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This article proposes a study of the novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006), by contemporary Indian-born writer Kiran Desai, by exploring some of the practices of colonialism and coloniality depicted in the novel. The Inheritance of Loss is a non-linear narrative, organized in fragments, that portrays the lives of Indian characters that belong to different generations and backgrounds. This paper aims at analyzing passages from the first decades of the 20th century that picture the British rule over India, some of the practices of colonialism introduced by the colonizers and the coloniality that permeates the Anglicized Indian character Jemubhai Patel in the novel. This paper emphasizes a fundamental strategy of colonialism used by the British rule in India which was the introduction of the English language and culture in that country. Homi Bhabha (1994), Gauri Viswanathan (1995), Elleke Boehmer (2005), Aníbal Quijano (2007), Walter D. Mignolo (2012), Robert J. C. Young (2015) are part of the theoretical framework that supports the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows the careers of ‘outlawed’ Indian Muslim subjects who moved outside the geographical and political space of British India and located themselves at the intersection of nineteenth century trans-Asiatic politics: Hijaz, Istanbul and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and Burma and Acheh in the East. These areas were sites where ‘modern’ Empires (British, Dutch, Ottoman and Russian) coalesced to lay out a trans-Asiatic imperial assemblage. The paper shows how Muslim ‘outlaws’ made careers and carved out their transnational networks by moving across the imperial assemblages of the nineteenth century. British colonial rule, being an important spoke in the imperial wheel, enabled much of this transnationalism to weld together. Webs of connections derived from older forms of Islamic connectivity as well: diplomacy, kinship ties, the writing of commentaries on Islam and its sacred texts in unique ways, oral traditions, madrasa and student contacts. These networks were inclusive and impacted by the tanzimat-inspired scriptural reformist thought in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. They were not narrowly anti-colonial in tone as they derived from a complex inter-play of imperial rivalries in the region. Rather, they were geared towards the triumph of reformist Islam that would unite the umma (community) and engage with the European world order. The paper shows how this imperially-embedded and individual-driven Muslim transnational network linked with Muslim politics rooted within India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1914, the Indian Army was deployed against the enemies of the British Empire. This paper analyses the administrative mechanism as well as the imperial assumptions and attitudes which shaped the recruitment policy of the Indian Army during the First World War. From the late nineteenth century, the Martial Race theory (a bundle of contradictory ideas) shaped the recruitment policy. With certain modifications, this theory remained operational to the first decade of the twentieth century. The construction of the ‘martial races’ enabled the British to play-off different communities against each other to prevent the emergence of a unified anti-British sentiment among the colonized. During the Great War, faced with the rising demands of manpower, the army was forced to modify the Martial Race theory. However, a conscript army did not emerge in British-India. This was due to imperial policies, the inherent social divisions of Indian society, and because the demands for military manpower remained relatively low in comparison to India's demographic resources. Due to innovations in the theory and praxis of recruitment, the volume of recruitment showed a linear increase from 1914 to 1918, with maximum intensification of recruitment occurring during 1917 and 1918. But as the war ended in November 1918, despite the entry of several new communities, the bulk of the Indian Army still came from the traditional martial races. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a gendered perspective to British domination in India through the British Indian Army—which in many ways was central to their entire structure of economic and political domination in India. Locating its understanding drawn from the political economy of south-east Punjab, it argues that the designated martial castes and military recruitment structurally and ideologically identified with and privileged those trends of existing masculinities in this region which suited their power structure and empire building. It was a constellation of marital caste status, land ownership, dominant caste syndrome and good bodily physique or physical strength that ideologically came to connect and configure dominant masculinity in colonial Punjab. An Army profession fully supported it. During the two world wars it emerged as the militarized masculinity, amply supported by legal and administrative measures introduced or apparently adopted in deference to certain popular cultural practices. The associated economic and political privileges turned ‘loyalty’ into an inherent and special ingredient of ‘masculinity’ which the nationalists had to confront and deal with till such times that it came to be firmly linked with nationalism and patriotism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper engages with Freud's theorisation of the uncanny to argue that the Anglo-Indian community occupies a position as India's unheimlich. Although familiar to the Indian nation, the community is alienated from it through narrative processes that construct the nation as progressive and independent from British colonial power. Dominant narratives of the Indian nation are strongly marked both by the anti-colonial Indian nationalism which characterised the freedom struggle and the repression of the 'effects' of British colonialism, including Partition and the existence of the Anglo-Indian community. I explore the ways Gothic strategies are often employed to signify Anglo-Indians as India's uncanny, and assert that such representation highlights the return of that which is repressed in the narration of the nation whilst highlighting the anxieties the community produces for the purportedly homogeneous and coherent Indian nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay assesses the impact of imperial culture, particularly constructions of India and hinduism, on British responses to the Indian nationalist movement in the 1930s. The essay draws on personal and governmental papers, paying special attention to the language and vocabulary employed by British policy makers concerned with Indian affairs. The major issue addressed here is the British presumption that the 1935 Government of India Act, a plan for a federated India with British central control, would defuse nationalist agitation. Such a sanguine view of this proposal seemed misplaced, given the popular success of the nationalists, especially Gandhi, and given the explicit demands of Indians for full self-government. However, such an optimistic assessment drew on presumptions about Indian political and social behaviour, and especially on conceptions of hinduism. Policy makers in Britain and India argued along well-established lines, that hinduism inculcated moral and physical weakness, among other deficiencies, and that a British offer of compromise would attract many Indians who feared continuing confrontation with the Raj. Moreover, colonial advisors relied on a belief that social and caste divisions within hinduism would recur within the nationalist ranks as well. This sense that Indians would respond to half-measures of reform persisted until the 1937 provincial elections. Though British administrators predicted only a moderate showing by the Indian National Congress, the polling proved otherwise, as Congress took power in the majority of the provinces. The Raj lasted another decade, but the confident cultural assumptions sustaining it took a fatal blow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]