IESHR - Recent Issues (Sage)

Oral tradition, nationalism and Assamese social history: Remembering a peasant uprising

Recent advances in folklore studies makes it possible to reasonably address the complex origin of historical-ballads. This scholarship carefully explores the forms, linguistic styles and more precisely, the mental universe of the rural society embedded in historical ballads. Doli-Puran—an Assamese historical ballad narrating the events related to the peasant rebellion of 1894—could be a key to an understanding of the social history of the Assamese peasantry. The textual content of this oral narrative underwent significant transformation over the years together with the changing political landscape of Assam and the Assamese peasant society. This essay explains the dynamics of the social origin of this oral narrative and its significance. It shows how historical imagination and social memory, mostly drawn from an Assamese rural landscape, influenced the Assamese nation building process in the twentieth century.

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Struggling against Dundee: Bengal jute industry during the nineteenth century

This article seeks to situate Bengal’s jute industry during the nineteenth century in a global perspective. It was a long-established cottage industry in Bengal that entered into the global market before the advent of jute technologies at Dundee, and grew together with the Dundee mills through the mid-nineteenth century. The subsequent emergence of modern mills in Bengal further aggravated the market competition. In view of inadequate deliberations in the existing literature, we intend to investigate four important questions on the contemporary jute industry: (a) what was the development status of the traditional jute industry in Bengal around the mid-nineteenth century?; (b) when did it enter into the phase of decline?; (c) what were the sources of comparative advantages between the Dundee and Calcutta mills?; and (d) what were the nature and consequences of competition between them? These issues are discussed, and also quantified, wherever possible, on the basis of contemporary data and information. The welfare implications of Bengal jute industry are also evaluated.

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Book Review: The Small Voice of History

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Visualising a region: Phaniswarnath Renu and the archive of the 'regional-rural' in the 1950s

Anchored in the decade of 1950s, this article focuses on the writings of Phaniswarnath Renu to understand ways in which he represented the rural life of Kosi region. Also known as the old Purnea district of Bihar, this region has been historically visualised as unhealthy and backward. Following Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, the article argues that Renu’s craftsmanship renders the backwardness of this region in a manner that highlights what Edward Soja calls ‘instrumentality of the space’. Unlike the dominant constructs of village life in India, Renu’s villages are neither empty of their geo-cultural specificities nor devoid of placeness. Instead, the landscape of a backward region is densely imbued with particulars that cannot be translocated to any other setting. Renu’s ‘regional–rural’ craftsmanship depended on three mutually connected factors. These include his innovative use of language forms distinguishing him from his predecessors like Premchand; his mobilisation of an enormous amount of information, which I shall call the cultural memory of the region; and third, his technique of storytelling. Together these three produce an archive for the reconstruction of the region at a particular historical juncture. This archive draws our attention to the apathy accrued to the dynamics of space by a large section of litterateurs as well as social scientists otherwise obsessed with the time.

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Rice trade in the 'rice bowl of Bengal': Burdwan 1880-1947

Burdwan district, with its advantageous position in transportation network and good resource endowments, spontaneously responded to the commercialisation of agriculture. Rice received considerable commercial importance in the second half of the nineteenth century. It found access to new markets within and outside Bengal and consequently rice trade flourished. Rice trade was carried on regularly in an organised way in Burdwan and expanded considerably from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The business acumen as well as entrepreneurial activities of Burdwan’s traders and merchants was successfully demonstrated with the expansion of commercialisation of agriculture. The rice merchants and rice millers dominated the rice trade of Burdwan, forming associations for protecting and promoting their business. They carried on their trade independently and successfully, demonstrating their entrepreneurial ability.

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Book Review: Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times

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Book Review: Dravidian Sahibs and Brahmin Maulanas: The Politics of the Muslims of Tamil Nadu, 1930-1967

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Book Review: Vijayanagara Visions: Religious Experience and Cultural Creativity in a South Indian Empire

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In the mirror of Ghalib: Post-colonial reflections on Indo-Muslim selfhood

This article focuses on studies of the preeminent Urdu and Persian poet Mirza Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’ written for the occasion of his death centennial in 1969 by three Pakistani Urdu writers: Mumtaz Husain, Salim Ahmad and N.M. Rashed. These studies also participate in a debate on Pakistani national culture at a moment when the Urdu literary community was increasingly divided, following the 1965 India–Pakistan war and the emergence of a ‘new generation’ of writers on either side of the border. Each author uses Ghalib to articulate a different model of the individual and his relationship to society and tradition, taking up a theme of Indo-Muslim selfhood that has typically been the site of intersection between literary and cultural politics. Through an examination of these works, this article highlights the role played by discussions of Indo-Muslim selfhood in cultural and literary debates in Urdu.

