The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2009
This special edition of the Indian Economic and Social History Review explores the ways in which ... more This special edition of the Indian Economic and Social History Review explores the ways in which law provided a forum for the construction of new notions of gender, family and community relationships in South Asia. Law, which has proved a rich site for debates about the impact of colonial rule in this region, is not a subject that has been neglected by scholars of South Asia. The development of the colonial legal system has received particular attention from historians interested in the relationship between power and knowledge in British India. Exploring the ways in which colonial governance and ethnography served to reshape existing social customs, these studies have demonstrated the highly constructed nature of colonial law. Exposing some of the contradictions at the heart of colonial rhetoric and policy, these works formed a crucial intervention in discussions about models of social and economic development. They have shown that, in spite of colonial officials’ stated desire to r...
This article investigates the formation of a political consensus between conservative ulama, Musl... more This article investigates the formation of a political consensus between conservative ulama, Muslim reformers, nationalist politicians and women's organisations, which led to the enactment of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act in 1939. The Act was a radical piece of social legislation that gave South Asian Muslim women greater rights for divorce than those enjoyed by other women in India and Britain. Instead of placing women's rights and Islamic law as opposed to each other, the legislation employed a heuristic that guaranteed women's rights by applying Islamic law, allowing Muslim politicians, ulama and women's groups to find common ground on an Islamic modernity. By interrogating the legislative process and the rhetorical positions employed to achieve this consensus, the paper hopes to map how the women's question was being negotiated anew in the space created in the legislatures. The legislative debate over family law redefined the boundaries of the public and the private, and forced nationalists to reconsider the ‘women's question’. The transformation of Islamic law through secular legislation also gave greater licence to the courts in their interpretation, and widened the schism between traditional practitioners of fiqh and modern lawyers.
That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the great... more That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the greater focus on Indian citizens’ welfare which many expected, has been the source of much confusion and disappointment. Looking at late-colonial debates about property rights under Hindu personal law, this paper seeks to explain why people assumed that independence could change the relationship between the state and Indian society, and also why this has not come about. It argues that, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, economic, social, and political changes placed pressure on the very hierarchical structures of joint-family patriarchy that colonial rule had hitherto depended on. Calls for family reform seemed, at certain moments, to critique patriarchal control and social order more generally, creating the intellectual space to rethink the place of women within the family, and the state more widely. Yet, while couched in the language of women's rights, underpinning these re...
The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2009
Recent debates about personal law and a uniform civil code in India have seen both Hindu and Musl... more Recent debates about personal law and a uniform civil code in India have seen both Hindu and Muslim leaders insist on the ‘religious’ status of Muslim law vis-à-vis a more secular or ‘civil’ Hindu legal system. This article argues that such claims obscure very important similarities in the development and functioning of these legal systems. Tracing the origins of the current debate to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century debates about law reform, it argues that the systems of personal law in operation in India today are the outcome of late colonial attempts by Hindu and Muslim male reformers to alter their legal systems in ways that served their own interests. The ways in which they succeeded in securing these ends were very different; colonial constructions of Hindu and Muslim religious practices, and later partition, shaped the context within which male reformers sought to assert their claims, before the state and their own religious communities. Thus, far from marking an i...
Author wrote the summaries for the following film in this series: Col. Alexander Films 1 & 2; Chi... more Author wrote the summaries for the following film in this series: Col. Alexander Films 1 & 2; Child; Gandhi stormy petrel; Higgins visits Ahmedabad girl school; Home life; Lahore - refugees from India; Magnus family; Montreal and; India; Mother; People and products of India; Viceroy's garden party at Belvedere
Theresa May's visit to India. Picture by Stefan Rousseau PA Wire/PA Images. Press Association... more Theresa May's visit to India. Picture by Stefan Rousseau PA Wire/PA Images. Press Association Images. All rights reserved. So Trump has affirmed the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Britain. Michael Gove assures us that this is an important step in securing a strong future for Brexit-Britain. Yet, the fact that Theresa May courted the new US president with a 1941 speech from Winston Churchill shows how much Brexiteer politics also draws heavily from a particular view of the past. From this perspective, an alliance between the US and Brexit-Britain seems obvious, even in the face of Trump’s openly nationalist and protectionist rhetoric; it marks a return to the correct order of things as Britain becomes, once-again, part of a unique super-power alliance, not just one of many in a community of European nation-states.
