Imperial India Research Articles

The India League and the Condition of India: Agnotological Imperialism, Colonial State Violence and the Making of Anticolonial Knowledge 1930–4

Abstract This article explores the 1932 visit to India of a delegation of Labour party figures associated with the India League, a prominent anticolonial organisation based in London, charged with investigating the colonial state violence unleashed by ‘Ordinance Rule’. It also examines efforts taken by the Government of India, India Office and Indian Political Intelligence to suppress their findings, through which it explores a dialectic between anticolonial knowledge-making and agnotological imperialism, which often took the form of the latter ‘exceptioning’ examples produced by the former of excessive colonial state violence. It offers the conclusion that the contradictions between liberal imperialism and the rule of colonial difference and repression in the age of mass nationalism in India and mass democracy in Britain meant that liberal imperialism in India increasingly flowed, paradoxically, from illiberalism in Britain.

인도 언어의 대전환

The purpose of this paper is to understand the great transition in India by studying the social structural hierarchical relationship between English and Indian languages in India, a multilingual country. For this, the power relationship between English and Indian languages was analyzed on linguistic imperialism. First, it was explained that English, a remnant of imperialism, came to coexist as a dominant language, and analyzed the position of English, which has recently expanded its influence for socioeconomic, from the perspective of Neo linguistic imperialism in India. By linguistic capital, the dominance of English was solidified in India, and due to political and ethnic conflicts, English was used as a resistance against Hindi. Therefore, it is revealed that socioeconomically marginalized regional languages have been marginalized by voluntarily assimilating into English, and that English is consolidating its position as the dominant language.

CONTEMPORARY TRAVEL LITERATURE: A POSTCOLONIAL READING OF FLÂNEUR IN MONISHA RAJESH’S AROUND INDIA IN 80 TRAINS

In the postmodern period, there has been a visible theorization of travel writing in the literary domain as the genre gains constant recognition for its close relation to issues such as colonialism, postcolonialism, globalization and multiculturalism. In fact, early travel writing and its involvement in European expansion has been noticeably reshaped with less exploitative practices of dehumanizing spaces and culture in the contemporary travel narrative. With the socio-political changes that are taking place in the new century, the genre’s establishment in the postcolonial scene has given an impetus to travel literature. This contribution has also given birth to the concept of the postcolonial flâneur, who is often referred to as a modern spectator immersed in observation and overwhelming experiences of the postcolonial society. In connection with this, the paper shall attempt to study the author, Monisha Rajesh as a postcolonial flâneur in her travel book, Around India in 80 Trains (2012). Further analysis shall focus on cultural diversity and paradox, language, religion, capitalism, and the after-effects of imperialism in India through the lens of the postcolonial flâneur.

COLONIZATION'S LINGERING INFLUENCE: EXAMINING THE IMPACT ON INDIAN ENGLISH LITERATURE

India is a rich site for studying intertextuality and influence due to its contemporary and colonial history of postcolonial culture. British imperialism in India was more pragmatic than other colonial powers, being motivated by economics rather than evangelism. During the emergence of Orientalism, India was the first nation to have a literary impact on the West, but this equation was reversed during colonial intervention. While some critics denounce or acclaim the West's effect on India, Indian writers' responses show complex instances of intertextuality and influence in the form of reception. The literary movement in India has been shaped by the traditional attitudes, culture, social life, and politics of the local people. British rule in India lasted for more than two hundred years and its authority halted the ruling power of the Indian subcontinent. The impact of British colonialism on Indian literature and social life is evident. Understanding English literature history is crucial for understanding English people's way of life, including their educational, social, and cultural attitudes. This research paper examines in detail the effect of colonial rule on English literature in India.

