Colonial South Asia Research Articles

The ‘Church of Islam’: esotericism, Orientalism, and religious origin myths in colonial South Asia

AbstractThis article analyses the construction of religious origin myths for Islam within ‘universal religion’ and esoteric frameworks in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia and beyond, and sheds light on the role of ‘Western’ and Anglo-Indian converts in this process. At its core is a case study of the elusive Hamid Snow, founder of the so-called ‘Church of Islam’ in 1891 in Sikanderabad, Deccan. On the following pages, I reconstruct Snow's biography from little-known Urdu and English sources, analyse his writings, and place him within a context of religious modernist, esoteric, and convert networks encompassing South Asia, Europe, the United States, the Philippines, and other parts of the world. By focusing on the nature of the scholarship of religion at the time, and the reconstruction of religious pasts under the influence of esotericism and religious modernism, the article traces the influence of Orientalist and Eurocentric views on perceptions of the Islamic tradition and contributes to larger debates about the role of laypeople, especially those with an interracial background, in interpreting religious history and acting as cultural mediators between different communities during a time of ‘hybrid transnational occultism’.1

Indigenous knowledges and colonial sciences in South Asia

ABSTRACT What do we mean when we use the category ‘indigenous knowledges’? What do we mean when we speak of ‘colonial sciences’? This Introduction briefly examines these questions in order to provide a context for the collection of articles presented in this issue on the making of the sciences in colonial South Asia. In doing so, it also addresses related questions: The translation of terms – does the Sanskrit word śāstra correspond to the English science? If not, what does each word mean? And the differences that arise when categories move across disciplines – development studies scholars use the term indigenous knowledges for the knowledge-forms of the original inhabitants of a territory; historians of South Asia and historians of science use it to refer to older forms of knowledge lost to colonial rule. The contributors represent very different disciplines – anthropology, history, history of science and Indology; and bring a variety of methodological approaches to the questions they address. They cover a chronological span stretching from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and address different subjects: the use of technical vocabulary in Sanskrit mathematical astronomy, astrology at universities in Banaras, the making of the Hindi Scientific Glossary, botanical knowledge-making in East India Company India, the philological practices of Vaidyas in Bengal, and Ayurvedic pedagogy in today’s Kerala. A common thread joining the essays appears in the role played by philology in practices as different as the naming of plants, the making of procedural medical knowledge in a gurukula, and the editing of Ayurvedic texts in the context of an expanding print culture in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Thinking the Question of Religious Minorities in Colonial South Asia

Abstract This conceptual essay pivots on the following problem: Tethered to a context of Muslim empire, how is the legacy of the premodern Islamic legal tradition engaged and negotiated in the modern colonial moment in South Asia, marked by the loss of Muslim political sovereignty and the emergence of South Asian Muslims as a minority community? It engages this question through the example of intra-Muslim debates and contestations on the boundaries of friendship between Muslims and non-Muslims in modern South Asia, with a focus on the thought of certain prominent traditionalist ‘ulama’.

Airing imperium: A historiography of radio governance in South Asia

The 1920s emerged as a landmark decade in the world history of radio, more particularly in South Asia. About a century later, this paper seeks to stitch together a critical historiography of radio governance in colonial South Asia. In doing so, the paper seeks to unravel colonial constructions, norms and rationalities associated with the modern medium of radio in the South Asian context. This paper draws on the works of Pinkerton, Zivin, Brayne, Potter and gleanings in their work of the autobiographical writings of Fielden and Reith, the first broadcasting controller of All India Radio and the general manager of the British Broadcasting Corporation, respectively, besides some official documents cited in these works pertaining to the goings-on in British South Asia and its broadcasting. Ultimately, this paper seeks to not only historicize the eventual decolonization and democratization that occurred, but also sets the stage to locate, understand and move towards sustainable media governance in a post-2015 world.

Introduction: Making Sense of Empire

This essay serves as an introduction to a special section on the senses in late colonial India. Participating in the act of decolonising sensory studies, this collection explores the intersections between post-colonial studies and sensory studies by paying particular attention to the sensorium of the colonised. In the historical and geographical context of colonial South Asia, the senses are embedded in acts of distinction across race, caste, class, and bodily and gender hierarchies. The collection intervenes by paying attention to the relationship between power and sense perception as it finds register in media, scientific practices and literature of the period. Across the section, we suggest that making sense of empire is also to make sense of the sensory regimes of empire that have resonances in the contemporary.

