The first printing press landed on the western coast of India in the mid-sixteenth century. The introduction of printing technology did not immediately lead to a flourishing print culture, and the oral and scribal traditions continued to thrive for at least three more centuries. This article examines the emergence of print culture in nineteenth-century western India by surveying the literary sources in the Marathi language. It argues that the book was regarded as a sacred object in the pre-print era and reading was considered a ritualistic activity. Print, on the other hand, was seen as defiling and therefore orthodox Brahmins hesitated to embrace the technology of printing. They were also threatened by the democratizing potential of printing. As the print culture bourgeoned, the sacredness of the book declined and it turned into a profane commodity. A market for vernacular books and periodicals started emerging gradually. However, pre-modern notions of literary patronage did not wither away as authors and publishers continued to bank on state patronage.

In 1833, Rammohun Roy, the so-called “Father of Modern India,” died abruptly while traveling in England. Because cremation was then illegal in Britain, he was buried rather than immolated according to brahminical norms. This article situates the micro-history of his colonial corpse within the genealogy of secularism. I take secularism as a formation of the body in the most morbidly literal of ways—fused to embodied formations of race, caste, class, and gender and entangled with the transcolonial networks of nineteenth-century heterodoxy. Roy’s ritually indeterminate flesh was a site for cultural improvisation around a Victorian-colonial secularity formed in and through the body.

Global music history projects have become increasingly popular in recent years. Going global has its advantages: it develops conversations between researchers working on disparate regions; it sheds light on larger frameworks that are less evident on smaller scales of analysis; it decentres how we teach music history; and it retraces a global hinterland for music systems that have conventionally been called ‘Western’. At the same time, the global history approach raises challenges for researchers working on the world beyond Europe. In particular, there is the danger of unintentionally reinstating Eurocentrism, either by uncritically exporting research questions based on the European experience to the wider world, or by narrowing our focus onto those musicians and scholars who engaged with European ideas and practices, especially in colonial settings. This work is valuable, but it also comes with risks. This essay considers these problems through a case study: a largely forgotten music scholar, Goswami Pannalal, who travelled and taught across north India in the late nineteenth century. Examining his musicological study in Hindi, the Nād Binod (‘Sonic Delight’, 1896), I consider how far asking ‘global’ questions might shed light on his work, and offer an alternative reading based on a ‘significant geographies’ approach.

This short article introduces the Forum on Muslim modernity in South Asia, placing its four articles—by Muhammad Qasim Zaman, SherAli Tareen, Julia Stephens, and Justin Jones—in the context of existing scholarship. I highlight the authors’ contributions to the study of Islamic reform and of women’s agency, in particular, in understandings of Muslim modernity in South Asia. Each of the contributions is on a discrete topic; this introduction therefore endeavours to pull at the threads within each that underscores their interventions in the study of Muslim modernity and that tie them together in this Forum.

The paper examines the introduction of trained female nurses for the British army men in colonial India between 1888 and 1920. It discusses the genesis of the Indian Nursing Service (INS), including the background and negotiations leading up to its formation, terms of employment, duties and working conditions of the nursing sisters. The memoir of Catharine Grace Loch, who served as the first Chief Lady Superintendent of the service is used extensively to trace the early experiences and challenges of the nursing sisters. The paper primarily argues that the INS being a new service, the colonial government maintained tight control over its functioning, and extreme conservatism in spending, thus retarding the growth of professional army nursing in India. Secondly, in examining the relations between the sisters and the (male) nursing orderlies, sub-medical and medical officers, the paper argues that the inadequate delineation of the nursing sisters’ position in the military medical hierarchy was an important reason for the undermining of their expertise and status. Thirdly, the paper contends that as an all-women service, nursing constituted an important avenue of female agency within the patriarchal colonial establishment, which subjected the sisters to scrutiny both professionally and socially. The paper analyses the resultant conditions and regulations imposed on the sisters – most of them determined by gender and class notions. Finally, the paper discusses the gradual establishment and recognition of the service as an important cornerstone for the health of the army, while highlighting the shortcomings that yet persisted up until 1920.