Medieval Deccan: Reflections Through the Lives of Madame Martin and Madame Dupleix

This article brings to the forefront an underexamined aspect of French Indian history. Scholars have researched on various aspects of French imperialism in India, but one aspect which remains outside the purview of many is the role played by European women who accompanied their husbands overseas. This article studies Madame Martin and Madame Dupleix and highlights their functions towards the fostering of the French colonial policy. Although indirect in many ways, they in a way contributed to the ongoing projects of the French Company. Consequently, this article seeks to present a holistic view of Madame Martin and Madame Dupleix. In doing so, mostly French sources have been used, accompanied by a Tamil source. Although there are differences between these two women, one aspect remains clear, which is their adoration for the French Company. The sacrifices they had to endure were immeasurable. The difference in time periods (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively) also had a very imperative role to play in the lives of Madame Martin and Madame Dupleix.

The making of a model town: planning in a Princely city and the All-India Sanitary Conferences

ABSTRACT The arrival of the third plague pandemic in the Indian Subcontinent in the late nineteenth century is well known to have prompted the state to rethink colonial governance. In this article, I examine how a locality in Bangalore, Fraser Town, was turned into a ‘model town’ at the All-India Sanitary Conferences hosted between 1911-1914, in the aftermath of the plague. I juxtapose archival manuals that recount the planning of Fraser Town with the discussions on town planning in the AISC proceedings to show how a universal ‘plague urbanism’ emerged as the most effective prophylactic against disease across Imperial India. The colonial government’s intent to project Fraser Town as an exemplar of sanitary planning at the AISC, I argue, had a twofold agenda. In Bangalore, they could claim credit for creating a model town although it was the Princely Mysore State’s capital. Across Imperial India, Fraser Town supported the Conferences’ agenda of deconstructing the difference between British, Princely, and variously ruled territories, reconstituting them in a performatively united ‘All-India’ against disease. Putting the making of Fraser Town alongside the imperial AISC, in dialogue with a global pandemic and conferencing; I show how planning processes were integral to territorial aspirations of empire.

Women, Horse Sports, and Liberation: Equestrianism and Britain from the 18th to the 20th Centuries

In Women, Horse Sports, and Liberation, Erica Munkwitz examines British women's involvement in equestrianism from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. In chronological order, she examines British women's participation in horse sports and how such involvement shaped—and was shaped by—gender, social, cultural, and sporting ideals. Muntwitz begins presenting women's participation in hunting, relating it to the sporting revolution in Britain, which spanned 1772 to 1825. Women have a long history of participating in hunting, and the late eighteenth century was an era of widespread and talented female horsemanship. Yet female numbers decreased in the first part of the nineteenth century as a consequence of the changing nature of the hunt. From 1805 through 1857, horse riding was seen as a healthy exercise for women, and the practice of riding in the city parks developed. According to Munkwitz, horse riding was connected to the elite up until the mid-nineteenth century. Thereafter, it trickled down the social ladder as horses became more affordable. The number of women as horse owners, the number of riding horses available, and riding manuals for women all increased. From 1857 to 1913, women's participation in hunting thus grew further. In the last periods analyzed in the book, 1894–1932 and 1932–1956, women's importance in equestrianism continued to expand. Women worked with horses during war times, and in the interwar period, there was a massive surge in the number of riders. Horse riding activities for women had emerged earlier than many other sports activities, and Britain, to an increasing extent, was represented by women in equestrian competitions at elite levels.In Munkwitz's work, the importance of national identity also comes forward as an important explanatory factor in relation to women's riding. Haute école (a style of horse riding born from cavalry movements and training for the battlefield) declined in Britain following the Civil Wars as the British considered it inadequate riding; this rejection was seen as a consequence of the British sporting revolution where hunting became important. Later, horse riding in India became a way of marking British nationality for both men and women, and women participated in horse riding activities in the colony to a higher (and broader) extent than in Britain. In imperial India, women could train horses, ride cross saddled, and participate in polo and gymkhana (a competitive sport played on horseback). In this context, being white was more important than gender identity in deciding who could ride or not. Women's involvement thus reshaped ideals of race and reinforced imperial ideology in the British Empire.The book is unique and fascinating in describing the history of equestrianism over a long period and from a gender perspective. There are, however, some critical issues I would like to raise (possibly deriving from my belonging to a different tradition of writing history). The work lacks a thorough presentation of the source material (and possibly a list of the sources). The author uses magazines, books about horse riding and women, and pictures (the book is beautifully illustrated with black-and-white prints, many in the author's collection). It is, however, difficult to know how many of these magazines and books are used as sources and how they were individually interpreted. Likewise, more information about readership and circulation of primary sources would have been useful. It is sometimes difficult to follow whether the number of books on horse riding was actually increasing or not, and especially whether any rise was part of the development of increased book publications in general. An argument in the book is that women's participation in horse sports “transcended limitations of class and gender in Britain and highlights the democratic ethos that allowed anyone skilled enough to ride and hunt—from chimney-sweep to courtesan.” Even though the author presents examples of this, it is, without a thorough discussion of the sources, difficult to know how widespread the development was.My objections do not detract me from the pleasures of reading a book that takes a holistic approach to women and equestrian sports. Muntwitz gives the reader excellent insights into the material culture of women's equestrianism. She presents and discusses aspects of social reality grounded in objects like the saddle and equestrian clothing and makes clear that men and women had different technical opportunities in relation to riding. The history of saddles is closely connected to the development of behaviors, norms, and rituals in relation to female equestrians. Over time, (British) women abandoned the sidesaddle—which they had been riding in for almost half a millennium—to ride astride like men. This is fascinating reading for all interested in how the intertwinement of material culture, gender, social class, nation, and whiteness influenced who participated in the sport and related activities and how the different positions were more or less important in various times and places.