Who are the ‘elites’ here? At the most basic level they are the ‘haves’, or maybe even more clear... more Who are the ‘elites’ here? At the most basic level they are the ‘haves’, or maybe even more clearly, not the have-nots. These are the people who have not been left destitute by the collapse of social welfare, or industrial production and the rise of free market economics. This is a large and diverse group, including of course the 1% but also middle class professionals, bringing in what to many are large salaries but who find themselves priced out of the housing markets around the areas in which they work; public sector workers who are working longer and longer hours, for less and less pay; young people working in the charity sector, often providing critical social services that were once funded by the state, now forced to live at home well into their 30s in order to do what they see as a worthwhile job that doesn’t pay them enough to rent a place of their own; artists and musicians (both aspiring and more successful) who juggle a host of unskilled, low paid jobs in order to secure a...
Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of r... more Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of rivalry between the western powers and attempts to manage the economic fallout of World War I. There has been little consideration of the way in which imperialism shaped debates and approaches to national accounting. Providing a close reading of Indian scholar K. T. Shah’s intervention in debates about how to measure the national economy of the 1920s, this article seeks to shed new light on innovative debates within Indian economics in this period. In so doing, it also seeks to draw attention to the ways in which debates about national economy were themselves a site of contestation, and reaffirmation, of colonial power structures in the interwar years.
This chapter considers the ways in which the fiscal demands of representative government, and spe... more This chapter considers the ways in which the fiscal demands of representative government, and specifically the development of a direct, personal income tax, impacted legal subjecthood during India’s transition to Independence. It shows how early twentieth-century understandings of economic value and public finance were embedded into Indian society and legal system through discussions about personal law. This had particular consequences for Hindu personal law, which, under pressure from a centrally administered income tax regime, was re-imagined as a singular, homogeneous all-Indian legal system in ways that rendered the Hindu joint family synonymous with the representative and fiscal structures of the Indian state.
Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of r... more Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of rivalry between the western powers and attempts to manage the economic fall out of World War I. There has been little consideration of the way in which imperialism shaped debates and approaches to national accounting. Providing a close reading of Indian scholar K.T. Shah’s intervention in debates about how to measure the national economy of the 1920s, this paper seeks to shed new light on innovative debates within Indian economics in this period. In so doing, it also seeks to draw attention to the ways in which debates about national economy were themselves a site of contestation, and reaffirmation, of colonial power structures in the interwar years. Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged in response to the Great Depression and the imperatives of wartime production generated by World War II (see Studenski 1958: 149-155, Kendrick 1970: 304-315, Coyle 2014...
Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of r... more Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of rivalry between the western powers and attempts to manage the economic fall out of World War I. There has been little consideration of the way in which imperialism shaped debates and approaches to national accounting. Providing a close reading of Indian scholar K.T. Shah's intervention in debates about how to measure the national economy of the 1920s, this paper seeks to shed new light on innovative debates within Indian economics in this period. In so doing, it also seeks to draw attention to the ways in which debates about national economy were themselves a site of contestation, and reaffirmation, of colonial power structures in the interwar years.
That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the great... more That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the greater focus on Indian citizens’ welfare which many expected, has been the source of much confusion and disappointment. Looking at late-colonial debates about property rights under Hindu personal law, this paper seeks to explain why people assumed that independence could change the relationship between the state and Indian society, and also why this has not come about. It argues that, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, economic, social, and political changes placed pressure on the very hierarchical structures of joint-family patriarchy that colonial rule had hitherto depended on. Calls for family reform seemed, at certain moments, to critique patriarchal control and social order more generally, creating the intellectual space to rethink the place of women within the family, and the state more widely. Yet, while couched in the language of women’s rights, underpinning these reform debates was an interest to change men’s property rights and enhance their individual control over the family. Thus, the interwar years witnessed not just a breaking down of an old colonial patriarchal order, but also the establishment of a new, post-colonial patriarchy based around the authority of the propertied husband.
Studies of the post-colonial state have often presented it as a structure that has fallen under t... more Studies of the post-colonial state have often presented it as a structure that has fallen under the control of self-interested sections of the Indian elite. In terms of citizenship, the failure of the state to do more to realize the egalitarian promise of the Fundamental Rights, set out in the Constitution of 1950, has often been attributed to interference by these powerful elite. Tracing the interplay between debates about Hindu property rights and popular support or tolerance for the notion of individual, liberal citizenship, this paper argues that the principles espoused in the Fundamental Rights were never neutral abstractions but, long before independence, were firmly embedded in the material world of late-colonial political relations. Thus, in certain key regards, the citizen-subject of the Indian Constitution was not the individual, freed from ascriptive categories of gender or religious identity, but firmly tied to the power structures of the community governed by Hindu law.
