World War I and Gendering of the Army in Colonial Punjab

This paper seeks to investigate the impulses that encouraged a ‘gendering’ process and its crystallization in colonial Punjab in relation to the masculine culture propagated by the institution of a military-martial structure by the British Raj. The imperial/colonial gender perceptions led to the creation of gendered spaces in a manner conforming to the masculine ideology of the army. This is highlighted through different aspects of the lives of both men and women – their struggles, works, contributions, dreams and politics – before, during and after the First World War (1914-18). As a result, there emerged amongst the soldiers’ new high-class martial castes, middle-class patriarchal structures, and ideological pillars keen on constructing and upholding ‘ideal masculinity’ and ‘safe femininity’. The paper argues that the process of ‘gendering’ took place at two levels. On the one hand, the army structure of the colonial state paved the way for military-martial culture to exist on extreme masculine lines and, on the other hand, this ‘high’ masculine ideology percolated in the society and presented itself in contrast to the women of the region by further relegating them to the feminine spaces. Thus, the society in colonial Punjab presented a layered martial structure, which, in turn, dichotomized the gender binary. The paper attempts to reveal such ‘gender’ realities and experiences witnessed by the region of Punjab. In this context, the operation of imperial power and the resistance of the colonized to it; the space that was denied to the disadvantaged gender – women – and; the changes they imbibed along with the history of the mutual roles of women and soldiers become crucial to understand the ‘gendering’ process.

Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano: A Legend and His Legacy

No honor befits a person who enjoys life without helping his country. What glory is entitled to a lazy person that the courageous man does not have? The head of a lazy person is not comparable to the nail of the strong; shame follows the pride of the lazy.2 Chief Isaac Delano discovered his intellectual mission during the colonial moment. The nature of the colonial state influenced his writings. The body of his work operated in a context of colonial-modernist state. The colonial power, in its imperialist/messianic philosophy and the quest to inscribe European ethos on other cultures, the colonized people of Nigeria, like others elsewhere, were told that the root to modernity was the European way of life. Tough it claimed to be liberal as it evolved from an already civilized society, “magnanimous” enough to spread the gospel truth of this civility and civilization to other societies still living far below their human potentials in their various crude and barbaric enclaves, it was not liberal enough to the extent of accommodating all indigenous cultural elements of the colonized people. Delano had to respond to the limitation of the colonial modernist project. Tus, for one to be qualified as being civilized—or call it “modern” if you like—is to be successful in the indoctrinated inevitability of combating every feature of one’s culture, values, and traditions to win the trophy of modernity.

Colonization through Municipalization: The Politics of Sanitation and Municipal Governance in the ‘Mofussils’ of Colonial Bengal, c. 1870–1940s

How does the state govern a territory which has rapidly grown to become one of the most densely populated regions of the province? How does the state account for the governance of a place which has only recently transitioned from a rural or a semi-rural tract to a town? Most importantly, how does the state govern a region where the main source of power resides with the proprietors of private enterprises? These were some of the questions the colonial state had to deal with when it was faced with the prospect of administering some of the most rapidly ‘urbanizing’ or expanding regions of Bengal. This included the industrial belt—the riparian municipalities of the districts of 24 Parganas and Hooghly—and the mining and railway junctions of Ranigunj and Asansol, which developed from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. How did their administration differ, if at all, from other mofussil municipalities which also had a semi-rural character? This article will examine these questions and try to understand how, through the process of municipalization, the colonial state was trying to control newer territories. It shall also analyse how local communities reacted to these attempts. This paper will argue that any attempt at improvement in these mofussil municipalities was hindered by alack of understanding, on the part of the provincial government, of the local socio-economic conditions and the ineffectiveness of the local self-government in these towns.

