Review of Paula Bannerjee's recent book

Book Reviews

M.G.S. Narayanan, Perumals of Kerala: Brahmin Oligarchy and Ritual Monarchy—Political and Social Conditions of Kerala Under the Cera Perumals of Makotai, (c. AD 800–AD 1124), Kerala: Calicut University Press, 1996, pp. 512.

Insightfully at the Empirically GivenA long-awaited publication of a widely-acclaimed Ph.D thesis, printed once for private circulation, is finally out now. The book is a meticulous exercise of empirical recon-struction of the history of Kerala under the reign of the Ceras of Makotai (Mahodayapura) between the eighth and twelfth centuries CE, commented by A.L Basham as ‘…one of the ablest and most thorough Indian theses that I have examined’. A comprehensive study systematically filling in gaps and bringing out corrections in the schema put for-ward by Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai, MGS’s book is a classic that required multiple attributes like the competency in collecting, deciphering and interpreting the published, defectively published and unpublished inscriptions, expertise in using their evidence for re-fixing the date of certain literary works in Tamil and Sanskrit, the historian’s craft in corroborative re-interpretation of the traditional chronicle once considered reli-able history and later rejected, and the perspective in integrating all this for doing the history of the region. It convincingly characterises the region’s polity, society and cul-ture of the period.

Narayanan’s main contributions in the work relate to the chronological and genealogical re-ordering of the political history of the Ceras, detailing of their governmental structure, analysis of the social relations, depiction of the interactive co-existence of religious institutions and illustration of the cultural richness and symbiosis. As regards the chronology, he established in the light of epigraphic and literary material that the founder of the Cera kingdom was not Kulasekhara Alvar as Elamkulam speculated but Rajasekhara, also called Ceraman Perumal Nayanar. He identified Kulasekhara Alvar with Sthanuravi Kulasekhara, the successor of Rajasekhara and clarified Kulasekhara as a coronation title like several other titles such as Rajasekhara, Vijayaraga, Kerala Kesari, Manukuladitya, Rajasimha, Rajaditya and Ranaditya. Narayanan’s accurate recognition of the relationship among the kings, settlement of the chronology of their inscriptions, and re-organization of the genealogy have rendered the study of the governmental structure, society, economy and culture

Indian Historical Review41(1) 103–141© 2014 ICHR

SAGE PublicationsLos Angeles, London,

New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521543http://ihr.sagepub.com

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Indian Historical Review, 41, 1 (2014): 103–141

systematic. Analysing the inscriptions, he has sorted out the constitutive structure of the Cera state as the king at the centre, ‘oligarchic caste corporation of the Brahmins called Nalutali surrounding him, and the relatively autonomous provincial governors and the local bodies at the villages and towns. He has brought out details of taxes, tolls, customs, protection levy and various fines; their modes of payment and measure of value, the periodicity, etc., with the help of inscriptions, and pointed out the bearing of the Arthasastra prescriptions on the Cera revenue administration. His interpretation of ‘the organisation of hundreds’ as companions of honour, the Ur in Kerala as the Brahmin settlement, the Brahmin oligarchy as the foundation of monarchy, and the sala-s or ghatika-s as the Vedic cum martial training centres of Brahmin caste exclusiveness, is remarkably distinguishing.

Narayanan showed with enormous clarity the inscriptional evidence corroborat-ing the Keralolpatti claim of the state-wide organisation of the temple-centred Aryan Brahmin villages and their hierarchical society with the tenant temple-servant sub-castes, Nayar tenants and occupation sub-castes in the descending order besides the slave sub-castes at the bottom. He discusses the category of the local ruling chieftains conferred with kshatriya status constituting the samanta sub-caste. Examining the prac-tice of passing the property on to the eldest son as a strategy to perpetuate family prop-erty undivided, Narayanan explains how the system encouraged the younger brothers to seek marriage alliance with the samantha sub-caste, temple servants and Nayars. A notable contribution is the good deal of new information that the book provides about the relations of merchants and their organisations such as Valanciyar, Nanadesikal, Ancuvannam and Manigramam with Kerala. Narayanan’s interpretation of the political context and strategic implications of the grant of land theoretically owned by the king to merchant bodies and agrarian corporations has been quite clinching.

About culture, say any aspect of it, like language, script, literature, writing, education, theatre, religion, religious institution, ritual, art, architecture, sculpture or what not, MGS’s discussion of the relevant data from epigraphic and literary sources is exhaustive. His views on the Buddhist Vihara called Srimulavasa, the practice of accommodating a representative of the Buddhist Centre in the Perumal’s Council, the existence of Jain centres as pockets in the northern and southern ends of the state, the co-existence of early Jews and Christians, their institutions, inscriptions, the survival of several old Pahlavi crosses, the period of introduction of Islam into the region, the Matayi mosque, the last Perumal’s conversion, and so on largely defy disputes. His study of the Saiva and Vaisnava Bhakti movements, interpretation of their ideological function, observation of their impetus to the temple building and consolidation of Brahmin villages, etc., are strikingly original. Narayanan’s analysis of the temple, its prosperity, power, organisation, administration, social functions and functionaries in the light of inscriptions and with the instances of the temples such as Tiruvancikkalam, Tiruvalla, Trikkadittanam, Trikkakkara and Tirumulikkalam, is profound. In short, Narayanan’s attempt to sketch the political and social history under the Ceras of Mahodyapura, is discussion of any aspect of contemporary life, limited only by the strength of the source, which he exhausted always. This empirically all-inclusive

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social history is conceptually an exclusive cultural case history of Aryanisation of a non-Aryan territory.

With the primacy of the source, Narayanan’s method is analytical positivism away from social theory and fully at the empirically given, allowing incompatibilities like viewing historical process as introduction from above (for example, viewing the ‘bot-tom up’ historical formation of the kingdom as the ‘top down’ division of the kingdom into provinces) and conceiving the simultaneity of the irreconcilable (for example, monarchy and oligarchy or monarchy and provincial autonomy or monarchy and ritual monarchy). However, to me it is a mine of new knowledge, enabling other studies. For example, my own study on the Kerala temple is a small flint flaked from this big rock. A lucid narrative of new knowledge accompanied by an extremely useful index to the Cera inscriptions (which itself is a major contribution to knowledge), it is an eminently educative book that contributes substantially to the understanding of a crucial period in the history of Kerala.

Rajan GurukkalVisiting Professor, Centre for Contemporary Studies,

Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Pius Malekandathil, The Mughals, the Portuguese and the Indian Ocean: Changing Imageries of Maritime India. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2013, ISBN: 978-93-80607-33-7, pp. viii + 234. Price: `850

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521619

Maritime History has become a tool in the hands of several Indian historians who are interested in Indo-Portuguese history. The study of maritime history enables these researchers to come closer to the crucial dynamics of historical process. Maritime history embraces many aspects of history, such as international politics, navigation, oceanic cur-rents, maritime transportation, coastal society, development of ports and port-towns, sea-borne trade and commerce, port–hinterland relations and so on.

As far as India and the Indian Ocean regions are concerned, maritime studies have a great relevance in the exchange of culture, establishment of political power, the dynam-ics of society, trade and commerce and religion of these areas. The Indian Ocean served not only as a conduit for conducting trade and commerce, but also served and still serves, as an important means of communication. The Indians have carried commodi-ties to several Asian and African countries even before the arrival of the Europeans from India. Exchange of goods promoted maritime trade as well as the fusion of dif-ferent cultures in the Indian Ocean. Art, architecture, culinary habits, music, cloth-ing, language and religion went through a transitional period because of the maritime activities in the Indian Ocean.

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There were favourable conditions in the Indian Ocean that helped the Portuguese to build their maritime power on their entry in the Indian Ocean. C.R. Boxer, among other things, mentions the following points as regards Portuguese Sea Trade:

1. The Emperor of Egypt, Persia and Vijayanagar had no armed shipping in the Indian Ocean.

2. Wealthy entrepôts of Ormuz and Mallaca did not possess ocean-going vessels.3. The Arabs, Gujaratis, and other Muslims who dominated the trade of the

Indian Ocean had large ocean-going vessels as well as small coastal ships, but even the largest were not provided with artillery and no iron was used in hull construction.

4. The Portuguese took control of the strategic points in the spice trade routes. They controlled Goa, Ormuz, Mallaca and these were supplemented by many other fortified coastal settlements and trading posts (feitorias) from Sofola in north-east Africa to Ternate in Moluccas.

5. The domination of the seaborne trade of the Indian Ocean, first by the Arabs and later to a large extent by Muslims of Indian origin chiefly Gujaratis, was achieved in both cases quite peacefully). Many Asian rulers shared the convic-tion of Bahadur Shah, the King of Gujarat, that ‘wars by sea are merchants’ affairs, and of no concern to the prestige of Kings’. Thus there were favourable historical conditions that helped the Portuguese to a certain extent to hold a de facto control of a section of the Indian Ocean, that is, mainly the Arabian Sea.

A large contingent of historians working on maritime history and Indian ocean stud-ies have brought in a new historical knowledge that has revolutionised the understand-ing of the integrated historical processes of Early Modern India. It was the academic endeavours of such leading historians like Ashin Das Gupta, Dietmar Rothermund, M.N. Pearson, Luis Philipe Thomaz, Om Prakash, K.S. Mathew, Teotonio R. De Souza, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Kenneth McPherson, A.R. Disney, R.J. Barendse, B. Arunachalam, K.N. Choudhury that a different set of meanings and added importance began to be accorded to the historical processes of Maritime India. Prof. Malekandathil has been working on this direction for more than a decade and published several vol-umes on Portuguese India.

The present volume, The Mughals, The Portuguese and The Indian Ocean: Changing Imageries of Maritime India by Pius Malekandathil is a collection of ten research papers, presented as a historical journey through Maritime India analysing its changing imageries and meanings against the background of the Mughal expansion from land to sea and the fluctuating fortunes of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. The author dwells upon the mechanisms of the land-centric activities of the Mughals and their relatively formative and feeble strand concentrating on the coastal developments and the trans-oceanic exchanges in the Indian Ocean respectively. The book covers a long span of time from 1500 to 1840 and defies the stereotyped and rigid per iodization of Medieval India to look at the history of Maritime India as a process bringing out patterns of continuity, change and transition.

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The focus of analysis in each chapter is changing contours of various regions of Maritime India which is done in the context of larger developments and connectivity. Out of the ten chapters, five deal with a variety of historical process that directly or indirectly help understand the economy and politics of the Mughals while most of the remaining ones dwell on the socio-economic processes of Maritime India.

The author introduces ten different themes of Early Modern Maritime India against the backdrop of definitions and redefinitions given to it by the Portuguese and Mughals in their attempts to bank upon the wealth derived from circuits in the Indian Ocean Regions. He points out that the last quarter of Akbar’s reign was marked by an intense phase of multi-religious discourse in which the dialogue between the Jesuit Missionaries from the Portuguese world and Akbar stands out as a remarkable feat of civilisational encounter in Medieval India. Upon their arrival in India the Portuguese divided the Indian coastal terrains into different hierarchies on the basis of their resourcefulness and strategic locations and the spatial manifestations of deeper societal processes of the cities that emerge from multiple levels of activities connected with production, exchange and power exercise. The author argues that the idea of South India was for-mulated and reshaped through the channels of commerce particularly through the fre-quent movements of commodities within the region through the trade circuits resorted to by Portuguese and their mercantile collaborators or by their competitors. There was trade through sea supplemented by the trade through inland routes whose chan-nels interlinked the various economic zones of South India so as to evolve the idea of a distinct region in the south. The Portuguese attempts to monopoly trade in the Indian Ocean received a major setback because of the parallel circulatory processes between India and the Mediterranean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in dif-fering quantities and degrees. The commercial vibrancy of the coastal Western India depended very much on its relationship with the chain of African markets bordering Indian Ocean which often made them operate as two sides of the same economic world geo-physically distanced but intrinsically connected by the waters and circuits of the Indian Ocean.

He goes on arguing that the period between 1650 and 1720 witnessed the emergence of several maritime power contenders in and around the ports of Northern Kankan and then critically analysed Varthamanapushthakam, which was written in 1785 by Fr Thomas Paremakkel as an account of his travel along with his friend Bishop Mar Joseph Kariyattil to Madras, Africa, Brazil, Portugal and Rome and often held as the first travelogue in an Indian language which has been immensely used as a literary medium by the author to ventilate his dissent and anger against the hegemonic attitudes and the cultural colonial fabric which the European religious missionaries set up for the church in India particularly for the St Thomas Christians of Kerala arguing vehemently that Indians should be ruled by Indians and not by foreigners. He goes on demanding as early as 1785 that Indian Christians should be ruled not by European religious mis-sionaries but by Indians.

