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4 Comparative and Historical Sociology

4.1 Comparative Sociology
See Sharma (14.1); Thorat & Fan (9.6); Vaiphei (10.3)

4.2 Historical Sociology

Bhukya, Bhangya: Delinquent Subjects: Dacoity and the Creation of a Surveillance Society in Hyderabad State. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 2 (2007): 179-212. This article looks at the colonial model of surveillance of criminal communities deployed in Hyderabad state, and specifically at the colonial states construction of the dacoity of the Lambada tribe. The colonial construction of Lambada dacoity was framed in terms of caste, religion and race, and reinforced by European notions of nomadism and criminality. The author shows how dacoity was associated with the community through extensive anthropological studies, census reports and surveys sponsored by the colonial state. Morphological traits such as the Lambadas claim (like many other adivasis and lower caste groups) to martial (Rajput) lineage, their religious practices, their occupations, and their past history of wartime pillaging were used by colonial administrators to fix dacoity as the hereditary practice of the Lambadas. On the contrary, the author claims that dacoity among the Lambadas was a result of the destruction of their longstanding livelihood practices, forced settlement and the distressing situation caused by recurring famines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871 and the stigmatization of the whole community restricted their movement and eventually led after the famines to a steep increase in crime in the state between 1916 and 1921. The policing techniques of the colonial state also varied from the Nizams in using finger printing, extradition, surveillance, registration of criminal tribes, anthropometric classification, etc. As a result, many Lambadas were forced to settle and become peasants, agricultural labourers or factory workers. Nonetheless, the stigma of dacoity hampered their social reputation and their engagement in an honest livelihood, a stigma which continues today in post-colonial India.

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Anwar, Ahmer Nadeem: The Noose, the Hegemon and the Apostate Body: Spectacular Transformations of the Scaffold Scene. Social Scientist 35, 3 & 4 (2007): 68-107. This article reflects on the event of the hanging of Saddam Hussein and the spectacle created around it. It reiterates the fact that the act of punishment and retributive justice reproduces the trauma, pain and horror involved in the original crime itself. The author contends that the intention of bloody vendetta is always embedded within the institution of capital punishment. Taking Dickenss Oliver Twist as the point of departure, he exemplifies the photo-negative likeness of crime and punishment. Just as Dickens intricately explains the psychological complexities that are created by the act of hanging of the criminal, the article explores the complex play of politics, power and spectacle that was created around the image of Saddam in front of the noose in the national and international media across the world. Foucaults idea of modernity corresponds with less visible and more clinical mechanisms of deaths, unlike earlier times when public execution was a matter of everyday life. In modern/postmodern times, the spectacle of death does not belong to the discourse of justice but to that of power and realpolitik, such that the violence inflicted on the body becomes a macro-political scene. Under the veneer of curbing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the attack on Iraq and the hanging of Saddam disclose a primitive desire to chase, curb and kill, merged with the new-age technology and phantasmagoric juxtaposition of images from the beginning of the attack till the end when Saddam is seen standing helplessly before the noose. In this way, and substantiated by reference to novels, films and theatrical performances, the article provides an insight into the complex interplay of politics, justice and psychology of a retributive spectacle of postmodern times.

Ciotti, Manuela: Ethnohistories behind Local and Global Bazaars: Chronicles of a Chamar Weaving Community in the Banaras Region. Contributions to Indian Sociology 41, 3 (2007): 321-54. Based on in-depth ethnographic research and oral narratives, this paper analyses the history of weaving in a Chamar (Untouchable)