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2009
This special edition of the Indian Economic and Social History Review explores the ways in which ... more This special edition of the Indian Economic and Social History Review explores the ways in which law provided a forum for the construction of new notions of gender, family and community relationships in South Asia. Law, which has proved a rich site for debates about the impact of colonial rule in this region, is not a subject that has been neglected by scholars of South Asia. The development of the colonial legal system has received particular attention from historians interested in the relationship between power and knowledge in British India. Exploring the ways in which colonial governance and ethnography served to reshape existing social customs, these studies have demonstrated the highly constructed nature of colonial law. Exposing some of the contradictions at the heart of colonial rhetoric and policy, these works formed a crucial intervention in discussions about models of social and economic development. They have shown that, in spite of colonial officials’ stated desire to r...
This article investigates the formation of a political consensus between conservative ulama, Musl... more This article investigates the formation of a political consensus between conservative ulama, Muslim reformers, nationalist politicians and women's organisations, which led to the enactment of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act in 1939. The Act was a radical piece of social legislation that gave South Asian Muslim women greater rights for divorce than those enjoyed by other women in India and Britain. Instead of placing women's rights and Islamic law as opposed to each other, the legislation employed a heuristic that guaranteed women's rights by applying Islamic law, allowing Muslim politicians, ulama and women's groups to find common ground on an Islamic modernity. By interrogating the legislative process and the rhetorical positions employed to achieve this consensus, the paper hopes to map how the women's question was being negotiated anew in the space created in the legislatures. The legislative debate over family law redefined the boundaries of the public and the private, and forced nationalists to reconsider the ‘women's question’. The transformation of Islamic law through secular legislation also gave greater licence to the courts in their interpretation, and widened the schism between traditional practitioners of fiqh and modern lawyers.
That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the great... more That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the greater focus on Indian citizens’ welfare which many expected, has been the source of much confusion and disappointment. Looking at late-colonial debates about property rights under Hindu personal law, this paper seeks to explain why people assumed that independence could change the relationship between the state and Indian society, and also why this has not come about. It argues that, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, economic, social, and political changes placed pressure on the very hierarchical structures of joint-family patriarchy that colonial rule had hitherto depended on. Calls for family reform seemed, at certain moments, to critique patriarchal control and social order more generally, creating the intellectual space to rethink the place of women within the family, and the state more widely. Yet, while couched in the language of women's rights, underpinning these re...
The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2009
Recent debates about personal law and a uniform civil code in India have seen both Hindu and Musl... more Recent debates about personal law and a uniform civil code in India have seen both Hindu and Muslim leaders insist on the ‘religious’ status of Muslim law vis-à-vis a more secular or ‘civil’ Hindu legal system. This article argues that such claims obscure very important similarities in the development and functioning of these legal systems. Tracing the origins of the current debate to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century debates about law reform, it argues that the systems of personal law in operation in India today are the outcome of late colonial attempts by Hindu and Muslim male reformers to alter their legal systems in ways that served their own interests. The ways in which they succeeded in securing these ends were very different; colonial constructions of Hindu and Muslim religious practices, and later partition, shaped the context within which male reformers sought to assert their claims, before the state and their own religious communities. Thus, far from marking an i...
Author wrote the summaries for the following film in this series: Col. Alexander Films 1 & 2; Chi... more Author wrote the summaries for the following film in this series: Col. Alexander Films 1 & 2; Child; Gandhi stormy petrel; Higgins visits Ahmedabad girl school; Home life; Lahore - refugees from India; Magnus family; Montreal and; India; Mother; People and products of India; Viceroy's garden party at Belvedere
Theresa May's visit to India. Picture by Stefan Rousseau PA Wire/PA Images. Press Association... more Theresa May's visit to India. Picture by Stefan Rousseau PA Wire/PA Images. Press Association Images. All rights reserved. So Trump has affirmed the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Britain. Michael Gove assures us that this is an important step in securing a strong future for Brexit-Britain. Yet, the fact that Theresa May courted the new US president with a 1941 speech from Winston Churchill shows how much Brexiteer politics also draws heavily from a particular view of the past. From this perspective, an alliance between the US and Brexit-Britain seems obvious, even in the face of Trump’s openly nationalist and protectionist rhetoric; it marks a return to the correct order of things as Britain becomes, once-again, part of a unique super-power alliance, not just one of many in a community of European nation-states.
