Early Colonial India Research Articles

The itinerant travellee: dubash accounts from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India

ABSTRACT This article seeks to read the travellee in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel in India with a focus on the nature of their contemporaneity with the traveller. It questions the overarching explanatory power bestowed on religion in colonial-era European travel accounts through an exploration of the itinerance of the Hindu travellee in early colonial India and the changing functions of the rest house, the latter often mentioned exclusively as a sign of Hindu hospitality in European travel texts of the time. Based on a reading of excerpts from dubash narratives interwoven with details from French and British accounts, the analysis sheds light on travellees as mobile and transitional, their paths intersecting with those of travellers. Travel here emerges as differentiated and constituted by being in place, with instances of shared time marking the experience of movement for all involved.

Exploring Capitalism in the Economy of Early Modern Gujarat: The Structure and Organization of Textile Production and the Market in Surat in the Eighteenth Century

Objective/Context: This study has two main goals. First, it explores the structural and organizational dynamics of the textile industry and the market in early modern India, eighteenth-century Gujarat in particular. In this context, the paper also examines how the ascendancy of the English East India Company in the political economy of Western India and the region’s transition to a colonial economy impacted the industry, the market, and the relationship between weavers and merchants. Methodology: This paper draws on the literature on textile production and trade, as well as on capitalism in early modern and colonial India, and uses evidence about Gujarat from the records of the English and Dutch East India Companies. Originality: This paper argues that the relationship between weavers and merchants in Surat/Gujarat was dynamic, complementary, and at times, contentious. None of them was able to dominate the relationship, and the English East India Company could not substitute a coercion-based production relation for a market-based one. Conclusions: The dynamics—such as product specialization and innovation, division of labor, the contract system, and forward buying—point to the existence of commercial capitalism in the textile economy. The paper also argues that because of the extraordinary diversity of people engaged in the industry and their varying professional and transactional experiences, it is relevant to recognize that commercial capitalism represents a mode of production that co-existed with others in the economy.

The Burmese Hour

This paper utilizes the concept of the "Burmese hour" to approach astrological practices in Burma as being not only distinctive but also historically related to Brahmanical astral sciences. First, the "Burmese hour" is examined as a unit of time: the hour (nārī) of twenty-four minutes, prevalent before the colonial-era introduction of the sexagesimal horometrical system. Focusing on the water clock used at the Burmese court (c. 18th–19th), I investigate the connection between this system of time-reckoning and Brahmanical horometrical techniques in India. Next, the "Burmese hour" is addressed through an opposition to the "Moghul hour" and the "British hour." I examine the different working conditions that Brahmin astrologers from Banaras had at the Burmese court compared with those experienced under other "foreign" rulers in early modern and colonial India. Finally, I argue for a closer dialogue between specialists of Burma and South Asia, beyond area studies divisions. Through this dialogue, I propound that the "Burmese hour" has come. It is time to study Burmese astrological practices as being socially diverse and locally distinctive.

Views from the Deck of a Ship: Weaving Histories in the Brackish Water Zone of the Coromandel Coast, 1650–1800

abstract: During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Coromandel Coast of Southeastern India became a world stage for artistic negotiations between local courts and European East India companies. After all, the region was both the endpoint of long-distance oceanic mobilities for European merchants and a site marking the boundaries of local kingdoms and polities. These two different orientations resulted in divergent perspectives on land and sea—what this article terms the “saltwater perspective” and the “ freshwater perspective.” This article discusses the intertwined nature of these two views in shaping the material culture of the region. While the saltwater perspective framed landscape (and seascape) through the lens of economic utility, favoring oceans and coastlines as corridors for mercantile dominance, the latter imagined inland territories and the freshwater rivers that irrigated them as intertwined entities that nurtured each other. By focusing on the differences between the saltwater and freshwater perspectives, this article is able to argue that this region’s negotiated, “brackish” mode of engaging with landscape underlay contemporary textile-making in Coromandel. This intertwined mode of making and viewing also highlights the agency of the landscape, rather than individual or national actors within it, in shaping artistic negotiations in early colonial India.

