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"Guha, Sumit"
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Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900
The perception, valuation, and manipulation of human
environments all have their own layered histories. So Sumit Guha
argues in this sweeping examination of a pivotal five hundred years
when successive empires struggled to harness lands and peoples to
their agendas across Asia. Ecologies of Empire in South Asia,
1400-1900 compares the practices of the Mughal and British
Empires to demonstrate how their fluctuating capacity for
domination was imbricated in the formation of environmental
knowledge itself.
The establishment of imperial control transforms local knowledge
of the world into the aggregated information that reproduces
centralized power over it. That is the political ecology that
reshapes entire biomes. Animals and plants are translocated; human
communities are displaced or destroyed. Some species proliferate;
others disappear. But these state projects are overlaid upon the
many local and regional geographies made by sacred cosmologies and
local sites, pilgrimage routes and river fords, hot springs and
fluctuating aquifers, hunting ranges and nesting grounds, notable
trees and striking rocks.
Guha uncovers these ecological histories by scrutinizing
little-used archival sources. His historically based political
ecology demonstrates how the biomes of a vast subcontinent were
changed by struggles to make and to resist empire.
eBook
History and collective memory in South Asia, 1200-2000
\"Sumit Guha considers South Asian traditions of social and historical memory in the context of world history, identifying the influence of varying forms of socio-political organization on precolonial regional and linguistic patterns of historical memory. These traditions shaped the historiographic legacy that was inherited by the British imperial era in India. Guha explores the ways in which socially objective historical memory has been made in South Asia through the past eight centuries. The latter part of that period was one in which Asia had to deal with the impact of the West, not only politically and economically, but also through the hegemony of Western modes of thought, especially history. Drawing on sources in a range of languages, Guha establishes the first intellectual history of the precolonial traditions of historiography in diverse Indian regions. He emphasizes the social context of historical thought, while noting that \"the frame does not make the painting, even though a canvas will fall limply underfoot without a frame to hold it.\" The Social Frame of Historical Memory contributes to far-reaching historiographical debates, which intensified in the Anglo-American world during the 1990s as historians responded to the post-modern critique of knowledge. Arguments around the objectivity of historians' practices continue to intensify following Oxford Dictionaries' selection of \"post-truth\" as the Word of the Year for 2016, and as accusations of \"fake news\" complicate the public's understanding of objectivity and documentation. This volume is thus a timely contribution to the study of history within the global setting\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Beyond Caste
Beyond Caste traces the many changes South Asian society through the centuries and shows how 'caste' should be understood as a politically inflected and complex form of ethnic stratification that persisted across religious affiliations.
eBook
Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World
Sociolinguists study the valorization of specific languages as a ‘language ideology’. Contemporary nation-states frequently identify with and promote specific languages. Such linguistic nationalism is a language ideology, but not the only one. This article examines earlier millennia to uncover the dynamics by which imperial systems managed linguistic diversity and how and why they favored and disfavored particular languages and scripts. I analyze states and empires as coalitions of interest groups. I invoke the scribal masters of imperial chanceries and archives as one such group. I develop a heuristic framework (or “model”) to understand the interactions of language and power that unfolded across West and South Asia. I begin with a great empire, the Persian, that did not employ its founders’ ethnic speech but instead refined an older state language in governance. That choice entrenched an interest group that endured through a thousand years till displaced by Arab conquest after 660 CE. But a simpler ‘New Persian’ revived in the eastern Iranian lands. Turkish and Mongol conquest elites emerging from Inner Asia carried this language and its scribes into their growing domains in the Indian subcontinent. I then explain why the non-Persian Mughals in the 1550s selected Persian as their state language and rejected the constant pressure to use Urdu creole. Mughal rule left behind a tenacious Persian-writing elite that the early British empire employed. Finally, I explain the state processes behind the colonial-era decline of Persianate administration and the emergence of a new linguistic politics in colonial India.
Journal Article
India in the pandemic age
COVID-19 is only the latest in a series of global pandemics that began when the world of disease was united by the establishment of intensive connections by sea after 1500. India was a major participant in this process. A pandemic has both direct and indirect effects. Human reactions to mass illness both mitigate and enhance these effects. The networks of transmission are paralleled by networks of private and public information. But aggregated information only becomes available as governmental information systems take shape. This article explains the use of quarantine as emerging from both. It then explains why it was introduced to India only after 1800. It then looks at three great pandemics: cholera, bubonic plague and lethal influenza and governmental and societal responses to each of these. The article analyses the subsidence of pandemics into chronic presences (‘background’) that nonetheless contributed significantly ill-health, poverty and early death for hundreds of millions. But there is a paradox after Independence. Successful state action in independent India was nevertheless accompanied by the effective collapse of government information systems. This contributed to the massive economic damage from what should have been a minor episode of plague in 1994. The article thus reviews what we know about the effects of the pandemic, epidemic and chronic background phenomena on the economic life of Indian sub-continent through the past 500 years.
Journal Article
Rethinking the Economy of Mughal India: Lateral Perspectives
This article seeks to reopen the argument regarding the economic structure of the Mughal Empire. The field saw vigorous debate in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by a stalemate. I seek to move beyond this impasse, first by studying British efforts at implementing a neo-Mughal tax system. This retrospective exhibits the practical difficulties that make it unlikely that the Mughals ever fully implemented their program. I then deploy underused Marathi sources to see what well-informed contemporaries guessed about the real working of the empire and analyze the effects of regimes of power in the creation and survival of the information that constitutes our evidence. I end by connecting key aspects of my structural analysis with the expansion of international trade and with India's political economy in the transition to British rule.
Journal Article
Colonialism, Disarmament, and the Closing of the Forest Frontier
THE IRISH SOLDIER OF FORTUNE W. H. TONE COMMANDED AN infantry battalion in the Maratha service in the 1790s. He wrote a careful assessment of the Marathas’ collective strength and emphasized the vast numbers of homebred horses that they could muster. Of the 274,000 soldiers that he mentions as being the aggregate strength of the five Maratha states in 1796, 210,000 were horsemen.¹ They clearly maintained hundreds of thousands of horses.
It is possible that Tone saw the Maratha light cavalry complex at an unsustainable height at the end of the eighteenth century. Light horses were still numerous until 1818:
Book Chapter