Nationalism, Patriotism and Political Ideas of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan: an Analysis

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (Founder of Aligarh Muslim University) was born into a noble Muslim family in 1817; he was a distinguished scholar while working as a lawyer at the British East India Company. After realizing the worthless condition of Muslims, his approach to western education for the benefit of the Muslim community became a priority. This study contemplates that Sir Syed was religiously oriented and very politically aware of nationalism and patriotism. The author uses primary data and also secondary data. The author also explores his main books and articles; the author aims to examine Sir Syed's nationalist and political ideas concerning political significance for Muslims in India. The writer would like to know the result that, what is the reason, Sir Syed was against the Indian National Congress. At the same time, the whole Indian society was afraid of the British, but Sir Syed maintained his good relations with the British, and he also showed the loyalty of the Muslims towards them. This study found the conclusion about Sir Syed that he became a symbol of communal harmony.

Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion

Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst’s book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, is a masterful exploration of how animperial discourse of religion in the nineteenth-century defined Islam,Muslims, and jihad. Specifically, Fuerst calls attention to the significanceof the 1857 Rebellion by Indians against the British East India Company,and argues that British official histories of the Rebellion fundamentally alteredhow colonial officials, European scholars, and Indians thought andwrote about religion. Thus she builds on the work of previous scholars ofreligion such as Tomoko Masuzawa, who has argued that the concept ofuniversal religion is a constructed category, and David Chiddester, who hasshown how colonialism constructed both religions and races. Additionally,Fuerst’s book draws on historians such as Thomas Metacalf, who haveexplored the various ways the 1857 Rebellion transformed the business ofempire. However, Fuerst’s unique contribution lies in revealing the ways anofficial British discourse about Muslims and their supposed propensity forviolence, and the Indian Muslim engagement with this discourse, racializedand minoritized Muslims. This discourse presented as fact that all Muslimswere essentially homogenous and dangerous to imperial interests ...

Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India by Nilanjana Mukherjee

Nilanjana Mukherjee’s book looks at construction of space, leading from imaginative to concrete contours, within the context of the British imperial enterprise in India. Fundamental to her argument is that colonial definitions of sovereignty were defined in terms of control over space and not just over people, and hence it was first necessary to map the space and inscribe symbols into it. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, imperialism and colonization were complex phenomena that involved new and imminent strategies of nation building. No other period of British history, as Linda Colley has noted, has seen such a conscious attempt to construct a national state and national identity (Colley 1992). Although the physical occupation of India by the British East India Company could be said to have begun with the battle of Plassey (1757), nevertheless the process of conquest through mediation of symbolic forms indicate the time and manner in which the ‘conquest’ was conscripted

The first painting of the red panda (Ailurus fulgens) in Europe? Natural history and artistic patronage in early nineteenth-century India

Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British East India Company officials, based in the Indian subcontinent, amassed huge collections of natural history images. One of the largest collections, consisting of many thousands of individual paintings commissioned mainly from Indian artists between 1790 and 1823, was formed by Major-General Thomas Hardwicke. Some of these later formed the basis of John Edward Gray’s Illustrations of Indian zoology, but the vast majority remained unpublished. This paper focuses on one of these images, a detailed watercolour of the red panda ( Ailurus fulgens), painted to accompany a scientific description of the species which Hardwicke sent from Bengal to the Linnean Society of London in 1820. The painting pre-dates Frédéric Cuvier’s description of the animal by four years, and is almost certainly the first image of the red panda to have arrived in Europe. This paper sets the painting in the context of Hardwicke’s career as a naturalist and private patron of Indian artists, highlighting both his role as an early investigator of Indian zoology and the importance of “Company Art” in the accrual of scientific information.

