3297816 results
3 - How Just and Democratic Is India’s Solar Energy Transition?: An Analysis of State Solar Policies in India
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 31 October 2024, pp 50-73
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Introduction
In our warming world, energy provision is not simply about technology but also politics (Hughes and Lipscy 2013). Energy systems are the result of intensely contested political battles in the domains of technology selection, ownership of capital, environmental externalities, access, and siting. The geographical reach, terms of access, and forms of ownership of electricity infrastructures reflect the prevailing distribution of political and economic power (Bridge, Özkaynak and Turhan 2018). Consequently, this gives rise to injustices such as uneven electricity access, displacement, and voicelessness among marginalized communities. Control over energy infrastructure is not just the result but often also the source of political and social power (Amin 2014; Larkin 2013) – that is, energy shapes politics just as much as politics shape energy.
India is facing the twin imperatives of tackling historic energy poverty through an expansion of its energy system on the one hand and pursuing climate mitigation on the other. India's electricity sector is dominated by coal-fired thermal power, which in turn drives the country's carbon emissions. The energy sector as a whole contributed around 74 per cent of India's total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2015, of which 38 per cent was from public electricity generation (GPI Secretariat 2016). On the other hand, India's average monthly residential electricity consumption is only 90 kilowatt-hour (kWh), which is one-third of the global average and one-tenth of that of the US (Chunekar and Sreenivas 2019). Despite official estimates of 100 per cent electrification, many households still receive poor quality electricity for only a few hours each day (S. D’Souza 2019). The growing feasibility of renewable energy (RE) indicates a potential opportunity to address both climate mitigation and energy poverty challenges. India announced a target of 450 gigawatt (GW) of RE by 2030 as against a total installed capacity of 370 GW in April 2020 (PMO India 2019). As we progress towards a low-carbon system, what are the implications of this transition, given existing patterns of injustice and the prospects of their reproduction in our twenty-first-century energy infrastructure?
India's electricity system can be characterized by its gigantic scale; the primary state ownership of its generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure; cross-subsidization from commercial and industrial consumers to agricultural consumers; and its federal nature.
2 - Shareholder Voice and Corporate Purpose
- Edited by Luca Enriques, University of Oxford, Giovanni Strampelli, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan
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- Board-Shareholder Dialogue
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- 31 August 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 46-90
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In "Prosperity," Professor Colin Mayer proposes a corporate law change, advocating for social goals in company constitutions. The chapter, however, argues this requires more than a legal tweak. Analyzing two cases, it suggests shareholders resisting profit restrictions under Friedman’s principle pose challenges. Insights from French corporate statements, US reactions to Public Benefit Corporation proposals, and UK companies’ responses reveal hurdles. Proposed solutions include reducing shareholder powers or court-specified purposes. In the second case, exploring investors prioritizing non-financial goals, the chapter considers Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing. Despite alignment potential, current ESG falls short. Uncertainty surrounds its future. If successful, the chapter contends existing corporate law can accommodate goals without a mandatory purpose. In summary, it suggests the mandatory purpose requirement may be ineffective in the first case or largely unnecessary in the second, highlighting the complexities in reshaping corporate conduct.
4 - The Constituent Administrator
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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- Legalizing the Revolution
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- 07 May 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 141-172
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Summary
Calculators, it is now up to you: count, measure, compare.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social ContractThe class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.
—John Maynard Keynes, ‘Am I a Liberal?’There are two things that the British have left behind for us. One is the efficiency of the civil services and the other is the rule of law.
