Sanjay Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy and the Colonial State. North India in the Early Nineteenth Century

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 316-318
Author(s):  
Ravi Ahuja
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State

Reformism and Orthodox Practice in Early Nineteenth-Century Muslim North India: Sayyid Ahmed Shaheed Reconsidered

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-198
Author(s):  
SANA HAROON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North India ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The North ◽  
The Creation

AbstractThis paper is a reconsideration of the career of the north-Indian Sayyid Ahmed Shaheed (1786–1831). I argue that Sayyid Ahmed used a Sufi devotional premise to understand and explain principles of orthodoxy. He also applied a concept of innate spiritual knowledge to reformed practice, suggesting that ordinary people, without scholarly training, could determine and apply the principles of orthodox practice of Islam for themselves and for others. His movement modified traditional seminary-centred teaching and leadership through the creation of a popular and easily transferrable system of practice rooted in the community and imprinted with the obligation to spread reformist teachings.

scholarly journals Governors, Regents, and Rituals: an Exploration of Colonial Diplomacy in Ambon at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Diplomatica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94
Author(s):  
Philip Post
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Dutch Colonial

Abstract This article analyses how the Dutch colonial state in Ambon in the early nineteenth century tried to reestablish relations with local regents, making use of already existing protocols that were produced during the period of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (1602–1799). Engaging in colonial diplomacy was very important because the demise of the voc (1796) and two short periods of British rule in Ambon (1796–1803 and 1810–17) had shaken Dutch rule to its foundations. To reestablish its legitimacy with these local rulers, the colonial state made use of diplomatic protocols, documents and rituals which had been drawn up and negotiated by the voc. This article will focus on comparing the so-called “Instruction for the Regents,” which was drawn up in 1771 by a voc administrator, with one that was reissued in 1818 by the colonial state and will analyze a number of rituals and protocols which played an important role in defining the relationship between the governor and the regents.

Gender, Family, and the Policing of the ‘Criminal Tribes’ in Nineteenth-Century North India

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 1669-1711
Author(s):  
JESSICA HINCHY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Period ◽  
North India ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Central Target ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The Family ◽  
And Gender

AbstractIn the South Asian setting, the fields of gender history and family history are still predominantly concerned with relatively elite social groups. Few studies have examined issues of gender and the family in the history of Dalit, low-caste, and socially marginalized communities, especially those that were labelled ‘criminal tribes’ from the mid-nineteenth century on. This article explores the ways in which gender patterned criminalized communities’ experiences of everyday colonial governance under Part I of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in the first two decades that it was enforced in northern India. In this early period, the colonial government did not closely regulate marriage practices, domestic arrangements, or the gendered organization of labour within communities categorized as ‘criminal tribes’. Nevertheless, notions of sexuality and gender underlay colonial knowledge of the ‘criminal tribes’, which emerged in dialogue with middle-class Indian gender and caste politics. Moreover, the family unit was the central target of the CTA surveillance and policing regime, which aimed to produce ‘industrious’ families. Officially endorsed forms of labour had complex implications for criminalized communities in the context of North Indian gender norms and strategies of social mobility. Gender power dynamics also shaped criminalized peoples’ interpersonal, embodied interactions with British and Indian colonial officials on an everyday basis. Meanwhile, different forms of leverage and evasion were open to men and women to cope with their criminalization and so the colonial state was experienced in highly gendered ways.

‘A Character to lose’: Richard Goodlad, the Rangpur dhing, and the priorities of the East India Company's early colonial administrators

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-315
Author(s):  
JAMES LEES
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
State Structure ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Local Officials ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
North Bengal

AbstractThis article examines the conduct of Richard Goodlad, the East India Company's collector in Rangpur, north Bengal, upon the outbreak of a peasant rebellion in his district during 1783. It uses his reaction to this event to illustrate the nature of the Company's district bureaucracy and its relationship with the central colonial authorities in Calcutta during the later eighteenth century.The article considers the aims and limitations of the European officials who were sent out to administer Bengal's districts, detailing their priorities and practices within a weak and decentralised state structure. Ultimately it argues that the relationship between these local and central components of the colonial state was, prior to the Company's rise to subcontinental hegemony in the early nineteenth-century, profoundly shaped both by widespread military under-resourcing, and by the primacy of personal interest among its local officials.

Gurusand Gifting:Dana, themathreform campaign, and competing visions of Hindusangathanin twentieth-century India

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
MALAVIKA KASTURI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
North India ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After

AbstractFrom the early twentieth century, Hindu socio-religious and political bodies debated the use thatmaths(monastic establishments) made of their wealth, amassed in large part throughdana(socio religious gifts). From the early nineteenth century, Anglo Hindu law on inheritance, and thereafter the Religious and Charitable Endowments Acts, had enabled the autonomy ofmathsby classifying them as private religious corporations, not charitable endowments. This article suggests that themathreform campaign between 1920 and 1940 in north India was impelled by the preoccupations of heterogeneous Hindu political and socio-religious organizations withdanaand its potential to fund cultural and political projects regenerating an imagined Hindu socio-religious community. Specifically, the Hindu Mahasabha yokeddanato its Hindusangathan(unity) campaign to strategically craft an integrated ‘Hindu public’ transcendingsampraday(religious traditions) to protect its interests from ‘external enemies’. My discussion probes how the Hindu Mahasabha and its ‘reformist’ allies urged the conversion ofmathsinto public charitable trusts, or endowments accountable to an ephemeral ‘Hindu public’ and the regulation of their expenditure. Monastic orders,guru-based associations like the Bharat Dharma Mahamandala, and the majority of orthodox Hindus successfully opposed this campaign, defending the interests ofmathsandsampradaybefore and after independence. In so doing, they challenged Hindusangathanby articulating alternative visions of the socio-religious publics and communities to be revitalized through philanthropy. Through this discussion, the article charts the uneasy relationship between monasticism and an emerging Hindu nationalist cultural and political consciousness that remained fractured and internally contested.

Forgetting like a State in Colonial North-East India

2019 ◽  
pp. 223-248
Author(s):  
Thomas Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
State Building ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
North East India ◽  
North East ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Conventional Models

What if governing and "seeing" like a state is actually about forgetting and misdirecting as much as it is about accumulating and communicating? In the colonial north-east during the early nineteenth century, governing and knowing peoples and spaces relied not on flows of knowledge, but on intermittent and selective adaptations of previously formulated information. This was not simply a product of unintended shortcomings, but resulted from deliberate attempts by British administrators to ensure that knowledge did not easily traverse time and space. These "men on the spot" sought to make many of their activities opaque to outsiders, including their institutional superiors. Focusing on David Scott, the leading colonial official during and immediately after the British annexation of Assam, this chapter proposes that conventional models for understanding modern colonial state-building and knowledge production do not fit this region. It argues that governing and comprehending the early colonial north-east emerged as much from creative engagements with myopia and amnesia as from clear-sighted and accumulative "state simplifications".

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