Resilient Communities

Household, State, and Ecology in Southern Panjab, c.1750–1900

Girija Joshi

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009512497
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book offers a historical perspective on the relationship between community, subsistence, and governance in north-western India. Focusing on Panjab, it explores the continuities in kinship and caste practices of rural Panjabi populations from the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. Working from the household outwards, it studies how agropastoral lineages formed, and how some of these managed during the eighteenth century to establish autonomous states or riyasats of their own. From the early nineteenth century onwards, this riyasati order was systematically dismantled by the colonial state. Nevertheless, this book suggests that colonial attempts to settle and reform rural society, by changing both its relationship to the environment and by imposing new definitions of 'community' upon it were met with uneven success. Colonial subjects in rural Panjab continued to forge bonds of kinship beyond the legal limits imposed by the state.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Resilient Communities
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Citations
• Introduction
• 1 Political Efflorescence in Late Mughal Panjab
• 2 The Metamorphoses of the Kalsia Household
• 3 Caste, Lineage, and Social Flux in the Early Nineteenth Century
• 4 Dismantling Riyasati Households
• 5 Ra‘iyati Privileges Reconfigured
• 6 Encouraging the ‘Drudging, Occupation of the Plough’
• 7 Household and Lineage in the Late Nineteenth Century
• Conclusion
• Appendix: On the Chronology of Colonial Conquest of Southern Panjab
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index