Showing papers in "Studies in History in 2008"

Abstract: The rural world of nineteenth-century Tamil Nadu was highly diversified in terms of land control and ownership. Academic efforts have largely focused on the various claims to ‘privileged’ landownership. This overemphasis on the authority, rights, claims and protests of the ‘privileged’ too often negated the prospects of a serious introspection into the twin issues of agrestic servitude and landlessness. The present article is concerned with one group of rural labourers, who in nineteenthcentury Tamil Nadu were essentially regarded as ‘agrestic serfs’. The Paraiyans were mostly landless labourers and depended for their livelihood on the dominant rural groups. Their existence as a depressed social category, denied of all privileges including landownership, provokes a serious investigation into the operation and mechanism of the institution of mirasi in the Tamil country. The definition of ‘waste’ was mired in terms of complexities emanating from the classification of lands, which were essentially referred to as anadu karambu or gramanattams. These complexities in course of the nineteenth century had fashioned differing sets of opinions within the conservative and reformist sections of the colonial bureaucracy. Such contradictions alongside discussions on the hidden ‘Paraiyan history’ have been explored to understand the broader issues centring around the ‘Sedentary Paraiyan’ as well as the ‘Slave Paraiyan’.

Abstract: The concept of religious debate is encountered even in the pre-Mughal period in India: we hear of special assemblies (mahzar) that held religious discussions but were confined to controversial themes within predominantly the Hanafi school of thought. But such debates were the instruments of the orthodoxy to consolidate their sway over the dissenters. The evidence of these religious assemblies (majlis) under the reign of Akbar is as early as 1570.However, from the testimonies of a critique of Akbar (Badauni), a theologian (Shaikh Nurul Haq) and a known sycophant and courtier (Abul Fazl), it appears that the constitution of the Ibadatkhana and the discussions being held therein were not an extension of the type of religious debates that were held or organized before. It is the argument of this essay that the Ibadatkhana was an instrument of ‘tolerance’ for the imposition of ‘Reason’. Throughout his reign there was a stress on reason (‘aql’), which was to be given precedence over traditionalism (taqlid).This...

Abstract: Archaeologists study craft production as it provides information on the ways in which artifacts were produced. Craft specialization is, however, more complicated as it involves not only techniques but also organization. In contrast to anthropology where observation can reveal the scale of production or the amount of resources or time utilized for the practise of a craft, archaeology can make only tentative interpretations. Scale of production, standardization, and levels of expertise can be understood when certain variables are known. Archaeology is a discipline that understands the past in the context of the present and thus often uses the methods of production and the function of present-day artefacts to interpret ancient artefacts. However, there is also a tendency to use present-day organizational systems to understand past production mechanisms. This may be problematic especially where past systems varied greatly from modern ones. The particular socioeconomic background of past systems must account f...

Abstract: Nineteenth-century British histories of the Indian ‘Mutiny’ have usually been seen as a moment of unequivocal imperial confidence. Little account has been taken of the large number of complex, non-historical texts that memorialized the ‘Mutiny’. Victorian Britain witnessed a wide and varied interest in the representation of events of the past. The representations spanned many genres and continually multiplied in form and medium under the impetus of an expanding commodity culture. Commoditized memorial texts—unlike professional histories—are read by an extremely diverse group of people. The wide dissemination and variety made the texts semantically unstable.By concentrating on non-historical memorial texts of the ‘Mutiny’ and by attending to both their production and consumption, we can discern a far wider set of attitudes towards the ‘Mutiny’. Not only are many of these texts revealed to be ambivalent towards the imperial project, but also indeed they reveal a multiplicity of fissures within Victorian soc...

Abstract: This article deals with the politics of envisioning a vernacular for Assam proper during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through a small, connected history of orthographic contests, grammarians’ debates and print-culture, it tries to understand the various ways in and through which the boundaries of a vernacular were drawn, policed and violated during this period. Rather than narrating the complexities of the question in terms of stable and ever-present languages, this article attempts to show how the metropolis-oriented production of linguistic knowledge came to hypostatize an abstract grid of standard languages within which the mutable, heterogeneous and fluctuating speech practices (and the corresponding scribal culture) of a frontier province had to be definitively mobilized. The article explores the debates regarding the alleged dialectal status of the ‘Assamese’ and traces some connections between spatial sequence, linguistic imagination and proprietorial logic.

