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ID:
179918
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Summary/Abstract |
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, monumental Muslim tombs in India served as spaces for refashioning local religious and social identities. Elite patrons, technical overseers, and stoneworkers engaged with new technologies of construction at sites meant to reflect claims on the Muslim past. This article interrogates divergent class understandings of monumental Muslim tombs in colonial-era India. It compares the construction of monumental Islamic tombs in the states of Hyderabad, Bhopal, and Rampur—three Muslim-led ‘native states’, quasi-autonomous polities under colonial oversight. By the late nineteenth century, many native state patrons employed a new middle class of technical intermediary to oversee tomb construction. The rise of this class created new hierarchies within construction, with apprenticeship-trained master craftsmen increasingly marginalized from state narratives and aligned with stoneworkers and other labourers. While patrons and middle-class intermediaries argued that new technologies and materials should be used to ‘modernize’ construction, they portrayed technical change as divorced from the religious symbolism of tombs. In contrast, workers integrated the religious and the technical, positioning technologies of construction within narratives of Muslim practice. The article uses native state tombs to analyse how labourers adapted to technical demands, without necessarily adopting state ideologies.
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2 |
ID:
181332
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Summary/Abstract |
Artisans in late nineteenth and early twentieth century India engaged with industrial change through vernacular-language manuals that explained new technologies and practices using regional cultural, literary and religious references. This article analyses the development, circulation and use of manuals written in Urdu for trades including metal smithing, masonry and carpentry. Urdu-language artisan manuals drew on both European-authored industrial textbooks and earlier Persian-language styles of writing about craftsmanship. The article argues that these late nineteenth and early twentieth century manuals shaped artisan training by rooting new technologies in regional literary and religious traditions and by articulating a perceived Islamic past for artisan trades.
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