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.

scholarly journals TRANSFORMATIONS OF BYRON IN THE LITERATURE OF BRITISH INDIA

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-593
Author(s):  
Máire ní Fhlathúin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

This essay examines the receptionof Byron's work, and some responses to it, among the poets of the British community in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. The first section sketches some of the routes by which Byron's work and accounts of his life were circulated and read in India and demonstrates the impact of his work on the poets of British India. These poets co-opted Byronic texts into their own writings in the form of epigraphs and other citations and allusions, composed responses to Byron and his work, and imitated the tropes, formats and themes of Byron's poetry. The second section of the essay looks in more detail at selected examples of the many adaptations and imitations of Byron's work that proliferated during this period. In these poems, Byronic models are appropriated by writers whose chosen professions or relationships have the effect of aligning them with the colonial project of the East India Company. They re-imagined the encounter with the romanticized Orient that characterizes many of Byron's works in response to the specific political and cultural contexts of British India in the nineteenth century.

Are Subaltern Studies Postmodern or Postcolonial? The Politics and Sensibilities of Geohistorical Locations

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Mignolo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Many

This chapter discusses South Asian subaltern studies as well as their adaptation by Latin Americanist historian Florencia Mallon and by the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. It is important to keep in mind the differences between the original projects of South Asian Subaltern Studies Group formulated in terms of querying the “historic failure of the nation to come to its own” and of making clear that, “it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India.” Although one can say that it is this problematic that engages Mallon's and the Latin American Group's adaptation, in both cases, there is a lack of attention to the fact that Latin America is not a country—like postpartition India—and that the many countries of Latin America obtained their independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century and not in 1947.

Islamic Identities in Colonial India

2018 ◽  
pp. 14-53
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British India ◽  
The South ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Subject ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter introduces many of the groups that will form the subject of this book and charts their emergence and development in conditions of British colonial rule. It shows that the traditionalist orientations that enjoy great prominence in the South Asian landscape began to take a recognizable shape only in the late nineteenth century, although they drew on older styles of thought and practice. The early modernists, for their part, were rooted in a culture that was not significantly different from the `ulama's. Among the concerns of this chapter is to trace their gradual distancing from each other. The processes involved in it would never be so complete, in either British India or in Pakistan, as to preclude the cooperation of the modernists and their conservative critics at critical moments. Nor, however, were the results of this distancing so superficial as to ever be transcended for good.

scholarly journals Constructing Native Homosexuality in British India

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Ruhnke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Moral Superiority ◽  
Previous Scholarship

In this paper I will examine how British constructions and criminalization of Indian homosexuality that evolved within the discourse of the imperial project. I will situate my discussion in the late nineteenth century, during which British colonists introduced anti-sodomy statutes to the Indian colony and homosexuality was socially and legally reconsidered in ways without precedent in pre-colonial India. By considering how Indian homosexuality was constructed in this colonial moment, we will be able to better understand the methods by which Britain asserted their colonial authority in nineteenth century India. In order to prove my claim, I will consider previous scholarship that has analyzed British Orientalist representations of Indian homosexuality, trials and testimonies under the anti-sodomy statute, Section 377 of the Indian Penal code, and the political and historical context of the late nineteenth century colonial moment in British India. Drawing upon this scholarship, I argue that British constructions and criminalization of Indian homosexuality served to emphasize the difference between native subjects and British rulers. I demonstrate that by associating “perverse” and “criminal” homosexual identity with native subjects, British rulers accentuated the divide between the ruler and the ruled, thus reinforcing their racial and moral superiority and, in turn, their colonial authority. 

Witnessing Space

2021 ◽  
pp. 2-14
Author(s):  
Andrea Polli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Spatial Data ◽  
Scientific Understanding ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Cosmic Scale ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Production Technologies

Significant advances in scientific understanding in the twentieth century pointed to a convergence of time and space, known as SpaceTime. Related scientific discoveries related to the nature of the cosmos invoked sound not only metaphorically but quite literally. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity changed the position of an observer from neutral to active. This position is consistent with an embodied experience of sound. Simultaneous to these scientific advances, developments in recording and production technologies gave artists the tools to explore sound in space, and to create in the intersectional spaces between art, geography, astronomy, and other sciences. In addition R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp, and others created a contemporary sound art movement that highlights the presence of the listener as inextricable to a soundscape experience. Many sound artists have created compelling immersive experiences for listeners through the audification and sonification of spatial data. Such works raise important questions: if sonic experience of space is embodied, how can space be understood through sound, especially that which is scaled much larger or smaller or of a duration much shorter or longer than that which we can experience with our bodies? How do affect, mood, and emotion influence our embodied understanding of sound in space? In this introductory chapter to this volume’s section on space and sound art, the author’s embodied experiences and interactions with scientists in Antarctica will serve as a background to a personal meditation on sound and space on a human, cosmic, and micro-cosmic scale.

scholarly journals Ethnology and colonial administration in nineteenth-century British India: the question of native crime and criminality

2003 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK BROWN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This paper examines the central role of ethnology, the science of race, in the administration of colonial India. This occurred on two levels. First, from the late eighteenth century onwards, proto-scientists and administrators in India engaged with metropolitan theorists through the provision of data on native society and habits. Second, these same agents were continually and reciprocally influenced in the collection and use of such data by the political doctrines and scientific theories that developed over the course of this period. Among the central interests of ethnographer-administrators was the native criminal and this paper uses knowledge developed about native crime and criminality to illustrate the way science became integral to administration in the colonial domain.

DARCY RIBEIRO UNIVERSITY CAMPUS MAP – 2017- TECHNICAL NOTE

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael Sanzio Araújo dos Anjos ◽  
Jose Leandro de Araujo Conceição ◽  
Jõao Emanuel ◽  
Matheus Nunes
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Data ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Technical Note ◽  
University Campus ◽  
Communication Tool ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Data Manipulation ◽  
Geographic Space ◽  
The Many ◽  
New Generation

The spatial information regarding the use of territory is one of the many strategies used to answer and to inform about what happened, what is happening and what may happen in geographic space. Therefore, the mapping of land use as a communication tool for the spatial data made significant progress in improving sources of information, especially over the last few decades, with new generation remote sensing products for data manipulation.

Mobility Stopped in Its Tracks

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharine Coleborne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
Poor White ◽  
White Immigrants ◽  
The Many ◽  
Interpretive Framework

This article examines the interpretive framework of “mobility” and how it might usefully be extended to the study of the Australasian colonial world of the nineteenth century, suggesting that social institutions reveal glimpses of (im)mobility. As the colonies became destinations for the many thousands of immigrants on the move, different forms of mobility were desired, including migration itself, or loathed, such as the itinerant lifestyles of vagrants. Specifically, the article examines mobility through brief accounts of the curtailed lives of the poor white immigrants of the period. The meanings of mobility were produced by immigrants' insanity, vagrancy, wandering, and their casual movement between, and reliance on, welfare and medical institutions. The regulation of these forms of mobility tells us more about the contemporary paradox of the co-constitution of mobility and stasis, as well as providing a more fluid understanding of mobility as a set of transfers between places and people.

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.

Hearing the Crimean War

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Black Sea Region ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document