History and Sociology of South Asia

This article is directed at historicising the language and practice of ‘civil liberties’ in India, and it does so by addressing the specific contingencies that have marked its early twentieth-century trajectory that continue to resonate in our historical present. Of course, the immediate point of departure for the article is a methodological fixation with what has been termed as a ‘political approach’ to rights, whose limits set the terms for a more historically resonant and contextually determined approach to an appraisal of normative languages like rights and civil liberties in highly charged political contexts. In thus illustrating the argument that the political approach to rights has translated into a constriction of the space of our normative languages, the effort here is also to set in perspective the pathways for a historicisation of ‘civil liberties’ in India—one sensitive to its subterranean regulatory folds that served to constitute the inner and outer limits of protest across socio-political collectivities active in the historical fields of action germane to the twentieth century India. These regulatory folds have persisted and sustain themselves well beyond the contours of the Constituent Assembly (CA) that went on to make for a republican India (although this latter point is only being hinted at within the broad ground traversed by this article).

This essay primarily concerns itself with attempting to retrieve contributions of some of the local and regional leaders of the Champaran Satyagraha Movement who have largely been left out by the existing literature. Further, it draws upon some of the unexplored archival sources as well as some vernacular literatures, mainly Hindi besides memoirs as well as newspaper reports have been used for the study. Yet, one faces huge constraints of evidences to find answers to many pertinent questions, which emerge after delving into the subject. This essay has been able to cull out significant information about the contributions of Pir Munis, mostly through the memoirs of the Hindi literatures and Hindi newspaper, Pratap. There is still a need to trace out many other sources to find out details about many other local leaders, who have been mentioned in this essay. Besides retrieving the roles played out by the local leaders and vernacular intelligentsia at great personal risks of state repression, this essay brings out that the agrarian problems of Champaran still suffers from something which has been inherited as a legacy during the colonial era, and even after seven decades post-independence many issues remains unresolved.

The complexities of studying informal sector labour can be dealt with bringing a wide range of identities and ideas used by the workers, which encompass beyond the socio-economic and political identities. ² 2

  This article is based on my MPhil dissertation, ‘Conditions of Informality: Beedi Industry in Colonial and Post 1947 Central India’, submitted to the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2015.

This article attempts to capture the diversified identities among the home-based beedi-making women workers and their settlement in Madhya Pradesh based on their oral interviews. Further, it captures how the division of work is sustained and perpetuated through the gendered allocation of work over the years. It also recounts how the state has perpetuated this division as the natural allocation of work in official discourse. Precisely, the article argues that how the worker’s narratives are an essential source to question the way work is explained in official language and the inequalities justified by the state.

The ‘new middle class’, often identified as an upwardly mobile segment, primarily employed in the growing private service sectors, such as the information technology, and supposedly, representative of the changing lifestyles and consumption patterns of the Indian middle class, has stolen much of the limelight of the contemporary popular as well as scholarly discourses on the Indian middle class. ² 2

  This article draws upon from the fieldwork conducted as part of my PhD work completed in 2016. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the international seminar on ‘The Middle Class in World Society’ held at ISEC (Institute of Social and Economic Change), Bangalore, India on 16^th and 17^th December, 2016.

This article, on the other hand, takes up a different social group located in West Bengal, having a close relationship with the state, often described as the ‘old middle class’/‘Nehruvian middle class’ in the postcolonial context, the respondents being predominantly public sector employees and academicians. By taking up the register of sanskriti (culture), the article argues that it is fundamentally through forging continuity from the past that this historically dominant social group is engaged in the construction of Bengali middle classness. Through an analysis of class and its relation to cultural distinctiveness, the article shows that the specific way in which this relation plays out in case of the respondents in my study and argues that any theoretical attempt to understand the complex relationship between class distinction and the question of taste needs to be grounded within narrowly defined contextualised specificities.

Bashing V.S. Naipaul’s travel books on India, the Caribbean, the Islamic World and Africa has produced a massive body of writing since the 1980s. Focusing on his perceived racism and Islamophobia, this literature seeks to thoroughly discredit Naipaul as a reliable chronicler of the lives of the victims of Western imperialism. Condemned, indeed, as an apologist for Western imperialism, Naipaul’s admitted brilliance as a writer of fiction has been dulled by these accusations. There is much truth in these critiques, but they are based on arguments that range from the accurate to the problematic to the quite simply wrong. Too many attacks on Naipaul’s work come from writers who have a limited knowledge of the body of his work or who misconstrue the knowledge they do have. Stepping back from the assault on Naipaul reveals important reasons to re-examine and rethink the meanings of his work and the lives it chronicles.

The British search for the custom within tribes to reproduce their knowledge which could be used for the imperial expansion in the Naga Hills of North East India. Nagas practiced oral tradition, therefore the colonial court judgment was based on how it understood what the litigants testified orally in the court without any prior documented directives. This way customary tradition of the people was interpreted back to the people according to how the court identified and understood what was customary. This strategically established symbolic authority, namely, favouring of ‘custom’ in the dispensation of justice. In addition to the British expansionist mission, there was also a very strong contender in the form of American Baptist Missionaries in the Naga Hills. Village life underwent a huge change as the Missionaries introduced the system of separating the village communities into the ancient ones and the converts khels (colony/block), which further altered the space for the operation of custom. In the process, the significant differences lasted as long as the imperial rule in the Naga Hills as is evident from many cases that read ancients/heathens v Christians lodged in the colonial courts in the Naga Hills.