Rule by Numbers

Rule by Numbers

Governmentality in Colonial India

U. Kalpagam

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Kalpagam, U.
Rule by numbers : governmentality in colonial India / U. Kalpagam.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-8935-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-8936-8 (electronic)
1. India--Politics and government--1765-1947. 2. India--Statistical services--History. 3. Statistics--
Political aspects--India--History. 4. Great Britain--Colonies--Administration--History. 5. Foucault,
Michel, 1926-1984--Political and social views. 6. State, The. I. Title.
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 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: The Colonial State and Statistical Knowledge 1

1 Sovereignty and Governmentality 27

2 The Production of Space 83
3 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 111
4 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 137
5 Classification and Society 175
6 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 223
7 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 261

Conclusion: Modern Freedom and Governmentality 289

Bibliography 311
Name Index 333
Subject Index 339
About the Author 363

v
 Preface and Acknowledgments

The “State” has been the subject of interest and curiosity of philosophers,
historians, political scientists, and economists for long. In recent years,
studies on the colonial state in India combining both historical and
anthropological perspectives initiated by American anthropologists and
the Subaltern Studies group received a renewed stimulus as Michel Fou-
cault’s ideas gained popularity in the social sciences. The historian’s
interests on liberalism and empire, the political scientist’s acknowledg-
ment of the potential of Foucault’s idea of governmentality, and the
anthropologists’ interest in studying state-effects at the margins have to-
gether provided new vigor to the study of the state with these perspec-
tives and new questions. This study has been influenced by these cur-
rents of thought in its attempt to understand how governmentality pro-
duced statistical knowledge in colonial India. In the many years that have
gone into this research, I have drawn much inspiration from Talal Asad’s
interest in Foucauldian ideas for anthropological analysis, and his essay
on “statistics and modern power” initiated me into this. His encourage-
ment over the years kept up my interest to complete this work despite
other diversions in my research. Rayna Rapp opened up a whole new
world for me with her enthusiasm and generosity and I have benefitted
much from her comments on this work. My thanks to both Talal Asad
and Rayna Rapp for all they have given me that is beyond measurement.
Deborah Poole evinced interest in this work in its early stages and gave
me her insights. I also thank the anonymous reviewer of this book for the
good suggestions that strengthened sections of some chapters. The edi-
tors and anonymous reviewers of journals that published earlier versions
of some of the chapters, in particular, Time and Society, History of the
Human Sciences, Economy and Society, Journal of Historical Sociology, and
Economic and Political Weekly were generous with their comments thus
helping to clarify many issues. In the initial stages of research, I received
a grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,
New York (Developing Countries Training Fellowship Grant# 4870-4201)
that helped me to pursue this study. A British Academy Fellowship for
another research project took me to London, which facilitated archival
research for the chapter on the public sphere at the India Office in the
British Library. I am thankful to Pat Caplan for hosting me in London.
Much of the reading for this was done over the years at the New York
Public Library and I am ever so thankful to the helpful staff there. Over

vii
viii Preface and Acknowledgments

the course of time I have been on the faculty of several institutions that
have supported this work and I am grateful to the staff of the libraries in
these institutions. A sabbatical leave from my present institution in Alla-
habad, India, helped me to complete this work. Friends and strangers
have helped me access literature that would otherwise have been un-
available to me and I should like to especially offer my thanks to S.
Subbalakshmi, Rama Deb Roy, Joan Mencher, David Scott, and Faisal
Devji. It has been a pleasure to receive all the helpful editorial support of
Sabah Ghulamali and Brian Hill at Lexington Books. My family has sup-
ported me in many ways and I offer my thanks to all of them.
 Introduction
The Colonial State and Statistical Knowledge

The modern state in India is of recent origin dating back to British coloni-
al rule of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite the prodigious
work of historians of the colonial period that deal with the colonial state,
only a few explicitly analyze the construction of the state that arose out of
a set of contingent factors. The paradigm shift in political studies of the
modern state brought in by the Foucauldian approach of “governmental-
ity” that displaced the earlier approaches that were based either on the
historical evolution of the state or the history of modern political thought,
and the insights bequeathed by recent anthropological studies of state
effects at the margins have cleared the way for critical analyzes of state
constructivism that integrates anthropological and postcolonial perspec-
tives with Foucauldian insights. This book narrates the construction of
the modern colonial state in India through a history of colonial govern-
mentality, focusing on the enumerative rationalities and strategies in the
process of colonial governance and its systems of recordation that gener-
ated vast knowledge even as it constructed the state and the colonial
subjects. New categories of space, time, measurement, classification, and
causality that were integral to the political technologies of colonial
governance constructed “economy” and “society” as domains of govern-
mental intervention and knowledge, and enabled the apprehension of
social phenomenon in modern scientific ways. Drawing on Foucault’s
notion of “episteme,” it is argued that the rise of quantification and
knowledge in colonial India and elsewhere in the colonized world is to be
understood as “the process of a historical practice” of modern govern-
ance, and intimately connected with the construction of the modern state.
For Foucault, the “episteme” is not what may be known at a given peri-
od, but what in the positivity of discursive practices makes possible the
existence of epistemological figures and sciences. 1
Forms of Western dominance over the rest have concerned historians,
anthropologists, sociologists, political economists and those in the hu-
manities for long both in the Western and and in the non-Western world.
But not until Talal Asad’s suggestion of anthropologizing the growth of
Western power that serious and critical reflections began in Western
anthropology of the imbrication of colonial power and knowledge. 2 An
anthropology of Western imperial power, Asad notes, must “try to
1
2 Introduction

understand the radically altered form and terrain of conflict inaugurated

by it through new political languages, new powers, new social groups,
new desires and fears, new subjectivities.” 3 Recently, historian Dipesh
Chakrabarty pointed out the paradox of third-world social sciences that
finds Western social theories and philosophies relevant to understanding
third world contexts in spite of the theorists’ ignorance about the empiri-
cal conditions of such societies and wondered if non-Western scholars
can return that gaze. 4 Anthropologist Bernard Cohn, who had long been
engaged in historically informed anthropological studies on India, has
highlighted the processes and modalities of how British colonial power
constructed knowledge of India and contributed along with his followers
at Chicago to a significant scholarship on the historical anthropology of
India. These were soon followed by studies of the “subaltern historians”
with their critical perspectives on colonial dominance, resistance, subject
and the state that have transformed significantly the nature of historical
scholarship on India in the last two decades. These reflections in Western
anthropology and history that were in themselves a paradigmatic turn
colluded with a similar critical and more powerful current of thought in
the humanities through the work of Edward Said.

ORIENTALISM, REPRESENTATION, AND KNOWLEDGE

Ushered in by Said’s Orientalism, and inspired by post-structuralist think-

ers, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, postcolonial studies explored
the theme of colonial power and postcolonial possibilities of knowledge
production. Said’s path-breaking Orientalism unraveled the complicity of
power and knowledge that characterized the long period of Western
domination over the rest of the world, and raised the politics of represen-
tation to a new level of critical awareness in postcolonial writings. For
Said, the “Orient” was a European invention, and orientalism “was a
style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinc-
tion made between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident.’” 5 Said argued that by
imposing muteness on the Orient as object, the Orient became not Eu-
rope’s interlocutor but its silent “Other,” as a “kind of Western projection
onto and will to govern over the Orient.” 6 By the late eighteenth century,
orientalism became a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient, “a
Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over
the Orient.” This Western style of domination refers to how the Orient
was represented as “of a constitutive otherness, of an essentialist charac-
ter.” 7 While Said was concerned to show how the “Occident” deployed
its powers to represent the “Orient,” specifically the textualization of the
“Orient” in the works of philology, literature and the humanities, he was
much less concerned with the interventionary role of colonial power.
Even though he acknowledged that orientalism was absolutely “anatomi-
 Introduction 3

cal” and “enumerative,” and engaged in “the particularizing and divid-

ing of things Oriental into manageable parts,” he did not specify, as Ar-
jun Appadurai has noted, how the Orientalist knowledge project and the
colonial project of domination and extraction were connected. 8 Colonial
rule sought both to posit a radical “Other” and to also search for univer-
sal truths in the “Other.” While the knowledge produced by European
expansion in India was no doubt qualitatively different, the methods to
produce the knowledge were not specific to India nor did all that knowl-
edge serve utilitarian purposes. 9 It is therefore necessary to set the de-
bates on Orientalist knowledge and colonial rule within the broader
framework of the development of nineteenth century imperialism and
the modern state.
Postcolonial studies has since Said’s Orientalism been marked by a
heightened awareness of representational politics, in the binary division
of the “West” and the “Rest,” as it figured in the humanistic studies
causing a rethinking of the theory of cultural hybridity and the transla-
tion of cultural differences that went beyond the binary, as in the para-
digmatic study of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. The defining
theme of postcolonial studies is “the investigation of the mutually con-
stitutive role played by colonizer and colonized, center and periphery,
the metropolitan and the ‘native’ in forming, in part, the identities of both
the dominant power and the subalterns involved in the imperial and
colonial projects of the ‘West.’” 10 Postcolonial studies has also sought to
grapple the fact that the “West” or Europe that was imagined in its hege-
monic roles in different postcolonial sites was not a homogenous single
entity but in fact was a hyper-real one, perceived by ex-colonial and
third-world non-Westerns as the primary habitus of the “modern,” as
Dipesh Chakrabarty noted in his project to provincilize Europe that at-
tempted to show by what historical processes Enlightened rationalism
that originated in Europe became naturalized and self-evident every-
where else. 11 The goal of such an exercise as “provincializing Europe” is
to make it possible for the world to be imagined once again as radically
heterogeneous, an imagination that Dipesh Chakrabarty claims moder-
nity has repressed.
A clear idea of how such imagination is repressed by modernity in the
rest of the world is needed, especially as it is increasingly recognized that
the project of modernity is both incomplete, uneven and perhaps never to
reach a completion even as “alternate/multiple modernities” are celebrat-
ed. Such repression of imagination takes place because modernity has
simultaneously made accessible new epistemological capacities, of ways
of knowing and understanding the world in universalistic terms even as
the ontological being was refashioned. Indeed, there is a growing realiza-
tion that the project of modernization that colonialism sought to carry
forward in the non-Western world entailed not merely institutional or
attitudinal changes, as the earlier genre of modernization studies empha-
4 Introduction

sized, but that it brought about a fundamental epistemological conquest

of those societies as well. Bernard Cohn has noted that the British in India
had unwittingly not merely conquered a territory but through their
“scholarship” invaded an epistemological space as even grammar could
be converted from an Indian form of knowledge to a European object. 12
“Epistemological conquest” is here referred to in a stronger sense as
the transmission and absorption of new categories and modes of thought
either displacing or coexisting in a situation of dominance with the older
categories and modes of thought arising not only through scholarship but
more importantly through the interventionary power of colonial rule. 13
Although colonial governance did entail cultural translation, it was more
appropriately engaged in reshaping practices and so “epistemological
conquest” is more appropriate than “cultural translation.” 14 In the long
period of colonial encounters in which Western powers dominated non-
Western societies, the techniques of governance were undoubtedly the
most important strategies of dominance.
Samir Amin in his book Eurocentrism argues that capitalism “born in
Europe” in imposing itself on a worldwide scale created a demand for
universalism at the level of scientific analysis of society, although he did
not elaborate on the techniques of intervention. 15 This demand was first
made by modern states in the interests of governance, particularly as
population became an object of concern. The demand for universalism in
the scientific analysis of society was made conjunctively with the demand
that societies participate in the Enlightenment’s project of universal histo-
ry. Bruno Latour in Science in Action has argued that it is the cumulative
character of science that needs to be grasped keeping in view all the
conditions that allow a cycle of accumulation to take place. 16 This allows
Latour to observe that the local knowledge of the Chinese need not have
to be opposed to the universal knowledge of the European, but could be
viewed as only two local knowledges, “one of them having the shape of a
network transporting back and forth immutable mobiles to act at a dis-
tance,” and that who has such a network is not a cognitive or a cultural
difference, but the result of a constant fight. 17 One needs to acknowledge
however, that historically Western domination of the non-Western world
has resulted in the marginalization of non-Western sciences/knowledges
and modern science originating from the West has entrenched itself
deeply as a new infallible reason.
While the epistemological agendas of scientific analysis as indicated
by Amin and Latour are fairly clear, that of orientalism needs a restate-
ment. Some years ago, historian Gyan Prakash provided a clear statement
of orientalism’s epistemological project and its impact on the writing of
history in South Asia. According to him, “essentialism,” “distancing,”
and the “centrality of the opposition between the East and the West”
were the techniques deployed by orientalism in producing knowledge of
the Orient. Based on the binary opposition it was able to fabricate the
 Introduction 5

Orient in terms of the “founding essences invulnerable to historical

change and prior to their representation in knowledge.” 18 This, he claims,
made it appear as though the colonial relationship was irrelevant to the
production of knowledge. If the conditions of coloniality are absent in
orientalism’s method, it is puzzling as to how it could have restructured
the Orient, as Said claimed was within its power. Nor is Prakash’s obser-
vation that the application of Eurocentric ideas adding to the stock of
images available for representing India, and thus “exponentially crowd-
ing the representational field” very helpful in understanding the mutual
determination of power and knowledge. Orientalist knowledge was just
one strand of colonial discourse, which in course of time became reactive
and contested as Indians reworked fragments of Orientalist knowledge
with Western ideas. The other important strands were the missionary
discourse on “heathen” beliefs and practices and the administrative dis-
course that was part of colonial governance in which power and knowl-
edge were mutually implicated, as European ideas shaped the political
rationalities and technologies of governance. The representational re-
quirements of these technologies of governance were markedly different
from precolonial forms of governance even when it borrowed from the
past or retained some continuity with it. Colonial administrative dis-
courses came to occupy a significant space in the representational field,
and its epistemological valence differed from orientalist discourses even
if as Gyan Prakash has rightly noted that essentialist assumptions were to
repeatedly refigure in both. Orientalism as Edward Said noted, consti-
tuted itself as an authoritative discourse based on the authority of the
orientalist whose presence “out there” in the Orient was rendered pos-
sible by colonialism, whereas the authoritative status of administrative
knowledge was backed by the power of the colonial state. 19

INSCRIPTION, INFORMATION, AND GOVERNANCE

For analyzing how cycles of accumulation of scientific knowledge takes

place by a center acting from a distance at many other points, Bruno
Latour has recommended discarding the categories of “power” and
“knowledge” as inappropriate as they do not sufficiently include materi-
alities that go into their making. 20 For Latour, the issue is only how to act
at a distance on unfamiliar events, places, and people and how to bring
those distant events, places, and people to the center. This can be
achieved by inventing means that render them mobile so that they can be
brought back, kept stable so that they can be moved back and forth, and
be made combinable so that they can be cumulated, aggregated or shuf-
fled.
As the colonial modality of governance through statistical enumera-
tion and inscription is a good illustration of Latour’s idea of acting upon
6 Introduction

distant events, places, and people, it seems possible to retain the catego-
ries of “power” and “knowledge.” Latour acknowledges the role of these
categories when he notes how “immutable and combinable mobiles”
changed cartography from a shaky foundation to a sure path of science,
and that these mobiles “all end up at such scale that a few men or women
can dominate them by sight, at one point or another, they all take the
shape of a flat surface of paper that can be archived, pinned on a wall and
combined with others; they all help to reverse the balance of forces be-
tween those who master and those who are mastered.” 21 Latour’s analy-
sis has contributed to a heightened awareness of how modes of inscrip-
tion and forms of writing and reading have been historically crucial in
the processes of making power and knowledge, and equally how inscrip-
tions construct persons, things, and events at the local or the periphery
and in turn is transformed by the periphery acting upon it. 22 These en-
able a fuller understanding of how both “acting at a distance” and “act-
ing at near” are relevant to an understanding of governance.
Max Weber’s prophecy of modernity that the earlier intimate social
forms would dissolve and be replaced by rational bureaucratic-legal or-
ders governed by the growth of procedure and predictability is most
evident in the procedures of the modern state that ushered in a quantific-
atory episteme. Arthur Bentley in his book The Process of Government first
published in 1908 observed that “quantities” are present in every bit of
political life and there is no political process that is not “a balancing of
quantity against quantity.” “Understanding any of these phenomena
means measuring the elements that have gone into them. . . . If we can get
our social life stated in terms of activity, and of nothing else, we have not
indeed succeeded in measuring it, but we have at least reached a founda-
tion upon which a coherent system of measurements can be built up . . .
we shall cease to be blocked by the intervention of unmeasurable ele-
ments, which claim to be themselves the real causes of all that is happen-
ing, and which by their spook-like arbitrariness make impossible any
progress toward dependable knowledge.” 23
Adapting Manuel Castell’s concept of “information order,” historian
Christopher Bayly has examined the modalities of information gathering
in colonial India through state surveillance and social communication by
drawing the distinction between “knowledge” and “information,” where
knowledge implies socially organized and taxonomized information.
Bayly noted that the evolving information order retained distinctly In-
dian features, even while it was absorbing and responding to the pro-
found influences set in motion by the European rulers, with the gradual
shift from “embodied” knowledge to “institutional” knowledge. 24 While
in the early phase of colonial occupation, the British in India had to gain
access and mastery over prior indigenous information systems which in
turn generated Orientalist knowledge of language, texts, and literature,
the progressive introduction of bureaucratic methods of rule and admin-
 Introduction 7

istration, especially after 1830 when the statistical movement in Britain

had a powerful impact on colonial administration, helped to constitute
systematic and scientific knowledge of the country.
As the domain and density of administrative discourses enlarged, the
discursive strategies of administration constructed objects and fields for
purposes of intervention. This is something unique to the modern state,
as its fields and objects of intervention are rationally constituted to meet
rational ends. Pre-modern states never acquired such instrumental capa-
bility through rational means. The representational goals are therefore
matched by the requirements of intervention. It is therefore important to
explore the colonial nexus of power and knowledge through the discur-
sive formations produced by modern governance, and tracing in them
their links with the sciences. Such an analysis of administrative dis-
courses is best done using the Foucauldian notion of “episteme,” ac-
knowledging as Ann Stoler does that the episteme did not exist fully
formed but itself emerged with the accretions to the discursive formation
over time. 25 Such a notion does not require a transcendental subject to
account for the existence of the sciences but locates the fact of such exis-
tence in historical practice.
The discursive practices of the modern colonial state embodying the
diverse strategies of rule and administration constitutes the colonial
archives, and could be treated as a discursive formation to trace the links
to knowledges and sciences by employing the notion of “episteme.” The
modern episteme that would constitute modern social sciences would no
doubt contain the numerical worldview, but the sciences in fact are more
than numbers. The discursive constitution of objects in scientific repre-
sentations has to lodge both categories and numbers in a manner amen-
able for interventions. Rendering modern social sciences into a universal
discourse is to locate these discursive formations everywhere, with such
discursive practices providing the scope to draw out those categories that
constitute the sciences.
As the focus here is on how the colonial state in India enabled the
constitution of modern scientific discourses, it is relevant to explore how
Western conceptions and categories of space, time, measure, reason, and
causality that constitute modern sciences emerged in its conceptual rep-
ertoire as the outcome of colonial governance. The routines and rituals of
the bureaucratic system of the modern colonial state set up especially in
the latter half of the nineteenth century ensured both procedures of regu-
lar accountability as well as statistical information that were amenable to
systematization as knowledge. The contextual histories of “universal sci-
ences” are the histories of how Western categories of modernity took root
in the non-Western world, histories that are complexly interwoven with
the histories of colonialism, especially of the role of the modern state in
the development of scientific analyses of society.
8 Introduction

The relationship between administrative discourses of British colonial

governance and the scientific discourses about society in the Foucauldian
framework of power and knowledge is introduced here to argue that the
regulatory practices and discursive regularities of colonial administration
enabled the emergence of modern scientific discourses in India. Specifi-
cally, the book deals with how the colonial state in India constituted
objective and statistical knowledge of Indian society. 26

SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSES AND THE MODERN STATE

Modern state forms with their specific modes of governance, bureaucra-

cies, and forms of accountability have been instrumental in an epistemo-
logical conquest wherever they have been allowed to emerge. Not only
did they introduce new ways and methods of “knowing” but also the
content of knowledge and the institutions that produced them were new
as well. In the colonized non-Western world the techniques of govern-
ment instituted by the colonial state gave rise to a whole set of scientific
discourses about society; often these discourses were constituted in terms
of competing discourses of the so-called “moral and material progress” of
these societies. In colonial India such discourses created the conditions
for the possibility of an anti-colonialist nationalist discourse to contest
colonial rule from within Western rationalist principles which were
sought to be introduced there, in addition to other forms of contestation
that were completely outside this rationalist paradigm as illustrated by
the works of the “subaltern” historians. 27
The production of certain kinds of knowledge about society as part of
the technologies of governance created the field for social scientific dis-
courses to emerge for the first time in those parts of the non-Western
colonized world. This is an aspect that has not so far received the atten-
tion it should have, despite a growing literature on the geo-politics of
knowledge and the domination of Western sciences. The dense adminis-
trative discourses of colonial governance were not merely representa-
tions of modern power enabling certain kinds of interventions but served
as carriers of Western categories of space, time, measure, reason, and
causality that constitute modern sciences that were not hitherto part of
the epistemological fabric of those societies. New categories of thought
that were introduced as part of colonial administrative practices rendered
it possible to conceive of “economy” and “society,” and these representa-
tions enabled both new modes of interventions as well as a body of social
scientific discourse. In so doing, the epistemological domains of pre-
colonial times were irretrievably altered.
This phenomenon of the modern state’s role in the production of
knowledge and the consequent emergence of scientific discourses can be
usefully studied deploying Foucault’s conception of “governmental-
 Introduction 9

ity.” 28 This is a derivative of Foucault’s more general notion of “power/

knowledge” which is concerned to show how forms of knowledge and
apparatuses of power are linked in constitutive interdependence, in par-
ticular “the historical matrix of conditions of possibility for the modern
human sciences to be understood in relation to the elaboration of a whole
range of techniques and practices for the discipline, surveillance, admin-
istration and formation of populations of human individuals.” 29
Population thus emerged as a datum or field of intervention and as an
objective of governmental techniques. The juridical and institutional
form given to the sovereignty that characterizes a modern state now
changed ushering a new triadic link between sovereign-
ty–governmentality–discipline replacing the older link of sovereign-
ty–territoriality–discipline. Thus by conceiving the state as embedding
“governmentality,” and by that Foucault meant the “ensemble formed by
the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and
tactics, that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of
power” he argued that this type of power resulted in the formation of
both a whole series of state apparatuses as well as the development of a
whole complex of “savoir,” what is known as “political economy.” 30
The practices of governance keeping population as a target of inter-
ventions introduced by the modern colonial state in India, and elsewhere
as well, ushered a new quantificatory “episteme.” Accounting and ac-
countability as techniques of governance with the specific objective of
governing populations, and other regulatory techniques in the varied
sites and institutions of the modern state, ushered this new quantificatory
episteme largely through quantification of more and more arenas of hu-
man experience, thereby promoting the modern statistical worldview.
Thus the progressive “governmentalization of the state” and the objectifi-
cation of the world bear indeed a close and direct correlation. 31
Thus Foucault’s concept of “episteme,” which has influenced my
specification of epistemological conquest would be useful to trace in the
discursive practices of colonial administration the origins of modern so-
cial sciences in India. For Foucault, the “episteme” is “something like a
world-view,” “a general stage of reason,” “a slice of history common to
all branches of knowledge” imposing on each one the same norms and
postulates. He defines “episteme” as
The total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive
practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and pos-
sibly formalized systems; the way in which, in each of these discursive
formations, the transition to epistemologization, scientificity, and for-
malization are situated and operate; the distribution of these thresh-
olds, which may coincide, be subordinated to one another, or be separ-
ated by shifts in time; the lateral relations that may exist between epis-
temological figures or sciences in so far as they belong to neighbouring,
but distinct, discursive practices. . . . The “episteme” is the totality of
10 Introduction

relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sci-
ences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities. 32
The quantificatory episteme ushered by the colonial state in India was
indeed unique. While precolonial states such as those of the Mughals, the
Mahrattas, or even Tipu Sultan, had streamlined administrative practices
and were indeed noteworthy for systematic record-keeping, none of
them introduced a quantificatory episteme. 33 The pre-colonial reckoning
of worldly affairs were less objectified and quantified. It was only with
the colonial practices of governance that measurement and quantification
assumed predominance; and modern social scientific thought in India is
of colonial origin and in fact traceable to it. What is indeed more interest-
ing is why the nature of governance as well as Indian philosophical
thought in pre-colonial India did not generate and perhaps was not even
capable of generating similar social scientific discourses. No doubt an
examination of the epistemic foundations of pre-modern science in India,
and its contrast with the Baconian ideas of modern inductive and experi-
mental science may provide some explanations. Despite the development
of sciences (sastra) in pre-modern India in fields such as medicine, mathe-
matics, and astronomy, the epistemic foundations for the modern social
sciences did not exist. Although it is often noted that Kautilya’s Arthasas-
tra is a treatise on statecraft and economics, it is only a manual of instruc-
tion written in maxim (sutra) and verse (shloka) form and was meant to be
transmitted orally. 34 While it spells out in detail the organization of
king’s administration including the maintenance of accounts, the only
policy intervention that can be found there is what the king ought to do
as famine measures. The idea of intervening in social processes did not
develop, for the conception of social process itself was lacking. In fact,
this idea is dependent on the development of the notion of social causal-
ity and the apprehension of social phenomenon.
As precise knowledge of society and its laws made it possible to citi-
cize the biases of ordinary obscurantism and the biases created by natural
sciences, Bruno Latour termed the newly founded social sciences of the
nineteenth century as the “second Enlightenment.” 35 The idea of cause
and effect and of the possibility of knowledge of the external world has
been the subject of modern Western philosophy since Descartes. If Ba-
con’s Novum organum in the seventeenth century laid a new foundation
for the entire work of “understanding,” his book The History of Life and
Death highlighted the importance of vital statistics to the broad improve-
ments in the human condition. 36 His call for quantitative studies which
later found reflection in the works of Graunt and Petty led to an emerg-
ing interest in statistical data in the seventeenth century.
Intervention in the external world is possible only when the objects or
events in the world are ordered and necessary connections between them
established. Kantian epistemology no doubt requires a “transcendental”
 Introduction 11

subject that constructs from the manifold of appearances objects that are
unities and this unifying act is necessarily subject to the categories. 37
Anthropologists have questioned Kant’s insights on the construction of
objects as unities. Ernest Gellner has argued that whereas Kant thought
that the mind is so constructed that it must bring forth within itself an
orderly knowable Newtonian world, he failed to find out how it was all
instilled in us, and that it was Emile Durkheim who, acknowledging the
pervasive presence of compulsion in our mental life, noted that it was
instilled by “ritual.” Gellner believes that the compulsive ideas of mod-
ern Cartesian man are not linked, in any one-to-one manner, to any spe-
cific ritual but to certain formal properties of ideas, which are socially
induced in more complex ways, and is engendered by a specific historic
experience. 38
In the present anthropological endeavor of grappling with the intro-
duction of new categories of knowledge and new modes of intervention
in colonial society, I suggest that governmentality of the modern colonial
state that made population its object of concern was instrumental in the
generation of social scientific knowledge. These being constituted
through practices meant that the “knowing subject” had exited the field,
and the authorizing power of governing practices became the subject of
knowledge.
If indeed the epistemological domains in colonial India were trans-
formed as a result of new modes of governance thus permitting the pos-
sibility of social scientific discourses, then the representations of the
spatio-temporal world of objects also underwent changes along with the
corresponding changes in collective consciousness. This could only have
been possible with the incorporation of new categories into the epistemo-
logical domains either through a set of new practices or by reconstituting
older ones. This is an aspect surprisingly neglected in anthropology and
in the recent postcolonial critical studies in spite of a great deal of atten-
tion paid to questions of rationality and modernity.

STATISTICS AND MODERN POWER

Particularly after the publication of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmod-

ern Condition questions relating to representation, legitimation, and the
role of the so-called “meta-narratives” have been foregrounded in the
debates on narrative strategies. With his declaration of incredulity to-
ward meta-narratives, Lyotard opened up new directions in the critique
of Enlightenment knowledge, with its assumptions of unanimity between
rational minds and of the teloses of its meta-narratives in which “the hero
of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end-universal peace.”
It is Lyotard’s opinion that the society of the future falls less within the
province of a Newtonian anthropology and more within the pragmatics
12 Introduction

of language particles with many different language-games and with only

local determinism, thus rendering void structuralism and systems theory.
Postmodern knowledge, he notes, is “not simply a tool of the authorities;
it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to toler-
ate the incommensurable.” 39
Although a great deal of debate has been generated since then, there is
an astonishing silence on a very important question. How did “modern”
knowledge, and by that I mean Enlightenment knowledge with teloses,
that which falls within Newtonian anthropology, which is a tool of au-
thorities, which erases differences for the sake of homogeneity and insists
on commensurability acquire its legitimacy and its universal character?
Although much of Foucault’s works deals with the constitutive relation-
ship of power and knowledge in the modern period in Europe, he no-
where mentions how modern regimes of power and knowledge were
instituted in the non-European world. Foucault’s disavowal of the coloni-
al moment as contingent to Western modernity enabled him to constitute
a “doubling of man” that was collusive with its dispersal because mod-
ern thought “moves no longer toward the never-completed formation of
Difference, but toward the ever-to-be-accomplished unveiling of the
Same.” 40 In the terrain of colonial discourse the “doubling of man” mani-
fested itself in a tension between the “synchronic panoptical vision of
domination . . . and the counter pressure of the diachrony of history.” 41
Universalist frameworks of knowledge sought to constitute a colonial
“Other” as a subject of difference that is almost the same but not quite.
With the foundational claims of knowledge being undermined in the
recent debates, and with the premium placed on the pragmatics of lan-
guage and language-games, one would have expected styles of language
initiated by modern knowledge, apart from literary and aesthetic devices,
to have gained some attention. 42 “Political Arithmetik,” for instance, is an
important aspect of modern power, and the significance of the “ava-
lanche of numbers” ushered by the modern state in most parts of the
world does not appear to have as yet been fully comprehended. 43 The use
of classificatory frames, objectification, and counting as an aspect of nor-
malizing power is something quite unique to the modern state.
Statistical representations have by far been the most potent form of
representation and indeed of constructing the worlds for enabling inter-
ventions in social, physical and natural processes. Statistical representa-
tions reflect different attitudes to reality, which mix of attitudes and rela-
tionship vary according to circumstances. Each of these attitudes have
different languages—a register of words, requirements, and arguments
that are consistent but difficult to interlink when one shifts from one
attitude to the other, such as from metrological realism, constructivism,
pragmatism of accounting, or argumentation based on data bases. 44 Un-
like ethnographic knowledge, which seeks to present “otherness” in its
uniqueness, statistical knowledge transforms “otherness” to differences
 Introduction 13

that it makes comparable and commensurable. 45 Comparative statistics

thus renders redundant the problem of the incommensurability of cul-
tures that concerned Enlightenment anti-imperialist thinkers of the eight-
eenth century like Diderot, Kant, and Herder whose inclusive moral uni-
versalism eschewed a universal scale of value. 46 By the end of the eight-
eenth century however, scales of comparison evolved as in the notion of
“mean intelligence,” which according to the French mathematician Prony
“characterizes and measures the superiority of one people over the other;
taking its state in France as term of comparison, one could make a nu-
anced and graduated table of all the peoples of Europe.” 47 The problem
becomes increasingly one of rendering commensurable the diverse social
arrangements and ways of living. 48 This also makes possible, as Talal
Asad noted for statistical universes to be expanded and contracted, un-
like the “cultural wholes” that constitute ethnographic knowledge. In fact
such universes have to be constructed, and does not exist out there. This
cognitive flexibility is not possible in the case of ethnographic knowledge
as its cognitive objects are “cultural wholes.” Statistical representations
thus emerge far more useful for intervening from both far and near, in
the economic, social, or political fields. Not only do enumerative prac-
tices of the modern state generate statistical data but such statistical nar-
ratives render both Western sciences and these practices universal, which
accounts for the dominance of positivity in modern knowledge.
As statistical facts are derived from enumerative practices there is a
tendency to view them as objective and free from the subjectivism of the
knowing subject. The distinction then between experiential data and sta-
tistical data is that the latter transforms data derived from a single act of
cognition into an aggregate, and locates data of a single event in a tempo-
ral sequence making possible the apprehension of statistical aggregates
and statistical repetition. These two transformations are generated
through the enumerative practice making it appear as though enumera-
tive practices can accomplish the epistemological goal without the
“knowing subject,” and become an instance of representation without
presence. Figuring the authority of nineteenth-century statistical dis-
course in England through the journal of the London Statistical Society,
Kirstie McClure shows in an interesting analysis of how the statistical
narrative by reversing the Lockean imagery of the move from the indi-
vidual to the state, effected an effacement of the subject. The “narrative
generated an image of state authority consistent not only with their ef-
facement of the individual as a subject of knowledge, but with their con-
comitant rendering of social institutions, practices, and populations as
objects of policy rather than subjects of authoritative political enunciation
in their own right.” 49
Statistical thinking has of course undergone profound changes. When
determinism was the guiding principle in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, it was felt that universally valid determinate laws of
14 Introduction

phenomenon could be deciphered. With the erosion of determinism, the

contingencies of chance were tamed through the development of probab-
ilistic thinking and correspondingly of stochastic statistical methods.
Sampling techniques developed in that context, and the idea of “repre-
sentative sample” replaced the earlier notion of “typical.” Statistically
derived “norms” and deviations therefrom were increasingly used to set
standards of judgment. The erosion of determinism did not undermine
the confidence in the abilities to manipulate and control systems, for with
probabilistic and stochastic thinking, the predictive possibilities also in-
creased. All this increased the potency of statistical modes of analysis. No
doubt, in recent years, the confidence in predictive possibilities as well as
the strength of positivity has been undermined with the appearance of
chaotic indeterminateness and nonlinear dynamical systems, thus put-
ting systems theory in jeopardy and giving greater importance to local
determinisms.
With the progressive governmentalization of the state with popula-
tion as its target the need to evolve standards such as the “normal” as-
sumed importance, and statistically derived notions replaced the earlier
“average man.” Post-colonial nation-states that embarked on national
planning had already been made aware of the importance of statistics, for
colonial governance had instituted complex systems of administrative
accountability in which statistics played the major role in recording and
evaluating performance. Indeed an interesting issue here is how statisti-
cal analysis of social and economic phenomenon assumed a universal
character, as it is only in the latter half of the nineteenth century that
statistical modes of analysis began to acquire importance in the European
world. 50 The transmission of such analytical practices to areas of the non-
European world would have to account for changes in the cognitive and
enumerative practices that made such analysis possible.
For sociological analysis to be conducted in terms of these statistical
categories, it is necessary for societal practices to themselves have been
reshaped by these categories. If practices are governed by rational acts
and conduct that embodies what can be called “practical reason,” then
these categories shaping the practices should have constituted that rea-
son before they can figure in the reason embodied in logical modes of
discursive analysis like “analytic reason.” Suppose one wants to study
the phenomenon of criminality in society. Before a sociological analysis
can be done, the social practices must enable the apprehension and iden-
tification of crimes. If society is unable to identify a set of acts as crimes,
the phenomenon of criminality cannot be analyzed. This is particularly
true of sociological analyses that seek to provide “explanations” in terms
of deriving law-like generalizations about phenomena and of the cause-
effect relationships that govern them. It does not refer to social analysis
that seeks to provide “understanding” based on interpretive or herme-
neutical methods, in which such understanding is derived through cate-
 Introduction 15

gories constituting the “natives” point of view. What may appear un-
problematically as two mutually exclusive types of social analysis, the
hermeneutical and the explanatory, has been the subject of debates in the
methodology of the social sciences.
I recall here the old debate between Peter Winch and Alasdair MacIn-
tyre on “The Idea of a Social Science.” 51 One of the issues that Winch
brings up for discussion is Weber’s account of “verstehen” and causal
explanation. He notes that for Weber “interpretation” aims at “self-
evidence” only, and cannot claim to be “causally valid.” Statistical laws
based on observations of what happens are necessary to verify such
hypotheses. Thus Winch notes that Weber arrived at a conception of
sociological law as a “statistical regularity, which corresponds to an intel-
ligible intended meaning.” 52 Winch contests Weber’s position and notes
that statistics is not the decisive and ultimate court of appeal for the
validity of sociological interpretation, as sometimes a proffered interpre-
tation could be wrong and what is needed then is a better interpretation.
The problem that Winch tries to grapple with in both Weber’s and Witt-
genstein’s ideas on sociological and philosophical analyses, is the pos-
sibility that categories used in investigations may be different from the
categories that belong to the activity under investigation. So, for Winch,
there is no scope for causal laws. Winch has a double-edged idea of a
social science, one bearing on the individual and the other on the societal
level understanding of regularities and institutions. 53 MacIntyre’s re-
sponse was that there were many phenomena in society that displayed
regularities and there were varieties of systematic regularities and not all
of them were the outcome of rule-governed behavior of the agents. Also
there were many conditions of individuals and societies that had a “logi-
cal character” such as “being unemployed, having kin-relations of a par-
ticular kind, rates of population change,” and these were not all action-
descriptions the way Winch assumed. 54 So for MacIntyre, there existed
scope for causal laws. Since then, of course, MacIntyre has altered his
position recognizing the game-theoretic character of social life with its
systematic unpredictability, and the ways in which predictability and
unpredictability are interlinked. 55
What seems to have been missed in that rather abstract debate was
that the conditions in question—of “being unemployed . . . rates of popu-
lation change”—were changes in the economy, and the “logical charac-
ter” of these conditions is not transparent under capitalist economies and
can only be perceived, deciphered, and predicted through statistically
generated laws. It was after all such a lack of transparency of the value-
creation feature of the “commodity,” the well-known “commodity fetish-
ism,” that prompted Marx to explore the laws of capitalism as well as the
then contemporary originators of the Neo-classical school to search for
laws regarding the price mechanism that could be statistically derived
and verified. This point may appear trivial to economists, though they
16 Introduction

may not all be aware that similar methodological debates have concerned
their fellows such as Friedrich von Hayek’s skepticism of statistical meth-
ods, or Thorstein Veblen’s attempts to draw on the semiotic ideas of
Charles Sanders Peirce to develop the foundations of institutional eco-
nomics as an alternative to the dominant positivist approaches. 56
The reason why I have retrieved this old debate between Peter Winch
and Alasdair MacIntyre is to bring to attention the long-standing issues
in anthropology on questions of rationality, relativism, and commensur-
ability of cultures. 57 An important issue seems to have been missed in
these debates, namely that the “ethnographic sites” have themselves
changed so tremendously in the era of “Late Capitalism,” that it is in-
creasingly being realized by anthropologists that it is not valid to talk
anymore of “cultural wholes.” 58 As “natives” everywhere try to compre-
hend as well as manage the changes taking place in new “languages” and
in new “styles of reasoning” such as the statistical ones, it seems that the
question of commensurability of cultures is not so significant an issue as
the problem of rendering commensurable more and more aspects of the
diverse “social arrangements” across the world. 59
If today in the era of “Late Capitalism” transnational and trans-
regional flows of finance, resources and information, and international
and intra-national disparities in income, wealth, and living standards are
so very obvious through the mass of statistical data, let us remind our-
selves that the significant ontological and epistemological shifts associat-
ed with those enumerative practices in different parts of the world have
not yet been fully comprehended. 60 International data spanning over two
hundred nations around the world are so commonplace today that we
hardly reflect on the ontological status of the nations. Nation-states in the
contemporary world system are similar, yet distinct and separable that
renders possible comparison and the marking out of differences. The
similarity is founded on the territorial boundedness of nations and state
sovereignty irrespective of its political form. Recently, Benedict Ander-
son provided an understanding of comparison across nation-states based
solely on similarity without conceding that it is constitutively linked to
“difference” marked by histories of power and processes of domination,
based on the canonical account of state sovereignty as being of autoch-
thonous European origins which has been universalized, bequeathing to
each nation comparable norms and forms of sovereignty. 61 Anderson
distinguishes two modalities of comparison, namely “bound seriality”
and “unbound seriality” based on the assumption of replicable plurals as
constituting the world. Comparison of cross-sectional and time series
statistical data across nations and regions would be an instance of bound
seriality that operates in and through governmentality. The relationship
between colonialism and the formation of norms of state sovereignty as
one of “inequality structured through the form of equivalence” are only
now being explored. 62
 Introduction 17

While census and statistics that established liberal governmentality

emerged from mercantile technologies of insurance and political arithme-
tic, the taxonomic management of “things” was learned by Europeans in
the process of governing bounded and isolated units of goods and per-
sonnel such as ships and islands. Written classifications of knowledge
that were the methodological predecessors of statistical questionnaires
arose from the epistemological shift “from the incorporating cosmology
of crusade, pilgrimage and mission to the distancing cosmology of explo-
ration.” 63 As industrial capitalism and new forms of governance devel-
oped in the West, the statistical mode of analysis came to acquire greater
and greater importance. 64 In the predominantly agrarian areas of the
world where industrial capitalism had not yet taken off, but which were
being integrated into the “economy of the Empire,” governance by the
colonial state provided the impetus for the statistical mode of analysis.
The techniques of governmentality by colonial states played a singular
role in this.
Statistics thus emerged as a powerful language in the construction of
modern power. Talal Asad notes very insightfully:
Statistics is a vital part of what I have elsewhere called “strong lan-
guages,” discursive interventions by means of which the modes of life
of non-European peoples have come to be radically transformed by
Western power. I want to say that modern statistics is the strongest
language of all. 65
Statistics was not merely a means of representing the colonized world but
was crucial in their construction as well, and enabled the development
and accumulation of instrumental capability. It also became the most
important language in the narrative legitimation of modernity, that is, for
telling stories about progress, of accumulation of wealth, control of na-
ture, the well-being of humanity, and equally to counter those stories as
well. It is therefore surprising that much of the critiques of colonial dis-
course have since Abdel Malek and Edward Said concentrated more on
representational powers, rather than considering representing and inter-
vening as two interrelated aspects. 66 An analysis of both the powers of
representing and intervening in their interrelated aspects is possible if we
explore the duality, of how regulatory practices constituted knowledge of
colonized societies and how administrative discourses sought to recon-
struct social forms in the colonial world. This book examines some of the
regulatory techniques of colonial state in India in both their representa-
tional and interventionist aspects by viewing them as mutually related
aspects of the regime of modern power and knowledge.
18 Introduction

COLONIAL GOVERNMENTALITY, QUANTIFICATION, AND

STATISTICAL KNOWLEDGE

The advent of colonial rule in India also marked the beginning of a vast
documentation project on a hitherto unknown scale of the activities and
life of the people. Various agencies such as archives, libraries, surveys,
revenue bureaucracies, folklore and ethnographic agencies, censuses, and
museums, and the writings and recordation of colonial administration
provided a context for the surveillance, recording, classifying, and evalu-
ating that was called for by the new order of nineteenth-century nation-
states with their imperializing and disciplining bureaucracies—whether
it concerned colonies abroad or criminals and slums at home. 67 Bernard
Cohn provides a classification of the investigative modalities by which
knowledge of Indian society was generated by British colonial rule that
he grouped as the historiographic, the observational/ travel, the survey
modality, the enumerative, the museological, the surveillance and sani-
tary modalities. 68 Although Cohn refers to the colonial state and “state-
making” as a cultural project, somewhat analogous to the ideas of Corri-
gan and Sayer, and invokes the name of Foucault, his investigative mo-
dalities are insufficiently integrated with the regulatory activities of the
state. 69 Foucault’s conception of governmentality provides a more useful
framework. 70
The techniques of government instituted by the colonial state differed
greatly from pre-colonial states both in the nature of accountability pro-
cedures and in the recording of information, although British administra-
tors sometimes overlooked the available data on India in their discus-
sions on colonial policy. These techniques of government called for the
setting up of new institutions, procedures, calculations, reflections, and
tactics giving rise to both a modern state form and to a modern regime of
power/knowledge, even if as argued the universalist knowledge project
though carried out successfully in the urban slums of England met its
limit in the colonial situation of India. 71
The institution of a fully developed colonial state was a process long
in the making during which colonial governmentality evolved with dif-
ferent political rationalities and technologies that were contingent and
context-related, even if in general colonial governmentality sought to
fuse liberal governmentality with the colonial rule of difference that was
racially marked. In the early years when the East India Company carried
its activities of commerce, the role of governing the population was insig-
nificant. Even then the Company bureaucracy set in its place systems of
accountability that consolidated knowledge of the commercial activities.
Once the company acquired the administration of police, justice and rev-
enue, first in Bengal and then in most other regions, the techniques of
government were progressively instituted. It was from 1818 onward,
after the defeat of the Mahrattas, that regular and centralized forms of
 Introduction 19

administration were to evolve; what Stokes aptly remarked in Burkean

phrase “The age of chivalry had gone; that of sophisters, economists and
calculators was to succeed.” 72
By now it is common knowledge that British administrative policy in
India did not evolve out of a consensus or at just one point in time. There
were the Anglicists who wanted to completely uproot the older system
and instal new institutions, and others who, following Burkean thinking,
wanting to revive, preserve, and improve the older institutions. In refer-
ring to the “modern system of morality and policy” as an epochal danger,
Burke anticipated the distinction between “the sense of responsibility to
act” and the “sense of responsibility to otherness.” 73 It was this difference
between the “sense of responsibility to otherness,” and the “sense of
responsibility to act” that marked the difference between Edmund Burke
and William Jones from Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. William Jones
in his researches on Oriental languages, laws and culture attempted to
define an idiom in which cultures could be compared and contrasted
which was a response to the need for such an idiom in the eighteenth
century that would determine the nature of British rule overseas, while
for Bentham and Mill the comparison of cultures on a scale of civilization
was essential for the formulation of their program of reform. 74 It was in
this context of the critique of political modernity by Burke and his detrac-
tors Bentham and James Mill who followed later that liberalism began to
influence Indian policy ultimately drawing out the authoritarian strains
within it, in the ideas of J. S. Mill and Bentham. Commenting on the
position of the “traditionalists” and those against the reforming zeal,
Stokes notes:
The passion for uniformity, for mechanistic administration and legisla-
tive regulation, which possessed the Utilitarians, was easily confused
with their life-long enemy, the system of Cornwallis. Yet, on the other
hand, they were largely in agreement with certain aspects of the Utili-
tarian viewpoint. The union of judicial and executive powers in the
collector; the simplification of the chaotic jungle of the law to a compact
intelligible code which respected Indian custom; the prejudice for a
ryotwari form of land settlement; and an accurate survey and record of
landed rights-in all these reforms they were in agreement with the
radical authoritarian strain in Utilitarian thought. But to the spirit of
utilitarianism they were as uncompromisingly hostile as Burke. 75
This picture drawn of the Utilitarians as crusading men who were anx-
ious to stamp their enlightened reason upon the diversity of race, culture,
and religion of the subcontinent leaving it in a state of “dull uniform
repose” was more of James Mill’s passion, and although Bentham is often
linked to it, it does not quite accord with Bentham’s views in his essay
Influence of Time and Place. Stokes argues that such liberal colonial admin-
20 Introduction

istrators as Thomas Munro struggled against the Utilitarian passion for

legislation and centrally imposed uniformity.
Ultimately, whatever the viewpoint and the local variations in admin-
istration, the procedures that got instituted called for an immense record-
ing of information. 76 From an initial “creolized form of colonial knowl-
edge” dependent on local subordinate intermediaries and informants
that mixed statistics and survey with a “motely” collection of informa-
tion, the British information-gathering became a system more and more
centralized, efficient, standardized, scientific, and statistical with the hier-
archical nature of long-distance governance under conditions of colonial-
ity progressively installing a new matrix of calculating rationality. 77 Al-
though in the early period of colonial rule, quantification was tied to
utilitarian concern it gradually became “more important part of the illu-
sion of bureaucratic control” and as Arjun Appadurai argued a key to a
“colonial imaginaire,” that by counting people and resources “at every
imaginable level and for every conceivable purpose, created a sense of a
controllable indigenous reality.” 78
From the latter half of the nineteenth century, after the 1857 rebellion
and the passing of governance from the Company to the Crown, admin-
istrative procedures in every department and province became far more
systematized. This period was also to launch the project of knowing India
“scientifically,” thus ushering the era of censuses and surveys on various
aspects of the social and economic life of the people. No doubt scientific
surveying of territories had started from the last years of the eighteenth
century, but population was not the explicit focus of concern. From the
latter half of the nineteenth century, population became the chief concern;
it was enumerated, classified, territorially delineated, and became the
target of interventions. As the apprehension of social and economic phe-
nomenon became possible through statistical methods, and as scientific
understanding of the nature of causality of a number of these social and
economic processes was gained, it became possible to devise modalities
of intervention by way of laws and regulations. The colonial state did not
have the developmental concerns of postcolonial state, and its adminis-
trative functions were to regulate the economy and society. Revenue ad-
ministration, law and order, education, infrastructure building, and a few
other activities constituted the bulk of administrative work. But in each of
these spheres, the statistical information recorded at various levels and
on an on-going basis provided the means to assess performance and thus
enabled modern social scientific discourses to emerge for the first time.
The archives of governance, as Ann Stoler has opined, render it pos-
sible to unravel the colonial categories of rule in their epistemic and
political trajectories of formation, effectiveness and contestation, and the
chapters that follow attempt to do so. 79 Statistics was not only a new
discourse, but the discursive practices of administration regulated certain
spatial and temporal categories, constituted new objects of discourse,
 Introduction 21

generated vast quantities of numbers and classifications, and ushered in

new kinds of interventions, new conceptions of causality, and new
modes of reasoning. With these new categories of time and space, new
conceptions of “economy” and “society,” and the new discourses of “his-
tory” and “progress,” narratives of modernity could be framed and con-
tested, and in so doing brought India within the discursive fold of univer-
sal science and universal history. In fact, the statistical practices of coloni-
al governance that promoted these new discourses were even instrumen-
tal in the formation of a new public sphere. Governance entered the pub-
lic discourse in a new way inviting the various publics to a “public use of
reason.” 80 By participating in this colonially instituted derivative dis-
course, nationalist discourse was able to both imagine the nation as well
as its teloses.

NOTES

1. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock Publications,

1969/1972/1985), 191–92.
2. Talal Asad, “Introduction,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal
Asad (London: Ithaca Press, 1973), 16–17.
3. Talal Asad, “From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of
Western Hegemony,” in Colonial Situations, ed. G. W. Stocking (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1991), 314–24. For the wider implications of Asad’s suggestion on
postcolonial criticism, read Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Cul-
ture and Society (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 73–74.
4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 29.
5. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Vintage,
1979/1995), 2. Scholars have argued that the construction of difference in Indological
discourse was not a simple dichotomy of “West” and “East” or “Self” and “Other” but
that there were multiple and shifting classifications of the “Other” in a text and at
times the discourse was premised not on discrete and dichotomous categorisation but
on a unifying essence expressed through the idiom of Romantic nationalism. Also
other discourses of “Otherness” were deployed simultaneously in a single text. Pea-
body seeks to establish these through his analysis of an Orientalist text—Tod’s Rajas-
than. See Norbert Peabody, “Tod’s Rajast’han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in
Nineteenth-Century India,” Modern Asian Studies 30, 1 (Feb 1996): 185–220.
6. Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (Autumn 1985):
95.
7. A number of scholars have criticized Said’s Orientalism as being itself an Orien-
talist discourse that sometimes appears to mimic the essentializing discourse it attacks.
See David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformation of Colonial Knowledge,”
in Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament, ed. Carol E. Breckenridge and Peter
Van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 250–78; Rosane
Rocher, “British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge
and Government,” in Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament, ed. Carol E. Breck-
enridge and Peter Van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1993), 215–49; Peter Heehs, “Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian
Historiography,” History and Theory 42 (May 2003): 169–95. Said has responded to
some of these criticisms. See Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered.”
22 Introduction

8. Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the

Post-Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia ed. Carol E. Breckenridge and Peter
Van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 314.
9. Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformation of Colonial Knowledge,” in
Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament.
10. Ali Rattansi, “Postcolonialism and its Discontents,” Economy and Society 26, 4
(1997): 481.
11. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
12. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 53.
13. Various understandings of colonialism’s “epistemological conquest” can be ob-
tained from the following works: Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encoun-
ter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973); Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelli-
gence Gathering and Social Communication, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1996); Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987/1990); Cohn , Colonialism and its Forms of Knowl-
edge: the British in India; Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected
Writings in Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Said, Oriental-
ism; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Inter-
pretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press,1988), 271–313; Phillip Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Pro-
duction of Colonial Knowledge,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, 4 (2003):
783–814; and others. Christopher Bayly notes, “The most common epistemological
strategy of colonial rule, was, in fact, a form of syncretism in which European knowl-
edge and technique were vaunted as superior, but were required to be grafted onto
indigenous stock when planted in the great extra-European civilisations.” See Bayly,
Empire and Information, 370.
14. When anthropologists use the expression “cultural translation” it is usually lim-
ited to making the meanings and significance of alien beliefs and practices coherent to
those outside that culture, and anthropologists as individuals generally do not seek to
intervene and reshape practices of the cultures they study. But as Nicholas Thomas
notes “Beliefs and notions that are not different take on the appearance of difference
through the process of apparent translation, through a discourse of the translation of
culture.” See Nicholas Thomas, “Against Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 6, 3
(August, 1991): 306–22.
15. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), 103.
16. Bruno Latour notes “All the distinctions one could wish to make between do-
mains (economics, politics, science, technology, law) are less important than the
unique movement that makes all these domains conspire toward the same goal: a
cycle of accumulation that allows a point to become a center by acting at a distance on
many other points.” See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and
Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 222.
17. Latour, Science in Action, 229.
18. Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspec-
tives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, 2
(April 1990): 383–408.
19. Edward Said has discussed in Orientalism as to how in discussions of the Orient,
the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as pres-
ence even if the Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective absence.
20. Bruno Latour observes, “Will we call ‘knowledge’ what is accumulated at the
center? Obviously, it would be a bad choice of words, because becoming familiar with
distant event requires, in the above examples, kings, offices, sailors, timber, lateen,
rigs, spice trades, a whole bunch of things not usually included in ‘knowledge.’ Will
we call it power then? That would also be a mistake because the reckoning of lands,
the filling-in of log books, the tarring of the careen, thugging of a mast, cannot without
absurdity be put under the heading of this word.” See Latour, Science in Action, 222.
 Introduction 23

