PRESENTERS AND ABSTRACTS
William Gould is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds. His latest books are on the history of the everyday state and corruption – Bureaucracy, Community and Influence: Society and the State in India (Routledge, 2012) and religious conflict – Religion and Conflict in Modern South Asia (Cambridge, 2012), and he has also worked on Hindu nationalism and the Congress in Uttar Pradesh – Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge, 2004). He is currently working on a collaborative project exploring the experiences of Denotified Tribes over India’s independence, which involves the making of a historical documentary.
Patronage, Publicity and the Black Market: The politics of Food and Civil Supply and ‘anti-corruption’ in 1940s UP cities: In 1943 India’s food and civil supply bureaucracy was near the centre of one of the most devastating famines of the twentieth century. In Uttar Pradesh, this administrative machinery was also a key mechanism in the working of political patronage. This paper explores the unusual position of these government servants of the early ‘license-permit-raj’ system, and looks at how the specific exigencies of war-time India, created the conditions for the more direct exploitation of supply officers by local politicians after 1947. But just as Town and District Supply Officers formed connections with Members of the Legislative Assembly, so too did ‘citizens’ movements in UP cities begin to develop media-driven campaigns against their ‘corruption’, and the blackmarkets in which they were immersed. The administration of Food and Civil Supply became one of the central planks in the development of the early post-colonial Indian project of ‘Anti-Corruption’ in urban spaces, even while rationing and civil supplies continued as the archetypal machinery of political patronage and clientelism.
Justin Jones is Lecturer in South Asian history at the University of Exeter. He specialises in South Asian Islam since c.1850, and has worked extensively on Islamic reform in the urban public sphere of colonial north India.
Nationalism in the city, and the city in nationalism: political fashions in Lucknow, 1909-1939: In the early 1920s, Lucknow became the capital of the colonial United Provinces. Thereafter, through the interwar years, the city became central in the stories of both the expansion of formal political arenas, and the emergence of the north Indian plains as the centre of popular nationalism. This paper will examine the ways in which political life in the city was informed by language, ritual and imagery rooted in the city’s perceived character and past. Discussing a range of public sphere associations and debates, this paper examines how political discourse in the city often incorporated a distinctively ‘Lucknawi’ character and rhetoric. Not only did public intellectuals construct a notion of Lucknawi cosmopolitanism as a component of nationalist discourse, but nationalist political activity in Lucknow often found itself taking on distinctive ideas and imagery in the Lucknawi setting. The paper, then, emphasises how the city itself exercised a particular influence upon nationalist politics and, conversely, how wider nationalist politics often found itself refracted through local motifs and senses of belonging.
Prashant Kidambi is Senior Lecturer in Colonial Urban History in the School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester. His research explores the interface between British imperialism and the history of modern South Asia through the prism of the urban. In addition to a number of journal articles and book chapters, Dr. Kidambi is the author of a major study of colonial Bombay, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920 (Ashgate, 2007).
Nationalism and Municipal Politics in inter-war Bombay City: In the inter-war years nationalism increasingly claimed the colonial city as the site of its own sovereignty. Notably, popular nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s spawned an extensive repertoire of collective performances and extra-constitutional forms of public action and protest that sought to re-territorialize the city as nationalist space. Simultaneously, however, nationalists also began to exercise institutional power in the municipal sphere. Yet, save for a few studies (notably, Ray 1979; Haynes 1991; and Gooptu 2001), this development has seldom been scrutinised closely. The teleological framework underpinning many of the writings on the nationalist movement have tended to construe the politics of the urban arena as an increasingly inconsequential side-show tothe anti-colonial struggle as it unfolded at the national level during the inter-war years. This paper redresses this neglect and examines the interplay between nationalism and municipal politics in colonial Bombay between the wars. In particular, it shows how municipal politics in the city were reshaped by nationalist mobilization, projects of reform and conceptions of urban citizenship.
Stephen Legg is Associate Professor at the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. His research focuses on colonial Delhi and explores themes of urban governmentality, nationalism and social memory, and the scalar politics of prostitution regulation. He has published Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Blackwell, 2007) and edited Sovereignty, Spatiality and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (Routledge, 2011)
Spatial Histories and Affective Geographies: Forms and Narratives of Nationalism in Colonial DelhiDelhihas been overwritten in imperial historiographies as a City of Empire, and the Capital of the Raj. Various works have recently set about exploring the local geographies of colonialism in the city, but a similar process of spatial recuperation has not taken place regarding Delhi as a city of nationalism. In this paper I will explore the methodologies through which we can explore cities as constitutive agents of nationalism. In part this is a question of spatial history; of paying attention to the intersecting scales of (inter)nationalism, relational networks with other cities, and the distribution and clusters of social movements throughout the urban landscape. But, I will suggest, balancing these narratives, must come attention to the performative repertoire of urban nationalism, spaces of religious community and (non-)violence, sites of counter-memory, and communities that threaded the national into daily and domestic routines; that is to say, to affective geographies.
Eleanor Newbigin is a lecturer in modern South Asian history at SOAS. Her work explores ideas and practices of citizenship in India, especially during the subcontinent’s transition to independence, including its partition. She has published several articles that explore the way in which discussions about religious family (or personal) law in India during the interwar years impacted on the formation of patriarchal structures and state secularism in post-colonial India (as well as editing a special edition of theIndian Economic and Social History Review (2009) on 'Personal law, identity politics and civil society in colonial South Asia'. This paper is taken from her current book project on Hindu law and the making of the 'modern' Indian state.
Constructing the 'urban' colonial subject: taxation and representation in interwar India: Limited devolution of power in the first half of the twentieth century paved the way for a new era in Indian politics that was distinctly marked by the presence and influence of urban, as opposed to rural, Indian elites. The war effort and the constitutional reforms that followed it committed the colonial administration to finding new and sustainable sources of funding to support the much-expanded state structure. The colonial administration sought to pay for these developments through the introduction of progressive income taxation – a charge that had historically been levied on non-agricultural incomes. Officials realized that it was more lucrative to tax wealthy Hindu families as a single financial collective than to break it down into individual payees. While Hindu businessmen and professionals initially opposed this move, they soon found that this aspect of colonial policy could be made to work to their advantage. Exploring the resulting bartering and negotiation, this paper traces the emergence of a specifically ‘urban’, but also Hindu, economic subject as the central figure of both colonial fiscal policy formation and Indian nationalist mobilization.
AnishVanaikis a D.Phil candidate at the Department of History, University of Oxford. His dissertation work is on property relations in Delhi, 1911-1947.
An Arena of Government: encroachment, public spaces and municipal politics in colonial Delhi: The commodification of urban space in 20th century Delhi generated a new set of relationships between space and time. Ownership came to be the idiom through which the municipality enunciated an idea of public-ness: asserting its authority vis-a-vis individual owners and neighbourhoods alike through a discourse about encroachment on its land. But, the diktats of economy in expenditure and rise and fall of property values, in turn, came to shape the spatial interventions of public defined in this fashion. The range of ways of creating common spaces that emerged from these contradictory impulses – charity hospitals, schools, parks and health clinics – generated both a crucible in which nationalist activity was formed and an arena in which they sought to participate. Its importance is more precisely limned when contrasted with the agitational idiom through which ideas of the nation as a common project was also asserted. Agitations like the various hartals, or pickets during the Civil Disobedience movement, or mass meetings, while spatially spread out were temporally more restricted marking, then,the municipality as an arena crucial to nationalist activity.