Resilient communities : household, state, and ecology in Southern Panjab, c.1750-1900 / Girija Joshi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Joshi, Girija, 1990- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Communities--India--Punjab--History--18th century.

Communities.

Communities--India--Punjab--History--19th century.

Human ecology--India--Punjab--History--18th century.

Human ecology.

Human ecology--India--Punjab--History--19th century.

Punjab (India)--Social conditions--18th century.

Punjab (India).

Punjab (India)--Social conditions--19th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 301 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Summary:

This book offers a historical perspective on the relationship between community, subsistence, and governance in north-western India. Focusing on Panjab, it explores the continuities in kinship and caste practices of rural Panjabi populations from the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. Working from the household outwards, it studies how agropastoral lineages formed, and how some of these managed during the eighteenth century to establish autonomous states or riyasats of their own. From the early nineteenth century onwards, this riyasati order was systematically dismantled by the colonial state. Nevertheless, this book suggests that colonial attempts to settle and reform rural society, by changing both its relationship to the environment and by imposing new definitions of 'community' upon it were met with uneven success. Colonial subjects in rural Panjab continued to forge bonds of kinship beyond the legal limits imposed by the state.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 29 Sep 2025).

ISBN:

1-009-51249-8

1-009-51252-8

OCLC:

1547910016