21. Latour, Science in Action, 227.

22. Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India
Company(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
23. Arthur Fisher Bentley, The Process of Government, ed. Peter H. Odegard (Cam-
bridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 202. First published by
University of Chicago Press, 1908.
24. Bayly, Empire and Information, 9.
25. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Com-
mon Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
26. Cohn, An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays; and Colonialism and
its Forms of Knowledge.
27. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Dis-
course? (London: Zed Press, 1986); and The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postco-
lonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ranajit Guha, ed., Subal-
tern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society I–VI (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1982–1990); Partha Chatterjee and Gyan Pandey, eds., Subaltern Studies: Writings
on South Asian History, Vol. 7 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). Subaltern
studies volumes did not deal with epistemological issues and at best are suggestive of
sites of “subjugated knowledges.” Essays on the theme of “Gandhi and Modernity”
discuss the issue of alternate modes of cognition, but are not written with sensitivity to
epistemological issues.
28. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” Ideology and Consciousness 6, (1979): 5–21.
Also appearing in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality ed. Graham Burchell,
Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991): 87–104.
29. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972–1977 ed., Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 239.
30. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 20.
31. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 21.
32. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 191.
33. Arjun Appadurai notes that the British colonial state in India did employ quan-
tification in its rule of the subcontinent in a way that was different from both its
domestic counterpart in the eighteenth century and from its predecessor states in
India. See Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the
Post-Colonial Predicament, 315. For an idea about the precolonial statistical system in
India, read Durgaprasad Bhattacharya and Rama Deb Roy, “Khanasumari Records
and the Statistical System of India,” Indian Historical Records Commission, Proceedings
of the Forty-Fifth Session (Mysore) 45 (1977): 227–37.
34. Kautilya, The Arthasastra, ed. L. N. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Penguin Books,
1992). What I find interesting to note is that the rediscovery of the text in 1904, its
publication in 1909 and its translation in English by R. Shamasastry in 1915 after the
near complete installation of a new form of state can be seen to be in fact part of the
Orientalist oeuvre of making known “Ancient India,” as it were.
35. Bruno Latour, We have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Hertford-
shire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 35.
36. Peter Buck, “Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital
Statistics,” Isis 68, 1 (March 1977): 77
37. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1781/1965); and Bruce Aune, Knowledge of the External World (New
York: Routledge, 1991).
38. Ernest Gellner, Reason and Culture: The Historic Role of Rationality and Rationalism
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 49, 52.
39. Jean Francoise Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiii–xxv.
40. Foucault explains how in the shift from the classical episteme to the modern
episteme, man in the analytic of finitude was constituted as an empirico-transcenden-
24 Introduction

tal doublet. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1966/
1973), 340.
41. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London/ New York: Routledge, 1993),
86.
42. Paul Rabinow, “Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Moder-
nity in Anthropology,” in Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed.
James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986),
234–61; and Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979).
43. Juri Mykkanen, “‘To Methodize and Regulate Them’: William Petty’s Govern-
mental Science of Statistics,” History of the Human Sciences 7, 3 (1994): 65–88. Some
recent works analyzing the role of statistics are The Probabilistic Revolution, volume 1,
ed. L. Kruger, L. J. Daston, and M. Heidelberger(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987); Ian
Hacking, The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Theo-
dore M. Porter, The Rise in Statistical Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986), and Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
44. Alain Desrosieres,”How Real are Statistics? Four Possible Attitudes,”Social Re-
search68, 2 (Summer 2001): 339–40.
45. Talal Asad, “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power,” So-
cial Research 61, 1 (1994): 55–88.
46. Sankar Muthu, “Enlightenment Anti-Imperialism,” Social Research 66, 4 (Winter
1999): 959–1007.
47. Lorraine Daston, “Enlightenment Calculations,” Critical Inquiry 21, 1 (Autumn
1994): 191.
48. Fortes reveals that anthropologists have long grappled with how ethnography
and statistics could be combined when he notes, “Our investigation shows that ele-
mentary statistical procedures reduce apparently discrete ‘types’ or ‘forms’ of domes-
tic organization in Ashanti to the differential effects of identical principles in varying
local social contexts. This makes an assessment of the factors underlying the ‘norms’
possible; and it also enables us to relate the ‘norms’ to one another and to the apparent
‘types’ of domestic organization by taking into account the effect of time as an index of
growth.” See Meyer Fortes, “Time and Social Structure: An Ashanti Case Study,” in
Social Structure: Studies Presented to A. R. Radcliffe Brown, ed. Meyer Fortes (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1949), 54–84.
49. Kirstie M. McClure, “Figuring Authority, Statistics, Liberal Narrative and the
Vanishing Subject,” Theory and Event 3, 1 (1999).
50. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books, 1982).
51. Bryan R. Wilson, ed., Rationality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970).
52. Peter Winch, “The Idea of a Social Science,” in Rationality, ed. B. R. Wilson
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), 7. Winch questions Weber’s implied suggestion that
“verstehen” is something that is logically incomplete and needs complementing by a
different method altogether, namely the collection of statistics.
53. Philip Pettit, “Winch’s Double-Edged Idea of a Social Science,” History of the
Human Sciences 13, 1 (2000): 63–77.
54. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Idea of a Social Science,” in Rationality ed. B. R. Wilson
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), 123.
55. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: Univer-
sity of Notre Dame Press, 1981/1984), 88–110.
56. Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as
Nature’s Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
57. For a recent discussion on this issue of the controversy over the Hawaiian per-
ception of Captain James Cook between anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gana-
nath Obeysekere, see Steven Lukes, “Different Cultures, Different Rationalities?” His-
tory of the Human Sciences 13, 1 (2000): 3–18.
 Introduction 25

58. Nicholas Thomas too makes a similar point in his critic of the anthropologists’
ethnographic monograph that privileges both the exotic and the fieldwork as partak-
ing of “alterity.” He notes “A monograph is not about ‘other cultures’ but rather
another culture, and the fact that this must at some level be treated as a bounded and
stable system makes implicit contrast with a home-point almost inevitable even where
there is no explicit one-to-one juxtaposition. . . . Insofar as this is what ethnographic
writing is about, exoticism can only be disposed of by disposing of ethnography, by
breaking from one-to-one presentation into modes that disclose other registers of cul-
tural difference and that replace ‘cultural systems’ with less stable and more deriva-
tive discourses and practices. These have a systemic character, but a dialectical ac-
count must do justice to the transposition of meanings, their local incorporation.” See
Thomas, “Against Ethnography,” 311–12.
59. Asad, “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power.”
60. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament.
61. Benedict, R. Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalisms, Southeast Asia
and the World (London: Verso, 1998).
62. Radhika V. Mongia, “Historicizing State Sovereignty: Inequality and the Form
of Equivalence,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, 2 (2007): 386–87.
63. Peter Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History and the Emer-
gence of Western Governmentality,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 175.
64. Williams, Politics and Letters; Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing
Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
and David Eastwood, “Amplifying the Province of the Legislation: the flow of infor-
mation and the English State in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Historical Research 62,
(1989): 276–94.
65. Asad, “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power,” 78; and
Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in
Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George
Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 141–64.
66. A. Abdel Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” Diogenes, 11, 44 (December 1963):
103–40; Said, Orientalism; Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1983).
67. Carol E. Breckenridge, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India
at World Fairs,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, 2 (1989): 195–96.
68. Bernard S. Cohn and Nicholas B. Dirks, “Beyond the Fringe: The Nation-State,
Colonialism and the Technologies of Power,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, 2 (June
1988): 224–29; and Cohn, “Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge.”
69. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cul-
tural Revolution (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
70. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1999); and David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social
Text 43 (1995): 191–220.
71. Mary Poovey, “The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and
the East Indiamen,” Critical Inquiry 31, 1 (2004): 183–202.
72. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1959/1989), 13.
73. According to Schoolman the “sense of responsibility to act” refers to acting in
the world in justifiable ways, to a moral-prudential obligation to acquire reliable
knowledge, achieve practical ends in a defensible manner, solve problems, realize
certain values, and meet the expectations of other. The “sense of responsibility to
otherness” refers to exposing and rejecting the devaluation and discipline of an “Oth-
er” which is inevitably engendered by the cognitive machinery that underpins the
moral uprightness and pragmatic effectiveness inherent in the sense of responsibility
to act. See Schoolman, “Introduction,” in Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity,
Politics and Aesthetics Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994/2000).
26 Introduction

74. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s “The History of British India”
and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 16.
75. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, 22–23.
76. Cohn and Dirks, “Beyond the Fringe,” and Bayly, Empire and Information.
77. David Ludden, “India’s Development Regime,” in Colonialism and Culture ed.
Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 247–87.
78. Appadurai,”Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament, 317.
79. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
80. Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in Immanuel Kant: Philosophical Writ-
ings (New York: Continuum, 1784/1986).
 ONE
Sovereignty and Governmentality

Sovereignty in India underwent a radical transformation as colonial

governmentality evolved. Much like the history of sovereignty in the
West, which is one of epistemic discontinuities, conceptual reversals, and
changing metaphors that indicate the hiatus between the concept of sove-
reignty and the reality of it, so too is India marked by changing concep-
tions of sovereignty in its long civilizational history. 1 This chapter indi-
cates these changing conceptions of sovereignty in precolonial India,
contrasting them with the way “sovereignty” was constructed in the dis-
course of nineteenth-century liberalism, and how it was constructed in
practice as colonial rule entrenched itself. It discusses how as colonial
governmentality evolved the bureaucratic procedures of writing and re-
cordation constructed the state drawing both from British governmental
practices and from local contexts and contingent factors, making increas-
ing use of statistics in the technologies of rule. An examination of the
colonial archives in its production highlights the epistemic space of such
knowledge production.
In outlining a strategic model of analyzing power Foucault contended
that war presided over the birth of States and is the secret motor of
institutions, laws, and order, and that the rationality of calculations and
strategies emerges out of the tangle of the brute facts of force and the
accidents of failures, victories, rebellions, and alliances. Such an analysis
of power, he noted, develops entirely within the historical dimension,
and requires that the juridical model of sovereignty which presupposes
individuals with natural rights or primitive powers to surrender part of
their powers in order to become subjects governed by a covenant be-
tween the ruler and the ruled as in Hobbes and Locke, be replaced by an
approach that seeks to understand how “relations of subjugation can
manufacture subjects.” 2 Although Foucault’s analysis relates to the Euro-

27
28 Chapter 1

pean context of the emergence of modern states, this approach is useful in

analyzing the emergence of the modern colonial State as it was through
colonial wars and subjugation of the colonized that the colonial state
emerged, progressively setting in place its administrative apparatus.
Conquest did pose a challenge to notions of sovereignty as Locke
condemned it, and the Spanish in spite of a vast American empire ac-
quired by conquest banned the official use of the word in 1680. From the
sixteenth century onward, European states delegated sovereignty to mer-
cantile companies that enabled them to use violence against each other
and the European states to procure wealth and territory through overseas
expansion. In 1766, a committee of the House of Commons set up to
investigate the English East India Company’s activities in India chal-
lenged the sovereign powers of the Company by noting that no subject of
the Crown could acquire the sovereignty of any territory for themselves
but only for the nation, and that the Company cannot hold territories in
sovereignty when they paid an annual rent to the Mughal ruler in India.
The parliamentary act of 1767 also required the Company to pay the
British government a certain sum of money annually for holding territo-
ries in India.
By the end of the eighteenth century, English East India Company
exercised four different forms of sovereignty in different regions—sove-
reignty exercised under the authority of the English Crown in territories
ceded to the English by the Portuguese, sovereignty granted by Indian
rulers in exchange for revenue, de facto sovereignty where Indian rulers
served at the pleasure of the company, and sovereignty over territories
acquired by conquest. 3 The Charter Act of 1813 formally claimed sove-
reignty over the company’s territories, and British sovereignty in India
was announced to other European powers the following year. By the
Charter Act of 1833 the Company ceased its commercial operations and
became solely the agency through which the British ruled India. In 1858
after the Indian mutiny all the territories and governmental powers were
fully transferred from the Company to the Crown. During this entire
period of Company operations state-building processes were clearly
underway. As initially the British did not have an authoritative list of
Indian rulers nor whom to consider as a prince, they began to count them
using data from the archives, surveys, maps, and censuses, and as their
numbers rose in the second half of the nineteenth century, the colonial
power restricted the sovereignty of these rulers. 4
The defining feature of the colonial state was its externality even if it
had retained or revised existing institutions and practices; it was still an
external imposition and not evolved from within. Historians have been
concerned about the validity of conceiving the early phase of colonial
rule under the East India Company as the colonial “state” and have either
distinguished between the early and later phase of colonial rule as the
“commercial” and the “imperial” phases, thereby suggesting that the
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 29

“commercial” phase was devoid of the state or state-like conduct, or have

tended to present the entire period as a seamless one. 5 The early phase
has also been characterized as one of “surrogate statehood” that allowed
it to perform state-like actions “without the inconvenience of establishing
a right to govern” by manufacturing specific forms of legitimacy for each
state-like function it performed. 6 Philip Stern has argued that in the hun-
dred years before the Battle of Plassey in 1757 in which the East India
Company acquired Bengal, it had been functioning like a state although
without territorial sovereignity. 7 From 1770 till around 1850, the Compa-
ny consolidated its territorial acquisitions through conquests and treaties
as the “paramount power.” These treaties curtailed the freedom of the
native rulers to enter into agreements with other native states or colonial
powers, effectively surrendering to the “paramount power” their powers
to conduct their external affairs. This was strikingly evident in their rela-
tions with the Moghul emperor since the War of Delhi in 1803 when the
British aided the emperor to fight the Maratha power. Since then the
emperor was confined to his fort and over a period of twenty-five years
until 1828, the British reduced the emperor’s status in stages and abrogat-
ed the earlier agreements with him. 8 After the 1857 mutiny, the Moghul
emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried for treason as a subject of the
British Empire as he had proclaimed himself as the sovereign ruler, and
was later exiled to Burma. The policy of “Doctrine of Lapse” followed by
Dalhousie from 1850 enabled the paramount power to absorb native
states under its sovereignty in the absence of a progeny as a natural heir,
by restricting the rulers from appointing their heirs. By restricting the
sovereignty of the native rulers, the colonial power sought to legitimize
itself. 9
Edmund Burke identified the fundamentally dual source of the politi-
cal authority of the East India Company. The first was derived from the
charter by which it was endowed by the Crown and authorized by an act
of the Parliament. The royal charters of Cromwell, Charles II, and Queen
Anne granted the East India Company permission “to safeguard sea-
lanes, set up trading and manufacture on foreign soil, run mints, raise
armies, sign treaties, and mete out limited civil and criminal justice,”
although these did not stipulate much regarding the diplomatic and po-
litical relationship with Indian powers. Over time, the Company acquired
the right to confer titles and distinctions on the natives, to make war and
peace, to enter into treaties with the native states of India, and to make
rules and regulations for the governance of native subjects. 10 The second
source of political authority was derived from the collective charters and
grants bestowed on the Company by the Mughal emperor, particularly
the charter of 1765 that gave the Company the stewardship of Bengal,
Bihar and Orissa. Systematic misuse and abuse of the Mughal charters
and grants helped the Company’s assumption of sovereign rights over
trade, revenue, law, and land. 11
30 Chapter 1

However, it is with colonial rule that the Mughal emperor’s display of

stateliness connected with the exercise of authority declined and the state
began to acquire its impersonality. Whereas under the king the art of
government revolved arguably around the interests of the king, the im-
personality of the modern state made it to become the central object of
knowledge for “reason of state.” It does therefore seem reasonable to
conceive the early phase of colonial rule in Bentham’s term as a “political
society” even if a full-blown modern state was yet to be established. 12
Noting that the Company was a “political monster of two natures, subject
in one hemisphere, sovereign in another,” Thomas Macaulay viewed the
power of the Company as an anomaly in politics when he noted, “It is
strange, very strange, that a joint-stock society of traders-a society the
shares of which are daily passed from hand to hand . . . should be in-
trusted with the sovereignty of a larger population, the disposal of a
larger clear revenue, the command of a larger army, than are under the
direct management of the Executive Government of the United Kingdom.
But what constitution can we give to our Indian empire which shall not
be strange, which shall not be anomalous?” 13

SOVEREIGNTY AND HINDU KINGSHIP

Sovereignty in the West established as unitary power in the monarch

meant “absolutism.” Jean Bodin argued that only undivided authority
could prevent dissension. The theory of Divine Right justified monarchi-
cal “absolutism” by arguing that in every kingdom, the king’s power
came directly from god. In seventeenth-century England, Robert Filmer
(1588–1653) defended the divine right of kings in his book Patriarcha, or
the Natural Power of Kings in which he upheld the view that a government
of a family by the father was the true origin and model of all government.
Later Jeremy Bentham argued that Robert Filmer had failed to prove
divine right but instead had proved that subjection and not indepen-
dence is the natural state of man. In France, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet
(1627–1704) defended the theory of divine right. Divine right meant that
the king could not under any circumstances be resisted. This view pre-
vailed in England until the time of the “Glorious Revolution” in 1688 and
in France until the Enlightenment and Revolution.
In the entire Western juridical edifice, the king was the central charac-
ter and royal power was conceived in two senses, of either absolute or
limited. The monarch was either the living body of sovereignty, and that
even when his power was absolute, it was in keeping with a basic right;
or that if his power was to retain its legitimacy, then the power of the
sovereign had to be limited by submitting it to certain rules. In the Mid-
dle Ages the essential role of the theory of right had been to establish the
legitimacy of power. 14 In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, this
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 31

juridico-political theory of sovereignty that was bound up with a form of

power exercised over the land and its produce was supplanted by new
mechanisms of power that acted upon bodies and that were absolutely
incompatible with relations of sovereignty. The theory of sovereignty
assumes the existence of a multiplicity of nonpolitical powers such as
“capacities, possibilities and potentials,” which can be constituted as
powers in the political sense, if sovereignty establishes itself as a unitary
power, whether as monarch or as state. In the classical Western theory of
sovereignty the right of life and death was one of sovereignty’s basic
attributes.
The Hindu theory of kingship and sovereignty bears only limited
comparison with the Western theory. The Hindu king was never vested
with divine right but was constituted as divine kingship and was indeed
seen as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu (the protector in the Hindu trium-
virate of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva). Only when he is virtuous and self-
restrained, only when he carries out his duties of providing protection for
his people and attending to their welfare, is the king to be compared with
the gods. 15 The king was to suppress the evil in him, acquire humility,
and overcome the vices arising from the love of pleasure and of wrath.
The noted Indologist Ananda Coomaraswamy published a tract in 1942
under the auspices of the American Oriental Society entitled Spiritual
Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of Government that draws
evidence from a wide range of Hindu and Buddhist scriptural works to
examine the nature of the relationship between the “Sacerdotium” (spiri-
tual authority) and the “Regnum” (temporal power). Whereas earlier
scholars, Evola and Hocart, accorded primacy to the “Regnum” as the
active principle and the “Sacerdotium” as the passive and contemplative
principle, Coomaraswamy proved the contrary.
In the Hindu divine kingship, sovereignty is not established as a uni-
tary power but as a duality enfolding in it the potentialities of both law/
welfare and force/violence. According to Coomaraswamy the whole of
Indian political theory is implied and subsumed in the words of the
marriage formula, wherein the progenitive pair Mitra-Varuna and In-
dragni are seen to articulate the principle of divine kingship, with Mitra,
Agni, and Brhaspati as the divine archetypes of the Sacerdotium or spiri-
tual authority (brahma) and Varuna and Indra those of the Regnum (ksa-
tra). In the constitution of divine kingship, the Sacerdotium assumes
precedence over the Regnum, and only under such a context can the king
in fact exercise sovereignty. 16 Coomaraswamy considers the Bhagavat
Gita as an Arthasastra (the science of government), as its message of the
control of the senses and conquest of self is identical with what Kautilya,
the author of Arthasastra, describes as the whole of this science of govern-
ment. Only when the Sacerdotium and the Regnum (the priest and the
king) act together, only then do they both possess the counseling power.
It is not for the king to say or command or do whatever he likes but only
32 Chapter 1

what is “ordered to the end” and thus “correct.” The king’s art is the
science of government, where science as “truth” is a combination of Intel-
lect and Voice. Government was essentially vocal in character.
Coomaraswamy notes that the octad of king-making deities (Savitr,
Agni, Soma, Brhaspati, Indra, Rudra, Mitra, and Varuna) endow the king
with a variety of powers and virtues. Describing the initiatory rites of the
king (abhisekha) translated as “Coronation,” Coomaraswamy argues
with evidence that it is intended to enthrone as king, not a “Varuna” but
a “Mitra” so as to ensure a “Supreme Sovereignty” and to slay all his evil
through the pressing of Soma. This puts the king above the law so that he
can do no harm. When the Sacerdotium and the Regnum (the priest and
the king) act together, then both possess the counseling power. Cooma-
raswamy notes that a king “works” not with his hands but by his fiat or
edicts. The king is the “Voice” that gives effect to the purposes of the
Spiritual authority and thus does the will of God on earth.
The primary work of the god-king and the earthly kings is the perfor-
mance of the Sacrifice. The essential purpose of the Divine Marriage, in
which the priest and king are the representatives of Sky and Earth, is
apotropaic of Death and especially Famine. 17 Death is averted from the
kingdom by means of the Divine Marriage and the Sacrifice, and many
Upanishad texts refer to the marriage as an insurance against the priva-
tion. The king is directly responsible for the fertility of the land and
rainfall at the right season depends upon his righteousness or default,
giving rise to the widespread belief that life and fertility of the realm
depends upon the king.
Coomarawamy notes that the notion of a divine pastor and of an
analogous human pastorate is one of the very many formulae common to
Platonic and Vedic philosophy. There is an art of herding human beings
and the government and care of men is preeminently the sacerdotal func-
tion, but in so far as the royal function is delegated to a king, the latter
can also be called a shepherd of men, as in some of the Indian texts where
the king too is a gopa. 18 Coomaraswamy thus concludes that the tradi-
tional Hindu king in antiquity is not a “constitutional ruler” whose ac-
tions merely reflect the wishes of a majority of his subjects or those of a
secular minister, nor king by virtue of any “social” contract, but a ruler
by divine kingship, and this does not imply that he is an “absolute” ruler,
but on the contrary that he is himself the subject of another king, where
the law (dharma), than which there is nothing higher, is the very princi-
ple of royalty, although the king was not really responsible to anything
like divine law. Thus while the constitutional monarch may be controlled
by his equals or even his inferiors, the ruler by divine kingship is con-
trolled by a superior. Human law reflects divine law and the king was to
link the people with the spiritual order.
With reference to the individual as a subject, the Indian science of
government has three aspects—the cosmic (adhidevatam), the political (ad-
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 33

hirajyam), and the self (adhyatmam). The question is not only one of a
universal and a national or civic order, but also one of internal econo-
my—a government of the self wherein the factors of disorder are ruled by
a principle of order, if the goals of wellbeing in this world and the other
are to be reached. It is believed that man has two selves, the one outer
and active, the subject of passions, the other inner, contemplative and
serene. The problem of the internal economy by which the man’s ends
(purusartha) can all be attained is one of the relationship of the psycho-
physical ego to the spiritual person, the outer king to the priest within
oneself. The two selves correspond to those of Mitra-Varuna, Sacerdo-
tium and Regnum. The kingship envisaged by the Indian traditional doc-
trine is thus far removed from “absolute monarchy” or of “individual-
ism.” Arthasastra, the classical Indian text on the science of government
observes that only a ruler who rules himself can long rule others, and that
the whole of this science has to do with a victory over the powers of
perception and action.
A few years after Coomaraswamy’s book was published, Georges
Dumezil published his book Mitra-Varuna in 1948, providing his interpre-
tation of the king-Brahman (king and priest) relationship wherein the
Brahman protected the king against the “magico-religious risks” inherent
in the exercise of the royal function while the king maintained the Brah-
man in a place equal to or above his own. 19 Dumezil also noted that the
sacerdotal early literature pointed to the existence of a brotherhood
formed to “educate heroes,” the Gandharva transposed to the mythical
realm as a band of supernatural beings, and which men may join by
initiation. The juxtaposition of Mitra and Varuna is antithetically asso-
ciated in a way that ensures their collaboration. While Mitra is associated
with the Brahman, Varuna is with the Gandharva.
Dumezil considers the anti-thesis underlying the Brahman-Gandhar-
va opposition as two organs of “magico-religious” sovereignty; Varuna
initiates in violence the religious and/or political order that Mitra devel-
ops in peace. The magical sovereignty of Varuna operates by means of
bonds (nexum) and debts: the violent god or king controls his enemy
with magical ties and his community with obligations. The second, juridi-
cal sovereignty of Mitra employs pacts (mutuum) and faith: the reasoned
legislator preserves society through the validity of contracts and the ful-
fillment of responsibilities. Both the Brahman and the Gandharva share
equally in the task of securing the life and fecundity of society. The two
heavenly sovereigns, Mitra and Varuna, who stand opposed as law and
violence, find place in Indian epic history as two dynasties called the
“sun” dynasty (Surya Vamsam) and the other “moon” dynasty (Chandra
Vamsam), of which one traces its ancestry back to the king-legislator,
Manu, and the other to the king-Gandharva Pururavas. 20 Extant archaeo-
logical evidence in all parts of the country that trace the genealogy of
Hindu kings mention as to which of the two dynasties the king belonged.
34 Chapter 1

Drawing from Dumezil’s “bipolar” sovereignity as varying relations of

force and contract and his idea of men being initiated as Gandarvas or
supernatural beings, it has been argued that such sovereignty could be
considered at varying thresholds of life, thus providing an understanding
of how “deified sovereignty” governs human conduct in everyday life. 21
Manusmriti that predates Kautilya’s Arthasastra by a few centuries
clearly lists the role and functions of the Hindu king. It notes that the king
is created of a Kshatriya who has received the sacrament according to the
Veda to protect the castes and orders of the world and that he is created
out of the eternal particles of gods like Indra, Agni, Vayu, Varuna, etc.
Such a king assumes many different shapes by turns for the complete
attainment of justice. Punishment ensured order and the performance of
duties, and it was a king’s duty to be a just inflictor of punishment and
the upholder of contracts. Manusmriti also mentions that the king does
not intervene directly in local matters but appoints a hierarchy of lords in
charge of one or more numerous villages who report about crimes in the
villages to the lords immediately higher in the hierarchy. This clearly
indicates that there were gradations of sovereignty in practice. In ancient
India, custom, Vedic laws, and the concept of one’s own dharma gov-
erned the daily lives of the people. As participation by the individual in
the politically organized pattern of relationships was small, and only
affected a small segment of a man’s personality, even if the political au-
thority had glaringly vicious features, these would not be apparent and
could be tolerated in the context of the political universe that was remote
and impersonal. 22
Historians of antiquity have questioned the connection of royalty with
priestly rank, and that if it ever had been a motif of the growth of king-
ship in India it had disappeared a long time before. Max Weber in his
Indische Studien thought the connection of king to the priest, the transfor-
mation of the Kshatriya to a Brahman through the sacrifice was a survival
of a former age, and that temporal power in India as in Europe gradually
freed itself from its originally legitimate status as agent of the spiritual
authority. Louis Dumont is of the view that kingship is secularized as its
domains are danda (legitimate force) and artha (material interests or expe-
diency) and that the political is subordinated to the religious which ex-
plains the relationship of the king to the Brahman, while Derrett dis-
agrees with Dumont as he thinks that the king performs religious roles
some of which are superstitious, and that the king’s relationship to the
Brahman is only a qualified subordination under limited circum-
stances. 23 Stein holds that a de-scaralization of kings occurred in the
Gupta period, in which sacred kings are replaced by sacred kingship. 24
The king was to abide by Rajadharma, which is the way a king should
comport himself in order to be righteous. The effects of unrighteous ad-
ministration cannot be washed away by sacrificial performance by the
ruler. 25 This is different from Rajaniti, which is the way a king should
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 35

comport himself in order to be successful. The theory of divine origin can

be confused with that of divine right by those schooled in the Western
tradition, but in Hindu political philosophy the two are distinct.

THE MUGHAL STATE AND SOVEREIGNTY

In the vast historiography of the Mughal state there is no consensus on

the nature of the state that was being made over the long period of
Mughal rule from 1526 to 1750. Conventional wisdom has highlighted
the systematicity and the systemic nature of the state especially as re-
gards its centralized fiscal and monetary system, and its revenue collec-
tion aided by the Mughal prebends, the ranking system (or mansabdari),
and the revenue assignment (or jagirs). However, using data on revenue
collection from “regulation” territories where land was surveyed and
measured and other territories where measurement was undertaken, his-
torians have noted that the Mughal system drew about one-third of its
revenue from nonregulation or other territories and concluded that the
system was after all not that centralized nor had it a uniform bureaucra-
cy. 26 Its interests in maritime trade, especially of emperors Akbar and
Shahjahan, carried the long Iranian tradition of combining imarat (state-
craft) and tijarat (trade). Most of the state’s actions can be explained in
terms of the desire of a small ruling class for more and more material
resources leading to unremitting extraction of resources from the agrar-
ian economy, what appeared to the British administrator W. H. More-
land, as “Oriental Despotism.”
Thomas Roe who arrived in the Mughal court in 1615 as an ambassa-
dor of King James complained in the letters he wrote back about the lack
of distinction between spoken edicts and written laws by the Mughal
king, indeed the absence of written laws, and that the king personally
presided over punishments, both civil and criminal. Moreover, Roe and
his deputies found that in the Mughal court, letters themselves and not
the contents of the letters were considered as objects that were venerated
and received as the person of the king himself. 27 This conflation of the
person of the king with the letters indicates that unlike the Europeans for
whom there was a stable correspondence between words and their refer-
ents, the Indians in the Mughal period had a different understanding of
the social relations of language. Bureaucracy in the modern sense was
lacking.
Nevertheless, the Mughal administration did produce knowledge in
the form of dastur ul-amal (revenue manuals) and its growing corpus in
the reign of Shahjahan paved the way for the “governmentalization” of
the state under Aurangazeb’s reign. This period saw the growth of for-
malization, a greater insistence on measurement sometimes through re-
surveys, the systematization of information flows to the center through
36 Chapter 1

akhbarat, the king’s letters to particular officials drafted as statements of

policy, and the growing collection of royal letters and instructions, fea-
tures that have since been characterized as those of a modern govern-
ment and rational bureaucracy. 28 While they had elaborate systems of
counting, classifying and controlling the large population under their
control, there was no enumeration of group identities. 29
A central question of sixteenth-century historiography is the transi-
tion from Afghan-style sovereignty of the early Timurids to the Mughal
claims to sovereign status. Although succession rivalries were present
under Mughal rule, the claimants were limited to those of direct descent
by narrowing down the peer group of the ruler. The formulation of Mu-
ghal authority was achieved through “illuminationist” theory (of farr-i-
izadi) and through the creation of a royal cult (tauhid-i-Ilahi), both of
which emphasized the personal qualities of the ruler, and the notion of a
single, rather than shared, sovereignty. Abul Fazl erected the intellectual
scaffolding for the dynastic ideology and asserted the divinely illumined
right of the Emperor to rule those with lesser qualities. His monumental
Akbar Nama was an annual recounting of the events of forty-seven regnal
years along with an Appendix in three volumes, the Ain-i-Akbari, an im-
perial manual and gazetteer. Akbar built upon his personal appeal by a
series of symbolic acts to establish an image of the Emperor’s person as
the embodiment of the Empire. 30 Strong emotive ties with the imperial
nobility who shared a complex Indo-Persian etiquette and ritual which
defined and patterned transactions of authority and subordination was
achieved through the glorification of the Emperor’s person. The Mughals
were eclectic in formulating their ideology reconciling the austere visions
of the Afghan court with the conditions prevailing in north India.
Over time, the Mughal state’s geographical area extended and Auran-
gazeb presided over a vast territory extending up to southern India even
as it encompassed a diversity of territories and communities, and were
seen as the only true source of sovereignty. The reasons cited for the
decline of the imperial system after the death of Aurangazeb are many
ranging from religious bigotry, the oppressive system of revenue extrac-
tion from the peasantry, an inherently flawed system of political integra-
tion of the nobility and the landholders, the burden of wars in the Dec-
can, the fiscal crisis caused by the indigenous banking firms that increas-
ingly turned their attention to the regional polities and the East India
Company and away from the Mughal nobility, and the lack of an imper-
sonal bureaucracy. 31 After 1765, both the Maratha power and the East
India Company in Bengal worked behind the Mughal façade.
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 37

PRECOLONIAL TERRITORIALITY AND SOVEREIGNTY

An examination of the nature of the territoriality-sovereignty relationship

in the pre-colonial polities of India indicates that the moral and political
rationale of those governing structures were vastly different from that of
the modern state. In fact, the term “sovereignty” in precolonial polities is
replaced by some as “subsumption” or “subsidiarity,” as powers even at
the highest centers were circumscribed in two ways. The caste system set
aside certain important aspects of social conduct outside its legitimate
purview, and secondly lower levels of the power structure were arranged
more or less as a modern federating structure than as a single whole with
indivisble sovereignty. 32 This form of precolonial polity enabled the
Company to establish its power from the grant of the Bengal Diwani in
1765 until the mutiny in 1857 when it deposed and exiled the Mughal
emperor.
Using the idea of segmentary states and the notion of “pyramidal
segmentation,” Burton Stein characterized medieval south India as com-
posed of numerous local segments, each of these were structurally and
morally coherent units themselves though they had the potential for
massing together as supralocal formations for political purposes. 33 Stein
noted that these segments comprise a state in their recognition of a sacred
ruler “whose overlordship is of a moral sort and is expressed in an essen-
tially ritual idiom.” 34 Except in the circumscribed core territories of the
capitals where the kings commanded and managed resources and men
through compelling coercive power, they were otherwise essentially ritu-
al figures or symbols of the sacred and moral order to which all must
belong. Territorial sovereignty in the segmentary state is different from
the unitary state, with two notions of territory, one in which there is
ritual supremacy that is legitimately conceded to a single center and the
other where there is political control which may be distributed among
many throughout the system. 35 Pyramidal segmentation and sacral king-
ship implied a political system of fluidity and indeterminacy both as
regards boundary and the reach of royal intervention.
Contending other historians’ view of the Chola state in medieval
south India, which lasted for about 300 years from A.D. 950 to A.D. 1100
as a centralized one, Stein has argued that it was a “pyramidally seg-
mented” state, because the smallest unit was linked to ever more compre-
hensive units of political organization of an ascending order for various
purposes, but that each unit stood in opposition to the other. 36 A marked
contrast in the conception of kingship in the Chola period in contrast to
the Pallava period was the royal support of grants to Hindu temples
instead of sacrifices like (yagas) such as the asvamedha (horse sacrifice) in
earlier times. Such grants were allocated not by the king but by the local-
ity chieftains from resources allocated to them. 37 Stone and copper plate
38 Chapter 1

inscriptions formed the normative documents of the era, in substitute of

modern bureaucratic documents.
Stein has also described the Vijayanagara state, immediately preced-
ing colonial rule in large parts of south India, as a segmentary state as it
extended its overlordship throughout the entire macro-region outside of
its core territory through an intermediary class of warrior chieftains
called “nayakas.” The Vijayanagara kingdom did not have “the linear,
centralizing, record-keeping modes of the Mughals and were oriented to
numbers as a far more subtle cosmopolitics of names, territories, honors,
shares, and relations.” 38 The ethnic territoriality that prevailed in earlier
times was disbanded for a system in which the village was the effective
unit of resource management, though the older territoriality prevailed as
a kinship and marriage unit.
This was the structure of governance that the British colonialists en-
countered in south India in the early period of colonial conquest. The
British soldier-administrators fought many little battles with these peas-
ant-warriors (Palaiyakkarar), referred in colonial accounts as “poligars,”
who while defending their own lands and rights resisted the imposition
of Company rule. The revenue settlement process under Company rule
made many of these “poligars” into “zamindars” or landlords serving as
revenue farmers as well.
Nicholas Dirks in his ethno-historical research of one of the little
kings, namely the “Poligar” of Puddukottai provides insight into the gov-
erning principles of such kingship. 39 Gifts provided the infrastructural
circuitry that connected ritual and politics, as relations of worship and
loyalty were articulated through this process. Gifts of land were held and
given without regard to the new forms of systematic assessment and
taxation that prevailed elsewhere, and the surplus of resources flowed to
temples that organized worship. Kaniyatci was a fundamental right in
that local society, and was seen inter alia as the right to a share in one's
local temple and signified in the right to receive temple honors, it also
had to do with grants from kings, territorial dominance, control over
local labor, and the ritual and agricultural services of the eighteen castes,
shares in lineage systems, marriage exchanges within subcastes, ideologi-
cal agreement about control over the cultural components of subcaste
organization and domination. 40. The caste system in Pudukkotai, Dirks
notes, was organized around principles of honor, order, discipline, royal
status, rights and shares to worship (puja) and associated ritual entitle-
ments. The reproduction of caste relations was thus a reproduction of the
cultural hegemony of kingship.
Using the same segmentary state framework, Pamela Price explored
the nature of kingship and political practice in the zamindaris of Sivagan-
gai and Ramnad in the Tamil country, where in the absence of bureau-
cratic regulation and administration and of universal legal norms, status
and honor were displayed and constituted in many arenas; ritual perfor-
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 39

mances and its transactions being a significant component. 41 Since status

was not something absolutely fixed, the personal relationships of govern-
ance were in fact very competitive. Contesting Dirks' claim that the kings
were not only legitimate, but that they defined the realm of the legiti-
mate, Price supports David Shulman's contention that the legitimacy of
precolonial Tamil kings were tenuous and continuously under attack.
Basing his study on the rise of Maratha supremacy, André Wink des-
ignated the shifting balance of power among heads of fluid domains
through the practice of fitna as the main principle of statecraft in precolo-
nial India. 42 He argues that the rise of Maratha supremacy based on fitna
did not in fact contribute to a depletion of the centralized Mughal power
as the Mughal Empire represented a form of sovereignty in which a
system of continually shifting rivalries and alliances were sought to be
balanced. Concomittant with the Mughal expansion, there was competi-
tion for local alliances among the conquering Mughal nobility striving for
independent power-bases in the provinces which occasioned participa-
tion in the system of sovereignty of the Hindu gentry, of the zamindars.
This was the powerful dynamic of fitna moving in the opposite direction
of universalism and centralism, a dynamic, which is misleadingly re-
ferred to as the “decline” of the Empire. 43 Thus it did not fundamentally
differ from the segmentary system that prevailed in the south during the
Vijayanagara rule.
The political system that prevailed in parts of northern India such as
Oudh was also similar to the segmentary forms of state. For eighteenth
century Benares, Bernard Cohn noted that it was possible analytically to
differentiate four levels of the political system. 44 The imperial and the
secondary levels exercised sovereignty over a major historical, cultural,
and linguistic region, often monopolizing the symbols of legitimacy. Each
secondary system was made up of groups of regional systems, which had
as their heads, individuals or families whose status was granted by the
higher authority, who were loosely incorporated through rituals of alle-
giance and financial obligation to the national power and were often in
competition with potential rivals. At the local level, the smallest political
units were the lineages, which were subordinate to the regional leader
though deriving their status from the secondary authority. These lineages
directly controlled the peasants and others in the locality often collecting
cash and kind for some protection they offered from outside interference.
There was a wide range of internal arrangements of the lineages, but the
principle of sharing was, however, based genealogically. In some local-
ities lineage control was substituted by a “raja” who had certain develop-
mental functions such as the construction of irrigation works and clear-
ing of jungles in addition to revenue collection. All this underwent
changes with the initial British contact in the late eighteenth century and
early nineteenth-century, as the British government replaced the Mughal
and regional systems with salaried civil administration. In the talukas
40 Chapter 1

where old lineages retained some power, their actions were circum-
scribed by the regulations of the British administration and the lineages
were not recognized as political entities. 45 Using the model of a develop-
mental cycle, Richard Fox has argued that often a strong state that is
locally intrusive could depose the kin order, and when the state was
weak the local corporate kin groups could grow and flourish. 46 In the
absence of territorial states, this dynamics of kinship conditioned the
state order and bound the region together. In the transition to a modern
state in the colonial context, caste, lineage and kinship were sundered
from locality and made to emerge as translocal social entities. 47 The na-
ture of the territoriality/sovereignty relationship was to undergo a funda-
mental change from precolonial to colonial rule.

“ORIENTAL DESPOTISM” AND THE CLAIMS OF LIBERALISM

The concept of despotism in the eighteenth century, especially in the

writings of Montesquieu, referred in particular to Asian societies and
governments that were seen as politically dysfunctional and deemed for
long to be under despotic rulers. Such a notion of despotic rule was also
applied to the governance of Warren Hastings, an early governor-general
of the East India Company whom Edmund Burke indicted for misrule.
The debates over the indictment give a clear idea about the conceptions
of “Oriental Despotism” that were then prevalent. In accusing Hastings
of despotic rule, Burke associated him with Oriental practices, as Euro-
peans perceived them, which clearly violated the moral norms of Euro-
pean political culture. Burke observed:
I do not know how we can deny the Existence of many despotic princi-
ples in the Moghul system of Government, but wherever those exist the
Powers of the Prince will be every Thing, and the Rights of subject
nothing. Since he was called upon to govern in this environment, he
too was possessed of an arbitrary and despotic power, restrained by no
laws but his own will. 48
Burke was of the view that despotism was neither the norm in Indian
government nor was it sanctioned by the prevailing moral and religious
codes. But there were instances of Indian despots, and aberrant periods
when such rulers and practices were common. The history of Bengal in
the years preceeding and during the acquisition of power by the East
India Company comprised such a period; certain local tyrants who were
employed, provided company servants with their conceptions of how
India of necessity had to be governed. 49 William Jones, the Orientalist,
was of the opinion that a democratic system would make Indians as
miserable as under a cruelest despotism as on account of their prejudices
and habits, they were incapable of civil liberty. He instead preferred a
“legal despotism” under British rule based on his digest of Indian laws. 50
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 41

Hastings defended his actions explaining that “Sovereignty in India is

a very different thing from European ideas of sovereignty,” it means
“arbitrary power and nothing else,” that “the history of Asia is nothing
more than the precedents to prove the invariable exercise of arbitrary
power,” so suggesting that a different individual and national morality
prevailed in India. 51 Hastings claimed that British imperial servants,
though ultimately responsible to Parliament, could ignore the principles
of government enshrined in the British Constitution.
In condemning the despotic rule of Hastings, Burke even referred to
Indians as “this unhappy part of our fellow citizens” and also as “our
fellow creatures and fellow subjects in that oppressed part of the world”
as he believed that empire could only be a single sovereign whole with-
out a divided legislative authority, and that government and empire
were bound by relationships of accountability. He noted “[A]ll political
power which is set over men . . . ought to be some way or other exercised
ultimately for their benefit.” 52 Burke detailed how the power exercised
by the East India Company worked at every level against the benefit of
Indians.
The reforms in Fox’s East India Bill sought to make the Company
accountable to Parliament. 53 Claiming that Fox’s East India Bill consti-
tuted the Magna Carta of Hindostan, Burke noted, “Whatever the great
charter, the statute of tallage, the petition of right, and the declaration of
right, are to Great Britain, these bills are to the people of India,” and that
such charters of rights and charters of limited government, the hallmark
of English, and to some extent European political history, were the basis
of constitutional government, and hence the guarantor of other valued
practices. 54 He believed that such enactments could be transplanted in
some form to India, where they could initiate a tradition of constitutional
role and a process by which India could learn to complement their laud-
able customs with political liberty. Although the Moghul rulers some-
times conferred privileges or issued grants of authority, as it did to the
East India Company, by means of legal documents called charters, there
were no charters in India providing for constitutional government or
legal protection of rights on a constitutional level. Burke hoped to rectify
this by promising to turn Indians’ natural rights, which the East India
Company abused, into “the chartered rights of Men” just as the Magna
Carta in England had transformed natural rights into prescriptive rights.
Observing that “every means effectual to preserve India from oppression,
is a guard to preserve the British constitution from its worst corruption,”
Burke went on to note:
Of this benefit, I am certain, their condition is capable; and when I
know that they are capable of more, my vote shall most assuredly be
for our giving to the full extent of their capacity of receiving; and no
42 Chapter 1

charter of dominion shall stand as a bar in my way to their charter of

safety and protection. 55
Emphasizing further the relationship of empire and constitution he
noted, “[I]f we are not able to continue some method of governing India
well, which will not of necessity become the means of governing Great
Britain ill, a ground is laid for their eternal separation; but more for
sacrificing the people of that country to our constitution.” 56 The Fox Bill
failed however, but this passage suggests without doubt the superiority
of British political conceptions, and hints at the kind of liberal justifica-
tion for imperialism that was to be greatly elaborated in the following
century.
Knowing that the servants of the East India Company “could not be
expected . . . [to] practice Magna Carta,” Burke appealed to a common
form of just treatment for the different people of the earth. Under this
conception, imperial contact outside the imperial society was to be
guided by a universal conception of human justice. Rejecting traditional
images of non-European peoples he sought to convince that justice be-
tween different peoples required not assimilation of the weaker to the
stronger but the preservation of difference. In confronting this problem of
the “Other” in his efforts to reform British imperial policy in India, he did
not refer to European standards to condemn the practices of the East
India Company, nor did he outline obligations on the basis of an institu-
tional view of international society. As his conception of international
law was influenced by the common cultural heritage of Europe, Burke
regarded India as outside the area where the “law of nations” applied.
He appealed instead to notions of universal justice and natural law in
criticizing British imperial policy in India. Even so, his use of natural law
to defend Indian culture from British imperialism has been regarded as
an exportation of a European “truth regime,” representing European
domination rather than moral sensitivity. 57
Influenced both by the developmental theory of the Scottish Enlight-
enment and the national and economic interests of Britain in its trans-
atlantic empire, Burke defended the subjugation of native Americans and
slaves in the New World that reveals a pro-imperialist bias. 58 The “Oth-
er” that Burke confronted that was outside the “law of nations” was
thematized by later thinkers, Grant and James Mill, as scalar models.
While for Grant it was “the moral scale,” James Mill, influenced by the
Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, appealed to a “scale of civilization,”
which ordered the cultural variety of human kind in a hierarchy of pro-
gressive development that became the theoretical base for a liberal theory
of Empire. James Mill criticized William Jones both for his fond credulity
of Hindu society and for having not fixed and definite assemblage of
ideas to civilization. Mill’s own standards were made clear by him when
he noted:
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 43

In looking at the pursuits of any nation, with a view to draw from them
indications of the state of civilization, no mark is so important, as the
nature of the End to which they are directed. . . . Exactly in proportion
as Utility is the object of every pusuit, may we regard a nation as
civilized. Exactly in proportion as its ingenuity is wasted on contempt-
ible and mischievous objects, though it may be, in itself, an ingenuity of
no ordinary kind, the nation may safely be denominated barborous. 59
In his History of British India James Mill noted, “To ascertain the true state
of the Hindus in the scale of civilization, is not only an object of curiosity
in the history of human nature; but to the people of Great Britain,
charged as they are with the government of that great portion of the
human species, it is an object of the highest practical importance.” 60 Re-
viewing the Hindu form of government Mill remarked, “despotism, in
one of its simplest and least artificial shapes was established in Hindu-
stan, and confirmed by laws of Divine authority” and “despotim and
priestcraft taken together, the Hindus, in mind and body, were the most
enslaved portion of the human race.” 61 Mill’s History provided a theoreti-
cal framework as Javed Majeed has noted, for the liberal agenda “to
emancipate India from its own culture.” 62 For James Mill something be-
yond education, namely reform of the form of government, laws, and
taxation was necessary to propel Indian society up the scale of civiliza-
tion.
In a letter written sometime in 1819–1821 James Mill noted, “the
government of India is carried on by correspondence; and that I am the
only man whose business it is, or who has the time to make himself
master of the facts scattered in a most voluminous correspondence, on
which a just decision must rest.” 63 While cultures could be compared
through translation and from at a distance, Mill viewed governance from
a distance as inefficient. The foundations for the administration of law,
revenue and the form of government in India conceived between
1830–1835 in William Bentinck’s time was only fully established by the
1860s.
A later utilitarian conception of the imperialist mission was expressed
by J. S. Mill in On Liberty published in 1859 shortly after the Indian Mu-
tiny of 1857. J. S. Mill observed:
The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great,
that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a
ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any
expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable.
Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbar-
ians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified
by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application
to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become
capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then,
44 Chapter 1

there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a

Charlemange. 64
J. S. Mill’s classification of Indians as “barbarians” reflected the nine-
teenth-century conviction of European superiority, a view not shared by
Warren Hastings or Edmund Burke although J. S. Mill’s view on the
instrumental necessity of despotism in the interest of welfare was in
agreement with Hastings. Burke took the opposite position that despotic
rule, which produced an atmosphere of personal insecurity and hence
economic stagnation was inconsistent with the general welfare.
Scalable models of civilization provided the rationale for liberal and
illiberal forms of governance. Whereas “savage life” was to be made
governable through “fear,” the more civilized life was supposed to be
“allured by hope.” 65 Outlining the criterion of a good form of govern-
ment, J. S. Mill noted that the proper functions of a government are not a
fixed thing, but different in different states of society; and much more
extensive in a backward than in an advanced state. Also “the character of
a government or set of political institutions cannot be sufficiently estimat-
ed while we confine our attention to the legitimate sphere of government
functions; for, though the goodness of a government is necessarily
circumscribed within that sphere, its badness is unhappily not.” 66 If it
were possible to enumerate and classify the constituents of social well-
being, then could a good government be identified as the one that unites
in the greatest degree all these constituents of social well-being. Accord-
ing to him, “Order” and “Progress” were the only ones generally iden-
tified as the necessary qualities of a good government, but “Order,” limit-
ed to laws and not that demanded by unmitigated despotism, is not an
object of government. As “Progress” encompasses “Order,” Mill suggests
that “Order” could be dropped and the best government be deemed as
one conducive to “Progress.” The merit of political institutions consists
“partly of the degree in which they promote the general mental advance-
ment in intellect, in virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency, and
partly of the degree of perfection with which they organize the moral,
intellectual, and active worth already existing, so as to operate with the
greatest effect on public affairs.” 67 Mill asserted that government is to be
judged by its action upon men and things:
In all states of human improvement ever yet attained, the nature and
degree of authority exercised over individuals, the distribution of pow-
er, and the conditions of command and obedience, are the most power-
ful of the influences, except their religious belief, which make them
what they are, and enable them to become what they can be. They may
be stopped short at any point in their progress by defective adaptation
of their government to their particular stage of advancement. And the
one indispensable merit of a government, in favor of which it may be
forgiven almost any amount of other demerit compatible with
progress, is that its operation on the people is favorable, or not unfa-
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 45

vorable, to the next step which it is necessary for them to take in order
to raise themselves to a higher level. 68
Regarding the adaptation of forms of government to states of society, J. S.
Mill was of the view that an ideal must be constructed taking into consid-
eration not only the “next step” that a society has to take but “all the steps
which society has yet to make; both those which can be foreseen, and the
far wider indefinite range which is at present out of sight” so that the
government would promote “not some one improvement, but all forms
and degrees of it.” 69 Having constructed the ideal form of government,
Mill observed that it is necessary to consider “the mental condition of all
sorts necessary to enable this government to realize its tendencies, and
what, therefore, are the various defects by which a people is made inca-
pable of reaping its benefits.” 70 If it be judged not suitable to introduce
the ideal form of government, then some “inferior forms of polity will
best carry those communities through the intermediate stages which they
must traverse before they can become fit for the best form of govern-
ment.” 71 For Mill, non-Europeans were only fit for a “government of
leading-strings.” 72 Their affairs were best run by a body of professionally
trained bureaucrats free from the control of elected politicians upon
whom the influence of shifting public opinion was palpable. He was also
of the view that colonial bureaucracy should not be accountable to the
“second and third class” of elected representatives either in Britain or in
the colonies.
J. S. Mill also believed that just as a civilized society had a right to rule
over a primitive or semi-civilized society, a more civilized group or na-
tionality within a civilized society had a right to “absorb” and dominate
inferior groups. 73 In practice though, J. S. Mill was critical of British impe-
rialism when it violated the norms of good government as in the case of
Jamaica. 74 Differing from John Locke, Mill divided human societies into
“civilized” and “backward.” In civilized societies, human beings were in
the maturity of their faculties and had attained the capacity of being
guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion. In his
view most European societies had long since reached that stage. By
contrast all non-European societies were “backward,” and human beings
there were in a state of “nonage” or “infancy.” Such backward societies
were incapable of being improved by free and equal discussion and
lacked the resources for self-regeneration. Like Locke, he argued that the
right to non-intervention, like the right to individual liberty, only be-
longed to those capable of making good use of it, that is, to those “ma-
ture” enough to think and judge for themselves and to develop unaided.
As in Locke, the right to non-intervention only applied to the relations
between civilized societies.
Although as human beings, such backward individuals had equal mo-
ral claims to the pursuit and protection of their interests with the mem-
46 Chapter 1

bers of civilized societies, but as collectivities they had no political claims

to independence and self-determination. Both the Mills’ positions reso-
nate with that of Thomas Hobbes who in Leviathan did not consider peo-
ple who lacked the ability to act on their own behalf such as children,
fools and madmen as a “Naturall Person.” 75 J. S. Mill stressed the value
of individual diversity within the framework of individuality and choice
and so ruled out traditional and customary ways of life, as well as those
centred on the community, and reduced diversity among societies to
variation along a single axis of progress, and like both his father and
Locke, conceptualized colonial rule as a pedagogical process seeing “dif-
ference” as deviation. 76
Although enthusiastic colonial administrators influenced by Bent-
hamite ideas sought to reform the judicial structures along Bentham’s
idea of pannomion and to introduce a rational bureaucracy, Bentham was
not in favor of colonial empires and had urged both Spain and France to
emancipate their colonies. While he made no such call to England and
was in favor of introducing reforms in India, he did speak up against
colonial oppression in India and elsewhere. The tendency to group Bent-
ham and the two Mills together as Utilitarians, often overlook the differ-
ences between their views as Bentham did not subscribe to the idea of
scale of civilization or the colonial “civilizing mission.” 77
Much before J. S. Mill’s views on liberty and government were pub-
lished, the colonial administrator Thomas Munro, who was more influ-
enced by Edmund Burke, noted in his famous Minute of 1824:
We should look upon India not as a temporary possession, but as one
which is to be maintained permanently, until the natives shall in some
future age have abandoned most of their superstitions and prejudices
and become sufficiently enlightened to form a regular Government for
themselves, and to conduct and preserve it. Whenever such time shall
arrive it will probably be best for both countries that the British control
over India should be gradually withdrawn. 78
While Bentham and the Mills laid the groundwork of liberalism that was
to inform colonial policy until the transfer of authority from the Compa-
ny to the Crown in 1858, the pragmatics of rule on the ground rendered
Utilitarian philosophy of reform a matter of contention. Inspired more by
Burke, administrators like Malcolm and Munro “distrusted the chilly
dogmatics” of Utilitarian reform, especially as regards land settlement
that “sought to reduce the historical modes of government to one central-
ized, uniform practice.” 79 They also rejected the idea of a single omni-
competent central government to replace the three semi-independent
presidencies of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras with their multiple struc-
tures of administration as contemplated to be incorporated in the Charter
Act of 1833. Although they were in agreement of certain aspects of Utili-
tarian reform such as the district collector’s judicial and executive pow-
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 47

ers, simplification of law respecting Indian customs, preference of land

settlement with the peasants or the “ryotwari” system and the accurate
survey and record of land rights, they were against the Utilitarian pas-
sion for uniformity and the mechanistic administration and legislative
regulation. In Political History Malcolm noted:
We may be compelled by the character of our government to frame
some institutions, different from those we found established, but we
should adopt all we can of the latter into our system. . . . Our internal
government . . . should be administered on a principle of humility not
pride. We must divest our minds of all arrogant pretensions arising
from the presumed superiority of our own knowledge, and seek the
accomplishment of the great ends we have in view by the means which
are best suited to the peculiar nature of the objects . . . by adapting its
principles to the various feelings, habits, and character of its inhabi-
tants, to give time for the slow and silent operation of the desired
improvement. 80
Bentham and Mill believed that the science of legislation had its universal
immutable laws and that local knowledge was not of great importance. In
his “Codification Proposal,” Bentham noted: “The great outlines, which
require to be drawn, will be found to be the same for every territory, for
every race, and for every time.” 81 Influenced by Bentham on the legisla-
tive process, James Mill argued for a small expert body rather than a
numerous legislative assembly for India, although such a proposal was
not adopted in practice, and he also did not trust the information gath-
ered by local observers in India. Although Mill supported representative
government in England to keep power-hungry elites in check, he did not
think that participation in government was a key to moral improvement.
Believing in the powers of science to demystify politics by making clear
the laws that determine phenomena, Mill was of the view that under-
standing these laws will help to educate individuals and ensure they
pursue their natural interests. Mill believed that so long as the business of
India’s government was “well and cheaply performed” it was of little
consequence as to who performed it. He even remarked “The feeling of
degradation, from being governed by foreigners, is a feeling altogether
European. I believe it has little or no existence in any part of Asia.” 82
For James Mill and Bentham, it was happiness not liberty that was the
end of government, and happiness was promoted solely through the pro-
tection of the individual in his person and property. Later, Fitzjames
Stephen was to hold the view that the aim of government was to secure
not liberty but the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which
could be achieved by the civilizing power of law exercised by the coer-
cive power of the state. Stephen’s authoritarian liberalism, linked with
parallel theories of scientific racism and historical jurisprudence re-
shaped Britain’s imperial ideology in the late nineteenth century. As John
48 Chapter 1

Strachey, a disciple of Stephen, put it, “the only hope for India was the
long continuance of the benevolent but strong government of English-
men.” 83 Nineteenth-century liberals advocated the colonial project of ra-
tionalizing India, even if that required endorsing an imperial despot-
ism. 84
However, nineteenth-century liberal ideology underwent a change
from the universalist to a culturalist stance from the 1860s after the trans-
fer of authority to the Crown. The earlier transformative agenda of the
civilizing mission also underwent a change to an imperial order on a
more conservative basis, concerned with issues of stability and order, and
in line with the traditional aspects of Indian society. An emphasis on the
insurmountable differences between people replaced the idea of the uni-
versalist project of civilization with its belief in modernizing them. So
marked was the shift in imperial ideology that the liberal agenda of edu-
cating Indians for self-government was almost completely eclipsed until
it was revived by the nationalist movement in the last decades of the
nineteenth century. 85 This indicates, as Henry Maine upheld, that liberal
imperialism was a historical constellation evolving in response to chang-
ing contexts of imperial dilemmas, and the abstract claims of liberalism
were negotiated on the terrain of practical politics under colonial condi-
tions. Maine was of the view that native belief had “a direct bearing on
the structure of government, which it may be possible to the Indian pos-
sessions of this country.” 86 So strong was this view at that time, that
Minto, who had come to India in 1906 as viceroy, was fully convinced
that Western forms of government were unsuited to India and argued
that representative government “could never be akin to the instincts of
the many races composing the population of the Indian Empire,” as it
was a Western importation to a context that for a long time had absolute
rulers. In Minto’s view what was suited for India was a constitutional
autocracy in British hands that invites to its councils “representatives of
all the interests which are capable of being represented.” 87 Yet, Minto’s
creation of special Muslim constituencies in 1906 was his belief that elec-
toral representation in India had to be sensitive to the communities com-
posing the population and which in course of time created a new politi-
cized vision of community.
Curzon also believed that a centralized despotism was best for India,
although he opened the way for a parliamentary system of government
by including the phrase in the Montague-Chelmsford declaration of 1917
of “the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view
to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an
integral part of the British Empire.” He had noted earlier the following in
a letter in 1900 indicating his firm commitment to the civilizing mission
of colonial rule:
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 49