Classifications at Work: Social Categories and Dutch Bureaucracy in Colonial Sri Lanka

AbstractFeeding into current debates on ethnic identities in colonial South Asia, this article questions to what extent Dutch institutions articulated and impacted social categories of people living in coastal Sri Lanka during the eighteenth century. A thorough analysis of three spheres of Dutch bureaucracy (reporting, registering, and litigating) makes it clear that there was no uniform ideology that steered categorisation practices top-down throughout the studied colonial institutions. Rather, the rationale of the organisation as such affected the way people were classified, depending to a large extent on what level of bureaucracy individuals were dealing with, and what the possible negotiation strategies were for the people recorded. Future research should perhaps not ask “when” certain ethnicities were “made up,” but strive to understand the process in which they were created, the institutional contexts in which they were recorded, and how changing bureaucratic practices not only articulated, but also transformed, social categories in the long run.

Subterranean Properties: India's Political Ecology of Coal, 1870–1975

AbstractScholars have long been attentive to the relationship between legal regimes and agrarian dispossession in the resource frontiers of the postcolonial world. The analytical problem of identifying how private firms use legal regimes to take control of land—whether for mining, plantations, or Special Economic Zones—now animates a new body of research seeking the historical antecedents for contemporary land grabs. In the case of colonial South Asia, existing scholarship has often tended to suggest that the law precedes processes of capital accumulation, and that colonial capital operated within the confines of definable, even if legally plural, institutional regimes, such as property rights and commercial law. This perspective suggests, if only implicitly, that capitalist firms prefer to work within formal frameworks of legality. In this article, I outline a different understanding of the place of law in colonial South Asia, which follows the formation of property law for coal at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that the discursive framing of coal's status as property emerged out of, rather than preceded, social and ecological displacements caused by a coal commodity boom after 1894. Reconstructing conflicts over coal-bearing agrarian land through civil court records and mining company property deeds, I demonstrate how the absence of coal property within the colonial legal archive was reassembled through a recursive conception of legality. This genealogy of law recovers the historical context for contemporary struggles over mining claims in India's coal region today.

The shastri and the air-pump: Experimental fictions and fictions of experiment for Hindi readers in colonial north India.

In the early twentieth century, the vernacular science periodical emerged as a key medium for building science-literate publics in colonial South Asia. This article argues that the Hindi science monthly Vigyan became a discursive laboratory for experiments with language, literary genres, narrative plots, and settings to create culturally grounded science lessons for Hindi readers in the mid-1910s. I focus on the writings of Prem Vallabh Joshi, a pandit, science graduate, and small town teacher, who experimented with distinct literary genres to create a sensibility for science – an experimental temper – amongst Vigyan’s readers. Through his strategic use of scientific experiments in the “history of” a particular branch of knowledge, detective mysteries, and the genre of the fictionalized dialogue, Joshi inducted colonial readers into experimental culture and global scientific modernity. As a reflexive participant in the ongoing confrontation between “Western” science and Hindu śāstra in colonial society, Joshi staged a fictional encounter between the experimental demonstration of the iconic air-pump and the textual authority of śāstra. This article examines the encounter between sastric commitments and scientific sensibilities and their conjoined mobilization in Vigyan in the era of linguistic nationalism. In this colonial vernacular publishing culture, the serial possibilities of the periodical and the history of science itself became critical resources in the ontological confrontations between experimental science and traditional authority.

The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Economy, Empire and Business by Karolina Hutková

