Archiving the British Raj

Archiving the British Raj
Author: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019
Genre: Archives
ISBN: 9780199095599

'Archiving the British Raj' analyses the institutional history of modern archival policy in India. It tells us the history of the colonial archive itself through the debates and discussions about its nature, use, and functioning that took place first amongst British officials and scholars and, nearer independence, amongst Indian historians. This account counters an understanding of the archive as a mere repository of documents, and instead lays bare its complex relationship with the colonial state.

Archiving the British Raj

Archiving the British Raj
Author: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2018-10-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199095582

The archives are generally sites where historians conduct research into our past. Seldom are they objects of research. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya traces the path that led to the creation of a central archive in India, from the setting up of the Imperial Record Department, the precursor of the National Archives of India, and the Indian Historical Records Commission, to the framing of archival policies and the change in those policies over the years. In the last two decades of colonial rule in India, there were anticipations of freedom in many areas of the public sphere. These were felt in the domain of archiving as well, chiefly in the form of reversal of earlier policies. From this perspective, Bhattacharya explores the relation between knowledge and power and discusses how the World Wars and the decline of Britain, among other factors, effected a transition from a Eurocentric and disparaging approach to India towards a more liberal and less ethnocentric one.

Reading the East India Company 1720-1840

Reading the East India Company 1720-1840
Author: Betty Joseph
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2004-01-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226412032

In Reading the East India Company, Betty Joseph offers an innovative account of how archives—and the practice of archiving—shaped colonial ideologies in Britain and British-controlled India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the British East India Company's records as well as novels, memoirs, portraiture and guidebooks, Joseph shows how the company's economic and archival practices intersected to produce colonial "fictions" or "truth-effects" that strictly governed class and gender roles—in effect creating a "grammar of power" that kept the far-flung empire intact. And while women were often excluded from this archive, Joseph finds that we can still hear their voices at certain key historical junctures. Attending to these voices, Joseph illustrates how the writing of history belongs not only to the colonial project set forth by British men, but also to the agendas and mechanisms of agency—of colonized Indian, as well as European women. In the process, she makes a valuable and lasting contribution to gender studies, postcolonial theory, and the history of South Asia.

The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire

The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire
Author: Jill C. Bender
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-02-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781316501085

Situating the 1857 Indian uprising within an imperial context, Jill C. Bender traces its ramifications across the four different colonial sites of Ireland, New Zealand, Jamaica, and southern Africa. Bender argues that the 1857 uprising shaped colonial Britons' perceptions of their own empire, revealing the possibilities of an integrated empire that could provide the resources to generate and 'justify' British power. In response to the uprising, Britons throughout the Empire debated colonial responsibility, methods of counter-insurrection, military recruiting practices, and colonial governance. Even after the rebellion had been suppressed, the violence of 1857 continued to have a lasting effect. The fears generated by the uprising transformed how the British understood their relationship with the 'colonized' and shaped their own expectations of themselves as 'colonizer'. Placing the 1857 Indian uprising within an imperial context reminds us that British power was neither natural nor inevitable, but had to be constructed.

Talking Back

Talking Back
Author: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2011-08-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199088586

British histories in the nineteenth century were by and large monologues. From the turn of the century Indians began to 'talk back', questioning colonial assumptions and narratives of India's past. What was the point of this endeavour? What was said when the Indians began to talk back? What was the discourse of civilization all about? Sabyasachi Bhattacharya explores these questions and lays bare the various forms this rhetoric took: from the defence of Indian civilization to a tendency towards vainglorious depiction of 'Hindu civilization'; from asserting civilizational unity in the distant past to creating a surrogate for nationhood. Tracing the inception of this discourse in the works of R.G. Bhandarkar and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, this book explores the evolution of the idea of civilization in the writings of luminaries like Gandhi, Tagore, Vivekananda, and Nehru, as well as works of intellectuals, historians, linguists, and sociologists like M.G. Ranade, V.K. Rajwade, D.D. Kosambi, Sardar K.M. Panikkar, Nirmal Kumar Bose, and many present-day scholars.

The British Raj

The British Raj
Author: Denis Judd
Publisher: Hodder Wayland
Total Pages: 128
Release: 1972
Genre: British
ISBN: 9780853401834

Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience

Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience
Author: Chandrika Kaul
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2014-07-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1137445963

Presenting a communicational perspective on the British empire in India during the 20th century, the book seeks to examine how, and explain why, British proconsuls, civil servants and even the monarch George V, as well as Indian nationalists, interacted with the media, primarily British and American, and with what consequences.

Islam and Britain

Islam and Britain
Author: Ron Geaves
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2017-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 147427174X

Based on hitherto untapped source materials, this book charts the history of Muslim missionary activity in London from 1912, when the first Indian Muslim missionaries arrived in London, until 1944. During this period a unique community was forged out of British converts and native Muslims from various parts of the world, which focused itself around a purpose built mosque in Woking and later the first mosque to open in London in 1924. Arguing that an understanding of Muslim mission in this period needs to place such activity in the context of colonial encounter, Islam and Britain provides a background narrative into why Muslim missionary activity in London was part of a variety of strategies to engage with European expansion and overzealous Christian missionary activity in India. Ron Geaves draws on research undertaken in India and Pakistan, where the Ahmadiya missionaries have kept extensive archives of this period which until now have been unavailable to scholars. Unique in providing an account of Islamic missionary work in Britain from the Islamic perspective, Islam and Britain adds to our knowledge and understanding of British Muslim history and makes an important contribution to the literature concerned with Islamic missiology.

Afterlife of Empire

Afterlife of Empire
Author: Jordanna Bailkin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2012-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520289471

This book investigates how decolonization transformed British society in the 1950s and 1960s, and examines the relationship between the postwar and the postimperial.