East India Company Strategies in the Development of Singapore

Singapore in the Malay Peninsula was targeted by the British East India Company (EIC) to be the epicentre of their direct rule in Southeast Asia. Seeking new sources of revenue at the end of the 18th century, after attaining domination in India, the Company sought to extend its reach into China, and Malaya was the natural region to do this, extending outposts to Penang and Singapore. The latter was first identified as a key site by Stamford Raffles. The EIC Governor General Marquess Hastings (r. 1813-1823) planned to facilitate Raffle’s attention on the Malay Peninsula from Sumatra. Raffles’ plan for Singapore was approved by the EIC’s Bengal Government. The modern system of administration came into the Straits Settlements under the EIC’s Bengal Presidency. In 1819 in Singapore, Raffles established an Anglo-Oriental College (AOC) for the study of Eastern languages, literature, history, and science. The AOC was intended firstly to be the centre of local research and secondly to increase inter-cultural knowledge of the East and West. Besides Raffles’ efforts, the EIC developed political and socio-economic systems for Singapore. The most important aspects of the social development of Singapore were proper accommodation for migrants, poverty eradication, health care, a new system of education, and women’s rights. The free trade introduced by Francis Light (and later Stamford Raffles) in Penang and Singapore respectively gave enormous opportunities for approved merchants to expand their commerce from Burma to Australia and from Java to China. Before the termination of the China trade in 1833 Singapore developed tremendously, and cemented the role of the European trading paradigm in the East.

Battling and Rescuing as Double Heroism in Ayo Gorkhali: A History of the Gurkhas by Tim I. Gurung

The main aim of this paper is to study the dual heroism of the Gorkhas: ‘battling’ and ‘rescuing’ in the book Ayo Gorkhali: A History of the Gurkhas by Tim I. Gurung from the evolutionary perspective. The book is about the Gorkhas’ bravery in battling as well as rescuing exhibited in wars around the world because of which they brought victory and power to Britain. Despite their defeat in the Anglo-Nepal War (1814-1816), the Gorkhas were able to impress the British authority for their bravery, dedication and discipline. The British East India Company began to recruit the Gorkhas in their army. They succeeded to suppress robberies, banditries and mutinies and establish peace and order in the society. In every theatre of war including the First and Second World Wars, the Gorkhas battled bravely for Britain and kept her name always high in the world. In this paper, the researcher has consulted books, journal articles and documentaries related to the Gorkhas and their heroic performance in wars. The Gorkhas are found to be brave in both ‘fighting’ as well as ‘making rescue’ of their co-warriors, officers and civilians during the wars. They have been known as the ‘bravest of the brave’ in the world. This paper will be new insights for the future researchers in the particular area of study.

Legal Pluralism in Historical Context

This chapter presents a historical context of legal pluralism. A pivotal shift of the past several centuries has been from law attached to a person's community toward territorial states that claim a monopoly over law—a long-term project that has always been marked by major exceptions and has never been fully completed. Prior to this shift, the widely held view, now largely forgotten, is that everyone was entitled to be judged by the law of their community, called “personal law” at the time because it attaches to each person, though the chapter descriptively labels this “community law” to enable comparisons to other contexts. The first step is to understand empires, which are cauldrons of legal pluralism, using the Roman Empire as an example. The chapter then covers legal pluralism during the High Middle Ages, followed by the slow process by which the state gradually crystallized, absorbing other forms of law within its ambit, though not entirely. It also addresses three legally plural contexts in the early modern period into the twentieth century: the millet system in the Ottoman Empire, extraterritoriality, and the plural legal system entrenched in India by the British East India Company.

Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence

An account of theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (dāya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharmaśāstra). This book examines the evolution of different?juridical models of inheritance—in which families held property in trusts or in tenancies-in-common—against the backdrop of related developments in the philosophical understanding of ownership in the Sanskrit text-traditions of hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) and logic (Nyāya) respectively. Ownership and Inheritance reconstructs medieval Sanskrit theories of property and traces the emergence of various competing schools of Sanskrit jurisprudence during the early modern period (roughly fifteenth to nineteenth centuries) in Bihar, Bengal, and Varanasi. The book attends to the ways in which ideas from these schools of jurisprudence shaped the codification of Anglo-Hindu personal law by administrators of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While acknowledging the limitations of colonial conceptions of Dharmaśāstra as positive law, Ownership and Inheritance argues for far greater continuity between pre-colonial and colonial Sanskrit jurisprudence than accepted previously. Finally, this monograph charts the transformation of the Hindu law of inheritance—through precedent and statute—over the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.