When 'provision of education' is just not enough...

State provides education, but what is it teaching the future citizens?

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34336826

Class Discussion Session 2

Three main concepts were reviewed during the class, ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘colonialism’. At some level there is a link between colonialism and the ‘modern state’ (in that structures, technologies and techniques of the modern state were developed in the colonial state and re-exported back to the West and re-presented as the ‘modern state’).

Cohn and Dirk’s work is seminal because they were among the first scholars to consider colonial constructs like caste, legal systems, land tenure, and so on… Before their work for e.g., caste categories had generally been considered naturalized phenomena and not viewed as attempts to enumerate and define the Indian population. Similarly our current systems of law, land administration, forest policies (which Sivaramakrishnan discusses) can all be traced to the colonial period. One could almost state that the idea of the Indian nation is a colonial construct.

This led to some discussion over whether we are falling into a trap of attributing pretty much everything to colonialism. However we agreed that the colonial period did mark a turning point in knowledge construction of India and its population. This led to a mention of the problem in post colonial and subaltern studies i.e. how does one read and interpret what is ‘Indian’ when much of it has been filtered through colonial processes and seemingly naturalized.

There was some question on if there is a slippage between the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in Stoller’s article. However, the important point to note about her work is that it studies affect among Dutch colonists - they were extremely violent and made no pretexts over looting / killing, unlike the British for e.g.

Foucalt’s work doesn’t mention ‘nation’ or ‘colonialism’ which we found problematic. He only seems to be concerned with state and technologies of power. He argues that the importance of ‘state’ has been exaggerated and what is key is its ‘governmentalisation’. 

In that sense Smith’s work appears to predate Foucalt as he studied everyday state processes. Likewise Dirks and Cohn were making similar arguments well before Foucaldian frameworks were being used. Namely, that the enterprise of the state is to produce systems of knowledge which in turn become systems of power. This led to some discussion on how Foucaldian frameworks appear to have become ‘popular’ leading to their application across various themes and disciplines.

The discussion then moved onto Anderson's work.

On nation and nationalism in the US - no comment

For March 4 class

Dear all,

- I have uploaded the revised reading list in the Drive folder (for sessions 4 and 5).

- I had included the reading by Siddiqi for yesterday's class but we forgot to discuss it, so I have moved it to session 4.

- For those of you who were asking, there is a 'Very Short Introduction' book on anthropology in the 'Extra Readings' folder.

Carol

Session 2: The Colonial State

Cohn’s book “Colonialism and It’s Forms of Knowledge: The British in India” speaks about the ways in which India as a colonized nation was “unravelled” and deemed ‘fit’ to be ruled by the British. This was done by “constructing” certain forms of knowledge or “inventing” cultural technologies of rule in order to know the country, its state system, law and culture, people, polity and religion. This exercise was necessary so that its ancient repositories of knowledge system could help the British get closer to deciphering the ancient codes of rule and rulership and make the country more amenable to be ruled effectively. Cohn therefore deploys the notion of “modalities”, the main framework by which such knowledge “construction” was rendered possible. In the process, the administrators also made a strong case of ‘Oriental Despotism’, lawlessness and the theocratic nature of the state whereby it was argued that Indians could not rule themselves but needed a “strong hand” to be governed with few exceptions like Hastings and William and who believed that India’s civic constitution wasn’t despotic.

The chapter “Law and Colonial State in India” forms part of the four separate essays where Cohn deploys the trope of ancient Indian law, clothes, language and art, artifacts and antiquities of nineteenth century colonial India in order to construct a certain kind of knowledge. These form part of the larger schema whereby such manipulations and strategies feed into and become links in the long chain of colonial subjugation. According to Cohn, the British in order to instrumentalise their idea of ‘peeling off’ the layers and extricating the various codes, tried to de-code the classical texts which were chiefly in Sanskrit and Persian by taking help of learned natives. Apart from this, based on the Western exegesis of law and order, the British administrators transplanted the same by redefining traditional forms of authority and rule with the “collector” who besides collecting revenue was incharge of maintaining law and order and dispensing justice through his aids the Dewan, pandit or maulwi in the Diwani and Faujdari Adalats or courts.

