Eighteenth-century India Research Articles

Sentiment and Exploitation in British Literary Representations of Eighteenth-Century India

This article argues that Henry Mackenzie’s novel, The Man of Feeling (1771), represents an important shift in British literary depictions of the indigenous peoples of India. Although the inhabitants of the West Indies had been represented condescendingly in British literature for centuries prior to the publication of Mackenzie’s novel, East Indian characters, such as John Dryden’s version of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, were seen as powerful and civilized. By 1771, however, East and West “Indian” characters had become virtually indistinguishable from one another in British literature.

When Mice Eat Cats: An Allegory of Empire as Border Art in the Diary of an Eighteenth-Century Mughal Bureaucrat

The study of Mughal history has relied extensively on manuscript sources in Persian language, especially court chronicles, travelers' tales, biographical dictionaries, and statistical accounts. Visual evidence, to the limited extent it is identified for study, tends to focus on court paintings, monumental architecture, or exceptional regalia left by royals. This essay breaks new ground by introducing a less elite source with striking visuals that helps to challenge dominant explanations of social change in eighteenth-century India. The source is the Persian diary of a lower-level Mughal bureaucrat named Itimad Ali Khan titled Mirat-ul Ḥaqaiq or Mirror of Events. Produced in the 1720s and acquired by East India Company official James Fraser during his stay in Gujarat, the compendium is now held at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. We begin by highlighting the cultural environment within which the Mirat-ul Ḥaqaiq was produced, and then present a conjectural interpretation of some stunning and unusual border art set across eight folios of the manuscript. Critical to this effort is an altogether new translation of the 71 lines of poetry that accompany the colorful illustrations. The art sequence tells the tale of a powerful and overconfident Cat King who is unexpectedly defeated by mice underlings. Despite recent scholarship that emphasizes eighteenth-century India as a period of continuity, growth, and economic prosperity, we suggest that for those directly involved in Mughal administration like Itimad Ali Khan, the spirit of the age felt more like one of social decline and political disorder boldly expressed by the topsy-turvy imagery of mice devouring cats.

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins

Reviewed by: Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins Angus Mitchell Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. By Caroline Elkins. London: The Bodley Head, 2022. The display of the Imperial State Crown adorning the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II was a potent reminder that Britain still inhabits a past and present linked by symbols of empire. During the days between her death and state funeral, global news reports recycled a clip of film showing the late queen making a statement on her twenty-first birthday from a garden in Cape Town promising that she would devote her life to “the service of our great imperial family.” Back in 1947, this comment was received with a sense of innocent pride, but the notion of Britain’s “great imperial family” has not aged well. In this latest study to strip away the lustre of empire, Caroline Elkins asks why this is. Legacy of Violence adds to a succession of recent academic interventions revealing the systematised use of force and associated weapons systems required to curate and manage dirty and messy inheritances. Other authoritative works on this shelf include Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire (2019), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History (2019), Priya Satia, Time’s Monster (2020), and Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums (2020). Each of these interventions has exposed the deceptive premise of empire as an engine of liberal progress and universal benevolence. Instead, Britain’s imperial prowess is shown to have deployed and finessed the technologies of war, secrecy and violence aided by the archive, photography and museums to extend and legitimise belief in liberal imperialism. Beyond the enduring military conflicts, the maintenance of empire became a project of information management, surveillance, cognitive dissonance and Orwellian doublethink. Secret state agencies created an alternative moral universe functioning outside law and democracy. As professor of history and of African and African American studies at Harvard University, Caroline Elkins established her reputation for her work on Kenya’s Mau Mau insurgency and her patient examination of Britain’s secret Hanslope Park archives, where many unknown unknowns were stored until they came to light in 2011. Her methodology scrutinises the intersections of history, law, secrecy and transparency and the role of the archive in managing perceptions. A key component of imperial authority was to deny the right to know the truth and to unashamedly manipulate what was known through select release of documentation. The opening section of Legacy of Violence deals with the period from eighteenth-century India to the outbreak of war in 1939, showing the mutually constitutive relationship between imperialism and liberalism and how empire became the faith of the nation. The middle section examines “Empire at War” and the world order that emerged from the empire’s Churchillian years and the increased role of policing tactics, covert military action and information management. Increasingly, the use of “special powers” and emergency regulations were adopted to defend the realm. The final part—Trysts with Destiny—scrutinises the post war / Cold War period and the economic dependence of Britain on the U.S., Europe and “the colonies” to restore national solvency. Elkins brings harrowing insights into the interconnecting and escalating violence flows circulating through a series of imperial trouble spots and the policing tactics used by the personnel who moved from one imperial outpost to another. Threats from communist, nationalist and anti-colonial insurgencies in Palestine, Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya were ruthlessly suppressed through torture and mass incarceration. Evidence of such tactics became potentially incriminating and a challenge to maintaining the moral high ground. Central to her analysis is the idea of legalised lawlessness and how the law was instrumentalised as both policy and in practice to justify systematised violence. In the words of the political philosopher, James Fitzjames Stephen, “law is nothing but regulated force.” Elkins shows how the British belief system, apparently based on the rule of law, human rights and an open society, has constructed a framework of norms that enables the liberal world system to continue to this day to ravage, pollute, slaughter, extract, divide and devastate in the name of progress and development. The legacies of empire are still evident in the...

