Colonial South Asia Research Articles

Railways in Colonial South Asia

Railways in Colonial South Asia

Universalising Aspirations: Community and Social Service in the Ismaʻili Imagination in Twentieth-Century South Asia and East Africa

AbstractTaking the example of the Ismaʻilis in colonial South Asia and East Africa, this article examines some aspects of the complexities involved in the identity formation of communities seeking gradual redefinitions in a deterritorialised global context, reformulating notions of community membership in the process. The Ismaʻili case illustrates an intertwined history of the development of community identity, and a language of social service that became the hallmark of the community under a religious leadership that virtually redefined its position through a vigorous and increasing emphasis on the idiom of social commitment. At one level, this thrust marks a passage from the translocal to the global context, intelligible in terms of the conceptual rubric of global assemblages. At another level, the article also seeks to evaluate the nature of the community's diasporic experience in Africa. It suggests that the ideational framework and praxis of social service — and in more recent times grander developmental endeavours addressing the needs of both Ismaʻilis and non-Ismaʻilis across the world — both reflect, and are mutually constitutive of, more fundamental experiments with identity and repositioning of religious authority that the Ismaʻilis first witnessed in colonial South Asia and East Africa. This article is thus an effort to retrieve some of the continuities and ruptures in the historical process.

Between qanungos and clerks: the cultural and service worlds of Hindustan's pensmen,c.1750–1850

AbstractThis paper argues that our understanding of the transition to colonialism in South Asia can be enriched by examining the formation of revenue collection systems in north India between 1750 and 1850. It examines agrarian revenue systems not through the prism of legalism or landholding patterns, but by looking at the paper and record-based mechanisms by which wealth was actually extracted from India's hinterlands. It also examines the Kayastha pensmen who became an exponentially significant component of an Indo-Muslim revenue administration. They assisted the extension of Mughal revenue collection capabilities asqanungos (registrars) andpatwaris (accountants). The intensity of revenue assessment, extraction and collection had increased by the mid 1700s, through the extension of cultivation and assessment by regional Indian kingdoms. The East India Company, in its agrarian revenue settlements in north India, utilized this extant revenue culture to push through savage revenue demands. These Kayastha pensmen thus furnished the ‘young’ Company with the crucial skills, physical records, and legitimacy to garner the agrarian wealth which would fund Britain's Indian empire. These more regular patterns of paper-oriented administration engendered a process of ‘bureaucratization’ and the emergence of the modern colonial state.

Nile Green. The Faqir and the Subalterns: Mapping the Holy Man in Colonial South Asia

To refer to the figure of the faqīr, typically characterized as a renunciatory, mendicant with anticonformist behavior, the author introduces the word “polivestiary” for “those holy men and saints whose various groups of followers symbolically ‘clothe’ them in ways reflecting the group’s own religious tradition” (p. 59). This article criticizes the dualistic Hindu/Muslim model that ignores the variety of the religious ideas held by these holy men’s followers. By claiming that the polivestiary...

Reading Revolutionaries: Texts, Acts, and Afterlives of Political Action in Late Colonial South Asia

This essay maps out the discursive and political trajectories of the ‘revolutionary’ in Indian historical and literary worlds. Focusing on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army and related interwar Indian anticolonial agitators, this essay reflects on the lineages, breadth, and productivity of the term. By tracing the figure of the revolutionary, we show that its genealogy reflects a wide range of political allegiances, ethical concerns, and aesthetic protocols. ‘Revolutionary’ not only suggests Marxist roots, but also reveals anarchistic, nationalistic, reformist, and socialist beliefs. Moreover, in our analysis, ‘revolutionary’ often escapes the grasp of the merely political: its use in popular discourse also suggests debates about violence, modernism, propaganda, cosmopolitanism, and utopianism. Consequently, we argue for the importance of historical context for understanding revolutionary thought, which is sensitive to an active rejection of rigid political categories or spectra.

Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime, and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire

AbstractNineteenth-century European colonialism produced a textured and uneven legal terrain rather than homogeneous imperial units. The fragmentation of sovereignty between empires and subordinated states created frontier zones that unsettled the workings of governance. This article views the developing landscape of power in high colonial South Asia from the loosely controlled frontier zone between Hyderabad, a Princely State ruled by sovereign Muslim dynasts titled Nizams, and the Bombay Presidency, part of Britain's Indian Empire, or Raj. I argue that the heterogeneous legal terrain along the border was a useful resource for administrators and subjects. State officials of both Hyderabad and Bombay justified various projects there; subjects of the two states shopped forums in a legal pluralist environment; and populations on either side of the border whose livelihoods and political agendas ran afoul of social pressures or the economic and cultural imperatives of state projects fled there from adversity. I examine cases of alleged cattle rustlers, bandits, and prostitutes and their engagements with police and courts to explore the political challenges and possibilities the frontier offered different groups. Colonial attempts to extend racialized policing practices across the frontier were frequently met by machinations of marginal people trying to avoid imprisonment or extricate themselves from oppressive social structures. Such figures could use the ambiguity of frontier legal authority to their advantage. The picture that emerges is one of a brute and often-arbitrary colonial power offset by alternative malleable sovereignties that resourceful subjects could play against one another.

