Everyday Politics of Economic Life in Small Town North India: A Social History of Kannauj through the Lens of the Ittar (Perfume) Business

2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-484
Author(s):  
Aseem Prakash
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social History ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
North India ◽  
History Of ◽  
Everyday Politics

This article attempts to understand the recent social history of Kannauj, a small town in North India famous for manufacturing ittar and associated products. Social history is captured by understanding the interconnectedness of society, economy and politics. The article argues that various social networks—meshed, cluster-based and transactional—facilitate business in ittar and associated products and also shape everyday politics of economic life interconnecting economy, society and politics.

Segmented Possibilities: Migrant life Histories of Hindustani Workers in Post Colonial India

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 134-158
Author(s):  
Camille Buat
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Spatial Configuration ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Paper Mill ◽  
North India ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
History Of

AbstractStarting in the late 19 th century, workers from north India came to constitute the backbone of the urban and industrial labour force in Calcutta and neighboring mill municipalities. As they settled in and around the colonial metropolis, these Hindustani workers maintained strong connections with their rural homes. One generation after the other, they reproduced this dual settlement over the following decades. This bi-local structure of labour circulation, which linked village and city through the constant coming and going of men and women, progressively broke down from the late 20 th century onwards, following the closure of the large textile, engineering and paper industries which underpinned the economic vitality of the Calcutta region. The article sketches out the history of this socio-spatial configuration over the second half of the 20 th century, through the life histories of two migrant Hindustani workers. Born around 1940, Siraj Prajapati and Mohan Lal both spent the greater part of their working lives in Calcutta's industrial suburbs. Siraj, a potter by caste, was engaged in the artisanal production tea-cups in Howrah. Born into one of the most marginalized sections of north Indian society, Mohan managed to train as a mason, and was employed in the Titagarh Paper Mill through the 1960s and 70s. Both have now settled back in their respective villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Teasing out the contradictory ways in which both men frame their life trajectories, the article contributes a micro-perspective to the social history of rural-urban migration in post-colonial north India.

Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charu Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
North India ◽  
Community Relations ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Hierarchical Relationship ◽  
History Of

This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repertoires of representation, it navigates how a contentious discourse around servant and employer developed in the Hindi print sphere. The essay links the portrayal of servants with changing class, caste and religious dynamics, in which print intersected with material circumstances to shape the hierarchical relationship between servants and employers. While imaging ‘ideal’ servants, the Hindi vernacular was also infused with their negative counterparts and anxieties around personal interactions between mistresses and servants, taking its cue from quotidian life and caste–community relations of the time. Increasing assertion by Dalits and growing antagonism between Hindus and Muslims left its imprints on portrayals of subordinate-caste and Muslim servants by dominant castes and classes. The vernacular straddled these domains of distance/desire and hate/love in the servant–employer relationship.

scholarly journals The Social History of a Genre

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Orsini
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
North India ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Epochal Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Material Form

Tales are ubiquitous in the literary culture of pre-modern North India, as elsewhere, and they come in all shapes, languages and inflections. For this reason, tracking them allows us to travel into and across most of the milieux of this multilingual literary culture. But precisely because of their ubiquity, when we move from the micro level of individual texts to the macro level of literary culture and historical processes, it becomes difficult to say anything more than ‘they were there, they circulated, they usually retold the same stories in new ways or mixed familiar elements to produce new narratives’. Yet if we pay precise attention to their articulation and re-articulation of cultural and social imaginaries, the particular linguistic textures and aesthetic emphasis, material form and evidence of patronage, the shifting extent of circulation and popularity, we can use the longuedurée history of the katha genre to illuminate the historical dynamics of cultural and aesthetic change in the region in ways that intersect, connect and question macro-historical narratives of dynastic and epochal change.

A Roundtable on Rupa Viswanath's The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India and the Study of Caste

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-64
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
North India ◽  
Roundtable Discussion ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Private Realm ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Abstract In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a ‘slave society’. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifies The Pariah Problem with a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the ‘religionization’ of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of a public that excluded the Dalit to inquire further about the gendered nature of that public and the private realm it simultaneously generated. Zoe Sherinian calls attention to Viswanath's characterization of missionary opposition to social equality for Dalits and examines missionary and Dalit discourses that stand apart from those that Viswanath studied. Joel Lee extends some of Viswanath's claims about the Madras presidency by showing strong parallels to social practices in colonial North India. Finally, Viswanath's own response addresses the assessments of her colleagues.

