Business, Ethnicity, Politics, and Imperial Interests: The United Planters' Association of Southern India, 1893–1950

2014 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Ravi Raman
Keyword(s):  
Entire Range ◽  
South India ◽  
Ethnic Composition ◽  
Southern India ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
And Control

The United Planters' Association of South India (UPASI), formed in 1893 at the zenith of British colonial rule in India, was an organization dedicated to the interests of British planters, mainly tea planters, of South India. In the first half century of its history, UPASI enjoyed an unusual degree of effectiveness and control. Its authority and reach owed to the fact that, unlike many other planters' organizations of the time, such as the Ceylon Planters' Association and the Planters' Association of Malay, UPASI was an “association of associations,” a cartel of cartels, its members being district associations. But its power also derived from the homogeneous ethnic composition of the firms that constituted and managed this body, making it an exclusive association of Europeans in an Indian world. In this article, I show how this combination of ethnicity and cooperation, dynamics that manifested across the entire range of modern businesses started in colonial India, proved to be both a source of strength and a point of weakness.

Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAZMUL S. SULTAN
Keyword(s):  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Indian People ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Indefinite Future

This article theorizes the colonial problem of peoplehood that Indian anticolonial thinkers grappled with in their attempts to conceptualize self-rule, or swaraj. British colonial rule drew its legitimacy from a developmentalist conception of the colonized people as backward and disunited. The discourse of “underdeveloped” colonial peoplehood rendered the Indian people “unfit” for self-government, suspending their sovereignty to an indefinite future. The concept of swaraj would be born with the rejection of deferred colonial self-government. Yet the persistence of the developmentalist figuration of the people generated a crisis of sovereign authorization. The pre-Gandhian swaraj theorists would be faced with the not-yet claimable figure of the people at the very moment of disavowing the British claim to rule. Recovering this underappreciated pre-Gandhian history of the concept of swaraj and reinterpreting its Gandhian moment, this article offers a new reading of Gandhi's theory of moral self-rule. In so doing, it demonstrates how the history of swaraj helps trace the colonial career of popular sovereignty.

THE RAJ AND THE PARADOXES OF WILDLIFE CONSERVATION: BRITISH ATTITUDES AND EXPEDIENCIES

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIJAYA RAMADAS MANDALA
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Sensitivity ◽  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Game Species ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Infrastructural Development ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Wild Predators

AbstractThis article throws light on how the issue of conservation stood in tension with imperial hunting and exploitation in colonial India. The indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife and the declining numbers of game species in nineteenth-century India gave rise to a need for conservation, but with a caveat. Wildlife conservation, consequently, was aimed at the expansion of colonial economy and infrastructural development. Thus, in colonial India, wild predators that posed a threat to such interests were ruthlessly decimated and those animals that were useful for the smooth functioning of the British colonial rule were overlooked. This, in part, was also necessitated by the British seeking to establish their credentials as rulers, which explains the reason the colonial government's conservation programme was fundamentally selective and guided by expediency. The comparative perspective on elephants and tigers elucidates how the former were protected by the law because of the critical role they played in the colonial economy and administration, whilst the latter were ruthlessly exterminated for the threat they posed to the same. This article especially argues that the reasons for conserving elephants and decimating tigers in colonial India were more practical and economic than a mere reflection of cultural sensitivity on the part of the colonizers.

Conclusion: Torture in a State of Exception

2021 ◽  
pp. 179-188
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
High Profile ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Primary Form

Colonial Terror concludes by exploring how the attempts of the British colonial regime in India, in the decades following the Madras torture commission, to deny the ongoing prevalence of torture in the Indian police began to unravel in the early twentieth century thanks to the emergence of a voluble Indian press and a mass nationalist movement. But it was not until 1909, following the failures of a series of high-profile ‘conspiracy’ trials due to the ongoing reliance of the police on extorted confessions as their primary form of evidence, combined with pressure exerted by yet another group of reformist MPs, that torture once again erupted into scandal. The Indian and British governments were thus forced to act, but although the actions they took exposed the sheer scale of police torture in colonial India, they did little, once again, to attempt to eradicate it, since eradication was impossible thanks to the importance of torture to the maintenance of colonial rule. They endeavoured, instead, to make it disappear by renaming it, as well as to transform India into a fully-fledged state of exception in which police torture could continue to flourish, freed from the constraints placed on it by the rule of law.

