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This article gives a brief history of the Gramophone Company, Ltd.'s chief recording experts, Theodor Heinrich Max Hampe and Arthur Spottiswoode Clarke in India between 1910 and 1915. The duties of the chief recording expert included record taking not only in India, but also other Asian countries, Burma, Ceylon, Siam, The Malay States, Singapore and Macao and the Dutch East Indies. The information on the recording experts in India has been compiled from a variety of sources, including original documents and communications between The Gramophone Company, Ltd. in London and their Branch Office in Calcutta, from the archival holdings of materials in the EMI Archives, London and The Gramophone Company, Ltd.'s Indian offices at Dum Dum. These documents have provided essential information about the setup and development of the sound recording industry in India and the activities of the companies concerned. (The old geographical place names used at the time in the documents have been maintained in this article.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Indian anticolonialists drew on Darwinism and evolutionary theory to resist British imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival material from The Bengalee (and beyond), I show how Indian nationalists marshaled evolutionist schemas to contest stage-based accounts of social advancement rationalizing despotic rule in India. I argue that Darwinian evolutionism enabled anticolonialists to respond to a particular decolonial dilemma—that of developmentalism, the unilinear notion of historical time justifying India's political subjection. While Darwinism's social application is commonly understood to sustain imperialism, I demonstrate that it served, in the colonial context, to deconstruct historicist tropes portraying India as politically immature. Drawing on evolutionism, nationalists contested the presumptions of imperialist discourse and reconceptualized progress in novel, anticolonial terms. Darwin's travel to India thus exposes a distinctive decolonial quandary, the syncretic Indian anticolonial response to it, and the intractability of the contradictions facing decolonizing movements globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines the diffusion of meritocratic practices as a potential instance of policy transfer by scrutinizing the introduction of open and competitive examinations during the mid‐nineteenth century in the British Civil Service. Scholars have argued that British reformers were inspired by meritocratic practices in British‐ruled India. In order to assess this claim, we combine qualitative analysis of archival material documenting the interdepartmental debates on meritocratic reforms in the British Home Civil Service as well as in the Indian Civil Service with quantitative analyses of unique data on the implementation of examinations with open competition in British public offices and the India experience of Heads of Departments. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses largely reject the idea that the Indian Civil Service was a key source of inspiration for British merit reforms. While our quantitative analyses show some, albeit weak, evidence, no such evidence was found in the qualitative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The administrative system during Iran's Safavid and India's Mughal empires had a complex structure. During that era, writing, recording, and dispatching of royal decrees as well as administrative, judicial, revenue figures, and rulings were carried out by three administrative divisions dealing with composition, execution, and judiciary. Such documents are exiting in two primary and secondary forms and their compositions are varied based on their themes. The components of documents are also distinguished in terms of their header, seal, and monogram. To prevent any type of forgery, they went through lengthy and complicated stages. These documents show the evolution of the bureaucratic system in both dynasties and were issued for purposes such as appointments, grants, exemptions, contracts, treaties, and so on. The research method applied in the present research is based sources extracted from library and archival materials and then the court documents of both Safavid and Mughals were compared and analyzed through the descriptive-analytical method. Research findings show that different administrative units were under the supervision of the minister (vazir), the second powerful figure after the King, who in fact led state, financial and judicial affairs. Although both dynasties had common roots, they created one of the most effective executive systems of their time by upgrading those prevalent in previous empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the introduction of European prefabrication building systems in India in the years immediately after independence from Britain in 1947, through the lens of two episodes. In each case, the analysis challenges the often-perceived notion of the local, in this case Indian, actors in the Global South as mere recipients of superior foreign technologies, positing them instead as critical assessors, evaluators and decision makers. In the first example of UK's Alcrete House, well known as the reason for German architect Otto Koenigsberger's infamous departure from India, the paper examines archival materials, discussed here for the first time, to shed light on the role of Indian players who demanded accountability from foreign experts. In the second lesser-known example of the Swiss lightweight concrete building product, Durisol, the analysis highlights