The Bengalis in Pakistan are starving…. One in ten is suffering from an absolute shortage of food. Twice that have protein and vitamin deficiencies, including women and children…. Harassment and discrimination have become part of everyday life…. The great impact has been to upper-class Bengalis, who are now treated as ‘niggers,’ or lower class…. But the small amount of additional discrimination to the lower classes affects many more people already at the edge of the cliff….

These are the observations of Jack Smith's report ‘Stranded Bengalis in Pakistan: The Winter 1972’, which provides ordinary Bengalis’ post-war experiences in Pakistan, detailing the despair the community faced and its response to it, from resilience to resistance. Even though most ordinary Bengalis were not interned, they were still under strict surveillance by the Pakistani government. They were not only subjected to curfews, censorship and exclusion from sensitive areas, but were also barred from leaving the country. Their experiences remain outside mainstream historiography. This chapter examines the internment experiences of Bengalis beyond camps and their discursive efforts to establish self-support networks while maintaining connections to their motherland, Bangladesh. It examines how the Bengalis responded to their wartime adversity by building a self-sustaining support system in captivity through a proliferation of Bengali associations, particularly through the actions of the Bengali governing body of the BWRC.

This chapter shows how the Bengalis drew upon their own meagre resources for a time and organised a rich array of assistance projects, such as free kitchens, schools, loan schemes and medical facilities, for those who needed help during the long post-wartime captivity, 1971–1974.

To place film in the urbanization of Hyderabad, a brief history of milestones of urban transformation of the city is needed. The two important markers for urban change in Hyderabad city in the twentieth century were the Musi river floods and the work of the City Improvement Board. The Musi floods of 1908 was the beginning of Hyderabad's spatial transformation with planned development. The area to the south of the Musi was where the densely populated walled old city of Hyderabad was located. In 1908, Hyderabad city was the fourth largest city in India after Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, and had a population of more than 400,000. The Musi floods devastated the entire area and there was a huge loss of life and property. The actual loss could not be ascertained but estimates point to about 15,000 people losing their lives and 19,000 homes being destroyed. The floods called for a massive restructuring of the city. Along with the relief work, the then Nizam, Mir Mahboob Ali Khan, wanted to ensure that such a disaster would not repeat in future. Sir Mokshagundam Visweswarayya, B.A., L.C.E, M.I.C.E, C.I.E, who was the dewan of Mysore at that time, was hired to draw up a plan for the new city. Employing Visweswarayya was acceptable to both the Nizam and the British, as he was an Indian but educated in the Western system. Visweswarayya made suggestions for drafting a new city, avoiding future flooding, and constructing a drainage system.

The story of agrarian transition in southern Morang in many ways epitomises the larger crisis facing the global peasantry and its relationship with capitalism in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Capitalism is expanding into the most peripheral corners of the world, and the peasantry, particularly those at the base of the agrarian structure – who are facing rising costs and agroecological stress – are increasingly drawn into capitalist labour markets via migration and local off-farm labour. It is these articulations between the capitalist and pre-capitalist which are increasingly central to peasant livelihoods.

Recognition of this process of agrarian transition whereby capitalism and peasant farming co-exist, with the former providing substantial profits to the latter, is of course not new and, as noted at the start of this book, these phenomena are generating renewed academic interest (Shah and Lerche, 2020; Zhan and Scully, 2018; Sehgal, 2005). However, what has received far less attention is the added complexity posed by additional axes of exploitation on the farm which long predate the peasantries’ integration into capitalist labour markets. This is a gap which this book has sought to address with a focus on the additional layers of livelihood stress when the economic and cultural burdens of neoliberal capitalism intersect with the legacy and persistence of landlordism and rent-seeking merchant capital. In doing so, this book offers a more nuanced analysis of the ‘pre-capitalist’ itself and its symbiotic (rather than subordinate) relationship with capitalism.

In April 1971, twenty-two-year-old Alak Chandra was dismissed from work in the Karachi Textile Mills and his residence, along with ten other Bengali employees who were domiciles of Faridpur district of East Pakistan. His luggage and cash, totalling Rs 900 – savings of his last five years – were snatched away. In desperation, he tried twice to cross from Sindh into Barmer (Rajasthan, India) and Indian border security forces sent him back to Pakistan. The third time he refused to budge, declaring that he would rather be shot dead in India than go back to Karachi. ‘If I am shot in India, at least my body will be burnt’, he told the Indian border authorities, ‘but if I am shot in Pakistan, they will leave my body for the dogs.’

This was the start of a trickle that by the summer of 1972 saw close to 20,000 Bengalis escape from Pakistan overcoming the hurdles of passport and foreign exchange controls.2 An editorial in the Dawn on 3 December 1972 underlined the hardships facing the ‘stranded Bengalis’ in Pakistan and their ceaseless attempts to escape thus:

Organised in three sections, this chapter starts with the anticipatory flight of wealthy families from West Pakistan before moving to the different ground and maritime routes of escape. It concludes with the state response to the Bengalis’ escape.

