For centuries, agricultural life in South India was seminomadic. But when the British took dominion, they sought to stabilize the region by inventing a Tamil "golden age" of sedentary, prosperous villages. Irschick shows that this construction resulted not from overt British manipulation but from an intricate cross-pollination of both European and native ideas. He argues that the Tamil played a critical role in constructing their past and thus shaping their future. And British administrators adapted local customs to their own uses.
For centuries, agricultural life in South India was seminomadic. But when the British took dominion, they sought to stabilize the region by inventing a Tamil "golden age" of sedentary, prosperous villages. Irschick shows that this construction resulted not from overt British manipulation but from an intricate cross-pollination of both European and native ideas. He argues that the Tamil played a critical role in constructing their past and thus shaping their future. And British administrators adapted local customs to their own uses.

Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795-1895
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Overview
For centuries, agricultural life in South India was seminomadic. But when the British took dominion, they sought to stabilize the region by inventing a Tamil "golden age" of sedentary, prosperous villages. Irschick shows that this construction resulted not from overt British manipulation but from an intricate cross-pollination of both European and native ideas. He argues that the Tamil played a critical role in constructing their past and thus shaping their future. And British administrators adapted local customs to their own uses.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780520084056 |
---|---|
Publisher: | University of California Press |
Publication date: | 04/05/1994 |
Edition description: | First Edition |
Pages: | 280 |
Product dimensions: | (w) x (h) x 0.80(d) |
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Dialogue and History
Constructing South India, 1795-1895By Eugene F. Irschick
University of California Press
Copyright © 1994 Eugene F. IrschickAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520084056
Introduction
This book is about how people created knowledge regarding agricultural space and cultural identity. In the process, a population became fixed in a resacralized land—an outcome ultimately useful in different ways to British administrators, Tamil nationalists, and local agriculturalists of various classes. This study, therefore, looks at the way both the British and local people in the area around Madras, in what came to be South India, formulated answers to urgent questions concerning the relation of culture to villages as part of that newly consecrated geography. These problems and the answers the people generated were attempts to resolve tensions implicit in the development of a new society.
Fixed population and resacralized land stand out as the two most important changes we can identify in this critical period. Even before the arrival of the Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, individuals in Tamil society moved around a great deal. The society was divided into two varieties of subcastes, each of whom had specific spatial orientations. The “right” castes oriented themselves to local areas, had local temples, and looked on theselocal zones as areas to which they “belonged.” The “left” castes, by contrast, had a conception of belonging to a space that was expansive, occupying many hundreds of villages. Their temples were separated far from one another. Since many of them were artisans and weavers, they had a tradition of mobility. Membership in “right” and “left” caste divisions was under dispute and “switching” prompted contestation on spatial questions as well.
Between 1795 and 1895, these spatial orientations were altered by the project to identify for each village outside Madras a corporate life stretching back almost two millennia into the Tamil past. Such a project connected not only the present with the past but also each village with what came to be “the Tamil country.” In this way, the spatial orientations of both left and right subcastes were harnessed and reshaped in a dialogic way to help create the nodules around which the Tamil country was based. Tamil culture came to be identified with territory.
During the intervening century, both local people and the British sought to formulate not only ideas about each other but also ideas about each other’s pasts. This book seeks to look at the way in which that preoccupation with pasts was used to create the future. In particular, it seeks to understand how rural society around Madras town transformed itself from one of great spatial mobility into one in which inhabitants remained in their villages and, from these fixed points, formulated a cultural entity recognized as distinctly Tamil.
The interaction through which new formulations of territory and identity were forged was dialogic and heteroglot in nature. Cultural negotiations regarding contested meanings involved many voices in a dialogue with unexpected outcomes. Certainly, the purposes inspiring these myriad voices were often contradictory or focused on entirely different problems and proposed solutions. The history that emerged from this set of dialogues, then, created discursive structures that have served several ends at once and over time: British administrators sought to create a fixed and productive society; Tamil nationalists defined a place and identifiable culture for that homeland; disputants struggling to retain control over land and human resources established competing claims. The forms taken by these cultural negotiations changed over time; the dialogues described here were historically contingent and thus need to be delineated with some care.