Who are the ‘elites’ here? At the most basic level they are the ‘haves’, or maybe even more clear... more Who are the ‘elites’ here? At the most basic level they are the ‘haves’, or maybe even more clearly, not the have-nots. These are the people who have not been left destitute by the collapse of social welfare, or industrial production and the rise of free market economics. This is a large and diverse group, including of course the 1% but also middle class professionals, bringing in what to many are large salaries but who find themselves priced out of the housing markets around the areas in which they work; public sector workers who are working longer and longer hours, for less and less pay; young people working in the charity sector, often providing critical social services that were once funded by the state, now forced to live at home well into their 30s in order to do what they see as a worthwhile job that doesn’t pay them enough to rent a place of their own; artists and musicians (both aspiring and more successful) who juggle a host of unskilled, low paid jobs in order to secure a...
Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of r... more Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of rivalry between the western powers and attempts to manage the economic fallout of World War I. There has been little consideration of the way in which imperialism shaped debates and approaches to national accounting. Providing a close reading of Indian scholar K. T. Shah’s intervention in debates about how to measure the national economy of the 1920s, this article seeks to shed new light on innovative debates within Indian economics in this period. In so doing, it also seeks to draw attention to the ways in which debates about national economy were themselves a site of contestation, and reaffirmation, of colonial power structures in the interwar years.
This chapter considers the ways in which the fiscal demands of representative government, and spe... more This chapter considers the ways in which the fiscal demands of representative government, and specifically the development of a direct, personal income tax, impacted legal subjecthood during India’s transition to Independence. It shows how early twentieth-century understandings of economic value and public finance were embedded into Indian society and legal system through discussions about personal law. This had particular consequences for Hindu personal law, which, under pressure from a centrally administered income tax regime, was re-imagined as a singular, homogeneous all-Indian legal system in ways that rendered the Hindu joint family synonymous with the representative and fiscal structures of the Indian state.
Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of r... more Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of rivalry between the western powers and attempts to manage the economic fall out of World War I. There has been little consideration of the way in which imperialism shaped debates and approaches to national accounting. Providing a close reading of Indian scholar K.T. Shah’s intervention in debates about how to measure the national economy of the 1920s, this paper seeks to shed new light on innovative debates within Indian economics in this period. In so doing, it also seeks to draw attention to the ways in which debates about national economy were themselves a site of contestation, and reaffirmation, of colonial power structures in the interwar years. Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged in response to the Great Depression and the imperatives of wartime production generated by World War II (see Studenski 1958: 149-155, Kendrick 1970: 304-315, Coyle 2014...
Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of r... more Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of rivalry between the western powers and attempts to manage the economic fall out of World War I. There has been little consideration of the way in which imperialism shaped debates and approaches to national accounting. Providing a close reading of Indian scholar K.T. Shah's intervention in debates about how to measure the national economy of the 1920s, this paper seeks to shed new light on innovative debates within Indian economics in this period. In so doing, it also seeks to draw attention to the ways in which debates about national economy were themselves a site of contestation, and reaffirmation, of colonial power structures in the interwar years.
That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the great... more That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the greater focus on Indian citizens’ welfare which many expected, has been the source of much confusion and disappointment. Looking at late-colonial debates about property rights under Hindu personal law, this paper seeks to explain why people assumed that independence could change the relationship between the state and Indian society, and also why this has not come about. It argues that, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, economic, social, and political changes placed pressure on the very hierarchical structures of joint-family patriarchy that colonial rule had hitherto depended on. Calls for family reform seemed, at certain moments, to critique patriarchal control and social order more generally, creating the intellectual space to rethink the place of women within the family, and the state more widely. Yet, while couched in the language of women’s rights, underpinning these reform debates was an interest to change men’s property rights and enhance their individual control over the family. Thus, the interwar years witnessed not just a breaking down of an old colonial patriarchal order, but also the establishment of a new, post-colonial patriarchy based around the authority of the propertied husband.
Studies of the post-colonial state have often presented it as a structure that has fallen under t... more Studies of the post-colonial state have often presented it as a structure that has fallen under the control of self-interested sections of the Indian elite. In terms of citizenship, the failure of the state to do more to realize the egalitarian promise of the Fundamental Rights, set out in the Constitution of 1950, has often been attributed to interference by these powerful elite. Tracing the interplay between debates about Hindu property rights and popular support or tolerance for the notion of individual, liberal citizenship, this paper argues that the principles espoused in the Fundamental Rights were never neutral abstractions but, long before independence, were firmly embedded in the material world of late-colonial political relations. Thus, in certain key regards, the citizen-subject of the Indian Constitution was not the individual, freed from ascriptive categories of gender or religious identity, but firmly tied to the power structures of the community governed by Hindu law.
