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.