Malekandathil discusses the commercially-oriented Portuguese settlers who expanded along the water space of Bay of Bengal, had a different format of operation not only because of their constant refusal to get integrated with the Portuguese power

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centre on the coastal western India but also because of the regional specificities and exi-gencies which defined the nature of their behaviour and activities over there. Then he shifts to the period between 1780 and 1840 which is often called the Age of Revolution in the West and the significant change in the Lusitanian space in India due to radical alteration in the politico-economic activities and socio ecclesiastical institutions.

Malekandathil follows an integrated and holistic approach by linking the land-oriented developments with the maritime ones to show the changing meanings that maritime India acquired at different periods following the redefinitions given by the constant coast-hinterland interactions. In fine, this collection focuses on the changing meanings of maritime India.

K.S. MathewDirector, Institute for Research in Social Sciences and Humanities

Nirmalagiri, Kannur University, Kerala, India

Agnieszka Kuczkiewiez–Fras (ed.), Islamicate Traditions in South Asia: Themes from Culture and History. New Delhi: Manohar, 2013

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521622

The editor of this neatly produced volume is known for her translations of Hindi and Urdu texts into Polish and also for her study of linguistic structures of Hindi–Urdu or Hindustani. She characterises traditions flowing from the cohabitation of Hindus and Muslims in India for centuries as a unique phenomenon, which resulted in creating the Islamicate (as distinct from Islamic) culture of South Asia.

Ashok Vajpeyi’s introductory essay arguing that Ghalib’s, ‘modernity’ was essen-tially a product of interaction of Indian and Persian literary traditions, seems to under-line this characterisation.

Articles contributed by experts in different fields are grouped in this volume under four sub-heads: ‘Places and Images’, ‘People’, ‘Ideas and Notions’ and ‘History and Language’. Those grouped under subhead ‘People’ seem to represent the more impor-tant part of the volume. These are important for novelty of subjects discussed as well as variety of source material put together. Christina Oesterheld’s piece on novels of Nasim Hijazi, for instance, is noteworthy for providing insights on popular sentiment among sections of Urdu reading public during agitation for partition and subsequently in the newly created Islamic state of Pakistan. The author very correctly refers to these novels as jihadi literature. According to her, these may not be compared with Abdul Halim Sharar’s late nineteenth century novels glorifying Islamic history where element of jihad is not always central to basic narrative. She however concedes that literary histories of Urdu do not take notice of authors of Nasim Hijazi’s ilk and if at all they are referred to as an example of literature which constructs a past that entirely belongs to conquerors and invaders. One may, however, note that Nasim Hijazi’s jihadist fury is mainly directed towards Christian regimes in West Asia and Europe overrun by Arabs.

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Islamic conquest of India conspicuously enough does not figure prominently in his novels. Hijazi’s piece on Muhammad Bin Qasim written in 1945, when communal agita-tion for Pakistan was on its peak, is the only exception. That from the remaining long period of ‘Muslim rule’ in India he could not pick out any theme to highlight his jihadist thesis with reference to Indian history is significant. This is, incidentally, reminiscent of Irfan Habib’s remark that unlike in other parts of the world, Islamic conquest of India did not result in wholesale conversion of local people. Throughout the period of Islamic domination, an overwhelming majority of India’s habitants remained non-Muslim.

Another important contribution included in the same section is David Lelyveld’s piece on Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s early contributions in Urdu print and oratory which in a way reflect his initial groping towards modernity and social reform. Gail Minault’s piece, ‘Zay Kay Sheen, Aligarh’s purda-nashin poet’, from the same section, is interest-ing for bringing into focus the rebellious spirit of a young Muslim woman brought up in a conservative zamindar family of Aligarh known for their ‘loyalists politics’. The author, however, seems to ignore the fact that already by the end of First World War several Sherwani young men, Tasadduq Ahmad Khan, for example, had been influ-enced by the growing ‘anti-British activism’. Z. Khe Sheen’s support for the Gandhian svadesi movement (1922) must also be seen in the perspective of this ‘quasi nationalist’ awakening among Indian Muslims during second decade of the twentieth century.

Mehr Afshan Farooqi’s article tracing the evolution of Urdu literary tradition from Vali Deccani to Ghalib is a fine piece of research. She argues that Urdu poetry, as one finds it in Mir’s and Ghalib’s compositions represents a continuation, of Hindvi, Dehlvi as well as Gurjari writings of medieval period (twelfth to sixteenth centuries). The case she builds entirely demolishes the notorious thesis that, after his visit to Delhi in 1700, Vali was persuaded to use more extensively themes borrowed from Persian lit-erary tradition eventually leading to a situation where rekhta of the earlier phase come to be replaced by a highly Persianised Urdu-e-Mualla. Mehr Afshan Farooqi is of the view that poetry of north India subsequently reflected a tendency on the part of Delhi and Agra poets to gain distance from Vali.

Two articles of the section entitled ‘History and Language’ deserve special atten-tion. These are Kinga Maciuszak’s ‘Persian Lexicography in South Asia’ and Andre Winks’ ‘On the Road of Failure: The Afghans in India’. Kinga Macinuszak’s piece is a survey of Persian dictionaries compiled in India which students of Persian literature and also of medieval Indian history cannot afford to ignore. It is an excellent guide to lexicons compiled in India from the fourteenth century onwards.

Andre Winks’ study of the Afghan ‘failure’ in India is essentially a survey of tradi-tions relating to expansion of Afghan tribes in the north-west which were recorded initially by Elphinstone. Such a study would have become more meaningful if the rise of Afghan settlements in different places in north India accompanied by emerging of Afghan zamindaris in many regions were also studied. In the process of the creation of Afghan zamindaris tensions were seemingly created among groups seeking employ-ment and patronage under the Mughal rulers. Manucci’s testimony that in the late seventeenth century, Akbar was remembered for his dislike of Afghans is perhaps an

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indication of this situation. In Tarikh-i-Farrukhabad, Waliallah notices a riot between Afghans and Shaikhzadas suggesting that such tension persisted in the Awadh and Farrukhabad tract down to the end of the eighteenth century.

On the whole, this scholarly volume is a welcome addition to growing literature on social and literary history of Islamic presence in the Indian sub-continent.

Iqtidar Alam Khan

Premansu Kumar Bandyopadhyay, Sepoys in the British Overseas Expeditions, Vol. 1, 1762–1826. Kolkata: K.P. Bagchi & Company, 2011, pp. xxvi + 380, `800

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521626

This book contains much more than a description of the role of Indian sepoys, both from north India and from the Presidency of Madras, sent from India to participate in British wars in Ceylon, Southeast Asia, Egypt and Mauritius. It also gives the results of the author’s painstaking searches to unravel the secrets of the expeditions’ costs and to quantify the frequent British failures to refund the East India Company for its military contributions to wars that could hardly be considered to be in India’s interest. In addi-tion, attention is paid to the sepoys ‘political’ attitudes, including their resistance to service abroad, as well as to the conditions of their service, such as health care, rations given, punishment, education, pensions and racial relations in the colonial army. Much of this goes beyond the mere history of the sepoys’ overseas service.

The volume under review represents the first part of a project of Dr Bandyopadhyay’s that covers the role of Indian soldiers in all overseas wars between 1762 and 1900. This first part deals with the expeditions to Manila of 1762–66, to Ceylon and the spice islands (now in Eastern Indonesia) in 1779–81 and again in 1784–97, to Egypt in 1801–02, to Mauritius and Java in 1810–12, and—the most massive attack of all—to Burma in 1824–26. All these campaigns except the war on Burma were forced upon the Company by the War Office in London and were part of British armed conflicts that had their centre on the continent of Europe. They caused great human suffering. The Manila expedition, a military success that culminated in the massive plunder of the city of that name, ended five years later with only a third of the men returning home, the others having perished from hunger and disease (p. 277). For all these years, the authorities had neglected to make available transport and the sepoys were left languish-ing in their barracks. Similarly, in spite of promises to the sepoys that their service would be of three years duration, those sent to the Eastern archipelago in 1794 began to embark for home only in 1801.

Yet, open discontent was rare. In 1812, a rather clumsily planned rising in Java was nipped in the bud. Until 1824, resistance to depart on service overseas was equally

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feeble. In that year, however, serious protest was voiced—and cruelly suppressed—in Barrackpore near Calcutta. Some years ago, the author published a monograph on this event (Tulsi Leaves and Ganges Water: Slogan of the First Sepoy Mutiny at Barrackpore, 1824, Kolkata, 2003). In this and in other protests, Bandyopadhyay discerns, though more in the north Indian sepoys than in the Madrasis, not only a consciousness of their ‘basic rights and self dignity as professional soldiers’, but also of their unique cultural heritage and ‘their distinct Indian identity’. It was in Java, he submits, that the Bengal sepoy first struck on the idea of an ‘Indian national identity irrespective of caste and religion’, though he is so careful as to suggest that the memory of similar feelings among the Madrasi mutineers at Vellore in 1806 may have contributed to such senti-ments. Interesting is his suggestion, that the intimate relations between the sepoys and members of the Javanese nobility in the Surakarta keraton, were as colonised as they were and as proud of their Indic heritage, and that these feelings made both of them culturally more confident and defiant (pp. 177, 221, 337). Anyway, at this stage, the Indian sepoy was no longer a mere mercenary. Throughout the book, the author sug-gests, implicitly and explicitly, that the historiography of the Indian sepoy during this period is part India’s proto-nationalist past, and that the sepoy’s protests and insubor-dination were not just matters of military indiscipline; they belong at least as much to the history of Indian resistance against colonial rule.

Though there is some traditional battle history contained in the volume, the focus is on the sepoy and on the human tragedy of his service abroad, especially during the Burma campaign in which some 20,000 sepoys were involved. Wherever possible figures, often in tables, are given of the numbers of troops involved, of their trans-portation on board ship, their pay and batta and their personal luggage, of mutineers court-martialed, military provisions, daily and weekly rations for Hindu and Muslim soldiers, distances marched per day, the occurrence of several diseases, prize money (and the scandalously unequal shares of it conceded to the common soldier), and more particularly, the cost of the several expeditions to the Indian tax payer.

Towards the end of the book (p. 348), the total expenditure of the expeditions dealt with is calculated at £10.61 million (without unpaid interest). This final table, however, should have been much more detailed. Earlier (p. 103) the Company’s total expenditure on the overseas expeditions of the 1794 to 1803 period only is given at £8.57 million (inclusive of interest), of which only £3.11 million was paid by the London Exchequer. Until the end of its existence, the Company fought, often with little success, with the UK government for the full payment of sums advanced. The London treasury was wont to argue, by way of excuse, that the Company had gained trading advantages from the victories gained by British arms. There seems to have been little truth in this and, except in the case of the Burma War, all the expeditions had been forced upon the Company by the government at home. Anyway, the author has unearthed much concrete financial information of a kind the historian is in much need of. A really dependable analysis of all financial aspects of early colonial rule has been so far beyond the grasp of the ordinary researcher and the military part of such an analysis must be regarded as per-haps the most difficult to execute. Therefore, though the job seems to be incomplete, Bandyopadhyay has done the historical profession a great service with this study.

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It is a pity the proofs were not corrected more carefully. As it is, we now have ‘Witteroreeden’ instead of ‘Weltevreden’ (p. 130), ‘Hemanghubauam’ instead of ‘Hamengkubuwono’ (p. 146), and a quote from Philip Mason that is garbled to the point of incomprehensibility (p. 341), to give only a few examples. Some terms should have been explained, for instance Coffrees/Coffreys (pp. 32, 36) for kāfir/caffer, and Pacauli (p. 47) for pakhālī/water-carrier. And, if I may, as a Dutchman, Chinsura was not Danish (pp. 106, 109), but a Dutch factory.

Dirk H.A. KolffLeiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947 (Second Edition with a new Postscript). Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 363, `795.