During the early 1780s, the agriculturalists largely deserted the area outside Madras, on the southeast coast of the Indian subcontinent. Between 1780 and 1782, Hyder Ali, a warrior-prince from the upland area called Mysore to the southwest of Madras, burnt many of the villages around the town. In his attempt to isolate the British, Hyder—often pictured at the time and later as an Asiatic despot—forced most villagers out of this area. Almost two decades later, Lionel Place, an English East India Company employee, described the situation he had never actually seen in a highly colored style. There were, he said, “hardly any other signs…left of the country having been once inhabited by human beings than the bones of their bodies that had been massacred, or the naked walls of their houses that had been burnt.”1 In his description, Place construed both the villagers and the huts in the villages as beings who were murdered. To this image must be added that created several years later by Mark Wilks, the historian of Mysore who wrote that the “minute traits in the manners and habits” of a people “break the force of despotism, or partially compensate, by a spirit of rude but manly independence, for the evils that spirit must encounter.”2 Thus, Wilks helped to create the image of a despot by describing those elements in ordinary people that could serve as a foil to him.
The style and formulations of Place and Wilks resulted from a long historical process. From the mid-1780s, employees of the English East India Company were no longer permitted to participate in commerce. Instead, they focused on an administrative preoccupation with reforming decayed societies by freeing them from despotism and internecine conflict. To envision this state of affairs meant describing the previous environment as totally disorderly. The most direct strategy, employed by individuals in the generation after the direct assumption of the Jagir in 1782, was to depict local culture, particularly village culture, as being in a state of moral disarray. This degenerate society, many British and local individuals believed, was permeated by suspicion, opulence, and corruption. Place, who exemplified this tendency, believed that “we should judge Hindu institutions not by the fallen natives of the present day, but by the reliques of antient tranquillity, happiness, agriculture and wealth of the country.…Where else do we hear of peace being undisturbed by any commotion, whatsoever, for thousands of years?”3 This reasoning presented the individuals encountered near Madras in the 1790s as fallen examples of a much more tranquil and wealthy society, a society that had persisted for many, many years.
Not only did many individuals reconstitute their ideas of local society but also, in the process, they redefined themselves entirely. Not least of those who redefined themselves were British administrators. During the nineteenth century, officers of the English East India Company distanced themselves more and more from activities they considered to be “indigenous.” They no longer used hunger strikes against local individuals, which they had done earlier in the century, or themselves sought to confine people to retrieve money or supplies.4 As we will see in Chapter 2, Place sought to act like a local king to revive what he perceived as a degraded culture. This taking of the role of the other by one individual was a momentary and experimental strategy to renew local society, an attempt to accelerate the kind of cultural change occurring everywhere at the time. It was perhaps the last in a series of transitional attempts to try to copy what were considered to be “essential” and “indigenous” symbolic expressions.
Since this process formed part of a large-scale interaction over many years, even preceding the arrival of the Europeans, it naturally involved many local participants, who used the context to create new answers to new existential problems. Given the change underway, it is impossible to refer to a pure, unalloyed indigenous system with values untouched by other elements.5 Rather, the British entered society through a long, continuing process already in motion that could not be called “indigenous” because it cannot be defined as existing in contradistinction to a foreign (British) alternative. The British and all other forces from the West or from other localities were immediately incorporated into a single analytical field that emerged from dialogic processes.
British and local interpreters participated equally in constructing new institutions with a new way of thinking to produce a new kind of knowledge. One writer who called himself a “native revenue officer” of Madras presidency, in the 1858 document On Bribery as Practiced in the Revenue administration of the Madras Presidency, wrote that “there was indeed a time not far back when universal content, concord and mutual sympathy reigned amongst the landholders and their labourers, when the cultivation was arranged amongst themselves, when their rights were mutually respected and violations of them amicably adjusted in the village without the interference of Government.”6 According to this construction, the decay of trust among villagers themselves and between villagers and outsiders was recent, producing an increase in amorality, deception, and mistrust. As we will see, during the 1790s the production of meaning and institutions for the villages of the region came to include an idea that the entire tax system was corrupt. Amorality came to be seen as a product of a culture born of cities, invading kings, and colonial powers who lived ostentatiously either in the present or in the immediate past. According to this thinking, the ubiquitous wealth and morality of the distant past was destroyed by an effete colonizing culture, either British or Muslim. In the construction of ideas about local cultural decay, both the Company employees and local participants sought to carry forward urgent cultural imperatives. Therefore, the social description of local society was an interactive product of these new historical necessities. One of the presumptions of this analysis is that all new ways of thinking resulted from contingent circumstances.
