“In that One the Ālif is Missing”: Eunuchs and the Politics of Masculinity in Early Colonial North India

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-116
Author(s):  
Nicholas Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Successor State ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Bodily Difference

AbstractAlthough ostensibly gendered as men and frequently maintaining independent, patriarchal households, enslaved eunuchs (khwājasarās) in pre- and early colonial regimes in South Asia were often mocked for their supposed effeminacy, bodily difference, and pretensions to normative masculinity. In the Mughal successor state of Awadh (1722-1856), such mockery grew more pronounced in the wake of growing financial demands from the British East India Company and attempts by eunuchs to alienate property with wills and testamentary bequests. Through examples of verbal derision directed at eunuchs, this essay shows that not only did ideas of normative masculinity serve as a vehicle for Awadh’s rulers to defend their sovereign authority from colonial encroachment, but that notions of normative manhood continued to inform eunuchs’ own self-perception into the nineteenth century.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 235-242
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Military Spending ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Executive Authority ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Colonial Order

The early colonial order gave way to a recognizably extractive and coercive colonial rule which stretched across the long nineteenth century. Scholarly debates about the overlap between the late colonial and postcolonial polities in twentieth century South Asia have generally not traced the antecedents of an institutional structure of governance that commits scarce resources and political will in expensive projects of military aggrandizement. The disdain for civilian bodies/rule, placing military spending beyond the purview of public debate, unchecked executive authority in war-making, violent assertion of sovereign authority, aggressively defined borders, special bodies of law and zones of exception where civil rule and liberties are declared to be inapplicable—owe much to the deep structures of early colonial rule.

Translating the Scribe: Lithographic Print and Vernacularization in Colonial India, 1857–1915

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
North India ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.

Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-120
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Coercive Force ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Military Law ◽  
Military Discipline

This chapter seeks to analyze the changing meaning of ‘peace’ under an early colonial regime which was perpetually at war. ‘Peace’ in early colonial South Asia no longer meant the absence of conflict, but rather a period when problems of war assumed an urgent significance. From paying soldier’s arrears incurred during military conflicts to disciplining them in times when the Company state was not formally at war—‘peace’ was no longer the opposite of war. Rather it was the fleeting opportunity to re-tool the apparatus of colonial war-making. Conquest did not occur in a legal vacuum. This chapter analyses debates about military law and its significance for the early colonial regime’s claims to sovereign authority. Jurisdictional jockeying between competing sources of law went well beyond the need to maintain military discipline. Examining these debates opens up an unexplored world in which we can understand important questions relating to the territoriality of early colonial rule, the legal personality of the Company state and efforts to compare Britain’s garrisoning of Ireland with the organization of coercive force in South Asia.

The Chinese Repository and Western Literature on China 1800 to 1850

1973 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth L. Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
British East India Company

In the first decades of the nineteenth-century Western missionary activity, like the opium trade, was prohibited by the Chinese government. The Protestant missionaries, however, could not equal the independent opium traders in their evasion of the Chinese authorities. As well, they had to contend with the opposition of the British East India Company, which theoretically monopolized Anglo-Chinese commerce at Portuguese Macao.

scholarly journals Transacting Business through/for Others in Early Colonial Western India: The Text, Context, and Meaning of a Mukhtār-nāma of 1821

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 640-659
Author(s):  
Ghulam A. Nadri
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Western India ◽  
Power Of Attorney ◽  
Business Transactions ◽  
Legal Instrument ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Text Context ◽  
Commercial Disputes

Abstract In the Persianate world, a mukhtār-nāma (deed of representation or a power of attorney) was a legal instrument that enabled people to transact business through a representative or agent (mukhtār or wakīl). This is a study of one such document written in Surat in 1821. It analyses the document for its socio-cultural, legal, and commercial significance as well as to explore the transition in the adjudication of commercial disputes and civil cases from Mughal to East India Company courts. It shows that there was a strong tradition of documenting business transactions in early modern South Asia and that such practices have continued into the colonial and postcolonial periods.

