Colonial India (colonial + india)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


,The Bombay Debt': Letter Writing, Domestic Economies and Family Conflict in Colonial India

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 2 2004
Erika Rappaport
Between 1856 and 1861 Minnie Blane and her husband, Captain Archibald Wood, wrote dozens of letters from India to the Minnie's mother in England. These letters and those associated with a military investigation into the couple's relationship in the 1860s detail the connections between the breakdown of the East India Company's rule in India and Minnie Blane's marriage. In particular, this correspondence shows some of the ways in which bourgeois identities were constructed in relationship to money and objects, place and race. It also exposes the fissures between family members, allowing us to see the gender, generational and cultural conflicts within such imperial families. The article raises concerns about the ways in which personal letters have been used as documents in the study of European women's imperial history. [source]


Debates on Domesticity and the Position of Women in Late Colonial India

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2010
Swapna M. Banerjee
Tracing the genealogy of domesticity from India's precolonial past, this essay problematizes the recent emphasis on the link between women and domesticity in late colonial India. Based on a review of the growing literature in the field, it considers the newly evolved notions of colonial domesticity as a moment of [re]consideration rather than a break with the past. The discursive formation of the new ideas of domesticity under colonial regime transcended the private-public and often national boundaries, indicating an overlap where the most intimate details of the ,private', personal life were not only discussed and debated for public consumption but were also articulated in response to imperial and international concerns. This paper argues that domesticity as a new cultural logic became the motor of change for both the British and the colonized subjects and it particularly empowered women by giving them agency in the late colonial period. In conclusion, this paper signals the importance of children, childhood, fatherhood, and masculinity as critical components of domesticity, which are yet to be broached by South Asian historians. [source]


Education for All: Reassessing the Historiography of Education in Colonial India

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2009
Catriona Ellis
This essay won the 2007 History Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Asia Section. Despite the extensive literature on the history of education in colonial India, historians have confined their arguments to very narrow themes linked to colonial epistemological dominance and education as a means of control, resistance and dialogue. These tend to mirror the debates of the colonial period, particularly regarding the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. This article argues that such an approach is both gendered and hierarchical, and seeks to fundamentally redress the balance. It looks firstly at formal school education , colonial and indigenous , in both philosophical and technological terms. It then turns to education as experienced by the majority of Indian children outwith the classroom, either formally or within the domestic sphere. The article then looks at the neglected recipients of education, and seeks to re-establish children as agents within these adult-driven agendas. By considering educational discourse and practice, and the emerging historiography of Indian childhood and children, we can begin to establish a more rounded and inclusive picture of what education really meant. [source]


Agriculture and ,Improvement' in Early Colonial India: A Pre-History of Development

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 4 2005
DAVID ARNOLD
The doctrine of ,improvement' has often been identified with the introduction , and presumed failure , of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal in 1793. Although recognized as central to British agrarian policies in India, its wider impact and significance have been insufficiently explored. Aesthetic taste, moral judgement and botanical enthusiasm combined with more strictly economic criteria to give an authority to the idea of improvement that endured into the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Concern for improvement also reflected dissatisfaction with India's apparent poverty and deficient material environment; it helped stimulate data-collection and ambitious schemes of agrarian transformation. A precursor of later concepts of development, not least in its negative presumptions about India and the search for external agencies of change, improvement yet shows many of the false starts and intrinsic limitations early attempts to transform rural India entailed. This article reassesses the significance of improvement in the first half of the nineteenth century in India, especially as illustrated through contemporary travel literature and through the aims and activities of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India. [source]


The New Cambridge History of India III.5: Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India, by David Arnold.

