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This chapter primarily focuses on the political dimensions of India's experience, though these, of course, reflected the changing realities of social and economic power. After a brief ‘scene-setting’ description, it investigates four themes that were central to the Imperial relationship between Britain and the subcontinent in its closing stages. These are: the longer-term erosion of Britain's interests in India as the context in which the Imperial power made key decisions about constitutional arrangements for India's government, which in turn affected Britain's ability to control India in the interest of a worldwide British Empire; the emergence of a nationalist movement and, opposed to its broad claims and attempted international image under Gandhi's guidance, the realities and limitations of its support, its political ideology, and strategic effectiveness; the changing nature and increasing vulnerability of the Imperial state; and the ways in which there are continuities between the colonial order and that established by independent states. The Indian experience suggests that the British Raj was clearly changing in the 20th century and proved capable of fairly profound adaptation in response to changing conditions.

This chapter discusses the ever-widening gap between the Hindus and Muslims and the Hindus and the British. It studies Khan’s policy of protecting the Muslim community from nationalist politics as well as strengthening its ties with the British Raj. It discusses the Muslim consciousness in India, which included a combination of self-pity and self-praise. It then emphasizes the isolation of the Indian Muslims from politics and society, which effectively drew them even closer to the government. It also discusses the establishment of the Indian National Congress and the protests against the Partition of Bengal. It shows that the partnership between proportional representation and joint electorates was meant to harmonize relations between the Hindu and Muslim communities and secure unbiased Muslim representation.

This chapter highlights Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan (Land Tax, 2001). An epic essay on cricket, the British Empire, and the collective will of a group of village farmers, the film joined the ranks of an elite group of Indian films to be nominated for an Academy Award. Lagaan quickly acquired the label of a contemporary classic and revived the career of film star Aamir Khan. The chapter offers a detailed and critically engaged study of the film. It covers areas such as the audience response to the film; representations of the British Raj; colonialism and imperialism; song and dance as narrative storytelling; the ideological value of religion; and the sports film as a vehicle for exploring national concerns.

This chapter examines how colonial women amateur filmmakers often documented in detail their early and mid-twentieth century overseas travel and settlement experiences, jobs, sports and private and official events. Relying on cross-archival primary sources, it discusses the filmmakers’ simultaneous roles as vectors of colonising credos and commodified subalterns of imperial paternalism. It explores the historical discourse present across several colonial amateur films made by British women in South Asia, Africa, Papua New Guinea, and the Middle East between 1920s and 1940s. It also considers gender and racial hierarchies as shaped by imperial rule while confirmed or challenged by the filmmakers' prevailing perceptions of cinematic vocabulary and practice. Although traditionally seen as a predominantly male hobby, amateur filmmaking across the British Empire has been a pastime preferred by women too, almost on par with their male counterparts. It thus becomes possible to speak of a gender-based visual narrative identifiable across British colonial amateur filmmaking, one validated by the thematic choices made by women amateur filmmakers and their shared visual literacy. Finally, the chapter explores the differences and similarities in visual literacy between several amateur films made by British colonial women during the final years of the British rule in India.

This concluding chapter details how Muhammad Iqbal aimed to re-establish Muslim dignity under the British Raj. Iqbal diagnosed a wound within the modern Muslim soul, caused by two injuries — first, a paternalistic colonialism justified through particular socio-political, philosophical, and religious doctrines and, second, the intellectual laziness and lack of courage on the part of the Muslims themselves. The medicine that Iqbal prescribes is the empowerment of the self (khudi). These newly empowered Muslims will be able to revitalise the community and confidently assert themselves against oppressive rule. However, in order to see a khudi-empowered community realised, Indian-Muslims need to be committed to instilling the necessary character traits within themselves.

The final chapter locates the careers of two prominent hunters-turned-conservationists—Jim Corbett and Richard Burton—within the essential paradox of hunting and conservation in colonial India. In the case of both, as this chapter demonstrates, any simple binary of the colonizer–colonized model is inadequate to explain their prolific hunting in the first half of their lives as well as their passionate commitment to the cause of conservation in the second half. The chapter examines how, in their dual roles as hunter and conservationist, killer and protector, ruler and saviour, both men encompassed the quintessential split image of the British Raj. Particularly in their role as slayers of man-eating predators, Corbett and Burton offer an extremely nuanced and complex image that revises any straightforward impression of colonial hunters in India dominating their natural environment in imitation of the imperial domination of India’s politics. Despite such caveats, this chapter argues that Corbett and Burton remained staunch loyalists to the British Raj, and cautions that the wider history of conservation thinking should pay due attention to the critical and historical analysis of individuals like Corbett and Burton, whose individual approaches to conservation issues were drawn from lived experience, just as much as from broader colonial attitudes.

This chapter describes Anglo-Indian newspapers' reactions to Knight's death, the fate of his family, and that of the Statesman. In concludes that, as Robert Knight had foreseen, it was the Indian-language newspapers which were able to reach the masses of Indians and stir them into political action during the twentieth century. However, it was the newspapers of the educated elite, usually in English, which created a national political consciousness and implanted the role of the press in the evolving modern state and society of India. It is here that Knight, severe and outspoken critic of the British Raj and creator of great newspapers, contributed greatly.

