British Indian Research Articles

The Gurkha Knife in Polish Second World War Memoirs

The Second World War created numerous opportunities for intercultural encounters, including contacts between soldiers of the 2nd Polish Corps and the Gurkhas of the British Indian Army. This article focuses on a prominent single element highlighted in Polish war memoirs, the Gurkha khukuri knife. Used as a multi-purpose tool in Nepal, it contributes to the image of fierce Gurkha soldiers, thanks to its reputation as a lethal weapon. The Gurkha knife attracted much attention during the war and seems to have become the most-remembered element of the representation of Nepalis in the Polish Second World War memoirs.

Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and Politics of Non-violence: A Perspective of Passive Resilience, 1920-1930

This article examines the emergence of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) among rural middle and lower middle-class Sikhs with the objectives of reforms in gurdwaras management along with to preserve separate Sikh identity, stop Sikhs conversion and popular representation of Sikhs through non-violent means during 1920-1930. SAD avoided to merge into national level Non-Cooperation movement and remained successful to achieve its initial goals. This article, based on revealing the fresh sources drawn from the Punjab Archives Lahore and Lahore Museum Library argues that initially a pure religious reformist movement emerged with popular support continued the strategy of nonviolence even after the acceptance of major demands in the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925. SAD’s nonviolence strategy was also influenced by other Sikh organizations like Khalsa Diwan, Central Sikh League and external forces, like Indian National Congress (INC), All India Muslim League (AIML), the Unionist Party, Non-Cooperation movement and Khilafat movement at different scale. The British Indian government initially tried to handle the Sikh resistance through Sikh elites, gurdwara mahatns and colonial Punjab administration but SAD’s nonviolent response forced the government to mend their ways and finally introduced the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925.

Between Afghan “Idolography” and Kafir “Autoethnography”


 
 
 This article presents a translation of and commentary on a previously unknown Persian account of Kafiristan published in Afghanistan’s first newspaper in 1874. The text purports to be the first-hand testimony of Wān, a recent convert to Islam, who describes the sacred sites of his homeland to a literate Muslim resident of Badakhshan. The account comes from the least documented region of former Kafiristan, not only in being on the Afghan rather than the British Indian side of the Durand Line, but also in possibly being from one of the least-known regions of Afghan Kafiristan. Wān’s testimony may not only be an extremely rare “autoethnographic” account of Kafir religious sites, but in being also a work of Afghan “idolography,” the text lends insight into how the religion of the kāfir (infidel) was understood by Afghan state officials in the decades before the conquests and forced conversions of 1895–96.
 
 

Indian Tamils of Srilanka and Unchanging Language Identities

The Indian Tamils settled down in the South Central Province of Mountains nearly 200 years ago. It is officially reckoned that the Indian Tamils are about 5% of the entire population of Sri Lanka. There is a strong background behind the settlement of the ancestors of millions of Indian Tamils who live widespread in the Uphills of Sri Lanka. Most of the Indian Provinces were severely affected by the Famine in the 19th century; Madras Presidency was one among them. In order that death due to famine may be controlled, the British Indian Administration decided to send away the Tamils to the Colonial Nations that were under the British rule.

The Evolving Russo-Pak Entente-Cordiale: Challenges for the Future

Historically, the Russo-Pak relationship had aforeign policy context and a legacy that went through the historic eras of pre-partition Great Game between the British Indian and Czarist Empires,and the post-partition Cold War between the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States of America (USA).Pakistan on its creation sided with the American led West through Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) or Baghdad Pact, plus, the partnerships against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and in the War on Terror. The US military and financial aid and the support by the International and Asian financial institutions for Pakistan is decades old—albeit now with a friction over Afghanistan, Russia and China. Still, the transactional-cooperation remains over Afghanistan through the air-corridorthatis useful for Americans in many ways. American influence, assets and the air-corridor is a deadly mix in Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban know thatthe drones, jets and aircrafts using the corridor take-off from and land at Qatar without ever landing in Afghanistan. Moreover, intelligence sharing is part of Pak-US operational cooperation with a possibility of a military base too. The context of Pak-US cooperation is the centuries old British era Frontier Policy. It remained until the American strategic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Therelationship since then has deteriorated and the perception of each other is not harmonious despite the tactical cooperation in Afghanistan. The reason is the strategic choices made by Pakistan and America lackingcongruence over China, Russia, Afghanistan and India.Theinteractive-arm-twisting of Pakistan is an indicator. The restis the detail of Pakistan’s New Frontier Policy.

