The New Cambridge History of India. Volume II.1. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire.

1989 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Michael H. Fisher ◽  
C. A. Bayly ◽  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
History Of

Chronicle of Dream in Amitav Ghosh’s Novel “Sea of Poppies”

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Ashok Kumar Malviya ◽  
Dr. Ajay Bhargava
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Opium War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Village ◽  
Village Woman

Sea of Poppies is a historical novel based on human being's survive and fulfilment of dream. The novel is divided into three main parts, first one is land, second one is river and third one is sea, in which the whole novel is chronologically weave with the fulfilment of dream. The chief character in this novel is Deeti, a village married woman of India, who dreamed to travel in an ample vessel, quenched her desire in an unprecedented situation. One day, she saw a big ship sailing on the ocean, which she had never seen earlier even in her dream.       Sea of Poppies is a meditation in the guise of a novel, but such is the author's meticulousness in matters of research, and so firm is his grasp of the unexplored underbelly of the British Empire. Ghosh is the author of ten highly acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction which include the booker- prize shortlisted Sea of Poppies. The novel, Sea of Poppies, told the history of Indian society, opened in 1838, on the eve of first opium war, the novel divided into three parts, Land, Water and Sea. The first part narrated the condition of the protagonist that made able to reach near the ship. The first part also described the economic and social states of the Indian society. The second part invited the characters to join the ship and being ready for their voyage to abroad. The third part, allowed the characters to sail for their new life in Mauritius.        Sea of Poppies, shows the chronicle of dreams through the eyes of an Indian village woman, named Deeti, in a different circumstances. The novel depicted the nascent desire of female protagonist, to fulfill her dream. She lived her life as a common Indian house lady, and left her village in an unpredicted situation that visualized the 19th and 20th century’s condition of Indian society. The novel, breaks the doors of caste description and colonialism, and reveals the new way of life, seeking freedom in a different condition.

Jack Sepoy and the Dervishes: Islam and the Indian Soldier in Princely India

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
NILE GREEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
South India ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
Chain Of Command ◽  
History Of ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Almost All

Like other Britons in colonial India, Sir William Sleeman had a poor opinion of the traditional holy men who still formed an important part of Indian society in the nineteenth century. Reflecting his writings on the suppression of the Thugs that would make him famous, Sleeman declared that, “There is hardly any species of crime that is not throughout India perpetrated by men in the disguise of these religious mendicants; and almost all such mendicants are really men in disguise”.1 None of these holy men were considered more dubious – more superstitious and reactionary – than the dervishes and faqīrs. In popular Indian usage the terms darwīsh and faqīr referred to a class of Muslim holy men who were considered to possess a range of miraculous powers, powers which served to demonstrate their proximity to God; and so in turn to underwrite their considerable authority.2 For many British officials, it was this authority that stood at the heart of what they saw as the faqīr problem. As the rumours that surrounded the various ‘mutinies’ of the nineteenth century demonstrate, faqīr s were seen as the perpetual ringleaders of rebellion and sedition. Nowhere were these concerns more insistent than in the circles of India's colonial armies, which more than any other aspect of colonial society relied on loyalty to a formalised and rational chain of command. Yet in spite (and in some ways because) of these fears, the commanders of the various armies under British command in India were anxious to demonstrate their respect for the autonomy of the religious rights of the Indian soldier. Through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Islam of ‘Jack Sepoy’ or the Indian soldier fell in between this tension of covert suspicion and official respect, and in different ways the careers of a series of Muslim holy men attached to the Muslim soldiers were shaped by this tension. Over the following pages, this essay examines the careers of three faqīr s connected to the Hyderabad Contingent, the army under British command in the nominally independent princely state of Hyderabad in South India, better known as the Nizam's State. Looking out from this princely corner of Britain's ‘informal empire’, the essay uses a number of forgotten small-town texts in Urdu to begin to reconstruct the religious history of the Indian soldier from the inside, as it were, and so to create an ethnohistory of Islam in the colonial armies of the British Empire.3

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

The Foreign Policy Mechanism of the Union Of South Africa and the Development of its Diplomatic Relations (1910–1948)

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-86
Author(s):  
Alexandra Arkhangelskaya
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
The Political ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Economic Evolution ◽  
Local Elite ◽  
History Of

The history of the formation of South Africa as a single state is closely intertwined with events of international scale, which have accordingly influenced the definition and development of the main characteristics of the foreign policy of the emerging state. The Anglo-Boer wars and a number of other political and economic events led to the creation of the Union of South Africa under the protectorate of the British Empire in 1910. The political and economic evolution of the Union of South Africa has some specific features arising from specific historical conditions. The colonization of South Africa took place primarily due to the relocation of Dutch and English people who were mainly engaged in business activities (trade, mining, agriculture, etc.). Connected by many economic and financial threads with the elite of the countries from which the settlers left, the local elite began to develop production in the region at an accelerated pace. South Africa’s favorable climate and natural resources have made it a hub for foreign and local capital throughout the African continent. The geostrategic position is of particular importance for foreign policy in South Africa, which in many ways predetermined a great interest and was one of the fundamental factors of international involvement in the development of the region. The role of Jan Smuts, who served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and from 1939 to 1948, was particularly prominent in the implementation of the foreign and domestic policy of the Union of South Africa in the focus period of this study. The main purpose of this article is to study the process of forming the mechanisms of the foreign policy of the Union of South Africa and the development of its diplomatic network in the period from 1910 to 1948.

Empires of Antiquities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Billie Melman
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
First World

Empires of Antiquities is a history of the rediscovery of the imperial civilizations of the ancient Near East in a modern imperial order that evolved between the outbreak of the First World War and the decolonization of the British Empire in the 1950s. It explores the ways in which near eastern antiquity was redefined and experienced, becoming the subject of imperial regulation, modes of enquiry, and international and national politics. A series of globally publicized spectacular archaeological discoveries in Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, which the book follows, made antiquity material visible and accessible as never before. The book demonstrates that the new definition and uses of antiquity and their relations to modernity were inseparable from the emergence of the post-war international imperial order, transnational collaboration and crises, the aspirations of national groups, and collisions between them and the British mandatories. It uniquely combines a history of the internationalization of archaeology and the rise of a new “regime of antiquities” under the oversight of the League of Nations and its institutions, a history of British attitudes to, and passion for, near eastern antiquity and on-the-ground colonial policies and mechanisms, as well as nationalist claims on the past. It points to the centrality of the new mandate system, particularly mandates classified A in Mesopotamia/Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan, formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire, and of Egypt, in the new archaeological regime. Drawing on an unusually wide range of materials collected in archives in six countries, as well as on material and visual evidence, the book weaves together imperial, international, and national histories, and the history of archaeological discovery which it connects to imperial modernity.

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