Showing papers in "Modern Asian Studies in 1991"

Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India

Abstract: The necessary vocabulary has not yet been created to encompass both the ‘informing spirit’ and ‘whole social order’ of British India. In part, at least, this is because research has generally concentrated on either British or Indian realms of action, rather than the interaction between them. But British colonial rule shaped a distinctive social system in India, one that drew on both British and indigenous values as well as notions of authority. This essay analyzes aspects of this colonial social order by focusing on its legal system, particularly that portion designed to deal with what the British identified as ‘extraordinary’ crime. Indeed, criminal law may be among the most revealing aspects of a social order. For, as Douglas Hay has observed for a similar elaboration of the English legal structure, ‘criminal law is as much concerned with authority as it is with property … the connections between property, power and authority are close and crucial.’

The Karakoram Highway: The Impact of Road Construction on Mountain Societies

Abstract: The opening up of regions in the high mountains for motorized traffic has led world-wide to consequences concerning the penetration of these formerly remote areas.Not only have running-times and means of transport been reduced through the modern routes, but also radical developments in the mountains have been induced. In this context physio-geographical and socio-political frame conditions are of predominant importance for the installation of functional communication systems. Especially in the high mountain regions of Asia relief, snow-covers in passes, glacial movements, earthquakes, water level fluctuations of rivers at fords and limited possibilities of fuel, fodder and foodstuff supplies all restrict the chances for the development of major trade routes.

‘Bravest of the Brave’: Representations of ‘The Gurkha’ in British Military Writings

Abstract: The legendary Gurkhas have inspired a considerable literature about their character, quality and exploits under British command. Some years ago, after I returned from fieldwork in an area of east Nepal inhabited by the Limbu people, many of whom had served in Gurkha regiments, I began to read some of this literature for background purposes. It struck me then, although not nearly so forcibly as it did later when I had read Edward Said (1978), and returned to the Gurkha material after a long absence, that these writings have a very distinctive character, constituting a particular mode of ‘orientalist’ discourse.

‘The Habitual Nobility of Being’: British Officers and the Social Construction of the Bengal Army in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract: The ethnocentric and racialist overtones of the Victorian empire have long been acknowledged. Most work in this field has generally centred on the mid to late nineteenth century and, by emphasizing the intellectual and cultural currents in domestic society, has focused our attention on the metropole. This reveals only part of the equation; British attitudes towards the outside world arose from a complex matrix of ideas, assumptions and contacts that linked the metropole and colonial environments. In order to understand more fully British responses to non-European societies, and the impact these had on imperial developments, this paper will examine the Bengal army in the 1820s and demonstrate that it was during this period, and under this institution, that many of the assumptions were established under which the later Raj would operate. Of great importance were experiences in the Burma War (1824–26) and the simultaneous mutiny at Barrackpore which, by bringing to the surface doubts about the loyalty and reliability of the Bengal army, hastened a transition from an army modelled on caste lines to one that rested principally on race. This transformation from a caste-based army to an army of martial races was not fully completed, although the foundations were laid, in the years before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, largely because even those who rejected Bengal's dependence upon the highest castes could not bring themselves to argue for the recruitment of the lowest castes no matter what ‘race’ they were drawn from.

‘Deindustrialization’ Revisited: The Handloom Weavers of the Central Provinces of India, c. 1800–1947

Abstract: When Marx in 1853 denounced the exploitation of India under British rule and wrote of ‘The British intruder who broke up the Indian handloom’ he laid the foundation for an economic critique which has endured to the present day. In the twentieth century, the fate of the Indian handloom weaver has been at the center of the controversy over the concept of the ‘deindustrialization’ of India on which there is now a substantial body of literature. Did the handloom industry collapse in face of competition from manufactured British imports as proponents of this thesis contend? Or were the handloom weavers able to survive the competition and at least retain (and, as has recently been argued, perhaps even improve) their position, as demand for cloth rose with rising per capita income, the fall in cloth prices was offset by the cheaper price of machine-spun yarn, and the handloom weavers diversified into higher-valued products and adopted new technologies? This paper is intended as a further contribution to this debate. It examines what happened to the handloom industry in one part of India (the region that from 1861 was called the Central Provinces) over a period of roughly one hundred and fifty years. It is in four parts. The first part studies the changes that occurred in the nineteenth century as British power spread throughout the subcontinent. This is the period when deindustrialization is said to have occurred to a significant extent.