Transacting Business through/for Others in Early Colonial Western India: The Text, Context, and Meaning of a Mukhtār-nāma of 1821

Abstract In the Persianate world, a mukhtār-nāma (deed of representation or a power of attorney) was a legal instrument that enabled people to transact business through a representative or agent (mukhtār or wakīl). This is a study of one such document written in Surat in 1821. It analyses the document for its socio-cultural, legal, and commercial significance as well as to explore the transition in the adjudication of commercial disputes and civil cases from Mughal to East India Company courts. It shows that there was a strong tradition of documenting business transactions in early modern South Asia and that such practices have continued into the colonial and postcolonial periods.

Early nineteenth-century Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani translations and the politics of emerging linguistic categories

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the translations produced at or prescribed by Fort William College (FWC) in the early nineteenth-century for the study of Hindustani/Urdu/Hindi. It demonstrates that the study of translations in the context of the formation of “new” languages adds fresh insights to our present understanding of Hindi/Urdu and their relationship to other varieties such as Awadhi and Braj. It explores the political context which undergirds the foundation of educational institutions such as FWC in early colonial India and the translation practices endorsed at these institutions for the study of languages and the conceptualization of different linguistic categories. It is hypothesized that within the multilingual context of early nineteenth-century north India, translation played an important role in the formation of new linguistic categories, hierarchies and language boundaries.

Military Mobility, Authority and Negotiation in Early Colonial India*

Abstract This article focuses on the career of Muhammad Yusuf Khan, an officer in the British East India Company who sought to turn his military service into political and diplomatic authority, only to be executed as a rebel in 1764. His rise and fall occurred early in the so-called colonial transition, a period characterized in recent scholarship as one of relative fluidity in contrast to later, more rigid instantiations of colonial rule. Institutionally, the Company’s armies seem to contradict that pattern: their rapid growth in the eighteenth century produced new exclusions and restrictions, including some of the earliest formal articulations of a racial binary between Indian and European actors. Yusuf Khan, however, gained political capital by mobilizing elements of those intended restrictions in new contexts, imbuing the Company’s military hierarchies with alternate meanings outside of its formal infrastructure. His innovative reinterpretation of military prestige becomes clear when the Company’s records are read alongside Persian-language material from the Indian courts against which he fashioned his political identity. His career offers insight into how the inequitable, but dynamic relationship between the Company and its soldiers shaped the former’s approach to and understanding of India s political landscape

State, Policy and Gender at the Workplace in India: A Comparison Over Time

This article seeks to compare the effect of gendered perceptions of labour on women’s presence in the workforce in early 20th-century colonial India, as nascent industry sprang up in several parts of the country, and towards the end of the 20th century. We compare the entry and exit of women workers in the mill industry of South India in the first half of the 20th century with the informalisation of labour in the fish processing industry, whose workforce was predominantly women, in the 1990s. The regulation of women’s work by means of protective laws that sheltered them from “hazardous” work and mandated benefits such as creches at the workplace and maternity benefits conditioned women’s employment in multiple ways, ranging from how they were resented and mistreated by male workers and how organised unions debated and finally championed equal wages for equal work to how women got excluded altogether. After independence, protective laws and regulations grew in number and women’s participation in the labour force steadily came down. One way to cross the hurdle to women’s large-scale employment raised by protective legislation is to employ women on informal terms. This means walking the thin line, on the part of employers, between observing the law on contract workers and their benefits in letter and complying with the law in spirit. The fish processing industry that came up along the Indian coastline is a good example of informality at the workplace mediated by gender. Differences in gender perceptions across India’s culturally varied regions explains why most workers in the fish processing industry hail from one single state, Kerala.

