Indian Historical Review

This article tries to show how the study of the Indian state in the recent decades by focusing on the understanding of processes has led to a nuanced reading of the sources in their entirety, and coherent long-term view of early India, which at times disturbs some of our cherished notions of the past. These studies enrich our understanding insofar as they unravel the regional trajectories of socio-political transformations and locate them in the wider context of their trans-regional linkages. They straddle a wide range of issues ranging from vana–kṣetra and tribe–caste continuum, through hierarchisation of society and evolving structures of legitimation to expanding resource bases and questions of identity formation.

In patriarchal societies around the world the absence of a male issue has been regarded a serious social aberration. Alternatives have been worked out to surmount the problem. Early Indian literature apprises us of one such option; niyoga or levirate wherein a widow or the wife of an impotent man was temporarily made to cohabit with a designated man in order to procure a son who would be regarded as the son of his mother’s legal husband. It clearly came within the fold of apaddharam or the law of exigency, something that could be resorted to only in the time of emergency. There seems to be a divergence of views in the narrative tradition and normative [shastriya] literature on the issue of its genesis and purpose. But what comes out clearly is that niyoga was hailed as a ‘strategy of heirship’.

The article intends to look at the trajectory of the practice in ancient and early medieval India from the vantage of principal female actors. A host of queries would be taken up. It would be worth dwelling upon the issue of its sustainability and popularity; whether the practice of niyoga was designed to benefit a particular section of the society or was meant for larger social good. Did the practice of niyoga bring women some solace or turned out to be an exploitative way of controlling their sexuality? Did the woman have the right to reject it or enter in out of their volition? How did men negotiate this practice? Did it bruise their masculinity or repair, at least in some cases? Did the practice also have caste and class angles to it? Can we detect divergence in the views of Brahman theoreticians and members of other castes such as kshatriyas for whom its practical application amounted to a survival tactic? Who eventually stood to gain from the practice and its eventual fading away? What was the legal and social status of the daughter born of such unions? We shall take up these issues for analysis in the article.

This article tries to investigate as to what were the notions of economic theory informing the working of the state and society in medieval India in order to identify and explain the social contradictions manifested in Indian history. As a preliminary step in the direction of such an investigation, it aims at identifying the notions, popular, religious, as also those underlying rules framed by the sultans for regulating the economy in medieval India.

