An exploration of religious conflicts in premodern urban India. Diverse peoples intermingled in the streets and markets of premodern Indian cities. This book considers how these diverse residents lived together and negotiated their differences. Which differences mattered, when and to whom? How did state actions and policies affect urban society and the lives of various communities? How and why did conflict occur in urban spaces? Through these questions, this book explores the histories of urban communities in the three cities of Ajmer, Nagaur, and Pushkar in Rajasthan, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The focus of this study is on everyday life, contextualizing religious practices and conflicts by considering patterns of patronage and broader conflict patterns within society. The book examines various archival documents, from family and institutional records to state registers, and uses these documents to demonstrate the complex and sometimes contradictory ways religion intersected with politics, economics, and society. The author shows how many patronage patterns and processes persisted in altered forms, and how the robustness of these structures contributed to the resilience of urban spaces and society in precolonial Rajasthan.

The volume deals with the inter-relations between agricultural production, agrarian trade, markets, towns and population of urban Rajasthan in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries. This study also displays that how the higher receipts from sair-jihat (non-agrarian taxes) in various areas of Rajasthan, worked in the evolution of agrarian markets into qasbas. On the same line the volume shows the fall in industrial activity in the nineteenth century which broadly corresponds with the theory of de-industrialization and de-urbanization. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Urbanization of Dibrugarh, a town in Assam.

Power -- Purity -- Hierarchy -- Discipline -- Non-harm -- Austerity -- Chastity.

India is undergoing massive urbanization. The future form of Indian cities in terms of urban planning and design is most urgent. A study of the key historical moments from the point of view of urban development is thus important. With case studies from the time cities originated in the Indian subcontinent and hand-drawn illustrations of these cities till the ones in recent times, the author discusses the last two hundred years of urban development in India with emphasis on the overall structure of the city, its nature of public places, institutions, and housing.