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'...Of real use to the people': The Tanjore printing press and the spread of useful knowledge

This article throws light on the self-consciously modern attempt on the part of Raja Serfoji II (r. 1798–1832) of Tanjore, South India to establish a Devanagari press in 1802–07 for the dissemination of ‘useful knowledge’. Adopting a social constructivist approach, this article concerns itself with the locality, materiality and the historical contingency of knowledge production, thus opting for a highly detailed case study of the Tanjore press. It focuses on people, objects, knowledge, technologies and labour that flowed along short- and long-distance networks connecting the local and the global in the early nineteenth century, to produce the printed book in the ‘locality’ called Tanjore. The article argues that the superior and elegant Devanagari types cast for Serfoji were not simply ‘crafted out’ of a European template, but were the result of a five-year long typographical experiment funded and directed by the Tanjore court involving several kinds of expertise that cut across geographical and cultural boundaries. Serfoji’s celebration of the social and intellectual uses of this piece of European technology so early in the nineteenth century is indeed a remarkable historical episode, and a reflection of the nature of enlightened modernity he wished to articulate through the vernacular printed book.

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'To stop train pull chain': Writing histories of contemporary political practice

Many political practices in India are today regarded as disruptive, extralegal, violent or otherwise detrimental to India’s democratic record, yet at the same time they have functioned in the past and continue to function as widespread forms of political communication. This article argues that such practices—often associated with those in positions of structural marginalisation—are as deserving of analysis and understanding as forms and sites of communication more conventionally associated with the history of democracy, such as the coffee houses and forms of print media associated with the bourgeois public sphere in Europe or practices associated with elections. Using the very common practice of alarm chain pulling to stop a train for political purposes as a specific example, the article also argues that it is important to place contemporary forms of political practice into their longer historical genealogies in order to fully understand their significance within the history and practice of democracy in India today.

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Beyond powerlessness: Institutional life of the vernacular in the making of modern Orissa (1866-1931)

This article calls for a revision and expansion of our understanding of the concept of ‘vernacular’ in modern Indian scholarship. Current definitions of the concept pose it as a local, indigenous and powerless language. Scholars like Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee have argued that such indegeneity and exclusion from structures of power provide vernacular languages with the capacity to represent the true voice of the oppressed. While this is true of vernacular languages in some instances, my analysis of linguistic politics in Orissa demonstrates that an overwhelming reliance on this definition of radical powerlessness blinds us to the hegemonic power exercised by regional vernacular languages in determining political and territorial alignments in modern India. This article illustrates how it is only by raising the question of how regional space is produced in India that we can illustrate the hegemonic power of major Indian vernacular languages.

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Book Review: In so Many Words: Women's Life Experiences from Western and Eastern India and Memsahibs' Writings: Colonial Narratives on Indian Women

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Book Review: Poetry and History: Bengali Mangalkabya and Social Change in Precolonial Bengal and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay: An Intellectual Biography

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Index to Volume XLVIII

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From source to sink: 'Official' and 'improved' water in Delhi, 1868-1956

This article examines the making of a modern colonial city through the rhetoric of ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’ in relation to water. The reference is to the history of water in the city of Delhi and what may be called ‘the first science of environment’ in a colonial urban context, with a focus not so much on the ‘extent’ of water supply and drainage, and its (in)adequacy in the colonial city, as on concerns around the ‘(im)purity’ of water, narratives of pollution, technologies of purity and the transformations they effected in a colonial context. In doing so it hopes to build upon a rich tradition of writings on urban water, its modernisation as also its location within a colonial regime, being suggestive of a framework in which we may consider water both as infrastructure and as environment, as much a network of pipes and drains as matters of pollution and well-being, as much a story of the search for and protection of the source as of the fate of the sink into which it ultimately flows.