Empire of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines by Andrew J. Rotter

Reviewed by: Empire of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines by Andrew J. Rotter Timothy Yang Empire of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines. By andrew j. rotter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 392 pp. ISBN 9780190924706. $41.95 (hardcover). The British and Americans who colonized Asia in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries often could not stand the sight and smell of those they colonized. Or, for that matter, the sound of their native tongues, the touch of their skin, or the taste of their food. They chafed (both literally and figuratively) from the heat and humidity of tropical climes. Conversely, colonial subjects often found themselves repelled by the odors and confounded by the habits of their rulers. Such sensory perceptions are the focal points of Andrew Rotter's fascinating comparative study of colonial India and the Philippines, Empire of the Senses. According to Rotter, Britain and the United States both took part in a project of liberal imperialism, of "nations intent on bettering the conditions of their subjects and certain that the imposition of their institutions would do so" (p. 49). Sensory perceptions of colonial agents and subjects were vital to this civilizing project. Constructing an empire was not just top-down, planned from above, but an "embodied experience, for both its agents and subjects" (p. 2) imbricated in quotidian, asymmetrical encounters on the ground, which were visceral, tactile, and pungent. And the more the colonizers [End Page 179] and colonized came into contact through their shared colonial experience, the more their perceptions of each other changed. Empire of the Senses makes two valuable historiographic contributions. First, it builds on the study of empire as a comparative and shared process involving ideas in motion. British and Americans engaged in a "transimperial exchange of information" in which "imperial agents were sharing ideas about how to address common problems, among them how to combat disease such as malaria, cholera, and tuberculosis, what to do about lepers, how to manage sewage, how best to educate Indians and Filipinos, and more generally what to do with their puzzling and refractory Asian subjects" (pp. 5–6). "Sensory stereotypes, preferences, and practices" were "portable and powerful, well-sharpened instruments" that traveled from the far-flung fringes of empire to the metropoles and vice versa (p. 7). Second, it makes a crucial contribution to study of the history of everyday life; according to Rotter, "empires were held together by everyday patterns: how rulers and subjects interacted, how they saw, heard, smelled, felt, and fed each other. The name of the cultural formation of empires was civilization" (p. 4). Empire of the Senses builds on the cutting-edge work in the history of the senses by scholars such as Mark Smith and Alain Corbin, and is theoretically informed by anthropologists and sociologists including Mary Louise Pratt, Clifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu, and Norbert Elias. Rotter's work also contributes to the burgeoning global scholarship on settler colonialism by arguing that empire can only be fully understood on the ground. The chapters of the book are mostly thematically organized. After two table-setting chapters—one that describes the importance of the senses to empire's civilizing project and the other that outlines how bodies came into contact through war—the remaining chapters cover each of the five major senses. Rotter argues that one sense, above all, has held hegemony over the others: sight. As James Scott has famously argued, states govern by rendering their subjects legible; cadastral surveys allow for the taxation of land, just as population registers allow for conscription and public health measures. If sight is the dominant sense of rational governance, then sound, smell, taste, and touch provide what is missing: a window into the irrational. "Empires are emotional communities," Rotter writes, "and emotions are triggered by the senses" (p. 265). To Rotter, the problem is that sight has often been analyzed separately from the other senses in historical scholarship. Sight alone does not provide the full picture (pun [End Page 180] intended): a picture may be worth a thousand words, but thousands more can be written if you add the ability to scratch and sniff...

