Pre-colonial India Research Articles

Drawing Roads, Building Empire: Space and Circulation in Charles D’Oyly's Indian Landscapes

Studies of colonial travel and mobility reveal how spaces are constructed through practices which select and link sites together, drawing fresh itineraries and re-organising places. A series of lithographic sketches published in 1830 as Sketches of the New Road in a Journey from Calcutta to Gyah, drawn by Charles D’Oyly (1781–1845) on his journey from Calcutta to Gaya, captures the tacit colonial imbrication of notions of travel, circulation, landscape and spatial production. An officer posted in various capacities at various places in eastern India in the early part of the nineteenth century, D’Oyly was a prolific amateur painter who sketched and painted different landscapes across the region. His Sketches holds a special significance as his pictures capture and freeze glimpses of a newly-constructed colonial road stretching across the countryside. D’Oyly's plates were intended to celebrate the new colonial circuit as a form of public works, drawing attention away from the urban epicentre of colonial Calcutta. I read this construction as a kind of spatial practice whereby a fresh idea of space emerges through these new operations, supplanting that of pre-colonial India.

Edict in Pre-Colonial India: An Analysis from the New Haven Perspective<sup>1</sup>

The territory of India is the locus of an ancient and deeply philosophical culture. This land not only gave birth to the epic religion of Hinduism but also to the first urban civilization, the Indus Valley Civilization. Many different kingdoms such as Mauryan Empire and Mughal Empire with customary authoritative decision practices also emerged in the Indian subcontinent. However, the impact these deep and distinct cultures, civilizations and empires have had on decision-making and official behavior in India over the decades has not been studied. This article seeks to study the notion of law/interstate law in pre-colonial India, how it was formulated during and in what way/s the process of making law was different from western traditions of law-making. To achieve this end, the New Haven methodology will be adopted. This work will also provide some preliminary conclusions in relation to Indian foreign policy which remains “formalist dualism” from ancient to current times.

Female Infanticide in 19th-Century India: A Genocide?

In post-colonial India the female foeticide, a practice evolved from customary female infanticide of pre-colonial and colonial period, committed though in separate incidents, has made it almost a unified wave of mass murder. It does not fulfil the widely accepted existing definition of genocide but the high rate of abortion of legitimate girl-foetus by Indian parents makes their crime a kind of group killing or genocide. The female foeticide in post-colonial India is not a modern phenomenon but was also prevalent in pre-colonial India since antiquity as female infanticide and the custom continued in the 19th century in many communities of colonial India, documentation of which are widely available in various archives. In spite of the Act of 1870 passed by the Colonial Government to suppress the practice, treating it a murder and punishing the perpetrators of the crime with sentence of death or transportation for life, the crime of murdering their girl children did not stop. During a period of five to ten years after the promulgation of the Act around 333 cases of female infanticide were tried and 16 mothers were sentenced to death, 133 to transportation for life and others for various terms of rigorous imprisonment in colonial India excluding British Burma and Assam where no such crime was reported. The present paper, on the basis of unpublished proceedings and files of Judicial and Criminal department of nineteenth century and published documents, presents a critical discussion on consideration of such unified wave of customary criminality as a sexually selective genocide, its concepts and location of female infanticide in selective areas dominated by specific patriarchal ethos of Hinduism alone, the religious and economic causes behind formation of a historically reliant peculiar Indian mind set, its nineteenth century encounter with legislative measures of astounded colonial state still responsible for continuation of such criminality in more sophisticated way with the help of modern technology, and historically reliant patriarchal mind set of post-colonial Indian state.

‘Not a Question of Theology’? Religions, Religious Institutions, and the Courts in India

Courts have played an important role in defining the relationship between religions and the state in India. Litigation by or against religious institutions has obliged the judiciary to engage in quasi-theological reasoning in order to determine what is ‘religious’, and therefore beyond state control, and what is ‘secular’, and therefore subject to government regulation. In pre-colonial India, religious conflicts were settled by means of local arbitration or by the threat or fact of violence. After British legal institutions were established, groups and individuals learned to use the courts to settle such conflicts. This tendency to seek legal solutions to religious disputes has continued in independent India. Since the state tends always to seek an increase of its powers, courts frequently decide such cases to the detriment of the litigants. Examples studied include the Maharaj Libel Case (1862), the Ramakrishna Mission Case (1995), and the Sri Aurobindo Society Case (1982).

