Colonial Knowledge Research Articles

The Rivers Come: Colonial Flood Control and Knowledge Systems in the Indus Basin, 1840s-1930s

Abstract This essay traces the development of the physical and cultural infrastructure of colonial flood control in the Indus valley. Reconstructing investigations into the causes of a series of floods illustrates the conflict between the idiosyncratic, local knowledge-based, approach of generalists and the reductionist, technological mentality of engineers. Repeated attempts to protect towns from the Indus River illustrate the growing dominance during the second half of the nineteenth century of an engineering mentality, despite its practical shortcomings. Complex engineering works replaced traditional warning systems and mobility, undermining alluvial farming systems as well as a precautionary approach to environmental management.

Acknowledging Knowledge: Dissemination and Reception of Expertise in Colonial Africa

At every level, the functioning of African colonial societies depended on the availability and mediation of useful information and knowledge. The majority of the existing literature on “colonial knowledge” focuses on one area of this broad field: the various forms of knowledge about their subjects on which colonial states depended. Most of our attempts to understand such knowledge have tended to analyze colonial knowledge as a system: we have tried to identify which were the sets of shared basic assumptions and rules that governed the creation and presentation of knowledge. In analyzing the processes through which colonial knowledge was produced, we have looked at the role of “Orientalism” and other forms of “Othering.” We have examined various investigative modalities. Finally, we have seen how such knowledge may be compared to a pidgin language that allows for communication between colonizers and representatives of the colonized. We have also examined the opportunities for Africans to manipulate the outcomes of colonial knowledge creation, as well as such basic but essential factors as the realities of government support and funding.

Missionary Knowledge and the State in Colonial Nigeria: On How G. T. Basden became an Expert

Between 1931 and 1937, the Anglican missionary G. T. Basden represented the Igbo people on the Nigerian Legislative Council. The Igbo had not elected Basden as their representative; he had been appointed by the colonial government. Basden's appointment seems remarkable. In 1923 the Legislative Council had been expanded to include seats for Unofficial Members, representing a number of Nigerian areas, with the expressed aim of increasing African representation on the Council. In selecting Basden the government went against their original intention that the representative of the Igbo area would be a Nigerian. However, the government decided that there was no “suitable” African candidate available, and that the appointment of a recognized European expert on the Igbo was an acceptable alternative. This choice throws light on a number of features of the Nigerian colonial state in 1930s, including the limitations of African representation and the definition of what would make a “suitable” African candidate.In this paper I am concerned with the question of how Basden became recognized as an expert by the colonial government and also, more generally, with the linkages between colonial administrations' knowledge requirements and missionary knowledge production. Missionary-produced knowledge occupied a central, but also somewhat awkward position in colonial society. On the one hand, colonial governments and missions shared a number of common assumptions and expectations about African peoples. On the other hand, there also existed tensions between missions and government, partly reflecting differing missionary and administrative priorities, which means that the missionary expert was not often recognized as such.

Changing Frontiers and Spaces

This article is an attempt to understand the transition to colonial rule in the region of Goalpara, a historically transitional space between the colonial provinces of Assam and Bengal. It does this through an examination of the confrontation between local and colonial notions of space, power and authority that was initiated by the construction of the region into a politically and economically unified territory. In the mid-nineteenth century Goalpara was a ‘frontier’ on the subcontinental mainstream in terms of social norms, settled production, forests and fields, long-distance trade and communication, centralized political power, law and taxation, as well as already being liminal in regional terms between ‘proto-Bengal’ and ‘proto-Assam’. What makes its transition from a divergent and peripheral economic and political space, which had mobility as a defining feature, to a unit of a modern state with permanent boundaries and an undivided sovereignty, more significantly, was its fairly rapid (and documented) move from fluid to the normative, from jhum (shifting) to settled cultivation, from local to interregional (trade, power and law), and so on. The article, therefore, defends the region as a unit of analysis for studying the extraordinary impact of colonialism, for it uses specific examples from Goalpara to demon-strate larger propositions about colonial rule, including the ways in which colonial knowledge and power worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

English Literature and Ancient Languages by Kenneth Haynes (review)