The writings of Muhammad Siddiq Hasan well exemplify the argument of Francis Robinson's influential article on vernacular print publications that furthered a Protestant Reformation-like democratising of sacred knowledge. Both the number of his publications, and the personal empowerment enjoined by his Ahl-i Hadith jurisprudence, make him, in fact, an ideal exemplar of this kind of publication. He also, however, stands apart. First, his ‘vernacular’ included not only Urdu, but also Arabic and Persian. Second, beyond democratisation, print simultaneously enhanced scholarly authority, and it did so to an unusual extent for Siddiq Hasan because of his pioneering reach beyond India to the Ottoman lands, with Arabic works published and distributed from cities like Istanbul and Cairo. Third, Siddiq Hasan's publications served a diversity of purposes, like Persian publications that enhanced his princely status, and Arabic publications that not only forged transnational networks of like-minded scholars but also, in other hands, served modernist theologians and innovative literary scholars. Finally, in the end, the potential of print turned on him as officials used his publications to allege seditious intent. That denouement aside, the life of Siddiq Hasan's print publication points to a moment of rich intellectual life in the context of colonial rule, taking Robinson's insights on the potential of publication in unexpected directions.

Muslims’ education in British India is treated in the literature as something encompassing resistance, reaction, and hence emancipation from putatively exploitative British policies. This article focuses on the patterns of Muslims’ emergent knowledge traditions in British India in response to the British government's involvement in the educational matters of the Indian subcontinent. Data findings reveal that Indian Muslims’ responses to the growing trend towards ‘modern’ education in the Indian subcontinent evolved gradually through discursive interactions leading to divergent reformist tendencies in favour of or against adopting Western education. The British government's decision to make ‘special’ arrangements for Muslims’ educational uplift had left legacies of mutual admiration, fear, and sometimes resentment between Muslims and the British government in the subcontinent. Amid ambivalent relations between the British and Muslims, it was not difficult to find apt illustrations of what Francis Robinson calls a ‘cheek by jowl’ relationship.

This article offers a first survey of a novel genre of grimoires published in Urdu-reading India in the early twentieth century. It contained a wide selection of magic material from Islamicate and Tantric sources as well as Western parapsychology and spiritualism. Its applications ranged from remedies of last resort in illness, relationship troubles, and other life problems to common household cures and magical tricks performed for pleasure alone. Produced and read by members of all religious groups in North India, this material indicates important changes in popular attitudes towards magic. Magic by no means declined at the beginning of the twentieth century, but flourished as a viable commercial print genre that became increasingly detached from religion.

This historiographical review considers a corpus of literature which examines the spread of modern Western sport within and beyond the locus of public schools, princely playgrounds and club greens in colonial India. While locating the old historiographical problems and new social historical interpretations, a great deal of attention has been paid to foregrounding significant research areas that are less catered to in existing scholarships. As well, this review contends that the eagerness to examine colonial interventions in the sports field without tracing the conflict and negotiation between two different – pre-colonial and colonial – ideas of leisure and body cultural movements expounds an incomplete history of Western sport in modern India. While doing so, it urges a rectification of the methodology of current academic studies in which vernacular literary sources are treated as a ‘passive mediator’ merely reflecting the popular enthusiasm for sport. It concludes that this ‘reflectionist’ approach is a hindrance to research work on the diffusion of Western sports in colonial India, which recognises the emergence and development of a new sporting culture as the discursive formation that surrounded the ideological meanings and images of the literary construction of sport.

At its founding in 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) selected its Governing Body from eight ‘states of Chief Industrial Importance’. The ILO’s attempt to define industrial importance was predicated on its seemingly expert-driven and statistical impartiality. As a technical organization, this standard was created to depoliticize the selection of its Governing Body. Yet, with its utilization of relative economic indicators, the standard ended up recreating a highly Eurocentric Governing Body. Resistance to these metrics by aggregately large but relatively underdeveloped economies, such as colonial India, reveals the inherently political nature of attempting to define industrial ‘importance’. This article examines the little-known history of how the Indian delegation to the ILO challenged the ILO’s Eurocentric metrics, constituting what it meant to be industrially important. In doing so, this article questions to what extent ‘technical’ international organizations can remain apolitical spaces and how our contemporary international institutions are responding to the increasing politicization of their function.

The treatment of injured Indian soldiers in Britain during WWI deployed particular ways of recording injuries and using them to make judgments about loyalty to the Imperial Army by assessing the soldier’s ability to malinger. This was possible by using personal correspondences between soldiers and their families for ethnographic ends ie. to determine susceptibility to develop mental illness through a soldier’s ethnic background and whether he was from the so-called ‘martial races’ or not. This classificatory knowledge as well as the suspicion towards exaggerated symptoms was also inherited by Indian psychiatry after partition. However, while these psychiatrists reproduced some colonial biases about susceptibility of illness, they were much more receptive to considering the social experience of patients including their kinship relations at home and in the military. By the end of WWII, symptoms came to be regarded as signs of recovery and readjustment to social relations to make a case for the lasting impacts of war on the soldier’s mental and physical health.

