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.