Overview

This book examines the process of domination of a civilization and the creation of a vast empire by the British in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores how they extended and maintained their tenuous rule over India through coercion, violent oppression, and exploration of knowledge of this vast region and its people. Excavating archival materials, this volume looks at extensive ethnographic surveys, the study of history, cartography, archaeology, native languages, and literatures from colonial times. It takes a critical look at the attempts of unravelling the social structural principles such as caste and religious groups and also how power was used in multiple forms and contexts to establish dominance over the people of the subcontinent and its resources. The essays in this volume are from a period when the technologies of colonization were being experimented with and reect a mixed bag of admiration, derogation, and paternalism from those holding positions of power and responsibility, including some elite Indians. It further examines the emergence of a sense of nationalism, a critique of the Eurocentric views of the colonial masters, indicating the contribution of Western education to the formation of an Indian identity that finds resonance in modern times. This book will be useful to students and researchers of anthropology, sociology, public administration, modern history, colonial studies, and demography. It will also be of interest to civil servants, students of history, Indian culture and society, religions, colonial history, law, and South Asia studies.

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Subhadra Mitra Channa retired as Professor from the Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi. Her research interests are in gender studies, marginalization, identity studies, urban ethnography, environment, cosmology, religion, and caste studies in India. She is the recipient of Charles Wallace Fellowship, UK. She was Fulbright Lecturer, USA (2003 and 2008–2009); Visiting Professor to Maison D’Sciences De L’Homme, Paris; Visiting Scholar, University of Kentucky, USA (2015); Visiting Professor, University of Bahia, Brazil (2019); Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology, USA; President of the Indian Anthropological Association (1997–2000); and was awarded S.C. Roy Gold Medal (Asiatic Society). She was awarded the Distinguished Teacher Award Delhi University, 2016, as the best teacher of the university. She was the Senior Vice-President of (IUAES) from 2018 and was former Chair of the Commission on Marginalization and Global Apartheid (2017–2021). Her publications include Gender in South Asia (Cambridge University Press); Life as a Dalit (ed. with Joan P Mencher, Sage Pub.); The Inner and Outer Selves (Oxford University Press), Gender, Livelihood and Environment (ed.) with Marilyn Porter; and Anthropological Perspectives on Indian Tribes (Orient Blackswan) and more than eighty scholarly papers and book chapters. Lancy Lobo holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology and a Doctoral degree in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited 30 books and scores of mimeographs based on research over 40 years. He has been a professor and the Director of Centre for Social Studies based in Surat, an institute under the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Delhi. He was an International Visiting Fellow at the Woodstock Centre, Georgetown University, Washington DC, in the year 1999–2000. He is the founder director of the Centre for Culture and Development, Vadodara, which has completed 20 years. Currently, he is Professor Emeritus at the Indian Social Institute, Delhi. Some of his recent publications include, with Jayesh Shah (eds.), The Legacy of Nehru: Appraisal and Analysis (2018); with A.M. Shah and Lancy Lobo (eds.), Essays on Suicide and Self-Immolation (2018); with Kanchan Bharati (eds.), Marriage and Divorce in India: Changing Concepts and Practices (2019), with A.M. Shah, An Ethnography of Parsees of India (2022); with A.M. Shah, Indian Anthropology (2022); with Dhananjay Kumar, Tribes in Western India (2022); and with Subhadra Mitra Channa, Religious Pluralism in India: Ethnographic and Philosophic Evidence, 1886–1936 (2023).

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