Massacre,Revolt and British Anxiety.Built Env.JUNI KHYAT JAN-JUNE (original) (raw)

Patna : Business And Urbanisation (1526-1707)

International Journal of Scientific Research in Science, Engineering and Technology, 2019

Patna an urbanised city in medieval times gain much prominence. It was held as a centre of administrative and power control to the eastern empires for a long period. The origin of this city can be traced during the first cycle of urbanisation and aftermath, the city passes through many semesters of ups and down, by which I mean rise and fall. Patna city had a unique geographical location, having surrounded by the three different rivers (Son, Ganges and Ghandak) in three corners of the city. As well as in the south, it has rich alluvial deposit which makes this city’s juncture of agricultural surplus and artisanal advancement. On beauty front, ‘The city is more beautiful than the face of the beloved; the inhabitants of the city are more charming than the city……’ . Almost the city has all the essentialities to support a holistic urbanisation. The satellite city distributed in the region also produced the surplus for the development of this city, and which make the resonance for making this riverine port as the trading junction of inland and internationaltrade in the region. The business and trade had enriched this city from time to time. We have reference in various sources about this riverine port and their commercial activities which had major impact and flavours among the Europeans. Thus, it might be concluded with the underlined fact, that this city was the manufacturing and commercial hub of east and it cannot be ignored while talking about the economics of eastern empires during the Mughals.

Patna: A city in the Sixteenth, the Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Century

isara solutions, 2018

The city is more beautiful than the face of the beloved; the inhabitants of the city are more charming than the city” - Mirza Muhammed Sadiq The arrival of the Great Mughals in India witnessed the creation and stabilization of provincial administration that continues till today more or less on same pattern. They clearly demarcated the boundaries of different subah and settled their capitals and ensured effective administrative systems for these subahs. In 1576 Bihar became a subah of the erstwhile Mughal Empire and from there it remained an integral part of the Mughal empire till the battle of Plassey in 1757, when the influence of the British was felt and acknowledged in the region. During the Mughal period Subah i Bihar was an important subah because of its strategic location and the plenty of resources which have been noticed and mentioned by various foreign travellers in their lengthy description. Walter Hamilton noted in the East India Gazetteer that Bihar is one of the most fertile, highly cultivated and populous of Hindustan, in proportion to its extent of plain arable ground, which may be computed at 26,000 square miles, divided naturally into two equal portion, north and south of the Ganges."

A Colonial Small Town in Bengal: Bankura in the Nineteenth Century

isara solutions, 2021

Study the history of a small town was not a very old phenomenon in the ambit of the historical research. In the course of historical inquisitiveness for urban history most of the time focuses would be on the features of the large scale urbanity or in other words cities or big urban centers are always sucks all the limelight of the historical research meant for reconstructing the urban history. Urban and urbanity are two words used exclusively to define the very nature and characteristics of the people inhabiting in a town or a city. Urban behavior along with the growth of physical urbanity in an area also marked by a clear-cut differentiation with its rural past and in between these two (urban and rural) there is a middle layer or state which can be defined as nascent urban, semi-urban or suburban or a small town. The name 'small town' indicating very distinct characteristics such as its closeness with rural culture, elite-popular dichotomy, deep rooted religio-centric social structure in one hand and on the other under the colonial rule its endless thrust for imbibing the new symbols of modernity for instance the new form of instruction, English education, raising of new professions, accepting the new form of local self government, readiness for accepting new economy, polity, lifestyle and so on. In the present text we are intending to deal with rise and growth of a small town, Bankura in the middle and last decades of the nineteenth century, its possibilities and complicities and at the same time colonial attitude towards this change. From the beginning of the colonial rule many old and traditional urban centers in Bengal like Dhaka, Murshidabad and Bishnupur were gradually lost their former glory and declined from their old prestigious position. Interestingly many new small suburban centers raised into prominence either as the administrative headquarter or a potential business or economic place under the colonial government. For example Bishnupur the traditional seat for administration, economy and culture flourished under the Mallas declined rapidly during the middle of the nineteenth century and comparatively less important Bankura, only thirty to forty kilometers away flourished as the district headquarter. Same thing happened in Birbhum district where Rajnagar declined and side by side Shuri flourished as a new potent urban site. 1 The nascent urbanity attached with these small towns certainty attracted the intellectual pursuits of the scholars. But interesting thing is that for reconstructing the history of these small towns one has to depend basically on unconventional sources. Archival documents, Government Reports and codified documents are not always abandoning for rebuilding the past story of a small town. Rather the scholar has to depend on from literary sources to oral evidence. Local writings, folklore, poems, proverbs, dairies, pamphlets, municipal and district board records, writings

Understanding Delhi during 1803 – 1860

A and V Publication, 2017

Revolt of 1857 was a rebellion in India which ran from May 1857 to July 1859 against the rule of East India Company. The revolt is still known by different names, including Sepoy Mutiny, the Rebellion of 1857, the Revolt of 1857, Great Rebellion, Indian Insurrection etc. There are many books written on British authority in India and one such book is “Delhi between two empires 1803-1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth” by Narayani Gupta. The main objective of this paper is to review “Delhi between two empires 1803-1931” by Narayani Gupta. However this paper will be reviewing only the first-three chapters of this book since my special interest lies in 1857. An effort has been made to plot unbiased as well as chapter-wise information about what Gupta is focusing throughout these chapters. Nevertheless, an attempt has also been made on understanding and conceptualizing ideas that has been put forth by Gupta. By the end of this essay I’m able to endeavor explicit conclusion including my own personally opinion concerning what author has consolidated within these chapters.

The Interrupted Becoming of a City: Patna in the Census

Working Paper Series 6, Centre for Development Practice and Research, Tata Institute of Social sciences, Patna, 2018

The paper looks at how the officialising procedures of categorisation define and regulate the movement of people and resources in an urban context. If we concur that these procedures, even with their sharp improvisations and endless flexibilities, are fixated on achieving some kind of stability or order in the world already familiarised to them, what will be their strategies to ensure and sustain that stability at the moment of social transformation? A makeshift response to this enquiry will be that they will develop a fresh repertoire of correspondence and a new regime of information to accommodate the change. In the next few pages of this paper, I shall try to find out the merit of this response by studying four census reports between 1901 and 1931 with a specific focus on the phenomenon of migration to and from Patna. The first two of them (1901 and 1911) were conducted before Patna became the capital of Bihar and Orissa, and the latter ones (1921 and 1931) after – a fact which allows us a comparative perspective. The reason of choosing the census as the primary object of analysis is twofold. First, by the end of the nineteenth century, census became the principal domain of enumerative knowledge production in the colony. But more importantly, by virtue of its being a repository of socialised numbers, it represented the encyclopaedic model of total knowledge. It is, therefore, imperative to investigate the modality of the census itself in order to understand how the social categories like 'migration' and 'urban' were produced within its ambit in the first place. Secondly, most of the accounts of urban history in India treat the census as a mere numerical source and seldom do they care to explore how certain census concepts like 'birthplace' or 'mobility' became so firmly inscribed in our collective social scientist imagination. The point of this paper is not only to show if and how the rate of migration changed after the separation of Bihar and Orissa from Bengal. I am hoping that this study will enable us to understand the process of normalisation of categories like migration and urban within an official knowledge regime that reinvents itself by making a correspondence between experience and data, narratives and numbers, movement and fixity. The censuses between 1901 and 1931 are significant in this respect as they contain a trajectory of transition within the paradigm of enumeration itself and Patna, being in a whirlpool of governmental activities in the first three decades of the twentieth century, presents a perfect opportunity for chronicling and contextualising this transition.