In colonial Kerala, how and why were poor children educated, and how did schooling become integral to childhood formation? These overarching questions frame the narratives detailed in this book. Although mentioning ‘Kerala’ and ‘education’ in the same breath may seem trite for some, an exploration teasing out the historical configurations of schooling is pertinent to understand the shifting cultural and political values associated with the Malayali child. Today, with the steady removal of children from agricultural and industrial labour, a declining fertility rate, smaller family units, increasing global migration, and commercial values accrued by families from an accumulation of certified educational skills, the Malayali child has become almost ‘emotionally priceless’, to use Viviana Zelizer's incisive term.1 However, since the second half of the twentieth century, this transition from an ‘economically useful’ to an ‘emotionally priceless’ child, marked by long years of familial protection and institutionalized schooling, has mostly occurred within urban, middle-class communities in south India, similar to the European and American contexts. The traditionally rich, landed upper castes, and literate families have looked upon schools as a worthwhile investment to segregate and mould their children into productive, gendered adult household members, workers, and citizens.

With this context in mind, this book moves away from the scholarly attention overwhelmingly paid to dominant social groups to reveal the parallel dynamics which shaped the construction of ‘poor childhoods’ in Kerala during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, ‘poor’ refers to the conditions of poverty and deprivation suffered by children belonging to oppressed castes and religious communities, including Christian converts, and the ways in which the circular logic of poverty shaped the schooling landscapes into which they were brought.2 As upper-caste and upper-class communities in colonial Kerala slowly embraced universalist notions of childhood innocence and vulnerability advocated by various local and transregional actors in state and non-state agencies, and agreed on the separation of children from adults in spaces specific to play, study, and leisure, those from labouring, low-caste communities continued to be largely viewed through the lens of pity and charity, subject to mechanisms of disciplinary control and humanitarian governance with little acknowledgement of their agentic selves.

Chapter 2 investigates the extent of the use of Bank notes in British society during the Bank Restriction period. Drawing upon the Bank of England’s Lost Note Books – the record of claims submitted by customers who had lost their Bank notes – this chapter traces the geographical and social distribution of Bank note users. Following in the footsteps of John Clapham, who explored what he called the ‘radius of the Bank of England note’, this chapter reveals the patterns of the Bank note’s diffusion into British society and the underlying causes of its penetration into a number of places on the British Isles. The three factors that significantly affected the pattern of diffusion were commerce, the culture of sociability and Britain’s ongoing wars with France. These economic and extra-economic factors determined where the Bank notes were likely to see relatively extensive use. This chapter’s argument is underpinned by a large data set compiled from the Lost Note Books, which contain information about Bank note users’ identity as well as their geographical and social distribution. This unique source provides valuable insights into the diffusion of Bank note use.

This chapter examines major revivals of Heimat culture in the ruins of post-war Cologne and appeals to “Heimat” as a site of new beginnings. To put this case study in context, it begins with a brief pre-history of the Nazi years and shows how the regime selectively appealed to Heimat when in the regime’s interest, while suppressing ideas about Heimat which were out of step with the regime’s goals. The chapter then examines post-war appeal to local Heimat as a vital tool for repairing local community, healing biographical rupture, mobilizing for reconstruction, and providing a sense of therapeutic community. The chapter outlines how the script of finding new life through Heimat differed significantly from that of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft, and it explains how these differences redounded to the benefit of cultural demobilization in the aftermath. This and Chapter 2, however, also highlight Heimat enthusiasts’ considerable failures. This chapter concludes by exploring one failure in particular: persistent gendered ideas about home and Heimat in which male visions of home were privileged over those of women, re-enforcing the conservative gender norms of the period.

The chapter analyzes the situation of Jews, Jewish organizations, Zionism, anti-Semitism, and the development of racist ideologies.

In August 1951, the person responsible for the food ministry as well as, often, providing food for thought, K. M. Munshi was a troubled man. Unburdening himself at some length to the prime minister, Munshi roamed far and wide: from the ‘oppressive’ India–Pakistan relation and our ‘timid’ people, because of the government's ‘weak policy’, to the unsympathetic international situation. His frustration's chief causes though were that cabinet colleagues were not entirely ‘in confidence’ of Nehru and that there was a need for effective publicity. Munshi was sorry that the information and broadcasting ministry lacked a ‘purposive education of self-righteous public opinion’, whether internally in Telangana, where forces were fighting communists ‘who pose as harmless politicians’, or externally. Munshi had visited three countries – England, America and then-Burma – in the last two years and found the external affairs ministry's publicity wanting. Munshi concluded his quasi-war cry with a characteristic passage: ‘Indians abroad [are] our best advertisers.… Modern publicity has become a thing of art and money, and we must stoop to conquer.…’

Mirroring the Prologue, this extended Epilogue attempts to delineate the path to the people's court and its accompanying electoral politicking, which in turn paved the way from ‘agitation’ to ‘construction’. Mohanlal Saksena, former central minister for refugee rehabilitation, and future parliamentarian, put his finger on the pulse of party politics at this time in a spirited exchange with Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, who had given a call to Congressmen to leave. Saksena, a legislator in UP since the 1920s, posited Kidwai's ‘exhortation’ with Nehru's ‘call to remain united’ and pointed out to Kidwai the problem in his position, which was that his ‘grouse’ was against party organisation, while having ‘full faith’ in the leadership of Nehru. Instead of leaving, if Kidwai stayed and helped the latter, it would have been politically sounder. For, as Saksena asked, were ‘the dissident Congressmen … morally superior’?

Before Tandon's election in 1950 and before the departure of the Congress Socialists in 1948, the CWC had as many members from the left as from the right, and Saksena could see Kripalani's Krishak Mazdoor Party becoming irrelevant in the electoral battle between those ‘who are out to dislodge [Nehru] … [those] who pay lip homage to him [and] those who, while swearing by him … forswear his advice’.

