Suchergebnisse

'There are no two things in the world more different from each other than East-Indian and West Indian-slavery' (Robert Inglis, House of Commons Debate, 1833). In Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843, Andrea Major asks why, at a time when East India Company expansion in India, British abolitionism and the missionary movement were all at their height, was the existence of slavery in India so often ignored, denied or excused? By exploring Britain's ambivalent relationship with both real and imagined slaveries in India, and the official, evangelical and popular discourses which surrounded them, she seeks to uncover the various political, economic and ideological agendas that allowed East Indian slavery to be represented as qualitatively different from its trans-Atlantic counterpart. In doing so, she uncovers tensions in the relationship between colonial policy and the so-called 'civilising mission', elucidating the intricate interactions between humanitarian movements, colonial ideologies and imperial imperatives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The work draws on a range of sources from Britain and India to provide a trans-national perspective on this little known facet of the story of slavery and abolition in the British Empire, uncovering the complex ways in which Indian slavery was encountered, discussed, utilised, rationalised, and reconciled with the economic, political and moral imperatives of an empire whose focus was shifting to the East

This article explores British attitudes to domestic slavery in the Princely States of Rajputana and Malwa in the nineteenth-century. Working primarily from colonial archives, it analyses British conceptions of the nature of slavery and slave-trading in Rajputana, making compari-sons between this and their perception of slavery in its wider Indian and transatlantic contexts in order to analyse British understandings of Rajput identity, family and gender relations, as well as their conception of the nature and limits of their political and moral influence. It argues that British constructions of 'benign' domestic slavery were juxtaposed against concerns about the implications of slave-trading for crime, stability and the integrity of territorial borders, in British and princely India. The article discusses British attempts to persuade Rajput rulers to prohibit and prevent slave-trading and slave-holding in their territories, representing this debate as a point of intersection between ideological imperatives (in this case anti-slavery ideals) and political concerns about the nature and limits of acceptable British intervention in the internal affairs of the 'independent' states, and demonstrating the degree to which 'moral' and practical concerns intertwined in the formation of political dis-course on the limits of British 'authority'. British attempts to regulate slave-trading on the ground are also explored, and cases brought before the British for the restitution of illegally procured slaves, contained in British Parliamentary Papers and East India Company's Board's Collections and Foreign Department Records, are used to demonstrate the fluid manner in which individuals could move (or be moved) between British and Indian controlled spaces, physically and metaphorically, demonstrating the extent to which the British capacity to both control and even observe was in practice limited, both spatially and ideologically.

Sati, the immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband's funeral pyre, is a rare, but highly controversial practice. It has inspired a surfeit of scholarly studies in the last twenty years, most of which concentrate on one of two main historical sati 'episodes': that of early‐colonial Bengal, culminating with the British prohibition of 1829, and that of late twentieth‐century Rajasthan, epitomised by the immolation of Roop Kanwar in 1987. Comparatively little detailed historical analysis exists on sati cases between these two events, however, a lacuna this paper seeks to address by exploring British and Indian discourses on sati as they existed in late‐colonial India. The paper argues that sati remained a site of ideological and actual confrontation in the early twentieth century, with important implications for ongoing debates about Hindu religion, identity and nation. It focuses on the intersection between various colonial debates and contemporaneous Indian social and political concerns during the controversy surrounding the immolation of Sampati Kuer in Barh, Bihar, in 1927, emphasising resonances with postcolonial interpretations of sati and the dissonance of early nineteenth‐century tropes when reproduced in the Patna High Court in 1928. Thus, while Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid have suggested that 'ad hoc' attempts to piece together a 'modern' narrative of widow immolation began in the 1950s, this paper will suggest that various contemporary discursive formations on sati can be observed in late‐colonial India, when discussions of sati became entwined with Indian nationalism and Hindu identity politics and evoked the first organised female response to sati from an emergent women's movement that saw it as an ideological, as well as physical, violation of women.

In the wake of the immolation of Roop Kanwar in Deorala, Rajasthan, in 1987, sati has re-emerged as a controversial political and social issue in modern India. Many of the terms of the contemporary debate on sati have their roots in the colonial period and are based on assumptions and ideas formulated during the British debate on sati in the early nineteenth century. These ideas were often as much the product of changing British society and its preoccupations as they were the encounter with India, however. This article explores the connotations of changing attitudes to suicide in influencing the nature of British responses to sati. By examining the relationship between attitudes to suicide and changing depictions of sati between 1500–1830, it seeks to undermine the suggestion of a constant western "morality" with regard to sati, depicting instead an encounter with the rite that was bi-directional and fluid with the dichotomy between "East" and "West" cross-cut by a myriad of other issues and concerns.