Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia 9781138364844, 9781032052489, 9780429431012

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Abbreviations
Introduction: The History of Colonialism in South Asia: Cutting Out Paths Through the Historiographical Jungle
Notes
Part I Overarching Themes and Debates
1 Caste in British India: Between Continuity and Colonial Construction, and Beyond
Introduction
The Colonial Construction of Caste
Continuity
The Emergence of Dalit Historical Studies
Résumé
Notes
2 The Political Economy of Colonialism in India
Introduction
Age of Mercantilism, 1498–1800
Age of Narco-Militarism, 1800–50
Age of Colonial Capitalism, 1850–1914
Age of Nationalism, 1914–47
Notes
3 State Formation in India: From the Company State to the Late Colonial State
Introduction
Traditional System Versus Constitutional System, 1773–93
Constitutional Development and the Invention of Indian Tradition, 1793–1935
Census of India, Communalism, and Crisis, 1871–1931
The British Standing Army in India, 1757–1947
Résumé
Notes
4 Nationalisms and Their Discontents in Colonial India
Introduction
Approaching the Nation
The Nation From the Margins
Region, Language, Religion, and Nation
‘Nation-building’ Projects: Secularism and Ethnic Nationalism
Résumé
Notes
5 Reordering Religion in Colonial South Asia
Introduction
The Trope of Western Impact
Models of Dialogism and Convergence
Co-emergence and the Trans-Colonial
Communalism and Nationalism
Résumé
Notes
6 Reconstituting Masculinities/Femininities: Modern Experiences
Introduction
Developments Among Indian Muslims
New Hindu Masculinities and Femininities
Matriliny and Adivasi Gender
Perceptions of Dalit Men and Women
Gender and Labour
Masculine and Feminine Bodies
Political Men and Women
Résumé
Notes
7 Contested History: The Rise of Communalism and the Partition of British India
Introduction
Communalism: Characteristics, Origins, and Impact
The Development of Partition Historiography
Writings in the 1940s
Post-independence Texts
Résumé
Notes
8 The Raj’s Uncanny Other: Indirect Rule and the Princely States
Introduction
The Princely States and the British Empire: Origins and Indirect Rule
Indian Rulers and Their Pursuits
Connected Histories of the Princely States
Résumé
Notes
Part II The World of Economy and Labour
9 The Emergence of a ‘Modern’ Urban-Industrial Workforce in India, 1860–1914
The Colonial Structuring of Industrial Capitalism
Migrant Workforces
Workplace and Neighbourhood
Factory Law
Mobilisations
Notes
10 Military Labour Markets in Colonial India From the Company State to the Second World War
Introduction
Military Labour and the Making of the Company State
From ‘Mutiny’ to ‘Martial Races’
Global Wars and Military Labour
Résumé
Notes
11 Merchants, Moneylenders, Karkhanedars, and the Emergence of the Informal Sector
Discourses On ‘(in)formality’
Market Framing, Regulation, and Defining ‘Propriety’ in Business Relations
Markets, Merchants, and the Residues of the ‘Bazaar’: Resources for the Emerging Informal Sector
Moneylenders, Brokers, and ‘Improper Transactions’: Extra-Legality and the Production of the ‘Shadow’ Economy
Seeking Regulation and Finding Loopholes: The Karkhana as a Contested Site of ‘(in-)formalisation’
Notes
12 Indian Big Business Under the Company and the Raj
Introduction
On the Genealogy of Indian Big Business
Indigenous Business and the Colonial Transition, C.1757–1850
Indian Big Business in the High Imperial Era, C.1850–1914
Indian Big Business in the Late Colonial Era, 1914–47
A Profile of Indian Big Business
Notes
13 Revenue Extraction in Colonial South Asia
Introduction
Precolonial Origins of Taxation
The Early Colonial Impact and Changes
Agrarian and Economic Impact of the New Fiscal Regime
Consolidation of Bureaucratic Governance
Summary
Notes
Part III Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education
14 The Science and Medicine of Colonial India
Introduction
The Period to 1890
The Later Period, 1890–1947
Résumé
Notes
15 Race in Colonial South Asia: Science and the Law
Introduction
Science
Law
Résumé
Notes
16 ‘A Race Apart’?: The European Community in Colonial India
Introduction
Colonial Hierarchies and the Imperial Construction of Racial Selves
Disciplining and Eliminating ‘Disorderly’ Forms of Whiteness
White Criminality, Racism, and Indian Nationalist Responses
Résumé
Notes
17 Christian Missionary Agendas in Colonial India
Introduction
Christian Mission Activities in Colonial India
Historiography On Christian Missions and Colonialism
Fields of Christian Mission Presence in India
Mission and Authorities
Résumé
Notes
18 Penal Law, Penology, and Prisons in Colonial India
Introduction
From Legal Pluralism to Company Laws
The Birth of the Colonial Prison
The Raj’s Carceral Archipelago
Punishment and ‘Colonial Violence’
Notes
19 Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Colonial India
Introduction
Defining ‘Terrorism’
Violence and Non-Violence in the Independence Movement
International Anti-Colonialism
Imperial Policing and ‘Counter-Terrorism’
Postcolonial Echoes
Notes
20 Schooling the Subcontinent: State, Space, and Society, and the Dynamics of Education in Colonial South Asia
Introduction
The Colonial State and Education in British India
Education, Imperialism, and Nationalism – and Beyond
Educating Believers: Religion and Pedagogical Institutions
Teaching the Subaltern: Informal Education and Useful Knowledge
Reconsidering Educational Spaces: India, the Empire, and the Global
Résumé
Notes
Part IV Environment and Space
21 Of Lives and Landscapes: The Environmental History of Colonial South Asia
Introduction
Forestscapes
Waterscapes
Socioscapes and Faunascapes
Résumé
Notes
22 Questioning ‘railway-Centrism’: Infrastructural Governance and Cultures of the Colonial Transport System, 1760s–1900s
Introduction
Infrastructural Systems: From Mughal to Colonial
The Company State, 1760s–1820s
Technology and Ideology, 1820s–1900s
Notes
23 Colonial Port Cities and the Infrastructure of Empire: Tracing the Geography of Alcohol in British Colonial India
Introduction
The Passage of Liquor
The Liquor Landscape
Servants, Godowns, and Bottlekhanas
Redrawing Liquor Lines
Lumpy Geographies
Notes
24 Site of Deficiency and Site of Hope: The Village in Colonial South Asia
Introduction
Imagining the Village
The Impact of Colonial Rule
The Tribal Village: A Case Study of the Kolhan Government Estate in Chotanagpur
Résumé: The Village as a Site of Hope
Notes
25 Imperial Sanctuaries: The Hill Stations of Colonial South Asia
Introduction
Englishness and the Racialisation of the Hill Stations
Hill Cantonments and British Soldiery
The Hill Towns and Their Bazaars
Governing From the ‘Hills’
Narratives of Decline
Résumé: Enduring Tropes of the Colonial Hill Stations
Notes
26 The Agrarian History of Colonial South Asia
Introduction
Colonial Interventions
Commercialisation
Peasant Labour and Mobilisation
Résumé
Notes
Part V Culture, Media and the Everyday
27 Physical Culture and the Body in Colonial India, C.1800–1947
Introduction and Overview
Physical Culture’s Intersections With Colonialism and Nationalism
The Ideal Body
New Directions
Résumé
Notes
28 Before Bollywood: Bombay Cinema and the Rise of the Film Industry in Late Colonial India
Introduction
The Silent Film and Its Predecessors
The Studio Era and the Sound Film: Professionalisation, Diversification, and Politicisation
Epilogue: Bombay Cinema in India’s Zero Hour
Résumé
Notes
29 Rhythms of the Raj: Music in Colonial South Asia
Introduction
European Music in South Asia
Modernisation of South Asian Art Music
The North: Hindu National Music Reform and the Muslim Ustad
The South: Brahmans and National Music Reform
Moral Cultivation of Taste: ‘High’ Art Music and ‘Low’ Popular Music
Résumé
Notes
30 Consumer Practices and ‘Consumerism’ in Late Colonial India
Introduction
The Availability of New Consumer Goods
Consuming Groups
Europeans
The ‘Middle Class’
Other Urban Classes
Rural Groups
Résumé
Notes
31 Food and Intoxicants in British India
Introduction
Transforming Dietary Habits in South Asia
‘Curryfication’ Or the Making of an Anglo-Indian Cuisine
The Home and the Hotel: New Culinary Experiences
Cooking ‘Hybrid’: Male Cooks Versus Colonial Women
Food: A Marker of Status in Everyday Life
Intoxicants
Résumé
Notes
32 Languages, Literatures, and the Public Sphere
Introduction
Literature of the Colonial Period, Or Colonial Literature?
New Media, New Public Spheres
Reordering the Language Situation
Impact of English and European Literature
Genre Turns and Returns
New Groups of Authors and Public Spheres
From Romanticism to Realism
Résumé
Notes
33 Emotions, Senses, and the Perception of the Self
Introduction
Discipline Them! The Civilising Mission
Balance Them! The Enduring Legacy and the Paracolonial
Arouse Them! Passions and the Fight for the Future
Epilogue
Notes
Part VI Colonial South Asia in the World
34 Women, Migration, and Travel From Colonial India
Introduction
Labour Migrations
Metropolitan Encounters
Travellers and Tourists
Revolutionary Mobilities
Résumé
Notes
35 Debates On Citizenship in Colonial South Asia and Global Political Thought (C.1880–1950)
Introduction
Janus-faced Liberalism
Liberal Nationalism Between Nation and Empire
Liberal Nationalism Versus Cultural Nationalism?
Building the Nation Through Active Citizenship
Renunciation as Participation
Résumé
Notes
36 South Asia and South Asians in the Worldwide Web of Anti-Colonial Solidarity
Introduction
Routes of Anti-Colonial Solidarity
The Geneva System and Its Limits
The Comintern as an Anti-Colonial Body
Regionalist Alternatives
Epilogue: Fractures and the Resilience of Solidarity
Notes
37 Disruptive Entanglements: South Asia and South Asians in the World Wars
Introduction
Proportions of Involvement and Disruption
Pushing the Boundaries of Military History: War Experience and Institutional Change
Beyond Military History: World Wars, Polities, and Society
Notes
38 Indian Humanitarianism Under Colonial Rule: Imperial Loyalty, National Self-Assertion, and Anti-Colonial Emancipation
Introduction
A Prehistory of Humanitarianism? Philanthropy and Charity in Colonial South Asia
Imperial Humanitarianism: Indian Humanitarian Provisions Within the Empire(s)
Nationalist Humanitarianism in an Internationalist Setting
Communal Relief Work in Late Colonial India and During Decolonisation
Résumé
Notes
39 Famine Relief in Colonial South Asia, 1858–1947: Regional and Global Perspectives
Introduction
Governing Famines in Colonial India
Private Charitable Responses to Famines in Colonial India
Famines in Colonial India: A Humanitarian Cause Célèbre
Résumé
Notes
Index

Citation preview

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ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE HISTORY OF COLONIALISM IN SOUTH ASIA

The Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the historiographical specialisation and sophistication of the history of colonialism in South Asia. It explores the classic works of earlier generations of historians and offers an introduction to the rapid and multifaceted development of historical research on colonial South Asia since the 1990s. Covering economic history, political history, and social history and offering insights from other disciplines and ‘turns’ within the mainstream of history, the handbook is structured in six parts: • • • • • •

Overarching Themes and Debates The World of Economy and Labour Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education Environment and Space Culture, Media, and the Everyday Colonial South Asia in the World

The editors have assembled a group of leading international scholars of South Asian history and related disciplines to introduce a broad readership into the respective subfields and research topics. Designed to serve as a comprehensive and nuanced yet readable introduction to the vast field of the history of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, the handbook will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of South Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and global and world history. Harald Fischer-​Tiné is Professor of Modern Global History at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich), Switzerland. He has published extensively on South Asian colonial history and the history of the British Empire. His research interests include global and transnational history, the history of knowledge, and the social and cultural history of colonial South Asia. His many publications include Low and Licentious Europeans: Race, Class, and ‘White Subalternity’ in Colonial India (2009) and Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-​Imperialism (2014). Maria Framke is a historian at the Leibniz-​Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), in Berlin, Germany. She works on the history of imperial, international, and nationalist politics, humanitarianism, and ideologies in the twentieth century. She is also the author of Engagement with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism in India, 1922–​1939 (2013).

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ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE HISTORY OF COLONIALISM IN SOUTH ASIA

Edited by Harald Fischer-​Tiné and Maria Framke

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First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Harald Fischer-​Tiné and Maria Framke; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Harald Fischer-​Tiné and Maria Framke to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​36484-​4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​05248-​9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​429-​43101-​2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9780429431012 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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This volume is dedicated to David Washbrook and Satadru Sen, two great scholars of South Asian history; both were involved in different ways in this project, but had to leave us before its completion.

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CONTENTS

List of illustrations  List of contributors  List of abbreviations 

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Introduction: The history of colonialism in South Asia: Cutting out paths through the historiographical jungle  Harald Fischer-​Tiné & Maria Framke PART I

1

Overarching Themes and Debates 

7

1 Caste in British India: Between continuity and colonial construction, and beyond  Dwaipayan Sen

9

2 The political economy of colonialism in India  David Washbrook 3 State formation in India: From the Company state to the late colonial state  Michael Mann

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36

4 Nationalisms and their discontents in colonial India  William Gould

48

5 Reordering religion in colonial South Asia  Brian A. Hatcher

62

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Contents

6 Reconstituting masculinities/​femininities: Modern experiences  Tanika Sarkar 7 Contested history: The rise of communalism and the Partition of British India  Ian Talbot 8 The Raj’s uncanny other: Indirect rule and the princely states  Teresa Segura-​Garcia PART II

The World of Economy and Labour 

77

92 105

117

9 The emergence of a ‘modern’ urban-​industrial workforce in India, 1860–​1914  Aditya Sarkar

119

10 Military labour markets in colonial India from the Company state to the Second World War  Gavin Rand

134

11 Merchants, moneylenders, karkhanedars, and the emergence of the informal sector  Sebastian Schwecke

145

12 Indian big business under the Company and the Raj  Claude Markovits

156

13 Revenue extraction in colonial South Asia  Hayden Bellenoit

167

PART III

Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education 

179

14 The science and medicine of colonial India  David Arnold

181

15 Race in colonial South Asia: Science and the law  Projit Bihari Mukharji

193

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Contents

16 ‘A race apart’? The European community in colonial India  Satoshi Mizutani

206

17 Christian missionary agendas in colonial India  Heike Liebau

218

18 Penal law, penology, and prisons in colonial India  Michael Offermann

230

19 Terrorism and counter-​terrorism in colonial India  Joseph McQuade

241

20 Schooling the subcontinent: State, space, and society, and the dynamics of education in colonial South Asia  Michael Philipp Brunner PART IV

252

Environment and Space 

267

21 Of lives and landscapes: The environmental history of colonial South Asia  Arnab Dey

269

22 Questioning ‘railway-​centrism’: Infrastructural governance and cultures of the colonial transport system, 1760s–​1900s  Nitin Sinha

281

23 Colonial port cities and the infrastructure of empire: Tracing the geography of alcohol in British colonial India  Swati Chattopadhyay

294

24 Site of deficiency and site of hope: The village in colonial South Asia  Sanjukta Das Gupta

309

25 Imperial sanctuaries: The hill stations of colonial South Asia  Nandini Bhattacharya

319

26 The agrarian history of colonial South Asia  Nikolay Kamenov

331

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Contents PART V

Culture, Media and the Everyday 

343

27 Physical culture and the body in colonial India, c.1800–​1947  Carey Watt

345

28 Before Bollywood: Bombay cinema and the rise of the film industry in late colonial India  Harald Fischer-​Tiné

359

29 Rhythms of the Raj: Music in colonial South Asia  Bob van der Linden

373

30 Consumer practices and ‘consumerism’ in late colonial India  Douglas E. Haynes

386

31 Food and intoxicants in British India  Utsa Ray

401

32 Languages, literatures, and the public sphere  Hans Harder

412

33 Emotions, senses, and the perception of the self  Margrit Pernau

424

PART VI

Colonial South Asia in the World 

437

34 Women, migration, and travel from colonial India  Shompa Lahiri

439

35 Debates on citizenship in colonial South Asia and global political thought (c.1880–​1950)  Elena Valdameri

450

36 South Asia and South Asians in the worldwide web of anti-​colonial solidarity  Carolien Stolte

463

37 Disruptive entanglements: South Asia and South Asians in the world wars  Ravi Ahuja

474

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Contents

38 Indian humanitarianism under colonial rule: Imperial loyalty, national self-​assertion, and anti-​colonial emancipation  Maria Framke

486

39 Famine relief in colonial South Asia, 1858–​1947: Regional and global perspectives  Joanna Simonow

497

Index 

510

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 23.1 Map of Madras, 1677  295 23.2 Detail of map of Calcutta, 1887–​93, sheet M10  298 23.3 James W. Browne, ‘Sailing directions from Chowringhee to Bankshall’, c.1876  299 23.4 Bombay Presidency, showing the abkari system  305 27.1 Cover of volume 3, Deshi Kasrati (Indian Gymnastics), from Vyayam Dnyankosha (Encyclopedia of Physical Culture), edited by D.C. Mujumdar 348 27.2 Saint Nihal Singh, ‘The Indian Hercules’  351 27.3 ‘Gandhi drafting a document at Birla House, New Delhi in August 1942’  353 28.1 Still from D.G. Phalke’s first feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913)  361 28.2 Bavarians in Bombay: Franz Osten, Josef Wirsching, and their Indian film crew at the set of Shiraz in India (1928)  365 29.1 ‘Maihar Band’  374 29.2 ‘V.N. Bhatkhande’  377 29.3 ‘The nautch party at Woolagiri Mines, c.1895’  381 29.4 ‘Kundan Lal Saigal, publicity photo, signed 1939’  382 30.1 Ad for ‘Godrej Vegetable Soap: Chavi Brand’  388 30.2 ‘He thought his shirt was white …’, ad for Sunlight Soap, made by Lever Brothers (India) Ltd (note the comment ‘Made in India from pure vegetable oils only’)  389 30.3 ‘Feel as young as your son’, ad for Kiran Jawani, made by Amritdhara Pharmacy of Lahore  390

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List of illustrations

39.1 Women at a government famine relief work camp during the famine of 1896/​7  39.2 Missionary fundraising for Indian famine relief during the famine of 1899/​1900 

500 504

Table 30.1 Consuming categories in India with estimates of their annual income  391

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CONTRIBUTORS

Ravi Ahuja, Göttingen University, Professor David Arnold, University of Warwick, Emeritus Professor Hayden Bellenoit, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, Associate Professor Nandini Bhattacharya, University of Dundee, Lecturer Michael Philipp Brunner, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, Postdoctoral Researcher Swati Chattopadhyay, University of California –​Santa Barbara, Professor Sanjukta Das Gupta, Sapienza University of Rome, Associate Professor Arnab Dey, State University of New York at Binghamton, Associate Professor; Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, South Asia Program, Visiting Scholar Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ETH Zürich, Professor Maria Framke, Leibniz-​Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Affiliated Researcher William Gould, University of Leeds, Professor Hans Harder, Heidelberg University, Professor Brian A. Hatcher, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, Professor Douglas E. Haynes, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, Professor Nikolay Kamenov, University of Basel, Guest Lecturer Shompa Lahiri, Queen Mary, University of London, Research Fellow xiv

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List of contributors

Heike Liebau, Leibniz-​Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Research Associate Bob van der Linden, University of Amsterdam, Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms, Affiliated Researcher Michael Mann, Humboldt University Berlin, Professor Claude Markovits, Centre d’Études de l’Inde et l’Asie du Sud, Paris, Emeritus Professor Joseph McQuade, University of Toronto, Postdoctoral Fellow Satoshi Mizutani, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Professor Projit Bihari Mukharji, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Associate Professor Michael Offermann, University of Berne, Affiliated Researcher Margrit Pernau, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Senior Researcher Gavin Rand, University of Greenwich, London, Associate Professor Utsa Ray, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Assistant Professor Aditya Sarkar, University of Warwick, Assistant Professor Tanika Sarkar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Emeritus Professor Sebastian Schwecke, Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, New Delhi, Director Teresa Segura-​Garcia, University Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, Postdoctoral Researcher Dwaipayan Sen, FLAME University, Pune, Associate Professor Joanna Simonow, University of Vienna, Department of Contemporary History, Postdoctoral Research Fellow Nitin Sinha, Leibniz-​Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Senior Research Fellow Carolien Stolte, Leiden University, Lecturer Ian Talbot, University of Southampton, Professor Elena Valdameri, ETH Zürich, Postdoctoral Researcher David Washbrook, formerly University of Oxford, Emeritus Professor Carey Watt, St Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, Professor

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newgenprepdf

ABBREVIATIONS

PAC A BL CUP EPW IESHR IOR JAS MAS NAI OUP

Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections British Library Cambridge University Press Economic and Political Weekly Indian Economic & Social History Review India Office Records Journal of Asian Studies Modern Asian Studies National Archives India Oxford University Press

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INTRODUCTION The history of colonialism in South Asia: Cutting out paths through the historiographical jungle Harald Fischer-​Tiné & Maria Framke

Historical scholarship on colonial South Asia was a fairly limited and manageable field until the 1980s, after which it exploded. There were several reasons for this unprecedented growth. First, countless empirical studies and new theoretical insights added new layers of complexity to established approaches and historiographical subfields such as economic history, political history, and social history. Thus, for instance, insights from gender history, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies have profoundly affected how seemingly straightforward and ‘conventional’ topics, such as the history of anti-​colonial nationalism, are approached and studied today. These influences have also resulted in more recent histories of Indian nationalism also paying attention to visual1 or literary imaginings of the nation,2 debates about female purity and national identity, and the impact of spatial models derived from Western economic thought.3 Similarly, the time-​honoured subfield of agrarian history has been enriched by environmental histories and studies revolving around the trajectories of the much-​debated Anthropocene.4 Various ‘turns’ within mainstream history writing as well as in contiguous disciplines have also opened up entirely new (and, arguably, extremely rewarding) avenues of enquiry. At the same time, practitioners of South Asian colonial history such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Christopher Bayly made theoretical and methodological advances that brought the (sub)discipline into the scholarly limelight, not only among historians but also within the humanities and social sciences more broadly. As a result, the historiography of the Indian subcontinent under colonial rule has grown much more diverse, multifaceted, and (for the most part) sophisticated than ever before. The well-​established triad of political, social, and economic history is now complemented and enriched by an increasingly refined body of literature on other branches of the discipline, including cultural history, the history of science and medicine, environmental history, transport history, body history, media history, the history of the everyday, and the history of emotions, to name just a few of the new and exciting fields that have lately transformed the historiography of colonial South Asia. Finally, since the early 2000s the conventional spatial framing that situated South Asian history either exclusively within the territorial bounds of the Indian subcontinent or, less frequently, within the British Empire has come under attack. The increasing popularity of the global history paradigm during this period has inspired a number of scholars to study many aspects of South Asian colonial history using a variety of alternative border-​crossing frameworks

DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-1

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Harald Fischer-Tiné and Maria Framke

ever since.5 As a result, historians of the Indian subcontinent have become used to less conventional approaches, such as ‘oceanic’,6 transnational, trans-​colonial, or entangled histories, in addition to the seemingly ‘natural’ national or imperial frames of analysis.7 Once again, established fields of enquiry such as the history of anti-​colonial nationalism have been affected by this spatial reconfiguration.8 This ever more complex picture poses multiple challenges, because of which we, the editors of this handbook, have taken on the task of accounting for these developments and clearing pathways through the sophisticated jungles of diverse historiographical specialities and subspecialities. Our book is designed to serve as a comprehensive and nuanced yet readable single-​volume introduction to the vast field of the history of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent. It pays due respect to the classic work of earlier generations of historians but also shines a spotlight on the multifaceted research carried out since the 1990s on the history of colonial South Asia. In other words, this book has been conceived, written, and compiled with a view to guiding both experts and newcomers through the myriad sub-​strands of the variegated historiography of colonial South Asia. In our first exploratory meeting in a Berlin café in December 2017, we editors knew immediately that the selection of potential authors required careful consideration given the magnitude of this project. Our aim has been to solicit contributions from both established and up-​and-​coming scholars of colonial South Asia with a view to introducing a broad readership to different methods, specialities, and research topics in traditional as well as cutting-​edge areas of study. At the same time, we showcase the geographical distribution of scholars working in this area, as the contributors to this volume are based in South Asia, North America, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Japan. As the only constraint that we imposed upon the authors was that they write about their areas of specialization in a way that would be accessible to a broad audience without prior knowledge, the individual chapters illustrate different approaches and preoccupations. Some contributors summarized the main trends in the literature of their subfield or topic, others wrote chronological surveys, while still others used their own research as the starting point for more general discussions. This diversity of styles and approaches can certainly be said to be representative of the multifaceted character of the field as a whole. At the same time, we feel, it will guarantee that a cover-​to-​cover reading of the entire volume –​although this is, admittedly, rarely practised when it comes to handbooks –​would certainly be an enjoyable exercise. There has been no dearth of one-​volume introductions to the history of modern India or colonial South Asia over the past two decades.9 In most cases, such single-​authored (or sometimes couple-​authored) textbooks present a very broad chronological narrative of historical developments in the Indian subcontinent under colonialism, more often than not with an emphasis on the political, economic, and social history of the region. In contrast, very few publications introduce less traditional subfields within the historiography or provide an overview of the actual existing variety in historical studies.10 To achieve this latter ambition, one must bring together the expertise of a large number of scholars. In other words: only a comprehensive anthology can effectively map the field. Equally crucial for such a project is, of course, the selection of the potential topics themselves. Even Routledge’s series editor’s generous conditions, which allowed us to include 40 chapters of around 7,000 words each, were not enough to enable us to take in some of the topics that emerged from our first brainstorming efforts. One of the first casualties of this selection process was a planned chapter on the history of the ‘other’ colonial empires in South Asia, dealing with the Portuguese, Dutch, and French presence in the region; these other empires do appear in some of the present chapters, however. Further, as the manifold histories of British India were the starting point for most 2

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Introduction: Colonialism in South Asia

of the chapters in this handbook, colonial South Asia beyond India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh is mostly neglected. Thus, the histories of Ceylon, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives under colonialism are not addressed in the contributions. We also refrained from including some predictable topics that have already received a great deal of historiographical attention in other contexts, such as the ‘Great Indian Rebellion’ of 1857–​59.11 In other cases, we had to choose between two similar topics. Thus, for example, we opted to include an article on the history of music under the Raj at the expense of a contribution on the visual arts, because of the ready availability of several helpful and fairly up-​to-​date introductions on the latter subject.12 We also discarded the idea of including a chapter on the history of the historiography of colonial South Asia for similar reasons, as a number of such meta-​surveys have already been written. A planned chapter on the history of sexuality –​a field that has started to flourish in the past two decades13 –​was also discarded when it became apparent that the topic already played a significant role in several other chapters. Not all selections and omissions were the result of rational choices, however, as completely unexpected difficulties hampered the progress of the manuscript even from its early stages. The onslaught of the Covid-​19 pandemic overlapped with the time earmarked for our authors to write, submit, and revise their respective contributions. As a result of the additional academic and domestic burdens connected with the lockdown prevailing in most countries during spring and summer 2020, some scholars were suddenly forced to withdraw from the project. For instance, two essays on South Asian plantation labour and the complex relations between religion and personal law were particularly regrettable cases of collateral damage caused by the global Covid-​19 crisis. Nevertheless, once the contours of the volume had taken concrete shape in spite of these odds, we saw that the handbook could be subdivided into six thematic parts. This distribution enables us to provide a comprehensive overview of many novel aspects of South Asia’s colonial history as well as the state of the art in more entrenched fields of historical enquiry. The first part delineates Overarching Themes and Debates in the field. The contributions in this section give an overview of eight topics widely considered to be pivotal to the field of modern South Asian history, which have produced particularly lively discussions and controversies among South Asianists in the past. The themes discussed here include topics as varied as colonial state formation, shifting gender norms, the reordering of religion, and the transformation of caste under colonial rule. The chapters in this introductory section are designed to acquaint the reader with the key debates and controversies revolving around these issues, and are therefore somewhat broader, both thematically and chronologically, than those in the following parts. The handbook’s five remaining parts each introduce one broad area of historiography from several angles. The discussions in the chapters in these sections bring to the fore new research trends, engage with an often extensive scholarship, reconstruct research turns and debates, and/​ or highlight new departures. The second part of the handbook, on The Worlds of Economy and Labour, includes contributions on the history of Indian big business and the question and practices of revenue extraction in South Asia. Whereas economic history at least gets cursory attention in most of the survey textbooks referred to previously, the history of labour is frequently overlooked. It is for this reason that we wanted to give this important and well-​researched field a higher visibility. Thus, the focus in this section is not only the most obvious topic –​the emergence of a modern urban-​industrial labour force in colonial India –​but also other, in the historiography often neglected labour categories, such as military and informal labour, too. The third part takes up the subject of Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education. The chapters under this heading analyse various taxonomies undergirding colonial rule. They also go further, and aim to understand the effects of such taxonomies on the 3

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actual practice of governance and the experience of being ruled. Our selection highlights some vibrant topics of study, such as the history of race as a ‘scientific’ and legal category as well as in its applied form as a practice of social differentiation. Another subject that has generated much scholarly interest of late is the emergence of ‘Indian terrorism’ as a political and legal category. The respective chapter in this handbook outlines the multifaceted consequences of ‘terrorist’ activities, emphasising that one of the most significant was the designing of ‘counterterrorist’ strategies by the colonial authorities. The fourth part of the book grapples with issues of Environment and Space. Reflecting the impact of the ‘spatial turn’ on South Asian historiography,14 some chapters in this section take a fresh look at the influence of spatial configuration on landscapes, resource management and biodiversity, knowledge production, mobility and trade, as well as on nationalist mobilisation and resistance. The contributions revisit familiar themes, such as the agrarian history of the subcontinent and the trajectories of the colonial ‘hill station’, but also address more recent concerns, such as environmental history and the history of transport. In like vein, the effects and scholarly endeavours resulting from the ‘cultural turn’ and German Alltagsgeschichte (i.e. ‘history of the everyday’) are explored in Part V, which engages with Culture, Media, and the Everyday. The chapters in this section explore a variety of historiographical currents. Thus, several contributions are clearly influenced by the cultural turn and reconstruct the history of literary public spheres, musical and film history, and the history of emotions. Another set of chapters in this section explores different elements of everyday life, such as patterns of consumption, dietary habits, and the practice of physical culture. Finally, the sixth part reflects the increasing impact of global and transregional perspectives on the history of the Indian subcontinent in the colonial era. It brings together a number of rich and variegated contributions from the new flourishing subfield concerned with situating Colonial South Asia in the World. These contributions highlight South Asia’s intellectual, political, economic, military, and material interconnectedness with neighbouring and faraway regions, while paying close attention to the circulation of people, commodities, money, and ideas. The chapters on the long-​distance migration of South Asian women, India’s role in the two world wars, and the global repercussions of Indian famines are only some examples that illustrate the enormous potential of this novel approach. All in all, despite knowing that not all of the many fertile fields of historical enquiry into the Indian subcontinent in the colonial era can be adequately represented in our selection, we are confident that our handbook provides a fascinating cross-​section of rich scholarship that goes beyond the world of ‘area studies’ and deservedly attained global visibility in mainstream historiography. Thus, its function in clearing pathways in the historiographical jungle aside, we sincerely hope that this anthology also serves as an appetiser for those who are yet to discover the rich history of colonial South Asia. In conclusion, we would like to express our thanks to those who have supported this project in various ways. Gratitude is due to Dorothea Schaefter from Routledge, who approached us with the suggestion for such a volume, and to Alexandra de Brauw from Routledge, who supported us during the preparation and submission of the manuscript. For most thematic sections, one or more historians supported the two editors and acted as editorial advisors, specifically because of their particular expertise or field of specialisation. We would especially like to thank Margrit Pernau, Nitin Sinha, Sebastian Schwecke, Nikolay Kamenov, and Prakash Kumar for their helpful feedback on individual chapter drafts. We also would like to express our gratitude to Joel Walder, research assistant at the chair of modern global history at ETH Zürich, who helped us greatly with the formal preparation of the manuscript. Vasudha Bharadwaj was

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kind enough to read and comment the introduction. Finally, we would like to thank Mike Richardson for his careful and diligent copy-​editing of the entire manuscript.

Notes 1 Sandria B. Freitag, ‘The visual turn: approaching South Asia across the disciplines’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 37 (3), 2014, pp. 398–​409; Ajay J. Sinha, ‘Visual culture and the politics of locality in modern India: A review essay’, MAS, 41 (1), 2007, pp. 187–​220. For some outstanding examples of this approach, see, for instance, Kama Maclean, ‘The portrait’s journey: The image, social communication and martyr-​making in colonial India,” JAS, 70 (4), 2011, pp. 1051–​82; Sumathi Ramswami, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Christopher Pinney, ‘The politics of popular images: From cow protection to M.K. Gandhi, 1890–​1950’, in: Arvind Rajagopal (ed.), The Indian Public Sphere: Readings in Media History (New Delhi: OUP, 2009), pp. 65–​86. 2 See, for example, Christina Oesterheld, ‘Campaigning for a community: Urdu literature of mobilisation and identity’, IESHR, 54 (1), 2017, pp. 43–​66; and Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–​ 1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: OUP, 2002). For a helpful overview, see also Javed Majeed, ‘Literary modernity in India’, in: Douglas M. Peers and Nandini Gooptu (eds.), India and the British Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2012), pp. 262–​83. 3 Ground-​breaking works include Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity and Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2000); and Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 4 For the contribution of a leading South Asianist on the broader Anthropocene debate, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Anthropocene time’, History and Theory, 57 (1), 2018, pp. 5–​32. 5 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Marrying global history with South Asian history: Potential and limits of global microhistory in a regional inflection,” Comparativ, 29 (2), 2019, pp. 52–​77; Gopalan Balachandran, ‘Claiming histories beyond nations: Situating global history,” IESHR, 49 (2), 2012, pp. 247–​72. 6 Particularly fruitful was the field of Indian Ocean studies. An excellent summary of Indian Ocean research in general is provided by Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘The Indian Ocean’, in: David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram (eds.), Oceanic Histories (Cambridge: CUP, 2017), pp. 31–​61. For pioneering efforts, see also S.C.A. Halikowski Smith (ed.), Reinterpreting Indian Ocean Worlds: Essays in Honour of Kirti N. Chaudhuri (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011); A. Jamal and S. Moorthy (eds.), Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social and Political Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010); and Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 7 See, for instance, Babli Sinha (ed.), South Asian Transnationalisms: Cultural Exchange in the Twentieth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher (eds.), Trans-​Colonial Modernities in South Asia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); and Kris Manjapra, The Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 8 Indeed, in the last decade there has been an entire wave of studies on the life and causes of Indian ‘long-​ distance nationalists’ active in the diaspora. See, for example, Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2020); Isabel H. Alonso, ‘M.N. Roy and the Mexican Revolution: How a militant Indian nationalist became an international communist’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 40 (3), 2017, pp. 517–​30; Maria Framke, ‘Shopping ideologies for independent India? Taraknath Das’s engagement with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism’, Itinerario, 40 (1), 2016, pp. 55–​81; Harald Fischer-​Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-​Imperialism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014); Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A long, strange trip: The lives in exile of Har Dayal’, South Asian History and Culture, 4 (4), 2013, pp. 574–​92; Manu Goswami, ‘Colonial internationalisms and imaginary futures’, American Historical Review, 117 (5), 2012, pp. 1461–​85; and Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 9 See, for instance, Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, 4th edn. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); Ishita Banerjee-​Dube, A History of Modern India (Cambridge: CUP, 2015); Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times: India 1880s–​1950s, Environment, Economy, Culture (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014); Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: CUP, 2012); Crispin Bates, Subalterns and the Raj: South Asia since 1600 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); and Douglas Peers, India under Colonial Rule, 1700–​1885 (Harlow: Pearson, 2006).

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Harald Fischer-Tiné and Maria Framke 10 Three publications come close to such an approach: Peers and Gooptu, India and the British Empire; Claude Markovits (ed.), A History of Modern India, 1480–​1950 (London: Anthem Press, 2004); and Michael Mann, South Asia’s Modern History: Thematic Aspects (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 11 Publications on the ‘Mutiny’ have been particularly abundant around the jubilee year –​i.e. 2007. See especially the seven volumes of Crispin Bates et al. (eds.), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857 (New Delhi: Sage, 2013). 12 Christopher Pinney, ‘The material and visual culture of colonial India’, in: Peers and Gooptu, India and the British Empire, pp. 231–​61. See also Freitag, ‘The visual turn’; and Sinha, ‘Visual culture and the politics of locality’. 13 See, for instance, Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020); Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850–​1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 2019); Shrikant Botre and Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Understanding R. D. Karve: Brahmacharya, modernity, and the appropriation of global sexual science in western India, 1927–​1953’, in: Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones (eds.), A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–​1960 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), pp. 163–​85; Ishita Pande, ‘Loving like a man: The Colourful Prophet, conjugal masculinity and the politics of Hindu sexology’, Gender and History, 29 (3), 2017, pp. 675–​92; Angma D. Jhala, ‘The scandalous case of the Rani of Lathi: Female regency, princely politics, and sexual impropriety in 1920s colonial India’, South Asian Studies, 33 (2), 2017, pp. 149–​64; Anjali Arondekar ‘Without a trace: Sexuality and the colonial archive’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14 (1/​2), 2005, pp. 10–​27; and Charu Gupta, ‘(Im)possible love and sexual pleasure in late-​colonial north India’, MAS, 36 (1), 2002, pp. 195–​221. 14 Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Ravi Ahuja, Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’, and Social Space in Colonial Orissa (c. 1780–​1914) (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009); Nitin Sinha, Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–​1880s (London: Anthem Press, 2012).

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PART I

Overarching Themes and Debates

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1 CASTE IN BRITISH INDIA Between continuity and colonial construction, and beyond Dwaipayan Sen

Introduction The historical study of caste during the British colonial era in India is a subject that has invited a very substantial degree of attention and scholarly debate. Long believed to have been one of the characteristic features of Indian society and polity, extant scholarship has concerned itself with the definition, theorisation, historicisation, and analysis of the presence and reproduction of this social form both in pan-​Indian and regional contexts, and across the major turning points of South Asian history. What is the most convincing way to understand this phenomenon? How do we explain its persistence across a wide variety of spaces and periods of time? How, if at all, was caste transformed with the advent and development of colonial rule in India? These are but some of the broad questions that have framed the voluminous literature on this controversial and complex subject. Perhaps one of the reasons as to why historical explanations of caste have generated as much heated debate as they have is the general sense of condemnation and embarrassment, if not shame, that has accompanied discussion of this particular mode of organising society and defining identities. For many commentators and observers alike, akin to race and racism, caste is a type of identification that ought to have died out but, clearly, has not. Not just the fact of its existence but its stubborn reiteration have caused no shortage of lament among those predisposed to modernist prejudices, which can be attributed to most historians of the modern era. Where one assigns blame or responsibility for the perpetuation of caste seems to have been an implicit question that has dogged many scholarly investigations into the phenomenon and its varied transformations. This is especially true if one considers caste in relation to the colonial context of India. As with a range of other dimensions of social life in India during this period, historical enquiry has turned on the question of how to assess and evaluate the effect of colonial rule on caste as social and political form. To put the matter in its starkest terms, was caste, as it has come to be contemporaneously understood, a consequence of British colonialism and its strategies of divide and rule? Or were there continuities in the nature of caste practices that bled into the colonial from the precolonial? Was caste an invention of the British, as one among a variety of techniques of governance over a socially divided population? Or was caste indigenous to Indian DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-2

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society and polity, such that the British accommodated its practice in the forms of government that they instituted during the course of the nineteenth century? Such concerns, to a large degree, have animated arguably the most prominent debate over the history and nature of caste and casteism during roughly the last two decades of the previous century, which is the subject of this brief historiographical survey. Rather than attempt an exhaustive review of the extensive scholarship on caste in colonial India, certainly not all of which has been framed by the questions raised above, this chapter maps out the terrain of dispute between two broadly conceived historiographical stances: caste as colonial construction, on the one hand, and caste as precolonial continuity, on the other. Although there are undoubtedly areas of overlap and attempted reconciliation between the two positions, the purpose here is to illustrate what has been at stake in articulating these differing approaches and understandings of caste through consideration of several of the representative contributions to this debate. As informed readers will immediately recognise, the aforementioned polarity largely follows a trend observable in scholarly conversations about colonialism itself: the very different interpretations of the phenomenon pursued by historians identified with the so-​called Cambridge school, as against those articulated by historians affiliated with the Subaltern Studies Collective and scholars influenced by postcolonial theory and historiography. Instead of pronouncing judgement on the relative merits and shortcomings, the focus here will be to offer a diplomatic treatment of the insights offered by historians positioned on either side of this debate, with the intention of familiarising readers unacquainted with these conversations to the substance of their contentions. The chapter subsequently turns to reviewing some of the key additions to the historical study of caste by surveying the recent emergence of Dalit studies. Although these works have been informed by the debate described above, they have also attempted to move beyond the terse dichotomies of the same. In so doing, they have charted new avenues for the historical understanding of caste in colonial India, including those that lay greater emphasis on the social and political activism of Dalit historical actors, as well as the varied constraints placed upon them.

The colonial construction of caste The emergence of the discourse on colonial construction within the subfield of modern Indian history may be attributed to several influences. At the broadest level, there was the change among scholars in the humanities and social sciences over the course of the 1980s in their methodological approaches as well as their objects of analysis. Widely referred to as the cultural and/​ or linguistic turn, this intellectual transformation witnessed a shift in historians’ interests from questions of social and political history to the terrain of culture and representation. In part a consequence of the growing popularity of structuralist and poststructuralist theory, historians increasingly moved from investigations of social and political forces and dynamics to examining how the past was shaped by the ways in which historical actors made meaning in the world.1 Another key influence was the publication of Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which offered a study of the typically denigrating ways in which key Western authors depicted the Orient in their works.2 Although based primarily on how these writers represented the Middle East, the book became a major source of inspiration for scholars studying societies in southern and eastern regions of the world, and how a vast range of colonial administrators, scholars, and literary figures represented the ‘non-​West’ in their work in an overwhelmingly deprecating manner that was untrue to the historical reality of these societies. Finally, the philosopher Michel Foucault’s insights into the intimate relationship between power and knowledge were 10

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extended to locations far beyond the sites of analysis on which he focused by a wide range of historians of colonialism.3 Whereas colonialism had primarily been understood as a peculiar means of political and economic domination of the West over the rest, Foucault’s analyses of how the making of knowledge, far from being an impartial and objective process, actually veiled the workings of power prompted a sea change in how historians came to understand colonial rule. Although there were certainly other sources of inspiration as well, these disparate strands of scholarly insight combined to produce a major transformation in the historical understanding of colonial contexts. The ways in which Western colonial powers had understood Eastern polities, societies, and cultures came to be seen less as self-​evident descriptions rather than as the consequence of a profoundly complex artificial process: colonial construction. Unarguably the most important interventions concerning South Asia in this respect issued from the anthropologist Bernard Cohn’s generative studies of British colonial rule.4 One of the key contributions of his works was to encourage a major shift in the understanding of colonialism, from its traditionally political-​economic and social-​historical emphases to an approach rooted in the cultural analysis of the phenomenon, or what would later come to be known as the cultural technologies of rule. A seminal essay by Cohn, ‘The census, social structure and objectification in South Asia’, exerted tremendous influence on subsequent students of the colonial encounter thanks to his powerful analysis of how a seemingly innocuous administrative mechanism such as the census came to have profound consequences for how Indians came to think of themselves –​and, as importantly, for how the British colonial rulers came to think about Indians. He showed how the colonial censuses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prompted a great transformation in how Indians thought about caste and religion in particular, two aspects of their social lives that British officials believed were the ‘sociological keys to understanding the Indian people’.5 Cohn’s illustration of the ultimately arbitrary, ad hoc, and muddled fashion in which British officials defined the social categories they set out to count in the service of administrative efficiency suggested the imprecision of their efforts. He nonetheless sought to demonstrate that the various attempts to systematise knowledge about the Indian population, and about caste, led, above all, to a flurry of responses from various caste groups, who became sensitised with the passage of time to the questions of precedence and status as they were identified in each subsequent census. The implementation of the census, in sum, contributed to the heightened awareness of caste and community affiliations. The deeper insight that lay at the heart of Cohn’s essay was that colonial knowledge about Indian society, and the means whereby it was accumulated, collated, and presented, far from being a seamless process, was not only riddled with errors but stemmed from the kinds of prejudices and perceptions British officials had of those they ruled. Furthermore, and as importantly, such processes contributed to quite drastic changes in how Indians came to understand themselves not merely in the colonial past but well into the postcolonial era as well. In short, the formation of colonial knowledge –​indeed, its construction –​wrought far-​reaching effects on the constitution and interpretation of Indian society.6 These arguments were carried forward and given greater empirical heft in a number of studies that followed. Rashmi Pant’s study of colonial ethnography in the Northwest Provinces and Oudh, for example, was devoted to the ‘elaboration of Cohn’s insights through a more systematically textual exposition’.7 Like Cohn, Pant sought to illustrate that the conceptualisation of caste as something that is the sum of ‘castes’ –​as the collation of substantial social entities that exist ‘out there’ –​owed much to the discourse of the British colonial administration on the structure of Indian society. Frank Conlon’s reflections on the census likewise confirmed the sense that the data contained in the British colonial censuses about caste were far from reliable indices of social reality. As he remarked, his ‘point of view is really that of a frustrated scholar 11

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who found that his own particular investigations on the history of a caste could not be much advanced through use of official census publications’.8 Although not centrally concerned with caste alone, Cohn’s essay also informed Arjun Appadurai’s reflections on the role of number in the colonial imagination in India, which hinted at the long shadow cast by the colonial state’s enumerative strategies and exoticising impulses on contemporary Indian political conflicts of caste and religious community.9 Most recently, Madhumita Sengupta and Jahnu Bharadwaj have pointed to the ways in which Assam’s regional complexities with respect to caste were flattened and made uniform as a consequence of late nineteenth-​century censuses.10 Undoubtedly the fullest expression of a colonial constructivist approach to caste came with Nicholas Dirks’ landmark study Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.11 One of Cohn’s students at the University of Chicago, Dirks took forward his teacher’s findings about how constitutive the history of colonial knowledge and the census had been for modern interpretations of caste through a book-​length study of how colonialism was implicated in the making of caste as a symbol representative of India. To quote him at some length: This book will address this question by suggesting that caste, as we know it today, is not in fact some unchanged survival of ancient India, not some single system that reflects a core civilizational value, not a basic expression of Indian tradition. Rather, I will argue that caste (again, as we know it today) is a modern phenomenon, the product of an historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule. By this I do not mean to imply that it was simply invented by the too clear British … But I am suggesting that is was under the British that ‘caste’ became a single term capable of expressing, organizing, and above all ‘systematizing’ India’s diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization. This was achieved through an identifiable (if contested) ideological canon as the result of a concrete encounter with colonial modernity during two hundred years of British domination. In short, colonialism made caste what it is today.12 Dirks sought to qualify that his was an argument ‘far more complicated than that the British invented caste, though in one sense this is precisely what happened’.13 Indeed, he did assign a relatively modest role to Indians themselves in the gradual stabilization of what caste meant. Yet, perhaps thanks to his commitment to a very particular interpretation of colonialism that saw the process as a hegemonic one, his analysis on the whole implied the far greater power of British colonial actors and the forms of knowledge they brought into being in articulating the meaning of caste. In Dirks’ rendering, caste was indubitably a colonial construction, the product of a complex process of reification that took place as a consequence of colonial rule itself. Castes of Mind pursued such an analysis over the longue durée of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through consideration of a dizzying array of colonial administrators and scholars and the kinds of work they undertook in their respective domains of activity. The book charted the gradual rigidification of what caste meant from the precolonial, when caste was but one among a multiplicity of units of social identity, through the early colonial, when orientalists came to recognise in caste an essence of Indian civilisational difference, to the late colonial, when what Dirks termed the ethnographic state came to ‘fix’ understandings of caste as a matter of varna hierarchy, through to the postcolonial, when a range of Indian figures laboured in the shadow of the colonial construction of caste to achieve their respective objectives. Although caste was not a matter of fundamental importance to administrators in early colonial India, the Rebellion of 1857 proved to be the critical turning point, as anxious colonial officials came to believe that the event had occurred, in part, because of their inadequate knowledge and understanding of 12

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Indian society and culture. In such a context, caste was privileged as the colonised form of civil society, with the colonial state coming to crystallise the social form as something that could be ethnographically studied, enumerated, and effectively understood. Rather than the persistence of fluid and fuzzy precolonial social practices, in Dirks’ treatment, caste –​understood, again, as a stable system of varna hierarchy, rank, and social precedence –​was the product of the colonial state’s vast enterprise to ‘know’ India, which was both motivated by and pressed into the service of colonial rule itself.14 The broader implications of Dirks’ study were spelled out in a rather polemically worded coda to Castes of Mind, which attracted its fair share of scholarly attention and controversy. Dirks strongly took issue with the so-​called Cambridge school’s historiographical approach to the history of colonialism in South Asia, and the emphases that group of historians placed on the continuities in social and political dynamics from the precolonial into the colonial, the roles played by Indians themselves in the formation and propagation of colonial rule, and the unstable, fractured, and fragile nature of colonial governance. To Dirks, such preoccupations had the effect of making colonialism ‘epiphenomenal’, and implying that Indians themselves were responsible for the advent and unfolding of colonialism in South Asia.15 They worked, in essence, to disavow the overwhelming power of colonialism to fundamentally remake the politics, society, and culture of the peoples it would subject, and to deny claims that it instituted a sharp rupture from the precolonial past. To the contrary, Dirks reaffirmed his commitments to a postcolonial historiography, an approach that stressed the long-​lasting consequences of colonial domination on the mentalities and social practices of the colonised. As he put the matter, ‘I have focused on caste to establish the salience of the imperial archive and the extraordinary impact of colonial rule, to the point that both the sources for the understanding of tradition and the terms of reference for tradition are implicated in colonial history.’16 In this historical imagination, it was colonialism itself that had structured the underlying conceptual terms whereby caste could be apprehended.17

Continuity Running roughly parallel to the emergence of postcolonial historiography, though with a far longer intellectual heritage that originated during the colonial era itself, historians of South Asia associated with the University of Cambridge during the last two decades of the previous century produced historical interpretations of caste, colonial knowledge, and British colonial rule in South Asia that, despite interesting areas of convergence, stand starkly opposed to those just reviewed.18 Among the characteristic features of this tradition, as alluded to above, one might include the appreciation for the variety of continuities in social and political dynamics that persisted from the precolonial into the colonial era, an awareness of the collaborative tendencies, if not agency, of Indian actors in the making and development of colonialism and its consequences in the region, and the acknowledgement that colonial rule, far from being a monolithic and uniform force, was riven with inconsistencies, variation, and a dependence on the kinds of social processes under way among Indians themselves. In the late Christopher Bayly’s pithy formulation, ‘Indians remained, therefore, active agents and not simply passive bystanders and victims in the creation of colonial India.’19 Without denying outright the asymmetries in power brought into being by colonialism, these historians placed due consideration on the indigenous social and political milieus within which colonial rule was erected in their analyses of modern India. The most substantial and influential historical statement on caste to have emerged from the Cambridge school has been Susan Bayly’s Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth 13

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Century to the Modern Age.20 Dismissive of the notion that caste was an orientalist fiction, Bayly was nonetheless appreciative of the work of scholars who had proposed that colonial constructions had been transformed into lived reality. Her own emphases lay elsewhere, however. Illustrative of some of the distinctive aspects of Cambridge historiography identified above, she argued that, ‘while colonialism deserves much emphasis, so too do the many changes which were under way well before the British conquest. Furthermore, much weight will also be given to the factors promoting the assertion of caste values in the years since Indian independence in 1947.’21 The role played by Indians themselves in propagating what Bayly alternatively termed caste values, conventions, norms, and lifestyles, prior to, during, and following the colonial period, was thus a central contention of her analysis. In her words: ‘The emphasis here has been on the importance of Indian actions and initiatives, with a focus on pre-​colonial states and rulers, and with British rule being seen as an active but far from all-​powerful element in the making of caste society.’22 Yet another characteristic dimension of Caste, Society and Politics in India, was the wide range of factors that Bayly marshalled in explaining the resilience of caste ideas and practices over the three centuries under consideration. A ‘multidimensional story of changing and interpenetrating reference points’, the story she told about the making of caste society involved a series of changes in Indian life, particularly in the domains of religion, state power, and the material environment.23 Caste conventions diffused as a result of economic change, the growth of modern communications and urban environments, the clearing of forests, and the spread of agriculture, besides the more familiar terrain of shifts in statecraft and religious observance. Despite such multiplicity in determination, and to stay with the temporal emphasis of her analysis, in Bayly’s account, the origins of a traditionally conceived caste society could be traced not to orientalist ideas of the social phenomenon but to developments commencing in the seventeenth century, which witnessed the rise of royal men of prowess who combined in their activities a growing affirmation and societal embrace of caste ideals. A roughly contemporaneous development that bled into but had originated significantly prior to the colonial period was the fusion of Brahmanical ideals with statecraft, which contributed to the spread of caste norms throughout the lands subject to what Bayly termed ‘Brahman raj’. In the context of the flux and uncertainties of the post-​Mughal era, such processes drew into their ambit a wide range of actors, seeking to fulfil their own aspirations in accordance with increasingly generalised and acceptable codes of caste conduct. When they came to be formulated, colonial perceptions of caste, although they undoubtedly played an important role in the making of a more caste-​conscious social order, nonetheless built upon these ‘broader political and social changes which were in progress well before the onset of colonial rule …’.24 The notions that early colonial observers adopted about caste were thus strongly informed by the practices of regimes that preceded their own. Although Bayly concurred that caste consciousness did become more pervasive under British rule, ‘this is not to say that caste was in any simplistic sense a creation of colonial scholar-​ officials, or a misperception on the part of fantasising Western commentators’.25 Moreover, the writings of Westerners about caste were much too diverse, contradictory, ambiguous, and varied to have shared any uniform understanding, much less having affected Indians’ own understandings and practices in a standardised manner. In addition, the latter were ‘decidedly not mere recipients of Western ideas’.26 Rather, as Bayly would go on to show, they were driven by complex motivations of their own that both responded to and went far beyond British colonial conceptualisations of caste. Of particular importance was the reformulation that the idea and place of caste would undergo once nationalism had emerged as a doctrine of paramount importance towards the end of the nineteenth century, and debate hardened 14

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between liberals, traditionalists, and those in between over how best to address the problems posed by such hierarchical norms. As crucial were the increased application and adoption of caste-​based identifications to and by those Indians affected by the economic transformations and dislocations of the nineteenth century. Two central insights thus stood out in Bayly’s analysis of caste in British India, which underlined themes of continuity, on the one hand, and Indian agency, on the other. First was the claim that it was not the case that India’s caste society was a consequence of European perceptions. Although there were certainly novelties to the techniques they instituted, ‘much that the British did in the way of collectively stereotyping, classifying and “essentialising” their Indian subjects was adapted directly from the statecraft of their Hindu and non-​Hindu predecessors’.27 Second was the argument that it was a wide variety of Indians themselves who had played the prominent role in propagating ideals and practices of caste, despite the evident consequences of British colonial rule in sharpening the awareness of caste distinctions and difference. Such conclusions could not but stand at some distance from those of postcolonialist scholarship. Yet another important contribution to the debate about caste in British India came in Norbert Peabody’s essay ‘Cents, sense, census: Human inventories in late precolonial and early colonial India’.28 Peabody’s study demonstrated how the caste-​based enumeration of households in the western Rajasthani kingdom of Marwar, and similar inventories that followed, shaped the early colonial censuses of the region. The suggestion here was that ‘colonial discourses often built upon indigenous ones in ways that inflected local politics about which the British initially were only dimly aware and indirectly concerned, but which later had a major impact on the constitution of colonial rule’.29 Peabody took objection to the manner in which extant studies of colonial rule assumed that colonial knowledge was formulated predominantly within a European epistemology that would come to radically transform those societies. In his reading, much postcolonialist scholarship depicted the colonized as ‘passive onlookers to the colonial encounter or, when they occasionally took to action, as unwitting imperial praetorians’.30 Reversing the direction of causality of impact, Peabody sought to show how early colonial censuses in Rajasthan and elsewhere in India relied upon the native officials, informants, and indigenous practices of counting castes, signifying their agency in enumerative practices widely believed to have been of exclusively European provenance. In perhaps the most arresting finding of the research on which the article was based, he illustrated how merchant groups were able to pursue their own agendas by inserting caste as the basis of social differentiation into early colonial attempts at enumeration. The wider implications of the study thus included the blurring of boundaries between overly reified understandings of ‘colonizer’ and ‘the colonized’, particularly when it came to the matter of counting populations on the basis of caste. The identification of significant continuities over the transition to colonial rule, and the substantial and consequential presence of indigenous collaborators in early colonial enumerative efforts, were of equal importance. In a similar vein, Sumit Guha’s ‘The politics of identity and enumeration in India c.1600–​ 1900’ reached conclusions broadly complementary to Peabody’s article, even if his analysis extended late into the twentieth century.31 Guha wrote against the notion (which had gained its share of popularity) that the emergence of modern political identities in colonial India was largely a consequence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century censuses. Departing from this view, he endeavoured to show through an assortment of examples over the long period he examined how caste and community identities were well defined and entirely significant in Mughal India; how the arrival of colonial rule, at least initially, left relatively unaltered classificatory and enumerative procedures; and how the social processes of identity formation continued 15

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in postcolonial India independent of official classifications. Taken together, they suggested a number of broader conclusions about identity formation in India. As Guha addressed his postcolonialist interlocutors: ‘The warm, fuzzy continuum of pre-​modern collective life was not suddenly and arbitrarily sliced up by colonial modernity. Local communities had long dealt with intrusive states that had penetrated along, and augmented, the fissures in local society.’32 Further, with the coming of colonial rule, communities ‘responded to the dialectic of colonialism and the opportunities of a new politics without being thereby transformed into creatures of the colonial or post-​colonial imagination’.33 Guha’s submission was that the identity of communities bore a tenacity that even, while at times dovetailing with the enumerative agendas of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial states, could not be reduced to the effects of counting alone.34 Perhaps the most recent addition to historical discussions on caste from scholars who have stressed precolonial continuities is Rosalind O’Hanlon’s article ‘Caste and its histories in colonial India: A reappraisal’.35 Based on a study of western India’s long tradition of caste commentary and debate, O’Hanlon sought to reconsider assumptions that the links between state power and caste were primarily a characteristic of the colonial state and its legal and administrative innovations, on the one hand, and that non-​Brahman critique of Brahman hegemony was the product of colonial rule, on the other. Rather, she maintained that ‘neither the use of Brahman expertise in Hindu textual law, nor the idea of an oppressive Brahman minority bent on depriving others of a dignified ritual and religious life, originated –​in Maharashtra at least –​ with the colonial state’.36 O’Hanlon thereby illustrated the significant continuities that linked precolonial histories of conflict and debate to legacies fairly deep into the colonial period. The Sanskrit Jativiveka, a text written by the Brahman Gopinatha approximately between the middle of the fourteenth century and the late fifteenth, and the caste distinctions it articulated between Brahmans and non-​Brahmans lay at the heart of O’Hanlon’s analysis of how such differences would inform contestations between rivalling parties of the Maratha state over subsequent centuries. She showed how this text was repeatedly invoked, cited, and recalled by conservatives seeking to forestall the advance of middling caste groups, and how it entered into the early colonial archive as well. Yet most revealing of all was O’Hanlon’s suggestion that the text’s differentiations between Brahmans and others came to inform the work of non-​Brahman critique in the later nineteenth century, particularly so in the hands of Tukaram Tatya Padval, who sought to undermine claims to Brahmanical purity by using the very logic of Jativiveka, and the subsequent discourses it inspired, against itself in his Jatibheda Viveksara. O’Hanlon’s account thus drew attention to a domain of Indian commentary about caste matters that not only straddled the onset of British colonial rule but extended beyond the reach of colonial knowledge. Late nineteenth-​century non-​Brahman critique certainly drew on the intellectual resources that became available under colonialism, but were no mere by-​products of colonial knowledge. What is valuable about their engagement with western India’s long tradition of argumentation about caste is that is reminds us that caste, as explicit or implicit hierarchy, is –​and has always been –​very much more than an epiphenomenon of the state …37

The emergence of Dalit historical studies Although debates about caste in British India along the fault lines just described will probably continue into the foreseeable future, this survey would be incomplete without at least a brief consideration of a comparatively recent and vibrant development in historical scholarship 16

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pertaining to caste, namely the emergence of historical studies of Dalits and their social and political mobilisations.38 Such studies have not been explicitly animated by the kinds of questions posed by the work of scholars examined above, and in some cases have attempted to move beyond the structuring binaries of those positions, but, taken together, they suggest yet another major factor to bear in mind when thinking about the meanings of caste in colonial India. In brief, such scholarship reminds us of the tremendous power of modern Dalit activism itself in shaping how caste has come to be contemporaneously understood. Rather than being mere derivative discourses, these works have foregrounded the substantial role of Dalit intellectual and practical agency in shifting the terms on which caste has been comprehended from a matter of social structure and hierarchy to questions of social and political justice. Early pioneering research on the Dalit movements of colonial India focused their energies on offering narrative accounts of their subject. Of particular note was the late Eleanor Zelliot’s study ‘Dr Ambedkar and the Mahar movement’, which was published many years after it was initially produced.39 Seeking to document the ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ of the Mahar movement, Zelliot settled on a number of factors, including the social and economic processes unleashed by British colonial rule in Maharashtra, the new political platforms that they won by virtue of the unfolding processes of political reform during the early twentieth century, the kinds of activism initiated by the members of the caste itself, and, above all, the fact of ‘Ambedkar’s genius’ and his leadership of the Mahar movement.40 Perhaps the most forthright claim of the study was the observation that the ‘push for rights was not an effort to move up a notch in the social system but a leap for the top, an attempt aided not by traditional methods of social betterment but by modern means’.41 As Zelliot would go on to show, efforts at Sanskritisation would gradually give way to processes of modernisation. Implicit in her study, however, was the suggestion that these methods were actively sought out and cultivated by Dalits themselves, rather than handed to them carte blanche as the result of colonial or nationalist benevolence. Although a number of path-​breaking studies of Dalit history on different regions of India followed in the wake of Zelliot’s, notably those by Eugene Irschick, Owen Lynch, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Gail Omvedt, a particularly significant research came with Rosalind O’Hanlon’s publication of Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-​Century Western India, due, in no small part, to the extensive use made of Marathi sources.42 Written in a historiographical context that had witnessed the influential emergence of theses about the socially elite origins of Indian nationalism, O’Hanlon’s was among the earliest studies to focus detailed attention on the ‘organizations and ideologies which arose amongst the lower caste social groups who took no part in early nationalist politics, or who actively opposed their programmes’.43 A further motivation was the concern to examine the actual content of non-​Brahman politics and ideology unto themselves rather than assume that material interests were the true forces by which they were impelled. O’Hanlon maintained that in Phule’s and his colleagues’ ‘brilliant effort of creativity and imagination’ in cohering a new collective identity for Maharashtra’s lower castes lay the root of the ideological impetus of the non-​Brahman movement of western India.44 Although they undoubtedly drew inspiration from a variety of sources beyond the ambit of local traditions, with Christian missionaries playing an important role in this respect, at the core of their forging a new and oppositional identity was their manipulation of existing symbols, religious rituals, conflicts, and other elements of Maharashtra’s popular culture. Non-​Brahman identity and ideology were thus moulded from indigenous materials and shaped by a hand that demonstrated great ingenuity in their formation. In so doing, Phule and his fellow co-​workers radically, and permanently, altered the grammar of caste dynamics and conflict in western India. 17

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Yet another landmark study arrived with the publication of Anupama Rao’s The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Although the second part of the book was concerned with paradoxical entailments of Dalit freedom during the postcolonial era, in the first part Rao lay emphasis on documenting the myriad ways in which Dalits in late nineteenth through mid-​twentieth-​century western India undertook the arduous work of their emancipation from the forms of disability and discrimination under which they laboured. A study of ‘how untouchables became Dalits’, the book offered an ‘account of how the stigma of being “untouchable” was redefined as an identity about historically specific forms of suffering and exclusion, and of how this identity eventually became politically powerful’.45 Central to this transformation were the varied struggles that caste subalterns inaugurated in defiance of their sanctioned subordination in domains as dispersed as schools, water tanks, temples, property, and politics itself, and in defence of their demand to be regarded as equal and rightful participants in such spaces. Crucially, Rao would assert that ‘it was largely (though not exclusively) through the activism of Dalits that untouchability was secularized and politicized, or, that certain socioreligious practices were redefined as forms of civic and political exclusion’.46 The wider implication of such observations thus extended the opportunity to appreciate the far-​reaching ways in which Dalit mobilisations transformed understandings of caste from being a matter of religiously ordained practice to concerns about social and political inequality. The processes of caste resignification that Dalit activists and politicians accomplished through their critique of the caste order dramatically changed the way Indians in colonial and postcolonial era apprehended the phenomenon. More recently, Rupa Viswanath’s The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, though primarily devoted to an examination of the various means of evading resistance to the class and caste subjugation of Dalits in Tamil country through the workings of what she identified as a caste–​state nexus, equally shone light on the persistent efforts by Dalits to seek avenues through which to overcome their suppression. A story of the containment and foreclosure of truly meaningful efforts to enable a substantive degree of freedom for Dalits by means of the spiritualisation and subsequent socialisation of caste, she nonetheless unearthed profuse evidence of the many ways they mobilised to secure relief from the oppressive conditions of their existence. As Viswanath would note, ‘[W]‌hen presented with the barest chance of altering the terms of the labor relation, Madras’s Dalits leapt at it.’47 These attempts included the novel alliances they initiated with Christian missionaries, the plethora of applications they submitted to the state to take ownership of their house sites, the ‘everyday warfare’ in which Dalits engaged to overturn the caste/​class subordination they suffered, and the demands of Dalit legislative representatives who desired the effective enactment of various ameliorative schemes to which their activism had, both directly and indirectly, given rise. Despite such sustained efforts to underline that caste was a peculiar form of labour exploitation, Dalits’ aspirations for political and economic justice were overwhelmed by the complex of interlocking forces that relegated address of their concerns to the nationalist social. Viswanath’s book thus illuminated how deep Dalit discontents shaped, but were ultimately and tragically managed by, social and political elites in ways that continue to have a resonance in the present moment. The volume Dalit Studies must receive final consideration in this review. Edited by Ramnarayan Rawat and K. Satyanarayana, the pioneering collection brought together historical and contemporary studies of Dalit life and activism, and sought to articulate an agenda for this burgeoning subfield of South Asianist scholarship. Set against developments in the 1990s in terms of the increased visibility of specifically Dalit concerns in the Indian public sphere and academia, the volume stressed a number of key areas of emphasis, including the

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foregrounding of issues of human dignity as central to the study of Indian history; examining practices that have enabled the persistence of caste discrimination; and moving beyond a historiographical framework defined by the antagonism between colonialism and nationalism.48 Following trends established by other historians of Dalit pasts, the contributions to the volume drew attention to practices of caste exclusion in ways that sought to refocus Indian historiography and social sciences. Second, they demonstrated that ‘Dalits were not passive imitators of dominant discourses and practices; rather, they actively articulated their own agendas for advancing struggles against caste discrimination’.49 The assertion of Dalit activism and agency in the making of the past, and the politics of caste, was thus a signal feature of the volume. As Rawat and Satyanarayana put the matter, quite bluntly: ‘It is insufficient to suggest that struggles against caste inequality emerged in response to the practices of colonial governmentality or to the demand for affirmative action’.50 The volume thus issued the reminder that Dalit conceptions of and resistance to their place in traditional caste society have acted as an autonomous force in conditioning the terms under which caste has been understood.

Résumé The debate over caste in British India has covered a considerable distance, though it would seem no discernible end is in sight. As this review has tried to demonstrate, historians have differed quite strongly over whether caste, as it has come to be understood, was a product of colonial power and knowledge, or whether precolonial continuities, elite indigenous collaboration, and Indian initiatives over the course of the colonial period of Indian history present more convincing explanations. In part, as I have suggested, this may have something to do with the conflicting assessments of British colonialism in South Asia itself that have evolved over several decades of scholarship. Such divergences perhaps also stem from what is meant by the term ‘caste’, given the large, and at times bewildering, number of ways in which it has been intended by scholars depending on their disciplinary vantage and methodological preferences. These are matters yet to be satisfactorily resolved. Yet, as I have proposed, the debate as surveyed could also stand to be enriched by the findings of the growing body of Dalit historical scholarship in recent years. There also remain some questions that may be well worth pondering as these discussions move forward. Despite the evident differences in respective historiographical stances, there appears to be a tacit agreement that it was primarily indigenous elites who were in dialogue with colonial officials over the course of the long nineteenth century. How, then, if at all, did subaltern figures participate in similar processes of knowledge formation and colonial governance? What were the consequences, if any, of their interactions? Turning to another matter, would there be anything to be gained from more rigorously distinguishing postcolonial governmentality from its colonial predecessor, rather than assume, as some seem to do, a relatively seamless transition? Furthermore, what could a focus on how upper caste groups navigated the transformations effected by colonial rule have to offer to these broader conversations about caste and colonialism? There has been a tendency, of late, to identify caste with Dalit life –​in a manner akin, in the context of the United States, to identifying the bearer of race with African-​Americans –​ to the relative exclusion, with some important exceptions, of the ways in which those at the higher echelons of caste hierarchy worked to retrench their dominance. Is there a case to be made for a critically construed ‘upper caste studies’? Relatedly, and finally, how can bringing questions of capitalism more firmly into the centre of conversations about caste and its reproduction help illuminate the analysis of both phenomena in India? It would seem there is ample

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scope for exploring the ways in which the capitalist mode of production was both inflected by casteist assumptions, even as it came to buttress and magnify an order that hinged on the extraction of value from those it deemed subservient. Was caste, in short, an ‘invention’ of capitalism? These are questions offered in the spirit of provocation and in the hope that they might inform the enquiries of historians, present and future, who wish to further extend the terrain of lively debate over caste in British India.

Notes 1 See Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds.), Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); and William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), for a variety of accounts on what such shifts in emphasis implied for the discipline of history. 2 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 3 Michel Foucault, Power/​Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–​1977 (New York: Vintage: 1980). 4 See Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: OUP, 1987); and his Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), for an overview of his contributions in this regard. 5 Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians, 242. 6 See Ronald Inden, ‘Orientalist constructions of India’, MAS, 20 (3), 1986, pp. 401–​46, for an elaboration of this theme. For important expositions on colonial knowledge and construction with regard to a variety of contexts, yet with differing evaluations, see Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: OUP, 1990); Philip Wagoner, ‘Precolonial intellectuals and the production of colonial knowledge’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45 (4), 2003, pp. 783–​814; Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: OUP, 2005); and Norbert Peabody, ‘Knowledge formation in colonial India’, in: Douglas M. Peers and Nandini Gooptu (eds.), India and the British Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2012), pp. 75–​99. 7 Rashmi Pant, ‘The cognitive status of caste in colonial ethnography: A review of some literature on the Northwest Provinces and Oudh’, IESHR, 24 (2), 1987, pp. 145–​62, 146. 8 Frank F. Conlon, ‘The census of India as a source for the historical study of religion and caste’, in: N. Gerald Barrier (ed.), The Census in British India: New Perspectives (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981), pp. 103–​17, 114. 9 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 114–​38. 10 Madhumita Sengupta and Jahnu Bharadwaj, ‘Caste census and the impact of colonial sociology in British Assam’, Asian Ethnicity, 2019, doi: 10.1080/​14631369.2019.1709802. 11 Note, however, the prefiguring of Dirks’ argument in Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990). 12 Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), 5, emphasis in original. 13 Ibid., 9. Such equivocations are what have, arguably, led less charitable readers to identify Dirks’ position with the notion that the British, in fact, were responsible for contemporary ideas and practices of caste. 14 See the following articles, however, for an appreciation of the limited influence of anthropological knowledge on colonial policy-​making: C.J. Fuller, ‘Anthropologists and viceroys: Colonial knowledge and policy making in India, 1871–​1911’, MAS, 50 (1), 2016, pp. 217–​58; and idem, ‘Colonial anthropology and the decline of the Raj: Caste, religion and political change in India in the early twentieth century’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 26 (3), 2016, pp. 463–​86. 15 Dirks, Castes of Mind, 306–​13. 16 Ibid., 314. 17 Although Dirks’ treatment is widely regarded as the most comprehensive articulation of a colonial constructivist interpretation of caste, see Padnanabh Samarendra, ‘Between number and knowledge: Career

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Caste in British India of caste in colonial census’, in: Ishita Dube (ed.), Caste in History (New Delhi: OUP, 2008), pp. 47–​66; and idem, ‘Anthropological knowledge and statistical frame: Caste in the census in colonial India’, in: Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar (eds.), Caste in Modern India: A Reader, vol. 1 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), pp. 255–​96, for efforts to critically engage with, yet move beyond, such a stance. 18 Interested readers may profitably consult Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000), for a richer understanding of the differences between these mutually opposed camps than can be elaborated in this brief review. But also see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Reading (the) late Chris Bayly: A personal tribute’, South Asian History and Culture, 7 (1), 2016, pp. 1–​6, for a sense of the relatively recent rapprochement, of sorts, between two key proponents of these perspectives. 19 Christopher A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 1987). 20 Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). As an aside, it is interesting to note that neither this book, nor its author, features prominently in Dirks’ Castes of Mind despite the obvious shared themes, and the fact that it was published several years previously. 21 Ibid., 2. 22 Ibid., 367. 23 Ibid., 365. 24 Ibid., 97. 25 Ibid., 97. 26 Ibid., 144. 27 Ibid., 373. 28 Norbert Peabody, ‘Cents, sense, census: Human inventories in late precolonial and early colonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43 (4), 2001, pp. 819–​50. 29 Ibid., 819. 30 Ibid., 820. 31 Sumit Guha, ‘The politics of identity and enumeration in India c.1600–​1990’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45 (1), 2003, pp. 148–​67. 32 Ibid., 162. 33 Ibid., 163. 34 Although it is beyond the purview of this survey, given its focus on the colonial era, see Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Leiden: Brill, 2003), for an ambitious reinterpretation of caste over the course of the past millennium. The relevant chapter on the British colonial period, and beyond, elaborates on the essay considered here. 35 Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Caste and its histories in colonial India: A reappraisal’, MAS, 51 (2), 2017, pp. 432–​61. 36 Ibid., 440. 37 Ibid., 461. 38 As noted before, this chapter cannot, unfortunately, aspire to an exhaustive survey because of constraints of space, and so settles on works that have proved especially influential. 39 Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013). 40 Ibid., 18. 41 Ibid., 13. 42 See Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-​Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–​1929 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969); Owen Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability: Social Mobility and Social Change in a City of India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Mark Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement against Untouchability in 20th-​ Century Punjab (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982); and Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage, 1994). 43 Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-​Century Western India (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), 3. 44 Ibid., 8. 45 Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), xi.

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Dwaipayan Sen 46 Ibid., 2. 47 Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 244. 48 Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana, ‘Dalit studies: New perspectives on Indian history and society’, in: idem (eds.), Dalit Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 1–​30, 17. 49 Ibid., 20. 50 Ibid., 26.

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2 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COLONIALISM IN INDIA David Washbrook

Introduction The economic relationship between Western Europe and the Indian subcontinent is a very long one, even discounting the Roman past. It became especially significant with the arrival of the Portuguese at the turn of the sixteenth century. Yet how much of it can be construed as operating under a ‘colonial’ dispensation is questionable. From some angles, the true colonial era might be regarded as very short –​from the assumption of direct rule by the British Crown in 1858 to national independence in 1947. From other angles, though, the application of force to gain economic benefit was a key part of the relationship from the very beginning. For this reason, ‘the political economy of colonialism’ may better be drawn across a broad canvas. Nonetheless, between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries its processes were marked not only by continuities but also by discernible breaks as circumstances, both in India and Europe, changed. Four different epochs can be identified, corresponding to different interests and imperatives. The first ‘age of mercantilism’ stretched from Vasco da Gama’s arrival in 1498 to the end of the eighteenth century. Its key feature was the search by Europeans for Asian products to export back to consumer markets at home. This search was never pursued by market means alone, however. From the first it involved attempts to use force and secure monopolies. By its end one European trading venture –​the British East India Company (EIC) –​had assumed effective state power over much of the subcontinent. Yet, even as the age of mercantilism reached its apogee, new pressures started to threaten it. The British Industrial Revolution crashed many of the export markets on which India’s overseas trade had depended, leaving a gap that was filled by two developments. Britain discovered that the land army that the East India Company had built up in the course of its conquests could be used as a tool of British foreign policy, overawing the world east and south of the Mediterranean. In addition, British business found one Indian product whose market had not crashed but promised exponential growth: opium. The period from 1800 to 1850 may best be described as an age of ‘narco-​militarism’. The military imperative continued throughout the nineteenth century. The importance of narcotics was eventually overtaken by that of other goods more profitable yet, however. After 1850 the revolution in steam transport allowed British industrial manufacturers to sell their wares in India on a previously unimaginable scale. Reciprocally, it also allowed Indian DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-3

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primary producers to sell their own crops in bulk on world markets. Further opportunities were provided for investment in infrastructure, especially railways. In many ways, the years from 1850 to 1914 marked the high point of the British–​Indian economic relationship, making it the quintessential ‘age of colonial capitalism’. Importantly, however, it was never entirely an age of ‘free-​market’ capitalism. The colonial state early on detected systemic contradictions, which it struggled to overcome, even at the expense of growth. And those contradictions came to the fore in the final ‘age of nationalism’, from 1918 to 1947. War, recession, and depression undermined the erstwhile imperial role of the Indian Army and sharply reduced the prospects of British capital. Instead, the lineaments of an Indian national economy began to emerge. In response, the rhetoric of colonialism turned towards possibilities of ‘cooperation’ and ‘Commonwealth’ between Britain and India, if never very convincingly.

Age of mercantilism, 1498–​1800 The arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century was, initially, an event of far greater significance for Europe than India. It signalled the exposure of ‘the West’ to new goods and commodities, which transformed lifestyles, consumption patterns, and economic operations over the next three centuries. South-​East Asian spices, Indian textiles, and Chinese porcelain and tea fundamentally altered eating and dress habits and helped to provoke Britain’s commercial and, later, industrial revolutions across the eighteenth century.1 In India, however, the impact was muted for a long time. The subcontinent already lay at the centre of a vast pan-​Asian trading network, especially in cotton textiles, spanning the Levant to China. At least until the late seventeenth century the addition represented by new European demand schedules was small, though, thereafter, it did start to become significant in certain regions, such as Bengal.2 Rather than trading volumes, the novelty of the Europeans was felt in other ways. The Portuguese introduced new crops from the Americas, which were widely adopted by Indians themselves: chilli, tobacco, potato, tomato, tapioca. In addition, if very reluctantly, they (and the Dutch, French, and English who followed them) debouched large quantities of specie metal taken from the Americas in return for the goods they purchased. This specie facilitated Asia’s commercial expansion, but was much resented by the Europeans, who saw ‘bullion’ as the lifeblood sustaining the power of their own states.3 Probably the greatest difference made by the Europeans was political, however, in which arena, from the first, they showed vaulting ambitions. The Portuguese set out to ‘arm’ the Indian Ocean in ways unknown beforehand, where commerce previously had been based on ‘free trade’. They imposed restrictive licences, fortified their ports, and took naval action against competitors deemed to be ‘pirates’.4 In this, they were also followed by the other Europeans moving into the region over the next two centuries. European aggression was always most obvious at sea, but had some corollaries on land too. As Philip Stern has seen, revisions to the EIC’s charter in the 1670s gave it (notional) authority to govern territory and make war.5 The Europeans’ tryst with violence had several causes. Most broadly, it reflected the bitter rivalry between Europe’s proto-​national states, whereby relations of war and trade had become inextricably entangled. Most rulers subscribed to ideologies of ‘mercantilism’, which conceived that, for profit to be made, it had to be forcibly denied to others. But, in the Indian Ocean, the Europeans’ position also reflected acute market weakness. When their manufactures were too crude to command Asian buyers, they had little to sell to purchase the goods they so desperately desired, and were largely dependent on bullion exports. What they really wanted was an ‘unrequited flow’ of goods from Asia to Europe, which violence alone was likely to give them. 24

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For a very long time, however, what their implicit violence achieved was not very explicit. Asian merchants carried on much as before, either evading would-​be European hegemons or manipulating them to their own advantage. Inter-​Asian trade still vastly outweighed any moving westwards, and, in practice, the operations of the European companies were heavily reliant on Indian intermediaries, who treated them as minor parts of their own business empires. Without the support of Virji Vora in Surat or Kasi Viranna in Madras, for example, the EIC would have had very little to trade.6 This situation also reflected how far the Indian states of the time partly tolerated and partly utilised the Europeans too. Inward-​facing and principally supported by land taxes, few Indian rulers had ambitions to monopolise overseas trade –​and rarely even contested the Europeans’ maritime pretensions. But, should those pretensions touch Indian sovereignties on land, they tended to be quickly crushed.7 The position started to change around the turn of the eighteenth century. Familiarly, the great Mughal imperium began to break up, giving rise to a series of regional ‘successor’ states. These became embattled against each other, desperately in need of cash and arms to support their military machines. Simultaneously, the rivalry between the European powers intensified, especially between the English and the French, who started to contest global trading supremacy. From the 1740s these two different arenas of conflict came to overlap. The English and French sought alliances with various Indian rulers, offering cash and arms training in the ‘new’ techniques of infantry warfare then developing in Europe. Their demands were for trading privileges and, increasingly, liens on tax revenues. Insidiously, their influence crept into the barracks and treasuries of the new regional rulers. For a while the full implications were scarcely grasped by either side. Indian rulers remained obsessed with their own internecine strife, recognising the Europeans more as bankers and mercenaries than potential ‘kings’. Equally, the Europeans themselves were bitterly divided over how far they should go towards bearing the full responsibilities (and costs) of Indian government.8 Over the final third of the eighteenth century the issues were decided in favour of the EIC. Two factors perhaps were critical. First, the governing structures of the Company gave primacy to ‘men on the spot’, whose immediate decisions were difficult to recall from thousands of miles away. The Company’s leading servants were not paid large salaries to encourage corporate loyalty but were expected to make their own fortunes via ‘private trade’. Obviously, those fortunes were likely to be much greater when their owners could call on state power to swell them. The local agents of the Company pressed ahead with the expansion of its territories almost regardless of rising corporate costs and the efforts of London to stop them.9 Furthermore, the conflict between Britain and France moved beyond dynastic rivalry to signal war between hostile identities and ideologies. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (from 1792 to 1815) were fought across the world, from the Americas to Java, over issues touching the meanings of freedom and tyranny. For the British, victory over the French and their allies (such as the notorious Tipu Sultan of Mysore) became a national duty. Ironically, by the wars’ end, the British state had not only accepted responsibility for the curious assemblage of lands (and tax privileges) put together by the EIC but was celebrating them as an empire gained in the defence of liberty.10 Behind this well-​known story, however, there were also a series of less transparent changes in the relations of global capitalism. In the later seventeenth century the export of Indian cottons to Western Europe grew to many millions of yards –​making fortunes for Company merchants but threatening to ‘de-​industrialise’ the European textile industry. Governments started to pass what were known in England as ‘Calico Acts’, setting up tariff barriers against cheap Indian imports. These eliminated the staple of the India–​Europe trade, leaving the Company struggling to meet high risks and heavy costs.11 25

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To sustain profitability, the Europeans had to diversify their products and markets. The Dutch had long subsidised their operations out of Java by cutting themselves in on ‘country trades’ within Asian itself. Over the course of the eighteenth century the British followed suit. They deepened their involvement in Indian markets for indigo and saltpetre (essential in making gunpowder).12 They also cast their gaze more widely, looking, in part, westwards towards the Atlantic world. Indian cloth became a key item in the West African slave trade, and was also re-​exported to the Americas.13 But, even more, the Company looked eastwards where it discovered in China a new set of products capable of replacing Indian cottons in the affections (and pockets) of European consumers. Chinese porcelain and tea in the later eighteenth century filled the commercial role played by Indian textiles in the seventeenth –​and were purchased with goods and commodities acquired in India. India now started to become the pivot in a series of multilateral trades, making it far more important to Britain than as a simple trading partner.14 Moreover, servicing these multilateral trades drew the Company into a much closer relationship with the Indian state system. In the textile trade, it meant serving ever wider markets with ever more varied demand schedules, which put pressure on the maintenance of price and quality and the timing of delivery. Yet the industry, notoriously, was dominated by quasi-​ independent artisans who resisted attempts at direction and profited from market competition.15 The Company appealed first to its Indian merchant intermediaries and, then, their local rulers to reduce labour to the subordinate position familiar in Europe itself. And, where that failed, it pursued state power in its own right to ‘properly discipline’ workers. By the turn of the nineteenth century the Company was relying largely on monopoly power and criminal law to secure its textile ‘investment’.16 The implications of the China trade also pulled it in the same political direction. The Chinese had no more use for the Europeans’ inferior products than their Indian counterparts. But they would accept raw cotton, silver bullion, and opium taken from India. Raw cotton was cheapest when acquired in lieu of tax payments. Silver could be taken from the Indian revenue system without raising ‘bullionist’ hackles at home. Additionally, Indian states had long held monopoly rights over the production of opium. From the middle of the eighteenth century the logic of its increasingly important China trade made the EIC gaze ever more avariciously at the commercial prerogatives of Indian rulers, giving it (and, even more so, its private trade interests) strong reason to grasp at their thrones.17 How important the emergent Indian empire was to Britain’s own economic development is much debated. In volume terms, the flow of goods from the East never matched that from the West and the Atlantic world. The two trading systems intersected, however, and they cannot entirely be separated. Moreover, goods such as textiles and porcelain eventually had strong catalytic effects on Europe’s own industrial systems.18 The exact quantities of wealth gained from the East are difficult to gauge, since most were dispersed via ‘private trade’. Furthermore, the numbers of people involved were always small. Yet it would not have taken many fortunes like that of Robert Clive, who bought Powys Castle, to alter the balance of property in Britain. At the very least, ‘East India fortunes’ contributed to the rising living standards on which Britain advanced its ‘industrious’ modernity.19 At certain times, they may have been even more important: Javier Estaban has estimated that, between 1772 and 1810, (reverse) bullion flows from India were crucial in financing Britain’s ultimately victorious wars against France.20

Age of narco-​militarism, 1800–​50 Yet, even as the EIC rose to power, Britain’s own Industrial Revolution was starting to take the textile export markets from which India had earned its wealth. The question of India’s 26

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‘de-​industrialisation’ in the nineteenth century is complex and has exercised the imagination of many generations since 1834, when the governor-​general, William Bentinck, graphically envisaged ‘the bones of the weavers … bleaching the plains of Hindustan’.21 There can be little question but that India suffered severe relative decline in its share of world industrial output, which fell from around 25 per cent in 1750 to barely 2 per cent by 1900.22 Whether this signalled an absolute decline remains at issue, however.23 Given population growth and transport difficulties, it is probable that much weaving of cheap cloth for local consumption continued undisturbed. In addition, consumer fashions favoured multiple small niche markets, reflective of caste, religious, and regional taste differences, which were better serviced locally and were impenetrable to mass industrial production.24 Equally, from the end of the nineteenth century there is a good case that the handloom industry started to make a significant recovery using industrially spun yarn.25 Nonetheless, at least between 1800 and 1850, the evidence of serious damage is hard to overlook. Hand spinning, which added at least half the value to woven cloth, was progressively replaced by machine spinning, mostly done abroad. Moreover, the export markets that India clearly lost were those most associated with high value-​added products. Weaving may have survived but at a much lower level of productivity and reward.26 The problems of the textile industry added to those being experienced by other sectors of the economy not connected to the thriving China trade. From the 1820s to the 1850s India withered under a severe price depression that sapped its entrepreneurial energies. The causes of the depression were many. The general impact of the Industrial Revolution was to reduce price levels worldwide. In monetary terms, inflows of specie from the cloth trade now dried up, while the Company’s export of silver to China depleted domestic supplies –​in effect, draining India of money.27 Further, post-​conquest pacification policies had a major impact on domestic demand. The Company dismantled the courts and armies of the rulers it defeated. These had been key foci of demand in the economy, however: using tax revenues to consume locally produced goods. The Company’s demand schedule was rather different, and, if its officers spent lavishly in India at all, it tended to be on goods imported from abroad. The expanding colonial port cities of the period give an entirely false impression of the health of the rest of the economy, where, in the hinterland, de-​urbanisation and a drift back to agriculture and subsistence production were marked. Indian society became ‘sedentarised’ and ‘peasantised’, as Christopher Bayly has put it.28 For non-​China interests, this presented serious problems. With bilateral trade dwindling, it was hard to remit profits directly back to Britain; and, with the Indian economy in recession, it was no less hard to make them in the first place. The promise of reward that many in Britain had perceived in the Company’s rise, and the supposed beginnings of ‘civilised government’, began to dissipate. Indeed, the Company now started to come under a new wave of attacks from London, less for its ‘corruption’, as in the eighteenth century, than for the incompetence and mismanagement of its government. Parliament significantly modified the terms of its charter in 1813 and 1833 and, in 1853, formally refused to renew it, leaving it in a species of legal limbo until its final dissolution after the 1857 Mutiny and Civil Rebellion.29 John Bright even presented several private members’ bills in the House of Commons calling for British withdrawal entirely. That his call was ignored was, in part, a function of the China trade, which continued to grow on the smuggling by private trade interests of opium bought from the Company government in India. In some years across the 1830s and 1840s the opium monopoly provided around a quarter of total Indian government revenues and over a third of total exports.30 Moreover, India also came to supply Britain with two other ‘services’, ensuring that it would not be lightly abandoned. 27

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One was a supply of cheap semi-​coerced labour to fill the vacuum left globally by the abolition of slavery. Economic depression in India created surplus labour capacity, which, from the late 1830s, started to leak out to other parts of the colonial world where, for one reason or another, there were labour shortages. Much of it was organised under terms of ‘indenture’ that, albeit temporarily, mimicked the criminal sanctions associated with slavery, and involved ‘selling’ labour to other colonies in return for bounties. Indian indentured labour was ‘transported’ to the Caribbean, where it replaced field slavery, and to South-​East Asia and Africa and the South Sea islands, where it compensated for demographic deficits in plantations and mines.31 Moreover, beyond indenture, scions of the Indian professional and business classes also migrated to other locations around the Indian Ocean, from the Gulf to Hong Kong, providing key social and economic infrastructure to sustain colonial enterprise: infrastructure that could never have been provided by Europeans themselves, who were too expensive to maintain in the tropics. Some 5 million migrants left the shores of India in the nineteenth century, and it can be doubted whether there would have been much of a ‘British’ Empire between Africa and China without them. The second key service was military, and it was even more critical to the empire. In the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Company’s conquests in India became imbricated in Britain’s wider imperial adventure. Its armies were used abroad to evict Napoleon from Egypt in 1799 and to seize Dutch colonies in Sri Lanka, Java, and Cape Town between 1801 and 1811. Moreover, after victory was assured in 1815, they were not dismantled but used both to expand Company possessions in India and overseas in Singapore (1818), Burma (1826), and –​notoriously –​Canton (1839), where they defeated attempts by the emperor’s government to clamp down on opium smuggling. In effect, India provided Britain with 120,000 to 180,000 trained sepoys, standing permanently in arms, to act as the coercive arm of British foreign policy across Asia and Africa: the essential complement on land to the British navy at sea in policing the Pax Britannica. No less significantly, this ‘service’ cost Britain absolutely nothing, since the Indian Army was paid entirely off the revenues of India, of which it regularly absorbed half.32 India, in these years, moved to a central place in Britain’s imperial system, becoming the proverbial ‘jewel’ in the Crown. There was never any likelihood that Britain would give it up –​ for all that bilateral connections yielded few direct profits. Indeed, the prospect of any such profit was further diminished by the weight of taxes that the Company government levied in India in order to meet its inflated military costs, which contributed further to the swingeing economic depression. But India’s value in military and ‘service’ provision to Britain’s global enterprise more than justified its own stagnation –​at least in London’s view.

Age of colonial capitalism, 1850–​1914 Eventually, the economic pall started to lift during the 1850s, and sunnier times set in –​at least for some. The price of agricultural commodities began a steady rise that lasted until the First World War –​albeit punctuated by occasional outbreaks of devastating famine. The principal cause of the rise was the transport revolution associated with steam, with India’s first railway being built in 1853. The railways integrated markets across the subcontinent, laying the foundations for a national economy and connecting the interior to ports whence steamships could move bulk cargoes across the world.33 Trade prospects were further enhanced by the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), which brought Bombay within 27 days of London. India became a major exporter of cotton, wheat, jute, groundnuts, rice, and tea, earning a large surplus with the rest of the world. 28

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The transport revolution also opened India to mass imports from Britain, especially of manufactured goods. Ironically, India became one of the leading markets for British-​made cotton textiles, taking upwards of 25 per cent of total production by 1913. It also absorbed large quantities of other cheap British manufactures. In addition, expanding import–​export markets provided opportunities for investment in infrastructure. India was never a leading field of British overseas investment, but it did attract significant funding for its railways –​at rates of interest guaranteed by its government.34 In 1900 about 10 per cent of Britain’s total overseas investment was held in India, mostly in the railways. Further, India was obliged to pay a series of ‘Home Charges’ for the costs of its government in Britain. Together, the bill for imports, dividends on interest, and Home Charges meant that India ran a large payments deficit with Britain. This deficit was met from, and absorbed most of, the surplus that India earned from its trade with the rest of the world. After the 1870s, as Britain’s global industrial supremacy declined, its favourable balance with India became increasingly important –​enabling the former to cover an otherwise deteriorating global trading position.35 In effect, during the second half of the nineteenth century, India was drawn into a classic relationship of colonial dependence with Britain. It served as an agricultural colony, exporting primary products while absorbing imported manufactures and paying service charges. Even at the time, the costs and benefits of these arrangements were controversial, giving rise to debates that have continued ever since.36 One such debate concerns the standard of living and whether India itself enjoyed significant economic growth under colonial rule. The statistics are fragile, but it may be telling that even the most optimistic estimate would not put any rise in income much above 0.5 per cent a year between 1860 and 1914.37 A major check on growth came from recurrent famines, most notably from 1876 to 1878 and 1896 to 1898, when millions died. Colonial policies have been charged with responsibility for these disasters.38 Dearth, of course, was an endemic risk of India’s monsoon-​fed agriculture, and the 1870s and 1890s were times of chronic climatic instability. Nonetheless, British trade and transport policies may have exacerbated the problem in parts of India lacking irrigation. Prevailing policies encouraged cash-​cropping of non-​food crops, while running down incentives for local grain production and storage.39 In addition, before the 1876–​78 famine government relief policies were heavily informed by laissez-​faire theories that eschewed direct intervention in food supply –​anticipating that the ‘hidden hand’ of the market would work better. In the 1876–​78 famine, however, it became clear that the ‘hidden hand’ was crippled. Thereafter, the colonial state did begin to elaborate more effective famine codes, which, as Amartya Sen has seen, still underlie relief operations today.40 Apart from the war-​induced Bengal Famine of 1943, crop failure and dearth never carried the same human cost after 1900 that they had beforehand. Another debate has concerned how far the colonial nexus ‘drained’ India’s wealth, leaving little surplus on which to build cumulative development. The idea of ‘the drain’ inspired the early emergence of Indian nationalism, and its refutation was a cardinal item of imperial apologetics.41 Subsequently, it has informed economic theories of ‘the world-​system’ and ‘underdevelopment’.42 On the available evidence, however, its significance is not easy to measure. Britain certainly took a flow of payments for goods and services; but only a small part of it may have been ‘unrequited’ in this era. Most came from returns on capital, investment, and services that supported India’s own expansion. Admittedly, there were regular attempts by London (especially the City) to artificially shift profit margins in its favour –​manipulating gold/​silver ratios and inflating dividends and railway interest payments. Their overall effects may not have been great, however. G. Balachandran has estimated the ‘real’ drain at the equivalent of 1 to 1.5 per cent of India’s gross domestic product a year –​a considerable sum 29

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for British financial interests to ‘steal’, but hardly the difference between India’s development and ‘underdevelopment’.43 Rather than ‘the drain’, more convincing may be arguments focusing on structural impediments that Britain set up to prevent India following its own path of industrial development to become a competitor. Only two major industries ‘took off’ in India in these years: in cotton and jute textiles, for which market conditions were overwhelmingly favourable. Elsewhere, though, what were seen as several promising industrial opportunities were ignored. By omission, the colonial state did not supply the kind of protectionist measures that aided contemporary industrialisation in countries such as Germany and the United States, and which, as Alexander Gershenkron famously argued, were essential to any ‘secondary’ process of industrialisation after Britain’s ‘first’.44 Moreover, by commission, the colonial state repeatedly tilted the proverbial level playing field away from India whenever market forces started to move in its direction. Notoriously, the 1894 Cotton Duties Act –​when the government imposed special duties on Indian-​manufactured cloth –​made the British Indian perhaps the only government in history to penalise domestic products in its own markets in favour of foreign imports.45 By and large, both the colonial state and British business interests preferred to maintain the classic dependency model rather than risk the transition to a more competitive industrial scenario. And this became much the same for British political interests. After the Crown replaced the Company in ruling India in 1858, the Indian Army continued to play a leading role in supporting British foreign policy, especially in Africa. Serious problems emerged concerning its loyalty, however. The 1857 ‘Mutiny’ left a legacy of acute anxiety. The old Bengal Army was dismantled as punishment for its involvement in the revolt. A new Crown army was raised in the north-​west, especially Punjab, from ethnic groups said to represent ‘martial races’ more in tune with Britain’s imperial values. Yet they represented not only martial races but also agrarian communities, whose appeasement now became a major priority of colonial government. In particular, the landed social base from which they came had to be safeguarded from market pressures and economic exigencies, which could foster antipathy to the British Raj. But such pressures and exigencies were a natural corollary to the deepening commercialisation of agriculture that came with the railways.46 In Punjab in particular, the British Raj became highly defensive of what it perceived to be Indian tradition: passing laws to prevent peasant communities from losing their lands to market creditors and investing heavily in reproducing ‘traditional’ village communities across an expanding landscape.47 Moreover, the inflection towards ‘tradition’ came to affect social and economy policy ever more widely. Market forces might dissolve the social fixities of status and hierarchy and drive peasantries off the land. But urbanisation and industrialisation were proceeding far too slowly to absorb them, creating the spectre of agrarian displacement and revolt. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century Indian nationalism was also strengthening, and, at least in western India, linked the agrarian problem to the future of British rule.48 In these circumstances, the colonial state turned ever more cautious –​legislating widely to keep the peasantry on the land and restrain the remit of capital, whether in landlord or moneylender form. Tenancy and Usury Acts proliferated. How effective any of them were at protecting the livelihoods of the poor can seriously be doubted. But they made the social ethos of British rule in the later nineteenth century deeply conservative, setting it against the forces associated with market capitalism and industrialisation. In many ways, the mind of the Raj became possessed by a feudal fantasy: preserving a world of loyal zamindars and maharajas, and ‘sturdy’ martial peasants, against the threats represented by the twentieth century and modernity.49 30

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Age of nationalism, 1914–​47 That fantasy was shattered by the First World War. India supplied the British Empire with crucial support between 1914 and 1918, expanding its army by 2 million men. What emerged at the end was a world so different, however, that India could never again resume its central position in the empire. A first casualty was the army itself. Even before 1914 questions had been raised about its continuing efficacy as a global force: a mercenary contingent amongst national armies, carrying rifles onto battlefields to face howitzers. Its imperial death knell had already been sounded by the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899 to 1902), from which it was largely excluded, and in the 1914–​18 war its performance was judged poor. Slaughtered in France, along with everybody else, it was even defeated in Mesopotamia by ‘Johnny Turk’. After 1918 the Indian Army held only a few tribal peoples ‘in terror’, and by the 1930s it was not considered capable even of defending India against a first-​class power, such as Japan.50 Several other factors also led to the Indian Army’s demission from the global stage. The challenge of Indian nationalism now became urgent both at home and abroad. To utilise Indian resources for the war, British rulers had had to promise concessions towards ‘responsible self-​ government’ –​which, try as they might, they could not entirely evade subsequently. One such concession was that Britain itself had to pay for the future use overseas of the Indian Army.51 Diplomatically, too, Britain found itself having to treat Indian nationalism with a new respect. The United States’ victory in 1918, and the Treaty of Versailles, made the ideology of nationalism globally hegemonic, at least for a time. In 1919 Britain was obliged to accept India as a founder member of the League of Nations, even while it was still under British rule. Membership gave rights to its subjects/​citizens, which London could not entirely ignore.52 The Amritsar massacre of 1919 became an international media disaster, never to be repeated. The Indian Army also fell casualty to the economic changes that took place during and after the war. Retrenchment set in, with the numbers of Indian soldiers severely reduced. The need for retrenchment derived from structural shifts in the economy. The war had severely disrupted the old colonial trades, cutting British industry off from Indian consumers and Indian primary producers off from their global markets. In the vacuum, Indian industry expanded to satisfy domestic demand, which also absorbed a larger share of home-​g rown crops. In effect, the economy turned in on itself, to become noticeably more self-​contained and ‘national’ in character. Whatever the long-​term benefits of the shift, its short-​term costs were heavy and marked by recession and depression in the 1920s and 1930s.53 Further problems came from the rate of population growth, which surged, and declining soil fertility resulting from overcropping. Economically, the interwar period was very difficult for India, with an agrarian crisis simmering barely beneath the surface.54 The British, doubtless, would have liked to take India back to the (for them) halcyon days before 1914. Their own global trading position had suffered badly in the war. In India, though, they could no more reverse the clock economically than they could politically or militarily. The new Indian factories were vital to sustaining such economic growth as there was; and starving peasants could pay no taxes. As the colonial state struggled to balance its books, it found itself acting in ways that endorsed the emergent national economy. In 1934 it even approved the foundation of the Reserve Bank of India as a species of (quasi-​)national bank.55 Nevertheless, such policies were hardly favourable to what was left of the old colonial system. The railways apart, there was a progressive withdrawal of British capital. British factory owners (for example, in the jute industry) began to sell up to Indian successors.56 In addition, wealthier Indian migrants and traders, who had supported the colonial economy in other parts of the world, now started to come home to invest in domestic enterprise, as global trade choked 31

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everywhere on deepening protectionism. India’s own national capitalist class expanded and strengthened, creating acute problems for a British-​Indian state that still possessed significant responsibilities to its metropolis.57 Unsurprisingly, the discourse of Indian political economy now shifted emphasis. Reflecting the deepening dualism of colonial governance, it started to stress ideas of ‘cooperation’ between Britons and Indians in meeting common goals alongside other members of Britain’s imperial ‘family’. Politically, this meant a long process of constitutional devolution –​via the Montagu–​ Chelmsford Reforms of 1918 and the Government of India Act of 1935 –​leading to Indian ‘responsible self-​ government’ under a British constitutional monarchy.58 Diplomatically, it meant progress towards ‘dominion’ status within the concert of self-​governing ex-​colonies known after 1926 as the British Commonwealth. Economically, it meant participation in a system of ‘imperial preference’, which protected trade between the dominions and which cartelised markets to accommodate the interests of both colony and mother country.59 The search for Commonwealth and cooperation preoccupied the interwar years and, at the time, enjoyed a degree of success. In spite of bouts of mass civil resistance organised by the Indian National Congress, the Montagu–​Chelmsford constitution lasted its full term to 1935; and that outlined by the 1935 Government of India Act achieved even more. In 1937 it split the Congress itself, such that, regardless of the opposition of leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the majority of party members accepted ministerial office and ran the Indian provinces on behalf of the (still) colonial state.60 The bonds of would-​be ‘Commonwealth’ were still strong in 1939, when, in spite of a walk-​out by the Congress from government, more than 2.5 million Indians volunteered to fight with the British Empire in the Second World War.61 And this was true also in the economic domain. Indian business was attracted to the imperial preference system, in part because of the protection that it offered from competitors now more threatening than Britain. Indian industry had not been alone in benefiting from the collapse of British exports during the First World War; so did Japanese and American industry. Imperial preference offered nascent Indian manufacturers some respite from highly competitive rivals. Additionally, imperial preference involved cartel arrangements ‘fixing’ market shares between Indian and British manufacturers to their own satisfaction, if not necessarily that of their customers.62 As India started to turn protectionist, another new phenomenon also appeared: the multinational corporation investing foreign capital behind tariff barriers to manufacture for Indian consumers. Lever Brothers set the ball rolling in India in 1933.63 Nonetheless, Britain’s dream of a ‘cooperating’ Commonwealth embracing India was itself shattered by the Second World War, which left the two parties looking for the quickest way to divorce. Britain (under the premiership of Winston Churchill) largely abandoned any strategy of ‘cooperation’ for a reversion to military ‘command’ aimed at fighting a ‘total’ war. After Pearl Harbor, India witnessed the largest build-​up of ‘white’ military force (European and American) that it had ever seen. It became a front-​line state, which Britain ruled like an army of occupation and with an iron fist. As the Quit India movement discovered in 1942, any expression of dissent was subject to ruthless repression.64 By the end Indian opinion had been widely alienated, and very little of it was prepared to ‘cooperate’ with British authority any longer than it had to.65 Britain also sacrificed its residual economic interests to win the war. Most of its investments in India (including the crucial railway debt) were liquidated to pay for wartime supplies, and by 1945 it was Britain that owed India a large debt in the so-​called sterling balances.66 Economically, too, the market disturbances created by the war had been disastrous for certain Indian regions, notably Bengal, which experienced a brutal famine in 1943 for which Churchill was widely 32

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blamed.67 By the end the British Raj had lost both its prestige and the few economic assets that it possessed. Unsurprisingly, with an exhausted conscript British army, a victorious United States once again trumpeting the cause of national self-​determination, and more urgent imperial needs elsewhere, Britain brought down the flag on its Indian empire in 1947. Indeed, its main problem after 1945 was finding a way of exiting in the context of obdurate negotiations between the Congress and the Muslim League. When the British did, finally, ‘quit’ there were remarkably few legacies left on which to build an enduring ‘neo-​colonial’ relationship, at least with the Indian Republic. Even the new kind of ‘multinational’ capitalism represented by Lever Brothers had failed to pollinate, because of the war. After 1947 India very much ploughed its own economic furrow, of public-​sector industrialisation and import substitution –​as, also, its own diplomatic furrow, of ‘non-​alignment’.68 Colonial legacies were stronger in the new Pakistan, which inherited much of the old Punjab-​based imperial army. Pakistan also opened its economy more widely to foreign investment, advancing the cause of ‘multinational’ capitalism.69 From the 1950s, however, if this fostered any relations of ‘neo-​colonialism’, they were more with the United States than Britain, as Washington took on the role of global hegemon that London was now progressively obliged to abandon.

Notes 1 Maxine Berg (ed.), Goods from the East, 1600–​1800: Trading Eurasia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 2 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–​1650 (Cambridge: CUP, 1989); Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1660–​1720 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 3 See Jonathan Barth, ‘Reconstructing mercantilism: Consensus and conflict in British imperial economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, William and Mary Quarterly, 73 (2), 2016, pp. 257–​90; and John F. Richards (ed.), The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India (New Delhi: OUP, 1987). 4 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500–​1700: A Political and Economic History, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2012). 5 Philip J. Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: OUP, 2011). 6 K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660–​1760 (Cambridge: CUP, 1978). 7 Michael Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974). 8 Peter J. Marshall (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in Indian History (New Delhi: OUP, 2005); idem, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford: OUP, 1965). 9 Idem, The New Cambridge History of India, part II, vol. 2, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India 1740–​1828 (Cambridge: CUP, 1987). 10 Christopher A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–​ 1830 (London: Routledge, 1989). 11 Chaudhuri, The Trading World; see also Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence 1600–​1850 (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), 89–​114. 12 Chaudhuri, The Trading World. 13 Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (eds.), How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles 1500–​1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 14 Chaudhuri, The Trading World. 15 Riello and Roy, How India Clothed the World. 16 Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India 1720–​1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). 17 Christopher A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 1987).

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David Washbrook 18 David A. Washbrook, ‘From comparative sociology to global history: Britain and India in the pre-​ history of modernity’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 40 (4), 1997, pp. 410–​43. 19 Peter J. Marshall, East India Fortunes: British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: OUP, 1976); Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: CUP, 2012). 20 See Javier Cuenca Estaban, ‘The British balance of payments 1772–​1810: India transfers and war finance’, Economic History Review, 54 (2), 2001, pp. 58–​86. 21 Famously quoted in Karl Marx, Capital I (London: CreateSpace Publishing Platform, 2011 [1867]), 423. 22 Paul Bairoch, ‘International industrialization levels from 1750 to 1980’, Journal of European Economic History, 11 (2), 1982, pp. 269–​333. 23 For a broad discussion, see Ian C. Wendt, ‘Four centuries of decline? Understanding the changing structure of the south Indian textile industry’, in: Riello and Roy, How India Clothed the World, pp. 193–​215. 24 Douglas E. Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–​1960 (Cambridge: CUP, 2012). 25 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–​ 1940 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994); Tirthankar Roy, Artisans and Industrialization: Indian Weaving in the 20th Century (New Delhi: OUP, 1994). 26 For converse positions on the debate, see A.K. Bagchi, ‘De-​industrialization in India in the nineteenth century: Some theoretical implications’, Journal of Development Studies, 12 (2), 1976, pp. 135–​64; and Tirthankar Roy, ‘De-​industrialisation: Alternative view’, EPW, 35 (17), 2000, pp. 1442–​6. 27 Asiya Siddiqi, Agrarian Change in a Northern Indian State: Uttar Pradesh 1819–​1833 (Oxford: OUP, 1973). 28 Bayly, Indian Society and the Making, 106–​69. 29 K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘Introduction’, in: idem (ed.), The Economic Development of India under the East India Company 1814–​58: A Selection of Contemporary Writings (Cambridge: CUP, 1971), pp. 1–​50. 30 George A. Prinsep, ‘Remarks on the external commerce and exchanges of Bengal, with appendix of accounts and estimates’, in: Chaudhuri, The Economic Development of India, pp. 51–​166; Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800–​1842 (Cambridge: CUP, 1969). 31 Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1820–​1920 (Oxford: OUP, 1974); David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–​1922 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995); Prabhu Mohapatra, ‘Assam and the West Indies, 1860–​1920: Immobilizing plantation labor’, in: Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (eds.), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–​1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 455–​81. 32 Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India (London: Bloomsbury, 1995). 33 John Hurd and Ian J. Kerr (eds.), India’s Railway History: A Research Handbook (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 34 Daniel Thorner, ‘The pattern of railway development in India’, JAS, 14 (2), 1955, pp. 201–​16; Stuart Sweeney, Financing India’s Railways 1875–​1914 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011). 35 B.R. Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India 1860 to the Twenty-​First Century, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: CUP, 2013). 36 Tirthankar Roy, Economic History of India 1857–​1947, 3rd edn. (New Delhi: OUP, 2011). 37 Alan Heston, ‘National income’, in: Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, c.1757–​c.1970 (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), pp. 376–​462. 38 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2000). See also the chapter by Joanna Simonow in this volume. 39 David A. Washbrook, ‘The commercialization of agriculture in colonial India: Production, subsistence and reproduction in the “dry south”, c.1870–​1930’, MAS, 28 (1), 1994, pp. 129–​64. 40 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: OUP, 1983). 41 A classic statement of drain theory is in Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-​British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901; repr. Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010); and a classic refutation in Vera Anstey, The Economic Development of India (New York: Longman Green, 1931). For a balanced reappraisal, see Brijesh K. Mishra and Siddhartha Rastogi, ‘Colonial de-​industrialisation of India: A review of drain theory’, South Asian Survey, 24 (1), 2017, pp. 37–​53. 42 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-​System, vol. 4, Centrist Liberalism Triumphant 1789–​1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011); Andre Gunder Frank, ‘The development of underdevelopment’, Monthly Review, 18 (4), 1996, pp. 17–​31.

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Political economy of colonialism in India 43 G. Balachandran, ‘Introduction’, in: idem (ed.), India and the World Economy 1850–​ 1950 (New Delhi: OUP, 2003), pp. 1–​45. 44 Alexander Gershenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); A.K. Bagchi, Private Investment in India 1900–​1939 (Cambridge: CUP, 1972). 45 P. Harnetty, ‘The Indian cotton duties controversy, 1894–​1896’, English Historical Review, 77 (305), 1962, pp. 684–​702. 46 K.N. Raj, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Sumit Guha, and Sakti Padhi (eds.), Essays on the Commercialization of Indian Agriculture (New Delhi: OUP, 1985). 47 Clive Dewey (ed.), Arrested Development in India (New Delhi: OUP, 1988). 48 Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism: Bombay and the Indian National Congress 1880–​1915 (Cambridge: CUP, 1973). 49 David A. Washbrook, ‘Law, state and agrarian society in colonial India’, MAS, 15 (3), 1981, pp. 649–​721. 50 David E. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–​1940 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994). 51 John Gallagher and Anil Seal, ‘Britain and India between the wars’, MAS, 15 (3), 1981, pp. 387–​414. 52 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-​Determination and the International Origins of Anti-​Colonial Nationalism (Oxford: OUP, 2009). 53 Dietmar Rothermund, India in the Great Depression 1929–​1939 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992). 54 B.R. Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj 1914–​1947: The Economics of Decolonization in India (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1979). 55 G. Balachandran, John Bullion’s Empire: Britain’s Gold Problem and India between the Wars (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996). 56 Maria Misra, Business, Race and Politics in British India c.1850–​1960 (Oxford: OUP, 1999). 57 Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931–​39: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge: CUP, 1985). 58 R.J. Moore, The Crisis of Indian Unity 1917–​1940 (New York: OUP, 1974). 59 Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj. 60 D.A. Low (ed.), The Congress and the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle 1917–​47 (London: Heinemann, 1977). 61 Alan Jeffreys and Patrick Rose (eds.), The Indian Army 1939–​ 47: Experience and Development (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (London: Bodley Head, 2015). 62 Basudev Chatterji, Trade, Tariffs and Empire: Lancashire and British Policy in India 1919–​1939 (New Delhi: OUP, 1992). 63 Tirthankar Roy, A Business History of India: Enterprise and the Emergence of Capitalism from 1700 (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), 188. 64 Khan, The Raj at War. 65 R.J. Moore, Escape from Empire: The Attlee Government and the Indian Problem (New York: OUP, 1983). 66 Marcelo de Paiva Abreu, ‘Britain as debtor: Indian sterling balances 1940–​53’, Economic History Review, 70 (2), 2017, pp. 586–​604. 67 Madhusree Mukherjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 68 Baldev Raj Nayar, ‘India and the world: The vicissitudes of mutual adjustment’, in: Atul Kohli and Prerna Singh (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Indian Politics (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 307–​19. 69 Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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3 STATE FORMATION IN INDIA From the Company state to the late colonial state Michael Mann

Introduction When the East India Company (EIC) was founded by a group of London merchants1 in 1600, the merchants did not have the acquisition of territorial possessions, let alone the creation of a colonial state, in mind. The royal charter furnished the EIC with the monopoly of trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straights of Magellan, as well as with the exclusive sale of goods and wares in England. The charter also included the right to establish factories and to found settlements in any of the territories where the Company established trading connections. Apart from the establishment of factories at old trading centres in Surat (1612), Calicut (1616), Dhaka (1669), and Hugli (1676), for example, the Company also founded independent settlements in Madras(apatnam)/​Chennai (1639; Fort St George, 1640), Bombay (Bombay Castle, 1668) and Calcutta (Fort William, 1698). The royal charters vested the EIC with limited rights regarding jurisdiction and legislation.2 The establishment of a settlement and acquiring privileges from local rulers and the home authorities in London could take decades, however. For example, with the establishment of the new settlement of Calcutta on the river Hooghly the EIC acquired privileges from the Mughal sovereign in Delhi and the nawab of Bengal, including zamindari rights to land revenue of the villages of Govindpur, Suttanati, and Kalikata (1689/​90), the right to fortify the factory (1699), and eventually the revenue rights to 38 additional villages (1717).3 Following a new charter from King George I (r. 1714–​27), the EIC authorities in Calcutta were entitled to establish a mayor’s court consisting of nine aldermen and a court of quarter sessions, consisting of the governor and council. A medical officer appointed by the government was responsible for the town’s health and sanitary conditions.4 It was not until 1794, long after the EIC had acquired territorial rights in Bengal and established basic regulations for a colonial state in India, that the management of Calcutta was entrusted to justices of the peace, responsible for maintaining the city’s streets, measuring property, and pleading court cases.5 At the beginning of the 1680s the Company’s authorities in London thought about using the income of local revenues from its new territorial possessions to substitute for the export of bullion. Instead of taking up loans on the European financial markets, Bengal’s fiscal income was to be used for purchases on Asian markets. Sir Josiah Child, the then governor of the EIC in London, propagated war against the Mughal Empire, which eventually took place in Bengal 36

DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-4

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from 1686 to 1689, ending in complete disaster.6 Despite the military fiasco, political relations were swiftly re-​established, and Calcutta was founded as the EIC’s new trading settlement in Bengal. It was only after the EIC representatives in Calcutta had decided to participate in a coup d’état, organised by the commercial and political elites of Bengal and ousting the nawab in 1757, that the Company was able to acquire territorial rights. In 1757 the EIC obtained the right of revenue collection (zamindari) in the 24 parganas (pargana: small administrative unit) south of Calcutta, in 1760 the zamindari in the districts of Burdwan, Midnapur, and Chittagong, and eventually the diwani (revenue collection and civil jurisdiction) in the Mughal provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in 1765.7 With the administration of the diwani, the Company’s representatives, appointed by Shah Alam II (r. 1759–​1806), had become the servants of two masters, namely the Mughal emperor, on the one hand, and King George III of the United Kingdom (r. 1760–​1820), on the other. Reflecting the shortage of personnel in Calcutta, the EIC did not interfere in the diwani administration of Bengal, instead relying on the established system. It was only after the fiscal difficulties of the EIC at the beginning of the 1770s in Bengal, and its near-​bankruptcy in London, that the Court of Directors of the EIC instructed its representatives in Calcutta to directly administer the diwani. In addition, a Select Committee of Parliament investigated the financial and commercial machinations of the EIC in Bengal.8 The Regulating Act of 1773 was the first measure of Parliament that interfered in the politics of the private undertaking, thereby initiating the transformation of the trading company into an administrative organisation. This was a process that was to last until the final renewal of the Company charter in 1853. The Regulating Act placed the EIC on a new organisational and financial footing. To regulate the finances, dividends were limited to 6 per cent until the loan of £1.5 million granted by Parliament in the same year was repaid. Additionally, it prohibited the servants of the EIC from engaging in private trade and accepting presents from Indians. To make the Company’s organisation transparent and more efficient, the term of the Court of Directors was restricted to four years. In Calcutta, the governor of Fort William was elevated to governor-​general of Bengal, subsuming the presidencies (large EIC administrative units) of Madras and Bombay under Bengal’s control. An executive council of four, the Supreme Council, was to assist the governor-​general, its members nominated by Parliament. Decisions were taken based on the majority vote of the council. In addition, Parliament established a Supreme Court and British judges were sent out for administering British law, though it was only to be applied to British residents.9 The Act created some ambiguity between the powers of the Supreme Council and the Supreme Court, however. It also caused confusion regarding the judicial powers of the Supreme Court. The governor-​general was responsible to the Court of Directors and Parliament for the decisions made by the Supreme Council, yet he had only a casting vote and no veto right. This contradicted the intention of the reform, namely to centralise the colonial government. The Settlement Act of 1781 partially solved the problems, as it restricted the Supreme Court’s responsibility to Calcutta and exempted the servants of the EIC from its jurisdiction. In addition, the appellate jurisdiction was shifted from the Supreme Court to the governor-​general in council, which from now on also administered the revenue jurisdiction. One long-​term consequence was the introduction of the administrative principles of English personal law, according to which Islamic law was to be applied to Muslim cases and Shastric law to Hindu cases. What constituted Islamic and Shastric law, respectively, was left undefined.10 Despite the amendments, legislation regarding the control of the government over the EIC remained insufficient. Therefore, the government of William Pitt (prime minister from 1783 to 1801) again regulated the Company in 1784. The main provision of the India Act of 1784 37

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established a Board of Control, consisting of two Cabinet members and four members of the royal Privy Council. The president of the board soon attended cabinet meetings and was de facto a secretary of state. The Board of Control was responsible for the political, military, and financial affairs of the EIC, the India budget being resolved in the British Parliament from 1788 to 1947. The Court of Directors remained responsible for the EIC’s commercial activities, and, enjoying patronage though the board, tried to exert influence on the selection of the outgoing personnel.11 To resolve the unsatisfying situation within the Bengal government, the governor-​ general was vested with the right to veto the decisions of the Supreme Council. This dual control of the emerging colonial state was the main outcome of Pitt’s India Act, regulating the relationship between the metropolis and the colony.12

Traditional system versus constitutional system, 1773–​93 With the regulations of 1773 and the direct administration of the diwani in Bengal, two decades of experimenting started regarding the question of which principles of state the colony ought to be ruled by. The Supreme Council debated whether Bengal was to be governed in accordance with the country’s ‘ancient constitution’, including the established institutions of the country, or whether the colony should be ruled according to British principles of state governance. Whereas the first governor-​general, Warren Hastings (1773–​85), opted for the former, Hastings’ successor, Lord Cornwallis (1786–​93), eventually decided in favour of the latter, following much critique of Hastings’ administration, which culminated in his recall from office. Cornwallis ended the ongoing debates regarding revenue administration with the Permanent Settlement, which fixed the revenue in Bengal permanently (until 1947). Further, in addition to the granted administration of civil jurisdiction, he usurped criminal jurisdiction from the diwan Naib Muhammad Reza Khan in 1793. Meanwhile, the Nawab of Bengal had been reduced to a pensioner of the EIC.13 Cornwallis’s reforms were based on the principles of oeconomy –​i.e. a reasonable, structured, and strictly organised administration, debated in England at the time. Consequently, he hierarchised the administration that went along with an expanded bureaucracy, he introduced separate departments (revenue, judicial, military, and commercial) with specified fields of responsibilities, and he abolished the habit of treating offices as sinecures. Eventually Cornwallis began legislation in Bengal with a set of 48 regulations in 1793, reminiscent of the English statute laws, which became known as the ‘Cornwallis Code’.14 The regulations remained in force until the end of British rule in India. The system of oeconomy as introduced by Cornwallis turned the colonial state into a more ‘modern’ state than Britain at that time, where ideas of oeconomy were not implemented until the beginning of the nineteenth century.15 Not all provinces that were to constitute British India in the nineteenth century were administered according to the ‘Cornwallis Code’, however. For example, the Punjab was ruled by the personal discretion of local British administrators; hence the Punjab was called a non-​regulated province. The formation of the colonial state in Bengal was part of a process that took place in Europe during the eighteenth century, namely dynastic territorialisation in tandem with a centralised revenue administration, the maintenance of a standing army, independent jurisdiction, and a mercantile economic policy. Similar processes can be identified on the Indian subcontinent at the time. The most prominent example is that of the rulers of the Sultanate of Maisur, Haidar Ali (1760–​82) and his son and successor Tipu Sultan (1782–​99), who established a highly centralised state with efficient revenue administration as well as an active local and a protective interregional commercial policy for increasing taxes and customs.16 As in parts of Europe at that time, the military-​fiscal state also came into being in parts of South Asia, providing the 38

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financial underpinning for extensive warfare.17 It is against this background that the revenue administration of the EIC in Bengal serves as a lucid example of how the territorialisation of revenue administration was continued by the British, ending a process of centralisation that had commenced with the establishment of the Nawabi dynasty in Bengal in the 1720s.18

Constitutional development and the invention of Indian tradition, 1793–​1935 When the charter of the EIC was renewed in 1813, the Company lost its trading monopoly –​ except for trade in tea and trade with China –​and, after lengthy debates in Parliament, had to admit missionaries to its territories. In 1833 the charter removed the Company’s remaining trade monopolies, divested it of all its commercial functions, and renewed for another 20 years its political and administrative authority. The charter carried further the ongoing process of administrative centralisation by investing the governor-​general in council with full power and authority to superintend and control the presidency governments in all civil and military matters, and it was entitled with the right to codify law in its territories. At the same time, the Board of Control was invested with full power and authority over the EIC, which deprived the Company of all its political functions. Eventually, the charter of 1853 separated the legislative and executive powers of the governor-​general in council.19 The Great Rebellion of 1857–​59 marked the great caesura in the modern history of the Indian subcontinent and the British colonial state in India. The uprising may also be characterised as the War of Liberation, thanks to the sometimes patriotic enthusiasm of the Indian sepoys (Persian, sipahis: Indian soldiers serving in the British Indian Army) peasants, merchants, and the courtesans of Lucknow. In large parts of northern India (Hindustan), the uprising brought British rule in India to the brink of termination. British Indian military forces from the Punjab and south India and British units from the Crimea, where the war had ended the previous year, helped to subdue the rebels/​freedom fighters.20 In the midst of the fighting the British government in London ended EIC rule in India, and British India was declared a Crown colony in 1858. The Mughal emperor was deposed and deported to Burma and the dual power structure established with the India Act of 1784 came to an end. The Board of Control was converted into a separate ministry (the India Office, headed by the secretary of state for India). In 1861 an act was passed further empowering the Supreme Council and the governor-​general to pass legislation for British India.21 Nonetheless, the disruptive effects of the rebellion/​liberation war were Janus-​faced with respect to reforms. On the one hand, the colonial state continued the politics pursued since the early nineteenth century, the most striking example certainly being legal reforms. After almost 30 years of continuous work, the Civil Procedure Code, the Penal Code, the Contract Act, and the Evidence Act were adopted in the 1860s, which saw British India submit to a single jurisdiction and standardised legal procedures.22 Continuity also existed with regard to the racist character of jurisdiction, however, as the legal system was by no means fair and equal. Its codification was extremely unjust, as violence against Indians by Europeans was dealt with extremely mildly, even in cases of murder, whereas, in the opposite circumstance of cases of Indian violence against Europeans, the law was quick to show no mercy and exert its full force.23 On the other hand, the colonial state of the post-​rebellion period was a truly conservative regime that rigidified the political and social dynamic of Indian societies. Nothing emphasised this more than proclaiming Queen Victoria ‘Empress of India’ (kaisar-​i-​hind) in 1876. A specially designed, pompous ceremony of proclamation was held in Delhi in 1877 to demonstrate the British succession to the Mughal dynasty. The British rediscovery and invention of Indian authorities (monarchs and princes) and their simultaneous integration into an invented 39

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feudal-​hierarchical power structure initiated the ostensible preservation of an age-​old social and political system in India.24 An image of a traditional ‘true’ India, an India of ‘princely states’, was constructed that was portrayed as backward and was placed in direct comparison to the emerging modern British India. This historiographically persistent image thus functioned as a justification of British colonial rule. The invented tradition was ceremonially embodied in the ‘Delhi Durbars’ (royal-​imperial assemblages), which became a representation of power and thereby were supposed to increase the legitimacy of the colonial state, in 1902/​3 and 1911/​12.25 During the nineteenth century little changed regarding the constitutional structure of British India’s provinces. Although provincial councils were established in the presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay in 1861, only a few appointed and non-​official Indians were consulted in legislative matters. The liberalisation of the 1880s changed little, even though Indians in both urban and local bodies were granted more participation. This occurred against the background of general municipal financial distress, however, as institutions had henceforth to be financed from their own taxes (octroi). In turn, this freed the British-​Indian government from the burden of having to raise new, and therefore unpopular, taxes. In 1892 the proportion of Indian members in municipal bodies was again increased, yet this was not accompanied by any extension of their powers. The participatory appearance was merely produced in the form of a so-​called representative government.26 Even the Morley–​Minto reforms of 1909 did little to live up to liberal discourse and instead merely applied a laissez-​faire cladding to the democratic facade of the authoritarian-​ paternalistic colonial state. Nevertheless, initial steps towards the decentralisation of power and its institutions began to manifest. In some cases, the number of Indians in the councils more than doubled, thus increasing representation. At the insistence of Muslim political leadership, the British introduced the principle of separate constituencies, whereby not only the Muslims but also Hindus were counted. The total number of the latter was significantly reduced, however, by separate registration of the so-​called untouchables and low-​caste groups in election lists. The British certified one solid community and constituency for the Muslims, but the Hindu constituency was based on a definition of the community as being comprised of ‘high-​ caste’ Hindus. Consequently, the latter saw their political influence to be in danger.27 Although the reforms in the provinces of British India provided, for the first time, a clear majority for the appointed non-​official Indian members, the central government led by the British retained exclusive power. The idea of a ‘responsible government’ in which the accountability of finances would lie with the representative body was at no point considered.28 The constitutional situation did not really improve with the Montagu–​Chelmsford reforms of 1919. They introduced diarchy, which transferred the ‘soft’ ministries such as health and education to Indian ministers while the ‘hard’ ministries, such as finance, justice, and police, would remain under British control. In this way the impression was created that democratic principles had begun to work their way into the political landscape of the colonial state, whereas, in reality, the British continued to hold the power almost without restraint. Hence the dramatic increase in the proportion of elected members in the Legislative Assembly was more of a cosmetic move than a true development of democratic principles. Although the right to vote was extended to women, the electorate of 1926 comprised a mere 2.8 per cent of the entire population.29 There was no transfer of power within the central government, as the governor-​general (unofficial title: viceroy) continued to represent Parliament (and the monarch) ahead of the secretary of state for India. In British India the governor-​general held a general veto power, was able to make regulations without having to hold consultation sessions, and had the power to block legislative action taken at various levels of government in India. British India’s legislature was based on a two-​chamber system, consisting of the Legislative Assembly and the Council 40

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of State. Representatives were forbidden from discussing the budget of the colonial state, however. The process of drafting reforms continued to be conducted without the assistance of the Indian ministers, although occasionally a leading Indian politician was consulted. Aside from the lack of participation, the introduction and successful codification of the religious community as a basis for political constituency was crucial for the future political development in British India. In 1909 and 1919 the British responded to the various political interest groups and organisations that were forming along (religious) communal lines with the concept of divide et impera.30 As can be easily imagined, the Indian political class, especially the leading members of the Indian National Congress (INC), were very disappointed and doubted Britain’s intention to develop British India politically.

Census of India, communalism, and crisis, 1871–​1931 To administer the territories of British India, officials of the Company state, as well as of the British Raj (as British India was also called between 1858 and 1947), needed information regarding the society, culture, polity, and economy. Initially EIC revenue collectors and magistrates were required to submit reports to Calcutta on specified subjects. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, reporting was gradually systematised. Occasionally, a census, such as in Calcutta in 1832, and in the North-​Western Provinces (today’s Uttar Pradesh) in 1853, provided more detailed and, at the same time, more comprehensive information. Information gathering became one of the most important issues of the colonial state. On the one hand, British administrators wanted to obtain as much data on their Indian subjects as possible to establish just rule, thereby legitimising the foreign regime; on the other hand, they were always afraid of subversive and rebellious movements, which, in the worst case, might run out of control and spread countrywide.31 Intelligence gathering was systematised and professionalised with the census of India that took place from 1871 to 1872 for the first time, and from then on every decade. With the census of India, the British created administrative categories they thought appropriate and essential for ruling the country and its people.32 One of the most long-​lasting consequence was the introduction of religion and caste as categories. The vast majority of Indian subjects were not familiar with the terminology. Despite local syncretic forms of beliefs, the census offered only major religious groups, such as Muslim, Hindu, Christian, etc. As to caste, the census systematised, hierarchised, and uniformly categorised the subcontinental societies regardless of regional and local variations and differences.33 This is not to say that caste did not exist in South Asia before colonialism and the census of India but, rather, that caste certainly was something different before the impact of the colonial state’s administration. Therefore, the census of India tells more about the administrative needs of the colonial state’s administration than about South Asian social and cultural realities.34 Of far-​reaching consequences was the division of British India’s societies and beliefs into religious categories and groups. It caused a process of identification and identity building along the lines of religious differences that, in that strict sense, had not existed in precolonial South Asia.35 In addition, the European idea of representation transformed the polities of South Asia and created communal identities. The founding of the All-​India Muslim League in 1907 and the request for separate electorates in 1909 were the most significant outcomes of communal politics before the First World War. The post-​war reforms of 1919 and the continuation of martial laws did not meet the political needs of the people of British India, which led to political unrest in the Punjab, where most of the demobilised soldiers had returned. Ongoing protest was forcefully quelled by the colonial state.36 In consequence, Mohandas Gandhi (1869–​1948) 41

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started the Non-​Cooperation campaign, which asked Indians to boycott colonial institutions and organisations, though it failed in 1922, however, after Gandhi’s credo of non-​violence had turned into open aggression at the police station of Chauri Chaura.37 The same happened with the Khilafat movement, a pan-​Islamic movement that came into being in British India after the Treaty of Sèvres had placed the Ottoman Empire’s Arabic provinces under French and British semi-​colonial control. The loss of control over the holy sites of Mecca and Medina threatened the position of the Ottoman sultan as caliph. The abolition of the caliphate by the new Turkish state in 1924 caused the collapse of the Khilafat movement. Since Mohandas Gandhi had supported the movement, its failure caused increased discontent among Muslims, and eventually led to growing communal violence between Muslims and Hindus during the 1920s.38 In addition, the Russian Revolution alerted the elites of the colonial state, for they feared communist agitation and conspiracies in British India. Several conspiracy cases as well as the radical and violent agitation of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) –​founded in 1924/​26 and known for its most famous member, Bhagat Singh (1907–​31) –​increased the colonial state’s overall feeling of fear and crisis.39 Crisis was further aggravated when the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, adopted at its annual meeting in 1929 the ‘independence resolution’. To put pressure on the colonial state, the INC commissioned Gandhi to organise a resistance movement. In 1930 Gandhi started the Civil Disobedience Campaign with the well-​known Salt March. For the first time a sense of Indian national identity was created among certain segments of society countrywide through the press media, which helped to organise resistance against the colonial state.40 Eventually, however, the effects of the Great Depression brought about the failure of the campaign, which ended with the Gandhi–​Irwin agreement in 1931.41 Both the revolutionary activities of the HSRA and the conspiracy cases, as well as the political agitation of the INC and overall public unrest during the 1920s and 1930s, caused the colonial state to implement a more rigid jurisdiction. Collective punishments and new punitive measures, such as the Goonda Act of 1932, provided for the persecution, imprisonment, and sentencing of so-​called ‘bad elements’ and ‘hooligans’.42 To alleviate the crisis of the colonial state in India, Parliament passed the Government of India Act in 1935. Its main provisions ended diarchy as introduced with the reforms of 1919 and transferred more competences to the provincial governments. Constitutional provisions envisaged a ‘Federation of India’, comprising British India and some or all of the princely states. The ‘Federation of India’ never came into operation, though, as a result of opposition from the rulers of the princely states, who feared becoming dominated by democratic parliamentary institutions that would minimise their political influence.43 Despite the shift of power to the provincial government level, the British provincial governors retained important competences and reserve powers. This was also the case at the central administration of the colonial state, where the extensive rights of the governor-​general in terms of finance, foreign affairs, and defence, his right to suspend provincial governments, and his right of veto were all reconfirmed.44 Consequently, the India Act of 1935 was again merely a freshly painted facade of the same authoritarian buildings of the colonial state.45

The British standing army in India, 1757–​1947 In Britain, Parliament opposed any standing army, as it would have provided the monarch with military means that might have been directed against the post-​revolutionary (1688/​9) regime. Therefore, military forces in Britain were of a protective nature rather than of expansionist character. During the long eighteenth century, in case Britain fought wars on the European 42

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mainland or on the North American continent, additional troops were recruited, mostly in Germany. It was during the worldwide war that Britain and France fought from the middle of the eighteenth century over global hegemony that the EIC and the British state developed military resources in India for fighting French and Indian forces and to pursue the politics of aggressive colonial expansion. From the very beginning, military forces in India consisted of two separate units, namely Company troops and royal troops. The Company troops consisted of European soldiers, recruited in Britain, and of Indian sipahis, recruited on the subcontinental military markets. The royal troops were either recruited in Britain or in Germany, to be sent temporarily to India. From the middle of the eighteenth century Company troops continuously increased in number. During the War of the Austrian Succession (1740 to 1748) the EIC recruited about 3,000 sipahis in Madras and roughly 2,000 in Bombay. In 1756, at the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, the Company had about 10,000 sipahis stationed in south India, against a mere 2,000 Europeans. As regional warfare did not end in 1763 in south India, the Madras government further increased its sipahi troops from 8,600 to 26,300 in 1769. In 1773 the EIC commanded around 9,000 European and 45,000 Indian troops in South Asia, in 1782 about 115,000, and in 1805, during the EIC’s most aggressive expansionist phase, it had more than 150,000 sipahis on its payroll.46 In 1854 the number of soldiers in the Company’s army had risen to around 250,000, which was reduced after the Great Rebellion to 220,000, some 35,000 of them British soldiers.47 Whereas Britain did not maintain a standing army, it was the colonial state in India that recruited, trained, and maintained a standing army of a size larger than most of the armies in Europe at the time.48 The need of the emergent colonial state to control the disposition of South Asian and European military resources regarding men, material, and finances may help to explain its coming into existence. Until the Great Rebellion the Company forces, in addition to the royal troops, were used for colonial expansion on the Indian subcontinent, wars against Burma from 1854 to 1856 being the EIC’s last war. From 1858 the British Indian Army49 fought campaigns outside India: against Afghanistan from 1878 to 1881, and again in 1919; troop contingents were deployed during the occupation of Egypt in 1882 and the suppression of the Mahdi uprising in Sudan; during the Boxer Rebellion between 1899 and 1901; and during the Second Boer War in South Africa, between 1899 and 1902. The majority of troops sent to these theatres of war were units of the standing British Army in India, indicating the central role that this army played in the expansion and maintenance of the British Empire in Asia and Africa throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and up to the middle of the twentieth.50 Military support from British India was immense during the First World War. In order to fight on the fronts of Western Europe, on the maritime borders of the Ottoman Empire, in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, the Army of India was increased from some 315,000 soldiers in 1914 to 1.2 million during the course of the war. From the Punjab alone an extra 355,000 men were recruited. Approximately 600,000 British Indian Army soldiers fought in Mesopotamia, some 110,000 in France, and 50,000 in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden.51 In addition to the immense human resource supplied by British India, economic resources were also extracted. Huge quantities of grain were exported from British India to Mesopotamia as horse fodder. An unknown number of railway sleepers was exported to the Middle East to build a railway network up Mesopotamia. Overall, the economic burden of the war increased to a figure approaching 300 per cent of the pre-​war level, which resulted in huge price hikes between 1914 and 1920.52 Demobilisation at the end of the First World War reduced the army to less than its pre-​war strength: some 180,000 men, including 45,000 British soldiers. By and large, the number, 43

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composition, organisation, and equipment of the Indian Army remained the same until the outbreak of the Second World War. Reforms aiming at the modernisation of the army in 1938 could not be implemented because of the commencement of hostilities. Even during the war modernisation took place late, an Indian Airborne Division eventually being formed in 1944. When fighting broke out, troops were recruited within a short time, numbers rising from 165,000 in 1940 to 326,500 in 1942, doubling again to 652,000 in 1942, to finally reach 2.5 million soldiers in 1945.53 Troops were fighting in South-​East Asia, North Africa, and Western Europe.54 And, as in the First World War, again the colonial state provided the warring British Empire with natural resources. In the 1940/​41 period alone 440,000 sleepers were exported, exceeding pre-​war demands by 65 per cent. Exceptions concerning access to forests were overridden in order to meet British war interests. This increasing activity is exemplified in north Indian Kumaon, where between 1942 and 1945 the felling of trees exceeded annual yields sixfold. Similarly, the income of the Hyderabad State Forest Department skyrocketed between 1940 and 1945, from Rs. 1.4 million to Rs. 11.4 million.55 The biggest problem the Indian Army faced during the war was its lack of modern equipment. Modernisation failed not only in the interwar period but also during the war, when the colonial state and the War Cabinet in London opposed the transfer of knowledge. The production of cars, planes, artillery, and tanks was either impeded or forbidden. An emerging aircraft industry, which started in the princely state of Mysore during the war, was eventually welcomed by the colonial state, as it partially relieved the mother country from sending aircrafts to the South-​Eastern theatres of war. Altogether, the Second World War had the effect of stimulating the expansion of production in many Indian states after imports largely failed and had to be substituted.56 In addition, the industries of British India also produced for Britain’s imperial warfare, which turned the colonial state from a debtor to Britain to its creditor. Eventually it was agreed that the British exchequer reimburse £800 million of the £1.3 billion that India had accumulated by way of war contributions up to 1945.57

Résumé Aside from the constitutional developments and reforms of the colonial state in Britain and India between 1773 and 1935, the British de facto controlled the colony by rule of the bayonet. The War of Liberation/​Great Rebellion –​or, as the British used to call it from the very beginning, the Indian Mutiny –​justified the application of brutal force to suppress the uprising. Sheer force was also applied after the demobilisation of Indian troops after the First World War, when, following the disappointment of the reforms in 1919, unrest broke out in the Punjab. The tragic climax was the Jallianwalah Bagh massacre in Amritsar, where a detachment of British-​Indian troops under the command of General Dyer shot several hundred and wounded more than 1,000 people who had assembled peacefully in an enclosed garden. Continuing ubiquitous unrest in the Punjab was quelled by military action, including air raids.58 Equally, the British suppressed the August uprising of 1942, after the Cripps mission had utterly failed to secure full Indian cooperation and support for British efforts in the war. No concrete offers regarding the post-​war political constitution of the colonial state were presented to the Indian negotiators. In consequence, the INC launched the Quit India movement, requesting the British to leave India. The colonial state reacted promptly, incarcerating about 60,000 members of the INC and collaborating suspects. When open violence broke out, sabotaging and destroying the colonial state’s infrastructure –​railways, roads, telegraph lines, and government buildings –​the government of India deployed British troops and armed police forces, approximately 50,000 men, to restore order.59 In the midst of the Second World War, 44

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the British were still not willing to implement substantial reform, let alone abandon the colonial state, and suppressed protest with sheer force. They had to comply after the war, however, when it became obvious that British military power would not suffice to keep the colony within the empire. Independence and the Partition of British India, on the night of 14/​15 August 1947, marked the end of the British colonial state in South Asia. The hurried exit of the British (it is most likely that they anticipated the outbreak of massive communal violence between Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in the wake of the Partition of the Punjab and Bengal between Pakistan and India) was one of the reasons why violence went out of control. Despite the gruesome rupture and the rather sad role the British played when ending their rule in India, many of the colonial state’s political, juridical, military, and educational institutions became the legacy of the independent successor states. This reflects the momentous consequences the British colonial state in India had, and still has, on the present-​day societies of and states in South Asia.

Notes 1 The Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. 2 K.N. Chaudhury, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-​Stock Company, 1600–​ 1640 (London: Cass, 1965); S. Muthiah, Madras that Is Chennai: Gateway to the South (Chennai: Ranpar, 2005), 12–​29; Phiroze B.M. Malabari, Bombay in the Making: Being Mainly a History of the Origin and Growth of Judicial Institutions in the Western Presidency, 1661–​1726 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910), 106–​14. 3 P. Thankappan Nair, Calcutta in the 17th Century (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private, 1986), 309–​37; Kathleen Blechynden, Calcutta Past and Present (London: W. Thacker, 1905), 3–​20. 4 Raja Binaya Krishna Deb, The Early History and Growth of Calcutta (Calcutta: Romesh Chandra Ghose, 1905), 41; Atul K. Ray, A Short History of Calcutta: Town and Suburbs [Census of India, 1901, vol. 7, part I, 1902] (Calcutta: Rddhi India, 1982), 146–​9. 5 Nisith Ranjan Ray, Calcutta: The Profile of a City (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1986), 51. 6 William W. Hunter, A History of British India, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, 1900), 247–​69. 7 Michael Mann, Bengalen im Umbruch: Die Herausbildung des britischen Kolonialstaates 1754–​ 1793 (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2000), 33–​93. 8 See Huw V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757–​1773 (Cambridge: CUP, 1991). 9 Philip J. Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: OUP, 2011). 10 Still indispensable is J. Duncan M. Derrett, Religion: Law and the State in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1968; repr. Delhi: OUP, 1999). For the administration of the personal law in England, see Frederick Pollock and Frederick W. Maitland, The History of English Law, 2 vols. (Cambridge: CUP, 1968), here vol. 1, 124–​31. 11 Mann, Bengalen im Umbruch, 126–​35. 12 Rather old but still the most comprehensive account of the EIC’s administrative development is Bankey B. Misra, The Central Administration of the East India Company, 1773–​1834 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959). 13 Mann, Bengalen im Umbruch, 340–​ 58; Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-​ Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: CUP, 2007). 14 Sebastian Meurer, ‘A system of oeconomy: Approaches to public administration in Britain and British India at the beginning of the age of reform’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Heidelberg, 2015); idem, ‘Approaches to state-​building in eighteenth-​century British Bengal’, in: Antje Flüchter and Susan Richter (eds.), Structures on the Move: Technologies of Governance in Transcultural Encounter (Heidelberg: Springer, 2012), pp. 219–​41. 15 Jon E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–​1835 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), ix. 16 Michael Mann, South Asia’s Modern History: Thematic Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 38–​42. For a general model of state formation in South Asia in the eighteenth century, see ibid., 20–​8.

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Michael Mann 17 For the British military fiscal state, see Ian Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. the contribution by Christopher A. Bayly, ‘The British military-​ fiscal state and indigenous resistance: India 1750–​1820’, in: ibid., pp. 322–​54; and Stephen Conway, ‘Checking and controlling British military expenditure, 1739–​ 1783’, in: Raffael Torres Sánches (ed.), War, State and Development: Fiscal-​Military States in the Eighteenth Century (Barañáim: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 2007), pp. 45–​67. 18 Mann, South Asia’s Modern History, 31–​4. 19 Bankey B. Misra, The Administrative History of India, 1834–​1947: General Administration (Oxford: OUP, 1970), 9–​21. 20 The 150th anniversary of the Great Rebellion/​War of Liberation saw a multitude of academic books appearing on the market, which provided the basis for Mann, South Asia’s Modern History, 54–​63. For a recent interpretation of the Great Rebellion, see Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), reprinted as Rumours and Rebels: A New History of the Indian Uprising of 1857 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017); and idem, The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (London: Hurst, 2017). 21 Misra, The Administrative History of India, 22–​30. 22 Mahabir P. Jain, Outlines of Indian Legal History (Bombay: N.M. Tripathi, 1966), 660–​96. 23 Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in India (Cambridge: CUP, 2010); Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–​1935 (New York: CUP, 2009); Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The boot and the spleen: When was murder possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (2), 2006, pp. 462–​93. 24 Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–​1870, 2nd edn. (New Delhi: Manohar, 1990). 25 Alan Trevithick, ‘Some structural and sequential aspects of the British imperial assemblages at Delhi: 1877–​1911’, MAS, 24, 1990, pp. 561–​78; Michael Mann, ‘Pomp and circumstance in Delhi, 1876–​1937, oder: Die hohle Krone des British Raj’, in: Peter Brandt, Arthur Schlegelmilch, and Reinhard Wendt (eds.), Symbolische Macht und inszenierte Staatlichkeit: ‘Verfassungskultur’ als Element der Verfassungs-​Geschichte (Bonn: Dietz Verlag, 2005), pp. 101–​34. 26 Dietmar Rothermund, Die politische Willensbildung in Indien, 1900–​1960 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1965), 47–​9. 27 John Zavos, Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (New Delhi: OUP, 2000), 76–​7. 28 Peter G. Robb, The Evolution of British Policy towards Indian Politics, 1880–​1920: Essays on Colonial Attitudes, Imperial Strategies, and Bihar (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 184–​203. 29 Anil C. Banerjee, The Constitutional History of India, vol. 3, 1919–​1977 (Delhi: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), 1–​36. 30 Meeto (Kamaljit Bhasin-​Malik), In the Making: Identity Formation in South Asia (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2007), 1–​22. 31 Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–​1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). 32 R.B. Bhagat, ‘Census enumeration, religious identity and communal polarization in India’, Asian Ethnicity, 14 (4), 2013, pp. 434–​8. 33 Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 34 Another output of information gathering was the District Gazetteers published from the 1880s onwards, as well as the Imperial Gazetteer published at the beginning of the twentieth century –​a sort of manual intended to provide a first access to British India. 35 Christopher A. Bayly, ‘The pre-​history of “communalism”? Religious conflict in India, 1700–​1860’, MAS, 19 (2), 1985, pp. 177–​203. 36 Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 37 S.R. Bakshi, Gandhi and Non-​Cooperation Movement: 1920–​22 (New Delhi: Capital Publishers, 1983); Talat Ahmed, Mohandas Gandhi: Experiments in Civil Disobedience (London: Pluto Press, 2018). 38 Still the most comprehensible work is Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India, 2nd edn. (New Delhi: OUP, 1999). 39 Chris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh (Cambridge: CUP, 2019); Kama MacLean, ‘The art of panicking quietly: British expatriate responses to “terrorist outrages” in India, 1912–​33’, in: Harald Fischer-​Tiné (ed.), Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 135–​67.

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State formation in India 40 See Michael Mann, Wiring the Nation: Telecommunication, Newspaper Reportage, and Nation Building in British India, 1850–​1930 (New Delhi: OUP, 2017), 195–​241. 41 Ananda Raj, Mahatma Gandhi and Salt Satyagraha (Delhi: Swastika Publications, 2009); Sumit Sarkar, ‘The logic of Gandhian nationalism: Civil disobedience and the Gandhi–​ Irwin Pact 1930–​ 31’, in: Sumit Sarkar (ed.), A Critique of Colonial India, 2nd edn. (Calcutta: Papyrus, 2000), pp. 86–​115. 42 Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010). 43 Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999); Barbara Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). 44 Banerjee, The Constitutional History of India, 126–​78. 45 Andrew Muldoon, Empire, Politics and the Creation of the 1935 India Act: Last Act of the Raj (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 46 Gerald J. Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–​1784: A Grand Strategic Interpretation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 216–​17, esp. 216, fn. 118; Channa Wickremesekera, Best Black Troops in the World: British Perception and the Making of the Sepoy, 1746–​ 1805 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002), 92–​5. 47 David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People, c.1870–​ 2000 (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 12. 48 In the middle decades of the nineteenth century the Prussian Army consisted of 150,000 soldiers and the French Army comprised 200,000 men, while the Imperial Russian Army consisted of 250,000 to 300,000 soldiers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Numbers on the respective armies are taken from https://​de.statista.com/​statistik/​daten/​studie/​1070472/​umfrage/​groesse-​europaeischer-​ armeen, accessed: 11 May 2020. 49 Generally, troops in British India were spoken of as the British Army in India after 1858, the British units of the Company forces having been transferred to the British army (in India). In 1895 the Indian units were named the Indian Army, and from 1903 to 1947 all units were subsumed under the denomination Army of India. 50 Timothy A. Heathcote, The Indian Army: The Garrison of British Imperial India, 1822–​1922 (Newton 1947 (Oxford: Osprey Abbot: David & Charles, 1974); Ian Sumner, The Indian Army 1914–​ Publishing, 2001). 51 Johannes H. Voigt, India in the Second World War (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1987), 8–​9. 52 Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–​1920 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), 89–​101. 53 Sumner, The Indian Army, 25. 54 Alan Jeffreys and Patrick Rose (eds.), The Indian Army 1939–​47: Experience and Development (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 55 Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (New Delhi: OUP, 1989), 48; Abdul S. Thaha, Forest Policy and Ecological Change: Hyderabad State in Colonial India (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2009), 80–​1, 85. A comprehensive scholarly work on the drain of natural resources and economic support is still missing. 56 Ramusack, The Indian Princes, 199–​201. 57 Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2016); Yasmin Khan, India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War (Oxford: OUP, 2015); Tarak Barkawi, ‘Culture and combat in the colonies: The Indian Army in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2), 2006, pp. 325–​55. 58 Kim A. Wagner, ‘ “Calculated to strike terror”: The Amritsar massacre and the spectacle of colonial violence’, Past & Present, 233 (1), 2016, pp. 185–​225; idem, Amritsar 1919. 59 Voigt, India in the Second World War, 145–​70; Biswamoy Pati, ‘The climax of popular protest: The Quit India movement in Orissa’, IESHR, 29, 1992, pp. 1–​35.

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4 NATIONALISMS AND THEIR DISCONTENTS IN COLONIAL INDIA William Gould

Introduction Whether in Delhi, London, or São Paulo, where unprecedented numbers protest against the subordination of minorities to populist majoritarian rule, it appears at the time of writing –​ 2020 –​that nationalism is resurgent. But the nationalism of vocal and exclusive majorities, especially in demographically large nation states such as India, has always existed in equilibrium with a proliferation of critiques and counter-​movements. For every declaration of overt patriotism originating in mainstream political culture in India, multiple critical visions of the nation exist. Some of these reject the very idea of the nation, but others appropriate its form and language and turn it to radical ends. India has historically been very fertile ground for the growth of many different versions of nationalism and regionalism that have challenged the mainstream. Given the scale of India’s intersecting regional histories and cultures, however, this chapter cannot be comprehensive. Instead, it will move between some of the main critiques of nationalism into an exploration of key themes in its ‘discontent’: societies, movements, and leaders who have either complicated nationalism as an idea or presented alternative forms of social organisation. Although historians and social scientists of India were interested in the phenomenon much earlier, the main critical work on nationalism came into vogue from the 1980s to the 2000s –​ the first theme of this chapter. These works, influenced by Edward Said, often took as their starting point the premise that histories that were framed principally within the nation state were a priori shaped by assumptions about power differentials between colonising and colonised societies and states. This required the category of ‘nation’ to be reconsidered as a frame of analysis. The corollary was that the ‘nation’ could no longer be viewed simply as a material entity but was, rather, more effectively examined as a social effect shaping political cultures over time. Historical work exploring nationalism in India since the 1990s, therefore, has uncovered multiple examples of communities lying at its putative symbolic and physical margins. The second part of this chapter explores some of these communities, and especially those that presented a direct challenge to majority ideas of the nation state. This included those on the margins in socio-​economic or ethnic terms, religious minorities, and organisations that sought to establish territorial or linguistic challenges to the nation state. Finally, the chapter returns to 48

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the means by which Indian governments of all hues have responded to these challenges, in the context of their own ‘nation-​building’ projects.

Approaching the nation Most historians have typically explored nationalism in terms of its institutions, political movements, and ideologies, situating the phenomenon as developing from the late colonial period following the Indian Mutiny/​Great Rebellion of 1857. Arguably, however, ‘patriotism’, as a forerunner to the ideology of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century nationalism, had earlier roots. Those applying this European historicism suggested that local patriotism existed in early modern periods in the prior expression of service to a watan, desh, or homeland. This territoriality appeared, for example, in regions of Maratha and Jat control in precolonial western and northern India.1 More extensively across India, ethnic loyalties based around group identities later described as ‘caste’ were also shaped by states before the advent of European colonialism, suggesting that some of the social forms of the nation state were developing independently of European influence.2 Historians exploring nationalism more often placed colonialism squarely at the centre of their work, however. Early histories of the main institutions of ‘All Indian’ mobilisation charted the development and progress of the Indian National Congress (INC) and its leadership with hagiographic accounts of freedom fighters against foreign rule.3 Some of the most detailed examples of this work proposed periodic ‘stages’ in the development of the freedom struggle. Mature nationalism emerged in response to Western educational institutions from the late nineteenth century, culminating in the ‘age of Gandhi’.4 By the late 1960s and 1970s writers later designated as the ‘Cambridge’ historians of India considered political organisation among urban publicists and rural power brokers. In contrast to earlier accounts, these historians argued that the ideological bases of anti-​colonial nationalism were, ultimately, less significant than the political factions thrown up by institutional competition. Focusing on political representation, party organisation, and education, they unearthed power struggles that played out in the spatial networks of locality, province, and nation. As a result, nationalism was structured in this work as an outgrowth of factional conflict surrounding patrons and publicists, some of whom derived authority from collaboration with the state.5 The so-​called ‘Cambridge’ historians became a foil for a later interconnected group of scholars, who critiqued both what they viewed as the state-​centric approach of this 1960s/​ 70s work and Marxist histories.6 The central aim of this loose and highly influential collective, published in 12 volumes under the title Subaltern Studies in the 1980s and 1990s, was to capture authentic histories of peasants and workers. In prioritising ‘subaltern’ agency as an autonomous domain in histories of resistance, the state now appeared, rather, at moments of violence and repression. Political activism was explored as an alternative to the ‘bourgeois’ nationalism of institutions explored in earlier work.7 Rebellious peasants and industrial working classes, in much of this work, were associated with semi-​coordinated mass (and often violent) action as the quintessential ‘politics of the people’,8 which was usually premeditated rather than spontaneous.9 These moments of rebellion were, nevertheless, encased within institutional and legalistic languages, which formed a master narrative of domination.10 Ranajit Guha, a key figure in this work, later drew on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’ in the development of the premier institution of Indian nationalism: the Indian National Congress. Described by Guha as an organisation of ‘bourgeois social interests’, Congress’s core activities were ‘mobilisation’ –​a hegemony contesting the parallel hegemony of the colonial state.11 In the case of the ‘Swadeshi’ movement from 1905 to 1907 and the Non-​Cooperation movement from 1920 to 1922, this 49

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included strategies of social boycott, which underpinned Congress’s grandiloquent claims to represent the entire nation. The resultant ‘illusion of common interests’ was then contested on the axes of religious community, class, and lapses in ‘non-​violent discipline’ from a variety of putative marginal groups –​peasants and workers. Rather than being habitually indisciplined, however, Guha and others strove to show how the politics of these communities possessed a customary discipline based on immediacy of action.12 Most of the Subaltern Studies work drew inspiration from European social critiques and post-​structuralism, especially work on sovereign and disciplinary power in Edward Said and Michel Foucault, and ideas of public sphere in Jürgen Habermas. Yet, in focusing on local studies, the collective also illustrated the very varied nature of popular responses to nationalism, which involved new forms of political association: From the cow-​protecting Gwala movement of peasants asserting prestige as ‘defenders of Hinduism’13 to the status mobilisations of adivasis (tribal communities) in the Devi movement and the hierarchies of jute workers in Calcutta.14 In contrast, for Partha Chatterjee, for example, nationalist thought in India in general was ‘derivative’ –​subject to the tyrannical power of reason and capital and thus unable to break out of paradigms of modernity and development.15 His later work on nationalism explored the complex relationship between public and private spheres as domains of sovereignty within colonial society, which acted to separate out spiritual from material concerns. This emerged from what Chatterjee saw as a contradiction between community and capital.16 Research on nationalism as a form of knowledge or discourse was widely adopted through the 1990s, and had some of its most powerful impacts in the study of religious community in India. For Gyanendra Pandey, the phenomenon described as ‘communalism’ in India by the interwar years was viewed by principal Congress leaders as the antithesis of ‘nationalism’ –​an aberration that challenged the idea of ‘common interest’, or a sense of national belonging that was supposed to stand above community. Pandey’s work reflected an extensive interest since the mid-​1990s in the phenomenon of Hindu nationalism –​a set of political parties and movements that developed out of early twentieth-​century attempts to define a ‘Hindu’ nation. This form of nationalism, employing the idea of a Hindu ethnic community, supported by a powerful central state, was fertile ground for exploring the knowledge networks linking ‘community’ with ‘nation’. It spawned a whole series of further studies, from religio-​political organisation17 to the role of European ideas in shaping a rhetoric of Indian primordialism,18 and on Hindu nationalism as a radical form of nationalism sharing much with a more moderate form of ‘secular’ nationalism.19 Certain elements of the Subaltern Studies critique of nationalism were more difficult to discern –​most notably, the dynamic of gender. Anticipating an aspect of Partha Chatterjee’s more generalised argument around domains of sovereignty, Tanika Sarkar, Kumkum Sangari, and Sudesh Vaid suggested that women became a political resource for Hindu nationalists, in the (often) scientific and precise definition of their domestic roles.20 In this work, gender became more clearly a category of analysis rather than of description, shifting the legitimacy of the entire national project. Other feminist historians of India and comparable colonised societies explored the nature of ‘racialised’ bodies,21 and the ways in which religious community organisations, in staking a claim to nationalism, reflected ideas about sexuality and the control of women.22 Since Subaltern Studies, the nation has been critiqued more commonly via the study of networks, flows, and global connections, rather than specific places and moments. These more clearly spatial approaches connected the local to the global in ways that described the contingent nature of national belonging in South Asia. Working on the questions of borderlands and boundaries, some of this work has suggested that concepts of national belonging have been 50

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formed by mass migrations,23 the changing nature of belonging around refugee movements,24 the liminal political spaces between nation states,25 or the relationship between cities and regions across the Indo-​Pakistan border.26 Other work, building clearly on Subaltern Studies, has shifted the analytical frameworks of time rather than space, in unravelling older assumptions about the writing of ‘national’ histories. The most important example of this critiqued nationalism in terms of its attachment to European historicism, which is occasionally suspended, for example, during elections in democratic India, when the supposedly ‘backward’ or ‘pre-​ political’ recipient of development achieves equal political rights.27

The nation from the margins As those working within the Subaltern Studies collective argued, nationalism appears in very different guises when viewed from India’s putative social margins. In particular, movements of ‘tribal’ communities or those subordinated by hierarchies of caste set up alternative political iconographies, or deliberately subverted mainstream discourses of the nation. It is axiomatic that few of these movements were central to the historical literature on nationalism, being more often treated as ‘social movements’ or mobilisations of labour and rural society.28 This can be explained partly by the difficulty of locating source materials, although the most prominent Dalit leader of the early twentieth century, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, was a prolific essayist and speech maker.29 Moving beyond ‘great men’, however, required a significant shift in historical approaches to nationalism as a whole. While acknowledging the importance of institution building and programmes of education to an array of political movements, historians recognised the in-​built elitism of their typical archives: institutional or personal collections of papers, newspapers, and records that emphasise the conventional worlds of the literate. Literacy, education, and ideas of ‘social reform’ were, nevertheless, still often central to movements of the poor and disadvantaged. Across India, for example, the restricted access to education and opportunity of low-​status communities, and in particular shudras and ‘untouchables’ (later Dalits), was compounded by both socio-​economic disadvantage and ritual or religious disenfranchisement. Education and the administrative roles that it led to were highly politicised within the colonial system. Acquisition of these intellectual resources was therefore inherently about nationalism, belonging, and social struggle against upper caste power, implicating strategies towards national and regional political representation. Schemes of social improvement via education and literary societies were, therefore, a means of propagating alternative visions of national politics and representation. The early non-​Brahman associations in the Madras Presidency in the 1910s and 1920s, which eventually formed into the Madras Dravidian Association and later Justice Party, placed literary education at the root of its schemes of association and special representation.30 Jotirao Phule, social activist and intellectual from the Pune district of Maharashtra, developed a movement out of an education project for women established with his wife, Savitribai, in 1848. In 1873 he founded the Sathyashodak Samaj (Society of the Seekers of Truth), which rejected caste and promoted the rights of low-​ status communities and women. Phule differed from other social reformers, however, in creating a theory of social change outside the realm of religion and culture, and developing the idea of specific castes as economic/​occupational categories. Revitalising a nativist movement against theoretical ‘Aryan’ high-​caste dominance, Phule framed a mythical tradition of a peasant king –​Baliraja –​that evoked a peasantry in control of land, and in opposition to the high-​caste national-​mythical symbols of Ram, Kali, or Ganpati. This ‘sons of the soil’ ideology created the idea of a high-​caste Aryan ‘foreign’ invader who paralleled later European immigrants. As such, it was inherently nationalist, aiming to develop an alternative idea of ‘majority’ among Dalits, 51

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other low castes, and tribals.31 Arguably, the ‘social’ revolution of Phule, exemplified by its anti-​Brahmanism, developed alongside the ‘national revolution’ of elite nationalism rather than within it.32 But, in promoting universal principles of social organisation, he set up the principle of rights equality (by gender as well as caste) that was later to figure powerfully in the national project in post-​independence India.33 That education and administrative/​political position was seen as key to the mobilisation of Dalits was most clearly illustrated later in the career of B.R. Ambedkar and his followers. Like Phule before him, the political approach of Ambedkar was directly aimed at the principle of exploitation as it manifested itself in caste and class difference. But, taking this further, his eventual critique of Hinduism and the Indian National Congress was situated in a fundamental rejection of the social and cultural power of Gandhism, and was overtly directed at political and administrative representation. While completing his second doctorate in London in the early 1920s, Ambedkar was already developing movements of communities described later as ‘depressed classes’ and editing a journal exploring their politics: Mooknayak. In the same period he drew on John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, outlining the principles of pragmatism and social transformation via democratic education.34 By 1924, shortly after his return to India, he had set up Bahishkrit Hirakarini Sabha (the Depressed Classes Institute), which, again, mobilised support through education and economic advance. By the early 1930s, unlike other radical leaders, Ambedkar and his followers were advocated the use of existing constitutional and political structures. This was most clearly illustrated at first in Ambedkar’s role in the Round Table Conferences in 1930 and 1931, arguing for separate electorates for ‘depressed classes’, in contradiction to Gandhi’s paternalistic suggestion that they should be contained within the ‘Hindu fold’.35 Ambedkar’s followers sought to reframe the legal and political rights of those deprived by Hindu caste between the 1920s and 1950s. In this sense, his work and movements not only represented a social rebellion against Congress nationalism but also posited a modernist rejection of the glorification of traditional village society and to the ‘vast jurisdiction’, as he saw it, of religion.36 This was not necessarily the pattern for other Dalit movements, such as in the northern state of the United Provinces (UP, later Uttar Pradesh). Here, the dominant Chamar community (today 14 per cent of the state) challenged colonial stereotypes of their communities propagated by anthropological studies. Rather than being guided by reforming movements such as that of Phule or, later, the Arya Samaj, Chamars and Pasis led their own reform organisations, and some of their key texts promoted the idea of ‘untouchables’ as higher-​ caste kshatriyas. More widely, in north India, the Adi Hindu (Original Hindu) movement of the first three decades of the twentieth century was directed less at the colonial state than the Congress. But it still articulated a clear idea of national belonging, always in the vernacular, and more clearly in relation to political representation and the state.37 Adi Hindus were self-​ referentially originary, but were not the only communities to make this claim. Adivasis or tribal communities, assumed by most colonial and postcolonial administrations to be ‘primitive’, also critiqued mainstream narratives and histories of nationalism, in ways not easily captured by models of ‘nationalism versus colonialism’.38 It is possible to write an entirely different history of India around the political acts of so-​called ‘tribes’ –​as one historian put it –​from the Santal rebellions in the Rajmahals to the Chuars in Jangal Mahals and the Munda agitations in Chhotanagpur.39 Not reducible to environmental movements, these histories of resistance often developed out of a range of concerns about land, property, and political representation. In some cases, such as in the opposition to forest regulation in Tehri Garhwal in UP, they were sustained and vast in their geographical spread. In other cases, they related to changed livelihoods: The patterns of shifting cultivation or jhum in the cases 52

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of Baigas in central India, for example, became a means of exercising resistance where it was prohibited;40 or the decision to continue practices of hunting (shikar). In other areas, resistance was more focused. For example, in 1910 the Kanger forest dwellers of Bastar rebelled against both oppressive revenue demands and the colonial state. The Maria and Muria communities objected to forestry reservations of 1905, which removed rights to the areas. Although not overtly expressed as ‘nationalism’, forms of political communication and combination were distinctly comparable: village council discussion, the use of community symbols and messages, forms of revenue strikes, and direct action, as was seen in the Rampa rebellion in 1879/​80,41 and in the rebellion of Gonds and Kolams in Hyderabad.42 Some of these early twentieth-​ century protests were appropriated by local Congress organisations, such as the Jungle Mahal strikes of Santals in 1922.43 Most common from the 1920s to the 1940s, however, was the autonomous nature of movements that sometimes came to be associated with larger anti-​colonial movements. For example, in 1930 a series of ‘forest satyagrahas’ took place across the Central Provinces, leading to strikes and agitations that erupted simultaneously in a number of districts. In these cases, the protests posed a much more serious threat to the stability of the provincial administration than anything directly offered elsewhere by the institutional movements of the Congress itself.44 Other communities largely overlooked by historical literature straddled state definitions around caste and tribe but were ‘marked’ by reference to historical associations with criminality.45 India’s ‘criminal tribes’, notified by statute in 1871, built on their existing associations within government-​run open prison ‘settlements’ to assert their rights to work and industrial action in the 1930s.46 By the 1970s India’s ex-​criminal tribes, now called Vimukta Jatis, whose rights were unevenly recognised in state-​level systems of reservations, promoted a movement to gain special constitutional recognition, and to observe a separate ‘independence day’ marking closure of the criminal tribe settlements on 31 August.

Region, language, religion, and nation As all the major early theoretical works on the subject have argued, the nation is, effectively, an invented community bound by forms of communication or a common language. For India, the reconciliation of territorial sovereignty with language was not straightforward, however. From the early stages of formal ‘national’ institutions in the middle of the nineteenth century, the question of language –​in both literary and everyday or formal usage –​was central. In the nineteenth century, in the presidency regions of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, this was shaped by literary public spheres in vernaculars.47 By the early twentieth century it was clear that languages (and, especially in India, Hindi) could themselves be vehicles for debates about social change, ideas of national progress, and common cultural heritage.48 By the last quarter of the nineteenth century vernacular and bilingual newspapers became the main outlets for the jurists and lawyers who spearheaded ‘national’ organisations, including the early Indian National Congress, founded in 1885. Literary enterprises in this period tended to reinforce the exclusivism, elitism, and liberal reformism in these institutions, although regional vernaculars may have set up different kinds of popular literary publics, such as in the Telugu works of Gidugu Ventaka Ramamurti.49 The debates about languages of governance and education shaped a range of new institutions too: educational movements such as the Aligarh Anglo-​Oriental College, and the various interwar vidyapiths and cultural organisations, such as the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan and the Hindi Pracharini Sabha in Banaras. The development of vernacular ‘publics’, especially in the Hindi belt of north India, connected to these literary and educational pursuits.50 The existence of the Hindi movement was significant, however, 53

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for what it sparked as its regional oppositions: movements for the promotion of vernaculars in other areas, many of which triggered new demands for administrative reorganisation. The most prominent of these were to be found in the west and south. For example, in western India, strong regional movements existed well before the development of modern nationalism, from the thirteenth-​century Varkari poet-​saints to the Marathi heroism of Shivaji from the seventeenth century.51 Later, the cry of ‘Samyukta Maharashtra’ was at the root of a worker-​based movement to promote Marathi. By the 1970s and 1980s these regional loyalties were often reduced to a Marathi chauvinism in the shape of the Shiv Sena.52 For the champions of Hindi, the idea of a ‘national language’ was not simply a borrowing from Europe but also a means of sustaining political authority and, eventually, control of the state. Therefore, language politics was as much about governance as national culture or identity and was implicated in systems of colonial mapping. For example, the Montagu–​Chelmsford Report of 1918, which resulted in the 1919 Government of India Act, examined the idea of subprovincial units of administration based on language. In 1920, in response, the Indian National Congress formally accepted the principle of the linguistic reorganisation of provinces in its Nagpur session –​an idea extended in its Nehru Report of 1928. In 1937 Congress recommended the formation of a separate Andhra Province, and after independence, in 1956, reorganisation began following the appointment of the States Reorganisation Commission in 1953.53 Following independence, India’s 1950 constitution recognised a number of official ‘state’ languages in its eighth schedule. In the erstwhile Madras state, Potti Sriramulu started a fast for a separate Telugu-​speaking Andhra state, initiating the process for linguistic reorganisation in 1955/​6.54 Ambedkar had argued that linguistic reorganisation would help to promote equality and justice, and greater public engagement for Dalits.55 The impact of linguistic reorganisation tended to accelerate both linguistic majoritarianism and the territorial claims of particular languages, however. This led to the decline of some historically important languages, which had cultural implications for how the nation was defined. For example, whereas Hindi could be claimed to be a ‘home state’ language of five states, Urdu had no territorial base, despite being spoken very widely across ten states and being the mother tongue of 5 per cent of the Indian population. Other much smaller languages began to die out entirely, especially those of remote adivasi groups, as dominant regional languages pushed them out of circulation.56 It was also very difficult to clearly justify a single national language. Most speakers of India’s largest (although not majority) language, Hindi, lived in Hindi belt states. By contrast, speakers of many minority languages, especially those of the south, including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Urdu, were spread more widely. This made the case for Hindi as a ‘national’ language difficult to justify on demographic grounds.57 Because of these distributions, with different linguistic groups living side by side, especially in the border regions of India, bilingualism and linguistic accommodation constituted a common everyday strategy. Equally, by the 1970s around 36 per cent of the population lived in areas that strongly resisted the imposition of Hindi as a national language.58 In addition, moves to impose Hindi as rashtra bhasha tended to reinforce opposition to any definitive statement on a national language.59 Questions of territory and language often overlapped with debates about ethnicity and belief. The promotion of both Hindi and Urdu began to coalesce, with institutions promoting ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ interests, respectively, by the 1920s, even though earlier Hindi/​Urdu literary cultures were cross-​communal.60 Language, then, became another dynamic of religious community competition and national belonging. And, like nationalism, the idea of Hindu/​Muslim community interests was a political taxonomy, largely produced by government. Intellectuals and reformers struggled to articulate changes in their religious cultures in relation to the idea 54

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of the nation. But, within this struggle, Hindu publicists were generally more successful both in ‘nationalising’ their own traditions and suggesting the non-​Indian, or extra-​territorial, loyalties of others, especially Muslims.61 This distorted the lived realities of both major communities into misleadingly corporate entities, which ignored the many other social, regional, and linguistic divisions that cut across them. Muslim members of the Congress were described in its own literature as ‘Muslim nationalists’, creating a presumption that Muslims both historically and in contemporary India normally eschewed national belonging, as alien to their supposedly transnational religious cultures. Yet Muslims made specific claims to national belonging, not least because of the rooted nature of Indo-​Islamic culture. The most obvious political manifestation of this claim to national belonging existed in the Muslim League, a party that developed out of an educational project: the Aligarh Anglo-​Oriental College set up by Syed Ahmed Khan. The early Muslim League was controlled by landed Muslims, but its more radical turn by the 1910s linked it more squarely to the emergent Aligarh Muslim University.62 In its early years, and then again in the 1940s, the League was ambivalent or politically opposed to the INC, but there were significant phases of political accommodation –​notably the period from the mid-​1910s to the mid-​1920s. Conditions at the end of the First World War encouraged the development of an All-​India protest movement, led by Muslims, but drawing in other communities –​the Khilafat agitation. Protesting against British control of the Muslim holy lands against the authority of the Caliph, Khilafatists recruited a successful Gujarati politician who had set up a form of non-​violent resistance in South Africa: Mohandas Gandhi. With Gandhi’s assistance, a temporary alliance was developed with the INC.63 But the ‘nationalism’ of the Muslim League cannot be judged simply with reference to other mainstream movements. Before the formation of Pakistan, the League mobilised constituencies on the basis of its own notions of territorial and political belonging: Separate electorates. Although viewed by many in the Congress as divisive or ‘anti-​national’, separate electorates granted a specific role for Muslims within an all-​India polity. This polity would recognise the distinctive requirements of Muslims as a minority. In some cases the requirements were articulated as ‘backwardness’, and in others in terms of ‘historic importance’. In both discourses a notion of Indian belonging was present –​either as a Muslim sense of corporate belonging to the idea of social development in India (as ‘backward’), or as the recognition of Islam to the cultural and religious characteristics of India as a land. This is not to argue that the Muslim League, in its final decade of existence, did not push strongly for the formation of a separate Muslim homeland, albeit one that was always vaguely conceived. But recent work on the idea of ‘Pakistan’ suggests that the specific associations of Muslims in India with a clearly separate ‘territory’ by the 1940s were always highly ambivalent, despite the presence in this nationalism of forms of separatism.64 The political and territorial logic of Muslims in India added to this ambivalence: Urban Muslims, as a significant but insecure minority in provinces such as UP (who ultimately formed the core group of highly skilled migrants to Pakistan from 1947), might see the advantages of a separate sovereign state. But this was not necessarily true for co-​religionists in the Muslim-​majority areas of Punjab and (especially) Bengal. These communities, until 1946, mostly lay in the support of cross-​communal parties, and in the case of Bengal often backed a strongly Bengali identity and leadership style, epitomised by that province’s key figure, Fazlul Haq.65 As with other communities, Muslims formed their own systems of political publicity around this politics of representation, most notably in the press and pamphlet literature. Muslim ashraf communities were at the centre of urban projects of literary revival in Urdu in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, whether in majority or minority regions. The poetry 55

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of Altaf Husain Hali, or the work of Syed Ahmed Khan and Maulana Shibli Numani (the latter opposing Muslim separatism), suggests that this intelligentsia was politically diverse. It also clearly demonstrates that the supposed ‘nationalist’/​‘communalist’ binary were more a product of interwar political discourse than an accurate reflection of political realities.66 Press and pamphlet debates could build out of sectarian differences too. Following the extension of separate electorates under the 1919 Government of India Act, Shia communities argued that they had been muscled out of representation on legislative councils. As a result, they formed their own political organisation, the Shia Political Conference, and newspaper, Sarfaraz.67

‘Nation-​building’ projects: Secularism and ethnic nationalism In the early 1950s the new government of independent India allowed its recently constituted Planning Commission to seek popular support for its development schemes. Massive ‘Plan publicity’ campaigns, including a celebration of such events as ‘Plan day’ and Plan week’, were established.68 As Ranajit Guha argued for the 1930s, the project of Congress hegemony mobilised large populations behind the ‘illusion of common interests’.69 This nation-​building project continued after 1947, albeit with new challenges to its claim to authority. Anti-​colonialism had required, for many, an embracing of modernity as a means of building a sovereign state, liberated from the West but also self-​confident in its socially modernist projects. In concrete form this included the popularisation of national planning, the ritual grandstanding of national citizenship in 1950s Republic Day ceremonies,70 and the Nehruvian rhetoric of ‘unity in diversity’. At a social level, it was epitomised by the calls for the reform of customary legal systems governing personal law –​the rights of women to divorce, custody, and property.71 At a territorial level, the idea of unitary India galvanised the spatial consolidation of ex-​princely states into the Union, and, as we saw in the last section, the reorganisation of territorial boundaries. One of the striking features of India’s post-​1947 projects in ‘nation building’ was its effective appropriation of the structures of the colonial state and what two historians have described as its imitation of that state’s idea of ‘monolithic sovereignty’.72 In effect, the state itself became the nation, moving away from some of the most powerful critical strands in anti-​colonial nationalism described above. This privileging of state power manifested itself most clearly in the 1950 constitution, which drew on the centralising themes set out in 1935, and in an unchanged ‘steel frame’ of a colonial bureaucracy. There were a range of competing visions of the nation, including rural ‘uplift’ led by the All India Women’s Association and the continuation of Gandhian ‘constructive nationalism’ in the Sarvodaya movement, the movement of J. P Narayan. But most other visions, being regionally rooted, fared poorly in the context of Congress’s centralised power. There was another nationalist ideology, however, which also depended upon a strong centralised state to carry through its larger agenda: Hindu nationalism. This alternative ‘all India vision’ based on a putative religious majority had its greatest purchase in parts of northern and western India but has, since the 2010s, managed to extend its appeal to other regions. The idea of ‘Hindu’ in Hindu nationalism does not signify that its organisations, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, promote a theocracy. On the contrary, this form of nationalism posits a political form of Hinduism, based on European ideas of race, ethnicity, and nation, and drawing strongly on European fascism via its key texts, such as Veer Savarkar’s Hindutva (1924) and M. S. Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts (1966).73 This fact qualifies the argument that the rise of Hindu nationalism in India has been the outcome of a ‘crisis’ of secularism, which accompanied a decline in Congress’s authority from the 1970s.74 The relationship of the Hindu right to the INC has deeper historical roots, with a significant 56

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section of Congress leadership, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, drawing on parallel forms of Hindu nationalism.75 The BJP government led by Narendra Modi also makes constant reference to founding figures and events of the late 1940s and early 1950s.76 Yet the political gains of the right still need to be explained. Part of the answer lies in the promotion by Indira Gandhi, and her son Rajiv Gandhi, of majoritarian religious populism. This included support for the notion of ‘Ram Rajya’ and backing the Hindu right’s position on the disputed mosque-​temple site in Ayodhya. The latter became a cause célèbre for the Sangh Parivar, and the violence surrounding the mosque’s destruction in December 1992 was effectively manipulated for electoral gains. In the 1989 election, and into the early 1990s, larger social changes drew India’s upper castes and middle classes into support for the BJP. These groups’ historic advantages were challenged by lower-​status communities now able to benefit from the extension of statutory affirmative action, presented in the Mandal Commission Report, which was actioned in 1990. This extended the system of government reservations to a large number of further ‘other backward castes’ (OBCs), leading to a reaction among key high-​caste communities.77 Through the 1990s the logic of India’s multiple regional circumstances permitted only relatively short phases of administration for the BJP at the centre in coalitions,78 the most significant being the National Democratic Alliance government from 1998 to 2004. But the general election of 2014 led to perhaps the single most dramatic transformation in India’s relationship to Hindu nationalism. This brought the BJP to power with a large majority under a leader who had been chief minister of Gujarat during the anti-​Muslim violence in February and March 2002. Narendra Modi’s electoral successes were repeated in 2019, and have changed not only the rhetorical articulation of nationhood and belonging but also the material characteristics of citizenship. The former is seen in the idea of the ‘anti-​national’ label, applied to a range of activities, from anti-​government protesting to social media activity and everyday food habits, and in the continued (and successful) use of violence and intimidation during elections. The latter has allowed nationalists to reshape the very bases of India’s major institutions of constitutional democracy. This has been most starkly illustrated in the abrogation of article 370 in relation to Kashmir’s autonomy and in the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, which weakens the citizenship rights of Muslims and some adivasi groups.

Résumé Recent commentaries on authoritarian populism across the world suggest that the apparent global enthusiasm for the ‘nation’ reveals its likely future demise. Populations worldwide are, according to this argument, poorly served by old structures of the nation state, now that global communications, trade, and cultures, and environmental change, so directly affect their lives.79 Since the 1980s at least, however, historians have attempted to reframe the category of the nation, bringing into question the legitimacy of the national project itself. For those writing within Subaltern Studies and in its wake, the argument has been taken further. The nation state has effectively promoted structures of violence, which have forced social movements affected by resultant structural inequalities to develop alternative forms of association. Movements and associations of citizens, in turn, have been shaped by alternative forms of social communication or affinity that parallel those of the state, sometimes strategically employing nationalist rhetoric. Language movements developed a notion of common interest that rooted belonging in cultural and literary spheres. While opposing the dominance of another language, they could create the spatial idea of a language nation, with all the cultural content that it contained. Religious minorities engaged with the political and cultural structures of the 57

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nation state, in some cases attempting to re-​form the nation and in others viewing themselves as separate and sovereign. India’s unique array of historically disempowered communities have rooted a sense of belonging to a common territory or place in land rights, property, and political representation. Some of these movements eschewed the modernity of state. Others sought to model new forms of national social equality. Ambedkar argued that India would only be a state, rather than a nation, unless social unity was achieved via radical state-​driven social reform in favour of minorities, particularly Dalits.80 In other areas, marginalised communities have crafted their own ideas of belonging and nationality in forms of insurgent citizenship that disrupt mainstream ideas of national belonging.81 Since 2014 in India, as elsewhere, right-​wing populism has gained electoral advantages, however, by developing and repurposing older ideas about the nation. It is significant that the Modi government has keenly referenced the first decade of Indian independence, as a means of not just reshaping but also reappropriating existing visions of the nation. This has included the gigantism of the ‘statue of unity’ –​the vast record-​breaking statue of Vallabhai Patel, the first home minister of India and right-​wing Congressman, erected on the river Narmada near the Sardar Sarovar Dam; the constant critical references during elections to the Nehru dynasty;82 and the appropriation of B.R. Ambedkar, for example, in the develop of five government-​ sponsored pilgrimage sites (panch teerth), in Delhi, Mumbai, Nagpur, Mhow, and King Henry’s Road, London. Nation building in India, even when it has apparently led to some dramatic ideological shifts around citizenship and the status of Kashmir, still makes reference to historical forms of nationalist mobilisation.

Notes 1 Christopher A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Governance in the Making of Modern India (New Delhi: OUP, 1998), 27–​30. 2 Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 3 For example, B. Pattabhai Sitaramayya, History of the Indian National Congress, vol. 1, (1885–​1935) (Delhi: S. Chand, 1969). 4 R.C. Majumdar, History of the Freedom Movement in India, vols. I & II (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962). 5 Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1968); John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson and Anil Seal (eds.), Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870 to 1940 (Cambridge: CUP, 1973). 6 Ranajit Guha, ‘On some aspects of the historiography of colonial India’, in: idem (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 1 (New Delhi: OUP, 1982), pp. 1–​8. 7 For a discussion of how subaltern studies authors made use of Gramsci’s notion of peasant politics and autonomy, see David Arnold, ‘Gramsci and peasant subalternity in India’, in: Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 24–​49. 8 Guha, ‘On some aspects of the historiography’, 4–​5. 9 Idem, ‘The prose of counter-​insurgency’, in: idem (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 2 (New Delhi: OUP, 1983), pp. 1–​3. 10 See idem, ‘Chandra’s death’, in: idem (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 5 (New Delhi: OUP, 1987), pp. 135–​65; and Shahid Amin, ‘Approver’s testimony, judicial discourse: The case of Chauri Chaura’, in: Guha, Subaltern Studies, vol. 5, pp. 166–​202. 11 Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 100–​20. 12 Ibid., 130–​42. 13 Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Rallying round the cow: Sectarian strife in the Bhojpuri region, c.1888–​1917’, in: Guha, Subaltern Studies, vol. 2, pp. 60–​129. 14 David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (New Delhi: OUP, 1987); Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Trade unions in a hierarchical culture: Jute workers of Calcutta, 1920–​1950’,

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Nationalisms and their discontents in: Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 3 (New Delhi: OUP, 1984), pp. 116–​52. 15 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1993). 16 Idem, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 17 John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (New Delhi: OUP, 2000); Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s (London: Hurst, 1996). 18 Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). 19 Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 22. 20 Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 1–​22; Tanika Sarkar, ‘The Hindu wife and the Hindu nation: Domesticity and nationalism in nineteenth century Bengal’, Studies in History, 8 (2), 1992, pp. 213–​35. 21 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 1–​18. 22 Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 3–​12. 23 Claire Alexander, Joya Chatterji, and Annu Jalais, The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 24 Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge: CUP, 2018). 25 Elisabeth Leake, The Defiant Border: The Afghan–​Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonisation, 1936–​ 1965 (Cambridge: CUP, 2017). 26 Sarah Ansari and William Gould, Boundaries of Belonging: Localities, Citizenship and Rights in India and Pakistan (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). 27 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5–​20. 28 See, for example, Ramchandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil, ‘State forestry and social conflict in British India’, Past & Present, 123, 1989, pp. 141–​77. 29 Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste (London: Hurst, 2018). 30 K.N. Arooran, ‘The Tamil renaissance and Dravidian nationalism, 1905–​1944, with special reference to the works of Maraimalai Atikal’ (unpub. PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1976). 31 Gail Omvedt, ‘Jotirao Phule and the ideology of social revolution in India’, EPW, 6 (37), 1971, pp. 1969–​79. 32 Ibid. 33 Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-​Century Western India (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), 220–​52. 34 Scott R. Stroud, ‘Pragmatism, persuasion and force in Bhimrao Ambedkar’s reconstruction of Buddhism’, Journal of Religion, 97 (2), 2017, pp. 214–​43. 35 Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage, 1994), 87–​130. 36 Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). 37 Ramnarayan S. Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011). 38 Ibid., 11–​18. 39 Prathama Banerjee, ‘Culture/​politics: The irresoluble double bind of adivasi politics’, Indian Historical Review, 33 (1), 2006, pp. 99–​126. 40 Guha and Gadgil, ‘State forestry’, 152–​4. 41 David Arnold, ‘Rebellious hillmen: The Gudem-​Rampa risings 1839–​1924’, in: Guha, Subaltern Studies, vol. 1, pp. 88–​142. 42 C. von Fürer-​ Haimendorf, ‘Aboriginal rebellions in the Deccan’, Man in India, 25 (4), 1945, pp. 208–​16. 43 Guha and Gadgil, ‘State forestry’, 160–​1. 44 David Baker, ‘A serious time: Forest satyagraha in Madhya Pradesh, 1930’, IESHR, 21 (1), 1984, pp. 71–​90. See also Sumit Sarkar, ‘Primitive rebellion and modern nationalism: A note on forest

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William Gould satyagraha in the Non-​Cooperation and Civil Disobedience movements’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 38 (1977), pp. 511–​23. 45 See also Projit Mukharji’s chapter in this volume. 46 Dakxin Chhara, Sarah Gandee, and William Gould, ‘Settling the citizen, settling the nomad: “Habitual offenders”, rebellion and civic consciousness in western India, 1938–​1952’, MAS, 54 (2), 2020, pp. 337–​83. 47 Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2001); Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–​1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (Oxford: OUP, 2009). 48 Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere. See also Hans Harder’s chapter in this volume. 49 Rama Sundari Mantena, ‘Vernacular publics and political modernity: Language and progress in colonial south India’, MAS, 47 (5), 2013, pp. 1678–​705. 50 Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere. 51 Anne Feldhaus, ‘Maharashtra as a holy land: A sectarian tradition’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 49 (3), 1986, pp. 532–​48. 52 Anand Teltumbde, ‘Maharashtra at 50: Celebration or shame?’, EPW, 45 (19), 2010, pp. 10–​11. 53 Papia Sengupta and T. Ravi Kumar, ‘Linguistic diversity and disparate regional growth’, EPW, 43 (33), 2008, pp. 8–​10; Robert D. King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India (New Delhi: OUP, 1997). 54 David D. Laitin, ‘Language policy and political strategy’, Political Sciences, 22, 1989, pp. 412–​18. 55 Asha Sarangi, ‘Ambedkar and the linguistic states: The case for Maharashtra’, EPW, 41 (2), 2006, pp. 151–​7. 56 Ganesh Devy, The Being of Bhasha (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014). 57 A.R. Kamat, ‘Ethno-​linguistic issues in Indian federal context’, EPW, 15 (24/​25), 1980, pp. 1053–​66. 58 Ibid. 59 N. Jayaram, ‘The language question in higher education: Trends and issues’, Higher Education, 26, 1993, pp. 93–​114. 60 Francesca Orsini (ed.), Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010). 61 Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalisation of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-​Century Banaras (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010). 62 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000), 108–​22. 63 Hamza Alavi, ‘Ironies of history: Contradictions of the Khilafat movement’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 17 (1), 1997, pp. 1–​16. 64 Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (London: Hurst, 2013). 65 For a detailed exploration of Fazlul Huq’s political style in the late 1930s and 1940s, see Sana Aiyar, ‘Fazlul Huq, region and religion in Bengal: The forgotten alternative of 1940–​43’, MAS, 42 (6), 2008, pp. 1213–​49. 66 Ayesha Jalal, ‘Exploding communalism: The politics of Muslim identity in South Asia’, in: Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (eds.), Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India (New Delhi: OUP, 1997), pp. 80–​90. 67 Justin Jones, Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge: CUP, 2011). 68 Nikhil Menon, ‘Out of commission’, The Indian Express, 15 July 2014. 69 Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 138–​40. 70 Ansari and Gould, Boundaries of Belonging, 23–​64. 71 Reba Som, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code: A victory of symbol over substance?’, MAS, 28 (1), 1994, pp. 165–​94. 72 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, ‘Nationalism, democracy and development’, in: Bose and Jalal, Nationalism, Democracy and Development, pp. 1–​9, 4. 73 Sumit Sarkar, ‘Indian nationalism and the politics of Hindutva’, in: David Ludden (ed.), Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 270–​96. 74 Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics (New Delhi: OUP, 1998). 75 William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). 76 Idem, ‘From Gandhi to Modi: Institutions and technologies of speech and symbolism in India’, in: Monroe Price and Nicole Stremlau (eds.), Speech and Society in Turbulent Times: Freedom of Expression in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), pp. 79–​95.

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Nationalisms and their discontents 77 Sugata Bose, ‘Hindu nationalism and the crisis of the Indian state’, in: idem and Jalal, Nationalism, Democracy and Development, pp. 130–​40. 78 Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds.), The BJP and the Compulsion of Politics in India (New Delhi: OUP, 1998), 1–​21. 79 Rana Dasgupta, ‘The demise of the nation state’, The Guardian, 5 April 2018. 80 B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or the Partition of India (Bombay: Thackers, 1945), ch. 7. 81 The idea of ‘insurgent citizenship’ is borrowed from James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 82 Gould, ‘From Gandhi to Modi’, 81–​7.

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5 REORDERING RELIGION IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA Brian A. Hatcher

Introduction It could be argued that the reordering of religion in modern South Asia constitutes one of the most consequential legacies of the colonial era. This is not because religion is of ultimate concern, nor is it because South Asia is inherently more religious than other regions of the globe. Rather, it is because the legacy of religious change in South Asia during the two centuries from 1757 to 1947 can be detected in everything from the disciplining of individual experience or the contestation of community identity to the pursuit of the very projects of decolonisation and nationalism that have done so much to shape the geography and politics, achievements, and tragedies we associate with modern South Asia. If it is an orientalist trope to render India as primordially religious, there is a certain irony to the fact that one enduring legacy of colonialism in South Asia is the prominent, contested, and sometimes violent place occupied by religion in public life.1 Here one need only think of the tragic history of Partition, the periodic outbreak of pogroms against minority communities, or the exploitation of religion among Hindu majoritarian political parties. Even as liberalism has struggled to limit the role of religion in official policy, religion has found increased saliency within public sphere debates and developments.2 Nor is this even strictly a South Asian story; the reordering of religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is more properly understood as a global process. Scholars today increasingly appreciate how the disciplinary matrices associated with the modern study of comparative religion came into being concurrent with –​and supported by –​the expansion of Western imperialism around the world.3 Recent work has illustrated how wrong it is to think of religion as a preordained and stable category available for neutral analytical study; instead, the genesis of modern conceptions of religion is directly linked to European attempts to rule over non-​ European peoples in places such as southern Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.4 What makes the global history of this ‘empire of religion’ so compelling is that, over time, the tools of modern religious study came to be adopted and adapted by non-​Western actors towards the end of countering and contesting European domination, as well as for new projects around nation building and the contestation of identity.5 A single figure such as Mohandas Gandhi (1869–​1948) proves immensely handy for demonstrating how religion’s history in South Asia may be viewed as a tangled skein of global threads. Gandhi was famously inspired by what he learned of Christianity; he worked creatively 62

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to refashion Indian religious values in light of his reading of the New Testament. But Gandhi was able to encourage new kinds of reflection on Christianity as well, whether by bringing the Gospel into contact with the Bhagavad Gita or through his experiments in communal living in South Africa and India. In his personal example of self-​restraint and simplicity, Gandhi would eventually be likened to Christ himself. That such recognition could occur was a blow to European colonial presumption, wherein empire and Christianity had for so long marched happily together. The ‘seditious fakir’ who bedevilled Churchill became synonymous with India’s movement for independence, itself a struggle in which the reordering of religion played out in the refashioning of communal and national boundaries.6 By reordering Christian knowledge and holding a mirror up to Christian presumption, Gandhi also came to stand for another way to think about religion itself. As one of several modern Indians honoured globally for their spiritual greatness –​alongside the likes of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo –​Gandhi came to embody the promise of religious pluralism. His message that ‘all religions are true’ became a watchword among twentieth-​century thinkers who pressed for universally valid definitions of religion.7 It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the modern academic study of religion as it came to be framed in American university curricula after the 1960s pays implicit homage to Gandhi in its attempt to explore and honour religion in all its manifestations. And, finally, the Gandhian ideal of equal respect for all religions (sarvadharma samabhava) underwrites what is often seen as a uniquely Indian version of secularism, one that seeks to improve upon the limitations of classic Western liberalism.8 The kinds of global repositioning and repurposing of religion one observes in the case of Gandhi thus illustrate not merely what a modern Indian could learn from emergent Western theories of religion but what such a figure ‘could do with that knowledge’ –​which was to recast and recentre religion itself in relation to Western authority.9 What makes this single illustration all the more useful is that we may tease apart these various threads in order to identify with greater precision some of the ways in which religion in South Asia came to be reordered in an era of empire and colonialism. Gandhi is thus not merely a remarkable historical figure; just as importantly, his life may be examined for what it reveals about the changing nature and role of religion in modern South Asia. The goal of this chapter is to undertake just such an exploration, by developing the following selected themes: the trope of Western impact; models of dialogism and convergence; co-​emergence and the trans-​colonial; and the dynamics of communalism and nationalism.

The trope of Western impact That British imperial rule depended upon discursive supports as well as on the material articulation of power is one of the chief conclusions arrived at during the first years of postcolonial theorising.10 When it came to endorsing the benefits of imperial rule for South Asia, the British found an important discursive tool in the claim that it was the joint influence of European civilisation and Christianity that led to the first major awakenings of modern religion in South Asia.11 Although Europeans had claimed to find no religion in places such as southern Africa, and used such a claim to legitimise their rule, the situation in South Asia was different, where there had long been recognition of religion, if largely construed as heathenism. Whether early advocates of the evangelisation of India spoke of Hinduism as containing seeds of truth or denounced it as the very counterfeit of true religion, they shared an assumption that Christianisation would ennoble, improve, and enlighten the world of South Asian religion.12 The advent of a progressive Indian intellectual such as Rammohun Roy (1772–​1833) could be framed in just this fashion. It was Rammohun’s extensive and informed engagement with 63

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Christian scripture and Protestant doctrine that seemed to support the conclusion that his modernity depended upon beneficial exposure to the moral truths of Christianity. As one of his admirers commented after Rammohun’s death in 1833, Rammohun was inspired by a ‘heavenly light’ to awaken India from ‘pagan gloom’ and guide it toward the ‘Sun of Righteousness’. No small part was granted in this endeavour to that ‘holy band’ of Christian patriots who first brought the Gospel to India.13 Notwithstanding the fact that Rammohun vociferously rejected Trinitarian Christianity in favour of a kind of Hindu theism (which drew some inspiration from Islamic theology), Western advocates for religious reform were convinced that religious modernity in India bore the ‘unmistakeable stamp of Christian influence’.14 This trope of Western religious and civilisational impact was to play a significant role in shaping a century or more of reflection on religious change in South Asia. Thanks to the presumed nexus between empire and improvement, the model of impact and response lived on through later colonial accounts of religious modernity; it lingered on in scholarly work produced during the heyday of development theory, with its commitment to finding the best pathways by which South Asia could be led towards modernity on a Western model.15 These strands inform David Kopf ’s widely read account of Rammohun and the Brahmo Samaj, which was produced as late as the last quarter of the twentieth century. It is a reminder of how easy it was even in the 1970s to construe the work of reforming Hinduism along the lines of importing into India Western ideas and values.16 Rammohun, the Brahmo Samaj, and religious reform are forever linked in the literature by virtue of epitomising what has long gone by the name of India’s ‘renaissance’ or ‘awakening’ (jāgaraṇ) under the influence of British rule. In a stirring passage from Indian pioneer historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870–​1958), writing in the early twentieth century, Rammohun is pictured as the ‘first fruit’ of India’s earliest awakening; he is pictured as the one best suited to building a bridge between India’s dark ages and its modern future.17 Expanding on this theme in another work, Sarkar would introduce Rammohun’s role in the Indian renaissance by proclaiming that ‘the intellectual and moral regeneration of India will be remembered as the greatest glory of British imperialism’.18 Even as Jadunath Sarkar praised Indians for throwing open their doors to the winds of reason and morality blowing in from the West, he nonetheless managed to strike a second note, which was to praise Rammohun for seeking a kind of harmony between the ‘modern west and the ancient east’.19 This was a theme identified by other early commentators on India’s renaissance, such as the Anglican clergyman Charles Freer Andrews (1871–​1940), who pointed out that the ‘precepts’ guiding Rammohun’s efforts at religious reform were drawn from two distinct sources: the ancient Upanishads and Christianity.20 Although he was still wedded to the idea that India’s awakening was characterised throughout by its ‘missionary aspect’, Andrews –​like Sarkar –​at least gestured towards something that scholars and critical theorists would subsequently give more attention to: the possibility that the reordering of religion in South Asia was not merely a matter of the West operating on the East but reflected significant processes of dialogue and convergence.

Models of dialogism and convergence To reach a more full-​blown appreciation of how religious modernity in South Asia reflected robust exchanges across linguistic, cultural, and civilisational frontiers, scholarship had first to move through a critique of the long-​dominant renaissance paradigm, with its presumption of benign colonial impact. Such rethinking would commence in the 1970s and 1980s, spurred by the conjoined forces of Marxist reflection on the colonial economy and the rise 64

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of critical initiatives such as subaltern studies.21 In the former mode, critics made less of what had happened under British rule than what had not; the confident proclamations of both the missionary apologists for empire and the likes of Jadunath Sarkar were replaced by a more stark assessment of how colonised subjects were necessarily and systematically prevented from realizing the central promises of liberalism and reform, even as they witnessed the destruction of indigenous industry, cultural performance, and religious traditions.22 Critiques emerging with the subaltern studies collective built on such insights to call attention to the experiences of colonised subjects, whose voices and modes of thought were either suppressed or denigrated within colonial discourse, or those who managed to translate marginal social advancement into the assertion of particular class interests.23 When viewed from either vantage point, a putatively progressive agent of renaissance and reform such as Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar (1820–​91) –​so often lauded for his role in supporting legislation providing for the marriage of Hindu widows –​ could be painted as perennially frustrated in the quest for change, if not otherwise complicit in British attempts to indelibly change Hindu customs by trading on a narrow understanding of Brahmanical Sanskrit culture.24 These critical initiatives from the 1970s and 1980s opened up space for raising questions of native agency, attending to hitherto ignored vernacular sources, and foregrounding patterns of dialogue that had received only passing acknowledgement in the work of figures such as Jadunath Sarkar and C.F. Andrews. Although the framework and constraints of colonial rule remained to the fore, new questions could be asked about how thinkers such as Rammohun and Vidyasagar operated creatively to articulate new visions of religion, literature, and culture.25 Situating South Asian intellectuals in contexts of cultural exchange, scholarship from the 1980s and 1990s offered not one-​dimensional portraits of Indian response but nuanced depictions of cross-​civilisational hermeneutics and lived dialogic experience.26 Along the way, tools were developed for thinking about how an English-​language education and a family background in Sanskrit might equip a figure such as Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838–​94) to redefine the very notion of dharma or to retell the story of Krishna.27 By stressing the cross-​cultural poetics of a figure such as Bankim, or his close contemporary Swami Vivekananda, such scholarship allowed the basic concept of the Indian renaissance to be reimagined as an effort by Indians to mobilise the spiritual, moral, and political riches of South Asian culture towards the goals of religious innovation, social change, and national self-​assertion.28 From such a vantage point, figures such as Vivekananda and Gandhi, so long trapped within orientalist tropes of Hindu spirituality, emerged as canny cultural operators who could work within the discourse of orientalism and Protestant religion in order to redeem the stature of Indian spirituality. Whether one thinks of Vivekananda in his turban and robes at the Chicago World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 or Gandhi’s status as ‘seditious fakir’, it is possible to speak about modes of ‘affirmative orientalism’, whereby colonised actors adopted what was once the negative trope of the world renouncer and imbued it with immense moral and political power.29 The skilful navigation of cross-​cultural currents and changing religious values can be noted in the case of the Buddhist innovator, Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–​1933), whose presence at the 1893 World’s Parliament is often celebrated alongside Vivekananda’s. But it is worth noting that Dharmapala was also central to the work of reclaiming and redefining the Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bodh Gaya –​a process that involved the creation of a new association (the Mahabodhi Society) that was itself situated intellectually at the crossroads of Buddhism, theosophy, and Protestant Christianity. No less than Bankim or Vivekananda, Dharmapala can be said to have skilfully negotiated the terrain of late colonial religious categories and political opportunities to assert a new presence for Buddhism in South Asia.30 Indeed, Dharmapala’s role in articulating a Buddhist vision of religious modernism has even been interpreted as a species 65

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of ‘Protestant Buddhism’, a coinage that captures the dialogic nature of religious change in modern South Asia even as it speaks to the force of modern, post-​Reformation frameworks for understanding religion.31 In a similar vein, others have spoken of the emergence of Protestant Islam and Protestant Hinduism during the same colonial era.32 As a result of critical reorientations taking place from the 1970s to the 1990s, movements that had come in for only passing study in the early twentieth century were treated to more extensive research. Thus, the Arya Samaj, summarily dismissed in earlier accounts as a reactionary phenomenon at odds with the course of modernity in South Asia, could now be pictured as a movement every bit as modern as the Brahmo Samaj –​even if oriented around a different reading of Vedic scripture and indebted to the charisma of another type of ascetic leader, Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1824–​83).33 Simultaneously, the settled truisms of post-​ orientalist scholarship themselves came in for re-​examination. Thus, the colonial lexicographer C.P. Brown, a pioneer of Telugu scholarship during the nineteenth century, could be situated in a context of cultural exchange and dialogue that allowed him to appear as something other than a mere agent of imperial domination.34 Some of the key energies of this critical moment were captured in a volume written for the New Cambridge History of India, published in 1988. In his Socio-​Religious Reform Movements in Colonial India, Kenneth W. Jones attempted to revise older accounts predicated on the notion of impact and response by encouraging readers to think instead of processes of acculturation and accommodation.35 In this regard, Jones’ work marked a significant advance over the outdated approach of the missionary J. N. Farquhar (cited above); most importantly, Jones liberated historical reflection from its dependence on the notion of Christianity as the central force behind South Asian modernity. Jones’ work also expanded upon the range of movements discussed by Farquhar and gave greater attention to traditions and developments outside the mainstream of Hindu reform. Even so, in other respects, the work remained hamstrung by its dependence on inflexible concepts of tradition and modernity and by its failure to attend to the global circuits and diasporic contexts that played into the reordering of religion in the colonial era.36

Co-​emergence and the trans-​colonial An important work for suggesting that the question of religious change in South Asia required answers that were more attentive to global contexts was Peter van der Veer’s Imperial Encounters, from 2001.37 In this work, van der Veer brought the problem of impact back to Britain, as it were, suggesting that a proper understanding of issues such as religion, race, and nation depended upon envisaging the shared –​or, as he put it, ‘interactional’ –​experience of Indians and Britons. As van der Veer pointed out, it was remarkable how little attention had been paid to the colonial experience of the British themselves, not least since two of the most constitutive things about being British in the nineteenth century were Christianity and empire.38 Drawing on the work of both Edward Said and Talal Asad, van der Veer insisted that pressing questions around the meaning of religion and secularity could be approached only by putting developments in India and Britain within the same frame. One could no more understand the shape and political fate of British Christianity in isolation from imperial contexts than one could understand the development of modern Indian religious movements and the Indian nation in isolation from pressing questions facing Britons back home. This turn towards an anthropology of modern Europe (à la Asad), or what Dipesh Chakrabarty referred to as ‘provincializing Europe’, would play an enormous role in fostering new global or trans-​colonial perspectives on the co-​emergence of religious modernity in India and the West.39

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One of the more important books to adopt this critical posture when thinking about modern Hinduism was Brian Pennington’s Was Hinduism Invented?. Often cited as representative of the trend towards revealing how Hinduism could be seen as an invention of the colonial era, Pennington’s work is just as important for what it suggested about the ways in which ‘the religious categories and social practices of both British Christians and Indian Hindus’ were artefacts of a shared colonial modernity.40 Returning to the well-​known denigration of Hinduism as pagan superstition, Pennington complicated colonial discourse by showing how British depictions of Hindu idolatry, fuelled by evangelical religious zeal, directly reflected domestic attempts to define Christianity in Britain as rational, respectable, and Protestant –​ often against an explicitly Catholic ‘other’. Pennington’s argument served to upend simplistic notions of a purportedly unilateral and monolithic ‘orientalist discourse’ by showing how images of the Indian idolater were not merely indicative of ‘British knowledge of the other’ in a doctrinaire Saidian sense but, in fact, served as effective tools for propagating ‘a certain brand of Christian identity’ back home.41 Being able to picture the simultaneous origins of modern Hinduism, modern Protestant theological systems, and the modern discipline of comparative religion marks a crucial moment for appreciating what it means to speak of the colonial reordering of religion. The ‘empire of religion’ may have overtly pledged itself to comparing a world of religious difference, but this so-​called new science also worked hand in hand with theological programmes intent on asserting the global supremacy of Christianity. Today we appreciate how the modern study of religion –​and its central category of the ‘world religions’ –​are both grounded in the global story of European Christian self-​construction.42 Picturing the co-​emergence of modern Hinduism, modern Christianity, and the modern study of religion in this way means, among other things, recognising that the reordering of religion did not simply take place ‘out there’ in the colony but was a metropolitan undertaking as well.43 Pennington’s evocation of ‘polyphonic discourses’ occurring among ‘polyvalent centers’ encouraged a break with unilinear and teleological historical narratives of imperial progress, not to mention with the pursuit of binary cultural comparisons so characteristic of mid-​ twentieth-​century work informed by Max Weber’s comparative sociological project.44 The moment had come when scholars could begin to develop new models for tracing global circuits of knowledge. One thus began to see increased recourse to metaphors of fluidity and dispersion, networks and assemblages, or webs of exchange and transformation. Work in the early 2000s revisited postcolonial and post-​orientalist formulations, by drawing attention to the far-​ flung and criss-​crossing trajectories of modern knowledge as shaped by interactions across and among diverse colonial and diasporic contexts.45 Writing about changes in Jain identity during the modern era, John Cort has noted that this process must be understood as encompassing more than British colonialism in India, since, by virtue of engaging ‘bureaucrats and scholars’ in scattered global locales, like so many modern religious communities in South Asia, Jains came to view themselves as yet another distinct ‘religion’.46 Against this new critical horizon, one could trace the global circulation of a range of formative categories such as religion and reform, not to mention other formative concepts such as asceticism, masculinity, and wisdom. Recognition of the circulation and localisation of such categories has, in turn, facilitated scholarly attempts to understand the origins of distinctively modern phenomena such as theosophy or global yoga, both of which traded on orientalist tropes but were likewise grounded in the aspirations and projects characteristic of a range of colonial and metropolitan actors. Conversely, attention to larger global circuits encouraged a decentring of European authority in the framing of modern notions of religion. Scholars could

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now unearth and scrutinise the contribution of thinkers who deployed the new science of comparative religion from locations such as Cape Town, Calcutta, and Cairo. Older histories of comparative religion, centred solely on developments occurring in universities in Leiden or Oxford or Berlin, were inadequate for capturing such a polycentric origin story.47 The recent work of J. Barton Scott on the global circulation of discourse around religious reform is a good example of the benefits of such reflection. Scott allows us to appreciate that even such apparently straightforward categories as ‘Protestant’ or ‘reform’ should be understood not as objective analytical categories shipped out from Europe for deployment in colonial locales but as themselves open-​ended intellectual ‘assemblages’.48 As such, it makes no sense to set out with a goal to determine how a category such as ‘reform’ came to be impressed upon the tabula rasa of South Asian intellectual life. Rather, the approach advanced by Scott asks how processes of intellectual change taking place within and among Europe and various colonial centres served to activate multiple understandings of reformed religion. Following van der Veer, Scott endorsed a critical approach that is ‘connective’ rather than ‘comparative’; he would have scholars abandon the empire of comparison and seek, instead, to unravel a world of dispersed and multi-​centred assemblages.49 Coming back to the colony when armed with such a critical awareness means revisiting the question of just what constituted religious modernity for South Asian actors. Reflecting on this problem in a volume dedicated to querying trans-​colonial modernities, the late Christopher Bayly remarked: Colonial constructions of the modern were often coercive, depending on the ‘othering’ of a variety of Indian practices … But so, indeed, were many Indian discourses of modernity and, even where these were dependent responses to Western tropes, they often transcended European ideas, announcing their own superior modernity and ‘counterpreaching’ against the backwardness and corruption of Europeans. Bayly further noted that, whenever and wherever such Indian discursive strategies succeeded, it was because they were able to settle into what he called particular ‘ecological niches’, sites that bore the traces of changes occurring over intervening centuries; in South Asia this meant attending to movements for Islamic reform, centuries of Hindu devotionalism, and the rise of affective bonds formed in relation to languages such as Urdu, Hindi, or Bengali.50 The particular niches shaped by such currents played host to particular modernities that bore evidence of both global discourse and local, contingent factors. One site Bayly highlighted as being of particular importance was the Punjab. He pointed out that, during the nineteenth century and early twentieth, the Punjab had witnessed not merely a range of grand imperial projects around landholding and administration but also efforts at Christian institution building, new modes of urban associational activity, and the rise of vigorous polemics among Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities. When viewed as a frontier far removed from the world of urban reform, it is tempting to view the Punjab as marginal. And yet Bayly stressed that the Punjab serves as an important reminder of the contingent, connected, and consequential history of religious reordering in colonial South Asia. On the one hand, this is because the region witnessed the flourishing of reformist religious movements such as the Arya Samaj and the Singh Sabha. On the other hand, it reflects the fact that the Punjab was linked by trade and migration to far wider global circuits, whether through recruitment for colonial military campaigns, the expansion of imperial trade, or the quest of imperial migrants for new homelands in places such as the United Kingdom or Canada.51 Ultimately, as Bayly pointed out, it was the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 that crushed the Punjab’s 68

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‘vibrant form of modernity’ –​a stark reminder of all that was at stake in the reordering of religion in colonial South Asia.52

Communalism and nationalism The rise of social constructionist theories of religion in the last quarter of the twentieth century, coupled with developments in discourse theory and postcolonial studies, helped prompt a range of new work that contributed greatly to awareness of the colonial construction of religion while fuelling numerous debates over the role of colonial rule in creating and fostering difference in South Asia in terms of caste, language, religion, and region. The literature is too vast to address here, not least because it also engages with a host of disciplinary concerns arising in adjacent scholarly locations such as history, anthropology, sociology, and political science. Nevertheless, the red thread of postcolonial studies and subaltern studies can be found running through most of the important work on communalism, nationalism, and religion generated since the 1990s. Key thematics for addressing the colonial reordering of religion would include the concepts of colonial rule by difference, bhadralok (Bengali: gentleman) hegemony, and the subaltern.53 And one important critical development that characterises the shift from early postcolonial formulations to more recent approaches may be said to consist in the recognition that, although colonised South Asians were disciplined, oppressed, and imprisoned in conceptual, moral, and institutional frameworks generated under imperial rule, they remained nonetheless actors in their own right and never merely patients lying inert on an operating table.54 If postcolonial theory commenced with attention to the dynamics of resistance, Bayly’s comment cited above points in the direction some scholarship would take, which was to proceed on the assumption that Indians had a hand in constructing the worlds they inhabited. To be sure, the imperial pitch was skewed and the realities of oppression were omnipresent; far from merely ‘counter-​preaching’ to the West, however, South Asian actors also preached, disciplined, and sought to ‘other’ their own neighbours. Thus, while the British had a vested interest in deploying new instruments such as statistical study, anthropometrics, and sociology to categorise, compartmentalise, and contain the peoples they sought to rule, South Asian actors were not only educated in these new sciences and disciplinary tools but capable of utilising them to pursue their own interests, whether these reflected caste, class, or religious concerns.55 This is one point on which the global discourse of reform, predicated on notions of progress, reason, and moral respectability, could provide elite religious leaders with a cudgel to threaten neighbours whose religious beliefs or practices failed to rise to their standards. Herein lies the crux of the thesis around bhadralok hegemony. These representatives of high culture and enlightened ideas were never averse to castigating subaltern groups they consigned to the category of the lesser people (chotolok) for their failure to eat, celebrate, congregate, or worship in proper fashion. Among those othered by high-​caste Hindu bhadralok were members of Muslim communities, setting aside, perhaps, those few who might be credited with sharing similar values –​meaning a preference for English, a recourse to European cultural forms, and an equal willingness to distance themselves from members of their own faith who failed to follow suit. But in places such as Bengal, where the self-​consciously refined piety of groups such as the Brahmo Samaj earned widespread sympathy, the bhadralok were equally prepared to stigmatise popular cultural forms associated with vulgar behaviour, to cast devotional religious movements as emotional or unrestrained, and to discipline women towards new ideals of companionate marriage and domestic respectability.56 To pursue the bhadralok is to come face to face with the contradictions of empire as it played out among a colonised people. On the one hand, the great reform initiatives of the nineteenth 69

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century –​including Rammohun’s opposition to sati and Vidyasagar’s promotion of widow marriage –​are often lauded as evidence of progress and might even (by some accounts) token an emergent consciousness of what was once called the ‘women’s question.’57 In this respect, the reformers deserve credit for advancing more liberal ideas about female education, property, and conjugal rights; it might even be argued that the reformers helped promote a greater recognition for women overall and empowered them to take up careers in literature or social activism.58 On the other hand, reformers such as Rammohun and Vidyasagar were also elite male Brahman scholars, who perhaps inadvertently helped promote limited and confining visions of true Hinduism. Since the 1990s feminist historiography has revealed how the work of the nineteenth-​century social reformers refashioned patriarchy in the interests of preserving caste privilege and advancing claims about Indian national honour. Far from a force for liberation, then, the reformers’ celebration of the chaste and submissive wife also worked to limit women’s agency.59 Celebration of a normative scriptural Hinduism, even in support of putatively progressive social causes, likewise tended to undercut the dynamic role of local custom in South Asian religious life, while significantly constraining the worlds of women and lower-​caste actors.60 What is more, the success of the great reform campaigns was predicated on a basic appeal to the power of the British colonial state. After 1857, with the rise of a more racialised and fully imperial Raj, such a strategy would fall from favour among South Asian change agents as a legitimate pathway to advancing their interests. Thus, the success of so-​called bhadralok reform came at the cost of hardened fault lines (with respect to caste, gender, and community) among even those who claimed to speak on behalf of religions such as Hinduism.61 There is another important structuring factor in colonial religious life that can be traced to the work of figures such as Rammohun and Vidyasagar. These two were among the most successful early masters of new possibilities within the modern colonial public sphere, which included the formation of voluntary associations to pursue concerted social or religious agendas and the use of print-​based media to advance new causes. Both these strategies would come to be central for the work of religious change, throughout the nineteenth century and across the subcontinent. The Arya Samaj in western India and the Punjab is an excellent example, not least when one recognises the skill with which Dayananda Saraswati coupled institutional organisation with print-​based polemics. Both were weapons he could use against his competitors as he sought a larger market share in the complex ‘ecological niche’ of the Punjab. Such strategies were hardly confined to regions such as the Punjab or groups such as the Arya Samaj; rather, they were deployed with enormous success by a wide range of actors. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century the twin acts of forming a society (sabhā or anjuman) and publishing a periodical were essential to the public articulation of any number of religious commitments.62 It has been shown, too, that, if progressive movements often pioneered associational and print-​based projects, these were readily adopted for the promotion of a wide range of ‘customary’ religion. Nile Green has thus argued for viewing the printing press as a neutral technology that could be employed to any number of ends. It might bolster the work of a modernist Muslim anjuman or just as easily support the ‘enchanted’ world of shrine-​based Islam in a city such as Bombay.63 The case of Islam in western India provides an important reminder of other ways religion was being reshaped by the fundamental logics of colonial governmentality and law. The significance of the role played by the introduction of the Indian census in precipitating competition among religious groups and communities is now widely recognised.64 Under imperial conditions of ‘Divide and rule’ and in dynamic multi-​religious contexts such as Bombay or the Punjab, it became possible for religious leaders from various communities to turn to official statistics in order to stoke fears among their followers that their communities were in danger 70

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of being overwhelmed or replaced within the landscape. The late nineteenth century in the Punjab represents one historical context in which movements of conversion and reconversion (the so-​called śuddhi campaigns of the Arya Samaj) were driven by census-​based thinking, which fuelled the flames of competition, anxiety, and even violence.65 Looking beyond the Punjab, the early twentieth century witnessed widespread communal agitation around equally inflammatory issues, such as cow protection or the sanctity of the Hindi language.66 Although it has been argued that communal tensions pre-​dated colonial rule, it cannot be denied that the reordering of religion in colonial South Asia involved the increasing communalisation of sentiment and the increased solidification of religious boundaries.67 There is general consensus today that, whereas religious identity had once been a matter of somewhat fluid or ‘fuzzy’ boundaries, the combined agency of state, law courts, census statistics, and associational activity supported the rise of what Sudipto Kaviraj has dubbed ‘enumerated’ communities. Replacing premodern openness and plural modes of religious engagement, the enumerated world of late colonial religion was one in which identities were increasingly envisaged as discrete, bounded, and therefore inherently poised for competition.68 Colonial legal decisions, often undergirded by orientalist definitions of religion predicated on claims about origins and scripture, served to enshrine fixed definitions of belonging and to reshape the parameters of authority within early colonial polities. Here we may think of a series of consequential legal cases involving the Khoja Ismailis (or Satpanthis) during the nineteenth century, the result of which was to redefine the once fluid world of the Satpanthis in relation to the modern, identitarian grid of authentic Islam.69 Moving into the twentieth century, one has only to think of the rise of Hindu–​Muslim tensions in Gandhi’s era, the trauma of the 1947 Partition, and the eventual destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 to reckon with how the colonial enumeration of religious communities has played out in modern South Asian history. At the same time, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, religious polemics and communal tensions began to articulate more clearly in relation to projects of anti-​colonial resistance. The Swadeshi period (1905 to 1907) marked a particularly potent moment for the expression of communalised religious sentiments, as these were yoked nativist (svadeśī) politics. By this time associational activity conjoined to the active use of popular media such as print, song, and visual imagery allowed for the direct –​and sometimes violent –​targeting of new kinds of enemy. The colonial state certainly represented the most obvious deterrent to self-​rule (svarāj); but, as we have seen in relation to bhadralok projects in general, elite Hindu actors were not above targeting internal enemies, not least the Muslim.70 To be sure, the pathway to the communalisation of religious sentiments was complicated. A good example can be found in the case of the song-​poem Bande Mataram (or Hail to the Mother), which was originally created by Bankimchandra Chatterjee as one element within his historical novel Ānandamaṭh (The Abbey of Bliss; 1882). During the Swadeshi movement, which was sparked by British plans to partition the Presidency of Bengal, Bankim’s song gained immense popularity, largely because it depicted India as a holy motherland in need of the protection of her devoted children. Soon there developed a veritable cult of Mother India, in which the nation came to be depicted along the lines of a Hindu mother goddess.71 As the protests gained momentum and the economic interests of poor Muslim populations in eastern Bengal came into conflict with the boycotts promoted by Hindu nationalists in places such as Calcutta, the song went from being a rallying cry to a flash point in confrontations between Hindu and Muslim protestors.72 It would be wrong to reduce such clashes to religious causes in a narrow sense, but, in the world of enumerated communities, religious identity clearly became a potent symbol for expressing social, political, or economic grievances. 71

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This legacy would continue long after the British government rescinded plans for the partition of Bengal. The song was reportedly chanted during Hindu–​Muslim riots in 1921 and as late as 1937 Muhammad Ali Jinnah expressed his outrage that ‘Bande mataram’ had become a slogan for the Indian National Congress. Jinnah’s concerns were scarcely misplaced, insofar as Bande Mataram was by this point not merely an ‘iconic text’ but one with ‘exclusivist’ resonances for new generations of Hindu nationalists.73 And so it remains to this day. The curious history of this slogan reminds us of the mutability and the power of symbols. Even the rallying cries of a leader such as Swami Vivekananda, widely recognised as a voice for universalism, can be quoted in such a way that his call to ‘Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached’ can be deployed as rallying cry for Hindu nationalists intent on reclaiming India as a sacred motherland.74

Résumé To invoke Vivekananda and the idea of universalism is to remind ourselves that, even as the communalisation of religion grew more strident in the early twentieth century and claims about Hindu identity came to be wrapped within claims about the Indian nation, there were those in South Asia who resisted the calls of both religious exclusion and narrow nationalism. Although Vivekananda had died before the onset of Swadeshi, his message of a ‘humanistic, man-​making religion’ proved immensely influential for a young man studying in south India: Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.75 Radhakrishnan was moved by Vivekananda’s love for his homeland but was equally inspired by his embrace of Vedanta as a message of religious universalism suitable for transcending the narrow boundaries of community and nation. Radhakrishnan would go on to become a great philosopher-​statesman and spokesperson for Vedanta as the shared human experience of ultimate truth, beyond caste, creed, and community. Appealing to personal experience as the highest court, Radhakrishnan participated in an important project to reimagine religion outside the creedal confines associated with European Christianity. His religion of experience proved to be one of colonial India’s great contributions to twentieth-​century attempts at religious tolerance and pluralism.76 With this we can return to Gandhi, who likewise valorised the personal experience of truth. Although it is reassuring to recall Gandhi’s pluralist legacy, we are, I hope, now equipped to appreciate what a tangled skein of influences must be accounted for when assessing his place in the colonial history of religion. Himself the embodiment of global flows and trans-​colonial networks, his views were also framed by –​even as he worked to renegotiate –​dominant tropes about religion in South Asia, not least that of the ‘naked fakir’. Similarly, Gandhi’s asceticism no longer appears sui generis but has to be situated within an emerging global imaginary that developed around the figure of the Indian holy man, the powers of spiritual practice, and the sanctity of poverty, sometimes refracted through the life of St Francis.77 Likewise, Gandhi’s embrace of the feminine must be understood in relation to late nineteenth-​century global discourse around muscular Christianity, not least as this came to resonate with and promote the claims of empire. Even his resort to a largely Hindu symbolic repertoire in pressing for what he called Hind Swaraj, or Indian self-​rule, was itself neither purely idiosyncratic nor merely Hindu. Rather, it represented one further dimension of the reordering of religion within confluent global imaginaries informed by Indic spiritual practices, new movements such as theosophy, the modern ‘cult of the individual’, and emergent forms of ‘biomorality’ flowing along turn-​of-​the-​century channels shaped by fads in hygiene, diet, sexual mores, and homeopathy.78 The very fact that Gandhi is today revered globally but contested in India –​where pluralism competes with exclusionary politics and a new generation of holy men stoke communal

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tensions for political gain –​is but one indication of how the colonial reordering of religion remains a matter of vital import.

Notes 1 See Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (New York: Routledge, 1998). 2 Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Robert Yelle, and Matteo Taussig-​Rubbo (eds.), After Secular Law (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 3 See Björn Bentlage, Marion Eggert, and Hans-​Martin Kramer (eds.), Religious Dynamics under the Impact of Imperialism and Colonialism: A Sourcebook (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 4 See Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 5 See David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 6 Churchill’s remark is quoted in Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 277. On circuits of counter-​hegemonic politics between South Asia and the United States, see Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 7 M.K. Gandhi, All Religions Are True, ed. A. Hingorani (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1962). 8 C.S. Adcock, The Limits of Tolerance: Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (New York: OUP, 2014). 9 Chidester, Empire of Religion, 49. 10 See Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The command of language and the language of command’, in: Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 4 (New Delhi: OUP, 1985), pp. 278–​329; and Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (New York: CUP, 1994). 11 See J.N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India (New York: Macmillan, 1915). 12 For the former view, see idem, The Crown of Hinduism (Oxford: OUP, 1913); for the latter, see A. Duff, India and Indian Missions (Edinburgh: John Johnston, 1840). 13 Lant Carpenter, A Review of the Labours, Opinions, and Character of Rajah Rammohun Roy: In a Discourse, on Occasion of His Death (London: Browne & Reid, 1833). 14 Cf. J.C. Oman on modern theistic reform in India: Indian Life: Religious and Social (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889), 87. 15 For a critique of the ‘empire of reform’, see Brian A. Hatcher, Hinduism before Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 16 David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 17 Jadunath Sarkar, India through the Ages: A Survey of the Growth of Indian Life and Thought (Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar, 1928), 105. 18 Idem, Fall of the Mughal Empire, vol. 4 (Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar, 1950), 347. 19 Ibid., 348. 20 C.F. Andrews, The Renaissance in India: Its Missionary Aspect (London: Church Missionary Society, 2012), 110–​11. 21 Brian A. Hatcher, ‘Great men waking: Paradigms in the historiography of the Bengal renaissance’, in: Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed.), Bengal: Rethinking History: Essays in Historiography (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), pp. 135–​63. 22 Barun De, ‘A historiographical critique of Renaissance analogues for nineteenth century India’, in: idem (ed.), Perspectives in Social Sciences, vol. 1 (Calcutta: OUP, 1977), pp. 178–​218. 23 Ranajit Guha, ‘Dominance without hegemony and its historiography’, in: idem (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 6 (New Delhi: OUP, 1989), pp. 210–​319. 24 Asok Sen, Vidyasagar and His Elusive Milestones (Calcutta: Ridhi India, 1977). 25 Brian A. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2020). 26 On this generally, see Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988). For a useful study centred on late colonial north India, see Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and Nineteenth-​ Century Banaras (New Delhi: OUP, 1997).

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Brian A. Hatcher 27 On Bankim’s understanding of dharma, see Halbfass, India and Europe; and Hans Harder, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srimadbhagabadgita: Translation and Analysis (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001). 28 Brian A. Hatcher, Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (New York: OUP, 1999); Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (New Delhi: OUP, 1988). 29 Richard G. Fox, Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). 30 Alan Trevithick, The Revival of Pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811–​1949): Angarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Temple (Delhi: Motilal Benarsidass, 2006); Stephen Kemper, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 31 Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 32 Francis Robinson, ‘The British Empire and Muslim identity in South Asia’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 8, 1998, pp. 271–​89, 275; M.G. Ranade, ‘Hindu Protestantism’, in: M.B. Kolasker (ed.), Religious and Social Reform: A Collection of Essays and Speeches (Bombay: Gopal Narayan, 1902), pp. 198–​228. 33 Kenneth W. Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-​Century Punjab (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976); J.T.F. Jordens, Dayananda Saraswati: His Life and Ideas (New Delhi: OUP, 1978). 34 Peter Schmitthenner, Telugu Resurgence: C.P. Brown and Cultural Consolidation in Nineteenth-​Century South India (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001). 35 Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-​Religious Reform Movements in Colonial India (New York: CUP, 1988). 36 On this, see Hatcher, Hinduism before Reform, ch. 9. 37 Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 38 Van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 30. 39 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 40 Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: OUP, 2005), 100. 41 Ibid., 52. 42 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also N.J. Girardot, ‘Max Müller’s “sacred books” and the nineteenth-​century production of the comparative science of religions’, History of Religions, 41 (3), 2002, pp. 213–​50. 43 For further critical orientation, see John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). 44 See Max Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, trans. H.H. Gerth and D. Martindale (New York: Free Press, 1958 [1916]). 45 The work of Tony Ballantyne is representative here. See especially Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 46 John E. Cort, ‘Jain identity and the public sphere in nineteenth-​century India’, in: Martin Fuchs and Vasudha Dalmia (eds.), Religious Interactions in Modern India (New Delhi: OUP, 2019), pp. 99–​137. 47 Here it is useful to compare Eric Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd edn. (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986), with Chidester, Empire of Religion. 48 J. Barton Scott, Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-​Rule (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), develops the concept of ‘magical assemblages’ found in Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 49 For an attempt to build on Scott’s model, see Brian A. Hatcher, ‘India’s many Puritans: Connectivity and friction in the study of modern Hinduism’, History Compass, 15 (1), 2017, pp. 1–​12. 50 Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Afterword: Bombay’s “intertwined modernities”, 1780–​1880’, in: Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher (eds.), Trans-​Colonial Modernities in South Asia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 231–​48, 244. 51 On reform in the Sikh context, see Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); on the global circuits of modern Sikhism, see Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora. 52 Bayly, Afterword, 244.

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Reordering religion in colonial South Asia 53 Some important works include Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, new edn. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and the essays in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: OUP, 1988). 54 For a classic Saidian interpretation of Indian ‘patiency’, see Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (New York: Blackwell, 1990). 55 R.B. Bhagat, ‘Census enumeration, religious identity and communal polarization in India’, Asian Ethnicity, 14 (4), 2013, pp. 434–​8; Michael Haan, ‘Numbers in Nirvana: How the 1872–​1921 Indian censuses helped operationalise “Hinduism” ’, Religion, 35 (1), 2005, pp. 13–​30. 56 Some essential titles include Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (New Delhi: OUP, 1997); idem, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001); Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Culture and Hegemony (New Delhi: Sage, 2004); and Mahua Sarkar, Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 57 The classic essay remains Partha Chatterjee, ‘The nationalist resolution of the women’s question’, in: Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 233–​53. 58 Brian A. Hatcher, ‘The Shakuntala paradigm: Vidyasagar, widow marriage and the morality of recognition’, Journal of Hindu Studies, 6 (3), 2013, pp. 363–​83. 59 Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), highlight parallels within Hindu and Muslim reformist programmes while drawing out important regional variations. On the ‘sacrifice’ of Muslim women’s freedom on the ‘altar’ of Islamic identity, see Ayesha Jalal, ‘The convenience of subservience: Women and the state of Pakistan’, in: D. Kandiyoti (ed.), Women, Islam and the State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), pp. 77–​114. 60 On sati, see Lata Mani, ‘Contentious traditions: The debate on sati in colonial India’, in: Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, pp. 88–​126; on widow marriage, see Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar, Hindu Widow Marriage: An Epochal Work on Social Reform from Colonial India, trans. Brian A. Hatcher (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 61 See Amiya Sen, Hindu Revivalism in Bengal, 1872–​1905: Some Essays in Interpretation (New Delhi: OUP, 1993). 62 See Jones, Arya Dharm; Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries; and John Zavos, ‘Defending Hindu tradition: Sanatana Dharma as a symbol of orthodoxy in colonial India’, Religion, 31, 2001, pp. 109–​23. 63 See Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–​1915 (Cambridge: CUP, 2011). 64 See Kenneth W. Jones, ‘Social change and religious movements in nineteenth-​century Punjab’, in: M.S.A. Rao (ed.), Social Movements in India, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979), pp. 1–​16. 65 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘ “Kindly elders of the Hindu Biradri”: The Arya Samaj’s struggle for influence and its effects on Hindu–​Muslim relations, 1880–​1925’, in: Antony Copley (ed.), Gurus and Their Followers: Studies in New Religious Movements in Late Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2000), pp. 107–​27. 66 See Gyandendra Pandey, Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: OUP, 1990); and Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions. 67 Christopher A. Bayly, ‘The pre-​history of communalism: Religious conflict in India, 1700–​1860’, MAS, 19 (2), 1983, pp. 177–​203. 68 Sudipto Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 69 See Amrita Shodhan, A Question of Community: Religious Groups and Colonial Law (Delhi: Samya, 2001); and Teena Purohit, The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 70 Sarkar, Visible Histories, Disappearing Women. 71 Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

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Brian A. Hatcher 72 For background on Bankim, the song, and its latter history, see Bankimcandra Chatterjee, Ānandamaṭh, or The Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Julius Lipner (New York: OUP, 2005). 73 Julius Lipner, ‘Introduction’, in: Chatterjee, Ānandamaṭh, pp. 3–​125, 83. 74 On the way that mantras such as this can be repurposed, see Brian A. Hatcher, ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: Problematic mantra of Hindu humanism’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 28 (1), 1994, pp. 149–​62. 75 Radhakrishnan, quoted in Robert Minor, Radhakrishnan: A Religious Biography (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 13. 76 On experience, see Halbfass, India and Europe, 378–​402; on Radhakrishnan, Vedanta, and modern Hinduism, see Brian A. Hatcher, ‘Contemporary Hindu thought’, in: Robin Rinehart (ed.), Contemporary Hinduism: Ritual, Culture and Practice (New York: ABC-​Clio, 2001), pp. 179–​211. 77 On colonial refigurings of the Indian holy man, see Timothy S. Dobe, Hindu Christian Faqir: Modern Monks, Global Christianity, and Indian Sainthood (New York: OUP, 2015). 78 On Gandhi and the ‘cult of the individual’, see Shruti Kapila, ‘Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist thought and critiques of liberalism’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (1), 2007, pp. 109–​27; on ‘biomorality’, see Joseph Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); on Gandhi’s experiments with food, see Nico Slate, Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019).

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6 RECONSTITUTING MASCULINITIES/​F EMININITIES Modern experiences Tanika Sarkar

Introduction The masculinity/​femininity dyad radically separates processes of becoming/​being men and women. The difference is not natural but is culturally constructed: gender regulations, mapped on sexed bodies, freeze minds, dispositions, and conduct –​rendering the woman the inferior ‘other’ of the man.1 Such regimes are not constant or monolithic, however –​criss-​crossed, as they are, by class, race, and caste.2 Although historical narratives are packed with men’s doings, we know little about how men see themselves as men.3 Several studies of Indian masculinity did appear from the 1990s, but gender studies have so far largely focused on women and womanliness.4 Conflicted gender norms proliferated from the nineteenth century, occasionally blurring the masculine/​feminine binary. As the period was one of enormous social upheaval, the changes went in such diverse directions that it is possible to discuss only a few aspects.

Developments among Indian Muslims Gendered social expectations have deep histories, early modern and colonial modern history sharing an umbilical cord in several respects. In early modern Persian conduct manuals, the monarch embodies ideal male conduct: tempering absolute power with justice, even as he maintains stern surveillance over subjects, servants, and women.5 Imperial manhood was tested in particular in battles and in big game hunting. Mughal miniatures amply depicted them, and colonial rulers too followed their example. Women were described as sensual, wily, frivolous, and amoral: a temptation to men. Only if they obeyed their male guardians and remained within seclusion could their natural proclivities be corrected and perfected.6 Some royal women, nonetheless, achieved considerable public prominence, especially in the imperial aesthetic realm. Noor Jehan, queen of Emperor Jehangir, and de facto power behind the throne, was an arbiter of courtly art. Zeb-​un-​Nissa, daughter of Aurangzeb, was a noted poet.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-7

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Conduct manuals reserved licit sex for procreation within marriage. Yet eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century Urdu ghazal songs celebrated homoerotic love between noble patrons and young cultural performers: Your face with down on it is our Quran What if we kiss it –​it is a part of our faith.7 Chaapatbaaz verses referred to women who rubbed their bodies against each other for pleasure. In nineteenth-​century Urdu rekhti verses, men sometimes borrowed the woman’s voice to express her longing for an absent male lover; a momentary gender switching, when they imagined themselves in the woman’s place. Colonialism induced enormous self-​searching among Muslim elites, who reproached their own impiety for the loss of political power. Nineteenth-​century religious reformers particularly blamed elite domesticity. Leading self-​indulgent lives, women fell prey to Hindu custom and ritual; even their speech carried Hindu influence. They were only notionally Muslims, alleged reformers. Barred from mosques and madrasas, they could read the Arabic Quran without any understanding of its foreign words. How, then, to make them genuinely Muslim –​and also circumspect managers of modern household economies? A lot of thought went into their education. Reformers envisaged a transformed domesticity, in which women personally directed household decisions, husbanded family resources, and ensured infants’ moral training. They began to bring religion home, in the form of Urdu novels and religious tracts. Urdu was their spoken language; novels were attractive reading, and, judiciously composed, they could help women’s self-​improvement.8 Nadir Ahmad’s didactic novel Mir’at al Arus (1896), for instance, was a runaway success, widely used as a school textbook, and gifted to brides. It was composed as a dialogue between two sisters, one educated and the other lazy and ignorant. Akbari, the educated homemaker, persuades Asghari to follow her example. Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi, a powerful religious authority, strove to segregate Muslim custom and women sharply from Hindu ones. Religious knowledge, he promised, would make the woman ‘a scholar of Arabic. You will achieve the rank of a learned person and you will be able to give judicial opinion as men do.’9 Even though she was a housewife, she must primarily dedicate herself to God; family should come after that. His divisive religious agenda added an interesting extra-​familial dimension to her identity while her domestic role, too, gained a new importance. Modernist Syed Ahmad Khan similarly favoured a home-​based religious education, citing the great days of early Islam, when women were educated. So, although her domestic confinement continued, reformers adorned it with new value. Syed Mumtaz Ali, however, broke new ground when he founded the first Urdu weekly for women in 1898: Tazhib un-​Niswan, which, unprecedentedly, was edited by his wife, Muhammadi Begum. His book on women’s rights in Islamic law, Huquq un Niswan, was an early instance of Islamic feminism. Arguing that Islam offered better rights to its women than other religions, he reinterpreted scripture to assert women’s biological, mental, and intellectual parity with men. He suggested a largely non-​gendered curriculum, and tried to minimise veiling to allow women ease of movement. He demanded genuinely consensual Islamic marriages, whereas consent was now merely notional. He also suggested better rights to dower.10 Remarkably soon, women joined the reform project. Muhammadi Begum was succeeded by several women editors and writers who agitated for abolition of polygamy, for greater property rights for women, and for her right to initiate divorce. Emboldened by family support and privileges, elite women challenged gender conventions from the early twentieth century. Atiya Fyzee went abroad, published her travel experiences, 78

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and publicised close friendships with men such as the poet Iqbal. Some of her letters revealed considerable intimacy with European and Indian men; they made her notorious. She married a Jew, and family photographs show her playing badminton with her mother and sisters and rowing a boat –​a very long step, indeed, away from the secluded zenana.11 Women’s magazines brought home information about women’s schools, serious as well as entertaining reading matter, and even instructions about how to behave at tea parties attended by European women. A novel describing the modern elite woman in the 1930s and 1940s referred to her fashionable saris and cosmetics, high-​heeled shoes, English tutors, and deepening closeness with male relatives: a marked erosion of strict seclusion rules within a single generation.12 Change did not necessarily affect all elite women, however, not even within a single household. Most preferred the old ways. Women reformers soon left the rather moderate plans of pious domesticity far behind. Begums of Bhopal and their associates funded schools and colleges for women from the early twentieth century.13 The All India Muslim Ladies’ Conference passed a resolution in 1918 against polygamy. It advocated talaq-​i-​tafwid, whereby the husband delegates the right to initiate divorce to the wife. After a lot of debates community leaders also conceded the right to initiate divorce on their own, once women threatened them with apostasy. Women worked with Muslim League politicians in drafting the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act and the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act in the late 1930s. Punjabi custom –​common to all regional religious communities –​deprived Muslim women from inheriting landed property, contrary to scriptural instructions. The Shariat Act restored Quranic entitlements; but it also distanced them from other Punjabi communities.14 A few middle-​class Bengali women were writing for liberal journals, such as Nabanoor, Kohinoor, and Saugat, from the early twentieth century. Firoza Begum attacked religious leaders as ‘the biggest impediment to women’s education’.15 Masuda Rahman said women were confined to cooking and reproducing ‘like a bitch’. Men worshipped their foreign masters whereas they expected women to worship them.16 Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was the first Bengali feminist in the true sense of the term. Her essays ‘Amader abanati’ (‘Our decline’; 1904) and ‘Stree jatir abanati’ (‘The decline of women’; 1905) compared seclusion to slavery. Whenever women tried to assert themselves, she said, they had been ‘crushed with the excuse of … the holy texts. […] Even our souls have become enslaved. […] Where the bonds of religion are slack, women are as advanced as men … I have to say that “religion” has strengthened the bonds of our enslavement.’ Gender injustice was common to all religions, and she gave examples from each.17 Her Sultana’s Dream (1906) imagined a realm ruled entirely by women while men sat at home, cooking and child-​minding. Women governed, fought wars, nurtured the environment, and made scientific discoveries –​ more efficiently than men had ever done. Usually read as a feminist utopia, its role reversal may also be seen as mockery of existing division of spheres. Rokeya set up the Sakhawat Hossain Memorial School in 1911 in Calcutta. To reassure parents that there would be no breach of propriety on the way to school, the school bus was heavily curtained –​so much so that girls found it difficult to breathe. The controversial cause of women’s education thus had to be served by a compromise with seclusion rules that Rokeya herself had criticised. A striking crop of left-​wing women wrote Urdu fiction from the 1930s –​work that was scandalously bold for the times, explicit about women’s bodily functions, sexuality, and class inequities. Rashid Jahan, a Communist Party activist, was a prominent member of the All India Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) in the United Provinces. She faced death threats when Angarey, a collection of plays and stories by four youthful left-​wing authors, appeared 79

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in 1933. It was soon banned under popular pressure. Ismat Chughtai, also a member of PWA, sharply exposed middle-​class hypocrisies and cruelties, as well as subaltern miseries. She made waves with her short story ‘Lihaf ’ (‘The quilt’) in 1941, which portrayed lesbian sex between a pampered wife of a rich landlord and a servant girl. From being recipients of male liberalism, many Muslim women became reformers in their own right, even fearless rebels, within a remarkably short space of time. They challenged community leaders and fractured entrenched norms of femininity, some with daring lifestyle preferences, others in their writing, and yet others with associational activities for legal and social change. Cushioned by familial privileges and liberalism, they could change themselves in ways that were unimaginable for the rest of Muslim womanhood –​whether from subaltern or from conservative backgrounds. Their boldness hardened orthodox reaction and fundamentalist politics in the community. In however limited a milieu, nonetheless, a strange and striking new Muslim woman had emerged and taken her place in the world with great confidence.

New Hindu masculinities and femininities Rajput and Maratha kings, pitted against Mughal power in its last days, became manhood icons for nineteenth-​century Hindus. Maratha courts in western India had encouraged competitive imperial conquests from the late seventeenth century. Kings were also zealous custodians of caste-​based purity pollution taboos, thereby fusing the warrior figure with Brahmanical authority. ‘Low-​caste’ warriors in south India established several small kingdoms in the eighteenth century. Continuous warfare expanded the military labour market for subordinate-​caste infantrymen. This improved their bargaining power, and they derived manly self-​esteem from their martial role. Dalit or untouchable-​caste protests later drew upon these memories to construct an empowering self-​image. In the middle of the nineteenth century Jyotirao Phule, founder of modern low-​caste and untouchable protest, added agricultural skills to the repertoire of manly virtues, fusing the peasant and the warrior-​king together in Dalit imagination. Twentieth-​ century untouchable Mahars deeply resented the disbanding of the colonial Mahar regiment, which undermined their martial past.18 If men had to be brave enough to die in battle, then Rajput royal women had to prove their feminine worth with spectacular acts of chastity. This involved collective self-​immolation or jauhar when Rajput men lost the war and feared that their women would be captured by Muslim adversaries. Jauhar provided the stuff of legends, and recent films still celebrate it.19 British official James Tod collected these ballads, and their widespread circulation added fresh ballast to nineteenth-​century Hindu pride. Heroic female chastity became a compensatory sign of past Hindu greatness in the colonised present. Rajput legends also produced modern stereotypes of Muslim kings as rapacious abductors of Hindu women. By the early twentieth century the predatory stereotype came to cover all Muslim men, past and present. Interestingly, so convinced were nineteenth-​century Hindu ideologues about an imagined Hindu masculinity deficit, as compared with their past and present rulers, that novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay reinterpreted the Hindu deity Krishna in the image of the Prophet –​without, however, mentioning him. Like Muhammad, and unlike founders of other religions, his Krishna was a warrior, lawgiver, nation builder, and a much-​married patriarch.20 Modern orthodoxy simultaneously valorised docile womanhood. Whether as obedient wife or as burning woman, feminine virtue, therefore, exemplified self-​ limitation and self-​destruction. 80

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Although Muslim daughters inherited a small part of their father’s property, Hindu women owned only their wedding gifts. Scripture allowed a maximum of four wives to Muslim men, but Hindu polygamy had no ceiling; eastern Indian Brahmans were prodigiously polygamous. Hindu sacramental marriage was indissoluble; but the man could marry many wives while the wife remained tied to a single husband. Upper-​caste widows could not remarry at all. They lived under a draconian regime of sartorial, dietary, and ritual self-​mortification and family surveillance, even if they were widowed at infancy. The image of the self-​denying widow –​which earlier denoted her inauspiciousness –​was later redrawn as emblematic of extraordinary Hindu conjugal commitment, since non-​Hindu widows were not similarly bonded to their first husbands’ memory. Her moral radiance shone bright even after remarriage was legalised in 1856. Remarriages were, consequently, extremely rare, and considered a social offence. Most scriptural texts promised that, if widows burnt themselves on their husband’s funeral, they would enjoy millions of years in heaven, along with their families. So tempting was the promise, and so great the family prestige accruing from the sati, that several low castes, too, began to perform ritual burnings or burials of living widows –​satis providing improved social and ritual status. Although immolations were abolished in 1829/​30, sati commemorations continued, encouraging occasional immolations. Sati temples multiplied enormously after independence.21 Scripture also enjoined pre-​pubescent –​preferably infant –​marriages for women. When reformers challenged child marriage, the modern orthodoxy bathed the figure of the child-​wife in a sentimental glow to prove the excellence of Hindu conjugal love. Despite their civilising claims, British rulers did remarkably little to reform Indian gender. Immolations were legal for the first 60 years of their reign until Rammohun Roy, Brahman, reformer, and renowned scholar of scripture, reinterpreted religious texts to justify abolition. Widow remarriage was legalised only after Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, another learned Brahman, interpreted a scriptural verse to suggest religious sanction for it.22 The state feared abolishing child marriage on Indian religious grounds, and it was Indian legislators who eventually pushed it through in 1929. British rulers refused to increase the age of consent for the child-​wife, until a little girl died of horrendous conjugal rape in 1889.23 The state was also parsimonious about funding women’s schools and colleges; most were established by Christian missionaries, by reformist religious sects such as the Brahmo Samaj or the Arya Samaj, or by private Indian investment. As men engaged with the women’s question, they also refashioned themselves. In the 1820s and 1830s students of Calcutta’s Hindu College were taught by their extraordinary young teacher, Henry L. Vivian Derozio, to close the gap between personal conviction and social conformism.24 They spectacularly defied orthodox injunctions in public. They also propagated women’s education and widow remarriage, before the latter was legalised. This was an unusual moment of reckless, bohemian manhood, which evaporated before furious social ostracism. Subsequent generations were more sober and cautious in their personal conduct. A civil marriage law was enacted in 1872 that allowed consensual adult marriage, widow remarriage, and marriage without parental consent for adult women. The couple had to renounce their faith, however, if they were Hindu, Muslim, or Christian.25 Despite enormous social outrage about founding marriage on love, a few couples did marry under the act. Vernacular fiction and romantic lyrics began to celebrate pre-​marital love and a few novels cautiously probed extra-​marital passion with sensitivity. Male reformism was, on the whole, limited to a vision of mentally compatible and equitable conjugality. Nonetheless, it introduced a different order of masculinity –​one deeply critical of 81

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masculine privilege. Profound shame and guilt structured the new male gaze. This was taken to unusual heights in 1916 in Rabindranath Tagore’s highly controversial novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World). A husband renounces his possessive entitlements when his wife turns to another man, because he cannot own her mind and body simply because he is a husband.26 The logic of reformism, therefore, stimulated transgressive literary imaginaries even when they were rarely socially realised. Until quite late in the nineteenth century even the barest literacy was taboo for Hindu women, since custom threatened that it made them widows. A nineteenth-​century wife, aching to read, dared not even look at a book in front of her guardians. She stole pages from her husband’s religious manuscripts and studied them in her kitchen where she cooked alone, matching the letters, one by one, with her son’s textbook. Eventually she wrote the first autobiography in the Bengali language. She had sought education because only then could she think on her own. Outwardly timid and homebound, she nonetheless valued intellectual independence. Times were changing strangely, and conservatives responded with fury. Many imagined that women’s education would masculinise female bodies and feminise men.27 Till late in the nineteenth century most educated women were schooled at home, taught by liberal husbands, in bedrooms at night. This forged a new and secret conjugal romance. Early nineteenth-​century missionary efforts to tutor women at home, or in schools, had largely failed because of fears of conversion. J.F. Drinkwater Bethune, aided by Bengali reformer Vidyasagar, founded the first successful girls’ school in Calcutta in 1849: Hindu Balika Vidyalay, later renamed Bethune School. Schooling faced the most tremendous social hurdles, because students travelled through public streets and acquired an independent identity and a peer group beyond family and kin group. School buses were attacked on streets, and parents faced punitive social ostracism and obscene press campaigns. Education did not merely produce companionate wives and educated mothers –​which was what most reformers hoped for. A few women wrote bitter denunciations of the Hindu household from mid-​century.28 In the 1880s Tarabai Shinde, a non-​Brahman Maratha woman, excoriated Hindu marriage and widowhood norms. Stri Purusha Tulana (A Comparison between Women and Men) questioned sexual double standards and mocked sacred texts.29 Rukhmabai, a Maharashtrian women from the lowly carpenter caste, was educated by her stepfather.30 Married off at 11 to a man who turned out dissolute and diseased, she refused to live with Dadaji Bhikaji when he insisted on his conjugal rights under the Restitution of Conjugal Rights Act of 1877. When judges asked her to choose between freedom from her husband and imprisonment under the act, she chose the latter. Eventually the husband was bought off. Rukhmabai horrified nationalist leaders and Hindu orthodoxy all over India. She later trained as a doctor abroad, became India’s first woman doctor, and continued to campaign against Hindu domestic practices.31 Phule, founder of low-​caste/​Dalit movements in India, was the only nineteenth-​century reformer who attached a critique of Brahmanical social and material power to Brahmanical gender abuse. With his remarkable wife, Savitribai Phule, he also established girls’ schools in the Bombay Presidency.

Matriliny and adivasi gender Matriliny among upper-​ caste Nayars in Kerala and among several tribal/​ adivasi groups confounded typical patterns of patriliny and patrilocality. Among Khasis in the north-​eastern state of present-​day Meghalaya, for instance, the youngest daughter inherited the property and the husband had to hand over even his self-​earned income to her. Nayar daughters lived in 82

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women-​headed households in which husbands had visiting rights while the maternal uncle managed family property, which passed from mothers to daughters. When large landowning households fragmented from the late nineteenth century, and as men turned to the new professions and became keen to run their own households, certain new laws were passed to pull Nayar matriliny into the patrilineal and patrilocal mainstream.32 American Baptist missionaries reaped a rich harvest in present-​day Nagaland in the north-​ east.33 Terrified by Naga ritual headhunting, they planned a thorough overhaul of traditional gender practices, which they branded as ‘degraded and sinful’. The colonial state disarmed Naga men while missionaries tried to implant an alternative ideal of docile, hard-​working masculinity among them. Mary Mead Clark said, hopefully, in 1907: ‘The Nagas, once civilized and Christianised, will make a manly, worthy people.’34 The state recruited them for the Labour Corps from the Naga Hills and Manipur during the First World War.35 Between 1876 and 1955 missionaries sought to transform Naga faith, culture, and everyday habits with churches, Bible classes, prayer meetings, study circles, preaching tours, and religious tracts –​and with the ‘wonders’ of Western science: gramophones, modern medicine, magic lantern shows, and musical instruments. They masculinised the highest Naga deity, who previously had had a feminine form. Naga bodies were made over: they were told to wear ‘decent clothing’, abandon traditional jewellery, use plain, modest dress, and avoid elaborate hairstyles. Naga girls were advised to shift to the Assamese costume of a jacket and a cloth that covered their whole body. Sewing machines, introduced in the early twentieth century, promised an abundance of ‘civilised’ home-​made garments –​making Clark exult in 1907: ‘The click, click, click of her sewing machine … sounded very civilized … on these far away mountain tops, promising much as an elevating influence in clothing.’36 Hill tribes could not be fully tamed, however. The British faced a revolt in Manipur, led by Jadonang. He was hanged in 1931, but his follower, a woman leader called Gaidinliu, came to be identified with a goddess who guided her rebellion with visions and dreams. While in hiding, she mobilised villagers to refuse tax payments. With their traditional weapons, they led a successful attack on the Assam Rifles at North Cachar Hills. In 1939 Manipuri women determinedly blocked the exodus of foodgrains from a starving area to feed the British army at war. After India became independent, Naga insurrectionaries resisted integration with the new nation state. These examples thus drastically demonstrated that not only did the British fail to fully suppress older forms of tribal manliness, they also provoked and brought forth a militant femininity.

Perceptions of Dalit men and women Upper-​caste and missionary literature represented Dalit labourers as foolish, and dirty; but also a peaceful people, happy to serve caste superiors.37 Like good workhorses, they were hardy workers, their strong bodies, ironically, signifying their subordination and low status. A few reformers suggested ameliorative measures, and Vivekananda asked upper castes to regard them as fellow humans. None, however, tried to overthrow caste –​apart from Dalit revolutionaries. A small segment of upwardly mobile Dalits, nonetheless, gained some education, especially at missionary schools. Some also invested in small-​scale landholding, trade, and manufacture. Untouchable leather workers, for instance, profitably supplied leather goods to soldiers during the First World War, and south Indian plantation workers, returning from overseas colonies, set up small businesses. Empowered by these advances, Dalits initiated anti-​caste movements in various parts of India. Adi Hindu (Original Hindu) ideologues in early twentieth-​century north 83

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India produced defiant caste histories for Chamars (leather workers), endowing them with a past of ethical kingship. They claimed that high-​caste Aryans had filched their realm through base trickery. Trade unions and strikes by municipal sweepers and scavengers facilitated a militant Dalit working-​class masculinity.38 Dr B.R. Ambedkar initiated a Dalit movement of enormous proportions from 1927 to challenge untouchability norms in western India. He wrote that not just untouchability but the entire caste system had kept the country backward and divided. No contemporary high-​caste politician could match his formidable intellectual achievements –​highest academic degrees from London and Columbia Universities and a law degree –​or his analytical skills and profound scholarship. His learning, therefore, was a source of great pride and self-​confidence among Dalits, who could not even enter a government school a few decades back. His message, ‘Organise, educate and struggle’, opened up an exhilarating vista of intellectual and political possibilities for people ritually barred from the education. Dalit women felt empowered by his sharp indictment of Brahmanical gender norms, which stood upper-​caste superiority on its head. Many women converted to Buddhism along with him in 1956.39 Even more radically, E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker’s (Periyar) Self-​Respect movement in Madras from the mid-​1920s challenged Brahmanical power, advocated women’s sexual freedom from chastity norms, and devised marriage rites based on absolute gender equality. Strident, powerful women leaders emerged within the movement, and some even criticised their leader. Unlike other advocates of birth control, Periyar did not refer to the need for population control. He wanted contraceptives to help women gain control over their bodies. His atheism undermined the sacred foundations of gender inequality among his followers.40 Low-​caste labouring women enjoyed considerable mobility as well as some economic independence. Their relative freedom signified their degraded status, however. Solvent segments of lower castes, therefore, tended to pull out their women from the workforce. They also imposed Brahmanical marriage norms to claim relative ritual purity. Some prohibited widow remarriage and practised infant marriage. Upper-​caste reformers occasionally regretted their caste stigma: ‘It is the moving story of the desolation of Hindu religion and Hindu society, and it is also the story of the rise of Islam and Christianity in India: it is the heart-​rending story of silent tears, soundless weeping and speechless suffering.’41 Their patronising image of abject Dalit women was contradicted by Adi Hindu narratives, which sought to discover Dalit women warriors in the 1857 anti-​colonial Uprising.

Gender and labour Most Indian women worked outside their homes –​yet they were seldom counted as workers. Labouring women –​almost always tribals and low castes –​worked in the agricultural sector as waged workers. Others took care of the finishing stages of production at home, as in grain threshing. This rendered their labour invisible; their domestic labour was not classified as productive work but as a vocation. Since women were not allowed to wield the plough, colonial laws did not allow them inheritance rights or shares in landed property; nor did the postcolonial state.42 Women also worked in considerable numbers in municipal sanitation work, in stone and coal mines, in tea and coffee plantations, and in jute and cotton factories from the nineteenth century. Largely composed of rural migrants, they lived in cities in dire poverty –​almost entirely lacking privacy or domestic comforts. A large number of male workers, therefore, left their families in villages, and many women migrants were single. Married women workers carried the triple load of factory work, domestic chores, and childrearing.43 Neither the state nor their 84

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employers provided maternity leave or childcare facilities, and nor did male-​dominated trade unions struggle for them. Women nonetheless played a strident role in working-​class strikes, though trade unions had no room for them and their fellow workers often derided them. In the early twentieth century women formed about 15 to 20 per cent of the textile workforce and more than a half of workers in mines and plantations. They also had a prominent presence in jute.44 A petition from Ahmedabad women textile workers to the government shows how much they valued their skills and working-​class identity, despite their atrocious living and working conditions. They feared that the protective labour law of 1891, which restricted their factory working hours, would make their employment insecure.45 Their numbers declined from the 1930s as labour investigations stoked public horror about their conditions. Some scholars argue that male workers and employers shared the notion of a family wage, earned by male breadwinners to keep women confined to domesticity and motherhood.46 Others ascribe it to a manufactured moral panic about female sexual licentiousness as well as about their sexual exploitation in plantations and factories.47 Some, however, attribute it to rationalisation arising from technological advances. They argue that women were kept as a reserve labour force, to be brought in or pushed out, depending on market demands.48 Although opinions of the root cause of the dwindling numbers of working women are divided, there is consensus that protective labour laws, colonially and globally, certainly affected female employment in mines, stone quarries, and factories.49 Women were not allowed to work in the deep Kolar gold mines in present-​day Karnataka. Mining towns saw the emergence of a macho, lower-​caste male personality among young workers: invigorated by cash wages, new food, and consumption possibilities, and made confident by caste protest discourses.50 Modern capitalism produced new men and women. They were part of a poor, exploited precariat, but also somewhat liberated from social restrictions in their urban anonymity, empowered by a sense of their industrial skills as well as by their unions and strikes. If Dalits and workers were the ‘other’ of gentlemen and gentlewomen, the modern prudish middle class degraded certain privileged categories of female work. Tawaifs or musicians and danseuses had earlier been honoured by wealthy patrons, who enjoyed their sexual favours.51 The profession now came to be equated with sex work alone.52 Temple dancers, forbidden to marry or perform outside temples, were redefined as sexual slaves of venal priests.53 At the same time, modernity opened up channels of great power, fame, and wealth for such women: as theatre actors from the 1870s, as film stars from the early twentieth century, as singers whose voices were carried across the country by gramophones and the radio. At first these cultural performers came from the ranks of sex workers.54 In the early decades of the twentieth century, however, music and dance schools, public cultural soirées, and competitions spread the skills among middle-​class girls, making the professions respectable and compatible with married life.

Masculine and feminine bodies Colonial rulers frequently hurled the slur of effeminacy at Indian men, especially educated, upper-​caste, professional Bengali ‘babus’.55 Bred in aristocratic families, public schools, club culture, and team sports, rulers were confident of their ultra-​male identity, of mastery over their own women as well as over their colonial subjects. They also laid claim to a chivalrous masculinity vis-​à-​vis Indian women, whom they were destined to save and civilise. Sarah Suleri suggests that imperial and nationalist discourses actually bypassed both Western and Indian women, and focused on male–​male relationships between coloniser and colonised. 85

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She interprets the respective masculinisation and feminisation of British men and Indian men in homosocial, even homo-​erotic, terms.56 The slur was reserved in particular for Bengali men, however, while the Punjab –​reservoir of post-​Mutiny army recruits –​was valued for its hardy, robust men. Very often climatic reasons rather than innate proclivities were used to explain masculinity or effeminacy: the dry extremes in the Punjab’s weather versus the enervating humid heat of Bengal. Mrinalini Sinha pluralises colonial stereotypes. She identifies four registers for the construction of Bengali manhood.57 During the Ilbert Bill agitations in the early 1880s,58 native men in general, and manservants in European households in particular, were painted as potential rapists of European women. When educated men tried to enter the Native Volunteer Movement in 1885, the image of aggressive masculinity was replaced with one of feebleness. When the Public Service Commission was formed in 1886, their mental and educational abilities were denigrated to keep them out. During the controversy over the Age of Consent Bill from 1890 to 1891, on the other hand, the state entered into an unspoken alliance with Hindu orthodox men, who agitated fiercely against the bill. Censuses followed a caste-​based diversification of masculinity. Certain untouchable agricultural labourers, for instance, were absorbed into village policing on the ground of their physical stamina.59 In the aftermath of the ‘Mutiny’, rulers and missionaries set up special schools and colleges to recast Indian princes and aristocrats as manly loyal allies of empire. When anti-​colonial nationalism gathered force, the Boy Scout movement was introduced shortly before the First World War to channelise schoolboy energies into organised outdoor activities.60 Elite boarding schools cultivated discipline, team sports, and corporal punishment from the 1870s, to produce robust but loyal male bodies and minds. At the turn of the century the Imperial Service Corps similarly trained young Indian aristocrats for army commissions, but they also retained elements of Indian traditions. The Church Missionary Society mocked this as ‘putting backbone into jellyfish’.61 Officials suggested calisthenics and mild physical exercises for women too from the 1890s. Because women’s bodybuilding disturbed the radical distinction between male and female physicality, they were careful not to let women into team sports.62 Missionaries admitted Indian girls to the Girl Guides movement from 1916 and the Madras-​based Indian Ladies’ Magazine suggested compulsory physical education for both sexes in schools. Arya Samaj schools made similar efforts while Annie Besant planned exercises that would not only strengthen women but also enhance their beauty. The new accent on womanly strength came primarily from eugenic concerns: the country needed healthy, well-​exercised maternal bodies to produce strong progeny. (I leave aside new practices of male and female bodybuilding outside institutions altogether because Carey Watt’s chapter deals with it extensively.)

Political men and women In the interwar years, as more and more middle-​class women entered schools, colleges, and universities, lived in hostels, sometimes married without family consent, and occasionally went abroad for higher studies, a new freedom marked their bodies, movements, and self-​images. In the early twentieth century women of the Nehru family began to ride the bicycle63 and, by the 1920s, college students in east Bengal small towns were cycling everywhere. Girls’ schools now awarded prizes for athletic feats. Two teenagers who assassinated the district magistrate of Comilla in east Bengal had approached him with a request for a public display of their swimming skills.64 Politics reconfigured masculinities and femininities more than anything else. Gender boundaries did not disappear, but, in several instances, they were suspended for the duration of a 86

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movement. When they were resumed, men and women could not return to their old lives without new complications and many adjustments. Early twentieth-​ century elite Muslim, Hindu, and Parsi women, often working with European ones, formed their own associations for suffrage, women’s seats on legislative councils and access to policy-​making for women and children. Unlike the first generation of nineteenth-​ century feminist writers, they took care not to criticise religion nor to offend male reformers.65 Anti-​colonial upsurges from the 1920s opened up modern politics to women without social distinctions, however. Strangely, they poured into a movement led by Gandhi, who subscribed to patriarchal values, and reinforced them with a stiff dose of compulsory celibacy, which he himself had practised since 1906. He maintained strict surveillance over his ashram inmates to check the slightest signs of romance. His own sexual experiments in his last days showed how deeply he associated abstinence with moral energy, and how readily he used young female bodies to test himself.66 Although Ashis Nandy credited him with transcending gender divisions, his own discourses were as peppered with criticism of effeminacy and praise of manliness as were colonial ones.67 But nationalist women remade the movements on their terms, as much as Gandhi refashioned them as moral, patriotic subjects. From 1921 they assumed all possible political roles within Congress movements, alongside men, who became fellow nationalists: in Gandhian ashrams, in village welfare, in picketing foreign goods shops, in demonstrations and rural agitations. They came from rich and conservative Marwari families as well as from peasant and tribal ones, marching and courting arrests together. Even though wives, mothers, and sisters of leaders were extremely prominent in demonstrations and in public addresses, most remarkable of all was the activism of peasant women –​butt of immense police repression, even killings.68 During the Quit India movement of 1942, when the Congress was banned and prominent leaders, including Gandhi, imprisoned, Aruna Asaf Ali emerged as the premier organiser of underground activities.69 During the Non-​Cooperation/​Khilafat movements of 1921, Bi Amman, mother of leading Khilafatist brothers, made history as she unveiled herself in public and addressed a nationalist crowd, breaking seclusion rules spectacularly. But she also called herself the mother of all Khilafatists; her fictive maternalism removed the stigma of her public appearance in front of perfect strangers.70 Armed revolutionaries, conspiring to assassinate British officials, represented a new political masculinity: male, youthful, deeply religious, upper-​caste Hindu. They, too, took the vow of celibacy. Engaged in a perpetual dance with death, since torture, execution, or exile were their expected fate, they became the most masculine of political icons, inflicting and courting violence with equal ease. Bhagat Singh, young Sikh revolutionary from Punjab, was their brightest star, but he was also an exception.71 He founded the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in North India –​socialism being an unusual addition to terrorist ideology. On the run from 1928, disguised as a sahib, he was captured in 1929, and executed in 1931. Before his death, he wrote Why I Am an Atheist, in prison, explaining his loss of faith, and also his embrace of Marxism as the ideal revolutionary path. Nationalist narratives underplay women’s role in terrorism. Durga Devi Vohra was Bhagat Singh’s close associate. Married, with a small child, she made bombs, helped him escape, shot at a European couple in 1930, and collected funds for his defence after his capture.72 From 1930 Bengali revolutionary women became full-​fledged comrades in violence. Bina Das fired at the Bengal governor, John Anderson, in 1932.73 In 1931 two schoolgirls assassinated a district magistrate and Pritilata Waddedar led an attack on the Chittagong European Club, killing several. Kalpana Dutt hid in Chittagong villages, dressed as a man for three years.74 87

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Finally, it should not go unmentioned that the demand for Pakistan also brought out Muslim women into politics in large numbers from 1941, when a Muslim Girl’s Student’s Federation was formed. The movement quickened Muslim feminism.75 Although political women radically overturned masculinity/​femininity divisions in practice, they did not seriously address gender issues. Communist women participated in the sharecropper uprisings in north Bengal in 1946/​47 and in the Telengana armed uprising against the Hyderabad Nizam from the late 1940s to early 1950s. Several feminist studies have underlined their marginalisation in the Communist Party of India.76 Leadership of all political stripes was entirely male, and women came into their own when repression temporarily removed men from direct action. Independence, with Partition, unleashed contradictory processes. The constitution conferred full adult franchise, and women instantly became citizens along with men without going through a prolonged or bitter suffragist struggle. Revised Hindu personal laws added to their legal rights.77 But the communal holocaust of 1947/​48 unleashed monstrous brutalities against Hindu and Muslim women. Shockingly, fathers killed daughters in the name of family honour, and many refused to readmit abducted women.78 India and Pakistan decided to return abducted Hindu women to India, and Muslims to Pakistan –​even when women were reluctant to do so.79 The image of abject female victimhood, therefore, was strengthened enormously. At the same time, refugee women now emerged as female breadwinners in large numbers. Gradually, they came to claim the streets, shops offices, schools and colleges as their own spaces.

Résumé Slowly, carefully constructed distinctions waned as male and female spheres of work, politics, and education began to converge among several social segments. They did not collapse, however, and even now people try to shore them up and restore a pristine past in which men and women knew their places. There is certainly a great deal of romantic nostalgia in certain kinds of contemporary literature, films, and tele-​culture. Changing masculinity reshaped femininity quite irrevocably, however, and vice versa. Modernity introduced modulations and modifications in images, norms, and practices, sometimes rehabilitating older versions in new ways, sometimes challenging –​even overthrowing –​them.

Notes 1 Judith Butler questions the existence of sexed bodies as anterior to the inscription of gender on them; the binary, she says, suggests a stable heteronormativity, which actually unravels as soon as we recognise non-​heterosexual relationships and transgender people. Idem, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 2 See, for instance, Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (New York: Macmillan, 1988). 3 Michael S. Kimmel, ‘Invisible masculinity: Examining masculinity in relation to history and social sciences’, Society, 30 (6), 1993, pp. 28–​35. 4 For instance, Radhika Chopra, Caroline Osella, and Filipo Osella (eds.), South Asian Masculinities: Context of Change, Sites of Continuity (Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004). 5 Rosalind O’Hanlon, At the Edges of Empire: Essays in the Social and Intellectual History of India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014); idem, ‘Kingdom, household and body: History, gender and imperial service under Akbar’, MAS, 41 (5), 2007, pp. 889–​923. 6 Faisal F. Devji, ‘Gender and the politics of space: The movement for women’s reform, 1857–​1900’, in: Zoya Hasan (ed.), Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1990), pp. 22–​37.

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Reconstituting masculinities/femininities 7 Mir Taqi Mir, Poems, cited in Saleem Kidwai, ‘Mir Taqi “Mir”: Autobiography (Persian) and poems (Urdu)’, in: Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (eds.), Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 184–​90, 188. 8 Margrit Pernau, Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-​Century Delhi (New Delhi: OUP, 2013). 9 He wrote this in an educational novel for women, Behesti Zewar (Heavenly Treasure), 1906. Cited in Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan (New Delhi: OUP, 2004), 106. 10 Gail Minault, ‘Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and Tahzib un-​Niswan: Women’s rights in Islam and women’s journalism in Urdu’, repr. In: Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar (eds.), Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader, vol. 2 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007), pp. 70–​98. 11 Siobhan Lambert-​Hurley and Sunil Sharma, Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (New Delhi: OUP, 2010). 12 Attia Hussein, Sunlight on a Broken Column (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1992 [1961]). 13 Siobhan Lambert-​Hurley, Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal (London: Routledge, 2007). 14 David Gilmartin, Empire or Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988). 15 Cited in Mahua Sarkar, Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 100. See also Sonia Nishat Amin, ‘The early Muslim Bhadramahila: The growth of learning and creativity, 1876–​1939’, in: Bharati Ray (ed.), From the Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women (New Delhi: OUP, 1995), pp. 107–​48. 16 Sarkar, Visible Histories, 115–​16. 17 ‘Amader Abanati’, cited in Sarkar, Visible Histories, 100. 18 Philip Constable, ‘The marginalization of a Dalit martial race in late nineteenth and early twentieth century western India’, JAS, 60 (2), 2001, pp. 439–​78. 19 See Padmavati, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali and released in 2018. It was a highly controversial film for two reasons. First, it used a communalised popular myth to depict Sultan Alauddin Khalji’s invasion of the Rajput state of Chittor as motivated by his desire to capture Queen Padmini –​when the two did not even live in the same century. Second, Rajasthani conservatives were infuriated because it revealed the belly of the actor who played the role of Padmini. 20 Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, 1st paperback edn. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 135–​62. 21 Idem, Rebels, Wives and Saints: Redesigning Selves and Nations in Colonial Times (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), 13–​68. Also see Anne Hardgrove, Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta (New Delhi: OUP, 2004). 22 Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar, Hindu Widow Marriage: An Epochal Work on Social Reform from Colonial India, trans. Brian A. Hatcher (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 23 Sarkar, Rebels, Wives and Saints. 24 Rosinka Chaudhuri, ‘The politics of naming: Derozio in two formative moments of literary and political discourse, Calcutta, 1825–​31’, MAS, 44 (4), 2010, pp. 857–​85. 25 Pervez Mody, ‘Love and the law: Love marriage in Delhi’, MAS, 36 (1), 2002, pp. 223–​56. 26 Sumit Sarkar, ‘Ghare Baire in its times’, in: Pradip Kumar Datta (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World: A Critical Companion (London: Anthem Press, 2005), pp. 143–​73. 27 Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: A Modern Autobiography (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999). 28 For a conservative female text, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Colonial Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 29 Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Western India (Cambridge: CUP, 2002). 30 Sudhir Chandra, Enslaved Daughters: Colonialism, Law and Women’s Rights, 2nd edn. (New Delhi: OUP, 2008). 31 Another telling example is Pandita Ramabai, who was crucial for remaking the new Indian womanhood. She is discussed in greater detail in Shompa Lahiri’s chapter in this volume. 32 G. Arunima, There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar, c1850–​ 1940 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003). 33 John Thomas, Evangelising the Nation: Religion and the Formation of Naga Political Identity (New Delhi: Routledge, 2016), 20. 34 Ibid., 28.

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Tanika Sarkar 35 Radhika Singha, ‘The short career of the Indian Labour Corps in France, 1917–​1919’, International Labor and Working-​Class History, 87, 2015, pp. 27–​62. 36 Thomas, Evangelising the Nation, 48. 37 Charu Gupta, ‘Feminine, criminal or manly? Imaging Dalit masculinities in colonial north India’, in: Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar (eds.), Caste in Modern India, vol. 2 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), pp. 234–​72. 38 Nandini Gooptu, ‘Caste and labour: Untouchable social movements in urban Uttar Pradesh in the early twentieth century’, in: Sarkar and Sarkar, Caste in Modern India, pp. 107–​32. 39 Sharmila Rege, Writing Caste, Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonies (Delhi: Zubaan, 2006). 40 S. Anandhi, ‘Women’s question in the Dravidian movement, c 1925–​1948’, in: Sarkar and Sarkar, Women and Social Reform, pp. 115–​37. 41 Chand, 1927, cited in Charu Gupta, The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016), 1. 42 Bina Agarwal, A Field of Her Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge: CUP, 1994). 43 Chitra Joshi, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). 44 Samita Sen, ‘Gender and class: Women in Indian industry, 1890–​1990’, MAS, 42 (1), 2008, pp. 75–​116. 45 Aditya Sarkar, Trouble at the Mill: Factory Law and the Emergence of the Labour Question in Late Nineteenth Century Bombay (New Delhi: OUP, 2018). 46 Radha Kumar, ‘Family and factory: Women in the Bombay cotton textile industry, 1919–​1939’, in: J. Krishnamurty (ed.), Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and the State (New Delhi: OUP, 1989), pp. 133–​62. 47 Samita Sen, ‘Honour and resistance: Gender, community and class in Bengal, 1920–​1940’, in: Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Abhijit Dasgupta, and Willem van Schendel (eds.), Bengal: Communities, Development and States (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994), pp. 209–​53. 48 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Class in Bombay, 1900–​1940 (Cambridge: CUP, 1989). 49 Kuntala Lahiri Dutt, ‘Bodies in/​out of place: Hegemonic masculinities and Kamins’ motherhood in Indian coal mines’, in: Assa Doron and Alex Broom (eds.), Gender and Masculinities: Histories, Texts and Practices in India and Sri Lanka (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), pp. 213–​29. 50 Janaki Nair, Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (New Delhi: Sage, 1998). 51 Veena T. Oldenberg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–​1877 (New York: OUP, 1984). 52 Ibid.; Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Street: Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989). 53 Priyadarshini Vijaisri, ‘Contending identities: Sacred prostitution and reform in colonial south India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 28 (3), 2005, pp. 387–​411; Kunal M. Parker, ‘A corporation of “superior prostitutes”: Anglo-​Indian legal conceptions of temple dancing girls, 1800–​1914’, MAS, 32 (3), 1998, pp. 559–​633. 54 Neepa Majumdar, Wanted: Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–​1950s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 22–​4. 55 Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Giving masculinity a history: Some contributions from the historiography of colonial India’, Gender and History, 11 (3), 1999, pp. 445–​60. Also see Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: OUP, 1983). 56 Sarah Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 57 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly’ Englishman and the ‘Effeminate’ Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 58 Law Member Ilbert had introduced a bill in 1883 to enable Indian magistrates and judges to try cases involving Europeans. This set off such a racist backlash among Europeans that it had to be dropped. 59 Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘The Kahar Chronicle’, MAS, 21 (4), 1987, pp. 711–​49. 60 Carey Watt, ‘The promise of “character” and the spectre of sedition: The Boy Scout movement and colonial consternation in India, 1908–​1921’, South Asia, 22 (2), 1999, pp. 37–​62. 61 Cited in Satadru Sen, ‘Schools, athletes and confrontation: The student body in colonial India’, in: James H. Mills and Satadru Sen (eds.), Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-​Colonial India (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 58–​79, 62. 62 Quinquennial Review of Education 1892–​97, cited in Elena Valdameri, ‘Physical education and femininity in India: Global trends and local politics towards crafting women citizens’, unpub. Article. 63 David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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Reconstituting masculinities/femininities 64 Tanika Sarkar, ‘Communist women: At home, in the world’, unpub. Article. 65 Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). 66 Vinay Lal, ‘Nakedness, nonviolence, and Brahmacharya: Gandhi’s experiments in celibate sexuality’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 9 (1/​2), 2000, pp. 105–​36; Tanika Sarkar, ‘Gandhi and social relations’, in: Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), pp. 187–​91. 67 Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. 68 Visalakshi Menon, Indian Women and Nationalism: The UP Story (Delhi: Har Anand Publications, 2003); Tanika Sarkar, ‘Politics and women in Bengal: The conditions and meanings of participation’, in: Krishnamurty, Women in Colonial India, pp. 231–​41. 69 Tanika Sarkar, Bengal 1928–​1934: The Politics of Protest (New Delhi: OUP, 1987); Aparna Basu, Mridula Sarabhai: The Rebel with a Cause (New Delhi: OUP, 1998); Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War: A Peoples’ History of India’s Second World War (London: Bodley Head, 2015). 70 Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilisation in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). The movement originated against the post-​war removal of the Turkish caliph by the British and their allies. 71 Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice, and Text (New York: OUP, 2015); Chris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). 72 Idem, ‘What Durga Bhabhi did next: Or, was there a gendered agenda in revolutionary circles?’, South Asian History and Culture, 4 (2), 2013, pp. 176–​95. 73 Bina Das, A Memoir, trans. Dhira Dhar (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2010), 80. 74 Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 2017), 219–​50. 75 Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shahid (eds.), Women of Pakistan: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back? (London: Zed Books, 1987). 76 Stree Shakti Sangathana, We Were Making History: Women and the Telengana Uprising (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989); Peter Custers, Women in the Tebhaga Movement: Rural Poor Women and Revolutionary Leadership, 1946–​47 (Delhi: Naya Prakash, 1989). 77 Renu Chakravartty, Communists in Indian Women’s Movements (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1980). 78 Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1998). 79 Kamala Bhasin and Ritu Menon, Borders and Boundaries: India’s Women in Partition (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998).

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7 CONTESTED HISTORY The rise of communalism and the Partition of British India Ian Talbot

Introduction Hindu, Indian, and Pakistani nationalism have all developed powerful and contested narratives of the 1947 Partition, underpinned by the political agendas that emerged in the late colonial era. Hindu nationalism identified India with Hindu civilisation. It opposed the ‘vivisection’ of the subcontinent. Hindu nationalist writings have both demonised Jinnah, the leader of the Pakistan movement, and ‘blamed’ a weak ‘secular’ Congress leadership under Nehru for accepting Partition. Indian and Pakistani nationalism have similarly constructed politically driven Partition narratives. The former juxtaposed a progressive ‘secular’ Indian nationalism with ‘bigoted’ Hindu and Muslim communalism, whose clash created the circumstances for the ‘tragedy’ of Partition. The official Pakistani narrative, on the other hand, saw the nation’s fulfilment in terms of long-​standing Muslim–​Hindu civilisational differences in which a separate state was both a ‘natural’ outcome and the result of the inspired leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-​e-​Āzam (‘great leader’). These contested histories testify to the fact that ‘[P]‌artition was more than a mere territorial division, it was foremost accompanied by a division of minds’.1 The powerful national narratives have influenced academic historians. The emergence of postcolonial theory, however, led scholars to challenge ‘constructed’ nationalist accounts. At the same time, the rising tide of religious conflict in the 1980s encouraged the growth of an understanding of Partition that was concerned with its victims. This chapter seeks to examine the development of what is simultaneously a rich and polemical Partition historiography. It will assess the emerging schools of writing and the clashes between them. The analysis concludes with a brief assessment of the likely destination of future writings in light of current trends. Before turning to the development of Partition historiography, it is necessary to reflect on the role of communalism, which is enmeshed in many of the debates.

Communalism: Characteristics, origins, and impact Communalism has been both vaguely defined and highly contested in terms of its meaning and causes.2 By the close of British rule, political identity in India was increasingly defined in terms 92

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of religion. The colonial state’s limited representative democracy reserved seats for Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians. Muslims had been accorded separate electorates from 1909. Political parties, such as the Shiromani Akali Dal, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Muslim League, institutionalised the identification of religion and politics.3 The notion that religiously monolithic communities possessed a common political interest was referred to as ‘communalism’. Indian nationalists blamed the division of the subcontinent and its human tragedies on communalism and its attendant violence. The Indian nationalist approach is encapsulated in the subtitle of Lal Bahadur’s account of the struggle for Pakistan: ‘Tragedy of the triumph of Muslim communalism in India, 1906–​ 1947’.4 The Muslim League is regarded as a bigoted party that rode roughshod over religious harmony in its pursuit of power. A slew of volumes hostile to Jinnah emerged after the 1940 passage of the historic Lahore Resolution. Jinnah was accused of espousing the Pakistan demand because of his vanity. Kailash Chandra’s work, published in 1941, entitled Tragedy of Jinnah typified this approach.5 Sacchinananda Sinha and Vasant Narayan Naik were later Indian writers who were highly critical of Jinnah’s personality and politics.6 Supporters of the Muslim League countered these criticisms. Popular works in English included Ziauddin Ahmad Suleri’s My Leader and Abdul Latif ’s The Great Leader.7 The ‘war of words’ looked back to the Muslim League’s creation. Indian nationalist authors attributed its emergence to the British divide-​and-​rule strategy. The Simla deputation, which created the conditions for the establishment of the All-​India Muslim League in 1906, was portrayed as a command performance –​i.e. a put-​up job by the British. The members of the deputation to the viceroy, Lord Minto, led by the Agha Khan, were described as ‘puppets to counterbalance the Congress’.8 The decision to establish a separate Muslim political party after the deputation was by no means straightforward, however. The Agha Khan’s doubts were dispelled only by the need to head off a unilateral attempt by Nawab Salimullah to establish a ‘Muslim All-​India Confederacy’. The disadvantage for the majority of the deputationists who came from the United Provinces (UP) was that such a body would have been dominated by Bengali interests. Not only was the creation of the Muslim League more complex than divide-​and-​rule accounts allow, but it was prompted by genuine fears. Muslim anxieties in UP were heightened from the late nineteenth century with the spread of political representation9 and the political mobilisation of Hindus in the Hindi–​Urdu controversy and the anti-​cow-​killing riots of 1893.10 The rise of the ‘extremist’ wing of the Congress and the furore created by the decision by the then viceroy, Lord Curzon, to partition Bengal in 1905 provided the final push for the establishment of the Muslim League.11 The Indian National Congress, which had been created in 1885, was regarded by the UP elite as serving only Hindu communal interests. The granting of separate electorates in 1909 was, similarly, more complex than Indian nationalists claimed. Rather than being a British gift, the Muslim League had to lobby hard to secure the award. These efforts intensified the anxieties of the Liberal secretary of state for India, John Morley, that a bill for increasing the system of elective government that excluded separate electorates designed to increase Muslim representation would not pass through the Conservative-​dominated House of Lords. Earl Percy, a former Conservative under-​secretary of state for India, pointed out that the bill’s proposals appeared to contradict the impression that Lord Minto had given to the Simla deputation as viceroy. Separate electorates, together with reservation of seats in the Imperial Legislative Council, were duly included in the Indian Councils Act of 15 November 1909. The granting of separate electorates did not make Pakistan inevitable. Nonetheless, it strengthened the communalist belief that people following a religion naturally shared common political interests from which others were excluded.12 93

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The Congress acceded to the grant of separate electorates at the time of the Lucknow Pact in 1916. The Muslim League’s support for the Indian nationalist struggle grew stronger from October 1919, during the Khilafat struggle. The cooperation ended three years later and was the prelude to what Pakistani historians term the ‘parting of the ways’. It is facile, however, to see these events as forming a straight path to the creation of Pakistan. Separatism remained the approach of the Muslim-​minority provinces. Muslims in the future Pakistan areas, such as Punjab and Bengal, used separate electorates and the British devolution of power to improve their employment opportunities at the expense of the Hindu and Sikh minorities. The 1935 Government of India Act provided further opportunities. It thus widened the gap between the interests of Muslims in the so-​called Muslim-​majority and -​minority provinces of British India.13 In the important Muslim-​minority UP, Muslim fears were intensified by the new system of provincial autonomy. Standard accounts see the Congress rule from 1937 to 1939 as marking a moment when separate electorates alone were deemed insufficient for protecting minority Muslim interests. The Congress’s ideological and institutional affinities with more militant expressions of Hindu nationalism were profoundly unsettling for Muslim-​minority communities. William Gould’s work deepens the understanding of the sense of foreboding among UP Muslims following the 1937 provincial elections. This was not just because of the problem of post-​election ministerial making but because congressmen, despite secular pretensions, possessed close ties with communal organisations such as the Arya Samaj, deployed Hindu symbols, and spoke in a Hindu register.14 Constructed Indian nationalist narratives of the clash between a ‘secular’, inclusive Congress and the ‘communal’ Muslim League that was the ‘creature of British imperialism’ thus overlook the historical complexities that were important to the emergence and sustenance of the separatist movement. The cultural roots of Indian nationalism lay in Hindu symbols and religious iconography. This was seen most clearly at the time of the early twentieth-​century Swadeshi movement in Bengal.15 In regions such as Punjab there was an overlapping membership of Congress, the Hindu reformist Arya Samaj, and the Hindu Mahasabha, as witnessed in the careers of figures such as Lala Lajpat Rai.16 The Muslim League may have played up the ‘oppression’ of Congress Raj in the period from 1937 to 1939 in the Muslim-​minority provinces. Nonetheless, it was not merely propaganda to proclaim that the Congress was primarily a Hindu body. Post-​independence Indian nationalist writings overlooked these realities. The human tragedies of the 1947 Partition, together with the ruling Congress leadership’s need to construct a ‘secular’ India in opposition not only to Islamic Pakistan but to that of the Hindu right responsible for Gandhi’s assassination, intensified the denigration of the term ‘communalism’.17 It was the ‘other’ of an ‘inclusionary, accommodative, consensual and popular anti-​colonial struggle’.18 Communalists in India, who after 1947 were identified with Hindu and Sikh organisations, were frequently identified in popular discourses as ‘obscurantist’, ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘separatists’, the complete antithesis of the ‘secular’ ideal that defined the ‘national mainstream’.19 ‘Communalism’ in fact became the ultimate derogatory appellation for undermining and disarticulating movements and demands that appeared to be ostensibly defined by religion, even when they often primarily reflected political and economic grievances.20 Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh nationalists in India have resisted their labelling as communalists. They have also argued that religious nationalism is not inherently intolerant. The Hindutva discourse extensively trumpets the tolerance of traditional Hindu values.21 Common to Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh religious nationalism is the importance accorded to ascriptive rather than constructed identity. From this perspective, ‘communalism’ is understood as a 94

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natural given, rather than a modern construct. This approach parts company not only with the Indian nationalist ‘Divide and rule’ understanding of communalism but with modern academic writing on identity, which sees it as ‘malleable’. Constructionist understandings of ‘communalism’ see it as arising from a colonial mediated modernity that viewed India in terms of ‘essentialised’ religious communities.22 The colonial category of religion smoothed out the bumps of uncontrollable multiplicities and presented the ‘knowable’ homogenised subjects desired by the state. The definition of Indian society in terms of religious community was institutionalised in the colonial state’s census enumeration.23 The way that the British viewed Indian society possessed twofold importance. First, it encouraged political mobilisation along the lines of religious community. Second, it stimulated religious reform, which sharpened community boundaries.24 Christophe Jaffrelot has deployed the term ‘strategic syncretism’ with respect to the Hindu reformers’ use of some of the techniques of Christian missionaries.25 It is important, however, not to teleologically link religious reform with communalism and Partition. Sharpened community identities, and even their politicisation, did not make communal conflict inevitable. Its likelihood increased, however, in contexts of shifting hierarchies of power linked with political and economic change. There are parallels here with the incidences of ‘communal’ violence that Christopher Bayly uncovered in eighteenth-​century and early nineteenth-​century India. It led him to maintain that ‘communal’ violence was not incompatible with pre-​modern eclectic religious practice.26 This awareness challenges the orthodox nationalist view linking the emergence of communal violence specifically with the colonial state’s sharpening of religious boundaries. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that communalism and its ‘clash’ with Indian nationalism did not encapsulate late colonial politics. Communal and national political identities continuously jostled alongside others based on region, language, and ethnicity.27

The development of Partition historiography Writings in the 1940s Notions of communalism were at the forefront of anti-​Pakistan polemic in the late colonial period. Such writers as Prasad, Kabir, Mehta, and Patwardhan portrayed communalism as an artificial colonial construct designed to weaken the nationalist struggle.28 Their works rejected an ‘essentialised’ Muslim identity, stressing instead the precolonial cross-​cultural exchanges between Muslims and Hindus and the diversities present in Indian Islam. Writers in favour of Pakistan, although they bridled at the linkage of communalism with Muslim bigotry, emphasised the existence of civilisational religious differences between Muslims and Hindus. The Pakistan demand was their natural outcome. This understanding is exemplified in the writings of Zia-​ud-​Din Suleri and G.M.D. Sufi. F.K. Durrani two years earlier had provided the classic work on the ‘communal’ historical consciousness of the Pakistan demand, in his account entitled The Meaning of Pakistan.29 For many writers, however, the freedom movement’s success also depended on Jinnah’s superhuman efforts. The new Gospel of Pakistan was preached from a hundred platforms and a thousand pulpits. Jinnah was the guiding-​spirit of the whole struggle. He was the theorist, the interpreter and again the defender of the theory of Pakistan … Jinnah stood like a rock and kept on his preachings till he hammered them into the heads of his people. His superb patience and untiring efforts were superhuman.30 95

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Jinnah’s leadership had provided a symbolic unity to the Indian Muslim community, divided along the lines of language, ethnicity, and majority-​and minority-​area political interest.31 His moral authority and forensic skills were also important leadership attributes. Jinnah did not create Pakistan single-​handedly, however. Congress’s non-​cooperation during the Second World War increased the Muslim League’s leverage. Concessions granted by the British to the Muslim League at the time of the 1942 Cripps mission strengthened Jinnah’s position, both against the nationalist elites and against Muslims who opposed the Pakistan demand from a regional perspective. Jinnah at the time of his interview with Cripps had been ‘rather surprised’ to see how far his declaration went ‘to meeting the Pakistan case’.32 The League was also able to grow following the imprisonment of front-​rank Congress leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru, in the wake of the 1942 Quit India movement. Such historical developments played an important role in Pakistan’s creation, although debates about communalism have taken centre stage. The growing prospect of Pakistan increased the militarisation of Indian politics. The activities of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) were boosted, as it presented itself as a protector of Hindu minority populations’ interests. RSS numbers rose to 58,000 in the Punjab alone.33 The Sikhs in the Punjab also organised themselves along military lines. Once the Second World War had ended, paramilitary organisations were further boosted by the return of ex-​servicemen, many of whom did not hand in their weapons. The presence of heavily armed and organised volunteer organisations set the scene for large-​scale communal violence in the Punjab, which had been the main recruitment area of the British Indian Army.34 Even in other provinces, such as UP, volunteer movements mushroomed, and bombastically paraded and drilled in city streets. There were around 25,000 members of the Muslim League National Guards, while the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha volunteers together numbered 40,000.35 Congress ‘radicals’ and ‘communalists’ overrode Gandhian opposition to drilling and armed preparations, to establish a Congress volunteer force whose existence contributed to the rising communal temperature.36 The final year of colonial rule was marked by endemic violence across north India. This was not the result of primordial religious hatreds. Rather, it reflected contests for local power as regional and national hierarchies shifted. The collapse of law and order opened the way for criminal violence. Ultimately, the British and the national-​level Indian political leaderships saw Partition as the best means of resolving conflict. It failed to work because of the drift into civil war conditions, which intensified the ‘joint violence’ in an administrative and moral vacuum. Even at the height of communal polarisation in 1946/​47, however, there were well-​ documented cases of people, political parties, and national political leaders refusing to accept the official registers, which defined the political categories of Hindus and Muslims.37 Indian and Pakistani accounts blamed the immense human suffering that accompanied Partition on the activities of rival communalist organisations. The ‘other’ community was almost exclusively portrayed as the instigator. Subsequent violence was thus merely retaliatory. The West Punjab (Pakistan) authorities produced a series of pamphlets that presented Muslims as victims of Sikh War bands (jathās) and the activities of the RSS.38 The violence in East Punjab was portrayed as part of a Sikh plan to clear out the Muslim population. These publications coincided with the internationalisation of the Kashmir crisis at the United Nations. This provided another incentive to control the narrative on the Partition violence. Semi-​official accounts produced in India emphasised the role of the Muslim League National Guards, ex-​servicemen, and the Muslim-​dominated police in attacks on non-​Muslim minority populations.39 The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) 1950 publication on violence in Amritsar portrayed the Muslim League concentrating its energies in the city as part of a ‘war’ strategy to break the Sikhs’ morale throughout the province. It drew parallels between the Muslim League ‘attack’ and the Nazi assault on Stalingrad.40 96

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Post-​independence texts Familiar themes Just as Partition itself is best understood in terms of the interplay of continuities and discontinuities, post-​independence historical narratives both perpetuate the colonial era ‘war of words’ and boldly reinterpret the causes and consequences of the subcontinent’s division. These new departures have arisen from wider historiographical shifts, as well as the availability of fresh source materials. Political change within South Asia has also encouraged fresh historical interpretations of the roles of Jinnah and Nehru. Partition historiography has as a result acquired a richness of texture without losing the polemical dimensions inherited from the late colonial era. Within Pakistan, the ‘two nation theory’ understanding has been constantly repeated, most notably in the works of such historians as Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, Hafeez Malik, and Khalid bin Sayeed.41 According to the latter, ‘There has never taken place [a]‌confluence of the two civilizations in India –​the Hindu and the Muslim. They may have meandered towards each other here and there, but on the whole the two have flowed their separate courses –​sometimes parallel and sometimes contrary to one another.’42 Many studies merely list the documents around the Pakistan idea, or provide biographies of such key figures as Jinnah and Iqbal.43 The Muslim League’s leaders are praised for achieving Pakistan against all odds, with the final viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, being especially singled out for condemnation because of his alleged pro-​Congress approach.44 There has been a veritable cottage industry of works on Jinnah, collections of his speeches, and correspondence. Zawwar Hussain Zaidi began the monumental task of publishing the Jinnah papers in 1991. The 18th volume of documents was released as a 71st anniversary commemoration of the passage of the Lahore Resolution. Writers such as Sharif Mujahid and Syed Sharifuddin have devoted many studies and editions to Jinnah’s career. Jinnah has also been examined in terms of his acting as a universal role model of Muslim leadership and as a charismatic leader.45 Indian nationalist accounts, on the other hand, have demonised Jinnah’s career and have ‘blamed’ him for stubbornly refusing an ‘all-​India’ settlement. Nehru’s decision in accepting Partition is portrayed as a pragmatic response to mounting violence and the troubled experiences of working alongside the Muslim League in the interim government from 25 October 1946. Sucheta Mahajan in 2000 returned to many of the themes of the 1940s Congress accounts in her work Independence and Partition.46 The quotation below epitomises her adherence to Indian nationalist laments that Partition was a regrettable tragedy occasioned by Muslim League stubbornness and that independence was the greater achievement. Congress had regretfully accepted Partition as unavoidable (and this) was only the final act of a process of step-​by-​step concession of the League’s intransigent championing of a sovereign Muslim state … If Partition was the most traumatic event of the century, then independence was surely the most significant turning point.47

New departures Following the decision of the United Kingdom’s Labour government headed by Harold Wilson, new sources for the study of Partition became available in Britain under the 30-​year rule.48 The growing availability of party records and private papers in India and Pakistan further increased the historian’s source base. Easier access to documentary records also resulted from the publication of British official documents in the 12-​volume series (1970–​83) The Transfer of Power 97

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edited by Nicholas Mansergh, Penderel Moon, and E.W.R. Lumby. The availability of new sources underpinned the fresh insights from the Cambridge school and the regional studies of the Pakistan movement. The writings of the Cambridge school historians questioned conventional assumptions about the role of ideas in Indian nationalism, focusing instead on the role of patron–​client factions in political mobilisation.49 Francis Robinson’s study Separatism among India Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims is the chief Cambridge school work in the field of Muslim separatism. It shifted the focus from the all-​India level of politics and argued that Muslim political identity arose from the context of colonial rule, especially with its introduction of representative politics.50 Robinson shifted his stance during his debate with the American political scientist Paul Brass on Muslim identity politics in UP.51 Brass argued that Muslim separatism had resulted from the elites’ manipulation of separatist symbols. Robinson rejected this ‘instrumentalist’ approach by claiming a ‘dynamic relationship’ between ‘visions of the ideal Muslim life’ and political activity. Farzana Shaikh further elaborated this idea, questioning whether Muslim separatism was inspired primarily by colonial definitions of Indian society and whether the Pakistan demand was nothing more than a bid for power. In her view, the separatist platform was based on Islamically derived values of political consensus and legitimacy, which increasingly conflicted with the liberal-​democratic understanding as the British devolved power in India.52 The Cambridge school approach and the availability of new sources provided the backdrop for regional studies of the Pakistan movement. The earliest works focused on UP, the heartland of Muslim separatism. Attention subsequently shifted to the Muslim-​majority areas of the Punjab, North-​West Frontier province, Bengal, and Sind.53 These provinces held the key to the creation of Pakistan, but they were areas in which the Muslim League existed only on paper at the beginning of the pre-​Partition decade. In the Punjab, which Jinnah dubbed the ‘cornerstone of Pakistan’, the cross-​communal Unionist Party had restricted the Muslim League to a single seat in the 1937 provincial elections.54 Regional studies of the Muslim League breakthrough in the future Pakistan areas pointed to a framework of factional realignment; the League’s ability to utilise support of traditional networks of authority in order to mobilise support in these regions where it was a latecomer; and the crucial importance of sufi pirs (spiritual guides); and the role of university students in popularising the Muslim League message. David Gilmartin effectively revealed the tensions during the Pakistan movement in the Punjab arising from the construction of a new ideological identity within the colonial state’s structure of mediatory politics.55 In Bengal there have been studies of the role of Dacca University in popularising the Pakistan message, and the polarising effects of both changing agrarian economic conditions and communal riots.56 Provincial-​level studies have not only filled in the gaps concerning knowledge of the Muslim League’s advance; more importantly, they have pointed to a political third way in opposition to the binary division between secular and religious nationalism/​communalism. This offers a counter-​narrative revealing that there were multiple possibilities at the close of British rule. This questions accounts that see Partition as the culmination of the interplay of Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communal politics.57 The notion that all-​India political considerations overrode provincial interests was raised by Sugata Bose in a book chapter that reflected on the failure of the 11th-​hour United Bengal Plan. It was outlined in May 1947 by Congress and Muslim League leaders, who feared that the creation of Pakistan would result in the partition of their province. Bose explained the plan’s failure primarily in terms of the Congress high command veto, while acknowledging the existence of grass-​roots divisions.58 Joya Chatterji in a subsequent study examined the local Bengali pressures 98

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for Partition. These, she argued, came not just from the ‘communalist’ Mahasabha. The Bengal Congress’s Hindu elite ultimately argued for Partition in order to regain the privileged position that had been eroded by political and economic developments from the 1932 Communal Award onwards.59 Ayesha Jalal, in an important ‘revisionist’ text, had earlier questioned the standard Pakistani nationalist interpretation of Jinnah’s intentions from the time of the 1940 Lahore Resolution. She questioned whether he saw Partition as the only outcome and that, alternatively, Muslims’ interests could be served by securing an equal say in an all-​India union. Jinnah was eventually forced to accept the ‘moth-​eaten’ Pakistan of the 3 June Partition plan, however, as it had become the only realistic option once the ending of the Second World War had both accelerated the British departure and reduced his political leverage.60 This bold interpretation has been criticised for its elitist political approach and its disregard of the role of cultural and religious ideals in the Pakistan movement. Many Muslims, it has been argued, instinctively supported the Pakistan demand, which was not about a calculated series of gambles in ‘smoke-​ filled’ rooms. Jalal’s perspective has nevertheless possessed a lasting impact.61 Political changes in South Asia as well as intellectual currents and source availability created the context for fresh departures. Zia ul Haq’s state-​sponsored Islamisation process in 1980s Pakistan led to a rewriting of the past, but along the implausible lines that Jinnah had intended to create an Islamic state when he espoused the Pakistan demand.62 Liberals in Pakistan clung on to his inclusive outlook in order to seek legitimisation for their resistance. The rise of Hindutva in India from the 1990s encouraged attempts to ‘blame’ the Partition on Nehru. When Jaswant Singh, a retired officer of the Indian Army, former Cabinet minister, and a founding member of the Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), took this too far and appeared in a publication to be exonerating the previously demonised Jinnah, he was expelled from the BJP.63 The 70th anniversary witnessed a resurgence in interest in independence and Partition. Academic South Asian historians remained largely focused on the ‘human dimension’ of Partition. This left the field open for more popular accounts of Partition. The military historian Barney White-​Spunner provided an account of its horrors that largely absolved the British for the decision to both quit and divide. In an echo of Jaswant Singh, Nehru was accorded primary responsibility.64 There were, in fact, numerous articles in print and online that sought to decide whether blame lay with Jinnah, Nehru, or the British. Shashi Tharoor in an opinion piece for al-​Jazeera returned to the long-​established theme that Partition was the outcome of British divide-​and-​rule policies in India.65 Finally, at the level of popular culture, Gurinder Chadha’s movie Viceroy’s House shifted ‘blame’ from Mountbatten to Winston Churchill, British prime minister till mid-​1945, and Hastings Ismay, Mountbatten’s chief of staff.66 Its inaccuracies aside, the film was a testament to the continuing fascination with Partition and its causes. The new departures we have discussed so far were all concerned with the causes of Partition. They either posited fresh interpretations that challenged nationalist narratives or they revealed that the path to Partition was less straightforward when viewed from a regional rather than a national perspective. Regional accounts formed an important corrective to the traditional emphasis on high politics, which omits vital details on how precisely support was mobilised in the Pakistan struggle. The human consequences of Partition formed the focus of what became termed the ‘new history’. This emerged from an intellectual milieu in the early 1980s provided by the subaltern studies school of writing. Its intention was to restore agency to non-​elite groups. As well as feminism and subaltern studies, the other major influences on the new history were deconstructionist methodologies of postmodernism, post-​structuralism, and postcolonialism that sought to place the subject at the centre of their research.67 A gendered dimension to Partition was 99

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also encouraged by the contemporaneous revival of mass communal violence symbolised by the 1984 Delhi riots. Indeed, her experiences as an activist in post-​r iot rehabilitation informed Urvashi Butalia’s oral-​history-​driven exploration of the human dimension of Partition.68 This new departure was taken up in a series of key studies.69 The ‘new history’ has made key advances not just in the gendered dimension of Partition. It has also shed light on the differentiated patterns of migration and refugee rehabilitation, and the extent to which Partition is better understood as a historical process rather than an event confined to August 1947.70 Local-​level studies have also interrogated constructed narratives of the violence that accompanied Partition. They have revealed, first, that all communities had their aggressors and victims; this has challenged communal stereotypes. Second, they have shown that violence owed its intensity not to religious barbarism, or even to the organisation of communal groups; rather, it resulted from a ‘joint violence’ that contained individual (criminal) as well as political motivation.71 This became uncontainable in an environment of administrative and moral collapse.72 Finally, local studies have uncovered the complicity of officials, soldiers, and police in violence and looting.73 This was another factor in the large number of casualties in the Partition-​related violence. This new history possesses shortcomings, however. The collection of ever-​ increasing numbers of personal testimonies has added immeasurably to the empirical depth of knowledge regarding Partition, though this comes perhaps at the expense of its conceptual and comparative understanding.74 Most importantly, the new history runs the risk of uncritically reproducing the sense of incomprehension and victimhood that is frequently all too evident in many of the first-​hand accounts of violence and uprooting.75

Résumé The contested historical narratives form part of a Partition studies sub-​genre of modern South Asian studies. Many new insights have emerged during the past 30 years, but, in the absence of integrating texts and themes, the reader is presented with an array of conflicting viewpoints. Communalism can be regarded as the sole cause of Partition, or as a false understanding that brushes over its economic causes. Communalism can be variously explained in terms of civilisation differences between Hindus and Muslims or as the product of a deliberate British divide-​ and-​rule strategy, or of a less intentional emergence of essentialised communal identities in the context of colonial modernity. In understanding Partition, there has been a historiographical turn to the region and locality and, ultimately, to the ‘human dimension’ resulting from the availability of new sources and the contrasting academic interventions of the Cambridge and subaltern schools of writing. Many accounts of the ‘new history’ are less concerned with causes than with the understanding of Partition and its accompanying massacres and mass migrations as a human tragedy on a vast scale. Common to both personal narratives and the constructed national and community histories is the desire to displace blame for Partition’s causes and tragic human consequences. Seven decades later, all accounts of Partition remain highly contested. ‘Communalism’ remains a term that is vaguely understood and often used polemically. Although the ‘new history’ has been able to transcend some of the old disputes, most valuably by hinting at the differential experience of Partition across class, gender, and regional divides, it is also prone to the familiar distortions, stereotypes, and biases that have been a marked feature of historical narratives ever since the 1940s.

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Notes 1 Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 8. 2 See Surya Prakash Upadhyay and Rowena Robinson, ‘Revisiting communalism and fundamentalism in India’, EPW, 47 (36), 2012, pp. 35–​59. 3 See Muhammad Saleem Ahmad, The All-​India Muslim League: A History of the Growth and Consolidation of Political Organization (Bahawalpur: Ilham Publishers, 1989); Prabhu Bapu, Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915–​1930 (London: Routledge, 2013); Mohinder Singh, Akali Movement (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2008). 4 Lal Bahadur, Struggle for Pakistan: Tragedy of the Triumph of Muslim Communalism in India, 1906–​1947 (New Delhi: Sterling, 1988). 5 Kailash Chandra, Tragedy of Jinnah (Lahore: Sharma Publishers, 1941). 6 Sachchinananda Sinha, Jinnah as I Knew Him (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, 1948); V.N. Naik, Mr Jinnah: A Political Study (Bombay: Sadbhakti, 1947). 7 Ziauddin Ahmad Suleri, My Leader: Being an Estimate of Mr Jinnah’s Work for Indian Mussalmans (Lahore: Lion Press, 1945); S. Abdul Latif, The Great Leader (Lahore: Lion Press, 1946). 8 Ian Talbot, India and Pakistan (London: Arnold, 2000), 116. 9 The introduction of representative government from 1861 onwards was used by Hindu leaders in towns in western United Provinces to control butchers’ shops and slaughterhouses and to alter procession routes at festival times. 10 Hindi and Urdu shared a common vocabulary, although they were written in the Nagri and Persian script, respectively. The issue of which was to be used had important employment repercussions for the administrative class. It became a wider source of conflict, as Muslims and Hindus jockeyed for power and influence. See also Hans Harder’s chapter in this volume. 11 Resistance to the partition, which was revoked in 1911, took on Hindu imagery and symbols. These included devotion to the goddess Kali and the use of local fairs and folk dramas. The singing of Bande Mataram became a rallying cry. Bande Mataram was a source of great inspiration for educated Bengali youths brought up on the historical novels of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who had included it in his 1882 work Ānandamaṭh (The Abbey of Bliss). Its aggressive Hindu imagery alienated Muslims. 12 Talbot, India and Pakistan, 18. The other side of the coin of separate electorates is the idea that, by withdrawing patronage from public religious ceremonies in an attempt to demonstrate religious neutrality, the British created a space for competing groups drawn from the rising Hindu merchant classes to sponsor public ritual to enhance their ‘social dignity’. Public ritual not only helped to create a supra-​local Hindu community identity but was a factor in rising tension between ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’. 13 David Page, Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control, 1920–​1932 (Cambridge: CUP, 1985). 14 William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). 15 Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–​ 1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973). 16 See S.R. Bakshi, Lajpat Rai: Socio-​Political Ideology (New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 1990). 17 Ibid., 133. 18 Ayesha Jalal, ‘Nation, reason and religion: Punjab’s role in the Partition of India’, EPW, 33 (32), 1998, pp. 2183–​90, 2183. 19 See S. Patel, ‘On the discourse of communalism’, in: T.V. Sathyamurthy (ed.), Nation, Religion, Caste, Gender and Culture in Contemporary India, vol. 3 (New Delhi: OUP, 1996), pp. 145–​79. 20 Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, 133. 21 Nitin Mehta, ‘Face to faith’, The Guardian, 23 May 2009, www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​ 2009/​may/​23/​face-​to-​faith-​nitin-​mehta, accessed: 6 January 2020. 22 Peter Gottschalk, Religion, Science and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India (New York: OUP, 2013). 23 For details, see R.B. Bhagat, ‘Census enumeration, religious identity and communal polarization in India’, Asian Ethnicity, 14 (4), 2013, pp. 434–​48; and Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Religion and identity in India’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 20 (2), 1997, pp. 325–​44. Gyanendra Pandey goes so far as to see communalism as a product of the colonial era because of the importance the modern rational-​bureaucratic

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Ian Talbot state attached to identification along religious lines: idem, The Construction of Communalism in North India (New Delhi: OUP, 1990). 24 See, for example, Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Kenneth W Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th Century Punjab (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975); Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Kindly elders of the Hindu Biradri: The Arya Samaj’s struggle for influence and its effect on Hindu–​Muslim relations’, in: A. Copley (ed.), Gurus and Their Followers: Studies in New Religious Movements in Late Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2000), pp. 107–​27. 25 Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘The genesis and development of Hindu nationalism in the Punjab: From the Arya Samaj to Hindu Sabha (1875–​1910)’, Indo-​British Review, 21 (1), 1995, pp. 3–​41. 26 Christopher A. Bayly, ‘The pre-​history of “communalism”? Religious conflict in India, 1700–​1860’, MAS, 19 (2), 1985, pp. 177–​203. 27 Talbot, India and Pakistan, 151–​7. 28 Rajendra Prasad, India Divided, 3rd edn. (Bombay: Hind Kitabs, 1947); Humayn Kabir, Muslim Politics 1906–​1942 (Calcutta: Gupta Rahman and Gupta, 1943); Asoka Mehta and Achut Patwardhan, The Communal Triangle in India (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1942). 29 Zia-​ud-​Din Ahmad Suleri, The Road to Peace and Pakistan (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf, 1945); G.M.D. Sufi, Common Sense on Pakistan (Bombay: Maktaba-​e-​Adab, 1946); F.K. Khan Durrani, The Meaning of Pakistan (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf, 1944). 30 A.B. Rajput, Muslim League Yesterday and Today (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf, 1948), 78. 31 For insights into Jinnah’s transformation from the apostle of ‘Hindu–​Muslim unity’ to the Quaid-​ e-​Azam, see Akbar S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin (London: Routledge, 1997). 32 Interview with Jinnah, 25 March 1942, P&J/​10/​4, Transfer of Power Records, Departmental Records, BL, APAC, IOR. 33 Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, 61. 34 See Saumitra Jha and Steven Wilkinson, ‘Does combat experience foster organizational skill? Evidence from ethnic cleansing during the Partition of South Asia’, American Political Science Review, 106 (4), 2012, pp. 883–​907. 35 Note ‘Volunteer organisations in UP’, 9 June 1947, L/​PJ/​5/​276, BL, APAC, IOR. 36 For the history of volunteer movements in interwar India, see Ali Raza and Franziska Roy, ‘Para-​ military organizations in interwar India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38 (4), 2015, pp. 671–​89. 37 See Anindita Dasgupta, ‘Denial and resistance: Sylheti Partition “refugees” in Assam’, Contemporary South Asia, 10 (3), 2001, pp. 343–​60, 345. 38 West Punjab government, The Sikhs in Action (Lahore: Government Printing Press, 1948); West Punjab government, Note on the Sikh Plan (Lahore: Government Printing Press, 1948); West Punjab government, RSS in Punjab (Lahore: Government Printing Press, 1948). 39 See G.D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning: A Survey of Events Leading up to and Following the Partition of India (New Delhi: Bhawani & Sons, 1949). 40 Gurbachan Singh Talib, Muslim League Attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab 1947 (Amritsar: Shiromani Gurwara Parbandhak Committee, 1950). 41 Hafeez Malik, Moslem Nationalism in India and Pakistan (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press 1963); Khalid bin Sayeed, Pakistan: The Formative Phase 1857–​1948 (Oxford: OUP, 1968); Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, The Struggle for Pakistan, 2nd edn. (Karachi: University of Karachi, 1984). 42 Sayeed, The Formative Phase, 12. 43 These accounts cite Iqbal as providing the inspiration and Jinnah the practical politics that culminated in the creation of Pakistan. 44 Latif Ahmed Sherwani, The Partition of India and Mountbatten (Karachi: Council for Pakistan Studies, 1986). 45 See Ahmed, Jinnah; and Sikander Hayat, The Charismatic Leader: Quaid-​i-​Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Creation of Pakistan (Oxford: OUP, 2014). 46 Sucheta Mahajan, Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India (New Delhi: Sage, 2000). 47 Ibid., 391. 48 Ian Talbot, ‘Pakistan’s emergence’, in: Robin W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. V, Historiography (Oxford: OUP, 1999), pp. 253–​63, 257.

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The rise of communalism and the Partition 49 The Cambridge school approach was signalled in this collection: John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson, and Anil Seal (eds.), Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 1973). 50 Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860–​ 1923 (Cambridge: CUP, 1974). 51 See Paul Brass, ‘Elite groups, symbol manipulation and ethnic identity among the Muslims of South Asia’, in: David Taylor and Malcolm Yapp (eds.), Political Identity in South Asia (London: Curzon Press, 1979), pp. 35–​77; Francis Robinson, ‘Islam and Muslim separatism’, in: Taylor and Yapp, Political Identity, pp. 78–​112. 52 Farzana Shaikh, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 1989). 53 Ian Talbot, Punjab and the Raj, 1849–​1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1988); Shila Sen, Muslim Politics in Bengal, 1937–​ 47 (New Delhi: Impex India, 1976); Harun-​ or-​ Rashid, The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh: Bengal Muslim League and Muslim Politics, 1936–​1947 (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1987); Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 1986); Sarah Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind 1843–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 1992); Erland Jansson, India, Pakistan or Pakhtunistan?: The Nationalist Movements in the North-​West Frontier Province, 1937–​1947 (Uppsala: Universitas Upsaliensis, 1981). 54 Talbot, Punjab and the Raj. 55 David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 225–​33. 56 Sen, Muslim Politics in Bengal; Harun-​or-​Rashid, The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh; Bose, Agrarian Bengal; Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905–​1947 (New Delhi: OUP, 1991). 57 Ian Talbot, Khizr Tiwana, the Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India (Karachi: OUP, 2002); Sana Aiyer, ‘Fazlul Huq and religion in Bengal: The forgotten alternative of Bengal 1940–​3’, MAS, 42 (6), 2008, pp. 1213–​49; Hamati Roy, ‘A Partition of contingency? Public discourse in Bengal 1946–​1947’, MAS, 43 (6), 2009, pp. 1355–​84. 58 Sugata Bose, ‘A doubtful inheritance: The Partition of Bengal in 1947’, in: D.A. Low (ed.), The Political Inheritance of Pakistan (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 130–​43. 59 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994). 60 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), 251–​93. 61 See, for example, Asim Roy, ‘The high politics of India’s Partition: The revisionist perspective’, in: Mushirul Hasan (ed.), India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilisation (New Delhi: OUP, 1994), pp. 101–​31. 62 Karam Hydri, Millat ka Pasban (Karachi: Quaid-​e-​Azam Academy, 1981). 63 Jaswant Singh, Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence (Oxford: OUP, 2010). 64 Barney White-​Spunner, Partition: The Story of Indian Independence and the Creation of Pakistan in 1947 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017). 65 Shashi Tharoor, ‘The Partition: The British game of “Divide and rule” ’, al-​Jazeera, 10 August 2017, www.aljazeera.com/​independence/​opinion/​2017/​8/​10/​the-​partition-​the-​british-​game-​of-​divide-​ and-​rule, accessed: 6 January 2019. 66 G. Chaddha, director, Viceroy’s House (20th Century Fox, 2017). The film, which was criticised for its interpretation, drew significantly on the work of Narendra Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2005). 67 The concept of a ‘subaltern class’ is drawn from Antonio Gramsci. The foundations of the subaltern studies school of Indian history were laid by Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: CUP, 1983). 68 Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1998). 69 Most notable was Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 70 On migration and refugee rehabilitation, see Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (New Delhi: OUP, 2007); Ian Talbot, Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar 1947–​1957 (Karachi: OUP, 2006); and Pippa Virdee, From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab (Cambridge: CUP, 2018). Vazira Zamindar has effectively traced the long-​term consequences of Partition for national citizenship, in The Long Partition and the Making of

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Ian Talbot Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Joya Chatterji’s fine study on the Bengal aftermath, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India 1947–​1967 (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), has recently been joined by Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). Sen has also produced an interesting account of Bengali refugees who were settled in the Andaman Islands: idem, ‘Memories of Partition’s “forgotten episode”: Refugee resettlement in the Andaman Islands’, South Asia Chronicle, 7, 2017, pp. 147–​78. The impact of Partition on Sindh and UP has been comparatively examined in a recently published work by Sarah Ansari and William Gould, Boundaries of Belonging: Localities, Citizenship and Rights in India and Pakistan (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). 71 See Ilyas Chattha, Partition and Locality: Violence, Migration and Development in Gujranwala and Sialkot 1947–​1961 (Karachi: OUP, 2011). 72 On the moral collapse in the desire for women and loot, see Jalal, ‘Nation, reason and religion’, 2189. 73 Ian Talbot, ‘The August 1947 violence in Sheikhupura City’, in: Ian Talbot (ed.), The Independence of India and Pakistan: New Approaches and Reflections (Karachi: OUP, 2013), pp. 90–​120. 74 Idem and Singh, The Partition of India, 19. 75 Joya Chatterji, “New Directions in Partition Studies,” History Workshop Journal, 67, 2009, pp. 213–​ 20, 215.

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8 THE RAJ’S UNCANNY OTHER Indirect rule and the princely states Teresa Segura-​Garcia

Introduction This chapter examines the overarching themes and debates that have emerged in the study of the Indian princely states from the 1970s to the present. The overview of these territories under indirect British control unfolds along three central questions that have defined the historiography on the princely states in the past decades: their origins and the nature of British control in these territories; the pursuits of Indian rulers and their subjects; and the connections that linked the states with the political, social, and cultural world beyond their borders. Modern European empires were more successful in the establishment of a new order wherever they nurtured connections with indigenous forces that provided them with local knowledge, legitimacy, and financial resources. In the Indian subcontinent, dubashes, banias, and other intermediaries linked local populations with the East India Company and, later, with the British Crown.1 It is Indian rulers and the states they governed, however, that have been characterised as ‘the single most important buttress’ of British rule in India, especially whenever the empire was threatened by internal revolt, anti-​colonialism, or world conflict.2 In the late colonial period the Indian subcontinent contained about 500 such buttresses. Some of these states were large and wealthy, such as Hyderabad, Mysore, and Baroda, while other were small and insignificant by comparison. They were all, however, nominally independent territories under some degree of British control. Overall, these princely states had a very significant territorial and demographic weight: they occupied one-​third of the Indian subcontinent and contained two-​fifths of its population.3 With the arrival of independence in 1947, however, most princely states disappeared, with their accession to the newly created nations of India and Pakistan. The incorporation of the states into South Asia’s two new countries has cast a long shadow over research on these territories.4 The princely states have been retroactively understood as ‘petty despotisms’ that were doomed to disappear –​as dead ends in the inevitable march towards independent, democratic, and republican South Asia.5 For years this made them unattractive as topics of historical enquiry, placing them at the margins of the historiography of South Asia. As early as the 1970s, however, some historians argued for the centrality of the princely states to the maintenance of British India –​a centrality that made them worthy of study.6 Since then a series of remarkable contributions has brought the princely states from the margins to, DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-9

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if not the centre, at least a less peripheral position within South Asian historiography.7 This scholarship has explored the continuities between the princely states and their precolonial origins; assessed the engagement of some Indian rulers with social and political reform; and highlighted the complex negotiations of rulers who attempted to establish political links with the British Empire while advancing nationalist and anti-​colonial positions.8 Scholars working on the princely states have, moreover, contributed to important debates within the general historiography of South Asia –​from the interplay between region, nation, and religious community to the importance of colonial ideology and practice in shaping the political culture of the subcontinent.9 Early work on the princely states reflected wider developments in the field of South Asian studies. In the 1960s historians and anthropologists in the field began to consider the social structure of regions as bounded entities that displayed particular characteristics.10 In a rather binary approach, these entities were perceived to either resist or precipitate modernisation. Typical works of this period include Burton Stein’s work on the ‘segmentary state’ and Bernard Cohn’s research on the ‘levels’ of the precolonial Indian state.11 These developments encouraged research that viewed the states as enclosed, circumscribed polities.12 The scholarly contributions of the 1960s led to the emergence of two interrelated debates in the historiography on the states. First, did the states have precolonial origins or were they created by the British Empire? Second, how did the British Empire affect the autonomy of Indian rulers from the early eighteenth century to their disappearance with their absorption into independent India and Pakistan? These questions are explored in the first and second sections in this chapter. From the early 2000s to the late 2010s a range of new approaches to the states gradually –​if unevenly –​ emerged. These scholarly contributions questioned old assumptions and proposed new ways of understanding the states. They all have in common the exploration of the connectedness of the princely states. The ‘new history’ of the states asks novel questions about their global projection. It is this topic that is examined in the third and final section of this chapter.

The princely states and the British Empire: Origins and indirect rule The first major theme in the historiography of the princely states concerns their origins: were they a ‘creation’ or ‘invention’ of the British or did they represent a continuity of traditional state formation in India?13 The idea that the states were created by foreign rule was used by the British themselves to justify their presence in India. According to this line of reasoning, many of the most important Indian dynasties were set up by the British, ‘and of the remainder few, if any, have been in possession of their countries so long as have the English of Madras or Bombay’.14 Although it is true that, in the eighteenth century, the fortunes of many dynasties rose along with those of the East India Company, this must not be taken to mean that the states were ‘created’ by the British. In the late 1970s historians challenged theories about the birth of the states through British control, arguing that the states were vigorous traditional rulerships well before the substantial disruptions brought about by the arrival of the East India Company.15 Robin Jeffrey proposed that it was in fact the precolonial vigour of the states that ensured their continuity under the constraints of indirect rule.16 Jeffrey’s argument was later amply corroborated by Barbara Ramusack, who demonstrated that many of India’s most prominent states had previously been monarchies whose history went back many centuries before the arrival of the European trading companies. Some of these states, once feudatories of the Mughal Empire, had forcefully asserted their independence from the Mughal throne. Others were fragments from the break-​up of the Mughal state after the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707. A third group sprang out of the 106

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more limited ‘empires’ of the Sikhs in the north, the Muslim rulers of the Deccan in the south, and the Marathas in the west.17 From the role of the British Empire in creating the states, scholars moved on to examine the degree of British interference in the states. Some historians researched the administrative changes that resulted from British influence, examining the policies and strategies of individual governors-​general or viceroys, Residents, and –​to a lesser extent –​rulers, diwans, courtiers, and other political advisors.18 This scholarship has focused largely on the concept of ‘indirect rule’ to characterise the relationship between the British Empire and the princely states. This concept came under criticism, however, as representative of what Hira Singh has termed a ‘colonial mode of historiography’: indirect rule, according to Singh, has obscured the role of indigenous agency in shaping the relationship between the states and the British Empire.19 Norbert Peabody complicated these arguments on the origins of the states and the nature of indirect rule in his study of late precolonial and early colonial rule in the kingdom of Kota, in Rajputana. Peabody established that some states did not exactly preserve existing social formations; rather, they modified such formations to make them a better fit with new political ideas.20 Peabody detailed how Kota’s complex political relations rendered the British unable to impose their power monolithically. He argued that British control arose from a dialogue with local actors and demands. These actors were often able to manipulate the British to serve their own –​and frequently diametrically opposed –​agendas. British control was not always successful in curtailing Indian kingly power and authority. Much depended on the resilience of the court and on the state’s financial resources –​as well as on the expertise of the ruler, the high-​ranking Indians they appointed, and the British administrators they came into contact with. In this way, Indian kingly resilience to British control effectively shaped and limited the reach of imperial power.21 This emphasises the importance of balancing the fact of imperial power with its occasional fragility and precariousness in the face of local forms of authority, culture, and resilience.22 Local culture and resilience in the states was not the exclusive domain of the small group of aristocratic men and women who ruled these territories. Yet historiography on the states has focused overwhelmingly on Indian rulers themselves, often rendering princely subjects invisible and creating calls to ‘bring the people back’ into this historiography.23 Ian Copland and Dick Kooiman foregrounded the inhabitants of the princely states by examining their involvement with nationalism and communalism -​two domains long thought to be exclusive to British India. Ultimately, however, their work reinforced the idea that the states were intrinsically different from British India.24 This line of enquiry has not always managed to locate the agency of princely subjects. Several contributors to Robin Jeffrey’s edited volume, for instance, maintained that not only did nationalism have a very limited presence in princely India, but that it had merely been imported from British India in the 1930s.25 This diffusionist approach has been challenged by later contributions, such as Hira Singh’s work on local peasant movements in interwar princely India.26

Indian rulers and their pursuits If the foremost question within the scholarship on the states has involved their precolonial origins or lack thereof, the second main debate has revolved around the degree of autonomy of Indian rulers once they entered into treaties with the East India Company. This question is not exclusive to the princely states; it has been at the heart of much of the debate surrounding the British Empire and the relationship it established with the old ruling elites of its colonial territories across the globe. In the case of South Asia, this debate has broadly taken place between 107

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the subaltern studies school, which has argued that colonialism produced a hegemonic order that sapped the political agency of the subcontinent’s rulers, and the so-​called ‘Cambridge’ school of historians, which has suggested that Indian elites remained political actors by negotiating with colonial administrators and inserting themselves into colonial hierarchies.27 Although this sketch does not fully do justice to the wide range of positions taken by scholars, it is a necessary short cut to mapping the state of the field. The seminal work of the line of reasoning that holds that the British depleted the political life of the princely states and their rulers is Nicholas Dirks’ The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, a study of the southern state of Pudukkottai.28 Dirks applied an anthropological approach to the polity, which he referred to as a ‘little kingdom’29. He argued that colonialism purposefully preserved many of the forms of the precolonial status quo in India, a phenomenon that was especially conspicuous in the states.30 From the case study of Pudukkottai, Dirks concluded that the British ‘hollowed out the Crown’ of local kingdoms and left ‘theatre states’ in their place. These ‘theatre states’ were characterised by a choreography of palace rituals devoid of political content. Similarly, Partha Chatterjee, a proponent of the subaltern studies school, argued that colonialism was a new, alien mechanism that had a profound impact on Indian society, often bolstering pre-​existing local organisations of power.31 The views put forward by Dirks and Chatterjee presented a colonial encounter in which Indian rulers were puppets whose strings were pulled by the British. This perspective denies agency to princely rulers and subjects, ultimately reinforcing the presumed irrelevance of these spaces. There is yet a second objection to the ‘theatre states’ theory. The sheer diversity of social, political, economic, and religious factors in India’s more than 500 states necessarily means that arguments such as Dirks’, though valid for some states, are inadequate to explain the political developments of others. The British did not succeed in ‘hollow[ing] out the Crown’ of the Gaekwads in Baroda to the same extent that they did with the Thondaiman dynasty in Pudukkottai. It is facile to attribute this to their size. Historians have produced compelling evidence, however, for the existence of small states that retained a large degree of autonomy, such as Cochin, as well as large states that had little, such as Mysore –​especially after 1831, when direct British control was imposed over the state’s administration.32 It was not a state’s size but its connections that account for the varying degrees of autonomy across states. Although this claim might appear tenuous at first, recent research on Hyderabad, Baroda, and other states –​which is discussed in the final section, on the global connections of the Indian princely states –​supports this hypothesis.33 An alternative to arguments on the destructive effects of colonial intervention can be found in the historiographical strand suggesting that, far from being puppet regimes, some states maintained considerable degrees of autonomy and succeeded in preserving existing social formations well into the nineteenth century. Barbara Ramusack has been at the forefront of this position, arguing that, whereas Indian rulers were politically disempowered by British rule, they were able to escape the social margins. They exercised their agency through the creation of internal spheres of relative autonomy into which they transferred their political drive.34 These pursuits, which included religious practice, aesthetic production, and the patronage of cultural and educational institutions, were eventually deployed as newly stylised cultural motifs in the field of politics proper.35 They found prosperity by alternative means, thus preventing their Crowns from being hollowed out. From this perspective, the British Empire certainly succeeded in establishing indirect rule over numerous polities, compelling them to cede tribute, military support, and control over external affairs. The conditions of indirect rule allowed Indian rulers to remain political actors, however, by segmenting the social world into distinct levels, so that the cultural became a way for intervening in the political. Within this line of enquiry, the work 108

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of Julie Codell and Priya Maholay-​Jaradi on art, royal collecting, and patronage in Baroda under the rule of Sayaji Rao III is of particular note.36 Scholarship has also assessed the engagement of Indian rulers with social and political reform, highlighting their ability to articulate alternative, non-​colonial projects of modernity for India.37 Although Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati raised significant questions about the impact of the progressive reforms ushered in by some states, it is important to carefully consider the engagement of Indian rulers with social reform.38 For instance, Maharaja Jai Singh of Alwar did not maintain his legitimacy through traditional rituals –​sacrifice, gift, and descent, among others –​but through his engagement with pan-​Indian movements of nationalist moral renewal, such as the Arya Samaj.39 From all recent contributions to the historiography of princely India, it is perhaps the work of Manu Bhagavan and Janaki Nair on social reform and modernity in the ‘progressive’ states of Baroda and Mysore that has received the most attention from historians of South Asia. Bhagavan explored the engagement of two of India’s leading states with modernity through a comparative study of the educational reforms launched under Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV in Mysore and Sayaji Rao III in Baroda.40 Bhagavan demonstrated that Mysore and Baroda appropriated the twin liberal creeds of good governance and Western education to revolutionise their societies and make them ‘modern’. In the process, they recast Western political practices as ‘native’ or non-​colonial –​often even anti-​colonial. Bhagavan concluded that Mysore and Baroda were complex polities where competing agendas of resistance and domination struggled for supremacy.41 In spite of this valuable contribution, Sovereign Spheres reinforced the widespread scholarly assumption that the states were either ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’, as well as the inference that the only scripts that were available to Indian rulers were resistance or complete acquiescence.42 On the issue of tradition and modernity, Nair critiqued the idea that the states were either completely in thrall to modernity –​such as the ‘progressive’ states of Mysore and Baroda, but also Travancore and Cochin –​or remained wholly untouched by it –​a characterisation most usually applied to Hyderabad, the Rajput states of north-​west India, and the Sikh states of the Punjab.43 Gender has also been an important category of study, though much work remains to be done. For the late colonial period Angma Dey Jhala demonstrated that courtly women were active agents in determining dynastic succession and marriage alliances, thus shaping the political status of Indian rulers, while Siobhan Lambert-​Hurley foregrounded the ground-​breaking engagement of the Muslim women of the Bhopal court with women’s rights.44 Princes and their male heirs have, equally, been examined through a gendered lens, which has produced studies such as Rosalind O’Hanlon’s work on martial masculinity, Julie Hughes’ on shikar (hunting), Shruti Kapila’s on personhood, and Satadru Sen’s on education.45 Despite the important, often sophisticated contributions examined across this section, the princely states are often still portrayed as conservative political spaces with ‘uncomplicated, old-​world value systems’.46 As backwaters of tradition –​unfailingly set against British India’s colonial modernity –​the princely states appear far removed from the processes that concern historians of British India and Britain’s larger imperial project.

Connected histories of the princely states The scholarship examined so far has largely studied the states as concrete units, as political and administrative spaces in contraposition to British India.47 If the states are acknowledged to have had any connections at all beyond their borders, these are unidirectional flows of ideas –​ such as nationalism –​from British India into the empty political receptacle of the states.48 Any 109

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wider links, such as the adoption of Western educational or government practices, have been characterised as ‘mimicked modernity’, to borrow Manu Bhagavan’s expression, adopted from British India.49 There is one aspect of the global connections of the states that has been explored extensively, often in lavishly illustrated books: the purchase of luxury European clothes, jewellery, and other personal items, often in bespoke commissions, by Indian rulers during trips to London, Paris, and other European capitals.50 The interest in this particular aspect of modern Indian kingship accords with what Jeffrey aptly called the ‘elephants-​and-​dancing-​girls’ picture of the states –​a picture that shaped academic and popular understandings of Indian rulers in 1978, when Jeffrey came up with the expression, and that still shapes them decades later.51 For all its emphasis on the international purchases of Indian rulers, this narrative glosses over the implication of such consumption: that the states were not isolated spaces, but polities that were linked –​in this instance, through the understudied phenomenon of princely travel –​with distant corners of the world.52 In questioning old assumptions and proposing new ways of understanding the princely states, some recent writing has begun to examine their connections with the world beyond their borders. In doing so, it has brought together two separate strands of historical enquiry: the global dynamics of the British Empire during the colonial period and the history of the Indian states. It has expanded recent research on the ‘webs of empire’ to the Indian states, to focus their attention on the human, material, and ideological connections criss-​crossing the world of empires.53 This new history of the states is best represented by Eric Beverley, Kate Boehme, Satadru Sen, Chitralekha Zutshi, and Siobhan Lambert-​Hurley. They have respectively located Hyderabad, the states of western India, Nawanagar, Kashmir, and Bhopal within broader milieus –​from political, to religious, commercial, social, linguistic, and sportive.54 Beverley’s contribution is particularly representative of the new connected history of the princely states. He has deprioritised the internal politics of Hyderabad, shifting our attention away from the court and towards the state’s wider dynamics. This has allowed him to focus on Hyderabad’s linkages beyond the subcontinent, tracing the Muslim networks of international intellectual collaboration –​the ‘Muslim internationalism’ –​that animated states’ politics and presented an alternative to British colonial modernity.55 Similarly, Lambert-​Hurley has demonstrated that the reforms of Nawab Sultan Jahan Begun of Bhopal, based on Islamic thought and practice, engaged not only with debates over the status of women in colonial India but with ideas from across the Muslim world, from Morocco to Egypt and Turkey.56 My own research has traced the states’ global links through a study of the protracted, peripatetic political career of Maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III of Baroda, who ruled the leading state of western India from 1875 to 1939.57 Across his six decades of rule, the Maharaja of Baroda established and maintained a wide array of political links with individuals and institutions in western India, the rest of the subcontinent, and the world. Some of these relationships were forged through travel: in 28 international tours, the ruler visited the length and breadth of Europe, North America, Africa, and East Asia. He made use of these tours to meet with and provide financial support to politically active diasporic Indians, from the London-​based Indian National Congress leader Dadabhai Naoroji to exiled revolutionary figures such as Bhikaji Cama and Shyamji Krishnavarma.58 Maharaja Sayaji Rao III of Baroda navigated several critical stages in the development of imperial and anti-​colonial politics in India and across the world. Whether as a direct participant or as a circumspect bystander, his engagement with these stages foregrounds that some Indian rulers cultivated significant links on a global scale well into the interwar period. If the Maharaja of Baroda was successful in balancing his anti-​colonial sympathies with the appearance of support for the British Empire, it was because he shifted his centre of power away 110

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from Baroda and into western India, the subcontinent, and the world. Global engagements were particularly important in the ruler’s resilience against foreign influence and in the assertion of Indian kingly authority. Although Ramusack has proposed that Indian rulers remained political actors throughout the colonial period by using the cultural to intervene in the political, the new connected histories of the states indicate that they did so by projecting the political beyond the borders of their territories. Sayaji Rao III of Baroda was certainly not alone in finding respite from British control in global connections. His links, with their princely tours and transoceanic voyages, were part of the same momentum towards independence that brought Mohandas Gandhi to Durban, Subhas Chandra Bose to Japan, Muhammad Iqbal to Germany, and Choudhury Rahmat Ali to Cambridge. In this sense, his career is a princely manifestation of a wider phenomenon within South Asian history. Far from being island of tradition, states such as Hyderabad and Baroda were plugged into to the webs of people, ideas, and resources that held the British Empire together and, at the same time, contributed to its eventual demise. These considerations bring to mind Norbert Peabody’s compelling thesis that Indian rulers attempted to take advantage of colonial penetration not only to reassert their own position within their polities but also to establish more robust form of kingships that were no longer rooted in webs of local social relations.59 The political, social, and cultural developments of princely states in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth took place not within local political boundaries but in a field that encompassed the subcontinent, the metropole, and other territories, colonies, and empires. The possibilities in the study of global connections, however, should not obscure their limitations. Recent critiques have alerted historians to the dangers of ‘the global turn’, which range from presenting global connections as quantitatively and qualitatively constant –​ ignoring the ‘lumps and gaps’ that disrupted them –​to failing to formulate overall explanatory frameworks.60 Without unduly privileging mobility over stasis, the things that move over the things that do not, historians studying the states should be ready to travel well beyond their borders, examining the sometimes thriving, sometimes fragile linkages of people and ideas that connected them with territories beyond the subcontinent. As long as historians use this global turn wisely, incorporating the states into wide geographical frameworks of interactions will allow us to understand them as a constitutive part of the history of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century South Asia and the British Empire.61

Résumé Robin Jeffrey’s call to historians to pay more attention to the Indian princely states is as relevant as it was in 1978, when his edited volume was first published.62 Princely states need to be re-​ envisaged not simply as counterpoints to British India but, rather, as entities that participated in more complex and far broader social, political, and economic networks. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s observation that empires did not usually produce consistent loyalty or constant resistance but ‘contingent accommodation’ is particularly apt to assess the position of the princely states vis-​à-​vis the British Empire.63 In the case of Baroda, Maharaja Sayaji Rao III’s long, convoluted affiliation with the empire suggests that one single ruler could rebuff British control and bolster it at different points, depending on shifting historical circumstances. The unfolding of the relationship between the princely states and what lay beyond their borders has far-​ranging implications for the study of India and the British Empire, starting with the importance of eroding the distinction between British and princely India. Approaching the states through the perspective of the global and the connected allows us to see them as a constitutive part of India and the British Empire, highlighting their ambivalent 111

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position as buttresses of imperial rule and agents of decolonisation. This ongoing collective enquiry recalibrates our understanding of the limits of the British Empire, and it may do the same for contemporaneous imperial ventures –​from South-​east Asia to Africa –​where local forms of kingship and authority coexisted with colonial regimes.64 The balancing act for this scholarship is to contribute to the growing body of research on global history and on the states while avoiding the romanticising pitfalls –​the fascination with mobility for mobility’s sake, on the one hand, and the enchantment with princely life, with its lingering whiff of Raj nostalgia, on the other.65

Notes 1 Christopher A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 1987); Rosanne Rocher, ‘British Orientalism in the eighteenth century: The dialectics of knowledge and government’, in: Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 215–​49; Kapil Raj, ‘The historical anatomy of a contact zone: Calcutta in the eighteenth century’, IESHR, 48, 2011, pp. 55–​82. 2 Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of a Modern Democracy (Oxford: OUP, 1994). 3 Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati (eds.), India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2007), 1. 4 V.P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1956). 5 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–​1967 (New Delhi: Macmillan, 2002), 65. 6 Robin Jeffrey (ed.), People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States (New Delhi: OUP, 1978). 7 Manu Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education and Empire in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2003); Ian Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes: Paramountcy in Western India, 1857–​1930 (London: Sangam, 1982); Ernst and Pati, India’s Princely States; Barbara Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge: CUP, 2004); Caroline Keen, Princely India and the British: Political Development and the Operation of Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). 8 For some of the most notable contributions, see Eric Lewis Beverley, Hyderabad, British India and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c.1850–​1950 (Cambridge: CUP, 2015); Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres; Julie E. Hughes, Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment and Power in the Indian Princely States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Aya Ikegame, Princely India Re-​ Imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to the Present (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Janaki Nair, Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2003); Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States; and Margrit Pernau, The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad, 1911–​1948 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000). 9 For the most notable monographs from each of these scholars, see Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States; Copland, The British Raj; Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres; Nair, Mysore Modern; and Siobhan Lambert-​Hurley, Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal (London: Routledge, 2007). 10 Leila Fawaz and Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Introduction: The connected world of empires’, in: idem (eds.), Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 1–​27, 3. 11 Burton Stein, All the Kings’ Mana: Papers on Medieval South Indian History (Madras: New Era Publications, 1984); idem, Peasant, State and Society in Medieval South India (New Delhi: OUP, 1985); Bernard S. Cohn, The Chamars of Senapur: A Study of the Changing Status of a Depressed Caste (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967); idem, ‘Notes on the history of the study of Indian society and culture’, in Milton Singer and idem (eds.), Structure and Change in Indian Society (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), pp. 3–​28. 12 An early example of this trend is Jeffrey, People, Princes and Paramount Power. See, in particular, Jeffrey’s ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–​31. 13 Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States, 2. 14 Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-​Speaking Countries, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1868), 323.

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Indirect rule and the princely states 15 Jeffrey, People, Princes and Paramount Power. 16 Idem, ‘Introduction’. 17 Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States, 12–​47. 18 Michael H. Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764–​ 1858 (New Delhi: OUP, 1998); Ian Copland, ‘The Baroda crisis of 1873–​77: A study in governmental rivalry’, MAS, 2, 1968, pp. 97–​123; idem, ‘The Maharaja of Kolhapur and the non-​Brahmin movement, 1902–​10’, MAS, 7, 1973, pp. 209–​25; idem, ‘Sayaji Rao Gaekwar and “sedition”: The dilemmas of an Indian prince’, in: Peter Robb and David Taylor (eds.), Rule, Protest, Identity: Aspects of Modern South Asia (London: Curzon, 1978), pp. 28–​48; idem, The British Raj; idem, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the integration of the Indian states: A reappraisal’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 21, 1993, pp. 385–​408; idem, The Princes of India in the End-​Game of Empire, 1917–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 2002); idem, State, Community and Neighbourhood in Princely North India, c.1900–​ 1950 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005). 19 Hira Singh, Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistance: Princes, Peasants and Paramount Power (New Delhi: Sage, 1998). 20 Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity. 21 Christopher A. Bayly, ‘The British military-​fiscal state and indigenous resistance: India, 1750–​1820’, in: Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 322–​45, 334. 22 Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, ‘Postcript: Bodies, genders, empires: Reimagining world histories’, in: idem (eds.), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 405–​23, 417. 23 Ernst and Pati, India’s Princely States. 24 Ian Copland, ‘ “Communalism” in princely India: The case of Hyderabad, 1930–​1940’, MAS, 22, 1988, pp. 783–​814; Dick Kooiman, Communalism and Indian Princely States: Travancore, Baroda and Hyderabad in the 1930s (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002). 25 Jeffrey, People, Princes and Paramount Power. 26 Singh, Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistance. 27 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3–​14. 28 Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 29 For a discussion of the ‘little kingdom’ model and it usefulness in the study of India’s precolonial states, see Binu John Mailaparambil, Lords of the Sea: The Ali Rajas of Cannanore and the Political Economy of Malabar, 1663–​1723 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 26–​8; Tilman Frasch, ‘In an octopussy’s garden: Of Chakravartins, little kings and a new model of the early state in South and Southeast Asia’, in: Georg Berkemer and Margaret Frenz (eds.), Sharing Sovereignty: The Little Kingdom in South Asia (Berlin: Klaus Schwartz Verlag, 2003), pp. 94–​114, 97; Hira Singh, ‘Colonial and postcolonial historiography and the princely states: Relations of power and rituals of legitimation’, in: Ernst and Pati, India’s Princely States, pp. 15–​29, 26; and Margret Frenz, From Contact to Conquest: Transition to British rule in Malabar, 1790–​1805 (New Delhi: OUP, 2003). 30 Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 282. 31 Partha Chatterjee, ‘More on modes of power and the peasantry’, in: Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies (New Delhi: OUP, 1988), pp. 351–​90, 388. 32 Nigel Chancellor, ‘Mysore: The making and unmaking of a model state, c.1799–​1844’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003). 33 Beverley, Hyderabad, British India and the World. 34 Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States, 132–​69; Hannah L. Archambault, ‘Becoming Mughal in the nineteenth century: The case of the Bhopal princely state’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 36, 2013, pp. 479–​95. 35 Lambert-​Hurley, Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage. For a similar argument in the context of late eighteenth-​century Awadh, see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750–​1850 (New York: Vintage, 2005). 36 Julie F. Codell, ‘Ironies of mimicry: The art collection of Sayaji Rao III Gaekwad, Maharaja of Baroda, and the cultural politics of early modern India’, Journal of the History of Collections, 15, 2003, pp. 127–​ 46; idem, ‘Resistance and performance: Native informant discourse in the biographies of Maharaja Sayaji Rao III of Baroda (1863–​1939)’, in: idem and Dianne Sachko Macleod (eds.), Orientalism

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Teresa Segura-Garcia Transposed: Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 12–​45; Priya Maholay-​ Jaradi, Fashioning India’s National Art: Baroda’s Royal Art Collection, Art Institutions and Crafts at Colonial Exhibitions (New Delhi: OUP, 2016). 37 For some of the most notable contributions, see Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres; Hughes, Animal Kingdoms; Ikegame, Princely India Re-​Imagined; Nair, Mysore Modern; and Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity. 38 Ernst and Pati, India’s Princely States. 39 Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory, and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (New Delhi: OUP, 1997). 40 Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres. 41 Ibid., 81. 42 Idem, ‘Demystifying the “ideal progressive”: Resistance through mimicked modernity in princely Baroda, 1900–​1913’, MAS, 35, 2001, pp. 385–​409. 43 Nair, Mysore Modern; idem, ‘Mysore’s Wembley? The Dasara exhibition’s imagined economies’, MAS, 47, 2013, pp. 1549–​87. 44 Angma Dey Jhala, Courtly Indian Women in Late Imperial India (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008); idem, ‘Made for maharanis: Aesthetics of courtly women in colonial princely India’, in: Maureen Goggin and Beth Tobin (eds.), Material Women, 1750–​1950: Consuming Desires and Consuming Objects (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 185–​208; idem, ‘Daughters of the hills: Legacies of colonialism, nationalism and religious communalism in the Chakma Raj family, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bengal, c.1900–​ 1972’, South Asian History and Culture, 4, 2013, pp. 107–​25; Siobhan Lambert-​Hurley, ‘Fostering sisterhood: Muslim women and the All-​India Ladies’ Association’, Journal of Women’s History, 16, 2004, pp. 40–​65. 45 Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of masculinity in north Indian history: The Bangash nawabs of Farrukhabad’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 4, 1997, pp. 1–​19; Hughes, Animal Kingdoms; Shruti Kapila, ‘Masculinity and madness: Princely personhood and colonial sciences of the mind in western India 1871–​1940’, Past & Present, 187, 2005, pp. 121–​56; Satadru Sen, ‘The politics of deracination: Empire, education and elite children in colonial India’, Studies in History, 19, 2003, pp. 19–​39. 46 Copland, The British Raj, 87. 47 Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States; Fisher, Indirect Rule in India; Copland, The British Raj; idem, The Princes of India in the End-​Game; idem, State, Community and Neighbourhood. 48 Jeffrey, People, Princes and Paramount Power. 49 Bhagavan, ‘Demystifying the “ideal progressive” ’. 50 Amin Jaffer, Made for Maharajas: A Design Diary of Princely India (London: Scriptum, 2009); Katherine Prior and John Adamson, Maharajas’ Jewels (Paris: Éditions Assouline, 2000), 98–​139, 140–​79. 51 Jeffrey, People, Princes and Paramount Power, 3. 52 For more detail, see the exhibition’s catalogue: Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts (London: V&A Publishing, 2009). 53 Ballantyne and Burton, ‘Postscript’. For instance, for the princely contribution to the First World War, see Santanu Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), 45–​9. 54 Beverley, Hyderabad, British India and the World; Kate Boehme, ‘Commercial networks and the making of a colonial bourgeoisie in western India, 1845–​1870’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015); idem, ‘Smuggling India: Deconstructing western India’s illicit export trade, 1818–​1870’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 25, 2015, pp. 685–​704; Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity and the Making of Kashmir (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003); idem, Kashmir’s Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies and the Historical Imagination (New Delhi: OUP, 2014); Satadru Sen, Migrant Races: Empire, Identity and K. S. Ranjitsinhji (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Lambert-​Hurley, Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage. 55 Beverley, Hyderabad, British India and the World, esp. 19–​53, 100–​46. 56 Lambert-​Hurley, ‘Fostering sisterhood’. 57 Teresa Segura-​Garcia, ‘The lens and the maharaja: The photographic remaking of Indian kingship in the late colonial period’, in: Marcus Banks and Annamaria Motrescu-​Mayes (eds.), Visual Histories of South Asia (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2018), pp. 115–​31; idem, ‘Baroda, the British empire and the world, c.1875–​1939’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015). 58 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-​ Imperialism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 138; Segura-​Garcia, Baroda, the British Empire and the World. 59 Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity, 17.

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Indirect rule and the princely states 60 Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, ‘Approaches to global intellectual history’, in: idem (eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 3–​32, 21–​3. 61 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Marrying global history with South Asian history: Potential and limits of global microhistory in a regional inflection’, Comparativ, 29, 2019, pp. 52–​77. 62 Jeffrey, ‘Introduction’. 63 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 14. 64 Fisher, Indirect Rule in India, 432–​83; Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 86; Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 151. 65 On the notion of Raj nostalgia, see Renato Rosaldo, ‘Imperialist nostalgia’, Representations, 26, 1989, pp. 107–​22. On its relation with the princely states, see Carol E. Henderson and Maxine Weisgrau, ‘Introduction: Raj rhapsodies, tourism and heritage in India’, in: idem (eds.), Raj Rhapsodies: Tourism, Heritage and the Seduction of History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. xxv–​xlvi; Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States, p. 153; and idem, ‘The Indian princes as fantasy: Palace hotels, palace museums and palace on wheels’, in: Carol Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 66–​89.

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PART II

The World of Economy and Labour

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9 THE EMERGENCE OF A ‘MODERN’ URBAN-​ INDUSTRIAL WORKFORCE IN INDIA, 1860–​1 914 Aditya Sarkar

The colonial structuring of industrial capitalism Indian industrialisation under colonial rule exhibited a pattern of uneven development. By the First World War India had the fourth largest railway network in the world. It boasted an extensive mining sector and a plantation economy with a major share of the global tea trade. It possessed a rapidly growing cotton textile industry, centred in western India, and was the centre of global jute production.1 Two of its major cities –​Bombay and Calcutta –​were nodal points of the economy organised around the British Empire. Yet all this took place in an overwhelmingly agrarian society, marked by the ravages of long agricultural depression till the turn of the century, repeated famines, crippling epidemics, and pervasive destitution and illiteracy. These were simultaneously the conditions and the contradictions of industrial capitalism in India as it functioned under the carapace of empire. Precolonial industry had been extensive and diverse. A wide array of handicraft industries serving local needs dotted both rural and urban locations. In a long tradition stretching from the writings of nationalist intellectuals, a sweeping deindustrialisation has often been attributed to British rule.2 It has also been vigorously contested by research since the 1960s, however, recent iterations of which demonstrate various forms of adaptation and survival by a range of handicraft industries.3 Family-​based production units, artisanal workshops, and small factories, it has been shown, devised economies of scale, developed specialised market niches geared to specific regional patterns of demand, and transformed capital–​labour relations in a process that led to the expansion of wage labour in small towns across the country (a process demonstrated particularly vividly for western India).4 This field of research mostly lies outside the scope of this chapter, but its significance is immense. An urban-​industrial workforce, characterised by distinctively ‘modern’ capitalist methods and relations of production, emerged between the 1850s and the First World War. This was the era of the telegraph, the creation of railway networks, the opening of the Suez Canal (coupled with the expansion of steam shipping), and the building of road networks across the Indian subcontinent. These processes made for a closer integration of internal markets, and for intensified DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-10

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dependence upon global economic currents. These, in turn, gave British economic policies –​ from tariff and currency regulations to the organisation of labour recruitment –​a continually expanding force, despite the thinness of direct colonial control. The economic and ideological structure that underpinned these policies was free trade, and it has been persuasively argued that, between 1850 and 1914, India experienced as untrammelled and rigorous a system of free trade as the world has ever seen.5 A distinctive feature of early Indian industrialisation was the narrowness of its base. Cotton mills, jute mills, mines, and railways accounted for the vast bulk of large-​scale industrial employment. In each of these cases, the colonial structuring of economic relations meant that ‘normal’ backward linkages –​such as light engineering or machine production –​were transferred to Britain, along with the corresponding economic benefits. The cotton mills of Bombay and the jute mills on the river Hooghly abutting Calcutta, for instance, imported their machinery from Britain, and their reliance on an intensive exploitation of labour allowed them to minimise investments in technological inputs (as well as the social reproduction of their workforces). The two major manufacturing industries, cotton and jute, experienced rapid but fitful growth till the war: economic booms, slumps and war dictated the rhythm of their expansion and contraction. This had consequences for the shape of labour relations. The mill industries of western India and Bengal were each committed from an early stage to strategies of flexible production, whereby output and working time could be curtailed or expanded, and product lines shifted (from yarn to cloth and back in the Bombay mills, for instance) in accordance with short-​ term fluctuations in demand.6 The labour markets the mills drew on, inevitably, witnessed corresponding fluctuations. Until 1914 India’s industrial growth featured the overt domination of British capital. This was especially pronounced in eastern India, where four sources of comparative advantage in the global economy spurred a tightening and sophistication of colonial economic controls.7 The first of these was Bengal’s monopoly of raw jute cultivation, which enabled the emergence of a British-​controlled jute industry, first in Dundee, and then in Bengal itself (which dethroned its Scottish predecessor in the jute business). The second was the abundant availability of coal reserves in Bengal and Bihar, which enabled the emergence of a large coal-​mining sector.8 The third was the cultivation of tea on the hill slopes of northern Bengal and Assam.9 The fourth was the availability of cheap labour, which was mobilised across longer distances than those accessed by any other industrial region in the country. A workforce drawn from the crisis-​ ridden agrarian regions of northern Bihar and eastern United Provinces (UP: (present-​day Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state) rapidly flowed into the jute mills (and were joined there by Oriya and south Indian migrants), and the same regions provided the workforce for the coal mines and the plantations. A characteristic feature of colonial industrialisation was the managing agency system.10 A single agency would, in principle, serve the interests of several firms, often across different industries. It would raise capital (from sources that individual firms could not access), supply financial and technical management to a series of firms, extract a fee for this management, and also take a percentage of the profits prior to dividends. Managing agencies played the same role in relation to the cotton mill industries of Bombay and Ahmedabad in western India, which were the two industrial cities where Indian rather than British capital controlled large-​scale production. In Bombay the managing agencies earned particular opprobrium among both shareholders and factory inspectors for their practice of levying a commission of one anna upon every pound of production, regardless of whether the mill ran at a profit or a loss.11 The industrialisation of late nineteenth-​century western India was, in contrast to that of eastern India, the most striking instance of the initiative and success of indigenous business 120

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enterprise. At the same time, the fortunes of the mill industry in Bombay Presidency were structured by European business domination. The industrialists who pioneered the Bombay textile industry, for instance, began their careers in a mercantile role, making their money from the imperial trade with China, first in opium and then in raw cotton. Racial hierarchies in the ownership and disposition of mercantile capital induced them to diversify into manufacturing. The industrial option, then, was as much a product of constraint as it was of opportunity.12 Nevertheless, Indian industrial capitalism did grow rapidly in Bombay and Ahmedabad. Indian firms became the main suppliers of cotton yarn to Chinese weaving mills by the end of the century, and later expanded into cloth production during and after the war, as a result of the end of free trade. Prior to the First World War, though, colonial tariff and currency policies curtailed their expansion substantially. The rhythms of urban contraction and expansion also shaped the emergence of industrial workforces. Bombay’s explosive expansion into one of the biggest cities in the world was initially fuelled by its status as a major imperial entrepôt of commerce and mercantile activity. From the 1850s onwards its growth took a more markedly industrial turn, as the northern parts of the city came to be monopolised by mills.13 Calcutta, Kanpur, Ahmedabad, Sholapur, Jamshedpur, Coimbatore, and Madras were similarly transformed by the expansion of large-​ scale factory production. On a smaller scale, several towns sprang up in the second half of the nineteenth century specifically around railway workshops, prominent among these being Jamalpur, Kharagpur, and Lilooah.14 Another relationship between urbanisation and the emergence of industrial workforces is showcased by the larger north Indian towns in UP. Here the eighteenth century had witnessed a thriving urbanisation based on a rising export trade, increased agrarian production, and expanded demand among urban service elites.15 This pattern was –​often violently –​reversed as colonial rule expanded across north India in the first half of the nineteenth century. Mounting revenue demand, declining public expenditure, and increased imports shrank local artisanal production. Urban growth acquired a new basis after the defeat of the 1857 Uprising. As older towns associated with dying elites declined, other towns grew, especially those that lay along railway lines and experienced a concentration of new urban professional groups and merchant communities. Lucknow’s fortunes as a major centre of artisanal manufacturing declined, while those of Allahabad and Benares rose in comparison. Kanpur’s commercial growth suffered severely from the destruction of large parts of the city during British reprisals after 1857, but thereafter it was reinvented as the province’s largest industrial centre. In each of these towns the effects of trade, artisanal or manufacturing activity, and new elite settlements composed of financial, trading, military, and administrative personnel brought about new rhythms of urban life. Municipal services –​such as sweeping and scavenging –​expanded considerably, and were staffed exclusively by untouchable Dalit workers, whose migration to the towns in search of work freed them of the authoritarian caste controls of the countryside, but subjected them to new and unsettling modes of exclusion. Hindu peasant migrants and migrant Muslim artisanal castes –​such as Momin Julaha weavers –​competed, sometimes violently, in the urban labour markets of many UP towns. Each of these towns would expand considerably after the First World War, as would their artisanal, manufacturing, and service occupations.16

Migrant workforces Urban workforces were –​and remained –​overwhelmingly composed of rural migrants.17 The experience of a ‘full’ proletarianisation, characterised by complete dependence on urban 121

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wage labour, never transpired as a whole for Indian workers.18 Most rural migrants retained connections with the rural economy, and, rather than a straight-​line progression from agriculture to industry or from the rural to the urban, they maintained a foot in both worlds. The sheer durability of this pattern is striking: to this day, patterns of ‘circular’, back-​and-​forth migration between countryside and city shape the lives of the bulk of urban workers.19 The distances covered by migrant workforces between their places of birth and their new workplaces varied immensely. The jute mills of Bengal offer the most pronounced instance of sustained long-​distance industrial migration; their workforces were recruited from northern Bihar, eastern UP, Orissa, and the Madras Presidency. Agrarian crisis in northern India, particularly in Bihar, intensified migration. The jute mills came to be composed of principally lower-​ caste and Dalit rural labourers, displaced and impoverished village artisans, and small peasants squeezed by rent burdens, insecure tenancies, and uneconomic, fragmenting landholdings. By the turn of the twentieth century these diverse patterns of long-​distance migration had replaced an older mill-​labouring population composed chiefly of local Bengali peasants.20 In Bombay labour was initially drawn from the Konkan coast, especially Ratnagiri district. Here, again, migration was driven by varied pressures upon a small-​holding peasantry squeezed by a local increase in population, fragmenting landholdings, and the exactions of rural upper classes.21 From the early twentieth century onwards a substantial body of north Indian migrants were added to the ranks of the textile mills and other segments of the labour market, a pattern that would intensify after the war. In both Bombay and Calcutta the mills employed a majority of Hindu labourers of varied caste origins, but also contained many Muslim workers, who came to occupy special prominence within weaving departments. In contrast to the experience of early industrialisation in Europe, textile workforces were composed chiefly of men, with women ranging from about 5 per cent of the workforce (as in Kanpur) to about 20 per cent (as in Bombay) before the First World War.22 Various social forces contributed to this: the prevalence of early marriage and childbirth in rural India; the social mores of a patriarchal society, which frowned upon women’s work outside the home; and the abundance of cheaply available male labour.23 Industrial workforces across the country would become more male-​dominated as the twentieth century wore on, partly because of the inadvertent effects of factory legislation and maternity legislation, which from the 1920s became a basis for industrial employers to rapidly shed women workers from their rolls.24 Labouring families extended between village and city, since the heads of rural households, who were men, decided which family members would migrate to cities in search of work.25 In the case of Bengal, it has been shown that, as men in north Bihar and eastern UP migrated city-​wards in large numbers, female family members experienced both an intensification and a devaluation of their labour in the countryside.26 The same pattern was visible in Ratnagiri, the largest supplier of migrant labour to Bombay, where census reports as early as 1872 noted the growing burden of field labour upon women.27 Besides field labour, women were also employed in large numbers in rural industries (rice mills, cotton-​ginning factories, etc.), in occupations that were highly exploitative. Women who did migrate tended to do so when their rural resources had been exhausted: widowhood, barrenness, and the break-​up of marriages often structured their migration. In the city, therefore, they were less likely to have access to the rural base that men enjoyed, and correspondingly less protection against the vagaries of urban labour markets. This pushed them into lower-​paid and casualised forms of urban work, in factories and outside. The inequalities of gender relations were thus a structuring force in patterns of industrial migration, and were reproduced in a new key in migrants’ urban destinations. The textile mills of Ahmedabad and south India (Madras, Madura, Coimbatore, Bangalore) sourced their labour from adjacent districts; here, relatively short-​ distance rather than 122

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long-​distance migration tended to be the rule.28 The south Indian mills, in sharp contrast to those in other parts of the country, also experienced a greater volume of family migration, rather than the migration of single males that dominated the other industrial centres.29 This would eventually produce much more ‘settled’ industrial workforces in south Indian towns –​but a full severing of the rural link was as chimerical here as elsewhere. The manufacturing industries of the United Provinces were made up of petty cultivators and agricultural labourers, and of large numbers of rural artisans and weavers displaced from their traditional craft occupations. This pattern was particularly pronounced among Muslim Julaha weavers, who migrated to various labouring destinations in both north India and the Bombay Presidency in search of work. Industrial migration was largely fuelled by rural distress. But, far from uniformly severing rural connections, the migration to cities in search of work often helped revitalise and stabilise the rural link. A large proportion of the earnings of urban workers were remitted back to the countryside, and helped shore up the small landholdings of their families. The reverse movement of workers back to their rural homes during the harvest season helped supplement their wages and tide over the insecurities of highly volatile urban labour markets. Networks of kinship, caste, and rural origin, in turn, were vital to workers’ prospects of urban survival as they negotiated an unfamiliar world: they supplied credit and housing that would otherwise have been in scarce supply. Industrial jobbers would typically recruit workers on the basis of regional and caste affinities.30 At the same time, however, the rural connections of urban workers also enabled the high degree of casualisation and insecurity within most forms of city-​based employment. They were factored into employers’ calculations, and sustained a structure of work relations in which the burdens of social reproduction were mostly borne by these informal networks of connection. The flexible deployment of labour that characterised factory employment was, at one level, structured by workers’ commitment to maintaining their rural links. At another level, the reverse was true. Employers –​especially in the major mill industries –​needed to adjust production to short-​term fluctuations in demand. In times of economic crisis, mill employers made persistent complaints about the erratic and unreliable nature of labour supply. In times of prosperity, however, this very insecurity appeared in another aspect: as a basis for the lowering of labour costs and keeping production geared to demand.31 The migrant character of urban industrial workforces, then, was essential to maintaining a permanent pool of casual labour. The badlis or casual workers within the hypothetically ‘organised’ mill industry of Bombay were estimated at 28 per cent of the total workforce in the mid-​1930s by the Labour Office, and were supposed to have been a much larger proportion earlier.32 The largest single category of urban labour returned in successive censuses was usually ‘general labour’, a code word for the casualised and floating forms of employment that engrossed much of the workforce. This structure of employment was enabled precisely by the rural linkages of urban workers, and it undercut the possibilities of effective combination and organisation among them. Yet, during strike action –​which was frequent and intense in most industrial centres –​it was precisely workers with the strongest rural connections (Konkani migrants in Bombay, Bihari migrants in Bengal) who could most successfully maintain themselves. Conversely, Dalit workers, who had in fact often broken links with the highly oppressive rural social structures of their birth, found it far more difficult to subsist. There were exceptions, of course, to the link between urban working-​class militancy and the relative security of a rural base. For instance, the ‘Madrasi’ south Indian workers in Calcutta’s mills were among the most militant segments of the workforce in the early twentieth century, and they came from greater distances than most other workers. But their militancy was underpinned by the fact that, running against the general pattern, they migrated as families rather 123

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than as single male migrants. In this case, the ‘fullness’ of their stake in their new homes enabled rather than disabled industrial organisation and militancy.33 There was a social and cultural depth to the experience of migration that cannot simply be explained in economic terms. One striking instance of this is the Muslim Julaha weavers who migrated from Madanpura in Azamgarh district in UP, and set up base in small and large towns across northern and western India, from Benaras and Mubarakpur in UP to Bombay and Bhiwandi in the Bombay Presidency. Wherever they found durable employment, they tended to form tightly knit neighbourhoods that went by the name of Madanpura. The ‘many Madanpuras’ that sprang up wherever this weaving caste settled testify to the work of cultural memory in keeping alive these rural identifications.34 Another instance, also drawn from the history of Muslim migrant workers, pertains to Bombay. Recent research has uncovered a rich world of reinvented Muslim religious practice in the context of Bombay’s industrialisation. Miracle tales surrounding Muslim saints, for instance, spread widely among the city’s large migrant Muslim workforce, through a busy traffic in cheaply printed tracts, as well as through urban circuits of rumour and social connection. Saints and holy men, themselves of migrant origin, were the focal point of an ‘industrial theology’, which involved saintly intercessions to ward off the dangers of industrial machinery, and a distinctively new modality of faith circulated in the city’s mills, dockyards, and other industrial establishments.35

Workplace and neighbourhood Cotton and jute mills were designed along the lines of British precedent, and also populated with industrial machinery imported from Britain. They were forbidding and dangerous spaces for new migrants to the city, and bore perennial risks of accident and disease. The machinery, which was rarely and reluctantly upgraded (in keeping with the cost-​cutting priorities of industrial employers), was often spaced very closely together so as to maximise production. In times of high export demand, the cotton and jute mills ran their machinery continuously, generating a depreciation of fixed capital and a corresponding depletion of working bodies. Further ‘economies’ were effected by workers themselves, who frequently cleaned mill machinery still in motion in order to fulfil production targets (this was especially the case if they were paid piece rates). A similar process is discernible in the appalling conditions of mill ventilation; workers in the spinning department of cotton factories, for instance, worked in boiling heat with the windows closed, since draughts could break the cotton thread. Dust, fluff, and consequent respiratory diseases were the inevitable consequence.36 The working day was correspondingly long. The introduction of electric light from the 1890s lengthened it further: by the mid-​1900s 15-​hour working days were by no means uncommon in the Bombay mills, for instance. This was often interpreted in improbably Panglossian terms by mill employers and managers testifying before factory commissions. Confronted with the evidence of unsustainably long working hours, they pointed to the ‘dilatory’ character of mill work, which bore little resemblance to the stringent discipline of industrial factories in the United Kingdom. They supplied investigators with descriptions of workers taking extended breaks to bathe or sleep or eat or smoke during their working day, of mothers who took time off from their work to nurse their babies, and of children who played in mill compounds while their older family members worked.37 The grain of truth contained in these descriptions relates to the fact that workers did, in fact, retain a certain degree of control over their working processes. This, in turn, bore a paradoxical relation to the structure of labour deployment in the mills. In the jute mills on the banks of the Hooghly, the need to retain a labour force in excess of requirements (in order to sustain the 124

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necessary flexibility in output) generated a distinctive mode of exploitation, the ‘multiple-​shift’ system, whereby workers worked overlapping shifts in work gangs in order to supply continuously running machinery with the labour it needed.38 Such work practices entailed a high degree of ‘informality’ at the point of production, and their efficiency was necessarily variable. None of this, of course, corresponded to the quasi-​Edenic picture painted by many employers and managers. The high turnover of factory labour serves as evidence of this: it was often remarked by observers in factory towns that very few older workers could be found in the mills, since the patterns of overwork were geared to produce premature exhaustion and retirement (if the worker was lucky; if not, a grim end by death or accident awaited). Industrial work was highly segmented along lines of community and gender. Women in both cotton and jute factories were typically employed in preparatory and finishing processes on extremely low wages, and rarely worked directly on machinery in the spinning or weaving departments. Outside the mill sector, equally stark occupational specialisations were at work. In Bombay, for instance, sweatshops producing bidis exclusively employed women and children, in hazardous conditions and for a pittance.39 Caste was another major source of segmentation and inequality in urban labour markets. In Bombay, for instance, Dalits were strictly excluded from employment in the weaving sheds of cotton mills, for reasons of ritual purity –​since the yarn had to be sucked into the shuttle when a weft bobbin was replaced, and higher-​caste workers refused to risk such ‘pollution’. In Kanpur, the same purity taboo led to the opposite result: weaving sheds were dominated by Kori Dalits and Muslims.40 Dalit sweepers and scavengers monopolised conservancy work in every urban centre. The same pattern was true of leather factories and tanneries, where the more intensive forms of manual labour were dominated by different Dalit castes.41 Such occupational rigidities could produce effects that were in tension with each other; thus, Dalits commanded a significant labour market monopoly in certain trades, but, by the same token, they were confined to the most stigmatised occupations within the hierarchy of urban labour. Wages varied across and within industrial workplaces, and the intensely competitive mutual relations of employers within the rapidly expanding jute and cotton industries prevented a standardisation of either wages or working conditions. There is, arguably, a more cogent narrative that can be constructed from the history of modes of wage payment, at least for the early period of industrial development, than there is one that can be constructed from the scanty evidence of wage levels. Mills typically withheld workers’ wages for a specified (but often extended) period of time. In Bombay’s cotton mills, where, unlike other industrial centres, wages were paid monthly rather than weekly, this frequently took the form of wages withheld for a month or more (so that new workers received their first monthly payment two months or more after they started work).42 Similar mechanisms of wage retention operated to different degrees across most forms of employment in most industrial cities. This led to pervasive working-​class debt, forcing workers upon neighbourhood-​based credit and social provisioning, and a structural reliance upon the jobber, the grain dealer, the moneylender, and the landlord. Multiple forms of social dependence and exploitation followed from this. In Bombay’s mills, payday was characteristically followed by high rates of absenteeism, since bania and Pathan moneylenders charging exorbitant rates of interest waited outside mill gates. Bombay’s Court of Small Causes was thickly populated, from the late nineteenth century, with cases lodged by creditors seeking the ‘attachment’ of mill wages as payment of debt, and this produced tensions that, on occasion, even compelled mill owners to intercede on behalf of their workers in the courts.43 All this bore witness to the systematic externalisation of the costs of social reproduction, which were met either by the rural links sustained by workers or by the social structures of the working-​class neighbourhood. The industrial wage linked the worlds of production and 125

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social reproduction, workplace and neighbourhood, through this structural mechanism of wage retention and debt. The storied figure of the mill jobber (known by various monikers: sardar, muccaddum, mistri, etc.) was another site upon which the worlds of production and social reproduction met. The jobber, who typically rose from the ranks of the workforce to an informally managerial role, was crucial to industrial recruitment in a context of flexible production. Ties of kinship, caste, and community enabled the jobber to identify, recruit, and when necessary fire workers –​ functions that factory managements usually lacked the expertise for. Besides hiring and firing, the jobber was also generally responsible, in the early phases of industrialisation, for the training, supervision, and disciplining of workers at the point of production.44 The jobber’s role extended well beyond the workplace itself, however, into the working-​ class neighbourhood, where he frequently supplied loans, cheap grain and other provisions, and accommodation to workers. The jobber’s authority thus often appeared awe-​inspiring to external observers. In reality, though, it was substantially qualified by the very social relations of the neighbourhood that accounted for the basis of his power. Within the tightly knit social worlds of urban spaces such as Bombay’s ‘Girangaon’ or ‘mill village’, or the small factory towns that dotted the Hooghly, or Kanpur’s expanding industrial belt, workers had recourse to a range of forms of sociability and solidarity that could restrain the jobber’s authority. This was often particularly visible during peak periods of industrial action. Equally, within the workplace itself, relations between jobbers and workers, based on ties of community or rural origin, were more complex than the labour market mechanisms that bound them might indicate. Jobbers shared more, socially and discursively, with workers than they did with the European or elite Indian employers of mill labour. In times of industrial conflict, it was by no means inevitable that they would side with employers against workers.45 The living conditions of urban working classes, especially in the larger cities, were marked by appalling standards of sanitation, high mortality levels, epidemic and other forms of disease, and perennially overcrowded housing. Sanitary infrastructure was a major source of social inequality. In Bombay, which by 1925 boasted more sewers than any other city in the East, the working-​class neighbourhoods had none.46 The modes of collection and disposal of faeces and waste, in cities with grossly inadequate sanitary provisions for their working classes, inevitably bred the conditions for widespread disease. So too did patterns of housing, which ranged from mud huts, in which many Dalit labourers resided, to the distinctive chawls of Bombay and Ahmedabad, the ‘coolie lines’ of the jute towns along the Hooghly, and the bastis of Kanpur and other north Indian urban centres. Working-​class residential patterns varied widely, but in the larger industrial centres they characteristically took the forms of immense concentrations of insanitary, overcrowded, and jerry-​built living quarters in which as many as ten or more people could be squeezed into tiny unpartitioned rooms.47 Bubonic plague, which claimed over 12 million lives across the country between 1896 (when the pandemic first appeared on Bombay’s shores) and the war, was only one of several epidemic outbreaks that devastated urban centres in late colonial India. Cholera, malaria, and smallpox were equally efficient killers, and the influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people in a matter of months than the plague had done over two decades.48 Arguably, though, the plague intersected with colonial apprehensions, the volatile conditions of urban labour markets, and the parlous living standards of urban working classes more thoroughly and consequentially than any other epidemic. In western India the coincidence of plague in the major cities and famine in the countryside in the late 1890s produced both urban and rural dislocation. The immediate effect of the plague, other than the daily presence of mass death, was the massive exodus of working-​class inhabitants, and violent confrontations triggered by colonial 126

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attempts to impose social controls upon native populations in order to check the spread of the disease.49 Bombay experienced the plague more catastrophically than any other city, in part because of the social sequencing of the crises it generated. The epidemic first struck the areas of the city where grain dealers and moneylenders lived, denuding the city’s working classes of their main source of credit. Food prices soared as credit lines collapsed, and the cumulative effects of the crisis produced the most serious labour shortage yet in the city’s industrial history. Plague appeared to colonial officials –​especially those who had warned about the social results of overcrowding and insanitary living conditions –​as a confirmation of their grimmest fears. One of the consequences of this was an unprecedented and invasive project of scrutiny and control, directed chiefly at the city’s working population. Compulsory hospitalisation (often in makeshift sheds, which reported deaths daily) and the destruction of working-​class dwellings that were deemed insanitary provoked immediate and violent defensive responses from the city’s working poor, which threw the sedimented social relations of authority within the city into crisis.50 Urban ‘improvement’ overnight became a pressing concern of colonial administrators and industrial employers alike; in 1898 the two combined forces, in the form of the Bombay Improvement Trust, to tackle the city’s urban crisis. Although this project increasingly metamorphosed into an exercise in coercive forms of urban renewal as the immediate crisis receded, it began as a belated recognition on the part of both mill owners and the colonial state that the social reproduction of the working classes (and especially the conditions of its housing) could not be left to itself any longer.51 Unprecedented initiatives were taken in the provision of chawl housing financed jointly by industrialists and the state, and industrial employers also began to tentatively take steps in the direction of providing grain shops, medicine, clean drinking water, and even sources of credit to their workforces in a relatively coordinated fashion. From the plague crisis onwards, the question of the social reproduction of the workforce pressed itself more forcefully upon the attention of the city’s governing and employing classes.

