Authority, accountability and representation: the United Provinces police and the dilemmas of the colonial policeman in British India, 1902–39*

2003 ◽  
Vol 76 (192) ◽  
pp. 217-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Campion
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Exchange ◽  
British India ◽  
Police Service ◽  
Police Administration ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Important Link ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Indian Police Service ◽  
United Provinces

Abstract This article examines police administration and the experience of colonial policing in the villages and towns of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, one of the largest and most important regions of British India in the early twentieth century. During this time it was the inefficiency and weakness of the British in their policing methods, rather than the brutally effective use of the Indian Police Service, that fuelled resentment among the population of colonial India and led to widespread discontent among European and Indian officers and constables. Yet throughout this period, the police remained the most important link between Europeans and Indians, and were a frequent conduit for social exchange as well as a point of bitter conflict.

scholarly journals Politicized Literature: Dramas, Democracy and the Mysore Princely State

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-58
Author(s):  
Vijayakumar M. Boratti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Social ◽  
Princely State

Literary writings such as poetry, drama or novel in colonial India manifest themselves into, react or subscribe to the larger discourse of colonialism or nationalism; rarely do they hold uniformity in their articulations. As colonial experiences and larger nationalist consciousness varied from region to region, cultural articulations—chiefly dramas—not only assumed different forms but also illustrated different thematic concerns. Yet, studies on colonial drama, thus far, have paid attention to either colonialism/orientalism or nationalism. There is a greater focus on British India in such studies. However, the case of princely states demands a momentary sidestep from the dichotomy of colonialism versus nationalism to understand the colonial dramas. The slow and gradual entry of nationalism in the princely states did not have to combat the British chiefly and directly. Much before its full blossom in the princely states, it had to grapple with a range of issues such as monarchy, democratic institutions, constitutionalism, bureaucracy and other pressing issues locally. In the present article, the Kannada dramas of Devanahalli Venkataramanaiah Gundappa (DVG) in the early decades of the twentieth century are examined to throw light on the ways in which they act as political allegories which imagine and debate democracy and its repercussions in the social and political spheres of the Mysore princely state.

scholarly journals Stimulation, Segregation and Scandal: Geographies of Prostitution Regulation in British India, between Registration (1888) and Suppression (1923)

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1459-1505 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN LEGG
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Government ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Contagious Diseases ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Military ◽  
Indian Cities

AbstractThis paper explores the regulation of prostitution in colonial India between the abolition of the Indian Contagious Diseases Act in 1888 and the passing of the first Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act in 1923. It challenges the commonly held assumption that prostitutes naturally segregated themselves in Indian cities, and shows that this was a policy advocated by the Government of India. The object was to prevent the military visiting these segregated areas, in the absence of effective Cantonment Regulations for registering, inspecting, and treating prostitutes. The central government stimulated provincial segregation through expressing its desires via demi-official memoranda and confidential correspondence, to which Rangoon and Bombay responded most willingly. The second half of the paper explores the conditions, in both India and Ceylon, that made these segregated areas into scandalous sites in the early twentieth century. It situates the brothel amongst changing beliefs that they: increased rather than decreased incidents of homosexuality; stimulated trafficking in women and children; and encouraged the spread of scandalous white prostitutes ‘up-country’, beyond their tolerated location in coastal cosmopolitan ports. Taken alongside demands that the state support social reform in the early twentieth century, segregation provided the tipping point for the shift towards suppression from 1917 onwards. It also illustrates the scalar shifts in which central-local relations, and relations between provinces, in government were being negotiated in advance of the dyarchy system formalized in 1919.

A Women’s Tradition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indian Woman ◽  
British India ◽  
Major Phase ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Third ◽  
Common Thread ◽  
The Common ◽  
Women's Tradition ◽  
Nepali Women

Chapter 5 examines the third and last major phase of narrative expansion of the Svasthānīvratakathā in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The common thread of these narratives is a sustained focus on women. Specifically, there was an entrenching of the “traditional” pativratā ideal in nineteenth-century Svasthānīvratakathā texts. Concurrently, the pativratā figure became the object of social and religious debates and reforms in British India. The chapter explores the degree to which the emergence of the “women’s question” and the “new patriarchy” in colonial India that gave rise to a vision of a modern, educated Hindu Indian woman influenced a reinvigorated emphasis on the pativratā ideal in Nepal as a signifier of Nepali Hindu identity. The chapter introduces many of the women-focused narratives, which today raise the question of Nepalis’ understanding of the Svasthānīvratakathā as a women’s tradition. Contemporary perspectives are explored through the voices of Nepali women and men.

scholarly journals Book Review: Deepak Kumar and Raj Sekhar Basu, eds, Medical Encounters in British India; Samiksha Sehrawat, Colonial Medical Care in North India: Gender State and Society c. 1840–1920; Poonam Bala, ed., Contesting Colonial Authority: Medicine and Indigenous Responses in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century India; and Madhuri Sharma, Indigenous and Western Medicine in Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-116
Author(s):  
Madhwi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
North India ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
State And Society

