Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Preface
- Glossary of terms
- Map 1 Madras Presidency, 1900
- Map 2 Pudukkottai State
- The Tondaiman line of Pudukkottai
- PART 1 INTRODUCTION
- PART 2 HISTORY AND ETHNOHISTORY
- PART 3 A LITTLE KINGDOM IN THE OLD REGIME
- PART 4 SOCIAL RELATIONS OF A LITTLE KINGDOM
- PART 5 COLONIAL MEDIATIONS: CONTRADICTIONS UNDER THE RAJ
- 10 Agrarian rebellion? Last gasp of the old regime
- 11 The colonization of the political order: land settlements, political intervention, and structural change
- 12 Temples and conflict: the changing context of worship
- 13 The theatre state: princely politics in colonial south India
- PART 6 CONCLUSION
- Appendix: Land and privilege: inams in Pudukkottai
- References
- List of records and abbreviations
- List of archives and record offices
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
11 - The colonization of the political order: land settlements, political intervention, and structural change
from PART 5 - COLONIAL MEDIATIONS: CONTRADICTIONS UNDER THE RAJ
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Preface
- Glossary of terms
- Map 1 Madras Presidency, 1900
- Map 2 Pudukkottai State
- The Tondaiman line of Pudukkottai
- PART 1 INTRODUCTION
- PART 2 HISTORY AND ETHNOHISTORY
- PART 3 A LITTLE KINGDOM IN THE OLD REGIME
- PART 4 SOCIAL RELATIONS OF A LITTLE KINGDOM
- PART 5 COLONIAL MEDIATIONS: CONTRADICTIONS UNDER THE RAJ
- 10 Agrarian rebellion? Last gasp of the old regime
- 11 The colonization of the political order: land settlements, political intervention, and structural change
- 12 Temples and conflict: the changing context of worship
- 13 The theatre state: princely politics in colonial south India
- PART 6 CONCLUSION
- Appendix: Land and privilege: inams in Pudukkottai
- References
- List of records and abbreviations
- List of archives and record offices
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
Summary
In attempting to study the old regime through the blinkers of nineteenth-century records, and to analyze contemporary ethnographic data with the retrospective concerns of an ethnohistorian, we confront colonialism at every turn. In the remainder of this book I will be examining colonialism and its contradictory mediations. I will show that the changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have often been particularly difficult to chart because many of the things we assume to constitute Indian “tradition” are in curious ways the products rather than the predecessors of colonialism.
In this chapter I will look at the Inam Settlement itself. The nineteenth-century records that provide much of the data for the redistributive nature of the pre-colonial political system are difficult to use for two related reasons. First, in reading these records we must reconstruct and recombine the integral relations of certain “subjects” just as they are being separated and reordered in new taxonomies. Second, we realize that much of what we wish to analyze has already disappeared from the sedimented survivals at our disposal. Not only, that is, do we have to try to put certain things back together, a task sometimes not dissimilar from that confronted by all the king's horses and all the king's men who were called to attend Humpty Dumpty, we have also to make distinctions and differentiations between and among things that have been soldered together in new forms by new technologies of power.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Hollow CrownEthnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, pp. 324 - 357Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988