The Entrepreneurial Reorganization of an Artisan Trade: The Bakers of Buenos Aires, 1770-1820

1980 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyman L. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Andes ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Major Reform ◽  
History Of

Although there have been numerous important contributions to the social history of colonial Spanish America published in recent years, these studies have generally ignored the artisan and semi-skilled working classes that were, numerically, the largest urban components of these societies. This article will examine one colonial artisan group, the bakers of Buenos Aires, during a period when the city and its hinterland experienced significant economic and political change, 1770-1820. At the beginning of the period, Buenos Aires was little more than a large village with a population of approximately 20,000 and an economy dominated by contraband trade. As part of a major reform of Spanish strategic and economic policy, Buenos Aires was selected in 1776 as the political capital of a new viceroyalty that included the vast region bordered by the Andes, the Atlantic and Brazil. The city's new political importance with a viceregal court, enlarged military garrisons and augmented bureaucracy stimulated both urban and regional economies and attracted large numbers of immigrants from the interior and from Europe. It is increasingly clear that these alterations in the city's economic life and social structure contributed to the political crisis that culminated in the independence period. Although this study will concentrate on a single occupational group, it is hoped that this effort to measure the responses of the bakers to the altered opportunities and challenges of the late colonial and early independence periods will also provide some new insights into the economic and political history of the region during this crucial period.

Food and the Annales School

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney Watts
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Food History ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
History Of Agriculture ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
History Of ◽  
Living Material ◽  
Annales School

Food history emerged as a serious academic pursuit in the wake of a major reorientation in the field of history led by French scholars of the Annales School. Established in 1929 by French historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the Annales in 1929 was a ground-breaking journal dedicated to historical and contemporary research in economics and sociology. Although the Annales is not solely responsible for the rise of social history, its founders undertook ambitious studies focusing on historical standards of living, material lives, demographic trends, and mentalities of pre-modern peoples, a research interest which typically addressed the history of agriculture and problems of subsistence. This article explores how the Annales School has shaped the field of food history by looking at three significant"moments": agricultural patterns and cognitive frameworks of pre-modern societies, food production and food consumption as a foundation of social and economic life, and the history of cuisine through a cultural approach to taste and identity. The article concludes by assessing the influence of the Annales School on the history of food outside of France.

From periphery to centre and back again: elite transformations in Mechelen (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries)

Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 610-631
Author(s):  
Frederik Buylaert
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social History ◽  
Capital City ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban Elite ◽  
Craft Guilds

AbstractThis article explores the social history of the political elites of Mechelen, a town that evolved from a seigneurial enclave within the duchy of Brabant to the de facto capital of the Burgundian–Habsburg Low Countries between the 1470s and 1530. Proceeding from a quantitative analysis of lists of aldermen, fiscal registers and epitaphs, the article argues that the short-lived functioning of Mechelen as a capital city had great impact on its ruling classes. Mechelen was traditionally ruled by a coalition of craft guilds and prominent citizens, but the latter reoriented their social networks to the court elite, as the latter's presence supercharged pre-existing trends towards ennoblement among the urban elite.

scholarly journals Knocker Ups: A Social History of Waking Up in Victorian Britain’s Industrial Towns

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-348
Author(s):  
Arunima Datta
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Primary Industry ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Waking Up

Abstract This paper examines the everyday history of one of the groups of auxiliary workers in industrial towns of Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing primarily from journal and newspaper records, this paper examines the work of knocker ups and the ways in which they became intimately tied to the lives of industries and primary industry workers. The paper then focuses on how knocker ups became highly influential in industrial towns through the multifarious jobs they performed – sometimes knowingly and sometimes less consciously. In so doing, this paper challenges the prevailing notion that auxiliaries merely served their primary clients by waking them up, and re-visualizes the position of knocker ups in industrial towns not as mere auxiliaries but as crucial contributors to social, political and economic life as well as partners in law enforcement in a broad variety of circumstances. The findings suggest a need to revise long-standing views of labour in industrial Britain.

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