—P. Subbarayan, Constituent Assembly Debates,25 November 1949In 1949, S. Sampurnanand, a minister in the government of the United Provinces, was addressing a convocation of students in the city of Agra. His subject was the nearly completed constitution, which was being drafted only a few hundred kilometres to the west in Delhi. That constitution, he remarked, should have had ‘something of a sacred character which inspires future generations. It is in the case of important States the embodiment of a living faith, the philosophy of life of those who framed it.’ However, ‘judged by this criterion’, the soon-to-be constitution ‘is a miserable failure.… It is just a piece of legislation like, say, the Motor Vehicles Act.’ The Indian constitution did not actually say much about motor vehicles or how to regulate them. For Sampurnanand, what it did share with that most routine of administrative statutes was its style. The constitution ran into several pages and contained an extraordinary amount of detail. It had 395 articles, each with numerous sub articles and halting caveats, not to mention eight lengthy ‘Schedules’, totalling to 146,000 or so words, making it the lengthiest national constitution by a fair margin. Constitutions, as per the Congress socialist Sampurnanand, were meant to be animated by the ‘living faith’ of revolutionary founders, not weighed down by detailed manuals on how to operate the complex machineries of the state. They should be crafted by inspirational assertions of exemplary lawgivers instead of being burdened with the meticulous calculations of administrators. Sampurnanand's criticism was dismissed by the members of the assembly. And it has not fared any better in the seven decades since. Of all the many, many words written to discuss and analyse the Indian constitution, few, if any, acknowledge Sampurnanand, or his line of criticism.
3 - Extinction: After/Lives
- Pramod K. Nayar, University of Hyderabad, India
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- Vulnerable Earth
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 68-120
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In the introductory remarks to her The Book of Vanishing Species, Beatrice Forshall writes: ‘In the eighteen months it has taken me to research this book, 107 species have been declared extinct…. We are depriving ourselves of the raw material of poetry’ (2022: 13). Charlotte McConaghy opens her novel Migrations with the statement: ‘The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here’ (2020: 3). James Bradley's Clade depicts a slow, incremental loss of species, as the earth itself implodes.
Most of the birds are gone now. She is not sure when they began to disappear: elsewhere there have been huge die-offs, great waves of birds falling from the skies, yet here the process has been more gradual, species slowly disappearing, those that remain less numerous with each passing year. (2017: 43)
Forshall mourns the passing of species, a passing that is irreversible and the species irretrievable. McConaghy suggests that when the nonhumans disappear, humanity will be left all alone. The excerpts are rooted in a history of vanishing species, which is then projected as the imminent future in the characteristic catachronism of the contemporary climate crisis novel, but with the exception that in this future, mankind is likely to disappear too, a literary theme Greg Garrard terms ‘disanthropy’ (2012).
The death of entire species, including the human, has been the subject of considerable literary interest in the era of climate crisis. Although Mary Shelley postulated an earth without humans in The Last Man (1826) and the planetary apocalypse that wipes out humanity is the subject of a novel as early as On the Beach (Nevil Shute 2010 [1957]), the concern with vanishing species has amplified. This decline narrative is everywhere: in different forms of literatur non-fictional works such as Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction (2014); studies of individual species vanishings such as Joel Greenberg's A Feathered River Across the Sky (2014) on the passenger pigeon; collections on vanished species such as Christopher Cokinos’ Hope Is the Thing with Feathers (2000); thought experiments like Alan Weisman's The World Without Us (2007); graphic texts like Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra's Y: The Last Man (2002–2008); and the IUCN's Red List of endangered species arranged in a rising scale of risk and vulnerability, among others. Artwork on endangered species and extinction has also flourished as seen in Isabella Kirkland and the Extinction Art Project.
Contents
- Pramod K. Nayar, University of Hyderabad, India
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- Vulnerable Earth
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp v-vi
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Foreword
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- By Benno Böer
- Pramod K. Nayar, University of Hyderabad, India
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- Vulnerable Earth
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp vii-viii
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Summary
The Anthropocene is a time of human activity causing massive environmental degradation. This phase has begun. It is characterized by biodiversity loss, climate change and pollution, with huge ramifications on food, water and energy security. In order for our species to survive this critical chapter, we need to mobilize everybody. Every person has to participate and understand that there are science-and-technology-based solutions available, waiting to be applied. Urgently. Decision makers need to support an action-based approach towards human survivability. Our resilience does not depend only on overcoming pandemics, armed conflicts and wars, but also on functioning ecosystems providing clean air, food and water, and ensuring climate justice for all species.