Winston Churchill described Jawaharlal Nehru in 1937 as a ‘Communist, revolutionary, most capable and most implacable of the enemies of the British connection with India’. Ironically, what the British Raj considered an enemy belonged to one of the most anglicized families in India at the turn of the century. His father, Motilal Nehru, had built up a profitable practice at the bar of the Allahabad High Court, disputed with Hindu orthodoxy, and defied the caste taboo on foreign travel. He dressed, lived, and even looked an Englishman. His son Jawaharlal was attracted by Fabian socialism and other radical ideas of pre-1914 England. Mahatma Gandhi’s emergence on the Indian scene early in 1919 radically altered the course of Jawaharlal’s life. Jawaharlal’s visit to Europe in 1926–7 imparted a sharp political and economic edge to his policies which he used on his return to India to organize students and industrial workers. Jawaharlal Nehru became the champion of a passionate and defiant nationalism and an influential figure in Indian politics.

This chapter presents an examination of women's agency, both from within and outside the Sikh reform movement. The author notes that her book has been conceived upon the notion that gender is a fluid construct, which is evolutionary, and emerges and develops within the shifting needs of a community. Victorian assumptions about race, religion, gender, as well as economic and political designs, were vital in the process of Sikh gender construction. The author feels that even while being part of a repressive patriarchal order, Sikh women held their own in ‘hidden, subversive ways’. Many Sikh women were able to negotiate the strictures of the Tat Khalsa, and be women in their own right. The early 1920s signaled the end of the Singh Sabha Movement. The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabndak Committee and the Akali Dal dedicated themselves to Nationalism and Mahatama Gandhi's call for non-cooperation. Sikh women—well versed in the Tat Khalsa ideals of self-denial, duty, honour—redirected their energies from the religious to the national front, thus proving that Sikh women were well versed in the art of mobilization. The participation of female and male Sikhs in India's nationalist struggle against the Raj had formally begun.

Chapter 3 makes the point that neither ethnic linkages nor geostrategicinterests were sufficient for strong cooperation in the history of the long relationship between the Ottoman and Mughal dynasties. The chapter, thus, discusses the ethnic commonalities including the Turkic roots of the two ruling families and makes the point that kinship ties militated against comity and instead provoked competition. The chapter then charts the evolution of political and geostrategic relations since sixteenth century between Ottomans and India and the introduction of the triangular relationship with the advent of the British Raj in India. The chapter concludes by the dynamics of this triangular relationship and the dilemmas it has created for the Indian Muslims in view of the increasingly hostile British attitude against the Ottoman Empire against the will of the Indians.

Recent events in the Arab world have sharpened and widened public interest in the way states can be broken and made. Since the end of the Second World War the world has seen three great waves of state-breaking and state-making: the end of European empires; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and the contemporary ‘Arab Spring’. By revisiting an example from the first of these great waves, perhaps the greatest ‘imperial ending’—the end of British imperial rule in India in 1947, this lecture investigates issues which may prove instructive in probing the dynamics of other phases of turbulence in the structures and nature of states. It addresses four major questions which are relevant across the many different episodes of state breaking and making, with the help of evidence from the case of the South Asian subcontinent. What is the relationship between state and society and the patterns of relationship which help to determine the nature and vulnerability of the state? What makes a viable and destabilising opposition to the imperial state? What is the nature of the breaking or collapse of that state? How are states refashioned out of the inheritance of the previous regime and the breaking process?

This chapter explores the history of British lexicographical projects documenting the Persian language as it was used in India. Hakala gives particular attention to Francis Joseph Steingass’s production of the Comprehensive Persian–English Dictionary in 1892. Steingass published his Persian–English dictionary at a moment of deep fascination among the British public with Orientalia in general and Persian in specific. Moreover, its publication took place at the end of a century during which British officials had insisted that they needed such a resource in order to administer India, where Persian was widespread as both an administrative and a literary language. By the time the dictionary came out, however, its value to the British Raj had diminished, since local vernaculars had gained in status and function.

This chapter begins delving into the politics surrounding and embedded into the historiography concerning the fall of the Sikh Empire. It particularly focuses on deconstructing narratives about Ranjit Singh’s death and how historically pivotal this event is thought to have been in leading to the internal problems and eventual collapse of the kingdom in the decade between 1839 and 1849. Instead, the chapter argues for greater attention to be paid to the gendered and colonial politics influencing the British and European writings on the Punjab’s royal elite and the kingdom’s affairs during this crucial period. Such sources have considerably constituted the basis of subsequent histories and biographies about Ranjit Singh and his family, but have rarely been critically interrogated for their internal debates and biases. This chapter instead attempts to piece together a political history of such colonial writings on the Punjab – together with drawing upon a range of less-studied Persian, Punjabi and Sanskrit courtly sources – to resurrect a vista of the world of Ranjit Singh’s heirs, as they sought to maintain the independence of their kingdom into the 1830s.