Late Colonial India Research Articles

Book review: Douglas E. Haynes, The Emergence of Brand-Name Capitalism in Late Colonial India: Advertising and the Making of Modern Conjugality

Douglas E. Haynes, The Emergence of Brand-Name Capitalism in Late Colonial India: Advertising and the Making of Modern Conjugality (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022), 328 pp.

Industrious, truthful, upright and manly: Reforming poor young men in the borstal schools of India in the 1920s and 1930s

AbstractThis article analyses the expansion of the borstal system for young male offenders in late colonial India. Based on legislative debates and prison administration reports, it considers the ways in which young adults were defined and treated within the context of these penal institutions. It reveals how institutionalised care for young men was used to reinforce the power of middle class coercive networks; to define and produce particular forms of masculinity among the poor youth of India and to contribute to wider, emerging discourses about the distinctive position of adolescents in Indian society.

Gujranwala, 14 April 1919: Terror from air and airmindedness in late colonial India

This article revisits one of the earliest instances of British colonial aerial aggression in an urban milieu in South Asia to better understand the normative conceptions of airmindedness, the popular appreciation of aviation. A day after the massacre of unarmed civilians in Jalianwala Bagh, Amritsar, in 1919, three Royal Air Force airplanes armed with bombs and machine guns flew out from Lahore toward Gujranwala in Punjab. The event unleashed a whirlwind of rumours that spread from Lahore to Rangoon, which spoke of the collective fears of aerial violence. If the scant evidence presented by the pilots to the official inquiry into the unrest in Punjab served only to whitewash the record, a peoples’ report that marshalled witness testimonies indicted the colonial state's proclivity for violence. By assembling photographic evidence and crafting a cartographic triangulation of the sites of bombing from their testimonies, the colonial subjects challenged the statist narrative. The asymmetry of vertical violence in Gujranwala was also excavated as political commentary in a novel published in New York by an Indian author. By piecing together these disparate discursive fragments, my article attempts to make a composite sketch of the popular responses to trace a non-Western perspective on airmindedness.

The YMCA in Late Colonial India: Modernization, Philanthropy and American Soft Power in South Asia

The YMCA in Late Colonial India: Modernization, Philanthropy and American Soft Power in South Asia

Rethinking Technology Transfer in a Colonial Milieu: Railways and Shifting Meanings of Travel in Late Colonial India

ABSTRACT The article reappraises nature of technology transfer in a colonial context by underlining how the colonised mediated and shaped what was ostensibly an imposition by the imperial administration. This wider point is illustrated by demonstrating the ways in which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different groups of Indians used newly introduced railways to reconceptualise meanings of travel by adding new categories of travel while significantly modifying the extant ones. Crucially deviating from both ‘technology as imperialism’ and ‘technology as subversion’ historiographical paradigms, this article argues for a more nuanced appraisal of technology transfer, especially emphasising the role of users in shaping the impact of technology. Examining a diverse range of sources, viz., railway records (Annual Railway Reports and railway passenger statistics), newspaper reports and travelogues and pamphlets written by Indian railway travellers, the article claims Indians not only mediated the impact of trains on travel in late colonial India; but they shaped the outcome of this technology transfer in ways that reveals agency and remarkable involvement with a new mode of transit. In short, the article demonstrates dynamic interaction between imperial policies and responses of the colonised through the lens of technology transfer.

Arguing Pakistan in Late Colonial India: The Political Thought of Shabbir Ahmad Usmani

Arguing Pakistan in Late Colonial India: The Political Thought of Shabbir Ahmad Usmani

Colonial Sense and Religious Sensibility: Understanding Injury and the Body of Nation in Censored Literature in South Asia

ABSTRACT This essay critically examines Angarey, a collection of nine short stories and one play by Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmuduzzafar, first published in December 1932. Considered a foundational work in Urdu literature which supported the Progressive Writer’s Association in South Asia during the pre-partition era and hailed as an act of literary resistance – especially in the context of the nationalist movements for freedom in India – the stories offer a succinct critique of social and religious practices. Because they exposed the oppression against Muslim women and promoted resistance against the colonial state, the text was banned in March 1933 by the British government. The historical account of its censorship characterizes the British colonial state as the rational and neutral arbiter of its presumed emotionally excitable colonial subjects. In observance of the relationship between affective politics of colonial empire and religion in late colonial India, I critically examine not just the text but also the contextual background of its censorship to explore the link between the colonial ideas about Muslim sensibilities and colonial regulations. In this respect, relying on Asad Ali Ahmed’s critique of the colonial genesis of censorship [“Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, The Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament.” In Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, edited by Raminder Kaur, and William Mazzarella, 172–205. Bloomington, 2009], Talal Asad’s insights on the complicated relation between injury and the discourse of blasphemy [Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, and Ann Laura Stoler’s argument about the Enlightenment’s relationship to empire “Reason Aside: Reflections on Enlightenment and Empire.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford University Press, 2013], this study attempts to understand how the embodied representation of the Muslim self figures in Angarey as an affective attachment, following the context of literary censorship in late colonial South Asia.