This introduction outlines the main questions and debates which the book addresses, followed by an overview of the history of the Heimat idea and the study’s methodological approach. While scholars have looked at post-war cinematic and literary Heimat tropes, the book argues for more attention to Heimat as specific sites of home. On the question of the concept’s Germanness, it steers a middle path that recognizes how the history of German-speaking Europe has shaped the concept, while acknowledging its connection to broader questions about place attachment. Rather than positing a single “German” understanding across time and space, the work approaches discussions about Heimat as an evolving and contested discourse about place attachments and their relationship to diverse political and social issues. The introduction continues by outlining the book’s contribution to debates about West German democratization, reconstruction, post-war confrontation with dissonant lives, and expellee history. It concludes by outlining the book’s findings on the history of efforts to eliminate the concept in the 1960s and left-wing attempts to re-engage with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s.

By 1957, education had truly become a political battleground in the state of Kerala. The newly elected government, led by the Communist Party of India, announced the agrarian relations and education Bills, aimed at keeping its promise of redistributing resources and regulating private educational institutions, against which there was mounting criticism of financial irregularities and biases. However, these private grant-in-aid institutions run by Catholics and Nairs, among other communities, occupied a crucial position in the promotion of school and collegiate education, and the government's attempts to restrict the authority of private managers received an unprecedented backlash. With the shift from a period when missionary and private manager-led schools looked towards the government for financial assistance to a stage where they waged mass agitations to topple the first democratically elected government for increasing regulatory norms, the relationship between the state and private actors in education had come full circle. Despite intense strife and the demonstration of the political clout enjoyed by religious, upper-caste communities through their educational networks, the underlying consensus on formal schooling as an anchor for modern childhood prevailed.

Around the same time, in 1956, the Education Department under the aegis of the director of public instruction, C. S. Venkateswaran, introduced the Kerala School Kalolsavam (Kerala State School Youth Festival), aimed at encouraging school-going children between the ages of twelve and seventeen years to showcase their artistic talents and drive to innovate and promote traditional and new art forms. The immense popularity of the festival, touted as one of the largest cultural events in Asia, has accumulated praise and criticism over the past few decades, as it also demonstrates severe competition among pupils to the detriment of their mental and physical health and pressure on children from their parents, music and dance teachers, and district-level authorities, all competing for prestigious titles and media coverage. The overwhelming attention paid to the young participants of these festivals is rather representative of evolving notions of Malayali children as ‘competing commodities’ in the wider market while they are also expected to be consumers and mediators of local cultural practices.

PROVINCES AND STATES

The dominant political pattern in India in the years between the attainment of independence and the articulation of the republic was one of provincialism, as Akbar Hydari, the governor of Assam, averred in July 1948. Here, too, the corresponding historiographical paradigm has understandably been that of Partition, with a wealth of material generated on the partitioned provinces of British India. Afterwards, from the early 1950s, the linguistic reorganisation of states provided the scholarly context. Located in-between these frames, this chapter maps three arenas: first, surveying the provinces and the intentions at play there; second, exploring the party, the cabinet and their clashes; and, third, considering the ideological currents from the left and the right that intersected violently and were, in turn, confronted thus by the centre.

Functioning under the federal Government of India Act 1935, an Uttar Pradesh (UP) minister was in England within a year of independence to procure capital equipment and stores, while the East Punjab government was preparing to send a purchasing mission to America, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. Such international initiatives meant internal competition, which was, in the words of Finance Minister Shanmukham Chetty, bound to raise prices and stretch delivery. The minister for industries and supply, Dr Mookerjee, too warned against the ‘tendency of provincial governments to operate on their own’. When Premier Gopichand Bhargava showed an unseemly insistence on amalgamating East Punjab and its contiguous hill states, the prime minister restrained him by indicating that the culturally and linguistically ‘distinct’ people of the latter were apprehensive about ‘exploitation’ from the former. Unwilling to enforce any merger yet, Nehru consoled Bhargava that the presence of three administrative units in the Indian Punjab need not preclude their cooperation.

Such cooperation was also necessary between East Punjab and the princely states next to its southernmost district. The Meos of Alwar and Bharatpur were forced to take shelter in Gurgaon from there, and now the East Punjab government was seeking to dispossess them again, under the inter-Punjab evacuee property mechanism, regardless of their status as ‘Indian citizens who had temporarily vacated without going to Pakistan’.

This chapter explores the many forms of bondage in the early English tropics, showing how difficult it can be to even define slavery from a global perspective, especially over the course of the seventeenth century. There was a blurry line between slavery and other conditions of bondage or subjugation, but the English gradually developed a more consistent approach to non-European enslavement across the tropics. By the 1680s, one particularly inflexible and brutal genus of racial slavery – forged in the Caribbean – had outcompeted most other forms of slavery and became the default in the English empire. This chapter highlights the difficulty in defining slavery and shows overlapping elements in bondage systems in the English tropics. It argues that one of the reasons that English slavery became more draconian and permanent than most other forms of slavery was that the English took steps in the comprehensive slave codes passed in the Caribbean to deny the subjecthood of the enslaved.

Chapter 3 will look into the sociocultural and intellectual conditions of Baghdad before and after the Mongol conquest of the city in 656/1258 as the locus of the production of al-Urmawi’s treatises on music. While not dismissing the damage that the city suffered during the conquest, this chapter will focus on the impact of the arrival of the newcomers on Baghdad’s intellectual environment. In particular, I will focus on the role of the Juwayni family, the rulers of the city in lieu of the Mongols as well as al-Urmawi’s patrons, in reviving the scientific spirit of the Baghdadi society.