ABSTRACT

This book presents an alternate history of colonial India in the 18th and the 19th centuries. It traces the transitions and transformations during this period through art, literature, music, theatre, satire, textiles, regime changes, personal histories and migration. The essays in the volume examine historical events and movements which questioned the traditional parameters of identity and forged a new direction for the people and the nation. Viewing the age through diverse disciplinary angles, the book also reflects on the various reimaginings of India at the time.

This volume will be of interest to academics and researchers of modern Indian history, cultural studies and literature. It will also appeal to scholars interested in the anthropological, sociological and psychological contexts of imperialism.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

part I|77 pages

Space, place and displacement

chapter 3|21 pages

The correct view

Ethnographic representation of Darjeeling hill tribes, from drawings to photography

part II|60 pages

Regional formations and movements

chapter 5|19 pages

struggle over a Mughal office

English response to Maratha expansion along coastal Western India in 1733

chapter 6|19 pages

Pre-modern cosmopolitanism

A challenge to Ladakh’s ‘Tibetanness’

chapter 7|20 pages

The ‘Cow Protection’ discourse in India

The making of a ‘movement’

part III|63 pages

Generic alterities of representation

chapter 8|18 pages

Aristocratic households during the transition to early modernity

Representation of domesticity in an Indo-Muslim 18th-century biographical compendium

chapter 9|19 pages

Delhi through Ghalib’s eyes

Politico-cultural transitions in the aftermath of the revolt of 1857

chapter 10|24 pages

Mapping transformations in the Indian public sphere

An analysis of the Punch and Oudh Punch cartoons

part IV|59 pages

Transigent cultures

chapter 11|22 pages

Music before the ‘Moderns’

A study of the changing economy of pleasure

chapter 13|21 pages

Indian trade textiles

Transition in patronage, transformation in style