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Appropriation and Invention of Tradition
This book, strongly grounded in primary sources, makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of early modern Bengal. It brings to light the complex interpenetration of diverse interests, opinions, and ideologies articulated by various social groups implicated in the process of colonization on the lines of Ranajit Guha's work on property relations in Bengal and Radhika Singha's work on law. There is no comparable work specifically on the subject of Hindu property rights and how these came to be perceived or interpreted in early modern Bengal. The author explores the so-called compendia prepared under British auspices and argues that there was hardly any link between the Smritis and the laws. The latter were determined almost entirely by changing British policy with regard to land revenue and that many of the positive features of Hindu custom like women's rights to property were undermined in the process.
Custom, Law and the Colonial State in Northeast India
This volume presents a multidimensional analysis of the current operational law - both constitutional and customary - in Northeast India. It looks at how colonialism redesigned and redefined extant customary practices, leaving a permanent legacy on the legal governance and societal structure of the postcolonial Indian state. The book interrogates 'law' through a broad spectrum of issues including gender, partition, the legacy of colonial structures, and religion as a form of resistance against land grabbing and censorship. It delineates a distinct historical process of the evolution of law and custom, and focuses on the intimate links between law and the dynamics of state, ethnicity, and governance. A unique contribution, the book offers new insights into how and why the continuity of colonial law within a democratic framework perpetuates deep rooted problems in governance and the psyche of the people. It will be indispensable for students and researchers of history, law, anthropology, legal anthropology, sociology, Indian politics, and South Asian studies.
Empires of Complaints
In this deeply researched and revealing account, Robert Travers offers a new view of the transition from Mughal to British rule in India. By focusing on processes of petitioning and judicial inquiry, Travers argues that the East India Company consolidated its territorial power in the conquered province of Bengal by co-opting and transforming late Mughal, Persianate practices of administering justice to petitioning subjects. Recasting the origins of the pivotal 'Permanent Settlement' of the Bengal revenues in 1793, Travers explores the gradual production of a new system of colonial taxation and civil law through the selective adaptation and reworking of Mughal norms and precedents. Drawing on English and Persian sources, Empires of Complaints reimagines the origins of British India by foregrounding the late Mughal context for colonial state-formation, and the ways that British rulers reinterpreted and reconstituted Persianate forms of statecraft to suit their new empire.
Britain's Oceanic Empire
A comparative study of how the British managed the expansion of empire in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean.
Making Sense of the Secular
This book offers a wide range of critical perspectives on how secularism unfolds and has been made sense of across Europe and Asia. The book evaluates secularism as it exists today – its formations and discontents within contemporary discourses of power, terror, religion and cosmopolitanism – and the focus on these two continents gives critical attention to recent political and cultural developments where secularism and multiculturalism have impinged in deeply problematical ways, raising bristling ideological debates within the functioning of modern state bureaucracies. Examining issues as controversial as the state of Islam in Europe and China’s encounters with religion, secularism, a...
Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta
Explores how the British Empire responded to the environmental challenges of the world's largest tidal delta.
After Secular Law
Bringing together scholars with a variety of perspectives and orientations, this work examines the interconnections between law and religion and the unexpected histories and anthropologies of legal secularism in a globalizing modernity.
Culture, Heritage and Identity: The Lepcha and Mangar Communities of Sikkim and Darjeeling
This book is about cultural politics and the quest for identity of two marginal communities of Sikkim and Darjeeling – the Lepcha and the Mangar. Sharing insights into the knowledge, aesthetics, aspirations and dreams of two marginal communities who have been innovatively and differentially appropriating ‘culture’ to exploit the politics of difference, it is a narrative about their ethno-cultural consciousness, notions of identity and anxieties over being minority communities in a pluralistic democracy. The narrative is essentially presented in the form of a field-trip diary, with observations and comments which try to situate the issues within a larger perspective. Based on two years of intensive field study, the book chronicles the endeavour of these two communities to reclaim their cultural past, and forge an identity that would ensure material security, self-esteem, dignity and also the fruits of ‘modernity’. The book will be useful to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, politics and history, especially those engaged in the study of culture and ethnicity in the Eastern Himalayan region.