According to these perceptions, whether shaped by European or local perspectives, society in the Jagir outside Madras and elsewhere in South India needed restoration. This necessitated a reordering of society to fix and essentialize it, to “get to the bottom of it.” This revivalist movement emerging from within both the British bureaucracy and local society to retrieve the “original” institutions of the society, this effort to characterize a former time, resulted in interactively constructed perceptions of the previous land system and the social hierarchy on which it was based. In other words, what was described resulted from attempts to create a new land system and social hierarchy. In effect, this was a dialogic production of a negotiated system of rules and institutions that included an equally mediated cultural system of juridical power.7 Thus, the construction of what both British and local participants conceived of as the values of a former age formed an attempt to interactively generate answers to solve current pressing cultural problems. These answers had to be expressed in new significations, of which “prior decay” and the “restoration” of an “indigenous system” were but three.
As we will see in Chapter 1, categorizing a rural dispute by local land controllers as an “insurrection” in 1795–96 became another device to create a new signification for village society. This holds similarities to the production of meaning in sixteenth-century Mexico between Cortés and Montezuma, or between Captain Cook and the Hawaiians in 1779, that provided “new” signification for “old” activities. In the same manner, Place and his superiors conceived of the “insurrection” in the Jagir outside Madras in 1795–96 in a very different way from that ascribed to it by the local villagers.
Because there was a difference in interpretation about these behaviors, the experience jeopardized the views of both local individuals and Company employees. That is to say, a “crisis in truth” had been created about the meaning of rural relations in the Jagir at this time. This crisis in meaning was illustrated, as we will see, by Place’s desire to try to bring in more taxes, to “get to the bottom of things,” to find out what was the “true” motivation of the villagers. Because of his persistence, Place proceeded much further than had any previous European in his attempt to understand the structure of local social and political relations.
Nonetheless, the villagers did not behave as the British expected. British expectations operated in an intellectual and institutional environment already tension-filled with alien concepts and value judgments, in which things were already agitated and contested. These alien concepts formed active subjects in the continuing production of meaning. For their part, villagers employed negotiated behaviors that were only partly based on activities they had pursued on previous occasions. They already actively anticipated the equally alien expectations of the British: the villagers’ attempt to “understand” British expectations was itself a dynamic behavior. However, Company employees—because they operated under new rules—also did not react as the villagers would have predicted that rulers would, not least because the British were also energetically preparing to “understand” local individuals.
The pragmatic context, the goals, the signifiers, the historic requirements had all changed dramatically for all participants. Everything seemed open to dispute and charged with value. As a result, the meanings placed on these activities both by the British and by the local population were being altered continuously. As products of this cultural negotiation emerged over the next century, new institutions and new kinds of knowledge were created to capture the nature of society and polity in this colonial environment and elsewhere. Moreover, as we shall see, dialogic activities carry with them internal contradictions inherent in heteroglossia.
What this process suggests is that we can no longer presume that the view of local or what later became Indian society was a product of an “imposition” by the hegemonic colonial power onto a mindless and subordinate colonized society. Writers like Edward Said have argued that the construction of meaning was a “willed activity” by white European colonizers of the Middle East and South Asia. “My contention is,” Said writes, “that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness.”8 The research presented here questions this claim that knowledge is constructed by willed activity of a stronger over a weaker group. It suggests, instead, that changed significations are the heteroglot and dialogic production of all members of any historical situation, though not always in equal measure; this is so whether they have a Weberian monopoly on violence or not.
This characterization of the process nevertheless presumes that in the colonial situation both domination and exploitation occurred on a constant basis. The colonial environment was used by imperial actors to derive political, economic, and social advantages for themselves. Constant efforts by these actors excluded the colonized from areas of formal juridical and economic power. Domination involved constant violence or threats of violence, and inequality. Exploitation and victimization were more than mere perception; they happened constantly in all colonial environments.
