Political and Lineage Intrigue in the Indian States: Rajput Realities and British Convictions-in Conflict (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Anglo-Indians are a mixed-race, Christian and Anglophone minority community which arose in India during the long period of European colonialism. An often neglected part of the British ‘Raj’, their presence complicates the traditional binary through which British imperialism in South Asia is viewed – of ruler and ruled, coloniser and colonised. This book looks at how Anglo-Indians illuminate the history of minority politics in the transition from British colonial rule in South Asia to independence. The book analyses how the provisions in the Indian Constitution relating to Anglo-Indian cultural, linguistic and religious autonomy were implemented in the years following 1950. It discusses how effective the measures designed to protect Anglo-Indian employment by the state and Anglo-Indian educational institutions under the pressures of Indian national politics were. Presenting an in-depth account of this minority community in South Asia, this book will be of interest to those studying South Asian History, Colonial History and South Asian Politics. Available worldwide from https://www.amazon.com/Anglo-Indians-Minority-Politics-South-Asia/dp/1138847224/ or in the UK https://www.routledge.com/Anglo-Indians-and-Minority-Politics-in-South-Asia-Race-Boundary-Making/Charlton-Stevens/p/book/9781138847224 or https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anglo-Indians-Minority-Politics-South-Asia/dp/1138847224/ To request a free copy to use for a magazine, journal, TV or Radio review please fill out this form: http://pages.email.taylorandfrancis.com/review-copy-request quoting the ISBN: 9781138847224
Modern Asian Studies, 1989
Consolidated imperial rule tends to alter the relationships among indigenous elites. Some elite groups may adjust to the new regime by joining it or otherwise becoming collaborators in rule. Others may see a marked deterioration in their former ruling status and honor. Groups which cooperated politically during the pre-colonial period may experience new tensions and enter into relationships of a more adversary nature. It is sometimes difficult for observers of social and political change to see clearly the nature of the new conflicts among elites and the directions of cleavage. For this reason a lack of consensus pervades scholarly assessments of the meaning of the development of tensions between high-status non-Brahmans and Brahmans in south India early in the twentieth century. It is not clear why anti-Brahmanism emerged in the ideology of the Justice Party, a party of landholding interests.Was this development another example of the exacerbation of social distinctions under imper...
Journal of Asian Studies, 2008
In the early twentieth century, Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, was a philosophy premised on exclusivist notions of "nation-ness" and "nation-state-ness." India, proponents claimed, had since the earliest times been the pitrabhumi and the punyabhumi of Hindus-their fatherland and holy land. This ideal realm was corrupted by Muslim and Christian "invaders," foreigners who defiled and split asunder "Akhand Hindustan," the one India of Hindus. In the context of British rule of the subcontinent, Hindu nationalists mirrored colonial claims and held up the native princely states as exemplars of "tradition," as territories unspoiled by foreign hands and thus representative of the "true India." The idea behind Akhand Hindustan came from a prominent member of the princely state bureaucracy, K. M. Munshi. Here the author explores how and why princely states were idealized in the Hindu imaginary and what role reformers, particularly Munshi, played in perpetuating this hard-line ideology. By exploring the regions on which early Hindu nationalism was mapped, the author illuminates the teleology of Hindutva while providing a better understanding of the place of princely states in the politics and society of colonial India.
Indian History - an alternate perspective
" We must create a history of India in living terms. Up to the present, that history, as written by the English, practically begins with Warren Hastings, and crams in certain unavoidable preliminaries, which cover a few thousand years…The history of India has yet to be written for the first time. It has to be humanized, emotionalized, made the trumpet-voice and evangel of the race that inhabit India. " Sister Nivedita. This article is a beginning to this dream of Sister Nivedita.
A History of India, Vol II: From the Break-up of the Mughal Empire to the End of Colonial Rule
2024
This is the second of a three-volume history of India, characterized by three main arguments: (a) Indian history has been crucially conditioned by the manifold and two-way connections linking the Indian subcontinent to the remainder of the world; (b) Indian society was never static, but always crisscrossed by powerful currents of change; (c) colonialism caused both the crystallization of a ‘traditional’ society – which, in that shape, had never really existed before – and, at the same time, the rise of modernity. This volume examines the history of India from the collapse of the Mughal Empire to the end of colonialism in 1947. It analyses the features of the most important pre-colonial Indian states and the role played by the British colonialism in their destruction or reduction to political irrelevance. Second, the volume highlights the contradictory role of the colonial order in freezing a previously evolving society, causing the coming into being of a ‘traditional India’ and, at the same time, somewhat unwittingly, triggering the rise of a new modern India. Furthermore, the volume analyses the role of India in supporting the British Empire both economically and militarily, and how the implementation of the liberal economic policy by the colonial rulers resulted in the loss of millions of Indian lives. Finally, the volume closely examines the rise and evolution of Indian nationalism, the reasons that forced for the British to end their rule, and, last but not least, the causes of partition and the responsibilities of the parties and political leaders involved.
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.