The nineteenth century saw the beginning of a violent and controversial movement of protest amongst western India's low and untouchable castes, aimed at the effects of their lowly position within the Hindu caste hierarchy. The leaders of this movement were convinced that religious hierarchies had combined with the effects of British colonial rule to produce inequality and injustice in many fields, from religion to politics and education. This study concentrates on the first leader of this movement, Mahatma Jotirao Phule. It shows him as its first ideologist, working out a unique brand of...

Whereas previous studies of the end of British rule in India have concentrated on the negotiations of the transfer of power at the all-India level or have considered the emergence of separatist politics amongst India's Muslim minorities, this study provides a re-evaluation of the history of Bengal focusing on the political and social processes that led to the demand for partition in Bengal and tracing the rise of Hindu communalism. In its most startling revelation, the author shows how the demand for a separate homeland for the Hindus, which was fuelled by a large and powerful section of...

In this book, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar presents the first major study of the relationship between labor and capital in India's economic development in the early twentieth century. He explores the emergence of capitalism in the region, the development of the cotton textile industry, its particular problems in the 1920s and 1930s and the mill owners' and the states' responses to them. The author also investigates how a labor force was formed in Bombay, its rural roots, urban networks, industrial organization and the way in which it shaped capitalist strategies.

This book is a detailed historical study of agriculture and agrarian society in a major province of British India, the Bombay presidency. Its objective is to examine the impact of British rule on the Indian peasantry, and the changes it brought. Among the specific issues discussed by the author are the development of the British land revenue system, the pattern of expansion in commercial agriculture and the consequences in terms of ownership and organisation of land and agrarian social structure. Dr Charlesworth goes on to look at the role of government policy, the nature of peasant protest...

This book examines the politics and culture of eastern India's landed chiefs.

To the modern world, the notions that freedom is an innate condition of human beings and that money possesses the power to bind people appear as natural facts. Bonded Histories traces the historical processes by which these notions became established as dominant discourses in India during colonial rule and continued into post-colonial India. Gyan Prakash locates the formulation of these discourses in the history of bonded labour in southern Bihar. He focuses on the emergence and subsequent transformation of the relationship of reciprocal power and dependence between landlords and labourers....

A detailed study of the local effects of the British Raj's irrigation schemes.

This is a study of the Indian National Congress, the first political association to approach the government of India at an all-India level. The Congress became the most important national party in twentieth century India, and the whole history of the freedom movement is closely bound up with its fortunes. National politics, however, were influenced by regional and local affairs. In the early twentieth century the Indian Congress was split between the 'Moderates' and the 'Extremists'. Dr Johnson argues that this division was closely related to existing rivalries between politicians in the...

South India is often portrayed as a land of Hindu orthodoxy, yet in fact three great "world religions" have interacted in the region over many centuries. This book uses a powerful combination of oral, literary, and architectural evidence to investigate the social and religious world of those large and influential groups of South Indians who came to identify themselves as Christians and Muslims, while retaining powerful links with the religion and culture of the wider society. The author shows how Christianity and Islam spread along the military and agricultural frontiers of southern India,...

In The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India 1500 1650 Sanjay Subrahmanyam explores the relationship between long-distance trade and the economic and political structure of southern India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He questions the more traditional views that external demand was the force behind pre-colonial Indian economic growth or that external trade was insignificant in quantitative and qualitative terms compared with the vastness of the internal economy. Instead, Dr Subrahmanyam authoritatively demonstrates the interaction between south Indian developments...