the role of local architects like Shaukat Rai, who deployed his own transnational and intranational networks in the product's bid to enter the Indian construction market in the early 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the engagements of people and various civic organizations, even from the margins of society, with the making of India's constitution during the early stages of its drafting. Using hitherto unstudied archival materials, it examines constitutional visions, demands, conceptions of inclusion, and constitutional proposals, as these were expressed at the time by people outside of the Constituent Assembly. The conventional understanding has been that the constitution was a product of elite consensual decision-making, and that India's nationalist leaders endowed it from above. This article shifts the historical inquiry away from the Constituent Assembly onto the ways the constitution-making process was experienced, related to, and understood from below by 'We the People' – those on behalf of whom the constitution would ultimately be enacted. Hence, it constructs a new perspective on the making of India's constitution. In doing so, the article throws light on the significance of people's interactions with the constitution-making process on the nature of India's decolonization, on its successful democratic transition, and on the rooting and endurance of its constitution against many odds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The golden past of the feminist conference is eclipsed by the present cynicism around depoliticisation of feminism, 'NGO-isation' and the cooption of such spaces by the state, large INGOs and donor organisations. With inter-generational conflicts and identity-based mobilisation, the current moment in the Indian women's movement has been termed by Indian scholars as one of a 'feminist civil war'. In this article, I reflect on the elements that made past processes such as the National Conferences on Autonomous Women's Movements in India an empowering experience for activists, and that created spaces where the movement could resolve – or at least make visible – its 'sticky' issues. I ask: what can we learn about feminist conferences as a driving force for feminist activism in the past for creating inclusive and safe spaces for dialogue in the future? Can they be the spaces where feminist dilemmas of the time can be resolved? Through examining archival materials and personal reflections in dialogue with theoretical discussions on new feminisms, autonomy, diversity and intersectionality, I argue that the feminist conference had a critical role to play in the personal journeys of activists in the Indian women's movement, and in collectively resolving some of the tensions in the movement through practices such as endorsement of co-written 'resolutions' and 'declarations' with purposefully diverse grassroots constituencies. In any new avatar, the feminist conference needs to retain such strengths but also take into account the feminist movement's new, young membership and a changed context by re-aligning its values, modes and materials of engagement to this landscape, so that dialogue on difficult themes is made possible in productive, caring and pleasurable ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's post-colonial constitution introduced a new approach to federalism based on a substantial sphere of shared responsibility between Central and State governments, especially in the fields of social and economic policy, and a Central government with strong prerogatives to intervene in provincial affairs. This was qualified at the time as a diminished or "quasi" form of federalism. Existing explanations of the origins of India's centralized federalism focus on efforts to curb further secession attempts in the aftermath of Partition or the need for a strong Center to consolidate democracy in a highly unequal society. This article draws on archival materials to demonstrate that distinctive elements of Indian federalism were shaped at their foundations by the desire to boost industrial development and lay the foundation for a national welfare state in a post-colonial future by preventing the consolidation of "race to the bottom" dynamics arising from unregulated inter-provincial economic competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia‐India relations during the Cold War years were tense. The dominant argument in the current literature that explains this tension is the Nehru‐Menzies dissonance, which resulted in fundamentally opposite readings of the Cold War. However, the role of Australian aid to India has been understudied in the bilateral relations literature. India was the largest receiver of Australian aid between 1951–1969, but in 1969, there was a marked decrease in this aid as Indonesia replaced India as the main aid recipient. By drawing on archival material, this article suggests an additional explanation for the dramatic change to the Australia‐India relationship. By examining the role of Australian ministers and senior bureaucrats, this paper argues that between 1951–1969, Australia's aid to India was driven by its strategic interests in India. However, by 1966 Australia's strategic interests in India became tenuous due to the souring of United States‐India relations, primarily because of the stresses of the Vietnam War. Thus, a sizeable cut in Australian aid to India was made in 1969 and the subsequent decision to make Indonesia the foremost beneficiary of its aid was a result of strategic reassessments in Australian foreign policy, to adhere more closely to United States (US) interests