The importance of science, the social sciences and the arts, and education must no longer be undervalued. It is with this in mind that I am happy for this scholarly book Vulnerable Earth being produced, with the aim of examining multiple vulnerabilities, as documented in numerous literary texts across the world.
I congratulate Professor Pramod K. Nayar, UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad, for the timely production of this important educational tool.
Vulnerable Earth is a study of the literature of climate crisis. But the climate crisis cannot be looked at in isolation. We need to look at the whole picture at large. We must look at the cumulative effect of the triple planetary crisis. This book brings to the reading public a vast corpus of literary material that foregrounds species loss, habitat destruction, climate injustice and its antecedents, and other themes. It covers a range of themes that enable a bringing-to-consciousness the nature of our present crisis, at this critical juncture in our planetary history.
Vulnerable Earth, I hope, will function to enhance the knowledge of and as an encouragement for the reader to actively recognize this triple planetary crisis, and engage in the search for and application of solutions in support of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
Part III - Institutions
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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- Legalizing the Revolution
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- 07 May 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 173-174
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3 - Blind Search
- Deepak Khemani, IIT Madras, Chennai
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- Search Methods in Artificial Intelligence
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 47-74
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Summary
In this chapter we introduce the basic machinery needed for search. We devise algorithms for navigating the implicit search space and look at their properties. One distinctive feature of the algorithms in this chapter is that they are all blind or uninformed. This means that the way the algorithms search the space is always the same irrespective of the problem instance being solved.
We look at a few variations and analyse them on the four parameters we defined in the last chapter: completeness, quality of solution, time complexity, and space complexity. We observe that complexity becomes a stumbling block, as our principal foe CombEx inevitably rears its head. We end by making a case for different approaches to fight CombEx in the chapters that follow.
In the last chapter we looked at the notion of search spaces. Search spaces, as shown in Figure 2.2, are trees corresponding to the different traversals possible in the state space or the solution space. In this chapter we begin by constructing the machinery, viz. algorithms, for navigating this space. We begin our study with the corresponding tiny state space shown in Figure 3.1.
The tiny search problem has seven nodes, including the start node S, the goal node G, and five other nodes named A, B, C, D, and E. Without any loss of generality, let us assume that the nodes are states in a state space. The algorithms apply to the solution space as well. The left side of the figure describes the MoveGen function with the notation Node → (list of neighbours). On the right side is the corresponding graph which, remember, is implicit and not given upfront. The algorithm itself works with the MoveGen function and also the GoalTest function. The latter, for this example, simply knows that state G is the goal node. For configuration problems like the N-queens, it will need to inspect the node given as the argument.
The search space that an algorithm explores is implicit. It is generated on the fly by the MoveGen function, as described in Algorithm 2.1. The candidates generated are added to what is traditionally called OPEN, from where they are picked one by one for inspection. In this chapter we represent OPEN as a list data structure.
Bibliography
- Sejuti Das Gupta, James Madison College, Michigan State University
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- Class, Politics, and Agrarian Policies in Post-liberalisation India
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 287-310
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References
- Bart Klem, University of Gothenburg
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- Performing Sovereign Aspirations
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 183-214
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Copyright page
- Stuart Casey-Maslen, University of Pretoria
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- International Counterterrorism Law
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- 31 August 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp iv-iv
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5 - Gujarat: Strong State-directed Capitalism across Sectors
- Sejuti Das Gupta, James Madison College, Michigan State University
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- Class, Politics, and Agrarian Policies in Post-liberalisation India
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 144-201
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This chapter addresses three primary concerns. First, whether political settlement in Gujarat has undergone a change since liberalisation. Second, the impact of ‘class’ interest on state apparatus with respect to agricultural policies and, because of such policies, if the existing proprietary classes have transformed themselves, remained unaffected, or have been replaced by new classes. Third, given that the state has been welcoming market forces, particularly under Chief Minister Modi, whether the market's free play has curbed the state's role in agriculture. These questions have been addressed by assessing various aspects of Gujarat's agrarian policy after 2000, in addition to land acquisition policies. Simultaneously, an analysis of what these policies entail for different classes of farmers is developed alongside the other two proprietary classes – the capitalist and the petty bourgeoisie. This analysis is, thus, undertaken from two angles – classes’ influence on the state and the state's role in forming, altering, and consolidating classes. It is based on field research in Gujarat, conducted between October 2011 and January 2012.
