scholarly journals Monsters in the dark: the discovery of Thuggee and demographic knowledge in colonial India

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sagnik Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Mary Douglas ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
Western Imagination

The thugs have been one of the most lasting images in the portrayal of India in Western imagination. Although several scholars have questioned the authenticity of the information contained in the thug archive, that is, the corpus of colonial knowledge about the thugs, Martine van Wœrkens and Tihanyi (The strangled traveler: colonial imaginings and the thugs of India. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002) and Macfie (Rethinking Hist 12 (3):383–397, 2008) argue that the very phenomenon as it was known to the British, was an orientalist construct. However, though the orientalist and romantic genesis of the thug imagery has been well established, the precise nature, reasons, and implications of the same largely remain “terra incognita”. This article examines the discovery of the thugs and analyzes parts of the thug-archive through the concept of the monster as elaborated by Mary Douglas (Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge, New York, 1966), Victor Turner (“Betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites de passage”. The forest of symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967) and Michel Foucault et al. (Abnormal:lecturesattheColleg̀edeFrance,1974–1975.Picador,NewYork,2003),and establishes the thug as an epistemological monster emerging from the cracks and gaps in colonial information gathering mechanisms that arose as a result of the changing nature of the Indian “state” and the employment of alien categories for demographic knowledge pro- duction. The key question here is: how can we explain the sudden appearance of thugs in the colonial archive in the 1830s and the disproportionate interest of the administration in era- dicating them? This article analyzes the journalistic and legal discourse surrounding the thugs in the nineteenth century and tries to demonstrate how the notion of the “monster” can act as a methodological tool in explaining the efforts of the Thug Department. The argument is then concluded through an investigation into the implications of the discovery of the thugs for the teleology of Indian history and the consequence of “othering” tribal and other anomic populations in the new Weberian state that the colonial and post-colonial regimes envisioned to establish.

External Definition or Self-assertion of Separateness: Understanding Muslim Identity in Post-colonial India

Social Change ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-531
Author(s):  
Zubair Ahmad
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Public Philosophy ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Religious Aspects

Muslim identity like any other identity is discretely constituted, defined by language, religion, caste, class, sect and numerous other diverse roles. Such an understanding largely seems to have eluded the public philosophy of the post-colonial Indian state and what seems to have remained central to it is their exclusive definition in religious terms and an exclusive emphasis on their religious engagements. This paper looks at this external religious definition of the community and identifies this definition in the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ identity construction processes and interprets other important developments which have all compounded to shape a separate Muslim identity in India. It analyses the construction of Muslim identity and attempts to understand the separateness that they have exhibited in post-colonial India. The argument follows that Muslim identity in India has been externally defined with an emphasis on religious aspects and that their separateness remains a quintessential result of this external definition.

The Itinerant Library of Lala Lajpat Rai

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 121-139
Author(s):  
Chris Moffat
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Urban America ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Colonial Histories ◽  
First World

Abstract This essay traces the movements of a library from New York to Lahore in the wake of the First World War and then to Shimla and Chandigarh following the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. It explores how this collection of books, assembled by the anti-colonial nationalist Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), intersected with and informed key moments of political struggle in twentieth-century urban America and colonial India. The essay then considers the fate of Lajpat Rai’s library today, its place in twenty-first-century Punjab, and the questions it poses for historians interested in anti-colonial histories, post-colonial presents and the commemorative work (as well as enduring political questions) that bind them.

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.

‘Useful’ and ‘Earning’ Citizens? Gender, state, and the market in post-colonial Delhi

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (06) ◽  
pp. 1924-1955
Author(s):  
ANJALI BHARDWAJ DATTA
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
The State ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Disaster

AbstractThe Indian state treated the partition of Punjab as a ‘national disaster’ and training for refugee women was deemed essential to restore the social landscape; yet the kind of help it offered to refugee women rested on its clear assumptions and biases about the kind of work that was appropriate for them: women were offered training in embroidery, stitching, tailoring, and weaving, as these are associated with feminine and household-based skills. This article will reveal that the state rehabilitation enterprise was primarily masculine in focus. The state treated women refugees as secondary earners and as guardians of hearth, kith, and kin; it did not see them playing a definitive role in nation-building in post-colonial India. In the absence of state supportive policies, refugee women were compelled to take up informal jobs like petty trading, domestic service, and labouring work. This article suggests that refugee women were handicapped in the labour market at their very point of entry. It traces the history of women's informalities in Delhi. In doing so, it investigates the feminization and commercialization of urban space in twentieth-century Delhi. It urges that women made space in more than one way: identifying fragmentary livelihoods, producing small-scale capitalism, and creating informal markets.

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