Sachi K. Patel, Politics and Religion in Eighteenth-Century India. Jaisingh II and the Rise of Public Theology in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism

Sachi K. Patel, Politics and Religion in Eighteenth-Century India. Jaisingh II and the Rise of Public Theology in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism

Crafting literary Urdu: Mirza Hatim’s engagement with Vali Dakhani

AbstractThe emergence in eighteenth-century India of literary compositions that used the elite registers of what was, at the time, called ‘Rekhtah’, and later defined as Urdu, is poorly understood. Conventionally, after an initial infatuation in Delhi with the works of Vali Dakhani,1 a mid-century break is assumed, exemplified by the revision of Zuhur ud-Din Hatim’s Divan as Divanzadah in the 1750s. Scholars have viewed this as a radical intervention in the creation of Urdu, which excised old vernacular models and embraced further Persianization. This article re-examines the evidence, combining methodologies from literary and historical studies. It points to the continuities present in Hatim’s revision, including sustained engagement with Vali, even as Hatim attempted to appeal to new audiences, incorporating new trends alongside older literary models. Foregrounding literary networks and arenas of poetic practice shows the limited impact of the proscriptions and literary criticisms voiced by Hatim’s critics. In studying the contested space of literary aesthetics and linguistic shifts against self-fashioning within changing networks, this article demonstrates that the relationship between the Persianate and vernacular sphere continued to be generative, rather than oppositional or hierarchical.

What’s in a name? William Jones, ‘philological empiricism’ and botanical knowledge making in eighteenth-century India

ABSTRACT ‘What is Indian Spikenard?’, asked the eighteenth-century orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746–1794), in a famous paper, ‘On the Spikenard of the Ancients,’ published in Asiatick Researches, Volume II (1790). The question serves here as a point of entry into Jones’s method for creating culturally specific plant descriptions to help locate Indian plants in their Indian milieu. This paper discusses Jones’s philological method for identifying the jaṭāmāṁsī of the Sanskrit verse lexicon, the Amarakośa, and materia medica texts, a flowering plant with important medicinal properties and great commercial value, as the ‘Spikenard of the Ancients’. Philology, for Jones, was of a piece with language study and ethnology, and undergirded by observational practices based on trained seeing, marking a continuity between his philological and botanical knowledge making. The paper follows Jones through his textual and ‘ethnographic’ explorations, as he creates both a Linnaean plant-object – Valeriana jatamansi Jones – and a mode of plant description that encoded the ‘native’ experience associated with a much-desired therapeutic commodity. The result was a botanical identification that forced the jaṭāmāṁsī to travel across epistemologies and manifest itself as an object of colonial natural history. In the words of the medic and botanist, William Roxburgh (1751–1815), whose research on the spikenard is also discussed here, Jones’s method achieved what ‘mere botany’ with its focus on the technical arrangement of plants could not do.

Unwomanly Woman: How Some Nineteenth-Century British Fictions Imagined Begum Samru of Sardhana

In the late eighteenth century India, Begum Samru rose from a dancing girl to become a renowned military adventuress and the ruler of a small semi-independent principality. One of the few female rulers in the country at that period, she is romanticized nowadays in popular histories and biographies. This article examines how three nineteenth-century colonial authors imagined her in their fiction. It shows that these provide counternarratives to contemporary romanticizations of the Begum. By comparing colonial depictions of her with contemporary ones, the article highlights how all such imaginings are informed by the authors’ confirmation biases. It finally argues for the need to look beyond the personal life of Begum Samru to fully appreciate the other aspects of her sterling career.

