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Shifts in writing technology are usually taken to mark a shift from discretionary to rule-bound, impersonal forms of government. Equating writing technology with rules, however, obscures how counterfeiting, both alleged and real, and the exertion of official discretion can consolidate a government of writing. In his important study of Yemeni scribal culture, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society, Brinkley Messick modifies Weberian models of domination by calling for the study of textual domination that intersects in diverse ways with other dimensions of authority. Messick relates the demise of the calligraphic state to the advent of legal codification and print technology. With the arrival of impersonal documents of government and a form of rational law, he argues, writing itself ceased to be the “non-arbitrary mark of the person” and the relationship between the sign and signified was no longer connected by an intermediary figure. Similarly, the notion that the innovations of disciplinary writing constituted a new assemblage of control exercised through the “unavoidable visibility of subjects” has been extremely productive in delineating the colonial career of modern infrastructural power. Following the work of Bernard Cohn, the colonial state's “investigative modalities” have been shown to be integral to colonial command and the production of an ever-accumulating corpus of reports. Statistical surveys, reports, and censuses in colonies did not create a uniform template of rule but did enable the operation of inherently selective, targeted, and differentially articulated projects of governance. These gains notwithstanding, the debates over colonial governance have remained limited to differing estimations of the state's successful mastery of information, and whether its taxonomies were collaboratively authored by intermediaries or imposed upon the colonized. We need to give more attention to the complex articulation of records and reports with the law under conditions of exogenous rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper examines the introduction of trained female nurses for the British army men in colonial India between 1888 and 1920. It discusses the genesis of the Indian Nursing Service (INS), including the background and negotiations leading up to its formation, terms of employment, duties and working conditions of the nursing sisters. The memoir of Catharine Grace Loch, who served as the first Chief Lady Superintendent of the service is used extensively to trace the early experiences and challenges of the nursing sisters. The paper primarily argues that the INS being a new service, the colonial government maintained tight control over its functioning, and extreme conservatism in spending, thus retarding the growth of professional army nursing in India. Secondly, in examining the relations between the sisters and the (male) nursing orderlies, sub-medical and medical officers, the paper argues that the inadequate delineation of the nursing sisters' position in the military medical hierarchy was an important reason for the undermining of their expertise and status. Thirdly, the paper contends that as an all-women service, nursing constituted an important avenue of female agency within the patriarchal colonial establishment, which subjected the sisters to scrutiny both professionally and socially. The paper analyses the resultant conditions and regulations imposed on the sisters – most of them determined by gender and class notions. Finally, the paper discusses the gradual establishment and recognition of the service as an important cornerstone for the health of the army, while highlighting the shortcomings that yet persisted up until 1920. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the intersection of the 19th and 20th century to bring into focus hitherto unused archival and diplomatic correspondence from the attempts to define and delimit a boundary between India and China. The theoretical point of departure for the paper is to discern how perception (knowledge, beliefs, and norms) relating to the boundary evolved over time to alter the meaning and construction of the material reality i.e. the boundary itself. In doing so it establishes how what each country deems today, as its 'traditional customary boundary' was not an unambiguous fixed one, but was mutable across different time periods. The political importance of the selection of these boundary lines did not lie in their being 'true', or in the claim being 'real' but in their being shared by a process of political selection, and then being reified in the respective countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the effective operation of money and credit among Europeans in Calcutta around 1800, arguing for the importance of informal processes and ties of friendship that facilitated, regulated, and enforced agreements, helping both to tide over individuals in times of economic stress and to underwrite the provision and transfer of capital. The argument is advanced by a detailed case-study of debts owed by one resident—Aaron Upjohn—to another, the diarist, Richard Blechynden, amid a web of acquaintance, officialdom, and law that variously ensured that the debts were honoured. It is defined as a support system among acquaintances, necessitated in part by shortage of money and abundance of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The creation of Assam as a new province in 1874 and the transfer of Sylhet from Bengal to Assam provided a new twist in the shaping of the northeastern region of India. Sylhet remained part of Assam from 1874 to 1947, which had significant consequences in this frontier locality. This paper re-examines archival sources on political mobilization, rereads relevant autobiographical texts, and reviews oral evidence to discover the ‘experienced’ history of the region as distinct from the ‘imagined’ one. The sub-text of partition (Sylhet) is more intriguing than the main text (Bengal), because events in Sylhet offer us a micro-level study. Generations of historians—writing mostly in Bengali and relying on colonial archives—have tended to overlook the mindset of the people of Sylhet. This paper, on the basis of an examination of combined sources, argues that the new province was implicated in overlapping histories, across Bengal-Assam borders. The voice of the indigenous—mostly Hindus but partly Muslim—elites were dominant from 1874 onwards. However, the underdogs—particularly ‘pro-Pakistani’ dalits (lower-caste Hindus) and madrasa-educated ‘pro-Indian’ maulvis—emerged as crucial players in the referendum of 1947. Hardly any