Small players in the great game: Marginality and representation on the northern frontiers of nineteenth-century colonial India

2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shafqat Hussain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Great Game

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

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.

British Secret Service Activity in Khorassan, 1887–1908

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-675
Author(s):  
L. P. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
Service Activity ◽  
Great Game

When great powers quarrel their lesser neighbours are often worst affected. Cajoled and wooed, they are drawn into conflicts they would prefer to avoid. Such involvement may exacerbate internal weaknesses and end by damaging them long after the causes of the original dispute have faded. Nineteenth-century Iran became drawn into Anglo-Russian rivalries in Central Asia as each sought to secure her assistance. Spectators of the so-called ‘Great Game’ were not allowed: the boxes were part of the field of play.

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.

Experiments with Khomeini's Revolution in Kargil: Contemporary Shi‘a networks between India and West Asia

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 370-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
RADHIKA GUPTA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Financial Flows ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Religious Networks ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractShi‘i scholars from India have been a sizeable presence in seminaries in Iran and Iraq, both historically and today. Yet there is a dearth of scholarship on Shi‘i linkages between India and West Asia, with the exception of historical work on the patronage of shrine cities in Iraq by centres of Shi‘ism in India. Departing from this geographical and historical focus, this paper lends insight into contemporary religious networks between India and West Asia, using the example of the Twelver Shi‘a in Kargil, a region located on India's ‘border’ with Pakistan in the province of Kashmir. Kargili scholars travelled overland via Afghanistan or by sea from Bombay to Basra to study in seminaries in Iraq and Iran from the nineteenth century onwards. Increasing fluency in Urdu in post-colonial India enabled them to connect with Shi‘i institutions in other parts of India, which mediate religious, cultural, and financial flows from a transnational Shi‘ite realm. These networks ofreligiouslearning are not only conduits for the transmission of textual, doctrinal knowledge, but also for politico-religious ideologies that are selectively harnessed, and often exaggerated, to effect significant social and political changes in micro-locales. While local conflicts are over-determined by the evocation of transnational links, they also reflect, even if only through rhetorical and partial reproduction, doctrinal and politico-religious schisms among Shi‘i leaders in West Asia. This is illustrated by an ethnographic account of the activities undertaken and contestations provoked by the Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust in Kargil, a modernist reform movement that has selectively appropriated Khomeini's revolutionary ideologies to instigate social change and shape local politics and religious practice in Kargil.

Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons:

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Rai Waits
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Built Form ◽  
British Rule ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
New System

Prison construction was among the most important infrastructural changes brought about by British rule in nineteenth-century India. Informed by the extension of liberal political philosophy into the colony, the development of the British colonial prison introduced India to a radically new system of punishment based on long-term incarceration. Unlike prisons in Europe and the United States, where moral reform was cited as the primary objective of incarceration, prisons in colonial India focused on confinement as a way of separating and classifying criminal types in order to stabilize colonial categories of difference. In Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons: British Jails in Bengal, 1823–73, Mira Rai Waits explores nineteenth-century colonial jail plans from India's Bengal Presidency. Although colonial reformers eventually arrived at a model of prison architecture that resembled Euro-American precedents, the built form and functional arrangements of these places reflected a singularly colonial model of operation.

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.

scholarly journals “Clean out of the map”: Knowing and doubting space at India’s high imperial frontiers

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spatial Data ◽  
Scientific Understanding ◽  
Breaking Point ◽  
British India ◽  
Multiple Agents ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Instruments And Techniques ◽  
The Many

During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India’s frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey office beyond breaking point. Far from producing supposedly unequivocal maps, many involved in frontier surveying acknowledged that their work was problematic, partial, and prone to contrary readings. They increasingly came to construe frontiers as spaces that exceeded scientific understanding, and resorted to descriptions that emphasized fantastical and disorienting embodied experiences. Through examining the many crises and multiple agents of frontier mapping in British India, this article argues that colonial surveying and its outputs were less assured and more convoluted than previous histories have acknowledged.

Corruption and Redemption: The Legend of Valluvar and Tamil Literary History

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

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