The Facilitators I: Policing

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-105
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Structural Violence ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Government ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Set Up

Focusing on the role of atrocity facilitators, particularly colonial officials and the British government, in the governmentalization of torture by the police and other officials in colonial India, this chapter examines the ways in which, following the transfer of India’s governance from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858, the extra-legal violence of torture became systematized as a technology of colonial rule. Beginning with an analysis of what led to the perpetration of torture by state officials, the existence of which had long been known in both India and Britain, to erupt into scandal in 1854, the chapter interrogates how the commission set up to investigate torture led to the emergence of a new facilitatory discourse that served both to deny the existence of torture and the structural violence that underpinned it, as well as to displace blame for it from the colonial regime to its Indian subordinates. The chapter further explores how police reform in the commission’s aftermath was designed not to eradicate torture or ensure the welfare of the Indian populace but to safeguard the coercive and terrorizing powers of the colonial state

Monument Preservation and the Vexing Question of Religious Structures in Colonial India

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indra Sengupta
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ancient Monuments ◽  
Vexing Question

The principles of conservation spelled out in the first law on preservation for the whole of India — the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904 — were indicators of the ways in which conservation policy was made in colonial India: determined by the state, and heavily influenced by principles of preservation derived from Europe, based on a specifically colonial understanding of India's history and heritage, and of the ‘guardianship’ role of the colonial state. Yet attempts to implement pre-colonial religious structures could have unforeseen results, as local, indigenous religious groups began to utilize the opportunities for funding opened up by the new Act and succeeded in using the provisions of the Act in ways that best suited their own interests. This chapter looks closely at the interface between preservation policy and practice in colonial India in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and calls into question colonial hegemony as an explanatory framework for understanding a complex process of cultural practice.

Federating the Raj: Hyderabad, sovereign kingship, and partition

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUNIL PURUSHOTHAM
Keyword(s):  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
British India ◽  
Indian States ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Muslim Majority

AbstractThis article explores the idea of federation in late-colonial India. Projects of federation sought to codify the uncodified and fragmented sovereign landscape of the British Raj. They were ambitious projects that raised crucial questions about sovereignty, kingship, territoriality, the potential of constitutional law in transforming the colonial state into a democratic one, and India's political future more broadly. In the years after 1919, federation became a capacious model for imagining a wide array of political futures. An all-India Indian federation was seen as the most plausible means of maintaining India's unity, introducing representative government, and overcoming the Hindu–Muslim majority–minority problem. By bringing together ‘princely’ India and British India, federation made the Indian states central players in late-colonial contestations over sovereignty. This article explores the role of the states in constitutional debates, their place in Indian political imaginaries, and articulations of kingship in late-colonial India. It does so through the example of Hyderabad, the premier princely state, whose ruler made an unsuccessful bid for independence between 1947 and 1948. Hyderabad occupied a curious position in competing visions of India's future. Ultimately, the princely states were a decisive factor in the failure of federation and the turn to partition as a means of overcoming India's constitutional impasse.

The Origins of Ethnic Activism: Caste Politics in Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-179
Author(s):  
Alexander Lee
Keyword(s):  
Group Size ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Ethnic Mobilization ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Caste Politics ◽  
Caste Groups

AbstractExisting accounts of ethnic mobilization have focused on the role of group size or state policy. This paper suggests that narrow identity activism was also non-linearly related to education since poorly-educated groups are unlikely to have an educated elite to participate in activism, while in very educated groups this elite existed but participated in the colonial state or anti-colonial nationalism. This theory is tested using a historical panel dataset of Indian caste groups, with petitions to the colonial census authorities being used as an index of caste activism.

scholarly journals Caste and its Histories in Colonial India: A reappraisal

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 432-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROSALIND O'HANLON
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Western India ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
Regional Histories

AbstractDavid Washbrook's influential early work on South India set the terms for much subsequent debate about caste, with its exploration of the key role of the colonial state in shaping caste ideologies and institutions. Over subsequent decades, historians and anthropologists have come increasingly to emphasise the ‘colonial construction’ of caste and its enduring legacies in post-colonial India. Yet there were also significant continuities linking the forms of colonial caste with much earlier regional histories of conflict and debate, whose legacies can be traced into the late colonial period. In particular, the juxtaposition between Brahman and non-Brahman itself was anticipated in a tradition of conservative social commentary that emerged in the Deccan Sultanate state of Ahmadnagar, and came to circulate widely through Banaras and western India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This tradition of commentary acquired new salience during the nineteenth century. It entered the colonial archive as an authoritative source of knowledge, and also provoked early ‘non-Brahman’ intellectuals into a fresh engagement with its conservative social vision. In their attempts to rebut this vision, these intellectuals displayed a detailed knowledge of its social history and a deep familiarity with the judicial decisions through which it had been upheld in earlier centuries.

The Renovation of Custom in Colonial Kenya: the 1932 Generation Succession Ceremonies in Embu

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Ambler
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Local Autonomy ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Genital Mutilation ◽  
New Tribe ◽  
Opposition Movements ◽  
Substantial Degree ◽  
Central Kenya

The role of custom and tradition in the development of colonial rule in Africa has received little attention from scholars. Historians of colonial Kenya, particularly, have focused on the powerful transforming impact of the colonial state and economy and on the growth of opposition movements; they have had little to say about the processes through which previously autonomous societies negotiated their incorporation into the Kenya state. Yet by the 1920s and 1930s that state had acquired a substantial degree of popular legitimacy. ‘Customary’ institutions and rituals played an important part in the development of that legitimacy. This essay examines the institution of the genealogically defined ‘generation’ in the Embu-Mbeere area in colonial central Kenya and the ceremonies held in 1932 to mark the transition from one generation to the next. These ceremonies attracted considerable attention because they provided the occasion for the proclamation of rules, supported by the British administration, relating to the bitter issue of genital mutilation in female initiation. But this was not a crude case of the manipulation of custom. The attempt to reform female initiation was part of a larger process, of which the rituals of generation succession were elements, of building the ideological basis of a new ‘tribe’ in a society previously characterized by local autonomy and collective authority. As investigation of the succession ceremonies makes clear, the notion of a tribe dominated by appointed chiefs and identified with an exclusive territory lay at the centre of this ideology.

