Search Result

Srl

Item

ID: 180615

Caste census and the impact of colonial sociology in British Assam / Sengupta, Madhumita; Bharadwaj, Jahnu

Sengupta, Madhumita	Journal Article
	0 Rating(s) & 0 Review(s)

Summary/Abstract

This essay challenges the salience of the caste question for writing a social history of modern Assam. It argues that pre-colonial records contained enough indicators for arguing that caste in Assam was never a rigid and impermeable social grid. The variegated nature of Assam’s geo-political and cultural past meant that the progress of Brahmanical culture here was neither smooth nor unmitigated. The essay argues that the region’s social and cultural intricacies could not be comprehended through an interpretive framework developed in a pan-Indian context. The same was, however, used by the census officials to streamline the region’s discrete patterns into rigidly structured hierarchies and uniformly imagined categories. Through a close reading of the pre-decennial and decennial census reports and other records from the nineteenth century, this essay identifies numerous misreading of local level empirical data that enabled the British to produce a uniform caste history for the region.

Key Words

Caste ; Religion ; Rituals ; Enumeration ; Category

Links

'Full Text'

In Basket

Export

ID: 180616

Coolies, tea plantations and the limits of physical violence in colonial Assam: a historiographical note / Bharadwaj, Jahnu

Bharadwaj, Jahnu	Journal Article
	0 Rating(s) & 0 Review(s)

Summary/Abstract

The paper seeks to locate the violence perpetrated on the bodies of the coolies in colonial Assam. The paper observes that the existing historiography on tea plantations in colonial Assam restricts corporeal violence on the coolies within the boundaries of the plantation estates and does not talk about the permeation of such violence to spaces and coolies totally outside of the plantation production process. This paper, with the evidence from a case from nineteenth-century Assam, extends the limits of corporeal violence on the coolies beyond the physical setup of the plantations. The paper proposes that histories of corporeal violence on labour in the colonial era need to look beyond the peripheries of the plantations and towards the social regimes of power under colonialism. The paper demonstrates the complicit character of the state and newly landed and moneyed native classes in the colony, which aggravated the magnitudes of violence on labour.

Key Words

Violence ; Historiography ; Coolie ; Colonial Assam ; Tea Plantations

Links

'Full Text'

In Basket

Export