Lucknow sagrayalaya kee munmurthiya

Prachin bharath

Sugar industry

Chalcolithic cultures of western India

Fall of the imperial Guptas

Devi Bhagavata purana

This thesis explores the relationship between law, sovereignty and violence in colonial India in the period 1857-1914. From murder, to corporal punishment, to jubilee amnesty, this thesis highlights two gaps within the scholarship of nineteenth-century Indian legal and political history. Firstly, that histories of colonial law have been reluctant to provide a political analysis of the relationship between crime, sovereignty and identity in the everyday. Secondly, the much-noted shift in political discourse from East India Company to British Crown rule in histories of imperial political philosophy has left unexplained the relationship between liberalism, the codification of criminal law, and the production of colonial legal-political subjectivity. This lacuna in scholarship has resulted in the construction of a limited theoretical framework for understanding the underlying politics at play in the histories of crime, law, and punishment. Ultimately this work provides such framework, allowing the writing of law and the act of crime to be brought into histories of political philosophy and colonial sovereignty. As a revisionist history of colonial politics and law the thesis therefore breaks new ground in respect to our broader understandings of colonial sovereignty and politics, the practice of colonial law, and the constitution of the colonial state in India.

Sakas in India

Considerable research has been done on the impact of English in India but despite the fact that, for a century and a half, almost all British civil and military officers had to learn Hindustani, almost nothing has been written on its importance to the colonial state. The small amount of literature has focused on a few particular aspects, either the very early Gilchrist years or specifically on the textbooks themselves. This study uses a wide range of archival materials relating to the British learning of the Hindustani, together with the textbooks and grammars they produced and memoirs of those who had to learn the language, both to tell the story of the British Hindustani ‘enterprise’ comprehensively, and to reveal its relationship to colonial state power. The initial premise was that Hindustani was the ‘cement’ which held the empire together. As to be expected, however, over such a long time frame the evidence revealed considerable changes in the perceived importance of Hindustani to the colonial state and links made by many scholars between language and colonial power are in this particular case, shown to be dubious. The study, in looking at an area hitherto unresearched, contributes to the knowledge and understanding of the role of an indigenous lingua franca in the colonial context and sheds new light on its ‘fate’ in the Indian context.

This dissertation examines how direct versus indirect rule shaped late colonial India through government finance. Fiscal policy has hitherto been overlooked in the literature on Indian economic history. This thesis considers how revenues were raised and spent in the Princely States compared with British India, and the welfare outcomes associated with these fiscal decisions. Part One examines the fiscal framework through the neglected public accounts. The key finding is that while the systems of taxation were broadly similar in both types of administration, patterns of public expenditure were dramatically different. The large Princely States spent more public revenue on social expenditure. This was made possible by lower proportionate expenditure on security and defence. Part one charts these trends empirically and unearths political and institutional reasons for the differences in fiscal policy between directly and indirectly ruled India. Part Two examines welfare. The study goes beyond previous anthropometric scholarship by assessing the impact of institutions and policies on biological living standards, deploying a new database of adult male heights in South India. Puzzlingly, heights were slightly lower in the Princely States, traditionally lauded for being more responsive to the needs of their populations, especially those of low status. The resolution to the conundrum is found in poorer initial conditions, and caste dynamics. Higher social expenditure and reduced height inequality occurred simultaneously in the States from the 1910s, suggesting policies directed at low status groups within the Princely States may have been successful. I also examine the consequences of Britain's policy of constructing an extensive rail network across the country. Importantly, the impact of railways differed by caste. Railways were good for High Caste groups, and bad for low status Dalit and Tribal groups. This suggests that railways served to reinforce the existing caste distinctions in access to resources and net nutrition.