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"Colonial administrators India History."
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The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality
From the invention of imperial authority along the North-West Frontier of British India, subjects were divided between the “civilized” inhabitants populating the cultivated plains and the “wild tribes” living in the hills. The problem of governing this latter group, the “independent tribes,” proved a vexed one for the British Raj. The mechanism developed by imperial administrators to manage the frontier inhabitants was the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), first promulgated in 1872 and still in effect today. The FCR was designed to exclude the Frontier's inhabitants from the colonial judiciary, and more broadly the colonial sphere, encapsulating them in their own colonially sanctioned “tradition.” Exploring the use of the FCR as an instrument of governance from its first inception into the twentieth century, this article argues that it was key to shaping the nature of frontier rule, which in turn shaped the very nature of the colonial state itself.
Journal Article
Gender, morality, and race in Company India, 1765-1858
\"Between 1765 and 1858, British imperialists in India obsessed continuously about gaining and preserving Indian \"opinion\" of British moral and racial prestige. Weaving political, intellectual, cultural, and gender history together in an innovative approach, Gender, morality, and race in Company India, 1765-1858 examines imperial anxieties regarding British moral misconduct in India ranging from debt and gift giving to drunkenness and irreligion and points out their wider relationship to the structuring of British colonialism. Showing a pervasive fear among imperial elites of losing \"mastery\" over India, as well as a deep distrust of Indian civil and military subordinates through whom they ruled, Sramek demonstrates how much of the British Raj's notable racial arrogance after 1858 can in fact be traced back into the preceding Company period of colonial rule. Rather than the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 ushering in a more racist form of colonialism, this book powerfully suggests far greater continuity between the two periods of colonial rule than scholars have hitherto generally recognized\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
'A Character to lose': Richard Goodlad, the Rangpur dhing, and the priorities of the East India Company's early colonial administrators
This article examines the conduct of Richard Goodlad, the East India Company's collector in Rangpur, north Bengal, upon the outbreak of a peasant rebellion in his district during 1783. It uses his reaction to this event to illustrate the nature of the Company's district bureaucracy and its relationship with the central colonial authorities in Calcutta during the later eighteenth century. The article considers the aims and limitations of the European officials who were sent out to administer Bengal's districts, detailing their priorities and practices within a weak and decentralised state structure. Ultimately it argues that the relationship between these local and central components of the colonial state was, prior to the Company's rise to subcontinental hegemony in the early nineteenth-century, profoundly shaped both by widespread military under-resourcing, and by the primacy of personal interest among its local officials.
Journal Article
The Historiography of the Medieval in South Asia
Colonial scholars and administrators in the latter half of the nineteenth century were the first to subject South Asia to modern historicist scrutiny. Using coins, inscriptions, and chronicles, they determined the dates and identities of numerous kings and dynasties within an apparently scrupulous empiricist framework. From the 1930s, with the widespread rise of nationalist sentiment, South Asian scholars began to write about their own past. The particular configurations of colonial and early nationalist historiography of South Asia have proved immensely consequential for subsequent generations of historians. Not only did this historiography value certain types of evidence, particularly Indic language epigraphy, Persian chronicles, and archaeology (while at the same time devaluing others like literature and religious texts), it set some of the enduring thematic and topical parameters which have shaped the course of the field. The initial focus was on the careers and personalities of rulers or the genius of races as the key causative forces in history, but eventually dynastic history became the dominant mode of writing about the past.
Journal Article
Looking Back on India
Hubert Evans' fascinating memior recounts his time in India and the people and events which shaped the history of the subcontinent. A must read for anyone interested in the history of India and the inner workings of the Raj.
eBook
Ethnology and colonial administration in nineteenth-century British India: the question of native crime and criminality
This paper examines the central role of ethnology, the science of race, in the administration of colonial India. This occurred on two levels. First, from the late eighteenth century onwards, proto-scientists and administrators in India engaged with metropolitan theorists through the provision of data on native society and habits. Second, these same agents were continually and reciprocally influenced in the collection and use of such data by the political doctrines and scientific theories that developed over the course of this period. Among the central interests of ethnographer-administrators was the native criminal and this paper uses knowledge developed about native crime and criminality to illustrate the way science became integral to administration in the colonial domain.
Journal Article
Anglo-Indian attitudes : the mind of the Indian Civil Service
In the years between the Indian Mutiny and Independence in 1947 the Indian Civil Service was the most powerful body of officials in the English-speaking world. About 300,000,000 Indians, a sixth of the human race, were ruled by 1000 Civilians. With Whitehall 8000 miles away and the peasantry content with their decisions, they had the freedom to translate ideas into action. This work explores the use they made of their power by examining the beliefs of two middle-ranking Civilians. It shows, in detail, how they put into practice values which they acquired from their parents, their teachers and contemporary currents of opinion. F.L. Brayne and Sir Malcolm Darling reflected the two faces of British imperialism: the urge to assimilate and the desire for rapprochement. Brayne, a born-again Evangelical, despised Indian culture, thought individual Indians were sunk in sin and dedicated his career to making his peasant subjects industrious and thrifty. Darling, a cultivated humanist, despised his compatriots and thought that Indians were sensitive and imaginative. Brayne and Darling personified two ideologies that pervaded the ICS and shaped British rule in India. This work aims to make a contribution to the history of British India and a telling commentary on contemporary values at home.
eBook
The Savage Family: Colonialism and Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century India
Between 1850 and 1870, British administrators in colonial India concluded that female infanticide was a problem of enormous proportions. They decided that the killing of infant girls was rooted not in individual deviance but in the culture of the zenana, or the women's quarters of the Indian home. These perceptions shaped countermeasures that sought to identify \"infanticidal\" communities and restructure the power relations within the infanticidal household. The project received cautious support from native elites who, it has been suggested, were typically reluctant to allow British interference in the \"Indian\" home. This article shows how the colonial understanding of the problem was shaped by ideas of collective criminality, and argues that the campaign against infanticide was inseparable from the British effort to colonize the zenana. It argues also that Indian men accommodated the intervention in order to promote their own moral authority, their national legitimacy, and their patriarchal privileges.
Journal Article
Women in the Śāstric Tradition: Colonialism, Law, and Violence
This chapter contains sections titled:
Definition of Key Terms
Women in the Early Colonial Agenda
Women's Rights to Property and the Early Colonial Rulers in Eighteenth ‐ Century Bengal
The Appropriation of Manusmrti
The Tradition of Sati in Bengal and Colonial Discourses
Colonial Codes, Women's Property, and the Issues of Sati
Concluding Statements
References
Book Chapter