princely states

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Amar Farooqui

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Nov 13, 2015, 3:05:00 AM11/13/15

to strategiesofim...@gmail.com, strategiesofim...@googlegroups.com

Following is the reading list for the topic on princely states:

Essential:

Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and their States, Delhi, 1978. [Use this as the main reading for the topic. It covers most of the issues we have discussed in class].

Hira Singh, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography and the Princely States: Relations of Power and Rituals of Legitimation’, Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati, eds., India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism, Indian edition, New Delhi, 2009. [regarding the issue of 'indirect rule']

Bernard Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in E.J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983. [Also in An Anthropologist Among the Historians] [on the 1877 durbar]

David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire, Oxford, 2002. [titles, ceremonial, rituals, cult of Victoria, feudal hierarchy]

Dick Kooiman, ‘The Guns of Travancore or How Much Powder May a Maharaja Blaze Away?, IESHR, 43, 3 (2006), pp.301-322. [on gun-salutes]

Additional:

Manu Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education and Empire in Colonial India, New Delhi, 2003. [particularly for Baroda]

Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, Cambridge, 1987. [I am giving the reference since Hira Singh discusses the thesis of this book in some detail, and critiques it]

Sebastian Joseph, ‘A Service Elite Against the Peasants—Encounter and Collision (Mysore 1799-1831)’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Bombay Session, 1980, pp.670-81.