Organizer and Chair: Thomas R. Trautmann, University of Michigan
Capital Punishment of Women in Early Colonial India: Debates about Law and
Practice in Records of the Deccan Commission, 1818-1826
Anne B. Waters, Columbia University
The paper examines the prosecution of women for capital crimes and the penal sentences meted out to them under the judicial administration of the Deccan Commission, 1818-1826. I examine specific cases of women convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and murder. These cases concern primarily the murder of husbands. Colonial officials, bound under Mountstuart Elphinstone's policy of continuation of local practice in judicial matters, confronted a contradiction between dharmasastric law, which permitted capital punishment of women, and Maratha custom which did not. The colonial debate centers upon differing conceptions of women as independent agents (and thus, potential criminals) or as culture-bound subjects (who do not bear personal responsibility for their actions).
I use the rich historical documents of this debate to explore the contextual nature of women's rights as they were defined in the adjudication of crime. Further, I use these trials to expose the pre-suppositions of colonial policy as it simultaneously extended both punishment of and protection to Indian women.
State Formation and the Poetics of Space: "Nepal" in 1816
Bernardo A. Michael, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
This paper seeks to understand the trajectory the process of state formation took in Nepal, especially at that critical juncture when at the turn of the nineteenth century, the expanding little kingdom of Gorkha in the central hills of Nepal established control over the Kathmandu valley, and then expanding westwards and eastwards found itself confronting the British (East India Company) on their southern flanks. It can be argued that this encounter brought into focus conflicting conceptions of space, which resulted in the dominance of the European version of a country's space being a bounded, objective entity capable of representation on a map. The result was the creation of a new form of knowledge, the "Geo-Body," a process initiated in Nepal by 1816. This was to have implications for the directions the process of state formation was to take in "Nepal," not withstanding the fact that, like Siam in Southeast Asia, she remained an independent country throughout the colonial period.
Development Discourse in a South Indian Agricultural District
Jenny Springer, University of Chicago
This paper examines development discourse and practices in a canal-irrigated agricultural region in Tamil Nadu. As targets of a series of state and international programs of technological and economic improvement since Independence, the villages of the Tambraparni river valley in Tirunelveli district have been impinged upon by planning models which set the terms for defining local problems and desirable solutions, and construct categories of persons and knowledge within which villagers must maneuver. However, while these broader regimes of representation have informed the circulation of development images at the village level, they do not determine the form and effects of discourses of modernization in these specific localities.
Concepts of development in Tirunelveli actively weave together a diverse set of existing and emerging ideological strands. Some of the discursive elements I explore include commodity consumerism, technological modernization, Sanskritization, and the politics of Dravidian nationslism. The evolving reformulation of what constitutes a "civilized life" has had profound effects on local orders of social relations, gender, caste and class identities, values, and forms of knowledge. Agricultural labor, ritual, and management practices, as predominant daily activities, are crucial sites for the construction and transformation of these social orders.
Bhutan's Forest Policies and their Role in Promoting Indigenous Forest
Management*
Gautam N. Yadama, Washington University, St. Louis
The Royal Government of Bhutan (RGOB) has long recognized the need to pursue social and economic development of its people through policies that are ecologically sustainable. RGOB has recently undertaken social forestry to sustainably manage community forests for the social and economic development of its people. Under the community forests model, the forest department identifies a traditionally utilized forest land unit (TUFLU) and entrusts the responsibility for managing the forest to local village user groups. The goal is to foster sustainable use of forests for social and economic development of the people by encouraging local initiatives to manage traditionally used forests. This paper will outline some of the shifts in the way Bhutan's forest policies integrate the needs of rural poor from the Forest Act of 1969 to the most recent Forest and Nature Conservation Act of 1993.
This paper will then discuss some of the implications of forest policies for indigenous forest management institutions. Implications of forest policies and other demographic changes on indigenous forest management institutions will be illustrated using data from three villages in Bhutan. Rapid rural appraisal data from Dawakha and Gubji-Mindagang villages in Punakha Dzongkhag (district). and Radhi Pangthang village in Tashigang Dzongkhag will illustrate how the incentives for people to manage community forests on their own initiative vary. The paper will end with a concluding section on how forest policies promoting local institutions are critical for both sustainable development of rural people and biodiversity conservation in a country such as Bhutan.
* Field work in the villages of Punakha Dzongkhag was conducted by Ugen Norbu and Kin Gyeltshen of the Social Forestry Extension Unit of the Forestry Services Division of the Royal Government of Bhutan.
The Politics of Privilege: A Study of Babus in Colonial India
Sridevi Menon, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
This paper will examine the formation of a native elite in "British" India. An investigation of colonial discourse and the imperial forces behind them reveals the importance of the English-speaking indigenous elite in the machinations of Empire. As a mediating class, the babus forged a crucial buffer between the British and the Indian masses. While the creation of an indigenous elite assuaged British cultural needs for a moral agenda to empire, colonial "altruism" stopped short of the political enfranchisement of natives. As this paper seeks to explore, privileged as they were, babus were constituted as subjects of an imperial order with no political agency.