The historiography of western medicine in colonial India has predominantly been analysed from the perspectives of the elite services – the Indian Medical Service (IMS) and their recruits. Unfortunately, perceiving colonial medical practices through the lens of the IMS has remained inadequate to provide a nuanced understanding of the role played by Indians in the semi-urban and rural areas of colonial India. This article examines the contributions of local administration and the role played by the recruits of the Subordinate Medical Service. This article uses the Madras Presidency as its case study and focusses on the medical subordinates who were pivotal in establishing a western medical tradition in the region. This will shift the urban-centric focus and examine mostly the rural parts of the presidency, in particular, the district hospitals and dispensaries located in the districts, taluks and villages. The article analyses the transformation in the Madras medical administration from the late nineteenth century until 1935 to argue how subordinates were the ones controlling the local medical services, and thus pulling the strings of health administration in the presidency. This will also demonstrate the uniqueness of Madras and how it disseminated western medical care with an active participation and involvement of the local residents.

This article explores the global spread of the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement to colonial India. By looking at the Great Eastern Crisis (1875–78) and the intense public ferment the events in the Balkans created in Britain, Switzerland, Russia and India, this article illustrates how humanitarian ideas and practices, as well as institutional arrangements for the care for wounded soldiers, were appropriated and shared amongst the different religious internationals and pan-movements from the late 1870s onwards. The Great Eastern Crisis, this article contends, marks a global humanitarian moment. It transformed the initially mainly European and Christian Red Cross into a truly global movement that included non-sovereign colonial India and the Islamic religious international. Far from just being at the receiving end, non-European peoples were crucial in creating global and transnational humanitarianism, global civil society and the world of non-governmental organizations during the last third of the nineteenth century.

This article examines one of the earliest Gujarati travelogues concerning China, written by Damodar Ishwardas—a Hindu resident of Bombay and a clerk for a Sunni Khoja commercial firm—and published in Bombay in 1868. Based on a three-year trip to the port cities of southern China, Ishwardas's text runs close to 400 pages and was patronized by a prominent stratum of Bombay's Gujarati-speaking commercial and bureaucratic elite. The primary intervention in this article is to analyze Ishwardas's account as a neglected relic of vernacular capitalism and vernacular intellectual history. Furthermore, the text presents an opportunity to reexamine the history of the Indian intellectual and mercantile engagement with late Qing China, especially before anticolonial nationalism and pan-Asianism supplied new paradigms for Indian writing on East Asia beginning around 1900. It further points to the many unstudied Indian materials that have yet to be integrated into the study of modern capitalism in the regions from the South China Sea to the western Indian Ocean.

In the 1870s, Indian news editors warned their readers of a series of crises threatening India. They saw the famines, wars, and poverty that they were describing as symptoms of the same illness: Colonial governors had failed to implement an ethical system of governance, and had therefore failed to create a healthy body politic, choosing to expend energy in punishing or censoring dissent when they should have been constructing more durable civic institutions. In North India, earlier Mughal traditions of political philosophy and governance offered a template to critique the current state. In drawing on these traditions, editors linked multiple registers of dissent, from simple ‘fables’ about emperors to more sophisticated arguments drawn from newly reinterpreted akhlaq texts, creating a print record of the multilingual, multivalent literary and oral worlds of Indian political thought. The figures of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb, representing the zenith and nadir of Mughal sovereignty, in turn linked popular and learned discussions on statecraft, good governance, and personal responsibility in an age of crisis. The press itself became a meeting point for multivalent discourses connecting South Asian publics, oral and literate, in their exploration of the nature of just rule in the context of empire, calling, in the process, new ‘publics’ into being.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian classical music was in transition. Most readings of the transition stress the choices of the professional musicians, as these musicians and the institutions in which they functioned were caught up in political and economic movements such as nationalism and commercialization. This article studies a different type of transition: when a small-town professional group with a strong associational culture became musicians. This second process, standing in contrast to the received narratives, suggests novel lessons in the history of urban cultures during a time of change.