Sunday, January 20, 2008
Knowledge is power
In what ways was the politics of swadeshi rooted in a wider politics of knowledge between colonial administrations and Indian nationalists?
In today’s world knowledge is widely recognized as the de-facto criteria for power. We today talk in terms of a ‘knowledge state’ or maybe even a network economy where pools of knowledge exist interconnected producing and consuming knowledge. Specialist is a person more respected, more in control than a generalist due to his sole ability to possess knowledge. It thus becomes clear that knowledge constitutes power, the ability to control, to politically maneuver, to manipulate thoughts and exercise domination over the ignorant. These concepts become clear to us as today we are thriving in knowledge based society, but historically also the same has been applicable. Michel Foucault terms pouvoir-savoir, or “power-knowledge” as the set of complex and dynamical equations which are valid throughout history in accordance to that specific time. It remains dynamical as the way in which knowledge is gathered through application of various technologies and the manner in which it is exercised, through acts of violence or consent keep on evolving.
Colonialism was in fact a massive thrust towards gaining native knowledge of the colonized and applying it to subjugating him. It was an act of violence supported by unseeingly small acts of knowledge gathering. For e.g. it involved for the British to study the plant life of India, carrying out botanical surveys. At a glance it might appear to just a scientific, purely objective study of nature but it was also an instrument of exercising economic control for it entailed them to grow cash crops. Indigo farming or tea plantations and the eventual exploitation were a direct result of such knowledge endeavors. What colonialism did to India was not only to replace the ruler from brown to a white man but to take control of the whole knowledge system in existence and destroy whatever pockets of local native knowledge existed.
The fight against the rule was also stemmed by ways of reacquiring the lost knowledge systems and an attempt was made to reset the balance. The Indian National Congress in 1885 consisted mainly of lawyers, journalists, businessman, landowners and professors and one of their initial demands was for equality in opportunity for Indians to enter into Indian Civil Service by introduction of simultaneous exams in India and England. What we see here are basically middle class intellectuals, who thrive on knowledge based occupations asking for their right of access to the knowledge the British had which they used to govern the country. The Indian freedom struggle was thus led not by peasants, not by armed sepoys but by learned men who understood the importance that knowledge had in their ability to get back the freedom of their nation. And thus started the game of politics of knowledge played between the Indian freedom fighters, be they be the moderates, extremists or even Gandhi and the Imperial authority and the concept of swadeshi i.e. self produced and its eventual metamorphism into demand for ‘self-rule’ emerged.
In 1905 Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India carried out the partition of Bengal despite nationalist opposition and Hindu Bengal’s indignation. The original plan for partition was based solely on geographical basis but later political considerations of ‘divide and rule’ were added in deciding the dividing line. The Hindu Bengali opposed the partition for it made them a minority, the fear of loss of trade as the new port would shift to Chittagong and saw it as a way to control the budding nationalist activity in Bengal. This fuelled the nationalist movement and fuelled the swadeshi movement. British manufactured goods were boycotted and huge bonfires of Lancashire goods and British cloth were lit arousing memories of Vedic sacrificial fires. The movement soon spread out to other parts of the country and efforts began in promoting indigenous industry. Hand spun cloth, khadi became the symbol of Indian struggle against the factory produced fine cloth. The swadeshi movement soon stimulated indigenous enterprise in many fields, from Indian cotton mills to match factories, glassblowing shops, and iron and steel foundries. Demands for national education followed and students boycotted the English schools and colleges. Bal Gangadar Tilak and Gokhale were pioneers in establishing Indian education institutes in Deccan. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya founded the Banaras Hindu University in 1910. One of the last major demands to be added to the platform of the Congress in the wake of Bengal's first partition was swaraj. Swaraj was first articulated, in the presidential address of Dadabhai Naoroji, as the Congress' goal at its Calcutta session in 1906.