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521627

This book was first published in 1997, but subsequently, based on further research on the political developments in 1940s and certain new issues that need further explora-tion, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has added a new ‘Postscript’ in the present volume to examine the emergence, consolidation of Namasudra identity as well as the move-ments of the Namasudras for social and political recognition. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s research on caste in Bengal and the Namasudras in particular marked the beginning of a new approach in understanding socio-political history of modern Bengal. Before him Hitesranjan Sanyal’s book Social Mobility in Bengal (Calcutta, 1981) provided a new insight to understand the social history of Bengal, particularly the importance of caste. But Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s study of the Namasudras, the second largest Hindu caste in the province of Bengal, brings out, for the first time, the complexities of socio-polit-ical mobilisation of a marginalised caste in modern history of Bengal. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century witnessed the mobilisation of marginalised castes for a new social identity and equal economic and political rights all over India. This was also the time when the ideology of caste hierarchy based on Brahmanical literature was chal-lenged by a number of intellectuals belonging to intermediary and lower castes. In Bengal, which was the epicentre of various reform initiatives in the nineteenth century, a number of lower castes engaged themselves in reinventing their past and, in a way, challenged their given identity. This study of the Namasudras by Bandyopadhyay focusing on the process of formation of a community identity, the nature of social protest and the diver-gent voices within the community explains the ‘transient nature of caste identity in India’ (p. 10). Through the study of the Namasudra movement, Bandyopadhyay has argued that ‘Caste movements gathered momentum and then dissipated, as castes themselves hardly remained static or homogenous’ (p. 10). The postscript in the present volume talks about the resurgence of the Namasudras after 1947 in West Bengal and their inter-vention in the electoral politics of West Bengal till the 2011 Assembly elections.

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Analysing the existing works on caste movements in India in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries Bandyopadhyay in the introduction of the book questions the assumption of caste as an undifferentiated group of people and argues that most of castes in India in spite of having common ritual rank are divided within in terms of eco-nomic and social status. He relates this differentiation to social awakening and political movements within a caste. The first two chapters of this book deliberate on the origin of the Namasudras, differentiation within the community in terms of socio-economic status and their movement towards formation of a new social identity. Development of the Matua sect in the late nineteenth century and its simple non-ritualistic doctrine of bhakti not only challenged the religious foundation of caste hierarchy but also helped in developing a sense of solidarity among the Namasudras. The construction of the Namasudra identity is explained as the sign of protest against disrespect and depri-vation perpetuated by the high-caste Hindu elite. At the same time the Namasudra protest movement did not demand for the abolition of the existing caste structure. ‘The movement therefore oscillated in a continuum of hidden protest, open revolt and accommodative behaviour’ (p. 63). The third chapter deals with the Namasudra movement in the period following the partition of Bengal in 1905. Anti-partition agi-tation being viewed as a movement of the high-caste Hindu elite, the leadership of the Namasudra movement disassociated themselves from the Swadeshi movement and provided unequivocal support to the British government. They demanded the same political rights as granted to the Muslims. The leadership of the nationalist movement tried, on its part, to address the grievances of the Namsudras, but they did not succeed much in convincing the Namsudra leadership to support the nationalist cause. Despite the divergent voices and aspirations within the Namasudras, ‘all their grievances and aspirations converged at one point-in a common desire to contest the existing power structure that had kept them down for centuries. It was around this ideology of protest that their community solidarity was constructed (p. 98). Alienation of the Namasudras from the mainstream nationalist politics continued even after Gandhi’s intervention and in the course of the non-cooperation movement. In Chapter 4, the reasons for the continuing alienation from national politics have been explained and also the contin-ued alliance between the Namasudras and the Muslims. Chapter 5 analyses important developments within the Namasudra movement and the success of the Namasudra leadership in securing a position of power within the constitutional framework of the British Raj. The alienation from mainstream nationalism continued despite efforts made by nationalist leaders. Divisions within the Namsudras also became more appar-ent. Particularly the Namasudra peasantry did not find much interest in the separate electorate, education and job opportunities in which the Namasudra leaders were pri-marily engaged. Bandyopadhyay writes, ‘the masses and the leaders of the Namasudra community had been gradually moving apart. Even the leaders no longer represented a united front. Even the leaders no longer represented a united front. During the years that followed, their movement continued to pull in different directions, with the more powerful political streams gradually appropriating minor parallel streams at different junctures (p.172). Chapter 6 talks about the transition of the Namasudra movement

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from alienation to integration into the mainstream nationalist movement between 1937 and 1947. Bandyopadhyay explains how changed electoral politics and the importance of the scheduled castes with thirty reserved seats in the Bengal provincial legislature brought the Namasudras, due to their numerical majority, in a dominant position in mainstream politics. But the differences within the Namsudra movement did not get completely resolved. A section of the leadership continued to maintain its alignment with the Muslim League and preferred to maintain a separate political identity. But the majority in the changed political scenario joined the Congress by the 1940s. This inte-gration of the Namasudras into national politics in the opinion of Bandyopadhyay was ‘to gain a position of power within the political nation…This was also perhaps a logical culmination of their movement which, though initially alienated from the national-ists, was not strictly separatist in its goals, despite frequently used separatist rhetoric’ (pp. 174, 208). In the next chapter integration of the Namasudra peasantry into the broader national, class and religious identities has been discussed. With the changing socio-political development in 1940s in Bengal the Namasudra peasantry joined hands with other small peasants on issues of common interest cutting across caste, class and religious boundaries. Bandyopadhyay argues that ‘Their notions of community were thus neither wholly autonomous, nor absolutely static and its boundaries were continu-ally redrawn as they were exposed to and responded to various socio-political realities, ideological influences and organizational mediation’ (pp. 235–36). In the postscript he has taken this study beyond 1947 in order to explore further what he described as ‘integrationist tendencies’ and how the Namasudra struggle changed in post 1947 political scenario. He does not agree with ‘the academic tendency to essentialise Dalit identity as politically autonomous and geographically universal’ (p. 247). In the light of postcolonial developments Bandyopadhyay argues that what he concluded in 1997 as ‘integrationist tendencies’ would have been more appropriate to describe ‘as stra-tegic alliances, dictated by the shifting paradigms of partition politics’ (p. 248). The trauma of Partition affected Namasudra identity politics but in the changed scenario the Namsudras adopted different strategies of empowerment. When a section of the Namasudra leadership was opposed to Partition, other leaders joined pro-partition campaign launched by the Hindu Mahasabha and the Congress. Partition caused more hardship for poor Namasudra peasants and they were forced to leave their homes in East Pakistan. The Namasudra peasants were the worst victims of post-Partition vio-lence. Without proper rehabilitation they joined political protests but did not identify with any particular political party. Namasudra refugees hardly got the desired response from established political parties. However, by the beginning of twenty-first century the Namasudras in West Bengal had made significant educational and social progress, although politically they remained marginalised. The resurgence came with the consol-idation of the new Matua identity since 1980s and the efforts made for political mobilisa-tion resulted in consolidation of the Namasudra demographic power in electoral politics. Analysing the election of 2011 in West Bengal and the success of the Matua solidarity in some districts of West Bengal Bandyopadhyay thinks that there is the possibility of consolidation of an independent Dalit voice in the politics of West Bengal.

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Based on exhaustive archival materials and other primary sources in English and a large number of vernacular tracts, pamphlets and newspapers, this study on the Namsudras shows the complex character of a caste movement. While social humiliation experienced in different ways acted as a major influence to look for a new social iden-tity and its legitimation through various means, at the same time the Namasudra caste leaders did not demand for abolition of the caste system. The study of the Namasudra movement points to the existence of different levels of consciousness within the same caste and how different aspirations of the Namasudras came out in open due to the changing political scenario. Although mobilised in the name of caste, different sets of goals and different ideologies co-existed within the Namasudra movement. Beyond caste identity it is important to take note of the other concerns and interests which co-exist within a caste. This probably explains that in colonial and post-colonial India in spite of having common concern against marginalization of Dalits why Dalit leaders speak in different voices. One may not agree with Bandyopadhyay’s hypothesis about fracturing of caste solidarities but this book would definitely provide new insights to look into caste movement.

Swaraj BasuSchool of Social Sciences

IGNOU, New Delhi

Jagdish N. Sinha, Science, War and Imperialism, India in the Second World War. Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp. 278

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521654

This is an important book on more count than one. It deals with a period which has not been extensively researched as yet because most of the attention has been on the forma-tive phase of colonialism ending in the early twentieth century. There are some inter-esting works dealing with development and industrialisation during this period but most of them are neither focussed on war nor on science. Jagdish Sinha has filled this gap successfully by venturing into a domain which is crucial due to the World War II and is also important because it had the seeds of scientific and industrial development in post independent.

As expected, the author begins by referring to the ‘science and empire’ phase as a backdrop to his own narrative of the latter period. Unfortunately, his coverage of this period is not exhaustive; it seems to be heavily dependent on just a few studies, empha-sising on science as a tool of the empire while some seminal studies are completely ignored. This lapse does not affect the main argument of the book but a more complete picture of the early colonial phase would have further enriched the work.

The wars in history have always benefitted by the advancements in technology, as pointed out by the author; however, the two World Wars amply demonstrated the role of new scientific discoveries in revolutionising the modern warfare. This enabled

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the European powers to conquer new areas, facilitating the expansion and consolida-tion of imperialism across the globe. The two World Wars sufficiently established the close nexus between scientists and their laboratory researches and politicians and their politics. The dreaded explosive terrorising the world today called RDX was one such discoveries in modern chemistry of the period.

At the turn of the last century, India had got into the industrialisation mode, trying to grapple with the consequences of industrial revolution in Europe and lessons to be learnt while appropriating various available models of industrial development. One of the most intense debates took place in the pages of The Dawn, the Calcutta based journal, edited by Satish Chandra Mukherjee. The emergence of swadeshi movement coincided with the victory of Japan over Russia in 1905, which catapulted Japan as a major Asian power. For the next few decades, it became one of the model states for industrial and scientific development in India, particularly in Bengal. Germany was another European country, which was touted as a model by a large number of intel-lectuals and scientists, including P.C. Ray, particularly between the two World Wars. As both Japan and Germany were together against the Allied powers during World War II, India faced a complex and difficult situation, which Sinha tries to engage with competently in one of the chapters of the book.

One of the interesting chapters in the book is ‘Science for Reconstruction’, which is placed in a period that was going through immense political, economic and social transformation. The concluding years of World War II called for a new global order, with increased mutual understanding and cooperation. The chaos and savagery of the war finally led to a growing desire for coexistence, harmony and common good. In India, this concern assumed significant political dimensions not only in relation to imperialism and nationalism but also for the advancement of science and technology. Here, Sinha points out, the war and the new forces of change it released combined with the local factors to compel the colonial authorities to respond sympathetically to the national aspirations and to use science and technology for material reconstruction of the country. (p. 137). The colonial government had to assuage the world opinion, par-ticularly the USA, its major ally in the war, which held British colonialism responsible for India’s poverty and backwardness.

Besides this global change of scene, the Indian nationalists were vociferous in their demand for reform and reconstruction and were supported by a large number of intel-lectuals, economists, scientists as well as industrialists. The two most articulate voices emerged from the National Planning Committee and the Science and Culture Group, demanding a comprehensive national reconstruction. Several other groups and indi-viduals came forward with possible plans of development like the ‘Bombay Plan’, put forth by a group of industrialists, M.N. Roy came out with his own ‘People’s Plan’, J.C. Kumarappa had his Gandhian model while the Planning Committee of the Indian Union Muslim League also had its own model. All of them considered science and technology as a major instrument of change and development while the Gandhian model emphasised on moral and spiritual aspects. The British colonial administration, Sinha goes on to point out, had its own compulsions during the 1940s so they came out

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with their own plan instead, forming a Reconstruction Committee with the Viceroy as its president.

The Committee seriously debated the issue of industrialisation and Jagdish Sinha highlights some interesting and not so well known facts from the period. Most of the members favoured privatisation of major industries and did not look at the state as a significant player. B.R. Ambedkar, as a representative of the lower classes and a mem-ber of the Council, opposed this and appealed for ‘nationalization of industries in as many sectors as possible because they believed that only the state controlled industries would allow the minorities a proportional allocation in jobs in the industrial sector’ (p. 152). It did not happen in the 1940s and the demands persist even today after more than sixty years of independence.