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community on the outskirts of the city of Banaras, eastern Uttar Pradesh, from the 1930s. It explores the earlier recruitment of rural Chamar men as apprentices to the citys Muslim master weavers, the subsequent emergence of a class of Chamar artisans, and then its gradual disappearance from the 1990s onwards. The paper begins with a discussion of the nexus between the shift in Chamar caste identity and culture in the pre-Independence period following their induction into the weaving industry, and the role of this artisan community in changing inter-caste and interreligious relations in the political economy of weaving in Banaras. The paper then describes the silk industry in Banaras and wider socio-economic trends that occurred in the region up to the 1930s, when the Chamars, originally small cultivators and landless labourers, began to be recruited into the citys economy as apprentices to the Muslim master weavers. Chamar weavers subsequently went back to their villages, where they were employed in the production of silk saris in a putting-out system. Their ritual status improved as a result of this craft production. Since the 1990s, the promotion of economic liberalization policies in India and the opening up of the handloom sector to competition from machine-manufactured textiles and imported silk textiles from China have led to a precipitate decline in the Banaras silk and sari industry. The Chamar weaving community began to experience a business slowdown which culminated in the almost total disappearance of their industry in the early 2000s. Former weavers have increasingly joined the ranks of unskilled casual labourers, and the social distance between them and the Chamar recruits to government service and the formal sector work has steadily increased as a result.

Hardiman, David: Purifying the Nation: The Arya Samaj in Gujarat, 1895-1930. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 1 (2007): 41-65. This article examines the history of communal violence in Gujarat by focusing on the growth and development of the Arya Samaj in the state between the years 1895 and 1930. Though the founder of the Arya Samaj, Dayanand Saraswati was from Gujarat, his first followers were Punjabis brought to Gujarat by Sayajirao Gaekwad

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of Baroda to carry out educational work among Untouchables. The Arya Samaj attained popularity in Gujarat only after mass proselytization among the Untouchables by Christians. Its main followers were the urban middle-classes, the higher farming castes and gentry of the Koli caste who joined the movement for various reasons, including upward social mobility, religious unity, and so on. From 1915, after the return of Gandhi from South Africa, many followers had drifted to the Gandhian movement until Gandhis arrest and imprisonment in 1922. Gandhi was closely associated with the Arya Samaj movement though he never extended it his unqualified support. Gandhis imprisonment and the Muslim revolt in Malabar in 1921 brought about a rift amongst leaders of the Congress and ultimately led to the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1923, the revival of quiescent Hindu organizations and the revival of shuddhi propaganda by the Arya Samajists. The riots of 1927-28 are also alleged to be the result of incitement by leading caste Hindus of the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha. The author also examines the changing profile of the Bohra Muslims of the region, their economic growth as an aggressively enterprising community in the 20th century and their relationship with other Hindus and Muslims. The author concludes that while the Arya Samaj played multiple roles as an organization and prompted the alienation of Muslims in Gujarat from the Indian National Congress, it was not solely responsible for the communal riots in the state.

Hatcher, Brian A.: Sanskrit and the Morning After: The Metaphorics and Theory of Intellectual Change. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 3 (2007): 333-61. The article is a critical reflection on Sheldon Pollocks project on Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism which deals with the practice and fate of Sanskrit intellectual life between 1550 and 1750, as well as on Sudipta Kavirajs interpretation of the same. The author takes issue, firstly, with the profuse use of metaphors in the work expressions such as the death of Sanskrit, the eve of colonialism, the replacement of Sanskrit by the vernaculars, etc. which together suggest sharp historical discontinuities. In fact, according to the author, Sanskrit survived, albeit under new

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conditions of training, patronage and material production, much after it was surmised to be dead in 1750, a surmise that suggests a strongly normative vision of authenticity and of the historicity of language. The author then critically analyses Kavirajs understanding of the many new beginnings and historical ruptures that he associates with the arrival of European modernity and the replacement of indigenous knowledge systems. The author then goes on to reinterpret the fate of Sanskrit in colonial Bengal through the concept of vernacularization, underlining the ways in which Sanskrit learning converged with colonial systems of knowledge and adopted a new social role. This process of cultural synthesis and transvaluation is elaborated through an exploration of Vidyasagaras Bengali tracts which disclose the continued respect for Sanskrit in the colonial period as both a form of expression and a cultural resource.

