Ravi Ahuja

State formation and 'famine policy' in early colonial south India

The experience of dearth turning into famine, of crises of subsistence turning into crises of mortality, had shaped social and cultural practices in South Asia long before British domination. Nor did famines disappear under colonial capitalism. Transformations and higher levels of integration of the subcontinent’s political, economic and social structure merely changed the causes of famine. While malnutrition continued to be or even became endemic among the lower classes of many regions, hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of Indians died in major famines between 1769-70 and 1943.~ Yet famines not only extinguished

The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras

This article challenges the view that the English East India Company was unable effectively to dominate society in the colonial metropolis of Madras before the end of the eighteenth century. Instead it is argued that colonial interventions, even into the social organization of labour, were persistent in goals and methods and acquired institutional forms in the latter half of the century. Hence an early colonial labour policy is clearly discernible. The ruling blocks strategies concerning the regulation of labour were not based on laissez-faire ideas but rather on a paternalistic brand of contemporary English social theory. This ideological disposition found practical expression in interventions into the citys labour relations by means of various “police committees”. Moreover, British legal techniques were used to regulate labour relations in Madras. On the whole, early colonial labour policy was distinguished from contemporary practices in Britain by a far higher level of coercion.

Labour unsettled: Mobility and protest in the Madras region, 1750-1800

Yet, recent indigenist interpretations of history seem to fall back on this intellectual inheritance to prove a cultural dichotomy between ’homeostatic’ [sic!] but accounttable’ Indian communities that ostensibly ensured the subsistence of all and the dynamic but ’unaccountable’, exploitative capitalist society of the colonial. and post-colonial periods.2 However urgent present desires may be to immobilise (and

Making the Empire a Thinkable Whole: Master and Servant Law in Transterritorial Perspective

“[T]he question really comes to this”, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Ellenborough proclaimed during a labour trial before the Kings Bench in 1817, “whether the master or the servant is to have the superior authority” (pp. 59–60). The draconian punishment imposed on the accused “servants” by Englands highest-ranking judge left no doubts as to his beliefs concerning the answer to this question.

'Opening up the Country'? Patterns of Circulation and Politics of Communication in Early Colonial Orissa

The nineteenth century idea of self-sufficient ’village republics’ was a mainstay of Eurocentric conceptions of pre-colonial India as a stagnant ’civilization’ without history. The discovery of astounding levels of circulation that involved large segments of South Asian societies in the period preceding the rise of colonialism has rendered this idea untenable. This is no small achievement of South Asia’s social

Expropriating the Poor: Urban Land Control and Colonial Administration in Late Eighteenth Century Madras City

The second half of the eighteenth century was a crucial stage in the development of Madras as south India’s colonial metropolis as almost perpetual military conflict with France and Mysore forced the East India Company’s representatives and their allies in urban society to reconstruct the city according to the imperatives of war. This essay argues that changes in the city’s spatial and socio-political st-uctures were reflected in growing efforts on the part of the colonial administration to restrict the use of urban land by the city’s ’labouring poor’. An extension of historical analysis to the labouring classes of Madras may also help to shake some prevalent assumptions about the city’s historical development in general. According to Susan Neild-Basu, one of the few historians who has taken a closer look at the social history of south India’s colonial metropolis in the last few decades, Madras was a ’city of villages’ in 1800.1 The Imperial Gazetteer ofindia described the Madras of the early twentieth century in very similar terms:

Book Reviews : MEENA RADHAKRISHNA, Dishonoured by History? Criminal Tribes and British Colonial Policy, New Delhi, Orient Longman, 2001, pp. 192

particularly oppressive piece of colonial legislation, the ’Criminal Tribes Act’ (CTA) of 1911. While the first law of this kind had been enacted four decades earlier, the 1911 Act was significant in that it further facilitated the notification of ’criminal tribes’ by authorising local officials to register members of itinerant communities and their relatives summarily, without any legal procedure, as ’hereditary criminals’ . Moreover, the act extended ’criminal tribes’ legislation for the first time to the Madras Presidency. Radhakrishna’s study focuses specifically on implications of the CTA for the South Indian Koravar, Yerukula and Koracha communities whose traditional subsistence strategies (namely itinerant salt and grain trade) had progressively failed them after the mid-nineteenth century due to the introduction of railways, investment in roads and colonial revenue policies. Contextualising the debate on ’criminal tribes’ in the wider Victorian discourse on ’crime’, the author points out that British administrators in India laid far less emphasis on eugenic than on sociological ’explanations’ of crime. Hence nomadic communities were deemed to be criminal not because of their genetic disposition, but rather due to ’irrational’ habits (e.g., allegedly ’aimless wandering’), ‘immoral’ customs (e.g., easy divorce) and to a loss of traditional means of subsistence. ’Criminal tribes’, therefore, required civilisational effort, i.e., education backed up by coercion, and this was what the CTAs were intended to provide a legal framework for. Koravars, Yerukulas and Korachas, like other nomadic communities, had combined itinerant trade with other economic activities such as cattle breeding and the production of bamboo items. Yet when pack bullocks were increasingly replaced by carts and railways, when itinerant traders were sidelined by merchant firms, the colonial administration concluded that these communities had lost all ’visible sources of income’ and were, therefore, bound to take to crime. This was