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Rulers, Merchants and Other Groups in the City-States of Saurashtra, India, around 1800
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Extract
During the past twenty years the major thrust of Indian historiography has expanded from its earlier concerns with imperial politics and sought to uncover the full range of actors within Indian political life and to identify the arenas in which they were active: local, regional, and national. One group of scholars has called particular attention to the diversity of elite groups, their interactions, and often their struggles for power. Their studies usually call explicitly for a broader understanding of ‘political’ activity outside the official levels of administration.
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References
Preliminary versions of this article were read at the South Asia Regional Studies Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, March 8, 1973, and the 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, Illinois, March 30-April 1, 1973. Research for this paper was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Danforth Foundation.
1 In this first group I would include: Ali, M. Athar, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1966)Google Scholar; Bayley, C. A., ‘Local Control in Indian Towns—The Case of Allahabad, 1880–1920’, Modern Asian Studies, V, No. 4 (October 1971), 289–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, Brenda F., ‘The Right-Left Division of South Indian Society’, Journal of Asian Studies XXIX, No. 4 (August 1970), 779–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Calkins, Philip, ‘The Formation of a Regionally Oriented Ruling Group in Bengal, 1700–1740’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXIX, No. 4 (August 1970), 799–806Google Scholar; Frykenberg, Robert E., Guntur District 1788–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Gokhale, R. G., ‘Ahmedabad in the XVIIth Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, XII (April 1969), 187–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leonard, Karen, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and Its Participants’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXX, No. 3 (May 1971), 569–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pearson, Michael Naylor, ‘Commerce and Compulsion. Gujarati Merchants and the Portuguese System in Western India, 1500–1600’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1971)Google Scholar, and ‘Political Participation in Mughal India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, IX, No. 2 (1972).Google Scholar
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4 Professor Holden Furber recently informed me that Hove's real, but secret, mission was to determine whether Indian varieties of cotton could be grown in the West Indies. The secret orders as well as the public ones, Furber noted, are preserved in the Public Record Office.
5 DrHove, ., Tours for Scientific and Economical Research Made in Guzerat, Kattiawar, and the Conkuns in 1787–88: Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, Vol. XVI, New Series (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1855), p. 77.Google Scholar
6 Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, XXXIX (New Series, 1856), 339. This volume was reprinted by the Government of Bombay in 1894, but renumbered as XXVII. This is confusing because in the same reprint series that volume XXXVII was renumbered as XXXIX. Thus two volumes were interchanged. Unless otherwise noted, the 1856 volumes and page numbering are used.Google Scholar
7 S. C. Misra points out that the continuing fragmentation of Rajput states in Saurashtra during the seventeenth century suggest that the Mughal authority was ‘superficial’. Gujarat State Gazetteers, Rajkot District (Ahmedabad), 1965, p. 37.Google Scholar
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Histories of Saurashtra are few. Wilberforce-Bell, H., The History of Kathiawar (London: William Heinemann, 1916)Google Scholar is the only one in English. The standard gazetteer, Kathiawar: Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. VIII (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884)Google Scholar provides much useful information. Another useful set of books are the mini-gazetteers of five of the major states of the peninsula prepared by Watson, J. W. as background for the overall gazetteer of Kathiawar. They are entitled Statistical Account of Bhavnagar, S.A. ofJunagadh, S.A. of Porbandar, S.A. of Nawanagar; and S.A. of Dhrangadhra. All the volumes were published in Bombay between 1883 and 1885.Google Scholar An especially useful historical perspective is Amarji, Randhodji, Tarikh-i-Sorath (Bombay: Education Society‘s Press, [1882]), an English perioditranslation from the Persian. Ranchodji's father was one of the greatest diwans of Saurashtra's largest state, Junagadh, from the 1760s until his assassination in 1784. The most recent and comprehensive history in Gujarati is Shambhuprasad Harprasad Desai, Saurashtrano Itihaas (Junagadh: Sorath Shikshan Ane Sanskruti Sangh, 1968). It lacks, however, an integrated approach, tending rather to be a catalogue of events state-by-state.Google Scholar
9 Selections, XXXIX, 21.Google Scholar
10 Ibid.
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12 Kincaid, C. A., The Outlaws of Kathiawar and Other Studies (Bombay: Times Press, 1905).Google Scholar
13 Meghani, Jhaverchand, Sorathi Bahaarvatiyaa (4 vols.; Ahmedabad: Gurjar Grantharatna Kaaryaalaya, 1929).Google Scholar
14 Shri Yaduvansh Prakaash, p. 41.Google Scholar No publication data found. The bahaarvatiyos of Saurashtra correspond to the ‘Social Bandits’ studied in Europe by Hobsbawm, E. J. in Primitive Rebels (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1965), pp. 13–29.Google Scholar Cf. Hobsbawm's, description of the conditions which give rise to social banditry: ‘It is rural, not urban. The peasant societies in which it occurs know rich and poor, powerful and weak, rulers and ruled, but remain profoundly and tenaciously traditional, and pre-capitalist in structure…. Moreover, even in backward and traditional bandit societies, the social brigand appears only before the poor have reached political consciousness or acquired more effective methods of social agitation. The bandit is a pre-political phenomenon and his strength is in inverse proportion to that of organized agrarian revolutionism and Socialism or Communism…. In such societies banditry is endemic. But it seems that Robin-Hoodism is most likely to become a major phenomenon when their traditional equilibrium is upset; during and after periods of abnormal hardship, such as famines and wars, or at the moments when the jaws of the dynamic modern world seize the static communities in order to destroy and transform them’ (pp. 23–4).Google Scholar
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16 Ibid.
17 Nightingale, Pamela, Trade and Empire in Western India, 1784–1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 231Google Scholar. Cf. also Gense, J. H. and Banaji, D. (eds.), The Gaikwads of Baroda: English Documents (10 vols.; Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons and Co., n.d.), VII, 530.Google Scholar
18 Forbes, Alexander Kinloch, Ras Mala (London: Richardson and Company, 1878), pp. 394–5Google Scholar, and cf. also Tod, James, Travels in Western India (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1839), p. 305.Google Scholar
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29 Cf. Sjoberg, Gideon, ‘The Rise and Fall of Cities; A Theoretical Perspective’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, IV, No. 2 (September 1963), 107–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sometimes, however, in the absence of adequate governmental protection, merchants hired their own guards. Tod, James. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. 2 vols. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1914) I, 379Google Scholar, and Hove, , Tours.Google Scholar
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39 Ibid., and cf. p. 146.
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103 Wilberforce-Bell, , History of Kathiawad, p. 127.Google Scholar For an example from south India of a new state administration building up its capital city by attracting migrant, cf. Leonard, Karen, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and Its Participants’.Google Scholar
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