Abstract: What Churchill's biographers have written about his life matter because he continues to be deployed by ideological conservatives in the Anglo-Saxon countries as the ideal leader exemplifying decisi...

Abstract: The complexities associated with interactions of various components of environment have not been examined in historical narratives of pre-colonial India. An important consideration for any agrarian society has been the availability of water for irrigation, and in arid and semi-arid regions—with unequal annual distribution of rains and low water table—often saline water is used even for the potable purposes. This article elucidates various systems of water management developed and maintained by the local/individual initiatives as well as those developed by the state at a larger scale for irrigation and potable purposes. It is argued here that the pre-colonial states in Rajasthan had to ensure continuity of habitation by offering concessions and support to protect the revenue base. It was a difficult act of balance in a society where political and social orders were integrated into a single complex web. The article argues that the same complex web endowed the state with an all-pervasive administrative appar...

Abstract: Archaeologists have at times perceived the early medieval to medieval period as marked by a break at the end of the twelfth century, thus separating the period 700–1200 CE—often described as the ‘Rajput’ period—from the period 1200–1500 CE—commonly designated as the ‘Sultanate’ period. It is frequently believed that this break is manifested in the entire range of archaeological materials with clear changes perceived between the two periods. Moreover, there has been a tendency to ascribe particular religious identities to the artefacts of the ‘Rajput’ and ‘Sultanate’ periods. Implicit in such a reading of the material culture are certain assumptions that have been made by archaeologists. One is that a change in political elites will bring about a change in daily practices and, concomitantly, in the artefacts. Another assumption is that certain artefacts indicate a specific religious/ethnic identity and that their use can be attributed only to a particular period. However, while excavating the cuttings at I...

Abstract: When Nabinchandra Sen published his epic poem, Palashir Yuddha, in Calcutta in 1875, a stormerupted in civil society that divided the literary community and disrupted the functioning of the Text Bo...

Abstract: This is a short political profile of P.C. Joshi underlying his relationship with the Communist Party of India (CPI). This article seeks to engage with Joshi and the CPI (in Joshi years) as a political organization, and to understand the reasons for its limited outreach. It also seeks to address the issue of CPI's and Joshi's, in particular, opinion on Gandhian and Nehruvian ideas to attain independence. Chandra argues that Joshi did not accept the notion that in colonial countries nationalism was a bourgeois concept and that this concept clashed with internationalism. Instead he put forth the notion of multiple loyalties to party, people and India. He did not see any clash among these three loyalties either.P.C. Joshi started out with the Workers and Peasants Party holding the position of the General Secretary in 1928 until he joined the CPI formally in 1929. In late 1935 Joshi became the General Secretary of CPI, holding the position for twelve years. Joshi also had a long standing with students and youn...

Abstract: Two important thinkers of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, had completely different perceptions about socio-political reality, and change in society. The thematic focus of their writings mainly centred on Europe, and in the case of Tocqueville also America. But India too interested both of them. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote extensively on India, particularly in the context of the Indian revolt of 1857–58, which attracted world-wide attention. What is less well known is that Alexis de Tocqueville also had a serious political and academic interest in India, or rather English India, of which he made a preliminary study in the 1840s. This appeared in the 1962 edition of his works titled Les Oeuvres Complètes d’Alexis de Tocqueville. Earlier, Tocqueville’s close associate Gustave de Beaumont had published his letters in 1861, in the collection Les Oeuvres et Correspondance Inédites d’ Alexis de Tocqueville. Several of these letters, particularly those he wrote to his English friends in 1857–58, contained elaborate comments and observations on the Indian revolt. His comments were pertinent and insightful because they were made by one who had attempted a serious study of India. On 14 November 1843, Tocqueville wrote to his English friend Henry Reeve that he had spent the entire summer doing an intensive study of India. He informed Reeve that he had examined ‘with an infinite pleasure the important question, from all points of view, about the process of your [English] establishment in India. It has been a long time that I have worked with so much passion and involvement.’ The very next day, on 15 November, he wrote to his friend de Corcelle: