Search

This article provides a textured history of the multivalent term "hindu" over 2,500 years, with the goal of productively unsettling what we think we know. "Hindu" is a ubiquitous word in modern times, used by scholars and practitioners in dozens of languages to denote members of a religious tradition. But the religious meaning of "hindu" and its common use are quite new. Here I trace the layered history of "hindu," part of an array of shifting identities in early and medieval India. In so doing, I draw upon an archive of primary sources—in Old Persian, New Persian, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and more—that offers the kind of multilingual story needed to understand a term that has long cut across languages in South Asia. Also, I do not treat premodernity as a prelude but rather recognize it as the heart of this tale. So much of South Asian history—including over two thousand years of using the term "hindu"—has been misconstrued by those who focus only on British colonialism and later. We need a deeper consideration of South Asian pasts if we are to think more fruitfully about the terms and concepts that order our knowledge. Here, I offer one such contribution that marshals historical material on the multiform and fluid word "hindu" that can help us think more critically and precisely about this discursive category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India's traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the economy. This article argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public-policy 'enclosure' of caste in the non-modern realm of religion and 'caste politics', while aligning modernity to the caste-erasing market economy. Village-level fieldwork in South India finds a parallel public narrative of caste either as ritual rank eroded by market relations or as identity politics deflected from everyday economic life. But, locally and nationally, the effects of caste are found to be pervasive in labour markets and the business economy. In the age of the market, caste is a resource, sometimes in the form of a network, its opportunity-hoarding advantages discriminating against others. Dalits are not discriminated by caste as a set of relations separate from economy, but by the very economic and market processes through which they often seek liberation. The caste processes, enclosures, and evasions in post-liberalization India suggest the need to rethink the modernity of caste beyond orientalist and post-colonial frameworks, and consider the presuppositions that shape understanding of an institution, the nature and experience of which are determined by the inequalities and subject positions it produces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In nineteenth-century British India, concern regarding large numbers of asylum patients with 'Indian Hemp Insanity' led to establishment of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The exotic cannabis plant was widely used in pharmacopeia and a source of government revenue. The Commission was tasked with determining the public health risks of cannabis use, particularly mental illness. This analysis of the Commission report seeks to highlight the status of 1892 cannabis research and compare it with current evidence for medical and recreational cannabis use. Methods: Detailed historiographic review of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report (1892). Results: In 1892, heavy cannabis use was considered to have been associated with severe mental illness (7.3% of asylum patients; 12.6% of patients with diagnoses). About two-thirds were children and young adults with higher relapse rates. Risk increased with early cannabis use and a family history of mental illness. Cannabis psychosis was found to have a shorter trajectory and better prognosis than other mental illnesses in the asylums. Different cannabis potency and modes of consumption had different effects. Occasional cannabis use was felt to have medicinal benefits for some. Appendices provided symptoms and demographic characteristics of cannabis-induced mental illness. Conclusion: This important nineteenth-century study observed frequency and dose-related effects of cannabis on mental health, particularly psychotic symptoms in young people with a previous or hereditary risk of mental illness. Pathophysiological observations were consistent with current knowledge. As one of the most systematic and detailed studies of the effects of cannabis of the time it foreshadowed contemporary cannabis issues. [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]

Studies of Indo-Persian historiography tend to focus on the monumental compositions created at the behest of the Mughal court. This has unfortunately led to the neglect of texts from "regional" settings. The present article intends to expand the field of inquiry by studying Mir Muhammad Maʿsum's Tarikh-i Ma ʿsumi (completed c. 1600) which was the first Mughal-era Persian history of Sindh. I will argue that the author used the new the literary models developed by Mughal chroniclers in order to both facilitate and contest imperial domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the extraordinarily broad advocacy of military enlistment by India's political and intellectual elites during the First World War. Though often interpreted as politically motivated, it shows above all a preoccupation with the enlivening effects of military experience—in particular its development of courage and manliness. In this it followed an established pattern of Indian elite concern with martiality. It also reflected anxieties of Indian weakness and effeminacy—something elites indicted themselves for, but which, importantly, they assumed to be more generally prevalent. Sampling calls for enlistment in the public space throughout the war, the article focuses on Bombay Presidency—a region that gave rise to such prominent Indian voices for enlistment as M. K. Gandhi, B. G. Tilak, and M. A. Jinnah. Bombay's recent experience of relative exclusion from military recruitment, and from membership of the 'martial races', was representative of much of India. This article enables us to view the effects of such 'demartialization' away from the classic case of Bengal. It suggests that it helped to inspire the call to enlist, especially as public spokesmen for the 'martial race' ideology explicitly linked martiality with manliness. The concern for enlistment ultimately superseded political calculation even for so hard-nosed a politician as Tilak. And though elites were most obviously concerned for their own martial vigour and leadership, they were also concerned with the manliness of the bulk of India's population, especially in Gandhi's conception of war as a preparation for satyagraha. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the history of the Husainabad Trust ('the Trust'), a quasi-religious endowment that supported a number of key Shi'a institutions in Uttar Pradesh (UP). It asks how Shi'a elites were able to sustain their political clout and cultural independence in India whereas, in neighbouring Pakistan, they struggled. The fate of the Trust after independence led to a contest between the Shi'as and the state, but also among Shi'as themselves. The resulting confrontation between the Shi'a community in Lucknow and across UP was, it shows, complicated by internal divisions among Shi'as who, though united against state interference in their religious and royal trusts, were divided on how best to manage them. The Trust assumed importance for Shi'as after independence because they lost some of the Trust properties to Pakistan and also because the Trust provided the means to support the largest public manifestation of Shi'a presence in Awadh, Muharram. Husainabad, it suggests, helps to explain how and why Lucknow re-emerged after independence as the heartland of the Shi'as of India, and arguably of South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how local lived experiences and nationalist sentiments converged to shape a regional literati's conception of the province of Bihar in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial India. Following the formation of the separate province of Bihar in 1912, certain very powerful Indian-nationalist and cultural-historical factors were deployed to create a much-needed cultural-historical past for Bihar. In this project of territorial self-fashioning, institutions such as the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (1915) and the Patna Museum (1917) became crucial to the new political-cultural configuration of the region. Additionally, they also made Bihar's ancient past visible in a deliberately nationalist narrative. Projecting its rich ancient past onto a national framework provided Bihar with the possibility of overcoming its characterization as ‘backward’ and provincial. This article therefore moves beyond analytic frameworks of nationalism which emphasize particularities of regional identity by framing them in perpetual antagonism to the efforts of Indian national integration. By looking at the construction of narratives of an ancient past that straddled the region and the nation, I argue that the emergence of an entity called Bihar was braided into India's nationalist imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar—Fellow of Trinity College and Reader in History at the University of Cambridge—passed away on 23 April 2006. In addition to a rich legacy of books and articles that were published in his lifetime, he left behind an enormous amount of manuscript material, much of which was ready for publication. A selection of this material was published in his posthumous History, Culture and the Indian City (Cambridge University Press, 2009), but new manuscripts continue to come to light. His wife, Jennifer Davis, recently found this essay among his effects. There is good reason to believe that Raj felt it was ready for publication. Therefore, we publish this essay almost exactly as it appears in his typescript, only correcting typos and minor errors, and adding a map. The editors would like to thank David Washbrook and Jennifer Davis for proofing this article, Uttara Shahani and Binney Hare for researching and adapting the map, and Francoise Davis for the photograph of Raj. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parsis (Indian Zoroastrians), a small traditionally endogamous group, are well known in India for their philanthropic giving. The Parsis of Mumbai are beneficiaries of hundreds of Parsi public charitable trusts today, and this article will show how trusts, as particular forms of giving, establish perpetual communal obligation connecting the past and present. It will show how the circulation of personal assets through customary inheritance within a family is replaced by the trust with the circulation of communal obligations in perpetuity. While this mechanism of giving has a marked endurance, what has changed is what constitutes ‘the good’ within these deeds. Moving away from traditional philanthropic practices of subsidizing education, medical care, and welfare to the poor, the focus of giving has shifted to the pursuit of communal reproduction, both biological and social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With an interest in historicizing contemporary philanthropic formations such as corporate social responsibility, this article outlines the modern Indian governmental coding of charity as a function of profit. To do so, it charts a trajectory of legal-fiscal policy on charitable tax exemption in India, especially since the 1940s. Informed by the study of vernacular capitalism, research on economization and on epistemologies of calculation, the analysis maps juridical trajectories on the idea of charity, its relationship with trade, and, more specifically, profit-making. It demonstrates how the legal mechanism of the public trust, which serves in the late nineteenth century to institutionalize a strict distinction and separation between charity and profit-making, later reconfigures and connects them by buttressing the main legal criterion for charity in India, that is, ‘general public utility’. This legal story is deployed to draw attention to philanthropy more broadly as a key terrain for research on processes of economization and neoliberal governing. At the same time, the argument also works against the grain of palimpsests in contemporary public discourse which stage a continuous and direct line from pre-colonial vernacular practices to Indian philanthropy today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malapportionment doubly penalizes people from relatively large electoral districts or constituencies by under-representing them in the legislature and in the political executive or cabinet. The latter effect has not been studied. This article develops theoretical reasons for large constituency disadvantage in the cabinet formation process, and tests them using a new repeated cross-sectional dataset on elections and cabinet formation in India’s states, from 1977–2007. A one-standard-deviation increase in relative constituency size is associated with a 22 per cent