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AbstractThrough a study of hitherto unexplored geography textbooks written in Bengali between 1845 and 1880, this paper traces the evolution of a geographic information system related to ethnicity, race, and space. This geographic information system impacted the mentality of emerging educated elites in colonial India who studied in the newly established colonial schools and played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of the territorial nation-state and the rights of citizenship in India. The Bengali Hindu literati believed that the higher location of India in such a constructed hierarchy of civilizations could strengthen their claims to rights of citizenship and self-government. These nineteenth century geography textbooks asserted clearly that high caste Hindus constituted the core ethnicity of colonial Indian society and all others were resident outsiders. This knowledge system, rooted in geography/ethnicity/race/space, and related to the hierarchy of civilizations, informed the Bengali intelligentsia's notion of core ethnicity in the future nation-state in India with Hindu elites at its ethnic core.

AbstractThis essay explores labor politics in Bengal in the period between 1890 and 1939. It investigates numerous supposed paradoxes in labor politics such as the coexistence of intense industrial action marked by workers' solidarity and communal rioting between Hindus and Muslims, labor militancy and weak formal trade union organization. In existing historiography, these paradoxes are explained through a catch all phrase 'peasant worker'—a concept that perceives Indian workers as not fully divorced from rural society and thus were susceptible to fragmentary pulls of natal ties that acted as a break on the emergence of class consciousness. In contradistinction to such historiography this paper argues that religion, language and region did not always act as a break on workers' ability to unite. It demonstrates that workers' politics was informed and influenced by notions of customary rights based on mutuality of shared interests at workplaces. When workers perceived that management violated such customary rights, they formed alliances among themselves and engaged in militant industrial action. In such circumstances, workers' natal ties assisted in producing solidarities. By drawing upon Chandavarkar's works, this essay accords importance to the contingency of politics in the making and unmaking of alliances among workers and thus argues that in different political circumstances religious or other forms of natal ties acquired different meanings to different groups of workers.

The growth of industrial suburbs with a large working-class population around Calcutta in the final years of the nineteenth century profoundly influenced the politics on the streets of the 'second city' of the British empire. The increasing concentration of a large industrial work force in the newly growing mill towns around Calcutta in these years was accompanied by frequent industrial action and violent confrontations between the colonial law enforcement agencies and various sections of factory operatives in the city and the suburban mill towns. In the 1890s, when the Indian Jute Mill Association (hereafter IJMA) extended working hours and increased the work load in the factories, Calcutta and suburban mill towns witnessed numerous strikes. In 1895 these strikes frightened the jute mill owners so much that the IJMA pleaded with the government to reorganize police forces in the mill municipalities in order to protect the European managerial staff from the wrath of angry workers.