serious study, however, has focused on the Sylhet referendum—a defining moment in the region. This study of the Sylhet referendum will reveal a new dimension to the multiple responses to these issues and provide a glimpse of the ‘communal psyche’ of the people in this frontier district, rather than a binary opposition between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ forces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the interaction between a religious leader, the Aga Khan, and a cluster of castes, the Khojas, in Colonial India. While scholars have usually investigated the Bombay judicial sources, claiming that the Aga Khan Case of 1866 put an end to dissent among the Khojas who rejected his authority, the Karachi judicial sources provide a new perspective on the issues. It will be argued that the so called dissenters were fighting for the autonomy of the Khojas as a caste that they were able to keep in turning to Isna ‘Ashari. Therefore, this paper deals with how the British colonials attempted to control the people of India through the courts, but also how Indian actors used the courts for reaching their goals. Furthermore, the religious discourse through which the claims were expressed was but a shell concealing economic pursuits as well as issues of social rank. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized—as passengers and population—negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper explores everyday responses to this dramatic change in ‘time-sense’ engendered through railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time. This allows for a historical analysis of how individuals and societies deal in practice with abstract technological transformations, and of how colonized populations have navigated the modernizing intervention of imperialist states. It argues that the ways in which the population of colonial India accepted, contested, and appropriated the temporal standardization instituted through railways and railway time challenged imperial policies determined by reified presumptions of metropolitan versus colonial ‘time-sense’. Since these responses were often analogous to how people and societies across the globe were responding to temporal standardization, they disrupt imperial strategies that used time-sense to locate colonized populations outside of History, in effect excluding them from their own present. They thus serve to materially de-stabilize a narrative of colonial time-lag and to reclaim the historical present as a time in which the colonizer and colonized exist contemporaneously. Consequently, they reconfigure modernity as an experiential rather than as a normative historical present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Starting from the position that authority is constantly a work in progress, this paper examines authority in Muslim South Asia at a time when Muslims felt the challenge of rule by another civilization. It examines the strategies in sustaining their authority: of religious leaders, of Unani hakims and of literary leaders. In all three areas there is a rejection of the Persianate Mughal past and an embracing of Arab models, of the Prophetic model, and in various ways a drawing on British models and British authority. The paper also looks at the strategies of the rulers noting, amongst other things, how the British drew heavily on Mughal models just as Indian Muslims were letting them go, and how, since independence, Muslim rulers have drawn on a mixture of Western, Arab and Prophetic sources. There is also a running discussion throughout the paper of the revolutionary shift towards rooting authority in society at large, and the development of techniques to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I compare late nineteenth and early twentieth-century sport hunting of markhor, a mountain goat, by British civil and military officials in the mountainous northern frontier region of Kashmir State, with their hunting of tigers, particularly man-eating tigers in the hilly and plains regions of India. Using these two instances, this paper elucidates and compares two competing visions of colonial governance. The British sportsman hunted man-eating tigers in order to protect Indian society from wild nature. Hunting them was also symbolic of their welfare-oriented governance ideology. They also hunted markhor in the northern mountainous region using begar, or forced labour, which they justified by falling back on the wider colonial representation of the northern mountainous region as a civilization-less area, where a more coercive form of governance was needed. So, rather than protecting society from nature, as in the case of man-eating tiger hunting in the plains, what was needed in the mountains was the ability of the British to introduce civilization into unruly nature via a strong disciplinary force. I argue that colonial governance entailed not simply a struggle to civilize India and its population, but a more profound struggle for control over nature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anxiety about the intemperance and misbehaviour of the European soldiery in nineteenth century India prompted a raft of regulations which not only imposed a punitive regime on those living and working in and around the cantonments, but prompted an extension of military space. This paper specifically examines the methods and levels of control—both of which existed and were attempted in and around the cantonment. These ranged from regulations enacted to order the physical space of the cantonment, to calls for a more direct control over the bodies of the soldiers themselves as well as the numerous others who occupied the land. Crucially for this argument, moral and medical concerns were of critical importance in moulding this ordering. However, as this paper argues, social and class perceptions of the men—and the fear of provoking their wrath—dictated what officers and officials felt was legally possible. The various ways in which the military and government imposed order on the cantonment (or attempted to do so) had serious implications for the shaping of the empire itself and European understanding of its inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Irish in India present an interesting case. Arguably a colonized people, the colonies of the British Empire ironically afforded them employment and profit on a large scale. Although studies have been made of Irish administrators, it was Irish soldiers that were most numerous and it is the ‘stereotyped’ Irish soldier who represents his nation in depictions of the colonial military. This paper first summarizes the Irish military involvement in India. The reasons why men