fall in the probability of a constituency’s representative being in the cabinet. Malapportionment affects cabinet inclusion by causing large parties to focus on winning relatively small constituencies. These effects are likely to hold in parliamentary systems, and in other contexts where the legislature influences cabinet inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Partition of the subcontinent that had occurred just a few years before. Neither is there mention of discrimination or violence carried out in the name of religion in these locations. New fieldwork reveals a different story about the rise of wholesale religious incivility in the public sphere. Caste has not vanished, but inter-caste relations have taken on new forms. We suggest that the intersection of affirmative action policies, political parties, and the systematic penetration of Hindu nationalist organizations has been crucial in the remaking of rural India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has four important goals. First, I want to ask why liberalization and market-friendly reforms failed to curb corruption in India. Indeed, confounding the predictions of most proponents of reform, corruption seems to have increased after the neoliberal reforms of 1991. Second, I aim to develop a typology in which the importance of particular sectors to corrupt practices is highlighted and explained. Third, I point out that India has failed to make the ‘transition’ historically seen in low-income countries as they develop. Nation-states have in the past moved from a system of vertical corruption—marked by the extraction of small sums from a large number of transactions with citizens in everyday life—to a system of horizontal corruption, in which governmental elites extract large sums in a small number of transactions from corporate and commercial bodies. Finally, I argue that anti-corruption movements cannot be understood without paying attention to the affective and emotional ties that bind citizens to the state. We have to take account of contradictory feelings about the state: cynicism about the state and popular anger against corruption on one side, and an attachment to popular sovereignty and patronage on the other. These contradictory sentiments will better enable us to understand the conjunctures that lead to effective institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The interwar period has recently been described as a highly internationalist one in South Asia, as a series of distinct internationalisms—communist, anarchist, social scientific, socialist, literary, and aesthetic1—took shape. At the same time, it has been argued that the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 drew to a close various opportunities for international association (at least, temporarily). Taking into account both these contradistinctive developments, this article deals with another—and thus far largely overlooked—South Asian internationalism in the form of wartime Indian humanitarianism. In 1938, the Indian National Congress helped organize an Indian medical mission to China to bring relief to Chinese victims of the Second Sino-Japanese War. By focusing on this initiative, this article traces the ideas, the practices, and the motives of Indian political humanitarianism. It argues that such initiatives, as they became part of much wider global networks of humanitarianism in the late 1930s and early 1940s, created new openings for Indian nationalists to establish international alliances. This article also examines the way in which political humanitarianism enabled these same nationalists to perform as independent leaders on an international stage, and argues that humanitarianism served as a tool of anti-colonial emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article studies corruption in India through an ethnographic elaboration of practices that are colloquially discussed as the ‘eating of money’ (paisa khana) in northern India. It examines both the discourse and practice of eating money in the specific context of the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (NREGA). The article works through two central paradoxes that emerge in the study of corruption and the state. The first paradox relates to the corruption–transparency dyad. The ethnography presented shows clearly that the difficulties in the implementation of NREGA arose directly out of the transparency requirements of the statute, which were impeding the traditional eating of money. Instead of corruption being the villain it turns out that, in this particular context, it was its categorical Other—transparency—that was to blame. The second and related paradox emerges from an ethnographic examination of the processes and things through which development performance, corruption, and transparency are established and adjudged in the contemporary Indian state. Corrupt state practices and transparent state functioning are authoritatively proclaimed through an assessment of evidence—material proof in the form of paper—that is constructed by the Indian state itself. The push for transparency in India at the moment is not only leading to an excessive focus on the production of these paper truths but, more dangerously, is also deflecting attention away from what is described as the ‘real’ (asli) life of welfare programmes. Ultimately, this article contends that we need to eschew treating corruption as an explanatory trope for the failure of development in India. Instead of devising ever-more punitive auditing regimes to stem the leakages of the Indian state, this work suggests that we need a clearer understanding of what the state really is; how—and through which material substances—it functions and demonstrates evidence of its accomplishments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a first systematic mapping of politically influential shrines across Pakistani Punjab by identifying shrine-related families that have directly participated in elections since 1937. One of the earliest entrants in the politics of pre-partition Punjab, shrine elites (pīrs) have shown remarkable persistence in electoral politics post independence. We find striking long-run continuities in the initial configuration of religion, land, and politics fostered during colonial rule and embodied in political shrines. Exploring possible mechanisms of this persistence, we emphasize the role of shifting political alliances, repeated military interventions, marital ties among shrine elites, and preservation of political brokerage. Defined by their privileged ‘origins and associations’ and organized as a group with a strong sense of solidarity around protecting common interests, the pīrs are a key component of Punjab's power elite, the study of which is central to understanding the genesis and persistence of elites and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

