Prashant Kidambi

Nationalism and the City in Colonial India Bombay, c. 1890-1940

Studies of Indian nationalism have frequently acknowledged its “urban roots” but seldom considered in a systematic and sustained fashion the ways in which nationalism shaped the city. Focusing on colonial Bombay, c. 1890-1940, this article explores the changing relationship between Indian nationalism and the city. The first section examines the period spanning the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and highlights forms of middle-class political activity in the urban public sphere that expressed a distinctive civic patriotism and local identity while simultaneously affirming loyalty to the British Empire. The second section shows how popular nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s spawned an extensive repertoire of collective performances and extraconstitutional forms of public action and protest that sought to reterritorialize the city as nationalist space. At the same time, the article also points to the constraints and contestations that marked the nationalist makeover of the “colonial city.”

‘An infection of locality’: plague, pythogenesis and the poor in Bombay, c . 1896–1905

In September 1896, a virulent plague epidemic broke out in the colonial port city of Bombay. Central to existing interpretations of the epidemic has been the pervasive assumption that colonial policies aimed at suppressing the disease were principally informed by ‘contagionist’ etiological doctrine. However, this article argues that long-standing ‘localist’ etiological theories continued to exercise a critical influence over colonial policies. It thereby highlights the explicit ‘class’ bias that informed the colonial states anti-plague offensive, which was largely directed at the urban poor.

Planning, the information order, and the Bombay census of 1901

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Bombay City was rocked by a series of events that undermined the systems of rule patched together over the course of the preceding century and triggered a crisis of the colonial ‘information order’ on which these were based. Saliently, these developments led to significant changes in the modes of colonial urban governance, in which a new planning agency played a key role. Integral to this shift was a reappraisal, on the part of the colonial state, of its mechanisms of information gathering and the growing recognition of the need for more knowledge about the swiftly expanding city and its rapidly diversifying population. The census of 1901 reflected, to a large extent, these new imperatives of colonial governance.

Hero, celebrity and icon: Sachin Tendulkar and Indian public culture

121508992363-1-1-5 Public Culture 1988 Volume 1, Number 1: 5-9. Show PDF in full window Full Text PDF.This special issue of Public Culture is, and is not, about Africa. Would have little value, both for Public Cultures readers and for us as editors. Why?Eric Klinenberg. Public Culture 2015 272 76: 197-199 doi: 10. Full Text Full Text PDF. In recent months, much of the worlds attention has turned to Anonymous, the rhizomatic, digitally based.Public Culture. It is today widely recognized that world capitalism is in the throes of a massive wave of.Public Culture is a peer-reviewed academic journal of cultural studies, established in 1988 by anthropologists Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai and.Public Culture. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and.show less. Christianity and Public Culture in Africa takes the reader beyond Africas apparent. Pdf icon Download PDF 153. Read more.Public Culture 14. Access article in HTML Access article in PDF. Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Spheretion of courts in American public culture, this essay explains how the contradictory embrace of. Pdf. 14 Congress and the Public, Gallup, 2014.In Culture and Public Action. Rao, Vijayendra and Michael Walton ed. The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of.Public Culture. 22 consequences and reinvent our own type of existence, political, economic and cultural. Instead of rejecting sexual norms that were meant to.well to the editors of Public Culture for their helpful suggestions and improvements. I wrote this article while resident at the Scientific Research Center, Slovene.I would like to thank Kelly Brewer, Caitrin Lynch, the editors of Public Culture. Following Sharon Zukin 1995, I call this urban space a public culture, which.PUBLIC BOOKS Go to June 1 Issue Public Culture. Public Culture is a reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year in.Public Culture in. Willy Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations. Public culture : bulletin of the Project for Transnational Cultural Studies.

Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. xiii + 376

Patrick Joyce has been a central figure in the debates that have defined British social and cultural history in the last three decades. As the essays by Robert Colls and James Vernon argue, Joyce’s writings have consistently explored the ways in which the key institutions of modern British society came to acquire their hegemonic character in the years leading up from the mid Victorian epoch to the Great War. For both writers (although in different ways), Joyce’s oeuvre is notable for its enduring preoccupation with the sources of cohesion and stability that defined Britain’s distinctive modernity in the Age of Empire. But if the intellectual concerns have been defined by continuity, the analytical frames though which Joyce has addressed his subjects have shifted significantly over time. His first monograph was a pioneering work of social history that sought to rethink the culture of the factory in late Victorian Britain.1 The two books that followed in the early 1990s reflected the influence of the ‘linguistic turn’ on social history, challenging as they did the foundational status of ‘class’ within the discipline.2 The years since the ‘history wars’ of the 1990s marked a further shift in his theoretical orientation as Joyce came to engage in a sustained and systematic fashion with the writings of Michel Foucault. The first substantive manifestation of Foucauldian themes in Joyce’s work appeared in Rule of Freedom (2003).3 In that book, Joyce explored a range of material practices pertaining to urban cartography, statistics, planning, architecture and public health in order to show how the modern city was a product of ‘liberal governmentality’. The term ‘governmentality’, which has acquired wide currency in the scholarly literature, denotes the specific forms of political reason, and their attendant technologies, which render reality amenable to the actions of those who are invested with the responsibilities of rule. Its ‘liberal’ variant entails the creation of reflexive, ‘self-governing’ subjects capable of regulating their own conduct and that of others within ‘society’. Historians who have deployed the concept regard the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as a crucial period in the emergence of the ideas and practices associated with this peculiarly diffuse rationality of governance. Rule of Freedom made an original contribution to this literature by highlighting the salience of the modern city as a site in which intersecting forms of material power made possible the production and performance of the liberal ‘individual’.

Sport and the Imperial Bond: The 1911 ‘All-India’ Cricket Tour of Great Britain

Summary This article explores the interplay of sport, politics and public diplomacy through a case study of the first ‘Indian’ cricket tour of Great Britain in 1911, an extraordinary venture peopled by an improbable cast of characters. Led by the young Maharaja Bhupindar Singh, the newly enthroned ruler of the princely state of Patiala, the team contained in its ranks cricketers who were drawn from different Indian regions and religious communities. The article examines the politics of this intriguing cricket tour against a wider backdrop of changing Indo-British relations and makes three key points. First, it suggests that the processes of ‘imperial globalization’ that were presided over by the British in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked an important epoch in the evolving relationship between sport and diplomacy. In particular, it highlights the role of sporting tours as instruments of public diplomacy in the age of empire. Second, it shows how the organization of the 1911 tour reflected the workings of a trans-national ‘imperial class regime’ that had developed around cricket in colonial India from the late nineteenth century onwards. Finally, the article considers the symbolic significance that came to be attached to the tour, both in imperial Britain and in colonial India.

Nationalism and the City in Colonial India

Studies of Indian nationalism have frequently acknowledged its “urban roots” but seldom considered in a systematic and sustained fashion the ways in which nationalism shaped the city. Focusing on colonial Bombay, c. 1890-1940, this article explores the changing relationship between Indian nationalism and the city. The first section examines the period spanning the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and highlights forms of middle-class political activity in the urban public sphere that expressed a distinctive civic patriotism and local identity while simultaneously affirming loyalty to the British Empire. The second section shows how popular nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s spawned an extensive repertoire of collective performances and extraconstitutional forms of public action and protest that sought to reterritorialize the city as nationalist space. At the same time, the article also points to the constraints and contestations that marked the nationalist makeover of the “colonial city.”