Factory law Before the First World War two bodies of labour law regulated urban workforces. The first comprised a set of regulations and enactments in different parts of the country aimed at securing stable workforces. These were enfolded within the general mechanism of master–​servant law, which defined labour relations in multiple contexts across the British Empire.52 It took the form of a regionally dispersed but thematically consistent principle of labour contracts. The emphasis was coercive. Breach-​of-​contract legislation compelled the ‘specific performance’ of work that had been contracted for, often extracted through punitive criminal sanctions, while the massive infrastructure of labour indenture generated laws that structured the recruitment of long-​distance migrants on unfree contracts.53 In these cases, the colonial state stepped in to enable and stabilise the forms of exploitation and coercion it had directly set in motion. The second body of law sought to regulate and –​to a limited extent –​restrict the expansion of Indian-​owned industry, principally the cotton mills of Bombay. The Factory Acts of 1881, 1891, and 1911 were the centrepieces of this legislative tradition. These acts defined factories in an extremely parsimonious manner, leaving the vast bulk of emerging industrial enterprises outside official scrutiny. The overt emphasis was the protection of mill labourers against the excesses of employers: child labour was curtailed, holidays mandated, and the working day delimited (differentially for men and women, and still allowing very broad scope for the intensive exploitation of workers). The priority given by factory law to the protection of workforces 127

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stemmed partly from the efforts of philanthropists and social reformers, and partly from the efforts by Lancashire’s mill owners to restrict competition from Bombay’s mills.54 Two twists in the early story of factory law convey a sense of its contradictory effects, even though both were direct consequences of the backlash by Bombay’s mill owners against labour legislation favouring workers. In the first place, the shibboleths of free trade were deployed impressively by Indian industrialists, who successfully warded off the threat of any genuinely rigorous scrutiny of their labour practices. The compromises they wrested from the colonial state rendered factory law ineffectual. In the second place, though, this very counter-​attack by mill owners generalised the scope of factory legislation. A Factory Act that restricted Bombay’s mills alone, mill owners argued successfully, would unfairly place Bombay at a competitive disadvantage with other Indian industrial centres. In the event, the Factory Acts were applied to industrial workforces all over India. This had the effect of further limiting the strength of legislation, since the European employers of mill labour in Calcutta and Madras were equally opposed to significant interference with their labour practices.55 The universal scope of factory legislation laid the template for much more ‘intrusive’ and sweeping labour legislation from the 1920s onwards, however, as the colonial –​and, later, the postcolonial –​state played a progressively larger role in the regulation of industrial relations. Workers’ own dispositions towards factory law varied. Many of the issues raised by campaigns for enhanced factory legislation –​such as the hours of work, or the retention of wages by employers –​did indeed become sources of workers’ agitation by the end of the nineteenth century. Workers who testified before factory commissions in 1875, 1884, 1890, and 1908 often expressed a desire for protection against oppressive working conditions.56 Factory law, which in its early incarnation sought to regulate the working conditions of vulnerable sections of the workforce (women and children) while leaving adult male labour unregulated in accordance with free trade doxa, could also produce contrary responses, however. As early as 1891 the first efforts towards legislative protection for women factory workers generated significant turbulence. Women workers in Ahmedabad mobilised against legislation that would threaten their employment, and communicated their grievance through a prominent Bombay-​based doctor sympathetic to the mill owners’ cause, K.N. Bahadhurji. He duly deployed their grievances skilfully in a well-​publicised philippic against factory legislation, during a speech delivered at the Congress for Hygiene and Demography in London the same year.57 The principal historical significance of factory legislation, though, lies elsewhere. Despite the warnings of contemporary observers –​including a factory inspector hired from Lancashire to examine the Bombay mills in the early 1880s –​the enactments insisted on a definition of factories based not only on the use of mechanical power but also on a minimum number of workers employed in any one unit. Initially factories were defined as units employing over 50 people; in time, this would be reduced to 20, and later to ten. But any attempt to delimit the recognition of factories in these terms would necessarily give employers significant scope for evasion of the law. Smaller units, which were proliferating across India’s industrial landscape much more rapidly than large workplaces were, afforded considerable latitude to employers.58 It is with the Factory Acts, in other words, that we see the beginnings of a ‘dualism’ in urban-​ based industrial manufacturing, and, in a distant sense, of the divide between the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sector that is a shibboleth of most public discourse around Indian industry.

Mobilisations Early attempts to organise industrial workforces tended to come from middle-​class philanthropists and social reformers, often with binding connections either to employing classes or to the 128

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colonial state. A significant instance of early labour reformism that gained some traction among the first generations of factory workers can be found in 1880s Bombay. N.M. Lokhande, a non-​Brahman activist closely associated with Jyotiba Phule’s anti-​caste Satyashodak Samaj, set up the first quasi-​trade-​union structure among Bombay’s mill workers, named the Bombay Mill-​Hands’ Association.59 Although the organisation’s actual influence on the urban working class was severely limited, Lokhande’s tireless advocacy of more substantive factory legislation brought his efforts to the attention of colonial administrators. By the late 1880s the Bombay government, as well as the government of India, were facing the pressure of another sustained campaign by Lancashire mill owners, who sought the further restriction of the hours of work of Bombay’s mills. For a brief period at the beginning of the 1890s Lokhande enjoyed some favour as an officially recognised representative of labour interests, and was asked to supply worker witnesses before the 1890 Factory Commission. The modes of agitation favoured by Lokhande –​petitioning and public pressure through the newspaper he ran, Din Bandhu –​were not in themselves a very serious threat to the interests of Bombay’s mill owners. But a wave of mill strikes in 1892 around wage issues intensified hostilities between him and the city’s mill owners, who seem to have amplified his capacities as an ‘instigator’ of labour unrest in their internal and official discourse.60 It was between the 1890s and the war that urban industrial workforces began to stamp their collective presence upon the politics of the colonial city. Pre-​war working-​class unrest, for the most part, preceded any rigorous attempts at unionisation. There were, of course, exceptions: railway strikes at the end of the century unleashed significant unionisation attempts among the higher ranks of railway employees, which comprised Anglo-​Indians and middle-​ class Indian clerical staff. And some forms of nationalist agitation –​notably the Swadeshi movement in Bengal between 1905 and 1908 –​triggered short-​lived but serious attempts to organise workforces employed in European enterprises in Bengal. Labour movements and strike action during the years of the movement engrossed iron workers, printers, railway employees, telegraph signallers, and jute workers, and there were several middle-​ class reformers and nationalists, most notably a barrister named Ashwinicoomar Banerjee, who sought to unionise workers. Formal trade union activity was severely limited both in scope and effect, though.61 The mounting strength of nationalist solidarities against imperialism left traces on working-​ class political activity, however, even in unusual contexts. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that, when the prominent anti-​colonial nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak was sentenced to imprisonment in 1908, the mill workers of Bombay undertook a spontaneous and massive strike. This unusually intense convergence of the nationalist and the working-​class causes in Bombay happened in the absence of any nationalist outrage against the exploitation of Bombay’s mill workers. Nationalist activists tended to sympathise with (and sometimes try to organise) workers employed by European firms, but to equally passionately deplore any attempt to organise Indian workers against Indian employers. Despite this dissociation of interests, however, early nationalist militancy clearly possessed considerable sway among some sections of the working classes. Perhaps the most dramatic instances of working-​class protest occurred during the plague pandemic. In large industrial cities –​most notably Bombay, but also Kanpur and Calcutta –​the years around the turn of the century witnessed unprecedented labour shortages occasioned by the spread of plague. Many workers made the painful trek back to their rural homes. Those who stayed on in the cities faced spiralling food prices and the daily presence of the epidemic. The most explosive urban confrontations that occurred in this context tended to take the form of working-​class riots and strikes occasioned by the urban social controls extended by colonial administrators. Thus, at the end of 1896 in Bombay, in March 1898 in the same city, and in 129

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1900 in Kanpur mill workers struck and rioted against enforced hospitalisation, the destruction of ‘insanitary’ dwellings, and the segregation of plague ‘suspects’.62 The plague pandemic also reversed the balance of the labour market in more structural terms, however, especially in Bombay. Here, the sudden shortage of mill labour led to ‘street-​ corner bidding’ by jobbers for workers, an unprecedented rise in money wages, the temporary suspension of the wage arrears system that had hitherto characterised mill employment, the relaxation of supervisory and disciplinary controls at the point of production, and the payment of daily bonuses –​often pegged at a very high level. Through much of 1897 mill workers in Bombay militantly went on strike –​often successfully –​when mill owners tried to restrain or cancel these new entitlements. Outside the sphere of mill work, too, strikes were frequent, encompassing diverse sections of the workforce, ranging from dock workers to railwaymen to carters. And municipal reports reveal great fear that Dalit sweepers and scavengers, whose labour of conservancy sustained the city’s survival, might decamp or go on strike.63 Strike action, despite the absence of any durable formal organisation, escalated in most industrial cities in the two decades before war broke out. Wages and hours of work were the commonest triggers of industrial action. Wage questions dominated the strikes of the 1890s and the plague years. Between 1905 and the war the lengthening of the working day (in response to favourable market conditions after the slump of the 1890s lifted in the cotton industry, and in response to the rapid expansion and growing prosperity of the jute industry) generated sustained waves of strike action in both Bombay and Calcutta. If strike action denoted, however tenuously, solidarities that cut across the segmentations of urban labour forces, these solidarities were just as often offset by severe communal tensions involving Hindu and Muslim workers. The potentially divisive salience of religious identities could, paradoxically, sometimes be demonstrated even during peak periods of cross-​community labouring solidarity. Thus, during a strike at Kharagpur railway workshop in 1906 during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, strike organisers deployed an unusual tactic against potential strike breakers, warning that Hindu blacklegs would be forced to eat cow flesh and Muslim strike breakers would be forced to eat pig meat. This signalled an awareness of the strength of sometimes violent community consciousness among both Hindus and Muslims in the city, amply manifested in the 1890s and 1900s in frequent communal riots.64 And, during a massive working-​class riot against plague regulations in Bombay in 1898, Hindu mill workers and Muslim Julaha weavers dramatically united forces, but observers also reported hearing cries to the effect that ‘the rule of the white man’ would now be replaced by ‘the rule of the Mohammedan’. The communal tensions inherent in this situation are best contextualised by reference to the riots of 1893 in Bombay, in which the same protagonists –​Muslim Julahas and Hindu mill workers –​had clashed violently only months after the city’s hitherto biggest wave of strike action. That particular urban riot was followed by a closure of the city’s workplaces and shops for several days; thus, ironically, a communal riot provided the context for the first major public revelation of the potentialities of coordinated working-​class militancy. One of the animating contexts for the riot was the spread of anti-​cow-​slaughter campaigns across northern and western India in the early 1890s, which mobilised working-​class Hindus against Muslims in organisations often headed by Hindu urban notables and elites. The cow protection movement in Bombay, for instance, was headed by some of the city’s most prominent mill owners.65 If the 1890s and 1900s revealed hitherto unexplored possibilities of proletarian solidarity against employers, they also revealed the opposite set of possibilities, in the form of communal unities that temporarily united Hindus and Muslims against each other on a cross-​class basis.

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These ambiguities of working-​class mobilisation prior to the First World War can, of course, be related to the vagaries of unsettled labour markets in industrial cities. Thick bonds of mutual dependence characterised the relations of different segments of urban workforces, but these dense networks of connection could, equally, serve as incubators of violent division. The shape of capitalist industry would change in far-​reaching ways after the war, as the long-​lasting regime of imperial free trade came to be replaced by a new constellation of economic forces increasingly dominated by more extensive forms of state intervention.66 This would be the ground upon which left-​wing working-​class mobilisation would thrive for several generations. Bombay, Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Madras, Sholapur, and several other cities would emerge as hubs of vibrant labour movements. Yet the politics of social division along communal lines would also grow apace, and the uncomfortable juxtaposition of labour movements and communal antagonisms poses many historical riddles, which have yet to be answered.

Notes 1 A.K. Bagchi, Private Investment in India 1900–​1939 (Cambridge: CUP, 1972). 2 See Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Polices of Indian National Leadership, 1880–​1905 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1966). 3 Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2004). 4 Douglas E. Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–​1960 (Cambridge: CUP, 2012). 5 Bagchi, Private Investment in India. 6 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–​1940 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-​ Class History: Bengal, 1890–​1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 7 See Ranajit Das Gupta, Labour and Working Class in Eastern India: Studies in Colonial History (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1994), for what remains the most exhaustive study of industrial labour force formation in eastern India. 8 Dilip Simeon, The Politics of Labour under Late Colonialism: Workers, Unions and the State in Chota Nagpur 1928–​1939 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995); Parimal Ghosh, ‘A history of a colonial working class, India: 1850–​1946’, in: B.B. Chaudhuri (ed.), Economic History of India from Eighteenth to Twentieth Century (Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2005), pp. 525–​692. 9 Rana Behal, One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2014); Nitin Varma, Coolies of Capitalism: Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). 10 Blair Kling, ‘The origin of the managing agency system in India’, JAS, 26 (1), 1966, pp. 37–​47; Rajat K. Ray (ed.), Entrepreneurship and Industry in India, 1800–​1947 (New Delhi: OUP, 1994). 11 Morris D. Morris, The Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force in India: A Study of the Bombay Cotton Mills, 1854–​1947 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965). 12 See Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism. 13 Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 14 See Ian J. Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850–​1900 (New Delhi: OUP, 1995), for a detailed study of labour regimes centred on the railways. See also Nitin Sinha, ‘Entering the Black Hole: Between “mini-​England” and “smell-​like rotten potato”, the railway workshop town of Jamalpur, 1860s–​1940s’, South Asian History and Culture, 3 (3), 2012, pp. 317–​47. 15 Christopher A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion (Cambridge: CUP, 1983). 16 Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-​Century North India (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). 17 See Lalita Chakrabarty, ‘Emergence of an industrial labour force in a dual economy: British India, 1880–​1920’, IESHR, 15 (3), 1978, pp. 249–​327. 18 See Shahid Amin and Marcel van der Linden (eds.), ‘Peripheral’ Labour? Studies in the History of Partial Proletarianization (Cambridge: CUP, 1997).

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Aditya Sarkar 19 See Chitra Joshi, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). See also Camille Buat, ‘Colonial India on the move: The circulatory regimes of the labouring classes in 19th century South Asia’, Revue d’Histoire du XIXe siècle, 56 (1), 2018, pp. 53–​66. 20 Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late-​Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge: CUP, 1999); Parimal Ghosh, Colonialism, Class and a History of the Calcutta Jute Millhands: 1880–​1930 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2000). 21 Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism. 22 Ibid.; Joshi, Lost Worlds. 23 Sen, Women and Labour in Late-​Colonial India. 24 Joshi, Lost Worlds; Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism; Radha Kumar, ‘Family and factory: Women in the Bombay textile industry, 1919–​39’, IESHR, 20 (1), 1983, pp. 81–​96. 25 Sen, Women and Labour in Late-​Colonial India. Also see Nitin Sinha, ‘The idea of home in a world of circulation: Steam, women and migration through Bhojpuri folksongs’, International Review of Social History, 63 (2), 2018, pp. 203–​37. 26 Sen, Women and Labour in Late-​Colonial India. 27 Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism. 28 For Ahmedabad, see Jan Breman, The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class: Sliding Down the Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad, India (New Delhi: OUP, 2004); and Sujata Patel, The Making of Industrial Relations: Ahmedabad Textile Industry 1918–​1939 (New Delhi: OUP, 1987). 29 Janaki Nair, Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore (New Delhi: Sage, 1998). See also Ghosh, ‘A history of a colonial working class’. 30 Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism, 124–​68. 31 Ibid. 32 S.B. Upadhyay, Existence, Identity and Mobilization: The Cotton Millworkers of Bombay, 1890–​1919 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 34. 33 Anna Sailer, ‘ “Spinners”, “Madrasis”, and “Hindus”: Jute workers’ strikes in Titagarh in the late 1930s’, South Asia Chronicle, 6, 2016, pp. 265–​88. 34 Santosh Kumar Rai, ‘Many Madanpuras: Memories and histories of migrant weavers of northern India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, in: Vijaya Ramaswamy (ed.), Migrations in Medieval and Early Colonial India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 225–​58. 35 Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the Western Indian Ocean, 1840–​1915 (Cambridge: CUP, 2011). 36 Ghosh, ‘A history of a colonial working class’; Upadhyay, Existence, Identity and Mobilization. 37 Ibid. 38 Anna Sailer, ‘Workplace matters: The Bengal jute industry between the 1870s and the 1930s’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Göttingen, 2016). 39 Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism, 85–​6. 40 Joshi, Lost Worlds, 237–​45. 41 Shahana Bhattacharya, ‘Rotting hides and runaway labour: Labour control and workers’ resistance in the Indian leather industry, c.1860–​1960’, in: Ravi Ahuja (ed.), Working Lives and Worker Militancy: The Politics of Labour in Colonial India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2013), pp. 47–​96. 42 Upadhyay, Existence, Identity and Mobilization; Aditya Sarkar, Trouble at the Mill: Factory Law and the Emergence of the Labour Question in Late Nineteenth Century Bombay (New Delhi: OUP, 2018). 43 Ibid. 44 Morris, The Emergence of an Industrial Labour Force; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘The decline and fall of the jobber system in the Bombay cotton textile industry, 1870–​1955’, MAS, 42 (1), 2008, pp. 117–​210. 45 Chandavarkar, ‘The decline and fall of the jobber system’. 46 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, History, Culture and the Indian City (Cambridge: CUP, 2009). 47 Ibid. 48 Ira Klein, ‘Urban development and death: Bombay City, 1870–​1914’, MAS, 20 (4), 1986, pp. 725–​54. 49 Ira Klein, ‘Plague, policy and popular unrest in British India’, MAS, 22 (4), 1998, pp. 723–​55; Prashant Kidambi, ‘ “An infection of locality”: Plague, pythogenesis and the poor in Bombay, 1896–​1918’, Urban History, 31 (2), 2004, pp. 249–​67. 50 Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–​1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Aditya Sarkar, ‘The city, its streets, and its workers: The plague crisis in Bombay, 1896–​98’, in: Ahuja, Working Lives and Worker Militancy, pp. 1–​46. 51 Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis.

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The ‘modern’ urban-industrial workforce 52 Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (eds.), Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–​ 1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 53 Prabhu Mohapatra, ‘Regulated informality: Legal constructions of labour relations in colonial India, 1814–​1926’, in: Andreas Eckert (ed.), Global Histories of Work (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 215–​38. 54 Sarkar, Trouble at the Mill. 55 Ibid.; Ghosh, ‘A history of a colonial working class’. 56 Upadhyay, Existence, Identity and Mobilization. 57 Sarkar, Trouble at the Mill. 58 See Jan Breman, ‘A dualistic labour system? A critique of the “informal sector” concept’, EPW, 11 (50), 1976, pp. 1939–​44. 59 Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low-​ Caste Protest in Nineteenth-​Century Western India (Cambridge: CUP, 1985). 60 Upadhyay, Existence, Identity and Mobilization; Sarkar, Trouble at the Mill. 61 Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–​1908, new edn. (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010), pp. 156–​214. 62 Joshi, Lost Worlds; Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics; Sarkar, ‘The city, its streets and its workers’. 63 Aditya Sarkar, ‘The tie that snapped: Bubonic plague and mill labour in Bombay, 1896–​98’, International Review of Social History, 59 (2), 2014, pp. 181–​214. 64 Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal; Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-​Class History. 65 Upadhyay, Existence, Identity and Mobilization. 66 See Ravi Ahuja, ‘A Beveridge Plan for India? Social insurance and the making of the “formal sector” ’, International Review of Social History, 64 (2), 2019, pp. 207–​48.

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10 MILITARY LABOUR MARKETS IN COLONIAL INDIA FROM THE COMPANY STATE TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR Gavin Rand

Introduction The military capacity of the East India Company (EIC), and the Crown Raj that it sired, derived in large part from the labour provided by South Asians. The ability of the Company to draw upon, monopolise, and contain the subcontinent’s extant military labour markets –​as well as to nurture and exploit new ones –​was fundamental to the making and breaking of the Company state, as well as to the British Raj that replaced it. The patterns of recruitment, and associated opportunities that went with colonial military service, have long outlived the colonial presence in South Asia –​a reminder that the legacies of colonialism are so important not because of the transformations wrought by Europeans but because colonialism depended on the participation of local allies and auxiliaries, and the privileges, opportunities, and liabilities produced during the colonial period have long outlived the formal end of colonialism.

Military labour and the making of the Company state The EIC took the better part of two centuries to secure a more or less effective monopoly over the means of coercion in the greater part of the Indian subcontinent. For most of the first century of its operations the Company entertained no such pretensions: survival, not hegemony, was the first objective of EIC employees. Having suffered significant reverses at the hands both of Asian powers and European rivals in the seventeenth century, the Company recognised the necessity of defending its operations at sea and its increasingly numerous territorial possessions. It was from a position of weakness, not of strength, that the EIC first sought to tap India’s military labour markets.1 At Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay (as well as in Sumatra) fortifications were erected to protect the Company’s fragile interests. Although all its servants were expected to play a role in defending its possessions, the Company relied on locally recruited levies to garrison its forts and factories.2 Until the middle of the eighteenth century these forces were essentially auxiliaries, but, as Anglo-​French rivalries escalated in the 1740s, both powers recruited and drilled larger numbers of local troops, styled as ‘sepoys’ (from the Persian sipahi). The 134

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Company subsequently raised three ‘native armies’, based in Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, each trained in a European style and officered by Europeans, with local recruits providing the bulk of the infantry.3 Competing with other powers to recruit and retain military labour, the Company relied on its ability to provide regular remuneration and favourable terms of service, both of which, in turn, depended on the success of its commercial activities. The growth of the Company’s military establishments prompted alarm from directors and shareholders in London, whose concerns about the potentially ruinous impacts of military expenditure (to say nothing of concerns regarding disruptions to trade caused by conflict) led them to urge ‘pacifick measures’.4 Although EIC officials wrote confidently of their ability to defeat Indian powers, the historical record shows that this confidence was often misplaced, and Company troops suffered regular checks well into the nineteenth century.5 Nevertheless, over time the EIC’s ability to recruit and retain local military labour ultimately enabled it to emerge as the pre-​eminent power in the subcontinent. To avoid the teleology implicit in nineteenth-​ century accounts of the Company’s rise, we need to acknowledge the primacy of local factors and actors during the early period of the EIC’s activities in the subcontinent, recognising the uneven nature of its expansion, and the many reverses encountered along the way. One way of approaching, and accounting for, the growth of the Company’s power is to trace the role of military labour in the shifting balance of power in the subcontinent. Such an approach was developed suggestively in Dirk Kolff’s analysis of the ‘ethnohistory’ of north India’s military labour market in the centuries preceding the Company’s rise.6 Kolff proposed that Hindustan’s peasantry, armed and skilled in the use of violence, constituted an enormous pool of military labour, from which a series of powers, large and small, were able to recruit and mobilise armies. Although such forces, and the powers they sustained, varied considerably in size, scope, and longevity, Kolff’s account centred the armed peasant as a significant factor in the formation and transformation of state power across the north of the subcontinent. The abundance of military labour, and the readiness of peasants to resort to violence, shaped and delimited the scale and nature of Hindustan’s polities. Mapping the military labour market (and its effects) in relation to ecological and climatic frontiers, as well as to political, demographic, and technological developments, Kolff’s reading showed how military labour supplemented and extended other peasant strategies, and how forms of peasant identity varied as these opportunities were navigated. Most importantly, perhaps, Kolff’s account cast the peasant soldier as an agent in his own history –​and as a powerful force in the making, and unmaking, of empires in north India. Although Company forces were involved in minor skirmishes in the south in the first half of the eighteenth century, it was in 1757, from its base at Calcutta, that the EIC began to seriously tap the enormous reserves of military labour surveyed by Kolff. In 1765 these troops secured the decisive victory at Buxar, after which the Company assumed the right to collect taxes, notionally on behalf of the defeated Shah Alam II. Thereafter, the Bengal Army swelled to become the largest of the Company’s three presidency armies, drawing recruits from Awadh, Bihar, and neighbouring territories to a total strength approaching 30,000 men by the end of the decade.7 Many came from around Buxar, from where the Mughals and, before them, the sultanates had enlisted large numbers of peasant soldiers, often through alliances with local powers and zamindars (landholders). These Purbiya (‘eastern’) soldiers –​drilled, dressed, and armed by the EIC –​served in their thousands to extend British influence across Hindustan. Although these men hailed from regions with established traditions of military service, important shifts occurred. Over time recruiting relied less on zamindari intermediaries, with the Mughals utilising ‘jobber commanders’ as brokers for their armies.8 Continuing the trend, the EIC recruited directly from the peasantry, reducing further the scope for challengers to intercede in its relationship 135

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with the rank and file.9 Intermediaries continued to play important roles in this process –​as brokers for or commanders of men at arms –​but the gradual decoupling of the peasant soldier from older zamindari networks reflects the disruption that accompanied, and was exacerbated by, the EIC’s increasing penetration of north India. Although Kolff’s reading draws out important long-​term continuities, and makes clear the vital significance of Hindustan’s military labour market, subsequent scholarship has developed and refined Kolff’s long durée analysis. Seema Alavi, for example, showed how important eighteenth-​century states –​Shuja-​ud-​Duala’s Awadh and Cheyt Singh’s Benares –​were in the organising and disciplining of regular military service.10 These states, Alavi showed, helped to produce an increasingly dynamic market for trained and disciplined military labour in the late eighteenth century, from which the EIC enlisted increasing numbers of troops from the 1780s. Preferring agricultural labourers to experienced ‘mercenary’ soldiers, the Company recruited directly from villages, establishing new forms of patronage, even as it built upon extant traditions, to cultivate a well-​paid high-​status occupation for those peasants who took arms in its service. By the 1830s, when a Company servant at Awadh described the kingdom as ‘the nursery for the armies of British India’, the EIC had secured a more or less effective monopoly over recruiting across Hindustan.11 In so doing, it nurtured an army in Bengal that was, in important ways, distinctive, with a soldiery comprised largely of high-​caste sepoys for whom military service (and the rituals associated with it) provided security and prestige in the midst of tumultuous change across Hindustan. The yoking together of caste and Company service worked well for both groups of protagonists, though, as we will see below, the unweaving of this relationship in 1857 painted the Company’s reliance on the Purbiyas in a new and very different light. Much of the literature on British expansion in South Asia focuses on the north, on Bengal and across the Gangetic plain, where the most valuable of the Company’s commercial activities occurred. Beyond Bengal, military labour markets responded to the intersection of regional, climatic, and commercial forces in different ways, and the dynamics of colonial expansion –​and the role of indigenous military labour in the process –​require alternative models. Whereas, in the north, the Company managed to secure an effective monopoly over large-​scale, and increasingly direct, recruitment, it was in a much weaker position in the west and in the south, confronted by powerful local rivals and fractured, highly fluid, military labour markets. Forced to compete in these markets with their rivals, including the Mysore sultanate –​where Haider Ali and his son Tipu Sultan maintained large bodies of troops, including both European and Ethiopian mercenaries (a reminder that military labour markets were already globalised) –​ the EIC relied on local potentates –​so-​called poligars –​to supply troops on contract, as well as on free-​booting war bands whose loyalty depended in part on the limited nature of the Company’s ambitions as well as the scope that alliances provided for the consolidation of their own power.12 Whereas in the north the Company’s military fiscalism was underpinned by its ability to monopolise the military labour markets, in the south the EIC’s coercive capacity rested more tenuously on alliances and patronage, leaving clients scope to act with considerable autonomy for longer. The career of Anupgiri Gosain, whose ascetic warriors fought against the Company at Buxar in 1764 but were allied with the EIC against the Marathas in 1803, represents a form of military entrepreneurship that the Company continued to rely upon into the early nineteenth century (despite suspicions about Anupgiri’s capacity and reliability).13 Logistical shortcomings, which forced the Company to contract out commissariat work and constrained its ability to make good its patronage, were a further obstacle. Despite its naval supremacy, and successes in Bengal (and the revenues and access to credit that these delivered), the EIC’s ability 136

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to constrain, and then defeat, Mysore depended on local alliances with petty chiefs and warrior groups. Only after the fall of the sultanate was the Company able to ‘pacify’ the fractious warrior groups of the south, and only with the final defeat of the Marathas in 1818 was it able to secure its position across the subcontinent’s peninsula. Although many of India’s regional powers, including the Sikh kingdom in the Punjab, Mysore, and the Maratha Confederacy, sought to engage military entrepreneurs and foreign troops –​both European and South Asian –​ the Company’s deep pockets, and deeper-​pocketed friends, eventually outlasted them.14 Here, then, the military labour market shaped the dynamics of colonial expansion in ways that were equally important as –​but rather different from –​those in the north. The ‘garrison state’ that the EIC assembled in the early nineteenth century thus reflected the Company’s ability to negotiate South Asia’s military labour markets, and to assemble the animal, human, and mineral resources required to field and sustain armies. Although this ability rested, in large part, on the Company’s financial capacity –​derived from revenues extracted from Bengal and on the metropolitan and South Asian credit that propped up the EIC in times of crisis –​the making of the Company state bears the imprint of the South Asian peasants and potentates who took the Company’s service, as well as those who resisted it. The Company’s hybrid military establishment extended the frontiers of British India to the north and the west, annexing Sind in 1843 and the Punjab in 1849.15 By the middle of the century more than 300,000 Indians served in the Company’s various formations, with 120,000 serving in the Bengal Army alone, far in excess of the fewer than 50,000 Europeans under arms across the entire subcontinent.16 British accounts frequently depicted the Company’s sepoys as sturdy yeoman soldiers but the evidence suggests that recruits to the EIC’s service followed established patterns, undertaking military labour to offset agricultural labour and, increasingly importantly, to hedge against the instability that accompanied the Company’s rise. The making of the Company state in India depended on the monopolisation of military labour, a process that involved securing and dominating existing labour markets as well as, crucially, related processes that constrained and ultimately constricted supplies of military labour. These transformations not only brought to an end the age of ‘military entrepreneurship’ but also helped to produce the social and economic dislocations from which ‘thuggee’ and ‘dacoity’ emerged as new concerns, prompting the Company to further codify the legal and coercive apparatus through which its monopoly over the uses of violence was sustained.17

From ‘Mutiny’ to ‘martial races’ Although indigenous labour had underwritten, secured, and extended British influence, its Rebellion in May 1857 imperilled the foundations of colonial rule across South Asia. The ‘Mutiny’ of the Bengal Army precipitated a wider rebellion across much of north India: confirmation that, if the sepoys felt their privileges traduced in the decades preceding 1857, Hindustan’s population had endured a similar fate for much of the preceding century. The Company had successfully insulated the sepoys through this period, but their grievances accumulated, and, in 1857, elite Purbiya soldiers and peasants aligned in opposition to the Company. The Rebellion, in which some 70,000 Bengal sepoys participated, was concentrated around Delhi and Lucknow, sites of alternative Mughal authority, as well as in Kanpur, one of the heartlands of Purbiya recruiting. Debates over the rebels’ objectives, and the wider relationship between the Uprising and Indian nationalism, rumble on, though recent works have gone some way towards providing more nuanced insights into the calculations and contingencies that shaped the Uprising.18 To suppress the Rebellion, the Company was able to call upon European reinforcements, but the majority of those who put down the ‘Indian Mutiny’ were themselves Indians. Almost 137

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50,000 men –​many of whom had served in the Khalsa armies defeated in the wars of the 1840s –​were raised from the Punjab alone in 1858. Thereafter, the province provided the rump of Britain’s Indian Army for the remainder of the colonial period.19 With military service closed off, the Purbiya recruiting grounds of Bihar and the United Provinces (UP) sent indentured labourers to the Caribbean, South Africa, and Fiji (as well as to French and Danish colonies), illustrating how traditions of naukari evolved across the colonial period. The overlaps and interconnections between military and other forms of peasant labour become more apparent as the sources to trace them become more plentiful.20 1857 also had significant consequences for the East India Company’s European troops, whose compulsory transfer to Crown service in 1858 prompted a second, ‘white’ mutiny on the part of European officers.21 Like the earlier rebellion of European officers in 1776, and those of Indian troops in Vellore (1806), Barrackpore (1824), and Singapore (1914), the ‘white mutiny’ underlines the universality both of soldiers’ concerns with pay and conditions and their common (and limited) means of protest. Indeed, the ‘white mutiny’ perhaps indicates that ‘the traditional habit of the north Indian soldier to renegotiate the terms of his service’ was a habit that was shared by European as well as local troops.22 Having suppressed the rebellion of the native army by raising a new one, India’s colonial military continued to rely on South Asian labour. No part of the subcontinent was more thoroughly transformed by the colonial demand for military labour than the Punjab, which, by the 1870s, was seen as ‘home of the most martial races of India and … the nursery of our best soldiers’.23 On the eve of the First World War, by which point the number of battalions raised in the Punjab had more than doubled, Sikhs comprised just over 20 per cent of the Indian Army’s total strength (32,702 men), while Punjabi Muslims accounted for some 16 per cent (25,299).24 The rewards for colonial service, in the form of remittances, land grants, and infrastructural investments, helped to make the Punjab the breadbasket of north India, and to produce a distinctive, and enduring, alliance between military and landed interests, on the one hand, and the colonial state, on the other. The construction of irrigation canals and, from 1890, the opening of canal colonies to provide land grants for soldiers inscribed these alliances into the land. So-​ called Fauji grants, which were available only to those ex-​soldiers who had completed 21 years’ service, helped secure ongoing loyalty to the colonial state, much as jagir grants had done under the Mughals and Sikhs. In total, nearly 500,000 acres were allotted to military grantees, illustrating how the recruits who sustained British military power leveraged their military labour to secure investments in land, reformulating the relationship between military service and landholding/​working that had long distinguished military labour markets in Hindustan.25 Similar schemes, which connected military and paramilitary service with land grants, were tried, with much less success, on the North-​West Frontier.26 As well as to the Punjab, the Indian Army turned to Nepal, from where thousands of ‘Gurkhas’ were recruited. The first Gurkha levies were raised from Nepalese prisoners taken during the Anglo-​Nepal War but it was in the decades that followed 1857, in which the Gurkhas were felt to have distinguished themselves, that Nepal’s recruiting grounds were systematically opened to colonial recruiting. Scholarly accounts of Gurkha recruiting (some of which are prone to reproduce romanticised visions of Nepalese bravery) have tended to focus on the imperial and strategic rationale, emphasising the logic of ‘divide and rule’ to help explain colonial recruiting patterns: having demonstrated their loyalty and martial ability during the Uprising of 1857, Gurkhas emerged as a favoured martial race in the second half of the nineteenth century, providing a useful counterweight to the Punjabis (and others) who comprised the remainder of the Indian Army’s troops. Other accounts have explained these shifts by charting changing attitudes towards race and masculinity in the aftermath of the rebellion.27 By 138

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the 1880s, when the Gurkha contingent doubled in size, strategic concerns regarding Russia’s advance into central Asia were also bearing on colonial recruiting, with Frederick Roberts, the Indian Army’s commander in chief, arguing that only the so-​called ‘martial races’ could be put into the field against a European army. Large reductions of the Madras and Bombay armies in favour of increased recruiting in the north, especially in the Punjab and Nepal, followed.28 The focus on imperial strategy and ideology has often obscured the social and economic contexts that motivated Nepalese men to seek military service in foreign armies. Recentring these contexts shows clearly how service in Britain’s colonial military forces followed patterns established by previous generations of émigré military labourers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as well as colonial archives, Mary Des Chene traced the disjunction between colonial constructions of the ‘Gurkhas’ and the perceptions of those who enlisted as ‘Gurkhas’. Indicatively, these men were never known as ‘Gurkhas’ but as ‘Lahores’, after the city of Lahore, to which previous generations of Nepali men went to enlist in the Sikh armies of Ranjit Singh in the early nineteenth century. ‘Lahore’ was also the term used to describe those men who took civilian employment in India, or in the Gulf, suggesting that émigré labour, rather than military service, is the primary marker of ‘Lahore’/​‘Gurkha’ identities. Much to their chagrin, colonial recruiting officers found themselves competing with recruiting agents for tea plantations in Bengal as well as with ‘emigration agents’ offering passages for indentured labour.29 Although Nepalese recruits unquestionably distinguished themselves in battle, and British officers saw strategic advantages in recruiting from outside India (and sometimes in racial explanations for the Nepalis’ martial aptitude), military labour was only one of the ways in which Nepali peasants navigated the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly changing, and unstable, world. Like their contemporaries from the Punjab, and the previous generations of recruits from Bengal, Nepal’s émigré soldiers responded to colonial demands for military labour in ways shaped not by timeless martial traditions but, rather, by the specific, and shifting, opportunities that emerged as colonial influence extended across north India. Tracing these calculations, and the opportunities that shaped them, provides greater insight into the strategies of those who enlisted, and into the operations of the military labour market. Native officers played key roles in recruiting military labour from Nepal, much as their predecessors had done in Benares and Awadh as the EIC bypassed jobber commanders.30 Trusted officers recruited family members and associates, confirming the martial pedigrees of those presented for enlistment. Although colonial understandings of recruiting –​and the composition of the Indian Army itself –​changed significantly in this period, the fundamental forces through which the colonial demand for and the indigenous supply of labour were negotiated remained basically consistent. As with the ‘dominance’ of the high-​caste Purbiya recruits in Bengal before 1857, the predominance of the ‘martial races’ attests to the ability of a minority of colonial subjects to secure privileged positions within colonial structures. In this sense, as Kolff noted of the early colonial period, the army was often the most important redistributive institution of the British Empire in South Asia.31

Global wars and military labour The mechanisms for incentivising and rewarding military service that were established in the nineteenth century can be seen in full operation in the global wars of the twentieth century. Although the demands of these wars threatened to outstrip the ability of colonised labour markets to supply and sustain imperial armies, they provide further illustration of how fundamental indigenous military and auxiliary labour was in shaping the global histories of empire and war. Historians have examined these processes fitfully: early histories celebrated 139

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the contributions of the millions of Indians who fought and laboured on behalf of the British imperial state in the world wars but, following partition and independence, the centrality of South Asian labour to the British war effort was elided. Only in more recent years, and especially as the war’s centenary approached, have historians turned their attention once again to the various roles played by Indian soldiers during the First and Second World Wars.32 In the First World War, during which nearly 1,500,000 Indians served, the increased demand for Indian troops was supplied from the established recruiting grounds, notably from the Punjab, which provided more than 446,976 men, and from Nepal, which supplied nearly 60,000 additional recruits. Together, the Punjab and Nepal supplied roughly a half of India’s 826,855 combatants. Jats, Pathans, Dogras, and Garwhalis were also recruited in greater numbers, and from 1917 recruits were taken from provinces without established martial traditions, and more than 115,000 men were supplied by the notionally independent princely states.33 The losses sustained by Indian troops, on the western front from October 1914 and then in the Middle East from 1915, posed serious challenges for the army’s recruiting and command infrastructure. In the Punjab, civil and military authorities were combined, and powerful rural interests mobilised, to encourage greater enlistment. Some 180,000 acres of new land grants in the canal colonies were offered to those who enlisted, with a further 15,000 reserved for those helped supply recruits –​a reminder of the ongoing importance of brokerage in the supply of military labour.34 To secure and preserve the loyalty of men serving outside India, soldiers’ interests were represented in official and semi-​official committees, as well as by influential local notables. These kinds of welfare mechanisms supplemented the pay, pensions, and other forms of patronage and reward that had long shaped the size and structure of India’s military labour markets. Accessing the perspectives of Indian soldiers and followers is difficult, but some insight may be gleaned from contemporary censor’s records as well as from later oral histories, both of which reveal the hopes, fears, frustrations, and calculations of Indian troops. Evidence of resistance and disquiet –​in the form self-​inflicted wounds or outright mutiny –​suggest the limits of the military compact struck between colonial power and colonised soldiers.35 Although the battlefields of the First World War were concentrated between 0 and 60 degrees longitude, in its mobilisation of labour, and materiel, the conflict of 1914–​18 was truly a global war.36 Colonised labour had long been vital to sustaining commerce and industry across Britain’s empire: lascars comprised 17.5 per cent of Britain’s merchant marine before the war, and this proportion increased during the conflict, as it did again during the Second World War. Some 445,582 Indians served as non-​combatants, with nearly 350,000 Indian labourers sent to Mesopotamia alone.37 Their work, as medics and engineers, or in supply and support roles, was vital to the prosecution of the war and to the consolidation of the enlarged British Empire in the aftermath of the war.38 Wartime mobilisations of labour tapped pre-​existing networks of migrant labour, prompting concerns that commercial activities, some of which were crucial to the prosecution of the war, might be undermined by competing demands –​a further reminder that, for all of its coercive power, the colonial state always depended on securing and sustaining the labour of its subjects. To distinguish wartime labour from widely distrusted forms of indenture, the ‘Coolie Corps’ was restyled as the ‘Indian Labour Corps’ and ‘Indian Porter Corps’. Demand for labour still exceeded supply, so in 1916 India’s prisons were opened to recruiters, leading to more than 16,000 prisoners enlisting in return for remission. Opportunities for colonial subjects were proscribed by imperial hierarchies, but South Asia’s military and auxiliary labourers calculated and calibrated their strategies to maximise their often limited opportunities, to burnish their social status, to secure post-​war exemptions from customary taxes, and, on occasion, to defend their interests by withdrawing their labour.39 140

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The crucial role played by Indian labour in Britain’s war effort is mirrored for the other principal belligerents, whose armies also drew extensively on colonised labour, enlisting more than 1 million Africans, and some 140,000 Chinese labourers. More than 4 million non-​white men served in European and American armies during the war, and the Ottoman Empire’s multi-​ ethnic and multi-​religious army included Armenians, Greeks, and Jews. Similar mobilisations, on a yet grander scale, were required during the Second World War. These too built on, and in turn transformed, existing labour relations and obligations. From a pre-​war strength of some 210,000 the Indian Army swelled to nearly 2,300,000 by the war’s end.40 Millions more men and women were tempted, cajoled, or pressed into war-​related civilian work, from mining to prostitution, to create and service the infrastructure, institutions, and soldiers required for prosecuting the war. Once again, the ability of the colonial state to tap such huge resources of labour was crucial to the British and Allied war effort. From the Punjab, some 800,000 combat troops were recruited;41 an additional ten battalions were recruited from Nepal, swelling the ranks of Gurkhas to a total of nearly 130,000.42 Having suffered serious reverses in the early years of the war, the enlarged and reformed Indian Army performed creditably across several theatres, notably in North Africa and Italy, as well as in Burma, where defeats by the Japanese were avenged over 1944 and 1945. These successes reflected the transformation of the army from its pre-​war status as colonial security force into a modern, effective combat force, the largest ‘volunteer’ army ever raised.43 Although the scale of the conflict and the size of the armies raised to fight it were unparalleled, the calculations made by those Indians who enlisted are familiar. In the Punjab, where agricultural prices (and thus the profits derived from them) soared, recruiters struggled, and failed, to supply the manpower required from the favoured martial castes, turning instead to groups previously refused colonial service, as well as to former, but long since deprecated, recruiting grounds in Madras and Bengal.44 To a greater extent than in the First World War, the opening of recruiting allowed more Indians to seek out the opportunities presented by military service. Although the adventure and rewards of service overseas were doubtless attractive to some, others were pushed into war-​related work by poverty. As expansion gathered pace, pre-​war requirements were relaxed to allow recruiters to enlist smaller men. Army medics found that, on basic rations, new recruits gained on average between five and ten pounds of weight during their first four months of service.45 From 1942 push factors were compounded by scarcity and then famine in Bengal, which eventually claimed the lives of at least 2 million people. As a consequence, Bengal’s military –​and auxiliary –​labour markets, whence generations of peasant soldiers had sold their service to hedge, and extend, their investments in the land, burnishing their social status in the process, disgorged millions of starving and desperate prospective recruits, including thousands of women who sold sex to Allied troops.46 The fortunes of war presented many difficult choices. For the 45,000 Indian troops captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore, these included the choice to join the Indian National Army (INA) and take up arms against their former colleagues and colonial paymasters. As the British had done with their Nepalese and Sikh adversaries in the first half of the nineteenth century, so the Japanese, aided by indigenous brokers, sought to engage Indian military labour in the service of their own imperial ambitions. Although many of those who chose to join the INA undoubtedly did so to secure short-​term improvements in their treatment, such calculations would have been familiar to generations of recruits, in India and elsewhere.47 In Singapore in 1942 and Bombay in 1946, those who rebelled against colonial service did so for a variety of reasons, some personal, some political. What all shared with previous generations of rebels at Vellore, Barrackpore, and Meerut was a readiness to forcibly renegotiate the terms of their service –​a reminder of the fundamentally transactional nature of 141

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colonial soldiering, and of the strategies employed by military labourers in Asia to navigate the opportunities and threats that colonisation, and its conflicts, presented. That many INA men subsequently deserted Subhas Chandra Bose’s nationalist army and that post-​war attempts to prosecute those who did not revealed considerable sympathy suggests the realities of colonial military service.48 Although the war helped to expedite the independence and partition of the Indian subcontinent, and the division of its army, the legacies of the colonial military persisted long after 1947. In Pakistan, West Punjab’s military elite emerged as a powerful force in the postcolonial state, entrenching the advantages associated with military service (and contributing significantly to the process that led to war in 1971).49 In India, despite a notional commitment to a more representative army, military labour remained unevenly distributed, with Punjabis, and Sikhs in particular, continuing to be over-​represented.50 Under the terms of a tripartite agreement with the governments of Nepal and the United Kingdom, serving Gurkhas were offered the choice of service in either the Indian or the British army. The majority chose service with India, a final reminder that South Asia’s military labour markets reflected the calculations of those who enlisted as much as it did the designs of those who recruited them.

Résumé Recruiting, retaining, and disciplining military labour was central to the making and breaking of empires in South Asia. Of the various powers that emerged to challenge the Mughal Empire, it was the East India Company that most successfully navigated the subcontinent’s military labour markets. In part, this was because the Company was able to call upon maritime, commercial, and financial resources from the United Kingdom, but it was also, and perhaps principally, because the Company found productive ways of exploiting and, in time, of monopolising Indian military labour. Crucially, the EIC, and then the colonial government, were able to connect increasingly global circuits of labour (military and otherwise) in ways that generated reciprocal returns. Although most of these returns accrued to the Company, military service also acted as a redistributive force. If colonial and nationalist historiographies did much to obscure, and misrepresent, the importance of military labour markets in the history of South Asia, a proper accounting calls attention to the complex, and changing, relationships between military labourers and their employers. Recentring these relationships provides a much better perspective on the vital role played by military labour in the making and breaking of empires in, and beyond, South Asia, as well as on the various ways in which colonial soldiers helped to shape the postcolonial world.

Notes 1 For useful overviews of the chaotic and often parlous nature of the Company’s early activities, see William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); and Jon E. Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London: Simon & Schuster, 2016). 2 Philip J. Stern, The Company-​State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundation of the British Empire in India (New York: OUP, 2011), esp. 185–​206; idem, ‘Soldier and citizen in the seventeenth-​ century English East India Company’, Journal of Early Modern History, 15 (1/​2), 2011, pp. 83–​104. 3 Channa Wickremesekera, ‘Best Black Troops in the World’: British Perceptions and the Making of the Sepoy, 1746–​1805 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002), 76–​95; Kaushik Roy, Military Manpower, Armies and Warfare in South Asia (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013). 4 Peter J. Marshall, ‘British expansion in India in the eighteenth century: A historical revision’, History, 60 (198), 1975, pp. 28–​43.

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Military labour markets in colonial India 5 For examples, see idem, ‘Western arms in maritime Asia in the early phases of expansion’, MAS, 14 (1), 1980, pp. 26–​7. 6 Dirk H.A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–​1850 (Cambridge: CUP, 1990). For global comparators, as well as a useful summary from Kolff, see the essays in Erik Jan Zürcher (ed.), Fighting for a Living: A Comparative History of Military Labour 1500–​2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). 7 Marshall, ‘British expansion in India’, 41. 8 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, 169–​92. 9 Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in 19th Century India (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 89. Peers concludes: ‘It was the nature of the pre-​colonial military labour market that initially determined the composition of the Bengal army; it was not a deliberate colonial policy.’ 10 Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770–​1830, new edn. (New Delhi: OUP, 1999), 46–​8; Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire 1500–​1700 (London: Routledge, 2002), 67–​97. 11 Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company, 43. 12 Mesrob Vartavarian, ‘Warriors and states: Military labour in southern India, c.1750–​1800’, MAS, 53 (2), 2019, pp. 313–​38; idem, ‘Pacification and patronage in the Maratha Deccan, 1803–​1818’, MAS, 50 (6), 2016, pp. 1749–​791; idem, ‘An open military economy: The British conquest of south India reconsidered, 1780–​1799’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 57 (4), 2014, pp. 486–​510. 13 William R Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 104–​47. 14 Roy, Military Manpower, Armies and Warfare in South Asia, esp. 71–​90. 15 Kaushik Roy, ‘The hybrid military establishment of the East India Company in South Asia: 1750–​ 1849’, Journal of Global History, 6 (2), 2011, pp. 195–​218. 16 Jonathan Peel, ‘Royal Commission to inquire into organization of Indian Army, report, minutes of evidence, appendix’, 1 January 1859, 1859–​034892, ProQuest UK Parliamentary Papers, http://​ parlipapers.proquest.com/​parlipapers/​docview/​t70.d75.1859-​034892. 17 Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: OUP, 1998); Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the social order of colonial north India’, MAS, 25 (2), 1991, pp. 227–​61. 18 Gavin Rand and Crispin Bates (eds.), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, vol. 4, Military Aspects of the Indian Uprising (New Delhi: Sage, 2013); see also the other volumes in this series; Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); idem, The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (London: Hurst, 2017). 19 Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–​1947 (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 2005), 49. 20 Ashutosh Kumar, Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–​1920 (Cambridge: CUP, 2017). 21 Peter Stanley, White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 22 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, 178. 23 Report of the Eden Commission, 15 November 1879, BL, IOR/​L/​MIL/​7/​5445. 24 David E. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–​1940 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 11; Kaushik Roy, Brown Warriors of the Raj: Recruitment and the Mechanics of Command in the Sepoy Army, 1859–​1913 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008); idem, ‘Race and recruitment in the Indian Army: 1880–​ 1918’, MAS, 47 (4), 2013, pp. 1310–​347. 25 Yong, The Garrison State, 90–​6; Rajit K. Mazumder, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). 26 Mark Condos and Gavin Rand, ‘Coercion and conciliation at the edge of empire: State-​building and its limits in Waziristan, 1849–​1914’, The Historical Journal, 61 (3), 2018, pp. 695–​718. 27 Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–​1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Lionel Caplan, Warrior Gentlemen: ‘Gurkhas’ in the Western Imagination (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995); Tony Gould, Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas (London: Granta Books, 1999). 28 Gavin Rand, ‘ “Martial races” and “imperial subjects”: Violence and governance in colonial India, 1857–​1914’, European Review of History, 13 (1), 2006, pp. 1–​20.

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Gavin Rand 29 Mary Des Chene, ‘Relics of empire: A cultural history of the Gurkhas, 1815–​1987’ (unpub. PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1991), 235–​60; idem, ‘Military ethnology in British India’, South Asia Research, 19 (2), 1999, pp. 121–​35. 30 Peers, Between Mars and Mammon, 83. 31 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, 186. 32 For a useful summary of the literature, see Santanu Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge: CUP, 2018). 33 Government of India, India’s Contribution to the Great War (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1923), 276–​7. 34 Yong, The Garrison State, 98. 35 David E. Omissi (ed.), Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–​18 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); George Morton-​Jack, The Indian Army on the Western Front: India’s Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium in the First World War (New York: CUP, 2014); idem, The Indian Empire at War: From Jihad to Victory, The Untold Story of the Indian Army in the First World War (London: Abacus, 2020). 36 Useful comparative collections include Andrew Tait Jarboe and Richard Fogarty (eds.), Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014); and Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge: CUP, 2011). 37 Radhika Singha, ‘Labour (India)’, in 1914–​1918-​Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014). 38 Priya Satia, ‘Developing Iraq: Britain, India and the redemption of empire and technology in the First World War’, Past & Present, 197 (1), 2007, pp. 211–​55. 39 Radhika Singha, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914–​1921 (London: Hurst, 2020); idem, ‘The short career of the Indian Labour Corps in France, 1917–​1919’, International Labor and Working-​Class History, 87, 2015, pp. 27–​62; idem, ‘Finding labor from India for the war in Iraq: The Jail Porter and Labor Corps, 1916–​1920’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49 (2), 2007, pp. 412–​45. For nuanced readings of Indian perceptions and experiences in Mesopotamia, see Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture, 239–​301. 40 Steven I. Wilkinson, Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2015), 66. 41 Yong, The Garrison State, 301. 42 Mary Des Chene, ‘Soldiers, sovereignty and silences: Gorkhas as diplomatic currency’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 13 (1/​2), 1993, pp. 67–​80, 71. 43 Tarak Barkawi, Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge: CUP, 2017); Alan Jeffreys, Approach to Battle: Training the Indian Army during the Second World War: War and Military Culture in South Asia, 1757–​1947 (Solihull: Helion, 2017); Daniel Marston, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). 44 Wilkinson, Army and Nation, 63–​85. 45 Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A different war dance: State and class in India 1939–​1945’, Past & Present, 176 (1), 2002, p. 190; Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–​1945 (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2016), 385–​90. 46 Yasmin Khan, ‘Sex in an imperial war zone: Transnational encounters in Second World War India’, History Workshop Journal, 73 (1), 2012, pp. 240–​58; idem, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (London: Bodley Head, 2015), 239–​44. 47 Daniel Marston, The Indian Army and the End of the Raj (Cambridge: CUP, 2014), 117–​50; Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 157–​79; Barkawi, Soldiers of Empire, 81–​119. 48 Raghavan, India’s War, 433. 49 Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Lahore: Vanguard, 1991). 50 Wilkinson, Army and Nation.

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11 MERCHANTS, MONEYLENDERS, KARKHANEDARS, AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE INFORMAL SECTOR Sebastian Schwecke

Discourses on ‘(in)formality’ It is only recently that the term ‘informality’ –​marking economic segments that lie beyond the regulatory reach of the state –​has begun to figure in scholarly debates on (late) colonial India. Regardless of the strong continuities between the late colonial and early postcolonial periods from the perspectives of both social and economic history, ‘informality’ has largely been treated by historians as a topic relevant only for the post-​independence era. In turn, the proclivity of many historians working on South Asia to view the political threshold of independence from British rule as a fundamental rupture –​indeed, the chasm separating the historian’s field of study from the realm of social science –​has further reinforced this tendency. As a result, the origins and trajectories of this particular amalgamation of economic regimes still making up a major element within the lives of the mass of the South Asian population continue to be largely overlooked. Although the concept of ‘informality’ has undergone significant transformations since its conception by Keith Hart in the early 1970s, and the precise extent of the ‘informal sector’ in South Asian economies continues to be contested, there is a broad scholarly consensus that it currently comprises the vast majority of the subcontinent’s workforce, with very little substantial change in the proportion of formal and informal sector workers since the early postcolonial period.1 In part, this treatment mirrors conceptualisations of ‘informality’ as the opposite or the absence of ‘formality’ in economic organisation, though even in this interpretation of the term the roots of the drive toward ‘formalisation’ can be located in the final decades of colonial rule. The relative absence of a historical analysis of ‘informality’ in late colonial India is all the more deplorable, however, in that it does not reflect more recent tendencies to reconceptualise and broaden its definition by including gradations of ‘(in)formality’, and emphasising the production processes of ‘(in)formalisation’.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-12

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In spite of its shortcomings, ‘informality’ as a concept has maintained its discursive traction, especially in the South Asian subcontinent, partially as it identifies an area of divergence from Western historical evolution that, at one and the same time, is highly visible yet remains analytically intractable. To some extent, this continued traction is clearly related to its conformity with and adaptability to larger theoretic discourses: whether it is its original emphasis as a counterpoint within Weberian emphases on rationalisation,2 or a Foucauldian understanding of power and knowledge, the binary link with ‘formalisation’ sustains analytical approaches contrasting it with the latter, and neatly (as well as incorrectly) divides South Asian economies into two separate segments. Similarly, the concept fits neatly into a Polanyian discourse focusing on the expansion and containment of ideas of the ‘free’ market and the (dis-​)embedding of economic relations. Although the contrast with ‘formality’ or ‘formalisation’ remains both an important point of reference and a crucial analytical tool for our understanding of the diverse socio-​cultural phenomena studied under the rubric of ‘informality’, historical analyses need to place a significantly greater emphasis not only on gradations of ‘(in-​)formality’. They also need to address and re-​engage with two related dimensions of ‘informality’. First, they need to overcome the proclivity of scholars to locate the latter within a framework highlighting –​especially, expressly, or at times exclusively –​the production of ‘(in)formality’ in law as the process by which South Asian states define economic segments through registration and regulation. Second, they need to place greater emphasis on the rootedness of ‘(in)formality’ within the social contexts and cultural constructions of meaning that comprise the worlds of economic practice that the term seeks to capture: In other words, they need to emphasise the intrinsic factors that made and make ‘(in)formality’ work: the embeddedness of economic life into structures of trust and obligation that reach beyond the state and the law, and at times replace these two, or its opposite, including the study of the benefits for enterprises in adhering to state regulation. Studies of ‘(in) formality’, accordingly, need to stress both the processes of production pertaining to codification and the responses to these processes by entrepreneurs and markets, and by labour. Keith Hart implicitly rephrased his idea of ‘informality’ in his later work on the Ghanaian slum of Nima –​on which the original concept had been based –​drawing attention to practices of trust and association, kinship and obligation, and contract and law as operational modes that make ‘(in)formality’ work.3 A history of ‘(in)formality’ in colonial and postcolonial South Asia needs to engage with similar conceptions in order to identify the historical lineages of one of the most significant characteristics of contemporary South Asian economies.

Market framing, regulation, and defining ‘propriety’ in business relations The debate on colonial ‘modernity’ pertaining to markets and their framing by the ‘modern’ state has long been overshadowed by the impact of the colonial encounter on Indian society in general rather than the more specific question of its impact on the shaping of markets. These debates can be subdivided into two strands of approaches: first, arguments on the creation of privileged positions for British and/​or Western capital on Indian markets, and the related questions of the extent of collaboration by specific groups of entrepreneurs; second, debates on entrepreneurial decline, resilience, and ascent in the face of colonial ‘modernisation’ –​marking the parameters of (un)successful adaptation by Indian capital –​and the related question of the extent to which Western firms needed to adapt to conditions considered to fall under the rubric of ‘indigenous’ entrepreneurial practices. The debate on the creation of privileged positions for Western capital inescapably needed to relate to larger questions on the development of underdevelopment and the colonial impact on 146

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arresting the emergence of an ‘indigenous’ capitalist development in South Asia. As such, these discussions necessarily concerned themselves with questions of ‘proto-​industrialisation’ and categorisations of mercantile capital(ism) in early modern times, and the disruptions brought about in the wake of British rule.4 One paradigmatic study standing in for a much wider field is Amiya Kumar Bagchi’s work related chiefly to changes in the money and credit markets around the time of the Bengali banking crisis in the 1830s.5 Bagchi depicted the growing clout of ‘British Indian’ (rather than ‘Indian’) finance capital, especially at the apex of the credit system concerned with intercontinental trade, based not only on the former’s competitive advantages but also on deliberate colonial bias favouring British credit institutions. This development included the emergence of a sector of ‘uncontrolled’ finance –​a vast array of credit practices ranging from petty money lending to ‘indigenous bankers’. It demonstrated the colonial state’s role in selectively using arguments of ‘modernisation’ to augment schisms between different classes of financial and commercial entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial practices. What Bagchi described, accordingly, was the production of realignments between finance capital and the (colonial) state, which primarily affected high-​end finance, and brought about a schism between the apex of the systems of intercontinental and inland commerce, respectively. Similarly, the debate on collaboration by mercantile strata with the colonial state arose primarily from questions that were central to nationalist historiography, but also pointed to issues of societal realignment, and the impact of the colonial encounter on Indian commerce. The question of mercantile roles in the rise and fall of imperial regimes in South Asia had been raised already in the context of the demise of Mughal power,6 but the well-​documented role of Indian financiers in the British expansion throughout the subcontinent –​helping to finance the colonial conquest –​provided a further entry point into this discussion.7 Although the debate emphasised early colonial history, it implicitly also raised questions on the longevity of mercantile collaboration in the face of the increasingly interventionist character of the colonial state in framing markets in correspondence with its own (changing) requirements. The changing fates of mercantile strata in the wake of colonial rule shifted the debate from its nationalist preoccupation to studies of mercantile resilience or demise, and the rise of new entrepreneurial groups that made use of the new opportunities provided by the imperial intervention in South Asian markets. Originally, this debate became dominated by studies on the rise of an ‘indigenous’ class of industrial capitalists,8 and the rise of specific ‘business communities’, such as the Parsis of Bombay and the Marwaris, especially in Calcutta. It also led to a renewed focus on artisanal groups and ‘vernacular’ forms of capitalism, which will be discussed later. In shifting away from the origins of industrial capitalists and the big industrialist families, the debate began to place renewed attention on mercantile strata, and tended to focus more strongly on issues of resilience in the face of colonial interventions, including interrogations of entrepreneurial operational modes and their socio-​cultural embeddedness. In particular, approaches to these issues started to revisit the organisation of Indian trading diasporas in central Asia, the East African littoral, and South-​east Asia. In the process, it highlighted factors such as caste and community cohesion from the point of view of entrepreneurial techniques rather than as signs of the continuation of ‘anachronistic’ practices, techniques that buttressed the competitiveness of Indian entrepreneurs against Western capital.9 More recently, this debate has been considerably extended by enquiries into the operations of British and other Western capitalists in colonial South Asia that went beyond the stereotypical application of the ‘modernisation’ idiom. Moving beyond the bridgeheads of ‘global’ capital that had been established primarily as intersections between inland and overseas trade, a number of studies took up questions of the organisation of Western firms within South Asia (including non-​ British firms, such as Volkart Brothers and Bayer), accordingly underlining interactions with 147

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Indian capital (and labour) rather than highlighting the distance between these poles. In consequence, these studies not only shed new light into the organisation of South Asian capitalism but partially managed to reverse the typical top-​down approach in comparing the metropole to the colony through their application of results from the study of ‘indigenous’ mercantile and industrial capital and its socio-​cultural embedment to the enquiry into Western and assumedly ‘modern’ businesses.10 With the exception of Bagchi’s work referred to above, however, the majority of these studies dealt with processes of market framing implicitly rather than explicitly, or focused on the micro-​scale and the impacts of the kaleidoscope of entrepreneurial practices on an emerging framework of business relations. The centrality of the colonial state for the framing of markets was strongly taken up again by Ritu Birla, in what can best be described as a legal history approach to the study of markets in South Asia that emphasised various aspects of colonial intervention in business organisation, such as the generalisation of limited liability, and the treatment of the Hindu undivided family with respect to the legal constitution of family firms.11 Placing her work at the intersection of (the colonial state’s prescriptive agenda for) business procedure and the impacts of colonial ‘modernity’, Birla depicted the incipient drive towards ‘formalisation’ as a process of defining ‘the proper swindle’. The importance of this shift in emphasis for the study of the origins of ‘(in)formality’ –​rather than the ‘traditional’ or customary in South Asian business practices –​cannot be overestimated, in that it facilitated a reappraisal of studies on entrepreneurial techniques and their (re-​)alignment with the changing grammar of economic relations in the wake of the long and gradual process of producing ‘modernity’ on South Asian markets, in the process already delineating an interpretative framework for the corollary of ‘formalisation’: the emergence of ‘informality’.

Markets, merchants, and the residues of the ‘bazaar’: Resources for the emerging informal sector The study of ‘the bazaar’ or the bazaar economy is inextricably linked to questions on the nature of capitalism in both pre-​modern and modern South Asia and the debate on proto-​ industrialisation. It poses questions about the emergence of sophisticated economic arenas beyond the Western world that have been interpreted variously as alternative paths towards the rise of capitalism, or as sophisticated alternatives to capitalism. Arguably the most important contributions in this field comprise the works of Christopher Bayly, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Rajat Kanta Ray. Bayly’s intricate study of the ‘burgher’ towns of the north Indian plains in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth –​and the network of markets and business practices linking these towns –​depicts the embedment of economic practice into socio-​cultural life in the advent of colonialism, and remains the most compelling work to date, detailing the relative sophistication of mercantile practices and ethics, especially with regard to inland trade, located at the junction of two of its most prominent poles: the market town and the merchant family firm.12 Subrahmanyam’s concept of ‘portfolio capitalists’ strongly intersected with Bayly’s work. Focusing originally on southern India, the concept was designed to correct the tendency of earlier literature to highlight aspects of community-​centric associational life in mercantile organisation rather than emphasising the individual entrepreneur and the firm in ways that enabled their depiction as capitalist enterprises of an ‘Indian’ rather than Western historical lineage. In doing so, it implicitly delineated a schism between capitalist traditions that marked the production of colonial ‘modernity’ and a rephrasing of the ‘great divergence’ paradigm that –​broadly defined –​seeks to explain the different evolutionary trajectories of Western and non-​Western societies after the emergence of capitalism.13 148

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Rajat Kanta Ray’s work, by contrast, deliberately placed the idea of the bazaar economy –​ a sophisticated arena of commercial exchange distinct from Western notions of the capitalist ‘market’, but also of less institutionalised patterns of exchange –​at the centre of his work.14 Accordingly, Ray’s interpretative framework remains the most highly developed conception of the bazaar economy. At the same time, however, it implicitly set some of the most important restrictions on further inquiry by its cogency, temporally, geographically, and organisationally. Temporally, it provided a historical narrative of the rise and, particularly, the demise of the ‘bazaar’ that coincides loosely with the end of colonial rule, by which time the bazaar economy was portrayed as having become comprehensively subordinated to Western ‘global’ capitalism. Geographically, it severed the linkages between lower-​order markets and the ‘bazaar’ and located the latter’s most sophisticated form predominantly in overseas trade. Organisationally, it emphasised various institutions –​predominantly the hundi (a ‘traditional’ category of financial instruments) and the arhat (a managing agency) –​and in this way impeded a broader engagement between anthropological and historiographical scholarship on the ‘bazaar’ in the context of modern South Asia. Ray’s ‘bazaar economy’, essentially, comprised an increasingly subordinate layer of Jairus Banaji’s locating of mercantile capitalism in the intercontinental produce trade, referred to above. Taking issue with older anthropological work on the ‘bazaar’, Ray proceeded to incorporate the bazaar economy in the Indian Ocean into an adaptation of world systems theory, depicting the ‘bazaar’ as an intermediate layer between petty commerce and ‘global’ capitalism that, in turn, became increasingly subordinated to the latter. This interpretative framework, regardless of its obvious strengths, precluded a more substantial interdisciplinary dialogue, especially in the wake of Clifford Geertz’s revised engagement with the topic15 in the context of the Moroccan suq, which –​though still emphasising the supposed link with petty profit margins –​emphasized the ‘bazaar’ as an informational and communication order and socio-​culturally embedded economic arena facilitating exchange under conditions of pervasive informational uncertainty. It also impeded the concept’s application to other anthropological approaches to markets in the South Asian context,16 and, conversely, the application of related anthropological approaches to the historiographic study of the ‘bazaar’, especially concerning debates related to socio-​cultural aspects of uncertainty in ‘modern’ capitalism, such as from the anthropology of trust and certification, or of obligation.17 Other studies on the ‘bazaar’ in modern South Asia have tended to remain less influential in scholarly debate. This is especially deplorable in the case of Sudipta Sen’s work, which emphasised the relationship between exchange and authority within the socio-​cultural sphere comprising the ‘bazaar’, and analysed the impact of the colonial encounter from this perspective.18 One important exception in this regard is Anand Yang’s work on the ‘bazaar’, which provided significant detail on the organisation of the ‘bazaar’ as an economic system, especially in terms of its socio-​spatialities.19 At the same time, Yang’s work illustrated a persistent feature in research on the phenomenon of the ‘bazaar’: recent works on the topic have tended to treat the ‘bazaar’ not only as a socio-​culturally embedded economic arena but primarily as a social and cultural arena, notwithstanding the centrality of relations of economic exchange that lay at the heart of it. Yang’s work, accordingly, can best be categorised as a study of the ‘India’ of the bazaar, rather than the ‘bazaar’ in India. This tendency has helped significantly in expanding our understanding of the semiotics associated with the ‘bazaar’, which, in turn, facilitates the reintegration of historical scholarship on the topic with the concurrent debates in anthropology. Thus, various authors from other subdisciplines have considerably enriched the understanding of the ‘bazaar’ as a place of leisure and entertainment, or as a public sphere with distinct political idioms.20 Similarly, the ‘bazaar’ has been identified as an underlying feature for a distinct 149

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aesthetics, which, in turn, facilitates correlations to its study as a public sphere that emphasise prevalent forms of disseminating information.21 Whereas looking at the ‘bazaar’ from the perspectives of social and cultural history has tended to marginalise the centrality accorded to economic exchange, it also allows scholarship focusing on economic practice to move beyond the original questions enquired into by Ray. These concerned, among others, the (sometimes not so) petty margins of profit, and the related institutional frameworks and their subordination under newer politico-​economic and legal regimes. The lingering effects of the ‘bazaar’ as a socio-​cultural arena correspond to similar continuities in the management of business risk, labour discipline, and the management of information flows, and of trust and obligation in the (partial) absence of the overarching regulatory presence of the ‘modern’ state. Ray’s argument on the demise of the ‘bazaar’ demonstrated the decline of an economic regime in terms of its sophistication and institutionalisation. In this, it echoed the strictly defined order of merchant capitalism as described by Banaji, whereby the ‘bazaar’ was associated almost exclusively with the global produce trade. In doing so, it neglected the survival of mercantile practices defining inland trade, local commerce, and middlemen. Yet it did not preclude the utilisation of other aspects, which need to be considered as inherent elements of the ‘bazaar’. This interpretation, in turn, corresponds strongly to late colonial notions of the ‘amateurisation’ of ‘indigenous’ business practices, which are prominent in various reflections from the period, as noted by Yang. Given the striking commonalities between the ‘bazaar’ and the ‘informal sector’ related to the (relative) absence of the state as regulator, registrar, and certifier of economic activity, and the corresponding need to look beyond politico-​legal categorisations to understand ‘informality’, study of the residues of the ‘bazaar’ constitutes one of the most promising areas for uncovering the resources and techniques available to entrepreneurs in the emergence of this economic segment.

Moneylenders, brokers, and ‘improper transactions’: Extra-​legality and the production of the ‘shadow’ economy As repeatedly highlighted, especially in the wake of the recent ‘demonetisation’ misadventure of the Indian state, there is a tendency to conflate the ‘informal’ sector and the segment of South Asian economies variously depicted as ‘black’ markets or ‘shadow economies’. This tendency can be traced in part to imprecise uses of terminology, conflating ‘informality’ and ‘illegality’, for instance, or ‘illegality’ and ‘extra-​legality’. At the same time, the discourses outlined above clearly demonstrate overlaps between these two segments of the market –​ not from the perspective of legality but in terms of economic practice and business procedure: whether it is in the study of the intersections of procedurally defined ‘modernity’ and the underlying politico-​economic dynamics of capitalist expansion that mark the definition of the ‘proper swindle’ and its corollary, the study of ‘improper transactions’, or the manifold uses of the residues of the ‘bazaar’ for entrepreneurial techniques in the relative absence of the state as regulator, overlaps between informality and extra-​legality are pronounced. They can be used for legal and illegal ends alike, and encompass both the illegal as well as the improper or illicit but extra-​legal. Focusing on the postcolonial rather than the late colonial period, in recent years a number of studies have shed light into this dimension of South Asian economies, primarily dealing with artisanal industries, hawkers, brokers and middlemen, and moneylenders. Work on hawkers focuses at one of the lowest levels of markets in modern South Asia, though not necessarily one of the least organised. Especially in the postcolonial period, the state’s reach into the regulation of urban environments expanded significantly, though at the 150

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same time it tended to set aside significant areas of its regulatory purview by vesting local authorities with discretionary powers over these ‘unregulated’ markets. Similarly, other forms of association, arbitration, and mediation emerged that collectively strengthened or contested the state’s jurisdiction over the marketplace. Although corresponding processes have been reported for other forms of marketplace organisation, the context of hawkers has been a prominent site of investigation, especially as hawkers out of necessity need to navigate a multitude of partially overlapping authorities, conceptualised as an institutionalisation of ‘informality’ by Ritajyoti Bandyopadhay.22 Studies of brokers/​middlemen and of moneylenders have constituted major areas of enquiry in the colonial period. On the question of middlemen, the most influential position was phrased by David Washbrook.23 According to his argument, a key component of the colonial state’s approach to development policy rested on targeting middlemen, and seeking ways to circumvent their entrenchment in the Indian economy. This approach centred strongly on the imperative to remove supposedly unproductive layers of accumulation from the processes of production and commerce to increase the profit margins realised by producers –​and to increase revenues for the colonial state. Yet the policy also allowed the colonial state to pursue a developmental and ‘modernising’ political idiom without openly addressing (and taking sides in) the much more central developmental questions of capital–​labour relations. At the same time, the continued importance of middlemen even in late colonial India has been profusely demonstrated by a variety of authors, thereby depicting the relative inefficacy of colonial policy in this respect.24 What the studies of both hawkers and middlemen highlight is the interface between forms of authority operating in various markets that transgress conceptions of ‘formality’. These also facilitate the operation of extra-​legal economic practices in the informal sector and in parts of the South Asian ‘shadow’ economy. In turn, these are at times strongly integrated into gradations of ‘formality’ within the economy, further increasing the complexities of markets in South Asia. Similar developments can be seen in the study of moneylending since the late nineteenth century –​another area of pervasive extra-​legality that shows some strong commonalities with the worlds of brokers, despite forming an entirely distinct economic arena. The study of moneylending in colonial India has been dominated by an emphasis on questions of usury and exploitation, and the partially related issue of land transfers through mortgages and the resulting changes in the composition of rural society. Following David Hardiman’s influential study of moneylending in the context of the Deccan Riots, the predominant narrative centred on the disruption of traditional or (in Hardiman’s parlance) ‘moral’ economies of debt by the colonial encounter, with the rupture of the abolition of the usury laws in 1855 serving as a point of reference for the emergence of a ‘capitalist’ economy of moneylending, primarily by bringing moneylending transactions under the purview of (liberal) contractual law.25 This work on moneylending and peasant debt, in turn, remains mostly detached from studies on the financing of trade and artisanal industries, despite the relatively close integration of (and organisational continuities between) both market segments, as depicted in a range of studies.26 It also falls short of correctly depicting the development of moneylending under the increasingly capitalistic conditions since the late nineteenth century, which, instead, were marked by the gradual removal of contractual law from the operations of the market, thereby facilitating a pervasive turn of moneylending (both petty loans and the financing of trade and small industries) towards extra-​legality. My own work depicts the gradual emergence of a comprehensively extra-​legal economy of debt in the emerging system of ‘informal’ finance that constitutes significant enclaves within the larger capitalistic economic order that, at their core, operate primarily as reputational economies of debt.27 151

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Thematically, these studies focus on aspects within South Asian societies that need to be understood as enclaves within capitalism that, at least in some parts, operate in different modes from those generally assumed for capitalist economies. Such an approach facilitates links with schools of thought in economics that allow for similarly bounded variations.28 What can be brought into this debate by historiographical (and anthropological) studies are discussions on extra-​legality, on reputation, trust, obligation, and ‘informal’ information flows –​i.e. on the minute details that made and make ‘informality’ work.

Seeking regulation and finding loopholes: The karkhana29 as a contested site of ‘(in-​)formalisation’ Indian labour history originally focused strongly on ‘dualistic’ conceptions of labour, juxtaposing ‘stark contrasts of rural with urban; feudal, traditional, or pre-​modern with modern capitalists; traders with industrialists; small artisanal manufactures with big factories; and causal or migrant labourers with a stable urbanized industrial workforce’.30 It was only with the Chakrabarthy/​Chandavarkar debate31 that the subdiscipline moved significantly towards the study of the multitude of non-​or only partially ‘formalised’ employment relations as an intrinsic part of South Asian ‘modernities’ rather than anachronistic remnants of pre-​modern traditions, and in this way started to have a significant impact on debates on ‘(in)formalisation’. Parts of this debate need to be interpreted as responses to the question of so-​called labour aristocracies32 that delineate enclaves of relative privilege among the ‘formalised’ segments of the labour force, especially in large-​scale industrial units and the public sector, and have been attacked particularly from Marxist labour historians, in the process leading to the incorporation of significantly greater nuance in debates on the ‘formality/​informality’ divide. A particularly insightful strand of arguments on this question, however, originates from new developments in the study of artisanal industries, especially focusing on the karkhana as a site of contestation of ‘(in)formalisation’ processes, and correspondingly the evolution of stratification processes within artisanal communities and clusters centring on the master artisan and karkhanedar. In its origins, these debates need to be traced to the opening up of the debate by the works of Tirthankar Roy, who successfully challenged the preoccupation of discourses on artisanal groups with the deindustrialisation paradigm, and the corresponding emphasis on artisanal decline.33 Roy’s work, apart from bringing significant new data into the debate, facilitated a reinterpretation of single-​case-​centred approaches to the study of artisanal groups that demonstrated the emergence of new business opportunities in artisanal industries alongside deindustrialisation processes. These opportunities formed the basis for technological appropriations as well as social stratification, and resulted in a shift towards the study of the karkhana as a site of production rather than the earlier focus on cottage industries. Arguably the most detailed depiction of the karkhana as a site of contesting ‘(in)formalisation’ processes related to stratification processes within artisanal groups in the first half of the twentieth century is Douglas E. Haynes’ Small Town Capitalism in Western India, which narrated the changes affecting both the socio-​cultural and economic parameters of artisans’ lives in the cotton-​weaving centres of the western Bombay Presidency.34 Haynes’ work focused on the array of factors affecting the lives of weavers, including the emerging petty capitalist class among them. It depicted the everyday struggles that created shifts within the organisation of markets for cotton textiles between the late nineteenth century and the early postcolonial period. Including both the dimensions of production and exchange, his work depicted the developments leading up to the establishment of the karkhana as one of the primary units of artisanal organisation. 152

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In turn, these shifts corresponded to changes in the regimes of labour control and discipline, and labour–​capital relations concerning the gradual decrease in dependence on middlemen and merchants –​in favour of workers’ reliance on petty industrial capitalists also able to make use of new regulatory structures, such as co-​operative societies, reinforcing their positions in relation not only to merchants and middlemen but also to workers. In depicting these changes, Haynes defined the emergence of a particular variety of ‘local’ capitalism that –​with reference to other aspects of his work35 –​may also be categorised as ‘vernacular’ forms of capitalism that allowed for significant variations and gradations in the simultaneous processes of ‘formalisation’ and ‘informalisation’. Although Haynes emphasised the approach of a social historian in his work, another example of a study that placed the karkhana at the centre of labour–​capital relations and the question of ‘(in)formalisation’ and, instead, highlighted the role of the state and legal history is Karuna Dietrich Wielenga’s work on the Non-​Power Factories Act of 1948.36 Her work demonstrated the construction of ‘formality’ through processes of selective exclusion, implicitly also producing ‘informality’ in various gradations, in which the Indian state acted as a ‘gatekeeper’ for the emerging formal sector, dissecting artisanal from industrial labour relations, and affecting the patterns of workers’ collective action. Focusing on a history of transition from artisanal to industrial labour as well as by emphasising market-​framing policies, though, her argument still partially neglected the manner in which the resulting residual category of ‘informality’ in labour relations was shaped beyond the reach of the state by relying either on supposedly ‘traditional’ mechanisms, rooted in the ordering of specific economic milieus, or on extra-​legal measures, such as evasions of the regulatory framework, the handling of reputation and trust, and the socio-​spatial dimensions of organising work on labour sites that did not correspond to the blueprint of the factory or mill. Histories of labour and capital both provide entry points into the debate on the production of the ‘informal sector’ in the Indian subcontinent, and it needs greater engagement between the two subdisciplines to identify the patterns of this production process much more clearly than is currently possible. In this way, it is to be hoped that the study of colonial ‘modernity’ and its corollary, the ‘procedural’ basis of ‘modernisation’, can be linked much more strongly to questions underlying the conundrum of class relations in ‘modern’ South Asia as well.

Notes 1 See, for instance, Jan Breman, ‘Industrial labour in post-​colonial India I: Industrializing the economy and formalizing labour’, International Review of Social History, 44 (2), 1999, pp. 249–​300. 2 Keith Hart, ‘Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana’, Journal of African Studies, 11 (1), 1973, pp. 61–​89. 3 Idem, ‘Kinship, contract, and trust: The economic organization of migrants in an African city slum’, in: Diego Gambetta (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 176–​93. 4 Frank Perlin, ‘Proto-​industrialization and pre-​colonial South Asia’, Past & Present, 98 (1), 1998, pp. 30–​95; Abhay Kumar Singh, Modern World System and Indian Proto-​Industrialization: Bengal 1650–​ 1800 (New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 2006); Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Portfolio capitalists and the political economy of early modern India’, IESHR, 25 (4), 1988, pp. 401–​ 24; Jairus Banaji, ‘Merchant capitalism, peasant households and industrial accumulation: Integration of a model’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 16 (3), 2016, pp. 410–​31. 5 A.K. Bagchi, ‘Transition from Indian to British Indian systems of money and banking, 1800–​1850’, MAS, 19 (3), 1985, pp. 501–​19. 6 Karen Leonard, ‘The “great firm” theory of the decline of the Mughal Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21 (2), 1979, pp. 151–​67. For a critique of Leonard’s concept, see J.F. Richards,

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Sebastian Schwecke ‘Mughal state finance and the premodern world economy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23 (2), 1981, pp. 285–​308. 7 Lakshmi Subramaniam, ‘Banias and the British: The role of indigenous credit in the process of imperial expansion in western India’, MAS, 21 (3), 1987, pp. 473–​510; Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The initial British impact on India: A case study of the Benares region’, JAS, 19 (4), 1960, pp. 418–​31. 8 See several contributions in Rajat Kanta Ray (ed.), Entrepreneurship and Industry in India, 1800–​1947 (New Delhi: OUP, 1994); Thomas A. Timberg, The Marwaris: From Jagath Seth to the Birlas (New Delhi: Portfolio, 2015); and Omkar Goswami, ‘Sahibs, babus, and banias: Changes in industrial control in eastern India, 1918–​1950’, JAS, 48 (2), 1989, pp. 289–​309. 9 See, for instance, Claude Markovits, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008); idem, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–​1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: CUP, 2000); and David W. Rudner, Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). 10 Christof Dejung, ‘Transcending the empire: Western merchant houses and local capital in the Indian cotton trade’, in: Ulbe Bosma and Anthony Webster (eds.), Commodities, Ports, and Asian Maritime Trade, c.1750–​1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 198–​ 217; Christina Lubinski, ‘Business beyond empire. German multinationals in pre-​and post-​independence India (1890s–​1960s)’, South Asia. Journal of South Asian Studies, 41 (3), 2018, pp. 621–​41; idem, ‘Global trade and Indian politics: The German dye business in India before 1947’, Business History Review, 89 (3), 2015, pp. 503–​30. 11 Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital. Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 12 Christopher A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–​1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 1983). 13 Subrahmanyam and Bayly, ‘Portfolio capitalists and the political economy’. 14 Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Asian capital in the age of European domination: The rise of the bazaar, 1800–​ 1914’, MAS, 29 (1), 1995, pp. 449–​554; idem, ‘The bazaar: Changing structural characteristics of the indigenous section of the Indian economy before and after the Great Depression’, IESHR, 25 (3), 1988, pp. 263–​318. 15 Clifford Geertz, ‘Suq: The bazaar economy in Sefrou’, in: idem, Hildred Geertz, and Lawrence Rosen (eds.), Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society (Cambridge: CUP, 1979), pp. 123–​244; Jacob C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (Bandung: Van Hoeve, 1955). 16 See, for instance, Alfred Gell, ‘The market wheel: Symbolic aspects of an Indian tribal market’, Man (New Series), 17 (3), 1982, pp. 470–​91; and Chris A. Gregory, Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1997). 17 See, for instance, Alberto Corsin Jimenez, ‘Trust in anthropology’, Anthropological Theory, 11 (2), 2011, pp. 177–​96; and Matthew Carey, Mistrust: An Ethnographic Theory (Chicago: HAU Books, 2017). 18 Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). A partially related approach is also followed in several contributions to a volume co-​edited by Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-​White, Douglas E. Haynes, and me, bringing together historians, anthropologists, and development studies scholars: Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction (Cambridge: CUP, 2020). 19 Anand A. Yang, Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). 20 On leisure and entertainment, see, for instance, Chitra Joshi, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and Its Forgotten Histories (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003); and Nita Kumar, The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–​1986 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); on the ‘bazaar’ and its politics, see, for instance, Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth Century India (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). 21 On ‘bazaar’ aesthetics: Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); on the dissemination of information in a public sphere in which the ‘bazaar’ takes a central place: Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–​1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). 22 Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, ‘Institutionalizing informality: The hawkers’ question in post-​ colonial Calcutta’, MAS, 50 (2), 2016, pp. 675–​717. 23 David A. Washbrook, ‘Law, state and agrarian society in colonial India’, MAS, 15 (3), 1981, pp. 649–​721.

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The emergence of the informal sector 24 The continued importance of middlemen forms a central concern in literature on artisanal industries, which will be reviewed subsequently as well as in the larger literature on ‘informalisation’ of industrial labour; for the latter, see, for instance, Jan Breman, At Work in the Informal Economy in India: A Perspective from the Bottom Up (New Delhi: OUP, 2013). On the centrality of the question of middlemen and its ambiguities in late colonial Indian politics, see, for instance, Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics, 1931–​1939: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge: CUP, 1985). 25 David Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (New Delhi: OUP, 1996); see also Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Economic dislocation in nineteenth century eastern UP: Some implications of the decline of artisanal industries in colonial India’, Occasional Paper 37 (Kolkata: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 1981). 26 David W. Rudner, ‘Bankers’ trust and the culture of banking among the Nattukottai Chettiars of colonial south India’, MAS, 23 (3), 1989, pp. 417–​58; Marina Martin, ‘Hundi/​Hawala: The problem of definition’, MAS, 43 (4), 2009, pp. 909–​37; Thomas A. Timberg and Chandrasekar V. Aiyar, ‘Informal credit markets in India’, EPW, 15 (5/​7), 1980, pp. 279–​302. 27 Sebastian Schwecke, ‘A tangled jungle of disorderly transactions? The production of a monetary outside in a north Indian town’, MAS, 52 (4), 2018, pp. 1375–​419; idem, ‘The artifice of trust: Reputational and procedural registers of trust in north Indian “informal” finance’, in: Gandhi, Harriss-​White, Haynes, and idem, Rethinking Markets in Modern India, pp. 147–​78. 28 For instance: Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-​colonial Capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007). 29 A workshop or small factory. 30 Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times: India, 1880s to 1950s (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), 217. 31 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal, 1890–​1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–​1940 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994). The debate centred on the importance of organisational forms of labour linked to community, with Chakrabarty’s work opening the discipline of South Asian labour history to the inclusion of organisational forms beyond simplistic conceptions of the working class. Chandavakar’s response, in turn, provided an opening to reintegrate community practices within the industrial workforce with class conceptions. 32 Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1987); Jonathan Parry, ‘Company and contract labour in a central Indian steel plant’, Economy and Society, 42 (3), 2013, pp. 348–​74. 33 Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). 34 Douglas E. Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants, and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–​1960 (Cambridge: CUP, 2012). 35 Idem, ‘Advertising and the history of South Asia, 1880–​1950’, History Compass, 13 (8), 2015, pp. 361–​ 74; idem, Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy, and Haruka Yanigasawa (eds.), Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 2010). 36 Karuna Dietrich Wielenga, ‘Repertoires of resistance: The handloom weavers of south India, c.1800–​ 1960s’, International Review of Social History, 61 (3), 2016, pp. 423–​58.

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12 INDIAN BIG BUSINESS UNDER THE COMPANY AND THE RAJ Claude Markovits

Introduction To start with definitional problems, both ‘Indian’ and ‘big’ are problematic terms. The question arises whether by ‘Indian’ we mean only businesses owned by people of Indian ethnicity (whatever the exact definition of this ethnicity, which is far from being unproblematic either) or include also those owned by people of other ethnicities, whether European, Chinese, Armenian, Jewish, etc., who happened to be domiciled in India. The choice made here is pragmatic: I treat as ‘Indian’ all businesses owned by people domiciled in India and exclude only those owned by people domiciled abroad. For instance, tea companies owned by London-​or Glasgow-​based firms are excluded, while jute mills owned by India-​based managing agencies, although their principals were generally Scots, are considered ‘Indian’, in contrast to those directly owned by Dundee-​based firms, which are treated as ‘foreign’. The question of size is even more problematic, given the paucity of reliable statistical information on assets and incomes of firms. It is not possible to define with enough precision a threshold beyond which a business can be defined as ‘big’. It is easier, in fact, to define what was not big business than what did correspond to that category. The myriad small traders and moneylenders who represented by far the bulk, in demographic terms, of the Indian capitalist class –​the universe of the so-​called ‘bazaar’ –​were, obviously, not part of big business. On the other hand, major traders, financiers, and industrialists, by definition a tiny elite, represented its core. But some factory owners, traders, and financiers, who occupied a sort of middling position, are susceptible to being included in our category of big business. Another definitional problem concerns Indian businessmen with operations outside India, a significant category whose exclusion would be, I feel, damaging. Most of them were domiciled in India and operated through branches situated abroad that were often managed by relatives. Having broadly delineated the field of our enquiry, we can turn to the question of origins.

On the genealogy of Indian big business This is another disputed question. Did Indian big business develop during the colonial era, or did its existence precede the advent of colonialism? Two different views emerge from a rapid 156

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survey of the existing literature, which is not very abundant. Those authors holding broadly Weberian1 or orthodox Marxist2 views pointed to the impossibility for capitalism to develop in India prior to the British conquest because of the lack of certain institutional features necessary to its flourishing, such as well-​regulated markets for land, labour, and capital, and –​above all –​ the absence of a legal apparatus protecting private property and permitting the rapid settlement of disputes. They often connected this lack to specific traits of Indian society, such as the caste system, which they thought inimical to capitalism because of the barriers it erected between social groups, preventing the widespread circulation of ideas and techniques throughout society. They characterised the precolonial Islamicate regimes, such as the Mughal Empire, as predatory and therefore an obstacle to capital accumulation in private hands. We are also reminded of Dutch historian Jacob van Leur’s well-​known (if somewhat outdated) characterisation of Asian traders in general as ‘peddlers’,3 not so much because of the size of their operations (which could be, in fact, quite large) as because they were involved in a multitude of ‘spot’ transactions, necessitating their physical presence, which contrasted with the kind of centralised long-​distance commercial transactions in which European trading companies were involved. The contrast was perhaps not as big as van Leur thought it to be, and some later authors pointed to the development in Mughal India of a layer of ‘portfolio capitalists’4 who combined business and politics in ways that were not that different from those of the European trading companies. There were obviously big businessmen in India prior to colonialism, men such as Virji Vohra (c.1590–​c.1670s), the major seventeenth-​century Surat trader singled out by Ashin Das Gupta in his study of that port city,5 even if the question of the existence of a proper capitalism must remain in abeyance. There are even a few cases of long-​term continuity in family business between the Mughal and colonial eras: the most well known is that of Ahmedabad mill owner and Gandhi supporter Kasturbhai Lalbhai (1894–​1980), who could trace his ancestry back to one Shantidas Zaveri, ‘jeweller’ at the court of Mughal emperors Jahangir and Shah Jahan.6 Recently Tirthankar Roy has argued that the existence in precolonial India of a specific system of business organisation that he called a ‘guild’ system, largely based on the ties of kinship and caste, compensated for the absence of a commercial law, as it allowed disputes to be settled through the internal mechanisms of arbitration that functioned within the said guilds, thus making ‘spot’ transactions a relatively efficient way of doing business.7 His rather positive view of the economic outcomes of the caste system, even masked under the term of guild, set him at odds with a whole strand in the literature, but is not without merit, as the role of caste has remained a long-​term fixture in the history of Indian capitalism.8 He further argued that the introduction into India of British commercial law did not have the positive consequences generally outlined in standard narratives, because it was combined with the creation in the late eighteenth century of a hybrid system of private law known as Hindu law that permitted Hindu businessmen (who represented by far the biggest segment of indigenous business) to actually escape the declarative obligations contained in British commercial law through the simple device of registering their firms as ‘Hindu joint families’.9 The protection given by that law to the maintenance of undivided family property favoured opacity and the non-​disclosure of assets. For Roy, the mixing of these two legal regimes resulted in ‘monstrously’ inefficient outcomes that hampered the smooth development of indigenous business in colonial India. At this stage, the colonial transition and its effect on indigenous business deserve a closer look.

Indigenous business and the colonial transition, c.1757–​1850 In a way that is only superficially paradoxical, sectors of Indian business were very much complicit in the advent of British domination. The case of Bengal, the ‘British bridgehead’,10 is 157

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significant: without the participation of the Jagat Seths, the Marwari financiers who were the bankers of the nawabs of Bengal, in the coup organised by part of the Bengal establishment against the Nawab Siraj-​ud-​Daula in 1757, the East India Company (EIC) would not have been able to gain victory at Plassey and to become dominant in the richest province of India. The fact that the two main generals of Siraj had been bought with the Seths’ money and deserted the field in the middle of the battle enormously facilitated the task for Robert Clive. It is not that the Seths particularly desired the advent of British rule –​which resulted, in fact, in their losing their dominant position in the economy of Bengal, as the finances of the province fell into the hands of agents of the East India Company –​but they undoubtedly helped it in a crucial way. In the rest of India, the EIC remained heavily dependent on the advances of indigenous bankers till the end of the 1810s. In Bombay, in particular, the constant transfer of the funds from Bengal necessary to keep that deficit province solvable was handled by Surat-​based bankers operating in close coordination with bankers in Benares, then the main financial hub in India. This closeness led historian Lakshmi Subramanian to talk of a period of ‘Anglo-​Bania’ rule in western India,11 a view that was contested by Italian historian Michelguglielmo Torri.12 It was only around 1820 that the Company was able to emancipate itself from too close a dependence on indigenous bankers through the setting up of treasuries that provided it with the funds needed for the financing of its military and administrative operations. Deprived of this link to the state, indigenous bankers entered a process of decline that was gradual. The creation of presidency banks, first in Calcutta (1806–​9), followed by Bombay (1840) and Madras (1843), tended to accelerate that decline, as these official banks came to play a central role in the functioning of the money market. Increasingly, indigenous bankers were reduced to financing small traders and agriculturists.13 The 1830s saw a major attempt by Indians to develop ‘modern’ business enterprises, however. The central figure there was Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–​1846), belonging to a famous family of Bengali zamindars; he created with a British partner, William Carr, the firm of Carr Tagore,14 which invested in an array of enterprises (indigo farms, coal mines, steamship companies) that were successful for a while but were devastated, after his death, by the 1848 collapse of the Union Bank, which had been closely linked to Carr Tagore. The crisis affected in different ways the British and Indian partners of the firm: whereas the former escaped relatively unscathed, the latter were literally ruined, and most of the enterprises they had created were transferred to British businessmen, thus bringing to a disastrous end this first flourishing of Indian big business. One field in which Indian businessmen were successful and accumulated significant fortunes was the China trade, in which Parsis were the dominant element. Parsi traders, who had moved from Surat to Bombay in the 1740s, started frequenting the China coast from 1756 onwards, selling Indian cottons and buying Chinese silks. When, in the 1770s, the East India Company started promoting sales of Indian opium to China, in defiance of an imperial edict prohibiting the sale of the drug, so as to avoid sending too much species to China in payment for its increasing purchases of tea, the Parsi China merchants stepped in as major intermediaries. They owned ships, built in the Parsi-​owned Wadia shipyards in Bombay, in which part of the opium was carried from India to China, and they often financed British opium traders.15 In 1839, when the Chinese authorities moved against the trade, leading to the First Opium War (1841–​ 42), there were more Parsis than Britons resident in Canton. After the ‘opening’ of China following the British victory in the war, the Parsi role in the trade only increased: the most famous Parsi opium trader, Sir Jamsetji Jejeebhoy (the first baronet: 1783–​1859), is reported as having supplied in the 1850s one-​third of the opium lying in the Canton warehouses of the great British firm that dominated the trade, Jardine Matheson.16 Many fortunes were made in 158

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this trade by Indian businessmen. Apart from Parsis, there were also Gujaratis and Marwaris actively involved in the trade in Malwa opium, produced in the princely states of central India and exported to China via a circuit that remained, till the early 1840s, outside EIC control.17 The colonial transition was thus marked by an ambiguous outcome for Indian businessmen: although bankers, after having largely underwritten it, tended to be losers, others did benefit by it. With the opening of a new phase in the economic history of colonial India, the same pattern would tend to repeat itself.

Indian big business in the high imperial era, c.1850–​1914 The 1850s were marked by an upsurge in the economy of India, following three decades of relative stagnation. A number of innovations coincided to usher in a new phase: a railway network started to be built from 1853, with a positive impact on the costs of internal transportation, facilitating the transit of goods from the hinterlands to ports that, following the abolition of the Acts of Navigation in 1849, were open to vessels of all nations without restrictions; and a Company law was passed in 1854 that permitted the creation of joint-​stock companies with limited liability,18 facilitating the development of modern industries. The mid-​1850s saw the quasi-​simultaneous foundation of the first mechanised cotton mill in Bombay by Parsi trader Cowasji Davar (1854) and of the first jute mill in Calcutta by British entrepreneur George Acland (1855). The start of a modern cotton textile industry, coming after a few aborted attempts, was particularly significant, as it appeared set to reverse a trend of decline in India’s textile production, which had started around 1800 and had led to India becoming, in 1843, the biggest importer of British cotton cloth. The first mills were founded by traders who met with increasing competition on the cotton market from British and other European firms (such as the Swiss firm Volkart Brothers)19 and were trying to diversify. This proved a shrewd move, as, in the following decade, the cotton market passed through extraordinary turbulence. The start of the American Civil War in 1861 led to a worldwide shortage of cotton, of which some Indian operators took advantage to finance development of the crop in the Deccan. For a few years they sold cotton to Britain at very high prices and made enormous profits. But, when the American Civil War came to an end in 1865, the boom was –​predictably –​followed by a bust in Bombay, in which many were ruined.20 On the other hand, the textile market proved resilient, and provided regular profits. Given the dominant position occupied by British cloth producers on the Indian domestic market, however, thanks to a dense distribution network in which Marwari traders from Rajasthan played a growing role,21 the new textile mills tended to specialise in the spinning of yarn for sale to artisanal weavers rather than in the weaving of cloth for sale to Indian consumers. This was not an expanding market, though, as artisanal production was rather stagnant. But in 1873 a new market opened to the Bombay mills in China,22 where the artisanal production of cloth was still buoyant, and where Indian yarn benefited from an advantage over British yarn, the rupee being a silver currency like the Chinese tael while the pound was a gold currency, and silver constantly depreciating in relation to gold, thus making imports from India very competitive on the Chinese market. From the 1870s the cotton mill industry developed in a regular fashion, through the constant ploughing back of profits rather than through recourse to a capital market that was still underdeveloped, and mills were erected outside Bombay in Ahmedabad, which became the second centre of the cotton textile industry, in Coimbatore in south India, in Cawnpore in northern India, and in a few other localities.23 In Ahmedabad, although the first mill was founded by a Brahman, Ranchodlal Chhotalal, the industry attracted capital and entrepreneurship from members of Hindu and Jain bania families, often owners of trading and financial firms who invested in the industry as a way of diversifying. 159

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The early twentieth century saw the beginning of a reorientation of the industry towards producing more cloth for the domestic market. Growing competition in China from Chinese and Japanese mills led to a fall in export sales of yarn, and the development of the Swadeshi movement against the partition of Bengal from 1904 to 1907 was accompanied by a widespread campaign for the use of domestically produced khadi (man-​made cloth) rather than imported cloth. The Indian textile industry took advantage of it to sell machine-​made cloth as khadi, and in 1914 its share in the domestic cloth market reached 20 per cent, as against 20 per cent for artisanal cloth and 60per cent for imports.24 Remarkably for a colonial country, the industry was dominated by Indian capitalists, the Parsis, prominent at the outset,25 having been joined by entrepreneurs belonging to various other communities (Gujarati Hindus and Muslims in Bombay, Jains in Ahmedabad, Naidus in Coimbatore, etc.). There were also British-​owned mills (in Cawnpore in particular), and some belonging to the Baghdadi Jewish family the Sassoons, but Indians clearly dominated an industry that, by 1914, with 300 mills employing some 260,000 workers, was the sixth largest in the world (after those of Britain, the United States, Germany, France and Russia) and the largest in Asia (although Japan was catching up swiftly).26 The case of the cotton textile industry was in clear contrast to that of the jute industry, which was dominated by British entrepreneurs, mostly Scots. The industry started expanding rapidly in the 1870s when a few industrialists from Dundee, the Scottish city where the British industry was concentrated, set up mills in Calcutta to take advantage of the proximity of the raw material (jute was mostly grown in east Bengal, present-​day Bangladesh, and carried by steamer to Calcutta) and of the cheapness of labour. Their example was followed by some of the big Calcutta managing agencies, of which the principals were often Scots, and in 1914 there were 100 mills employing 200,000 workers around Calcutta.27 India’s jute industry had overtaken that in Dundee as the largest in the world and exported most of its production to the ‘new countries’, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina, where it was used mainly to bag wheat and other agricultural products for export to Europe. The industry was controlled by British capitalists28 (although part of the shares in the mills were owned by Indian shareholders), but the jute trade was largely in the hands of Marwari traders, who advanced money to the cultivators and bought the crop from them, pressed it into bales, and conveyed it to Calcutta.29 They fought with the British mill owners over prices, and, from 1907, resorted to fatka (futures trading), a form of speculation that tended to disrupt the market. The domination of British capital was uncontested in other branches, including in the crucial financial sector, where a few mostly British exchange banks had a quasi-​monopoly over the financing of India’s external trade; the collapse, in the early 1880s, of the last great indigenous banking house of northern India, the so-​called ‘Mathura Seths’, was emblematic of that trend. It even provided the background for the first Hindi-​language novel, Pariksaguru, by Srinivasdas (1882).30 The tea industry, which developed from the 1870s in Assam and Bengal, was controlled by big London-​and Glasgow-​based firms that employed British managers, known as planters. Coal mining, which developed quickly from the 1880s, when the railways started using coal instead of wood to power the locomotives, was also British-​dominated, though there were some Indian-​owned mines. The engineering industry was similarly dominated by British firms, but in some other industries, such as cement and chemicals, Indian entrepreneurs made their mark. The cement industry was pioneered by the firm of Khataus in Bombay, and, during the Swadeshi movement, Bengali chemist Dr Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861–​ 1944)31 founded the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceuticals Products Company, which became the largest in that sector. The most remarkable example of Indian entrepreneurship was the foundation in 1907 of the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) by the sons of the great entrepreneur Jamsetji 160

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Nusserwanji Tata (1839–​1904), who had created, starting in the late 1860s, a diversified business group.32 He had conceived the project, in the face of many obstacles, but died before he could see it realised. When large iron ore deposits were discovered in eastern India in the 1890s, not very far from the Raniganj coalfield, Jamsetji had seen the prospects for the creation of an Indian iron and steel industry that could make the country self-​sufficient. He had benefited from the support of the secretary of state for India, Lord George Hamilton, who had perceived the strategic advantage Indian steel production could represent in the event of a conflict cutting communications with Britain, and overlooked the objections of British steel producers afraid of losing a profitable export market for their products.33 But the project could come to fruition only thanks to the wave of patriotic enthusiasm that swept the Indian middle classes in the wake of the Swadeshi movement. When the Tatas called on the public in Bombay to subscribe to most of the shares in the new company, the response was overwhelming, and the shares were sold out in 48 hours. It took another four years for the mill to be erected in the jungles of Bihar, in a location equidistant from the coalfield and the iron mines, where a new town, called Jamshedpur, was hastily built to house the workers and managers.34 The plans of the factory were designed by a firm of American consultants, and technicians were hired both in the United States and in Germany, giving the place a cosmopolitan character (some Chinese carpenters were also recruited) that was unique in the India of that period. The first steel rolled out of the mill in 1913, but the company faced the problem of weak demand for its products, mostly rails, given that the railway network had been practically completed by then.35 It was saved from bankruptcy by the start of the First World War. But the war had other momentous consequences for Indian big business, inaugurating a new era.

Indian big business in the late colonial era, 1914–​47 The First World War, although it created massive economic disruption that adversely affected the Indian masses, with a severe bout of inflation leading to a considerable rise in the price of foodstuffs, proved a boon for Indian big business. The threat of German submarines and a shortage of shipping led to a fall in imports of manufactures from the United Kingdom, of which Indian industrialists took advantage. The cotton textile industry was able to increase its cloth production by 50 per cent during the war years, thus expanding its market share at the expense of British mills. The Tata steel mills benefited from a big contract with the British army for the supply of rails destined for the building of a new railway line in Mesopotamia (Iraq), meant to transport men and materials from Basrah to Baghdad as an essential aid to the military operations against the Turks. The Tatas were able to sell 200,000 tons of rails to the army, which allowed the company to avoid looming bankruptcy and break even.36 The jute industry also received large orders from the military authorities, jute bags being in great use in the trenches, and made record profits, as did the Marwari traders who sold it the raw material. Some of these traders made a fortune through speculation on the stock exchange and were able to purchase jute mills, putting an end to the British monopoly in that industry.37 The Tatas, on the other hand, went through difficult times, as the ending of war orders, to which was added the flooding of the Indian steel market by producers from Belgium and Luxembourg, resulted in a dramatic fall in profits at TISCO. Bankruptcy loomed again, but the firm was saved in 1924 by the combination of a large loan from the maharajah of Gwalior and of the passing by the Indian Legislative Assembly of a Steel Protection Bill that imposed high tariffs on imported non-​British steel, thus directly targeting the Belgian and Luxembourg exporters. The Tatas also pioneered the production of hydroelectricity with the building of power stations making use of the denivelation of the Western Ghats, providing cheap power to 161

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the Bombay cotton mills. The Bombay cotton textile industry, after having made record profits during the war years, was hit by a post-​war slump, however, and ceased to expand after 1922. It suffered particularly from increased competition from Japanese mills, which had lower production costs and made inroads into the market for ordinary cloth. The industry, which benefited, after the war, from some tariff protection following the granting to India of fiscal autonomy under the 1919 Montagu–​Chelmsford political reforms, continued to grow elsewhere, however, particularly in Ahmedabad, where mills tended to specialise in higher-​quality cloth and increased their share of the market at the expense of Lancashire. The jute industry also went through good times. Other industries that expanded in the 1920s were the cement and chemical industries.38 The period was also marked by the creation of a new set of private ‘modern’ Indian banks, which tended to diminish British dominance of the financial sector. The world depression of the early 1930s, which hit India with particular force,39 had some positive outcomes for Indian business, however. The cotton textile industry benefited from the boycott of British textiles linked to the Civil Disobedience movement from 1930 to 1934, and, despite being exposed to increasing Japanese competition, expanded its share of the domestic cloth market to 60 per cent in 1939, as against 30 per cent for artisanal production and 10 per cent only for imports.40 The main beneficiaries were mill owners outside Bombay, especially those in Ahmedabad. The adoption of measures of tariff protection for a certain number of industries, though meant mostly to help state finances hit by the fall in land revenue, permitted the development of new industrial sectors. The most spectacular case was that of the sugar industry. Although India grew a lot of sugarcane, most of the local crop was used in the production of gur (molasses) or khandsari, a kind of sugar refined by an artisanal process. Factory-​ made sugar was mostly imported from the Dutch East Indies, and there were only a few mills in India.41 The passing in 1936 of the Sugar Protection Act, which imposed high custom duties on imported sugar, led to a sudden mushrooming of mills in the United Provinces and Bihar. Most were created by Marwari entrepreneurs, among whom the Birlas and the Dalmias (newcomers to business) were prominent. Such unrestricted growth led to overproduction, and in 1937 a cartel was formed to regulate the market and avoid overproduction. Other industries that benefited from a degree of tariff protection were the cement, paper, and match industries. In cement, the major Indian producers created in 1936 a combine that took the name of Associated Cement Companies (ACC) and occupied a clearly dominant position in a market that was expanding because of a shift by builders away from ‘traditional’ materials towards greater use of concrete. The paper industry, which benefited from an increase in domestic consumption linked to a (slight) increase in literacy, was also dominated by a few Marwari capitalists, with the Birlas again in a prominent position. In the match industry, by contrast, it was mostly the Swedish Match Company, the largest in the world, that offset the negative effect of the tariff by increasing the production of its Indian factories and gained market share at the expense of imports from Japan.42 Some other international companies, such as the Anglo-​ Dutch Unilever, the British Dunlop, and British American Tobacco, created subsidiaries in India to offset the effect of increased duties on imported products.43 The 1930s were thus a mixed bag for Indian big business, with some significant advances, but also growing exposure to international competition –​paradoxically, an outcome of a growing trend of protectionism. The Second World War saw complex developments. Industrialists benefited from war orders, but were also subjected to strict constraints, as a system of war economy was set up by the authorities, India having become a front-​line country. Textile producers tried to give priority to supplying the civilian market over providing materials for defence but had to fight the government over the allocation of machinery and raw materials. The Ahmedabad mill owners closed their mills for several weeks at the time of the Quit India movement (August to 162

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September 1942), which resulted in large-​scale disorders and disruption to the economy. Some new industries were set up specifically to supply war-​related materials, such as aluminium and trucks. There were also the beginnings of aircraft production. Profits were high during the war years, and the new confidence felt by Indian big business in the future of the country found expression in the publication in the mid-​1940s by a group of prominent businessmen of a plan for the economic development of India, which became known as the ‘Bombay Plan’44 and served as a blueprint for the economic policy of independent India during the first post-​ independence decade. Indian big business reacted in various ways to the Partition of British India between India and Pakistan. Some pointed to the irrationality, from an economic point of view, of partitioning the country and predicted dire consequences. Others, such as G.D. Birla, took a stand in favour of Partition as necessary to provide a strong central government capable of pursuing an ambitious economic agenda. Indian big business took advantage of a retreat of British capital following independence to strengthen its position in branches that had been British-​dominated such as the jute industry, coal mining, and even, albeit to a lesser extent, tea plantations. The existence of a strong indigenous capitalist class differentiated India from most other colonial countries but could create problems in relation to the agenda of social transformation promoted by large sections of the Indian National Congress. In the last section, I focus on the profiles of some prominent businessmen.

A profile of Indian big business Indian big business was dominated by a few family-​based groups. The reasons why the family remained the basic organisational prop of big business throughout the entire colonial period are not difficult to fathom. Basically, they had to do with the relatively undeveloped character of the capital market, which, in its turn, was linked to the weakness of the legal regulatory framework of economic life. The general level of trust was low, and, as a result, businessmen tended to favour dealing with members of their family or close kin. Even for the provision of working capital, as the mostly British-​controlled banks were reticent to extend loans to Indian industrialists, the latter had to rely on community resources; in Ahmedabad it was done through a system of fixed-​term deposits that were popular with local banias. Few companies went public, TISCO being a prominent exception, and the private limited companies were generally tightly held by members of the owner’s family. Most business groups were organised as managing agencies, an institutional form originally created by British businessmen that allowed a few people to control several companies.45 The system has often been described as detrimental to ordinary shareholders, because the agents were generally remunerated by a fixed commission, and not a percentage of the profits. Some operators no doubt specialised in asset stripping, but that was not the most frequent case. Most managing agents proved to be fairly competent at running the companies they controlled, and there was a strong incentive to maintain a constant rate of profit, as companies developed mostly through the ploughing back of profits. As a result, few dividends were distributed to ordinary shareholders, the controlling families relying mostly on the managing agency contract for their own remuneration. Of the business families that rose to prominence during the colonial period, the two most prominent were no doubt the Tatas and the Birlas. A comparative look at them offers an interesting study in contrast. The Tatas were issued from a lineage of Zoroastrian priests originally based in Navsari in Gujarat, while the Birlas were Hindu Marwari banias of Maheshwari caste from the locality of Pilani in Rajasthan. Both original founders, Nusserwanji Tata (1822–​ 86) and Shivnarain Birla (1838–​1910), moved from their respective localities to Bombay around the middle of the nineteenth century and were involved in finance. Nusserwanji, in association 163

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with a few other Parsi businessmen, founded a firm that, after having gone through difficult times, had a lucky break in 1868 when it earned a lot of money in providing supplies to a military expedition to Abyssinia. He gave half his gains to his son Jamsetji, who had been involved for a few years in the opium trade in China, and with that money bought in 1869 a cotton mill in Bombay. He sold it after two years with a profit and went to Britain to make a study of the textile industry. On his return, he conceived the plan for a modern textile mill specialising in high-​quality cloth, which he located in Nagpur, in the heart of the Deccan cotton belt, saving on transport costs. It was inaugurated in 1877, and, as it coincided with the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, he called it the Empress Mills. It was to prove particularly profitable, and, with the profits gained, Jamsetji purchased two more mills. Then he embarked on the project of a steel mill, and other ambitious schemes that were realised by his sons after his death. In the meantime, Shivnarain pursued an obscure career in Bombay, while his son Baldevdas (1864–​1957) was put in charge of a branch in Calcutta, which did marginally better. It was Baldevdas’ son, Ganshyamdas (known as G.D.: 1894–​1983), who, starting in 1908, at the age of 14, as a jute and gunny broker, made a fortune during the First World War on the stock exchange and emerged in 1919 as one of Calcutta’s richest men, founding the firm of Birla Bros with his three brothers.46 It became one of the largest in the jute trade, gaining a slot on the London Jute Exchange, and thanks to the profits gained in jute, was able to invest in cotton, sugar, and paper, thus becoming a large diversified conglomerate. The trajectories of the two groups were quite different. The Tatas, starting with a diversified portfolio that included trading and real estate, tended, from the time of the founding of TISCO, to follow a kind of industrial logic, with steel leading to tinplate, and at a later stage to truck manufacturing, and cotton leading to electricity production to power the mills; the logic followed by the Birlas was more purely financial, the development of the group being basically opportunistic, with advantage taken of tariff protection to enter new branches. The Birlas controlled their companies tightly, holding most of the shares, while the Tatas relied much more on their management expertise to retain control.47 Politically, the two also followed different courses.48 G.D. Birla, who developed nationalist sympathies at an early age, was one of the major financiers of Congress and owned a newspaper, the Hindustan Times, that was openly pro-​nationalist; he got himself elected to the Legislative Assembly, where he took pro-​nationalist positions while remaining an independent. By contrast, the Tatas tended to be loyalists, like most members of the Parsi community, and openly rallied to the nationalist cause only on the eve of independence.

Notes 1 Morris D. Morris, ‘Values as an obstacle to economic growth in South Asia: An historical survey’, Journal of Economic History, 27 (4), 1967, pp. 588–​607. 2 Irfan Habib, ‘Potentialities of capitalistic development in the economy of Mughal India’, Journal of Economic History, 29 (1), 1969, pp. 32–​78. 3 Jacob C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (Bandung: Van Hoeve, 1955). 4 Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Portfolio capitalists and the economy of early modern India’, IESHR, 25 (4), 1988, pp. 401–​24. 5 Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat 1700–​1752 (Wiesbaden: Fritz Steiner Verlag, 1979). 6 Dwijendra Tripathi, The Dynamics of a Tradition: Kasturbhai Lalbhai and His Entrepreneurship (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981). 7 Tirthankar Roy, Company of Kinsmen: Enterprise and Community in South Asian History 1700–​1940 (New Delhi: OUP, 2010).

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Indian big business 8 On this question, see David W. Rudner, Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); and James Scoville, ‘Discarding facts: The economics of caste’, Review of Development Economics, 7 (3), 2003, pp. 378–​91. 9 See Swamy Roy, Law and the Economy in Colonial India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); and Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 10 Peter J. Marshall, The New Cambridge History of India, part II, vol. 2, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India 1740–​1828 (Cambridge: CUP, 1987). 11 Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Banias and the British: The role of indigenous credit in the process of imperial expansion in western India in the second half of the eighteenth century’, MAS, 21 (3), 1987, pp. 473–​ 510; idem, ‘Seths and sahibs: Negotiated relationships between indigenous capital and the East India Company’, in: H.V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid (eds.), Britain’s Oceanic Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), pp. 311–​39. 12 Michelguglielmo Torri, ‘Trapped inside the colonial order: The Hindu bankers of Surat and their business world during the second half of the eighteenth century’, MAS, 25 (2), 1991, pp. 367–​401. 13 A.K. Bagchi, Money and Credit in Indian History since Medieval Times (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2002). 14 Blair Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976). 15 On the opium trade, see M. Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China (Cambridge: CUP, 1951); and Carl Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750–​1950 (London: Routledge, 1999). 16 Asiya Siddiqi, ‘The business world of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy’, IESHR, 19 (3/​4), 1982, pp. 301–​24. 17 See Amar Farooqi, Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the Politics of Opium (New Delhi: Age International, 1998); and the critique in Claude Markovits, ‘The political economy of opium smuggling in early nineteenth century India: Leakage or resistance?’, in: Richard M. Eaton, Munis D. Faruqui, David Gilmartin, and Sunil Kumar (eds.), Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History: Essays in Honour of John F. Richards (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), pp. 81–​103. 18 R.S. Rungta, Rise of Business Corporations in India 1851–​1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 1970). 19 Christof Dejung, ‘Transcending the empire: Western merchant houses and local capital in the Indian cotton trade’, in: Ulbe Bosma, Anthony Webster, and Jaime de Melo (eds.), Commodities, Ports and Asian Maritime Trade since 1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 198–​217. 20 Sven Beckert, ‘Emancipation and empire: Reconstructing a worldwide web of cotton production in the age of the American Civil War’, American Historical Review, 109 (5), 2004, pp. 1405–​438; Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), 211–​37. 21 On the dominance of the Marwaris in the cloth trade in Bihar, see Anand A. Yang, Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Bihar (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 257. On the Marwaris in general, see Thomas A. Timberg, The Marwaris: From Traders to Industrialists (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978). 22 Morris D. Morris, ‘The growth of large-​scale industry to 1947’, in: Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, c.1757–​c.1970 (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), pp. 553–​676. 23 S.D. Mehta, The Cotton Mills of India 1854–​1954 (Bombay: Millowners’ Association, 1954); Howard Spodek, ‘The Manchesterisation of Ahmedabad’, Economic Weekly, 17 (2), 1965, pp. 483–​90. 24 A.K. Bagchi, Private Investment in India 1900–​1939 (Cambridge: CUP, 1972), 226–​7, tab. 7.1. 25 A.V. Desai, ‘Origins of Parsi enterprise’, IESHR, 5 (4), 1968, pp. 307–​17. 26 Douglas A. Farnie and David J. Jeremy (eds.), The Fibre that Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspectives, 1600–​1990s (Oxford: OUP, 2004). 27 D.R. Wallace, The Romance of Jute: A Short History of the Calcutta Jute Mill Industry 1855–​1927 (London: W. Thacker, 1928). 28 Gordon T. Stewart, Jute and Empire: the Calcutta Jute-​Wallahs and the Landscapes of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 29 Omkar Goswami, Industry, Trade and Peasant Society: The Jute Economy of Eastern India 1900–​1947 (New Delhi: OUP, 1991). 30 A.S. Kalsi, ‘Pariksaguru (1882): The first Hindi novel and the Hindu elite’, MAS, 26 (4), 1992, pp. 763–​90. 31 Benjamin Zachariah, ‘The chemistry of a Bengali life: Acharya/​Sir Prafulla Chandra Roy in his times and places’, in: K. Rehberg (ed.), Soziale Ungleichheit, kulturelle Unterschiede: Verhandlungen des 32

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Claude Markovits Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in München, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Vert, 2006), pp. 4316–​32. 32 Frank Richard Harris, Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata: A Chronicle of His Life (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1958). 33 Mircea Raianu, ‘The incorporation of India: The Tata business firm between empire and nation, c.1860–​1970’, Enterprise and Society, 19 (4), 2018, pp. 816–​25. 34 Idem, ‘ “A mass of anomalies”: Land, law and sovereignty in an Indian company town’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 60 (2), 2018, pp. 367–​89. 35 Gilbert Slater, ‘The steel industry of India’, Economica, 13, 1925, pp. 62–​8. 36 C.M. Lala, The Creation of Wealth: A Tata Story (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1981). 37 Omkar Goswami, ‘Then came the Marwaris: Some aspects of the changes in the pattern of industrial control in eastern India’, IESHR, 22 (3), 1985, pp. 225–​49. 38 For a general survey of the development of manufacturing industry, see Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘The rise of modern industry in colonial India’, in: Latika Chaudhary, Bisnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy (eds.), A New Economic History of Colonial India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 67–​83. 39 Dietmar Rothermund, India in the Great Depression 1929–​1939 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992). 40 Bagchi, Private Investment in India, 226–​7, tab. 7.1. 41 Ulbe Bosma, The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production 1770–​2010 (Cambridge: CUP, 2013). 42 Klas Markensten, Foreign Investment and Development: Swedish Companies in India (Lund: Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies, 1972). 43 B.R. Tomlinson, ‘Foreign private investment in India, 1920–​1960’, MAS, 15 (3), pp. 655–​77. 44 Purshottamdas Thakurdas (ed.), A Plan of Economic Development for India, 2 vols. (Bombay: Commercial Printing Press, 1945). 45 P.S. Lokanathan, Industrial Organisation in India (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935). 46 Medha M. Kudaisya, The Life and Times of G.D. Birla (New Delhi: OUP, 2003). 47 Claude Markovits, ‘The Tata paradox’, in: Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 1996), pp. 237–​48. 48 Idem, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1930–​39: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge: CUP, 1985).

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13 REVENUE EXTRACTION IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA Hayden Bellenoit

Introduction The extraction of revenue from the Indian agricultural economy was arguably one of the most significant features of colonial rule. Starting with the East India Company’s acquisition of the right of diwan (‘chamber’, in Arabic, in Persian referring to fiscal authority) in Bengal under the Treaty of Allahabad (1765), the Company’s morphing from a commercial entity into a political sovereign was made possible by its ability to raise revenue. It was used to oil the machinery of the East India Company’s state and, later, the British Raj –​its sipahis (soldiers), law courts, and prisons. At a broader level, Indian taxation enabled the British to project power –​namely through the Indian Army –​across the world. Yet, curiously, for India’s sophisticated agrarian and concomitant social history, increased revenue extraction has been treated as largely axiomatic. It is only recently that scholars have started to examine the means through which the colonial state extracted wealth. Bhavani Raman has outlined how the emergence of an ‘attestation state’ in south India utilised recast paper as a tool of the state’s authority after the 1780s.1 Complimentary work on north India has demonstrated how the East India Company utilised extant scribes and their documentation to tax the agrarian countryside more relentlessly.2 With such recent research enriching our historical understanding, this chapter aims to give a broader overview of the origins and impact of more extractive forms of taxation in modern Indian history. The first aspect I examine is its pre-​British origins.

Precolonial origins of taxation The East India Company’s taxation regime was built upon changing and structures in landholding, fiscal practice, and governance in the eighteenth century. This was the era when semi-​ independent regional kingdoms emerged in northern (Awadh and Punjab), eastern (Bengal), western (the Marathas), and southern India (Mysore, Hyderabad). This ‘regionalisation’ of the Mughal Empire unleashed aggressive tendencies for kingdoms to increasingly raise revenue to pay for more soldiers, scribes, and various forms of cultural and religious patronage. Bengal, the Punjab, and the Maratha territories all witnessed greater revenues flowing into their government coffers. Basically put, regional treasuries became the central motors of regional state building. Importantly, this also generated more intrusive forms of taxation, paper management, DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-14

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and documentation. Although these kingdoms were derided by the British for their ‘despotism’, historians have demonstrated that they worked within particular limits. Stewart Gordon, for example, showed that the ‘predatory’ Marathas’ one-​quarter assessment (chauth) was relatively light on the peasantry.3 And Richard Barnett persuasively argued that Awadh’s revenue extraction was calibrated to be just extractive enough to prevent widespread agitation.4 Nevertheless, as eighteenth-​ century Indian kingdoms such as Bengal, Awadh, Punjab, and the Marathas became more revenue-​hungry, they pushed the envelope when it came to maximising revenue. As shown by Muzzafar Alam,5 regional rulers were increasingly taxing and documenting their agrarian holdings to build up their power bases and authorities. And much of this built upon a broader Mughal precedence, which, as documented by Irfan Habib,6 was rooted in an Indo-​Islamic administrative and cultural tradition. It was one in which the language of authority and documentation was Indian Persian (istimal-​e-​Hindustan) and the broader sensibilities of fiscalism were moored in Islamic legal jurisprudence. It was also manned overwhelmingly at the middle and lower levels by various Hindu pensmen, namely Kayasthas and to a lesser degree Khattris. In many cases, the drive to extract more revenue was also seen in the incentives kingdoms used to increase cash flows. Prepayments, for example, were often given tax rate discounts in order to fill treasuries more quickly to pay for forts, soldiers, and religious patronage. We also see the emergence of what historians have called ‘revenue farming’ (ijara), in which the rights to land could be purchased so long as the individual remitted a set amount. This increasingly ‘commercialised’ the process of eighteenth-​century Indian fiscalism and opened up landholding to large number of Indian merchant and trading families, as the late Christopher Bayly and Muzzafar Alam have illustrated.7 In a way, parts of India were already moving towards treating property as a commodity, though it did not resemble the conception brought by the British to India. These eighteenth-​ century regional kingdoms were also becoming more paper-​ driven and fiscally intense in their taxation. Historians have tended to see the Mughal Empire as ‘patrimonial-​bureaucratic’,8 but recent works have emphasised its more paper-​focused nature. The precolonial trends of revenue extraction were highly permeated by increasing documentation and non-​legalised procedure, as the maximisation of revenue went hand in hand with a commensurate form of documentation; paper and pensmen were necessary to manage the whole fiscal scaffolding. One Benares-​based Hindu scribe, Chattar Mal, described concrete methods for calculating harvests that involved documenting specific tables for the net production of seeds, wheat, and eggs.9 Documents contained a number index used to value agricultural goods by weight, which produced an early ‘archive’ of documented historical prices. Five-​year revenue contracts (bandobast-​i-​panjsala) started to become an unofficial norm. Here, vagaries in harvests had to be written down; these five-​year agreements had to be historicised and draw upon ten-​year averages. This stimulated volumes of paperwork to track and detail historical yields, all of which had to be managed by scribes, consulted by authorities, and –​in some cases –​fought over by competing parties and claims. One nineteenth-​century commentator, Muhammad Faiq, who came from the middle-​sized Muslim service gentry township of Sultanpur, noted that fiscal practice required sophisticated and accurate records that detailed who paid and when and, importantly, who was in default.10 Eighteenth-​century Indian taxation was therefore already defined by paper before the full emergence of ‘bureaucratic Raj’ under the British. Emergent kingdoms had also started to enforce payments more aggressively. This was, of course, exacerbated by the intensely competitive nature of eighteenth-​century regional politics. Sometimes military force by a faujdari (‘force commander’) was used to guarantee payment. One standard piece of advice was to bring 50 armed horsemen to ‘persuade’ defaulters to 168

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pay up.11 It was common for soldiers to physically drag a defaulter to the central government office. But this ‘fiscally informed’ violence was sensitive to rank and caste. The honourable and higher-​ranked could settle behind drawn curtains; lower-​caste cultivators and herdsmen were physically transported, however. For defaulting landowners (zamindars), soldiers could issue military threats and could even take a zamindar as collateral (asir: ‘prisoner of war’).12 Another eighteenth-​century commentator, the Bihari Kayastha Shitab Rai, argued that violence was best kept as a last resort. But it was one that had to be used as an occasional deterrent. The idea that violence was a tool of fiscal statecraft greatly coloured British perceptions about Oriental ‘despotism’, a ‘turbulent’ eighteenth century, and the need for British ‘peace’. Precolonial revenue extraction was also firmly rooted in an Islamic, specifically Hanafi, legal tradition –​already the major branch of Sunni legal thought in South Asia; Muslim sovereigns largely understood that one of their rights was to the ‘taxes on the vegetative powers of the soil’.13 And, in spite of its largely Hindu colourings and cultural syncretism (including the overwhelming staffing by non-​Muslims),14 the whole system was legally ‘Islamic’. For example, in the case of defaulting landowners, Hanafi jurisprudence did not sanction dispossession and the transfer of proprietary rights. This was even the case in revenue farming (ijara). Land was not interpreted as a strict commodity but as a nexus of relationships between individuals, who all maintained an interconnected social stability, rooted in a local community. Fiscal debt was also handled according to sharia norms. In Bihar and north India, for example, the local judge (qazi) heard cases of default in the ‘court of moral judgment’ (katcheri-​ye-​ghezah).15 Default was treated not as a legal category but as a moral barometer, which required mediation from the legally learned and the court. Taxation and local social stability were intertwined and inseparable.

The early colonial impact and changes These increasing trends of revenue extraction, higher assessments, and more relentless documentation were the foundations upon which the colonial state built itself. Agrarian taxes would fund the East India Company’s Indian empire from the very beginning. The 24 parganas that Robert Clive acquired in 1756, for example, were confirmed by the Mughal emperor according to Hanafi legal precedent. The later acquisition of the diwan of Bengal by the Company (1765) was also carried out within the traditional framework of Indo-​Islamic cultural administration. The Company also utilised the extant Persian fiscal lexicon when it started assessing and collecting revenue. Thus, the Company, at least initially, worked largely within the parameters of precolonial revenue administration. Although the Company stepped into a sophisticated and paper-​driven revenue administration, it very quickly ushered in changes that would transform the nature of Indian taxation. These early changes set the standard for revenue extraction up to the 1940s, and set the British apart from their Indian predecessors. After initially learning fiscal information and practice in Bengal from the last of the ‘late Mughal officials’, Shitab Rai and Muhammad Reza Khan, the Company rapidly cut out the constellation of intermediary officers who fortified the countrywide relationships between rulers and cultivators. Robert Clive established revenue councils in Patna and Murshidabad, and made rent rolls legal requirements to enter negotiations over taxes. Governor-​general Harry Verelst, for example, appointed European supervisors to every district of Bengal and instructed British observers to collect information beyond the standard rent rolls (hastobuds).16 He then introduced the policy of supervision in 1769, which allowed British supervisors to summon Indian subordinate collectors (amils, malguzars) and to audit records without advance notice. The disaster of the 1769 Bengal famine accelerated the 169

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Company’s drive towards fiscal centralisation. Controlling Councils of Revenue replaced the previous councils and were given ‘powers of interposition in all matters of importance’. Robert Travers demonstrated that British distrust of Reza Khan and Shitab Rai informed their ideas of inherent Indian ‘corruption’.17 This distrust was also informed by Rai’s and Khan’s insistence that cultivators and peasants should be taxed within certain limits. In a marked jettisoning of the old guard, Shitab Rai’s and Mohammad Reza Khan’s approving ‘seals’ were subject to Controlling Council approval.18 The Company centralised its authority over taxation and cut out Indian intermediaries. British collectors now presided over revenue courts (diwani adalats) and could put pressure on subordinate Indian officers and record keepers. The results can be seen in the overall numbers: within three years of Company rule starting in Bengal, the Company was collecting 68 per cent more revenue.19 The Company also made default a strictly legal category, divorcing it from its morally tempered Hanafi moorings. Defaulters could now be hauled in front of the Court of Judicature, and have their property and assets liquidated in order to recoup revenue. All these significant transformations took place within the first decade of British rule in Bengal. The Company’s fiscal hunger was unprecedented compared to its Indian predecessors. Geographically, the broader taxation patterns that originated in Bengal had a marked impact on its development farther up-​country through the Gangetic Plain. Here, the acquisition of Benares (1775) was crucial. The holy city’s revenue administration was informed by the precedents set in Bengal and, later, was amplified further north-​west via the Gangetic regions. Jonathan Duncan’s Residency (1788–​95) drew upon older officers and fiscal documents, and recast them to suit Company priorities. The Raja of Benares’s munshi, Sanbhu Lal, offered the British guidance and a paper-​based form of administration that required regular documentation of payments, receipts, and various other aspects of revenue extraction.20 These documents were quickly vacuumed up by Duncan’s office, exacerbating the overall volume of paperwork. Duncan sought records going back ten years as a starting point for new revenue negotiations. And, since a fifth of assessed holdings were locked in property disputes,21 ballooning documentation resolved uncertainty and resolved such disputes –​rendering these contested lands taxable. As in many other Indian townships, the early volume of sheer land litigation largely reflected the British drive to settle property disputes and make a maximum of land taxable. We see the beginnings of this first in Bengal, where the Company acquired fiscal sovereignty earliest. Almost immediately debt was transformed into a legal category. Defaulters were dragged before courts, and warrants were issues for arrests, particularly if they attempted to flee.22 Various old landholders and ‘evaders’ saw their properties liquidated, usually with the help of qanungos’ (‘registrars’) fiscal documents, rent rolls, and local knowledge. To the British, the extraction of revenue backed up by legal force made the difference between Oriental ‘despotism’ and ‘justice’. In the Doab regions, which encircled the kingdom of Awadh, the East India Company arguably secured some of the most profitable agricultural taxes in Asia. After these territories had come under Company rule, as a result of ceded territory from Awadh (1801) and wars with the Marathas (1803), the Company moved quickly to ‘settle’ these territories. Here, taxation was used to pacify formerly ‘rebellious’ regions and groups, and render them legally obliged to pay revenue to the Company sarkar (authority). For example, the more ‘rebellious’ conquered districts of Agra, Aligarh, Bundelkhand, and Saharanpur saw taxes skyrocket 225 per cent over the next 13 years, compared to a mere 6 per cent in the Ceded Districts, such as Allahabad, Etawah, Moradabad, and Shajahanapur.23 The Company also moved quickly to expand the scope of assessable land. It scoured through rent rolls and sanads (deeds; literally, ‘titles’) to uncover previously exempt holdings. The British tended to view holdings that were historically 170

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tax-​free, such as inam (a gift of land) and Muslim religious endowments (waqfs), as inherently ‘evasive’. This fed into how the British viewed India intermediaries with distrust and as prone to lying. And, as Bhavani Raman demonstrated, this engendered the emergence of a ‘document Raj’ that privileged paper attestation as a way of verifying ‘truth’.24 This became manifest in the early fiscal tools of the colonial state. Often using the fiscal information from rent rolls held by extant scribes, the Company ruthlessly prised open thousands of previously shielded lands from authority. To the British, who brought a more exclusive notion of state sovereignty, rent-​ free lands amounted to a ‘defrauding’ of government. Old landholders hid or destroyed records that might have exposed their holdings to taxation. But the Company quickly utilised various middling officers, such as qanungos and patwaris (village accountants), who possessed interrogating –​and sometimes compromising –​documentation. Another way the Company maximised its extracted revenue was by extending cultivation. It used the agrarian intelligence of existing scribal communities to identify drainable swamp tracts and uncultivated soils to penetrate more deeply into India’s agrarian wealth. Irfan Habib showed how the Mughals’ aggressive colonisation reclaimed wastelands after the middle of the seventeenth century.25 But the British outdid them by every measure. Drawing upon rent rolls, paperwork, and historical records, the Company identified clearable jungle tracts and wells across the Doab, which brought in British district collectors, subordinate scribes, and the broader apparatus of the state. Often at a pen stroke, tens of thousands of acres were brought within the state’s fiscal scope. In fact, in the central Doab, taxable agricultural land increased by 25 per cent within a generation after falling into Company hands. It was not just the intensity of taxation that changed; equally important were the scale and scope of the new state’s taxation prism. The Company quickly closed the gap between what was assessed and what was collected. And its ability to collect what was due became disturbingly efficient; often it was close to 99 per cent of assessed revenue that was collected, and some district collectors even managed to collect more than what was due.26 Crucially, the early colonial state ushered in a fundamental change by transforming tax debt into a strict legal category. It rapidly ‘legalised’ the whole process of revenue extraction after the 1780s. One of the Company’s most passionate defenders, John Stuart Mill, argued that India’s revenue administration needed the ‘force of a judicial decision’.27 Gone were the days of sending armed cavalry to debtors to force them to pay up. Under the Company, using violence to collect the sovereign’s due ‘was not tolerated’.28 Instead, debtors faced British magistrates, who viewed them as individually liable legal subjects removed from the social context in which they operated. Moreover, the nature of the adjudicating documents used to try debtors changed. Rent rolls and historical data used to frame assessments became ‘state property’ and official legal documents. Previously they had been privately held by middle-​ and lower-​tier revenue officials; now, though, jamabandis (assessment agreements), qabooliyats (payment agreements), and hastobuds (historical rent rolls) were transformed into legally adjudicating documents referenced by British magistrates and collectors. This reflected the new legal culture the British had brought to India, which saw legal sovereignty as exclusive to the state, and which privileged written knowledge above mnemonic and ‘informal’ forms. As part of this process, the British also divorced fiscalism from its Hanafi/​Islamic legal moorings. Suspicious of ‘Moorish jurisdiction’, the Company’s new taxation regime quickly jettisoned many precolonial legal underpinnings of revenue extraction. This was seen particularly in the case of default. In Hanafi mulki (‘possession’, which the British interpreted as ‘proprietary’) law, defaulters could rarely be deprived of holdings even if they had fled. The guide for Muslim rulers was to maintain the land’s agricultural productivity for the public good in the interim.29 But the British brought a more exclusive notion of private property. 171

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Property was private and individually owned, which translated into individual responsibility, divorced from any social contexts. The legal nature of land also was changed. Hanafi legalism largely interpreted land as a commodity only if it was rented out (ijara). But the legal culture the Company brought to India viewed all land as a commodity, regardless of its usage. This was seen most famously in the Permanent Settlement in Bengal after 1793, which witnessed large turnovers in landownership within a generation. The British also legalised the material proceedings of tax collection, by giving the revenue agreements (qabooliyats) ‘the weight of Judicial Authority’.30 Under Hanafi practice, they were referenced but not ‘legal’ documents per se. Transforming these into legally binding documents ended up concentrating more power in the hands of Company officials. Collectors and settlement officers therefore had to wear two hats: that of a magistrate and that of a fiscal officer.

Agrarian and economic impact of the new fiscal regime The emergence of a more inflexible, legalised revenue administration set in motion various and significant economic and demographic changes across India. The combination of this legalised taxation regime with more intense probing of agrarian holdings and inflexible demands bore down upon the Indian village and agricultural economy. Debt and the impoverishment of the countryside were early features of colonial rule. And the Company was ecumenical in its fiscal jurisprudence, paying little regard to social convention or standing: ‘Under the British government, a village once lost is always lost. The Nuwabee principle was to drive no one to desperation. The English mete out to everyone [sic] the same inexorable justice.’31 From very early in the colonial era the Company’s fiscalism engendered simmering levels of agrarian discontent. Michal Mann showed how north India witnessed regular, smaller-​scale revolts against new tax demands.32 The effects were felt right from the beginning of the nineteenth century. When the Company pushed for more intense scrutiny of landed holdings, such as with regulation VII (1822), low-​level resistance and armed revolt was common. Districts that had a large British military presence tended to have higher assessments than neighbouring districts. This was a result of the greater demand for agricultural produce and regular rations for sipahis, British soldiers, and officialdom. Yet a district’s overall higher tax bills, coupled with British soldiers’ purchasing power, hit cultivators particularly hard. The influx of Indian merchant credit and higher demand for agricultural produce contributed to overall higher tax bills. Wherever increase commercial activity and wealth could be ascertained by the Company’s fiscal apparatus, it could be documented and taxed. When the toxic combination of dearth, falling prices, and the ratcheted-​up assessments of the 1830s hit, Company cantonments were targeted by hard-​up cultivators. Sources told of armed men roaming about ‘in quest of plunder’, who sought literal relief from cantonments’ granaries.33 The Company’s military-​ economic presence tended to exacerbate the effects of these new forms of revenue extraction. Another economic dynamic made possible by the Company’s taxation was seen in the scope it gave to Indian capital. Taqavi loans, which were advances to cultivators for growing crops, were a feature of precolonial fiscal statecraft. But after the 1820s the Company largely discontinued them during the ‘age of reform’,34 which was concurrently the ‘age of cost cutting’.35 Many Indian merchant and commercial families filled the gap, which tied cultivators down to the production of exportable cash crops: opium, cotton, jute, and indigo. Here, government spending was replaced with private Indian capital.36 Thus began the subjection of the Indian agrarian economy to global prices, capital markets, and –​importantly –​price fluctuations. When existing taqavi loans were called back, falling prices and an already highly taxed countryside further impoverished peasants and cultivators. Discontent was subtle but simmering. In 172

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Rohilkhand, for example, smaller rebellions had become so normalised by the 1840s that one collector advised his successor to ‘take your gun in your hand, and go among the people’.37 These profound changes in taxation also had an impact on Indian demographics and migration. Within a single district, assessment rates could vary considerably. Cultivators who could migrate increasingly did so after the 1810s. Fleeing one Company taxman for a more lenient one, previously settled cultivators migrated to neighbouring parganas or districts to pay lower rates. For example, adjacent parganas could see differences in assessment as large as 2,000 per cent. And, again, these migrations were further exacerbated by the presence of the Company’s ‘cantonment-​spending economies’. Agra in the later 1830s, for example, saw tens of thousands of emigrant cultivators from throughout the Doab arrive, hoping that the large administrative and cantonment presence would offer a better chance of relief.38 Chris Bayly’s documentation of the 1830s ‘scarcity cycles’ is given a richer understanding when we consider that punishing and inflexible taxation not only exacerbated underlying economic change but also propelled these very changes. Some cultivators could not adjust so easily, however. At the end of the day, when it was feasible, many simply ran from the Company taxman.

Consolidation of bureaucratic governance Another crucial by-​product of these major changes in taxation was an accompanying expansion of bureaucratic government and documentation. In order to effectively harness India’s agrarian wealth, the ecological world of soils, proprietary rights, historical rents, flora, and fauna needed to be documented and categorised in order to render them intelligible –​i.e. taxable. Starting from the late eighteenth century, we see the early beginnings of the ‘colonial archive’. If late Mughal fiscalism was already moving towards more intense paper and documentation, the British hyper-​charged its volume, depth, and frequency in extracting agrarian wealth for its empire. The later Raj’s source of revenue and power was a taxation regime that, ultimately, rested ‘on the solid basis of minute local inquiry’.39 The myriad minutiae of agrarian ecology formed the archival tentacles of the early colonial state, in which the archive’s ‘granularity’ literally accounted for every grain. Ecological and agrarian knowledge was classified and organised early in the colonial period. Settlement manuals, in the British obsession with ‘actual’ agricultural potential, began to read as if they were taxonomies of soil science and local ecology. Previously such information had been held by local scribes and grain traders. Sometimes it was held as a localised, mnemonic form of ecological knowledge. But the colonial state quickly appropriated this knowledge by categorising and documenting it, rendering it usable for the purposes of efficient revenue extraction. It was also indexed, which made the information easily referable by collectors, magistrates, and Indian scribes. This ecological information was repeatedly referenced, which further entrenched its ‘permeance’. Summarised charts of ecological and agrarian knowledge fed into the colonial state’s drive to project historical trends, with disastrous consequences for India’s cultivators. Documenting the ‘potential’ of Indian agriculture with historical statistics and ‘averaging’ was used to justify higher tax rates in the present, with the Whiggish hope that future gains would balance everything out.40 The emergence of a more probing revenue administration also stimulated unprecedented volumes of paperwork and binding. Fixing the tax rates of a single village involved thousands of pages, which included the individual names of cultivators, their caste, occupation, and historical tax rates paid. William Sleeman observed that ‘records of great bulk are annually prepared which give the most minute details about every holding and each field’.41 The volume of paper as a symbol of authority easily increased many thousands of times over within the first 173

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generation of British rule. And, although it was symbolic of the power of the new colonial state, it reached almost absurd heights and became a subject of satire within British officialdom. One observer noted that the collector’s office was, effectively, a legion of ‘instructors, surveyors, and inspectors; assessors … tehsildars and cutcherry servants … a flight of locusts, devouring in their course the fruits of the earth’.42 There were even official procedural forms for registering complaints against manure thieves.43 It became, to paraphrase Radhika Singha, a ‘despotism of paperwork’.44 The expansion of an archivable, and bureaucratic, governance also went hand in hand with a ‘depersonalisation’ of administration. This reflected an increasingly imperial British hubris. Paper, because it was impersonal and required less human interaction, increasingly distanced the British from their Indian subjects and subordinate administrators. It became the medium through which the British communicated with their Indian subjects. It was no coincidence that the ‘age of reform/​hiatus’ also became the age of bureaucracy. This itself was a coded form of racial distancing. Indian scribes noted that the British were uninterested in the context of and reasons for cultivators going into debt, and their plight was never reported to the authorities. Revenue administration was depersonalised and replaced with paper, procedure, and categorised depth. It became ‘Weberian’ very early in the colonial era, and it reduced the Indian farmer to a mere figure in the statistics. And, because it was procedural, it was equally inflexible.

Summary The decades after the 1850s in north India witnessed the suppression of the Uprising and Great Rebellion. In Awadh –​the epicentre of the Revolt –​taxation and fiscal power was used to ‘settle’ and punish formerly ‘rebellious’ regions. As Veena Oldenburg demonstrated, Lucknow became the most highly taxed city in all India.45 The British Raj expanded its pre-​1860 fiscal edifice –​the legalisation of taxation, inflexible and punishing revenue demands, and at times astounding paper regulation thereof –​to ‘settle’ and ‘pacify’ the countryside. After the 1860s this continued with newfound intensity. The British district collector and his subordinate staff of scribes and clerks penetrated ever more deeply into the Indian countryside, interrogating every holding and ‘accounting for every grain’. India also witnessed regular large-​scale famines across the country between 1860 and 1900. The seven major famines that rocked India in the run-​up to the twentieth century were exacerbated by the very fiscal tools of statecraft the British had built up since the 1760s. Combined with British officials’ commitment to laissez-​ faire economic ideals, it was no coincidence that the most regular famines India had yet seen coincided with the maturation of the colonial state’s fiscal might and coercion. By 1900 the colonial state had built up the subcontinent’s most penetrating, paper-​r idden system of revenue extraction. Exercising a more exclusive notion of fiscal sovereignty, payments of the sovereign’s dues become a legal obligation. Subjects were reclassified as legally obliged taxpayers, and any precolonial considerations of social standing and status were quickly jettisoned. In treating zamindars and peasants as legal equals, taxation was ruthlessly ecumenical. And there were other vertical changes in the relationship between government and the local economy. John Richards once argued that the Mughals were never able to pierce the ‘hard cyst’ of the local village economy.46 The British, with a deeper archive, paper documentation, and a pliant class of intermediary scribes, were able to penetrate the lowest pargana more successfully than their predecessors. This chapter has argued that the expansion of more intrusive forms of fiscalism and taxation went hand in hand with the formation of the colonial state. The Company’s fiscal appetite 174

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was a central motor in its formation; indeed, the two were inseparable. The hunger for revenue generated the emergence of the state’s archival depth early on. Information on soil types, seeds, historical yields, and landholding patterns created the early archival depth that came to characterise the colonial state. Bernard Cohn argued,47 and Nicholas Dirks echoed later,48 that the state’s ‘investigative modalities’ were the genesis of the colonial archive. But the more pressing and tangible requirement of filling the fiscal arteries of the colonial state were far more important than categories of caste, community, and tribe. These categories were by-​products of the Company’s drive to manage Indian agricultural wealth efficiently via taxation. As the above discussion has amply illustrated, the paper materiality of government increased drastically under colonialism. Historians now have a better sense of how paper-​bound and permeated late Mughal India already was by the middle of the eighteenth century. But the British took this to new heights. The colonial state’s voracious appetite for rent rolls, documentary evidence, and accompanying legal proceedings fed into a concomitant and expanding bureaucracy. Paper also fed into the other veins of the new state. Emergent departments such as education, public works, and the police became branches that were filled by and given authority with processed pulp. And much of this was guided and stimulated by the model of fiscal administration set by the Company early on. By the final decades of the nineteenth century paper was an intrusive feature of Indian governance. The colonial state was as much a ‘kaghaz (paper) Raj’49 as it was a standing armed camp. British revenue extraction was also unprecedented because it quickly welded to the state groups of middle-​tier scribes, such as Kayasthas. Irfan Habib once termed them the ‘second layer’ of Mughal administration.50 They connected courts and agrarian hinterlands and possessed the keys of fiscal-​agrarian intelligence. The British found this ‘layer’ more pliant and malleable than the elite, primary layer. The rapid downfall of Muhammad Reza Khan and Shitab Rai in Bengal were telling previews of what was to come. At the local level, these scribes (later assistant registrars and deputy assistant surveyors) enforced British fiscal authority in the countryside deep into the colonial period. If the Indian cultivator dreaded the arrival of the measurement rod, it was because it foretold the arrival of a Kayastha under a chatri (umbrella).51 He and his colonial master’s larger staff would interrogate every single grain, even in times of famine.52 Yet, for all the knowledge the colonial state accumulated, there were limits (and consequences) to its power. The British putatively knew a vast amount more about the Indian ecological and agrarian worlds by the 1850s. They had the shelved and bound volumes to prove it. In doing so, however, they reduced the agrarian economy to averages and numbers in a fit of taxonomical frenzy, eliminating the personal element. The British, bringing more exclusive notions of legal sovereignty and a legal tradition that ‘commoditised’ property, rapidly depersonalised revenue extraction, with little consideration for the human factor. Removing themselves from these crucial and binding face-​to-​face interactions, which were also forms of what Chris Bayly termed ‘affective knowledge’,53 it was no surprise that the 1857 Uprisings blindsided the British where the Rebellion was most pronounced (and taxed). In terms of characterising these changes in Indian taxation, the East India Company harnessed movements already afoot and recast them to suit its own military-​fiscal priorities and broader economic interests. The British Raj continued these practices with even more intensity after the 1860s. There was both continuity and change. Residual features of the precolonial era –​the continuance of middling scribes in later colonial administration and the primacy of agricultural taxation to the Raj –​continued well into the 1940s. But the older Hanafi moorings and ‘moral tempering’ of revenue extraction were gone. Not only did the colonial state recast taxation as a legal category, but it was more impersonal, paper-​inundated, and intrusive than 175

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its Indian predecessors. The Raj was, as Frank Perlin has argued, ‘transitional’, possessing both premodern and modern features.54 From the Treaty of Allahabad in August 1765 to the transfer of power in August 1947, this chapter has argued that the extraction of revenue from India’s agrarian economy was one of the most significant pillars of British power in South Asia. This wealth not only maintained British dominance in the subcontinent through law courts, the Indian Civil Service, and the police, but it was also was the lifeblood of the Indian Army, which was deployed widely across the globe for the British flag.

Notes 1 Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 2 Hayden Bellenoit, The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760–​1860 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 3 Stewart Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-​Century India (Oxford: OUP, 1994). 4 Richard Barnett, North India between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British, 1720–​1801 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980). 5 Muzzafar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–​48 (New Delhi: OUP, 1986). 6 Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–​1707 (Aligarh: Aligarh University Press, 1963). 7 Christopher A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–​1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 1983); also see Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India. 8 Stephen Blake, ‘The patrimonial-​bureaucratic empire of the Mughals’, JAS, 39 (1), 1979, pp. 77–​94. 9 BL, OR. 2011, fol. 111, Chatar Mal, ‘Diwan-​i-​Pasand’, n.d., early nineteenth century, fols. 15–​16. 10 Mumammad Faiq, Insha-​ye-​Faiq (Composition of Faiq) (Lucknow: Nawal Kishore Press, 1880), 19. 11 This was a reference to traditional Persian governance taken from the writings of Sa’adi. I am grateful to Nandini Chatterjee, who originally brought this to my attention. 12 BL, Mss. ADD. 6586, ‘Full statement of the mode of collecting revenue and administering justice, by Shitab Rai and the qanungos, pursuant to an Order of Council’, 24 January 1773, fol. 69. 13 Neil Baillie, Muhammadan Laws on Land Tax from the Futawa Alumgeeree (London: Smith & Elder, 1853), 25. 14 Shal Wali Ullah once complained that ‘all [of India’s] accountants and clerks [are] Hindus ... they control [sic] the country’s wealth’. See Athar Rizvi, Shah Wali-​Allah and His Times: A Study of Eighteenth Century Islam, Politics, and Society in India (Canberra: Marifat Publishing House, 1980), 304. 15 ‘Full statement …’, fol. 62. 16 Nandalal Chatterjee, Verelst’s Rule in India (Allahabad: Indian Press, 1939), 237, 246. Hastobud was a combination of the Persian hast (‘is’) with bud (‘was’). It alluded to rates that were paid and those more recently. 17 Robert Travers, Empire and Ideology: The British in Eighteenth-​Century Bengal (Cambridge: CUP, 2007). 18 Banki Misra, Judicial Administration of the East India Company in Bengal, 1765–​1782 (Delhi: Montilal Banarsidass, 1961), 43. 19 Chatterjee, Verelst’s Rule, 225. 20 BL, OR. 1750, fol. 162, Sanbhu Lal, ‘Miftah-​i-​Khanzain’, fols. 6–​7. 21 BL, APAC, IOR/​P/​111/​60, Bengal revenue proceedings (Bengal and Bihar): Collector of Benares to Board of Revenue, 24 August 1816. 22 BL, Eur. Mss. F218/​30: ‘Translation of a Persian petition from the native inhabitants of the Subah of Azeemabad to the King’, 17 July 1772. 23 Authors’ calculations, from Selections from the Revenue Records of the North-​West Provinces 1818–​1820 (Calcutta: Government Press, 1866), 156–​7; Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 1979), 89. 24 Raman, Document Raj; for Bengal and Bihar, Travers, Empire and Ideology. 25 Irfan Habib, ‘The social distribution of landed property in pre-​British India’, in: Ram Sharma and Vivekanand Jha (eds.), Indian Society: Historical Probings in Memory of D.D. Kosambi (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1958).

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Revenue extraction in colonial South Asia 26 In Jaunpur in the early 1880s, for example, Rs. 17,000 were assessed and Rs. 17,106 were collected. See Annual Report on the Operations under Act II of 1878 (Allahabad: Government Press, 1884), 18. 27 John Stuart Mill, Memorandum of the Improvements in the Administration of India during the Last Thirty Years (London: W.H. Allen, 1858), 4. 28 Charles J. Connell, Our Land Revenue Policy in Northern India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1876), 81 fn. 29 Baber Johanson, The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent (Abingdon: Routledge, 1988), 83. 30 Directions for Revenue Officers in the North-​Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1858), 79. 31 C. Elliot, The Chronicles of Oonao (Allahabad: Mission Press, 1862), 129. 32 Michael Mann, Britische Herrschaft auf Indischem Boden: Landwirtschaftliche Transformation und ökologische Destruktion des ‘Central Doab’ 1801–​1854 (Stuttgart: Ergon Verlag, 1992). 33 George Girdlestone, Report on Past Famines in the North-​Western Provinces (Allahabad: Government Press, 1868), 43. 34 Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 35 Bellenoit, The Formation of the Colonial State, ch. 4. 36 Girdlestone, ‬Report on Past Famines. 37 Johnathan Thornton, ‘The settlement of the N.W. Provinces’, The Calcutta Review, 12, 1849, pp. 413–​ 67, 429. 38 Girdlestone, Report on Past Famines, 58‬.‬ 39 Selections from the Revenue Records of the North-​West Provinces 1818–​1820 (Calcutta: Government Press, 1866), 74. 40 See Connell, Our Land Revenue Policy, 46. 41 William Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, vol. 1 (London: J. Hatchard & Son, 1844), 78 fn. 42 Henry Tucker, A Review of the Financial Situation of the East India Company (London: Kingsbury, Parbury & Allen, 1825), 134. 43 BL, APAC, IOR/​P/​220/​73, NWP revenue proceedings: Circular order of 1836, 4 January 1856. 44 Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 1998). 45 Veena Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–​77 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 46 John Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 86–​93. 47 Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5. 48 Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 49 The term is attributed to Jadunath Sarkar. 50 Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 331. 51 Henry Thullier, A Manual of Surveying for India: Detailing the Mode of Operations on the Trigonometrical, Topographical and Revenue Settlements of India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1851), 599. 52 For more on famines, see Joanna Simonow’s chapter in this volume. 53 Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–​1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). 54 Frank Perlin, ‘The pre-​colonial Indian state in history and epistemology’, in: Henri J.M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik (eds.), The Study of the State (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), pp. 272–​302, 295–​7.

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PART III

Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education

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14 THE SCIENCE AND MEDICINE OF COLONIAL INDIA David Arnold

Introduction When India and Pakistan became independent in August 1947, they inherited a medical and scientific regime that was designed primarily to serve the needs of the colonial power, but that only imperfectly met the expectations and requirements of the new nation states. The colonial medical and scientific order, never fixed and static nor entirely chaotic and directionless, had changed immensely over the course of the two centuries since the first establishment of British power in South Asia, however. It changed in response to the evolving needs of the colonial regime, through interaction with India’s existing medical and scientific traditions, and –​latterly –​through the nationalist and revivalist movements of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, and in relation to global developments that both impacted upon and reflected India’s international standing. The evolution of this medical and scientific order was piecemeal and relatively slow until the 1890s, during the East India Company period and the early decades of Crown rule from 1858 onwards; this was a time of observation, exploration, and institution building. Progress was more rapid and the evolution of science and medicine more diverse and complex in the period from the 1890s, with fundamental changes in the organisation and conduct of science, in the human and institutional agencies involved, and in their deepening relationship with state and society. Behind these long-​term developments lies the issue of what was ‘colonial’ about the science and medicine of the period and the role played by Indian agency in the constitution and reformulation of the scientific and medical order.1 Was colonial science and medicine essentially an expression of Britain’s cultural and political hegemony over India or were Indians the creative co-​authors of India’s scientific and medical modernity?

The period to 1890 The creation of an institutional infrastructure for science and medicine in British India was a slow process, one that belied any overall sense of a clearly defined imperial project and yet one that helped define the intrinsically colonial nature of science and medicine at both an ideological and an empirical level.2 Some of this activity expressed the amateur interests and personal aesthetic tastes of individual British residents –​a private passion for plant collecting or for recreational ornithology and entomology.3 Substantially more of scientific significance flowed from DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-15

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the needs and ambitions of the colonial state and from the commissioned agency of its army officers, military engineers, and medical personnel.4 Surveying, broadly understood, was one of the most characteristic modes of scientific activity during the early East India Company period, and this continued into the second half of the nineteenth century.5 Much about India’s material environment and disease ecology was novel or unknown to its new rulers and so needed, from the British perspective, to be mapped, measured, and classified if that rule were to be authoritative, profitable, and prestigious. Although one might identify precedents for this surveying in such works as Abu’l Fazl’s imperial gazetteer, the A’in-​i Akbari, in the late sixteenth century, more immediate analogues were the French scientific surveys of Egypt following the Napoleonic invasion of 1798 and the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s scientific travels in Central and South America. Ultimately, one of the most ambitious of these schemes, undertaken between the 1790s and 1840s, was the Trigonometrical Survey of India. This began as a trans-​peninsular survey of south India but developed into the systematic measuring of India from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, applying survey techniques to an unprecedented area and creating the cartographic illusion of effective control over the entire South Asian landmass.6 During the nineteenth century scientific cartography was extended to other kinds of data, such as geology and epidemic disease, with the Office of the Survey of India in Calcutta becoming a highly specialised and technically proficient centre for the preparation of maps and surveys of various kinds.7 In the early nineteenth century the surgeon-​naturalist Francis Buchanan carried out several surveys for the Company, including the southern territories recently annexed in the Carnatic and Mysore and British possessions in Bengal and Bihar. These wide-​ranging ‘statistical’ works encompassed geology, botany, agriculture, ethnography, and human disease.8 Buchanan also published a descriptive catalogue of the fish of the river Ganges, the first of several marine and riverine surveys conducted by the British. Like many other zoological and botanical studies of the Company period, Buchanan’s text was accompanied by numerous colour plates, which demonstrated the skilled contribution of Indian draughtsmen and colourists to the science as well as the art of the Company period.9 Yet, even when made by Indians, such illustrations were clearly intended in their style and subject matter for a European, not Indian, audience. From the 1830s the survey mode of colonial science was further extended, in prose narratives and through the growing use of statistical data, with the publication of medical topographies that linked the health and disease of a locality to its climate, soils, vegetation, and human activity. European experience and a European sense of the pathogenicity of the Indian environment dominated such works.10 The state’s own medical establishment, the Indian Medical Service, played a crucial role in developing field sciences, especially given the paucity of other European personnel with a scientific outlook or training. Physicians (‘surgeons’) were appointed from Britain to serve the medical needs of the Indian Army, itself a primary instrument of colonial expansionism and control; but many medical officers were also accomplished botanists, zoologists, and geologists, combining scientific pursuits with service on military campaigns as far afield as Afghanistan and Sumatra.11 The practical limitations of this early phase of scientific endeavour were apparent, however. Medical officers found themselves repeatedly transferred from place to place or burdened with routine duties that curbed or prevented their scientific activities. State patronage and funding were erratic; the absence of libraries, reference works, and even basic instruments, combined with remoteness from even regional centres of science, proved deeply frustrating. Ill-​health and premature death ended many a promising career. Other institutions arose from a need, increasingly felt, not just to observe India but to identify and exploit its material resources. Calcutta’s botanic garden, dating from 1786, and others 182

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at Saharanpur in north India and Dapuri in the Bombay Presidency functioned as centres for the investigation, naturalisation, and dissemination of plants with medicinal, commercial, and industrial uses, though even here, as the Calcutta garden showed, state support could be fitful and parsimonious.12 A long-​standing interest in India’s stratigraphy, palaeontology, and mineral resources –​notably iron and coal –​was put on a more systematic basis only with the creation of the Geological Survey in 1851, on the very eve of India’s railway age.13 The Indian Forest Service, established in 1864, was a further example of self-​interested colonial enterprise, intended to put India’s rich (but, in colonial eyes, ravaged and neglected) forest estate under scientific management while simultaneously meeting a practical need for timber, firewood, and ‘minor’ forest produce (such as bamboos and medicinal drugs), and so provide a much-​needed additional source of state income.14 Alongside state-​directed initiatives and their evolving institutional forms, there were scientific and medical activities less immediately tied to regime needs and personnel. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, established by William Jones in 1784, provided a forum within which a wide range of scientific subjects –​from astronomy and meteorology to archaeology and geology –​ could be presented and discussed.15 Scholarly journals served as local outlets for scientific and medical observations, such as the Calcutta Journal of Natural History, launched by surgeon-​ naturalist John M’Clelland in 1840, or the Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta, which dated from 1823. These organisations and their publications demonstrated the sporadic and largely unstructured nature of much scientific and medical enquiry and reporting at the time. Nevertheless, the dominant colonial ideology of utility and ‘improvement’, of an India that was backward, still governed by custom and superstition, and so in urgent need of the moral and material progress only Britain and the West could provide, was shared by many Europeans outside the state sector –​such as the Baptist missionary William Carey, who set up Calcutta’s Agri-​Horticultural Society in 1820.16 As naturalists, surgeons, ethnographers, and agriculturalists, Christian missionaries –​continental European and American as well as British –​ were important ancillaries to state-​run medical and scientific activities, and continued to be so well into the late nineteenth century and early twentieth.17 A notion of ‘colonial’ science and medicine would mislead if it were thought to preclude Indian agency. Much recent scholarship has been devoted to exploring how, why, and to what extent the science and medicine of British India represented a symbiotic interaction with India and Indians rather than merely constituting an external and unmediated Western imposition. The history of this interaction can be traced back to well before the advent of British rule –​ to the early medical and botanical encounters of the Portuguese, Dutch, and French, and the German missionaries of the Tranquebar Mission.18 Some of these engagements produced significant results that did much to inform and enrich science and its knowledge base in the West. Interaction continued into the East India Company period, through conversations between Company surgeons and Indian vaids or hakims (practitioners of Ayurvedic and Unani medicine, respectively), through the recruitment of Indian assistants and informants, and by the pivotal role of Indian princely states as centres for the preservation of vernacular knowledge and for cross-​cultural exchanges in such fields as astronomy and medicine.19 Some of the earlier colonial institutions of British India, such as the Native Medical Institution, established in 1822 and forerunner of the Calcutta Medical College, provided a forum in which the Western and Indian medical systems were taught side by side.20 Although many of the scientific and medical societies of the period excluded Indians or relegated them to minor, informant status, others gave greater scope to active Indian engagement; the Grant Medical College Society, dating from 1851, was a prime example of this, providing an open environment in which Indians and Europeans could report on and discuss research in botany, materia medica, disease, 183

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and physiology.21 British enthusiasm for exhibitions following the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 created a further arena for the presentation and recognition of vernacular knowledge, especially of Indian plant drugs, and in this lay one of the roots of the later revival of Indian medicine and pharmacology.22 Viewed in this way, the sometimes rigidly presented ‘divide’ between colonial and indigenous science and medicine appears excessively stark or to reflect only the self-​interested perspective of a European scientific and medical elite. And yet, in an age of growing European assertiveness and confidence in the universality of Western science and medicine, the practical and ideological limits of these encounters and exchanges need to be recognised. The plurality of the Native Medical Institution was replaced in 1835, after only 13 years, by the Calcutta Medical College, which exclusively taught the Western system of medicine to students intended for employment as sub-​assistant surgeons and apothecaries in the army and state service. This usurpation signalled a wider turning away from respecting and valuing vernacular knowledge and indigenous agency towards a greater insistence on the intrinsic superiority of the West. Jennerian vaccination replaced the long-​practised art of variolation in smallpox prophylaxis; and couching to remove cataracts, an Indian practice once greatly admired by Europeans for its skill and effectiveness, was increasingly disparaged by European ophthalmologists, who favoured the far more radical removal (rather than displacement) of the ocular lens.23 Exchange and interaction never entirely ceased, but for several decades, from the 1830s through to the 1890s, Indians were allowed much less of a voice in science and medicine, and the racial contempt shown towards Indians and Indian agency was intensified by the Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857–​59 and the transfer of power from Company to Crown. Characteristically, the charitable funding of hospitals and dispensaries, such as the general hospital in Bombay, named after the Parsi philanthropist Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy in 1845, was one of the few ways in which Indians were allowed a prominent role in the creation or running of medical institutions. Pedagogically, a colonial insistence on Indian tutelage supplanted any appetite for cross-​cultural enquiry and multicultural tolerance. In India’s medical colleges, beginning with Calcutta and Madras in 1835 and Grant Medical College in Bombay a decade later, the unwavering emphasis was on Indians learning from and emulating the Western practice of anatomy, medicine, and surgery, and for those exemplary sites in turn promoting the wider dissemination in Indian society of Western values and methods.24 Indians were an essential presence in the scientific and medical activities of the period and made possible the collection of scientific data, its processing, and its presentation –​as translators, informants, guides, plant collectors, survey assistants, botanical artists, draftsmen, and lithographers. At times the role of Indians was more that of scientific and technical collaborators than of subordinates, providing original insights or practical expertise in ways that have encouraged historians to speak of the ‘co-​construction’ of colonial-​era science.25 Without Indian agents and protagonists, sanitary schemes from smallpox vaccination to the containment of cholera in the pilgrimage town of Puri would not have been possible.26 And yet the dominant ethos, agency, and intent remained that of a colonial regime bent on consolidating its control, using science to locate and exploit India’s material resources, and to demonstrate its cultural and political hegemony over India. Although Indians were duly named and valued as collaborators and assistants, they were often excluded, on racial grounds, from full participation in institutional activities, confined to subordinate tasks or denied access to the higher state services. Indian participation in the unsuccessful but scientifically important expedition to observe the solar eclipse of April 1875 in the Nicobar Islands was confined to one Indian, Munshi Ismail, from the Survey of India Office in Calcutta, drafted in as a makeshift photographer.27 Even when admitted to more senior positions, Indians often experienced flagrant examples of what we would now call ‘institutional racism’. Such, for instance, was the case of 184

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Pramatha Nath Bose in the Geological Survey in the 1880s, who met with systematic disparagement of his scientific credentials and personal probity by a European departmental head, H.B. Medlicott, who was hostile to the very idea of employing ‘natives’ as geologists and believed that ‘positive [i.e. scientific] knowledge’ was exclusively ‘a modern characteristic of the Western man’.28 The Asiatic Society of Bengal had a ‘Native Secretary’ as early as 1823, but its first Indian president was not elected until 1885. The converse of this exclusion and subordination of Indians was a far greater readiness to allow non-​British Europeans into the scientific and medical services. Although in the early period the Company was wary of allowing outsiders to visit India, however strong their scientific credentials (such as Humboldt, who was denied access), for fear that they might challenge British rule, India was visited by European travellers and scientists who added to the empire’s scientific kudos –​such as the French naturalist Victor Jacquemont in the 1830s, and in the 1850s the German Schlagintweit brothers, who toured the Himalayan region and sent back to Europe some 40,000 objects and artefacts.29 India under British rule attracted a number of foreign nationals, some of whom came to hold senior positions in its scientific services –​ such as the Danish-​born botanist Nathaniel Wallich, who presided over the Calcutta botanic garden from 1815 to 1846, the three Germans who consecutively held charge of the Forest Department between 1864 and 1900, and the central Europeans employed by the Geological Survey.30 Some of these individuals had a fascination for India or sought scientific opportunities unavailable in their own countries; others were recruited to compensate for the lack of suitable expertise –​such as in ‘scientific forestry’ –​among the British themselves. For all the wariness of the Company, its fitful mix of enthusiasm and parsimony, and the frustrations of pursuing science at a distance from its metropolitan centres, the work of these foreign scientists helped attract international attention, or they were the human conduits by which new scientific knowledge reached India or was transmitted from India to the wider scientific community. As a source of technical knowledge, raw data, and professional expertise, science and medicine helped to promote international recognition of British ownership over India and the legitimacy of its political power.

The later period, 1890–​1947 It is a moot point as to quite when and how the science and medicine of colonial India changed gear and became both the exemplars of a modern imperial state and the vehicle for an increasingly assertive national identity. By the 1870s and 1880s the state services and the medico-​scientific community they supported seemed to have ossified and to have lost touch with international developments. The Indian Medical Service might serve as a prime example of this. Its officially held position on the aetiology of cholera (as a consequence of local environmental conditions rather than, as modern science showed, a comma-​shaped bacillus) was no longer tenable, just as the lack of innovation in ideas and practices suggested a service that had grown complacent or lacked the time, energy, and incentive to be more imaginative.31 Laboratory science, so important to medical and scientific progress in the West, had made few advances in India since the 1830s. The significance of germ theory and the new science of bacteriology were slow to gain acceptance in India, although in the 1870s and 1880s a few pioneering researchers, such as T.R. Lewis and D.D. Cunningham, used modern laboratory techniques, including microscopy, to investigate cholera, filaria, leprosy, and other diseases.32 But it still took an outsider, the German bacteriologist Robert Koch, to identify the bacillus that was cholera’s causative agent in 1883/​4, and even that discovery was for many years resisted by India’s colonial medical establishment. The first Pasteur Institute in India (at Kasauli, in 185

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the Punjab hills) was not opened for the treatment of rabies and the study of bacteriology until 1900.33 Meanwhile, British India’s appalling record of hunger, malnutrition, and disease worsened still further with the famine from 1876 to 1878, in which vast areas of southern India were devastated by drought and starvation. Agriculture cried out for scientific innovation and investment, but the state’s response was either technocratic (more canals and railways) or bureaucratic (a Famine Code).34 Although colonial India could still boast of innovative engineering projects, key scientific fields such as physics and chemistry had shown little progress since the 1830s or remained narrowly tied to the state’s revenue needs and regulatory mechanism; an example is provided by the provincial chemical examiners, whose main task was to aid the police and judiciary in the investigation of suspected poison cases and to analyse food and water samples for contamination or adulteration.35 In science and in medicine the 1890s and 1900s in India marked a watershed moment. In 1896 bubonic plague broke out in Bombay and spread across western and northern parts of the country, accentuating the impact of famine and of previous epidemics. Faced with intense international pressure and a threatened boycott of its maritime trade, the government of India was forced to act far more drastically than it had hitherto with cholera and malaria. Through the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 the state assumed unprecedented interventionist powers in order to enforce radical sanitary measures, to destroy infected property, and to inspect and hospitalise plague suspects. The Russian-​born bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine, already in Bombay to work on an anti-​cholera serum, turned his attention to producing a plague prophylactic, which soon became the front line of attempts to prevent the further spread of the disease.36 Imperial and international investigations into the aetiology of plague, led by the Indian Plague Commission (which reported in 1901), opened up a vast new field for epidemiological research; in 1906 the Indian government recognised the need for change by setting up its own bacteriology department. Ronald Ross’s breakthrough study of the malaria plasmodium and its transmission by anopheles mosquitoes in 1897/​8 extended this pioneering work and became the point of departure for innovative research into malaria, as well as diseases such as kala-​azar. Plague and malaria stimulated a new interest in medical entomology and parasitology in order to understand the nature of both human and animal diseases. Ross’s Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902 captured the new international prominence and prestige of medical science in India and its central role in the rapidly emerging field of tropical medicine, even though India itself did not have a school for tropical medicine (in Calcutta) until 1920, 20 years after London. In 1911 the Indian government set up the Indian Research Fund Association to support and publish medical research, a body that, following independence, was reconstituted as the Indian Council of Medical Research. Agricultural science, too, entered a new era, with the creation of an Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa in Bihar in 1905 and the appointment of an imperial entomologist for the study of plant pests four years earlier. Informed by advances in bacteriology and parasitology, veterinary science was placed on a new professional footing, with the creation of a Civil Veterinary Department in 1892 and the study of animal diseases, such as surra among camels, at the Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory, originally located in Poona but moved to Muktesar in Kumaon in 1895.37 Another field vital to human health as well as agriculture was nutrition. Following earlier work on prison diets that reached back to the middle of the nineteenth century, but utilising the new knowledge of vitamins and nutrition, from 1918 Robert McCarrison investigated Indian dietary deficiencies, focusing on milled rice and beriberi at his laboratory at Coonoor in the Nilgiris. This work was extended in the 1930s by W.R. Aykroyd, who used diet surveys of targeted groups (such as schoolchildren and factory workers) to investigate a range of nutritional disorders and to recommend improved but affordable diets.38 186

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The increased range of scientific and medical research from the 1890s onwards bore two notable characteristics. One was the increasingly prominent role allotted to named Indians in scientific and medical research; Aykroyd, for instance, worked with several Indian collaborators, who shared the authorship of their published research. A further factor was the increasing, if still very limited, participation of women. This was most evident in medicine: missionary organisations had pioneered the employment of white women doctors and the provision of medical training for Indian women from the middle of the nineteenth century. This was followed by the admission of Indian women to medical colleges, the creation of the Dufferin Fund in 1885 to supply medical women to India, and in 1913 by a state-​run Women’s Medical Service.39 By the 1930s maternal and infant health was becoming, like nutrition, a substantial field of medical research and public health engagement. Nonetheless, although medicine provided a gendered niche for women as doctors, their involvement in other scientific fields was far less marked; the botanist E.K. Janaki Ammal, born in 1897 and educated in Madras, was one of the few Indian women to gain international recognition for scientific research (in her case conducted in Britain as well as in India).40 All this might suggest the growing stature of India’s colonial state as a modern scientific and technocratic empire, committed to the furtherance and utilisation of science and medicine, and, at least notionally, addressing the material needs of the Indian people. And yet, by investing so much political importance and cultural capital in science and medicine, in making them such visible attributes of state power and colonial dominance, while at the same time denying Indians a greater and more independent role in both science and the running of the country, the British provoked a counter-​hegemonic backlash. This sought either to put Indians (rather than Britons) in charge of science and its future direction or to question or circumscribe colonial authority by advancing vernacular alternatives to the hegemony of Western science and, more especially, Western medicine. Following the establishment of the Indian National Congress in 1885, there was increased pressure for the state medical and scientific services to be opened up to greater Indian participation, European preponderance in the elite Indian Medical Service coming in for particularly scathing criticism. But the progress of Indianisation was slow, and not until the late 1930s, barely a decade before independence, were Indians allowed to occupy more than a handful of senior positions. Disillusioned with the state services, alienated by their racial bias and lack of research opportunities, Indians sought alternative opportunities. In 1876 a Bengali physician, Mahendra Lal Sircar, founded the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta to encourage Indians’ pursuit of science, especially in physics and chemistry. Other Indians sought scientific and medical training outside India –​in Britain or, increasingly, in Germany and the United States. Prafulla Chandra Ray, for instance, studied chemistry at the University of Edinburgh before returning to India in the late 1880s to become professor of chemistry at Calcutta University, to establish his own chemical and pharmaceutical works and to write a history of ‘Hindu chemistry’, the first volume of which appeared in 1902, that helped foster growing awareness of India’s past scientific achievements.41 His contemporary, Jagadish Chandra Bose, likewise left the colonial educational service to follow an independent career in physics, including the path-​breaking work on electromagnetic waves that earned him international recognition. Then, influenced by a growing sense of Hindu identity and Indian nationalism, he began in 1899 to explore plant physiology and the highly sensitive response of plants to external stimuli. In 1917 he established the Bose Institute in Calcutta to further his research.42 The labours of these three inspirational ­figures –​Sircar, Ray, and Bose –​encouraged a new orientation and a new optimism in Indian science, navigating it away from the priorities and needs of the colonial regime, in favour of an Indian audience for science and medicine and promoting the idea of science and medicine as a form of dedication and service for the Indian nation. 187

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A new era of institutional reform followed in the universities, led by Ashutosh Mukherjee, the enterprising vice-​chancellor of Calcutta University, who in 1909 helped to transform an institution hitherto primarily dedicated to the teaching of arts and humanities to one in which science subjects were given prominence, with postgraduate training and professorial chairs established in such fields as physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology. In the opening decades of the twentieth century the teaching of science expanded still further, with the creation of several new universities endowed, from the outset, with science departments and facilities for innovative scientific research.43 The Indian Science Congress, founded in 1914, provided a common, all-​India platform for this new wealth of scientific enterprise. Industrialists, such as the Tatas, encouraged by the prevalent nationalist ethos and by the idea of Indian self-​sufficiency, became important patrons of modern science as well as beneficiaries of some of its practical results. Once widely dismissed as backward and archaic, some of India’s princely states offered a further avenue of scientific advancement, notably with the opening of the Indian Institute for Science in Bangalore in 1908, with support from Mysore State. In 1933 C.V. Raman, recipient of the Nobel Prize for physics three years earlier, became its first Indian director. Not only did these personal and institutional initiatives allow Indians a far greater (and freer) role than formerly in science teaching and research, they also signalled the arrival of a more internationalist outlook, in which Indian scientists might bypass the imperial power and look instead to Germany and the United States for recognition and collaboration –​a move epitomised by the now famous exchanges in the early 1920s between Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein on quantum physics.44 Newspapers, magazines, and vernacular texts further promoted this new feeling for science and helped popularise the idea of India as a modern scientific nation. More radical alternatives to Western dominance were also sought, especially in medicine. Shortly before setting up the Indian Association for the Advancement of Science in 1876, Mahendra Lal Sircar announced his conversion from the orthodox Western medicine in which he had been trained to homoeopathy, declaring it to be a superior system of treatment. This indicated more than just a personal rejection of Western medical orthodoxy: despite its foreign (German) origins, homoeopathy was spreading rapidly among the Indian middle classes, especially in Bengal, and becoming in the process increasingly vernacularised in its language, agency, and pharmacology. To the many users and practitioners of homoeopathy, allopathic medicine appeared less effective in the treatment of many ailments, more expensive to use, and tainted by association with colonial officialdom.45 The late nineteenth century and early twentieth also witnessed a revival of Ayurveda, encouraged by the rise of Hindu nationalism, a renewed interest in Indian tradition, and the identification of Western medicine with foreign rule and an alien culture. The perceived failure of colonial medicine to provide effective treatment for many diseases (such as bubonic plague in the 1890s and 1900s or influenza in 1918/​19) and the limited penetration of Western medical services into the towns and countryside gave Ayurveda and its Muslim counterpart, Unani Tibb, the opportunity to reassert and refashion themselves.46 Although Ayurveda proudly looked back to the remote precolonial past, to the ancient samhitas (medical compilations) of Caraka and Sushruta, to the authority of tradition, humoral physiology, and indigenous drugs, the revivalist movement was also distinctly modern in its outlook and practice –​in its incorporation of modern diagnostic instruments and techniques, the adoption of modern institutional forms such as the hospital and dispensary, in the avid use of modern advertising and marketing techniques, and in its determined quest for formal state recognition for its practitioners and colleges.47 This challenge to the dominance of Western medicine did not go uncontested, and many practitioners of Western biomedicine (both European and Indian) continued to regard their rivals as little better than cranks and the principles underlying their therapeutic practices as anachronistic and probably dangerous.48 188

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Nevertheless, the extent of popular as well as middle-​class opposition to the state’s draconian anti-​plague measures in the late 1890s and the regime’s increasingly desperate need to seek political accommodation with the Indian middle classes in order to contain the upsurge of anti-​ colonial agitation, especially after 1918, forced the government to adopt a far more conciliatory stance towards the Indian medical systems and even to give a more authoritative role in public health to vaids and hakims.49 This revivalist, nativising impulse was less marked in relation to science than in medicine. But, even so, colonial dominance was challenged –​by making scientific and medical institutions subject to greater scrutiny and financial control by legislatures in which Indians were an increasingly powerful presence, and by continuing to press for the more rapid Indianisation of the services. Provincial autonomy under the Government of India Act of 1935 and the election of Indian ministries in 1937, though weakening the role of the central government in science and medicine, added to the pressure for increased Indian control in the provinces. In addition, Gandhi’s rise to nationalist leadership after 1918 marked something of a political and intellectual move away from the kind of science and medicine represented by the colonial services and even by the new Indian universities and their science departments. In 1920 many students joined in the boycott of colonial educational institutions and joined the Non-​Cooperation movement, depriving science of many talented teachers and researchers. The Mahatma’s own reservations about modern science, technology, and medicine permeated the mood of the nationalist movement over which he presided and favoured less science-​based and technocratic approaches to the long-​standing problems of Indian poverty and ill-​health. The ashram challenged the university; khadi and the spinning-​wheel implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) questioned the value of hydroelectric dams and the need for nuclear physics.50 The coming of the Second World War in 1939 gave fresh impetus to Indianisation because of the shortage of British medical and scientific personnel and the creation of new scientific bodies, such as the Board (later Council) of Scientific and Industrial Research headed by the chemist Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, to meet urgent war needs. But before independence and Partition in 1947, and after nearly two centuries of British rule, India’s genius for science had yet to find its fulfilment.

Résumé What most distinctively characterised as ‘colonial’ the science and medicine of British India was its ideology and agency. Dominated by ideas of Western superiority and the need for Indian ‘improvement’, presided over by a European elite that jealously guarded its privileges and reputation, science and medicine represented a utilitarian preoccupation with the security, prestige, and profitability of the regime rather than the interests of its Indian subjects. But the colonial scientific and medical order was far from homogeneous and never entirely hegemonic. It contained diverse, at times contradictory, ambitions: to ‘improve’ India but also to keep it locked in imperial subordination. Yet the nature of science and medicine changed over time, and entailed varying degrees of engagement with, or appreciation for, India’s own multi-​ stranded scientific and medical traditions. The colonial –​and colonising –​impetus in science and medicine was greatest between the 1830s and 1890s. Thereafter pressure from Indian nationalism and the biases and deficiencies in the colonial delivery of science and medicine led to a professional and political backlash as Indians strove to assert for themselves a more directive and innovative role. But it is only by understanding the symbolic power, as well as the material strengths, of colonial science and medicine that we can fully understand the extent of Indian engagement with, or depth of antipathy to, Western science and medicine, and the continuing calls, even now, for science and medicine to be decolonised. If colonial science and medicine 189

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were not homogeneous, however, neither were Indian responses to it, ranging from assimilation and appropriation, through degrees of hybridity and ‘braiding’, to outright rejection and the quest for vernacular, non-​Western alternatives. The legacies of science and medicine in British India remain but they are as diverse as they are complex.

Notes 1 Shula Marks, ‘What is colonial about colonial medicine? And what has happened to imperialism and health?’, Social History of Medicine, 10 (2), 1997, pp. 205–​19; Mark Harrison, ‘Science and the British Empire’, Isis, 96 (1), 2005, pp. 56–​63. 2 For critical overviews of science in British India, see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2000). 3 [Julia Maitland], Letters from Madras, during the Years 1836–​39, by a Lady (London: John Murray, 1846), 35, 47, 97–​8, 135. 4 David Arnold, ‘Science and the colonial war-​state: British India, 1790–​1820’, in: Peter Boomgaard (ed.), Empire and Science in the Making: Dutch Colonial Scholarship in Comparative Global Perspective, 1760–​1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 39–​62. 5 Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3–​15. 6 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–​1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Ian J. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c.1756–​1905 (New Delhi: OUP, 2003). See also Kapil Raj, ‘Networks of knowledge, or spaces of circulation? The birth of British cartography in colonial South Asia in the late eighteenth century’, Global Intellectual History, 2 (1), 2017, pp. 49–​66. 7 J. Waterhouse, Report on the Cartographic Applications of Photography as Used in the Topographical Departments of the Principal States in Central Europe (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1870), 131–​51. 8 Marika Vicziany, ‘Imperialism, botany and statistics in early nineteenth-​century India: The surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762–​1829)’, MAS, 20 (4), 1986, pp. 625–​60. 9 Francis Hamilton (formerly Buchanan), Account of the Fishes Found in the River Ganges and Its Branches (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1822); H.J. Noltie, Indian Botanical Drawings, 1793–​1868 (Edinburgh: Royal Botanic Garden, 1999). 10 James Ranald Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta: G.H. Huttmann, 1837); John M’Cosh, Topography of Assam (Calcutta: G.H. Huttmann, 1837); Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–​1850 (New Delhi: OUP, 1999). 11 William Griffith, Journal of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bootan, Affghanistan and the Neighbouring Countries (Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1847); Lachlan Fleetwood, ‘Science and war at the limit of empire: William Griffith with the Army of the Indus’, Notes and Records, 2020, doi.org/​10.1098/​ rsnr.2019.0048, accessed: 28 July 2020. 12 J. Forbes Royle, ‘Account of the Honorable Company’s Botanic Garden at Saharanpur’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1, 1832, pp. 41–​58; Adrian P. Thomas, ‘The establishment of Calcutta Botanic Garden: Plant transfer, science and the East India Company, 1786–​1806’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 16 (2), 2006, pp. 165–​77; H.J. Noltie, The Dapuri Drawings: Alexander Gibson and the Bombay Botanic Gardens (Edinburgh: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2002). 13 Pratik Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern India: Metropolitan Methods, Colonial Practices (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2004), ch. 4. 14 Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces, 1860–​1914 (New Delhi: OUP, 1996); K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Gregory Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: CUP, 2002). 15 O.P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past (New Delhi: OUP, 1988). 16 David Arnold, ‘Agriculture and “improvement” in early colonial India: A pre-​history of development’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 5 (4), 2005, pp. 505–​25. 17 See also Heike Liebau’s chapter in this volume.

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The science and medicine of colonial India 18 Richard Grove, ‘Indigenous knowledge and the significance of south-​west India for Portuguese and Dutch constructions of tropical nature’, MAS, 30 (1), 1996, pp. 121–​43; Hugh Cagle, Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450–​1700 (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), ch. 4. 19 Savithri Preetha Nair, Raja Serfoji II: Science, Medicine and Enlightenment in Tanjore (New Delhi: Routledge, 2012); Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-​Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–​ 1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Harald Fischer-​Tiné, Pidgin-​Knowledge: Wissen und Kolonialismus (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2013). 20 Zhaleh Khaleeli, ‘Harmony or hegemony? The rise and fall of the native medical institution, 1822–​ 35’, South Asia Research, 21 (1), 2001, pp. 77–​104. 21 T.G. Mainkar (ed.), Writings and Speeches of Dr Bhau Daji (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1974), 343–​54. 22 Official and Descriptive Catalogue of the Madras Exhibition of 1857 (Madras: C.K.S. Press, 1857). 23 David Arnold, ‘Smallpox and colonial medicine in nineteenth-​century India’, in: idem (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 45–​65; Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Mark Harrison, and Michael Worboys, Fractured States: Smallpox, Public Health and Vaccination Policy in British India, 1800–​1947 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2005). For contrasting views on couching, see P. Breton, ‘On the native mode of couching’, Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta, 2, 1826, pp. 341–​82; and Robert Henry Elliot, The Indian Operation of Couching for Cataract (London: H.K. Lewis, 1917). 24 C. Morehead, An Introductory Lecture Delivered in the Grant Medical College at Bombay on the 15th June 1853 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1853). 25 Joydeep Sen, Astronomy in India, 1784–​1876 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014). 26 Biswamoy Pati, ‘Ordering “disorder” in a holy city: Colonial health interventions in Puri during the nineteenth century’, in: idem and Mark Harrison (eds.), Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001), pp. 270–​98; Ujaan Ghosh, ‘Combating filth: The temple, the state, and urbanization in late nineteenth-​century Puri’, MAS, 53 (6), 2019, pp. 1849–​91. 27 J. Waterhouse, Report on the Operations connected with the Observation of the Total Solar Eclipse of April 6, 1875 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1875). 28 Records of the Geological Survey of India, 22, 1887, 11–​13; Deepak Kumar, ‘Racial discrimination and science in nineteenth-​century India’, IESHR, 19 (1), 1982, pp. 63–​82. 29 On the latter, see Moritz von Brescius, German Science in the Age of Empire: Enterprise, Opportunity and the Schlagintweit Brothers (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). 30 Ulrike Kirchberger, ‘German scientists in the Indian Forest Service: A German contribution to the Raj?’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 29 (2), 2001, pp. 1–​26; David Arnold, ‘Plant capitalism and Company science: The Indian career of Nathaniel Wallich’, MAS, 42 (5), 2008, pp. 899–​928. 31 Mark Harrison, ‘A question of locality: The identity of cholera in British India, 1860–​1890’, in: David Arnold (ed.), Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–​1900 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 133–​59. 32 T.R. Lewis and D.D. Cunningham, A Report on Microscopical and Physiological Researches into the Agent or Agents Producing Cholera (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1872); T.R. Lewis, The Microscopic Organisms Found in the Blood of Man and Animals and Their Relation to Disease (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1877). 33 Pratik Chakrabarti, Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 66–​7. 34 But see Deepak Kumar, ‘Science in agriculture: A study in Victorian India’, in: idem and Bipasha Raha (eds.), Tilling the Land: Agricultural Knowledge and Practices in Colonial India (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016), pp. 20–​48; and Prakash Kumar, ‘Modernization and agrarian development in India, 1912–​52’, JAS, 79 (3), 2020, pp. 633–​58. 35 David Arnold, Toxic Histories: Poison and Pollution in Modern India (Cambridge: CUP, 2016), 111–​16. 36 Chakrabarti, Bacteriology, 49–​60. 37 Saurabh Mishra, Beastly Encounters of the Raj: Livelihoods, Livestock and Veterinary Health in North India, 1790–​1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), ch. 3; Prakash Kumar, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), ch. 4. 38 David Arnold ‘The “discovery” of malnutrition and diet in colonial India’, IESHR, 31 (1), 1994, pp. 1–​26; Ashok Malhotra, ‘Race, diet, and Class: Robert McCarrison’s laboratory rat experiments in Coonoor, 1925–​27’, Food Studies, 9 (1), 2019, pp. 17–​27.

