Jihad is a much used and abused term in the contemporary twenty-first century. Today’s world has seen the proliferation of self-proclaimed jihadi groups claiming responsibility for terror strikes like the 9/11 attacks in the USA and the recent Paris strikes. The backdrop of these terrorist activities is the geopolitics of wars and oil refineries and the quest by western powers to spread democracy to the so called non-democratic Islamic world.
From the thirteenth century onward, cities played a central role in the emergence, consolidation and subsequent expansion of Muslim power across large sways of the Indian subcontinent. The Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526), the Mughal Empire (1526– 1857), as well as smaller medieval Muslim principalities such as the sultanates of the Deccan, revolved around urban agglomerations that were simultaneously seats of power, centers of learning and economic hubs. The intimate relations of Indian Muslims with the urban environment remains epitomized, to this day, by the takhallus (nom de plume) of many Urdu poets, which showcases their belonging to a particular city.
Debjani Das’s book attempts a close look at the history of the establishment of asylums in various parts of Bengal throughout the nineteenth century. The book is rich in archival detail with the different chapters complementing the themes considered for discussion.The first theme is the exploration of the linkages of the politics of inner space and geographical location of the asylums with that of the emergence of the various definitions of insanity intervened by notions about race.
The historiography of colonial rule in India has for long been focused on the polarities of coercion and consent. Over the past two decades or so, historians have done much to further our understanding of the admixture of force and collaboration in sustaining colonial domination. More recent works inspired by Foucauldian notions of governmentality have drawn our attention to the workings of colonial power at its point of application. These have underscored the extent to which imperial governance was, in practice, far from being ideologically stable and self-confident, and was actually shot through with uncertainty and panic, hesitancy and contradiction
Almost all studies of the colonial Indian military establishment which impinge on the relationship between the British and Indian personnel of the colonial Indian armed forces focus attention on the existential crisis of the colonial subjects in military uniform. This existential crisis arose from the peculiar colonial circumstances which governed the lives and societies of these, to use a cliched term, peasants in uniform. There is no dearth of books and articles written on the subject of obedience and disobedience among the Indians who served as soldiers and junior officers first in the three Presidency Armies and later in the Indian Army. Many of these narratives are mentioned and discussed in the Introduction by Dasgupta.
Zia ud Din Barani, in his Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi begins his account of the history of the Delhi Sultanate where Qazi Minhaj ud Din Juzjani had left it in his Tabaqat-i Nasiri. Minhaj had covered the history of mankind from Adam till the end of Sultan Nasir ud Din’s reign. Thus, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi begins from the accession of Balban in AH 662/1266 CE and it is brought to the sixth year of Firuz Shah Tughlaq’s reign in AH 758/1357.