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.

Introduces the themes of empire and overseas enterprise, specifically shipping and telegraphy, as engines of social mobility, of expatriate opportunities for the British working and lower middle classes, and a related love story created by conditions of expatriate life in the Middle East, particularly Persia. It reviews imperial historians’ focus on informal empire, stressing Robert Bickers’ concept of non-elite ‘other ranks of empire’. David Lambert and Alan Lester’s concept of imperial ‘careering’, and of expatriate experience forging a ‘transformation of identity’, points to the book’s key characters as ‘agents of imperialism’: William Cooper in telegraphy, Edgar Wilson in river shipping and William’s daughter, Winifred Cooper, exploiting expatriate opportunities for independence, and eventually married to Edgar. The key source, a rich British Library archive, yields intimate insights, through letters and diaries, into familiar social history themes like class, marriage, gender and sexuality, and an argument about expatriate social mobility into retirement.

A well-wisher advises Aasman-ud-Dowla, the erstwhile Nawab of Hyderabad, presumably at the cusp of the fall of the Nizam's state, in K. A. Abbas's 1965 film Aasman Mahal (Figure 3.1). To this provocation, Aasman-ud-Dowla says that Hindustan is his mother, it has Taj Mahal, Bibi ka Maqbara, Ajanta Ellora, his ancestors’ graves, and his friends. This scene gives a glimpse into the communal politics of Hyderabad in the decade of the 1940s. The political events of those times are key to understanding the development of the film industry and their implications on Hyderabadi Muslims.

The 1940s were transformational on many fronts for the Indian subcontinent, and Hyderabad and the film industries of the subcontinent were also a part of these changes. In the context of the film industry in Hyderabad, the events we discussed until now slowly start moving into the background as other pressing socio-political conditions take centre stage. The nationalist movement and its politics shape Hyderabad in this period. This shift serves as a precursor to the post-colonial remaking of Hyderabad. The chapter first discusses these matters to place changes in the film industry in context.

This song from the 1957 film MLA, made almost immediately after the formation of the linguistic state of Andhra Pradesh with Hyderabad as the capital city, introduces the city to the Telugu public who until then did not really consider it as a part of the Telugu imagination. The song narrates the history of the city from its establishment by the Qutb Shahi Dynasty. However, interestingly, it omits the Asaf Jahi dynasty out of it. After the Police Action, several historical and cultural traces of the Asaf Jahi dynasty were erased.

Hyderabad, the capital city, was a new geography for the Telugus in Madras Presidency. The Telugus were politically active in several civil society organizations in Madras such as the Madras Native Association and the Madras Mahajana Sabha. They also played an important role in the Justice Party. Most prominent Telugu newspapers were published from Madras. The city for Telugu people was Madras until 1953 when Andhra state was formed. The Telugus made a claim for Madras as their capital city with the slogan ‘Madras Manade’, meaning ‘Madras is ours’, while the Tamils raised the slogan ‘Madras Namade’, also meaning ‘Madras is ours’.

This chapter charts Edgar Wilson’s elevation in status and class identity, embodying the book’s main theme, the capacity of expatriate employment to create career opportunities for ordinary Britons, in this case for the impecunious lower middle class. Wilson’s earlier family background, with schoolteacher parents, underlines the precarious position of the ‘middling sort’ in semi-rural districts during dramatic social and economic transformation, but then the role of education and culture in enabling the three sons to achieve professional and business careers. After marrying, and with dismal white-collar stagnation in London, his subsequent experience in Persia depicts a rare picture of life on a remote river port, Ahwaz, in the early years of oil exploration. The tragic loss of his first wife from typhoid left him with two infant sons, a grim price of expatriate social mobility. His transfer to Tehran, mixing with political and diplomatic elites, cemented his rise in status and authority, and brought a new romantic venture. Socially, Wilson had arrived.