Cohn premises his argument of colonial knowledge forms and practice on the Foucaldian framework of “governmentality” and “knowledge as power” but which gets sabotaged by its own making since the one who was considered superior in knowledge and civilizational attributes that is the coloniser is vulnerable to the colonised who are interpreting the codes as laid down in the ancient texts. Also Cohn, while dealing with the colonial forms of knowledge becomes oblivious to the intent and purpose of indigenous forms of knowledge. 

Notes for Session 2

Notes for Session 2:

The first class addressed the questions ‘What is the State?’ or rather ‘Is there a State’?’ and consequently whether there could even be an Anthropology of the State. The current session continues with a genealogy of the State with a set of readings that trace the ‘Colonial State’ particularly with respect to India, centered on knowledge production.

Smith’s piece focuses on the link between knowledge and administrative control through a review of Village Records and District Reports in British Punjab. He considers both instruments of British rule - records were meant to provide specific knowledge i.e. ‘statistics’ at the level of a village but Smith shows there was substantial differences between actual village papers and what was published or made official. And reports were meant to provide generalized knowledge about Indian society and became the "authorized versions" of such knowledge.

Rather than have villages (in their avatar of ‘mini republics’) form the base unit of such knowledge production the British introduced the category of ‘district’, loosely based on their understanding of Mughal admin systems. The post of Collector was created to mediate between specific ‘native knowledge’ at lower levels and the more ‘generalised knowledge’ that would serve the upper levels of administration. Smith then argues that Manuals were created to mediate between the two as a way of straitjacketing native knowledge to fit into more generalized forms that would be ‘useful’ to the British Administration. Referencing Foucalt the author argues that these “new technologies of government” worked on the underlying assumption that Indian society could be represented as a collection of facts, which would make it “knowable and hence governable”. As he argues, census and surveys were ways of breaking down society into discrete units and statistics was a way of reassembling it. Smith critiques colonial construction of knowledge about Indian society as selective, related to power and control.

He also address the question of caste stating that though we are now inured to it, it was not always central to social activity, including the government (admin). His viewpoint ties in well with Dirks’s chapter on the enumeration of caste during the colonial period and his argument that the Census played an extremely significant role in defining modern caste identities in India. Cohn’s chapter on law and the colonial state in India, supplement Smith and Dirk’s articles. Cohn argues that the attempt to create a system of laws for the Indian state ended up mirroring the English system, as it was based on a British interpretation of the Mughal political system. 

Sivaramakrishnan approaches the same topic i.e. colonial ideologies and ‘technologies of power’ but pertinent to forest policies in India. The starting point for his work is the realm of practice, where forests are centres of conflict and he seeks to theorise such conflicts. He argues for a need to trace the historical development of such policies and to take into account ‘cultural contexts’ (referencing Dirks and Cohn) in order to interpret them. He argues that Orientalist ideas about pre-capitalist, primordial and ecologically sustainable ways of living informed 19C forest policy. He links his work to the "larger colonial project of constructing India as knowable by representation” and ties it with the Foucaldian framework that the “classic episteme” of the modern state was an “exhaustive ordering of the world”. The author centers such an ordering on the notion of ‘scientific forestry’. He draws on Said and Nigam to argue that colonial knowledge typically used circular reasoning, i.e. using a priori assumptions to prove their original belief (ties in with Smith's article). His work suggests that there is a dialectical relationship between discourses of rule and of protest. I.e. it is not a simple impact – response model. Based on this viewpoint he presents a critique of subaltern studies with its focus on resisting a “monolithically conceived state”.

Stoller’s essay on Affective States complements the other articles as it challenges the “Weberian” notion that rationality, reason and stable bureacracy were the foundation stones of colonial states. Based on an analysis of a demonstration in Batavia, Java (Dutch East Indies) she shows that it was not rule by reason but sentiment – either excess or absence of it. She questions the side stepping of sentiment in colonial studies and referring to Foucalt argues that, ‘feelings’ or ‘sentiments’  were not metaphors for something else but were instrumental as “transfer points of power”.  Contrary to Bayly she argues that ‘affective knowledge’ was at the core of political rationality in the late colonial period.  Bayly considered that ‘mastering affect’ was a concern of early colonial period which faded away during its later stages.

