Andrea Major

‘The Slavery of East and West’: Abolitionists and ‘Unfree’ Labour in India, 1820–1833

This article explores abolitionist treatments of East Indian slavery in the 1820s. It argues that rather than resulting from a lack of information or a conception of the qualitative difference between East and West Indian slavery, ambivalent and muted abolitionist responses to this issue prior to 1833 were conditioned by the wider imperatives of the anti-slavery campaign. Abstentionist substitution of ‘free-grown’ East India sugar for morally tainted West Indian produce, together with wider economic arguments about the equalisation of the sugar duties and the potential of India to provide a free labour alternative to the West Indian slave system, marked points of intersection between abolitionist and East India economic interests that relied on the assumption that labour in India, however cheap, was fundamentally ‘free’. As a result, rather than engaging with the various forms of slavery in India, abolitionists focused on discursively distancing them both from sugar production and from their campaign. This response suggests that abolitionist ideology was intersected by pragmatic political, economic, and discursive imperatives that precluded the universal application of humanitarian anti-slavery ideals.

Enslaving spaces Domestic slavery and the spatial, ideological and practical limits of colonial control in the nineteenth-century Rajput and Maratha states

This article explores British attitudes to domestic slavery in the Princely States of Rajputana and Malwa in the nineteenth-century. Working primarily from colonial archives, it analyses British conceptions of the nature of slavery and slave-trading in Rajputana, making compari-sons between this and their perception of slavery in its wider Indian and transatlantic contexts in order to analyse British understandings of Rajput identity, family and gender relations, as well as their conception of the nature and limits of their political and moral influence. It argues that British constructions of ‘benign’ domestic slavery were juxtaposed against concerns about the implications of slave-trading for crime, stability and the integrity of territorial borders, in British and princely India. The article discusses British attempts to persuade Rajput rulers to prohibit and prevent slave-trading and slave-holding in their territories, representing this debate as a point of intersection between ideological imperatives (in this case anti-slavery ideals) and political concerns about the nature and limits of acceptable British intervention in the internal affairs of the ‘independent’ states, and demonstrating the degree to which ‘moral’ and practical concerns intertwined in the formation of political dis-course on the limits of British ‘authority’. British attempts to regulate slave-trading on the ground are also explored, and cases brought before the British for the restitution of illegally procured slaves, contained in British Parliamentary Papers and East India Companys Boards Collections and Foreign Department Records, are used to demonstrate the fluid manner in which individuals could move (or be moved) between British and Indian controlled spaces, physically and metaphorically, demonstrating the extent to which the British capacity to both control and even observe was in practice limited, both spatially and ideologically.

‘Pious Flames’: European encounters with Sati before 18051

On 4 December 1829 the governor-general of India Lord William Bentinck promulgated a regulation prohibiting the burning or burying alive of Hindu widows. This interference with Hindu custom was justified on the basis that ‘suttee’ (or sati as it is now more correctly designated) was ‘nowhere enjoined by the religion of the Hindus as an imperative duty’. During the preceding thirty years the question of the precise religious status of sati had been integral to the debate over its abolition. While few European officials questioned the desirability of putting an end to the immolations, the widely held assumption that sati was an authentic and fundamental part of Hindu religious practice made the English East India Company’s men wary of intervening. Only once the prescriptive nature of the scriptural authority for sati had been refuted, did the British feel that they could outlaw the rite without violating their self-imposed principle of religious tolerance. The result of these concerns, as Lata Mani has suggested, was an official discourse on sati that was more about defining the parameters of colonial control than it was about burning women. By choosing to regard the act primarily as one of religious conviction, the British failed to adequately address the sociological aspects of the rite, with the result that these, and the widow herself, were often marginalised within their understanding of it.

Introduction: Princely spaces and domestic voices: New perspectives on the Indian princely states

In the past few years, the princely states have emerged as a new terrain for both historians and social scientists to explore. The discovery of previously untapped local archival sources and the use of oral histories, together with an interdisciplinary re-reading of the well-thumbed colonial archive and the application of postcolonial methodological and theoretical perspectives to all of the above, have contributed to the continuing development and expansion of new scholarship on princely India. Yet, studies of the princely states still often have to begin with clichés, in order to remind readers of the extent and nature of the forgotten areas of the Indian subcontinent. This special edition is no exception. The map of colonial India was marked in two colours that represented two supposedly separable Indias: ‘British India’, which after the Uprising of 1857–58 was controlled directly by the British Crown, and Princely India, which was often understood as an ‘Indian India’ and was only indirectly influenced by British imperial power. This Princely India covered two-fifths of the territory and contained about one-fifth of the population of the subcontinent. It was comprised of about 600 states, ranging from large kingdoms like Hyderabad and Mysore to small patrilineal holdings of a few square kilometres. At the moment of independence, this divided subcontinent was both partitioned once again, into India and Pakistan, and unified, as the princely states were subsumed into these newly created nation–states. The political and scholarly bifurcation of the colonial subcontinent into British and Princely India has not been an equal process, of course, as the political, social and cultural importance of the princely states has, until recently, been largely

Self‐determined Sacrifices? Victimhood and Volition in British Constructions of Sati in the Rajput States, 1830–60

During their encounter with sati in early nineteenth century Bengal, the British constructed an image of the Hindu widow who burned on her husband’s funeral pyre as a passive victim of a barbaric oriental practice. The imagery that they produced, which denied the widow both agency and rational engagement with the processes of sati, remains influential today and has led to those who oppose sati in the present being accused of adopting “western” attitudes. Yet this was not the only interpretation of sati to emerge from the colonial encounter. When the British experienced sati in the alternate context of the Rajput States (1830–60) their understanding of it changed subtly, as the widow was increasingly depicted as self‐determined—the perpetrator rather than the victim of sati. This article explores these shifts in British understanding, and asks what implications this alternate colonial interpretation might have for discourses on sati in contemporary India.