MLR, 100.3, 2005 803 archive, Joseph suggests, 'always challenges the firstone's monopoly over colonial truth, but it is impossible to get at fully' (p. 15). Joseph takes a period of 120 years in which the British East India Company de? veloped its monopoly on South Asian trade into a ruthless colonizing force, and by analysing the exchanges between these two kinds of archives, attempts her charting of a grammar of power. She takes female presence in these archives as a test case of how colonial knowledge and power were formed out of systematic exclusions and erasures , but also disruptive presences, fragments, hauntings, pressures. Thus, Joseph reads Defoe's Roxana with the official records of the rape of an unnamed Indian woman in Madras, Holwell's famous account of the 'Black Hole' of Calcutta inci? dent against Phebe Gibbes's Hartley House, Williamson's East India Vade-Mecum with Mrs Monkland's novel Life in India. In each case, what the exchange between the literary archive and the official one shows is not merely the symbiotic relation? ship between the two, but that in inventing subjects (gendered or otherwise) through omissions, distortions, and disruptions, the 'official'/historical archive was as fictional as the secondary 'literary' archive was historical. Thus, the limits and very tangible capacities of the fictional nature of colonial power become startlingly evident once gender is moved to the centre of analysis. Betty Joseph's book is a compelling demon? stration of this fact. And what of Bishnukumari, the Bengali rani who secured such a tenacious presence in the colonial archives ?Joseph's study reveals that she escaped the summary dismissal from her post that was the fate of most other Zamindars under British rule, and over fifty years later was celebrated by J.S. Mill in his essay 'The Subjection ofWomen', as an example of 'the natural capacity of women forgovernment'. Such a deployment no doubt reveals the changing contours and compulsions of patriarchal colonial power. But perhaps it also signals the role played by such challenges and disruptions as were mounted by the rani in altering the essence of such power itself. University of Warwick Pablo Mukherjee English Literature and Ancient Languages. By Kenneth Haynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. xiv + 210 pp. ?47. ISBN 0-19-926190-3. This is an unusual and welcome book, probably the first monograph of its kind, devoted to the influence of the Latin and Greek languages upon English literature from the Renaissance onwards. Of the five chapters, the firstthree are concerned predominantly with relations between Latin and English literature in earlier centuries, while the final two are concerned with Greek, the emphasis here being mainly on the nineteenth century but looking also to modernism and the twentieth century. The order and proportion of the parts thus broadly illuminate the actual history of the linguistic influence which is broadly represented in all its great variety and range. Throughout the discussion, specialist terms that will be familiar to linguists but perhaps less familiar to literary readers are fully explained and clearly applied in many particular examples. Indeed, it is one of the virtues of this study that it contains a wealth of detailed, precise, and discriminating analysis of actual usages and quotations, that will be of great interest and value to linguists and literary critics, within the context of broader more general topics central to linguistic interaction and the history of influence. In the opening chapter on multilingualism, the modern history of Latin is briefly surveyed 'in its social, political, religious, and economic aspects' (p. ix) to provide contexts for the quotation of Latin and its presence in modern authors. The resort to Latin is shown to derive from many differentimpulses and to result in many dif? ferenteffects.The discussion gives the lie to the old notion that Latin and Greek have 804 Reviews been 'dead' languages since antiquity and provides an authoritative demonstration that even the humblest, most minute reference or quotation can be invested with a discernible cultural significance or value. The governing principle in the next chapter on varieties of language purism is the juxtaposition of two contradictory attitudes: the desire to accentuate the 'pure' Saxon elements...

Colonial knowledge and the military in India, 1780–1860

Military officers and surgeons played a critical role in the collection, analysis and dissemination of knowledge in colonial India. Yet the little attention to date that has been directed at scholars with military backgrounds has treated their army service as incidental to, rather than formative of, their contributions to knowledge of India. While not all were actively engaged in intellectual pursuits, a surprisingly large number of orientalists came from the army. In some cases, this can be attributed to the military's need for specific information. But such strictly utilitarian motives were not always at work; boredom, curiosity and professional aspirations encouraged officers and surgeons to take up scientific, literary and artistic activities. Military service also offered opportunities for travel, as well as technical training, which furthered such pursuits. Consequently, much of the colonial knowledge that was generated in the first century of colonial rule was tinged with military values and it was sometimes framed in language redolent of the army. This would in turn help to popularise certain readings of Indian society, particularly those which stressed the medieval and fragmented nature of Indian society. The boundaries between fact and fiction became blurred as romanticism came to influence British aesthetic, historical and scientific encounters with India.

