The Government of Social Life in Colonial India

The Government of Social Life in Colonial India
Author: Rachel Sturman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2012-06-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107378567

From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyses the system of personal law in colonial India through a re-examination of women's rights. Focusing on Hindu law in western India, it challenges existing scholarship, showing how - far from being a system based on traditional values - Hindu law was developed around ideas of liberalism, and that this framework encouraged questions about equality, women's rights, the significance of bodily difference, and more broadly the relationship between state and society. Rich in archival sources, wide-ranging and theoretically informed, this book illuminates how personal law came to function as an organising principle of colonial governance and of nationalist political imaginations.

The Government of Social Life in Colonial India

The Government of Social Life in Colonial India
Author: Rachel Sturman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2012-06-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107010373

This book analyses religious law in colonial India, exploring how it encouraged gender equality and a rethinking of the relationship between state and society.

Social History of Science in Colonial India

Social History of Science in Colonial India
Author: S. Irfan Habib
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN:

Can science be seen as the flag bearer of the 'civilizing mission' dispelling the darkness of centuries of superstition? Did the installation of new technological systems displace ancient primitive techniques? Rejecting the simplistic notion of transmission of science and technology, this reader argues for a variety of perspectives. Part of the prestigious Themes in Indian History series, it provides an excellent introduction to the world of science and technology in colonial India. Departing from the standard practice of seeing science as a cultural universal, Social History of Science emphasizes the need for redrawing boundaries long taken for granted. It investigates how modern science - considered as a pristine Western cultural import - was reconstituted in the encounter with other ways of knowing and acting on the world. Bringing together some of the finest writings - even rare - on the subject, this volume highlights the multiplicity of historiogaphic positions on colonial science and the changing landscapes for the study of science in South Asia. The contributors approach issues related to science and colonialism from a variety of scientific disciplines. They engage with the drift produced by the entanglement of science and values and the complicity of the scientific project in that of imperialism.

Administering Colonialism and War

Administering Colonialism and War
Author: Colin R. Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2019-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199096945

Colonialism is a dehumanizing experience for all those at the mercy of its power structures. The officers of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) were no exception. This book focuses on the role of ICS in World War II and engages in a wider debate about colonialism’s impact on its administrators and subjects. The author looks at the events of World War II specifically in the province of Assam in India’s North-East. It is here that the British and American troops were stationed as they attempted to retake Burma following Japan’s invasion in 1942 and supply the Allied Chinese by road and air. The volume also focuses on how radio broadcasting was used to manufacture the Indian public’s consent for the war effort and explores the horrors of the Bengal Famine and the controversies surrounding the British responses to it. The central character in the book’s narrative is Sir Andrew Clow who was a career civil servant in India. He was the Minister for Communications during the late 1930s and early 1940s before he became the Governor of Assam in 1942. The book is partly a biography of his fascinating career.

Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India

Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India
Author:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2019-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108656269

This book tells a story of radical educational change. In the early nineteenth century, an imperial civil society movement promoted modern elementary 'schools for all'. This movement included British, American and German missionaries, and Indian intellectuals and social reformers. They organised themselves in non-governmental organisations, which aimed to change Indian education. Firstly, they introduced a new culture of schooling, centred on memorisation, examination, and technocratic management. Secondly, they laid the ground for the building of the colonial system of education, which substituted indigenous education. Thirdly, they broadened the social accessibility of schooling. However, for the nineteenth century reformers, education for all did not mean equal education for all: elementary schooling became a means to teach different subalterns 'their place' in colonial society. Finally, the educational movement also furthered the building of a secular 'national education' in England.

The British in India

The British in India
Author: David Gilmour
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2018-11-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374116857

An immersive portrait of the lives of the British in India, from the seventeenth century to Independence Who of the British went to India, and why? We know about Kipling and Forster, Orwell and Scott, but what of the youthful forestry official, the enterprising boxwallah, the fervid missionary? What motivated them to travel halfway around the globe, what lives did they lead when they got there, and what did they think about it all? Full of spirited, illuminating anecdotes drawn from long-forgotten memoirs, correspondence, and government documents, The British in India weaves a rich tapestry of the everyday experiences of the Britons who found themselves in “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. David Gilmour captures the substance and texture of their work, home, and social lives, and illustrates how these transformed across the several centuries of British presence and rule in the subcontinent, from the East India Company’s first trading station in 1615 to the twilight of the Raj and Partition and Independence in 1947. He takes us through remote hill stations, bustling coastal ports, opulent palaces, regimented cantonments, and dense jungles, revealing the country as seen through British eyes, and wittily reveling in all the particular concerns and contradictions that were a consequence of that limited perspective. The British in India is a breathtaking accomplishment, a vivid and balanced history written with brio, elegance, and erudition.

Sex and the Family in Colonial India

Sex and the Family in Colonial India
Author: Durba Ghosh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2006-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521857048

Study of conjugal relationships between Indian women and British men in colonial India.

Colonial Terror

Colonial Terror
Author: Deana Heath
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192646168

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

Culture, Ideology, Hegemony

Culture, Ideology, Hegemony
Author: K. N. Panikkar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN:

This Work Is An Attempt To Understand And Explain How Indians Under Colonial Subjugation, Came To Terms With Their Past And Present, And Thus Envisioned A Future For Their Society. It Covers A Wide Range Of Issues, Moving From An Overview Of Religious And Social Ideas In Colonial India To More Empirical Studies Of Themes Like Indigenous Medicine, Family And Literary Fiction.

The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India

The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India
Author: Haruki Inagaki
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-10-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9783030736651

This book takes a closer look at colonial despotism in early nineteenth-century India and argues that it resulted from Indians’ forum shopping, the legal practice which resulted in jurisdictional jockeying between an executive, the East India Company, and a judiciary, the King’s Court. Focusing on the collisions that took place in Bombay during the 1820s, the book analyses how Indians of various descriptions—peasants, revenue defaulters, government employees, merchants, chiefs, and princes—used the court to challenge the government (and vice versa) and demonstrates the mechanism through which the lawcourt hindered the government’s indirect rule, which relied on local Indian rulers in newly conquered territories. The author concludes that existing political anxiety justified the East India Company’s attempt to curtail the power of the court and strengthen their own power to intervene in emergencies through the renewal of the company’s charter in 1834. An insightful read for those researching Indian history and judicial politics, this book engages with an understudied period of British rule in India, where the royal courts emerged as sites of conflict between the East India Company and a variety of Indian powers.