Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity by Mahmood Mamdani (original) (raw)

2013, Anthropological Quarterly

Chroniclers of the British Empire foreground the momentous shift in policy, from direct to indirect rule, occasioned by developments in India in the year 1857. It was in this year that except 7,796 of the 139,000, sepoys of the Bengal Army in a spectacular uprising, known as the Sepoy Mutiny, turned against their British masters. Colonial authority was indeed challenged in that singular historical moment of the mutiny but, more significantly, the very logic and foundational ethic of the colonial project had been rendered banal. Responsibility for formulating anew the logic of colonial rule and thus redeeming Empire from its mid-nineteenth-century crisis fell on the best of British colonial minds. In their bid to rest the colonial project on a more enduring framework these colonial thinkers denounced the difference effacing pulse of the civilising mission by recommending instead, as an antidote, the recognition and protection of difference. Thus, the transition from direct to indirect rule epitomised, in terms of policy, the attempt to render the colonial enterprise as more secure. The figure of Sir Henry Maine was key in the intellectual endeavour to reconstitute the colonial architecture. His contribution was significant far beyond serving as the bedrock for a number of policy measures instituted throughout the British Empire from the 1857 crisis onwards, in that his works became compulsory reading for colonial administrators. In this short but enlightening book of three chapters that began their life as Du Bois memorial lectures, Mahmood Mamdani, maps the history of what he refers to as "a new form of colonial governmentality born in the aftermath of the mid-nineteenthcentury crisis of colonialism' (pp. 6). A critical exposition of the new logic and ethic of colonial rule as it evolved from the pen of Sir Henry Maine in India to that of the Dutch scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, "whose object of reflection was the Dutch imperial project in Aceh in the East Indies" is offered in the first chapter (pp. 2). In the main, Maine wrote in response to the 1857 crisis of Empire in India. He begins his attempt to rehabilitate the colonial project by seeking first to diagnose the real cause of the crisis. And this he found to be the failure of analysis "a failure to understand the ASR_V3.indd 139 2013/12/17 9:42 AM