| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
089386
|
|
|
|
|
| Publication |
2009.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Despite the contemporary importance of the Ridge forest to the city of Delhi as its most important 'green lung', the concept of urban forestry has been explored neither by urban historians studying Delhi nor by environmental historians. This article places the colonial efforts to plant a forest on the Delhi Ridge from 1883 to 1913 within the context of the gradual deforestation of the countryside around Delhi and the local colonial administration's preoccupation with encouraging arboriculture. This project of colonial forestry prioritized the needs of the white colonizers living in Delhi, while coming into conflict repeatedly with indigenous peasants. With the decision to transfer the capital to Delhi in 1911, the afforestation of the Delhi Ridge received a further stimulus. Town planners' visions of a building the capital city of New Delhi were meant to assert the grandeur of British rule through imposing buildings, with the permanence of the British in India being emphasised by the strategic location of the ruins of earlier empires within the city. The principles of English landscape gardening inspired the planning of New Delhi, with the afforestation of the Delhi Ridge being undertaken to provide a verdant backdrop for-the Government House and the Secretariat-the administrative centre of British government in India. Imperial notions of landscaping, which were central to the afforestation of the Delhi Ridge epitomised colonial rule and marginalized Indians.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
174131
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
By providing the first comprehensive account of the role of the British and Indian press in war propaganda, this article makes an intervention in the global history of the First World War. The positive propaganda early in the war, intertwined with a rhetoric of loyalism, contrasted with how the conservative British press affixed blame for military defeats in Mesopotamia upon the colonial regime's failure to effectively mobilize India's resources. Using a highly emotive and enduring trope of the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’, the Northcliffe press was successful in channelling a high degree of public scrutiny onto the campaign. The effectiveness of this criticism ensured that debates about the Mesopotamian debacle became a vehicle for registering criticism of structures of colonial rule and control in India. On the one hand, this critique hastened constitutional reforms and devolution in colonial India and, on the other, it led to demands that the inadequacy of India's contribution to the war be remedied by raising war loans. Both the colonial government and its nationalist critics were briefly and paradoxically united in opposing these demands. The coercive extraction of funds for the imperial war effort as well as the British press's vituperative criticism contributed to a post-war, anti-colonial political upsurge. The procedure of creating a colonial ‘scandal’ out of a military disaster required a specific politics for assessing the regulated flows of information, which proved to be highly effective in shaping both the enquiry that followed and the politics of interwar colonial South Asia.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|