Bhai Mati Das Museum has a large collection of paintings on display (169) and a majority of these were not prepared for the purpose of exhibition in a museum. They were made over a period of three decades, from the 1970s to early 2000s, by the Punjab & Sind Bank (PSB) for publication in their annual calendars. These canvases which lay in the bank's collection for several years were subsequently donated to the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) for display in the Bhai Mati Das Museum. This chapter addresses three main questions: Why does a prominent public sector bank commission calendars on Sikh history? How were these paintings made and who made them? What is the relationship between the bank, the museum and Sikh heritage?

The PSB was founded in the year 1908, during the rise of the Singh Sabha movement, by three prominent Sikhs: Bhai Vir Singh, Sardar Trilochan Singh and Sardar Sunder Singh Majithia.

The Singh Sabha was a highly influential reform movement among the Sikhs which began in the 1870s in Punjab. The main objectives of the movement were social, religious and educational improvement of the Sikh community. The emphasis was on returning to a pure, original form of Sikhism, away from the influences of other religious traditions, which were considered deviant or corrupt. This was done through the establishment of several institutions to guide Sikh religious and educational practices and the publication of popular tracts on Sikh history and religion.

Film City Urbanism in India is about the reciprocal relationship between film and the city as two institutions that constitute each other while fashioning the socio-political currents of the region. It interrogates imperial, postcolonial, socio-cultural, and economic imprints as captured, introduced, and left behind by the politics of cinema. Film City Urbanism in India is located at the intersection of film history and urban history, setting up a dialogue between them. While telling the story of film in Hyderabad, the book also tells the story of makings and re-makings of the city. The term ‘film city urbanism’ is used in two ways in the book. The first, to discuss the role of the film industry, its labour, infrastructure, capital, and audience in the making of the city. The second, to discuss the phenomenon of ‘Film City,’ enclaves dedicated to film production. For clarity, the book uses the full name of the particular Film City such as Ramoji Film City and M.G.R. Film City to refer to the specific enclave under discussion and uses the term ‘film city scheme’ while referring to the general urbanization pattern through these enclaves.

South Asian historiography is dominated by the study of British India. The histories of colonial India stand in for cultural histories of modernity. Historians preoccupied with colonialism and nationalism have often relegated to footnotes other geographies (such as princely states) that are not conducive to telling the story of the nation.

For many today, Patna exists as two moments in time: ancient Pataliputra, the capital of magnificent empires, and modern Patna, the dingy and dangerous capital of a state synonymous with violent chaos and contagious, criminalized, political dysfunction. “Perhaps unique among my country's most iconic cities,” the Patna-raised writer Amitava Kumar has remarked, “Patna has had glories only in the distant past.” Similarly, a children's book about Indian cities introduces young readers to the seeming contradiction between Patna's storied past and its unromantic present by saying, “This is one city you may have actually read about in great detail in school without necessarily associating it with its present-day avatar as capital of Bihar.”

Some, though, also imagine a future Patna that will shed the burdens of the past and present. The children's book authors optimistically predict Patna's resurgence: “Patna may have lost most of its ancient shine but its dynamism still peeps through occasionally—in the intelligence and resourcefulness of its people. You never know when it may regain its lost glory to become a major commercial and political centre of the region, all over again.” This deferral of hope is echoed in the responses garnered on Facebook by the celebrity architect Hafeez Contractor's renderings of a futuristic “New Patna World City,” full of gleaming skyscrapers emerging from newly reclaimed land in the Ganges.

Historians of South Asia have their own global pilgrimage circuit. The stations vary by research topic, but itineraries often focus on collections built by the colonial state and maintained by its successors, among them the National Archives of India in Delhi, the National Library in Kolkata, and the British Library in London. Many have noted the perverse fact that the last of these—easily the world's richest collection of South Asian texts from both the colonial and precolonial eras—is located thousands of miles (and tens of thousands of rupees) away from the subcontinent, out of reach for most scholars from the region. Meanwhile, Germany, which had no colonial presence in South Asia, possesses major collections of Indian manuscripts, and American institutions hold immense troves of printed materials.

Anyone looking for the Mughal libraries or those of states like Avadh and Mysore will be disappointed. The great collections of precolonial South Asia were looted and scattered during the nineteenth century and, in some cases, carted off wholesale to Europe.3 Apart from some belonging to religious establishments, most of the region's libraries date to the late colonial and postcolonial periods. Many boast excellent collections of printed books, often maintained on a shoestring by hard-working staffs. Two libraries stand out, however, for their rich collections of Arabic and Persian manuscripts. These are the Raza Library in Rampur, the former capital of a small princely state, and the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna.