joined the army in large numbers and, in particular, why they sought service in India, are explored. The regimental culture into which they were absorbed is also examined. The representation of Irish soldiers in officers’ writings, both in fiction and popular media, is then discussed. The various aspects of the stereotype surrounding them are delineated, and the purposes of the colonial state served by their stereotypical representation are explained. Lastly, the reactions of Irish soldiers to their stereotype label are discussed. There were advantages to be gained from acting up to it, but it is argued also that soldiers found ways of rejecting bad or rebellious aspects of the stereotype and, by drawing on the ‘good’ or loyal aspects, helping to establish their own identity. Hence they manage to sustain and reconcile multiple national affiliations. Ultimately, however, the politics of Irish independence precipitates a crisis of identity which makes their position impossible. The paper concludes by considering the lives and memories of veterans of Indian service, and hence the afterlife of the Irish military identity beyond Irish independence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses Anglo-Indian modernist architect and city planner Walter Sykes George and his influence from British architect Edwin Lutyens, who also worked in Delhi and New Delhi, India. The author examines George's letters with his family friend Anne Shearer and architectural theorist Hope Bagenal and offers an overview of George's career. Specific topics include George's appreciation for Classical architecture, his work for architect Herbert Baker in New Delhi, George's integration of Indian culture into his designs such as Kashmir House and St. Stephen's College, and his work in India after it gained independence from Great Britain.

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]

We study the effect of railroads, the single largest public investment in colonial India, on human capital. Using district-level data on literacy and two different identification strategies, we find railroads had positive effects on literacy, in particular on male and English literacy. We show that railroads increased literacy by raising secondary and elite primary schooling, rather than vernacular primary schooling. Our mediation analysis suggests that non-agricultural income, urbanization, and opportunities for skilled employment are important mechanisms, while agricultural income is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930–1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came to link cultivation and territorialization, state violence and food, and dispossession and espionage. I engage with the powerful symbolism attached to rice by colonial and post-colonial officials, border guards, and cultivators who were variously conceived of as peasants and adivasis, as they sought to settle, cultivate, demarcate, and govern new national boundaries in a radically changing landscape. This paper situates rice battles within current discussions on Asia's borderlands to show how rice established the border as a space for alterity and to expose the blurred boundaries between static peasants and mobile adivasis, and between cultivation and soldiering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past decade, discussions of religious extremism and “fanatical” violence have come to dominate both public and academic discourse. Yet, rarely do these debates engage with the historical and discursive origins of the term “fanatic.” As a result, many of these discussions tend to reproduce uncritically the same Orientalist tropes and stereotypes that have historically shaped the way “fanaticism” and “fanatical” violence have been framed and understood. This paper seeks to provide a corrective to this often problematic and flawed understanding of the history of “fanaticism.” It approaches these topics through an examination of how British colonial authorities conceived of and responded to the problem of “murderous,” “fanatical,” and “ghazi” “outrages” along the North-West Frontier of India. By unpacking the various religious, cultural, and psychiatric explanations underpinning British understandings of these phenomena, I explore how these discourses interacted to create the powerful legal and discursive category of the “fanatic.” I show how this was perceived as an existentially threatening class of criminal that existed entirely outside the bounds of politics, society, and sanity, and therefore needed to be destroyed completely. The subjectification of the “fanatic,” in this case, ultimately served as a way of activating the colonial state's “sovereign” need to punish and kill. Finally, I deconstruct these reductive colonial representations of fanaticism in order to demonstrate how, despite British views to the contrary, these were often complex and deeply political acts of anti-colonial resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the colonial representation of tribal raids in the Northeast frontier of India and argues that, rather than being the ‘lawless and predatory habits of the savage hill tribes’, it was an expression of hill politics. The Kukis raided British territory when they discovered that an extension of the colonial boundary threatened their very existence as an independent state-evading population. It traces how the Kukis re-ethnicized themselves in the hills by evolving a system that is state-repellent, protected by a vast strip of forested jungle around their settlements commonly known as the ‘hunting ground’. It locates the ‘raid’ in the context of the difference in the perception of space and territoriality between the colonial state and indigenous polities. Colonial spatial ideology and its hill-valley binary are seen to play a vital role in animating tension on the frontier. The raid is thus understood as the ultimate weapon of resistance against an established state by an independent ‘not-a-state-subject’ people in defence of their autonomy and essentially represents non-state practices against state appropriations. Instead of being ‘unruly’, the raid is seen as a form of organized and premeditated resistance based on the consciousness of the hillmen's lived world order. [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 contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century. [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]