Hardly more than a decade old, the 21st century has already been dubbed 'the Asian century' in re... more Hardly more than a decade old, the 21st century has already been dubbed 'the Asian century' in recognition of China and India’s increasing importance in world affairs. Yet discussions of Asia seem fixated on economic indicators – gross national product, per capita income and share of global trade.
In his book, Ram Guha seeks to reorient our understanding of contemporary Asia by highlighting the political leaders, not billionaire businessmen, who helped launch the Asian century. With contributions from leading scholars, Makers of Modern Asia illuminates the intellectual and ideological foundations of Asia’s spectacular rise to global prominence.
This event was chaired by Nick Pearce, director at IPPR, and features a response from Dr Eleanor Newbigin, lecturer in the history of South Asia at SOAS, University of London.
The last decade has seen an important shift in scholarly approaches to the history of economics w... more The last decade has seen an important shift in scholarly approaches to the history of economics with scholars moving away from a narrative of theoretical revolutions to put greater emphasis on economics as a historically constructed discipline. Yet, the vast majority of these newer works have remained firmly focused on developments in Europe and the United States.
This paper offers a close reading of K.T. Shah and K.J. Khambata’s Wealth and taxable capacity of India, (published in Bombay in 1924) to argue that late-colonial India was also an important site for economic knowledge production. Comparing Shah and Khambata’s work with that of their British contemporaries, it argues that economists in both the metropole and colony grappled with similar kinds of economic questions but the answers they produced were deeply informed by the particular political, social and fiscal contexts within which they worked. One important difference between these contexts was the access British and Indian economists had to data about the respective societies on which their work focused – while early twentieth century British economist and statisticians sought to process a growing abundance of increasingly detailed statistical data about individual members of British society, Indian economics in the same period grappled with problems of data scarcity and a lack of knowledge about individual Indians’ economic conditions. I show that, in seeking to address this data silence, Shah and Khambata produced statistical models of Indian society that emphasised the important relationship between political, social and economic power, rather than the separation of these spheres of government. While this did not contribute to the strand of economic knowledge production that provided the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings of the post-Keynsian economic order, Shah and Khambata helped to produce important new ways of thinking about Indian subjecthood which highlight, more clearly perhaps than the works of their western peers, the ways in which economic thought and practice have shaped the formation of what we now refer to as democratic government.
Between 1955 and 1956 the Government of India passed four Hindu Law Acts to reform and codify Hin... more Between 1955 and 1956 the Government of India passed four Hindu Law Acts to reform and codify Hindu family law. Scholars have understood these acts as a response to growing concern about women's rights but, in a powerful re-reading of their history, this book traces the origins of the Hindu law reform project to changes in the political-economy of late colonial rule. The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India considers how questions regarding family structure, property rights and gender relations contributed to the development of representative politics, and how, in solving these questions, India's secular and state power structures were consequently drawn into a complex and unique relationship with Hindu law. In this comprehensive and illuminating resource for scholars and students, Newbigin demonstrates the significance of gender and economy to the history of twentieth-century democratic government, as it emerged in India and beyond.
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In his book, Ram Guha seeks to reorient our understanding of contemporary Asia by highlighting the political leaders, not billionaire businessmen, who helped launch the Asian century. With contributions from leading scholars, Makers of Modern Asia illuminates the intellectual and ideological foundations of Asia’s spectacular rise to global prominence.
This event was chaired by Nick Pearce, director at IPPR, and features a response from Dr Eleanor Newbigin, lecturer in the history of South Asia at SOAS, University of London.
This paper offers a close reading of K.T. Shah and K.J. Khambata’s Wealth and taxable capacity of India, (published in Bombay in 1924) to argue that late-colonial India was also an important site for economic knowledge production. Comparing Shah and Khambata’s work with that of their British contemporaries, it argues that economists in both the metropole and colony grappled with similar kinds of economic questions but the answers they produced were deeply informed by the particular political, social and fiscal contexts within which they worked. One important difference between these contexts was the access British and Indian economists had to data about the respective societies on which their work focused – while early twentieth century British economist and statisticians sought to process a growing abundance of increasingly detailed statistical data about individual members of British society, Indian economics in the same period grappled with problems of data scarcity and a lack of knowledge about individual Indians’ economic conditions. I show that, in seeking to address this data silence, Shah and Khambata produced statistical models of Indian society that emphasised the important relationship between political, social and economic power, rather than the separation of these spheres of government. While this did not contribute to the strand of economic knowledge production that provided the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings of the post-Keynsian economic order, Shah and Khambata helped to produce important new ways of thinking about Indian subjecthood which highlight, more clearly perhaps than the works of their western peers, the ways in which economic thought and practice have shaped the formation of what we now refer to as democratic government.