South Asian Muslims in Hong Kong: Creation of a ‘Local Boy’ Identity

Abstract: South Asian Muslims migrating throughout the world usually establish tight-knit communities in which most of their socioeconomic and religious activities occur. The social organization of South Asian Muslims in Hong Kong is unique in that their separation and isolation into a cohesive ethnic group is a relatively recent phenomenon. Communal orientations have undergone substantial change over time, often paralleling the kinds of changes occuring in Hong Kong as a result of its relationship to the British Empire. This paper seeks to understand the characteristics of the early South Asian Muslim community in Hong Kong and contrast these with social themes which are found in the contemporary community so as to discover the principles underlying social cohesion and cultural identification within this group.

Maintaining Cultural Boundaries in Retailing: How Japanese Department Stores Domesticate ‘Things Foreign’

Abstract: This essay explores the division between 'things Japanese' and 'things foreign' in contemporary Japanese life through an analysis of modern retailing. Japanese department stores domesticate 'foreign things', including customs, holidays, goods, and people, by creating for these meaning consistent with the existing fabric ofJapanese culture. Their role in gift-exchanges, in the adoption of foreign holidays and in establishing special advocacy centers for foreigners reinforces the distinction between 'Japanese' and 'other' that shapes and affirms Japanese identity (economy, national identity, symbolism, popular culture, gift-exchange, Japan). Structural anthropologists have emphasized a widely found human tendency to characterize existence in terms of categorical contrasts. The juxtaposition of these polarities helps define reality for a culture's

Secular Trends in Burmese Economic History, c. 1350–1830, and their Implications for State Formation

Abstract: Scholars of Burma cannot, in good conscience, invoke the usual justification — lack of adequate primary materials — for failing to construct an economic history of the precolonial era. By comparison with Siam, Cambodia, the Malay principalities, or indeed any Indianized Southeast Asian society with the possible exception of Java, Burma offers a uniquely continuous and voluminous array of documents bearing on patterns of cultivation, monetization, taxation, and domestic and foreign trade from at least the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

The Nineteenth-Century Indo-American Ice Trade: An Hyperborean Epic

Abstract: Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta [sic], since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin [sic], priest of Brahma and Vishnu, and Indra, who sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and waterjug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred waters of the Ganges. With favouring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the Periplus of Hanno, and floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.' So Henry David Thoreau alluded to the Indo-American ice trade-a trade based on shipping ice produced of Massachusetts' winters to the ice-free world of India where its chill relieved the stress of tropic climes by frosting beverages, soothing fevered brows, and preserving perishable foods. Thoreau's rapturous statement is one of many which refer to Indo-American intercourse prior to the emergence of the United States

Reform, Nationalism and Internationalism: The Opium Suppression Movement in China and the Anglo-American Influence, 1900–1908

Abstract: Of the late Ch'ing reforms, perhaps none is more surprising than the opium suppression movement. Beginning in late 1906, it had by the end of 1908 succeeded in markedly curtailing the cultivation and consumption of opium at home and in obtaining formal assurance from the British to terminate gradually opium imports. These startling achievement are further magnified when we consider the setting within which they occurred.

From Crisis to Community Definition: The Dynamics of Eighteenth-Century Parsi Philanthropy

Abstract: India's Parsis as a group have long been noted for their entrepreneurial talent. Parsis have played an important role in the growth of Indian industry in the nineteenth century, pioneering cotton textile industries in western India. Parsis were first described by early European visitors like J. Ovington as the principal weavers of Gujarat who worked primarily in ‘silks and stuffs’. In the late seventeenth century, Parsis began to participate in trade as ‘a large number of Parsi merchants began to operate in Swally and some of them like Asa Vora bought pinnaces (small coastal ships) to transport their goods to Basra and other ports in the area.’

