Indian Economic & Social History Review current issue

Introduction: Princely spaces and domestic voices: New perspectives on the Indian princely states

Ikegame, A., Major, A. — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:14:16 PDT

Re-visioning princely states in South Asian historiography: A review

Zutshi, C. — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:14:17 PDT

This article reviews several key works within the scholarship on princely states produced in the past decade, in order to highlight their engagement with larger conversations in South Asian historiography. It argues that princely state scholarship no longer operates on the margins; rather, it has the potential to, and does, contribute to issues such as the idea of the feudal formation, the nature of modernity and the modern state, the articulation of religious and ethnic identities, women's status in Islam, and indigenous agency and resistance in colonial knowledge production, to name a few, that animate South Asian history while also transcending its narrow confines. Rather than analysing princely states in opposition to British India, these works approach them as distinct entities where particular social, economic and political conditions, combined with an interaction with external ideas and movements, produced certain outcomes in the realms of state, society and collective identity. Moreover, by combining archival research with ethnographic studies, these works have allowed access to the oral histories, memories, and vernacular literary traditions of several marginalised social groups in South Asia. More remains to be done, however, as we continue to decolonise these realms in popular memory and scholarly analysis, and the article suggests some directions princely state scholarship can take in this age of global historiographies.

Enslaving spaces: Domestic slavery and the spatial, ideological and practical limits of colonial control in the nineteenth-century Rajput and Maratha states

Major, A. — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:14:17 PDT

This article explores British attitudes to domestic slavery in the Princely States of Rajputana and Malwa in the nineteenth-century. Working primarily from colonial archives, it analyses British conceptions of the nature of slavery and slave-trading in Rajputana, making compari-sons between this and their perception of slavery in its wider Indian and transatlantic contexts in order to analyse British understandings of Rajput identity, family and gender relations, as well as their conception of the nature and limits of their political and moral influence. It argues that British constructions of ‘benign’ domestic slavery were juxtaposed against concerns about the implications of slave-trading for crime, stability and the integrity of territorial borders, in British and princely India. The article discusses British attempts to persuade Rajput rulers to prohibit and prevent slave-trading and slave-holding in their territories, representing this debate as a point of intersection between ideological imperatives (in this case anti-slavery ideals) and political concerns about the nature and limits of acceptable British intervention in the internal affairs of the ‘independent’ states, and demonstrating the degree to which ‘moral’ and practical concerns intertwined in the formation of political dis-course on the limits of British ‘authority’. British attempts to regulate slave-trading on the ground are also explored, and cases brought before the British for the restitution of illegally procured slaves, contained in British Parliamentary Papers and East India Company's Board's Collections and Foreign Department Records, are used to demonstrate the fluid manner in which individuals could move (or be moved) between British and Indian controlled spaces, physically and metaphorically, demonstrating the extent to which the British capacity to both control and even observe was in practice limited, both spatially and ideologically.

Space of kinship, space of empire: Marriage strategies amongst the Mysore royal caste in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Ikegame, A. — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:14:17 PDT

This article centres on perceptions of ‘space’ amongst members of the Mysore royal caste from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. There were several perceptions of space coexisting at the time. One was based upon a traditional idea of space that prohibited the aristocracy, especially the king, from travelling beyond a certain area. Another was the imposed perception of empire, which gave Indian royals the idea that parts of their world were connected horizontally through the expansion of empire. The Mysore royals tried to embody perceptions of both spaces through restrictions on kinship and strategic matrimonial alliances beyond their territories. On the one hand, one of the royal clans insisted that they had the right to receive women from the royal house by using a Dravidian kinship language of ‘reciprocity’, which had in practice never been fully exercised between the clan and the royal house in the pre-colonial period. On the other hand, some royal caste members were keen to embody the Imperial hierarchy, in which Mysore occupied the second highest position, by establishing marriage alliances with the Rajputs in northern India. By doing so, they could re-assert their status, both in terms of Imperial hierarchy and of Kshatriyaness. The article argues that both perceptions of spaces helped a national class of Indian aristocracy to emerge, and that that class of aristocracy still influences the political culture of India in the twenty-first century.

The Malabar Hill murder trial of 1925: Sovereignty, law and sexual politics in colonial princely India

Jhala, A. D. — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:14:17 PDT

This article seeks to address issues relating to sovereignty, law and sexual politics in colonial princely India through an examination of the Malabar Hill Murder Trial of 1925 in the Bombay High Court. In this particular case, the Hindu Maratha Maharaja of Indore was charged with the murder of his Muslim courtesan's lover. The ensuing trial illuminates two important developments in late colonial Indian law. First, it reveals how British courts empowered some Indian women as individual agents before the law, despite the restrictions of pardah (or seclusion), to contest and resist indigenous patriarchies. Second, it exposes the complex rela-tionship between Indian kingship and British paramountcy. Due to their position as semi-autonomous rulers, who were not under the restrictions of British Indian law, native princes were exempt from being tried in British Indian courts on the basis of their treaty regulations. This case discusses the extent to which the sexual desires and love unions of the Indian kings were affected by the princely state's fraught relationship with the colonial regime. In this in-stance, the Malabar Hill Murder trial cost the ruler his gaddi (throne) when he was compelled to abdicate.

To 'tear the mask off the face of the past': Archaeology and politics in Jammu and Kashmir

Rai, M. — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:14:17 PDT

This article examines the historical and political course followed by a colonial discipline, namely the British-initiated archaeological project, as it was extended to the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in the early twentieth century. It examines how and in what circumstances colonial archaeology was adopted both by the Dogra-Hindu rulers and their preponderantly Muslim subjects in this indirectly governed part of the British Indian Empire. This article argues that the adoption of this project emanated not so much from interest in the discipline of archaeology qua discipline, but in its ancillary political effects. It demonstrates that whereas the Hindu princely rulers modified colonial archaeology in ways that could enable them to use it buttress their sovereignty, their Kashmiri Muslim subjects appropriated it to strip the legitimacy off that very sovereignty. In the process, this article also highlights the capacity of various indigenous actors to recast aspects of colonial projects to serve their own several purposes.

Princely states and the making of modern India: Internationalism, constitutionalism and the postcolonial moment

Bhagavan, M. — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:14:17 PDT

This article examines discussions that took place regarding princely states at the moment of transition from colonial to postcolonial India. It argues for a rethinking of Nehru's vision for ‘the integration of states’, locating his intellectual position in his broader concerns with the United Nations and a framework of international rights. For Nehru, the relationship between princely states and independent India existed reciprocally with that between the new postcolonial state and the UN. The purpose of the article, then, is to understand what ‘princely states’ meant to the imagination of India, and, more broadly, the idea of postcoloniality itself.