This project centres on the continuing relevance of the 1947 Partition of India in texts that engage with the national landscape of Pakistan. This approach proposes that Partition cannot be understood outside of a discussion of Pakistan, as Partition emerged through demands for liberty and enfranchisement for India’s Muslims that became articulated through the discourse of the nation-state; my analysis of cultural texts asks what the implications are of this proposal. This study moves beyond looking at Partition as an isolated series of events in 1947 and contextualises its processes, interrogating why Partition and Pakistan became such a persuasive demand, and what the ongoing ramifications are of its happening. This thesis also considers what the 1971 secession of Bangladesh suggests regarding the attempts of the original cartographic articulation of Pakistan to maintain a unified nation. This project seeks to understand Partition in new ways by utilising a framework that takes into account the broader context of Partition both temporally and spatially. It moves beyond work that solely focusses on texts that discuss the moment of Partition directly, by examining texts that approach the time that preceded Partition, and that which succeeded it. In so doing this thesis charts how texts articulate the arguments for Pakistan’s creation against the events and commemoration of its becoming. I aim to be broad temporally, geographically, and in how I engage with the notion of violence, extending this to include the bureaucratic violence of drawing borders and colonial withdrawal. This study maintains a focus on women’s narratives, arguing that due to the gendered experience of violence at the time of Partition, such as rape, abduction, and honour killing, women’s stories have a particular intervention to make. As such this thesis proposes that there is a pattern of specifically gendered trauma that emerges which disrupts dominant nationalist remembering of Partition. This work takes an interdisciplinary focus by analysing fiction, feature film and documentary. Central to the study is the deployment of a number of theoretical methodologies, such as affect, cultural memory and trauma. Engagement with this critical material enables a discussion of the cultural texts that considers the role of affects in generating and maintaining national belonging, the impact of trauma on individuals who lived through Partition and on the nation writ large, and the implications of how trauma and affect are negotiated when texts imagine reparative futures.

This thesis interrogates the emergence of a universal modern idea of childhood in the Madras Presidency between 1920 and 1942. It considers the construction and uses of ‘childhood’ as a conceptual category and the ways in which this informed intervention in the lives of children, particularly in the spheres of education and juvenile justice. Against a background of calls for national self-determination, the thesis considers elite debates about childhood as specifically ‘Indian’, examining the ways in which ‘the child’ emerged in late colonial South India as an object to be reformed and as a ‘human becoming’ or future citizen of an independent nation. Social reform in late colonial India is often assumed to be an area of conflict, particularly informed by racial difference. Children are seen as key targets in the competition between the colonial state and Indian politicians and professionals. However, a detailed study of the 1920 Madras Children Act and 1920 Elementary Education Act reveals the development of consensual decisions in regard to child welfare and the expansion of a ‘social’ realm, which existed outside the political. Dyarchy profoundly changed the nature of government and in policy areas related to children the ‘state’ was Indian in character, action and personnel. This thesis contends that the discursive emergence of ‘the child’ was complicated when legislation was implemented. By tracing implementation it demonstrates the extent to which modern childhood was a symbolic claim, rather than political commitment to children. Tracing the interactions between adults in authority - whether as parents, teachers, politicians or civil society activists – the thesis explores the extent to which the avowedly universal category of childhood was subsumed beneath other identities based on class, caste and gender. Understanding childhood through a variety of administration reports, political debates and pedagogical journals reflects the views and actions of adults. By utilising the remembered experience of middle-class children in autobiographies and the layered archival evidence of aristocratic children under the jurisdiction of the Court of Wards, the thesis balances adult discourses with an awareness of children as historical agents. It considers the ways in which children learned, played and interacted with each other. Finally, therefore, it charts the limits of adult authority and the ways differing identities were experienced in the lives of children in southern India in the early twentieth century.

India’s North-West Frontier was the one area where the British Raj could suffer a knockout blow from either external Russian invasion or internal revolt. Frontier defence was amongst the greatest burdens during India’s inter-War financial austerity. Despite the RAF’s operational and financial efficacy in 1920s Iraq, air control was never implemented on the Frontier and air power’s potential was never fully exploited. Instead, aircraft were employed to enhance the Army’s traditional battlefield capabilities, resulting in efficient tactical co-ordination during the 1930s Waziristan campaign - the RAF’s most operationally-active pre-War theatre. To address why air power was constrained on the Frontier, the Thesis examines the inter-War relationship between the Armies of India and the RAF and its impact on the development and application of RAF doctrine. It concludes that the conservatively-natured Indian Armies were slow to recognise the conceptual shift required to fully exploit air power. This entrenchment was reinforced by inter-Service rivalry and the threat of aircraft replacing land forces with a concomitant loss of political standing. The enduring high-level internecine conflict resulted in the squandering of both resources and the opportunity to test independent, ‘strategic’ air power theory prior to WWII. Its legacy impacted on Army-RAF relations into WWII.

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No description available.

