This issue of Social Scientist focuses on and draws upon the world of histori- cal research. As has been our constant endeavour, we seek to assemble a range of articles authored by some of India’s leading historians, along with those…
The celebrated American novelist, Mark Twain, had recounted an incident he had witnessed during his tour of Europe in 1892. He was invited to a banquet at the University of Berlin. When everyone was seated Mark Twain saw ‘the end…
Khwaja Qutb-ud-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki, a music afficionado and second in a chain of five great Chishti Sufis who flourished in the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, died in 1235, after bouts of ecstasy caused by the above…
The harmonious bonds shared by the Jains with Mughal royalty is a well- researched area.1 This paper examines the role of religious symbols, beliefs, and practices in the construction of political/religious relations, and the forms of Jain interaction with the…
In the travel narratives of the late seventeenth century, incidents involving gender relations appear regularly; sometimes the travel/author2 narrates them in order to depict these relations, while in other instances, the tropes of gendered discourse need to be excavated from…
The historiography of the Sannyasi Rebellion has a chequered career. The first book about that uprising was a historical novel by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Ananda Math (1882). If Ananda Math is seen as an index of Bankim’s historical consciousness, one has…
Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c. 1830, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2010, pp. xii+277. In 1870 Bombay and London were connected by telegraph. According to received wisdom, this technological leap enabled greater metropolitan…