India has the largest informal, unregistered economy in the world, infrastructurally backward, yet vital for both growth and livelihoods. In the first section of this article, five economic institutions that shape this economy are introduced: small firms, informality, non-metropolitan towns, innovation and innovation systems, and the state's regulative impact on the economy it does not directly regulate. In the second section, we trace the development of the commodity economy of a South Indian town taken for case study over 40 years, before exploring three kinds of innovation in the third section: invention, adaptive, and adoptive innovation. In the fourth section, the formal and informal institutions that nurture informal innovation are analysed: family business, business associations, banks and finance, informal insurance and gold, hybrid state–private institutions, and informal innovation inside the state. The conclusion confirms the innovative dynamism of the informal economy and the complex pathways of institutional change that both shape, and are shaped by, innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

These three essays on distinct research areas and case studies cover a broad history of educational institutions in India, their focus on theatre and cultural education, and their role in creating citizens active in the public sphere and civic communities. The common point of reference for all the three essays is the historical transition from pre- to post-independence India, and they represent three dominant genres of Indian theatre practice: the amateur progressive theatre emerging out of sociopolitical movements; the State Drama School, which has remained at the core of the state's policy and vision of a national theatre; and college theatre, which comprises the field from which the National School of Drama sources its acting students, as well as new audiences for urban theatres. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Though India declared itself a sovereign nation only in 1947, after two hundred years of British rule, its people had unleashed the processes of ‘Indianization’ well before independence. While addressing the transition from colonial subjecthood to independent citizenship is intricately linked to efforts of decolonization, the role of English-medium education in the creation of a new emergent class of independent Indian citizens often gets overlooked. This essay analyses the immediate impact of independence (1947–50), and locates the educational spaces where Indians (predominantly elite Bengalis) were struggling to unlink citizenship from nationalism and exploring inter-community relationships such as those between the Bengali elite and the micro-minority Jews, Parsis, Armenians and Anglo-Indians. I show how theatre activities by the students of St Xavier's Collegiate School and College, their new roles as potential public intellectuals and citizens of post-independent India and their theatre constituted an important intervention in the new democratic processes. I examine the duality of a Bengali elite who acquired an English-medium education and performed English-style Shakespeare while trying to construct a political dramaturgy as an ensemble or collective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The archives of French India and French Guiana, two colonies that were failing by the mid-nineteenth century, elucidate the legacy of colonial linguistics by drawing attention to the ideological and technological natures of colonial printing and the far-reaching and longstanding consequences of the European objectification of Indian vernaculars. Torn between religious, commercial, and imperialist agendas, the French in India both promoted Catholicism and advanced the scientific study of Tamil, the majority language spoken in the colonial headquarters of Pondicherry. There, a little known press operated by the Paris Foreign Missions shipped seventy-one dictionaries, grammars, and theological works printed in Tamil and French to Catholic schools undergoing secularization in French Guiana, a colony with several thousand Tamil indentured laborers. I analyze the books’ lexical, orthographic, and typographical forms, metalinguistic commentaries, publicity tactics, citational practices, and circulation histories by drawing on seldom-discussed materials from the Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, France. I propose a theoretical framework to investigate how technology intersects with the historical relationship between language and colonialism, and argue that printing rivalries contributed to Orientalist knowledge production by institutionalizing semiotic and language ideologies about the nature of “perfectible” and “erroneous” signs. My comparative approach highlights the interdiscursive features of different genres and historical periods of Tamil documentation, and underscores how texts that emerged out of disparate religious and scientific movements questioned the veracity of knowledge and fidelity of sources. Such metalinguistic labor exposed the evolving stances of French Indologists toward Dravidian and Indo-Aryan linguistics and promoted religious and secular interests in educational and immigration policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In analysing a campaign launched by the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board in a Hindi literary periodical, this article seeks to read tea advertisements within the cultural history of gendered lives and nationalism in the decade leading up to Indian Independence. More specifically, it explores how multiple versions of feminized Indian modernity came to feature in the construction of black tea as a healthy, social, and national beverage. As the habit and custom of tea drinking was not common amongst the Indian population of the first half of the twentieth century, the advertisements focused on the creation of a culture of ‘proper’ tea preparation and ‘correct’ consumption. Not only did the middle-class woman and her family feature centrally in these advertisements; aristocratic and working women as well as movie actresses were all associated with the beverage drunk to reenergize and savour. While the advertisements addressed middle-class society and consciousness, this article