The first section of the chapter offers a brief history of the state and outlines the changes in its economy in the past two decades. This is followed by sections presenting the fieldwork findings, in combination with a review of secondary literature. These sections first elaborate the main tenets of agricultural policy and the key factors behind the agricultural success of Gujarat, and then evaluate through a politico-economic lens, differential impact across classes and their fractions that have contributed to the agrarian success in Gujarat, particularly after 2000.
Brief overview
Geographical divisions
The present state of Gujarat historically constituted of two parts: Saurashtra and mainland Gujarat. During the colonial period, Saurashtra was a feudatory state and was constituted of 112 principalities, while the mainland was under the British rule. Baroda was an exception; it was situated in Gujarat but was ruled by an enlightened royalty reputed for its benevolence towards its subjects, contributing to the pursuit of education and arts among its population (Bakhle, 2005). Baroda merged with Gujarat in 1949. In 1960, the regional state of Bombay was divided into two states, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Thus, Gujarat gained independent statehood.
Conclusion: Realising Labour Justice
- Supriya Routh, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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- Labour Justice
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 170-199
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The purpose of this concluding chapter is not merely to reprise the major arguments made in the book and condense its main thesis. Instead, building on the arguments made in the book, this chapter aims to be future-guiding and discusses a potential alternative approach to labour law, particularly from an Indian and more generally from a Global South perspective. It is hoped that some of the future-guiding reflections offered in this chapter will aid the way labour law is debated, practised and interpreted in the country, by both policy and legal practitioners, including the judiciary. Of course, some of the main arguments of the book are revisited here, but they occupy a limited part of this chapter. In revisiting the main arguments of the book, the intention is to emphasise the understanding of labour law in light of the specific requirements under the Constitution of India. In discussing an alternative approach to labour law, this chapter also indicates some potential areas for future scholarly explorations. After this more general introduction to the chapter, in the first section, the foundations of labour law in India, as conceived under the Constitution, are revisited. Drawing on this discussion, the second section offers a more general take on the alternative social justice-based theorising of labour law. The third section is devoted to the discussion of the overall orientation of the 2020 labour law reforms. The chapter ends (fourth section) with a note on overcoming the dependent juridical mentality, which has historically constrained an alternative conceptual formulation of labour law in India, in view of the contextual realities of the country.
This book argued that labour law furthers the social justice mission of the Constitution, which is conceived in relation to social cooperation among worker-citizens of the country. Labour law is, then, an instrument to practically realise the constitutional commitment made to worker-citizens. In so realising the constitutional commitment, the challenge for labour law is to sustain the balance among the different aspects of the social justice mission envisaged under the Constitution. It is this balance among the three components of social justice – market freedom, social solidarity and participatory deliberation – that gives the idea of social justice its unique Indian character.
