Books in the Cambridge South Asian Studies series

The 1930s was a critical decade in Indian politics. It saw the Congress Party begin its rise to political dominance, while Indian 'big business' strengthened its position in the economy. This book seeks to analyse the response of India's most important indigenous businessmen to the growth of political nationalism. Dr Markovits' study falls into three parts: an analysis of the structure of the business class, revealing its basic heterogeneity and lack of political unity; an examination of the impact of the Depression of the 1930s on the fortunes of Indian businessmen and on government economic policy; and a survey of the uneasy and changing relationship between businessmen and Congress at a time of political turmoil and realignment. Drawing heavily on the private papers of prominent businessmen as well as on a wealth of official sources, this is the first systematic study, on an all-India scale, of the political attitude of big business during the final and most crucial phase of the nationalist struggle. Given increasing prominence of businessmen in Indian politics after 1920 an understanding of their behaviour is fundamental to our view of the overall pattern of Indian nationalist politics. All those interested in the rise of anti-colonial movements and in patterns of capitalist development in Third World countries should also find matter for thought in this sensitive and unusual study.

This is a study of the Indian National Congress, the first political association to approach the government of India at an all-India level. The Congress became the most important national party in twentieth century India, and the whole history of the freedom movement is closely bound up with its fortunes. National politics, however, were influenced by regional and local affairs. In the early twentieth century the Indian Congress was split between the 'Moderates' and the 'Extremists'. Dr Johnson argues that this division was closely related to existing rivalries between politicians in the provinces, and that provincial interests determined their national point of view. Because the early Congress depended so much for its regular organisation on men from Bombay, party lines in western India were particularly important in determining the course of the struggles between the parties in the National Congress. The unpublished letters and diaries of the protagonists in these disputes have enabled Dr Johnson to examine this theme in detail. This is the first book to stress the need for study of regional and local politics as an integral part of the history of the Congress. Its revelation of the complex connections between parochial, provincial and all India politics adds a new dimension to our understanding of nationalism in South Asia.

The purpose of this substantial work is to study British policy towards India during the second half of the nineteenth century as formulated in Britain and India by the highest authorities. The period from the Revolt and the assumption by the British Government of direct responsibility for the administration of India to the end of Curzon's viceroyalty is a crucial one and 1905 may be taken as the end of the first phase of the Crown's rule in India. Thereafter political and constitutional developments become more important than the efforts of the administration.

At the end of the First World War, Indian officials and nationalist politicians began to recognize the need to create a propaganda machine that could spread news to a large and diverse population. This 1994 book describes the role of the press in the last stage of the nationalist struggle in India on the eve of the British departure.

Dr Kozlowski's important study pioneers a fresh approach to the study of a critical Muslim institution: the endowments or awqaf which almost everywhere in the Islamic world provide support for mosques, schools and shrines. His novel approach will attract all those interested in the study of Islam.

Dr Brown presents a political study of the first clearly defined period in Mahatma Gandhi's Indian career, from 1915 to 1922.

Dr Moore's enterprising book focuses on an apparent paradox: the failure of Sri Lanka's highly politicized smallholder electorate to place on the national political agenda issues relating to the public distribution of material resources.

West Bengal has the longest-ruling democratically elected Communist government in world history. In this book, Dr Ross Mallick convincingly argues that it has been a failure in terms of redistributive development reform.

This innovative study of the power of lineage in India across two centuries examines some of the traditional social structures which transcended so successfully the political upheavals of British rule.

This book presents a comprehensive and perceptive study of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh through the first two decades of its history from 1951. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh was the most robust of the first generation of Hindu nationalist parties in modern Indian politics and Bruce Graham examines why the party failed to establish itself as the party of the numerically dominant Hindu community.

Religion under Bureaucracy is an innovative study of religion and politics in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu which focuses on the relationship between the state and the central religious institution of the area, the Hindu temple.

As well as being an outstanding contribution to Indian economic and social history, this book draws important conclusions about peasant politics in general and about the effects of international economic fluctuations on primary producing countries.

A pioneering piece of ethnohistory, The Hollow Crown uses a variety of interdisciplinary means to reconstruct the sociocultural history of a warrior polity in south India between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries.

This book examines the behaviour of private industrial investment in Pakistan in the 1960s, in the first half of which it rose at an unprecedented rate, followed by sharp decline, and then stagnation for the rest of the period. The approach adopted is institutional and empirical.

Although temples have been important in South Indian society and history, there have been few attempts to study them within an integrated anthropological framework. Professor Appadurai develops such a framework in this ethnohistorical case study, in which he interprets the politics of worship in the Sri Partasarati Svami Temple, a famous ancient Sri Vaisnava shrine in India.

The establishment in British India produced an impressive number of scholars and scholarly amateurs who pursued historical and other studies. Mr Palmer has produced a work in this tradition. His subject is the outbreak of the Mutiny (as the Raj considered it) among the native regiments (as the Raj called them) at Meerut on the evening of Sunday 10 May 1857.

This book examines the effect of Classical political economy - the economic and monetary writings of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, the Mills and others - on the policy-making of the British government in India in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Caste Conflict and Elite Formation is a study in the social history of Sri Lanka.

This book offers a path-breaking analysis of the transformations that occurred in the art and aesthetic values of Bengal during the colonial and nationalist periods. Tapati Guha-Thakurta moves beyond most existing assumptions and narratives to explore the complexities and diversities of the changes generated by Western contacts and nationalist preoccupations in art.

This study constitutes an analysis of factionalism between rival groups in the dominant Congress Party in Maharashtra. The principal question examined is whether a politician's decision to oppose or 'rebel against' party authority is determined or can be predicted by certain characteristics of the individual concerned and his environment.

The interwar years witnessed great changes in the political life of India, with the establishment of new governmental institutions, the emergence of political movements based on class, caste and ideology, and the rapid expansion of the nationalist campaign.

This book deals with the history of private investment in India and its determinants during the period 1900-1939. It develops a simple theoretical framework in its first part and tries to isolate the influence on private investment in India of factor supplies, as against demand conditions. In the second part, all the major manufacturing industries of the period are studied in detail.

This is a study of agricultural development in undivided Bengal during the period 1920-1946.

This book examines India's export performance and export policies in the 1960s. The author analyses the causal factors underlying the trends in exports and evaluates the government policies which affected them. This authoritative work will be of interest to all those concerned with Indian economic problems, international trade and development economics.

Saiyid Muhammad Reza Khan held the office of Naib Nazim and Naib Diwan of Bengal from 1765 to 1772. This study includes the early life of the Khan, but concentrates particularly upon the years from 1756, when the Khan first held public office, to 1775.

This book studies workers in four factories in Bangalore - an industrial city of more than one and a half million people in South India - and seeks to answer questions about the situation and thinking of workers in modern capital intensive factories.

This anthropological work of unusual historical depth describes the pattern of land tenure and resulting social structure in the Ceylonese village of Madagama. Dr Obeyesekere analyses the contemporary system in detail, and traces the evolution of every land holding and the correlated kinship pattern from the inception of the estate in 1790.

A detailed comparative analysis of electorates in Sri Lanka. It addresses issues that are relevant not only to South Asia but to the developing world in general and will therefore be of interest to specialists and students of South Asia, comparative politics, sociology and anthropology.

This book is based on extensive and previously unused Portuguese and Dutch archival sources. Its secondary theme is to explore the relationship between the documentation used and the context within which it was generated, thus illuminating how Europeans and Asians reacted to one another.