Tag Archives: History

Meanwhile, the fate of the secular perspective on women’s rights was sealed with Muslim leaders opposing a uniform code due to concerns about the survival of the Muslim community after a violent Partition. The reform of personal law for women thus, could not escape religious identity with the Muslims

Sinha marks this episode as the beginning of Sahi’s long-running guerrilla resistance, a struggle which sustained for over two decades, made possible in part by the enduring strength of a hereditary local magnate. The author traces Sahi’s lineage from Mayyur Bhutt, who is said to have lived either during the time of the Buddha or under the reign of Harshvardhana, down to ancestors (with a thousand-year gap) who were granted the titles of Raja, Maharaja Bahadur,

The book traces the personal histories of the Chattopadhyays in Calcutta, their home city and in Hyderabad, the city of their education and profession; Chatto’s turning towards revolutionary activities under the influence of radical Indian nationalists at the India House, London3; his initiative to create the Berlin Indian Committee with the help of Indian pan-Islamists and to obtain the support of the Ameer of Afghanistan.

Gopal Gandhi’s account of all these changes is embedded throughout in a larger story of India and, to some extent, India’s interface with the world. His candour and even-handed descriptions remain but one misses in these somewhat dense with politics and geopolitics chapters, the eye for the quirks and curiosities of history which had made the earlier parts of this book such a compelling read.

The legacy of Nehru in the economic sphere is being reversed and the poor are no longer on the radar. The rapid privatization of national assets, withdrawal of the state from education and health to benefit the rapacious private sector, the rapid informalization of labour with no trade union rights are pointers to the backslide. In the Global Hunger Index, India is ranked 111 out of 125 countries.

While most of the issues concerning partitions of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have been examined extensively, it is the detailed study of the lesser-known separations of Burma and the Arabian Peninsula that makes the present work important. In a lengthy portion, the author outlines not only the socio-political conditions which led to the separation of Burma from the Indian Empire, but also highlights fascinating details pertaining to the inauguration of the new state. The challenges that emerged in the wake of this partition have been examined thoroughly in the present book

The consolidation of British power in western India in the eighteenth century and the emergence of Bombay as the preeminent urban centre of the west coast created favourable conditions for the growth of Parsi enterprise towards the end of the century. A section of Parsis, largely based in Bombay, achieved great success in commerce, industry, finance and shipping, thereby also contributing to the development of the city.

How different these Jamaats were from other entities such as the Parsi panchayat or Armenian network structured around law and custom is not very clear. The question is raised once in a while but never really fleshed out. The comparison seems warranted and even inevitable given that Parsis and Armenians also represented the ‘middle power’ that Sullivan talks about in explaining the extraordinary rise and success of these merchant communities. By middle power Sullivan means the co-functioning of the Sarkar and the Jamaat of which the communities were prime beneficiaries.

Ever optimistic, Vanina records that there may be ‘differences and even conflicts, but on the majority of events and actors of the past there is usually a national agreement’ in favour of ‘mutual respect for differing feelings and affiliations’ (pp. 338-39). This is true for politics and history on an international scale.

Nevertheless, they were able to take advantage of the culture of ‘hospitality’ which had been encouraged by the post-1789 government policy of honouring misfortune (honore le malheur) by way of hospitality (à titre d’hospitalité), which was also decreed by the Comity of Public Safety when granting assistance to ‘Ahmad Khan Indian’.

The soldiers were part of the 2.5 million-strong Indian Army. They were taken prisoners, as the war progressed, in theatres in east and north Africa, the Mediterranean, Europe and on the high seas. They endured five years of incarceration. Included in them were the Viceroy Commissioned Officers (VCO), a category so peculiar to the Indian Army that the confused Germans had to enquire from the British whether they were to be treated as soldiers or officers! Another oddity was that the earliest, and often the longest-serving POWs were not even soldiers.

Rather than limiting itself to the colonial period, the study deliberates at length the socio-economic and political conditions of the YMCA in the post-1947 era. The author highlights the role that the institution played during the Cold War period.

Indian towns and urbanism (by Helen Millar and AG Krishna Menon) is a synoptic view of colonial planning in the city of Calcutta (Partho Datta). Ranjeeta Dutta takes us back to the early modern Srirangam, via a text called the ‘Koil Olugu’ (‘The Koil Olugu and Srirangam in the Tamil Region’), more properly a temple history. Other accounts of pre-colonial cities and urbanisms include a discussion of Agra (Shailaja Kathuria), Jalandhar (Indu Banga) and a comparison of Calcutta and Delhi (Atiya Habeeb Kidwai).

Historical scholarship on Kutch is rather scanty. Although some aspects of the history of the region in the modern period have received the attention of scholars, there is hardly any work that deals with the colonial and postcolonial period as a whole. The colonial administrator LF Rushbrook Williams who held several important positions in the bureaucracy, and also wrote on historical subjects, penned a book on Kutch titled The Black Hills: Kutch in History and Legend which was published in 1958 shortly after the erstwhile State became part of Bombay Province in Independent India.

Piecing together evidence from their memoirs, newspapers, various journals and magazines, advertisements, burial records, building histories and street directories, the author has woven the tales of figures like Harry Hobbs, the piano tuner, raconteur and businessman; Robert Reid, the police detective; and Shirley Tremearne, ‘Law Officer—Media Moghul—Businessman in Kolkata’. The life-stories of Henry Thoby Prinsep reveal the issue of slavery and indentured labour in the city. Another figure, the American civil war hero,

In the book we get to encounter many forms of Māra and many Buddhism(s) in vast temporality and diverse spatial contexts. The author proposes three features of Māra in this long history—didactic, demonizing and shapeshifting. In any given context the figure has been instrumental in communicating didactic messages of Buddhism (in plural) and to corner or criticize the other thoughts contrary to the vision of the tradition by labelling them as Māra or evil.

The Loharu family as ‘the Habsburgs of north India’, whose network of alliances enabled them to be successful in their quest for social, cultural and political advancement is described in chapter five. This first part of the chapter provides details of the matrimonial alliances forged between the Loharu family and other Muslim princes in different corners of India.

An even more disappointing presence, though sparse, is of the female characters. While they are hardly a part of the narrative, whenever they do appear, they seem to be objects of desire or cunning plotters hungry for power through their male counterparts.
‘The nautanki-wali’s breasts showed dark and bulbous beneath the thin pink silk of the baju. Rohidas, who could not tear his eyes away, recognized them at last for large purple brinjals,

Further, in the overarching context of the structural relations of modes of production, Baruah introduces three distinct cultural forms/windows—memoirs, ballads and world views—and their articulations by the respective figures of the hunter, the peasant and the rebel to draw attention to, as mentioned earlier, the combined nature of the underlying structure of colonialism in Assam.

As far as the Indian Paralympics is concerned, the story of country’s glorious sons and daughters resembles the socio-economic milieu of the country. The book provides a vivid description of the social background of the athletes, their rationale for choosing para sports, the physical and the emotional struggles they underwent during the course of their career. More than physical strength, it was the willpower of the para-athletes which makes their story enthralling.