The PSB's collection of paintings found its way to the Bhai Mati Das Museum through the efforts of Baba Harbans Singh Kar Seva Dilli Wale (1920–2011). He was a much-respected Sikh who organised kar seva (voluntary service) for the construction of gurdwaras, including the historic gurdwaras in Delhi, Darbar Sahib at Amritsar, Gurdwara Tarn Taran and Gurdwara Paonta Sahib, among others (Khatri n.d.). It appears that it was on his initiative that the building of Majestic cinema at Chandni Chowk was purchased by the DSGMC and replaced by a museum. The bank donated its paintings for the purposes of display, and the Bhai Mati Das Museum opened in 2001. There is little information available on the process of selection of paintings, curation of the display and the people involved. Initially, artist Amolak Singh (1950–2006) was in charge of the museum, but at present there is no artist or curator associated with it. The sevadars of the gurdwara act as caretakers of the museum, and their role is limited to opening, cleaning and closing it.

Bhai Mati Das Museum has 169 history paintings, each provided with a description in three languages, English, Hindi and Punjabi. Here, Sikh history is presented in chronological order, beginning with Guru Nanak (in the fifteenth century), covering the ten Gurus, the events of the eighteenth century that saw conflict with the Mughals and Afghans and subsequently the emergence of Sikh misls and Ranjit Singh's kingdom in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Beyond this, the story is patchy, with a few canvases on the bhagats, whose verses are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikhs’ struggle against the British and their contribution to the army of free India.

INTRODUCTION

My mother's side of the family came to India as refugees from East Pakistan in 1947. As a result, we grew up with what my brother and I coded as ‘stories of relentless lament’. But some of the Partition lament narratives were also stories of bravery and heroism. Among those, an oft-repeated one was how our grandmother crossed the border with her four daughters, an infant son and a box of gold. When land is lost, gold offers the only hope as security for fleeing families. But these heroic stories quickly morphed into family intrigues and outright fraud, often by the close relatives whom one trusted the most. And there were gendered stories of jealousy: who got or did not get which piece of jewellery or how much gold, from whom! Gold possession and its emotionally fraught distribution are the staple of the familial bonds (and their breakdown) in India. Gold is most contentious when dowry prestations are calculated. Yet, as in my family, until the idea of this book took shape, they are so quotidian that they easily escape academic scrutiny. Gold dominates our rituals and customary exchanges and, at the same time, it functions as a quasi-currency and store of value. It constitutes the lifeblood of women's inheritance.

Through a multidisciplinary study of gold in India, this volume connects a reconnaissance of the roles of gold in familial and gendered wealth with a range of key issues in political economy. It shows how exploring the quiddity of gold offers a perfect plot to deepen our understanding of the socially regulated Indian economy.

Why did I come to write this book? Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the author of Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, reminds us that ‘we all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are in the lessons we learn at home, in poetry and childhood games, in what is left of history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts’. I was born about a couple of kilometres from Qadirabad Headworks Colony (in the district of Gujranwala–Punjab), one of Pakistan's largest 1971 wartime Bengali internment camps, which a former internee described as a place in ‘hell’. This residential colony, located on the bank of the Chenab River, was established in the 1960s by the governments of Australia and New Zealand for the workforce who worked on the construction of Qadirabad Headworks under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. I grew up playing cricket on the Qadariabad Headworks Colony School field in my early teens, and I remember going to drink water from a nearby nalka (traditional water pump). There was a rusted water tank, with the inscription ‘J [Joi] Bangla’ on it. I have heard stories about ‘Bengali qaidi’ (prisoners) being imprisoned in the colony. One story is that a Bengali was shot by a camp guard while attempting to flee from the colony and was buried in a nearby graveyard. As a boy I did not have the orientation to understand most of the ‘stories’ about ‘Bengali qaidi’; however, their residing in the colony has always intrigued me.

During the research for my previous book, The Punjab Borderland: Mobility, Materiality and Militancy, I found documentation about the 1971 wartime events in West Pakistan, the opposite of what I had anticipated to seek out.