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David Arnold 39 Maneesha Lal, ‘The politics of gender and medicine in colonial India: The Countess of Dufferin’s Fund, 1885–​1888’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 68 (1), 1994, pp. 29–​66. 40 The subject of a forthcoming biography by Savithri Preetha Nair. 41 J. Lourdusamy, Science and National Consciousness in Bengal, 1870–​1930 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004), 143–​87; Projit Bihari Mukharji, ‘Parachemistries: Colonial chemopolitics in a zone of contest’, History of Science, 54 (2), 2016, pp. 362–​82. 42 Chakrabarti, Western Science, chs. 5–​7. 43 Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine, 160–​1, 190–​2. 44 Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 111–​42. 45 Shinjini Das, Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, Market and Homoeopathy (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). 46 Guy N.A. Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), ch. 2. 47 Rachel Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern: Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India, 1900–​ 1955 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 48 R.H. Elliot, ‘The Madras government and indigenous systems of medicine’, British Medical Journal, 1924, pp. 786–​88. 49 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-​Century India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), ch. 5. 50 See especially the critical view of Gandhi by the physicist Meghnad Saha, in Science and Culture, 1 (3/​ 4), 1935, and in subsequent issues of this journal.

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15 RACE IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA Science and the law Projit Bihari Mukharji

Introduction As the birthplace of what is possibly the most destructive and notorious word in the history of race in the modern world, namely ‘Aryan’, one would expect the history of race itself to be a fecund topic for historians working on the region. This has not been the case, however.1 Occasional spurts of scholarship, though rich and varied, have largely failed to produce a vibrant subfield in the way that it has done in some other parts of the world, such as, for instance, Africa and Latin America.2 One of the prime reasons for this relative lack of enthusiasm for more fulsome histories of race, I would suggest, is that both the idea and the practice of race in South Asia have perennially been haunted by the histories of caste. Where the history of race ends and where the history of caste begins has been difficult to determine. A second reason why the history of race has remained relatively marginal to the mainstream of South Asian historiography has been the relative neglect of the interwar period in modern South Asian history. The dominance of studies by British administrator and pioneering race scientist H.H. Risley and the ‘ethnographic state’ of the era prior to the First World War has meant that ‘race’ is understood to be something that was mainly done by the colonising class and aimed at the colonised population.3 Therefore, the continuities of racialised structures of thought and practice that connect this nineteenth-​century ‘ethnographic state’ to the contemporary postcolonial states of South Asia have been missed; for it was precisely in the interwar years, prior to formal decolonisation, that the state’s apparatus and, in particular, its knowledge production machinery was nationalised. The lack of attention to the interwar or late colonial period has also resulted in a lack of sensitivity towards the more refined and apparently scientific forms that race has taken. The historiographic emphasis on the seemingly crude cranial measurements and nasal indices as the basis of racial demarcations during the nineteenth century has allowed many to mistakenly believe that the history of race in South Asia was merely a matter of ‘pseudo-​science’ and that advances in enlightened and properly scientific thinking have banished it. Yet, as the historian of science Michael Gordin pointed out, the very notion of ‘pseudo-​science’ is an actor’s category. It is used by particular groups of scientists against others and has very contextually specific DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-16

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boundaries. There is no trans-​historically valid way to distinguish what is proper ‘science’ and what is ‘pseudo-​science’.4 Moreover, scholars working in other parts of the world have increasingly drawn attention to how racial thinking, after the Second World War, was progressively resuscitated and refigured by the contemporary science of genetics. Anthropologists have also increasingly documented how these new forms of race science, along with popular understandings of race informed by mediatised versions of this new race science, are thriving in South Asia.5 The work of the Indian Genome Variation Consortium and its genetic database are a particularly redolent example of how the colonial legacy, as developed in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, has borne fruit in our contemporary present. This prestigious, governmental initiative, which involves some of the top scientific institutions in India, describes the basis of its project to catalogue the biological variations in the country thus: The vast majority of the people of India (~80%) belong to the Hindu religious fold. Hindus are hierarchically arranged into 4 socio-​cultural clusters of groups (castes) and there are set rules governing marriage within the Hindu religious fold. About 8% of the population is constituted by tribals, who are ancestor worshippers and are largely endogamous. The remaining belongs to other religious groups, including Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, etc. Primarily, marriages occur within the religious groups. In addition, language and geographical location of habitat serve as barriers to free gene flow. These factors have resulted in the formation of a several thousand endogamous groups in India. Indian population, comprising of more than a billion people, consists of 4693 communities with several thousands of endogamous groups, 325 functioning languages and 25 scripts.6 Such constructions of biological diversity on the basis of alleged endogamy, not to mention the construction of religiously defined, monolithic, pan-​South Asian categories such as ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Christian’, etc., obviously build upon classic nineteenth-​century racial thought. It is little wonder, then, that Partha Pratim Majumder, one of the main scientists involved with the project, while trying to distinguish the contemporary projects from the nineteenth-​century ones, candidly acknowledges Risley’s work as the starting point for such endeavours. Scientists such as Majumder insist that, whereas, until the 1950s, his predecessors had attempted to ‘classify the people of India into a number of racial “types” ’, thereafter they have been interested in pursuing quantification of variability and relationality.7 Historians of science, such as Veronika Lipphardt, Jenny Bangham, Dorothy Roberts, and many others pointed out that this post-​war reinvention of ‘race’ as ‘population’, though allegedly premised on a move away from ‘essence’ to ‘frequency’, did not actually result in a break with pre-​war race science.8 What it did was refurbish and reinvent the plausibility and legitimacy of race science in the wake of the horror of Nazism. Underneath this rhetorical caesura of a clear break, therefore, there thrived much continuity of thought and practice with pre-​war race science. Indeed, as Sebastian Gil-​Riano showed, even the famous UNESCO Statement on Race, which has long been seen as spelling the death knell for scientific racism, was in fact much more ambivalent and its proponents far from unequivocal on the implausibility of race.9 What all this points to, of course, is the continuing importance of race in contemporary South Asia and beyond, as well as its deep, colonial-​era foundations. The social scientific platitude that ‘race is a social construct’ has, in effect, had little purchase on the scientific and political apparatuses. Particularly in South Asia, the absence of a more vigilant, critical discourse on race has allowed all sorts of racialised projects to proliferate without much scrutiny. The 194

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statement from the Indian Genome Variation Consortium quoted above, for instance, exemplifies the extent to which the voluminous and rich body of critical scholarship on caste has failed to have any impact on the scientific establishment or the state that funds this establishment. That such failure passes with so little comment from scholars and students of caste, in turn, is a testament to how little critical social scientific discourse has attended to the ongoing unfolding of race in South Asia. In what follows, I try to summarise some of the broader contours of the history of race in South Asia. I emphasise in particular some of the newer trends in the scholarship and the developments of the late colonial –​that is, mostly the interwar –​period. I divide the chapter into two parts, focusing, respectively, upon race science and race in legal practice.

Science Broadly speaking, in the most general terms, race is characterised by three interlocking claims: first, that a particular social group has certain fixed and ‘essential’ characteristics; second, that such characteristics are somehow biologically heritable; third, that physical appearances are connected to intellectual or moral qualities. None of these three, by themselves, were novel to the modern world. One can find a wide variety of pre-​modern sources in which some of these claims are made about certain groups or the other. Indeed, in some cases all three claims might even be found together before the modern era. But, as Suman Seth recently, and brilliantly, pointed out, the key change from the eighteenth century is in the causal direction of these claims. Instead of arguing, as the pre-​moderns had, that the moral qualities somehow determined the physically ‘undesirable’ traits, from the eighteenth century people begun to argue that it was the physical trait that determined the moral and intellectual qualities. Thus, it was no longer, for instance, that a ‘heathen soul’ resulted in a dark visage, but that black skin meant moral depravity.10 Statistical data emerged as a principal way to make these claims. Even before the full flourishing of craniometric and anthropometric measurements, such statistical claims were developed mainly by army doctors working in British imperial contexts. Indeed, it was partly as a consequence of the emerging centralised military bureaucracies that managed far-​flung imperial holdings, producing large, statistical data sets tabulated far away from the original face-​ to-​face contexts in which they were originally collected, that statistically structured racial identities began to emerge. From the closing decades of the eighteenth century, precisely the period in which the Raj was being established, these new racial optics began to take shape, though it was in the early decades of the nineteenth century that they became properly entrenched.11 By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, phrenology –​i.e. the study of skulls to get at the mind –​had become far more prominent as the scientific site upon which race was produced. Phrenology’s success lay partly in its ability to work through the new and emergent technologies of communication in order to create large networks of material circulations that allowed for new comparisons. Just as statistical data had allowed numbers, stripped of the thick social interaction in which they were collected, to be compared in faraway locations, so too with the skulls, casts, charts, and photographs that allowed phrenology to emerge.12 Notably, however, even as these artefacts were abstracted out of their lived social locations, their scientific value eventually derived from colonial ethnology’s ability to link the artefacts to fixed, racialised identity categories.13 In a pattern that we will see repeated for many of the other race sciences in colonial India, phrenology was also quickly adopted and repurposed by Indians. It became a particularly important component of samudrik-​vidya, a form of physiognomic knowledge that thrived in 195

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the vernacular print worlds of South Asia.14 Shruti Kapila called these vernacular forms of race science ‘insurgent knowledges’.15 The existence of multiple precolonial traditions of physiognomy, namely lakshana-​vidya and ilm-​al-​firasa, suggests, however, that colonial samudrik-​vidya was probably produced by a creative braiding of particular precolonial and colonial traditions of classifying bodily difference.16 Ishita Pande argued that this impulse to universalise racial categories, engendered in the practical needs and possibilities of empire, was in fact the common ground on which early nineteenth-​century liberalism and science came together. As a result, there developed a ‘universal schema’ within which the ‘liberal racialists’ sought ‘to analyse and locate objects and places, people and pathologies’.17 Medicine and phrenology were particularly fertile sites upon which such analysis was carried out. To interrupt these ‘universal schemas’, therefore, it is crucial that we attend precisely to the particular, the contingent, and the practical, which were stripped away in order to build the ‘universal schema’. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the new historiography on race has been to move away from a history based entirely on ideas, theories, and claims and look, instead, more closely at the role played by material practices, numbers, instruments, and samples. What has made this turn to the material practice more pressing is not merely its potential for yielding new historical insights but, rather, the striking fact that many of these older material collections have become the sources of new forms of racialisation. Thus, hair samples collected from inhabitants of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at the dawn of the twentieth century and stored in museums, for instance, have recently been used for new genetic studies that reracialise these individuals in new ways.18 These studies provide a richer and deeper context for the earlier historiography, which had attended to the late nineteenth-​century efflorescence of ethnographic practices connected usually to the colonial state’s census operations. These earlier studies had been particularly cognisant of the role of H.H. Risley, an erstwhile census commissioner with an avid interest in race science, who had attempted to understand caste as a historical outcome of the racial mixing of Aryan and non-​Aryan races.19 Attempts to trace the emergence of biological theories of race in the late nineteenth century in India also described how an earlier, mostly linguistic, interest in ‘Aryans’, as nourished by the late eighteenth-​century science of comparative philology, eventually transformed into a designation grounded in anthropometric measurements.20 Studies of Aryanism quickly also began to point towards the sheer plurality of the concept and its heterographic deployments, not only in South Asia but throughout the anglophone world.21 Such complexities gradually began to raise doubts about the import and centrality that the late nineteenth-​/​early twentieth-​century ethnography, as exemplified in the Risleyan census, had been given in earlier studies. Recently, Chris Fuller’s detailed study of Risley’s own administrative work further confirmed these doubts. Fuller showed that, leaving alone the colonial state more generally, Risley did not even deploy his own racial theories consistently in other areas of administration, beyond the censuses, where he was active.22 These findings underline the frequent gaps that existed between the theory and practice of colonial rule. Although the extent and importance of race science within the colonial state in the era before the First World War might well now be in need of serious reconsideration, what is clear is that race science quickly caught on in middle-​and upper-​class circles in India. Risley’s project, though lacking in full-​throated support within the state’s apparatus, called forth a much more fulsome response from elite colonised groups, such as the Arya Samajists of north India and the Bengali bhadralok. For the Hindu ‘revivalist’ Arya Samajists, anthropometry became a crucial part of their pedagogical project. It was used as part of the admission process for entry 196

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into their flagship educational institution, the Gurukul (‘traditional school’) at Kangri, in order to select the ‘fittest boys’, who, in turn, would be the ‘germ cell of the nation’.23 Amongst the Bengali bhadralok, it was more of an intellectual pursuit aimed at clarifying the racial identity of the upper-​caste Hindu elites. Hence, by the second decade of the twentieth century, upper-​ caste Bengali intellectuals, such as Ramaprasad Chanda, had undertaken extensive anthropometric studies with a view to repudiating Risley’s findings that the upper-​caste Bengali Hindus were not Aryans. What is remarkable is that Chanda’s efforts were financed by a number of wealthy and philanthropic Bengalis, backed by the foremost cultural and literary organisations of the day, and eventually tacitly supported by the colonial state, which allowed Chanda to go on paid leave and use anthropometric instruments belonging to the state to complete his studies.24 Such pre-​war collaborations between the colonised elite and the colonial state with regard to race science in many ways prefigure the clearer developments of the period after the Second World War. Anthropometry was not the only form of race science in the Raj prior to the First World War. Another key site for racialised understandings to flourish –​and, indeed, one with much more practical immediacy –​was medicine. Ideas about racial immunity and racial susceptibility flourished in South Asia throughout the nineteenth century. Yet, as David Arnold showed, it was far from a simple white-​on-​black form of racial thinking. A variety of groups, of both European and South Asian background, deployed racial idioms to make sense of a variety of differential disease rates among neighbouring groups. In the context of malaria, David Arnold therefore pointed out that ‘race’ was never a ‘relatively homogeneous set of ideas and practices, driven by material greed and social anxieties in the West, and capable of delivering social power and political authority to whites across the globe’. It was always a far more ‘nebulous and self-​contradictory concept’, which was frequently ‘internalized and reworked’ by the very people who were subjects of European racial discourse.25 Indeed, it was U.N. Mukherji, an upper-​caste Bengali doctor, who authored a pamphlet calling the Bengali Hindus a ‘dying race’, which became a cornerstone for the emerging Hindu right-​ wing political discourse. Mukherji’s pamphlet was also interesting because of the ways in which he combined medical and statistical tools, obtained from culling colonial census data and medical theories of racial immunity, to create an image of Bengali Hindus as a ‘dying race’. He argued that Muslims were growing at a much faster rate as a ‘population’ (itself a new concept, popularised and sustained through the statistical compilations of the colonial censuses) while the Bengali Hindu ‘race’ was dying out.26 In fact, Bengali daktars (those who had trained in ‘Western’ medicine but through a largely vernacular curriculum) were at the forefront of attempting to forge a new, healthy, and more disease-​resistant nation, often imagined along explicitly racial lines. Diseases such as malaria, cholera, and plague became symbolic and practical resources for daktars such as Mukherji as they sought to revivify a national race.27 What is also worth noting in this regard is that some aspects of Bengali daktari (vernacularised versions of ‘Western’ medicine), including ideas about racialised bodies, acquired a much wider popular purchase through the precocious decision by the Bengal government in the 1850s to include ‘human physiology’ as a subject for teaching in high schools. As a result, generations of Bengali schoolboys became acquainted with racially marked physiological differences.28 Indeed, physiology was not alone. Schoolchildren also imbibed racial ideas in other areas of instruction, such as geography.29 After the First World War the medical and the scientific apparatuses of the colonial state were both rapidly ‘Indianised’.30 As a result, many of the ambiguities and polyvalences that had resulted through colonised elites such as Chanda and Mukherji appropriating and redeploying 197

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race were now reinserted into the formal apparatus of the colonial state. A number of men and some women emerged in the interwar years as proponents and practitioners of race science. Perhaps the two most famous figures of this period were Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the self-​taught statistician who would go on to found the Indian Statistical Institute as well as become a key scientific advisor for Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister, and Biraja Shankar Guha, the first Indian to obtain a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University. Mahalanobis and Guha came to race science through different routes and had significant political differences, yet they were in agreement in imagining a new role for accurate race science and its role in post-​independence India.31 This quest of greater accuracy and objectivity resonated with the political context of the interwar years. As different social groups tried to imagine distinctive political futures in a postcolonial context, technocratic elites sought to find a bloodless, fair, and acceptable political resolution grounded in accurate racial measurements of capability, interests, and relatedness. Such a technocratic dream had initially been floated by the Bengali polymath Sir Brojendra Nath Seal in the early twentieth century. Both Mahalanobis and Guha inherited his dream through their personal proximity with Seal. But they developed it differently and along their own lines.32 The newly Indianising late colonial state therefore created a patchwork of ‘racialised’ interests that connected elements within the state to elements in the wider civil society. Hence Guha, for instance, sought to argue that upper castes, across the different states, were biologically closer to each other. Mahalanobis argued that Bengali upper and lower castes were more closely integrated than with similar ranking castes in neighbouring provinces. Beyond Bengal, the political stakes were often even starker. D.N. Majumdar and Irawati Karve, two other leading anthropologists of the time, were recruited by those seeking a separate Gujarati state from within the territories of the erstwhile Bombay state, in a bid to biologically prove their claims to the people of the Dangs.33 Even more striking, perhaps, was the fact that, in 1942, as the Quit India movement was reaching its climax, the Hindu Mahasabha (the leading Hindu right-​wing organisation of the time) published a book by another scholar, Atul Krishna Sur, to prove the affinity of Bengali Hindus to other Hindus using anthropometric tools.34 What held these diverse political investments together was the dream of a technocratic solution to tricky and often intractable political issues. This dream was, in turn, sustained through new technologies that promised greater objectivity and accuracy. Mahalanobis, for instance, kept trying throughout the 1930s to build a new camera that would accurately measure the racial identity of subjects.35 Majumdar and Karve explored blood group frequencies, which would gradually grow into post-​war genetic studies. Guha continued to use anthropometric measurements, but now used more modern instruments and enforced greater rigour in sampling.36 The interwar period, therefore, is when we witness what I have elsewhere called ‘biometric nationalism’.37 This is a new form of interrogating and debating the boundaries of the nation, based on biometric measurements of blood, hair, skull size, etc. Such biometric nationalism was politically polyvalent and heterographic. But it was sustained through an underlying agreement that technologically accurate and objective physical measurements could settle difficult questions about national belonging. Biometric nationalism, though perhaps the most prominent, was far from the only way in which colonial race science was appropriated, refigured, and entrenched among the colonised elites of South Asia. In Ayurvedic medicine, for instance, racialised ideas of Aryanism became a prominent symbolic and conceptual resource. The Edinburgh-​trained South Asian prince Sir Bhagvat Singhjee of Gondal, who did much to promote Ayurveda, named his influential 198

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book on the subject A Short History of Aryan Medical Science. Although confessedly it was a discourse on ‘temperaments’, rather than the more monolithic idea of ‘racial types’ that informed the paradigms through which modern Ayurveda of the late colonial era conceptualised bodily difference, in the constitution of the self-​identity of high-​caste Ayurvedic physicians, as well as the public identity of the medical tradition as such, Aryanism was almost ubiquitous.38 The most prominent vernacular uptake of race science, beyond biometric nationalism, however, was in the realm of what Luzia Savary perceptively called ‘santati-​sastra’ or the ‘science of progeny’. Braiding together older ideas available in traditions such as the ratisastra with classical Galtonian eugenic ideas, proponents of this science sought to develop ways in which parents might intervene in the physiological process of reproduction to produce desirable racial traits in their children.39 Working through the Hindi public sphere, rather than the institutional mechanisms of the state, santati-​sastra resonated with the highly racialised framework of building a ‘strong nation’, similar to what we see in the writings of the Bengali daktars. Savary demonstrated precisely how widespread ideas about race were in the Hindi public sphere and how intimately entangled these racial ideas were with the imaginations of an Indian nationalism. More importantly, she argued convincingly not only that the concept of race was ‘vernacularized’ in the Hindi and Urdu public spheres but that entirely new ‘vernacular sciences’, such as santati-​sastra or progeniology, were produced as a result of such vernacularisations.40 These vernacular formations of race science point both to what is distinctive about the history of race science in South Asia and to what is perhaps the most pervasive and long-​lasting legacy of colonial racial thinking. To sum up then, we might say that medicine, anthropology, and a more amorphous domain of vernacular sciences were, in fact, the three most productive sites upon which sciences of race flourished in the colonial era.

Law Both the medical and the anthropological forms of racial thinking developed significant legal footprints during the Raj era. But, whereas most of the anthropological iterations of race influenced colonial legislative law, the impact of medical racialism was mainly felt in the colonial courtrooms. The most blatantly racist anthropologically informed colonial legal statute was no doubt the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. By 1947, in Uttar Pradesh alone, some 1,500,000 people were classified as ‘criminal tribes’ under this act.41 In India as a whole nearly 1 per cent of the entire population at the time of independence, or some 3.5 million people, were thus classified.42 Most of the groups criminalised by this act were extremely low on the caste hierarchy, often very poor, and frequently groups that had traditionally engaged in mobile forms of labour and eschewed sedentary lifestyles. In David Arnold’s words, the act was used mostly ‘against wandering groups, nomadic petty traders and pastoralists, gypsy types, hill-​and forest-​dwelling tribals, in short, against a wide variety of marginals who did not conform to the colonial pattern of settled agricultural and wage labor’.43 The act created a legally justiciable assumption that members of these groups were ‘criminals by birth’. As a result, they were required to register with the local police and be present for a daily roll call, and allowed to leave the village they were registered in only upon receiving a temporary permit stipulating the time they could be away. Any violation of this led to fines and imprisonment, while parallel efforts were made to encourage local landholders to recruit these groups as agricultural labour.44 Already labouring under the social stigma associated with low-​ caste ranks, this explicit criminalisation further cemented the social, political, and economic 199

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marginalisation of these groups. Indeed, even after independence and the repeal of the 1871 act, the social stigmatisation of these now so-​called ‘de-​notified tribes’ continued, and, consequently, postcolonial police forces persisted in suspecting and persecuting them for crimes that they had not committed.45 Sanjay Nigam pointed out that the 1871 act was not exactly novel. It built upon a litany of earlier ‘stereotypical notions such as the thugs, the dhatoora poisoners and Buddhuks derived from India’s otherness’.46 Others have even tried to argue that the ‘criminal tribe’ stereotype is itself of a long, precolonial vintage that the British picked up from their South Asian interlocutors. Leaving aside the search for the origins of the idea, it is indubitable that many of the specific bureaucratic mechanisms of surveillance incorporated into the 1871 act were, in fact, already part of more ad hoc regimes developed by administrators in the Punjab and the North West Provinces, at least since the 1850s.47 It is precisely in the realm of specific practices and mechanisms that the distinctiveness of colonial articulations of stereotypes such as ‘criminal tribes’ emerged. These articulations were increasingly authorised by the sign, protocols, and legitimacy of sciences such as ethnology and phrenology. It was these sciences that allowed local hierarchies, patronage structures, and stereotypes to be collected, collated, and applied, as part of a single colonial system. This is also precisely why treating the history of the criminal tribes discourse merely as a history of a ‘stereotype’ disconnected from a broader history of ‘race’ is inadequate. Whereas the now fairly vast literature on the 1871 act and its precursors tends to attend mostly to the regimes of surveillance, reform, economic plight, and social stigma, histories explicitly engaging with the role of modern race sciences in the constitution of ‘criminal tribes’ are still relatively small.48 Kim Wagner’s, Mark Brown’s, and Saurabh Mishra’s works are the welcome exceptions. Wagner explored phrenology, Brown investigated ethnology, and Mishra evoked the troika of ethnography, toxicology, and medical jurisprudence.49 Although Mishra did not dwell upon this, the context within which each of these forms of race science operated in the larger colonial apparatus was quite distinctive. Ethnography, of course, had emerged after 1857 as the pre-​eminent form of colonial administrative science. As Karuna Mantena pointed out, the post-​1857 period witnessed a significant ideological reorientation in colonial rule. This reorientation ‘was closely tied to the development of anthropological and sociological theories of native society, accounts that gave sustenance to the newly understood rigidity of native customs and traditions’.50 But the operational context of such expertise was usually within the executive. The period therefore saw numerous colonial administrators doubling up as ethnographers. These administrator-​ethnographers worked on policy and direct administration and were supremely important in the making of laws such as the Criminal Tribes Act. They did not usually appear in courts of law as scientific experts. By contrast, toxicologists and doctors trained in medical jurisprudence rarely had much direct role in either administrative decision-​making or the creation of statutes. They did, however, increasingly come to be called into law courts as scientific experts –​though their roles within those courts itself has an interesting history. English law had long resisted the use of ‘experts’ in court, holding instead that, within the legal context, judge and jury alone were the experts. Experts began to gradually be accepted in English courtrooms as part of a larger ‘adversarial revolution’ at the very end of the eighteenth century.51 By the middle of the nineteenth century the English courts began to see rival experts testifying for opposing parties.52 Yet British Indian courts and the role of the scientific expert witness in it were often quite distinctive. Toxicologists and medical examiners in the colony, for instance, were allowed to send in written reports and not have to necessarily appear in person in the court. This was perhaps mainly a matter of expediency, to save the time of colonial officials, 200

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but it also served to bolster the authority of science by significantly reducing the opportunities for a battle of experts in court. Rather than being an independent professional outside the judiciary, the expert in British India was more akin to a friend of the court. Yet these people were also state employees. As a result, the lines between the judiciary and the executive became blurred in a way that did not mirror the situation in England. The anomalous but privileged position that the colonial scientific expert enjoyed was founded on the pervasive racialized belief in ‘native mendacity’. South Asian witnesses were held to be fundamentally unreliable. Hence greater authority had to be assigned to scientific experts, who could divine the truth from the mendacious natives.53 Moreover, even the testimonies of the natives that were heard in the court were regularly filtered through the racialised ethnographic common sense encoded in such redolent shibboleths as the ‘criminal tribe’, the ‘fanatical Muslim’, the ‘wily Brahman’, and so forth.54 Much more glaring were the so-​called ‘boot and spleen’ cases. In these cases, which eventually became a nationalist cause célèbre, South Asians –​most often servants –​died as a consequence of a beating by a white man, and the colonial courts acquitted the culprit on the grounds that the victim had died of a ruptured spleen. This is when medical opinion was frequently used to argue that natives, owing to endemic malarial fevers, had chronically enlarged spleens that could spontaneously burst, and hence the beating did not directly result in the rupture.55 Elizabeth Kolsky argued that ‘European judges and juries in the late nineteenth-​century colonial courtrooms collaborated across hierarchies of class to buttress the racial basis of British dominance’.56 She also noted the increasing use throughout the colonial period of a variety of medical and scientific experts both in the drafting of the Criminal Procedure Code and in the legal practice in courtrooms. Unfortunately, however, she did not delve into the bases of the racialised discourse of these experts beyond merely observing that it ‘contradicted the claims of an objective scientific method’.57 As historians of science have repeatedly pointed out, ‘objectivity’ and ‘scientific method’ are not in themselves trans-​historical categories.58 They acquire specific horizons within specific historical contexts. What, then, beyond simply near-​universal bad faith within the colonial judiciary, might have rendered the racialised ethnographic and physiological views to appear ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ at the time therefore remains to be explored. Indeed, this is precisely what Sudipta Sen, for instance, offered by way of a genealogy of the medical thinking that was eventually mobilised in the ruptured spleen cases.59 Mitra Sharafi’s brilliant recent analysis of the way blood tests were deployed in colonial courts points also to another way in which we might get beyond simple aspersions of universal bad faith and lack of objectivity.60 Sharafi illuminated two important aspects of how colonial law worked in practice. First, she demonstrated that the judiciary’s paranoia about ‘native mendacity’ did not simply lead them to mistrust witnesses. It also led them to mistrust their own native police force, native doctors, and so forth. As a result, the privileging of a small number of scientific experts was as much a product of the mistrust of the native witness as it was of the fear that native officers would in fact fabricate evidence. Second, Sharafi imaginatively and convincingly argued that the faking of evidence might not have been entirely a figment of colonial paranoia. It might well in fact have been, at least partly, a product of a distinctive set of South Asian practices associated with justice through ‘punitive self-​harm’. Sharafi included such practices as the hunger strike, dharna, political protest, suicide, etc., many of which were formative for Mohandas Gandhi’s conceptualisation of non-​violent resistance, in the genealogy of ‘punitive self-​harm’. She argued further that many of the cases of fabricated evidence might actually have been instances of a ‘legal pluralism’ at play, whereby different sides were operating by different rules. What appeared as ‘native mendacity’ to one side appeared as ‘punitive 201

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self-​harm’ to the other. Sharafi’s insights do not negate the pervasive influence of race in colonial legal practice. She argued, however, that ‘ending the story with racial difference, in other words, means missing a whole other sphere of activity, namely, noncolonial modes of disputing as they adapted to the new colonial rules’.61 Sharafi’s plea that we push our critiques beyond simply reiterating stories of racial difference and look instead for the legal pluralisms lurking in the cracks leads us back to a position similar to that advocated by Savary and others for histories of race science, namely a need to look for the vernacular, hybrid, braided, and pidgin forms. In the legal context, one area in which such vernacular and liminal forms are particularly prominent is in the histories of criminal detection itself. Although they were steeped in the ‘Oriental grammar’ of racial stereotypes, the very fact that the majority of the detectives in the colonial period were themselves Eurasians renders this space of legal enquiry particularly liminal. In fact, one of the most successful of such detectives, Charles Hardless, who fathered an actual biological dynasty of talented police and private detectives as well as several key forensic techniques, always insisted that his loyalties were equally split between England and India. Keen to find a postcolonial future for Eurasians in the subcontinent, Hardless advocated for Eurasians adopting careers in forensic science as a hereditary occupation akin to hereditary caste occupations. He even opened a detective training school to train Eurasian orphans in the profession.62 In Hardless’s career we witness, then, not merely a racial liminality but, more interestingly, a self-​conscious performance of that liminality. It is easy to miss such liminality in the Manichean racial discourse of colonial legal culture, but to do so is to miss a crucial set of intellectual, political, and practical stakes within the colonial legal apparatus that resolutely refused to reduce the world to ‘black’ and ‘white’. Given the large numbers of Eurasians in the colonial police, not merely as detectives, these stakes were not insignificant.

Résumé What the histories of science and legal practice reveal, then, is a complex archive of mutable and heterographic practices of hierarchisation. These histories are neither the histories of mere ‘stereotypes’ nor monolithic and stable groups. Race, as Claire Anderson in her work on indentured South Asian labour pointed out, was a ‘contingent category that worked through other social referents … as well as rank and class’. Furthermore, ‘race was not grounded in “birth”, “blood” or “color”, but incorporated into a more complex set of social and cultural meanings. These meanings were open to subaltern subversion, transformation and even performance.’63 To deny either the intersectional dimensions of race or its potential for subversion, transformation, and performance is to perpetuate precisely the decontextualised and abstracted identities that enabled race to emerge in the first place in the eighteenth century. To disrupt the universal schemas that sustain racial regimes of recognition and hierarchy, it is crucial to defamiliarise how contingent, local, and contested forms of hierarchy were invested with seemingly more general, universal authority and applicability. Refusing the universalistic claims of race science, therefore, we must insist on ‘putting … (race) in its place’.64

Notes 1 Sayori Ghoshal, ‘Race in South Asia: Colonialism, Nationalism and Modern Science’, History Compass, 19 (2), 2021, e12647, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hic3.12647 [accessed 8 June 2021].

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Race in colonial South Asia 2 Warwick Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Lundy Braun, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 3 Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002). 4 Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); idem, Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction, forthcoming. 5 Yulia Egorova, ‘The substance that empowers: DNA in South Asia’, Contemporary South Asia, 21 (3), 2013, pp. 291–​303. 6 Indian Genome Variation Consortium, ‘IGVdb portal: Diversity of populations’, IGVdb portal, www. igvdb.res.in/​references.php, accessed: 29 May 2020. 7 Partha P. Majumder, ‘People of India: Biological diversity and affinities’, Evolutionary Biology, 6 (3), 1998, pp. 100–​10. 8 Veronika Lipphardt, ‘ “Geographical distribution patterns of various genes”: Genetic studies of human variation after 1945’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences: Part A, 47, 2014, pp. 50–​61; Jenny Bangham and Soraya de Chadarevian, ‘Heredity and the study of human populations after 1945’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 47, 2014, pp. 45–​9; Susan Lindee and Ricardo Ventura Santos, ‘The biological anthropology of living human populations: World histories, national styles, and international networks: An introduction to Supplement 5’, Current Anthropology, 53 (5), 2012, pp. 3–​16, 5. 9 Sebastian Gil-​Riano, ‘Relocating anti-​racist science: The UNESCO Statement on Race and economic development in the Global South’, British Journal for the History of Science, 51 (2), 2018, pp. 281–​303. 10 Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-​Century British Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2020). 11 Ibid. 12 James Poskett, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 13 Kim A. Wagner, ‘Confessions of a skull: Phrenology and colonial knowledge in early nineteenth-​ century India’, History Workshop Journal, 69, 2010, pp. 28–​51. 14 Shruti Kapila, ‘Race matters: Orientalism and religion, India and beyond c.1770–​1880’, MAS, 41 (3), 2007, pp. 471–​513. 15 Ibid., 502–​11. 16 Daud Ali, ‘Padmasri’s Nagarasarvasva and the world of medieval Kamasastra’, Indian Journal of Philosophy, 39 (1), 2011, pp. 41–​62; Yael Rice, ‘The emperor’s eye and the painter’s brush: The rise of the Mughal court artist, c.1546–​1627’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2011); on the notion of ‘braiding’, see Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 17 Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (London: Routledge, 2012), 22. 18 Projit Bihari Mukharji, ‘Hairy races: Hair, science and human difference in the British Empire, c.1850–​1920’, in: Marina Mogilner (ed.), A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Revolution, Empire and Nation State (1760–​1920) (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 19 Crispin Bates, ‘Race, caste and tribe in central India: The early origins of Indian anthropometry’, in: Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 1995), pp. 219–​59; Dirks, Castes of Mind. 20 Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008). 21 Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 22 C.J. Fuller, ‘Anthropologists and viceroys: Colonial knowledge and policy making in India, 1871–​ 1911’, MAS, 50 (1), 2016, pp. 217–​58. 23 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘From Brahmacharya to “conscious race culture”: Victorian discourses of “science” and Hindu traditions in early Indian nationalism’, in: Crispin Bates (ed.), Beyond Representation: Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity (New Delhi: OUP, 2006), pp. 241–​69. 24 Projit Bihari Mukharji, ‘The Bengali pharaoh: Upper-​caste Aryanism, pan-​Egyptianism, and the contested history of biometric nationalism in twentieth-​century Bengal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 59 (2), 2017, pp. 446–​76.

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Projit Bihari Mukharji 25 David Arnold, ‘ “An ancient race outworn”: Malaria and race in colonial India, 1860–​ 1930’, in: Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris (eds.), Race, Science and Medicine (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 123–​43, 123. 26 Ibid. 27 Projit Bihari Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body the Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine (London: Anthem Press, 2009). 28 Idem, ‘Vernacularizing the body: Informational egalitarianism, Hindu divine design, and race in physiology schoolbooks, Bengal 1859–​1877’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 91 (3), 2017, pp. 554–​85. 29 Subho Basu, ‘The dialectics of resistance: Colonial geography, Bengali literati and the racial mapping of Indian identity’, MAS, 44 (1), 2010, pp. 53–​79. 30 David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 60–​1. 31 Mukharji, ‘Bengali pharaoh’. 32 Ibid. 33 Idem, ‘From serosocial to sanguinary identities: Caste, transnational race science and the shifting metonymies of blood group B, India c.1918–​1960’, IESHR, 51 (2), 2014, pp. 143–​76. 34 Idem, ‘Bengali pharaoh’. 35 Idem, ‘Profiling the profiloscope: Facialization of race technologies and the rise of biometric nationalism in inter-​war British India’, History and Technology, 31 (4), 2016, pp. 376–​96. 36 Idem, ‘Bengali pharaoh’. 37 Ibid.; idem, ‘Profiling the profiloscope’. 38 Idem, Doctoring Traditions. 39 Luzia Savary, ‘Vernacular eugenics? Santati-​sastra in popular Hindi advisory literature (1900–​1940)’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 37 (3), 2014, pp. 381–​97. 40 Idem, Evolution, Race and Public Sphere in India: Vernacular Concepts and Sciences (1860–​1930) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). 41 Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and policing the “criminals by birth”, part 1: The making of a colonial stereotype –​the criminal tribes and castes of north India’, IESHR, 27 (2), 1990, pp. 131–​64. 42 Andrew J. Major, ‘State and criminal tribes in colonial Punjab: Surveillance, control and reclamation of the “dangerous classes” ’, MAS, 33 (3), 1999, pp. 657–​88. 43 David Arnold, ‘Crime and crime control in Madras, 1858–​1947’, in: Anand A. Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985), pp. 62–​88, 85. 44 Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and policing the “criminals by birth”, part 2: The development of a disciplinary system, 1871–​1900’, IESHR, 27 (3), 1990, pp. 257–​87. 45 Dilip D’Souza, ‘De-​notified tribes: Still “criminal”?’, EPW, 34 (51), 1999, pp. 3576–​8. 46 Nigam, ‘Disciplining, part 1’, 134. 47 Ibid., 136–​50. 48 Meena Radhakrishna, ‘The Criminal Tribes Act in Madras Presidency: Implications for itinerant trading communities’, IESHR, 26 (3), 1989, pp. 269–​95; idem, ‘Surveillance and settlements under the Criminal Tribes Act in Madras’, IESHR, 29 (2), 1992, pp. 171–​98; Rachel Tolen, ‘Colonizing and transforming the criminal tribesmen: The Salvation Army in British India’, American Ethnologist, 18 (1), 1991, pp. 106–​25; Henry Schwartz, Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief (Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2010). 49 Wagner, ‘Confessions of a skull’; Mark Brown, ‘Ethnology and colonial administration in nineteenth-​ century British India: The question of native crime and criminality’, British Journal for the History of Science, 36 (2), 2003, pp. 201–​19; Saurabh Mishra, ‘Of poisoners, tanners and the British Raj: Redefining Chamar identity in colonial north India, 1850–​90’, IESHR, 48 (3), 2011, pp. 317–​38. 50 Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 56. 51 Tal Golan, ‘The history of scientific expert testimony in the English courtroom’, Science in Context, 12 (1), 1999, pp. 7–​32. 52 Christopher Hamlin, ‘Scientific method and expert witnessing: Victorian perspectives on a modern problem’, Social Studies of Science, 16 (3), 1986, pp. 485–​513. 53 Vinay Lal, ‘Everyday crime, native mendacity and the cultural psychology of justice in colonial India’, Studies in History, 15 (1), 1999, pp. 145–​66. 54 Ibid., 156.

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Race in colonial South Asia 55 Jordana Bailkin, ‘The boot and the spleen: When was murder possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (2), 2006, pp. 462–​93; Michael Carrington, ‘Officers, gentlemen, and murderers: Lord Curzon’s campaign against “collisions” between Indians and Europeans, 1899–​1905’, MAS, 47 (3), 2013, pp. 780–​819; Sudipta Sen, ‘Confessions of the unfriendly spleen: Medicine, violence, and the mysterious organ of colonial India’, in: Rohan Deb Roy and Guy N.A. Attewell (eds.), Locating the Medical: Explorations in South Asian History (New Delhi: OUP, 2018), pp. 71–​100. 56 Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), 193. 57 Ibid., 110. 58 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Henry M. Cowles, The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 59 Sen, ‘Confessions of the unfriendly spleen’. 60 Mitra Sharafi, ‘The imperial serologist and punitive self-​harm: Bloodstains and legal pluralism in British India’, in: Ian A. Burney and Christopher Hamlin (eds.), Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), pp. 60–​85. 61 Ibid., 76. 62 Projit Bihari Mukharji, Ian A. Burney, and Christopher Hamlin, ‘Handwriting analysis as a dynamic artisanal science: The Hardless detective dynasty and the forensic cultures of the British Raj’, in: Burney and Hamlin, Global Forensic Cultures, pp. 86–​111. 63 Claire Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–​1920 (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 57–​8. 64 Suman Seth, ‘Putting knowledge in its place: Science, colonialism, and the postcolonial’, Postcolonial Studies, 12 (4), 2009, pp. 373–​88.

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16 ‘A RACE APART’? The European community in colonial India Satoshi Mizutani

Introduction What does it mean for historians of colonialism, particularly those studying the non-​settler sort found in British India, to talk of a ‘European’ community as ‘a race apart’? It seems natural enough to assume that members of such a community are different from the rest of the society in which they reside, in the obvious sense that they originate from a nation that has conquered and is governing the territory in question. Their ‘whiteness’ would serve as the primary marker of their social distinction, particularly from the middle of the nineteenth century, when the idea of ‘race’ established itself as a ‘universal truth’ justifying Europe’s domination of non-​European societies. This familiar narrative though not entirely wrong, is partial and self-​limiting, however, closing off other possibilities of historical enquiry. In 1989 Ann Laura Stoler, a historical anthropologist specialising in the Dutch East Indies, published a historiographical essay that emphasised the internal hierarchies and tensions that lay within colonial European communities. The existence of groups whose whiteness was regarded as inauthentic or contradictory, such as ‘poor whites’ and people of mixed descent, called into question the very meaning of what it was to be ‘European’, and, by extension, the clear distinction between the coloniser and the colonised that made imperial rule seem natural. Stoler argued that scholars should question their own tendency to historicise in ways that make ‘colonialism and its European agents appear as an abstract force’. The picture of the European community as a homogeneous entity united by shared goals and interests was less a mirror of reality than an ‘imagined’ construct –​something that was ‘consciously created and fashioned’. This construction was, in part, a response to instabilities brought about by changing circumstances. From the late nineteenth century European colonialism itself was increasingly challenged politically by the colonised, and the terms of inclusion and exclusion were forced to shift accordingly. Whiteness in this context should not be seen as a signification of pre-​established and stable distinctions. Rather, it is better understood as a colonial means of social intervention, serving the ruling order by allowing it to investigate and discipline the quotidian lives of those who were seen as responsible for the disruption of the racialised social order needed for colonialism and for the sense of political insecurity arising therefrom.1 In the historiography of colonial South Asia, David Arnold, Waltraud Ernst, and Kenneth Ballhatchet had already published important works consistent with Stoler’s preoccupations,2 206

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but it was only from the beginning of the new millennium that research inspired by Stoler’s theoretical insights gained momentum, with the publication of a series of monograph-​length works. Foregrounding the imperial realm of the intimate, Durba Ghosh’s seminal book Sex and the Family in Colonial India (2006) analysed the socio-​political complexities of the interracial sexual unions between British men and Indian women in the early decades of British rule.3 In monographs such as Children of Colonialism (2001) by Lionel Caplan, Lines of the Nation (2007) by Laura Bear, and, more recently, Anglo-​Indians and Minority Politics in South Asia (2017) by Uther Charlton-​Stevens, histories of the mixed-​descent people of India, called ‘Eurasians’ (officially ‘Anglo-​Indians’ since 1911), were examined in ways that address the class, gender, and racialised hierarchies in and around the European community.4 Elizabeth Collingham’s study, Imperial Bodies (2001), located the physical and social practices of British residents in the quotidian realm, vividly showing how they consciously cultivated their whiteness instead of taking it for granted. In her Empire Families (2004), Elizabeth Buettner illuminatingly focused on the family, laying bare the efforts of the better-​off British to maintain their whiteness across generations from parents to children.5 Elizabeth Kolsky’s monograph Colonial Justice in British India (2010) critically re-​examined the issues of colonial violence and legal injustice in connection with the day-​to-​day lives of Britons and their contradictory relationship to the rule of law.6 Published around the same time, Low and Licentious Europeans (2009) by Harald Fischer-​Tiné explored the worlds of ‘white subalternity’ in British India, closely studying the implications of the presence of ‘poor white’ groups, both men and women, and addressing important historiographical questions relating to both race and class in the colonial context.7 Along similar lines, my own book, The Meaning of White (2011), analysed how both Eurasians and ‘domiciled Europeans’ (white people who had permanently settled in India) emerged as a contradiction to whiteness, with their increasing impoverishment becoming a target of state and philanthropic intervention.8 This chapter draws to a large extent on these contributions made in the last two decades. Focusing on the post-​ Mutiny period, when the question of race became increasingly pronounced, I examine the (largely unsuccessful) efforts made to construct the European community as ‘a race apart’.

Colonial hierarchies and the imperial construction of racial selves Before the British conquest of India, starting in Bengal in the middle of the eighteenth century, Europeans in India had originated from several Western empires, including the Portuguese, Dutch, and French as well as the British. In our period, the community was increasingly ‘British’, particularly in Calcutta, though it was not so obvious in Madras and Bombay. Reflecting the political structure of Britain as a ‘United Kingdom’, the European community in India was heterogeneous in terms of ethnic background, with its members including Scottish, Welsh, and Irish as well as English men and women. In terms of religion, by and large, it was a self-​ consciously Protestant community, though, mirroring the aforementioned ethnic composition, there was a degree of denominational diversity. The community’s gender distribution was disproportionately male-​oriented, although the imbalance was somewhat amended from the late nineteenth century onwards. In comparison with the incredibly numerous Indian population, the European community was but miniscule. Although it is extremely difficult to capture the precise numerical size of the ‘European community’, partly because of its ambiguous definition and boundaries, it did not probably exceed 100,000 as of the beginning of the 1910s. Occupationally, members of the community were largely divided into two groups. On the one hand, there were ‘officials’, including the servants of the colonial state, both civil and military. 207

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On the other hand, there were a diverse range of ‘non-​official’ groups, including business owners/​operators, missionaries, and so forth. In itself, the aforementioned demographical outline of the European community tells us little about how its members saw themselves or about precisely who were included in, and were excluded from, its membership. In order for us to understand the kind of European community that the British Empire sought to build in India, it is crucial to recognise that, since the days of the East India Company, the British consistently saw the subcontinent as a territory for an extractive, rather than settler, variety of colonialism.9 The Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement, appointed by the imperial government in 1858, left no room for ambiguity on this point. In its report, the committee made it clear that men and women from working-​ class families should be encouraged to emigrate to Australia or other settler colonies, but not to India.10 The raison d’être of the European community in India was not to populate the territory but to govern it, and thereby to procure surplus value by extracting from its resources. In accordance with this approach, members of this community were supposed to originate only from the upper strata of British society, and their purpose in India was to serve British interests as high-​ranked civil servants, businessmen, and professionals, as well as missionaries and philanthropists. As chosen members of a ruling nation, these people were expected to practise what we may call the ‘politics of white prestige’. In the intentional absence of a working class, the committee argued, these people of ‘respectable’ standing would be able to embody Britain’s ‘more advanced’ civilisation. Each of these European individuals was to be always aware of the imperial meaning of their presence, and to cultivate refinement so that they could command the respect and awe of the colonised. Only by living according to exemplary standards of conduct would they be able to stand themselves up against the increasingly critical gaze of Indians.11 The politics of white prestige were inseparably linked with a range of practices whereby Europeans distanced themselves from the rest of society. The socialising activities of respectable Britons were largely restricted to the tight confines of what was called the ‘club’, which provided the ‘sahibs’ (meaning high-​status Europeans) with comfortable and familiar amenities for social intercourse and leisure. The club was an exclusive institution, denying entry to non-​ Europeans in ways that clearly demarcated the boundary between coloniser and colonised.12 Europeans sought to distance themselves from the very society they colonised in their everyday lives as well. This was manifest, for example, in their housing and domestic arrangements. The British residences built in the wake of the Mutiny were located in spacious quarters called ‘civil lines’, which were sharply set apart from native towns or ‘bazaars’.13 The architectural structure of the residence, called the ‘bungalow’, was meant to protect its residents from the blistering and humid climate as well as from the supposedly unsanitary conditions of the surrounding world. The large size of the bungalow was meant to impress Indians with the superiority of its residents, while physically regulating their entry into it.14 During the latter half of British rule, domestic life within the bungalow was dominated by ‘memsahibs’ –​the wives of sahibs –​whose number sharply increased with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which dramatically reduced the time and cost involved in the passage to India.15 The growing presence of white women in the domestic sphere of the European community allowed the Raj to supervise and promote the politics of white prestige. The views of the ruling order, disseminated through medical and housekeeping manuals, placed these women in a position of special political importance. They were expected to play an important part in (re)producing the cultural and moral orders within the community.16 Their assigned roles included vigilant supervision of Indian nursemaids and live-​in servants.17 As wives, their presence was expected to ‘protect’ British men from those women, particularly women of 208

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mixed descent, who were alleged to tempt British males into sexual relations in the hope of social and economic betterment.18 The practice of self-​isolation was performed at macro levels as well. For example, the British aspiration for creating uncontaminated white enclaves under their Raj manifested itself in the spread of ‘hill stations’ dotted around the mountain ranges of the subcontinent.19 These strategies of self-​distancing were beset with difficulties, however. All their efforts notwithstanding, the British could not continue to exist without having to drink Indian water, eat Indian food, and breathe Indian air, while relying on Indians for domestic and other labour. The more obsessively they sought to insulate themselves from Indian influences, the more acute their sense of insecurity became.20 Firm as it was, the belief of the British in their own pre-​eminence was inevitably complicated by a simultaneous sense of fear that they might at any moment fall from their racial ascendancy unless appropriate medical and cultural care was taken. The colonial prevalence of the concept of ‘degeneration’ tells us the extent to which this precarious sense of self shaped colonial racial politics. Although racial ideas developed and disseminated in the metropole tended to seize on the supposed inferiority of the colonised ‘other’, their colonial counterparts focused in addition on the possible vulnerabilities of, and dangers to, the colonising ‘self ’. One of the perceived causes of degeneration was miscegenation. There were some commentators who viewed the mixing of white and native blood as a measure that facilitated white people’s adaptation to the environment of South Asia. By the late nineteenth century, however, such a view had been sidelined by a more negative one. As an anonymous article published in The Calcutta Review in 1858 put it, miscegenation would produce ‘terrible and portentous’ effects; it was seen as nothing short of an ‘unnatural union’ or ‘fatal mélange’, as a result of which the community ‘would shortly lose all its virtue and pre-​eminence’.21 In order for members of the European community to protect their whiteness, they should not be allowed to produce offspring of mixed descent. An influential medical expert, W.J. Moore, argued in Health in the Tropics (1862) that miscegenation might ensure settlement, but only in such a way as to risk degeneration, and that the existence of degenerate whites was not what British rule required. ‘The question’, as he put it, ‘was whether or not a healthy and vigorous European stock can be propagated and maintained’.22 Thus, in the post-​Mutiny period, anti-​ miscegenation feelings were increasingly high among the European community in India.23 This problematisation of miscegenation was only one part of the larger picture, however. It was the influence of the broadly defined Indian environment that was seen as a threat to Europeans’ racial qualities; the prevention of miscegenation would be a necessary but not sufficient condition for checking degeneration. The colonial authorities knew only too well that many of the undesirable characteristics of Europeans were environmentally acquired rather than genetically inherited. It is for this reason that certain Lamarckian variants of evolution theory became prevalent in colonial India, rather than the social-​Darwinist sorts that emphasised heredity.24 The influence of India’s climate on the European bodily constitution was a key concern in British debates about degeneration. Whether or not Britons could adapt to the new environment –​or ‘acclimatise’, as it was often called –​became an urgent question, especially during the early decades of Crown rule. Some views regarding acclimatisation were regarded not just as pointless but as positively dangerous. If they were long exposed to the hot and humid climate of India, it was believed, Europeans would mutate into ‘degenerate’ beings. Such reasoning was authenticated by scientists and doctors who were concerned about the health of Britons in the subcontinent.25 Ultimately, the feared influence of the Indian milieu was regarded as deeply socio-​cultural, rather than simply medico-​natural. Staying detached from their homeland for too prolonged 209

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a period was believed to acculturate Europeans to Indian life in irreversible ways. A military surgeon, George Yeates Hunter, noted in his Health in India (1873) that returnees from the subcontinent tended to have become so immersed in the social norms of colonial society that, on returning to Britain, they were often observed to be ‘lost in the sea of English life’.26 Such a view attests to a stigma that had been attached to colonial residence itself, regardless of how carefully racial segregation had been practised.27 Even though their colonial residence could last for several decades, it was imperative for the sahibs and memsahibs of the Raj to deny emphatically that India was their permanent place of domicile. Only Britain could be regarded as their genuine homeland and the true source of their norms and values. Europeans in India were, as a rule, transients, who would always choose to travel back to the British Isles as soon as their colonial career came to an end.28 It was in this context that great attention was paid to the community’s youngest generation. In fact, central to the British debates on degeneration was the question of white children’s health and moral development. This was not least because the aforementioned environmental influences were considered to inscribe themselves far more deeply in young children, whose bodily and mental constitutions were still at a formative stage, making them especially susceptible to external influences. Typically, it was held that European children should leave India to be raised and educated in Britain when they reached the age of six or seven. The reason for this was more cultural than medical: day-​to-​day contact with Indian domestic servants was recognised as particularly detrimental to the formation of a child’s moral character. Within the household, it was usually the Indian nursemaids (ayahs) and wet nurses (dais) who catered to the child’s needs, and this inevitably involved a degree of cross-​racial contact. With servants regarded as a malign source of Indian cultural influence, such contact was seen to risk irrevocably transforming a child into a degenerate being quite unbecoming of a member of the European community.29 These fears were triggered and reinforced by related socio-​economic concerns. By the late nineteenth century it had become firmly established that British educational qualifications were a prerequisite for gaining the prestigious positions in the colonial service reserved for Europeans. The importance placed upon metropolitan education was, at the same time, linked to a characteristic disregard on the part of European parents for their children’s schooling in India. The ‘hill schools’, though modelled on English elite schools, soon lost their appeal as an educational option for the ‘respectable’ families in British India.30

Disciplining and eliminating ‘disorderly’ forms of whiteness The British Raj’s identification of colonial whiteness with the values of elites in the metropole did not mean that all Europeans in India were seen as sufficiently ‘respectable’.31 In fact, a large proportion of the white population of post-​Mutiny India were categorised as ‘poor whites’, placing the official edifice of whiteness in constant tension with its actual demographic reality. Despite the aforementioned unwillingness on the part of the empire to allow the formation of a white working class as such, it was impossible for British rule to completely do away with the presence of white men and women whose class origins were lower than desired. Soldiers, for example, were needed in greater numbers than hitherto because their service was considered indispensable, particularly in the wake of the Mutiny, which ushered in a period of intensified racial antagonism.32 European barmaids –​white but not from respectable classes –​would serve men of the European community by selling the fantasy, if not the reality, of sexual availability33. Even European prostitutes –​whose presence was perhaps the most dreaded of all white subaltern groups –​were given an almost officially sanctioned function: the sexual service they 210

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provided was found useful in preventing British men from committing rape, miscegenation, or homosexuality.34 Albeit as necessary evils, these groups were, curiously, given a space to occupy under British colonialism. With India not defined as a settler colony, however, opportunities for working-​class white men and women were naturally limited. The problem for the empire was that most of these subordinate white groups in India found no employment after they left their assigned jobs, making them wanderers without means. In British India, the European poor were not simply poor on a par with other poor groups; they were poor in ways that were politically injurious to British rule. If the whiteness of the colonising European community was to be conditioned by the respectability of its members then there simply was no room for poor people in the imagined membership. In fact, the very category of ‘poor whites’ was oxymoronic: how could a white person be ‘poor’ and still be seen as ‘white’? The sight of a European person roaming among Indian subjects in a state of impoverishment was seen as deeply disruptive to the racialised order of the Raj. The collective image of Europeans, it was feared, would suffer in the eyes of colonised subjects. The disorderly effects that impoverished Europeans supposedly engendered had to be domesticated and controlled. One obvious way to do this was to keep their number at a minimum by institutionalising and then deporting them to Britain whenever they were found to be in a state of unemployment. This was put into practice through the introduction of the European Vagrancy Acts (1869, 1871, and 1874). Under this legislation, Britons and other Europeans who were identified as ‘vagrants’ could be institutionalised into workhouses and/​or repatriated. Government of India statistics listed as many as 5,000 vagrants institutionalised in workhouses between 1876 and 1897.35 This measure was far from sufficient, however, allowing a significant portion of ‘non-​ respectable’ white people to slip through the cracks of institutional surveillance and control. Remaining permanently in India rather than being deported back home, they became so-​ called ‘domiciled Europeans’, often, if not always, merging through miscegenation into the pre-​ existing community of ‘Eurasians’, who were persons of mixed blood with European descent on the paternal side.36 It was in the context of their common exclusion from membership in the European community that these two peoples of white descent –​‘domiciled Europeans’ and ‘Eurasians’ –​were thrown into and treated as a single social category known as the ‘domiciled community’, despite the significant differences between them.37 As of 1911, in the Calcutta district, nearly two-​thirds of the population of European descent had been domiciled, and, if we allow ourselves to boldly assume that the same ratio also applied elsewhere, we might conjecture that, in British India, there were roughly 93,000 non-​domiciled Europeans, 47,000 domiciled Europeans, and 160,000 Eurasians.38 The growth of the domiciled community was to emerge as yet another contradiction to the imagined homogeneity of the European community, as the white agents of the empire were not supposed to become rooted in India permanently, much less participate in racial mixing. A person could not be regarded as genuinely ‘white’ while being ‘domiciled’ in the same breath. This perceived problem of the domiciled version of whiteness was made even more complicated by the fact that an increasing number of Eurasians and domiciled Europeans were severely impoverished, making the domiciled community visible in a negative sense.39 For ruling elites and social reformers invested in the construction of an imperial order based on white prestige, this class of poverty was even more disturbing than that of ‘poor whites’, for three reasons. First, even in a state of unemployment, Eurasians and domiciled Europeans could not be removed from the colonial scene by repatriation to Britain, because they were legally categorised as ‘natives of India’, not ‘European-​British’. Second, the ‘degeneration’ of 211

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the domiciled community was seen as more deeply rooted because of its members’ cross-​ generational residence in India as well as its high rates of racial mixture. Third, unlike their non-​domiciled counterparts, the Eurasian and domiciled-​European poor usually had families to feed, including children growing up entirely in India. Once poverty struck, as it often did, the domiciled community tended to be affected down successive generations, making the poverty chronic and harder to eradicate. With India –​rather than Britain –​as their domicile, Eurasians and domiciled Europeans were hardly regarded as genuine members of the European community and were largely excluded from its privileges. Their opportunities to mix socially with Europeans of respectable standing were limited. For example, parents of the European community did not want their own children to socialise with domiciled children for fear that the former might acquire the cultural traits of the latter, particularly their accent, which was regarded as a marker of colonial degeneration and inferior status. The long-​standing demand of the Eurasian and Anglo-​Indian Association –​a political organ of the domiciled community, whose first branch was established in Calcutta in 1876 –​to be treated as a positive and equal element of the European community of India was repeatedly rejected.40 The presence of the domiciled community was taken as a contradiction of the British notion of colonial whiteness, which by the late nineteenth century had become rigidly defined in terms of race, class, and domicile. At the same time, however, the colonial authorities and concerned members of the European community could not just turn a blind eye to the pauperisation of the domiciled community. This was not so much because of a sense of sympathy felt towards a fellow people of white descent. Rather, it had deeply to do with the politics of white prestige. Members of the domiciled community were not just of white descent, but also Christian and English-​speaking. Like it or not, in the imagination of Indians, an increasing number of whom were critical of British rule, the domiciled tended to appear as part of the colonising community. This made their visible pauperisation a question of the collective image of the European community. As Charles John Canning, governor-​general of India, famously asserted in 1860, ‘Very few years will make it [the domiciled community], if neglected, a glaring reproach to the Government, and to the faith which it will, however ignorant and vicious, nominally profess.’41 The visible presence of the domiciled poor was referred to as the ‘Eurasian question’, reflecting the fact that the majority of the people involved were Eurasians. Through the discourse of the Eurasian question, those British concerned, particularly philanthropists and educationalists, sought to explore, identify, and control the spaces of disorder allegedly created by the Eurasian and domiciled European poor. Initially there was some optimism that the Eurasian question could be addressed by the provision of school education, which was expected to open up avenues of employment for the youth of the domiciled community. Although the domiciled were not supposed to compete for public service posts with Britons educated in the metropole, it was hoped that they might still be able to pursue respectable careers within their legal capacity as ‘natives of India’. This largely failed, however, partly because, particularly from the middle of the nineteenth century, British rule strategically relied on English-​educated Indians for the local supply of white-​collar labour that supplemented the work of European civil servants. In fact, this governmental policy was itself one of the reasons why members of the domiciled community became economically disadvantaged in the first place. Thus, particularly from the last decade of the nineteenth century onwards, the British attempted to come to terms with the Eurasian question through a range of specific anti-​poverty measures. Pauperism commissions were launched, which came out with proposals regarding housing reform, the regulation of charitable relief, and reformatory training and discipline. The 212

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most radical of these measures were those involving the removal, resettlement, and/​or emigration of the domiciled on a collective scale. This approach gained favour because it appeared that, ultimately, the poverty of the domiciled community would not be solved without uprooting its members from their ‘slums’.42 The attention of concerned educationalists, philanthropists, and missionaries was focused primarily on the youngest generation of the domiciled community. It was increasingly deemed necessary to remove Eurasian and domiciled European children from their parents while still at an early age, and to bring them up in complete isolation from the rest of colonial society. School education of a conventional kind was no longer considered sufficient to transform the moral character of these children, which was believed to have developed through their everyday exposure to the influence of their family members, particularly the mother, who herself was seen as irredeemably ‘degenerate’ because of both her colonial domicile and urban slumming. In fact, child removal and emigration came to be considered as almost the only way to resolve (not merely relieve) the Eurasian question. At the beginning of the twentieth century the idea was actually put into practice by a Scottish missionary named John Graham, through the St Andrew’s Colonial Homes that he established in Kalimpong in a hill tract near Darjeeling.43 This is not at all to suggest that this institution actually solved the question. Despite emigration being the homes’ ultimate goal, the fact is that only a handful of their pupils could actually leave India as juvenile emigrants for the settler territories of the British Empire.44

White criminality, racism, and Indian nationalist responses Let us now continue to discuss the colonial contradictions of whiteness and the limits of British colonial control by focusing on the question of law and order. As far as official ideology went, members of the European community in India were supposed to be invisible or transparent, silently but omnipresently spreading the cherished values of Western modernity, including the ‘rule of law’. In actuality, however, this self-​image found itself blatantly violated by the noisy claims for exceptional treatment, and the highly visible misbehaviour, of certain sectors of the colonial white population. For the colonial authorities, the aforementioned problem of ‘poor whites’ was not just about the scandalous sight of their vagrancy. Another problem emanating from their uncontrolled presence was their frequent mistreatment of Indian subjects, including physical offences of a criminal sort. This could not help but emerge as a highly political issue, as Indians did not fail, through the ‘native press’, to express their fury at such crimes –​which included theft, rape, and murder –​perpetrated against their own people.45 The problem of white criminality was deep-​rooted. Its Indian critics were not just angry about the racist behaviours of European offenders; their anger was exacerbated by the fact that these criminals were rarely brought to justice, despite Britain’s supposed commitment to the principle of equality under the law. From Bentinck through Lytton to Ripon, the governors-​ general of India regarded the rule of law as a crucial ingredient of the British Raj. Naturally, they expressed concerns not just about European misconduct but also about the colonial legal system, which was perceived by Indian elites as discriminatory and contrary to the spirit of European civilisation. The problem for the government was that, when it came to the question of law, the European community in India was not united on the issue: many of its non-​official members staunchly defended their privileges, calling any attempts by the government to put them on a par with Indian subjects ‘Black Acts’. Among the most vocal advocates of ‘extra-​legal’ status for ‘European-​British subjects’ were planters, who were notorious perpetrators of daily violence against the Indian labourers they employed. They particularly disliked the idea of Europeans being presided over by Indian 213

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judges in criminal trials, and were at the forefront of the agitation against the so-​called ‘Ilbert Bill’ in 1883.46 This bill was a liberal measure proposed by Courtney Ilbert, a legal member of the Council of the Governor-​General of India, with the intention of removing the limitations upon Indian judges in criminal cases. In the end, the government succumbed to the pressure of the anti-​bill agitators, and the actual legislation turned out to be toothless, containing a stipulation that, in cases when a European was tried, at least half the jury should consist of Europeans. Politically, the presence of planters was often unwelcome for the governing circles. Both their loud cries for white racial privilege and their propensity for ‘uncivilised’ behaviour, including the mistreatment of Indians, were contradictory to the formal tenets of British rule. It was also the case, however, that, economically speaking, the empire benefited from the planters’ presence. The controversy over the Ilbert Bill showed that, ultimately, the colonial government condoned, even if it did not encourage, the explicitly racist attitude of a certain section of the European community. This came at a price, though, for the question of legal inequality became one of the major reasons for the emergence of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century.47 The attitudes of non-​official Europeans were not the only problem with regard to the question of racial inequality, however. European officials in India may not have been as notoriously vocal about their rights and privileges as their non-​official counterparts, but they were in a position to benefit from the kind of racism that gained currency during the agitation against the Ilbert Bill. In their hostility towards Indian judges, opponents of the bill argued that Indian officials –​particularly English-​educated Bengali men —​-​were ‘effeminate’, which allegedly made them inferior to British officials, who alone, so the argument went, were true ‘gentlemen’ and thus fit to rule.48 This gendered mode of racism reflected a growing sense of insecurity on the part of the colonising British. By the time of the Ilbert Bill controversy there had emerged a number of Indian men of upper-​caste background who were so educated and refined in European ways as to be perceived as a threat to the hitherto unquestioned privileges of British officials. The more qualified English-​educated Indians became, the less confident British officials grew.49 It is important to recognise that, contrary to the myth of the Indian Civil Service as the ‘steel frame’ of British rule in India, not many of its members can be said to have been among the cream of the English establishment. Despite imperial attempts over the decades to attract to India the Oxbridge graduates springing from the ruling families of English society, most officials in India had humbler backgrounds, including a sizeable number of Scottish, Welsh, and Irish men. Until the First World War the Indian Civil Service –​the upper, commanding branch of the colonial administration –​remained largely ‘European’. This was not because European recruits were actually more capable or qualified but because of the institutional arrangements, which effectively barred Indian candidates of unquestionable merit.50 Indians perceived this as a manifestation of the characteristically racist attitude of Britain towards the non-​European subjects of its empire. In fact, along with the issue of white violence and impunity, the public service question was another major reason why Indian nationalism emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Résumé The ‘European-​ness’ of the European community in British India was not as self-​evident as we all too easily tend to assume. Its racial prestige was equivocated by a significant presence of people regarded as ‘not white enough’, as it were, because of their ambiguous class and/​or racial origins. Moreover, the racist claims and behaviours of Europeans, particularly the non-​official sector of the community, did much damage to the ideal self-​image of Europeans as benevolent 214

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bringers of civilisation and progress. Therefore, to maintain the fiction of the European community as a race apart, it was deemed important that the problematic forms of whiteness be vigilantly watched and acted upon whenever necessary. Thus, throughout the late colonial period, efforts were constantly made to tame or remove the disorder caused by the presence of ‘poor whites’, the domiciled, European criminals, and so forth. These efforts were neither thorough nor effective enough, however, leaving the European community in India visibly divided and hierarchised, with its equivocal boundaries exposed to view. The problem for colonial rule was that these internal contradictions and tensions negatively affected the community’s external relations with the rest of Indian society. In an age of anti-​colonial nationalism, this proved fatal. Indians were increasingly aware that they were stuck in subordinate positions not because of the supposed superiority of their European masters but because of those masters’ racist attitudes towards them.

Notes 1 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (1), 1989, pp. 134–​61, 137–​9. With other seminal essays, the same article is collected in her Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010). 2 David Arnold, ‘European orphans and vagrants in India in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 7 (2), 1979, pp. 104–​27; idem, ‘White colonisation and labour in nineteenth-​ century India’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 11 (3), 1983, pp. 133–​58; Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800–​1858 (London: Routledge, 1991); Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–​1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). 3 Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2006). 4 Lionel Caplan, Children of Colonialism: Anglo-​Indians in a Postcolonial World (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Uther Charlton-​Stevens, Anglo-​Indians and Minority Politics in South Asia: Race, Boundary Making and Communal Nationalism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 5 E.M Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800–​1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001); Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (New York: OUP, 2004). 6 Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: CUP, 2010). 7 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, Low and Licentious Europeans: Race, Class, and ‘White Subalternity’ in Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009); similar ground is covered in Sarmistha De, Marginal Europeans in Colonial India, 1860–​1920 (Kolkata: Thema, 2008). 8 Satoshi Mizutani, The Meaning of White: Race, Class, and the Domiciled Community in British India, 1858–​1930 (Oxford: OUP, 2011). 9 For a discussion of these different varieties of colonial regimes, see Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2005), 10–​12. 10 Report of the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (General) (London: House of Commons, 1859), iii. 11 Mizutani, The Meaning of White, 18–​23. 12 For a detailed historical examination of the club in British India, see Benjamin Cohen, In the Club: Associational Life in Colonial South Asia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britishness, clubbability, and the colonial public sphere: The genealogy of an imperial institution in colonial India’, Journal of British Studies, 40 (4), 2001, pp. 489–​521; and Mary A. Procida, ‘Good sports and right sorts: Guns, gender, and imperialism in British India’, Journal of British Studies, 40 (4), 2001, pp. 454–​88. 13 Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 165. See also Howard Spodek, ‘City planning in India under British rule’, EPW, 48 (4), 2013, pp. 53–​61. See also Swati Chattopadhyaya’s chapter in this volume. 14 Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 177–​8. See also William J. Glover, ‘ “A feeling of absence from old England”: The colonial bungalow, home cultures’, Home Cultures, 1 (1), 2004, pp. 61–​82.

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Satoshi Mizutani 15 David A. Washbrook, ‘Avatars of identity: The British community in India’, in: Robert Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas (Oxford: OUP, 2010), pp. 178–​204, 180. See also Peter J. Marshall, ‘The whites of British India: A failed colonial society’, International History Review, 12 (1), 1990, pp. 2–​44. 16 Indrani Sen, Gendered Transactions: The White Woman in Colonial India, c.1820–​1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 115–​17. See also Susmita Roye and Rajeshwar Mittapali (eds.), The Female Gaze: The British Raj and the Memsahib (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2013). 17 See R.M. George, ‘Homes in the empire, empire in the home’, Cultural Critique, 26, 1993, pp. 95–​ 127, esp. 107–​15. 18 Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: India in the British Imagination (London: Verso, 1998), 85. 19 For a thorough analysis of the colonial hill stations, see Nandini Bhattacharya’s chapter in this volume. 20 Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 177. As David Arnold has recently shown, such diffuse anxieties sometimes even translated into concrete fears of European planters and settlers that they might be poisoned by their Indian servants. Idem, ‘The poison panics of British India’, in: Harald Fischer-​ Tiné (ed.), Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 49–​72. 21 Anon., ‘Colonisation of India’, The Calcutta Review, 30, 1858, pp. 163–​88, 181. 22 W.J. Moor, Health in the Tropics; or, Sanitary Art Applied to Europeans in India (London: Medicina Literis, 1862), 280. 23 The prevalence of this ideology in this period does not mean that miscegenation as a phenomenon actually stopped. The recent research by Valerie Anderson shows that conjugal relations between Europeans (particularly lower-​class ones) and non-​Europeans (Indians and Eurasians) was common. Idem, Race and Power in British India: Anglo-​ Indians, Class and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 73–​90. 24 Buettner, Empire Families, 32. 25 Mizutani, The Meaning of White, 29–​30. See also Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–​1850 (New Delhi: OUP, 1999). 26 Quoted in ibid., 26. 27 Already, by the late eighteenth century, India was widely imagined in Britain as an alien land culturally and morally corrupting Europeans, as the imperial discourse of the ‘nabob’ shows. See Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Cambridge: CUP, 2010). 28 See also Georgina Gowans, ‘A passage from India: Geographies and experiences of repatriation, 1858–​ 1939’, Social & Cultural Geography, 3 (4), 2002, pp. 403–​23. 29 Buettner, Empire Families, 38–​9. On Indian domestic servants, see also Indrani Sen, ‘Colonial domesticities, contentious interactions: Ayahs, wet-​nurses and memsahibs in colonial India’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 16 (3), 2009, pp. 299–​328; and Nitin Sinha and Nitin Varma (eds.), Servants’ Pasts, 18th–​20th Centuries, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2019). 30 Mizutani, The Meaning of White, 43–​5. 31 This section largely draws on my Meaning of White, particularly ­chapters 2 to 5. 32 Thomas Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–​1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 297. 33 Ashley Wright, ‘Maintaining the bar: Regulating European barmaids in colonial Calcutta and Rangoon’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 45 (1), 2017, pp. 22–​45. 34 On European prostitutes, see Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘ “White women degrading themselves to the lowest depths”: European networks of prostitution and colonial anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca.1880–​1914’, IESHR, 40 (2), 2003, pp. 163–​90; and Ashwini Tambe, ‘The elusive ingénue: A transnational feminist analysis of European prostitution in colonial Bombay’, Gender and Society, 19 (2), 2005, pp. 160–​79. 35 Fischer-​Tiné, Low and Licentious Europeans, 163–​6. 36 For the historical formation of the Eurasian community in the early period of British rule, see C.J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–​ 1833 (Richmond: Curzon, 1996). 37 For the view of domiciled Europeans as a distinctive group, see D. McMenamin, ‘Identifying domiciled Europeans in colonial India: Poor whites or privileged community?’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 3 (1), 2001, pp. 106–​27. 38 For details of this speculation see, Mizutani, The Meaning of White, 72.

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The European community in colonial India 39 This is not to say that there were no eminent or respectable individuals. See Carlton-​Stevens, Anglo-​ Indians and Minority Politics in South Asia. It should be noted that a section of the domiciled community had steady jobs in the railway service. See Bear, Lines of the Nation; and Anjali G. Roy, ‘Performing Britishness in a railway colony: Production of Anglo-​Indians as a railway caste’, in: Zarine L. Rocha and Farida Fozdar (eds.), Mixed Race in Asia: Past, Present and Future (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 195–​210. 40 Mizutani, The Meaning of White, 181–​218. 41 Quoted in Review of Education in India in 1886 (Calcutta: Government of India, 1888), 294. 42 For resettlement schemes, see Alison Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-​Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 43 Andrew J. May, ‘Our miniature heaven: Forming identities at Dr Graham’s homes’, in: Markus Viehbeck (ed.), Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands: Kalimpong as a ‘Contact Zone’ (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2017), pp. 55–​70. 44 Mizutani, The Meaning of White, 137–​80. On the experience of those children who actually emigrated, see, for example, Jane McCabe, Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 45 Fischer-​Tiné, Low and Licentious Europeans, 145; Kolsky, Colonial Justice, 199. 46 Raymond K. Renford, The Non-​Official British in India to 1920 (New Delhi: OUP, 1987), 202–​69. See also Satoshi Mizutani, ‘Contested boundaries of whiteness: Public service recruitment and the Eurasian and Anglo-​Indian Association, 1876–​1901’, in: Harald Fischer-​Tiné and Susanne Gehrmann (eds.), Empires and Boundaries: Rethinking Race, Class and Gender in Colonial Settings (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 86–​106. 47 For all these points discussed here on the relationship between law, violence, and Europeans, see Kolsky, Colonial Justice; and Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The boot and the spleen: When was murder possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (2), 2006, pp. 462–​93. 48 The question of racial inequality was also observed in prisons, where European convicts received separate treatment in terms of punishment. See Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Hierarchies of punishment in colonial India: European convicts and the racial dividend, c.1860–​1890’, in: idem and Gehrmann, Empires and Boundaries, pp. 41–​65. Prisons were not the only colonial institution in which forms of racially differentiated treatment were practised. In asylums for the mentally ill, European inmates were given institutional arrangements with due consideration to their social and cultural sensitivities, whereas those for their Indian counterparts included mixing lower-​class patients, irrespective of their gender, caste, or sex. See Waltraud Ernst, ‘Idioms of madness and colonial boundaries: The case of the European and “native” mentally ill in early nineteenth-​century British India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39 (1), 1997, pp. 159–​60, 163. 49 On these points concerning the gendered kind of racism and the public service question, see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), esp. 33–​68, 100–​37. 50 On these points concerning the Indian Civil Service, see Bradford Spangenberg, ‘The problem of recruitment for the Indian Civil Service during the late nineteenth century’, JAS, 30 (2), 1971, pp. 341–​60.

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17 CHRISTIAN MISSIONARY AGENDAS IN COLONIAL INDIA Heike Liebau

Introduction Although the historical processes of colonial expansion in India and the activities of Christian missions on the subcontinent were entangled in a number of ways, their agendas, practices, and effects differed considerably. Fields of common actions and collaboration existed along with areas of friction and conflict. To understand Christian missionary agendas in colonial India, we must consider political developments, economic interests, and cultural and religious factors, both in Europe and in India, as well as connections and communication flows between both sides. This ‘colonial mission space’1 constantly changed and differed, depending on religious denominations as well as political constellations. The Indian subcontinent became a destination for Christian mission activities long before British colonial power was established over large parts of India. Links between European expansion and the spread of Christianity2 can be observed starting with the first wave of European colonial expansion (c.1500–​1750), when European merchants were accompanied by a number of Catholic priests, some of whom became missionary-​scholars or initiators of mass conversion. In the early eighteenth century systematic Protestant mission activities began. After the British East India Company (EIC) had formally allowed Christian missions on its colonial territories with the charters of 1813 and 1833, both Catholic and Protestant missions, of European but also American origin, competed in different parts of India. In the early decades of the twentieth century Indian churches were founded and administrative power and theological development were slowly transferred to local functionaries. In this chapter, I examine competing missionary agendas in colonial India. After a historical overview of the development of Christian missionary activities and a short discussion of recent historiography on mission and colonialism, I discuss missionary agendas within various fields of Christian mission presence in India, ranging from immediate conversion activities through practical engagement in socio-​economic fields to the vast area of missionary knowledge production. This is followed by a discussion of the relation between Christian mission and colonial authorities and the ambivalent social, political, and religious dynamics that Christian mission activities caused in colonial India.

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Christian mission activities in colonial India To understand Christian mission agendas in British India, one has to consider precolonial times as well as early non-​British colonial activities. Before European colonial expansion, and long before European Christian missionaries turned their activities to India, the ‘Thomas’ or ‘Syrian’ Christians had arrived in the subcontinent. They trace their origin back to the activities of the Apostle Thomas in India during the first century AD. Although Thomas Christians, too, were later in the focus of modern mission societies, they continued to follow the apostolic tradition of St Thomas and still exist in various institutional forms in India today.3 After the discovery of the passage to India via the Cape of Good Hope at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Catholic missionaries from the Dominican, Franciscan, and –​later –​ Jesuit orders arrived in India together with Portuguese merchants and colonialists. The most influential institution behind them was the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, which engaged in worldwide evangelisation. The Jesuits were not organised along national lines but as a centralised order with its headquarters in Rome. Men from different parts of Europe were sent out in the name of the society. In India the Jesuits started their activities from the Portuguese colonial enclave of Goa, and from there reached out to other areas, such as Kanara and the Malabar Coast. When Portuguese political power in Europe began to decline, countries such as England, France, and Denmark entered the spice trade, founded their trading companies, and established settlements in India. Even as Jesuit priests continued their activities, new missionaries arrived.4 Protestant missions started their organised work in India at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The first of them was the Danish-​Halle Mission, a Pietist enterprise initiated and supported by the Danish king, with the majority of its missionaries coming from German territories. This mission society was present in south-​east India for nearly one and a half centuries (1706 to 1845). Its radius of activities was not limited to the Danish trade settlements around Tranquebar but extended into the British territories too. During the second half of the eighteenth century France and Britain were struggling for dominance, at a time when Britain had subjugated large parts of the Indian subcontinent. Already in the mid-​1760s it had gained power over Bengal, and in 1799, after the end of the Mysore Wars, it extended its power into the Deccan and south India. Although the French lost their political influence in India, their mission in Pondicherry, which had been started by Capuchin and Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century and had been taken over by the Paris Mission Society in 1773 (after the suppression of the Society of Jesus), continued to exist.5 The most powerful European actor on the subcontinent, the British East India Company (EIC), evinced an ambivalent relationship to Christian mission activities. In a parliamentary debate in 1793 the EIC voted against missionary activities on its territories, but, with the charters of 1813 and 1833, the British government legalised mission work, first for British missions only, then for foreign missions too. After 1813 British missionary societies sent their preachers into various regions. Thus, the Society for Propagating the Gospel (SPG) began its work in the south Indian region of Tirunelveli and the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Madras, Bengal, and Travancore. In addition to south India and Bengal, north-​east India also became a central region for the spread of Christianity. After 1833 missionaries from other nations were also allowed to work. They came from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Germany, and other countries.6 Among the foreign mission agencies that sent missionaries to India were Baptist organisations, such as the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, the Australian

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Baptist Mission Society, and the New Zealand Baptist Missionary Society, along with evangelical societies, such as the Leipzig Mission from Germany, the Basel Mission from Switzerland, and the Church of Sweden Mission.7 Another impact on society was the growing influence of Hindu revivalism and reform movements such as the Arya Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj, which actively responded to Western intellectual and religious influence. Although the growing presence of Christian missions in many parts of India did not always result in large numbers of converts, the religious and political consciousness of Indian Christian groups grew, and at the beginning of the twentieth century local churches were established in many parts of the country. Based on different denominations and with the respective support of the involved mission societies, these churches claimed independence and led their own struggle for Indian Christian identity and citizenship.8

Historiography on Christian missions and colonialism Given this complex historical picture, it is clear that there were a number of competing mission agendas at work in colonial India. Since the first studies emerged in the nineteenth century, historiography on Christian missions in India has been informed by various academic disciplines and religious and geographical contexts. Systematic and critical investigations of missionary agendas in colonial India can be found mainly since the 1980s, however. A crucial moment in the debates on theological and socio-​political aspects of an Indian Christianity was the series A History of Christianity in India, published between 1982 and 2012 under the direction of the Church History Association of India.9 An important line of enquiry was the history of Christian missions, studied not only as part of the history of (world) Christianity but also as part of the history of Asia and, in particular, India.10 Considerable scholarly interest has focused on this history by looking at specific mission societies, at the conflicts and the mutual influence between Christian mission activities and Hindu reformist movements, at Christianity as a social mobilising force, and at the emancipatory influence of Christian missions.11 Studies of mission history along secular lines, including social history, have been informed by postcolonial debates or new imperial history. Studies in new imperial history have mostly been based on the political economy of imperial structures and highlight the inseparable association of mission and empire. Although they did not necessarily discuss the ambivalent roles of missions, academic debates have shifted towards questions of culture and identity, such that processes of encounter and interaction, which consider interdependences and frictions of interests, became more prominent.12 Recent studies have emphasised the ambivalent role of Christian missions in education and health care, the effects of mission activities on social and economic structures, such as on caste structures, and the interdependence of Christian movements and Hindu reform movements in India.13 Another huge field of scholarly interest is intellectual history and the history of knowledge production. New studies have made considerable contributions to the interdependence of ‘mission’ and ‘colonial’ knowledge. Within this context, the development of linguistic knowledge is an important topic. Languages were (after religion) the most important field of activities and a prerequisite for mission success.14 The ambivalent relation between Christian mission and Orientalism is emphasised, along with a more critical approach to missionary interest in the production of knowledge about the mission region. Missionaries as researchers are placed in the context of the development of new research disciplines, and knowledge produced within the frame of mission enterprises is discussed together with knowledge produced within more secular colonial environments.15

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Fields of Christian mission presence in India Spreading the Christian faith and converting as many individuals as possible to Christianity was the main agenda of all mission enterprises. The implementation of these aims in India was not limited to strictly conversion-​oriented activities, however; within this frame, mission agendas stretched out over other social, cultural, legal, and political fields. Economic and legal questions had to be dealt with in order to acquire land and establish mission stations and settlements, hospitals, and schools. With their practical and social work in education and health care, missions had to negotiate their spaces of actions within broader infrastructures and political developments. Schooling and education constituted an important field of activity. Missionaries used education as a tool for conversion work, although the intended aims were not always the same as the real impact of Christian mission education.16 Education activities depended on a number of conditions, among them colonial intentions, local demands, and the educational experience of missionaries. By distributing knowledge and implementing discipline, missions contributed to the formation of ‘civilised’ Christian individuals, who, in the eyes of the mission masters, became not only worthy followers of Jesus Christ but also submissive colonial subjects ruled by European powers. At the same time, however, growing literate and educated groups developed a critical political consciousness that could be mobilised for discourses on Christian and national identity. Mission societies used different approaches and various models of Christian education. They ranged from schools to educate the poor, through schools for girls and vernacular schools, to education based on English-​language teaching. Other mission societies were more active in higher education or professional vocational training.17 During the nineteenth century education became a major field of competition. Although the East India Company ran its own institutions, among them the presidency colleges, mission societies established Christian institutions for higher education. CMS, for instance, set up Anglo-​vernacular high schools in the south Godavari/​Krishna region to attract Brahmans, who had been a major target of their mission activities.18 The Madras Christian College was founded in 1837 by the Scottish missionary John Anderson. After 1853 the EIC introduced the grant-​in-​aid system, which provided a way for the government to support and control education, especially mission education, in India. Education work carried out by mission societies also depended on their own educational background and on debates on education reforms in their home contexts. In the nineteenth century the monitorial method from England was implemented and developed by the ordained Anglican pastor Andrew Bell in Madras. Bell connected pedagogical practices from south India with ideas from the Scottish Enlightenment. This development influenced education in India and Britain alike.19 Furthermore, the legal changes that had come with the charter of 1833 opened up new possibilities for Christian youth organisations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), which started work in India in the late nineteenth century and became active during and after the First World War with an educational programme that included vocational training, agriculture, education for physical fitness, and discipline.20 A very important field of missionary education and knowledge generation that has attracted much attention recently is agriculture. As a result of a general shift of mission agendas from proselytising to one that foregrounded a variety of social services, agricultural missions emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. During the first decades of the twentieth century Christian agricultural missions grew and competed with other programmes for rural social uplift. These missions had a threefold strategy: to acquire and produce knowledge of

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agricultural methods; to implement new models of agricultural production; and to build and promote agricultural educational institutions in India. The latter ranged from local agricultural societies, which provided training in villages, to agricultural departments at universities. One of the most well-​known agricultural institutions in late colonial India was the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, linked to the Allahabad Christian College, established by the American Presbyterian missionary Sam Higginbottom in 1911.21 Missionaries had been working in the field of medicine since the seventeenth century. Not only did they bring Western methods to India, they also studied local practices and methods of healing. We should differentiate, however, between practical medicine and day-​to-​day care as part of the daily conversion-​oriented agenda, on the one hand, and the production of medical knowledge through research and scholarly encounters, on the other. The ultimate aim of the Jesuit hospital in Goa, called the Hospital of the Poor Natives, was, of course, conversion, whereas the immediate social effect included a certain progress in health care for local people.22 During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth Protestant medical missions grew. In this context, women medical missionaries were also recruited. They received special training in Europe and were then sent to India, where they were especially suited to approach Indian women and work in women’s hospitals or in local schools for nurses. Rosemary Fitzgerald showed that women’s medical mission work was strategically placed in India in those regions where segregation between men and women was strong. In this context, what were called zenana missions became an important approach to reaching out to the segregated women’s parts (called zenana) of people’s houses. Medical mission lady doctors, local female medical workers, and Bible women played a crucial role.23 Medical knowledge production was not just a random by-​product of the daily routine; rather, it was medical practice oriented towards the strategic aim of using health to persuade the masses to take up the Christian faith. One of the early examples of scholarly interest in medical knowledge exchange was Johann Ernst Gründler from the Danish-​Halle Mission, however, who as early as 1712 compiled the Medicus Malabaricus, a unique document on south Indian methods of healing.24 Whereas, in the early periods of mission enterprise in India, medical work within the mission dominated over medical work among the local population, later doctor-​missionaries became more interested in local medicine, realised the power of medical aspects for mission interests, and strategically combined these aspects. With the impact of the Enlightenment and increasing imperial colonial expansion in the nineteenth century, the European cognitive interest covered larger geographical realms, and medicine in Europe became eager to gain knowledge about medical methods in the colonies. At the same time, medical colleges emerged in India itself, where local doctors and nurses were educated.25 Missionaries belonged to the most important and largest group of non-​Indians who produced knowledge about life and thoughts in India. They differed from other groups, such as colonial officers, in their interests and possibilities to acquire and produce knowledge. Missionaries usually lived in India for long periods, and not just in big urban places but also in smaller rural areas. They often were well-​educated men who were involved in scholarly networks of academic knowledge production worldwide. Their attitudes, motivations, and interests differed not only from the perspectives of colonial officers but also among themselves. These interests depended on the religious philosophy of the sending institution, the education of the missionaries, and the conditions, expectations, and requirements in the field itself. One major theme of mission studies was linguistics. The command of Indian languages, a necessary tool for successful conversion, was often combined with research and the production of dictionaries and grammars. There were differences in the methods, level, quality, and influence of such studies, however. The early Sanskrit studies carried out by German Jesuits such as 222

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Heinrich Roth (1620–​1668) and Ernst Hanxleden (1681–​1732), the Italian Roberto de Nobili (1577–​1656), and the French Jesuit J.F. Pons (1688–​1752) became well known and had considerable influence on the development of comparative linguistics in Europe. Works by Protestant missionaries in the same field were lesser known.26 Although scholars from Europe would often ask for information on Sanskrit as the language associated with philosophical and religious knowledge from India, local languages commonly became more important for the missionaries in daily routine. As in the sciences, where they provided European scholars with data and collections of artefacts, missionaries collected language samples using prescribed questionnaires or patterns. For instance, Benjamin Schultze from the Danish-​Halle Mission sent alphabets, lists of numbers, and the Ten Commandments in different Indian languages to Friedrich Fritz to be used in the ‘Sprachmeister’.27 The linguistic work of missionaries was connected with their efforts to translate the Bible. Hermann Gundert (Basel Mission), who translated parts of the Bible into Malayalam, compiled a Malayalam–​English dictionary (1872) and a book on grammar, Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranan (1859).28 The Scottish-​Anglican missionary Robert Caldwell of the LMS became a linguist and Tamil scholar. He, like other Anglican missionaries in the nineteenth century, was quite successful in anthropological research and in linguistics.29 Among the American missionaries, one of the most well-​known linguists was Miron Winslow, who became a Tamil scholar and created a Tamil dictionary.30 Besides religion, linguistics, and anthropology, missionaries turned their attention to other fields of knowledge production, such as botany, zoology, and astronomy. Especially throughout the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, when Western scholars often did not have the possibility to travel, they approached missionaries to get firsthand information and collections of facts and artefacts. Thus, for instance, Christoph Samuel John from the Danish-​Halle Mission sent a collection of fish to Marcus Élieser Bloch, one of the most important ichthyologists of the time.31 In the nineteenth century, in the time of high imperialism, European powers established new economic power structures in their colonial territories, which had by then developed from small trading posts into territories covering large areas. These developments led in consequence to a more utilitarian approach to knowledge gathering that differed considerably from the way cultural differences had been approached throughout the eighteenth century. At the same time, the emergence of new scholarly institutions in India, such as the Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in 1784 by William Jones in Calcutta, provided new spaces for missionaries to engage in scholarly debates in a vast range of fields.

Mission and authorities The exploration of mission agendas in India started with the assumption that it would be more fruitful to understand processes simultaneously in India and in Europe. Nevertheless, many scholars either concentrated on European developments or investigated the Indian context more closely. The concept of the ‘colonial mission space’ (kolonialer Missionsraum), outlined by Helge Wendt and introduced at the beginning of this chapter, can open important perspectives for analysis. Wendt understands colonialism as a specific form of globalisation characterised by instability, a break in existing structures, and encounters between cultures and economic structures at the same time. These processes were accompanied by collective experiences of self-​identity and otherness. Nonetheless, in contrast to most colonial institutions, Wendt argues, a characteristic of the colonial mission is that, although it had a European origin, all its major processes took place in the colonial contact zone itself.32 There were (infra)structural and legal factors that could enable or inhibit mission work at a certain time and place. We have to consider the dynamic relationships between religion and state 223

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in Europe that led to mission initiatives, as well as the political conditions and interests of local and European authorities in India itself. In the end, the consequences of the structural context differed between the early missionaries, such as those from the Dominican, Franciscan, and Jesuit orders, who often acted individually in their ‘fields’, and institutionalised missions with local settlements on the ground, which depended heavily on the respective legal conditions. Mission stations were established mostly in territories occupied by European trade companies or conquered by colonial powers. Even though trade companies did not always welcome missions and sometimes regarded them with suspicion, occasionally even with open rejection, there were mutual dependences. Missions and missionaries acquired land and established social and economic relations to their environment.33 A mission settlement was not only a place where missionaries lived and from where they started their work; often the philosophy behind such a social space was much broader, as, for instance, Caldwell’s model of Christian villages shows. Caldwell wanted Christian villages to become a ‘visible symbol of a new order’ and, at the same time, ‘powerful instruments in the propagation of the Gospel’.34 In north-​east India, rural structures changed through the spread of Christian villages, where local churches assumed a number of social and economic functions, while local crafts and traditions were lost.35 With the establishment of formal colonial rule over large parts of India, the British-​Indian colonial government gained control over Christian mission actions. In the late nineteenth century mass movements of conversion occurred, especially in south and north-​east India. Hence, these groups were not just closely observed by the colonial authorities but ‘became a focal point of nationalist concern and opposition in the twentieth century’ too.36 In the first decades of the twentieth century Indian Christian groups debated Christianity’s attitude towards nationalism. In the context of growing anti-​colonial sentiments, conversion was under sceptical observation from different angles, not only from the colonial power but also from local political and religious actors. Comparing developments in Britain and in India, Gauri Vishvanathan discussed conversion as a form of societal critique. She highlighted worldly aspects of conversion and interpreted this step not as single acts with individual dimensions but as acts whose collective dimension could be seen as ways of social protest. People express dissent with a given structure and challenge the authorities they are facing. Thus, in her understanding, conversion was not a complete break with earlier social practices and religious beliefs but, rather, a process of assimilation and change.37 Around 1900 more than 9,000 British missionaries acted abroad for some 60 societies of high and low Churches. Conflicts between imperial ambitions and domestic problems of the Churches in England were prevalent. Stephen Maughan observed that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘Anglican missionary leaders tried to shift from a missionary movement that focused on religious identity to one that focused on the wider role of missions in imperial and national life’.38 The Salvation Army became an important player within the British colonial civilising mission by implementing the colonial policy of criminalising and disciplining various tribal groups in order to transform them into productive colonial subjects. The Salvation Army also became a partner of the government in carrying out social programmes in competition with and against other mission societies.39 During the First World War the British colonial government interned those missionaries who worked for mission societies from wartime enemy countries. Beyond that, the colonial administration was afraid of Christians supporting the national movement and, therefore, controlled the activities of missionaries (and Indian Christians) in their territories. Missions had also become a self-​contained economic factor, and often introduced their own business.40 After the war the government took legal actions, and in 1919 issued memoranda in order to control and discipline Christians and missionaries, British and non-​British. Mission societies had to declare loyalty towards the colonial government in 224

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order to be ‘recognised’.41 Within this context, Indian Churches of various denominations were established. Scholarship has explored the ambivalence and complexity of the formation of Indian Christian identities by discussing Christian missions in colonial India as an element of cultural imperialism and civilising mission activities, while at the same time considering Christianity in the region as a stimulator and instrument of anti-​colonial resistance. After the foundation of local Churches, Indian Christianity developed its own characteristics and its own theologies. It is recognised that, especially through the introduction of Western education, as well as through the implementation of social reform activities, Christian missions in India had a considerable influence on the emergence and development of nationalist political ideas. Stanley argued, however, that ‘a ready identification between Christian profession and nationalist sympathies has not been possible. In India, partly because of the logic of the caste system and partly as a result of the British encouragement of separate religious electorates, political alignments became irretrievably entangled with questions of fundamental religious identity.’42 Chandra Mallampalli has dealt with the responses of Indian nationalists to missionary work and, vice versa, the reaction of missionaries to the Indian nationalist movement. His work showed that reactions were not homogeneous; different Hindu organisations reacted in different ways. Mallampalli argued that the main contentious issue between missionaries and nationalists was not conversion but was related to political and cultural questions, among them the role of the Christian religion with regard to an Indian nation. With reference to Partha Chatterjee, who has described the religious character of Indian nationalism partly as a result and reaction of Hindu groups to Christian developments in India, Mallampalli discussed the case of Calcutta. Here, one finds an educated Hindu class defending Hinduism against Christianity by overestimating the role of Hinduism and emphasising its superiority over other religions, among them the Christian religion. Mallampalli asked whether Gangadhar Tilak’s overestimation of Hindu festivals and rituals in Bengal, for instance, was a reaction to the presence of Christianity and the missionaries, but provided no answer.43

Résumé As we have seen, a number of competing missionary agendas prevailed in Indian colonial contexts. They differed and changed depending on the respective religious, social, economic, and political conditions under which they had been framed in Europe (or elsewhere), on the one hand, and how they were implemented in India, on the other. Missionary activities were part of complex processes of larger (trans-​)colonial encounters and have to be investigated from several perspectives. Although it is important to locate Christian missions in the economic, political, religious, and social contexts of the mission fields, Christian missions in colonial South Asian settings were always influenced by political processes and rivalries between European colonial powers. Political and economic ambitions that found their expression in trade interests and strategies of expansion have to be linked to religious movements and Church histories in Europe with their consequences for mission activities. Scholars have to consider these complexities and ambivalences when they investigate the historical impact and influence of mission agendas on Indian colonial society. Christian mission activities had various, sometimes unintentional, ramifications within the Indian context. But it would be too simple to open up a dichotomy between intended and unintended results. If we speak of unintended dynamics, we again need to ask from whose perspective these are seen. The reactions of local religious reform movements, the effects on society, and the ambivalent processes caused by mission work are difficult to measure and to directly mark as a reaction to 225

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Christian mission activities within the vast field of anti-​mission movements, anti-​colonial ideas, and the Indian national movement. Christian missions were part of an attitude that one could call cultural imperialism, which included policies of disciplining, making inferior, and education to obedience –​in other words, the formation of an identity fitting the needs of colonial structures. At the same time, it cannot be denied that these missions also played a role in local processes of emancipation and modernisation. In some regions, the increase in conversion resulted in the empowerment of socially and politically oppressed groups or castes that then opposed the established social and religious order. What are the implications for researchers who deal with colonial missionary knowledge? What is colonial missionary knowledge? A historian is obliged to carefully and critically treat all available sources, no matter where they are from. As Andreas Nehring stated in his study of the Leipzig Mission, the mere fact that colonial mission sources provide a European view does not necessarily make their view wrong; and the apologetic interest of the missionaries in local societies does not automatically mean that scholars should not use their reports.44 It is established beyond doubt that colonial administration and power made use of knowledge produced by missionaries. But it is equally noteworthy that the interest of the missionaries often differed from the interest of other European groups, such as diplomats, adventurers, and colonial officers, who all produced knowledge about India. Needless to say, wherever available, sources from local actors must be consulted and evaluated, while also taking into consideration their respective agendas and intentions.

Notes 1 Helge Wendt, ‘Mission transnational, trans-​ kolonial, global: Missionsgeschichtsschreibung als Beziehungsgeschichte’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions-​und Kulturgeschichte/​Revue suisse d’histoire religieuse et culturelle/​Rivista svizzera di storia religiosa e culturale, 105, 2011, pp. 95–​116, esp. 102–​3. 2 Horst Gründer, Welteroberung und Christentum: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der Neuzeit (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1992), 24. 3 Among these groups of ‘Thomas’ Christians in India, the most well known are the Orthodox Syrian Church and the Mar Thoma Church. See Robert Eric Frykenberg, ‘Christians in India: An historical overview of their complexes’, in: idem (ed.), Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-​Cultural Communication since 1500 (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 33–​61, 46. 4 On the early role of the Jesuits in India, see Ines G. Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–​17th Centuries) (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005). For later developments, see also Ambrose Pinto SJ, ‘The achievements of the Jesuit educational mission in India and the contemporary challenges it faces’, International Studies in Catholic Education, 6 (1), 2014, pp. 14–​32. 5 On the Tranquebar Mission (also called the Danish-​Halle or Danish-​English-​Halle Mission), see, for instance, Andreas Gross, Y. Vincent Kumaradoss, and Heike Liebau, Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India: The Danish-​Halle and the English-​Halle Mission, vol. 1 (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2006). On the Société des Missions Étrangerès de Paris, see Henriette Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society: Social and Religious Change in South India (1840–​1900) (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1994), 50–​6. 6 See Dick Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality in India: The London Missionary Society in South Travancore in the 19th Century (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1989); and Andrew Porter (ed.), The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–​1914 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003). 7 For a general historical overview, see Frykenberg, ‘Christians in India’. For the role of American missions, see, for instance, Mary Schaller Blaufuss, Changing Goals of the American Madura Mission in India, 1830–​1916 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2003). On the Swedish Mission in south India, see Gunnel Cederlöf, ‘Social mobilization among people competing at the bottom level of society: The presence of missions in rural south India, ca.1900–​1950’, in: Frykenberg, Christians and Missionaries in India, pp. 336–​56. 8 For example, Dhirendra Kumar Sahu, The Church of North India: A Historical and Systematic Theological Inquiry into an Ecumenical Ecclesiology (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994); Chandra Mallampalli,

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Christian missionary agendas Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India, 1863–​1937 (London: Routledge, 2004); Joseph Tharamangalam, ‘Whose Swadeshi? Contending nationalisms among Indian Christians’, Asian Journal of Social Science, 32 (2), 2004, pp. 232–​46. 9 Editors of the series were A. Mathias Mundadan, Joseph Thekkedath, F.S. Downs, John C.B. Webster, and E.R. Hambye. The first volume was: Anthony Mathias Mundadan, History of Christianity in India: From the Beginning up to the Middle of the 16th Century (Bangalore: Church History Association of India, 1982). The second volume, published in the same year, was: J. Thekkedath, From the Middle of the Sixteenth Century to the End of the Seventeenth Century (Bangalore: Church History Association of India, 1982). Later volumes also dealt with specific regional contexts, such as: Hugald Grafe, Tamilnadu in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Bangalore: Church History Association of India, 1990). 10 Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (Oxford: OUP, 2008); idem, ‘Christian missions and the Raj’, in: Norman Etherington (ed.), Mission and Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2005), pp. 107–​31; Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India (Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press, 2002); Klaus Koschorke, Frieder Ludwig, and Mariano Delgado (eds.), A History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2007). 11 Geoffrey Oddie, Religious Conversion Movements in South Asia: Continuities and Change (London: Routledge, 1997); idem, Social Protest in India: British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reform, 1850–​ 1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979). Recently a growing number of Indian authors have written about mission history with regard to the self-​understanding of Christians in India today. For example: Jayabalan Murthy, Leipzig Mission and Dalit Christians in Pandur, Tamil Nadu (New Delhi: Christian World Imprints, 2018). 12 For the discussion of imperialism and mission, see Andrew Porter, ‘ “Cultural imperialism” and Protestant missionary enterprise, 1780–​1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 25 (3), 1997, pp. 367–​91; idem, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–​1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); and idem, The Imperial Horizons. 13 One recent example is M. Christhudhas, Christianity and Health and Educational Development in South Travancore: The Work of the London Missionary Society from 1890–​1947 (New Delhi: Christian World Imprints, 2019). See also David Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012). 14 Here, biographical approaches are often used. See, for example, Y. Vincent Kumaradoss, Robert Caldwell: A Scholar-​Missionary in Colonial South India (New Delhi: ISPCK, 2008); Albrecht Frenz (ed.), Hermann Gundert: Quellen zu seinem Leben und Werk (Ulm: Süddeutsche Verlagsanstalt Ulm, 1991); and Geoffrey Oddie, Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-​Nationalism: James Long of Bengal: 1814–​87 (Richmond: Curzon, 1999). 15 Geoffrey Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–​ 1900 (New Delhi: Sage, 2006); Andreas Nehring, Orientalismus und Mission: Die Repräsentation der tamilischen Gesellschaft und Religion durch Leipziger Missionare 1840–​1940 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003); Thomas Ruhland, ‘Zwischen grassroots-​Gelehrsamkeit und Kommerz: Der Naturalienhandel der Herrnhuter Südasienmission’, in: Silke Förschler and Anne Mariss (eds.), Verfahrensweisen der Naturgeschichte: Akteure, Tiere, Dinge in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne: Bühlau Köln, 2017), pp. 29–​45; Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Third-​stream Orientalism: J.N. Farquhar, the Indian YMCA’s literature department, and the representation of South Asian cultures and religions (ca.1910–​1949)’, JAS, 79 (3), 2020, pp. 659–​83. 16 Jonathan Ingleby, Missionaries, Education and India: Issues in Protestant Missionary Education in the Long Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: ISPCK, 2000). 17 See, for instance, Hayden Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–​ 1920 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007). For a specific case of American missions’ education programmes for Dalits, see Arun Kumar, ‘The “untouchable school”: American missionaries, Hindu social reformers and educational dreams of labouring Dalits in colonial north India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asia, 42 (5), 2019, pp. 823–​44. 18 Geoffrey Oddie, ‘Christian conversion in Telugu country, 1860–​1900: A case study of one Protestant movement in the Godavari-​Krishna Delta’, IESHR, 12 (1), 1973, pp. 61–​80. 19 Jana Tschurenev, ‘A colonial experiment in education: Madras, 1789–​1796’, in: Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere (eds.), Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-​ Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), pp. 105–​20; Jana Tschurenev, Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India (Cambridge: CUP, 2019).

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Heike Liebau 20 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Fitness for modernity? The YMCA and physical-​education schemes in late-​ colonial south Asia (circa 1900–​40)’, MAS, 53 (2), 2019, pp. 512–​59; idem, ‘ “Unparalleled opportunities”: The Indian YMCA’s army work schemes for imperial troops during the Great War (1914–​1920)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47 (1), 2019, pp. 100–​37. 21 Rajshekhar Basu, ‘Missionaries as agricultural pioneers: Protestant missionaries and agricultural improvement in twentieth-​century India’, in: Deepak Kumar and Bipasha Raha (eds.), Tilling the Land: Agricultural Knowledge and Practices in Colonial India (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016), pp. 99–​ 121; Nandini Chatterjee, The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–​1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 134–​64; Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘The YMCA and low-​ modernist village development in South Asia, 1922–​1957’, Past & Present, 240 (1), 2018, pp. 193–​234. 22 Ines G. Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–​17th Centuries) (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 192–​231. 23 Rosemary Fitzgerald, ‘Rescue and redemption: The rise of female medical missions in colonial India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, in: Ann Marie Rafferty and Jane Robinson (eds.), Nursing History and the Politics of Welfare (London: Francis & Taylor, 1997), pp. 64–​79; Antoinette Burton, ‘Contesting the zenana: The mission to make “lady doctors for India” 1874–​1885’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (3), 1996, pp. 368–​97; Rhonda Semple, ‘Ruth, Miss Mackintosh, and Ada and Rose Marris: Biblewomen, zenana workers and missionaries in nineteenth-​century British missions to north India’, Women’s History Review, 17 (4), 2008, pp. 561–​74; Eliza F. Kent, ‘Tamil Bible women and the zenana missions of colonial south India’, History of Religions, 39 (2), 1999, pp. 117–​49. 24 Arno Lehmann, ‘Hallesche Mediziner und Medizinen am Anfang deutsch-​indischer Beziehungen’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Martin-​ Luther-​ Universität Halle-​ Wittenberg: Mathematisch-​ Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe, 5 (2), 1955, pp. 117–​32. 25 On European medical interest and intercultural knowledge production in India, see Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, Pidgin-​Knowledge: Wissen und Kolonialismus (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2013). 26 Iwona Milewska, ‘First European missionaries on Sanskrit grammar’, in: Frykenberg, Christians and Missionaries in India, pp. 62–​9. Toon Van Hal discusses the Protestant contribution to Sanskrit studies in the eighteenth century and argues that, at that time, knowledge exchange did not always move through colonial channels –​but through missionaries (here especially from the Danish-​Halle Mission) and their networks: idem, ‘Protestant pioneers in Sanskrit studies in the early 18th century: An overlooked chapter in south Indian missionary linguistics’, Historiographia Linguistica, 43 (1/​2), 2016, pp. 99–​144. 27 Heike Liebau, Cultural Encounters in India: The Local Co-​Workers of the Tranquebar Mission, 18th–​19th Centuries (New Delhi: Social Science Press 2013), 237–​49. 28 On Gundert’s life and work in India, see Frenz, Hermann Gundert. See also Mrinalini Sebastian, ‘The scholar-​missionaries of the Basel Mission in southwest India: Language, identity, and knowledge in flux’, in: Heather Sharkey (ed.), Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013), pp. 176–​202. 29 Robert Caldwell, The Tinnevelly Shanars: A Sketch of Their Religion and Their Moral Condition and Characteristics as a Caste; with Special Reference to the Facilities and Hindrances to the Progress of Christianity amongst Them (Madras: Christian Knowledge Society’s Press, 1849); idem, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (London: Harrison, 1856). See also Hephzibah Israel, Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation, and the Making of Protestant Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Vaitheespara Ravindran, ‘The unanticipated legacy of Robert Caldwell and the Dravidian movement’, South Indian Studies, 1996, pp. 83–​110. 30 Miron Winslow, A Comprehensive Tamil and English Dictionary of High and Low Tamil (Madras: P.R. Hunt, 1862; repub. Asian Educational Services, Madras, 1996). 31 Hannelore Landsberg, ‘Eine Fischsammlung aus Tranquebar, die Berliner Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde und deren Mitglied Marcus Elieser Bloch’, in: Heike Liebau, Andreas Nehring, and Brigitte Klosterberg (eds.), Mission und Forschung: Translokale Wissensproduktion zwischen Indien und Europa im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen 2010), pp. 167–​80. See also other chapters in the same volume. On the concept of physico-​theology, see Karsten Hommel, ‘ “Für solche [Theologen] wolle Gott seine Ost-​Indische Kirche in Gnaden bewahren!” Physikotheologie und the Dänisch-​Englisch-​Hallesche Mission’, in: Liebau, Nehring, and Klosterberg, Mission und Forschung, pp. 181–​94. 32 Wendt, ‘Mission transnational’, esp. 96–​7. 33 Andrew Porter, ‘Introduction’, in: idem, The Imperial Horizons, pp. 1–​13.

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Christian missionary agendas 34 Kumaradoss, Robert Caldwell, 49; on the villages, see also 76–​8. 35 Kersti Aßmann, ‘Christianisierung in Nordostindien und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Staats-​und Nationenbildung’, in: Wilfried Wagner (ed.), Kolonien und Missionen: Referate des 3. Internationalen Kolonialgeschichtlichen Symposiums ’93 in Bremen (Münster: LIT, 1994), pp. 325–​38. 36 Robert Eric Frykenberg, ‘Introduction’, in: idem, Christians and Missionaries in India, pp. 1–​32, 23. 37 Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion: Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); D. Arthur Jeyakumar, Christians and the National Movement: The Memoranda of 1919 and the National Movement with Special Reference to Protestant Christians in Tamil Nadu: 1919–​1939 (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1999). 38 Steven Maughan, ‘Imperial Christianity? Foreign missions of the Church of England, 1895–​1915’, in: Porter, The Imperial Horizons, pp. 32–​57, 56. 39 Rachel J. Tolen, ‘Colonizing and transforming the criminal tribesman: The Salvation Army in British India’, American Ethnologist, 18 (1), 1991, pp. 106–​25; Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Reclaiming savages in “darkest England” and “darkest India”: The Salvation Army as transnational agent of the civilizing mission’, in: Carey Watt and Michael Mann (eds.), Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2011), pp. 125–​65; Jagjeet Lally, ‘Crafting colonial anxieties: Silk and the Salvation Army in British India, circa 1900–​1920’, MAS, 50 (3), 2016, pp. 765–​807. 40 On the activities of the Basel Mission as an economic entrepreneur, see, for instance, Heinrich Christ, Zwischen Religion und Geschäft: Basler Missions-​Handlungs-​Gesellschaft und ihre Unternehmensethik, 1859–​ 1917 (Stuttgart: Franz-​Steiner Verlag, 2015). 41 A discussion of these memoranda of 1919 is provided by Jeyakumar, Christians and the National Movement. On the policy of ‘recognition’, see esp. 29–​30. 42 Brian Stanley, ‘Introduction: Christianity and the end of empire’, in: idem (ed.), Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003), pp. 1–​11, 7. 43 Chandra Mallampalli, ‘British missions and Indian nationalism, 1880–​1908: Imitation and autonomy in Calcutta and Madras’, in: Porter, The Imperial Horizons, pp. 158–​82, esp. 159–​61, 169. 44 Nehring, Orientalismus und Mission, 19.

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18 PENAL LAW, PENOLOGY, AND PRISONS IN COLONIAL INDIA Michael Offermann

Introduction Over the last 20 years scholarship on crime, penal law, and punishment in British India has exploded. Up to the 1990s only a handful of studies existed that barely sketched the outlines of colonial penology. Since then historians have demonstrated the complexities of colonial notions of crime and punishment. They have shown that the colonial authorities’ thoughts about penology and the practices they used in dealing with criminality were never stable and uncontested. Indeed, they underwent significant transformations over time that were directly connected to shifts in the general conceptions of British power and sovereignty. This was partly a result of conflicting interests inside the colonial administration, but, more importantly, it was Indian agency that drove the development of penal thought. The constant challenges to British authority by defiant subjects, from ‘criminal dacoits’ via ‘rebellious tribals’ to ‘seditious elites’, prompted the state to search for new ways of maintaining (the illusion) of colonial control. The historiography of punishment in Europe, North America, and ‘white’ settler colonies has been dominated by the ‘revisionist school’ since the 1970s. This school’s fundamental insight that a society’s ideas about punishment are directly linked to socio-​economic circumstances and the ways in which power is exerted applies also to British India. Indeed, the establishment of the East India Company (EIC) as a territorial power on the Indian subcontinent had a far-​ reaching impact on Indian economy and society, which also extended to the field of criminal law and the practice of punishment. Although the EIC pretended to maintain the legal institutions inherited by the Mughal Empire, colonial rule introduced sweeping changes of the law and its application. These trends further increased when the British state replaced the EIC and introduced a new system of law, such as the Indian Penal Code in 1862. As a result, institutions, legal codes, and concepts established during the colonial era continue to shape penal policies in South Asia until today.1 This chapter, therefore, seeks to give a brief overview of the development of colonial conceptions of crime and punishment. Instead of providing a comprehensive account, it will familiarise the reader with the main debates and provide suggestions for further reading. Given the enormous historical and thematic scope, it is impossible to do justice to all subfields of the copious scholarship that exists on various facets the topic. Nonetheless, the reader will be introduced to seminal literature and the main debates. 230

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From legal pluralism to Company laws Scholarship on law and order in South Asia before the colonial era remains notoriously scarce, mostly because of the very difficult archival situation. British sources of the time often painted the picture of despotic trials and quoted the ‘barbaric’ punishment of Islamic legal codes, such as the sharia and the precepts of the hanafi school of jurisprudence. This fitted orientalist prejudices and served to portray colonial rule as a ‘civilising mission’ that followed Mughal rule.2 It neglects, however, that the practice of Islamic jurisprudence was characterised by a wide range of discretionary powers that allowed complainants, judges, and the ruler to intervene in the judicial process and mitigate punishments.3 When the EIC acquired the diwani in 1765, it also assumed the responsibility for administering the criminal law in Bengal. Being more interested in revenue and lacking the necessary employees, the EIC left the judicial system in the hands of the nawab, until the ensuing administrative chaos forced the Company to control the courts directly. As the British ruled under the fiction that they were still vassals of the Mughal emperor in Delhi, the Company’s courts outside the Presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras administered Islamic criminal law. The Regulating Act of 1773 consolidated the British administrative structure and instituted a hierarchical system of courts for the British possessions in South Asia. Up to 1783, however, the administration of criminal justice remained in the hands of non-​British actors, and the influence of the British on jurisprudence remained marginal, since they had to deal with the influence of powerful local elites, such as the zamindars, and popular notions of law and justice.4 Non-​official Europeans living in India enjoyed a racialised privilege and were mostly exempted from the colonial criminal justice system. Up to 1872 they were subject only to British Crown laws and could not be tried by Indian judges. Following the infamous Ilbert Bill controversy in the 1880s they reserved the right to be tried by a jury, of which at least a half of the members had to be white.5 Early colonial criminal law can be portrayed as a complex legal pluralism.6 The law, and –​ most significantly –​its application, underwent major changes under British rule, however. Muslim judges were replaced by British judges, and possibilities for victims and their relatives to intervene on behalf of the culprit after a payment of money (kisas, diya) were curbed. This move to monopolise the administration of justice in British hands was linked to the Company’s conception of political paramountcy: only the sovereign should have the power to decide over the criminal law and its implementation.7 Most importantly, the process of codification altered the practice of jurisprudence and replaced judicial discretion with a set of fixed regulations. The first drafts of a new penal code had already been created during the 1830s, but an entirely new code, which largely replaced the existing system of regulations and local laws, was not passed until 1862 under Crown rule.8 The EIC’s main aim from the 1770s onwards was to establish itself as the sole authority to administer punishment legally. With the acquirement of territorial control and the shift from a trading company to a revenue-​based state, the maintenance of order and stability in the countryside gained crucial importance. Indeed, in the thought of Company officials, revenue extraction was closely related to policing the countryside and the crusade against thugs, rebels, and bandits following the collapse of the Indian military labour market. British campaigns against ‘dacoity’ or ‘thuggee’ testify to the British willingness to redefine legal categories to a degree unknown in the United Kingdom.9

The birth of the colonial prison British administrators rarely failed to mention that the introduction of imprisonment was a key element of the Raj’s ‘civilising mission’ in India. It was not until the 1820s and 1830s, 231

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however, that systematic attention was paid to the East India Company’s prisons. Prisons had already existed in South Asia before the establishment of British hegemony on the subcontinent. Usually confinement served the purposes of detention for debtors, political enemies, or prisoners who were exempted from capital punishment because of their social status.10 The earliest British prisons stood in the presidency towns and were used for the punishment only of British and Indian Company employees and the population of the trading posts that were in British possession.11 In 1725 Madras had three smaller jails, some of which had existed since the seventeenth century.12 Calcutta’s oldest prison, in Lalbazar, dated from 1733, and it was soon complemented by the Harinbari prison on the Maidan.13 Although many British administrators professed to abhor the ‘barbarous punishments’ prescribed by Islamic legal codes, it is difficult to see their abolition as a gesture motivated by humanitarianism. The main aim of the British was to make the imposition of punishments more uniform and establish the Company laws as the authoritative text on how criminals should be punished. The general effect was a steep increase in executions.14 The Company also continued to apply a wide range of other punishments besides the death penalty and imprisonment. These included various degrees of deportation, from transportation overseas to banishment. Punishments aiming at the body, such as godna, the tattooing of convicted criminals, and tashir, public exposure, continued well into the 1840s, with corporal punishment remaining an alternative to imprisonment or fines for almost the whole colonial period.15 From the 1770s the first prisons in the Indian countryside began to emerge. They were characterised less by a vision of a uniform system of imprisonment than by pragmatism and local convenience. Dedicated prison buildings were rarely constructed but existing structures were used, such as courthouse annexes, old forts, stables, or serais (rest houses for travellers). The local magistrate, who was nominally in charge of the jail, usually left the daily work to the local jailor.16 Characteristic of these institutions was their lack of a uniform routine that resembled contemporary British prisons: debtors, suspected criminals, and convicted prisoners, male and female alike, were often confined together and left to themselves once locked up. The prisons were also extremely porous: prisoners were taken out to work on the roads on a daily basis, where they had contacts with friends, and food vendors, barbers, and servants could enter the prisons to offer their services to those who could afford them.17 Only by the 1820s did colonial administrators become concerned over the necessity to reorganise the prisons under their control. This was attributable to a combination of local factors and global influences: First, at the height of the impact of utilitarian thought on the colonial administration, the codification of the law became a major issue in debates on British India.18 A second factor that undoubtedly shaped the views of British administrators in India, particularly those with a utilitarian inclination, were the worldwide debates on prison reform that had gained prominence in the 1810s and 1820s.19 The American penitentiaries in Philadelphia and Auburn were discussed globally as model institutions that would offer new ways to efficiently deal with criminals. Instead of simply leaving prisoners to themselves, a regulated regime of isolation, work, instruction, and moral exhortation should transform criminals into disciplined citizens.20 Prison reform became a central topic of modernising elites, not only in Europe and North America, and was directly linked to discourses of ‘civilisational progress’. Third, Indian domestic issues also played a seminal role. Alarmed by local physicians, from the 1820s onwards the medical boards had highlighted the extreme mortality rates that existed among the road gangs of prisoners who worked on the major road-​building programmes on the subcontinent, such as the Grand Trunk Road. The convict road gangs also came under attack as an inefficient means of exploiting the labour of prisoners. Finally, a major uprising in the Calcutta jail in 1834 alerted the government to the urgency of reviewing the administration of Indian prisons.21 232

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The ensuing report of a rashly formed Committee on Prison Discipline was published in 1838. It soon became the penological key text of the Raj, but also a testament to the limits of the ‘age of reform’.22 Building on the latest penological advances made in North America and the United Kingdom, the report revealed the appeal of the ‘modern’ prison for a colonial regime such as British India. Although the committee was sceptical as to whether the ‘morals’ of Indian prisoners could indeed be improved by imprisonment, it nevertheless recommended the construction of new prisons and a uniform scheme of ‘prison discipline’ as a means to increase the deterrence of imprisonment and teach the inmates ‘habits of industry’. Here, the modern prison’s multifunctionality appears as the decisive factor explaining why imprisonment became the most prevalent form of punishment in very diverse societies within a few decades of the nineteenth century. The balance between discipline, repression, labour extraction, and moral reform was always shifting, and in colonial spaces such as India deterrence and repression usually outweighed reform. In fact, the committee explicitly declared that there existed no principal difference between prison reforms in Britain and India. It was necessary to consider how imprisonment could be adapted to local circumstances, however.23 The committee had already anticipated that its recommendation to construct new prisons would be considered too expensive by the colonial government. And indeed, administrative inertia hampered the reformist zeal: the model penitentiary proposed by the committee to test its suggestions never materialised. The report did, however, encourage provincial governments and eager district magistrates to ‘experiment’ with new forms of punishment. In the North-​Western Provinces, William Woodcock was put in charge of the prison in Agra, where he introduced elements that represented the penological state of the art: solitary confinement, a regularised daily routine of labour and instruction, and individualised schemes of good conduct. Under Woodcock and his successors, Agra grew to house almost 3,500 prisoners and was considered a ‘model prison for India’.24 Other presidencies and provinces followed, and until the middle of the 1850s the major provinces of British India employed a full-​time official as ‘Inspector of Prisons’. The concept of ‘central prisons’, where prisoners serving longer sentences were sent to and where a stricter discipline could be maintained, was also followed in other parts of the subcontinent, and various attempts to construct large prisons after modern designs were undertaken.25 Thus, by 1857, there existed at least a handful of major institutions of confinement that claimed to be ‘modern prisons’. Colonial penal administrators remained painfully aware that their institutions often lacked what was considered to be the defining feature of the modern prison, namely the single cell, but they were, nonetheless, optimistic that their institutions could compete with most other European prisons.26 The prisoners were by no means simply passive recipients during this period, when numerous prison administrators ‘experimented’ with measures to tighten prison discipline and labour exploitation. New machines set up to provide especially degrading and monotonous labour, such as hand cranks and mills, were often sabotaged.27 Feigning illness was another method that prisoners tried in order to avoid hard labour, as they were aware of the high importance the British placed on low mortality numbers. Especially provocative were measures surrounding the introduction of common meals, ‘messing’, which touched on caste restrictions. In Bihar in particular major riots ensued, which also affected the local townspeople when prisoners claimed that prison reforms were aimed at undermining Indian customs and religion. Faced with stiff resistance, the British had to make concessions, and for the time being exempt high-​ caste prisoners from common meals.28 In this, as in other cases, the institutional recognition of demands made by prisoners from the upper classes of colonial society tended to reify existing social differences. 233

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In these conflicts, prisoners often also demonstrated that they were aware of what happened outside and in other jails. Despite British efforts to isolate the ‘modern prisons’ from the Indian public, people, news, and goods circulated between the prison and the outside world. The continuing forms of outdoor labour and the architectural shortcomings made the borders of the jails remain extremely porous. Equally, local staff often assisted prisoners, either in return for money or because of kinship ties.29 After the Indian Uprising and the opening of the Andaman penal colony in 1857, the debate about the aims of imprisonment in a colony such as India continued mainly inside the colonial administration. Although a small group of specialised penal administrators argued for an extension of central prisons, together with the mass construction of solitary cells, and demanded that the necessary funds be raised, the bureaucrats of the Home Department rejected any additional spending and questioned whether Indian prisoners could be ‘reformed’ at all.30 Eventually, most of the prisons destroyed during the ‘Great Rebellion’ were rebuilt along the established lines, with a limited number of solitary cells for disciplinary measures and associated confinement as the norm. Over the following decades colonial prison administrators were inventive as to how the separation of prisoners could be secured by technological means within the existing wards. This was motivated not just by a desire to make imprisonment more severe or rehabilitative but also by Victorian gender norms, as the repeated claims and proofs of homosexual acts inside the prisons regularly caused moral panics within the administration, especially in the case of female prisoners31 and juveniles.32 In other aspects, too, a lack of willingness to invest in adequate prison facilities led colonial officials to improvise, the subsequent results often being presented as innovative features of the efficiency of the Indian prison system. The use of convicts as warders, a practice taken over from the Straits Settlements, which received Indian convicts sentenced to transportation until 1867, was presented as an Indian peculiarity that lowered costs and contributed to the good behaviour of the convicts. Right from the outset, however, critics accused the convict warders of corruption and mistreatment of fellow prisoners.33 In a similar vein, the introduction of prison industries such as printing and, especially, carpet weaving was motivated by an urge to generate money for the cash-​starved jail departments rather than a desire to teach prisoners useful skills that would enable them to earn a livelihood after the end of their term.34 Prisons also emerged as key sites for the medical and anthropological investigation into Indian society. Besides the army barracks, carceral institutions were among the few places where the colonial state had an almost unrestricted access to Indians and their bodies. This allowed experiments with medicine and nutrition, but also anthropometrical and anthropological research to produce ‘colonial knowledge’.35 Not only did the medical and rehabilitative aspects of imprisonment undergo a process of modernisation, but techniques of control and repression were also carefully tested. Penological experiments included studies of the effects of a reduction of rations on the health and conduct of prisoners and the introduction of new forms of corporal punishment.36 Pseudo-​scientific claims of a somatic difference between European and Indian bodies also justified better treatment of European convicts, who enjoyed more and qualitatively superior food and for whom special prisons were erected in the cooler climate of the hill stations.37 Colonial administrators repeatedly listed the construction and management of prisons as a major achievement of Britain’s civilising mission in South Asia. Below this veneer, however, the colonial prison system was constantly plagued by a lack of funds and limited willingness to invest in the prisons, as was demonstrated repeatedly by foreign visitors and the Raj’s own research committees in 1864, 1877, and 1888.38 In fact, the move towards imprisonment was not unidirectional, and was full of setbacks. In view of the overcrowding and the dismal state 234

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of most local jails, the Whipping Act of 1864 reintroduced corporal punishment as a measure to reduce prisoner numbers, especially for juveniles, who were feared to be ‘contaminated’ by elder prisoners in jail.39 Even in the central prisons, heralded as model institutions, most inmates suffered from the effects of forced hard labour, constant malnutrition, frequent corporal punishment, and medical neglect. Equally, within the colonial administration many claimed that the prisons even failed to achieve their most fundamental task: the deterrence of prisoners and the Indian population at large. The penal administrators remained aware of the shortcomings of their institutions, but nevertheless defended them against sporadic public criticism by British and Indian social reformers.40 By the time of the last major reform attempt, the Indian Jail Committee that inspected India’s prisons in 1919/​20 found that little change had taken place since the Prison Act of 1894. In the 1860s and 1870s colonial prison administrators had claimed that India’s penal institutions could stand comparisons with most Western prisons, but the reality in the 1920s was that they were still marked by overcrowding, sanitary problems, and a focus on utter repression. Perhaps more troubling for the committee was the fact that, even in the prisons, the colonial state’s power remained limited at best, as prisoners and staff found myriad ways to subvert the elaborate prison rules. Reform attempts foundered, as the high number of prisoners who came into the jails during the nationalist mass campaigns put the prison system under additional strain. Vast outdoor camps were erected to try and relieve the overcrowding. Finally, the economic crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War prevented any serious reform effort.41

The Raj’s carceral archipelago Prisons and jails were nodal points of the Raj’s carceral archipelago, through which people went before they were distributed to other institutions of confinement, such as labour camps, juvenile reformatories, and penal settlements. Convicts who were sentenced to transportation often passed through a number of local and central jails until they ended up in Calcutta’s Alipore jail, which served as a depot before the final deportation to Burma and, later, the penal settlement on the Andaman Islands. This included prisoners of war, such as Sikhs following the conquest of the Punjab in the 1840s and Burmese prisoners deported to south India in the 1870s.42 Similarly, prisons often served as sites of detention for the mentally ill who were not supported by their families,43 or for destitute people during times of scarcity. A notorious example is the work camps erected beside the prisons during the great famine from 1876 to 1878.44 Members of ‘criminal tribes’ also passed from penal colonies to jails and vice versa on their journey through the carceral archipelago of the Raj. Children of convicts and juvenile criminals also went through the jails, as the number of dedicated reformatories remained minimal.45 Although the penological discourse in India rarely addressed it, prisons were crucial for the control of people deemed politically dangerous by the colonial government. The infamous Bengal regulation III of 1818 and its sister regulations in other presidencies allowed the government to confine prisoners on political grounds without trial. Regulation III remained in force until the end of the Raj and was used extensively to imprison members of the nationalist movement for indeterminate periods. The political importance of the prison for maintaining control was not lost on the colonisers and Indian society, as events during the Indian Uprising of 1857–​59 demonstrated. Prisons emerged as key sites in the struggle between rebels and the British government. Many jails across north India were destroyed by prisoners, partly for military reasons, but predominantly as symbols of British rule.46 In the twentieth century ‘jail going’ became one of the most powerful tactics employed by Mohandas Gandhi and his followers to expose the repressive nature of a political system that imprisoned non-​violent resistance. As in 235

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other colonial contexts, prisons became important places during the struggle for independence, where nationalists reflected on the state of their struggle and instructed fellow prisoners. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru famously spent their time in prison writing, as did Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who published his hugely influential book Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? while still in prison.47 Transportation was directly linked to British efforts to colonise territories in the Indian Ocean region. Here, convict labour was not a means of redemption but the punishment reserved for the most serious felonies and the prisoners considered most threatening to colonial rule. Already by 1787 the EIC was deporting prisoners to the Straits Settlements, Malaya, and Mauritius. After the Indian Uprising the British opened the most notorious penal settlement for captured rebels and criminals on the Andaman Islands.48 The cellular jail constructed in Port Blair in 1904 became the central institution for the confinement of Indian political leaders, and after independence it became a place of pilgrimage for Indian nationalists.49 Besides the prison buildings and penal colony on the Andamans it left behind, the labelling of certain communities as ‘hereditary criminals’ was one of the most enduring influences of the Raj in the area of criminology. Although it has been pointed out that the idea that certain communities were inherently criminal pre-​dated colonial rule,50 the colonial state’s response did much to institutionalise these groups’ status as outsiders of the colonial society.51 The British had already encountered the phenomenon of organised groups who periodically resorted to organised robbery in Bengal in the 1770s. In their campaign against ‘dacoity’, the Company contemplated extraordinary measures, such as also enslaving the family members of convicted dacoits. The ‘discovery’ of ‘thuggee’ added to the colonial imagination of India as a country housing groups of ‘hereditary criminals’ for which the usual provisions of the law were not sufficient. By the 1820s the idea that some parts of Indian society were not criminal by individual choice but by ethnicity was by then firmly established within colonial thinking. Non-​sedentary and tribal groups such as the Kanjars but also communities at the margins of society such as the Hijra were seen as suspicious and prone to criminal behaviour by the colonial state. People were not punished for individual behaviour but for suspected membership of a certain group.52 From the 1830s the colonial state built a separate institutional and carceral network that aimed specifically at ‘criminal communities’. An important step was the creation of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department in the 1830s. The various local measures culminated in the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871, which gave the police enormous power to supervise and punish members of a group that had been listed as ‘criminal’ under the act. People were restricted in their movement, subjected to forced labour, or deported to penal settlements. Officially, the labour camps and forced settlements that were set up under the CTA were intended to ‘civilise’ the communities, by teaching them hard labour, discipline, and appropriate gender roles. Most of the camps provided only menial work and little means of subsistence, however. Living conditions often were appalling, with leaving considered a criminal offence.53 Being presented as a central part of the Raj’s civilising mission, the camps also provided a possibility for non-​ state actors to take part in the imperial work of ‘uplifting’ Indian society. Tens of thousands of children of ‘criminal tribes’ members were forcibly removed from their families and put into special camps run by the Salvation Army.54 Alongside the institutional network, a dedicated criminal ethnography developed that aimed to identify members of ‘criminal castes and tribes’ by ethnic features. A diverse set of disciplines was marshalled to help the police and administrators to identify members of ‘criminal tribes’, from anthropology to linguistics. A system of surveillance measures, passports, photographic registers, and ‘caste handbooks’ was designed to ensure that the state could control 236

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the movement of groups considered as ‘dangerous’.55 The Criminal Tribes Act, which saw a number of revisions, remained in force until the end of the colonial era. Although independent India repealed the CTA in 1952 and ‘de-​notified’ the groups that had come under the act, a series of Habitual Offenders Acts and the use of old police registers continued the surveillance and police harassment of groups considered as ‘criminal’.56

Punishment and ‘colonial violence’ It should have become clear by this point that colonialism was an essential factor in debates about crime and criminality in nineteenth-​century South Asia. Although rhetorically, at least, the British-​Indian government and prison officials claimed they had introduced ‘civilised’ institutions of punishment that compared to prisons in Europe or North America, the parsimony of the colonial state prevented the large-​scale investments that would have been necessary to fundamentally improve the conditions inside India’s penal institutions. More fundamentally, under colonialism penal institutions were not intended to rehabilitate citizens but to discipline colonial subjects. Repeatedly, colonial commentators noted that Indian criminals did not differ fundamentally from Indian society at large.57 Hence, a ‘moral reform’ of the convict as an individual was perceived as almost impossible as long as Indian society was not fully ‘civilised’ according to British standards. Although some British officials expressed the view that ‘reformation’ of the convict was to be the ultimate aim of confinement, this was primarily understood as the adoption of ‘habits of industry’. Recently scholars have claimed that a focus on official institutions neglects the wider system of oppression that sustained colonial rule.58 The prison and penal colonies aside, the colonial state had a wide range of other measures at its disposal to extinguish behaviour deemed as threatening to public order and the power of the state. These included extra-​legal punishments, military penal expeditions, and extraordinary judicial powers in frontier regions that legalised preventive killings.59 Combined with the covering up of violence by Europeans towards Indians, this constituted a wide-​ranging network of formal and informal repression mechanisms that underpinned foreign rule.60 The permanent anxiety of the British about losing control over the subject population resulted in exemplary punishments and public spectacles of violence that aimed to instil terror in the wider society.61 Moments of crisis revealed that colonial rule could rely only on military force to assert its power and control. On the other hand, it is difficult to ascribe a marginal role to the colonial prison system. The sheer number of inmates who went through the jails and prisons, as well as the significant amounts of money and administrative paperwork expended in building and running prisons, can lead only to the conclusion that the prison system was considered vital to sustain colonial control. To establish how precisely the prison and other forms of colonial repression worked together would appear to be one of the most promising avenues for further research.

Notes 1 Mira Rai Waits, ‘Colonial mimicry and nationalist memory in the postcolonial prisons of India’, in: Daniel E. Coslett (ed.), Neocolonialism and Built Heritage: Echoes of Empire in Africa, Asia, and Europe (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 168–​88. 2 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Law and the colonial state in India’, in: idem (ed.), Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 62–​5. 3 Sumit Guha, ‘An Indian penal régime: Maharashtra in the eighteenth century’, Past & Present, 147, 1995, pp. 100–​26. See also the recent contribution by M. Reza Phirbai, ‘A historiography of Islamic

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Michael Offermann law in the Mughal Empire’, in: Anver M. Emon and Rumee Ahmed (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law (Oxford: OUP, 2018), pp. 492–​510. 4 Michael Mann, ‘Dealing with Oriental despotism: British jurisdiction in Bengal, 1772–​93’, in: Harald Fischer-​Tiné and Michael Mann (eds.), Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 29–​48. 5 Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘Codification and the rule of colonial difference: Criminal procedure in British India’, Law and History Review, 23 (3), 2005, pp. 631–​8. 6 Sandra den Otter, ‘Law, authority, and colonial rule’, in: Douglas M. Peers and Nandini Gooptu (eds.), India and the British Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2012), pp. 168–​90; Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–​1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 127–​66. 7 Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2000), 65, 233–​4. 8 Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 55–​68. 9 Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the social order of colonial north India’, MAS, 25 (2), 1991, pp. 227–​61; Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-​Century India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 36. 10 Guha, ‘An Indian penal régime’. 11 John Mulvany, ‘Bengal jails in early days’, The Calcutta Review, 293, 1918, pp. 293–​315. 12 Henry Davidson Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–​1800, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1913), 228–​9. 13 Sumanta Bannerjee, The Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009), 546–​9. 14 Jörg Fisch, Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs: The British Transformation of the Bengal Criminal Law, 1769–​ 1817 (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1983), 104. 15 Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality, and Colonialism in South Asia (New York: Berg, 2004), 15–​56. 16 See Mira Rai Waits, ‘Imperial vision, colonial prisons: British jails in Bengal, 1823–​73’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 77 (2), 2018, pp. 146–​67; and the plans of jails in the Madras Presidency in BL, IOR/​F/​4/​899/​23257 and IOR/​F/​4/​900/​23258. 17 T.K. Bannerjee, Background to Indian Criminal Law (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1963), 317–​23. 18 David Skuy, ‘Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code of 1862: The myth of the inherent superiority and modernity of the English legal system compared to India’s legal system in the nineteenth century’, MAS, 32 (3), 1998, pp. 513–​57. 19 Randall McGowen, ‘The well-​ordered prison: England, 1780–​1865’, in: Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (eds.), The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: OUP, 1998), pp. 71–​99. 20 David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, rev. edn. (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002). 21 Chitra Joshi, ‘Fettered bodies: Labouring on public works in nineteenth-​century India’, in: Marcel van der Linden and Prabhu Mohapatra (eds.), Labour Matters: Towards Global Histories (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009), pp. 3–​21. 22 Christopher A. Bayly, ‘The age of hiatus: The north Indian economy and society, 1830–​ 50’, in: C.H. Philips and Mary Doreen Wainwright (eds.), Indian Society and the Beginnings of Modernisation (London: School of African and Oriental Studies, 1976), pp. 83–​105. 23 Report of the Committee on Prison-​Discipline (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1838), 138. 24 Stewart Clark, History of the Central Prisons of the North-​Western Provinces (Allahabad: Government Press, 1868), 5–​6. 25 Clare Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857–​8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (London: Anthem Press, 2007), 34–​48. 26 Frederic John Mouat: ‘Prison labour, as an instrument of punishment, profit, and reformation: An episode in the prison history of Lower Bengal’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 20 (1005), 1872, pp. 270–​84. 27 William Woodcock, Inspector of Prisons, to J. Thornton, Secretary to the Government of the North Western Provinces, 29 January 1845, BL, IOR/​F/​4/​2229/​111314. 28 Rachna Singh, ‘Messing, caste and resistance: The production of “jail-​scapes” and penal regimes in the early 1840s’, in: William A. Pettigrew and Mahesh Gopalan (eds.), The East India Company, 1600–​ 1857: Essays on Anglo-​Indian Connection (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 193–​217; Anand A. Yang, ‘The Lotah Emeutes of 1855: Caste, religion and prisons in north India in the early nineteenth

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Penology in colonial India century’, in: James H. Mills and Satadru Sen (eds.), Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-​Colonial India (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 102–​17. 29 Frederic John Mouat, Reports on Jails Visited and Inspected in Bengal, Behar, and Arracan (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1856), 97, 109, 141, 167. 30 A.P. Howell, ‘Note on jails and jail discipline in India’, 20 July 1874, NAI, Home, Judicial, Proceedings, July 1876, no. 174. 31 Satadru Sen, ‘The female jails of colonial India’, IESHR, 39 (4), 2002, pp. 417–​38. 32 Manju Ludwig, ‘Britische Sittlichkeitsreform und das “Laster wider die Natur” im kolonialen Indien’, in: Judith Große, Francesco Spöring, and Jana Tschurenev (eds.), Biopolitik und Sittlichkeitsreform: Kampagnen gegen Alkohol, Drogen und Prostitution 1880–​ 1950 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2014), pp. 291–​323. 33 Anoma Pieris, Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes. A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 131. 34 David Arnold, ‘Labouring for the Raj: Convict work regimes in colonial India, 1836–​ 1939’, in: Christian G. De Vito and Alex Lichtenstein (eds.), Global Convict Labour (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 199–​221. 35 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-​Century India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 97–​113. 36 Dana Simmons, ‘Starvation science: From colonies to metropole’, in: Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World (Oxford: Berg, 2008), pp. 173–​91. 37 Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, ‘Hierarchies of punishment in colonial India: European convicts and the racial dividend, c.1860–​ 1890’, in: idem and Susanne Gehrmann (eds.), Empires and Boundaries (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 41–​65. 38 Measures Taken to Give Effect to the Recommendations of a Committee Appointed to Report on the State of Jail Discipline and to Suggest Improvements (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1867); Report of the Indian Jail Conference Assembled in Calcutta in January–​March 1877 (Calcutta: Home Secretariat Press, 1877); Report of the Committee Appointed […] to Enquire into Certain Matters Connected with Jail Administration in India (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1889). 39 Satadru Sen, ‘A separate punishment: Juvenile offenders in colonial India’, JAS, 63 (1), 2014, pp. 81–​104. 40 Maun Singh Bahadoor, ‘Messing in jails’, in: idem (ed.), Proceedings of the Meetings of the British Indian Association of Oudh 1861–​1865 (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1865), pp. 104–​5; ‘Deputation to the secretary for India from the Social Science Association’, in Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science: Belfast Meeting 1867 (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1867), pp. 20–​3. 41 F.A. Barker, The Modern Prison System of India (London: Macmillan, 1944). 42 Clare Anderson, ‘A global history of exile in Asia, c.1700–​1900’, in: Ronit Ricci (ed.), Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), pp. 20–​47. 43 James H. Mills, Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism: The ‘Native Only’ Lunatic Asylums of British India, 1857–​1900 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 90–​6. 44 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), 33–​43. 45 Satadru Sen, Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850–​1945 (London: Anthem Press, 2005), 114. 46 Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857–​8, 96–​106. 47 Ujjwal Kumar Singh, Political Prisoners in India (New Delhi: OUP, 1998). 48 Aparna Vaidik, Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 49 Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (New Delhi: OUP, 2000). 50 Anastasia Piliavsky, ‘The “criminal tribe” in India before the British’, Comparative Studies in Science and History, 57 (2), 2015, pp. 323–​54. 51 Meena Radhakrishna, Dishounored by History: ‘Criminal Tribes’ and British Colonial Policy, rev. edn. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001). 52 Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and policing the “criminals by birth”, part 1: The making of a colonial stereotype –​the criminal tribes and castes of north India’, IESHR, 27 (2), 1990, pp. 131–​64; Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850–​1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 2019).

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Michael Offermann 53 Radhika Singha, ‘Punished by surveillance: Policing “dangerousness” in colonial India, 1872–​ 1918’, MAS, 49 (2), 2015, pp. 241–​69; Rachel J. Tolen, ‘Colonizing and transforming the criminal tribesman: The Salvation Army in British India’, American Ethnologist, 18 (1), 1991, pp. 106–​25. 54 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Reclaiming savages in “darkest England” and “darkest India”: The Salvation Army as a transnational agent of the civilizing mission’, in: Carey Watt and Michael Mann (eds.), Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development (London: Anthem Press, 2011), pp. 125–​64. 55 Crispin Bates, ‘Race, caste and tribe in central India: The early origins of Indian anthropometry’, in: Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (Oxford: OUP, 1997), pp. 219–​57. 56 Sarah Gandee, ‘Criminalizing the criminal tribe: Partition, borders, and the state in India’s Punjab, 1947–​55’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 38 (3), 2018, pp. 557–​72. 57 George Hutchinson, Reformatory Measures Connected with the Treatment of Criminals in India (Lahore: Punjab Printing Company’s Press, 1866), 225. 58 Taylor C. Sherman, ‘Tensions of colonial punishment: Perspectives on recent developments in the study of coercive networks in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean’, History Compass, 7 (3), 2009, pp. 659–​ 77; idem, State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010). 59 Mark Condos, ‘Licence to kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the rule of law in colonial India, 1867–​1925’, MAS, 50 (2), 2015, pp. 479–​517. 60 Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The boot and the spleen: When was murder possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (2), 2006, pp. 462–​93; Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: CUP, 2010). 61 Kim A. Wagner, ‘ “Calculated to strike terror”: The Amritsar massacre and the spectacle of colonial violence’, Past & Present, 233, 2016, pp. 118–​225.

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19 TERRORISM AND COUNTER-​T ERRORISM IN COLONIAL INDIA Joseph McQuade

Introduction In most popular accounts, the history of Indian independence is inevitably connected to the history of non-​violent non-​cooperation and civil disobedience, first introduced to the realm of mass politics by Mohandas Gandhi. The image of India’s non-​violent struggle for freedom remains prevalent in popular memory, from the ubiquitous appearance of Gandhi’s face on all denominations of Indian currency to the international acclaim heaped on Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi. Recent scholarship has challenged this narrative by highlighting the many and varied arteries of nationalist thought and practice that ultimately led to the end of British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Although early accounts of independence were dominated by narratives that centred on the work of the Indian National Congress party, which ultimately inherited the bureaucratic and legal architecture of the colonial state, the freedom movement was in fact highly heterogeneous in its aims, tactics, and modes of thought. Vital countercurrents to the Gandhian mass movement of the interwar period were the assassination and propaganda campaigns carried out by so-​called revolutionary ‘terrorists’. Dismissed as ‘extremists’ by the colonial authorities, and by their more ‘moderate’ nationalist contemporaries, the revolutionaries of the first half of the twentieth century believed that independence from colonial rule could be achieved only through violence. As such, a variety of clandestine organisations used targeted assassinations, bomb attacks, and radical propaganda to shake the foundations of imperial rule and destabilise the seemingly invincible security apparatus of the colonial state. Despite their use of force, revolutionaries were not the irrational and non-​political ‘terrorists’ colonial officials sought to portray them as but, rather, represented an alternative vision of anti-​colonial politics that was compelling to many and overlapped in significant ways with the better-​known activism of the Indian National Congress. This chapter begins by describing the contentious nature of the label of ‘terrorism’ within the context of colonial India, before moving on to examine how revolutionary networks articulated their vision within both local and international contexts. Finally, the chapter assesses the security measures adopted by the colonial state in seeking to suppress the revolutionary movement, and

DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-20

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gestures towards the continued relevance of this history in the counter-​terrorism discourses and legislation of the postcolonial Indian nation state.

Defining ‘terrorism’ It is notoriously difficult to come up with a widely agreed-​upon definition for the term ‘terrorism’. Although this fact has become something of a truism in the post-​9/​11 world, it was no less valid during the early twentieth century, when the term first came to be enshrined in various domestic and international laws. The earliest references to ‘terrorism’ or ‘terrorists’ date to the period of the French Revolution, with the British conservative philosopher Edmund Burke referring in 1795 to ‘thousands of those hellhounds called terrorists’ when referring to the French radicals. The following year Burke wrote in his Letters on a Regicide Peace, ‘Scratch any ideology and beneath it you will find a terrorist.’ In 1798 the term ‘terrorisme’ appeared for the first time in the supplement to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française.1 Although some historians have traced the origins of terrorism to the early asymmetrical warfare conducted by clandestine groups such as the Sicarii of first-​century Palestine or the Ismaili Assassins of the medieval Middle East, the concept of ‘terrorism’ as a specific category of criminality and political communication is firmly rooted in modernity. As the intellectual historian Mikkel Thorup has shown, the context of the French Revolution is key to understanding what makes modern terrorism distinct from tactics of assassination or asymmetrical warfare deployed in earlier times. What made the execution of Louis XVI such a significant turning point in the history of political violence, according to Thorup, was the fact that, whereas previous acts of tyrannicide justified themselves on the principle of upholding justice through the murder of an unjust ruler, Louis was killed not for his specific actions but for his symbolic position as king. This means that what made terrorism a historically new form of violence was the fact that, ‘even though actual persons are being targeted, and perhaps their killing is being legitimated by specific actions they have committed, the real target of the attack is not the person but the abstraction of the system’.2 Typically regarded as the first act of ‘terrorism’ in colonial India, the assassination of W.C. Rand, the Pune plague commissioner, by Damodar Chapekar and his brothers in 1897 certainly fits Thorup’s definition. Although Chapekar was usually understood by colonial officials and later historians as motivated by ‘personal resentment and religious enthusiasm’,3 his memoir makes it clear that his goal was to target Rand as an abstraction of the colonial sovereignty. Chapekar wrote that his decision to murder the plague commissioner directly followed an earlier act of defacement against a statue of Queen Victoria, who he described as ‘the real enemy of our people’.4 Because assassinating the queen was impossible, Chapekar selected Rand as the closest representation of imperial authority, despite harbouring no animosity towards the man himself.5 Even so, the problem with beginning the narrative of Indian terrorism with the Rand assassination in 1897 is that such a chronology lends itself to a reading of Indian history as being divided into a ‘pre-​political’ nineteenth century followed by a ‘political’ twentieth century dominated by the mass nationalism of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. According to this version, it is only with the political ‘awakening’ of India’s educated elite at the turn of the century, followed by the incorporation of the illiterate peasantry into the Non-​Cooperation movement during the interwar years, that a modern political consciousness emerged.6 In reality, the revolutionaries of the twentieth century self-​consciously patterned themselves on the rebels of earlier times, with the 1857 Uprising and the fictionalised rebel-​monk santans

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of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1882 novel Ānandamaṭh forming key reference points, alongside literature on the secret societies and nationalist insurgents of Ireland, France, Italy, and Russia. Similarly, colonial officials seeking to define and legislate against the ‘terrorism’ of the twentieth century made regular reference to older categories of Indian criminality, such as the dacoits, thugs, river pirates, and fanatics of the nineteenth century. In his study of colonial and international intelligence services, Michael Silvestri referred to the matrix of colonial assumptions regarding the moral and physical degeneration of Indian society as comprising a ‘kaleidoscopic vision of the Indian underworld’.7 The point is not that ‘thugs’ or ‘fanatics’ should be understood as proto-​terrorists but that the later colonial vocabulary of terrorism drew heavily from familiar tropes of Indian ‘savagery’ when seeking to understand the tactics of violence adopted by revolutionary nationalists. Just as the ‘fanatics’ of the North-​West Frontier were characterised as unthinking slaves to a violent and barbaric form of religious excess, the ‘terrorists’ of Bengal came to be defined by a set of deeply rooted assumptions regarding masculinity, religion, and culture.8 The labelling of revolutionaries as terrorists was, unsurprisingly, contested by the revolutionaries, who viewed themselves as patriots adopting necessary measures for fighting the violence of colonialism. Sachindranath Sanyal, one of the foremost revolutionaries of his generation and founder of the Hindustan Republican Association, published a pamphlet titled ‘The revolutionary’ in 1925 that clearly laid out his position regarding the language of terrorism.9 Sanyal argued that revolutionaries ‘are neither terrorists nor anarchists’ and that it was the colonial government that relied on terrorism to maintain its hold on India, and that this ‘official terrorism is surely to be met by counter-​terrorism’.10 Then, as now, determining who constituted a terrorist was often a matter of politics, power, and perspective.11

Violence and non-​violence in the independence movement Although it was never completely forgotten, especially in places such as Calcutta, the role of violence in shaping India’s independence movement was largely marginalised from scholarship for the first few decades following independence in 1947. As the shine of the initial Nehru years began to wane, the 1970s saw an early outpouring of interest in alternative approaches to the history of the freedom struggle, most notably in Sumit Sarkar’s foundational study of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal.12 The twentieth century’s first major popular mobilisation against colonialism in India, the Swadeshi movement was a response to the colonial government’s decision to partition the populous province of Bengal along communal lines in 1905. The decision triggered a major outpouring of anger and the emergence of a strong anti-​ colonial movement that put pressure on the administration through mass protests, boycotts, and calls for a reinvigoration of Bengali culture.13 Alongside the popular mobilisation of the Swadeshi movement, new secret societies and revolutionary associations proliferated throughout Bengal and across India. The largest of these was the Anushilan Samiti, headquartered out of Dacca, with as many as 500 branches spread across cities such as Mymensingh, Faridpur, Tippera, and Pabna, and perhaps as many as 20,000 members in total. The size, strength, and influence of this organisation led to its designation by the colonial security services as ‘perhaps the most important of the outward and visible manifestations of the revolutionary movement in Bengal’.14 Even so, the best known and most heavily researched of these early societies is the Jugantar association, against whom the famous ‘Alipore bomb case’ of 1909 was tried following the

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murder of two English women and the subsequent discovery of arms and seditious printed materials at the association’s Maniktala garden ashram. The high-​profile trial ultimately resulted in 15 individuals being convicted of sedition and conspiracy-​related offences, including the prominent revolutionary Barindra Ghose, brother of the philosopher Aurobindo, who narrowly escaped conviction himself.15 The chief justice found a direct correlation between the ‘propagandism’ of radical publications such as Jugantar and the so-​called ‘terrorist outrages’ committed by members of the Maniktala garden group. Print media such as newspapers and pamphlets provided a cheap and effective way for revolutionary associations to disseminate their message to a wider audience, as evidenced by the explosion of demand for copies of Barindra’s Jugantar, which soared from 200 to 20,000 in the span of only a few months.16 As with Sachindranath Sanyal’s 1925 leaflet discussed above, pamphlets were a key outlet for disseminating revolutionary propaganda. Although established newspapers could be shut down on charges of sedition –​with Jugantar, for example, being prosecuted no fewer than six times –​the ‘underground pamphlet press’ of the early twentieth century proved much more difficult to police and helped revolutionary associations influence the broader political culture of the period. Alongside broader calls for a reinvigoration of Bengali culture and the introduction of new athletic associations designed to disprove the colonial stereotype of the effeminate Bengali ‘babu’, revolutionary associations drew heavily on deep-​seated local religious, cultural, and literary themes to situate their acts of violence within a longer historical continuum.17 Early Bengali ‘terrorists’ also drew inspiration from other revolutionary and anti-​colonial traditions around the world, most notably those of Ireland.18 Although some have seen the eclecticism of this propaganda as indicating a ‘confusing mess of ideas’ drawing on a ‘mishmash of historical examples’, the wide-​ranging repertoire reflected in these early publications in fact represented a deliberate strategy to legitimise radical methods by situating them alongside familiar imagery drawn from both local and global contexts.19 Similarly, the release via royal amnesty of many incarcerated revolutionaries following the end of the First World War supplied a new genre of anti-​colonial propaganda in the form of the prison memoir. Distributed through serials in periodicals, visual materials, and other textual forms, autobiographies gave revolutionary ‘terrorists’ an opportunity to convey their stories, ideas, and objectives to a wider audience.20 The rise of mass nationalism following the launch of Gandhi’s Non-​Cooperation movement in 1920 created a wider audience engaged in questions of anti-​colonialism, ensuring a broad readership and keen interest in matters pertaining to the biographies of India’s ‘freedom fighters’. Gandhi denounced violence as an unacceptable strategy for achieving independence, but his stance on this issue was by no means universally accepted. In the early 1920s more radical voices within the Congress party, such as those of C.R. Das and Subhas Chandra Bose, praised the courage of revolutionaries and vehemently protested against the imposition of draconian ‘counter-​terrorism’ measures. After a young man named Gopi Nath Saha murdered an English man after mistaking him for the police commissioner of Calcutta, Gandhi and Das clashed at the Ahmedabad session of the All India Congress Committee over the wording of a resolution on the assassination. In the event, Gandhi’s ‘non-​ violence’ faction won by a narrow margin: 78 votes to 70.21 As the Ahmedabad vote indicates, the lines between ‘violent’ and ‘non-​violent’ factions within the Indian independence movement were often more blurred than the older historiography allows. In 1931 the hanging of a Punjabi revolutionary named Bhagat Singh following his bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly prompted a huge outpouring of public support, forcing the Congress party to adopt a careful approach that disavowed violence while accepting Singh as a martyr for the nation. Although Gandhi referred to bomb throwing as ‘suicidal’, the circulation of portraits of Bhagat Singh with his distinctive hat and moustache supplied a 244

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powerful vehicle for conveying an anti-​colonial message to a wider audience, producing a series of ‘afterlives’ that continue to resonate in Indian politics today.22

International anti-​colonialism The activities of anti-​colonial revolutionaries were by no means limited to the subcontinent. Taking advantage of the freer press environment in Britain, radicals such as V.D. Savarkar and Shyamji Krishnavarma published anti-​colonial tracts right in the heart of imperial London.23 Meanwhile, revolutionaries spread out across North America, Europe, and Asia worked tirelessly to build relationships with sympathetic groups and individuals from across the political spectrum, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Communist International (or Comintern), the right-​wing Kokuryūkai of Japan, and countless others.24 Just as revolutionary propaganda situated the freedom movement within a wider context of anti-​colonialism and radicalism around the world, revolutionary associations actively sought to build a global network capable of challenging –​and, indeed, overthrowing –​Britain’s global empire.25 The most notable of these transnational networks was the Ghadar party, a revolutionary association founded by predominantly Punjabi immigrants in California in 1913. At its height, Ghadar boasted 8,000 members during the First World War, and launched a series of bold attempts to spark a violent rebellion across India in 1915.26 The organisation drew significant support from communities of Indian migrant labourers, students, and political exiles chafing under the racial restrictions imposed upon them in settler states such as Canada and the United States. As Seema Sohi showed, the mirrored experience of subjugation at home and abroad prompted expatriate Indians along the Pacific coast to increasingly envisage their struggle as part of a wider global fight against racism, colonialism, and economic exploitation.27 As such, the wartime activities of the Ghadar party can be understood only in transnational, indeed trans-​imperial, terms. With networks spread across the globe, Ghadar revolutionaries –​often with the help of German agents –​exploited the neutrality of states such as the Dutch East Indies and Siam to smuggle arms and propaganda into British India, on the one hand, and French Indochina, on the other.28 Although the attempts to overthrow the British Raj were unsuccessful, they nonetheless marked a major challenge to imperial rule that helped give rise to the modern security state, a point that will be revisited in the following section.29 After the end of the war Ghadar ideology shifted to the left, with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 providing a key source of inspiration that proved radical political transformation was possible. Former Ghadar activists such as M.N. Roy, who had been detained during the war under the alias ‘Martin’, increasingly conceptualised their resistance to British rule through the lens of international communism.30 Becoming deeply involved in the activities of the Comintern, Roy became critical of ‘sporadic terrorism’, ridiculing it as being every bit as useless as the constitutional nationalism of the mainstream independence movement. Embracing the Marxist perspective that a full-​scale workers’ revolution was the path towards anti-​capitalist, and hence anti-​colonial, liberation, Roy wrote in 1924 that it was ‘no more possible to win National Independence by killing a number of officials than by a series of Reform Acts passed by the British Parliament’.31 Colonial officials similarly began to note a distinction between terrorism and communism, with H.W. Hale of the Indian police remarking: ‘Terrorism, as distinct from other revolutionary methods such as Communism or the Ghadar Movement, may be said to denote the commission of outrages of a comparatively “individual” nature.’32 In practical terms, however, the distinction between ‘terrorists’ and ‘communists’ –​much like the distinction between ‘violent’ and ‘non-​violent’ strands of anti-​colonial nationalism –​were often far more blurred than these neat categories would suggest. 245

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Although this shift towards communism by many revolutionaries led some colonial officials to simply brand all anti-​colonial radicals as ‘Bolshevik agents’, the revolutionary movement throughout the interwar period continued to reflect a high degree of diversity. For example, Rash Behari Bose, a leading ‘terrorist’ who fled to Japan in 1915 following a failed attempt to stage a massive uprising across northern India, allied himself firmly with Japan’s ultraconservative faction and maintained correspondence with Hindu nationalists back home in India. Sceptical of communism, Bose instead articulated a culturally-​based pan-​Asian ideology that aimed to bring together Asians –​and, indeed, the ‘Coloured People’ of the world more broadly –​into a united front to overturn the Anglo-​European world order reflected in such international institutions as the League of Nations.33 Bose was not alone in his conviction that ‘Asia’ comprised a definable space that could provide the cultural locus for new political futures. Other figures, such as Kalidas Nag and P.C. Bagchi, constructed sophisticated arguments in favour of a ‘Greater India’ serving as a benign colonial power in its own right throughout South-​East Asia, based on the historical connections between Hinduism and Buddhism.34 Similarly, pan-​Asian ideas animated the work of Mahendra Pratap, a committed anti-​imperialist involved in the revolutionary intrigues of the First World War, who spent much of the interwar period attempting to implement his vision of a federated Asia stretching from Kabul to Tokyo.35

Imperial policing and ‘counter-​terrorism’ It should come as no surprise that imperial officials did not take these revolutionary challenges lightly. Contrary to earlier historiographical perspectives that saw the revolutionary movement as courageous but ineffective, more recent scholarship has clearly shown that the policing of anti-​colonial radicals was a high priority for imperial intelligence services, many of which developed in direct response to these global ‘subversive’ networks.36 Rather than an unimportant side note, the activities of revolutionary ‘terrorists’ were front and centre in the minds of colonial officials, generating fears that not only considerably affected the life of colonial administrators ‘on the spot’ in India37 but were absolutely instrumental in the formation of Britain’s imperial intelligence networks. At the same time, although ‘terrorism’ played a key discursive role in the expansion of the security apparatus of the British Raj, enhanced systems of surveillance and executive detention were widely deployed against non-​violent anti-​colonial activists as well.38 The study of imperial information systems from the eighteenth century to the twentieth has sought to assess the degree to which cultural knowledge has shaped the intelligence-​gathering habits and priorities of on-​the-​ground informants, agents, and officers. The late Christopher Bayly famously argued that colonial knowledge should not be understood as a ‘monolith derived from the needs of power’ but, rather, as a series of imperfect linkages connecting Indian society to the colonial administration via ‘native informants’, who marked ‘the point of intersection between political intelligence and indigenous knowledge’, where colonialism was ‘at its most vulnerable’.39 By contrast, Priya Satia’s study of British intelligence in the Middle East showed the important role played by cultural representations in shaping colonial information gathering. Attempting to make sense of unfamiliar practices, intelligence officers in the Arabian peninsula drew heavily on existing stereotypes, tropes, and prejudices in a process that in turn helped to reinforce European perceptions of ‘the Orient’.40 As we have seen, this was no less true in India, where the nineteenth-​century fears of thugs, pirates, and fanatics played a direct role in defining the terms through which revolutionary ‘terrorism’ was understood.41 The security apparatus of the twentieth-​century state in India can also be traced in more tangible ways to the policing infrastructure of the early colonial period. Under the leadership of 246

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viceroy and governor-​general Lord Curzon at the turn of the century, the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which had previously functioned as the main internal intelligence service of the Raj, was reconfigured into a centralised Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) at the centre, working with information collected by various local criminal investigation departments spread throughout the provinces. Although it built on existing networks, the new intelligence services also sought to account for the heightened mobility afforded to organised crime and political challengers enabled by the introduction of new technologies such as railways, telegraphs, and an expanded postal service. Retaining the Thuggee and Dacoity Department’s focus on ‘special’ criminal categories such as thugs, bandits, criminal tribes, counterfeiters, and poisoners, the new DCI also expanded its remit to focus on ‘political’ offences.42 The reconfiguration of the British Raj’s intelligence services occurred alongside wider transformations in global practices of securitisation. New advances in forensic science and fingerprinting –​as well as less legitimate ‘scientific’ theories such as phrenology and eugenics –​ revolutionised policing during the second half of the nineteenth century, giving rise to new forms of surveillance, social ordering, and political coercion. Although they were sceptical of such methods when applied in the context of continental Europe, British officials had few qualms about applying more illiberal techniques of governance within colonial settings or against ‘troublesome’ itinerant populations within Britain.43 The British also worked closely with friendly countries to prevent the free cross-​border circulation of ‘anarchists’ and ‘terrorists’, though disagreements and conflicting national priorities made the establishment of formal international protocols more contentious.44 Growing nationalist consciousness throughout the colonised world from 1919 onwards led to increased cooperation between the two major colonial powers –​Britain and France –​whose trusteeship over newly created League of Nations mandates in Africa and the Middle East was accompanied by an increased preoccupation with suppressing anti-​colonial dissent.45 Rather than being a unidirectional process in which the rise of anti-​colonial nationalism triggered the expansion of a global security apparatus, the relationship between anti-​colonial revolutionaries and imperial intelligence services is best understood as mutually constitutive. In contexts such as the Pacific coast of North America or British colonies in South-​East Asia, enhanced security measures most often gave rise to greater feelings of social exclusion on the part of Indian migrants, thus enhancing the appeal of radical organisations such as Ghadar.46 Paranoia regarding the potential for ‘radicalised’ expatriate Indians to return home and create unrest in Punjab or Bengal led to increasingly restrictive pre-​emptive measures against returning migrants, especially during the First World War. The famous voyage of the Komagata Maru, a Japanese ship chartered to challenge Canada’s racist immigration laws by transporting 376 Indian passengers from Hong Kong to Vancouver in 1914, is illustrative. After a tense stand-​off with Canadian immigration officials that lasted weeks, the passengers were forced to return home to India, where they were detained under a recent emergency law drafted with the explicit aim of preventing the ‘contagion’ of sedition from spreading within the subcontinent.47 The Ingress into India Ordinance, the law under which the passengers of the Komagata Maru were detained, was only one of many such ‘emergency’ measures passed during the first half of the twentieth century. From the early 1900s through the 1940s officials implemented a series of emergency laws designed to target ‘seditious’ publications, speeches, and meetings, as well as revolutionary conspiracies, secret societies, and violent acts of ‘terrorism’. Over this roughly 40-​year period the rhetoric surrounding the passage of these laws was remarkably consistent, though notable linguistic shifts did take place, especially after the end of the First World War. For the most part, officials justified these measures as necessities designed to meet the exceptional circumstances presented by clandestine networks aiming at the violent overthrow of the 247

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colonial government. In fact, most of these laws had a wider remit and were used as tools to suppress various forms of anti-​colonial dissent far beyond the narrow confines of what would typically be considered ‘terrorism’. Even so, terrorism remained the primary rationale behind each new measure, as did the supposedly sinister, fanatical, and inscrutable nature of Indian society and culture. Examined from the standpoint of law, anti-​colonial violence played a very similar role to anti-​colonial non-​violence, in that both modes of protest forced the state to deploy ‘illiberal’ emergency measures that undermined the legitimacy of what was ostensibly a colonial ‘rule of law’.48 Attempting to sidestep this criticism, officials explicitly sought to depoliticise revolutionary ‘terrorism’ by describing it as ‘a thing entirely apart by itself … on a separate plane entirely from anything like constitutional politics’.49 Although ‘political offences’ played a central role in British metropolitan and international law, the depoliticisation and criminalisation of similar offences in a colonial context sought to undermine the claims of revolutionaries who argued that their actions, like those of the Russian anarchists, were a necessary defence against tyranny.50 As such, the colonial state existed, essentially, in a permanent state of exception, with a direct and mutually reinforcing relationship between the supposedly temporary ‘emergency measures’ of counter-​terrorism policy and the normative legal architecture of colonialism.51

Postcolonial echoes A deeper understanding of revolutionary anti-​colonialism in India is of more than historical interest. In even a cursory glance at the ongoing story of insurgency and the independent Indian state, it becomes clear that a colonial discourse of sinister ‘terrorists’ residing in criminal neighbourhoods and posing a threat to ordered society and civilisation has, in many cases, been directly borrowed and appropriated by the upper-​caste-​dominated ruling parties. The bureaucratic and administrative rationale of the independent Indian nation state did not emerge ex nihilo but relied heavily on the infrastructure of rule created by the colonial state, particularly in terms of policing, taxation, and law. The bureaucratic apparatus of high-​caste, middle-​ class administrators and functionaries remained largely intact, and, in fact, even expanded over decades of largely uncontested Congress rule. As anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen put it, the postcolonial Indian state carried on a ‘double discourse’ that ‘governed middle-​class society through law and rational procedure, and ruled popular communities through rather repressive means and through the long-​standing connivance and shared political imaginaries of local social elites and the local representatives of the state’.52 Many of the emergency measures deployed by colonial authorities to suppress ‘terrorist’ networks in the first half of the twentieth century have been transplanted, in whole or in part, into the bureaucratic and security apparatuses of the postcolonial Indian nation state. Legal measures first deployed against anti-​colonial dissent, such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1942 or section 124-​A of the Indian Penal Code from 1870, remain in force to this day, and their use shows no sign of abating. Although many revolutionaries of the colonial period now enjoy widespread currency throughout India as political and cultural icons, it is notable that the same laws and procedures once used to surveil, detain, and execute them remain in place. In the context of the seemingly indefinite US-​led ‘global war on terror’, the proliferation of new technologies of mass surveillance, and the hardening of national borders in the name of securitisation, the contested histories of terrorism and counter-​terrorism in the early twentieth century remain as salient as ever.

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Notes 1 Walter Laqueur and Christopher Wall, The Future of Terrorism: ISIS, Al-​Qaeda, and the Alt-​Right (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2018), 28–​30. 2 Mikkel Thorup, An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and the State (New York: Routledge, 2012), 9–​10. 3 Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–​1910 (New Delhi: OUP, 1993), 11. 4 Damodar Hari Chapekar, Autobiography of Damodar Hari Chapekar (Bombay: Bombay Police Abstracts, 1910), 999. 5 Ibid., 1014. 6 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 1983), 2–​5. See also Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 7 Michael Silvestri, Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World: Imperial Intelligence and Revolutionary Nationalism, 1905–​1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 26. 8 Mark Condos, The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India (Cambridge: CUP, 2017). 9 Kama Maclean and Daniel Elam, ‘Reading revolutionaries: Texts, acts, and afterlives of political action in late colonial South Asia: Who is a revolutionary?’, Postcolonial Studies, 16, 2013, pp. 113–​23. 10 Sachindranath Sanyal, ‘ “The revolutionary”, 1 January 1925’, in: Amiya K. Samanta (ed.), Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of Documents on Terrorist Activities from 1905 to 1939, vol. 2, Activities of the Revolutionaries in Bengal from 1st September 1924 to 31st March 1925 (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1995), p. 405. 11 See also Partha Chatterjee, ‘Terrorism: State sovereignty and militant politics in India’, in: Carol Gluck and Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing (eds.), Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 240–​62. 12 Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–​1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973). Other significant works from this period include A.C. Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad 1905–​1922, in the Background of International Developments (Patna: Bharati Bawan, 1971); and David M. Lausey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India, 1905–​1942 (Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1975). 13 For a more recent study of the movement, see the special issue edited by Bernard Bate et al., ‘Swadeshi in the time of nations’, EPW, 47 (42), 2012. 14 J.E. Armstrong, ‘ “An account of the revolutionary organization in eastern Bengal with special reference to the Dacca Anushilan Samiti”, parts 1 and 2, 1917’, in: Samanta, Terrorism in Bengal, vol. 2, pp. 271–​98. 15 Detailed in Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal. See also Alex Wolfers, ‘Born like Krishna in the prison house: Revolutionary asceticism in the political ashram of Aurobindo Ghose’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 39 (3), 2016, pp. 525–​45. 16 Shukla Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets, Propaganda and Political Culture in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: CUP, 2014), 30–​5. 17 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 18 Michael Silvestri, ‘The bomb, bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita, and Dan Breen: Terrorism in Bengal and its relation to the European experience’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 21 (1), 2009, pp. 1–​27. 19 Laqueur and Wall, The Future of Terrorism, 66–​7; Sanyal, Revolutionary Pamphlets, 87–​123. 20 Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 2017), 60–​91. 21 Nitish K. Sengupta, Land of Two Rivers: A History of Bengal from the Mahabharata to Mujib (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2011), 342. 22 Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (London: Hurst, 2015), 52–​81. See also Chris Moffat, ‘Bhagat Singh’s corpse’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 39 (3), 2016, pp. 644–​61. 23 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Mass-​mediated panic in the British Empire? Shyamji Krishnavarma’s “scientific terrorism” and the “London outrage”, 1909’, in: idem (ed.), Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial

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Joseph McQuade Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 99–​134; Janaki Bakhle, ‘Savarkar (1883–​1966), sedition and surveillance: The rule of law in a colonial situation’, Social History, 35 (1), 2010, pp. 51–​66; Nicholas Owen, ‘The soft heart of the British Empire: Indian radicals in Edwardian London’, Past & Present, 220 (1), 2013, pp. 143–​84. 24 Ole B. Laursen, ‘Anarchist anti-​imperialism: Guy Aldred and the Indian revolutionary movement, 1909–​1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46 (2), 2018, pp. 286–​303. 25 Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, ‘ “Indian nationalism and the world forces”: Transnational and diasporic dimensions of the Indian freedom movement on the eve of the First World War’, Journal of Global History, 2 (3), 2007, pp. 325–​44. 26 Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 27 Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (New York: OUP, 2014). 28 Heather Streets-​Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge: CUP, 2017). See also Tim Harper, ‘Singapore, 1915, and the birth of the Asian underground’, MAS, 47 (6), 2013, pp. 1782–​811. 29 Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London: HarperCollins, 2013), 1–​30. 30 Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010). 31 Quoted in David Petrie, Communism in India, 1924–​1927 (Calcutta: Editions Indian, 1972), 91. 32 BL, APAC, IOR/​L/​P&J/​12/​403: H.W. Hale, Terrorism in India, 1917–​1936 (Simla: Government of India Press, 1937), 1. 33 Joseph McQuade, ‘The new Asia of Rash Behari Bose: India, Japan, and the limits of the international, 1912–​1945’, Journal of World History, 27 (4), 2017, pp. 641–​67. 34 Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and internationalism (ca.1905–​1940)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54 (1), 2012, pp. 65–​92. 35 Carolien Stolte, ‘ “Enough of the great Napoleons!” Raja Mahendra Pratap’s pan-​Asian projects (1929–​1939)’, MAS, 46 (2), 2012, pp. 403–​23. 36 Richard Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–​1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995). See also Daniel Brückenhaus, ‘ “Every stranger must be suspected”: Trust relationships and the surveillance of anti-​colonialists in early twentieth-​century Western Europe’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 36, 2010, pp. 523–​66. 37 Kama Maclean, ‘On the art of panicking quietly: British expatriate responses to “terrorist outrages” in India, 1912–​33’, in: Fischer-​Tiné, Anxieties, Fear and Panic, pp. 135–​66. 38 Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 97–​101. 39 Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–​1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 167, 2. 40 Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations for Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 4–​10. 41 See also Alex Tickell, ‘Scholarship terrorists: The India House Hostel and the “student problem” in Edwardian London’, in: Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee (eds.), South Asian Resistance in Britain, 1858–​1947 (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 3–​8. 42 Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 43–​4. 43 Paul Knepper, ‘The other invisible hand: Jews and anarchists in London before the First World War’, Jewish History, 22 (3), 2008, pp. 295–​315. 44 See, for example, Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–​1934 (Cambridge: CUP, 2014); and Ben Saul, ‘The Legal response of the League of Nations to terrorism’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 4 (1), 2006, pp. 78–​102. 45 Daniel Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–​1945 (Oxford: OUP, 2017); Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and Their Roads from Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2014). 46 Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny. See also Peter Campbell, ‘East meets left: South Asian militants and the Socialist Party of Canada in British Columbia, 1904–​1914’, International Journal of Canadian Studies, 20, 1999, pp. 35–​65. 47 The full story of the Komagata Maru is told in Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and Anjali Gera Roy, Imperialism and Sikh Migration: The Komagata Maru Incident (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

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Terrorism in colonial India 48 Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 289–​90. 49 BL, APAC, IOR/​L/​PJ/​6/​1886: Gazette of India Extraordinary, 25 October 1924, 18. 50 Joseph McQuade, ‘Political discourse, political violence: Fenians, nihilists, and the revolutionaries of Bengal, 1907–​1925’, Sikh Formations, 10 (1), 2014, pp. 43–​55. 51 John Pincince, ‘De-​centering Carl Schmitt: The colonial state of exception and the criminalization of the political in British India, 1905–​1920’, Politica Comun, 5, 2014, pp. 1–​18. See also Nasser Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 52 Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 46–​51.

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20 SCHOOLING THE SUBCONTINENT State, space, and society, and the dynamics of education in colonial South Asia Michael Philipp Brunner

Introduction It is by now a commonplace that the British conquest of South Asia was also a conquest of knowledge.1 Studies in the Marxist historiographical tradition in particular have described colonial education as a fundamental tool of cultural imperialism.2 Ever since the 1940s the narrative of conquest and –​consequently –​resistance has structured much of the historiography on education in colonial South Asia.3 It permeated the scholarship of nationalist authors, subaltern and postcolonial studies, and new imperial history. There is much to this argument; knowledge and education were, indeed, pivotal and highly contested tools for understanding and ruling Indian society. Even so, the complex phenomenon of colonial education can only partially be apprehended through this one-​dimensional narrative –​which, thanks to its persisting and formative influence, has even been called a ‘myth’.4 Although the category of power remains a crucial factor, this chapter aims to expand the analytical and topical scope in its overview on education in British India. It starts with a conventional chronological survey of colonial education policies from Company rule to independence and then addresses the inevitable question of the success or failure of colonial education in South Asia and its correlated themes of imposition and resistance. The chapter sees this not as a verdict, however, but opens its purview in the second part and examines a multifarious array of issues. Considering spatial and topical shifts in historiography, the chapter encourages a comprehensive look at colonial education and its diverse formations and effects on the subcontinent.

The colonial state and education in British India When the British established their rule over South Asia in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, they encountered an indigenous educational landscape that was shaped by the subcontinent’s large size and diversity. Although there were forms of instruction available that did not relate directly to religious purposes, such as occupational training or Persian learning, most of the precolonial educational opportunities in South Asia were tied to particular religious 252

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traditions. Boys could receive basic formal schooling (reading, writing, arithmetic, accounting) in patshalas and gurukuls and Muslim madrassas, where they were taught scriptures such as Hindu mantras, the Quran, or the Sikhs’ Granth Sahib. Although they did not constitute a coherent educational system as such, these village schools were spread over the subcontinent.5 Education became an official responsibility of the East India Company (EIC) in its possessions in India when the Charter Act of 1813 obliged it to allocate Rs. 100,000 annually for the education of its Indians subjects. The formal introduction of education into the EIC’s agenda had been preceded by the orientalist sentiments of early administrators such as Warren Hastings. Motivated both by a concern in understanding the political and social structures of their new subjects and by a genuine fascination with ‘Eastern’ learning and languages, they encouraged the establishment of institutions such as the Calcutta Madrasa (1780) and Sanskrit College at Benares (1791).6 In the 1820s and 1830s, however, a conflict built up that has become famous in historiography as the ‘Anglicist/​orientalist controversy’.7 It revolved around the basic question of whether government funds within the new General Committee of Public Instruction should be used to support educational institutions teaching in ‘oriental’ languages and for respective translation projects, or whether the money should be spent exclusively for teaching in English. The latter position of the ‘Anglicists’ was influenced by evangelical and utilitarian, especially Benthamite, beliefs popular back in Britain and advocated by colonial administrators such as Charles Edward Trevelyan and Thomas Babington Macaulay. The culmination of this debate has often been seen in the (in)famous ‘Minute on Indian education’ written by Macaulay in 1835, which denied Indian literature and languages any usefulness and which has been regarded one of the most explicit examples of Western cultural imperialism. Eventually the then governor-​general, William Bentinck, issued a resolution that favoured the Anglicist position and the ‘promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India’,8 which resulted in the passing of the English Education Act of 1835. The orientalist/​Anglicist debate was, undeniably, a turning point in imperial interpretations of the ‘civilising mission’. Even so, it should not be read exclusively as an expression of unfettered imperial power. A small but vocal class of Indians actively took part in the discussion and, in fact, supported Anglicist arguments. In particular, it was the bhadralok (Bengali: gentleman) class in Bengal and Parsis in Bombay who, as early adaptors of Western education, recognised its potential as a means to improve their position in both Indian society and the new imperial order, and to engage with the colonial overlords on a shared discursive level. Further, both sides of the orientalist/​Anglicist controversy were joined by a conviction that education was best to be spread through a ‘downward filtration’, which meant that the emphasis first lay on teaching a small and usually urban and/​or aristocratic elite.9 After losing to Anglicist arguments in the 1830s, (neo-​)orientalist sentiments among the British-​Indian administration resurfaced on another level, as a new generation of educators turned their attention towards the rural areas. Colonial administrators carried out extensive experiments on village schools. In the North-​Western Provinces and in Punjab the halkibandi project set out to start thousands of village schools, covering huge areas, which were supposed to combine traditional forms of education in local languages with Western/​European approaches. Although the ambitious schemes eventually could not claim lasting success, their impact showed in the (so-​called Wood’s) education despatch of 1854, which signalled that the British-​Indian government now assumed a more inclusive responsibility for the education of its subjects. The despatch recommended mass schooling, teaching in Indian languages in primary and secondary education, and English instruction in higher education, and set up the establishment of universities in bigger cities.10 After the turmoil of the 1857 Rebellion, however, government policy 253

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shifted again in multiple directions: from the villages back to urban centres; from direct state endeavours to the support of private, especially missionary, initiatives; from centralisation to decentralisation. Budget cuts in educational spending further halted the evolution of a coherent ‘national’ education system. In the early 1880s a commission headed by William Hunter conducted an extensive survey into the state of education in British India. The commission’s report showed that Wood’s despatch of 1854 had hardly been implemented, especially regarding mass and primary education and an ascertained ‘backwardness’ in education among the Muslim population, and that the colonial administration had lost much of its initiative over secondary and higher education. Despite the report and its recommendations, however, the situation did not change significantly in the following years, and the marginalisation of primary education and further concentration on private higher educational institutions continued. The government’s main policy now preferred subsidising private initiative. After all, the colony had to be economically profitable for the metropole, a goal that it was hoped the strategy of subcontracting education would support. Education was thus ceded mostly to market forces. This led to a rapid increase in English education on the subcontinent, mainly on the secondary and tertiary levels. One of the main motives of the colonial authorities’ educational policy had been the creation of an English-​educated Indian class who could serve as clerks and petty officials in the lower ranks of the administration. Indeed, most of the young Indians who flocked to the new schools and colleges –​of whom many were of rather poor quality –​did this with a view to get the necessary credentials for comparably secure government employment.11 The nomination of Lord Curzon as viceroy of India entailed several educational reforms. Curzon arrived in India in 1899 and, soon after assuming office, introduced a new education policy that dismissed previous laissez-​faire approaches. It was formalised in 1904 by the highly controversial Indian Universities Act. This strengthened the provincial governments’ control over university syndicates and individual educational institutions and tightened the requirements for university-​affiliated colleges in matters of quality, fees, and inspection. To some extent, these reforms aimed at regaining control over an educational landscape that had partially slipped out of the hands of the colonial authorities in the last decades of the nineteenth century, which had led to colleges and other institutions of higher education increasingly being monitored by an anxious government.12 The era of Curzon led to a new centralisation of educational policies. In 1910 a Central Education Department was established in Calcutta. At the same time, private, often communal and/​or nationalist all-​India initiatives were growing. In 1906 Bengali nationalists founded the National Council of Education in Calcutta, and the mid-​1900s saw the establishment of all-​ India Muslim and Sikh educational conferences. These had only limited impact, however. Ambitious plans to introduce free compulsory primary education in all of British India as the nationalist G.K. Gokhale had sketched them out, for instance, were never adopted by the government. Even so, the late colonial decades saw more direct involvement of Indians in educational matters, not only because of the ever-​increasing number of private schools but also as a result of slow constitutional changes. The Government of India Act of 1919 set up a system of dyarchic rule at the provincial level, transferring selected departments –​such as education –​into the responsibility of elected legislatures. The introduction of provincial assemblies in 1937 was a further step in this direction. When the British withdrew from India in 1947, they had to admit that they had not been able to develop a coherent and functional system of education on the subcontinent. In fact, general literacy had only minimally increased during the Raj, many indigenous schools had vanished, and a fixation on one-​dimensional education for the sake of obtaining government 254

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jobs was plaguing the existing system. Although many British and Indian educators had offered ambitious plans for teaching the Indian people, the subcontinent’s huge and heterogeneous population, a sluggish bureaucracy, perpetual underfunding, and inconsistent imperial policies impaired by conflicting agendas had severely impeded the development of education in colonial India.

Education, imperialism, and nationalism –​and beyond Since the end of the colonial period, many interpretations of colonial education have been structured around false binaries and abstract notions of ‘failure’ or ‘success’ and ‘imposition’ or ‘resistance’. Whereas Indian nationalist historiography highlighted the shortcomings and lasting deficiencies that British policies created, revisionist imperial history tried to point to the numeral growth of students and institutions under the Raj. The judgement must remain a fundamentally difficult one, as there never was a consistent policy. Although much points to the decline of precolonial educational institutions because of the spread of English education and its curricula,13 it is hard to assess this development since information on precolonial education systems is sparse and their history difficult to reconstruct.14 Even so, the colonial period (especially early on) saw numerous ‘transitional’ episodes and institutions that showed an intriguing persistence and complex transformation of earlier knowledge culture. For various South Asian scholarly traditions the advent of British rule did not mean their immediate end. As Christopher Bayly argued, there were indeed many continuities between precolonial information orders and colonial networks of communication and knowledge transfer.15 For instance, renowned scholarly institutions in the major Muslim cultural centres in north India taught a comprehensive learning that qualified its students for a wide range of intellectual professions. This highly standardised and rationalist Islamic learning culture translated well into colonial times and the demands and expectations of British Indian administrators.16 In the Hindu context, especially in Bengal, similar processes occurred that did not necessarily lead to a complete exclusion of precolonial experts but, rather, saw them negotiate the new circumstances in creative ways.17 With regard to children’s education, other lines of tradition continued. At the local and regional levels, many respective efforts in education embedded in systems of philanthropy and patronage survived. To some extent, therefore, colonial rule did allow the continuance of indigenous pedagogical traditions, albeit in significantly modified forms.18 All the same, there is no doubt that English education transformed schooling and learning on the subcontinent in profound ways. Forms of ‘Western’ epistemology became hegemonic and were widely perceived as universally valid templates.19 Precisely how this disruptive moment was interpreted varied tremendously among the Indian population, however. The long-​standing historiographical commonplace that ‘Western’ education facilitated, if not created, Indian nationalism, for instance, has come to be seen critically. Although an explicit causal connection between a background of English education and an interest in the question of political participation can be discerned, it would be an oversimplification to posit a direct link between education and nationalism, as both imperial and Indian nationalist historiography have done.20 Numerous fault lines structured the interpretation of education in colonial India. In many ways, education was a crucial factor in the production and maintaining of hierarchic, social, economic, linguistic, and religious difference.21 Notions of caste, class, religion, and gender determined substantially the extent to which colonial education affected Indians, and how they were able to participate in and profit from the rise of Western schooling. Since the advent of subaltern studies, this perspective has proved to be a fruitful one when looking at education 255

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in the colonial context. It allowed a reassessment of the role of English-​educated Indians, picturing them in a more nuanced way as being simultaneously elites and subalterns, collaborators and resistors, traditionalists and modernists, but –​most importantly –​historical actors with an individual agency. Acknowledging the agency of Indians, in return, does not necessarily lead to a harmonising overemphasis of forms of knowledge ‘hybridity’, nor does it result in taking out of the picture the European dynamic that, indeed, dominated many discourses.22 Analysing colonial hegemony and Indian reactions is therefore not the sole aim or final verdict of the historiography on Indian colonial education. Instead, this macro-​narrative provides the backdrop of and springboard into more multifaceted histories that consider different constellations. The following paragraphs therefore address further dimension –​religious, social and spatial –​that provide insights into the complex history of education in colonial South Asia.