Trapped inside the Colonial Order: The Hindu Bankers of Surat and their Business World during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: During the second half of the eighteenth century, Surat was still a large city and an important centre of trade. One of the most successful sectors of its merchant class was made up by shroffs, namely businessmen specializing in money-exchanging, money-lending and the giving and discounting of bills of exchange. By the late 177os, the fortunes of the shroffs, who were mainly Hindu, were on the rise. According to knowledgeable observers, the Hindu businessmen, but most particu-

Socio-Economic Development Through the Informal Credit Market

Abstract: While a number of in-depth studies have been carried out on the role of the formal financial market (Gurley and Shaw, 1955; Patrick, 1966; Porter, 1966; Goldsmith, 1969; McKinnon, 1973; Shaw, 1973, to mention a few), the informal or unorganized financial sector has largely been neglected. While discussions about the operations of the informal market were popular about 20 years ago (Geertz, 1962; Ardener, 1964; Anderson, 1966; Kurtz, 1973) they have gradually been relegated to the side-lines and this is despite the fact that the said market is neverthel ess of significant size and importance (as will be illustrated elsewhere in the paper).

Daughter's Right of Inheritance in India: A Perspective on the Problem of Dowry

Abstract: One may argue that it [i.e., dowry] is nothing but a gift of love and affection by the bride's father who is not obliged to give any share to his daughter by birth. Now, however, the law of succession has been changed, giving equal right of inheritance to the daughter along with the son under the Hindu Succession Act, 1956.

Coping with the world depression: The Nationalist Government's relations with Chinese industry and commerce, 1932–1936

Abstract: The relationship between state and society has recently attracted increasing interest (Skocpol 1985). In many cases, particularly in Asia and the ‘third world’, the question has been posed in terms of how far the state's economic policies reflect the (real or perceived) interests of the capitalist class, or whether the state and its personnel act as an autonomous force above society pursuing policies irrelevant or even inimical to capitalist interests.

Rulership and Divinity: The Case of the Modern Hindu Prince and Beyond

Abstract: The former rulers of Princely India present to many people a simple stereotype. Surrounded by pomp and luxury, they are thought to have headed autocratic and tradition-based regimes in which their word was law and their desires untrammeled, since they were considered to be in some way divine because of their descent from such deities as the sun and moon. Moreover this view, by implication, contrasts with the democratic regime which followed the accession and merging of their States into the Indian Union in I948. This paper considers two questions raised by this picture. First, what kind of divinity did the Hindu Prince' possess? And second, did his rule differ from the regime which succeeded it? I consider each of these questions in turn, by taking material gathered in a number of States for the years immediately preceding independence.2 This will show that the nature of the Prince and his rule must be seen in the

Purse or Principle: Dutch Colonial Policy in the 1860s and the Decline of the Cultivation System

Abstract: In 1976 I published an article in the Acta Historiae Neerlandicae (an annual series of publications in English on the history of The Netherlands, alas abruptly discontinued in 1982 for financial reasons) in which I tried to summarize the main causes of the decline of the cultivation system in Java (Fasseur, 1976, 143–62). Being then a young and ambitious historian with little respect for the big names in the field of Indonesian sciences, I stated that the literature on the cultivation system contained many misunderstandings as to the origins of the ‘decay’ of the system. In this connection I mentioned in particular Wertheim's well-known study on Indonesian Society in Transition and Clifford Geertz's stimulating essay on Agricultural Involution (1963). Although this latter book is certainly not without its shortcomings, it has greatly obliged all historians by reviving the interest in the role played by the cultivation system in the development of Java during the last century and a half. The period of the cultivation system, in the words of Geertz, was ‘the classic stage’ of colonial history, ‘the most decisive of the Dutch era’. Although I did not realize that fully in 1975, it was thus an opportune moment to publish, twelve years after Geertz's provocative study, a doctoral dissertation on the history of the system. The main flaw of Geertz's work was its weak historical component. The only ‘historical’ data Agricultural Involution provided, were borrowed from an agricultural atlas ofJava published in 1926.

