The policing of tradition: Colonialism and anthropology in Southern India

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 182-211

  Dirks, Nicholas B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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EID: 0001724836     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (59)

1. October 23,1891. The Madras Mail was the largest English daily in Madras at the time.
2. Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989) 88-126.
3. Individual vows, such as those that involved the piercing of the body in fulfillment of various pledges, were never subjected to administrative concern; however, when vows led to activities such as firewalking in public, collective, ritual events, some of the same concerns that we find in regard to hookswinging were also raised. For a superb anthropological account of different rites in Sri Lanka, see Gananath Obeyesekere, Medusa's Hair, An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
4. For an important account of the development of colonial contradictions around public space in northern India, see Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas in the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
5. For a suggestive analysis of left- and right-hand castes in southern India and contests over space, see Arjun Appadurai, "Right and Left Hand Castes in South India," Indian Economic and Social History Review, 14:1 (1974), 47-73.
6. For an account of missionary responses to hookswinging, see the recent book by Geoffrey Oddie, Popular Religion, Elites and Reform: Hook-Swinging and Its Prohibition in Colonial India, 1800-1894 (Delhi: Manohar, 1995).
7. Judicial Department, Madras (Tamil Nadu Archives), Government Order (G.O.) #83, 14 January 1892.
8. See Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, Reports on the Swinging Festival and the Ceremony of Walking through Fire, Madras: 1854 (India Office Library, V/23/139).
9. Judicial Deartment, Madras, G.O. #1257, 7 July 1892.
10. Ibid., #856, 5 May 1892. letter from J.H. Wynne, Acting District Magistrate, to J.F. Price, Chief Secretary to Government, Judicial Department.
11. Kallan is the singular form of Kallar, a caste group of some colonial notoriety in the southern region of the Tamil country because it is associated with thievery on what was at times considered a professional basis. Kallars were in fact a major landed group that tended to reside in mixed or dry agricultural zones and had been associated in intimate ways with precolonial chiefs and their military systems. Their association with criminality had both to do with their military prowess, amply displayed in early wars with, or involving, the British, and their forms of land control and local authority, based as they were in protection systems. See my book, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
12. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. #856, 5 May 1892.
13. See Oddie, Popular Religion, 47-68; also Edgar Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India (Madras: Government Press, 1907), 487-501; 510-19.
14. See Oddie, Popular Religion, 47-68; also Edgar Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India (Madras: Government Press, 1907), 487-501; 510-19.
15. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 856, 5 May 1892.
16. Ibid., G.O. No. 1321, 22-7-92.
17. Ibid., G.O. 2662/2663, 21-12-93.
18. Public Consultations, nos. 35-37; 21 December 1858, vol. IV.
19. Letter dated 27 September 1858 in Ibid.
20. See Dirks, "The Conversion of Caste: Location, Translation, and Appropriation," in van der Veer, Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1996).
21. Quoted in Oddie, Popular Religion, 175-84.
22. Extract from the Minutes of Consultation, Public Department, Madras, 18 February 1854.
23. Ibid., G.O. No. 2662/ 3 - 21-12-93.
24. Ibid., G.O. 1418, 27-8-90.
25. Ibid., G.O. 990, 25-5-92.
26. Ibid., G.O. 2662/3, 21-12-93.
27. This is a view that is echoed in large part by Geoffrey Oddie in his recent book on hookswinging (Popular Religion, 1995). After dismissing those critics of colonialism who merely focus on colonial sources rather than the truths available in them, he emerges with an analysis that could have been developed without any of the sources. His book, which I came across just in the final stages of preparing this essay, provides some useful, mostly London-based, sources for the analysis of hookswinging but exemplifies the historiographical problems suggested throughout this study.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. All quotes in this paragraph are from Ibid.
31. For a helpful account of the rise of bourgeois morality in nineteenth-century Britain, see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986).
32. G.O. 2662/3.
33. Ibid.
34. Quoted in Ibid.
35. This petition is enclosed and translated in Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 1284, 27-5-94.
36. Ibid., G.O. No. 2627, 2-11-94.
37. See my argument in "From Little King to Landlord: Colonial Discourse and Colonial Rule," in Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
38. For an example of this view, see Oddie, Popular Religion.
39. India Office Library, Madras Judicial Proceedings, P/4621, September 24, 1894.
