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This book offers a historical perspective on the relationship between community, subsistence, and governance in north-western India. Focusing on Panjab, it explores the continuities in kinship and caste practices of rural Panjabi populations from the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. Working from the household outwards, it studies how agropastoral lineages formed, and how some of these managed during the eighteenth century to establish autonomous states or riyasats of their own. From the early nineteenth century onwards, this riyasati order was systematically dismantled by the colonial state. Nevertheless, this book suggests that colonial attempts to settle and reform rural society, by changing both its relationship to the environment and by imposing new definitions of 'community' upon it were met with uneven success. Colonial subjects in rural Panjab continued to forge bonds of kinship beyond the legal limits imposed by the state.
List of contents
Note on transliteration, translations, and citations; List of maps, tables, and figures; List of abbreviations; Introduction. An Experiment in Governance; 1. Political Efflorescence in Late-Mughal Panjab; 2. The Metamorphoses of the Kalsia Household; 3. Caste, Lineage, and Social Flux in the Early Nineteenth Century; 4. Dismantling Riyasati Households; 5. Raiyati Privileges Reconfigured; 6. Encouraging the 'drudging, occupation of the plough'; 7. Household and Lineage in the Late-Nineteenth Century; 8. Conclusion; Appendix: On the Chronology of Colonial Conquest of Southern Panjab; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Girija Joshi is a historian interested in the environmental, social, and intellectual history of the Indian subcontinent. She received her doctorate from Leiden University in 2021, and was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. Her present research explores archival and historiographical practices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Northwestern South Asia.