A hundred years ago, pre-puberty marriage for girls was the norm among South Indian Tamil Brahmans, and Brahman girls received little or no education. By the 1940s, child marriage had largely ended and girls’ education was improving gradually. Today, girls’ educational standards more or less match that of boys’, and many Brahman women are also employed outside the home. In relation to marriage and education in particular, the position of women has greatly improved, which is regarded by Tamil Brahmans themselves as a sign of their modern, educated, professional, middle-class status, whereas extreme gender inequality formerly indicated their traditional, high-caste status. This paper examines how female marriage, education, and employment are interrelated and how they have changed among Tamil Brahmans, particularly in the Eighteen-Village Vattima subcaste, which continued child marriage until the 1970s. Among Tamil Brahmans, as both women and men recognize, a real reduction in gender inequality has occurred. Moreover, Brahman men have more readily ceded status to Brahman women than Brahmans together have to non-Brahmans, so that there is a striking contrast today between persisting ideas of caste superiority and diminishing gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1904, the British Indian government passed the Ancient Monuments Protection Act and, in doing so, radically enlarged the state's bureaucratic claim to structures defined, for the purposes of the Act, as monuments. The project of conserving the Hindu temple was beset by disagreements. The claims of the colonial state and local Hindu devotees were separated by different precepts about religiosity and alternate orders of aesthetics, time, and history. However, it is clear that there were also confluences: legislative authority could masquerade as custody of the antiquarian and, in practice, the secular veneration of material antiquity blurred with Hindu divinity. This paper combines an exploration of the principles of archaeological conservation, as they were formed in the European bourgeois imagination, and then traces their transfer, though imperial administration, to case-studies of specific temples. Of particular interest is the deployment of the Act by local administrations and the counter-challenges, appropriations, and manipulations of the same legislation. How were the aesthetic codes of conservation—and the legislation that sought to order and enforce their introduction—compromised by religious claims and practices? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out. India's best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh—who was executed by the British in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case—has been celebrated more in posters, colourful bazaar histories and comic books than in academic tomes. These popular formats have established a hegemonic narrative of his life that has proved to be resistant to subsequent interventions as new materials, such as freshly-declassified intelligence reports and oral history testimonies, come to light. This paper accounts for why Bhagat Singh's life story has predominantly prevailed in the domain of the popular, with special reference to the secrecy of the revolutionary movement and the censure and censorship to which it was subjected in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The expansionist policies of the early colonial regime led to a significant emphasis on the importance of a large cavalry, but horses of a suitable quality appeared difficult to obtain within the subcontinent. Several measures were consequently taken to encourage horse-breeding, including the establishment of government studs and policies directed towards the creation of a ‘native’ market in quality horses. However, these measures did not appear to produce any significant results, despite sustained implementation. This paper examines in detail colonial policies on horse-breeding and links them to the larger economic logic of empire. It touches on several related themes such as early colonial interaction with ‘native’ agents, the question of free markets, and the impact of utilitarian and physiocratic doctrines on colonial policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Colonial transformation of the relations of production contextualized the cultural articulation of a new set of values, prejudices, and tastes for the Bengali Hindu middle class. These cultural values, together with the political and economic conditions of colonialism, formed the habitus of this class. This paper tries to understand this self-fashioning by the middle class through their construction of a ‘Bengali’ cuisine. A distinct enthusiasm for new gastronomic possibilities defined this cuisine, and yet, at the same time, it possessed important elements of continuity from pre-colonial times, evidenced especially in the reinstitution of caste-based norms of gastronomy. The resultant cuisine was cosmopolitan yet still Bengali. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By the turn of the twentieth century a distinct ‘social domain’ – along with its constituent parts, problems and internal dynamics – was turned into a political entity, and a concern for state bureaucracies existed across the industrializing world. Specific motivations for this trend may have varied from location to location, but included arguments for higher industrial productivity and less political discontent, often intertwined with a humanitarian impulse in calls for better housing, expanded public health or improved working conditions. As has been well documented, the politicization of the social domain in early twentieth-century Britain owes much to the consolidation of British sociology as a distinct discipline. Yet while the link between the rise of social politics and sociology has been established with regard to Britain, little has been said about the occurrence of this coupling elsewhere in the twentieth-century British Empire. This article aims to rectify that omission by showing the interplay between newly raised social concerns of the colonial administration in the Bombay Presidency, Western British India, and the establishing of sociological research within the borders of the Presidency around the time of the First World War. The article will explore how the colonial administration in Bombay planned to meet new demands for sociological knowledge in colonial state policy, how sociology was subsequently introduced into the Presidency as a research subject, and how new sociological methods were applied in actual colonial government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a ‘uniform civil code’ which would override the existing ‘personal laws’ or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of ‘religious laws’, then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the Indian state claims to be secular. This paper, by discussing the history of the lesser-known Christian personal