A Princely Affair PDF Download

Author: Yaqoob Khan Bangash
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199407361
Category : Pakistan
Languages : en
Pages : 452

View

Book Description

Author: Yaqoob Khan Bangash
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199066490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
On August 15, 1947, West Pakistan was less than half its present size. Nearly a year of negotiations, arguments, threats, and even chance, brought nine princely states into the Pakistani fold. Thereafter followed a long and staggered process of integration. Using hitherto inaccessible primary sources, this path-breaking book completes the story of the creation of Pakistan. In charting the accession and integration of the princely states, this book shows, for the first time in detail, the complicated and often botched processes of the early consolidation of Pakistan. The problems emanating from this early period, haphazard constitutional integration, weak local political forces, the insurgency in Balochistan since 1948, and a weak sense of national identity and citizenship remain with Pakistan today.

Author: Priyasha Saksena
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192691783
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 273

View

Book Description
What constitutes a sovereign state in the international legal sphere? This question has been central to international law for centuries. Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia provides a compelling exploration of the history of sovereignty through an analysis of the jurisdictional politics involving a specific set of historical legal entities. Governed by local rulers, the princely states of colonial South Asia were subject to British paramountcy whilst remaining legally distinct from directly ruled British India. Their legal status and the extent of their rights remained the subject of feverish debates through the entirety of British colonial rule. This book traces the ways in which the language of sovereignty shaped the discourse surrounding the legal status of the princely states to illustrate how the doctrine of sovereignty came to structure political imagination in colonial South Asia and the framework of the modern Indian state. Opening with a survey of the place of the princely states in the colonial structures of South Asia, Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia goes on to illustrate how international lawyers, British politicians, colonial officials, rulers and bureaucrats of princely states, and anti-colonial nationalists in British India used definitions of sovereignty to construct political orders in line with their interests and aspirations. By invoking the vernacular of sovereignty in contrasting ways to support their differing visions of imperial and world order, these actors also attempted to reconfigure the boundaries among the spheres of the national, the imperial, and the international. Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, debates and disputes over the princely states continually defined and redefined the concept of sovereignty and international legitimacy in South Asia. Using rich material from the colonial archives,Sovereignty, International Law, and the Princely States of Colonial South Asia conveys an understanding of the history of sovereignty and the construction of the modern Indian nation-state that is still relevant today. A riveting read, this book will be of considerable interest and importance to scholars of international law and South Asia, legal historians, and political scientists.

Author: Harrison Akins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526167840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

View

Book Description
Conquering the maharajas demonstrates that the political and military clashes between the Indian and Pakistani governments and the princely states, a legacy of the layered sovereignty of British indirect rule in India, was a product of the competing ideas of state sovereignty leading up to and following the transfer of power in 1947.

Author: Ian Copland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521894364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

View

Book Description
A fascinating study of the role played by the Indian princes in the devolution of British colonial power.

Author: Partha Chatterjee
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691090313
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

View

Book Description
In 1921 a traveling religious man appeared in eastern British Bengal. Soon residents began to identify this half-naked and ash-smeared sannyasi as none other than the Second Kumar of Bhawal--a man believed to have died twelve years earlier, at the age of twenty-six. So began one of the most extraordinary legal cases in Indian history. The case would rivet popular attention for several decades as it unwound in courts from Dhaka and Calcutta to London. This narrative history tells an incredible story replete with courtroom drama, sexual debauchery, family intrigue, and squandered wealth. With a novelist's eye for interesting detail, Partha Chatterjee sifts through evidence found in official archives, popular songs, and backstreet Bangladeshi bookshops. He evaluates the case of the man claiming, with the support of legions of tenants and relatives, to be the long-lost Kumar. And he considers the position of the sannyasi's detractors, including the colonial government and the Kumar's young widow, who resolutely refused to meet the man she denounced as an impostor. Along the way, Chatterjee introduces us to a fascinating range of human character, gleans insights into the nature of human identity, and examines the relation between scientific evidence, legal truth, and cultural practice. The story he tells unfolds alongside decades of Indian history. Its plot is shaped by changing gender and class relations and punctuated by critical historical events, including the onset of World War II, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the Great Calcutta Killings. And by identifying the earliest erosion of colonialism and the growth of nationalist thinking within the organs of colonial power, Chatterjee also gives us a secret history of Indian nationalism.