Islamic Identities in Colonial India

2018 ◽  
pp. 14-53
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British India ◽  
The South ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Subject ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter introduces many of the groups that will form the subject of this book and charts their emergence and development in conditions of British colonial rule. It shows that the traditionalist orientations that enjoy great prominence in the South Asian landscape began to take a recognizable shape only in the late nineteenth century, although they drew on older styles of thought and practice. The early modernists, for their part, were rooted in a culture that was not significantly different from the `ulama's. Among the concerns of this chapter is to trace their gradual distancing from each other. The processes involved in it would never be so complete, in either British India or in Pakistan, as to preclude the cooperation of the modernists and their conservative critics at critical moments. Nor, however, were the results of this distancing so superficial as to ever be transcended for good.

scholarly journals Pre-partition India and the Rise of Indian Nationalism in Amitav Ghosh’s 'The Shadow Lines'

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-165
Author(s):  
Sheikh Zobaer
Keyword(s):  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Great Insight ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Insight Into

The Shadow Lines is mostly celebrated for capturing the agony and trauma of the artificial segregation that divided the Indian subcontinent in 1947. However, the novel also provides a great insight into the undivided Indian subcontinent during the British colonial period. Moreover, the novel aptly captures the rise of Indian nationalism and the struggle against the British colonial rule through the revolutionary movements. Such image of pre-partition India is extremely important because the picture of an undivided India is what we need in order to compare the scenario of pre-partition India with that of a postcolonial India divided into two countries, and later into three with the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. This paper explores how The Shadow Lines captures colonial India and the rise of Indian nationalism through the lens of postcolonialism.

Tagore’s Perspective on Decolonizing Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mousumi Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Education Reform ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Social ◽  
British Colonial

Decolonization is a historic process that picked up momentum in the second half of the 20th century, whereby several countries of the Global South in Asia, Africa, and Latin America successively gained independence from European colonial rule and became sovereign modern nation-states. However, territorial independence from an external ruling power alone could not bring an end to all the social, political, and economic problems ushered in by hundreds of years of imperialism. This fact was realized long before independence from colonial rule by Rabindranath Tagore within the context of British colonial India. Hence, even before territorial and political decolonization, Tagore sought to decolonize the minds of people through education reform by first setting up his own school in 1901 and then establishing Visva-Bharati University in 1921. In fact, Tagore, who is the author of the national anthems of two independent modern South Asian nation-states, never saw independent India. He died in 1941 as a British colonial subject, six years before the independence of India from colonial rule in 1947. While many indigenous intellectuals of his era adopted violent and nonviolent methods to fight against British imperialism, Tagore devoted much of his adult life to the pursuit of freedom through pedagogic reforms. Tagore’s philosophy and practice of pedagogic reform sought to “decolonize education” in British colonial India. Tagore’s own writings on education beginning in 1892 reveal that his philosophy and practice to “decolonize education” was based on the memory and critical reflections on his own experiences as a student in mainstream schools during the British colonial era in India. Tagore’s philosophy of education, institutionalized through his decolonizing pedagogic reform work in his school and university at Bolepur, Shantiniketan, were concrete responses of a highly creative and critical-thinking indigenous intellectual to the problems of the mainstream education system during his time. Hence, studying Tagore’s perspective on “decolonizing education” can provide us with a deeper understanding of the educational problems posed by British imperialism in India, as well as the evolution of these problems in the colonial metropole, which became global in nature through the process of colonialism, as has been argued by a number of academics, including modern British historian Michael Collins and postcolonial Indian academic Sanjukta Dasgupta.

