Jack Sepoy and the Dervishes: Islam and the Indian Soldier in Princely India

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
NILE GREEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
South India ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
Chain Of Command ◽  
History Of ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Almost All

Like other Britons in colonial India, Sir William Sleeman had a poor opinion of the traditional holy men who still formed an important part of Indian society in the nineteenth century. Reflecting his writings on the suppression of the Thugs that would make him famous, Sleeman declared that, “There is hardly any species of crime that is not throughout India perpetrated by men in the disguise of these religious mendicants; and almost all such mendicants are really men in disguise”.1 None of these holy men were considered more dubious – more superstitious and reactionary – than the dervishes and faqīrs. In popular Indian usage the terms darwīsh and faqīr referred to a class of Muslim holy men who were considered to possess a range of miraculous powers, powers which served to demonstrate their proximity to God; and so in turn to underwrite their considerable authority.2 For many British officials, it was this authority that stood at the heart of what they saw as the faqīr problem. As the rumours that surrounded the various ‘mutinies’ of the nineteenth century demonstrate, faqīr s were seen as the perpetual ringleaders of rebellion and sedition. Nowhere were these concerns more insistent than in the circles of India's colonial armies, which more than any other aspect of colonial society relied on loyalty to a formalised and rational chain of command. Yet in spite (and in some ways because) of these fears, the commanders of the various armies under British command in India were anxious to demonstrate their respect for the autonomy of the religious rights of the Indian soldier. Through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Islam of ‘Jack Sepoy’ or the Indian soldier fell in between this tension of covert suspicion and official respect, and in different ways the careers of a series of Muslim holy men attached to the Muslim soldiers were shaped by this tension. Over the following pages, this essay examines the careers of three faqīr s connected to the Hyderabad Contingent, the army under British command in the nominally independent princely state of Hyderabad in South India, better known as the Nizam's State. Looking out from this princely corner of Britain's ‘informal empire’, the essay uses a number of forgotten small-town texts in Urdu to begin to reconstruct the religious history of the Indian soldier from the inside, as it were, and so to create an ethnohistory of Islam in the colonial armies of the British Empire.3

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

scholarly journals The sportification of judo: global convergence and evolution

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global Convergence ◽  
Martial Arts ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Olympic Sport

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.

The Dialectics of Resistance: Colonial Geography, Bengali Literati and the Racial Mapping of Indian Identity

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUBHO BASU
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Information System ◽  
Geographic Information System ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Geographic Information ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Core ◽  
Indian Identity

AbstractThrough a study of hitherto unexplored geography textbooks written in Bengali between 1845 and 1880, this paper traces the evolution of a geographic information system related to ethnicity, race, and space. This geographic information system impacted the mentality of emerging educated elites in colonial India who studied in the newly established colonial schools and played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of the territorial nation-state and the rights of citizenship in India. The Bengali Hindu literati believed that the higher location of India in such a constructed hierarchy of civilizations could strengthen their claims to rights of citizenship and self-government. These nineteenth century geography textbooks asserted clearly that high caste Hindus constituted the core ethnicity of colonial Indian society and all others were resident outsiders. This knowledge system, rooted in geography/ethnicity/race/space, and related to the hierarchy of civilizations, informed the Bengali intelligentsia's notion of core ethnicity in the future nation-state in India with Hindu elites at its ethnic core.

scholarly journals Soldiers & Colonists: Imperial Soldiers as Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
John McLellan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Land Grants ◽  
Family Networks ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Arrival ◽  
Government Records ◽  
Decision To Stay