What emerges out is that it was the loss of economic dominance of Calcutta which was a major factor in developing of the opposition. The economic critique of colonialism has been the basis of the Indian national movement. India with its diverse culture and modes of life was united under the British rule under collective economic exploitation and so emerged the ideas of political economy of nationhood. Dadabhai Naoroji was at the forefront in formulating the theory of the “bleeding drain” of India. India was reduced to a dumping ground for the British manufactured goods. India was to be only the supplier of raw materials and a market of finished goods. The British rulers in a way destroyed the indigenous industry and made it pay for the upkeep of the Crown in England. The British argument that India was basically an agrarian economy was totally farce, it was only result of British induced deindustrialization, ruralization that had set the clock back and reduced India from being a major world exporter to now dependent on England for even basic consumption goods. The British pointed out that setting up of railways, telegraph networks, irrigation canal systems was a positive work of their towards the development of the nation. The nationalist counter argued the networks are merely instruments of controlling the flow of information and bounded the geographical space of India. The setting of railways in India only resulted in more impoverishment unlike America where it had generated employment and give rise to opportunities. The task of setting up of the Indian railways was the most expensive in the world and the risk were born by Indian taxpayers. The nationalist sought to modify it manner planning and implementation. The British portrayed there work as for ‘great public benefit’, but it really meant a more manageable nation, more productivity and more exploitation for the benefit of British trade. The British sought to downplay the industrial growth in India and sought to limit the research in science to be merely ‘pure’ in nature unlike the nationalist for whom the nation was to be visioned in a state actively promoting and applying science and technology.
What the British preached in England, the ideals of free trade, free land holdings were totally upturned in India and there’s became a socialist view. The Colonial figures for development always painted a rosier picture of a state of well being; Naoroji countered them with figures of his own and painted out a picture of famines, of indebted peasants and discontent. Thus emerged a parallel statistic body to gather knowledge in order to counter the British claims.
The nationalists rooted its demands for stake in the control of power for nation by contesting the knowledge base established by the British. They attempted in Gyan Prakash’s words to ‘rescripting the rationality of colonial governance as the logic of nation’. They tried their hands at controlling the technics of rule, they tried to adopt technology, science and indigenous knowledge as their counter weapon against the British hegemony and swadeshi was a by product of these efforts. Planning was the keyword here and for the nationalist to rework the knowledge systems the British had established by first gaining access to them and then modifying it to local needs was the stepping stone towards their demand of self rule.
Reference:
Gyan Prakash – Another reason, science and the imagination of Modern India
Manu Goswami – The political economy of nationhood
Britannica Encyclopedia 2003 reference Suite DVD
In what ways did the census operations emerge as one of the critical pillars of the colonial knowledge state?
How have the data generated form census categories informed our perceptions of community and caste in India?
Colonialism is a state of hegemony, of control of human and material resources by the colonizing force. It is state of dominance and generally speaking results in exploitation and repression of the colonized. To this effect one views the colonizing power through the lens of victimization and sees superiority in military powers, organization and technological prowess, economical wealth and political power. But behind this iron gloved exterior lays the certain soft expressions of control. These are what Dirks call the ‘investigative modalities’ which the British used to classify, categorize, order and fix the identity of ‘India’ from the landmass, population, culture and traditions it represented. ‘There was an extra festival on calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, although it had 5000 years of history, had traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary, into a mythical land.’(Salmaan Rushdie). This imaginary land was fixed into a nation. The idea of ‘India’ was created by the acts of fixing the nation in terms of the different modalities the British used to consolidate their rule. The nation was won by brutal wars but the control established by acts of documentation and categorizing the spatial and temporal space that India was. Colonialism was thus a project of cultural control which was executed in the form of several gazetteers, archaeological expeditions, surveys, the census and other government reports. Michel Foucault’s theory that knowledge is power is clearly visible with respect to the British colonial state; it was only the knowledge of the native, which was instrumental in their ability to govern effectively. The British seek to establish a kind of panopticon state where they had the know how of the all the activities around them.
It started with activity of learning administrative control and inheriting the political knowledge of Indian rulers and thus began attempts to know the land as under the revenue department. To know the land became an attempt to know the people tilling it, the people supported on that land and so started the full fledged accounts to understand the economic structures, socio-cultural differences, linguistics, religions, extensive narratives about the caste and domestic organizations. Thus it became what Cohn terms as the enumerative modality. And out of such attempt was born the great Indian Census as visioned by Risley. Similarly census found its application in army recruitment, policing and distribution of labour. Census in its original attempt was about concerns of economic issues. In Britain and other European countries it has largely been a very secular affair concerned entirely with efforts to enumeration on non ethnic and non racial grounds. In India it became an exercise deeply rooted in British ideas of racial theories and their attempt to prove the idea of racial superiority was given a very neat sample space in Indian population which was cleanly divided into different racial stocks due to restricted inter marriages.
