Ritika Prasad
Biographic Data
| ID | 3767977 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ritika Prasad |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ritika |
| FAMILY NAME | Prasad |
| SIGNATURE | PRASAD R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Charlotte |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5112-2943 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Practicing Censorship? Paper, Print, and Democracy in India
Examining a series of legal challenges by newspaper companies in the first half-century after Indian Independence (1947), this essay examines the legal boundaries and practical content of press freedom in postcolonial India. The cases, which were concerned with official regulation of page length, newsprint allocation, and customs duties, were far from obvious attempts at censorship. And yet the petitioners claimed that such regulation of form, pr…
Introduction: Rethinking Colonial Print through Practices
What was colonial about colonial print culture? By analyzing the social and material dimensions of print—its practices, communities, networks, and technologies—our special issue probes whether and how colonialism shaped the specific print cultures that took shape across varied and geographic and temporal contexts. In so doing, we contribute to a wide-ranging intervention on print that has, in recent decades, dismantled teleological narratives lin…
Let there be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880-1945 by Suvobrata Sarkar
Buttressing the limited scholarship on techno-scientific education in colonial India, Let there be Light studies the establishment and expansion of electrical infrastructure in colonial Bengal between 1880 and 1945. Sarkar analyzes how the growing interest in technical education, particularly engineering, combined with increasing entrepreneurial experimentation to drive indigenous industrial expansion across several fields, from electricity to ch…
Railway Bookselling and the Politics of Print in India: The Case of A.H. Wheeler
Railway Bookselling and the Politics of Print in India:The Case of A.H. Wheeler Ritika Prasad (bio) It was 2004. The railway minister of a newly elected government was presenting the railway budget in parliament. Outlining his agenda for enhancing "transparency," and "competitiveness," Lalu Prasad Yadav took umbrage at the ubiquitous presence of a firm of railway booksellers, A.H. Wheeler, which ran bookstalls across India's railways, except on t…
Imprimatur as Adversary: Press freedom and colonial governance in India, 1780-1823
Examining cases of libel between 1780 and 1823, this article analyses how the theory and practice of press regulation and governmentality was initially articulated in colonial India, embodied in everyday transactions between the newly invented East India Company state and an emerging newspaper press. While Company officials recognized that scrutiny by a free press was central to establishing their fairly new claims to just governance and public l…
Home Fronts - Britain and the Empire at War, 1939-45
Examines the "home front" war effort from an overall imperial perspective, assessing the contribution of individual imperial territories. There is increasing interest in the "home front" during the Second World War, including issues such as how people coped with rationing, how women worked to contribute to the war effort, and how civilian morale fluctuated over time. Most studies on this subject are confined to Britain, or to a single other colon…
Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India
Time-Sense: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India
This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized-as passengers and population-negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper e…
Smoke and mirrors: Railway travel and women in colonial India
Tracing the history of accommodation for female passengers on Indian railways, this article explores the anxieties and imperatives that regulated the presence of women in railway spaces in colonial India. Examining the entry of women into the public space of the railway, it emphasizes how an axiomatic relationship between female seclusion, respectability and mobility became pivotal to the conversation about women passengers from the mid-nineteent…
Time-Sense: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India
This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized-as passengers and population-negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper e…
Imprimatur as Adversary: Press freedom and colonial governance in India, 1780-1823
Examining cases of libel between 1780 and 1823, this article analyses how the theory and practice of press regulation and governmentality was initially articulated in colonial India, embodied in everyday transactions between the newly invented East India Company state and an emerging newspaper press. While Company officials recognized that scrutiny by a free press was central to establishing their fairly new claims to just governance and public l…
Smoke and mirrors: Railway travel and women in colonial India
Tracing the history of accommodation for female passengers on Indian railways, this article explores the anxieties and imperatives that regulated the presence of women in railway spaces in colonial India. Examining the entry of women into the public space of the railway, it emphasizes how an axiomatic relationship between female seclusion, respectability and mobility became pivotal to the conversation about women passengers from the mid-nineteent…
Time-Sense: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India
This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized-as passengers and population-negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper e…
Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India
Home Fronts - Britain and the Empire at War, 1939-45
Examines the "home front" war effort from an overall imperial perspective, assessing the contribution of individual imperial territories. There is increasing interest in the "home front" during the Second World War, including issues such as how people coped with rationing, how women worked to contribute to the war effort, and how civilian morale fluctuated over time. Most studies on this subject are confined to Britain, or to a single other colon…
Railway Bookselling and the Politics of Print in India: The Case of A.H. Wheeler
Railway Bookselling and the Politics of Print in India:The Case of A.H. Wheeler Ritika Prasad (bio) It was 2004. The railway minister of a newly elected government was presenting the railway budget in parliament. Outlining his agenda for enhancing "transparency," and "competitiveness," Lalu Prasad Yadav took umbrage at the ubiquitous presence of a firm of railway booksellers, A.H. Wheeler, which ran bookstalls across India's railways, except on t…
Imprimatur as Adversary: Press freedom and colonial governance in India, 1780-1823
Examining cases of libel between 1780 and 1823, this article analyses how the theory and practice of press regulation and governmentality was initially articulated in colonial India, embodied in everyday transactions between the newly invented East India Company state and an emerging newspaper press. While Company officials recognized that scrutiny by a free press was central to establishing their fairly new claims to just governance and public l…
Let there be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880-1945 by Suvobrata Sarkar
Buttressing the limited scholarship on techno-scientific education in colonial India, Let there be Light studies the establishment and expansion of electrical infrastructure in colonial Bengal between 1880 and 1945. Sarkar analyzes how the growing interest in technical education, particularly engineering, combined with increasing entrepreneurial experimentation to drive indigenous industrial expansion across several fields, from electricity to ch…
Practicing Censorship? Paper, Print, and Democracy in India
Examining a series of legal challenges by newspaper companies in the first half-century after Indian Independence (1947), this essay examines the legal boundaries and practical content of press freedom in postcolonial India. The cases, which were concerned with official regulation of page length, newsprint allocation, and customs duties, were far from obvious attempts at censorship. And yet the petitioners claimed that such regulation of form, pr…
Introduction: Rethinking Colonial Print through Practices
What was colonial about colonial print culture? By analyzing the social and material dimensions of print—its practices, communities, networks, and technologies—our special issue probes whether and how colonialism shaped the specific print cultures that took shape across varied and geographic and temporal contexts. In so doing, we contribute to a wide-ranging intervention on print that has, in recent decades, dismantled teleological narratives lin…
Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Colonialism (7 works) · History (7 works) · Politics (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Law (4 works) · Archaeology (3 works) · History (3 works) · African history and culture studies (2 works)