This chapter begins with Wu Jijue’s early years and upbringing, including his family and his education, with an eye toward the strategies that capital elites like the Wu family used to protect their status. It then turns to his long – nearly half a century – career in the capital and the provinces. As the sovereign’s man, Wu Jijue – like all merit nobles – performed a wide variety of tasks, and this chapter offers a series of snapshots to give a sense of the range of his duties, including (1) ritual officiant, (2) envoy to princely courts, (3) regional commander, and (4) participant in imperial reviews. The following chapter traces Wu Jijue’s service as a senior administrator in key military institutions with special attention to the light it sheds on the dynasty’s regularized assessment and reward of administrative performance.

This chapter is organized into four sections. First, using Wu Shixing as a focal point, it examines the role of merit nobles as envoys of the throne in missions to provincial courts and in offerings to the souls of the imperial house’s deceased members. Second, it briefly reviews the heightened prominence of military affairs during the reign of Zhengde (1505–21), including important changes to the organization of the Capital Garrisons, which was where Wu Shixing and other merit nobles held posts. Third, it considers the military laborscape of the early sixteenth century, with particular attention to how the Ming court addressed issues of ability and difference in the suppression of a series of large-scale rebellions. Fourth, this chapter returns to debates at the Ming court surrounding the education and training of merit nobles like Wu Shixing.

Thus far it is evident that the rural livelihoods in southern Morang are embedded within a deeply inequitable agrarian structure, with dual surplus appropriation by landlords and merchant capital. However, it is important to remember that feudalism, like capitalism itself, is not a static system, but is dynamic and subject to evolution and flux. While changes to the feudal system over the last few centuries were explored in Chapter 3, this chapter explores the contemporary trajectory of change. The last three decades in particular have marked a new era in Nepal's agrarian political economy. As noted earlier in this book, pre-capitalist inequalities have not been undermined, and these in part contributed to the 10-year civil war and waves of more recent ethnic unrest. However, at a national level, Nepal has also undergone significant economic change following neoliberal restructuring.

Within this context, capitalism is articulating with rural pre-capitalist economic formations like never before. A key argument is that there is growing ‘agrarian stress’ associated with climatic-ecological pressures, expanding capitalist markets with an associated wave of monetisation and cultural change. In its wake, farmers are becoming more dependent than ever before on off-farm labour in the capitalist sector both locally and overseas, to supplement the meagre returns gained from the land under feudal agriculture This has intensified throughout the 17 years within which this research has taken place. We explore these changes in turn below.

Moving pictures were first exhibited in Hyderabad and Secunderabad within a few months of the famed Lumiere exhibition in Bombay in 1896.1 S. C. Eavis brought ‘Edison's latest phonograph or the talking machine’ and ‘the marvellous kinetoscope [sic] or living pictures’ to the cantonment town of Secunderabad, after which he went to Madras in 1896. T. Stevenson, the proprietor of Madras Photographic Stores, exhibited films for the first time in Hyderabad in 1897 as a part of his south India tour.

However, we do not see Hyderabad and Secunderabad in any early cinema map of South Asia. This is because of two reasons. Most of the historiography of South Asia in general and film historiography in particular has focussed on British India, and the colonial cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.3 As a result, what we understand as the history of modern South Asia is most often the history of British India. Relatively, we know much less about the princely states of India4 that had control over significant land mass and people in South Asia. The focus on colonial cities is also because of the availability of sources. The colonial cities are relatively better documented and their sources are in English and hence easy to access.

A film city in business parlance is an enclave dedicated to film work, where infrastructure, labour, and capital organization are oriented towards the production of films. The usage of the term ‘film city’ has transformed with the changing global media landscape. Cities like Bombay with long histories of film production are often referred to as film cities. The financial capital of India, Bombay is a hub of several economic activities. However, due to the symbolic significance of film, it is often characterized as a film city. The second usage is film studios being named as film cities. For example, Y. A. Fazalbhoy's studio operational in the 1930s was called Film City Studio. There is also a third use of the term that amalgamates the first two: a studio, an enclosed space, which simulates the city and incorporates the wide cluster of film-related activities. A film city here is a large enclave almost comparable to a ‘real’ city or district in its area, a peculiar urban formation of planned development.

Film city as an enclave was first imagined in Hyderabad by the Andhra Pradesh state government in the 1960s through the Brahmananda Chitrapuri plan. It was, however, unsuccessful. The second and successful attempt happened with the involvement of the Telugu Kamma capitalist Ramoji Rao with the creation of Ramoji Film City (RFC).

The historic region of Morang has made a remarkable transition over 200 years from a forested frontier at the fringes of the Mughal empire to a breadbasket and source of natural resources for the emerging state of Nepal. This chapter reviews this historical transformation. It begins by exploring the subordination of the ‘Adivasi mode of production’ to feudalism, particularly following its annexation into the centralised Gorkhali state. Interconnected processes include the imposition of agrarian taxation, stratification within the indigenous peasantry, the clearing of the forest frontier and the distribution of land grants – the precursor to the absentee landlordism of today. The analysis goes on to look at the emergence of imperialism, and how the persistence of rural feudalism went alongside the distorted and uneven development of capitalism, particularly of industry. The final section explores the changes in the rural economy following the downfall of the Rana regime and rise of the monarchical Panchayat system. As the king pursued a developmentalist agenda in the 1960s, the agrarian relations on the ground remained similar, yet the relationship between caste, class and ethnicity shifted – particularly in the wake of the 1960s land reforms. In particular, the chapter charts the declining wealth of the indigenous Tharu landed elite, and the emerging dominance of absentee landlords at the apex of the agrarian structure with close ties to the state. The final part of the chapter charts the emerging articulations with capitalism following the establishment of manufacturing industry in the Morang region and the perpetuation of semi-colonial trade relations.