Social Support Base and Electoral Politics: The Congress in Colonial Southeast Punjab

Abstract: The weakest hold of the Indian National Congress in the colonial period was in the province of Punjab. The strength and domination of the National Unionist Party and the limited support and response afforded to the various nationalist movements highlight the weakness of the Congress especially in its southeast region, now known, after being carved out as a separate state on the 1st of November 1966, as Haryana.

Mass Movement, Famine and Epidemic A Study in Interrelationship

Abstract: Meenakshipuram is a small, dusty village in Tamilnadu's Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli) district, very close to the south Kerala border. In 1981 this inconspicuous place, and several other villages in its immediate vicinity, made big headlines in the Indian daily papers when thousands of harijans or ex-untouchables decided to leave Hinduism and to embrace Islam. This spectacular case of mass conversion created a terrible shock among caste Hindus and threatened to upset the always precarious communal balance. Rumours circulated about Arabian sheikhs who had come to give tangible expression to the immense richness of Islamic belief by handsome distributions of oildollars. More serious investigation, however, showed that the harijans in this region had been suffering from oppression by aggressive landlords, harassment by police authorities and acute prejudices by caste Hindus for a very long time. A growing awareness of this social degradation has led many of these harijans to convert to Islam.

Origins and Development of the Malayan Communist Movement, 1919–1930

Abstract: Communism as an ideology was first introduced to Malaya by Chinese anarchists, and not by Kuomintang Left, Indonesian communists or Chinese communists as claimed in existing scholarship. 1 A handful of Chinese anarchists arrived in British Malaya during the First World War to take up positions as Chinese vernacular school teachers or journalists. These Chinese intellectuals harboured not only anarchism but also communism, commonly known then as anarcho-communism.

Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860–1947. By Farzana Shaikh. South Asian Studies 42. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989. Pp. xiv, 257.

Abstract: rect to reprimand the misjudged arrogance of generations of Westerners who have 'explained' caste and endemic instability as the products of an inherent 'Indian mind' addicted to fatalism and ritual. But he is wrong to suggest that they cannot be explained at all or, what amounts to the same thing, wished away with the magic wand of deconstructionism. One obvious first step, as Inden himself hints at, would be to ask whether caste is a consequence of weak kingship. Indeed just this argument has recently been made in Jean Baechler's La solution indienne and, less explicitly, in Clifford Geertz' Negara, the Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali. Caste, it can plausibly be argued, is a form of social organization which places a heavy premium on kinship and ritual precisely because stable political structures are lacking. There is no doubt that the study of India has produced as much essentialism and misguided speculation as any other field of enquiry. If it had produced a uniform picture, it would be tempting to follow Inden and credit successive generations of Europeans with precisely the same feverish, yet slavish, imagination which he claims they have attributed to Indians. The fact is, however, that Western interpretations of Indian society have been as divergent as indigenous ones. This is partly because the former often chose among the latter for their models, and also because the West added one or two more of its own—in particular, the Marxist explanation (s) and the form of structuralism employed by Dumont. There is another problem. In the kind of (Durkheimian) idealism which Dumont and others embrace, societies are produced by the ideas of those who live in them. Though this is false, it has an obvious attraction. In Inden's version, however, it is no longer their ideas which produce their society, but ours: 'In many respects the intellectual activities of the orientalist have even produced in India the very Orient which it [sic] produced in its discourse' (p. 38). Imagination is no doubt powerful, but hardly that powerful. University of Cambridge DECLAN QUIGLEY

