Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2011
Recently, a group of scholars, all either students of Anil Seal or persons very much affected by his thinking, have produced a volume entitled Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870–1940,1 which is reprinted from Volume VII (1973) of Modern Asian Studies. Included in it are an introductory essay by eal himself entitled “Imperialism and Nationalism in India,” two essays on U.P. by C. A. Bayly and F. C. Robinson entitled “Patrons and politics in northern India” and “Municipal Government and Muslim separatism in the United Provinces, 1883 to 1916.” There is one essay by R. A. Gordon called “Non-cooperation and council entry 1919 to 1920” and one by David Washbook entitled “Country politics: Madras 1880 to 1930.” The volume ends with two essays on Bengal by Gordon Johnson and John Gallagher entitled respectively “Partition, agitation and Congress: Bengal 1904 to 1908” and “Congress in decline: Bengal 1930 to 1939.” This volume raises issues of great substance for the study and interpretation of recent Indian history. Seal, in his essay, argues that previous historians of India (in which he includes himself) have been too much concerned with policy and with the educated elite bound together by a common ideology. Instead of looking at partnerships of fellows, we should be looking at vertical alliances. After all, according to him, these alliances were mostly cross-caste and cross-religion. “Hindus worked with Muslims, Brahmins were hand in glove with non-Brahmins; and notables organized their dependents as supporters …” (p. 3).
1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). The editors are Gallagher, John, Johnson, Gordon, and Seal, Anil. Page numbers included in the text of this article refer to this volume. Other sources will be cited separately in footnotes.Google Scholar
2 Mukherjee, S. N., “Caste, class and politics in Calcutta, 1815–1838,” Mukherjee, S. N. and Leach, Edmund eds., Elites in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 34.Google Scholar
3 See Masselos', J. C. fine article entitled “Bombay in the 1870s: A study of changing patterns in urban politics,” South Asia, No. 1 (August, 1971), pp. 29–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarDobbin's, Christine “Competing elites in Bombay city politics in the mid-nineteenth century (1852–83)” in Mukherjee and Leach, Elites in South Asia, particularly pp. 84–90Google Scholar on the fight over Bombay Municipal reform, uses some of the same material and has similar conclusions.
4 See C. A. Bayly, “Patrons and politics in Northern India,” in the collection discussed here, p. 31. In Bombay city, the British used a faction headed by SuHcman Cassim Mitha to help break up a move toward Muslim unity. See Brown, Judith M., Gandhi's rise to power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 31, and the unpublished work of one of my students, Kathleen Roberson Dickson, “The Adamjee Pccrbhoy Family: A Case Study,” p. 17.Google Scholar
5 Eric Stokes' work on the mutiny indicates that this phenomenon operated well before the intrusion of municipal councils into U.P. See his “Rural revolt in the great rebellion of 1857 in India: a study of the Saharanpur and MuzafTarnagar Districts,” The Historical Journal XII (1969):609.Google Scholar
6 Sec also David Washbrook's case study of the rivalry between the Mothey and Reddi Naidu factions in Kistna District in the 1920s, in his review of Judith Brown's Gandhi's rise to power, in Modern Asian Studies VII (January, 1973)1111–112.
7 See Barrier, N. Gerald, “The Punjab Government and Communal Politics, 1870–1908,” Journal of Asian Studies XXVII (May, 1968): 537.Google Scholar
8 Burton Stein argues that the setting up of these district town centers (and their institutions) provided a new kind of legitimation and organized politics in a new way. See his article, “Agrarian integration in South India,” in Frykenberg, Robert, ed., Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 211.Google Scholar See particularly the story of the way-group. This was repeated many times in the 19th and 20th centuries.