Imprimatur as Adversary: Press freedom and colonial governance in India, 1780–1823

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
RITIKA PRASAD
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Press Freedom ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Public Scrutiny ◽  
Public Critique

Abstract Examining cases of libel between 1780 and 1823, this article analyses how the theory and practice of press regulation and governmentality was initially articulated in colonial India, embodied in everyday transactions between the newly invented East India Company state and an emerging newspaper press. While Company officials recognized that scrutiny by a free press was central to establishing their fairly new claims to just governance and public legitimacy, they feared that public critique would destabilize the very sovereign authority that they sought to establish. Concerned with appearing arbitrary, officials developed strategies through which they could demand obedience without necessarily predicating it on censorship. Journalists derived much of their negotiating power from the early colonial state's vulnerability to public scrutiny, but they also knew that the state possessed extensive control over their livelihood. Cognizant of the power and constraints of colonial governmentality at this juncture, they produced their own mechanisms of permissible intransigence. This uneasy equilibrium generated the questions explored in this article: What rights of comment and critique practically accrued to newspapers? What was the legal authority of executive regulations censoring newspapers and how far were these enforceable? Why, in practice, did punishments remain strikingly similar across periods with and without formal censorship? The cases between 1780 and 1823 not only reveal the historical negotiations that structured this foundational—though somewhat marginalized—period of India's press history, but also explain the strategic shifts that followed as, in 1823, the fulcrum of crime and punishment turned away from press censorship and towards press licensing.

The Imperial Coronation of 1819: Awadh, the British and the Mughals

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Other ◽  
North India ◽  
Gangetic Plain ◽  
Indian History ◽  
The Face ◽  
English East India Company

The interaction among the expanding British, the regional rulers of the Gangetic plain, and Mughal Emperors stands central to Indian history during the first half of the nineteenth century. Each of these three groups determined to advance its own political and cultural values in the face of the conflicting expectations and assumptions of the other two. The English East India Company regarded itself as under the authority of the British Parliament and the sovereignty of the British crown. At the same time, the Company continued nominally to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Mughal Emperor, at least in India. The various regional rulers of north India, most prominently the rulers of the province of Awadh, acted and apparently perceived themselves as de facto independent of the Mughals while also symbolically submitted to Mughal sovereignty. The Mughal Emperors, whose power to command armies had faded to nothingness during the last half of the eighteenth century, continued to pretend to absolute sovereignty over virtually all of India until 1858. Each of these three groups wished to see the 1819 imperial coronation by the Awadh ruler as an overt proof of their own cultural values and of their understanding of their relationships to the others.

scholarly journals Palmer and Company: an Indian Banking Firm in Hyderabad State

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1157-1184 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN LEONARD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
British East India Company

AbstractAlthough the misreading of Hyderabad's early nineteenth century banking firm, Palmer and Company, as scandalous, illegal, and usurious in its business practices was contested at the time in Hyderabad, and at the highest levels of the East India Company in both Calcutta and London, such conspiracy theories have prevailed and are here challenged. The Eurasian William Palmer and his partner, the Gujarati banker, Benkati Das, are best understood as indigenous sahukars or bankers. Their firm functioned like other Indian banking firms and was in competition with them in the early nineteenth century as Hyderabad State dealt with the increasing power of the British East India Company and its man-on-the-spot, the Resident. Historians need to look beyond the English language East India Company records to contextualize this important banking firm more accurately.

Communications Between Cultures: Difficulties in the Design and Distribution of Christian Literature in Nineteenth-Century India

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 339-356
Author(s):  
Graham W. Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Well Being ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Christian Literature

The nineteenth century, saw the heyday of Protestant missionary activity in the Indian subcontinent. South Asia – even then with one fifth of the world’s population – was such a magnet for Christian missionaries that it was estimated that one-third of all such ‘labourers in foreign lands’ were operating there. This was despite the deliberate policy of the East India Company to discourage missionary activity in India (used throughout this paper in the old sense of ‘undivided India’) as liable to foment unrest and therefore upset theeconomichealth of the country which from the Company’s perspective was of paramount importance, not itsspiritualwell-being. This antipathy was the reason, for instance, why William Carey and colleagues founded their famous pioneering mission in 1798 not in Calcutta in the Company’s territory but further up the Hooghly river in the tiny settlement of Serampore then under Danish rule.

scholarly journals MATERIAL TURNS IN BRITISH HISTORY: II. CORRUPTION: IMPERIAL POWER, PRINCELY POLITICS AND GIFTS GONE ROGUE

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot C. Finn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
British History ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Material Politics ◽  
The Family ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Dynastic Politics

ABSTRACTThis address examines the ‘Old Corruption’ of Georgian Britain from the perspective of diplomacy and material culture in Delhi in the era of the East India Company. Its focus is the scandal that surrounded the sacking of Sir Edward Colebrooke, the Delhi Resident, during the reign of the penultimate Mughal emperor, Akbar II. Exploring the gendered, highly sexualised material politics of Company diplomacy in north India reveals narratives of agency, negotiation and commensurability that interpretations focused on liberal, Anglicist ideologies obscure. Dynastic politics were integral to both British and Indian elites in the nineteenth century. The Colebrooke scandal illuminates both the tenacity and the dynamic evolution of the family as a base of power in the context of nineteenth-century British imperialism.

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