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Iran to India: The Shansabānīs of Afghanistan, c. 1145-1190 CE
Alka Patel

Brings together all the architectural patronage attributed to the Shansabānīs in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Swat and lower Indus region).

• Creates an architectural biography of this pivotal polity and its trans-regional empire.
• Treats built remains as independent, primary sources – and juxtaposes them with the principal texts – to create a complex understanding of the historical processes the Shansabānīs initiated throughout the landscapes they re-conjoined.
• Provides the first analysis of this important epigraphic corpus.
• Serves as the starting point for future research on the medieval epigraphy of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This book charts the origins and rise of the Shansabānīs, a nomadic-pastoralist or transhumant group from modern central Afghanistan. As they adapted and mastered the mores of Perso-Islamic kingship, they created a transregional empire unseen in the region for almost a millennium, since the Kushanas of the early centuries CE.

The Shansabānīs’ imperialism of little more than a half-century belies their longue durée significance: they altered the geopolitical landscapes of eastern Khurasan through the Indo-Gangetic plains, reconnecting these regions in continuous flows of people, objects, and ideas that broadened the Persianate world and had consequences into the modern age of nation-states in Central and South Asia.

Language in the Indian Diaspora: Sociolinguistic Perspectives
Rajend Mesthrie, Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi (editors)

Examines the role of language in shaping the Indian diaspora experience.

• Brings together a wide range of Indian languages and diasporic contexts.
• Has a stronger and more up-to-date sociolinguistic focus than has been the case in previous collections.
• Explores repertoire changes in diaspora, as well as migration and language resilience.

Rajend Mesthrie and Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi bring together an international range of scholars to explore the sociolinguistic outcomes of multilingualism and contact involving the Indian diaspora. The collection presents twelve rich case studies of Indian diaspora languages in South Asia, East Asia, Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the USA. It examines different forms of displacement in response to a wide range of historical, social, technological and geopolitical developments: internal displacement and transcontinental migration, colonial and contemporary migrations, urban and rural migrations, migration of skilled and unskilled workers, and migration of major and minor Indian languages. By comparing the sociolinguistic consequences of migration in diverse contexts, Language in the Indian Diaspora examines the role of language practices in shaping local and global mobile contexts. In doing so, it develops our understanding of the processes of language use and language change in the emerging arena of migration studies.

Failed Masculinities: The Men in Satyajit Ray’s Films
Devapriya Sanyal

The first comprehensive study of men and masculinity in the cinema of Satyajit Ray.

• Links Ray’s male characters with India’s national trajectory in its early post-independence years.
• Interrogates the director’s standing as a national filmmaker.
• Situates Ray within post-colonial filmmaking and realist cinema traditions.

Satyajit Ray belonged to a category of filmmakers and artists from newly independent countries whose work was used to define ‘national culture’.

Failed Masculinities: The Men in Satyajit Ray’s Films argues that a study of his films will give us a purchase on the moral trajectory of India in its first few decades of independence, particularly through examination of his male characters and their narratives. Films discussed by Sanyal include the Apu Trilogy, Shakha Prasakha, Ghare Baire and Kapurush.

Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals in Persia and British India, 1865-1914
Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi

An innovative history of medical mission from the perspective of the history of emotions.

• Raises important historical questions about the process of civilising emotions in Christian missionary contexts.
• Utilises archival research in the UK and Canada, and field work in Persia.
• Weaves together the history of emotions and Christian missions with the history of colonial built environments and colonial medicine to bring new insight to the history of medicine and the history of architecture.
• Highlights and examines the involvement of female missionaries in the design process of mission buildings, engaging concepts of feminist historiography.
• Focuses on Iran/Persia to extend our understanding of the transnational dimensions of architectural history, medical history and the history of emotions.

Missionary medicine flourished during the period of high European imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was considered the best and surest method to overcome the distrust of and gain access to the indigenous population in the so-called Muslim World. Through studying the medical activities and infrastructures of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Persia and north-western British India, and building upon existing works on missionaries in the Middle East and British India, this book examines the practice of obtaining trust.

A synthesis of Christian mission history, architectural history, emotions history and history of medicine and empire, Emotion, Mission, Architecture raises broader historical questions about the process of mobilising and regulating emotions in the Christian missionary contexts – contributing in turn to discussions on hybridity, missionary and local encounters, women’s agency and the interactions between mission and empire.

Women, Wealth and the State in Early Colonial India: The Begams of Awadh
Nicholas J. Abbott

Examines wealthy Indian matriarchs as essential makers of states—and ideas of ‘the state’—in pre- and early colonial India.

• Rethinks the political, economic and institutional transition to British colonial rule through the lives of wealthy matriarchs in a late-Mughal successor state.
• Links the gendered politics of Indian ruling families with the formation of the colonial state and attendant ideas of sovereignty and statehood.
• Traces shifting ideas of ‘the state’ in pre- and early colonial India through emic Persianate political concepts.
• Utilises the East India Company’s vast but little-used Persian-language archive.

Few polities were more instrumental to the rise of the East India Company and the advent of British colonial rule in South Asia than the Mughal successor state of Awadh (c. 1722–1856). And few individuals influenced the making of the Awadh regime and its pivotal relationship with the Company more than the chief consorts (begams) of its ruling dynasty. Drawing on previously unexamined Persian sources, this book centres the begams of Awadh within a revised history of state-formation and conceptual change in pre- and early colonial India. In so doing, it posits the begams as essential, if contested, builders of both the Awadh regime and the Company state, and as ambivalent partners in forging evolving political economies and emerging conceptual languages of statehood and sovereignty in early colonial India.

J.S. Mill's Encounter with India
Martin I. Moir, Douglas M. Peers, Lynn Zastoupil

John Stuart Mill worked for the East India Company in London for thirty-five years (1823-58), drafting many hundreds of dispatches for the guidance of British administrators in India. Historians have long been aware of Mill’s involvement in British Indian government. This comprehensive effort brings together different strands of scholarship on Mill to determine the character of his role based on analyses of his draft dispatches and comparisons of their practical and theoretical concerns with the broad themes of Mill’s major writings on political philosophy and economics. The essays in this collection explore specific aspects of Mill’s approach to Indian issues, including religion, law, education, and security, and also place him within the broader currents of utilitarianism. The contributors present different perspectives on the ideology in Mill’s pragmatic work for the Company and his personal philosophy.

Brothers and Sisters in India: A Study of Urban Adult Siblings
G.N. Ramu

Indian society is rapidly becoming more urban, and while the level of urbanization and the values associated with it have yet to correspond with those of Western societies, the traditional ethos governing sibling relations is becoming increasingly less relevant. G.N. Ramu explores this phenomenon in Brothers and Sisters in India, the first detailed study of adult siblings in contemporary Indian society.

Based on sixteen months of field work in the city of Mysore and over three decades of research in this area, Ramu’s study focuses on the three types of sibling relationships (fraternal, sororal, and cross-sibling), and examines the frequency of interaction, the level of mutual assistance, and the incidence of conflict and strain between brothers and sisters. Ramu’s findings are revealing, and often differ substantially from those typically found in research on family and kinship patterns in contemporary India. The sibling relationships investigated in this study demonstrate that the nature and function of kinship ties in India are undergoing striking changes – changes that suggest patterns similar to those found in Western societies.