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Book ChapterDOI

The Rise of Modern Industry in Colonial India

20 Aug 2015-pp 67-83
About: The article was published on 2015-08-20. It has received 10 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Colonialism.
Citations
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Dissertation
01 Apr 2017
TL;DR: In this paper, a study of post-coloncolonisation Indian novels is presented, where authors adopt the realist form to represent the historical aspects and traumatising consequences of the events and their realisms undergo immense stylistic improvisation.
Abstract: This thesis attempts to understand, through a study of postcolonial Indian novels, the nature and character of Indian (post)colonial modernity. Modernity is understood as the social condition that (post)colonial modernisation and development have given rise to. This condition underlies a historical crisis which is manifest in various kinds of catastrophic events – famine, peasant insurgency, caste violence, communal riot, state repression, and so on. By analysing three of these historical events – the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1972), and the State of Emergency (1975-1977) – this thesis argues that a careful reading of the dialectic between event and crisis can offer crucial insights into the conditions of postcolonial modernity. It claims that novels that register these events are able to capture the event-crisis dialectic through their use of form and mode. Socially committed writers adopt the realist form to represent the historical aspects and traumatising consequences of the events. However, because the nature, form, and orientation of these events are different, their realisms undergo immense stylistic improvisation. These stylistic shifts are shaped primarily by the writers’ adapting of various literary modes to the specific requirements (i.e. the historical context). Modes are chosen to represent and historicise the specific character and appearance of an event. In order to represent the Bengal famine, the thesis argues, Bhabani Bhattacharya and Amalendu Chakraborty use analytical-affective and metafictional modes, while Mahasweta Devi and Nabarun Bhattacharya deploy quest and urban fantastic modes to register the Naxalbari Movement and its aftermath. For the Emergency, writers such as Salman Rushdie, O. V. Vijayan, and Arun Joshi use magical, grotesque and mythical modes, and Nayantara Sahgal and Rohinton Mistry employ critical realist modes, defined sharply by the writers’ class- and caste-based perspectives. These modes shape the realisms in the respective texts and transform realist literary form into a highly experimental and heterogeneous matter. Contrary to the prevailing academic belief that modernity breeds modernism, the thesis posits that, in the postcolonial Indian context, the conditions of modernity have provoked a historically conscious, experimental, and modernistic form of ‘crisis realism’.

30 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a novel income tax data set to present evidence on the evolution of income concentration in the last 60 years of colonial rule in India and identified three key facts: (1) the evolution in British India was nonlinear, following a U-shape, (2) the majority of top income earners were non-Europeans, and (3) the geographical location of top incomes earners changed over time with the province of Bombay gaining in importance in the early XXth century.

14 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines one of the earliest Gujarati travelogues concerning China, written by Damodar Ishwardas, and published in 1868 in Bombay, India, based on a three-year trip to the port cities of southern China.
Abstract: This article examines one of the earliest Gujarati travelogues concerning China, written by Damodar Ishwardas—a Hindu resident of Bombay and a clerk for a Sunni Khoja commercial firm—and published in Bombay in 1868. Based on a three-year trip to the port cities of southern China, Ishwardas's text runs close to 400 pages and was patronized by a prominent stratum of Bombay's Gujarati-speaking commercial and bureaucratic elite. The primary intervention in this article is to analyze Ishwardas's account as a neglected relic of vernacular capitalism and vernacular intellectual history. Furthermore, the text presents an opportunity to reexamine the history of the Indian intellectual and mercantile engagement with late Qing China, especially before anticolonial nationalism and pan-Asianism supplied new paradigms for Indian writing on East Asia beginning around 1900. It further points to the many unstudied Indian materials that have yet to be integrated into the study of modern capitalism in the regions from the South China Sea to the western Indian Ocean.

8 citations


Cites background from "The Rise of Modern Industry in Colo..."

  • ...As Bishnupriya Gupta (2015, 73–74) has argued, while informational asymmetry in colonial India accorded select social groups a distinct edge, it also “segregated trade and industrial investment.”...

    [...]

  • ...…have stressed, Indian firms found the acquisition of information (especially about the export trade) far more costly than their British counterparts (Gupta 2015, 72; Morris 1983, 557), and the China trade perhaps presented an even more marked contrast from prevailing discrepancies in South Asia....

    [...]

  • ...In A New Economic History of Colonial India, edited by Latika Chaudhary, Tirthankar Roy, Bishnupriya Gupta, and Anand V. Swamy, 67–83....

    [...]

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2020
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that a condition of relation through difference can be better understood via a reading of form and mode of the novels of the catastrophic events of India's late-colonial and post-colonial periods.
Abstract: British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and industry. These programmes resulted in a long-term agrarian and food crisis which then led to a number of catastrophic events in the long twentieth century. The present book is about three such events from India’s late-colonial and postcolonial periods—the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the 1967–1972 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975–1977 national emergency. It argues that these events are all linked with the historical crisis and yet distinct in their nature and orientation. The chapter contends that such a condition of relation through difference can be better understood via a reading of form and mode of the novels of these events. It shows that writers have predominantly used the realist form to represent the long-term historical crisis, while they have employed a range of modes—from social realist, critical realist to metafictional, urban fantastic, gothic, and others (many of which are conventionally understood as anti-realist or non-realist). These modes have shaped their realisms into a deeply heterogeneous and dynamic form, and, in so doing, composed the aesthetic framework of catastrophe-prone, crisis-ridden condition of life and living in postcolonial India, which is called here as “catastrophic realism.” The chapter situates the link between crisis and event by drawing upon the works of Fredric Jameson, Veena Das, Shahid Amin, and Louis Althusser. Its take on catastrophic realism is mediated through a thorough reading of realism, form, and mode in the European and postcolonial/Indian contexts, where Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s pre- and post-partition stories are offered as examples.

8 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors show that the railroad network increased city size in the period 1881 to 1931, and they construct instrumental variables for railroad proximity based on distance from a least cost path spanning cities that existed prior to the start of railroad construction.

6 citations

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