Imprimatur as Adversary: Press freedom and colonial governance in India, 1780–1823

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
RITIKA PRASAD
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Press Freedom ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Public Scrutiny ◽  
Public Critique

Abstract 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 legitimacy, they feared that public critique would destabilize the very sovereign authority that they sought to establish. Concerned with appearing arbitrary, officials developed strategies through which they could demand obedience without necessarily predicating it on censorship. Journalists derived much of their negotiating power from the early colonial state's vulnerability to public scrutiny, but they also knew that the state possessed extensive control over their livelihood. Cognizant of the power and constraints of colonial governmentality at this juncture, they produced their own mechanisms of permissible intransigence. This uneasy equilibrium generated the questions explored in this article: What rights of comment and critique practically accrued to newspapers? What was the legal authority of executive regulations censoring newspapers and how far were these enforceable? Why, in practice, did punishments remain strikingly similar across periods with and without formal censorship? The cases between 1780 and 1823 not only reveal the historical negotiations that structured this foundational—though somewhat marginalized—period of India's press history, but also explain the strategic shifts that followed as, in 1823, the fulcrum of crime and punishment turned away from press censorship and towards press licensing.

Political Economy of Conquest

2021 ◽  
pp. 121-152
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Financial Health ◽  
Financial Flows ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Parliamentary Debate ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Public Scrutiny ◽  
Colonial Warfare ◽  
Modern Form

By the final decade of the eighteenth century, the political economy of conquest had crystalized into a distinctively recognizable modern form. Expanded scale of war-making created a need to surveil the financial operations of the colonial state. The changing valence of ‘corruption’ came to include a growing insistence on eliminating leakages from the financial flows that enabled conquest. Corruption was not merely a moral scourge but a structural flaw, which if left unresolved would drain the war-making capability of the early colonial regime. Financial accounts of the East India Company therefore had to be rendered legible to public scrutiny and parliamentary debate in the form of an annual India Budget. Colonial conquest captured the cultural imagination of metropolitan Britain – from painting and the Georgian stage to a new graphic scheme of statistical visualization – all sought to comprehend Britain’s territorial empire in South Asia. The growing appetite for war was fed by territorial conquest on an ever-expanding scale and transformed colonial warfare into the most fiscally impactful activity. An entire infrastructure of financial surveillance had to be created to organize warfare and conquest more efficiently. This edifice of control and scrutiny rested upon a growing appetite for reliable information about the financial health of the Indian empire and forecasting the dividends of territorial conquest.

“In that One the Ālif is Missing”: Eunuchs and the Politics of Masculinity in Early Colonial North India

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-116
Author(s):  
Nicholas Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Successor State ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Bodily Difference

AbstractAlthough ostensibly gendered as men and frequently maintaining independent, patriarchal households, enslaved eunuchs (khwājasarās) in pre- and early colonial regimes in South Asia were often mocked for their supposed effeminacy, bodily difference, and pretensions to normative masculinity. In the Mughal successor state of Awadh (1722-1856), such mockery grew more pronounced in the wake of growing financial demands from the British East India Company and attempts by eunuchs to alienate property with wills and testamentary bequests. Through examples of verbal derision directed at eunuchs, this essay shows that not only did ideas of normative masculinity serve as a vehicle for Awadh’s rulers to defend their sovereign authority from colonial encroachment, but that notions of normative manhood continued to inform eunuchs’ own self-perception into the nineteenth century.

Military Mobility, Authority and Negotiation in Early Colonial India*

2020 ◽  
Vol 249 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-84
Author(s):  
Christina Welsch
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Persian Language ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract This article focuses on the career of Muhammad Yusuf Khan, an officer in the British East India Company who sought to turn his military service into political and diplomatic authority, only to be executed as a rebel in 1764. His rise and fall occurred early in the so-called colonial transition, a period characterized in recent scholarship as one of relative fluidity in contrast to later, more rigid instantiations of colonial rule. Institutionally, the Company’s armies seem to contradict that pattern: their rapid growth in the eighteenth century produced new exclusions and restrictions, including some of the earliest formal articulations of a racial binary between Indian and European actors. Yusuf Khan, however, gained political capital by mobilizing elements of those intended restrictions in new contexts, imbuing the Company’s military hierarchies with alternate meanings outside of its formal infrastructure. His innovative reinterpretation of military prestige becomes clear when the Company’s records are read alongside Persian-language material from the Indian courts against which he fashioned his political identity. His career offers insight into how the inequitable, but dynamic relationship between the Company and its soldiers shaped the former’s approach to and understanding of India s political landscape

Shooting a Tiger

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vijaya Ramadas Mandala
Keyword(s):  
Critical Role ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Forest Legislation ◽  
Imperial Governance ◽  
North And South