Collections of objects of Sikh history and Sikh art exist in the hands of both private individuals and institutions. The most famous examples of private collections include those of the maharajas of Patiala and Nabha in India, the Kapany Collection and the Khanuja Family Collection in the USA (Taylor and Dhami 2017) and the Toor Collection in the United Kingdom (UK). A selection from the Khanuja family's private collection is now displayed in a dedicated gallery in the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, USA (Taylor 2022), and, similarly, a part of the Kapany Collection is housed in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, Canada. Recently, in 2022, the Lahore Museum in Pakistan inaugurated a Sikh Gallery with objects from the time of Ranjit Singh (Ahmed 2022). The items in these collections range from handwritten and illustrated manuscripts (including of the Guru Granth Sahib), miniature paintings, sculptures, clothes, weapons, jewellery, coins, pieces of furniture—mostly associated with the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the colonial period, including paintings done or commissioned by colonial officials and early photographs of the Sikhs and their shrines (c. mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries). The Sikh Gallery at Lahore Museum, for example, displays portraits of the members of the royal family (of Ranjit Singh), administrative records of the court and even personal items like prayer beads of the maharaja. Illustrated folios of a nineteenth-century Janamsakhi are among the paintings available in the Kapany Collection. Some collections also include modern art by Sikh artists such as the UK-based Singh Twins and some of the artists whose works were discussed earlier in the book (such as Sobha Singh, Jarnail Singh, R. M. Singh and Devender Singh).

Years before British India contained any political unit called Bihar, the people living there already referred to it as a province. A convenient shorthand is one thing, however, and political reality is another. Though Bihar had been a province of the Mughal Empire before being absorbed into the Bengal Presidency in the eighteenth century, administrative boundaries had not produced a strong Bihari social or political identity. The region was diverse in language and in other respects; the Bhojpuri-speaking region in western Bihar was linked to eastern UP, Maithili-speaking northern Bihar had ties with Bengal and southern Nepal, and the Magahi-speaking region around Patna edged into the Chota Nagpur Plateau. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, though, some middle-class men began to see themselves as Biharis. More and more, they objected to the dominant role played by the Bengalis with whom they shared a province. The political demands they made as Biharis ultimately led to the creation of the new province of Bihar and Orissa in 1912, with Patna as its capital.

Patna was at the center of these transformations in middle-class subjectivity and political expression. Especially crucial were the city's English-medium schools and colleges. Many of these had been founded and nurtured with support from the aristocrats of Patna City, but by the turn of the century, they were thoroughly tied to the fortunes of Bihar's emerging white-collar elite.

An Experiment in Governance

In the 1970s, the city of Chandigarh in the Himalayan foothills faced a pressing problem: Sukhna Lake, a large artificial reservoir and recreational spot in the city, was beginning to silt up. In trying to locate the source of the problem, conservation experts landed at Sukhomajri (‘dry/happy little village’), a small gujjar settlement some 15 kilometres from the town. It transpired that Sukhomajri was the site of a badly denuded watershed. Here, rainwater found little resistance from vegetation and was released with great force, causing damage to arable land. These floods contributed directly to the silting problem in Chandigarh, for rather than flowing into Sukhna, rainwater was inundating the fields of Sukhomajri's villagers. Preserving the lake was thus tied to soil conservation in Sukhomajri and other settlements in the area. It became apparent, however, that any project of conservation would also have to deal with the sociopolitical dynamics of rural subsistence in Sukhomajri, whose residents practised a mixture of rainfed cultivation and livestock grazing. Like many rural communities dependent upon dwindling pastures and erratic monsoons, they earned just enough to subsist upon. They were therefore unwilling to cooperate with projects such as controlled grazing or laying orchards, whose benefits could only be reaped in the long term and which directed precious resources away from day-to-day needs.

Urban studies scholarship has marked liberalization as the turning point in the lifeworld of cities in India.1 Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore associate it with government policies that enable the free flow of capital and with cities being modified to attract international financial capital. Globally, liberalization is marked by competition between cities for investments. However, contrary to this understanding, we see a race between cities to establish the film industry in India pre-dating the liberalization in the 1990s. As shown in Chapter 3, as early as the 1940s and 1950s Bombay and Madras were competing to become the most important production centre for film. After the formation of linguistic states, with the emergence of new film production centres such as Hyderabad, there was competition between Madras and Hyderabad. The competition between cities is thus not just a post-liberalization phenomenon but is a continuum in different phases of capitalism. The difference, however, was in the nature of global capitalism at these different points. In the 1940s, Madras and Bombay were operating in the colonial world. Starting from the 1960s, Hyderabad and Madras were competing for regional capital within the nation. All these distinct capital relations produced distinct cities. In the post-liberalization phase, the film industry forms a nexus with the tourism and real estate sectors and participates in producing the city as a constant spectacle to attract international capital.