Passionate Projectors: Savants and silk on the Coromandel coast 1780–98

Passionate Projectors: Savants and silk on the Coromandel coast 1780–98 Maxine Berg Silk in India Silk was an industry of longstanding provenance in precolonial India, highly specialized by region and the specific markets it provided. It was well known from the Punjab, Dacca and Bengal, Surat and Ahmedabad, Benares, and Hyderabad; in South India silk and cotton mixes were produced in Mylapore, Tanjore, Trichinopoly and Madurai. Wild silks (moonga) were known in India “from time immemorial” and produced for the Arab market.1 Yet a recent survey of the early European and Eurasian industry mentions the Indian silk industry only once, as “known in India before our era.”2 From the early medieval origins of South Indian production, the industry flourished during the Vijayanagar Empire of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries in the Karnataka, Andhra and Tamil regions. Silk production in new cotton and silk mixes (mushroo and himroo) also expanded in the Deccan and the Mughal courts in the fashionable dress of the nobility.3 Silk production in South India for export to Europe became an East India Company project in the later eighteenth century, at a time when it was seeking cheaper alternatives for European, Persian and Chinese silks on the London luxury market. A series of South Indian silk projects also found its context in Enlightenment projects of “useful knowledge” and industrial improvement. This article investigates James Anderson’s silk projects on the Coromandel coast. Though the projects ultimately failed, they show dedicated attempts to adapt and transfer technologies and substantial investment by the East India Company. Detailed analysis of the setting-up phases, early progress, then failure of a number of these projects shows a common lack of engagement with local environmental constraints and local commercial incentives among farmers and zamindars. Europeans were well aware of Indian silks by the first half of the sixteenth century. Portuguese chroniclers described the silk robes and caps of the Vijayanagar kings and of the court of the Zamorin in Calicut. Bengal had a reputation by then for its lightweight silks, “taffeties” or “taffeta,” much used by the English by the seventeenth century.4 European imports from the seventeenth century, especially from Bengal, included large amounts of silk textiles. European trading companies soon sought to exploit the potential of an export trade to Europe in Indian silks. From this time the crafts and production moved away from the indigenous production and trading centres to the “black towns” around the European trading centres and factories in coastal India. There was also an increased demand for silk in the princely states.5 The English sent Streynsham Master to India in 1675 to learn about silk production there, and its potential as a trade product. He spent five years there, and promoted the promise of Bengal silks.6 He wrote in 1676: “All the Country, or great parts thereof about Cassambazar, is planted or sett with Mullberry trees, the leaves of which are gathered young to feed the worms with and make the silke fine, and therefore, the trees are planted every yeare.”7 From the later seventeenth century the Dutch and the English imported large amounts of raw silk from Bengal. It accounted for 88 per cent of the Asian raw silk sold on the Amsterdam market from 1693 to 1820. Bengal also supplied most of the raw silk and silk goods from Asia to the London market; Chinese silk piece goods made up no more than 2 per cent of imports at the turn of the eighteenth century.8 English silk weavers so feared the competition of Indian and Near Eastern silks by the late seventeenth century that an Act of 1699 outlawed their sale in England, though the re-export trade was still allowed.9 Indian silk was by the eighteenth century a priority of the English East India Company, then seeking cheaper alternatives for a large London luxury market in Italian and later French silks, and to a lesser extent in expensive Persian and Chinese silks. The English Weavers Company achieved a total ban on imported French silks in 1766; the law remained until 1824.10 Silk fascinated European savants and projectors. Its exotic provenance from ancient times...