argues that they did so by also drawing on, and not distancing from, diverse class, caste, and professional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will examine the relationship between Gandhi's two major intellectual developments in his last years: his insistence on political secularism (‘individualization of religion’) and his controversial religious experiments with brahmacarya (sleeping naked with his 17-year-old grandniece, Manubahen). Contrary to the prevalent interpretations, I will argue that Gandhi's political principle of secularism during the last years of his life entailed implicitly his radical religious belief, which he thought worth risking his life to present before the public. There was an intimate relationship between the concepts of brahmacarya, individuality (vyaktitva), and religion (dharm) that constituted his principle of secularism—these concepts were integrated by Gandhi in his distinct Hindu metaphysics of ātmā. Although Gandhi's ideas on ātmā were initially influenced by Śrīmad Rājcandra's Jainism, he later repudiated the latter's views and revised them by incorporating some ideas from Western Orientalists, including Sir John Woodroffe's tantric thought. Gandhi's concept of ātmā was considered to inhere with the cosmological spiritual power of śakti, ultimately identified with God (Īśvar, Brahm): this concept of ātmā was one of the fundamental components of Gandhi's eventual ideas of individuality and religion. Gandhi attempted to realize his ‘unique individuality’ (‘anokhuṃ vaktitva’) in his last religious experiments with brahmacarya, which were conducted contemporaneously to his increasing political valorization of secularism. Gandhi's secularism was virtually a political platform to universalize religion, paradoxical in that he meant to go beyond the impregnable hedge of privatization by making religion deeply individualized—that is to say, ātmā-centred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the role of the legal profession and the evolution of aspects of Indian nationalist ideology during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22. Very few legal professionals responded to Gandhi's call to boycott the British courts despite significant efforts to establish alternative institutions dedicated to resolving disputes. First identified by leading legal professionals in the movement as courts of arbitration, these alternative sites of justice quickly assumed the name ‘panchayats’. Ultimately, this panchayat experiment failed due to a combination of apathy, repression, and internal opposition. However, the introduction of the panchayat into the discourse of Indian nationalism ultimately had profound effects, including the much later adoption of constitutional panchayati raj. Yet this discourse was then and remains today a contested one. This is largely a legacy of Gandhi himself, who, during the Non-Cooperation Movement, imagined the panchayat as a judicial institution based upon arbitration and mediation. Yet, after the movement's failure, he came to believe the panchayat was best suited to functioning as a unit of village governance and administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the debates about the use of a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing, the fast-changing social and political landscapes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lent their own weight to the discourse. The debates about the writing system became the venue for various competing social forces and political movements. The issues of region, caste, class, and religion—the core of today's identity politics—were all embroiled in this debate, as were both the British colonial and Indian nationalist governments. In just 150 years, Balbodh (a variant of Devanagari) emerged as the sole script for the Marathi language. At least three different arguments were used to dismiss the Modi script. The first was about printing types, and the legibility and economy of Devanagari. By the end of the nineteenth century, the social empowerment of the literati and administrative convenience were the reasons given for abolishing Modi. In the twentieth century, British resistance to nationalist efforts in western India, and then a fear of regionalism under the new nationalist independent republic, ensured that a single script able to be used for both Hindi and Sanskrit would be officially sanctioned for Marathi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides stating that global or cosmopolitan citizenship is an incoherent concept in the absence of a global state, some critics assert that it represents a form of Western-centric moral neoimperialism. This article develops some responses to such objections through examining the efforts of Indian activists who have undertaken intensive international engagement in their struggles against caste discrimination. The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights has sought to close domestic rights-implementation gaps for Dalits (formerly called untouchables) in part through vertical outreach to United Nations human rights bodies. This mode of outreach is shown to represent an important practice of global citizenship, and to challenge a view of South agent as primarily passive recipients of moral goods within a global citizenship frame. Further, the Dalit activists’ global citizenship practice is shown to be significantly ‘institutionally developmental’, in that it highlights implementation gaps in the global human rights regime and can contribute to pressures for suprastate institutional transformation and development to address them. NCDHR actions are, for example, highly salient to the recently renewed dialogue on creating a World Court of Human Rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The forceful expropriation of land, labour, water, and other productive resources is fundamental for processes of agricultural expansion and intensification. What is known today as 'land grab' was theorized byMarx as 'primitive accumulation' and by David Harvey as 'accumulation by dispossession'. Today it is most prominent and controversial in Africa, where the governments of India and China are major perpetrators; and it also drives most contemporary urban expansion in India and China. This article deploys David Washbrook's idea of 'country politics' to explore the process of land grabbing in the early-modern expansion of agrarian Bengal, where local peasant society and worldwide imperial political economy came together to expand frontiers of farming in what is now the Sylhet District of