The last chapter of the book is called ‘Towards Organizing Science’, dealing mostly with the founding of CSIR and its initial problems. Most of the other chapters in the book deal with technology and industrialization during World War II. While referring to the agenda of CSIR and also its structure, Sinha writes that ‘the CSIR was another office of the colonial set-up, which catered to the scientific and technical requirements of the Raj. By creating the CSIR, the authorities tried to serve a twofold purpose: of serving their immediate interests concerning wartime crises on the one hand and of assuaging the demand of the Indians for freedom to manage their scientific and techni-cal affairs on the other’ (p. 174). Unfortunately, the CSIR continues to be run with the same wartime colonial mentality, with strict controls, where scientists as bureaucrats are much worse than the bureaucrats themselves. For obvious reasons, the colonial regime vested Directors of the laboratories with unabashed powers and we continue with the same model more than six decades after independence.

I must reiterate that this book is a very useful and timely addition to the growing literature on history of science. It is particularly important because it deals with the later colonial period, which has not been investigated in great detail.

S. Irfan HabibNational University of Educational Planning and Administration

New Delhi, India

Sanghamitra Misra, Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India. New Delhi: Routledge, 2011, pp. xiv + 236, `695

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521655

Reviewing the same book twice (earlier done in The Book Review) provides an immensely profitable exercise of re-reading a text. Re-reading produces different comprehension or strengthens the understanding. Reviewing Sanghamitra Misra’s above-mentioned work provides this rare opportunity of re-reading. Most books on the north-east deal with its ongoing epistemological struggle with identity and space.

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Sanghamitra’s book too deals with the same changing spectre of identity with its changing political space of a very low profile district of Assam, Goalpara. The author picked up this sleepy ‘borderland’ and penetrated its apparently calm exterior to bring out the deep churning this nondescript place has actually undergone in last two to three centuries. Goalpara despite being just a small district of Assam province had historical linkages with Tibet, Bhutan, Bengal, Coochbehar, Bengal and finally Assam. From, to use the author’s words, ‘an anomalous Mughal frontier into a distinct local space….[to a] fragmental zone of dependent and independent polities and bounded political units of the colonial state…[to a] colonial borderland…reduce[ing] it to a marginal realm of colonial cores’.

Indeed, Goalapara was an unusual space. Surrounded by the states of Tibet and Bhutan, two expanding states like the Ahoms and Mughals on two sides of the neigh-bourhood, inhabited by myriad tribal autochthones, a strong sedentarised peasantry, innumerable chieftaindoms, the massive landscape of dense forests and equally dense wildlife all converged to make a critical zone. The author was able to capture this diversity vividly and the problem it presented either for agrarianisation or for polity formation. However, along with other areas of the region, Goalpara evolved an autonomous polity under the Koches. Ecology, autochthones and peasant groups were interestingly integrated to the political economy of state making by the Koches in a troubled frontier region. The Koches however did not survive the expansionist designs of the Mughal imperia. A series of expeditions yielded the defeat of partial absorption of Kochbihar, Goalpara and Duars into the Mughal Empire which made it part of the political economic processes of the Mughal Empire. The agrarianisation also resulted in peasant discontent and consequent resistance movement reflecting an amazing fluidity of history in this limited space. The colonial intervention in the nineteenth century did not however halt the rapid fluidity. The colonial endeavour in expanding the agrarian order in this depopulated and uninhabited territory cre-ated new communities of landholders and new authorities of power. To compound it there were overlapping territorialities and shared sovereignties resulting in multiple contestations. Trade formed an important feature of the economy in a frontier region. Goalpara was no exception. Under colonialism this trading activity underwent sig-nificant reorientation to affect its history. The colonial state then settled down to appropriate the acquired territory by sponsoring migratory waves to settle and the wasteland consequencing changes in the region’s landholding structures and property rights supervised by a set of new colonial laws that substantially affected the state society continuum and were successful in creating a hierarchy of contesting claims of political identity. One such claim was the controversy over speech, language and identity. The space of Goalpara was claimed to be an integral part of the cultural landscape of Bengal and Assam at the same time. In this politics of identity the elite of Goalapara was the critical player. This chapter was brilliantly brought to life by the author. There were contradictory claims and counter-claims. There were landed interest and cultural affiliations crisscrossing. In the midst of such contesting expan-sionisms the indigenous culture of Goalpara was at an existentialist crossroad. ‘We

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have never been either Assamese or Bengali. They are both our neighbours. We are neither of the two… we are we. We are the people of this area. We are Goalparia…we are the people of this customs and traditions’ reflected another assertion to com-plicate this politics of identity. How these contestations over the politics of identity generated new narratives of history in Goalpara, how standardised histories were resisted through such narratives, how memories of the local past had become the new resort and how despite surrendering to a constructed national history of Assam/India, the Goalparia identity still remains secluded in and about its landscape, about its tall trees and forests, about its wildlife iconised by the elephant and its catchers immor-talised in the Mahout bandhu songs. All these are very poignantly brought about in the last chapter entitled ‘Histories, Memories and Identities’ by the author.

The book begins roughly in the later Mughal period, spans to the advent of the colonials and ends with the recasting of Goalpara as a borderland after 200 years of colonial rule. It touches upon the entire gamut of historical processes like pre-colonial polity formation in the region, absorptive intervention by the mighty Mughal state and the concomitant transformation in its polity and economy and the eventual advent of British colonials who wrested it back from Bengal and attached it to Assam in 1874, interestingly to make Assam a viable state. The book then concentrated on the colonial transformation that Goalpara underwent under the British and the kind of politics it generated to relegate it into an insignificant borderland. The success of the author was in demonstrating that despite its apparent calm the deep stirring and cross currents Goalpara had actually underwent. Hence as a micro-study the book succeeds hugely in its objective.

The work is as much about the relegation of a mainstream territory and its people into a peripheral borderland due to the political vicissitudes of the region as it is about the politics and identity and space. The author succeeds in braiding the two currents successfully and uses the Schendelian concept of ‘borderland’ profitably. However the same cannot be said about the other concepts she brings in course of discussion. Sometime these categories were irrelevant in her work, for example, the use of the concept of Zomia. The author, one gets the impression, was attracted to ‘grand theo-ries’ to be applied to her work even when not necessary. This no doubt demonstrated her topicality and grasp of world currents in social science research, but disrupted her narrative. It made the book dense and heavy and hence difficult reading.

The author will be appreciated for her critical mind. But for a scholar of Sanghamitra’s sharpness it is a difficult to understand how she missed to view ‘waste-land’ and ‘depopulated zones’ as colonial constructions. How is it that most of colonies were found to possess vast wastelands, were depopulated and full of lazy natives? It was also not explained why Goalpara or for that matter Assam had such unending sup-ply of so called wastelands and what were the reasons for its depopulated status. More so, because the whole politics of identity in the region was complicated by the colonial construction of ‘wasteland’ available in Assam and then opening them for incessant migration from the neighbouring Bengal districts. It not only changed the demography of Goalpara but also transformed its cultural character resulting in a new religion-based

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politics of identity. One also missed a discussion on the emergence of communal poli-tics in Goalpara which has been almost given a miss by the author.

Coming from a prestigious publication house, the printing errors are glaring. The Bibliography misses some book details which were there in the references. The double method of referencing makes it slightly cumbersome to read. Some of the sections of the book lack freshness as these were already published as research articles in aca-demic journals. Despite the academic compulsions a budding scholar confronts, one wished that author resisted the temptation of publication and offered the book entirely fresh. However, these thoughts are generated because it is a worthwhile book. It would delineate its own space in the growing body of north-east literature.

Sajal NagProfessor, Department of History

Assam University, SilcharAssam, India

Rakhahari Chatterji, Gandhi and the Ali Brothers: Biography of a Friendship. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2013, pp. xi + 229, `695

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521656

Defining or at least making sense of Indian nationalism in the context of anti-colonial struggle could not escape finding answers for many vexed questions on the Hindu–Muslim divide. It was as if two contending nationalisms were at work, which had to be either acknowledged, or they had to be glued together to announce a unity. But the glue was often recalcitrant, as the Indian National Congress discovered it, either in the aris-tocratic discomfort it produced in Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan or in the events of the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal or in the making of the Muslim League. The chemistry of British policy also ensured that the glue did not stick. Mahatma Gandhi saw Hindu–Muslim unity as imperative and largely achievable in his South African experience and hoped to achieve it too after his return to India. It was an ideal he never turned his back on, although its practice brought him high dividends of frustration and frequent recrim-inations from both sides and, of course, the tragic denouement of martyrdom. It also forged many friendships in its cause, some lasting and some fleeting, and some tied to the situational compulsions of politics. Among them his friendship with the Ali broth-ers, Shaukat Ali and Mohamed Ali, was the most interesting and intriguing. It was also the most show-cased and advertised, since it was intimately linked to the marriage between the Non-Cooperation and the Khilafat Movements in India. Rakhahari Chatterji in his Gandhi and the Ali Brothers has traced its links and fortunes with fine analytical skill and sensitivity and has told its story with some felicity, ensuring that the book offers rewarding fare.

Although the author has reminded us, more than once, that this ‘Biography of a Friendship’ is ‘less interpretative than descriptive’, it is nevertheless sought to be

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placed within the debate on communitarianism and multiculturalism in the making of the nation. The nineteenth century European discourse on nationalism, whether in its liberal or Marxist variant, did not have any meaningful place for the rights of minorities except to seek their unconditional assimilation or to resent the presence of those ‘sulk on his own rocks’ or the ‘ethnic trash’ who become the ‘fanatical standard bearers of counter-revolution’. As against the mono-cultural concept of nationhood which Europe expounded with fitful excursions into barbarity, Gandhi’s fight in South Africa was for the cultural rights of a cultural minority. His ‘never-failing sensitivity to the cultural/religious rights of minorities’ was carried forward to the larger site of the Indian freedom struggle, which, as he was convinced, was unthinkable without Hindu–Muslim unity.

But in India the problem of community awareness of Muslims and its equations with the British rule and the Hindu majority was more complex and subject to fre-quent convulsions and shifts. In the post-Mutiny years the Muslim elite needed to recast its self-perception and equations with the British rule, and its most visible representative was Sir Sayyid Ahmed, who symbolised the mix of eloquent loyalism with the Muslim community identity in India. For him the community was qaum (nation or a people), and not the ummah (community of Islamic peoples) of faith. Less anti-Hindu than pro-British, his belief in the autonomy of the Indian Muslim community also implied a rejection of the Khalifa’s jurisdiction over it. As opposed to this was a more consistent anti-British pan-Islamism of Jamaluddin al-Afghani, who put forth a kind of civilisational argument that Indian Muslims were integral to Dar al-Islam with the Turkish Caliphate as its head. The Firangi Mahal and the Deoband schools seemed to occupy the middle ground: notwithstanding the differ-ences of opinion between them, they generally believed that an autonomous Indian Muslim community could be built on the ground of universal Islamic teaching. The community identity of Muslims vis-à-vis the Hindus developed further in the last decades of the twentieth century while cow-protection and Hindi–Urdu controversy raged or when the Partition of Bengal was revoked in 1911. The question of separate electorate over which the communal divide was further exacerbated was, however, temporarily halted by the Lucknow Pact (1916).

But one of the more intriguing problems related to pan-Islamism and Muslim iden-tity was the Khilafat Movement, mixing up with the political behaviour of Turkey in Europe with its status as the seat the Caliphate. In India the movement had a long pedigree when Maulana Abdur Razzak was passionately sympathetic to Turkey in the Russo-Turkish war of 1878 and founded the Majlis Muid ul-Islam to secure men and money to help the Turkish cause. His passion had rubbed on to his grandson Abdul Bari, who became an iconic figure in the Khilafat movement, sending money and medical mission to Turkey while the Balkan Wars raged. The chief articulators of the Khilafat movement were the ulama, but Abdul Bari was able to recruit, among others, the Ali brothers for his cause. Not particularly religious hitherto, the western educated Ali brothers were attracted to pan-Islamism. Mohamed Ali’s Comrade had begun with a pro-government and anti-Hindu bias, which suited the high officials in the bureaucracy. But

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the events leading to the annulment of the Partition of Bengal (1911) made Mohamed Ali believe that a marriage of convenience with the Hindus, ‘honourably contracted and honourably maintained, is not to be despised’. The position of Turkey in the Great War placed the champions of the Khilafat in India in an untenable position of having to reconcile their loyalty to Britain with their love for Turkey. Although the Ali brothers and their mentor, Abdul Bari, had tried to persuade the Turkish Sultan either to remain neutral or support Britain in the War, an article written by Mohamed Ali in the Comrade had given the government enough reason to suspect the loyalty of the Ali brothers and intern them (1915–1919). This wartime paranoia which took away their freedom dried up whatever loyalty they professed to the Raj and made them its bitter critics.

