Late Colonial India Research Articles

‘Using a Blacksmith’s Hammer to Crush a Fly’: Jallianwala Bagh, Public Order and Popular Protests in late Colonial India

This article reconstructs the unfolding of events in India in March–April 1919 that led to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. It evaluates the circumstances and the administrative and military response from a legal history perspective. It argues that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was not a unique event but culminated colonial rage against a broader anti-colonial mobilisation.

The Materials of Home: Studying Domesticity in Late Colonial India

Abstract In this essay I argue for opening up South Asian historiography on the home to explore not just ideals of middle-class domesticity, but also the material goods and spaces of home lives. This helps to rethink class, as ideals of middle-class respectability were often worked out in buildings and through goods shared with lower classes, deploying caste hierarchies to articulate definitions of proper home life. At the same time, taking materials and spaces seriously allows attention to the role of men in shaping and experiencing homes, whether as designers, retailers, planners, or residents themselves. Drawing on the specific example of the iconic firm Kamdar Ltd., which created modern home interiors in mid-century Bombay, I argue that thinking through the materials of home allows attention to the global engagements of home life defined in class and caste terms, by men and women alike.

Music and Society in Late Colonial India: A Study of Esraj in Gaya

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian classical music was in transition. Most readings of the transition stress the choices of the professional musicians, as these musicians and the institutions in which they functioned were caught up in political and economic movements such as nationalism and commercialization. This article studies a different type of transition: when a small-town professional group with a strong associational culture became musicians. This second process, standing in contrast to the received narratives, suggests novel lessons in the history of urban cultures during a time of change.

Federating the Raj: Hyderabad, sovereign kingship, and partition

AbstractThis article explores the idea of federation in late-colonial India. Projects of federation sought to codify the uncodified and fragmented sovereign landscape of the British Raj. They were ambitious projects that raised crucial questions about sovereignty, kingship, territoriality, the potential of constitutional law in transforming the colonial state into a democratic one, and India's political future more broadly. In the years after 1919, federation became a capacious model for imagining a wide array of political futures. An all-India Indian federation was seen as the most plausible means of maintaining India's unity, introducing representative government, and overcoming the Hindu–Muslim majority–minority problem. By bringing together ‘princely’ India and British India, federation made the Indian states central players in late-colonial contestations over sovereignty. This article explores the role of the states in constitutional debates, their place in Indian political imaginaries, and articulations of kingship in late-colonial India. It does so through the example of Hyderabad, the premier princely state, whose ruler made an unsuccessful bid for independence between 1947 and 1948. Hyderabad occupied a curious position in competing visions of India's future. Ultimately, the princely states were a decisive factor in the failure of federation and the turn to partition as a means of overcoming India's constitutional impasse.

Geopolitical jockeying: Economic nationalism and multinational strategy in historical perspective

Research SummaryWe explore multinational strategy formation in the context of rising economic nationalism. Specifically, we examine how firms develop strategies to capitalize on the historical and aspirational attributes of national identity. Analyzing the histories of two German multinationals in late colonial India, we find that these firms engaged in “geopolitical jockeying” to delegitimize rival multinationals and position themselves as complementary to the economic and political goals of the host nation. Toward that end they employed “aspirational political practices,” addressing the inherently future‐oriented character of nationalism, and invested in the development of political capabilities to gather information and shape perceptions of national contexts. The paper contributes to a more robust conceptualization of nations and nationalism and their role in the formation of international competition and strategy.Managerial SummaryRising economic nationalism can create political and economic opportunities as well as threats for multinational firms. Through a historical analysis of the emerging strategy of two German companies—Siemens and Bayer—in late colonial India, we show how firms can engage in “geopolitical jockeying” to delegitimize rival multinationals and position themselves as complementary to the economic and political goals of host nations. To do so the companies engaged in “aspirational political practices,” addressing the inherently future or goal‐oriented aspects of nations, and created political capabilities designed to both gather intelligence on and shape the nationalist movements. The paper uses history as a mirror for reflecting on the causes and consequences of economic nationalism for international strategy in our own time.

The problem with neera: The (un)making of a national drink in late colonial India

Over the course of the interwar period, the Congress-led movement for prohibition wrought a lengthy debate about ‘Indian’ and ‘foreign’ drinks. This debate gave rise to a little-known movement to promote the fresh, unfermented sap of the palm tree as India’s swadeshi beverage. If the British tried to claim the initiative for temperance through their tea campaign, Congress leaders sought to replace intoxicating drinks and their sobering ‘foreign’ alternatives with an indigenous drink. They had high hopes for this drink, which they believed would facilitate social reform while supporting national economic development. Neera, in other words, was the nationalists’ answer to toddy as well as tea. Indeed, the project of popularising neera was entirely in keeping with the upper-caste sensibilities of the Congress leadership: if toddy was the profane, neera was fresh, unfermented, and hence, pure. To this end, Congress leaders emphasised its nutritional value and potential in supporting the manufacture of gur (jaggery). They also promised a ready source of re-employment for tappers displaced by prohibition. As this article demonstrates, however, the neera scheme proved to be a slippery course to navigate owing to a combination of factors, foremost amongst them the impossibility of taming toddy.

