To show how kingship was enacted and materialised in specific contexts within the ‘Gupta Ecumene’, writ large, this article presents a detailed analysis of two sites that served as centres for political performance, devotional practice, and artistic production between the fourth and the sixth century CE: Eran and Sondhni in the Indian heartland of Madhya Pradesh. Eran is commonly held to be a key site

Ellora is the place where caves associated with different sects and religions were carved over a span of at least 800 years. While the caves, narrowly understood, have been the subject of many studies, the ‘place’, as a site of political and social interaction, has been largely neglected. Ellora was larger than just the caves; it was a place with a long history where traders, monks, artisans and armies

Grape wine is not mentioned in our earliest texts from South Asia, the Vedas nor in the epics, yet these texts contain evidence of an established drinking culture based on grain and sugarcane liquors. When did grapes and wine appear in the Indic cultural world and how were they received? Previous scholarship has focused on peripheral, Hellenised, wine-producing regions, like Gandhāra, or on finds of

This paper studies the connections between Prakrit and early Maṇipravāḷam literature from premodern Kerala. Maṇipravāḷam (literally, ‘gems and corals’) is the emic term for a dominant part of Kerala’s premodern vernacular literature, binding together Kerala’s local language and Sanskrit. As a highly Sanskritised register of a Dravidian language, Maṇipravāḷam has generally been viewed as having been

A decade after IESHR’s Special Issue of 2010, ‘Munshis, Pandits and Record-Keepers: Scribal communities and historical change in India’, we return again to the challenges and dilemmas that scribes, bureaucrats, intellectuals and literati of different kinds faced during the early modern centuries. Building on recent advances in our understanding of these key communities, this Special Issue turns the

By the end of the eighteenth century, emerging states in South Asia drew on successive waves of migration to staff their institutions. Scholars, poets and bureaucrats in these new states were entrusted with the crafting and maintenance of new bureaucratic systems and cultural spaces. The attempts to create shared bonds in these new spaces, however, also created tensions between those who were recent

Early modern poets conventionally began their compositions by praising and invoking the blessings of their higher authorities, be they their gods, gurus or courtly patrons. In the eighteenth century, North Indian society was particularly unstable, and the relationships between these different power brokers proved volatile. This article considers how intellectuals attached to religious households navigated

Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of powerful courtly patrons. The rapid expansion of emerging regional states in the eighteenth century created new opportunities to apply these skills to administration, land-holding, and politics. This article examines the changing professional identity of the Kayastha scribal household in eighteenth-century

In eighteenth-century South Asia, ‘political’ vakils are familiar to us principally as diplomats, active in the inter-state negotiations of the period. They were unlike their predecessors, the īlchī and hejib of earlier centuries, who were associated with the service of courts and states. Maratha political vakils, like others, worked rather more as the mobile agents of individual rulers. Their activities

Recent studies of scholarly life in early modern India have concentrated on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My essay has two aims: to push this study into the long eighteenth century, and to contextualise the new configurations of Sanskrit scholarship in the movement of people between Banaras and Thanjavur, theorised here as centres of gravity and of levity, respectively. Towards the end of

This article analyses the diary entries made by a Persographic secretary (munshī), Aḥmad ʿAlī, who was employed by a retiring East India Company official to write an account of the journey they made together in 1780 across North India from Lucknow to the Mughal imperial capital in Delhi and back. Much of the landscape that they traversed—including a cluster of qasbahs, river passes, forests and fields—was

Nachiket Chanchani, Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains: Architecture, Religion, and Nature in the Central Himalayas, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019, 268 pp.

Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019, 272 pp.

Rajan Gurukkal, History and Theory of Knowledge Production: An Introductory Outline. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019, 308 pp.

Sumit Sarkar, Essays of a Lifetime. Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns, Delhi and Albany: Permanent Black and University of New York Press, 2017 and 2019, 650 pp.

Between 1939 and 1949, a million men, women and children worked for the railways in India and Pakistan. Drawing on memoires, newspapers and government documents, this article seeks to examine the survival strategies these workers adopted in this tumultuous decade. It starts with a study of their efforts to survive the challenges of the Second World War. The article highlights how they rose to these

This article contains both a study and a translation of the laws relating to slavery found in the thirteenth-century Hindu law digest called the Smṛticandrikā. By focusing on a single text, we can clearly see the ideology of slavery in the view of one important author of medieval India. First, slaves formed one end of a categorical continuum of workers, all of whom laboured for the benefit of others

This article traces the twentieth-century ‘afterlife’ of Indian opium, following the global trajectories of the commodity beyond the decades of prohibition, when its international trade was broadly viewed as being in terminal decline. The article demonstrates how opium from Malwa, Bengal and Bihar was brought into the ambit of Western pharmaceuticals during the two World Wars. In spite of the scepticism

This article focuses on the little-known Indian Labour Corps (ILC) who hailed from the Northeast frontier of India during the Great War (WW1). It engages with the labour recruitment process, their collective experience during the long march to France, the nature of their work and life at the warzone camps, their heroic homecoming and subsequently, their life back into the heart of the hills. It argues

The history of Mysore coffee is inextricably linked to the mountainous inam lands of Baba Budan dargah situated atop eponymous hills. In the Malnad region of the Nagar Division in the seventeenth century grew probably the earliest coffee gardens of India. This paper examines the significance of the Baba Budan inam lands coffee in the development of the coffee economy of Mysore. The trajectory of coffee

Gunnel Cederlöf and Mahesh Rangarajan, eds, At Nature’s Edge: The Global Present and Long-Term History, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018, 331 pp.

Nitin Sinha, Nitin Varma and Pankaj Jha, eds, Servants’ Pasts: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century South Asia, Vol. I, Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2019, 421 pp.

This paper builds on my earlier study of the relationship between the elephant and imperial sovereignty in north India, extending the argument from 1200 to 1600ce. The ritual and military use of the elephant signalled a self-conscious imperial formation, based on the Ghaznavid model, with the emperor as king-of-kings and elephant-master, ruling over subjugated tributary monarchs. However, new conditions