Mandal, Krishna Kumar: Forms of Peasant Protest in the Jatakas. Social Scientist 35, 5 & 6 (2007): 39-46. In this brief paper, the writer describes the several forms of peasant resistance disclosed through the Jataka tales, an important source of folklore for the reconstruction of the history of India. Since class antagonism is present in some form or other in any type of society, the writer has explored the general ideas of protest through words, phrases and different kinds of verbal and non-verbal communication in the Jatakas. The stories not only describe the contemporary situation of land, peasantry and agriculture but also provide an alternative to the dominant system. Through the songs and the stories, the Jatakas explain the exploitative relations of production. The mention of Gahapatis as the controllers of the primary means of production, the large estates belonging to Brahmanas, Sethis and Khattiyas being worked on by slaves and hired labourers, and the antagonistic relations between the peasants and the landowners are some of the prominent issues in the Jatakas. Another form of peasant protest was migration from the land when the regime became oppressive. There is also mention of various contractual systems by which the labourers were exploited. The most formidable form of protest was abusive language and body language or movements. In fact, several peasants

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were also punished for using abusive language towards their masters. Further, the Jatakas also mention robbery as a technique of defiance. Some Jatakas also mention peoples movements against the king. Altogether, these stories demonstrate that the Jatakas are an important source of popular literature to understand the everyday forms of peasant resistance in ancient India.

Misra, Sanghamitra: Law, Migration and New Subjectivities: Reconstructing the Colonial Project in an Eastern Borderland. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 4 (2007): 425-61. This article emphasizes the significance of writing the history of a borderland, that is, a social and cultural system or crush zone straddling a border between centres of sovereign territorial power. The author takes the case of the borderland area of Goalpara, a historically liminal and fluid space located between the politically compact provinces of Assam and Bengal, focusing on the negotiations and contestations between the colonial state, settled agriculturists and peripatetic communities in Goalpara. Despite its late entry in the mid-nineteenth century, colonial modernity irrevocably transformed the social and material life of the local communities of Goalpara, as witnessed by the appropriation of marginal histories and regions by dominant narratives which are re-inscribed into the narrative of the nation. The complex social relationships and networks between the settled and peripatetic communities were reduced to dichotomous ones in the dominant discourse through processes of the privileging of sedentarization, the settlement of wastelands, and the extension of colonial legality into everyday lives. The article also details the influx of migrants from East Bengal in the early twentieth century which altered the population figures and regional economy, and looks at the changing material relations and perception of the law by the people as well as the legitimacy provided by colonial law for the continuance of the system. The concluding section also looks at how various communities and social groups worked with the colonial regime to reinvent customs, create spaces for self-representation and enhance economic opportunities while also circumventing and resisting the colonial project.

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OHanlon, Rosalind: Cultural Pluralism, Empire and the State of Modern South Asia: A Review Essay. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 3 (2007): 363-81. This review article discusses two recent works on Indias early modern history Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbots India before Europe (2006) and Indo-Persian Travels In The Age of Discoveries, 14001800 (2007) by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam and their presentation of the historical continuities, transformations and ruptures that shaped Indias historical transition to the present. India in Asher and Talbots history is multicultural and cosmopolitan, with the focus on the interplay between Indic and Islamic culture, providing thereby a corrective to the Hindu nationalist search for the origins of communal antagonism. Asher and Talbot trace the history of the Mughal Empire in India to show that its peak was characterized by commercial dynamism and successful multicultural regional states, while its disintegration was a result of the complex interplay of many factors. The authors also outline the significant geographical, commercial and sociological shifts that began to reshape the subcontinents regional societies from the late seventeenth century, placing the state at the centre of Indias early modern history. Unlike the Asher and Talbot book, with its greater emphasis on the state, Alam and Subrahmanyam explore the individual experiences of central and west Asian travelers to India between 1400 and 1800. These accounts show the changing setting for literary and intellectual endeavours in early modern India in the growth of all-India networks of patronage and employment, in the development of new genres of expression, and in the development of a new and wider audience for aspirant literati. Through exploration of diverse texts ranging over four centuries, the authors claim that unlike the Orientalist project there was no single IndoPersian view of India, but a Persophone cultural formation that cut across the boundaries of subsequent national histories. The narrative also reveals some interesting tensions between literary genres and social experience.

