by Eugene F. Irschick, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994

Irschick made a deep dive into the colonial archive and summarized in his preface that “the presentation here seeks to show how structures of meaning and institutions are cultural products negotiated by a large number of persons from every level of society in a given place and time” (pg. ix). The central field where this reality is documented is land use and agriculture.

In his introductory chapter Irschick points out that prior to the European arrival there had been in India “two varieties of subcastes, each of whom had specific spatial orientations. The ‘right’ castes oriented themselves to local areas to which the ‘belonged.’ The ‘left’ castes, by contrast, had a conception of belonging to a space that was expansive, occupying many hundreds of villages” (pg. 10).

But then 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….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 identity recognized as distinctly Tamil. (pg. 4)

So, repeating again his main theme,

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.[1] (pg. 10)

It should be noted that Irschick is not seeking to downplay the negatives of colonialism; he states that “this characterization of the process nevertheless presumes that in the colonial situation both domination and exploitation occurred on a constant basis” (pg. 8).

Chapter one is “To Fix the People to Their Respective Villages.” By 1795 the British had become the dominant power in south India after devastating wars with Hyder Ali. At the same time, the East India Company became bureaucrats rather than traders. They proceeded to map south India, particularly focused on agriculture for taxation purposes. Lionel Place, who led the initial survey, becomes a main player under discussion throughout the book.

Details of various interactions are outlined and present a fascinating picture of the British commitment to a portrayal of decline into which they arrive as saviors. Local power syndicates obviously objected to the new power brokers and did their best to subvert taxation and domination processes. Local caste tensions added further complexity.

Chapter two is “Using the Past to Create the Future.” The British restructured south Indian life, including related to “Hinduism” and “religion.” Lionel Place funded the restoration of temples and the celebration of neglected festivals.[2] Irschick suggests that, “this would, he thought, make the population happier and correspondingly more productive, useful and cooperative with each other” (pg. 79). Further, “In many ways, Place appears to have operated as he felt a Tamil king would act in regard to temples” (pg. 81). This is part of the larger picture of the British construction of Hinduism, which again is shown by Irschick to have been a complex, negotiated development involving many players.[3]

Chapter three brings Chingleput district into focus. The greed and short-sightedness of the British is documented along with local strategies to subvert their power and influence. Again, the focus is on land and agriculture as the primary scene where disputes played out.

The final chapter brings the Dalits into focus within a British debate between those looking for the “liberation of the land” (eliminating the power of local elites who hindered tax collection) and those concerned about “the emancipation of the slaves” (pg. 157). India was interpreted in terms set by William Booth of the Salvation Army in his analysis and response to poverty in England. The famines of 1866 and 1876-78 added fuel to the debates.

Broader reactions about the colonial government were now developing, including the claim that Britain was looting India. Both renascent Indians and the British were happy to redefine enslaved paraiyars (Dalits from whom the English term “pariah” comes) as the original Dravidians of India (pg. 169). This follows the theme throughout the book of the creating of pasts for the sake of the future.  “In effect, therefore, the elimination of the ‘slavery’ signification helped to create another, more useful identity, which gradually claimed the paraiyars [against actual history] as the most fixed inhabitants of the entire population” (pg. 190).

In his conclusion Irschick again returns to the main theme of the complexity of the development of cultural constructs, including this explicit critique of Edward Said:

Hence, we can no longer accept Said’s contention that the cultural categories of the colonized operated in a willed, unidirectional, top-down way on an unthinking and unresisting colonized group, as inert object. Despite the judicially dominant position of the British, who theoretically had a monopoly on the use of violence, these kinds of knowledge were not imposed. Rather, categories emerged from interactive, heteroglot cultural formations that had no author. To put is in another way, these formations were so multiauthored that the ideas and interactions that went to make up these cultural productions made it impossible to locate any real provenance for them. (pg. 193)

This is a stimulating book which provides detailed documentation of the many strategies employed by various groups in the long transition to colonial rule.

Notes

1. “An assumption made by many scholars about the Indo-British administration on the subcontinent is that it had, almost form the beginning, the capacity to exploit the environment to its advantage through violence and cultural imposition. What is not stated in this formulation is that all of these elements—important in creating bureaucratic devices such as special educational and employment facilities—resulted from intense cultural negotiations that took place over a long period of time. Even devices such as the development of juridical mechanisms to coerce the populations were heteroglot creations, not simple impositions by European conquerors. In the eighteenth century, the British were often not in a position of juridical strength but rather were forced continually to modify their expectations of local social and political structures in order to remain ‘in power’ or ‘legitimate.’ Negotiations took place in this and later contexts.” (pg. 68)

2. In 1818 the British ceased funding festivals but temple involvement continued for many years (pg. 84).

3. “Indeed, the definition of what came to be Hinduism or the temple was not imposed or reinvented by the British or by the Indo-British ‘state.’ The complicated process of defining religion included not only activity around the temple itself but also the act of disconnecting the political from the religious and the related process of placing the monopoly of violence in the hands of the state. Given the complexity of the process, we cannot attribute these cultural products to Europeans or to the colonial state alone in a top-down fashion; we must include in that new productive process the many, many individuals from the whole subcontinent who participated.” (pg. 94)