Nitin Sinha

Mobility, control and criminality in early colonial India, 1760s–1850s

The article looks into the ways certain mobile groups like the banjaras, gosains, fakirs and sanyasis were ‘criminalised’ by the colonial state between the periods of the 1760s and 1850s. Historiographically, the article argues for looking at the early colonial period more closely than has hitherto been done to understand the changing material and circulatory regimes in which these peripatetic groups operated. Unlike the current historiographical convention, which would explain crime as the artefact of a paranoid colonial mind-set, this article traces criminality to the disruption in prevailing patterns of trade and transport, and the livelihoods supported by them, consequent to colonial settlement and, in this region (eastern India), the rise of the kingdom of Nepal.

Contract, Work, and Resistance: Boatmen in Early Colonial Eastern India, 1760s–1850s

In the period between the 1760s and the 1850s boatmen were the most important transport workers in early colonial eastern India, at least numerically. Unfortunately, they have received little scholarly attention so far. By looking at the regime of work, which surprisingly had strong bases in the notion of contract from as early as the 1770s, this article explores the nature of work, work organization, and resistance by boatmen. It argues that although work was structured according to the wage or hire-based ( thika ) contract regime, the social, political, and ecological conditions in which contract operated were equally crucial. The centrality of contract was premised upon how effectively it was enforceable and, in fact, historically enforced. Boatmen being one of the most important “native” groups with which the British were left on their often long journeys, this article suggests that contract helps to understand the formal “structure of work”, and the minute details of the journey help to understand the “world of work”, of which clandestine trade, weather, wind, rain, torrents, tracking, mooring, internal squabbling, and, not least, preparing food were some of the main components.

Entering the Black Hole: between ‘mini-England’ and ‘smell-like rotten potato’, the railway workshop town of Jamalpur, 1860s–1940s

Jamalpur came into existence as a railway town in 1862 when Indias first locomotive workshops were established there. By studying its history until the 1940s, this article provides a description of a small industrial town that arose from colonial capitalist necessity, but which shared many of the features of colonial urban governmentality. Therefore, a call for greater small town studies, as this article modestly makes, is not based on challenging existing studies on bigger cities but for generating a fuller understanding of the link between the policies and the discourses of colonial rule that applied broadly to towns and cities of various descriptions. The diverse population of Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Bengalis and Biharis forged different forms of sociability; the workshop and other civic amenities were both shaped and contested through these forms. The discursive sites of such contestations – race, work, region, identity, sanitation, defence and protest – were as multiple as the physical ones: roads, drainage, workshop, houses, fields, bath and akharas. As a result, Jamalpur seen from the perspective of Europeans and Anglo-Indians was one type of locality that was highly insular and self-fulfilling; from the viewpoint of labour it was an extended space based on the rhythmic circulation of labour.