But in the Jagir in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many British employees of the Company felt their control over their territories to be very shaky. Lionel Place confronted violent raids into the Jagir from the territories of the Nawab (or Nabob) of Arcot, a local prince ruling to the west of Madras, and attempts by Company employees of the newly founded police committee from Madras town to impose their authority. Referring to these challenges, Place said to his superiors at the Board of Revenue in Madras, “The Board know, by what a tender thread, the Collector’s authority hangs, and from past experience, how necessary to the administration of the Revenue, that it should be respected.”9 As we will see from the account that follows, the precariousness of British authority over many groups not only in this local area but on the subcontinent as a whole continued for many years.10 Moreover, the attempt of the British to impose their ideas on the proprietary system of the Jagir was continually used by local inhabitants to conjure up something else. Indeed, the shaping of the proprietary system became an activity mediated by many other local individuals. It would therefore be hard to say that in this realm the British were dominant. If anything, nineteenth-century evidence shows that in the area the local Mirasidars exercised greater dominance than did the British.
Moreover, the segmentary organization of local polity enabled the population to develop significant arenas of juridical power not subject to formal British authority for many years. In the nineteenth century, after the British evolved their bureaucratic structure and a system of living in specific spatial areas set apart from the local population, there were hundreds of domains on the subcontinent where British authority was altogether lacking or uncertain. The shakiness of British dominance enabled these regions to serve throughout the period as critical sites for productive epistemological projects.
The discussion here begins with a sense that previous characterizations have been incomplete. It does not see the British presence in India as a “limited” or a repressive state.11 Nor does this study look on the creation of culture as part of what Ashis Nandy has called the “intimate enemy,” a view in which he characterized this creative and dialogic process as an “oppressive structure.”12 Nor does it look on colonialism as something that involves “cultural damage.”13 The argument here focuses less on the willed or repressive aspect of a colonial state as part of the construction of knowledge than on the dialogic, heteroglot productive process through which culture is formed. The result is a necessary corrective to what has been an unbalanced picture of a complex process.
This is not to say that there was no resistance to the meanings that were created by these interactions. Recent work by scholars suggests that as individuals or historical forces operated in local areas of South Asia, the significations granted to those forces or to those individuals’ actions were in many ways “subaltern” or “local.” These meanings competed with each other in the conflict that precedes the centripetal movement toward a unitary and scientific discourse.14 To put it in another way, the centripetal movement to create a unitary structure of meaning both at this time and later operated in the midst of an equally powerful centrifugal movement to create local meaning from many different voices and epochs. In the long term, therefore, scientific discourse and the institutions that represent it create a negotiated, heteroglot construction shaped by both the weak and the strong, the colonized and the colonizer, from the present and the past. Thus, it is not possible to find a single, definite origin to these meanings and institutions. They are neither “European” nor “indigenous.” We must not essentialize any of the positions held by those involved in the dialogue. Equally important, we must recognize that the voices speaking at any given moment are tied to that specific historic instant.
Moreover, the process by which these knowledges and institutions compete with each other and the mechanism by which centripetal, scientific discourse is formed are something quite different from simple repression. If anything, repression helps to create new knowledge. Instead, discourse was also constructed through what Bakhtin called Rabelaisian laughter.15 Laughter, according to Bakhtin, represents a positive, regenerating and creative epistemic force. Rabelaisian laughter suggests a process of becoming that is open, unfulfilled, and ambivalent. It is a way the present and the past are buried in the process of looking at the future. It also proposes the creativity and radicalism of the people’s unofficial truth. What Place, a Company employee, had to say about the chaos and decay of contemporary Tamil society constituted a kind of Rabelaisian laughter in the bazaar. Laughter, according to this formulation, is new meaning not directed at anybody in particular and not intended to threaten anybody. These new meanings—Bakhtinian laughter or Durkheimian religious electricity—drew on a wide variety of voices from many social classes and many epochs in time. But this laughter and religious electricity, this competition between local knowledges and voices, was itself connected with meanings from other epochs. Bakhtin’s formulation of laughter therefore demonstrates the way in which discourse develops to deal with new historical requirements. Laughter and bazaar voices can usefully be made part of a centrifugal and nonvaluative projection of new competing formulations. In this system, there is no attempt to enclose. Often this process can be thought of as an emptying, a deforming, and a naturalizing mechanism in order to accomplish a major change in signification, to realize a new project.