This thesis analyses the nation-building work that the Indian Army undertook during the military administration of Malaya, 1945-6. This was a two-part process, taking in military-led relief work and a political reform scheme. Historians have conducted little work on the Indian Army’s role in the British return to empire in Malaya, thus the army’s crucial and nuanced role has been overlooked. This limits the understanding of the army’s institutional development and role in Malayan nation-building between 1945-6. This thesis redresses this. It argues that the military administration of Malaya encapsulated the culmination of wartime changes to the role of the Indian Army fighting soldier. Whereas before the war the Indian Army found it expedient to keep its soldiers isolated from current affairs, British experience during the Second World War instead suggested that soldiers educated in current affairs could be very effective. Concurrently, British military leaders began to think on the role of the Indian Army and its men after the war. They concluded that the Indian Army’s soldiers could become catalysts of national political and social development, and initially identified this as a role for the army in post-war India. Furthermore, it was felt that the Indian Army could contribute both to the Commonwealth and United Nations ideals. The return to Malaya encapsulated these changes to the conception of the Indian Army soldier and was a practical expression and measure of these. The soldiers became agents of political change, imperial re-entrenchment and administration – which this thesis terms ‘soldier-administrators’. The Indian Army, it is argued, was deployed consciously as a nation-building force, using the new thinking on the role of Indian Army soldiers. In so doing, the Indian Army partook in targeted schemes for military relief, political reform and nation-building to try to build the new Malayan nation.

This DPhil dissertation aims to delineate an ambivalent construction of 'Britishness' in late British India by paying special attention to certain discourses and practices that regulated the lives of both colonial elites and of their impoverished and/or racially mixed kin. Peculiar racial self-anxieties of the colonial ruling classes, - namely those over hygienic / sexual degradation and cultural hybridisation, the increased presence of indigent and/or racially mixed white populations, and the undesired consequences of the last - are examined thorough a close and analytically coherent analysis of colonial representations and practices. An important feature of this research is to bring the internal-cum-class distinctions of metropolitan society to the fore in order to circumscribe a peculiarly class-specific constitution of British racial identity in the colonial context. Broadly speaking, in two related senses can the (re)production of white racial prestige in the British Raj be regarded as a class-conditioned phenomenon. First of all, colonial Britishness can be said to have been characterised by class because not all persons or groups of British descent living in the colony were recognised as 'European enough': only those from the upper or middle classes were considered as so 'European' as to be capable of ruling the 'subject races' of India. The remaining people of British racial origins, including the so-called 'poor whites', the 'domiciled Europeans' (those whites permanently settled in India), and the mixed-decent 'Eurasians', were not regarded as 'British enough' (although they were not seen as 'Indian', either). Especially, 'domiciled Europeans' and 'Eurasians', often collectively referred to as 'the domiciled class', were not treated as 'British' but only as 'Native' in socio-legal terms: the 'domiciled' differed from 'Indians' in terms of racial and cultural identification, but were supposed to be no higher than the latter by constitutional status and socio-economic standard. Secondly it was because of its recourse to 'bourgeois philanthropy' that the construction of Britishness in late British India may be said to have been bound by aspects of Victorian or Edwardian class culture. Although the British excluded their domiciled brethren from the sphere of their social and economic privileges, the former also 'included' the latter within limited frames of philanthropic and educational care. For, their exclusion from the elite white community notwithstanding, the domiciled were still regarded as one part of the European (as opposed to Indian) body politic. Thus the colonial authorities feared that an unregulated destitution of 'poor whites', domiciled Europeans, and Eurasians might present itself as a political menace to the prestige of the British race as a whole: in a sense, the authority of Britishness also depended on how 'European pauperism' could be solved before it had disorderly effects on the colonial hierarchies of race and class. It was in this context that the philanthropic management of pauperism emerged as a negative but no less unimportant measure for reproducing British prestige in the colonial context. And central to this was a specific, colonial application of a politics of class that the bourgeoisie played against the indigent and various 'unfit' populations in the metropole.