Re-imagining the Komagata Maru incident: Canadian history through fiction and film

ABSTRACT The failed journey of the Komagata Maru in 1914 of British Indian subjects from Hong Kong to the Burrard Inlet in Vancouver, is a reminder of Canada’s deep-rooted racial prejudice and practice of exclusion, further reflected through its discriminatory policies and façade of multiculturalism. Canada’s strategic implementation of the Continuous Journey Act and its subsequent effect on the ship, turned out to be a nightmare for the aspiring South Asian immigrants to Canada as they were stranded onshore for two months. Renewed focus on discussion around borders, rights, and identities draws attention to the early nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses that expose the complexities of colonial regimes and the crises that have followed. It is in this vein I propose a re-reading of the Komagata Maru incident, through its contemporary literary and artistic representations and raise questions of race, citizenship, ethnicity vis-à-vis issues of borders, empires, nations, belonging, and home.

The Rules-Based Order, International Law and the British Indian Ocean Territory: Do as I Say, Not as I Do

AbstractPerpetuating Britain’s controversial administration of the Chagos Archipelago (BIOT – British Indian Ocean Territory) raises questions about the UK’s commitment to the rules-based order and international law. This interdisciplinary article examines British administration of the Chagos Archipelago by taking a legal-international relations perspective. It provides an overview to the rules-based order concept and its relation with international law, briefly examines the Territory’s history, and outlines how BIOT violates the principles enshrined in the rules-based order concept, specifically promotion of self-determination, prohibition of forced displacement and respect for international institutions. This study is significant due to its timing – set in a period of increased international pressure on the United Kingdom to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius – and also significant in a period of increased rules-based order strain throughout the Indo-Pacific. This article argues that, despite Britain’s assertion that it is a champion of the rules-based order, of which international law is a component, continued British administration of the Chagos Archipelago is in contravention of both. In an era of rules-based order strain, British BIOT policy provides fertile ground to criticisms of its foreign policy and international law selectivity and double standards.

THE FEMALE IN SELECTED LITERARY PIECES: A SOCIAL CRITICISM

In the previous two decisive decades, feminism's enquirers have imprinted a vital rebuke to the way social science has etched out men, women, and society. Arguments regarding epistemology, method, and methodology have been entwined with confabulations about how to effectively modify skewed and partial accounts in the setting of traditional analyses from the dawn. To grasp the comprehensiveness of the social sciences' metamorphosis, to distinguish women and gender practices, one required to observe the most visible approaches to alter the classic analyses' andro-centrism. Feminists have attempted to 'include women' in these discussions. We find three types of women who emerged as undisputable candidates for this framework: women who contributed to public life and were already being studied by social scientists, women social scientists, and women who have been victims of the most abhorrent and blatant forms of male pre-eminence. This research article is an endeavor to study feminism taking selected literary pieces from Sanskrit, British English Literature and Indian English Literature. KEYWORDS: Women in Our Society, Gender Inequalities, Women in British Society, Women in Ancient Indian Society, Society through Literature

Modernization of leather industry and chequered history of technical education in colonial Kanpur

Modernization of industry in the western world was determined by application as well as the training of man for applying science in industry. The leather industry which was manufacturing at the cottage level did not resist this modernization. The leather industry in India employed the most depressed class of the Indian society. On the one hand, modernization of leather industry was determined by application of science, while on the other by the training of the workforce. The latter invoked political and social factors like state policy for technical education, receiving of technical education by artisan class and employment opportunity for the skilled workforce. By the late nineteenth century, Kanpur emerged as the prominent centre of modern leather industry in colonial India due to military needs of the British Indian army. The reasons for slow growth of science and technology in colonial India have been extensively examined by scholars but the configuration of industry at the local level, the role of social composition of the workforce in the modernization and the inception of technical education have been less examined. The present paper seeks to address the questions as to the factors which led to the emergence of modern leather industry in Kanpur; the nature of its organization and the relationship between leather industry and institutionalization of technical education for this industry.

Delivering surgical education: a specialist surgical society and undergraduate student collaboration.

Currently, the delivery of the undergraduate medical curriculum includes various teaching, learning and assessment strategies. Self-directed learning is an important aspect of this mix and includes the use of resources, sometimes not provided by the parent University, in the student's own time to enhance the student's knowledge, skills and professional practice. Societies aimed at a particular specialty contain a pool of professionals that can provide undergraduate students with opportunities for further self-directed learning, development of specialty-specific core skills and exploration of research interests. This may then enhance and enlighten the students' approach to a particular orthopaedic problem and reinforce the curriculum they are studying while providing an understanding of current areas of debate that are not part of the curriculum at present. The collaboration of postgraduate societies with undergraduate students in developing and implementing undergraduate engagement strategies is of benefit to undergraduate education, the specialty society and the collaborating students. We explore the planning and implementation of an interactive webinar series run by the British Indian Orthopaedic Society in collaboration with undergraduate students. We provide a case study of a surgical specialty society engaging with undergraduate students with synergistic effect. We pay particular attention to the benefits accrued by the specialty society and the student collaborators by this joint effort.

Delivering surgical education: a specialist surgical society and undergraduate student collaboration

Currently, the delivery of the undergraduate medical curriculum includes various teaching, learning and assessment strategies. Self-directed learning is an important aspect of this mix and includes the use of resources,...

Reconfiguring colonial hierarchies: Examining the ‘European versus native wrestling’ debate in the late nineteenth-century India

The ‘empire’ as a project has always been fraught with tensions across several dimensions. And that tension is evident in the relationship between the ‘coloniser’ and the ‘colonised’ throughout the social, political and economic spectrum. At times, many of these tensions spill over in interesting ways at the most unexpected moments revealing lesser-known dimensions of the colonial relations. The 1891 wrestling match between the English Champion wrestler Tom Cannon and the Maharajah of Jodhpur’s court wrestler, Karim Bux in Calcutta, the British Indian capital, was one such moment. This article is an attempt to demonstrate how wrestling matches between a European and a native could become a flash point that it became, among other things, an occasion for the natives to question the ‘superiority’ of Europeans.

Book Review: The 1945 Burma Campaign and the Transformation of the British Indian Army by Raymond A. Callahan and Daniel Marston

Book Review: <i>The 1945 Burma Campaign and the Transformation of the British Indian Army</i> by Raymond A. Callahan and Daniel Marston

The stratigraphic significance of self‐organization: Exploring how autogenic processes can generate cyclical carbonate platform strata

AbstractAutogenic spatial self‐organization can produce coherent patterns of ordered cyclical strata through interaction of system components, independent of initial conditions and without external forcing. Previous numerical modelling work that partially explored self‐organized cyclicity in carbonate strata is expanded, refined and tested using a different numerical model formulation of an existing carbonate forward model ‘CarboCAT’. Results show that cross‐platform sediment transport creates a series of self‐organized prograding islands and shorelines that generate upward‐shallowing autocycles, defined by strong statistical evidence for ordered facies successions. A subtidal factory in front of each shoreline supplies sediment that drives shoreline progradation and these subtidal supply‐zone widths are also self‐organized to an optimal characteristic width due to island progradation, such that an accommodation creation/sediment supply ratio of around one maintains self‐organized shoreline progradation. The resulting island progradation rate determines autocycle thickness, which is very different from the accommodation control assumed in most sequence stratigraphic and cyclostratigraphic interpretations. This self‐organization process is comparable to the reaction–diffusion model first suggested by Alan Turing. The simplest possible combination of processes that leads to self‐organization are water‐depth‐dependent production, straight long‐distance cross‐platform transport and uniform subsidence. Additional more complex processes can produce self‐organization, but also more diverse island morphologies, less ordered autocyclic strata and more variable lateral facies continuity. Exploration of the model parameter space shows that self‐organization occurs for only a limited range of accommodation creation/sediment supply ratios. The modelling is calibrated and checked for realism against shoreline progradation rates measured on the Peros Banhos carbonate platform, British Indian Ocean Territory, and a Holocene Abu Dhabi shoreline, suggesting that this is a realistic and perhaps ubiquitous process in geological history. Given the fundamental nature of processes modelled here, and the match with observed processes in modern depositional systems, it seems possible that similar autogenic, self‐organizing processes have operated on many carbonate platforms and are an important component in the stratigraphic record.

Seeing is Believing: How the Layering of Race is Obscured by “White Epistemologies” in the Criminal Justice Field

Criminology has been slow in recognizing the central organizing logic of race in (post)colonial societies. It is therefore unsurprising that research practice falls behind that proffered through other disciplinary epistemological critiques. In this paper, we interrogate the tools of whiteness that are obscured in the widely used research method of in-depth interviews. We scrutinize what is not “seen” but which can be made evident in research interactions, using three interview case studies conducted in England. Warren, a white man interviewed by a white man (Earle), exposes the occlusions and upholding of race and racism in prison settings. Rafan, a British Bangladeshi man interviewed by a British Indian woman (Parmar) reveals a socio-cultural backstory in which coloniality is deeply implicated but seems just beyond view, within and outwith the criminal justice system. Finally, the interview of Cairo, a black (British) Jamaican man by a mixed-race black British woman (Phillips), articulates a poignant yet defiant response to structural and cultural racism, which begins long before interaction with the criminal justice system. Laid bare are the limitations of existing research where over-represented white researchers typically conduct research involving under-represented minorities who are vulnerable to exclusion, criminalization, and state violence. Our three case study interviews offer a step beyond traditional qualitative research instruction for students and apprentice researchers. It aims to impart a reflexive pedagogy which intertwines biography with politics in training the next generation of criminal justice researchers.

Indian or British Film Heritage? The Material Life of Britain's Colonial Film Archive

This article examines selected titles from a collection of colonial films shot in India between 1899 and 1947, preserved at the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archives. It tracks these films' changing cultural value from the time they entered the archive to their recent digitization and recontextualization in curatorial projects such as the 2017 UK-India Year of Culture. As part of this yearlong program, British Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri repurposed these same films in her archival documentary Around India with a Movie Camera (2018). By subverting their intended meanings, Suri's film expands the BFI's curatorial discourses and advances what this article reads as a powerful experiment in decolonizing the film archive.

Entangled Empire: Religion and the Transnational History of Pakistan and Israel

In this article I trace the transnational history of Pakistan and Israel, focusing on the global politics of religion entailed therein. I study the often-overlooked intra-imperial dynamics and the ways in which these intersected with the colonial and post-colonial sociology of knowledge, the politics of cultural diversity and the changing international order. I illustrate how the census and the enumeration of minorities, the claim to political representation, and the transition from ‘minority’ to ‘nation’ shaped that which could be recognised as religious difference as well as the states defined by it. I thereby show how the colonial governmental logic that structured the minority politics of the British Indian Muslims and the Palestinian Jews both limited and enabled the claims to the nations and the states that came to replace them. The case study focuses on two key individuals in the history of the Indian and Palestine partition, and the Pakistani and Israeli independence that followed, Reginald Coupland and Muhammad Zafarullah Khan. I ask how they, the institutions they represented, and the ideas they carried, circulated and influenced changed over the final decade before independence. In the final part of the article, I argue that claims for the recognition of religion in international relations (IR) are not separate from these forms of colonial epistemological politics but are intimately connected to them. By studying the global, entangled politics of religion we can begin to understand the costs of its recognition.

The British Non-Recognition of Bukhara&amp;apos;s Independence in 1922: Assessments, Forecasts, and Mechanism

The article examines the British vision and assessments of the situation in Bukhara in the winter of 1921–1922, immediately after the split of the Union of Bolsheviks and Young Bukharians, which previously led to the creation of the so-called Bukhara People&amp;apos;s Soviet Republic in the fall of 1920. Drawing on British archival sources, the article examines the decision-making process and projections for future development and outlines the mechanism of interaction between the various institutions of the British Indian administration and its decisions regarding Anglo-Bukharian relations. The United Kingdom needed to prevent any threat to its Indian possessions. Therefore, the recognition of the independent statehood of Bukhara immediately after the overthrow of the emir by the Bolsheviks and the Young Bukharans, and the establishment of the pro-Soviet regime, became particularly important. The problem of recognition affected a wide range of issues, including British positions in the East, its relations with individual countries of the region, primarily with Afghanistan, and the establishment of relations with Soviet Russia, which, on the one hand, showed its interest in promoting them, and on the other, engaged in anti-British activities in the East with an emphasis on India. The Afghan authorities, pursuing their own goals in Central Asia, persistently appealed to the British to recognize the independence of Bukhara, referring to the Soviet and Afghan examples. British diplomats reacted cautiously to all appeals, without losing sight of the Afghan plans and goals of London. Their final refusal to participate in the Bukhara chaos is caused, to a greater extent, by the lack of a real force on which the British could rely. Thus, the very idea of British recognition turned out to be unviable because of the nature of the puppet regime established in the BNSR, and because of the unwillingness of the British to aggravate their relations with Soviet Russia.

The noble mission of Nobel Laureate Sir Ronald Ross

The noble mission of Nobel Laureate Sir Ronald Ross

“But It’s Not That They Don’t Love Their Girls”: Gender Equality, Reproductive Rights and Sex-Selective Abortion in Britain

ABSTRACT Recent demographic analysis of sex ratios at birth in the UK has signaled the issue of “missing girls” in British Asian minority populations. This paper juxtaposes the processes of reproductive regulation set in motion by this new demographic knowledge of son preference, with lived experiences of gender equality and family-making practices. Ethnographic research conducted with British Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi families reveal diverse mechanisms of family decision-making that add to and nuance the prevailing statistics. We use the lens of “gender equality” and vernacular framings of sex-selective abortion to advance conceptual understandings of son preference as increasingly disconnected from selective reproduction, at the same time as selective reproduction is connected with the governance of ethnic minority identity and reproduction.