Political players: Courtesans of Hyderabad

Important recent works on the Mughal state and women in the Indo-Muslim world have not considered courtesans or tawa’ifs, the singing and dancing women employed by Indo-Muslim states and nobles, to be significant participants in politics and society. Drawing on detailed archival data from late nineteenth century Hyderabad state and other historical materials, I argue that courtesans were often elite women, cultural standard-setters and wielders of political power. Women whose art and learning gained them properties and alliances with powerful men, they were political players in precolonial India and in the princely states. They successfully negotiated administrative reforms in princely states like Hyderabad, continuing to secure protection and patronage while in British India they began to be classified as prostitutes. Colonial and modern India have been less than kind to courtesans and their artistic traditions, and more research needs to be done on the history of courtesans and their communities.

Religion Compass: A Survey of Current Researches on India’s Nāth Yogīs

AbstractThe Nāth or Kānphaṭā Yogīs belong to a Hindu Shaiva ascetic and monastic tradition which had a lot of influence on the religious and literary landscape of precolonial India and is still counted among the important sectarian movements of modern India. This survey offers a brief overview of scholarship on three key areas: first, the relationship to Yoga and the link with Gorakhnāth as the supposed author of Sanskrit treatises on Haṭha Yoga; second, the interpretation of the vernacular literature of the Nāth Yogīs, their legends, their strong relationship to power and their convergence with the bhakti milieu; and third, the Nāth Yogīs as constituting a modern sectarian organization, and recent developments relating to their organisation and rituals.

Narcotics and Drugs: Pleasure, Intoxication or Simply Therapeutic—North India, Sixteenth— Seventeenth Centuries

Narcotics,1 in this article, has been used as synonymous with drugs and drug-like products including mild stimulants and intoxicants like opium, tobacco, alcohol and alcoholic preparations. All three commodities, of great commercial significance, were also major items that were chewed and consumed to generate euphoria, stimulation and intoxication. Seen as symbols of power and authority, they were considered to be facilitators of social bonding and social interaction. Consumed by a wide variety of people, it was around narcotics that hierarchies of class and gender were built. Although used as a therapy in some instances, narcotics came to be linked to health hazard, disease and death. With such a diverse trajectory, narcotics become an integral and an interesting medium to discover and study the lives of many in pre-colonial India.

Aporia and the postsecular

The Politics of Postsecular Religion by Ananda Abeysekara provides a novel critical intervention within the growing debate on religion and the secular. It does this by exposing a limitation of the influential form of criticism known as ‘genealogical critique’ that has become popular in disciplines such as postcolonial studies, history of religions and anthropology. By grounding critical thought on the logic of aporia, it is possible to interrupt conventional forms of critique that merely recover or inherit the name, and thus to re-imagine political futures. The paper briefly demonstrates the applicability of aporetic logic by way of reference to the violent interdictions of modes of speech that were prevalent in pre-colonial India and which eventually enabled the Western category of ‘religion’ to take root in the minds of Indian elites in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Toads and Diamonds (review)

Reviewed by: Toads and Diamonds Kate Quealy-Gainer Tomlinson, Heather . Toads and Diamonds. Holt, 2010. 278p. ISBN 978-0-805-08968-4 $16.99 R Gr. 7-10. In a single evening, the fortunes of two young girls change dramatically: still reeling from the untimely death of their father, stepsisters Diribani and Tana each make separate trips to the local well, where they receive "blessings" from the goddess Naghali-ji—blessings that manifest themselves in very different ways. The stunningly beautiful and kindhearted Diribani finds herself speaking valuable gems and flowers while her practical and plain stepsister, Tana, spouts frogs and venomous snakes with each utterance. Their new gifts do not go unnoticed, and soon the two girls find themselves far away from home—Diribani is whisked off to the royal palace for safekeeping while Tana is literally chased out of town as a witch—as they struggle to make sense of the goddess' blessings that now feel like curses. Savvy folktale readers will most certainly recognize the premise of Charles Perrault's eponymous tale, but Tomlinson makes this retelling her own: set in a fictional version of pre-colonial India (according to an author's note), the story focuses primarily on the genuinely affectionate and sisterly relationship between the two girls while relegating most of its moralizing to the background. The book follows each sister's individual journey, alternating sisters chapter by chapter, through a vividly imagined landscape rife with beauty, power, and plague, while presenting two distinct and entirely likable protagonists. The politics of the fictional situation are less well developed, but nonetheless, a satisfying resolution brings each girl her happily ever after and makes this a both riveting and enjoyable retelling. [End Page 502] Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

