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During colonial times, dioramas were commonly used to portray the diverse peoples of India. They depicted essentialised human types through plaster models in rural settings, engaged in typical activities, and dated back to the exhibition of human beings in universal expositions held in Calcutta, Delhi and London. Since Independence, there have been determined efforts to move away from colonial stereotypes and to decolonise government-funded museums in India. Meanwhile, Adivasi artists are finding their own way out of the curatorial confines of the museum. This paper describes how Indian museology still struggles to exorcise the ghosts of the Victorian museum and India's own internal colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their pursuit of self-serving goals, sometimes governments create and use various instruments as the means to relatively short-term ends. Such instruments, however, can be tenacious, and have perverse, long-lasting impacts. This paper focuses on one such instrument created during the British Raj: the Frontier Crimes Regulation. Often, the literature on the Regulation focuses on the rationale for its creation from the perspective of the colonisers and refers to the long-term consequences in hindsight, thereby ignoring local voices. However, I show that in 1901, at the time of the drafting of the Regulation, the local colonised population foresaw the potentially lasting pernicious effects stemming from it and voiced their concerns. I demonstrate that these local voices can help us understand the roots of the problems in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending the paradigms of Subaltern Studies, this paper takes up three disparate sites—didactic Hindi literature, conversions and army discourses—to provide a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signified Dalit bodies in colonial north India. Through different arenas, it shows how representations constituted, and were reflective of, the power relationships between upper and lower castes, in which the former reinstated their dominance. At the same time, the paper challenges straightjacketed links between representation and domination by expanding its archival arenas, and argues that Dalit bodies were not just screens on which high castes and colonial authorities projected their own caste, racial and gender anxieties. Rather, Dalits too represented themselves in different ways, conceiving a gendered sense of self in social, religious, public and political spaces. Such contested practices of representations produced creaks and dislocations in dominant embodiments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article recounts the ways in which the Sumi (or Sema) Naga tribes of Northeast India remember their service in Europe during World War I (1914–18). The state records pertaining to the Sumi Naga Labour Corps (SNLC) in the War were destroyed during the Japanese invasion of Kohima in 1944. However, the descendants of the SNLC members have transmitted and preserved their experiences through oral histories and storytelling, leaving a vast repository of cultural histories that weave together structures of wars, politics, violence, and ideas of nations. The article delves into the personal experiences evident in these memories and critiques the silencing of non-literary communities where they find no resonance with written archives, demonstrating that storytelling is pivotal in the transmission of ideas and the prosecution of wars. The scarcity and fragility of Naga memories of events beyond Nagaland raise questions about the relationship between oral and written history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the cultural imperialism policy of the British which has been intended to civilize and Christianize the people especially the tribal people in Chhotanagpur in East India through Christian missions. The tribes have been considered a difficult challenge which has required more rigorous programs of interventions to adapt the Western cultures. The colonial conceptions about the tribes have been abandoned to acquire equal and full citizens of the democratic India.

This article analyses the homologies between colonial knowledge projects and post-colonial revival programmes through Indian textiles and dress. In the nineteenth century, the colonial bureaucracy treated Indian textiles as samples of 'native' artisanship, using them to police discourses of race, gender and citizenship. Concomitantly, the nationalist movement created a model of Indian womanhood that conscripted women to be both 'traditional' and 'modern', signified in the Nivi sari, linking this to emerging craft conservation movements. Post-Independence, elite women became the directors of craft revival by linking sartorial taste to ideal womanhood in a continuation of colonial discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During and immediately after World War I, Indian nationalism became subsumed into the overall American governmental efforts to cripple the activism of alleged subversives, radicals and anarchists. Indian nationalism was cast in a particularly negative light in the United States after British and American officials uncovered the Indo-German conspiracy of 1915. Using primary sources from American and British archives, I argue that through this 'imperial collusion' with the British, the United States spurned its Indian population and plainly let it be known that it would not support anti-colonialist independence movements. There were, however, American supporters of Indian nationalism in the United States who voiced their condemnation of British imperialism and disdain for American government repression and racism towards its Indian population. This article adds depth to South Asian studies through its transnational approach to anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism by revealing the shared solidarity among Indian and American anti-imperialists as they combatted the seemingly ubiquitous forces of the British and American empires from 1917 to 1920. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The activities of multinationals in India have so far been described as a British-Indian story. However, the British Empire was never an impenetrable economic area, but, rather, a contact zone for firms of many different origins. This article diversifies the historiography of Indian business history by tracing the commercial interactions between Germany and India from the 1890s to the 1960s as one example of non-British multinationals. It shows continuities in actors, debates and strategies and across major political turning points. In particular, it highlights the alignment of aspirations between Germans and nationalistic Indians as a coalition against British dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The now natural ideal of defining higher education through its societal utility is a relatively recent historical formation, and in the case of South Asia, its construction is entangled with the colonial history of the institutionalisation of modern higher education in the nineteenth century. Drawing on Robert Young's history of the Bentham-inspired ‘chrestomathic’ University of London, this article reviews the shifting construction of practicality in British Indian higher education policy in the formative period between 1835 and 1904. The article underlines the continuities and ruptures over time in the policy rhetoric of utility as a normative ideal and points out some implications for understanding colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]