Bangladesh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a focus by scholars on states and classes, the environment of India and its impact on agriculture has been neglected, except to provide a context--which was largely unchanging--in which states extracted and classes struggled. One example of environment as the backdrop is the distinction between 'wet' and 'dry' areas in Tamilnad and South India more widely. This distinction is based on the availability of water and on the local categorization of agricultural activity (nanjai versus punjai). There are two problems with this approach, however. First, it is a narrow treatment of the environment as it neglects other features of the land such as forests, grasslands, scrublands, and other so-called wasteland. Second, it sees the environment as a fixed entity, but the landscape has changed dramatically in the past, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If changes in the environment are included in the mix, the development of agriculture in nineteenth-century Tamilnad may be seen in some new ways. Agricultural production existed in symbiosis with the complex and varied environment of the region. In the early nineteenth century Tamilnad contained extensive tracts of forests, widespread wastelands, and abundant surface water. This diverse environment made it possible to maintain high levels of agricultural productivity as it provided the resources to maintain the fertility of the soil and the supplies of water that were critical for agricultural enterprise, as well as the well-being of the rural population. The consequences of changing regimes of water is the focus of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sirdar (also termed sardar and jobber in Indian historiography)--foreman, recruiter, at once a labour leader and an important intermediary figure for the employers of labour both in India and in the sugar colonies--is reassessed in this article. Tithankar Roy's thoughtful 2007 article looked at how the sirdars' multiple roles represent an incorporation of traditional authority in a modern setting, giving rise to certain contradictions. In 2010 Samita Sen, conversely, developed Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's argument about the use of labour intermediaries in colonial India to reveal how, in the case of the Assam tea plantations, the nexus between contractors and sirdars belies the 'benign' role often accorded to the intermediary within narratives from the tea industry. This article provides examples from the overseas labour destinations in the Indian Ocean region, particularly Mauritius, to further develop and nuance the debate, through an assessment of the complexity of sirdari roles in the colonial Indian labour diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the career of a woman agrarian entrepreneur in early nineteenthcentury Gujarat, this article seeks to foreground the role of family firms specializing in the assessment, realization, and investment of land revenue. The article argues that such firms, which were commonly found service providers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were deemed to be alienators of the loyalties and revenues that the East India Company state considered its due. They were allowed to persist on sufferance for a few decades but were phased out by the 1830s, an obliteration that has erased their role from the history of South Asian capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including David Washbrook's career as a historian of modernity in India, the politics of water in India and how it was manipulated in the 19th century, and sirdars and migration to Mauritius.

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]

The work of time-making is always a work of the present, and even in its driest form, the archaeological chronology, is a political process. Archaeological practices which make time from space necessarily dissect unified material landscapes into temporal slices, ‘cuts’ of time and space that can either mute or give voice to past interactions with material landscapes, engagements sometimes called ‘the past in the past.’ Despite the fact that historical and archaeological remains in India are often central to political contestation, the structures and objects studied by archaeologists and art historians are typically viewed as straightforward exemplars of past periods, dynasties, or cultures, disappearing from gaze as they leave the period to which they ‘belong’. This article considers some forms of interaction between people and places in southern India—from ashmounds to megaliths to temples—interactions ‘out of time’ according to traditional archaeological practice, but which reveal past contestations and concerns. Such forms of landscape history require both analytical techniques such as chronologies which divide time, as well as landscape-based approaches which can heal those divisions by allowing past action ‘out of place’ to be made visible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article considers narratives and experiences of love marriage in the garment city of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, South India. As a booming centre of garment production, Tiruppur attracts a diverse migrant workforce of young men and women who have plenty of opportunity to fall in love and enter marriages of their own making. Based on long-term ethnographic research, the article explores what love marriages mean to those involved, how they are experienced and talked about, and how they shape postmarital lives. Case studies reveal that a discourse of loss of postmarital kin support is central to evaluations of love marriages by members of Tiruppur's labouring classes. Such marriages not only flout parental authority and often cross caste and religious boundaries, but they also jeopardize the much-needed kin support youngsters require to fulfil aspirations of mobility, entrepreneurship, and success in a post-liberalization environment. It is argued that critical evaluations of love marriages not only disrupt modernist assumptions of linear transformations in marital practices, but they also constitute a broader critique of the neoliberal celebration of the ‘individual’ while reaffirming the continued importance of caste endogamy, parental involvement, and kin support to success in India's post-reform economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the exception of a few anthropologists working on gender, much of the recent literature on emerging intimate modernities in South Asia, and the middle class in