Imperial Connections between Ireland and India in the Late Eighteenth Century

ABSTRACT This article examines the imperial connections between Ireland and India in the late eighteenth century in order to demonstrate how colonial territories engaged with one another beyond the shadow, or concerns, of the British metropole. Building on the landmark work of C. A. Bayly in comparing Ireland and India’s connected history of nationalism during the long nineteenth century, as well as other scholarly publications concerning migration and land ownership, it explores the broader issue of the circulation of people and ideas during a pivotal moment in the later 1700s. A joint consideration of the two-way traffic that operated between Ireland and India provides a more balanced view of the global opportunities provided by imperial expansion, and of the ways in which Irish and Indian travellers engaged with colonialism. Secondly, the circulation of intellectual ideas between the two countries, and the resonance of domestic Irish or Indian concerns in their corresponding locale, demonstrate how colonial subjects interacted with developments occurring elsewhere in the empire. This article weaves together the varying strands of comparison that scholars have already carried out on late eighteenth-century Ireland and India to argue for a more rounded image of continuous circulation.

Transacting Politics in the Maratha Empire: An Agreement between Friends, 1795

Abstract Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate world. Focusing on the karārnāmā or agreement, this paper explores how a repertoire of Marathi and Persian documentary genres, binding formulae, and graphic procedures enabled legal, commercial, and diplomatic transactions in eighteenth-century western India. The exchange of written agreements facilitated interstate relations as well as profit-sharing contractual arrangements between individuals. Despite their centrality to interactions between European and South Asian polities, these instruments met with limited success in establishing rights to property under the legal regime of the East India Company-state and instead acquired new functions in colonial revenue administration.

The Continuation of Ijtihād

This article deals with legal thought of Shāh Walī Allāh, an outstanding religious thinker of eighteenth-century Muslim India, who emerged as one of the most prominent proponents of independent legal reasoning (ijtihād). According to Walī Allāh, ijtihād has always been a communal duty and thus it stipulates the existence of jurists capable of independent legal reasoning (mujtahids) in all ages. His thought-provoking response to the issues concerning ijtihād and taqlīd has led to a great deal of attention from scholars in both the East and the West. However, there remains the controversy of whether he advocated for an independent ijtihād after the eponyms of the law schools or not. This study attempts, analyzing Walī Allāh’s views on the juristic typology maintained by Sunnī jurists, to show how Walī Allāh argued for the continuity of ijtihād, both partial and independent, throughout the history of Islamic law. The author concludes that Walī Allāh believed not only in the possibility of absolute ijtihād (al-ijtihād al-muṭlaq) or ijtihād through legal theory (fī ’l-uṣūl) and positive law (wa ’l-furū‘), after the eponyms of the juristic schools, but also in the existence of such absolute jurists throughout Islamic centuries.

Historical Mistranslations: Identity, Slavery, and Genre in Eighteenth-Century India

AbstractColonial and postcolonial historians writing in English relied upon an emancipated slave's eighteenth-century Persian text,Tahmās Nāma, to construct the history of the Punjab in the same period. In this process, they have mistranslated the text and the genre. Rather than readingTahmās Nāmaas factual history or as a moral text of refinement, this article argues that if we return to the original account, in Persian, we see that the text is primarily auto/biographical. While this auto/biography does provide some insight into eighteenth-century political history of the Punjab and Mughal Hindustan, it—more importantly—sheds light on the ethnic, religious, social, economic and gendered lives of the author, Miskin, and the people whom he includes in his narrative. These intersecting and overlapping identities have been erased, flattened or misrepresented in translations of the text. Based on a re-reading of the auto/biography in its original language, this article considers how identity and slavery—conceptual categories of the present that are elided in the mistranslations—function in the text, and how those categories were understood, negotiated and leveraged during the eighteenth century.