While the authors try and present a balanced picture, I am unclear as to how the colonialist arrived at these different ‘technologies of power’? Are we missing out pieces of the puzzle by focusing on critiques of colonialism, surely there was some social and / or cultural system already in place which similarly used certain ‘technologies of power’? What makes the colonial and / or imperialist system a key moment?

All the articles refer Foucaldian frameworks in some way or the other. In ‘Governmentality’ Foucalt analyses the origin of the ‘modern’ state building his argument from political treatises 16C onwards.  He considers the modern state to be an “ensemble” of population, government and political economy, a complex form of power he calls ‘governmentality’. Population becomes the target of such power, political economy the essential form of its knowledge and government or its apparatus namely the  institutions of police and judiciary, the technical means to secure this power.

Session 2: The Colonial State

Of the six readings for this session, three of them jumped out as possibly a curated thread on the way the Indian state was formed and imagined by the colonial powers. Each piece examines an important element that drives colonial power and the urge to dominate. I will be attempting a reading of these three pieces in the light of how a colonial power imagined and set up a state, something that was unprecedented or without precedent as Cohn puts it in the beginning of his essay. It will also try and see how the state that was established by the British Crown has influenced and almost remained in place about 130 years after it began to be put in place.

The three pieces are:

1. Bernard Cohn, Law and the colonial state. In History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology, edited by June Starr and Jane Fishburne Collier (Cornell UP, 1989).
2. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton UP, 2001), Chap. 10.
3. Ann Laura Stoler, Affective states. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, edited by David Nugent and Joan Vincent (Blackwell, 2007), 4-20.

Law and the Colonial State in India

The piece begins with an explanation as to why the East India Company had to 'create' a state. This state was to be modeled on what was existing in the Indian subcontinent and also used teh laws of Great Britain. (Ironically these 18th century laws are still a part of the laws used to govern the state in independent India. While the colonizer has evolved their own laws to accommodate change in culture). 

The British who were in India agreed that there was a State system in place but was in decline. The Hastings government went to lengths to understand the ways in this state was structured. The paper also goes into a bit of detail on how the system established by the British for rent collection was far more complex than on paper, so to speak. An example is made of how the badly managed collecting of revenue resulted in a Famine in Bengal. 

It is also relevant to note that Warren Hastings believed that understanding the Indian Knowledge systems, specially of statecraft would be significant for developing British Administrative institutions. 

While Hastings' project was to ultimately control the colony, there was a certain amount of pragmatism. The terms like Faujdari and Dewani were maintained from the earlier mughal and indegenous rulerships. The position of 'collector' was also created at this point. Something that was continued in the post independence administrative system. This officer acted in both judicial and administrative capacity. He was, effectively responsible for pronouncing judgements on civil litigations as well as on criminal cases.  

But most important is perhaps the point of creating or constructing in the minds of the British Crown and therefore in the Indian population, the local as lawless. By doing this it takes away the power of the people, effectively creating a system where the dominant 'civilised' power was what the peopel required.  

The Enumeration of Caste: Anthropology as Colonial Rule

This essay/piece points out the reasons for the Colonial powers to 'document' the people and communities of the country/colony. This was necessary as the ruling power realised that they know very little about the region that they were ruling. So, was born, the Imperial Gazette. These volumes were meant as a statistical account of the state. 

This kind of documenting is important as it allows the state to collect and publish data for the public but also serves as a tool to keep an eye on what was going on at the district level. In one way a means of micro managing? 

Numbers were elegant, discrete, comparable, meaningful within and across categories and units. Numbers could be manipulated in ways that narratives, however they might have always served the interests of state and privilege, could never be. Statistics could capture discrete details in ways that would best serve the state (after which, of course, the science was named), whether in metropolitan or imperial contexts.

This survey system can be seen as a predecessor to the current fetish that the state has with locating and documenting the caste of its citizens. Going back to the point of this review, of looking at the various things that the British Crown put in place. The purpose behind this documenting has opf course changed.

AFFECTIVE STATES 

...colonial states would seem to conform to a Weberian model 

of rationally minded, bureaucratically driven states, outfitted with a permanent and 

assured income to maintain them, buttressed by accredited knowledge and scientific 

persuasion, and backed by a monopoly of weaponed force...

This section is perhaps more of a theoretical framework behind analyzing the colonial state. The author goes into the legacies or what the colonial powers left behind. While the earlier pieces pointed to a story of India, this draws from the Dutch colonies of Indonesia. The author speaks of social constructs that would have been looked down upon by the British Crown. 