Gandhi, after his long sojourn, struggles and experiments in South Africa, returned to India early in 1915. He was convinced that a meaningful nationalist struggle could only be founded on a strong Hindu–Muslim unity, and he found its best symbol in the Ali brothers. ‘It was a question of love at first sight between us’, he declared, and between 1915 and 1919 Gandhi was engaged with the question of getting the interned Ali brothers released, even to the irritation of the high officials in the government by linking it to the issue of recruitment for the War. To the Ali brothers Mr Gandhi became Mahatmaji, and to Mohamed Ali, his ‘friend, philosopher and guide’. The strategic coalition of the Rowlatt Satyagraha and later the No-cooperation Movement with the Khilafat Movement which Gandhi was able to orchestrate involved many knotty prob-lems of relating and reconciling the national and pan-Islamic issues, finding a comfort zone with the conservative and insular ulama, holding in leash the intemperate language Mohamed Ali was capable of using and of winning over a big chunk of Hindu leader-ship which did not find any meaningful connection between the Non-cooperation and Khilafat movements. But the mood was one of enthusiasm which was apt to drown any cacophonous doubts and voices. However, when enthusiasm ebbed doubts surfaced. Rakhahari Chatterji shows that the Ali brothers tended to make equivocal statements about non-violence, which was to Gandhi an article of faith. Gandhi was not unaware of the embedded fault lines in the alliance, and admitted even in 1920 that he had suc-ceeded in ‘weaning the party of violence from its ways…purely on utilitarian grounds’. The bogey of Afghan invasion and the response of the Ali brothers to it triggered off a series of reactions in government and Gandhi, who secured from the Ali brothers an apology, which, in turn, embarrassed and irked the Muslim press and the Hindu fac-tions alike. The Non-cooperation–Khilafat Movement had to face further awkwardness in the face of the Moplah insurrection, recrudescence of communal riots in various parts of the country and the conduct of Mohamed Ali in his trial at Karachi. When the movement was suspended after Chauri-Chaura the dynamics of the alliance was all but dead. But after the release of the Ali brothers it was kept alive when Mohamed Ali was elected the president of the Coconada Congress in December 1923 where he made a four-hour long speech and expressed his emotions with ‘sobs and tears for Mr. Gandhi’, who was still under detention.

As is well known, the rug was pulled from under the feet of the Khilafat move-ment by the events of Turkey. The champions of the movement in India could

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not meaningfully fight for an institution which the Turks themselves were throw-ing away. It naturally unglued the alliance with the Congress and the sentiment of Hindu–Muslim unity could not be tied to any meaningful programme. When the communal riots broke out at Gulbarga and Kohat, the spirit was one of mutual recriminations in which Gandhi too, in an aberrant mood, participated. He wrote, ‘My own experience confirms the opinion that the Mussalman as a rule is a bully, and the Hindu as a rule is a coward…Where there are cowards there will always be bullies…But I, as a Hindu, am more ashamed of Hindu cowardice than I angry at the Mussalman bullying’. The Kohat tragedy, despite Gandhi’s expiatory fast, had driven a wedge between the Mahatma and the Ali brothers, and the famed friendship had clearly gone tepid. Shaukat Ali’s rejection of the Nehru Report and vitriol against its author, and Mohamed Ali calling the signatories of the Nehru Report as ‘not leaders, but misleaders’ highlighted the growing difference. The meeting between Gandhi and the Ali brothers had become rare, and by the end of 1929 Shaukat Ali wrote to Mohamed Ali, ‘I am afraid, he [Gandhi] is not fit to lead any great movement; he is too individualistic’. As Rakhahari Chatterji observes, with their mentor Maulana Abdul Bari dead (September 1926) and relationship with Gandhi withered, they veered towards their one-time foe Mohamed Ali Jinnah. The Ali brothers refused to join the Civil Disobedience Movement. Mohamed Ali was invited to join the party to attend the Round Table Conference, which the Congress boycotted and the grateful invitee duly acknowledged the government’s kindness. Shaukat Ali was busy nego-tiating with the Viceroy for the restoration of his monthly pension of `150, which he did not draw since 1 June 1919; to his chagrin the pension was restored only from October 1933, the government refusing to take into account the period during which he was an opponent of the government. Shaukat Ali haggled with the government and in a letter claimed that the government could at least take 1 January 1930 as the date when he turned a ‘sane politician’, when he accepted the invitation to the Round Table Conference and began active cooperation with the Government!

The friendship between Gandhi and the Ali brothers was shown to hold out far-reaching consequences in Indian politics. But, as Rakhahari Chatterji, points out, what began with a bang, as it were, ended in a whimper. He even gives a quantitative analy-sis of the erosion of its fervour: From October 1917 to January 1925 there are 651 total mentions in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi indexes, while from January 1925 to April 1931, there are only 163 mentions. Even if we are not swept away by a Shakespearean mood of sentimentality and say,

‘Love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds’,

we must acknowledge that any love or friendship which is hypothecated to political exigencies is bound be fickle. Contemporaries like Dilip Kumar Roy had given nega-tive estimate of the Ali brothers; Tagore had expressed his inability to appreciate the spurious foundations on which the alliance was built. The Khilafat movement itself was a fleeting triumph of religious sentimentalism over political rationality and international

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reality, and soon it collapsed into a comical heap. After the Khilafat issue evaporated its zealous soldiers were left without a cause. They did not even have the windmill to tilt at. Gandhi would still talk about Hindu–Muslim unity because it was for him a mat-ter of conviction; but the Ali brothers, who did not carry any such burden, soon suc-cumbed to collaborationist communalism. Gandhi and the Ali Brothers is a well-told story of a political friendship, in which there is more politics than friendship, where there are more expectations than fulfilment, and suggestive of a moral that political friendship is at best a contradiction in which friendship is more likely to be frustrated by politics than politics ennobled by bonds of friendship.

B. Surendra RaoFormerly of Mangalore University

Karnataka, India

Neeti Nair, Changing Homeland: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2011, pp. 340. `750.

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521672

The old wisdom of Congress for unity and Muslim League for partition—or what his-torian Asim Roy once called the twin myth of Partition historiography—has been strongly challenged by a younger generation of historians following Ayesha Jalal’s forceful revisionist intervention in her 1985 book, The Sole Spokesman. One of her students Neeti Nair in her present book has expanded that interrogation by looking at what may be called a long history of Partition.

Although ‘India’ figures prominently in her title, Nair’s book is more specifically focussed on Punjab and looks closely at the politics of the Hindu community of this par-titioned province. The Hindus occupied a peculiar demographic position in the Punjab vis-à-vis the Muslims: they were a minority in the Punjab and a majority in India, while the Muslims were a minority in India and a majority in the Punjab. Nair, however, problematises the category of ‘Punjabi Hindu’ by identifying multiple strands of opin-ion and intersecting interests among them. Such identification, she argues, unsettles the usual historical assumptions of a communal polarisation on the eve of Partition. She concludes that the Punjab was ultimately partitioned because ‘those Hindus who did not want to concede Muslims their majority in the Punjab won over those Hindus who wanted to reach a consensus through renewed negotiations’ (p. 258). Nair takes a longer view of Partition history by starting in 1907, that is, four decades before Partition, and taking the story into the post-Partition period by looking at the memo-ries of Partition refugees in Delhi—memories that were shaped by their contemporary temporal location. Partition as a result has acquired ‘multiple meanings’ for the Punjabi Hindus in today’s India, the book concludes.

Nair’s story starts from an anti-colonial agrarian struggle in 1907 when the Punjab Council proposed to amend the Colonisation Act to change the terms of tenure in the

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canal colonies. This sparked off an agitation by peasants to stop payment of revenue, and resulted in severe government repression, including deportation of leaders like Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh. The government ultimately had to back down and the leg-islation was withdrawn. The movement witnessed remarkable Hindu-Muslim-Sikh solidarities, but in its aftermath, as Arya Samaj endeavoured to reposition itself in Punjab’s public life, with some leaders preaching loyalty to the British, it brought fis-sures and Hindu–Muslim divisions in its wake. In this political conundrum Nair detects a variety of political strands and emotions, like ‘tactical loyalism, an emotive anti-colonialism, communal patriotism, and communal antagonism’ (p. 7). Such a repre-sentation of multiple loyalties of the Punjabi Hindus could be seen in various forms between 1907 and 1919, and continued into the 1920s. Even after the Kohat riots of 1924, which brought in further religious polarisation in the Punjab, accompanied by sangathan work, there was still enough space for ambivalence, as anti-colonial protests like the Khilafat movement or the hunger strike by Bhagat Singh and others, witnessed remarkable Hindu–Muslim amity. In Nair’s view, ‘bounded categories’ like commu-nity or nation cannot grapple with these multiple imaginings of nation and religion. No serious historian any more argues that ‘communal’ or ‘anti-colonial’ were mutually exclusive positions. Nair uncovers those interlocking loyalties and interests with sig-nificant empirical evidence.

But the Hindu nationalists represented by organisations like the Hindu Mahasabha —interestingly, Nair uses ‘Nationalist’ within quotation marks to refer to them—had a role to play in destroying possibilities of a negotiated political settlement between the Hindus and the Muslims. In her view the Indians had almost reached a negotiated settlement after 1935 through the Jinnah–Rajendra Prasad talks, which would ensure both freedom and unity. But that possibility was torpedoed by the Hindu ‘Nationalists’ like Pandit Malaviya and the Hindu Mahasabha. The other lost opportunity was of course the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946. And it was the breakdown of these politi-cal negotiations—and not any religious fanaticism —which was responsible for the outbreak of Partition violence. Very few in Punjab could actually foresee what was coming and no one anticipated that they would ultimately have to leave their homes. The British officials were however aware of such possibilities, Nair argues, as they had received enough signals, but they abdicated their responsibilities and did not take any preventive measures to stop this catastrophic event from happening. What took place in the subcontinent in the second half of 1947 was not a planned genocide, but an ‘unprecedented and unplanned crumbling of an old order’ (p. 218).

Different individuals experienced that catastrophe in various ways and therefore Partition had multiple meanings for the Hindu Punjabi refugees. In the last chapter Nair tries to capture that multiplicity of meanings through fifty interviews of Punjabi Hindu refugees who subsequently settled in Delhi. The interviews were taken in 2002–03, and so the memories are evidently shaped by their familiarity with the state-sponsored narratives of Partition universalised in postcolonial India and Pakistan. Yet they do not always conform to those dominant narratives. Here she contests the position of Gyanendra Pandey and Veena Das who have argued that these inconsistent often

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dissenting memories or ‘fragments’ resist the construction of a homogenised history of nation. Nair thinks that her fragments do not always resist the whole, but constantly interact with it and come to terms with it. However, she also thinks that this diversity of memories which she uncovers ‘afford(s) us the ground on which to combat the tele-ology of nationalist histories’ (p. 254). To this reviewer this polemical battle seems to be a little tenuous. But that notwithstanding, this chapter brings out interesting details about how the Punjabi Hindu refugees remember their pre-Partition days, their rela-tionships with the Muslims, their decision to leave West Punjab, the experiences of dis-placement and migration, and subsequent struggle to find a niche in postcolonial India. These diverse memories indicate, according to Nair, that ‘at the moment of founding, the nation was severally imagined’ (p. 255).

It is in this emphasis on the heterogeneous history of nationalism and Partition, and in its contestation of the exclusivity of categories like communal, anti-colonial or nationalist that this book can claim its distinctive place in South Asian historiography. Not that these ideas are very new or original, as in recent years a number of historians have argued about the nation living in heterogeneous time. This book buttresses that argument with significant empirical evidence, culled from conventional archives as well as retrieved through oral history methods. In that sense, it is an important addition to the genre of Partition literature.

Sekhar BandyopadhyayVictoria University of Wellington,

New Zealand

Michael Gottlob, History and Politics in Post-colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, xi+300 pages, `695

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521686

History and politics share a curiously uneasy but symbiotic relationship. One can politely brush aside the once-familiar, but palpably naïve definition of history as past politics, but history yet remains vulnerable to the grasping reach of the present politics. It is not just about the dialogue that the present sets up with the past—which is neces-sary and can be creative—but it is the ownership of the past as history that makes it contentious and acrimonious. All the battles of the past are fought and all the drums and trumpets are played in the present, so much so somebody indignantly asked if history has anything to do with the past at all! In India we have been witnesses to, sometimes participants in, and certainly victims of, this frantic game in which history is con-scripted into the service of politics. In fact, this is in a sense a violent swing too, from being told that Indians cared little for history to a situation where they seem to care for it much too passionately, but not necessarily wisely, for their own good. They have made it both a battleground and an object of conquest. In this din and bustle what hap-pens to ‘historical sense’ is another matter, though. In four essays in History and

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Politics in Post-colonial India, Michael Gottlob lays bare the politics that have gone into the reordering of India’s history and the implications thereof.

