Draft:Original research/Colonial India

"The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism— colonialist elitism [from the time of colonial India] and bourgeois-nationalist elitism.1"

"Both originated as the ideological product of British rule in India, but have survived the transfer of power and been assimilated to neo-colonialist and neo-nationalist forms of discourse in Britain and India respectively."

Colonialism
Def.
 * 1) a "settlement of emigrants who move to a new place, but remain culturally tied to their original place of origin",
 * 2) a region "or governmental unit created by another country and generally ruled by another country", or
 * 3) a "group of people with the same interests or ethnic origin concentrated in a particular geographic area"

is called a colony.

Def. a "colonial domination policy" or a "colonial system" is called colonialism.

Castes
"[C]olonialism in India produced new forms of civil society which have been represented as traditional forms; chief among these is caste itself (1987)."

"Caste continues to be the central social fact for South Asia and social history remains implicated in many of the same theoretical and methodological problematics as anthropology. The regnant importance of scholars such as Dumont (1980) and Heesterman (1985) suggests that the ghost of colonial sociology still haunts us; anthropologists still write about the need for a sociology of India and historians still borrow what they need to know about Indian society from Weber and Dumont before proceeding to do social history. Anthropologists of India have themselves remained so firmly wedded to a Dumontian position (even in dissent) that India has become marginalized as the land of caste."

"Dumont's general views, and the fact that Dumont has occupied a hegemonic position in the field of Indian anthropology, reveal important aspects of the implication of comparative sociology in colonial structures and legacies. Weber, Marx, Maine, and now Dumont have all held that in India, in marked contrast to China, the state was epiphenomenal. Instead, caste, not the state, was what held society - - with its constituent village republics and communities--together. In a more general sense, caste is seen as the foundation and core of Indian civilization; it is responsible for the transmission and reproduction of society in India. And caste, like India itself, has been seen as based on religious rather than political principles."

Until "the emergence of British colonial rule in southern India the crown was not so hollow as it has generally been made out to be in Indian history, anthropology, and comparative sociology in general. Kings were not inferior to Brahmans; the political domain was not encompassed by a religious domain. State forms, while not fully assimilable to western categories of the state, were powerful components in Indian civilization. Indian society, indeed caste itself, was shaped by political struggles and processes."

"I stressed the political both to redress the previous emphasis on "religion" and to underscore the social fact that caste structure, ritual form, and political process were all dependent on relations of power. These relations were constituted in and through history; and these relations were culturally constructed. But most recently this cultural construction took place in the context of British colonial rule, in which caste was constructed as the religious basis of Indian society, a cultural form that became viewed as a specifically Indian form of civil society."

"Paradoxically, colonialism seems to have created much of what is now accepted as Indian "tradition," including an autonomous caste structure with the Brahman clearly and unambiguously at the head, village based systems of exchange, isolated ceremonial residues of the old regime state, and fetishistic competition for ritual goods that no longer played a vital role in the political system."

"It was not merely convenient for the British to detach caste from politics; it was necessary for them to do so in order to rule an immensely complex society by a variety of indirect means. But caste--now disembodied from its former political contexts--lived on. In this dissociated form it was appropriated, and reconstructed, by the British. Paradoxically, they were able to change caste only because caste in fact continued to be permeable to political influence."

Economics
"The colonial experience of developing countries provides valuable evidence regarding the impact of legal and institutional innovations on economic growth."

"Drawing on historical records and a formal analysis of the credit market, [...] the reform led to increased competition among lenders. [This] reduced lenders' incentives to subsidize farmers' investments in times of crisis, leaving them more vulnerable in bad times."

Laws
"Perhaps the most intransigent problem in the recent history of Indian society remains an adequate understanding of the processes of social change which took place under colonialism. As the continuing controversies within, as much as between, the traditions of modernization theory, Marxism, and the underdevelopment theory make plain, the Indian historical record is peculiarly difficult to grasp with conventional sociological concepts. In the study of Western European society, a focus on the evolution of legal ideas and institutions has proved a useful entry point to social history. The law may be seen to represent a set of general principles through which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find valuable. As such, its history reflects the struggle in society to assume, control or resist this authority."

Medicine
"The historiography of disease and medicine in colonial India has tended to concentrate on epidemic diseases and particularly those that have produced the greatest political upheavals."

Rebel consciousness
"This classic work [Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India] in subaltern studies explores the common elements present in rebel consciousness during the Indian colonial period."

From "the peasants' viewpoint the relations of dominance and subordination in rural India from 1783 to 1900 [are described]."

"Challenging the idea that peasants were powerless agents who rebelled blindly against British imperialist oppression and local landlord exploitation, Guha emphasizes their awareness and will to effect political change. He suggests that the rebellions represented the birth of a theoretical consciousness and asserts that India's long subaltern tradition lent power to the landmark insurgence led by Mahatma Gandhi."