Suchergebnisse

AbstractIn the early twentieth century, the Salvation Army in British India transformed its public profile and standing, shifting from being an organization seen by the state as a threat to social order, to being partner to the state in the delivery of social welfare programmes. At the same time, the Army also shaped discussion and anxieties about the precarious position of India's economy and sought to intervene on behalf of the state—or to present itself as doing so—in the rescue of India's traditional industries. The Army was an important actor in debates about the future of traditional industries such as silkworm rearing and silk weaving, and was able to mobilize public opinion to press provincial governments for resources with which to try to resuscitate and rejuvenate India's silk industry. Although the Army's sericulture initiatives failed to thwart the decline of India's silk industry, they generated significant momentum, publicity, and public attention, to some extent transforming the Army's standing in British India and beyond.

Around the turn of the sixteenth century, in Mughal India, artists in the imperial atelier innovated the Mughal equestrian portrait, unique in Asian art although a fusion of Asian and European influences, and quickly ubiquitous as a compositional topos that was identifiably "Mughal" to the extent that it proliferated in the successor states of the Mughal empire over the eighteenth century. Lally's article analyzes the transformation of the equestrian portrait, using this topos as a set of sources through which to examine changes in kingship and imperial politics from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Both equines and equestrianism were enmeshed in the fabric of the Mughal empire and its successor states: in foreign trade, in its military practices, in the organization of the hierarchy of the nobility, and in the ritual practices, language, and visual culture of the court. Turning toward the horse as a subject of analysis draws attention toward the entanglement of the human and the non human, of rituals and ritual objects, of gift horses and equestrian portrait gifts, and between pictorial practices, texts, traditions, and trade in shaping the cultural dimensions of imperial politics in South Asia.

The history of economic change in colonial and post-colonial Punjab is well-studied, at least for the period from c. 1880, when Punjab became a major producer of relatively low-value-added crops, such as cereals, raw cotton and sugar. This article argues that the colonial state's intervention in the economy in the 1840s to 1870s—the decades of the British colonial conquest of Punjab and the early administration in the province—should not be seen as a prelude to later developments. Specifically, this article argues that state policy proceeded by trial and error, that the state worked through a seemingly private organisation—the Agri-Horticultural Society—to trial a scheme that sought to re-model Punjab as a producer of higher-value-added commodities for the global market such as silk following the precedent of colonial Bengal, and that the resultant failure of these experiments contributed to the changes in policy and the pattern of development from the final-quarter of the century. In studying the Agri-Horticultural Society's silk experiments, furthermore, this article also sheds light on the history of the early colonial state and the history of sericulture in Punjab.