Dynamics of the policy environment and trauma in relations between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the settler-colonial state

This integrative review seeks to employ insights from critical social psychology and Indigenous nation building governance research to advance an explanation for why Australian state policy continually fails to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and reproduces trauma. The review suggests that settler-colonial law and policy embed a history of oppressive relations that suppress Indigenous voice, culture, and identity, inexorably leading to intergenerational traumatic social and wellbeing outcomes for Indigenous peoples. Given settler-colonial policy’s ongoing role in continuing the subordination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander law/lore, the ongoing policy failure to redress Indigenous inequality and improve their wellbeing is unsurprising. Nevertheless, our analysis contributes to understanding how just and viable relations between Australian Indigenous peoples and the settler-colonial state are possible through collaborative politics. Allowing space for agreement and disagreement in their worldviews, collaborative negotiations offer a way forward to redress policy failures and traumatic outcomes that are currently entrenched.

Artificial Intelligence from Colonial India: Race, Statistics, and Facial Recognition in the Global South

This article examines the history of a similarity measure—the Mahalanobis Distance Function—and its movement from colonial India into contemporary artificial intelligence technologies, including facial recognition, and its reapplication into postcolonial India. The article identifies how the creation of the Distance Function was connected to the colonial “problem” of caste and ethnic classification for British bureaucracy in 1920-1930s India. This article demonstrates that the Distance Function is a statistical method, originating to make anthropometric caste distinctions in India, that became both a technical standard and a mobile racialized technique, utilized in machine learning applications. The creation of the Distance Function as a measure of “similitude” at a particular period of colonial state-making helped to model wider categories of classification which have proliferated in facial recognition technology. Overall, we highlight how a measurement function that operates in recognition technologies today can be traced across time and space to other racialized contexts.

Keeping the master cool, every day, all day: Punkah-pulling in colonial India

This article studies how the distribution of the work of punkah-pulling in European households and barracks of colonial India involved European masters making gradually multiplying claims on their servants’ labouring time and how these claims fared in practice. The laborious task of punkah-pulling in such establishments was often resisted by native servants on counts of caste, custom or simply exhaustion. In the context of such conflicts, this article tries to understand how the colonial state and its legal and regulatory functions mediated the contested terrain of domestic and service work over the nineteenth century. Over the latter half of this century, punkah-pulling became a separate occupation, even as this occupation slid down the hierarchy of service work and became a more pronounced target of recurring racial violence. Against this background, the article also tries to grapple with the material limits encountered by the regimes of work involved in the cheap, day-and-night conduct of punkah-pulling that eventually led up to the acceptance of mechanised alternatives.

Colonial Modernity and Diffusion of Power: Identity and Community Formation among Mappilas of Malabar

This paper explores colonial modernity and the knowledge system’s role in constituting community formation among the Mappilas of Malabar. Colonial modernity, such as the introduction of printing, made this transformation more advanced and communitarian in structure. It also discusses colonialism as a force to reshape and bring socio-cultural changes in Malabar during the time. It argues that the existence of a clearly defined community is not a predetermined social fact; it looks at how the Mappilas were represented in an analytical category. In Malabar, the press and literature have played an essential role in framing community consciousness among Mappila society. Print media has brought a revolution in the transmission of knowledge. This paper will encompass the coming of the printing press and the moulding of community consciousness among the Mappilas of Malabar. It discusses the discursive and non-discursive practices of the colonial state for constructing various identities in Malabar.

Political Economy of Conquest

By the final decade of the eighteenth century, the political economy of conquest had crystalized into a distinctively recognizable modern form. Expanded scale of war-making created a need to surveil the financial operations of the colonial state. The changing valence of ‘corruption’ came to include a growing insistence on eliminating leakages from the financial flows that enabled conquest. Corruption was not merely a moral scourge but a structural flaw, which if left unresolved would drain the war-making capability of the early colonial regime. Financial accounts of the East India Company therefore had to be rendered legible to public scrutiny and parliamentary debate in the form of an annual India Budget. Colonial conquest captured the cultural imagination of metropolitan Britain – from painting and the Georgian stage to a new graphic scheme of statistical visualization – all sought to comprehend Britain’s territorial empire in South Asia. The growing appetite for war was fed by territorial conquest on an ever-expanding scale and transformed colonial warfare into the most fiscally impactful activity. An entire infrastructure of financial surveillance had to be created to organize warfare and conquest more efficiently. This edifice of control and scrutiny rested upon a growing appetite for reliable information about the financial health of the Indian empire and forecasting the dividends of territorial conquest.