Studies in People’s History

During the period of fourth–eighth century ad, women begin to appear as not only as queens but also as donors, burnt widows (satī) and female servants in inscriptions of both India and Nepal. In a patriarchal set-up, men dominated over women. Yet there were exceptions. Although widows were now encouraged to immolate themselves in the funeral pyres of their husbands, Prabhāvatī (from India) and Rājyavatī (from Nepal) as widows continued to control kingdoms that their husbands had left behind. The poorer economy of Nepal perhaps allowed women to exercise greater freedom than in India in some matters. An inscription from Nepal shows that a married woman had the freedom to remarry. No such instance has been found in inscriptions from India.

Geography, as known to the Mughal court and the Persian-writing authors of Mughal India, should have expanded in respect of Europe once the Portuguese and then the Dutch, English and French merchants arrived in India. An exploration of Persian texts containing geographical information, including lists of places in the world with their coordinates, reveals that while both Indian and European geographers followed the same Hellenistic system of coordinates, there was very meagre information about Europe added in Mughal-period texts to what had already been recorded in earlier Arabic-Persian works, and this remained pretty meagre. Even the discovery of the New World was rarely noticed and so its implications were not at all comprehended.

Among the inhabitants of medieval Indian cities, the largest group was naturally represented by its workforce. They were a crucial element in the urban dynamics of these cities. Ahmadabad, during the seventeenth century, was the leading manufacturing hub of Gujarat besides being the administrative headquarters of that province. This ensured varied employment opportunities for different categories of labourers and artisans residing in the city and its neighbourhood. Leveraging several analytical tools, the present study is an attempt to provide an insight into the contribution of the workforce behind the economic prosperity of Ahmadabad in the seventeenth century.

In the closing decades of the eighteenth and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Peasant insurrection was endemic to the north-eastern borders of Bengal, including the submontane region of Gird Garrow, a characteristic shared with the contiguous Garo Hills. Locating these conditions of insurrection within changes in the order of the regional economy under the Company’s rule, the article elucidates the economic rationale of ‘primitive violence’ and reflects on the processes generated by the state itself in the course of subjugation of the Garo peasants in the region.

This article briefly traces some general trends defining the existence of handloom weaving industry in United Provinces in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Handloom industry, in spite of the dislocation through large imports of British cloth, still remained the largest employing sector in this region, after agriculture. Use of machine-made yarn play a part in the survival of the handloom weaver, and there being now escalating competition between Indian and British mill yarn for supplying the local handloom industry. Handspun yarn ultimately became a miniscule part of the yarn market. The article analyses the ways in which the region’s handloom weavers were affected by these changes, by focusing on the shifts towards production of special kinds of cloth and search for investments, raw material and market. Such changes also meant that the previous inter-community forms of dependence tended to be transformed into intra-community forms of exploitation.

Nationalism is a fluid concept which needs contextual understanding. Construction of communal and caste identities played an important role in countering or qualifying nationalism in the United Provinces (UP) (1918–30). This article investigates the contents of some of the Brahman caste journals in order to study the evolution of identify consciousness, the construction of the ‘self’ vs. the ‘other’, where the self was always the Hindu upper caste, and the ‘other’ was invariably the ‘Musalman’. It is clear that identity consciousness had an overarching presence in middle-class UP in the 1920s—a presence which is clearly traceable in the caste journals published in that decade.

This article seeks to revisit the contributions of Professor Irawati Karve, one of the foremost anthropologists of twentieth-century India. In particular, it highlights her work as a public intellectual and draws attention to her views on various issues of general interest such as concept of culture and its origins and diversity, characters in the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, language policy, and ban on beef eating.

Audrey Truschke, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Muslim Pasts (New Delhi: Penguin Random House India), 2021, xlviii + 354 pp., ₹699.

Irfan Habib and Tarapada Mukherjee (late), Braj Bhūm in Mughal Times: The State, Peasants and Gosā’ins (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2020), 286 pp., ₹1,095 (Hb).

Saiyid Zaheer Husain Jafri, Beyond the Chronicles: ‘Recovering’ Histories of the Institutions and Families (Persian Documents in India, 17th–19th C.) (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House), 2021, 216 pp., ₹ 790 (Hb).

Farhat Hasan, Paper, Performance, and State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2021, 155 pp. ₹731.

Robert Eric Frykenberg, ed., Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (Delhi: Primus Books), 2020, 273 pp., ₹300 (Pb) [originally published in 1969].

Robert Eric Frykenberg, ed., Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia, (Delhi: Primus Books), 2020, ₹350 (Pb) [originally published 1977].

Amiya P. Sen, Vidyasagar: Reflections on a Notable Life (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan), 2021, 240 pp., ₹925.

K. L. Tuteja, Religion, Community and Nation: Hindu Consciousness and Nationalism in Colonial Punjab (New Delhi: Primus Books), 2021, 372 pp., ₹1,250 (Hb).

S.K. Kumar, and S. Sarkar, eds., Contextualizing the body: An Indian Experience (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distributors), 2020, ₹1,650.

Suranjan Das and Achintya Kumar Dutta, Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal: A Documentation (Delhi: Primus Books), 2021, 397 pp., ₹1,250.

Suranjan Das, Interrogating Politics and Society: Twentieth-Century Indian Subcontinent (New Delhi: Primus), 2014, 228 pp., ₹950 (Hb).

Arunima Dutta, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), xviii + 240 pp., ₹1,195 (Hb).

Ravi K. Mishra and Narendra Shukla, ed., Selected Works of C. Rajagopalachari: Vol. VI, 1936–39 (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan), 2021, 576 pp., ₹2,095 (Hb).

Geetanjali Srikantan, Identifying and Regulating Religion in India: Law, History and the Place of Worship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2020, viii + 251 pp., ₹647 (Hb).