9 See the famous instance in the life of Mill, John Stuart where he discovers the function of “feelings” after 20 years of “rational” behavior. Mill, J. S., Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), pp. 118–122.Google Scholar
10 See Owen, Hugh, “Non-cooperation, 1920–22,” Sibnarayan Ray, ed., Gandhi, India and the World (Bombay: Nachikcta, 1970), pp. 169–70.Google ScholarSee also my Politics and social conflict in south India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 194–197.Google Scholar
11 McLane, John R., “The 1905 Partition and the New Communalism,” Lipski, Alexander ed., Bengal East and West (East Lansing: Michigan State University Asian Studies Center, 1969), p. 69.Google ScholarSee also Cronin, Richard P., “The British administration of Eastern Bengal and Assam, 1905–1912: The Bureaucracy and nationalism in Partitioned Bengal,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1974.Google Scholar
12 It is available in a very expanded version in his newly published Provincial politics and Indian nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), particularly chapters III and IV.Google Scholar
13 Murton, Brian, in his “Key people in the countryside: Decision makers in interior Tamilnadu in the late eighteenth century,” Indian Economic and Social History Review X (June, 1973)1171–72,CrossRefGoogle Scholar indicates how local patels in Kongunadu (Salem and Coimbatore Districts) “necessarily directed all transfers of landed property and settled the rent of every field.” In this context patels had absolute “authority over land” and “all inhabitants of villages were the tenants of patels.”
14 To this day, the Tamil Nadu government has experienced great difficulty in trying to impose centralized control over these individuals. In a recent editorial (October 14, 1973), ,nc Madras Hindu agreed with the Tamil Nadu Administrative Reforms Commission that although a group of centrally controlled officers could administer a much wider area more efficiently than the headman, “the unanswered question is whether they can resist local pressures arising out of the squabbles within the panchayat unions where they are to work. A new cadre of officers may not make any difference unless the Government supports them in standing up to local politicians.”
15 The nature of the relationship of the peasant to non-peasant populations in the Tamil area was a function of the increasing impingement of peasant populations on forest and other preserves of tribal populations and was epitomized by the so-called Kalabhra “interregnum” of perhaps the 7th to the 9th centuries when peasant and non-peasant populations fought over certain areas of the Coromandcl plain. See Stein, Burton, “Brahman and peasant in early south Indian history,” Adyar Library Bulletin XXXI-XXXII (1967–8) 249–50.Google Scholar
16 Dupuis, Jaques, Madras et le nord da Coro-mandel, (Paris: Librairie d'Amcrique et d'Orient, 1960), pp. 126–7.Google Scholar
17 I have indicated this in my Politics and social conflict in South India, pp.173, 181–2.Google Scholar
18 Ibid, pp. 193–198.
19 Taken from computations in an unpublished paper by a student of mine, Richard Kennedy, “Status and control of temples in Tamil Nadu,” p. 24.
20 The “Self Respect” marriage of the son of a wealthy Sengunthar weaver who had become a rice merchant in Pollachi in Coimbatore District, Mudatiar, T. P. K. Arumuga, provoked the comment that “these ceremonies which were meaningless to us were not performed by Brahmans in Sanskrit. Everything was performed by one of us in our own Tamil language.” Cenkimta Mittiran (Pankuni, 1930), P. 93.Google Scholar
21 See the comments in his private diary concerning the death of Dr. Nair, T. M., quoted in my Politics and social conflict in South India, p. 140.Google Scholar
22 It can also be maintained that the Brahmans lost political power because many of them cut most of their connections with the land during the same period and became primarily an urban group. When they got to the cities, Brahmans found the avenues to professional training and employment very limited indeed. See Dupuis, pp. 48–51.
23 Musgrave, P. J., “Landlords and Lords of the Land: estate management and social control in Uttar Pradesh 1860–1920,” Modern Asian Studies VI (July, 1972) 157–75.Google Scholar
24 Stein, “Agricultural integration,” p. 201.
25 ibid,p. 211.
26 ibid, p. 209.
27 Ibid, p. 203.
28 Ibid, p. 210.
29 See Washbrook's, David Review of Brown, Judith M., Gandhi's rise to power, in Modern Asian Studies VII (January, 1973) :109.Google Scholar
30 Jones, W. H. Morris, “India's political idioms,” in Philips, C. H., ed., Politics and Society in India (New York: Praeger, 1963), p. 138.Google ScholarJones's, Morris “idiom” was also employed by Mukherjee, S. N., “Caste, Class and Politics in Calcutta,” Mukherjee and Leach, Elites in South Asia, p. 34.Google Scholar
31 Indian Express (Madras), March 11, 1968.Google Scholar
32 Bernard Cohn has argued that small “kingdoms” were bound together into a political order which was “legitimized and maintained” through a set of ground rules based on these “rituals, traditions, myths and histories.” See his “Political systems in eighteenth century India: The Banaras Region,” Journal of the American Orientel Society LXXXII (July-September, 1962): 313.Google Scholar