Reviewed by: The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Economy, Empire and Business by Karolina Hutková Aparajita Mukhopadhyay (bio) The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Economy, Empire and Business By Karolina Hutková. London: Boydell Press, 2019. Pp. 275. The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Economy, Empire and Business By Karolina Hutková. London: Boydell Press, 2019. Pp. 275. Karolina Hutková's book is a welcome addition to our understanding of technology transfer in colonial context and its wider consequences on the colony and the metropole. The book focuses on English East India Company's (hereafter EEIC) "silk enterprise" in Bengal from 1750 to 1850. The book sits at the intersection of global history, history of technology transfer, and business history in the eighteenth century and beyond. The narrative reflects overlapping strands of these distinct historiographies. The introduction situates EEIC's silk enterprise in the wider debates about the role and impact of EEIC's policies on Bengal's economy—and the history of EEIC and British political economy. The first chapter is an overview of the early modern silk industry across the globe. It also contextualizes EEIC's silk enterprise in Bengal. Next, the book shows how Britain's inability to produce raw silk necessitated the search for potential sources of supply (ch. 2). This need, Hutková argues, was underpinned by principles of mercantilism. Consequently, Britain preferred a region within their expanding empire. Bengal [End Page 593] became a "natural" choice, especially after the failed experiments with silk production in the Atlantic. The book then discusses how EEIC embarked on its silk enterprise in Bengal (ch. 3, 4) and why the peculiarities of silk production in Bengal made raw silk production a profitable venture (ch. 5). The last two chapters focus on metropolitan Britain. The author argues that the aforementioned advantages were lost in the nineteenth century as laissez-faire became the preferred economic principle and EEIC lost its monopoly rights to trade in Asia (ch. 6). She then shows how disinclination in investing in raw silk production forced a formerly profitable sector to eventually disappear, with deleterious consequences for Bengal's economy (ch. 7). The book makes an important contribution to the ongoing and contentious debates among historians and non-academics about the impact of imperial policies on economic fortunes of colonies. It also throws light on an instance of successful technology transfer in a colonial setting. Nevertheless, it is important to ask what is new about underlining how imperial policies did not have salutary impact on the economies of colonies. This is a lesser-known story, but there is no denying the idea of "deindustrialization" as a consequence of imperial policies is time-worn. At a related level, there is an important inconsistency in the central hypothesis of the book. Hutková claims the "research challenges the perception that deindustrialization was the outcome of exploitative British institutions" (p. 4); yet in the same page she writes how the nineteenth-century decline in raw silk production was an unintended result of the shift to laissez-faire policies in Britain. Unless the operative word here is "unintended"—and the author proffers evidence that is absent from the book—it is difficult to balance two such radically opposite views. Technology transfer is an equally important theme of the book. Yet, there is little use (except Ben Marsh's work on the United States) of the wider historiography of the subject—especially the recent literature about technology transfer in colonial South Asia, which focuses on limits (or lack thereof) of the process, including highlighting interactions between imported technologies and local societies. The absence of historiography in this book is particularly surprising, as some of the themes repeatedly underlined in the chapters (such as learning by doing, reliance on local knowledge, and resistance by silk farmers) show how even successful technology transfer in a colony was underpinned by more than financial investment and the desire for profit in the metropole. Also, the discussion is primarily about Britain and India, with a smattering of information about silk in the early modern world—a rather diminutive outcome for a book...

Identifying Kin Biometric Belonging and Databased Governance in Colonial South Asia and Postcolonial Pakistan

Identifying Kin Biometric Belonging and Databased Governance in Colonial South Asia and Postcolonial Pakistan

Colonial Anxiety and Identity: Ethnic Networks as Cultural Supports in Colonial South Asia and Sumatra

This study was inspired by research into the personal correspondence of colonial servants in Sumatra and South Asia, and the realisation that their articulation of negative emotions such as anxiety or fear are ill-fitted to the current wider understanding of colonial anxiety. This article argues that the progress of colonial empires was widely shaped by negative emotions such as these, yet there were also methods used by colonial servants to deal with such negative experiences. The core example of this has been the case studies of Robert Cowan and Alexander Hall; these men’s letter archives display their usage of correspondence networks as part of their coping strategy. It is argued that these specifically ethnic, and at times gendered, correspondence networks formed a cultural bulwark which was used to cope with aspects of colonial anxiety. The method of this study therefore was epistolary examination to gather evidence and construct arguments. The archives of Cowan and Hall were compared and examined side by side to identify common patters and content. These were then considered in tandem with the current wider understanding of colonial anxiety. Based on the evidence gathered, it has been concluded that ethnic networks such as those examined could mitigate aspects of colonial anxiety. At the same time, these also demonstrate the great potential for future interdisciplinary studies involving personal histories tied to both Sumatra and South Asia.

Empire, sociality, and political economy in colonial Bengal

AbstractHow to conceptualize the broad dissemination of economic concepts in colonial South Asia? This article uses an essay by a mid-nineteenth-century Bengali, Peary Chand Mittra, as a point of departure to approach this problem in South Asian historiography. In the first part, the essay locates the conditions of possibility for Mittra's political-economic analysis of Bengal's agrarian social order within an imperial and commercial space of extended interdependencies. The aim is not to explain the specificity of Mittra's politics so much as to highlight his recourse to political-economic concepts to ground his analysis. In the second part, the essay suggests that the grounding of political economy's colonial histories within histories of imperial space needs to be supplemented by closer attention to new normative impulses and aspirations emerging directly from agrarian society in the region. This second emphasis provides better grounds for grasping the depth and durability of political economy's reach into political and ethical claims across social space in the Subcontinent in the twentieth century. It thus broaches the necessity of subaltern histories of political economy.