Contribution of the British To Develop Indian English Literature

Development of Indian English Literature in India gathered momentum with the consolidation of British imperialism in India. As we know the British sow the seed of Indian Writing in English during the period of the British rule in India. English language and literature in India starts with the advent of East India Company in India. It all started in the summers of 1608 when Emperor Jahangir, in the courts of Mughals, welcomed Captain William Hawkins, Commander of British Naval Expedition Hector. It was India's first tryst with an Englishman and English. Jahangir later allowed Britain to open a permanent port and factory on the special request of King James IV that was conveyed by his ambassador Sir Thomas Roe. English were here to stay. Indian writings in English were heavily influenced by the Western art form of the novel. It was typical for the early Indian English language writers to use English unadulterated by Indian words to convey experiences that were primarily Indian. The core reason behind this step was the fact that most of the readers were either British or British educated Indians. In the early 20th century, when the British conquest of India was achieved, a new breed of writers started to emerge on the block. These writers were essentially British who were born or brought up or both in India. Their writing consisted of Indian themes and sentiments but the way of storytelling was primarily western. They had no reservation in using native words, though, to signify the context. This group consisted likes of Rudyard Kipling, Jim Corbett, and George Orwell among others. In fact, some of the writings of that era are still considered to be masterpieces of English Literature. KEYWORDS: Contribution of British, Development, British works & strategy, English Literature.

The Peacock Dress: The Language of British Imperialism in India, 1899-1905

This essay aims to discuss the actualization of the imperialist language through the Peacock Dress of Lady Mary Curzon, the new viceroy’s wife in the British colonial India. As the essay argues, the Peacock Dress holds within it a history of appropriation, not appreciation. It highlights the unique colonizing language of the British rule, the racist cloaked as ‘civilizing’ sentiments of the West, the subjugation of the Indian textile industry, and the manifold ways that the British turned their Indian subjects into a colonial Other.

Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines. By Andrew J.Rotter. Oxford University Press. 2019. 370pp. £25.99.

Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines. By Andrew J.Rotter. Oxford University Press. 2019. 370pp. £25.99.

Ritual and authority in world politics

The contributions to this Forum on Ritual and Authority in World Politics examine the role that ritual performances play in the constitution of positions of authority and the maintenance of relations of authority in historical and contemporary international relations. The Forum takes as its point of departure three related observations: (i) that recent years have witnessed a remarkable upsurge of interest in ritual as a recurring feature of international practice, but (ii) that this recent interest in ritual has not extended, thus far, to the study of international authority, (iii) in spite of political anthropologists’ long-standing claim that the performance of ritual is absolutely crucial to the production of authority. The performance of ritual grounds, makes tangible and enhances various forms of authority, including forms of international authority, historical and contemporary. The contributions to this Forum demonstrate the veracity of that claim in five different empirical contexts—Byzantine diplomacy, early modern cross-cultural encounters, British imperialism in India, military lawyering in America’s armed forces, and the casting of ballots in Crimea and the US—and attempt also to explain precisely how it is that ritual served to undergird and stabilise authority in these various instances.

Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines by Andrew J. Rotter

<i>Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines</i> by Andrew J. Rotter

Review essay: Global and comparative perspectives on media and development

This essay reviews the works ‘Television and the Afghan Culture Wars’ (University of Illinois Press) by Wazhmah Osman and ‘Media Imperialism in India and Pakistan’ (Routledge) by Farooq Sulehria as recent contributions to the fields of global and comparative media studies. It considers the overlapping themes in these works through ruberics of media imperialism and development in terms of growth of television industry in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the broad context of globalization and transnational media flows.

The heritage sewer networks of Kolkata (Calcutta) and ascertaining their coping potential under growing urban pressures

ABSTRACT The earliest sewer networks of the city of Kolkata, or erstwhile Calcutta, covered a modest 19.1 km2 of the central district of the city and the first phase of the network-commenced operation in 1868. Calcutta, then, was the capital of imperial India under British rule and the combined sewer was only second in the empire after London. The conduits of this sewered catchment, and of the two others that followed subsequently, continue to be in operation despite heightened base flows due to population rise and increased stormwater runoff because of greater imperviousness arising from urbanisation. The recent lining of the sewer conduits or augmentation of the drainage pumping capacities has not, however, reduced street waterlogging during the monsoons by a great amount. One aim of this study is to investigate the reasons behind this failure of the system and evaluate the sustainability of these historic sewers with the help of mathematical models, verifying them as far as possible with the scant available data. The other objective is to make the reader aware of the engineering heritage of the country and document the available information about the Calcutta sewer networks for providing a base of reference for future researchers.

British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, intercolonial relations and the empire by Kama Maclean

Reviewed by: British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, intercolonial relations and the empire by Kama Maclean Margaret Allen British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, intercolonial relations and the empire By Kama Maclean. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2020. This volume sets out to write a history of relationships between India and Indians and Australia and Australians in the first half of the twentieth century, through the "framework of the [British] empire, and later the commonwealth." The period begins with the federation of the Australian colonies, based upon restrictive immigration policies directed, in part, at the Crown's Indian subjects. Federated Australia became a self-governing entity within the empire, while India was unable to progress to a similar position, remaining largely under direct British rule until the growing nationalist movement was able to effect independence in 1947. This study builds upon and makes a contribution to the small but growing literature on the histories of Indians resident in Australia during the heyday of the restrictive White Australia policy. But it does much more than that. The focus upon the "awkward triangular dynamic that developed between Britain, India and Australia in the early twentieth century" allows larger questions to be explored. Clearly the racially restrictive immigration policies were an important barrier to cordial relationships between these two very differently situated parts of the British Empire. Indeed Indians saw the White Australia policy as a "permanent characteristic of Australia." The British government was very critical of Australian racism, but Maclean argues for "the similarities between the White Australia policy and the White Man's Burden, the very premise of British imperialism in India." The British castigation of Australian racial thinking around immigration diverted attention from British rule in India. An important focus of this volume is upon political history and intercolonial/international relations but it also delves into popular culture and histories of representation. An exploration of the categorization of the naming practices of Indians in Australia reveals a litany of mostly derogatory terms: Hindoos, Asiatics, aliens, Natives, coolies, and Indians. Many of these were used on the Certificate Exempting the Dictation Test, an identity document which resident Indians needed to negotiate Australian entry ports. Maclean also traces the origins and meanings of the name "Charlie," often applied indiscriminately to Indian men resident in Australia, arguing it was a further manifestation of Indians being distanced by the Australian community. Politicians and press promoted an undesirable view of India and Indians which, along with the pervasiveness of works by Kipling and his ilk, served to maintain racial prejudices, but by delving into an archive of Australian family photographs, which included images of Indian hawkers, who were so often crucial to the rural communities they served, Maclean finds that some "individual Indian hawkers were able to transcend the stereotypes that were so dominant in the public sphere": their "acceptance" was both "limited and conditional." Maclean argues that as the nationalist movement built in the first decades of the twentieth century, Australian knowledge of India's hopes and aspirations was limited, especially as works expressing pro-Indian views including Palme Dutt's India Today (1940) were largely kept from the Australian public. The Australian public was fed a stream of pro-imperial propaganda as "the government of India continued to covertly influence global opinion about Gandhi and the Congress." Indeed even as Indian independence neared, the British were still intervening in the India-Australia relationship and even seeking to censure the speeches of India's first High Commissioner in Australia, R. Paranjpye. Maclean brings to light individuals such as Winston Burchett who sought to enlighten the Australian public. He attended the 1937 conference of the Indian National Congress, and hearing Nehru and other leaders speak, became committed to breaking through the veil of misinformation about India and to informing the Australian public about the nationalist movement and its aspirations. However, missing from this study is any discussion of Australian Christian missionary activity in India and such missionary influence on Australian views of India. India was a favoured field for Australian missionaries and many people and organizations formed long and deep associations with India and Indians. It is easy to see Christian missions merely as an arm of...

