Monument Preservation and the Vexing Question of Religious Structures in Colonial India

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indra Sengupta
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ancient Monuments ◽  
Vexing Question

The principles of conservation spelled out in the first law on preservation for the whole of India — the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904 — were indicators of the ways in which conservation policy was made in colonial India: determined by the state, and heavily influenced by principles of preservation derived from Europe, based on a specifically colonial understanding of India's history and heritage, and of the ‘guardianship’ role of the colonial state. Yet attempts to implement pre-colonial religious structures could have unforeseen results, as local, indigenous religious groups began to utilize the opportunities for funding opened up by the new Act and succeeded in using the provisions of the Act in ways that best suited their own interests. This chapter looks closely at the interface between preservation policy and practice in colonial India in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and calls into question colonial hegemony as an explanatory framework for understanding a complex process of cultural practice.

Sport and the Imperial Bond: The 1911 ‘All-India’ Cricket Tour of Great Britain

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 261-285
Author(s):  
Prashant Kidambi
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Summary This article explores the interplay of sport, politics and public diplomacy through a case study of the first ‘Indian’ cricket tour of Great Britain in 1911, an extraordinary venture peopled by an improbable cast of characters. Led by the young Maharaja Bhupindar Singh, the newly enthroned ruler of the princely state of Patiala, the team contained in its ranks cricketers who were drawn from different Indian regions and religious communities. The article examines the politics of this intriguing cricket tour against a wider backdrop of changing Indo-British relations and makes three key points. First, it suggests that the processes of ‘imperial globalization’ that were presided over by the British in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked an important epoch in the evolving relationship between sport and diplomacy. In particular, it highlights the role of sporting tours as instruments of public diplomacy in the age of empire. Second, it shows how the organization of the 1911 tour reflected the workings of a trans-national ‘imperial class regime’ that had developed around cricket in colonial India from the late nineteenth century onwards. Finally, the article considers the symbolic significance that came to be attached to the tour, both in imperial Britain and in colonial India.

The Facilitators I: Policing

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-105
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Structural Violence ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Government ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Legal Violence ◽  
Set Up

Focusing on the role of atrocity facilitators, particularly colonial officials and the British government, in the governmentalization of torture by the police and other officials in colonial India, this chapter examines the ways in which, following the transfer of India’s governance from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858, the extra-legal violence of torture became systematized as a technology of colonial rule. Beginning with an analysis of what led to the perpetration of torture by state officials, the existence of which had long been known in both India and Britain, to erupt into scandal in 1854, the chapter interrogates how the commission set up to investigate torture led to the emergence of a new facilitatory discourse that served both to deny the existence of torture and the structural violence that underpinned it, as well as to displace blame for it from the colonial regime to its Indian subordinates. The chapter further explores how police reform in the commission’s aftermath was designed not to eradicate torture or ensure the welfare of the Indian populace but to safeguard the coercive and terrorizing powers of the colonial 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.

The Origins of Ethnic Activism: Caste Politics in Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-179
Author(s):  
Alexander Lee
Keyword(s):  
Group Size ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Ethnic Mobilization ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Caste Politics ◽  
Caste Groups

AbstractExisting accounts of ethnic mobilization have focused on the role of group size or state policy. This paper suggests that narrow identity activism was also non-linearly related to education since poorly-educated groups are unlikely to have an educated elite to participate in activism, while in very educated groups this elite existed but participated in the colonial state or anti-colonial nationalism. This theory is tested using a historical panel dataset of Indian caste groups, with petitions to the colonial census authorities being used as an index of caste activism.

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.

Bringing Order to Chaos: The Appropriation of Maithili by Colonial State, c 1870s–1940s

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-246
Author(s):  
Sneha Jha
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Colonial Policies ◽  
The Government

This article, through the use of several surveys, grammar books and articles on language written by colonial officials, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has explored how language became an instrument in the exercise of colonial power in Bihar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the case of a particular language Maithili, spoken in the Mithila region of Bihar, the paper has engaged with the suggestion by Bernard S. Cohn that the history of language can help us understand the mechanism of power in a colonial context. The aspirations of the rulers, as well as the intended and unintended implications caused by such experiments, are worth examining. They would help us answer many general questions about colonial policies and power – not just on the theme of language – such as the following: How does one situate the understanding of the rulers while writing a history of colonialism? How do different debates among the colonial administrators shape the policies of the government, and what does that tell us about the nature of colonial rule? How does one see the role of the ‘native’, both as an informant as well as the subject of study? How does one read the native agency?

REINVENTINGIMBALUAND FORCIBLE CIRCUMCISION: GISU POLITICAL IDENTITY AND THE FIGHT FOR MBALE IN LATE COLONIAL UGANDA

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-379
Author(s):  
PAMELA KHANAKWA
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Separate Entity ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Ethnic Tensions ◽  
District Council ◽  
Ethnic Competition ◽  
The Town

ABSTRACTUgandan colonial authorities carved Bugisu and Bukedi districts out of Mbale district in 1954, isolating Mbale town as a separate entity. With ethnic tensions escalating as independence approached, Gisu and Gwere fought for Mbale's ownership. Empowered by decentralisation, Bugisu District Council pressed the colonial state to declare Mbale part of Bugisu, viewing the town as key to the region's wealth, and providing a symbolic status similar to that enjoyed by Uganda's leading ethnic groups. Gisu activists reinvented tradition as a tool of political advocacy, exerting hyper-masculine power over Mbale's non-circumcising Gwere residents through forcible circumcision. Gisu reformulation of a cultural practice within an urban struggle challenges previous categorisations of the Mbale case as merely another local obstacle to Uganda's peaceful decolonisation. Evidence analysed in this article contributes to a new understanding of East Africa's uneasy transition to self-government, and to the role of ethnic competition within late-colonial mobilisations more broadly.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Images ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Advocacy Role ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.

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