‘Living Together in Difference’: Religious Conflict and Tolerance in Pre-Colonial India as History and Discourse

Asim Roy focuses on religious conflict and tolerance in pre-colonial India as history and discourse. The position of the Muslim communalists was essentially premised on the logic of the 'two nation theory,' which they perceived as holding true of Hindu-Muslim relations since the dawn of Indo-Muslim history. The British rulers, in turn, suspicious at first of the fanatical, aggressive and rebellious orientation of the Muslims, gradually shifted their position and broadly sought explanations in the essentially religious mores of the Indian societies, making the people of that community easy prey for religious and communal propaganda and conflict throughout history. The intrusion of such malevolent political designs into the arena of professional historical research has proved immeasurably harmful for the Indian minorities and the country as a whole. Still, Hindutva politics and propaganda have led to an engagement of sorts with medieval India.

Meaning of Work in Dalit Autobiographies

There have been varying perceptions of manual labour in different societies, cultures and thought systems. However, in most pre-modern stratified societies, manual work was considered demeaning. In pre-colonial India, despite various dissenting traditions and protest movements, the dominant ideology continued to privilege non-manual work while degrading manual labour. Thus, the Dalits, most of whom were poor manual workers, remained at the receiving end of this ideology. The colonial regime, owing to its peculiar inherent contradictions, created a dual labour regime for the Dalits whereby their subjection was further strengthened in the rural areas while they experienced some measure of freedom in the cities. The consequent contradictory experiences gave impetus to Dalit movements which sharply attacked the caste system. The Dalit autobiographies emerged in the post-independence period as the most important component of Dalit literature which was a product of the Dalit movement. This article endeavours to analyze some of these texts for their explicit and underlying ideas and notions about work.

The Informational Fabric of Eighteenth-Century India and the Middle East: Couriers, Intermediaries and Postal Communication

AbstractMundane knowledge of how information flows is essential for a proper understanding of large organisations and complex activities. It gives us valuable insights into the prevailing constraints of the era and the creative responses that enabled the demands of its cosmopolitan residents to be met. Though the sinews of communication have been a major topic of historical inquiry in recent decades, the focus has been decidedly uneven; much of the attention has been directed towards modern times and, for earlier periods, has been confined almost entirely to Europe, the western European empires and those sectors of the world's political economy in which Europeans had a stake. The rest of the world, in comparison, has been neglected, which may be seen clearly in the case of early modern India and the Middle East. This paper seeks to rectify the imbalance by offering a typology for making sense of how packages of low weight and high value were collected, transported and delivered over long distances within the region in the eighteenth century. While drawing on a wide range of sources, at the core of this analysis lies the correspondence of the headmen of a group—the Aiyangar pattamars—who specialised as couriers in pre-colonial southern India. Among the principal claims set forth are that there existed in this period two basic modes of private communication: in one, personal trust was paramount, in the other, the mode was effectively monopolised by recognised communities providing the necessary informational services within their cultural domain. These claims, if sustained, have major implications for current views on early modern India and the Middle East.

