This chapter covers regional loyalties and religious institutions, focusing on the Kulturkampf, the state’s attack on Catholicism.

At the end of my research on the 1946–47 interim government published as India in the Interregnum (2019), I had hoped to produce a second instalment, on its 1947–51 successor, given its relative neglect in published accounts and presence in primary sources, especially the now-accessible post-1947 Jawaharlal Nehru papers. The last years of the 1940s and the first of the 1950s constitute an intermediate period between Partition/Freedom (1947) and Republic/Democracy (1950–52) that is often seen through either or both of these lenses. This was captured in a critical review of India in the Interregnum that considered ‘this continuity … to be the root cause of the ills that plague the post-colonial nation.…’

Approaching its eighth decade, as independent India experiences its eighteenth government, this book seeks to remember its first predecessor, which functioned in a uniquely intermediate period. It is important to do so because, whether in public recall or in academic research, the first Nehru government has had a somewhat shadowy existence, which is compensated by the axiom that it stood for a transitional phase for the country. But, as the late D. L. Sheth wrote, ‘historicization makes historical sense, only when made in terms of contemporary sensibilities….’ This intervention then surveys the 1947–51 government, liminally located between dominion and democracy, and subsumed between Partition and nation-building, in an ‘academic no-man's land’. It attempts an exercise of historical recovery crystallised from the post-1947 prime ministerial papers in the hope that this reconstruction might help in reading post-Partition Indian party politics. The standard conception of that multi-party government is that it is clustered around a duumvirate, but this book tries to bring forth and intertwine its multiple individual traits, identity tensions and institutional trends.

This triangular pyramid was held together by provincial or princely politics, progressive or prejudicial passions and party pronouncements. The all-India whole that was forged in those first years, before being put to a popular test, was pivotal to subsequent state-building, and this book probes the performance of that pre-1952 government, whose political heritage continues to be dissected. As it has been said, ‘nations themselves are narrations …’, so a history of the first independent Indian government is one way to contextualise the contemporary by answering the ‘need for links and connections’.6

Chapter 6 discusses the definitions of ratios and intervals as different ways of conceptualizing the relationship between musical notes. Here, the author’s main interest lies in the two different ways in which the ancient Greek scholars of music, the Pythagoreans and the Aristoxenians, conceptualized the relationship between any given two notes. While the former understood notes as equal to numbers and thus conceptualized the relationship in the form of a numerical ratio, the latter understood them as points on a continuum and thus perceived the relationship as a geometrical distance between the two points on a scale. A third group of Greek scholars, the later Neoplatonic scholars, tried to reconcile the two approaches into a synthesis. It was this synthesis that Islamic scholars inherited during the medieval period.

In the story of British colonialism in India, we often overlook the role of other European actors, especially those who lived in close contact with the local populace. The predominantly German-speaking, Switzerland-based Basel Evangelical German Missionary Society (BM) was one such group that lived and functioned under the aegis of British rule in India from 1834 onwards. On the Malabar coast, in the southwestern part of the subcontinent, they saw themselves as members of a broader religious community than those confined within specific territorially defined boundaries and forged a cordial relationship with several administrators. The BM was also a beneficiary of the European foreign evangelical movement during the early nineteenth century and postured itself like its contemporaries as a mission to save ‘heathen souls’ in faraway lands, especially children. This chapter explores the complex encounters between the BM and the local poor children of low-caste and, sometimes, mixed-race descent, supervised in their boarding schools or orphanages in various parts of British-administered Malabar. The Basel missionaries established the first residential institutions for poor and needy children in the predominantly Malayalam-speaking region, where they sought to establish ‘model’ Christian communities. In their attempt to erase caste-inscribed markers, the Basel missionaries negotiated with different adults and children to run these establishments. In fact, ‘orphans’ were not always without parents, and the BM employed coercive measures to admit pupils by arguing against the ‘barbarity’ of Indian parenting and childhood norms. They were not always successful as children influenced decision-making processes and resisted strategies of emotional disciplining and modes of labour regulation imposed on them. Exploring these dynamic encounters of local populations with non-Britons in determining educational agendas helps us understand transregional histories predicated on ideas of ‘whiteness’.

