This book deals with various political movements that have taken place in southern part of Orissa during colonial rule i.e. from the second half of Eighteenth Century to the first half of tweintieth century.
A provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.
Historians have generally focused on the ‘extraordinary’ forms of protest while speaking of the lives of oppressed social groups, but the basic survival strategies of these groups are often overlooked in research. The fact that excluded groups have managed to survive has, hidden right beneath the surface, a whole range of complexities, while also demonstrating their ability to resist dominant social orders. Biswamoy Pati’s posthumous volume on the lives of the tribals and dalits/outcastes in Orissa, from c. 1800 to 1950, shows how such communities were further impoverished by both colonial government policies and the chiefs of the despotic princely states. Colonial knowledge systems, constructions of the ‘criminal tribe’, and agrarian settlements affected tribals and dalits crucially. These marginalized groups were connected with the national movement. However, their inherited problems remained unresolved even after Independence. Examining these and several other issues such as adivasi strategies of resistance, indigenous systems of health and medicine, the colonial ‘medical gaze’, conversion (to Hinduism), the fluidities of caste formation, as well as the development of colonial capitalism and urbanization, the author presents a broader view of their struggle and endurance.
The manifestation of the colonial nation-state as a legal-bureaucratic-police structure – an exploitation tool – undermined customary modes of governance in colonies. When post-World War II independence of colonies transferred ownership of the state structure to the colonized elite, electoral and civil society politics battled for capture of this post-colonial state. Meanwhile, the state was also forced to build its legitimacy in the face of customary governance practices seeking rehabilitation and decolonization in the midst of civil wars and strife. This "state-building social movement" was further complicated with the global spread of neoliberalism and neocolonialism, and herein lies the significant difference between the post-colonial nation-state and the Western nation-states. This book fills the gap in literature and argues that it is necessary to foreground discussions of the nature of the post-colonial nation-state in examining resistance and provides a window into the dynamics of the post-colonial state and its implication in everyday organizing and resistance.
This is an invaluable collection for scholars working on the princely states of India due to abundance of sources consulted and broad coverage of the subject It includes contributions by authors from Europe/UK, India and North America. Both editors are highly regarded and well reputed scholars. Most contributors are well known researchers in their field It will be of interest to scholarly community in Europe/UK, North America, Asia and Australia where Indian History and Politics is taught
Under the guise of 'development', a globalizing capitalism has continued to cause poverty through dispossession and the exploitation of labour across the Global South. This process has been met with varied forms of rural resistance by local movements of displaced farm workers, small and landless (women) peasants, and indigenous peoples in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa, who are resisting the forced appropriation of their land, the exploitation of labour and the destruction of their ecosystems and ways of life. In this provocative new collection, engaged scholars and activists combine grounded case studies with both Marxist and anti-colonial analyses, suggesting that the developmental project is a continuation of the colonial project. The authors then demonstrate the ways in which these local struggles have attempted to resist colonization and dispossession in the rural belt, thereby contributing essential movement-relevant knowledge on these experiences in the Global South. A vital addition to the fields of critical development studies, political-sociology, agrarian studies and the anthropology of resistance, this book addresses academics and analysts who have either minimized or overlooked local resistances to colonial capital, especially in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions.
The history of medicine and disease in colonial India remains a dynamic and innovative field of research, covering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics. This volume presents a selection of essays examining varied aspects of health and medicine as they relate to the political upheavals of the colonial era. These range from the micro-politics of medicine in princely states and institutions such as asylums through to the wider canvas of sanitary diplomacy as well as the meaning of modernity and modernization in the context of British rule. The volume reflects the diversity of the field and showcases exciting new scholarship from early-career researchers as well as more established scholars by bringing to light many locations and dimensions of medicine and modernity. The essays have several common themes and together offer important insights into South Asia’s experience of modernity in the years before independence. Cutting across modernity and colonialism, some of the key themes explored here include issues of race, gender, sexuality, law, mental health, famine, disease, religion, missionary medicine, medical research, tensions between and within different medical traditions and practices and India’s place in an international context. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, sociology, politics and anthropology as well as specialists in the history of medicine.
More and improved roads, railways and canals are they in the public interest under all circumstances? Phrases like public works or infrastructure are rarely subjected to historical reflection. Colonial, nationalist and postcolonial operators have presented their transport policies as if they were informed by the needs of a general public and not shaped according to preferences of particularistic forces. Pathways of Empire moves beyond the technocratic progressivism of earlier writings on the history of transport. For the first time theories of produced social space are concretised in order to open a new perspective on India s social history of circulation and infrastructure. Moreover, the prevalent and narrow focus on railways is overcome. The effects of the steam revolution are thus located in the wider context of existent South Asian regimes of circulation.
This volume explores the theoretical foundations of postcolonial translation in settings as diverse as Malaysia, Ireland, India and South America. Changing the Terms examines stimulating links that are currently being forged between linguistics, literature and cultural theory. In doing so, the authors probe complex sequences of intercultural contact, fusion and breach. The impact that history and politics have had on the role of translation in the evolution of literary and cultural relations is investigated in fascinating detail. Published in English.
"Tribes" appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as "tribal" have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by "subaltern" groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, this book draws on fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research to argue that statemaking is intertwined inextricably with the politics of tribal resistance in the margins of modern India. Uday Chandra demonstrates how the modern Indian state and its tribal or adivasi subjects have made and remade each other throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, historical processes of modern statemaking shaping and being shaped by myriad forms of resistance by tribal subjects. Accordingly, tribal resistance, whether peaceful or violent, is better understood vis-à-vis negotiations with the modern state, rather than its negation, over the past two centuries. How certain people and places came to be seen as "tribal" in modern India is, therefore, tied intimately to how "tribal" subjects remade their customs and community in the course of negotiations with colonial and postcolonial states. Ultimately, the empirical material unearthed in this book requires rethinking and rewriting the political history of modern India from its "tribal" margins.