Above all I see, oh so clearly, that we can only hold this country by our
superior standards of honour and virtue and by getting the natives to
recognize them as such. . . . On the other hand we cannot take the
natives up into the administration. They are crooked-minded and cor-
rupt. We have got therefore to go on ruling them and we can only do it
with success by being both kindly and virtuous. I dare say I am talking
rather like a schoolmaster; but after all the millions I have to manage
are less than schoolchildren. 88
Understanding liberalism as a historical event means to understand it as
more than just bearer of rights and freedom, but also as structures of
power and dominance, of colonial and others, and that which holds the
“Other” in contempt. 89 Liberalism’s reliance on procedures also leads to a
dehumanization of the world.
Partha Chatterjee has posed the question provocatively as to whether
there is any analytical purpose in distinguishing the colonial state from
other forms of the modern state or whether it is to be regarded simply as
another form of the modern state that generalized itself across the
globe. 90 If rational forms of administration distinguish the modern state,
then clearly colonial rule rendered it possible in India. But as Chatterjee
notes “the more the logic of a modern regime of power pushed the pro-
cesses of government in the direction of a rationalization of administra-
tion and the normalization of the objects of its rule, the more insistently
did the issue of race come up to emphasize the specifically colonial char-
acter of British dominance in India.” 91 Two significant features of a colo-
nial rule are domination by aliens in which material gains of such domi-
nation accrue to the alien rulers, and being such a rule the aliens seek to
shape the conduct of the governed in particular ways. These two features
could vary in their intensity in different colonial contexts. British colonial
rule of Canada and the United States could not have deployed the rule of
colonial difference, in which difference was marked by race and position
in the evolutionary scale as a modern disciplinary power, the way it did
in India and elsewhere. As evident from the debates and opposition to
the Ilbert Bill of 1883 that sought to grant native judicial officers the
powers to try English offenders as also with regard to the freedom of the
press, colonial rule in India differentiated between colonized natives and
the English/foreign residents in the country. 92
The colonial state in India was indeed a modern state that reconsti-
tuted and combined certain aspects of earlier forms of administration
with the modern rational administration introduced by the British, based
in part on the British administrative practices. 93 As a colonial state it
enfolded certain colonial projects such as surplus extraction, and the nev-
er-to-be-completed project of governing the conduct of the colonized sub-
jects as part of its “improvement” or civilizing agenda, which entailed
strategies and tactics of colonial governmentality that were liberal and
50 Chapter 1

disciplinary, even combining it with the violence of colonial wars, coer-

cion, and domination. 94

THE MODERN STATE AND “OFFICIALIZING PROCEDURES”

If Hobbes conceived the theoretical ideas of the modern state, it was

Bentham who worked out the edifice, and the structure and functioning
of the modern state, even if he did not publish a full account of the ideal
administrative structure of a state. Drawing from the authoritarian
strains of Hobbessian thinking, Bentham acknowledged government to
be an artifact, a creation, and expression of will, and sovereignty to be
single and indivisible with law expressed in the language of command as
its instrument. For Bentham, the modern state was not an actuality but an
aspiration as he shared the political attitude of the “reason of state”
thinkers or Machiavellism, who treated the state as an ideal. 95 Under-
standing the Benthamite ideas on government and the practices of
government of the later Victorian state helps to understand the transfor-
mation of government from an “art” to a “science.”
In the Constitutional Code Bentham recognized two kinds of govern-
mental action-legislation insofar as the measures it displays itself in are of
a permanent nature, and administration consisting in measures of a tem-
porary nature, determined by the occurrences of the day. He believed
that the exercise of the powers of government consists in the giving of
directions or commands, positive and prohibitive, and incidentally in
securing compliance through the application of rewards and punish-
ments. Accordingly, the Constitutional Code considered law and its effec-
tive implementation as important. Administration (including the admin-
istration of justice) was brought into the system as a means of making law
effective. The elaborate administrative arrangements proposed were in-
tended to make the administrative department an effective weapon of,
and at the same time to prevent it from supplanting or rivalling, the
legislature. The principal instrument for regulating the administrative
department was law. The existence of the melioration-suggestive func-
tion, that is, the identification of subject matters (including ordinances
and arrangements) presenting themselves as needing reform or being
susceptible of improvement, and the many references to it in the Code,
imply a flexible, continuously adapting approach to social regulation and
the process of government, which contradict the idea that Bentham was
aiming at a once-for-all solution of social problems. 96
In Bentham’s scheme the State activities were to be typically, though
not exclusively, legislation and then suspension, inspection and report to
ensure that the requirements laid down in the legislature’s “ordinances”
were being observed. Most of the other functions assigned by Bentham to
ministers and their subordinates were concerned primarily with internal
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 51

management and control. As Hume noted, when Bentham discussed in

detail the functions of the health minister, he did not suggest that these
would start from the establishment, maintenance or control of a network
of hospitals or dispensaries. The task he emphasized were the inspection
of hospitals, schools, prisons, chemists’ shops, factories, theaters, mines,
sewers, and drains, the survey of water supply facilities in designated
areas, the enforcement of regulations relating to the sale of poisons, the
destruction of spoiled or surplus medical material and the oversight of
professional associations. He made less extensive provision in the Code
for the operation of enterprises or the provision of services by the State. 97
Bentham envisaged government to be one in which the “exclusion of
delay, vexation and expense” would be achieved with the appropriate
“aptitudes” at various levels, based on the necessary conditions of re-
sponsibility and fear of consequences. Responsibility was created by
“subordinateness” and “accountableness.” Accountability meant the ne-
cessity to report on the performance of operations undertaken “in conse-
quence of, and compliance with” the superordinate’s directions. Bentham
suggested the use of annual and other reports as a link between the
legislature and organizations otherwise limited in responsibility. 98
Conceptualizing the modern state as an organized entity made up of
internal relations between its components such as the legislature, execu-
tive, judiciary, and bureaucracy makes the state knowable as a totality of
analogous relations between its elements. 99 Indivisible sovereignty is
now attributed to the totality of relations and in Schmittian terms, it
concerns the making of decisions on the “exception” and so differentiates
the modern state ontologically and ethically from other forms of political
life. It thus establishes the transcendental conditions of possibility of the
modern state as subject, a being capable of knowing and acting even as it
is susceptible to empirical knowledge as object that modern knowledge
renders possible. 100 The state is often spoken of in terms associated with
human subjectivity and imagined as possessing a will of its own, which
helps sustain the practices through which the state administers civil soci-
ety and fabricates social order. 101
Modern state formation, as Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer have
argued, is a cultural project embodied in “the repertoire of rituals and
routines of rule through which legitimized powers and authorized
modes of control organize some of the most fundamental divisions,
which become part of the media of modernity.” 102 With the increasing
centralization and condensation of regulative functions with the modern
state, domination expresses itself and functions through administration
and bureaucratic writing. Classification began to be used by bureaucracy
as a flexible system of control since the meanings of taxonomic units
could be determined with utilitarian ends in view. 103 Panoptic adminis-
tration depends on centralization, bureaucratic lines of command, regu-
larity of observation, and also classification and measurement. The forms
52 Chapter 1

of knowledge that the state creates and organizes about the population
that it governs, such as its health, wealth and welfare constitutes and
represents the legitimacy of the state. Until recently, this vast documenta-
tion by the state was not perceived as a totalizing project or as one that
requires a hermeneutic reading of official texts, as these documents were
seen as natural and neutral. 104
Bureaucratic disciplines that emerged with the modern state embod-
ied these principles of panopticism. 105 For Max Weber, discipline is “the
consistently rationalized, methodically trained and exact execution of the
received order,” and this conduct under orders is rationally uniform by a
plurality of men. 106 Michel Foucault has also shown that these panoptic
disciplines became a general formula of domination in an array of institu-
tional settings in modern Europe. For both Weber and Foucault, these
disciplines do not depend for their operation and effects on individual
personalities and the legitimation required is minimal, such that a bu-
reaucracy could implement these based on mere behavioural and proced-
ural regularities. These also exercise control over its subjects by disci-
plines of calculation and classification. 107
Bureaucratic writings such as the “form,” ”memo,” or “report,” collec-
tively called the “document,” are carriers of information which direct
others to act as a command and emerged out of modern managerial
practice expressing the impersonality of bureaucratic authority. 108 Modes
of writing and reading solidify into institutional routines and forms of
rule through processes of inscription and reinscription. 109 Written bu-
reaucratic communications being fixed and context independent have
greater capacity for transmission across space and time, and by separat-
ing communication and observation it enables these separated elements
to be recombined in different ways. 110 The “official secret” is a specific
invention of the bureaucracy. 111 Governmental transactions cause bu-
reaucratic writings to be classified into different categories of “official-
ness,” some marked as public and rendered visible and others classified
as “secret” that is archived away from public visibility even for extremely
long periods of time, removing whole domains of knowledge and in-
creasing the state’s potencies in immeasurable ways. 112
Written rules and regulations of the modern state make the state ap-
pear as an abstract and distant entity and existing as though in a “homog-
enous empty time” in which the past, present and future are always
different and in which the process of “improvement” or “progress”
marks the transition from one to the other. 113 More often, the representa-
tions the modern state creates and embodies in its technologies of
governance take on a life of their own such that the agents who imple-
ment the rules, the bureaucracy, and upon whom the rules seek to act, all
live in divergent moments. The concrete reality is not the ordered and
rational world that the state envisaged to bring forth but one that is
chaotic, in which heterogeneous temporalities characterize everyday life
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 53

and in which it is continually engaged in attempts to reform and make

the chaotic reality fit its abstract and ordered categories. 114 The material-
ity of “graphic artifacts” such as the form, file, manuals, reports, and
maps generated by the state’s documentary practices mediates many oth-
er social processes between people and things apart from its semiotic
role, such that even if the state appears to remain distant, it also pene-
trates into the everyday life of the governed. 115
Foucault has noted that the art of government began to transform in
the modern West from the eighteenth century onward. Although from
the beginning of the seventeenth century it was realized that the State
was governed by principles of rationality, those principles being con-
tained in the specific reality of the state rather than in divine laws or
other transcendent rules, the art of government was still immobilized
between, on the one hand, a theory of sovereignty in which the social
contract between the ruler and the subjects provided the matrix for inte-
grating the art of government, and that of the family which provided the
model for the economy based on the importance of territorial possessions
and the royal treasury. The general principles of public law derived from
the social contract theory provided the basis for government. 116
These underwent changes in the eighteenth century when through a
subtle process of interlinked developments in the economy, the art of
government transformed itself into a science of government, in which the
idea of governing the population assumed centre stage. Along with this,
there was a shift in the basis of government from “law” derived from
notions of social contract, to “order” based on the idea of governing and
managing population. Population emerged as field of intervention, and
as an objective of governmental techniques. Simultaneously the problem
of the “economy” was reconfigured from the model of the family to one
in which the specific problems of the population relating to the economy
provided the framework for government that was outside of the juridical
framework of sovereignity. This was not to suggest that sovereignity was
no longer important but to find the juridical and institutional form to be
given to the sovereignity that characterized a state. In his essay on
“Governmentality” Foucault observes “whereas the end of sovereignty is
internal to itself and possesses its own intrinsic instruments in the shape
of its laws, the finality of government resides in the things it manages and
in the pursuit of the perfection and intensification of the processes which
it directs; and the instruments of government, instead of being laws, now
come to be a range of multiform tactics.” 117
Governmentality thus refers to the links between sovereignty/disci-
pline/population, with population as its primary target and apparatuses
of security as its essential mechanism. In the power regimes that devel-
oped in liberal societies in the nineteenth century, the thematics of sove-
reignty, discipline, and biopower were relocated within the field of
governmentality, which were also reconfigured in the domain of colonial
54 Chapter 1

governmentality to govern colonized peoples. In attempting to write an

analysis of state formation, Foucault has argued that population is the
pivot on which turned the transition from rule based on sovereign au-
thority to a “governmentalized rule” that decenters the state under liber-
alism. The construction of “population” is central to the creation of new
orders of knowledge, new objects of intervention, new forms of subjectiv-
ity and new state forms. 118 Population, unlike the family, is not a norma-
tive concept but a descriptive and empirical one, and though it may
contain elements of “naturalness” and “primordiality” that are not prod-
ucts of rational contractual association such as for instance “castes,” it
does make available a set of governmental technologies to target popula-
tions through programs and policies. 119
By referring to the material and epistemic basis of state action, and by
placing specific governmental activity in specific historical contexts,
“governmentality” shows how in the gradual evolution of the adminis-
trative state, governing the “population” with new forms of knowledge
became the fundamental mode of the exercise of political power. The
modern state is not the outcome of a “quasi-rational historical process”
but a contingent product of both “historical nominalism” and “historical
contingency,” and a “history of governmentality” is an “inquiry sui gene-
ris,” that both “disassembles the assumed ideality of the state and histori-
cizes its form at the same time,” thus providing a constructivist account
of the state as an “effect” within a “history of multiple causes and influ-
ences.” 120
As a scalable approach, governmentality can be applied to study state,
statecraft, state-civil society, or state-economy relations in terms of the
“conduct of conduct” at any level micro or macro. The state is articulated
into the activity of the government, the problematics of which require to
be analyzed in terms of “political rationalities,” “governmental technolo-
gies” and the interdependencies between them. In Foucault’s thought,
“political rationality” is a “rationality which presents itself as intrinsic to
the nature of the state, focusing on the welfare or the interests of the state,
and of the population ruled by the state, and understanding those inter-
ests in their own terms, rather than as if they were dependent on some
external, superordinate principle.” 121 This enabled him to develop a per-
spective on the government of modern states that is not dominated by
discourses of sovereignty and legitimacy. The domain of strategies, tech-
niques and procedures through which different forces seek to render
programs operable and by means of which a multitude of connections are
established between the aspirations of authorities and the activities of
individuals and groups” constitute “governmental technologies.” 122 The
exercise of this complex form of power, which Foucault claimed, at least
in the West to have acquired a preeminence over all other forms of power
brought together a whole ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses
and reflections, calculations and tactics developed in the political centers
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 55

to connect with the myriad spatially scattered points (as of colonial em-
pires) where the fiscal, organizational, judicial, (un)/constitutional pow-
ers of the state endeavored to manage economic life and govern popula-
tions. According to Nikolas Rose, it is this governmentalization of the
state, which has permitted the state to survive, as it is this tactics of the
government that make possible what is within the competence of the
state and what is not, what is political or not, and the public versus the
private. 123
Liberal rationality of government implies that governing human be-
havior in the framework of, and by means of, state institutions cannot be
an end in itself and so differs with the “reason of state” rationality in
which strengthening the state was the objective. “Society” is both the
precondition and end of liberal rationality. 124 Liberalism can therefore be
found in “different but simultaneous forms as a regulative scheme of
governmental practice and as the theme of a sometimes-radical opposi-
tion.” 125 Foucault suggests that liberalism is to be analyzed as a principle
and a method of rationalizing the exercise of government and obeying
the internal rule of maximum economy.
The perspective of governmentality calls into question the liberal view
of the separation of state and civil society, the latter being autonomous of
the state. 126 The discursive space of government is not homogenous but
intersected by numerous other discourses such as the discourses of sci-
ence and the changing moral rhetorics and ethical vocabularies of the
culture, which histories and problems are independent of those of the
problematics of government but converge and cohere together as transla-
tion at particular moments. Such intersecting discourses both constructed
colonial “difference” and legitimized colonial governmentality. As an in-
creasingly centralized and bureaucratized modern state gets progressive-
ly governmentalized, society both “civil” and “political” and the public
sphere are continuously recreated and reconstituted, becoming the dis-
cursive site in which contestations over entitlements and identities take
place, even as new claims seek to establish themselves. It is through these
“bound serialities” of governmentality and the “unbound serialities,” in
Anderson’s notions that the modern state transforms into the modern
nation-state.
Liberal technology of government sought regulation in the “law,” not
through a legalism but because the law defines forms of general interven-
tion excluding particular, individual or exceptional measures. 127 Statis-
tics was a modality of defining the law or norm. As more and more
arenas of the population's activities come under regulatory mechanisms
they need to be represented appropriately to facilitate the mechanisms of
intervention. These modalities of representing and intervening enabled
the production of knowledge about the population. 128 As an object of
knowledge, population is a statistical artifact as “mundane techniques of
writing, registering and recording attached individuals to new kinds of
56 Chapter 1

administrative and hence also epistemological spaces, turning them into

‘cases,’ elements in series that could be rank-ordered and subjected to
practices of ‘optimization.’” 129 Such knowledge that is generated as part
of administrative requirements is different from knowledge derived for
nonprogrammatic purposes, these being generally constituted by the
interpretive communities themselves. If the distinctive feature of the
modern state is that unlike pre-modern states, its practices of governance
are guided by principles of rationality, then the modalities of intervention
are bundles of strategies that seek to achieve rational goals through ra-
tional means. The knowledge of objects of such administrative interven-
tions is instrumental knowledge that facilitates the objects to be consti-
tuted, molded, and shaped according to the desired ends. When popula-
tion emerged as the object of governmentality, the knowledge of the pop-
ulation was to be both the aggregate of the population as a mass phenom-
enon subject to growth and decay, as well as the knowledge of the popu-
lation in its depth and details. The analytics of government is not con-
cerned with language as meaning or with texts and authorial intentions
but with knowledges and regimes of truth. It is concerned with “histori-
cal epistemologies,” the reconstruction “of the epistemological field that
allows for the production of what counts for knowledge at any given
moment, and which accords salience to particular categories, divisions,
classifications, relations and identities.” 130
As these bureaucratic practices multiplied in the colonial world, it
created an imperial archive as “a fantasy of knowledge collected and
united in the service of the state and Empire” by the merger of the Ro-
mantic project of comprehensive knowledge and the Victorian project of
positive knowledge. 131 By the end of the nineteenth century there
emerged a vast imagined community of the state with the growing exten-
sion of state intervention and with a vast quantity of documents being
produced annually. This uncontrolled accumulation of knowledge was
transformed to a controlled flow of information to and from the state
through a variety of narratives such as reports, statistical surveys, depart-
mental proceedings, and publications thereby making the archive as “the
very form of the modern state.” 132 More recently, these archival forms
including “prose style, repetitive refrain, the arts of persuasion, affective
strains that shape ‘rational’ response, categories of confidentiality and
classification, and not least, genres of documentation” are viewed as
“condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as
skewed and biased sources” and “transparencies on which power rela-
tions were inscribed and intricate technologies of rule in themselves.” 133
In the shadows and margins of these archives of the colonial state hang
the disqualified knowledges and displaced histories that ill-fitted the
archival forms as some social facts were selectively converted into knowl-
edge and some modes of knowing were privileged over others even as
this process inscribed the authority of the state.
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 57

NINETEENTH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS IN BRITISH

GOVERNMENT

From the eighteenth century onward, European states moved away from
ritual performance and display of spectacle as visible manifestations of
power to “officializing procedures” that gradually extended their inter-
ventionary power. 134 The developments in the British Government in the
nineteenth century influenced the administrative system in colonial India
as many of the state building projects of documentation, legitimation,
classification, bounding, and the associated institutions often reflected
ideas, experiences, and practices worked out originally either in Britain,
India and the other colonies of the Empire and then applied to Great
Britain, India and elsewhere. 135
The growth of government refers to both the movement of govern-
ment into new fields, new types of action, and the expansion of numbers
and the organization and standardization of procedures. Up to 1870, it
has been observed that the growth of government in Britain in the nine-
teenth century cannot be described as a single phenomenon or process as
there were differing traditions and patterns of developments in different
departments triggered by a series of impulses toward change and new
developments whose connections were coincidental as much as causal.
After 1870, there was expansion of numbers and elaboration of proce-
dures but much less movement into new fields of action. As the bureau-
cracy began to gently ossify, external initiatives began to increase after
1890. 136 Mary Poovey is of the view that the growth of nineteenth-centu-
ry government was “irrational” in the sense that “it realized no ulterior
logic, whether individual or deep structural,” but one effect of it was a
further “consolidation of the form of subjectivity that both facilitated and
depended on the administrative routines institutionalized by these
changes” signifying the interdependence of the modern forms of individ-
ualism and administration. 137
Nineteenth-century British government was undoubtedly shaped by
the ideas of Bentham and J. S. Mill. Benthamite reforms of the 1830s and
the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of 1850s together brought about three
major inventions in British governmental machinery in the nineteenth
century, namely, the classified civil service recruited by open, academic,
competitive examination; the elected, multi-purpose local authority; and
the ministerial department. 138 None of these was a sudden or indepen-
dent invention, but their importance is unarguable. In fact the “adminis-
trative revolution” in the British central government is usually dated
from 1780 with the reports of the Statutory Commission for Examining
the Public Accounts (1780–1787) having inspired most of the administra-
tive reforms for the next half-century. The commissioners’ reports tried to
introduce public economy by reducing expenses in the management of
revenue and sought to introduce “more simple, regular, and accordant
58 Chapter 1

system into the internal frame of the office.” 139 As the system of public
economy required speed, precision, impartiality, uniformity and account-
ability, they were in effect evolving a bureaucratic system of organization
along Weberian lines in which official business was completely reduced
to a written routine. Although bureaucracy did exist prior to 1780, it was
in many aspects patrimonial in nature. By progressively bringing an ar-
ray of diverse practices under a few uniform principles, they were able to
recommend uniformity itself as an administrative principle. Urging the
recovery of control over public functions by the government that had
fallen prey to private interests, the commissioners based their arguments
on the doctrine of public trust which by questioning royal prerogatives
and rights opened the way for a utilitarian conception of government. 140
In 1866 the Exchequer and Audit Department (EAD) was created, headed
by the comptroller and auditor general (CAG), which was constitutional-
ly a tool of parliament that controlled the financial regularity of executive
functions.
A crucial and independent factor in nineteenth-century administrative
developments in Britain was the cycle of enforcement-inspection-amend-
ment that was built into and prescribed in Bentham’s scheme. The doc-
trine of annual reports prepared independently linking administration to
parliament emerged from this cycle of enforcement/inspection/amend-
ment, although it was the French rather than the English who first started
the publication of annual reports. 141 By the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury there was an enormous amount of bureaucratic productions by way
of official reports that some note it as a “peculiar achievement” of the
English state and yet others saw it as a “formidable weapon in the hands
of a predatory government.” 142 The spread of Benthamite ideas involved
the “combining of manipulated inquiry with a manipulated publicity”
using pre-selected witnesses and selective evidence in the compilation of
reports of the Select Committees and Royal Commissions, and the free
distribution of large numbers of Blue Books amid an orchestrated fanfare
of comment. 143 Commissions as “quasi-state” technologies blurred the
boundary between the state and civil society as it called upon outside
experts to author and authorize the reports. Royal Commissions were
used extensively in the Victorian Age as the state became increasingly
interested in investigating every phase of social life, almost as if the Baco-
nian dream of inductivism was being realized in the realm of social af-
fairs. By the late nineteenth-century, commissions as a technology of state
practice spread across the Empire.
A number of features of the mid nineteenth-century interventionist
state, however, departed significantly from the kind of state that Bent-
ham had described and recommended in the Constitutional Code. Victo-
rian governments, experimenting in new forms of regulation, adopted
particular administrative devices that Bentham had vehemently criticized
such as granting to officials very general and loosely defined authorities
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 59

to make law or to judge cases, and permitting officials to develop and

apply their own standards and interpretations of public interest. 144 When
each particular reform is closely scrutinized, Bentham’s ideas seem less
and less to have been the decisive factor as it was a practical continuance
shaped by men of various persuasions, that one scholar has remarked
that the Victorian state “was a very confused and disjointed state, and in
all probability Bentham himself, the passionate lover of logic and efficien-
cy, would have vigorously disclaimed its authorship.” 145
As Patrick Joyce has observed, the liberal state needed to know
enough but not to know more that would cause it to lose the trust of the
citizens. This delicate balance between “knowing” and “not knowing”
was worked out for the first time in the early and mid-nineteenth century
and was central to liberal political reason. 146 Alongside, a new mentality
developed with an unprecedented interest in facts, a worship of statistics,
and an insatiable appetite for official reports. 147 The urge to measure and
count emerged in the Western culture in a variety of contexts and situa-
tions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries correlating with political
and economic changes, such as the growth of centralized government
and the expansion of overseas trade. 148 But English reformers of the
1830s saw scientific knowledge through statistical surveys disseminated
through official reports as a precondition for a rational reordering of both
the state and society. Edwin Chadwick’s Sanitary report of 1842 was the
culmination of the “use of ocular inspection, quantification, and calcula-
tion” to administer liberal government to the poor, which signal the ex-
tent to which scientific method influenced social analysis. 149 Poovey
notes that “its statistical tables, eyewitness reports, and the summary of
policy recommendations” were soon codified as the protocol for govern-
ment reports, and such documents also helped constitute social norms. 150
Statistics and commissions forged as tools of statecraft by the reform-
ers were instruments of moral science as commission reports comple-
mented the statistics with “prototypic cases to measure gradations of
morality and the gradations of unfreedom that went along with them.” 151
The reports of the Royal Commissions were generally considered as
superior than the reports of the Select Committees, their ostensible pur-
pose being not to aid in the legislative process but to lobby for a particu-
lar solution in the manner that Bentham would have termed exemplifica-
tive and ratiocinative or expositive. The primacy accorded to centrally ap-
pointed commissions led to a centralization of information that in turn
led to the centralizing of power. David Eastwood notes “The capacity of
central government to command, filter, and deploy information consti-
tuted the kernel of a revolution in government.” 152 Partly as a result of
the demand for more and better information from local governments, the
local governments too became sensitive to the benefits of more systematic
and extensive empirical inquiries to be incorporated in policy making
even as they became objects of inquiry by the center. The growth of the
60 Chapter 1

central government expanded the range of social issues over which it

collected statistical information, transformed the machinery for collecting
and interpreting the information, and deployed the information to con-
siderable political effect.
Long before the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the English
state had been attempting to manipulate the population. The Domesday
Book compiled between 1085–1087 was the single most exhaustive exer-
cise in data collection by the central state in England until the first popu-
lation census of 1801. 153 In the seventeenth century when Graunt and
Petty found that quantification was a powerful instrument of social and
political order, it became increasingly clear to the architects of the British
state’s central administration that it increased administrative efficiency.
By the turn of the eighteenth century the importance of mathematics in
state’s affairs was realized, that Arbuthnot even remarked that it was
“not only the great instrument of private commerce, but by it are (or
ought to be) kept the public accounts of a nation. . . . Those that would
judge or reason about the state of any nation must go that way, subjecting
all . . . particulars to calculation. This is the true political knowledge.” 154
Whereas the techniques of Political Arithmetik in the eighteenth cen-
tury could only provide a snapshot of problems at a particular time, the
collection of annual data could reveal secular trends in social problems
adding new dimension to the social inquiries of the reform commissions
of the 1830s. 155 From the 1830s onward, the kinds of information de-
manded by official parliamentary inquiries began to be shaped by the
concepts of Ricardian political economy as well as by the ideas of the
British statistical movement supported by anti-Ricardian inductivists like
Richard Jones and the Benthamite legacy of social investigations, holding
true the view that it is “through bureaucracy and inside the files that the
results of science travel the furthest.” 156 By 1870, the parliament’s inabil-
ity to assimilate the vast amount of statistical information that was be-
coming more sophisticated called for experts who could master the infor-
mation important for the government. 157 The “statistical movement” led
by the creation of the statistical section of the BAAS (British Association
for the Advancement of Science) in 1833 and its offshoot the London
Statistical Society in assisting the progress of social improvement often
argued for improved statistics before parliamentary committees. The So-
cial Science Association which had various departments like legal reform,
penal policy, education, public health and “social economy” (concerned
with industrial, financial, and commercial affairs) maintained a central
organization in London to coordinate the lobbying of parliament and the
administration, and had at one time even J. S. Mill on its governing coun-
cil. 158
As the official documentary system was being extended to the colo-
nies, the British succeeded in creating one of the most data-intensive
empires in history. Centralized imperial government propelled an inter-
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 61

est in knowledge from all localities in standardized forms and local agen-
cies were constrained to report to the imperial agencies. As inscriptions
of various kinds reached imperial centers, they were assembled, sorted,
scaled, and organized in ways deemed to be useful for imperial govern-
ance. In Canada, colonial documentary system evolved as a result of
policy-driven demands of the imperial government, for whom the em-
pire was the terrain of comparative investigations of not just policy but a
variety of other scientific researches as well. The documentary system
distinguished between circular enquiries that included printed report
forms and that were likely repeated regularly, and occasional enquiries
wherein the reporting format was left to the colonial initiative. Bruce
Curtis has highlighted that a Canadian colonial governor who requested
for forms to report information sought under the Merchant Shipping Act
was asked to specify what he needed from a list of nineteen books and
sixty-six different forms covering shipping questions alone. 159 The Blue
Book inaugurated in 1817, with printed forms for its completion appear-
ing in 1822, was by 1840 the most extensive, regular, and standardized
imperial inquiry conducted annually of the colonies and territories of the
empire. The Colonial Office in London required the colonies to produce
an annual statistical and informational Blue Book. Prepared printed ta-
bles of contents and pages with the necessary headings were dispatched
to the governors of every colony each year for completion and return to
London. The Blue Books were the forerunners of the modern statistical
yearbooks produced by many colonial governments. After the East India
Company handed over the administration to the Crown in 1858 it was the
India Office that took charge, and the Colonial Office that administered
other colonies did not have influence on Indian administration. The doc-
umentary system continued even after the imperial government lost
much of its sovereignty in information gathering, and with the colonial
governments in place official documentation became an index of state
sovereignty.
Bruno Latour’s ideas of how stable, immutable, and combinable “mo-
biles” that can be inscribed and moved back and forth from the calculat-
ing centers and the peripheries of action could be deployed to act at a
distance on unfamiliar events, places, and people seems to have been
largely successful as a broad strategy in governing colonies through
rules, inscription, and recordation. 160 But it also ran into its limits as the
“graphic artifacts” of state documentation were produced within local
contexts of power, anxiety, and ambivalence. 161 This is evident for in-
stance, in the quest from the 1840s onward to have synchronized and
uniform census of the British Empire for nearly a century.
Following the British lead of the 1801 census, many colonial author-
ities conducted census enumerations based on their needs and the preva-
lent local context including parts of India. On account of the fragmenta-
tion of information, the Colonial Office in London developed the concept
62 Chapter 1

of a unified census of the British Empire, which remained only an ideal,

although attempts were made to collect and collate statistical information
from all parts of the British Empire. 162 India started the enumeration of
population through the decennial census from 1871 onward, which until
then had been a sporadic exercise in certain towns and cities and was
never a synchronized all-India exercise. Census statistics from various
colonies were collated at the 1901 census to compile the final Report on the
Census of the British Empire 1901 that was published as a parliamentary
command paper in 1906. At its core were the comparative tables that
covered area and population, houses and population in 1891, populations
of cities, ages, marital status, occupations, birthplaces, religion, educa-
tion, and disabilities. In addition to the comparative tables, the report
contained a commentary, as well as summaries of all the individual colo-
nies’ statistics. As the various classification systems were often not com-
patible, the tables had to be reconfigured using British systems and cate-
gories. 163 By 1917 doubts were raised on the usefulness of such an exer-
cise when the Registrar General expressed his reservations about the val-
ue of the project noting that it being only a brief epitome of the returns is
unlikely to serve any useful purpose, nor can it in any case supersede the
separate reports prepared by those familiar with the local circumstances
and problems of the various portions of the Empire. He was of the view
that future progress should be sought for in the development and im-
provement of these reports and an increase in their scope and interest,
and only simple tabular summaries of such results as are comparable
may be all that can advantageously be attempted by any central author-
ity. 164 The emphasis on synchronized census and standardized classifica-
tions nevertheless continued although it varied in practice in the different
colonies.