The Strange Ecologies of Empire

This essay reads nineteenth-century imperial India as the mise en scène for certain critical concatenations of human sovereignty, divinity, and animality. It does so by focusing on the imperial state's war upon human and extrahuman forms of predation, showcasing in the process a cluster of texts on collective criminal activity, hunting, and popular religion and folklore that share certain grids of intelligibility and vocabularies of rule. Collocating these texts on human and nonhuman predation brings into visibility the degree to which imperial sovereignty in the Victorian period entails traffic across human and extrahuman domains. Thus, thinking about the sanctioned killing of fearsome animal predators comes to be twinned with thinking about wars of pacification against dangerous humans and noxious deities. To think imperial sovereignty consequently involves thinking with humans and animals but also thinking with mutually antagonistic theological forces, Hindu and Christian—and in thinking these together. An attentiveness to these heterogeneous ecologies of empire might serve to illuminate the degree to which the imperial project depends on a complex mesh of transversal and co-constitutive life-forms and forces.

From London to Bombay: Judicial Comparisons between Parsis and Jews, 1702–1865

Abstract As England extended its authority over Bombay, Calcutta and other localities in early imperial India, law served as a medium of transfer between metropole and colony and English judges faced complex questions about the law’s relationship with its non-Christian subjects. While Hindus and Muslims were provided with authorised religious advisors at the English courts in India, Parsis remained officially excluded as a minority religious group. Judicial creativity, when faced with questions of Parsi marriage, divorce, child custody and conversion, was limited by judges’ ‘available conceptual resources’. Cases involving Jews in England from the eighteenth century proved to be uniquely relevant, as they rehearsed the fundamental challenges involved in the interaction of the Anglican establishment with non-Christian subjects. The common legal paradigm of Jews and Parsis was further manifested in the unconscious framing of outsiders in the courtroom using the metaphor of a ‘body of people’. This phrase, which appears only twenty times in the corpus of English Law Reports, reflects the physicalisation or personification of a society of individuals with a shared history, values, and political and legal framework. It expresses a judicial conception of them as distinct and unified, with the corollary negative associations of being threatening and potentially subversive. Despite their strong mercantile ties to the colonisers, Parsis thus served as the ‘Jews’ of India in the sense that they helped define and secure the majority by contradistinction, and their separateness was reinforced both explicitly and implicitly in legal encounters.

Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines. By Andrew J. Rotter

<i>Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines</i>. By Andrew J. Rotter

Empires of the Senses: Bodily encounters in imperial India and the Philippines by Andrew J. Rotter

Empires of the Senses: Bodily encounters in imperial India and the Philippines by Andrew J. Rotter