Educating believers: Religion and pedagogical institutions Education in precolonial South Asia was transmitted mainly in the context of religious systems and institutions, and was thus usually tied to religious instruction. With the rise of English, ostensibly secular education marginalised these older institutions and facilitated the spread of indigenous movements combining socio-​religious and educational agendas that set up new institutions that followed the organisational models of Western schools.23 Religious instruction was far from absent in the English curriculum, however. Although it was not imparted in the form of formal religious education, Christian morals and theology permeated the classics of English literature prescribed in the curricula, as Gauri Viswanathan famously showed.24 Conversely, the colonial doctrine of non-​interference in religious matters and the consequential absence of standards on religious education also led missionary and communal institutions to formulate (and standardise) their own religious curricula, which did not necessarily run along the lines of the colonial state’s formally secular agenda. In consequence, the colonial education system hardly led to a ‘secularisation’ of education in India.25 Christian missionaries played a particularly influential role.26 Missionary education could relate in various ways to governmental endeavours: as competition, as alternatives, but also as a means of intermediation between ‘Indian’ and ‘English’/​‘Western’, or ‘imperial’ and ‘local’, educational systems. Although some have interpreted missionary education as mainly an extension of imperial desires and the ‘civilising mission’, others have stressed the dialogic nature that often structured the approach of missionaries.27 Evangelisation had been the immediate goal of missionary education when the missions became a crucial educational player after missionary societies were allowed entry into British India in 1835. In later decades the missionaries’ strategies shifted to more indirect approaches by emphasising general knowledge, modern science, and other ostensibly ‘secular’ subjects.28 After colonial education policy had shifted towards private initiative in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in particular after the 1882 Hunter Commission, it was especially the socio-​religious reform organisations that took the lead and started numerous schools and colleges, challenging the state’s and the missionaries’ monopoly of supplying the nation with ‘modern’ education and knowledge. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth thus saw the foundation of an ever-​increasing number of private, Indian-​led educational institutions at the tertiary level. First, socio-​religious associations and individuals started numerous colleges, such as the (first) Dayanand Anglo-​Vedic College in Lahore (1886) and the Muhammadan Anglo-​Oriental (MAO) College in Aligarh (1875). Later, Curzon’s controversial university reforms and growing nationalist sentiments led to schemes to establish independent universities, and eventually, in the late 1910s, the Banaras Hindu University was founded, and the 256

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MAO College in Aligarh was made into Aligarh Muslim University. Other plans, such as the wish of the Sikh community to establish a ‘Khalsa University’, were less successful. Apart from the colleges and universities, the activists and reformers also set up dense networks of primary and secondary schools. As the number of these institutions grew quickly, this meant that Indian pupils could now progress from elementary to college education completely within these ‘Arya’, ‘Islamia’, or ‘Khalsa’ networks. How such private institutions conceptualised and implemented the complex negotiation of ‘Indian’, ‘Western’, ‘modern’, and ‘traditional’ knowledge differed widely and has been analysed in numerous studies.29 Often, attempts at reconciling religious sensibilities and knowledge systems with the idioms of ‘modernity’ and ‘Western education’ resulted in the promotion of a reformed, standardised, and homogenised interpretation of religious tradition, which simultaneously, however, introduced new forms of social and religious exclusion and demarcation. Since in the recognition of their classes private educational institutions were dependent on the goodwill of the universities, their scope of action was limited, and religious instruction usually had to be offered as an optional subject. Despite the activists insisting on their claim to provide a ‘genuine’ Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh education not available elsewhere, religious education therefore could assume only a minor role in the actual curricula of these institutions, whereas supposedly secular subjects dominated. Further, even the most vocally revivalist or nationalist institutions usually received and were dependent on governmental subsidies, an observation that blurs the strict analytical division between the state and civil society.

Teaching the subaltern: Informal education and useful knowledge Many of the educational opportunities offered in both state and private institutions were available only for boys with a middle-​or upper-​class background. For most of the colonial period education remained mainly an elite project. Various British and Indian activists, and even famous nationalist leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, were highly critical of mass and compulsory schooling.30 The education of lower castes and girls and women was particularly contested. Although schooling became more accessible to broader parts of the Indian population, it was also a means to teach subaltern classes their position in society and to reproduce a rigid social stratification.31 Even so, various Indian educationists and social reformers set out to enable the more suppressed rungs of Indian society to educate themselves and create educational opportunities beyond the institutionalised, government-​provided and -​sanctioned framework.32 Numerous caste, Dalit, and tribal associations, as well as philanthropic and missionary enterprises, self-​ organised and arranged for some form of instruction and teaching for the less privileged. Female and male activists, such as Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule in Maharashtra and Bibi Harnam Kaur and Bhai Takht Singh in Punjab, built educational institutions for low-​caste children and girls. In the realm of girls’ and women’s education, early dedicated attempts to distribute formal English schooling were made by Christian missionaries who were guided by evangelical ideas and the hope of making Indian women literate and thus receptive to Bible studies. Especially in the subcontinent’s south, women’s education went hand in hand with advances in teacher training in missionary centres.33 Once more, however, the introduction and propagation of ‘Western’ education did not just lead to an increase in numbers of pupils and literates but also entailed substantial social change.34 Vaishnavi or Bairagi women, for instance, who had long since played a crucial part in teaching women in Hindu households, were left behind by native Christian teachers because they could not conform to new Victorian notions of respectable femininity.35 257

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Statistically, such efforts in female education remained mostly insignificant. Arguably, activities that did not conform to the strict realm of formal education made a greater impact. Much of the early ‘knowledge imparting’ that both girls and boys received happened in the non-​formal domestic sphere. It can hardly be denied that the main recipients of colonial education have been mostly overlooked: the children. Although a few books have explored colonial childhood in a broader sense, there still awaits a concise history of colonial education as seen and experienced through the eyes of actual pupils.36 Research on pedagogical realities is sparse. Equally rarely covered hitherto have been the diverse areas lying outside formal schooling, which included much of the education of girls and ritualistic or professional knowledge, and concerned social outsider groups such as the lower castes. Informal education covered not only specific groups and communities but also topics. Besides curricular studies, schooling in colonial educational institutions entailed an array of non-​curricular activities. Fundamentally connected to the nexus of gender, for instance, was the question of physical exercise. Historians have described the body as a site of contestation in colonial societies, as bodily culture lay at the heart of modern negotiations of uniformity and difference.37 Normative constructions of ‘manliness’ and virility were part of an imperial ideology that was diffused in schools through ‘manly games’ –​British Victorian team sports such as football, hockey, and cricket. Ideals of discipline, loyalty, and sportsmanship were propagated by British imperial officers and supposed to be translated to the colonial subject, but were quickly subverted in manifold ways by Indians trying to ‘recapture’ their body in a discourse that deemed Indian men effeminate and passive.38 Physical activities and the educational formation of the Indian youth were perceived as interdependent matters. In the early twentieth century Boy Scouts organisations, for instance, sprang up in educational institutions around the country. Some British officials introduced scouting enthusiastically and saw it as a means to inculcate in Indian youth civilian values such as cooperation, social service, and good citizenship. Other colonial government officials gave warnings early on about the movement, and, indeed, ideas of citizenship were quickly interpreted with a nationalist spin, and Scout associations were founded that rivalled the official British version initiated by Robert Baden-​Powell, such as the Seva Samiti Boy Scouts or the later Hindustan Boy Scouts.39 Especially towards the end of the Raj, government worries about these rival scouting associations that were not affiliated to the British mother organisation increased when communal tensions began to rise in the 1930s and 1940s and various youth and volunteer associations wearing uniforms and practising physical exercise emerged.40 Concerns about the ‘usefulness’ of education for both the individual and society similarly informed debates on formal curricular topics. A consistent theme was the call for more practical and technical education, a shared concern among the British-​Indian administration and educationists and nationalists of various colours.41 The later years of the nineteenth century had seen an influx of graduates from secondary and tertiary institutions seeking white-​collar employment in the colonial administration. Criticism towards the British-​Indian education system and against particular practices such as rote learning and cramming increased. Further, critics posited a lack of moral education inherent in the colonial schools. Educationists called for ‘useful knowledge’ to replace the output of allegedly unproductive, politically active graduates and an effeminate ‘babu’ class and advance national economic and industrial development. Agricultural education played an especially prominent role in this debate. By the late nineteenth century various groups from colonial administrators to Christian missionaries, including Indian nationalists, private philanthropists, and (often communal) voluntary associations, had drawn their attention to agriculture and the Indian countryside, guided by differing interests that ranged from economic concerns about agricultural productivity to missionary intentions 258

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or political agendas. As both official and private concerns with agricultural improvement and agricultural education were increasing, the turn of the century saw the establishment of various agricultural colleges and institutions in the presidencies and in north India, such as the creation of the Agricultural Research Institute in Pusa and the Lyallpur Agricultural College.42 In the early twentieth century agriculture was introduced into the classroom as a separate subject. Educationists debated whether specific agricultural educational institutions were to be preferred, or whether agriculture was to be taught alongside other topics in regular schools and colleges. The latter position prevailed, as in the 1920s and 1930s a discourse on holistic ‘rural reconstruction’ or ‘village uplift’ dominated discussions on the development of rural India.43

Reconsidering educational spaces: India, the empire, and the global In recent decades a spatial turn has transformed cultural studies and, likewise, affected the historiography on education in colonial South Asia. A reassessment of spatial frameworks and relations allows us to explore education in British India beyond the lingering question and evaluation of ‘national education’. This spatial reorientation applies in both directions. The often essentialist and over-​theorised emphasis on the macro level and questions of ‘failure’ and ‘success’ can be corrected through a renewed focus on the local and the regional. Simultaneously, analysing colonial education in the context of global interdependences and transnational connections can reveal hitherto overlooked aspects of the phenomenon. The latter approach coincides with a shift in general educational history (and theory) towards concepts and topics such as comparison, internationalisation, exchange, and lending and borrowing.44 Education in British India, of course, was not a homogeneous project. There existed considerable regional differences throughout the vast subcontinent. Whereas in Bengal the early formation of a small intelligentsia influenced by English education led to a rapid demand for more educational opportunities, the Madras Presidency in south India was characterised by the special role missionaries took there. In the north, complex communal constellations structured the debate on education, and numerous private societies and associations competed with the colonial state as well as missionaries in the field. These regional differences not only resulted from differing administrative traditions and from local social and economic constellations but also related back to the chronology of the gradual British conquest of the subcontinent. Accordingly, the development of education differed considerably between old presidencies, such as Bengal or Bombay, and younger provinces, such as the Punjab or Sind. The geographical areas of colonial South Asia arguably most gravely neglected by historians, however, have been the princely states. The princely states were headed by Indian dynasties and –​to a varying extent –​indirectly ruled by the British through political residents and agents. By the end of the colonial period the states covered about 40 per cent of the landmass and a quarter of the population of the subcontinent. The early history of colonial education in the princely states can, once again, be painted as a history of elite schooling. The education of the ‘native gentlemen’ drew special attention from the colonial state. ‘Chiefs’ colleges’, such as the Mayo College in Ajmer or the Aitchinson College in Lahore, modelled after British public schools, were supposed to shape the young Indian aristocrats in accordance with imperial visions.45 Soon, however, the princes started to send their sons to Britain to get their education directly at Eton and similar institutions. Reforming the chiefs’ colleges to halt this trend thus became part of Viceroy Curzon’s reform agenda. The Indian princes themselves –​following their rajadharma (duties of a king) –​had, since precolonial times, played a crucial role as patrons and benefactors of religion and culture. Often they understood it as their duty to advance the educational development of their realms. Quickly, they joined British administrators and Indian 259

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private activists in setting up new and ‘modern’ schools and sponsored institutions in both their states and British-​Indian provinces and presidencies.46 British officials viewed the princely states, on the one hand, as the exotic, if not despotic, ‘oriental other’. On the other hand, the princes were supposed to follow particular rules of governance as imagined by the colonial government, which usually wielded substantial influence over the monarchs through its residents and agents. Princely reaction to the colonial encounter was diverse and ranged from anti-​colonial to loyalist and from liberal to authoritarian. ‘Western’ education often proved to be a means for the princes to show themselves as reformers and modernisers, and thus enhance their monarchical authority vis-​à-​vis both their subjects and the British.47 Alternatively, education in the princely states can also be interpreted as an example of the reach of colonial intervention into the princes’ autonomy. The British-​Indian government had much sway over local colleges and institutions in princely states, since these were affiliated to the universities of British India in Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, and Lahore. Governmental resistance and anxiety accordingly rose when princes such as Sayaji Rao of Baroda and Krishnaraja Wadiyar of Mysore started schemes to establish universities in their own territories in the early twentieth century.48 As such, the history of education in princely India is not detached from the general colonial history of the continent. On the contrary, educationists from and in the princely states were heavily involved in all-​Indian structures and debates. The instructive example of Osmania University, established in the princely state of Hyderabad in 1918, and its use of Urdu as its medium of instruction elucidated the complex interplay of language and identity in South Asia and showed the possibility of alternative secular and linguistic imaginations of the nation.49 Although British India was itself an administratively and politically heterogeneous unit, it was also part of the bigger networks of the British Empire. As with other areas of colonial governance, the experiences of colonial officials in the ‘jewel of the British Crown’ shaped educational policies in other colonies, particularly in the younger British Africa. In 1924/​5 an Advisory Committee on African Education was set up in which a remarkable number of members had had a prehistory on the Indian subcontinent. The Indian experience of the rise of the allegedly subversive ‘babu’ class played a significant role in retarding the development of tertiary education in British Africa in the 1930s.50 As historians of colonialism have noted, the various parts of the empire often functioned as social and political laboratories in which ideas and policies could be tested and later brought back in modified forms to the imperial metropole. These ‘laboratory’ environments were far from sterile. Colonial policies had to be negotiated, and often local actors significantly shaped, contested, or even undermined them.51 One such example in the educational field was (coined after its co-​inventors) the Bell–​Lancaster method, a pedagogical monitorial system that advocates pupils assuming the role of teachers. The method had part of its origins in colonial India, where the chaplain and educationist Andrew Bell in the early nineteenth century conceived its basic idea at an orphanage school in Madras. As Bell himself acknowledged, he had been partly inspired by local practice at village schools. Although this example questions Euro-​centrist narratives of one-​way processes and of the colony as a sterile ‘laboratory’, it should also not lead to a simple inversion of these tropes, however. Bell was influenced by and stood in contact with various other European educationists too, such as German missionaries in Tranquebar. Thus, the genesis of the Bell–​Lancaster method and its subsequent export as a standard model to Britain, the empire, and numerous other countries, as well as its reimportation into India, show both the intricate process of knowledge hybridisation and the transnational character that educational and pedagogical discourse had already assumed by around 1800.52 260

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Hybridisation also cut in the other direction: decidedly nationalist and revivalist Indian educational projects, such as the Gurukul Kangri founded by radical nativist Arya Samaj splinter groups, or even Gandhi’s nai talim (‘new education’) schemes, incorporated –​despite their ostensibly nativist and ‘traditionally’ oriented agendas –​heavily ‘Western’ discourses and then current scientific concepts such as eugenics and ‘progressive’ (or ‘new’) education.53 When it came to progressive education in particular, an extensive transnational network of persons and ideas engaged with and on the Indian subcontinent. The educational experiments of Indian leaders such as Gandhi, Aurobindo, and Rabindranath Tagore reverberated back to Europe and North America. As an echo of persisting romantic orientalist sensitivities, these Indian figures were celebrated by European educationists and fed a narrative of the mystical and ancient ‘East’ that was supposed to teach the materialist ‘West’. This veneration had its limits, however; despite the positive reception of Tagore and others, an actual transfer of tangible pedagogical practices lay outside the purview of these encounters. The motivation of Western progressive educationists in referencing the ‘East’ often lay in marketing and self-​legitimisation rather than productive exchange.54 Such wide-​spanning ‘spaces of education’55 transcended the sphere of the colonial state and followed different, transnational frameworks. As such, they could also claim a persistence to some extent detached from the subcontinent’s political history. An example of this is the case of Loreto, a catholic teaching order for women that, since 1842, had spread from Calcutta to the rest of the subcontinent. As part of a network that operated outside the political framework of the colonial state and the British Empire, it was embedded in different pedagogical and organisational structures, namely Irish Roman Catholic ones, and was thus eventually able to survive independence and the end of the British Raj.56 There are many other examples that show the presence of globally circulating educational knowledge and its reception, adoption, and transformation in colonial South Asia. One of them was an intricate debate on modern ‘scientific’ physical education appropriated by various social, religious, and political groups, both Indian and non-​Indian, and interlinked with the question of education and the ‘Indian body’, as elaborated above. Prominently advocated in India was this type of modernist bodily culture by the American-​led YMCA, which established in 1920 a College of Physical Education in Madras.57 The application of a global lens offers new insights also when applied to the history of the princely states, highlighting surprising connections and ambivalent constellations.58 The establishment of the University of Mysore in 1916, for instance, can be read in the context of other nationalist initiatives to found Indian universities in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, it tells a story about complex flows of educational and organisational knowledge: in preparation for the university’s founding, the ruler of Mysore took the service of a number of European educational experts, who undertook an extensive five-​year study of higher education that led them to Europe and North America. Eventually, the University of Mysore in its outlook drew on various sources and sought to implement elements from the leading institutions in both the imperial metropole and the New World, from the latter especially its distinct research and extension approach. Similar strategies appeared in different contexts, often among intermediary and minority groups that subscribed only partially to either imperial or nationalist visions. To them, the global and transnational presented an opportunity to position themselves between both Indian mainstream nationalism and an uncritical loyalism to the Raj. At Khalsa College, Amritsar, for instance, the centre of the educational endeavours of the (reformist-​modernist) Sikh minority, allusions to and adaptations from transnational discourses enabled the institution’s authorities to conceive a distinctive interpretation of modern Sikh identity. Its educational implementation 261

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allowed it to distance itself from a Hindu-​dominated nationalist mainstream while simultaneously challenging British discursive hegemony by promoting a distinctively modernist scientific universalism.59

Résumé Today the various postcolonial nation states of South Asia face major social and educational challenges. Understandably, the legacy of colonialism still lingers heavily over debates on the present state and the future of education in these countries. Although scholarship on the colonial period remains a highly prolific field, the immediate postcolonial phase often receives only marginal attention.60 Assessing colonial education on an abstract level as either success or failure can only to a limited extent help in understanding the historical but often lasting processes and effects of the Raj. An analytical dialectic between imperialist state policies and nationalist reactions does not adequately cover the complex dynamics of education in colonial South Asia. Diverse social, political, and religious constellations structured educational debates and schemes. Social, economic, and religious hierarchies and interests were often more formative than inconsistent policies and politically motivated reactions. Although ‘Western’ education took on a hegemonic position, this did not mean that Indian and European educationists had no room for developing their own adapted and often subversive visions. Further, education was not contained by imperial or national borders. Reconsidering spatial categories and introducing the global into the analysis of colonial education thus has figured as a corrective to earlier scholarship and has the potential to further our understanding of the conditions and effects of educational change in and beyond both South Asia and the British Empire.

Notes 1 Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 2 Martin Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York: David McKay, 1974). 3 Bruce T. McCully, English Education and the Origins of Indian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940). 4 Parimala V. Rao, ‘Myth and reality in the history of Indian education’, Espacio, Tiempo y Educación, 6 (2), 2019, pp. 217–​34. 5 Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (New Delhi: Biblia Impex, 1983); Ali Riaz, ‘Madrassah education in pre-​colonial and colonial South Asia’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 46 (1), 2010, pp. 69–​86. 6 David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–​ 1835 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969); Thomas T. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 7 Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (eds.), The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist–​Anglicist Controversy, 1781–​1843 (Richmond: Curzon, 1999). 8 Ibid., 195. 9 Jana Tschurenev, Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). 10 Tim Allender, Ruling through Education: The Politics of Schooling in the Colonial Punjab (Elgin: New Dawn Press, 2006). 11 Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 19–​20; Suresh Chandra Ghosh, The History of Education in Modern India, 1757–​2007 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2009), 100–​8. 12 Suresh Chandra Ghosh, Indian Nationalism: A Case Study for the First University Reform by the British Raj (New Delhi: Vikas, 1985).

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Education in colonial South Asia 13 See, for example, I.K. Chaudhary, ‘Sanskrit learning in colonial Mithila: Continuity and change’, in: Deepak Kumar, Joseph Bara, Nandita Khadria, and C. Radha Gayathri (eds.), Education in Colonial India: Historical Insights (New Delhi: Manohar, 2013), pp. 125–​44; and Riaz, ‘Madrassah education in pre-​colonial and colonial South Asia’. 14 Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree. 15 Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information. Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–​1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996); cf. Phillip B. Wagoner, ‘Precolonial intellectuals and the production of colonial knowledge’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45 (4), 2003, pp. 783–​814. 16 Jamal Malik, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien: Entwicklungsgeschichte und Tendenzen am Beispiel von Lucknow (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Francis Robinson, The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Margrit Pernau (ed.), The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857 (New Delhi: OUP, 2006); idem, Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-​Century Delhi (New Delhi: OUP, 2013). 17 Wagoner, ‘Precolonial intellectuals’; Michael S. Dodson, ‘Re-​ presented for the Pandits: James Ballantyne, ‘useful knowledge’, and Sanskrit scholarship in Benares College during the mid-​nineteenth century’, MAS, 36 (2), 2002, pp. 257–​98; Brian A. Hatcher, ‘Sanskrit and the morning after: The metaphorics and theory of intellectual change’, IESHR, 44 (3), 2007, pp. 333–​63; idem, Hinduism before Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 18 See Krishna Kumar, The Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas (New Delhi: Sage, 1991). 19 Seth, Subject Lessons. 20 Aparna Basu, The Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898–​1920 (New Delhi: CUP, 1974). 21 See Dilip Chavan, ‘Politics of patronage and the institutionalization of language hierarchy in colonial western India’, in: Kumar et al., Education in Colonial India, pp. 187–​226. 22 Seth, Subject Lessons. 23 Nita Kumar, Lessons from Schools: The History of Education in Banares (New Delhi: Sage, 2000). 24 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London: Faber, 1990). 25 Parna Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 26 Ibid. 27 Hayden J.A. Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–​1920 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007). 28 Joseph Bara, ‘Higher education and Christian missionary manoeuvres in India 1818–​1910’, in: Kumar et al., Education in Colonial India, pp. 147–​86. 29 David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Harald Fischer-​Tiné, Der Gurukul-​Kangri oder die Erziehung der Arya-​ Nation: Kolonialismus, Hindureform und ‘Nationale Bildung’ in Britisch-​ Indien (1897–​ 1922) (Würzburg: Ergon, 2003); Leah Renold, A Hindu Education: Early Years of the Banaras Hindu University (New Delhi: OUP, 2005); Pernau, The Delhi College; Sanjay Srivastava, Constructing Post-​Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School (London: Routledge, 1998); Michael Philipp Brunner, Education and Modernity in Colonial Punjab: Khalsa College, the Sikh Tradition and the Webs of Knowledge, 1880–​1947 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 30 See Parimala V. Rao, Foundations of Tilak’s Nationalism: Discrimination, Education and Hindutva (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010). 31 Jana Tschurenev, Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education; Parimala V. Rao, ‘Colonial state as “new Manu”? Explorations in education policies in relation to Dalit and low-​ caste education in the nineteenth-​century India’, Contemporary Education Dialogue, 16 (1), 2019, pp. 84–​107. 32 Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (ed.), Education and the Disprivileged: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002); Padma Velaskar, ‘Education for liberation: Ambedkar’s thought and Dalit women’s perspectives’, Contemporary Education Dialogue, 9 (2), 2012, pp. 245–​71. 33 Timothy Allender, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–​ 1932 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); Divya Kannan, ‘ “Saving our sisters”: Female education and the London Missionary Society in nineteenth-​century south India’, in: Ulrike Lindner and Dörte Lerp (eds.), New Perspectives on the History of Gender: Comparative and Global Approaches (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 269–​94.

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Michael Philipp Brunner 34 See, for example, Marcelo Caruso and Maria Moritz, ‘The Indian female pupil-​teacher: Social technologies of education and gender in the second half of the nineteenth century’, South Asia Chronicle, 8, 2018, pp. 21–​52. 35 Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion, 102–​22. See also Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 1999). 36 Judith E. Walsh, Growing Up in British India: Indian Autobiographers on Childhood and Education under the Raj (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983); Satadru Sen, Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850–​1945 (London: Anthem Press, 2005); Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-​Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 37 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–​1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 12–​ 21; Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds.), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 38 James A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986); Sikata Banerjee, Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005); Revathi Krishnasvamy, Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 39 Carey Watt, ‘The promise of “character” and the spectre of sedition: The Boy Scout movement and colonial consternation in India, 1908–​1921’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 22 (2), 1999, pp. 37–​62. 40 Ali Raza and Franziska Roy, ‘Paramilitary organisations in interwar India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38 (4), 2015, pp. 671–​89. 41 Suvobrata Sarkar, ‘Bhadralok aspirations and the quest for technical knowledge, 1830–​1900’, in: Kumar et al., Education in Colonial India, pp. 99–​124. 42 Nandini Chatterjee, The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–​ 1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). 43 Michael Philipp Brunner, ‘Teaching development: Debates on “scientific agriculture” and “rural reconstruction” at Khalsa College, Amritsar, c.1915–​1947’, IESHR, 55 (1), 2018, pp. 77–​132. 44 Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere (eds.), Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-​Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014). 45 Caroline Keen, Princely India and the British: Political Development and the Operation of Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 46–​89. 46 Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 110–​11, 140–​ 7; Manu Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education and Empire in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2003). 47 Aarti Bhalodia-​Dhanani, ‘Princes, diwans and merchants: Education and reform in colonial India’ (PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2012). 48 Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres. 49 Kavita S. Datla, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013). 50 Clive Whitehead, ‘The historiography of British imperial education policy, part II: Africa and the rest of the colonial empire’, History of Education, 34 (4), 2005, pp. 441–​54. 51 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoller, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 5. 52 Jana Tschurenev, ‘Diffusing useful knowledge: The monitorial system of education in Madras, London and Bengal, 1789–​1840’, Paedagogica Historica, 44 (3), 2008, pp. 245–​64. 53 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘ “The only hope for fallen India”: The Gurukul Kangri as an experiment in national education’, in: Georg Berkemer, Tilman Frasch, Hermann Kulke, and Jürgen Lütt (eds.), Explorations in the History of South Asia: A Volume in Honour of Dietmar Rothermund (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), pp. 277–​99; Simone Holzwarth, ‘A new education for “young India”: Exploring Nai Talim from the perspective of a connected history’, in: Bagchi, Fuchs, and Rousmaniere, Connecting Histories of Education, pp. 123–​39. 54 Elija Horn, Indien als Erzieher: Orientalismus in der deutschen Reformpädagogik und Jugendbewegung 1918–​ 1933 (Bad Heilbrunn: Julius Klinkhardt, 2018).

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Education in colonial South Asia 55 Esther Möller and Johannes Wischmeyer (eds.), Transnationale Bildungsräume: Wissenstransfers im Schnittfeld von Kultur, Politik und Religion (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). 56 Timothy Allender, ‘Transcending the centre–​periphery paradigm: Loreto teaching in India, 1842–​ 2010’, in: Bagchi, Fuchs, and Rousmaniere, Connecting Histories of Education, pp. 227–​43. 57 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Fitness for modernity? The American YMCA and physical-​education schemes in late-​colonial South Asia (circa 1890–​1940)’, MAS, 53 (2), 2019, pp. 512–​59. 58 Teresa Segura-​Garcia, ‘Pour une histoire connectée des états princiers indiens’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, 56 (1), 2018, pp. 132–​4. 59 Michael Philipp Brunner, ‘Manly Sikhs and loyal citizens: Physical education and sport in the Khalsa College, Amritsar, 1914–​1947’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 41 (1), 2018, pp. 33–​50; idem, Education and Modernity; idem, ‘Teaching development’. 60 Ali Usman Qasmi, ‘A master narrative for the history of Pakistan: Tracing the origins of an ideological agenda’, MAS, 53 (4), 2019, pp. 1066–​105; Taylor C. Sherman, ‘Education in early postcolonial India: Expansion, experimentation and planned self-​help’, History of Education, 47 (4), 2018, pp. 504–​20.

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PART IV

Environment and Space

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21 OF LIVES AND LANDSCAPES The environmental history of colonial South Asia Arnab Dey

Introduction Environmental management in colonial South Asia was at once a biological, economic, social, and political process. It is helpful, therefore, to understand its history as a pastiche: a complex interplay of post-​Enlightenment political ideology, race theory, physiocratic ‘improvement’ missions, biomedical presumptions, and agro-​economic manoeuvres of landscapes and lives.1 These principles and practices dovetailed and diverged given the priorities in India of the British Empire, which also borrowed from and jettisoned older, precolonial modes and methods of ecological management as necessary and expedient. This chapter focuses on four broad parameters –​forests, water, social unrest, and animals –​through which this history unfolded and materialised. Although other approaches to environmental history (the Anthropocene, urban history, pollution and sustainability, etc.) have also become prominent in the last decade or so, these have been left out because of constraints of space.

Forestscapes Forests provide a helpful template for understanding broader questions in the environmental history of colonial South Asia: the impact of imperial law on India’s natural spaces; the relationship between ecological policy and indigenous response; the role of imperial science in environmental planning and resource regulation; praxis in terms of conservation and commerce; and the importance of ideology on ecological planning.2 Although pre-​British India was by no means an ecological equilibrium, as has been convincingly argued,3 the coming of forestry as a distinct arm of colonial bureaucracy –​itself an import into Britain from its continental, especially German, roots4 -​changed the prevailing notions of agrarian property, local access to forest produce, and resources, and induced long-​ term clashes by indigenous stakeholders against its restrictive notions of privilege and ownership. It is important not to draw a neat line between early colonial environmental management and its post-​Mutiny iteration, however. In terms of forests, for instance, studies have shown how local zamindari practices, ties of kinship and community, regional ecological variation, the role of rural elites, and the staggering diversity of flora and fauna ‘confounded foresters’ and their plans of ecological takeover. In other words, forest management in the early colonial DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-22

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period (or ‘state making’, to use an overarching analytic category) often operated in a transactional, hybrid, and intransigent space between the ruler and the ruled.5 Nonetheless, faced with a depleted stock of ship timber for the Royal Navy, and burgeoning demand for railway sleepers at ‘home’ and in the colonies from the 1850s onwards, actively husbanding and ‘protecting’ forest acres in the subcontinent became crucially important for the East India Company (EIC). EIC surgeons, notably Hugh Cleghorn and Alexander Gibson, expanded the scope of these ‘conservationist’ arguments to draw connections between drought and deforestation, agricultural prosperity, and the ‘health’ of the empire as a whole.6 All this required long-​ term planning. Official personnel appointments in the form of Conservator of Forests were also made, namely in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies in 1847 and 1857, respectively. The earliest attempt to formulate this was through the Indian Forest Act of 1865, which was short-​lived and largely ineffectual. The subsequent Forest Act of 1878 was more definitive. It called for a novel reconceptualisation of existing property relations by claiming a two-​tier hold over the subcontinent’s forests: ‘reserved’ and ‘protected’. In the former, no ‘rights’ could be acquired unless explicitly granted by the provincial governments, whereas the same was recorded but not settled in the latter. There were wide regional variations to this act, as the Madras (and the Assam) governments resisted this India-​wide law by calling for provincial variants. Another law was passed in 1927.7 Although the varied systems of land tenures across the subcontinent meant heterogeneity of practice in terms of legal implementation, these forestry legislations inaugurated a new period of colonial ‘conservationist’ (or ‘annexationist’) agenda in India.8 At the centre of these policies was a recalibration of property ownership. In Ramachandra Guha’s words: [The 1878 Act] sought to establish that the customary use of forest by the villagers was based not on ‘rights’ but on ‘privileges’ and that this ‘privilege’ was exercised only at the mercy of the local rulers. Since the British were now the rulers, the rights of absolute ownership were held to be vested in them. As one officer bluntly stated in 1873, ‘the right of conquest is the strongest of all rights –​it is a right against –​which there is no appeal’. The 1878 Act was the means by which the success of this … was assured.9 An early example of this aspect of colonial ecological engagement in which ‘scientific’ forestry and silvicultural management ruptured centuries-​old practices of communal management of resource use can be seen in the hill districts of Kumaon and Tehri Garhwal of present-​day Uttarakhand. In this now classic study, Ramachandra Guha argued that the bureaucratic praxis of imperial forestry, restrictions on forest produce and access, and a gradual shift towards a ‘money-​order economy’ brought definitive changes in the everyday experiences of peasant and agrarian communities in Tehri Garhwal.10 Challenging an earlier historiographical focus on the ameliorative benefits of ‘Pax Sylvana’, Guha asserted that colonial forestry took off as a direct corollary of –​and in concert with –​colonial economic and geo-​strategic demands, especially for the railways, and the Royal Navy among others. From an earlier ‘egalitarian structure of the [South Asian] village community’ with sufficient and relatively open access to forest produce and other natural resources, the rise of colonial state forestry, forced labour (begar) systems, and the commercialisation of agriculture after 1865 ruptured the subsistence economy in these hill districts of the western Himalayas. This study was among the first to systematically document the social (and political) fallout of these economic and environmental policies. Periodic instances of forest incendiarism in 1916/​17, the Utar forest movement of 1921, the sustained social protests in Kumaon between 1921 and 1942, and the eventual rise of the Chipko movement in the 1970s provide vivid illustrations 270

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of peasant resistance that participated in –​and arose distinct from –​their larger nationalist and Gandhian milieu. To this end, environmental change, economic transformations, and social impact in Tehri Garhwal were interconnected nodes in this forest history. But was ‘scientific’ forestry in colonial India a one-​sided project of environmental transformation? Was it, in other words, always in control of, and able to predict and plan, its mandate and claim of ‘improving’ South Asia’s agrarian frontiers –​whether settled or unsettled? Was the colonial moment a defining watershed in inducing these changes? Provincial level studies of British forest policy in South Asia have deepened our understanding of the relationship between colonial rule and its use (and abuse) of nature.11 For instance, in the Central Provinces between 1860 and 1914 large-​scale commercial forestry and woodland management had close overlaps with how it dealt with shifting agriculturalists and big game. Although they were significantly disruptive, colonial extractive policies (forestry and ecological takeover being two under focus) often built on pre-​British systems of land and landscape management. To that extent, they are best studied together. Moreover, forest policy and punitive taxes on forest produce in the Central Provinces had crippling –​but differential –​impacts on ‘autochthon’ groups such as the Baigas and Gonds in the region.12 Although both were impacted, exclusion from government-​regulated forests were felt differently by ‘tribal’ groups in these parts of South Asia depending on cultivation use, wood felling, and ‘cultural’ codes.13 Most interestingly, big game hunting (or shikar) was also part of this ecological history. To this end, the regulation of ‘predatory’ and ‘dangerous’ beasts was synonymous with controlling disorder among the native landscapes and peoples. The coming of the 1878 Indian Forest Act, and especially with its demarcation of ‘reserved’ forests, definitively changed the bio-​habitat of big game, particularly for the wolf and the tiger. Older traditions of Princely shikars, colonial notions of masculinity, and ideologies of ‘improvement’ coalesced to bring ‘sport’ and hunting together in British India. To this end, ‘exterminating’ and ‘regulating’ these animals went hand in hand with controlling errant and mobile swidden cultivators in the Central Provinces who refused to come under the ‘civilising’ influences of the plough. In Rangarajan’s words: [T]‌he colonial period saw major changes in the structure of the polity and in the nature of property relations. The shift in ecological terms was in part a consequence of the emergence of a new kind of polity, which left little elbow-​room for groups on the fringes of sedentary agriculture. The old order under the Mughals or the Marathas in northern India had been more conducive to dispersed patterns of production and settlement.14 Another wave of scholarship added much-​needed clarity and depth to these questions. When it came to eastern India (especially south-​western and northern Bengal), for instance, imperial forestry was shown to be inextricably linked to planned and contingent processes of ‘state making’.15 To this end, the forest-​savannah grassland areas that straddled these geographic regions both were targets of colonial resource managers and exceeded rational and calculable logics of state planning. In Sivaramakrishnan’s words, these were ‘zones of anomaly’ and ‘environmental transition zones’ where local ecological practices and idioms of power, peasantry and colonial foresters, bureaucrats and graziers, and scientific expertise and ignorance participated in the uneven making and unmaking of colonial governance. As he put it, ‘Forest management was not only predicated on requisite scientific knowledge but on techniques of validating or valorizing certain knowledge while discounting others.’16 As an arm of the colonial bureaucracy, forestry and silvicultural management introduced a new vocabulary of property rights, which were both legally enforced and materially coerced out of hereditary local custom. 271

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Whereas the latter was often a negotiated and protracted struggle, as Guha, Sivaramakrishnan, and others showed, the juridical framework was an integral part of how state making and colonial forestry went hand in hand. But were these foresters, and the praxis of imperial forestry, shaped by colonial ‘expediencies’ alone? How important is it for us to connect on-​g round colonial silvicultural operations and conceptions with their continental roots? What do these connections reveal? It has been argued that understanding the ‘epistemic communities’ of colonial forestry officials and practitioners and their metropolitan counterparts helps us put forestry’s ‘material priorities’ and ‘ideological visions’ in the subcontinent together.17 Looked at this way, the praxis of Whig order and improvement that continental forestry sought to impart in India, ideals of forest conservancy and commerce,18 and the synergies and divergences between colonial foresters and other members of the imperial scientific establishment become clear. To wit, these historical concerns attempted to understand the ‘paradigms of natural resource management implicit in forestry science’.19

Waterscapes The control of fluvial landscapes followed closely that of forests in colonial India. This history may be usefully approached within three broad themes: the mechanics of water control, especially through canal irrigation; the ‘benefit’ versus ‘rupture’ debate; and colonial hydrology as an ideological concept. To be sure, the importance of irrigation for agriculture was not lost on pre-​British rulers. In the Punjab region of north-​western India, for instance, Mughal and Sikh rulers and their chieftains had long advocated the digging of wells and canals for cultivation purposes. The Hasli Canal was constructed by the Mughal officer Ali Mardan Khan to provide water for area fountains and the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore. What was noteworthy in these efforts was that drainage channels were dug to form inundation canals ‘without greatly altering or obstructing their natural courses’.20 The ‘improving’ hand of Pax Britannica changed this relationship between water as resource and water as a form of communally managed set of rights from the middle of the nineteenth century. As with forests, colonial hydraulic projects formed the backbone of efforts by the British to consolidate and codify their hold over vast, ‘unmanageable’, and ‘barren wastelands’. As ideological alibis for agrarian productivity and order, canals were necessary instruments of sedentarisation and revenue maximisation. A wide array of promulgations solidified these plans. The Northern India Canal and Drainage Act came into effect in 1873, and the North-​Western Provinces government promptly declared its authority to ‘use and control for public purposes the water of all rivers and streams flowing in natural channels, and of all lakes and other natural collections of still water’.21 Although the centralising effort of sovereign authority over water differed across the subcontinent, its impact on the end user and surrounding local communities was significant and often contrary to stated intentions. For instance, water was not sold by volume; rather, the type of crop irrigated determined water rates, with the result that upstream users often took more than they needed, leading to inefficient use and waterlogging. Downstream users were, therefore, left with less or faced water shortages as a consequence.22 Colonial irrigation departments had to also confront customary legal ‘rights’ in areas with landownerships claims pre-​dating these canals. The impact of these canal colonisations on demographic shifts was significant. Consider, for instance, that eight tahsils (districts) in western Punjab (now in Pakistan) –​Shahpur, Jhang, Gujranwala, Multan, Montgomery and Lahore, Lyallpur, and Sheikhupura –​saw staggering 272

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population increases between 1901 and 1921. Although statistics vary, census figures indicate inflows of around 1.45 million migrants into these canal colonies during the above period.23 Even as migration continued into the next decade, these erstwhile sparsely populated districts drew settlers in vast numbers as a result of canalisation. It should not be forgotten that the Lower Chenab Canal Colony (launched in 1892), the Lower Jhelum Canal, and the Triple Canal Project irrigated close to 13 million acres in these tahsils by 1916. The ‘success’ of these schemes, adverse effects notwithstanding, correlated directly with revenue maximisation for the imperial state. As M.W. Fenton, financial commissioner of the Punjab, noted in 1915, ‘The land revenue of this tract, amounting to from 60 to 70 lakh p.a., exceeds that of any other district in India.’24 The ‘improving’ hand of Britain had ostensibly transformed ‘arid wilderness’ into settled regions of agrarian prosperity and growth. These proclamations obfuscated many unintended consequences and damaging after-​effects of canalisation in the Punjab and elsewhere, as we shall soon see. Historians have broadly identified three categories of canals during the colonial period.25 The type noted above could be classified as ‘productive’ canals: those that accrued direct fiscal benefits to the imperial state in the form of local taxes and levies on irrigation benefits. The Indus Basin as well as the Kistna and Godavari tracts of south India would fall under this category. Canals of the second type have been deemed ‘protective’: those that were designed to stem impacts from flood inundation, or as catchment for famines. These rarely served the profit interests of the British Raj, but supporters of canals of this type ‘asserted that [they] saved the government the costs of famines: relief projects, reduced land revenues, and human and domestic animal deaths’.26 Canals of the third and final type have been classified as ‘minor works’: a combination of small-​scale canal projects that built on pre-​existing water systems, private irrigation works, and navigable canals. It is imperative to note that issues of water control and supply also extended to providing for sanitation and drinking water, not just in the presidency towns of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta but in the countryside as well. The 1882 Indian Easements Act is particularly relevant, in that it instituted a clear distinction between ‘state-​controlled surface water’ and ‘privately owned groundwater’.27 Issues of boundaries and enforcement, of course, were rarely this categorical, and often had to confront disputes in the colonial period and beyond. Were these new colonial technologies of water management beneficial or harmful to local communities, lands, and ways of life? Were these techniques wholly metropolitan imports, or were they forged in response to, and with help from, local and indigenous systems of water use? The second approach to water history in British India largely engages with this question. Although a neat position is difficult to take, commentators have repeatedly noted that perineal (perennial) canal irrigation works in colonial India left a legacy of environmental and social ruptures in its wake.28 Issues of waterlogging, salinisation, silt accumulation, disruption of groundwater flow because of embankments, uneven development, flood inundation, and restrictions on grazing cropped up in almost all areas under canalisation schemes. Thus, an early study on canal colonies in the United Provinces argued that these irrigation schemes were inherently damaging the land as a result of salinisation and waterlogging.29 The author was emphatic: ‘The awe-​inspiring size of the great canals obscured, to those minded to see in them a monument of engineering achievement and administrative virtue, their less direct repercussions and the faults in their construction.’30 The author further suggested that the economic imperatives of these canals created ‘islands of plenty amidst a sea of epidemically swamped and depressed peasantry’.31 Our previous discussion of demographic pressures on the eight canal colonies of the Punjab may be recalled here. More than a decade later another study claimed that, in terms of these water control schemes, colonial economic aims and political 273

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agendas were at odds with each other. To this end, it argued that the colonial state’s capital imperatives for canalisation were undermined by its simultaneous reliance on ‘archaic’ and ‘traditional’ methods and institutions.32 Against these critiques were others who argued that the ‘dynamism’ of these canals and perennial irrigation systems created the ideal ‘technical and institutional environment for the maximization of peasant production’.33 This was an argument from the other side, namely that colonial canal water management was instrumental in the rise and consolidation of settled cultivation in areas that received its first benefits. The impact of centralised water control measures in colonial India cannot be productively analysed or answered through these absolute positions. Although it is undeniable that total net revenue gains, arable land areas, trade volumes, and agrarian output increased as a consequence of British-​led perennial irrigation schemes, these measures were too standardised to account for the specificities in ecology and land use that they served. In the Punjab, for instance, we see that the imperatives of colonial ‘benevolence’ and diktats of scientific ‘rationality’ spurring these canalisation schemes failed to account for wide variations in local land use, patterns of settlement and grazing, hydrology, and social relationships between dominant (landowning) groups and itinerant (land-​receiving) groups. Thus, for upland nomads in the Punjab, cattle rearing was the predominant form of social and economic life. This was both geographically convenient (abundance of grazing land) and climatically calibrated (dry, sandy soil with rainfall scant yet sufficient to produce abundant grass). Although settlers in this region had their own preferences in the pre-​British period, the natural balance between shifting pastoralists and settled agriculturists was rarely disrupted. But the coming of perineal irrigation canals –​and the concomitant preference for sedentarisation –​changed all that. Henceforth, as numerous studies have shown, itinerant grazers and pastoral communities (whether in the Punjab or elsewhere) would be targeted as ‘wandering’ or ‘criminals’ tribes in need of civilisational ‘reform’.34 Canalisation would also cause social friction between dominant landowning groups, who benefited directly from these irrigation advancements, and those who were left out of its ambit.35 ‘Scientific’ water control mechanisms instituted by the colonial government also led to decidedly contradictory outcomes. In the flood-​prone north Bihar region, for instance, work on bands (embankments) was instituted to stem river outflows into productive agricultural lands. Nevertheless, on-​ground policies that favoured competitive and haphazard embankment construction by local zamindars in lieu of revenue incentives often led to ‘clogged drainage’ and ‘deterioration’ to riverbeds that only aggravated the flood line.36 That these competitive bids to build bands led to local power struggles and conflicts is a related matter. Moreover, rival claims and economic interests (especially of the railways, but also of revenue and district officials, irrigation engineers, and landowners) created roadblocks to these ‘rational’ embankment-​based flood control strategies. Conversely, it has been argued that the Godavari anicut37 in southern India did not ‘cause considerable alteration to [their] riparian environments’, nor did it ‘displace up-​r iver human populations’.38 Indeed, this anicut, pioneered by Arthur Cotton, is viewed as having ‘rejuvenated the sacred and historical importance of [this] deltaic region’ by bringing in a constant flow of water –​and, thereby, economic (and cultural) prosperity –​to the area. The third, and final, approach examines this water history through the praxis of colonial capitalism as a peculiar ‘social form’ and as an ‘ecological footprint’. It suggests that the dawn of a new economic rationale of private property and demands of extractive surplus as dual logics of imperial capital induced changes in its conception of fluvial landscapes in the subcontinent. Instead of continuities between precolonial and colonial technologies of water management, or the harmful impact of the latter on local communities, this approach argues that calculations of colonial capitalism introduced a new relationship with India’s nature (water included) that 274

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primarily recast it as a ‘resource’ for imperial profit. In terms of flood control measures in the Odisha delta, for instance, this approach showed how a precolonial ‘dependence’ on inundation from the river Mahanadi for agricultural production, among others, transformed into a narrative of flood ‘vulnerability’ in the hands of the colonial state, engineers, and hydrological ‘experts’.39 Imperial embankment works erected as flood control measures only ‘introduced a range of hydraulic complications that … worsened deltaic inundation’.40 The Orissa Canal Scheme of 1863 was, similarly, a fiscal and structural failure.

Socioscapes and faunascapes It is obvious from the above discussion that the colonial period introduced wide-​ranging and decisive changes to local relationships with nature. And at the centre of these relationships were embodied, often idiomatic, understandings of natural surroundings by village communities, peasants, autochthon ‘tribes’, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers, among others.41 Although these were certainly not the neat rupture with the precolonial period that some historians have argued, the foregoing sections on forests and waterways show that nature was reimagined, classified, cordoned off, and appropriated as sovereign ‘property’ in new and legalistic ways by the British Empire. Predictably, social response to these changes often took the shape of protests, petitioning, and political resistance. As mentioned above, the Tehri Garhwal and Kumaon region of Uttarakhand saw welters of peasant resistance throughout the middle of the nineteenth century till the second decade of the twentieth against the imperial commercialisation of forests and forest produce. Primarily directed against the growing ‘reservation’ of woodlands through colonial forest laws –​and restrictions on the customary use of lopping, grazing, and forest floor burning –​these protests were part of the larger socio-​political struggle to forestall colonial ownership of local landscapes and lives.42 In other areas, reaction against these policies of agrarian sedentarisation and resource control were subtle and localised. In the Central Provinces, for instance, Mahesh Rangarajan showed how the Gonds regularly fled to adjoining hills to escape excessive taxes on wood and land. In an area of scare labour hands, such measures were often effective in bringing colonial revenue collection and forest dues to a standstill.43 In this context, the tug-​ of-​war between the imperial state and indigenous forest users in terms of settled agriculture and swidden cultivation was never one-​sided and straightforward. British efforts to popularise the plough among the Ho ‘tribes’ of Kolhan in Jharkhand in eastern India were met with conflict and co-​option in equal measure. Although Hos used covert and overt forms of social protest to push back against the increasing colonial intervention on the customary use of forest lands and produce, they also adopted and adapted to patterns of ‘ruralisation’ and ‘peasantisation’ that had already been in place in the region before the British.44 Imperial policy and local practice, in this instance, thus produced a ‘hybrid’ of ecological attitudes and impacts that continues to this day. In some cases, epidemiology and environmental resistance were interlinked. The burgeoning military fiscalism of the East India Company (and later the Crown) to clear forest land in the Gudem-​Rampa hill tracts of Madras Presidency in the middle of the nineteenth century were considerably checked by local ‘tribal’ immunity to malaria and kala-​azar (blackwater fever).45 Epidemiological resistance may have conferred some strategic benefits to indigenous groups during the protests of 1879/​80 (and again from 1922 to 1924), but the colonial state, for its part, doubled down on ‘disease’ as a raison d’être for greater efforts to deforest, settle, and regulate these ‘backward’ and ‘fever-​stricken’ lands and lives. The broader link between imperial environmental management, disease regulation, and socio-​political control was never too far to seek.46 275

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In keeping with these social movements, there has been much scholarly debate on the influence of Mohandas Gandhi (1869–​1948) on environmental activism in colonial and post-​ independence India. Although the Chipko Andolan (or ‘tree-​hugging’ movement) of the 1970s and the anti-​dam Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada) can trace their modalities of protest to Gandhi’s views on satyagraha and civil disobedience, there is little historical evidence of the Mahatma’s direct call for environmental protection.47 We may trace an analytic genealogy, however, between Gandhi’s insistence on self-​reliance, trusteeship, and self-​sustainable communities (espoused most notably in Hind Swaraj, 1909) and the modern ecological movement of non-​corporate local sovereignty. To this end, the seemingly divergent opinions of Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru on India’s path towards modernity is worth looking into. To wit, the impact of activities since the Second World War on the subcontinent –​especially on fragile ecologies, local societies and natural habitats, wildlife conservation, and in terms of left-​behind unexploded munitions and chemical pollutants –​is worthy of further sustained research. As with natural landscapes, the fortunes of large mammals, reptiles, birds, and beasts of prey underwent changes during and after the British Empire. And, as with water and forests, there were continuities from the precolonial period. Vast areas of arid land, scrub jungle, wetlands, and wooded forests spanned the length and breadth of the Mughal Empire. Although the axe, fire, and the plough had made systematic inroads and begun to shape cultivation patterns, maintaining and expanding agriculture was very much a core political aim of the Mughals. Notably under Akbar (1556–​1605) and his son Jehangir (1605–​1627), however, hunting and game became endowed with symbolic political and personal overtones that went hand in hand with control of cultivated landscapes and local populations.48 Although they were codified, the absolute notions of private property had not yet taken root in terms of forest management (and its produce, whether animate or inanimate), but the elaborate ritual and spectacle of the hunt –​aided by meticulous record-​keeping, observation, and portraiture –​signalled important shifts in the relationship between imperial power and natural order.49 By one estimate, Jehangir is said to have killed close to 17,000 animals in the first 12 years of his reign.50 Within the mega-​mammal group, the lion and the tiger played important symbolic roles in the Mughal imperium, and were hunted and honoured in equal measure. Elephants were accorded royal status, and often received as ‘tributes’ in lieu of cash. Paeans were sung in the elephant’s honour by Akbar and Ibrahim Adil Shah II, the ruler of Bijapur. Additionally, the blackbuck, antelopes, rhinos, gazelles, falcons, and cheetahs regularly featured in historical records of the period. It is important to note, however, that the symbolism of the hunt meant many things to Mughal kingship: in varying and complex degrees, it aided in military campaigns, helped ‘protect’ subject populations from recalcitrant and ‘dangerous’ beasts, and provide political alibis to ‘clear’ revenue-​yielding forest lands for cultivation and settlement. How did the British Empire react to these deep and long-​standing idioms and symbols of Mughal prestige and authority as far as animals were concerned? What was new in its relationship with –​and use of –​animals in the colonial period? Although Pax Britannica tapped into much of the aforementioned Mughal repertoire of animal management, the relationship did undergo some signal changes.51 For one, the scope and scale of faunal control expanded exponentially. Fuelled by a desire to increase land revenue, and peasant sedentarisation, ‘wild’ animals –​especially the non-​domesticated buffalo, and tiger –​became targets of hunts and ‘extermination’. An elaborate idiom and ideology of ‘lawless beasts’ and ‘vermin’ faunas were superimposed onto imperial understandings of recalcitrant and rebellious Indians.52 Especially after the ‘Sepoy Rebellion’ of 1857, these overlaps between human and faunal management took on widespread urgency. When it came to hunting and managing tigers, in particular, other historical meanings were adduced. As a symbol of local Indian kingship, the tiger carried 276

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metonymic overtones of local authority and independence that the British were keen to ‘legitimately’ supplant and quash.53 The use by Tipu Sultan (1750–​1799), the ruler of Mysore, of tiger symbolism in his crest and reign riled the imperial government, and his defeat at Seringapatam was widely seen as emblematic of Britain’s takeover of Indian lives and landscapes. Ideational reasons aside, tiger hunts for trophies and game also became intertwined with the colonial state’s ‘ability’ to ‘protect’ local Indians and livestock from the animal’s depredations.54 Although local hunters (shikaris) were widely recruited to assist in and provide habitat information during these parleys, the Raj rarely acknowledged them as important in these excursions.55 Of course, that these hunts were closely linked to ‘the construction of British imperial masculinity’ is a related part of the same story. It should also be noted that the formation of the Indian Forestry Department in 1864 –​and especially the Indian Forest Act of 1878 –​were instrumental in simultaneously expanding the reach of the imperial government in faunal control, agrarian settlement, and cash crop monocultures while also restricting the natural habitat of the tiger and other ‘wild’ animals. Indeed, as numerous studies have pointed out, the ideological and political categories of the ‘forest’ (managed) versus the ‘jungle’ (unruly) were allied with these projects of human and animal superintendence.56 The tiger was not alone in the imperial repertoire of animal management and classification. The wild boar, the wild buffalo, wolves, jackals, deer, rhinos, cheetahs, and leopards came under the sights of imperial foresters, bounty hunters, and sportsmen throughout the period under review. More than 80,000 tigers, 150,000 leopards, and 200,000 wolves were reported to have been slaughtered between 1875 and 1925 for control or ‘reward’.57 To be sure, myriad economic, social, and political reasons converged in the making of these animal classifications as ‘vermin’ or ‘useful’ in colonial India. As with natural environments, there were many considerations at stake. Although also closely linked to Indian kingship, the elephant, for instance, never made it to the list of ‘vermin’ faunas.58 Some reasons were obvious. Being crucial for warfare, carriage, and ‘wild’ animal hunts, the elephant was, by and large, not hunted down in the same manner as wild cats were.59 In some parts of colonial India, legal protection guaranteed it. Hunting the elephant (kheddah was one such method) –​especially if it went ‘rogue’ –​was, of course, not uncommon. And also, on certain occasions, elephant hunts were organised, such as when the Prince of Wales visited Ceylon in December 1875.60 Finally, it is also important to consider that these imperial relationships with animals were not one-​sided. Channelled through the Forestry Department’s efforts, and through personal initiatives and interests, many British viceroys also championed animal ‘conservation’ through the middle of the nineteenth century and early twentieth.61 Concern for ‘vanishing species’ (especially the one-​horned rhinoceros, the tiger, and the lion) often impelled British administrators and officials to recognise the limits of bounty hunts and game trophies even as they continued to deliberate their role as ‘protectors’ and guardians of India’s fauna and peoples.

Résumé The British colonial impact (and legacy) on the subcontinent’s ecological landscape and inhabitants was undeniably long-​standing and significant. From agrarian resettlement and access to resources, faunal management and irrigation works, forest regulation and fluvial regulation, plant monocultures to biochemical residues, habitat engineering to social discontent, epidemiology to public health schemes, these effects were at once environmental, biological, and political. These shifts notwithstanding, the foregoing analysis has argued that, in terms of ecological change, a neat divide between India’s precolonial and colonial periods is neither persuasive nor 277

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historically accurate. To be sure, India never became conducive to wholescale environmental ‘conquest’ by Old World settlers and faunas –​the ‘Neo-​Europe’, in Alfred Crosby’s use of the term62 –​and retained older, pre-​British forms and techniques of socio-​ecological management, habitat use, and social resilience well into the last days of colonial rule and beyond. As Mahesh Rangarajan aptly put it: ‘Despite the history of attempts at homogenizing social and ecological diversities, South Asia retained a level of heterogeneity that is perhaps without parallel.’63 That story continues into the present.

Notes 1 See David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–​ 1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 2 Although this section focuses on the forest history of undivided India, other contiguous regions of the subcontinent also have competing and complementary studies. See, for instance, D.G. Donovan, ‘Forests at the edge of empire: The case of Nepal’, in: Deepak Kumar, Vinita Damodaran, and Rohan D’Souza (eds.), The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 2011), pp. 231–​61. 3 Mahesh Rangarajan, ‘Environmental histories of India: Of states, landscapes, and ecologies’, in: Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds.), The Environment and World History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 229–​54. 4 Ulrike Kirchberger, ‘German scientists in the Indian Forest Service: A German contribution to the Raj?’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 29 (2), 2001, pp. 1–​26. 5 See K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); also see Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (New Delhi: OUP, 1999). 6 B.H. Baden-​Powell, ‘The political value of forest conservancy’, The Indian Forester, 2 (3), 1877, pp. 280–​ 7. For a recent history, see Pallavi V. Das, Colonialism, Development, and the Environment: Railways and Deforestation in British India, 1860–​1884 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 7 Although it was similar to the 1878 act, the 1927 version expanded the scope of forest produce to include timber, charcoal, wood, oil, resin, bark, and lac, among others. Punishments for violations of forestry regulations were also made more stringent: see. B.R. Beotra, The Indian Forest Act (XVI of 1927) with State Laws (Allahabad: Law Book, 1965); and Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests. 8 See B.H. Baden-​Powell, Forest Law: A Course of Lectures on the Principles of Civil and Criminal Law and on the Law of the Forest: Chiefly Based on the Laws in Force in British India (London: Bradbury, Agnew, 1893). 9 Ramachandra Guha, ‘Forestry in British and post-​British India: A historical analysis’, part I, EPW, 44, 1983, pp. 1882–​96, 1884. 10 See Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, expanded edn. (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2013); and Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, The Use and Abuse of Nature (New Delhi: OUP, 2005). 11 See Michael Mann, ‘Ecological change in north India: Deforestation and agrarian distress in the Ganga-​Jamna Doab, 1800–​1850’, Environment and History, 1 (2), 1995, pp. 201–​20; and idem, British Rule on Indian Soil: North India in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Manohar, 1999). 12 Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces 1860–​1914 (New Delhi: OUP, 1996). 13 Kavita Philip, Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 14 Ibid., 200. 15 Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 See S. Ravi Rajan, Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-​ Development 1800–​ 1950 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2008). 18 Gregory A. Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: CUP, 2007). 19 Rajan, Modernizing Nature, 19. 20 Indu Agnihotri, ‘Ecology, land use, and colonization: The canal colonies of Punjab’, in: Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds.), India’s Environmental History: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Nation (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012), pp. 37–​63, 40.

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The environment in colonial South Asia 21 Cited in Michael H. Fisher, An Environmental History of India: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-​First Century (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), 149. 22 Ibid. 23 See details in Agnihotri, ‘Ecology, land use, and colonization’, 37–​40. 24 Quoted in ibid., 38. 25 These classifications are used by Fisher, An Environmental History of India, 149–​51. 26 Ibid., 150. 27 Iqbal Ahmed Siddiqui, ‘History of water laws in India’, in: Chhatrapati Singh (ed.), Water Law in India (New Delhi: Indian Law Institute, 1992), pp. 290–​365. 28 See Elizabeth Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India: The United Provinces under British Rule, 1860–​1900, vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972); Agnihotri, ‘Ecology, land use, and colonization’; Rohan D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (New Delhi: OUP, 2006); and Imran Ali, The Punjab under Imperialism, 1885–​1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 29 Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India. For waterlogging problems in the Punjab canal colonies, see Agnihotri, ‘Ecology, land use, and colonization’, 37–​58. 30 Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India, 85. 31 Ibid., cited in D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed, 3. 32 See Ali, The Punjab under Imperialism, 1885–​1947. 33 Ian Stone, Canal Irrigation in British India: Perspectives on Technological Change in a Peasant Economy (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), 346. 34 See, for instance, the work of Anand A. Yang, Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985); Mark Brown, ‘Crime, governance and the Company Raj: The discovery of thuggee’, British Journal of Criminology, 42 (1), 2002, pp. 77–​95; Anand Pandian, Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Skaria, Hybrid Histories. 35 For a nuanced study of the Punjab canal colonisation schemes, see Agnihotri, ‘Ecology, land use, and colonization’; and idem, ‘Agrarian change in the canal colonies, Punjab, 1890–​1935’ (unpub. PhD thesis, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1987). 36 Praveen Singh, ‘Flood control for north Bihar: An environmental history from the “ground-​level” (1850–​ 1954)’, in: Kumar, Damodaran, and D’Souza, The British Empire and the Natural World, pp. 160–​78. 37 A masonry check dam made in a stream to impound water to regulate irrigation. 38 See Peter L. Schmitthenner, ‘Colonial hydraulic projects in south India: Environmental and cultural legacy’, in: ibid., pp. 180–​201. 39 D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed. The literature on dams and their socio-​ecological and political impacts, especially in the late colonial and postcolonial period in India, is vast; see, for instance, Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (New Delhi: OUP, 1995). 40 D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed, 15–​16. 41 For a longue durée analysis of this relationship, see Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–​ 1991 (Cambridge: CUP, 1991). 42 Guha, The Unquiet Woods. 43 Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest. 44 See Asoka Kumar Sen, ‘Collaboration and conflict: Environmental legacies and the Ho of Kolhan (1700–​1918)’, in: Kumar, Damodaran, and D’Souza (eds.), The British Empire and the Natural World, pp. 202–​27. 45 David Arnold, ‘Disease, resistance, and India’s ecological frontier, 1770–​1947’, in: James C. Scott and Nina Bhatt (eds.), Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the Cutting Edge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 186–​205; and idem, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze. 46 Admittedly, the study of the relationship between health, morbidity, and ecological change in colonial India can also be included in these discussions. Since these topics have usually been treated within the distinct field of STM (science, technology, medicine), I do not elaborate on them in this chapter. See, for example, David Arnold (ed.), Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–​1900 (Amsterdam: Rodop, 1996); Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-​Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–​1914 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,

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Arnab Dey 1993); and Ira Klein, ‘Development and death: Reinterpreting malaria, economics, and ecology in British India’, IESHR, 38 (2), 2001, pp. 147–​79. 47 See Ramachandra Guha, ‘Mahatma Gandhi and the environmental movement in India’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 6 (3), 1995, pp. 47–​61. 48 Shaha Parpia, ‘Hunting ground, agricultural land and the forest: Sustainable interdependency in Mughal India 1526–​1707’, Landscape History, 39 (2), 2018, pp. 23–​42; Anand Pandian, ‘Predatory care: The imperial hunt in Mughal and British India’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 14 (1), 2001, pp. 79–​107. 49 For a detailed account, see Mahesh Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History: An Introduction (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2001). 50 Ibid., 14. 51 Ibid., chs. 1–​4. 52 See idem, ‘The Raj and the natural world: The war against “dangerous beasts” in colonial India’, Studies in History, 14 (2), 1998, pp. 265–​99. 53 Joseph Sramek, ‘ “Face him like a Briton”: Tiger hunting, imperialism, and British masculinity in colonial India, 1800–​1875’, Victorian Studies, 48 (4), 2006, pp. 659–​80. 54 Hussain Shafqat, ‘Sports-​hunting, fairness and colonial identity: Collaboration and subversion in the Northwestern Frontier region of the British Indian Empire’, Conservation and Society, 8 (2), 2010, pp. 112–​26. 55 Ezra D. Rashkow, ‘Making subaltern shikaris: Histories of the hunted in colonial central India’, South Asian History and Culture, 5 (3), 2014, pp. 292–​313; Julie E. Hughes, Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 56 Rangarajan, ‘Environmental histories of India’. 57 Cited in idem, India’s Wildlife History, 32. 58 See D.K. Lahiri Choudhury (ed.), The Great Indian Elephant Book: An Anthology of Writings on Elephants in the Raj (New Delhi: OUP, 1999). 59 Jonathan Saha, ‘Colonizing elephants: Animal agency, undead capital and imperial science in British Burma’, British Journal for the History of Science Themes, 2, 2017, pp. 169–​89. 60 ‘The Prince of Wales in India: The elephant hunt’, The Daily Gazette, 14 December, 1875, p. 3. 61 Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History, esp. chs. 4 & 5. For an analysis of the workings of these wildlife ‘reserves’, especially in terms of protecting tigers in the post-​independent period, see Paul Greenough, ‘Bio-​ironies of the fractured forest: India’s tiger reserves’, in: Rangarajan and Sivaramakrishnan, India’s Environmental History, pp. 316–​56. 62 Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–​1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 1986). 63 Rangarajan, ‘Environmental histories of India’.

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22 QUESTIONING ‘RAILWAY-​C ENTRISM’ Infrastructural governance and cultures of the colonial transport system, 1760s–1900s Nitin Sinha

Introduction The theme of transport infrastructure has long been treated as a footnote to the social and economic history of South Asia. The only exception to this observation is the periodic interest shown in studying railways in scholarly monographs, implying that the only meaningful exploration of the transport history of India is through a focus on the railways. Right through the 1950s, as reflected in the works of Daniel Thorner, to the 1980s, with the works of John Hurd and Ian Derbyshire, among others, and –​latterly –​the culture-​, labour-​, and spatiality-​oriented research carried out mainly under the influence of an untiring railway scholar of modern India, Ian Kerr, railways have remained the central axis of transport infrastructure studies.1 Although recent work by Ritika Prasad and Aparajita Mukhopadhyay has added significantly to the thematic corpus by raising new questions and adopting new methodologies, the focus on the railways nonetheless has remained surprisingly unchanged.2 The reason behind this preoccupation can be summarised in a simple but generalised manner: because railways helped construct the notion of ‘modern India’, the modern Indian history in retrospect becomes accessible only through the ‘tracks of modernity’.3 The power of this association between the modern and the railways is so pernicious that even scholars such as Mukhopadhyay, who have significantly questioned the default mode of this pairing, have also looked only at the railways. This railway-​centric approach betrays an uneasy alliance between colonialist claims that nothing existed in India before the puffing and the chuffing of the railways began and the latter-​ day scholarly disinterest in conceptualising transport infrastructural governance in broader terms.4 An exclusive focus on the railways not only disfigures the colonial transport history temporally (as the resulting account is severely limited to the seven or eight decades following their introduction in 1853), the possibility to think broadly of ‘transport infrastructure’ as intersecting with and underpinning the histories of mobility, trade, gendered practices of travel, the politics of financial investment, forms of knowledge production, and social resistance also becomes restricted.5 The polarised positioning on the role of the railways –​between ‘bad’ and ‘benevolent’ imperialism –​has done exactly this: it has reduced infrastructure to a functional DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-23

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and narrow role of tools of either a beneficent or an exploitative empire.6 This has begun to change in the last two decades, as the cultural histories of modernity, practices of travel, and everyday forms of transport negotiations and challenges (such as overcrowding in carriages or flooding through embankments, etc.) have become the themes of investigation.7 Finally, excessive focus on the railways, which by default are spatially concentrated on the mainland, have created an spatial imbalance because, for ‘frontier/​border zones’, roads remained the prime highways of control and resource extraction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as has been shown in recent studies.8 In a country where steel mugs in railway toilets are chained to iron bars, largely to prevent theft, and the maddening labour of a heartbroken widower results in opening a pathway through a mountain, as goes the story of Dashrath Manjhi,9 we surely need to appreciate the deep embeddedness of infrastructure (and its lack) in everyday life. This is made possible by examining the ideologies and practices of governance and ways people use, craft, and imagine infrastructures as utilities, and ascribe them with meanings of social hierarchy, power, and access. Aspiration and alienation are intertwined in the meaning-​making process. It is necessary to outline the scope of ‘infrastructural governance’ before we proceed to chart its broad contours in the long history of South Asia’s colonial past. Primarily, I use the word ‘infrastructure’ as a network of systems of physical means of transport, communication, and mobility. It means, in practical terms and for the purposes of this chapter, roads, rivers, and railway tracks. Infrastructural governance, therefore, would include the set of ideas, ideologies, and practices in which such means of transport became part of state-​centric changes, mechanisms of control, and discourses of power. The socio-​cultural part of it relates to the domain of how people, groups, and societies engaged with such networks; how the changing forms of mobility or communication modified the existing practices of material and cultural exchanges and beliefs. Capital, technology, institutions, divinity, and morality are interlinked aspects of infrastructure. The practices of travel, mobility, and trade (explored through asking questions such as asking if ways of travelling affected the ways of ‘seeing’ and reporting) are part of infrastructural governance and culture as much as the environmental and ecological settings in which the means of transport emerge and which, in turn, they shape. Although the interlocked nature of technology and ecology has for some time been high on the agenda of research,10 in the South Asian context the overlapping zone of these two historiographical blocks has not been adequately explored. Surprisingly, only very recently has some breakthrough been made in understanding the environmental costs of railway construction in India.11 Finally, infrastructures are sites of social contestations, breakdowns, and aspirations; they are ‘critical locations through which sociality, governance and politics, accumulation and dispossession, and institutions and aspirations are formed, reformed, and performed’.12 As is usually the case with such exercises of conceptual delimiting, certain equally important aspects are left either unattended or marginally covered. Urban infrastructure, through the materiality of civic interventions (water pipes, sewage, drainage, pavements, etc.), which is a growing field of research in various disciplines of history, anthropology, and urban geography, is not covered here.13 Similarly, the flow of information and the technologies and institutions that assisted it (the zamindari dak and the telegraph in the nineteenth century and telephone and internet in the twentieth) obviously constitute a part of this infrastructural set-​up, but also remain largely tucked into the background of our discussion. This is not because of any hierarchical privileging of one set of themes over the other. Given the space constraints here, a focused engagement with ‘transport infrastructure’ and less with communication technologies and networks has been chosen, with a historiographical aim in mind: the need to shed the railway-​centrism in our approach if we wish to generate a more comprehensive account of colonial transport infrastructure. 282

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More importantly, infrastructure in historical accounts needs to emerge as a crucial site of investigation in which the political, the social, and the technological can at once be investigated both as interlinked processes and as a set of discourses liable to be recast (for instance, the language of technology and improvement that decoupled human and nature in the nineteenth century). ‘Infrastructure’ can, of course, be approached through different entry points –​such as technology and its scale, labour, gender, urban, and social adaptations and resistance –​and they will all come up with their own contributions to the general approach, but the common –​ and crucial –​point remains that infrastructural governance and infrastructural cultures need to be situated in the interrelated forces of ideological pursuits, ecological conditions, labouring processes, technological innovations and encounters, and social contestations. Transport involved both devising and perfecting technologies to harness nature,14 it involved labour power to move people and objects from one place to the other, and it itself became a site of ideological pursuit leading to a discursive contestatory terrain of social and civilisational hierarchies, expressed through phrases such as ‘improvement’, ‘moral and material progress’, ‘civilising mission’, and ‘public goods’.15 The chapter is chronologically arranged in two parts: first, the 1760s to 1820s; and, second, the 1820s to 1900s. But a brief contextualisation through the precolonial Mughal period is necessary to understand and identify the ‘new’ that happened with the onset of colonialism in the 1760s. In addition, without being dismissive of the transformative role of the railways, on which scholarship abounds, the focus is deliberately on non-​railway modes in order to put the historical changes and continuities in perspective. For this reason, the second section does not put a break in the 1850s/​60s, as is usually done, but traces the emergence of railways amid the existing discourses on steam, good roads, and infrastructural improvement.

Infrastructural systems: From Mughal to colonial I am inclined to claim that the diverse networks of roads and ferries, and then the coming of the railways, were integrated into a single infrastructural system of transport under colonialism. The compulsions of state formation, military marches and wars, territorial control, and –​later –​ capitalist investment in the nineteenth century led to a coalescing of the divergent means of communication into one system. But we are in the dark in terms of knowing how the infrastructural system of transport in the precolonial period worked, what its nature was, and how it was managed. The extent to which this system was uniform will remain unknown because the comparison between early colonial and immediate precolonial is often overlooked. Changes between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries are little known because ‘steam’ is treated as a fundamental dividing line in infrastructural history.16 We do know about certain episodes, such as Sher Shah Suri constructing the Grand Trunk Road dotted with inns and serais, Akbar’s and Jahangir’s measures to put milestones and construct serais on major routes, measures taken to control road robberies in the seventeenth century, and certainly the vibrant postal communication that existed in Mughal India.17 That the empire had departments related to these activities –​superintendent of the posts; mir bakshi and mir saman, who arranged for transport of the army and maintained musters of elephants, horses, camels, mules, etc.; mir bahr, in charge of water transport; and others –​points to the active thinking given to organise transport and communication as integral to the project of imperial expansion. But what is lacking is a synthesis of the dispersed and patchy research into a consolidated body of knowledge on Mughal infrastructural governance in the way I have tried to outline above. Some questions may be raised here to illustrate this point: if the upkeep of roads and waterways improved in 200 years of the early modern period, then who did that? Was it the 283

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state, the merchants, the countryside agrarian landlords, or the caste-​based craft and professional associations? How was authority over infrastructural networks parcelled and balanced off between different stakeholders? Did their improvement lead to better resource exploitation, price uniformity, and market integration? The use of horses in warfare as well as in postal relay is well documented, so why is it that an elaborate system of horse-​drawn carriage coaches, as existed in Europe, was never tried in South Asia? Or, was it tried but failed, and the details are largely lost now? Did the use of elephants for royal mobility (and the army) symbolise the cultural meaning of transport (the ‘beastly’ strength complementing the ‘royal’ character) alone or did ecological concerns govern such choices? Given the nature of the Indian monsoon, it would have become too expensive to constantly repair the roads, as a horse-​drawn coach system and other wheeled carriages require better surfaces, and hence regular maintenance. The use of pack animals –​bullocks, camels, and oxen –​was therefore very frequent in the conveyance of merchandise. Carts tied to bullocks and oxen, apart from palanquins, remained important for human conveyance, in a diminishing marginal way, up until the early twentieth century.18 But, here again, ecological concerns would have created cycles of mobility. Banjaras, a community of itinerant traders in bulk commodities, who moved with pack bullocks and oxen, must have found it difficult to do so in dry summer months as their cattle grazed while in transit.19 In other regions, especially eastern India, Sind, the upper north-​west (Lahore) and Kashmir, boats were important for conveying goods.20 Communities, ecologies, and commodities came together to create rhythms of infrastructural use and management, about which the aggregate picture of the Mughal Empire is patchy. These rhythms changed and intensified with the presence of European trading companies, which made use of both existing water and land systems of transport, and laid claim to the same structures of services provided by a variety of transport workers, such as bazaar qassids (foot couriers, postal entrepreneurs), boatmen, runners, and banjaras. In the absence of answers to these and similar questions related to the precolonial period, the problem becomes one of framework. If we start studying transport infrastructure from, say, the 1760s, which marks the beginning of formal colonial rule, then we also associate, unwittingly, the making of the infrastructural system with the processes of colonial change or stasis. In effect, we deny the history of infrastructure the benefit of deep historical contextualisation. We deny it to emerge as a historically shaped ‘structural force’ in itself –​at least heuristically –​of engendering historical changes around which social relations and power struggles might have coalesced. This has led even those scholars who have provided rare instances of an all-​India synthesis to formulaically argue that, in the late eighteenth century, ‘the old organization of transport had been very greatly disrupted’.21 This is a presumption rather than an argument. Where comparisons have been drawn, they have failed to address the core of the issue. For instance, it is not adequate to simply state, as Irfan Habib does, that in Mughal India the rise of a government postal service for all, as happened in seventeenth-​century Europe, just did not take place. This is indeed a crucial comparison, but what is required is further explanation of how ‘infrastructure and communication’ were shaped by the political, economic, and ecological exigencies of the time, which made them remain non-​uniformly controlled and unevenly accessed. What do universal access in one instance (the Western world) and uneven configuration in South Asia tell us about the ways infrastructure was protected, encouraged, and contested as an arm of governance and control? How did this ‘regime’ of infrastructure emerge and further shape the practices of governance related to news dissemination, intelligence, political conspiracies, and economic ties? And, finally, was it something integral to the uneven structures of infrastructure itself that, because of the lack of uniform control over them, the resulting political nature of 284

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hierarchies of dependences made the Mughal state, to paraphrase Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a ‘patchwork quilt’ rather than a ‘wall-​to-​wall carpet’?22

The Company state, 1760s–​1820s The network of infrastructure that the colonial state encountered, if we go by the accounts of James Rennell and others of the period, was dense. It inherited the precolonial structures rather than invented them. Yet ‘roadless India’ emerged as the tagline of colonial improvement discourse at the turn of the eighteenth century. Although precolonial notions of territoriality, institutions of espionage and communication, and even the physical tracks of pathways and waterways were all utilised by the colonial state, the two related views –​India does not have good roads and India does not need good roads –​loomed large in colonial discourse. Even critical studies, such as that of S.K. Munshi, uncritically accepted the charge of ‘roadless India’ pedalled by colonial rulers.23 In this period Britain underwent a canal boom and a turnpike revolution. The travel costs lessened, the spring technology in the horse coach system was introduced to give a comfier ride to the passengers sitting inside, and new profits were made by enterprising men who combined businesses by keeping both barges and horses.24 In Calcutta a little later, around 1780, reportedly the jutywallahs, shoemakers, intended to petition the governing council because of the decline in their trade. Bengalis, mostly banians and sircars who had gained in wealth from trading with Europeans and managing their households, had started keeping phaetons, chariots, buggies, and palanquins, sometimes all four. The petitioners claimed that the decline in the act of walking had affected sales of their shoes.25 The imitation of the sahib culture, in terms of taking morning and evening strolls along the maidan, did not seem to have become the rage among the Bengali new elites as much as the use of conveyance as a marker of social respect. Even for the British, such a performative spectacle of mobility was part of the codes of representation of power: the wealthy among them kept boats, horses, and palanquins for private hire, as Indian rajas and zamindars did. The less wealthy and affluent of white society, such as cadets and writers, fell into debts while trying to create the power of ‘white mobility’. Arab horses in Bengal were bought at high prices by East India Company (EIC) officials. If banians imitated their white sahibs in keeping phaetons then the cadets displayed pomp by keeping palanquins in their private hire, a practice that was legally banned by the Company state as early as in the 1750s. Although there is a growing literature on transport and communication in the early colonial period, mostly on construction and labour, the social and legal parameters of usages could just be the beginning of producing denser and regionally varied works on ‘cultures of mobility’ in this period, which is currently either studied only in regard to the railways or packaged under the colonial discursive ‘gaze’ analysis framework.26 Horses and palanquins were the major means of transport within the city. Between cities from the eastern to the northern stretch of the country, the means of communication were mainly roads and rivers. No reference to the presence of a commercial horse carriage system on any of the thoroughfares exists. The inland canal navigation in India also remained weak, most probably as a result of large ecological and fluvial changes in the course of rivers, but also reflecting administrative preferences.27 Around the middle of the nineteenth century there were efforts to double up irrigation channels for navigational purposes, but they proved short-​lived.28 Dependence on two main river systems –​the Ganga and the Indus –​meant that infrastructural patterns of mobility remained guided by seasonal changes. In peninsular India, there was little use of rivers as channels of communication, except for the Mahanadi, which connected the 285

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coast with the mainland. Instead, coastal transport was better developed (a theme not covered here). Although, as merchants, the European companies participated and utilised the existing networks by paying taxes and toll duties collected at different points on rivers and roads –​a practice that they often characterised as ‘exactions’ associated with ‘oriental despotism’ –​the relationship of governance to infrastructure gradually began to change when the EIC transitioned from being a group of muslin buyers to that of pen-​wielding rulers. Trade, taxes, military and postal mobility, and the ‘rule of law’ became the main axes of engagement of the new Company state with the means of infrastructure. The intention of the new state was clear: unlike the Mughals, it wanted to create a wall-​to-​wall carpet of control over networks of communication and curb unwanted forms of mobility. Institutionally, the Company was not yet capable of carrying out the desired programme, and often it had to make compromises that reveal the contingent nature of infrastructural control and contests over the means of infrastructure reflecting broader political, labour, and commercial arrangements. Two areas became prominent. One was the acquisition of territorial knowledge; the other was the construction and improvement of roads, together with the imposition of controls. Long before railway maps appeared, the roads maps from the eighteenth century presented the idea of a unified territory. Such maps were products of road, route, and river surveys, which were undertaken on a wide scale in the first 50 years of colonial rule. They reveal the importance of transport networks in the imagination of the territory and in the creation of knowledge that the colonial state invested in.29 Trade expeditions, sent to far-​off places such as Tibet (George Bogle), also generated this knowledge.30 Of interest for future research would be to move away from physical means of transport and commodities to the changing role of certain knowledge communities, such as of gosains, fakirs, and banjaras, who earlier significantly contributed in the growth of colonial infrastructural knowledge but later were sidelined.31 This was compensated for, however, when new areas of exploration opened up in the nineteenth century, as ‘pundits’, the knowledge intermediaries in survey exercises, remained important.32 The territorial control and trade structures established through monopoly trade over certain commodities brought networks of movement under surveillance. Although there was investment in making the New Military Road (NMR) connecting Bengal with northern India, together with the formation of district road fund committees, in the late eighteenth century, the political and administrative will to invest more was divided. These new roads also served as means of colonial surveillance. Within the city, such as Calcutta, the nocturnal sojourns of lascars, international seamen, servants, and other such supposedly low-​class people were guarded through a system of city night patrol. Along the river highway of the Ganga, night patrol boats were established at different points to check the movements of robber gangs as well as individuals carrying trade in prohibited commodities. The police choukies (outposts) manned the NMR to control the illicit salt trade. In this nexus of mobility and criminality, the infrastructural networks became nodes of control.33 Connectivity and boundary demarcation are inseparable processes, as were colonisation and claims to modernisation, within which the creation of a superior infrastructure lies at the heart –​both in the past and in the present.34 The Mughal infrastructural governance mirrored its general policy, which it followed in other sectors as well: delegation of authority and the parcelling of revenue into hierarchically organised different stakeholders, all accountable for maintaining law and order in their units and segments and providing the required service.35 In such cases, the destruction of pathways and roads leading to nodal centres of power, as was often done by refractory zamindars and chiefs to avoid attacks, or of increased demand for revenue and duties when higher nodes of power started weakening, were part of the political negotiation and structural balancing acts. The outcome of wars depended on the control of strategic passages and routes.36 The colonial state, 286

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in spite of its protracted institutional reliance on precolonial personnel and systems, altered this by a centralising motive in which different types of monopolies emerged –​over violence, trade, and movements –​which shook the existing power balance structure. It needed roads, ferries, and highways over which it could establish direct and inalienable control. In the earlier regime, infrastructure can be seen as a link connecting different social power holders packed in a dynamic, complementary, and contestatory relationship. Under the colonial regime, it became more of a site that could be controlled only singularly by the state. The territorial imagination, the trading monopolies, the subjugation of refractory chiefs, the acquisition of knowledge about routes, and –​not least –​control over various forms of labour constituted the process of colonial state formation. Infrastructure was a key component of this process –​a field that still needs deeper exploration.

Technology and ideology, 1820s–​1900s Two features define the nature of this period: technological innovation and ideological shift. The new agent of transportation –​steam power –​entered into play in this period, whose value for speedier communication was first realised in India during the Anglo-​Burmese wars (1823–​ 26) on the river Brahmaputra. Before its importance was recognised by the state authorities, some private interests had taken the lead in assembling steamships with imported engines. The fascination of steam also pervaded the minds of Indian rulers. The ruler of Avadh was one of the first to request a steamship model for his court. In fact, reportedly he also had a pleasure steamboat plying the river Gomti.37 The Diana, which was originally meant to ply the river Canton, was later reshipped to Calcutta in 1823, but, on the refusal of the government to purchase it, was used by the agency houses in Calcutta. During the Anglo-​Burmese wars in the 1820s, however, the state realised its potential; another steamship, the Enterprise, was purchased in England and shipped to Rangoon, which reportedly saved the government over Rs. 600,000.38 William Bentinck, the utilitarian governor-​general, showed keen interest in improving the infrastructure of steam, but –​not to miss out –​of good roads as well. He described the lack of good roads as a positive scandal and a disgrace to the British government in India. Part of the blame, of course, was put on the Mughal rulers, but a number of voices from within the EIC also pointed to the lack of financial interest of the London board and the Company state as leading to the deterioration of Indian roads.39 In the field of steam technology, a long phase of experimentation started of making steamships work on ‘treacherous’ Indian rivers. The tug system was introduced, as steamships frequently hit shoals and sunken logs, which made long navigation between Calcutta and Allahabad, and further upstream, extremely challenging. Research done on the rivers Ganga and Indus currently suggests that their success was limited. Country boats remained an important medium of transport, and the technology of steam failed to overcome ecological constraints. This is an area, though, that still requires further work.40 Between the 1820s and the 1840s trunk lines received a significant amount of investment. The Grand Trunk Road (Calcutta–​Peshawar), the Bombay-​Agra Road, and the Calcutta-​ Bombay Mail Road were the three main ones. Other thoroughfares of length of around 100 miles and, more importantly, the Darjeeling Cart Road were also constructed in the 1840s. The large-​scale mobilisation of convict labour and hill coolies for the construction of these trunk lines still awaits in-​depth scholarly analysis.41 More work, particularly on western and southern India, is also required to get a fuller picture of the colonial state’s investment in roads. Under the utilitarian impulse, the ideas of the ‘measurement’ and ‘calculation’ of road distances started to standardise the speed and payment to palanquin and dak runners.42 The 287

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publication of road books through the quartermaster-​general’s office and post office, as well as some done independently, aimed to give accuracy to distance measurements, as troops, travellers, and merchants required such accurate information. Needless to say, because of administrative practices and ecological conditions, they were often fixed arbitrarily. The denser ecological zones of forests, the Terai, and hilly areas where routes were still outside state control provided shelter to refractory powers. Dependence on native guides was still far from over. It is worth noting that the emergence of the centralised authority of the state was coterminous with the linearity of the roads as arms of the state.43 That said, a generalised reading had better be avoided, as roads and thoroughfares were part of social contestations for a range of groups –​from convicts to local chiefs. It is no surprise that in any treaty agreement with local leaders the colonial state still made them responsible for keeping the lines of communication open. Roads were infrastructural sites that required labour, finance, and constant repair; they were used by pilgrims, merchants, ‘thugs’, and sojourners, and they displayed the prestige of officials and rajas. The sinew of power was interwoven with granules of contestation, which need to be viewed simultaneously. The impression of physical linearity of power would then appear more rhythmic and contingent. In the mainland of the riverine plains, the discourse of improvement concretely and administratively materialised in the ascendancy of ‘public works’. A separate Public Works Department (PWD) was set up in 1854 by the then governor-​general, Lord Dalhousie, as part of his reform programme for bringing ‘moral and material progress’ to the colonised, but the build-​up to it, institutionally, ideologically, and technologically, can be traced back to at least the two preceding decades. By the 1820s and 1830s ‘public works’, though still supervised by the Military Board, began to acquire a distinct meaning in comparison to ‘military works’.44 Famines added a new layer of meaning to ‘public works utility’, paving the way for the state’s philanthropy to displace the alleged indigenous notions of charity.45 A notable beginning is the new research into women’s famine relief work, which promises to open the gendered approach to the production of infrastructure as a separate field.46 The Thomason College of Civil Engineering was set up in 1847, and three more civil engineering colleges were established prior to 1870 to help supply the PWD with engineers.47 Engineering colleges, railway workshop schools, and workers’ night schools emerged as institutions of knowledge production and skill for running the new technology of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. Some recent works promise to encourage future researchers to explore the knowledge base and its social locations in this history of transport and technology.48 Good roads, the power of steam, and the new telegraph technology created a discursive grid of control. The commercial and military utilities were both part of it, as they were in the promotional literature on the railways a decade later. Infrastructure became an inalienable component of securing British rule as well as ‘improving’ the condition of the colonised. It can perhaps be said that, unlike the Mughal precedent of public works, which was invariably attached to notions of piety and charity, in the early nineteenth century ‘public works’ started acquiring a ‘secular’ hue. This was a long-​drawn-​out process –​and also a contested one, in which concerns for finances intermeshed with the control of power. There was no absolute switch from the religious-​charitable connotation of public works to the secular modernising one. In fact, until the end of the nineteenth century local notables were encouraged, through the language of charity and community service, to spend on ‘public works’. The infrastructural politics of the late nineteenth century was not ‘modern’ in its narrow sense (of being secular or a-​religious).49 In an ironic twist, modern transport structures, including railways, popularised ‘native’ religiosity and pilgrimage.50 This might have surprised the chronicler Rudyard Kipling, but capturing the pilgrim traffic to places such as Allahabad, Benares, and Gaya was not in fact a by-​product but, rather, part of the planning of early 288

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railway proposals. Subsequently this also received corroboration when railway companies put out adverts to encourage pilgrims; indeed, special trains were organised on occasions such as the Kumbh Mela.51 Through these examples we notice that infrastructural governance and infrastructural culture often did not sit comfortably with each other. Much of this tussle reveals what infrastructure meant to different stakeholders: the authorities in London, EIC officials, zamindars, local rulers, pilgrims, and various labourers. It also invites us to think more closely about the cultures of mobility, which give meaning to means of infrastructure. Travel, for pilgrims, was also a form of penance. For boatmen, going up and down the Ganga was their work, but also one in which rituals were not compromised. They cooked on the shore only when the boats moored in the evening, to avoid defilement because of the ‘white presence’. Working on the road was punishment for convicts, but the road also acted as a ‘zone of freedom’ for them to smoke hookah, socialise and chat, and flee, if possible. For British masters and mistresses, travelling with a large retinue of servants meant that roads and rivers created a long ‘stretch of display’ of power.52 The coming of the railways in the 1850s symbolised the ‘true’ power of steam for awakening the ‘slothful and slumbering’ Indians. This discourse, as noted, had antecedents in the technological grid of good roads and steamships. The new lines of railways followed the old circuits of trade and mobility. Indeed, a change in patterns of connection starts becoming evident towards the end of the nineteenth century. The extent of economic changes in terms of price uniformity and market integration is still being debated.53 The new ‘modern’, ‘secular’, and homogenised culture of mobility has also been convincingly questioned recently.54 But in other aspects, such as time discipline, the role of the railways in India, as was true globally, seems significant. A good number of works (as already cited) in the recent years have covered these issues. In the twentieth century railways became a site of violence, disruption, and destruction under the nationalist and extremist forms of politics. From the Kakori train robbery in 1925 to that of the dead bodies stacked in railway carriages during Partition, the train became the symbol of mobility and pain, hope and despair. In the midst of this, by the 1930s and 1940s roads had started challenging the railways’ earnings in certain sectors. They became part of urban planning documents.55 On the one hand, traffic and congestion led to new kinds of imaginings of social and public spaces; on the other, blockading them emerged as a form of protest against the state.56 The notion of improvement engendered new forms of resistance. The mugs that are chained in railway toilets symbolise a new kind of engagement with public infrastructure. Anecdotally speaking, the practice of stealing electric bulbs was rampant in postcolonial India until very recently. The alienating nature of infrastructure –​the popular belief that public works are sarkari,57 and hence liable to be vandalised –​tells us about the cryptic meaning of the term ‘public’ itself. The works that claimed to benefit the public became the sites of public ire. It is only through the blending of material, ideological, and discursive perspectives that the transport history of infrastructure can be brought into the mainstream of Indian history.

Notes 1 Representative works are of Daniel Thorner, Investment in Empire: British Railway and Steam Shipping Enterprise in India, 1825–1849 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950); John Hurd, ‘Railways’, in: Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, c.1757–​c.1970, expanded edn. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005), pp. 737–​61; Ian Derbyshire, ‘Economic change and the railways in north India, 1860–1914’, MAS, 21 (3), 1987, pp. 521–​45; Ian J. Kerr, Engines of Change: The Railroads that Made India (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007); and idem (ed.), 27 Down: New

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Nitin Sinha Departures in Indian Railway Studies (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007). A very important work is that of Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 2 Ritika Prasad, Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2015); Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, Imperial Technology and ‘Native’ Agency: A Social History of Railways in Colonial India, 1850–1920 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). 3 Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Prasad, but more so Mukhopadhyay, substantially complicated this claim, albeit by not going before and beyond the railways but by looking at the inner social tensions and hierarchies of the ‘modern’ that railways produced but also succumbed to. 4 For a longer treatment, see Nitin Sinha, ‘Histories of transport and communication in South Asia: A first review’, Journal of Transport History, 2020, doi: 10.1177/​0022526620971461. 5 Select published and unpublished works that have in the past and more recently tried to go beyond the railway-​centric framework are by S.K. Munshi, Geography of Transport in Eastern India under the British Raj (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1980); Robert Varady, ‘Rail and road transport in nineteenth century Awash: Competition in a north Indian province’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1981); Ravi Ahuja, Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa (c.1780–1914) (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2009); and Nitin Sinha, Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s (London: Anthem Press, 2012). 6 Some scholars, such as Niall Ferguson and Tirthankar Roy, have highlighted the positive role of ‘imperial links’ in India when it came to infrastructural development. Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: OUP, 2000); Niall Ferguson, ‘British imperialism revised: The costs and benefits of “Anglobalization” ’, Historically Speaking, 4 (4), 2003, 21–​7. Although Ferguson showed the importance of the empire in terms of capital outflow, he did not mention that the British capital investment in building Indian railways was secured through a state guarantee of 5 per cent security on the investment. By 1868 £80 million was invested in the railways, on which the colonial government of India, using Indian money, had paid approximately around £14 million in guarantee. By 1900 the amount of guarantee had risen to £50 million. Data taken from Daniel Thorner, ‘Capital movement and transportation: Great Britain and the development of India’s railways’, Journal of Economic History, 11 (4), 1951, pp. 389–​402; and R.D. Tiwari, Railways in Modern India, Bombay (Bombay: New Book, 1941), 56. 7 See chapters in Kerr, 27 Down. 8 In fact, they helped in creating the idea of frontier and border. Lipokmar Dzuvichu, ‘Roads and the Raj: The politics of road building in colonial Naga Hills, 1860s–1910s’, IESHR, 50 (4), 2013, pp. 473–​94; Raile Rocky Ziipao, ‘Roads, tribes, and identity in northeast India’, Asian Ethnicity, 21 (1), 2018, pp. 1–​21. 9 See anon., ‘Dashrath Manjhi: Some lesser known facts on the Mountain Man who worked for 22 years and carved a path through a mountain’, India Today, 15 July 2015, www.indiatoday.in/​education-​ today/​gk-​current-​affairs/​story/​dashrath-​manjhi-​282520-​2015-​07-​15, accessed: 4 March 2020. 10 Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr, ‘At the intersection of histories: Technology and the environment’, Technology and Culture, 39 (4), 1998, pp. 601–​40. 11 Iftekhar Iqbal, The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840–1943 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), ch. 6; Prasad, Tracks of Change, ch. 3; Pallavi Das, Colonialism, Development, and the Environment: Railways and Deforestation in British India 1860–1884 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 12 Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel (eds.), The Promise of Infrastructure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 3. In the Indian case of resistance over infrastructure, see Lisa Mitchell, ‘To stop train pull chain: Writing histories of contemporary political practice’, IESHR, 48 (4), 2011, pp. 469–​95; Nitin Sinha, ‘Infrastructural governance and social history: Roads in colonial and postcolonial India’, History Compass, 15 (9), 2017, doi: 10.1111/​hic3.12401. 13 See chapters in Anand, Gupta, and Appel, The Promise of Infrastructure. For some recent interventions in South Asia, see Michael Mann, ‘Delhi’s belly: On the management of water, sewage and excreta in a changing urban environment during the nineteenth century’, Studies in History, 23 (1), 2017, pp. 1–​31. 14 A very useful essay on understanding the complex nature of the relationship between technology and nature is by Catherine Larrère and Raphael Larrère, ‘Technology and nature’, in: Sacha Loeve, Xavier Guchet, and Bernadette Bensaude-​Vincent (eds.), French Philosophy of Technology: Classical Readings and Contemporary Approaches (Cham: Springer, 2018), pp. 189–​208.

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Colonial cultures of transport 15 On the power of the discourse of ‘opening up the interiors’ and its relationship with steam, see Ravi Ahuja, ‘ “Opening up the country’: Patterns of circulation and politics of communication in early colonial Orissa’, Studies in History, 20 (1), 2014, pp. 73–​130; Sinha, Communication and Colonialism, chs. 2–​3; and Harald Fischer-​Tiné and Michael Mann (eds.), Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London: Anthem Press, 2003). 16 Jean Deloche, ‘Introduction’, in: Transport and Communications in India prior to Steam Locomotion, vol. 1, Land Transport (New Delhi: OUP, 1993), p. 1. 17 On postal communication, see Irfan Habib, ‘Postal communication in Mughal India’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 46, 1985, pp. 236–​52 (hereafter PIHC); and Michael Fisher, ‘The office of Akhbar Nawis: The transition from Mughal to British forms’, MAS, 27 (1), 1993, pp. 45–​82; for a brief general account, Dig Vijay Singh, ‘Transport and communication in Mughal India’, Prajna-​Bharati, 10, 1999, pp. 151–​9. A number of insightful empirical articles have appeared in the volumes of Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, which must be thoroughly sifted for future work. A recent unpublished work is of great value: Murari Kumar Jha, ‘The political economy of the Ganga River: Highway of state formation in Mughal India, c.1600–1800’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Leiden, 2013). 18 Abul Fazl and Pietro della Valle both compared the speed oxen could attain with horses. Sarkar, Inland Transport, 26–​7. 19 On banjaras in general, see Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707, 2nd rev. edn. (New Delhi: OUP, 1999), 69–​70; Robert Varady, ‘North Indian banjaras: Their evolution as transporters’, South Asia, 2 (1/​2), 1979, pp. 1–​18; Ian J. Kerr, ‘On the move: Circulating labor in pre-​ colonial, colonial and post-​colonial India’, International Review of Social History, 51 (S14), 2006, pp. 85–​ 109; Sinha, Communication and Colonialism, ch. 5. The other factor was rain, making pack and not draught (ploughs, carts, guns, native chariots, etc.) cattle conveyance possible on roads. Mountstuart Elphinstone, The History of India, vol. 1, 2nd edn. (London: John Murray, 1843), 15–​16. 20 Habib, The Agrarian System; Clive Dewey, Steamboats on the Indus: The Limits of Western Technological Superiority in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 2014). 21 Habib, The Agrarian System, 75, fn. 40. 22 Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Mughal State 1526–1750 (New Delhi: OUP, 2001), 57. I am here influenced by Timothy Mitchell’s idea that it was coal and the nature of energy production and distribution that laid foundations for mass democracy, thus centring material artefacts and associated technology in explaining the resulting changes in political and social domains, rather than the other way around. 23 Munshi, Geography of Transport, 3. For a detailed critique of ‘roadless India’, see Sinha, Communication and Colonialism, introd. & ch. 2. 24 Kirstin Olsen, Daily Life in 18th-​Century England, 2nd edn. (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2017), 279–​94. 25 Henry Yule and Arthur Burnell, Hobson-​Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-​Indian Words and Phrases, ed. William Crooke (London: J. Murray, 1903), 49. 26 Paulami Guha Biswas, ‘Precarious measures and precise numbers: Fixing the milestones in early colonial eastern India’, EPW, 52 (4), 2017, pp. 43–​50; Gagan Sood, ‘The informational fabric of eighteenth-​century India and the Middle East: Couriers, intermediaries and postal communication’, MAS, 43 (5), 2019, pp. 1085–​116; David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 27 Railways remained more important than canals in the colonial policy of infrastructure, which later became subject to criticism by people such as R.C. Dutt. 28 On the general lack of interest in canal construction, see Deloche, Transport and Communications in India. 29 On the less worked latter set of themes, see Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), ch. 2; and Sinha, Communication and Colonialism, ch. 4. 30 Kate Telstcher, The High Road to China: George Bogle, Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to Tibet (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008); Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). 31 Gosains, sanyasis, fakirs, and banjaras were trader-​cum-​military mercenaries of the eighteenth century who became powerful thanks to the regional state formation and thus became objects of colonial control. Because they possessed knowledge about trading routes and borderland polities (Nepal Terai,

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Nitin Sinha Tibet, etc.), however, the early colonial state also depended on them. See William R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: CUP, 2006). 32 Clements Robert Markham, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys (London: Secretary of State for India in Council, 1871). 33 Nitin Sinha, ‘Mobility, control and criminality in early colonial India’, IESHR, 45 (1), 2008, pp. 1–​33. 34 For roads as tools of British colonization and contemporary ‘development’ in India’s north-​east, see Zilpao, ‘Roads, tribes, and identity in northeast India’. 35 Rohan D’Souza’s work on eastern deltaic Orissa is a good example showing such a Mughal arrangement: idem, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (New Delhi: OUP, 2006). 36 Jha, ‘The political economy of the Ganga River’. 37 ‘Steam boats in India’, Calcutta Journal of Politics and General Literature, 5 (283), 1821, p. 631. 38 See Henry T. Bernstein, Steamboats on the Ganges: An Exploration in the History of India’s Modernization through Science and Technology (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1960); G.A. Prinsep, An Account of Steam Vessels and of Connected Proceedings with Steam Navigation in British India (Calcutta: Government Gazette Press, 1830); and Sinha, Communication and Colonialism, 24–​32, 172–​80. 39 Sinha, Colonialism and Communication, 150–​60. George Tremenheere, in compiling a history of public works in Bengal, expressed surprise that an administrator of the stature of Lord Hastings failed to put the savings into works of public improvement. Writing in 1858, he mentioned that the term ‘public works’ had no significance in India in the 1820s. Idem, On Public Works in Bengal Presidency (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1858). 40 Sinha, Colonialism and Communication; Dewey, Steamboats on the Indus. 41 Lipokmar Dzüvichü, ‘Empire on their backs: Coolies in the eastern borderlands of the British Raj’, International Review of Social History, 59 (S22), 2014, pp. 89–​112. 42 Biswas, ‘Precarious measures and precise numbers’; Chitra Joshi, ‘Dak roads, Dak runners, and the reordering of communication networks’, International Review of Social History, 57 (2), 2012, pp. 169–​89. 43 David Arnold, ‘On the road: A social itineration of India’, Contemporary South Asia, 22 (1), 2014, pp. 8–​20. 44 On the idea of improvement, some selective texts are: anon., ‘India: Its products and improvement’, The Calcutta Review, 30, 1858, pp. 33–​65; Arthur Cotton, Public Works in India, Their Importance; with Suggestions for their Extension and Improvement (London: Richardson Bros., 1854); and Peter Robb, ‘British rule and Indian “improvement” ’, Economic History Review, 34 (4), 1981, pp. 507–​23. On the changing nature of ‘public works’, see Ahuja, Pathways of Empire; and Sinha, Colonialism and Communication. 45 Sanjay Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy and the Colonial State: North India in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: OUP, 2001), ch. 4. 46 Madhavi Jha, ‘ “Men diggers and women carriers”: Gendered work on famine public works in colonial north India’, International Review of Social History, 65 (1), 2020, pp. 71–​98. 47 The hold of the military remained intact, however, in organising the pedagogy of the first four engineering colleges of India as well as over the PWD’s organisation: John Black, ‘The military influence on engineering education in Britain and India, 1848–1906’, IESHR, 46 (2), 2009, pp. 211–​39. 48 Aparajith Ramnath, The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry, and the State 1900–​47 (New Delhi: OUP, 2017); Arun Kumar, ‘Skilling and its histories: Labour market, technical knowledge and the making of skilled workers in colonial India (1880–1910)’, Journal of South Asian Development, 12 (3), 2018, pp. 1–​23. 49 Ravi Ahuja, ‘ “The bridge builders”: Some notes on railways, pilgrimage and the British “civilizing mission” in colonial India’, in: Fischer-​Tiné and Mann, Colonialism as Civilizing Mission, pp. 195–​216. 50 Ian J. Kerr, ‘Reworking a popular religious practice: The effects of railways on pilgrimage in 19th and 20th century South Asia’, in: idem (ed.), Railways in Modern India (New Delhi: OUP), pp. 304–​27. 51 See Kerr, Engines of Change, 92–​5. 52 It is important to think not only of how mobile people interacted with means of mobility but also of how such rivers and roads might locally get meanings that otherwise, because of being a channel or a linear unit, may appear as homogeneous. The same river, for instance, is known by local names in different segments. Ecologically and culturally they are not uniform, therefore. See Jean Deloche, Transport and Communications, vol. 2, 9–​11. The same also goes for the nature of the trade, which depended upon water conditions in different segments. In the upper Ganga basin and in Bihar/​Nepal Terai streams, timber floating was the easiest thing to do: ibid, 19. In contrast, in the Sundarban area,

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Colonial cultures of transport composed of flat and marshy wetlands, passage along small creeks and streams required special kinds of skill and boats. These ecological conditions explain infrastructural formations and social conditions related to industry (boat making), skill (in reading tides and rowing), and livelihoods. Fiction can provide great insights to historians in giving a ‘rounded’ history of infrastructure: on the Sundarbans, see Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (HarperCollins, 2004); on the Indus, see Alice Albinia, Empire of the Indus (London: John Murray, 2008). 53 For a succinct review of this literature, see Ritika Prasad, ‘Railways in colonial South Asia’, Mobility in History, 6 (1), 2015, pp. 120–​6. 54 Prasad, Tracks of Change; Mukhopadhyay, Imperial Technology and ‘Native’ Agency. 55 Awadhendra Sharan, In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c.1850–2000 (New Delhi: OUP, 2014). 56 David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 57 Literally, the term refers to property owned by government: trains, electricity, and other such utilities. In its popular usage, the destruction and violation of such property (sarkari property) is seen as a form of protest.

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23 COLONIAL PORT CITIES AND THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF EMPIRE Tracing the geography of alcohol in British colonial India Swati Chattopadhyay

Introduction In a narrative celebrating the rise of British power in India on the occasion of the Imperial Assemblage of 1877, J. Talboys Wheeler included a 1677 map of Fort St George, Madras (Figure 23.1). He explained the features of the settlement depicted in the map in terms of its enclosing wall, fortification, and the separation of ‘White Town’ and ‘Black Town’.1 The map neatly indexed 200 years of British presence in the Indian subcontinent, and served to demonstrate the growth of empire from the first ‘permanent’ foothold to the establishment of British paramountcy across the subcontinent. The Imperial Assemblage was held in Delhi, the erstwhile centre of Mughal power in India. From there the triumphant imperialists could now look back across time and space towards the shores of the subcontinent, from where their trade and conquest had begun. Wheeler was not being terribly creative. By that time the genesis of empire in the myth of founding port cities, the idea of colonial cities as dual cities divided into black and white towns, and fortified port cities as colonial bridgeheads had become the stock of colonialist histories. What is surprising, perhaps, is that these colonialist frameworks have had a remarkable shelf life. As the British Empire disintegrated after the Second World War, several important studies were published to take stock of the role of colonial cities in the history of colonial trade and territorial acquisition in South Asia. Colonial port cities in these works continued to be seen as ‘colonial bridgeheads’ that facilitated further territorial acquisition and trade advantages.2 Viewing them as a sequence of developments from trading posts to port cities, this framework assumed a fairly neat correspondence between increased economic strength, military power, and territorial acquisition: a trading post as the first attempt to gain a foothold along the sea coast acquires its territorial imperatives with the establishment of a factory, which subsequently reports to the trading centre, and the eventual success of the trading center transforms it into

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Figure 23.1  Map of Madras, 1677. Source: J. Talboys Wheeler, The History of the Imperial Assemblage at Delhi, held on the 1st January 1877, to Celebrate the Assumption of the Title of Empress of India by Her Majesty the Queen (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1877), n.p.

a large port city. Having assumed ancillary functions such as revenue and military administration, such a port city emerges as a presidency town that serves as the administrative centre of a large territorial division. These histories described scalar growth from small to large, and from dispersed to nucleated, from the ‘birth’ of colonial cities to their eventual consolidation and maturity. Indeed, most histories of colonial urbanism follow this framework. In these narratives, the growth and maturity of colonial cities signal the achievement of colonial sovereignty. Colonial port cities are commonly described in terms of three dominant features that worked in close relation to each other: the fort, the port, and an administrative centre. A morphological analysis that begins with these features, however, tends to sacrifice heterogeneity for clarity, the role of everyday encounters in favour of big events, and the fine grain of urban fabric for large buildings and dominant spaces.3 The tremendous complexity of urban formations –​and the multitude of actors shaping these colonial cities –​are thus analytically short-​changed to foreground colonial dominance. This habit of imagination has been difficult to break. In this chapter I argue for a different kind of urban history, one that takes into account the ‘lumpy’ geographies of empire.4 Attention to the unevenness of urban formation and experience helps us grapple with certain aspects of colonial cities that have long intrigued scholars: the correlation between the organisation of city space and the relative economic strengths of the European and Indian communities; the politics of land use and the ineffectiveness of urban segregation, despite the racialised practices of a colonial society; and the emergence of new spaces and building methods to accommodate the functioning of colonial trade, administration, and the army. Together, these features constitute the infrastructure of empire. The kind of urban

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history I advocate involves grounding the infrastructure of empire in everyday material culture, and necessitates opening up the spatial and temporal bounds within which we have developed the habits of urban spatial imagination. This urban history demands altering the imagination of the scale of empire that favours the big scale, large capital, bulk commodities, and large spaces as units of analysis. Rethinking scale and paying attention to small transactions and the small spaces of empire help us locate a wider array of agents and activities. These small spaces, often service and labouring spaces, held up the infrastructure of empire, even if they sat askew with the dominant infrastructure in terms of disposition. Attention to the small scale helps unravel the idea of the colonial city –​really, any city –​as processually coherent. With the goal of linking the large scale of empire with small commodities and small spaces, I take as my starting point the passage of a modest-​scale import commodity –​alcohol –​and try to understand how its distribution and consumption was made possible. This is to say, rather than begin with a mercantile agency or a city as a unit of analysis, I ground the journey of alcoholic beverages in material culture and the built spaces in which these were stored and consumed in ports and commercial, military, and domestic establishments to understand how this infrastructure was constituted and transformed. These spaces –​taverns, bottlekhanas and godowns (storage places) –​were often dimensionally modest, but the warehouses in ports, commercial, and even domestic establishments, as well as the distillery compounds, could be considerably larger. Smallness is thus not always a descriptor of size but, rather, a referent to the site’s/​ object’s/​people’s marginalised position in the historiography of British colonialism. Tracing the geography of alcohol helps us see the connections between port cities and their surroundings, and the manner in which new spatial types were created, and how they contributed to the organisation and experience of the urban landscape.

The passage of liquor The history of the importation of European liquor into the Indian subcontinent goes back to at least the seventeenth century. Canary wine, Shiraz wine, arrack, and ‘pale-​punch’ –​a concoction of brandy, rose water, lime juice, and sugar –​shared the table with European-​and Indian-​ styled food at the factory table, taverns, and residences.5 The factory records of Bengal dating from the 1660s to 1680s carry ample evidence of Spanish wine, brandy, and liquor glasses being bought by the elite of the Dacca (Dhaka) court and given to them as presents by the servants of the East India Company (EIC).6 In this, the English followed the lead of Dutch merchants. In the late eighteenth century the most common imports of alcoholic beverage were claret, Madeira, porter, pale ale, beer, rum, sherry, cider, and perry (pear brandy), as well as other types of flavoured brandy. The range of alcoholic beverages, including champagne, expanded in the nineteenth century, with white wine being advertised for the first time in 1812,7 whereas those such as arrack started to disappear from the inventory of polite households. As the range and volume of imported alcohol increased from the middle of the eighteenth century, distinct geographies of liquor importation and consumption grew in tandem.8 At the turn of the nineteenth century, of the three presidency towns, Calcutta was the prime destination for alcohol from Europe, importing a larger volume than either Bombay and Madras.9 When the cargo of private traders arrived at the Indian presidency towns, the commission warehouses, auction houses, and agency houses undertook the responsibility of storing and disposing imported goods on behalf of private traders. The retail spaces clustered around the import and export warehouses, producing identifiable nodes where overseas and domestic trades intersected. 296

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The agency houses in the port cities sent wine and provisions upcountry, and also catered to the Indian princely houses, merchants, and the emergent professional classes, who became eager consumers of imported luxuries.10 It was fashionable among Indian elites to purchase the finest imported liquor for entertaining guests, and to have family monograms etched onto imported glassware. The agency and auction houses competed with each other to supply this broad clientele and frequently advertised their wares with hopes of quickly disposing the stock. They advertised in the gazettes and distributed their own catalogues, and from 1784 we have detailed lists of commodities that were put up for sale. Alcoholic beverage took up a prominent space in these advertisements. From here the alcohol travelled to bottlekhanas and godowns in private and public establishments –​taverns, town halls, and restaurants –​to be readied for consumption. The Parsis in Bombay Presidency acquired a significant portion of the trade in ‘Europe goods’ from the 1780s onwards. By the second half of the nineteenth century European provision and liquor stores owned by Parsi merchants had become fixtures of small and large towns across the subcontinent.11 Some of the most successful Parsi European wine merchants were contractors to the colonial army, and received civil commissions by virtue of their regional business network.12 Thus liquor in colonial India travelled through multiple, sometimes overlapping, networks: import trade by the EIC and by private individuals that involved agency houses and retailers in port cities, who sold both locally and sent out liquor stocks to inland stations; the elite realm of fine liquor consumption; the sailors and subalterns who indulged in cheap liquor and were repeatedly disciplined for their drunkenness; the realm of servants, who were the keepers and servers; the masters and mistresses, who wrote reams in hopes of controlling this labouring population; the networks of locally produced liquor, as well as country liquor that competed with the imported liquor from Europe and China; and, last but not least, the abkari department, which hoped to generate revenue by controlling alcohol production and consumption. These networks intersected at various sites: warehouses and agency houses in port cities; retail stores, taverns, and brothels in large and small towns; regimental canteens and cantonments; country stills, distilleries, and liquor shops; bottlekhanas in clubs and households; and the service spaces in the Anglo-​Indian compound. We know about these sites because they entered the colonial archive as sites of anxious commentaries on the supply and consumption of alcohol. As social nodes where different populations interacted, they constituted a heterogeneous landscape that gave rise to new kinds of agencies.

The liquor landscape Before the establishment of hotels, the public houses of entertainment –​taverns and punch houses –​served the immediate needs of freshly disembarked soldiers and sailors, and the fortunes of these establishments ebbed and flowed with the arrival of ships and the tavern owners’ ability to secure the right class of clientele. In the seventeenth century ‘disorderly conduct’ inside and outside the EIC’s factory premises was a recurring concern.13 With a view to inculcating a moral order, the factory maintained a public table that was meant to visibly articulate the subordinate role of the writers to the factory agent, who sat at the head of the table. This was to prevent the writers from keeping bad company: ‘Stragle into Punch howses & other inconvenient places.’14 But brawls and unseemly behaviour at the table were frequent, and the spaces outside the factory were even more difficult to control. A series of regulatory actions followed. In 1659 ‘unmarried persons’ were prohibited from running taverns in Madras, and soldiers were expected to be out of taverns by 8 p.m. In 1678 ‘victualling houses’ were licensed in 297

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Figure 23.2  Detail of map of Calcutta, 1887–​93, sheet M10. Courtesy of West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata.

Madras to stop the indiscriminate sale of liquor and to prevent ‘disorderly’ behaviour among newly arrived young cadets.15 The publicans in Madras were licensed to sell ‘Wine, Beere, Rum, or other Europe Liquors; Punch, Arrack, or Indian liquors’, suggesting a basic distinction made very early on between locally sourced and imported liquor.16 These actions set a pattern of consumption, distinction, and regulation that was to recur in various guises during the remaining years of British colonial rule in India. From the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth the overseas retail trade in Calcutta was dominated by Europeans and centred around Tiretta’s Bazar, China Bazar, and New China Bazaar, cutting a distinct figure next to the administrative heart of the city (Figure 23.2). The agency and auction houses were located close to places of entertainment: restaurants, taverns, coffee houses, and the red light district. Lalbazar Street, on which was located the police headquarters, boasted some of the most important auction houses, wine sellers, and taverns owned and managed by both Indians and Europeans. Also known as ‘Flag Street’, because of the ‘string of flags across the street leading to eating houses, grog shops and brothels’, it had become notorious for drinking and ‘debauchery’ as early as 1745.17 By the late eighteenth century a class sorting of taverns was taking place, as tavern owners attempted to fit up taverns with assembly rooms and fine dining. Before the Calcutta Town Hall was built, it was in these elite (if not polite) taverns that balls, lodge meetings, and other public gatherings and lotteries organised by the European community were held. This did not fundamentally change the nature of the streetscape outside, however. Rather, exclusive gatherings 298

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Figure 23.3  James W. Browne, ‘Sailing directions from Chowringhee to Bankshall’, c.1876, British Library WD1346. Copyright British Library Board.

would move into the premises of newly formed gentleman’s recreation clubs and upscale hotels, within which racial and class distinctions could be handled with greater impunity. At its peak, in the 1860s, there were an estimated 200 ships and 8,000 sailors in Calcutta creating a demand for taverns and places of entertainment.18 The identification of taverns with the consumption of liquor by sailors and subalterns became the stuff of popular lore and anxious representations.19 James W. Browne’s ‘hydrography’ of Calcutta, from around 1876 –​a humorous representation of the possible courses sailors could take to imbibe liquor –​signalled the continuity of the heterogeneous geography of commerce and sociality that defined the ‘European’ part of the city (Figure 23.3). Here we have European hotels, taverns, the police station, native liquor shops, and the red light district in a symbiotic relationship. The annotated drawing maps the locality between Esplanade Row on the south and Mangoe Lane on the north and from Chowringhee on the east to Bankshall Street on the west, beyond which lay the riverbank, lined with import and export warehouses. Here, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, a brisk trade in bottles, cork, and liquor took place, with agency houses keen to get rid of their stock for fear of the weather lowering the quality of the alcohol. Liquor required better storage, and the liquor godown rates

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in the city were the highest of any commodity.20 Since most of the liquor arrived unbottled, a profitable trade in bottles and corks ensued. In addition, soda water (the essential ingredient of the Indian peg: brandy and soda) was imported as well as produced locally, and soda bottles were bought back by manufacturers. Large lots of empty bottles in probate inventories affirm their significant resale value.21 Much of the trade in bottles and corks (as well as ships’ provisions) was handled by Indian merchants. Some of them, such as Motilal Seal, who leveraged this success to embark on a range of business enterprises, including shipping, tea, banking, insurance, and real estate, became extremely wealthy. The cumulative impact of these entrepreneurs on the city’s landscape was profound, as money from these Indian business enterprises flowed into real estate and charitable institutions.22 The speculative investment in the secondary sector of real estate is evident in both the real numbers of property owned by wealthy merchants (Motilal Seal owned around 60 landed properties in Calcutta) and the nature of the business enterprise they undertook that used real estate investment to siphon off excess capital to create new assets. The proximity of retail trade, taverns, agency houses, godowns (the largest for opium) and warehouses to the key institutions of government –​Government House, the High Court, and Writers’ Building –​constituted a fine-​g rained, mixed-​use urban fabric that lasted into the first decade of the twentieth century. The street network (despite fitful planning efforts that attempted to create a grid of superblocks of sorts) did not comprise the city’s primary organisational feature. The urban fabric was characterised by a vast mesh of small properties that nestled among gardens and water bodies. Against this mesh, large public buildings, markets, and mansions stood out as dominant figures. The edges of the city were a mix of orchards, water tanks, rice fields, thatched huts, and commodious garden houses, interspersed by large pockets of open country. The close proximity of the habitations of the working class and servants to both European and Indian upper-​class residences, both within and in the outskirts of the city, produced an impression of ‘confusion’ in the eyes of those who expected to see class/​racial homogeneity and a discernible distinction between urban and rural. Three factors contributed to the resilience of the cobbled nature of the landscape: a pattern of property ownership in which Indians owned most of the landed property; dependence on domestic labour, which necessitated the proximity of the poor, middle-​class and wealthy residents; and uneven investment in the city’s road and utility infrastructure. Calcutta shared this characteristic with Madras and Bombay, and this feature did not substantially change in these three cities until the 1920s, when the suburbs were reorganised and platted.23 The liquor landscape stretched across this expanse as paved city streets gave way to dirt roads in the suburbs dotted with garden houses –​the weekend retreats of the city’s wealthy residents, European and Indian alike. Suburbs dotted with garden houses, orchards, markets, and shrines were a precolonial tradition in the subcontinent, exemplified by the environs of Shahjahanabad (Delhi).24 This tradition carried over to the colonial cities. In 1780 there were 200 garden houses in the suburbs of Madras.25 The preference for garden houses, some commentators felt, had deprived Madras of its city feel: Madras was too green! Approaching the city by ship, garden houses in Garden Reach along the banks of the Hooghly in Calcutta and on Malabar Hills in Bombay cast a hospitable impression on visitors. Into the twentieth century any pretension to wealth among Indians necessitated the ownership of a garden house. The garden house carried multiple valences, however. In popular Indian imagination these sites acquired notoriety as sites of drinking and womanising. As mercantile wealth acquired in the city flowed into zamindari estates in the countryside, the garden house became the symbol of the planters’ and absentee landlords’ expropriative power and alienation from the peasantry.26 300

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Garden houses comprised a range of building stock: from modest residential premises to expansive villas. Their modular building plan was conducive to adaptation as needs or functions changed. As a result, in all three cities there were instances of garden houses being turned into ‘rural taverns’, where customers could enjoy the luxury of outdoor drinking and dining in the setting of a pleasure garden. Here an ideal, manicured rural world, emptied of the poor peasantry but amply serviced by uniformed servants, could be created for elite pleasure. The buildings occupied by taverns such as the Bread and Cheese bungalow on the very edge of Bowbazar Street in Calcutta, a popular haunt in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, had a rectangular three-​bay layout with a large spacious hall in the middle and extensive outhouses, servants quarters, and stabling. Such a plan was not just identical with those found in the city centre, but replicated that of garden houses in Madras and Bombay.27 Nevertheless, most taverns up and down the Hooghly until 1824 (when the arrival of steam engines made ‘half-​way houses unnecessary’) that catered to sailors and subalterns were devoid of many of the niceties of their elite counterparts. In the experience of soldiers and subalterns passing through the city, the city taverns, with their soiled tablecloth, flies, and potent punch, were one among a long line of taverns that stretched from their first landfall –​at Culpee, Kedgeree, Diamond Harbour, Fulta –​and linked the city with the suburbs and countryside. With the shifting of the dockyards to Kidderpore in 1892, the spaces of liquor consumption for sailors in Calcutta would shift further south, away from the city centre.

Servants, godowns, and bottlekhanas Because of the periodicity of ships reaching port (which, before the opening of the Suez Canal, could take between four to six months from Europe to the Indian subcontinent), the purchase and storage of liquor took on peculiar contours. Into the late nineteenth century liquor was purchased in large quantities by tavern owners and those households that could afford the cost. The practice of bulk purchase found corresponding support in the architecture of colonial buildings. Irrespective of location (city, suburb, cantonment), buildings in the Anglo-​Indian compound shared an architectural vocabulary: the main building was located in the centre of a lot and service spaces were organised along the edges of the lot, thus creating a distinct geography of service spaces.28 Government House, elite residences, and clubs had separate liquor godowns as well as ready-​use liquor stores. Sometimes these storage spaces are referred to as abdarkhana, following the precolonial nomenclature, suggestive of a continuity in spatial vocabulary. This was often complemented with the introduction of wine cellarets in the dining room for convenient access.29 The size of the bottlekhana or liquor godown in a house, and the degree to which these spaces were elaborated and differentiated, were suggestive of a household’s socio-​economic status. The term bottlekhana –​literally, a room for keeping bottles –​is a peculiar Anglo-​Indian construct. Probably a moniker invented by Indian servants, given the sheer novelty of storing so many bottles in one place, it appears to have been more popular in eastern and northern India (Lower and Upper Provinces of Bengal), where the use of the term lasted into the 1920s. In the North-​Western Provinces and other presidencies, the usual Anglo-​Indian nomenclature for this space was ‘store’ or godown.30 It is not unusual to find a house description or house plan with mention of both godown and bottlekhana, or store and bottlekhana, suggesting that these spaces were differentiated in terms of use.31 In some instances the terms were used interchangeably.32 The term godown related to something more capacious both physically and conceptually, and could refer to a large storage space in both residential and commercial buildings. As in other parts of South and East Asia, godowns were a ubiquitous feature of the urban landscape in port cities.33 301

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Building plans and real estate advertisements suggest that, initially, the bottlekhana was part of the other service spaces of the household located on the periphery of the compound. This nexus of outbuildings built of mud or fired brick, consisting of warehouse, storeroom, and cookroom, went back to the earliest British settlements in India.34 The tradition of large storage spaces in residential buildings was linked to the extensive private trade carried on by merchants and the EIC’s servants in the eighteenth century, and also because the function of buildings could change rapidly without any change in the architecture: residential buildings were frequently turned into commercial buildings, and vice versa. In cities such as Calcutta, this pattern gave rise to a thick edge of service spaces in back-​to-​back lots, suggestive of a servants’ network quite distinct from the main house in each compound.35 Depending on the perspective of the resident, one could view oneself as suitably protected from the messy world of the street, or besieged by a recalcitrant servant population. The proliferation of storage spaces in colonial houses indicated a division of labor. The newly built Government House in Calcutta, built in 1803 as the office and residence of the governor-​general of the EIC, contained a large number of storage spaces considered necessary for hosting public functions. The responsibilities of the servants in charge of these spaces give a sense of the hierarchy of labour. Government House had at least five distinct stores and store managers. Robert Moore, the butler, was responsible for the ‘store godown’, while Bhowany Bose was the ‘wine godown sircar’ and Koodrutwoollah was the ‘bottle connah sircar having taken over the duties of the bottle-​khana from bottle-​khana sircar, Syfollah’.36 The extensive service spaces of Government House were not only outside the house proper, however, but outside the walled enclosure, in a separate set of buildings across the street. A century later, in the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, the ‘head godown cooly’ and his three assistants acted as storekeepers, and the former was responsible ‘for all bulk stocks of food, wine, and spirits’. These were among the higher-​ranked servants, and all of them were literate. From here the wine and beverage moved up to the care of the ‘head abdar’, a table servant, who was ‘responsible for the “ready-​use cellar” and for all drinks consumed in the house’.37 The separation of bottlekhana, store, and cookroom from the main house was a pattern shared by large and modest houses alike.38 The distance between the service spaces and the house continued to be a point of anxious debate into the early twentieth century.39 The author of Englishwomen in India suggested that ‘domestic arrangements in India are of the simplest character’, provided the storage spaces were under the mistress’s control. To ensure her ‘comfort’ the simple solution was ‘to have either a locked-​up go-​down, with a little padlock on it, for stores, or else substantial boxes with locks to contain the articles required for daily use’.40 The very need to keep valuable provisions under lock and key, however, seemed to have enabled the migration of the storeroom or bottlekhana to the main house. By the first decade of the twentieth century the bottlekhana was firmly located in the main house. Curiously, this meant that the bottlekhana/​godown/​store in which imported and local provisions and liquor were kept became the only room in the colonial compound that was placed under lock and key.41 The ubiquity of servants in the household and the weather made it impossible to lock living spaces, even if that would have meant more privacy for the master and mistress.42 As it turned out, European women well into the twentieth century would claim that the housekeeping of the simplest character was anything but simple; it was an ‘arduous’, ‘pioneering task’, thus inscribing their role in the colonial landscape in direct reference to the servant population over whom they were expected to ‘rule’ for the benefit of empire.43 ‘Hold the reins of household management in your own hands, and hold them firmly too,’ advised Eliot James, following dozens of housekeeping guides.44 The housekeeping guides invoked a direct correspondence between the sparkling glassware, the readiness and decorum of serving alcohol, and 302

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the control of servants.45 Control of the bottlekhana became for European women the mark of their ability to control the household of servants. The bottlekhana thus emerged as an unexpected but new site of agency.

Redrawing liquor lines By the second decade of the twentieth century the bottlekhana was losing its importance, in part because of the proliferation of retail establishments supplying imported food and liquor in small and large towns. The term bottlekhana began to disappear from building plans in the 1920s, replaced by a neat pantry/​store next to the dining room. No longer was it necessary to keep large stocks of liquor at home. As compared to 25 wine merchants in Calcutta in 1845, there were over 90 wine merchants and liquor stores operating in Calcutta in 1915.46 Selling both imported and domestic liquor, these retail establishments –​the vast majority of which were owned and managed by Indians –​catered to a much wider clientele, casting an extensive network across the city. Such networks extended from the city to the countryside at a scale that made them tremendously attractive for generating revenue. The large number of these establishments gives the lie to the claim that, among Indians, only the poor working class and some Westernised elites imbibed alcohol.47 Reflecting its cost, imported alcohol faced the stiffest competition from local producers. To keep country liquor (thought to be tainted or spiked in a variety of ways) away from European soldiers, the colonial authorities repeatedly tried to prohibit stills and liquor vendors within a couple of miles of military cantonments, but with uneven success.48 The aim of government regulations was two-​pronged: they enabled the government to manage the lucrative abkari revenue, while regulating the social and economic interactions between European soldiers and the Indian populace. The anxiety of the colonial authorities was as much about the drunkenness of European soldiers and sailors as it was about where they were getting drunk and with whom –​in the brothels, bazaars, and open streets. There was, after all, less public concern about the prodigious drinking of alcohol that took place within bungalows and elite establishments.49 The domain of European soldiers, sailors, and poor white women was seen as a separate matter, inflected by class and racial understandings of colonial society. Liquor, intoxicants, and sex were seen to be closely interrelated. Villages next to military cantonments and camp followers who supplied armies on the march with fresh produce also supplied country liquor and sex workers, and the colonial authorities developed an ambiguous relation of encouragement and control with these populations.50 The reality of the nineteenth-​century liquor landscape was lopsided in favor of domestic production. The production of country liquor –​comprising many versions of tari, arrack (distilled from tari), mahua or mowra, pichwai (rice beer), daru, and the domestic production of beer and spirits from barley and wheat –​far outstripped import trade. Official estimates give snapshots of the extensiveness of domestic production. An 1888 report counted 26,633 country liquor shops in the Madras Presidency. In 1810 the number of mahua shops in Rajputana and Gujarat was described as ‘absolutely incalculable’.51 Mahua flowers by weight could yield more alcohol than molasses or barley, and thus had a distinctive advantage. Mowra spirit was distilled to produce rasi and benda on a large scale in Uran (near Bombay harbour) in the second half of the nineteenth century, aided by rail and harbour connectivity that supplied mahua flowers.52 In 1850 government duty on Uran spirits amounted to Rs. 2 million and was higher in the 1880s.53 Through the Tariff Act of 1875 the customs duty on imported liquor was raised from Rs. 3 to 4 per gallon, and ‘the Government of India soon after declared the expediency of increasing gradually the excise on country spirit, so as to approach as nearly as possible the 303

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Customs duty leviable on imported spirit’.54 In Bombay Presidency the abkari revenue more than doubled between 1876/​7 and 1886/​7, with revenue from foreign liquor and domestically brewed liquor both increasing, but the latter was 284 times more than the revenue recovered on foreign liquor in 1876/​7 and about 75 times more in 1886/​7. C.E. Buckland, reporting on abkari administration in 1888, remarked that the increase in excise on country spirits ‘stimulated illicit practices’ that in turn ‘could only be suppressed by legislation’.55 In 1886/​7, in the town of Bombay, there were 50 shops that were allowed to sell toddy spirit and 100 shops permitted to sell raw toddy, and 30 licences for hawking toddy were issued. In comparison, there were 50 shops for foreign liquor and other establishments such as hotels, refreshment rooms, and wholesale shops for the sale of foreign liquor and country spirits sold at the tariff rate, with a total of 209 licences issued. The liquor sold in these establishments included Madras, Shahjehanpur, Mauritius, and Jamaica rum charged with duty at tariff rate. Although greater in number, the establishments selling foreign liquor produced a scant Rs. 65,657 of the total receipt of Rs. 2,252,578.56 The increase in revenue from country liquor in the last decades of the nineteenth century is largely attributed to the reform of the abkari system. A series of excise reforms were put in place to ensure an increase in revenue, discourage the ‘immoderate sale and consumption of cheap liquor’, prevent ‘monopolists’ (in this case, toddy farmers in the Bombay Presidency) from selling ‘weak and inferior spirit’, at a rate they chose, and stop the practice of ‘subletting’ liquor shops, by which farmers became the middlemen who extracted the profit ‘which ought to have come to the Government’.57 These goals meant stricter regulation of the practices of farmers, distillers, and consumers, and of the farms, stills, and shops. Buckland summarised the projected effects of the reforms on establishments in the Bombay Presidency that had moved from the farming to the still head system succinctly: ‘(1) Raising the price of licit liquor; (2) checking the consumption of illicit liquor; (3) restriction of manufacture to certain centres; (4) diminishing the number of liquor shops.’58 The efforts to maximise revenue extraction and control the country liquor trade vis-​à-​vis foreign liquor and liquor produced in government-​controlled distilleries meant a reorganisation of the liquor landscape. An important feature of reform was the centralisation of distilleries, which restricted country liquor manufacture to certain locations, usually to sudder (district headquarter) stations, where a highly controlled distillery system was set up. In the case of Bombay, to control toddy production and the ‘unfair’ competition it gave Uran-​produced mowra liquor, between 1877/​8 and 1881/​2 500 toddy stills in Bombay and 4,000 stills in Thana were brought within two enclosures in Chaupati and Dadar and 14 in Thana. This intervention, according to Buckland’s report, greatly reduced the drunkenness among the lower classes.59 Enclosed by high walls, the largest of these, such as at the distillery at Uran, extended for three-​quarters of a mile. The toddy distillery at Dadar on the border of coconut tree plantations of Mahim and Worli had a ten-​foot-​high enclosing wall, with one entry gate, and two rows of still sheds. The storerooms, built of wattle and daub, were set apart from the still sheds.60 The centralised distillery thus emerged as a new spatial type that brought together architectural elements of the godown in a colonial compound with that of the high-​walled jail factory, hoping to produce an observable method of production and transportation in which bodies and commodities could be tracked to aid the goal of maximising state revenue.

Lumpy geographies C.E. Buckland’s report on abkari administration contained a remarkable map of the Bombay Presidency (Figure 23.4). Intended to explain the eight kinds of system that comprised the 304

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Figure 23.4  Bombay Presidency, showing the abkari system. Source: C.E. Buckland, A Report on the Systems of Abkari Administration with respect to the Taxation of Country Liquor in the Presidencies of Bombay and Madras (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1888). Copyright British Library Board.

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abkari administration of the presidency, it gave a sense of the historically contingent set of relations that gave rise to the liquor landscape. Not only did it show the patchwork nature of abkari administration, but it marked almost the entire western boundary of the presidency as a territory from which native states had agreed to remove their ‘frontier liquor shops’. Here we have an image of liquor shops and capital from native states sloshing against the edges of the presidency, seeking to siphon off revenue and control from colonial administration. The government’s desire for more centralised control was intended to eliminate the anomalous regions produced by myriad agents and the unregulated movement of liquor, people, and capital. In so doing, the map also demonstrated the fiction of control that operated in constructing colonial territory. Colonialist spatial imagination confronted other organised and unintended effects from groups who saw the liquor geography very differently from that of the colonial state. This differential vision was enabled by the ability of various constituencies –​ toddy farmers, still owners, liquor retailers, the working poor, and the native states –​to construct and leverage connections that were barely legible to the colonial state, even if colonial authorities were cognisant of their many effects. It would be incorrect, however, to surmise that the map with which I began this chapter evinced a more controlled view of the urban–​rural continuum, and that in the late nineteenth century the open plans of the presidency towns were somehow lacking control. As Miles Ogborn pointed out in his discussion on the scribal-​commercial culture of the EIC’s factory in seventeenth-​century Madras, ‘the vision of the factory as a hierarchical and artificially enclosed social and moral order’ frayed both inside and at its edges.61 The EIC servants’ inclination to disobey the Company’s injunction against private trade, and inefficiencies resulting from inexperience and recalcitrance, contributed to the problem inside. And, outside, the edges of control were perpetually insecure because of the political and economic power of the Indian merchants who helped construct the trade infrastructure, and the lure of the extramuros to Company servants. The map indeed does not make the distinction between white and black towns that Wheeler insinuated, and that would become the stock language of colonialist histories. The armed posture of the double enclosure that described the location of the Governor’s House within Fort St George was physically, economically, and politically dependent on the ‘Indian Town’ to which the roads from its two gates led. When we bring this spatial imagination to bear upon the 1677 map of Madras, in light of contemporary archival documents on liquor regulation, we see a quite different urbanscape. No matter where we look, the city was the product of a patchwork of intentions and practices, and it is in the heterogeneity of its lumpy geography that we may seek the roots of its later success and growth as colonial city. Once we learn to see colonial port cities as having open seams and as effects of multiple paths through which commodities and people travelled, we will be better positioned to grapple with the diverse spatial imaginations that constituted the urban experience of these cities: imaginations that were often conflictual and fractured rather than coherent and congruent.

Notes 1 J. Talboys Wheeler, The History of the Imperial Assemblage at Delhi, held on the 1st January 1877, to Celebrate the Assumption of the Title of Empress of India by Her Majesty the Queen (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1877), 31. 2 Peter J. Marshall, East India Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (New York: OUP, 1976); Rhoads Murphey, The Outsiders: The Western Experience in India and China (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1977). 3 Meera Kosambi and John E. Brush, ‘Three colonial port cities in India’, Geographical Review, 78 (1), 1988, pp. 32–​47. For various approaches to colonial port cities, see Dilip K. Basu (ed.), The Rise and

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Colonial port cities and alcohol Growth of the Colonial Port Cities in Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983); and Indu Banga (ed.) Ports and Their Hinterlands in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992). 4 Lauren Benton discusses imperial legal space in terms of its ‘lumpiness’. See idem, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–​1900 (New York: CUP, 2009), xii–​xiii. 5 John Biddulph, The Pirates of Malabar and an Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago (London: Smith, Elder, 1907), 268. 6 Richard Temple (ed.), The Diaries of Streynsham Master, 1675–​1680, and Other Contemporary Papers Relating Thereto, vol. I (London: John Murray, 1911), 58. 7 The Calcutta Gazette, 25 June 1812. 8 An instance of elite consumption, Governor-​General Robert Clive’s household and camp expenses carry evidence of substantial amounts of claret, old hock, champagne, Madeira, beer, and arrack from Goa and Batavia. Accounts of Lord Clive, 1752, BL, MSS Eur G37/​75/​2; Accounts of Lord Clive, 1765: BL, MSS Eur G37/​80/​2. 9 William Milburn, Oriental Commerce: Containing a Geographical Description of the Principal Places in India, China, and Japan with Their Produce, Manufacture, and Trade, Including the Coasting or Country Trade from Port to Port, 2 vols. (London: Black, Perry, 1813), vol. 1, 182, vol. 2, 12, 112. 10 Christine Furedy, ‘British tradesmen of Calcutta 1830–​1900: A preliminary study of their economic and political roles’, in: C.B. Sealy (ed.), Women Politics and Literature in Bengal (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1981), pp. 43–​62. 11 Katherine Platt, The Home and Health in India and the Tropical Colonies (London: Ballière, Tindall & Cox, 1923), 27. 12 H.D. Darukhanawala, Parsi Lustre on Indian Soil, vol. 2 (Bombay: G. Claridge, 1963). 13 Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 88–​9. 14 Cited in ibid., 89. 15 Ibid., 72. 16 Henry Hobbs, John Barleycorn Bahadur: Old Time Taverns in India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1944), 78–​9. I thank Sanjeet Chowdhury for a copy of this book. 17 Ibid., 144. 18 Ibid. 19 Despatch to Bengal, ‘Reply to military letter dated 15th June 1858, no. 87. Correspondence bringing to notice the demoralization of the European soldiery by means of the liquor shops in Calcutta’, Bengal Despatches, BL, IOR E/​4/​855; Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘ “The drinking habits of our countrymen”: European alcohol consumption and colonial power in British India’, Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, 40 (3), 2014, pp. 338–​408. 20 Milburn, Oriental Commerce, vol. 2, 171. 21 For example, the planter Robert Dunlop’s inventory contained 150 six-​quart and 203 pint beer bottles, 121 two-​quart sherry bottles, 76 ‘brandy champagne’, and a ‘quantity of other bottles’. Estate of Robert Dunlop, Jan 31, 1859. BL, L/​AG/​34/​27/​182. 22 Motilal Seal constructed a ghat on the Hooghly that bears his name, funded a college, Motilal Seal’s Free College, and donated the land for the founding of the Calcutta Medical College Hospital. For more on the Indian ownership of property, see Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2005). 23 The reorganisation of the city centre and the platting of suburbs for the middle classes were concomitant phenomena. See Susan Lewandowski, ‘Urban planning in the Asia port city: Madras, an overview, 1920–​1970’, South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies, 21 (2), 1975, pp. 30–​45; Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘The other face of primitive accumulation: the garden house in colonial Bengal’, in: Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash (eds.), Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 169–​98; Nikhil Rao, House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–​1964 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); and Preeti Chopra, ‘Free to move, forced to flee: The formation and dissolution of suburbs in colonial Bombay, 1750–​ 1918’, Urban History, 39 (1), 2012, pp. 83–​107. 24 Stephen Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639–​ 1739 (Cambridge: CUP, 1993). 25 Eugenia W. Herbert, Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 28. 26 Chattopadhyay, ‘The other face of primitive accumulation’.

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Swati Chattopadhyay 27 See, for example, the plans of Col. Mackenzie’s garden house in Madras in the collection of the British Library: www.bl.uk/​onlinegallery/​onlineex/​apac/​other/​largeimage66575.html, accessed: 16 March 2017. 28 The term ‘Anglo-​Indian compound’ refers to the accommodations built for European residents, and in locations outside the presidency towns by the colonial government, but, because landed property changed hands frequently, both Indians and Europeans lived in these residences. 29 Estate of Robert Dunlop, 1859. 30 Eliott James, A Guide to Indian Household Management (London: Ward, Locke, 1899), 61. 31 The Calcutta Gazette, 10 June 1790. 32 Elizabeth Garrett, Morning Hours in India: Practical Hints on Household Management (London: Trubner, 1887), 6, 14, 28. 33 For discussion of godowns in nineteenth-​century Canton and Shanghai, see Cole Roskam, Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843–​1937 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). 34 Temple, The Diaries of Streynsham Master, vol. 1, 48, 213. 35 See Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, ch. 1, for a plan and accompanying explanation. 36 Servants account book presented by the representative of the Marquess Wellesley, general list of servants in the establishment at Government House, June 1805. BL, Add MS 13893. 37 Peter Howes, Viceregal Establishments in India (New Delhi: Governor General’s Press, 1949), 5–​6. 38 James, A Guide to Indian Household Management, 62. 39 Platt, The Home and Health, 44–​5. 40 A Lady Resident, The Englishwoman in India (London: Smith, Elder, 1865), 62. 41 Garett, Morning Hours, 6; Platt, The Home and Health, 51. 42 Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, 121–​32. 43 Alison Blunt, ‘Imperial geographies of home: British domesticity in India, 1886–​1925’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24 (4), 1999, pp. 421–​40. Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘Goods, chattles, and sundry items: Constructing nineteenth-​century Anglo-​Indian domestic life’, Journal of Material Culture, 7 (3), 2002, pp. 243–​71. 44 James, A Guide to Indian Household Management, 3. 45 Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 7th edn. (London: William Heineman, 1907), 60. 46 Data collected from the English-​ language Thacker’s Indian Directory (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1915) and the Bengali-​language Kalikata Street Directory (Calcutta: P.M. Bagchi, 1915; repr. 2016). 47 See, for example, David Fahey and Padma Manian, ‘Poverty and purification: The politics of Gandhi’s campaign for prohibition’, The Historian, 67 (3), 2005, pp. 489–​506. 48 Erica Wald, ‘Governing the bottle: Alcohol, race and class in nineteenth-​century India’, Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, 46 (3), 2018, pp. 397–​417, 405. 49 Hobbs, John Barleycorn, 34–​5; Sam Goodman, ‘Spaces of intemperance and the British Raj 1860–​ 1920’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 48 (4), 2020, pp. 591–​618. 50 Douglas Peers, ‘Imperial vice: Sex, drink and the health of British troops in north Indian cantonments, 1800–​1858’, in: David Killingray and David Omissi (eds.), Guardians of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 25–​52; N. Cherian, ‘Spaces for races: Ordering of camp followers in the military cantonments, Madras Presidency, c.1800–​1864’, Social Scientist, 32 (5/​6), 2004, pp. 32–​50; Wald, ‘Governing the bottle’. 51 K.T. Achaya, Food Industries of British India (New Delhi: OUP, 1995), 43. 52 C.E. Buckland, A Report on the Systems of Abkari Administration with respect to the Taxation of Country Liquor in the Presidencies of Bombay and Madras (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1888), 25–​7. 53 Achaya, Food Industries, 43; Buckland, A Report, 27. One lakh is 100,000. 54 Buckland, A Report, 4. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 10–​11. 57 Ibid., 5. 58 Ibid., 6. 59 Ibid., 21. 60 Ibid. 61 Ogborn, Indian Ink, 90.

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24 SITE OF DEFICIENCY AND SITE OF HOPE The village in colonial South Asia Sanjukta Das Gupta1

Introduction In his entry on the ‘Munda village’ in Encyclopedia Mundarica (1932–​7), the Jesuit missionary Rev. Hoffmann observed: ‘[I]‌t is difficult, perhaps impossible, for the modern European town dweller, to realize clearly all the associations the word hatu [village] calls up in the mind of a Munda, and all the deep feelings it is apt to evoke in his heart.’2 For more than a century and a half British administrators grappled with the nature of a ‘true’ Indian village as they debated whether it represented a geographical space, signified a fiscal and administrative category, or indicated an intrinsic inner coherence and unity. Actuated by the need to garner substantial revenue to support the colonial state apparatus, as well as to establish control over the Indian interior, they attempted to define rural relationships through revenue settlements and tenancy legislations and embarked on a long process of recovering ‘tradition’ and restoring ‘original’ rights. Yet the sense of belonging to which Hoffmann alluded, and which imparted a common identity to often diverse communities, remained an enigma to colonial scholar-​administrators as well as to later scholarship. As Neeladri Bhattacharya has pointed out, for British officialdom in India the preferred unit of rural society had initially been the estate, not the village.3 Inspired by contemporary English experiences, and following experiments with the Permanent Settlement (1793), men of property were recognised as ‘natural’ leaders with a long-​standing anchorage in the indigenous society. It was only from the middle of the nineteenth century, as they grew increasingly disenchanted with rentier zamindars and stagnant revenue returns from Bengal, that the East India Company’s officials turned to re-​examining the relationship between rent and revenue. Adopting David Ricardo’s model of enhanced taxation based on increasing surplus to encourage investment in production,4 revenue officials focused upon the village as the unit of assessment. As settled agriculture came to constitute the new normative, the spatial and institutional category of the village was valorised and universalised, thereby irretrievably transforming the rural landscape and erasing the more fluid spaces inhabited by pastoralists, nomads, and forest dwellers. There were thus significant similarities both in the colonial conceptualisation of village societies –​whether of the settled peasantry society or of tribal and forest-​based communities –​and in their fortunes under the impact of colonial policies. DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-25

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Imagining the village Even before the ‘villagisation’5 of the rural world, the idea of the village as an unchanging ‘little republic’ had become popular among British revenue officials in the early nineteenth century, and it continued to hold sway even later, despite ideological differences.6 The village community thus exemplified social cohesion to romantic conservative observers, or stagnation to utilitarian philosophers, yet for both it represented a self-​sufficient, closed entity, relatively untouched by external influences. Debates raged as to the origins of the village community, however. To Henry Sumner Maine, the Whig comparative jurist and historian and a law member of the Governor-​General’s Council in India between 1862 and 1869, the nineteenth-​century village communities of the Rajputs, Jats, and Gujars in north India were direct continuations of the Aryan village ‘brotherhoods’. Land in these village communities, he stated, was communally owned by clan groups and governed by councils, with the patriarchal household forming the basic unit of a hierarchically ordered social structure.7 The exclusive nature of caste society and the transmutation of clan brotherhoods, together with the historical isolation of the country till its discovery by European commerce, accounted for the immutability of the village community over centuries.8 B.H. Baden-​Powell, on the other hand, was not convinced by the ‘Aryan’ village hypothesis. Arguing that the numerically smaller groups of invading Aryans would have been forced to accommodate themselves within the pre-​existing indigenous system, he proposed the ‘Dravidian model’ in his Land Systems of British India (1892). He outlined two forms of village formation: the ‘aristocratic’ joint holdings and the raiyatwari villages. The former, he was convinced, had its roots in Aryan social structure and involved conquest by a clan group of an already populated and cultivated area. In contrast, the raiyatwari village, formed by clearing and cultivating fallow tracts, was believed to have originated in the ‘tribal stage of society’ and was essentially Dravidian in character, pre-​dating Aryan settlement in north and south India.9 The notion of the pre-​Aryan ‘tribal’ village was further refined by J.F. Hewitt, who distinguished between the Dravidian and the Kolarian villages, suggesting that the latter pre-​ dated the former. Seeking to locate parallels across diverse cultures, he argued that tribal villages of Chotanagpur and south India closely resembled those of West Asia, as well as those that belonged to Europe’s past.10 Towards the end of the century tribal village communities, particularly of the Chotanagpur Division of Bengal Presidency and the Central Provinces, came under official scrutiny against a background of violent agrarian agitations and forest uprisings. Attempts to address the grievances of the tribal peasantry through the official recognition of customs as rights led to a long search for ‘authentic’ tradition. Tribal villages continued to be portrayed as ‘little republics’, independent of supra-​political authority.11 Legitimising British intrusion, these villages were shown to require British protection against oppressive non-​tribal regimes. Despite differences in details, the underlying assumption of colonial writings was the changelessness of village communities once they had been established through various permutations in the remote past. Such perceptions served to build up the idea of an archetypical peasant community, characterised by communal solidarity and a closed subsistence economy that remained mired in stagnation. It also served to legitimise colonial rule as the harbinger of modernity. As Ronald Inden argued, the Indian village did not ‘exist in the same time as the [European] Self, nor did it occupy the same political and economic space’.12 By claiming for itself the sole authority to know, govern, and improve the village, the colonial government thus sought to divest the village community of its own agency. 310

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The notion of the self-​sufficient Indian village was not confined to British colonial scholar-​ administrators but was also widely shared by Indian nationalists and framed academic debates well into the twentieth century. What had epitomised stagnation to colonial writers became a symbol of resilience, organisational strength, and invulnerability to external pressures and a site of ancient democracy in the nationalist counter-​argument.13 Nehru thus asserted that ‘the old Indian social structure which has so powerfully influenced our people … was based on three concepts: the autonomous village community, caste and the joint family system’.14 Although it was not perfect, the village was seen to be the site of authenticity, the core category that represented the real India.15 For Gandhi, specifically, the village was the essence of Indian civilisation. Although he did not explicitly subscribe to the idealised image of the ancient democratic village community, his views on the revitalisation of autonomous village communities as the basis of resource management and rural development in the India of the future largely influenced the political leadership of the Indian National Congress.16 Reiterating some widely held nationalist beliefs, economic historians of the middle of the twentieth century argued that the pre-​British Indian economy was characterised by typically self-​subsisting and self-​perpetuating village communities distinguished by the non-​existence of private property in land, communal control over the utilisation of peasants’ lands, and limited production for the market.17 It was pointed out that, in a non-​monetised –​or, at best, a minimally monetised –​economy, with a poor communication system confining the flow of goods and services within a limited area, wants were few and could be satisfied locally. Not, admittedly, an ideal system for engendering economic growth, the village nevertheless provided employment and a basic standard of living to its members. Above all, self-​sufficiency was enhanced by the caste-​wise division of labour. Some of these idealised notions were substantially revised by later researches, which demonstrated that the Indian villages were not isolated autonomous units but were linked in various ways to the wider economic and political networks, while simultaneously retaining certain internally determined domains. Rather than a single, individual village, a cluster of villages constituting a specific zone came to be regarded as the unit of economic organisation. The village markets played a significant role in channelising the flow of credit from urban to rural areas.18 Self-​sufficiency, therefore, did not imply the absence of economic transactions, since commercialised agriculture and monetisation coexisted with subsistence economies. Nonetheless, the notion of the ‘relative self-​ sufficiency’ of the early colonial village system remains valid, since a considerable part of the village needs was internally supplied and the nature of exchange remained limited in comparison to that of the later colonial period.

The impact of colonial rule The colonial period subjected the village community to rapid and deep changes. Primarily with a focus on devising efficient means of maximising revenue income, the government experimented with various forms of revenue settlements that classified rural society and tenurial relationships as specific categories in different regions of India. The Permanent Settlement –​ i.e. the revenue settlement with zamindars (or landlords) –​was first introduced in the Bengal Presidency in 1793 by Lord Cornwallis as governor-​general. In 1798 Lord Wellesley ordered its extension to the Madras Presidency, where local poligars were given the status of zamindars and villages were aggregated to form estates. In view of the growing British disillusionment with the Permanent Settlement, however, the ryotwari settlement was made with peasant proprietors, first in the Madras Presidency in the 1820s, and subsequently in the Bombay Presidency.19 The ‘village community’ that Maine wrote about, however, was identified in the vast stretches of 311

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territory in north and north-​west India and was brought under the mahalwari settlement after experimentations with landlord-​based revenue systems. The most prominent of the village systems identified through these diverse revenue settlements included the mirasi villages of the Madras Presidency and the zamindari, pattidari, and bhaiachara villages of north India. Whereas zamindari regions were defined by individual control over estates, which in turn were divided among individual tenure holders, the mirasi villages were held by dominant peasant groups on ‘privileged tenures’ with a variety of rights related to ownership or usufruct of the soil and its produce. In contrast, in Punjab and the North-​Western Provinces the focus was on the undivided joint village, collectively held by a clan or tribe brotherhood (bhaiachara) and based on patrilineal inheritance. Villages held by a single individual, yet classified as joint holdings, were described as pattidari villages after being partitioned among descendants. With zamindari being deemed wasteful and inefficient, bhaiachara villages came to be valorised as representing egalitarianism and rationality, bearing the signs of an incipient democracy in their patriarchal village panchayats. With the integration of villages within the fiscal arrangements of the Raj, the economic effects of colonial rule became apparent. Rural India was exposed to a long period of agricultural decline even as village economies became linked with the global market.20 Although this process began in the early nineteenth century, the role of market forces in determining agrarian production became more significant in the latter half of the century, with the state coming to play a secondary role in the organisation of agriculture. Peasant production for the market rather than for subsistence was not a new phenomenon during the colonial period. What was new was the nature of the market, which now came to be linked with the British economy and dependent upon the vagaries of the world market. This ‘external integration’ with the metropolis was accomplished without an accompanying growth of an ‘integrated’ internal market, leading to a ‘disarticulated generalized commodity production’, the hallmark of a colonised economy.21 Commercialization, moreover, was highly localised, depending upon geography and ecology, and its impact varied in different parts of British India. Peasant response to the market tended to vary according to the nature of the cash crop produced: opium, indigo, silk, and sugarcane before the 1850s, and jute, cotton, sugarcane, and wheat for the later period. Despite nationalist claims of forced cultivation of commercial crops, cash crop cultivation was not always involuntary. Peasants, in fact, displayed a rational response to the market, albeit under certain limitations. How did these changes impact upon the village community? Together with factors such as increased pressure on resources because of population growth, as well as the movement of agricultural prices, agricultural commercialisation resulted in a sharper peasant ‘differentiation’ –​ i.e. a relationship of control and domination –​arising from peasants’ growing dependence on those with superior economic resources, and resulting in institutionalised forms of tenancies, sharecropping, etc. The newly emerging category of landless labour significantly swelled the previously existing class of attached labour that had developed out of caste-​based institutions. Some historians argue that peasant differentiation indicated economic decline, immiseration of the peasantry, growing dependence on moneylenders, and falling social status as peasants gradually became converted to landless agricultural labour through a process of ‘depeasantisation’.22 Conversely, others consider peasant differentiation to be an indicator of improved economic situation.23 There were, of course, vast regional variations.24 The rise of a rich peasantry, an expansion in agricultural labour, and the gradual weakening of bonded labour could be perceived everywhere in India, however. In the Malabar region, for instance, the anti-​slavery movement, legal measures such as the Indian Penal Code of 1862 criminalising the sale and purchase of slaves, and the efforts of Christian missionaries and the 312

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princely states of Travancore and Cochin gradually put an end to agrarian servitude. Although bonded labourers could seek employment in railroads and plantations and as indentured labour abroad, landlords increasingly preferred to replace them with contractual labour during seasons of high demand.25

The tribal village: A case study of the Kolhan government estate in Chotanagpur The impact of colonial rule was equally felt in the tribal or adivasi villages. Although portrayed by colonial writers as isolated and autonomous entities, most adivasi villages had linkages with the wider politico-​economic network. Their integration within the Raj was more complex and pervasive, however. In the first place, by privileging settled agriculture, colonial rule attempted to sedentarise forest dwellers and nomadic pastoral communities. Furthermore, colonial interventions led to shifts and repositionings within the internal organisation of the village community, along with a reassessment of the community’s relationship with ‘alien’ outsiders. These tendencies were not very marked during the initial days of colonial intrusion. In the early nineteenth century the East India Company largely relied upon pre-​existing political structures for extending its rule into autonomous territories, converting relatively isolated communities into ‘fiscal subjects’ under Company rule.26 Although this has been construed as a ‘limited Raj’, constricted by pre-​existing institutions and forms of governance,27 the encapsulation of tribal polities within the ambit of British rule redefined the roles of the traditional leadership within the village community, introducing crucial changes within the structure and organisation of the tribal village. Such changes are apparent, for instance, among different adivasi groups of central and eastern India, such as Mundas and Oraons of Chotanagpur, Santals of the Damin-​i-​Koh (renamed as Santal Parganas after 1855), and Hos of Kolhan.28 Tribal polities had specific features and institutions of their own. In comparison with the non-​tribal peasantry, adivasi communities combined a greater dependence on forest resources with different forms of agricultural production, which reflected upon village formation and the organisation of internal space. To the Hos, the village or hatu did not simply indicate a geographical site but was a religiously defined space, which conferred upon them their distinct social and cultural identity. The hatu represented civilisation, in contrast to the bir, a word indicating both the forest and the state of wildness. The borders of the village –​bonga ko seemana, or the boundary of spirits –​separated and protected it from the forest and its spirits. From its very inception, the hatu established a deep connection between the people, their ancestors, and the world of the spirits.29 The selection of a village site was rarely left to chance, but depended upon the propitiation and taming of the forest spirits, the burubongako, by the intercession of the village guardian spirit, the hatu bonga. Moreover, by housing the ancestral spirits, the village conferred membership and belonging across generations. The transformation of bir into hatu was concluded only with the development of the clan graveyard or sasan, which enabled ancestors to be called upon to protect the inhabitants. Within the village, the pioneer clans, variously known as khuntkattidar (among Mundas), bhuihar (among Oraons), and marang killi or dupup parja (among Hos), enjoyed a superior status to the later entrants, the parjas. As original settlers, they enjoyed special rights interwoven with religious practices, which ensured their control over village resources.30 ‘Tribal egalitarianism’ was, therefore, a valid concept in the context of the original descent group. Nevertheless, gender-​based inequalities limited this egalitarianism. Customary land and inheritance laws reinforced the rights of the patrilineal male descendants to the land clearings made by their ancestors, while daughters and descendants on the wife’s side of the family were excluded from 313

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inheriting patrilineal property. Adivasi villages also included several lower-​caste groups, who provided services that adivasis were not willing to perform for themselves. They were tolerated for their services, but only so long as they did not make a bid to gain control of the village land. The integration of tribal villages was effected by the colonial government through the appropriation of communal institutions. In 1837 Kolhan was placed under direct control of the Company as a ‘government estate’, in which the government functioned as ‘improving’ landlord and protector of the Hos as tenants. The pre-​existing organisation of governance through village headmen was retained for this purpose. Although the communal structure of the village appeared to have been preserved, in reality the autonomous authority of the village leadership was radically curtailed. From their customary status as the first among equals, the village leaders were effectively transformed into government servants who no longer required community sanction for their posts but depended upon British goodwill. These changes cumulatively resulted in the reconfiguration of the community’s internal hierarchy and an increasing distance between the villagers and their traditional leaders. There was an incipient tendency among the village leaders to accumulate wealth in the form of land. With time, they could utilise their status and the power of their office to control the reclamation of wastelands and foster new cultivation. Some of the village leaders also tended to intermarry among themselves, thereby giving rise to almost a separate class in adivasi society.31 Such new stratifications were noticeable also among other adivasi communities, such as the Oraons.32 The high revenue demand of the colonial government in Chotanagpur, on the other hand, resulted in growing adivasi dependence on moneylenders, land alienation, and frequent movements and rebellions seeking equitable land rights. In this context, the adivasi land question became a burning issue in the late nineteenth century, and new tenancy legislation was introduced to remedy the situation. After Birsa Munda’s rebellion of 1899/​1900, the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908 (CNTA) aimed at securing pioneer groups’ khuntkatti tenures against encroachments of landlords by fixing their rents in perpetuity. Since the CNTA was implemented throughout Chotanagpur without taking into consideration local differences in custom, it created new problems for the Hos, among whom khuntkatti tenures were not common.33 Since the late nineteenth century adivasi women had increasingly made a bid for land rights, sometimes acting on their own, or with the support of their family and even of the village community. This challenged tribal patriarchy, patrilineality, and primogeniture, the principal guiding features of their property rights. Several such instances are to be found in the colonial archives, especially in the Chaibasa regional record room, where records of civil disputes give an intimate picture of adivasi quotidian life. The Kolhan land settlement report of 1897 cited a large number of cases of daughters sharing in the father’s property with the full approval of the village community.34 Some Ho women disputed their menfolk in the colonial courts over formal land rights. The Kolhan rent settlement documents from 1913 to 1918 revealed several instances of land being registered in the names of Ho women. Married women also claimed title over parental property, although, according to custom, they held usufructuary rights only so long as they remained unmarried.35 As Nitya Rao showed, similar claims for land rights were also made by Santal women in the neighbouring district of Santal Parganas.36 This was an area where the colonial government hesitated to intrude by legislating in favour of women’s claims, however. Tenancy laws therefore continued to safeguard local customary rights and usages, thereby reaffirming the hold of adivasi males on land. Colonial rule also changed the composition of the tribal villages through a massive influx of outsiders.37 In course of the nineteenth century, as the non-​tribal population grew in number and power, the accommodation of Kolhan within the colonial economy naturally led to a 314

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greater movement of population into the region. In the early days it had been the government policy to encourage traders dealing in necessities to settle in Kolhan, in the belief that increased contact with outsiders, particularly with Hindus, would help to ‘civilise’ the Hos. The moderate rate of rent in comparison to other areas of British India and the opportunity to cultivate new, rent-​free lands were the chief attractions for outsider cultivators. With the construction of the Bengal Nagpur Railway, the formerly remote parts of Kolhan became well connected to the main markets. Manoharpur, the chief village of the forested region of south-​west Kolhan, gradually developed into a significant timber trade hub. Labourers came here from different parts of India to work on setting the railway tracks. Subsequently many of them settled permanently in the estate. To the adivasis, these new intruders became the dikus, a term of contempt reserved for exploitative outsiders. As the Hos’ resentment against the outsiders began to grow, the earlier mode of complementary relationship between adivasis and resident service castes was replaced by a sense of exploitation and oppression. The impact of British rule redefined relationships both within village society as well as between insiders and outsiders. This was not simply a story of the disintegration of the village community, however. Although cleavages within the village tended to become more pronounced in the course of colonial rule, the leadership retained the sanction of the community. Far from being a fixed entity with no capacity for historical transformation, adivasis could adjust to innovations whenever possible and reinvent themselves, so as to derive some benefit by making use of legal and other new instruments introduced by the British as part of their ‘civilising mission’.

Résumé: The village as a site of hope The new tensions arising out of dislocation within the village society and changes in economic relations and property rights had a devastating impact on the peasant economy, leading to peasant resistance, often through violent uprisings, throughout the colonial period. The land reforms and high revenue demands of the early colonial period ignited a series of ‘restorative rebellions’38 conducted by disaffected local leaders, as well as movements organised by peasants on their own initiative, such as the Rangpur rebellion of 1783. Religion sometimes played an important role in peasant mobilisation, as can be seen in the Sannyasi and Fakir rebellions in Bengal between 1763 and 1800 and the Moplah uprisings of the 1840s and 1850s in the Malabar region of south India. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, as the Indian rural economy was drawn into the world capitalist system, these uprisings came to be directed against the local representatives of the state, moneylenders, and landlords as well as the rich peasantry, as exemplified by the Santal hool (1855), the Indigo rebellion (1859/​60), the Pabna uprisings (1873–​75), and the Deccan Riots (1875).39 Peasant discontent focused the attention of the intelligentsia and the nationalists on agrarian issues and on the village. As stated earlier, for nationalists, the village represented the real India, ‘the nation that needed to be recovered, liberated and transformed’.40 Steeped in poverty and ignorance, the village had to be rescued and reconstituted as the building block of a modern progressive nation. In the 1920s several rural reconstruction programmes were adopted, partly in answer to Gandhi’s call for the recovery of national autonomy based on local resources and practices.41 An ‘articulated plan for the recovery of India’s self-​sufficiency’,42 Gandhi’s rural reconstruction programme envisaged participation in a moral, alternative economy, which he named sarvodaya –​i.e. the uplifting of all. Initially centred on khadi, or hand-​spun cotton, it was expanded gradually to cover the basic necessities for subsistence. To this end, Gandhi set up the All-​India Spinners’ Association (AISA) in September 1925, which was to coordinate 315

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all khadi-​related initiatives.43 Once the khadi movement had gained ground, the rural reconstruction programme was further expanded through the establishment of the All-​India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) in December 1934. Following the Bengali intelligentsia’s early experiments in rural reconstruction,44 the poet Rabindranath Tagore developed new ideas and plans of rural reconstruction based upon scientific concepts and techniques harmonised with local cultural traditions.45 As a model agency for poverty removal, he established the Visva Bharati Institute of Rural Reconstruction at Surul in 1922 to assist economically depressed Santal communities and regenerate stagnant villages through the infusion of dignity and self-​respect. Agrarian improvement was not merely a nationalist response to the peasant question. Together with Indian reformers and nationalists, colonial administrators and missionaries were involved in such schemes. In the first decades of the twentieth century there was an intense public debate on scientific agriculture and agrarian improvements, and agricultural education came to be included in the university curriculum. American Christian overseas missions, in particular, sought to improve the living conditions of the rural poor through new cultivation techniques as part of their community service.46 Despite differences in approach, all experiments in rural reconstruction signalled the initiation of a wider debate on the role of the village in national development, an issue that was taken up after independence by the Planning Commission and other governmental agencies. The village, which in colonial times was the site for the government to appropriate resources, was thus transformed into the space where the government was required to invest resources in the interests of national regeneration and development. Although economic distributive policies have varied over time in focus and priorities, the fundamental notion has remained unchanged to this day: that the ‘true’ development of India has to be measured against the living conditions of its villages.

Notes 1 I would like to thank the editors, Maria Framke and Harald Fischer-​Tiné, for their comments on my chapter. 2 John Hoffmann and Arthur Van Emelen, Encyclopaedia Mundarica, vol. 6 (Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1990), 1663–​4. 3 The British equation of the rural with the village was reaffirmed and accepted uncritically by academics, who failed to ‘unpack’ the category ‘village’ even as they critiqued the problematic stereotypical representations. Neeladri Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2018), 64–​74. 4 For details, see Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 5 Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest, 70. 6 Louis Dumont, ‘The village community from Munro to Maine’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 9, 1965, pp. 67–​89; C.J. Dewey, ‘Images of the village community: A study in Anglo-​Indian ideology’, MAS, 6 (3), 1972, pp. 291–​328; Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 131–​61; Vandana Madan, The Village in India (New Delhi: OUP, 2002), 1–​26; Surinder S. Jodhka, Village Society (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2012), 1–​22. 7 Inden, Imagining India, 137–​40. 8 Henry Maine, Village-​Communities in the East and West (London: John Murray, 1871), 57. 9 B.H. Baden-​Powell, The Land Systems of British India, vol. 2 (Delhi: Oriental Publishers, 1974), 636–​9. 10 J.F. Hewitt, ‘The pre-​Aryan communal village in India and Europe’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 31 (2), 1899, pp. 329–​56. 11 T.S. Macpherson, Final Report on the Operations for the Preparation of Record-​of-​Rights in Pargana Porahat, District Singhbhum, 1905–​07 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1908), 28. 12 Inden, Imagining India, 148.

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The village in colonial South Asia 13 Continuities between orientalist/​colonial knowledge and nationalist historians have been discussed by several historians of modern India. See Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Carol Upadhyay, ‘The Hindu nationalist sociology of G.S. Ghurye’, Sociological Bulletin, 51 (1), 2002, pp. 28–​57. 14 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 244. 15 Others critiqued the village as a site of caste-​based exploitation oppression. B.R. Ambedkar, The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables (Delhi: Amrit, 1948). 16 For Gandhi’s view of rural India, see Surinder S. Jodhka, ‘Nation and village: Images of rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar’, in: idem (ed.), Village Society (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2012), pp. 44–​63. 17 Daniel Thorner and Alice Thorner, Land and Labour in India (London: Asia Publishing House, 1974). 18 Ravinder Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). 19 Introduced by Alexander Reed in Baramahal in 1792, it was continued by Thomas Munro from 1801 in the Ceded Districts, arguing that ryotwari constituted the ancient land tenure system and was best suited to Indian conditions. 20 In the early colonial period the decline was ‘conjunctural’ in nature, being related to the political instability of the time. The weakening of the agrarian economy during the later colonial era was attributed to ‘structural’ factors arising out of increasing linkages with the wider political economy. B.B. Chaudhuri, Peasant History of Late Pre-​Colonial and Colonial India (New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2008), ch. 5. 21 Hamza Alavi, ‘India and the colonial mode of production’, EPW, 10, 1975, pp. 1235–​62. 22 Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour in India. 23 Neil Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule: Agriculture and Agrarian Society in the Bombay Presidency, 1850–​1935 (Cambridge: CUP, 1985). 24 For the rise of jotedars, see Rajat and Ratnalekha Ray, ‘Zamindars and jotedars: A study of rural politics in Bengal’, MAS, 9 (1), 1975, pp. 81–​102; Nariaki Nakazato, Agrarian System in Eastern Bengal c.1870–​1910 (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1994); and Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 1986). For the transformation of mirasidars, see David Ludden, Peasant History in South India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); and William van Schendel, Three Deltas: Accumulation and Poverty in Rural Burma, Bengal and South India (New Delhi: Sage, 1991). For the Bombay Presidency, see Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century; Sumit Guha, ‘Society and economy in the Deccan, 1818–​1850’, in: Burton Stein (ed.), The Making of Agrarian Policy in British India, 1700–​1900 (New Delhi: OUP, 1992); H. Fukuzawa, ‘Agrarian relations: Western India’, in: Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, c.1757–​c.1970 (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), pp. 177–​206. For the rise of patidars, see David Hardiman, ‘The crisis of the lesser patidars: Peasant agitations in the Kheda district, 1917–​1934’, in: D.A. Low (ed.), Congress and the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle, 1917–​1947 (London: Arnold Heinmann, 1977), pp. 47–​75. 25 Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1965); K. Saradamani, Emergence of a Slave Caste: Pulayas of Kerala (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1980), ch. 4; Jan Breman, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujrat, India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), 70–​8. 26 Gunnel Cederlöf, Founding an Empire on India’s North-​Eastern Frontiers, 1790–​1840 (New Delhi: OUP, 2014), 233. 27 Anand A. Yang, The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–​1920 (New Delhi: OUP, 1989). 28 Sanjukta Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj: Socio-​Economic Transition of the Hos, 1820–​1932 (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011). 29 The adivasis’ worldview is expressed in their village origin stories and clan genealogies. For a discussion, see Nandini Sundar, ‘Village histories: Coalescing the past and present’, in: P. Chatterjee and A. Ghosh (eds.), History and the Present (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), pp. 144–​82; Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (New Delhi: OUP, 1999); Sumit Guha, ‘Speaking historically: The changing voices of historical narration in western India, 1400–​ 1900’, American Historical Review, 109 (4), 2008, pp. 1084–​103; and Sanjukta Das Gupta, ‘History or

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Sanjukta Das Gupta tradition? Exploring adivasi pasts in nineteenth-​century Jharkhand’, Rivista degli Studi Orientali, 91 (2), 2018, pp. 95–​108. 30 Pioneering families invariably held the posts of munda (village headman), pahan or deuri (priest), and manki (head of a group of villages). Certain differences existed in the practices of different adivasi communities. Among Mundas, the village priests necessarily belonged to the original descent groups, while Hos often recruited priests from among Bhuiyas, who were believed to possess supernatural authority. 31 D.N. Majumdar, The Affairs of a Tribe: A Study in Tribal Dynamics (Lucknow: Universal, 1950). 32 Sangeeta Dasgupta, ‘Reordering a world: The Tanabhagat movement, 1914–​1919’, Studies in History, 15 (1), 1999, pp. 1–​41. 33 Sanjukta Das Gupta, ‘From rebellion to litigation: Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908) and the Hos of Kolhan Government Estate’, Irish Journal of Anthropology, 19 (1), 2016, pp. 31–​45. 34 J.A. Craven, Final Report on the Settlement of the Kolhan Government Estate in District Singhbhum of the Year 1897 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1898). 35 Case no. 68 of 1906, Court of the Deputy Collector, Serial 229 of 1906, Records of Kolhan Suits and Appeals, Chaibasa Collectorate Record Room. 36 Nitya Rao, ‘Good Women Do Not Inherit Land’: Politics of Land and Gender in India (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2008), 129–​30. 37 Between 1867 and 1897 the number of ‘alien cultivators’ in Kolhan increased from 1,579 to 15,755. Among them, 5,643 were heirs of non-​Ho cultivators already recorded in 1867, while 10,112 were new settlers. Das Gupta, Adivasis and the Raj, 249–​51. 38 Kathleen Gough, ‘Indian peasant uprisings’, EPW, 9 (32/​34), 1974, pp. 1395–​6. 39 A rich literature exists on this subject. See, for instance, Blair B. Kling, The Blue Mutiny: Indigo Disturbances in Bengal, 1859–​1862 (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1966); K.K. Sengupta, The Pabna Disturbances and the Politics of Rent, 1873–​1885 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1974); David Arnold, ‘Rebellious hillmen: the Gudem-​Rampa risings 1839–​1924’, in: R. Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 1 (New Delhi: OUP, 1986), pp. 88–​ 142; Ian Catanach, ‘Agrarian disturbances in 19th century India’, in: D. Hardiman (ed.), Peasant Resistance in India, 1858–​1914 (New Delhi: OUP, 1993), pp. 184–​203; Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 1983); and Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (New Delhi: OUP, 1989). 40 Jodhka, Village Society, 5. 41 Andrew Rigby, ‘Practical utopianism: A Gandhian approach to rural community development in India’, Community Development Journal, 20 (1), 1985, pp. 2–​9; Nicholas S. Hopkins, ‘Gandhi and the discourse of rural development in independent India’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 18, 1998, pp. 205–​36; Ashutosh Pandey, ‘Gandhian perspective of rural development’, Indian Journal of Political Science, 69 (1), 2008, pp. 141–​48; Mario Prayer, The Gandhians of Bengal: Nationalism, Social Reconstruction and Cultural Orientations, 1920–​1942 (Pisa: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2001), 74–​9. 42 Mario Prayer, ‘The reconstruction of unity: Meanings of rural development in late colonial India’, Rivista degli Studi Orientali, 92 (3/​4), 2019, pp. 95–​109, 103. 43 For details on the khadi movement, see Rahul Ramagundam, ‘Khadi and its agency: Organizing structures of philanthropic commerce’, Social Scientist, 32 (5/​6), 2004, pp. 51–​68. 44 Bipasha Raha, The Plough and the Pen: Peasantry, Agriculture and the Literati in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012). 45 On Tagore’s initiatives for peasants’ welfare, see Usha Mukherjee, ‘Sriniketan experiment in rural reconstruction’, EPW, 4 (43), 1952, pp. 1107–​ 9; Rathindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1958); Leonard K. Elmhirst, Poet and Plowman (Calcutta: Visva Bharati, 1975); Uma Das Gupta, Santiniketan and Sriniketan (Calcutta: Visva Bharati, 1983); and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (ed.), The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915–​1941 (Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997). 46 Prakash Kumar, ‘ “Modernization” and agrarian development in India, 1912–​52’, JAS, 79 (3), 2020, pp. 1–​26; Nandini Chatterjee, The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–​ 1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘The YMCA and low-​modernist rural development in South Asia, c.1922–​1957’, Past & Present, 240 (1), 2018, pp. 193–​234; Rajsekhar Basu, ‘Missionaries as agricultural pioneers: Protestant missionaries and agricultural improvement in twentieth-​century India’, in: Deepak Kumar and Bipasha Raha (eds.), Tilling the Land: Agricultural Knowledge and Practices in Colonial India (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016), pp. 99–​121.

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25 IMPERIAL SANCTUARIES The hill stations of colonial South Asia Nandini Bhattacharya

Introduction Hill stations, a British imperial institution, were built in colonial India and, later, in other tropical areas of the British Empire in the nineteenth century.1 Therefore, although they were most prominent in British India, hill stations were built on high ground all over the British Empire: in Ceylon, Hong Kong, and Penang, to offer a few instances, and even in colonies in Indo-​China and in sub-​Saharan Africa. These sustained the climatological and racial binaries of tropics/​temperate, white/​non-​white. Hill stations were also a peculiar urban development; in their nomenclature, in their location, and, indeed, in all their distinctive features they represented something more than their own identities: they embodied the antithesis to the hot and dusty plains of the tropics. As the historian E.T. Jennings has argued, the French Empire created its own segregated social spaces within cooler climates in their tropical colonies.2 In the Indian subcontinent, their raison d’être was to offer an alternative to the unrelenting heat and the ever-​present crowdedness of the plains –​foremost in the minds of the British civil and military officials who were now entrusted to govern or watch over the vast subcontinent. It was only after the conquest of the majority of the Indian subcontinent, therefore, that the British administration felt the need for, and acquired the ability to create, hill stations. The iconic hill stations of Simla, Ootacamund, and Darjeeling were all established between about 1819 and 1840. They were built on high mountain ridges, their sites usually first identified by officials who were surveying the relevant annexed territory with strategic or commercial advantages in mind. Simla, Mussoorie, and Darjeeling were all situated in the northern Himalayan tracts, which were annexed to British India after the long war with Nepal (1814–​16). Similarly, Ootacamund (or Ooty, as it was more easily pronounced by the British), situated in the Nilgiri Hills of the Western Ghats in southern India, was acquired as part of Tipu Sultan’s territories after the fall of Mysore in 1799. The hill station, a peculiarly official term (‘station’ was a military term in British India, denoting an administrative unit), at first represented an informal official retreat to a relatively cool and salubrious place away from the heat of the Indian plains. As historian Dane Kennedy pointed out, the term ‘hill station’ was a misnomer, as they were situated mostly in the high mountains, rather than on hills. He suggested that it was an attempt to etymologically ‘tame’ the sites in the vast Himalayan ranges (Ootacamund or Ooty being the exception).3 The towns DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-26

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on the mountain ridges initially consisted of a few bungalows with the usual large gardens, to host civil officials during the hot weather. The first plans of Darjeeling (c.1840) included a total of 40 bungalows.4 John Sullivan, the collector of Coimbatore, was one of the first to build his own residence in Ooty, having been charmed by its climate and seeing in it a true ‘English’ paradise. This image of such a paradise, argued Kavita Phillips, was ‘refracted’ through colonialist tropes of gigantic tropical wonderlands, thus ending up with an image of ‘home’ enlarged into fantastic proportions.5 The first house in the village that expanded to become the town of Simla was built in 1822, and in 1830 the little retreat included 30 houses, all of them inhabited by British civil servants stationed at Punjab or the north Indian plains, to escape the scorching Indian summers.6 It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, however, that the hill stations became prominent sanctuaries for British officials in summer, for their wives and children almost throughout the year, and for the military troops in turn from their postings in the ‘plains’.

Englishness and the racialisation of the hill stations The Revolt of 1857 (which started between Indian troops of the East India Company against their British commanders but soon became general uprisings across northern and central India against British rule) threw a long shadow across the Indian plains. An immediate consequence was that the numbers of British troops stationed in India expanded massively, as the government attempted to recruit white soldiers to Indians at a proportion of around one to three, from the far fewer pre-​1857 numbers.7 At the same time, any lingering prospect of European settlement in tropical south Asia was suppressed by the immediate expressions of antipathies against the ‘treachery’ of Indians that had been aroused in the English public sphere. These were matched by the simultaneous extinction of acclimatisation theories in medical discourse in the middle of the nineteenth century. As Mark Harrison argued, eighteenth-​century medical discourse favoured the idea that, after initial years of ‘seasoning’, through resisting disease and heat white Europeans would eventually acclimatise in the tropics. The optimism about the success of white settlement in tropical zones was concomitant with the predominance of environmental monogenist theories of race that assumed common origins for all mankind.8 But acclimatisation theories were on the wane from the 1830s, and monogenist theories were overwhelmed by polygenist theories of race in British and French evolutionary thought, which stressed that each race was suited to a particular environment –​i.e. European (white) races were suited only to cool and salubrious climates and would either degenerate or disappear through death or miscegenation in tropical climates.9 The prospect of miscegenation was also not quite as alarming in either medical or political terms at this time as it came to be later on. As racial categories hardened during the course of the nineteenth century, any expectation that white races might, over a few generations, acclimatise in their tropical colonies disappeared and was replaced by a racialised view of colonisation in the Indian subcontinent. In the middle of the nineteenth century, at precisely the moment when the British Empire in South Asia was at its greatest geographical extent and political power, there was little prospect for its white ruling class to settle in the subcontinent for the long term.10 It is here that the hill stations changed in character; from the quiet retreats of a few privileged British officials, they were now earnestly designed and built as imperial sanctuaries for the white race –​a place of refuge from the diseases, heat, dust, bustle, and chaos of mainland India. Therefore the hill stations, though situated within the tropical colonies, came to represent everything that tropical colonies were not: cool and salubrious; quiet and decorous; full of feminine frivolities and European luxuries; invested with arboreal wonders and civic amenities. 320

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In brief, the hill stations were now conceived as the other of the tropical colony, and used as a hiatus from it by colonial officials. Scholars have pointed out the many ways in which this narrative was sustained. The tropical landscape, imagined in magnified fearful terms, was a familiar trope in official discourse in the nineteenth century. The ‘plains’ of the lower deltaic Bengal were identified as the ‘home’ of the dreaded cholera.11 Indian landscapes more generally were associated not only with heat and dirt but also with malaria, dysentery, diarrhoea, the ague, and unexplained fevers. Therefore, apart from their climate, the second distinguishing feature of all hill stations was their ‘Englishness’; this was both natural and reinforced by settlement from Britain. In British medical discourse, ‘non-​tropical’ characteristics were central to the mountain towns of British settlements within tropical colonies. This conceptual manoeuvre involved identifying a non-​tropical zone beyond a certain altitude within the tropical colonies. As David Arnold pointed out, British botanists in the nineteenth century identified Indian territories at higher altitudes in the Nilgiris or the Himalayas as temperate zones, albeit within tropical regions.12 The botanist J.F. Royle found that, as we ascend these mountains, the plants of India disappear, and we are delighted at finding the increase in number and variety of those belonging to the European genera. At first we see only a few straggling towards the plains, which in a more temperate climate would be their favourite resort; and it is not until we have attained a considerable elevation that, having apparently lost all traces of tropical vegetation, we enter a forest of pines or oaks, and lofty rhododendrons, where none but European forms are recognizable.13 As the Indian topography was categorised ‘tropical’, and racial anxieties hardened to marginalise or eliminate entirely any miscegenation between the now rather more numerous British troops, officials, and civilians and the local Indians, the ‘hill stations’ assumed both topographical and climatic nuances that replicated Europe.14 Therefore, the first signifier of a likely hill station at an accessible mountain ridge was its access from the ‘plains’; the second, its climate. In the first survey intended to assess the site of Darjeeling for a sanatorium for British troops, J.T. Herbert, the deputy surveyor-​general, noted both its ready access to urban centres such as Calcutta and Allahabad favourably in comparison with Almora or Dehradun; and also, of course, its climate. Therefore, as Kavita Philips pointed out, Lord Lytton’s rhapsodic account of the monsoons in Ooty –​‘Such beautiful English rain, such delicious English mud!’ –​resonated not with tropical storms but with what the British perceived as an essential Englishness within the mountain landscapes.15 J.D. Hooker, the botanist who later succeeded his father as the director of Kew Gardens, travelled in the eastern Himalayas in the decade that Darjeeling was established. His Himalayan Journals was replete with botanical and geological information, ‘discoveries’ of numerous mountain flora, vignettes on the new hill station of Darjeeling, and illicit travelling into neighbouring Himalayan kingdoms. His comment on the ‘rosy cheeks’ of healthy English children in Darjeeling, in stark contrast to their pale and sickly peers in the presidency towns, resonated through the discourse of healthy, home-​like, little towns as far from the physical discomforts of tropical colonies as possible. I believe that children’s faces afford as good an index as any to the healthfulness of a climate, and in no part of the world is there a more active, rosy, and bright young community, than at Dorjiling. It is incredible what a few weeks of that mountain air does for the India-​born children of European parents: they are taken there sickly, 321

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pallid or yellow, soft and flabby, to become transformed into models of rude health and activity.16 In the middle of the nineteenth century, when hill stations were newly built, the optimism among officials was nearly unanimous: ‘[T]‌here have been … very few cases of bad health even in the natives; and those were generally found to have been contracted in the morning, in the plains.’17 The racialisation of the hills/​plains dichotomy therefore acquired the conventions of medical opinion and official policy.18

Hill cantonments and British soldiery There were two categories of hill stations. First, the iconic hill stations such as Simla, Ooty, and Darjeeling served as cultural and administrative hubs for the British in the Indian subcontinent. These towns are what represented hill stations to the British as well as to the Indians. There was another kind of hill station, though: the hill cantonment. These were located in a ring on the mountainous ranges around the main civilian part of the hill stations. The cantonment hill stations accommodated British troops who had served in mainland India. Greatly increased in numbers after 1857, they replicated the civil hill stations in being laid out for British troops. The hill cantonments formally segregated the troops from the town that inevitably grew around these. Such were the cantonment stations of Kasauli, Subathu, Jalapahar, Senchal, Murree, Shillong, Nainital, and Ranikhet, which were situated from the north-​west of India to the north-​east and which formed a ring around the northern frontiers of the British Empire. In essence, the cantonments –​and, indeed, much of British Indian architecture –​grew out of the necessity of negotiating tropical climates, the bungalow and the veranda being notable examples.19 Eighteenth-​century cantonments and their architecture in British India borrowed heavily from vernacular iterations and practices. The racialisation of the tropics medically by-​ passed these innovations, however.20 Therefore, the military cantonments after 1857 in particular were situated away from the living spaces in the tropical cities; both the cantonment and the civil lines distinguished themselves from the native quarters and the ‘bazaar’.21 Each hill cantonment, in consequence, functioned both as convalescent depot for those made ill by the tropical climate and as military barracks to support troops, which could be mobilised easily either for the great Indian plains or for the mountainous borders when necessary. The cantonments were often located too high in the mountains, however, with the architecture entirely unsuitable to their climate. In many cases this resulted in invalided soldiers struggling to adjust to the mountainous climates, the almost constant rain, and the cold. The convalescent depot of Senchal, set up in 1845 above Darjeeling, at 7,000 feet, proved so cold and miserable that the regiments stationed there witnessed a very high number of suicides among the troops.22 The entire cantonment at Senchal had to be abandoned after 20 years and relocated 2,000 feet lower, at Lebong.23 Indeed, in 1864 the report written by T. Graham Balfour, deputy inspector-​general of hospitals, on the sanitary conditions in the Indian Army showed that medical officials clearly recognised the anomaly of building convalescent depots in the Himalayan mountains: As to the influence on the health of troops of high mountain elevations in India, as from 4000 to 7000 feet above sea-​level, the information we possess seems to be anything but favourable. […] At Kussowlie, Subathoo, and Dugshai, in front of Simla, the death-​rates are stated to have been in the ratio of 37, 36, and 68 per 1000. At Murree,

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which is due north of Rawul Pindi, and seven thousand feet above sea-​level, the mortality for five years was 92 in 1000; but then it was a depot for invalids …24 Eventually the British military establishment settled on an altitude of 2,000 to 4,000 feet as the ideal height for convalescent cantonments. As the medical thought and practice in Britain focused heavily on sanitarian approaches to curing disease in the middle of the nineteenth century, the architecture and planning within the sanatoriums became significant. Moreover, the focus of health now involved the threat of venereal diseases. These involved heavy-​handed legislation and control over the boundaries of the cantonments and the bodies of the Indian women who provided sex and companionship to the troops.25 This was entirely fitting; the clear racial distinctions between the British and the Indians discouraged any interaction to prevent miscegenation. The policy of locating convalescent cantonments at elevated heights from the Indian plains continued over the next few decades. In fact, lock hospitals were established in the vicinity of most hill convalescent depots.26 The medical discourse shifted and endorsed the convalescent depots as suitable for certain illnesses, such as dysentery and malaria –​but not for phthisis or tuberculosis. When the new, elite Pasteur Institute for medical research was to be established, medical experts strongly urged that its location be at a hill station –​at one remove from the heat and dust of the plains of British India. The Pasteur Institutes at Kasauli (1897) and at Coonoor (1907) were located in hill stations in order to preserve both the biological sera and vaccines and the British medical officials from suffering in the tropical heat.27

The hill towns and their bazaars Like the Mall and the promenade, usually flattened out from a mountain ridge and decked with glittering shops selling European consumer goods (bakeries; cosmetics and medicine; fine tobacco; wine and spirits), each station also had its ‘bazaar’. The bazaar, or marketplace, synonymised the Indian section of the hill towns. These were situated at the bottom of the ridges, at a lower height than the European parts. As Kennedy suggested, the location of the Indian populations of the hill stations (except the live-​in domestic servants) around the bazaar represented the difference in social status between the ruling white race and the Indians. The Indian settlements, built higgledy-​piggledy on the lower slopes in the alleys around the bazaars, were visually and architecturally different from the ‘English’ cottages or ‘Swiss’ chalets on the mountain ridges. They accommodated many times more people than the British administrators had planned for when they built the hill stations. Incrementally, Indians of various trades –​tailors and haberdashers, store keepers, butchers, cart-​men, porters, grain merchants, moneylenders and timber traders, labourers, rickshaw pullers, street sweepers, porters –​settled in the bazaar in the fast-​g rowing hill stations to service the Europeans in their picturesque homes on the hills. The hill stations themselves extended in all directions. Apart from being a government town, by the late nineteenth century Simla had developed as an entrepôt for the administration of forest resources in the now settled region. The free use of hill communities’ forced labour and the utilisation of the resources of the minor princely states saw Simla being connected to 63 separate roads. The initial British dreams of a trans-​Tibetan trade route through these roads never did materialise; but the establishment of Simla enabled the heightened commercialisation of forest produce from its neighbouring regions. These areas were mostly demarcated either as forested lands or reserved as such by the government. Similarly, the forested areas around Darjeeling and Ooty were used for timber or sold as ‘wastelands’ to land speculators and consortiums, and later converted to vast tea or coffee, or cinchona plantations, established by British companies and run by the famed British Indian managing agencies.28 323

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The railways facilitated the consolidation of the hill regions and further established the hill stations, especially when the viceroy and his entire office took to spending the summer in Simla. The bustling trade and lively business of serving the administration of government therefore compromised the essential ‘whiteness’ and the cultural and social homogeneity of the hill stations. The hill towns, with their mall and the promenade flattened from the mountain ridges, a few churches, the club, and picturesque cottages with gardens that grew roses and orchids, also sprouted bazaar areas that far outpaced the white enclaves in size and population. Even within the European areas, the incremental cluster of hotels and boarding houses accommodated not only British officials but the entire range of the non-​official British in India who crowded the hill stations. Their residents included retired servicemen and officials, traders, and commercial travellers from the large cities, planters who lived regionally and needed to recuperate from the malarial fevers of their tea/​cinchona/​coffee estates, modestly pensioned widows, missionaries of diverse denominations, and pregnant wives of officials who were on duty all over the subcontinent. It became the norm for women ‘in confinement’ to remove themselves to the ‘hills’ from the cities and from remote outposts within the subcontinent in the months leading to the birth of their children, and for some time thereafter. As scholars have pointed out, sending white British women to the hill stations to preserve their health and that of the white European families served to entrench the social spaces in the hill stations as disproportionately white and ‘English’, and this in sharp relief against the clamour of multitudes of Indians everywhere else. The memsahibs therefore represented the entire racial aspiration for a homogeneous social space in the mountain resorts, as unsullied as the pristine landscapes at these sites.29 The hill stations provided refuge to yet another section of Europeans in British India. European children were considered particularly vulnerable to the climate of the plains (and also to excessive intimacy with native servants). Therefore, from an early age the children of the British families that were obliged to remain in the cities in India were sent to the residential European-​only schools that were established in the vicinity of hill stations. Those who could not afford to send their children to school in Britain settled for the hill stations. Moreover, the political necessity of retaining a sharp, apparently unbridgeable racial distinction between the ruling elite and all others presented the problem of what to do with the destitute or near-​ destitute white population, as well as the so-​called mixed race or ‘half-​caste’ children, who were often the orphaned offspring of British troops and local women. This was not an issue solely within the hill stations. As historians have pointed out, in British India generally the mixed-​race population was viewed as the physical representation of the degeneration of the white race in the nineteenth century.30 Yet the poor white could not be abandoned entirely without endangering the trope of the superiority of the entire white race. In the nineteenth century the government averted the frightful prospect of thousands of poor and sickly white children markedly visible in the rougher areas of the presidency towns by establishing schools for European and Eurasian orphans in the hill stations.31 The missionaries and military officials who influenced this policy hoped that even the mixed-​race Eurasians would develop stronger constitutions and moral fortitude in the temperate, hardy hill climate.