Fluid Epistemologies

By using the term “fluid”, this article critically interrogates western ontologies of “solid” (land) and “liquid” (flowing waters), which were transplanted in colonial South Asia and transmitted in post-Independence river/water policies and actions with severe socio-ecological implications. Drawing lessons from recent environmental history and political ecology of water (“hydrosocial”) literature that shed light on liminal scapes beyond the mainstream land/water binary in hydrological studies, this study conceptualizes “fluidscapes” by drawing on field research in the river islands (chars) of Lower Bengal. By capturing snippets of livelihoods in the chars of the Malda and Murshidabad districts, West Bengal, situated upstream and downstream of the Farakka Barrage respectively, this article advances why and how it is imperative to rethink sediment beyond its physical-geomorphological existence and to see it as social sites of interactions. It unravels avenues through which chars can be perceived as not only emblems of uncertainty but also as zones of possibility bestowed with rich ecosystem services and the collective resilience of choruas.

Visual Politics of Japanese Majolica Tiles in Colonial South Asia

This paper examines the political, socio-economic, and cultural aspects of Japanese decorative tiles or the so-called majolica tiles widely diffused in colonial South Asia in the early twentieth century. A tile became a popular building material in European countries by the first half of the nineteenth century, and European tiles spread over the world with the expansion of colonialism. Japan in the making of a modern nation established domestic manufacturing of tiles mainly after British models, and the industry’s rapid development was helped by the First World War (1914–1918) and the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923). The Japanese tile industry successfully entered into foreign markets, among which India was the largest and most important market that resulted in developing a variety of new Indian or Hindu designs associated with the rise of nationalism and mode of consumption. Not only within India, tiles, however, also played a crucial role in formulating cosmopolitan identities of migrant mercantile networks exemplified by the Chettiar architecture in South and Southeast Asia. However, in the late 1930s, cosmopolitanism shared by different communities in colonial urban settings became overwhelmed by nationalisms as seen in Sri Lanka where Japanese majolica tiles were differently used as a means to express religiously-regulated nationalisms in the Chettiar and Sinhalese Buddhist architecture. Thus, the analysis reveals visual politics of different religious nationalisms symbolized by Japanese majolica tiles in the interwar period that still structure the present visualscapes.

Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia, written by Jennifer Dubrow

Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia, written by Jennifer Dubrow

Islam in Pakistan: A History by Muhammad Qasim Zaman

Reviewed by: Islam in Pakistan: A History by Muhammad Qasim Zaman Uğur Z. Peçe Islam in Pakistan: A History. By muhammad qasim zaman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 432 pp. ISBN 9780691149226. $39.50 (hardcover); $27.95 (paper). What if we organized our personal libraries by the character of books? If the shelves were populated by books with comparable disposition, Muhammad Qasim Zaman's Islam in Pakistan: A History would take its place not too distant from the late Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam? The [End Page 811] Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). The latter explored "the historical and human phenomenon that is Islam in its plenitude and complexity of meaning" to present a complex story of islams, as opposed to a singular and uniform Islam (p. 5). Rather than purporting to provide an easy answer to the question "What is Islam?" Ahmed approached Islam as a complex constellation of beliefs, philosophies, traditions, and practices. Islam in Pakistan's affinity to Ahmed's tour de force lies not only in its impressive scope but its investigation of the meanings and importance of being Islamic over the course of Pakistan's checkered history without presuming "any sharp distinction between belief and practice, between normative and lived Islam" (p. 2). Zaman's examination of multiple dimensions of Islam in South Asia over the period of almost two centuries within the frame of a single book is an ambitious undertaking, the likes of which only the most competent of scholars perform compellingly. Covering a wide array of topics from Islamic law to education to non-Muslim minorities and to interpretations of jihad, Zaman discusses the modernists, 'ulama, Sufis, and Islamists as the key actors who have shaped state and society in colonial India and Pakistan. Organized thematically, Islam in Pakistan opens with an introduction into Islamic identities in pre-partition South Asia. During the mid-nineteenth century, the deepening penetration of British colonialism in South Asia recast the region, which was home to the largest Muslim population in the world. Perhaps the most formative transformation occurred with Britain's crashing of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, spelling the end of centuries-long Muslim political dominance in India. This proved extremely dislocating for South Asian Muslims as they lost the privileged status of professing the same religion as their rulers whose very existence was widely believed to be indispensable to the implementation of Islamic law. Zaman, however, does not recount a story of Islamic decline in post-Mughal India but a narrative of dynamic adaptability instead. Dislocation brought by the passing of the Mughal rule soon sparked an intellectual vitality among Muslims, both traditionalists and modernists, as they navigated the radically transformed political landscape. And changes in the physical landscape such as the extension of the railway network, helped create a more closely-knit community out of the millions of Muslims scattered across a vast area. From the 1860s through 1940s the length of railroads increased from 1,587 to 40,524 miles, which translated into a sixty-fold surge in the annual number of passengers. In no way did such a dramatic rise in the volume of communications compensate the loss of state power for Indian Muslims, yet it certainly connected them more [End Page 812] firmly as disciples visited, with more ease, their Sufi masters and religious scholars. Following a historical survey of Islam under British colonialism, the book is organized thematically with each chapter examining a major component of Islamic imprint in Pakistan. Chapter 2 investigates the mixed fortunes of Islamic modernism throughout Pakistan's history. Zaman's discussion of the primacy of Islamic modernist ideas in the project for an independent Pakistan as a Muslim state shines light on its founders' objective to prove Islam's compatibility with modernity. The birth of Pakistan, on the other hand, provided the 'ulama with an opportunity to claim leading roles under an Islamic republic, which constitutes one of the main topics in Chapter 3, others being constitution-writing, Islamic legislation, and madrasa reform. The Objectives Resolution, the founding document of Pakistan accepted in 1949, envisioned the new state to be governed in accordance with the idea...