After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (review)

Reviewed by: After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation Edward C. Moulton After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation. Edited by Antoinette Burton. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. 369 pp. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). This is an intellectually stimulating and thought-provoking collection of twenty-one essays (including the invaluable introduction by the editor) that debate the adequacy or limitations of the "modern, Western, Euro-American nation" (p. 1) as an analytical category for the study of history and culture. This questioning of the hitherto widely accepted idea of the centrality of the nation-state, as Burton acknowledges, owes much to the development of postcolonial studies and its new and discerning investigations into the nature of colonial hegemony. However, Burton does not appear to see herself as an integral [End Page 110] part of that school of studies. Rather, she evidently, and with good reason given her scholarly contributions, sees herself as an exponent of a new subfield of studies concerning "the imperial turn." Helpfully, for those who may not be immersed in the latest theoretical developments in this area, she defined "the imperial turn" as "the accelerated attention to the impact of histories of imperialism on metropolitan societies in the wake of decolonization . . . racial struggle and feminism in the last quarter century" (p. 2). While acknowledging the interrelationship between this subfield and postcolonialism, she does not tend to see the two as "coterminous" (p. 9). Indeed, her object in providing the intellectual and organizational drive to create this collection of original essays is to stimulate debate and thinking about the limitations of traditional national histories and to further explore and critique the interconnectedness of empire, nation, colony, race, and gender as the world moves into an era of increasing globalization. This also involves reshaping the nature of history writing itself to give it more of an international, interdisciplinary flavor and contemporary relevance. The volume is divided into three parts, the first of which is titled "Nations, Empires, Disciplines: Thinking beyond the Boundaries" and is intentionally Anglocentric in focus. This is logical because Britain was so pivotal as an empire, and its experience in the aftermath of decolonization can be illustrative of what happened to other Western nations. Furthermore, India and Indo-British relations during the time of empire are central to much of the historiography of both postcolonialism and "the imperial turn," and Burton's own scholarship focuses primarily on the influence of the Indian periphery on the metropolis of Britain during the imperial era. The six essays in this first section provide insightful commentaries from different disciplinary perspectives on recent scholarly writings on empire and nation and questions ways of thinking, writing, and teaching about these subjects. Not all authors agree on the downgrading of emphasis on the nation. For example, Tony Ballantyne, writing about South Asia, emphasizes the centrality of the nation-state in subaltern studies, the importance of horizontal linkages between British colonies as well as vertical connections with the metropolis, and the need to reread the archive in the light of the complex web of colonial knowledge. Second, Ann Curthoys, writing on Australia, stresses that national history there is relatively new and full of vitality. She welcomes this development and recognizes the merit of opening up historical analysis to outside cultural and historical influences so long as it does not jeopardize national history. Part 2, titled "Fortresses and Frontiers: Beyond and Within," contains [End Page 111] six essays, three of which form a counterpoint to the earlier focus on Britain, taking the discussion of empire and nation to an examination of the experiences of France, Germany, and Spain. To my mind, the most significant of these three essays is that in which Josep M. Fradera, a distinguished Spanish historian, responds to questions concerning Spanish colonial historiography. He argues convincingly that traditional Northern European capitalist and Protestant interpretations of "Spanish and Catholic backwardness" (p. 163) and exceptional brutality toward its colonial subjects were based largely on prejudice and misunderstanding. There is soundness, as well, in his further contention that Spanish imperialism, which began internally with the colonization of the Iberian Peninsula in the thirteenth century and...

Raiding the dreaded past

This article looks at the diverse and rich representations of headhunting in north–east India, especially in the European translations of this tribal practice into ethnographic ‘writings’ during the late imperial age. Colonial concern and anxiety to ‘civilise’ the headhunter and ‘control’ this ‘savage’ practice in the hills is characterised by inner contradictions at every level of its articulation and operation. Headhunting is a history, a heritage, a rhetorical trope, a discursive practice, a philosophy, a returning gaze from the ‘other’, and a space for contesting masculinity. Moreover, it is a textual ‘record’ of colonial knowledge about vanishing societies for the benefit of the human sciences as well as frontier administrators in the region. But the vanishing object of salvage ethno–graphy itself appears to be a colonial construct of the anthropologising world and its legitimising representational practice. Headhunting is often neither the subject nor the object of study: it is a prolific site of discourse where the coloniser, the ethnographer, and even the local people engage in representing and translating the ‘other’ as well as them–selves, with diverse intentions.

The Blind Eye and the Strong Arm: The Colonial Archive and the Imbrication of Knowledge and Power in Mid-Nineteenth Century Java

AbstractThe argument of this paper relates to on-going debates about the acquisition of knowledge and the enhancement of power in the context of European empire building during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seeks to locate these debates in the specific context of the Netherlands Indies and its key island of Java in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, at a time when the Dutch colonial power attempted a major fact-finding investigation of the island's sugar industry, and of the social and economic circumstances of "peasant" Java, in which colonial sugar manufacturers operated. It argues that in this particular instance, the attempt to assemble colonial knowledge exposed the potentially counter-productive aspects of such projects. It highlights the limitations of colonial knowledge implicit in the institutional structure of colonial power, and the extent to which, in the circumstances of mid-nineteenth century Java, the blind eye was the necessary corollary of the strong arm. This was because power rested on a carefully and consciously circumscribed quest for knowledge, which might easily be upset by too keen an investigation of the social and economic circumstances of the countryside.

A Sign that History is Happening: Shakespeare in 20th‐Century South African literature

AbstractThis article makes use of the notion of cultural hybridity as developed by Homi Bhabha in order to come to terms with the ways in which specific writers in 20th‐century South Africa incorporated Shakespeare as an icon and as a collection of texts into their work. I explore how the parameters of, particularly, gender and class impact on the identity positions that are both enabled by and developed in defiance of colonial and apartheid knowledge systems and institutions. In this context, extracts from the work of Solomon Plaatje and William Bloke Modisane are briefly discussed. Shakespeare's putative universalism is invoked by both these writers who, positioned at different points in South Africa's pre‐democratic history, make use of the texts, and the cultural and humanist associations that accrue to “Shakespeare.” The hybrid textual inscriptions that result need to be understood in terms of the local conditions of production, the subject positions they in part enabled, and the changing socio‐political climate which made its own demands on the writers who had access to Shakespeare. I locate this discussion within a post‐colonial framework in order to unravel some of the cultural complexities at work in the presence of Shakespeare in 20th‐century South African literature, and the connections with specific political and social conditions.

History at the Limit of World-History (review)