After the 1857 mutiny of sepoys or the first Indian war of Independence it became imperative for the British rulers to understand their subjects. The sepoy revolt is largely attributed to the caste issue; the idea of pollution by using cow/pig greased cartridges inflamed the angst of economic exploitation by the British. This lead to serious rethinking in the British manner of ruling other than the visible change of power from Company to the Queen’s hands. The British understood that they couldn’t continue to disregard the native opinions and sensibilities. Thus the census of India also was an attempt to know the beliefs of people and not merely the count of people. This is what Dirks means by the anthropologization of colonial knowledge. Ethnographic knowledge could reasonably explain the grievances which caused the 1857 rebellion and help work around them to prevent any such future incidents. It also enabled to understand who was culturally more suited to be loyal. Thus the British state became a whole encompassing repository of Indian beliefs and traditional knowledge. Thus we see that the census became one of the critical pillars of the British colonial knowledge state.
Community and caste are the basic foundations on which the Indian society stands. They both give order to its diversity and disorder it like in riot situations. Indian is an overtly religious state, the spiritual capital of the world. So much so that pre colonial rulers were not required to monitor the political attitudes of people and police them but to detect any moral transgressions, upholding the ‘dharma’, morality of the society at large was the primarily duty. The first major implication of the British census was defining the term ‘Hindu’. Today the word has become to be understood as people practicing the faith of ‘Hinduism’. This particular definition is but a direct result of the census. Jawaharlal Nehru in ‘Discovery of India’ says that the term Hindu is the result of inability of the Persian people to pronounce ‘sindhu’. Its first usage is recorded in 7th century A.D. with reference to a particular group of people living in the Sindhu region. The association of the word Hindu with religion is due to the association the British provided to it. So far as the Hinduism goes, there is no common thread which joins the complete race, there is no unique identifier. Variations in practices, beliefs exist as far as belief in the supremacy of Brahmin to the consumption of beef. The British census confronted the people in defining them as belonging to a particular religion. India had before the British been a confluence of religion, various religions co-existed and influenced each other. An Indian Muslim also has a caste which is kind of anathema to the Islamic belief at large. Today we have dalit Christians fighting to get listed as scheduled caste. The British census failed to recognize such intricacies and sought to order them in different yet interlinked beliefs into sharp categories. So much so that certain population didn’t knew whether they were Hindu or not? This is what R.B. Bhagat calls as fuzzy communities being concretized. These ramifications are still felt today. Our honorable President K.R. Narayan in 2001 census couldn’t be declared ‘scheduled caste’, because according to definition of ‘scheduled caste’ he was one in Kerala but not so in Delhi. So the idea of caste or religion in India has always been unclear, it’s not all black and white. Lot of transitory states is there. The 1881 census was in self a little fuzzy as it listed about 11,645 categories and about 3000 main castes. This census represented the relative fluidity and complexity in pre colonial time before it could create a ‘freeze effect’ which was seen in later censuses.
Those who couldn’t be clubbed into the major religious categories, the nomads and tribal because they were outside the society at large got labeled as the ‘notified tribes’ or the criminal tribes. The census marked the people, the people got labeled and their identity got fixated. So the notified tribes got labeled criminals and till date, despite the free Indian government act to denotify them, they still are regarded as criminals, anti social and discriminated against. The census defined the various religions and castes as the British sought them to be and people’s opinion on the other got hardened. They understood themselves as what they were not. Fuzziness didn’t require defining the other but concreteness crystallized the other. So cropped up the ideas of majority and minority. The idea which has long since haunted the nation and caused deep birth pangs at partitioning and recurring reminders of the divide during several riots which followed. The census gave clear numbers; percentages of the strength, the fertility rate, the economical situation of particular community and so arose the zeal to protect one against the other. Also the distribution of the communities came to the forefront. The census highlighted clearly the skewness in population and brought in a sense of fear and so communalism was born. What was earlier a comfortable situation where people from different communities managed to co-exist became fear ridden and led to bad blood and growing animosity. The enumeration of fuzzy communities became an instrument in the hands of British for their policy of ‘divide and rule’.
