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.

Our book has shown how Indian gold is different. And since we finished the manuscript, changes have been taking place in the structure of the gold economy more rapidly than we envisaged while we were working on our histories and ethnographies. So here, in this briefest of epilogues, we pan some small and scattered nuggets from 2024 which hint at likely surprises and riches for future research.

THE CONTEXT OF PRICES (INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTERS 1, 2 AND 3)

From the fourth quarter of 2023 to that of 2024 global gold prices surged by 30 per cent. By April 2025 they had hit USD 3,400 – a further rise of 30 per cent – and showed no sign of spiking. These new demand-led peaks have been attributed to familiar processes – the role gold plays as a safe haven and hedge for central banks and retail purchasers alike. What is less familiar, however, is the context of these age-old responses: a new conjuncture involving new scales of geopolitical uncertainty, a move by some trading countries towards de-dollarisation, and domestic economic volatilities in India.

Time will tell whether the price jump was a bubble rather than a trend, but in India last quarter prices for 2024 declined rather than rose. Reasons suggested for this countercyclical Indian behaviour cover culture, policy and financialisation. They range from postponed festival sprees and the doubling of goods and services tax (GST) on crafted gold to the lure of cryptocurrencies, competitively high interest rates, and the attraction of US treasury yields (Vivek 2024; Anshul 2024).

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’.