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This article studies the extraordinarily broad advocacy of military enlistment by India's political and intellectual elites during the First World War. Though often interpreted as politically motivated, it shows above all a preoccupation with the enlivening effects of military experience—in particular its development of courage and manliness. In this it followed an established pattern of Indian elite concern with martiality. It also reflected anxieties of Indian weakness and effeminacy—something elites indicted themselves for, but which, importantly, they assumed to be more generally prevalent. Sampling calls for enlistment in the public space throughout the war, the article focuses on Bombay Presidency—a region that gave rise to such prominent Indian voices for enlistment as M. K. Gandhi, B. G. Tilak, and M. A. Jinnah. Bombay's recent experience of relative exclusion from military recruitment, and from membership of the 'martial races', was representative of much of India. This article enables us to view the effects of such 'demartialization' away from the classic case of Bengal. It suggests that it helped to inspire the call to enlist, especially as public spokesmen for the 'martial race' ideology explicitly linked martiality with manliness. The concern for enlistment ultimately superseded political calculation even for so hard-nosed a politician as Tilak. And though elites were most obviously concerned for their own martial vigour and leadership, they were also concerned with the manliness of the bulk of India's population, especially in Gandhi's conception of war as a preparation for satyagraha. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how local lived experiences and nationalist sentiments converged to shape a regional literati's conception of the province of Bihar in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial India. Following the formation of the separate province of Bihar in 1912, certain very powerful Indian-nationalist and cultural-historical factors were deployed to create a much-needed cultural-historical past for Bihar. In this project of territorial self-fashioning, institutions such as the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (1915) and the Patna Museum (1917) became crucial to the new political-cultural configuration of the region. Additionally, they also made Bihar's ancient past visible in a deliberately nationalist narrative. Projecting its rich ancient past onto a national framework provided Bihar with the possibility of overcoming its characterization as ‘backward’ and provincial. This article therefore moves beyond analytic frameworks of nationalism which emphasize particularities of regional identity by framing them in perpetual antagonism to the efforts of Indian national integration. By looking at the construction of narratives of an ancient past that straddled the region and the nation, I argue that the emergence of an entity called Bihar was braided into India's nationalist imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar—Fellow of Trinity College and Reader in History at the University of Cambridge—passed away on 23 April 2006. In addition to a rich legacy of books and articles that were published in his lifetime, he left behind an enormous amount of manuscript material, much of which was ready for publication. A selection of this material was published in his posthumous History, Culture and the Indian City (Cambridge University Press, 2009), but new manuscripts continue to come to light. His wife, Jennifer Davis, recently found this essay among his effects. There is good reason to believe that Raj felt it was ready for publication. Therefore, we publish this essay almost exactly as it appears in his typescript, only correcting typos and minor errors, and adding a map. The editors would like to thank David Washbrook and Jennifer Davis for proofing this article, Uttara Shahani and Binney Hare for researching and adapting the map, and Francoise Davis for the photograph of Raj. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interwar period has recently been described as a highly internationalist one in South Asia, as a series of distinct internationalisms—communist, anarchist, social scientific, socialist, literary, and aesthetic1—took shape. At the same time, it has been argued that the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 drew to a close various opportunities for international association (at least, temporarily). Taking into account both these contradistinctive developments, this article deals with another—and thus far largely overlooked—South Asian internationalism in the form of wartime Indian humanitarianism. In 1938, the Indian National Congress helped organize an Indian medical mission to China to bring relief to Chinese victims of the Second Sino-Japanese War. By focusing on this initiative, this article traces the ideas, the practices, and the motives of Indian political humanitarianism. It argues that such initiatives, as they became part of much wider global networks of humanitarianism in the late 1930s and early 1940s, created new openings for Indian nationalists to establish international alliances. This article also examines the way in which political humanitarianism enabled these same nationalists to perform as independent leaders on an international stage, and argues that humanitarianism served as a tool of anti-colonial emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

These three essays on distinct research areas and case studies cover a broad history of educational institutions in India, their focus on theatre and cultural education, and their role in creating citizens active in the public sphere and civic communities. The common point of reference for all the three essays is the historical transition from pre- to post-independence India, and they represent three dominant genres of Indian theatre practice: the amateur progressive theatre emerging out of sociopolitical movements; the State Drama School, which has remained at the core of the state's policy and vision of a national theatre; and college theatre, which comprises the field from which the National School of Drama sources its acting students, as well as new audiences for urban theatres. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1867, the Government of India passed one of the most brutal-minded and draconian laws ever created in colonial India. Known as the ‘Murderous Outrages Act’, this law gave colonial officials along the North-West Frontier wide powers to transgress India's legal codes in order to summarily execute and dispose of individuals identified as ‘fanatics’. Arguments for the creation and preservation of this law invariably centred around claims about the purportedly ‘exceptional’ character of frontier governance, particularly the idea that this was a region that existed in a perpetual state of war and crisis. Far from being peripheral in its impact, this article explores how this law both drew upon and enabled a wider legal culture that pervaded India in the wake of 1857. It argues that this law was a signal example of British attempts to mask the brute power of executive authority through legalistic terms, and was also evocative of a distinctly ‘warlike’ logic of colonial legality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In examining the remarkable expansion of India's textile production in the late colonial period, many scholars have identified consumption trends as shaping the relative success of mills as opposed to handlooms. That scholarship, however, has focused on only one component of consumption: clothing. This article explores another important area of cloth consumption in western India: non-clothing textiles. Across classes, urban dwellers used curtains and furnishing fabrics to try to improve comfort and create privacy—two qualities in short supply in cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad, where the pressures of rapidly growing populations came into conflict with new sanitary demands to open up houses to light and air. More broadly, non-clothing textiles helped to negotiate the novel conditions of urban life, where people moved regularly, homes were increasingly open to non-kin visitors, men and women shared space in new ways, and elite women were aesthetic arbiters of domestic space. While clothing choices in the late colonial period have often been studied in the context of nationalism, this article argues that nationalism was only one factor among many that shaped the use of household furnishing fabrics; equally, or more importantly, new ideas of ‘home’ led to and were expressed in expanded fabric use in urban western India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the memoirs of Indian Civil Service officers as they continued to work in what became the Indian Administrative Service after independence. Rather than being understood solely as historical archives, these texts constitute a genre that can be called the ‘bureaucratic memoir’ which reveals masculinities that are both colonial and post-colonial. These memoirs, and their publication decades after independence reveal attempts by elites to preserve the power of the bureaucracy into subsequent decades. The texts hope to disavow but instead also reveal the patriarchal intimacies of these elites, even as these were challenged by charges of corruption and failure which emerged almost from the first moments of independence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 15 August 1950, just as India was celebrating its third independence anniversary, an earthquake of 8.6 magnitude struck the remote northeastern state of Assam and its surrounding borderlands. Rivers burst their banks and landslides blocked Himalayan valleys, destroying towns, villages, roads, fields, and tea gardens in their wake. Beyond the disaster's shattering impact on the physical geography of the region, this article explores how it participated in another reconfiguration—that of Assam's place within India's political geography and national imaginary. The Indian public had hitherto known very little about India's remote ‘northeast frontier’; the cataclysm and subsequent relief measures served to carve out a space for it on Indian mental maps. Simultaneously, by forcing a large-scale encounter between Indian authorities and the people of the scarcely controlled eastern Himalayas, post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation led to unprecedented state expansion in this newly strategic borderland. Yet in the same breath, the aftermath of the disaster fuelled stereotypes about Assam and its hinterland that would eventually further their marginality within India and undermine their continued unity. The crystallization of Assam's image as a place irreducibly subject to the whims of nature and, more importantly, incapable of taking care of itself (and hence, of its highland dependencies), would poison centre–state relations for decades to come. Imperfect and contradictory, the reordering of this border space from a colonial frontier to a component of independent India's national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Within a year of Indian independence, the Communist Party of India declared independence to be a false dawn and the whole Socialist bloc within the ruling Indian National Congress cut its ties with the national government. The speed with which the left disengaged from what had been a patriotic alliance under colonialism surprised many at the time and has perplexed historians ever since. Some have looked to the wider context of the Cold War to explain the onset of dissent within the Indian left. This paper points instead to the neglected domestic context, examining the lines of inclusion and exclusion that were drawn up in the process of the making of the new Indian constitution. Once in power, Congress leaders recalibrated their relationship with their former friends at the radical end of the political spectrum. Despite some of the well-known differences among leading Congress personalities, they spoke as one on industrial labour and the illegitimacy of strikes as a political weapon in the first year of national rule and declared advocates of class politics to be enemies of the Indian state. Congress thus attempted to sideline the Socialists and Communists and brand them as unacceptable in the new regime. This paper focuses on this first year of independence, emphasizing how rapidly the limits of Indian democracy were set in place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the first decades of the twentieth century, classically trained Muslim scholars (`ulama) of the influential Deobandi school of North India issued a number of immensely popular, mass-printed ‘primers’ on Islamic belief and ritual practice. Now ubiquitous in the Islamic bookshops in South Asia and elsewhere, these primers sought to summarize the rudiments of an Islamic education for a nascent lay Muslim reading public. Focusing on three Deobandi `ulama—Ashraf `Ali Thanvi (d. 1943), Mufti Muhammad Kifayatullah (d. 1952), and Muhammad Manzur Nu`mani (d. 1997)—this paper explores how their primers advanced the Deobandi school's well-known critique of popular piety even as they claimed to address Muslims generally, and how their authors negotiated the subtle dynamics of print. Understanding the potentially subversive power of print to open a space for readers to form their own interpretations of minute doctrinal matters and the threat of mass-printed religious texts to their own authority, these `ulama implored readers to refrain from forming their own opinions of the primers’ content and to consult the `ulama throughout the reading process. Thus, even as they took advantage of print's possibilities, they remained deeply suspect of its ramifications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gandhian and Hindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simplify the historical nexus of relations between missionaries, converts and the colonial state. Challenging the view that conversions were ever only about material gain, this paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with leprosy-affected people in South India to consider the role that conversion has also played in establishing alternative, often positively construed, identities for those who came to live in leprosy colonies from the mid twentieth century onwards. The paper draws out the distinctive values associated with a Christian identity in India, exploring local Christianities as sets of practices through which, for example, a positive sense of belonging might be established for those otherwise excluded, rather than being centred upon personal faith and theology per se. Biographical accounts are drawn upon to document and analyse some of the on-the-ground realities, and the different implications—depending on one's wider social positioning—of converting from Hinduism to Christianity in South India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the end of the Great War to the onset of the Second World War, Great Britain and British India clashed over the Indian Army's role in imperial defence. Britain increasingly sought an imperial fighting force that it could deploy across the globe, but the government of India, limited by the growing independence movements, financial constraints, and—particularly—renewed tribal unrest on its North-West Frontier, refused to meet these demands. Attempts to reconcile Britain's and India's conflicting strategies made little headway until the late 1930s when compromise ultimately emerged with the establishment of the Expert Committee on the Defence of India 1938–39. While the Committee refuted India's traditional focus on the subcontinent's own security, importantly it recognized the necessity of British financial support for the Indian Army and the maintenance of a large local fighting force to prevent North-West Frontier unrest from disrupting imperial military planning at a time of global war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized—as passengers and population—negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper explores everyday responses to this dramatic change in ‘time-sense’ engendered through railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time. This allows for a historical analysis of how individuals and societies deal in practice with abstract technological transformations, and of how colonized populations have navigated the modernizing intervention of imperialist states. It argues that the ways in which the population of colonial India accepted, contested, and appropriated the temporal standardization instituted through railways and railway time challenged imperial policies determined by reified presumptions of metropolitan versus colonial ‘time-sense’. Since these responses were often analogous to how people and societies across the globe were responding to temporal standardization, they disrupt imperial strategies that used time-sense to locate colonized populations outside of History, in effect excluding them from their own present. They thus serve to materially de-stabilize a narrative of colonial time-lag and to reclaim the historical present as a time in which the colonizer and colonized exist contemporaneously. Consequently, they reconfigure modernity as an experiential rather than as a normative historical present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper attempts to see how a particular labour market (domestic service), a traditionally male domain, became segregated both by gender and age in the post-partition Indian state of West Bengal, and mainly in its capital city Calcutta. It argues that the downward trend in industrial job opportunities in post independent West Bengal, accompanied by the large scale immigration of men, women and children from bordering East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), led to a general decline in wage rate for those in domestic service. Poor refugee women, in their frantic search for a means of survival, gradually drove out the males of the host population who were engaged in domestic service in urban West Bengal by offering to work for a very low wage and often for no wage at all. As poor males from the neighbouring states of Bihar, Orissa and the United Provinces constituted historically a substantial section of Calcutta domestic workers, it was mainly this group who were replaced by refugee women. The second stage in the changing profile of domestic service since the 1970s in urban West Bengal was arguably set by migrating girl children from different parts of the state to Calcutta city in search of employment. This is probably why West Bengal had the highest girl children's work-participation rate in urban India in 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates some key questions regarding the socio-cultural implications of a relatively understudied print media, the literary miscellany, its production and consumption in early twentieth century British Bengal. Through a study of Ramananda Chattopadhyay's Prabāsī, a major literary journal that set the trend of sacitra māsik patrikā or illustrated monthly magazine in Bāṅglā, its literary innovations and editorial interventions, this paper explores how periodical reading and the notions of aesthetics and culture that it cultivated became intimately tied up with questions of middle class identity and class differentiation. It shows how this pioneering sacitra patrikā came to command a literary and visual space that, by the time of the Swadeshi years, was conceived as co-extensive with the future sovereign nation. Problematizing notions of a quotidian practice like leisure-reading that had become integral to the lifestyles of an expanding middle class, this study shows how Prabāsī not only lent new meanings to ideas of sustained interest and participation in public life amongst its readers, but that it also represented a self-consciously, high-brow cultural sensitivity that the Bengali bhadralok were to claim and safeguard as their own. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After partition, minorities in South Asia emerged as a distinct legal category of citizens who were not fully protected by the states within which they lived. The power of South Asia's nation-states over their ‘minority-citizens’ far exceeds their sovereignty over ordinary citizens, and the capacity of ‘minority-citizens’ to resist this power was broken, this article will show, by a series of draconian executive actions. But ‘minority citizenship’ was not simply a product of ‘bureaucratic rationality’, as some have suggested, or even of ‘governmentality’. On the contrary, it was produced by complex, often violent, interactions between government and a range of non-state actors, who forced their own ideas of nationality, justice, and entitlement on to the statute books. Citizenship in South Asia thus proves to have a complex parenthood, with ‘civil’ and ‘political’ more entangled, and mutually constituted, than some theorists would have us believe. India and Pakistan continued to be bound together by migrants and migration even as their discursive claims seemed to pull them ever further apart. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out. India's best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh—who was executed by the British in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case—has been celebrated more in posters, colourful bazaar histories and comic books than in academic tomes. These popular formats have established a hegemonic narrative of his life that has proved to be resistant to subsequent interventions as new materials, such as freshly-declassified intelligence reports and oral history testimonies, come to light. This paper accounts for why Bhagat Singh's life story has predominantly prevailed in the domain of the popular, with special reference to the secrecy of the revolutionary movement and the censure and censorship to which it was subjected in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to test the limits of current assessments of the New Negro renaissance, which tend to emphasize either its investment in cultural nationalism or its Pan-African focus, by exploring the international contours of The Crisis under Du Bois’s editorship. Recent analysis of The Crisis has paid considerable attention to the productive juxtaposition of what Anne Carroll has termed “protest and affirmation,” whereby Du Bois positioned reports on racial violence next to accounts of African American achievements in order to prompt acknowledgement of the realities of racism. But such criticism has focussed almost exclusively upon Du Bois’s treatment of American issues, overlooking his sustained interest in international cultural and political concerns. Focussing on the editorial framing of Indian nationalism, this article contends that the common distinctions drawn between internationalism and nationalism are too simplistic to accommodate The Crisis's formulation of cultural nationalism by way of internationalism. Indeed, scrutiny of the magazine's formal texture, which stages dynamic interplay between poetry, short fiction, investigative journalism, photography, readers' letters and political cartoons, reveals tensions that animate Du Bois's project, not least his dependence upon colonialist ways of seeing and a narrative of racial unity across the African diaspora that serves to elide cultural and historical specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The historical trading communities of early twentieth century Ladakh, in northern India, interacted with multiple cultures through both travel and the flow of trade goods. Using a neo-pragmatic philosophical framework, I will argue that this community—largely rural and commonly thought of as isolated—was, in fact, cosmopolitan. The traders' interactions with specific commodities prompted them to traverse cultural boundaries and engage with new ideas. This view of cosmopolitanism suggests that, while particular economic, political or social contexts may be part of the settings in which both individuals and communities are engaged in cosmopolitan processes, contexts do not define the cosmopolitan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Asianisms, that is, discourses and ideologies claiming that Asia can be defined and understood as a homogenous space with shared and clearly defined characteristics, have become the subject of increased scholarly attention over the last two decades. The focal points of interest, however, are generally East Asian varieties of regionalism. That “the cult of Asianism” has played an important role on the Indian subcontinent, too—as is evident from the quote above—is less understood. Aside from two descriptive monographs dating back to the 1970s, there has been relatively little scholarly engagement with this phenomenon. In this article, we would like to offer an overview of several distinct concepts of Asia and pan-Asian designs, which featured prominently in both political and civil society debates in India during the struggle for Independence. Considering the abundance of initiatives for Asian unification, and, in a more abstract sense, discourses on Asian identity, what follows here is necessarily a selection of discourses, three of which will be subjected to critical analysis, with the following questions in mind: •What were the concrete motives of regional—in this case Indian—actors to appropriate the concept of Asianism? Is the popularity of supranational frames of reference solely to be explained as an affirmation of a distinctive identity vis-à-vis the imagined powerful West, or are there other motives to be found?•What were the results of these processes of appropriation, and how were these manifested politically and culturally?•What tensions resulted from the simultaneous existence of various nationalisms in Asia on the one hand and macro-nationalistic pan-Asianism on the other? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]