Communication and colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s-1880s

South Asian History and Culture ISSN: 1947-2498 (Print) 1947-2501 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsac20 Communication and colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s, by Nitin Sinha Devyani Gupta To cite this article: Devyani Gupta (2014) Communication and colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s, by Nitin Sinha, South Asian History and Culture, 5:3, 387-389, DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2014.905330 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2014.905330 Published online: 16 Apr 2014. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 22 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsac20 Download by: [University of Cambridge] Date: 22 November 2015, At: 11:51 South Asian History and Culture 387 Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 11:51 22 November 2015 Prasad’s essay From Cultural Backwardness to the Age of Imitation is an extraordinary meditation over the film form. Melodrama, for Prasad, performs a pedagogic function even as it proclaims ‘its own inferiority faced with the finer products of a classical culture’ (p. 7). Prasad, by arguing that the melodramatic value system seems imposed from above, traces the contemporary film form – accommodating new values and ideals associated with the emerging capitalist society – back to the historical construction of the culturally backward spectator. He argues, in support of his thesis that Bhaskar challenges, that realism became a state-supported aesthetic venture with the double purpose of culturally grasping the complexities and conflicts of the interior and developing a cinema that could represent the nation for other nations. A general culture of realism, however, implied not just a sociological or ethnographic documentation of the interior or a psychological portrayal of middle-class subjectivities but a concrete sense of our contemporary. (p. 13) Formal imitation, then, is a way of regrounding ourselves in the quicksands of the globalized present, a step towards autonomy and a modality of the struggle to recover an enunciative position vis-à-vis the overall formal rehabilitation of society. The students of Film Studies would benefit greatly by beginning, as well as ending, with Prasad’s narrative of the historical present, to move across this handbook – a welcome aggregate of a wide variety of material, ideas and perspectives. Akshaya Kumar University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK Email: [email protected] © 2014, Akshaya Kumar http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2014.905326 Communication and colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s, by Nitin Sinha, London and New York, Anthem Press, 2012, xxxviii + 272 pp., US$99 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-85728-448-8 This work is a significant contribution to the history of communication in modern India. Focusing on eastern India – Bihar, specifically, Sinha draws out the interdependence of spatial transformation and communication networks in nineteenth-century India. He treats Bihar not as a case study but as a geographical and historical space, seeking to draw out greater socio-economic patterns from regional specificities (xxxvii). Unsurprisingly, preoccupation with physical space lies at the heart of this study. In addition to material aspects of geography and knowledge production, however, the author uses networks of exchange and flow to emphasize the physicality of space. Sinha’s work demonstrates how the very perception of what constituted the empire, its frontiers and borders, and more significantly, what constituted ‘the interiors’, came to derive from accessibility of communication channels. He explores how spatial categories came to be defined around narratives and experiences of nineteenth-century travel. The European travelling gaze, often (though not always) mediated by native input, emerges as central to the process of knowledge accumulation. Journeys of travel and exploration, as Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 11:51 22 November 2015 388 Book reviews well as survey expeditions, were means of ‘knowing’ the country, its people and their culture. But knowledge production and accumulation was not a process of unilinear transfer. Deployment of this knowledge was historically deterministic and influenced by the ideological considerations of colonial rule. The present study takes into account the shifting discourse and policies of the colonial state. In the initial phase of colonial expansion, the interiors were encountered and/or imagined, with communication lines serving as means of territorial and economic control. However, with the consolidation of colonial domination and the rise of utilitarian ideology, communication, as the author argues, became the dominant ideology of colonial rule, where material and moral progress came to be tied up with the extension of public works. Insofar, communication came to play a major role in delineating the civilized parts of the country from the uncivilized. Sinha’s work is self-professed in the departure it makes from established historiography, by situating developments in the field of communication within the political economy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India. Drawing out the symbiotic relationship between the circulation of commodities, movement of people and transfer of ideas on the one hand, and the development of means and modes of communication on the other, he attempts to chalk out a holistic history of trade, transport and mobility. Consequently, his work is noteworthy in its attention to micro-history – it emphasizes a particularistic approach to the study of networks of communication and exchange, centred on commodities, communities and