This book has sought to trace the long-term and fluctuating development of community in the arid southern fringe of Panjab from the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. At the core of its analysis is the household, which this study has followed anthropologists and historians from the subcontinent and beyond in studying not simply as an expression of a self-contained ‘culture’, but rather as a vehicle for subsistence in a precarious environment. In the context of late-Mughal southern Panjab, it identified two kinds of extended household or lineage as politically key. The first of these was that of the ra‘iyat, the ordinary husbandman who earned a living through a combination of agropastoralism and raiding–soldiering. The second was that of the ra’is, the chieftain, patron, and provider, who in the eighteenth-century context was often just at a generation's remove from his humble ra‘iyati roots. It was in large part through these ra‘iyati and riyasati lineages that rural folk in southern Panjab provided for themselves, by forging relations with peers, subordinates, and patrons. It is this ensemble of relations and their material context that the first three chapters in particular sought to bring into relief.

The eighteenth century in Panjab as a whole was a time of intense rural warfare. Historians of the Mughal Empire have shown that this protracted period of conflict was the result of two opposing trends: an initial economic upswing that brought prosperity and the chance for socio-economic improvement deep into the hinterland, followed by a contraction that set in by roughly the 1720s.

This information is collected from the interviews and the personal collections of the artists and employees of the gurdwaras and the PSB and compiled with reference to the existing collection at the Bhai Mati Das Museum. The PSB does not maintain an archive of the paintings or the calendars. The following list provides the year of issue and theme of the calendar, the descriptions of the paintings, along with the credits as originally published in the PSB calendars. The calendars carried the text in English and Punjabi (and at times in Hindi); I have reproduced the English text here. All illustrations refer to history paintings unless otherwise mentioned; the more recent calendars mostly publish photographs. This is an incomplete list—due to the lack of available information. At times, it was difficult to find all the pages of a calendar or the text accompanying a painting; in some cases, no information was available about the annual calendar, which is visible as a gap or missing year (for example, the years 1977 and 1980–1988). The following text has been slightly edited for clarity and readability.

1974 Important Personalities [title provided by author, original title not available]

Bhai Vir Singh, Bhai Nand Lal Goya, Bhai Gurdas, Sant Mian Mir, Baba Buddha, Bhai Kanhaiya

1975 Women in Sikh History [to mark the UN International Year of Women]

First disciple: Bebe Nanaki

Soul of sacrifice and humility: Mata Khivi

Mata Sahib Devan contributing womanly sweetness to amrit

Mai Bhago leading forty muktas in the battlefield at Muktsar

Bibi Bhani: Guru's daughter, Guru's wife and Guru's mother

Women plying heavy grindstones in Mir Manu's prison, as punishment for their steadfast faith

The first three chapters of this book have explored the ecologically embedded processes of lineage formation unfolding in southern Panjab during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, we have seen how declining Mughal reach, as well as the prosperity that Panjab enjoyed during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, created room for many new riyasati lineages to emerge from husbanding populations. On the other, this very upward mobility heightened competition between rural folk for a larger share of resources including land, water, and subjects. Against this backdrop, rural households and their lineages repeatedly transformed themselves, shedding and acquiring members, and growing more or less stratified along the way. The remainder of this book considers how the processes of lineage formation described previously were impacted by colonial rule. It does so with the awareness that the colonial state was itself rapidly changing, particularly during the first half of the nineteenth century, as were the priorities it set itself with the annexation of southern Panjab.

This chapter begins by outlining the strategic and military reasons for this annexation. These were anchored in Anglo-French imperial competition, which had intensified in the context of the rise of Napoleon. The Company did not expect to derive significant agrarian revenues from southern Panjab. Once the Maratha armies had been driven from this tract, it hoped to govern the region indirectly for the most part, with the help of local riyasats.