Governing from the ‘hills’ By the turn of the twentieth century the hill stations had become vital sites of colonial governance in British India. Not just bacteriological or nutritional research institutes; most official government business was conducted from the hill stations by the turn of the century. By the early twentieth century the federal and presidency governments spent around eight months of 324

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the year at the hill stations. This involved, naturally, an annual move up to the mountains on the part of the entire administration: its clerks and lackeys, servants and porters. The hill stations spilled out at its edges to accommodate the burgeoning hill towns, changing their characters fundamentally. As the British Raj reached its high imperial age, there was a challenge to the social exclusivity of the hill stations that fundamentally altered their character. This was the intrusion of the elite Indians who aspired to mimic the social and cultural practices of the British. It diluted the white and English character of the hill stations, making the sustenance of physical distance between the rulers and the ruled complicated as well as fractious. At first the presence of the viceroy and high officials in Simla provided political and social incentive to the more powerful Indian princes to buy expensive (and prestigious) residences within Simla, often from highly placed retiring British officials returning to the home country. Similarly, the princely states invested in large mansions in the high ridges of Ooty and Darjeeling where elite British officials had their residences. Rapidly escalating property prices tempted British officials to sell their homes to Indian princes, some of whom, such as the rulers of Nabha and Patiala, bought several prestigious properties in the hill stations as real estate investments and rented them out to well-​heeled tenants, usually British officials or aristocratic Indians. Therefore, the ownership by Indians of large houses in the prestigious places became a regular feature of the ever-​growing hill stations. By the 1880s the dilution of British ownership in the prominent hill stations became regular enough for the government to control the sale of properties by the British to Indian princes, and even by princes to each other. Nonetheless, by the turn of the century affluent Indians, mostly professional and landed aristocrats, were present in significant numbers in all major hill stations. They established their own clubs, theatres, and places of entertainment; donated generously to the local charitable hospitals and temples or mosques in the bazaars; and participated in the civic life of the hill stations in their segregated communities. Inevitably, their social exclusion from European-​only sites such as the mall, the promenade, and the clubs generated increasing hostility as the clamour of nationalist politics grew in the urban metropolises in British India.32 By the 1920s the location of the official administration in Simla for eight months of the year served to arouse nationalist hostility at the physical distancing of the government from its people.33 Gandhi famously observed that the viceroy was physically away from the bulk of his Indian subjects, high in the mountains at Simla, for most of the year. With the devolution of local government, albeit fragmented, the presidency municipalities of Calcutta and Bombay prominently included elite Indians in significant proportions. They often intervened to block tax rises to finance civic infrastructure, especially if they perceived that these would benefit only the British residents in the white towns of the metropolises.34 Not so the hill stations; viewed as exceptional and, for political purposes, as ‘English’ towns, the government made sure that nominated and ex officio members outnumbered elected officials and prioritised the interests of the government and of the British residents, even after the substantive decline in local powers in the constitutional reforms of 1919.35 By the turn of the century the hill stations accommodated overcrowded bazaar areas, heightened pressure within the main ‘white’ towns, oversubscribed and expensive hotels, boarding houses with inadequate facilities, shortages of milk and butcher’s meat, supplies of contaminated water, and regular outbreaks of cholera in the high season. These threw into sharp relief the constant tension between the imaginary of pristine and European retreats and the realities of colonial towns in India. As research has shown, this compromised the hill stations’ characteristics, and enraged British residents as well as summer visitors. The Indian intrusions, both in the bazaar by the labouring classes and traders and by well-​heeled landed proprietors 325

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and Westernised, professional Indians on the hillsides, incensed the English. The Indian population of Simla, for instance, doubled between 1898 and 1921.36 Although the princely states could be formally restrained from acquiring properties in hill stations, other Indian residents could not be circumscribed. Darjeeling, being the summer capital of Bengal, where the middle classes were also highly Anglicised, was a case in point. Rich zamindars, such as the rajas of Darbhanga and Burdwan, owned large mansions here. The esteemed landowner and littérateur Rabindranath Tagore regularly spent summers in Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and its environs. Well-​known barristers from Calcutta built summer residences along its upper ridges, in proximity to the British. In a trend disconcerting to the British officials resident there, the numbers of affluent Indians with substantial property in well-​heeled localities in Simla rose rapidly from 1905, and, even though they were closely vetted, remained high.37 Similar trends were visible in other prominent hill stations such as Ooty.38

Narratives of decline Civic amenities, such as the sewerage or roads, and the maintenance of public spaces, including gardens and parks, in the hill stations benefited not only from the ratepayers’ taxes but also from regular grants from provincial and central governments. Officials nominated by government dominated their civic bodies.39 Thus, the urban municipalities of Simla, Darjeeling, and Ooty, unlike civic bodies elsewhere in British India, were never entirely reliant on ratepayers to finance their civic amenities. As these remained the seats of government for most of the year as well as the natural homes of the British in India, much effort was spent on their arboreal cultures, sewage disposal and sanitation, water supply, and public road maintenance. The municipalities legislated heavy fines to ensure that private and commercial units did not pollute the main thoroughfares with sewage or waste.40 Beggars and mendicants were similarly discouraged with heavy penalties. These measures were not available to the British in district towns, and rarely even in the presidency capitals of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, in the twentieth century. Although spared from the worst consequences of the unrelenting pressures of burgeoning native populations, the hill stations’ reputations as sanatoriums suffered through a narrative of decline and deterioration. This was most evident in the escalating epidemics in the various hill stations. From the time of their establishment medical experts had pointed out that patients with respiratory diseases would see their symptoms worsen at the hill sanatoriums.41 By the late nineteenth century epidemic cholera was present annually in several hill cantonments and high-​profile hill stations. The route for annual Hindu pilgrimages and their movement along the Garhwal and Kumaon regions, as well as the larger festival of Kumbh Mela in the plains, were blamed for epidemics in the army cantonments and hill stations.42 When a severe cholera epidemic occurred in Simla in 1875, medical officials blamed it on the ‘the central bazaar in which the native population of the sanatorium is massed. This part … is also the most insanitary. It encloses a gorge into which is poured the filth of the densely peopled neighbourhood.’43 The supposedly quintessential tropical diseases –​cholera, malaria, and dysentery –​had become endemic to several hill stations in the twentieth century. In 1914 military medical officials were distinguishing between malarial and non-​malarial hill stations and stipulating that, in addition to quinine treatment, troops suffering from malaria be sent to non-​malarial hill stations for convalescence to rid their bodies of malarial parasites in the long term.44 And ‘hill-​diarrhoea,’ distinguished somehow from ‘true dysentery’ and likened to ‘sprue’, as well as ‘hill-​malaria’, remained in the lexicon of medical experts, who found these diseases in the mountain resorts and tea plantations around them.45 A retired civil surgeon in Ooty even distinguished ‘hill-​ diarrhoea’, common in other hill stations, from the ‘catarrh of the liver’ and ‘bilious diarrhoea’ 326

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that he claimed that Europeans would usually suffer from in Ooty, thereby, presumably, identifying Ooty as healthier than other hill stations of a similar status.46 As the bacteriological investigation of diseases became used more regularly by British Indian medical officials, these diagnoses shifted to bacterial causations from environmental ones. Even so, it was indisputable that hill stations remained vulnerable to annual epidemics, albeit probably on a lower scale than similar epidemics in the plains. In the 1940s medical researchers even suggested that the hill climate and ecology were conducive to the prevalence of plague in, for instance, Ooty and Coonoor, because the natural forests in the region provided an ideal environment for its vectors: In the Nilgiris, the peculiar configuration of the land, the prevailing climatic conditions, the abundance of a variety of wild rodents and fleas (all complementary hosts and vectors of plague), the common occurrence of human and rodent plague sporadically in areas apparently independent of traffic and the occurrence of pneumonic plague more frequently than in the plains, are features. […] It is, therefore, suggested that sylvatic plague either actually exists now, or the factors are such as may contribute towards its onset at any time.47

Résumé: Enduring tropes of the colonial hill stations It was in the twentieth century, though, that the hill stations were at the height of their splendour. At a time when the presidency capitals were often in the grip of nationalist protests and turmoil, the hill stations afforded the British refuge from the heat and clamour of the plains and of the fast-​politicising Indians in the metropolitan cities. These were encroached upon by the affluent natives, on the one hand, and crowded at the fringes by labouring populations, on the other, but they still afforded an English way of life and exclusive social spaces that were seldom so demarcated in the metropolises or the mofussil towns of India. Much of the continued myth of the pure mountain resorts was attributable not just to the hill stations themselves but to the forests and natural beauty that surrounded them. The uncultivated areas within the boundaries of the tea, coffee, and cinchona plantations and the government forests, managed from the middle of the nineteenth century to yield timber and revenues from miscellaneous forest products, also provided almost infinite opportunities for outdoor leisure activity. These mimicked closely the gentlemanly sports of aristocratic Britons; hunting, fishing, riding, and the scientific observation of nature, besides the quintessential colonial British pastimes of polo and cricket.48 Although Indians jostled eventually with the British for the right to host their own cricket tournaments in the metropolitan cities, polo and horse racing remained elite sports in British India.49 The game-​r ich Nilgiris, to provide one instance, offered almost infinite possibilities for pursuing hunting; the Nilgiri Hunting Club and the Ootacamund Hunt Club were prestigious and exclusive and counted the most powerful officials in the presidency among their members.50 Historians have pointed out how the appropriation of forests and the marginalisation or objectification of the indigenous peoples who resided there took place concomitantly with the establishment of plantations and hill resorts.51 These tropes endured and were appropriated by the Indian elite, and the hill stations themselves survived into independent India as cool, temperate, refuges from the heat and dust of the plains of mainstream India.

Notes 1 See James S. Duncan, ‘The struggle to be temperate: Climate and “moral masculinity” in mid-​ nineteenth century Ceylon’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 21 (1), 2000, pp. 34–​7; David

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Nandini Bhattacharya M. Pomfret, ‘ “Beyond risk of contagion”: Childhood, hill stations, and the planning of British and French colonial cities’, in: Robert Peckham and David M. Pomfret (eds.), Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2013), pp. 81–​ 104; Robert S. Aiken, ‘Early Penang hill station’, Geographical Review, 77 (4), 1987, pp. 421–​39; and A.J. Njoh, ‘Colonial philosophies, urban space, and racial segregation in British and French colonial Africa’, Journal of Black Studies, 38 (4), 2008, pp. 579–​99. 2 Eric T. Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 8–​39. 3 Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). See also Queeny Pradhan, Empire in the Hills: Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund, and Mount Abu, 1820–​1920 (New Delhi: OUP, 2017). Judith Kenny has emphasised the symbolic significance of the high altitudes, and linked the location of British or European architecture located at the high ridges and the native homes and the bazaar at the lower parts with the assertion of racial hierarchy: idem, ‘Climate, race, and imperial authority: The symbolic landscape of the British hill station in India’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85 (4), 1995, pp. 694–​714. 4 Anon., The Dorjeeling Guide: Including a Description of the Country, and of its Climate, Soil and Productions with Travelling Directions etc. (Calcutta: Samuel Smith, 1845), 43. 5 Kavita Phillips, Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 6 Pamela Kanwar, Imperial Simla: The Political Culture of the Raj (New Delhi: OUP, 2003). 7 Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-​ Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–​ 1914 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 61. After the suppression of the Revolt in 1858, military and medical officials suggested that most of the British troops in India be stationed ‘at five or six thousand feet’ and be summoned to the plains when necessary. See Julius Jeffreys, The British Army in India, Its Preservation by Appropriate Housing, Clothing, etc. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1858). 8 Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–​1850 (New York: OUP, 1999), 58–​152. 9 Michael A. Osborne, ‘Acclimatizing the world: A history of the paradigmatic colonial science’, Osiris, 15 (1), 2000, pp. 135–​51. 10 Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (New York: OUP, 2004), 27–​33. 11 Pratik Chakrabarti, Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 179–​210. 12 David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–​1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 13 John F. Royle, Illustrations of the Botany and Other Branches of the Natural History of the Himalayan Mountains, and the Flora of Cashmere, vol. 1 (London: W.H. Allen, 1839), 15. 14 In 1830 the number of white men in the army was 36,409 and there were 3,550 civil officials: Peter J. Marshall, ‘The whites of British India, 1780–​1830: A failed colonial society?’, International History Review, 12 (1), 1990, pp. 26–​44; idem, ‘British society in India under the East India Company’, MAS, 31 (1), 1997, pp. 89–​108. 15 Philip, Civilizing Natures, 40. 16 J.D. Hooker, Himalayan Journals, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2004), 120. 17 J.T. Pearson, ‘Note on Darjeeling’ [bound newspaper article], 1839; repr. in Fred Pinn, The Road to Destiny: Darjeeling Letters 1839 (Calcutta: OUP, 1986), pp. 1–​13. 18 The climate was supposed to have redemptive properties for Europeans of all classes, even the socially marginalised within conventional British Indian society. See Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Hierarchies of punishment in colonial India: European convicts and the racial dividend, c.1860–​1890’, in: idem and Susanne Gehrmann (eds.), Empires and Boundaries: Race, Class and Gender in Colonial Settings (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 51–​75. 19 Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (New York: OUP, 1984), 51; Mādhavī Desāī, Mīkī Desāī, and Jon Lang, The Bungalow in Twentieth-​Century India: The Cultural Expression of Changing Ways of Life and Aspirations in the Domestic Architecture of Colonial and Post-​Colonial Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). 20 Therefore, the bungalow, for instance, sustained the tension between representing an elite, English domestic space that highlighted English authority and physical distance from the natives and, simultaneously, constantly having to accommodate social practices that subverted these objectives. See William

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The hill stations of colonial South Asia J. Glover, ‘ “A feeling of absence from old England”: The colonial bungalow’, Home Cultures, 1 (1), 2015, pp. 61–​82. 21 Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); Neema Cherian, ‘Spaces for races: Ordering of camp followers in the military cantonments, Madras Presidency, c.1800–​64’, Social Scientist, 32 (5/​6), 2004, pp. 32–​50; Stephen Legg, ‘Governing prostitution in colonial Delhi: From cantonment regulations to international hygiene (1864–​1939)’, Social History, 34 (4), 2009, pp. 447–​67. 22 John H. Rumsby, ‘Suicide in the British army, c.1815 to c.1860’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 84 (340), 2006, pp. 349–​61. 23 Annual Sick Returns and Reports: Hospitals, Convalescent Depots and Sanatoriums Abroad, WO 334/​40 (The National Archive, Kew). 24 Anon., ‘Hill stations in India’, British and Foreign Medico-​Chirurgical Review, 34 (68), 1864, pp. 294–​300. 25 See, for instance, Philippa Levine, ‘Venereal disease, prostitution, and the politics of empire: The case of British India’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4 (4), 1994, pp. 579–​602; Erica Wald, Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780–​1868 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 118–​56; and Douglas Peers, ‘Imperial vice: Sex, drink and the health of British troops in north Indian cantonments, 1800–​1858’, in: David Killingray and David Omissi (eds.), Guardians of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 25–​52. 26 For instance, see BL, APAC, IOR/​L/​MIL/​7/​13903, ‘Reports of lock hospitals in Bengal, 1886–​90’. 27 Chakrabarti, Bacteriology in British India. 28 Nandini Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 58. 29 Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, 117–​46. 30 David Arnold, ‘Race, place and bodily difference in early nineteenth-​century India’, Historical Research, 77 (196), 2004, pp. 254–​73. 31 Idem, ‘European orphans and vagrants in India in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 7 (2), 1979, pp. 104–​27. 32 As Pamela Kanwar has pointed out, it was not clear to middle-​class Indians if they were allowed at the Mall in Simla. Ill-​dressed labourers were forbidden; but Indians did walk in the malls, only not, presumably, at the same time as the elite British officials used the promenade. Idem, Imperial Simla, 202–​14). 33 Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, 147–​74. 34 Harrison, Public Health in British India, 202–​26. 35 Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves, 84–​98. 36 Kanwar, Imperial Simla, 191. 37 Ibid., 140–​5. 38 Molly Panter-​Downes, Ooty Preserved: A Victorian Hill-​Station in India (London: H. Hamilton, 1967). 39 Pamela Kanwar, ‘The changing profile of the summer capital of British India: Simla 1864–​1947’, MAS, 18 (2), 1984, pp. 215–​36. 40 See, for instance, BL, APAC, IOR/​P/​11643, Bengal proceedings/​Revenue/​Excluded territories/​ April 1927, pp. 3–​5. 41 J.T. Calvert, ‘Note on Darjeeling climate in the treatment of phthisis’, Indian Medical Gazette, 44 (4), 1909, pp. 129–​30. 42 E. Hart, ‘The nurseries of cholera: An address delivered before the Section of Public Medicine of the British Medical Association at Newcastle, August, 1893’, British Medical Journal, 1 (1729), 1894, pp. 358–​63. 43 Anon., ‘Cholera in Simla’, Indian Medical Gazette, 10 (12), 1875, pp. 328–​30. 44 P. Hehir, ‘Prevention of malaria in the troops of our Indian empire’, Indian Medical Gazette, 49 (8), 1914, pp. 305–​9. 45 G.G. Crozier, ‘Hill diarrhoea’, Indian Medical Gazette, 41 (4), 1906, p. 156; K. Macleod, ‘An address on the study of tropical diseases: Delivered at the opening of the winter session of the London School of Tropical Medicine’, British Medical Journal, 2 (2389), 1906, pp. 901–​4. See also anon., ‘The Indian medical year’, Indian Medical Gazette, 59 (1), 1924, pp. 35–​49. 46 C.L. Williams, ‘The etiology of hill diarrhœa’, Indian Medical Gazette, 41 (3), 1906, p. 112. 47 P.V. George and B. Timothy, ‘A preliminary study of plague at a hill station in the Nilgiris, south India’, Indian Medical Gazette, 76 (3), 1941, pp. 142–​8.

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26 THE AGRARIAN HISTORY OF COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA Nikolay Kamenov

Introduction One of the most confounding paradoxes of colonialism in South Asia was the growing dependence of the economy on agriculture through the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. A number of ‘industrial revolutions’ around the world over the same period ushered in a new age of unprecedented affluence for specific pockets, underlined by previously unheard levels of productivity. In British India, some of the boons of modern industry were slowly becoming visible. From around the middle of the nineteenth century a rail system started connecting cities and sites of agricultural production. New cotton and jute textile industries sprang up in Bombay and Calcutta and to smaller extent in Ahmedabad. The appearance of new industrial centres as symbols of modernity notwithstanding, the first half of the twentieth century saw a growing proportion of the population engaged in agricultural labour, reaching over 70 per cent by 1951. Even more disconcerting was the fact that overall agricultural productivity in colonial South Asia made progress only piecemeal. Indeed, most of the documented growth in the rural sector over the colonial period could easily be ascribed to the extension of the labour involved and to the additional land claimed from jungles and former pastures. A chronic deficiency of investment and a lack of capital inputs characterised the agricultural economy. Stagnation, frequently punctured by famines, was thus a defining feature of most of South Asian agrarian history in the long nineteenth century and beyond. Yet, despite the apparent sluggishness of the agricultural economy, the agrarian world of South Asia was in a state of flux and underwent profound transformations. To begin with, the colonial state embarked on an all-​encompassing project of codifying property rights that would eventually have a lasting effect in the agrarian context, not only on the productive employment of land but also on the usage of the commons and the stratification of rural communities along degrees of proprietorship. Parallel to the question of property rights –​and, one might add, deeply intertwined with it –​was the question of revenue. Based partially on economic and philosophic theory of the time and partially on existing practices on the ground, the colonial state created several revenue regimes that operated in parallel in the different presidencies. Over the nineteenth century other colonial interventions, ranging from cartography, new tenant rights’ laws, and early developmental projects, brought further change to rural India. Beneath such colonial endeavours, however, there were deeper, tectonic transformations, captured most DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-27

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succinctly by the category of commercialisation. Developments such as the monetisation of the economy, logistical breakthroughs, the formation of a market for land, and the appearance of new agricultural export commodities were all in a dialectic relationship to the broader process of commercialisation; they were both a cause for and a result of the ever deeper ingress of market forces into rural society. If new laws and commerce brought transformation to rural society, were there any lasting characteristics of this agrarian world in flux? Turning to the peasantry and peasant labour, the pre-​eminent social historian of India Sumit Sarkar has noted that the only constant was ‘lives of endless toil and exploitation’.1 Yet even the conditions of toil and exploitation changed over time. Did peasants toil on a small piece of land they owned, were they tenants on the land of bigger proprietors, or simply wage labourers? Could peasants organise and challenge the constant exploitation? What political projects managed to mobilise peasants? In addressing these questions, this chapter sketches the broader transformations of the agrarian world in South Asia during colonial times. The chapter is divided into three sections, following broadly the themes raised above: it starts with a discussion of the legal and organisational interventions of the colonial state, continues with the economic underpinnings of the transformation of agriculture, and concludes with a discussion on peasant history.

Colonial interventions The first challenge faced by the colonial administration in British India was the securing of an efficient revenue collection mechanism. After 1757 the Company initially had to collect revenue in a single district, but it was swiftly granted Diwani rights for Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. By 1773, while the Company Raj administered and collected revenue for the whole Bengal Presidency, its officers knew very little about the agrarian system prevalent in this part of India. A variety of ancient and medieval texts written in a number of languages competed against unwritten local customs over the practice and meaning of property laws. Familiarity with the language(s) as well as with the agricultural practices on the ground and estate accounting thus paid well for an emerging class of learned native intermediaries. As the defects associated with the lack of coherent collection policy started to become apparent, an endeavour in codifying property rights for the purpose of creating a unified revenue regime for the whole presidency started to gain momentum. During Warren Hastings’ years as governor-​general a large project to understand and preserve codes based on religious texts saw the employment of pandits and ulemas who interpreted such texts for their prospective application in civil law. On the other hand, a number of scholars, jurists, and economists started devising a broader administrative framework based on the philosophical and economic theories predominant in Europe at the time. Two doctrines proved decisive for the resulting Permanent Settlement inaugurated in 1793 by the governor-​general, Charles Cornwallis. First was the idea that value is created exclusively off the land. Although there were competing schools of economic thought, the broad tendency of the period was the supplanting of mercantilism by a belief in free trade. The publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776 flag-​posted this shift. In addition, the French school of physiocracy, with its insistence on agriculture as the main source of value, flanked the laissez-​faire theory of the time. This combination informed the belief that securing rights over land would lead to its improvement and eventual accumulation of wealth in Bengal. Second, on an even deeper level, was the emphasis on property as the most basic principle of good government.2 Putting property as the paramount legal right over land was not necessarily the likeliest choice. On the one hand, there is evidence of different arrangements of ownership in South 332

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Asia at the dawn of the Company Raj; the most prominent example in this sense would be ownership along familial and communal lines, rather than property attached to a person. On the other hand, beyond ownership there could be multiple rights over a piece of land, or, in other words, different communities might have different vested interests in the same parcel, such as those of the collection of revenue, possession, and the right to evict. One group could be responsible for paying up revenue to the state, while another group could cultivate the land, with the tenancy rights of the latter approximating ownership as much as the claims of the former. Further, it was possible that land was not alienable from its owner on religious grounds, or, rather, sellable only to someone from the same community, further confounding the concept of ownership and its transferability.3 It is not surprising, then, that the colonial state invested much effort in regulating three legal dimensions of private property: proprietorship, tenancy, and transferability.4 Although the depth and pace of change might be debatable, the gradual replacing of social relationships based on multiple interests with a legal regime based on exclusive property rights was certainly one of the most consequential and enduring colonial interventions. Following the tenet of secure property as the cornerstone of good governance, the Company Raj soon imposed a number of parallel revenue regimes in the different presidencies of its growing territory. The foremost example is the zamindari system, initiated through the aforementioned Permanent Settlement of 1793. The logic behind the proclamation was that the tax on land would be settled in perpetuity, supposedly providing ‘all zamindars, independent talookdars, and other actual proprietors of land’ with unprecedented degree of security.5 Further, ‘their heirs and lawful successors will be allowed to hold their estates at such assessment for ever’.6 Theoretically, the Permanent Settlement was supposed to incentivise proprietors –​one is tempted to think: English gentry –​into investing in and improving their land.7 In practice, the imposition of the zamindari revenue system was fraught with confusion and compromises. For example, there were zamindars in title who were in fact only farming taxes over a tract who were now pronounced actual proprietors of the land. Indeed, it has been suggested that the Permanent Settlement reflected, above everything else, the weak state’s need to outsource its taxing.8 Be that as it may, in parallel to the zamindari system, and partially in reaction to its real and perceived shortcomings, a belief in the need for a direct taxation of cultivators started gaining momentum. As a prominent colonial official with experience as collector, military man, and administrator, Thomas Munro became a principal proponent of the ryotwari revenue system, arguing on the basis of local circumstance and tradition –​i.e. that land was predominantly occupied by ryots, or small proprietors, in South India. Once Munro had been pronounced governor-​general of the Madras Presidency, in 1819, the ryotwari system was introduced in most of the presidency, and soon afterwards in the Bombay Presidency.9 In contrast to the Permanent Settlement, here land and its ‘rent’ usually underwent a process of reassessment every 30 years. A third system, based on an assessment of the agricultural capacity of a village or estate –​mahal –​started operating in the North-​Western Provinces from around the same time.10 To add to the diversity and complexity of colonial revenue, since Mughal times there were also the so-​called inam –​grant or reward –​lands, which paid a nominal or no tax whatsoever. The colonial state not only honoured such existing arrangements but also formalised them through new legislation, in effect providing new lease of life to inams, which existed until the middle of the twentieth century. There were two unintended, albeit long-​ lasting and far-​ reaching, spin-​ off effects of these parallel revenue regimes. First, land assessment delivered a powerful impetus to the surveying of India. Mobilising pre-​existing cadastral knowledge in India and combining it with new surveying methods from continental Europe, the colonial regime produced maps 333

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of unprecedented detail instrumental for the revenue assessments. Such endeavours in India were not simply concomitant with the appearance of but in many ways spearheaded modern cartography and geography.11 The other development associated with the introduction of the various revenue regimes demanding cash payments was the incremental expansion of market forces and money–​commodity exchange in rural South Asia in the nineteenth century. It is important to note, however, that the precolonial revenue in many regions of the eighteenth-​ century economy was already fully monetised, indicating extensive trade with grains and cash crops in specific regions.12 Even so, the broader coverage of colonial cash requirements and its corollary regime based on property rights certainly played an important role in the qualitatively new process of the commercialisation of the rural sector. One indicator for this commercialisation was the formation of a –​or the intensification of the existing –​land market throughout India towards the end of the nineteenth century.13 Another indication was the reliance of agriculturists on credit extended by moneylenders and/​ or their landlords. Although the extent of debt and its effect on the overall economy remain debatable, colonial authorities identified moneylending as a central issue in the development of the agricultural economy in the latter half of the nineteenth century.14 Hence, as debates surrounding revenue ‘dried out’ while the famines remained recurrent, a new wave of debates and legislation surrounding credit and tenancy gathered momentum in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.15 The resulting laws protecting tenants –​or, generally, the ‘agriculturalist class’ –​did not necessarily spell future prosperity. In a much-​cited article, David Washbrook argued that such legislation impeded capital accumulation while also effectively subverting the process of proletarianisation, which was predictive of modern industrial capitalism.16 Beyond legislative interventions, the colonial state embarked on some infrastructural initiatives that brought a more visible and immediate change to the environment and agrarian society in South Asia. We shall return to the development of railways in the section on commercialisation below, but one infrastructural endeavour directly implicated in agriculture bears mentioning here. Throughout the nineteenth century, despite a great diversity in regional endowments and climates, most of the agricultural production in South Asia was bound to the generous but notoriously capricious monsoon rain. A failing monsoon often signalled, if not an outright famine, certainly a tough year ahead. Much hope was therefore invested in projects of modern, perennial irrigation.17 Although most remained on paper, or just on the level of debate, some regions were indeed remade through the building of canals. In particular, the canal colonies in Punjab were associated with substantial economic growth and were meant to display technological modernity at work.18 An implicit part of the project of transforming pastoral landscape into irrigated and cultivable land was also the displacement of pastoralists, or, respectively, their bringing into the fold of ‘civilisation’. The success of the canal colonies was not undisputed, however. Waterlogging, for example, and the corollary malarial outbreaks and increased soil salinity made an ad hoc appearance. Perennial irrigation similarly compromised the water supply of existing inundation canals.19 Regardless, the Punjab was becoming something of an epitome for agricultural success in the early twentieth century, not least because of the canal colonies.

Commercialisation Long-​distance trade with agricultural commodities such as grains, cotton, sugar, opium, and indigo had already reached impressive volumes during the Mughal times.20 The nineteenth century, however, saw a substantive quantitative and qualitative extension of commerce. Different interpretations as to the cause behind the inroads of market forces into the South Asian agrarian 334

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society are available. First, there is the original notion of ‘forced commerce’, extended by Amit Bahaduri.21 In this interpretation, based on the author’s work primarily on independent Bengal, markets for produce, land, labour, and credit were interlocked: peasants were indebted to a moneylender or their landlord and were, in turn, obliged to sell their produce through them. These involuntary transactions led to the sale of agricultural produce beneath remunerative prices and generally disturbed the supply/​demand equilibrium. A further implication of this somewhat ahistorical premise is the existence of concomitant legal and institutional structures that allowed for –​if not caused –​the emergence of such ‘forced commerce’. Although Bahaduri’s hypothesis came under severe criticism from various corners, most historians would still agree that colonial interventions such as the aforementioned legal framework set around property and the revenue regimes created structural preconditions for the reinforcement of market forces in nineteenth-​century South Asia. In the half-​century between 1830 and 1880 agricultural prices more than doubled throughout India, creating powerful incentives for the expansion of commercial commodities and trade. As we will see below, however, there were also clear cases in which the cultivation of certain cash crops was literally forced upon peasants. Recent studies have drawn attention to other causes and effects of commercialisation, such as the so-​called Pax Britannica and the demand side of the rural economy; deeper penetration of market forces often meant a wider (if not fuller) consumer basket.22 Indeed, the commercialisation of the agriculture and agrarian society in South Asia is best seen as a multidimensional and longitudinal process, often characterised by a combination of push and pull factors. One important factor allowing for the acceleration of commercialisation in rural settings was logistics. Several technological and infrastructural improvements bear mentioning here. Agricultural commodities in South Asia were transported over long distances primarily by means of pack bullocks and boats in the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth. The 1820s and 1830s saw two new developments. First, bullock carts started slowly replacing pack bullocks in transporting commodities such as cotton. This development was also flanked by the construction of metalled roads that connected mofussil towns, fairs, and bigger cities.23 Importantly, it should be noted that the expansion of this infrastructural network was only gradual and, even by the end of the century, limited, at best; mud roads made impossible the transport of bulk commodities from villages during monsoon times well into the twentieth century. Second, steamboats started plying the rivers Ganges and Indus. Far from replacing the ‘country boats’, however, they competed with and complemented the traditional sail and oar boats. In some cases, steamboats even created a higher demand for the ‘country’ flotilla. The early steamboats on the Ganges, for example, consumed high amounts of coal, which had to be stockpiled along the river –​a service performed by the flotilla. Indeed, around the middle of the nineteenth century traditional sailboats were still transporting the bulk of agricultural produce, and steamboats on the Indus, despite the large investments, proved no match.24 Elsewhere, steamboats became successful only slowly towards the end of the century.25 In comparison to the uncertain fortunes of the steamboats, the railways achieved a lasting and ever-​growing success in South Asia, and certainly played a role in the long-​distance marketing of agricultural produce in the second half of the nineteenth century.26 Introduced first around the middle of the century, railways in India were a political and economic project with wide cultural and social implications.27 Private investments and dividends on them were secured by the state.28 Events such as the Rebellion of 1857–​59 and the American Civil War, leading to the Lancashire cotton famine and a skyrocketing in the demand for Indian cotton, made a strong case for the building of railways that could swiftly and reliably transport materiel and personnel. Even before that, however, debates raged over the feasibility and suitability of railway projects in 335

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India. Rejecting the idea that railways in India should be on light tracks only, John Chapman, the founder of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company, commented that [c]‌anals did for England what it is now proposed that a tramway should do for Candeish [Khandesh] […] but when railways came, and educed the latent tendencies and wants of society, they showed that the canals, vastly valuable as they had been, had not done half what the country wanted.29 Indeed, what followed in the closing decades of the century, and well into independence, was a revolution in haulage; the net tonnage of carried goods expanded some 40 times between 1871 and 1946, from 3,542 to 128,716 thousand tons, while the net ton-​miles of goods expanded from 4,376,024 in 1891 to 26,981,313 thousand in 1946.30 The cash crops that made their way through South Asia on pack bullocks, in carts, in boats and ships’ holds, and in train carriages, varied over time and place, needless to say. Some crops served the internal market in the Raj, others were for export, and yet others made their debut on South Asian soil as a colonial project. The quintessential colonial commodity in the period of the Company Raj was opium. Grown from the poppy plant –​Papaver somniferum –​opium from Bengal and Bihar was already traded by European merchants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.31 It was the East India Company and its exports of opium to China, however, that brought a significant increase in the cultivation of poppy. Initially used as a mechanism for offsetting the British trade deficit with China caused by the growing demand for tea back in Europe, and characterised by the continuous one-​directional remittance of silver bullion, the export of opium from Bengal to China grew more than tenfold between 1771 and 1840 –​from 1,400 to 15,081 chests.32 To secure a steady flow of what was to become a strategic commodity, the Company established early on a monopoly over the trade and, gradually, a system for licensing the cultivation. Although a second major source, the Malwa opium, was developed in western India and could not be easily controlled, the colonial state retained high profits in the business. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century there were some 1.3 million growers licensed to the Patna and Benares agencies.33 Indigo was another commodity that was cultivated and traded in the precolonial period, but it reached unprecedented volumes in the nineteenth century, making Bengal the leading producer in the world. The new system of indigo production of Bengal was a successful blend of local knowledge in cultivation, imported experience in plantation enterprise from the New World, and science; between 1795 and 1831 indigo production in Bengal and the adjoining territories rose approximately twenty-​fold.34 Similarly, later in the nineteenth century Bengal became the biggest producer of jute in the world, its acreage almost reaching a staggering 4 million acres in 1907.35 A jute-​processing industry developed around Calcutta.36 The other major export fibre was cotton, particularly after the Lancashire cotton famine. The acreage of cotton also grew –​albeit bumpily –​hand in hand with demand and continuously rising prices up to the interwar period.37 An erstwhile tailor of the world, India was exporting raw cotton and, later, with the formation of textile industries in Bombay and Ahmedabad, yarn and eventually cloth.38 Notably, artisanal weaving upcountry managed to survive the competition of imported textile by catering to the lowest and highest segments of the market.39 The growth of non-​food crops necessarily implied a reciprocal and compensatory growth of food crops elsewhere; as mentioned above, the second half of the nineteenth century saw a marked price convergence of grains. Sugarcane was a cash crop of growing importance in various regions of South Asia.40 India became the leading producer of sugar in the world in the second half of the twentieth century, a title for which it bitterly competes against Brazil 336

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today. Other foodstuffs, such as groundnuts, a substantial proportion of which were grown in Tamilnad for export to South-​East Asia, grew in importance in particular regions.41 Finally, tea bears mentioning here. First introduced to South Asia as a colonial project, tea created a large plantation complex in the second half of the nineteenth century –​Assam is the quintessential ­example –​based on indentured labour recruitment.42 By the end of the nineteenth century the system, which also triggered the formation of South Asian diasporas in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and Fiji, had recruited a labour force of more than half a million coolies working on plantations in Assam. The question of labour and peasant mobilisation forms the core of the last section of the chapter.

Peasant labour and mobilisation How did the interventions of the colonial state affect the Indian peasant? How did the processes of commercialisation and market formation change the agrarian society in South Asia? To answer these deceptively simple questions, one strategy applied by historians is to look at the processes of stratification in rural South Asia. A hypothetical historical bifurcation of society, producing a capitalist landholding class and a labouring dispossessed class, could inform the study of solidarities and class struggle. Conversely, the formation (or perseverance) of a ‘middle’ peasant signals a layered and nuanced social composition, the implication being that economic forces affected different groups –​big landowners, subsistence owners, tenants, labourers –​in a bewilderingly disparate manner, thus also making this scenario theoretically less conducive to broad political mobilisation.43 In practice, it is difficult to clearly identify either of the two developments, and particularly so at an all-​India level. Specific factors beyond economic trends, notably caste and geographical endowments, played a major role in the composition of the agrarian community. Stratification was bound to the specific region and time. To take Bengal as an example, despite the common denominator of the Permanent Settlement, three main types of property/​production arrangements characterised the structure of the agrarian society in the early twentieth century. In the frontier regions in the north of Bengal, the landlord or rich farmer (jotedars) sharecropper system had become dominant. Whereas in east Bengal smallholding families were the defining factor in agricultural production, the western and central parts were marked by a system of smallholding and hired labour.44 Turning to the other side of the subcontinent, the halipratha system in Gujarat was transformed in the twentieth century. From a system that bonded the halis or agricultural labourers to their landlords, through the monetisation of loans, agricultural production turned into a form of neo-​bondage characterised by credits and advances that locked in the labour of the halpatis –​‘lords of the plough’, a name given by Mohandas Gandhi to mark their alleged emancipation.45 Conversely, there were many regional examples of whole districts where most land was parcelled into smallholdings and divided between owners and tenants, and where there were almost no records of agricultural labourers up to the middle of the twentieth century. The diverse arrangements of social strata across time and space notwithstanding, agricultural labourers’ and peasants’ resistance was present throughout South Asia during the colonial period. It took various forms and shapes –​from foot-​dragging in plantations to violent struggles and political mobilisation. Perhaps the most consequential peasant revolt was the 1857–​59 Indian Rebellion. Conventionally reduced to an insurgency in the armed forces –​hence ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ –​the Rebellion would not have posed such as significant threat to British power and, subsequently, would not have triggered such far-​reaching reforms of the Raj if it had not been for its rootedness in agrarian society and rural space. Although it was not an all-​India event, the Rebellion did engulf the whole of the Gangetic plain. Many of the sepoy soldiers stemmed 337

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from rural settings; they brought the revolt swiftly home. Apart from attacking the direct representatives of colonial authority, as, for example, collectors, the insurgents also attacked moneylenders and grain traders.46 The Rebellion was sans issue, and swiftly extinguished; it marked a new period of consolidation of British colonial power and its formal transfer to the Crown. Although no armed insurgency of such geographical extent was to happen again, localised violent revolts were to shake agrarian society in South Asia regularly until independence. Seventeen years after the Rebellion the so-​called Deccan Riots took place. Ostensibly on the issue of indebtedness, the Deccan Riots targeted primarily Marwari moneylenders who had recently settled in villages in the Deccan and who profited from trade networks connecting Gujarat and the Bombay Presidency. The signs of social conflict –​mounting number of litigations relating to debt –​remained unnoticed, and colonial authorities could act only post factum. Following the report of the Riot Commission, the Deccan Agriculturists Relief Act of 1879 provided protection against fraud and was generally meant to protect the borrower.47 Elsewhere, early signs of trouble were also ignored. Petitions written by distressed peasants to colonial authorities in Malabar in the early nineteenth century, for example, reflected a sense of lowering living standards. In particular, the ‘Moplah outrages’ –​revolts by poor Mappila (Muslim sections of the population) peasants and agricultural labourers –​brought the agrarian society in Malabar in the second half of the century and into the twentieth to a state of ‘perpetual ferment’. The insurgent tradition reached a culmination in 1921; the ensuing Malabar Rebellion saw tens of thousands of Mappila peasants deported to the Andaman Islands.48 In the closing decades of the colonial period, as peasant mobilisation was brought closer to the freedom movement under Gandhi, attempts were made to direct it away from violence. No event captures this process better than the Chauri Chaura riot. On 2 February 1922, at the height of the Gandhian Non-​Cooperation movement, a protest including the picketing of a liquor shop and demands for fair prices for meat and fish was held in the small bazaar town of Chauri Chaura. The police reacted with arrests but also by ‘a salutary thrashing to one Bhawan Ahir’, a government pensioner and First World War veteran who had served in Mesopotamia –​in the eyes of the police, a figure singularly unsuitable for manifesting any disloyalty. Neighbouring villages were mobilised, and two days later a rally against police atrocities was held. The local police, freshly resupplied by the morning train with eight additional armed guards, were no match to the large number of protestors. In the ensuing clashes the police fired and killed three protestors while injuring several others. As the police took refuge in the station, the crowd locked them in, poured kerosene taken from the neighbouring Mundera bazaar over the building, and burned and battered the 23 officers to death. The event marked the end of the civil disobedience campaign on the all-​India level, as the Indian National Congress (INC) sought to distance itself from such a horrific event. In the remaining years until independence, nationalist lore managed successfully to contrast the discipline of the satyagrahi to the actions of the mob: Chauri Chaura was to become a metaphor for ‘untrammeled peasant violence’.49 It was not only the INC, however, that sought to mobilise, channel, and subsume peasant resistance into mass politics. British colonialism had started in Bengal with a famine in 1770 and was about to end when the Bengal Famine of 1943 claimed over 2 million lives. It is not surprising that various renditions of Marxist ideology found their way into peasant politics; the All India Kisan Sabha, founded in 1936, was to split, its branches joining the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Even more telling is the success of the Krishak Praja Party in the 1930s in Bengal. Its slogans spoke clearly, albeit in a populist manner, to the agrarian society of east Bengal: ‘Land belongs to the tiller’ and ‘Rice and dal for everyone’.50

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Résumé During the period of almost two centuries bridging the Company and British Raj, colonial South Asia remained a primarily agricultural society. Consequently, most economic and social past remains ingrained in the agrarian history of the subcontinent. This is perhaps the foremost reason why the paradoxes with which colonialism was wrought are so striking when we turn to questions of land, crops, and the effects of commerce on rural society. The Raj claimed ultimate authority but depended on intermediaries; its projects of modernisation were predicated on the codification of tradition; a commitment to free trade was ruptured by monopolies and indentured contracts; a desire to create agricultural entrepreneurs was soon to be undermined by initiatives to protect smallholders and tenants. Legal interventions nonetheless provided a broad framework for the subsequent transformation of agrarian society. The securing of property rights translated eventually into the rise of a land market, which went on to increase the volume of credit and provide further incentives for the cultivation of cash crops. New modes of transportation significantly accelerated the haulage of agricultural produce and increased the geographical range of its marketing. Indian peasants were not passive recipients of externalities. Where possible, as, for example, in jute and cotton tracts, peasants welcomed incentives. Furthermore, despite the varying degrees of social stratification, new solidarities were forged, and organised resistance could erupt in violence. Significantly, after 1858 –​and, one might add, despite the transport revolution –​peasant rebellion was to become regionalised and localised. Eventually political parties subsumed the peasant’s vote. As the ‘biggest democracy’ goes through an economic transition but continues to rely heavily on agricultural labour, the questions of the transformation of the agrarian society in the colonial period and its legacy in the post-​independence period remain vital.

Notes 1 Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times, India 1880s–​1950s: Environment, Economy, Culture (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2015), 151. 2 Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, 1963); Rachel Sturman, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women’s Rights (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 35–​69. 3 Ainslie T. Embree, ‘Landholding and the concept of private property’, in: Ainslie T. Embree and Mark Juergensmeyer (eds.), Imagining India: Essays on Indian History (New Delhi: OUP, 1989), pp. 85–​100. 4 Tirthankar Roy and Anand Swamy, Law and the Economy in Colonial India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), esp. 27–​103. 5 Cited in Guha, A Rule of Property, 11. 6 Ibid. 7 Ratnalekha Ray, ‘The changing fortunes of the Bengali gentry under colonial rule: Pal Chaudhuris of Mahesganj, 1800–​1950’, MAS, 21 (3), 1987, pp. 511–​19. 8 Roy and Swamy, Law and the Economy, 31. 9 Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1965), 77–​98. 10 Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 1978), 90–​119. 11 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–​1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 60–​94; cf. U. Kalpagam, ‘Cartography in colonial India’, EPW, 30 (30), 1995, pp. 87–​98. 12 See, for example, Irfan Habib, ‘Agrarian relations and land revenue: North India’, in: Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1, c.1200–​c.1750 (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), pp. 235–​48; and H. Fukazawa, ‘Agrarian relations and land revenue: The

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Nikolay Kamenov medieval Deccan and Maharashtra’, in: Raychaudhuri and Habib, The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1, pp. 249–​60. 13 Sakti Padhi, ‘Property in land, land market and tenancy relations in the colonial period: A review of theoretical categories and study of a zamindari district’, in: K.N. Raj, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Sumit Guha, and Sakti Padhi (eds.), Essays on the Commercialization of Indian Agriculture (New Delhi: OUP, 1985), pp. 1–​50; Sumit Guha, ‘The land market in upland Maharashtra c.1820–​1960 –​ I’, IESHR, 24 (2), 1987, pp. 117–​44; idem, ‘The land market in upland Maharashtra c.1820–​1960 –​ II’, IESHR, 24 (3), 1987, pp. 291–​322; Prabhu Mohapatra, ‘Land and credit market in Chotanagpur, 1880–​1950’, Studies in History, 6 (2), 1990, pp. 163–​203. 14 Sugata Bose (ed.), Credit, Markets and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 1994); David Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (New Delhi: OUP, 1996). 15 Peter Robb, ‘Law and agrarian society in India: The case of Bihar and the nineteenth-​century tenancy’, MAS, 22 (2), 1988, pp. 319–​54; Roy and Swamy, Law and the Economy, 54–​79. 16 David A. Washbrook, ‘Law, state and agrarian society in colonial India’, MAS, 15 (3), 1981, pp. 649–​ 721; see also David Washbrook’s chapter in this volume. 17 Ian Stone, Canal Irrigation in British India: Perspectives on Technological Change in a Peasant Economy (Cambridge: CUP, 1984). 18 Imran Ali, The Punjab under Imperialism, 1885–​1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 8–​12; David Gilmartin, Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015); Daniel Haines, Building the Empire, Building the Nation: Development, Legitimacy and Hydro-​Politics in Sind, 1919–​1969 (Karachi: OUP, 2013). 19 Neeladri Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2019), 385–​99; idem, ‘Promise of modernity, antinomies of development: Canal colonies of Punjab (1890s–​1940s)’, in: Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (eds.), Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhuasan Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2017), pp. 90–​135. For a dissenting opinion, see Clive Dewey, ‘Changing the guard: The dissolution of the nationalist–​Marxist orthodoxy in the agrarian and agricultural history of India’, IESHR, 56 (4), 2019, pp. 489–​509. 20 Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–​1707, 3rd edn. (New Delhi: OUP, 2013), 68–​102. 21 Amit Bahaduri, ‘A study in agricultural backwardness under semi-​feudalism’, The Economic Journal, 83 (329), 1973, pp. 120–​37; Amit Bahaduri, ‘Class relations and the pattern of accumulation in an agrarian economy’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 5, 1981, pp. 33–​46; Amit Bahaduri, ‘Forced commerce and agrarian growth’, World Development, 14 (2), 1986, pp. 267–​72. 22 See, for example, Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Market formation in Khandesh, c.1820–​1930’, IESHR, 36 (3), 1999, pp. 275–​302; Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). The extent of Pax Britannica –​the notion of lasting peace brought about by imperial law and order and conducive to prosperity –​has been the subject of debates. Authors have long questioned both the overnight commencement of Pax Britannica as well as the implicit suggestion that the earlier period was marked by constant political instability. See, for example, Eric Stokes, ‘Agrarian society and the Pax Britannica in northern India in the early nineteenth century’, MAS, 9 (4), 1975, pp. 505–​28. 23 Amalendu Guha, ‘Raw cotton of western India: 1750–​1850’, IESHR, 9 (1), 1972, pp. 1–​41. See also Nitin Sinha, Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–​1880s (London: Anthem Press, 2012), 164–​72; and Ravi Ahuja, Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa, c.1780–​1914 (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009). 24 Clive Dewey, Steamboats on the Indus: The Limits of Western Technological Superiority in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 2014). See also Sinha, Communication and Colonialism, 172–​80. 25 Smritikumar Sarkar, Technology and Rural Change in Eastern India, 1830–​1980 (New Delhi: OUP, 2014), 28–​37. See also Nitin Sinha’s chapter in this volume. 26 One conventional interpretation, for example, sees the convergence of grain prices and the building of railways in India as concomitant: John Hurd, ‘Railways’, in: Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, c.1757–​c.1970 (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), pp. 737–​61. For a dissenting opinion arguing that the railways played an ‘important but surprisingly modest role in grain price convergence’, see Tahir Andrabi and Michael Kuehlwein, ‘Railways and price convergence in British India’, Journal of Economic History, 70 (2), 2010, pp. 351–​77.

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Agrarian history of colonial South Asia 27 Ian J. Kerr, Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850–​1900 (New Delhi: OUP, 1995); Ritika Prasad, Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India (New Delhi: CUP, 2015). 28 Daniel Thorner, ‘Great Britain and the development of India’s railways’, Journal of Economic History, 11 (4), 1951, pp. 389–​402. 29 John Chapman, The Cotton and Commerce of India, Considered in Relation to the Interests of Great Britain; with Remarks on Railway Communication in the Bombay Presidency (London: John Chapman, 1851), 276. 30 John Hurd and Ian J. Kerr (eds.), India’s Railway History: A Research Handbook (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 148. 31 On the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, see Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-​ Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 195–​204. 32 Tan Chung, ‘The Britain–​China–​India trade triangle (1771–​1840)’, IESHR, 11 (4), 1974, pp. 411–​31; Rolf Bauer, The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-​Century India (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 33 J.F. Richards, ‘The Indian empire and peasant production of opium in the nineteenth century’, MAS, 15 (1), 1981, pp. 59–​82. For western India, see Amar Farooqui, Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2006); and idem, Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants, and the Politics of Opium, 1790–​1843 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005); cf. Claude Markovits, ‘The political economy of opium smuggling in early nineteenth century India: Leakage or resistance?’, MAS, 43 (1), 2009, pp. 89–​111. 34 Prakash Kumar, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2012). 35 Ali, A Local History, 23. 36 Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). 37 See, for example, Laxman Satya, Cotton and Famine in Berar, 1850–​1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997); and Sumit Guha, The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, 1818–​1941 (New Delhi: OUP, 1985). 38 Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (eds.), How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–​1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–​1940 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994). 39 Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 61–​98. 40 Ulbe Bosma, The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production, 1770–​ 2010 (Cambridge: CUP, 2013). 41 Christopher Baker, An Indian Rural Economy, 1880–​1955: The Tamilnad Countryside (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 42 Nitin Varma, Coolies of Capitalism: Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); Arnab Dey, Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India (Cambridge: CUP, 2018); Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 43 Neil Charlesworth, ‘The “middle peasant thesis” and the roots of rural agitation in India, 1914–​1947’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 7 (3), 1980, pp. 259–​80. 44 Sugata Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), 3–​33. 45 Jan Breman, Capitalism, Inequality and Labour in India (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). 46 Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘ “Satan let loose upon Earth”: The Kanpur massacres in India in the Revolt of 1857’, Past & Present, 181 (1), 1990, pp. 92–​116. 47 Neil Charlesworth, ‘The myth of the Deccan Riots of 1875’, MAS, 6 (4), 1972, pp. 401–​21; Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya. 48 K.N. Panikkar, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836–​1921 (New Delhi: OUP, 1989). 49 Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–​1992 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995). On the INC and peasant movements, see also David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District, 1917–​1934 (New Delhi: OUP, 1981); Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendency of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh: Class, Community and Nation in Northern India, 1920–​1940, 2nd edn. (London: Anthem Press, 2002). 50 Ali, A Local History, 137–​67.

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Culture, Media and the Everyday

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27 PHYSICAL CULTURE AND THE BODY IN COLONIAL INDIA, c.1800–​1 947 Carey Watt

Introduction and overview Physical culture may be defined as a variety of gymnastic and strengthening exercises in different combinations, intended to improve bodily strength, agility, fitness, and aesthetics, as well as overall health –​including mental and spiritual or moral health, as in the Latin phrase Mens sana in corpore sano (‘A healthy mind in a healthy body’). Diet, environment, and rest are important too. In the colonial era, from about 1800 to 1947, physical culture was intended to promote good health, or, in some cases, to restore fitness as a curative or therapeutic treatment. For the British in colonial India, the dissemination and teaching of physical culture was part of a civilising mission that was ostensibly intended to make Indian boys and men stronger and more manly, and, from the British perspective, more appreciative of and loyal to the Raj. In the last decades of the nineteenth century missionary and government schools introduced a variety of European gymnastics, exercises, drill, and team sports such as cricket to Indian youth.1 These usually served to highlight Indian ‘difference’ and supposed racial inferiority, however, while showing off the superiority of British masculinity and all the moral and racial attributes that were said to accompany it. In this chapter, physical culture is meant to be distinguished from sports, especially team sports associated with muscular Christianity, though it does represent a form of physical education and could involve competition. Physical culture could help prepare someone for sporting activities, but it is not discussed as a sport here despite areas of overlap as in, say, weightlifting or bodybuilding. By the same token, physical culture was part of a ‘martial culture of the body’ in many South Asian societies before the advent of British rule, and it was used to prepare and train men –​particularly young men –​for military service and battle.2 During the nineteenth-​ century era of nationalism and related Darwinian and Spencerian concerns about racial fitness and possible degeneration, however, martial exercises and sports were gradually transmuted towards civilian applications in the hope of cultivating manly, loyal, and efficient citizens.3 The objective of this chapter is, first, to provide an overview of the growth and development of male-​oriented physical culture in colonial South Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before exploring, in the next section, how physical culture and fitness regimes were DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-28

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implicated –​or not –​in cultures of colonialism or nationalism. The third section explores the ideal male body that fitness educators and practitioners sought to develop and reconstructs how that ideal changed in the early decades of the twentieth century. The final part briefly considers some of the new paths available to physical culturists after 1900. Throughout, the chapter seeks to show that Indian men were surprisingly open to European, American, and, indeed, global influences while creatively reworking and redirecting their own practices and ‘traditions’. Although physical culture dates back centuries or even millennia in many societies, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of its ‘modern’ forms. In the post-​1800 era of nationalism and colonialism the best-​known and most widely promoted systems of gymnastics emerged in Europe and were globalised as European and neo-​European (American) imperialism spread across seas, oceans, continents, and hemispheres. These Western bodily regimes did not survive their travels unchanged, however. They were affected by imperial ‘counterflows’ and were contested, adapted, or redirected by colonial subjects. In short, there was no simple spread or dissemination of European physical culture to India, or anywhere else, and the development of physical culture and related ideal male body types was multifaceted and part of a complex process of interaction and exchange despite the seemingly clear-​cut political, military, economic, and cultural power imbalances of the nineteenth century. The period from the 1890s to 1914 represented the apogee of European imperialism and the British Raj in India. It also represented an era of global acceleration and the emergence of a worldwide physical culture movement in which European ‘physical culture systems’ were dominant.4 These directly and indirectly supplemented government of India and missionary physical education efforts in their schools, albeit with much more spectacle and fanfare. The most famous ‘physical culturist’ was Eugen Sandow, the East Prussian born in 1867 who relocated to London in the late 1880s and became widely accepted as the world’s ‘perfect man’ and ‘apostle of physical culture’ in the 1890s and 1900s. Sandow was well known to Indians and Europeans in India before his eight-​month stop in India during his ‘world’s tour’ of 1904/​5, although his performances in big presidency cities such as Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras created physical culture ‘crazes’. His legacy in India has persisted to the present day.5 Yet Sandow was just one of many ‘Western’ physical culture experts and entrepreneurs who were influential on a regional or global scale at the turn of the twentieth century. There was also the American Bernarr Macfadden, the ‘Danish Apollo’ Jørg Peter Müller, Edmond Desbonnet of France, and ‘the Russian lion’ George Hackenschmidt, to name just a few. To this list we can add youth organisations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Boy Scouts, as they also helped spread the ‘gospel’ of physical culture on the subcontinent. The YMCA was founded in Britain in 1844 and was active in India from 1857, though it was dominated by Americans in the key period from the 1890s to the 1930s, when physical culture and sports became its biggest selling points in South Asia.6 Robert Baden-​Powell’s Scout movement had Indian and European scout troops in the subcontinent as early as 1907, and saw rapid growth into the 1920s.7 Each organisation had its own system of physical education and training, though the YMCA also featured team sports such as football (soccer), (field) hockey, and basketball. Apart from such Western influences, we should acknowledge the global spread and impact of ju-​jitsu –​the forerunner of judo –​that emanated from Japan in the late 1890s and 1900s,8 as that country established itself as an imperial power. In India during the nineteenth century and early twentieth the major local forms of physical culture derived from kushti or mallakala (wrestling), with its pahalwans (wrestlers or strongmen) and akharas (wrestling pits and gymnasia), as well as the south Indian martial art of kalarippayattu, which featured a variety of exercises, therapeutic treatments, and training in fencing with daggers, swords, or spears.9 Both dated back many centuries and had atrophied under British 346

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colonial rule by the middle of the nineteenth century, but they had not disappeared. There was also an array of Indian gymnastics and exercises in general, which were often a type of martial training with swords and lathis (wooden staves). As John Rosselli showed, in Bengal the Hindu Mela (‘Hindu fair’, a.k.a. ‘national gathering’) of the late 1860s and 1870s attempted to energise some of these forms of physical culture.10 It also led to the opening of akharas and the training of physical education instructors, as well as the promotion of ‘traditional’ sports, including wrestling. Another wave of renewed Indian interest in physical culture occurred in the 1890s and 1900s, and it mixed ‘indigenous’ exercises of the wrestling akhara with European, American, and some Japanese forms of fitness training. It was in this context that Professor Ramamurti Naidu of Madras emerged as a physical culture teacher, a practitioner, and, before long, a famous performer. He mixed Indian training with the ‘Sandow system’, among other influences, though by 1920 he rejected Sandow and European physical culture.11 The vyayam (physical culture or exercise) movement emerged in the early 1900s in western India and launched its own influential journal, titled Vyayam, in 1915. It reproduced and translated articles from American and British physical culture magazines into Marathi, and even featured Sandow on its cover in 1938.12 Hybrid systems of physical culture education began to appear in schools under Indian control in the 1900s and 1910s, including those run by nationalistic groups such as the Theosophical Society, at Central Hindu College (Benares), and the Arya Samaj.13 During the Swadeshi movement, from about 1905 to 1908, the physical culture of the Hindu Mela resurfaced in the Anushilan Samiti (‘Bodybuilding Society’) and veered into anti-​ British ‘terrorism’.14 More mixing and complexity emerged in Indian physical culture between 1890 and 1930 as yoga –​and, specifically, hatha yoga –​incorporated various forms of exercise and gymnastics to become the ‘modern yoga’ that is known and practised around the world today.15 Swami Kuvalayananda and Shri Yogendra were key in effecting the eventual emergence of yoga as a form of physical culture in the 1920s and 1930s, with K.V. Iyer putting more emphasis on physical culture and bodybuilding in the 1930s and 1940s.16 It seems, however, that Professor Ramamurti used the breathing techniques and asanas of hatha yoga to perform his impressive feats of strength, in an ‘early synthesis’ with physical culture.17 Mark Singleton and Joseph Alter both emphasised the global complexity inherent in the making of this new yoga, with Alter stating that it was the result of ‘fairly complex transnational configurations’ involving influences from Britain, the United States, France, Sweden, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire.18 Singleton identified three major physical culture systems that contributed to reshaping of hatha yoga into the global fitness-​oriented yoga of the late twentieth century and early twenty-​first: (1) the Scandinavian systems, based on the approach of Swedish callisthenics pioneer Per Henrik Ling; (2) the ‘Sandow system’; and (3) the YMCA.19 In a 1930 article that appeared in a YMCA publication entitled Vyayam, Dr J.H. Gray, the American national physical director for the YMCA in India, Ceylon, and Burma, tried to sort out the many different strands of physical culture accessible to Indians.20 He listed three major ‘groups’: (1), ‘the indigenous group’; (2), ‘the individual system group’; and (3), ‘the national emphasis and other groups’. Under ‘indigenous’ he then listed the ‘yogic system group’, ‘Shivaji system group’ (martial exercises using swords and lathis, etc.), and wrestling akharas. The ‘individual group’ included physical culture regimes of European, American, or Indian ‘strong muscle enthusiasts’ such as Sandow, Macfadden, Ramamurti, and Iyer, but it also listed a ‘selected series of exercises group’ featuring J.P. Müller and the suryanamaskar (a flowing series of gymnastic movements as ‘salutations to the sun’) of India –​often associated with modern yoga. Finally, the ‘national emphasis and other’ group listed six types of physical culture: the 347

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Figure 27.1  Cover of volume 3, Deshi Kasrati (Indian Gymnastics), from Vyayam Dnyankosha (Encyclopedia of Physical Culture), edited by D.C. Mujumdar (Baroda, 1936–​49). Photo by the author, with the kind permission of the librarian at the Theosophical Society Library, Pune.

Ling system of Swedish callisthenics; the Neils Bukh system of Danish extension movements; the Jahn system of German gymnastics; the Maharashtrian (western Indian) vyayam system; Anglo-​Saxon games and recreational activities; the Boy Scout system of training; and a generic ‘military training group’. Clearly, the field of physical culture had become quite crowded and featured much Indian involvement as well as many global influences. Between 1936 and 1949 an Indian catalogue of physical culture in South Asia was produced in Baroda by the publishers of the Marathi periodical Vyayam. This consisted of ten thick volumes entitled Vyayam Dnyankosha (Encyclopedia of Physical Culture). Such a massive undertaking showed India’s awareness of physical culture practices on a global scale and conveyed confidence in its own ‘national’ exercises. Fitness regimes from imperial Britain and Europe were subsumed into Indian classifications –​with Eugen Sandow in volume 9 (1947) and categorised with ‘foreign physical exercises’.21 The dialogue between Indian and European physical culture 348

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systems in the late colonial era invites us to explore how physical education may have been affected by the forces of nationalism and colonialism.

Physical culture’s intersections with colonialism and nationalism To see how physical culture was implicated in cultures of colonialism and nationalism, we can turn to the well-​known pronouncement of Thomas Babington Macaulay –​made shortly after the British had become the ‘paramount’ power in India –​about Bengali men being ‘feeble’ and ‘effeminate’.22 Macaulay’s words affected the attitudes of colonial administrators and many Indians into the late nineteenth century. Charges of effeminacy meant that Indian men were deemed to lack essential masculine qualities of loyalty, trustworthiness, and rationality, and were therefore considered unworthy of respect and responsibility –​let alone self-​rule. The exceptions were Indian aristocrats (whose sons were trained in special institutions emphasising ‘character building’ through physical instruction) and members of the ‘martial races’, including most Sikhs and Muslims as well as some Hindu groups, such as Rajputs and Gurkhas.23 Over the decades the repeated allegations of effeminacy led to the notion becoming internalised by Indians. For example, in his Autobiography, Mohandas Gandhi recalled feeling feeble-​bodied and cowardly as a teenager in the 1880s compared to a friend who ate meat like the British. He cited a Gujarati poem to underline the point: ‘The mighty Englishman, He rule the Indian small, Because being a meat-​eater, He is five cubits tall.’ Gandhi’s meat-​eating companion was hardier, physically stronger, and more daring than himself. All this left Gandhi ‘dazzled’, and it took him many years to overcome his sense of inferiority.24 Similar comments about the weakness of Indian bodies were made by many others, including Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Swami Vivekananda.25 In terms of Indian Muslims, in 1895 Abdus Salam regretted that they had forsaken their ‘brilliant past as regards physical vigour and manliness’.26 Of course, this does not mean that Indian efforts to ‘revive’ indigenous or ‘traditional’ physical culture in the 1890s and 1900s were solely responses to colonial critiques. Phillip Zarrilli dated the decline of kalarippayattu to the growth of East India Company power in southern India in the late eighteenth century, and the advent of ‘colonial chaos’ and new modes of martial training and employment in the decades that followed. It never disappeared completely, and its resurgence was well established by the 1920s, in an era of growing nationalism, albeit in a slightly different ‘composite training’ format.27 Likewise, Indian wrestling was still a ‘living tradition’ despite the fact that it had atrophied over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fewer princes or rajas could patronise stables of wrestlers as India was pacified in the decades after 1830, while the passage of the Arms Act in 1878 further distanced Indians from the martial physical culture found in wrestling akharas. Nonetheless, new akharas were opened and wrestling dangals (tournaments) continued to be held. Many prominent Indian political leaders, such as Surendranath Banerjea, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Motilal Nehru, had either practised wrestling or were aware of its relevance to training youth as healthy, active, and responsible members of society –​and, eventually, as Indian citizens.28 A new Indian physical culture movement emerged that was more urban and led by upper-​caste, middle-​class men. They knew English as well as local ‘vernacular’ languages and could therefore creatively blend European, American, and other global influences with indigenous exercise idioms from the wrestling akhara and elsewhere.29 As in the case of the emergence of hatha yoga as modern yoga with a considerable element of physical culture, Indians were open to global fitness and physical culture practices. Singleton aptly referred to India’s ‘permeability’ in terms of Western physical culture influences, but he also pointed out how such influences were redirected to serve the objectives of Indian historical actors.30 349

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If we turn to look at British perspectives on Indian physical culture, we can see that they were characterised by paradoxes and inconsistencies. In keeping with Britain’s imperial status, there were tacit expectations to maintain an attitude of superiority and condescension towards indigenous exercises and bodily practices. Yet there were also undercurrents of anxiety about Indian physical culture, mixed with frequent expressions of admiration.31 This applied to officials who were part of the Raj as well as to non-​officials such as Eugen Sandow. Shortly after the strongman arrived in Calcutta in October 1904 for his first big ‘season’ of performances he was interviewed at length by a journalist from The Bengalee, an Indian-​owned newspaper. The journalist was fully aware of the stereotype about the average Bengali as weak and he asked Sandow about it, probably with a tinge of irony. He then queried whether Sandow’s physical culture could stimulate courage in Bengali men. Sandow claimed to be unaware of Macaulay’s slur, but he assured his interlocutor that Bengalis could become strong like him if they followed his system of exercises.32 Sandow eventually repeated tropes of Indian effeminacy and other colonial disparagements. For example, in a November 1905 story entitled ‘Physical culture in India’ in Sandow’s Magazine, he quoted Macaulay to say that Hindus ‘have always been weak even to the point of effeminacy’, although they were commended for showing great interest in Sandow’s physical culture and producing some ‘admirably developed specimens’.33 Sandow also made very interesting and paradoxical comments about Indian wrestlers, claiming to ‘know nothing about them’ though opining that ‘their system helps [with] the accumulation of fat and increase of weight. There is no idea of increasing strength.’34 When staying in Bombay just a short while later he apparently began fraternising with local pahalwans, and in January 1905 Sandow’s Magazine proudly reported that he had been named a pahalwan –​ an honorific title –​by local wrestlers.35 He even added a Punjabi wrestler to his entourage.36 In an article on ‘Indian wrestlers’ in Sandow’s Magazine some months later, however, praise for Indian wrestling –​years of training, impressive fitness, endurance, and sinuosity –​was mixed with colonial derision about wrestlers’ food and clothes, and their inability to properly measure wrestling pits: ‘[I]‌naccuracy is one of the race characteristics of the Indian.’37 Sandow’s admiration for Indian martial physical culture related to the wrestling akhara can be embedded in a long British tradition that dated back to the Company era. Rosalind O’Hanlon commented on this issue, and on how Indian military sports and exercises became firmly established within the colonial Indian Army following the 1857 Rebellion. Military men such as Baden-​Powell warmly recalled the feats of Indian soldiers in regimental histories and personal memoirs, well into the twentieth century.38 The derisive comment that Sandow made about the inability of Indians to accurately measure their wrestling pits is significant, because it highlights a key difference that Europeans assumed –​ and sometimes explicitly stated –​about modern ‘Western’ forms of physical culture vis-​à-​vis Indian variants: their status as a science. Indeed, scientific and technological achievement was an important marker of European colonial superiority, and the ‘Sandow system’ was described as rational and scientific as well as ordered and systematic.39 Sandow’s 1905 book Body-​Building or Man in the Making put it succinctly: ‘Physical culture is exercise reduced to a science.’40 As Harald Fischer-​Tiné has recently documented, the YMCA in India was emphatic about the supposed superiority of its scientific approach to fitness and the real or imagined defects of indigenous practices. This is ironic, because American fitness experts who dominated the Indian YMCA from the 1910s to the 1930s tended to see themselves as more progressive than their British counterparts. Yet J.H. Gray and H.C. Buck, for example, recalled bringing ‘scientific fitness education’ and ‘scientific leadership’ to India to replace the ‘physical torture’ of the Hindus, with their unscientific games and e­ xercises –​and thus improve their defective bodies.41 350

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Figure 27.2  Professor Ramamurti prepares to perform a feat of strength. Saint Nihal Singh, ‘The Indian Hercules’, The Strand Magazine, 50 (1915), p. 696.

Indian fitness practitioners were aware of European and American claims to have superior physical culture systems based on science and rationality, but they challenged them in writing during the first decades of the twentieth century.42 This coincided with a rise in Indian confidence, which was especially noticeable after 1920 as the Indian Army, Indian Civil Service, and YMCA were Indianised and the Indian National Congress (INC) became a mass organisation. An account of wrestling contests held in Allahabad in late December 1910 –​immediately following the annual meetings of the INC in the same city –​described Indian wrestling as India’s national sport, along with references to the ‘science of wrestling’ and ‘the science of physical training, in which the Indian wrestler excels.’43 The competitions were coordinated by a British member of the Indian police with local residents and Congress members Madan Mohan Malaviya and Motilal Nehru. Indian physical culturist Professor Ramamurti gave a lecture and demonstration in Calcutta in 1909 in support of National Education (a movement to boycott government schools), and was in Allahabad in 1910, where he performed as ‘champion athlete and medallist’, ‘the modern Bhimsen and Indian Hercules’, at a special benefit night for the Congress. He was also an official delegate at the 1910 meetings.44 Ramamurti proudly asserted the superiority of Indian methods of physical culture.45 We must also acknowledge the efforts of Swami Kuvalayananda, Shri Yogendra, and K.V. Iyer in the 1920s and 1930s. They studied hatha yoga scientifically and blended it with global physical culture practices to create a new ‘yogic physical culture’ that was holistic, therapeutic, and scientific. Kuvalayananda’s emphasis on yoga as a science helped persuade the YMCA to adopt postural yoga into its physical education programme in the 1930s.46

The ideal body In the late 1920s Harry Buck, the most influential ‘physical director’ of the Indian YMCA, identified the organisation’s ideal of the physical body for men as follows: slender, graceful, supple, erect, alert, and ‘not heavily muscled’.47 Apart from an apparent YMCA preference for white skin complexions,48 this description could also apply to most men who practised yogic physical culture. It also applies to students of kalarippayattu in southern India. In fact, the focus on slender, supple, and graceful bodies has also been common to military cultures of sport 351

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and exercise in India, Europe, and globally for many centuries. As noted above, O’Hanlon has discussed a ‘martial culture of the body’ in India from the era of the Mughals in the sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century. She highlighted how the soldier’s body was expected to be lean, fit, and flexible while exhibiting qualities of agility, suppleness, and grace, especially for those holding more physically demanding posts in the cavalry.49 Notions of suppleness also assumed qualities of strength, vigour, and courage, which connoted manliness. The body ideal of Baden-​Powell’s physical culture in the Scout movement was of the same type. This was based on his decades of experience in the British military, as well as influences from Swedish callisthenics, the martial art of Japanese ju-​jitsu, and borrowings from British physical culturists such as Eustace Miles, as well as Indian sports and exercises. The Scout bodily ideal was also put forth as the model for the British citizen of the early twentieth century, during a time when fears about bodily degeneration and racial decline were rife.50 The ‘Sandow system’ of physical culture also adhered to ideals of a strong yet supple body for men, though this is often obscured by the fact that Sandow’s physique as displayed on stage and in photographs flaunted much visible muscle. Contemporaries such as Baden-​Powell and J.H. Gray criticised Sandow as a promoter of ‘showy muscle’ or ‘muscle enthusiast’, despite the strongman’s emphasis on light exercises to develop overall health as well as good bodily carriage and symmetry.51 Sandow’s stress on symmetry was consistent with his praise for the sinuosity of the ‘average’ Indian wrestler mentioned earlier. Nonetheless, his spectacular stage acts, his poses, and the widely circulated images of his ‘sculpted’ body inspired men around the world to develop and display their muscles, thereby increasing their manliness and aesthetic or sexual appeal. Although Indian followers of Sandow were sending photographs of their flexed muscles and bodily measurements to the Reader’s Club of Sandow’s Magazine well before his eight-​month tour of India in 1904/​5, the ‘Sandow seasons’ in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras led to a new ‘culture of the body’ and an interest in bodybuilding among Indian youth.52 The results of this were evident by the 1920s and early 1930s. The two-​in-​one book Barbell Exercise and Muscle Control, published in Calcutta in 1930 by K.C. Sen Gupta and B.C. Ghosh, is a spectacular example of this, though it also betrays significant influence from the tomes of the German Max Sick (a.k.a. Maxick) on muscle control in the 1910s. The first part of the book celebrated ‘scientific and systematic exercise’ and featured 13 sets of detailed photographs demonstrating various barbell routines, while part two, by B.C. Ghosh, extolled ‘big’, ‘bigger’, and ‘huge’ muscles in numerous poses covering the entire body. The latter’s 42 photographs were sensational examples of the kind of physique photography that Sandow pioneered in the 1890s and 1900s and that Maxick used in his own Muscle Control book of 1911.53 Most pictures were of young Bengali men in Roman sandals and leopard-​skin briefs à la Sandow, but three of them featured Mr Preston, a British member of the Calcutta police who was trained by Ghosh and photographed wearing an Indian langot (loincloth). Sen Gupta dedicated his part of the book to ‘Young Bengal’, the group centred on Henry Derozio in the 1830s that was critical of Hindu superstitions while being very open to European culture. This seems to confirm the permeability of many Indians to ‘Western’ physical culture, though the fact that a British policeman dressed in an Indian loincloth was a student of Ghosh indicates an interesting countervail. Ghosh’s muscle control techniques contained significant influences from hatha yoga.54 The synthesis of yoga and bodybuilding was taken further by K.V. Iyer in his 1930 book Muscle Cult, which aimed to reconcile muscle building with the asanas of hatha yoga. The influence of Sandow’s techniques was specifically acknowledged, along with the ‘Maxalding’ approach of Maxick. Iyer celebrated the ‘body beautiful’ and claimed to be India’s ‘most perfectly developed man’, but he emphasised bodily harmony and symmetry as well as ease, grace, 352

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and poise. Building muscle and strength was admirable to Iyer, but he stressed that knotty muscles or bulging biceps were not the goal. He also denounced the bulk of many Indian wrestlers, stating that their bodies were not symmetrical and their e­ xercises –​vyayam –​were not scientific. The stout bodies of champion wrestler Gama and strongman Professor Ramamurti were giving way to more lithe bodies with well-​defined musculature. The hyperbole and ideal body types envisaged by Iyer were reminiscent of Sandow and the YMCA, respectively, though he presented his ‘yogic synthesis’ as distinctly Indian.55 Mahatma Gandhi’s body would not usually be considered a ‘body beautiful’, and he could make no claims to ‘perfect male development’, but he is nonetheless relevant to this discussion of physical culture and the body. When Gandhi achieved tremendous fame in the 1920s and 1930s as leader of the Indian National Congress and the ‘freedom struggle’ he became the most photographed and visible Indian in the world. Moreover, after adopting a shortened dhoti (loincloth) in 1921, supplemented only by a shawl in cold weather, his body was very visible, and most images of him date from this era, when he was in his 50s and 60s. As Salman Rushdie remarked regarding the 1946 photograph of Gandhi used in the famous Apple ‘Think different’ advertisement campaign of the late 1990s, it showed ‘a thin Indian man with not much hair and bad teeth’ sitting alone on a bare floor, yet ‘this bony man shaped India’s struggle for freedom’.56 Gandhi was 76 years old at this time and his chest sagged a little, but the physical Gandhi shown there was not much different from the man in images from the 1920s and 1930s: he looked thin and rather weak, and possibly even ‘unmanly’ in the sense of not displaying muscle or bodily firmness. Indeed, in the first days of the Salt March of 1930 America’s Time Magazine commented on Gandhi’s ‘spindly frame’ and ‘spidery loins’ and doubted that the ‘emaciated saint’ could finish the march.57 Appearing weak and embracing feminine or androgynous

Figure 27.3  ‘Gandhi drafting a document at Birla House, New Delhi in August 1942’, Wiki Commons, https://​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Gandhi_​writing_​Aug1942.jpg, accessed: 26 February 2021.

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qualities was a deliberate manoeuvre on the part of Gandhi as he attempted to defy and subvert colonial assumptions about masculinity within the larger social, cultural, and political programme associated with his non-​violent satyagraha (truth-​force) movement.58 But in the 1910s and 1920s Gandhi criticised ‘rickety bodies’ while emphasising that his satyagrahi followers required ‘bodies of steel’. He was aware of the physical culture programmes of Sandow and Ramamurti, too, and even met with the latter in September 1925. He also experimented briefly with some of Swami Kuvalayananda’s hatha yoga postures in 1927 in an attempt to treat high blood pressure and other ailments related to stress.59 In fact, Gandhi demonstrated a long-​standing and serious interest in physical culture and bodily fitness. While establishing Tolstoy Farm in Johannesburg he paid attention to ‘the building up of the body’ of the boys and girls who resided at the experimental settlement. He stated that gardening and other manual labour on the farm ‘gave them ample exercise’ and ‘they built up fine physiques’.60 By 1921 he formulated a more coherent guide to physical exercise in A Guide to Health, and it listed two key forms of Gandhian physical culture: (1) gardening (informed by the strenuous physical exercise of the farmer); and (2) walking –​‘the Queen of all exercises’.61 Gandhi’s ideal body for a satyagrahi or Indian citizen eschewed both the beefy brawn of British colonial masculinity and the aesthetically presented muscle in the systems of Sandow, Sen Gupta, Ghosh, and Iyer. He promoted the useful body of a soldier –​lean, fit and supple –​though it would be directed towards a ‘non-​violent martiality’ characterised by self-​ control and austerity rather than a more overt and aggressive masculinity.62 His own body may have appeared thin and weak, but his fitness and physical endurance often surprised observers –​ whether friend or foe –​as shown by the successful completion of the Salt March at a ‘quick pace’ in early April 1930.63

New directions Even if Gandhi is a rather dramatic example of how physical culture could show continuity while being redirected to new ends, the various ventures of Sen Gupta, Ghosh, and Iyer also remind us that there were novel meanings, opportunities, and possible career paths connected to the field of physical culture by the early decades of the twentieth century. These included weightlifting, bodybuilding, and martial arts competitions as well as publishing, photography, and films. The career of Tamil film star P.K. Raja Sandow is an interesting example of the latter.64 Physical culture, therefore, was no longer oriented only to military employment or forms of national education –​or the militant Hindu nationalism of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) from 1925 onwards.65 Moreover, the period from roughly the 1890s to the 1930s constituted the heyday of music hall and circus entertainment on a global scale. Such global networks of fantasy and spectacle brought Sandow and his troupe to India in 1904.66 Music hall and circus performances commonly featured strongman acts, and thus presented new avenues of employment for serious physical culturists, if they were willing to risk the social censure that working in the field of popular entertainment could attract. Between the late 1880s and 1920 Professor Bose’s Great Bengal Circus also afforded career options to Bengali and other Indian strongmen (and strongwomen), who were seen as helping to erase the stain of Bengali cowardice. During the years of the Swadeshi movement, which was getting under way just as Sandow was leaving India for South-​East Asia in mid-​1905, Professor Bose’s circus got caught up in the currents of Indian nationalism.67 The career of Indian physical culturist Professor Ramamurti intersected with the circus too. He toured with the Raja of Tuni Circus Company from 1902 to 1904, before emulating Sandow’s routines in his own show, named the Indian Circus, from 1906 onwards.68 In southern India, meanwhile, Keeleri Kunhikannan is remembered as the ‘father 354

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of the circus’ for his efforts in the early twentieth century, especially the training of acrobats in circus kalaris. He mastered many forms of Indian and European physical culture, including kalarippayattu, and many of his students had careers in Indian or foreign circuses.69

Résumé Physical culture practices and objectives were implicated in most areas of colonial South Asia’s social, cultural, and political life, from powerful forces of nationalism and colonialism to ‘lesser’ fields of publishing and entertainment. Despite the harmful effects of British colonial discourses regarding Indian bodies and exercises, by the late colonial period of the 1920s and 1930s Indian fitness experts and physical culturists seemed to have overcome their initial tendency to internalise the negative stereotypes of the nineteenth century. Indian bodies could no longer be simply categorised as weak, effeminate, and degenerate, or, as the case of Gandhi shows, such constructions or representations could be creatively challenged or appropriated. Indian exercise and body culture was permeable, but it could also engage confidently with British, European, American, and other physical culture influences to create new amalgams that went global themselves –​such as modern yoga. It could, and did, claim to be modern, scientific, and superior as well. It is also possible and intriguing to see examples of cross-​cultural borrowing that seemed to ignore ‘official’ colonial rhetoric despite being aware of its existence. British admiration for Indian wrestlers and the assimilation and redirection of Sandow’s system of physical culture and modes of self-​presentation by the likes of Ramamurti, Ghosh, and Iyer is testament to this, and it underlines some of the ambiguities and complexities of the colonial encounter in South Asia. The common reference point of martial exercises and the soldier’s supple and lithe body for Europeans, Americans, Japanese, and Indians is another example of shared perspectives that often get overlooked in assumptions about ‘colonial difference’. Additionally, if space permitted I could further explore Indian and Western commonalities in terms of holistic, humoral approaches to health and the body, or the deep influence of European ‘life reform’ and Nature Cure movements on Gandhi, Sandow, and others. Clearly, neither colonialism nor nationalism could fully contain or define the range of physical culture ideas, practices, and exchanges in South Asia between 1800 and 1947.

Notes 1 Ambi Harsha, Development of Physical Education in Madras 1918–​1948 (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1982), 1–​15; Satadru Sen, ‘Schools, athletes and confrontation: The student body in colonial India’, in: James H. Mills and Satadru Sen (eds.), Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-​Colonial India (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 58–​79; Tim Allender, Ruling through Education: The Politics of Schooling in the Colonial Punjab (Elgin: New Dawn Press, 2006), 132, 267, 286–​7. 2 On ‘martial cultures of the body’, see Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and imperial service in Mughal north India’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 42 (1), 1999, pp. 47–​93. On the importance of the soldier’s body in Europe c.1500 to 1900, see Jens Ljunggren, ‘Nation-​building, primitivism and manliness: The issue of gymnastics in Sweden around 1800’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 21 (2), 1996, pp. 101–​20. 3 Carey Watt, ‘ “No showy muscles”: The Boy Scouts and the global dimensions of physical culture and bodily health in Britain and colonial India’, in: Nelson R. Block and Tammy M. Proctor (eds.), Scouting Frontiers: Youth in the Scout Movement’s First Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 130–​2. 4 On the ‘acceleration’ of globalization in the 1890s and 1900s, see Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–​1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), esp. the

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Carey Watt conclusion, 451–​62. On the global dominance of European or American physical culture systems, see Ina Zweiniger-​Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Britain, 1880s–​1939 (Oxford: OUP, 2010), 36–​41, 96–​101. On Sandow’s global influence, see Carey Watt, ‘Cultural exchange, appropriation and physical culture: Strongman Eugen Sandow in colonial India, 1904–​ 1905’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 33 (16), 2016, pp. 1921–​42. 5 Watt, ‘Cultural exchange’, 1926–​9. 6 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Fitness for modernity: The YMCA and physical education schemes in late colonial South Asia (c.1900–​1940)’, MAS, 53 (2), 2019, pp. 512–​59; Patricia Vertinsky and Aishwarya Ramachandran, ‘The “Y” goes to India: Springfield College, muscular missionaries, and the transnational circulation of physical culture practices’, Journal of Sport History, 46 (3), 2019, pp. 363–​79. 7 Carey Watt, ‘The promise of “character” and the spectre of sedition: The Boy Scout movement and colonial consternation in India, 1908–​1921’, South Asia, 22 (2), 1999, pp. 37–​62; Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 83–​105. 8 On judo (and ju-​jitsu) as a ‘global physical culture that had its origin outside the West’ and ‘converged’ with other traditions c.1882–​2012, see Shohei Sato, ‘The sportification of judo: Global convergence and evolution’, Journal of Global History, 8 (2), 2013, pp. 299–​317, 301. 9 Joseph S. Alter, ‘Somatic nationalism: Indian wrestling and militant Hinduism’, MAS, 28 (3), 1994, pp. 557–​88; idem, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). On kalarippayattu, see Phillip B. Zarrilli, When the Body Becomes All Eyes: Paradigms, Discourses and Practices of Power in a South Indian Martial Art (New Delhi: OUP, 1998), 25–​6. 10 John Rosselli, ‘The self-​image of effeteness: Physical education and nationalism in nineteenth-​century Bengal’, Past & Present, 86, 1980, pp. 127–​30. See also Indira Chowdhury-​Sengupta, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: OUP, 1998). 11 On Professor Ramamurti (also Rama Murti, Ramamurthy, etc.), see Watt, ‘Cultural exchange’, 1928–​ 9, 1931–​2; idem, Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association, and Citizenship in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2005), 144–​6; Prashant Kidambi, Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2019), 230–​8. 12 Namrata R. Ganneri, ‘The debate on “revival” and the physical culture movement in western India (1900–​1950)’, in: Katrin Bromber, Birgit Krawietz, and Joseph Maguire (eds.), Sport across Asia: Politics, Cultures, and Identities (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 121–​43. 13 Watt, Serving the Nation, ch. 5. 14 Anushilan is a term meaning the fullest development of one’s physical and mental faculties, which was taken from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s 1882 Bengali novel Ānandamaṭh. See Rosselli, ‘The self-​image of effeteness’, 130–​1; and Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–​1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973), 468–​92. See also Joseph McQuade’s chapter in this volume. 15 See Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford, New York: OUP, 2010), for information on the debates about yoga, hatha yoga, and ‘authentic’ yoga. 16 Idem, Yoga Body; Joseph S. Alter, Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). K.V. Iyer is covered in Singleton’s Yoga Body, as well as Elliott Goldberg, The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2016), ch. 11. 17 On Ramamurti’s ‘early synthesis’, see Singleton, Yoga Body, 106–​8. 18 Joseph S. Alter, ‘Yoga at the fin-​de-​siècle: Muscular Christianity with a “Hindu” twist’, in: John J. MacAloon (ed.), Muscular Christianity in Colonial and Post-​Colonial Worlds (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 59–​76, 64. 19 Singleton, Yoga Body, 8. On Per Henrik Ling, see Ljunggren, ‘Nation-​building, primitivism’, 116–​19. 20 J.H. Gray, ‘India’s physical education what shall it be?’, Vyayam, 1930, pp. 5–​9. It should be noted that the Vyayam published by the YMCA was different from the western Indian journal of the same name. 21 See D.C. Mujumdar (ed.), Vyayam Dnyankosha, 10 vols. (Baroda, 1936–​49). My thanks go to Anand Bhagwat for his assistance with the Marathi text. The one-​volume English compendium is D.C. Mujumdar (ed.), Encyclopedia of Indian Physical Culture: A Comprehensive Survey of Physical Education in India (Baroda: Good Companions, 1950). 22 See Rosselli, ‘The self-​image of effeteness’, 122–​4. See also Paul Dimeo, ‘ “A parcel of dummies”? Sport and the body in Indian history’, in: Mills and Sen, Confronting the Body, pp. 39–​57, 42–​5; and Ishita Banerjee-​Dube, A History of Modern India (New Delhi: CUP, 2015), 199–​201.

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Physical culture in colonial India 23 J.A. Mangan, ‘Eton in India’, History of Education, 7 (2), 1978, pp. 105–​18. On ‘martial races’, see van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 95–​6; and Indira Chowdhury-​Sengupta, ‘The effeminate and the masculine: Nationalism and the concept of race in colonial Bengal’, in: Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 1997), pp. 282–​303, 288–​9. 24 Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (New York: Dover Publications, 1983 [1927]), 12–​18. 25 Regarding Chatterjee and Vivekananda, see Rosselli, ‘The self-​image of effeteness’; on Vivekananda specifically, see Amitava Chatterjee and Souvik Naha, ‘The muscular monk: Vivekananda, sports and physical culture in colonial Bengal’, EPW, 49 (11), 2014, pp. 25–​9. 26 Adbus Salam, Physical Education in India (Calcutta: W. Newman, 1895), 17. 27 Zarrilli, When the Body, 35–​6, 50–​1. 28 Watt, Serving the Nation, 147–​51. See also Alter, The Wrestler’s Body, 17. 29 Ganneri, ‘The debate on “revival” ’, 127–​36. See also See Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Military sports and the history of the martial body in India’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 50 (4), 2007, pp. 490–​523, 517–​20, on the survival and redirection of older martial sports practices. 30 Singleton, Yoga Body, 7–​10, 88, 97, 108. 31 Harsha, Development of Physical Education in Madras, 9; Dimeo, ‘ “Parcel of dummies” ’, 45. 32 Anon., ‘A high priest of physical culture: Sandow in Calcutta, interviewed by our representative’, The Bengalee, 30 October 1904, p. 3. See also Watt, ‘Cultural exchange’, 1929–​30. 33 Anon., ‘Physical culture in India’, Sandow’s Magazine, 16 November 1905, p. 547. 34 Anon., ‘A high priest of physical culture’. 35 Anon., ‘Mr Sandow in India’, Sandow’s Magazine, 19 January 1905, p. 57. 36 Anon., ‘Sandow in Madras: Farewell performance’, The Madras Mail, 8 June 1905, p. 5. The Indian wrestler who joined Sandow’s troupe was also discussed in anon., ‘Sandow’s visit to India and home-​ coming’, The Daily Mirror [London], 18 September 1905, p. 10; and is named as Harichund in anon., ‘My last tour: Some impressions’, Sandow’s Magazine, 28 September 1905, pp. 337–​8. 37 Anon., ‘Indian wrestlers’, Sandow’s Magazine, 7 December 1905, pp. 633–​5. 38 O’Hanlon, ‘Military sports’, 512–​16. See also Watt, ‘ “No showy muscles” ’. 39 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (New Delhi: CUP, 1995), 66–​7, 110–​13, and passim; Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 40 Eugen Sandow, Body-​Building or Man in the Making: How to Become Healthy and Strong (London: Gale & Polden, 1905), 24. See also the section ‘My system described’, 19–​22. We can also note that Sandow was named ‘professor of scientific physical culture’ by King George V in 1911. See anon., ‘The king and physical culture: Appointment for Mr Sandow’, The Times [London], 28 March 1911, p. 8. 41 See Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Fitness for modernity’, 526–​9, 530–​2, 537–​8, 547, 553–​6. 42 Namrata Ganneri makes an important point about the Marathi journal Vyayam (1915–​54) as an example of Indian sports and physical culture print journalism that was in dialogue with American and European publications. See idem, ‘Notes on Vyayam: A vernacular sports journal in western India’, The Newsletter [International Institute for Asian Studies], 69, 2014, p. 8. 43 United Provinces Exhibition, Allahabad, 1910–​1911, Official Handbook, 2nd edn. (s.l.a.n.), 4–​6, 236–​52. 44 ‘Bhimsen’ refers to Bhimasen or Bhima, the strong warrior hero of the epic Mahabharata. On Ramamurti in Calcutta in 1909, see Rosselli, ‘The self-​image of effeteness’, 146. For Allahabad in 1910, see the advertisement in The Leader [Allahabad], 29 December 1910, p. 1; and Report of the Twenty-​fifth Indian National Congress held at Allahabad, 26th, 27th, 28th and 29th December, 1910 (Allahabad: Indian Press, 1911), 191. 45 Singleton, Yoga Body, 106–​8. 46 On ‘yogic physical culture’ as a science, see ibid., 91–​4, 113–​29; Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 66–​7; and idem, Yoga in Modern India, 73–​108. 47 As quoted in Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Fitness for modernity’, 551. 48 On YMCA bleaching and whitening tendencies, see ibid., 551–​2. 49 O’Hanlon, ‘Military sports’, 514–​16. 50 Ina Zweiniger-​Bargielowska, ‘Building a British superman: Physical culture in interwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (4), 2006, pp. 598–​601. 51 See J.H. Gray, ‘India’s physical education’ (discussed above); and, on Baden-​Powell’s comments on muscles, Watt, ‘ “No showy muscles” ’, 124. On Sandow’s goals for the symmetrical and graceful bodily development of his followers, see his Body-​Building, 19–​22.

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Carey Watt 52 Moti Nandy, ‘Sports in Calcutta’, in: Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.), Calcutta: The Living City, vol. 2, The Present and Future (Calcutta: OUP, 1990), pp. 321–​30, 328; Abhijit Gupta, ‘Cultures of the body in colonial Bengal: The career of Gobor Guha’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 29 (12), 2012, pp. 1687–​700, 1691–​2. 53 On physique photography and the body in visual culture c. 900, see Zweiniger-​Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 38. 54 Keshub Ch. Sen Gupta and Bishnu Charan Ghosh, Barbell Exercise and Muscle Control (Calcutta: self-​ pub., Lakshmibilas Press, 1930); Singleton, Yoga Body, 132–​3. 55 On K.V. Iyer, see Singleton, Yoga Body, 122–​9; and Goldberg, The Path of Modern Yoga, 142–​51. Iyer’s comments on Indian wrestlers’ bodies are discussed in idem, 144–​5. 56 Salman Rushdie, Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–​2002 (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2002), 165. The photograph was taken by Margaret Bourke-​White in 1946; see ‘Gandhi and the spinning wheel: Margaret Bourke-​White, 1946’, Time 100 photos: The most influential images of all time, http://​100photos.time.com/​photos/​margaret-​bourke-​white-​gandhi-​spinning-​wheel, accessed: 30 July 2020. 57 Time Magazine, 24 March 1930, as quoted in Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World 1914–​1948 (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018), 328. 58 David Arnold, Gandhi (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), 187–​ 8; Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: OUP, 1983), 4–​8, 48–​55; Alter, Gandhi’s Body, 139. 59 Ibid., 15–​16; Goldberg, The Path of Modern Yoga, 97–​9. 60 Gandhi, Autobiography, 298–​9. 61 Idem, A Guide to Health, trans. A. Rama Iyer (Triplicane: S. Ganesan, 1921), 59–​64. 62 On Gandhi’s ‘non-​violent martiality’, see Maria Misra, ‘Sergeant-​major Gandhi: Indian nationalism and nonviolent “martiality” ’, JAS, 73 (3), 2014, pp. 689–​709. 63 Quoted in Guha, Gandhi, 329. 64 Neepa Majumdar, Wanted: Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–​1950s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 110–​12. 65 On the uses of physical culture in the RSS, see van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 102–​3; and Joseph S. Alter, ‘Physical education, sport and the intersection and articulation of “modernities”: The Hanuman Vyayam Prasarak Mandal’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 24 (9), 2007, pp. 1156–​ 71, 1167–​9. 66 Emily S. Rosenberg, ‘Shows and entertainments’, in: idem (ed.), A World Connecting, 1870–​1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012), pp. 971–​82; Carey Watt, ‘Eugen Sandow and the circus, 1904–​05’, in: Nisha P. Rayaroth and Dilip Menon (eds.), Circus History and Theory (New Delhi: OUP, forthcoming). 67 Rosselli, ‘The self-​image of effeteness’, 145–​7. 68 Saint Nihal Singh, ‘The story of India’s Hercules’, The Indian Review, June 1912, pp. 478–​82; and anon., ‘Indian Sandow arrives’, The Straits Times, 2 June 1909, p. 7. 69 Nisha P. R., ‘The circus man who knew too much’, EPW, 52 (34), 2017, pp. 18–​19.

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28 BEFORE BOLLYWOOD Bombay cinema and the rise of the film industry in late colonial India Harald Fischer-​Tiné

Introduction There is perhaps no better example to illustrate a particularly striking variety of the manifold transnational entanglements that characterise South Asia’s recent past than the history of the subcontinental film industry under the Raj. Although border-​crossing interaction, transcultural cross-​fertilisation, and global circulation play a key role in this story, film critics and cultural historians have time and again pointed to the unique cultural coding of movies produced in the subcontinent, positing their quintessentially ‘Indian’ character.1 Even though this kind of cultural essentialism is always problematic, the momentous impact South Asian cultural and historical specificities had on the modes of production and content of popular Indian drama and cinema can hardly be denied. After all, we are talking about a cinematic industry whose products drew heavily on local cultural repositories such as religious epics and motives inspired by regional history. Besides, it catered overwhelmingly to a domestic market during the first five decades of its existence. The topic thus offers a unique opportunity to analyse how the complex interplay between domestic and colonial cultural, political, and economic constellations and developments, on the one hand, and broader global factors, on the other, led to the creation of an idiosyncratic and strikingly original form of cultural expression and mass cultural consumption. This chapter provides a survey of the development of ‘Bombay’ cinema with a short excursion to its theatrical predecessor, so-​called ‘Parsi theatre’. The term ‘Bombay cinema’ refers to the film industry set in today’s Mumbai, specialised in producing ‘commercial’ feature films. Whereas silent movies were exhibited to a pan-​Indian audience, most Bombay film producers focused on movies with dialogue in an accessible Hindi/​Hindustani after the introduction of the ‘talkie’ (or sound film) in the early 1930s. Simultaneously, they integrated Hindustani song sequences into their (often melodramatic) narrative plots.2 That the focus on the Hindi cinema is a pars pro toto approach needs to be emphasised. Right from the beginning of the talkie era, there were vibrant Bengali and Marathi film industries.3 At the same time, movies in the Dravidian languages of the south, such as Tamil and Telugu, were extremely popular in their respective language communities, and continued to be so even after the meteoric rise of ‘Bollywood’ in independent India.4 DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-29

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The discussion of Bombay cinema in this chapter links the development of the Hindi movie to the broader historical transformations in late colonial South Asia and beyond. It provides an outline of the main stages of India’s most lively film industry’s development, from the initial experiments with the new medium in the 1890s through to the late 1940s, when the coming of independence brought new opportunities and challenges for Indian film-​makers.

The silent film and its predecessors Film arrived in India at a moment when the links to Western modernity were becoming significantly stronger among the subcontinent’s elites. The major gateway for the influx of new ideas, inventions, and the latest products of everyday technology was Bombay. In 1896 a French cameraman and sales agent of the Lumière Brothers who was en route to a marketing tour in Australia made a long stop-​over in the western Indian port city.5 He used his sojourn to organise a public screening of the few ultra-​short documentaries earlier shown by Auguste and Louis Lumière in Paris. Following the racist logics of ‘social distance’ that characterised interactions between rulers and ruled in British India,6 the first shows in the classy Watson’s Hotel were reserved exclusively for Europeans. The ‘marvel of the century’, as the new ‘cinematograph’ was hyped in advertisements in the Bombay press, turned out to be such a success, however, that the ‘whites-​only’ policy was quickly given up and screenings were continued for a second week in the large Novelty theatre hall, this time for a predominantly Indian audience. In hindsight it becomes obvious that the historic first film screenings in the Novelty in July 1896 already marked the beginnings of the long and complex process of cultural adaptation or ‘vernacularisation’ of the new medium, which would go on for the next few decades. The owners of the theatre immediately dispelled concerns about the suitability of cinematographic exhibitions for ‘respectable women’, uttered by some members of the local elites, through the creation of ‘reserved boxes for Purdah ladies’ and the introduction of special zenana shows for women, thus tailoring the emerging cinematic viewing culture to local customs and sensibilities.7 Late nineteenth-​century Bombay, generally regarded as ‘India’s most modern city’,8 proved to be an ideal bridgehead for the introduction of foreign innovations, as it possessed a relatively sizeable segment of English educated middle-​class population in the age group ranging from 18 to 40 that was particularly open to the latest technical gadgets and mass leisure habits from the West.9 Photography, for instance, had taken root in the Western Presidency capital only a few years after its spread in Europe, and by the 1880s there existed dozens of photo studios in the city, most of them run by Indians.10 Besides, the money generated during the cotton boom of the 1860s and the subsequent set-​up of a highly profitable textile industry guaranteed that there were enough investors possessing the necessary capital base to launch new economic ventures.11 By 1920 almost 150 cinema halls existed in British India.12 Most of them were concentrated in the provincial capitals, such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras.13 The movies shown during the 1900s and early 1910s were feature films, almost invariably imported from Europe. Occasionally, however, they were supplemented by short Indian-​made documentaries. Initially, film viewing in India was an exclusively urban phenomenon, but as early as 1908, with the establishment of the earliest travelling cinema, the new medium made forays into India’s rural hinterland.14 Makeshift cinemas would eventually take off on a larger scale in the late 1920s, and their number continued to grow until about 1950, when more than 900 mobile cinema crews were criss-​crossing the subcontinent with their tents, screens, and projectors.15 It was especially among the mostly illiterate rural population that the popularity of silent cinema rose to a new level with the arrival of the first major Indian feature film. The legend has 360

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Figure 28.1  Still from D.G. Phalke’s first feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913), 5, Bhagwan Das Garga Collection. Source: Bowrings Fine Art Auctioneers: Indian Film Memorabilia (New Delhi: Bowrings Fine Art Auctioneers, 2002), n.p.

it that the Parsi photographer Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (1870–​1944) watched a French movie about the life of Christ in a Bombay cinema in 1910 and, inspired by the wave of patriotism in the wake of the Swadeshi movement, had the vision to create a similar movie based on Hindu mythological themes and designed exclusively for ‘the sons of India’.16 He finally came up with the full-​length feature Raja Harischandra (King Harischandra, 1913), based on a story from the Hindu epic Mahabharata. The film was launched in 1913 and successfully marketed with clearly (Hindu) nationalistic overtones, as the ‘[f]‌irst film of Indian manufacture, [s]pecially prepared at enormous cost [and] sure to appeal to our Hindu patrons’.17 The spectacular triumph of Raja Harishchandra at the box office had two important consequences for the history of Indian popular cinema. First, it allowed Phalke to set up his own studios and produce more than 40 other films in the subsequent 20 years. Second, and even more importantly, the movie’s stupendous success established a highly idiosyncratic genre within Indian cinema that would attract millions of viewers in the decades that followed. The so-​called ‘mythologicals’ –​i.e. films based on Hindu epics and legends –​would remain popular all over the subcontinent well into the post-​independence era.18 Significantly, such movies building on familiar religious tales catalysed the acceptance of the new medium among the rural population, and especially among women; even conservative husbands and fathers would find it hard to deny their wives or daughters darshan of Rama, Krishna, or the countless other gods, goddesses, and mythical heroes celebrated on the silver screen.19 The popularity of the new genre was further boosted by the fact that mythologicals such as Phalke’s second most successful film, Shri Krishna Janma (The Birth of Lord Krishna, 1918), made liberal use of the latest special effects borrowed from French film pioneer Georges Méliès to depict the exploits and miracles of their godly protagonists, thereby allegedly creating a religious shock-​and-​awe effect.20 Other varieties of religiously themed films consisted of the so-​called ‘devotionals’ and the ‘Islamicate’ films. The devotional movies celebrated the pious deeds not of gods but of historical figures: the Hindu sants, protagonists of the late mediaeval/​early modern Bhakti movement.21 The Islamicate movies, on the other hand, catered 361

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to the specific tastes of the subcontinent’s sizeable Muslim population, and were also successfully exported to the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world from the late 1920s onwards.22 It would certainly be a rewarding exercise for cultural historians and scholars of religious studies to unravel the ways in which this novel mass-​mediated experience impacted on popular conceptions and practices of religion. Although South Asian religious traditions thus undeniably shaped the content of film scripts right from the outset, there has been a long debate among film historians about the importance of local forms and styles of textual, visual, and performative expression for the emerging aesthetic of Indian popular cinema. In recent years several scholars have highlighted the impact of Indian painting and photography on the visual styles dominating early Indian cinema.23 Some authors of an earlier generation instead emphasised the role of classical Sanskrit drama and its rasa theory for Indian films during the silent era and afterwards.24 More obviously, however, the relatively recent Indian theatrical traditions, and especially the so-​called ‘Parsi theatre’ of Bombay, left its mark on Phalke and other Indian film pioneers. The Parsis were a small religious minority group predominantly located in the Bombay Presidency who had their ethnic and religious roots in Persia. They were disproportionally well represented in the world of commerce and became very active in promoting the performing arts and as sponsors of the early film industry.25 Parsi theatre groups had begun to mushroom in Bombay in the middle of the nineteenth century. Their repertoire was highly eclectic, with influences stretching from local folk traditions to the Indo-​Persian literary and theatrical practice and to the Shakespearean plays regularly performed by European amateur theatre groups in the larger Indian cities since the late eighteenth century.26 Clearly, the ‘hybrid’ Parsi theatre provided the most important pool of film actors, directors, and exhibitors in the pioneering years of Bombay cinema, a fact that left its imprint on the movies of the silent era and even beyond. The interpolation of music and dance sequences breaking up the plot, which was to become an essential Bollywood characteristic after the introduction of sound film in the early 1930s, was a stylistic device already used in most Parsi plays half a century earlier.27 There were many other connections between Bombay drama and Bombay cinema as well. As mentioned already, many of the ‘picture palaces’ in use during the early 1900s were converted theatre halls. In a similar vein, film directors recruited the bulk of the actors during the pioneering decades from Parsi theatre companies. This led to yet another distinctive feature of early silent movies: just as with Parsi plays, women’s roles used to be performed by men for more than a decade.28 This was because acting and dancing were regarded as highly disreputable activities for women. Revealingly, the first women to eventually accept roles in Indian silent films in the 1920s belonged to the Indo-​European mixed-​race community: ‘Anglo-​Indian’ women did not have much of a reputation to lose, as they were widely viewed as ‘women of easy virtue’ by both Indian and European elites.29 The first female icons of Indian cinema, therefore, chose to Indianise their names on their road to stardom: Ruby Myers became ‘Sulochana’ and Renée Smith changed her name to ‘Seeta Devi’.30

The studio era and the sound film: Professionalisation, diversification, and politicisation During the 1920s cinema gradually became a mass medium in India and its neighbouring countries. Entrepreneurs such as Jamshetji F. Madan built their film empires consisting of production studios and cinema chains, with halls spread all over India, Burma, and Ceylon. By 1930 the Parsi movie magnate alone owned no fewer than 126 theatres.31 The British colonial government noticed the ever-​g rowing popularity of the new medium at an early stage, and 362

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reacted immediately with the Indian Cinematograph Act 1918.32 The promulgation of this law marked the start of the long history of a strained relationship between the Indian film industry and the colonial state. The latter set up boards of censorship to prevent the screening of films that either sent out ‘seditious’ or ‘communalist’ messages or lowered ‘European prestige’ by disproportionately focusing on the ‘debauched’ aspects of the Western way of life. This last point was clearly a central concern in the report produced by the Indian Cinematograph Committee, which toured the country in 1927/​8.33 The British authorities had become particularly anxious about the popularity of ‘cheap American films’, which had started to conquer Indian cinema halls after the end of the First World War. In fact, US movies had reached a market share of 80 per cent by the late 1920s.34 Not only was this dominance of Hollywood economically detrimental to the British and Indian film industries, the American penchant for sex and crime was also seen as seriously undermining British claims about white civilisational superiority. As a result, quite a few Hollywood classics of the silent era fell victim to the new censorship regulations, because they portrayed excessive violence and alcohol consumption or depicted Western women as ‘immoral’. The report of the Committee provides fascinating insights into the relationship between the Indian National Congress under Mohandas Gandhi’s leadership and the film world in Bombay. That the Mahatma was not a supporter of the new form of urban entertainment becomes apparent from the statement with which he refused to fill in the Committee’s survey form: Even if I was so minded, I should be unfit to answer your questionnaire, as I have never been to a cinema. But even to an outsider, the evil that it has done and is doing is patent. The good, if it has done any at all, remains to be proved.35 Ironically, Gandhi’s view that movies were primarily a source of moral contagion was fully in line with that of some British officials, who criticised the cinematic industry in India as a major factor ‘in lowering the standard of sex-​conduct and thereby tending to increase the dissemination of disease’.36 Indian elites outside nationalist circles, too, widely perceived cinema as a crude, low-​class amusement rather than an art form well into the 1940s.37 In particular, films of Indian production were despised by the ‘lettered’ urban elites –​a fact that was reflected in a segregation of ‘Western’ and ‘native’ cinema halls. American movies were usually shown in expensive picture palaces in the better urban areas (some of these film houses were ultra-​ modern, and imposing brick and mortar signifiers of a liberal American modernity)38 and primarily attracted a small segment of the urban middle classes. Indian-​made films, by contrast, were typically screened in cheap and shabby theatres located in the poorer parts of town or by travelling cinemas in the rural hinterland. This gap between elite and subaltern cinematic cultures and tastes is also obvious from the Cinematograph Committee Report, which observed that ‘Indian films are extremely popular with the less cultured classes’, whereas ‘the educated Indian is generally apt to compare them unfavourably with the more finished American products’.39 The elites’ dislike for the emerging indigenous film industry thus has to be seen in the broader context of their ambiguous perception of the plebeian elements of Indian society at large. The groups labelled ‘urban poor’ –​i.e. coolies, millhands, street vendors, rickshaw pullers, etc. –​ were seen as potentially troublesome and standing in urgent need of education and constant elite guidance.40 As recent research suggests, this created a somewhat paradoxical situation. To be sure, cinema was more ‘democratic’ than most existing art forms in South Asia, allowing ‘castes, classes, communities as well as women, children and families to participate and mix in new public ways within a new kind of social space’.41 At the same time, however, both the colonial authorities 363

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and South Asian elites attempted to control and regulate this newly created space by imposing social and cultural hierarchies based on class, wealth, and taste. Even staunch modernists such as Jawaharlal Nehru remained distrustful towards Indian popular cinema. Nehru and many other political leaders regarded Indian feature films as too trivial, escapist, and artistically ‘backward’ to educate this low-​class audience in the way they deemed necessary. In their view, popular Indian cinema possessed only very limited ‘social development value’, at least in its existing form and with its existing genres.42 Educational documentaries, therefore, seemed to be a much more suitable tool for inculcating civic virtues and fostering national unity.43 Having said that, it needs also to be stressed that neither the disregard of influential politicians nor elite attempts to refine the taste of the lower-​class audience could stop the triumphant rise of Bombay cinema from becoming the subcontinent’s most popular form of mass entertainment. The bulk of the ‘urban poor’ remained utterly unimpressed by efforts to sway their filmī predilections, and by the late 1930s and early 1940s Bombay cinema had also become increasingly popular with the ‘educated’ segments of society. There is, likewise, plenty of evidence that, the lack of official support notwithstanding, Indian producers, screenwriters, and directors were nonetheless influenced by the political developments of their times and often made oblique anti-​colonial statements or intervened in contemporary controversies through their work. The sympathies of most Bombay film-​makers for the cause of Indian nationalism were apparent. The growing political aspirations of individual Indian producers and directors went in tandem with the rapid professionalisation of film-​ making, which, in turn, was catalysed by various transnational interactions and inspirations. Phalke had bought his equipment and learned the technical side of his trade during a brief sojourn in London, but technical and artistic influences on the fledgling industry were not limited to the imperial metropolis. Suchet Singh was the first Indian director to be trained in cinema technique in Hollywood, where he had worked under Charlie Chaplin. He returned to India at the end of 1918 and formed the Oriental Film Manufacturing Company, which produced its first movie in 1920.44 Even more long-​lasting was the German influence on Indian cinema in the era of silent movies and early ‘talkies’. The most spectacular case in point is certainly the protracted cooperation between the Calcutta attorney, film producer, and actor Himanshu Rai (1892–​1940) and the Bavarian film director Franz Osten (1876–​1956) and his visionary cameraman Josef Wirsching (1903–​71).45 Working for the Munich-​based Emelka Studios, Osten had already built a reputation for himself in Germany by directing Heimatfilms (i.e. sentimental ‘good old country’ movies) when he was contacted by Himanshu Rai in 1924. Rai wanted to produce a film on the life of the Buddha based on the popular narrative poem The Light of Asia by Edwin Arnold. Osten agreed to act as a director, and the Indo-​German co-​production was shot on location in India the following year before being processed and edited in Munich. The film was laden with orientalist clichés and featured Rai himself as Gautama Buddha and the 14-​year-​old Anglo-​ Indian femme fatale ‘Seeta Devi’ as his wife Yashodhara. Interestingly, it became a major success in continental Europe, but fared rather poorly at the Indian box offices. Nonetheless, the cooperation between Rai and the Bavarian film crew had a certain impact on the artistic and technological development of Bombay cinema. It continued for two more India-​themed silent movies that were fully financed with German capital: Shiraz (1928) and Prapanch Pash (A Throw of Dice, 1929). Many experts today regard the latter in particular as a path-​breaking masterpiece of global silent cinema, not least due to Wirsching’s extraordinary camera work, which was noticeably influenced by expressionist art and would serve as an inspiration to some of his Indian colleagues.46

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Figure 28.2  Bavarians in Bombay: Franz Osten, Josef Wirsching, and their Indian film crew at the set of Shiraz in India (1928), p. 12, Private Collection Gerhard Koch. Source: Chidanda Das Gupta and Werner Kobe (eds.), Kino in Indien (Freiburg: Wolf Mersch Verlag, 1986), n.p.

As we shall presently see, the fruitful cooperation between Rai, Osten, and Wirsching was to be revived a few years later, after the fledgling Indian film industry had been completely transformed by the sound film revolution. Before we turn to sound film, however, it is important to stress that the Indo-​German cinematic joint venture during the era of the silent movies was by no means an exceptional phenomenon but, rather, part of a much broader trend of transnational borrowing and interaction. Thus, a very similar story could be told about Indo-​ Italian collaboration. The Italian director Eugenio di Liguoro (1895–​1952) was hired by Madan Theatres in Calcutta in the early 1920s and shot several successful mythologicals in India, such as Nala Damayanti (1921) and Ramayana (1922).47 He had brought along several Italian actors from Rome, among whom one ‘Signorina P. Minelli’ apparently became particularly famous among the Indian film fans, thanks to her penchant for translucent costumes.48 The Indo-​Italian silent film alliance peaked in 1923 with the production of Savitri, a mythological financed by Madan Theatres, but shot entirely in Rome with an Italian cast and director.49 The arrival of the ‘talkies’, in 1931, constituted a major breaking point in the history of South Asian cinema.50 First, with films in Indian languages being available, the dominance of Hollywood in Indian cinemas was broken within a few years: by the end of the 1930s the market share of US and other foreign films in India had dropped from about 80 to less than 10 per cent.51 Second, it brought language and music to the fore in an unprecedented manner. Whereas the marriage of music and film was an uncomplicated affair, the language issue turned out to be a highly sensitive one in the linguistically diverse setting of India. The language problem was particularly thorny in the turbulent 1930s. Multiple conflicts were at play during this period, including that of resistance on the part of various regional language groups to the perceived dominance of the north and Hindi–​Urdu,52 and tensions between hard-​line Muslim and Hindu nationalists advocating either Urdu or Hindi as a ‘national language’. Ultimately, a sort of middle ground referred to as ‘Hindustani’, which had a considerable amount of Persian

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and Arabic loan words generally seen as characteristic of Urdu, became the vehicle for popular Bombay (or ‘Hindi’) cinema.53 Thus, in an era characterised by the sharpening communal conflicts and the popularity of language purification schemes among religious and regional (sub)nationalists, commercial Bombay films provided a politically neutral and potentially integrative lingua franca acceptable to a wide audience.54 The sound revolution had more effects. As happened elsewhere, cinema hall orchestras (or, more often, harmonium and tablā55 duos) accompanying the film shows vanished in South Asia, and many stars of the silent era now disappeared from the screen because of their lack of proficiency in the film language, or simply because they spoke with a strong accent.56 At the same time, the new possibility to integrate music into the film-​viewing experience through sound recording also created new stars. The first Indian talkie, Alam Ara (The Light of the Earth, 1931), was a musical. Inspired by its immense success at the box office, most Indian films would feature around six to ten songs and several dance sequences by the mid-​1930s.57 Since the majority of actors and actresses had limited musical talent, however, playback singing was introduced in 1935, and the most talented representatives of this new art form, singers such as Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar, quickly became celebrities in their own right. Although they never appeared on the screen themselves, these musical masters who entered the scene in the 1940s continued to be worshipped by film and music lovers for decades.58 The question as to precisely what kind of musical styles flourished in Bombay’s studios over time has recently received some scholarly attention, and the results once more point towards the importance of transcultural entanglements. Doubtless, popular as well as ‘classical’ forms of Indian music were the most important ingredients for the emerging Indian film music industry.59 From the very beginning, however, Bombay film music was a hybrid phenomenon, allowing music directors and instrumentalists to creatively adapt styles (and instruments) from other musical traditions, such as European ballroom music, American jazz, Hawaiian music, or Latin dance rhythms.60 This propensity to borrow freely from foreign sources, of course, was barely compatible with the tendency of cultural purism prevailing in most currents of Indian nationalism, and hence reinforced the rather negative image Bombay cinema had among the country’s political elites. Between the mid-​1920s and the early 1950s the film industry in Bombay was dominated by a studio system that shared many features with the one prevailing in Hollywood during that era. The ‘talkie’ revolution entailed the ruin of some of the old players, but simultaneously it witnessed the rise of a handful of new studios, the more successful of which tended to specialise in one of the genres that came to shape Hindi cinema from the 1930s to the early 1950s.61 Mythologicals and devotionals remained popular, and there was no other film company that was as strongly associated with this type of pictures than the Prabhat Studios in Pune and Kolhapur, which produced religiously themed movies in both Hindi and Marathi. Under the aegis of the patriotically inclined Prabhat directors, however, the stories from the ancient Hindu epics often had a barely concealed political twist. In Gopal Krishna (1938), for example, the familiar narrative of the young Lord Krishna’s resistance against the tyrant ruler Kamsa is used as an analogy for the Indian opposition against the exploitative practices of British colonialism.62 Incidentally, Prabhat’s co-​founder and most important director, V. Shantaram (1901–​90), influenced the development of the Indian film business in ways that put the early Indian film industry’s German connection once more into stark relief. With the support of the Berlin-​ based photo company AGFA, he experimented with colour film as early as 1933.63 Even more importantly, Shantaram pioneered the distribution of film songs on shellac records that were also imported from Germany.64 The gramophone records with the soundtrack of Shantaram’s

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movie Sairandhari, which were available from 1934, mark the start of a lucrative complementary industry that developed around Indian film production and would continue to blossom for decades. The immense popularity of the second genre that boomed under the studio system seemed to confirm the predominant elite view of cinema as a worthless and vulgar form of low-​class entertainment. The so-​called ‘stunt film’ combined mostly hair-​rising plots with somewhat haphazard action scenes, slapstick elements, and dance sequences.65 The most successful producer of this type of motion pictures was Wadia Movietone. Given Wadia’s almost purely male, Indian lower-​class audience, it seems ironic that the studio’s top star was a blond actress of European parentage. The Australian-​born former circus artist Mary Evans (1908–​96), daughter of a Scottish soldier stationed in India, belonged to the often forgotten group of low-​class Europeans or ‘white subalterns’ residing in the subcontinent.66 Under her screen name ‘Fearless Nadia’, Evans became one of the first female leads in Indian cinema, in successful action trash classics such as Hunterwali (The Girl with the Whip, 1935) and Diamond Queen (1940).67 In her Zorroesque signature outfit, complete with a black mask and kurbash, the hard-​hitting action heroine embodied a complete inversion of the dominant gender roles in South Asian societies and yet managed to attract a devout following of male cinemagoers for over a decade. Unlike the stunt film, whose popularity had largely evaporated by the mid-​1940s, the third genre that throve in the wake of the sound film revolution would continue to define Bombay cinema in the first two decades after independence. To be sure, the social melodramas had roots reaching back to the Parsi theatre, and had already experienced a first wave of popularity in the silent era. It was only the technically polished productions of studios such as the Calcutta-​based New Theatres, however, and especially Bombay Talkies, that fully established the ‘social’ as a staple of the popular Hindi film. Bombay Talkies was founded by silent film veteran Himanshu Rai (who by now preferred to work behind the camera as a producer) and his young wife Devika Rani (1908–​94), who also acted as the studio’s main female star until 1943. Like her husband, Rani had a German connection. In 1929/​30 she had started her career in the film world as an apprentice with the UFA studios in Babelsberg, where she met master directors such as Josef von Sternberg and Georg Wilhelm Pabst.68 Rai and Rani founded Bombay Talkies in 1934 with a view not only to make money at the box office but also to use film as a medium to address India’s social and political problems.69 The studio’s solid financial basis – Bombay Talkies was a joint-​stock company with substantial working capital –​allowed its founders to purchase the latest technological equipment in Europe and to hire Osten, Wirsching, and a few other technicians and sound engineers from Germany and Britain.70 The talent of young actors such as Devika Rani and the company’s main male star, Ashok Kumar, the professionalism of the international crew, and the creativity of screenwriters such as Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–​55) and K.A. Abbas (1914–​87), both prominent literary figures, contributed to the studio’s commercial and artistic success.71 The social and political commitment of the studio (the bulk of the employees were associated with the Communist Party of India or various other leftist circles or organisations) was expressed in the choice of the topic of the company’s major successes. Presenting a tragic love story between an outcast girl and a young Brahman in an Indian village, Acchut Kanya (The Untouchable Girl, 1936), for example, engaged with the persistence of caste hierarchies, particularly in rural India.72 It hardly needs to be emphasised that caste conflicts represented a problem that was particularly intense at the time the film was released, which coincided with the controversies surrounding the politicisation of the Dalits under B.R. Ambedkar.73 In a similarly melodramatic fashion, Jeevan Naiya (A New Life, 1936) tackled another social taboo that

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had preoccupied Indian religious and social reformers since the late nineteenth century: the stigmatisation and social ostracism of ‘dancing girls’ and prostitutes.74 In line with the overall ‘progressive’ outlook of Bombay Talkies, both films made a flaming (if somewhat paternalistic) appeal to overcome the obsolete religious traditions and rigid social conventions that were crippling Indian efforts for national unity and political autonomy.

Epilogue: Bombay cinema in India’s zero hour Although the imperatives of national unity and social reform were well-​established topics in popular Hindi cinema before independence, these themes acquired an entirely new significance after the end of the British Raj in 1947. The conditions for creating a new ‘national’ cinema in independent India were unfavourable, however, for multiple reasons. Like other parts of the South Asian economy, the film industry was severely affected by the Partition that came with independence. A considerable part of the audience was suddenly beyond reach, since Pakistan put a ban on the import of Indian movies in 1952.75 Moreover, many actors, directors, screenwriters, and musicians working in Bombay’s film studios were Muslims,76 and quite a few of them decided to move to their newly created ‘homeland’. They left a gap that was not easy to fill. What made matters worse was the fact that the distrust towards the film business that had been so vividly expressed by Gandhi was still the prevailing attitude among the new political leadership. Far from being elevated to the status of a ‘national art’, Indian cinema continued to receive rather reserved treatment. Whereas Indian literature, visual arts, and music now enjoyed the financial support of the state, and artists could study in government institutions or hope to win one of the many newly created awards and prizes, the film industry was relegated to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Instead of the huge government subsidies pumped into ‘high culture’, the ministry, and most provincial authorities, rationed the distribution of raw film stock, restricted the construction of new film houses, and continued to levy high entertainment taxes.77 Partly as a result of the limited support of the cinematic industry by the Indian state, most of the film companies that had dominated the scene in the interwar years no longer existed by the mid-​1950s. New forms of financing and production were about to replace the studio system.

Résumé This brief outline of the first half-​century of colonial India’s film industry has attempted to show, first, that a cinematic tradition often described in terms of its exotic features and cultural uniqueness was closely entangled with global developments in art, technology, economy, and politics right from its inception in the 1910s. Having said that, it is evident that much more remains to be done to explore the transnational dimensions of Bombay cinema’s ‘silent’ and ‘studio’ eras. Second, and on a more general level, the analysis of the historical trajectories of the Bombay’s film world has once again forcefully demonstrated the outstanding value of feature films as source material for social and cultural historians: even seemingly apolitical entertainment genres such as the stunt film possessed an almost seismographic quality, recording the shockwaves of social turmoil, cultural anxieties, and political tensions in the subcontinent. Through a careful analysis of movies (and, for that matter, of the audiences and viewing cultures connected to them), historians can hence expect to discover new and rewarding perspectives on the region’s recent social and cultural history that would be difficult to access otherwise.

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Notes 1 Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–​1987 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993), 35–​9. 2 Jayson Beaster-​Jones, Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song (New York: OUP, 2015), 28–​33. 3 Sharmistha Gooptu, Bengali Cinema: ‘An Other Nation’ (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 22–​70; Madhuja Mukherjee, ‘Rethinking popular cinema in Bengal (1930s–​1950s): Of literariness, comic mode, mythological and other avatars’, South Asian History and Culture, 8 (2), 2017 pp. 122–​42; Amrit Gangar, ‘Marathi cinema: The exile, the factory and fame’, in: K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 72–​87, 75–​9. 4 M.K. Raghavendra (ed.), Beyond Bollywood: The Cinemas of South India (Noida: HarperCollins India, 2013); S. Theodore Baskaran, History through the Lens: Perspectives on South Indian Cinema (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009). 5 For the following, see Suresh Chabria, ‘Before our eyes: A short history of Indian silent cinema’, in: idem (ed.), Light of Asia: Indian Silent Cinema, 1912–​1934 (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2013), pp. 17–​42; and Mihir Bose, Bollywood: A History (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), pp. 38–​47. 6 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 160–​85. 7 Bhagwan D.G., So Many Cinemas: The Motion Picture in India (Mumbai: Eminence Designs, 1996), 11. 8 Sujata Patel, ‘Bombay’s urban predicament’, in: idem and Alice Thorner (eds.), Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India (New Delhi: OUP, 1995), pp. xiii–​xxxv, xiv. 9 Kaushik Bhaumik, ‘Cinematograph to cinema: Bombay 1896–​1928’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2 (1), 2011, pp. 41–​67, 57–​8. See also idem, ‘At home in the world: Cinema and cultures of the young in Bombay in the 1920s’, in: Douglas E. Haynes, Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy, and Haruka Yanigasawa (eds.), Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 2010), pp. 136–​54. 10 Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: British Library, 2008). 11 Gijsbert Oonk, ‘The emergence of indigenous industrialists in Calcutta, Bombay, and Ahmedabad, 1850–​1947’, Business History Review, 88 (1), 2014, pp. 43–​71; Rajnarayan Chandarvarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–​1940 (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 44–​72. 12 Manjunath Pendakur, Indian Popular Cinema: Industry, Ideology and Consciousness (New York: Hampton Press, 2003), 18. 13 Garga, So Many Cinemas, 13–​14. 14 Bose, Bollywood, 47; Sudhir Mahadevan, ‘Traveling showmen, makeshift cinemas: The bioscopewallah and early cinema history in India’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 1 (1), 2010, pp. 27–​47. 15 Pendakur, Indian Popular Cinema, 18. 16 Babli Sinha, Cinema, Transnationalism, and Colonial India. Entertaining the Raj (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 53. For other incisive discussions of Phalke’s life and work, see Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of Cinema in India (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015), 89–​99; and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The Phalke era: Conflict of traditional form and modern technology’, in: Tejaswini Niranjan, P. Kudir, and Vivek Dhareshwar (eds.), Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993), pp. 47–​82. 17 Cited in Brian Shoesmith, ‘Swadeshi cinema: Cinema, politics and culture: The writings of D.G. Phalke’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2 (1), 1988, pp. 44–​50. 18 Manishita Dass, Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 39–​71; Rachel Dwyer, Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 12–​45. 19 Darshan is a term used in Hinduism to refer to the occasion of seeing a holy person or the image of a deity. 20 Sean Cubitt, ‘Phalke, Méliès, and special effects today’, Wide Angle, 21 (1), 1999, pp. 115–​30; Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York: OUP, 1980), 20. 21 Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of the Hindi Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 18–​19. 22 Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen, Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009); Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Geographies of the cinematic public: Notes on regional, national and global histories of Indian cinema’, Journal of the Moving Image, 9, 2010, pp. 94–​117, 102–​4.

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Harald Fischer-Tiné 23 Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine; Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 72–​3. 24 See, for instance, M. Christopher Byrski, ‘Bombay philum: the Kaliyugi avatara of Sanskrit drama’, Pushpanjali, 4, 1980, pp. 111–​18; and Beatrix Pfleiderer and Lothar Lutze (eds.), The Hindi Film: Agent and Re-​Agent of Cultural Change (New Delhi: Manohar, 1985). 25 Kathryn Hansen, ‘Passionate refrains: The theatricality of Urdu on the Parsi stage’, South Asian History and Culture, 7 (3), 2016, pp. 221–​38, 222–​3. For the Parsis’ role in nineteenth-​century Bombay more generally, see Jesse S. Palsetia, ‘Parsis and Bombay City: Community and identity in the nineteenth century’, in: P. Kidambi, M. Kamat, and R. Dwyer (eds.), Bombay before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos (London: Hurst, 2019), pp. 35–​55. 26 Somnath Gupta, The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2005). 27 Anupama Kapse, ‘The moving image: Melodrama and early Indian cinema 1913–​1939’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2009), 24. 28 Mrinal Pande, ‘Moving beyond themselves: Women in Hindustani Parsi theatre and early Hindi films’, EPW, 41 (17), 2006, pp. 1646–​53; Kathryn Hansen, ‘Making women visible: Gender and race cross-​ dressing in the Parsi theatre’, Theatre Journal, 51 (2), 1999, pp. 127–​47. 29 Lionel Caplan, ‘Iconographies of Anglo-​Indian women: Gender constructs and contrasts in a changing society’, MAS, 34 (4), 2000, pp. 869–​73. 30 See Neepa Majumdar, Wanted: Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–​1950s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 93–​104; and Priti Ramamurthy, ‘All-​consuming nationalism: The Indian modern girl in the 1920s and 1930s’, in: Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow (eds.), The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 147–​73, 160–​4. 31 Bose, Bollywood, 64. On the growth of Madan’s film empire, see Gooptu, Bengali Cinema, 15–​20. 32 Miriam Sharma, ‘Censoring India: Cinema and the tentacles of empire in the early years’, South Asia Research, 29 (1), 2009, pp. 41–​73; Someswar Bhowmik, Cinema and Censorship: The Politics of Control in India (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009), 33–​65. 33 Dass, Outside the Lettered City, 75–​97; Priya Jaikumar, ‘More than morality: The Indian Cinematograph Committee interviews (1927)’, The Moving Image, 3 (1), 2003, pp. 82–​109. 34 Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927–​1928 [hereafter ICC Report] (Calcutta: Government of India, Central Publication Branch, 1928), 29. 35 ICC Evidence, vol. 4 (Calcutta: Government of India, Central Publication Branch, 1928), 56. 36 ICC Report, 5, 116. 37 For the following, see Ranita Chatterjee, ‘Cinema in the colonial city: Early film audiences in Calcutta’, in: Ian Christie (ed.), Audiences (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp. 66–​ 80; Manishita Dass, ‘The crowd outside the lettered city: Imagining the mass audience in 1920s India’, Cinema Journal, 48 (4), 2009, pp. 177–​98; and Bhaumik, ‘Cinematograph to cinema’, 48–​54. 38 Michael Windover, ‘Exchanging looks: “Art dekho” movie theatres in Bombay’, Architectural History, 52, 2009, pp. 201–​32, 208–​10. 39 ICC Report, 22. 40 Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-​1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 210–​18. For the broader phenomenon, see also Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early-​Twentieth Century India (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). 41 Stephen Hughes, ‘House full: Silent film genre, exhibition and audiences in south India’, IESHR, 43 (1), 2006, pp. 31–​62, 34. 42 For a succinct overview of the intertwined Nehruvian projects of economic development and ‘citizen crafting’, see Ganesh Kudaisya, A Republic in the Making: India in the 1950s (New Delhi: OUP, 2017), 113–​70. 43 Camille Deprez, ‘The documentary film in India (1948–​1975): Independence and the challenges of national integration’, Studies in Documentary Film, 11 (1), 2017, pp. 64–​80; Ravi S. Vasudevan, ‘Official and amateur: Exploring information film in India, 1920s–​40’, in: Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds.), Film and the End of Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 73–​94. 44 Firoze Rangoonwala, ‘1896–​1930: The silent years’, in: Gulzar, Govind Nihalani, and Saibal Chatterjee (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema (New Delhi: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2003), pp. 25–​41, 33. A detailed interactional history between Hollywood and Bombay cinema is provided in Nitin Govil,

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The film industry in late colonial India Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 45 For the following, see Veronika Feuchtner, ‘The international project of national(ist) film: Franz Osten in India’, in: Rodowski Christian (ed.), The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), pp. 167–​81; and Gerhard Koch, ‘Von der “Münchner Lichtspielkunst” zu den “Bombay talkies”: Franz Osten: Zur Geschichte der deutsch-​ indischen Kulturbeziehungen’, in: Chidanda Das Gupta and Werner Kobe (eds.), Kino in Indien (Freiburg: Wolf Mersch Verlag, 1986), pp. 125–​44. 46 Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empires (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 268–​9. 47 Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘Reflected readings in available light: Cameramen in the shadows of Hindi cinema’, in: R. Kaur and A.J. Sinha (eds.), Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 118–​40, 122, fn 3. 48 B.D. Garga, Silent Cinema in India: A Pictorial Journey (Noida: HarperCollins, 2012), 71. 49 Ibid., 72. 50 Madhuja Mukherjee, ‘To speak or not to speak: Publicity, public opinion and the transition to talkies, Calcutta 1931–​35’, in: L. Brueck, J. Smith, and N. Verma (eds.), Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020), pp. 268–​296; Joppan George, ‘The many passages of sound: Indian talkies in the 1930s’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2 (1), 2011, pp. 83–​98. 51 Tejaswini Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 11. 52 Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Battling the demoness Hindi in Tamil India’, in: Crispin Bates (ed.), Beyond Representation: Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity (New Delhi: OUP, 2006), pp. 123–​50. 53 On the Hindi–​Urdu conflict and the language question more generally, see Madhumita Lahiri, ‘An idiom for India’, Interventions, 18 (1), 2016, pp. 60–​85; and Christopher R. King, One Language, Two Scripts (New Delhi: OUP, 1994). 54 David Lunn, ‘The eloquent language: Hindustani in 1940s Indian cinema’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 6 (1), 2015, pp. 1–​26. 55 The tablā, a percussion instrument consisting of a pair of membranophonic drums, was widely used in a variety of northern Indian music styles from the eighteenth century. 56 Olympia Bhatt, ‘Musical beginnings and trends in 1920s Indian cinema’, in: C. Tieber and A.K. Windisch (eds.), The Sounds of Silent Films: New Perspectives on History, Theory and Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 123–​38. 57 Gregory D. Booth, Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios (New Delhi: OUP, 2008), 27–​54. 58 Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook, 13–​14. 59 Booth, Behind the Curtain, 129–​32. 60 Bradley Shope, ‘Latin American music in moving pictures and jazzy cabarets in Mumbai, 1930s–​ 1950s’, in: idem and Gregory D. Booth (eds.), More than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popular Music (Oxford: OUP, 2013), pp. 201–​14; Bradley Shope, American Popular Music in Britain’s Raj (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 152–​65. 61 A helpful overview of the main studios of the 1930s and 1940s and the genres they represented is provided in Garga, So Many Cinemas, 85–​137. 62 On the fascinating history of the Prabhat Studios, see Hrishikesh Ingle, ‘Early Marathi cinema: Prabhat Studios and social respectability’, Synoptique, 5 (2), 2017, pp. 79–​100; and Hrishikesh Arvikar, ‘The cinema of Prabhat Studio: An overview’, Sahapedia, 2016, www.sahapedia.org/​the-​cinema-​of-​ prabhat-​studio-​overview, accessed: 2 November 2019. 63 Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, 258. 64 G.N. Joshi, ‘A concise history of the phonograph industry in India’, Popular Music, 7 (2), 1982, pp. 147–​56, 150. 65 Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 100; for an in-​depth discussion, see Majumdar, Wanted: Cultured Ladies Only!, 104–​22. 66 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, Low and Licentious Europeans: Race, Class and White Subalternity in Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009).

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Harald Fischer-Tiné 67 Rosie Thomas, ‘Not quite (pearl) white: Fearless Nadia, queen of the stunts’, in: R. Kaur and A.J. Sinha (eds.), Bollywood: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 35–​69. 68 Feuchtner, ‘The international project’, 169. 69 For the following, see Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, 267–​74. 70 Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: OUP, 1999), 68. 71 Garga, So Many Cinemas, 111. On K.A. Abbas, see also Iffat Fatima and Syeda Sayidain Hameed (eds.), Bread, Beauty, Revolution: Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, 1914–​1987 (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2015). The gifted poet and short story writer Manto provides a fascinating account of his experience in Bombay’s film industry in Saadat Hasan Manto, Stars from Another Sky: the Bombay Film World of the 1940s (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2010). 72 Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire, 228–​30. 73 Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 93–​14; Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Low Castes in North Indian Politics (London: Hurst, 2003), 13–​31. 74 Ruth Vanita, Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Debashree Mukherjee, ‘Good girls, bad girls’, Seminar, 598, 2009, pp. 2–​8. 75 Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook, 21. 76 For the role of Muslims in Bombay’s film world, see also Ravi S. Vasudevan, ‘Film genres, the Muslim social, and discourses of identity c.1935–​1945’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 6 (1), 2015, pp. 27–​43. 77 Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 72–​6.

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29 RHYTHMS OF THE RAJ Music in colonial South Asia Bob van der Linden

Introduction South Asia has two ‘art music’ traditions: north Indian ‘Hindustani’ music and south Indian ‘Karnatak’ music. Although there is a great overlap between them, especially in music theory, Hindustani music mainly developed in a different manner because of the much greater interaction between Indic and Persian-​Central Asian music in the north. In addition, the subcontinent has a wide variety of ‘popular music’, ranging from devotional genres, such as Sikh kirtan and Muslim Sufi qawwali, to a bewildering number of regional ‘folk music’ traditions. Over the centuries art music and popular music influenced each other as well. For a long time it was generally assumed that South Asian music survived colonialism largely unscathed.1 Yet recent research has shown that the patronage, performance, practice, and reception of both art music and popular music changed remarkably under colonial rule.2 Accordingly, this chapter underlines that the modern history of music in South Asia cannot be fully understood without seeing it as an overall reflection of the wider socio-​economic and intellectual ‘rhythms of the Raj’, from the impact of British orientalism and modern science to the emergence of (Hindu) nationalism.

European music in South Asia As is common with the history of European overseas expansion, South Asians too primarily became familiar with European music through military music and Christian hymnody. Today’s wedding bands are a reminder of the fact that Indians learned to play European drums and wind instruments in colonial military bands.3 Conversely, for example, Bengali socio-​religious reformers of the Brahmo Samaj from the 1860s onwards sang their songs congregationally in a Christian manner. Furthermore, their singing was accompanied on the European harmonium, an instrument that was adopted from the missionaries and, over time, became the ‘national’ accompanying instrument of India, largely in replacement of the sarangi (a bowed, short-​necked string instrument). Rather than the harmonium, however, in south India the European violin eventually became the main accompanying instrument, because of its ability to mimic the singing voice and being a sign of the modern. That said, the harmonium and

DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-30

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violin were wholly indigenised and, thanks to special playing techniques and innovations to the instruments, came to be played in unique ways.4 Besides continuing to patronise art musicians, South Asian ‘princes’ (Hindu rajas, Muslim nawabs, etc.) generally took up European music as a status symbol. Throughout the subcontinent courts maintained military bands and acquired pianos and organs, although the latter were often regarded only as furniture. Some Indian aristocrats studied and composed European music themselves. In 1803, for instance, the Maratha king of Tanjore, Maharaja Serfoji II, notated a number of marching tunes in the Western manner for the court’s military band.5 Among South Indian rulers, the Wadiyar kings of Mysore were most intensely involved with European music. In 1913, in fact, Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar, a student of Western music himself, established an institution run by an English woman ‘to prepare students to appear for the examination of the Trinity College of Music, London’.6 In addition, the Mysore court had a palace orchestra, which consisted mostly of Indian musicians and was conducted by the German Otto Schmidt, as well as an ‘Indian orchestra’ that performed Karnatak repertoire on both European and Indian instruments. Under Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar, Karnatak songs were not only recorded but also written down in European staff notation, both for preservation and ‘to render them suitable for harmonization’.7 The Maihar Band, established in 1918 by the illustrious musician Allauddin Khan, combined Indian and European instruments, and later stimulated Khan’s disciples Timir Baran and Ravi Shankar to work along similar lines. During the 1930s Baran was the musical leader of the orchestra that accompanied the dances of Uday Shankar during his tour in the West, and included Allauddin Khan and Uday’s younger brother Ravi as well.8 On his return to India he created a Western-​style orchestra, began to compose film music, and generally came to be known as the father of the Indian symphony orchestra.9 After independence Ravi Shankar stepped into footsteps of Allauddin Khan and Timir Baran, initially by leading an orchestra at All India Radio (AIR). The compositions of the Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore remain another intriguing illustration of the influence of European music in South Asia. During

Figure 29.1  ‘Maihar Band’, The Report of the 4th All-​India Music Conference Lucknow, vol. 1 (Lucknow: Taluqdar Press, 1925), n.p.

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his late nineteenth-​century visits to Europe he was much impressed by local classical and folk songs, of which he learned to sing some himself. Partially under their inspiration, he composed an oeuvre of over 2,000 ‘modernist’ songs, including the national anthems of India (Jana Gana Mana) and Bangladesh (Amar Sonar Bangla).10 Notwithstanding these examples, the overall impact of European music in the subcontinent was marginal. Until today, therefore, South Asian music probably remains the non-​ Western world’s prime last stand in the face of the global hegemony of European music in its basic form –​i.e. the use of equal temperament tuning and (functional) harmony, as well as instruments and ensemble playing.11 Indeed, the British tried to dominate most aspects of South Asian life and, like the Mughals, to establish their superiority. Yet, unlike their predecessors, their unfamiliarity with or sympathy for Indian music dissuaded them from direct interference in musical developments. Even so, their successive victories over the Indian princes and the subsequent conversion of the latter’s territories into princely states under the Raj, or Crown rule from 1858, substantially altered the patronage of South Asian musical life. Furthermore, reflecting a growing awareness of European music and its history, as well as modern scientific and liberal ideas in general, elitist Indians began to think differently about their own music traditions and initiated reforms to modernise Indian music. As in so many other fields of modern knowledge about South Asia, the stimulus of European orientalist studies was critical to this process.

Modernisation of South Asian art music In precolonial South Asia, musicians mostly lived in isolation from each other at the courts of local rulers and, particularly in south India, at temples. Even so, following the rise of British power, court/​temple patronage towards what were largely hereditary families of musicians diminished significantly. In the north, the annexation of the state of Awadh by the East India Company and the suppression of the Indian Revolt of 1857 were especially crucial for this transformation. When the British subsequently sent the nawab of Lucknow and the Mughal emperor from Delhi into exile, to Calcutta and Burma, respectively, many musicians from these north Indian court cities moved elsewhere, and mainly to Bombay and Calcutta.12 The Indian Revolt had little impact in the south, yet after the British took over the power at local courts something similar took place there as well, with numerous former court musicians, mostly from Tanjore, heading for Madras. In general, musicians throughout the subcontinent broadened their intellectual horizons, because it became increasingly easy to travel around thanks to the introduction of better roads and, above all, the railways. Some of them even went overseas by steamship. Likewise, the introduction of the telegraph and telephone made the planning of public concerts simpler. By the turn of the twentieth century such concerts, with tickets to be paid for, increasingly became the norm in the main cities. On the other hand, modern print culture furthered the proliferation of knowledge about both Indian and European music. In his Universal History of Music (1896), the Bengali music reformer and South Asia’s first modern musicologist, Sourindro Mohan Tagore, discussed music worldwide from a comparative perspective and with some measure of equality in the treatment of the different continents, not only examining each tradition against its own historical background but also paying attention to cultural interactions. In writing this book, Tagore was influenced by Carl Engel’s The Literature of National Music (1879) and, in terms of organisation, by Hubert Parry’s The Evolution of the Art of Music (1893).13 As elitist South Asians with an interest in music became aware of wider musical worlds, they began to ask new questions about Indian music. In what ways did it differ from Western music? 375

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How to change Indian music in order to make it modern and, indeed, scientific? Accordingly, music reformers, who were mostly Hindu Brahmans, ‘classicised’ the Hindustani and Karnatak music traditions on a par with Western classical music, among other things, by institutionalising music schools, music conferences, canonical repertoire, concert arrangements, music theory, and manuals for different instruments.14 Earlier, in fact, many elitist Indians had associated musicians with low-​caste groups and looked down upon them, especially female singers (more about this later). Music reformers, therefore, not only turned Indian music into a symbol of national pride but also made it ‘respectable’ for the emergent, often English-​ educated, Hindu middle class, and especially so for its women, while a commercial market for music education and performance was created at the same time. In his classic Indian Music and the West (1997), Gerry Farrell argued that the roots of Indian national music reforms predominantly lay in the British colonial imagination: When India was discovered as a cultural entity by Orientalists in the late eighteenth century, the study of music, like language, had to suit their project of discovering and reconstructing a pristine Hindu past, free from Muslim influences. Hence the ‘dead’ music of Sanskrit texts was more revered than the living Indo-​Muslim tradition.15 In particular, the work of William Jones was crucial to the Indian reception of the idea of ‘Hindu music’ and its degradation under Muslim rule. In On the Musical Modes of the Hindus (1792), he not only portrayed the myth of Indian music being on the verge of extinction but, like other orientalists glorifying Sanskrit sources, directly combined it also with the loss of the ‘Hindu music’ of a supposedly ‘golden age’. Although he had a great affection for Persian literature, Jones solely trusted the Sanskrit music treatises for the study of Indian music, and further argued that Muslim writers had mystified the tradition through their poor translations of these texts.16 British orientalists approached south Indian music differently. In The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891), Charles Day underlined that, in contrast to the north, the peninsula had been ostensibly less affected by the Islamic interlude and the Karnatak tradition therefore was more authentic.17 On the contrary, of course, south Indian music to some extent had also emerged as a result of the complex interaction between Hindu and Islamic culture, as attested, for example, by the shared cultural taste of Vijayanagar and Bijapur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the influence of ‘Sufi musical lineages fostering a mystical devotion which transcended sectarian boundaries’.18 Nonetheless, following Charles Day, south Indian music reformers assertively argued that Karnatak music embodied the more original ‘Hindu music’. Yet, rather than for the different intellectual positioning of south Indian music in history by coloniser and colonised alike, the modernisation of the Karnatak and Hindustani music traditions above all needs to be discussed separately because of the dominant position of the Muslim hereditary musicians, commonly known as ustads, in the north.

The north: Hindu national music reform and the Muslim ustad Before the colonial era Hindustani music had predominantly developed through the musical innovations that took place at the Mughal court, and, for that reason, besides Muslim patronage in general, the north Indian music scene from the seventeenth century until the early twentieth was professionally dominated by Muslim hereditary musicians. Since the late nineteenth century, however, this supremacy by a social minority group was gradually dismantled, willed or accidental, through a process of ‘Hinduisation’. To begin with, in the wake of the writings 376

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of William Jones and other British orientalists, elitist Hindu national music reformers located the origins of Indian music in a pre-​Muslim golden age of ‘Hindu music’. Furthermore, they unjustly argued that the state of Hindustani music had declined because it had fallen into the hands of the ‘illiterate’ Muslim ustads, who ‘secretly’ kept their knowledge among themselves, away from Hindus. Quite the reverse, the whole nineteenth century was an important and creative period of transition for north Indian art music. Thus, for example, new instruments became popular, such as the sitar, sarod (a fretless, plucked lute), and tablā (a pair of tuneable hand-​played drums), and relatively new genres, such as khayal and a modernised thumri, replacing the instruments and styles associated with the Mughal court.19 On the whole, Hindu national music reformers stigmatised the ustads’ knowledge and teaching of music for not being scientific.20 In doing so, their ideas to a great extent overlapped with the civilizing mission of modern Indian socio-​religious reformers, and, indeed, the British civilizing mission at large.21 Into the twentieth century, then, the Hindu community became the mainstay of Hindustani music in terms of students, professional musicians, and audiences. The case of India’s most important modern music reformer, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, best exemplifies the Indian music reformers’ adherence to modern scientific knowledge: the Enlightenment search for the origins of music, standardisation of music theory and practice, music notation, music education, and so on. On the whole, Bhatkhande sought to revive and scientifically redefine Hindustani music as a national music that would be accessible for a wider Indian public. To the point, he claimed that north Indian art music had a history of only ‘a couple of centuries’, while understanding ‘the futility of trying to trace India’s music back to the Vedas or even more recent treatises such as the Natyashastra or the Sangitratnakar’.22 Bhatkhande based his argument on extensive fieldwork, during which he collected an enormous amount of orally transmitted musical repertoire from contemporary, and mostly Muslim, musicians from different lineages. This material resulted in the six-​volume Kramik Pustak Malika (1919–​37), a collection of compositions in Indian sargam notation. Between 1916 and 1926 Bhatkhande convened five all-​India music conferences. At these meetings, scholars (mostly Hindu) and musicians (mostly Muslim) came together from all over India with the goal of

Figure 29.2  ‘V.N. Bhatkhande’, The Report of the 4th All-​India Music Conference Lucknow, vol. 1 (Lucknow: Taluqdar Press, 1925), n.p.

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regulating the standards and boundaries of a national music. In particular, a national system of notation and a uniform description of ragas (tonal frameworks for composition and improvisation) were thought necessary. During the 1920s and 1930s Bhatkhande’s inspiration was a major factor in the founding of music schools in Baroda, Gwalior, Bombay, Nagpur, and –​above all –​Lucknow.23 Altogether, Bhatkhande propagated his own research findings, system of raga classification, and music notation system over what he saw as the unscientific knowledge of the hereditary musicians. Yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, both Indian and British, he did not believe that Muslim rulers had been bad music patrons or that the ustads had ruined Indian music. On the contrary, he often praised the musicality of the latter, including that of one of his main informers, the legendary Wazir Khan, and he also sent his foremost disciple, S.N. Ratanjankar, to the celebrated singer Faiyaz Khan for further studies. At the all-​India music conferences, moreover, Bhatkhande allowed Muslim scholars and musicians to elaborate their alternative views on Indian music history. Thus, by challenging the continuity of Indian music since Vedic times and admiring the creativity of Muslim musicians, he softened what by his time had become a clearly defined narrative of Muslim dominance and the decline of ‘Hindu music’. In his search for a textual foundation for Indian music history, however, he too was very critical about the ustads, whom he generally described as ignorant of texts and history, as well as bad pedagogues. Indeed, like William Jones before him, Bhatkhande ultimately believed only in the Sanskrit music treatises and Hindu origins of Indian national music.24 The musician and music reformer Vishnu Digambar Paluskar straightforwardly argued that ‘Hindu music’ had degraded in the hands of the ustads. Accordingly, he made its revival the goal of his life, and particularly promulgated Hindu devotional music (bhakti) as India’s national music.25 In Paluskar’s hands, and especially in those of his disciples, music education and public music performances became channels for Hindu proselytising. In 1901 he founded the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya music school in Lahore, with the support of two Hindu nationalist organisations, the Arya Samaj and the Sanatan Dharm Sabha. Typically, although Lahore had a large Muslim population and was a prime centre for Hindustani music, the school had no Muslim teachers and only a few Muslim students. Paluskar also developed a notation system and wrote books on music theory and collections with compositions in different ragas. Conversely, he promoted the inclusion of devotional songs (bhajans) in the concert repertoire as well as the singing of nationalist songs, especially Vande Mataram (Glory to the Mother[land]), originally from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s celebrated nationalist novel Ānandamaṭh (1882). From the beginning, in fact, the use of Vande Mataram as national song was controversial, not only because it addressed ‘Mother India’ as a Hindu goddess but also, especially, because it was adopted as a slogan by Hindu chauvinists, such as during anti-​Muslim riots.26 After Paluskar’s death, in 1931, his disciples under the leadership of Vinayakrao Patwardhan established the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal, to promote the foundation of affiliated schools with a uniform music curricula, examinations, and degrees governing them all. All in all, the agenda of Hindu national music reforms clashed with the ustads’ study and teaching methods. The notated compositions and overall urge towards musical standardisation resisted the diversity of the oral versions in circulation. Although many Hindu musicians continued to study, albeit often only temporarily, with Muslim musicians, and, in this way, musical knowledge from different lineages more or less was maintained, one could simultaneously argue that it was partially –​and largely unintendedly–​‘Hinduised’, in the sense of being taken away from the ustads and appropriated into a reformist musical idiom and/​or in a modern institutional setting. Probably this process is best illustrated by the marginalisation of the ustads in modern music institutions such as Bhatkhande’s Marris College (since 1926) in Lucknow, 378

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Paluskar’s schools, and, after Indian independence, All India Radio (under the directorship of B.V. Keskar) and Benares Hindu University’s College of Music and Arts (since 1950).27 To different degrees, modern north Indian music colleges and schools increasingly aired a ‘Hindu cultural sphere’, whereas almost all students and, eventually, teachers were Hindus and, for instance, Hindu festivals were celebrated prominently. In chorus, Hindu nationalists adopted romantic beliefs of superiority about the antiquity, complexity, and, indeed, spirituality of ‘Hindu music’. A sideshow of this process, facilitated by modern print culture, was the growing visual dominance in society of musical images of Hindu gods, such as Krishna playing the flute, Saraswati with the vina (a plucked string instrument), and, especially in south India, Shiva as the ‘cosmic dancer’ Nataraj. Ultimately, the ‘Hinduisation’ of Hindustani music resulted in the retreat of an important domain of shared music and affective experience. Regardless, in the context of processes of modernisation and state formation, Hindustani music making was professionalised in the twentieth century –​this especially so because Bhatkhande and Paluskar, and in particular their disciples, created a network that led to a remarkable historical continuity in music institutions, a canon of compositions, teaching methods, and so on. Truly, there is no doubt that, through his writings, system of raga classification, and music notation system, which generally replaced all other existing systems, Bhatkhande had a definite influence on modern Hindustani music teaching and practice. At the same time, musical professionalisation was enhanced by recordings, radio performances, the modern concert format, music tours to the West, and so on.

The south: Brahmans and national music reform Following British Crown rule and the arrival of court musicians from elsewhere in south India, upper-​caste Hindus, largely Brahmans, in Madras established music organisations, concert halls, and music academies for the ‘revival’ of Karnatak music. In this, they were supported by the city’s emerging middle class, who, by their participation in neighbourhood organisations (sabhas), raised money through donations and ticket sales to pay for concerts. Mainly through the Madras Music Academy (1928) the standards for the teaching and performance of south Indian ‘classical’ music were defined and disseminated, through its journal and teacher training college, for example, as well as by radio broadcasts.28 By and large, a musical canon was created on the following basis. First, the heavily texted devotional compositions (kritis) –​written almost exclusively in Sanskrit and Telugu, rather than in Tamil –​by the Brahman composers Tyagaraja, Syama Sastri, and Muttusvami Dikshitar. Ever since, the music of this so-​called ‘trinity’, and especially that of Tyagaraja, has occupied the centre of most concerts and provided the model for composers. Second, several improvisational genres of court music (pallavi) ‘spun in sequence around a brief composed core theme –​usually just one line of text’.29 Third, musical elements of the two branches of non-​Brahmanical music ensembles, cinna melam and periya melam, respectively used for ‘temple and court dance’ and ‘temple ritual music’. Subsequently, the singer Ariyakudi Ramanujam Ayyangar introduced a standard concert format (katcheri), in which the main ‘classical’ composition was followed by ‘lighter’ pieces, and melody, particularly the voice, often closely followed by the violin, was emphasised over rhythm and percussion accompaniment. In comparison to what happened to modern Hindustani music, no doubt, national music reforms in south India led to a stricter standardisation of performance practice and repertoire. Modern south Indian music reformers too became preoccupied with music theory and music notation. In Oriental Music in European Notation (1893), A.M. Chinnaswami Mudaliar, who was trained in Western music and generally wanted to make ‘Hindu’ Karnatak music known to the rest of the world, notated a collection of south and north Indian melodies in staff notation and 379

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provided hints for harmonisation. Together with Subbarama Dikshitar, the adopted grandson of Muttusvami Dikshitar (of ‘trinity’ fame), moreover, he compiled Sangitasamprayadapradarsini (1904). Besides discussions of ragas, performance routines, and biographies of musicians and authors of musicological treatises, this encyclopedia of Karnatak music included numerous songs in staff notation with additional symbols to represent Karnatak music’s typical trills, shakes, slurs, and glissandi. In 1904 Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande actually met Subbarama Dikshitar, and, afterwards, the north Indian music reformer not only took Sangitasamprayadapradarsini as an example for his own work but also based his own system of raga classification on the ingenious symmetrical south Indian melakarta scheme of 72 ragas, which was first proposed by the theorist Venkatamakhi around 1620 at the Tanjore court. From the 1930s onwards P. Sambamoorthy, who had studied European music in Munich and was appointed professor of music at Madras University in 1937, did much for the further standardisation and spread of ‘classical’ Karnatak music through his initiatives in music education and numerous musicological writings. Although communal conflict between Hindus and Muslims was not an issue in the south Indian music scene, the ‘classicisation’ of Karnatak music by elitist Brahmans was nevertheless accompanied by the marginalisation of certain musical communities. Caste was the main concern. As already mentioned, the newly created canon excluded songs in Tamil, the mother tongue of the non-​Brahman majority. In response, the Tamil Isai Iyakkam (Tamil Music Movement) lobbied for the inclusion of Tamil repertoire. To a certain extent the debate took on communal overtones, as the movement’s aim overlapped with that of the Self-​Respect movement led by the non-​Brahman political leader ‘Periyar’ E.V. Ramasamy, ‘father of the Dravidian movement’.30 Annamalai Chettiar, a wealthy banker from the non-​Brahman Chettiar community, provided the financial support to the Tamil Music Movement. To promote the study and performance of Tamil music, he successively founded Minakshi College, which a few years later became Annamalai University, in Cidambaram (1929) and the Tamil Isai Sangam (Tamil Music Academy) in Madras (1943). As a result, Tamil songs were eventually included in ‘classical’ Karnatak music concerts.31 Most unfortunate, however, was the fate of the devadasis, the female musicians and dancers attached in hereditary service to both temples (mostly) and courts, about whom more will be said in the next section. Conversely, T.N. Rajarattinam Pilla, the great player of the nagasvaram (a long double-​reed aerophone), has to be mentioned because his efforts generally improved the status of the hereditary male temple musicians. For indeed, although they did not suffer the same degree of social contempt as the devadasis and their male accompanists, Brahman reformers and musicians generally scorned periya melam musicians.32

Moral cultivation of taste: ‘High’ art music and ‘low’ popular music All in all, Indian national music reforms had an elitist bias and favoured a moral cultivation of taste. High-​caste Hindus looked down upon the culture and music making of, in random order, Muslim, lower-​caste, and, especially perhaps, female hereditary musicians. Music was to be studied scientifically and performed in a restrained spiritual rather than a bawdy or sensual manner. Typical to the times, Rabindranath Tagore complained that Indian singers neglected their instrument and stage presentation. In contrast, he was very impressed by the voice quality of Western singers and the fact that they, unlike their Indian counterparts, tuned up before they went onto the stage.33 Like A.M. Chinnaswami Mudaliar and numerous other music reformers, he also loathed ‘the convulsions, grimaces and ungraceful gesticulations’ of Indian singers during their performances.34 In this context, the role of recordings and AIR should be mentioned as well, because both demanded disciplined and concise performances. Recordings often also set an authoritative standard. In fact, from its foundation in 1938, AIR aimed to 380

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Figure 29.3 ‘The nautch party at Woolagiri Mines, c.1895’, Wikimedia Commons, https://​ commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:The_​Nautch_​Party_​at_​Woolagiri_​Mines._​1895.jpg, accessed: 26 January 2021.

cultivate what was considered ‘good taste’ among Indian audiences. After numerous complaints by Indian music reformers and Western students of Indian music about the devastating influence of the harmonium on Indian music, for instance, AIR forbade the use of the instrument for broadcasting, only for it to be back in unrestricted use by 1980. In this way, musicians and audiences were educated about what was good and bad in music and, over time, acquired different aesthetics, standards, and desires in music. Undeniably, print culture was decisive to this process, as concerts and music publications were reviewed and subsequently discussed in the public sphere.35 South Asia’s hereditary female musicians and dancers probably were most affected by Indian national music reforms. Although north Indian Muslim courtesans (tawaifs and baijis) and south Indian devadasis produced some of the most talented and famous musicians, British officials and missionaries, as well as Indian (music) reformers, increasingly stigmatised them as ‘dancing (nautch) girls’ and, indeed, ‘prostitutes’.36 From the late nineteenth century, then, as part of a larger movement to improve the status of women, the anti-​nautch campaign was in effect, leading to their almost total disappearance by the middle of the twentieth century. Actually, one of the first policies of AIR after Indian independence was to ban singers and musicians associated with courtesan culture –​anyone ‘whose private life was a public scandal’.37 In replacement, there emerged a whole new generation of ‘respectable’ female singers from a Hindu middle-​class, and generally upper-​caste, background. In the north, these female singers specifically moved away from performing at private gatherings (mehfils), as was common for the tawaifs and baijis, to public concerts. So, thanks to national music reforms and an overall ‘civilising’ attitude among elitist Hindus, Muslim courtesans –​who obviously were unacceptable as role models for middle-​class Hindu women –​and, indeed, their male, mainly Muslim, 381

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Figure 29.4  ‘Kundan Lal Saigal, publicity photo, signed 1939’, Wikimedia Commons, https://​ commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:KL_​Saigal_​publicity_​photo.jpg, accessed: 26 January 2021.

accompanists on the sarangi were marginalised during the early twentieth century.38 Something similar happened to the devadasis in south India, largely through the efforts of the theosophist Rukmini Devi Arundale, who sanitised the temple dances of devadasis into the ‘respectable’ dance of Bharatanatyam, mainly at Kalakshetra, the academy that she established in 1936 in Madras.39 In addition, the singer M.S. Subbulakshmi, whose mother was a devadasi, was a crucial figure to this period of change, because she paved the way for middle-​class south Indian singers to perform in modern concert halls.40 At first, however, some courtesans and devadasis made use of the opportunities offered by both the recording and film industries. They were among the first recorded artists (onwards from Gauhar Jan in Calcutta, 1902), both because they were famous and because male art musicians were very hesitant to do so. Between 1910 and 1930 the best-​selling recordings in south India were those of devadasi singers such as Bangalore Nagarathnammal and M. S. Subbulakshmi. Likewise, courtesans and devadasis found employment and fame in the film industry, before they were replaced by female singers from middle-​class background. Subbulakshmi, for instance, made her film debut in 1938.41 Soon afterwards, nonetheless, the singing of film songs changed through the use of the microphone and playback singers (acting and singing were one earlier). In particular, Kundan Lal Saigal, who introduced the ‘crooner’ style, and Subbulakshmi –​and later, of course, India’s most famous playback singer, Lata Mangeshkar –​became the role models for successive male and female singers respectively. From the late 1930s onwards, moreover, the accompanying music became increasingly Westernised through the use of European-​style orchestras utilising musical influences and instruments from all around the world. Expectedly, contemporary Indian art musicians, national music reformers, and elites in general disliked film music because it was Westernised and did not represent authentic and spiritual India.42 Despite a growing distinction between ‘high’ art music and ‘low’ popular music in society, processes of ‘classicisation’ also took place in devotional music genres such as Bengali and Sikh kirtan. Crucial to the case of Bengali Vaishnavite kirtan was the work of Professor Khagendranath Mitra of the University of Calcutta, who argued that saving the genre from extinction, and 382

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especially from the hands of courtesans, ‘should be a national commitment of all Bengalis’.43 Together with his kirtan guru Nabadwip Brajabashi, he subsequently brought the genre to the attention of the Bengali elite, whereby they not only standardised and shortened songs but also connected kirtan with a base of Sanskrit aesthetic theory to make it ‘respectable’. The instance of Sikh kirtan is particularly interesting because it concerns the hymns from the Sikh holy scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, as composed by several of the Sikh gurus, as well as Hindu and Muslim saints (Sheikh Farid, Kabir, Ravidas, etc.). In the wake of the modern Singh Sabha reforms, the performance of these hymns became increasingly standardised and sanitised in line with the idea of spiritual music. In the process, not only did the harmonium replace string instruments for the accompaniment of singers, but Muslim musicians (rababis), who had performed kirtan since the time of Guru Nanak, Sikhism’s founding guru, also were discarded.44

Résumé Characteristically for the times, Indian national music reformers simultaneously looked backwards and forwards, in complicated ways. In opposition to Western music, for example, they continually emphasised the ancientness of Indian music as a marker of its importance and ‘difference’. Yet, ambiguously, the early nineteenth century of the ‘trinity’ composers came to be seen as the ‘golden age’ of south Indian music, supposedly the more original ‘Hindu music’. Other markers of ‘difference’ concerned the spirituality, improvisational nature, and oral tradition of Indian music. All the same, the ‘classicisation’ of the Hindustani and Karnatak music traditions, among other things, led to an overall standardisation in performance practice (the use of the microphone, for example, led to lower and softer singing) and the sanitisation of stage performances (i.e. the disciplining melodic and rhythmic gestures of singers, censorship of erotic lyrics and dances, etc.) in order to make the music more ‘respectable’, especially for Hindu middle-​class women. Moreover, it resulted in the marginalisation of diverse musical practices of hereditary musicians, above all those of the Muslim ustads in the north. The fate of the north Indian Muslim tawaifs and baijis and south Indian devadasis specifically highlights the importance of moral and patriarchal thinking in this context. Although Hindu (Brahman) nationalism was obviously crucial to this process, it was also, to a great extent, the result of an urge among Hindu national music reformers to be scientifically modern. In any case, as part of a growing demarcation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ music, the Hindustani and Karnatak traditions more or less were aesthetically redefined as spiritual music that belonged to an inner realm, away and apart from history, politics, and money. Similar to Western classical music, it thus gained authority, educated the newly emerged ‘Hindu’ audiences, and, indeed, became increasingly elitist –​the latter, in fact, in contrast to devotional and folk music traditions, and above all worldly film music, which nonetheless over time would become India’s most popular music, filling in the cultural niche that ‘pop’ or ‘rock’ music came to occupy in the rest of the world.

Notes 1 Two recent examples are Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (New York: OUP, 2005), 3, 14, 252; and Daniel Neuman, ‘A tale of two sensibilities: Hindustani music and its histories’, in: Jonathan McCollum and David G. Hebert (eds.), Theory and Method in Historical Ethnomusicology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), pp. 279–​308, 297. See also, for an overview of the idea of continuity in ‘Hindu’ music, Justin Scarimbolo, ‘Brahmans beyond nationalism, Muslims beyond dominance: A hidden history of north Indian classical music’s Hinduization’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014), ch. 3.

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Bob van der Linden 2 See, for example, Max Katz, Lineages of Loss: Counternarratives of North Indian Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 2017); Bob van der Linden, Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism and Cross-​Cultural Communication (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); Lakshmi Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India (New Delhi: OUP, 2006); and Amanda J. Weidman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 3 Gregory D. Booth, Brass Baja: Stories from the World of Indian Wedding Bands (New Delhi: OUP, 2005). 4 On the indigenisation of the harmonium and violin, respectively, see Bob van der Linden, Arnold Bake: A Life with South Asian Music (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 78; and Weidman, Singing the Classical, esp. ch. 1. 5 Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court, 4. 6 Weidman, Singing the Classical, 65–​6. 7 Ibid., 67. 8 On Uday Shankar, see Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (New York: OUP, 1997), 163–​7. 9 On Timir Baran, see Linden, Arnold Bake, 97. 10 Ibid., ch. 3. 11 Bob van der Linden, ‘Non-​ Western national music and empire in global history: Interactions, uniformities, and comparisons’, Journal of Global History, 10 (3), 2015, pp. 431–​56; idem, ‘Global connections: dealing with European music abroad’, in: Klaus Nathaus and Martin Rempe (eds.), Musicking in Twentieth-​Century Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 393–​416. 12 Katz, Lineages of Loss; Adrian McNeil, ‘Hereditary musicians, Hindustani music and the “public sphere” in late nineteenth century Calcutta’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 41 (2), 2018, pp. 297–​ 314; Aneesh Pradhan, Hindustani Music in Colonial Bombay (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2014). 13 Martin Clayton, ‘Musical Renaissance and its margins in England and India, 1874–​1914’, in: idem and Bennett Zon (eds.), Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–​1940s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 71–​93, 85. 14 On the ‘classicisation’ of the Hindustani and Karnatak music traditions, see Bakhle, Two Men and Music; Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court; and Weidman, Singing the Classical. 15 Farrell, Indian Music, 1–​2. 16 William Jones, ‘On the musical modes of the Hindus (1792)’, in: Sourindro Mohun Tagore (ed.), Hindu Music from Various Authors (Calcutta: I.C. Bose, 1882), pp. 125–​60. 17 C.R. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (London: Novello, 1891), 5, 13. 18 Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court, 13. 19 Joep Bor, Françoise Delvoye, Jane Harvey, and Emmie te Nijenhuis (eds.), Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries (New Delhi: Manohar, 2010). 20 Katz, Lineages of Loss; McNeil, ‘Hereditary musicians’. 21 Bob van der Linden, Moral Languages from Colonial Punjab: The Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj and Ahmadiyahs (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008). 22 Neuman, ‘A tale of two sensibilities’, 288. 23 On Bhatkhande, see Bakhle, Two Men and Music; Harold Powers, ‘Reinterpretations of tradition in Hindustani music: Omkarnath Thakur contra Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande’, in: Jonathan Katz (ed.), The Traditional Indian Theory and Practice of Music and Dance (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 9–​51; and David Trasoff, ‘The all-​India music conferences of 1916–​1925: Cultural transformation and colonial ideology’, in: Bor et al., Hindustani Music, pp. 331–​56. 24 Scarimbolo, ‘Brahmans beyond nationalism’, 362. 25 On Paluskar, see Bakhle, Two Men and Music; and James Kippen, Gurudev’s Drumming Legacy: Music, Theory and Nationalism in the Mrdang aur Tabla Vadanpaddhati of Gurudev Patwardhan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 26 Peter Manuel, ‘Music, the media, and communal relations in north India, past and present’, in: David Ludden (ed.), Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996), pp. 119–​39. 27 Katz, Lineages of Loss; David Lelyveld, ‘Upon the subdominant: Administering music on All India Radio’, in: Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in Contemporary India (New Delhi: OUP, 1996), pp. 49–​65. 28 On Karnatak national music reforms, see Subramaniam, From the Tanjore Court; and Weidman, Singing the Classical.

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30 CONSUMER PRACTICES AND ‘CONSUMERISM’ IN LATE COLONIAL INDIA Douglas E. Haynes

Introduction In contrast to scholars working on Europe and America, historians of colonial South Asia have paid scant attention to consumer practices until recently. Consumption has not been a major concern for economic historians, who were long preoccupied with the agrarian economy, the causes of Indian poverty, and the roots of social inequality. Historians of capitalism emphasised the importation of manufactured products, the export of raw materials, and the development of large-​scale industrial production, but left little room for treating the ways South Asians became consumers of the products being imported or manufactured. Scholars working on the middle class –​a category elsewhere in the world often defined by its consumer practices –​focused their attention on its occupational character, its involvement in the public sphere, the development of nationalism, social reform movements, and new attitudes about gender –​but not on its material behaviours. An implicit assumption through much of this literature was that India was too poor a society throughout the colonial period for consumption to be of significance. The one major exception to this trend was literature on the Swadeshi (Self-​Reliance) movement. During the late nineteenth century Indian nationalists became concerned that the country was experiencing ‘deindustrialisation’ and impoverishment as a result of the influx of mass-​produced goods from Europe. During the movement against the partition of Bengal, between 1905 and 1908, nationalist leaders advocated boycotting imported items and using Indian goods alone. The call of Swadeshi remained a central aspect of nationalist activity after Gandhi rose to leadership in 1919; the Mahatma urged his followers both to weave and purchase khadi cloth made of homespun yarn in an effort to revive the economy and spur rural employment. But scholarly attention to Swadeshi as a political development was not matched by an interest in the material behaviours associated with the movement.1 In the last dozen years historians have begun to redress the neglect of consumption. Their work now shows that consumer practices have shaped the character of the economy, have contributed to the construction of status and social identity, and have informed political action. Taken as a whole, this literature has highlighted profound change in South Asian consumer patterns; indeed, a large proportion of the things that Indians bought and used, including major components of their diet, were novel. But, although a certain degree of globalisation in material 386

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practices took place,2 South Asian consumption did not simply converge into some uniform world pattern but developed along its own lines.

The availability of new consumer goods Two broad sets of factors were responsible for transformations of Indian material life during the late colonial period. First, South Asians had access to new kinds of goods. Most obviously, the Industrial Revolution was responsible for making available novel types of consumer items in India. The most prominent were textiles manufactured in Europe, most famously in the mills of Lancashire. Around 1900 nearly 60 per cent of the cloth purchased by Indians came from England.3 Indians came to wear imported cloth not just because it was cheaper but, often, because it possessed qualities, ranging from colour and weave to an association with colonial power, that made it appealing.4 But Indians rarely wore European clothing in unaltered form; often they incorporated these clothes into forms of sartorial presentation that reflected new forms of hybrid identities.5 A host of other manufactured items –​including British glass, Swedish matches, American cigarettes, European soaps, and kerosene for cooking food –​also made their way into South Asian life, even for quite ordinary people. And ‘everyday technologies’, such as sewing machines and bicycles, started to penetrate Indian material practices.6 In the twentieth century foreign corporations such as Unilever, the British American Tobacco Company, Wander AG (makers of Ovaltine), Horlicks, Nestlé, Phillips, and Brooke Bond began to market consumer items in India by their brand name in the press and in Indian bazaars, sometimes hiring professional advertising specialists to run campaigns. Products advertised included soap, toothpaste, cocoa-​like drinks, cigarettes, light bulbs, cameras, electric appliances, new forms of cooking mediums, and tea. In some cases, the importers sought to usurp the place of unbranded products already available in Indian bazaars; for instance, mass-​produced cigarettes were often portrayed as substitutes for hand-​rolled bidis. In other cases, they sought to induce the adoption of globalised bodily habits, representing practices such as bathing with soap, brushing teeth with a toothbrush on a daily basis, or using electric lighting at home as crucial to the reproduction of modern families.7 Some of these products found a market only in urban centres, though makers of soap, cigarettes, and –​eventually –​tea (the latter especially during the 1940s) found innovative ways to promote them in rural areas, such as publicity trucks that carried campaigns into the villages and small towns. In many cases manufacturers operated by a new kind of logic: that, if millions of Indians could be induced to make tiny purchases of consumer items on a regular basis, then large profits could be earned. On the other hand, the marketers of more expensive items, such as motor cars, refrigerators, telephones, and air-​conditioners, sought to sell small quantities of goods to wealthy customers at high profit margins. But the reasoning behind the marketing of even such items could be complex. Stefan Tetzlaff has shown that motor vehicles were not purchased only by rich Europeans, Indian aristocrats, and wealthier professionals but by cab drivers and by people of modest circumstances he terms ‘owner-​drivers’, who ran transport services between towns for paying passengers.8 By this period, as well, South Asian industrialists too were beginning to produce new consumer goods. Indian capitalists often experienced difficulty breaking into technology-​intensive fields. Businessmen with some capital found it easier to enter consumer industries, however. Indian textile manufacturers initially developed some of their largest markets by selling yarn in East Asia after the 1860s, but turned decisively towards supplying the indigenous market by the end of the nineteenth century. During the First World War, when European industry shifted to meeting wartime needs, Indian mills expanded their production, providing new cloth varieties to markets throughout the subcontinent. The advent of Swadeshi sentiment further spurred 387

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Figure 30.1  Ad for ‘Godrej Vegetable Soap: Chavi Brand’, Bombay Chronicle, 27 December 1937, p. 5.

the production of consumer items, as many Indians consciously rejected foreign clothing for everyday wear. By the 1930s India’s mill industry was meeting well over half the country’s clothing requirements.9 Parallel developments happened in other fields. The Godrej family of Bombay started off by making locks and safes in the 1890s. By the 1920s it had entered soap production on a mass basis, promoting sales of its products through newspaper advertisements that stressed their Swadeshi character and their manufacture from vegetable oils rather than animal fats (see Figure 30.1).10 388

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Figure 30.2  ‘He thought his shirt was white …’, ad for Sunlight Soap, made by Lever Brothers (India) Ltd, Bombay Chronicle, 3 May 1939, p. 11 (note the comment ‘Made in India from pure vegetable oils only’).

Other significant Indian enterprises involved in making consumer items included the Tata Oil Mills Company in Bombay, Alembic in Baroda, and Bengal Chemical in Calcutta. The introduction of protective tariffs in some industries during the 1920s made it easier for Indian consumer enterprises to flourish.11 Some multinational companies, such as Unilever, responded by establishing factories on the subcontinent and by customising their products to Indian needs (see Figure 30.2). Somewhat less noticeably, thousands of smaller producers began to take up the manufacture of consumer items –​tonics (including sex tonics), hair oil, hosiery, medicines, soap, matches, 389

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Figure 30.3  ‘Feel as young as your son’, ad for Kiran Jawani, made by Amritdhara Pharmacy of Lahore, Bombay Chronicle, 6 February 1943, p. 8.

saris, incense, leather goods, and calendars –​often in workshops located in small towns.12 Despite the large volume of textile imports, handloom cloth producers continued to supply about one-​quarter of the Indian cloth market into the twentieth century. After the First World War they began to diversify their production, for instance by making saris with borders of artificial silk and imitation gold thread for middle-​class consumers and prosperous cultivators; in western and southern India, respectively, artisans and rich peasants began to purchase used powerlooms and to make cloth in their homes or in small workshops.13 The producers of medicinal items proliferated in large numbers, supplying the expanding demand for self-​medication; makers of these products claimed grounding in a great diversity of medical systems, including 390

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western biomedicine, Ayurveda Unani, and ‘Chandshir Chikitsa’, or in secret formulae they themselves had discovered.14 Sometimes small firms advertised their wares in vernacular and English newspapers, creating markets in distant locales that would been difficult to reach before the advent of print capitalism (see Figure 30.3).15 Finally, the agrarian economy also reoriented itself in the twentieth century towards the supply of consumer commodities to Indians. Consumption of rice and wheat expanded widely during the late colonial period; these ‘superior grains’ often only now became part of the staple diets of ordinary Indians. In south India poor peasants and agricultural labourers switched over from coarser grains such as cholam and kambu to milled rice, which was grown in south India or imported from Burma and was often sold in parboiled form.16 Tobacco cultivation made possible bidi and cigarette smoking on a wider scale; groundnuts were grown on an increasing scale for cooking oil.17 Refined sugar –​often imported at the turn of the twentieth century, but increasingly grown by Indian agriculturalists in later decades –​displaced the traditional product gur (jaggery) as the most commonly used sweetener.18 Perhaps most spectacularly, tea and coffee, grown in Indian hill areas but consumed mostly by Europeans before the First World War, became standard aspects of Indian consumption habits. Their ascendancy was achieved only after considerable cultural conflict and major advertising campaigns run by large companies such as Brooke Bond at the very end of the colonial period.19

Consuming groups The other major force transforming material practices was the role of consuming groups that sought access to new kinds of material items. The deepening of the commercial economy in late colonial India stimulated the formation of a variety of actors who were freed from pre-​existing forms of social control from above and who were gaining access to modest cash incomes. In 1931 a report from the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson divided the population of British India into nine categories (Table 30.1).20 This exercise was a very rough effort, and it avoided consideration of in-​kind transactions and debt, but it provides perhaps the best available estimate from the time period. Table 30.1  Consuming categories in India with estimates of their annual income

Native princes Well-​to-​do (mill owners, high government officials, European executive, Indian merchants, etc.) Landed proprietors (in rural areas; also junior Europeans, senior railway officials) Professional class (teachers, lawyers, clerks, better-​class shopkeepers) Middle class (small shopkeepers, clerks, manual workers, etc.) Small farmers, millhands, artisans, coolies, etc. Cultivators Unemployables Dependants Total

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Number of persons

Annual income, rupees (Rs. 1,000 ≈ US$300)

193 100,000

Non-​calculable 12,000 up

1,000,000

10,000 up

2,000,000

3,000–​8,000

4,500,000

1,000–​3,000

20,000,000 90,000,000 35,000,000 200,000,000 352,000,000

100–​1,000 Less than 100

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We can discuss here four particularly important categories of consumers in late colonial India, each itself internally diverse in character: the Europeans; the urban middle class; urban workers and artisans; and the more prosperous peasantry.

Europeans21 According to the J. Walter Thompson report mentioned above, the European population of British India in 1931 was 175,000; 30 per cent lived in the cities of Bombay and Calcutta.22 This number was little more than 0.05 per cent of India’s population but, because expatriates tended to earn much greater salaries than most Indians, they still constituted a significant portion of the consumer market from the perspective of the global companies trying to market brand-​name products in India. According to one account, Europeans were compelled by social expectations to live a lifestyle openly reflecting their affluence: ‘They employ many servants, use Clubs a great deal and entertain to a greater extent than any other group.’ In addition, they ‘dressed well’ and cared a lot about their appearance, even changing clothes for dinner in the evening.23 This characterisation omitted a segment of the European category that lived in poverty, some of whom had no fixed domicile.24 There were also substantial numbers of Eurasians, who may have tried to emulate wealthier Europeans but typically lacked the same buying power, many being unemployed, especially during the Great Depression. Most Europeans were sojourners in India who intended to return to their native countries after a few years or upon retirement. Reports from the late nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth often stress their efforts to reproduce standards of living that followed the upper class in Britain, in effect creating ‘a home away from home’.25 Such efforts were important not only to establish levels of material satisfaction necessary to motivate continued residence in India under social and climatic conditions the Europeans regarded as trying but also to mark the racial boundaries between themselves and the ‘natives’. Guidebooks for Europeans about to settle in the subcontinent advised their readers on what they needed to bring to create the highest level of comfort.26 In the twentieth century large department stores catering mainly to the requirements of Europeans, such as the Army and Navy Store in Bombay and Whitelaw, Laidlaw & Co. in Calcutta, provided canned foods, dresses made in the latest continental styles, Western-​style cosmetics, cigarettes rather than bidis, and European alcohol rather than native intoxicants. They also sometimes conducted mail order business for Europeans scattered in mofussil areas. Frequently Europeans stuck by bodily practices that seemingly made little sense in an Indian climate, such as wearing corsetry in the case of women and evening jackets in the case of men. Advertisements geared to expatriates often highlighted the ways products helped to reproduce a sense of Europe in India. By the interwar period Europeans often expected to enjoy many of the household technologies that they possessed at home, such as refrigerators, electric stoves, vacuum cleaners, and telephones.27 But, despite substantial efforts to reproduce European living standards in the subcontinent, expatriates often made significant accommodations to Indian circumstances in their material lives. Some of them lived in free-​standing ‘bungalows’ that reflected a compromise between European material requirements, such as the expectation of meals served around a dining table with chairs, and Indian architectural forms, such as roofing and airy rooms with wide doorways designed to prevent heat penetration and enhance air circulation.28 In a city such as Bombay with limited housing space, by contrast, many Europeans were compelled to reside in poorly equipped urban flats. Although Anglo-​Indians might import items such as curtains, linen, and dishes from England, they often found it necessary to buy bulkier goods such as wicker chairs and furniture made in India.29 Adaptations were made in dress as well. For example, the sola topi 392

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or pith helmet, regarded as a guard against India’s summer heat, was often worn by Britishers in the subcontinent and other tropical colonies. In practice, moreover, Europeans frequently relied on their servants to purchase their everyday material needs from Indian bazaars. This was no doubt especially the case in terms of food requirements, which cooks often obtained in morning shopping expeditions. The diet of the Europeans was undoubtedly influenced by this sense of dependence. ‘Curry’ –​actually a range of dishes with spiced sauces that would often have been known by more specific names in Indian regional cuisines –​often became the mainstay of expatriate meals. Other hybrid dishes, such as ‘mulligatawny soup’, emerged in the context.30 Similarly, chota hazari or early morning breakfast was to some extent a uniquely expatriate practice that perhaps grew out of the Europeans’ interactions with their servants.

