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.

This chapter sees Edgar in peak career, a seasoned director and company secretary, but with continuing financial anxieties and resentments against his employer as he approached retirement. His last two years in Baghdad, in company with Winifred, illustrate the close relationship of the British imperial administration with Middle East shipping companies, and Edgar’s role in both. Winifred fostered the development of the Baghdad Anglican church, mainly for expatriates, and missionary activity, extending her St Albans church work. For Edgar, as for Winifred, their subsequent decade in the 1930s in St Albans before retirement offers a case study in expatriate transition to life at ‘home’, to domesticity and engagement in public life and local society, along with lingering Persian associations and nostalgia for their expatriate past. While expatriate service succeeded in cementing their class transformation, they remained vulnerable to middle-class economic austerity which characterised peacetime 1930s and wartime 1940s. The Wilsons’ longed-for stable settlement in England contrasted with the adoption of expatriate careers by all their children, with daughters as overseas missionaries and sons as overseas mining engineers, a tension between the continuation and rejection of expatriate mobility concluded in the next chapter.

This epilogue chronicles the changes to the city–cinema relationship in Hyderabad after the new millennium.

The Telangana Movement

The discontent among the people of Telangana against the hegemony of people from Andhra and Rayalaseema in social, political, cultural, and economic spheres had been simmering since the stubbing down of the Telangana movement in the 1970s. The movement gained new force in the late 1990s. There were renewed protests against the sidelining of the region, which took the shape of a demand for a separate Telangana movement. The Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) party was formed with a single point agenda – to create Telangana state – in 2001. This became the moment for reevaluating the dominant historiographies of the region on various spheres, including film. In the demand for a separate Telangana state, activists and agitators pointed out that the Telugu film industry was almost completely comprised of coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema (collectively called as Seemandhra) stars and capitalists. In Noorella Therapai Telangana Atma, Mamidi Harikrishna, a prominent Telangana activist, argued that Telugu cinema failed to represent Telangana. There was a rewriting of histories by rediscovering actors from the region. For example, Paidi Jairaj was discovered and celebrated as the first hero from Telangana (Hyderabad State).

Film was also used as a campaign vehicle for the Telangana movement. Films like Jai Bolo Telangana and Inkennallu narrated the manifesto for a separate Telangana. Separate statehood activists appeared in some films. The film industry went through serious turmoil during the Telangana agitation.

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.