40. See M.N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
41. The particular example comes from Pudukkottai: see Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). For other examples, see Franklin Presler, Religion under Bureaucracy: Policy and Administration for Hindu Temples in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
42. The particular example comes from Pudukkottai: see Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). For other examples, see Franklin Presler, Religion under Bureaucracy: Policy and Administration for Hindu Temples in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
43. The particular example comes from Pudukkottai: see Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). For other examples, see Franklin Presler, Religion under Bureaucracy: Policy and Administration for Hindu Temples in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
44. See the argument in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See my longer critique of this position in "Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies and Anthropological Histories," in T. McDonald, The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
45. See the argument in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See my longer critique of this position in "Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies and Anthropological Histories," in T. McDonald, The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
46. For a longer account of Mullaly, see Dirks, "Reading Culture," in J. Peck and E. V. Daniel, eds., Culture/Contexture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
47. Public Department, Madras, G.O. No 6/6A, 10-1-93.
48. Frederick S. Mullaly, Notes on Criminal Classes of the Madras Presidency (Madras: Government Press, 1892).
49. Public Department, India, G.O. 647/26 June 1901.
50. In the early 1890s the Bertillon system of using anthropometric measurements had been adopted first in Bengal, then in Madras. The idea was to identify habitual criminals who moved from place to place and shifted their identities. In India, the Bertillon system was applied according to conventions set out by the colonial sociology of criminal castes. The basic operational principle was that "only members of criminal tribes and persons convicted of certain definite crimes" should be so measured (Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. 1838, 9-9-93). Since most crimes were committed by circumscribed groups of people, anthropometry seemed to be the perfect means to apprehend the principal suspects. As E.R. Henry, the Inspector-General of Police in Bengal put it, "With anthropometry on a sound basis, professional criminals of this type will cease to flourish, as under the rules all persons not indentified must be measured, and reference concerning them made to the Central Bureau." Nevertheless, there was residual concern that measurements varied not only from measurer to measurer but from measurement to measurement. The instruments were costly, the course of instruction was lengthy, the statistics were hard to classify, and the measurement process itself was time-consuming.
51. Fingerprinting was considered error-free, cheap, quick, and simple; and the results were more easily classified. By 1898, Henry wrote that "it may now be claimed that the great value of finger impressions as a means of fixing identity has been fully established" (Judicial Department, Madras, GO No. 1014, 1-7-98).
52. Thurston, The Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 7 vols (Madras: Government Press, 1907). The entries on each caste range in length from one sentence to seventy-five pages and include such salient ethnographic facts as origin stories, occupational profiles, descriptions of kinship structure, marriage and funerary rituals, manner of dress and decoration, as well as assorted stories, observations, and accounts about each group. Naturally, Thurston also included the results of his anthropometric researches, which he said were "all the result of measurements taken by myself, in order to eliminate the varying error resulting from the employment of a plurality of observers."
53. See my "Castes of Mind," Representations, no. 37 (Winter 1992), 56-78.
54. See Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 32-52; Veena Das, "Strange Response," Illustrated Weekly of India (February 28, 1988), 30-32.
55. See Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 32-52; Veena Das, "Strange Response," Illustrated Weekly of India (February 28, 1988), 30-32.
56. See Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).
57. Susan Pederson, "National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-making," Journal of Modern History, 63 (December 1991), 647-80.
58. See Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar, Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993).
59. For example, while I understand why Nandy points out the colonial character of post-colonial condemnations of sati, I do not accept that this should constitute the primary basis for a critique of the positions taken by the secular intellectuals whom he holds in such disrepute (see Nandy, The Savage Freud).