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Agrarian Localities: Political economy as local power in early nineteenth-century British India*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2015

UPAL CHAKRABARTI
UPAL CHAKRABARTI*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Presidency University, Kolkata, India Email: upal.soc@presiuniv.ac.in
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Abstract

This article writes the agrarian history of an obscure locality, Cuttack, in early-nineteenth-century British India. In doing so, instead of exalting the explanatory power of the local, or the particular, it interrogates the category of the ‘local’ itself by demonstrating how it was assembled as the object of agrarian governance in British India through a densely interwoven network of discursive practices. I present this network as various inter-regional practices and debates over agrarian governance in British India and some methodological debates of political economy in contemporary Britain. This article argues that the governmental engagement with locally specific, indigenous forms of interrelationship between landed property and political power in British India can be more productively understood as internal to the transformed vocabulary of contemporary political economy, rather than lying outside it, amid the pragmatism and contingency of governance. Accordingly, it shows how the particularity of agrarian relations in a locality was produced out of a host of reconfigurations, over different moments and sites, of a universal classificatory grid. In the process, I question those histories of British India which, being rooted in a series of hierarchized binary oppositions, like inside–outside, abstract–concrete, or universal–particular, reproduce the rationality of colonial governance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 898 - 933
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their comments and criticism. I am thankful to Professor Joya Chatterjee and the editorial team of Modern Asian Studies for their support. I will always remain indebted to Peter Robb for his careful scrutiny of my thoughts. I keep learning from Sukanya Sarbadhikary the art of critique. I can only hope that some of it has informed this article.

References

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16 That is why, within a month of the reporting of the insurrection, it was pointed out that, ‘although I have discovered nothing calculated to remove the suspicion, that the Rajah of Khoordah is the immediate instigator of the disturbances . . .I lament to state that there are some grounds to believe that a much more general spirit of disaffection at present exists in that District . . .’ 11 April 1817, BJC.

17 17 July 1818, Proceedings Connected with the Recent Disturbances in Cuttack, Examiner's Office, 1819 (Volume 1), India Office Records, British Library, London.

18 It was being argued that the permanent settlement of Bengal had mistakenly established the zemindars, or big landlords, as the exclusive proprietors of the soil. In doing this it had swept away a great variety of proprietary rights possessed by different kinds of landholders. See ‘Minute by the Right hon. the Governor-General, on the Revenue Administration of the Presidency of Fort William, 21 September 1815’ in Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company 1831–32, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, n.d., Appendix 9, Revenue, p. 84.

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20 ‘18 April 1818’ in Revenue Proceedings Relative to the Late Disturbances in Cuttack, Vol. 2, Examiner's Office, 1819, emphasis mine.

21 Ibid.

22 ‘3 April, 1818’ in Revenue Proceedings Relative to the Late Disturbances in Cuttack, Vol. 2, Examiner's Office, 1819.

23 A. Stirling, An Account, Geographical, Statistical and Historical of Orissa Proper, Or Cuttack (No publisher, 1822), p. 5.

24 Ibid., p. 6.

25 Ibid., p. 56.

26 Ibid., pp. 56–57.

27 Ibid., p. 57.

28 Norbert Peabody argues that James Tod made similar use of the category ‘feudal’ in describing the social and political organization of the Rajputs of Rajasthan. See Norbert Peabody, ‘Tod's Rajasthan and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India’, Modern Asian Studies, 30:1, 1996, p. 198.

29 Stirling, An Account, p. 65. He further pointed out that these chiefs never had a right of property in the soil itself. That right belonged only to the actual cultivators of the soil under the ancient Hindu government, but he did not find any traces of it in Cuttack. Further, almost echoing the discussion in the ‘Fifth Report’, he noted that such a right was existent in other parts of India, like Canara and Malabar.

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33 Ibid., p. 88, emphasis mine.

34 Ibid., p. 89.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., p. 91.

37 Ibid., p. 96.

38 Ibid., p. 97.

39 Ibid., p. 150. See also, Holt Mackenzie, ‘Memorandum’, 1 July 1819, para. 414, as cited in Husain, Land Revenue Policy, p. 130.

40 Bentinck, William, ‘Minute on Land Tenures’ in Circular Orders of the Sadar Board of Revenue at the Presidency of Fort William; Including the Rules of Practice for the Guidance of the Board and of the Commissioners of Revenue, from the Year 1788 to the End of August 1837, India Office Records, British Library, London, 1838, pp. 317–51Google Scholar.

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42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 In the ‘Fifth Report’ the ‘ryot-proprietor’ was discussed in terms of the same example.

45 Bentinck, Minute on Land Tenures.

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47 ‘Extract of a Despatch’.

48 9 July 1833, Acc. No. 28B, June 1829 to December 1830, Revenue, BDR.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 12 November, 1833, Acc. No. 28B, June 1829 to December 1830, Revenue, BDR.

52 12 January, 1838, No. 37, Sadar Board of Revenue—Settlement Proceedings, West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata.

53 ‘Papers on The Settlement of Cuttack and On The State Of The Tributary Mehals’, Selections from the Records of the Bengal Government, No. III, 19 (Calcutta: no publisher, 1851).

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67 In his political economy lectures at Haileybury, Jones taught concepts in this field through a discussion of the agrarian structure of various localities in British India. Whewell (ed.), Literary Remains, pp. 185–290.

68 Ibid., p. 552, emphasis mine.

69 Ibid., p. 554.

70 Ibid., p. 553.

71 Ibid., pp. 557–58.

72 Ibid., p. 557.

73 Ibid., p. 570.

74 Mary Poovey, despite examining the inductivist intervention in the debates over formulation of objective knowledge in nineteenth-century Britain, fails to identify its universalizing aspirations and its underlying similarities with the a priori perspective of which it claimed to be a critique. See Poovey, Mary, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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