<p>The approximately 18,000 imperial troops who arrived in New Zealand with the British regiments between 1840 and 1870 as garrison and combat troops, did not do so by choice. However, for the more than 3,600 non-commissioned officers and rank and file soldiers who subsequently discharged from the army in New Zealand, and the unknown but significant number of officers who retired in the colony, it was their decision to stay and build civilian lives as soldier settlers in the colony. This thesis investigates three key themes in the histories of soldiers who became settlers: land, familial relationships, and livelihood. In doing so, the study develops an important area of settler colonialism in New Zealand history. Discussion covers the period from the first arrival of soldiers in the 1840s through to the early twentieth century – incorporating the span of the soldier settlers’ lifetimes. The study focuses on selected aspects of the history of nineteenth-century war and settlement.  Land is examined through analysis of government statutes and reports, reminiscences, letters, and newspapers, the thesis showing how and why soldier settlers were assisted on to confiscated and alienated Māori land under the Waste Lands and New Zealand Settlement Acts. Attention is also paid to documenting the soldier settlers’ experiences of this process and its problems. Further, it discusses some of the New Zealand settlements in which military land grants were concentrated. It also situates such military settlement practices in the context of the wider British Empire.  The place of women, children, and the regimental family in the soldier settlers’ New Zealand lives is also considered. This history is explored through journals, reminiscences, biography and newspapers, and contextualised via imperial and military histories. How and where men from the emphatically male sphere of the British Army met and married women during service in New Zealand is examined, as are the contexts in which they lived their married lives. Also discussed are the contrasting military and colonial policies towards women and marriage, and how these were experienced by soldier settlers and their families.  Lastly, the livelihood of soldier settlers is explored – the thesis investigating what sort of civilian lives soldier settlers experienced and how they made a living for themselves and their families. Utilising newspapers, reminiscences, biography, and government records the diversity of work army veterans undertook in the colony is uncovered. Notable trends include continued military-style roles and community leadership. The failed farming enterprise is also emphasised. Going further, it offers analysis of the later years of life and the different experiences of soldier settlers in their twilight years, particularly for those with and without family networks in the colony. The thesis challenges the separation between ‘war’ and ‘settlement’ by focusing on a group whose history spanned both sides of the nineteenth-century world of colony and empire.</p>

scholarly journals Montenegro as perceived by a British diplomat: The Hugh Rose's report of 1852.

Balcanica ◽  
2002 ◽  
pp. 211-226
Author(s):  
Cedomir Antic
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
East European ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Periphery

The following article deals with the image of Montenegro, a little country from the south-east European periphery, as perceived by a member of the nineteenth century British political elite. The history of this petty entity, less populated than an average English city, became especially important on the eve of the Holly Places Crises (of Palestine, 1853). A single dispute over the Montenegro-Ottoman border threatened to turn into European war, just a year before the Crimean War commenced. In regard the Montenegrin question, the always sensitive European "balance of power" was upset with the appearance of the unexpected alliance between Russia and Austria. The unique interest of the British Empire then started, for a short period of time, to be tied in with this almost unknown principality. The attitude of British diplomacy to Montenegro, image of the principality reconstructed in the Colonel Hugh Rose's report and its sources, could contribute not only to the advance the history of British foreign relations, but also to the development of the history of Montenegro.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Scientific

This introductory chapter traces the history of the concept of the sexually deviant female in colonial India. It first takes a look at how the figure of the prostitute appears across different archives from colonial India and within analyses of Indian social life. The chapter then shows how colonial studies on the nature of Indian society were to become the empirical basis for universalist theories of comparative societies. Indeed, the colonial state in India was, at its inception, an experiment in new forms of scientific and social scientific practices that were to influence state practices and the formation of disciplinary knowledge in the colony and metropole. At the heart of these sciences of society was a concern about structuring, tracing, and mapping the social world of colonial India through the assessment of women's sexuality. These histories reveal the way key debates about gender, caste, communal difference, and social hierarchy in India became objects of social scientific analysis through the description and evaluation of female sexuality. And, as the chapter shows, this social scientific imaginary had extraordinary reach.

scholarly journals Learning to Labour: “Native” Orphans in Colonial India, 1840s–1920s

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-42
Author(s):  
Soni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Poor Children

AbstractTo this day, the history of indigenous orphans in colonial India remains surprisingly understudied. Unlike the orphans of Britain or European and Eurasian orphans in the colony, who have been widely documented, Indian orphans are largely absent in the existing historiography. This article argues that a study of “native” orphans in India helps us transcend the binary of state power and poor children that has hitherto structured the limited extant research on child “rescue” in colonial India. The essay further argues that by shifting the gaze away from the state, we can vividly see how non-state actors juxtaposed labour and education. I assert that the deployment of child labour by these actors, in their endeavour to educate and make orphans self-sufficient, did not always follow the profitable trajectory of the state-led formal labour regime (seen in the Indian indenture system or early nineteenth-century prison labour). It was often couched in terms of charity and philanthropy and exhibited a convergence of moral and economic concerns.

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