in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia‐India relations during the Cold War years were tense. The dominant argument in the current literature that explains this tension is the Nehru‐Menzies dissonance, which resulted in fundamentally opposite readings of the Cold War. However, the role of Australian aid to India has been understudied in the bilateral relations literature. India was the largest receiver of Australian aid between 1951–1969, but in 1969, there was a marked decrease in this aid as Indonesia replaced India as the main aid recipient. By drawing on archival material, this article suggests an additional explanation for the dramatic change to the Australia‐India relationship. By examining the role of Australian ministers and senior bureaucrats, this paper argues that between 1951–1969, Australia's aid to India was driven by its strategic interests in India. However, by 1966 Australia's strategic interests in India became tenuous due to the souring of United States‐India relations, primarily because of the stresses of the Vietnam War. Thus, a sizeable cut in Australian aid to India was made in 1969 and the subsequent decision to make Indonesia the foremost beneficiary of its aid was a result of strategic reassessments in Australian foreign policy, to adhere more closely to United States (US) interests in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the history of Bannerghatta National Park (BNP), a deciduous forest south of Bengaluru city, India that is undergoing rapid socio-ecological transformations. Using remotely sensed data combined with interviews, oral histories and archival material we map the changing landscape to discern continuity and change in BNP across pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods. Our findings show that complexity is historically contingent and is core to the understanding of contemporary forest governance challenges. Legacies of past social structures such as caste remain a visible presence in the landscape and affect institutional functioning significantly. Our findings also uncover the role of exogenous factors such as the park's peri-urban location and post-liberalization policies in adversely affecting "rules-in-use". A historical approach can offer analysts better grounded and "situated" understandings of the complex interplay between institutions (formal, informal, traditional, modern) and the patterned social practices operating in natural resource systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the Comex expeditions founded in 1965 to allow young people to understand Commonwealth ideals through travelling by road to India. Comex drew on optimistic narratives about the possibilities of the Commonwealth as an antidote to the perceived problems of race and declining values in the modern world, attempting to produce enlightened Commonwealth citizens through the travel culture prescribed on route. The article argues that contact, hospitality, adventure and discipline were all central to the expeditions, feeding into and reproducing visions for the Commonwealth in the 1960s and drawing on other narratives of the road and post-colonial travel. By recalling episodes and events on these journeys, the paper highlights the creation and practice of a Comex Commonwealth citizenship through travel. It also provides insights into the reconstruction of expeditionary memories and identities through a variety of archival materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is reproduced from Mapping Cultural Diversity-Good Practices from Around the Globe published by the German Commission for UNESCO and the Asia-Europe Foundation in November 2010. The publication is a project of the U40-program "Cultural Diversity 2030". The electronic version of the publication is available for download from http://www.unesco.de. Based on the DCA projects of National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai, this paper explores Digital community Archive initiatives as suitable models for preserving intangible heritages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the literature on Bhutanese studies found in the Library of Tibetan Works and Archive (LTWA) in Dharamsala, India. According to the author, the LTWA, which is an important repository of Tibetan literature, collects various manuscripts and documents of Bhutanese studies. He adds that the library also holds important documents on the history of Bhutan.

India is rich in culture and heritage. Photographs are one of the important mediums of cultural heritage materials. The present paper emphasizes the importance of photographs as cultural and heritage materials. It discusses different aspects of photographs and the importance of digitization of such materials while presenting different techniques adapted in different projects at different places for posterity as well as for easy accessibility. It also enumerates the importance of the metadata adhering to Dublin Core Metadata Standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using recently declassified archival material pertaining to the Chartered Bank of India Australia and China, this article foregrounds quantitative evidence that sheds new light on the history of British banks in Asia. It shows that Hong Kong came to play a critical role in the bank's note issue strategy after the Straits Settlements had moved off the silver standard in 1906. Locally denominated notes issued on mainland China complemented the Hong Kong issue. However, their circulation volume dropped dramatically during the anti-British boycott that followed the May Thirtieth Incident (1925). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]