible from India's national imagination today. It further critiques dominant readings of the twin battles for their failure to accommodate the heterogeneity of experiences and contributions of the hill tribes of the India-Burma borderlands who fought in it. The omission appears even more intriguing given that despite being on the winning side, the border communities end up losing the memory battle. While it questions the conventional notion that memory is the postcolonial state's prerogative, it also recognizes that counter-memories are by no means monolithic. It makes the case for acknowledging alternative constructions and communities of practice that imaginatively decenter the construction of memory in the borderlands. Without connecting with the lives, and in turn, the memories of the border communities who inhabit the physical sites of the war, the cliché of the "forgotten war" will remain an overused, and ultimately, an offensive trope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postage stamps are a significant visual text of an issuing state. In 1947, British India was divided into independent states of India and Pakistan. The successive new regimes in both countries got the freedom to design, print, and circulate the official visual iconography through postage stamps as a symbol of sovereignty for its citizens and the world community. This article explores how India and Pakistan visualized the narrative of national identity and discourse on development through postage stamps in the first two decades of their independence. The article does not intend to retell the narrative of the postcolonial nation-building process in the subcontinent. Instead, the objective is to introduce postage stamps as a primary visual resource for exploring the contours of public history of India and Pakistan by arguing that stamps retain its importance as excellent visual archives for postcolonial scholarly analysis in the age of new media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of transportation development and socio-economic changes, 19th century upper middle class British women began travelling and discovering many countries of the British Empire of which they provided accounts. The objective of this study is to bring to the fore the recurring lexical features used in authentic non-literary Victorian women's travel writings forming a corpus. This was especially compiled, by downloading digitalised texts available in dedicated sites with the purpose of analysing the relatively most frequent key words and clusters used to construe discursive social identities while interacting with different social groups encountered in India. The methodology adopted is a mixed one. It integrates a corpus assisted approach with discourse analysis of the emerging data. The results suggest Victorian women travellers used discourse not only to construe distinct social identities linked to their awareness of England's role in India, and to demarcate their identity from the 'other' but also to highlight hybrid identities in the colonial socio-cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A majority of the existing narratives on studying civil society in India are flooded with empirical findings, without much emphasis on theoretical understanding of the subject. Thus, the article tries to provide a historical overview of the development of notion of civil society and its research in "uncivil" Indian tradition from different dominant theoretical angles in the field. After finding their limitations, the study attempts to provide an alternative understanding of emergence of civil society in colonial India. It also aims to explore, how the lineage of traditional inform civic assocciationalism combined with modern institutionalized associational space gave birth to liberal-minded individuals and the conscious public in colonial India. Moreover, the present research further reveals that how civic awareness inculcated among the marginal's along with the educated Indian middle class and how interactions between the state, society, and religion helped in development of spirit of civility among individuals, awareness among the public and voice of protest among community in "uncivil" colonial India which was unique from its western counterpart both in the process of formation and the forms of manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is sometimes claimed that India has ambitions to become the leading power in the Indian Ocean. This article examines the different streams of Indian strategic thinking about the Indian Ocean and how they will likely contribute to future Indian strategic behavior. It argues that although many among its elite aspire for India to eventually become the leading power in the Indian Ocean, there is little conceptualization as to what India needs to do to achieve this. For several reasons, including an attachment to ideas of non-alignment and strategic autonomy, Indian strategic behavior in the Indian Ocean will likely continue to be relatively reactive and constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The essay discusses the color symbolism of the so-called Swadeshi movement in early twentieth-century Bengal, India. In particular, the author highlights links between art, especially of the so-called Bengal School, and Indian and Hindu nationalism, as exemplified in the works and writings of such figures as artist Abanindranath Tagore, poet, artist, and art theorist Rabindranath Tagore, and the leader of the Indian anti-colonial movement, Mohandas Gandhi.

The article discusses Americans' experiences in the Indian Subcontinent between 1784 and 1838. It comments on Americans' impressions of Indians and Hindus, examining their tolerance of cultural, racial, and religious differences. The author reflects on shifts after the War of 1812, including an increased missionary presence. The work of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and the experiences of Benjamin Crowninshield, a merchant mariner and later U.S. Secretary of the Navy, are also considered.