Who Is (Not) a Servant, Anyway? Domestic servants and service in early colonial India*

AbstractThe article deals with one of the under-researched themes of Indian history, which is the history of domestic servants. Thinking about servants raises two fundamental questions: who were they and what did domestic service mean? The identities of a servant as a contract wage earner or a person either belonging as a member or tied to the family through fictive/constructed claims of kinship were not mutually exclusive. Servants' identity existed in a continuum running from ‘free’ waged coolie on the one hand to ‘unfree’ slave on the other. The article traces the history of domestic servants along two axes: the slave–servant continuum, but, more importantly, the coolie–servant conundrum, which is a lesser-explored field in South Asian labour history or burgeoning scholarship on domesticity and household. Charting through the dense history of terminologies, the space of the city, and legal frameworks adopted by the Company state to regulate servants, it also underscores the difficulties of researching on a subaltern group that is so ubiquitous yet so fragmented in the archives. In order to reconstruct servants' pasts, we need to shake up our own fields of history writing—urban, labour, gender, and social—to discover servants’ traces wherever they are found. From serving as witnesses in courtrooms to becoming the subject of a city's foundational anecdote, their presence was spread across straw huts, streets, and maidans. Their work, defined through ‘private hire’, was the product of a historical process in which a series of regulations helped to intimatize the master-servant relationship.

Tagore’s “rooted-cosmopolitanism” and international mindedness against institutional sustainability

ABSTRACT Cosmopolitanism is often seen as a western concept associated with liberal individualistic values. It is also associated mostly with the urban educated middle-class. However, cosmopolitan thinking has been also prevalent in the East. Scholars in the twenty-first century are increasingly arguing that, there are multiple ways of thinking about cosmopolitanism originating from different regions of the world. Among Eastern thinkers, Rabindranath Tagore from colonial British India has been considered by many as one of the most cosmopolitan thinkers. The uniqueness about Tagore’s cosmopolitanism is that, it did not uproot him from his rural Bengali roots and sense of ethnic identity. He was very much a “rooted-cosmopolitan”. In his book, ‘Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers’, Kwame Anthony Appaiah had agued that, a “rooted cosmopolitan” is someone who was rooted in his own cultural context while having an open-mind to feel literally at home in the world. This article draws on archival research at Rabindra Bhawan in Shantiniketan and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Library archives to further this argument and demonstrates how Tagore’s school and university were built drawing on his “rooted cosmopolitan” ideals and international mindedness. In conclusion, this article highlights some of the challenges of sustaining the reformist educational institutions led by Tagore’s unique personality traits, social and pedagogic reform movements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century colonial British India.

Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India by Tobias Wolffhardt

Reviewed by: Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India by Tobias Wolffhardt Thomas Simpson Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future: Colin Mackenzie, the early colonial state and the comprehensive survey of India By Tobias Wolffhardt, trans. Jane Rafferty. New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2018. The expansive collections, writings, and images that Colin Mackenzie (1754—1821) produced during his four-decade imperial career present historians of early colonial India with opportunities and challenges. Many recent scholars use Mackenzie’s sprawling archive as a privileged vantage point from which to take in the expansion of British rule in southern India, yet the Scotsman eludes easy categorisation. According to Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks, Mackenzie’s sympathetic approach to the people and places of Madras’s hinterlands rendered his work relatively useless for administrative purposes.1 For Peter Robb and Phillip Wagoner, by contrast, Mackenzie adapted local structures to instantiate influential modes of colonial power and knowledge.2 Unearthing the Past befits its subject in being founded on admirably deep and fastidious research. Drawing on wide-ranging material that covers Mackenzie’s whole life, Tobias Wolffhardt mediates between the competing versions of Mackenzie in the extant historiography and develops some important new insights. The opening chapter of the main body of the book contains innovative material, demonstrating how Mackenzie’s first twenty-nine years in the Western Isles of Scotland mattered to his later work in India. His time as Comptroller of Customs at Stornoway instilled a commitment to scrupulous writing and archiving practices, while his experience of the brutal imposition of economic and social change in the Highlands underpinned a preference for more culturally sensitive and incremental forms of “improvement.” The following two chapters consider Mackenzie’s development during his sixteen years in southern India prior to starting the decade-long survey of Mysore, for which he was primarily renowned, in 1799. Wolffhardt convincingly positions Mackenzie not as someone driven by idiosyncratic and fixed intellectual passions, but a man of his time, place and interactions in South Asia. He had to build a long-term career as the East India Company’s rule became more formal and opportunities to make a quick fortune through private trade diminished. His learned interests, meanwhile, were shaped by a tight circle of administrator-scholars in Madras and, increasingly, by the Indians on whom he relied in conducting survey fieldwork. Wolffhardt’s examination in Chapters Four, Five and Six of Mackenzie’s work in Mysore is thorough and deserves to become the standard account of the survey, even if his focus on Mackenzie’s personal and institutional wranglings leaves space for further work on practices in the field. The analysis of the vital issue of the dynamics between Mackenzie and his interlocutors is comprehensive. Although drawing conclusions similar to Wagoner’s and Robb’s about the essential role of Indian intellectual elites, Wolffhardt goes further in focusing on how Mackenzie rooted the Mysore survey in the extant spatial structure of parganas (sub-districts). By privileging a form of territorial organisation he understood to have been established long before the Mughals, Mackenzie attempted to order his data into what Wolffhardt terms a “comprehensive research aim… based not on a mathematized observation of the globe, but on the historical geography of a cultural region” (158). This is among the most compelling and original claims of Unearthing the Past, not only deepening our understanding of Mackenzie but also highlighting that survey sciences in early colonial India were oriented to matters of human history as much as to spatial abstraction and fiscal extraction. The book’s final two chapters deal, respectively, with Mackenzie’s vast collection of objects, manuscripts and archaeological inscriptions, and his tenure during the final decade of his life as Surveyor General of Madras and, finally, of India. Wolffhardt persuasively shows that Mackenzie’s collection was of a piece with his “historicist orientation” (236), which grounded colonial administration in ancient rights and laws while acknowledging that India’s past was socially and politically dynamic. Mackenzie’s time as Surveyor General is dealt with somewhat hastily: more details on key projects from this era, especially the Atlas...

