Early colonial transformation: The emergence of wedged dichotomies (original) (raw)

Village Communities andLLand Tenures in Western India Under Colonial Rule

Village Communities and Land Tenures in Western India Under Colonial Rule, 2009

Village communities in Western India rested on hierarchy and were not egalitarian and tried to institutionalise existing social disparities.They began to disintegrate under the impetus of market economy and the increasing intervention of the colonial state when the process of class polarisation went beyond this institutionalised limit. the continuous restructuring of social relatioships reflected in the changing tenurial patters accumulating by slow degrees resulted in the long-run in ultimtely dislocating the existing social structure.The historical records show that the central contention of the neo-imperialist writings regarding the fundamental continuity between the pre-colonial and colonial social structure is not sustainable.

Book Review. The great agrarian conquest: the colonial reshaping of a rural world

South Asian History and Culture, 2021

Scholarship on the rural world in the Indian subcontinent has focused mainly on five aspects: agrarian economy, peasant labour, caste and gender features, rural ecology and rural development programmes. This book, however, populates the narrative with the interrelations of the peasant, the pastoralist as well as the nomad. Its new political-economic emphasis shows the limits and antinomies of modernist development. Paternalist power and custom Bhattacharya argues that colonial governance from 1830s to 40s onwards in the Punjab (Northwest India) functioned as a paternalist power through empathetic moderation and protection. It occasionally mitigated the burden of land revenue and protected peasants from the loss of lands to non-agriculturalists. This argument is partly in league with a similar viewpoint formulated by David Ludden, 1 albeit rejecting any reference to the prevalence of imperial hegemony and the emergence of imperial agrarian citizenship. Contra Ludden, 2 the book offers a 'why' for imperial paternalism. This also goes against an enunciation of colonial state-power as a 'state of domination' 3 or 'dominance without hegemony'. 4 Bhattacharya suggests that imperial paternalism was wedded to both romantic and utilitarian ideologies in the colonial setup and operated as a political economic imperative. It was equally an instrument to effect the legitimization of agrarian expansion at the expense of nomadic and pastoralist land-use. It aimed to placate the peasants deserting lands under the burden of revenue demand and mitigate the plight of peoples faced with the famines. The large numbers of Punjabi peasants in the imperial army meant that agrarian disturbance could fuse with mutinous activity. This palpable fear in the aftermath of the 1857 revolt was another factor undergirding imperial paternalism, as Bhattacharya notes. Effectively, Bhattacharya's attention to the discursive and ideological self-presentation of the colonial government as paternalist diverges from the politicoeconomic causes identified by Washbrook 5 and Ali 6 to explain the socioeconomic conservatism of the colonial state. However, the study stops short of elaborating on an issue: Whether it was imperial paternalism or was the rising prices of agricultural produce during the 1860s-1920 that was responsible for a fall in the real value of land tax, that is, the amount of agricultural produce paid by peasants as land tax? Delineating the limits of imperial paternalism, Bhattacharya notes that any questioning of its authority could not be tolerated (pp. 440-41); the peasants' confrontation with the colonial state over the rates of canal-water and land tax since 1906-7 was an instance. Further, empathetic moderation and protection for the male landowners brought about dispossession and subordination to the pastoralist and the nomad, who traditionally occupied the arid scrublands. Also excluded were women, lower castes, other non-agrarian castes as well as the Butimar (those who cleared and improved the lands on an invitation of the village headman). Colonial governance exemplified despotism in these cases. In view of these, what remains unsettled in this book is the relationship between the dual images of the state-'state of domination' versus paternalism. Colonial paternalism stood for conservation, recording, translating and legalizing of living custom as embodied in practices. Local native power also influenced the very invocation and codification of custom. Bhattacharya argues that colonial rule came up with a hybridized but uniform custom, as opposed to precolonial heterogeneity. At the cost of other social groups, new

Slow Change in Colonial South India : The Transformation of Thanjavur (1988)