regions. Chapter 3, for instance, contains a well-argued section on the impact of free and regulated trade (under British rule) on country networks and circuits of exchange of the local zamindars in Bihar. At the same time, Sinha is successful in situating transport networks within a longer history of socio-economic interlinkages. His argument about ‘nested networks’ (Chapter 7) predating, adapting and surviving colonial circulatory regimes, is significant. Sinha’s study is important in the focus it places on mobility as one of the defining features of social, political and economic impulses in this period, as also in demonstrating that India (and, by extension, its landscape) was never a static or unexplored entity. Rather, perceptions about the country were constantly undergoing a change and colonial networks of knowledge production can be situated within this long historical tradition. Technologies of survey and exploration were by no means colonial; rather, they were extensively deployed by the Mughal State as well. Therefore, there is a clear emphasis on continuity between precolonial and colonial periods. However, these tools of governance acquired a more directed intent under British domination. The safety and regularity of communication networks, and the extraction of resources by extension, were the pressing concerns. The author goes on to suggest that these expanding networks impacted primordial categories (such as caste) in such a way that the very idea of mobility came to be redefined in the nineteenth century. Mobility has both a physical and a social dimension, and by its very definition, alludes to the interlinked movement of man, material and ideas (Chapter 5). It also has significant implications for the fate of pre-existing circulatory regimes, and communities and groups associated with them. Sinha does not necessarily argue for the replacement of an older system of exchange by one which was more advanced; rather, he suggests ‘different forms of mobility existed along different networks of communication’ (xxv). This undoubtedly had significant fallouts in the domain of socio-economic relations. His chapter on the social composition of the labouring classes is one such significant intervention; colonial dependency on native workers regularized Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 11:51 22 November 2015 South Asian History and Culture 389 labour relations in an increasingly wage-based economy, which in turn came to impact networks of circulation in nineteenth-century India. While paying attention to the practices and techniques employed in acquiring knowledge and facilitating communication, Sinha also allows space for gaps in networks of circulation, which had the possibility of affecting the uses to which such knowledge might be put. This was not necessarily a consequence of imperfect knowledge societies or weak institutions of governance and infrastructure. It had a lot to do with deployment of circulatory networks and regimes as well. Most significantly, the author employs communication as an analytic category in exposing the interconnectedness of various colonial concerns. The success or failure of communication technologies lay not in their introduction but in their implementation and application. More often than not, new lines and means of communication did not open up new areas, but reinforced control over the pre-existing ones. Traditionally, historiographies of colonial economy and communication systems have highlighted the introduction of steam in early nineteenth-century India. While conceding the significance of this technological development, Sinha draws out the centrality of road works, bullock carts, ferry management and bridge construction in colonial policies of governance and extraction (Chapter 6). Whereas, on the one hand, these mediums heralded the pre-steam technological superiority of the eighteenth-century state, on the other, they also took off as corollaries to the development of railway tracts and steamships in the nineteenth century, supplementing and not lapsing before these new channels of communication. More critically, despite emphasizing the need for a rounded approach to the study of communication, Sinha himself fails to accord more than cursory attention to certain other significant means of communication, namely the telegraph, postal lines, oceanic steam networks or even cross-country railways. This may qualify as stretched criticism though; these are undeniably areas of great importance and they demand individual research dedicated to them. In referring to the emerging grid of modern communication, the author alludes to their role in building up the modern state structure, but fails to engage with the administrative aspects of this relationship. Power and its implementation are never lineal and uncontested; rather, it is negotiated through bureaucratic structures and institutions. Administrative histories not only reveal tensions within the functioning of state institutions, but can also throw light on hitherto unexplored aspects of social interaction and economic exchange. The book reproduces some beautiful sketches and maps from the early nineteenth century, reflecting the author’s emphasis on visual (and literary) representation of knowledge in the colonial period. Devyani Gupta Faculty of History, University of Cambridge Email: [email protected] © 2014, Devyani Gupta http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2014.905330 Fatehpur Sikri revisited, by Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2013, 316 pp., Rs. 1395 (hardback), ISBN-10 019808403X. The imperial city of Fatehpur Sikri was built 1571 onwards by the third Mughal emperor, Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, as his new capital. Fourteen years later, it was abandoned by the same sovereign, never to be used as a political centre again. Syed Ali Nadeem