Books in the Cambridge South Asian Studies series

The nineteenth century saw the beginning of a violent and controversial movement of protest amongst western India's low and untouchable castes, aimed at the effects of their lowly position within the Hindu caste hierarchy. This study concentrates on the first leader of this movement, Mahatma Jotirao Phule.

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.

Although one of the acknowledged achievements of the British Raj was the extensive construction of irrigation works, their effects have to date been little studied by historians. Focusing upon the western Uttar Pradesh, this book looks at the response of the peasant economy to this important and pervasive form of technological change.

Combining a sophisticated theoretical analysis with evidence from archival records, village documents and oral testimonies, Bonded Histories presents an original and compelling view of the changing relationship between landlords and labourers in southern Bihar. It will be of interest to historians, social anthropologists and contemporary social theorists.

South India is often portrayed as a land of Hindu orthodoxy, yet in fact three great 'world religions' have inter-acted in the region over many centuries. Saints, Goddesses and Kings investigates the social and religious world of those South Indians who came to identify themselves as Christians and Muslims.

Concentrating on the All-India Muslim League, this book assesses the role of religious communalism in shaping the movement for Pakistan.

In this book, Dr Sarah Ansari examines the system of political control constructed by the British in Sind between 1843 and 1947. In particular, she looks at the part of the local Muslim religious elite, the pirs or hereditary sufi saints, whose participation in the system ensured its success.

These twelve essays explore the nature of south Asian agrarian society and examine the extent to which it changed during the period of British rule. The central focus of the book is directed to peasant agitation and violence and four of the studies look at the agrarian explosion that formed the background to the 1857 Mutiny. The essays give a coherent historical treatment of the Indian peasant world, and the paperback edition of this successful book will be of interest to the student of peasant studies and to the sociologist as well as to development economists and agronomists generally.

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 book explores the dual and sometimes conflicting roles of the zamindari, the landed chiefs, in eighteenth-century western Bengal during the decline of the Mughal empire and the rise of the British hegemony. It discusses zamindari rent extraction, techniques of coercion, and the meaning of gift-giving and gift-receiving.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book examines the impact of British rule on the Indian peasantry, and the changes it brought. It finds that significant long-term economic and social change did occur but that the highly 'differential' pattern to commercialisation prevented any structural transformation in the peasant economy and society.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.