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.

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.

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.

Linguistic Movements and Political Heterogeneity: Rethinking Unification Movement across British and ‘Princely’ Karnataka

2021 ◽  
pp. 239386172110541
Author(s):  
Vijayakumar M. Boratti
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
British India ◽  
The South ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The North ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Heterogeneous Nature ◽  
Political Differences

Subsequent to the Partition of Bengal in 1905, the consolidation of linguistic identities and movements emerged as an important assertion of core democratic values, positing that governance must be in a language intelligible to the majority. Like other linguistic movements in late-colonial India, the Karnataka Ekikarana (Karnataka unification) movement did not proceed with a spatially uniform logic nor followed a uniform temporality in realising its objectives of uniting Kannada speakers from disparate sub-regions. Attempting to reconcile elite literary ambitions, popular aspirations and political differences, the movement shifted gears through several phases as it worked across multiple territorial jurisdictions and political systems, including the demarcations of British India and princely India. Focussing on the period between 1860 and 1938, the present article examines the heterogeneous nature of the unification movement across British-Karnataka and two Kannada-speaking princely states, namely, Mysore in the south and Jamakhandi in the north. It explores the ways in which the ruling family of ‘model’ Mysore sought legitimacy in embracing their Kannada heritage; in contrast, the Jamakhandi rulers resisted any concession to Kannada linguistic sentiments. The article shows how, in arriving at monolingually indexed territorial entities, the bridging of ‘internal’ frontiers across these divergent political and linguistic contours proved just as crucial as the claiming of dominance over other language groups within an intensely polyglot world.

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.

From Orientals to Imagined Britons: Baghdadi Jews in Shanghai

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 999-1023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Betta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Safe Haven ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
The City

Studies and reminiscences, which dissect the communities of the Baghdadi trade diaspora, have so far tended to over-emphasize the smooth Anglicization process experienced by Baghdadi Jews in British India, Singapore and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The myth of the Sassoons as the ‘Rothschilds of the East’ has, in particular, distorted and enhanced the representation of Baghdadi Jews as wealthy, Anglicized and thoroughly integrated in British social circles. In reality, if we want to unravel the multi-layered history of Baghdadi Jews from India to Japan we must not only analyse in depth the complexities of the westernization process of the Baghdadi upper classes but also reconstruct carefully class divisions within Baghdadi communities. With this aim in mind, this essay will investigate the various strands of identity developed by Baghdadis during their stay in Shanghai and will especially focus on the local allegiances forged between Baghdadi and British settlers, the so-called Shanghailanders. The following pages will, at the same time, delineate the social structure of the Baghdadi community in Shanghai and will indicate that westernized affluent Baghdadis were forced to confront painfully their own ‘other’: destitute vagrant co-religionists who hailed from the Middle East and India and roamed between the various nodes of the Baghdadi diaspora. The period considered in this essay stretches from 1845, the year the first Baghdadi trader set foot in the city, to the middle of the 1930s when large numbers of Jewish refugees from Europe started to flock to Shanghai in search of a safe haven.

Ecology, Gender and Social Crises: North Bengal in 1896–1897 Famine

2021 ◽  
pp. 2455328X2110389
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relief Operations ◽  
The Government ◽  
North Bengal

The present article deals with the ecology and social aspects of famine of 1896–1897 in north Bengal. Ecological issues were no less important to convert the drought or scarcities into famines, even though the human agencies played a crucial role towards the intensification of the famines in colonial India. Famines had provided a major blow to the social ecology of dependency and survival, which were critically manifested through the transformation of existing social norms and cultural values, especially for the women. The responses of women towards the emerging social crises and to the government relief operations were mixed with hesitancy and desperateness, which was further influenced by changing norms of feminine ‘modesty’ and ‘values’. Thus the gendering of famine is deeply rooted in the cultural response of women to the natural disasters, and north Bengal remained as a principal site of gendered response where the women attitude towards the 1896–1897 famine can be best understood.

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 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.

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