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The concerns, methods, and findings of Indian historiography for the period of direct rule by Crown-in-Parliament experienced fundamental changes after the Second World War, though there are marked continuities in perceptions in some areas. The older tradition, with its emphasis on British policy, remains one of the strands in the post-war historiography of the Raj but this acquired a much greater degree of professionalism. A considerable gap in Indian historiography exists in the study of the internal dynamics of the princely states which covered two-fifths of the Subcontinent's territory. An interesting development in modern Indian historiography has been a growing concern with the history of modern Indian art.

Most of the work which focused on events in India before 1858 gradually became more localized, occasional, mundane, or antiquarian in character. In the 20th century, new histories about India before 1858, and about Indian history as a whole, did not increase in number until the third decade. As late as the 1960s, understandings of events in India before 1858 tended to be pursued mainly from the ‘top down’, concentrating narrowly upon concerns of government, and relating contexts and consequences of decision-making and public policy to Imperial development. The central question of how India could ever have fallen under British rule continues to engage almost obsessive attention. The twin capstones upon the edifices of new Indian historiography, combining bottom-up and top-down perspectives of British control in North India and South India, were put in place by C. A. Bayly and Burton Stein. The categories of new historiography are explained in this chapter. In general, the argument of this chapter is that historical understandings of India, never wholly one or the other, always were and still are products of a dialectical process in which both Indians and Westerners have contributed to an evolving synthesis.

This chapter focuses on the third phase in the historiography of the British West Indies by Waddell. Waddell contended that this phase began in the early 1950s and, when he wrote, was ‘as yet in its early stages’. This phase, he predicted, ‘may be expected to be dominated by the West Indian professional historian’. It is perhaps significant that in the periods before Waddell's third phase, there was no attempt to study the history of the writing of West Indian history. An important general feature of history-writing in the West Indies since 1950 has been an effort to think of the British colonies as part of a larger region and a larger world to subvert the fragmentation rooted in the geophysical history of the archipelago exploited by European imperialism. Efforts to rethink the history of the territories which once formed the British West Indies and to rewrite that history from a West Indian point of view have been only partially successful. The fragmented nationalisms of the modern Caribbean reflect the Imperial realities of the past, and some questions can be conceptualized efficiently only by restoring to the narrative the organizing principles of British Empire.

This introductory chapter examines the terminology of subordination including ‘paramountcy’, ‘protection’, ‘subsidiary alliance’, ‘indirect rule’, and ‘collaboration’, drawn mainly from British experience in India and Africa. The advantages of adopting a patron-client model derived from anthropological work on clientage in segmentary societies and patrimonial states are contrasted with older terms in imperial history. Semantic debate aside, it became clear by the 1980s that a bridge between administrative history and the dynamics of political clientage was already available in the case of Indian history to explain the transformation of the Indian Mughal empire and its successor states under pressure from Europeans. Indian historiography has moved between two images of empire — British and Indian — towards a greater synthesis with less on justification and administrative categories and more on the exercise of power at lower levels. That example can be applied elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.

This introductory chapter outlines the core theme of the book, which involves an exploration of the cultures of history writing in early modern Bengal. The seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first decade or so of the nineteenth centuries provide the temporal framework for this study — a period which witnessed the consolidation of the Mughal political and cultural order, its subsequent political decline and the transition to early colonial rule. A related theme which runs through the book is the connection between culture and the production of history and specifically, between a Persianized Mughal political culture and history writing. The chapter then presents a critique of pre-modern Indian historiography, followed by discussions of the Mughal Empire and Persianization, and interactions between Islamicate and Indic cultures. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter focuses on Indian historical writing. The end of colonial rule in 1947 was a turning point in Indian historical writing and culture. History emerged as a professional discipline with the establishment of new state-sponsored institutions of research and teaching. Attached to the institutionalization was the political imperative of a newly independent nation in search of a coherent and comprehensive historical narrative to support its nation-building efforts. At the same time, there was a desire to establish an autonomous Indian perspective, free of colonial constraints and distortions. In this, post-independence historiography owed much to earlier strands of nationalist historiography. During the first two decades after independence, three main trajectories of historical writing emerged: an official and largely secular nationalist historiography, a cultural nationalist historiography with strong religious overtones, and a critical Marxist trajectory based on analyses of social forms.

This introductory chapter explores the breadth of Mughal historiography throughout the ages, from the centuries-old memoir of Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur to the more contemporary, English-language histories taught in universities and the politically charged ideals of the post-1950s historiographical research. Mughal history has come a long way and in many, many forms. Mughal historiography has changed over time to suit the academic and political climates of the era in which they were published; and for the most part it has dominated Indian historiography, even as it spread over various continents over time. Current trends in Mughal historiography include renewed interests in the religion of the period, as well as in the “neglected periods” of Mughal history, regional monographs, the feminine angle within Mughal history, among many others.

This chapter is a detailed review of the source material and historiography. It involves discussion of the different categories of the source material such as the archaeological that consists of the excavated remains of port-sites, Roman coins, Indian inscriptions and Egyptian inscriptions including the Muziris Papyrus, as well as the literary sources that consist of direct and indirect types such as the classical Graeco-Roman maritime writings and the ancient Tamil poetic anthologies. It ends up with a critical appraisal of the historiography of trade in early India in general and South India in particular.

A summary of the major arguments and observations is given at the end by way of conclusion. It attempts at a recapitulation of the context, purports, questions, and methodological preoccupations of the book before stating the main arguments by way of tentative responses.

From 2007 onwards, a sizeable majority of the top-grossing Bollywood films have been funded partially or in full by a Hollywood studio. Since 2015, Indian films have found new outlets in online media companies such as Netflix, Amazon Studios, and YouTube. And in 2018, both Amazon and Netflix had marketed their original content using the Bollywood star-centric model. It is in this context that the last chapter unpacks the probable futures in the ever-evolving, flexible historiography of Indian cinema.