The scribal household in flux: Pathways of Kayastha service in eighteenth-century Western India

Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of powerful courtly patrons. The rapid expansion of emerging regional states in the eighteenth century created new opportunities to apply these skills to administration, land-holding, and politics. This article examines the changing professional identity of the Kayastha scribal household in eighteenth-century western India. I focus on the ascendancy of the Chitnis household of Satara in the context of the growth and diversification of Kayastha employment under the Maratha sovereign Shahu Bhonsle (1682–1749). By consolidating portfolios of titles, appointments, and rights to property, ambitious scribes and secretaries, as epitomised by the career of Govind Khanderao Chitnis (d. 1785), were able to pursue riskier and more lucrative political assignments and form networks of kinsmen and associates across Maratha governments. Yet greater scrutiny and competition for state largesse, not least from within the Chitnis household itself, forced members of later generations to adopt creative and sometimes risky strategies to defend their claims to property. This article explores how the profound dislocations of political transformation in eighteenth-century South Asia enabled distinctive modes of individual and collective self-fashioning amongst skilled, upwardly mobile groups.

Political Power, Religious Authority, and the Caliphate in Eighteenth-Century Indian Islamic Thought

AbstractThis article examines how Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762), one of the most prominent scholars of eighteenth-century India whose thought has continued to be influential in many Muslim circles to the present day, conceptualized the interplay of political power and religious authority. Though several of Wali Allah's numerous writings have received considerable scholarly attention, this aspect of his political and religious thought has, oddly, been much neglected. A close reading of Wali Allah's writings reveals him to be keenly interested not just in the immediately relevant issues of the chronic political instability afflicting his age but also in the broader, theoretical, questions of how political power undergirds the moral force of religious norms and institutions. It is his unusually blunt but robust recognition that power is part of what enables a religious tradition to evolve and change that this article explores. That recognition—buried in writings that purport to be about the merits of Islam's first caliphs—has other important implications, too, notably for an understanding of the broad political context in which the sacred law itself undergoes change.

Negotiating Female Authorship in Eighteenth-Century India: Gender and Multilingualism in a Persian Text

AbstractIn the last years of the eighteenth century, an Indian woman authored a work in Persian intended for the entertainment and guidance of students of that language. EntitledMiftāḥ-i Qulūb-i Mubtadiyān(‘The Key of the Hearts of Beginners’), the work comprised of stories from vernacular oral traditions as well as extracts from well-known Persian poetic, historical and ethical works. Although the work was translated into English in 1908 by Annette Beveridge, it has received no serious scholarly attention. Drawing upon recent scholarship offering new ways of thinking about India's multilingual literary past, this article examines the intersection of multiple vernacular and generic traditions as translated and manifested inMiftāḥ-i Qulūb al-Mubtadīyān. While vernacular languages followed different, and in relative terms, more limited routes of circulation and exchange in comparison with cosmopolitan languages such as Persian, their paths of movement were no less significant. Through a close reading of this work and its context, this article seeks to understand how Bībī Ḥashmat al-Daula crafted a distinct, cosmopolitan voice for herself through her deployment of both Persianate and regional Indian traditions.

Vivek Gupta. Review of "Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century India: Poetry and Paintings from Kishangarh" by Heidi Pauwels.

Vivek Gupta. Review of "Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century India: Poetry and Paintings from Kishangarh" by Heidi Pauwels.

The King’s Plunder, the King’s Justice: Sovereignty in British India, 1756–76

The following article is an attempt to contribute to an understanding of sovereignty in late eighteenth-century Britain and British India by examining the role of the King in his sovereign authorization of the East India Company. This sovereign authorization is illustrated through a study of the articulation of two elements from within the King’s prerogative in Britain between the 1750s and the 1770s as it applied to the East India Company: (a) the authority to sanction prize money, itself derived from the war and peace making authority of the King and (b) the authority to set up the ‘King’s Bench’, that is, the Supreme Court in 1773, where the King is virtually present and from which supreme juridical writs may be issued. In measuring the nature and scope of the King’s sovereignty, the article hopes to further the understanding of empire and its adumbrations in the Age of Enlightenment. It does so by arguing, on the one hand, that the conquests of the subcontinent will have to be related directly to a conceptualization of the King’s sovereignty, specifically the laws of prize; on the other hand, what is broadly seen as ‘custom’ cannot be understood outside the constituting ambit of sovereignty, that is, that by which laws are authorized. The specific implications of this for the development of laws in the subcontinent are sketched out.

