Politics And Religion In Eighteenth Century North India

Author : Ankita Choudhary
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (129 download)

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Download or read book Regional Patrias in the Eighteenth Century written by Ankita Choudhary and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The eighteenth-century regional kingdoms of South Asia functioned as the locus of parochial culture and the ruling dynasties sought to legitimize these patrimonies by appealing to distinct religious traditions and syncretic cultural rituals. The institutional brittleness and the volatile political scenario coupled with the decline of one empire and the rise of another did not enable these dynasties to stabilize their rule. The patrimonies were honey-combed with influential power brokers ranging from women of the royal household and British Residents to revenue farmers and talukdars. Besides, the increasing penetration of rapacious English East India Company in the local political economy added to the chaos and altered the methods of surplus extraction in the countryside. British interference in Awadh's internal administration escalated with troops' garrisoning in the name of protection, as did Residents' appointment at the court, who, under the guise of being a mediator between the Company and the Nawab, vitiated the administrative setup. Residents, or plenipotentiaries of the English East India Company, encouraged the formation of dual centers of governance and deliberately undermined the authority of the ruling monarch. They gradually indulged in illegal private trade and appointed proteges at the court to extract monetary benefit. What flourished in such circumstances was the growth of urban culture in the context of the encounter between English East India Company, distinctive Indo- Islamic cultural tradition of the court, and various exotic European influences in the Orient. Thus, the eighteenth-century polities could be termed as 'frontier polities' situated temporally between the Mughal empire and the British empire and culturally between expanding European colonial culture and distinctive syncretic 'Islamicate' culture.The thesis thus departs from extant literature in three ways: first, it sees these dynastic patrimonies not simply as successor states of the Mughal empire but distinct political entities, second these patrimonies did not mark a continuity of the Mughal tradition of governance and third English East Company destabilized the local political-economic settings rather than continuing with it"--