The article studies the regulation of regimental prostitution during the nineteenth century in Faizabad, a small provincial cantonment town in northern India that has garnered little attention in the existing scholarship. While the literature on colonial prostitution stressed the centrality of medical surveillance, spatial segregation and moral discipline in major colonial port towns, this article employs Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, Radhika Singha’s notion of delegated authority, and Mark Condos’ view of uncertain sovereignty to examine the everyday administrative practices rather than the legislative intent. Drawing on cantonment correspondence, annual lock hospital reports, statistical returns and medical officers’ observations, the article reconstructs how prostitution was organised, supervised and rendered administratively visible in Faizabad. The study foregrounds the primary role of native intermediaries like mahaldarnis, dhais and darogas, whose indigenous knowledge and labour translated legislative intent into practice. Additionally, the article illustrates the negotiated, uneven and eventually fragile aspects of colonial regulation of regimental prostitution in the small cantonment town of Faizabad, challenging historiographical assumptions about coherence and efficiency of colonial regulatory governance.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the publication of Textures of Time (2001), this article returns to the question of ‘history’ in South Asia. It counterposes two unlikely suspects: textual traditions in Persian and Kannada—tārīkh and campū kāvya, respectively—from the Karnatak region of southern India to show how caste concerns, specifically of warrior groups, shaped literary production in the late eighteenth century. It puts into dialogue genres from the literary cultures of these two languages that had a continuous set of conventions and themes since at least the medieval period. The two texts we analyse are Munshi Muhammad ‘Azimuddin’s Tārīkh-i Dilīrjangī (The Chronicle of Dilir Jang, completed ca. 1839), which was produced for the Miyana Afghan Nawabs of Savanur at the time when many such little kingdoms were increasingly beholden to the authority of the English East India Company, and Linganna’s Keḷadinṛpavijayaṃ (The Victory of the Kings of Keladi, ca. 1762–1804), written during or after the dissolution of the nāyaka kingdom of Keladi. Written from geographic zones located at the interstices of multiple political formations, both texts offer sites for intertextual readings of the intersecting social domains of elite martial groups and the literary cultures they fostered. Specifically, we pay close attention to parallel ways of narration and modes of recording contemporary politics, and build upon previous attempts to compare a regional vernacular like Kannada with transregional, imperial Persian. The article demonstrates how texts from two putatively different literary traditions show features of continuity in their respective genres while sharing concerns about the region, political genealogy and caste. The article makes the case for why the two texts—and by extension, the two literary traditions they are thought to be representing—should be seen as intertextually related, rather than dissimilar. In doing so, it opens up fresh avenues for historicising the region by questioning the long-standing practice of associating a region with a monolingual literary tradition.
This article analyses the impact of divination on political decision-making and warfare in the Ahom kingdom of Northeastern India. It identifies two principal state-sponsored mantic specialists: Ahom priests who relied on osteomancy (bone-divination), a practice traceable to Chinese cultural traditions; and daivajnas, a caste group in the Ahom kingdom, who utilised astrological knowledge derived from northern India. The Brahmaputra Valley became a site of ritual contestation as these traditions vied for royal patronage. The article traces the brahmanisation of Ahom polity reflected in the ascendancy of the daivajnas at the Ahom court. The study contributes to the scholarship on ritual power and state formation in pre-modern South Asia. Drawing on mythological, historical and ethnographic data, the article argues that divinatory praxis held greater importance in the kingdom's political and social processes than hitherto recognised. The study situates dreams and omens within their socio-religious milieu, while emphasising their centrality in political decision-making. In military contexts, diviners were integrated into the army hierarchy, advising on strategic appointments and battlefield tactics. Their pronouncements could induce shifts in political allegiance, compelling the state to regulate their activities. Given the weight attached to and high stakes associated with the divinations, mantic practitioners faced risks of punishment as well as the lure of rewards, intensifying the contestations between mantic and religious traditions.
The 1940s saw an upsurge in media initiatives for children in India, which invited the young to participate and co-produce content. Soon, some of these projects garnered an immense following, staying popular for the next two and a half decades. The article explores the early trajectory of two kinds of media enterprises based out of Calcutta: weekly children’s pages introduced by newspapers, and children’s programmes of All India Radio. Both were started within years of each other and had the common vision of incorporating children’s voices. At the core of the article is the remarkable babel that characterises archives of such media initiatives. Exploring media archives and interviewing respondents who were involved in these initiatives as children, it studies how children responded to these initiatives and the reactions this drew from media producers in the 1940s and 1950s. The article demonstrates how foregrounding children’s voices enables conversation with the historiography of media participation, revealing a significant moment in Indian media history when the press and radio whetted the participatory appetite of hundreds of children and briefly gave their desires an outlet for a few years.
Historiographical narratives of world history have frequently portrayed China's long-standing global engagement as culminating abruptly in 1839, when the Qing imperial commissioner Lin Zexu (1795-1850) confiscated and destroyed British opium. In these traditional accounts, Lin's actions are often characterised as insular or misguided, while China's defeat in the Opium War is framed as a decisive rupture marking the triumph of European modernity. This article challenges such teleological interpretations by situating the conflict within the contested political, moral and economic debates of the nineteenth century. British discourse from the period reveals deep ambivalence toward the war, while Qing officials widely viewed Lin's policies as largely principled and reformist. By reexamining the global ramifications of Britain's illicit opium trade, this study reassesses prevailing historiography and foregrounds China's continued agency within the interconnected processes of nineteenth-century global history.