Image of communities in medieval India as a self-sufficient and autonomous entity has come under scrutiny in the recent past. Studies have successfully challenged these stereotypes and have argued that communities have regularly seen changes and transformations have been an integral part. Another dominant corollary has been the argument that these communities were averse to centralised polity as any negotiation with the state would have diluted their autonomy and dominance over various components. Meos of Mewat have also been portrayed as practitioner and believer of ‘Pal polity’/ autonomous community. It is in this respect, the present article makes an attempt to challenge the oft-repeated idiom of ‘autonomy of communities’ in the medieval India. During Sultanate period Meos were broadly identified as tribes inhabiting the Aravalli hills, valleys and dense forest of the Mewat region and were known for cattle-lifting, loot and plunder. However, one witnesses a major transformation in their identity with the passage of time. Soon Meos were not only peasantised but they were also able to establish their zamindaris. One also notices gradual and very slow but continuous Islamisation of this community. During Mughal era we follow them engaged in several other important occupations. They became trusted post carriers for the Mughal Empire and came to be known as dak Meoras. Similarly, they were also employed as personal bodyguards and as security guards in the royal palace and came to be known as khidmatiyyas. Interestingly and contrary to traditional portrayal, Meos approached Mugahl state administration for the redressal of their grievances, even intra-community. Rajasthan State Archives has a good repository of numerous Arzdashts, Chithis, Vakil reports, Khatut-ahalkarn, Arsattas, etc., depicting the processes of negotiations and contestation among Meos and between Meos and Mughals. Thus, it is necessary to challenge the established scholarship on these counts and the present article argues, on the basis of contemporary Turko-Persian literature and archival records, that there is a need to examine the inherent dynamism of any community, in this case Meos of Mewat region between thirteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Gunpowder manufacture at Ichapur near Calcutta in the 1790s engaged in busy years 2,000 to 2,500 skilled labourers and was therefore one of the world’s largest factories. In the first part of this article published in Indian Historical Review Vol. 39(1), the factory was situated in the framework of India’s colonial and military history, in particular the Mysore wars. The demand for gunpowder, the organisation of the work, the composition and the recruitment of the workforce were analysed first. In this second part of the article, the (comparably favourable) primary and secondary labour conditions are discussed, as well as the collective actions of the workers which cannot be seen separated from these. This remarkable case study raises many questions regarding long-term trends in the labour history and migration history of India, where accepted wisdom stresses the emergence of mobility since the 1840s and poor performance of the industrial workers since the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1931–32 a military operation (‘Hunt for Prince Charlie’¹) was conducted by the 3rd and 4th Assam Rifles, mainly assigned the duty of searching a popular tribal girl who had been working relentlessly for her Zeliangrong community to be freed from colonialism, poverty, confiscation of land and property through a benevolent way of religious-cum-non-violent movement. However, unavoidable conditions transformed her movement into an armed rebellion. The girl was none but Miss Gaidinliu. From 1925 to 1931, her mentor Jadonang and she were working to unite all conglomerate tribes by launching a political-cum-religious movement against the colonial ruler. Untimely Jadonang was arrested and hanged on 29 August 1931; the movement conditionally stopped for a while. To accomplish their dream of freedom, liberty and unity of this community, Miss Gaidinliu had been spreading their political message in North Cachar Hills, Naga Hills and north-western part of Manipur. On the other hand, the British colonial ruler considered her as a seditionist, hallucinated, millenarian and provoker of the Kuki–Naga ethnic issue. The search operation was mainly assigned to J.P. Mills, Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills and J.C. Higgins, Political Agent, Manipur (classified) assisted by Sub-Divisional Officer Haflong, North Cachar Hills and Sub-Divisional Officer, Tamenglong Sub-division, Manipur. This article tries to draw the British search for her and the atrocities against the Zeliangrong community from a historical perspective.

One of the crucial features of the tussle over Assamese in the nineteenth century was that it inspired multiple imaginings of the ‘Assamese’. This article has been conceived with the aim of following some of these different mappings of the ‘Assamese’ that became the focal point of a debate over the identity of the Assamese language in nineteenth-century Assam. The article contends that neither the official nor the missionary discourses on linguistic identity can be labeled as either exclusively ideological or instrumentalist. One of its principal aims has been to foreground a particular moment in the history of the debate when official rhetoric seems to have shed, if only momentarily, its usual concerns of governance and power and engaged in a genuine quest for ‘authentic’ linguistic attributes for defining the vernacular. The article addresses both the ideological parameters of the official discourses on the identity of Assamese as well as the pragmatic considerations and the lack of harmony in the seemingly unanimous discourse of the missionaries. Further, there has been an attempt to reflect on the many lives of Assamese in the pages of the vernacular periodicals, wherein, apparently fixed linguistic boundaries were tampered with in an attempt to equip the ‘mother tongue’ with suitable linguistic and cultural properties. The article shows how boundaries of religion were drawn up and affirmed as the provincial elite sought to produce a Hindu–Sanskrit identity for the ‘Assamese’ community.

The article tries to argue that in 1845–46 and again in 1848–49 Punjab manifested the same kind of patriotic feeling and nationalist ardour irrespective of all considerations of race or religion in trying to resist the progress of British imperialism which had been expressed by the fauj-i-Hindustani in northern and central India twelve years later in 1857–58. The Khalsa may thus be said to have played a pioneering role in India’s war for independence against foreign domination. If the purbias had not helped the British put down the resistance of the Khalsa during these earlier occasions, they could have called in an independent Khalsa to their aid in 1857–58.