This chapter explores the political efflorescence of eighteenth-century Panjab and its intersections with household and lineage formation. Using a history of the Kalsia riyasat, it traces the changing form and organization of this principality as it developed from a dominant ra‘iyati lineage to a small Panjabi riyasat in the last half of the eighteenth century. At the heart of this transformation were the households of Gurbaksh Singh, the first sardar of Kalsia, and his more famous son, Jodh Singh. By considering the changing composition of Gurbaksh and Jodh's extended households and the relationships these encompassed, this chapter brings the contingent nature of kinship bonds into relief. It suggests that these bonds were predicated upon belonging to the same warband that was central to the control of resources in the countryside. While these bands of warrior ‘brothers’ were often subsequently remembered as consanguineous patrilinies, this chapter underscores the key roles that women played in their constitution. It ties the status of women in the polity, as well as of other dependents of the riyasat, to the sardars’ attempts to maintain the integrity and continuity of their lineage. This imperative sometimes meant that the chieftains were obliged to uphold arrangements in their followers’ domestic affairs that went against the norms of what was considered respectable (sharif) and even customary (dasturi). At the same time, treating custom as responsive to the changing circumstances of rural lineages, this chapter highlights the contingent space available to women as shareholders in the land.

In the previous chapter, we saw how the East India Company used an evolving and sometimes inconsistent body of family and property law to dismantle the households and confiscate the wealth of several riyasats of southern Panjab. In the following pages, I develop this analysis further to consider the colonial state's treatment of the extended networks of riyasati relatives (rishtadaran), as well as the elites of dominant ra‘iyati lineages (got) studied in Chapters 2 and 3. Since there was some degree of overlap between these two categories, for the sake of convenience I will refer to these groups collectively in this chapter simply as ‘ra‘iyati elites’. As we have seen, there were great differences of rank and status within this class, some being no more than first-amongst-equals in their lineages and others having clearly established dominance therein. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these rural lineages were moreover quite volatile, with fierce competition between them as well as amongst their members. When the Company inserted itself into the politics of southern Panjab, it found itself entangled in these lineage ambitions and rivalries, which it sought to exploit to its own advantage.

This chapter studies this colonial involvement in inter- and intra-lineage competition, foregrounding the use of titles such as jagirdar, malik, muqaddam, chaudhari, and biswadar as well as their associated privileged tenures as forms of patronage. It focuses principally on the period prior to 1857 when the bulk of existing titles and tenures were reviewed and variously scrapped, limited, or reconfigured, even as new ones were created.

Walking the lanes of London during my visit to the British Library, I usually heard street musicians. One evening, near London Bridge, I had a conversation with a busker named Richard Hydr, who I often listened to.

‘Where are you from?’ Richard asked.

‘India,’ I said.

‘Where in India?’ he asked.

‘You wouldn't have heard of it, Hyderabad,’ I replied.

‘My name is Richard Hydr. Hydr is for Hyderabad. My ancestors had worked in Hyderabad,’ he said.

Thus, I found Hyderabad in London.

I have seen the world through Hyderabad, in comparison with it, and in conversation with it. This book is a Hyderabadi's attempt at recovering some lost histories of the city.

My interest in film came from hearing stories that my mother and aunts told me; their youth, as they recounted, was full of watching morning shows and matinees in cinema theatres that are now defunct but remain in their memory. It is from these stories that I wanted to understand my beloved city through cinema. Hyderabad today is known as the global information technology hub and home of the Ramoji Film City (RFC), the largest film city in the world, built on 2,000 acres of land. Most of the literature available on the question of interrelationship between cinema and Hyderabad was on the Telugu film industry, with a marked absence of any discussion on film culture before 1948. Most of the newspapers and magazines spoke of the city as a tabula rasa, which was made into a site for the Telugu film industry in the 1960s.

This exploration has shown that the 1971 wartime experience of Bengalis residing in Pakistan as citizens remained rather distinct from the concepts of ‘mere life’ and ‘bare life’ theorised by Arendt and Agamben. Unlike Nazi Germany, which denationalised Jews before gassing them in concentration camps, the Pakistani government interned Bengalis as disenfranchised citizens. This distinguishes the Bengali experience of human rights alienability in the nation state system even when individuals have not ceased to be citizens of a state. The concept of human rights alienability hinges not on citizenship alone, but on a deeper sense of belonging within a political community – the right to have rights as Arendt puts it. Bengalis were still Pakistani citizens; the state did not rescind their citizenship, that is, they were not even stateless in a strictly legal sense. Nonetheless, they had devolved into rightless citizens, or mere bodies.

By labelling them as ghaddar because of their ethnolinguistic identity, the Pakistani state stripped them of their entitlement to a right-bearing political subjectivity as citizens, hence making it possible to subject them to violence. By invoking colonial-era laws for the DPRs, the state legally notified zones of exception in the form of an internment camp where the Bengalis were to be kept. In this way, the Bengali citizen was transformed into an internal other through the labelling of ghaddar, whose bodies had to be marked out both legally and socially as that of a traitor, after which they could be interned without any consequences. The legally calibrated disenfranchisement of citizens and their transformation into traitors was an act of retribution but a calculated move to secure the Pakistani POWs from India and personnel from Bangladesh. It was also tied to precluding the POWs from being tried for war crimes and to recognising Bangladesh as a sovereign state.