Organizer and Chair: Mitchell W. Numark, Bowdoin College
Discussant: Thomas Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
This panel aims to begin a dialogue that seeks to
highlight Bombay’s
place in the history of India. With papers employing Marathi, Gujurati, Sindhi,
and Urdu language sources and addressing the locales of Karachi, Ahmedabad,
and the Konkan and their connection to Bombay City, the panel embodies the Bombay
Presidency’s rich geographic and linguistic diversity. By exploring Indian
social, labor, political, and religious history, the panel also approaches the
history of Bombay Presidency from several different topical perspectives. The
first paper examines political frictions between Bombay-based civil servants
and Charles Napier, Sindh’s military governor, and argues that this conflict
represents tensions between military and civil forms of colonial authority as
inflected by liberal and paternal conceptions of society. Another paper examines
how British Protestant Christianity, in conjunction with Bombay’s religious
diversity, framed the way in which British missionaries and Orientalists understood,
fashioned, and helped to institutionalize scripture-centric ideas of “Hinduism” and
the other “religions” of Bombay’s heterogeneous population.
The last two papers explore labor history. One employs labor reports and
trade union pamphlets to show how Bombay workers co-opted the discourse of development
to express and attain their political interests. The last paper uses hospital
and labor organization records to examine the choices and ideas of maternity
and maternal care held by women workers in different industrial locations
in Bombay Presidency.
Matthew A. Cook, North Carolina State University
A strong archival link exists between the Bombay Presidency and Sindh. Sindh’s
1843 annexation by the British was largely supported by military and material
resources from Bombay. Nevertheless, during the pivotal years following annexation,
the British ruled Sindh through a Governor (Charles Napier) who reported directly
to the Governor General in Calcutta. This flow of political authority greatly
impacts the study of Sindh; historical research on the region often relies on
Calcutta-derived documents (from the British Library, the National Archives
in Delhi, and/or the Commissioner’s Archive in Karachi). This archival
trail, by-and-large, circumvents collections associated with Bombay. Not consulting
Bombay-associated materials produces a major gap in historical knowledge about
Sindh. This paper examines post facto criticisms of Sindh’s annexation
by colonial officials in Bombay and the larger political debate that they reflect.
Through a combined anthropological and historical analysis, I illustrate how
frictions expressed in this debate are not just squabbles between individuals
who publicly and privately disliked one another. These frictions—which
pit Bombay-based civil servants against Sindh’s governor (i.e., Napier)—represent
an abrasive socio-cultural rift within the British East India Company. This
intra-colonial rift hinges on military and civil authority’s historical
relationship to liberalism and paternalism and which of colonialism’s
internally competing discourses, guiding principles, and legitimizing ideas
should be preeminent. I argue that liberal and paternal British worldviews
unbalance the integration of military and civil authority in the Bombay Presidency
and facilitate a form of colonial rule in Sindh that is autocratic and despotic.
Mitchell W. Numark, Bowdoin College
With Bombay as its focus, this paper examines how the concepts of religion
and the religions were understood and transformed in nineteenth-century India.
It explores how Scottish missionary-Orientalists understood the “religion” concept
and applied it to Indian religious and cultural formations that were or would
ultimately be known as distinct “religions”. Examining the application
of the religion concept to several non-Christian religions (and to formations
of Indian Christianity) during the first half of the nineteenth century in such
a religiously diverse locale as colonial Bombay helps to illuminate how different
religions in India became refashioned or newly conceptualized as “religions”.
I argue that Bombay is the ideal location to explore this issue. Bombay’s
unparalleled religious diversity, the multiple interactions and religious debates
between Scottish missionaries and Bombay’s Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Parsis,
Jews, Roman Catholics, and Indian tribal peoples, and the vast scholarly and
polemical writings on the different religions and religious communities produced
by the Scottish missionary-Orientalists enables one to more fully understand
not only how Hinduism was fashioned in the nineteenth century, but also how
other “religions” were fashioned through the same Protestant Christian
template of religious understanding. This template and the assumptions embedded
within it would ultimately foster changes in how Indians understood their “religions”.
I demonstrate how religious debates between Scottish missionaries and Bombay’s
different religious communities, in conjunction with a program of “constructive
Orientalism”, enabled the British paradigm of religion to gain currency
among Bombay’s population.
Juned Shaikh, University of Washington
This paper argues that the colonial discourse of development informed the
politics of the working class in late-colonial Bombay. The paper situates
the colonial state’s rhetoric of development--i.e. its aspirations to improve
the standard of living and the efficiency of the workers--within the context
of its competition with the Japanese textile industry. But the desire for “development”,
I argue, escaped the boundaries of rhetoric and the colonial state’s progressive
intent. Instead, it was co-opted by workers and trade unions to articulate a
radical politics that often came in conflict with the colonial state and the
textile mill owners. The paper uses labor reports, trade union pamphlets, and
newspaper accounts in English and Marathi as evidence of the workers’ desire
for development. In the process, it disagrees with scholarship that situates
worker’s politics in Calcutta in an autonomous domain where it is shaped
by pre-capitalist social relations. On the other hand, it also deviates from
accounts that see their politics in Bombay as being determined by the strategies
of the elites.
Lisa Navin Trivedi, Hamilton College
This paper explores maternity and maternal care for women working in the
Bombay Presidency’s cotton mills as a means through which to reconsider “public
health”. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the colonial
government and native philanthropists increasingly employed discourses of maternal
care to legitimize their authority, either to govern the subject population
or to oversee India’s modernization. In both cases, proponents of maternal
discourses characterized native practices among women working in Bombay’s
mills as backward, superstitious, and in need of reform. By bringing together
materials drawn from government and philanthropic records, as well as those
of Wadia Maternity Hospital, Parel, and the Textile Labour Association, Ahmedabad,
one sees a surprisingly different picture of the maternal care choices of working
women. Women mill workers actively sought access to the best treatment, physicians,
and facilities available to them, whether by attending hospitals in their neighborhood
or by seeking care benefits through their union. This particular case enables
us to understand “public health” not simply as a discourse of governmental
bodies and native elite authority, but also as the experiences of the public—working-class
women—in the broadest sense.
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