Organizer: Anand A. Yang, University of Utah
Chair: William R. Pinch, Wesleyan University
Discussant: Michael H. Fisher, Oberlin College
Knowledge and Power: The Making of the Company Army, 1770-1830
Seema Alavi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
This paper looks at the making of the East India Company Army which was critical in establishing and consolidating colonial control in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on a period during which colonial rule extended its political domain westward beyond Bengal and into the Ganges valley, it shows the strategies deployed and accommodations made with local military traditions in order to expand the empire territorially. It also highlights the role played by European military adventurers in building up the Company Army.
An important feature of the paper is the emphasis on examining the organization and development of Company knowledge about local society, particularly as it related to traditions of castes and rituals that were considered to be of strategic importance in recruiting and coopting local men for the Company's military organization and rule. How this knowledge was translated into recruitment practices is also discussed.
A (British) Indian/Rajput Soldier in China: "Self" and
"Others" in the Autobiography/History of Gadhdhar Singh
Anand A. Yang, University of Utah
This paper offers a reading of Thakur Gadhdhar Singh's first-hand account (in Hindi) of his experiences in China in the service of the Allied Expedition of 1900 that suppressed the Boxer Uprising and lifted the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing. One of the 20,000 men who comprised this force consisting of Japanese, Russians, and Indians representing the British Indian Army, Singh's testimony is remarkable not only because it is one of the few 'foreign' eyewitness reports of this expedition and perhaps the only surviving Indian account but also because it self-consciously and explicitly sets out to record his impressions of Chinese society and of the Japanese who constituted the single largest contingent in the Allied force.
My reading of his experiences is directed not so much at recuperating the Indian role in the Allied Expedition but at exploring how travel and displacement prompted him to engage a range of questions relating to self and identity, to questions of his Rajputness and Indianness as well as to how these self-definitions shaped his notion of the 'others.' To what extent his rhetoric can be fitted into colonial and orientalist discourses is also a central concern of this study.
Battle Colors: Race, Sex, and Colonial Soldiery in World War One
Philippa Levine, University of Southern California
The First World War saw the deployment of a huge variety of colonial troops, including a significant contingent drafted by the British from India for action in theaters of war in both the east and the west. Indian soldiers drafted to the Western front experienced in many respects a different war from that of other soldiers, including fellow colonial soldiers from the Dominion countries.
An increasingly alarmist link between racial mistrust and a vision of sexual disorder subjected women and nonwhite colonial soldiers to far more rigorous controls than other wartime groups on the basis of their potential disloyalty. This made for an explosive anxiety about the sexual threat posed by the presence of colonial blacks on white, and especially on British soil. For women and for colonial soldiers, this was less a war about the grand principles of national self-determination than one which cast race and sex and critical security factors to be sternly and thoroughly controlled.
This paper will examine the ways in which the First World War thus became a war of imperialism, but not in the ways imagined by Lenin and other contemporary critics of the war. It will investigate the ambivalence with which Indian soldiers were regarded: necessary to the British war effort, but with the constant potential to betray the colonial relationship, not only through nationalism or desertion but, critically, through the transgression of sexual boundaries.