One promising traditional industry slated for revival in late colonial India was carpet weaving. Characterized by low technology, high product value, and strong demand, carpets appealed for obvious economic reasons, while simultaneously evoking India's luxurious artisanal past. In western India, carpet weaving was centered in jails where convicts produced high-quality rugs using historic designs in prison factories that served as laboratories for redefining penal labor and traditional design under the eyes of the colonial state. For, even as they were poised at the center of new exchange networks of design ideas, jail factories also claimed practical economic goals: to earn money for jails, train convicts in new skills and habits, and build India's productive potential in a time of economic malaise. As such, they provide an ideal site for examining the economic context for the emerging design industry, and for limitations of colonial visions of the Indian economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In his article "Imperialist Nostalgia in Masters's To the Coral Strand" Mehmet Fikret Arargüç discusses nostalgia as a resource of identity formation. Arargüç argues that imperialist nostalgia is no innocent emotional attachment to the past; rather, it is an adaptation to changed circumstances and its discursive practices (i.e., eulogizing) evade responsibility. In addition to practices to alleviate or absolve repressed guilt about the past, they often relate to discourses of power and regret that the past is no more. This type of nostalgia is another neo-imperialist form of exploitation by (ab)using or generating fluid, dynamic, and ever-evolving identities. Arargüç suggests that in his autobiographical To the Coral Strand Masters attempts to cope with loss of status and identity following the end of British rule of India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The East India Company began to establish lending libraries for soldiers at its stations in India from about 1891 and, by the early 1830s, the majority of those responsible for the day-to-day operation of these institutions were keen to stress their beneficial effect upon the readers who frequented them. In a series of reports that were written at this time station chaplains and commanding officers emphasised that reading was having a positive effect upon the men's behaviour. What also emerges from these reports is evidence of a contemporary belief that the ‘setting’ in which reading took place determined the degree to which the activity was beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, discussion of technology in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century colonial world has moved away from earlier insistence on the centrality of imperial agency and the instrumentality of empire's technological “tools” of conquest and exploitation. There has been a broad shift from diffusionist preoccupations with a one-way traffic in “technology transfers” that privileged Euro-American innovation and entrepreneurship, to consideration of the “social life of things” within the colony. This has corresponded with a move away from understanding technology through European representations of machines as the measure of the imperial self and colonized other, to rethinking technology's role in reconfiguring social hierarchies and cultural practices in colonized or semi-colonized non-Western societies. Without ignoring empire's importance in facilitating change or restricting the socio-economic parameters within which innovative technologies might operate, there has been a growing tendency to identify colonialism as a conduit for technological modernity rather than its primary embodiment. The colony is understood as a locally constituted, rather than merely imperially derivative, site for engagement with techno-modernity and its discontents. Scholars now commonly eschew emphasis on the implanting of “big technologies” such as railroads, telegraphs, steamships, modern weaponry, major irrigation works, and electrification systems (capital-intensive, often state-managed technologies that figured proudly in the rhetoric of imperial achievement), in favor of the ways in which these were understood, assimilated, and utilized by local agency. There has also been growing interest in small-scale, “everyday technologies,” from the sewing machine, wristwatch, and radio, to the typewriter, camera, and bicycle. Colonial regimes were unable to monopolize or disinclined to control these, and they passed with relative ease into the work-regimes, recreational activities, social life, and cultural aspirations of colonized and postcolonial populations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars are looking again at banking and mercantile families in India's early modern history, responding to the challenge issued by Claude Markovits in the epilogue of his 2008 volume, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs, to “return the merchant to South Asian history.” Some of the underlying assumptions and questions being asked are old and some are new. My own longstanding assumption, upon which this article relies, has been that bankers and merchants played multiple and important roles with respect to states in South Asia, and that their relations with non-kin officials and other political actors determined their success or failure and sometimes the success or failure of a state, most notably, the Mughal state. Questions are again being raised about “trust,” assumed to be a leading attribute of and asset to financial networks (especially in long-distance trade diasporas), and the notion so commonly put forward by scholars to explain the success of Hindu banking and mercantile communities. Recent work by Francesca Trivellato has found that membership in the Sephardic trade diaspora facilitated but did not guarantee trust or cooperation: the Sephardic merchants relied on non-Jewish as well as Jewish agents and networks of information, and evolving legal norms guided their business activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an examination into the liberal discourse of Bengal during its British colonial period, focusing on the perceived antithesis between custom and liberty. Introductory information is given highlighting the intellectual history from the Enlightenment to the present which has contrasted the two concepts and set them as exclusive opposites. An overview of liberal discourse in Bengal during the 19th century is then reviewed seeking to find examples when the two were not seen as mutually exclusive and opposing political ideas.

In this commentary I would like to offer some reflections on the Deleuzian concept of 'assemblage' (agencement) from the perspective of my grounding in 'governmentality studies' and, secondly, on the latter's central concern with the concept of the security 'apparatus' (dispositif). I would like to suggest that the two be thought of dialectically, both as concepts and as actually-existing things in the world. After outlining my use to date of these concepts, and their deployment in my research into colonial India, I will counterpoise Giorgio Agamben's and Giles Deleuze's reflections on Michel Foucault's use of the term dispositif/apparatus. Deleuze's obvious and acknowledged indebtedness to Foucault's work, but his explicit re-rendering of the Foucauldian interest in order with the Deleuzian conceptualisation of dis-order, will be used to conclude with some methodological suggestions regarding how Deleuze and Foucault, agencement and dispositif, assemblages and apparatuses, can and should be thought together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The status of Kalhana's poem Rajatarangini was mediated in colonial India in part through its English translations. However, the intent of the translations has been insufficiently analyzed in the context of the interrelationship between Orientalist and nationalist projects and the historical and literary ideas that informed them. The translators of Rajatarangini framed the text as more than a solitary example of Indian historical writing; rather, they engaged with it on multiple levels, drawing out, debating, and rethinking the definitions of literature and history and the relative significance of and relationship between them in capturing the identity of the nation and its regions. This article examines two translations of the text -- one Orientalist and the other nationalist -- with the purpose of interrogating these categories, by drawing out the complex engagement between European and indigenous ideas, and the dialogue between past and present that informed their production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an examination of Islamic power in Colonial India. It explores a power struggle that occurred during the reign of Princess Nawab Shah Jahan Begum involving the nawab consort Siddiq Hasan Khan and Sir Lepel Griffin, a colonial civil servant. The articles discusses the princess's rule of Bhopal, India, examines fears about Islamic activism and Islamic reform in India and discusses how Griffin exploited these fears through the press to gain influence and cast the princess as a fanatic.

In the years before and during the Second World War, the Roosevelt Administration played an important and often overlooked role in encouraging Britain's disengagement from the Indian subcontinent. Roosevelt's motivations in pressing for Indian independence were varied. They included a mix of principled opposition to colonialism, practical concern for the outcome of the war and pragmatic jockeying for influence with post-colonial nations when the war was won. Churchill's government was wary of being pushed by Washington to move more quickly to 'quit India' than it thought prudent. U.S. policy and actions clearly influenced the direction of events toward independence, but U.S. caution as the war ground on led to disillusionment among nationalist leaders. This reaction would have consequences once swaraj was won and India came into its own, at a time when the Cold War was becoming the dominant factor in America's view of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]