Editor’s Introduction

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s IntroductionPaul StirtonPaul StirtonBard Graduate Center Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDesign historians and material culture scholars have long been aware of the affective role of one’s surroundings, and the ways in which objects shape and even direct our behavior. In fact, most thoughtful people recognize this. Nevertheless, it was slightly surprising to discover that John Maynard Keynes gave a talk on this very subject to the secret society known as The Apostles in Cambridge University in 1909. But why should we have been surprised? Keynes was incredibly smart by any standard, so it was probably as natural that he should consider the influence of furniture on love, as he might address issues of monetary policy, elasticity of demand, or the law of diminishing returns. The manuscript of this talk lay in Keynes’s papers at King’s College Cambridge and is published here for the first time as one of our Primary Source Texts.The articles in this issue are more widely dispersed than usual; from eighth-century Northumbria to eighteenth-century India, and on to antebellum Philadelphia and postwar Glasgow. Each of these articles examines different media deploying a variety of techniques. Ben Tilghman considers the processes of laying out manuscript pages in the early Middle Ages and how this affects their meaning; Siddhartha Shah traces the changes in symbolism and status that a highly prized diamond undergoes when translated from the Punjab to Britain, from the armlet of Duleep Singh to the crown jewels of Queen Victoria via the Great Exhibition of 1851; Anne Verplanck aims to put some of the people involved in early American portrait photography back into the picture in her study of daguerreotypes in Philadelphia; and Glenn Hooper considers the ways in which design and new materials played a role in re-establishing the British furniture industry in the wake of the Second World War by tracing the business history of one firm, Morris and Co. of Glasgow, between 1948 and 1958.The book and exhibition reviews in this issue are similarly wide-ranging. In England alone, we move from the glorious survivals of medieval embroidered vestments to the equally spectacular psychedelic clothing of the later 1960s, and from a single Lithuanian boot in Cambridge to the occasionally conflicting advice on home decorating in the Aesthetic Movement. Alongside this, one can find discussions of simulacra in medieval Germany, the autobiography of the Viennese émigré Paul Frankl, and a retrospective exhibition of the work of the French furniture and interior designer Pierre Paulin. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by West 86th Volume 24, Number 1Spring–Summer 2017 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/693795 © 2017 by The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Comparing Comparisons: The role of religion in British-produced histories of Ireland and India, c. 1650–1800

This article traces the evolution of history-writing practices in two distinct settings of the British Empire, late seventeenth-century Ireland and late eighteenth-century India, in order to analyse the progression of imperial thought over the course of a century and a half. In doing so, it argues that these British-produced histories demonstrate global patterns towards colonial subjects throughout this period. Moreover, the specific points addressed by these histories with regards to religion and forms of government, as well as the position of the British within colonial societies, suggest that Britons looked for universal elements in all of their colonies.

Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth‐Century India: Poetry and Paintings from Kishangarh By HeidiRikaMariaPauwels. Studies in Asian Art and Culture, Volume 4. Berlin: EB Verlag, 2015. Pp. 301; 20 plates (18 color); €45.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 42, Issue 4 p. 309-309 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: South Asia Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century India: Poetry and Paintings from Kishangarh By Heidi Rika Maria Pauwels. Studies in Asian Art and Culture, Volume 4. Berlin: EB Verlag, 2015. Pp. 301; 20 plates (18 color); €45.00. John E. Cort, John E. Cort Denison UniversitySearch for more papers by this author John E. Cort, John E. Cort Denison UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 December 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.12760Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume42, Issue4December 2016Pages 309-309 RelatedInformation

Widows, Family, Community, and the Formation of Anglo-Hindu Law in Eighteenth-Century India

AbstractLate eighteenth-century colonial agrarian and judicial reforms had a direct impact on women from elite and non-elite backgrounds. Informed by British liberal ideologies and upper-caste Brahmanical norms, colonial policies marginalized women's access to, and control over, resources in the emergent political economy. In this article, I reconstruct histories of the ways in which Anglo-Hindu law compromised women's status as heirs, businesswomen, and members of society who wielded social capital with other community groups. Focusing on widows in Banaras who commandeered their property disputes, I illustrate that pre-colonial precedents of case-resolution under the Banaras rulers, and practices of ‘forum shopping’ by disputants themselves, shaped the widows’ approach to the colonial courts. Colonial judicial plans being incommensurable to everyday life, the courts incorporated pre-colonial forms of dispute handling and maintained a flexible approach to the practice of colonial law under the supervision of an Indian magistrate for a period of time. These characteristics made the courts popular among local society in the Banaras region. However, British officials, insistent on applying abstract scriptural laws, aligned customary practice to the dictates of Anglo-Hindu law. This article shows that the narrow legal subject position available to widows under scriptural law reordered their relationships with family and community networks to their disadvantage.