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Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however...
The charged emotional politics of language and identity in India
A richly textured ethnography about knitwear manufacturers in South India that explains how peasant-workers have refined notions of place, gender, and class to create a local industrial form that succeeds in the global economy.
In the wide-ranging and innovative essays of Cultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. Cultures in Motion challenges the premise of fixed,...
Outgrowth of an international workshop on the subject of South Asian ethical practices held in Vancouver, Canada in September 2007.
Looking at the political processes in early modern South Asia as shaped by state formation from below, this work argues that, outside the imperial and trans-regional contexts, the Mughal state subsisted on the mutually-empowering relations with the elites and common people.
This volume reflects a recent transformation of the concerns of social scientists regarding the legal history of South Asia. While, earlier, historians looked at the results rather than the performance of law, the concerns later shifted to unravelling the socioeconomic and political contexts that shaped law-making and its practice. Iterations of Law advances these new perspectives on legal history from South Asia. Going beyond an area studies rubric to critically engage with recent work in colonial and transnational legal history, the essays in this volume utilize both archival and everyday records to interrogate the relationship between the discipline of history and the institution of law. ...
Travers explores how Mughal political and legal culture shaped and was reshaped by the British colonial state in Bengal.
Exile was a potent form of punishment and a catalyst for change in colonial Asia between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Vast networks of forced migration supplied laborers to emerging colonial settlements, while European powers banished rivals to faraway locations. Exile in Colonial Asia explores the phenomenon of exile in ten case studies by way of three categories: “kings,” royals banished as political exiles; “convicts,” the vast majority of those whose lives are explored in this volume, sent halfway across the world with often unexpected consequences; and “commemoration,” referring to the myriad ways in which the experience and its aftermath were remembered by...
After the Dark is a tale of a prisoner’s resolute fightback for freedom. Not by jumping over walls, but by conquering his inner-self and then winning over his outer handicaps by becoming larger than beliefs. About the author Rohit Pagare was sentenced to life imprisonment by court on charges of murder. But he had set one more condition for himself: that he would obtain release only when he selflessly brings smile to someone, or he would brace death. What he needed was one chance to partly atone his doing. One day, administration asked suggestions from him to smoothen prison processes. This was his chance. He gathered a team of inmates, motivated them to develop a prison software and outper...