Suchergebnisse

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class people across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these changes, Indian Muslim artisans began publicly asserting the deep relation between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine Islamic traditions "from below." Centering the stories and experiences of metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor examines colonial-era social and technological changes through the perspectives of the workers themselves. As Amanda Lanzillo shows, the colonial marginalization of these artisans is intimately linked with the continued exclusion of laboring voices today. By drawing on previously unstudied Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo highlights not only the materiality of artisanal production but also the cultural agency of artisanal producers, filling in a major gap in South Asian history.
"The history of technology in South Asia has mostly been devoted to the 'temples of modernity,' accenting the monumental, the secular, and the modern. Amanda Lanzillo introduces us to a very different history, where technology, religion, and tradition domesticate modernity within intimate laboring cultures." — Projit Bihari Mukharji, Professor of History, Ashoka University
"Lanzillo explores entirely new vistas of the intertwined history of religion and labor in colonial South Asia, making a fascinating case for the flourishing of an 'artisan Islam' in the industrializing cities of the subcontinent." — Nile Green, Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History, University of California, Los Angeles
"Pious Labor opens up vital new conversations between scholars of Islam, vernacular print culture, labor, and technology studies. This work will have a major impact on the fields of South Asian history, Islamic studies, and beyond." — Julia Stephens, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University

Abstract
This article focuses on the recruitment and organization of labor for projects of colonial state infrastructure in the city of Peshawar between 1849 and 1947. Providing access to the Khyber Pass—and thus Afghanistan—Peshawar was an urban center from which the colonial state sought to organize security on the Indo-Afghan frontier. Peshawari laborers, recruited to support the city's large colonial military cantonment, railways, jail, and other infrastructure projects, were regulated according to colonial narratives about the security threats posed by the city's geography and ethnic composition. This article contributes to our understanding of the labor of colonial security and border-making by uncovering the circular logic that connected security and labor in colonial-era Peshawar. The colonial state sought to build physical infrastructure to protect the city from the perceived threats posed by the Indo-Afghan frontier. But to build this infrastructure of security, colonial administrators relied on a porous border. Through the porous border they recruited labor from regional populations who they characterized as intrinsically prone to violence or difficult to discipline, spurring a continuous expansion of security infrastructure. Therefore, though an analysis of how laborers were recruited for state projects, the article argues that the colonial regime reified ethnic and social hierarchies within the city.

AbstractIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, monumental Muslim tombs in India served as spaces for refashioning local religious and social identities. Elite patrons, technical overseers, and stoneworkers engaged with new technologies of construction at sites meant to reflect claims on the Muslim past. This article interrogates divergent class understandings of monumental Muslim tombs in colonial-era India. It compares the construction of monumental Islamic tombs in the states of Hyderabad, Bhopal, and Rampur—three Muslim-led 'native states', quasi-autonomous polities under colonial oversight. By the late nineteenth century, many native state patrons employed a new middle class of technical intermediary to oversee tomb construction. The rise of this class created new hierarchies within construction, with apprenticeship-trained master craftsmen increasingly marginalized from state narratives and aligned with stoneworkers and other labourers. While patrons and middle-class intermediaries argued that new technologies and materials should be used to 'modernize' construction, they portrayed technical change as divorced from the religious symbolism of tombs. In contrast, workers integrated the religious and the technical, positioning technologies of construction within narratives of Muslim practice. The article uses native state tombs to analyse how labourers adapted to technical demands, without necessarily adopting state ideologies.