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Oldenburg, Veena Talwar: Afternoons in the Kothas. Seminar 575 (2007): 36-45. Based on research conducted over the decade 1976-86 in the city of Lucknow, this article provides an intimate account of the lives of some of the citys courtesans, their strategies for ensuring survival and economic independence, and their challenge to the very respectability of the institution of marriage. The account is set in the context of British colonial domination which dehumanized the profession of the courtesans, stripping it of its cultural functions while making sex cheap and exposing the women to venereal infection from European soldiers. Dismantling many of the clichs and prejudices surrounding the lives of the courtesans, the author details the compelling circumstances that brought the majority of the women to the various tawaif households in Lucknow, chiefly the misery they endured in either their natal or their conjugal homes. Under such adverse circumstances, the life of a courtesan was one way in which women could liberate and empower themselves. The article sums up a century-long process of converting a proud cultural institution into a species of vice, and Lucknows celebrated kothas (courtesans residences) into musty dens for furtive sexual encounters.

Pati, Biswamoy: Nationalist Politics and the Making of Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Social Scientist 35, 9 & 10 (2007): 52-66. In this article, based primarily on secondary sources such as the private papers of Tilak and the English newspaper Mahratta, the author revisits the way historiography has located Tilak as a conservative reactionary or a political extremist. Representing the face of nationalism in a transitional phase, the writer argues that in all Tilaks political interventions vis--vis the moderates, there was a clear logic, which was the attempt to represent the bourgeoisie as a class in the colonial context. The paper looks at four instances of Tilaks intervention into politics: (i) his position vis- -vis the Age of Consent bill; (ii) his efforts to take the Shivaji and the Ganapati festivals to the streets; (iii) his effort to link urban-centric politics to famine-affected peasants of Maharashtra; and finally (iv) his interactions with the working class of Bombay. According to the

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author, these examples illustrate the inadequacy of the colonialist labels of moderate and extremist politics. In fact, what was typically regarded as Tilaks extremist politics was also very much part of Congress politics. The author also communicates the need to contextualize and problematize theoretical formulations of the public sphere and modernity. Altogether, the article unsettles the idea that conventional history presents of Tilak as a political figure.

Pingle, Urmila: C. Von Frer-Haimendorf: Half a Century of His Imprint on Tribal Welfare in Andhra Pradesh. The Eastern Anthropologist 60, 3 & 4 (2007): 565-580. This article reflects on the ethnographic work of C. Von FrerHaimendorf. Between 1940 and 1949, Frer-Haimendorf had carried out a series of studies of various tribes of Andhra Pradesh the Chenchus, Hill Reddis and Raj Gonds using a holistic and multidisciplinary approach within an essentially evolutionary perspective. His studies have proved useful for administrative purposes. Pingle goes on to describe specific details of Frer-Haimendorfs work and of his stay with each of these tribes, where he followed their lifestyles and shared in their hardships. In the course of his fieldwork he also functioned as an activist for the tribes, advocating and implementing land reserves for the Chenchus and a schooling system for the Gonds to protect them from external exploitation. He was also the Advisor to the Nizams government for tribes and backward classes. In sum, Frer-Haimendorf was not only an administrator with close access to government officials, but also played a strong part in the implementation of tribal policy.

Sen, Satadru: The Orphaned Colony: Orphanage, Child and Authority in British India. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 4 (2007): 463-88. This article examines British encounters with Indian, Andamanese, white and African orphans in colonial India in the second half of the nineteenth century, arguing that orphans provided colonial administrators with opportunities to articulate increasingly scientific constructions of race.

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In India in the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial state and its semi-official allies had begun a long and intimate relationship with Indian children, white subalterns, aborigines and several others who violated an increasing significant colour line. This was part of a broadly shared academic and bureaucratic effort to construct a hierarchically organized but ideologically consistent inventory of modern childhoods within the unitary field of empire. While metropolitan experiments sought to establish the normative criteria of Victorian childhood, colonial experiments investigated deviations which would not only reinforce the norms, but also render colonialism necessary and rewarding. Orphaning as a linguistic-conceptual category allowed the colonial agents to enter into a relationship of rescue with the children they acquired, bypassing questions of legal custody. The interest of the colonial administration in orphans was generated in the aftermath of the 1857 Rebellion as an attempt, especially in the case of Eurasian and white orphans, to save the race and provide for its survival in a hostile environment. This experimentation extended to cases of Black African orphans, as in the case of Bombays African Asylum, a category that marked an intersection between slaves and orphans, as well as to the Andamanese procured orphans in the Andaman home, subjects of the colonial effort to study and rule the savage. In sum the author concludes that orphaning in late nineteenth century India was not only a metaphor for governance, but also a problem of governance, and in some situations a technique for the management of colonized populations.