law, demonstrates that this conundrum is of considerable heritage. From the earliest days of British imperial rule in India, the quest to establish a universal body of law conflicted with other legal principles which upheld difference: that of religion, as well as race. It was the historical role of Indian Christians to occasion legal dilemmas regarding the jurisdictions of British and ‘native’ law, and concurrently about the identity of people subject to those different laws. In trying to discover who the Indian Christians were, and what laws ought to apply to them, British judges had perforce to reflect on who the ‘British’ were, whilst also dealing with conflicting collective claims made by Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians themselves about their own identity and religious rights. The Indian Christian personal law was an unintended by-product of this process, a finding which throws light both on the dynamics of colonial legislation, and on the essentially modern nature of Indian personal laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In part because a single colonial project eventually formally incorporated Burma as an appendage to British colonial rule of India, Burma scholars persistently draw on historiography and anthropology of India to assert that ethnic categories in Burma were "reified" and hierarchized by colonial governmentality and ensuing postcolonial statecraft. This article disputes such assumed equivalences, re-theorizing "reification" through the concept of governmentality to distinguish modes of regulation and the kinds of social responses incited, suggesting that India and Burma stand as respective exemplars of distinct governmental forms. Specifically, scholarship represents Indian population groups (of caste, tribe, ethnicity, etc. permutations) as being reified by dense and reinforcing applications of knowledge/power. Even when these various and interlinking regulatory apparatuses "fail" to accurately describe social reality, they interpellate a response from subject populations, a process that operates to dialectically reinforce the categories. Conversely, similar governmental apparatuses desultorily implemented in Burma have operated differently. While they have succeeded in making South Asian and Muslim subjects into Burma's self-perceived constitutive outside, governmentality has "doubly failed" on its taingyintha (indigenous) subjects. Poor knowledge of these Burmese peoples has foreclosed intensive projects of knowledge production, leading to "misinterpellation," a form of metapragmatic awareness in which subjects recognize that discourses misdescribe them, and then strategically maneuver with(in) those labels. Ethnic emblems become hollow integuments navigable with comparative ease, as individuals modify their particular bodily and dispositional indices. The article concludes by encouraging comparative postcolonial governmentality studies that would delineate particularities in a concept (governmentality) that often remains unnuanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prison labour was an integral part of the penal order in colonial India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially in Bengal, such coerced labour, overwhelmingly male, was increasingly deployed in handicrafts production rather than in extramural construction projects, a regimen that led to the development of a prison-handicraft complex. Colonial efforts to refine this system focused largely on increasing the severity of the conditions of incarceration and indoor work, but also on the conflicting goal of maximizing the profits of its handiwork. Prisons thus emerged as effective sites of handicrafts production, with the products of their forced labour facilitating the revival of the crafts industry whose growth is generally attributed to the rise of an international arts and crafts movement in Britain and India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines British Protestant missionary scholars' representations of Tamil culture and history, analysing how this form of knowledge evolved in relation to missionary concerns and the intellectual trends of nineteenth-century India. I focus on the work of Robert Caldwell, whose scholarship had a profound influence on the identity discourses of twentieth-century Tamil nationalism. I situate Caldwell's work in ethnography and philology within the broader field of colonial knowledge produced about Tamils in nineteenth-century India and within a broader study of British missionary concerns in South India. I examine two of Caldwell's publications to argue that his later work, far from being driven by mere scholarly interests, was also shaped by his concerns as a missionary, and that his evolving scholarship mirrored the development of anti-Brahmanism in British Protestant missionary circles of the time. Missionary anti-Brahmanism arose as a response to the caste system, which missionary groups came to regard as the biggest obstacle to Christian conversions. Departing from some of his earlier ideas, Caldwell strategically positioned his later work to challenge Brahman influence, which he saw as being intrinsically tied to the strength of caste sentiment in Indian society. Caldwell's construction of a discursive framework for understanding Tamil linguistic identity was informed by public reactions to his first publication and his subsequent understanding of the dynamic relationship between European scholarship and Indian social relations. More broadly, this article demonstrates the close relationships between Protestant Christian missionary activity, Indian social politics, and the field of knowledge production in colonial South India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of what might be termed embodied experience in generating knowledge about climate - specifically by focusing on conversations about the effects of climate on the body in late nineteenth-century India. Central to the story is the question of how race maps onto ideas about the body's capacity to register or perceive its environment, and how this question articulates with concerns about standardization and judgement in scientific practice. Focusing on tropical heat, I argue that the British body became figured in late colonial scientific discourse as a kind of sensing technology, one that was transformed by the heat that it registered. However, determining the effects of heat on the body was not always straightforward; the sensation of heat was, at moments, attributed not to heat but instead to light. At stake in this partial displacement from heat to light was not the sensation itself, nor the bodily effects it produced, but rather the mechanisms