“ETERNAL FLAMES”: SUICIDE, SINFULNESS AND INSANITY IN “WESTERN” CONSTRUCTIONS OF SATI, 1500–1830

In the wake of the immolation of Roop Kanwar in Deorala, Rajasthan, in 1987, sati has re-emerged as a controversial political and social issue in modern India. Many of the terms of the contemporary debate on sati have their roots in the colonial period and are based on assumptions and ideas formulated during the British debate on sati in the early nineteenth century. These ideas were often as much the product of changing British society and its preoccupations as they were the encounter with India, however. This article explores the connotations of changing attitudes to suicide in influencing the nature of British responses to sati. By examining the relationship between attitudes to suicide and changing depictions of sati between 1500–1830, it seeks to undermine the suggestion of a constant western “morality” with regard to sati, depicting instead an encounter with the rite that was bi-directional and fluid with the dichotomy between “East” and “West” cross-cut by a myriad of other issues and concerns.

‘Mothers have become monsters’: danger, distress and deviance in British evangelical depictions of Indian Motherhood, 1757–1857

ABSTRACT Images of maternal distress and maternal deviance were frequently invoked in order to mobilise British women in support of her ‘heathen’ sisters overseas. Yet these accounts were not uniform in their interpretation of Indian maternity, or its relationship to emerging Victorian ideals of motherhood. This paper explores ideas of maternal danger, distress and deviance as they appeared in evangelical and colonial discourses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, revealing complex and ambivalent responses and challenging the idea that Indian woman were simply one-dimensional signifiers of victimhood within gendered constructions of the ‘civilising mission’.

‘Hill Coolies’: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836–38

This paper uses debates about Indian migrant labour that took place in New South Wales in 1836–38 to problematize enduring tropes about indenture and the ‘typical’ Indian labour migrant, which have their roots in British anti-slavery discourse of the late 1830s. By juxtaposing abolitionist assumptions against ongoing debates about Indian labour migration in other parts of the British Empire, it explores the economic, political, and moral/ideological imperatives that underpinned the representation of indenture during this formative period. By placing metropolitan British anti-indenture literature alongside arguments for Indian migration made by settlers from the Australian periphery of empire, it explores the ways in which racial, imperial, and commercial discourses intersected in the representation of the so-called ‘hill coolie’ as the quintessential Indian labour migrant. In doing so, it seeks to destabilize persistent representations of the Indian migrant as passive victim of indenture and suggest a more complex set of identities and interactions.

Tall tales and true: India, historiography and British imperial imaginings

This slim edited volume presents a series of short articles by scholars from Australia, the United States and Canada, which seek to reinterpret iconic events and personalities from the traditionally accepted tale of the British Raj. By problematising some of the ‘emblematic events and people that have greater resonance and durability than other moments and figures that might appear in the story’ (3), the volume as a whole successfully works to destabilise the grand narrative of British imperialism in India from within, opening space for consideration of how such histories are cast and recast at different historical moments. The articles contained within the volume range in subject matter from the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756, to the life of Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946) and are arranged in chronological order; a structure that both mirrors and subverts the traditional Eurocentric narrative. Through detailed studies of their various subjects, the authors suggest ways in which they might be re-imagined in the light of developments in post-colonial, anthropological and subaltern historical methodologies, and encourage the reader to question the received wisdom of imperialist historiography. Among the figures presented for reassessment are Warren Hastings, Arthur Wellesley, Tipu Sultan, Ranjit Singh and Madan Mohan Malaviya, while key events that elicit attention include the Black Hole of Calcutta, the Indian Revolt of 1857 and the thuggee ‘phenomenon’. There is an emphasis on challenging accepted frameworks for understanding these figures and events: in ‘Orientalism or capitalism’, for example, Rahul Sapra argues that Hastings combined the establishment of colonial rule with a regard for Indians and their culture in a way that ‘undermines the nexus between Orientalism and the ideology of colonialism’ (29). Likewise Kate Brittlebank reminds us of the need to present historical figures within the context of their times, before putting this into practice in ‘Piety and power’: a fascinating discussion of the dream diaries of Tipu Sultan, which uses the contents of this extraordinary document to open a window onto the (sub)conscious worldview of the ruler of Mysore. In another carefully argued article ‘From novice to hero’, the future Duke of Wellington is shown by Channa Wickremesekera to have been less a born military genius than ‘a very lucky boy’, whose career starting victory at Assaye in 1803 was primarily the result of inexperienced decision making, naı̈veté and good fortune. Several of the chapters focus on the implications of the telling and re-telling of emblematic stories for our understanding not only of the events themselves, but of the political, ideological and intellectual contexts in which they have been recast. Thus Ian Barrow’s ‘The many meanings of the Black Hole of Calcutta’ traces the Contemporary South Asia Vol. 19, No. 3, September 2011, 331–349