scholarly journals “There'll Always Be an England”: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948–1968

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Webster
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Daily Mail ◽  
National Community ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The 1950S

“In Malaya,” theDaily Mailnoted in 1953, “three and a half years of danger have given the planters time to convert their previously pleasant homes into miniature fortresses, with sandbag parapets, wire entanglements, and searchlights.” The image of the home as fortress and a juxtaposition of the domestic with menace and terror were central to British media representations of colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. The repertoire of imagery deployed in theDaily Mailfor the “miniature fortress” in Malaya was extended to Kenya, where the newspaper noted wire over domestic windows, guns beside wine glasses, the charming hostess in her black silk dress with “an automatic pistol hanging at her hip.” Such images of English domesticity threatened by an alien other were also central to immigration discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. In the context of the decline of British colonial rule after 1945, representations of the empire and its legacy—resistance to colonial rule in empire and “immigrants” in the metropolis—increasingly converged on a common theme: the violation of domestic sanctuaries.Colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s have received little attention in literatures on national identity in early postwar Britain, but the articulation of racial difference through immigration discourse, and its significance in redefining the postimperial British national community has been widely recognized. As Chris Waters has suggested in his work on discourses of race and nation between 1947 and 1963, these years saw questions of race become central to questions of national belonging.

British Raj to China's Hong Kong: The rise of madrasas for ethnic Muslim youth

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
WAI-YIP HO
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Day School ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Muslim Youth ◽  
British Colonial

AbstractThe madrasa, the Islamic institution of learning, has for centuries occupied a central role in the transmission of religious knowledge and the shaping of the identity of the global Muslim community (umma). This paper explores the sharp rise in the number of madrasas in contemporary Hong Kong. It examines, in particular, how South Asian Muslim youth, after receiving a modern education in a conventional day school, remain faithful to their religious tradition by spending their evenings at a madrasa studying and memorizing the Qur'an. Engaging with the stereotypical bias of Islamophobia and national security concerns regarding the ties of madrasas to Islamic terrorist movements over the last decade, this paper argues that the burgeoning South Asian madrasa networks have to be understood in the context of Hong Kong's tripartite Islamic traditions—South Asian Muslim, Chinese Hui Muslims, and Indonesian Muslims—and within each Muslim community's unique expression of Islamic piety. Furthermore, the paper also identifies factors contributing to the increase in madrasas in Hong Kong after the transition from British colonial rule to China's resumption of sovereign power in 1997.

Prevalence and family factors associated with loneliness during COVID-19: A cross-sectional study from South India

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (02) ◽  
pp. 61-67
Author(s):  
G. Sanjana ◽  
Vijaya Raghavan
Keyword(s):  
Online Survey ◽  
South India ◽  
Survey Design ◽  
Southern India ◽  
Related Factors ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Factors Associated ◽  
Family Discord ◽  
The Impact

Background: Loneliness can affect anyone at any point in their life. It can be detrimental to the wellbeing and quality of life of individuals and communities. In the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, loneliness is considered as a public health crisis. Hence, the objectives of the study were to estimate the prevalence of loneliness and family related factors associated with loneliness among general population in south India. Materials and Methods: The study employed a crosssectional online survey design. The data was collected in the first phase of the lockdown in 2020 from adults in Southern India. Socio-demographic profile and family related variables were collected using a semistructured proforma. Loneliness was assessed by UCLA loneliness scale. Results: Of 573 total respondents to the survey, aged between 18-65 years, 43% were male and 57% were female. The overall prevalence of loneliness was 63% (358/573). No significant gender differences were observed in the prevalence of loneliness. Family discord was associated with higher rates of loneliness (p less than 0.01). Other factors associated were younger age and being single. Conclusion: Rates of loneliness during the COVID-19 lockdown were high in Southern India. Findings suggest that interventions should prioritize younger people. Increasing social support and improving interpersonal skills, which in turn would help reduce family discord and may reduce the impact of COVID-19 on loneliness.

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