Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean: Power, Pleasure and the Andaman Islanders / Edition 1

by Satadru Sen

Overview

This book examines the social, political and ideological dimensions of the encounter between the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman islands, British colonizers and Indian settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British-Indian penal settlements in the Andaman Islands – beginning tentatively in 1789 and renewed on a larger scale in 1858 – represent an extensive, complex experiment in the management of populations through colonial discourses of race, criminality, civilization, and savagery. Focussing on the ubiquitous characterization of the Andaman islanders as ‘savages’, this study explores the particular relationship between savagery and the practice of colonialism.

Satadru Sen examines savagery and the savage as dynamic components of colonialism in South Asia: not intellectual abstractions with clear and fixed meanings, but politically ‘alive’ and fiercely contested products of the colony. Illuminating and historicizing the processes by which the discourse of savagery goes through multiple and fundamental shifts between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, he shows the links and breaks between these shifts and changing ideas of race, adulthood and masculinity in the Andamans, British India, Britain and in the wider empire. He also highlights the implications of these changes for the ‘savages’ themselves. At the broadest level, this book re-examines the relationship between the modern and the primitive in a colonial world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415497824
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/21/2009
Series:	Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series , #2
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Satadru Sen teaches South Asian History at Queens College at City University of New York, USA. He is the author of Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1860-1945; Migrant Races: Empire, Identity and K.S. Ranjitsinhji;
Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands and (as co-editor) Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia.

Table of Contents

1. Racializing the Andamanese 2. Counterinsurgency and the Jungle 3. Clearings of the Kidnapped 4. The Dying Savage: Work, Medicine and Andamanese Extinction 5. Another Jungle: Natives and Savages 6. Savage Pleasures: The Erotics of the Andamanese Body .Conclusion: Beyond the Clearing

Editorial Reviews

"The study essentially is novel in its nature as it looks specifically at the indigenous population of the Andaman. Up till now scholarship has largely focused on the convicts and their settlements in the penal colonies. The work juxtaposes the three actors—the colonisers, the convicts and the aborigines—and reflects very well the tensions between these three." - Shilpi Rajpal, University of Delhi; South Asia Research, 2013.

From the Publisher