Centre For Historical Studies

Based on a previous study by ethnomusicologist Daniel Neuman from the 1970s, my thesis is an ethnographic account of how a particular group of sārangi musicians have dealt with the socio-cultural complexities of music making in postmodern India. It is a report that deconstructs the social make-up of hereditary musicians, analyzes the character and significance of the gharānā system as a professional organization, and evaluates the efficacy of contemporary patronage avenues to provide a larger portrait of how Indian art music is cultivated today.

My conclusions are based on research carried out during a six month stay as a study abroad student at Delhi University in 2006. Using established methods in Ethnomusicology, I focused on the various contexts within which musicians develop their technical abilities and musical acumen. In addition to extensive library research, I conducted my own fieldwork by interviewing musicians, establishing their genealogies, attending concerts, continuing to learn the tabla, and actively interacting with patrons and connoisseurs of North Indian art music.

New Delhi’s “urban villages” are the result of government land acquisitions that began in 1912 and continued into the 1960s. Since the 1980s, growing demand for real estate within the city has engendered unprecedented residential and commercial development in these former agrarian areas. The consequences of this include structural changes in the built environment, shifts in the social make-up of the village, and new relationships with the municipal and planning authorities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research between 2010 and 2015, this article examines Hauz Khas, an important archaeological site and urban village in New Delhi. It analyses historical transformations in boundary and land use in the twentieth century, and shows how local responses to land acquisitions, city planning, and powerful money networks have created a new politics of urban formation.

Keywords:
New Delhi, urban villages, land acquisitions, urban history, city planning, municipal elections

The meaning of land revenue farming in Indian history has eluded consensus. Some view it as an administrative aberration indicating weak state control, while others see it as a strategy for consolidating authority. This essay traces the historical development of iqṭāʻ and ijārah, two Perso-Arabic terms frequently translated from the sources as ‘revenue farming estate’. I then suggest that existing perspectives do not capture the broader structure and significance of various entitlements to land revenue. Instead, I suggest that entitlements be schematized according to how regularized the right was, whether it was permanent, and how duty-bound the right holder was. In this formulation, revenue farm refers to a complex of rights and duties secured by contract in which a sovereign transferred the temporary exploitation of a holding for rent in ad- vance. It was one of four tenurial complexes under which entitlements fell, the others being estates from bureaucratic assignment, hereditary occupation or possession by grant/gift, and tributary or chieftaincy.

A text that has found renewed interest among scholars of early modern India is the Persian compendium of religion called Dabistān-i Maẕāhib. Written between 1645 and 1658, the Dabistān presents a lively ethnographic and historical account of customs and habits of various major and minor religious communities in northern India during the heyday of the Mughal Empire (1526-1707). Written like a travelogue, it moves between various modes of description including mythical revelations, storytelling, ethnographic notes, and authorial commentary. The Dabistān-i Maẕāhib is also valuable because it is the earliest work outside of the Sikh literary tradition that contains first-hand accounts of the growing Sikh socio-religious movement established in Punjab during the sixteenth century. Focusing on this section titled "The Nanak Panthis", this article explores what translators, commentators, and historians have variously understood as comprising the original text. Since the early twentieth century, scholars have relied on later manuscript and print editions in their English translations and use of this work without necessarily reflecting on how these choices have preconditioned interpretive possibilities. My analysis of a recently discovered and earliest known manuscript copy of the Dabistān-i Maẕāhib from 1650 suggests that all of the later hand written and print editions, which have now become standardized through scholarly convention, omit certain details and even entire passages. This has major implications for how we have understood the genesis and transmission of the text, and perhaps more significantly, the social groups and historical moments depicted in this one-of-a-kind work.

This working paper examines the social impact of the film industry in India during the first four decades after Indian Independence in 1947. Its shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India and the counterpart in scale to Hollywood in the United States, shared Hollywood’s privileging of paler skin over darker skin, and preference for presenting women in stereotypical ways lacking agency. Bollywood reflected views on skin color and gender long prevalent in Indian society, but this working paper shows that serendipitous developments helped shape what happened on screen. The dominance of Punjabi directors and actors, organized as multi-generational families, facilitated lighter skin tones becoming a prominent characteristic of stars. By constraining access to legal finance, pursuing selective censorship, and by denying Bollywood cinema the kind of financial and infrastructural support seen in other developing countries, the Indian government also incentivized directors and producers to adopt simplified story lines that appealed to predominately rural audiences, rather than contesting widely accepted views. Employing new evidence from oral histories of producers and actors, the paper suggests that cinema not only reflected, but emboldened societal attitudes regarding gender and skin color. The impact of such content was especially high as rural and often illiterate audiences lacked alternative sources of entertainment and information. It was left to parallel, and to some extent regional, cinemas in India to contest skin color and gender stereotypes entrenched in mainstream media. The cases of parallel cinema and Tamil cinema are examined, but their audiences were either constrained or – as in the case of Tamil cinema – subject to the isomorphic influence of Bollywood, which grew after policy liberalization in 1991.

This article examines how the film industry influenced prevailing gender and skin color stereotypes in India during the first four decades after Independence in 1947. It shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India, shared Hollywood's privileging of paler skin over darker skin, and its preference for presenting women in stereotypical ways lacking agency. The influence of film content was especially significant in India as audiences often lacked alternative sources of entertainment and information. It was left to parallel, and often regional, cinemas in India to contest skin color and gender stereotypes entrenched in mainstream media. As conventional archival sources for this history are lacking, the article employs new evidence from oral histories of producers and actors.

The meaning of land revenue farming in Indian history has eluded consensus. Some view it as an administrative aberration indicating weak state control, while others see it as a strategy for consolidating authority. This essay traces the historical development of iqṭāʻ and ijārah, two Perso-Arabic terms frequently translated from the sources as ‘revenue farming estate’. I then suggest that existing perspectives do not capture the broader structure and significance of various entitlements to land revenue. Instead, I suggest that entitlements be schematized according to how regularized the right was, whether it was permanent, and how duty-bound the right holder was. In this formulation, revenue farm refers to a complex of rights and duties secured by contract in which a sovereign transferred the temporary exploitation of a holding for rent in advance. It was one of four tenurial complexes under which entitlements fell, the others being estates from bureaucratic assignment, hereditary o...

The financial crisis of 2008 brought with it a renewed interest in the study of capitalism across disciplines. While historians have since led the way with writings on commodities, labor, finance, and institutions, these have been largely conveyed from the Euro-American perspective without necessarily probing other values, parameters, and conditions beyond western political economy that have shaped business over time. This article suggests that to assess the benefits and limits of the global capitalist experience, we must prioritize unconventional subjects, sources, and styles in how we frame research questions, analyze evidence, and cast narratives. Such an endeavor is especially timely given the growing influence of regional markets around the world and the increasing prominence of computational tools to generate and analyze novel datasets.

The conjoined yet opposed attributes of dharma and adharma are often recognized as centrally defining Indian religions. What, however, eludes scholarly attention is the well-defined "midway" between the two expressed through the notion of āpaddharma. Āpaddharma espouses a conceptual shift in the way dharma and adharma function as it permits the transgression of the principles of dharma in the context of crisis situations. It advances the notion that both dharma and adharma are conditional and are devoid of a definite finality which renders a required flexibility to ancient religious traditions. Āpaddharma is made of two components: āpad and dharma which are usually translated as "laws of crises". However, the message intended and expressed through the compound term encompasses the multiple attributes of the concept. The present paper intends to capture the meanings and nuances underlying the terminology by tracing the early semantic history of āpad. The aim is twofold: firstly, to understand the rationale behind the selection of the term āpad to define the attributes of āpaddharma; secondly, to understand how the meaning of āpad evolved through an interaction between the Brahmanic and Buddhist traditions.

The conjoined yet opposed attributes of dharma and adharma are often recognized as centrally defining Indian religions. What, however, eludes scholarly attention is the well-defined "midway" between the two expressed through the notion of āpaddharma. Āpaddharma espouses a conceptual shift in the way dharma and adharma function as it permits the transgression of the principles of dharma in the context of crisis situations. It advances the notion that both dharma and adharma are conditional and are devoid of a definite finality which renders a required flexibility to ancient religious traditions. Āpaddharma is made of two components: āpad and dharma which are usually translated as "laws of crises". However, the message intended and expressed through the compound term encompasses the multiple attributes of the concept. The present paper intends to capture the meanings and nuances underlying the terminology by tracing the early semantic history of āpad. The aim is twofold: firstly, to understand the rationale behind the selection of the term āpad to define the attributes of āpaddharma; secondly, to understand how the meaning of āpad evolved through an interaction between the Brahmanic and Buddhist traditions.

Since the 1990s, the Indigenous movement worldwide has become increasingly relevant to research in India, re-shaping the terms of engagement with Adivasi (Indigenous/tribal) peoples and their pasts. This book responds to the growing need for an inter-disciplinary re-assessment of Tribal studies in postcolonial India and defines a new agenda for Adivasi studies. It considers the existing conceptual and historical parameters of Tribal studies, as a means of addressing new approaches to histories of de-colonization and patterns of identity-formation that have become visible since national independence. Contributors address a number of important concerns, including the meaning of Indigenous studies in the context of globalised academic and political imaginaries, and the possibilities and pitfalls of constructions of indigeneity as both a foundational and a relational concept. A series of short editorial essays introduce the reader to issues of representation, resistance, agency, recognition and marginality.

(The Paperback Edition was published in 2013, and the First Indian Reprint was published in 2014.)

This article analyses some of Sarat Chandra Roy's writings on the Oraons that were for- mulated between 1915 and 1937 in order to point to the different shades of opinion that were reflected in his works as he sought to define, and redefine, his image of the Oraons and that of the 'tribe'. An anthropologist who had in the formative years internalised the precepts of British social anthropology and supported colonial intervention in Chhotanagpur, Roy became, towards the end of his career, one who deeply sympathised with the communities of Chhotanagpur as he advocated an 'Indian approach' to the study of anthropology. In a larger context, this article cautions one against an uncritical acceptance of anthropological representations, and suggests that an anthropologist and his writings need to be located within a historical context. A few months before his death, Sarat Chandra Roy confessed to his student, Nirmal Kumar Bose, that if given the chance, he would rework his earlier ethnographic accounts, concentrate on village units and local nuances, and thereby give a new orientation to his study of tribal culture.' His anthropology, which had overlooked Acknowledgements: Professor Gautam Bhadra introduced me to the records at the Man in India Office, Ranchi; Ms Meera Roy gave me the rare opportunity of consulting the private papers of Sarat Chandra Roy, her father; Mr Subrata Ray discussed the many faceted personality of his grandfather. For comments on this article, I thank Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya, Professor Gautam Bhadra, Professor Gyan Prakash (who as one of the examiners of my thesis made several suggestions on a chapter from which this article was developed), Sheena Panja and Padmanabh Samarendra. The anonymous reader from the IESHR thankfully forced me to once again review Roy's writings and considerably enlarged my reading list. Sohini Dasgupta and Uddalok Bhattacharya helped in editing an earlier version.