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, Issue 8 2000
2000., 40.00 h/bk, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.234.
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India , By William Gould

ASIAN POLITICS AND POLICY, Issue 1 2009
Yamini Vasudevan
[source]


Authority, accountability and representation: the United Provinces police and the dilemmas of the colonial policeman in British India, 1902,39*

HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 192 2003
David A. Campion
This article examines police administration and the experience of colonial policing in the villages and towns of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, one of the largest and most important regions of British India in the early twentieth century. During this time it was the inefficiency and weakness of the British in their policing methods, rather than the brutally effective use of the Indian Police Service, that fuelled resentment among the population of colonial India and led to widespread discontent among European and Indian officers and constables. Yet throughout this period, the police remained the most important link between Europeans and Indians, and were a frequent conduit for social exchange as well as a point of bitter conflict. [source]


Debates on Domesticity and the Position of Women in Late Colonial India

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2010
Swapna M. Banerjee
Tracing the genealogy of domesticity from India's precolonial past, this essay problematizes the recent emphasis on the link between women and domesticity in late colonial India. Based on a review of the growing literature in the field, it considers the newly evolved notions of colonial domesticity as a moment of [re]consideration rather than a break with the past. The discursive formation of the new ideas of domesticity under colonial regime transcended the private-public and often national boundaries, indicating an overlap where the most intimate details of the ,private', personal life were not only discussed and debated for public consumption but were also articulated in response to imperial and international concerns. This paper argues that domesticity as a new cultural logic became the motor of change for both the British and the colonized subjects and it particularly empowered women by giving them agency in the late colonial period. In conclusion, this paper signals the importance of children, childhood, fatherhood, and masculinity as critical components of domesticity, which are yet to be broached by South Asian historians. [source]


Education for All: Reassessing the Historiography of Education in Colonial India

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2009
Catriona Ellis
This essay won the 2007 History Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Asia Section. Despite the extensive literature on the history of education in colonial India, historians have confined their arguments to very narrow themes linked to colonial epistemological dominance and education as a means of control, resistance and dialogue. These tend to mirror the debates of the colonial period, particularly regarding the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. This article argues that such an approach is both gendered and hierarchical, and seeks to fundamentally redress the balance. It looks firstly at formal school education , colonial and indigenous , in both philosophical and technological terms. It then turns to education as experienced by the majority of Indian children outwith the classroom, either formally or within the domestic sphere. The article then looks at the neglected recipients of education, and seeks to re-establish children as agents within these adult-driven agendas. By considering educational discourse and practice, and the emerging historiography of Indian childhood and children, we can begin to establish a more rounded and inclusive picture of what education really meant. [source]


The Desired ,One': Thinking the Woman in the Nation

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2007
Anirban Das
A review of the secondary literature on the way nationalist thought in colonial India conceived ,woman' shows three broad strands. One is the perspective of the history of art, which studies the genealogy of the iconic symbolisation of women. The remaining stands have similar objects of knowledge (the nationalist representation of women in terms of the debi) but differ in their foci of attention. The first is concerned with the (role of the) woman in nationalist thought and how ,real' women had responded to that construction. The other focuses on the processes of nation building in the colony to reach its gendered aspects. We finally make a case for a synthesis of these through a few instances. [source]


Between Objectivity and Illusion: Architectural Photography in the Colonial Frame

JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION, Issue 1 2001
Vikramaditya Prakash
In this paper, I compare the use of photography by Sawai Ram Singh, the maharaja of the Princely State of Jaipur in colonial India, and by James Fergusson, the earliest historiographer of Indian architecture. Contrasting the "objective" use of photography by the colonist, with the maharaja's hybridized and illusionistic images, I argue that photography, on the one hand, helped fix "India" into stereotypical brackets, but on the other enabled the colonized to re-invent himself in more contemporary and potentially threatening ways. Foreshadowing the contadictory nature of postcolonial modernity, photography, in other words, enabled the maharaja to simultaneously resist the hegemonic interests of the colonizer while coveting and appropriating the instruments and signs of the West to his own ends. [source]


Flourishing branches, wilting core: research in modern Indian economic history

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 3 2004
Tirthankar Roy
The core theme in modern Indian economic history until recently was economic growth in colonial India and models explaining stylised facts about growth or stagnation. From the 1980s, research moved away from the general toward more specific and local issues, a trend that has allowed new questions to be asked, has approached other fields and introduced a healthy scepticism for overarching models. But it also made macro-questions somewhat outdated, thereby weakening the link between history and models of economic growth and development. This essay reviews scholarship on new themes and asks how problems of economic growth can be motivated anew. [source]