Purba Pakistan Zindabad: Bengali Visions of Pakistan, 1940–1947

AbstractThis paper details the history of the concept of Pakistan as debated by Bengali intellectuals and literary critics from 1940–1947. Historians of late colonial South Asia and analysts of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab along with colonial Indian ‘Muslim minority’ provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual aspects of Bengali conceptions of the Pakistan idea. When Bengal has come into focus, the spotlight has centred on politicians like Fazlul Huq or Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy. This paper aims to provide a corrective to this lacuna by analyzing Bengali Muslim conceptualizations of the idea of Pakistan. Bengali Muslim thinkers, such as Abul Mansur Ahmed, Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, and Farrukh Ahmed, blended concepts of Pakistan inside locally grounded histories of the Bengali language and literature and worked within disciplines of geography and political economy. Many Bengali Muslim writers from 1940 to 1947 creatively integrated concepts of Pakistan in poetry, updating an older Bengali literary tradition begun in earlier generations. Through a discussion of the social history of its emergence along with the role of geography, political thought, and poetry, this paper discusses the significance of ‘Pak-Bangla’ cultural nationalism within late colonial South Asian history.

Indigenization of Cinema in (Post)Colonial South Asia: From Transnational to Vernacular Public Spheres

This article investigates the indigenization of cinema, from production to reception, within the broader social, political, and cultural domain of early- to mid-twentieth-century East Bengal/Pakistan. As an attempt to fill certain gaps in South Asian film studies, Raju’s essay locates the early encounters of the East Bengal population with film through multiple public spheres. Raju demonstrates how cinema was a site of contest between various social groups from the 1900s through the 1960s in East Bengal. He challenges the dominant mode of nationalist, empirical-teleological historiography to interpret the absorption of cinema in the East Bengali cultural milieu. He further argues that the cultural adoption of the film medium may be seen through overlapping public spheres for different publics during the first six decades of the twentieth century in East Bengal, where and when the nationhood was always in mutation. This article thus elaborates how colonial rulers, non-Bengalis, as well as Bengali Muslims of colonial East Bengal appropriated cinema in different ways and later in postcolonial East Pakistan how both urban and rural Bengali Muslims indigenized film to construct their preferred identities. It identifies such events related to appropriation of cinema as and within various public spheres: from transnational and colonial to cultural-national and rural-vernacular. In this way Raju attempts to understand the specific processes of cultural appropriation of cinema, a Western technological medium in a largely Islamic and agrarian society of South Asia.

“Tandrusti Deen ka Kaam Hai”: Health as a Matter of Religion in Book 9 of Ashraf Ali Thanvi’sBahishti Zewar

introduction When scholars have written about health in colonial South Asia, and about indigenous responses to the diffusion of biomedicine through the colonial administration, religious projects that focus on forming pious selves have often been ignored. Below I illustrate how a particular thinker associated with the Deobandi Islamic revival movement used health as a way to make oneself the object of one’s care in order to produce a fortifiedMuslim self. Ashraf Ali Thanvi, a Deobandi aalim (Islamic religious scholar and expert) writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, produced an enduringly influential Urdu religious manual known as the Bahishti Zewar (heavenly ornaments). This

Emotional styles – concepts and challenges

This themed issue intends to open up new vistas on the history of emotions. It does so with articles that examine community-based or spatially defined emotional styles that were simultaneously performed within larger socio-cultural contexts. Following this approach one might – for example – discern ‘Muslim’, ‘Hindu’, ‘British’ and ‘Anglo-Indian’ emotional styles within colonial South Asia around 1900 as well as diverging modes of thinking about, handling, generating and expressing emotions that prevail in work-, leisure- or consumption-spaces within contemporary Berlin. As the contributors to this issue demonstrate, capturing these multiplicities of co-existing styles and analysing their interactions enhances our understanding of the diachronic variability and synchronic diversity of emotional patterns and practices. Put differently, this issue of Rethinking History seeks to expand the scope of previous approaches that were informed by rather monolithic understandings of emotionality.1 Pursuing this agenda, this editorial first offers a working definition of emotion and outlines the concept of ‘emotional styles’. This notion not only produces new narratives and perspectives in a variety of disciplines, including history and sociology, but also raises fundamental questions about different understandings of the actor, that is, the subject and its potential for choice and agency. These matters are addressed in the second part of this editorial, while the third part raises questions about emotional styles in historiographical practice – how do we come to terms with the historian's emotions?