The earliest cohorts of German-speaking Basel missionaries encountered a myriad of people upon their arrival in southwestern India. In addition to Malabar's many castes and religious communities who spoke Malayalam, the coastal villages and towns were also home to Portuguese sailors, Dutch traders, English soldiers, Tamils, Telugus, and other migrants. Such diversity was most evident among the earliest educational and boarding establishments in the BM's walled mission compounds.

This chapter surveys the introduction of new technologies, regional centers of industry, development of business organization, and the broad cultural consequences.

The chapter attends to the ideological foundatons and organization of political power, as well as patterns of parliamentary politics, between 1871 and 1890.

The chapter examines the growth of German cities and patterns of social differentiation within them, and municipal government.

The introduction of measures to promote mass vernacular education ushered in significant shifts in the educational landscape of colonial Kerala from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, which indigenous and mission schools had hitherto dominated. These developments provided an impetus to the emergence of a ‘public’ sphere and a concomitant debate on notions of ‘publicness’ during this period. The right to access government schools, increasingly seen as ‘public’ in nature, was far from universal and constituted a major claim for subaltern communities in their quest for dignity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, upper-caste and upper-class pupils dominated government schools in the region, as some monarchical subjects were granted protection and guarantee of rights based on their caste status. In contrast, others were barred from entry and confined to separate, marginal spaces. d

By the 1890s, the shifts in modes of governance, led by the executive hand of the dewan subject to the ultimate authority of the monarch, witnessed several individual reformers, journalists, and caste and religious associations advocate for participation in an inclusive public sphere as rights-bearing subjects in Travancore and Cochin. Alongside struggles for temple entry, government employment, and land ownership, education became a key component of mass mobilization, undermining the princely states’ claims to modernity and pushing the limits of citizenship. In particular, school-based literacy was viewed as central to individual and community progress, occupational mobility, and reform, all of which were central to rethinking the interconnected relationship between space, body, and the self.

As a result of the establishment of the Travancore Legislative Council (TLC) in 1888, with the TSMPA in 1904, and the Cochin's Legislative Council (CLC) in 1925 consisting of nominated official and unofficial members, schooling became firmly enshrined on the political agenda. In every annual meeting, members belonging to different interest groups, particularly mercantile and planters’ associations, caste and religious organizations, and nominated members from depressed and backward classes, stressed the need to improve welfare provisions and addressed the budgetary concerns related to an overall expansion in primary and secondary education. A consensus was also emerging that children across class lines should receive elementary schooling and that the government would establish schools or provide grants to private agencies willing to take on the responsibility.

This chapter begins to explore the impact of slave majorities and limited white migration and settlement to the tropics. This chapter starts with Barbados in the middle of the seventeenth century, showing that the island had held a substantial white majority population and that it was the most densely settled place in England’s overseas empire before a mix of disease and emigration combined with dwindling immigration led to a sharp decline in the white population. The chapter details the increasing black to white ratios at tropical sites across the colonies after the dispersal of white settlers from Barbados. The English tried to mitigate their fears of these emerging racial imbalances by turning to new modes of political arithmetic to socially engineer populations and recruit more European migrants. English colonial architects started to calculate exactly how many white settlers would be necessary to ensure the survival of the English in the tropics and counter the new crisis in political economy. These constructed metrics helped to entrench ideas about racial distinctions.

Chapter 7 will examine the question of consonance and dissonance of musical ratios and intervals in the medieval Islamic world and the growing importance of the human soul in the discussions pertaining to this question. The Pythagoreans, having conceptualized the relationship between two notes as a numerical ratio, insisted that the key to consonance and dissonance lay in the mathematical neatness of these ratios. The Aristoxenians, however, insisted that consonance and dissonance were a matter of human experience. A third group of synthesizers emerged that aimed at reconciling the two approaches: Neoplatonic philosophers. Inheriting the works of these philosophers, scholars of music in the Islamic world set about the task of explaining the mechanisms of apprehension of consonance by human ears according to mathematical rules. In this process, the role of the soul as the link between humanity and the cosmos – with its mathematical underpinnings – gradually grew in emphasis.