Appendix: A note on methods
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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- Sovereign Atonement
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 168-173
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Sovereign Atonement builds primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in phases during 2015, 2017, and 2018, supplemented by secondary sources from archives and online platforms. During 2015, I conducted pre-dissertation fieldwork in June and July, when both Bangladesh and India were preparing to exchange the enclaves, and their residents were preparing either to move or to stay. In the span of these two months, I interviewed thirteen enclave residents in four former enclaves under Panchagarh district in Bangladesh. I also interviewed two mid-level state bureaucrats then posted in Panchagarh. This fieldwork phase was crucial to comprehend the preparation of both the Bangladeshi state to exchange the enclaves and the former enclave residents who were preparing either to leave or to stay. This was also the phase when I was able to locate and interview several residents who had decided to opt for Indian citizenship and move to India. I conducted twelve-month ethnographic fieldwork from June 2017 to May 2018 in the newly merged former enclave of Bangladesh, during which I stayed in and around eight of the biggest enclaves across three districts in Bangladesh: Kurigram, Lalmonirhat, and Panchagarh. I also visited numerous other small enclaves all over the region. This period produced fifty-seven in-depth interviews with former enclave residents who became Bangladeshi citizens. I interviewed ten regular Bangladeshi citizens who lived in the vicinity of the former enclaves and saw them before and after the exchange. This phase further involved twenty-two in-depth interviews with government officials at different hierarchies, from the UNO to clerical staff in various state offices. I also conducted six focus group discussions (FGDs). All the interviews were conducted in Bengali, and I transcribed them with the help of my research assistant. The interviews were semi-structured; I used a checklist to guide the conversation. The average interview lasted about 43 minutes. Although most of my participants permitted an audio-recording of the conversation, a few, especially the government officials, did not allow it. In such cases my research assistant, Morshed, and I took meticulous notes. Although I use insights from those interviews, I do not quote them directly anywhere in the book. I spent my downtime and the months of June and July in 2018 conducting archival research in the Central Library of Dhaka University, the Central Public Library in Dhaka, the National Archives of Bangladesh, and the Rangpur Public Library in Bangladesh.
Frontmatter
- Sejuti Das Gupta, James Madison College, Michigan State University
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- Class, Politics, and Agrarian Policies in Post-liberalisation India
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp i-iv
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3 - Land and citizenship as technologies of territory
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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- Sovereign Atonement
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 63-87
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The first time I had ever been to the enclaves was in the early 2000s, not for academic purposes but out of curiosity, as I kept hearing about these “weird” pockets of Indian land located inside Bangladesh. Access was easier for me because I was born and raised in the northern region of Bangladesh, which hosted all these enclaves. I also had friends and relatives living closer to the enclaves. My first visit to the enclaves in an academic capacity was between 2009 and 2010 as a final-year bachelor's degree student doing my undergraduate capstone thesis. My next visit was in 2015 to undertake summer research for my doctoral dissertation. All these trips were before the enclaves were exchanged and accepted as regular Bangladeshi territories. By the time I started my year-long fieldwork in 2017–2018, I therefore already had preconceived ideas about the enclaves. Of course, many changed. However, there were a few scenarios that immediately grabbed my attention, both because they were not what I had expected and because they were surprisingly similar across the enclaves. Many marketplaces and public gathering spaces were renamed. Furthermore, there was a mushrooming of schools, madrasas (educational institutions following an Islamic curriculum), and youth and sports clubs. They all shared some characteristics. These were primarily makeshift structures made with tin and bamboo, often incomplete, with no or insufficient furniture and locked from the outside. However, they all had a signpost describing their names, types, and the year they were founded. The signposts and the patched-together structures they represented immediately “spoke” to my internal “geographer.” They were all founded in 2015 or 2016, just after the enclaves were absorbed as regular Bangladeshi territories. Most of the names were strategically chosen to signify a strong sense of belonging to the state of Bangladesh and drew from either the first PM of the country, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, or one of his family members assassinated in a military coup in 1975. They were supposed to be emotionally appealing to the then Bangladeshi PM, Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of Sheikh Mujib – one of the two surviving family members from the coup. For example, the most common to come up were Sheikh Russel followed by Sheikh Fazilatunnesa, the PM's youngest brother – a toddler when assassinated – and her mother, respectively, as demonstrated in Figure 3.1.
14 - Shareholder Engagement in East Asia
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- By Lin Lin
- Edited by Luca Enriques, University of Oxford, Giovanni Strampelli, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan
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- Board-Shareholder Dialogue
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- 31 August 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 426-449
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Summary
The multidimensional and evolving nature of contemporary shareholder-company engagement practices means that the processes which shape corporate decisions are becoming more diffuse and potentially less transparent. Ensuring accountability is more complex in these circumstances and requires a focus on various channels of influence-wielding.
