India\'s Princely States : People, Princes and Colonialism
Contents: Acknowledgements. 1. People, princes and colonialism/Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati. 2. Colonial and postcolonial historiography and the princely states: relations of power and rituals of legitimation/Hira Singh. 3. \'Cruel, Oriental despots\': representations in nineteenth-century British colonial fiction, 1858-1900/Indrani Sen. 4. Narcotrafficking, princely ingenuity and the Raj: the subjugation of the Sindia State, c. 1843-44/Amar Farooqui. 5. The agrarian system of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir: a study of colonial settlement policies, 1860-1905/Shakti Kak. 6. The order of legitimacy: princely Orissa, 1850-1947/Biswamoy Pati. 7. Loyal feudatories of depraved despots? The deposition of princes in the Central India Agency, c. 1880-1947/Fiona Groenhout. 8. \'Hostages in our camp\': military collaboration between princely India and the British Raj, c. 1880-1920/Samiksha Sehrawat. 9. Historicizing debates over women\'s status in Islam: the case of Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal/Siobhan Lambert-Hurley. 10. The Maharana and the Bhils: the \'Eki\' Movement in Mewar, 1921-22/Hari Sen. 11. Women\'s hospitals and Midwives in Mysore, 1870-1920: princely or colonial medicine/Barbara N. Ramusack. 12. Public health administration in princely Mysore: tackling the influenza pandemic of 1918/T.V. Sekher. 13. Border incidents, internal disorder and the Nizam\'s claim for an independent Hyderabad/Manjiri N. Kamat. Index.
"This book reassesses the place of the Indian princely states within the history of South Asia and weaves together hitherto uncharted areas. It employs a multi-disciplinary approach and critiques some of the received paradigms of conventional historiography about princely India, leading the reader into new realms of discussion such as literary constructions, aspects of political economy and legitimacy, military collaborations, gender issues, peasant movements, health policies and the mechanisms for controlling and integrating the states. The contributors focus on a range of states in different regions and base their analyses on hitherto unused or underused archival sources.
The collection will appeal to scholars of South Asia and students of transnational histories, cultural and racial studies, international politics, economic history and social history of health and medicine."
