For many today, Patna exists as two moments in time: ancient Pataliputra, the capital of magnificent empires, and modern Patna, the dingy and dangerous capital of a state synonymous with violent chaos and contagious, criminalized, political dysfunction. “Perhaps unique among my country's most iconic cities,” the Patna-raised writer Amitava Kumar has remarked, “Patna has had glories only in the distant past.” Similarly, a children's book about Indian cities introduces young readers to the seeming contradiction between Patna's storied past and its unromantic present by saying, “This is one city you may have actually read about in great detail in school without necessarily associating it with its present-day avatar as capital of Bihar.”

Some, though, also imagine a future Patna that will shed the burdens of the past and present. The children's book authors optimistically predict Patna's resurgence: “Patna may have lost most of its ancient shine but its dynamism still peeps through occasionally—in the intelligence and resourcefulness of its people. You never know when it may regain its lost glory to become a major commercial and political centre of the region, all over again.” This deferral of hope is echoed in the responses garnered on Facebook by the celebrity architect Hafeez Contractor's renderings of a futuristic “New Patna World City,” full of gleaming skyscrapers emerging from newly reclaimed land in the Ganges.

Historians of South Asia have their own global pilgrimage circuit. The stations vary by research topic, but itineraries often focus on collections built by the colonial state and maintained by its successors, among them the National Archives of India in Delhi, the National Library in Kolkata, and the British Library in London. Many have noted the perverse fact that the last of these—easily the world's richest collection of South Asian texts from both the colonial and precolonial eras—is located thousands of miles (and tens of thousands of rupees) away from the subcontinent, out of reach for most scholars from the region. Meanwhile, Germany, which had no colonial presence in South Asia, possesses major collections of Indian manuscripts, and American institutions hold immense troves of printed materials.

Anyone looking for the Mughal libraries or those of states like Avadh and Mysore will be disappointed. The great collections of precolonial South Asia were looted and scattered during the nineteenth century and, in some cases, carted off wholesale to Europe.3 Apart from some belonging to religious establishments, most of the region's libraries date to the late colonial and postcolonial periods. Many boast excellent collections of printed books, often maintained on a shoestring by hard-working staffs. Two libraries stand out, however, for their rich collections of Arabic and Persian manuscripts. These are the Raza Library in Rampur, the former capital of a small princely state, and the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna.

This chapter explores the political efflorescence of eighteenth-century Panjab and its intersections with household and lineage formation. Using a history of the Kalsia riyasat, it traces the changing form and organization of this principality as it developed from a dominant ra‘iyati lineage to a small Panjabi riyasat in the last half of the eighteenth century. At the heart of this transformation were the households of Gurbaksh Singh, the first sardar of Kalsia, and his more famous son, Jodh Singh. By considering the changing composition of Gurbaksh and Jodh's extended households and the relationships these encompassed, this chapter brings the contingent nature of kinship bonds into relief. It suggests that these bonds were predicated upon belonging to the same warband that was central to the control of resources in the countryside. While these bands of warrior ‘brothers’ were often subsequently remembered as consanguineous patrilinies, this chapter underscores the key roles that women played in their constitution. It ties the status of women in the polity, as well as of other dependents of the riyasat, to the sardars’ attempts to maintain the integrity and continuity of their lineage. This imperative sometimes meant that the chieftains were obliged to uphold arrangements in their followers’ domestic affairs that went against the norms of what was considered respectable (sharif) and even customary (dasturi). At the same time, treating custom as responsive to the changing circumstances of rural lineages, this chapter highlights the contingent space available to women as shareholders in the land.

In the previous chapter, we saw how the East India Company used an evolving and sometimes inconsistent body of family and property law to dismantle the households and confiscate the wealth of several riyasats of southern Panjab. In the following pages, I develop this analysis further to consider the colonial state's treatment of the extended networks of riyasati relatives (rishtadaran), as well as the elites of dominant ra‘iyati lineages (got) studied in Chapters 2 and 3. Since there was some degree of overlap between these two categories, for the sake of convenience I will refer to these groups collectively in this chapter simply as ‘ra‘iyati elites’. As we have seen, there were great differences of rank and status within this class, some being no more than first-amongst-equals in their lineages and others having clearly established dominance therein. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these rural lineages were moreover quite volatile, with fierce competition between them as well as amongst their members. When the Company inserted itself into the politics of southern Panjab, it found itself entangled in these lineage ambitions and rivalries, which it sought to exploit to its own advantage.

This chapter studies this colonial involvement in inter- and intra-lineage competition, foregrounding the use of titles such as jagirdar, malik, muqaddam, chaudhari, and biswadar as well as their associated privileged tenures as forms of patronage. It focuses principally on the period prior to 1857 when the bulk of existing titles and tenures were reviewed and variously scrapped, limited, or reconfigured, even as new ones were created.

Walking the lanes of London during my visit to the British Library, I usually heard street musicians. One evening, near London Bridge, I had a conversation with a busker named Richard Hydr, who I often listened to.

‘Where are you from?’ Richard asked.

‘India,’ I said.