The ‘middle class’ The ‘middle class’ was a somewhat nebulous category. Most of the people who constituted a middle class identified more strongly with their caste and ethnic groupings than with any economic strata. But official records and newspaper reports during the 1920s and 1930s increasingly defined the middle class on the basis of its urban character, its involvement in literate occupations (shopkeepers of middlish incomes were rarely included), and its growing commitment to modernity. Most people in British India who fell in this category were high-​ caste and Hindu, and belonged to households headed by males earning salaried incomes. The middle class was a product of developments associated with colonial rule. Although families oriented towards government service had certainly worked within precolonial states, the colonial government became a ‘document Raj’ dependent on an army of educated Indians to staff its bureaucracy.31 Large European and Indian companies also came to rely on literate employees. The category as used in interwar reports included not only the wealthier lawyers, doctors, and high government officers who dominated accounts of early nationalism and social reform but also the much larger ranks of clerks and other petty officials, who lived under more modest circumstances. Many of these individuals held college degrees but during the interwar period they struggled to obtain or hold on to jobs. Except in eastern India, where joint families prevailed, most middle-​class families lived in nuclear households, typically with only one income earner.32 Although existing literature on the middle class mostly focuses on politics, involvement in social reform, and gender roles,33 the middle class in India was also defined by its material practices. At the same time, any notion of middle-​class ‘consumerism’ would be inappropriate in late colonial India. Much of the middle class lived a spartan existence. A survey of families in Bombay identified as middle class suggested that about 40 per cent lived on less than Rs. 125 a month, only somewhat better than the incomes of the upper end of the city’s working class.34 They devoted much of their spending to simple necessities; on average, the middle-​class families committed only 35 per cent of their expenditures to purposes other than food, fuel, bedding, and house rent. The typical middle-​class family in the city spent just Rs. 3 to 4 a month on electricity, mostly on electric light, which by this time was available in most middle-​ class households in the city.35 By contrast, the prices of some other appliances were prohibitive: refrigerator rentals in Bombay during the 1930s cost Rs. 14 a month and telephone use required Rs. 16 a month. The most widely available gramophones cost Rs. 40, though cheaper versions sold for as little as Rs. 9, still putting them outside the reach of clerks and other lower middle-​class families, especially when the cost of the actual records was included.36 Not all Indian urban centres possessed a public electric supply at the time. Automobiles and even radios were usually out of the question. 393

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Attitudes towards consumption among the middle class were ambivalent.37 On the one hand, individuals and families certainly were subject to pressures that required spending. Among Bombay’s clerks, one observer indicated that the maintenance of family respectability necessitated some critical expenditures: All of these [clerks] belong to a certain status in society and have certain appearances to keep up. They have to provide decent clothing for their wives and children and a decent education to the latter. Not only this, but they have to live in decent quarters and have faithfully to keep up certain social engagements.38 According to accounts in the journal of Saraswat Brahmans in Bombay, the life of contemporary Saraswats was one of a relative ‘extravagance and luxury’ compared to 50 years earlier.39 Middle-​class families all over the country in the interwar period typically outspent their incomes, relying on savings, contributions from relatives, and borrowing to make up the difference.40 At the same time, there were strong social counter-​pressures to restrain consumption. The nationalist movement under Gandhi not only insisted that Indians give up foreign goods but also that they exercise more general self-​control over the use of luxuries and refrain from expenditures on tea, alcohol and idle entertainments.41 Social critics castigated or mocked families who indulged in frivolous purchases and who enjoyed unnecessary extravagances.42 Reformers urged their followers to observe frugality in their everyday activities, sometimes expressing concern that to do otherwise would exacerbate strains on familial well-​being or hinder India’s progress.43 Of course, the presence of such abstemious discourses is itself evidence of the presence of practices they condemned. In general, middle-​ class families prioritised expenditures necessary for their own self-​ reproduction. Investing in education for boys and, to a lesser extent, for girls, the most essential requirement for the next generation’s continued access to employment, was a central concern for parents all over India. R.G. Khare, writing about Bombay in 1917, reported that the middle class represented a type of people who spend remarkably much more on the education of their children than their limited exchequer can really permit. There is a sincere desire to offer the children the best educational advantages possible, with the ultimate hope that not only will the family place higher in the material scale when the young male wage earner of the coming generation has secured a better job, but also that the passage from the lower middle class life to higher middle class society will be definitely established.44 Health-​related expenditures also were a high priority. As Pradip Kumar Bose has stressed, the conception of the middle-​class family in Bengal became increasingly medicalised in the late colonial period, focusing on the physical well-​being of its members.45 New discourses about the family, Bose argues, privileged health and principally the health of children, … [health] became one of the family’s most-​demanding objectives. The obligations that were imposed include those of a physical kind, like care, contact, hygiene, cleanliness, attentive proximity, breast-​ feeding of children, clean clothing, physical exercise and so on, which specified and finalized the corporal relations between parents and their children.46

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If the ubiquity of medical ads in newspapers is any gauge, then expenditures on health products were very significant indeed.47 Products designed to enhance family hygiene were embraced by middle-​class households; soap and toothpaste became nearly universal among the middle class during the early twentieth century, marking their use as modern and demarcating it from the rural poor and the urban underclass. Health and energy were also themes in ads for items that in other cultural-​historical contexts might be sold for pleasure-​inducing qualities, such as cigarettes, tea, cocoa-​like hot drinks, and even alcohol. The role of the middle-​class female consumer certainly became pronounced during the late colonial period. Historically, the expectation in many regions of India that women maintain low public profiles had long necessitated that men did most of the family shopping. Some marketers of consumer goods concluded that women exercised little role in decision making about purchases. In practice, however, middle-​class women generally managed family budgets, and their input into decisions about household consumption was critical.48 Consumer businesses began to recognise the female role in family choices by the 1930s and to direct many of their ads for goods such as toilet and laundry soap, hot drinks (such as Ovaltine), and cooking mediums to women as guardians of family health and status. In other cases, they began to appeal to females as the ultimate users of these products. Cosmetics, beauty soaps, hair oil, and medicines for women were marketed extensively by the 1930s. Women increasingly took a direct role in shopping by the 1930s in much of India, making it imperative for businesses to consider female consumer perspectives. In response to marketing campaigns developed by large and small business firms alike, middle-​class households began to purchase greater quantities of brand-​name products. But they still obtained most of their needs in unbranded, unpackaged form. Food and dress were typically purchased in shops located in urban bazaars without awareness of manufacturers’ identity. Fruits and vegetables were sold mostly by hawkers who obtained their supplies through informal channels that reached into the countryside. Textile mills usually left selling operations to intermediary agents rather than engage in direct marketing. Consumers often depended upon their own savviness (or that of their servants) and upon qualities touted by shopkeepers in assessing foods and clothing rather than rely on the manufacturers’ reputations or on advertising. Although a few retail stores in the biggest cities began to sell goods such as furniture and lighting to members of the middle class, most commodities reached Indians through the bazaars.49 The ability of brand-​name capitalism to capture even the small urban middle class was far from complete.

Other urban classes Besides the middle class, there was a wider set of less prosperous actors in the urban economy of South Asia who earned cash incomes. Many of these persons worked in the informal sector as artisans, hawkers, shopkeepers, and casual labourers but there was also a working class employed for regular wages in factories and government jobs in some cities. A 1938 J. Walter Thompson report divided an Indian urban population (those living in towns with more than 30,000 people) that it estimated as 22,500,000 into five categories. It dismissed as negligible the buying power of category E, the largest group with 13,000,000 people and incomes under Rs. 50 a month, but estimated that categories A to C, and even some of the D class, had some buying power and could be reached by advertising.50 Most information about consumer practices among the lower income groups above the lumpenproletariat in cities is confined to the formal working class, who were frequently surveyed in official reports.

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The richest of these reports focused on the cities of Bombay and Ahmedabad, where most members of the working class were employed in the mills.51 They showed, first of all, that workers had quite meagre living standards: 97 per cent of Bombay’s working households lived in one room in tenement houses (chawls); and many of Ahmedabad’s workers lived in ‘badly built, insanitary, ill-​ventilated and overcrowded’ buildings, especially during the 1920s (the mills had constructed some new forms of workers’ housing by the early 1930s). Usually workers lacked electricity in their homes, and relied on firewood and, to a lesser extent, charcoal for cooking and kerosene lamps for lighting. Educational expenditures were non-​existent among most families and spending on medicines and doctors was confined to a small minority. Workers’ households purchased branded consumer goods only to a limited extent. They typically spent 50 per cent or slightly more of their incomes on food; cereal consumption in Ahmedabad was greater than famine code allotments but less than jail prisoners received. Second, the reports also suggested significant stratification in consumption practices within the working class. Working families with higher incomes spent smaller percentages of their total earnings on food but higher absolute amounts, both because they maintained larger households and because they devoted their spending to more nutritive and more expensive foods, such as dairy products. They also spent more on clothing. Expenditures on items in the miscellaneous category –​which included barbers’ fees, hair oil, cooking utensils, and laundry soap but also sugar, pansupari, liquor and tobacco products –​increased with family income. Authors of these reports were often influenced by European and middle-​class moralising on working-​class profligacy, but found it particularly difficult to gather accurate information on liquor use. Third, there seems to have some improvement in working-​class living standards from the 1920s to 1930s, in part due to Depression-​era price declines, which were apparently more severe than wage reductions. Workers spent smaller portions of their earnings on food and shifted to healthier, more expensive diets. Clothing standards and miscellaneous expenditures increased as well. There is no clear evidence, however, whether these standards marked a permanent increase or a short-​term trend. But, clearly, any shifts in working-​class consumption were modest ones. Workers lived under hard-​pressed circumstances even in comparison to the austere standards of the lower middle class.

Rural groups A surprising finding in recent research is the significance of rural consumption in late colonial India. The J. Walter Thompson report in 1938 characterised the agrarian population of India as very poor but, collectively, it still possessed considerable buying power, particularly at harvest time (either in March/​April or October/​November), when peasants sold their crops to the markets.52 Although literacy was low in the countryside, the sheer size of the rural population meant that there were actually millions more literate people living in villages and small towns –​including richer peasants, moneylenders, and traders –​than there were in the bigger cities. Consumer-​oriented companies had not yet figured out how to sell their products in these locales, however. Instead, most rural people obtained consumer items in periodic bazaars distributed widely over the countryside, or from itinerant pedlars who moved from place to place with their wares. One typical bazaar in the Khandesh district of the Bombay Presidency in 1891, for instance, averaged about Rs. 1,500 every Thursday: Rs. 500 of grain, Rs. 200 of cloth and clothes, Rs. 200 of cotton and yarn, Rs. 175 of groceries, Rs. 400 of cattle, and Rs. 25 miscellaneous –​an indication that both consumer goods and items required in farming and cloth production were sold alongside each other. Handloom saris, metalware, cloth, ghee, sugar, and fruits were items that regularly appeared in rural markets in the region. But reports 396

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up to the late 1920s give limited evidence of the presence of branded goods.53 Soap and tea increasingly made their way into rural expenditure only after this point. In addition, rural people often obtained a fair amount of their needs –​such as fuel for cooking and material for building houses –​in non-​market form from the local environment.54 It was not uncommon for rural people to spend 60 to 75 per cent of their incomes on foodstuffs.55 Medical expenditures seemingly were very limited. Transformations in India’s rural economy after the late nineteenth century made possible the emergence of a stratum of wealthier peasants who had money to spend on consumer goods. Tariq Ali has shown that in many areas of Bengal a more prosperous set of Muslim cultivators acquired cash from growing jute during the late nineteenth century and spent it on items such as ‘umbrellas, clothing, corrugated iron sheets, soaps, tea, coffee, tobacco, kerosene oil, metal and porcelain utensils, toys and confections’.56 On the other hand, they rarely adopted Western-​ style clothing, housing, or furnishing. When middle-​class Hindu Bengalis began to advocate the boycott of European goods in the early twentieth century in the Swadeshi struggle, the peasants resisted their call out of a desire to maintain these consumer practices. In western India, cultivators growing cotton, sugar, and tobacco were often the biggest purchasers of new styles of saris made by the region’s handloom weavers –​which helped demarcate their rising social status –​as well as buttoned coats, shoes, European blankets, roofing for homes, and horse-​drawn tongas (carts).57 Haruka Yanagisawa has argued that new forms of consumption flourished even among some non-​landed agricultural workers, who increasingly earned cash incomes by migrating outside their villages for jobs on farms, plantations, and urban centres, and by freeing themselves from earlier forms of social domination by village elites.58 There is, of course, a danger in any portrayal of growing rural prosperity and consumption, even in the twentieth century, when famines had become less common. Many areas of India remained economically stagnant and experienced little development in terms of a wealthier peasantry or increased opportunities for agricultural labour. In many agrarian tracts local elites maintained their hold over the poor of low-​caste background. Large sections of the rural population experienced conditions of chronic malnutrition, inadequate housing, high infant mortality, and abysmal health standards. Moreover, high-​caste groups often resented efforts by ‘untouchables’ to adopt material standards associated with high status, such as wearing breast cloth to cover the female torso or using ghee (clarified butter, which possessed religious associations) in preparing foods.59 And, as Ali has shown, access to improved material comforts could be short-​lived. In many parts of India, prices of agricultural commodities deteriorated after the First World War (especially during the Great Depression). In Bengal, where jute prices had dropped significantly, a process of immiseration set in and peasants in the 1920s and 1930s could not sustain the living standards the previous generation had experienced.60 Surveys of the Bombay Presidency also suggested higher levels of consumption before the First World War than after it.61 By contrast, reports from south India suggested that new items of consumption, such as coffee, curd, and ghee, had recently come into more regular use among the upper strata in the rural population by 1940.62 Material expectations may have increased almost everywhere, whether or not rural groups possessed the capacity to buy new goods.63 Even for the most successful agrarian groups, participation in new forms of consumption had been modest.

Résumé The analysis of material practices in late colonial history needs to avoid two temptations. The first is to leave consumption out of any meaningful position in this history; the other is to place stories of consumption in a teleological framework leading to the development of mass 397

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consumerism. No doubt consumer behaviours experienced significant transformations in both cities and countryside during the colonial period. A host of new body practices arose in South Asia; material behaviours served to demarcate social groups from one another as well as from the members of early generations. Nowhere did these practices lead to straightforward emulation of globalised Western standards, and the changes sometimes were quite modest. It should also be emphasised that, for most groups, even for the middle class, standards of material comfort remained quite limited.

Notes 1 For exceptions, see Christopher A. Bayly, ‘The origins of swadeshi (home industry): Cloth and Indian society 1700–​1930’, in: Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), pp. 285–​321; Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007); and Peter Gonsalves, Clothing for Liberation: A Communication Analysis of Gandhi’s Swadeshi Revolution (New Delhi: Sage, 2010). 2 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–​1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 3 Tirthankar Roy, Artisans and Industrialization: Indian Weaving in the Twentieth Century (New Delhi: OUP, 1993), 28. 4 Bayly, ‘The origins of swadeshi’, 307–​9. 5 Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1996), esp. ch. 1. 6 David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For related work elsewhere in South Asia, see Nira Wickramasinghe, Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014). 7 Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Brand-​name capitalism, advertising and the making of middle class conjugality in western India, 1880–​1960’ (manuscript in progress). 8 Stefan Tetzlaff, ‘The motorisation of the “mofussil”: Automobile traffic and social change in rural and small-​town India, c.1915–​1940’ (PhD thesis, University of Göttingen, 2015), 91–​5, 184. 9 Roy, Artisans and Industrialization, 28. 10 For instance, see B.K. Karanjia, Godrej: A Hundred Years, 1897–​1997, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Viking, 1997). 11 Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–​1947 (New Delhi: OUP, 2000), 162–​3. 12 Idem, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 1999); Douglas E. Haynes, Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–​ 1960 (Cambridge: CUP, 2012); Haruka Yanagisawa, ‘Growth of small-​scale industries and changes in south India, 1910s–​1950s’, in: Douglas E. Haynes, Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy, and Haruka Yanigasawa (eds.), Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 2010), pp. 51–​75. 13 Haynes, Small Town Capitalism, 247–​53. 14 For instance, see Madhuri Sharma, ‘Creating a consumer: Exploring advertisements in colonial India’, in: Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India (Abingdon: Routledge Books, 2012), pp. 213–​28; Jeremy Schneider, ‘Reimaging traditional medicine: Tracing the emergence of commodified Ayurveda in the interwar period’ (unpub. MSc thesis in economics and social history, University of Oxford, 2008); Projit Bijhari Mukharji, ‘Chandshir Chikitsa: A nomadology of subaltern medicine’, in: David Hardiman and Projit Bihari Mukharji (eds.), Medical Marginality in South Asia: Situating Subaltern Therapeutics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 85–​108; and Rachel Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern: Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 15 Haynes, ‘Brand-​name capitalism’; Prithwiraj Biswas, ‘Advertisements, manufactures and consumer culture of colonial Bengal, c.1880–​1920’ (PhD thesis, Jadavpur University, 2019). 16 Yanagisawa, ‘Growth of small-​scale industries’, 52–​6. 17 For a major source on the tobacco industry of India, see a report published in the very early post-​ independence period: ‘A report on tobacco and the tobacco market in India for Murray, Sons and Company Limited’, produced by J. Walter Thompson Company (Eastern) Ltd, Calcutta, 1950 HAT 50/​ 1/​ 112/​ 2/​ 2/​ 1, History of Advertising Trust, Norwich, UK; on groundnuts, see Yanagisawa, ‘Growth of small-​scale industries’, 56–​8.

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Consumer practices in late colonial India 18 Shahid Amin, Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur: An Inquiry into Peasant Production for Capitalist Enterprise in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 1984). 19 A.R. Venkatachalapathy, ‘In those days there was no coffee: Coffee drinking and middle-​class culture in colonial Tamilnadu’, IESHR, 39 (2/​3), 2002, pp. 301–​16; Bhaswati Bhattacharya, Much Ado over Coffee: Indian Coffee House Then and Now (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2017); Philip Lutgendorf, ‘Making tea in India: Chai, capitalism, and culture’, Thesis Eleven, 113 (1), 2012, pp. 11–​31. 20 J. Walter Thompson Archives, Duke University [hereafter JWTA], reel 225 of microfilm collection, ‘Report on India, Burma and Ceylon, compiled on the basis of Messrs. Lehn and Fink’s questionnaire, 1931’, 15. 21 On the European community in colonial India, see also Satoshi Mizutani’s chapter in this volume. 22 JWTA, ‘Report on India, Burma and Ceylon’, 7, 15. 23 Ibid., 19. 24 David Arnold, ‘European orphans and vagrants in India in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 7 (2), 1979, pp. 104–​27; Aravind Ganachari, ‘ “White man’s embarrassment”: European vagrancy in 19th century Bombay’, EPW, 37 (25), 2002, pp. 2477–​86; Harald Fischer-​Tiné, Low and Licentious Europeans: Race, Class, and ‘White Subalternity’ in Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2009); Sarmistha De, Marginal Europeans in Colonial India, 1860–​1920 (Kolkata: Thema, 2008). 25 See, for instance, Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005). 26 ‘An Anglo-​Indian’, Indian Outfits and Establishments: Practical Guide for Persons About to Reside in India, Detailing the Articles which Should be Taken Out and the Requirements of Home Life and Management There (London: I. Upcott Gill, 1882); F.A. Steel and G. Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (London: William Heinemann, 1909); Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘ “Goods, chattels and sundry items”: Constructing 19th-​century Anglo-​Indian domestic life’, Journal of Material Culture, 7 (3), pp. 243–​71. 27 Haynes, ‘Brand-​name capitalism’; Abigail McGowan, ‘Selling home: Marketing home furnishings in late colonial India’, in: Prashant Kidambi, Manjiri Kamat, and Rachel Dwyer (eds.), Bombay before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos (London: Hurst, 2019), pp. 117–​45, 124–​6. 28 Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, 2nd edn. (Oxford: OUP, 1995). 29 Chattopadhyay, ‘ “Goods, chattels and sundry items” ’, 250–​5. 30 Collingham, Curry; Colleen Taylor Sen, Curry: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). See also Utsa Ray’s chapter in this volume. 31 Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); C.J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, Tamil Brahmins: The Making of a Middle-​ Class Caste (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Hayden Bellenoit, The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760–​1860 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 32 See, for instance, Report on an Enquiry into the Family Budgets of Middle Class Employees of the Central Government (Delhi: Government of India, 1949), 2. 33 For instance, see Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi: OUP, 2001); and Margrit Pernau, Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-​Century Delhi (New Delhi: OUP, 2013). 34 Compare Report on an Enquiry into Middle Class Family Budgets in Bombay City (Bombay: Labour Office, 1928), 1, with G. Findlay Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Working Class Budgets in Bombay (Bombay: Bombay Labour Office, 1923), 3. 35 H. Shankar Rau (ed.), A Chitrapur Saraswat Miscellany (Bombay: self-​pub., 1938), 22. My thanks to Frank Conlon for this reference. 36 Christina Lubinski and Andreas Steen, ‘Traveling entrepreneurs: The early gramophone business in India and China’, Itinerario, 41 (2), 2017, pp. 275–​303. 37 See particularly Prashant Kidambi, ‘Consumption, domestic economy and the idea of the “middle class” ’, in: Haynes et al., Towards a History of Consumption, pp. 108–​35. 38 Bombay Chronicle, 1 March 1920, cited in Kidambi, ‘Consumption, domestic economy’, 116. 39 Anon., ‘Milestones and movements, 1886–​1936’, Kanara Saraswat, 20 (11), 1936, pp. 33–​6. 40 Report on an Enquiry into the Family Budgets of Middle Class Employees, 3. 41 Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Creating the consumer? Advertising, capitalism and the middle class in urban western India, 1914–​40’, in: Haynes et al., Towards a History of Consumption, pp. 185–​223, 192–​3. 42 Partha Chatterjee, ‘The nationalist resolution of the women’s question’, in: Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University

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Douglas E. Haynes Press, 1990), pp. 233–​53, 240–​1; Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Pubic in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Abigail McGowan, ‘Consuming families: Negotiating women’s shopping in early twentieth century western India’, in: Haynes et al., Towards a History of Consumption, pp. 155–​84; Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-​Expression: The Urdu Middle-​Class Milieu in Mid-​Twentieth Century India and Pakistan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 195–​6. 43 Kidambi, ‘Consumption, domestic economy’, 118–​24. 44 L.G. Khare, ‘The depressed middle classes (part II)’, Social Service Quarterly, 3 (1), 1917, pp. 14–​19. 45 Pradip Kumar Bose, ‘Reconstituting private life: The making of the modern family in Bengal’, in: Ghanshyam Shah (ed.), Social Transformation in India: Essays in Honour of Professor I.P. Desai (Jaipur: Rawat, 1997), pp. 501–​31. 46 Ibid., 518. 47 See fn 14. 48 Abigail McGowan, ‘An all-​consuming subject? Women and consumption in late-​nineteenth and early twentieth-​century western India’, Journal of Women’s History, 18 (4), 2006, pp. 31–​54. 49 Idem, ‘Selling home’. 50 JWTA, reel 232, ‘Notes on Indian advertising, 1938’, 5–​7. Given the income figures provided, most of the middle class would have fallen into categories B and C, with most of the working class in category D. Category E would have been made up by casual laborers and people working in the informal sector. 51 The material in the following three paragraphs is based on Report on an Enquiry into Working Class Family Budgets in Ahmedabad (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1937); and Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Working Class Budgets. See also A.R. Burnett-​Hurst, Labour and Housing in Bombay: A Study in the Economic Conditions of the Wage-​Earning Classes in Bombay (London: P.S. King & Son, 1925); and Report on an Enquiry into the Family Budgets of Industrial Workers in Madras City (Madras: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1938). 52 JWTA, ‘Advertising in India’, 1–​3. 53 Douglas E. Haynes, ‘Market formation in Khandesh, c.1820–​1930’, IESHR, 36 (3), 1999, pp. 275–​302. 54 Harold H. Mann, Land and Labour in a Deccan Village (London: OUP, 1917), 125; G. Findlay Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Agricultural Wages in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1924), 22. 55 Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Agricultural Wages, 24; P.J. Thomas and K.C. Ramakrishnan, Some South Indian Villages: A Resurvey (Madras: University of Madras, 1940), 294. 56 Tariq Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 57 Haynes, Small Town Capitalism, 97–​104. 58 Yanagisawa, ‘Growth of small-​scale industries’. 59 For instance, see B.R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, ed. S. Anand (London: Verso, 2014), 217. 60 Ali, A Local History, ch. 4. 61 Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Agricultural Wages, 23–​4. 62 Thomas and Ramakrishnan, Some South Indian Villages. 63 Ibid.; Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Agricultural Wages.

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31 FOOD AND INTOXICANTS IN BRITISH INDIA Utsa Ray

Introduction Practices of consumption have played a crucial role in the constitution of South Asian society, culture, and economy since the eighteenth century. The existence and survival of human as well as animal species, which are dependent on food, is central to these practices of consumption. What is more significant is that these practices, which can almost be dubbed visceral, have always been a marker of identity/​identitarian politics. The emerging middle class in India, for instance, embraced such patterns of consumption that would distinguish them from Indian princes and rural magnates, on the one hand, and from workers, artisans, and villagers, on the other.1 There are, of course, debates on relating consumption to ‘middle-​classness’ that lay more emphasis on everyday practices. The consumption of commodities juxtaposed with everyday practices of life is called upon in order to understand the hierarchical nature of the middle class.2 If we look at the everyday gastronomic practices of the colonial subjects in India it is possible to etch the image of a new culture of food. These everyday practices negotiated with the new changes and appropriated them, thus shaping a new culture of food in colonial India. The resultant cuisine represented a process of indigenisation, which is often seen in these practices of the colonial and reminds us about ‘the tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus lend[ing] a political dimension to everyday practices’.3 Bengal was the first colonial settlement of the British in India where the latter initiated most of the experiments of their rule. It served as a laboratory where the British colonial state was reordering the scene of agrarian production, with the express intention of introducing ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ agriculture into the colony. For this reason, much of this chapter focuses on the culinary habits of the Bengal region. The everyday practices of the middle class in Bengal hold true not only of other regions in India, however, but also in other settings where such self-​fashioning of the middle class is visible. This chapter will try to narrate these changes, which primarily span from the nineteenth century to the 1940s. Although several new food crops came to India with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, their actual dietary effect were not felt until the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth. Since I have used memoirs, cookbooks, and recipe columns mostly authored by the Indian or the Anglo-​Indian middle classes, the middle-​class diet occupies a major share of this chapter. But I have also tried to capture the daily food habits of the subalterns, through the silence of archival records. DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-32

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Transforming dietary habits in South Asia The innumerable experiments that the colonial state carried out in the realm of agriculture in India were often accompanied by the logic of ‘improvement’ and ‘rationalisation’. Since so-​called methods of ‘improved cultivation’ could not increase the food productivity of land, agricultural policies were couched in a cultural language. Ultimately, these experiments did leave a mark on the diet of the population, even if not to a great extent. Many of the new food crops introduced in India were a direct result of the discovery of the ‘New World’ and some of them came from Europe itself. These crops were chiefly introduced by the Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century. They brought a number of crops with them, among which the most extraordinary was the potato.4 Tomato, okra, and the ubiquitous chili pepper also came around this time.5 Among the fruits from the New World, the most notable example is the pineapple. Grown in the beginning in the Portuguese colonies on the western coast, by the end of the sixteenth century it had become common enough in areas in the eastern parts of India, such as Bengal. Papaya and cashew nuts were also introduced by the Portuguese in India, but these took time to spread.6 This was, in fact, true about potatoes, tomatoes, and okra; although they had been introduced by the sixteenth century, these vegetables never became a common dietary item until the nineteenth century, when the British colonial state took the initiative to spread them on a much larger scale. The colonial government in India decided to expand the cultivation of potato, which had been accepted by the Irish as their dietary staple since the seventeenth century as a safeguard against scarcity.7 The English, who considered potatoes to be a food of the poor, were extremely enthusiastic to popularise it among the Indians. Similar suggestions were also put forward for the introduction of carrots, barley, and peas. The government had difficulties figuring out a way to make people’s palate accustomed to these new crops, however. Ultimately, it was found that, in Bengal, for instance, crops such as cucumbers and pumpkins, which were already sown, proved to be most beneficial in times of scarcity. It was a gross underestimation of what grew in the colony that led the colonial state to introduce new food crops.8 This resulted in several initiatives, such as the establishment of the Imperial Institute of Agricultural Research in Pusa in 1911.9 Attempts to transform the dietary habits of South Asians were also pushed in prisons10 and in the Coonoor nutrition research institute, established in 1918.11 Improvement also brought with it the question of aesthetics. It was not enough to grow radishes, pumpkins, eggplants, arums, and cucumbers. In the colonial imagination, they needed to be accompanied by what would look colourful and beautiful, such as strawberries and peaches. To improve Indian gardening, several experiments were carried out. One such experiment was with the cultivation of cocoa. The tropical climate of Latin America was imagined to be like the tropical climate of India and ‘different’ from the climate of the metropole. Although it was suggested that the cocoa plant be grown in hilly places in India, the experiment was actually carried out in the Botanical Garden, close to Calcutta, which was on the Gangetic plains and could hardly be called hilly. As a consequence of this hasty decision, all the plants died.12 These recurrent failures of new experiments in the colony were thus indicative of loopholes in the colonial knowledge system and the mode of so-​called ‘rational’ agriculture. Despite several failures in the agricultural policies of the colonial state, it is undeniable that by the late nineteenth century many such ingredients were becoming available that facilitated the preparation of European food in colonial India. Although they were initially produced by European companies such as Huntley & Palmer, biscuits and edible essences had begun to be made by Indian companies in Delhi, Lucknow, and Calcutta by the beginning of the twentieth century. In the Indian Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition at Calcutta in 1906/​7, chocolates 402

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made by Indian companies such as Soyaji Chocolate Manufacturing Company from Baroda were exhibited. A variety of examples of condensed milk and milk powder from Calcutta, Baidyabati, Munshiganj, Rajshahi, and Bombay were also displayed at the exhibition.13 The Indian Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition demonstrated the straight fact that products never previously heard of in India had not only become available in the market but had also started to be manufactured in the country itself. But what is most significant is the fact that this exhibition showed changes in the dietary practices of the Indians. The number of Indian companies producing tea, coffee, and cocoa would never have risen to such a scale had there not been sufficient demand for the foodstuffs within the country itself.

‘Curryfication’ or the making of an Anglo-​Indian cuisine Scholars such as Jennifer Brennan and Lizzie Collingham have enriched our understanding of Anglo-​Indian cuisine. Collingham argued that an ‘authentic’ Indian food has never existed, either in ancient India or in contemporary Britain. In fact, Anglo-​Indian cookery represented the first pan-​Indian cuisine, in the sense that the British adopted recipes, ingredients, techniques, and garnishes from all over the subcontinent and combined them in a coherent repertoire of dishes. Anglo-​Indian cuisine also helped to transport it to other parts of India.14 She argued that, even after the seizure of India by the British Crown, the attempts by the colonisers to retain their identity by consuming English food was bound to fail; since British women often did not know how to cook, cuisine hybridity was unavoidable. Moreover, Indian kitchens were not prepared for British cooking. As a result, they often had to depend on bawarchis (Indian Muslim cooks), who incorporated their own knowledge of cooking while preparing English food.15 Brennan, in her reminiscences of her childhood in colonial India, also mentioned that Indian cooks and their British mistresses together created a cross-​cultural cuisine in Anglo-​ Indian homes in India.16 If, on the one hand, Brennan had cooked ham and Scottish whisky marmalade, her breakfast platter also included nimboo curd (lemon yogurt) and sooji (semolina).17 And her favourite memory was that of her grandmother churning buffalo butter, which she would spread on chapatis (Indian wheat bread) and ate with marmalade for breakfast.18 Anglo-​Indian cuisine was the product of imperial expansion. Nupur Chaudhuri, Susan Zlotnick, and Piya Chatterjee maintained that ‘foreign’ products such as curry and tea were domesticated in Britain.19 Nupur Chaudhuri showed that, with an increase in the travel of British women to India, tastes for Indian dishes became widespread among all social classes in British society.20 Thus, in Chaudhuri’s view, British women served as agents for many middle-​and upper middle-​class families in Britain to acquire the taste of Indian material culture.21 Zlotnick took Chaudhuri’s argument a little further by emphasising that British women incorporated curry into their national diet, domesticating it as a British food and erasing any ‘foreign’ stigma from it.22 In domestic manuals and cookbooks, the origins of curry have been traced to the reign of Richard II. This conversion of the exotic or foreign into the familial, Zlotnick argued, was made possible through the association of curry with the woman’s domain of home and kitchen. Curry was, in fact, naturalised to the extent that the British could give it back to India as the gift of a ‘civiliser’.23 Piya Chatterjee made a similar argument in relation to the importation of tea into Britain. According to her, tea was an exotic product that was domesticated and made quintessentially ‘English’.24 The acceptance of tea into the daily life of the British depended upon imperial expansion.25 Although the emphasis on Indian food definitely changed after 1857, these changes were not necessarily all-​pervasive. The Revolt of 1857 led to the abolition of the rule of the East India Company and introduced direct rule by the Crown in India. Consequently, what followed was 403

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an unprecedented degree of racialisation of colonial politics. British residents in India were now expected to keep an even greater distance from the natives.26 Based on these developments, most scholars have taken it for granted that, in order to avoid the earlier Indian ensemble of food (which the British began to consider too native and rich and spicy to be included on their table), the British changed their diet after 1857. Many cookbooks now called for simpler fare to be followed in India, in contrast to earlier times, and the focus was now more on Italian, German, or Spanish salads, etc. Hence, they showed a distaste for anything tasting like curry. This endeavour to ‘purify’ Anglo-​Indian cuisine played out more in theory than in practice, however. The Indian Cookery Book, first published in 1869 for the Anglo-​Indian population residing in India, was written by someone who had spent 35 years in British India. Basically, this book was a compilation of Indian recipes, going from rice dishes such as khichri and pulao to preserves such as kasundi. There were, in fact, very few ‘pure’ British recipes and hardly anything ‘continental European’.27 Curry had quite different overtones for the metropole and the colony. Colonial visitors to Britain often searched for curry in British restaurants as it carried a semblance of the familial, of belonging.28 Often, however, they were disappointed to find out that the two curries were in reality not very similar. In fact, the use of the curry powder that added flavour to left-​over meat dishes was more a British invention than an Indian one.29 In India curry was prepared by a combination of different Indian spices.30 The majority of the cookbook writers in India hardly used the English formulaic recipe for curry, which was generally made using ready-​made ‘curry powder’. These writers were quite eclectic in their inclusion of different recipes in their cookbooks, though. The cookbooks not only taught techniques for the preservation of new fruits, such as strawberries, apples, and peaches, at home; at the same time, they also referred to new utensils, such as cake moulds, pie dishes, and patty pans. Although the cookbooks written by Indian authors would have recipes for apple pie, apple mincemeat, guava jelly, or a tipsy pudding, the new social feasts included soda water, peach pudding, pear pudding, pineapple pudding, and ice cream in their menu.31 These cookbooks were mainly intended for the ‘new’ Indian women but very often male cooks excelled in the preparation of ‘new’ food in colonial India. The ‘new’ Indian women, commonly educated by either fathers or their husbands, were imagined to be the perfect companions for their husbands, who protected the domestic sphere from penetration by colonial rule and wanted all initiatives for improvement to come from Indian men.32

The home and the hotel: New culinary experiences For many Indians, the new hotels and the restaurants that sprang up in Calcutta from the nineteenth century onwards had their attractions. These hotels served as a convenient locus for those who could easily gorge on a chicken cutlet without being concerned about polluting their home. All over India, these eateries at first served as meeting places for the Anglo-​Indians. Coffee houses were set up for them and served ice and sherry cobblers.33 Such beverages, as well as the coffee houses, were chiefly for the benefit of the British residing in India, however. Spences’ Hotel was one of the first hotels established in Calcutta, in the 1830s; later, in the 1860s, it transformed into a limited company owned by both British and Indians. In 1841 a second hotel, named the Auckland Hotel, was started up, which later became the famous Great Eastern Hotel. Bengalis also started taking an active interest in the 1870s and 1880s, and entered the hotel business in European quarters. The Sen Brothers, for instance, started the Esplanade Hotel in 1874 and another the next year.34 By the 1940s several small eating places were also cropping up in Calcutta. These were tiny eateries, such as the Basanta Cabin, serving toast and 404

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boiled eggs, and the Chachar Hotel, all run by Bengalis. Two other small Bengali hotels, called Café-​de-​Monico and Bengal Restaurant, were established around 1936. Some other eateries called ‘pice hotels’ (where a full meal was supposedly served for 1/​16th of a rupee) or ‘bhater hotels’ (rice hotels where daily meals were served), catering to people with small budgets, chiefly students, also emerged by the 1940s. These places served meals consisting of rice at a low price.35 The definition of food changed in relation to the public and the private. What one consumed at the eateries could not be consumed at home. Bipin Chandra Pal, one of the early nationalists, wrote about how the public/​private divide dominated the eating scene in Calcutta. Pal stayed in a hostel when he first came to Calcutta from Sylhet in eastern Bengal. Residents were not allowed to bring in food that could hurt Hindu feelings. Loaves and biscuits had become quite common in Calcutta, however, and there was no bar on bringing in these foods to the hostel. Residents could, of course, consume what they wanted outside the hostel.36 Notions of the public and the private also need to be problematised in this context, though. A hostel that was considered a ‘public’ place, as opposed to the home, had rigid rules for food, whereas at least some upper middle-​class Hindus had started enjoying ‘new’ food in their homes. But, generally speaking, the newly emerging hotels served as abodes of gastronomic pleasure. These eateries did not just introduce new food; they also changed eating habits. In the upper middle class and some of the middle-​class households it was chiefly the male cook who was employed for making ‘new’ food, most often for the men of the family. It appears that the employment of servants in a Bengali middle-​class household and in an Anglo-​Indian household had many features in common. In both households domestic servants were subject to various types of class, caste, or racial segregation. So-​called ‘dirty’ and ‘unhygienic’ habits seem to have worried the British officials residing in India as well as the Indian literati. In her work on the culture of food in colonial Asia, Cecilia Leong-​ Salobir argued that the cooks working in British households in colonial Asia did much more than just menial work. These cooks were actually responsible for the purchase of food for the Anglo-​Indians, and thus contributed hugely to the emergence of colonial cuisine by bringing in changes in the diet of the British.37 In a middle-​class Indian household, however, a cook did not wield any such power even unwittingly. Middle-​class women had to be more active in their kitchens.

Cooking ‘hybrid’: Male cooks versus colonial women In her work on the changing role of women in colonial Bengal, Meredith Borthwick argued that new techniques of education, cookery, and hygiene training were created to hone the ‘traditional’ skills of ‘new’ women.38 Apart from the inclusion of culinary skills in schools and colleges, various domestic manuals and women’s journals began publishing recipes for the benefit of ‘modern’ women. Cookbooks, giving women detailed instruction for cooking, began to be published from the late nineteenth century.39 As Borthwick argued, however, this extant literature was created more for widening the art of cookery for women than for teaching them to cook from scratch.40 Borthwick further maintained that culinary skills never decreased. In fact, they became more exacting to suit different social requirements.41 When the colonial Indian middle class insisted upon the inclusion of cookery in the curriculum at schools, they often argued that this was because it was a part of the curriculum in Britain too. Unlike in Victorian Britain, however, where cookery was clearly a subject of women’s education, in colonial Bengal the discourse of cooking was gendered in a more complex way. Judith Walsh argued that the nineteenth-​century reformation of Hindu domestic 405

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ideas grew out of the interactions of a contemporary hegemonic, transnational discourse on domesticity and indigenous domestic concerns and practices.42 Unlike Victorian Britain, where a clear-​cut demarcation was visible between the public and the private spheres, in colonial Bengal the demarcation was much more complex. Although women were situated in the space of the family kitchen and had the responsibility of preparing food, knowledge about cooking came primarily from men. The latter widely wrote on culinary hygiene and often gave instructions to women on how to become efficient and modern cooks. Cooking was widely regarded as the most important of all household activities. Everything around cooking had to be sacrosanct and clean, as it came to be prepared with Yagna (a Hindu worship ritual involving fire), and the kitchen was considered a sacred place where one could read scriptures.43 Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, the famous journalist, went on to write that a home that did not promote good cooking was not a good home, as it neglected a part of the sacred rites.44 Middle-​class men who began to take a keen interest in the subject of cookery now traversed what was considered to be a woman’s domain. What needs to be mentioned here is that, after imbibing such ‘Western’ influences as playing the piano or reading a novella, a perfect culinary curriculum could be formed for the ‘new’ woman that placed emphasis on restraint, elegance, and –​last but not the least –​a distinct cosmopolitanism. Thus, although a woman was advised to brush up her skills in making pickles, this needed to be juxtaposed with the art of making a variety of soups and Worcester sauce. Often it was the women from royal and aristocratic households who lent a distinct cosmopolitan flavour to colonial Indian cuisine. These women travelled from one end of India to the other to be a part of royal families through marriage. Whereas their husbands, the princes, or heads of the royal households had close connections with the British, these cultural exchanges were replicated in the culinary realm by their wives.45 Although the cookbooks were playing a vital role in laying down detailed instructions for the sake of the ‘new’ women, the writings of this genre omitted to mention a particular class who participated in this activity of daily labour: the male cooks.46 Most of the male cooks were Brahmans; but the food cooked by them was considered to be much inferior compared to the food cooked by the women of the house. Middle-​class men’s valorisation of women’s labour in the kitchen –​the most conspicuous form of physical work done in middle-​class homes –​had the impact of distancing physical labour in ‘respectable’ society from the laborious toil of the rest of the population.

Food: A marker of status in everyday life Food and foodways are crucial indicators of the differences that the middle class had with other classes, castes, and communities. In colonial Tamilnadu a new beverage such as coffee became the marker of status for the new Tamil middle class. It was accompanied by the emergence of novel institutions known as ‘coffee hotels’, which were usually run by Brahmans.47 Tea, associated by the middle class with urban working-​class culture, turned into the ‘other’ of coffee.48 The middle-​class body became a site that would set boundaries for communities or classes. A good coffee, for instance, could be made only from cow’s milk, a belief that reflected the ritual importance of cow in the Brahmanical discourse.49 Although, at one level, there was a perceptible change in everyday culinary habits by the end of the nineteenth century, at another level the abstract category of ‘tradition’ was constructed in order to criticise these eating practices. Issues of caste constituted the core of this debate on ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’. The caste question was reformulated through spaces that were intrinsically modern. Udupi’s hotels, in the south Canara district of Karnataka, for instance, 406

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transferred Brahmanical eating practices associated with village and temple rituals to eating outside such sacred spaces. Many Udupi hotels originally had separate dining areas for Brahmans. Until 1947 these restaurants denied entry to Muslims and Dalits alike.50 Although rice was the most significant food in the context of commensality, whatever was new came to be considered a caste taboo. This list also included vege­tables –​such as cauliflowers, cabbages, and potatoes –​and tea. Food could also be rejected on account of having been prepared by someone outside the colonial middle class’s comfort zone. The colonial middle class, for instance, looked at bread with suspicion because of the assumption that it had been prepared by a Muslim baker. Although the middle class overcame many such barriers and embraced such ‘new’ food, initially for its medicinal qualities, and later simply for culinary pleasures, their suspicions over beef remained. Beef was never seen simply as food to be eaten. Its association with the sacred cow made it suspect. Although an oft-​heard argument by Hindu reformers was that the cow was beneficial because it provided dairy products and the consumption of beef had the potential of bringing down the number of cows,51 the fear from the beef eaters remained stark. Critique of the consumption of beef could easily be translated into hatred for the beef eater. There was, of course, a counter-​response to these critiques of beef eating by the rising Muslim middle class.52 A number of Islamic texts devoted to the improvement of material culture of the Muslims made the quotidian life of the Muslims their point of focus. Insistent on purifying Islam of all the vile practices of ‘other’ religions, these texts also gave instructions on how to construct an exclusivist Muslim identity. Eating beef became one of the major tenets of such improvement texts.53 The majority of the population hardly had a choice in terms of consumption. Often, especially in times of scarcity, the lower castes in the villages survived on the consumption of snails, frogs, crabs, shrimps, and even snakes. The average diet of a lower-​class villager consisted of very coarse rice and dal (lentils). Vegetables could be consumed but only occasionally. The condition of the lower classes varied from one district to another. Irrespective of regional differences, one can argue that a twice-​daily meal was something that the lower classes could afford only in ordinary times. But the situation was different in times of scarcity.54

Intoxicants The British consumption of both alcoholic and non-​alcoholic beverages often depended on their medicinal qualities. Tea and alcohol both became part of the ration for the garrison of Lucknow during the Rebellion of 1857. Many medical accounts pointed out the recovery potentials for drinks such as tea. For the colonial subject population, tea had an additional advantage. In this context, the endeavours of the Indian Tea Association to popularise tea were highly successful. In fact, as Lizzy Collingham argued, tea often improved intercommunal relations. It was considered to be free from the burden of purity associations and hence easier to share with members of other castes.55 As far as alcohol is concerned, Indians were quite accustomed to drinking in precolonial India.56 There were certain perceptible changes in colonial times, however. Initially, while the upper echelons of the European society enjoyed their imported liquors, the less privileged among them could hardly afford them. The latter, therefore, often took to Indian country liquor. By the 1760s the colonial state was making attempts to curb this tendency of Indian country liquor consumption among Europeans. Colonial taxation policies encouraged the consumption of foreign liquor and Indian-​made foreign liquor over more traditional Indian alcoholic drinks, such as toddy and country liquor.57 As a result, even those who were habituated to country liquor were forced to drink foreign liquor, which contained much higher levels of 407

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alcohol than traditional Indian alcoholic beverages. Indian nationalists therefore often identified problems of drinking with British culture. In the interwar years, however, alcohol also boosted the Indian economy. Thus, when the nationalists demanded total prohibition, Indian traders and manufacturers pleaded for tariff exemptions. Simultaneously, scientists advocated the use of alcohol for the sake of new industries.58 Although the consumption of alcohol, which pre-​dated colonial rule, was linked to intrusions of colonial modernity by the Indian nationalists, the story of cocaine brings in another dimension to the narrative of intoxicants. Cocaine, considered to be one of the modern types of drugs, was domesticated in South Asia through an age-​old practice: the consumption of paan or betel leaf. Cocaine might have first found its place as a medicine in colonial India, but soon it began to be consumed by various communities and cutting across gender. The colonial government tried to ban the consumption of cocaine from the early twentieth century, but most of its enforcement policies proved to be futile. In fact, South Asia became one of the largest markets for cocaine in the twentieth century.59 Of course, the case of opium is a very different story. Poppies, which were grown locally by Indian peasants, were transformed into a transnational commodity, opium, by the British colonial state. This opium was mainly exported to China. Although this export added to the problem of drug addiction among the Chinese, the extent of the damage is often overstated. In addition, although initially it was the colonial state that exported opium from Bengal, very soon Indian private merchants also engaged in the trade in opium cultivated in Malwa.60

Résumé The history of colonialism for a long time concentrated on mainstream politics. Until recently very few historical accounts paid any heed to how everyday life was transformed through colonial modernity. The stories of food and intoxicants in colonial South Asia are complex. Although there were impositions by the colonial state to influence the everyday practices of consumption of their colonial subjects, it is undeniable that these impositions were not unchallenged. The way the colonised people adapted to new culinary habits cannot be called an example of total acceptance. Rather, they appropriated these new changes and turned them into a hybrid cuisine. Thus, vanilla or strawberry essences could easily be used to make traditional sweets in Indian homes. Similarly, the British in India adapted many Indian elements into their food habits. These two-​way interactions produced a colonial cuisine. This cuisine was not simply a product of the coming of British imperialism; the British contributed as much to the production of this cuisine as did their Indian subjects. Colonial subjects’ responses to the various intoxicants were also complex. Although tea and coffee were welcomed by many, the issue of caste identities shaped their consumption in different moulds. Generally speaking, whereas the nationalists protested against alcohol consumption, traders often had a different agenda. Everyday practices of consumption thus became integrally connected with the politics of the day. There is scope for the account of food and intoxicants to be further enriched by continued study of this politics of foodways.

Notes 1 Douglas E. Haynes, Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy, and Haruka Yanigasawa (eds.), Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 2010). 2 Henrike Donner and Geert De Neve, ‘Introduction’, in: Henrike Donner (ed.), Being Middle-​Class in India: A Way of Life (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1–​22.

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Food and intoxicants in British India 3 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), xvii. 4 Irfan Habib, ‘Mughal India’, in: Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1, c.1200–​c.1750 (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), pp. 214–​25, 218. 5 Idem, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556–​1707, rev. edn. (New Delhi: OUP, 1999), 53. 6 Ibid., 54–​5. 7 Larry Zuckerman, The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1998). 8 Utsa Ray, Culinary Culture in Colonia India: A Cosmopolitan Platter and the Middle Class (Cambridge: CUP, 2015). 9 Deepak Kumar, ‘Science in agriculture: A study in Victorian India’, in: idem and Bipasha Raha (eds.), Tilling the Land: Agricultural Knowledge and Practices in Colonial India (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016), pp. 20–​48. 10 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-​Century India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 110–​13. 11 Ashok Malhotra, ‘Race, diet, and class: Robert McCarrison’s laboratory rat experiments in Coonoor, 1925–​27’, Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9 (1), 2019, pp. 17–​27. 12 Ray, Culinary Culture in Colonia India. 13 A Report of the Indian Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition: Calcutta, 1906–​07 (Calcutta: Industrial India Office, 1907), 24–​6. 14 Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 119. 15 Ibid., 162–​3. 16 Jennifer Brennan, Curries and Bugles: A Memoir and a Cookbook of the British Raj (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 15. 17 Ibid., 72–​5. 18 Ibid., 16. 19 Nupur Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, jewelry, curry, and rice in Victorian Britain’, in: idem and Margaret Strobel (eds.), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 231–​46; Susan Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating imperialism: Curry and cookbooks in Victorian England’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 16 (2/​3), 1996, pp. 51–​68; Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/​Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 20 Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, jewelry, curry’, 240. 21 Ibid. 22 Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating imperialism’. 23 Ibid. 24 Chatterjee, A Time for Tea, 21. 25 Ibid., 49. 26 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). 27 ‘A Thirty-​Five Years Resident’, The Indian Cookery Book: A Practical Handbook to the Kitchen in India Containing Original and Approved Recipes in Every Department for Summer Beverages and Home-​Made Liqueurs: Medicinal and Other Recipes together with a Variety of Things Worth Knowing (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1931 [1869]). 28 G. Paramaswaran Pillai, London and Paris through Indian Spectacles (Madras: Vaijayanti Press, 1897), cited in Jayeeta Sharma, ‘Food and empire’, in: Jeffrey M. Pilcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Food History (Oxford: OUP, 2012), pp. 241–​59. 29 Cecilia Leong-​Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 54–​5. 30 Uma Narayan, ‘Eating cultures: Incorporation, identity, and Indian food’, in: idem (ed.), Dislocating Cultures/​Identities, Traditions, and Third-​World Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 161–​219. 31 Engagement menu from the engagement ceremony of Indira Debi; from Indubala Debi’s album. 32 Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001). 33 William Knighton, Tropical Sketches, or Reminiscences of an Indian Journalist, vol. 1 (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1855), 150–​1. 34 B.V. Roy, ‘Calcutta, old and new: Taverns and hotels’, The Calcutta Municipal Gazette, 45 (3), 1946, pp. 45–​6.

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Utsa Ray 35 Pratulchandra Gupta, Alekhya Darshan (Kolkata: Ananda, 1990), 30–​43. 36 Bipin Chandra Pal, Memories of My Life and Times: In the Days of My Youth (1857–​1884), vol. 1 (Calcutta: Modern Book Agency, 1932), 135–​6. 37 Leong-​Salobir, Food Culture. 38 Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849–​1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 39 Ibid., 215–​16. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Judith E. Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). 43 Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, Paribarik Prabandha (Hooghly, 1302 BS [c.1895]), 138–​141; Pratapchandra Majumdar, Streecharitra, 3rd edn. (Calcutta: Nababidhan, 1936), 138–​41. 44 Ibid, 189–​97. 45 Angma D. Jhala, ‘Cosmopolitan kitchens: Cooking for princely zenanas in late colonial India’, in: Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas (eds.), Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 49–​72. 46 Rachel Berger, ‘Between digestion and desire: Genealogies of food in nationalist north India’, MAS, 47 (5), 2013, pp. 1–​22, 8. 47 A.R. Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006), 16–​25. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 16–​20. 50 Vegard Iversen and Raghavendra P.S., ‘What the signboard hides: Food, caste and employability in small south Indian eating places’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 40 (3), 2006, pp. 311–​41; Stig Toft Madsen and Geoffrey Gardela, ‘Udupi hotels: Entrepreneurship, reform and revival,” in: Ray and Srinivas, Curried Cultures, pp. 91–​109. 51 Therese O’Toole, ‘Secularising the sacred cow: The relationship between religious reform and Hindu nationalism’, in: Antony Copley (ed.), Hinduism in Public and Private: Reform, Hindutva, Gender, and Sampraday (New Delhi: OUP, 2003), pp. 94–​109. 52 In the early nineteenth century Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who had an Indian father and an English mother, had a tremendous influence on a group of young men in Calcutta. These men were swayed by Derozio’s radical thinking and often indulged in acts such as eating beef in public to make a critique of the orthodoxies of Hindu society. See Rosinka Chaudhuri, Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2012). 53 Pradip Kumar Datta, Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth-​ century Bengal (New Delhi: OUP, 1999), pp. 64–​108. 54 Ray, Culinary Culture in Colonial India. 55 Sam Goodman, ‘Unpalatable truths: Food and drink as medicine in colonial British India’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 73 (2), 2018, pp. 205–​22; Gautam Bhadra, From an Imperial Product to a National Drink: The Culture of Tea Consumption in Modern India (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 2005); Collingham, Curry, 201. 56 Prasun Chatterjee, ‘The lives of alcohol in pre-​colonial India’, Medieval History Journal, 8 (1), 2005, pp. 189–​225. 57 David Hardiman, ‘From custom to crime: The politics of drinking in colonial south Gujarat’, in: Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 4 (New Delhi: OUP, 1985), pp. 165–​228. 58 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘ “The drinking habits of our countrymen”: European alcohol consumption and colonial power in British India’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40 (3), 2012, pp. 383–​ 408; idem and Jana Tschurenev (eds.), The History of Alcohol and Drugs in South Asia: Intoxicating Affairs (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Robert Eric Colvard, ‘A world without drink: Temperance in modern India, 1880–​1940’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 2013); Nandini Bhattacharya, ‘The problem of alcohol in colonial India (c.1907–​1942)’, Studies in History, 33 (2), 2017, pp. 187–​212. 59 James Mills, ‘Decolonising drugs in Asia: The case of cocaine in colonial India’, Third World Quarterly, 39 (2), 2018, pp. 218–​31.

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Food and intoxicants in British India 60 J.F. Richards, ‘Indian empire and peasant production of opium in the nineteenth century’, MAS, 15 (1), 1981, pp. 59–​82; idem, ‘The opium industry in British India’, IESHR, 39 (2/​3), 2002, 149–​80; Amar Farooqui, Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the Politics of Opium (New Delhi: New Age International, 1998); Amar Farooqui, ‘Opium enterprise and colonial intervention in Malwa and western India, 1800–​1824’, IESHR, 32 (4), 1995, pp. 447–​73; Lizzie Collingham, The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food shaped the Modern World (London: Penguin Random House, 2017).

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32 LANGUAGES, LITERATURES, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE Hans Harder

Introduction This chapter looks at the manifold developments in the linguistic and literary domains of South Asia at the time of colonialism. The histories of languages and literatures are intricately interwoven with the emergence of new kinds of public spheres. The subcontinent, home to hundreds of languages, hosts at present some 30 major literary languages that are fully functional in literature, media, administration, and other major domains of public life. At the same time, English continues to play a very strong role in the public arena. As the following will show, this situation betrays much continuity with developments in colonial times, and, although the languages involved are much older, the various reshufflings that happened under colonial rule have definitely shaped the constellation. In a longue durée perspective, multilingualism was already a factor in the classical period, and it became more accentuated around the beginning of the second millennium AD with the onset of ‘vernacularisation’.1 It was the colonial nineteenth century and early twentieth that ushered in the decisive tendencies that led to the present, however: the standardisation and modernisation of a limited set of regional languages; English largely replacing earlier transregional languages such as Sanskrit and Persian; the onset of print; the concurrent emergence of new reading publics; and the widening of social and political concerns addressed in a rapidly expanding range of literary forms and formats. The focus of this chapter is on literature in relation to the development of public spheres, drawing examples from some, but not all, major modern South Asian languages.2 Rather than providing a strictly chronological account, I have chosen to present and discuss a few separate, but overlapping aspects regarding media, language, literature, and the newly emerging public spheres.

Literature of the colonial period, or colonial literature? A survey of linguistic and literary developments on the Indian subcontinent under British colonial rule requires some premeditation, since positing a clearly delineated colonial period, necessary though such periodisation may be, conceptually produces a ‘contemporaneousness of the uncontemporary’, to use Reinhart Koselleck’s term, and hides the great variance with which the colonial context sets in. Indeed, the tendencies just mentioned and the massive changes they brought to these fields made themselves felt very unevenly both chronologically 412

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and spatially. Some regions and metropolitan centres, such as Calcutta, Bombay, Poona, Madras, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Allahabad, and Benares, worked as motors and trend setters while others took much longer to assimilate the impulses emanating from these bridgeheads of modernity. Divides between different regions and administrative units, cities and villages, men and women, different generations and religious milieus, castes and classes mattered greatly and impacted on the velocity and nature of the changes. The presence of Europeans in the wake of Vasco da Gama’s landing at Calicut (1498) dates back to the early sixteenth century, but in the realms of language and literature the beginning of the colonial era is commonly set no earlier than 1800. For Bengali literature, and to some degree for Hindi and Urdu as well, that is an obvious date to choose. The establishment of Fort William College and the setting up of Serampore Mission Press in that very year are two key events, signalling a new recognition of regional languages by the British administration and the appropriation of print culture by vernacular authors.3 Of course, Christian missionaries had started much earlier to translate and distribute the Bible with the help of print,4 missionaries such as Roberto de Nobili (1577–​1657) in the seventeenth century and Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680–​1747) in the early eighteenth had used the Tamil language century for self-​authored Christian and satirical texts, colonial presences were registered in traditional compositions, and authors such as Urdu poet Nazir Akbarabadi (1740–​1830) had implied, in their laments at the decay of Islamicate rule in the north, the coming of new colonial powers. It was not before 1800 in Bengal, however, or subsequently in other regions, that the new linguistic and literary developments gained momentum and were greatly accelerated. Another issue to initially reflect upon is the putative ‘colonial’ character of these developments: is it justified to attribute certain new features and changes to the colonial situation? Or was colonialism a rather contingent outer frame with little influence on the dynamics of the linguistic and literary fields? Writings of the colonial period displayed a wide range of ways in which their production was linked to specifically colonial contexts, and reveal very different attitudes vis-​à-​vis the British. To avoid prejudicing these relations, I will generally refrain from the tag ‘colonial’ for the literature at hand.

New media, new public spheres The first printing presses had already been brought from Europe to Goa in the sixteenth century, but it was only in the nineteenth century that print really caught on. Starting in and around a few colonial centres, such as Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, printing in various regional languages of South Asia became a very strong factor. At first missionary printing presses held the scene, and the development of the first movable types for many South Asian languages took place in their ambiance. But gradually entrepreneurs –​often reformers, writers, journalists, and individual printers –​took advantage of the technology. On a subcontinental scale, this transition in writing practices took a fairly long time. Manuscript cultures, some of them highly developed, lingered on in many pockets. But print triggered a veritable explosion in written material of all kinds: books, periodicals, and pamphlets started to establish themselves with the public. One of the earliest examples of using print for disseminating reformist ideas was the Faraizi movement in Bengal, advocating a return to scripturalist Islam, albeit apparently devoid of any commercial interest in the new technology.5 In the further course of the nineteenth century, however, the commercial aspect made itself felt. Print capitalism firmly established itself, producing huge, influential publishing houses6 and effecting a certain homogenisation of the readership.7

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Although one can argue that, in some cases, the new writing industry virtually wrote its public into existence, it would be wrong to assume that the changes were basically media-​ driven. The process under way in the nineteenth century in languages such as Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, etc. was very multidimensional. A political vacuum of subcontinental dimensions had given way to the advancement of British domination. The growth of colonial cities and the confrontation with British military power, administration, and culture had started creating multiple ‘contact zones’,8 upsetting and reshaping precolonial social hierarchies, and unsettling, in particular, the position of many ashraf Muslims.9 The establishment of Western-​ style educative institutions increased the impact of European learning, sciences, and literature. Christian missions fuelled the renegotiation of religious traditions under way in Islamic and Hindu circles, and orientalism started opening up a new field of engagement with the past. In such circumstances of social instability, paired with new cultural vistas and economic opportunities, the emerging middle class proved a solid consumer base for printed books and periodicals.10 Print brought with it a set of practices that gradually but radically changed the character of literature. Whereas traditional scholarly, religious, and courtly domains had for centuries developed their scribal conventions and produced extremely large corpora of manuscripts, mostly in formalised high languages such as Sanskrit and Persian, the heritage of the regional languages was not as systematically scripted, and it also prominently contained orally transmitted traditions.11 Texts were generally publicly narrated, sung, recited, or performed rather than read in solitude. With typeset printing and lithography, the availability of written material increased dramatically and changed these reception patterns. A book reportedly passing through many hands –​which for the colonial period allows historians to calculate readerships more than ten times as numerous as the respective editions12 –​brought with it the sense of taking part in a new kind of reading community. In particular, the coming of the newspaper or periodical, with its creation of simultaneousness among an anonymous readership, deserves attention. In some pockets, of course, pre-​print patterns were preserved; and there were also cases in which the printed book replaced the manuscript while the etiquette and performances around it remained the same;13 but, in general, print and silent reading gradually displaced traditional modes of production and reception during the colonial era. We can thus state that the period from the early nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth covers the transition from pre-​print stages to a fully fledged print media landscape in many of the major languages.14

Reordering the language situation In a bird’s-​eye view, colonial rule did not radically alter the basic linguistic profile of the subcontinent as it had existed in the preceding centuries: multilingualism and diglossia had also been defining features beforehand, and so had literary bilingualism.15 Vernacular languages had been on the rise for many centuries, claiming parts of the literary sphere that had been dominated by Sanskrit (and partly Persian) for themselves, and thus, in Sheldon Pollock’s wording, destabilised the Sanskrit ‘cosmopolis’ of the first millennium AD.16 The introduction of English into this set-​up, arguably the most important change that came about, cannot facilely be equated with the British presence on the subcontinent. Right up to the end of the eighteenth century languages such as Portuguese and Persian (or pidgins developed on their basis) served British traders in their interactions. Only in the early nineteenth century did debates arise about whether education for Indians should use vernacular languages or English as its medium. The so-​called ‘orientalist’ faction, partly coterminous with the staff of the Fort William College and engaged in producing primers and reading material 414

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in languages such as Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu, argued for vernacular education, but ultimately had to give in to the ‘Anglicists’, advocates of English-​medium education, as far as higher education was concerned.17 Another outcome of this debate was the abolition of Persian as the official language of administration and the courts, and the introduction of English and Indian regional languages such as Urdu in its stead between 1832 and 1837.18 This did not hinder the parallel developments in many modern South Asian languages, however, in which the foundations were being laid for independent, print-​based public spheres to emerge. On this micro scale of the South Asian language situation at the time, heated activities in journalism, literary production, and the editing of pre-​print literary heritage, and somewhat later also academic and scientific writing, set in. Bengali and Marathi were the first languages to enter this process in the early decades of the nineteenth century, with many others, such as Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, etc., to follow. A common task of the early print pioneers in these languages was what one might term linguistic engineering –​i.e. to devise an idiom suited to the needs of communication in a changed colonial world. In Telugu, for instance, a prose close to the spoken language and fit for such purposes took a long time to emerge between the so-​called Karanam and pandit styles of writing.19 Marathi had in the times of the Peshwa rulers developed a tradition of prose writing it could build on, but precolonial Bengali had hardly any prose worth mentioning.20 The tasks at hand included adapting textual formats and structures, innovating a syntax suitable for prose, introducing punctuation, and, most importantly, finding/​inventing an appropriate vocabulary.21 Coining neologisms, often by exploiting the treasure houses of the classical languages, was the order of the day; in fact, explaining a coinage by placing a bracketed English term behind it has been common practice in many languages ever since these days of early print. The choices made by these print pioneers often had far-​reaching cultural and political consequences, particularly with multi-​scripted languages. The standard example, discussed in great detail by a number of scholars, is Hindi/​Urdu, which arguably still is, and in the early nineteenth century definitely was, one language written in two scripts, Devanagari and Nastaliq, a Persian variant of the Arabic script.22 Construing equations between Devanagari, Sanskrit, and Hindu, on the one hand, and Nastaliq, Persian/​Arabic, and Muslim, on the other, these pioneers and later language ideologists viewed Hindi and Urdu as community-​based variants, ultimately making them into two discrete languages whose mutual intelligibility is diminished in registers beyond colloquial speech.23 Those choices also decided the fate of varieties such as Braj and Avadhi that had earlier served as literary languages but now fell through the grid, lingering on as local idioms and carriers of a mostly fossilised heritage. Towards the end of the nineteenth century research on the histories and literatures of modern languages also gained momentum. The monumental Linguistic Survey of India (1894–​ 1928) under the direction of George Abraham Grierson (1851–​1941), funded by the colonial government and published in 11 volumes, furnished exhaustive descriptions of 364 languages and dialects, a number much smaller than what later estimations and surveys claim.24 Like his French predecessor Garcin de Tassy (1794–​1878),25 Grierson also helped initiate among orientalists the serious study of precolonial literature in modern languages,26 a trend that had many parallels in learned South Asian circles. Some spectacular discoveries were made around the turn of the century, such as the unearthing by Bengali philologist Haraprasad Shastri (1853–​ 1931) of the Caryāpadas, a collection of Tantric Buddhist songs composed between the tenth and twelfth centuries AD in what he saw as proto-​Bengali,27 or the uncovering of the Tamil Caṅkam corpus from the first to sixth centuries AD under Swaminatha Iyer (1855–​1942) and others.28 Attaining historical depth gave pedigree to the vernaculars, and was reflected in the literary histories of the regional languages that started to be written around that time. Another 415

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trend was the collection and scripturalisation of oral literature in collective efforts of literary fieldwork, thus further enriching the emerging vernacular canons.

Impact of English and European literature In all these developments, the role of English was very important. The statements by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–​59) in his Minute on Education of 1835, a benchmark for the history of English on the subcontinent and trigger for replacing Persian with English in the same year, are rightly chided for their undiluted cultural chauvinism. Macaulay famously claimed that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’.29 At the same time, however, it is clear that English was not simply thrust upon South Asians but was welcomed by many as a means to assimilate European culture, science, and –​not least –​literature. Indian proto-​nationalist Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–​31), betraying the poor state of general knowledge about the cultural traditions on the subcontinent, had deplored that literature did not thrive in India,30 and his pupils at Hindu College, founded in 1817 by local initiators in Calcutta in order to teach Western sciences and humanities, absorbed English literature frenetically. Institutionally, the reception of English literature revolved around the new British colleges attracting the middle classes aspiring to secure employment in the colonial administration, and the newly founded universities from 1856 onwards (Calcutta, Bombay, Madras).31 From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards English books loomed large in the markets and libraries of the urban centres, shaping the reading habits and tastes of the upper echelons of South Asian society. Writing in English also gained some ground among the educated elite. Dean Mahomed’s (1759–​1851) Travels of Dean Mahomed of 1794, regarded as the first book in English authored by a South Asian, is still an exceptional and rather isolated event.32 But Rammohan Roy’s (1772–​1833) English writings in the early nineteenth century led on to above-​mentioned Derozio, Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–​73), and Toru Dutt (1856–​ 77) and point to the development of a writing tradition in English, even though it was still very heterogenous. Michael Madhusudan Dutt was one of the famous examples of ‘serially bilingual’ writers in the nineteenth century who relinquished their English beginnings and shifted to Bengali as their medium of writing.33 A similar surge of translations of English works and original writings in English was under way in places such as Aligarh, Lahore, and Delhi, and institutions such as the Muhammedan Anglo-​Oriental College (renamed Aligarh Muslim University in 1920) and Delhi College.34 Although the emergence of a South Asian Anglophone literary sphere at that time was certainly significant, the impact that English literature and education had on developments in the modern South Asian languages was just as important. First, the spirit of reform that the confrontation with colonialism, religious proselytisation, Enlightenment thought, etc. had spread in the English medium caught on in the vernacular writings. Religious reform was one of the earliest issues that triggered tracts from exponents of the early reform body Brahmo Samaj, starting with its founder Rammohan Roy himself, and later Islamic reformist literature in Urdu, tracts of the Prarthana Samaj, Arya Samaj, etc.35 After the satī (self-​immolation of widows) debates and prohibition in the late 1820s, the ‘woman question’ came to dominate public controversies again from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Actively advocated by Christian missionaries and coupled with ideas of social progress, this debate went on for decades in the Bengali and Marathi press and, later, entered other vernacular spheres. The point is that these debates originated in the interface between English and vernacular spheres, with the former greatly influencing the latter.36 416

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Second, English acquired a model function for the English-​educated public. The sheer presence of English literature was impressive,37 and many were the adaptations and translations of English works in South Asian vernacular literature.38 In the second half of the nineteenth century English journalism and literature set the norms for many forward-​looking, ‘progressive’ middle-​class readers in the urban centres, and supplied the models for news reporting, satire, poetry, and fiction alike.

Genre turns and returns It would be easy to compile a long list of periodicals and works of the colonial period carrying equivalents of the adjective ‘new’ in their titles. Newness was both a common perception capturing the spirit of change under way, and an aspirational category signalling progress towards a better future. Indeed, there was much innovation in the literary sphere, and it found its most obvious expression in the way writers turned to new literary genres that were, for the most part, adaptations of English or European forms. The most important among these was the novel. English novels had found their way to English-​educated South Asian readers, and almost all major vernacular literatures started producing upanyāses, kādambarīs, or just novels, in the second half of the nineteenth century.39 In several cases the readers’ expectations actually preceded the authoring of the works. Writers such as Harinarayan Apte (Marathi, 1864–​1919), Samuel Vedanayakam Pillai (Tamil, 1826–​ 89), Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (Bengali, 1838–​94), Shrinivas Das (Hindi, 1850–​1907), and others thus did not act in the void when they started writing novels in their respective languages. The degree to which the genre was self-​consciously adopted also varied; thus, Nazir Ahmad (Urdu, 1836–​1912), though certainly inspired by the novel and acclaimed as one of the first Urdu novelists, preferred to refer to his works as qiṣṣah.40 Conversely, O. Chandumenon (1847–​99), known as the author of the Malayalam novel Indulekhā (1889), narrated in his foreword how he had read many English novels and had to retell and translate them for his friends. Growing tired of this, he decided ‘to write something like an English novel in Malayalam’.41 Although the early novels often openly proclaimed that they were a new way of narrating a story, the novel became a household genre in many South Asian languages in a very short time, and its most typical form of publication was serially in periodicals. In the years from their inception to the middle of the twentieth century there was a discernible shift from historical sujets and romances towards present social concerns.42 Other prose genres that started to thrive from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards in all the major languages were the travelogue and the (auto)biography. Both have recently found much attention in scholarship as types of ego documents that provide fascinating insights into the writers’ identity constructions and self-​positionings.43 Travelogues, in addition, allow us to glean colonial India and the Empire in terms of space making and mobility. For both genres, it is not entirely clear how new they were and whether or not they were adaptations from English models, since both have precedents in precolonial South Asian texts –​e.g. in pilgrimage accounts. When accounting for their proliferation in colonial times, however, it is impossible to deny a good amount of intertextuality between European biographical and travel literature and these South Asian texts. Another extremely successful new genre to be taken up and developed in many South Asian languages from the beginning of the twentieth century was the short story.44 Even more than the novel, the short story focused on contemporary social conditions and issues. Authors such as Rabindranath Tagore (1861–​1941) and Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay (1873–​1932) introduced the short story in Bengali fiction in the first decades of the twentieth century. Tamil 417

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writer Putumaippittan (1906–​48, lit. ‘Crazy for the new’) programmatically used the genre for propagating a new aesthetics of an unvarnished portrayal of social issues such as gender relations, caste, etc. Premchand (1880–​1936), towering figure of modern Hindi and, to some extent, Urdu literature, displayed a similar orientation in his massive output of short stories by the side of his novels. In poetry, the new developments throughout the colonial period were perhaps the most varied and difficult to summarise.45 Besides epic compositions in reformed versified diction and the adaptation of forms such as the sonnet in Bengali and other languages, it was the introduction of short lyrical forms and, in the twentieth century, free verse dissociated from song that appeared to be the most characteristic features (see below). Dramatic performances also changed greatly with the introduction of Western-​style proscenium theatre, which came to complement rural vernacular theatre forms such as tamāśā, nauṭaṅkī, yātrā, etc., and traditions of Sanskrit theatrical performance that had either lingered on or undergone processes of revitalisation –​e.g. kūṭiyāṭṭaṃ in Kerala. Last but not least, the coming of the (social-​reformist, literary, religious, philosophical, satirical, utopian, etc.) essay in all major South Asian languages also needs mentioning as one of the most widespread means of engaging in public debates and shaping public opinion. The urge for newness reflected in the adoption of such a range of new genres and formats did not preclude, however, that the manifold literary and public engagements at the time were projected as a reawakening, return, or renaissance. Terms such as maṟumalarcci (‘re-​ florescence’, Tamil), punarutthān (‘re-​r ise’, Bengali), navajāgaraṇ (‘new awakening’, Hindi), etc. indicate that the developments were cast in a narrative of recovery from a temporary state of decay and the reattainment of a lost state of cultural efflorescence. Such renaissance notions were most pronounced in the case of the Bengal Renaissance; they have been criticised and deconstructed, but they do tell us much about the self-​understanding at the time. For our topic at hand, such re-​rhetorics have some limited use insofar as the various innovations also involved (perceived or actual) returns to non-​colonial, classical, and popular literary forms. Manifold were the engagements with the epics Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata and mythology at large: translations and abridged versions loomed large on the market and represented, for instance, a considerable chunk of the Hindi and Urdu publications output of the Nawal Kishore Press, Lucknow.46 Additionally, the rewriting –​ or, rather, re-​encoding –​of mythological literature, known from colonial caste chronicles as well as colonial and postcolonial Dalit emancipation, was famously foreshadowed in Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Meghˡnādˡbadhˡkābya (1861), a Ramayana in which Lord Rama was portrayed as the villain and his antagonist Ravana as the tragic hero.47 Much carnivalesque literature, as, for instance, in the works of Hindi pioneer Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850–​85), used classical models such as the stuti (hymn of praise), śāstra (learned tract), or purāṇa for mock purposes;48 and mythological motives were extremely important for colonial proscenium theatre around and after the turn of the twentieth century, as well as for the beginnings of the film industry. Last, certain genres proved to be resilient, sticking to their poetic idioms and forms and still occasionally, or thoroughly, accommodating the social changes around them. Bengali Baul songs were a good example of a basically rural folk genre of a mystic community; and the Urdu ġazal and naẓm were perhaps the most impressive instances of very refined, urbane lyrical genres that did not succumb with Mirza Ghalib (1797–​1869), their most famous exponent in late Mughal/​early colonial nineteenth-​century Delhi, but widened their thematic reach.49 The ġazal, in particular, has had much impact on the songs in the Bombay film industry in colonial and also postcolonial times. 418

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New groups of authors and public spheres In general, we can say that the colonial period caused some reshuffling in the linguistic set-​up, social hierarchies, and gender and caste relations in South Asia. Partly as an effect of the nineteenth-​century debates about the ‘woman question’, one of the very significant developments of the colonial era was the emergence of women as writers and active players in the public sphere.50 In the 1860s Bāmābodhinī patrikā, the first Bengali women’s magazine, started to appear, initiated by members of the Brahmo Samaj, and it was soon followed by others. Initially these papers contained household advice, general knowledge items, and essays about women’s education, and were mostly written by men for women, but towards the end of the nineteenth century women’s original writings increased. In 1898 Antaḥpur started as the first periodical edited and written exclusively by women for women. Similar developments took place in Marathi, Hindi, and other languages. At the same time, some spectacular publications signalled that women were claiming their part in the public sphere. One was the 1889 Marathi travelogue of the United States by Pandita Ramabai (1858–​1922).51 Ramabai was a Christian convert, social reformer, and educationist who became an influential public figure in the United States and India, and her book testifies to her learnedness, inquisitiveness, and appreciative but critical mind. In Bengali, 1876 had seen the publication of Rassundari Debi’s (1810–​99) Āmār jīban (My Life), the first autobiography of an Indian woman. In the following years Svarnakumari Debi (1855–​1932) emerged as the first female Bengali novelist, Krishnabhabini Das (1862–​1919) authored a fascinating travelogue called Iṃlaṇḍe baṅgamahilā (A Bengali Woman in England, 1885), and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–​1932) came out as a strong voice for women’s education and emancipation. In the first decades of the twentieth century other women writers, such as Sarojini Naidu (1879–​1949) and Mahadevi Varma (1907–​87), emerged in the English and Hindi spheres, and women’s journalism in many languages developed, indicating two things at once: first, that a public sphere for educated women had indeed evolved; and, second, that women had gained increased recognition with the general, male-​dominated public.52 Like women, other social groups that had been underprivileged and marginalised also profited from the changes under colonial rule. Thus, the colonial era also saw the beginnings of low-​caste and Dalit self-​assertion, developments that would after independence lead to Dalit literature. Jyotirao Phule (1827–​90) fought in his Marathi writings for the social inclusion of low-​caste and Dalit groups,53 and Iyothee Thass (1845–​1914) agitated in Tamil for the abolition of untouchability and conversion to Buddhism,54 both foreshadowing Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1891–​1956).55 Whether British colonial rule in South Asia was in general beneficial for emancipatory movements and, if so, whether such benefits were intentional or not are vexed questions far too large to answer here, calling as they do for a very differentiated account. It is well established that British liberalism was practised more liberally at home than in the colonies, and the contradictions between high egalitarian principles and colonialist discrimination and racism were part of the nationalist criticism of the British. In many cases, progressive literary works, particularly dramas, were prescribed if they posed a threat to the colonial government. Nonetheless, it must be stated that the emergence of female public spheres and the presence of women in the general public benefited from the social upheavals that colonial rule had created, and so did anti-​caste movements, albeit both with only limited success.

From romanticism to realism If the story of literature under colonial rule can be told in terms of media, transfers, genres, and authors, broad literary movements are another means of making sense of the events of the 419

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period. Two international formations that held sway from the time when somewhat ‘thick’ literary scenes developed (the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth) in the various South Asian languages to the middle of the twentieth century were romanticism and realism. Of course, there was anything but a neat timeline of one preceding the other; both ran in parallel for many decades, and the transition was full of anachronic ruptures. On the whole, however, we can discern a tendency of realism gaining ground as we approach the middle of the twentieth century. Romanticism and realism are classifications originating in Europe that have no easy application to South Asian conditions, and are fully legitimate only when and in as far as European models did play a role at the time. But they do have some use in distinguishing literary orientations. Generalising broadly, the mode of romanticism was prone to engage with the past, mythology, romances, and local traditions. It had a strong focus on the aesthetic, on language and diction, somewhat in continuity to more traditional understandings of literature. Romanticism was also akin to religious experience; it was open to, or actively sought, the metaphysical and mystic. The mode of realism, by contrast, was more present-​driven and concerned with an inclusive social consciousness. One of its programmatic aims was to turn to the normal people, including the downtrodden, subaltern, and marginalised, and narrate their lives and experiences. Realism often went hand in hand with new ideas of progress aligned with leftist ideologies or Marxism, but also Gandhism. Two of the greatest authors of the twentieth century of the subcontinent, Rabindranath Tagore and Muhammad Iqbal (1877–​1938),56 had closer affinities to the romantic stream than the realist one. Tagore, the only Nobel laureate (1913) to date who wrote in a South Asian regional language, Bengali,57 always addressed present-​day concerns in his essays, literary prose, and satires, but the centre of gravity of his works, his poetry and songs, displayed strong mystic assonances synthesising a multitude of sources and lyrical idioms, among them many local Bengali ones. Iqbal, a multilingual author from Punjab who wrote in Persian, Urdu, English, and Punjabi, became a prominent spokesman of an essentialised East as opposed to the West. Hailed as the father of Pakistan, he used Sufi ideas and Nietzschean concepts for his poetic agenda of a moral and spiritual regeneration of the South Asian Muslims. Both gained iconic status during their lifetime, and, typically for icons, engendered their antitheses: a whole set of authors searching for new means of expression, closer touch with social realities, and more revolutionary agendas. The new orientation took shape, in Bengal, with authors such as Manik Bandyopadhyay (1908–​56), Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay (1898–​ 1971), and Nazrul Islam (1899–​1976) –​the latter, however, cutting across any neat opposition between romanticism and realism. In 1936 the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) was founded, and Premchand presided over the foundational meeting in Lucknow.58 The PWA was a collective of mostly Hindi-​, Urdu-​, and English-​language writers, among them Sajjad Zaheer (1899–​1973, Urdu) and Mulk Raj Anand (1905–​2004, English). Another very significant new foundation equally subscribing to a revolutionary agenda was the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA, 1943).59 Strong tones of anti-​colonial nationalism not only characterised the literature produced from these quarters but became a general tendency in various literatures and milieus during the final years of the Raj.

Résumé My account has sketched linguistic and literary developments during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth in colonial South Asia. In this period a number of modern literary languages and fully fledged public spheres emerged, one among them English, on the 420

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subcontinent. Thousands of periodicals and newspapers evolved and catered to growing reading publics. In general, colonial rule did not directly encourage the production of literature or the development of new public spheres among South Asians; rather, the contrary. But many of the innovations it helped spread, such as print, higher education, and exposure to European literature, proved decisive for the booming literary production of these years. Although English and European literature often served as a model in the nineteenth century, the rise of nationalism and the freedom struggle triggered much critical contestation of the British and of colonialism as such. Wrath occasionally also turned against the English medium, particularly following Gandhi.60 But postcolonial history has shown that the presence of English has remained a very stable given of the multilingual set-​up of South Asia.

Notes 1 See, for example, Sheldon Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan and vernacular in history’, Public Culture, 12 (3), 2000, pp. 591–​625. 2 Being a specialist first and foremost of Bengali literature, my perspective is considerably shaped by the situation of colonial Bengal. Given the topic, this is not disadvantageous, since Bengal’s centrality for colonial India is undisputed; but of course it is not sufficient. In my attempt to speak about the subcontinent at large, I have taken into account examples from Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. No doubt a recognition of, say, Gujarati, Sinhala, Sindhi, Nepali, or Asamiya would add much to the picture. This survey being what it is, however, a clear line of argument has been given precedence over exhaustive representation. For an attempt to narrate the story across a large number of language literatures of India, see Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature, vols. 8 & 9 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1991, 1995). A storehouse of information on nineteenth-​century formative phases in various South Asian languages is Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (eds.), India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). See also Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), a comprehensive whole-​scale assessment of a number of subcontinental literatures that, seminally, includes the colonial period. 3 Das, A History, vol. 8, takes 1800 as the beginning and quotes these two events as decisive. 4 For the following, see Vinay Dharwadker, ‘Print culture and literary markets in India’, in: Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 108–​33. 5 Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims 1871–​1906: A Quest for Identity (New Delhi: OUP, 1981), 39–​71. 6 Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007); Francis Robinson, ‘Technology and religious change: Islam and the impact of print’, Modern Asian Studies, 27 (1), 1993, pp. 229–​51. 7 On print capitalism and public spheres in general, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). For case studies from India on Marathi, Hindi, and Telugu, respectively, see Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and Public Spheres: Western India under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2002); Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere (1920–​1940): Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: OUP, 2002); and Rama Sundari Mantena, ‘Vernacular publics and political modernity: Language and progress in colonial south India’, Modern Asian Studies, 47 (5), 2013, pp. 1678–​705. 8 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. 9 Margrit Pernau, Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-​Century Delhi (New Delhi: OUP, 2013); Ulrike Stark ‘Letters beautiful and harmful: Print, education, and the issue of script in colonial north India’, Paedagogica Historica, 55 (6), 2019, pp. 829–​53. 10 Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–​1905 (New York: OUP, 2006); Francesca Orsini, Between Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009). 11 See Stuart Blackburn, ‘The burden of authenticity: Printed oral tales in Tamil literary history’, in: idem and Dalmia (eds.), India’s Literary History, pp. 119–​45, who makes a strong case for the important role of oral folk narratives in early Tamil print (and, by extension, elsewhere).

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Hans Harder 12 Writer Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in 1878 estimated a circulation of 200 to 500 copies to reach 5,000 to 7,000 readers. Baṅkimˡcandra Caṭṭopādhyāẏ, ‘Lokˡśikṣā’, in: idem (ed.), Baṅkim Racanābalī, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Sāhitya Saṃsad, 1990), pp. 376–​7. 13 This is particularly obvious in the treatment of religious books, such as the Quran or, even more spectacularly, the Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikhs. See Pashaura Singh, ‘Scripture as guru in the Sikh tradition’, Religion Compass, 2 (4), 2008, pp. 659–​73. 14 Francesca Orsini, The History of the Book in South Asia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 15 For instance, Amir Khusrau (1253–​1325, Persian and Hindavi); Ramananda (fourteenth–​fifteenth centuries, Sanskrit and Hindi); Krishnadas Kabiraj (1496–​1588, Bengali and Sanskrit). 16 For the transregional Sanskrit and Persian public spheres, see Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006); and Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–​1765 (London: Allen Lane, 2018), esp. 10–​18. 17 Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (eds.), The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist–​Anglicist Controversy, 1781–​1843 (Richmond: Curzon, 1999). For an older account, see David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–​ 1835 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969). 18 Christopher King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (New Delhi: OUP, 1999), 54–​6. 19 Velcheru Narayana Rao, ‘Print and prose’, in: idem, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–​1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 146–​63. 20 Anisuzzaman , Purano bāṃlā gadya (Kalˡkātā: Ekuśe, 1984). 21 See, for example, Javed Majeed, ‘Modernity’s script and a Tom Thumb performance: English linguistic modernity and Persian/​Urdu lexicography in nineteenth-​century India’, in: Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher (eds.), Trans-​colonial Modernities in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 95–​115. 22 Carmen Brandt, ‘Scriptal pluricentricity: Hindi–​Urdu’, in: Daniel Bunčić, Sandra L. Lippert, and Achim Rabus (eds.), Biscriptality: A Sociolinguistic Typology (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), pp. 149–​58. 23 King, One Language, Two Scripts; Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (London: Sangam, 2007); Madhumita Lahiri, ‘An idiom for India’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 18 (1), 2016, pp. 60–​85. 24 Javed Majeed, Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (New York: Routledge, 2019); idem, Nation and Region in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (New York: Routledge, 2019). 25 Joseph Garcin de Tassy, La langue et la littérature hindoustanies de 1850–​1869: Discours d’ouverture du cours d’Hindoustani (Paris: Librairie Orientale de Maisonneuve, 1874). 26 Francesca Orsini, ‘Present absence: Book circulation, Indian vernaculars and world literature in the nineteenth century’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 22 (3) 2020, pp. 310–​28. 27 See Sukumār Sen, Bāṅgālā sāhityer itihās, vol. 1 (Kalˡkātā: Ānanda, 1990), 54ff. 28 See Kamil Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan: On Tamil Literature of South India (Leiden: Brill, 1973). 29 See Zastoupil and Moir, The Great Indian Education Debate, 165. 30 For a discussion, see Hans Harder, ‘Introduction’, in: idem (ed.), Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of Modern Indian Languages (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2011), pp. 1–​18, 9. 31 See also Michael Philipp Brunner’s chapter in this volume. 32 Michael H. Fischer (ed.), The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-​Century Journey through India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 33 On literary engagements between and across English and Bengali, see Rosinka Chaudhuri, Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2012). 34 Margrit Pernau, Bürger mit Turban: Muslime in Delhi im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008). 35 See also Kenneth W. Jones (ed.), Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992). 36 See also J. Barton Scott and Brannon D. Ingram, ‘What is a public? Notes from South Asia’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38(3), 2015, pp. 357–​70. 37 Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

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Languages, literatures, the public sphere 38 See Poonam Trivedi, India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 39 For the following, see also T.W. Clark (ed.), The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960); Meenakshi Mukherjee (ed.), Early Novels in India (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002); and Vasudha Dalmia, ‘A novel moment in Hindi: Pariksha Guru’, in: idem (ed.), Hindu Pasts (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017), pp. 231–​50. 40 Christina Oesterheld, ‘Entertainment and reform: Urdu narrative genres in the nineteenth century’, in: Blackburn and Dalmia, India’s Literary History, pp. 167–​212, 192. 41 O. Chandumenon, Indulekha, trans. Anitha Devasia (New Delhi: OUP, 2005), 237. Also quoted and discussed at greater length in Hans Harder, ‘Migrant literary genres: Transcultural moments and scales of transculturality’, in: Laila Abu-​er-​Rub, Christiane Brosius, Sebastian Meurer, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, and Susan Richter (eds.), Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), pp. 185–​96, 190–​1. 42 Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (New Delhi: OUP, 1985). 43 David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn (eds.), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004); Siobhan Lambert-​Hurley, ‘Life/​history/​archive: Identifying autobiographical writing by Muslim women in South Asia’, Journal of Women’s History, 25 (2), 2013, pp. 61–​84; Shobhana Bhattacharji, Indian Travel Writing in India (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008); Pramod K. Nayyar, Indian Travel Writing 1830–​1947, vol. 5 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Simanti Sen, Travels to Europe: Self and Other in Bengali Travel Narratives, 1870–​1910 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2005). 44 For a detailed history of the short story in many Indian languages, see the section on the short story in K.M. George (ed.), Comparative Indian Literature, vol. 2 (Trichur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi, 1985), pp. 721–​837. 45 For a detailed account, again, see idem (ed.), Comparative Indian Literature, vol. 1 (Trichur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi, 1984), pp. 149–​472 (sections on traditional and modern poetry). 46 Stark, An Empire of Books; Akshay Mukul, Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2014). 47 Michael Madhusudan Dutt, The Slaying of Meghnad: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal, trans. Clinton Seely (Oxford: OUP, 2004). 48 Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhāratendu Hariśhchandra and Nineteenth-​ Century Banaras (New Delhi: OUP, 1997). 49 Jennifer Dubrow, Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018). 50 For women’s writing on the subcontinent in general, see the ground-​breaking anthology by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (eds.), Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present, vol. 2 (London: Pandora, 1991). 51 See the English translation and extensive introduction by Meera Kosambi: Pandita Ramabai, Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter: The Peoples of the United States (1889), trans. and ed. Meera Kosambi (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003). See also Shompa Lahiri’s chapter in this volume. 52 For women’s journalism in Hindi, see Shobhna Nijhawan, Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere (New Delhi: OUP, 2012). 53 Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict, and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-​Century Western India (Cambridge: CUP, 1985). 54 Gyana Aloysius, Dalit-​Subaltern Emergence in Religio-​Cultural Subjectivity: Iyothee Thassar and Emancipatory Buddhism (New Delhi: Critical Quest, 2004). 55 See Krishnamurthy Alamelu Geetha, ‘From Panchamars to Dalit’, Prose Studies, 33 (2), 2011, pp. 117–​31. 56 For two introductory biographies, see Uma Dasgupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (New Delhi: OUP, 2004); and Javed Majeed, Muhammad Iqbal: Islam Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2009). 57 Even though he received the prize for an English translation of Gitanjali (1912), a collection of poems, or, actually, songs. 58 Jennifer Dubrow, ‘The aesthetics of the fragment: Progressivism and literary modernism in the work of the All-​India Progressive Writers’ Association’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 55 (5), 2019, pp. 589–​601. 59 Nandi Bhatia, Acts of Authority/​Acts of Resistance: Theatre and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 76–​94; Prarthana Purkayastha, ‘Women in revolutionary theatre: IPTA, labor, and performance’, Asian Theatre Journal, 32 (2), 2015, pp. 518–​35. 60 Peter Brock, Mahatma Gandhi as a Linguistic Nationalist (Hong Kong: South Asia Publications, 1995).

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33 EMOTIONS, SENSES, AND THE PERCEPTION OF THE SELF Margrit Pernau

Introduction The last few decades have seen a tremendous expansion of the scope of historiography. Most aspects of life that were once deemed natural and hence universal, unchanging, and apart from history have been read for the way they have been created, perpetuated, and challenged by social conditions and cultural knowledge specific to certain local and temporal circumstances. This has brought forth histories of gender, of the body, and of the senses, histories of space and, more recently, of time, and histories of the environment, of oceans, rivers, weather, and climate. Emotions, too, which since the nineteenth century had come under the purview of psychology and medicine, were historicised. Not only did the rules applying to the display of emotions vary from one society to another, but also the knowledge about emotions, the language and concepts used for their interpretation, the emotional practices, and, finally, the ways in which emotions were experienced and felt, were shaped by society and culture and thus changed through history.1 This did not disrupt the link between emotions and the body but, rather, built upon the efforts to historicise the body: the body, which brought about the emotions and in turn was formed by them, was itself a body-​in-​history. Unlike the profound historicity of emotions, the second aspect of the history of emotions –​ the importance emotions have in history, their management, their disruptive power, their motivational force2 –​has been part and parcel of investigations in South Asian history on topics as diverse as the family, religion, nationalism, and violence for a long time. The rising number of publications explicitly devoted to emotions opens our gaze in a twofold manner. On the one hand, it allows for an increasing complexity and reflexivity in the categories we are researching.3 If older literature at times thought it sufficient to rely on common-​sense knowledge about emotions and how to detect their workings in the field and in texts, recent debates have brought about a refinement of our toolbox. Instead of assuming that we already know what love, anger, or fear are and that we can, therefore, use them to explain interactions and developments, the categories themselves have become open to enquiry. On the other hand, emotion studies constitute a new approach to questions that have already been on the table for a long time. Emotion studies do not constitute a counter-​programme to political and social history and to an anthropology sensitive to power structures, but can add to our understanding of how hierarchies are

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constituted, how power is created and used, how violence arises, and how social, political, and economic relations link up with a sense of self and identity. As a first step, this chapter looks at the locus classicus of emotion history, the civilising mission, central to the way the colonial power interpreted its own role in India from the 1830s. It then, secondly, moves to pre-​and paracolonial traditions in the conception and management of emotions, and brings out how they interwove with, but also resisted, the colonial programme. Finally, the third section looks at a counterpoint: the increasing emotionalisation of the private, and even more so of the political field since the late nineteenth century. The conclusion traces some suggestions as to how the discipline of emotions and the appreciation and cultivation of strong passions might be brought together.

Discipline them! The civilising mission Since the sixteenth century, travelogues and other reports of early colonialists, travellers, and missionaries have brought about an increasing awareness of social and cultural differences across the globe. Enlightenment philosophers mapped this spatial difference onto a timeline: in the course of history, every society proceeded through the same stages of development, from the savagery of the hunters and gatherers through different stages of barbarous kingdoms, based on agriculture, and finally to the civilisation of a ‘polite and commercial people’4. They started their history at different points in time, however, and progressed at different speeds. This interpretation allowed the creation of a hierarchy among societies based on their civilisational stage, which became the ideological basis for the creation of a global order in the nineteenth century. Where exactly a society was located on the timeline had profound political consequences.5 The stages of development were premised on a variety of categories: economic, social, and political. Civilisation came with trade and industry, with a vibrant civil society, in which citizens organised themselves, with a political order that guaranteed basic rights as well as rights of participation. At a deeper level, however, all these developments were premised on a specific way of managing emotions. Only people able to discipline their desires and not give in to every whim, the discourse went, were able to work hard and bring about economic progress; only people who managed their anger and did not turn to violence in order to resolve their conflicts could live without the Hobbesian strong state and solve their problems through the mechanisms of civil society; only they could be trusted with political rights. Attempts to place societies on the timeline of development and to diagnose how far they had progressed, therefore, always included and often gave pride of place to the habitual emotions and the practices they engendered –​‘character and manners’, in colonial parlance.6 Civilisation did not just happen but required an effort. Even though the aim was the autonomous individual living in a free society, so the basic premise of the liberal discourse went, at least the initial stages required a stern but benevolent guidance from the outside. For India, this position was slightly modified after the Revolt of 1857, which the conservatives argued showed where the overestimation of Indian society’s potential for civilisation could lead. But, in practice, the changes were much less significant, and efforts to transform the Indian character and manners went on. From the 1830s onwards, education was one of the central venues for imparting British norms and values, be it through missionary schools or through schools run by the state, in which English language and literature were to take over the role of the Bible in shaping the mental and emotional life of the students.7 The emotional ideal was never uniform, but three aspects remained relevant throughout the period of colonial rule. First, English education was

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to train the young student in rational thinking and thus help him (and, later, also her) to overcome his inherited superstitions. This in turn should lead to an autonomous subject who would be able to think calmly and make his own decisions, without being swayed by religious emotions, by fear, or by pious passions. Needless to say, Christianity, especially in its Protestant form, did not fall under the same category as Indian religions, but, on the contrary, was believed to further a rational approach to the world. Second, English education was considered the basis for political progress. Whereas oriental rulers were imagined as cruel and unable to bridle their sensuous passions, their subjects had become cowardly and unable to stand up for themselves. Civilisation, civil society, and civic rights required men with a different set of emotions: capable of disciplining their emotions and passions, not giving in either to anger or to greed or to uncontrolled desires, but courageous enough to stand up for what they considered right and just. Third, an English and Christian education was to inoculate emotions of true love towards children (avoiding both excessive harshness and spoiling them) and towards the legally wedded spouse in a monogamous marriage, as well as sympathy towards the poor –​but, again, a sympathy guided by reason, rather than a spontaneous overflowing of pity or the desire to fulfil religious obligations. Education was not the only way to promote civilised emotions, however. For the colonial thinkers, although emotions needed explicit teaching and training, changes in the social and material environment were just as important for making people think and feel in the required ways. If education was based on the assumption that knowing the good emotions would lead to their cultivation and to appropriate behaviour, here, the enforcement of practices came first, and the feelings would follow the doing. Law, John Stuart Mill maintained, was a civilising force of the first order. Learning to obey rational and impersonal rules instead of personal authority not only transformed subjects into potential citizens but created the emotional foundation for political progress.8 Economic transformations, especially factory work, were believed to be a great disciplining force, teaching labourers the value of time, eradicating laziness and the emotional universe that ranked around it, and imparting a work ethic.9 The last great transformative force that, the colonial power believed, would contribute to the adoption of a rational and disciplined mindset was the bureaucracy. What the factories did for the working class, naukri, work in the service of the state, mainly by clerks educated in the new English medium schools, did for the middle classes. Bureaucracy provided a world of rules and regulations, which effectively subordinated spontaneous emotions for those who staffed it,10 as well as for the many who were confronted with these new forms of government in their daily life.11 At no point did the colonial state rely only on these indirect and internalised ways of disciplining a potentially rebellious population. If the historiography of industrialisation draws on Karl Marx and the reinterpretation of his framework in the late twentieth century, notably by Subaltern Studies, and the historiography of the bureaucracy still shows traces of Max Weber, the idea about the colonial disciplining project takes its inspiration from Michel Foucault, notably his work on the prison, and extends it to the police and the army. Displaying, if not feeling, the right emotions was not just a pedagogical project but was enforced, if need be, by the military and through the carceral power of the colonial state.12 The success of the colonial civilising mission was to a large extent premised on its adoption and adaptation by important strands of the Indian middle classes. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, those who engaged with the paradigm rarely challenged its basic assumptions: the mapping of difference along a historical timeline and the need of every society to advance towards civilisation. What they did criticise was the place allocated to India within this global hierarchy. Various golden ages were brought forward as proof that India’s civilisational potential, which had already been realised in history, lay dormant now, and had 426

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to be reawakened.13 Often also the means employed by the colonial government to bring civilisation to India were questioned and alternative routes debated. But, whether it was through English medium education, which gave more importance to character formation than government schools;14 through vernacular education, held to have a deeper impact in shaping students’ morality; through voluntary associations; or through debating societies and other organisations taking up questions of public welfare,15 in their own self-​perception, too, the colonial subjects were to discipline their emotions if their motherland was to ascend the civilisational ladder and recover the international honour and recognition that were her due. This goal could be achieved only if everyone interiorised these goals and worked hard for them. Whether this work took the concrete shape of building up muscles to overcome the ascribed cowardice and effeminacy,16 the cultivation of a work ethic and punctuality, or continuous efforts to promote the education and welfare of the poorer strata of society mattered less than the way it brought forth disciplined emotions and displayed them to the world.

Balance them! The enduring legacy and the paracolonial Reflections on the colonial state and its impact have become more nuanced in recent years. Although no one would deny the profoundly transformative power of British rule, backed up by violence –​or at least its threat –​whenever needed, the colonial state was not a strong state.17 It neither had the resources to penetrate deeply into all aspects of Indian society and culture nor did it, until well into the twentieth century, aim at systematically controlling more than those areas crucial to the extraction of resources and the stability of its power. Outside these areas, developments operated through a slightly different logic. They were neither completely independent from colonial influences nor enforced by the colonial power to the same extent. Rather, they allowed a transformation that was premised to a greater extent on continuity and indigenous agency, if not a persistence of some aspects of precolonial knowledge systems and practices. For this, the concept of the paracolonial has been suggested.18 Medicine was a case in point. The colonial state exerted a tight control over every aspect that related to the health of the army (at least where medical supervision was at stake; the colonial state was less anxious as far as provisions and food were concerned).19 The lives of ordinary people, too, came into contact with the colonial medical apparatus, but only in times of epidemics.20 Other than this, Ayurveda and Unani medicine not only remained the basis for everyday health care but, more importantly for the investigation of emotions, provided the basic assumptions for thinking about the body, its place in the world, and its links to a moral cosmos.21 Ayurveda and Unani medicine had a shared history not only with each other but also with Greek medicine, which went back at least to the time of the Abbasid Empire.22 Neither medical system was timeless and unchanging, but what did change under colonialism was more an incorporation of new techniques and new materia medica than a reformulation of any foundational beliefs. Drawing on humoural pathology, Ayurveda and Unani medicine assumed that illness consisted of an imbalance in the bodily humours. Medical intervention aimed to restore a state of balance. This treatment was highly individualised. Neither the diagnosis nor the remedy was premised on a universalised body. This informed a classification of subjects into different character types, which found their innate balance at different points. But individualisation went even further, viewing bodies not as bounded but as permeated by their physical environment, the air and the water sustaining them, as well as by their social situation. Restoring health, therefore, also meant re-​establishing the harmony between the bodily micro-​cosmos and the macro-​cosmos.23 427

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Emotions were linked to the body in multiple ways. Some emotions resulted directly from an excess of some bodily fluid; melancholia, for instance, was provoked by an excess of black bile, whereas an excess of blood led to anger and, once this predominance had become permanent, to a choleric temper. If the disturbances led to serious illness, medication might be resorted to, but in many cases the balance, including the emotional balance, could be restored through a change of diet and bodily regime. In Ayurveda and Unani medicine, the body was always a body in context. Emotions were not (only) inside the body but also shared its permeability to outside influences. Feelings were conceived as relational. They moved between people and were highly infectious: one could catch a feeling in the same way that one caught a cold. This accorded a crucial importance to sociability in the emotional education and self-​education; no one could develop virtuous emotions as a solitary individual, but only through an interaction with those who aspired to and cultivated the same emotions and virtues. On the other hand, carelessness in the choice of friends, and hence an exposure to bad and morally reprehensible feelings, not only carried practical risks but also brought about an infection with the wrong emotions.24 Nevertheless, the bodily aspect of the emotions did not marginalise the role of the will. Virtuous emotions were also a question of will: of parental will in the early stages of life, but afterwards increasingly of the subject himself (for women, this autonomy was more contested). Moral education did not just mean acquiring knowledge about appropriate feelings but, rather, training the emotions through repetitive enactment until they became habitual and a part of the person’s character, even of his nature. At first sight, this might seem to lead back to the disciplining and self-​disciplining project, and, surely, the two became closely linked during the colonial period. There was a difference, however, in the conceptualisation of emotions, which persisted at least until the late nineteenth century: the ideal of balance and harmony implied that no emotions were, by themselves, either good or bad. An excess of anger, for instance, had to be avoided, as it could lead to violence and to a disruption of social relations. But its deficiency was just as harmful for society, as it led to cowardice, and thus to people no longer willing to protect justice and the common good, or even their own rights and honour. Generosity was a virtuous emotion, but its excess, wastefulness, had to be avoided no less than its absence, miserliness.25 Precolonial courtly society related to the ideal of balance and harmony in multiple ways (which is not to say that this ideal was ever achieved). The king was conceived as the linchpin, holding not only the forces of society but also the various factions in the court in balance –​a balance intimately linked with the idea of justice. This provided the framework for courtly life. Similar to the gardens of the king and the nobility, which transformed nature into works of art, taming but not destroying its vital forces, etiquette was also held to contribute to overcoming the raw and threatening nature of the courtier by trimming excesses and transforming it into a flowerbed. Portraits often show noblemen holding a sword in one hand, a symbol of their vigour, courage, and manliness. But, taken in isolation, these qualities were not enough. Therefore, in their other hand, they held a rose, a symbol of their softer emotions, of their appreciation for fine arts, of their devotion to their beloved, be it God, the ruler, or an earthly lover, and to their friends, and of their ability to be moved to compassion by the fate of those less fortunate than themselves.26 In this context, the control of the passions by the will mattered, but the fine arts, notably poetry and music, were just as important, allowing noblemen and courtiers to cultivate their finer feelings.27 The argument could be made that colonial rule in India went hand in hand with the wane of courtly culture and its replacement by the middle classes, more interested in projects of reform than in the inheritance of a courtly tradition that many viewed as decadent and as one of the 428

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reasons for the decline of Indian civilisation. The material basis for the courtly culture may have declined, and the cultural ideal of the leisurely stroll through the rose garden been replaced by the clarion call to hard work, punctuality, and thriftiness,28 but the position of traditional poetry and music was already more ambiguous, and Ayurveda and Unani medicine have kept much of their attraction until the present day. After the 1870s, the ideal of balance and harmony no longer occupied centre stage, but it never completely lost its appeal.

Arouse them! Passions and the fight for the future Control over the emotions, discipline, and the transformation of the social and material surroundings, which bring about the interiorisation of feeling rules, proved to be powerful elements in the master narratives of modernity and colonialism. A critique aimed at Norbert Elias no less than at Michel Foucault maintains that they tend to reduce earlier times to the other of modernity and paint them in an image of unbridled passions, which subjects were neither interested nor able to control, in order to bring out the changes of modernity more clearly. If modernity is discipline, then pre-​modernity has to be its absence, a narrative still distantly echoing that of the stages of development.29 The ideal of balance and harmony lost its overall hegemony around the 1870s. It was not replaced by discipline in an unequivocal way, however. As shown above, discipline was crucial for some institutions linked with colonial modernity: the factory, the bureaucracy, the military and carceral complex, and, to some extent, English medium schools. It is less helpful in explaining developments in other fields, such as the family and the community, and, above all, the religious and national mobilisation that characterised the twentieth century. It is to these phenomena that I now turn. The Scottish Enlightenment had already linked the stages of development to the prevalence of certain emotions, and central among them were the emotions towards women and the place accorded to them in society and, most of all, the development of tender spousal love.30 Although in India, for a variety of reasons, this did not challenge the arrangement of marriage by the family, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, companionate marriage became an ideal for the educated middle class. Marriage remained embedded in patriarchal structures, but the ‘new patriarchy’ placed importance on the development of a new dyad within the extended family, in which the spouses were bound by love.31 This not only allowed the display of emotions, considered modern and civilised, but also permitted young men to teach their wives to read and write and to gain influence in the women’s quarters, which were otherwise dominated by senior women who resisted the reformist agenda of these young men. Not a few of these younger women subscribed to this agenda of a love that was civilised and modern and offered them a path to education.32 In the course of the twentieth century, spousal love took up the passionate language formerly associated with poetry and courtesans. Whether the spouses fell in love before or after their wedding, marriage and family life were increasingly seen as founded upon strong feelings. The second field in which powerful emotions became crucial was that of philanthropy, which had a long tradition in the different Indian religions. The decline of royal and noble patronage meant that social and educational projects needed to rely on donations from a multitude of actors committed to their goals –​whether it be the many caste associations, which took care of widows and orphans, helped arrange dowry for poor girls, or set up schools to the larger institutions, such as the Aligarh College, the madrasa at Deoband, and the Benares Hindu University; or, slightly later, Gandhi’s fundraising campaigns for his multiple social initiatives.33 429

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Philanthropy points to the complexity of emotions in the public sphere. On the one hand, under colonial rule, it became increasingly geared towards efficiency. A perennial complaint of colonial officials during times of scarcity and famine related to the disorganised charity efforts of Indians, which, these officials thought, contributed to the misery by failing to encourage self-​help and hard work as a condition for succour. To this was added the competition between charitable causes for the meagre funds available, which led to many debates about the best way of allocating the money. On the other hand, the philanthropic discourse drew on compassion and sympathy, which were no longer perceived within the framework of balance but, rather, as burning passions. The new subject no longer resembled the image of the nobleman of old, who calmly gave out of the kindness of his heart, but was now depicted as alight with the fire of love for his compatriots and co-​religionists. Although the discipline of philanthropy and the passion of compassion might seem contradictory, in practice they were often shown as joining forces. The rationale for hard work and thriftiness was not to be a greed for wealth, nor even the advancement of one’s family in the world, but the possibility to help those in need; passions were the driving force of discipline, while at the same time providing the bond of love that held communities together.34 The third field, nationalist mobilisation, was tied to philanthropy, but went much beyond it. As the contemporary discourse did not tire of pointing out, the motherland and the religious community did not just need a donation of money but demanded the ardent devotion of their sons (and, increasingly, also their daughters, although strong passions in women remained something most men were at least ambivalent about). This love drew on a large variety of established languages and feelings: from family relations it took the image of the mother and the filial duty to protect her, as well as affection between brothers;35 from the ghazal came the figure of the beloved, whose demand for sacrifice was obeyed by the lover with a smile and without any desire for reward. This beloved was sometimes interpreted as God, adding yet another layer to nationalist emotions and opening them to the influence of religious affections, be it through the language of bhakti, of the various forms of Sufism, or of the commemoration of the Battle of Karbala, in which strong emotions had been valued and cultivated for a long time. Nationalism certainly cannot be interpreted without reference to colonial rule. But its relation to emotions points in a direction distinctly different from the discipline inoculated by the factory or the bureaucracy –​one from which the colonial state could ultimately hope to benefit. Nationalism as a global imagination, linking people with each other and with a territory, had taken root in dialogue with the knowledge transmitted through English. But, although Thomas Macaulay had once claimed that the day when India demanded British institutions and freedom would be the proudest day in British history, the sign that the civilising mission had been successfully completed,36 once nationalism did become a political force, it was quickly challenged by colonial rule, rather than working hand in hand with it. In its classical form, elaborated in the Enlightenment, the idea of the stages of development explained the contemporaneity of the non-​contemporaneous: how societies existing in the same present could embody different stages of historical time. Asia and Africa showed Europe its own past, while Europe (and, a little later, North America) showed the rest of the world its future. Reaching the higher stages of civilisation required an effort, it was said, but the future was secure; if India were to be guided by the colonial civilisation mission and worked hard, it would make it. This confidence in stable temporalities changed around the turn of the century. Although modern temporal imagination was said to be premised on linear development, the idea of circularity, of the rise and fall of empires, and the anxiety that even the empires of the present might one day, perhaps even soon, experience degeneration because of an excess of civility and fall from their position of power, came back with a vengeance. Instead of an orderly 430

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progress into the future, nations were now perceived as involved in a battle for survival. Notably, the works of Herbert Spencer became influential in India and in other colonies.37 The future was no longer a horizon of hope, the historical stage in which India would have recovered her due place among the civilised and powerful nations, but it became a focal point for anxiety. Success in securing a position among the leading nations was more important than ever, but, at the same time, the window of opportunity was narrowing. It was up to the present generation either to safeguard a place of honour and respect or, should they fail, to be damned and to damn their children and grandchildren and all generations after them to utter degradation and slavery. The crisis of the future was also a crisis of masculinity: only if men continued to embody true virility and if they shed their softer emotions that they shared with women and the nobility and went instead for fervour and full-​blooded passions, would they be able to gather the strength to save their nation and its future. This quest for passions went hand in hand with an increase in violence in the public sphere, notably in the numerous riots between religious groups. These clashes had multiple causes, both economic and political. Riots did not happen for rational reasons alone, however, or because people were manipulated, or because they were overwhelmed by their feelings against their better knowledge and intentions. Violence was also an indicator of a widespread desire to become a specific kind of person, a person who felt intensely and passionately and who desired to display these feelings, his hurt, and his finely geared sense of honour, which was the very precondition to experiencing such a hurt, before the state, before his adversaries, and before his peers.38 It was the very strength of their passions, bursting all the boundaries imposed by discipline, that was the nation’s ultimate hope for a rebirth and reawakening, as more and more journal and newspaper articles across the religious and political spectrum claimed.39

Epilogue At first sight, these findings seem to stand in contradiction to the most important movement in twentieth-​century India, Mohandas Gandhi’s campaigns of non-​violent non-​cooperation. The concept of satyagraha, ‘holding onto truth’, that he developed was intended not simply as an efficient political weapon but also as a means for transforming individual characters and, ultimately, the moral being of the entire nation. It was premised not only on avoiding violent actions, no matter what the provocation, but also on overcoming anger and other violent passions and desires, through a plethora of bodily techniques, rooted in ascetic traditions, from chastity to diet,40 and from prayer to self-​punishment for transgressions.41 Nevertheless, this very philosophy, its embodiment by the Mahatma, and the political mobilisation he was able to effect elicited strong emotions among his followers. This became obvious in the instances when the campaigns turned violent (which Gandhi attributed to a lack of training on the part of the protesters, relegating them to the margins), but more so in the feelings of love and devotion towards the motherland and the leaders of the national movement.42 The disciplining of some emotions thus went hand in hand with the attempt to raise other feelings to the burning passions that provided the motivation to face violence without retaliation and the readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice without hesitation. In Gandhi’s thought, non-​violence never meant a renunciation of virile emotions; he repeatedly stated that he would prefer violence to cowardice.43 Non-​violence thus never severed all links with the masculinist discourse of other movements happening simultaneously. Instead of writing the history of emotions under colonial rule exclusively as a history of the disciplining project, or exclusively as a replacement of this master narrative with a history of emotionalisation, it seems more interesting for future projects to look at their intertwining. The 431

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attempts at disciplining and self-​disciplining evoked strong emotions, not so much as a return of repressed feelings but, rather, because discipline itself –​in its colonial version encompassing the assurance of modernity and civilisation, and in its Gandhian avatar promising redemption and the new golden age of Ram Rajya –​became an object of desire. But the desire for strong feelings, too, could not do without discipline: the masculinist exuberance, the craved indomitable passions, did not just happen, but needed a carefully devised education, focused on a bodily regime, on muscle building, on training in the use of weapons, and on obedience. Subsuming both the control of the emotions and their exhortation under the concept of discipline, as is sometimes suggested, would obliterate the possibility of attending to the differences in what emotions could be and could do in different historical situations.

Notes 1 There are a number of excellent introductions to the history of emotions, although most of them focus exclusively on Europe and North America: Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2017); Susan Matt and Peter Stearns, Doing Emotions History (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Barbara Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017); Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). Several series devoted to the history of emotions exist: Ute Frevert and Thomas Dixon, Emotions in History (OUP); Peter Stearns and Susan Matt, History of Emotions (University of Illinois Press); William Reddy and David Lemmings, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions; Jan Plamper, History of Emotions and the Senses (CUP). There is also a journal on the history of emotions: Emotions: History, Culture, Society. 2 Ute Frevert has brought this together in the formula: emotions have history, emotions make history. See idem, ‘Was haben Gefühle in der Geschichte zu suchen?’ [‘What has history got to do with emotions?’], Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 35 (2), 2009, pp. 183–​208, 202. 3 Recent years have seen the publication of a number of collective volumes and special issues: Francesca Orsini (ed.), Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (Cambridge: CUP, 2006); Amélie Blom and Nicolas Jaoul (eds.), Outraged Communities: Comparative Perspectives on the Politicization of Emotions in South Asia, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2, 2018, doi: 10.4000/​samaj.234; Elisabeth Chatterjee, Sneha Krishnan, and Megan Eaton Robb (eds.), ‘The history of emotions in urban South Asia’, JAS, 27 (4), 2017; Margrit Pernau (ed.), ‘Feeling communities’, IESHR, 54 (1), 2017; Daud Ali and Emma Flatt (eds.), ‘Friendship in Indian history’, Studies in History, 33 (1), 2017; Imke Rajamani, Margrit Pernau, and Katherine Butler Schofield (eds.), Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2018); Amélie Blom and Stéphanie Tama Lama Reval (eds.), Emotions, Mobilizations and South Asian Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021); Margrit Pernau (ed.), Emotion Studies in South Asia [a double special issue of South Asia History and Culture, forthcoming]. These collections also provide a guide to the rapidly growing market for monographs and single articles on emotions and affects across the disciplines. 4 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–​1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 5 Margrit Pernau et al. (eds.), Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth-​ Century Asia and Europe (Oxford: OUP, 2015). 6 Ibid.; Harald Fischer-​Tiné and Michael Mann (eds.), Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London: Anthem Press, 2004). 7 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Satadru Sen, Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850–​1945 (London: Anthem Press, 2005); see also Michael Philipp Brunner’s chapter in this volume. 8 John Stuart Mill, ‘Civilization’, in: idem (ed.), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 28, Essays on Politics and Society, part I (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 117–​47. 9 E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, work-​ discipline and industrial capitalism’, Past & Present, 38 (1), 1967, pp. 56–​97. 10 Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 11 Sumit Sarkar, ‘Colonial times: Clocks and Kali-​yuga’, in: idem (ed.): Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 10–​37.

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Emotions, senses, perceptions of the self 12 Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 1998); Anand Yang, ‘The voice of colonial discipline and punishment: Knowledge, power and the penological discourse in early nineteenth century India’, Indo-​British Review, 21 (2), 1993, pp. 62–​72; Vinay Lal, ‘Everyday crime, native mendacity, and the cultural psychology of justice in colonial India’, Studies in History, 15, 1999, pp. 145–​55; Satadru Sen, Disciplined Natives: Race, Freedom and Confinement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2012); James Mills and Satadru Sen (eds.), Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-​Colonial India (London: Anthem Press, 2004); David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–​1947 (New Delhi: OUP, 1986). 13 For many others, see Subrata Dasgupta, The Bengal Renaissance: Identity and Creativity from Rammohan Roy to Rabindranath Tagore (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007). 14 Sudipa Topdar, ‘Knowledge and governance: Political socialization of the Indian child within colonial schooling and nationalist contestations in India (1870–​1925)’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2010). 15 Kavita Datla, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013); Carey Watt, Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association, and Citizenship (New Delhi: OUP, 2005); Franziska Roy, ‘International utopia and national discipline: Youth and volunteer movements in interwar South Asia’, in: Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah (eds.), The International Movement: South Asia, Worlds and World Views, 1917–​39 (New Delhi: Sage, 2015), pp. 150–​87; Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘ “The only hope for fallen India”: The Gurukul Kangri as an experiment in national education’, in: Georg Berkemer, Tilman Frasch, Hermann Kulke, and Jürgen Lütt (eds.), Explorations in the History of South Asia: A Volume in Honour of Dietmar Rothermund (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), pp. 277–​99. 16 Sikata Banerjee, Make Me a Man!: Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005). 17 Mark Condos, The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India (Cambridge: CUP 2017); Kama Maclean, ‘The art of panicking quietly: British expatriate responses to “terrorist outrages” in India, 1912–​33’, in: Harald Fischer-​Tiné (ed.), Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), pp. 135–​67. 18 A big thank you to Katherine Schofield, who brought this concept to my attention and who shared her unpublished work with me: Katherine Schofield, ‘Connected histories and synoptic methods: Music and colonial transitions in South and Southeast Asia’. The concept was first used by Stephanie Newell, ‘Paracolonial networks: Some speculations on local readerships in colonial West Africa’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 3 (3), 2001, pp. 33–​54. 19 Samiksha Sehrawat, ‘ “Prejudices clung to by the natives”: Ethnicity in the Indian Army and hospitals for sepoys, c.1870s–​1890s’, in: Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 151–​72. 20 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-​Century India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). 21 For the development of mixed forms of indigenous and ‘doctory’ medicine, see Projit Bihari Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine (London: Anthem Press, 2009). 22 Guy Attewell, ‘Islamic medicines: Perspectives on the Greek legacy in the history of Islamic medical traditions in West Africa’, in: Helaine Selin (ed.), Medicine across Cultures: History and Practice in Non-​ Western Culture (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2003), pp. 325–​51; Margrit Pernau, ‘The Indian body and Unani medicine: Body history as entangled history’, in: A. Michaels and C. Wulf (eds.), Images of the Body in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), pp. 97–​108. 23 Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–​1900 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007); Guy Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007). The historiography of Ayurveda has been more focused either on the ancient period or on phenomena of modernisation in the twentieth century; see Rachel Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern: Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India, 1900–​ 1955 (New York: Springer, 2013); Dagmar Wujastyk and Frederick M. Smith (eds.), Modern and Global Ayurveda: Pluralism and Paradigms (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013). 24 Margrit Pernau, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (New Delhi: OUP, 2019), pp. 20–​70. 25 Idem, ‘The virtuous individual and social reform: Debates among north Indian Urdu speakers’, in: Pernau et al., Civilizing Emotions, pp. 169–​87.

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Margrit Pernau 26 Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge: CUP, 2004); idem and Emma Flatt (eds.), Garden and Landscape Practices in Pre-​Colonial India: Histories from the Deccan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-​Persian State Secretary (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015); Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200–​1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). 27 Aditya Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–​1545, ed. Wendy Doniger (Oxford: OUP, 2012); Katherine Butler Brown, ‘If music be the food of love: Masculinity and eroticism in the Mughal “Mehfil” ’, in: Francesca Orsini (ed.), Love in South Asia: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), pp. 61–​87. 28 Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, ‘On time? Railway time and travel-​discipline in colonial India’, in: idem (ed.), Imperial Technology and ‘Native’ Agency (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 20–​40. 29 Rüdiger Schnell, Zivilisationsprozesse: Zu Erziehungsschriften in der Vormoderne (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004); Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Modernity: A problematic category in the history of emotions’, History and Theory, 53 (1), 2014, doi: 10.1111/​hith.10695. 30 John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, or, an Inquiry into the Circumstances which Give Rise to Influence and Authority the Different Members of Society, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1771, repr. 2006). 31 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 116–​57. 32 Judith Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned when Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Mytheli Srinivas, Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008). 33 Douglas E. Haynes, ‘From tribute to philanthropy: The politics of gift giving in a western Indian city’, JAS, 46 (2), 1987, pp. 339–​60; Malavika Kasturi, ‘All gifting is sacred: The Sanatana Dharma Sabha movement, civil society and the reform of Dana in late colonial India’, IESHR, 47 (1), 2010, pp. 107–​39; Prashant Kidambi, ‘From social reform to social service: Civic activism and the urban poor in colonial Bombay, c.1900–​1920’, in: Michael Mann and Carey Watt (eds.), Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Post-​Colonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development (London: Anthem Press, 2011), pp. 217–​38; Jesse S. Palsetia, ‘Merchant charity and public identity formation in colonial India: The case of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 40 (3), 2005, pp. 197–​217; Sumathi Ramaswami and Filippo Osella (eds.), Charity and Philanthropy in South Asia [special issue of MAS], 52 (1), 2018. 34 Margrit Pernau, ‘Love and compassion for the community: Emotions and practices among north Indian Muslims, c.1870–​1930’, IESHR, 54, 2017, pp. 21–​42. 35 For this translation of everyday emotions into nationalism, see Véronique Bénéï, Schooling the Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 36 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Government of India: A speech delivered in the House of Commons on the 10th of July 1833’, in The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, vol. IV, Lord Macaulay’s Speeches (London: Longmans, Green, 1880), available at https://​onlinebooks.library.upenn. edu/​webbin/​gutbook/​lookup?num=2170, accessed: 7 January 2020. 37 Shruti Kapila, ‘Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist thought and critiques of liberalism, 1890–​1920’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (1), 2007, pp. 109–​27. 38 Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-​Expression: The Urdu Middle-​Class Milieu in Mid-​Twentieth Century India and Pakistan (London: Routledge, 2006); for the legal framing of hurt sentiments, see Julia Stephens, ‘The politics of Muslim rage: Secular law and religious sentiment in late colonial India’, History Workshop Journal, 77 (1), 2013, pp. 45–​64. 39 Pernau, Emotions and Modernity. 40 Nico Slate, Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). 41 Joseph Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2000); Veena Howard, Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013); Peter van der Veer, ‘Pain and power: Reflections

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Emotions, senses, perceptions of the self on ascetic agency’, in: H.L. Seneviratne (ed.), The Anthropologist and the Native: Essays for Gananath Obeyesekere (London: Anthem Press 2011), pp. 203–​18. 42 Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur district, eastern UP, 1921–​2’, in: Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 3 (New Delhi: OUP, 1984), pp. 1–​61. 43 Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Uday Singh Mehta, ‘Gandhi and the common logic of war and peace’, Raritan, 30 (1), 2010, pp. 134–​56; Maria Misra, ‘Sergeant-​major Gandhi: Indian nationalism and nonviolent “martiality” ’, JAS, 73 (3), 2014, pp. 689–​709; Ajay Skaria, ‘Living by dying: Gandhi, satyagraha and the warrior’, in: Anand Pandian and Daud Ali (eds.), Ethical Life in South Asia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 211–​31.

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PART VI

Colonial South Asia in the World

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34 WOMEN, MIGRATION, AND TRAVEL FROM COLONIAL INDIA Shompa Lahiri

Introduction In the century from 1834 nearly 30 million Indians travelled overseas. The vast majority did not travel far, emigrating across the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean to the nearby British colonies of Burma, Malaya, and Ceylon, where only 6 million took up permanent settlement.1 British colonialism accelerated and enabled some existing forms of mobility, both within and outside India, for purposes of lifestyle (tribal), trade, religious pilgrimage, leisure, education, and employment, including seamen (lascars)2 and soldiers (sepoys). It also created new forms of mobility, specifically indentured labour, and provoked unexpected mobilities, such as the movement of anti-​colonial nationalists and pioneering social reformers.3 Thus, the relatively narrow concepts of migration, associated with settlement, and travel, suggesting impermanence, encapsulate a much broader and varied range of colonial Indian mobilities. By the end of the nineteenth century many Indians either had personal experience of life outside India or knew someone who had travelled abroad as a lascar, indentured labourer, Hajj pilgrim, sepoy, tourist, or student. Indian migrants and travellers who left India’s shores in the colonial period were differentiated by region, language, religion, caste, class, education, politics, and –​most importantly for the purposes of this c­ hapter –​gender. Although the vast majority of Indians who crossed the Kala Pani (black waters or oceans that separated India from the rest of the world) were men, women also experienced migration and travel, both within India –​where they moved to take up employment in Bombay textile mills, Bihar coal mines, Assam tea gardens, and Calcutta jute mills; on religious pilgrimages; to attend schools and colleges; for weddings, political meetings and holidays –​and outside India, campaigning for nationhood, female franchise, and social reform and participating in educational, leisured, religious, occupational, and artistic mobilities. Nevertheless, not all women who left India in the colonial period were captured within these categories, such as female convicts, who comprised 11.4 per cent of Indians transported to the penal colony of the Andaman Islands at its peak in the 1870s, gradually decreasing to under 1 per cent in the last decade of the colonial era.4 This chapter focuses on the neglected global movements of subaltern and elite colonial Indian women through various models of female migrancy, travel, and resistance, from coolie woman DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-35

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to Dark Princess, and builds on Crispin Bates’ call to abandon the polarities of freedom and un-​ freedom that have dominated colonial migration scholarship, in favour of a focus on creative agency that acknowledges the constraints, complexity, and diversity of gendered mobile lives.5

Labour migrations From the 1830s a system of indenture was instituted, whereby bonded Indian labourers were recruited to replace African slave labour and for railway construction across the British Empire, in the colonial plantation economies of the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, South and South-​East Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Although a 40 per cent quota of women was introduced in 1842, most colonies managed to achieve only a 20 to 30 per cent quota of female migrants. Female indentured labourers left India in order to escape famine, abusive families, widowhood, prostitution, domestic servitude, and violence, or, in the words of one coolie woman, incongruously named Maharani, ‘because I getting too much licks’.6 While many coolie women travelled with their families in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth the proportion of single women, particularly widows, had increased. An estimated two-​thirds of women left India without a male partner. Caste carried less weight outside India. Women were able to marry outside caste, which attracted a greater proportion of high-​caste widows, who were able to ignore the Hindu taboo on widow remarriage. The disruption of caste had a differentially negative impact on some male indentured labourers, who experienced loss of status and corresponding emasculation, which resulted in higher suicide rates in high-​ caste men than women, reversing the trend in India, where more women committed suicide than men.7 Some historians have claimed that indentured women were the victims of sexual and economic exploitation and domestic violence, known as the ‘sorry sister’ thesis of indenture.8 Many others have argued that migration was, to some extent, a liberating experience, although women were constrained in the choices they could make.9 Indentured women adopted covert resistance, including subterfuges, such as feigning sickness, absenteeism, and desertion, that manipulated indenture rather than dismantled it.10 Similarly, Arunima Datta has argued that coolie women, who constituted 30 to 40 per cent of the plantation workforce in Malaya, utilised ‘episodic and situational agency’ to further their interests when confronted by quotidian colonial and patriarchal oppression.11 Indentured women were also involved in more public collective forms of confrontation when they joined their husbands to protest about pay and conditions. Women were not just relegated to supporting roles during revolts, the archives show them taking up leadership positions as well, such as Salamea, who led an insurgency on a Bernice plantation in 1903.12 Although the coolie woman’s character and body were fixed by both Indian patriarchy and imperial racism, reflected in much lower rates of pay and resulting in economic dependence and legislation that limited their movements and confined them to the plantation, some women did seek legal redress from the colonial state in cases of domestic violence. An illiterate coolie woman named Baby was far from infantile when she took the initiative and petitioned the court in British Guiana for compensation on the grounds of assault, trespass, and police harassment. As Gaiutra Bahadur has argued, ‘She did not win the compensation petition, but was audacious enough to try.’13 The remarkable case of indentured woman Tulukanum, who in 1899 exploited legal uncertainty over polygamous marriage in Natal to successfully sue for nullification of her marriage on the grounds it was bigamous, in order to escape a bad marriage and win custody of her children (which would not have been possible in colonial India), reveals a knowledge of personal law and willingness to claim legal rights.14 440

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Like the coolie woman, another archetype of colonial female Indian subaltern migrancy, the ayah, who was employed by British families to care for British children when travelling by ship back and forth between India and Britain, also sought legal justice when faced with poor treatment from employers in the imperial metropolis. A significant proportion of ayahs also appear to have been widows, in line with indentured women. Unlike indentured women, however, who were bonded, unskilled labour, some hyper-​mobile ayahs enjoyed economic empowerment when they were able to negotiate comparatively high rates of pay for skills that were in demand.15 Surviving passports of ayahs issued in the 1930s by the India Office document their mobility and reveal their diversity, in terms of regional background, religion (including Muslims, Hindus, and Roman Catholics), and age, ranging from early 20s to 60s.16 Thus, the subaltern Indian woman, in contrast to her elite mobile sister, was seen but not heard when she was captured by the disciplinary photographic gaze of the imperial state –​although photographs taken of indentured women by the Colonial Immigration Department, decades after their arrival, do speak by countering the image of the impoverished female migrant through the jewellery adorning the women’s bodies.17 Like the passport photographs, they give a human face to the anonymised category of coolie woman and ayah.

Metropolitan encounters Ayahs were part of a steady stream of Indian women, including royalty, social reformers, travellers, and students, who visited the imperial metropolis from the late nineteenth century, after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which significantly reduced journey times between India and Britain. For the poet and Christian convert Toru Dutt, who arrived in nineteenth-​century Britain with her parents and sister in order to obtain higher education, travel to Europe was not just a means to acquire education, dictated by upper-​class/​-c​ aste and reformist affiliation; it also enabled her to appropriate aspects of European travel discourse, specifically romantic notions of selfhood, landscape, and the connection between freedom and physical mobility outside the home, including walking in the countryside. But not all Indian women travelling to the West in the nineteenth century deployed romantic European notions of travel as freedom. For Pandita Ramabai, travel was functional and at times restrictive.18 Pandita Ramabai was born in 1858 into an unconventional, reformist upper-​caste Hindu family from Maharashtra. Her early life was spent travelling throughout India on pilgrimage with her family until she was orphaned by famine. Ramabai then travelled to Calcutta with her only surviving sibling, and after public examination was conferred the title ‘Pandita’ (‘Scholar’). Following her brother’s death she married his friend in an inter-​caste wedding and gave birth to a daughter, only to be widowed shortly afterwards. Ramabai travelled to Britain to study medicine with the support of sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin (CSMV), but despite speedy baptism her relationship with the Anglican Church was acrimonious and characterised by doctrinaire disputes, stemming from Ramabai’s rejection of denominational Christianity and key areas of theology, including immaculate conception, resurrection, and the divinity of Christ. Following alienation from the Anglican Church, Ramabai became a student and teacher at Cheltenham Ladies’ College under the mentorship and guidance of Dorothea Beale. Ramabai rebelled at attempts to control her religious thought and freedom of action and movement, expressed defiantly in her letters to her spiritual mother, Sister Geraldine, although, as Gauri Viswanthan has argued, silence could be an equally powerful tool of resistance to doctrinal coercion for Ramabai.19 Ramabai resisted imperial power in Britain through heresy, 441

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which took many forms. Her heresy reflected not just her rejection of aspects of Anglican doctrine but a direct assault on British imperial rule, through her vociferous advocacy of self-​ determination, free will, and independence of action. Her disobedience to religious authority had a distinctly gendered dimension, expressed through her critique of both Hindu patriarchy (priesthood) in India and the male leadership of the Anglican Church in Britain, when she questioned if ‘Christianity was the teaching of Christ or a certain body of men’.20 To be a single woman was also a form of heresy, placing Ramabai beyond the control of male authority –​father, husband, kinsmen, and community. For many colonial Indian women migrants, travellers, and sojourners, widowhood represented an opportunity to break away from familial bonds of obligation, religious orthodoxy, and patriarchal control. These widows’ international mobility contrasted sharply with the traditional high-​caste Hindu widow’s immobility and domestication, confined within the walls of the women quarters or zenana. In her travelogue/​ethnography of American society The Peoples of the United States, published after her return from America in 1889, Ramabai was much less critical of the United States than her encounter with Britain. Ramabai’s admiration for America was underpinned by the support and sympathy she received from both the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (in contrast to the Anglican Church) and American feminists for the cause of Indian women’s emancipation during almost three years of travelling and lecturing across the country, in order to raise awareness and funds for a school for Hindu widows in western India. Meera Kosambi has argued that Ramabai reached outside white America by meeting Harriet Tubman, the African-​American activist, at her home in New York, who clearly made a positive impression on her, but this was not mentioned in her travelogue, where there is no reference to personal contacts and solidarities with ethnic minorities.21 Both the tone and content of Ramabai’s discussion of racial discrimination in America positioned her as a reluctant critic of the United States. Despite noticing evidence of the Jim Crow laws, specifically racial segregation in public spaces, Ramabai still clung to misplaced optimism when she wrote of favourable signs that obstacles to harmonious race relations would soon disappear. Although Ramabai acknowledged the poor treatment endured by Native Americans, imprisoned in reservations and at the mercy of corrupt agents, any sympathy was undercut by victim blaming, when she wrote of ignorance or predisposition as the cause of their plight.22 Ramabai’s ability to appreciate the reluctance of Chinese-​Americans to culturally assimilate conflicted with her call for Native Americans to follow the Cherokee and abandon, in the language of imperialism, ‘savage customs’ in order to achieve upliftment. Ramabai was blind to the structural origins of US racism, preferring instead to view it as a product of ignorance on the part of the ‘common people’. She was equally myopic concerning the clear parallels between the extent of racism in America and casteism in India. In contrast, she was able to see the hypocrisy of poor treatment towards humans, particularly women, when compared to animals in India and vice versa in America. Thus, although Ramabai resisted Hindu and Anglican patriarchy and disputed British imperial power at the heart of empire,23 her sojourn in America suggests that on the issue of race she was not immune to imperial rhetoric. Another Hindu widow, Parvati Athavale, followed in Ramabai’s footsteps when she sought to raise funds in America for the construction of a widow’s home. Whereas Ramabai was spirited in her opposition to spiritual, imperial, and gender subjugation in Britain, Athavale adopted subtle approaches to resisting religious conversion and diasporic patriarchy in early twentieth-​century America. Athavale did not openly oppose Indian student attempts to return her to India; instead, she employed ‘sly docility’, a gendered variant of Homi Bhabha’s sly civility, in order to remain in the United States. Athavale’s successfully masked her insubordination in a shroud of compliance when she wrote that ‘I go because I have promised … to do so, 442

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much against my will, but with the thought that I should meet his wishes’. Another example of her covert resistance was reflected in her skilful manipulation of American missionary attempts at conversion by responding: ‘Teach me English. I shall then be able to compare your religion with mine, and shall surely accept the religion that I think is true.’24 Thus, Athavale found it expedient to give the impression that she was open to conversion, in order to negotiate English language tuition. As a result, she was able to benefit linguistically from contact with missionaries without surrendering any of her religious autonomy.

Travellers and tourists Unlike high-​caste Hindu women, who faced religious sanctions on overseas travel in the nineteenth century, Muslim Indian women were encouraged to cross the Kala Pani, in order to undertake Hajj, pilgrimage to Mecca, the fifth pillar of Islam. Approximately 20 per cent of pilgrims participating in the Hajj from British India were women.25 The first woman to leave India for Hajj in 1575 was Gulbadan, the Mughal emperor Akbar’s aunt, followed nearly 300 years later by Sikander, begam of Bhopal, in 1863. The begam’s granddaughter, Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam Saheba also embarked on pilgrimage to Mecca, with a retinue of 1,000, in 1903. According to Zerin Alam, Muslim women’s travel narratives represented an alternative to more resistant anti-​colonial texts.26 Thus, although Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam Saheba was keen to represent herself as a good Muslim and loyal colonial subject in her travel writings, in sharp contrast Pandita Rambai’s metropolitan encounters with the West accentuated both her anti-​colonialism and iconoclasm. Both women travelled to promote social reform and advance the position of women. For the begam, encountering British women provoked not just admiration but caustic criticism of social customs, a duality apparent in other colonial Indian women’s travel writing.27 Pandita Ramabai, Parvati Athavale, Atiya Fyzee-​Rahamin, and Sikandar Begum of Bhopal were just a handful of a plethora of elite colonial Indian women who wrote travelogues in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, including Pothum Janakummah Ragaviah’s Pictures of England (1876) and Krishnabhabini Das’s Englande Banga Mahila (A Bengali Woman in England, 1885).28 But, unlike Ramabai and Athavale and the other indentured widows and ayahs discussed earlier, most of these women accompanied their husbands on trips abroad and therefore can be characterised as travelling wives, who, as Somdatta Mandal has shown, ‘shared a westernized education, some knowledge of English and a family background that was more or less affluent and cosmopolitan’.29 The travelogues may have differed in style and length, but most focused on domesticity rather than public life, including family, marriage, fashion, cuisine, and home interiors. Although it was unusual for middle-​class Indian women to venture beyond the women’s quarters and record their overseas travels, travel writing did enable women to gain entry into the public sphere and connect to circuits of colonial mobility and cosmopolitan modernity. Thus, colonial Indian women’s travel writing both reinforced and, simultaneously, disrupted Partha Chatterjee’s influential but contentious model of gendered spatial public–​private divide in colonial Bengal, ghare/​baire, or home and the world, by emphasising domesticity or ghare (home) as the spiritual female realm while simultaneously engaging with the public sphere or baire, the external materialist male domain.30 Similarly, although travel narratives appeared to have given a voice to colonial Indian women, travel could also, as Ashis Nandy has shown, silence the female colonial subject, evidenced by the frustration of Durgabati Ghose (daughter of pioneering Indian psychoanalyst Girindra Sekhar Bose) at her inability to challenge Sigmund Freud when she was questioned in London about her fear of dogs, recorded in her dairy: ‘I kept 443

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on thinking. If I could speak fluent English, I would ask Professor Freud, at least once, what his own love of dogs signified.’31 Limited scholarship has been devoted to Indian women nationalists and feminists, including Sarojini Naidu, Amrit Kaur, and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who forged alliances with international feminists in the interwar years, through their travels and conference attendance in Europe and around the globe.32 Indian women tourists, travelling as part of a group, have been further neglected. Consequently, Mrs C. Kuttan Nair’s unique first-​hand account of her participation in the 1935 Indian women’s tour of Europe is particularly valuable. Nair was one of Kerala’s first generation of feminists. Born in 1908 in Thrissur, a science graduate of Queen Mary College, Madras, she became a teacher and regular participant in the All India Women’s Conference and campaigned on issues of women’s education and birth control. While Nair sought to put Europe on display for an Indian readership through a multiplicity of tourist, gendered, colonial, and political optics, she soon discovered that she and her fellow tourists were the object of intense observation from Europeans. Thus, Indian woman tourists were positioned as both sightseers and sights to be seen, or, in Nair’s words, ‘walking zoos’.33 Indian women tourists’ ambivalent gaze enabled them to consume the sights of Europe while simultaneously being visually consumed by Europeans –​a recurrent theme in Indian women’s travelogues. Haripabha Takeda, who married a Japanese man and moved to her husband’s homeland from Dacca, caused a crowd to gather at a station to see her, the ‘Indojin’, a person of Indian origin. Shanta Devi attracted similar attention wearing a sari on public transport in Japan.34 The unrelenting scrutiny that Indian women tourists endured seems to have also been based not just on skin colour but on sartorial signifiers of difference, specifically the sari. Nair’s contemporary, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, reflecting upon her experiences during a visit to Europe and America in the 1930s, also wrote of how she was viewed as a clotheshorse rather than a politician. Pandit declined to dress up and be put on display, however. Indian women tourists also opposed the European gaze when they refused to conform and defied the tyranny of the press camera and its ability to control both gaze and gesture, not just by refusing to smile but by focusing their gaze away from the camera and disrupting lines of vision. It is in these glances that it is possible to glimpse spaces of resistance. The term ‘walking zoo’, coined by Nair, indicates the powerful legacy of the ethnographic gaze to visually objectify and racialise colonial subjects in Europe, at a time when ethnographic or ‘racial’ cinema was popular. It also raises questions about the extent to which it was possible for colonial Indian women tourists and travellers to resist scopic colonisation. Nair’s writings show that Indian women tourists were able to comment on European politics and society though the deployment of a critical and frequently ironic eye. The scrutiny to which Nair’s colonial body was subject did not pacify her or prevent her from returning the gaze.35

Revolutionary mobilities Just as Indian women travellers sought to deflect unwanted scrutiny, Indian male revolutionaries also attempted to evade the panoptical imperial gaze in interwar Europe and beyond. By adopting transformative strategies as an aid to mobility, male revolutionaries reinvented themselves through the use of aliases and new class, caste, ethnic, and religious identities in order to counter imperial travel restrictions and surveillance. Subhas Chandra Bose adopted several subterfuges, including acting as a mute Muslim Pathan and an Italian, Orlando Mazotta, in his epic journey across Europe and Asia during the Second World War. Less well documented are the lives of Indian anti-​ colonial revolutionaries such as M.N. Roy, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, and Udham Singh, who also used aliases and disguises. The careers of these 444

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Indian revolutionaries show how the ability to inhabit and pass through multiple bodies, identities, and transnational spaces was crucial to the maintenance of a revolutionary anti-​colonial movement in the diaspora. As Kris Manjapra has argued, M.N. Roy’s life ‘invokes the de-​ territorial register of anti-​colonial politics … lived through the political missions and interpretative actions of globally dispersed actors as they travelled’.36 The histories and geographies of Indian revolutionaries provide masculine accounts of global Indian mobilities and diasporic anti-​colonial networks.37 A feminine vision of Indian revolutionaries operating outside colonial India, however, can be found in the literary imagination of leading ‘Black Atlantic’ African-​American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, in the character of Princess Kautilya, maharani of Bwodpur, a fictitious Indian princely state and heroine of his romance Dark Princess, published in 1927. The character of the royal itinerant female revolutionary plotting the demise of the British Empire was allegedly based on an Indian delegate Du Bois had met at the first 1911 Universal Races Congress in London. The Harlem Renaissance novel focuses on the romance between an African-​American, Mathew Townes, and Princess Kautilya, who travels anonymously across India, Europe, and America, transforming from maharani to servant, tobacco hand, waitress, labour organiser, and mother. Although the character has been criticised as a ‘caricature of the orientalist imaginary’,38 Kautilya’s fictive global travels and labours do, at times, resonate with the lives and activities of real-​life colonial Indian women travelling outside India. Like Kautilya, Parvarti Athavale, mentioned earlier, was also a Hindu widow and worked as a domestic servant in America, and the maharani’s reference to serving with a Red Cross unit in Europe during the First World War links with Princess Sophia Duleep Singh’s stint nursing with the Red Cross in west London in the same period.39 Nevertheless, most elite Indian women who travelled overseas during the colonial period, including Sarojini Naidu, Rameshwari Nehru, and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, were involved in nationalist rather than revolutionary politics and came from middle-​class rather than aristocratic backgrounds, although there were exceptions, such as Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. Kautilya’s revolutionary Marxist politics and leadership position connected her more closely to Madame Cama, on whom it has been claimed she was modelled.40 Bhikaji Rustom Cama was the daughter of a Parsi lawyer and merchant, brought up in luxury in Bombay, until she left to seek medical treatment in London following famine relief work in western India, and later took up permanent residence in Paris as one of the few high-​profile Indian women in diasporic Indian revolutionary nationalist circles. In 1907 she attended the Internationalist Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, unfurled the precursor of the Indian flag, and called for an end to British rule in India, after which she embarked on a political tour of the United States, where she forged ties with Irish nationalists.41 Like Du Bois’s fictional creation, Cama was inspired by the Bolshevik revolution and Marxist ideology and tried to enlist the support of Egyptian, Turkish, and Persian anti-​colonial nationalists, in line with Du Bois’s imaginary ‘Council of the Darker Peoples’. Kautilya’s political awakening and radicalisation in Europe also resembled Suhasini Nambiar, whose revolutionary communism developed in interwar Berlin, a key location in Dark Princess, and at the Eastern University for Asian students in the Soviet Union.42 Kautilya’s trade union activities and leadership of a secret anti-​colonial revolutionary society can also be found in the popular Bengali novel written by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Pather Dabi (The Right of Way), which was published a year before Dark Princess, in 1926, in the character of a well-​ travelled revolutionary, Sumitra, daughter of a Indian father and Jewish mother, who organises Indian factory workers into strikes. But arguably the most revolutionary and radical feature of Dark Princess, both at the time of publication and today, is its depiction of Indo-​African-​ American solidarity through colour and oppression. Parallels can also be drawn between the 445

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eponymous dark princess’s affinity with African-​Americans and Suhasini’s Nambiar’s sister-​in-​ law Kamaladevi Chattopadhya’s identification as a ‘coloured woman’ during her travels across America.43 Nonetheless, Du Bois heroine’s fictional declassing, shedding her life of aristocratic privilege and status to join the working poor as servant, waitress, factory worker, and trade unionist, does not appear to be drawn from a real-​life contemporary –​or, at least, one that has come to light yet –​though it is important to note that Madame Cama did sacrifice the comfort and security of her affluent life in Bombay when she took up residence in Paris. Another area in which the novel appears to depart from reality is in its emphasis on the romantic potential of diasporic revolutionary anti-​colonialism to construct and maintain intimacies.44 Rather than bringing men and women together, as depicted in Dark Princess, the evidence suggests that, for many peripatetic Indian revolutionaries, political exile took its toll on personal relationships, both in India and overseas, mirroring instabilities under indenture highlighted earlier.45 For both Madame Cama and peasant Ghadar activist Gulab Kaur, separation from their husbands, who did not share their political views, was an essential precursor to involvement in diasporic anti-​colonial revolutionary politics. But, while Madame Cama has received limited attention from historians, in contrast, the role and gendered labour of subaltern colonised women such as Gulab Kaur has been absent from the historiography of the revolutionary anti-​colonial Ghadar movement, which was founded in 1913 in San Francisco and based in North America, but attracted affiliates from the global colonial Indian diaspora in South-​East Asia, Indo-​China, Western Europe, and Africa.46

Résumé In the age of empire, colonised Indian women undertook economic, political, cultural, social, spiritual, and personal journeys across the globe, and yet overseas colonial Indian women, particularly non-​elite female migrants, have remained hidden in official and private archives and frequently overlooked in the historiography of colonial South Asian diaspora, migration, travel, and anti-​colonial nationalism. Historians have paid greater attention to the way male Indian colonial migrants resisted imperial control outside colonial India than to the resistance strategies of women.47 In this chapter I have explored how Indian women attempted to resist imperial power outside the colony, manifest not just as violence and economic exploitation but as spiritual coercion and visual objectification, through multifarious strategies including seeking legal redress, heresy, and anti-​colonial revolutionary activism. Not only does a focus on colonial Indian female migration and travel challenge the masculine bias of existing scholarship, it also undermines traditional histories and geographies of empire, mobility, and gender by placing the Indian female colonial subject outside her putative habitat: colonial India. Thus, colonial Indian women may have been symbolically, but not always literally, confined within the patriarchal home and homeland. Ultimately, mobile Indian women reveal the significant opportunities and limitations for creative agency that migration, sojourn, and travel could offer during the colonial period.

Notes 1 Sunil S. Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), 18. 2 See Gopalan Balachandran, Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, 1870–​1945 (New Delhi: OUP, 2012). 3 Tony Ballantyne, ‘Mobility, empire, colonisation’, History Australia, 11 (2), 2014, pp. 7–​37, 26. Javed Majeed has argued that travel was central to the autobiographical projects of leading male Indian

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Women, migration, and travel nationalists Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Muhammad Iqbal: idem, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 4 Clare Anderson, ‘The British Empire, 1789–​1939’, in: idem (ed.), Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 211–​44. 5 Crispin Bates, ‘Some thoughts on the representation and misrepresentation of the colonial South Asian labour diaspora’, South Asian Studies, 33 (1), 2017, pp. 7–​22. 6 Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (London: Hurst, 2013), 49. I take the term ‘coolie woman’ from Gaiutra Bahadur’s attempt to recover the personal history of her great grandmother and connect the term to ‘coolitude’, originating from ‘Negritude’, and reclaim and subvert the word ‘coolie’, a pejorative ethnic slur. Ibid., xxi. Like Bahadur, Samia Khatun, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia (Oxford: OUP, 2018), also applies innovative methodologies and sources to the migration history of colonial and postcolonial South Asian women. 7 Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 39, 128. 8 Jo Beal, ‘Women under indenture in Natal’, in: Surendra Bhana (ed.), Essays on Indentured Indians in Natal (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1990), pp. 86–​116; Rhoda Reddock, ‘Freedom denied! Indian women and indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1854–​1917’, EPW, 20 (43), 1985, pp. 79–​87; Jeremy Poynting, ‘East Indian women in the Caribbean: Experience and voice’, in: David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (eds.), India in the Caribbean (London: Hansib Publishing, 1987), pp. 23–​61. 9 See Kalpana Hiralal, ‘Rebellious sisters: Indentured women and resistance in colonial Natal’, in: Maurits S. Hassankhan, Brij V. Lal, and Doug Munro (eds.), Resistance and Indian Indenture Experience: Comparative Perspectives (New Delhi: Manohar, 2014), pp. 241–​70; and Marina Carter, ‘Resistance and women migrants to Mauritius under the indenture system’, in: Hassankhan, Lal, and Munro, Resistance and Indian Indenture Experience, pp. 271–​92. 10 Indian male agricultural workers adopted similar strategies in America. See Shompa Lahiri, Indian Mobilities in the West: Gender, Performance, Embodiment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 46–​9. 11 Arunima Datta, ‘ “Immorality”, nationalism and the colonial state in British Malaya: Indian “coolie” women’s intimate lives as ideological battleground’, Women’s History Review, 25 (4), 2016, pp. 584–​601. 12 Prem Misir, ‘Introduction and overview: Indian indentured women as human agency’, in: idem (ed.), The Subaltern Indian Woman: Domination and Social Degradation (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 1–​46, 3–​4; Lomarsh Roopnarine, ‘East Indian women and leadership roles during indentured servitude in British Guiana 1838–​1920’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 16 (3), 2015, pp. 174–​85. 13 Bahadur, Coolie Woman, 98. 14 See Nasifa Essop Sheik, ‘Making the personal civil: The Protector’s Office and administration of Indian personal law in colonial Natal, 1872–​1907’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 23 (1), 2005, pp. 43–​71. 15 See Olivia Robinson, ‘Travelling ayahs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Global networks and the mobilization of agency’, History Workshop Journal, 86, 2018, pp. 44–​66. 16 See BL, IOR/​L/​PJ/​11. 17 See Marina Carter, ‘Representation and memorialization of the experiences of women in indenture’, in: S. Daithota Bhat (ed.), Diaspora Poetics and Homing in South Asian Women’s Writing: Beyond Trishanku (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), pp. 3–​16. 18 See Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996), 133–​78. 19 Gauri Viswanthan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 149. Silence was also one of many strategies adopted by Indian seamen to resist conversion in the imperial metropolis. See Shompa Lahiri, ‘Patterns of resistance: Indian seamen in imperial London’, in: Anne Kershen (ed.), Language, Labour, Migration (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 155–​78. 20 A.B. Shah, Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai (Bombay: Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture, 1977), 151. 21 Pandita Ramabai, Pandita Ramabai’s America Encounter: The Peoples of the United States (1889), trans., ed. Meera Kosambi (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 26. There is a much longer history of pioneering Indian women travelling to America for medical education and social reform in the nineteenth century, prior to the arrival of Ramabai, including Dr Anandibai Joshi, a kinswoman, whose graduation Ramabai attended in Philadelphia, and Dr Kadambini Ganguly from Bengal. 22 Ibid., 116.

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Shompa Lahiri 23 See Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and Colonial Encounter in Late-​Victorian Britain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 1, 3. 24 Parvati Athavale, My Story: The Autobiography of a Hindu Widow (London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930), 82, 108. See Lahiri, Indian Mobilities in the West, 34–​57. 25 Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 205. 26 Zerin Alam, ‘Travels of colonial Muslim women from India’, in: Somdatta Mandal (ed.), Journeys: Indian Travel Writing (New Delhi: Creative Books, 2013), pp. 231–​49, 233. 27 Siobhan Lambert-​Hurley, ‘Out of India: The journeys of the Begam of Bhopal, 1901–​1930’, Women’s Studies’ International Forum, 21 (3). 1998, pp. 263–​76; idem and Sunil Sharma (eds.), Atiyah’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2010), 139; Sunity Devi, The Autobiography of an Indian Princess (London: John Murray, 1912), 109. 28 See Michael Fisher, Shompa Lahiri, and Shinder Thandi, A South-​Asian History of Britain (Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007), 110. 29 Somdatta Mandal, ‘Mapping the female gaze: Women travel writing from colonial Bengal’, in: idem, Indian Travel Narratives, pp. 126–​51, 129. 30 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 120. 31 Durgabati Ghose, The Westward Traveller, trans. Somdatta Mandal (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010), xii, 73. 32 See Rosalind Parr, ‘Citizen of everywhere: Indian nationalist women and global public sphere 1900–​ 52’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018). 33 C. Kuttan Nair, A Peep at Europe (Palghat: Scholar Press, 1936), 90. 34 Hariprabha Takeda, Bongomohilar Japan Jatra [The Journey of a Bengali Woman to Japan] (Dhaka: Dhaka Uddharashram, 1915); Shanta Devi, ‘Japan Bhroman’ [‘Travels in Japan’], Prabasi, Bhadra 1345 BS (1938), pp. 683–​90. 35 Lahiri, Indian Mobilities in the West, 83–​114. Olive Christian Malvery provides another example of the colonial Indian woman’s capacity to manipulate and challenge the visual order beyond colonial India: ibid., 9–​32. 36 Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 184; Lahiri, Indian Mobilities in the West, 59–​82. 37 See Zaib un Nisa Aziz, ‘Passages from India: Indian anti-​colonial activism in exile 1905–​20’, Historical 21; and Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, ‘Indian nationalism and world Research, 90 (248), 2017, pp. 404–​ forces: Transnational and diasporic dimensions of the Indian freedom movement on the eve of the First World War’, Journal of Global History, 2 (3), 2007, pp. 325–​44. 38 Tamara Bhalla, ‘The true romance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess’, The Scholar and Feminist Online, 14 (3), 2018, http://​sfonline.barnard.edu/​feminist-​and-​queer-​afro-​asian-​formations/​the-​true-​romanceof-​w-​e-​b-​du-​boiss-​dark-​princess, accessed: 2 January 2019. 39 W.E.B Du Bois, Dark Princess: A Romance (New York: OUP, 2007), 169; Mrs St Nihal Singh, ‘War-​ work of Indians in Britain’, Modern Review, 26 (1), 1919, pp. 56–​62, 58–​9. 40 Homi K Bhabha, ‘The black savant and the dark princess’, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 50 (1/​2/​3), 2004, pp. 137–​55, 142–​3. 41 B.D. Yadav, Madam Cama: A True Nationalist (New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 1992). 42 See Ania Loomba, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism and Feminism in India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 244–​7; and Vappala Balachandran, A Life in Shadow: The Secret Story of ANC Nambiar: A Forgotten Anti-​Colonial Warrior (New Delhi: Lotus Collection, 2016), 90–​8, 100–​14. 43 See Nico Slate, ‘ “I am a colored woman”: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay in the United States, 1939–​ 1941’, Contemporary South Asia, 17 (1), 2009, pp. 7–​19. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was arguably the best-​travelled Indian women of the colonial era, circumnavigating the globe despite attempts by the British imperial authorities to restrict her movements. See Julie Laut, ‘ “Chasing me over globe”: Kamaladevi and the limits of imperial surveillance and passport controls, 1939–​41’, in: Ellen Carol Dubois and Vinay Lal (eds.), A Passionate Life: Writings by and on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2017), pp. 401–​23. 44 A notable exception was the close relationship that developed between Prem Sahgal, senior officer of the Indian National Army, and Lakshmi Swaminadhan, leader of Rani of Jhansi Regiment, the women’s wing of the Indian National Army, eventually culminating in marriage in 1947 –​though Lakshmi Swaminadhan told her daughter, Subhashini Ali, that ‘there was little time for romance’.

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Women, migration, and travel Subhashini Ali Sahgal, ‘A life in service: Subhashini Ali Sahgal on Lakshmi Sahgal’, in: Malvika Singh (ed.), Freeing the Spirit: The Iconic Women of Modern India (London: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 28–​46, 39; Peter Fay, The Forgotten Army: India’s Armed Struggle for Independence, 1842–​1945 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 45 Examples include M.N. Roy’s and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya’s troubled relationships with their American partners, Evelyn Trent and Agnes Smedley. See Kumari Jayawardena, The White Women’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule (London: Routledge, 1995), 229–​43. 46 See K.K. Singh, ‘Queering colonial power: Sikh resistance in the Ghadar movement’, Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 3 (4), 2017, pp. 268–​90. Arunima Datta has made a similar argument about the erasure of Tamil rubber plantation workers from the history of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, the female wing of the Indian National Army in South-​East Asia. Idem, ‘Social memory and Indian women from Malaya and Singapore in the Rani of Jhansi Regiment’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 88 (309), 2015, pp. 77–​103. 47 See Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee, South Asian Resistances in Britain 1858–​1947 (London: Continuum, 2012).

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35 DEBATES ON CITIZENSHIP IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA AND GLOBAL POLITICAL THOUGHT (c.1880–​1 950) Elena Valdameri

Introduction In the past 20 years new historiographical trends have emphasised the need to challenge the methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism that still play a significant role in framing historical research. This perspective has started to discredit Western diffusionist explanations that consider modernity as emerging in ‘the West’ and then being transferred to (or imitated in) the ‘rest’.1 Such a new paradigm has benefited intellectual history too, showing that the globalisation of ideas was the result of co-​production, exchanges, and interactions2 rather than a unidirectional flow from the former imperial centres to the colonised peripheries. Although Europe is still largely considered the place of origin of political ‘ideal types’, of universal categories of thought,3 the distance between Western and non-​Western political cultures has thus been reduced, essentialist interpretations unsettled, and notions of political thought become more and more pluralised.4 Adopting these new historiographical perspectives, this chapter provides a survey of the history of political thought in colonial South Asia, showing that this can be better appreciated if its ‘miscegenated diversity’ is acknowledged.5 In fact, in the Indian subcontinent too, political notions, concepts, and models were the outcome of complex processes of circulation, reinterpretation, selective adaptation, and subversion across geographical distances and beyond political and cultural boundaries.6 These operations began with the ‘hidden Indian enlightenments’7 –​ that is, with the formation of an Indian civil society and public sphere from the 1820s onwards, which fostered the circulation of ideas as well as the production and dissemination of new knowledge through the development of press and literature in English and in the vernaculars.8 In the effort to solve their problems qua colonised people and to understand and change the world around them, public men from the subcontinent selectively appropriated Western concepts and ideas that helped them rediscover, reassess, criticise, and reformulate their own cultural, social, and political imaginary. Western notions could alternatively represent normative ideals whose adoption was often seen as useful for catching up with an idealised West,9 or, conversely, for

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founding a new polity that was more just than the ones embodied by the Western nations, thus becoming ideological instruments of differentiation and resistance. The following discussion, although dealing mainly with the early phase of the anti-​colonial movement from the 1880s to the 1910s, goes on until the time soon after the attainment of independence in 1947, when the postcolonial actors were faced with new working realities. The decades under review represented a momentous period in the history of India, when intellectuals, reformers, and political activists, in dialogue with transnational discourses, elaborated different visions of the nation and attendant nationalist projects, debated about ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, discussed the role of the state and of civil society, and envisaged the duties and rights of citizens. The focus of this chapter is on some pathways into political ideas, concepts, and practices belonging to the domain of liberalism and concerned with providing conditions for political legitimacy and participation. For reasons of space, it will be impossible to give a comprehensive account of how anti-​colonial nation-​building projects and visions of citizenship were also informed by ideologies and concepts from other parts of the political spectrum. This choice entails the leaving out of influences and borrowings coming from left-​wing and fascist ideational systems, which, with their emphasis on community, proved no less important for Indian political circles, offering ideological reference points to envisage the nation and its specific political goals.10

Janus-​faced liberalism In colonial India, liberal ideas featured very prominently in the language and discourses of both the coloniser and the colonised. Positing a universally applicable idea of civilisation based on reason, individual freedom, and material progress, liberalism was inherently imperialist: through colonial expansion, ‘backward’ and ‘custom-​bound’ peoples such as Indians could be morally and materially ‘improved’. Imperialism, thus, was justified as a paternalistic pedagogical project that, forced upon diversity, could correct cultural ‘inferiority’ while gradually educating to freedom. In this way, and despite its abstract universal terminology, liberalism became benevolently authoritarian, temporising, and parochial –​in India, as well as in other colonies.11 This moral apologia of imperialism notwithstanding, liberal ideas were taken up by Indian intellectuals, social reformers, and political activists to formulate their criticism of empire. For them, British liberal ideals represented a ‘respectable’ and ready-​made ideological resource that in the West, from John Locke onwards, had been used to refute both the paternalistic and the despotic conception of sovereign power and therefore to curb abuses of power against citizens. This was undoubtedly an effective ammunition for shooting at the political inconsistency of the British rulers and a perfect language in which to frame discourses of political and civil rights. Overall, the attainment of political and civil liberties through political gradualism, the expansion of educational institutions, the critique of social mores, the reform of religion and the –​often overoptimistic –​faith in the inevitable moral and material progress of humankind remained important in the Indian liberal milieus. The distrust towards the masses and the fear of ‘mobocracy’, too –​though not exclusive to Indian liberals12 –​corroborated, more or less consciously, the ethos of the high castes, to which the national elite mostly belonged. Other important issues started being debated in India before appearing in liberal discourses in the West, however. In this respect, it is important to remember that Indian public men demanded state interventionism in the social and economic spheres in favour of greater equality as early as the 1880s –​something that contributed to sanitising liberal ideas from their excessive emphasis

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on ‘possessive individualism’.13 Another specific objective of Indian liberalism was to incorporate concepts of personal freedom and autonomy within the particular structures of cultural and religious communities.14 Secularism too acquired a different meaning in the Indian context, with the Indian National Congress stressing as early as 1887 the need on the part of the state to safeguard the balance between the different religious confessions –​a characteristic that, although not unproblematic and increasingly challenged by the recent rise of Hindu nationalist forces, has remained in place for several decades and continues to inform struggles for minority rights and pluralism.15 All this points to the history of liberalism as a transnational and heterogeneous one.16

Liberal nationalism between nation and empire Liberalism was important to give an explicit political thrust and ethical dimension to Indian nationalism. In fact, from an ideological point of view, the British liberal political tradition was instrumental in envisaging an inclusive idea of the nation formed by all the inhabitants of ‘British’ India and in formulating a concrete state project based on a constitutional political system, which would be gradually devolved to Indians. One of the main promoters of this liberal nationalism was Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–​1915), a central figure of the Indian National Congress and leader of the so-​called ‘moderates’ from the beginning of the twentieth century until his death. Gokhale was influenced by the discourse that emerged with the American and the French Revolutions: that, in order to be considered ‘legitimate’, a political community had to be a nation.17 His vision of the nation, which combined endogenous and exogenous elements of identity and belonging, aimed at de-​emphasising the ‘objective’ elements, such as race, caste, language, and religion, that divided the subcontinental population and that, according to the British, made India a geographical entity rather than a nation. Gokhale’s envisaged nation revolved around voluntarism –​that is, the individual will to become members of the national community and contribute to its welfare. Thus, national identity was, for Gokhale, to be built in the future, and liberal values were crucial for it: the liberal nation offered a freedom-​enabling context to the individual, provided that he was educated and politically empowered –​a fact that implied a certain degree of coercion and ‘othering’ of Indian practices seen as conflicting with modernity and freedom. The example of the Italian Risorgimento –​and Giuseppe Mazzini’s political ideas in particular18 –​became important reference points, given their accent on the subjective element. In Mazzini’s opinion, nationality was a common thought, a common aim, and a common principle; these, in his view, were the only essential elements to make a nation.19 Then, for Gokhale, as for other liberal nationalists, national consciousness had to be built thanks to a common project of moral and political regeneration.20 This implied that Gokhale never radically questioned the presence of the British. Conversely, the continuance of the British Raj, though progressively Indianised, would contribute –​through the institutions of the colonial state –​to keep together the nation, ultimately defined by the enjoyment of political, civil, and social rights, while religion, caste, and community divisions would become irrelevant under the wider national consciousness. The political, therefore, had to transform the social. In other words, the state had the pedagogical role to help individuals realise their political national identities.21 Another important aspect of liberal nationalism is that it often had a cosmopolitan dimension as a political project based on the recognition of multiple identities.22 If we momentarily keep our focus on Gokhale, we see that he imagined India’s future as part of the British Empire. Although this may appear paradoxical, the liberal politician did not condemn imperialism per

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se but its forms of discrimination. He considered the empire as the space where Indians could become free and enjoy the rights of imperial citizens, as per Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation, depicted as India’s ‘Magna Carta’ –​its bill of rights. The proclamation, from being an instrument of colonial power, was thus strategically transformed into a cornerstone to claim inclusion and political rights.23 Even Mohandas Gandhi (1896–​1948), during his South African sojourn (1893–​1914), upheld the ‘spiritual’ validity of the proclamation and believed in ideas of imperial brotherhood so much that he was in favour of taking up arms to support the British Empire in the South African War from 1899 to 1902 and against the Zulu uprising in 1906.24 Attaining imperial citizenship would help transcend the manifold religious and caste divisions while overcoming the status of ‘inferiority’ of colonised Indians and becoming ‘worthy of the self-​respect of civilised beings’.25 Attempts to fashion national identity while appealing to the awareness of the world as an interconnected place were elaborated not only in the British Empire but also in non-​British colonies.26 In colonial South Asia, the parable of the hopes in the recognition of political rights within the empire –​hopes further raised by the First World War allegiance and by the Wilsonian programme,27 and, significantly, shared even by former ‘extremists’ such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–​1920) and Lal Lajpat Rai (1865–​ 1928) –​started descending after the war. The disillusionment stemmed from the Paris Peace Conference and from the neglect of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points,28 making it clear that India would not be recompensed by the British for its war support with a government for and by Indians. In addition, efforts to legally establish a common imperial status were thwarted by the racial prejudices of the dominions against non-​whites. Srinivasa Sastri (1869–​1946), disciple of Gokhale and founder of the Indian Liberal Federation, expressed his bitter frustration at the 1921 Imperial Conference. He wondered whether, for the dominions, the British Empire was simply a ‘matter of convenience and trade connections’ or whether they grasped ‘a conception of it far greater and higher than any of those bonds implied’, in which case they had to admit Indians’ rights as equal citizens of empire.29 The quest for equal Indian citizenship within the empire demonstrates not only that the objectives, dreams, programmes, and ideals of Indian patriots could not always be inscribed in the ‘container nation’.30 Although easily dismissible ex post as naïve and impracticable diversions from the main road to full independence,31 these aspirations – whether the reality of the independent nation state was a necessary historical development or not – represented also a political choice that Indians had to initially experience before elaborating more revolutionary alternatives.32 At the same time, it is important to recall that liberal thought and rhetoric could fuel even more radical political visions, which acquired greater legitimacy by making reference to recognised English liberal thinkers. The nationalist and revolutionary Shyamji Krishnavarma (1857–​1930), for example, drew on the ideas of Herbert Spencer to further substantiate his disapproval of European imperialism and to justify the use of violent methods to overthrow it.33

Liberal nationalism versus cultural nationalism? If liberal/​universal nationalism is a political oxymoron or not has been a matter of ongoing debate.34 Certainly, in colonial India, especially from the first decade of the twentieth century, liberal views of the nation, with their sense of universal humanity, were fiercely attacked from several quarters. Radical figures such as Tilak and Aurobindo Gosh (1872–​1950) depicted liberalism as ‘un-​national’, as ineffective for practical action.35 Liberalism, in the views of cultural nationalists, was incompatible with the nationalist discourses that were gaining ground from the Swadeshi (of one’s own country) movement onwards and that were predicated on the essential

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difference between the East and the West and on India’s cultural superiority over ‘Western civilisation’. In order to be ‘true’, nationalism had to be theoretically committed to the significance of the particular and not seeking universal benevolence.36 So, liberal nationalism was criticised for not recognising the ‘power of tradition’, which would dissolve in a nation made up of an assemblage of individuals. Moreover, there was no need to build the nation in the future, as it already existed in Indian ancient political traditions, waiting to be revived. Postulating that Indian civilisation had endured intact through the ages, these national imaginaries, when translated into their more radical political projects, such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s (1883–​1966) Hindutva (Hinduness),37 ended up envisaging the nation in exclusive terms, to the detriment of the non-​Hindus inhabitants of the subcontinent. The ‘glorious’ past depicted as authentically Indian was, in fact, defined as Hindu in essence. Thus, since Hindu culture was presented as the only social and moral binding factor of the nation and described as pristine and permanent, the most logical consequence was an attitude of resistance against those influences coming from other cultures. In a reality as diverse as India, such a vision of the nation could not but lead, in addition to the obvious –​if often only discursive –​rejection of everything British, to the exclusion of the Muslim minority, who, in this nationalist discourse, were regarded as one of the historical agents that had greatly contributed to the contamination and decline of the ‘golden age’ of the Hindu people.38 Such ideas of the nation as a separate and compartmentalised unit were influenced by the ‘scientific’ theories of races as fixed, stable, and given entities that were circulated at the global level and exploited for political purposes.39 Cultural antitheses of Europe were also envisaged in supranational terms, for example, by contending Asia’s cultural uniqueness. Asianist discourses could be predicated on the orientalism-​ derived and well-​established myth of Asian spiritual superiority, as exemplified by the Japanese art historian Okakuro Kakuzo Tenshin (1863–​1913) in his Ideals of the East (1903), a work that became very popular among Indian intellectual elites.40 Pan-​Asian ideals were further spurred by the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, which also proved the material superiority of Asia. Japan, symbol of a new Asian power, was increasingly perceived in India as the potential liberator of the East.41 Despite the disillusionment provoked by the Far Eastern nation’s imperialist policies, Japan kept exerting a long-​term fascination over India as an influential alternative model of modernity.42 Later on, in the 1920s, a group of Bengali intellectuals, largely inspired by studies carried out in the French academia, popularised the theory of Asia as a geographical-​ cultural space that had India as its pivot and westernmost point.43 Combining elements of romantic nationalism with a scientific language, these Indian scholars promoted India as a supranational civilising force that, thanks to a benevolent colonisation eastward, had enriched Asia and made it flourish. The ‘Greater India’ theory –​now disproved –​was well received in various academic circles and political milieus not necessarily close to Hindu nationalism, and even today it resonates in the rhetoric of supremacist Hindu right-​wing organisations.44 Such Asianist discourses were often elaborated across transnational networks of intellectuals and politicians, who met and shared their views in urban centres across the globe. It is important to note that even those discourses that asserted India’s or Asia’s cultural distinctiveness and otherness to Western political forms engaged with global ideas.45 Just as they discovered their own ‘authentic’ intellectual traditions, their culturalism was open to ‘articulate a theoretical convergence with categories of European modern thought’.46 So, the disjunction between the ‘national’ and the ‘modern’, despite being ideologically necessary in sharpening a sense of cultural specificity in a context in which the advent of ‘modernity’ was considered the direct result of colonial domination, was never as clear-​cut as presented.47 Cultural nationalists turned to the past in order to accommodate their purported national 454

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communities with modernity.48 Similarly, those imagining the nation in more rational and political terms were not entirely immune to culturalist impulses, something that shows that the dichotomy between liberal and cultural nationalism is only conventional:49 on empirical grounds, all national movements tend to contain elements belonging to both the political and the cultural realm, albeit in different measure according to the ideological perspective undergirding them.50 Hence, despite looking at humanity as the space in which India should find its rightful place besides other free nations, liberal visions of the nation too presented some contradictions between the universal and the particular, taking into account the significance of cultural difference.51 This can be evinced, for example, by the emotional tones Gokhale used to describe Asia as a ‘special culture and civilisation’ vis-​à-​vis the imperial ‘West’52 or by the support that a champion of secularism such as Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–​1964) gave to the thesis of ‘Greater India’ as a Hindu and Buddhist ‘civilising force’ across large parts of Asia.53

Building the nation through active citizenship Another aspect worthy of consideration at this point is the new attention that was paid to organised philanthropy, social service, and active citizenship in the subcontinent from the early twentieth century onwards. This new interest, which was instrumental to counter the absence of a sympathetic and responsible state, can be better grasped if inserted in the broader global context. In fact, service for society became increasingly perceived in many parts of the world as a crucial instrument to enhance the well-​being and ‘efficiency’ of the nation through the ‘uplift’ of its citizens. Such a global phenomenon, profoundly influenced by eugenic ideas and by social Darwinist or Lamarckian thinking, was spurred by anxieties about race degeneration, which could be prevented by encouraging individual members of the nation to become ‘manly’, dynamic, and active citizens serving their own country. Resulting from a process of multi-​directional citations, in colonial India notions, discourses, and practices of social service and active citizen-making acquired specific characteristics.54 These activities, which in many ways resembled the colonial ‘civilising mission’,55 became prominent tools for activists in religious reform movements and for more secular political leaders and social reformers in order to present Indians as an autonomous and sovereign people.56 Aimed at bringing about a thorough transformation of Indian society, the various educational and political programmes sought to physically and morally ‘improve’ segments of the populace by spreading a sense of civic duty, an ethic of discipline, and ideals of social service and cooperation.57 As elsewhere, in India too, the growth of such mobilising initiatives contributed to the emergence of a rich panorama of associational cultures and organisational societies, which played an important role in the civil society and public sphere even after independence. In these settings, Hindu ‘living traditions’ such as seva (service), dana (charity), and sannyas (renunciation, asceticism), once negotiated with foreign ideas of social service, charity, and philanthropy and transferred in the worldly domain, adopted new meanings.58 These religious notions became central in making prudent participatory citizenship and social service naturalised as ‘Indian’ while, in many cases, presenting them as essential to create ethical alternatives to the materialistic individualism of the West. Moreover, they had a strategic value to mobilise the (upper-​ caste Hindu male) citizen to engage in activities to serve the larger community drawing on the familiar. This was true also for a nominally secular self-​help association such as the Servants of India Society, founded by Gokhale in 1905 to promote nation building through active citizenship. The members of the society had to be political sannyasi, living in poverty and dedicated to jan seva (public service). This shows not only that both religious indigenous traditions and social altruism had increasingly permeated Indian liberalism; more importantly, it reveals that even a 455

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‘modern’ and secular idea of the nation had to be transmitted and put into practice through the adoption of concepts belonging to Indian (Hindu) culture, transformed into more intelligible and culturally distinct political instruments. Thus, the rationality of a liberal conceptualisation of the nation had to be compensated for by invoking the religio-​spiritual domain and everyday political understandings.

Renunciation as participation Renunciation came to represent an important factor of Indian distinctiveness vis-​ à-​ vis the Western culture of acquisitiveness. Transferred from the religious domain, in which it entailed political indifference and the abandonment of material pursuits, renunciation became a politically relevant topos appropriated by different ideological fields –​from socialism to Gandhism –​and useful to define desireless and unattached ways of being modern and worldly.59 During the Swadeshi movement, from 1903 to 1908, which called for the boycott of British goods and for the promotion of India-​made ones, the renunciatory act acquired an economised connotation. Despite being a practice of consumption whose real end was national productivity,60 Swadeshi, with its moralising tones, embodied Hindu ideas of simplicity, purity, and poverty and appealed to renouncing wasteful expenditure, all in the name of the service of the nation.61 The Hinduised discourses of Swadeshi had as an unfortunate consequence the alienation of Muslim participation,62 while contributing to engendering normative and patriarchal views of Hindu women as virtuous and sacrificing representatives of the nation/​community.63 The predisposition to renounce worldly well-​being and personal desires for the sake of the common welfare was presented as a sign of Indian moral and cultural superiority over the colonial rulers. Renunciation was also used strategically, to counter those self-​serving imperial narratives that claimed, on the one hand, that love of country and patriotism were unknown phenomena in India and, on the other, that Indians had to be politically loyal and grateful towards British rule because of the material benefits it had generated.64 With the emergence of Gandhi as mass nationalist leader from the late 1910s, ideals of religious asceticism and poverty were all the more invoked as means of resistance and self-​ discipline. By gaining greater control over the self, each individual could increase his or her capacity to work for the national cause and to become one with others. In Gandhi’s view, these ideals were the appropriate cure urgently needed by the materialistic and decadent ‘Western civilisation’, whose failure to represent the highest aspirations of humanity had been once and for all exposed by the First World War. This kind of anti-​Westernism, which drew on arguments of European pessimistic intellectuals such as Max Nordau, Edward Carpenter, and Oswald Spengler, was a global phenomenon that informed several occidentalist discourses in many parts of the world.65 Gandhi wanted poverty, a widespread condition in colonial India, to become a cultural practice, a factor of national identity, and an individual expression of self-​realisation. Colonial rule was increasingly perceived as amoral and illegitimate not because it betrayed the liberal principles of formal equality –​as Gokhale and the liberals would say –​but as a by-​product of the greediness of European nations, which had to be replaced by a simpler yet more sustainable pre-​modern life.66 Thus, Gandhi’s ashram practices and satyagraha campaigns represented alternative modalities of inhabiting the political world through a critique of liberal modernity and the state.67 The reward for the sacrifice of renunciation, voluntary abnegation, and denial of the self was a higher notion of freedom unrestrained by ego and assertive pursuits and presented as already part and parcel of ‘Indian tradition’. 456

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The language of renunciation and poverty remained meaningful in independent India, albeit hijacked to comply with the values and needs of Nehruvian developmentalism. Until well into the 1960s the working poor, epitomised as morally and ethically upright, were in the official discourse ‘worthy’ Indians, contributing to the prosperity of the country. Industrialisation, productivity, and economic development became the new ‘lofty’ collective goals for which the individual citizen had to sacrifice, without necessarily having guarantees of benefits in return. In fact, only a small section of the workforce was entitled to welfare: protective social legislation, despite official declarations promising its extensions to the whole workforce, remained linked to a narrowly defined employment condition.68 This limited range of post-​independence social welfare can be better appreciated if we consider that social and economic rights, unlike political and civil rights, were not inserted among the fundamental rights of the Indian constitution. This is surprising, given that the 1950 constitution aimed at being transformative, linking freedom not only to political independence from colonial rule but also to the removal of social and economic inequality.69 All this notwithstanding, and in spite of the thorough engagement of Indian legislators, reformers, and union leaders with the global debates on welfarism and social policy, welfare entitlements were not made a universal right inherent in the status of citizen, but conditional on specific forms of employment. The result was thus a much narrower scope and execution of protective social legislation than, for example, the British one.70 As during the colonial period, then, the postcolonial state ended up relying largely on philanthropic benevolence and charity rather than bearing the legal obligation and moral responsibility for the economic and social well-​being of all its members.71 The discourse of charity as ‘voluntary sacrifice’ and renunciation as civic duty continued to compensate for –​and justify –​limited state intervention in social and economic fields. At the same time, the unfulfilled promises of social and economic equality have proved until today a lever used by a variety of social movements of the excluded.

Résumé The foregoing sketch has tried to show, in the first place, that political thought in colonial India was not the result of a process of mere imitation of Western models but, rather, the outcome of global historical developments that made possible the encounter of and exchanges between different intellectual and political traditions. The specificities and idiosyncrasies of Indian visions of liberalism, national imaginaries, and citizenship have to be understood within this context of complex transnational entanglements of ideological and socio-​cultural forces at play in the period under purview. The intriguing question, then, is perhaps not so much whether Indian political thought and visions were ‘authentic’ or ‘derivative’ as how and why political ideas became significant in the particular settings of modern India. The same questions seem pertinent for the reception of European ideas in general: why were they discussed at all and how were they used to reinvent alternative modernities and to dispute the legitimacy of colonial authority in creative ways? Second, this brief outline has further demonstrated that our understanding of postcolonial India can be enhanced by considering that Indian democracy and its political trajectories, far from being simply and necessarily the legacy of the institutions left by the British Raj, have been shaped by various, and often contrary, bodies of knowledge. Following the continuities and discontinuities of notions, epistemes, and practices of political agency, freedom, and belonging from the colonial past to the independent nation state can provide us with more nuanced explanations of today’s patterns of inclusion and exclusion and forms of equality and inequality. 457

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Notes 1 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–​1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 2 Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, ‘Approaches to global intellectual history’, in: idem (eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 3–​29, 5; Christopher A. Bayly, ‘European political thought and the wider world during the nineteenth century’, in: G. Stedman Jones and G. Claeys (eds.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-​Century Political Thought (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), pp. 835–​63. 3 For a recent example, see Timothy Garton-​Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World (London: Atlantic Books, 2016). 4 Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride, Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations (Oxford: OUP, 2011). 5 Dilip Menon, ‘Review of Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India’, H-​Asia, H-​Net Reviews, February 2015. 6 Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Afterword’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (1), 2007, pp. 163–​96. See also Gurpreet Mahajan, India: Political Ideas and the Making of a Democratic Discourse (London: Zed Books, 2013), esp. ch. 1, ‘Indian political theory: Beyond cultural essentialism’. 7 Christopher A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), pp. 35–​41. 8 Neelandri Bhattacharya, ‘Notes towards a conception of the colonial public’, in: R. Bhargava and H. Reifeld (eds.), Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship: Dialogues and Perceptions (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), pp. 130–​56. 9 Hagen Schulz-​Forberg, ‘Introduction: Global conceptual history: Promises and pitfalls of a new research agenda’, in: idem (ed.), A Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860–​1940 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), pp. 1–​24, 11–​14. 10 Among many others, see Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Introduction: The internationalism of the moment: South Asia and the contours of the interwar world’, in: idem (eds.), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views 1917–​1939 (New Delhi: Sage, 2015), pp. xi–​xli; Maria Framke, ‘International events, national policy: The 1930s in India as formative period for non-​alignment’, in: N. Miskovic, H. Fischer-​Tiné and N. Boskovska (eds.), Non-​Aligned Movement and the Cold War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 37–​56; Marzia Casolari, In the Shade of the Swastika: The Ambiguous Relationship between Indian Nationalism and Fascism (Bologna: I Libri di Emil, 2011); and Mario Prayer‚ ‘Creative India and the world: Bengali internationalism and Italy in the interwar period’, in: S. Bose and K. Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 236–​59. 11 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Barbara Arneil, ‘Liberal colonialism, domestic colonies and citizenship’, History of Political Thought, 33 (3), 2012, pp. 491–​523, 502–​5. 12 See, for example, on Gandhi, Ranajit Guha, ‘Discipline and mobilize’, in: P. Chatterjee and G. Pandey (eds.), Subaltern Studies, vol. 7, Writings on South Asian History and Society (New York: OUP, 1992), pp. 69–​120. 13 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, p. 23. 14 Ibid., 212. See also the concluding part in Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Limits of the Indian political imagination’, in: V.R. Mehta and T. Pantham (eds.), Political Ideas in Modern India: Thematic Explorations (New Delhi: Sage, 2006), pp. 437–​58, 455. 15 On secularism, see Jakob De Roover, Sarah Claerhout, and S.N. Balagangadhara, ‘Liberal political theory and the cultural migration of ideas: The case of secularism in India’, Political Theory, 39 (5), 2011, pp. 571–​99. 16 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, passim; see also Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014). 17 Liah Greenfeld, ‘Is modernity possible without nationalism?’, in: M. Seymour (ed.), The Fate of the Nation-​State (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2004), pp. 31–​51, 40. 18 Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Liberalism at large: Mazzini and nineteenth-​century Indian thought’, in: idem and E.F. Biagini (eds.), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism (1830–​ 1920) (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 355–​74; Enrico Fasana, ‘Deshabhakta: The leaders of the Italian

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Debates on citizenship independence movement in the eyes of Marathi nationalists’, Asian and African Studies, 3 (2), 1994, pp. 152–​75; Gita Srivastava, Mazzini and His Impact on the Indian National Movement (Allahabad: Chugh Publications, 1982). 19 Simon Levis Sullam, ‘The Moses of Italian unity: Mazzini and nationalism as political religion’, in: Bayly and Biagini, Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation, pp. 107–​24, 112, quoted from ‘ “Nationalité”: Quelques idées sur une constitution nationale’, La Jeune Suisse, 19, 23, 30 September 1831, in: Scritti Editi ed Inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, vol. 6 (Imola: Cooperativa Tipografico-​Editrice Paolo Galeati, 1909), p. 125. 20 For a perceptive discussion on the birth and evolution of the idea of the modern nation in India, see Michelguglielmo Torri, ‘Nazionalismo indiano e nazionalismo musulmano in India nell’era coloniale’, in: M. Mannini (ed.), Dietro la bandiera: Emancipazioni coloniali, identità nazionali, nazionalismi nell’età contemporanea (Pisa: Pacini editore, 1996), pp. 139–​99. 21 Elena Valdameri, ‘Gopal Krishna Gokhale: Nazione e impero tra “oriente” e “occidente” ’, in: M. Casolari and C. Tresso (eds.), Sguardi sull’Asia: Scritti in onore di Michelguglielmo Torri (Bologna: I Libri di Emil, 2017), pp. 101–​27, 106–​11. 22 This is one of the main ways cosmopolitanism has been understood by scholars. See, for example, Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, ‘Introduction: Conceiving cosmopolitanism’, in: idem (eds.), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice (Oxford: OUP, 2002), pp. 1–​22. 23 Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-​Victorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 23. 24 Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, ‘Empire’s soldier: Gandhi and Britain’s wars, 1899–​1918’, Journal for Contemporary History, 39, 2014, pp. 1–​14. It is noteworthy that Gandhi too was influenced by racial discourses in this phase of his political life, identifying Indians as ‘Aryan’ to stress their similarity to Europeans rather than to Africans; see Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-​Bearer of Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), pp. 45, 119. 25 Anon., ‘Gopal Krishna Gokhale and the struggle for Indians in South Africa’, The Leader, 19 December 1912. 26 See, for example, Frederick Cooper, Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Mark R. Frost, ‘ “Wider opportunities”: Religious revival, nationalist awakening and the global dimension in Colombo, 1870–​1920’, MAS, 36 (4), 2002, pp. 937–​67; Ulbe Bosma, ‘Citizens of empire: Some comparative observations on the evolution of Creole nationalism in colonial Indonesia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46 (4), 2004, pp. 656–​81; and Sam Erman, ‘Citizens of empire: Puerto Rico, status, and constitutional change’, Californian Law Review, 102 (5), 2014, pp. 1181–​241. 27 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-​Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: OUP, 2007). 28 Durba Ghosh, ‘Whither India? 1919 and the aftermath of the First World War’, JAS, 78 (2), 2019, pp. 389–​97. 29 Quoted in Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens, p. 24. 30 Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 148–​92. 31 Richard Drayton, ‘Federal utopias and the realities of imperial power’, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37 (2), 2017, pp. 401–​6. 32 Mark R. Frost, ‘Imperial citizenship or else: Liberal ideals and the India unmaking of empire, 1890–​ 1919’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46 (5), 2018, pp. 845–​73. 33 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology, and Anti-​ Imperialism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 126–​64. 34 For a helpful theoretical discussion, though not specifically on India, I suggest Andrew Vincent, ‘Liberal nationalism: An irresponsible compound?’, Political Studies, 45 (2), 1997, pp. 275–​95. On the debate going on in today’s India, in which liberals are often described as ‘anti-​national’ by supporters of Hindu nationalism, see Ashutosh Varshney, ‘Liberals and nationalism’, The Indian Express, 2018, 29 March, https://​indianexpress.com/​article/​opinion/​columns/​liberals-​and-​nationalism-​hindutva-​anti-​ national-​minority-​r ights-​5115119, accessed: 18 February 2020. 35 For Tilak’s critique of liberalism, see Shruti Kapila, ‘Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist thought and critiques of liberalism, 1890–​1920’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (1), 2007, pp. 116–​20. See also, passim, Parimala V. Rao, Foundations of Tilak’s Nationalism: Discrimination, Education and Hindutva (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010). For Bengali ‘indigenist’ nationalism, see Andrew Sartori, Bengal in

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Elena Valdameri Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 136–​75. 36 The distrust towards liberal nationalism is exemplified in a series of three editorials published in Tilak’s English newspaper The Mahratta in the issues of 18 and 25 July and 1 August 1909 under the title ‘Liberalism and nationalism’. 37 Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (New Delhi: Bharati Sahitya Sadan, 2005 [1923]). Hindutva became the ideology of the Hindu Mahasabha and Savarkar its president from 1937 to 1943. The Hindu Mahasabha, founded in 1915, aimed at safeguarding Hindu interests against Muslims, whom, in their views, were being favoured by the Indian National Congress policies. The Mahasabha has played a marginal role in independent India –​although it should be remembered that Gandhi was killed by one of its members –​whereas the Hindutva ideology, since the 1980s, has gained ground at the political and cultural level, becoming central in the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been the main rival party of the Indian National Congress for the past 30 years. 38 The dichotomous discourse of ‘us’ and ‘them’, emphasising the positive features of Hindus while denigrating Muslims as ‘others’ and a threat to Hindu values, is exemplified in Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1939). Golwalkar (1906–​73) was the ideologist and leader of the Hindu right-​wing paramilitary organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925. 39 Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘The idea of the Hindu race in the writings of Hindu nationalist ideologues in the 1920s and the 1930s: A concept between two cultures’, in: P. Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (New Delhi: OUP, 1995), pp. 327–​54. 40 Rustom Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (New Delhi: OUP, 2006). 41 On Pan-​Asianism and the importance of Japan for India, see Carolien Stolte, ‘Orienting India: Interwar internationalism in an Asian inflection, 1917–​ 1937’ (PhD thesis, University of Leiden, 2013); and T.R. Sareen, ‘India and the war’, in: R. Kowner (ed.), The Impact of the Russo-​Japanese War (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 239–​50. 42 Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, ‘Indian nationalism and the “world forces”: Transnational and diasporic dimensions of the Indian freedom movement on the eve of the First World War’, Journal of Global History, 2 (3), 2007, pp. 325–​44, esp. 336–​43. 43 Susan Bayly, ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indian visions of colonialism in the Indic mode’, MAS, 38 (3), 2004, pp. 703–​44. 44 Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and internationalism (ca.1905–​1940)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54 (1), 2012, pp. 65–​92. 45 See Mahajan, India: Political Ideas, pp. 56–​8. 46 Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, p. 232. 47 Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 176. 48 For a discussion on this topic, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 49 It was largely established by Hans Kohn’s works The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and States: The French and German Background (New York: Macmillan, 1960) and Prelude to Nation-​ Experience, 1789–​1815 (New York: Van Nostrand, 1967). 50 See, for a theoretical discussion, Taras Kuzio, ‘The myth of the civic state: A critical survey of Hans Kohn’s framework for understanding nationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25 (1), 2002, pp. 20–​39; for the postcolonial South Asian context, see Joya Chatterji, ‘South Asian histories of citizenship, 1946–​1970’, Historical Journal, 55 (4), 2012, pp. 1049–​71. 51 For a long-​term perspective on this, see Srirupa Roy, ‘ “A symbol of freedom”: The Indian flag and the transformations of nationalism, 1906–​2002’, JAS, 65 (3), 2006, pp. 495–​527. 52 See Gopal Krishna Gokhale, ‘East and West in India’, in: R.P. Patwardhan and D.V. Ambekar (eds.), Speeches and Writings of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, vol. 2, Political (Poona: Asia Publishing House, 1966), pp. 380–​8. The paper was presented at the Universal Races Congress in London in July 1911. 53 Stolte and Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Imagining Asia in India’, p. 87. 54 Carey Watt, Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association, and Citizenship in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2005). 55 Among others, see Sanjay Seth, ‘Nationalism, modernity, and the “woman question” in India and China’, JAS, 72 (2), 2013, pp. 273–​97; and Prashant Kidambi, ‘From “social reform” to “social service” ’, in: Carey Watt and Michael Mann (eds.), Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development (London: Anthem Press, 2011), pp. 217–​40.

