The Law Relating To Hindu And Mahomedan Religious Endowments With Commentaries On The Religious Endowments Act Act Xx Of 1863 And Bengal And Madras Regulations Xix Of 1810 And Vii Of 1817

Kalighat is said to be the oldest and most potent Hindu pilgrimage site in the city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). It is home to the dark goddess Kali in her ferocious form and attracts thousands of worshipers a day, many sacrificing goats at her feet. In The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City, Deonnie Moodie examines the ways middle-class authors, judges, and activists have worked to modernize Kalighat over the past long century. Rather than being rejected or becoming obsolete with the arrival of British colonialism and its accompanying iconoclastic Protestant ideals, the temple became a medium through which middle-class Hindus could produce and publicize their modernity, as well as the modernity of their city and nation. That trend continued and even strengthened in the wake of India's economic liberalization in the 1990s. Kalighat is a superb example of the ways Hindus work to modernize India while also Indianizing modernity through Hinduism's material forms. Moodie explores both middle-class efforts to modernize Kalighat and the lower class's resistance to those efforts. Conflict between class groups throws into high relief the various roles the temple plays in peoples' lives, and explains why the modernizers have struggled to bring their plans to fruition. The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City is the first scholarly work to juxtapose and analyze processes of historiographical, institutional, and physical modernization of a Hindu temple.

This book analyses the character of British rule in nineteenth-century India, by focusing on the underlying ideas and the practical repercussions of agrarian policy. It argues that the great rent law debate and the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 helped constitute a revolution in the effective aims of government and in the colonial ability to interfere in India, but that they did so alongside a continuing weakness of understanding and in effective local control. In particular, the book considers the importance of notions of historical rights and economic progress to the false categorisations made of agrarian structure. It shows that the Tenancy Act helped to widen social disparities in rural Bihar, and to create political interests on the land.