Urban Culture in Northern India During the Eighteenth Century

Urban Culture in Northern India During the Eighteenth Century
Author: Muhammad Umar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN:

Description: This is perhaps the first work concerned exclusively with Muslim Society and Culture in eighteenth century India. The book was originally presented as doctoral thesis at the Aligarh Muslim University, but is now presented in a fully revised and personae of rise and decline of Indian towns in northern India, origin and development of Persian literature; food, dress, customs and domestic life in the last phase before colonialism and the beginnings of modernization.

The Place of Many Moods

The Place of Many Moods
Author: Dipti Khera
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2020-09-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0691201846

"India retains one of the richest painting traditions in the history of global visual culture, one that both parallels aspects of European traditions and also diverges from it. While European artists venerated the landscape and landscape paintings, it is rare in the Indian tradition to find depictions of landscapes for their sheer beauty and mood, without religious or courtly significance. There is one glorious exception: Painters from the city of Udaipur in Northwestern India specialized in depicting places, including the courtly worlds and cities of rajas, sacred landscapes of many gods, and bazaars bustling with merchants, pilgrims, and craftsmen. Their court paintings and painted invitation scrolls displayed rich geographic information, notions of territory, and the bhāva, or feel, emotion, and mood of a place. This is the first book to use artistic representations of place to trace the major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts in South Asia over the long eighteenth century. While James Tod, the first British colonial agent based in Udaipur, established the region's reputation as a principality in a state of political and cultural deterioration, author Dipti Khera uses these paintings to suggest a counter-narrative of a prosperous region with beautiful and bountiful cities, and plentiful rains and lakes. She explores the perspectives of courtly communities, merchants, pilgrims, monks, laypeople, and officers, and the British East India Company's officers, explorers, and artists. Throughout, she draws new conclusions about the region's intellectual and artistic practices, and its shifts in political authority, mobility, and urbanity"--

The King and the People

The King and the People
Author: Abhishek Kaicker
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190070676

An original exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire's capital, The King and the People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah's devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime which saw them only as the ruled. Drawing on a wealth of sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this book is the first comprehensive account of the dynamic relationship between ruling authority and its urban subjects in an era that until recently was seen as one of only decline. By placing ordinary people at the centre of its narrative, this wide-ranging work offers fresh perspectives on imperial sovereignty, on the rise of an urban culture of political satire, and on the place of the practices of faith in the work of everyday politics. It unveils a formerly invisible urban panorama of soldiers and poets, merchants and shoemakers, who lived and died in the shadow of the Red Fort during an era of both dizzying turmoil and heady possibilities. As much an account of politics and ideas as a history of the city and its people, this lively and lucid book will be equally of value for specialists, students, and lay readers interested in the lives and ambitions of the mass of ordinary inhabitants of India's historic capital three hundred years ago.

Urbanization in India During the British Period (1857–1947)

Urbanization in India During the British Period (1857–1947)
Author: Dipsikha Sahoo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000196364

Urban history is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field of research. The rate of urban growth in the twentieth century has also stimulated interest in the city as an object of socio-historical inquiry. Some historical studies on individual Indian cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Cawnpore, Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Surat and Madras have primarily explored the growth of urban centres by tracing their histories under colonial rule. This study offers a macro picture of the urban process under British administration, giving an understanding of how colonial capitalism shaped and imposed urban patterns in India. It contextualizes the urbanization of India in the world capitalist system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, explaining the multifaceted historical conditions in 1857, just before the imposition of direct Crown rule. Sahoo examines the socio-economic developments and demographic changes in India under British rule and analyzes the impact of the world capitalist economy, the pattern of urbanization under British rule, and the contribution of railways to urbanization. This volume is a profile of India’s primate cities, identifying the core, the periphery and the underdeveloped hinterlands.

Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age

Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age
Author: Susan Bayly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2001-02-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521798426

The phenomenon of caste has probably aroused more controversy than any other aspect of Indian life and thought. Susan Bayly's cogent and sophisticated analysis explores the emergence of the ideas, experiences and practices which gave rise to the so-called 'caste society' from the pre-colonial period to the end of the twentieth century. Using an historical and anthropological approach, she frames her analysis within the context of India's dynamic economic and social order, interpreting caste not as an essence of Indian culture and civilization, but rather as a contingent and variable response to the changes that occurred in the subcontinent's political landscape through the colonial conquest. The idea of caste in relation to Western and Indian 'orientalist' thought is also explored.

The Eighteenth Century in India

The Eighteenth Century in India
Author: Seema Alavi
Publisher: OUP India
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2007-09-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780195692013

Part of the prestigious Debates in Indian History and Society series, this volume presents the key argument of the debates, along with a selection of writings that made pioneering interventions in the study of the 18th century in Indian history.

The Shi‘a in Modern South Asia

The Shi‘a in Modern South Asia
Author: Justin Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2015-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 110710890X

This book explores various Shi'i communities in the subcontinent as well as South Asian Shi'i diasporas in East Africa.

Urban Histories of Rajasthan

Urban Histories of Rajasthan
Author: Elizabeth M. Thelen
Publisher: Gingko Library
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2022-06-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1909942677

An exploration of religious conflicts in premodern urban India. Diverse peoples intermingled in the streets and markets of premodern Indian cities. This book considers how these diverse residents lived together and negotiated their differences. Which differences mattered, when and to whom? How did state actions and policies affect urban society and the lives of various communities? How and why did conflict occur in urban spaces? Through these questions, this book explores the histories of urban communities in the three cities of Ajmer, Nagaur, and Pushkar in Rajasthan, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The focus of this study is on everyday life, contextualizing religious practices and conflicts by considering patterns of patronage and broader conflict patterns within society. The book examines various archival documents, from family and institutional records to state registers, and uses these documents to demonstrate the complex and sometimes contradictory ways religion intersected with politics, economics, and society. The author shows how many patronage patterns and processes persisted in altered forms, and how the robustness of these structures contributed to the resilience of urban spaces and society in precolonial Rajasthan.

Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History

Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History
Author: Richard M. Eaton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2013-03-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107034280

This book has brought together some of the foremost scholars of South Asian and Global History, who were colleagues and associates of Professor John F. Richards to discuss themes that marked his work as a historian in an academic career of almost forty years. It encapsulates discussions under the rubric of 'frontiers' in multiple contexts. Frontier has often been conceived as a space of transformation marking new forms of economic organization, commodity trade, land settlement and state authority. The essays here underline the range of interests and approaches that marked Professor Richards' illustrious career - frontiers and state building; frontiers and environmental change; cultural frontiers; frontiers, trade and drugs; and frontiers and world history. The volume discusses issues from medieval to early modern South Asian history. It also reflects a concern for large-scale global processes and for the detailed specificities of each historical case as evident in Professor Richards' work.

The City in South Asia

The City in South Asia
Author: James Heitzman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2008-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134289626

The macro-region of South Asia – including Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – today supports one of the world’s greatest concentrations of cities, but as James Heitzman argues in the first comprehensive treatment of urban South Asia, this has been the case for at least 5,000 years. With a strong emphasis on the production of space and periodic excursions into literature, art and architecture, religion and public culture, this interdisciplinary study is a valuable text for students and scholars interested in comparative history, urban studies, and the social sciences.