Showing papers in "Studies in History in 1995"

'Restoring the Family': Wife Murders and the Making of a Sexual Contract for Indian Immigrant Labour in the British Caribbean Colonies, 1860-1920:

Abstract: Acknowledgement: I am thankful to Madhavan K. Palat for suggesting to me the importance of the theme. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Program in Agrarian Studies colloquium at Yale University and at a seminar at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. I am grateful to the participants of these seminars for their useful comments. Thanks are due to Catherine Le Grand and Ricardo Salvatore for their incisive comments

Indian Warfare and Afghan Innovation During the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: In 1757 the English East India Company took its first step towards empire. At Plassey the highly professional European army under Colonel Robert Clive defeated the larger Indian forces under the reigning Bengal Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah. The Company’s victory was partly the result of its more advanced firepower and discipline, partly of its superior skill in diplomacy. Before the advent of the battle the British had successfully seduced the backbone of the army into revolt against the Nawab. Hence, at the time of battle the great body of the Indian army stood aloof watching while the remainder was butchered by the controlled salvoes of the British sepoys. Yet the best troops of the Nawab were not at all present at the battle scene. They were deployed on the Bihar frontier to meet a possible attack of the Afghan invader Abmad Shah Durrani (1747-1773) who had sacked Delhi, Agra and Mathura and had proclaimed himself emperor and shahanshah of India. Apparently, Siraj ud-Daulah considered the Afghan threat more dangerous than the British one and it is only with the benefit of hindsight that we may judge him wrong.’ 1

Orientalism, Genealogy and the Writing of History: The Idea of Resistance to Silk Filature in Eighteenth Century Bengal

Abstract: Acknowledgement: The research for this article was funded by the UGC. I am indebted to Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, B.B. Chowdhury, Gautam Bhadra, Anne Hardgrove and Anup K. Sinha for their comments and suggestions. I am grateful to Sabyasachi Bhattacharya for his encouragement to publish this paper. The responsibility for the errors and inaccurracies is mine. Genealogy is grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times .... Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the mole like perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies .... History has a more important task than to be a handmaiden of philosophy, to recount the necessary birth of truth and values; it should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes. Its task is to become a curative science.

The Bombay Marine: Aspects of Maritime History 1650-1850

Abstract: Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Majid Siddiqi, Satish Saberwal, Sumit Guha and the anonymous referee for their comments on earlier drafts. I also acknowledge Anu’s personal support. All archival sources cited here are located in the National Archives of India, New Delhi. In 1877 Charles Rawthone Low, a retired officer of the East India Company’s navy, published a two volume ’connected narrative’ of the Indian Navy’s past to ’disentomb’ an ’eventful career’. This Victorian panegyric celebrating the activities of the Company’s naval officers is part of a genre best known in India by a collection of regimental histories of the Indian Army. But Low’s complaint against a dominant historiography which ignored the ’little wars’ of history was also the cry of an officer lamenting the passing away of a favourite service. However, Low’s exhaustive volumes make more than a point. Later James Douglas, another Bombay man,

German Missionaries as Research Workers in India: Their Diaries as Historical Sources (Benjamin Schultze [1689-1760]—Exception or Norm?):

Abstract: on this basis. As for the history of south India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is voluminous source material in various languages, because people from Denmark, Netherlands, Great Britain, Portugal and France had been here for a long time. Before the historian can even use the source material in different languages, he first has to find these, mostly long forgotten, documents. Among these the manuscripts and books of the Danish-Halle Mission in south India, not only useful for studies on the history of Christian missions, but also of special interest to scholars working on south Indian history, culture or religion and for scholars working on German history or on the history of Danish-German relations. Manuscripts and early printed books of the time of the Danish-Halle Mission in south India (Tranquebar) mostly lie in the Archives and Library of the so-called Francke-Foundations in Halle. Some are in the University and State Library in Halle, others in the Mission Library at the Protestant Lutheran Mission in Leipzig, and also the Library at the Ecumenical Missionary Centre in Berlin’. The connections between the Francke-Foundations and the Protestant mission in south India lasted more than a century. A product of a rich and systematized collection of travel books, diaries, descriptions of the lives of

Agrarian Bengal, 1850-1947: Issues and Problems:

Abstract: Official discussions of conditions in rural Bengal’ in the later decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century tended to paint a picture of prosperity, especially in the ecologically favoured eastern lands of the province. The Famine Commission of 1880, while taking a generally pessimistic view of the future in many parts of India, nonetheless felt assured that eastern Bengal could be regarded as exempt from famines caused by crop failure.2 More stringent critics of the Government of India, such as R.C. Dutt, agreed with this prognosis, and explained it in terms of low rents and a prosperity that extended to the lower classes of the rural

History of a Subject or the Subjects of a History? (Or: Is a Labour History Possible?):

Abstract: unique to their respective contexts. Two factors stand out in particular: the enduring and powerful influence of ethnic identities, and the importance of im/migration in the development of the urban cultures. In neither the Indian nor US case (and there are no doubt many others) has class been a basis for collective action and popular identifications as in England or Western Europe, hitherto the conventional benchmarks for labour historians.

From Orality to Literacy: The Case of the Tamil Society:

Abstract: Author’s Note: Paper presented at the Seminar on Literacy and Communication in Indian Tradition organised by the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 9-11 March 1994. Acknowledgements: This research has been carried out by me as a National Fellow, Indian Council of Historical Research, as part of my larger project on Early Tamil Palaeography. I am indebted to Prof. R. Narasimhan for having suggested this topic for me to work on. I have greatly benefited from the many sessions of long discussions with him. I am grateful

Caste Conflict in South India in Early Colonial Port Cities—1650-1800

Abstract: A unique feature of the social history of south India was the polarization of society into two vertically divided caste groups or sodalities, more commonly referred to as the ’right hand’ and ’left hand’ (valangai and i4a?igai in Tamil) castes. In pre-modern times, social relations and conflicts were defined and articulated through this division of society, which provided a social base very different from the more usual base of caste and class relations. By the seventeenth century, the divide had become accentuated into a sharp antagonism, fed by almost continuous conflict between the two sides to defend their relative social positions and status. These, in their perception, were located both in a symbolic, abstract social space, as well as in the physical space of human settlements where each side lived in and controlled demarcated, segregated areas.’ Both the historical origins of this division, and its virtual disappearance remain unexplained and shrouded in mystery. Reconstructions of this nearly forgotten form of social organization bring out its highly complex nature. Difficulties arise in trying to reduce the system to some understandable, orderly and uniform categorization when,