The Sounds of Satyagraha: Gandhi's Use of Sung-Prayers and Ritual M.K. Gandhi's work towards Indian independence was influenced significantly by sung-prayers found in a collection entitled Ashram Bhajanavali, a collection which, in turn, gives fresh insight into the satyagraha movement. Gandhi's employment of sung-prayers, chant, and ritual has, however, gone unrecognized until this time. The Sounds of Satyagraha presents detailed information concerning how formative and how important these sung-prayers were to Gandhi and to the national independence movement. Chapter One sets forth this thesis, along with methodology, historical context, and certain terms defined. Chapter Two consists of a preliminary historical overview of the Ashram Bhajanavali, along with a descriptive summary of the sung-prayer materials found within it. (An analysis of ritual practices presented in Chapters 3 through 5 also provides additional information regarding historical context and development.) This collection of chanted prayers used by the Indian sayagraha community, has sometimes been referred to as a hymnal. However, the collection is much more than what the word "hymnal" might imply, both in the scope of its contents, and in its significance as a tool with which to understand the developments of Gandhi's satyagraha community. Chapters Three, Four, and Five examine in detail how the Ashram Bhajanavali was used in ritual contexts, and how these sung-prayers supported Gandhi and the nation in its work for social change. The ritual theory of Roy Rappaport is utilized to discover the Bhajanavali's sitz im leben. Chapter 3 discusses the use of these sung-prayers in ritual prayer meetings that occurred twice daily. Chapter 4 looks at additional ways in which these songs were used by Gandhi and the satyagraha community to achieve their purposes, as the movement grew into a national initiative. Chapter 5 considers how it is that this sung-prayer repertoire, being specifically sung and chanted (rather than spoken or read), had a significant power for India and appeal for the satyagraha communities. By placing this collection in its historical, social, and ritual contexts, the extent to which these sung-prayers influenced and shaped Gandhi's sayagraha in India becomes clear. Chapter 6 considers the life and work of one spiritual musician, Shri Karunamayee Abrol, who teaches the Ashram Bhajanavali, its melodies and its history. Shri Karunamayee's family were freedom fighters, and, as a child, she sang for Mahatma Gandhi, receiving his blessing. Shri Karunamayee represents a living tradition. Inspired by childhood experiences and her respect for Gandhi, she has a special devotion to this repertoire. As a spiritual musician, she is a "tradition-bearer" of the Ashram Bhajanavali. The chanting of these sung-prayers has been her daily devotional ritual for decades. Her teaching, which stems from both musical knowledge and Æ⁄¿‰ò™ experience, provides additional insight into satyagraha. Chapter Seven concludes with a review of the evidence, illustrating the large extent to which Gandhi was guided by the sung-prayers and principles found in the Ashram Bhajanavali collection. It also consists of reflections in an analysis of the success or failure of satyagraha. Ashram Bhajanavali offers insight into the Indian independence movement, which has not been acknowledged or identified previously. Final reflections place this collection within the on-going East-West dialogue, indicating its continuing importance in the current discussion.

Establishing India explores how British Protestant women’s foreign missionary societies of the mid nineteenth century established and negotiated outreach to the women and girls of India. The humanitarian claims made about Indian women in the missionary press did not translate into direct missionary activity by British women. Instead, India was adopted as a site of missionary activity for more complex and local reasons: from encounters with opportunistic colonial informants to seeking inclusion in national organisations. The prevailing narrative about women’s missionary work in nineteenth-century India is both distorted and unsatisfactory. British women’s missionary work has been characterised as focused on seeking to enter and transform the high-caste Hindu household. This both obscures other important groups of females who were key historical actors, and it reduces the scope of women’s work to the domestic and private. In fact, British women missionaries sought inclusion in mainstream missionary strategies, which afforded them visibility, largely through establishing schools and orphanages. They also engaged with mainstream discourses of colonial and missionary education in India. Establishing India also details how India was established for British missionary women through texts and magazines. Missionary magazines provided British women with a continuous record of women’s work in India, reinforcing a belief in the providential rightfulness of the project. Magazines also both facilitated and misrepresented various types of work that British women engaged with in India: orphan sponsorship was established through the magazines and myths of zenana work were constructed. Missionary magazines were crucial to counteracting male narratives of white female absence or victimhood in India and they served to keep the women’s missionary project in India both visible and intact.

Anglo-Indians, a designation acquired in the 1911 Indian Census, had previously been known as Eurasians, East Indians, Indo-Britons and half-castes. ‘Anglo-Indian’ had previously denoted, and among some scholars continues to denote, Britons long resident in India. We will define Anglo-Indians as a particular mixed race Indo-European population arising out of the European trading and imperial presence in India, and one of several constructed categories by which transient Britons sought to demarcate racial difference within the Raj’s socio-racial hierarchy. Anglo-Indians were placed in an intermediary (and differentially remunerated) position between Indians and Domiciled Europeans (another category excluded from fully ‘white’ status), who in turn were placed below imported British superiors. The domiciled community (of Anglo-Indians and Domiciled Europeans, treated as a single socio-economic class by Britons) were relied upon as loyal buttressing agents of British rule who could be deployed to help run the Raj’s strategically sensitive transport and communication infrastructure, and who were made as a term of their service to serve in auxiliary military forces which could help to ensure the internal security of the Raj and respond to strikes, civil disobedience or crises arising from international conflict. The thesis reveals how calls for Indianisation of state and railway employment by Indian nationalists in the assemblies inaugurated by the 1919 Government of India Act threatened, through opening up their reserved intermediary positions to competitive entry and examination by Indians, to undermine the economic base of domiciled employment. Anglo-Indian leaders responded with varying strategies. Foremost was the definition of Anglo-Indians as an Indian minority community which demanded political representation through successive phases of constitutional change and statutory safeguards for their existing employment. This study explores various strategies including: deployment of multiple identities; widespread racial passing by individuals and families; agricultural colonisation schemes; and calls for individual, familial or collective migration.