Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vvkck Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T04:40:39.842Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How Modernity Arrived to Godavari

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2017

JON WILSON
JON WILSON*
Affiliation:
King's College London, United Kingdom Email: jon.wilson@kcl.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article traces the way in which modern institutions emerged in one region of British-ruled India—the Godavari Delta of coastal Andhra—during the early nineteenth century. Rejecting recently popular cultural theories and the vague language of ‘multiple modernities’, it suggests that modernity can be defined as the practical effort to govern subjects perceived as strangers with abstract and general categories. But, arguing that our conception of modernity needs to be limited, the article suggests that modern institutions always rely on non-modern ways of life: the rule of law depends on ideas about individual honour; bureaucracy; on family connections and affective expressions of loyalty; and rational interests that are coordinated by archaic idioms of political leadership. The peculiarity of the history of modernity in imperial India was marked not by the limited or partial imposition of modern practices, but by the British regime's reluctance to accept the legitimacy of the very non-modern forms of power it relied on. Tracing this process in the Godavari Delta, the article shows how a regime with limited local resources asserted the monopolistic authority of its structures of government, but in doing so, corroded its own capacity to exercise power. Local institutions which had coordinated local productive resources were undermined, but alternative forms of local leadership were unable to emerge. The consequence was famine in the 1830s, and in the 1840s an effort to refound the imperial regime by imposing British power on the region's natural resources.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Special Issue 2: New Directions in Social and Economic History: Essays in Honour of David Washbrook , March 2017 , pp. 399 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 32 Google Scholar. Founding texts of modernization theory include Lipset, Seymour Martin, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy, Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, The American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959), pp. 69–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action. A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of European Writers (New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937)Google Scholar, each of which attempted to integrate belief, institutions, and practice into a single system. Parsons’ text was ignored until the 1940s. Classic works on empire and India which use a similar framework include Gallagher, John and Robinson, Ronald, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (1 August 1953), pp. 1–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohn, Bernard S., ‘From Indian Status to British Contract’, The Journal of Economic History 21, no. 4 (December 1961), pp. 613–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Washbrook, David, ‘From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the Pre-History of Modernity’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40, no. 4 (1997), pp. 413–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999), pp. 1–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincialising Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Sivaramakrishnan, K. and Agrawal, Arun, Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

4 Washbrook, David, ‘The Global History of “Modernity”, A Response to a Reply’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (1998), p. 299 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400–1750’, Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998), pp. 75–104 Google Scholar; Washbrook, D.A., ‘Eighteenth-Century Issues in South Asia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 44, no. 3 (2001), pp. 372 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–83; Bayly, C.A., Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bayly, C.A., The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar.

5 For a discussion of non-linear modern time, see Devji, Faisal, ‘Apologetic Modernity’, Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 1 (2007), pp. 61–76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 The best examples of this approach are Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 199 Google Scholar. Taylor does not see ideas as causes, but argues that social practices can be understood by examining the systematic beliefs they encapsulate. Works on South Asian history which understand Western modernity through philosophy include the classic works by Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments and Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe.

7 Vernon, James, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Wilson, Jon E., The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 My account here is indebted, of course, to the argument about sovereignty and power in Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984)Google Scholar.

9 Nandy, Ashis, ‘India: State, History and Self’, The Little Magazine 1, no. 3 (2000)Google Scholar, www.littlemag.com/, [accessed 20 December 2016].

10 Schumpeter, Joseph, ‘The Sociology of Imperialisms’, in his Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1951), p. 65 Google Scholar

11 Washbrook, David, ‘Reviews’, History Workshop Journal 38, no. 1 (1994), pp. 256 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–58.

12 Washbrook, David, ‘South India 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition’, Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004), pp. 479–516 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Washbrook, David, ‘Economic Depression and the Making of “Traditional” Society in Colonial India 1820–1855’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Sixth Series, no. 3 (1993), pp. 237 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–63.

13 O'Hanlon, Rosalind and Washbrook, David, ‘After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (1992), p. 150 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

15 Talbot, Cynthia, Precolonial India in Practice. Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 181 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–86.

16 J.F. Richards, ‘The Mughal Retreat from Coastal Andhra’ and James Grant, ‘Political Survey of the Northern Circars’, 20 December 1784, Parliamentary Papers, 1812 (377), p. 690.

17 Bryant, G.J., The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 201 Google Scholar–10; Grant, ‘Political Survey of the Northern Circars’, p. 694.

18 For a discussion of revenue systems in these years, see John Sullivan, ‘Observations Respecting the Circar of Mazulipatam’, 1780, India Office Records (IOR) H/335, 1–47.

19 Mallikarjuna Rao, ‘Native Revolts in the West Godavari District, 1785–1805’, PhD thesis, Andhra University, 2000, p. 128; Grant, ‘Political Survey of the Northern Circars’, p. 664.

20 For example, in Washbrook, David, ‘South India 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition’, Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (July 2004), pp. 479–516, doi:10.1017/S0026749X03001197 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Wagoner, Phillip B., ‘Money Use in the Deccan, c. 1350–1687: The Role of Vijayanagara Hons in the Bahmani Currency System’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 51, no. 4 (1 October 2014), pp. 457 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–80.