The main contention of Shooting a Tiger is that hunting during the colonial period was not merely a recreational activity, but a practice intimately connected with imperial governance. The book positions shikar or hunting at the heart of colonial rule by demonstrating that, for the British in India, it served as a political, practical, and symbolic apparatus in the consolidation of power and rule during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyses early colonial hunting during the Company period, and then surveys different aspects of hunting during the high imperial decades in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book draws upon an impressive array of archival material and uses a wide range of evidence to support its contentions. It examines hunting at a variety of social and ethnic levels—military, administrative, elite, princely India, Indian professional hunters, and in terms of Indian auxiliaries and (sometimes) resisters. It also deals with different geographical contexts—the plains, the mountains, north and south India. The exclusive privilege of hunting exercised by the ruling classes, following colonial forest legislation, continued to be extended to the Indian princes who played a critical role in sustaining the lavish hunts that became the hallmark of the late nineteenth-century British Raj. Hunting was also a way of life in colonial India, undertaken by officials and soldiers alike alongside their everyday duties, necessary for their mental sustenance and vital for the smooth operation of the colonial administration. There are also two final chapters on conservation, particularly the last chapter focusing on two British hunter-turned-conservationists, Jim Corbett and Colonel Richard Burton.

Ecology and Imperium: State Formation in Early Colonial Bengal c. 1765–1800

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Baijayanti Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
State Formation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Remote Areas ◽  
Tribal Communities ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Outlying Regions ◽  
Power And Authority

This article looks at the process of state formation in Bengal in the second half of the eighteenth century when the English East India Company emerged as the paramount authority in the province. The article argues that compared with the previous regime of the Nazims who were content in exercising a loose sovereignty over the outlying regions of Bengal, the Company showed greater initiative in conquering and pacifying the remote areas of the province. In terms of its ecology, the province of Bengal could be divided into three distinct zones: the plains, the hills and the delta. The process of state formation varied in these three distinct eco-zones. While it was easy for the Company to establish its control over the Bengal plains, it became increasingly difficult for them to establish their power and authority in the hill forests (home to autonomous tribal communities who resented and resisted British interference) and in the deltaic tracts where the maze of rivers provided safe refuge and a means of escape to the Magh pirates and every other state fugitive. This article is an account of the Company’s struggles to establish its supremacy in Bengal, but it also looks at the resistance offered by autonomous tribal groups to retain and preserve their independence. Finally, this article attempts to link ecology with the process of state formation in early colonial Bengal.

The Languages of Petitioning in Early Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Levels

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.

Colonial Terror

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Indian Population ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
World War ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
The Law ◽  
Colonial Police ◽  
First World

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule—of some of the ways in which, in other words, extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maintenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a ‘regime of exception’ in which two different forms, or levels, of exceptionality were in operation, one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by ‘petty sovereigns’ in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

Navigating Pluralities Reluctantly: The Marriage Contract in Dutch Galle

Itinerario ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-237
Author(s):  
Nadeera Rupesinghe
Keyword(s):  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
Marriage Contract ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Normative Order ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Customary Practices

This article examines diverse practices in the establishment of marriage partnerships in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka,1 parts of which were controlled by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Family law was an area in which the attempt to transform local practices was conspicuously present, but not fully achieved. Lawful marriage was linked to conversion to Dutch Protestantism and to inheritance of property. In the authoritative space of the provincial board that heard the matrimonial disputes examined in this article, the Company did not proactively attempt to reform family life, an area where it could not easily dictate terms. It made a significant dent as the requirement for marriage registration was recognised by natives. But the limited reach of the introduced law is evident in the Company’s reluctant recognition that its two-step process of reading the banns and subsequent marriage ceremony created confusion and that locals still followed customary practices for forging unions. The VOC faced a normative order in the villages that was characterised by ritual underpinnings. Such local features went unrecognised in official law rules, but their perseverance is testimony to the pluralities in practice in an early colonial encounter in the Indian Ocean world.

Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-120
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Coercive Force ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Military Law ◽  
Military Discipline

This chapter seeks to analyze the changing meaning of ‘peace’ under an early colonial regime which was perpetually at war. ‘Peace’ in early colonial South Asia no longer meant the absence of conflict, but rather a period when problems of war assumed an urgent significance. From paying soldier’s arrears incurred during military conflicts to disciplining them in times when the Company state was not formally at war—‘peace’ was no longer the opposite of war. Rather it was the fleeting opportunity to re-tool the apparatus of colonial war-making. Conquest did not occur in a legal vacuum. This chapter analyses debates about military law and its significance for the early colonial regime’s claims to sovereign authority. Jurisdictional jockeying between competing sources of law went well beyond the need to maintain military discipline. Examining these debates opens up an unexplored world in which we can understand important questions relating to the territoriality of early colonial rule, the legal personality of the Company state and efforts to compare Britain’s garrisoning of Ireland with the organization of coercive force in South Asia.

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