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Debates on citizenship 56 It is important to note that this phenomenon was border crossing and involved several transnational actors, such as Christian missionaries, international non-​governmental organisations, and foundations, that could not be easily situated in the colonial or anti-​colonial field. See, for example, Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, ‘Fitness for modernity? The YMCA and physical-​education schemes in late-​colonial South Asia (circa 1900–​40),” MAS, 53 (2), 2019, pp. 512–​59. 57 For the gendered dimension of these citizenship discourses, see Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Historically speaking: Gender and citizenship in colonial India’, in: J. Butler and E. Weed (eds.), In Terms of Gender: Joan Scott’s Critical Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 80–​101; for a special focus on women, see Annie Devenish, Debating Women’s Citizenship in India, 1930–​1960 (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2019). 58 Watt, Serving the Nation, p. 18, passim. 59 Prathama Banerjee, ‘Between the political and the non-​political: The Vivekananda moment and a critique of the social in colonial Bengal, 1890s–​1910s’, Social History, 39 (3), 2014, pp. 324–​25. 60 Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 243–​4, 257–​8; Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, p. 168. 61 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Clothing the political Man: A reading of the use of khadi/​white in Indian public life’, Journal of Human Values, 5 (1), 1999, pp. 3–​13. It is worth noting that the Swadeshi movement had an internationalist dimension too. While seeking to assert cultural autonomy from the British Empire, it aimed also at establishing international affiliations in terms of knowledge production beyond the epistemic boundaries of the empire in order to advance the Indian nationalist cause: Kris Manjapra, ‘Knowledgeable internationalism and the Swadeshi movement, 1903–​1921’, EPW, 47 (42), 2012, pp. 53–​62. 62 Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–​1908 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010 [1973]), pp. 344–​94. 63 Charu Gupta, ‘ “Fashioning” Swadeshi: Clothing women in colonial north India’, EPW, 47 (42), 2012, pp. 76–​84. 64 Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2015), pp. 116–​18. 65 On the influence that the fin de siècle pessimism over civilisation and anxieties about human degeneration had on Gandhi, see Dilip Menon, ‘An eminent Victorian: Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and the crisis of liberal democracy in the nineteenth century’, History of the Present, 7 (1), 2017, pp. 33–​58. On globally circulating visions of anti-​Westernism, see Çemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-​Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-​Islamic and Pan-​Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 66 Manfred B. Steger, ‘Searching for Satya through Ahimsa: Gandhi’s challenge to Western discourses of power’, Constellations, 13 (3), 2006, pp. 332–​53. 67 Ajay Skaria, ‘Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the question of the ashram’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101 (4), 2020, pp. 955–​86. 68 Ravi Ahuja, ‘A Beveridge Plan for India? Social insurance and the making of the “formal sector” ’, International Review of Social History, 64 (2), 2019, pp. 207–​48. 69 On the question of social and economic rights in the Indian constitution, see also Jayna Kothari, ‘Social rights and the Indian constitution’, Law, Social Justice and Global Development Journal, 2, 2004, https://​warwick.ac.uk/​fac/​soc/​law/​elj/​lgd/​2004_​2/​kothari, accessed: 18 February 2020; and Rohit De, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 5–​9. It should not be forgotten that India’s 1950 constitution was shaped, on the one hand, globally, by other constitutions (including the Irish, Swiss, and Australian), and, on the other hand, by the recently published Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Javed Majeed, ‘A nation on the move: The Indian constitution, life writing and cosmopolitanism’, Life Writing, 13 (2), 2016, pp. 237–​53. The implicit hierarchy between political rights and socio-​economic rights –​the latter inserted in the Directive Principles of State Policy –​fell in line with the discussions that were taking place at the UN General Assembly, which postulated a ‘progressive realisation’ of social and economic rights. This differentiation between rights reflected the Cold War divide, with each bloc appropriating its own version of human rights: whereas economic and social rights were believed to derive mostly from socialist ideologies, civil and political rights, seen as a legacy of the Enlightenment, were considered more immediately applicable in democratic contexts. 70 Ravi Ahuja shows that the first half of the twentieth century saw several moments in which the tendency towards the universalisation of social welfare seemed to be gaining the upper hand in India. N.M. Joshi (1879–​1955), member of the Servants of India Society, legislator, and prominent trade

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Elena Valdameri union leader, was one of the main promoters of this view. Nevertheless, the exigencies of a war economy, the competition in the global market, the intensification of the labour struggle, and the diversification of Indian industry created the context for the emergence of a form of minoritarian welfarism; see Ahuja, ‘A Beveridge Plan for India?’, pp. 224–​46. 71 For an insightful discussion on the status of social and economic rights in independent India, see Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents, ch. 6, ‘Social citizenship in neoliberal times’.

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36 SOUTH ASIA AND SOUTH ASIANS IN THE WORLDWIDE WEB OF ANTI-​C OLONIAL SOLIDARITY Carolien Stolte

Introduction Over the past two decades the historiography of South Asia has broken out of the local, communal, and national moulds in which it was long cast. This has been accompanied by increasing attention on the ways in which South Asian anti-​imperialists organised across borders. Between the opening years of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the European phase of the Second World War, anti-​imperialist internationalism thrived on a hitherto unprecedented scale. As the worldwide web of communication and transport possibilities expanded rapidly, so too did the circulation of people and ideas. Both provided an enormous impetus for international associational life, and a desire for international mobilisation around specific political, social, and religious causes. These developments had a major impact on the emerging anti-​imperialist movement in colonial South Asia. In turn, South Asian anti-​imperialists played an important role in shaping a worldwide web of anti-​colonial solidarity in this era.

Routes of anti-​colonial solidarity What is anti-​colonial solidarity, and who participated in this ‘worldwide web’? During the period between 1905 and 1939 anti-​colonial solidarity refers to individuals and associations organising themselves according to the belief that all territories under colonial domination were united by a shared set of problems that were best fought collectively, and that a more equitable and just world order could be achieved only by ending Euro-​American imperialism. In South Asia, anti-​colonial internationalists were found across the full breadth of the ideological and religious spectrum. They also hailed from all walks of society. They were illiterate lascars and renowned scholars, expatriate revolutionaries and settled social workers, members of secret societies as well as mass organisations. As a consequence, anti-​colonial internationalism meant different things to different people. All anti-​colonial internationalists shared a sense of kinship with others suffering under colonial domination, and an anti-​imperialist

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agenda. They did not necessarily share a vision for a postcolonial world order, or the means by which to achieve it. South Asia’s location at the crossroads of multiple sea and land routes played a large role in shaping the engagements of anti-​colonial internationalists. The attraction to South Asian activists of metropolitan hubs such as London, New York, and San Francisco has been well documented.1 Telegraph and shipping lines connected these hubs to the entire world, and their educational institutions attracted a global, if elite, student body. For elite South Asian students, the fact that these cities were also relatively anglophone was an additional draw, but this was certainly not a necessary condition. As the number of South Asian students abroad started to grow, so did the number of students and student activists in places such as Paris, Zurich, and Rome.2 It is important to note, however, that there were major centres far away from Western Europe and the United States that offered a similar blend of cosmopolitan population, rich associational life, relative anonymity, and distance from watchful British eyes. It is with an eye on these other centres that the diversity of anti-​colonial nationalism is brought into view. After Japan’s victory over Russia in the war of 1904–​5, Japan became an increasingly attractive destination.3 Although the partition of Bengal and subsequent unrest in India pushed some radical anti-​imperialists to continue their political work abroad, Japan pulled a considerable number of them in by offering space in its academe, such as establishing a professorship in ‘Hindustani’ at Tokyo University in 1909, offering cheap student accommodation, and providing a public sphere open to the circulation of pan-​Islamic and pan-​Asian ideas both in Japanese and in other languages. The Anglo-​Japanese Alliance demanded a precarious balance between support of South Asian anti-​colonial activists and sharing information on their movements and actions with British intelligence services. Nevertheless, the existence of organisations such as the Zen Ajia Kyokai (Pan-​Asiatic Society, 1924) and its inclusion of Indian activists at its gatherings, as well as in its journal Ajia, helped to connect South Asian anti-​colonial activists to their counterparts from across East and South-​East Asia and publicise their struggle.4 If Japan offered an alternative to existing metropolitan connections after 1905, the First World War opened new anti-​colonial routes as well. Several anti-​colonial revolutionaries who were resident in Europe became regular visitors to Berlin, including Shyamji Krishnavarma and Har Dayal. The German Empire explicitly and openly funded anti-​British activities as part of its Weltpolitik.5 The most striking example of these was the Niedermayer–​Von Hentig Expedition, a combined German, Turkish, and Indian initiative to persuade independent heads of state in Asia, particularly King Habibullah of Afghanistan, to declare war against the British. German orientalists and Indian revolutionaries prepared for their Afghan mission by recruiting Pashtun-​ speaking Afridi soldiers from German prison camps.6 The group left for Istanbul in April 1915, another spoke in the anti-​colonial web, especially in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth.7 They continued from there, armed with Ottoman emissaries as well as letters from the Sultan, signed as Khalifa of the community of the faithful. For most participants, the expedition was not a success. Habibullah carefully guarded Afghanistan’s neutrality in the face of increasing opposition from more bellicose elements of Afghan society, and the German and Turkish diplomats waited in vain for Afghan commitments. The Indian revolutionaries succeeded not only in recruiting Indians in Afghanistan to their cause, however, but also in securing the release of Indian political prisoners in Kabul, and even declared a ‘government of free India in exile’, which operated several successful foreign missions before losing Afghan support.8 In the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, Tashkent similarly emerged as an inviting location for anti-​colonial activists. This was the first step in a pragmatic relationship that would grow stronger with the arrival of greater numbers of Indian revolutionaries. The communist 464

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papers of Tashkent were happy to provide space in their pages for Indian political messaging, and reported frequently on the state of anti-​imperial ferment in India. Moreover, Tashkent quickly developed a considerable revolutionary infrastructure. By 1919 a Tashkent chapter of the Moscow-​based Union for the Liberation of the Peoples of the East was up and running.9 Two Indian revolutionaries, Abdul Majid and Muhammad Shafiq, opened a bilingual Indian newspaper in Urdu and Persian called Zamindar. On 17 October 1920 the same Muhammad Shafiq became a co-​founder of the Communist Party of India, along with more famous anti-​ colonial internationalists such as M.N. Roy, Abani Mukherjee, and M.P.T. Acharya.10 The Communist Party in Tashkent stood in direct contact with Bengali revolutionary groups such as Anushilan and Jugantar.11 In this way, international support for Indian anti-​imperialism connected expatriate revolutionaries to their counterparts at home. If South Asians’ connections to New York and San Francisco were facilitated by an increasingly tight network of shipping routes, the roads that led anti-​colonial activists to Kabul and on to Tashkent followed well-​worn caravan routes across the mountains into Central Asia.12 Different locations offered South Asian anti-​colonial internationalists access to different types of anti-​imperialist politics and, as a result, to different vectors of anti-​colonial solidarity. But, thanks to a small but hypermobile number of itinerant South Asian revolutionaries, these sites of anti-​colonial internationalism were directly connected. Anti-​colonial internationalism was thus both polyphonic and polycentric. The following sections examine different parts of the ‘worldwide web’ and their ideological signatures, as well as several South Asian anti-​colonial activists who threaded these parts together.

The Geneva system and its limits After the end of the First World War a new series of opportunities to advocate for Indian independence on the international stage presented itself. President Wilson’s Fourteen Points included ‘a free, open-​minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims’, which inspired anti-​colonial activists across Asia and the Middle East.13 In addition to the terms of the peace, the Paris Peace Conference included a wide-​ranging set of measures to facilitate international contact and conversation in order to prevent future international conflicts from developing. The most important of these was the League of Nations.14 In recognition of the Indian war effort, which had included the deployment of over 1 million troops, 700,000 of whom had served in Mesopotamia against the Ottoman Empire, India was granted membership of the League of Nations.15 Along with Australia, which was admitted for the same reason, it was the only non-​self-​governing territory to be included in the League. The League of Nations offered an international platform to advocate for the rights of minorities, women, and colonised populations.16 Recent historiography has added the activities of the many official and unofficial organisations and pressure groups in the League’s orbit to this narrative.17 The importance of the League as an anti-​colonial platform should not be overstated, however. The Indian delegates were still part of the larger British delegation, alongside representatives from the metropole, and nor was the Indian National Congress free in the selection of its delegates. As a result, in keeping with social and political expectations at the League of Nations headquarters, most Indian delegates to the League consisted of rulers from the princely states and otherwise loyalist members of the Indian elite. More radical anti-​colonial activists, such as Taraknath Das, even went as far as to speak of the intentional misrepresentation of India at the League.18 Equally, however, it would be going too far to state that the League of Nations had no value for South Asian anti-​colonial internationalism. For several South Asian organisations, it 465

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functioned as a pedagogical space, offering its members lessons in lobbying, applying political pressure, and gathering support for and solidarity with their cause. The All-​India Women’s Organization is an excellent example.19 Second, if the Indian princes and other community leaders selected to be part of the League’s Assembly were largely loyalists, this did not prevent them from standing in solidarity with those to whom they felt kinship. Thus, when the third Aga Khan served as India’s chief delegate between 1932 and 1938, he championed the expansion of the League’s membership with states outside Europe, in particular Turkey and Iraq.20 He also used his time in Geneva to advocate for Asia at the Red Crescent Society and at the Geneva Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments. Instead of limiting his political work to South Asia, he saw a wider opportunity to redress the inequity of representation that the ‘Geneva system’, as it has since become called, accorded to the non-​Western world.21 Finally, the Geneva system was not limited to the ‘Palais Wilson’ in which the meetings of the League’s Assembly initially took place. In fact, the International Labour Organization (ILO) proved to be the more effective and more lasting of the Wilsonian institutions that emerged from the Versailles Treaty. It is somewhat surprising that the ILO has received far less attention as a site of anti-​colonial organising, as it allowed for direct representation.22 The tripartite delegations to the ILO consisted of government representatives as well as employers’ and workers’ delegates. The possibility of nominating the latter had been one of the primary reasons for the establishment of the All-​India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) in 1920. The workers’ nomination had given AITUC an international dimension from the start, and one that developed further over time. At the ILO, too, Asian representation was limited, and the Indian delegation worked to maximise its impact. Together with Japanese and Ceylonese delegates, they resolved to bring Asian ILO delegations together six weeks ahead of the annual ILO meeting, in order to be able to advocate for Asia with a united voice. Here too issues of connectivity played a large role: it is no coincidence that the first meeting of the Asiatic Labour Congress took place in Colombo in 1934, a convenient stopover on the way to Geneva for the Japanese delegation.23 The Asiatic Labour Congress, however short-​lived, saw the mitigation of unequal development resulting from capitalism and imperialism as its primary task. It did have some successes, although the strong Japanese participation became an increasingly contentious issue. When the Congress met in Japan in 1937, just two short months before the outbreak of the Sino-​Japanese War, it lost the support of Indian trade union organisations, who sympathised with Chinese workers and not with Japanese labour leaders. The Japanese sponsors of the Asiatic Labour Congress had been critics of Japan’s China policy, but the political climate in India had made collaboration with Japanese organisations impossible. The disintegration of the Asiatic Labour Congress as an organisation of anti-​colonial leaders in 1937 was not unique. The All-​Asia Women’s Congress, an initiative of the All-​India Women’s Congress, which had first met in Lahore in 1931, suffered a similar fate. Much like its labour counterpart, it argued for the inclusion of an Asian agenda on Asian terms in the international system. In Geneva this meant, among other things, work against the trafficking of women and children and for equal rights for married women, especially the retention of nationality, and, more generally, for the legal status of women.24 Ten Indian delegates, among them the Gandhian activist and prominent poet Sarojini Naidu, had attended the International Women’s Suffrage Association Conference in Geneva as early as 1920.25 In Lahore, they had urged all members of the All-​Asian Women’s Conference (AAWC) with representation in Geneva to argue for women’s rights in the League of Nations’ Assembly.26 But the 1937 conference of the AAWC was to take place in Japan, and vehement protest from several AAWC members caused a rift that was never repaired. 466

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In all, the international institutions of Geneva, and organisations elsewhere that subscribed to its principles, did not seek to overthrow existing global power structures. Rather, they aimed at reforming those structures into a more just and equitable world order. Change was to take place within the context of the existing international system, and was geared towards evolution, not revolution. These groups and organisations, often analysed together under the label of ‘liberal internationalism’ and self-​identifying as ‘moderate’, could and did provide space for anti-​colonial activism and solidarity. For those seeking to effect change through mass working-​ class solidarity, collective action, or forms of revolution predicated on other outcomes than a world of nation states, however, Geneva was not the preferred site of action. Nevertheless, it is important to note that different sites of anti-​colonial solidarity were in constant dialogue with each other, and that the relationship was not always adversarial. Anti-​colonial activists also moved between sites as their own politics and interlocutors evolved. In this way, different sites of anti-​colonial internationalism co-​produced each other.27

The Comintern as an anti-​colonial body The effects of the Bolshevik revolution were felt globally, not least in the colonial world. The first Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) had declared solidarity with anti-​colonial struggles, and publicised this fact widely.28 In 1920 it organised the Congress of the Oppressed Peoples of the East in Baku, which was attended by 14 Indian revolutionaries.29 At this Congress, the plight of workers and peasants in India figured prominently in the proceedings. Moreover, the Baku congress, under the leadership of Comintern chief Grigory Zinoviev, was self-​consciously inclusive of Muslim movements, which allayed fears of the Comintern’s incompatibility with Asian revolutionary movements. He also stated publicly that the colonial world did need not to pass through a capitalist phase in order to achieve revolution.30 The Soviet Union’s support for anti-​colonial movements appeared to be cemented further in 1921, when Lenin abrogated all secret treaties that had been contracted between Tsarist Russia and the imperialist powers regarding claims to Asian territories. This, too, was hailed widely as an anti-​colonial act. In all, it was no surprise that Maulana Barkatullah, one of the small circle of hypermobile revolutionaries whose activities included pan-​Islamism in Tokyo, Ghadar work in San Francisco, the wartime expedition to Kabul, and revolutionary work in Tashkent, would write a pamphlet entitled ‘Bolshevism and the Islamic nations’, in which he proposed modernisation along the Soviet model as the best way forward for Asia.31 Indeed, some of the expectations of Soviet support, raised in the aftermath of the revolution, did materialise. If the ILO was an attractive way to achieve direct Indian representation on an international body, the Comintern’s Executive Committee included members from the colonial world from the start. Its trade union wing, the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), was set up as a competing body to the International Federation of Trade Unions, or ‘Amsterdam International’. The RILU was far more inclined to support workers’ action in India directly. For unionists involved in industrial action, the RILU was a more attractive partner, as it offered material and monetary support towards strikes that other international bodies did not. For a while, the quest for international recognition meant that the All-​India Trade Union Congress was able and willing to send delegations to the ILO and remain on friendly footing with the RILU at the same time. When the RILU established a Pan-​Pacific Trade Union Secretariat in 1927, funded from Moscow but aimed specifically at supporting the workers’ movement in Asia, AITUC was invited to its founding meeting in Hankou, China. Nevertheless, the Indian trade unionists who were selected to attend the gathering, D.R. Thengdi and S.V. Ghate, were 467

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barred from travel by the colonial authorities.32 The Pan-​Pacific Trade Union Secretariat itself continued to reach out to Indian workers over the course of its short lifespan, however, and was especially active among sailors and other transport workers at interstitial spaces such as seamen’s clubs.33 The denial of passports on the suspicion of ‘subversive’ politics was a continuing practice, as Daniel Brückenhaus has shown.34 It would also come to plague the organisational aftermath of another radical event in 1927: the establishment, in Brussels, of the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression.35 The founding congress in Brussels had been primarily attended by anti-​colonial activists already present in Europe, such as representatives from Indian student unions in Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, or exiled revolutionaries such as Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and Barkatullah. A few months after the Congress, however, British authorities used the existing passport system to bar direct contact between the League Against Imperialism and India. Shapurji Saklatvala, a British Indian Labour MP and member of the executive committee of the league, was among those barred.36 Despite attempts at suppression from the Dutch, French, and British authorities –​even Belgium had allowed the congress to meet in Brussels only on the condition that Belgian Congo was not to be discussed –​the League Against Imperialism survived in various forms until 1937. South Asian anti-​colonial activists forged connections with their counterparts across the world. Some of the early connections lasted well beyond the lifetime of the league itself, and helped build Afro-​Asian cooperation after independence.37 Other connections were severed, however, when the Soviet Union entered its ‘third period’. Heavily influenced by the Comintern, the league expelled ‘bourgeois nationalists’ such as Jawaharlal Nehru from its ranks after 1929, as the vision of a broad coalition of the oppressed gave way to that of a more radical revolutionary body. The very name of the League Against Imperialism had been meant to illustrate the frustration felt across the colonised world with the League of Nations in general and the mandate system in particular. With participation from the Americas, Africa and Asia as well as a host of European sympathisers, the league considered itself to be a far more globally representative body, and even self-​identified as the ‘real’ League of Nations.38 Both the ‘Geneva’ and ‘Moscow’ systems were important sites of anti-​colonial solidarity. They also created fractures, however, not least in the Indian independence movement itself. Like the League Against Imperialism, the All-​India Trade Union Congress was unable to keep its pro-​Geneva and pro-​Moscow factions within the same body. This had far-​reaching consequences in India itself. The very fact that AITUC split in 1929 over the issue of its international affiliations to the ILO, the Pan-​Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, and the League against Imperialism also precluded the possibility of using a full general strike as a political tool. This had serious consequences for the effectiveness of trade unions in the anti-​colonial struggle in India. Internationally, the loss of the League Against Imperialism as a platform for a diverse coalition of anti-​colonial internationalists in favour of a more exclusive and radical left-​wing body likewise stalled the development of a truly global anti-​colonial platform.

Regionalist alternatives Given the differences in politics between the worlds of ‘Geneva’ and Moscow’, could they be part of the same web of anti-​colonial solidarity? Did engagement with one preclude engagement with the other? This question is more complicated than the parting of ways of communists, (democratic) socialists, and sympathisers after the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in 1928, or the withdrawal of Moscow’s funds to the latter two. From a South Asian perspective, the separation of international politics between ‘Moscow’ and ‘Geneva’ had 468

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always been an artificial one. For many anti-​colonial activists, the key issue driving their international engagements was the availability of international platforms to argue their cause, and the availability of means (monetary, documentary, and logistical) to do so. Notwithstanding anti-​ colonial activists of deep ideological conviction –​such as the aforementioned M.P.T. Acharya to anarchism, or Virendranath Chattopadhyaya to communism –​this helps explain how specific regionalist agendas appeared within global platforms.39 It also helps explain how South Asian activists were involved in shaping centres of anti-​colonial solidarity outside these platforms, not at the centre of Euro-​American international life, but at the crossroads of Asianist and Islamist networks.40 In the opening decades of the twentieth century Asianism took many forms.41 Here, it is understood as the belief that Asian solidarity was a means to achieve independence from the West, whether from formal colonialism or from economic, social, or cultural influences. Some Asianist centres built on existing trading networks and South Asian diasporas, such as Tashkent, noted above. Other centres emerged in the wake of British imperial networks, such as Shanghai. Under Japanese sponsorship of pan-​Asianism, Indian anti-​imperialists were also cultivated in Kobe and Tokyo. Further pan-​Asianist networks were cemented at the pan-​Asian conferences organised in Nagasaki and Shanghai in 1926 and 1927, respectively.42 Indian activists participated in both conferences, and Indians resident in Japan, such as Rashbehari Bose and Anand Mohan Sahay, helped build an extensive infrastructure to facilitate anti-​ colonial activism.43 They advocated Indian independence through establishing a Japanese branch of the Indian National Congress, promoted Japanese knowledge of India through the Nichi-​In Kyōkai (Japanese-​Indian Association), and conceived of a post-​imperial Asia in journals such as Shin Ajia (New Asia). But they also provided support for South Asian anti-​colonial activists directly, by opening houses for Asian students –​‘Asia Lodge’ in Tokyo and ‘India Lodge’ in Kobe –​where ‘students’, broadly defined, could stay subsidised in Japan for Rs. 25, or around US$7.50, per month.44 Anti-​colonial centres outside Europe and the United States allowed for a conceptualisation of a postcolonial world order based not on nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Western political ideologies but on other intellectual traditions. In South Asia, cultural and political Asianism dated back to the late nineteenth century, but drew on much older connections and conceptions of Asia. Another alternative was Islamism, where the conception of the umma could also be conceived of as coinciding with the region suffering from Western imperialism.45 As part of the worldwide web of anti-​colonial solidarity, activists used Islamism not to advocate a singular Islamic state or caliphate (though that, too, occurred) but, rather, to foster a shared set of social, cultural, and political values under threat from, as well as antithetical to, European imperialism. For South Asia, the Khilafat movement between 1918 and 1924 was a crucial moment in this regard. It was important not least for the many young men, especially from the north-​west of British India, who crossed the Pamirs on foot in an effort to reach Anatolia and join the fight for the restoration of the Ottoman caliphate.46 But the movements of these muhajirs (migrants) were particularly vital to the formation of anti-​imperialist groups and organisations in Asia and the Middle East. When large numbers of muhajirs initially arrived in Kabul, they drew other anti-​colonial activists as well as communist agents to that city. Some were recruited into the revolutionary group in Tashkent that would later found the Communist Party of India, and others moved on to Baku to attend the Congress of the Oppressed Peoples of the East. Even if the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1924 quashed all hopes of Ottoman restoration, the muhajirs themselves continued to connect anti-​imperialist centres ranging from Cairo to Kashgar. An excellent example is Shaukat Usmani, who became a muhajir at just 17 years of age and ended up running a printing press in Kashgar along with fellow muhajir Rafiq Ahmad.47 469

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Epilogue: Fractures and the resilience of solidarity On balance, is it fair to speak of a ‘worldwide web’ of anti-​colonial solidarity? Anti-​colonial activism spanned the breadth of the ideological, religious, and social spectrum. Nevertheless, many of the individuals mentioned in this chapter, such as Maulana Barkatullah, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, and Rashbehari Bose, built connections to anti-​imperialists outside South Asia as well as to South Asian activists outside their own political and social circles. Itinerant exiles such as Shaukat Usmani and Mahendra Pratap functioned as the spokes that connected different parts of the web. By the closing years of the interwar period the web of anti-​colonial activists and their sympathisers could truly be said to be worldwide, ranging across continents and empires from, in the South Asian case, Vancouver to Munich and from Cape Town to Hong Kong. As the 1930s progressed, however, this worldwide web came increasingly under attack from different fronts. The Manchurian crisis from 1931 to 1933 and the evolving Japanese activities on the mainland strained movements that revolved around Asian solidarity, and fractured most of them in 1937. The reverberations of the 1929 financial crisis were truly global, restricting both the movement of people and ideas. The rise of Nazism and Fascism impacted many of the organisations mentioned in this chapter, including the raid on the League Against Imperialism’s Berlin headquarters, which also destroyed much of its archive. The ‘third period’ of the Soviet Union did not just solidify ideological boundaries; it also closed off possibilities of forming alliances across different political movements, and cut off funding for much of Moscow’s activities in the colonial world. In South Asia, this combination of hardening ideological lines, financial hardship, and corresponding social unrest culminated in the Meerut conspiracy case of 1929 to 1933, one of the most drawn-​out, expensive, and volatile cases in colonial legal history. The case tried 32 activists, revolutionaries, and trade unionists who had, allegedly, entered into a conspiracy to deprive the king emperor of his sovereignty of British India, an offence punishable under section 121-​A of the Indian Penal Code. The indictment also listed no fewer than 63 organisations and individuals abroad, however, all suspected of conspiring against the Raj.48 It is not an exaggeration to say that the Meerut case put anti-​colonial internationalism itself on trial. It was certainly perceived as such at the time, and the shock reverberated through every thread of the web. But, rather than tearing through it, the Meerut case ended up revealing the web’s strength. The Meerut prisoners received solidarity from around the world, inspired theatre plays and demonstrations, and showed that anti-​colonial solidarity was rapidly growing beyond the reach of imperial control mechanisms.49 If the 1930s tested the worldwide web of anti-​colonial solidarity, the Second World War disconnected many of its parts from each other. It was not easily destroyed, however. Post-​ war anti-​colonial efforts, such as the Asian Relations Conference of 1947 and the Bandung Conference of 1955, built on connections made in earlier decades, and explicitly acknowledged the efforts that had led them there.50 In this way, anti-​colonial solidarity laid the groundwork for decolonisation.

Notes 1 Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-​Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–​1930 (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-​Imperialism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011).

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South Asians and anti-colonial solidarity 2 Michael Goebel, Anti-​ Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: CUP, 2015); Mario Prayer, ‘Self, other and alter idem: Bengali internationalism and Fascist Italy in the 1920s and 1930’, Calcutta Historical Journal, 26 (1), 2006, pp. 1–​32; Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, ‘The other side of internationalism: Switzerland as a hub of militant anti-​colonialism (c.1910–​ 1920)’, in: idem and Patricia Purtschert (eds.), Colonial Switzerland: Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 221–​58. 3 Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, ‘ “Indian nationalism and the world forces”: Transnational and diasporic dimensions of the Indian freedom movement on the eve of the First World War’, Journal of Global History, 2 (3), 2007, pp. 325–​44. 4 Sven Saaler and Christopher Szpilman, Pan-​ Asianism: A Documentary History, 2 vols. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). 5 Kris Manjapra, ‘The illusions of encounter: Muslim “minds” and Hindu revolutionaries in First World War Germany and after’, Journal of Global History, 1 (3), 2006, pp. 363–​82, 366. 6 Heike Liebau, ‘The German Foreign Office, Indian emigrants and propaganda efforts among the sepoys’, in: Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau, and Ravi Ahuja (eds.), ‘When the War Began We Heard of Several Kings’: South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2011), pp. 96–​129, 125. 7 Wolfdieter Bihl, ‘Zur Indien-​ Politik des Osmanischen Reiches im Ersten Weltkrieg’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 82, 1992, pp. 51–​66; Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2012), esp. ch. 2. 8 For a first-​person account of this episode, see the memoirs of expedition member Mahendra Pratap. First serialised in his own publication World Federation, the most accessible republication is Reminiscences of a Revolutionary (New Delhi: Raja Mahendra Pratap Birth Centenary Celebration National Committee, 1986). For the most recent historical analysis, see Jennifer Jenkins, Heike Liebau, and Larissa Schmid, ‘Transnationalism and insurrection: Independence committees, anti-​colonial networks, and Germany’s global war’, Journal of Global History, 15 (1), 2020, pp. 61–​79. 9 Surendra Gopal, Indian Freedom-​Fighters in Tashkent, 1917–​1922 (Calcutta: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute, 2002), 10–​11. 10 See, most recently, Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: CUP, 2020). On M.N. Roy, see Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010); on M.P.T. Acharya and his disagreements with Roy and Mukherjee about the direction of anti-​colonial politics, see Ole Birk Laursen, ‘An uncompromising rebel: M.P.T. Acharya and Indian anarchism’, Kairos, 3 (1), 2018, pp. 66–​77. 11 On these organisations, see Joseph Mc Quade’s chapter in this volume. 12 On the long history of both mobile and settled Indian connections to Central Asia, see Scott Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550–​1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 13 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-​Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: OUP, 2007). 14 On the link between the League of Nations and empire, see in particular Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2015). 15 On India and the League of Nations, see T.A. Keenleyside, ‘The Indian nationalist movement and the League of Nations: Prologue to the United Nations’, India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, 39, 1983, pp. 281–​98; and D.N. Verma, India and the League of Nations (Patna: Bharati Bhawan, 1968). 16 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), esp. 45–​78. On the (European) minorities issue, see Mark Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations in interwar Europe’, Daedalus, 126 (2), 1997, pp. 47–​63. 17 Urs Matthias Zachmann (ed.), Asia after Versailles: Asian Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Interwar Order, 1919–​33 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Anne-​Isabelle Richard, ‘Competition and complementarity: Civil society networks and the question of decentralizing the League of Nations’, Journal of Global History, 7 (2), 2012, pp. 233–​56; T.R. Davies, ‘Internationalism in a divided world: The experience of the International Federation of League of Nations Societies, 1919–​1939’, Peace & Change, 37 (2), 2012, pp. 227–​52. 18 BL, IOR, L/​PJ/​12/​166, copy of an untitled 1923 pamphlet by Taraknath Das. On Taraknath Das, see Maria Framke, ‘Shopping ideologies for independent India? Taraknath Das’s engagement with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism’, Itinerario, 40 (1), 2016, pp. 55–​81; and idem, ‘India’s freedom and the League of Nations: Public debates 1919–​33’, in: Zachmann, Asia after Versailles, pp. 124–​43.

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Carolien Stolte 19 Carol Miller, ‘Geneva –​the key to equality: Interwar feminists and the League of Nations’, Women’s History Review, 3 (2), 1994, pp. 219–​45. 20 For a collection of the Aga Khan’s speeches at the League of Nations, see K.K. Aziz (ed.), Aga Khan III: Selected Speeches and Writings of Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, 1928–​1955, vol. 2 (London: Kegan Paul International, 1997). 21 Verax, ‘Silhouettes étrangères: L’Aga Khan’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 13 (2), 1933, pp. 352–​59. 22 With the exception of Daniel Roger Maul, ‘The International Labour Organization and the struggle against forced labour from 1919 to the present’, Labor History, 48 (4), 2007, pp. 477–​500. 23 Carolien Stolte, ‘ “Bringing Asia to the world”: Indian trade unionism and the long road towards the Asiatic Labour Congress, 1919–​1937’, Journal of Global History, 7 (2), 2012, pp. 257–​78. 24 Miller, ‘The key to equality’; Jessica Pliley, ‘Claims to protection: The rise and fall of feminist abolitionism in the League of Nations Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–​1936’, Journal of Women’s History, 22 (4), 2010, pp. 90–​113; Barbara Metzger, ‘Towards an international human rights regime during the inter-​war years: The League of Nations’ combat of traffic in women and children’, in: Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.1880–​1950 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), pp. 54–​79. 25 Sumita Mukherjee, ‘The All-​Asian Women’s Conference 1931: Indian women and their leadership of a pan-​Asian feminist organisation’, Women’s History Review, 26 (3), 2017, pp. 363–​81, 378. 26 Ibid., 373. 27 For a demonstration of how this dynamic played out, see the special issue Liberal and Illiberal Internationalisms, ed. Philippa Hetherington and Glenda Sluga, in Journal of World History. For the argument of ‘co-​production’ in particular, see Philippa Hetherington and Glenda Sluga, ‘Liberal and illiberal internationalisms’, Journal of World History, 31 (1), 2020, pp. 1–​9, 2. 28 Gangadhar Adhikari, Documents on the History of the Communist Party of India, vol. 1, 1917–​1922 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1972), 105. 29 John Riddell (ed.), To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920: First Congress of the Peoples of the East, the Communist International in Lenin’s Time (New York: Pathfinder, 1993). 30 Ibid., 114–​36. 31 Adhikari, Documents, 121, 126. 32 B.L. Mehta, Trade Union Movement in India (New Delhi: Kanishka Publishing House, 1991), 140; Prem Sagar Gupta, A Short History of the All-​India Trade Union Congress (New Delhi: AITUC, 1980), 112. 33 On the PPTUS and Asian maritime workers, see Josephine Fowler, ‘From East to West and West to East: Ties of solidarity in the pan-​Pacific revolutionary trade union movement, 1923–​1934’, International Labor and Working-​Class History, 66, 2004, pp. 99–​117. 34 Daniel Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–​1945 (Oxford: OUP, 2017). 35 On the League Against Imperialism, see Fredrik Petersson, Willi Münzenberg, the League Against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925–​1933, 2 vols. (Lewiston, NY: Queenston Press, 2013); Michele Louro, Carolien Stolte, Heather Streets-​Salter, and Sana Tannoury-​Karam. (eds.), The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020). 36 Daniel Brückenhaus, ‘British passport restrictions, the League Against Imperialism, and the problem of liberal democracy’, in: Louro, Stolte, Streets-​Salter, and Tannoury-​Karam, The League Against Imperialism, pp. 187–​210. 37 For this argument, see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press 2007), 30. Sukarno also invoked the Brussels Congress at the Bandung Conference in 1955 even though he had not personally attended the former: George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-​African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia, 1955 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), 39–​40. 38 Michele Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Nationalism (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), 55. 39 For a detailed account of both men, see Ole Birk Laursen (ed.), We Are Anarchists: Essays on Anarchism, Pacifism, and the Indian Independence Movement, 1923–​1953 (Chico: AK Press, 2019); and N.K. Barooah, Chatto: The Life and Times of an Indian Imperialist in Europe (New Delhi: OUP, 2004). 40 For a political analysis of pan-​Islamism and pan-​Asianism in this period, see Çemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-​Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-​Islamic and Pan-​Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University, 2007).

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South Asians and anti-colonial solidarity 41 For an overview of Indian Pan-​Asianism in this period, see Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and internationalism (c.1905–​1940)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54 (1), 2012, pp. 65–​92. 42 On Asianism and anti-​imperialism at these conferences from an East Asian perspective, see Torsten Weber, Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and the Contest for Hegemony, 1912–​1933 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 43 On Rashbehari Bose, see J.G. Oshawa, The Two Great Indians in Japan: Sri Rash Behari Bose and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (Calcutta: Kusa Publications, 1954); and Eri Hotta, ‘Rash Behari Bose and his Japanese supporters’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 8 (1), 2006, pp. 116–​32. For a brief sketch of Anand Mohan Sahay’s activities, see Raman Sinha, ‘A forgotten freedom fighter, Anand Mohan Sahay: A colleague of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 63, 2002, pp. 637–​43. 44 BL, IOR, L/​P&J/​12/​163, file on Rash Behari Bose 1923–​1926. Note from the British Embassy at Tokyo, 31 May 1933. 45 Çemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 46 On the Khilafat movement, see M. Naeem Qureshi, Pan-​Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–​1924 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); and Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 47 M. Ahmad, The Communist Party of India and Its Formation Abroad (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1962), 30. On Shaukat Usmani’s revolutionary travels, see his own Peshawar to Moscow: Leaves from An Indian Muhajireen’s Diary (Benares: Swarajy Publishing House, 1927); and, more recently, Raza, Revolutionary Pasts, 52–​65. 48 Michele Louro and Carolien Stolte, ‘The Meerut conspiracy case in comparative and international perspective’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 33 (3), 2013, pp. 310–​15, 311. 49 Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019), 245–​60; Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 146–​99. 50 Report on the Proceedings and Documentation of the First Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi March–​April 1947 (New Delhi: Asian Relations Organization, 1948); George McTurnan Kahin (ed.), The Asian African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), 40.

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37 DISRUPTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS South Asia and South Asians in the world wars Ravi Ahuja

Introduction If the first half of the twentieth century has been characterised as an ‘age of catastrophe’, two periods of ‘total’ –​industrially intensified as well as geographically expanded –​military conflict stand out. They are commonly remembered as ‘world wars’ and were, no doubt, among the events of this century with the deepest impact on global society. Paradoxically, however, these ‘world wars’, their first instalment in particular, were rarely remembered or studied as global events until recently.1 Although the strategic significance of ‘non-​European’ economic resources and colonial soldiers for the Entente forces was recognised and debated during the interwar period, the ‘First World War’ came to be regarded in the second half of the twentieth century, by professional historians and the wider public alike, as an essentially European war. As to the ‘Second World War’, the ‘world’ came to be conceived of somewhat less narrowly, as the Pacific war theatre was more difficult to ignore. But even this second climax of military conflict was understood more often as a war connecting some far-​flung geographical regions than as a historical juncture affecting and involving the world as a whole. South Asia, in particular, remained a blind spot of world war studies, since armed hostilities had been very limited on the subcontinent’s territory, and even though the importance of ‘British India’ for the empire as a base for supplies and military recruitment was generally recognised. In the subcontinent itself, the fact that millions of South Asians had served the British Empire abroad as soldiers and non-​combatant military workers during both world wars was common knowledge. Historians in post-​independence India, generally working from within nationalist frames, were not attracted, however, to examining closely what was now frowned upon as less than honourable mercenary service for the colonial rulers.2 One result of this embarrassed silence was that the opportunity of oral history research among the numerous South Asian world war participants was largely missed, in stark contrast, for instance, to the rich research that was conducted, while it was still possible, among African ex-​soldiers.3 A slow shift in historiographical perspective, a rediscovery and reassessment of South Asia’s ‘forgotten’ armies and world war entanglements, commenced only towards the close of the twentieth century.4 Two decades later a rich crop of new research was harvested on the occasion of the centenary of the First World War.5 This chapter surveys this diversification and deepening of South Asian world war histories. I begin by recapitulating the proportions of 474

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South Asia’s world war participation and of the disruptive entanglements these wars engendered in the spheres of economy and society. I then retrace the expanding boundaries of military-​ institutional histories towards new experiential and intellectual histories of South Asian war participation. I conclude by examining the wider ramifications and dynamic impact of the wars on polities and society during the final decades of British rule in South Asia.

Proportions of involvement and disruption With the expansion of the British Empire in the late nineteenth century, the military functions of the ‘Indian Army’ diversified: this peculiar military formation, comprised of Indian and British soldiers at a ratio of two to one and led by a predominantly British officer corps, no longer solely served to prop up colonial rule over the subcontinent and fortify its north-​western frontier. Indian forces were now also deployed across the Indo-​Pacific to suppress anti-​colonial insurrections in regions as far apart as Sudan and China, and to guard British colonies as occupation forces.6 The First World War prompted further involvements with the world, as it brought imperial colonies closer home, as it were, to the imperial metropolises. This was at least as true for the French colonial empire as it was for the British, and the effects were probably most visible in Flanders. Here combat units and labour corps were assembled from remote parts of the globe, including the Maghreb, West Africa, Madagascar, China and Indochina as well as South Asia.7 In official accounts, ‘India’s military contribution’ during the First World War was reduced to seemingly objective figures: by the end of 1919 877,000 soldiers and 563,000 ‘non-​ combatant’ military workers (or ‘followers’) had been recruited in India, of whom 621,000 and 475,000 served overseas, respectively. The majority, about 675,000 men, distributed to combat units and labour corps in almost equal proportions, were sent to Mesopotamia. In addition, almost 140,000 Indians were shipped to France, about the same number to Egypt, and smaller contingents to the Persian Gulf, East Africa, Aden, Salonica, and Gallipoli. The official death count of South Asians who were killed in military action or succumbed to their injuries amounted to 53,000, or about 3.5 per cent of the combatant strength of the Indian Army –​a low proportion if compared to the overall average of 10 per cent that was calculated for British imperial troops.8 This was, paradoxically, mainly because of the fact that the Indian Army was badly equipped for the ‘modern’ forms of warfare that ravaged the most heavily embattled frontlines. As Victor Kiernan put it succinctly: ‘Britain wanted to think its native troops good enough to help win the war, but not good enough to be able to break away from the empire.’9 Indian units thus were largely withdrawn from the Western Front in late 1915 as soon as the newly formed British ‘Kitchener armies’ were ready to take over, and were rarely deployed as crack troops thereafter. They were utilised, instead, to relieve British troops from military duties that were considered less critical though indispensable for the upkeep of the empire: despite considerable unease, especially among Muslim sepoys (soldiers), the Indian Army was now mainly deployed against the Ottoman Empire, and until well after the armistice in Europe as an occupation force in Mesopotamia.10 In sheer numbers, the Second World War appeared to be, at first sight, a repeat of the First on an expanded scale: if the Indian Army had a total strength of 194,000 in 1939, it comprised almost 2.6 million men in September 1945, with South Asians amounting to about 90 percent of the combat units.11 Consequently, the preference for so-​called ‘martial races’, mainly from Punjab, the North-​West Frontier, and Nepal, that had governed British recruitment policy in India since the late nineteenth century proved even less sustainable than during the previous global war, forcing the military authorities to further expand their recruitment bases across the 475

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subcontinent.12 Proportionally, the Indian Army now contributed 21 percent to the overall military manpower of the Commonwealth, whereas its share had been 17 percent of the British imperial forces during the First World War. South Asian combat units and labour corps were sent to war theatres in Iraq, East Africa, Egypt, the Maghreb, and Italy, though the focus shifted to South-​East Asia as the war progressed. The death count amounted to less than half of that of the First World War, however –​an indication that the status of the Indian Army as an ill-​ equipped auxiliary force was preserved in the interwar period even though the issue had been debated, controversially, within the imperial establishment.13 Indian soldiers were still largely commanded by British officers, although a reluctant ‘Indianisation’ policy during the interwar years had increased the share of South Asian commissioned officers to 10 percent by 1939 –​a proportion that expanded to about a quarter during the war.14 In economic and social terms, the effects of the two world wars on South Asia, too, bore some similarity. If ‘British India’ was an important base for auxiliary military recruitment, it proved to be even more crucial as an economic hinterland in the times of industrialised and ever more costly war. During the First World War military expenditure tripled in British India, resulting in increased taxation and heavy war loans. In addition, the Indian Treasury provided credit on a massive scale for military expenditure elsewhere in the British Empire –​almost £0.5 billion, according to one calculation. India also supplied large amounts of material, including 85 million yards of cotton to clothe soldiers in Western war theatres and 20 million jute bags, on which many of these soldiers bled to death. The social impact of this war was highly uneven; businesses prospered under war conditions, which provided a protectionist umbrella as they encouraged the substitution of now unavailable or more expensive imports. Indian big business, such as the Tata and Birla concerns, increased not only their economic clout but also their political standing in these years, and India’s industrial base diversified to new sectors more easily. Large sections of the population did not partake in these war gains, however. Although wages remained stable, consumer prices doubled during the war and a bad harvest in 1918 resulted in near-​famine conditions.15 When the Spanish flu took hold of a physically weakened population in South Asia in late 1918, the death toll was higher than in any other world region with ‘excess deaths’ estimated at about 18 million.16 The economic effects of the Second World War may have been more predictable in their broad features after the experience of the previous global confrontation, but the proportions were unprecedented. This was most visible with regard to state finances. Even in 1939/​40 the defence budget had accounted for 52 per cent of British India’s state expenditure as well as of its total revenue. Five years later defence costs had risen to 80 percent of state expenditure and to 98 percent of total revenue, with the remaining fifth of the state budget financed by loans. In addition, India provided war loans to the British government that surpassed India’s total revenue, in 1944/​5, by about 20 per cent. Together, state expenditure and war loans were thus almost three times the size of British India’s total state revenue in that year, even though the latter had been boosted by tax hikes. Agricultural and industrial production lagged far behind the expanded state spending, implying heavy inflation and rising consumer prices.17 Once again, the burden was distributed most unequally: although substantial farmers and big business profited from high export prices for strategic commodities and industrial production diversified into new sectors, real wages dropped by 30 percent between 1939 and 1943.18 If the First World War had ended with a food crisis for India’s poor followed by a devastating epidemic, social dislocation in the Second World War culminated as early as 1943/​4 in one of the most lethal famines of the century, aggravated by politically motivated inaction on the part of the imperial state. The ‘Bengal Famine’ left behind, according to some estimates, a death toll of at least 3 million people who succumbed to starvation or subsequent disease.19 That the global 476

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tendency towards ‘total war’ could manifest itself socially and demographically even in territories largely unaffected by armed hostilities was now experienced painfully by India’s poorer classes, just as it had been in famine-​stricken ‘Greater Syria’ in the previous instalment of global imperial warfare.20 Moreover, the Second World War did more than just starve the rural poor in eastern India; dearness and the unavailability of basic consumer goods affected all parts of the subcontinent and triggered social upheaval in various garbs after the end of the war –​an upheaval that was fuelled and charged dangerously by the largely uncompensated demobilisation of 1.5 million ex-​combatants within two years.21

Pushing the boundaries of military history: War experience and institutional change The historiography of warfare and armed forces in South Asia remained, well into the early 2000s, almost exclusively the preserve of a narrowly institutional approach to military history. Historians of the Indian Army were often associated with war administration, armed forces, or academic units providing educational services for the latter.22 Many either carried forward an older tradition of writing regimental histories or used historical material to assess methods of military management. Such historiographical exercises often entailed meticulous scholarship but had strict limitations: they focused either on narratives of military action or on the internal workings of military institutions; they assessed these events and institutions mainly in terms of combat effectiveness –​i.e. with regard to the functions ascribed to armed forces by the political and military authorities. They were less concerned with the reciprocity between military institutions and society at large. Moreover, politically unintended effects of military organisation and service experience that ran contrary to the expectations of the authorities were considered, if at all, as disturbing background noise or as issues to be tackled by efficient military leadership. Although military history in this vein continues to emanate from Indian and British academic institutions alike,23 the boundaries of research have expanded markedly since the 1990s. The use and discovery of new source materials and the development of new analytical frameworks both contributed to this shift. Older histories of the Indian Army mostly relied on official accounts of military authorities, while Indian perceptions of the armed forces and the world wars were generally discussed by political historians through the statements of nationalist politicians and intellectuals. Two seminal publications in the late 1990s indicated the possibility of alternative perspectives: David Omissi’s edition Indian Voices of the Great War brought to the attention of a wider audience the enormously rich collection of soldiers’ letters, collected, excerpted and partly translated from various Indian languages by British military censors in France.24 Around the same time an essay by Lloyd Rudolph introduced the reflections that an elite military officer from a princely state had noted down in a diary kept for 44 years, including his period of service in the Indian Army on the Western Front in the First World War.25 More recently various publications, most notably Santanu Das’s imaginative studies of the cultural history of the First World War, have demonstrated that a plethora of material, including diaries, letters, images, songs, and literary reflections, are still recoverable for Indian experiences of military service.26 Other researchers unearthed rich documentation on Indian prisoners of war in the First World War in Germany, including a rare set of sound recordings.27 Although the research effort has been more focused, in this respect, on the First World War, it is evident that the second instalment of global military conflict leaves much to discover.28 This new research challenged the historical imagination of the Indian soldier, which had been shaped in much of the older literature by a mixture of colonial racism and high-​caste 477

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prejudice. The sepoy had been stereotyped for long as a rural, intrinsically apolitical analphabet with little capacity for intellectual reflection who was, however, entrenched in an innate, earthy, and rigorous code of morality and honour (izzat), which bound him eternally to the master whose ‘salt he ate’. ‘Martial races’ were believed to embody these behavioural norms to perfection and to represent an inferior mirror image of the warlike Britisher: both were considered suitable material for fearless soldiers, the former because he never disobeyed the commands of izzat and lacked the imagination to even perceive the perils of war, the latter because he was capable of confronting the mortal dangers of modern warfare bravely as well as intelligently.29 The recovery of Indian soldiers’ ‘voices’ rendered such imaginations untenable in several ways. To begin with, the notion of the sepoy’s encapsulation in an information-​poor culture of illiteracy was challenged by the sheer mass of soldiers’ letters that were sent out from Flanders to various parts of South Asia: between 10,000 and 20,000 per week in early 1915.30 Whether composed individually or (as was often the case) with the help of literate comrades, these letters indicated that written communication mattered to soldiers’ households as early as in the First World War and to society in recruitment areas at large. In terms of content, it became clear that, far from being unperceptive and dumbfounded, South Asian war participants made sense of their experiences in new ways, compared the countries they were sent to with their own, developed critical perspectives on authorities, engaged with unfamiliar ideas and practices, and debated whether industrial warfare could still be considered honourable service or whether it was even detrimental to izzat. They looked for ways to renegotiate service conditions and many advised their relatives to avoid recruitment; a fair number deserted while some dared to revolt.31 The new material permitted not merely a pluralisation of perspectives but also a qualitative shift in the assessment of the consequences of global war for South Asia; it suggested that global entanglements, in this period, extended beyond the spheres of military logistics, international politics, and highbrow intellectual musings. South Asian soldiers partook, quite literally, in a republic of soldiers’ letters that connected trenches, military hospitals, and prison camps in Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa with their home regions. World wars turned, as it were, into ‘assessment exercises’ permitting peasant soldiers from far-​flung areas of the globe to compare diverse articulations of human society, test the prevalent myth of European civilisational superiority, and participate in an exchange of ideas on social norms, political order, and religious propriety. Notions associated with nationalism, socialism, pan-​Islamism, or pan-​Asianism circulated more quickly and more widely in Asia as a consequence.32 The phenomenon of exponentially growing, increasingly plebeian, and ever more diverse social and political movements in interwar India has been recognised for long in South Asian historiography but the conditions that rendered this development possible have been explained insufficiently as yet.33 Economistic short cuts –​such as establishing mechanical links between social distress and political unrest in post-​war situations –​were often taken in the older literature but satisfy no longer. Recent studies have explored avenues for retracing the elusive capillary processes that rendered new social and political ideas usable for grass-​roots-​level movements. They identified complex networks of actors (such as that of the Punjabi Ghadar movement), highlighted the importance of war veterans as local-​level leaders of diverse social movements, and revealed the militarisation of political forms (as in the rise of paramilitary organisations attached to almost all political currents) as one of the key features of the political culture that was shaped in the age of catastrophe.34 Although much of the new research focused on war experiences, institutional transformations of the Indian Army in the age of world wars also came under scrutiny. The two best-​ examined aspects concern the shift in recruitment patterns and the ‘Indianisation’ of officer 478

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ranks. Both developments were precipitated by the enormous growth of the military forces during the years of global war. Preferred recruitment areas such as the Punjab or Nepal were further squeezed for men using incentives as much as methods of forced inscription, while the range of suitably ‘martial’ castes and communities was expanded considerably. But the excessive demand could not be satisfied by these measures alone, forcing the British authorities to recruit in areas of the subcontinent such as south India, which had been typecast as ‘unmartial’ for decades. The proportion of Punjabis among the Indian combat forces, which had been raised from 30 percent in 1890 to more than 50 percent in 1910, was kept up through the First World War despite the massive growth of the Indian Army –​the result of increasingly oppressive recruitment practices as well as of an expansion of the recruitment base within the Punjab. In the Second World War, however, the sheer size of the recruitment effort led to a shift in the regional proportions, and the Punjabi share declined to about a third of the combat troops.35 The unprecedented size of the armed forces required for global military conflicts in the first half of the twentieth century also implied that the older practice of not admitting South Asians to commissioned officer ranks (and confining them to inferior and auxiliary strata of ‘non-​commissioned officers’) could no longer fully be held up and that nationalist demands for ‘Indianisation’ had to be accommodated to some extent. Moreover, industrial –​and particularly trench –​warfare transformed the nature of military service itself, had no use any longer for the proud cavalryman, and replaced him with a foot soldier using the spade as much as the rifle. Although the soldier’s service was thus increasingly demoted to hard and demeaning work, ‘labour corps’ grew into ever more sizeable and indispensable components of the British Indian Army. This ‘labourisation’ of military service also impacted on contemporary debates on ‘industrial efficiency’ in India.36 At the same time, the provision of military medical services, backed up by a ‘home front’ of charitable institutions, emerged as a crucial instrument for the maintenance of loyalty and fighting power, which impacted on the medical and welfare policies of the post-​war period.37 Two further institutional changes in colonial military organisation had equally momentous effects on society at large. First, older and more informal recruitment mechanisms that relied almost exclusively on alliances with local magnates no longer sufficed in key ‘catchment’ areas such as the Punjab. Here, a process of institutionalisation resulted in the establishment of ‘district soldiers’ boards’ and in a militarisation of local administration that left a lasting imprint on the political structure of the province and on the Pakistani successor state.38 Second, the sheer size of the Indian Army during the two world wars posited the problem of demobilisation after the end of hostilities in much graver terms. An older colonial policy to provide war veterans with land grants and utilise them as linchpins of loyalism in key recruitment areas was no longer sustainable. After both world wars only a minority of ex-​combatants were compensated in the course of a regulated pacification process. This added a further destabilising element to a situation of economic distress and social unrest. Agitation among war veterans assumed various shapes and attached itself to diverse social and political projects. It made its most grisly appearance during the Partition of India in 1947, when ex-​soldiers were instrumental in turning murderous but loosely organised pogroms into systematic genocidal killings in former core areas of army recruitment.39

Beyond military history: World wars, polities, and society Despite all the structural similarities, the two world wars punctuated a period when the political and economic situation in South Asia underwent fundamental shifts. Accordingly, the two instalments of twentieth-​century global war had distinct consequences for polities and 479

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society. Most evidently, the British colonial state was capable of mustering the support of Indian society and political forces in starkly diverging proportions. During the First World War all major political forces in India had supported the ‘British war effort’ –​a wide spectrum ranging from loyalist princes (who donated lavishly and set up their own expedition forces)40 to most stalwarts of Indian nationalism, including Mohandas Gandhi, who saw the war as a chance to demonstrate India’s martial mettle and hoped that British support would result in major constitutional concessions after the termination of hostilities. The flimsy ‘dyarchy’ of the Montagu–​Chelmsford reforms and the prolongation of the wartime state of emergency through the Rowlatt Act (both in 1919) shattered such hopes, however, and gave rise to new forms of nationalist mobilisation.41 A narrow if diverse revolutionary current, which had seen the war as an opportunity to forge alliances with the enemies of the British Empire, had not been overly successful either, but it gained some popularity and influence on the post-​war movements even though it would remain in the shadow of mainstream nationalism. During the First World War this revolutionary current struck roots among Punjabi peasant migrants to North America as much as among upper-​and middle-​class intellectuals, who moved across continents as students, scholars, or exiles. The latter involved themselves with the political and academic establishments of countries that sought to foster anti-​colonial nationalism in the empires of their adversaries and forged, at the same time, links with other anti-​imperialist movements, including Irish republicans as much as Tunisian or Persian militants.42 This contributed to a wider circulation of anti-​imperialist, pan-​Islamic, and socialist ideas. Moreover, the disasters of the First World War deeply unsettled the belief in the superiority of European ‘civilisation’ that had been held widely among educated classes in British India as much as in other colonies. Rabindranath Tagore, claiming in 1917 that ‘Western nationalism’ had given Europe the semblance of a ‘pack of predatory creatures’, was only one voice expressing this sentiment.43 Furthermore, the violently racist European response to Asian, and especially African, war participation on European battlefields during and after the ‘Great War’ did not help to restore confidence in morally charged ‘civilising mission’ projects.44 When the Second World War began, the constellation had changed fundamentally. The Indian National Congress (INC) had gained mass support in the interwar period, headed the governments in most provinces, and was no longer prepared to give the colonial administration a carte blanche in times of war. When the Congress-​led governments stepped down in 1939 after not having been consulted before the declaration of India’s war entry, this did not mean, however, that other segments of India’s political spectrum followed suit. Liberal social reformers, B.R. Ambedkar’s Scheduled Castes Federation, regional parties, and sections of the Indian left –​including (after Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941) the Communist Party –​all supported the ‘British war effort’. The Muslim League even celebrated a ‘Liberation Day’ when the Congress governments stepped down; the Hindu right, for their part, traded political cooperation for the licence to expand their paramilitary forces.45 Even though all these political currents used the war years to consolidate their organisational strength vis-​à-​vis the INC, the Quit India movement of 1942 demonstrated the deep unpopularity of the war and revealed that British rule in India could be kept up by force during the war, but not much longer. Moreover, the British loss of Singapore and the subsequent threat of a Japanese invasion from the east further undercut the nimbus of British invincibility, while the Bengal Famine of 1943 shook the legitimacy of colonial rule to the core.46 If the majority of Indian nationalists steered clear of an alliance with the Axis powers and some, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, took a more active anti-​fascist stance, others, including a faction headed by Subhas Chandra Bose, did not. A certain sympathy with rising European 480

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forms of authoritarianism, with Italian Fascist corporativism as much as with German ‘völkisch’-​nativist Nazism, had been perceivable among Indian nationalists during the interwar period, and various channels of communication had been established –​either in continuation of First World War collaborations or through new efforts supported by right-​wing intellectuals in both Germany and Italy. This rendered tactical alliances imaginable and prepared for the long-​drawn-​out but ultimately abortive negotiations of Bose and other Indian nationalists with the Hitler and Mussolini governments.47 Drawing upon pan-​Asianism, another ideological current that had impacted already on the previous global confrontation, a bargain could be struck eventually with Japanese imperialism. Bose established an exile government in 1943 and assumed control over an ‘Indian National Army’ (INA) that had been recruited among Indian prisoners of war after Japan’s conquest of Singapore in 1942. The symbolic charisma was far greater than the military clout the INA displayed on its march towards eastern India. Even though the INC leaders remained wary of this rebel force and would not allow its soldiers to join India’s armed forces after independence, its popularity compelled them to support the defendants of the INA trials in 1945/​6.48 Unrest among the armed forces during the post-​war years, including the Indian Navy uprisings in Bombay and Karachi in 1946 as well as a strike wave among the police, was emboldened by these developments; this was perceived, both by the outgoing colonial administration and its Indian nationalist successors, as a most undesirable erosion of state authority.49 If the First World War had fed into a social and political crisis that energised anti-​colonial protest and gave rise to diverse popular movements, the crisis following the Second World War struck at the foundations of social and political power both in the territories directly ruled by the colonial administration and in the princely states. The metaphor of sitting on the edge of a volcano was widely used in these years, expressing the prevailing fear of an impending violent upheaval with unpredictable consequences.50 This generalised crisis was finally deflected, in the main, towards a single major fault line and resulted in the Partition of large parts of the subcontinent into the nation states of India and Pakistan. At a deeper, structural level the two world wars contributed to a transformation of the state in South Asia that prepared the strongly etatist modes of governance in both postcolonial successor states. This does not merely refer to the abovementioned measures of administrative militarisation in recruitment regions such as the Punjab and to the authoritarian emergency legislation imposed on British India as a whole; the economic compulsions of industrial warfare also furthered a reconsideration of the role of the state in regulating economy and society. This had become visible, in a limited way, even during the First World War, resulting in a tendency towards bureaucratisation. The Great Depression then dealt fatal blows to the hegemonic idea of a largely self-​regulating economy in the 1930s. When the Second World War began, the idea of economic planning was already rampant across the political spectrum, the bureaucracy and the public sector expanded drastically, and all the administrative ‘controls’ required –​as one senior Indian economist would point out a few years later –​for the implementation of the Nehruvian five-​year plans had been forged for the purposes of the war economy.51 South Asian etatism, whether in the militaristic garb it wore in Pakistan or in the developmental attire chosen by the Republic of India, was the child of world war as much as of economic global crisis. The authoritarian potentials of postcolonial states are to some extent an outgrowth of this inheritance, which the new rulers accepted consciously in their effort to secure social and political stability.

Notes 1 The historiographical shift can be illustrated by a comparison of older handbooks of First World War history with the recent Jay Winter (ed.), Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: CUP,

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Ravi Ahuja 2014); or 1914–​1918-​Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014), https://​encyclopedia.1914-​1918-​online.net/​home, accessed: 15 April 2020. 2 There were, of course, important exceptions to this general pattern, such as DeWitt C. Ellinwood and S.D. Pradhan (eds.), India and World War I (New Delhi: Manohar: 1978); and Johannes H. Voigt, India in the Second World War (New Delhi: Arnold-​Heinemann 1987 [1st German edn. 1978]). 3 For key publications concerning the First and Second World Wars, respectively, see Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); and Brigitte Reinwald, Reisen durch den Krieg: Erfahrungen und Lebensstrategien westafrikanischer Weltkriegsveteranen der französischen Kolonialarmee (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2005). 4 Publications indicating this shift include David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–​18 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); David Killingray and David Omissi (eds.), Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, c.1700–​1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Partha Sarathi Gupta and Anirudh Deshpande (eds.), The British Raj and Its Indian Armed Forces, 1857–​1939 (New Delhi: CUP, 2002); and Christopher A. Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–​45 (London: Penguin Allen Lane, 2004). 5 Substantial collections of recent research on non-​European First World War involvement include Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Dyala Hamzah, and Ravi Ahuja (eds.), The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives form Africa and Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge: CUP, 2011); Andrew Tait Jarboe and Richard S. Fogarty (eds.), Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014); Helmuth Bley and Anorthe Kremers (eds.), The World during the First World War (Essen: Klartext, 2014); Ashley Jackson (ed.), The British Empire and the First World War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, and Heike Liebau (eds.), The Long End of the First World War (Frankfurt: Campus, 2018); and Roger D. Long and Ian Talbot (eds.), India and World War I: A Centennial Assessment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). See also the International Encyclopedia of the First World War, which contained, at the time of writing, 22 articles with a geographical focus on India. 6 Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–​1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 68–​101. See also Anand A. Yang (ed.), Thirteen Months in China: A Subaltern Indian and the Colonial World (New Delhi: OUP, 2017). 7 Dominiek Dendooven and Piet Chielens (eds.), World War I: Five Continents in Flanders (Tielt: Lannoo, 2008). See also Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–​ 1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Kimloan Vu-​Hill, Coolies into Rebels: Impact of World War I on French Indochina (Paris: Les Indes savants, 2011); Xu Guoqi, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Claude Markovits, De l’Indus à la Somme: Les Indiens en France pendant la Grande Guerre (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2018). 8 War Office, Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, 1914–​1920 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1922), 756, 777–​8. Officers and other Indian Army ranks of British descent are not included in these figures. 9 Victor G. Kiernan, Colonial Empires and Armies, 1815–​1960 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 186. 10 Sarmishtha Roy Chowdhury, The First World War, Anticolonialism and Imperial Authority in British India, 1914–​1924 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019); Santanu Das, ‘ “Subalterns at Mesopotamia”: Battle, siege, and captivity’, in: Long and Talbot, India and World War I, pp. 134–​49. 11 Kaushik Roy, India and World War II: War, Armed Forces, and Society, 1939–​45 (New Delhi: OUP, 2016), 42. 12 See ibid., 8–​63; Anirudh Deshpande, British Military Policy in India, 1900–​1945: Colonial Constraints and Declining Power (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005), 145–​84; and Tarak Barkawi, Soldiers of the Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge: CUP, 2017), 17–​67. 13 S.L. Menezes, Fidelity and Honour: The Indian Army from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-​First Century (New Delhi: Viking, 1993), 370. 14 Deshpande, British Military Policy in India, 87–​144; David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–​1940 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 153–​91; Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 85. 15 Krishan G. Saini, ‘The economic aspects of India’s participation in the First World War’, in: Ellinwood and Pradhan, India and World War I, pp. 141–​76.

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South Asia, South Asians in the world wars 16 Kenneth Hill, ‘Influenza in India 1918: Excess mortality reassessed’, Genus, 67 (2), 2011, pp. 9–​29; I.D. Mills, ‘The 1918–​19 influenza pandemic: The Indian experience’, IESHR, 23 (1), 1986, pp. 1–​40. 17 P.S. Lokanathan, India’s Post-​War Reconstruction and Its International Aspects (New Delhi: OUP, 1946), 36 and passim. See also Raghavan, India’s War, 320–​55. 18 Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A different war dance: State and class in India, 1939–​1945’, Past & Present, 176, 2002, pp. 187–​221. 19 Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2015); Srimanjari, Through War and Famine: Bengal 1939–​45 (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009); Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 20 See Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 19–​38; and Abdallah Hanna, ‘The First World War according to memories of “commoners” in the Bilad al-​Sham’, in: Liebau et al., The World in World Wars, pp. 299–​311. 21 Voigt, India in the Second World War, 304. 22 See, for example, Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (London: Cape, 1974); Menezes, Fidelity and Honour; and Gordon Corrigan, Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian Corps on the Western Front, 1914–​15 (Stroud: Spellmount, 2006). 23 For a British example, see George Morton-​ Jack, The Indian Army on the Western Front: India’s Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium in the First World War (Cambridge: CUP, 2014). Kaushik Roy, India’s most prolific military historian, has also moved largely within these historiographical confines, despite some forays into wider contexts. See, for example, his Indian Army and the First World War, 1914–​18 (New Delhi: OUP, 2018); and India and World War II. 24 Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War. 25 Lloyd I. Rudolph, ‘Self as other: Amar Singh’s diary as reflexive “native” ethnography’, MAS, 31 (1), 1997, pp. 143–​75. Subsequently, two book-​length publications rendered parts of these diaries accessible: Dewitt C. Ellinwood, Between Two Worlds: A Rajput Officer in the Indian Army, 1905–​1921: Based on the Diary of Amar Singh of Jaipur (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2005); and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary as a Narrative of Imperial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2000). 26 See especially his India, Empire, and First World War Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2018). See also Vedica Kant, ‘If I Die Here Who Will Remember Me?’ India and the First World War (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2014). 27 See especially Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau, and Ravi Ahuja (eds.), ‘When the War Began We Heard of Several Kings’: South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2011). 28 For an important departure, see Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (London: Bodley Head, 2015). See also G.J. Douds, ‘The men who never were: Indian POWs in the Second World War’, South Asia, 27 (2), 2004, pp. 183–​216. 29 For critical analyses of ‘martial race’ theories, see Gavin Rand’s chapter in this volume; Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–​ 1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Lionel Caplan, Warrior Gentlemen: ‘Gurkhas’ in the Western Imagination (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995); Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, 1–​46; and Barkawi, Soldiers of the Empire, 17–​48. 30 Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, 7, passim. The amount of handwritten evidence from South Asian prisoners of war in Germany, many of them educated at regiment schools in India, suggests that assumptions of almost total illiteracy among the ‘sepoys’ requires re-​examination; see Roy, Liebkau, and Ahuja, ‘When the War Began’. 31 Susan VanKoski, ‘Letters home 1915–​16: Punjabi soldiers reflect on war and life in Europe and their meanings for home and self ’, International Journal of Punjab Studies, 2 (1), 1995, pp. 43–​63; David Omissi, ‘Europe through Indian eyes: Indian soldiers encounter England and France, 1914–​1918’, English Historical Review, 122 (496), 2007, pp. 371–​96; Claude Markovits, ‘Indian soldiers’ experiences in France during World War I: Seeing Europe from the rear of the front’, in: Liebau et al., The World in World Wars, pp. 29–​53; Ravi Ahuja, ‘The corrosiveness of comparison: Reverberations of Indian wartime experiences in German prison camps (1915–​1919)’, in: ibid., pp. 131–​66; Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars. Between Self and Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture, 203–​38, passim.

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Ravi Ahuja 32 See, for example, Çemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-​Westernism in Asia: Visions of the World Order in Pan-​ Islamic and Pan-​Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); K.H. Ansari, ‘Pan-​Islam and the making of the early Indian Muslim socialists’, MAS, 20 (3), 1986, pp. 509–​37; Tim Harper, ‘Singapore, 1915, and the birth of the Asian underground’, MAS, 47 (6), 2013, pp. 1782–​811. 33 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–​1947 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), 165–​253. See also Durba Ghosh, ‘Whither India? 1919 and the aftermath of the First World War’, JAS, 78 (2), 2019, pp. 389–​97. 34 See especially Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011); and Ali Raza and Franziska Roy, ‘Paramilitary organisations in interwar India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38 (4), 2015, pp. 671–​89. 35 Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–​1947 (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), 71, 98, 301; Rajit K. Mazumdar, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003); Roy, Indian Army and the First World War, 35. 36 Radhika Singha, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914–​1921 (London: Hurst, 2020). 37 Philippa Levine, ‘Battle colors: Race, sex, and colonial soldiery in World War I’, Journal of Women’s History, 9 (4), 1998, pp. 104–​30; Mark Harrison, ‘Disease, discipline and dissent: The Indian Army in France and England, 1914–​1915’, in: Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison, and Steve Sturdy (eds.), Medicine and Modern Warfare (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 185–​203; Andrew Tait Jarboe, ‘Healing the empire: Indian hospitals in Britain and France during the First World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 26 (3), 2015, pp. 347–​69; Aparna Nair, ‘ “These curly-​bearded, olive-​skinned warriors”: Medicine, prosthetics, rehabilitation and the disabled sepoy in the First World War, 1914–​1920’, Social History of Medicine, 2, 2019, pp. 1–​21. For charitable institutions, see Sarah Ansari, ‘The Bombay Presidency’s “home front”, 1914–​1918’, in: Long and Talbot, India and World War I, pp. 60–​78; and Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, ‘Unparalleled opportunities: The Indian YMCA’s army work schemes for imperial troops during the Great War (1914–​1920)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47 (1), 2019, pp. 100–​37. 38 Tan, The Garrison State, 141–​86. 39 See especially Swarna Aiyer, ‘ “August anarchy”: The Partition massacres in Punjab’, in: D.A. Low and Howard Brasted (eds.), Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence (New Delhi: Sage, 1998), pp. 15–​38. 40 See Roy, Indian Army and the First World War, 32–​3. 41 Sarkar, Modern India, 165–​226; Robert E. Upton, ‘ “It gives us a power and strength which we do not possess”: Martiality, manliness, and India’s Great War enlistment drive’, MAS, 52 (6), 2018, pp. 1977–​ 2012; Faisal Devji, ‘Gandhi’s Great War’, in: Long and Talbot, India and World War I, pp. 191–​206. 42 See, for example, Ramnath, Haj to Utopia; Jennifer Jenkins, Heike Liebau, and Larissa Schmid, ‘Transnationalism and insurrection: Independence committees, anti-​ colonial networks, and Germany’s global war’, Journal of Global History, 15 (1), 2020, pp. 61–​79; Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-​Irish Radical Connections, 1919–​64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). 43 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1918), 21. 44 Christian Koller, ‘Nationalism and racism in Franco-​German controversies about colonial soldiers’, in: Nico Wouters and Laurence van Ypersele (eds.), Nations, Identities and the First World War: Shifting Loyalties to the Fatherland (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 213–​32. 45 Raghavan, India’s War, 7–​32. 46 Indivar Kamtekar, ‘The shiver of 1942’, Studies in History, 18 (1), 2002, pp. 81–​102; Khan, The Raj at War, 108–​21; Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal. 47 For the period of the Second World War, a critical analysis of these fragile alliances is still to be offered, but see Jan Kuhlmann, Subhas Chandra Bose und die Indienpolitik der Achsenmächte (Berlin: Hans Schiler, 2003); and Romain Hayes, Subhas Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence and Propaganda, 1941–​43 (London: Hurst, 2011). 48 The extensive literature on the INA includes Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India’s Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942–​45 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies; and Chandar S. Sundaram, ‘Seditious letters and steel helmets: Disaffection among Indian troops in Singapore and Hong Kong, 1940–​41, and the formation of the Indian National Army’, in: Kaushik Roy (ed.), War and Society in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2006), pp. 126–​60.

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South Asia, South Asians in the world wars 49 Anirudh Deshpande, Hope and Despair: Mutiny, Rebellion and Death in India (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016); Partha Pratim Shil, ‘Towards postcolonial statehood: Constabulary strikes and the question of colonial “inheritance”, British India 1945–​7’, in: Samir Kumar Das (ed.), India: Democracy and Violence (New Delhi: OUP, 2015), pp. 29–​57. 50 Sumit Sarkar, ‘Popular movements and national leadership’, in: idem, A Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985), pp. 133–​64. 51 Kamtekar, ‘A different war dance’, 214. See also Dietmar Rothermund, ‘Die Anfänge der indischen Wirtschaftsplanung im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in: P. Hablützel, H.-​W. Tobler, and A. Wirz (eds.), Dritte Welt: Historische Prägung und politische Herausforderung: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Rudolf von Albertini (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983), pp. 81–​93.

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38 INDIAN HUMANITARIANISM UNDER COLONIAL RULE Imperial loyalty, national self-​assertion, and anti-​colonial emancipation Maria Framke

Introduction Although philanthropy and charity are well-​established themes of historical study, interest in the history of humanitarian aid has increased only in the last few years. In the beginning, historical works focused primarily on the ‘West’, and humanitarianism –​despite the acknowledgement that aid practices occurred in all world regions at all times –​was argued to be a phenomenon of European or Western origin. This argument rarely considered non-​Western forms of humanitarianism that already existed parallel to those developed in the West. In response to this shortcoming, non-​Western humanitarianisms have begun to incite new research. Nonetheless, there remains ample scope to expand this fresh field of enquiry to add to our understanding of the historical practices, ideas, and consequences of African, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Asian ways to deal with humanitarian crises.1 In his influential standard work Empire of Humanity, the political scientist Michael Barnett has distinguished humanitarianism from philanthropy and charity. He has defined the former as ‘a form of compassion’ and listed three other criteria: ‘assistance beyond borders, a belief that such transnational action was related in some way to the transcendent, and the growing organisation and governance of activities designed to protect and improve humanity’. Focusing on a timespan between the early nineteenth century and the twenty-​first, Barnett has, furthermore, identified three phases of humanitarianism: imperial (1800–​1945), neo-​(1945–​89), and liberal humanitarianism (1989–​present).2 This framework is unsuited to describe the genesis of Indian humanitarianisms in at least three regards. First, in South Asia, but also in other regions, a clear-​cut divide between philanthropy, charity, and humanitarianism is sometimes hard to establish, as neither the contemporary use of such terminology nor the self-​understanding of aid providers was consistent. Second, Barnett’s definition of humanitarianism as assistance that crosses borders appears too narrow, especially since his understanding of borders was limited to markers of geographically and politically defined spaces. Giving aid to people residing in different regions of the same nation or empire or to persons belonging to another religion, ethnicity, language group, caste, etc. did not –​technically –​overcome borders, yet meant 486

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the crossing of considerable social, religious, and economic boundaries and barriers nevertheless. Third, Barnett’s periodisation of humanitarianism, if read against non-​European histories, appears simplistic and occasionally unfitting. In the case of South Asian aid initiatives during the late colonial rule period (from the 1870s until 1947), which is the focus of this chapter, the conceptual label ‘imperial humanitarianism’ would obscure humanitarian practices and ideas driven by nationalist, internationalist, or communal actors and agendas. Thus, research on Indian humanitarianisms can add new layers of complexity to our understanding of the broader phenomenon of humanitarianism. In addition, examining the South Asian ‘avatars’ of humanitarianism allows us to learn more about the relationship between Indian elites, the wider public, and the colonial authorities, and sheds light on the room to manoeuvre left to South Asian elite and non-​elite actors within colonial power structures. With research on South Asian humanitarianism still scarce, this chapter provides a first overview of this emerging historiographical subfield. To begin with, it sketches out the long and multifarious traditions of philanthropy and charity in colonial India. Subsequently, the chapter discusses three different varieties of Indian humanitarianism (imperial, nationalist, and communal) to emphasise the plurality of motivations and practices of aid in the period under study. The chapter examines humanitarian responses to conflicts and wars, leaving out aid rendered to people affected by famine or other ‘natural’ disasters. Although the latter doubtless also fed into the making of humanitarianisms in South Asia, a detailed review of these activities is beyond the scope of this survey because of space constraints.

A prehistory of humanitarianism? Philanthropy and charity in colonial South Asia Practices and concepts of dānā (charitable giving/​r itual gifts), dharma (religious duty), and bhikṣā (alms) developed in South Asia during ancient times; they were joined by other modes of giving in Jain, Sikh, and Muslim traditions. Precolonial modalities and ideologies of charity and religious patronage strengthened both the reputation and the moral and political legitimacy of Indian donors. At the same time, the gifting revealed the donors’ piety, it often led to economic advantages, and sometimes undergirded statecraft.3 A shift in the practices of giving occurred with the establishment of British colonial power in the subcontinent. In the early nineteenth century British administrators used philanthropic measures to assist needy Europeans and Anglo-​Indians as well as to consolidate their authority and to build and expand their state. In connection with the latter purpose, British officials concentrated their philanthropic initiatives primarily on ‘works of public utility’, which were conducted through modern rational public institutions.4 These works, which included building courts, police stations, jails, hospitals, wells, walls, and roads, aimed to serve collective public interest, but first and foremost the ‘moral and material objectives of British colonial rule’.5 At the same time, missionaries and other non-​governmental actors, such as school societies, introduced new forms of civil society organisation, fundraising, and reform activism.6 The encounter with British philanthropy altered the indigenous charitable and associational traditions of the South Asian elites. The nineteenth century saw the beginning of a twofold process. First, wealthy Indians continued relief efforts in times of fire, flood, and famine, as well as the building of wells and rest houses, which had been common before 1800. Likewise, traditional religious gifting, which included large donations to shrines of deities and saints, remained important, and festivals were also sponsored. In conjunction, the objective of gift giving was to gain social reputation and economic credit within the community. At the same time, under the influence and directives of British rule, such gifts were complemented by a 487

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more utilitarian and humanitarian understanding of gifts and donations. To secure good and stable relationships with the rulers, and to legitimise their own status, bankers, entrepreneurs, merchants, the landed, and –​later –​the urban middle classes began investing in the provision of schools, colleges, hospitals, and other public works.7 Under colonialism, therefore, alms giving (dānā) and service (sevā) acquired the special characteristic of catering to two different sets of audiences: one, the community (caste, religious group); and, two, the colonial state. In the late nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth, South Asian philanthropic traditions evolved into modern systems of social service through the redefinition of the ‘living traditions’ of giving, service, and religious duty.8 Modern forms of social service aimed at ‘improving’ and strengthening ‘community’, ‘race’, and ‘country’,9 and encompassed activities in a variety of fields, such as education, the establishment of orphanages, and the curbing of epidemics. Social services were conducted by diverse voluntary bodies and individuals, such as the Arya Paropkarini Sabha, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Servants of India Society, the Seva Samiti of Allahabad, various social service leagues, and the Theosophical Society. Gradually, health care, emergency relief, and first aid provision at large fairs also came under the ambit of service. The efforts of these organisations were largely directed towards the poor, ‘backward’, and marginalised people of South Asia.10 A redefinition of giving and service also took place in relief provisions for victims of natural disasters, such as cyclone, floods and earthquakes, and famines.11 Here, Indian volunteer humanitarianism combined indigenous traditions of relief with British models of organised philanthropy.

Imperial humanitarianism: Indian humanitarian provisions within the empire(s) Next to charitable giving and services during natural disasters and for different social, medical, and educational causes, Indian donors also contributed to humanitarian initiatives beyond the subcontinent from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. This happened for the first time during the Irish Famine from 1845 to 1851.12 Subsequently Indians shifted their focus to aid provisions during armed conflicts. Although these humanitarian engagements were embedded within the nexus of the British Empire, the latter was not the only impetus of such aid giving. As Adrian Ruprecht has convincingly shown for the ‘Great Eastern Crisis’ (i.e. the Balkan Wars, from 1875 to 1878), it could also be linked to motivations and solidarities that supported not the British but other imperial or extra-​imperial (religious and political) interests. During the wars between the Ottoman Empire and Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia, the Red-​ Cross-​inspired idea of helping wounded soldiers caused widespread humanitarian agitation on the subcontinent not only among Indian Muslims but also in Hindu circles. Precipitated by a global mediascape, this mass campaign was marked by modern practices of giving, such as the ‘formation of [public] committees, the publication of proceedings and appeals, the systematic collection of subscriptions and the transfer or money to the seat of war’.13 Indian humanitarian donations in support of the Ottoman Empire were motivated by a variety of reasons, but, clearly, pan-​Islamic notions and ideas of Muslim solidarity played a decisive role. In addition, nationalist feelings and the question of a (shared) humanity and civilisation impelled donors to give.14 Although responses to the ‘Great Eastern Crisis’ had already revealed that ambitions for volunteering and concerns to prove one’s own masculinity informed debates around aid giving, it was with the creation of the Indian Ambulance Corps that these concerns moved to the forefront. Two humanitarian initiatives of Indian volunteers organised by Mohandas Gandhi during the South African War from 1899 to 1902 and the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906 tapped 488

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into the complex politics of male self-​empowerment. As the British portrayed Indians in general and Hindus in particular as effeminate and weak, Indians perceived the ambulance work as an opportunity to demonstrate their courage and manliness. Alongside this, Gandhi strongly substantiated the humanitarian support rendered to the British war effort with his belief in the moral obligation of (imperial) subjects to be loyal to the empire –​an idea he would later abandon. This loyalty could be referred to in claims of equal political and civil rights.15 The reference to the rights and obligations of citizenship continued to mark South Asian practices and ideas of humanitarian aid in late colonial India, though the meanings of citizenship and the scales of humanitarianism could greatly vary. The first medical missions organised by Indian Muslims in the United Kingdom and on the subcontinent appeared in the wake of the Italian invasion of Ottoman Tripolitania (Libya) in 1911/​12 and the Balkan Wars in 1912/​ 13. Pan-​Islamism and a critical stance towards European imperialism were driving forces behind the initiatives, which created an ‘interconnected Islamic Red Crescent sphere’,16 sustained strongly by Indian donations. Although the British colonial authorities reacted with suspicion, they did not prohibit the humanitarian engagement of Indians.17 The humanitarian work of Indian civil society at this and at other occasions was shaped by its relationship with the British Indian state, which, although it generally aimed to control giving, also depended on it and therefore frequently encouraged it. The embeddedness of Indian non-​state humanitarian work in the colonial state’s and imperial structures came to the forefront during the First World War.18 After the British-​Indian government decided that India would join the war in August 1914, the colony’s contributions of men, materials, and money became a crucial source of supplies to the Allied powers and involved significant repercussions, both for colonial rulers and the ruled.19 The major involvement of Indian combatants and non-​combatants, first in the European and later in the Mesopotamian and East African theatres of war, soon confronted the British with an army of wounded and sick Indians, for whose medical treatment and care giving they were ill-​prepared. Although London and Delhi both strove to improve conditions for wounded and sick Indian war participants,20 voluntary humanitarian initiatives mushroomed and started assisting their fellow Indian countrymen as well as other military and civilian war victims.21 The most common way to aid the sufferers, and hence to support the war effort in India voluntarily, was donations in cash and in kind to the manifold war charities set up during the war.22 Nevertheless, Indian men and women –​ often, but not always, in cooperation with British and ‘European’23 residents in India –​also gave their time and labour for participating in non-​state humanitarian relief work, for instance as members or supporters of the Indian branch of the St John Ambulance movement, the YMCA and YWCA, the Bengal Ambulance Corps, Gandhi’s Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps and the Women’s Branch of the Bombay War Fund.24 On the subcontinent, British and Indian women undertook, as Sarah Ansari emphasised, ‘a staggering amount of activity’, and their engagement ‘mirrored what came to be expected of, and associated with, women on the “home front” in Britain and elsewhere’.25 Concretely, they became active in garment making and sock knitting, packed first aid bags, collected donations, and organised aid fêtes, concerts, and so on for fundraising purposes as well as entertainments for the wounded soldiers. Women distributed food and comfort bags among returnees, formed hospital visitor groups, and helped with the Red Cross inquiry services.26 Indian male volunteers also engaged in several of these activities. Additionally, they formed a number of ambulance initiatives that assisted the wounded and sick soldiers in Europe, Mesopotamia, and India and worked to keep up the morale of the fighting troops.27 Thus, during the First World War, Indian humanitarian war work occurred in an imperial frame, albeit without being exclusively driven by imperial motives. Invoking India’s war 489

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contributions again and again, Indian nationalists put forth their demand for self-​government within the empire. Thereby, they displayed, as Santanu Das has argued, ‘a complex “structure of feeling” ’, visible in ‘a strange conjunction of imperialist zeal and nationalist aspirations’.28 Likewise, this ‘strange conjunction’ underpinned the endeavours and work of various Indian humanitarian initiatives, which were characterised by their imperial loyalty but also advocated notions of public service, nationalist efficiency, citizenship, and patriotic duties. By postulating a degree of reciprocity, these initiatives entertained the hope for future (political) concessions for India29 –​a hope that the post-​war policies of the British-​Indian government failed to fulfil. With the rise of the Gandhian nationalist mass movement in the 1920s, the ideas and practices of an imperial humanitarianism lost some, but not all, appeal for Indians, who began increasingly to engage in nationalist, communal, and internationalist forms of humanitarian aid provisions. During the Second World War Indians worked again as volunteers for and donated money to a number of organisations and initiatives that were still (closely) linked to the colonial state, such as the Indian Red Cross Society (established in 1920) and the Indian St John Ambulance Association. Following the rather uniform response to the imperial war effort during the First World War, however, Indian humanitarianism now became fragmented, as alternative motivations and structures, especially those in a nationalist garb, began to benefit victims of war.30 As they had done three decades previously, Indian donors again contributed comprehensively to multiple war funds. Yet not all these contributions came forward voluntarily; this time the extraction of cash for the war funds involved severe pressure from the governmental authorities in multiple cases, which was not only resented but also, occasionally, resisted by the local population. The Raj’s approach to ‘voluntary giving’ further undermined feelings of imperial loyalty and questioned India’s place in the common (Allied) war effort.31

Nationalist humanitarianism in an internationalist setting The First World War and its repercussions influenced the mainstream Indian nationalism of the Indian National Congress (INC), which turned to Gandhi’s idea of non-​violence and mass politics and disavowed itself increasingly from the empire. India’s future (political) status was now understood less in terms of being an imperial dependency that might develop into a dominion under British rule. The (long-​term) goal in the late 1920s was to achieve independence. This reframing of Indian nationalism went hand in hand with a reorientation of possible alliances and support networks on the international stage. To strengthen India’s claims for independence, it became important to cooperate and align with ‘progressive’, anti-​colonial forces worldwide.32 One area to do so was the humanitarian realm. An early instance of Indian nationalist humanitarianism in an international conflict –​which was proposed, but never implemented –​occurred in the context of the Chinese national revolution in 1927. As the conflict also meant a challenge to its formal presence in China, Britain responded with the despatch of the Shanghai Defence Force, which included Indian soldiers. Indian nationalists not only criticised this move as an imperialist act but decided to send an ambulance corps to China. Preparations were well under way when the government of India, in agreement with London, refused to grant the ambulance corps the necessary passports, secretly fearing that the proposed medical mission would serve political purposes by being used ‘as a demonstration against the British policy in China’.33 This state intervention thus prevented any successful realisation of Indian nationalist humanitarianism in the late 1920s. The emerging nationalist humanitarianism was clearly politically motivated. It aimed to demonstrate that the INC had its own foreign policy stance, and underlined notions of the

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country’s readiness for independence. As well as aspiring to become free from colonial rule, the Indian National Congress and civil society actors provided ideological support and financial and material humanitarian assistance to Abyssinia, the Spanish Republicans, and China in the 1930s. The Italian–​Abyssinian War (from October 1935 to May 1936), which was closely followed in India, raised inter alia questions as to the kind of help that could be provided for the African victims. Aligning itself officially with Abyssinia, the INC expressed its solidarity with its African ‘brethren in distress’ and condemned Italy’s imperialist aggression and Britain’s timid foreign policy, which it also thought partly responsible for Abyssinia’s fate.34 The vocal support did not translate into any concrete material or financial initiative on the part of the INC for the African country, however. Although plans for medical and monetary aid for Abyssinia were also discussed among Indian civil society groups and in the nationalist media, money and medical supplies were forwarded to the Abyssinian Red Cross only by the Indian Red Cross Society. The donations came from the society’s members and the general public following appeals for contributions, published in the Indian press and voiced during protest meetings against Italy’s imperialist war.35 Only a few months later the Spanish Civil War broke out, and this time the Indian national movement created its own humanitarian programme, which saw the collections of funds and food items in favour of Republican Spain. Although it appears that the outcome of the INC’s initiative was rather modest in real terms when compared to humanitarian giving by other organisations around the globe, its aid involvement bestowed legitimacy upon Indian nationalists and enhanced the status of the Indian national movement on the international stage. Dissociating itself, as in the Abyssinian case, from Britain’s foreign policy, the INC aimed to orchestrate a politics of moral superiority for itself. Participating in transnational networks of left solidarity that catered aid to war victims, INC leaders concurrently utilised these connections to advance their own end: the achievement of an independent state. Whereas Indian nationalists viewed humanitarian help as a moral necessity, the Congress clearly considered it a political instrument. When directed towards the internationalist sphere, nationalist humanitarianism in its political avatar became, therefore, a tool for anti-​colonial emancipation.36 The same motivations were at play when the first INC-​ organised medical mission materialised in 1938. In the midst of the Second Sino-​Japanese War the Congress sent a team of five doctors with a fully equipped ambulance car and medical supplies to China as a token of nationalist India’s (anti-​imperialist) solidarity with its neighbour. Although the INC initiative was closely monitored by the British government, the colonial authorities intervened this time only in a limited way, falling back on intercepting correspondence and refusing to grant the passport for one potential team member. The state’s faltering reaction seemed to be linked with the growing strength of the national movement in the 1930s. Financed by contributions collected throughout India and coming from support groups in Britain and from Indians residing in South-​East Asia, the members of the Indian Medical Mission worked in China first in areas controlled by the Guomindang and later in Communist-​held Yan’an. Here, the Indian humanitarians met doctors, nurses, and miscellaneous personnel from Canada, the United States, Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and so on who, similarly, were providing politically informed humanitarian aid to China. The work of the Indian Medical Mission can therefore be understood as an integral part of the global political humanitarianism of the late 1930s and early 1940s –​a humanitarianism characterised by its strong leftist, anti-​imperialist attributes.37 Although much of India’s interwar nationalist humanitarianism has been forgotten, the Indian Medical Mission spawns a significant legacy in terms of the bilateral relations between India and China. One of its members, Dwarkanath Kotnis, who died of epilepsy in China in late 1942

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while on duty, was quickly celebrated as a martyr to the anti-​fascist cause and became a symbol for the bond of solidarity between the two countries. The story of the Indian Medical Mission also found its way into Indian popular culture, in the form of V. Shantaram’s movie Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani/​The Immortal Tale of Dr Kotnis (1946) and, decades later, as a comic book titled Doctor Kotnis in China (1984), published in the famous series Amar Chitra Katha.38 Before the end of colonial rule the Indian national movement once more engaged in non-​ state relief work, during a humanitarian crisis in Malaya in 1946. Research on this humanitarian campaign –​which occurred in the context of decolonisation and national self-​determination –​ is still lacking. Combined with missing historical analyses of state-​sponsored aid campaigns for Indonesia and Korea,39 organised by the INC-​led government after India had gained independence in 1947, such research promises to chart out continuities and discontinuities in Indian nationalist humanitarianism from the late colonial to the postcolonial period.

Communal relief work in late colonial India and during decolonisation Our discussion of the imperial and nationalist versions of Indian humanitarianism has shown that the relief work of non-​state actors and organisations was often linked in many ways with the domain of the ‘political’. In a colonial situation, one of the strongest political manifestations of humanitarianism was its relationship with nationalism. By fostering the production of patriotic citizens who cared for each other, for the nation, and for strangers in need, nation-​ building efforts could claim moral authority, and political legitimacy, against colonial rule.40 As different South Asian concepts of nationalism emerged, the questions of who belonged to the (imagined) nation and, therefore, who should receive aid and support in times of crisis were contested, and partially reinforced efforts to care (exclusively) for one’s own community. One set of organisations that followed such a particularistic approach in relief work came from the Hindu nationalist fold, most prominent among them the All-​India Hindu Mahasabha (hereafter Hindu Mahasabha), the political party of the Hindu nationalists.41 Although research has just begun to tap into this history, aid initiatives by Indian Muslims during internal humanitarian crises have so far been mostly overlooked and present an important area of future research. In general, there is a lacuna of historical scholarship dealing with (South Asian) non-​state relief work during communal conflicts and the mass violence of the Partition period.42 From the 1920s community-​based organisations became very active in organising help to their community members, thus following a selective understanding of who is a citizen and concomitant citizenship duties and rights. The Hindu Mahasabha provided relief for Hindu victims in the aftermath of communal violence, such as in Nagpur in 1927.43 After the so-​called ‘Great Calcutta Killings’ in August 1946, and with the spreading violence throughout British India, the political party again took up the work of aiding wounded victims and also provided relief for displaced Hindu refugees in Bengal. In the following months before, during, and after Partition, the Hindu Mahasabha and other associated Hindu nationalist organisations extended their relief work and granted similar assistance in north and west India. Their assistance, framed in exclusionary terms, was thereby coupled to a vision of a Hindu nation. Although continuing to favour a selective mode of aid provisions for Hindu victims, humanitarian and political competition with mainstream Indian nationalism during Partition influenced the Hindu Mahasabha’s aid practices. The party’s efforts after August 1947 to cooperate with other humanitarian actors following a non-​selective aid approach must be read against the Hindu Mahasabha’s desire that its relief work should be recognised by the postcolonial government and the Indian people; hence, it should be understood as part of the national framework of aid.44

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Résumé Focusing on aid rendered during armed conflicts, this chapter has introduced the reader to three varieties of South Asian humanitarianisms: imperial, nationalist, and communal. These different forms of assistance sometimes crossed geographical and political borders. Often Indian humanitarian giving assisted fellow citizens, however, and in doing so transcended barriers that were social, religious, and economic in nature. At the same time, communal relief work established and tightened boundaries, as assistance targeted one particular group of recipients. Beyond the imperial, nationalist, and communal frames of reference, the chosen case studies have shown that the activities of humanitarian organisers, volunteers, and donors followed a plethora of motivations –​i.e. morality, ethics, questions of masculinity, extension of social spaces and gender roles, patriotism, notions of public service, national efficiency and citizenship, anti-​colonial resistance, etc. Although the works of non-​state humanitarian organisations and actors clearly occurred within the limits set by the colonial and early postcolonial state, they likewise point to the complex relationship between Indian humanitarianism and colonialism, which ranged from (loyal) cooperation to critical distance and rejection. Writing the history of Indian humanitarianisms is still –​in many regards –​a novel undertaking, and it calls for further research. The chapter is intended to provide a first overview of the work done so far and to point to future lines of enquiry. In doing so, research into Indian humanitarianisms can not only contribute to but even shift arguments about humanitarian giving that were established through Eurocentric lenses.

Notes 1 Michael Barnett, The Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 15–​16; Johannes Paulmann, ‘Conjunctures in the history of international humanitarian aid during the twentieth century’, Humanity, 4 (2), 2013, pp. 215–​38. For work that looks beyond Europe and the West, see, among others, Mark R. Frost, ‘Humanitarianism and the overseas aid craze in Britain’s colonial straits settlements, 1870–​1920’, Past & Present, 236 (1), 2017, pp. 169–​205; Alexandra Pfeiff, ‘The Red Swastika Society’s humanitarian work: A re-​interpretation of the Red Cross in China’, New Global Studies, 10 (3), 2016, pp. 373–​92; Semih Çelik, ‘Between history of humanitarianism and humanitarianization of history: A discussion on Ottoman help for the victims of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–​1852’, WerkstattGeschichte, 68, 2015, pp. 13–​27; and Esther Möller, ‘The Suez Crisis as a transnational humanitarian moment’, European Review of History, 23 (1/​2), 2016, pp. 136–​53. 2 Barnett, The Empire of Humanity, 10, 29–​33. 3 Leona Anderson, ‘Generosity of householders, generosity of kings: Situating philanthropy in South Asia’, in: Soma Hewa and Philo Hove (eds.), Philanthropy and Cultural Context: Western Philanthropy in South, East, and Southeast Asia in the 20th Century (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), pp. 185–​202; Gregory Kozlowski, ‘Imperial authority, benefactions and endowments (awqaf) in Mughal India’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 38 (3), 1995, pp. 355–​70. For an excellent overview of literature on precolonial and colonial philanthropy and charity, see Filippo Osella, ‘Charity and philanthropy in South Asia: An introduction’, MAS, 52 (1), 2018, pp. 4–​34. 4 Carey Watt, ‘Philanthropy and civilizing missions in India c.1820–​1960: States, NGOs and development’, in: idem and Michael Mann (eds.), Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development (London: Anthem Press, 2011), pp. 275–​79; Ravi Ahuja, ‘ “The bridge-​ builders”: Some notes on railways, pilgrimage and the British “civilizing mission” in colonial India’, in: Harald Fischer-​Tiné and Michael Mann (eds.), Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 95–​116; Lionel Caplan, ‘Gifting and receiving: Anglo-​ Indian charity and its beneficiaries in Madras’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 32 (2), 1998, pp. 411–​15. 5 Watt, ‘Philanthropy and civilizing missions’, 278. 6 Jana Tschurenev, ‘Incorporation and differentiation: Popular education and the imperial civilizing mission in early nineteenth century India’, in: Watt and Mann, Civilizing Missions, pp. 93–​124.

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Maria Framke 7 Douglas E. Haynes, ‘From tribute to philanthropy: The politics of gift giving in a western Indian city’, JAS, 46 (2), 1987, pp. 339–​60; Jesse Palsetia, ‘Merchant charity and public identity formation in colonial India: The case of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 40 (3), 2005, pp. 197–​ 217; Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Patrons and politics in northern India’, MAS, 7 (3), 1973, pp. 349–​88. 8 Carey Watt, Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association, and Citizenship in Colonial India (New Delhi: OUP, 2005), 13–​19; Gwilym Beckerlegge, ‘Swami Vivekananda and Seva: Taking “social service” seriously’, in: William Radice (ed.), Swami Vivekananda and the Modernisation of Hinduism (New Delhi: OUP, 1998), pp. 158–​93; Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–​1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), ch. 7; Malavika Kasturi, ‘ “All gifting is sacred”: The Sanatana Dharma Sabha movement, the reform of dana and civil society in late colonial India’, IESHR, 47 (1), 2010, pp. 107–​39. 9 Watt, Serving the Nation, 3; Katan Alder, ‘Arenas of service and the development of the Hindu nationalist subject in India’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2015), 58–​63. 10 Watt, ‘Philanthropy and civilizing missions’, 279–​86; idem, Serving the Nation; Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-​Religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 38, 41–​6, 64, 100, 175; Soni, ‘Learning to labour: “native” orphans in colonial India, 1840s–​1920s’, International Review of Social History, 65 (1), 2019, pp. 1–​28. For an overview of the several meanings of sevā in the social and political contexts of colonial South Asia, see R. Srivatsan, ‘Concept of “seva” and the “sevak” in the freedom movement’, EPW, 41 (5), 2006, pp. 427–​38. 11 Gwilym Beckerlegge, Swami Vivekananda’s Legacy of Service: A Study of the Ramakrishna Mission (New Delhi: OUP, 2006). On responses to famines, see Joanna Simonow’s chapter in this volume. For overviews of the state-​managed responses to disasters in colonial India from an economic history perspective, see Tirthankar Roy, ‘State, society and market in the aftermath of natural disasters in colonial India: A preliminary exploration’, IESHR, 45 (2), 2008, pp. 261–​94; and Georgina Brewis, ‘ “Fill full the mouth of famine”: Voluntary action in famine relief in India 1896–​1901’, MAS, 44 (4), 2010, pp. 887–​918, 917–​18. 12 Christine Kinealy, ‘ “Some great and terrible calamity”: India’s response to Ireland’s Great Famine’, in Christophe Gillissen (ed.), Ireland: Looking East (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 13–​21. 13 Adrian Ruprecht, ‘De-​centering humanitarianism: The Red Cross and India, c.1877–​1939’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017), 65. 14 Ibid., 50–​103. Idem, ‘The Great Eastern Crisis (1875–1878 as a global humanitarian moment’, Journal of Global History, 21, 2021, pp. 1–26, doi: 10.1017/S1740022821000085. 15 Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-​Bearer of Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), chs. 3, 7; Pradip Kumar Datta, ‘The interlocking worlds of the Anglo-​Boer War in South Africa/​India’, South African Historical Journal, 57 (1), 2007, pp. 35–​59; Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Gandhi 1869–​1915: The transnational emergence of a public figure’, in: Judith Brown and Anthony Parel (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), pp. 30–​50. 16 Ruprecht, ‘De-​centering humanitarianism’, 200. 17 Ibid., 166–​203. For the Indian initiative during the Balkan Wars, see also Burak Akcapar, People’s Mission to the Ottoman Empire: M.A. Ansari and the Indian Medical Mission, 1912–​13 (New Delhi: OUP, 2014); and Syed Tanvir Wasti, ‘The Indian Red Crescent mission to the Balkan wars’, Middle Eastern Studies, 45 (3), 2009, pp. 393–​406. 18 For a discussion on humanitarianism and empire, see Rob Skinner and Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and empire: New research agendas’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40 (5), 2012, pp. 729–​47, 731. They convincingly argued that empire and humanitarianism ‘are both ultimately bound together in a series of mutually constituting histories, in which the ideas and practices associated with imperial politics and administration have both been shaped by and have in themselves informed developing notions of humanitarianism’. 19 Kaushik Roy, Indian Army and the First World War, 1914–​18 (New Delhi: OUP, 2018); Radhika Singha, ‘Finding labour from India for the war in Iraq: The Jail Porter and Labour Corps, 1916–​1920’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49 (2), 2007, pp. 412–​45; Santanu Das, ‘Responses to the war (India)’, in 1914–​1918-​Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014); Judith Brown, ‘War and the colonial relationship: Britain, India and the war of 1914–​ 18’, in: Dewitt C. Ellinwood and S.D. Pradhan (eds.), India and Word War I (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), pp. 19–​47.

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Indian humanitarianism under colonial rule 20 Mark Harrison, The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (Oxford: OUP, 2010); Samiksha Sehrawat, ‘Health and medicine (India)’, in 1914–​1918-​Online; Samuel Hyson and Alan Lester, ‘ “British India on trial”: Brighton military hospitals and the politics of empire in World War I’, Journal of Historical Geography, 38, 2012, pp. 18–​34. 21 For a first set of enquiries about state and non-​state care for disabled Indian soldiers, see Aparna Nair, ‘ “These curly-​bearded, olive-​skinned warriors”: Medicine, prosthetics, rehabilitation and the disabled sepoy in the First World War, 1914–​1920’, Social History of Medicine, 2, 2019, pp. 1–​21. Indian prisoners of war in German captivity received aid provision by the Indian Soldiers’ Fund, set up under the auspices of the Order of St John in Britain; see Nadja Durbach, ‘The politics of provisioning: Feeding South Asian prisoners during the First World War’, War & Society, 37 (2), 2018, pp. 75–​90. One example for providing medical aid to the civil population was the Bengal Ambulance Corps’ work in Amara; see Sailendranath Bose, The Bengal Ambulance Corps: A Short Sketch of the Bengal Ambulance Corps and Its Work in Mesopotamia (Calcutta: N. Mukherjee at the Art Press, 1922), 48–​9. 22 For information on India’s voluntary humanitarian war contributions, see the series India’s Services in the War, vols. 3 to 5 (Lucknow: Newul Kishore Press, 1922). 23 The category of ‘European’ also included Americans and Australians. 24 Harald Fischer-​Tiné, ‘ “Unparalleled opportunities”: The Indian YMCA’s army work schemes for imperial troops during the Great War (1914–​1920)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47 (1), 2019, pp. 100–​37; Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury, The First World War, Anticolonialism and Imperial Authority in British India, 1914–​1924 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), chs. 1, 2; Santanu Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), ch. 6; James D. Hunt, Gandhi in London, rev. edn. (New Delhi: Promilla, 1993), 162–​74; Sarah Ansari, ‘The Bombay Presidency’s “home front”, 1914–​1918’, in: Roger D. Long and Ian Talbot (eds.), India and World War I: A Centennial Assessment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 71–​2; Ruprecht, ‘De-​ centering humanitarianism’, 208–​44. 25 Ansari, ‘The Bombay Presidency’s “home front” ’, 72. 26 India’s Services in the War, vol. 4, Bombay (Lucknow: Newul Kishore Press, 1922), 51–​64; ‘Appendix VIII: Report on the work of Lady Carmichael’s Bengal Women’s War Fund’, in: The Red Cross Work of the St John Ambulance in India: Third Interim Report (Delhi: Thakur Das & Sons, 1915), pp. 91–​9. 27 Fischer-​Tiné, ‘ “Unparalleled opportunities” ’; Bose, The Bengal Ambulance Corps. 28 Das, ‘Responses to the war (India)’. Other motives that influenced Indian humanitarians were, next, the idea of relieving the suffering of war victims, the opportunity to gain military experiences and to prove their masculinity, and to practise medicine. The work opened up for them new and unique (individual and professional) opportunities of moving beyond their houses, families and/​or countries. 29 Welcome Library, MS1456/​ 7920/​ 7920/​ 7922: ‘Indian Field Ambulance Corps’, Morning Post, 2 February 1914. 30 Norah Hill, ‘The Indian Red Cross in peace and war’, The Asiatic Review, 37 (129), 1941, pp. 1–​11; ‘St John Ambulance units’ good work’, Times of India, 1 February, 1942, p. 4. So far, historical research has hardly analysed non-​state Indian humanitarian aid during the Second World War. One exception is the focus on voluntary aid provisions during the Bengal Famine; see Joanna Simonow, ‘The Great Bengal Famine in Britain: Metropolitan campaigning for food relief and the end of empire, 1943–​44’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 48 (1), 2020, pp. 168–​97; and Abhijit Sarkar, ‘Fed by famine: The Hindu Mahasabha’s politics of religion, caste, and relief in response to the Great Bengal Famine, 1943–​1944’, MAS, 54 (6), 2020, pp. 2022–​86. 31 Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (London: Vintage, 2016), 51–​4. 32 See Carolien Stolte’s chapter in this volume. 33 B. Prasad, The Origins of Indian Foreign Policy (Calcutta: Bookland, 1960), 73–​4; BL, APAC, IOR/​L/​ PJ/​6/​1941. 34 Maria Framke, Delhi–​Rom–​Berlin: Die indische Wahrnehmung von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus, 1922–​1939 (Darmstadt: WBG, 2013), 249–​67; idem, ‘International events, national policy: The 1930s in India as a formative period for non-​alignment’, in: Nataša Mišković, Harald Fischer-​Tiné, and Nada Boškovska (eds.), The Non-​Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi–​Bandung–​Belgrade (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 37–​56; Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Observance of Abyssinia Day’, in: Gopal Sarvepalli (ed.), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 7 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1975), p. 567. 35 Indian Red Cross Society, Annual Report 1936 (Simla: Pioneer, 1938), 9–​10; Framke, Delhi–​Rom–​ Berlin, 253–​5.

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Maria Framke 36 Idem, ‘Political humanitarianism in the 1930s: Indian aid for Republican Spain’, European Review of History, 23 (1/​2), 2016, pp. 63–​81. In 1934 the Indian National Congress became also involved in organising relief for fellow Indian citizens after the devastating earthquake in Bihar. As with later efforts to enhance its status internationally by providing aid, here the INC felt it important to prove to the nation and the colonial government its ability to help in a time of crisis; see Eleonor Marcussen, ‘Acts of aid: The politics of relief and reconstruction after the 1934 Bihar–​Nepal earthquake’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Heidelberg, 2016), ch. 3. 37 Maria Framke, ‘ “We must send a gift worthy of India and the Congress!” War and political humanitarianism in late colonial South Asia’, MAS, 51 (6), 2017, pp. 1969–​98. 38 On the movie, see Neepa Majumdar, ‘Immortal tale or nightmare? Dr Kotnis between art and exploitation’, South Asian Popular Culture, 6 (2), 2008, pp. 141–​59. Several books have been published on the Indian Medical Mission, and in particular on Dwarkanath Kotnis. See, among others, K.A. Abbas, … And One Did Not Come Back! The story of the Congress Medical Mission to China, 4th edn. (Bombay: Sound Magazine, 1944); and Bijoy K. Basu, Call of Yanan: Story of the Indian Medical Mission to China, 1938–​43 (New Delhi: All India Kotnis Memorial Committee, 1986). 39 Baladas Ghoshal, ‘India and the struggle for Indonesian independence’, Akademika, 54 (1), 1999, pp. 105–​30; Kim ChanWahn, ‘The role of India in the Korean War’, International Area Review, 13 (2), 2010, pp. 21–​37, 26–​7. 40 Watt, ‘Philanthropy and civilizing missions’, 279–​92; idem, Serving the Nation, ch. 6. See also Elena Valdameri’s chapter in this volume. 41 See, for Hindu nationalist famine work, Sarkar, ‘Fed by famine’; Joanna Simonow, ‘After the “late Victorian holocausts”: Transnational responses to famines and malnutrition in India, c.1900–​1955’ (PhD thesis, ETH Zürich, 2019), 146–​62. 42 For first enquiries and fragmentary information in non-​state relief work during communal violence and the Partition, see Ian Talbot, Freedom’s Cry: The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and Partition Experience in North-​West India (Karachi: OUP, 1996), 67–​9; Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 156–​7; Anwesha Roy, Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940–​1947 (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), 49, 56, 201; T. Muhammedali, ‘In service of the nation: Relief and reconstruction in Malabar in the wake of the rebellion of 1921’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 68 (1), 2007, pp. 789–​805; and B.V. Deshpande and S.R. Ramaswamy, Dr Hedgewar the Epoch Maker: A Biography (Bangalore: Sahitya Sindhu, 1981), 95–​6. There is a growing body on literature on the provision of aid by the national and provincial governments of India and Pakistan. See, among others, Joya Chatterjee, ‘Right or charity? The debate over relief and rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947–​1950’, in: Suvir Kaul (ed.), The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Divisions of India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), pp. 74–​110; Ian Talbot, ‘Punjabi refugees’ rehabilitation and the Indian state: Discourses, denials and dissonances’, MAS, 45 (1), 2011, pp. 109–​ 30; and Elisabetta Iob, Refugees and the Politics of the Everyday State in Pakistan: Resettlement in Punjab, 1947–​1962 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 43 Deshpande and Ramaswamy, Dr Hedgewar the Epoch Maker, 95–​6. 44 Maria Framke and Esther Möller, ‘From local philanthropy to political humanitarianism: South Asian and Egyptian humanitarian aid during the period of decolonization’, ZMO Working Paper 22, 2019, www.zmo.de/​publikationen/​WorkingPapers/​framke_​moeller_​2019.pdf, accessed: 10 May 2020.

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39 FAMINE RELIEF IN COLONIAL SOUTH ASIA, 1858–​1 947 Regional and global perspectives Joanna Simonow

Introduction It was in the middle of the nineteenth century that famines in India turned into a popular cause of border-​crossing humanitarian activities. The imperial, transnational, and global networks that began to undergird such responses to famines in late colonial India illustrate that the history of famines in the region is also a history of South Asia’s growing interconnectedness. Even beyond scholarly work that foregrounds humanitarian entanglements, however, are histories of famines in colonial India seldom written without references to movements, debates, or events that occurred outside the Indian subcontinent. Whether the ideological roots of colonial anti-​ famine policies or the environmental, economic, and political causes of famines in the region are under scrutiny, historians can seldom cling to national frames of analysis to answer their research questions convincingly. Moreover, with scholars aptly illustrating how famine in India shaped the political geography of Indian cities,1 the environmental history of the region,2 and the creation of camps across the British Empire,3 the history of food crises in colonial India are now increasingly situated at the interface of variegated fields of historical enquiry. This chapter offers an introductory reading to the vast and still growing literature on famines in colonial South Asia by surveying official and non-​state famine relief activities. Structured in three parts, the chapter commences with a review of the making of colonial anti-​famine policies in the nineteenth century, followed by a second section that discusses old and new philanthropic and charitable responses in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. The final part draws from novel additions to the field to sketch how famines in late colonial India emerged as a cause célèbre of imperial and international humanitarianism. To prepare the ground for this three-​pronged review, let us consider the frequency and scope of famine crises in the colonial period first. Famines and food scarcities of various degrees accompanied colonial rule in India. Only about a dozen of them have received scholarly attention. For long, this attention has been distributed rather unevenly, with literature on famines in the second half of the nineteenth century being more extensive than research dealing with famines in the early colonial period. But, with the growth of scholarly work on the latter, the balance is shifting.4 DOI: 10.4324/9780429431012-40

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In 1769/​ 70 famine conditions surfaced in Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar, resulting in the estimated death of 10 million Indians in Bengal alone –​a third of the province’s population. Millions of Indians died of starvation in the south of India from 1781 to 1783, and a year later in north India as well because of the rapid succession of another major famine crisis.5 Droughts were frequent in the North-​Western Provinces, in 1803/​4, 1812/​13, 1817–​19, 1824–​26, and 1833, often spilling over into severe subsistence crises. This spate of food crises anticipated the onset of yet another major famine in 1836/​7, which threw the Doab region into havoc and caused the death of an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of the population.6 In the second half of the nineteenth century famine conditions devastated Orissa in 1866/​7 and ravaged the Madras Presidency, the Deccan region, and the North-​Western Provinces from 1876 to 1878.7 Even greater in scope were the famines of 1896/​7 and 1899/​1900, which held almost the entire subcontinent in their grip.8 Adding to the pangs of hunger, epidemics preyed on those weakened by starvation.9 Mortality was excessive during these latter famine crises. Historians have estimated that between 12 and 29 million died between 1876 and 1902.10 Following the improvement of colonial mechanisms to identify and contain famine conditions, their scale decreased in the early twentieth century. Yet scarcities as well as outright famines continued to haunt India’s agriculturalists. They were particular frequent during and in the aftermath of both world wars, when the wars’ economic, social, and political repercussions increased the vulnerability of India’s agricultural labourers to subsistence crises.11 It was not until the great Bengal Famine of 1943/​4, however, which resulted in the death of an estimated 3 million Bengalis and displaced even more, that mass starvation again resulted in horrific sights of emaciated bodies and corpses filling the streets of urban centres of British India.12 Following the worst South Asian famine of the twentieth century, the nation’s political elite prepared for independence even while the country remained on the brink of famine. India’s interim government was not yet constituted when food shortages resurfaced in the east and the south of India. Food rationing kept famine at bay, but it bred widespread malnutrition.13 As India attained independence, the nation grappled with a food deficit of 7 million tons, 10 per cent of its needs, rendering the achievement of food security a pressing concern for India’s political elite in the first decade of independence.14

Governing famines in colonial India Contemporaries and later historians alike have debated whether British colonialism increased the scope and frequency of famines.15 The paucity of statistical evidence regarding famines in the precolonial period limits the empirical basis on which we can base our answer to this question. Nevertheless, scholars have convincingly shown that colonial interventions in India’s economy, in particular changes to the revenue system, lowered the resilience of landless agricultural labourers to scarcities caused by droughts and floods.16 Famines in India were no colonial invention, yet colonialism began to shape their nature, course, and impact. In light of the widespread havoc created by famine crises in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, the East India Company (EIC) began to realise that famines potentially threatened its expansion in the Indian subcontinent. Migration, resistance to tax collectors, and rising crime rates at times of famine became a concern of the early colonial administration. Although officials sought ways to contain famines, the nature of their responses remained ad hoc and unsystematic. Until the codification of the rules of official famine relief in the 1880s, their nature and scope largely hinged on personal discretion and career choices. Moreover, nineteenth-​century responses to famines in India were informed by metropolitan debates. The revision of the British poor laws in the 1830s produced an ideological basis that would 498

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influence famine relief in India. The new Poor Law of 1834 bore the imprint of the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus and the utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham. It postulated a rigid system of control and established the poor-​or workhouse as main instruments of poor relief in England. Receiving government assistance became dependent on the willingness and ability to labour under strict control. The careful selection of the ‘deserving poor’ and the wish to keep the public investment in welfare to a minimum –​central elements of poor relief in Victorian Britain –​found their way into colonial famine management in India.17 Early tests of neediness demanded the famine-​stricken to overcome distances to gain access to relief, or consume food that contradicted religious and cultural norms, although these soon proved unsuitable to prevent death. Meanwhile, theories on the market economy, articulated by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, further discouraged colonial administrators from controlling food prices, instead encouraging them to wait until the market eventually self-​regulated.18 Although non-​ intervention with market forces became a frequently evoked core principle of colonial famine governance, the recognition among colonial administrators grew that some sort of intervention was necessary to contain the economic, political, and social unrest caused by famines. The consolidation of colonial rule in the early part and middle of the nineteenth century, which was accompanied by a reflection on the responsibilities of the colonial state, fuelled contemplation about the expansion of anti-​famine policies. It was not until 1880, however, that the colonial state officially acknowledged its duty to mitigate famines in India. In 1878 the government of India had tasked the members of the Indian Famine Commission with the development of a uniform scheme to guide the official response to famine crises.19 Its outcome was the provisional Famine Code of 1883, which was adopted by provincial administrations across India with minor alterations thereafter (thereby demanding the use of the plural: famine codes). The famine codes systematised the management of famine and installed an administrative structure to enable a timely response. Through the observation of migration, mortality rates and, lastly, the willingness of people to conduct hard manual labour in exchange for a subsistence wage, colonial administrators attempted to identify the moment scarcities developed into famine. The drafters of the first Famine Code were convinced that famines were largely caused by a lack of work rather than a lack of food. Whereas using labour as relief had been an early tenet of the colonial famine response, the famine codes zeroed in on public famine relief works that provided the starving with money (and, more seldom, food) in exchange for hard manual labour. Only a limited amount of gratuitous relief also administered in poor-​houses for the infirm.20 Infrastructural projects, the construction of railways, roads, and irrigation networks, became main areas in which the famine-​afflicted laboured.21 Many contemporaries in and outside India viewed the Indian famine codes as a piece of innovative colonial statecraft. Important limits prevailed, however, and rendered seeking government relief a risky undertaking. The risk was particularly high for women. With women constituting 50 per cent of the total of people labouring on famine relief works in the late nineteenth century, gender became an important category for setting wages and ensuring that relief was kept to a minimum. Echoing contemporary ideas on the dietary needs of women and their physical capacities, the colonial administration established differential wages for the two sexes, with women receiving less.22 When the famine codes were applied for the first time, during the prolonged famine period of the 1890s, colonial administrators implemented them inadequately and thereby conditioned the death of millions. It was only in the aftermath of these harrowing famines that the colonial system of famine relief improved. The colonial state’s success in reducing mortality during subsequent famines in the early twentieth century, however, should not gloss over the fact that people in India still died of the lack of food.23 Malnutrition was rampant in colonial India, and, 499

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Figure 39.1  Women at a government famine relief work camp during the famine of 1896/​7. Source: Vaughan Nash, The Great Famine and Its Causes (London: Longmans, Green, 1900), opp. p. 16.

as nutritionists of the interwar period demonstrated, was the reason for high mortality rates among infants and mothers.24

Private charitable responses to famines in colonial India Indian philanthropists had offered employment, opened food kitchens, and financed the building of wells to mitigate famine conditions long before British colonisers arrived in India. Their activities were part of a diverse set of socio-​cultural and religious practices that assisted the poor at times of subsistence crises.25 British administrators were sceptical of Indian philanthropy, however. They refuted indigenous customs of hospitality towards the poor and the assistance of mendicants. Alongside the consolidation of colonial rule in India, practices and traditions that were in conflict with contemporary Victorian notions of charity were discouraged. On the other hand, the colonial state created incentives for Indians to take part in ostensibly modern forms of charity.26 To encourage Indian donations to British-​led famine relief committee, provincial governments began to match the sums raised. Meanwhile, Indians who joined such committees gained official recognition and improved their status.27 With the creation of the famine codes, such colonial attempts at governing the private charitable response to famine further broadened. The famine codes defined the purpose of private charity at times of famine narrowly and increased the mechanisms in place to ensure that charity met its expectations. Relief financed through private money was allowed to supplement, not to overlap with, colonial efforts to mitigate famine, and any interference with official operations was strictly ruled out.28 Legitimate forms of charity now included the maintenance of children orphaned by famine, the assistance of ‘respectable persons’ who were inhibited by caste, class, or religious prescriptions from seeking relief in public, and, lastly, the provision of ‘small comforts’, namely food and cloth, for those unable to work because of age or sickness.29 The institution in charge of ensuring that charity adhered to colonial rules was the central committee of the India Famine Charitable Relief Fund in Calcutta. It received funds solicited throughout the British Empire, 500

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including India, and administered their dispersal through hierarchically organised provincial and district committees.30 The impact of such and other colonial interferences in Indian charitable practices produced mixed results. Despite these interventions, philanthropic responses to famines in colonial India remained heterogeneous as traditional forms of assistance to the poor were still practised. Yet the colonial state succeeded in motivating a greater number of Indian philanthropists to channel their money through official funds, and Indian volunteers soon outgrew the number of British members of the India famine charitable relief fund, though they seldom acquired a leading position.31 Meanwhile, new practices of Indian philanthropy emerged in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth that made creative use of colonial institutions and rules of famine relief, adapting them in accordance to indigenous ideas and requirements. Illustrative of the Indian social service movement that began to gain pace in the late nineteenth century, new associations were created and long-​established Indian socio-​ religious reform movements adopted novel fundraising methods and mobilised volunteers that provided assistance at times of famines.32 The Sadharan Brahmo Samaj began to address famine conditions in Bengal in 1885, and in 1907 created a central and permanent famine relief fund to increase the timeliness of its relief response.33 Under the lead of the Indian social reformer and politician Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–​1928), the Arya Samaj joined famine relief activities in 1897. Alarmed by the doings of missionaries who sheltered children orphaned by the famine, Rai initiated a famine relief campaign that assisted Hindu orphans and widows. Students of the Dayanand Anglo Vedic College assembled Hindu children in the famine-​affected provinces in north India and placed them in orphanages run by the Samaj in Ferozepur, Punjab.34 It was during the same famine crisis of the late 1890s that volunteers of the Ramakrishna Mission equally began to offer relief to people suffering from famine.35 With the creation of the Servants of India Society in Pune in 1905, the origins of Indian non-​state famine relief further diversified. Formed by the famous moderate Indian nationalist Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–​1915), the Servants of India Society worked within the constitutional boundaries of the British Raj to make India and its citizens fit for self-​rule. Gokhale understood the Servants of India Society as offering training to Indians to transform them into future leaders of social reform. After its first response to famine during a crisis that affected the United Provinces in 1907/​8, the Servants of India Society developed into an important relief provider in the following decades.36 Although the social service movement was initially dominated by men, the creation of Indian women’s organisations, the Seva Sadan (the Mission to the Women of India) in 1909 and the All-​India Women’s Conference (AIWC) in the late 1920s, significantly increased the participation of women volunteers in public social service activities, including modern practices of famine relief.37 In the late 1930s, and particularly during the great Bengal Famine of 1943, women were at the forefront of Indian non-​state efforts to mitigate the suffering.38 The contribution of women to famine relief activities can already be discerned in the late nineteenth century, however, when the well-​known Indian social reformer and later Christian convert Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–​1922) led a group of women volunteers to rescue and shelter women and children during famines in the 1890s.39 Women who engaged in famine relief arguably shaped its contours by vociferously criticising the alleged insufficiency of assistance provided to female famine sufferers and by catering to women’s needs.40 Given that women were often inhibited from earning an adequate wage on government-​run famine relief works, for women who lived through famine without family or communal support prostitution often provided the only prospect of survival. Apart from preventing prostitution, the trafficking of women and children and sexual violence in poor-​houses were pressing concerns of women 501

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social reformers. With Ramabai again being an early example, women drew from international contacts to mobilise funds for their famine relief activities. Thus, the number of Indian relief providers working outside the official system of famine relief grew at the turn of the twentieth century. Their relationship to colonial structures and rules of famine relief was often complex. This was, not least, because famine relief work became a vehicle of Indian nationalist mobilisation.41 Even before then the frequent occurrence of famines in the late nineteenth century had undermined the claim that India prospered under colonial rule and had fed into the ensuing nationalist economic critique of colonialism.42 The three-​time president of the Indian National Congress (INC) and the first Indian Member of Parliament in Britain in 1892, Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–​1917), had articulated the demand to end the ‘drain of wealth’ from India to the United Kingdom for the first time in the late 1860s, when he linked the frequency of famines in India to the economic exploitation of the country under colonial rule.43 He fleshed out his argument in Poverty and Un-​British Rule in India (1901), which became part of a series of monographs lending empirical evidence to the claim that India’s economy suffered from the effects of colonial capitalism.44 Although this critique had originated in India, it echoed in the metropole, where British socialists supported Indian disagreement with the colonial management of famines. In 1877, a year before the first India Famine Commission was constituted, the socialist Henry Mayers Hyndman (1842–​1921) called for an impartial assessment of colonial anti-​famine policies in The Indian Famine and the Crisis in India.45 By 1901 the India Famine Union in London comprised prominent British and Indian politicians, journalists, and philanthropists assembled to pressure the colonial state to improve the structures in place to mitigate subsistence crisis in the subcontinent.46 Meanwhile, Indian politicians and social reformers used the famine codes as a benchmark to assess the colonial responses to famines and to demand that provincial governments enforce their own rules. Indians also repeatedly pressed for the adaptation and change of the famine codes. Through their own information gathering and evaluation of famine crises, which often challenged the appraisal of provincial governments, they contributed significantly to the improvement of the colonial governance of famines. At the same time, Indian famine relief providers often demonstrated their adherence to the principles of charitable giving to claim legitimacy. The emulation of ostensibly modern practices of famine relief and charity allowed Indians to demonstrate aspirations of self-​rule that challenged colonial assumptions of India’s civilisational inferiority. The ways in which famine relief began to feed into Indian nationalism was more intricate, however. Indian famine relief espoused the right and duty of Indians to assist their crisis-​afflicted countrymen and -​women. It hence drew from the idea that the people of India were part of one Indian nation, although in the nineteenth century and early twentieth the contours of ‘the nation’ were, arguably, still heavily contested and ill-​defined. In addition, volunteering in times of famines facilitated the attempts of Indian nationalists to train an Indian citizenry. The provision of famine relief created new contact zones that brought mostly upper-​ caste, urban volunteers in touch with rural low-​caste populations, on the one hand, whereas assisting the famine-​stricken offered volunteers with important experience and training in social service, on the other.47

Famines in colonial India: A humanitarian cause célèbre Although the rise of humanitarian activities on behalf of famine-​afflicted populations in general, and of Indians particular, has multiple origins, it is deeply entangled with the history of British imperialism.48 Scholars of British history have referred to the widespread opposition against the new Poor Law in the 1830s in Britain as well as the harrowing experience of the 502

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Irish Potato Famine (Gorta Mór) from 1845 to 1849 as watershed moments in the establishment of the starving as targets of humanitarian benevolence.49 Those mobilising funds to assist those suffering from the pangs of hunger refuted Malthusian interpretations of famines, which had long cast the hunger of the poor as a necessary evil and a natural check against population growth. Concern over the fate of Indian sufferers of famine had been rising in Britain prior to the 1840s. When north and central India were visited by famine in 1837/​8, a metropolitan debate about the EIC’s responsibilities to mitigate starvation in India ensued.50 It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, that famine relief committees mushroomed across and beyond the British Empire to solicit funds for charitable famine relief in India. During the famine that ravaged Madras and Bombay from 1876 to 1878, the scale of the Australian response to imperial fundraising was unprecedented.51 When the British Empire renewed its call to give to India in the 1890s, the geographical scope of such imperial fundraising further broadened, as money was forthcoming, among others, from the Straits Settlements, Hong Kong, and South Africa.52 In addition, the ascendance of US moral imperialism conditioned the growth of North American missionary famine relief in India in the 1890s.53 Missionaries raised funds to assist their famine relief efforts in British India with the support of the religious and secular press in the United States. The Christian Herald, a popular New-​York-​based religious magazine that carried the wish to establish North America as the almoner of the world, organised the shipping of tons of grain from Kansas to the shores of India twice during the 1890s.54 Meanwhile, as the social gospel movement gained pace in North America, missionaries in India were drawn to the material needs of the communities they worked with.55 Coupled with the potential that famine relief allegedly held for attracting converts, this nourished the interest of North American missionaries in assisting the famine-​stricken in British India. Historians have attributed this emergence and growth of empathetic responses at least in part to new methods of narrating and visually depicting suffering. Sketches and engravings had already been part of humanitarian fundraising when the advance of modern communication, print technology, and photography further intensified the use of images of suffering in humanitarian campaigns in the late nineteenth century.56 More than a decade before the invention of the hand-​held Kodak camera in 1888 made photography fit for general use, photographs of famine in India were already applied in fundraising campaigns across the British Empire. In 1876–​78 images taken by the British military officer Willoughby Wallace Hooper in India were reproduced in newspapers as sketches in Britain and Australasia.57 Although the production of pictures of famine in colonial India were informed by discourses and ideologies that were unique to the historical context in which they emerged, gendered depictions of maternal and infant distress, which became a common trope in the visual representations of famine in colonial South Asia, also became a typical means of imaging famines elsewhere.58 Photographs taken during Indian famines in the nineteenth century began to feed into a global repertoire of famine images.59 Although the images and narratives applied to solicit funds often aimed at empathic responses, the reasons donors gave to famine relief in India were complex and diverse. People in the British Empire answered calls to assist imperial fundraising to gain status and public acknowledgement. At other times funds were raised by diaspora communities wishing to assist people in the homeland. Motives were further complicated by religious beliefs that mandated the sharing of one’s wealth and the fact that imperial humanitarianism was also an effort to navigate political realities at home and in the empire.60 With the Indian nationalist movement gaining pace at home and abroad in the early twentieth century, the reasons for and origins of famine relief for India further diversified. 503

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Figure 39.2  Missionary fundraising for Indian famine relief during the famine of 1899/​1900. Source: Illustrated Missionary News, 32 (384), 1899, cover.

The relief mobilised for the victims of famine in India was part of a wider net of aid flows that was multidirectional in nature. Benevolence originated not only in the metropole. During the Gorta Mór, the Irish Relief Fund in Calcutta attracted donations from a broad section of people in India that, apart from Irish soldiers and British residents, also included Indian wage 504

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labourers.61 In response to the great Persian famine of 1871/​2, Zoroastrians in Bombay raised money for relief work in Persia.62 Although these early examples of South Asian humanitarianism implicitly undermined imperial power structures and hierarchies, the use of humanitarianism to demonstrate aspirations and capacities of self-​rule turned more explicit in the twentieth century.63 An altogether new source of funds for famine relief activities was created with the formation of Indian diaspora institutions in North America and in Britain after 1905, when the Japanese victory over the Russian Empire and the Swadeshi movement in Bengal led a growing number of Indian nationalists to settle outside India.64 This ‘global turn’ of Indian nationalism in the early twentieth century rendered famines a topic of nationalist mobilisation outside the country, where Indian nationalists successfully established bonds with like-​minded anti-​imperialists. The beginnings of nationalist efforts at mobilising funds for famine relief in India in the early twentieth century were modest: in 1908 the Indian nationalist firebrand Taraknath Das reprinted a postcard that he had received from India to solicit money for famine relief in North America, while he accused British colonialism of causing famine in the a series of editions of The Free Hindusthan.65 Such activities by Indian nationalists in North America and in Britain grew decisively throughout the following decades. They peaked during the Bengal Famine of 1943. At this time the India Famine Relief Committee in New York united a broad alliance of anti-​imperialists of different backgrounds to advocate US food aid for India.66 Meanwhile, in London and Birmingham, the India Relief Committee raised money that it channelled to Indian providers of famine relief in Bengal. Assisted by British socialists and communists, Indians took their demands for food relief and the end of colonial rule onto the streets and into the lecture halls of Britain.67

Résumé The consolidation of colonial rule in South Asia was accompanied by the development of a colonial system of famine relief. The frequent instances of social, economic, and political havoc created by famines in the subcontinent posed a threat to the political legitimacy of the Raj and hence challenged the coloniser’s emphasis on non-​intervention, leading to the codification of a system of famine relief in the 1880s. With the adoption of the famine codes, the colonial administration accepted its duty to prevent mortality at times of famine, while it refrained from introducing welfare measures to attend to general levels of mal-​and undernutrition. Relief was given in cash or in kind to those willing and able to conduct hard manual labour on governmental public famine relief works. In addition, smaller-​scaled gratuitous relief was administered in poor-​houses to the infirm. Meanwhile, the colonial state tightened its control over private charity. Indian practices of philanthropy that emphasised a principle of hospitality towards the poor were deemed ‘indiscriminate’ and, hence, in contradiction with Victorian notions of poor relief that emphasised the need to control the poor and limit relief to a minimum. The famine codes defined the purpose and legitimate channels of charitable responses to famines rigidly, while the colonial administration further encouraged Indian contributions to British-​ led famine relief funds. It was in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth that Indian social reformers began to widen the scope of their famine relief work. Mobilising and administering famine relief in congruence with the contemporary understanding of modern famine relief became an important signifier of Indians’ ability to self-​improve, and hence tapped into a wider colonial discourse that promoted modernisation along predefined terms. Indian social reformers defined famine relief as a site of nationalist mobilisation. With the Indian social service movement gaining pace, the participation of Indians in famine relief was declared to constitute a right and 505

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a duty of Indians towards their fellow countrymen. Volunteering, moreover, entailed an educative purpose that aimed at forming an active Indian citizenry, prepared for self-​rule. Lastly, with an increasingly diverse set of donors contributing to imperial fundraising efforts in the late nineteenth century, famines in colonial South Asia were turned into a popular cause of border-​crossing humanitarian activity. Whereas the rising concern for the famine-​afflicted in India was initially of an imperial dimension, money was soon raised outside the British Empire as well. In the 1890s North Americans were drawn to the prospect of propagating Christian America through the sending of grain and money to British India at times of famine. The media-​driven mobilisation of famine relief overseas received another set of players in the early twentieth century, when the global turn of Indian nationalism integrated famine into nationalist mobilisation outside India as well. With the growth of Indian diaspora institutions in North America, Britain, and beyond, Indian providers of famine relief increasingly received financial support from outside the Indian subcontinent. Although the picture presented in this chapter remains necessarily incomplete, it has illustrated the multitudinous historical agents involved in attending to famines in colonial South Asia, the different agendas that motivated poor relief, and the breadth of networks that undergirded such interventions. Despite the copious literature on famines in colonial India, the history of famines still provides scholars of South Asia with new points of departure to deviate from common scales of analysis and to explore largely untouched primary sources. As demonstrated, the history of famines in colonial South Asia is also –​though certainly not exclusively –​a history of the region’s interconnectedness. Although this interconnectedness is a particularly vivid aspect of non-​state famine relief in the late colonial period, this history, in part, remains to be written.

Notes 1 Sheetal Chhabria, Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), 56–​83. 2 Sunil S. Amrith, Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 65–​91. 3 Aidan Forth, Barbed-​Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–​1903 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 43–​73. 4 On famines in the early colonial period, see Sanjay Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy, and the Colonial State: North India in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: OUP, 2001); Ravi Ahuja, ‘State formation and “famine policy” in early colonial south India’, IESHR, 39 (4), 2002, pp. 351–​80; Vinita Damodaran, ‘Famine in Bengal: A comparison of the 1770 famine in Bengal and the 1897 famine in Chotanagpur’, Medieval History Journal, 10 (1/​2), 2006, pp. 143–​81; and George Adamson, ‘ “The most horrible of evils”: Social responses to drought and famine in the Bombay Presidency, 1782–​ 1857’, in: Greg Bankoff and Joseph Christensen (eds.), Natural Hazards and Peoples in the Indian Ocean World: Bordering on Danger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 79–​104. 5 Ahuja, ‘State formation and ‘famine policy” ’, 352. 6 Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy, and the Colonial State, 3–​9; the death figure is provided in Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 63. 7 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2007), 25–​59. 8 Ibid., 141–​75. 9 David Arnold, ‘Social crisis and epidemic disease in the famines of nineteenth-​century India’, Social History of Medicine, 6 (3), 1993, pp. 385–​404. 10 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 7. 11 For the impact of the Second World War, see Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A different war dance: State and class in India 1939–​1945’, Past & Present, 176, 2002, pp. 187–​221; and Christopher A. Bayly, ‘ “The nation

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Famine relief in colonial South Asia within”: British India at war 1939–​1947’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 125, 2004, pp. 265–​85; On the repercussions of the First World War, see Sarah Ansari, ‘The Bombay Presidency’s “home front”, 1914–​1918’, in: Roger D. Long and Ian Talbot (eds.), India and World War I. A Centennial Assessment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 60–​78; and Suchetana Chattopadhyay, ‘War-​time in an imperial city: The apocalyptic mood in Calcutta (1914–​1918)’, in: ibid., pp. 79–​99. 12 Amartya Sen, ‘Starvation and exchange entitlements: A general approach and its application to the Great Bengal Famine’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1 (1), 1977, pp. 33–​59; Paul R. Greenough, ‘Indian famines and peasant victims: The case of Bengal in 1943–​44’, MAS, 14 (2), 1980, pp. 205–​35; idem, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–​1944 (New York: OUP, 1982); Srimanjari, Through War and Famine: Bengal, 1939–​45 (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009); Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (London: Hurst, 2015); Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 13 Rohit De, ‘ “Commodities must be controlled”: Economic crimes and market discipline in India (1939–​1955)’, International Journal of Law in Context, 10 (3), 2014, pp. 277–​94. 14 For this figure, see Benjamin Robert Siegel, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), 100. On the efforts of the postcolonial state to provide sustenance to its population, see also Jack Loveridge, ‘Between hunger and growth: Pursuing rural development in Partition’s aftermath, 1947–​1957’, Contemporary South Asia, 25 (1), 2017, pp. 56–​69; and Taylor C. Sherman, ‘From “Grow more food” to “Miss a meal”: Hunger, development and the limits of post-​colonial nationalism in India, 1947–​1957’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 36 (4), 2013, pp. 571–​88. 15 Tirthankar Roy, Natural Disasters and Indian History (New Delhi: OUP, 2012), 25–​71. 16 B.M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A Study of the Aspects of the Economic History of India (1860–​1965) (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1963); Michelle Burge McAlpin, Subject to Famine: Food Crisis and Economic Change in Western India, 1860–​1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 17 S. Ambirajan, ‘Malthusian population theory and Indian famine policy in the nineteenth century’, Population Studies, 30 (1), 1976, pp. 5–​14; John C. Caldwell, ‘Malthus and the less developed world: The pivotal role of India’, Population and Development Review, 24 (4), 1998, pp. 675–​96. 18 Rune Møller Stahl, ‘The economics of starvation: Laissez-​faire ideology and famine in colonial India’, in: Mikkel Thorup (ed.), Intellectual History of Economic Normativities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 169–​84. 19 Lance Brennan, ‘The development of the Indian famine codes: Personalities, politics, and policies’, in: Bruce Currey and Hugo Graeme (eds.), Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), pp. 91–​111. 20 Sanjay Sharma, ‘Poorhouses and gratuitous famine relief in colonial north India’, in: Ayesha Mukherjee (ed.), A Cultural History of Famine: Food Security and the Environment in India and Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), pp. 129–​48. 21 Stuart Sweeney, ‘Indian railways and famines, 1875–​1914: Magic wheels and empty stomachs’, Essays in Economic & Business History, 26, 2008, pp. 147–​58. 22 Madhavi Jha, ‘ “Men diggers and women carriers”: Gendered work on famine public works in colonial north India’, International Review of Social History, 65 (1), 2020, pp. 12–​23. 23 On the colonial state’s reluctance to introduce a system of welfare in India, see David Arnold, ‘Vagrant India: Famine, poverty, and welfare under colonial rule’, in: idem (ed.), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), pp. 117–​39. 24 Idem, “The ‘discovery’ of Malnutrition and Diet in Colonial India,” IESHR, 31 (1), 1994, pp. 1–​26; also see idem, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 25 Douglas E. Haynes, ‘From tribute to philanthropy: The politics of gift giving in a western Indian city’, JAS, 46 (2), 1987, pp. 339–​60; Filippo Osella, ‘Charity and philanthropy in South Asia: An introduction’, MAS, 52 (1), 2018, pp. 4–​34. 26 Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 103–​42; Malavika Kasturi, ‘ “All gifting is sacred”: The Sanatana Dharma Sabha movement, the reform of Dana and civil society in late colonial India’, IESHR, 47 (1), 2010, pp. 107–​39. 27 Georgina Brewis, ‘The making of an imperial ideal of service: Britain and India before 1914’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of East London, 2009), 149–​52. 28 Report of the Central Executive Indian Famine Charitable Relief Fund, 1897 (Madras: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1898), 2.

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Joanna Simonow 29 Ibid. 30 Georgina Brewis, ‘ “Fill full the mouth of famine”: Voluntary action in famine relief in India 1896–​ 1901’, MAS, 44 (4), 2010, pp. 887–​918, esp. 903–​4. 31 Idem, ‘The making of an imperial ideal’, 156. 32 Carey Watt, Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association, and Citizenship (New Delhi: OUP, 2005), 97–​129; Brewis, ‘ “Fill full the mouth of famine” ’. 33 David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 129–​54. 34 Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-​Religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 94–​103; Watt, Serving the Nation, 82–​3. 35 See Gwilym Beckerlegge, Swami Vivekananda’s Legacy of Service: A Study of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission (New Delhi: OUP, 2006), ch. 10. 36 Watt, Serving the Nation, 172–​6; N.M. Joshi, ‘Relief work’, in: H.N. Kunzru (ed.), Gopal Krishna Devadhar (Poona: Servants of India Society, 1939), pp. 133–​50. 37 For women’s participation in the social service movement and the work of the AIWC, see Annie Devenish, Debating Women’s Citizenship in India, 1930–​1960 (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2019), 100–​ 28; and Aparna Basu and Bharati Ray, Women’s Struggle: A History of the All India Women’s Conference, 1927–​2016 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2018); On the creation and significance of the Seva Sadan, see Padma Anagol, ‘Feminist inheritances and foremothers: The beginnings of feminism in modern India’, Women’s History Review, 19 (4), 2010, pp. 531–​32. 38 Gargi Chakravartty, ‘Emergence of Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti in the forties: Calcutta chapter’, in: Tanika Sarkar and Sekhara Bandyopadhyaya (eds.), Calcutta: The Stormy Decades (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2015), pp. 177–​203. 39 Meera Kosambi, Pandita Ramabai: Life and Landmark Writings (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 203–​48; idem, Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter: The Peoples of the United States (1889) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 29; Also see Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2013). 40 For Ramabai’s criticism, see Ellen Brinks, ‘Feminizing famine, imperial critique: Pandita Ramabai’s famine essays’, South Asian Review, 25 (1), 2004, pp. 156–​76. 41 Kokila Dang, ‘Colonial ideology, nationalist politics and the social organization of relief in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (unpub. PhD thesis, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1998). 42 A well-​written classic is Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India. Economic Policies of Indian National Leadership: 1880–​1905 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1969). 43 Ajit K. Dasgupta, ‘Dadabhai Naoroji and the drain theory’, in: idem (ed.), A History of Indian Economic Thought (London: Routledge, 2002), 74–​86; Vikram Visana, ‘Vernacular liberalism, capitalism, and anti-​imperialism in the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji’, The Historical Journal, 59 (3), 2016, pp. 775–​97. 44 Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-​British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901). William Digby, Prosperous India: A Revelation from Official Records (London: Unwin, 1901); Prithwis Chandra Ray, The Poverty Problem in India: Being a Dissertation on the Causes and Remedies of Indian Poverty (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1895); Romesh Chandra Dutt, England and India: A Record of Progress during a Hundred Years, 1785–​1885 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1897); Romesh Chandra Dutt, Indian Famines: Their Causes and Prevention (London: P.S. King & Son, 1901); Subramanya Iyer, Some Economic Aspects of British Rule in India (Madras: Swadesamitran Press, 1903). 45 H.M. Hyndman, The Indian Famine and the Crisis in India (London: Edward Stanford, 1877). 46 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 165; S.K. Ratcliffe, ‘The Indian Famine Union’, in: idem (ed.), Sir William Wedderburn and the Indian Reform Movement (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923), pp. 110–​19. 47 Watt, Serving the Nation, 171–​201; R. Srivatsan, ‘Concept of “seva” and the “sevak” in the freedom movement’, EPW, 41 (5), 2006, pp. 427–​38. 48 Tehila Sasson, ‘From empire to humanity: The Russian famine and the imperial origins of inter37; idem and James national humanitarianism’, Journal of British Studies, 55 (3), 2016, pp. 519–​ Vernon, ‘Practising the British way of famine: Technologies of relief, 1770–​1985’, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire, 22 (6), 2015, pp. 860–​72. Also see Emily Baughan and Bronwen Everil, ‘Empire and humanitarianism: A preface’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40 (5), 2012, pp. 727–​8.

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Famine relief in colonial South Asia 49 James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 17–​30. 50 Andrea Major, ‘British humanitarian political economy and famine in India, 1838–​42’, Journal of British Studies, 59 (2), 2020, pp. 221–​44. 51 Christina Twomey and Andrew J. May, ‘Australian responses to the Indian famine, 1876–​78: Sympathy, photography and the British Empire’, Australian Historical Studies, 43 (2), 2012, pp. 233–​52. 52 Mark R. Frost, ‘Humanitarianism and the overseas aid craze in Britain’s colonial Straits Settlements, 1870–​1920’, Past & Present, 236 (1), 2017, pp. 169–​205. 53 Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 98–​120. 54 Heather D. Curtis, Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 123–​70. 55 Ian Tyrrell, ‘Vectors of practicality: The social gospel, the North American YMCA in Asia and the global context’, in: Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, Stefan Huebner, and Ian Tyrrell (eds.), Spreading Protestant Modernity: Global Perspectives on the Social Work of the YMCA and YWCA (1889–​1970) (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2020), 39–​60. 56 Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (eds.), Humanitarian Photography: A History (New York: CUP, 2015). 57 Christina Twomey, ‘Framing atrocity: Photography and humanitarianism’, History of Photography, 36 (3), 2012, pp. 259–​60. 58 Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Andrea Major, ‘ “Mothers have become monsters”: Danger, distress and deviance in British evangelical depictions of Indian motherhood, 1757–​1857’, Cultural and Social History, 15 (4), 2018, pp. 540–​41. 59 Twomey, ‘Framing atrocity’; for the use of photography during the famine of 1899/​1900 by the nizam of Hyderabad, see Deborah Hutton, Raja Deen Dayal, and sons, ‘Photographing Hyderabad’s famine relief efforts’, History of Photography, 31 (3), 2007, pp. 260–​75. 60 Frost, ‘Humanitarianism’; Emily Baughan, ‘The Imperial War Relief Fund and the all British appeal: Commonwealth, conflict and conservatism within the British humanitarian movement, 1920–​ 25’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40 (5), 2012, pp. 845–​61; idem, ‘ “Every citizen of empire implored to save the children!”: Empire, internationalism and the Save the Children Fund in inter-​war Britain’, Historical Research, 86 (231), 2013, pp. 116–​37. 61 Christine Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: The Kindness of Strangers (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 43–​4. 62 Simin Patel, ‘The Great Persian Famine of 1871, Parsi refugees and the making of Irani identity in Bombay’, in: Prashant Kidambi, Manjiri Kamat, and Rachel Dwyer (eds.), Bombay before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos (London: Hurst, 2019), pp. 57–​96. 63 Maria Framke, ‘ “We must send a gift worthy of India and the Congress!”: War and political humanitarianism in late colonial South Asia’, MAS, 51 (6), 2017, pp. 1969–​998. 64 Harald Fischer-​ Tiné, ‘Indian nationalism and the “world forces”: Transnational and diasporic dimensions of the Indian Freedom movement on the eve of the First World War’, Journal of Global History, 2 (3), 2007, pp. 325–​44. 65 ‘William C. Hopkinson to William W. Cory, 25 November 1909’, 1. Available at Simon Fraser University Digitized Collections, https://​digital.lib.sfu.ca/​km-​4289/​william-​c-​hopkinson-​ immigration-​inspector-​william-​w-​cory-​deputy-​minister-​interior-​copy-​page, accessed: 8 August 2019; ‘Famine in Hindusthan and the only remedy’, The Free Hindusthan, 1 (1), 1908, pp. 2–​3; ‘Victims of British rule’, The Free Hindusthan, 1 (8), 1908, pp. 1–​2. 66 On the formation and work of the New-​York-​based committee, see M.S. Venkataramani, Bengal Famine of 1943: The American Response (New Delhi: Vikas, 1974), 40–​59. 67 Joanna Simonow, ‘The Great Bengal Famine in Britain: Metropolitan campaigning for food relief and the end of empire, 1943–​44’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 48 (1), 2020, pp. 168–​97.

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INDEX

active citizenship 455–​6 Adi Hindu movement 52–​3; gender norms 83–​4 adivasis (tribal communities) 50, 52–​53; citizenship rights 57; colonial rule, impact of (case study) 313–​15; language 54; matriliny 82–​3 agency: creative agency 439–​40, 446; Dalit agency 17, 19; education 256; penal thought 230; precolonial continuity, caste as 15, 427; religious modernity 65; science and medicine 183–​5, 189; subaltern agency 17, 19, 49–​50, 65, 99–​100, 107–​9, 188; village communities 330; women’s agency 70 agency houses 287; liquor trade 296–​7, 299–​300 agricultural education 258–​9, 316; Christian missionaries 221–​2 agriculture: agricultural economy 331–​2; East Bengal, 337, 338; cash-​crops 336; colonial intervention 332–​4; commercialisation of the rural sector 334–​7; cotton 336; food crops 336–​7; forced commerce 335; indigo 336; non-​ food crops 336–​7; peasant labour/​mobilisation 337–​8; property rights 332–​3; rights over land 332; technological and infrastructure improvements 335 alcohol consumption 407–​8; see also liquor All-​Asian Women’s Conference 466 All-​India Muslim League 41, 55, 93, 254, 377–​8 All-​India Women’s Association 56, 466, 501 All-​India Trade Union Congress 466, 467–​8 Ambedkar, Bhim Rao 17, 51–​2, 54, 58, 84, 367–​8, 419, 480 Andaman Islands 234, 235–​7, 338, 439 Anglo-​French wars 25, 28, 43, 182 anthropometry 69, 195, 196–​8, 234

anti-​colonial revolutionaries 245–​6; intelligence services 246–​8; revolutionary mobilities 444–​6, 464; see also anti-​colonial solidarity; nationalism anti-​colonial solidarity 463–​4, 470; with Abyssinia and China through humanitarian aid 491–​2; Asian solidarity 468–​9; Afghanistan 464; Comintern 467–​8; communism 464–​5; East Asian/​South-​East Asian links 464; Geneva system 465–​7; infrastructure, role of 463–​5; Islamic movements 469; Khalifat movement 469; Moscow System 467–​8; Niedermayer-​Von Hentig Expedition 464; Pan-​Asiatic Society 464; Soviet Union 467–​8; students and student activists 464 Anushilan Samiti: revolutionary activism 243, 347, 465 apostolic missionaries 219 armed forces: East India Company 43, 134–​7; First World War 31, 43–​4; military support from British India 43–​4; Second World War 44, 44–​5; standing army, British opposition to 42–​3; see also Indian army; military labour ayahs 210, 441, 443 Ayurveda and Unami medicine 427–​9 Baden-​Powell, Robert 258, 310, 346, 350, 352 Bagchi, Amiya Kumar: market framing 146–​8 balance and harmony 427–​9 East Bengal: agricultural production 337, 338; textile industry 160 Bayly, Susan: precolonial continuity, caste as 13–​15 Bayly, Christopher: religious modernity 68–​9 bazaar economy: capitalism, emergence of 148–​9; hill stations 323, 325; social and cultural impact 149; see also informal economy; shadow economy

510

511

Index Bengal: Bengali manhood 86; business 157–​8; famine 29, 169–​70, 338, 476–​7, 480, 498, 501–​2, 505 Bentinck, William, Governor General of India (1828–​35) 26–​7, 213, 253, 287 bhadralok hegemony 69–​70, 71, 196–​7, 253 bhikṣā 487 ‘big business’ 156, 163–​4; caste system, relationship with 157; China trade 158; Depression era 162; development 157–​8; financial sector 160; First World War 161; opium 158–​9; origins 156–​7; pre-​WWI 156–​61; Second World War 162–​3; Tata Iron and Steel Company 160–​1, 161–​2; textiles 159–​60 biometric nationalism 198–​9 black market see shadow economy Bose, Rash Behari 246, 469–​70 bottlekhanas 301–​2; decline 303 Brahmans: construction of caste 16, 17, 80–​1; construction of gender norms, 80–​1, 82, 84; cookery and food 406–​7; music 379–​80 Brahmo Samaj movement 64, 66, 69, 81, 220, 373, 416, 419, 501 breach of contract 127 Buck, Harry 351–​2 Calico Acts 25 callisthenics 347–​8 cash-​crops 29, 172–​3, 277, 312, 334–​7, 339 caste 9–​10, 19–​20; big business 157; Brahman construction of 16, 17, 80–​1; capitalism, influence of 19–​20; colonial construction, as 10–​13, 19; Dalits 16–​19; food 406–​7; nationalism, relationship with 51–​3; precolonial continuity, as 13–​16, 19; see also Dalits caste consciousness 14–​15; censuses, role of 12–​13, 15 caste conventions 14 Catholic missionaries 219 census of India (1871–​72) 11–​12, 41–​2; caste consciousness 12–​13, 15; consequences 41–​2 Chanda, Ramprasad 197–​8 charity see philanthropy and charity children: ayahs 210, 441, 443; children of convicts 235–​6; education 210, 255, 257–​8, 394; European children 210; hill stations 320, 321–​2, 324; infant mortality 397; malnutrition 186; philanthropy 500–​2; social mixing 212–​13 child labour 125, 128 child marriage 81, 84 China (trade) 26–​7, 158; opium 27, 158–​9 Christian missionary agendas: agricultural missions 221–​2; anthropology, 222–​3; apostolic missionaries 219; Catholic missionaries 219; colonial expansion processes distinguished 218; conflicting agendas 224–​5; conversion 221; East

India Company, relationship with 219–​20; education 220, 221, 252–​65; government control 224; healthcare 220; impact 225–​6; knowledge production 220, 221–​3; linguistics 222–​3; medicine 222; nationalist response to 225; origins 219, 220; Protestant missionaries 219; science 223 Christianity, influence of 63, 221–​3; civilisational myth 64; Gandhi 62–​3, 72–​3; religious co-​ emergence 67; religious convergence 64–​6; religious modernity 66–​8; Roy 63–​4 Churchill, Winston 32–​33, 63, 99 cinema: Bombay cinema 359–​60, 366–​8; censorship 362–​3; independence 368; musicals 366; mythological epics 361, 366; origins 360; politicisation 367–​8; popularity 360–​1; silent movies 360–​2; social melodramas 367; studios and professionalisation 362–​6; stunt films 367; ‘talkies’ 365–​6 citizenship: active citizenship 455–​6; mobilising initiatives 455–​6; humanitarian obligations of 489 ‘civilising mission’ 425–​7; crime and punishment 231–​2 Clive, Robert 158, 169–​70 coal-​mining 120 Cohn, Bernard: cultural technologies of rule 11 colonial capitalism 28–​30 colonial construction of caste 19–​20; colonial ethnography 11–​12; colonial knowledge 12–​13; cultural/​linguistic approach 10–​11; cultural technologies of rule 11; historiographical approach 13; social identity 12–​13; structuralist and poststructuralist theory 10–​11 colonial dependence 29–​30 colonial mission space 223 colonial rule by difference 69, 70–​1 Comintern: anti-​colonial solidarity 467–​8; Red International of Labour Unions 467–​8 commercialisation of the rural sector 334–​7; peasant labour/​mobilisation 337–​8 communal relief work 492; Hindu Mahasabha 492 communalism 41–​2; contested narratives (Indian nationalism) 92; contested narratives (post-​ independence) 97–​100; contested narratives 95–​6; nationalism, relationship with 69–​72; origins 92–​5, 100; religion 69–​71, 72, 93 communism 245–​6; anti-​colonial solidarity 464–​5 consumerism 386–​7; availability of imported goods 387; consumer economy, origins of 387–​91, 397; domestically produced goods 387–​91; transformation of material life 387–​91, 397–​8; see also alcohol; food; liquor consumers 391–​2; Europeans 392–​3; middle classes 393–​5; rural groups 396–​7; urban classes 395–​6

511

512

Index contested narratives 100; Indian nationalism 92; Partition (post-​independence) 97–​100; Partition 95–​6; princely states (autonomy) 107–​9; princely states (origins) 106–​7 contract law 127 Cornwallis, Charles, Governor General of India (1786–​93) 38, 311, 332 coolie women 440–​1 cotton trade see textile trade counter-​terrorism: emergency measures 248; information gathering and surveillance 246; see also policing crime and punishment 230; banishment 232; ‘civilising mission’ 231–​2; colonial violence 237; deportation 232; East India Company 231; Islamic law 232; legal pluralism 231; prisons 231–​2; transportation 232; see also penal law; prisons criminal tribes 52; Criminal Tribes Act 199–​200; ‘hereditary criminals’ 199–​200, 236–​7 Criminal Tribes Act (1871): criminals by birth 199; discrimination 199–​200; marginalisation 199–​200; stereotypical prejudices 200 Crown rule 30 cross-​culturalism 65–​6, 95; cuisine 403–​4; physical culture 347–​9, 350, 355; science and medicine 183–​4 cultural nationalism: liberal nationalism compared 453–​5 cultural technologies of rule 11 culture see cinema; consumerism; food; music; physical culture Curzon, George, Governor General of India (1899–​1905): education 254, 256–​7, 259; intelligence service 246–​7; partition of Bengal 93 dacoity 137, 231, 236 Dalit social identity: activism 18–​19; agency 17, 19; class subjugation 18–​19; education 82, 257; gender norms 83–​4; historical studies 16–​17, 19; labour 85; literature 419; nationalism and social improvement 51–​2; ‘untouchables’, stigma of 18; women 85 dānā 487 debt: moneylending 125–​6, 151, 156, 312, 314, 315, 323, 334, 338; see also peasant debt deserving poor 499 dharma 487 diet: agricultural policy 402–​3; changing habits 402–​3; see also famine; food; malnutrition direct rule 38 Dirks, Nicholas: colonial constructivism 12–​13 disease 197; health and sanitation 185–​6; hill stations 320, 323, 326–​7; industrialisation 124, 126–​7; plague 126–​7, 129–​30, 186; surveys

and studies 182, 183–​4, 185–​6; urban working classes 126–​7 divide and rule strategy 9, 70–​1, 93, 95, 99, 138 domestic violence 440 East Bengal: agricultural production 337, 338; textile industry 160 East India Company 25, 26; Christian missionaries, relationship with 219–​20; Company troops 42–​3, 134–​7; crime and punishment 231; dissolution 27; education 253; princely states 106, 107; prisons 231–​2; renewal of Charter (1813) 39; taxation 169–​75 East India Company (taxation): agrarian taxes 169; alienation from precolonial approach 171–​2, 174–​6; extending cultivation 171; fiscal centralisation 169–​70, 175; private property 171–​2, 175; regional differences 170–​1; supervision policy 169–​70; tax debt 171 economic relationship with Western Europe 23–​4; age of colonial capitalism 24, 28–​30; age of mercantilism 23, 24–​6; age of narco-​militarism 23–​4, 26–​8; age of nationalism 24, 31–​3 economic sectors see bazaar economy; big business; informal economy; shadow economy education 210, 252, 255–​6, 257–​8, 262, 394, 425–​6; agricultural education 258–​9; Anglo-​ orientalist debate 253; Christian missionary agendas 220, 221, 252–​65; colonial state, role of 252–​5; Curzon 254; East India Company 253; Hunter Commission 254; hybridisation 261; imperial versus nationalist visions 259–​62; India within the Empire 259–​60; lower castes 257; non-​curricular activities 258; princely states 259–​60; religious institutions 256–​7; rural areas 253–​4; scout movement 258; shortcomings of colonial education policy 254–​5; variation 259; women 258 emotions 431–​2; Ayurveda and Unami medicine 427–​9; balance and harmony 427–​9; ‘civilising mission’ 425–​7; historiography 424; history of 424–​5; humoural pathology 427–​8; nationalist mobilisation 430; philanthropy 429–​30; Scottish Enlightenment, impact of 429, 430–​1; state of balance 427–​9; will 428 environment 277–​8; fauna 276–​7; forests 269–​72; socioscapes 275–​6; waterscapes 272–​5 environmental activism 276 epiphenomenal colonialism 13 European community 214–​15; children 210; consumers 392–​3; degeneration 209–​10; demographics 207–​8; ‘disorderly’ forms of whiteness 210–​13; diversity of groups 206; miscegenation 209–​10; officials versus non-​ officials 207–​8, 214; origins 207; politics of white prestige 208–​9; racial hierarchies 207–​10;

512

513

Index self-​isolation 209–​10; see also poor whites; ‘whiteness’ exports 24–​5, 29; see also trade factory law: breach of contract 127; contract law 127; historical significance 128; protection of the workforce 127–​8; restrictions on industrial expansion 127 famine 29, 32–​3, 169–​70, 186, 476–​7, 497–​8; British poor laws, impact of 498–​9; East India Company governance 498; Empire governance 502–​3; global humanitarian aid 488, 504–​5; Irish Famine 488, 502–​4; see also malnutrition famine relief 497, 505–​6; British poor laws, impact of 498–​9; famine codes 499–​500; global humanitarian aid 488, 504–​5; international aid 503; Irish Famine 488, 502–​4; philanthropic and charitable relief 500–​1 fauna: decline through cultivation practices 276; human and faunal management 276–​7; hunting 276–​7 femininity see masculine/​feminine binary feminism 444; Islamic feminism 78–​80, 88 film see cinema First World War: big business 161; demobilisation 43–​4; economic effect 476; humanitarianism 489–​90; Indian Army 31, 43–​4, 138, 140–​1, 477–​8; influence on Indian society and politics 479–​80; military support from British India 31, 43–​4, 138, 140–​1, 475, 480; social effect 476 fitness see physical culture food: agriculture 401; Anglo-​Indian cuisine 403–​4; cross-​cultural developments 403–​4; curry 404; gendering of cookery 406–​7; hotels and restaurant food 404–​5; public versus private food 405–​6; status 406–​7; see also diet; famine; famine relief; malnutrition forestry: conservation 270, 271; forest management 269–​71; scientific forestry 271; social importance 269, 272; state forestry 270–​1 Foucault, Michel 10–​11, 50, 426, 429 Gandhi, Mohandas 72–​3, 353–​4; Christian influence 62–​3; gender norms 87; mass politics and resistance 241; Non-​Cooperation Movement 41–​2, 49–​50, 189, 241, 244, 338, 431; renunciation 456–​7; women’s rights 87 Gandhi–Irwin Agreement (1931) 42 garden houses, town planning and suburbs 300–​1 garrison state 134–​7 gender norms: colonialism, impact of 78; conduct 78; Dalits 83–​4; femininity 77, 86; labour 84–​5; male reformism 81–​2; masculinity 77, 85–​6; matriliny 82–​3; princely states 109; reform 80–​1; traditional gender norms 80; see also masculinity; women Geneva system 466–​7

Ghadar movement 245, 446, 467, 478 godowns, 301 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna 452–​3 Government of India Act (1919) 54, 56, 254; see also Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms (1919) Government of India Act (1935) 32, 42, 94, 189 Great Rebellion (1857–​59) 27, 30, 39, 43–​4, 49, 86, 137–​9, 174, 184, 208–​9, 234 Guha, Biraja Shankar 198 Guha, Ranajit 49 Guha, Sumit 15–​16 Gurkhas 138–​9, 141–​2, 349 Hastings, Warren, Governor General of India (1773–​85) 38, 253, 332 health see health and sanitation; physical culture health and sanitation 185–​6; plague pandemic 126–​7, 129–​30, 186; urbanisation 126–​7; see also scientific and medical order ‘hereditary criminals’ 199–​200, 236–​7 hill cantonments 322–​3 hill stations 319–​20, 327; bazaars 323, 325; children 320, 321–​2, 324; decline 326–​7; governance 324–​5; Indian ‘intrusion’ 325–​6; racialisation 320–​2; topography 321; trade 323–​4 Hindu nationalism 56–​7, 492; see also nationalism Hindu revivalism 188–​9, 196–​7, 220, 262 Hinduism see religion; religious convergence; religious modernity Hindustani music 373; formalisation 377–​8; national music, as a 377–​8; origins 376–​7; professionalisation 379; ustads, relationship with 378–​9 homosexuality 85–​6, 210–​11, 234 honour 428, 431, 478; national honour 70, 427 humanitarianism 486–​7; Balkan Wars 488; Bambatha Rebellion 488–​9; citizenship, rights and obligations of 489; First World War 489–​90; global humanitarian efforts 488–​90; medical missions 489; nationalist humanitarianism 490–​2; South African War 488–​9; see also famine relief Imperial Assemblage 294 imports: from Britain 29; liquor 296–​7; see also trade independence 33, 45, 105; Anushilan Samiti 243; cinema 368; Jugantar association 243–​4, 465; global anti-​colonialist movements, impact of 245–​6; peaceful protest 243–​4; popular mobilisation 243; revolutionary propaganda 244; scientific and medical order 181; Swadeshi movement 243; transnational networks 245–​6; violence 243–​5; see also counter-​terrorism; nationalism; terrorism

513

514

Index India Act (1784) 39 Indian Army 28, 30, 138; First World War 31, 43–​4, 138, 140–​1, 475, 477–​8; Great Rebellion 30, 39, 44, 137–​8; Gurkhas 138–​9, 141–​2, 349; Indianisation of officer class 478–​9; recruitment patterns 478–​9; Second World War 44, 141–​2, 475, 477–​8; size 479; weaknesses 31 Indian Association for the Advancement of Science 188–​9 Indian Civil Service 176, 214, 351 India Famine Union 502 Indian Medical Service 182, 185, 187 Indian Mutiny see Great Rebellion Indian National Congress 41; Hindu nationalism 56–​7; independence resolution 42; nationalism 49–​50; nationalist humanitarianism 490–​2; Quit India movement 44; Second World War 480–​1 indirect rule: princely states 106–​7, 108–​9 industrialisation 119–​20; disease 124, 126–​7; regional variations 120–​21; urbanisation, relationship with 121; see also factory law informal economy 145; artisanal decline 152; formal economy compared 146; karkhana 152–​3; market framing 146–​8; regulation 152–​3; see also bazaar economy; shadow economy infrastructure 119; agriculture, impact on 335; anti-​colonial solidarity, role in 463–​5; integration of an infrastructural system 283–​4; New Military Road 286; Public Works Department 288; railway-​centric approach 281–​3; rivers 285–​6; roads 283–​4, 287–​8; steam 28, 283, 287; Suez Canal 28; technological innovation 287–​9, 335; trade 28; waterways 283–​4; see also port cities; railways infrastructure governance 282–​3; control 286; East India Company, 285–​6; Mughal governance 286–​7; territorial knowledge 286 intelligence services 246–​7; anti-​colonial revolutionaries 246–​8; Department of Criminal Intelligence 247; securitisation 247; Thuggee and Dacoity Department 246–​7 International Labour Organization 466 intoxicants see alcohol Iqbal, Muhammad 420 Islamicate films 361–​2; see also cinema Jallianwalah Bagh massacre 44 Jugantar association 243–​4, 465 Jungle Mahal strikes 53 karkhana 152–​3 Karnatak music 373; Brahmans, relationship with 380; formalisation 379–​80; revival 379 Kashmir 57, 58, 96 labour/​workforce: Dalit social identity 85; gender norms 84–​5; managing agencies 120; militancy

123–​4; protection of the workforce 127–​8; tea plantations 84, 441; textiles 84–​5; wages 125; women 84–​5, 440; working conditions, 124–​5; see also factory law; military labour labour migration 440–​1 labour reform: early attempts 128–​29; health and sanitation, impact of pandemics 129–​30; nationalism, impact of 129–​30 labour relations 120, 129–​30; see also labour reform landscapes see environment language 57; development of languages 415; education, language of 414–​15; English literature, impact of 416; English, introduction of 414; language of governance 53; linguistic reorganisation 54, 414–​16; post-​independence 54; vernacular diversity 53–​4 law and order: Criminal Tribes Act 199–​200; criminals by birth 199; white criminality 213–​14 League of Nations 465–​6 legal reforms 39 liberal nationalism: cosmopolitanism 452–​3; criticisms of 453–​4; cultural nationalism compared 453–​5; Empire, relationship with 453; nation politics 452; national identity 452 liberalism: cultural nationalists 453–​4; freedom and autonomy 452; imperialism and 451; possessive individualism 451–​2; secularism 452; see also liberal nationalism liquor 407–​8; abkari administration 304–​6; bottlekhanas 301–​2, 303; domestically produced liquor 303–​4; garden houses and rural taverns 300–​1; godowns, 301; imports 296–​7; licensing 297–​8; service spaces and servants 301–​3; tariffs 303–​4; taverns 297–​9, 300–​1; trade 299–​300 literacy 51, 119, 254–​5; education 79, 82; Hindu women 82 literary movements 419–​20; revolutionary literature 420 literature: autobiography/​biography 417; Bengal Renaissance 418; colonial era 412–​13; Dalit literature 419; English literature, impact of 416, 418, 419; novels 417; genres 417–​18; poetry 418; printing and dissemination of literature 413–​14; short stories 417–​18; travelogues 417; women authors 419 living conditions: criminal communities 236; hill stations 326–​7; improvement 316; urban working classes 126–​7; village life 316; water control and supply 273 love and passion 429 Mahalanobis, Prasanta Chandra 198 malnutrition 499–​500; children 186; food rationing 498; prisoners 235; rural population 397, 498; see also famine

514

515

Index marriage 81, 429; child marriage 81, 86 martial arts 346–​7 masculine/​feminine binary 77, 88; Adivasi gender 82–​3; Dalit community 83–​4; Hindus 80–​2; human body 85–​6; labour and gender 84–​5; Muslims 77–​80; politics 86–​8; see also gender norms masculinity see masculine/​feminine binary matriliny 82–​3 medical missions 489, 491–​2 medicine: Ayurveda and Unami medicine 427–​9; Europeanisation 184; health of the army 427; Indian engagement 183–​4; Indian Medical Service 182, 185, 187; institutional infrastructure 181–​2; pluralism 183–​4; research 182–​3; scientific institutes and societies 183 migrant workforce: social and cultural impact 124; urbanisation 121–​24 migration 28, 439–​40; ayahs 441; coolie women 440–​1; labour migration 440–​1; return to domestic enterprise 31–​2; women 439–​41 military labour: Bengal 136–​7; East India Company 134–​7; garrison state 134–​7; shifting balance of power 135 miscegenation 209, 210–​11, 320–​1, 323 moneylending 125–​6, 151, 156, 312, 314, 315, 323, 334, 338 Montagu–​Chelmsford reforms (1919) 32, 40, 54, 162, 480; see also Government of India Act (1919) Morley–​Minto reforms (1909) 40 Moscow system 467–​8 Mountbatten, Lord Louis 97, 99 Mukherji, U.N. 197–​8 music 383; art music versus popular music 380–​3; elitism 380; European music, impact of 373; Hindustani music 373; Karnatak music 373; modernising music 375–​6; precolonial music 375; see also Hindustani music; Karnatak music Muslim feminism 78–​80 Muslim League see All-​India Muslim League Muslim political identity 98–​9 narco-​militarism 26–​8 nation-​building 48–​9, 57–​8; Planning Commission 56; territorial reorganisation 56; see also state formation nationalism (generally) 48–​9 nationalism (Indian): Adi Hindu movement 52–​3; colonialism, relationship with 49; Commonwealth and cooperation 32; Christian missionary agenda, response to 225; contested narratives 92; emergence 30; independence 33, 45; national self-​determination 33; nationalist mobilisation 430; passion 430; patriotism

49; return of migrant workers 31–​2; social movement, as 51; subaltern studies 49–​51; women 444; see also Hindu nationalism; independence; terrorism nationalist humanitarianism: Indian National Congress 490–​1; Italian-​Abyssinian War 491; Malaya 492; medical missions 491–​2; non-​state relief work 492; Second Sino-​Japanese War 491; Spanish Civil War 491 nature: environmental activism 276; socio-​ communal importance 275 Nehru, Jawaharlal 32, 468; cinema, 364; developmentalism 276, 457, 481; imprisonment 96, 235–​6; Partition 92, 97, 99; Second World War 480–​1; secularism 455; unity in diversity 56; village life, 311 Nehru Report 54 non-​Brahman identity 17–​18 Non-​Cooperation Movement, 41–​2, 49–​50, 87, 189, 241, 244, 338, 431 non-​state relief work 492; communal relief work 492 O’Hanlon, Rosalind 16; Dalits 17 opium 27, 121, 158–​9, 408 Pakistan 33, 93–​5; Islamisation 99; women’s rights 88; see also Partition Pant, Rashmi 11 Parsi theatre 359, 362; see also cinema Partition 45; communalism 95–​6; consequences 99–​100; contested narratives (post-​ independence) 97–​100; contested narratives (post-​WW2) 92, 95–​6; documentary records and evidence 97–​98; gendered dimension 99–​100; Indian nationalist accounts 97; Jinnah, role of 97; militarisation 96; Muslim political identity 98–​9; Nehru, role of 97; Punjab 68–​9; revisionism 99; two-​nation theory 97; violence 96; women’s rights 88 Peabody, Norbert 15; princely states 107 peasant debt 125–​6, 151, 172, 174, 334–​5; see also moneylending peasant labour/​mobilisation 337–​8 pedagogy: Bell-​Lancaster method 221, 260; see also education penal law 230; see also crime and punishment; prisoners; prisons philanthropy and charity 429–​30, 457, 486; alms giving 488; British influence 487–​8; organised philanthropy 487–​8; precolonial ideologies 487; relief efforts (natural disasters) 487; social service 488, 501–​2; see also famine relief; humanitarianism phrenology 195–​6, 247; law of race 200 Phule, Jyotirao: caste system 17, 80, 82; education 51–​2, 82, 257; low caste/​Dalit movements 17, 80, 82, 129, 257, 419

515

516

Index physical culture 345; colonialism, relationship with 349–​50; history 345–​9, 354–​5; ideal body 351–​4; sports distinguished 345; Western influence 347–​9, 350 plague 126–​7, 129–​30, 186 policing 246–​7; see also intelligence services political thought 450–​1, 457; cultural nationalism 453–​5; liberal nationalism 452–​5; liberalism 451–​2; nation-​building and citizenship 455–​6; renunciation 456–​7 politics of white prestige 208–​9 polygamy 78–​9, 81, 440 poor laws (Britain) 498–​9, 502–​3 poor whites 210–​11; child removal and emigration 213; domiciled Europeans 211–​12; Eurasian question 212–​13; pauperism commissions 212–​13; vagrancy 211 populism 57, 58 port cities: imports of liquor 296–​7; urban history 294–​6 poverty: deserving poor 499; renunciation 456–​7; see also poor whites precolonial continuity, caste as 13, 19–​20; Cambridge school 13–​14; caste consciousness 14–​15; caste conventions 14; Indian agency 15 precolonial industry 119 princely states 105–​6, 111–​12; British creation narrative 106–​7; British influence narrative 107; colonial intervention 107–​8; connected histories 109–​11; contested narratives (autonomy) 107–​9, 111–​12; contested narratives (origins) 106–​7, 111–​12; education 259–​60; gender norms 109; indirect rule 108–​9; origins 106–​7; theatre states theory 108 prisoners: malnutrition 235; scientific and medical research on 234 prisons: Committee on Prison Discipline report 233; conditions 234–​5; East India Company 231–​2; investment 234; lack of uniformity 232; reform 232–​3, 235; reorganisation 232; riots and conflicts 233–​4; scientific and medical research on prisoners 234; see also Andaman Islands ‘private trade’ 25–​6, 302; liquor 296; opium 27; prohibition for EIC staff 37, 306 property ownership 332–​3; parallel revenue regimes 333–​4; private property (taxation) 171–​2; women 81, 84 protectionism see taxation; tariff barriers Protestant missionaries 219; see also Christian missionary agendas public works: Public Works Department 288–​9 punishment see crime and punishment Punjab: canal colonies 273; canalisation schemes 274, 334; First World War, support for 43, 140, 479; Ghadar movement 478–​9; governance 38; Great Rebellion 137–​9; new Crown army 30,

33, 39; Partition 96, 98; political unrest 41–​2; religion 68–​9; Second World War, support for 141 race, history of 193–​5; see also European community race, law of 202; criminal tribes 199–​200; medical jurisprudence 200–​1; phrenology and ethnology 200; racial bias 200–​1; scientific experts 200–​1 race, science of 195; anthropometry 196–​7; Aryanism 196; Ayurvedic medicine 198–​9; biometric nationalism 198; Chanda 197–​8; evolving historiographies 196; Guha 198; Mahalanobis 198; Mukherji 197–​8; phrenology 195–​6; santati-​sastra 199; vernacular sciences 197–​9 racial bias: law of race, 200–​2; legal system 200–​2; racial hierarchies 207–​10 racism: white criminality 213–​14 railway-​centrism 281–​3 railways 28, 31–​2, 289; agriculture, impact on 335–​6 Rao, Anupama 18 Ramaswamy Naicker, E.V.: Self-​Respect movement 84 Rawat, Ramnarayan 18–​19 regionalism 53–​4, 57 religion 54–​5, 57–​8, 62–​3; Hindus 55; Muslims 55–​6; state, relationship with 223–​4; see also All-​India Muslim League, Christian mission agenda religious conversion 64–​6 religious identity 71–​2 religious modernity: co-​emergence in India and the West 66–​9; communalism 69–​71, 72, 93; cross-​culturalism 65–​6; dialogism and convergence 64–​5; Indian agency 65; nationalism 71–​72; religious conversion 64–​6; social constructionist theories 69–​70; theism and harmonisation 63–​4; Western impact 63–​4; renunciation 456–​7; Indian tradition, as 456 revenue extraction 167, 174–​6; bureaucratic governance 173–​4; precolonial origins 167–​9; reform 169–​72; reform, impact of 172–​3; see also taxation revolutionary ‘terrorists’ 241–​2; women 87, 444–​6; see also nationalism; terrorism roads 283–​4; investment, 287–​8; measurement and calculation of distance 287–​8; New Military Road 286 Rowlatt Act 1919 480 Roy, Rammohun 63–​4 Said, Edward 10, 50, 66 Sandow, Eugen 346, 350, 352 santati-​sastra 199

516

517

Index Sarvodaya movement 56, 315–​16 Satyanarayana, K. 18–​19 scientific and medical order: agricultural science 186; Christian missionary agenda 222–​3; disease control 185–​6; hunger/​malnutrition/​ starvation 186; independence 181; Indian Association for the Advancement of Science 188–​9; Indian engagement 183–​4, 185–​6, 188–​9; Indian exclusion 184–​5; Indian inclusion 187; Indian Medical Service 182, 185; Indian participation 184–​5, 187, 189–​90; institutional infrastructure 181–​2; institutional racism 185; institutional reform 188; natural world 182–​3; research 182–​3; scientific and medical research on prisoners 234; scientific institutes and societies 183; surveying 182; Western predominance 184–​5; women 187; see also medicine scout movement 258, 346, 352 Second World War 44, 44–​5, 141–​2; big business 162–​3; economic effect 476, 481; fascist support 480–​1; military support from British India 475–​6, 480; social effect 476–​7 secularism 56, 455; equal respect for all religions 63; Indian National Congress 452; post-​Partition 94; sarvadharma samabhava 63; secularisation of education 256; see also communalism separate Muslim and Hindu electorates 93–​4 service spaces and servants 301–​3 shadow economy 150, 152; brokers 151; hawkers 150–​1; middlemen 151; moneylending 151; peasant debt 151 slave trade 28 slavery: abolition, impact of 28; anti-​slavery movement 312–​13 social identity within the caste system 12–​13, 15–​16 social improvement: living conditions 316; nationalism, relationship with 51–​2; social service 488, 501–​2; urbanisation 127; see also diet; health and sanitation social service 488, 501–​2 state formation: Bengal 38–​9; Cornwallis reforms 38–​9; direct administration 38; East India Company 36–​8, 39; Governor-​General, role of 40–​1; invented tradition 39–​40; Montagu-​ Chelmsford reforms (1919) 40; Morley-​Minto reforms 40; regulated and non-​regulated provinces 38–​9; Victoria Empress of India 39–​40; see also nation-​building steam power 28, 283, 287 Stoler, Ann Laura: ‘whiteness’ 206–​7 structuralism and poststructuralism 10–​11, 50 students and student activists; anti-​colonial solidarity 464

subaltern studies 49–​51; bhadralok hegemony 69–​70; religious modernity 64–​5; subaltern agency 17, 19, 49–​50, 65, 99–​100, 107–​9, 188 sugarcane 162, 312, 336–​7 surveying: disease 182, 183–​4, 185–​6 Swadeshi movement 49–​50, 129, 130, 243, 386; Anushilan Samiti 347; communalised religion 71, 94; consumerism, relationship with 386, 387–​8, 397, 456; industry 160–​1; liberalism, relationship with 453; physical culture, subversion of 347, 354 Tagore, Rabindranath 420 tariff barriers 30, 32, 119–​20, 161–​2, 164, 389; Calico Acts 25; Home Charges 29; Indian expansion, impact on 121; liquor 303–​4, 408; see also taxation Tata Iron and Steel Company 160–​1, 164; decline 161; hydroelectricity 161–​2; rescue 161 taverns 297–​9, 300–​1 taxation: agrarian impact 172–​3, 176; alcohol 407–​8; bureaucratic governance 173–​4; coercive control 174; East India Company 169–​72, 174–​6; economic impact 172–​3, 174–​6; Hanafi tradition 169; Home Charges 29; precolonial origins 167–​9, 174; see also East India Company (taxation); tariff barriers tea drinking 407 tea plantations: decline 326–​7; labour 84, 120, 139 terrorism: definition 242–​3; Rand, assassination of 242; revolutionary ‘terrorists’ 241–​2; women 87 textile trade: Bangladesh/​East Bengal 160; indigo 336; industrialisation 120; labour 84–​5; migrant workforce 122–​23; trade 24, 26, 26–​7, 30, 336; working conditions, 124–​5 Thuggee and Dacoity Department 236, 246–​7 thuggees 137, 231, 236 trade: agricultural commodities 334–​5; Anglo-​French wars 25; China 26, 26–​7; diversification 26; East India Company 25; European aggression 24–​5; hill stations 323–​4; mercantilism, age of 23, 24–​6; Portugal 24; textiles 24, 26, 26–​7, 30; trade restrictions 24–​5; see also exports; imports; private trade; tariff barriers; taxation transport revolution see infrastructure transportation (convicts) 232, 234, 235–​6 travel and tourism: high-​caste women 443; Hindu women 442–​3; middle-​class women 443–​4; Muslim women 443; religious restrictions on women 442–​3; women 441–​6 tribal communities see adivasis United Provinces 52, 93, 120; famine 501; labour 138; manufacturing 123, 162

517

518

Index universalism 262; racial categories 196, 202; religion 72 untouchables see Dalits urbanisation 119–​21; health and sanitation 126–​7; industrialisation, relationship with 121; living conditions 126; migrant workforce 121–​4; urban improvement 127 Uttar Pradesh see United Provinces Victoria: Empress of India 39–​40, 164, 453 village life: bhaiachara villages 312; capitalism, impact of 315; case study 313–​15; colonial rule, impact of 311–​13, 315; composition of villages 314–​15; land rights 314; mirasi villages 312; peasant differentiation 312–​13, 315; population growth 312; revenue settlements 311–​12, 314; rural reconstruction 316; village, concept of 309–​11 Vimukta Jatis 53 Viswanath, Rupa 18 Vivekananda 72 vyayam movement 347, 348, 353 wage retention 125–​6 wages 125–​6 warfare: historiography 477; new perspectives 477–​8; see also armed forces; First World War; Indian Army; Second World War water control: benefit versus rupture debate 273–​4; canals and drainage 272–​3; colonial

capitalism 274–​5; hydraulic projects 272; hydrology 274–​5; irrigation 272 Wellesley, Richard Colley, Governor General of India (1798–​1805) 311–​12 Wendt, Helge 223 ‘whiteness’ 206–​7; degeneration 209–​10; ‘disorderly’ forms of whiteness 210–​13; miscegenation 209–​10; poor whites 210–​11 widows 81–​2, 429, 440–​1, 442, 443, 501 women: ayahs 441; challenging gender norms 78–​9; child marriage 81, 86; coolie women 440–​1; Dalit women 85; domesticity 78; education 79, 82, 258; famine, impact of 501–​2; freedoms, increasing 86–​7; gender norms 77–​78; labour 84–​5; literature 79–​80; migration of spouses 208–​9; Muslim feminism 78–​80; Muslim women 78, 443; politics, women in 86–​7; property ownership 81; revolutionaries and terrorism 87, 444–​6; rural migrants 84–​5, 125; scientific and medical order 187; social service 501–​2; textile workers 84–​5, 125; widows 81–​2, 429, 440–​1, 442, 443, 501 women’s rights 78, 86–​8; see also feminism workforce see labour/​workforce wrestling 346–​7, 349–​51 yoga: hatha yoga 347, 349, 351, 352–​3, 354; internationalisation of 67, 347–​8, 349, 351, 355 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) 221, 261, 346, 347–​8, 350–​1, 351–​2, 489

518