For the Record: An Educational Memoir in Late Colonial India

Mary Bhore’s Some Impressions of England (Bhore 1900) forms a record of her travel to England and the basis of her argument for women’s education in India. While Bhore does not openly criticise the empire, her account of her experiences as well as her very presence in England invert the logic of imperial relations by turning the colonial subject into the ethnographic observer. Her memoir is not unlike the writing of the “England-returned” men and women in late-colonial India, but it shows a curious absence of the personal. Drawing on Foucault’s “Self Writing”, I will argue that Bhore’s text is as much “a narrative of the self” as it is about a shaping of the other; in other words, it is an attempt to turn her own experience into a kind of guide for her readers.

Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India by Manishita Dass (review)

Reviewed by: Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India by Manishita Dass Anila Gill Manishita Dass, Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 248 pp., US$ 29.95, ISBN: 9780199394395 On an initial reading of Manishita Dass’s Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India one might place the book within the existing South Asian literature on vernacular and colonial print publics,1 but a closer study of her research methods reveals a break with modernist divisions between educated elites and illiterate masses. Dass identifies a challenge to the notion of Habermasian publics as arenas of social engagement, noting that a vision of the Indian city as a literate, urbane forum that conversed exclusively in print ignores the influence of uneducated populations and the subsequent modern crowd anxiety that constituted everyday life amongst film-going Indians from the 1920s–40s. Cinema, poised to traverse such class distinctions, offers a newfound social power to the consumer crowd within Dass’s book. The structure of this book reflects shifting perspectives taken of and by the masses, beginning with early mythological films that drew on the cultural cache of popularly circulated folklore and the attractions of cinematic special effects to draw audiences to the cinema. Later, Dass analyzes governmental records [End Page 44] characterizing cinema as a polluting contagion in need of prophylaxis, and then investigates the pedagogical power ascribed to the photographic image that fueled such fears. In conjunction with the archival research necessary for such a historical overview of cinema and mass culture as they coalesce under the social and economic changes dictated by “modernity,” Dass has diligently recovered celluloid films, publicity booklets, ethnographic government reports, and film journalism from research sites in Calcutta and Bombay to bring the study of early Indian cinema outside the lettered city. Early mythological films lend themselves well to the study of cinematic origins in India for their purchase on both traditional and modern narratology, yet Dass’s formal analysis of these films paired with their history of reception connects the spiritual meaning embedded in mythological archetypes to a potential for national allegory. In her estimation, early spectators willingly submitted to the sublime illusion of movement inherent in projection, mirroring the suspension of disbelief required of faith-based Hindu mythology and Parsi Zoroastrianism. Citing contemporaneous ads for the Madan Theatre in The Times of India that deployed sensational language to attract audiences to the cinema, Dass observes how print journalism socialized and produced cinematic audiences. She continues to trace this genealogy of spectacle to the Parsi theater, noting the same trust in illusion that its stage machinery demanded from audiences. Phalke’s Sri Krishna Janma (1918) and Kaliya Mardan (1919), fragments of which Dass was able to access in the National Film Archives of India in Pune, locate the magical quality of cinema and myth at the center of this study of cinematic origins. After a description of the opening scene from Sri Krishna Janma in which Lord Vishnu addresses an awestruck crowd, Dass foregrounds “the act of vision, melding the pleasures of darshan with the delights of cinematic spectatorship, inviting the audience to revel not only in the spectacle of the divine, but in the spectacular possibilities of the cinematic medium and in the pleasure of identifying themselves in the images of the diegetic audience.”2 The colonial state’s characterization of such pleasures is evident in one bureaucratic instance that Dass offers as an antecedent to the formation of the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC) of 1927, in which the British Social Hygiene Council alerted the Government of India to cinema’s disregard for chastity, which would lead to an increased circulation of disease. The ICC was then introduced as a moral authority to suppress the supposed vulgarity of cinema, and offered an elite perspective on filmmaking and film-going practices. A number of ICC documents as Dass analyzes them indicate a history of upper class disdain for Indian films that anticipated Hollywood’s Hays code and its moral stand against the representation of violence and sex...