Reviewed by: History at the Limit of World-History Bernardo A. Michael History at the Limit of World-History. By Ranajit Guha. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 116 + ix pp. $24.50 (cloth). This slender book grew out of a series of lectures delivered by Ranajit Guha, one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective, at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. In this latest book he strives to show philosophy's complicity with colonialism and its forms of knowledge. For this reason he takes the German philosopher Georg Hegel and his conception of "World-History" (Weltgeschichte) to task for its elitist biases, prejudices, and complicity in European arrogance, imperialism, and colonial knowledge. For Hegel, World-History signified the teleological movement of Reason in History through a series of successive advances that culminated in God. This providential design was undoubtedly highly Eurocentric. Hegel also attributed an important role for the state in this progressive movement. Such a conception of World-History, according to Guha, became the justification for European expansion, the colonization of continents and the wholesale destruction of entire cultures. World-History became the amoral record of states and empires, great men, and clashing civilizations. This in turn rendered irrelevant and pushed to the margins the everyday experiences of ordinary people (or "historicality," as Guha terms it). Everything that lay outside the narrative of World-History was dismissed as "Prehistory." To remedy this situation, Guha endeavors to take the reader to the limit of World-History (as defined by Hegel) and give the reader a glimpse of what history practiced outside World-History would look like. This for Guha is "a creative engagement with [End Page 530] the past as a story of man's being in the everyday world. It is in short, a call for historicality to be rescued from its containment in World-History" (p. 6). After introducing his argument in the first chapter, Guha proceeds to elaborate on it in the remaining four chapters. In chapters 2 and 3 he examines the contents of historicality and World-History. Hegel's notion of world history denied large parts of the world any agency in human history. Thus, while Hegel admired India for its religious and spiritual qualities, he felt it did not have a history because it lacked a state. Obviously, there was plenty of evidence to the contrary, and Guha cites the instance of Ramram Basu, a petty official working for the East India Company, being commissioned to write a history of kings of the province of Bengal, in eastern India. Guha calls for broadening our prose of the world to include "all of man's being in time and his being with others to write itself into that prose and enter it with all the multiplicity and singularity, complexity, and simplicity, regularity and unpredictability of such being" (p. 46). He argues that historians should decenter statist concerns with public affairs in their writings and focus more attention to issues of historicality. In chapter 4 Guha examines indigenous southern Asian traditions of history (itihasa) that focus on the experience and circumstance of the narration versus the European novel, which privileges the firsthand experience of the narrator. He calls for rescuing historicality from marginalization by World-History and its emphasis on writing, the state, and notions of universal progress. He believes that this task remains to be accomplished as historians are still conceptually walled in by Hegelian notions of World-History. Our narratives need to be filled with a sense of wonder about human agency at the level of everyday life and be less concerned with the rigid formalities of representing the development of states. In the final chapter Guha turns to literature as a way out of the clutches of World-History. He finds sustenance in the concerns the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore had for historicality—in the "weal and woe of human life which, with its everyday contentment and misery, has always been there in the peasants' fields and village festivals, manifesting their very simple and abiding humanity across all of history—sometimes under Mughal rule, sometimes under British rule" (Rabindranath Tagore cited...

Schools for Muslim Girls -A Colonial or an Indigenous Project? A Case Study of Hyderabad

Since several years the discussions on Eduard Said's interpretation of oriental ism mark the dispute on the character and the importance of colonialism in South Asia. This has led to very interesting research on the relationship between colonial power and the production of knowledge on the colonies, notably on the ways in which indigenous institutions and traditions have been reinterpreted and thus re-formed by the British. While indigenous resistance is glorified, it nevertheless does not seem to have had much of an effect, as according to this position, both the power to interpret the world and the agency to change it re mained exclusively colonial. Challenging this all too sharp dichotomy between the omnipotent coloniser and the helpless colonised which in a strange way rejoins contemporary British images notably the Cambridge School and Chris Bayly have pointed out the many different forms of interaction, through which colonial knowledge on India was formed and reality transformed. Emphasising reciprocities and cross-fertilisa tions, Jamal Malik has recently shown that much of the 18tn and early 19th cen tury can also be read as a history of 'mutual encounters'1 between British and Indians.

Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India

SummaryBritish India was an especially fruitful site for the development of historical linguistics. Four major, unanticipated discoveries were especially associated with the East India Company: those of Indo-European, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian and the Indo-Aryan nature of Romani. It is argued that they came about in British India because the European tradition of language analysis met and combined with aspects of the highly sophisticated Indian language analysis. The discoveries of Indo-European and Dravidian, the subject of this article, were connected with the British-Indian cities of Calcutta and Madras, respectively, and the conditions under which they came about are examined. The production of new knowledge in British India is generally viewed through the lens of post-colonial theory, and is seen as having been driven by the needs of colonial governance. This essay sketches out a different way of looking at aspects of colonial knowledge that fall outside the colonial utility framework. It views these discoveries and their consequences as emergent products of two distinct traditions of language study which the British and the Indians brought to the colonial connection. If this is so, it follows that some aspects of modernism tacitly absorb Indian knowledge, specifically Indian language analysis. Indian phonology, among other things, is an example of this process.