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An urban imaginaire, ca 1350: The capital city in Ziya' Barani's Fatawa-i Jahandari

This article examines information on the capital city in the Fatawa-i Jahandari, written by the ex-Tughluq courtier Ziya’ al-Din Barani in the 1350s in Delhi. It argues that the imagined, ideal capital city described by the author inheres everyday, ground realities that contested the execution of politics and imperial authority, thereby problematising the template of absolute political rule, especially in the capital city. Always judged as conservative, Barani’s advice to achieve the ideal was hardly orthodox: kingly justice was neither severely nor canonically ‘Islamic’ but was at once a combination of tact, compromise and, where unnecessary, acceptance of unIslamic practices. The larger argument is one of methodology, seeking to draw attention to the importance of studying normative texts more carefully for historical information in the hope to writing a more textured history.

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Of poisoners, tanners and the British Raj: Redefining Chamar identity in colonial North India, 1850-90

This article explores colonial representations of the crime of cattle poisoning and uses it as a starting point to investigate questions related to the formation of Chamar identity. Starting from the 1850s, it looks at the process whereby the caste group was imbued with certain undesirable traits of character. Simultaneously, it also explores the larger trend towards fixing the caste with certain occupational traits, so that it began to be identified completely with leather work by late nineteenth century. The role of new specialisms such as ethnography, toxicology and medical jurisprudence in the formation of new definitions about Chamars is also highlighted. The overall aim of the article is to reveal the complexities involved in the formation of colonial discourse about caste and caste groups.

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Civilisation and its malcontents: The politics of Kuki raid in nineteenth century Northeast India

This article examines the colonial representation of Kuki raids in nineteenth century Northeastern India as, at best, ‘lawlessness’ and, at worst, ‘predatory habits of the savage hill tribes’ whose ‘natural love of plunder’ took of it as an ‘amusement’ for procuring human heads or captives for sacrificial purposes. From the hill perspective, it argues that raiding was mainly made to procure human labour forces, and was an expression of hill politics. Essentially, it was a function of newly emerging notions of kingship and authority. Since the early nineteenth century Kuki country witnessed the emergence of some powerful rajahs. The ensuing warfare, death, subjugation and displacement changed the political and demographic landscape of the hills. The new regimes depended mostly on coerced labour power, which now transformed into wealth, not only to construct, enforce and sustain its authority but also to overcome the constraints generated by the non-state practices. The scarcity of labour power in the hills induced them to acquire it from the plains or other hostile tribes through the in-strument of raid.

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Avril A. Powell, Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press), 2010, pp. 336.

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A nation state insufficiently imagined?: Debating Pakistan in late colonial North India

Tropes of ‘insufficient national imagination’, ‘secular nationalism’ and ‘accidental state formation’ have long dominated historical accounts of Pakistan’s origins and have also been critical for explanations regarding this nation-state’s post’colonial trajectory. This article challenges these foundational assumptions about Pakistani nationalism by examining how the idea of Pakistan was articulated and debated in the public sphere and how popular enthusiasm was generated for its successful achievement in the last decade of British colonial rule in India. In this regard, it examines the trajectory of the Pakistan movement in the United Provinces (UP, now Uttar Pradesh, India) and the leading role played by UP Muslims aligned to the Muslim League (ML) in Pakistan’s creation, despite their awareness that the UP itself would not be a part of this new nation-state.

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Antony Copley, Gay Writers in Search of the Divine: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writings of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood (New Delhi: Yoda Press), 2006, pp. 316.

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An improbable reconstruction: The transformation of Madurai, 1837-47

This article concerns the city of Madurai in the middle of the nineteenth century, at a time of urban development undertaken by the head of the colonial administration in that district. The difficulties involved in this exceptional operation, at a time when colonial administration was not very concentrated with urban development, reflect how there was not much colonial control in urban areas. The article also looks at how this urban development affected the organisation and appearance of the city, how city inhabitants made use of the space available to them and their rights to property. It also shows how the relationships established between inhabitants and local colonial authorities were very different from those developed in pre-colonial times.