The Japanese Annexation of Korea 1910: The Failure of East Asian Co-Prosperity

Abstract: While Britain was amassing the largest empire ever seen, her policy makers continued to believe that economic ties were a far more effective means of control than costly and provocative military domination. Fortunately for British empire-builders, the peoples they encountered were frequently divided amongst themselves, and lacked confidence in their ability to challenge British domination. This was not entirely the case with Japan's attempts to establish hegemony over Korea following the Russo-Japanese war (1904–05). Although there were serious political and regional divisions within Korea, these were subordinated to broad hostility towards Japan. Japanese technological superiority was seen as a hand-me-down from the West, and Korea's elite, raised in the Chinese tradition, was largely dismissive of Japanese cultural attainments. Even financially, Japan remained a small player in the international market, dependent for her own overseas development on New York, London and Paris. To win Korean converts, Japan had to introduce rapid, visible improvement. One means to support this aim was the idea of Asian unity underJapanese leadership. Failing this, she could enforce her actions with a sizeable, but expensive, military and police presence. However, the rhetoric of Japanese—Korean unity could not be overstressed in view of the burgeoning Western fear of an Asian resurgence. Moreover, the concept of Japan and Korea stemming from one family was unconvincing given the historical enmity of the two peoples. Consequently, Japan sought to diminish native antipathy and retain international sympathy by emulating Britain's exaple of discreet civilian control in Egypt.

Colonial Beginnings and the Indian Response: The Revolt of 1857–58 in Madhya Pradesh

Abstract: The Narmada valley and adjoining districts of Madhya Pradesh' came under British administration following the defeat of Sagar and Nagpur in I818. Known from I820 as the Saugor and Nerbudda (Sagar and Narmada) Territories (map i), the area was administered, variously, as an agency of the governor general or as a commissioner's division of the North Western Provinces. As officials made the area part of the British imperial and capitalist system, they met with increasing resistance from notables, smaller chiefs and malguzars.2 A first round of protests occurred between 1818 and 1826, though these proved no match for the new administration or the troops still in central India. A more determined agitation took place in I842-43, to meet the same fate.3 In i857-58 the traditional landowners launched a third and more coordinated revolt against British rule, but were again unable to dislodge it from the region. This essay explores the origins and nature of that revolt and it does so against the background of colonial beginnings in Madhya Pradesh.

The Control of Fate and Fortune: The Origins of the Market Mentality in British Administrative Thought in South Asia

Abstract: regularity.' This shift can in part be explained as the natural product of the territorial cessions by the Marathas to the Bombay Government in I802-3: Bombay ceased from that date to be solely a commercial presidency and became a government with territorial responsibility. It took about a decade for this new role to be fully accepted and to be reflected in the attitudes of Bombay administrators. It is also true, however, that this natural evolution was reinforced by the appearance within the Bombay administration of the ideas of 'Economic Liberalism' first developed by the French Physiocrats and

The Eighteenth-Century Social Order in Surat: A Reply and an Excursus on the Riots of 1788 and 1795

Abstract: The Banias of eighteenth-century Surat, whom Michelguglielmo Torri earlier treated with indifference if not innocence, have invited his wrath since they were brought into focus by the publication of my essay on the Banias and the Surat riot of 1795. In his ‘rejoinder’ to my article, he seeks to wish away their existence altogether (to him there was no specific Bania community, the term merely signifying traders of all communities engaged in the profession of brokerage), and seeks to provide what he regards as an ‘alternative’ explanation of the Muslim–Bania riot of 1795. the Muslim-Bania riot of 1795. It shall be my purpose in this reply to show that his alternative explanation is neither an alternative nor even an explanation, and is based on a basic confusion in his mind about the Banias as well as the principal sources of tension in the social structure of Surat. I shall treat two main subjects in this reply to his misdirected criticisms. First, I shall present some original indigenous material as well as European documentation to further clarify the identity, position and role of the Banias, whom Irfan Habib in a recent article has identified as the most important trading group in the trading world of seventeenth and eighteenth-century India. It is also my purpose to show how the social order of Surat operated under stress by presenting some archival material, the existence of which Torri seems to be completely unaware of, on the Parsi-Muslim riot of 1788.