A Mughal Matriarch and the Politics of Motherhood in Early Colonial India

A Mughal Matriarch and the Politics of Motherhood in Early Colonial India

The Languages of Petitioning in Early Colonial India

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.

Agriculture and ‘Improvement’ in Early Colonial India: A Pre-History of Development

On associe souvent la doctrine de l’« amélioration » avec l’instauration – et l’échec présumé – du Règlement Permanent du Bengale en 1793. Bien que reconnu comme crucial pour la politique agraire britannique en Inde, son impact et son importance plus larges n’ont pas été suffisamment étudiés. Le goût esthétique, le jugement moral et l’enthousiasme botanique se combinèrent à des critères plus strictement économiques pour imposer l’idée d’amélioration qui se prolongea jusqu’au milieu du XIXe siècle. Le désir d’amélioration reflétait aussi l’insatisfaction face à la pauvreté apparente de l’Inde et à un environnement matériel déficient ; il contribua à stimuler la collecte de données, ainsi que d’ambitieux projets de transformation agraire. Victime des limites propres aux premières tentatives visant à transformer l’Inde rurale, l’amélioration connut plusieurs faux départs. Elle préfigure néanmoins certaines conceptions ultérieures du développement, par ses présupposés négatifs sur le pays, et dans sa recherche d’agents externes de changement. Cet article réévalue l’importance de l’amélioration dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle en Inde, surtout telle qu’illustrée dans les récits de voyage de cette époque et à travers les objectifs et les activités de l’Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India.

Smallpox Vaccination in Early Colonial India

Using reports about local resistance of the smallpox vaccination between 1800 and 1805 in colonial India, this brief article analyses how the diversity in both the level and type of resistance, depicted in earlier primary sources, has been distorted by later accounts into a single category of ‘South Asian smallpox vaccination resistance’. Careful analysis of the historical primary documents demonstrates, however, that such resistance stemmed from a variety of reasons, including sanitary concerns, political discontent and practical difficulties in arriving at vaccination centres. The article therefore suggests the need for more careful handling of earlier primary sources in order to not lose evidence of early diversities in reactions to colonial interventions.

Provincial Pasts and National Histories: Territorial self-fashioning in twentieth-century Bihar

AbstractThis article explores how local lived experiences and nationalist sentiments converged to shape a regional literati's conception of the province of Bihar in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial India. Following the formation of the separate province of Bihar in 1912, certain very powerful Indian-nationalist and cultural-historical factors were deployed to create a much-needed cultural-historical past for Bihar. In this project of territorial self-fashioning, institutions such as the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (1915) and the Patna Museum (1917) became crucial to the new political-cultural configuration of the region. Additionally, they also made Bihar's ancient past visible in a deliberately nationalist narrative. Projecting its rich ancient past onto a national framework provided Bihar with the possibility of overcoming its characterization as ‘backward’ and provincial. This article therefore moves beyond analytic frameworks of nationalism which emphasize particularities of regional identity by framing them in perpetual antagonism to the efforts of Indian national integration. By looking at the construction of narratives of an ancient past that straddled the region and the nation, I argue that the emergence of an entity called Bihar was braided into India's nationalist imagination.