Imperial Alliances: Women, Power, and Precarity in Colonial South Asia and New Zealand

Imperial Alliances: Women, Power, and Precarity in Colonial South Asia and New Zealand

Pluralizing the Non-dual: Multilingual Perspectives on Advaita Vedānta, 1560–1847

With a textual record spanning dozens of languages—to say nothing of its oral histories—Advaita Vedānta’s multilingual archive presents obvious and daunting challenges for scholars of South Asian intellectual and religious histories. The papers in this issue build on recent multilingual and contextual approaches to South Asian intellectual history by reading a rich corpus of Advaita Vedānta material in Persian, Marathi, Tamil, Sanskrit and Braj Bhasha. In bringing these sources and their authors into conversation with one another, this issue acknowledges Advaita Vedānta’s broad appeal in early-modern and colonial South Asia; but it also attests to Advaita Vedānta’s heterogeneous, textured, and even contested historical development. The following papers chart Advaita Vedānta across five unique social, linguistic, intellectual, and geographical spaces from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. While no single issue could contextualize something as historically recalcitrant as Advaita Vedānta, we see this special issue as a step on the long and necessary road to historicizing Vedānta, broadly, and Advaita Vedānta, specifically.

Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Late Nineteenth-Century South Asia

The article examines the relationship between colonialism and international law by focusing on late nineteenth century debates surrounding the sovereignty of the “princely states” of colonial South Asia. The princely states were ruled by indigenous rulers and were not considered to be British territory, but remained subject to British “influence;” as a result, there were numerous controversies over their legal status. During the course of jurisdictional disputes, a variety of interested players - British politicians, colonial officials, international lawyers, rulers and advisors of princely states - engaged in debates over the idea of sovereignty to resolve questions of legal status, the extent of rights and powers, and to construct a political order that supported their interests and aspirations. I focus on legal texts written by British international lawyers and colonial officials as well as material relating to two jurisdictional disputes (one between the state of Travancore and the British Government and another between the state of Baroda and the British Government) to trace two versions of sovereignty that were articulated in late nineteenth century South Asia - unitary and divisible. In doing so, I argue that international law, and the doctrine of sovereignty in particular, became the shared language for participants to debate political problems and a key forum for the negotiation of political power.

Scandal in Mesopotamia: Press, empire, and India during the First World War

AbstractBy providing the first comprehensive account of the role of the British and Indian press in war propaganda, this article makes an intervention in the global history of the First World War. The positive propaganda early in the war, intertwined with a rhetoric of loyalism, contrasted with how the conservative British press affixed blame for military defeats in Mesopotamia upon the colonial regime's failure to effectively mobilize India's resources. Using a highly emotive and enduring trope of the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’, the Northcliffe press was successful in channelling a high degree of public scrutiny onto the campaign. The effectiveness of this criticism ensured that debates about the Mesopotamian debacle became a vehicle for registering criticism of structures of colonial rule and control in India. On the one hand, this critique hastened constitutional reforms and devolution in colonial India and, on the other, it led to demands that the inadequacy of India's contribution to the war be remedied by raising war loans. Both the colonial government and its nationalist critics were briefly and paradoxically united in opposing these demands. The coercive extraction of funds for the imperial war effort as well as the British press's vituperative criticism contributed to a post-war, anti-colonial political upsurge. The procedure of creating a colonial ‘scandal’ out of a military disaster required a specific politics for assessing the regulated flows of information, which proved to be highly effective in shaping both the enquiry that followed and the politics of interwar colonial South Asia.