Psychiatrists and psychiatry in late colonial India

The history of professionalisation of psychiatry in India is an array of parallel histories. The article describes the variegated processes of professionalisation, modernisation and Indianisation and the impediments that colonialism created in their path. It charts the reification of the professional identity of a psychiatrist which was uniquely different from the Western counterpart. The process that began at the turn of the twentieth century was far from complete even on the eve of independence. It argues that psychiatry remained at the margins of medicine and the colonial state maintained an indifferent attitude towards development of the mental sciences. Highlighting contributions of individual psychiatrists and juxtaposing them with those of the state, this article situates psychiatrists as historical actors and how the emergence of psychiatry was enmeshed with political histories of the period.

Thresholds of caste and nation: Mulk Raj Anand’s spatial aesthetics in Untouchable

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable employs a spatial aesthetics – premised on the politics of social spaces and the disruptive potential they hold – to illustrate the active contestations that constituted the social formations of caste and nation in late colonial India. In particular, it suggests that the novel highlights the political potency of thresholds by constructing “formal thresholds” that serve as textual corollaries for Bakha’s troubled affective experience of casteized spaces within the emergent nation. Attending to the novel’s spatial aesthetics, which has not yet received the critical consideration it merits, allows us to bridge the realism–modernism binary that has framed recent scholarship on Anand by juxtaposing the novel’s verisimilar spatial descriptions with its innovative spatio-affective structuring. Moreover, it troubles the novel’s popular association with Gandhian nationalism, suggesting that Anand emphasizes the sociopolitical fissures dividing the nation and questions both sides of the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate regarding Dalit liberation.

‘My words were not cared for’: Customary law, criminality and the ‘woman question’ in late colonial India

Drawing upon the court case of one woman sentenced for killing her infant in the early decades of the last century, this article reads Pierre Bourdieu’s insight on how the trial stages conflicts produced in the social realm as a paradox for explaining how British administrators and Indian village officials negotiated non-conflicting codes of sexual and moral conduct on the basis of colonial ideology and locally fixed caste hierarchies to convict women of infanticide. This article argues that a staging of women’s agency is crucial for understanding the colonial conferral of legal subjectivity and for a gendered critique of the Subaltern Studies paradigm of conflict or collaboration as ‘dominance without hegemony.’

The Ban Formula

In a colonial context, and against the backdrop of an anti-colonial movement, it is all too easy to see censorship of publications operating along racial lines and to assume that only publications by Indian authors were subject to censorship. However, non-Indian authors—former colonial officials and soldiers, journalists and missionaries—writing in English on matters concerning India commanded audiences in their home countries in addition to being read by an influential section of the Indian population. Precisely because they escaped colonial stereotyping about ‘seditious natives’, non-Indian authors’ words carried a greater illusion of neutrality and sometimes more weight. Their criticism of the colonial state or excessive approbation of nationalist leaders could less easily be dismissed as biased than that by Indians. By reconstructing the question of, and the controversy over, the possible banning of seven such books by the colonial state in the 1920s–30s, this article will question commonly held assumptions about the conduct of the censorship of publications in late colonial India.

Muhammad Iqbal’s constitutionalism

ABSTRACTIn this article, I look at Muhammad Iqbal’s legal vision for an Islamic Republic. By focusing on the 1930s, the last decade of his life, I piece together how Iqbal’s constitutionalism was hospitable to legal transformation up until sovereign power conflicted with the principles of tauhid (unity of God) and the somewhat obscure concept khatm-e-nabuwwat (finality of prophethood). In mapping the conceptual tension of Iqbal’s thought in relation to the individual, the community and politics in late colonial India, this article speaks directly to debates on Islamic constitutionalism, conceptual counter-geographies of international law and the intellectual history of Pakistan and India’s Constitutions.

A Colonial in the Colonies: Governor Casey, Mahatma Gandhi, and the endgame of empire

This article explores the particular subjectivity of a “colonial” in the higher echelons of imperial governance in late colonial India. Focussing on the Australian statesman R.G. Casey, who served as Governor of Bengal from 1944–46, it demonstrates the unique perspective that Casey brought to his role. Appointed to a troubled province—stricken by a famine now widely recognised as colonially-induced, on the frontline of the Japanese advance toward India, at a time when communal violence was sharply on the rise, and at a critical time in the negotiations over decolonisation—Casey skilfully deployed his positionality as a relative outsider in British India to gain political leverage and to further negotiations with Indian nationalists. Casey might have been rendered ineffective after being identified somewhat disparagingly at the time of his appointment as a “colonial” by Britons, and as an “Australian,” tainted through association with the exclusionary White Australia Policy, by a critical Indian press. Yet Casey deployed these identities to strategically project himself as an engaged intermediary in the standoff between a defensive, reluctant decoloniser and a restive, fractured nationalist movement. The best example of this is a series of talks Casey held with M.K. Gandhi on the political situation in late 1945, at a time when Gandhi’s relations with the Government of India and in particular, with the viceroy, Lord Wavell, had badly deteriorated. This article focuses on the impact of the Gandhi-Casey talks, as they became known in the press, on the cusp of decolonisation.