William Cooper’s rise from working-class living in London was steeper than Wilson’s but followed an equally complex pattern of social mobility generated by expatriate employment. The chapter charts his career and social journey from telegram-boy in working-class Bermondsey, underlining cultural factors supporting his rise in status. He progressed to junior telegraphy work on several Persian Gulf stations, then to supervision of a station in Russian Georgia on the Black Sea, and finally in Tehran, directing his company’s entire Persian telegraph operations, acquiring elite trappings of the Edwardian gentleman abroad. Telegraph management worked around the impacts of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Persian constitutional revolution of 1905-09, bringing him into close contact in Tehran with diplomatic and Persian elites, aided by his Bermondsey wife who earned a reputation among expatriates as an accomplished hostess. His elevation to elite status was underlined by his family’s adoption of an expatriate middle-class identity, and his middle-class masculinity and fatherhood practices, marked an intimate father-daughter relationship alongside firm patriarchal rules of behaviour.

If you plan a visit to Patna, the capital of Bihar in north India, guidebooks will tell you that it is little more than “a noisy, congested city” that “shows few signs today of its former glory.” These blunt assessments reflect a broad present-day consensus. A century or so ago, however, the city had quite a different reputation. In 1926, a poet named Safi Lakhnavi visited Patna for an annual gathering of Shi‘a Muslims. As he did every year, he recited a long poem in Urdu in honor of the host city. Invoking Patna's ancient past as Pataliputra, the capital of the great Mauryan Empire, he moved through Mughal times and into the present, praising the city's elegance and the sophistication and talent of its people:

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FLOWS AND CIRCUITS OF GOLD IN INDIA

Gold has been unaccountably neglected as an object of study. In this chapter, to remedy this dearth of scholarship, we use a systems approach to political economy and reconnoitre the material circuits of gold, its institutional ‘ecosystem’, relations of power and control and their impact on the distribution of wealth. In tracing the pathways and connections between its production, distribution and consumption, we pursue how and why the system of gold has continually adapted in response to a series of public policy interventions by the state, which it mostly acts to avoid. Our sources have ranged from official data, specialised press and business association reports, academic analyses and think-tank reports to granular ethnographies steeped in local field experiences. In scratching the surface, this overview – and our volume – shows how and why much more scholarly effort is needed to mine the political economy of gold.

India's gold does not originate in India. Local mining hardly figures in quantitative terms. Gold originates elsewhere but comes to India in the form of bullion or of mine-head alloys known as doré,1 mainly through Dubai, whose gold economy is umbilically connected to India’s. A great – and mostly informal – refining industry is growing in the north of India to purify the imported doré, while local scrap gold is largely recycled in the south.2 By-products from doré, such as silver, disappear into other workshops in the informal economy. Some of the new doré refineries are being added to corporate portfolios that also include other precious metals and gemstones.

The English East India Company first acquired a foothold in southern Panjab during the second Anglo-Maratha War with the signing of the Treaty of Surji Arjungaon in 1803. This treaty gave the Company formal possession of the Maratha domains west of the Yamuna River. The Marathas’ role as agents and protectors of the Mughal emperor likewise passed to it. These provisions secured an important strategic aim, namely that the region and the symbolically powerful Mughal court be prised from the grasp of the Marathas and, more importantly, from that of their powerful French generals. In the global context of the Napoleonic wars, this would, it was hoped, prevent the French from attacking the Company's Indian possessions via its western frontier.

From 1803 onwards, the Company began the long process of determining just how much of southern Panjab had been under Maratha or Mughal rule and how much of this territory it in fact wanted to govern. Since much of the region was thought to be arid and unproductive, Governor-General Wellesley initially adopted a policy of indirect rule. Lord Lake, the Commander-in-Chief of the Company's Indian armies, and his assistant, Charles Metcalfe, were given the authority to issue charters (sanad) to the various jagirdars as well as autonomous chieftains who held land in the newly acquired domains, confirming their grants and associated privileges in return for their acceptance of the Company's supremacy.