Development & Change, 1988

There is a growing awareness that change in colonial societies was far from uniform. Not only was colonial rule imposed on societies that differed widely in scale, complexity and social dynamics, but the objectives and circumstances of colonial annexation varied, as did the character of colonialism itself over time. The new overlords established their rule by entering into alliances with various local groups that could influence the local shape of colonialism to a certain extent. But within a single colony the new rulers might ally themselves regionally with quite disparate groups, and initial alliances might be altered at some later time. All these factors could produce very different patterns of change in colonized societies. In British India all these complexities could be seen. An ethnically and politically divided subcontinent, India had been colonized by a single European power over a period of 100 years. The historiography of this colony has long been dominated by a controversy between 'imperialist' and 'nationalist' historians who disagreed about the impact of British rule on India as a whole but who agreed on the all-powerful nature of British colonialism in transforming Indian society. More recent studies have concentrated, however, on regional patterns of growth and decline; they show that the local effects of colonialism differed significantly in scope, depth and timing, and that they fluctuated over time. It is now recognized that an important factor is the degree to which local social structures lent themselves to easy manipulation. Some local societies could be transformed more easily than others, either because local ruling groups could not withstand the forces of colonialism or because they actively welcomed them. This paper is concerned with one small area of India in which the social order proved to be relatively 'resilient'. Here British occupation

Colonial Interventions and Tribal Society: Land Settlements and the Expansion of Cultivation

International Journal of Creative Research and Thoughts , 2021

Although marked by diversities, the impact generated by colonialism on the world of the tribals was increasingly felt by the second half of the nineteenth century in a significant manner. The colonial regime started the process of recording land rights in tribal areas, often giving an individual farmer the right of cultivation. In most cases the effort was to make a direct relationship between the farmer and the state. This impacted tribal societies in three ways. First, in many tribal societies, especially those practicing jhum, there was no individual ownership of land. Land was owned by clans as in the case of khuntkatti system of Chotanagpur or village councils in the Garo and Khasi hills of North East. Since jhum was banned under forest laws, the right to land for jhum cultivators was not recognised. Secondly, though the rights of the tribal peasants were recognised, the increasing burden of taxes lad their increasing indebtedness. Finally, the British policy also tried to expand plough cultivation in areas where jhum was being done earlier.

Review The Colonial State And Forms Of K

Over the last few decades, roughly from the mid 1970s to the present, the field of colonial historiography has seen some valuable publications. With works such as Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), Bernard Cohn's Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (1996), and related works that sought to explore alternate genealogies of colonialism, such as C.A. Bayly's Rulers, Townsmen, Bazaars (1983) and Empire and Information (1996), all have given us vast, interesting, and contending vignettes into the nature of colonialism. While these works have often fallen on various sides of the debate in asking questions about how totalising the nature of colonialism was, recent works have begun constructing more sophisticated and critical understandings of colonialism. To reproduce colonialism's own totalising narratives, one runs the risk of assuming that the voice one is reconstructing the past through, is the past itself. There is a fine distinction that needs to be made between two sets of historiographical statements, particularly when writing such a book, namely, a) that colonial knowledge was power, and b) that this power/knowledge was totalising. The question is whether the second statement necessarily follows from the first. The second statement hinges on how much it is reproduced in conversation, activism, discourse, political strategy, and in the last instance, historiography. In the set of essays that Vinay Lal has put together in The Colonial State and Forms of Knowledge, the distinction between these two considerations is not collapsed, but show colonialism as being complex, strange, and as un-totalising as any other facet of history. Lal's introductory essay provides the conceptual map to the rest of the work. He o ers an analysis of the ways in which British colonial actors constructed knowledge of people whom they ruled over. The conceptual architecture of the book relies on the works of theorists and writers such as Bernard Cohn, Edward Said, and Michel Foucault. Lal reconstructs the discourses that British o cials used to construct knowledge about India, much of which was armed with an Orientalist outlook (5).