22 Perlin, Frank, ‘Growth of Money Economy and Some Questions of Transitions in Late Pre-Colonial India’, Social Scientist 11, no. 10 (1983), pp. 27–38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perlin, Frank, ‘State Formation Reconsidered: Part Two’, Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985), pp. 415 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–80.

23 Chatterjee, Nandini, ‘Reflections on Religious Difference and Permissive Inclusion in Mughal Law’, Journal of Law and Religion 29, no. 3 (2014), pp. 396–415, doi:10.1017/jlr.2014.20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alam, Muzaffar, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Devji, Faisal, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptations of Violence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Letter from the Court of Directors, 12 April 1775, and Fort St George, Revenue Consultations, 28 June 1776, Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy, House of Commons, 27 June 1781, pp. 319–24.

25 Report from the Board of Revenue, Madras, 15 April 1792, IOR H/366, pp. 405–520; Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire; Wilson, The Domination of Strangers.

26 For details of the family history, see William Holman to Champion Branfill, November 1720, Essex County Office Archives, D/Y1/1/34/1.

27 For the importance of the district officer's reputation, see Lees, James, ‘A “Tranquil Spectator”: The District Official and the Practice of Local Government in Late Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38, no. 1 (1 March 2010), pp. 1–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Collector of Rajahmundry, Letter to Col. Vigor, 31 March 1800, and Letter to Lt. Col Gardiner, 5 April 1800, Andhra Pradesh (AP) State Archives, Godavari D[istrict] R[ecords], vol. 856, p. 112.

29 Collector of Rajahmundry to Board of Revenue, 27 October 1800, AP State Archives, Godavari DR, vol. 934, pp. 45–46; Instructions to Lt-Colonel Campbell, 26 January 1802, Godavari DR, vol. 940, pp. 199–224 and pp. 253–55.

30 Madras Public Despatch, 27 June 1804, IOR E/4/892, p. 571.

31 Gordon, Stewart, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Curley, David L., ‘Kings and Commerce on an Agrarian Frontier: Kalketu's Story in Mukunda's Candimangal’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 38, no. 3 (2001), pp. 299–324 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘Trade and Politics in the Arcot Nizamat (1700–1732)’, in their Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

32 Frykenberg, Robert Eric, ‘Traditional Processes of Power in South India: An Historical Analysis of Local Influence’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 1, no. 2 (1963), p. 136 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Mayer, Albert, Pilot Project, India: The Story of Rural Development at Etawah, Uttar Pradesh (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1958), p. xvii Google Scholar.

34 Guha, Ranajit, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

35 Kaviraj, Sudipta, ‘On the Crisis of Political Institutions in India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 18, no. 2 (1984), pp. 227 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 232.

36 Weber, Eugen, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Bulpitt, Jim, Territory and Power in the United Kingdom: An Interpretation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

37 N.W. Kindersley, Collector, to Board of Revenue with Attachments, 13 May 1824, AP State Archives, Godavari DR, no. 4638, 132-7.

38 Grant, ‘Political Survey of the Northern Circars’, p. 664.

39 John Reid, Collector, to Board of Revenue, 18 October 1799, 13 November 1799, and 24 June 1800, and John Reid, Collector to Captain Bowness, 18 December 1799, AP State Archives, Godavari DR, no. 854, 92, 141-5, 227-240, 176.

40 Scott, Sir Walter, The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott: With a Biography, and His Last Additions and Illustrations (New York: Conner and Cooke, 1833)Google Scholar, V, 44; Frykenberg, R.E., ‘Village Strength in South India’, in his Land Control and Social Structure (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 246 Google Scholar; Frykenberg, R.E., Guntur District, 1788–1848. A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 231 Google Scholar–48.

41 John Reid, Collector, to Board of Revenue, 24 January 1800, AP State Archives, Godavari DR, no. 854, p. 254.

42 J. Long, Magistrate of Rajahmundry, to George Strachey, 23 March 1816, IOR H/602, pp. 157–59.

43 Arthur Cotton, ‘Report on the Irrigation of the Rajahmundry District’, 22 August 1844, Parliamentary Papers, 1850 (127). For this argument in more detail, see Wilson, Jon, India Conquered. Britain's Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London: Simon and Schuster, 2016), pp. 270 Google Scholar–74.

44 Henry Montgomery to Chief Secretary, Fort St George, 18 March 1844, IOR P/280/44, 2191; Rao, G. N., ‘Canal Irrigation and Agrarian Change in Colonial Andhra, A Study of Godavari District, c.1850–1890’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 25, no. 1 (1 March 1988), pp. 25–60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Morris, Henry, A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Godavery District (London: Trubner, 1878), pp. 290 Google Scholar–92.

46 Henry Montgomery to Chief Secretary to Government, Fort St George, 18 March 1844, IOR P/280/48, 2166.

47 Montgomery to Chief Secretary, 18 March 1844, IOR P/280/49, 2280.

48 Cotton, ‘Report on the Irrigation of the Rajahmundry District’, 22 August 1844, I Copies of Letters of Major Arthur Cotton, Parliamentary Papers 1850 (127), p. 4; Cotton, Sir Arthur, Public Works in India (London: Richardson Brothers, 1854)Google Scholar.

49 Washbrook, David, ‘Country Politics, Madras 1880 to 1930’, Modern Asian Studies 7, no. 3 (1973), pp. 475–531 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.