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A study of the ‘hybrid half-century’, The Broken Script is a narrative of the city of Delhi for the period 1803-1857, when the Mughal Empire witnessed the last vestiges of its power and the British East India Company emerged as the  de facto ruler, marking the end of one way of life and the rise of another. It is the story of a city, ‘a fast-modernizing society’ in the midst of profound changes, a discussion on its culture, literature, language, intellectualism, its tehzeeb, social and economic life.

This collection of essays is representative of the themes pursued by Richard Eaton. As a definitive, prolific and meaningful scholarly voice studying medieval India since the 1970s, Eaton’s essays cover a swathe of topics in the domains of social and cultural history. While some themes—such as the cultural history of Islam, and the social history of religious communities—are regularly featured in writings by historians of medieval India.

Members of the Ajnabi Radio Shrota Sangha (Strangers’ Radio Club) in Bhagalpur, Bihar, regularly tuned into Radio Ceylon, broadcast from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to vote for their favourite songs on Binaca Geetmala, a subcontinental hit countdown show. The club was among 400 radio listeners’ groups that were voluntarily formed by Hindi film music fans in India, mid-1950s onwards, to collectively listen to and talk about the popular music that they ironically did not have access to via their national broadcaster, the All India Radio (AIR).

In Gillian Tindall’s engaging book on Bombay, City of Gold (1982), she describes initial encounters with colonial buildings and her incredulous response: ‘Hallo! Fancy seeing you here?’. Indeed, colonial buildings may seem strange implants in the tropical landscape despite their historic presence for three centuries on Indian soil. Michael Mann argues for Calcutta that between 1770s and 1830s, the East India Company committed itself to a vision—that of building another Rome and set a trend.

History is an ever-evolving subject. Historians have, in recent times, attempted to study this subject through various novel ways. And understanding the human past through historical objects is one such technique which has become quite popular in recent times. Sudeshna Guha’s latest work A History of India through 75 Objects belongs to this category of history writing.