A ‘BALANCE SHEET …’

Until the start of 1950, the interim government was carrying all within and before it. That critical year though, as this chapter shows, was the crucible that saw non-Congress members leave the cabinet, while the party's turf war came to the fore, outlining the upcoming electoral battle. These ideological tussles and individual contests inside the party and the cabinet are explored here, with the India–Pakistan Minority Pact providing an analogy to wider socio-cultural tensions. That year was also climactic for Nehru–Patel differences on Congress organisation and China, which this time ‘were papered over’ by Patel's death. Within a week of the new year, there were ominous signs when the Faridabad township project was effectively trifurcated between cooperatives (1,000 houses), contractors (2,000) and East Punjab public works (1,000). These houses were meant to be ready by June, but now, there were apprehensions all around. There was some ambiguity around the coming of the republic, which had been passive and somewhat inert in its immediate substance. After all, the premiers, with their ministries, were to continue under a new name – chief minister – and under a different oath of allegiance. In the old-new central parliament, very few women and Scheduled Caste members had come in and the Akalis had refused to accept this constitution, while the Hindu right-wing groups had ‘declared their condemnation’.

Moreover, the challenges coming in the last days of the old constitution cast a shadow over the first days of the new. From London, D. N. Pritt, the lawyer-legislator, was making representations on the summary death sentence by a military court in Hyderabad to ‘108 peasants and communists’. Pritt held that the said trial was rather a court martial, as the advocate-general acted for both the prosecution and the defence, while mercy petitions did not reach the nizam's privy council. Their executions were arranged for 23 January, so as to prevent the appeals from reaching the Supreme Court, and Pritt requested the central government to stop any executions before 26 January. Especially highlighted were the death sentences for two children, one of whom was 11-year-old Dina Lingayya.

In colonial Kerala, how and why were poor children educated, and how did schooling become integral to childhood formation? These overarching questions frame the narratives detailed in this book. Although mentioning ‘Kerala’ and ‘education’ in the same breath may seem trite for some, an exploration teasing out the historical configurations of schooling is pertinent to understand the shifting cultural and political values associated with the Malayali child. Today, with the steady removal of children from agricultural and industrial labour, a declining fertility rate, smaller family units, increasing global migration, and commercial values accrued by families from an accumulation of certified educational skills, the Malayali child has become almost ‘emotionally priceless’, to use Viviana Zelizer's incisive term.1 However, since the second half of the twentieth century, this transition from an ‘economically useful’ to an ‘emotionally priceless’ child, marked by long years of familial protection and institutionalized schooling, has mostly occurred within urban, middle-class communities in south India, similar to the European and American contexts. The traditionally rich, landed upper castes, and literate families have looked upon schools as a worthwhile investment to segregate and mould their children into productive, gendered adult household members, workers, and citizens.

With this context in mind, this book moves away from the scholarly attention overwhelmingly paid to dominant social groups to reveal the parallel dynamics which shaped the construction of ‘poor childhoods’ in Kerala during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, ‘poor’ refers to the conditions of poverty and deprivation suffered by children belonging to oppressed castes and religious communities, including Christian converts, and the ways in which the circular logic of poverty shaped the schooling landscapes into which they were brought.2 As upper-caste and upper-class communities in colonial Kerala slowly embraced universalist notions of childhood innocence and vulnerability advocated by various local and transregional actors in state and non-state agencies, and agreed on the separation of children from adults in spaces specific to play, study, and leisure, those from labouring, low-caste communities continued to be largely viewed through the lens of pity and charity, subject to mechanisms of disciplinary control and humanitarian governance with little acknowledgement of their agentic selves.

Chapter 2 investigates the extent of the use of Bank notes in British society during the Bank Restriction period. Drawing upon the Bank of England’s Lost Note Books – the record of claims submitted by customers who had lost their Bank notes – this chapter traces the geographical and social distribution of Bank note users. Following in the footsteps of John Clapham, who explored what he called the ‘radius of the Bank of England note’, this chapter reveals the patterns of the Bank note’s diffusion into British society and the underlying causes of its penetration into a number of places on the British Isles. The three factors that significantly affected the pattern of diffusion were commerce, the culture of sociability and Britain’s ongoing wars with France. These economic and extra-economic factors determined where the Bank notes were likely to see relatively extensive use. This chapter’s argument is underpinned by a large data set compiled from the Lost Note Books, which contain information about Bank note users’ identity as well as their geographical and social distribution. This unique source provides valuable insights into the diffusion of Bank note use.