Emancipation for Survival: Access to Land and Labour of Thandans in Kerala

Abstract: Landless labourers often cultivate relations of patronage1 as part of survival strategies even though such relations severely curtail the scope for their emancipation2 in the long run. In the past decennia, however, the possibilities to maintain relations of patronage or get into new ones have been dwindling fast (Breman 1974). New forms of dependency, such as political clientelism, have proven to be relevant to only a selected minority.3 To which strategies for survival does the mass of the landless take resort in this situation? Are these more

Philosophy and Reality in Riparian South Asia: British Famine Policy and Migration in Colonial North India

Abstract: The assumption of the passive peasant in Indian history has been existent at least since the time of Max Weber, and continues to return, phoenix-like in its appearance, every few decades. Its importance, however, lies in the responses the generality spawns. Morris D. Morris refuted Max Weber's thesis, detailed in The Religions of India, in 1967, while Barrington Moore, Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was aptly rebutted by Kathleen Gough in 1974. Since then, the concept of the rational peasant, particularly during colonial times, has undergone a metamorphosis. Various modes of peasant dynamics have been amply demonstrated in recent works, stepping into the realms of peasant rebellion, desertion, banditry, and the like. Of particular import, in terms of peasant consciousness, has been the rise of the ‘Subaltern School’ of study. Beginning with Ranajit Guha's seminal work, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, and continuing with volumes of articles by a variety of authors, the Subaltern Studies group has attempted, in their own words, to offer an alternative to historical writing ‘that fails to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contributions made by the people on their own, that is independently of the elite.…’ These scholars thus use the term subaltern for those social groups which they believe have been ignored through the course of history.

A Hindi Writer's View of Social, Political and Language Issues of his Time: Attitudes of Hariścandra of Banaras (1850–1885)

Abstract: The individual works of Hariścandra in prose, poetry and drama have been little analysed or exploited by western scholars for the light they throw on social and political attitudes, and on language issues, in north India in their author's time Yet many of these works are of interest from the above point of view One such work is an essay based on an address given by Hariścandra in the town of Ballia, to the east of Banaras, in 1877 In the following pages the content of this interesting essay is outlined and analysed; an introductory account is first provided of Hariścandra, his activity, and its historical context

The Power of Imagination - Imagining India. By Ronald Inden. Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1990. Pp. vii, 299.

Abstract: A book of two, rather unequal, halves, Ronald Inden's Imagining India is the full-blown version of an earlier article entitled 'Orientalist Constructions of India'. Partly inspired by Edward Said's Orientalism, one of the central strands of Inden's case is that 'Without the dark rock of Indian tradition under its feet, European rationality would not have seemed so bright and light' (p. 32). The author argues that the dominant Western inrerpretation of India has always deprived that country's inhabitants of their own agency and rationality and made them prisoners of various 'essences'—caste (or caste ideology), Hinduism, the Indian mind, divine kingship, and the like. Inden's attack is not only on Indian historiography and anthropology, but on the human sciences in general. Invoking the post-Hegelian philosopher Collingwood, he argues that social science continues to lapse into a spurious essentialism where 'the agent of history is taken to be an ideal or material something that underlies, but is not itself affected by, historical acts' (p. 18). Imagining India promises a devastating deconstruction of this approach. Inden's aim is to turn the study of India away from the search for essences and towards the exploration of activities where the fact of agency cannot be ignored—for example, to caste and village councils, royal courts, the performance of rites, or the building of temples (and, of course, mosques). He is at his best when demonstrating the deficiencies of a too-hasty reification and exposing the succession of Indianists who took refuge in it. It is curious, however, that Inden does not call on the concept of reification himself, given its obvious affinity to what he and Collingwood call the doctrine of substantialism (not to mention the fact that it has been extensively discussed in sociological literature). Caste is, of course, at the heart of the issue. Inden argues that the Western obsession with caste reached its zenith in the rampant empiricism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when zealous imperialists attempted to tidy up India in successive censuses—the pigeonholing of populations being a necessary corollary of imposing a unified political order. Inden notes that the Commissioner for the 1901 Census, Herbert Risley, himself drew attention to the perils of this procedure. The census entry which asked for the name of the caste, tribe or race to which someone belonged produced a bewildering variety of responses which caused endless difficulties for the enumerating