The paintings in the Bhai Mati Das Museum have descriptions written in English, Hindi and Gurmukhi. I have provided the English titles and descriptions here, and as they appear in the museum. The text has been edited slightly to improve readability. The name of the painter and the year of creating the painting have been taken from the respective canvas. The paintings are numbered here in the sequence they may appear in to a viewer at the museum; no numbering is done at the museum itself.

In the first decade of independence, the weekly magazine Bichitra (est. 1972) presented itself as the arbiter of a new Bangladesh. Benedict Anderson's ‘imagined community’ through print publication was refracted through the geographic particularism of Bangladesh, which underwent three transformations in the twentieth century – the 1905 partition of Bengal province (reversed in 1911); the 1947 partition of British India, which renamed East Bengal as East Pakistan; and, finally, the 1971 Liberation War that birthed Bangladesh. In the British Indian era, Saogat (est. 1918) had promoted a ‘Bengali Muslim’ voice, and in the lead-up to partition, the feminist magazine Begum (est. 1946) was for a ‘new woman for the new nation’ in East Bengal's new identity as East Pakistan. With the end of the Pakistan era, Bichitra was founded in 1972 by the Bangladesh government. Over the next three decades, the magazine shaped popular attitudes towards governance, gender, culture, diversity, sexuality and more.

On 28 September 1973, Bichitra published a haunting cover with a photograph by Shamsul Islam – three passengers, two women and a young boy, descending airplane stairs. The cover headline was ‘Ora Fire Elo’ (They Have Returned), while the inside story carried a second headline of ‘Ora Ashche’ (They Are Coming). In its second year of publication, Bichitra's mandate for a new imagined community of Bangladesh had belatedly extended to the Bengalis who had been stranded in Pakistan at the end of the 1971 war – the ‘Prisoners of Pakistan’ that Ilyas Ahmad Chattha has written about in this book, breaking five decades of uneasy silence and discomfort.

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.

Winifred Cooper’s birth as a middle-class expatriate followed parental decisions to embark on challenging mobile employment and adventure. However, the chapter shows how expatriate opportunities worked for young girls in unique, gendered ways. The expatriate social mobility argument here takes a more complex turn, charting a growing girl’s ability to exploit frequent travel and greater freedoms of privileged life abroad. Her education and social life shifted frequently between sites in Georgia, London and Tehran, and later Ahwaz, fostering a degree of maturity and linguistic ability. Her engagement with local politics and multicultural friends in Georgia, her work as a telegraphist, her popularity as a multilingual and fashionable ‘young lady’ at the Persian court and among Tehran expatriates, and management of successive hopeful suitors, underline the potential of expatriation to enable women’s independence and cosmopolitanism. Told mostly through a diary and letters, it ends with a compelling account of Winifred and Edgar’s early love story and a fashionable expatriate wedding in Tehran. It moves from two unknown English men, prospering in overseas service, to a complex dynamic of how expatriate identity could be exploited by the next generation and contribute to an unconventional, cosmopolitan marriage.

When the separation was announced, Patna was named as the capital of Bihar and Orissa (see Map 5.1). The new province was hailed by Biharis as a deliverance from obscurity into a “flourishing new life.” While the Bengali papers complained, The Beharee jubilantly began to call Calcutta a “Provincial town” in the “mofassil.” One advertisement exulted, “Who Says Behar is Backward? Perfumes are made in Behar.” To many, Patna was the obvious choice for a capital. For others, though, it was not too late to make a last-minute pitch on behalf of another city. The separation offered many opportunities to maneuver for power and to try to rearrange spatial politics within the new province.

Skirmishes also broke out over the details of the province's boundaries. Linguistic, historical, and ethnographic claims were made to demonstrate the natural belonging of this or that territory to one province or the other. Bihari and Bengali papers warred over the fate of various districts. The interests and opinions of the adivasi (aboriginal) inhabitants of these territories were never brought up, except when, for example, the Amrita Bazar Patrika expressed its dismay at the inclusion of Manbhum in Chota Nagpur, when “the latter is inhabited mainly by half-savage Sonthals, while a large portion of Manbhum is the abode of civilized Bengali-speaking people.”