In the fall of 1925, S.J. Saklatvala, an Indian-born Communist Member of the British Parliament, attempted to travel to the United States for the annual meeting of the Interparliamentary Union. At the last minute, the US government revoked his visa because of his Communist politics. This article examines this affair, analyses American government’s decision and the British government’s reaction, and places this in the context of the anti-Communist sentiment in Britain and the United States during the 1920s. Finally, the article examines the unsucessful campaign against the ban, emphasising how the campaign allowed Communists to build support among different sectors of the population.
This article discusses the variation in response to the advent of the Portuguese on the Malabar Coast by different Muslim literary and intellectual figures. It is argued that certain Arabic sources dealing with the history of Islam in Malabar and with jihād against the encroaching Portuguese in fact reveal cleavages and antagonisms within learned Muslim opinion. Both the content of these Arabic texts and the choice of genre by their authors are indicative of this internal conflict within the Malabar Muslim community. Thus, any view positing a monolithic or essentialist view of Malabar Muslims as such becomes untenable. One well-known and previously translated work, Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn, by the well-known Malabari scholar Zain al-Din al-Ma‘bari has been misunderstood as entirely representative of the totality of opinion within the Malabari Muslim community. However, it will be argued that a second and hitherto understudied set of texts reveal another, and, startlingly different viewpoint. All these works are clearly products of the conceptual world of jihādi discourse but present sharply opposed prescriptions for collective Muslim actions within Kerala. These divergent prescriptions are rooted in differing historical narratives and imaginaries capable of addressing a perceived profound crisis confronting Malabar Muslims.
Can one write a ‘visual history’ of the family? This article is a preliminary attempt to explore the relationship between visuals and history and how this is configured in relation to an institution like the family. By examining a diverse set of Indian images, ranging from Company art, Kalighat prints, realist portraiture and some photography, I wish to problematise the relationship between representation and history. A chief interest in this exploration is to see how the visual effects exceed the illustrative, and how that transforms our understanding of the ‘subject’ in question, in this instance, understanding the family conceptually.
By revisiting the events from July 1947 to February 1948 that comprised the accession of the princely state of Junagadh to India, this article gives an insight into the newly independent Dominion’s ‘mobilisation of violence’ in re-fashioning its sovereignty and authority. In doing so, it adds to the growing historical literature on state formation in India that argues that multiple crises of the period 1947–49—post-partition violence in Punjab and Delhi, rebellion, accession and war in Kashmir and the so-called ‘police-action’ in Hyderabad—far from being aberrations to the emerging Indian nation-state were, instead, affairs through which its new sovereignty evolved. The mobilisation of Indian defence forces in the lead up to the accession of Junagadh in November 1947 and the management of violence directed at Junagadh’s Muslims afterwards are yet another instance of the forcible incorporation of Indian princely states and Indian Muslims into the reconstructed post-colonial state. Present in this matrix were also the ‘sub-states’ within Junagadh and the attendant questions of their autonomy, an instrumentalist alarmism about popular will and unrest and a hastily conducted referendum. These aspects of this contested accession have remained overshadowed in the historical record and are here revised to provide an alternative narrative.
The spread of transferred plants such as the prickly pear and lantana, labelled ‘noxious weeds’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century south India, and the exploration of viable means for their extirpation gave rise to a complex colonial discourse. Such plants not only seriously impeded agricultural and plantation interests but also threatened colonial commercial concerns. The eradication discourse consisted of various shades of opinion highlighting the ambivalences and contradictions within the eradication agenda. The increasing use of the legal domain as a regime of control by the colonial state was directed at legitimising the use of coercion for the destruction of undesirable plants. Notably, the use of legal coercion proved ineffective in the face of escalating costs of implementation and lack of local support. Local voices appealing against the enactment of eradication programmes were also attempts at opposing the colonial state’s efforts at instituting a regime of control. The colonial state’s eradication discourse and campaign against lantana in south India provide valuable insights into the then prevailing perceptions and attitudes towards exotics and invasives.
The Rohilkhand Literary Society, Bareilly, a voluntary association comprising Muslims and Hindus, printed seven instructional books for women in the 1870s. The Bareilly books are a measure of the vibrant Hindi print culture, emerging for women across colonial north India. The books were written in response to new initiatives by the colonial government and by local elite groups for promoting female education. Statistics on girls’ schools in this region remained dismal for decades. At a fundamental level, this essay argues that instead of merely employing school statistics, we reconsider the social history of female education with regard to print culture. The Bareilly books draw upon Sanskrit, Perso-Arabic, Avadhi, Bengali and English sources. They remind us of the multiple instructional and linguistic traditions within which women in this region came to read. The analytical template developed here explicitly foregrounds the range of discourses available to contemporary women readers. To ask the question, what did Sundaria read, is to suggest that women readers were being fashioned in ways that are not always reflected in statistics on schools or official statements by colonial officials.
Dalits of the Telugu-speaking region of Madras Presidency struggled for liberation from socio-economic and politico-cultural deprivation by mobilising themselves under the ‘Adi-Andhra’ identity. They worked for the eradication of untouchability, achieving education, land, jobs and political representation, using modern ideas of equality and empowerment and, thus, challenged the traditional caste hierarchy. The existing literature on the subject has largely tended to represent Dalit movements as either autonomous from or integral to Congress-dominated nationalism and Hinduism. However, I would argue that to accomplish their objectives, Dalits constantly interacted with Hindu nationalists and the colonial state between 1917 and 1930. However, on a number of occasions, they expressed their dissatisfaction with both Hindu nationalist reform and colonial policies and programmes for the emancipation of Dalits. It is, therefore, essential to recognise that Dalits were neither integrated with them, nor entirely estranged from them.
This article suggests that territorialisation was the dominant concept that defined British expansion in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. It underlies the Company’s efforts to impose sovereignty over the region and to exert its ‘right’ to collect tax from its inhabitants. The introduction of the plough and creation of a political economy of rule were some key means by which the Raj sought to tighten its grip over the territory and its people. Territorialisation in the Tracts manifested as the spatial, economic, agricultural, as well as political expansion of the Company state in the region. The article discusses how, in the aftermath of the raids of the early 1860s, the administration resorted to tougher policies to control, deter and counteract the raiders of the eastern hills. It suggests that by setting up institutions of economic control, as well as by modifying existing centres of political power, the Raj succeeded in capturing both the polities and the economies of the territory.
It is an axiom of early postcolonial Indian history that Nehru and his statist conception of nationalism and of economic development dominated the political and economic life of India. As such, scholars have assumed, Gandhian ideas, especially radically non-statist answers to the problems of development, lost influence in this period. This article explores Gandhian economic thinking, in the form of the Bhoodan Movement and three of the thinkers on sarvodaya economics in the 1950s: Vinoba Bhave, K.G. Mashruwala and J.C. Kumarappa. It goes on to demonstrate the complex relationship that these men and their ideas had with Nehru and various levels of the Indian state. It argues that the non-statist ideas remained important in the development of the postcolonial Indian nationalism.