THE COLONIAL STATE, ADMINISTRATION, AND

GOVERNMENTALITY

Outlining here the nineteenth century developments in the British state is

not to suggest that the construction of the state in the colonial context was
a simple exercise of packing and transporting the modern state from
Britain and unpacking it in India. It could not have been that way as the
modern state and new modalities of administration were themselves be-
ing developed in Britain from the last quarter of the eighteenth century
until about the 1840s. While many of these administrative measures were
eventually to be introduced in India in some modified form, there was no
immediate transfer of these, although the Empire did figure in many
instances in the reforming measures. It cannot be lost on the reader
though that Burke’s insistence on bringing to trial Warren Hastings clear-
ly took place after the Act on public accounts in England. Equally, the
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 63

reforming zeal of Edwin Chadwick in the 1830s inspired by Benthamite

thinking that led to a multiplication of surveys of the condition of the
working class in England were not matched in the colonial Indian con-
text, at least not before the next century. But this cannot negate the fact
that the modern colonial state in the broad outlines reflected the organ-
ization of the British state, that colonial administrators were well versed
both in the political philosophy of the day as well as the administrative
practices in Britain, and the curriculum at Haileybury that trained coloni-
al administrators for India did incorporate these. Although many preco-
lonial states in India had archives of information and long institutional
memories, British rule greatly expanded the density of institutions that
collected and processed information not only to create longer institution-
al memories but new kinds of interventions and new discourses of soci-
ety. In the process, the embodied knowledge of Indian specialists gave
way to abstracted institutional knowledge through centers of governance
and commerce. 165
Some scholars have suggested that gleaning the writings of liberal
philosopher-administrators like James Mill and J. S. Mill may mistakenly
make the “colonial project” appear systematic and coordinated with in-
tentionality attributed to agents. Using Simmel’s idea of “stranger,” Jon
Wilson has argued that the domination of strangers in early colonial
Bengal was effected more by contingent factors as colonial rule on the
ground often consisted of uncoordinated activities that were in disar-
ray. 166 Though the British in India knew that information and knowledge
were necessary for them to rule, they were hardly conscious of an over-
arching framework of power and knowledge as today’s postcolonial
scholars. 167 Yet others have highlighted, as Ranajit Guha does, that colo-
nial officials in the early decades, quite understandably, were ridden
with anxiety as strangers in an alien context attempting to map alien
social practices onto “abstract regularities and written rules.” 168 They see
the modern colonial state as the outcome of “the gap that increasingly
opened up between the life-worlds of Indian social actors and the forms
of textual knowledge and abstraction colonial officials used to under-
stand it.” 169 This gap produced the state even as it continually repro-
duced their anxiety thus rendering the colonial state not as a coherent
and monolithic entity but one that was fragmented, and that initiated
future-oriented projects to overcome the chaotic present but was never
realized. The “colonial project” therefore remained always deferred.
Although the governmentality framework adopted here sets up an
opposition with the framework of sovereignty in Foucauldian thought, it
still needs to be recognized that the idea of state sovereignty as well as
the idea of a separate sphere of the “political” were introduced for the
first time in colonial India. Two distinctive phases in the development of
governmentality in colonial India can be identified to help in our concep-
tual exploration. The first phase coinciding with the period of rule of the
64 Chapter 1

East India Company and lasting up to the middle of the nineteenth centu-
ry is one in which the colonial state acquires its “stateness.” Within a few
years after the Company acquired Bengal in 1765, it set up the only effec-
tive local bureaucracy in the British Empire with a specialized adminis-
trative corps of Company servants posted in “districts” who acted as
collectors of revenue, magistrates, and judges. In this phase, the relation-
ship between territoriality-soverignty-discipline is constituted. While
managing the population has not yet assumed center-stage as it would in
the second phase, here the state-making process entailed the acquisition
of territory through wars and annexations, and the process of making the
territory familiar. The colonial state was not interested in territory per se
but in managing the things contained in the territory, and especially of
things in relation to the people. The Company thus had “its hands on the
levers with which to regulate the lives of millions without their consent.
It assessed and collected taxation, devised new schemes of land tenure,
created a new system of courts applying newly codified laws, fixed the
customs to be levied on trade, regulated currency and founded banks.” 170
Until the mid-nineteenth century, two important state activities name-
ly the revenue settlement process and the codification of law along with
the establishment of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of
the government, were instrumental in preparing the ground for the ra-
tional governance of the population. These activities no doubt took place
among contending and divergent opinions such as the difference be-
tween the anglicists and the paternalists on the retention and adaptation
of the older institutions of administration in contrast to the wholesale
introduction of the British system; or the settlement of revenue with the
class of aristocratic landlords as envisaged in the Cornwallis settlement
or with the class of peasantry as under Munro's ryotwari system. Despite
these differences, all opinion converged on the idea that private property
in land was necessary for the reconciliation of freedom with order. The
administration of state security and private property yoked sovereignty
to bureaucracy.
Establishing rights on land meant taking cognizance of ownership
and usufruct rights often established through custom and tradition,
transferred along hereditary lines, and backed by complex and confused
evidence of land grants bestowed at different points in time by the ruling
elites. Revenue settlement process meant the comprehension of the enor-
mous diversities in the de-jure and de-facto relationship of people to
land. Settlement records of the early colonial period in many places con-
tained therefore a great deal of information about the population such as
the number of inhabitants and their caste details among others. Land
revenue administration was the single important activity during this
phase of state making. Defining the rights on land with unambiguous
responsibility for revenue payment and collection was in effect a process
that delegitimized the principle of sovereignity that characterized the
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 65

earlier state-society-subjects relationships in order to redefine and recon-

stitute it anew by the colonial state. It also afforded the opportunity to
redefine the principle of sovereignty in conjunction with the disciplinary
mechanisms to sustain that sovereignty. No doubt there were important
threads of continuity between the successor states to Mughal power in
the eighteenth century and the early phase of British rule which
prompted Bentham to call the Company’s rule as a “sort of local monar-
chy,” the kind of rule criticized by James Mill. 171
Bentham’s principles of publicity and inspectability were to ensure
accountability of bureaucrats by making their official actions as public as
possible and by subjecting them to official inspection. While the press
and public criticism would take care of publicity, the principle of inspect-
ability would compel officials to keep detailed records and accounts and
to submit reports of their actions to higher officials regularly. 172 A judi-
cial dispatch in 1835 probably drafted by James Mill bore the imprint of
Bentham’s principle of inspectibility when it requested the commission-
ers of revenue to submit half-yearly reports on “the operation of the Civil,
Criminal and Police systems, the condition and morals of the people, and
should convey any suggestions they may desire to offer, with a view to
promote in any way the public welfare. These reports were in no way to
supersede the means of superintendence and control over all judicial
officers which consists in their rendering with perfect accuracy regular
and complete accounts of the duty performed by them.” 173
This dispatch bears striking resemblance to what James Mill had writ-
ten in his History regarding the judicial reforms of Cornwallis: “To re-
quire periodical reports from the judges, for the purpose of making
known the evils which remained without a remedy, is a measure deserv-
ing no common tribute of applause. Were a similar operation carried out
over the whole field of government, and made sufficiently faithful and
searching, the melioration of governments, and with it the happiness of
the human race, would proceed with an accelerated pace.” 174 Similarly, J.
S. Mill described the working of the Company to the House of Lords
Select Committee in June 1852:
All the orders given and all the acts of executive officers are reported in
writing. . . . [There] is no single act done in India, the whole of the
reasons for which are not placed on record. This appears to me a great-
er security for good government than exists in almost any other
government in the world, because no other has a system of recordation
so complete. 175
J. S. Mill remarked that the government of India was necessarily and
essentially a “government of record,” as it was clearly impossible to exer-
cise detailed control over the decision made in India, but the effect of
doing so could be achieved if every decision were recorded, its ground
noted, and comments on it sent back. Overcoming his father’s distrust of
66 Chapter 1

information collected by native informants, J. S. Mill sought to combine

specialized and fragmented knowledge with general principles in order
to render them useful for administration. 176 Thus the Company obliged
every one of its servants to record his decisions and to send a copy of the
record to London where it was duly filed. This raised questions about the
vast army of clerks and the huge mountains of paper that such a system
would seem to require. But Mill’s reply was that the material was in-
dexed with great accuracy, so that all files were immediately on hand,
and the cheapness of copying was ensured by employing native labor. 177
Homi Bhabha suggests that Mill’s system of recordation as a syntax of
deferral, in which events “experienced and inscribed in India are to be
read otherwise, transformed into acts of governments and the discourse of
authority in another place, at another time,” is to be acknowledged as “a
specific colonial temporality and textuality of that space between enuncia-
tion and address.” 178 Embarrassment to the “righteousness of recorda-
tion” and its “certainity of good government” that was likely to arise in
the misreadings in the space between enunciation and address was
sought to be avoided through systems of verification set in place that
tried through “inquisitorial insistence” to extort the “secretless secret.” 179
This system of inspectability through reports was to initiate an audit
culture in the bureaucracy in which ritualized practices of verification
became significant in their role in the production of organizational legiti-
macy rather than efficiency. 180 With evidence complementary to verifica-
tion, the form of evidence shifted to documentation based on hard facts
of which statistics and numbers came to signify accuracy. Commissions
became an important state technology as the conditions of the population
under such acute circumstances of famines and epidemics compelled the
gaze of the interventionist state. Ann Stoler opines that commissions and
statistics were part of “the ‘moral science’ of the nineteenth century that
coded and counted society’s pathologies.” 181 Although there were only
four Royal Commissions inquiring into Indian affairs as late as the early
twentieth century unlike in some of the other British colonies, there were
numerous other commissions in the nineteenth-century conducting in-
vestigations on every conceivable aspect of governance in every depart-
ment; each commission’s reports replete with statistics or the advice on
the need to collect statistics.
Bentham’s ideal state was envisaged as a hierarchy of officials with a
clear chain of command and distribution of responsibility. Administra-
tive areas were divided into districts and subdivisions each with a head
and aided by departmental subordinates. When Bentham’s disciples in
England like Chadwick tried to introduce such a scheme for administra-
tion of poor law, public health and local government they faced opposi-
tion. But no such opposition occurred when introduced in India as it was
realized that only a bureaucracy could govern India. But the reforms
envisaged in law and education in the 1830s only took effect thirty years
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 67

later as the apparent lack of finance and communications stalled such a

development agenda. Stokes remarks “Colonial rule is peculiarly subject
to the distortions of bureaucratic structures, which mistake the report for
the bullet, the plan for action, and what one clerk says to another for
history. On this view the age of modernizing reform which set in reput-
edly when Lord William Bentinck was appointed as Governor-General in
1827 was a grand confidence trick.” 182 A fully harmonized and uniform
administrative structure somewhat along the lines of Bentham and James
Mill was realized only between 1860 and 1870. As routine set in, the
administrative machine steadily grew more ponderous and less adapt-
able. Henry Maine in the 1860s challenged the hegemony of Utilitarian
ideas and denied they were of absolute and universal validity.
Throughout the later nineteenth century, the British had always to
negotiate the disjuncture between an acknowledgement of similarity, and
an insistence upon difference as they construed their “India.” 183 In this
phase of state-making beginning from the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury when the administration passed from the East India Company di-
rectly to the Crown, the rational and instrumental management of popu-
lation and of its welfare acquired a direct and sharp focus of the objective
of government. Up until 1858, governmentality entailed a more indirect
governance of the conduct of native population through revenue appro-
priation, legal system of court adjudication even if the penal code was
adopted only much later, attempt to abolish sati and the introduction of
modern education system. Such modes of governance were rendered
possible by the grids of law and bureaucratic disciplinary power. From
1860s onward, as new modes of intervention multiplied in the numerous
spheres of administration of modern institutions such as schools, facto-
ries, hospitals, the bureaucracies, barracks, railways, and prisons, as well
as interventions in times of famines and epidemics, it became necessary
to have detailed knowledge of the population that was to be governed.
This phase would not have been possible without first establishing the
territoriality-sovereignty-discipline grid of power.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Curzon could in his farewell
speech in 1905 claim that he had been able to set policymaking on the
following four cardinal principles. First, that every department of the
State and every branch of the administration must have a policy. He
noted “This method of treating the subject in question is based upon
accepted premises, either of reasoning or experience, and is laid down in
clear language, understood by the officers who have to apply it, and
intelligible to the people to whom it is to be applied.” In the sphere of
“internal politics” a slightly different method was adopted, though with
the same end, for as a rule no policy was framed without “a most exhaus-
tive preliminary examination of the data upon which it ought to rest
conducted by the most expert authorities.” He claimed that plague poli-
cy, famine codes and manual, irrigation schemes, university reforms, po-
68 Chapter 1

lice reforms, and the Railway Board were all implemented through the
same process that entailed
first, the ascertainment from the information at our disposal, from the
representation of the public, and from the known facts, that there was a
case for reform; secondly, the appointment of an influential and repre-
sentative body to go round the country and take evidence; thirdly the
critical examination of their report, accompanied by consultation of
Local Governments and of public opinion.; fourthly, the accomplished
reform. . . . And now I can say that not a single Commission has sat and
reported in my time without its results having been embodied with the
least possible delay in administrative measures or in legislative Acts.
The second and the third principles were to target the population as a
mass rather than any section or class, and “to take them into open confi-
dence as to the views and intentions of Government, to profit by public
opinion instead of ignoring it, never to flatter or cozen and never to
mystify or deceive.” The last principle “has been everywhere to look
ahead; to scrutinize not merely the passing requirements of the hour, but
the abiding needs of the country, and to build not for the present alone
but for the future.” 184 He claimed that the one great fault of Englishmen
in India was that they do not sufficiently look ahead. Cognizant of the
possibility that an efficient staff could be converted into a not so efficient
bureaucracy, Curzon noted that the growth in colonial government, the
creation of new departments and posts, was on account of global tenden-
cies of economic advancement that they were “powerless to resist, but
not powerless to control.” 185
The idea of governmentality targeting population as the tactic of
government was a novel idea as no pre-colonial state in India had devel-
oped the technologies of rule for the rational governance of the popula-
tion, and of the instrumental approach to the economy. Premodern states
that existed in India prior to the colonial state did often have well devel-
oped administrative structures and record-keeping practices but the
states hardly assumed interventionary roles. The collection of land reve-
nue and other taxes constituted the most significant state activity that
was largely performed by intermediaries belonging to kinship structures
that bound the ruling elites with the local units. The direct intervention-
ary roles even when states were strong were at best minimal. Kings rul-
ing under divine authority sought to dispense welfare to their subjects
through the invocation of the moral order, thus rendering moral and
political order as inextricably bound together. This underwent a pro-
found change with the emergence of the modern state, the distinguishing
characteristics of it being the separation of legislative, executive and judi-
cial authority, which did not exist under pre-modern forms of govern-
ance when kingship held the covenant. The political technologies of rule
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 69

deployed by the modern state are therefore both different and governed
by different political rationalities.
A question of concern are the similiarities and differences between
metropolitan governmentality and colonial governmentality especially
since new techniques of rule that evolved in Britain found a place in
colonial governmental practices, and new techniques tried out in the col-
onies were deployed in the internal civilizing mission of the newly con-
stituted urban working class in England. No doubt, metropolitan and
colonial governmentality developed together, in mutual fertilization, al-
though the liberalism of colonial governmentality was “highly qualified”
and “ambiguous,” being “inflected by a certain degree of agonism be-
tween authority and liberty,” what has been called a “dislocated liberal-
ism.” 186 Liberal governmentality in the colonial context faced contradic-
tions between the liberal assumption of equality of individuals and the
difference of the colonial “Others.” Equally, the universalism of liberal-
ism predicated on the idea of “progress” consigned “barbarous” India
outside the pale of progress and was a fundamental contradiction of
liberal governmentality as illiberal forms of governance were seen as
necessary for the “Improvement” of conduct of such people. If for some,
colonial governmentality is “structurally different if also intimately relat-
ed,” for others it is “radically discontinuous with the Western norm.” 187
If liberal governance is rule through freedom, the colonial context was
not one of freedom. Modern statecraft was largely a project of internal
colonization, glossed with the imperial rhetoric of “civilizing mission.” 188

RECORDS, STATISTICS, AND EPISTEMIC CONCERNS

Language and meaning constructed colonial power in new ways as for

the British meaning was attributed to the word or object in a direct way
that appeared not so for the Indians. When a Mughal ruler issued a
farman or parwana, it was more than an order or entitlement, as through
the act of creating the document, they were sharing in the authority and
substance of the sender. Bernard Cohn notes “The paper, the forms of
address, the preliminary invocative phrases, the type of script, the elab-
oration of the terminology, the grammar, the seals used, the particular
status of the composer and writer of the document, its mode of transmis-
sion, and the form of delivery, were all meaningful.” 189 All these carried
the charisma of the ruler in an embodied sense. Records of tax and reve-
nue that were maintained by the Mughal administration and native rul-
ers indicate that writing and some form of replication of it was prevalent
in pre-colonial times. Yet bureaucratic writing did not construct the Mu-
ghal state the way it did the colonial state.
If the colonial archives are the products of the colonial state, they are
also technologies that enabled the production of that state. 190 Bureaucrat-
70 Chapter 1

ic writing becomes a “routinization of charisma” through a process of

standardization. 191 Derrida noted in Grammatology that in order to under-
stand the fundamental nature of power that human institutions exercise
over human beings, it is crucial to concede that writing is more basic than
speech in its utter conventionality. He identified three kinds of signature
in Glas—the signing of an actual name, the style of an author, and the
heraldic self-images the author buries, consciously or otherwise, in a text.
All these are copious in the colonial administrative writings; they are so
thoroughly authorized that one could say they are signed in “administra-
tive triplicate.” Rukmini Bhaya Nair notes that in the governmental sig-
nature “the Barthesian image and letter are perfectly coalesced.” 192 Filing
systems and bureaucratic writing as disciplinary technologies produce
assemblages of control through hieracrchy and accountability, and spe-
cific methods of domination. 193 For the first time, individuals and groups
who had hitherto been below the threshold of description could be de-
scribed in writing under the gaze of a framework of knowledge that
classified, compared, and counted.
A “biography of the archive” to use Nicholas Dirk’s phrase, would
require us to distinguish “archival power lodged in moments of creation
from practices of assembly, retrieval and disciplinary legitimation.” 194
This necessitates viewing the archive not as an institution or a library of
events but in the Foucauldian sense of “the law of what can be said,”
“that system that establishes statements as events and things,” and “sys-
tem of enunciabilities.” 195 Ranajit Guha has made us aware that colonial
documents were rhetorical sleights-of-hand that erased the facts of subju-
gation and reinforced colonial “Otherness” to ensure the colonizer’s
dominance and rule. To understand the materiality and imaginary of
archival collections and the kinds of truth-claims in the documentation,
Ann Stoler recommends that archives be approached not with an “extrac-
tive attitude” but with “ethnographic sensibilities.” 196 The disjuncture
between the point of enunciation and address that opens up a space of
interpretation and misappropriation, and that inscribes an ambivalence
to colonial authority, what Bhabha notes as “sly civility,” the disjuncture
maneuvered by Mill’s system of “recordation” that produces the distinc-
tive colonial temporality and textuality persuades Dirks to call the coloni-
al state as an “ethnographic state.” Clearly, understanding colonial
archives as a process sensitizes us to be open to epistemic uncertainities
and to question how epistemic warrant was granted.
Earlier I had noted that the production of statistical knowledge in the
process of colonial governance could be best understood through Fou-
cault’s notion of episteme. This notion of “episteme” suggests an already
well-formed and enduring thought-formation, which it clearly was not.
In the colonial archive that was being created as part of governance,
colonial truth claims were at best provisional and subject to change. 197
Colonial categories and knowledge was more often produced in an am-
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 71

biguous epistemic space relying on rules, trust, and common sense of

what was to be likely and colonial administrators strove to steer political
projects in the direction of plausibility while attempting to tame chance.
Numbers played both justificatory and disciplinary roles even as it
served the logistical and discursive needs of the state. In the “rule by
records” and “rule by reports” of the colonial administration as described
by Richard Saumarez Smith, 198 Appadurai is of the view that while num-
bers in “records” served the descriptive thrust of the colonial gaze, num-
bers in “reports” served as a normalizing frame that balanced the contes-
tatory and polyphonic aspects of the narratives, much like what Guha
had elsewhere called “the prose of counter-insurgency.” 199
Numbers and statistics produced in governance may and may not
have been accurate and were categorized based on exigency determined
by administrators in the bureaucratic hierarchy, whose accountability
was ensured through reports from the subordinates and verified by the
superordinates, the Benthamite principle of accountability and his cycle
of enforcement-inspection and amendement. Arjun Appadurai has noted
that the justificatory dimension of the use of numbers relates to the differ-
ent levels of the colonial state in India, where numbers were “the fuel for
a series of nested struggles between Indian officials at the lowest level of
the bureaucracy up the system to the governor-general of India, through
a series of crosscutting committees, boards and individual office-holders,
who conducted a constant internal debate about the plausibility and rele-
vance of various classifications and the numbers attached to them.” 200
Following is a colonial collector of Cuddaph district involved in fa-
mine administration giving his explanation for a report he had filed
which received unfavourabe remarks from his superiors especially for its
statistical deficiency. He writes:
The unfavourable remarks made by the Board as to my touring in its
review of my narrative for the first fifteen days in January having been
followed by further remarks unfavourably criticising my narrative for
the second half of January, I think, it is due to myself to place on record
the following
Considering the great importance of famine matters in the Cud-
daph district and the fact that I had not seen the conservator for a year,
I respectfully consider that I acted discreetly in postponing leaving my
headquarters until after the conservators arrival. I have been continu-
ously touring in the portions of the district reported to be most serious-
ly affected by adverse season from 18th January until 14th instant, on
which date, I cut my tour short in order to meet the Famine Commis-
sioner of Cuddaph. As regards my narration for the second half of
January in which I showed that I had carefully examined a large extent
of the tract reported to be affected, I am found fault with for furnishing
no statistics (emphasis mine) and for giving vague information. I beg
respectfully to represent that the narrative in question chiefly differs
from its predecessors, which the Board unfavourably comments in the
72 Chapter 1

fact that it gives a more hopeful and sanguine estimate of the agricultu-
ral prospects. In the nature of things it had to be based in the main
upon the reports of subordinates, and in the absence of statistics fur-
nished by them, it was ex-necessitate to a corresponding degree devoid
of statistics, and was to a very large extent a mere resume of the reports
like its predecessors, I am glad to state that I was able, in consequence
of my personal inspection to afford some information leading to the
inference that their reports were not quite accurate and were unneces-
sarily gloomy. [In this connection, I wish to emphasise that in my com-
ments upon Deputy Collector M.R. Ry. Narrainasaamy Pillai's report, I
had not the slightest intention to question honesty of purpose or good
faith, but merely wished to record for the information of the Board and
Government, facts that had come under my personal observations and
that of another officer of same standing and which seemed to indicate
either that his (Narrainasaamy Pillai's) observation was not acute or
else that language used by him was too general and his opinion such as
could be gathered from his language was open to question]. The fort-
nightly narrative should depict as accurately as possible the facts of the
fortnight. I am entirely in agreement with other officers in the district
that when harvest operations are over in March, it is to be expected that
there will be a considerable increase of workers on relief works. We are
quite prepared for such a contingency if the Public Works Department
officers have a sufficient number of subordinates in readiness. I fear
that there will be some difficulty about their subordinate staff, and
consider that early arrangements should be made to have a sufficient
number of subordinates in readiness.
The Collector of Cuddaph (The Hindu, dated April 10, 1897)
Here is a clear illustration of an ambiguous epistemic space in the realm
of famine administration in colonial south India at the end of the nine-
teenth century. Facts on the ground had to be accurately reported to the
higher authorities for governmental action. Statistics ensures accuracy if
they are accurate and there is no mechanism for checking accuracy in
such cases on the ground. Also in the absence of statistics being for-
warded by the lower level administration, ethnographic authority is sub-
stituted, in which the authority is that of one officer and of another of
“some standing” whose impressions based on such authority (presum-
ably also marked by race though unmentioned) is pitted against the im-
pressions of an obviously “native” officer who though may be honest did
not make an “acute” observation or used unconvincing language, and
whose report was not considered favorably only because his impression-
istic findings presented a gloomy agrarian situation. Even a more opti-
mistic report however is found wanting on account of lack of statistics.
Statistics clearly constructs the truth here.
In a similar vein, Arjun Appadurai calls the revenue documents as a
“prose of cadastral domination” that contained the internal debates of the
revenue bureaucracy on the pragmatics of rule formation and the rhetoric
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 73

of utility along with the new technical practices, and were “composed
partly of rules, partly of orders, partly of appendices, and partly of letters
and petitions” whose manifest rhetoric is technical, but whose subtext is
contestatory in regard to superiors, and disciplinary in regard to inferi-
ors. 201
The foregoing substantiates Ann Stoler’s claim that the epistemic
practices of science and colonial governance share a common preoccupa-
tion of taming chance depending as interpretive communities on “rules
of reliability and trust, on an assumed common sense about what was
likely,” and figuring out governing strategies that could work based on
“sound conjecture and expectation.” 202 Conjecture or not, numbers were
more than a part of the colonial “imaginaire” enabling governing at a
distance, conferring a legitimacy to colonial governmentality, measuring
its performance, establishing domains of objectivity, and constituting a
new game of politics of calculation, opinion, and representation. 203 The
chapters that follow inquire into the conditions of the production of sta-
tistical knowledge by colonial governmentality considering the colonial
archive in the process of production, and organized around key epistem-
ic categories of space, time, measurement, classification, and causality.