India in particular, seems to support a view of social relationships evolving in a kind of linear development towards free choice, individualism, and identities based on sexual preference. This imagery is particularly prominent in the representation and self-representation of metropolitan, educated middle-class youths, whose views dominate popular media representations and are associated with secularism, individualism, and independence from family and community. In this article I argue that apart from the ostensibly overwhelming transformations that discourses on coupledom, love, choice and self-realization bring in their wake, new ways of choosing a spouse and of conducting conjugal relations among middle-class urbanites have to be interpreted in relation to much more subtle and long-standing social transformations as well as existing institutional forms, in particular the practical implications of patrilocality and the ideology and reality of the joint family. Based on fieldwork with Bengali-speaking middle-class families in Kolkata spanning two decades, the article charts continuities and subtle shifts in the way ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ are related in conversations, and how young women and their parents negotiate marriage in the context of middle-class consumerism, status competition, and uncertainty. [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]

Secular governance in India wasmeant to have incorporated religionwithin public life, but the implementation of 'Indian secularism' has in important ways been premised on separating religious and secular lifeworlds. Public Hindu temples, whose assets and operations are managed by a melange of statutory bodies, courts, and state governments, exemplify this puzzling situation. The 2011 discovery of treasures within the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Trivandrum, Kerala, prompted extended public debate about the ownership of temple assets as well as litigation that eventually reached the Supreme Court of India. Indian citizens, erstwhile princely rulers, and the deity of the temple were variously presented as the true owners of the wealth. Ultimately, both public discourse and judicial opinion largely reaffirmed the notion that religious institutions are to be treated as private, contractually defined properties, and that temple wealth, as specifically religious property, exists outside of market circulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama that was widely used in India between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to narrate, represent, and record antecedents, entitlements, and injuries with a view to securing legal rights and redressing legal wrongs. Mahzars were a known documentary form in Islamic law and used by qazis (Islamic judges) in many other parts of the world, but in India they took a number of distinctive forms. The specific form of Indian mahzar-namas that I focus on here was, broadly speaking, a legal document of testimony, narrated in the first person, in a form standardized by predominantly non-Muslim scribes, endorsed in writing by the author's fellow community members and/or professional or social contacts, and notarized by a qazi's seal. This specific legal form was part of a much broader genre of declarative texts that were also known as mahzars in India. I examine the legal mahzar-namas together with the other kinds of mahzars, and situate them in relation to Indo-Islamic jurisprudential texts and Persian-language formularies. What emerges is a distinctive Indo-Islamic legal culture in contact with the wider Islamic and Persianate worlds of jurisprudence and documentary culture, but responsive to the unique socio-political formations of early modern India. I also reflect on the meanings of law, including Islamic law, for South Asians and trace the evolution of that understanding across the historical transition to colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of mass political formation in post-colonial metropolitan India has generally been narrated through the optic of ‘competitive electoral mobilization’ of the ‘poor’. How then are we to explain cases of successful mobilization in the terrain of ‘political society’ when some population groups are yet to, or just beginning to, constitute themselves as ‘vote bank’ communities? This article invites us to look into the organizational dimensions of subaltern politics in contemporary urban India. It also prompts us to re-examine the relation between law and subaltern politics. In this light, the article presents some of the major findings of a larger historical anthropology project on the organized mobilization of footpath hawkers in Calcutta since the 1970s. It examines the ways in which the hawkers have acquired and aggregated crucial resources to sustain prolonged anti-eviction movements. In this connection, this article makes a critique of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014. [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]

In examining the remarkable expansion of India's textile production in the late colonial period, many scholars have identified consumption trends as shaping the relative success of mills as opposed to handlooms. That scholarship, however, has focused on only one component of consumption: clothing. This article explores another important area of cloth consumption in western India: non-clothing textiles. Across classes, urban dwellers used curtains and furnishing fabrics to try to improve comfort and create privacy—two qualities in short supply in cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad, where the pressures of rapidly growing populations came into conflict with new sanitary demands to open up houses to light and air. More broadly, non-clothing textiles helped to negotiate the novel conditions of urban life, where people moved regularly, homes were increasingly open to non-kin visitors, men and women shared space in new ways, and elite women were aesthetic arbiters of domestic space. While clothing choices in the late colonial period have often been studied in the context of nationalism, this article argues that nationalism was only one factor among many that shaped the use of household furnishing fabrics; equally, or more importantly, new ideas of ‘home’ led to and were expressed in expanded fabric use in urban western India. [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]

