This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonial uses of the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0010417515000055

The criminal tribe in India before the British

This thesis excavates what lies beneath commonly accepted judgements of the patterned pile carpets of South, Central and West Asia, widely known as ‘oriental’ carpets, in order to open new areas of investigation into these artifacts. Beginning with a critique of the dominant European and North American connoisseurial and scholarly position on these artifacts, the thesis analyses the role they play in materializing ideas of the Other, the subaltern and the colonized. It investigates their participation in complex global networks of materials, technology, skills, and ideology. It interrogates important concepts underlying not only European and North American ideas about the patterned pile carpets of South, Central and West Asia, but about crafts more broadly. Contested concepts such as tradition, authenticity, authorship, originals and copies, handmade and machine-made are explored, and the binaries implied by them are challenged.

Chapter one interrogates the assumptions underlying European and North American writing and thinking on these artifacts since around 1840. It argues that rather than articulating stable and enduring evaluations of aesthetic and cultural value, these assumptions express certain psychological, political, social and economic ideas in which Europeans and North Americans invested from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The chapter examines the circumstances which brought into being this dominant reading, a reading I describe as the European and North American orthodoxy; deconstructing the work of its foundational thinkers, and the practice which enacts and polices it.

Chapters two, three and four investigate the orthodoxy at work, both materializing its values in carpets it reinvents as iconic and excluding carpets it regards as transgressive of its values. I use three examples to argue my case. The first is the reimagining of the canonical sixteenth century Persian Ardabil carpet in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, as the preeminent example of the values of the orthodoxy, from its arrival in the museum in 1892 to the present day. The second two examples are of carpets that transgress the European and North American orthodoxy’s values and are consequently defined by it as of low aesthetic, cultural and commercial value. They are machine-made versions of these artifacts woven at the Templeton Carpet Manufacturing Company in Glasgow from 1840, and handmade carpets produced for a global export market in colonial Punjab from 1860, and independent Pakistan from 1947.

The thesis takes an approach which is at once political, rooted in the framework of orientalism, postcolonialism and decoloniality; historical, setting out to write a history of objects and history through objects; material, focused on technology, making, dyes and fibres; and experiential, drawing on haptic and psychoanalytical thought. From these perspectives, the thesis argues for an opening up of the conversation about these artifacts, beyond the frequently used constraints of connoisseurship and provenance. It sets out to readmit excluded weavers and their carpets to the story of these artifacts; and to reposition these carpets in the discussion about creativity, how things are made, and how that making changes across time and space, a conversation where their role has commonly been restricted to that of exemplars of the traditional and the Other.

What is an ‘oriental’ carpet? Reimagining, remaking, repossessing the patterned pile carpets of South, Central and West Asia since 1840

The ethical dimensions of quantification are seldom analysed. We examine three ethical features that are characteristic of quantification – its capacity to express or mediate power, focus attention...

Ethical dimensions of quantification

This dissertation is an investigation of alcohol and indigeneity in India. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the state of Jharkhand, I aim to describe the complex and contradictory roles that alcohol plays in the lives of people variously referred to adivasis, tribals, or Scheduled Tribes. By taking a closer look at the presence of alcohol in various registers of adivasi lives (economy, religion, social relations) as well as by studying the ways alcohol is implicated in the constitution of adivasis as a distinct category of governmental subjects, I hope to provide a nuanced and multilayered account of the relationships between adivasis and alcohol. I will thereby conceptualize these relationships in terms of obligations, which will allow me to approach them without the constraints of determination or causality inherent in concepts like addiction and/or alcoholism, and to circumvent the notion of compulsion implied in ideas about adivasis as either culturally or genetically predisposed to drinking. In the chapters that follow, I will first discuss how the criterion of alcohol consumption is implicated, discursively, in the constitution of adivasis as a separate population, and a distinct subject category through governmental procedures of knowledge formation and administration. I will then describe the ways alcohol is present, as a substance, as a commodity, and as an intoxicant, in two distinct landscapes of Jharkhand: an (unauthorized) settlement of migrant laborers adjacent to a massive industrial enterprise at the outskirts of the state capital Ranchi, and a rural environment inhabited by

Inebriety and Indigeneity: the Moral Governance of Adivasis and Alcohol in Jharkhand, India

On October 8th 2005 the villages surrounding Chinati bazaar in Bagh district of
Pakistani-administered Kashmir (PaK) were hit by an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the
Richter scale that affected the lives of more than 3.5 million people in PaK and Khyber
Pukhtunkhwa. In this thesis I attempt to understand, through the stories and narratives
of the people of Chinati bazaar, how they lived through, made sense of, and dealt with
the earthquake and its aftermath. I use participant observation and conversations to tell
the stories of those affected by the earthquake in their own voices as much as possible.
The storytellers of the bazaar lived through two types of events: the earthquake itself
and the post-earthquake rehabilitation and reconstruction process. The latter brought
with it both positive and negative impacts: if, on the one hand, it brought progress and a
new hope that life could be ‘Built Back Better’, on the other hand, it brought a different
type of suffering – one that led to a loss of honour and dignity, resulted in social
upheavals, and led to the exclusion and marginalization of certain groups. In this thesis I
focus on both these ‘events’.

Through these stories I build an argument about post-disaster discourses of change. I
argue that while the narratives of the storytellers of Chinati bazaar posit the earthquake
as a point of rupture in their confabulated stories, from which the collective memory of
the bazaar dates its movement towards becoming modern and global, these changes
have their origins instead in ‘bigger’ stories of modernisation and globalisation that predate
the earthquake and that highlight and emphasise more continuous processes of
change that have been occurring over a longer period of time. In this thesis I analyse
how these two competing discourses of rupture and dramatic change on the one hand,
and slow, continuous change on the other, play out in the lives of the storytellers of
Chinati Bazaar.

Of the earthquake and other stories : the continuity of change in Pakistan-administered Kashmir

Caste, as conceived in contemporary academic writings or within the policies of the State, is a new idea produced during the second half of the 19th century in the course of and because of the census operations. Colonial census officials, working with concepts of varna and jati, struggled unsuccessfully to define and classify these into castes on a single pan-India list, where each caste had to be discreet, homogeneous and enumerable. The history of caste enumeration in the Indian census illustrates how difficult it is to capture indigenous social hierarchies and identities under the term “caste”. We embark on a new caste census without having addressed many of these challenges. T he proposal of the Government of India to conduct a caste – census has generated intensely conflicting responses within and outside the Indian Parliament. Those in favour of the proposal argue that the survey would reveal the identity and numerical strength of the castes which suffer from deprivation; this in turn would help the state in reformulating and extending policies, such as that of reservation, which would then ensure the upliftment of the deprived sections. Those arguing against the enumeration of caste believe that the measure contravenes the ideals of citizenship and would foster divisive tendencies within society and the polity of the nation. Notwithstanding the other differences, both the protagonists and antagonists in this debate stand together when sharing the following premises: they believe that caste is an indubitable reality of Indian social life; that it has been so since the earliest times; and that the census could map this reality and produce castedata. In the present paper I adopt a contrasting stance. I argue that caste, as conceived in contemporary academic writings or within the policies of the state, is a new idea and that the social form imagined through this term never characterised the Indian society. Further, I suggest that this idea of caste was produced towards the end of the 19th century in the course of and because of the census operations. Caste of the Jati

/pdf/census-in-colonial-india-and-the-birth-of-caste-7yx69pfdlf.pdf

Padmanabh Samarendra

Papers

Census in Colonial India and the Birth of Caste