Study of the administration of John Briggs, 1785-1875, collector and political agent in Khandesh.

This book offers one of the first critical evaluations and in-depth analysis of the intellectual movement in Maharashtra in the 19th century. Arguing against the prevalent view that Indian rationality was imported from Europe through the colonial agency, it traces the rational roots of the movement to indigenous intellectual traditions and history. It also questions the centrality assigned to the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ as being the representative of the contemporary intellectual movement in the country. Strongly grounded in primary research, this volume brings forth many new facts and facets into the scholarly discourse on topics such as the idea of ‘Drain’ and the rise of Indian nationalism, so far seen as a predominantly political process divorced from its cultural dimensions. It re-examines the view that cultural consciousness that preceded political agitation was a separate sphere of activity and suggests that both were integral stages of anti-colonialism in the country. The author maintains that rationalism and nationalism were closely connected as a means-and-end continuum. He also provides a new and substantially different understanding of the 19th-century intellectuals Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Pandita Ramabai among others. Lucid, accessible and thought provoking, this book will interest scholars and researchers of modern Indian history, Indian political thought, sociology, philosophy and Marathi literature.

Presenting cutting-edge scholarship dedicated to exploring the emergence and articulation of modernity in colonial South Asia, this book builds upon and extends recent insights into the constitutive and multiple projects of colonial modernity. Eschewing the fashionable binaries of resistance and collaboration, the contributors seek to re-conceptualize modernity as a local and transitive practice of cultural conjunction. Whether through a close reading of Anglo-Indian poetry, Urdu rhyming dictionaries, Persian Bible translations, Jain court records, or Bengali polemical literature, the contributors interpret South Asian modernity as emerging from localized, partial and continuously negotiated efforts among a variety of South Asian and European elites. Surveying a range of individuals, regions, and movements, this book supports reflection on the ways traditional scholars and other colonial agents actively appropriated and re-purposed elements of European knowledge, colonial administration, ruling ideology, and material technologies. The book conjures a trans-colonial and trans-national context in which ideas of history, religion, language, science, and nation are defined across disparate religious, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. Providing new insights into the negotiation and re-interpretation of Western knowledge and modernity, this book is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, as well as of intellectual and colonial history, comparative literature, and religious studies.

This book is written by eminent judges, advocates and legal luminaries among others under the expert guidance of an Editorial Board constituted by the Supreme Court. It is an attempt to trace the historical evolution of courts in India. The book attempts to identify the diverse court systems prevalent in India, map its historical origins and contextualize the present system of courts.

This is the first account of Dante's reception in English to address full chronological span of that process. Individual authors and periods have been studied before, but Dante's British Public takes a wider and longer view, using a selection of vivid and detailed case studies to record and place in context some of the wider conversations about and appropriations of Dante that developed in Britain across more than six centuries, as access to his work extended and diversified. Much of the evidence is based on previously unpublished material in (for example) letters, journals, annotations and inventories and is drawn from archives in the UK and across the world, from Milan to Mumbai and from Berlin to Cape Town. Throughout, the role of Anglo-Italian cultural contacts and intermediaries in shaping the public understanding of Dante in Britain is given prominence - from clerics and merchants around Chaucer's time, through itinerant scholars, collectors and tourists in the early modern period, to the exiles and expatriates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The final chapter brings the story up to the present, showing how the poet's work has been seen (from the fourteenth century onwards) as accessible to 'the many', and demonstrating some of the means by which Dante has reached a yet wider British public over the past century, particularly through translation, illustration, and various forms of performance.

Beyond Macaulay provides a radical and comprehensive history of Indian education in the early colonial era — from the establishment of the Calcutta Madrasa in 1780 until the end of the East India Company’s rule and the beginning of the administration by the crown in 1860. The book challenges the conventional theory that the British administration imposed English language and modern education on Indians. Based on rich archival evidence, it critically explores data on 16,000 indigenous schools and shows that indigenous education was not oral, informal, and Brahmin-centric but written, formal, and egalitarian. The author highlights the educational policies of the colonial state and the way it actively opposed the introduction of modern education and privileged Brahmins. By including hitherto unused 41 Educational Minutes of Macaulay, the volume examines his educational ideas, and analyses why the colonial state closed down every school established by him. It also contrasts the educational ideas of the British elites and the Orientalists with dissenting Scottish voices. The book discusses post-Macaulayan educational policies and the Wood’s Despatch of 1854 as well as educational institutions during the revolt of 1857. It covers indigenous education in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and modern Indian vernaculars, the impact of the colonial policies on these schools, and traces the history of education in Bengal, North India, and Madras and Bombay Presidencies, as also the role of caste and religion in society. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of education, history of education, Indian history, South Asian history, colonial history, sociology, political history and political science.

This is a collection of important essays on the formation of agrarian policy in British India.