What is interesting is the idea that belonging to the colony or calling the colonised region home, by the generation of europeans who were perhaps born here and who married or identified as locals, was looked down upon. It was all right to feel a sense of ownership but not a sense of belonging. 

This is perhaps the most interesting reading for me. I would like to connect it with the idea of nationalism today. It is 'expected' that the country you live in or were born in are where your loyalties will lie. The state has constructed this idea that the sentiment of wanting to belong is something that is natural. This is further cemented by the idea that there can be no room for entertaining thoughts of 'belonging' elsewhere. 

This train of thoughts is what I would like to discuss. 

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

 The concepts of ‘Simultaneity’ and ‘Continuity’ are important hubs in Anderson’s argument.

Core Arguments:

• Nation, Nationality, and Nationalism are ambiguous notions which emerged in recent history, but became popular, and are mostly taken for granted in the current eon. 
• The ontology of a nation and its meaning is impossible to be precisely known, possibly because the arguments floats in the contradiction between its objective modernity and subjective antiquity i.e. most nations are similarly modern in their functioning even though they had different histories or start points.
• Defines ‘Nation’ as an "Imagined political community that is both limited and sovereign". ‘Nation’ because of a perceived horizontal unity of equals. ‘Imagined’ because its impossible to know everyone. Concept of the nation came during the period of enlightment so the term ‘Sovereign’ was used to portray the highest power and its ‘Limitation’ within a border or boundary.
• The origin of Nationalism is embedded in the Cultural Roots: Religious Community and Dynastic Realms.
• Transformation in the Cultural Roots: Religion had its own hierarchies, and propagated on the basis of sacred texts and languages, which only few people had access to. The earlier dynastic realms consisted of rule by a so called ‘god chosen’ ruler over his or her ‘subjects’ than ‘citizens’ of a region. The rule was conducted from a center which held control over a heterogeneous population. With the advent of print capitalism, the sacred texts were vernacularized and mass-produced to reach out a larger market. New forms of print products floated into these vernacularized markets, thereby, people began to imagine a common identity on the basis of the print readership, and the very subjects they read in the print products also started to have a calendrical continuous identity. These identities could have separated ‘us’ and ‘them’ and idea of Nation emerged ambiguously.  Earlier, religions promptly explained the continuity of life and death. With the enlightment in Europe, the idea of Nation gave new meanings to the continuity of life and death; of glorious past and promising future. For e.g. the cenotaphs and tombs of an unknown fallen soldiers portrayed the glory which exist even after death [India Gate in New Delhi is a War Memorial]. Surveys, Maps and Museum provide reference nodes as numbers, puzzle pieces and inheritances to the notion of a State.

Key Questions 

A.     Anthony W. Marx (Faith in nation: exclusionary origins of nationalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.)

·      How to explain the diversity of languages in some states, if the state itself was formed on the basis of language?

·      language aided in transmission of ideas; doesn’t mean the ideas were of unifying nature, could also have had a reverse effect as messages can be of divisive nature.

·      How did language and literacy render the ‘Limited’ status to states?

·      What role did institutions play to overcome certain internal conflicts before being inclusive?

B.     Rogers Brubaker (In the name of the nation: reflections on nationalism and patriotism 1." Citizenship Studies 8.2 (2004): 115-127.

·      A state being ‘Limited’ vs the relevance of ‘Cosmopolitan’ view

·      “Not only are different nations imagined in different ways, but the same nation is imagined in different ways at different times- indeed often at the same time, by different people” (p.122)

-Shyam

Notice for February 19th class

Dear students,

I have omitted the Mitchell book from the readings for Session 2 on the colonial state. See updated syllabus in the Google Drive folder.

For Session 3, I have added a recent piece as a companion to Anderson, as well as an article on Anderson by Ram Guha.

Please come to the next class with your proposals for the book reviews.

Carol

For Session 3 - nation and state

To accompany Imagined Communities, here is the extract from Anderson's memoirs (soon to be published):
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n02/benedict-anderson/frameworks-of-comparison?utm_source=recap&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20151219+recap&utm_content=usca_subsact&hq_e=el&hq_m=4135644&hq_l=9&hq_v=aee5c8f39d