‘Where in India?’ he asked.

‘You wouldn't have heard of it, Hyderabad,’ I replied.

‘My name is Richard Hydr. Hydr is for Hyderabad. My ancestors had worked in Hyderabad,’ he said.

Thus, I found Hyderabad in London.

I have seen the world through Hyderabad, in comparison with it, and in conversation with it. This book is a Hyderabadi's attempt at recovering some lost histories of the city.

My interest in film came from hearing stories that my mother and aunts told me; their youth, as they recounted, was full of watching morning shows and matinees in cinema theatres that are now defunct but remain in their memory. It is from these stories that I wanted to understand my beloved city through cinema. Hyderabad today is known as the global information technology hub and home of the Ramoji Film City (RFC), the largest film city in the world, built on 2,000 acres of land. Most of the literature available on the question of interrelationship between cinema and Hyderabad was on the Telugu film industry, with a marked absence of any discussion on film culture before 1948. Most of the newspapers and magazines spoke of the city as a tabula rasa, which was made into a site for the Telugu film industry in the 1960s.

This exploration has shown that the 1971 wartime experience of Bengalis residing in Pakistan as citizens remained rather distinct from the concepts of ‘mere life’ and ‘bare life’ theorised by Arendt and Agamben. Unlike Nazi Germany, which denationalised Jews before gassing them in concentration camps, the Pakistani government interned Bengalis as disenfranchised citizens. This distinguishes the Bengali experience of human rights alienability in the nation state system even when individuals have not ceased to be citizens of a state. The concept of human rights alienability hinges not on citizenship alone, but on a deeper sense of belonging within a political community – the right to have rights as Arendt puts it. Bengalis were still Pakistani citizens; the state did not rescind their citizenship, that is, they were not even stateless in a strictly legal sense. Nonetheless, they had devolved into rightless citizens, or mere bodies.

By labelling them as ghaddar because of their ethnolinguistic identity, the Pakistani state stripped them of their entitlement to a right-bearing political subjectivity as citizens, hence making it possible to subject them to violence. By invoking colonial-era laws for the DPRs, the state legally notified zones of exception in the form of an internment camp where the Bengalis were to be kept. In this way, the Bengali citizen was transformed into an internal other through the labelling of ghaddar, whose bodies had to be marked out both legally and socially as that of a traitor, after which they could be interned without any consequences. The legally calibrated disenfranchisement of citizens and their transformation into traitors was an act of retribution but a calculated move to secure the Pakistani POWs from India and personnel from Bangladesh. It was also tied to precluding the POWs from being tried for war crimes and to recognising Bangladesh as a sovereign state.

In the spring of 1972, the Ennals Mission, led by David Ennals, a British MP, visited Pakistan. The mission was informed by some members of the ‘stranded Bengali community’ in Pakistan that ‘a large number of senior Pakistani officers [have sought] to stop the Bengali officers for coming to the offices. They threatened action against the Bengali officials, if Government did not accept their demand.’1 Picking up from the previous chapter and offering a counterpart to the story of the capture and internment of the Bengali military personnel, this chapter explores the wartime experience of the Bengali civil servants. It traces their journey from being citizens and serving officials/officers of the Pakistani state to becoming marked collectively as a potential ‘traitor’ community, a threat to national security. Their situation highlights an important dimension of the idea of citizenship and the making of disenfranchised citizens of a nation state in a wartime-like situation. Some of the most detailed accounts of internment come from these servicemen who belonged to the privileged classes of Pakistan's Bengali community and were to be used as hostages in the international negotiations to free the captured Pakistani POWs. This chapter seeks to explain how and why.

The Bengali civil servants were interned in two stages: first, in their homes during and immediately after the Pakistan army surrendered in December 1971; second, in different camps after the Bangladeshi government announced the ‘trial of war crimes’ of the Pakistani POWs in early 1973. The chapter begins by explaining the Bengali servicemen's dismissal from government services before moving on to tracing their mass internment.

On 1 January 1972, a fortnight after the Pakistan army's surrender in Dacca (now known as Dhaka) signalling Bangladesh's liberation, some 300 civil servants in Islamabad submitted a petition, ‘The West Pakistan Class 1 Civil Servant Petition’, to President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto asking ‘to remove all Bengali officials immediately from government secretariats’ and, similarly, to recall ‘all East Pakistan officials in the Pakistan foreign missions and embassies….’ They were considered dangerous and were possibly communicating with ‘enemies’, and they were to be secluded from the rest of the public and confined to one locality in Islamabad, the petition continued, so that ‘their activities and movements could be easily checked’. Further, it carried on, ‘interning allowance admissible to East Pakistani officials working in West Pakistan should be disallowed’, and all their movable and immovable assets, including ‘gold whether in the pockets, family possessions or with the individuals should be taken … till the situation is well under control’. This remarkable petition, most of whose signatories were Punjabi bureaucrats, concluded thus:

This petition irrevocably changed the position of Bengalis residing in West Pakistan, who were no longer regarded as fellow citizens but as disenfranchised citizens or enemies of the state.