Art. XII.—Notice of the Scholars who have Contributed to the Extension of our Knowledge of the Languages of Africa

1882 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-175
Author(s):  
R. N. Cust
Keyword(s):  
British India ◽  
The Subject

In the Journal for 1879 I was permitted to insert a notice of the scholars who have contributed to the extension of our knowledge of the Languages of British India during the last thirty years; and upon the occasion of its being read at one of the Society's meetings, considerable interest was shown in the subject. I venture now to intrude upon the Society with a kindred notice upon those great scholars who have devoted their talents, and in many cases their lives, to enlarging our knowledge of the Languages of Africa.

Expedition turned Invasion: The 1888 Sikkim Expedition through British, Indian and Chinese eyes

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
YI MENG CHENG
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
British Government ◽  
British India ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
Peace Negotiations ◽  
British Foreign Policy ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
The Subject ◽  
British Foreign Office ◽  
Chinese And English

Abstract A fresh look at the 1888 Sikkim Expedition using both Chinese and English language sources yields very different conclusions from that of previous research on the subject. During the course of policymaking, the British Foreign Office and the British Government of India did not collaborate to devise a plan to invade Tibet; conversely, their aims differed and clashed frequently. During the years leading to war, the largest newspapers in British India gave plenty of coverage to the benefits of trade with Tibet, thus influencing British foreign policy and contributing indirectly to the outbreak of war. The Tibetan army was soundly defeated in the war, while the British troops suffered only light casualties. Although the Tibetan elites remained committed to the war, the lower classes of Tibetan society quickly grew weary of it. During the war, the British made much use of local spies and enjoyed an advantage in intelligence gathering, which contributed greatly to their victory. Finally, although the war was initially fought over trade issues, the demarcation of the Tibetan-Sikkim border replaced trade issues as the main point of contention during the subsequent peace negotiations. During the negotiations, Sheng Tai, the newly appointed Amban of Tibet, tried his best to defend China's interests.

Burning Matters

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-49
Author(s):  
Susmita Roye
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Indian Woman ◽  
British India ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Subject

Sati in British India came to simultaneously refer to the widow-burning rite as well as to the self-immolating widow. With growing imperialist interests in the Empire in India, the British administration detected in the sati issue a powerful opportunity to promote the image of a progressive, reform-minded, benevolent Raj. An endeavour to know how Indian women themselves portray sati in their writings is of unfailing interest. Caught between the loud crossfire of the two warring camps of pro- and anti-Sati campaigns, the Indian woman—both the subject and the object of the entire sati discourse—hardly gets a chance to claim for herself the attention of a perceptive audience. The silence of the sati victim is, of course, nearly insurmountable and only a voice, seeped through another agency, reaches us. This chapter concentrates on three such mediated voices (Cornelia Sorabji, Snehalata Sen, and Sita Devi) as presented in their fiction.

“DEEPLY INDEBTED TO THE TEA-PLANT”: REPRESENTATIONS OF ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY IN VICTORIAN HISTORIES OF TEA

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 531-547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie E. Fromer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Tea Plant ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
British India ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
English National Identity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

These words were penned by a professor of the Royal Medico-Botanical Society in the late 1830s to commemorate the “recent discovery in British India of the Tea Plant” (vii). Yet although written near the beginning of the Victorian era, their sentiment – that tea was both an element of national self-definition and a stimulator of the individual prosperity and wellbeing on which that polity was based – nonetheless epitomizes the broader sweep of the nineteenth century's engagement with that article of consumption. How tea came to occupy this role, and why, is the subject of this essay, which focuses on the book-length tea history – a slightly peculiar genre that blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, advertisement and travelogue, personal account and scientific treatise. These histories appeared throughout the nineteenth century and often were explicitly funded by various segments of the tea industry (thus resembling the nineteenth-century equivalent of an infomercial). Because of their direct relationship to commercial and trading concerns, their role in recording and shaping the taste for the beverage, and their dissemination across a fairly broad public, tea histories offer an important, intertextual index of the Victorians' relationship to the beverage, as well as the way in which the relationship between home and Empire was constituted and changed over the course of the century.

Liberalism and the British Empire in India

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 711-722
Author(s):  
Sudipta Sen
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
British India ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Freedom And Responsibility

It is hard to argue against the view that liberalism and empire have historically shared the same terrain of political ideas. If Raymond Williams is correct, then there is indeed an older set of implications attached to the words “liberal” and “liberalism” dating back to uses of the word “liberty,” commonly known in Shakespearean England, especially as expressed in “liberties of the subject,” that is, to a far more limited construction of the word “liberty” than its modern usage would allow (Williams 1976, 180). Liberty in this instance was the recognition of certain rights granted to subjects of a sovereign authority. In this brief essay on how historians and political theorists in recent years have debated the tortuous relationship between the ideas of empire and liberty in British India, I would like to pause on this constricted and negative definition of liberty rather than its widest possible connotation in terms of human freedom and reflect on how the British Empire in India provided a critical arena for the exercise of sovereign power in the name of both freedom and responsibility. It might be worth stressing that the term “liberal” itself, with its various connotations ranging from licentious to the humane, predates the narrower body of ideas typically attributed to political liberalism, and moreover, that liberalism by far precedes imperialism as a coherent doctrine.