Recovering the Dalit Public Sphere: Vernacular Liberalism in Late Colonial North India

AbstractDrawing from publications by Swami Achutanand and the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha press between 1916 and 1940, this article examines the role of this north Indian Dalit organization in creating language and categories of liberalism in the Hindi vernacular. The Mahasabha poet-activists published numerous song-booklets in a variety of Hindi song genres to intervene in ongoing discussions on the subjects of representation and equality which they characterized as mulki-haq and unch-niche. Histories of liberties in late colonial India have typically examined its emergence within dominant Hindu and Muslim middle-class groups. This article uncovers the unique contributions of Dalit poet-activists who recognized the value of liberal ideas and institutions in challenging caste and abolishing “Manu’s Kanun” (lawgiver Manu’s Hindu law codes). It highlights the methodological importance of mohalla (neighborhood) sources usually located in Dalit activists’ houses in untouchable quarters. The chapbooks found in mohalla collections have enabled the writing of a new history of the Mahasabha’s activism and of the initiatives taken by poet-activists in founding a new Dalit politics in northern India. I explore the emergence of a Dalit literate public which sustained the activities of the Mahasabha and which responded with enthusiasm to its articulation of the new social identity of Achut (untouched) and a new political identity of Adi-Hindus—original inhabitants of Hindustan (India). Offering a new methodological approach in using mohalla sources and song-booklets composed in praise of liberal institutions, this essay makes a significant contribution to the recovery of a forgotten Dalit public sphere in early twentieth-century India.

An elusive quest for a region: Darbhanga Raj, caste and language in late colonial India

This essay is an exploration of the contingent nature of identity formation in late colonial India. In the wake of the 1912 separation of Bihar and Orissa from Bengal, two distinct conceptions of the region of Mithila and Maithila identity gained prominence. First, the Darbhanga Maharaja viewed Mithila as a bastion of brahmanical orthodoxy, and this underpinned the claims for Mithila to be converted to a native state with its own ruling chief. Second, by the 1930s we see the consolidation of a movement which proposed the Maithili language as the marker of a Maithila people, one that did not make brahmanical orthodoxy or Hinduism a prerequisite to belonging. Both these discourses accepted the mythic conception of Mithila, and its traditional puranic geography, yet the Darbhanga Maharaja embraced all-India markers of belonging by emphasising Hinduism and presenting himself as the leader of brahmanical orthodoxy in India. The local, in this discourse, found validation by embracing national markers, even as the nation itself remained colonised. On the other hand, the Maithili language movement, which gained momentum in the twilight of colonial rule and in post-independence India, emphasised and embraced the local. This essay therefore charts the gradual shift in the conception of Maithila identity where language displaces religion and brahmanical orthodoxy, as championed by the Darbhanga Maharaja, to become the marker of local identity.

Inventive Indians: Technological Imaginaries and Patenting Activity in Late Colonial India (1911–48)

The Patent Act extended to colonial India in 1859 introduced to Indians the right to file a patent for an invention. The article locates India as a site for invention and innovation, not by looking at the legal evolution of the law or the inventions themselves, but at the Indian patentees’ engagement with the law. The consistent but small number of Indian patentees is suggestive of patent-filing being a form of sustained engagement with technological modernity. The establishment of a Patent Office completed the bureaucratic structure and was an intrinsic part of the development of India as a technocratic and scientific state. Examining the nature of this colonial institution, the paper examines a parallel process which shaped patenting: Indianisation. The colonial policy of Indianisation shaped Indians’ access to employment and research in technical institutes. This had two visible but discrete consequences: in the number of Indian employees whose patents were acquired by the government, and the creation of a notable ‘patent culture’ with the Patent Office in Calcutta as a site and headed by an Indian. The paper uses the patent law as an axis to illuminate conversations around inventive activity in colonial India.