NOTES

1. Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1995).
2. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended, Lectures at the Collège de France,
1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York:
Picador, 2003), 267–69.
3. Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extrater-
ritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1994), 101.
4. Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States, The New Cambridge
History of India III. 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 88.
5. Political sociology has been concerned with the question of what is the “state.”
Philip Abrams notes that the state comes into being as a structuration within political
practice, and that the state is a mask that prevents one from perceiving political prac-
tice as it is. He thinks it more useful to go by the concepts of “state-system,” a palpable
nexus of practice and institutional structure centered in government and more or less
extensive, unified and dominant in any given society, and “state-idea” which is pro-
jected, purveyed and variously believed in different societies at different times. See
Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical
Sociology 1, 1 (1988): 82.
6. Henry Schwarz has argued that Orientalist research furthered the ideological
project of manufacturing legitimacy. Henry Schwarz, “Laissez-Faire Linguistics:
Grammar and the Codes of Empire,” Critical Inquiry 23, 2 Front Lines/ Border Posts
(Spring 1997): 509–35.
7. Philip Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foun-
dations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
8. Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British
India (London: Routledge, 2002).
74 Chapter 1

9. Henry Maine even argued that sovereignty was divisible. See “Minute by Sir
Henry Maine dated 22 March 1864 in Sever, Documents, Vol. 1, 251” in Ramusack, The
Indian Princes and Their States, 94.
10. Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India.
11. Nicholas. B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2006).
12. Bentham defines political society as: “When a number of persons (whom we
may style subjects) are supposed to be in the habit of paying obedience to a person, or
an assemblage of persons, of a known and certain description (whom we may call
governor or governors) such persons altogether (subjects and governors) are said to be
in a state of political society.” See Jeremy Bentham, Fragment on Government in The
Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. IV, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh, 1859).
13. Thomas Babbington A. Macaulay, Speech delivered in the House of Commons,
July 10, 1833, reprinted in The Complete Works of Lord Macaulay 19, The Miscellaneous
Works (Philadelphia: The University Library Association, 1910), 162–63.
14. Foucault notes “To say that the problem of sovereignty is the central problem of
right in Western societies means that the essential function of the technique and dis-
course of right is to dissolve the element of domination in power and to replace that
domination, which has to be reduced or masked, with two things: the legitimate rights
of the sovereign on the one hand, and the legal obligation to obey on the other.” See
Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 26.
15. Charles Drekmeier, Kingship and Community in Early India (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1962), 251.
16. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian
Theory of Government (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1978), 3. Origi-
nally published by American Oriental Society, New Haven, Connecticut, 1942.
17. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of
Government, 63.
18. Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of
Government, 45–46 fn 34.
19. Georges Dumezil, Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations
of Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
20. For an understanding of the evolution of conceptions of kingship in England
that conceives the prince as possessing two bodies—a body natural and corruptible,
and a body politic and immortal, which is a landmark of Christian political theology,
read Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957/1997).
21. Bhrigupati Singh, “The Headless Horseman of Central India: Sovereignty at
Varying Thresholds of Life,” Cultural Anthropology 27, 2 (2012): 383–407.
22. Varma, cited in Drekmeier, Kingship and Community in Early India, 261.
23. Duncan J. M. Derrett, “Rajadharma,” The Journal of Asian Studies 35, 4 (August
1976): 597–609; and Louis Dumont, “The Conception of Kingship in Ancient India,”
Contribution to Indian Sociology 6, (1962): 61–64.
24. Hartmut Scharfe, The State in Indian Tradition (Leiden/New York: E.J. Brill, 1989),
97.
25. Altekar disagrees with the view that the king is not incapable of doing or think-
ing wrong. He remarks that the king was regarded as being more exposed to errors
and temptations than ordinary human beings, nor was the king’s divinity construed as
necessitating passive obedience even to wicked kings. See A. S. Altekar, State and
Government in Ancient India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1949), 94.
26. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction” in The Mughal State
1526–1750, ed. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 15.
27. Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/ Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in
the Language of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996), 32–33.
28. Alam and Subrahmanyam, The Mughal State, 31.
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 75

29. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament, 315.
30. John F. Richards, “The Formulation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and
Jahangir,” in The Mughal State 1526–1750, ed. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahman-
yam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 126–67.
31. Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab,
1707–48 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
32. Sudipta Kaviraj, “Modernity and Politics in India,” Daedalus 129, 1 (Winter
2000): 142.
33. Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1980).
34. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, 23.
35. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, 269.
36. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, 264.
37. Chapter VII “The Chola State and the Agrarian Order” in Stein, Peasant State and
Society in Medieval South India.
38. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament, 326.
39. Nicholas. B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
40. Dirks, The Hollow Crown.
41. Pamela G. Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996).
42. Wink explains fitna as follows: “As opposed to a purely military operation fitna
was at least a mixture of coercion and conciliation and characteristically implied inter-
vention in and making use of existing local conflicts. Fitna can be equated with the
political expedient of upajapa of the Indian Arthasastra, comprising conciliation, gift-
giving, sowing dissension among and ‘winning over’ of an enemy’s local supporters,
and involving the use of force only secondarily. . . . In India, as in all Islamic states,
sovereignty was primarily a matter of allegiances; the state organized itself around
conflict and remained essentially open-ended instead of becoming territorially circum-
scribed.” Such forms of sovereignty, characterized by dispersal through shifting com-
binations with local powerholders, have become alien to Europe and the modern state
in general, whose sovereignty is always expressed in terms of political territory and
not of allegiances. See Andre Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and
Politics under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1986), 27–28.
43. Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India, 34.
44. Bernard S. Cohn, “Political System in Eighteenth Century India: The Banaras
Region” in An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1987/1990), 483–99.
45. Bernard S. Cohn, “The Initial British Impact on India: A Case Study of the
Benares Region,” The Journal of Asian Studies 19, 4 (Aug 1960): 418–31.
46. Richard G. Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Pre-industri-
al India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
47. Appadurai notes that the unyoking of social groups from the complex and
localized group structures and agrarian practices occurred in two major steps—one
before 1870 in which issues of land settlement and taxation were dominant colonial
projects, and the other in the period of census 1870–1930. See Appadurai, “Number in
the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament, 326.
48. Paraphrased by Burke, “Speech in Reply”, (11:195) Cited in Frederick G. Whe-
lan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 233. Also see Edmund Burke, “Speech on Opening of Im-
peachment-1788 on 15th, 16th, 18th, and 19th Feb 1788” in The Writings and Speeches of
Edmund Burke vol. 6, ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 264–471.
49. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India.
76 Chapter 1

50. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 29–30.

51. David. P. Fidler and Jennifer M. Welsh, ed., Empire and Community: Edmund
Burke’s Writings and Speeches on International Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1999), 23. Talal Asad has highlighted two divergent European perceptions of non-
European rule. While Orientalists perception of the Ottoman Empire subscribed to the
image of “Oriental Despotism,” the anthropologists’ images of African societies was
one of “rule by consent.” He attributes the differing perceptions to the historical peri-
ods of imperial rule when these perceptions emerged. See Talal Asad, “Two European
Images of Non-European Rule,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal
Asad (London: Ithaca Press, 1973), 103–118. Also read Franco Venturi, “Oriental Des-
potism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 133–42.
52. Anthony Pagden, “Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest and Sove-
reignty in Europe’s Overseas Empires,” History and Theory Theme Issue 44 (December
2005): 34–35.
53. Fidler and Welsh, Empire and Community, 23.
54. Fox’s Bill, Speech on Fox’s India Bill (1783). See Edmund Burke, “Speech on
Fox’s India Bill–1783,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke vol. 5, ed. P.J.
Marshall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 386.
55. Fox’s Bill, Speech on Fox’s India Bill (1783). See Burke, “Speech on Fox’s India
Bill–1783,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke vol. 5, 386.
56. Fox’s Bill, Speech on Fox’s India Bill (1783). Burke, “Speech on Fox’s India
Bill–1783,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke vol. 5.
57. Fidler and Welsh, Empire and Community.
58. Margaret Kohn and Daniel I. O’Neill, “A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on
Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America,” Political Theory 34, 2 (April 2006):
192–228.
59. James Mill History vol. 2, 105. Cited in Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 136.
60. James Mill, The History of British India vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1817/1858/ 1968), 107.
61. James Mill History vol. 2, 166–67. Cited in Stokes, The English Utilitarians and
India, 54.
62. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 127.
63. James Mill to Dumont. The Works of David Ricardo, ed. R.Sraffa, vol. 8, Letters
1819–21, 40 n. Cited in Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, 48.
64. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Prometheus Books, 1986), 16–17. First
published in 1859.
65. Ute Tellmann, “Catastrophic Populations and the Fear of the Future: Malthus
and the Genealogy of Liberal Economy,” Theory, Culture and Society 30 (March, 2013):
135–55.
66. See chapter II, “The Criterion of a Good Form of Government,” in Mill, J. S.
(1991)
67. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Prome-
theus Books, 1991), 43.
68. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 46–47.
69. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 53.
70. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 53.
71. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 53.
72. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government (London: J.
M. Dent, 1912), 117.
73. Bhikhu Parekh, “Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill,” in
The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, ed. Jan Nederveen Pie-
terse and Bhikhu Parekh (London: Zed Press, 1995), 81–98.
74. Kohn and O’Neill, “A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slav-
ery in the West Indies and America.”
75. Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” The
Journal of Political Philosophy 7, 1 (1999): 13–14.
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 77

76. Parekh, “Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill” in The
Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, 95–96.
77. Jennifer Pitts, “Legislator of the World? A Rereading of Bentham on Colonies,”
Political Theory 32 (2003): 200–34.
78. Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of
Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 293.
79. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, 14.
80. Malcolm Political History, Vol II: 143. Cited in Stokes, The English Utilitarians and
India, 23.
81. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, 178.
82. James Mill, Testimony before Select Committee, 25 Aug, 1831. Cited in Lynn
Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 23.
83. Thomas R. Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj, The New Cambridge History of India III. 4
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 58.
84. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: India in British Liberal Thought (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35.
85. Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
86. Mantena, Alibis of Empire, 5.
87. Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj, 224–225.
88. Letter of Curzon to Lytton, 29 August 1900. Cited in Robin J. Moore, “Curzon
and Indian Reform,” Modern Asian Studies 27, 4 (October 1993): 723–24.
89. William E. Connolly, “Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel
Foucault,” Political Theory 21, 3 (August 1993): 365–89.
90. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 14.
91. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 19.
92. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 20.
93. Bayly insists on the continuities between precolonial and colonial administra-
tion noting that the informational needs of precolonial states were directed to specific
rather than general aims. See Bayly, Empire and Information, 20–23.
94. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). Originally published by Harvard University
Press.
95. Nancy L. Rosenblum, Bentham’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1978).
96. L. J. Hume, “Jeremy Bentham and the Nineteenth-Century Revolution in
Government,” in Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessments vol. 3, ed. Bhikhu Parekh (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 823–25.
97. Hume, “Jeremy Bentham and the Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Govern-
ment,” in Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessments vol. 3, 826–29.
98. B. B. Schaffer, “The Idea of the Ministerial Department: Bentham, Mill and Bage-
hot,” in Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessments, vol. 3, ed. Bhikhu Parekh (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 839–40.
99. Bhikhu Parekh, “When Will the State Wither Away?” Alternatives: Global, Local,
Political 15, 3 (Summer 1990): 247–62.
100. Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, 188–89.
101. Mark Neocleous, Imagining the State (Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University
Press, 2003), 5.
102. Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch , 6–7. Cited in Cohn and Dirks, “Beyond the
Fringe.”
103. Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Herzfeld, Anthropology: Theoreti-
cal Practice in Culture and Society, 266–67.
104. Cohn and Dirks, “Beyond the Fringe,” 226.
105. For Don Handelman this panoptic principle renders possible the association of
spectacle and bureaucracy. In the metalogic of presentation, Handelman notes that
78 Chapter 1

spectacles are declaratives, sometimes imperatives, but rarely interrogatives. Michael

Herzfeld notes that they reproduce the bureaucratic concern with the outward replica-
tion of order with precision, attention to detail, evocation of uniformity and are perfor-
mances of bureaucratic exactitude and serves the goals of national and political ho-
mogenization. See Herzfeld, Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society,
270.
106. S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Max Weber: On Charisma and Institution Building (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1968), 28.
107. Bryan S. Turner, “Nietzsche, Weber and the Devaluation of Politics: The Prob-
lem of State Legitimacy,” in Max Weber: From History to Modernity (London: Routledge,
1992).
108. John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 31, (Autumn 2004):
108–32.
109. Ogborn, Indian Ink.
110. Elena Esposito, “The Arts of Contingency,” Critical Inquiry 31, (Autumn 2004):
15.
111. Max Weber, “Bureaucracy” in Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1946), 233–34.
112. Peter Galison is of the view that in contemporary times the United States has
probably more classified (not made public) state documents than what is unclassified.
See Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 31, 1 (2004): 229–43.
113. The notion of “homogenous and empty time” was put forth by Walter Benjamin
when he noted “History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in
homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now.” See
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Gesammelte Schriften I:2 trans. Dennis
Redmond (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag), 8. Benjamin also noted “The con-
cept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its
progression through a homogeneous, empty time.” See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on
the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken
Books), 261.
114. Jon E. Wilson, “The Domination of Strangers: Time, Emotion and the Making of
the Modern State in Colonial India,” Economic and Political Weekly XLVI, 30 (July 23,
2011): 45–52.
115. Matthew Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Paki-
stan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
116. Foucault, “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality.
117. Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,
95.
118. Bruce Curtis, “Foucault on Governmentality and Population: The Impossible
Discovery,” The Canadian Journal of Sociology 27, 4 (Autumn 2002): 505–33.
119. Partha Chatterjee, “On Civil and Political Society in Post-Colonial Democra-
cies,” in Civil Society: History and Possibilities, ed. Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 173.
120. Martin Saar, “Relocating the Modern State: Governmentality and the History of
Political Ideas,” in Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges, ed. by Ulrich
Brockling, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke (New York: Routledge, 2011),
39–40; and Bob Jessop, “Constituting Another Foucault Effect: Foucault on States and
Statecraft” in Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges, ed. Ulrich Brock-
ling, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke (New York: Routledge, 2011), 62.
121. Barry Hindess, “Politics and Governmentality,” Economy and Society 26, 2 (1997):
258.
122. Nikolas Rose, and Peter Miller, “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics
of Government,” The British Journal of Sociology 43, 2 (Jun, 1992): 183.
123. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 18.
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 79

124. Foucault has observed that at the end of the eighteenth century, political
thought discovered “society” as a complex and independent reality that has its own
laws and mechanisms of reaction, its regulation as well as its possibilities of distur-
bance and that has to be manipulated by techniques of “government” rather than
being penetrated by “police.” See Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge and Power,” in
The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 242.
125. Michel Foucault, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed.
Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 75.
126. See Chapter 2, “Populations and Political Society” in Partha Chatterjee, The
Politics of the Governed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 27–51.
127. Foucault, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth , 76–77.
128. Bruce Curtis has pointed out that Foucault did not follow the explanatory tactic
of relating population as an object of political government to the development of
large-scale practices of social observation and recording when he became concerned
with governmentality. Instead population was situated in the field of “political rea-
son.” See Curtis, “Foucault on Governmentality and Population: The Impossible Dis-
covery,” 511.
129. Curtis, “Foucault on Governmentality and Population: The Impossible Discov-
ery.”
130. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chica-
go: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3.
131. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (Lon-
don: Verso, 1993).
132. John Guillory defines “information” as any given datum of cognitive experience
that can be materially encoded for the purpose of transmission or storage and “knowl-
edge” organizes masses of information or data into complex structures of intelligibility
and uses these structures to discover new relations and new facts. See Guillory, “The
Memo and Modernity,” 110. This notion of “information” is closer to the “modern
fact” of Poovey. See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge
in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See
also Richards, The Imperial Archive.
133. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 20.
134. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, 3.
135. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, 3–4.
136. G. Sutherland, “Introduction,” in Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth Century
Government, ed. G. Sutherland (London: Routledge, 1972), 6–8.
137. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 114.
138. Schaffer, “The Idea of the Ministerial Department.”
139. John Torrance, “Social Class and Bureaucratic Innovation: The Commissioners
for Examining the Public Accounts 1780–1787,” Past and Present 78 (February 1978):
56–81.
140. Torrance, “Social Class and Bureaucratic Innovation,” 68.
141. Hume, “Jeremy Bentham and the Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Govern-
ment,” 826. Hacking points out that the Swedes too had been compiling annual re-
ports within the framework of the parish and were considered the best available
statistics for late eighteenth century Europe, but it is the French who have to be
credited for their achievement of “secular” numbers, which is a Bonapartic legacy. See
Ian Hacking, “Bio-Power and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Soci-
ety 5, 3–4, (1982): 286.
142. Eastwood, “Amplifying the Province of the Legislation,” 276–277. Hugh Mc Dowall
Clokie and William J. Robinson note “Not only did the number, size, and circulation of
parliamentary papers increase many fold in the first third of the nineteenth century,
but by the middle of the century the annual product was far greater than in all the
centuries before 1800.” See Hugh McDowall Clokie and William J. Robinson, Royal
Commissions of Inquiry: The Significance of Investigations in British Politics (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1937), 54.
80 Chapter 1

143. S. E. Finer, “The Transmission of Benthamite Ideas 1820–50,” in Studies in the

Growth of Nineteenth Century Government ed. G. Sutherland (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1972), 22–26.
144. Hume, “Jeremy Bentham and the Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Govern-
ment,” 832.
145. David Roberts, “Jeremy Bentham and the Victorian Administrative State,” in
Jeremy Bentham: Critical Assessments vol.3 ed. Bhikhu Parekh (New York: Routledge,
1993), 881.
146. Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso,
2003), 21.
147. Mary Poovey, “Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Discourse of Sta-
tistics in the 1830s,” Critical Inquiry 18, 2 (Winter, 1993): 256–276. Patricia Cline Cohen
remarks that an upsurge of quantification was also evident in America in the 1820s
and 1830s and many types of quantitative materials and documents emerged that
previously were quite rare. Not only government agencies but private associations
and individuals were eagerly counting, measuring and churning out data. See Patricia
Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 4.
148. Cohen observes that half a century before William Petty invented “Political
arithmetic,” the Virginia Company of London was busy collecting census and prepar-
ing ship lists of emigrants, because their enterprise reduced people to commodities.
Also in the seventeenth century the newly formed Lords of Trade and Plantation
decided that correct regulation of mercantilism required periodic quantitative reports
from the royal governors on the scene. See Cohen, A Calculating People, 47–48.
149. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 36.
150. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 36.
151. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 30–31.
152. Eastwood, “Amplifying the Province of the Legislation,” 278.
153. E. Higgs, The Information State in England: The Central Collection of Information on
Citizens since 1500 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
154. John Arbuthnot ‘Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning’ (London,
1701). Cited in Buck, “Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic,” 81.
155. Eastwood, “Amplifying the Province of the Legislation,” 288.
156. Latour, Science in Action, 255.
157. MacDonagh provides a model of the legislative cum administrative process that
leads to the gradual crystallization of an expertise in a field of government. See Oliver
MacDonagh,”Delegated Legislation and Administrative Discretions in the 1850s: A
Particular Study,” Victorian Studies 2, 1 (September 1958): 29–44.
158. Lawrence Goldman, “The Social Science Association, 1857–1886: A Context for
Mid-Victorian Liberalism,” The English Historical Review 101, 398, (January 1986):
95–134.
159. Bruce Curtis, “Official documentary systems and colonial government: from
imperial sovereignty to colonial autonomy in the Canadas, 1841–1867,” Journal of His-
torical Sociology 10, 4 (1997): 392.
160. Bruno Latour even notes that the invention of statistical variance and sampling
solved the major problems of inscription—mobility, combinability, and faithfulness.
See Latour, Science in Action, 222–55.
161. Jon E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India
1780–1835 (London: Palgrave and McMillan, 2008).
162. Timothy Mitchell observes that French colonial rule in Egypt tried to calculate
statistically “the average power of Egyptian men” as the new methods of colonial
order was seeking to colonize such power towards extractive ends. When the British
following the French in Egypt tried to obtain the population statistics, they found the
Egyptian way of life such as the harem made half the population invisible. The colonial
model plan of Egyptian village sought to overcome this kind of inaccessibility. See
 Sovereignty and Governmentality 81

Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),

46.
163. A.J. Christopher, “The Quest for a Census of the British Empire c. 1840–1940,”
Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008): 278.
164. Christopher,”The Quest for a Census of the British Empire c. 1840–1940,” 281.
Beaud and Prévost discuss the stillborn British Empire Statistical Bureau 1918–1920.
See J.-P. Beaud and J.-G. Prévost, “Statistics as the science of government: the stillborn
British Empire Statistical Bureau, 1918–20,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Histo-
ry 33, 3 (2005): 369–91.
165. Bayly, Empire and Information, 179.
166. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers.
167. Foreword by Nicholas B. Dirks in Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge.
168. Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry 23, 3 Front Lines/ Bor-
der Posts (Spring 1997): 488.
169. Wilson, “The Domination of Strangers: Time, Emotion and the Making of the
Modern State in Colonial India,” 52.
170. P.J. Marshall, “Empire and Authority in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History 15 (1987): 117.
171. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 25.
172. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, 74.
173. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, 188.
174. Mill History, vol. V, 430–31. Cited in Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, 188.
175. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 93.
176. Javed Majeed notes that it is in response to this problem that J.S.Mill developed
his notion of the State in his On Liberty as a “central depository, and active circulator
and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials.” See John Stuart Mill, “On
Liberty” in Essays on Politics and Society, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill vol. 18 ed.
J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 306. See Javed Majeed,
“James Mill’s ‘The History of British India: A Reevaluation’” in J.S. Mill’s Encounter
with India ed. Martin I. Moir, Douglas M. Peers, and Lynn Zastoupil (Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, 1999), 63.
177. Alan Ryan, “Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy: The Views of J. S. Mill,” in Studies
in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government, ed. G. Sutherland (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1972), 40. Also see Martin Moir, “Kaghazi Raj: Notes on the Docu-
mentary Basis of Company Rule 1783–1858,” Indo-British Review 21, 2 (1983): 185–93.
178. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 95.
179. Derrida’s phrases, cited in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 98.
180. Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997), 14.
181. Ann Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science, 2
(2002):106.
182. Eric Stokes, “The First Century of British Colonial Rule in India: Social Revolu-
tion or Social Stagnation?” Past and Present 58 (February, 1973): 146.
183. Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj, 66.
184. Farewell Speech at the Byculla Club, Bombay delivered on November 16th,
1905. Curzon (1907), 6–11.
185. Farewell Speech at the United Service Club, Simla Sept 30th, 1905. Curzon, Lord
Curzon’s Farewell Speeches–Being Speeches delivered as Viceroy and Governor-General Dur-
ing Sept-Nov 1905, ed. R. P.Karkaria (Bombay: Thacker and Co, 1907), 22–23.
186. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, 248.
187. Joyce , The Rule of Freedom, and Gyan Prakash, “The Colonial Genealogy of
Society: Community and Political Modernity in India,” in The Social in Question: New
bearings in history and the social sciences,ed. Patrick Joyce (London: Routledge, 2002),
81–96.
188. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 82.
82 Chapter 1

189. Bernard S. Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Com-
mand,” in Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit
Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 280.
190. Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 98.
191. Michael T. Clanchy, “Does Writing Construct the State?” Journal of Historical
Sociology 15, 1 (March 2002): 68.
192. Nair observes about the awesome power of the bureaucratic signature in a
postcolonial state—“this fact of signing, and notably signing in all three of Derrida’s
modes, commands a special resonance in any postcolonial society. . . . In any bureau-
cratic culture, such as India’s, a signature carries legendary authority. Signatures are
manifestations not just of personhood, of a singular subjectivity, but the seal of an
absolute and unknowable deified ‘other’.” See Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Lying on the Post-
colonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2002), 37. In a different vein, Veena Das notes that governance through technologies of
writing institutes the possibility of forgery, imitation, and the mimetic performances
of its power. See Veena Das, “The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility,”
in Anthropology in the Margins of the State, ed. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (Santa Fe,
NM: School of American Research Press, 2004), 225–52.
193. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 33.
194. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 48.
195. See “The Statement and the Archive” in Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge,
79–124.
196. Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 92–99.
197. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 43.
198. Richard Saumarez Smith, “Rule by Records and Rule by Reports: Complemen-
tary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 19,1,
(1985): 153–176.
199. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, 326.
200. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, 319.
201. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia,321.
202. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 42.
203. For the role of numbers in modern government, read chapter 6 “Numbers” in
Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom, 197–232. For the role of numbers in colonial imagina-
tion, read Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Orientalism and the
Post-Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia.
 TWO
The Production of Space

Colonial administrative practices and its technologies of governance such

as surveying and mapping produced abstract space and functional sites
of governance, and the spatial knowledge so produced in turn enabled
modern forms of governance. Spaces fashioned by states have varied
historically. Significantly pre-modern states guided by their political ra-
tionality gave importance to territoriality, which signified the space over
which a state sought to control. Territoriality was, however, often fuzzy
in pre-modern polities where frontiers rather than boundaries defined
such territories. In the frontier regions the control of the state was often
not as strongly felt as in the other regions of the state, and hence became
subject to competing claims by neighboring states. One of the fundamen-
tal changes caused by Western intrusion into India was the replacement
of the frontiers of the traditional political systems with the linear boun-
daries of the modern nation-state, as there is no instance of a frontier
drawn with precision on a map before 1718. 1 Imperial space used boun-
dary as a mechanism to convert abstract space into a concrete reality of
territory. 2 With the rise of the modern state, territoriality was gradually
superseded by governmentality and correspondingly the modern state
territorialized populations contained within a specified space as states,
countries, populations and societies over which the state was to govern.
Foucault has noted that the transition from a “territorial state” to a
“population state” in Europe was “not a substitution but, rather, a shift of
accent and the appearance of new objectives, and hence of new problems
and new techniques.” 3 Although territory is absent in Foucault’s triad of
“security, population and government” characterizing governmentality,
the apparatuses (dispositifs) of security that he considers highlights spatial
issues and spatial distributions of population such as spaces of security,
aleatory (the chancy, the risky, the contingent), normalization as mecha-

83
84 Chapter 2

nism of security, and the relations between technologies of security and

population. Unlike territory, security operates on a different strategy that
requires a sociospatial ordering of resources and the means for their dis-
tribution and circulation.
Such a shift in the conception of modern state space had significant
epistemological consequences as new inscription devices of objectifying,
marking, inscribing and preserving were deployed to make otherwise
ephemeral and subjective visions into something stable, mobile, durable
and comparable through maps, charts, diagrams, graphs, and so on. 4
Modern maps of the world are no doubt the result of European expan-
sionism around the world and for Edward Said it was an act of geograph-
ic violence, as these cartographic representations linked the intervening
and reconstructive role of colonial power, and which ushered in new
discourses of space. Representations of nations pictorially in the forms of
maps enabled the world’s population to be demarcated and contained
within governing spaces like the empire and regions which played a
major role in the collective imaginations of the “nation” in the modern
period. 5 While the epistemological shifts in the construction of the geo-
graphic archive that accompanied the mapping of the colonial empire in
India in the nineteenth century has been persuasively documented, there
is much less concern about the significance of surveying and mapping as
a liberal technology of governance. 6

THE NOTION OF ABSTRACT SPACE

Henri Lefebvre has brought to our awareness that space is not an “aprori
category” or a “mental construct” but is itself produced within social
practices even as it shapes those practices. Thus the state and each of its
constituent institutions call for spaces, which they can organize according
to their specific requirements. 7 The space of the modern state is the ab-
stract space, and although this abstract space is not homogeneous, it has
homogeneity as its goal and hence attempts to reduce all differences
within that space. It is formal and quantitative, erases distinctions, and
functions objectally as a set of things/signs and their formal relationships.
Its abstraction is neither transparent, nor can it be reduced either to a
logic or to a strategy. 8 Abstract space is also universalizable like Fou-
cault’s space of “Utopia,” which are “fundamentally unreal spaces,”
“sites with no places” that are universalized and made abstract, while
heterotopias are real places with unique characteristics that are not “natu-
ral” to them but are products of ideological practices. 9 But abstract space
carries within it the seeds of a new kind of space, a “differential space”
that accentuates differences. The modern notion of space contrasts the
medieval conception of space, which was restricted to “the space of em-
placement” and to “a hierarchic ensemble of places” without any signifi-
 The Production of Space 85

cant sense of infinite space. 10 Displacing Aristotelian conception of space

the seventeenth century Western world considered Euclidean space as
essentially infinite and capable of homogeneous extension and deemed it
identical with the real space of the world.
Modernity’s disenchantment with the idea of spatial infinity arose
with its need for functional sites leading to the re-absorption of place into
space after being transmuted into site. These are Foucault’s “sites with no
places” that are universalized and made abstract, in contrast to “heteroto-
pias.” The attributes of “sites” are homogeneity, isotropism, unidirection-
ality, and monolinearity that generate empty, planiform surfaces of si-
multaneity, the “pharmakon of place.” 11 These sites result in spaces of
domination that can be subjected to the panoptic gaze; “it is a segmented,
immobile frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his space,” and every-
thing in site-space is “constantly located” be it the “disciplinary individu-
al” or the “calculable man.” 12 The rule of functional sites which takes
over space, time, and place in a “laboratory of power” aims to bring
about a rigid “location of bodies in space,” of bodies that exist only in
sites and as a function of sites, and these bodies become disembodied to
the extent to which they are disemplaced. 13 The modern subject is thus
made a placeless subject, although as abstract space carries within it the
“differential space,” the placeless subject constantly attempts a “placial-
ization” of space.
The ontological dependence of abstract space on representation often
obscures its material conditions of possibility. 14 Rational representations
of space during the Enlightenment made it possible for the rational or-
dering of space as an integral part of the modernizing project, and for the
first time in human history, the population of the world could be located
within a single spatial frame leading to a certain conception of “Other-
ness.” 15 Social spaces now appeared to differ only in physical attributes
and inhabitants, as all other differences could henceforth be transformed
into a temporal difference in which time and not space was what mat-
tered in rendering social spaces different. 16 Such a perspective had far-
reaching implications for universalizing liberal technologies of govern-
ance. The modern state could thus supplant all other state forms and the
abstract spaces produced could then be reduced to functional sites neces-
sary for modern governance.