Muslim Modernism and Trans-regional Consciousness in Bengal, 1911–1925

Histories of Marxism in South Asia often focus on the great men of colonial Indian politics, such as M. N. Roy, who imagined political futures away from nation or identity, or narrowly on activists like Muzaffar Ahmad, the founder of the Communist Party of India, without consideration of the regional-historical and intellectual contexts out of which such activism and imaginations sprang. Using the Bengali Muslim context of the early twentieth century, this article examines how Muslim activists imagined their identity outside of and beyond normative frameworks such as nation or religious community. This article specifically analyses Samyabadi, a left-oriented journal published in Calcutta from 1922 to 1925, in the larger context of communist developments in Bengal and throughout India. The findings offer exciting support for new research approaches to regional and religious identity in late colonial South Asia.

Being ‘Ismaili’ and ‘Muslim’: Some Observations on the Politico-Religious Career of Aga Khan III

This paper examines the role of politico-religious leaders of smaller sectarian and sub-sectarian Muslim sects in the broader politics of Muslim community consciousness in colonial South Asia. The case of Aga Khan III, the Imam of the Shiite sub-sect of the Khojas, provides our example. This complex process, whereby the Khoja sub-sect increasingly came to identify with the broader Muslim community in colonial South Asia—albeit preserving certain sub-sectarian particularities—is examined with reference to the paradigmatic model of ‘path dependence’. The balance that Aga Khan III struck between the socio-religious and political worlds—hinging upon his dual role as a spiritual and a political leader—is deconstructed with the qualified employment of the analytical tool of ‘strategic syncretism’. The paper shows how specific socio-religious sub-sectarian traits were effectively retained at the same time as an overarching political consensus forged links between different Muslim sectarian traditions.

Property, Authority and Personal Law: Waqf In Colonial South Asia

British rule in South Asia transformed the economy and society of the subcontinent, in large part by revamping the status of landed property. Colonial law was founded on the notion that ostensibly religious personal law was outside state jurisdiction. The boundary between state law and personal law, however, was blurry and some elements of ‘religious’ law had major implications for matters at the core of colonial policy, such as property control. This ambivalence produced a scenario in which legal debates became authorised spaces for colonial subjects to pursue their agendas. Taking the Muslim charitable trust, or waqf, in late colonial British India, this article argues that advocacy of substantive and procedural changes in waqf laws by Muslim legal activists repre-sented a pointed critique of colonial policies. Through a brief history of the articulation between charitable trusts and colonial property policies, the article draws from the work of two late colo-nial Muslim judges, Syed Ameer Ali and Faiz Badrudin Tyabji, to demonstrate the role waqf debates played in refashioning colonial legal culture. It is suggested that claims about waqf were both instrumental attempts to advance claims to property, and instances for articulating broader ideological critiques of the interpretative authority of British judges.

BETWEEN SUBALTERNITY AND INDIGENEITY

This introductory essay addresses the conditions for possible exchange between subaltern studies and indigenous and American Indian studies. It highlights the special significance of Spivak's ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ as an inaugurating moment of postcolonial studies in the US with important implications for those working in indigenous studies. Scholars in postcolonial and indigenous/American Indian studies share an interest in challenging the logics of colonialism and deploying incommensurability as a critical tool. However, the essay also points to tensions between postcolonial and indigenous studies that derive from indigenous people's sense of living under ongoing colonial projects – and not just colonial legacies – and from postcolonial studies’ over-reliance on models of colonialism in South Asia and Africa that do not necessarily speak to the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Besides tracing the convergences and tensions that mark the relation between indigenous and postcolonial critical tendencies, this essay introduces the contributions to this special issue and seeks to prompt further dialogue that continues the project of interrogating subalternity.

Madrassah Education in Pre-colonial and Colonial South Asia

This paper traces the history of madrassahs (Islamic seminaries) in South Asia from their inception in the 12th century until the end of colonial rule in 1947. The paper argues that many of the pre-colonial rulers of South Asia, including the Mughals (1526—1857), played key roles in promoting education and providing patronage of various educational institutions, including madrassahs. The policies of British colonial rule (1757—1947), however, made the most indelible marks on madrassah education, not only directly, wherein their policies have impacted on the structure, functions and curriculum of madrassahs, but also indirectly, through the prompting of responses from the ulama and the Muslim community that determined the contours and the content of madrassah education. The paper examines the roles of various strands of madrassah education, and the interplay of politics and curriculum of various major madrassahs. The paper demonstrates that madrassah as a concept and as an institution has come a long way, that its contents and contours have undergone changes, and that as an institution it has largely remained embedded within the society.

