This issue of Social Scientist carries three articles that in different ways examine the transformation wrought by colonial rule in pre-Independence India. Aparna Balachandran in her article titled ‘Colonialism, Caste Formation and Urban Rule in Early Colonial Madras’, examines the…
This paper examines the relationship between caste labour and colonialism from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century through the lens of urban governance in the port city of Madras in South India under East India Company rule. A substantial…
The extant economic history of Jammu and Kashmir largely neglects the impact of the famine of 1877–78 which re-oriented the traditional occupational patterns to form new livelihood alternatives and labour regimes derivative of colonial rule. Such histories focus rather on…
Every historical age in which the production and reproduction of social relations take shape has its specificities. There is a position that over the course of capitalist progression, pre-existing social forms would evolve into capitalist forms (MECW, Vol. 6, 1976:…
To understand Irfan Habib the academician, let us start with his magnum opus, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556–1707 (1963). The range of his scholarship gets displayed by the conception of the book itself. It is a comprehensive and…
Geeta Kapur, Speech Acts, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2025, 284 pages, Rs 995. That art is not originary to Geeta Kapur’s most recent book can be seen in its title: Speech Acts. Kapur remains the most formidable practitioner of a…