Building on the discussion of earliness in the Prelude and Interlude, this chapter examines how Webern began to forge a narrative of earliness in relation to his own compositional development. It argues that this narrative solidified fully only as a result of the psychological dependency on Schoenberg that Webern developed in the years after completing his studies with him in 1908. This argument is grounded in an analysis of how Webern, between 1909 and 1914, increasingly distanced himself from certain influences that once had shaped his musical thinking, most notably those of Richard Strauss. That said, there is evidence that Webern continued to engage with his early compositions at later stages in life and even reworked parts of the String Quartet M. 79. In the light of these findings, this chapter suggests that the category of earliness is inherently porous, yet shining through the category’s porousness is its critical-heuristic potential.

Hobbes argues that in a “condition of meer nature,” lacking a common power, reason requires that we appoint one, lest our lives be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” No covenant of peace can be effective without a Sovereign arbiter to enforce it. Therefore, reason requires each of us to surrender the natural right to judge for ourselves, and to appoint a Sovereign. An effective Sovereign must have authority to determine religious practice and to raise an army – precisely the powers the “Roundhead” rebels had denied Charles I.

In 1974, I travelled as a young graduate student volunteer to join Kishore Bharati (KB), an organisation working for rural education and development in Palia Pipariya village on the eastern tip of Hoshangabad district in Madhya Pradesh. The train made a short halt at Pipariya station, leaving me with only faint memories of yet another nondescript small town. Over the next 20 years, however, Pipariya was to be my nearest market town, and eventually my home. It also became a major centre of KB's educational and social mobilisation activities.

After moving to Delhi in 1992, I continued to visit the town and kept in touch with its people. Over the years, the educational landscape of the town and the aspirations of its young population underwent a striking change. Young students started to enrol in private engineering and management colleges across the country. Graduates from the town gained employment in national and international companies in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, the United States (US), Europe and Canada. I was curious to know what developments had made these changes possible and who had been left behind.

On one such visit to Pipariya in 2018, I met two old friends: a couple who work as schoolteachers and who graduated from the Pipariya Government College (PGC). Hailing from the Other Backward Class (OBC) social category, they were among the last few young science and mathematics graduates recruited as permanent government schoolteachers in the mid-1980s. At their home, the couple introduced me to their two children who had completed secondary education in Pipariya.

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.

Schoenberg claimed to be the successor of Richard Wagner in the tradition of German and Austrian music culture. For this reason, he had to deal with the latter’s antisemitic nationalism throughout his life. For Schoenberg, on the other hand, Wagner was at the centre of his artistic concerns, which always retained its vitality. The chapter shows that Wagner is at the centre of Schoenberg’s compositional experiments in his early work around 1900. In 1910, Schoenberg uses Wagner’s ideas as a starting point to justify his radical expressionism. Around 1920, he takes Wagner to task for introducing the twelve- tone technique; and around 1930 he fights with Wagner for his right to a German culture. In this way, Wagner’s enduring fascination is put at the service of continually changing needs.

In this chapter, the contrast between two models of expatriate masculinity developed earlier is brought to a head, with a fresh twist on the history of masculine identity. In retirement William Cooper indulged his passion for global wanderlust at the expense of his family, whereas Edgar Wilson happily abandoned his expatriate frustrations for a conventional model of settled suburban domesticity with his wife in England, spurning the mobile attractions of the cosmopolitanism they had long nurtured, but with Winifred continuing to exercise her public activism and independence. Ironically, the domestic model, rather than William’s continuing mobility, was most closely associated with the lower middle class, recalling Edgar’s origins and early white-collar labours. The disparity is underlined by a tragic account of William’s last years, interned by the Nazis in wartime Paris after an ill-advised excursion across France. Wartime domesticity for Edgar and Winifred was a struggle, only relieved by a comfortable inheritance from William. Winifred’s Will reflected her long commitment to chosen causes like the Mothers’ Union, a statement of her lifetime priorities.

This chapter explores a further aspect of colonial sedentarization, focusing upon the state's attempts to settle and agrarianize the agropastoral economy of southern Panjab. It does so by studying, as in the previous chapters, how conflicting financial, political, and moral calculations shaped these efforts. The most significant positive measures taken in this direction, as opposed to measures that impeded itinerant subsistence, pertained to irrigation. This chapter therefore begins by tracing the history of one of the oldest canalization projects undertaken by the colonial state in northern India, the repair and extension of the Delhi and Feruz Shahi canals, or, as they together came to be known, the Western Jumna Canal (WJC). The following pages highlight some of the challenges that the state encountered in the WJC's construction, the unintended effects it had upon the land and the health of rural populations, and the system of revenue assessment with which it was bound up. If in the short term, the WJC did lead to an agrarian expansion, this upward trend already began to stagnate by mid-century, even as its disadvantages became apparent.1 Its reliance upon canals in southern Panjab, where the viability of this form of irrigation was limited by the lack of perennial sources of water, underscores the narrow policy framework that in fact underpinned the colonial state's rhetoric of agrarian expansion.

The latter half of the chapter then considers patterns of agropastoral subsistence outside the tracts that benefitted from canals. It demonstrates that in the arid interior of southern Panjab, settled cultivation variously advanced and retreated over the course of the nineteenth century.

Gurdwara Sisganj in Delhi is one of the holiest Sikh shrines in India. It stands prominently on Chandni Chowk, the main street in the former Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (now popularly referred to as purani Dilli, or old Delhi). The site of Sisganj is immensely significant for its association with the martyrdom of the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur (1621–75), and also for its location, very close to the Red Fort, the seat of the Mughals. Sikh tradition2 informs us that Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (1618–1707) was forcing a group of Kashmiri brahmins to convert to Islam, and they approached Guru Tegh Bahadur for help. The Guru declared that if Aurangzeb could convert him, everyone else would convert; if not, the emperor must leave them alone. The Guru, along with three of his disciples, Bhai Mati Das, Bhai Sati Das and Bhai Dyala, was imprisoned at the Mughal kotwali (prison) in Chandni Chowk. The three Sikhs were tortured in the Guru's presence to scare him into converting to Islam. It is said that Bhai Mati Das was sawn in half, Bhai Sati Das was wrapped in cotton and burnt and Bhai Dyala was boiled alive. Even after witnessing the torture and death of his followers, the Guru refused to convert.

This chapter considers how gender as a social framework has shaped and informed stand-up comedy, with a particular focus on the UK. Gender identities entail certain cultural expectations, especially when these identities interact with race, class, and sexuality. The chapter explores how gender impacts on all stand-up performers, addressing the unavoidable nature of gender stereotypes as well as historical and contemporary debates about feminism, femininity, and the role of women within the comedy industry. In addition to considering how gender is represented in stand-up material, the chapter examines how wider power structures influence the business of comedy, specifically problems faced by women stand-ups in terms of their access to comedy venues and their treatment by audiences. This chapter tracks the evolution of comedy’s relationship to gender from music hall to working men’s clubs through to the ‘alternative’ comedy boom of the 1980s and stand-up on television.