Modern Times: India 1880s-1950s (Environment, Economy, Culture)

476 Pages·2014·8.41 MB·English

by  Sumit Sarkar

SUMIT SARKAR
Modern Times: India
1880s-1950s
~
Environment, Economy, Culture
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Contents
Preface
Glossary
1 IMPERIAL STRUCTURES, POLICIES, AND IDEOLOGIES 1
CONSOLIDATING THE RAJ 2
Imperial Ceremony and Restructuring after 1857 2
Viceregal Attitudes- Liberal Rhetoric, Conservative
Compulsion 5
British Indian Foreign Policy Before Curzon 7
The Army and Military Policy 8
Financial and Administrative Pressures in the
Late Ninereemh Century 10
Local Self-Government, Council Reform, and
Divide-and-Rule 13
KNOWLEDGE AND GOVERNANCE 17
Orientalism, Old and New 17
A Legal Basis for Communalism? Law and the Creation
of Religious Domains 24
Surveying an Empire: The Census and the Constitution
of Social Realities 31
Unmasking Conquest: Education, Print, and the Early
Public Sphere 38
The Missions of Empire-Christianity and the State 45
Western Science, Colonial Practice 53
Contents
Vil!
Racist and Gendered: Facets of the Empire 59
THE PRINCELY STATES 64
Mysore 65
Jammu and Kashmir 65
Manipur 67
Bibliography 69
2 WOODS AND TREES: THE ENVIRONMENT AND
THE ECONOMY 75
Environmental Histories: Origins and Core Issues 77
Regulation and Protection as Appropriation: Forests and
'Wastes' in Late-Colonial India 80
Sedentarization, Property, and Order 88
Seeing the Wood through the Trees: Regional Studies 95
Bibliography 102
3 FIELDWORK: AGRICULTURE AND AGRARIAN HISTORY 106
Agricultural Production 106
Revenue, Rent, and Tenancy 110
Commercialization and Indebtedness 117
Agrarian Structures, Changes, and Continuities 131
The Forms of Labour 140
Famines and their Diagnosis 151
Bibliography 160
4 TRADE, INDUSTRY, AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY
OF EMPIRE 167
OF DRAINS AND TRAINS 168
Drain Inspectors? Ideas on the 'Drain of Wealth' and
Beyond 168
Imperial Steam: The Railways and their
Far-reaching Consequences 178
Indian and European Commerce, Finance, and
Entrepreneurship 186
Contents
IX
Bazaars, Townsmen, Rulers, and Enclaves 186
Noteworthy: Banking and Currency 191
European and Indian Entrepreneurship: Regional
Variations 198
Deindustrialization and the Traditional Industries 205
A Vexed Question: Did Handicrafts Decline? 210
Capital and Labour: Plantations, Mines, and Factories 217
Unedenic Gardens: Tea, Indigo, and Plantation Labour 225
Trouble Underground: Mines and Mine-workers 229
An Old Yarn: Jure Mills and Markets 234
Spinning Stories: Cotton Mills in Western India and
Elsewhere 243
Beyond Blacksmiths: Tron and Steel 259
Labour in the Informal Sector 261
Colonial Economic Policies 264
Demography and the National Income 269
Bibliography 273
5 SOCIETY AND CULTURE 281
The Country, the City, and the New Middle Class 281
Picturing India: The Country and the City 281
The Road to Urban Spaces: Refashioning Colonial Cities 285
Hail Fellow Well Mer: Urban Sociabilities from the Late
Nineteenth Century 301
Forever Rising, Forever New: The Middle Class 310
Languages and Literatures 326
Prinr and rhe Developmenr of Vernacular Languages 327
Literatures, High and Low: Poetry, Novels, Short Stories 345
The Viewless Wings of Poesy: Poetry and Poetic Forms 352
A Various Universe: Prose, Fiction, Stories 356
The Visual and Performing Arts 372
Hybridity and Technological Change: Photography,
Theatre, Painting, and the Early Cinema 372
x Contents
Mechanical Reproductions of Art, 'Real Life', and Sound 374
Photography: Brirish and Indian 380
Play-acting: Theatre and the Movies 383
Music, Dance, and Dance-Drama: Devadasis,
Bhatkhande, Paluskar 398
Picturesque: Paiming and the Fine Arts 406
Kalighat Paintings 409
Gentlemen Artists, Realism, and Ravi Varma 412
The Bengal School-and After 418
The Beginnings of Indian Cinema 428
Bibliography 435
Index 447
Preface
Much has changed in the world of South Asian history-writing
over the last three decades since I wrote a book entitled
Modern India (1983). The passage of thirty years having
rendered that work thoroughly dated, the futility of any attempt to
revise it became increasingly clear to me, especially as over this period
my own historical perspectives took new and unexpected directions.
The present work of synthesis, which is an altogether new attempt to
cover the same period in the light of fresh research and rethinking,
is intended as the first of two companion volumes. In it I offer an
overview of political, material, and cultural processes, and of imperial
administrative institutions from the mid nineteenth century to the
mid twentieth. In its subsequent companion I intend providing a
chronological narrative about the political developments of that
period: anti-colonial nationalisms, peasant and adivasi movements,
developments and problems in India's north-east, labour and Left-wing
struggles, caste organizations and Dalit protests, women's activism and
the politics of right-wing formations-all of these within, outside, or
opposed to the framework of mainstream nationalism even as I look
at the formation of regional identities and movements.
The present work begins with a study of imperial institutions
and policies. Unlike the majority of post-colonial histories, I do not
see the colonial state as an unchanging monolith with innate ten
dencies. I focus, instead, on shifts, contradictions, and movements
across time, and on variations in state practices across space. This
perspective is developed, however, within a framework that recognizes
overarching colonial domination and exploitation. Contrary, again,
Preface
Xll
co much post-colonial writing, I attend carefully to the specifically
colonial experiences of the imperial state within India rather than
derive its activities from Western discourses about the Orient. That
allows greater scope to specific and contingent historical events and
conjunctures.
Environmental histories have emerged as an exceptionally rich area
of recent research and the second chapter has benefited enormously
from them. In it I look closely ar patterns of rribal life and peasant
cultivation: not as static entities always distinct from each other, bur
as shifting and inrerpenetrating processes. Scientific discourses, laws,
and the administration of forests were a major source of tensions and
protests among peasants and adivasis, and I study them in some detail.
I also look at irrigation and river-control projects, and at the conflicts
over land use and land rights that they repeatedly stimulated.
The third chapter deals with changing patterns of agricultural
practices and agrarian relations that unfolded as the aftermath to
colonial revenue policies. I elaborate the links between these and pro
cesses of commercialization, rural indebtedness, and endemic famine.
I focus closely on the changing countryside, tracing the new agrarian
tensions and conflicts that were provoked. While I look at strug
gles against state policies I also attend closely to internal contradictions
and tensions, and to relationships of domination and exploitation
among agrarian castes and classes.
I then pass on to issues of trade, finance, and industry to outline
the specific forms of emergent capitalism in India. Shifting rela
tionships between European and Indian entrepreneurial groups are
analysed as I try to identify and explain regional variations within
the broad pattern. I also look at Indian and imperial debates around
deindustrialization, as well as financial drain through the mechanism
of trade: these came to constitute major themes in the developing
nationalist critiques of colonial policies. The growth of modern
sectors of so-called free and unfree labour in plantations, mines, and
factories is another focus of close attention. I indicate some of rhe
major tendencies within labour conflicts in these areas, though this
is a theme developed in greater detail in the ensuing companion to
the present book.
In the final chapter, the formation of modern cities, in all their