Education and Womens Identity: Missionary Initiatives and State Intervention in Early Twentieth Century Kerala

The intervention of missionaries in twentieth-century Kerala offers fascinating insights into the intricate relationship between education and the reordering of social norms in late colonial India. Comprising of the former Princely states of Travancore, Cochin, and British Malabar, the region witnessed significant strides in administrative modernization and educational advancements by the early decades of the twentieth century. Several factors including the progressive nature of the princely state and the influence of Marxist ideologies, the role of the christain missionaries and the prevalence of matrilineal practice among caste groups were attributed for the advancements made in education and health. Yet what distinguishes Travancore, was the presence of a strong indigenous Syrian Christian group, whose presence attracted Western Protestant missionaries into Travancore. Missionary intervention extended byond the realm of religion and shaped had an important bearing on education, including women's education in shaping individual perceptions of sanity, morality, and hygiene, leading to the reconfiguration of social and community relationships.

Book Review: Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secular Nationalism in Late Colonial India by Sarah Fatima Waheed

Book Review: <i>Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secular Nationalism in Late Colonial India</i> by Sarah Fatima Waheed

Urdu Ethics Literature and the Diversity of Muslim Thought in Colonial India

Abstract This essay discusses Urdu-language akhlaq (ethics) texts produced and circulated in late-colonial India (1858–1947), situating them both within a classical genre of Islamic ethics and in the context of Indian vernacular print culture. It focuses on three akhlaq texts published between the 1870s and 1930s to consider contemporary Muslim ethical concerns and schema, arguing that the genre points to a widespread, everyday, and unexceptional Muslim subjectivity that placed a high value on ethical striving. The essay offers new perspectives on the history of Muslims in late-colonial India by highlighting a non-institutional, diffuse, and capacious intellectual formation whose ideas were disseminated through print in a commercial market. It also expands existing notions of Muslim authority from individuals—such as the ulama (Muslim clerical class)—and institutions—such as madrasas (religious schools and seminaries)—to include literary genres themselves. Finally, the article broadens the range of Muslim subject-positions represented in scholarship on Islam in colonial India.

The sciences of love: Intimate ‘democracy’ and the eugenic development of the Marathi couple in colonial India

This article studies the eugenic theories of Marathi sexological writer and novelist Narayan Sitaram Phadke, and his attempts to domesticate the modern ideal of the adult romantic couple as a yardstick of ‘emotional democracy’ in late colonial India. Locating Phadke's work against the backdrop of the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) and its eugenicist concerns, I argue that he conceptualized romantic love as an emotion and a form of sociability central to the state's biopolitical schemes of ensuring modern coupledom but as exceeding the state's capacity to rationally order Indian sex life. Consequently, he crafted literary supplements like the bildungsroman to circulate ‘English’ idioms of emotional and corporeal intimacy in Marathi; his novels domesticated eugenic sexology for its ‘vernacular’ audiences by advocating caste-bound romantic love as the blueprint for Indian marital coupling. As exemplified by Phadke's work, an emerging Marathi discourse of love demarcated a space for the young couple to operate as a vehicle of interpersonal openness within the constraints of the upper-caste joint family. By outlining the parameters of this Brahmanical aesthetic discourse, I show that the couple became the locus of a self-styled ‘democratic’ form of emotional attachment aimed at developing a necessary dynamism within endogamous caste-based marital arrangements without radically transforming them. The science performed through the Marathi novel in the 1920s and 1930s consequently explains the increasing prominence of romantic love as a form of developmental ‘democratic’ discourse at a time when both romantic love and democracy-in-practice were widely experienced as absent from Indian society.

Reading Benjamin Franklin’s life story in Bareilly

ABSTRACT This essay follows the print history of Benjamin Franklin’s life story. It appears first in William and Robert Chambers’ The Moral Class Book (1839) in Edinburgh and later in the Bareilly Tattvabodhini Sabha’s Niti Pradip (1870). As we juxtapose the English Franklin alongside the Hindi Franklin, it becomes possible to see the pliancy and polysemic character of a life story that emerges at the intersections of history and literature. It absorbs different meanings for readers separated by race, nation, language and gender and becomes an unpredictable vehicle for contradictory aspirations among male and female readers. At times illuminating a commitment to entrepreneurial and working class aspirations, particularly those of printer-publishers, it signals an interest in modernity and its institutions. At the same time, the themes of publicness and statesmanship make Franklin’s life an unusual pedagogical device for women readers in late colonial India. As we trace the Franklin life story through shifting linguistic and interpretative frames, it calls attention to the fraught dynamic in cultural and educational debates of the late colonial period in north India.

Training Female Bodies for New India: Women’s Physical Education between Global Trends and Local Politics in Colonial South Asia, c. 1900–1939

This paper explores the emergence of modern female physical education in late colonial India in the period between the beginning of the twentieth century and the late 1930s. Focusing mostly on physical training schemes directed at middle-class, upper-caste Hindu girls and women, the study provides detail about the role played by a variety of Indian and non-Indian historical actors that were committed to the spread of female physical fitness. It demonstrates that, despite different ideological tendencies, political agendas and methods, the extent to which these actors shared beliefs and assumptions about the fit female body is striking. The paper also makes it clear that it is necessary to move away from national or imperial lenses that have hitherto occluded the global interconnections and border-crossing trajectories at play when analyzing discourses and practices of female physical education in South Asia in the period under purview.