Writing the nation’s history is necessarily linked to the contentious definition of its nationhood. The Congress ‘official’ profession of the ideal of ‘unity in diversity’ was not necessarily endorsed by the sectarian nationalisms which anathematised diversities and conceived nationalism in terms of ‘our own religion and culture as against theirs’. The denouement of this ideology and practice is too well known to warrant a reminder. In independent India the battle for the ‘ideal nationhood’ has continued. The notion of a secular nation in which, ideally, religion is allowed no space except in private sphere, is challenged by the right-wing nationalist groups and parties whose political ideologies are uncompromisingly presented in the idioms of religious and cultural ‘take-over’. This has gone into the making of political Hinduism, which has allowed a free mutual swapping of the political and the religious, brushing aside conscience if ever it comes in the way. To this ideology and praxis is invariably linked the various projects of own-ing history by rewriting it.

One of the issues drawn into contention in independent India is the scientific and political claims in the rewriting of Indian history. Although every serious research par-ticipates in rewriting history, the pompous political project of rewriting history draws heavily from mythologising history in which selective beliefs in what happened in the past out-shout others and any concern for scientific proofs or demand for a larger ratio-nal historical picture. The larger project of making the Hindu nation needed recasting Indian history in the Hindu mould to which was drafted many myths that coalesced with the flourishing or propped-up religious beliefs. Since faith is not falsifiable, his-tory that the faith asserts too brooks no questioning.

In independent India the conflict between secular and Hindu imaginings of nation-hood is reflected in the contentious field of history-writing ever since the triumphal publication of The History and Culture of the Indian People. Those who disagreed with its assumptions and proofs have been refused the nationalist label. But the more open political battle over history took place after another freedom was won in 1977, follow-ing the end of the Emergency. The champions of the newly won freedom were keen to impose their own version of history on the textbooks, declaring the existing ones as contaminated by Marxist fixations. The ensuing debates, political though they were, at least did not exclude the academic community. But the subsequent battle over history was fought over Ayodhya, which, if we go by the literal meaning of the name, should not ever have been a battlefield. But it was not only rendered so for political and elec-toral purpose, crafting a newly conjured up picture of Rama fighting his newly found enemy in Babur, but also by summoning a host of historians as adjudicators. Here what disabled a free academic dialogue among historians was the grinning presence of faith. Alliance between faith and politics tended to speak a language which could strike no resonance with the scientific evidence, and the matter was curiously referred to the judiciary as the third umpire! But none asked the question whether a repeat of medieval vandalism could be permitted at the end of the twentieth century even if the evidence was on your side. But it was less about history than about politics. More recently the

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Rama Setu controversy has also cleverly harnessed faith to overrule scientific evi-dence. Michael Gottlob rightly points out that the truth claims of science and religion belong to different orders, and they cannot be negotiated. The scientists in the service of the Sangh Parivar have use for science only to serve their politics in coalition with faith, which would have their history as it ought to be rather than as it is. However, in the case of Babri Masjid the use of history was much more insidious. It was part of a propaganda starting in the 1960’s, with people like P.N. Oak in the vanguard and with strong institutional support, that all Muslim monuments, including Taj Mahal, were indeed Hindu monuments. It was meant to deny the Muslims their share of history in India, except as invaders and plunderers, which, by implication, meant that Muslims did not quite belong to the Indian nation. The destruction of Babri Masjid was part of an irredentist project. Religion was merely recruited as a willing instrument.

The passion with which the textbooks were sought to be controlled was also part of this propagandist and irredentist project. History was its main target. Culture that was show-cased as glorious was Hindu, loftily unchanging because it was so flawless and perfect, influencing others and influenced by none. Many of the vexed questions regarding caste, untouchability and other evils were mostly pushed under the carpet, and the Brahmanical lead for Indian culture was either implicitly assumed or explicitly defended. Those scholars who disagreed were declared as enemies of Indian nation. Such use of history did not overly worry about historical facts, method or logic of infer-ence. Perhaps the most powerful tool of fascist propaganda was invoking the passion of the people, who would have history as a given capsule rather than as a subject of inquiry. Propaganda always had the ordinary consumers of history as its target, and the ordinary consumers of history would have it only as a myth.

However, one of the more appealing arguments for history and for the understand-ing of Indian society is to secure freedom from the hegemonic Eurocentrism that has pervaded Indian thinking and achieve a decolonisation of the mind. India should see herself with her own eyes, and not with those of the colonisers. But that did not mean an inversion of Eurocentrism. There has been no agreement as to what are truly ‘Indian’ perceptions, free from the influence of others. The contending Indians seem to reject the definition of true India. Its many margins are astir and demand reckoning. For a while the Subaltern Studies group promised to reinstate the voice of the hitherto voiceless. But now it is being shown as being taken over by the western academia and its new and expanding fads. Now the women, Dalits and Adivasis have legitimately been demanding their space in history. This is not supplied either by the received models of history or by the bumbling right-wing politics. They need a different kind of politics. But they are often drawn to the Hindutva politics, not-withstanding the historical divide it envisages for them. Michael Gottlob brilliantly brings out the many forces which impact historical writings in India. But many ques-tions keep haunting us: Are Indians now free to write ‘their own history’? Does that history mean a history which we all agree upon, or what is sanctioned as right history by the government in power? Is history a matter of inquiry or a fable agreed upon or a certified version of the past? What is the relation between history as inquiry and

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history as propaganda? What does history as research mean to the vast passionate consumers of history? These and many questions surface in the domain of histori-cal writing, which knows it cannot insulate itself from politics, but is called upon to decide what politics suits the country best. The debate is not designed for any easy or speedy agreement.

B. Surendra RaoFormerly of Department of History, Mangalore University,

Karnataka, India

Paula Banerjee, Borders, Histories, Existences, Gender and Beyond. Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2010, 300 pages, `650.

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521687

Paula Banerjee’s monograph, Borders, Histories, Existences, Gender and Beyond, adds to her already existing body of work on gender and forced migrations by locating these and other related concerns within the politics of national cartography and its produc-tion of fixed borders. Though many of these concerns have long been prevalent in vari-ous disciplines, including in that of conventional history writing, Banerjee’s work would perhaps be more comfortably located within the new emerging, and may we add, fast expanding ‘interdisciplinary’ field of ‘Border Studies’ and its analogous field of study, ‘Migration Studies’.

Borders, Histories, Existences, Gender and Beyond is a book about borders and their numerous social, political and economic subversions in contemporary South Asia. Except for Chapter 1, ‘Aliens in the Colonial World’, which functions more as the customary obeisance offered to the spectre of history and less as a serious engagement with extant historical writings on borders, the other chapters address themselves very specifically to themes from the post colonial politics of South Asian nations: Aksai Chin, McMahon lines and Sino-Indian relations, the governance of security along the India–Pakistan Line of Control, the violence embedded in the cross-border migra-tions of women and in their ‘bordered existences’, ‘border’ diseases such as HIV and AIDS, and the complex and violent world of border laws: the Defence of India Act, The Armed Forces Special Powers Act and The National Security Act. Nevertheless, the opening lines of the book express the author’s frustration with the reluctance of historians in South Asia to ‘write on borders’, a situation that she examines in some detail in her Introduction and then elaborates in the first chapter of the book. Since this portrayal of historians of South Asia as unable to interrogate the ‘normative discourse about borders’, entrenched as they are in Barthes’ doxa of historical opinion (p. xi), is introduced almost as the leitmotif of the work, we will have reason to return to it at a later point in the review.

The other chapters of the Borders, Histories, Existences research various aspects of the making of definitive political borders, focusing on their arbitrariness and

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inflexibility and the erasure of a certain fluidity and porosity by the exigencies of the post colonial state. The chapter ‘Borders as Unsettled Markers’ revisits the problems of assuming political borders to be the markers of territoriality by the post colonial states of India and China. To support its central argument—‘borders are basically human constructs that become problematic at different historical junctures’, the explanation for which has to be sought in the contingencies of contemporary politics—the chapter draws upon a close reading of several primary documents (papers and correspondence of Jawaharlal Nehru, Lok Sabha debates, private paper collections of political figures such as Jayaprakash Narayan, T.T. Krishnamachari, among others) and convincingly demonstrates that, contrary to prevalent arguments, the drawing of political borders through the McMahon line and Aksai Chin determined diplomatic relations between the two nations, and not vice versa. The next chapter extends this line of argument about turbulent political borders in South Asia into the region of Kashmir. Here, unlike the preceding chapter, Banerjee skids on a rather thin political narrative of the con-flicts over control over the Line of Control in the post 1947 period until the present, to emphasise the language of violence and control that has marked the political discourse in the region. While summations such as ‘The logic of violence is to designate alien status on certain groups of people’ (p. xvii) or ‘Violent displays of control will only lead to greater violence resulting in overall insecurity that will often spill over and vitiate the entire political system’ (p. 80) no doubt attempt at a realistic representation of the political history of this border region, they contribute little by way of concep-tual analysis (historical, philosophical and otherwise) of the forms and persistence, of violence between communities in the border areas of Kashmir or of the post colonial state. There is little on offer in the chapter either, of how the author’s understanding of the existent political situation could then translate into more specific suggestions for ameliorating circumstances.

The fourth chapter, ‘Circles of Insecurity’ is well researched and perhaps the stron-gest in the book. It investigates the often violent effects of migration on women liv-ing, and straddling, border areas of different parts of north-eastern India. The chapter elaborates this theme with a overview of the many histories of migration and move-ment in north-eastern India, drawing upon available historical work which sees the region as one traversed by routes of trade and migration, mobility and fluidity on socio-economic practices that wove communities living in the hills and in the valleys into various networks of dependence, and posits all of this against the regimes of binaries and fixity that were introduced by the Company state and the later colonial government and the accompanying erasure of a world of connected histories. The section ‘Women’s insecurity in the North East’ in the chapter begins with a fine analysis of the social position of tribal women among some of the hill communities of north-eastern India, unravelling the embedded nature of their social inequality in structures and practices of local political economy and customary laws. It then weaves this argument with femi-nist perspectives on sexuality to unpack the deeply disturbing practice of trafficking in women from Nepal, Mymanmar and Bangladesh in the border areas of the region. The discussion on the silence in official realms about the prevalence of trafficking and

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AIDS, in both of which the state and its arms, including the army and the bureaucracy, are often complicit, is then also a strident critique of the ‘masculine power structures’ that overdetermine the discourse of ‘security’ in the region. The concluding sections of this chapter therefore anticipates the subject of the next chapter, ‘Mobile Diseases and the Border’, which explores the vulnerability of women towards what the author terms as ‘border diseases’—AIDS and HIV—and its imbrications in the ideology of the state’s security apparatus. In the last chapter, ‘Border Laws and Conflicts in North-east India’, Banerjee returns to the subject of the politics of territoriality and the repro-duction and enforcement by the state of the notion of an absent territoriality among communities of the northeast in order to further its security concerns.

As should be evident from the above, the themes thus laid out in the book are located very definitively within the contours of contemporary post colonial histories of South Asian states. There are meaningful echoes and resonances of these themes in the shared colonial past of these regions, but Banerjee’s engagement with the dis-cipline of academic history through the text remains cursory at best. And this would not have posed any problem of academic rigour at all for a work that addresses prob-lems of contemporary society and politics, except for the fact that the initial forty pages or so of the book are littered with expressions of severe disappointment about the apparent intellectual stubbornness of historians in their inability to appreciate the significance of the historicity of borders in the histories they write. The signs of disillusionment (‘The history books of South Asia suggest that South Asian borders had remained undemarcated for years evoking little interest from the British colo-nialists and almost none from the Indians themselves’: p. xxxii) are many, but the following paragraph from the Preface is illustrative of the tone of this criticism: ‘In trying to make borders rigid, the state tries to control the border which means con-trolling the bodies that inhabit borders, which in turn threatens and destabilizes that control and creates uniquely bordered existences. This goes against the traditional and received histories of borders that sanitise and stabilize the borders’ (p. xviii). This is not the place to reflect about the nature of the historians’ enterprise but to exit without a comment would amount to ignoring themes that have dominated his-torical knowledge. Historians of South Asia have not been silent about borders; on the contrary they have engaged seriously and productively with encounters between colonial and indigenous forms of space, ideas of hybridity, appropriations, transgres-sions and contestations of not just territorial borders (the concern of a book such as this) but of other ‘borders’: borders of normative difference, of nationalist and impe-rialist ideologies, of hill-plain tribe-caste binaries, the liminal borders of cultural and historical memories, narratives and counter narratives of different imaginations of spaces. On some of these themes, the works of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Michael Fisher, David Shulman, Sumit Guha, Thongchai Winichakul, Prasenjit Duara and Benedict Anderson (on Java) stand out, among others. That it will be difficult to neatly slot these works into field of ‘border studies’ is of course another matter.