This also lead to the partitioning of Bengal, the demand for separate electorates, the demand for Pakistan on ground of minority insecurity and after freedom the policy of minority appeasement and their reduction as mere vote banks. The problems that India faces today in forms of the Babri Masjid demolition or the Gujarat carnage are but fallouts of the results of the Indian census. Pakistan sees the Indian army in a predominantly Muslim Kashmir as anti to it’s formation theory and so we have four wars fought over it. What was the census result to the British for their policy of divide and rule is what they are to the political parties for their policies of vote banks. What Swami Shradhanand wrote in 1926 on the dying race of Hindu, the same RSS does on Islam bashing using census results of fertility today. And so we see the ramifications of the British census exist till date and continue to influence our perceptions about ourselves, they define our religion, our caste in terms of the numbers of the other. The British census created Knowledge about the people of India and they used the same Knowledge in a manner suited to their governance to exercise their power.
Reference:
K.P. Singh – Communities, Synonyms, Segments, Surnames and titles of India (pg. 1-12)
R.B. Bhagat – Census & the Construction of India
Nicholas B. Dirks – The Ethnographic State
Bernand S. Cohn – Colonialism & its forms of Knowledge
R. Champakalakshmi - Cultural technologies of colonial rule (Hindu newspaper online edition)
Salmaan Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
Mahasweta Devi - Year of Birth - 1871
http://roxygagdekar.blogspot.com/
Colonialism is a state of hegemony, of control of human and material resources by the colonizing force. It is state of dominance and generally speaking results in exploitation and repression of the colonized. To this effect one views the colonizing power through the lens of victimization and sees superiority in military powers, organization and technological prowess, economical wealth and political power. But behind this iron gloved exterior lays the certain soft expressions of control. These are what Dirks call the ‘investigative modalities’ which the British used to classify, categorize, order and fix the identity of ‘India’ from the landmass, population, culture and traditions it represented. ‘There was an extra festival on calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, although it had 5000 years of history, had traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary, into a mythical land.’(Salmaan Rushdie). This imaginary land was fixed into a nation. The idea of ‘India’ was created by the acts of fixing the nation in terms of the different modalities the British used to consolidate their rule. The nation was won by brutal wars but the control established by acts of documentation and categorizing the spatial and temporal space that India was. Colonialism was thus a project of cultural control which was executed in the form of several gazetteers, archaeological expeditions, surveys, the census and other government reports. Michel Foucault’s theory that knowledge is power is clearly visible with respect to the British colonial state; it was only the knowledge of the native, which was instrumental in their ability to govern effectively. The British seek to establish a kind of panopticon state where they had the know how of the all the activities around them.
It started with activity of learning administrative control and inheriting the political knowledge of Indian rulers and thus began attempts to know the land as under the revenue department. To know the land became an attempt to know the people tilling it, the people supported on that land and so started the full fledged accounts to understand the economic structures, socio-cultural differences, linguistics, religions, extensive narratives about the caste and domestic organizations. Thus it became what Cohn terms as the enumerative modality. And out of such attempt was born the great Indian Census as visioned by Risley. Similarly census found its application in army recruitment, policing and distribution of labour. Census in its original attempt was about concerns of economic issues. In Britain and other European countries it has largely been a very secular affair concerned entirely with efforts to enumeration on non ethnic and non racial grounds. In India it became an exercise deeply rooted in British ideas of racial theories and their attempt to prove the idea of racial superiority was given a very neat sample space in Indian population which was cleanly divided into different racial stocks due to restricted inter marriages.
After the 1857 mutiny of sepoys or the first Indian war of Independence it became imperative for the British rulers to understand their subjects. The sepoy revolt is largely attributed to the caste issue; the idea of pollution by using cow/pig greased cartridges inflamed the angst of economic exploitation by the British. This lead to serious rethinking in the British manner of ruling other than the visible change of power from Company to the Queen’s hands. The British understood that they couldn’t continue to disregard the native opinions and sensibilities. Thus the census of India also was an attempt to know the beliefs of people and not merely the count of people. This is what Dirks means by the anthropologization of colonial knowledge. Ethnographic knowledge could reasonably explain the grievances which caused the 1857 rebellion and help work around them to prevent any such future incidents. It also enabled to understand who was culturally more suited to be loyal. Thus the British state became a whole encompassing repository of Indian beliefs and traditional knowledge. Thus we see that the census became one of the critical pillars of the British colonial knowledge state.
