The Subordination of the Sovereigns: Colonialism and the Gond Rajas in Central India, 1818–1948 (original) (raw)
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The British Raj: Colonial rule in South Asia
Description: (Offered as HIST 377 [AS/TE] and ASLC 377) This course examines the rise, establishment, and decline of British colonialism in India. Originating with the profound transitions underway in the mid-eighteenth century, the colonial state extended its reach over much of the subcontinent over the following century, yet crumbled by the middle of the twentieth. How do we understand these great revolutions in society and politics historically? What did they mean for those whose lives were transformed by them? How does the legacy of colonialism endure? Structured by the most important debates colonial rule generated both historically and historiographically, the course offers the opportunity to ask the old riddle, what was colonialism? In consultation with the instructor, students may choose to write the seminar-paper required for the History major in this course. One class meeting per week.
The British Political Agent as the Perennial Outsider: Paramountcy in the Rajputana States
Presented to the Annual Meetings of the American Historical Association, New York, NY, December 1990, 1990
Without exception, those Europeans who served in India during its brief period-just two hundred years-of British rule were-and remained-outsiders. Unlike India's Turkic conquers of several centuries before, the British never had to confront the Mongols sacking London (as they had Baghdad), severing thereby their external link with "home" and forcing the foreign rulers back upon their own Indic cultural resources. While the Gurhids, Khaljis, and their successors became increasingly "Indian", the British remained perpetual outsiders in an alien land where colonization on the Canadian, Australian, or South African model was discouraged consciously. Conceptually, these transient Anglo-Indians (in the earlier meaning) tried to make India somewhat less alien by imagining it into a cultural and historical reality of their own devising, creating thereby such dubious offspring as feudalism, communalism, "Martial Races", Curzonian orientalism, and a census-specific subcontinental incarnation of caste. Yet-as this panel addresses-there were within this imperial structure Europeans who were, even within the norms of Anglo-Indian society, special outsiders. There were some-perhaps many-British officials who we can readily imagine awakening early on some dark morning, asking themselves "Why are we here?", and being unable to return to sleep secure in an easy The research presented in this paper bas been supported by grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Foreign Currency Program of the Smithsonian Institution.
The Customs of Conquest: Legal Primitivism and British Paramountcy in Northeast India
Studies in History, 2021
The discourse around indigeneity, customary rights of possession and claims to political autonomy in Northeast India conventionally traces the postcolonial protectionist legislation for 'tribes' to various acts passed under the late colonial state, the most significant precursor being seen as the Government of India Act, 1935. This article will argue that one can in fact trace the 'original moment' in the idea of customary law for 'tribes' much further back in history, to the early decades of the nineteenth century. This historical moment was anchored in the beginnings of the East India Company's conquest of the Garo hills in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the appropriation of the land and revenue of the Garos and in the ethnogenesis of the 'hill Garo'. The article will explore the ways in which the beginning of the invention of customary law and traditional authority in Northeast India under East India Company rule was impelled by the Company's demands for revenue and was shielded and secured by the deployment of military power across the hills. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the strategies of imperial control first introduced in the region were reproduced across the rest of Northeast India, underscoring the significance of the Garo hills as the first 'laboratory' of colonial rule in the region as well as sharpening our understanding of the character of the early colonial state. The article thus takes as its task the historicization of the categories of 'customary law', 'traditional/indigenous authority' and the 'hill tribe', all of which form the basis of late colonial and postcolonial legislation on the 'tribe'.
Scalar, Spectacular and Subaltern Sovereignty: Colonial Autocracy and Democracy in Interwar India
Sovereignty: A Global Perspective, 2022
This chapter opens by introducing three recurring characteristics of contemporary debates regarding sovereignty in colonial India. The first concerns scale; the way in which the sovereignty of the Government of India was positioned between that of the Indian village and the imperial capital in London. The second concerns spectacle; the accentuated role of the visual and of violence in the Raj. The third debate emerges from subaltern studies and regards the popular sovereignty of the Indian non-elite. These three types of sovereignty will be shown to have been renegotiated at the Round Table Conference which took place over three sittings in London between 1930 and 1932. A new federal hybrid of autocracy and democracy was devised, a new spectacle of interwar colonial sovereignty was manufactured, and vying claims were made to speak not only of but for Indian subalterns.
The British Policy of Indirect Rule in India: A Historical Perspective
2016
ABSTRACT: When the British established a vast empire in Asia and Africa, they faced the basic problem , because they dominated over the existing political authorities. In most parts of their dominions, they had adopted a system of utilizing the pre-existing political authority, indigenous rulers or traditional chiefs, to carry out most of the processes of local government. This was the situation where an imperial power did not supersede the pre - existing political authority, but established its dominance over it, where traditional rulers were allowed to exercise as before in the local governance. This system is called “Indirect Rule”, which stood for a Government through the pre-existing political authority. This was a well - established system of British colonial administration and was followed in Africa, Malaya States , and elsewhere. The British system of indirect rule was the exercise of determinative influence and exclusive political control over a nominally sovereign State, a...
A Tryst with the Tribes: A Comparison of State – Tribe Relations in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India
2020
It is well-known that the relationship between the colonial State and the Tribes in nineteenth century India had been particularly conflict-ridden and interrupted by periodic ‘insurrections’ or rebellions. This paper studies the relationship between the pre-colonial Mughal State and its tribes and juxtaposes it against the colonial state’s management of the Khonds and the Santals, and explores what can be known about the nature of the nineteenth century ‘Indian’ state that is fundamentally different from its earlier avatars. Employing police reports and legal court files, this paper concludes, that the uniqueness of the colonial State lay in its unilateral interactions with the tribes that is a product of the transition from a state that exercised ‘narrative sovereignty’ over its territories to one that aspired to enforce ‘actual sovereignty.’ This categorical change in the nature of the state, this paper argues, employing Marshall Sahlins’ ‘possible theory of history,’ caused struc...