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 Art. II.—An Essay on the Brāhūī Grammar, after the German of the late Dr. Trumpp, of Munich University

1887 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-135
Author(s):  
Theodore Duka
Keyword(s):  
British India ◽  
Strong Emission ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The Subject

In the range of philological study and research there is nothing so attractive as the discovery of certain tribes who speak a language unconnected with the languages of the peoples which surround them. In Europe we have the striking example of the Basque language on the French and Spanish frontier, and, on a larger scale, we find the descendants of the ancient conquerors of the upper part of Pannonia — the Hungarians — surrounded by German, Sláv and Latin elements, speaking the Magyar language, a language wholly isolated, whose philological position has not as yet been determined to the satisfaction of all. Such isolated peoples appear like islets on the vast ocean of Languages. Another remarkable example is the language of the Bráhúi in the north of Sindh and on the east of Balúchistan, on the north-west of British India, which is the subject of the present essay. This language is spoken in a region to which much attention has been attracted of late; it is the territory formerly known as the Khánat of Khelat. The writing of the Bráhúi is the Arabic alphabet, and the letters l and t are pronounced from the roof of the mouth with a strong emission of the breath.

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas R. Trautmann
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Indian Language ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Language Analysis ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Indian Cities

Summary British India was an especially fruitful site for the development of historical linguistics. Four major, unanticipated discoveries were especially associated with the East India Company: those of Indo-European, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian and the Indo-Aryan nature of Romani. It is argued that they came about in British India because the European tradition of language analysis met and combined with aspects of the highly sophisticated Indian language analysis. The discoveries of Indo-European and Dravidian, the subject of this article, were connected with the British-Indian cities of Calcutta and Madras, respectively, and the conditions under which they came about are examined. The production of new knowledge in British India is generally viewed through the lens of post-colonial theory, and is seen as having been driven by the needs of colonial governance. This essay sketches out a different way of looking at aspects of colonial knowledge that fall outside the colonial utility framework. It views these discoveries and their consequences as emergent products of two distinct traditions of language study which the British and the Indians brought to the colonial connection. If this is so, it follows that some aspects of modernism tacitly absorb Indian knowledge, specifically Indian language analysis. Indian phonology, among other things, is an example of this process.

scholarly journals II. On the nature and physiological action of the poison of Naja tripudians and other Indian venomous snakes.—Part I

1873 ◽  
Vol 21 (139-147) ◽  
pp. 358-374 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
British India ◽  
Modus Operandi ◽  
Lethal Effects ◽  
Physiological Action ◽  
Venomous Snakes ◽  
Snake Bites ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
The Subject

The destruction of life in India by snake-bites is so great, that, with the hope of preventing or diminishing the mortality, in 1867 Dr. Fayrer began, and has recently completed, a protracted and systematic series of investigations on the subject in all its aspects; and, in a work entitled the 'Thanatophidia of India,’ has published a description of the venomous snakes found in British India, with an account of a series of experiments on the lower animals, conducted for the purpose of studying the nature of the poison, its modus operandi , and the value of the numerous remedies that have been from time to time reputed as antidotes—that is, as having the power of neutralizing the lethal effects of the virus, and of saving life.

Devoted Wife/Sensuous Bibi: Colonial Constructions of the Indian Woman, 1860-1900

2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indrani Sen
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Community Resident ◽  
Indian Woman ◽  
British India ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Gender Representations ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Anglo Indian

Current research has rather tended to neglect the print culture of 19th-century British India and its contribution towards the formation of gender ideologies. This article attempts to scrutinise the clamorous voices of the print culture: the newspapers, popular periodicals as well as copious published works, and to unravel the complex and sometimes contradictory web of constructions that ihese built around the gendered colonised. The second half of the century witnessed a definite cultural focus on the Indian woman. Among other things, this interest took the form of a constant engagement with the subject of the 'native' female in the print culture of the British community resident in India. The article explores the multifaceted and pluralistic representation of the Indian woman, ranging from prurient accounts of native female sensuality and discussion of social reform issues to laudatory inscriptions of wifely devotion and the sati. In other words, the image of the Indian woman was constantly being reconstituted and proscriptions of her sensuousness were interwoven with prescriptions of passive feminine behaviour. Admired models of perceived Eastern female docility were often selectively drawn upon, in a process constituting an 'Indianisation' of the Anglo-Indian female paradigm. While it is well recognised that representations of Indian women were strategically linked to the agenda of empire, what this article also tries to show is that, due to the complex interconnections between the ideologies of gender and empire, these gender representations also served to contain disturb ing issues raised by the contemporary women's movement in England.

Art. XI, — On the Introduction of Trial by Jury in the Hon. East India Company's Courts of Law

1836 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 244-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rám Ráz
Keyword(s):  
British Government ◽  
British India ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Character ◽  
Different Parts

[It will be of use to the future historian of British India, to know the precise periods at which the British government granted to the natives of the Island of Ceylon, and of the different parts of India, those rights which are alike calculated to elevate both their moral and their political character; and, also, to be enabled to refer to the opinions which were entertained at the time upon the subject, by the people of the country. One of the most important of these rights was that of sitting upon juries, and of being tried by juries of their own countrymen. It is, therefore, thought advisable to record the period, and to give some account of the circumstances under which the British government granted this right to the natives of the Island of Ceylon, and to the natives of the different parts of India; and, also, to give a copy of a paper written to Mr. GræMe, the late Governor of Madras, by Rám Ráz, who was native Chief Judge of the Mysore country, and one of the most enlightened of the Hindú inhabitants of the peninsula of India.

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