This article discusses the impact of British commercial policies on the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. It argues that British imperialist policies should be seen as a continued expansion of the empire by integrating South Asian markets into the larger economies of the empire. It takes the example of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and hints at the changes in the magnitude of trade, which largely changed the region's economic output towards British India. For instance, when the region came into political contact with the British after the 1850s, it hardly dealt with trade by or through the empire, but by the early 1870s, cotton piece goods from both British India and Europe constituted more than 40% of trade into or through the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Second, the article discusses the empire's need for constant expansion and exploring unknown regions for information and control. At the expense of the princely state, the British asserted their dominance through treaties, creating spaces of access to control and monitor territories. Third, through employing trade as their motive, and expanding territorial limits with the treaties as justification, the British were able to create a rationale for intervention in the region. Thus, the article also contributes to the historiography of princely states in colonial India, which have been characterised as instances of divisible sovereignties, and instead argues that British paramountcy was the political norm and regional sovereignties meant little in the face of British imperialist expansion.
This article analyses the business history of the Syrian Christian community in Travancore during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It attempts to study the entrepreneurial networks and accumulation strategies of the community to establish a dominant native business class in Travancore. It argues that the Syrian Christians utilised their familial relations and community affiliations to build capital-intensive agricultural enterprises. Drawing upon government records, vernacular newspapers and magazines, company records and biographies, the study traces the evolution of Syrian Christian joint-stock enterprises in plantations and banking. The joint-stock enterprises were based on trusted social relations for turning their agrarian surplus into business investments such as plantations, banking and trade. These were a distinct form of communal enterprise that allowed the Syrian Christians to consolidate their wealth within the community and paved a pathway for business enterprises in Travancore.
This article examines the Andaman Islands not merely as a remote penal colony but as a key node in the Bay of Bengal's evolving meteorological and communication networks. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British meteorologists, the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, colonial officials and rival wireless companies-each with different motives-sought to incorporate the islands into a cyclone-warning system aimed at safeguarding maritime traffic. Tracing proposals for submarine cables and the later adoption of wireless telegraphy, the article situates these efforts within a three-dimensional oceanic environmental history linking seabed, sea surface and atmosphere. It argues that commercial anxiety, environmental uncertainty, and imperial rivalry turned the Andamans into one of the first experimental sites for wireless technology in the British Empire, even as cyclones, financial limits and geopolitical shifts repeatedly discouraged these ambitions. Extending the narrative into the postcolonial period, the article shows how Indian meteorologists rebuilt storm-warning infrastructures after Independence, drawing on earlier imperial visions. Conceptually, it suggests that relations between the Andamans and the Indian mainland are best understood as an oscillating condition of partial connection and partial separation shaped by infrastructure, environmental risk, commercial interests and changing regimes of governance.
In the late nineteenth century, British officials epitomised tribal populations in Northeast India as rural, primitive and place-bound. State-sanctioned forms of migration into the region-of tea-plantation labourers, missionaries, scientists, ethnographers, mapmakers and armed forces-generated paper trails that underscored the separateness of two worlds: an urban and mobile imperial world that entered other lands, and a rural and immobile tribal world that was entered. Decentring the concerns of empire, this article focuses on Mizo travellers from the Lushai Hills District (modern-day Mizoram) who not only travelled in the opposite direction but also changed the imperial world as they worked, learned, wrote, loved and conducted diplomacy in scales that spanned it. Tribal presence in distant urban centres-as choir members, students, labourers, diplomats, chiefs, nurses and preachers-challenged imperial fictions, often flying under the radar of colonial recordkeeping. This article argues that illuminating their stories requires an alternative archive: vernacular newspaper travelogues, Mizo-language diaries and historical materials today held in family collections across Mizoram unveil an overlooked era of outbound mobility, predating by over a century the current swell of travelling tribal youth, but also offering a way to reconceptualise it as part of a tradition rather than as a rupture. The histories of highlanders at lower elevations and in bustling urban centres-far away from rural frontiers and imperial borderlands-do not simply add to, but in fact constitute, the history of Northeast India.
Drawing upon official and local Indian sources, translations of Bhutanese sources, colonial records, oral history reports and field reports, this article aims to outline a connected history of a frontier region called Duars, and its role as Indo-Bhutan borderland during the pre-colonial period. The article highlights the need to rethink and interrogate how human history has been conventionally written by opening up the possibility of engaging with sacred/divine periods in the regional historical narratives and oral accounts that throws light on the nature and evolution of political and social formations of an ecoregion such as Duars.
A few centuries before the onset of colonial rule in South India, the focus of historical narratives underwent a gradual shift from the affairs of courts and temples to those of rural communities-migrations, land settlements and the political life of local chiefs. These narratives, referred to as 'social documents' in this article, evolved through a range of social institutions and found expression across diverse literary genres. Building on modern historical scholarship on this subject and focusing on the Kongu uplands of South India, this article explores three interrelated processes: socio-economic transformations in a frontier peasant society; shifts in the 'social framework' that shaped diverse modes of remembering the past; and the intersecting roles of bards, poets and scribes in recording and transmitting social memory at the local level. The opening sections examine the social function of the past in upland society, focusing on Pulavars as genealogists and custodians of peasant memory, and on the social negotiations that shaped collective and localised pasts. The subsequent sections discuss the processes of transmission and textualisation of social memory.
