Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond

Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.


Author(s):  
Mirza Sangin Beg

The second part of the translation has three segments. The first is dedicated to the history of Delhi from the time of the Mahabharat to the periods of Anangpal Tomar to the Mughal Emperor Humayun as also Sher Shah, the Afghan ruler. In the second and third segments Mirza Sangin Beg adroitly navigates between twin centres of power in the city. He writes about Qila Mubarak, or the Red Fort, and gives an account of the several buildings inside it and the cost of construction of the same. He ambles into the precincts and mentions the buildings constructed by Shahjahan and other rulers, associating them with some specific inmates of the fort and the functions performed within them. When the author takes a walk in the city of Shahjahanabad, he writes of numerous residents, habitations of rich, poor, and ordinary people, their mansions and localities, general and specialized bazars, the in different skills practised areas, places of worship and revelry, processions exemplifying popular culture and local traditions, and institutions that had a resonance in other cultures. The Berlin manuscript gives generous details of the officials of the English East India Company, both native and foreign, their professions, and work spaces. Mirza Sangin Beg addresses the issue of qaum most unselfconsciously and amorphously.


Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.


1994 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moses Nathaniel Moore

In 1890 theBoston Heraldcarried the following review of an article entitled “Thoughts for the Times or The New Theology”: “A curiosity is a paper by a native African, Orishatukeh Faduma, on ‘Thoughts for the Times,’ by which he means the new theology. This is the first time that a criticof the new theology has turned up from the dark continent, and is a curious and significant paper. When a native can write like this on subjects in which he has been obliged to educate himself, it means that we are to say nothing more against the intelligence of the African race.” While correct in noting the historical significance of Faduma's efforts, the reviewer's condescension disclosed his failure to appreciate and understand the sophistication and depth of Faduma' theological analysis and agenda. Faduma's critique of elements of the New Theology did not entail his rejection of this controversial theological synthesis which emerged during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Rather, his comments on religion and science, the historicalcritical method, comparative religion, missiology, the historical development of Christianity, and Christian ethics reveal that he essentially shared the theological orientation of its formulators.


Author(s):  
Tom McInally

Using company records and Della Valle’s journals, this chapter explains Strachan’s introduction to members of the East India Company in Isfahan. The struggles of the fledgling organisation to establish itself in Iran and India in the face of opposition from Portuguese and other western traders and its shortage of gold and silver are outlined and set against the background of Shah Abbas I’s reign and trade along the Silk Road. Strachan’s early involvement with the Levant Company in Aleppo and Baghdad did not overcome the suspicions that the English merchants in Isfahan held about Strachan because of his religion, nationality, friendship with the Carmelite friars in the city and, above all, his association with the Spanish ambassador, Don Garcías de Silva y Figueroa. Nevertheless, they employed him as physician and interpreter.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
Anja Nadine Klopfer

Oral histories of the Hurricane Katrina experience abound in stories of conscious decisions to “ride out the storm.” My article explores the narrative of “choosing to stay” as an empowering narrative rooted in assertions of place-knowledge and traces its historical genealogy to the nineteenth century. I argue that claiming agency in New Orleans and articulating a sense of belonging and local identity through professed intimate knowledge of the local environment took shape as a strategy of resistance against dominant discourses of American progress after the Civil War. Ultimately, this counternarrative of connecting to place as “homeland,” drawing on knowledge arising from lived experience, defied the normative twist of modernization, simultaneously reformulating power relations within the city. “Choosing to stay” thus turns out to be a long-lasting narrative not only of disaster, but of place, belonging, and community; without understanding its historical layers, we cannot fully make sense of this particular Katrina narrative.


2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-238
Author(s):  
Dagmara Łopatowska-Romsvik

Ernst von Dohnányi visited Kristiania, nowadays Oslo, the first time in 1906. Receiving very good reviews, he became a frequent guest in the city playing usually for full concert halls. He came to the city numerous times as a soloist performing music of the leading European composers of the nineteenth century and Beethoven’s and Bach’s works as well. He appeared on the stages in Kristiania also as a chamber music performer. Besides, his music was played there being prized high. He was considered a permanent and very wanted guest in the city and became an artist recommended as a piano teacher to the young Norwegian students by for example Edvard Grieg. His name was also used by the Norwegian piano factory’s owners together with the names of other famous artists such as Leschetizky, Paderewski, Carreño and others in the commercials of the instruments for many years. Eventually, his music was played there not only by the artist. This article’s aim is to show all the aspects of presence and reception of Dohnányi’s art in Kristiania in the period the artist used to show up in the city’s musical life.


1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Fisher

The interaction among the expanding British, the regional rulers of the Gangetic plain, and Mughal Emperors stands central to Indian history during the first half of the nineteenth century. Each of these three groups determined to advance its own political and cultural values in the face of the conflicting expectations and assumptions of the other two. The English East India Company regarded itself as under the authority of the British Parliament and the sovereignty of the British crown. At the same time, the Company continued nominally to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Mughal Emperor, at least in India. The various regional rulers of north India, most prominently the rulers of the province of Awadh, acted and apparently perceived themselves as de facto independent of the Mughals while also symbolically submitted to Mughal sovereignty. The Mughal Emperors, whose power to command armies had faded to nothingness during the last half of the eighteenth century, continued to pretend to absolute sovereignty over virtually all of India until 1858. Each of these three groups wished to see the 1819 imperial coronation by the Awadh ruler as an overt proof of their own cultural values and of their understanding of their relationships to the others.


AJS Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Manekin

AbstractOne of the markers of the emerging Reform movement in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was the publication of synagogue regulations that introduced new norms of decorum and, occasionally, slight changes in the prayer service. Scholarly discussions of the first synagogue regulations have been limited to the available published regulations, namely, the Westphalian (1810) and Amsterdam's Adat Jesurun regulations (1809). The recently discovered regulations composed by Joseph Perl for his synagogue in Tarnopol (1815) enable us for the first time to consider an east European perspective for understanding the different varieties of the new trend of synagogue innovations in the early nineteenth century. In addition to an analysis of Perl's regulations, the following article explains the circumstances in which Perl's synagogue project took shape, and highlights the historiographical significance of his synagogue regulations. I argue that Perl may be credited as the first to suggest a religious path that was both traditionalist and modern, a path that later characterized the synagogue innovations in several Habsburg cities. An English translation of the regulations is provided in an appendix.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document