Administrator-scholars and the Writing of History in Early British India: A review article

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 826-843
Author(s):  
JAMES LEES
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Times

AbstractThe histories of Asian peoples penned by British East India Company officials during the early years of colonial rule—rightly—have long been considered to be doubtful source material within the historiography of South Asia. Their credibility was suspect well before the middle of the twentieth century, when Bernard Cohn's work began to present the British colonial state as one that relentlessly sought to categorize Indian society, and to use the distorted information thus gained to impose its government.However, the histories of these administrator-scholars still retain value—not as accurate studies of their subjects, perhaps, but as barometers of the times in which they were written and also in the unexpected ways in which some continue to resonate in the present. To illustrate that point, this paper will review three recent monographs which deal with the writings and historical legacies of some of the Company's most prominent early nineteenth-century administrator-scholars. These are: Jason Freitag's Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan; Jack Harrington's Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India; and Rama Mantena's work centred around the antiquarian pursuits of Colin Mackenzie, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780–1880.1

Introduction: Torture, Empire, and the Exception

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
High Court ◽  
Virtual Absence ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Exposed Facets

Colonial Terror begins with an examination of a historic case before the High Court of England and Wales in 2011 regarding torture in colonial Kenya that exposed facets of the brutal violence that sustained Britain’s empire, and argues that the case and its aftermath offer a number of insights into the role of extraordinary violence in the operation of colonial states, and with it to the maintenance of imperial and colonial sovereignties, in addition to the discourses and practices of denial regarding British culpability for torture and other forms of colonial violence. After elucidating the book’s key arguments regarding the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of British colonial rule in India the introduction then considers both the virtual absence of colonial violence from British historical memory and recent scholarship on such violence in former British colonial contexts that seeks to redress such an absence. Proposing that scholars of colonial violence need to broaden their understanding of, and approaches to, violence, as well as the impact of violence on both bodies and minds, the introduction goes on to examine the scholarly literatures on, and lacunae in, colonial policing, colonial law, the colonial state, colonial sovereignties, and the use of torture and terror to construct and maintain such sovereignties, and suggests ways in which Colonial Terror will address such omissions.

scholarly journals “Human Telephone Lines”: Flag Post Mail Relay Runners in British Southern Cameroon (1916–1955) and the Establishment of a Modern Communications Network

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (S22) ◽  
pp. 211-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Gam Nkwi ◽  
Mirjam de Bruijn
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Communications Network ◽  
Southern Cameroon ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Communications System

AbstractThe flag post mail relay runners, a communications system established in Cameroon during British colonial rule, laid the foundations for the communications structure of this colonial state. They were a remnant of a pre-colonial communications system and, with the advancement of “modern” communications structures such as roads, telephone lines, and post houses, the flag post runner gradually disappeared. This article explores the role of the runners for the colonial administration in Cameroon and is based mostly on archival research. It describes the runners’ system and how it influenced the colonial communications landscape. In addition, the questions of how these runners were involved in the colonial state and what forms of resistance emerged among runners are analysed. Finally, the article discusses the degree to which the subsequent construction of roads, telegraphic communications, and postal networks reflected the role played by mail runners in the British colonial period up to the 1950s.

Bringing Order to Chaos: The Appropriation of Maithili by Colonial State, c 1870s–1940s

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-246
Author(s):  
Sneha Jha
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Colonial Policies ◽  
The Government

This article, through the use of several surveys, grammar books and articles on language written by colonial officials, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has explored how language became an instrument in the exercise of colonial power in Bihar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the case of a particular language Maithili, spoken in the Mithila region of Bihar, the paper has engaged with the suggestion by Bernard S. Cohn that the history of language can help us understand the mechanism of power in a colonial context. The aspirations of the rulers, as well as the intended and unintended implications caused by such experiments, are worth examining. They would help us answer many general questions about colonial policies and power – not just on the theme of language – such as the following: How does one situate the understanding of the rulers while writing a history of colonialism? How do different debates among the colonial administrators shape the policies of the government, and what does that tell us about the nature of colonial rule? How does one see the role of the ‘native’, both as an informant as well as the subject of study? How does one read the native agency?

Lyric Population and the Prospects of Police

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-160
Author(s):  
Sal Nicolazzo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Legal Subjectivity ◽  
Global War

This chapter offers a new reading of vagrancy in early Romantic poetry. By reading the poetry of Mary Robinson against the backdrop of police reform and vagrancy law at the end of the eighteenth century, it proposes a turn away from lyric or legal subjectivity in order to see other crucial poetic valences of what can be termed “Romantic vagrancy.” Robinson not only pushes one to reconsider a literary-historical narrative that has long been dominated by William Wordsworth, but also offers an engagement with vagrancy that theorizes law and lyric as intersecting precisely where legal persons and lyric subjects disappear. Tracing how Robinson's collection brings rural English poverty into the same frame as global war, the scandal of destitute Asian sailors stranded in London by the East India Company, the Sierra Leone colonization project, and the role of police reformers in reshaping dockside labor in London, the chapter argues that poetic vagrancy allows one to understand its most iconic recurring image — the dispossession of the rural English poor — as an optic for invoking vast scales and distant populations. Vagrancy's relation to police, especially as a mode of governmentality that spanned scales from local to global, is in fact crucial to its poetic redeployment.

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