that produced these sensations and effects. Nevertheless, observing these racialized bodily effects was a way to know climate, arguably as important as recording data from thermometers. Along these lines, pigmentation became a powerful, if imperfect, marker of racial difference that was also thought to confer specific sensory capacities on some and not on others. And it was through these capacities, through the perceived ability of certain bodies (and not others) to register the effects of heat and light, that knowledge of climate became intimately tied to ideas about race and biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While various scholars of Indian economic history have focused on the progress of import substitution in India after the 1920s, few have studied why this led to hardly any export of industrial products during the colonial period. One of the most probable reasons for the lesser popularity of this issue could be attributed to a commonly shared view that there was less hope for the export of industrial products in colonial India since import substitution had progressed only so far. Although it is accepted that the industrial development of colonial India was generally stagnant, this does not necessarily apply to specific products in specific industries. For instance, the iron and steel industry achieved almost a full self-sufficiency rate for some of its steel products during the 1920s, although the industry hardly exported the products afterward. This paper aims to clarify why hardly any steel of the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO), the only steel producing company with modern technology until the mid-1930s, was exported. A detailed study of the company's archives will show that the steel export of the company was fundamentally hindered by a fact which had its origin in British imperial policy: the strict quality specifications in the production of steel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1905, Viceroy Nathaniel Curzon applied well-worn principles of imperial order to reorganize northeastern regions of British India, bringing the entire Meghna-Brahmaputra river basin into one new administrative territory: the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. He thereby launched modern territorial politics in South Asia by provoking an expansive and ultimately victorious nationalist agitation to unify Bengal and protect India's territorial integrity. This movement and its economic programme (swadeshi) expressed Indian nationalist opposition to imperial inequity. It established a permanent spatial frame for Indian national thought. It also expressed and naturalized spatial inequity inside India, which was increasing at the time under economic globalization. Spatial inequities in the political economy of uneven development have animated territorial politics in South Asia ever since. A century later, another acceleration of globalization is again increasing spatial inequity, again destabilizing territorial order, as nationalists naturalize spatial inequity in national territory and conflicts erupt from the experience of living in disadvantaged places. Remapping 1905 in the long twentieth century which connects these two periods of globalization, spanning eras of empire and nation, reveals spatial dynamics of modernity concealed by national maps and brings to light a transnational history of spatial inequity shared by Bangladesh and Northeast India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an exploration into the history of the British silver trade in India in the late 18th century. Details are given citing and criticizing prevailing historical views that silver was not a major sector of British commercial interest. It is asserted that the British export of silver was conducted on a large scale after 1785 for trade, debt-relief and military finance. An overview is given of several British firms in India, particularly the East India Company from the late 18th century into the early 19th.

This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with 'tribes'/'peasants' in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the 'tribe' under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the circular intra- and transimperial movements of medical experts from colonial India in three imperial settings. The analysis of the trajectories of José Camillo Lisboa, Paramananda Mariadassou, and Mary Poonen Lukose highlights, first, how crucial freedom of movement—not only between parts of the same empire, but also across empire borders and between their metropoles as well as their colonies—was for individuals; secondly, how questions of citizenship, the recognition of degrees and certificates, and notions of gender, race, class, and place of origin played a role in enabling or preventing Indians living in Portuguese, French, or British India from studying or working elsewhere; and thirdly, how this in turn had an effect on their potential social mobility, which depended on the historical contingency of time and place, and the opportunities and limitations in these contexts. The article argues that through their chosen careers and their sociopolitical activities they expanded conventional notions of citizenship and lived as global citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorizes the colonial problem of peoplehood that Indian anticolonial thinkers grappled with in their attempts to conceptualize self-rule, or swaraj. British colonial rule drew its legitimacy from a developmentalist conception of the colonized people as backward and disunited. The discourse of "underdeveloped" colonial peoplehood rendered the Indian people "unfit" for self-government, suspending their sovereignty to an indefinite future. The concept of swaraj would be born with the rejection of deferred colonial self-government. Yet the persistence of the developmentalist figuration of the people generated a crisis of sovereign authorization. The pre-Gandhian swaraj theorists would be faced with the not-yet claimable figure of the people at the very moment of disavowing the British claim to rule. Recovering this underappreciated pre-Gandhian history of the concept of swaraj and reinterpreting its Gandhian moment, this article offers a new reading of Gandhi's theory of moral self-rule. In so doing, it demonstrates how the history of swaraj helps trace the colonial career of popular sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, petitioning cultures have attracted scholarly interest because they are seen as germane to the infrastructure of political communication and modern associative life. Using materials from early colonial Madras, this article discloses a trajectory