Deepak Kumar and Raj Sekhar Basu, eds, Medical Encounters in British India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013, 329 pp.; Samiksha Sehrawat, Colonial Medical Care in North India: Gender State and Society c. 1840–1920, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013, 292 pp.; Poonam Bala, ed., Contesting Colonial Authority: Medicine and Indigenous Responses in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century India, Delhi: Primus Books, 2016, 158 pp.; and Madhuri Sharma, Indigenous and Western Medicine in Colonial India, Delhi: Foundation Books, 2012, 177 pp.

cAbdullah Yūsuf cAlī & Muhammad Asad: Two Approaches to the English Translation of the Qur'an

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Iqbal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
British India ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Political Milieu ◽  
The Times

This article attempts to present a comparative study of the role of two twentieth-century English translations of the Qur'an: cAbdullah Yūsuf cAlī's The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'ān and Muḥammad Asad's The Message of the Qur'ān. No two men could have been more different in their background, social and political milieu and life experiences than Yūsuf cAlī and Asad. Yūsuf 'Alī was born and raised in British India and had a brilliant but traditional middle-class academic career. Asad traversed a vast cultural and geographical terrain: from a highly-disciplined childhood in Europe to the deserts of Arabia. Both men lived ‘intensely’ and with deep spiritual yearning. At some time in each of their lives they decided to embark upon the translation of the Qur'an. Their efforts have provided us with two incredibly rich monumental works, which both reflect their own unique approaches and the effects of the times and circumstances in which they lived. A comparative study of these two translations can provide rich insights into the exegesis and the phenomenon of human understanding of the divine text.

Public Finance and Personal Law in Late Colonial India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Newbigin
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Income Tax ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Personal Income Tax ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Personal Law

This chapter considers the ways in which the fiscal demands of representative government, and specifically the development of a direct, personal income tax, impacted legal subjecthood during India’s transition to Independence. It shows how early twentieth-century understandings of economic value and public finance were embedded into Indian society and legal system through discussions about personal law. This had particular consequences for Hindu personal law, which, under pressure from a centrally administered income tax regime, was re-imagined as a singular, homogeneous all-Indian legal system in ways that rendered the Hindu joint family synonymous with the representative and fiscal structures of the Indian state.

Reinventing Ramanand: Caste and History in Gangetic India

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Pinch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
North India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
History Of

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.

Utilitarianism and the Criminal Law in Colonial India: A Study of the Practical Limits of Utilitarian Jurisprudence

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 739-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kartik Kalyan Raman
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
British India ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Penal Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Common Observation ◽  
The One

The role of legal tradition in the reformist rhetoric of Benthamite Utilitarianism presents us with a contradiction. On the one hand, there is the common observation that Utilitarian jurisprudence was necessarily ahistorical and rejected the past as a source of concepts for reworking the criminal justice system existing in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For philosophic reformers such as Bentham, contemporary British criminal justice was to be replaced by a scientific jurisprudence, abstract, universal, and secular in outlook, and antipathetic to the more conservative insistence that the foundations of the penal law continue to be tradition-based. ‘If society was to see any improvement, its law must be reformed; if its law was to be reformed it must be burned to the ground and rebuilt according to a new and rational pattern.’ On the other hand, we find that the very same Utilitarian thinkers, in works describing the state of the law in British India, were concerned with local rather than universal conceptions of criminality. In his 1782 Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation, Bentham, for instance, urged the philosophic reformer to temper change in India by fitting Utilitarian judgments about the law to the frames of local society.

Jainism in Danger? Temple entry and the rhetoric of religion and reform in post-colonial India

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
MANISHA SETHI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Open The Doors ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract A bitter debate broke out in the Digambar Jain community in the middle of the twentieth century following the passage of the Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act in 1947, which continued until well after the promulgation of the Untouchability (Offences) Act 1955. These laws included Jains in the definition of ‘Hindu’, and thus threw open the doors of Jain temples to formerly Untouchable castes. In the eyes of its Jain opponents, this was a frontal and terrible assault on the integrity and sanctity of the Jain dharma. Those who called themselves reformists, on the other hand, insisted on the closeness between Jainism and Hinduism. Temple entry laws and the public debates over caste became occasions for the Jains not only to examine their distance—or closeness—to Hinduism, but also the relationship between their community and the state, which came to be imagined as predominantly Hindu. This article, by focusing on the Jains and this forgotten episode, hopes to illuminate the civilizational categories underlying state practices and the fraught relationship between nationalism and minorities.

Book review: Sujata Mukherjee, Gender, Medicine, and Society in Colonial India: Women’s Health Care in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Bengal

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-456
Author(s):  
Bikash Das
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women’S Health ◽  
Women's Health ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Gender Medicine ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Women's Health Care ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Sujata Mukherjee, Gender, Medicine, and Society in Colonial India: Women’s Health Care in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), xxxv + 223 pp.

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