Kings versus Bandits: Anti-colonialism in a Bandit Narrative

2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shail Mayaram
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
Weak State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Specific Theme ◽  
Indirect Rule

AbstractDebate and controversy have bedevilled the subject of social banditry. The early writing on social banditry saw it as primitive rebellion, as prepolitical and antithetical to class consciousness. Another approach identified it with weak state formation. The literature on South Asia saw social banditry as absent having been eroded by the institutional structure of caste. This article examines and critiques some of these theses on banditry. It argues, firstly, that social banditry can be simultaneous with a phase of intensified state formation. The specific theme investigated here is the interaction of the king, peasant and bandit in an Indian kingdom under late colonialism. A window to this universe is opened up by a folk epic from the oral tradition of a community of Muslims called the Meos. Far from being prepolitical, banditry raises crucial questions with respect to authority and legitimacy. This narrative not only interrogates the legitimacy of kingship, it also challenges the authority of the colonial state. Secondly, the article challenges the argument of South Asian exceptionalism to banditry that is perhaps easier to refute. Thirdly, as this article demonstrates, banditry need not relate to a pre-industrial capitalist world. Our bandit narrative indicates the reverberations of industrialism and attendant exchange relations and institutions in the colony even though it belongs to an area of ‘indirect’ rule.

Genealogy of Colonial Discourse: Hindu Traditions and the Limits of European Representation

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raf Gelders
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The Core ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Eastern Cultures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Core Issues

In the aftermath of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), European representations of Eastern cultures have returned to preoccupy the Western academy. Much of this work reiterates the point that nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship was a corpus of knowledge that was implicated in and reinforced colonial state formation in India. The pivotal role of native informants in the production of colonial discourse and its subsequent use in servicing the material adjuncts of the colonial state notwithstanding, there has been some recognition in South Asian scholarship of the moot point that the colonial constructs themselves built upon an existing, precolonial European discourse on India and its indigenous culture. However, there is as yet little scholarly consensus or indeed literature on the core issues of how and when these edifices came to be formed, or the intellectual and cultural axes they drew from. This genealogy of colonial discourse is the subject of this essay. Its principal concerns are the formalization of a conceptual unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called “Hinduism” today, and the larger reality of European culture and religion that shaped the contours of representation.

scholarly journals The Impacts of Terrorism and Capitalist Incorporation on Indigenous Americans

2013 ◽  
pp. 130-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asafa Jalata
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
State Formation ◽  
World System ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Colonial Policies ◽  
Structural Aspects ◽  
Policies And Practices

This article demonstrates the connections between terrorism, colonial state formation, and the development of the capitalist world system, or globalization, exploring the consequences of colonial terrorism on indigenous American peoples. First, the piece introduces the central argument and conceptualizes and theorizes terrorism. Second, it examines the structural aspects of colonial terrorism by connecting it to specific colonial policies and practices. Third, it explains the ideological justifications that Euro-American colonial settlers and their descendants used in committing crimes against humanity and dispossessing the homelands of indigenous Americans, as well as in amassing wealth/capital by ignoring moral, ethical, and philosophical issues and human rights.

CHIEFTAINCY POLITICS AND COMMUNAL IDENTITY IN WESTERN NIGERIA, 1893–1951

2003 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
OLUFEMI VAUGHAN
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Communal Identity ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Strong Emphasis ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Traditional Authorities ◽  
Indirect Rule

This article examines the dimensions of indigenous political structures that sustained local governance in colonial Yorubaland. Legitimated by reconstructed traditional political authorities and modern concepts of development, Yoruba indigenous political structures were distorted by the system of indirect rule. Conversely, obas (Yoruba monarchs), baales (head chiefs), chiefs, Western-educated Christian elites and Muslim merchants embraced contending interpretations of traditional authorities to reinforce and expand their power in a rapidly shifting colonial context. With a strong emphasis on development and governance, collective political action also entailed the struggle over the distributive resources of the colonial state. Traditional and modern political leaders deployed strong communal ideologies and traditional themes that defined competing Yoruba communities as natives and outsiders.

scholarly journals Tuberculosis, Housing and the Colonial State: Hong Kong, 1900-1950

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 653-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Jones
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Imperial State ◽  
Indirect Rule

As Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, the ‘dominant’ view of colonial rule in Hong Kong is one of a state which governed through ‘a deliberate policy of indirect rule—a combination of economic laissez-faire and political non-intervention’. It depicts a government which was disengaged from the population, preferring to see the colony as a trading opportunity, whilst leaving the condition of the peoples it held sway over to the philanthropy and humanitarianism of the colony's Chinese elites. This view of British rule was even supported by the primary representative of the imperial state when Sir David Trench admitted in 1970 that social policy, in the sense of responding to the needs of the populace, only began in the colony in 1953. But as Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, these ‘established narratives’ of Hong Kong's colonial history need to be reassessed and a more nuanced approach adopted to reveal the complexity of even Hong Kong's seemingly simple ‘colonial state-society’ relations.

Language and the Subject

Joseph Conrad ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Yael Levin
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Heart Of Darkness ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Experimental Narrative

The chapter focuses on Conrad’s scenes of suspension as sites for an investigation of language and its role in the creation of the modernist subject. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory are read as the serial restaging of an unsolicited encounter with the language of the other. These unwarranted interruptions contribute to an exploration of a particularly passive and fragmented subjectivity that relinquishes the agency and cohesion afforded the Cartesian cogito. The insistence on the oral tradition is thus read not as an attempt to resurrect speech within an essentially silent medium but as a dramatization of the role of language in the evolution of the modernist subject and the narrative that houses him. Those same experimental narrative techniques that are often associated with Conrad’s commitment to an inherently epistemological philosophical inquiry are attributed here to the author’s effort to chart the ontological coordinates of character and narration.

‘Sufficient Reinforcements Overseas’: British PostWar Troops' Recruiting Policy in Nigeria, 1945–53

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 823-844
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Nwafor Mordi
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
World War ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Overseas Deployment ◽  
Second World

This article critically examines Britain's postwar recruitment policy in Nigeria, 1945–53. It is a subject that has not been studied by scholars. As the Second World War drew to a close, the Nigerian colonial military had declared that it had sufficient illiterate, ‘pagan’ infantrymen of northern Nigerian ‘tribal,’ including Tiv, origin to meet any but unforeseen demands of troops for service in the South East Asia Command (SEAC). Yet, recruitment of the same category of infantrymen, as well as ex-servicemen, was resumed after the war. The critical/analytic historical method is deployed to interrogate Nigerian and British archival sources on the subject. The study shows that, unlike the case of the High Commission Territories Corps (HCTC), Nigeria's postwar recruitment was not meant for overseas deployment. It was primarily driven by Britain's objectives of restoring the army to its pre-war role of enforcing colonial law and order in furtherance of its resolve to maintain its colonial state in Nigeria despite postwar militant nationalism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document