Local People and the Global Tiger: An Environmental History of the Sundarbans

Abstract The present article investigates the significance of the Sundarbans as a natural reserve or buffer area (a resource of yet unknown magnitude) in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial South Asia. In pre-colonial India this region was, by and large, outside the purview of the state and occasionally served as a natural reserve in more ways than one. In British India the vast mangrove swamp of the Sundarbans became an important location where European “Selves” and Indian “Others” started interacting. The Sundarbans jungle became the object of European thoughts and actions. A new systematic endeavour to manage this unknown and unique natural frontier began under the forceful thrust of European enlightenment. This quest for knowledge went on throughout colonial rule and even after Indian independence in 1947. The British colonial government sought to manage an area they had little understanding of, and hence incurred in a series of unforeseen problems which posed new challenges to the colonial project in the Sundarbans. In this area, the tiger had always been at the centre of people's economic, social, cultural and religious life. This was the case in the past and still is today. During the Raj, the colonial drive to maximize revenue forced the inhabitants of the Sundarbans to come face to face with the tigers. In post-colonial India, the introduction of Project Tiger turned the Sundarbans into a local theatre of a larger campaign. The present paper also seeks to explore the complex pattern of the production of knowledge and its short term and long-term implications. I argue that the human endeavour to manage unknown frontiers often produces new complications and brings to fresh engagements with new unforeseen challenges. This is all the more true of the last quarter of the twentieth century, when the impact of capitalism, politics and science was more distinctly felt at the global level. In the 1960’s and 70’s European wildlife biologists made a strong case of the fact that only in the forests of India and the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans there were tigers in sufficient numbers for an effort to save this endangered species to have any likelihood of succeeding. The rhetoric of wildlife conservation fuelled a universal campaign which disregarded local knowledge systems. This campaign led to the launching, in 1973, of Project Tiger in nine reserve forests of India, including the Sundarbans. Project Tiger led to friction between the universal/global and the local, giving rise to new unexpected troubles which needed to be addressed.

Some Were Larger Than Their Communities

Focussing on a ritually low caste but materially affluent potter’s family of eighteenth century Rajasthan that got embroiled in a petty family dispute, this article traces how a domestic squabble spilt out and played itself out in the public sphere. Dispelling the notion of harmonious joint families characterizing pre-colonial India, this article demonstrates the tensions and often antagonistic interests and agendas of different members in Kumhar Paima’s household and examines the negotiations attempted by competing interests with the dispute-processing fora. These help highlight the overlapping yet intersecting networks of discipline and control. The locally influential position of this kumhar family points towards considerable differentiation within castes and communities, and complicates ideas about the homogeneity of caste groups. More importantly, its dispute with the community of potters points towards instances of dilution in caste bonds, while its protection by the Jodhpur rulers suggests vertical bonds that often superseded horizontal kin and community affiliations. Through a close reading of this court case, this article argues that power and authority were culturally constructed, not merely in terms of royal gift-giving and material support to retainers as often argued, but also in terms of extending patronage that included intangible non-material support, especially intercession on behalf of a client in the process of judicial dispensation

AN ELEGY FOR Nīti

The essay reflects in an elegiac mode on a now largely forgotten (or effaced) body of literature from precolonial India regarding the art and business of politics. This body, known as nīti, has classical roots in Sanskrit but came in particular to be popular in peninsular India between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries in vernacular languages such as Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi. Secular and this-worldly in orientation, it can be broadly contrasted to the far better known body of texts on dharma, which are concerned to preserve a normative, ritually and religiously sanctioned, order based on strict adherence to caste and gender roles. We first trace the classical roots of the tension between dharma and nīti and then set out how these two bodies of texts came to play distinct and evolving roles in medieval and early modern south India. We argue further that under the early phase of colonial rule, East India Company officials misunderstood the nature of nīti texts and that this has led to a persistently erroneous view of their role and content. We conclude by noting, however, that some astute modern observers of and participants in Indian politics, such as B. R. Ambedkar, have understood the part that nīti might play for the development of a secular language of politics in modern India.

Situating the Environment

The complexities associated with interactions of various components of environment have not been examined in historical narratives of pre-colonial India. An important consideration for any agrarian society has been the availability of water for irrigation, and in arid and semi-arid regions—with unequal annual distribution of rains and low water table—often saline water is used even for the potable purposes. This article elucidates various systems of water management developed and maintained by the local/individual initiatives as well as those developed by the state at a larger scale for irrigation and potable purposes. It is argued here that the pre-colonial states in Rajasthan had to ensure continuity of habitation by offering concessions and support to protect the revenue base. It was a difficult act of balance in a society where political and social orders were integrated into a single complex web. The article argues that the same complex web endowed the state with an all-pervasive administrative apparatus. It questions the dominant assumption(s) centring on the relative apathy of the state towards agricultural production and resultant immunity enjoyed by the local magnates of socio-political power and even cultivators. The article also examines the nature of intricate interventions of the above-mentioned socio-political web to underline the prominent considerations enjoyed by the environment-related uncertainties.