The dynamic of this process is much more important than the attribution of authorship on which we usually rely. It was part of an emptying process. It formed a statement that came out of a crowd and was addressed to a crowd of competing local, “subaltern,” or bazaar voices. If we say that a certain person (such as Place) is an author of any given set of views, this is simply an illusion that is socially accepted. All authorized products are the product of a work group that includes those who agree and those who disagree with each set of ideas.16 Place simply played a part in a worldwide crowd of competing voices, a large intellectual work group. However, no single individual can determine meaning.
The methodological implications for a historian of this production process are necessarily complicated. Historians traditionally deal with documentary evidence, and documents are—mechanically though not intellectually—produced by a single author. One way of balancing out the weight of this form of primary evidence is to treat a range of behavioral evidence also as “primary” documentation, and this effort is made repeatedly in the pages that follow. Nevertheless, the overall weightage in a study like this one unintentionally privileges the written word proffered by elite actors, many of them British. Only by reminding ourselves continually that this evidence is but the tip of a much larger iceberg of dialogic interaction can we resist a single, straight-line interpretation connected to elite concerns.
We remind ourselves, then, that the project to describe society around Madras in the 1790s as needing reconstruction involved local individuals—Europeans and many others. Though it was a project of domination, it was an intensely collaborative, if not harmonious, project. The dialogue of which this history is made emerges from connected processes of negotiation and mediation, as these developed throughout the nineteenth century. All these persons participated in it with compelling excitement and interest. Interactions in constructing local culture and its institutions involved many special pleasures. The imperatives associated with this historical task in a new historical era provoked an equally compelling stimulus to create “truth” about themselves. Many local individuals, for example, sought to “discover the truth” about the Tamil past. Their goal was to speak about this history of the Tamil area to prepare for the future. Their enthusiastic participation helped to induce a large-scale centripetal codification of knowledge about the Tamil past and involved great and persistent pleasure for all who took part, both colonizer and colonized.
Therefore, contrary to the argument proffered by Edward Said, the production of categories or juridical institutions was not a production simply of unmediated willed activities imposed by the western colonial state from the top. Active voices came from all segments of society (those who dominated and those who were being dominated) and from all epochs. This study focuses on key epistemological moments to elucidate that process for a particular part of South India in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through these key moments, we may examine the interactive aspects of the process for creating meaning.
The production of meaning could be studied in many ways. One of the most important ways is the focus here: the organization of rural space and society to settle an agrarian population. This process resulted in an embedded society, with concomitant implications for alternative actions available to participants in dialogic processes. “Embedded” refers to a society in which individuals are enmeshed by ties of restraint.
I have divided this study into four chapters. The first sets the historical stage for the investigations of Place and many other individuals. These investigations formed part of a general historical project not confined to the Jagir or to South India. This project, in its attempt to find out “what was going on,” brought together unlikely elements of knowledge regarding culture, religion, social relations, and economic productivity of the land. By seeking to understand how proprietary relations operated, Place provoked a rural disturbance that Company officials called an “insurrection.” The crisis of this disturbance, in turn, offered an opportunity to redefine the way in which village culture was conceived. It also offered an opportunity to define local society as one characterized by immorality and deceit, a society that needed reconstruction.
Chapters 2 and 3 represent respectively the theoretical and practical working out of these conceptions of spatializing, reconstructing, and resacralizing rural society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They propose that the future society of the area was projected from a constructed past dialogically produced by both British officials and local individuals.
Chapter 4 is concerned to show that this “production of the past” involved “finding the original settlers” of the territory not only to grant them antiquity but also to fix them in specific villages and homes. The general historical project on which all these activities focused gave the entire population a reason not to wander about the countryside, to fix them in place. The implications of this sedentarization process continue to be played out in the late twentieth century and thus have great import for those wishing to understand the major aspects of change in the modern postcolonial world.