Community and caste are the basic foundations on which the Indian society stands. They both give order to its diversity and disorder it like in riot situations. Indian is an overtly religious state, the spiritual capital of the world. So much so that pre colonial rulers were not required to monitor the political attitudes of people and police them but to detect any moral transgressions, upholding the ‘dharma’, morality of the society at large was the primarily duty. The first major implication of the British census was defining the term ‘Hindu’. Today the word has become to be understood as people practicing the faith of ‘Hinduism’. This particular definition is but a direct result of the census. Jawaharlal Nehru in ‘Discovery of India’ says that the term Hindu is the result of inability of the Persian people to pronounce ‘sindhu’. Its first usage is recorded in 7th century A.D. with reference to a particular group of people living in the Sindhu region. The association of the word Hindu with religion is due to the association the British provided to it. So far as the Hinduism goes, there is no common thread which joins the complete race, there is no unique identifier. Variations in practices, beliefs exist as far as belief in the supremacy of Brahmin to the consumption of beef. The British census confronted the people in defining them as belonging to a particular religion. India had before the British been a confluence of religion, various religions co-existed and influenced each other. An Indian Muslim also has a caste which is kind of anathema to the Islamic belief at large. Today we have dalit Christians fighting to get listed as scheduled caste. The British census failed to recognize such intricacies and sought to order them in different yet interlinked beliefs into sharp categories. So much so that certain population didn’t knew whether they were Hindu or not? This is what R.B. Bhagat calls as fuzzy communities being concretized. These ramifications are still felt today. Our honorable President K.R. Narayan in 2001 census couldn’t be declared ‘scheduled caste’, because according to definition of ‘scheduled caste’ he was one in Kerala but not so in Delhi. So the idea of caste or religion in India has always been unclear, it’s not all black and white. Lot of transitory states is there. The 1881 census was in self a little fuzzy as it listed about 11,645 categories and about 3000 main castes. This census represented the relative fluidity and complexity in pre colonial time before it could create a ‘freeze effect’ which was seen in later censuses.
Those who couldn’t be clubbed into the major religious categories, the nomads and tribal because they were outside the society at large got labeled as the ‘notified tribes’ or the criminal tribes. The census marked the people, the people got labeled and their identity got fixated. So the notified tribes got labeled criminals and till date, despite the free Indian government act to denotify them, they still are regarded as criminals, anti social and discriminated against. The census defined the various religions and castes as the British sought them to be and people’s opinion on the other got hardened. They understood themselves as what they were not. Fuzziness didn’t require defining the other but concreteness crystallized the other. So cropped up the ideas of majority and minority. The idea which has long since haunted the nation and caused deep birth pangs at partitioning and recurring reminders of the divide during several riots which followed. The census gave clear numbers; percentages of the strength, the fertility rate, the economical situation of particular community and so arose the zeal to protect one against the other. Also the distribution of the communities came to the forefront. The census highlighted clearly the skewness in population and brought in a sense of fear and so communalism was born. What was earlier a comfortable situation where people from different communities managed to co-exist became fear ridden and led to bad blood and growing animosity. The enumeration of fuzzy communities became an instrument in the hands of British for their policy of ‘divide and rule’.
This also lead to the partitioning of Bengal, the demand for separate electorates, the demand for Pakistan on ground of minority insecurity and after freedom the policy of minority appeasement and their reduction as mere vote banks. The problems that India faces today in forms of the Babri Masjid demolition or the Gujarat carnage are but fallouts of the results of the Indian census. Pakistan sees the Indian army in a predominantly Muslim Kashmir as anti to it’s formation theory and so we have four wars fought over it. What was the census result to the British for their policy of divide and rule is what they are to the political parties for their policies of vote banks. What Swami Shradhanand wrote in 1926 on the dying race of Hindu, the same RSS does on Islam bashing using census results of fertility today. And so we see the ramifications of the British census exist till date and continue to influence our perceptions about ourselves, they define our religion, our caste in terms of the numbers of the other. The British census created Knowledge about the people of India and they used the same Knowledge in a manner suited to their governance to exercise their power.
Reference:
K.P. Singh – Communities, Synonyms, Segments, Surnames and titles of India (pg. 1-12)
R.B. Bhagat – Census & the Construction of India
Nicholas B. Dirks – The Ethnographic State
Bernand S. Cohn – Colonialism & its forms of Knowledge
R. Champakalakshmi - Cultural technologies of colonial rule (Hindu newspaper online edition)
Salmaan Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
Mahasweta Devi - Year of Birth - 1871
http://roxygagdekar.blogspot.com/
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