The Persianization of Itihasa: Performance Narratives and Mughal Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century Bengal

This paper explores the nature and understandings of history, or itihasa/Purana, in eighteenth-century India using two Mangalkabya narratives. These materials belong to a large genre of performance narratives, usually devoted to eulogizing various deities, that were produced in Bengal for several centuries. The paper illustrates how a “traditional” genre such as the Mangalkabya was effectively used to articulate contingent political and cultural preoccupations. The narratives studied here show that the historical experiences and contexts mirrored in them were derived from Mughal rule over Bengal and large parts of India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The paper seeks to historicize and contextualize the shifts noticeable in these narratives and to engage with the notion that premodern, precolonial India lacked a sense of history molded by contemporary material and cultural imperatives.

Axis Satellite Armies of World War II: A Case Study of the Azad Hind Fauj, 1942–45

During the Second World War, Japan and Germany raised several auxiliary armies in South East Asia and Europe. One such Japanese sponsored army was the Indian National Army (INA). The historiography of the Second World War gives marginal importance to the INA because of its low combat effectiveness. Neither the mainstream historiography of modern India nor the literature on decolonization did attach much importance to the INA. In contrast, a minority group (mostly ex-INA personnel, including some historians) overemphasizes the INA's contribution to India's struggle for independence. However, it would be interesting to analyse how the Japanese and some Indian nationalist leaders attempted to structure an army out of the British controlled Sepoy Army. Much light could be thrown on this complex interaction by studying the managerial format of the INA. Moreover, the INA also influenced the genesis of post-1947 Indian Army. This article places the INA as an institution at the centre stage. It tries to figure out who joined the INA and why and the nature of interaction between the human materials of the INA and its command structure. The focus is on the social base of the INA and its managerial infrastructure. Recruitment techniques and disciplinary mechanism of the INA are highlighted. Instead of focussing merely on Subhas Chandra Bose, the functions of the middle and low ranking officers are emphasized. The INA utilized the social and cultural ethos of pre-colonial India and also the organizing principles of the Western armies. This blend of pre-British Indian martial traditions with the institutions of professional militaries of the West, in the context of alliance with the Axis powers, had its own contradictions. Though this contradiction made the INA an ineffective combat organization, it had a multiplier effect on the process of erosion of the Raj's legitimacy. The strength of this essay lies in utilizing untapped sources like The Oracle, Fauji Akhbar, the INA files in the National Archives and oral interview transcripts of the leading figures.

:The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. Of a different world than common prostitutes, courtesans deal in artistic and intellectual pleasures in ways that are wholly interdependent with their commerce in sex. In pre-colonial India, courtesans cultivated a wide variety of artistic skills, including magic, music, and chemistry. In Ming dynasty China, courtesans communicated with their patrons through poetry and music. Yet because these cultural practices have existed primarily outside our present-day canons of art and have often occurred through oral transmission, courtesans' arts have vanished almost without trace. The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, unveiling the artistic practices and cultural production of courtesan cultures with a sideways glance at the partly-related geisha. Balancing theoretical and empirical research, this interdisciplinary collection is the first of its kind to explore courtesan cultures through diverse case studies--the Edo period and modern Japan, 20th-century Korea, Ming dynasty China, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past and present. Each essay puts forward new perspectives on how the arts have figured in the courtesan's survival or demise. Though performative and often flamboyant, courtesans have been enigmatic and elusive to their beholders--including scholars. They have shaped cultures through art, yet their arts, often intangible, have all but faded from view. Often courtesans have hovered in the crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money, courts and cities, feminine allure and masculine power, as substitutes for wives but keepers of culture. Reproductively irrelevant, they have tended to be ambiguous figures, thriving on social distinction while operating outside official familial relations. They have symbolized desirability and sophistication yet often been reviled as decadent. The Courtesan's Arts shows that while courtesans cultures have appeared regularly in various times and places, they are universal neither as a phenomenon nor as a type. To the contrary, when they do crop up, wide variations exist. What binds together courtesans and their arts in the present-day post-industrialized world of global services and commodities is their fragility. Once vital to cultures of leisure and pleasure, courtesans are now largely forgotten, transformed into national icons or historical curiosities, or reduced to prostitution.