Winner of the Karachi Literary Festival Peace Prize 2015, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan traces the history of the political exclusion of the Ahmadiyya religious minority in Pakistan by drawing on revealing new sources. The Ahmadis believe Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadiyan (1835 1908) was a prophet (in a nuanced understanding of this term) and promised messiah. This led to the group s condemnation as infidels during the colonial period, setting in course a painful history of religious exclusion.

Part I of this volume traces the development of the...

Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s 1880s' departs from the dominant scholarship in South Asian history that focuses narrowly on railways, and instead argues that any discussion of railway-generated changes needs to see such changes, at least up to the 1880s, as situated amidst existing patterns and networks of circulation within which roads and ferries were crucial. The volume also offers a detailed exploration of early colonial policies on road building and ferry improvement an area that has hitherto remained unexplored.

Just as the new development of...

How did European colonization transform the organization of territory in South Asia? "Statemaking and Territory in South Asia: Lessons from the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814-1816)" seeks to connect two historical junctures at which the idea of the modern state as a geographically discernible and territorially circumscribed entity emerged in colonial South Asia.

The volume first examines the territorial disputes that emerged along the common frontiers of the Himalayan kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) and the English East India Company that eventually led to the Anglo-Gorkha War of...