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"Raman, Bhavani"
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Oceanic Mobility and the Empire of the Pass System
From the age of empires to the apartheid regime in South Africa, pass laws have defined the scope of the mobility of subjects by relying on a paper document, the pass. This essay focusses on the pass document to understand the governance of mobility in the Indian ocean. In doing so, it shows how the pass document in its various forms through many centuries in fact, illuminates a form of inter-legal governance through which racialized life came to be constituted via convention and statute.
Journal Article
Cultures in motion
\"In the wide-ranging and innovative essays of Cultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. Cultures in Motion challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The essays offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing--dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks--remains stationary.\" Publisher's website.
Book
Civil Address and the Early Colonial Petition in Madras
In recent years, petitioning cultures have attracted scholarly interest because they are seen as germane to the infrastructure of political communication and modern associative life. Using materials from early colonial Madras, this article discloses a trajectory of the appeal which is different from its conventional place in the social theory of political communication. Colonial petitions carried with them the idea of law as equity through which a paternalist government sought to shape a consenting subject, even as this sense of equity was layered by other meanings of justice. In this sense petitions reworked and exceeded the idioms of imperial law and justice. Thus two aspects of the colonial petition are the focus of this article: its genealogies in the institutional history of the early modern corporation that transmitted notions of law as equity, and the recursive and heteroglossic nature of the language of appeal that enabled this text-form to be an enduring site for refashioning terms of address.
Journal Article
Sovereignty, Property and Land Development: The East India Company in Madras
Abstract
From the late eighteenth century struggles over untitled and unassessed land in Madras became completely entangled with the East India Company's efforts to craft its sovereign powers. These lands could not be leached of their social meanings and use and instead, competing ideas of ownership incarnated sovereignty as eviction and the Company as a pre-eminent land developer.
Journal Article
Cultures in motion
In the wide-ranging and innovative essays ofCultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history.
Cultures in Motionchallenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The essays offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing--dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks--remains stationary.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Celia Applegate, Peter Brown, Harold Cook, April Masten, Mae Ngai, Jocelyn Olcott, Mimi Sheller, Pamela Smith, and Nira Wickramasinghe.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
eBook
Islamic Cultures of Documentation: An Afterword
The documentation process of the Islamic culture is examined. A Sanskrit praise poem composed in 1752 on South India's Coromandel coast makes an interesting reference to the reception of a Mughal document. The poem describes a Mughal royal order endowing honors for this success to the French and Pillai. The document arrived in French Pondicheny in a silver palanquin: fanned with flywhisks, it was received with ritual salutes (salams) and a convivial gathering at which betel leaf and perfumes were served. The description illustrates a prevailing familiarity with the endowment and circulation of Mughal imperial documents as a precious mark of political authority and social status outside the formal bounds of the Indo-Islamic polity. That rituals provided a way for documents to embody sovereign presence across linguistic, cultural and political borders.
Journal Article
The Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colonial Madras
Shifts in writing technology are usually taken to mark a shift from discretionary to rule-bound, impersonal forms of government. Equating writing technology with rules, however, obscures how counterfeiting, both alleged and real, and the exertion of official discretion can consolidate a government of writing. In his important study of Yemeni scribal culture, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society, Brinkley Messick modifies Weberian models of domination by calling for the study of textual domination that intersects in diverse ways with other dimensions of authority. Messick relates the demise of the calligraphic state to the advent of legal codification and print technology. With the arrival of impersonal documents of government and a form of rational law, he argues, writing itself ceased to be the “non-arbitrary mark of the person” and the relationship between the sign and signified was no longer connected by an intermediary figure. Similarly, the notion that the innovations of disciplinary writing constituted a new assemblage of control exercised through the “unavoidable visibility of subjects” has been extremely productive in delineating the colonial career of modern infrastructural power. Following the work of Bernard Cohn, the colonial state's “investigative modalities” have been shown to be integral to colonial command and the production of an ever-accumulating corpus of reports. Statistical surveys, reports, and censuses in colonies did not create a uniform template of rule but did enable the operation of inherently selective, targeted, and differentially articulated projects of governance. These gains notwithstanding, the debates over colonial governance have remained limited to differing estimations of the state's successful mastery of information, and whether its taxonomies were collaboratively authored by intermediaries or imposed upon the colonized. We need to give more attention to the complex articulation of records and reports with the law under conditions of exogenous rule.
Journal Article
Itinerancy and Power
This volume of essays is a collective effort to write peripatetic histories. Its contributors attend to itinerancy rather than place, and journeys rather than destinations. The journey is the story and the trajectory of things, practices, and concepts; it is the very object of scholarly attention. The idea of motion in these essays is not dissimilar to Aristotle’s notion ofkinêsis. To Aristotle kinêsis was potentiality actualized. In his conception, potentiality was distinct from outcomes, something that he explained in theMetaphysicsas the difference between house building and the result, the house. Both house building and the finished object
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