of the appeal which is different from its conventional place in the social theory of political communication. Colonial petitions carried with them the idea of law as equity through which a paternalist government sought to shape a consenting subject, even as this sense of equity was layered by other meanings of justice. In this sense petitions reworked and exceeded the idioms of imperial law and justice. Thus two aspects of the colonial petition are the focus of this article: its genealogies in the institutional history of the early modern corporation that transmitted notions of law as equity, and the recursive and heteroglossic nature of the language of appeal that enabled this text-form to be an enduring site for refashioning terms of address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant South Asian histories of race, and more specifically biometrics, focus almost exclusively upon the colonial era and especially the nineteenth century. Yet an increasing number of ethnographic accounts observe that Indian scientists have enthusiastically embraced the resurgent raciology engendered by genomic research into human variation. What is sorely lacking is a historical account of how raciology fared in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, roughly the period between the decline of craniometry and the rise of genomics. It is this history that I explore in this article. I argue that anthropometry, far from being a purely colonial science, was adopted by Indian nationalists quite early on. Various distinctive shades of biometric nationalism publicly competed from the 1920s onward. To counter any sense that biometric nationalism was teleologically inevitable, I contrast it with a radical alternative called “craftology” that emerged on the margins of formal academia amongst scholars practicing what I call “vernacular anthropology.” Craftology and biometric nationalism continued to compete, contrast, and selectively entangle with each other until almost the end of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the way in which modern institutions emerged in one region of British-ruled India--the Godavari Delta of coastal Andhra--during the early nineteenth century. Rejecting recently popular cultural theories and the vague language of 'multiple modernities', it suggests that modernity can be defined as the practical effort to govern subjects perceived as strangers with abstract and general categories. But, arguing that our conception of modernity needs to be limited, the article suggests that modern institutions always rely on non-modern ways of life: the rule of law depends on ideas about individual honour; bureaucracy; on family connections and affective expressions of loyalty; and rational interests that are coordinated by archaic idioms of political leadership. The peculiarity of the history of modernity in imperial India was marked not by the limited or partial imposition of modern practices, but by the British regime's reluctance to accept the legitimacy of the very non-modern forms of power it relied on. Tracing this process in the Godavari Delta, the article shows how a regime with limited local resources asserted the monopolistic authority of its structures of government, but in doing so, corroded its own capacity to exercise power. Local institutions which had coordinated local productive resources were undermined, but alternative forms of local leadership were unable to emerge. The consequence was famine in the 1830s, and in the 1840s an effort to refound the imperial regime by imposing British power on the region's natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What truths are available in imperial archives for non-colonial subjects? Tibet was never colonized by the British, and yet was drawn into the British imperial domain in ways that impacted both political history and historiography. In the 1940s, Tibetan intellectual Rapga Pangdatsang based his Tibetan Improvement Party in Kalimpong, India where he soon ran afoul of colonial officials who thought he was a Chinese spy. By drawing on multiple archival, ethnographic, and historic sources, I show how the story of Rapga Pangdatsang and the first Tibetan political party enables a recalibrating of both Tibetan and British imperial history. It also opens up a consideration of empire beyond the colonial, and speaks more broadly to a consideration of the non-colonial as a thus-far overlooked aspect of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1867, the Government of India passed one of the most brutal-minded and draconian laws ever created in colonial India. Known as the ‘Murderous Outrages Act’, this law gave colonial officials along the North-West Frontier wide powers to transgress India's legal codes in order to summarily execute and dispose of individuals identified as ‘fanatics’. Arguments for the creation and preservation of this law invariably centred around claims about the purportedly ‘exceptional’ character of frontier governance, particularly the idea that this was a region that existed in a perpetual state of war and crisis. Far from being peripheral in its impact, this article explores how this law both drew upon and enabled a wider legal culture that pervaded India in the wake of 1857. It argues that this law was a signal example of British attempts to mask the brute power of executive authority through legalistic terms, and was also evocative of a distinctly ‘warlike’ logic of colonial legality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the memoirs of Indian Civil Service officers as they continued to work in what became the Indian Administrative Service after independence. Rather than being understood solely as historical archives, these texts constitute a genre that can be called the ‘bureaucratic memoir’ which reveals masculinities that are both colonial and post-colonial. These memoirs, and their publication decades after independence reveal attempts by elites to preserve the power of the bureaucracy into subsequent decades. The texts hope to disavow but instead also reveal the patriarchal intimacies of these elites, even as these were challenged by charges of corruption and failure which emerged almost from the first moments of independence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The chief concern of this article is the organization and administration of rural policing in colonial Bengal during the last 40 years of the nineteenth century. It connects its design and implementation with the consolidation of India's colonial police force, while highlighting the ongoing negotiations made by the Bengal police in a wider colonial model. The article argues that the police administration of rural