This book has sought to trace the long-term and fluctuating development of community in the arid southern fringe of Panjab from the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. At the core of its analysis is the household, which this study has followed anthropologists and historians from the subcontinent and beyond in studying not simply as an expression of a self-contained ‘culture’, but rather as a vehicle for subsistence in a precarious environment. In the context of late-Mughal southern Panjab, it identified two kinds of extended household or lineage as politically key. The first of these was that of the ra‘iyat, the ordinary husbandman who earned a living through a combination of agropastoralism and raiding–soldiering. The second was that of the ra’is, the chieftain, patron, and provider, who in the eighteenth-century context was often just at a generation's remove from his humble ra‘iyati roots. It was in large part through these ra‘iyati and riyasati lineages that rural folk in southern Panjab provided for themselves, by forging relations with peers, subordinates, and patrons. It is this ensemble of relations and their material context that the first three chapters in particular sought to bring into relief.

The eighteenth century in Panjab as a whole was a time of intense rural warfare. Historians of the Mughal Empire have shown that this protracted period of conflict was the result of two opposing trends: an initial economic upswing that brought prosperity and the chance for socio-economic improvement deep into the hinterland, followed by a contraction that set in by roughly the 1720s.

This information is collected from the interviews and the personal collections of the artists and employees of the gurdwaras and the PSB and compiled with reference to the existing collection at the Bhai Mati Das Museum. The PSB does not maintain an archive of the paintings or the calendars. The following list provides the year of issue and theme of the calendar, the descriptions of the paintings, along with the credits as originally published in the PSB calendars. The calendars carried the text in English and Punjabi (and at times in Hindi); I have reproduced the English text here. All illustrations refer to history paintings unless otherwise mentioned; the more recent calendars mostly publish photographs. This is an incomplete list—due to the lack of available information. At times, it was difficult to find all the pages of a calendar or the text accompanying a painting; in some cases, no information was available about the annual calendar, which is visible as a gap or missing year (for example, the years 1977 and 1980–1988). The following text has been slightly edited for clarity and readability.

1974 Important Personalities [title provided by author, original title not available]

Bhai Vir Singh, Bhai Nand Lal Goya, Bhai Gurdas, Sant Mian Mir, Baba Buddha, Bhai Kanhaiya

1975 Women in Sikh History [to mark the UN International Year of Women]

First disciple: Bebe Nanaki

Soul of sacrifice and humility: Mata Khivi

Mata Sahib Devan contributing womanly sweetness to amrit

Mai Bhago leading forty muktas in the battlefield at Muktsar

Bibi Bhani: Guru's daughter, Guru's wife and Guru's mother

Women plying heavy grindstones in Mir Manu's prison, as punishment for their steadfast faith

The first three chapters of this book have explored the ecologically embedded processes of lineage formation unfolding in southern Panjab during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, we have seen how declining Mughal reach, as well as the prosperity that Panjab enjoyed during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, created room for many new riyasati lineages to emerge from husbanding populations. On the other, this very upward mobility heightened competition between rural folk for a larger share of resources including land, water, and subjects. Against this backdrop, rural households and their lineages repeatedly transformed themselves, shedding and acquiring members, and growing more or less stratified along the way. The remainder of this book considers how the processes of lineage formation described previously were impacted by colonial rule. It does so with the awareness that the colonial state was itself rapidly changing, particularly during the first half of the nineteenth century, as were the priorities it set itself with the annexation of southern Panjab.

This chapter begins by outlining the strategic and military reasons for this annexation. These were anchored in Anglo-French imperial competition, which had intensified in the context of the rise of Napoleon. The Company did not expect to derive significant agrarian revenues from southern Panjab. Once the Maratha armies had been driven from this tract, it hoped to govern the region indirectly for the most part, with the help of local riyasats.

If you plan a visit to Patna, the capital of Bihar in north India, guidebooks will tell you that it is little more than “a noisy, congested city” that “shows few signs today of its former glory.” These blunt assessments reflect a broad present-day consensus. A century or so ago, however, the city had quite a different reputation. In 1926, a poet named Safi Lakhnavi visited Patna for an annual gathering of Shi‘a Muslims. As he did every year, he recited a long poem in Urdu in honor of the host city. Invoking Patna's ancient past as Pataliputra, the capital of the great Mauryan Empire, he moved through Mughal times and into the present, praising the city's elegance and the sophistication and talent of its people:

…

Capitalism is a unique economic system, and its emergence is arguably the most important turning point in the history of humanity, transforming how societies function and the physical environment in unprecedented ways. Nevertheless, it is critical to acknowledge that far from emerging onto a blank slate, capitalism has been built upon the foundations of much older economic systems which date back thousands of years. The purpose of this chapter is to review the well-established literature on the transition to capitalism within the context of an agrarian society while emphasising the need to acknowledge the ‘pre-capitalist’, as both an impediment to the expansion of capitalism and a mediating factor, which shapes how transition is taking place. In doing so, the conceptual framework for the book is introduced – in particular, the key concept of the mode of production.

The origins of capitalism date back to the early modern period – developing in the context of a crisis within feudalism in early modern Europe (Dobb, 1948). However, if one is to understand what lies inside of capitalism and what lies outside, it is useful to clearly define what this system actually entails. How we define capitalism has always been open to debate (see, for instance, recent contributions by Hodgson, 2016; Harris and Delanty, 2023), although Marx (1974), in the volumes of Capital, still gives by far the most comprehensive characterisation of the system, key features of which are still fundamental today.

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 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.

There is a widespread academic acknowledgement, much of which was covered in Chapter 2, that the classical ‘semi-feudalism’ which was the focus of Indian debates in the 1970s and 1980s is of limited relevance in the twenty-first century due to market expansion, labour migration and the subdivision of landlord estates (see Lerche, 2013). Even Nepali leftist commentators have suggested that the declining power of landlords and monetisation of wages mean that agrarian relations are now ‘capitalist’ rather than ‘feudal’ with the exception of a few pockets (see, for example, Sharma, 2019). However, a critical finding of this book is that landlordism has remained remarkably resilient through decades of change, which have included land reforms, the expansion of industry and a state-led modernisation agenda. While the old Tharu landlords’ economic power may have declined in the ways documented in some other parts of South Asia, the absentee landed elite retain considerable control over its holdings, and rent and usury continue to act as the so-called depressor (Harriss, 2013) – constraining the development of the productive forces and pushing households into extreme food insecurity.

Nevertheless, intensifying articulations with the capitalist sector in the wake of economic liberalisation, and rising dependence upon wage labour, on a theoretical level could undermine dependency on tenancy or merchant capital amongst the landless and small landholders. Expanding capitalist markets could also simultaneously open up new avenues for capital investment amongst the urban and rural elite, reducing the incentive for landlords to hold on to their estates.