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Through a regional focus on Bihar between the 1760s and 1880s, ‘Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India’ reveals the shifting and contradictory nature of the colonial state’s policies and discourses on communication. The volume explores the changing relationship between trade, transport and mobility in India, as evident in the trading and mercantile networks operating at various scales of the economy. Of crucial importance to this study are the ways in which knowledge about roads and routes was collected through practices of travel, tours, surveys, and map-making, all of which benefited the state in its attempts to structure a regime that would regulate ‘undesirable’ forms of mobility.
‘Exemplary’ Ravish Kumar 'A wonderful selection’ Rana Safvi For generations, domestic servants in India have been subjected to neglect, apathy and cruelty. Though they are known nowadays as the domestic ‘help’, ‘aid’ or ‘staff’, often merely to meet the requirements of political correctness, their condition remains unchanged for the most part as the country’s privileged classes have failed to truly address the most pervasive inequalities in their households. In Lesser Lives, Nitin Sinha and Prabhat Kumar collect short fiction from the Hindi heartland that turns the gaze onto these continuing disparities. The eleven stories in the book, including Premchand’s ‘Maidservant’, Mahadevi Varma’s ‘Rama’, Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Blouse’, Amarkant’s ‘Bahadur’ and Shekhar Joshi’s ‘Dajyu’, offer both timeless classics and little-known literary gems, some of which have never been published in translation before.
A politician need not necessarily be an economist. Neither is it required that he be an expert on renewable energy. He may not be proficient on infrastructure planning or be adroit towards managing natural resources. Instead, a politician ought to be a person savvy enough to manage diverse fields with an aim to enable the country realise her true potential. This essentially underlines Nitin Gadkari's political philosophy. Whether, it was the execution of the Mumbai-Pune Expressway way back in 1999 as Maharashtra's PWD Minster or the social changes ushered in by his entrepreneurial initiatives in Nagpur or more recently his path-breaking moves as the BJP President, Gadkari is a maverick who l...
This book commemorates 150 years of railways in India. Introduced under colonial rule in the second half of the nineteenth century, the railways soon embraced the length and breadth of India bringing with it rapid political, economic, ecological and cultural changes. The articles in this book explore the impact of this technological phenomenon from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. From early railway thinking in renaissance Bengal, to railway policing in Uttar Pradesh and issues of management to railway themes in literature, the writers in this volume reveal the world of the railways in all its exciting facets. The photo essay invokes the nostalgic world of steam with a series of evocative images. In the twenty-first century, the ever expanding horizon of the railways continues to draw in people and goods in the third largest railway network in the world.
The volume introduces a new analysis of interconnected labour and economic history of colonial India and Scandinavia. From a recently found archive of a railway contractor’s private and business papers, the studies revise both Indian labour history and Scandinavian modern history, and ties south Sweden into the British Empire. With deep insights into everyday work practices of Indian and European contractors and manual labourers, the book establishes a bridge across the globe, between two poor regions as sites of extraction and industrial transformation, resulting from global migration and capital flows. Drawing on rich archival sources such as the Joseph Stephens Archive, Maharashtra Stat...
The Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the historiographical specialisation and sophistication of the history of colonialism in South Asia. It explores the classic works of earlier generations of historians and offers an introduction to the rapid and multifaceted development of historical research on colonial South Asia since the 1990s. Covering economic history, political history, and social history and offering insights from other disciplines and ‘turns’ within the mainstream of history, the handbook is structured in six parts: Overarching Themes and Debates The World of Economy and Labour Creating and Keeping Order: Scie...
This edited collection traverses the genre of anger studies by documenting its transition from the Classical age up to our present-day cognizance of the philosophical, socio-historical, psycho-physiological and pathological theorizations of anger. The book illustrates how literature may systematically document and even institutionalize primal, emotive outbursts, providing meaningful analysis for scholars across various disciplines. The contributions here cover a wide spectrum of critical works, ranging from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Seneca’s De Ira and Plutarch’s On Restraining Anger to Bharat Muni’s Natyashastra, as well as notable nineteenth century texts by authors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Bronte, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling and Henry Lawson.
The Birth of an Indian Profession is the first comprehensive history of engineers in modern India. Charting the development of the engineering profession in the country from 1900 to 1947, it explores how engineers, their roles, and their organization were transformed during the politically tumultuous interwar years. Through detailed case studies of engineers in public works, railways, and private industry, the book argues that the profession, once dominated by expatriate British engineers closely associated with the state, saw an increasing proportion of Indian members, and an emerging emphasis on industrial engineering. In the process, it fashioned for itself an Indian identity. Turning the spotlight on practitioners of technology and their professional lives, Ramnath explores several themes including the work culture of engineers, their conception of their own identity, their status in society, and their relationship with the evolving colonial state. In so doing, he provides a fresh perspective on the history of science and technology in twentieth-century India.
The history of globalisation is usually told as a history of shortening distances and acceleration of the flows of people, goods and ideas. Channelling Mobilities refines this picture by looking at a wide variety of mobile people passing through the region of the Suez Canal, a global shortcut opened in 1869. As an empirical contribution to global history, the book asks how the passage between Europe and Asia and Africa was perceived, staged and controlled from the opening of the Canal to the First World War, arguing that this period was neither an era of unhampered acceleration, nor one of hardening borders and increasing controls. Instead, it was characterised by the channelling of mobilities through the differentiation, regulation and bureaucratisation of movement. Telling the stories of tourists, troops, workers, pilgrims, stowaways, caravans, dhow skippers and others, the book reveals the complicated entanglements of empires, internationalist initiatives and private companies.
Have a Safe Journey is a collection of short stories on road safety. It attempts to make readers realise the importance of road safety, not through boring guidelines, rules and regulations.. but through interesting stories that will force you to be always careful on the road. This book is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Mahindra Truck and Bus Division and Natural Habitat Preservation Centre. Includes stories by bestselling writers Ashwin Sanghi, Anand Neelakantan, Kiran Manral, Shinie Antony, Priyanka Sinha Jha and Pankaj Dubey. The book is the first compilation of short stories on road safety in India. Includes 25 stories of pain, loss and hope, that make the readers realise the dangers of drunken driving, talking on the phone while driving, speeding, importance of wearing helmets and seatbelts, use of a baby seat, etc. The stories also talk about the importance of helping road accident victims and being a good Samaritan instead of running away from accident sites. The stories are not preachy; instead they use humour, wit, tragedy, horror and futuristic ideas to encourage readers to observe traffic rules and drive safe.