Douglas E. Haynes

From Tribute to Philanthropy: The Politics of Gift Giving in a Western Indian City

During the nineteenth century, South Asian businessmen began to engage in modern forms of philanthropy. Focusing on the western Indian city of Surat, this essay explores the emergence of philanthropic activity within the larger “portfolios” of gift giving held by indigenous merchants from roughly 1600 to 1924. Throughout this period, Hindu and Jain commercial magnates employed gifts as means both of building up their reputations ( ābrū ) within high-caste society and of fostering stable ties with political overlords. Local merchants continuously adjusted their charitable choices to changes in the ideology of these overlords as they sought to obtain influence with and honors from the ruling power. Involvement in philanthropy reflected a “negotiated” accommodation to Victorian values through which elite merchants maintained a relatively secure commercial and political environment in the context of late nineteenth-century British rule. When government policies seriously threatened their ābrū during World War I, however, local traders began to view donations to the Indian National Congress as an alternative method of conserving status and credit.

Conceiving mobility: Weavers' migrations in pre-colonial and colonial India

During the past decade, historical work on artisans has moved away from old preoccupations. While scholarship once focused on the question of whether or not handloom weavers and others had been displaced from their occupation in the economic environment of the nineteenth century, recent work has stressed the ways in which artisans adapted dynamically to changes under colonialism, and sometimes made significant contributions to the character of the larger economy.’ I

Beyond the Colonial City: Re-Evaluating the Urban History of India, ca. 1920–1970

It was long customary to begin essays on the historiography of cities in South Asia by mentioning the low level of scholarly interest once given to the study of urban pasts; 2 but a major corpus of...

The dynamics of continuity in Indian domestic industry: Jari manufacture in Surat, 1900-47

Few topics in the economic historiography of India have raised more controversy than the fate of domestic industries under colonialism. For more than two decades now, a debate has raged in the field between ’nationalist’ scholars who have argued that colonialism and the flood of cheap manufactured goods from Europe caused irreparable damage to indigenous forms of production and ’revisionist’ historians who have

The Labour Process in the Bombay Handloom Industry, 1880–1940

Analyses of capital-labour relations in Indian industry during the colonial period have generally been confined to studies of large-scale units. This essay turns to an examination of the organization of the workplace among handloom producers in the Bombay Presidency during the period between 1880 and 1940. While recognizing the importance of contradictions between weaving families and various kinds of capitalists, the essay eschews any straightforward model of “proletarianization” to characterize this relationship. Weavers possessed methods of resistance, particularly “everyday” actions, which thwarted efforts to impose tight regimes of labour discipline within the workshop. Seeking to contain these resistances, shahukars (putting-out merchants) and karkhandars (owners of establishments using wage labour) developed complex social relationships with their workers based upon patronage, debt, and caste. Consequently, collective protest in the industry was limited, and when it did emerge in Sholapur during the later 1930s, it was highly conditioned and constrained by the multiple lines of affiliation weavers had with karkhandars.

Market formation in Khandesh, c. 1820-1930

Acknowledgements: An earlier draft of this paper was originally presented at the International Economic History Congress in Madrid, August 1998. I wish to thank those present at my presentation for their comments, particularly Tirthankar Roy, Ian Kerr and Jairus Banaji. John Hurd also offered valuable suggestions. Nat Case prepared the maps. Brian Murton provided many useful references. I alone remain responsible for both content and argument of the article. This article examines the changing character of the marketing system in the region of Khandesh in northern Maharashtra during the first century of British rule. By the term ’market’, I am referring to the actual physical sites where the buying and selling of commodities was done, ranging from small periodic bazaars to larger towns. I concentrate primarily on the places that were essential to making ordinary goods available to rural folk. This focus is intended as a corrective to existing scholarship, which has concentrated heavily on the processes by which agricultural commodities were extracted from the countryside, but which has paid very little attention to practices of consumption. While there have been many studies of individual cities and towns during the period of British rule, there has been limited discussion by historians of regional market systems as a whole.’ By contrast, quite a number of geographers have taken an interest in market networks, many in the context of studies of economic

Selling Masculinity: Advertisements for Sex Tonics and the Making of Modern Conjugality in Western India, 1900–1945

Abstract This essay discusses advertising for sex tonics in Western Indian newspapers between 1900 and 1945. It specifically focuses on the emergence of a new paradigm of tonic advertisement—the marital happiness advertisment—after 1935. Arguing that tonic advertisers always sought to develop appeals grounded in prevously circulating conceptions of sexuality and the body, it first examines pre-1935 forms of advertisement submitted by local businesses and global corporations. It then turns to discussion of the marital happiness ads, which stress the modern husbands need to satisfy his wife sexually, demonstrating that this trope was strongly influenced by the development of global sexology. These ads, however, resorted to a hybrid reasoning, which also included the kinds of logic found in earlier advertisements, especially those about ‘semen anxiety’.

Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Anxieties: Middle-class males in western India and the correspondence in Samaj Swasthya, 1927–53

This article examines letters written by young men to the Marathi-language journal Samaj Swasthya and its editor, R. D. Karve, a major advocate of birth control and sex education in western India. The letters, and Karves responses to them, constituted perhaps the earliest sex-advice column in Indian print media. We argue here that the correspondence provides a unique vehicle for understanding the forms of sexual knowledge held by middle-class males in mid-twentieth-century India as well as for appreciating their most significant sexual anxieties. The article analyses the concerns expressed in the letters about masturbation and seminal emissions, the nature of the female body and processes of conception, birth control and same-sex sexual practices. It particularly illuminates the ways in which the concept of modern conjugality pervaded the sexual understandings of the young men who wrote to Karve. It thus offers valuable insights into specifically sexual aspects of conjugality and masculinity—aspects that have previously been unexplored.

The Making of the Hyper-Industrial City in Western India: The Transformation of Artisanal Towns into Middle-Sized Urban Centres, 1930–1970

This essay explores the rapid expansion of small handloom centres in Western India between 1930 and 1970. It attributes the transformation of these places into larger cities to the role of local weaver-capitalists, who developed new markets for local textiles and introduced significant technological innovations into the industry, and who forged strategies for combatting the growth of labour resistance. The essay also highlights the role of the late colonial and early post-Independence states, which promoted the growth of weavers’ co-operatives and which imposed extensive regulations on larger enterprises. The paper argues that the powerloom centres of Western India sustained a ‘hyper-industrial’ quality, with limited economic or cultural diversification, restricted urban amenities and public services, and the extensive concentration of poor urban migrants in slums.

Book Reviews : TIRTHANKAR ROY, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. xi + 252

and secularism, in which B6teille and a number of other intellectuals have participated, Jan Breman describes the ghettoisation of Muslims in Ahmedabad after Ayodhya. This is a sensitive and disturbing account of communal riots and their aftermath: Breman vividly conveys the fear with which muslims of all classes now live, thanks to the cynical politics of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its allies and the (deliberate?) growing communalisation of public institutions and the press. On more narrowly sociological issues, two contributions take off from B6teille’s