Bengal was shaped initially by the ordinary constraints of the colonial state which underpinned the design of the Indian police—namely its frugality and preference for collaborating with local intermediaries, a manifestation of salutary neglect. Yet, it highlights the role of Bengal's largely British police executive in renegotiating customs of governance and, ultimately, as an established model of policing in India. The article focuses, therefore, on ongoing and at times informal police reforms which were based upon notions contradictory to an official discourse about policing in India. This article thus contextualizes the development of rural police administration in Bengal in a strong tradition of police-led reform in the province. In so doing, the article redresses a traditional historiographical focus on the political origins and coercive function of the police, and problematizes current research which situates Indian policing within customs of British governance in the subcontinent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Flood protection in the Brahmaputra's floodplains began rather late and was implemented precisely to protect the important commercial crop of jute. To begin with, in the early twentieth century, after a long wait and much speculation, action was finally taken to make the Brahmaputra's floodplains more productive to the British Empire. Soon the commercial production of jute began in the floodplains. This article explains how the Brahmaputra's floodplains were converted into the British empire's eastern-most jute frontier. The article also explains the political economy of flood management in Assam in the second half of the twentieth century. Further, explaining the shifting relations between state, capital, and floodplain, the article shows how these schemes achieved only partial success and at the cost irreversible ecological damage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article throws light on how the issue of conservation stood in tension with imperial hunting and exploitation in colonial India. The indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife and the declining numbers of game species in nineteenth-century India gave rise to a need for conservation, but with a caveat. Wildlife conservation, consequently, was aimed at the expansion of colonial economy and infrastructural development. Thus, in colonial India, wild predators that posed a threat to such interests were ruthlessly decimated and those animals that were useful for the smooth functioning of the British colonial rule were overlooked. This, in part, was also necessitated by the British seeking to establish their credentials as rulers, which explains the reason the colonial government's conservation programme was fundamentally selective and guided by expediency. The comparative perspective on elephants and tigers elucidates how the former were protected by the law because of the critical role they played in the colonial economy and administration, whilst the latter were ruthlessly exterminated for the threat they posed to the same. This article especially argues that the reasons for conserving elephants and decimating tigers in colonial India were more practical and economic than a mere reflection of cultural sensitivity on the part of the colonizers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the way in which legal codification, the scrutiny of the high courts, and the expansion of the ‘native Bar’ restructured colonial ‘preventive policing’. Habitual Offender legislation in England targeted the ex-convict, but in India the bad-livelihood sections of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC sections 109–110) permitted a far more flexible construction of ‘habituality’. They illustrate the degree to which summary judicial powers wielded by the executive head of the district were incorporated into the code, not excised from it. Educated Indians critiqued this combination of executive and judicial powers in the hands of the district magistrate, yet CrPC ‘preventive sections’ proliferated. Furthermore, in 1918 the Punjab province passed a Habitual Offender Act which, drawing upon the pattern of the Criminal Tribes Act (Act XXVII of 1871), permitted CrPC section 110 to be used to restrict the suspected ‘habitual’ to a certain area as well. Hitherto amendments to the CrPC were supposed to be matters for central not provincial legislation. The Punjab Act inaugurated an era of provincial enactments to intern or release ‘habituals’, structured around essentialist contrasts between urban and rural space. Under the surface of drives to codify colonial law a striated jurisdictional topography continued to re-form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that theatre in colonial India – both in the form of touring companies and amateur dramatics – offered much more than mere entertainment: first, it was an important social space where the British diaspora constituted itself as a community. Secondly, it served as a lifeline to the home country. By watching theatrical performances either brought to them straight from London or which they performed themselves, colonial Britons felt in touch with their homeland. Finally, theatre not only allowed colonial audiences to participate in the metropolitan culture; it inadvertently helped to unify the British empire. Whether living in London, the provinces, or a colonial city, all British subjects consumed the same popular culture, forming in effect one big taste community. Theatre, therefore, lends itself to a discussion of central issues of imperial history, as, for example, the relationship between the metropolitan centre and the imperial periphery, the colonial public sphere, social and racial hierarchies, the perception of the ‘Other’, and processes of cross-cultural exchange and appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the reception and understanding of the Indian village council (panchayat) among East India Company officials, British politicians, and Indian intellectuals during the first third of the nineteenth century. One of the several ways in which the panchayat was imagined was as an institution analogous to the English jury. As such, the panchayat took on significant meaning, especially for those influenced by the Scottish Orientalist tradition and who were serving in India. The issue became especially salient during the 1820s and 1830s as the jury system was debated and reformed in England. In this context, there was a transnational interplay of both ideas and policies that shaped both Company rule in India as well as the first generation of Indian nationalists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]