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Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black), 2009, pp. 310

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Marcus Franke, War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (London: Routledge), 2009, pp. 219

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R.S. Sharma, Rethinking India's Past (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2009, pp. 299

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Margrit Pernau and Yunus Jaffery, eds, Information and the Public Sphere: Persian Newsletters from Mughal Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2009, pp. 480

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Markets in eighteenth century Bengal economy

This article explores the emergence, functioning and growth of markets in early modern Bengal and suggests the existence of decentralised interlinked exchange sites whose numbers increased over the course of the eighteenth century, with founders from diverse social groups and clearly delineated rules about establishment and resolution of conflict. Markets were both extensive as well as efficient with panoply of market regulations to ensure the smooth functioning of these sites. Investment made by different strata of society, guiding principles determining the spatial and temporal distribution of market places, the pervasive and robust service industry, internal consumption and mercantile penetration, in agriculture as well as other sectors, consolidated the process of commercialisation and shaped the provincial economy. A differentiated merchant community, with differing scales of operation, area and profit margin, serviced this economy. Both the indigenous and the early Company state were beneficiaries of the taxes but they were not the prime movers. The Nizamat of Bengal played a facilitating role in the smooth functioning of the market places, but the state even in the later part of the eighteenth century did not or could not act as the sole unilateral arbiter of all that was happening in the economic sphere.

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Casting despots in Dutch drama: The case of Nadir Shah in Van Steenwyk's Thamas Koelikan

By 1745, the Persian ruler Nadir Shah (also known as Tahmasp Quli Khan) had made a name for himself as a conqueror in Asia. In the same year, the Dutch playwright Frans van Steenwyk scripted a play titled Thamas Koelikan in Amsterdam. The play not only chose Nadir for protagonist, but also identified his conquest of Mughal India as the backdrop to the drama. Just as Van Steenwyk’s drama reflected the curiosity of his peers in Nadir Shah, another image of Asian rulers circulating in Europe at the same time also featured in the play—the image of the Oriental Despot. Although the theme of Oriental Despotism was a generic appli-cation to Asian rulers, the relationship of this label with Nadir Shah was more intimate. From the late eighteenth century onwards, any mention of Nadir Shah meant a reference to Oriental Despotism. This article analyses the nature of representation of Nadir Shah in Van Steenwyk’s Thamas Koelikan. It studies the means by which the notion of Oriental Despotism features in the play. It argues that the observations made in this regard should be seen in the light of the sources that the playwright employed in penning his play. This related closely to the world of the Dutch East India Company in South Asia.

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Manu Bhagavan and Anne Feldhaus, eds, Speaking Truth to Power: Religion, Caste, and the Subaltern Question in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2008, pp. 242

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Revenue, rent...profit? Early British imperialism1, political economy and the search for a differentia specifica (inter se)

This article argues that in the mid to late eighteenth century, political economy, through writers such as Francois Quesnay, David Hume and Adam Smith, saw a discussion of ‘despotism’, which stood for thinking through the political arrangement within which economic productivity was formulated; even as the distinction between the two was not always self-evident. This theoretical function of despotism disappears in the ‘mature’ phase of political economy (David Ricardo), precisely when it was taking shape—in institutional and conceptual-lexical terms—in the subcontinent through Britain’s conquest of India via the East India Company. We argue that the disappearance of despotism at the conceptual level in this phase in Britain is not only questionable from a theoretical standpoint but also played its historical role as a decoy in occluding attention toward imperialism in India wherein the distinction between the political and the economic was becoming more and more difficult to make. Through such an investigation we thus hope to examine the emergence of the economy (and by implication the state-political) as an independent analytic site as well as evaluate its categories and historical significance. We base our argument on a reading of the canonical texts of figures such as Adam Smith, William Blackstone and David Ricardo, Land Revenue Settlement sources in India and the hitherto neglected economic writings of W.H. Sleeman.

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Aparna Basu and Shailja Kalelkar Parikh (Trans.), The Road Less Travelled: The Life and Writings of Vinodinee Neelkanth (Kolkata: Stree), 2009, pp. 320

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Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877-1947 (New Delhi: Permanent Black), 2008, pp. 251

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Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of Nehru Years (Ranikhet: Permanent Black), 2010, pp. 359

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Gail Minault, Gender, Language and Learning: Essays in Indo-Muslim Cultural History (Delhi: Permanent Black), 2009, pp. 314

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Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval 'Hindu-Muslim' Encounter (New Delhi: Permanent Black), 2010, pp. 384

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