‘A light to the world’: British devolution and colonial vision

This essay explores the centrality of vision to colonial knowledge, and particularly the importance of a consolidated Britishness to this form of knowledge. It stresses that, in the case of anglophone imperialism, visual metaphors were created by those most keen to get involved in the empire – as in the assumptions of Edinburgh Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith and Hume. So far, those disciplines which have been concerned with Britain’s break-up, such as Scottish studies, and those disciplines which push for post-imperialist justice, such as postcolonial studies, have had surprisingly little to say to one another. This essay notes how vision in the Enlightenment sense requires a subject-self to be entirely separate from a knowable and unchanging object-world – exactly the epistemology of imperialism. Conversely, it also charts the breakdown of these metaphors in a post-Enlightenment scene in which Scottish thought shows extraordinary similarities to early postcolonialist thought, and as a case study compares Frantz Fanon’s and John Macmurray’s ideas of the subject-self. Moreover, it suggests that England, rather than Scotland, has become ‘invisible’ underneath British images of light leading from the Enlightenment, since England has occupied a default position which does the ‘seeing’. Thus the undoing (in the proper sense of the word, the deconstruction) of British vision, and the recovery of English specificity, may represent the final stage of anglophone imperialism, a situation in which the highly British subject-self will have ceased to have currency.

The process of social stratification in the lineage society of Kolhan in Singhbhum

To study ‘tribes’ is to be drawn into the world of colonial knowledge. As I take up the Ho tribe of Chotanagpur1 and reconstruct the process of its social stratification, I have mainly to grapple w...

Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason (review)

Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason Satadru Sen Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason. By Biko Agozino. London: Pluto Press, 2003. In Counter-Colonial Criminology, Biko Agozino sets out to demonstrate that the location of criminology in former imperial metropoles is inseparable from the implication of social science in colonialisms past and present. Drawing attention to the lack of interest in criminology in former colonies, Agozino calls for a new intellectual and political commitment that will allow the black/colonized to refashion the discipline as an instrument for a redefinition of criminality. Such a redefinition, Agozino asserts, will enable effective critiques of colonialism, and effective resistance against the persistence of colonial relations in the contemporary world. The strength of the book lies in the author’s ability to integrate a wide range of theoretical scholarship in the social sciences, as well as works of literature, to identify the echoes of imperialism in metropolitan criminology. At the same time, the notion that internal minorities — especially ‘people of color’ — constitute domesticated colonies in the post-imperial age is not entirely original, and the analytical gain from extending the ‘internal colonies’ idea to criminology is somewhat dubious. While Agozino’s work is undoubtedly an impassioned piece of polemic, it suffers from the lack of an argument of its own, and there are long stretches when the author appears to do little more than review one book after another. There are other serious problems, which derive from a rather shallow grounding in the histories of colonialism, including the history of crime and punishment in colonial societies. Agozino does take note of events such as the Mau Mau rebellion, the Vietnam War and the killing of Amadou Diallo, but these serve merely as moral signposts without specificity of context. This disinterest in context — or the assumption that colonialism is monocontextual — allows the book to float above the mundane details of politics, in the rarified space that intellectual history occasionally inhabits. It also allows Agozino to fall into crudely Manichean oppositions and essentialisms, in which the black/colonized are consistently victimized by white/colonizers who are remarkably consistent in their duplicity and viciousness. The historical instabilities of such oppositions and essences are for the most part obscured by naked moral outrage and the name-calling; there is little appreciation here of the nuances of colonial reality, of the participation of the colonized in the production of colonial knowledge, or of the hesitations, uncertainties and contradictions within colonizing agendas. Nor is any notice taken of the negotiated nature of colonial encounters. In Agozino’s analysis, colonialism is entirely coercive and native responses can be described unproblematically in terms of innocence and heroic resistance. While this approach makes for a fine diatribe against the “crimes” of imperialism, it also compromises the value of the study. The description of Jeremy Bentham as a callous and scheming “gangster” is ultimately intellectually dishonest, and it does not further our understanding of Utilitarianism either in the metropole or in the colony. To some extent, the problem is rooted in the genre of black studies, within which Agozino’s book might be located. With its presupposition of unhistoricized and thus stable racial, political and moral identities, it inevitably reproduces colonial categories of identity, behavior and academic discipline. Typically of nationalist responses to colonialism, such critiques can seek to reverse or usurp a set of power relationships, but they cannot deconstruct the basic assumptions that make nation, race, colony, metropole and discipline politically meaningful. Satadru Sen Washington University, St. Louis Copyright © 2004 Satadru Sen and The Johns Hopkins University Press