NotesLionel Place, Report on the Jagir, 1799 (hereafter Place, 1799 Report), para. 164, BOR, Misc., vol. 45, TNSA.
Mark Wilks, Historical Sketches of the South of India in an Attempt to Trace the History of Mysoor, ed. Murray Hammick (1810; reprint, Mysore: Government Branch Press, 1930), 1:2.
Place, 1799 Report, para. 95.
We know that Englishmen performed a version of dharna (a hunger strike to force a person to pay a sum of money) on the Nawab of Arcot either to get back money that the Nawab owed them or to get him to do things that he did not want to do. It has been shown that Lord Pigot, governor of Madras, in early 1776, shortly before the “revolution” that removed him from power, sought to place a close surveillance on the relations of the Nawab of Arcot with the Muslim prince Hyder Ali and to assure the return of certain important areas (Arni, Sivaganga, Ramnad, Ariyalur, and Variyarpalayam). Lord Pigot accomplished this by a hunger strike directed against the Nawab. Paul Benfield, an English merchant and moneylender, also used this tactic on many occasions against the Nawab of Arcot to get his tankhwahs—assignments on the taxes of certain tracts of land—paid. John Gurney, “The Debts of the Nawab of Arcot,” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1964), 303. Benfield was by training an engineer and civil architect. It was his demands for restitution for claims on the Nawab relating to some of the revenues of Tanjore that were the basis of the “revolution” that overthrew Lord Pigot. H. Davidson Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800 (London: John Murray, 1913), 3:104.
In 1760, Eyre Coote was leaving Kanchipuram on his way to Vandavasi (in the contemporary South Arcot district) to fight the French under the command of Lally. Coote was at Uttiramerur, southwest of Madras town, where his progress was impeded by the lack of grain for his troops. Coote found that “the renter [tax farmer], though he depended on Madras [i.e., the British], had sold his store [of rice] to some agents, probably employed by the French at Sadras [on the coast forty miles south of Madras]; on which he was seized, and confined without eating, until the army was supplied; and his people in a few hours brought enough for the immediate want, and promised more.” Robert Orme, Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, 2d ed. (London: John Nourse, 1775), 3:576
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
A Native Revenue Officer, On Bribery as Practiced in the Revenue administration of the Madras Presidency (Madras: Hindu Press, 1858), 15.
In the pages that follow, I use the word “power” in two different senses. When I speak about “juridical” power, I refer to the capacity to coerce an individual or a group by violence or the sanctions of law. When I use the word “power” without any modifier, I refer to the function that discourse has on the creation of values that constrains individuals.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 204.
Place to BOR, 10 September 1798, BC, no. 2109, IOL.
See the account in Bernard S. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 658, in which the dominant British rulers sought desperately to freeze and “make manifest and compelling the sociology of India.” This darbar of 1877, says Cohn, sought to invite participants “in relation to ideas which the British rulers had about the proper social order in India.”
For a view of the state as “limited,” see Anand Yang, The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 390. Brown writes, “The British raj was a light-handed, amateur affair compared to the state of the later twentieth century, with its greatly increased numbers of employees and functionaries, its bigger revenues, higher expenditure on the army and the police, its economic planning and control of the economy through directives and a pervasive system of licenses.”
For a view of the state as “repressive,” Gyanendra Pandey, “‘Encounters and Calamities’: The History of a North Indian Qasba in the Nineteenth Century,” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 122–23
Pandey writes, “What the advent of colonialism meant for the people of Mubarakpur is perhaps not unfairly summed up in the following terms: more rigorous administrative demands and control following the establishment of a centralized colonial powers; improved communications, increased traffic and a significant change in the direction of the cloth trade; and higher prices of food and of the raw materials needed for the local cloth industry, at least for important stretches of time.”
Nandy, Intimate, xiv–xv, 32.
See the account of the “meaning” attached to Gandhi in Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma,” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 288–350.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Press, 1968).
Alvin Gouldner, The Two Marxisms (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980), quoted in Richard Fox, Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 72; H. M. Collins, “The Core-Set in Modern Science,” History of Science, 19:6–19, quoted in Fox, Utopia, 82.
Continues...
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