Understanding the ‘Mofussil’ and the ‘Ditch’ in Early Colonial India

At the beginning of the 19th century, the term Mofussil meant 'outside the limits of Calcutta' since the limit was for a while the Maratha Ditch dug around Fort William in the 1740s. Europeans (missionaries, merchants and planters) who lived in Calcutta they were called ditchers and those who lived outside the Maratha Ditch were known as Mofussilites. However, with the passage of time, the meaning of the term got changed and it could be studied in juxtaposition to rural-urban dichotomy. In this research article, the origin of the term Mofussil is investigated and how the original connotation has changed with the passage of time in the early 19th century. Mofussil always stood in contrast to bigger cities like Calcutta but it was always linked to the cities through the Zilla Sadar towns.

Mixed voices: post/colonial biographies and transnational identities

ABSTRACTThis article aims at showing the relevance of family biographies to a social history of transnational identities. It focuses on individuals from four generations of an extended family of South Asian descent – all of them outstanding in their chosen fields. The path of an Indian psychiatrist working in early twentieth-century colonial India crosses with that of an eminent Indian philologist and language instructor based in Berlin when he marries the latter’s daughter. The life trajectories of these individuals were shaped by broader political circumstances such as colonialism, two world wars, decolonization and the partition of India. They were also Parsis, belonging to a minority community known for its cosmopolitan outlook, western education and economic success. The psychiatrist’s two daughters went their own different ways – one, settling in Pakistan married to a Muslim and becoming a renowned postcolonial poet and professor of English literature in Karachi. The other, travelling the world, spent most of her professional career in Germany and gained repute as a documentary film-maker and director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The paths of the Parsi poet based in Pakistan, Maki Kureishi, and of her nephew Hanif, of Pakistani descent and domiciled in Britain, do not cross.The sources used include poems, novels, newspapers, official correspondence, government proceedings and personal communications.

Importing Gendered Legal Reasoning from England: Wife Murders in Early Colonial India, 1805–1857

The informal criminal defence in India of ‘injured masculine honour’ was steadily narrowed over the course of the nineteenth century. Yet this remained a popular – and extremely effective – appeal to the judiciary. This article argues that such regular and successful appeals by husbands in India are best understood by examining how lethal domestic violence was represented in England, and how this cultural baggage was transferred to Indian courts as a central part of the new ‘Anglo-Muhammadan’ criminal law. Such gendered legal ideas, as I demonstrate here, seriously limited the chances that wife-killers in colonial India would be brought to justice.

Material meanings: ‘waste’ as a performative category of land in colonial India

Nearly seven decades after ‘decolonization’, policymaking in India continues to be haunted by colonial categories. Focusing on the category ‘wastelands’, which has been central to recent debates on India's biofuel policies, we study how it was heterogeneously constituted during the Permanent Settlement of land revenue in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century colonial India. In particular, we trace how this category took on multiple meanings through its encounters with different human and nonhuman entities in disparate spatio-temporal settings. The entities encountered included not only ideas and moralities derived from theoretical notions such as Locke's ‘natural rights’, but also the soil and water on diverse lands, and the beings living or made to live on these lands. The multiple meanings of the category led to debates and controversies between colonial administrators regarding the ways in which the Permanent Settlement should be introduced and extended. By mapping these debates and controversies, we attempt to accomplish two things. First, we construct a narrative in which dominant colonial categories and associated rules do not possess unidirectional power to reformat colonized realities and practices. Second, we attempt to account for and recognize realities and practices that were marginalized or disregarded in the formulation of colonial administrative rules. Narratives such as ours, we hope, can help proliferate possibilities for enacting new decolonial and decolonizing practices of making, using and transforming meanings.