The Shahidganj Mosque and Muslim Nationality in Late Colonial India: From Law to Sacrifice

The Shahidganj Mosque and Muslim Nationality in Late Colonial India: From Law to Sacrifice

Manly Sikhs and Loyal Citizens: Physical Education and Sport in Khalsa College, Amritsar, 1914–47

ABSTRACTThis article looks at Khalsa College, the first college specifically aimed at the Sikh community in late colonial India, and its schemes for and ideals of physical culture. Despite Sikh communal and Indian national aspirations, as well as a robust transnational discourse on ‘scientific’ physical culture that was being increasingly articulated in the inter-war period, Khalsa College remained remarkably devoted to ‘modernised’ physical exercise schemes focusing on British ‘manly games’ such as football, hockey and cricket. The essay locates the reasons behind the college management's staunch loyalty to Britain and opposition to newer, radical Sikh politics; its use of images of Sikh military traditions and ‘martial manliness’, often used to demarcate Sikhism from an ‘effeminate’ Hinduism; and its specific interest—shared by the colonial authorities—in keeping the students fit for military service.

Rethinking the Nineteenth-Century Domestication of the Sharīʿa: Marriage and Family in the Imaginary of Classical Legal Thought and the Genealogy of (Muslim) Personal Law in Late Colonial India

This article situates the ‘personal law’ in late colonial India in the nineteenth-century genealogy of the idea of ‘family law.’ In doing so, it also looks at a case between Indian Muslim spouses before the judge and Islamic modernist Syed Mahmood. Involving the doctrine of the restitution of conjugal rights, the case was conducted in the shadow of a question about whether marriage was a status or contract that had a much wider resonance in the late nineteenth-century Anglo-common law world. The overall goal of the article is to critically reconsider a common view about legal modernization in the long nineteenth-century Islamicate world as a process of domesticating the Islamicsharīʿatradition to the sphere of family affairs and personal status. Working along a distinct path from other new scholarship that is moving past this thesis, I suggest that domestication should be seen as part of what some have called the globalization of classical legal thought after 1850. Because the era of domestication continued to be an important point of reference for later exponents of political Islam the article also argues that seeing the categories of personal law and family law genealogically has implications for the problem of translation that has often made scholars reticent about striking an equivalence between ‘Islamic law’ andsharīʿa(or beyond the Islamicate world, between ‘modern law’ and Afro-Asian juridical tradition).

Loving Like a Man: The Colourful Prophet, Conjugal Masculinity and the Politics of Hindu Sexology in Late Colonial India

Loving Like a Man: The <i>Colourful Prophet</i>, Conjugal Masculinity and the Politics of Hindu Sexology in Late Colonial India

Ideas of Parity: Muslims, Sikhs and the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan

ABSTRACTHistorians have suggested that the politics of late colonial India centred on a battle between two discrete ideas: Indian and Muslim nationalism. Complicating this binary, this paper focuses on three conceptions of parity between religious groups, contending that this logic transcended Mohammad Ali Jinnah's and the Muslim League's call for constitutional equality between Hindus and Muslims to shape a wider debate about how to defy communal majoritarianism and exit identity politics altogether. Just as Jinnah sought to prevent Hindu dominance within a single state, the Akali Sikhs—influenced as much by a negative historical imagination as the contemporary logic of numbers—produced their own constitutional claim in order to avert Muslim supremacy in the Punjab. Meanwhile Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, president of the Indian National Congress between 1940 and 1946, posited a unique thesis: since modern India was the joint construction of Hindus and Muslims, parity already existed. Though he held that Jinnah's call for constitutional parity was consequently superfluous, Azad's idea of the shared nation led him to search for a genuine consensus, rather than a simple truce, between India's two major political parties. This paper argues that the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan, offering a degree of parity between communities whilst retaining Indian unity, represented the near-realisation of these three ideas.

A Communal Affair over International Affairs: The Arrival of IR in Late Colonial India

ABSTRACTThis paper makes an archival journey into the making of institutes of international affairs in late colonial India. By exploring the intertwined lives of two such institutions, it unearths an ideational fight over the study of international affairs in India between the Indian Institute of International Affairs (IIIA), established in 1936, and the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), started in 1943. From the outset, the IIIA was strongly pro-government and saw the ICWA as an institutional rival and a propaganda front for the Indian National Congress (INC). Closer to Independence, the two institutes were increasingly divided along communal and nationalist political lines. The IIIA's leadership became dominated by Muslims and the Muslim League and the ICWA by Brahman Hindus and the INC. As a result, a battle for legitimacy and recognition ensued over participation in international conferences and the ability to publish meaningful research. The ICWA successfully organised the Asian Relations Conference in March 1947, which sealed the fate of the IIIA. It moved to Pakistan in the wake of Partition, then quietly closed down after co-existing briefly with the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA).