Nineteenth-Century South India Research Articles

Caste, space, and schooling in nineteenth century South India

ABSTRACT This paper examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of varied schooling agendas for poor and oppressed caste children and adults in the princely state of Travancore in nineteenth-century colonial south India. Schools became socially contested and politically charged spaces in which various subaltern castes, particularly the Dalits and Nadars, articulated a new language of social and religious self-fashioning. British Protestant missionaries played a crucial role in provoking these imaginations and yet, the joint workings of caste and racial prejudices resulted in ambivalent cultural encounters in the educational landscape. Caste was central to these contestations and negotiations in making modern child subjectivities and tended to produce new forms of inequality and reproduce existing ones. I argue that schooling campaigns for the poor resulted in the perpetuation of hierarchised, caste-inflected norms of childhood and produced multiple marginal children in local society. This paper draws upon British Protestant missionary archives to highlight the unstable and violent geographies in which children of subaltern castes navigated the sphere of modern schooling in colonial Travancore and the constitutive function of schools in the making of marginal childhoods.

Translation as pedagogy in colonial south India

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the introduction of a new function for translation in a changing context of formal language learning in the Madras Presidency in nineteenth-century south India. Amongst this region’s multiple languages, the article considers language examination papers, examiners’ feedback, and preparatory materials in Hindustani, Tamil and Telugu to reconstruct two developments in relation to translation: first, translation as pedagogy, introduced as a key mechanism in the instruction and examination of languages, increased and made visible the scope of translation beyond the literary context. Second, competition based on translation abilities across diverging professions in the colonial domain promoted greater awareness of the changing distinctions between different language registers and varieties within languages. Paying attention to translation pedagogy undertaken for non-literary purposes is thus important in expanding current understandings of how translation evolved and functioned in colonial South India.

The value of tanks: maintenance, ecology and the colonial economy in nineteenth-century south India

Tanks are technologies used to store water for irrigation in south India since ancient times. Scholars have been divided over the reasons for the decline of tanks. In the late eighteenth century, when the British colonial government took control of large parts of south India, tanks were in a decrepit state and unusable. Over two hundred years of colonial rule resulted in tanks diminishing in importance to agriculture, and many were replaced by canals and well irrigation. While some scholars have blamed ‘modern’ colonial policies of profit for the decline of tank systems, others have argued that tanks were neither managed perfectly nor egalitarian institutions during precolonial times. This article furthers this analysis and examines policies of tank maintenance in the specific context of an expanding nineteenth-century colonial economy, focused on producing ‘value’ and eliminating ‘waste’. The article shows how the colonial state, in the wake of a famine, undertook renewed efforts at maintaining tanks in the late nineteenth-century. However, tank maintenance intersected with expanding railways and large scale deforestation, which were cornerstones of the productive colonial economy. The article shows how tanks occupied an uncertain space within the ‘waste’ and ‘value’ dialectic, unsure of how maintenance policies and ecological changes produced them within these underlying conditions of the colonial economy.

Religion and the emergence of print in colonial India: Arumuga Navalar’s publishing project

This article offers one of the first scholarly analyses of the impact of print on religion in India in the middle of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the publishing project of Arumuga Navalar, one of the most important authors and editors of Tamil Shaiva works. I examine the details of some of Navalar’s key publications, especially his 1852 prose rendition of the Tamil Shaiva classic Periya Puranam. This work was part of Navalar’s effort to make Shaiva canonical texts, traditionally composed in verse, more widely accessible. He employed prose and print to defend established Shaiva caste and ritual practices; to respond to Christian critiques of Hinduism; and to marginalise Shaiva voices that questioned caste or engaged in ritual innovation. I argue that in nineteenth-century South India, print served as an effective tool to disseminate messages of established religious interests.

The geography of weaving in early nineteenth-century south India

Most research on the handloom industry is focused upon the export trade and production for export, and, by extension, upon the Coromandel Coast. This article, by contrast, explores the physical and human geography of weaving for the ‘domestic’ market in the ‘inland’ regions of south India. Using visual sources such as Company paintings, together with archival materials and statistical data, it reconstructs everyday modes of dress and clothing in the early nineteenth century in order to obtain a picture of the ‘kinds’ of cloth produced: this analysis shows that the largest proportion was white or predominantly white, and of coarse to middling quality. It goes on to map different systems of cloth production, and the pattern of weaver settlements, and shows that both were significantly different from those described for the Coromandel Coast. In the inland regions, coarse and durable kinds of cloth were woven almost everywhere by plebeian weavers scattered through the countryside; patterned and fine varieties were woven by specialist, full-time weavers who usually lived in large settlements. The article describes a diversity of markets and production systems, unpicks the meanings of part-time and full-time work, and their significance. The data and analysis serve to complicate the debate on the nature of the textile economy in early modern India.

Book Review: Deborah Sutton, Other Landscapes: Colonialism and the Predicament of Authority in Nineteenth-Century South India

Book Review: Deborah Sutton, Other Landscapes: Colonialism and the Predicament of Authority in Nineteenth-Century South India

DEBORAH SUTTON. Other Landscapes: Colonialism and the Predicament of Authority in Nineteenth-Century South India.

DEBORAH SUTTON. Other Landscapes: Colonialism and the Predicament of Authority in Nineteenth-Century South India.

Gender, Colonialism, and Faith

Gender, Colonialism, and Faith Elizabeth Elbourne (bio) Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew Brown-May, eds. Evangelists of Empire? Missionaries in Colonial History. Melbourne: University of Melbourne E-scholarship Research Centre and School of Historical Studies, History Conference and Seminar Series, no. 18, 2008. Sonya Grypma. Healing Henan: Canadian Nurses at the North China Mission, 1888–1947. Vancouver and Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2008. 312pps.; ill.; ISBN-13: 978-0774814003 (pb). Dorothy Hodgson. The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 2005. xvii + 307 pp.; ill,; ISBN-13: 978-0253217622 (pb). Eliza F. Kent. Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 336 pps.; ISBN-13: 978-0195165074 (hb). Selma Ahmed Nageeb. New Spaces and Old Frontiers: Women, Social Space, and Islamization in Sudan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. vii + 217 pps.; ISBN-13: 978-0739105962 (hb). Barbara O. Reyes. Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of the Californias. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2009. 245 pps.; ill.; ISBN: 9780292718968 (pb). Jon Sensbach. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005. 302 pps.; ISBN-13: 978-0674022577 (pb). One of the most fruitful departures in scholarship on European colonialism has been an explosion of work on gender. An important subset of this work has focused on religion and, more particularly, on gender and the history of missions and mission Christianity. Despite the limitations of an institutional focus on missions, examining how gender operates within them is a useful approach to questions about how colonialism affected daily life and how daily life became a site for gendered power struggles. It also [End Page 182]raises questions about how particular views of gender were reworked and disputed in the quest to justify or contest colonialism. This essay examines work on religion, gender, and colonialism in the hope of drawing out some common themes and points of tension with particular attention to works on mission and Christianity. The studies range from Jon Sensbach’s sensitive portrayal of a black Moravian missionary working her way around the eighteenth-century Atlantic world; to Salma Ahmed Nageeb’s compelling examination of how women in the contemporary Sudan negotiate social spaces; Eliza Kent’s multi-faceted analysis of Christianity in nineteenth century South India; and Dorothy Hodgson’s engaging account of Catholicism among Maasai women in twentieth century Tanzania. Sonya Grypma examines Canadian nurses in China from the late nineteenth century to the revolution, while Barbara O. Reyes looks at the lives of three women on Catholic mission stations in colonial California. Finally, the e-publication co-edited by Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew Brown-May derives from an Australian conference that brought together scholars exploring the relationship of missions to colonialism, with particular attention to gender relations. Most of these books focus on gender, missions, and the politics of conversion, although there are a couple of outliers. For example, Nageeb’s study of women and Islamization in the Sudan provides a useful point of comparison. Although Nageeb examines Islam rather than Christianity, her interest in the ways individual women navigate state Islamization programs parallels Hodgson’s and Kent’s accounts of local reactions to Christianization programs. In each of these three cases, reforming gender roles lies (or lay) at the heart of religious reform. The second apparent outlier is Grypma’s work on Canadian missionary nurses in China, for whether or not this medical mission was an instrument of colonialism is an unresolved question throughout the book. This, however, raises useful questions about what “counts” as colonialism, a question at the heart of recent work on “cultural colonialism.” All of these studies point to the importance of a gendered account of religious experience, especially with regard to conversion. The theme of religion and power occupies center stage in all of the books, as does the topic of women’s struggles to exploit ambiguities in religious language to negotiate better positions for themselves. Yet each author takes seriously the importance of religious belief and therefore refuses to see religion as merely a reflection of material power. This is...

Book Reviews

Abstract James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800-1920 (John M. MacKenzie) Karen Brown, Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa (Dominik Hünniger) Deborah Sutton, Other Landscapes: Colonialism and the Predicament of Authority in Nineteenth Century South India (Ezra Rashkow) Ian. D. Rotherham and Robert A. Lambert (eds.), Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals: Human Perceptions, Attitudes and Approaches to Management (Robert Alexander Hearn) SueEllen Campbell, with Alex Hunt, Richard Kerridge, Tom Lynch and Ellen Wohl, The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science and Culture (Ruth Morgan)

Book Review: Other Landscapes: Colonialism and the Predicament of Authority in Nineteenth-Century South India

Book Review: Other Landscapes: Colonialism and the Predicament of Authority in Nineteenth-Century South India

Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India. By Sascha Ebeling.

Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India. By Sascha Ebeling.

Enforcement of nineteenth century banking contracts using a marriage rule

► The paper studies the self-enforcement mechanisms used by the Chettiar banking caste. ► Provides a new historical instance of self-enforced order in a large banking system. ► Represents an application of rational choice theory to caste as a social institution. ► The functioning of caste appears as vital to trade and prosperity in this case. The enforcement of financial and banking contracts is commonly thought to lie within the domain of government law provision. This paper analyzes a case of self-enforcing financial contracts within a banking system in nineteenth century South India. The Chettiars, a merchant-banking caste, relied on religious homogeneity as well as an endogamous marriage rule, whereby members only married others from within the community, to enforce banking contracts within their system. Widely acknowledged to have been an important source of credit locally and throughout South East Asia, this paper describes and analyzes the enforcement mechanisms at work, in the absence of government involvement. Apart from presenting a new case of self-enforced financial contracts, this paper also represents a novel approach to interpreting the social institution of caste, as seen through the rational choice framework.

Colonizing the realm of words: the transformation of Tamil literature in nineteenth-century South India

Colonizing the realm of words: the transformation of Tamil literature in nineteenth-century South India

Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India, by Sascha Ebeling

Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India, by Sascha Ebeling

Between consent and coercion: Danish Missionaries and Tamil parents in late nineteenth century South India

Between consent and coercion: Danish Missionaries and Tamil parents in late nineteenth century South India

Vernacular futures

The article explores how a new concept of historical time entered discourses on language in nineteenth-century south India. Particularly, I look at the work of C.P. Brown, a prominent scholar of Telugu in the nineteenth century, who through his philological intervention—his Telugu grammar, dictionary and definitive editions of Telugu literary classics—worked arduously to preserve the language. I argue that because colonial philology saw language as having a progressive history, i.e., the unfolding of language in progressive stages towards constant improvement, it instigated a profound intervention in language practices and thought, foreshadowing the great debates at the turn of the twentieth century on ‘modernising’ languages.

Native Collecting and Natural Knowledge (1798–1832): Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore as ‘Centre of Calculation’

AbstractTanjore in South India during the reign of Raja Serfoji II (1798–1832), is a hitherto unexamined episode of both colonial science and of ‘Enlightenment’ in the non-western context. If Joseph Banks, a product of the English Enlightenment, was a metropolitan ‘centre of calculation’ directing and controlling a collecting network in India between the 1770s and 1820, it is argued that Raja Serfoji was his native counterpart, exhibiting similar formal properties, and drawing on those very same ideas and networks of metropolitan practice to systematically produce useful knowledge. This case study demonstrates strongly (among other things) the weaknesses of the centre-periphery model of scientific practice. It shows how the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are not determined by virtue of the geographical location, but by the nature of practice, which is a combined effect of social, scientific and power relations. Thus, this article examines the ways in which it became possible for a small quasi-Indian state in early nineteenth-century South India to leap onto the threshold of modernity, by generating an intellectual ferment of the kind that it did, as a unique native response to the western encounter.

Telugu Resurgence: C. P. Brown and Cultural Consolidation in Nineteenth-Century South India

A distinctive feature of nation-building in modern India has been the paradoxical persistence and growth of regional linguistic-based cultural identities. The appearance of regional languages on Rupee currency notes, the present provincial boundaries of India, and the rising strength of regional political parties manifest the importance of these regional identities to defining the national culture of India. Telugu Resurgence examines the origins and formation of a regional identity which ultimately gave birth to Andhra Pradesh, the first linguistic state formed in India after independence.

Book Reviews : PETER L. SCHMITTHENNER, Telugu Resurgence: C.P. Brown and Cultural Consolid ation in Nineteenth-Century South India, Delhi: Manohar, 2001, pp. 324

Book Reviews : PETER L. SCHMITTHENNER, Telugu Resurgence: C.P. Brown and Cultural Consolid ation in Nineteenth-Century South India, Delhi: Manohar, 2001, pp. 324

Reviews of Books:Telugu Resurgence: C. P. Brown and Cultural Consolidation in Nineteenth-Century South India Peter L. Schmitthenner

Reviews of Books:Telugu Resurgence: C. P. Brown and Cultural Consolidation in Nineteenth-Century South India Peter L. Schmitthenner