Fanny Parkes and Changing British Attitudes to India in the Mid Nineteenth Century

Following the success of Edward Said's groundbreaking work Orientalism (1979), an entire school of criticism has attempted to apply Said's ideas to the whole range of colonial writings and art. Some of these applications have proved more suitable than others, and there sometimes seems to be an assumption at work in academia - especially in the US - that all writings of the colonial period exhibit exactly the same sets of prejudices. It is as if there is at work a monolithic, modern, academic Occidentalism which seems to match the monolithic stereotypes perceived in the original Orientalism uncannily. Fanny Parkes, author of Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (1850), has not escaped this academic pigeon-holing, and has recently been the subject of two academic articles which would have her implicit in the project of gathering 'Colonial knowledge' and 'imbricated with the project of Orientalism' - in other words an unwitting outrider of colonialism, attempting to 'appropriate' Indian learning and demonstrate the superiority of Western ways by 'imagining' India as decayed and degenerate, fit only to be colonised and 'civilised'. Anyone who reads Fanny Parkes's writing with an open mind cannot but see this as a wilful misreading of the whole thrust of her text, an attempt to fit her book into a mould which it simply does not fit.

Turkestan and the fate of the Russian Empire

Preface Maps Illustrations Part I: Russian Turkestan and the Revolt of 1916 1. Judgments on a Flawed Imperial Undertaking 2. Visions of Imperial Integration 3. Colonial Uniqueness and Authoritarian Rule Part II: Constructing Russia's Colony 1. Creating Colonial Turkestan 2. Kaufman's Colonial Plans 3. Colonial Knowledge of Turkestan Part III: The Colony in the Empire 1. Civil Order and the Statute of 1886 2. Language Politics and Cultural Missionaries 3. Colonial Profits and Productivity Part IV: Islam in Russian Turkestan 1. Colonial Conflict and Islam 2. Turkestan in a New Civilization 3. Resurgent Popular Islam Part V: The Making of a Settler Colony 1. Plans for Settler-Soldiers 2. Pioneers and Nomads 3. Colonization and the Empire Part VI: Turkestan and the Fall of the Russian Empire 1. War and Colonial Crisis 2. Colonial Collapse Epilogue: The Colonial Dilemma Resolved Select Bibliography Index

Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge

Recent years have seen the emergence of a lively debate over the nature of “colonial knowledge”—those forms and bodies of knowledge that enabled European colonizers to achieve domination over their colonized subjects around the globe. Lying at the heart of the debate are two opposing evaluations of the role played by colonized subjects in the production of colonial knowledge. One position holds that the role of the colonized was negligible—at most, permitting some of them to serve as passive informants, providing raw information to the active European colonizers who produced the new knowledge by imposing imported modes of knowing upon the raw data of local society. In contrast, the other holds that indigenous intellectuals in reality contributed actively to the process, and that colonial knowledge was thus produced through a complex form of collaboration between colonizers and colonized, and an attendant process of epistemic confrontation and adjustment between European and indigenous knowledge systems. Although this debate has focused primarily on one colonial context—that of British India—it has important ramifications for the broader history of colonialism, and is complemented by contributions relating to other areas of European colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997:11–18).

From caste to category: Colonial knowledge practices and the Depressed/Scheduled Castes of Bihar

This article seeks to unpack the administrative and knowledge practices through which the community of Depressed Classes/Scheduled Castes was delineated in colonial Bihar. It does so by examining both the distinctions that were posed between Untouchables and the upper castes, and between them and the Criminal Tribes. Four fields are examined with respect to the marking of these boundaries-social/religious, law and order, education, and political representation. This article argues that right through the colonial period, there remained a great deal of ambiguity about how to distinguish lower castes from tribes, unclean castes from Untouchables and these from the Depressed Classes, ambiguities that were consequent upon the particular enumerative exercise being undertaken.