Seeking to challenge the totalizing theory of an ‘ethnographic state’, this article examines a mid-nineteenth-century paradigm shift that impacted the colonial study of borderland populations along India's North-West Frontier. While the establishment of metropolitan ethnographic societies in the 1870s facilitated the rise of socio-cultural evolutionism, colonial agents also utilized folklore and proverb studies to represent the borderland societies as dynamic cultural entities reactive to British encroachment. Four case-studies, moreover, demonstrate that a variety of motivations compelled colonial agents to produce ethnographic material. These factors included personal scholarly ambition, political activism, and a commitment to transregional ‘scientific’ data collection projects. This study complicates the relationship between knowledge production and state power by reasserting the significance of personality as an operative force in the formation of colonial discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter prevailed. The results were the establishment of coverture and wardship laws interpellated from British common law courts into Company revenue policies, the demolition of buildings. and the relocation of the markets that were attached to many of the buildings women had sponsored. Together, these historical processes made women's commercial presence invisible to future scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the final years of French rule in India. It questions the established narrative of the merger of the French settlements, which implied that they were always a ‘natural’ part of the Indian Union. It argues, on the contrary, that a full merger was only one of several possibilities for the various actors involved in the negotiations that took place between the independence of India in 1947 and the French withdrawal in 1954. Even those who supported a merger did so for different reasons, while a significant proportion opposed the merger on economic, social, and historical grounds. By examining more closely the opposing positions in the merger debate, we can locate them within the larger tensions of early post-colonial India – a new state that was struggling to define its geographical and ideological boundaries. This suggests that the decolonization of French India was not simply another chapter in French imperial decline; it was also an important example of Indian nation-building. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the cosmopolitan world of the colonial zenana through the marriages of two mid-twentieth-century royal Indian women, Maharani Brijraj Kumari of Dhrangadhra and Maharani Krishna Kumari of Jodhpur. In particular, it analyses the close connection between zenana women's education and emergent adolescent sexuality. These women ordinarily began their studies in mixed-gender classrooms with their brothers and male cousins as children. As they neared the age of menarche, girls were extracted from the formal schoolroom and undertook instruction in household management and childcare in preparation for their expected roles as wives and mothers. Despite being prematurely cut off from the childhood classroom, women's educational backgrounds (in both Western and Indic forms of knowledge) and future learning potential remained an important part of their postmarital identity. Young, anglicized Indian men increasingly desired wives who reflected the modernity that they hoped to represent as imperial subjects and were encouraged to adopt by British advisors and tutors. They required wives who would not wear pardah and thus reflect more Western ideals of companionate marriages of friendship, yet simultaneously live in gender-segregated palace quarters, uphold traditional kinship networks, perform religious duties, and engage in the maintenance of a large polygamous household. Definitions of sex, marriage, and domesticity were increasingly cross-cultural and pan-historical in nature, incorporating aspects both of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’, the Indic and the European, the regional and the transnational. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I am grateful to Tirthankar Roy for his prompt response, and his generosity in acknowledging the validity of some of my criticisms. It will be obvious to readers that there are some fundamental disagreements between us regarding what constitutes economic history. On this, and a number of other issues that Professor Roy has chosen not to address, it would be tedious to repeat myself; we must agree to disagree and invite readers of this journal to draw for themselves the conclusions they wish—and, ultimately, how fair I have been in assessing his book is something that readers will only be able to judge by reading it themselves. I focus below on the three core issues with which most of his response is concerned: ‘reading the past with reference to the present’, the importance of a ‘region-focused approach’, and the ‘comparative approach’. [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]

On 15 August 1950, just as India was celebrating its third independence anniversary, an earthquake of 8.6 magnitude struck the remote northeastern state of Assam and its surrounding borderlands. Rivers burst their banks and landslides blocked Himalayan valleys, destroying towns, villages, roads, fields, and tea gardens in their wake. Beyond the disaster's shattering impact on the physical geography of the region, this article explores how it participated in another reconfiguration—that of Assam's place within India's political geography and national imaginary. The Indian public had hitherto known very little about India's remote ‘northeast frontier’; the cataclysm and subsequent relief measures served to carve out a space for it on Indian mental maps. Simultaneously, by forcing a large-scale encounter between Indian authorities and the people of the scarcely controlled eastern Himalayas, post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation led to unprecedented state expansion in this newly strategic borderland. Yet in the same breath, the aftermath of the disaster fuelled stereotypes about Assam and its hinterland that would eventually further their marginality within India and undermine their continued unity. The crystallization of Assam's image as a place irreducibly subject to the whims of nature and, more importantly, incapable of taking care of itself (and hence, of its highland dependencies), would poison centre–state relations for decades to come. Imperfect and contradictory, the reordering of this border space from a colonial frontier to a component of independent India's national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]