Borders, Histories, Existences, Gender and Beyond comes across to the reader as a set of essays strung together by the rather tenuous thesis of ‘borders’ without a sustained

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cogent argument. It is however richly informative in parts and should be of interest to scholars working on issues of migration, displacement, gender and security in north-eastern India.

Sanghamitra MisraDepartment of History

University of DelhiDelhi, India

Mohammad Zakir, Understanding Islam. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd., 2012

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521706

This is a carefully rendered translation of the Urdu text, Ijtihad (‘striving to arrive at a theological decision’), published by Nazir Ahmad (1836–1912) in 1907. The translator of this text, Mohammad Zakir, a retired Urdu professor of Jamia Millia Islamia, is known for his translation of Nazir Ahmad’s novel Ibn ul-Waqt (‘Son of the Moment’) which, it is believed, was written to provide a sympathetic portrayal of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s role in ‘ post-Mutiny’ years.

Ijtihad was seemingly conceived by the Nazir Ahmad as a commentary on his volu-minous treatise Al-huquq wa Faraiz (‘Rights and duties’) penned a year earlier (1906) where the attempt was to explain Quranic postulates from a ghair muqqalid standpoint, that is, a theological approach to the study of sacred texts not confined to the doctrines of four sunni schools of jurisprudence. As is evident from the overall trend of discourse in this short treatise, presented in the form of questions and answers, the attempt is to highlight an interpretation of the Quran and Sunnah (Prophet’s Traditons) in the changed social- political environment of the Muslim genteel groups (the ashraf) in north India during the second half of the nineteenth century.

While dilating on Islamic thought and beliefs, Nazir Ahmad, like Saiyyid Ahmad Khan, his senior colleague in the Aligarh Movement, had a tendency to implicitly iden-tify himself with the ashraf rather than ordinary Muslims, can be established with reference to his statements recorded in various contexts. Nazir Ahmad’s disdain for artisan groups is, for instance, betrayed by a passage in Ibn ul-Waqt where, an Indian khidmatgar (‘personal servant’) of an Englishman caught in the turmoil of 1857 revolt is made to say: ‘Now a days, very few Englishmen of the category of ashraf come here. Among those who do come are persons belonging to castes like bhatiaras (inn keepers), muchis (coblers) and nais (barbers). Their caste characteristics are bound to reflect in their behaviour’. (Saiyyid Ahmad Khan’s pro-ashraf bias is manifest by his well-known statement in Asbab-i baghawat-i Hind denouncing all those Muslims who fought on the rebels’ side as persons belonging to menial professions).

Nazir Ahmad’s approach in interpreting Quranic teachings often conforms to Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s vision of Islam, dubbed by his critics as the Nechari (‘Natural’)

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religion (that is, a faith driving its inspiration from the material phenomena). Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s central argument amounted to holding that there cannot be a conflict between the word of God (that is, the Quran) and the work or creation of God (that is, the phenomenon of ‘nature’ or the material world). On a closer examination, one may, however, discern this as brought out by Christian W. Troll (Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology, New Delhi, 1978), the nechari discourse of Sayyid Ahmad Khan was the outcome of an in-depth study of Islamic thought as it developed from Mutazilites and thinkers like al-Razi (865–925 AD) and al-Farabi (d. 950) (all of them influenced by Greek thought) down to the mystic orthodoxy of Shah Waliullah’s school (eighteenth century). Nazir Ahmad’s concurrent interpretation, on the other hand, was basically a product of his thorough reading of the Quran and sunnah, which was facilitated by his command of classical Arabic and skill of argumentation. But he certainly lacked Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s intellectual prowess to speculate about the meaning of sacred texts in the light of interpretations projected by early thinkers. Nazir Ahmad’s attitude, while arguing for a reinterpretation of sacred texts, was sim-ply that of an individual exposed to the effects of colonial rule and its ideological trap-pings. As is well known, during the time he was enrolled as a student at Delhi College, Nazir Ahmad was much influenced by Christian preaching of his teacher, Ram Chandra. There is indeed a view that he actually remained converted to Christianity for some time (Siddiqur Rahmad Kidwai, Master Ram Chander (Urdu), Bombay, 1962).

It would thus appear that Nazir Ahmad’s regaining a firm belief in the basics of Islam was a long tortuous process of a quest which appears to have continued for a long time. His ostensibly common-sense arguments defending Islamic beliefs in this as well as his other writings were possibly a reflection of long process of self examination he went through before it could be possible for him to reaffirm his faith in what he con-sidered to be pristine Islam. On a closer examination, however, one may discern that Nazir Ahmad generally endorsed Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s vision of nechari Islam only in a limited sense. This endorsement actually stemmed from his simplistic ‘common sense’ approach to the interpretation of Quran which was not informed by the study of Islamic thought as it evolved down to his own time.

An extreme example of simplification resorted to by Nazir Ahmad in the name of reinterpreting Quranic teachings in the light of realities obtaining in nineteenth century India, is his assertion that a much discussed ayah (‘obey Allah and Messenger and those charged with authority among you’ (4.59)) suggests the obligation of loyalty to the British Government. Another similar example is his view on the rise of Sufic attitude in Islam. According to him ascetism preached by mystics was all right ‘when there was opulence’.

Besides the editor’s introductory remarks, this volume also carries two appendi-ces (‘The Twelve Imams’ and ‘The Ten Persons who were Promised Paradise’) and a ‘Select Glossary and Notes’.

Iqtidar Alam Khan

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Gayatri Bhattacharyya, The First Indian Social Theorist: Ideas of Bhudev Chandra Mukhopadhyay. Kolkata: University of Calcutta, 2012, pp. 503 + Appendices, References Index and photographs, `500

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521708

In the 1950s, when compiling what was possibly the first anthology of writings by Bhudev Chandra Mukhopadhyay (1825–94), Pramathanath Bishi, the well known Bengali literary critic, bemoaned the fact that even such a gifted thinker and writer as Bhudev had been all but forgotten in his own province.1 Bishi’s attributed the rela-tive unpopularity of the man to his social anachronism, as particularly found in his Paribarik Probondho (Essays on the Hindu family, 1882) and Achar Probondho (Essays on Hindu Domestic rites and customs, 1895). At a time when Reform Hinduism was strongly urging parents to raise the minimum age of marriages, Bhudev pressed for early betrothals and early marriages; on the subject of female education, he favoured only such education that would adequately prepare Hindu girls for domestic responsibilities; even after the state passed a law enabling widow marriages among Hindus, Bhudev strongly discouraged it; while a fellow educationist like Vidyasagar tried to propagate bourgeois virtues of thrift and self-help (yatna) in his school text books and modelled ideal characters on well known figures drawn from the West, Bhudev felt that such attempts were culturally and pedagogically flawed. Sadly, we do not know enough about what Bhudev’s contemporaries thought of his revitalized conservative rhetoric. When compared to Bankim, his life and works attracted far fewer biographers, critics or commentators. In Bishi’s introduction though, there is a brief reference to the comment made by the journalist–politician, Sisir Kumar Ghosh, who saw Bhudev as the last of the Brahmin scholars and law-givers brought up in the smarta tradition of Raghunath Shiromani and Raghunandan. Public disinterestedness did not discourage Bhudev from producing what may be labelled as the modern Grihya Sutras. It would also appear as though he had the cour-age and conviction to swim against the tide; to be called a conservative in an age when that word was fast becoming unsavoury.

Not everybody agreed with Bishi; in 1988, the historian Ashin Dasgupta, though also writing in a somewhat nostalgic vein (his essay was titled ‘Bismrita Brahman’, The Forgotten Brahmin) attributed the relative unpopularity of Bhudev to the fact that he pinned his faith on the innovative and yet culturally stabilising role that Brahmins traditionally played in Hindu society. At first sight, this appears to be an interesting the-sis since especially after the 1830s, the defenders of Brahmanical culture were more men drawn from upper bracket castes like Baidyas and Kayasthas than Brahmins

1 I am reliably informed that the first edition of Bishi’s anthology was published in 1957. That it went into a revised and expanded third edition (the edition that I have in my possession) by the year 1968 would prima facie belie Bishi’s thesis. Nevertheless, it does seem reasonable to say that early interest in Bhudev was pri-marily literary in nature. The first important monograph on Bhudev by Sipra Lahiri (Bhudev Mukhopadhyay o Bangla Sahitya) appeared in 1976 and clearly belonged to the genre of literary studies.

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themselves. On the other hand, what Dasgupta overlooks is that in the Bengal, social reform, initiatives had come mostly from Brahmins beginning with Rammohun. Judging by the life and works of Rammohun or Vidyasagar, it is the Brahmin that would appear to be the radical heretic. Arguably, such a paradox suggests subtle shifts in social leadership and latent social competition within Bengali upper bracket castes. In his treatise, Dharmatattwa (1888), Bankimchandra first admitted the Baidya Keshab Chandra to be ‘deservedly a Brahmin’ only to hurriedly withdrew that remark in the next edition of the work.

It is remarkable that scholarly interest in Bhudev did not immediately follow from Tapan Raychaudhuri’s seminal work of 1988; it had to await nearly another decade until new and exciting post-modernist, post colonialist debates around Orientalism retrieved, as it were, a colonized figure who could lay claim to have offered a counter-Orientalist discourse well before present day scholars. In 1995, Sudipta Kaviraj’s bril-liant piece on the ‘reverse Orientalism’ of Bhudev Mukhopadhay set new standards in historical and cultural theorising, which has determined in some ways, the trajectories of current scholarship on the subject.

The work under review is by a sociologist and, understandably enough, leans heavily on heuristic tools borrowed from that discipline. The core of this work com-prises three fairly long essays (Chapters 5 to 7) which seek to study ‘afresh’ the most important of Bhudev’s writings. Unlike Kaviraj though, it makes good use of the miscellaneous essays (Vividha Probondho) authored by Bhudev over a period of time. The importance of this work also follows from the wide varieties of sources used, mostly rare. In this work Bhattacharya brings out quite succinctly, the major theoretical arguments in Bhudev. She reveals a culturally smitten Bhudev who criti-cally engages with western social theory, within the framework of the then emerging western discipline of sociology. She is equally able to establish the ways in which his discourse purposively supplants western categories of thought by the indigenous and to turn back, as it were, the western gaze upon itself. Particularly in the Samajik Prabandha (Essays on Society, 1892), she reveals how Bhudev formulates certain cultural technologies which are then used to counter those that the colonial state, or more generally Orientalism, had manipulatively created in relation to Indian society. The Samajik Probondho clearly establishes the ascendancy of the social collective (Samaj) over the Rashtra (the State or even the nation forged by mere political will). In Bhudev’s taxonomy, culture thus serves the dual purpose of defining and perpetu-ating the Indian self against such inept historical or sociological categories that hith-erto ran it aground. Whether directly or indirectly, his writings dispute the totalising presence or functions of both history and the new nation-state; for Bhudev, history can be also read in many imaginative and instructive ways. In so arguing Samajik Probondho also makes the valuable point that unlike the west, Indian society does not necessarily look upon tradition and modernity as sequentially arranged in time or in collective cultural understanding. In India, the past is never wholly detached from the present in a way that the western discourses of reason and utility would make these out to be.

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The work, one has to admit, quite admirably obtains its stated purpose which is essentially to examine the unfolding of Indian sociological thought. On the other hand, I have reason to believe that it would have also benefited from adopting a more historical frame of narration. The origins of an Indian sociology or situating Bhudev within it could have been better accomplished by some reference to earlier thinkers like Akshaykumar Dutta, the foundation of the Bengal Social Science Association (1867) or the anxiety expressed as early as 1870, by the Bengali paper Somprakash, to effect improvements in matters ‘social’. In recent times, young researchers like Swarupa Gupta have also brought to light, a wealth of Bengali literature pertaining to cultural tropes like ‘unity in diversity’ that precedes or runs contemporaneously with Bhudev. They contest no less than Bhudev, the claim that Indian nationalism was a ‘deriva-tive’ discourse. In a work such as the present one, some discussion along these lines would have been useful. Bhattacharya’s work might also have been better organized stylistically and conceptually. Perhaps the discussion on Vividha Probondho deserved a separate chapter and when going through this work, I also wondered if a work on his ‘ideas’ could keep out (as seems to be the case here) some other important writings of Bhudev, particularly his Swapnalabdha Bharatvarsher Itihas (1895) and Pushpanjali (1876?) if not also his historical romances (Aitihasik Upanyas,1857). When discussing Samajik Probondho, Bhattacharya gives us virtually a summary of the work, chapter by chapter. This could have been reasonably avoided. Ideally, the chapter titled ‘What others have said about Bhudev’ should have been integrated with the introduction. Finally, it would have been interesting to compare Bhudev’s writings on the domestic economy of the Hindus with comparable works from the period. How, for instance, does the work by the Brahmo Sibnath Sastri (Griha dharma) compare with that of the orthodox Bhudev?

I cannot imagine what constraints led Gayatri Bhattacharyya to publish with the University of Calcutta. University presses in India are evidently far less professionally managed than they are in the West. In this instance, while the price of the book remains very reasonable, this has come at the cost of poor production quality. Some valuable photographs which have been appended to this book are hardly visible. Also, a book running into over 500 pages cannot really be handled with a thin paper jacket. In my own case, the jacket came apart after only a month of handling.

On the whole, I would strongly recommend the present work to students and schol-ars of history and sociology. Specifically on the sociological thought of Bhudev, this is easily the most detailed and comprehensive work. It is also a work painstakingly compiled and which lends the reader some valuable leads and clues with which to bet-ter understand an important and intriguing chapter in our cultural history.

Amiya Prosad SenHead, Department of History & Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia

New Delhi, India

Book Reviews 137


C.A. Bayly, Vijayendra Rao, Simon Szreter and Michael Woolcock (eds), History, Historians & Development Policy: A Necessary Dialogue. Hyderabad, India: Orient BlackSwan, 2012, pp. xii + 276, `675

DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521717

The book emerged out of the engagement of three of the editors, Vijayendra Rao, Simon Szreter and Michael Woolcock in the World Development Report 2006 of the World Bank, which was devoted to the theme of ‘equity and development’. Since the typical programmes and recommendations of the World Bank have rarely served the causes of either equity or development, some parts of the book, and especially the introduction by the editors, bear marks of that unnatural conception. Before I turn to an analysis of those marks, let me say that most of the chapters on straight history, such as those by Chris Bayly, Richard Smith, Sunil Amrith, Stephen Kunitz, David Vincent, Tim Harper, Paul Warde and Keith Breckenridge are useful for summarising and underscoring the less-researched parts of the discourses and histories of actual development, stretching from those of the First Nations of North America, to the actual history of progress of literacy in England, the neglect of public health in India, and the reasons why a rich endowment of natural resources has often proved so detrimental to many developing nations, includ-ing those in Africa.

The birthmarks start from the subtitle of the book itself, ‘A Necessary Dialogue’ between historians and policy-makers. The need is not for a dialogue but for educating the policy-makers so as to instil in them a degree of literacy in history. Most econo-mists now, under the malign influence of the US and British establishment, diffusing through the rest of the world, get their graduate and postgraduate degrees without hav-ing ever studied the actual history of economic or human development of any country, or the works of the classical political economists in Europe or the USA, when those regions were becoming the dominant economic powers in the world. As Wallerstein pointed out, before the nineteenth century, the discourses in the three major disciplines in the social sciences, namely, political economy, political science and sociology were all idiographic, that is, highly contextual.1 But with the triumph of liberalism as the winning political creed of the ruling classes in Europe and North America, they were turned into nomothetic disciplines on the pattern of basically Newtonian mechanics, possessed of eternal truths, independent of time and space. The triumph of free trade and the ‘civilising’ missions of the European powers had given them the right to preach what they considered to be good for the natives in Asia, Africa and the Americas, and therefore there was no need to contextualise issues relating to economic policies. The typical discourses of neoclassical economics and modernisation theory in political science and sociology, favoured by the World Bank and similar organisations following the tenets of the Washington Consensus, follow the tripartite, ahistorical division between the three disciplines.

1 Wallerstein, ‘Anthropology, sociology, and other dubious disciplines’.

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Some of the papers in this volume do recognise the ubiquitous role of the ethni-cisation of peoples and their Social Darwinist partitioning into inferior and superior races, and the issue of colonialism is mentioned in the papers and the introduction. But their framing effect on the admissible discourses is not captured by the editors’ introduction.

There is a further problem with the relation of the economists’ professional work and their policy advice. As Ravi Kanbur pints out in his comment on Smith and Wong, ‘[Economists] are criticized unfairly by the other social sciences [sic] for ignoring distribution and politics. They certainly don’t ignore these issues at the research frontier, but they are often ignored in the policy context. Paradoxically, therefore, where it matters most they tend to ignore politics in the policy prescription, although these days economics research papers are replete with models of rational choice politics’ (p. 118).

Even with many of the papers that recognise the importance of colonialism, there is a general problem that they fail to make a distinction that Harlow made between ‘colonies of settlement and colonies of exploitation’.2 The much-celebrated work of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, the AJR team to whom the editors pay respectful attention, is fatally flawed by their failure to make this basic distinction. A further distinction needs to be made between the colonies of settlement of European powers whose inhabitants had experienced the abolition of feudalism and of those powers which still had entanglements of the feudal order. The clearest distinction here would be between England, illustrating the first kind of power and Spain, the pre-eminent example of the second kind of power. Overseas migrants from the former were generally aiming to set up as independent farmers, tradesmen or craftsmen. Wherever they thought they could clear the land, they did so by exter-minating the natives, as Stephen Kunitz recognises in his very interesting paper. The number of original inhabitants of today’s United States is far larger than had been thought earlier—it almost certainly exceeded 20 million at the time the colonies of New England were founded. Correspondingly, the scale of slaughter was also of a mind-boggling order. Wherever there was a possibility of extracting profits by creating centralized plantations or mineral companies, the colonial powers created a freehold tenure for the plantation-owners or holders of mining rights, leaving the natives under various kinds of insecure and coercive tenure, with chiefs or zamindars as the intermediaries to gather the tribute for the metropolitan power. This is clearly recognised by Keith Breckenridge in his paper.

Now take the case of Spain and Spanish America. The population of Mexico and Central America went into a disastrous decline after its conquest by Spain; by the end of the sixteenth century, it had gone from somewhere around 26.5 million to only 1.5 million. But under the prevailing pattern of governance by Spain and its grandees, the population gap was not filled up with migration of free peasants or craftsmen from Spain, but with slaves imported from Africa. Much later, when Spanish America had

2 Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire.

Book Reviews 139


gained political independence, the criollo rulers just continued the governance pat-tern of Spanish feudalism, and instituted new patterns of landlordism all over their dominions.

The most striking illustration of the creation of new landlordism occurred in the case of Argentina, although Portuguese Brazil followed the same pattern, with some variations.3 With the conclusion of the extermination campaigns against Patagonian Indians in the 1830s, the Argentine rulers practically killed off all native Americans in the valley of the River Plate. Then they proceeded to create the new landlord-ism by distributing the empty land in thousands of hectares to influential politicians and their families. One result was that when Italian and Spanish immigration into Argentina accelerated from the 1870s, the permanent immigrants became insecure tenants on ranchero land. Because of the very high land–labour ratio and high produc-tivity with little investment in the pampas, Argentine per capita income was higher than that of Italy in 1913. But because of the difference in the tenurial system and composition of the ruling class, its per capita income already lagged behind that of Australia and Canada, which combined the extermination policy towards the natives with a freehold tenure for the settlers. Because of the convenient alliance between landlordism in the periphery and manufacturer control in the metropolis, ideologi-cally supported by free trade doctrines, followed by the Washington Consensus and policies conforming to them, Argentina went into a century-long economic decline, with only a few breaks. The pattern was upset when Argentina decided in December 2001, under the presidency of Néstor Kirchner, to default on the huge external debt contracted under the US-blessed regime of Carlos Menem. Belying dire predic-tions to the contrary, that action led to a fall in unemployment and poverty in that country. This kind of history is, of course, not to the liking of the ideologues of the Washington Consensus.

Chris Bayly has written an interesting chapter tracing some of the indigenous ori-gins of development thinking in India and Indonesia, and the role of history in that thinking. I was a little disappointed, however, that there is no reference in his paper, to Dutt, which is an erudite economic history of British India, and at the same time, a sus-tained polemic against British rule in India.4 May I also say that the news of economic integration of India and the establishment of a rule of law under British rule in India has been much exaggerated? India was divided into different zones of land tenure under the British, and the burden of that division is still weighing heavily on major parts of India. The different parts of India were connected by a railway network; but that network connected the major centres for collection of exportable goods to the ports, leaving vast regions of India internally unconnected with one another. Until 1861, the formal bank-ing space of India was occupied by the three government-backed banks, the Banks of Bengal, Bombay and Madras, which divided the regional businesses among themselves.

3 Bagchi, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, Chapter 3; Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brazil; Morris, ‘Politics, Development, and Society’.4 Dutt, The Economic History of India.

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The total number of branches of these banks did not exceed a hundred until the end of World War I. They issued notes which were not exchangeable against one another, except at a substantial discount. When the government of India took over the right to issue legal tender notes, the country was divided into a number of currency circles, and notes issued in different circles could be exchanged only after paying a substantial discount. That situation prevailed until the beginning of the twentieth century, that is, less than fifty years from the end of British rule.5 Bayly himself provides illustrations of the rule of law in British India. In fact, it was in many situations a law of emergency, the severity of which was demonstrated in the incident of the Jalianwala Bagh mas-sacre.6 The perpetrators of that massacre were not punished because they were simply applying the colonial law in a particular situation that they judged to require that kind of action.

Reflecting the politics of location, in this volume, there are very few references to papers or books written in India or any other colonial country, so that old discourses are often presented by many of the writers in this volume as if they are new discoveries. It will be invidious to pick out any particular paper in this connection.

Finally, the limited perspective on the uses of history provided by this kind of genu-flection to that ancient muse is glaringly revealed by the fact that nowhere does the book discuss how the only regions outside the North Atlantic seaboard and the over-seas offshoots of Britain, and some component states of the ex-Soviet Republics, came to be industrialised. The ex-Soviet Republics in their rise to the status of industrialised states had nothing to do with the neoliberal dogma of markets ruling everything. It is, in fact, the embrace of that dogma under Boris Yeltsin that caused numerous woes to the ordinary people of those states. But apart from those states, the successful industrialis-ers have been Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Taiwan Province of China, Singapore, Hong Kong (a Special Administrative Region of China), and now, the world’s second largest economy, the People’s Republic of China. They have succeeded by violating most tenets of the Washington Consensus. A set of deliberations that contains no refer-ence to that history can only provide a biased perspective on global history or develop-ment policy.

ReferencesBagchi, A.K. The Political Economy of Underdevelopment. Cambridge, 1982.———. Presidency Banks and the Indian Economy 1876–1914, New Delhi, 1989.Dutt, R.C. The Economic History of India, Vol. 2, In the Victorian Age 1837–1900, Delhi,

1960(1906).Furtado, C. The Economic Growth of Brazil: A Survey from Colonial to Modern Times, Berkeley,

1963.Harlow, Vincent T. The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1893: Volume I—Discover

and Revolution, London, 1952.

5 Bagchi, Presidency Banks and the Indian Economy.6 Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency.

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Hussain, Nasser. The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law, Ann Arbor, 2003.

Morris, Cynthia Taft. ‘Politics, Development, and Society in Five Land-rich Countries in the Latter Nineteenth Century’, Research in Economic History, Vol. 14, pp. 1–68.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. ‘Anthropology, sociology, and other dubious disciplines’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 44(4), 2003, pp. 453–65.

Amiya Kumar BagchiInstitute of Development Studies, Kolkata, India

Documents

Review of Paula Bannerjee's recent book