8 - Chess and Other Games
- Deepak Khemani, IIT Madras, Chennai
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- Search Methods in Artificial Intelligence
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 221-262
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Summary
Acting rationally in a multi-agent scenario has long been studied under the umbrella of games. Game theory is a study of decision making in the face of other players, usually adversaries of the given player or agent. Economists study games to understand the behaviour of governments and corporates when everyone has the goal of maximizing their own payoffs. A stark example is the choice of NATO countries refusing to act directly against the Russian invasion of Ukraine given the threat of nuclear escalation.
In this chapter we turn our attention to the simplified situation in which the agent has one adversary. Board games like chess exemplify this scenario and have received considerable attention in the world of computing. In such games each player makes a move on her turn, and the information is complete since both players can see the board, and where the outcome is a win for one and a loss for the other. We look at the most popular algorithms for playing board games.
Chess has long fascinated humankind as a game of strategy and skill. It was probably invented in India in the sixth century in the Gupta empire when it was known as chaturanga. A comprehensive account of its history was penned in 1913 by H.J.R. Murray (2015). The name refers to the four divisions an army may have. The infantry includes the pawns, the knights make up the cavalry, the rooks correspond to the chariotry, and the bishops the elephantry (though the Hindi word for the piece calls it a camel). In Persia the name was shortened to chatrang. This in turn transformed to shatranj as exemplified in the 1924 story by Munshi Premchand (2020) and the film of the same name by Satyajit Ray, Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players). It became customary to warn the king by uttering shāh (the Persian word for king) which became check, and the word mate came from māt which means defeated. Checkmate is derived from shāh māt which says that the king has been vanquished.
Table 8.1 lists the names of the chess pieces in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and English (Murray, 2015). In Hindi users often say oont (camel) for bishop and haathi (elephant) for rook.
From India the game spread to Persia, and then to Russia, Europe, and East Asia around the ninth century.
Bibliography
- Supriya Routh, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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- Book:
- Labour Justice
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- 30 April 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 200-220
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6 - Secluded Poets in Literary Spaces: Memorializing Female Rulers, Consorts, and Memsahibs
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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- 06 March 2024
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- 31 October 2024, pp 154-167
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Summary
In their biographical compendia, as mentioned earlier, Ranj and Nadir divide women poets into two broad categories: ‘public women’ and ‘secluded women’. Seclusion was an important marker of difference but, within the literary space, they were both represented as contributing to the enrichment and diversification of art, aesthetics, and language. The bāzārī ‘aurat, or ‘the woman of the market’, was defined by the absence of a household, and, of course, the word bāzār reflected her association with money – as someone who evoked the sensoria in exchange for an economic transaction. Definitions are elusive and reductionist; our tazkiras reveal these women as invested with a wide range of skills and linguistic abilities, leading an enriching life, and actively participating in the shaping of the social and cultural landscape. There was, as we have seen, a wide range of women who fell under this category, and there were considerable differences among them in terms of resources and patronage, caste and sub-caste affiliations, social location, profession, and place and type of performance. Furthermore, the boundaries that separated them from ‘chaste women’ were quite porous, and crossovers were not unknown.
Hindustani Poetry and Music in British Homes: English-speaking Women Composing Poems in Urdu
Described as pardah nashīn, or ‘women who live in seclusion’, these ‘chaste women’ were also marked by considerable diversity. There were some among them who belonged to the royal harem, but the harem was itself a diverse space; there were poets therein who had matrimonial relations with the rulers, and those who were their blood relations, and yet some others who served as concubines and slaves, but were still literate enough to compose poems. Our tazkiras refer to women poets who came from the homes of nobles, aristocrats, and, more interestingly, merchant houses as well. We also come across women poets who came from the home of an English official; the daughter of an English gentleman, Jami‘at was a ‘Hindustani’ from her maternal side. Described by both Ranj and Nadir as a ‘Christian woman’ (‘īsayī ‘aurat), she was married to a high-ranking British army officer, Major R. Justin. ‘Her lyrics were’, says Nadir, ‘on the lips of professional singers (gawa’iyōn) in the city of Agra’. She was also quite adept in the ‘knowledge of music’ (‘ilm-i musaqī). She knew English well and composed poems in Braj, Persian, and Urdu.