Author: Peter Finn
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307908011
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

View

Book Description
Drawing on newly declassified government files, this is the dramatic story of how a forbidden book in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West. In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village just outside Moscow to visit Russia’s greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the original manuscript of Pasternak’s first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: “This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.” Pasternak believed his novel was unlikely ever to be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an irredeemable assault on the 1917 Revolution. But he thought it stood a chance in the West and, indeed, beginning in Italy, Doctor Zhivago was widely published in translation throughout the world. From there the life of this extraordinary book entered the realm of the spy novel. The CIA, which recognized that the Cold War was above all an ideological battle, published a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled it into the Soviet Union. Copies were devoured in Moscow and Leningrad, sold on the black market, and passed surreptitiously from friend to friend. Pasternak’s funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands of admirers who defied their government to bid him farewell. The example he set launched the great tradition of the writer-dissident in the Soviet Union. In The Zhivago Affair, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée bring us intimately close to this charming, passionate, and complex artist. First to obtain CIA files providing concrete proof of the agency’s involvement, the authors give us a literary thriller that takes us back to a fascinating period of the Cold War—to a time when literature had the power to stir the world. (With 8 pages of black-and-white illustrations.)

Author: Roderick Matthews
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 178738618X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

View

Book Description
How can we explain the establishment and longevity of British rule in India without recourse to the clichés of "imperial" versus "nationalist" interpretations? In this new history, Roderick Matthews offers a more nuanced view: one of "oblige and rule", the foundation of common purpose between colonizers and powerful Indians. Peace, Poverty and Betrayal argues that this was not a uniformly systematic approach, but rather a state of being: the British were never clear or consistent in their policies, and among British and Indians alike there were both progressive and conservative attitudes to the struggle over colonization. Matthews' narrative also takes in the East India Company, which was manifestly incompetent as a ruler by 1770, yet after 1820 arguably became the world's first liberal government. Skillfully tying these ambiguities and complexities of British rule in India to the ultimate struggle for independence, Matthews illustrates that the very diversity of British- Indian relations was at the heart of the social changes that would lead to the Freedom Struggle of the twentieth century. Skewering the simplistic binaries that often dominate the debate, Peace, Poverty and Betrayal is a fresh and gracefully written narrative history of British India.

Author: T.C.A. Raghavan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1787382591
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
This book traces the seven decades of the India-Pakistan relationship since the bloody Partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Events, anecdotes and personalities drive its narrative to illustrate the cocktail of hostility, nationalism and nostalgia that defines every facet of Indo-Pakistani relations. T.C.A. Raghavan illuminates the main events of this tumultuous dynamic through the eyes and words of key players and contemporary observers. He exposes how, in both countries, this shared past is seen through radically different prisms; how history keeps resurfacing, with unavoidable resonance, to this day. The People Next Door digs beneath the obvious political, military and security issues, evoking other perspectives: divided families and unwavering friendships; peacemakers, war-mongers, and contrarian thinkers; intellectual and cultural associations; the footprint of Bollywood; cricket and literature--all are an intrinsic part of this most profoundly tangled of relationships.

Author: John R. Schmidt
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429969075
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

View

Book Description
How did a nation founded as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, most of whom follow a tolerant nonthreatening form of Islam, become a haven for Al Qaeda and a rogue's gallery of domestic jihadist and sectarian groups? In this groundbreaking history of Pakistan's involvement with radical Islam, John R. Schmidt, the senior U.S political analyst in Pakistan in the years before 9/11, places the blame squarely on the rulers of the country, who thought they could use Islamic radicals to advance their foreign policy goals without having to pay a steep price. This strategy worked well at first--in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad, in Kashmir in support of a local uprising against Indian rule, and again in Afghanistan in backing the Taliban in the Afghan civil war. But the government's plans would begin to unravel in the wake of 9/11, when the rulers' support for the U.S. war on terror caused many of their jihadist allies to turn against them. Today the army generals and feudal politicians who run Pakistan are by turns fearful of the consequences of going after these groups and hopeful that they can still be used to advance the state's interests. The Unraveling is the clearest account yet of the complex, dangerous relationship between the leaders of Pakistan and jihadist groups—and how the rulers' decisions have led their nation to the brink of disaster and put other nations at great risk. Can they save their country or will we one day find ourselves confronting the first nuclear-armed jihadist state?