The Marital Patchwork of Colonial South Asia: Forum Shopping from Britain to Baroda

The British Empire created channels for imperially intended movement. Commodities, bodies, and ideas flowed along axes structured by imperial law and technology. Unintended motion also occurred along these same planes. With every legal structure meant to promote one type of behavior came litigants devising strategies to achieve the opposite. Collusion, bribery, forgery, and perjury were favorite ways to manipulate imperial law. The more permissible strategy of forum shopping was another. Forum shopping is the attempt to push one's case into a jurisdiction promising an optimal result when there is ambiguity over the controlling jurisdiction. It reveals the perception among litigants that bottom-up—and sideways—mechanics exist within legal systems. Unlike work on resistance to state law through extralegal means, I here examine the ways parties tried to work strategically within the confines of the legal system to reconfigure their marital situations. Rather than documenting the success of these maneuvers, however, I note their more common failure. The colonial courts usually saw through unconvincing attempts to forum shop. The fact that litigants continued to try reflects the ingenuity, arguably, of the “legal lottery” mechanism at work in British imperial law. Colonial law, and therefore colonial rule, reinforced its hold on subjects by dangling before them the possibility of individual relief through rule-of-law proceduralism.

Constructing Colonial and Contemporary South Asia

Until recently the literature on the architecture and urbanism of colonial South Asia was a revealing illustration of the tenacious nature of the colonial project. Substantially written by and for a western readership of academics and armchair travelers, it was still driven by interests predominantly outside the former colonial societies concerned, and delimited by the unquestioned assumption of the dominance of the imperial regime on the colonial building scene. Although western academia continues to be the dominant context in which the architectural history of South Asia is written, a new generation of scholarship has emerged since the mid 1990s that has actively engaged this field in the broader academic project of postcolonial critical inquiry. Thinking between and beyond the material and symbolic dimensions of architecture, this new scholarship has mobilized interdisciplinary theories and tactics to interpret the hybrid building and dwelling practices of 'colonialmodern' South Asia as forms of social production. Whilst South Asia has been the source and focus of much of the most sophisticated postcolonial scholarship in other disciplines, this paper examines why the architectural historiography of South Asia remained comparatively unengaged with that wider postcolonial discourse until recently, and how it has been shaped by the geographically distant institutional frameworks, including Australasian academia, in which it has emerged.

Archiving from below: The Case of the Mobilised Hawkers in Calcutta

In the last two decades or more, critical scholarship in the human sciences has been commenting on different aspects of the ‘archive’. While much has been said on the archive of the state, especially in the historiography of colonial South Asia, very little is known about the archival functions of political parties, movements, grassroots community organisations, and trade unions that are involved in the governance of populations in the post-colonial state. The paper argues that archival claims lie at the heart of negotiations between the state and population groups. It looks at the archival function of the Hawker Sangram Committee (HSC) in Calcutta to substantiate the point. Following Operation Sunshine (1996), a move by the state to forcibly evict hawkers from some selected pavements of Calcutta, in order to reclaim such ‘public’ spaces, a mode of collective resistance developed under the banner of the HSC. The HSC has subsequently come to occupy a central position in the governance of the realm of pavement-hawking through the creation and maintenance of an archival database that articulates the entrepreneurial capacity of the ‘poor hawker’ and his ability to deliver goods and services at low-cost. The significance of the HSC's archive is that, it enables the organisation to form a moral and rational critique of the exclusionary discourses on the hawker, mostly propagated by a powerful combination of a few citizens’ associations, the judiciary and the press. The paper also documents how the successful mobilisation of a population group like the hawkers is marked by the virtual destruction of a pre-existing archive on the other group of ‘encroachers’ of the pavement space, the pavement dwellers.

The Guru's Weapons

This article presents the biography of a set of objects held to be powerful within Sikh traditions, with a focus on how these objects operate within a field determined by colonial and post-colonial formations of value and meaning, in relation to pre-colonial forms of the same. The article describes cultural production that articulates the sphere of the religious, highlighting how different frames of knowledge—pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial—interact in the articulation of this sphere. As such, I address an ongoing debate in the historiography of South Asia regarding the relative influence of colonialism in South Asia that has significant potential impact on our understanding of South Asian religions like the Sikh tradition.

Waqf and Muslim Legal Activism in Colonial South Asia, c. 1900

Waqf and Muslim Legal Activism in Colonial South Asia, c. 1900