Kamala Satthianadhan and the Indian Ladies' Magazine: Women's Editorship and Transnational Print Networks in Late Colonial India

The Indian Ladies' Magazine, launched in 1901 under the editorship of Kamala Satthianadhan, quickly evolved into a platform where the future of Indian womanhood was fiercely debated. Publishing anonymous writers alongside household names like Sarojini Naidu, it made a crucial intervention in the ongoing conversation about the public and private roles of Indian women at a time when both colonial rule and patriarchal notions of domesticity were being unsettled. This essay focuses on Satthianadhan's editorial persona and the first run of the magazine (1901–18), arguing that this first iteration provided the editor and contributing authors a significant platform for advocating social reform, creating a community of readers, and fashioning the New Indian Woman.

Fragmented Sovereignty, Ḍakaitī (Banditry), and ‘Criminal Tribe’ in a ‘Minor’ State of Late Colonial India

AbstractScholars have often considered twentieth-century sovereignty in colonial contexts as increasingly connected to the modern, territorially bounded state, stimulated by the influence of European rule. Yet there remained more malleable and amorphous sovereign configurations well into the twentieth century. Focusing on the case of Indore, a ‘minor’ state in late colonial central India, this article reveals the ongoing dynamism of ḍakait (‘bandits’) within such configurations. By approaching the state as a disaggregated entity, it captures how such communities held complex reciprocal relationships with local state representatives. These interactions challenge older histories, both in South Asia and beyond, that understand banditry primarily as evidence of state evasion or resistance, rather than reflecting an interlocking web of relational and gradated jurisdictions. By exploring connections between ḍakait and the state at the ‘everyday’ level, this article also takes issue with existing emphases on the wider institutional frameworks that classified such communities as ‘criminal tribes’. Such connections could engender local responses that undercut their ethnographic categorization and complicate postcolonial critiques of the essentialization of caste and ‘tribe’ in South Asia. Reconceptualizing sovereignty ultimately provides us with a compelling analytic tool to reconsider wider scholarly axioms relating to colonial knowledge, marginality, and state–society relations.

A Partition of The Public Sphere

Historians of Partition have focused upon the bitterly polarized yet vibrant public sphere of the last days of the British Raj, wherein newspapers representing Congress, Muslim League and Akali opinion vied for influence through increasingly hostile propaganda targeted at the ‘other/s’. Such studies’ focus on ideological battles and propaganda results in relatively less attention being given to what became of these papers once the British departed and the parties these papers espoused or opposed captured power. This paper will seek to revisit such assumptions by analyzing the trials and tribulations of the significant newspaper houses unfortunate enough to be located on the geographical frontlines of Partition and in major centres of communal conflagration. Through such analyses, I will seek to show that it was a combination of initial mob action, reinforced often by state repression and even popular reproach, that forced newspapers viewed as belonging to the ‘other’ party to move to safer (and greener) pastures. In the process, late-colonial India’s once pluralist public sphere came to be partitioned into sections that broadly conformed to the ideologies that the respective Dominions’ new rulers espoused. While aligning newspapers with the majoritarian public opinion, this Partition occasioned shifts of personnel and presses that would fundamentally alter the postcolonial press industry in West and East Pakistan, and to a lesser extent, in India.

Between the Global and Regional: Asia in the Tamil Buddhist Imagination

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Madras became home to a movement that anticipated Ambedkar’s turn to Buddhism by nearly half a century. Founded in 1898, the Sakya Buddhist Society was led by Iyothee Thass (1845–1914) and became the first Dalit Buddhist revival of its kind in late colonial India. In this article, I explore the global dimensions of Sakya Buddhism through an intertextual reading of its journal, Oru Paica Tamilan, and the work of Asian Buddhists like Henry Olcott and Anagarika Dharmapala who were associated with the movement. I argue that Sakya Buddhism’s historical imaginaire of Dalits as indigenous Buddhists intersected with the political concerns that drove Asian Buddhist revivalist movements in important ways. I also show that the movement created a distinctly Tamil tradition of Buddhism for Dalits and attempted to reorient them towards the broader Buddhist world even as they had a notionally marginal presence within this landscape. In doing so, I propose the category of ‘pararegional’ as a way of thinking about seemingly uneven or unidirectional interactions between different spatial scales such as ‘global’ and ‘regional'.