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- Convenors:
-
Kim Wagner
(Queen Mary, University of London)
Michael Mann (Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin)
- Location:
- Room 111
- Start time:
- 27 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to re-assess the transformation of the Indian political landscape beyond the First World War, by exploring a new periodization; one that reflects global as well as local developments, and takes into account both long- and short-term factors.
Long Abstract:
The assassination attempt against Viceroy Lord Hardinge in Chandni Chowk in December 1912, and the killing of 23 Indian policemen at the hands of local rioters at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, marks the beginning and the end of what is arguably the most significant decade of change in India during the first half of the twentieth century. The decade was witness to the activities of anti-colonial nationalism assuming a truly global scope, the emergence of Gandhian politics and the short-lived co-operation of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. The contradictory impulses of British colonial policies furthermore led to the irreparable break in the relations between rulers and ruled following the 1919 Punjab disturbances. Within the conventional historiography on British India, however, the First World War still over-determines the manner in which the events of the decade are conceived. If the relentless and ongoing commemoration of 1914-18 has taught us anything, it is surely that a periodization derived from an exclusively Eurocentric perspective is of limited use when applied to South Asia. This panel seeks to re-assess the transformation of the Indian political landscape beyond the First World War, by exploring a new periodization; one that reflects global as well as local developments, and takes into account both long- and short-term factors. In other words, we wish to reimagine the period of 1912-22 in Sahlinian terms, as the site of a 'structure of the conjuncture'.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Mark Condos (Queen Mary University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the recruitment and employment of Punjabi soldiers and policemen in Britain’s overseas colonies became a source of insecurity and vulnerability that prompted new forms of coercive, legal intervention on the part of the colonial state.
Paper long abstract:
By the late nineteenth century, Punjab was one of the most strategically vital outposts within the entire British Empire. Not only was it the primary recruiting ground for the Indian Army, but it also increasingly furnished vital police and military manpower to British colonies outside of India. Although most historians have emphasized the untold benefits that Punjabi police and military labour provided to the wider empire, this paper examines how this same recruitment and movement of Punjabis overseas also created new challenges and problems for the Government of India. Whether it was fears that the popularity of overseas service was sapping the strength of the Indian Army and weakening its ability to defend against a potential Russian invasion through Afghanistan; rumours that Punjabis were taking up military service with Britain's European imperial rivals; or the panic caused by the return of radicalized ex-servicemen under the banner of the Ghadar Party during the First World War, the use of Punjabi military and police labour actually became a source of chronic colonial anxiety and insecurity. This acute sense of imperial vulnerability, in turn, prompted new forms of coercive political and legal intervention on the part of the colonial state, including the notorious 1915 Defence of India Act. By examining the 'flipside' of imperial security, this paper argues that we can gain new insight into the ways that authoritarian crackdowns by the colonial state were fundamentally driven by its own sense of weakness and precariousness.
John Pincince (Loyola University-Chicago)
Paper short abstract:
This paper historicizes the making of a colonial state of exception through an examination of legal-institutional 'moments' in the period from 1818-1919.
Paper long abstract:
This paper historicizes the making of a colonial state of exception through an examination of legal-institutional 'moments' in the period from 1818-1919. From Regulation III of 1818 to the Rowlatt Acts of 1919, the British colonial regime attempted to consolidate its legal-political authority over a 'de-politicized' colonial subject. In this paper, 1919 serves as a crucial break in the history of British India, not merely as a consequence of the end of WWI, but rather in the way anti-colonial resistance sought and came to challenge the British colonial regimes de-politicization of colonial subjectivities.
Gajendra Singh (University of Exeter)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will be a study of the everyday violence of the Ghadar Movement through one particular event – the Sahnewal dacoity in Colonial Punjab on 23rd January 1915. The everyday violence of Sahnewal will be used to explore the contours and constructions of revolutionary identity in the period.
Paper long abstract:
In Lahore, on the 26th April 1915, a trial began of 81 individuals for their connection to the Ghadar Movement. It was one of the first of a long list of prosecutions that were to take place in India, Burma, Canada and the United States. The Ghadar Movement served, in the Anglo-American imagination, as the missing link between anti-imperial violences in India, Ireland and Egypt and the ideologies of Anarchism, Bolshevism and Pan-Islamism. The dangers Ghadar posed required extraordinary measures. The Lahore trial was the first in a series of 'Conspiracy Cases' in British India that suspended ordinary jurisprudence. Guilt was assumed; it was innocence which had to be proven.
The near certainty of successful prosecutions made the Lahore trial a process of constructing a narrative of events rather than proving guilt. And, in that narrative of events relatively inconsequential crimes could become treason as long as it was shown that the participants were one step removed from an identifiable Ghadari.
This paper will focus on one such event - the Sahnewal dacoity on 23rd January 1915. It involved several men who killed and robbed a village moneylender, assaulted his wife and collectively raped his daughter-in-law. The paper will analyse how this relatively minor event could be used to construct revolutionary criminality and revolutionary consciousness in India during the First World War. It will explore the bodily violences committed at Sahnewal as a way of reading into the alternative consciousnesses of the rebel, and not-so-rebel, Ghadari.