Sivasundaram, Sujit: A Christian Benares: Orientalism, Science and the Serampore Mission of Bengal. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 2 (2007): 111-45. This article describes the style of science instruction practiced by the Serampore trio (Rev. William Carey, Rev. William Ward and Rev. Joshua Marshman), Baptist missionaries who brought Western science to the non-Western world, but practiced it in a distinctive way. The Serampore college trio adopted Sanskrit science alongside European science in order to create a Christian Benaras at Serampore. In addition to teaching European languages and sciences,

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the college encouraged the study of vernacular languages and employed Brahmins to teach the Sanskrit sciences. Though their success in their mission of colonizing the minds of their pupils is doubtful, as instanced in the fraught relation with Rammohun Roy, they did succeed in bringing about changes in agriculture, in the practice of botanical description and in the teaching of science in India.

Subramanian, Lakshmi: A Language for Music: Revisiting the Tamil Isai Iyakkam. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 1 (2007): 19-40. Amanda Weidman, in her essay Can the Subaltern Sing? (2006), argues that the polarization of caste politics and challenges to classical music by the Tamil music movement created a divergence between Karnatik music and the Tamil language. This article seeks to re-examine the history of the Tamil Isai that configured the language-music dichotomy in the twentieth century, locating it in the larger context of the social history of the literary and musical culture of Tamil Nadu. Until the late nineteenth century, South Indian music culture existed at various levels in ritual, court entertainment and learning, each influencing the other and involving a miscellany of caste groups. The Brahmanization of the music tradition can be traced to the cultural politics of Tanjore under Nayaka rule in the seventeenth century, when the various layers of the music tradition came to be associated with certain caste groups. The Tamil Isai Iyakkam expressed the changing political equation in the Madras Presidency where non-Brahmins used the Tamil language to emphasize their difference from the Brahmins. The Movement produced a Tamil devotionalism, an extension of which was the Tamil Music Movement which sought to promote Tamil songs. Tamil music was defined as an expression of popular devotion, with centrality given to lyrics and the affective voice. Though the Tamil Isai became a popular art through the medium of cinema, it was trapped in the dominant discourse of classicism and cannot be properly termed the voice of the subaltern.

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Xavier, ngela Barreto: Disquiet on the Island: Conversion, Conflicts and Conformity in Sixteenth Century Goa. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 44, 3 (2007): 269-95. In this article the author looks at how the negative effects of the Christian presence in Goa under the Portuguese were overcome and transformed into an acceptable situation by the people of the territory. After much struggle and negotiation by the colonial governors, Goa became the true centre of Portuguese power in Asia in 1530. This was followed by the destruction of non-Christian temples, mass conversion and the incorporation of missionaries into the colonial imperium. While conversion had threatened to upset the old social order, it did not in fact lead to its collapse but rather to a legitimization of the old structures through new ritual practices. Using Clifford Geertzs method of thick ethnographic description applied to the colonial and missionary descriptions of the social and religious landscape of the people, the author studied the impact of the colonial invasion and conversion on the local society in two villages on the island of Choro, where conversions took place to disclose the several ways in which Christian presence was negotiated by the local people and the adaptive processes of agents of Christian missionary activity. The author suggests a number of reasons for the continuance of the social order in spite of the disruption of religious structures consequent on conversion to Christianity. Apart from the complexity of the local social order as a reflection of the existing fissures of power within and between villages and the heterogeneity of devotional worlds, the political goals entailed in conversion resulted in tension between theological matters and political goals. The attitude of the population vying for better social position or seeking to maintain their traditional status resulted in stable but not static structural relations among converts. This process in return reinforced Portuguese power. See also Freitag (6.8); Narayan (24.1); Narayan (23.1); Patel (13.1); Prasad (16.1); Rao (14.5)