GOVERNMENTALITY AND SPACE

Indeed the rational production of abstract space and the rational proce-
dures of modern governance are mutually implicated, as new political
rationalities emerged with the rise of the modern state. Such a space
facilitates governance in modern ways through rules, procedures, bu-
reaucracy, and accountability; and a new set of power relations, with
86 Chapter 2

instrumentality as its dominant feature. Cadastral surveys and cartogra-

phy began to serve increasingly useful roles for administration such as
defining property rights in land, territorial boundaries, domains of ad-
ministration and social control, communication routes, etc., with increas-
ing accuracy. Space acquired importance with the requirements of func-
tional sites as governance and the welfare of people progressively came
under a new matrix of calculating rationality, such spaces provided both
for the configuration of knowledge as well as the localization of that
knowledge.
Nikolas Rose is of the view that unlike abstract spaces that crushes
lived experience by privileging represenation, governable spaces as fabri-
cated “irreal” spaces make possible new kinds of experiences and new
modes of perception. 17 Abstract spaces transmuted into functional sites
enabled the application of disciplinary technologies associated with in-
dustrial capitalism and the dispositifs of security. While disciplinary tech-
niques operate through enclosure and circumscription of spaces as in
schools, factories, barracks, and prisons, security requires the opening up
and release of spaces to enable circulation and passage as in urban plan-
ning or road construction. 18 Abstract space makes it possible for uniform
technologies of governance to be applied to various social groups such
that demarcating population in a grid of abstract space and fixing bodies
in functional sites could enfold all within the homogenous political ra-
tionalities and technologies of colonial governance. The diversities of his-
tories and place that emplaced particular social groups and made them
unique could now be rendered legible in the grid of abstract space that
makes social groups and individuals apparently similar or different from
each other, such similarities and differences being amenable to scaling
and measurement.
While the technologies of government associated with the modern
state required the production of abstract space leading to the emergence
of a new world-space everywhere that enfolded a multiplicity of func-
tional sites, the creation of such abstract spaces and sites in the colonized
world of the nineteenth century also entailed both the creation of colonial
“otherness” as well as rendering that “otherness” manageable through
technologies of government that were purported to be universally valid.
Colonized bodies were fixed in multiple functional sites to realize the
colonial modernist agendas in the realms of education, social reforms,
labor, crime, and punishment, as well as those of taxation and land reve-
nue that was necessary to make the colonial enterprise economically ad-
vantageous. These called for knowledge about the population, as the
governance of conduct was meant to alter the behavior of discrete social
groups rather than individuals per se. 19 Governable space was modeled
not on the model of isotropic, two-dimensional space but on the model of
political economy. 20
 The Production of Space 87

The processes by which the colonial state organized its spaces of ad-
ministration marked a movement from historical space to abstract space
and the creation of functional sites and spaces of political economy. Ab-
stract spaces that were produced contained their contradictions in the
various functional sites that made the emergence of differential space
imminent; but more remarkable was the resistance to the abstract spaces
and functional sites by those subjected to the authority of the colonial
state and their attempts to reinstate place, which provided them the secur-
ities of emplacement and identity. Such resistance in due course became
subdued as the governance of colonial conduct in an improving direction
rendered the functional sites as loci of knowledge that made apparent the
telos of “progress” and the success of the colonial project.
In the early stages of the formation of the modern colonial state “terri-
tory” became an object of knowledge in order to constitute it as a “reve-
nue state,” and knowing the territory entailed an epistemological con-
quest. As governmentality progressively replaced territoriality, it became
necessary to delineate aggregates of population in demarcated spaces.
Thus the construction and deployment of new political technologies as
part of the new political rationalities introduced by colonial governance
entailed the reconstitution of space. 21
Precolonial states had also produced their spaces by delineating their
territories, measuring lands through techniques they thought would
yield accurate measurements, and even drew maps that fulfilled their
cognitive requirements. For instance, wherever the Mughal emperor Ak-
bar traveled, distances were recorded and superintendents and inspec-
tors audited pole-measurements by surveyors and their calculations. But
mapping culture in the modern sense of a representational instrument
facilitating measurement, inquiry and examination simultaneously did
not exist in India prior to the colonial mapping efforts, even if maps were
produced by both Hindu and Arab geographers. Pre-modern maps were
territorial representations but modern maps could represent populations
as well, and the carto-statistical techniques that evolved along with the
modern maps to facilitate measurement, inquiry and examination simul-
taneously could bring abstract spaces and functional sites within the epis-
temic gaze.
Colonial surveying and mapping was, however, not a one-time effort.
Rather, it evolved over a period of more than a hundred years during
which time, as Mathew Edney has shown, it underwent certain epistemo-
logical shifts in the construction of geographic knowledge. Its discursive
history reveals not merely the burdens of introducing Western scientific
methods that were purportedly more rational but also the complex con-
structions of an imperialist “Self” that was marked out to be very differ-
ent from the colonial “Other.” 22 Partha Chatterjee has noted that colonial
rule was compelled to produce the truth of colonial “difference” within
the “universalist” frameworks of knowledge. 23 The obsessive concern for
88 Chapter 2

scientific precision and rationality that accompanied the colonial survey-

ing and mapping efforts served no doubt to validate colonial governmen-
tality.
Christopher Bayly has argued that surveillance was a vital dimension
of the science of kingship, and that precolonial indigenous rule used
surveillance not to create a political state that monitored the political
attitudes of the subjects, but to check moral transgressions including the
oppression of the weak. 24 He believes that it is an exaggeration to say that
precolonial and colonial regimes differed widely in their intellectual and
administrative techniques, although the precolonial rulers search for
knowledge was not simply utilitarian or bureaucratic in motivation. 25
Rational techniques with emphasis on empirical accuracy were as much a
part of Indo-Islamic descriptions, and pre-colonial regimes accumulated
knowledge of geography, resources, and statistics in much the same way
as the British, which enabled those states to order their spaces. But he
does admit that Mughal and other indigenous maps rarely displayed
scalar fidelity in the geometric sense, which is essential to the production
of an abstract space, which is something unique to the modern state.
The nature of sovereignty no doubt implies the nature of space. For
instance, the sovereignty of the precolonial states of southern India were
symbolic and ritual such that the moral and political rationale of their
governing strategies required spaces that were different from those of the
modern colonial state. The Chola and Vijayanagaram Kingdoms of south
India covering the period of eleventh to seventeenth centuries A.D. had a
political system that was segmentary or pyramidal, and did not deem
political life as superior to social and cultural practices as religious insti-
tutions played a central role. 26 While the conception, size, and complexity
of the locality changed between the Chola and the Vijayanagaram king-
ship, the locality known as nadu in the Chola period was not an adminis-
trative unit of the state, but represented a region of prominence of lead-
ing people of the locality in donative transactions, suggesting that the
social basis of the locality predated its political functions. 27 It was place
rather than space that signified the link between power and people in
precolonial states. Governance in such contexts did not require functional
sites to rigidly locate bodies in space, but emplaced subjects whose iden-
tities were shaped by place.
The modern state in contrast is different from premodern states every-
where, largely because it constitutes its sovereignty by according prima-
cy to political life over social and cultural practices. For its technologies of
governance to be universalized, the spaces of its rule need to be made
homogeneous and capable of producing objective knowledge by render-
ing itself an object of imagination symbolized by territorial shape. This
necessitates the transformation of historical space into abstract space,
making it thereby possible to acquire spatial knowledge, shape, social
form, and ground political authority. In its spatial form, the modern state
 The Production of Space 89

is qualitatively different from the medieval realm, a difference that owes

something to the techniques of knowing and representing space originat-
ing in the Renaissance. 28 Techniques of governmentality that are pur-
ported to be universally valid require functional sites to monitor not only
the political attitudes of the governed but to shape the behaviors of indi-
viduals and social groups, and to conceive of social phenomenon and
social processes in quantifiable and probabilistic ways, so as to devise
appropriate interventions to achieve desired ends.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL ANTICIPATIONS, SURVEYS, AND SPACE

Surveying and mapping were important aspects of the technologies of

state formation in early modern Europe and, in the heydays of empire
formation, these practices were carried on in other parts of the world as
well. 29 Although there have been a number of attempts to represent “In-
dia” in the form of maps by Hindu and Arab geographers, and by many
early European explorers as well, the nature of mapping efforts that be-
gan with the establishment of colonial rule was to be vastly different. For
one, they were more systematic and scientific, and resulted in a vast body
of knowledge about the country. Although many would regard James
Rennell’s maps Bengal Atlas (1781) and the Map of Hindoostan (1788) as a
red herring in the discursive history of colonial cartography, his surveys,
maps, and the accompanying Memoir anticipate the epistemological sig-
nificance of surveying as a modality of knowledge. By drawing informa-
tion from both archival sources as well as actual measurement, Rennell’s
efforts signal two epistemic agendas that were to become important in
the later moments of the construction of the geographic archive. First, the
geographic archive implicates a historical archive as also modes of writ-
ing histories and the opportunities that such histories affords for narra-
tivizing the historical pasts and the political futures. 30 Secondly, the
measurement problems that Rennell highlights in his Memoir became the
core issue in the later discourses of scientific rigor. Measurement became
a contestatory site for different epistemes as colonial and indigenous
practices vied for supremacy.
Appearing at a time when modern historiography was at its formative
stages in India, the preliminary maps and surveys of Rennell’s Bengal
Atlas were used by Orme in 1763 for the first part of A History of the
Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (1745–1760) recount-
ing the early military achievements of the English in India. As more and
more areas were brought within the fold of modern maps, it became
necessary to note the succession of the political rule of those regions, and
thus began the accumulation of historical knowledge. The political space
of “Hindoostan” created through Rennell’s Map of Hindoostan (1788)
made it possible to reconstruct historical maps, which enabled the politi-
90 Chapter 2

cal space of the past to be (re)-experienced in new ways. The Memoir

accompanying the Map of Hindoostan carried sketches of the history of the
Moghul Empire and that of the Maharattas. The purpose of these narra-
tives of history that were reconstructed selectively was no doubt to im-
press the English reader of the idea of the nonfixity of political spaces.
Both the Memoir and the early British historiography of India sought to
provide the chronology of different rulers as also the locales of those
regimes. This in course of time was to serve the important role of recon-
structing national identities and to reclaim nationhood antecedent to Eu-
ropean presence.
James Rennell’s Map of Hindoostan with its accompanying Memoir of a
Map of Hindoostan; or the Mogul Empire published in 1788 sought to pro-
duce a visual effect and to provoke an aggressive desire for the British
viewers as the Memoir accompanying the map contained detailed notes
on the military capabilities as well as the revenue potential of the princi-
pal states. Clearly, the vast amount of details presented in it, particularly
the revenue and disbursement statements can only be read as a statement
of political intentions of conquest and the establishment of a revenue
state. There were only scanty references to the inhabitants in the Memoir
and these were mainly in terms of how amenable they were to conquest.
From this stage of scanty reference to the inhabitants, there is a dis-
cernible move to acquire more information about the population as the
geographic archive later expanded in scope with the introduction of sci-
entific surveys. From the initial stages of acquiring territory to the consol-
idation of the state and the organization of its practices, there is a pattern
in the manner in which knowledge about people was generated. Not only
did it proceed from aggregative to more detailed aspects such as the
counting of households, population, caste, and other group characteris-
tics through the censuses, ethnographic and linguistic surveys, there has
also been a progressive systematization of the diverse instruments used
to generate that knowledge. Representing what came to be known as
“India” pictorially in the form of maps thus involved very complex pro-
cesses of retrieving knowledge, reconstructing histories, laborious meas-
urements, calculations and enumerations in which the advances in the
sciences of measurement and cartography rendered it possible to define
and fix boundaries, demarcate territories, and locate persons and objects
in fixed spaces.
Constructing the unifying frame of maps to bring together spaces that
have had disparate existences also entailed confronting the diversities of
measurement. Rennell encountered significant problems of measurement
as specifying the dimensions and distances of regions was quite a com-
plex exercise then. An itinerary measure was adopted, which usual meas-
ure in most parts of “Hindoostan” Rennell found was called Coss, which
was then commonly estimated as two British statute miles. The length of
the Coss apparently varied depending on the length of Coss fixed by
 The Production of Space 91

different emperors, and sometimes regional differences in the measure of

Coss were also on account of the fact that in some places it had evolved
into a modern rational measure and in other places it was still linked to
the body and bodily functions. 31 While Rennell was far more cautious in
criticizing indigenous techniques of measurement, he noted quite aptly
that such differences in measurement was not something unique to India
as it existed in Europe as well, the later surveyors in the era of scientific
surveys made measurement a bone of contention to establish the scientif-
ic superiority of Western methods.
Different kinds of surveys such as the military, the topographical, the
trigonometrical, and the revenue survey evolved under different admin-
istrative controls. While the military surveys were to chalk out supply
routes and encampments, as well as the existence of forts, etc., for the
advancement of troops into new territories, the topographical surveys
were meant to survey and map the topography of the country, in particu-
lar to mark the administrative boundaries and the villages. The revenue
surveys were to survey the plots of fields in the villages, determine the
nature of land rights, and the revenue potential based on past assess-
ments. The trigonometrical survey initiated by William Lambton and
then taken up by George Everest was to lay down a continuous series of
triangles such that the positions of the places could be unambiguously
fixed by determining the latitudes and longitudes.
The era of scientific surveying and mapping that began from early
nineteenth century grappled with yet more numerous problems of meas-
urement. Whereas in some surveys the technical problems in the intro-
duction of European methods of measurement had to be surmounted, in
yet others the conflicts between the European methods and the indige-
nous methods had to be resolved. Although in the early years of survey-
ing only a few of the surveyors realized the need for order and precision,
the rhetoric of accuracy, truth, and precision gained prominence as the
surveys become more coordinated, systematic and regular. “Scientific
surveys” became yet another expression of objectification of what defied
definition, fixity, and permanence as surveys sought to make fluidities
into rigidities, and to render objects passive and yielding, such that the
vastly heterogeneous spaces could be presented as a homogeneity by
reducing differences that the modern state could penetrate with its vari-
ous instrumentalities.
Surveys thus ushered a discourse of scientific rationality and rendered
possible new modalities of interventions and new discourses about
space. Functional sites needed for modern governance such as prisons,
factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, courts, government offices, and so
on associated with the practices of the modern governance of subjects
needed discursive practices like surveys to constitute these sites as sites
of interventions where subjects could be shaped and molded. As a liberal
technology of governmentality surveys are both totalizing and individu-
92 Chapter 2

alizing. Being inherently reductive of differences, surveys enable the

creation of homogeneous spaces, and in its attempts to establish norms,
variations, and modal values, it is individualizing as well. The obsession
of surveys with accuracy and uniformity later came to be institutional-
ized in colonial and post-colonial life at sites such as the Forest Research
Institute in Dehradun established in 1906 where a whole paraphernalia
for the precise measurement and classification of the seemingly unclas-
sifiable was established. 32

THE RHETORIC OF ACCURACY

Euclidean space implies the reduction of three-dimensional realities to

two-dimensional maps and plans which has social and political utility.
Colonial cartographic rhetoric of scientific precision gained its full
strength in this reduction to Euclidean space. Although what was consid-
ered scientific varied over the period of surveying, first from being just
measured, to triangulation and then to being linked up with the Great
Trignometrical Survey (GTS), the practices of surveying often did not
match up to the expectations of scientific rigor.
This becomes particularly evident with the trigonometrical surveys as
its object was to fix the latitudes and longitudes of all places using the
method of triangulation. Prior to the introduction of trigonometrical
methods, astronomical positions were fixed for the triangulation, which
often caused errors. In 1799 Lambton introduced triangulation for the
first time in India, basing it upon “correct mathematical principles,” and
sought to extend the triangles right across the Peninsula to make it ca-
pable of extension in every direction, so as to form a reliable basis for all
other surveys. 33 It also sought to accomplish something more “sublime,”
namely to determine by actual measurement the exact length of the me-
ridian line in equatorial latitudes, and thus to establish the shape of the
earth, what Lambton describes as “the magnitude and figure of the
earth.” 34
Often, improvements in scientific results rendered the prior work
done to be of limited value for geodetic requirements although they were
valid for geographical and topographical purposes. In 1830, it was de-
cided that all surveys should be subordinated to one master survey for
ascertaining the great geographical features of a country upon correct
mathematical principles and thus was launched the Great Trigonometri-
cal Survey (GTS). Unlike Lambton’s survey, it first measured one control
meridian running through the length of the country from which triangu-
lation in different directions was carried forward, thus ensuring a reliable
basis for topographical and other surveys and maps. Also, as it sought to
completely do away with astronomical observations for triangulation it
was considered more precise and accurate. New instruments, new sys-
 The Production of Space 93

tems of observation, and new methods of reduction were introduced

progressively as part of the survey. Everest, who was in charge of the
survey, issued instructions to his surveyors like his predecessors that
were suffused with the rhetoric of accuracy and uniformity. Although the
natives did not contest the rhetoric of science and accuracy, the practice
of science evoked strong protests. 35 Such resistance put up by the natives
were all due neither to science confronting superstition nor to the un-
wanted intrusions in their lives; rather they were acutely aware that sur-
veillance and the gathering of information were integral to these surveys
which the natives both complied and resisted. 36
The colonial project of governance entailed first defining the territory
and fixing the boundary, and an understanding of the realm contained
therein in terms of people and things. Even in Britain, only the Ordnance
Boundary Survey carried out between 1841 and 1888 resulted in the reli-
able mapping of administrative boundaries for the first time based on
oral local knowledge. In colonial India, the surveys were not confined to
marking the boundaries alone but to accumulate as much knowledge as
possible about the country. Right from the beginning, the topographical
surveys were concerned with the acquisition of statistical information on
different aspects. When Colin Mackenzie was appointed in 1799 to sur-
vey Mysore, the governor-general proposed that the attention of the sur-
veyor should not be confined to mere military or geographic information,
but that his enquiries should be extended to a “statistical account of the
whole country.” 37 The range and scope of Mackenzie’s survey is evident
from his Plan of the Mysore Survey of 1800, which was to consist of two
parts, a mathematical and a physical one. The mathematical or geometri-
cal survey was to fill in the geographic details, and an agricultural sur-
vey. The geometrical survey was to lay down the position of every town,
fort, and village using the method of triangulation. It was to also careful-
ly note all the rivers and their courses, roads, lakes, tanks, and “every
remarkable object, feature, and property of the country.” The physical
branch of the survey was to include all “remarks, facts and observations”
that can be conducive to the improvement of natural history. 38 The par-
ticular branches that was to be covered by the survey were botany, mine-
ralogy, medicines, diseases, remedies, conditions of the weather such as
air, climate, seasons, periodical rains, agro-ecological features such as
soil, produce, modes of cultivation, water works, and tenures of land. It
was to also inquire into the various descriptions and classes of natives,
their customs, languages, manners, etc., as also of animals, wild and
tame, and of the revenues and population. 39 As exploration facilitated the
exploitation of resources, the superintendent of the Mysore survey was
advised to institute a series of enquiries into the statistical history of the
country. Although Mackenzie was obsessed with the idea of ensuring a
uniform plan, and claimed that his topographical survey of Mysore and
94 Chapter 2

Kanara in 1800 was founded upon geometrical certainty and truth, the
standards of accuracy often varied.
Laying the grid of triangles and filling in the triangles with the topo-
graphical details does not complete the process of producing the abstract
space; it merely renders natural space into Euclidean space, which makes
the vastly different lived places commensurable on a uniform grid of
space and capable of being visually represented. To become the locus and
site of state power the visual representation of space has to create an
aggressive visual effect that such a space can be manipulated and con-
trolled, which the Euclidean space affords by erasing the autonomy of
places.
Whereas the rationale of the governing structures of precolonial states
in India sought to retain the significance of place through ties of lineage
and community with kingship, the colonial state in contrast sought to
both create a smooth space of economic exchange and to govern the
conduct of colonial subjects and so set in place structures of governance
to achieve these ends. 40 The spaces and sites shaped by the colonial state
required not just the presence of the state but were to be rendered amen-
able for the measurement of progress.

THE POLITICAL SPACE OF APPROPRIATION

The colonial state sought to institute itself in its political space primarily
as a revenue state, though it sought to reorganize other spaces such as
urban towns and new functional sites as well. The conduct of the revenue
surveys enabled the colonial state to institute itself most decisively in its
political space and in doing so it completed the production of abstract
space and generated knowledge of village India necessary for administer-
ing it. Since the very inception of their rule, the British imposed a grid of
official categories over the network of agrarian relations as the delinea-
tion of property rights and the constitution of private property in land
along with revenue appropriation were the spatial strategies of colonial
revenue governance. 41 The manner in which a new space of appropria-
tion and knowledge thereof was produced illustrates how colonial
governmentality devised technologies of control through science, objec-
tification and rationality often resulting in a conflict between different
knowledge epistemes in its attempt to reinstate a new regime of power
and knowledge. The rhetoric of accuracy became shrill in the conduct of
the revenue surveys in the debates over the use of survey methods and
the indigenous measurement practices.
The violence of the state represents the intrusive power of the state to
control and manipulate the space to achieve desired ends. Colonial vio-
lence was first expressed in conquering the territory and acquiring the
necessary information to rationalize its extractive procedures. But the
 The Production of Space 95

rationalization of extractive procedures required that the ways in which

land was controlled and property defined be taken cognizance of. Alex-
ander Read, who was put in charge of the regions known as Ballagaut
ceded by Tipu Sultan, submitted the first report of the settlement work he
had carried on in Colar district in January 1792 presenting the range of
information he had collected. First, Read opens with an account of how
he sent the Company troops as well as experienced official people to gain
“every requisite information of their affairs.” He noted that after the cap-
ture of Droog (fort), he was able to secure the records of the districts that
served to check the accounts given by the zamindars and recorded in the
village registers. Read noted that the zamindars interests were “to mis-
lead and to conceal, whatever relates to the affairs of the country,” a truth
which he claimed he experienced daily “being obliged to draw from
them, by stealth and by perseverance, every point of information.” 42
Read’s letter of appointment as collector and manager of the Compa-
ny’s revenues in the Ceded districts of Baramahal and Salem explicitly
required him to be prepared with such authentic information as can be
gathered together respecting the real annual produce of the Districts. In
the initial year revenue settlement was at the level of districts or smaller
portions of it, and as no survey was undertaken, revenues were deter-
mined based on ancient usage. In his letter to Governor-general Cornwal-
lis in 1792, Read noted that his scheme for the management of the dis-
tricts was to bring “every head of revenue into order, and afterwards to
carry it on with a steady eye to improvement,” thus requiring a perfect
knowledge of the affairs as an initial necessary step. 43 To that end Read
proposed a “political survey” of every district, which was incorporated in
a general survey and was very extensive in its scope and coverage as it
included subjects covering the inhabitants, occupations, calendar and di-
visions of time, weights and measures, coinage and exchange rates, pro-
duction and crop cycles with appropriate diagrams, agricultural prices,
land rents, tenures and rates and modes of taxation, histories of the dis-
tricts and of their institutions including a financial history, settlement
records of the district including maps defining boundaries and forts,
mode of revenue management, etc.
As even the most intelligent of the natives were only partially and
imperfectly informed on revenue detail, Read felt that survey was the
only means to ascertain them. His idea was to settle every district, village
by village, in small farms as he thought it to be the best method. To make
it even more complete, Read intended to accompany every such settle-
ment of a district with a correct map though he had to settle only for a
sketch that conveyed the situation, shape and magnitude of every district
sufficiently correctly for general purposes. Read noted that the object of
the system projected was to consist in making everything it compre-
hended “as distinct, simple, and permanent as possible.” 44 The Court of
Directors appreciated both Read’s maps and his surveys, noting that it
96 Chapter 2

was the first of its kind for procuring the knowledge of the “real value of
any part of the Company’s possessions on the coast.” 45
The reliability of gathering information through surveys and from
drawing information from existing accounts was to become an issue of
contention. Surveys were not accepted as the best principle right from the
beginning. There was a lengthy debate between the Bengal government
and the Court of Directors on this issue when in 1801 the districts of
Oudh and Rohilkhand and in 1803 that of Cuttack came under the Com-
pany’s possessions. The efficacy of survey methods versus reliance on the
existing records of revenue accounts were debated when the Court of
Directors were not in favor of an extension of the permanent settlement
(fixing land revenues in perpetuity with zamindars who acted as revenue
farmers) in these districts as in the case of Bengal and wanted a scrutiny
of individual rights. 46 The directors wanted a “minute and detailed sur-
vey” of the extent, cultivation, and productive powers of the territory
taking into account the local peculiarities. 47 The Bengal government, on
the other hand, felt that revenue assessments were not being fixed merely
by a few years’ experience, but from the accounts of the Zamindars (large
landowners), the Kanungoes (revenue accountants), and the Patwarries
(keeper of village records), and that these native institutions had existed
even prior to the British rule, and that although the village accounts
should be received with circumspection, much greater confidence can be
reposed in them because they are not easily falsified or fabricated than
the accounts of local surveys and valuations made almost exclusively by
the agency of native officers. 48 The Court of Directors refused to accept
these arguments as in their opinion the accounts kept by native revenue
officers were for the most part fallacious and were of the opinion that
only a regular revenue survey can solve the numerous boundary dis-
putes that have arisen on account of the “undefined state of property
with respect to limits.” 49
Soon the instrumentality of survey was accepted as the best method to
verify and collect information on property rights, and the revenue collec-
tors in the Madras Presidency were asked in 1805 to proceed with a
survey of their respective districts. The earlier general district surveys
conducted by the assistant revenue surveyors were considered untrust-
worthy for revenue purposes, which as Bentinck noted had not “been
laid down by men of science,” and being done by the natives were
“equally liable to error from want of honesty and from want of knowl-
edge.” 50 The debate over surveys also highlighted a significant issue of
contention in the shaping of the colonial state that pitted the Burkeans
with the Utilitarians as to the efficacy and desirability of retaining the
older institutions that were already in existence in some form or to dis-
card them altogether and reinstate a new set of institutions for revenue
administration. 51 A few years later Thomas Munro, the architect of the
ryotwari system (revenue settlement directly with the cultivators) while
 The Production of Space 97

arguing the case for including natives in the civil administration, who can
supply all the necessary information, noted the importance of collecting
detailed information when he remarked:
We ought, therefore not to be satisfied with a superficial knowledge of
the general state of the country, but make it a part of our system to
obtain the most minute and accurate information concerning its inter-
nal condition, and preserve and accumulate that information in clear
and detailed revenue accounts and statistical statements. 52
Sometimes the enthusiasm for collecting detailed information far ex-
ceeded their utility. For instance, in 1810 Hawkins, who was asked to
survey the Oarts situated in the Bombay and Salsette Islands, received
instructions to “ascertain the number of Coconut, Brab, Date, or Betelnut
trees in each Oart, the proprietors of them, their quantities, and whether
the trees were used for distillation for the sale of the Liquor in the crude
state, or whether the trees were allowed to run to fruit, the average num-
ber of Coconuts produced annually by each Coconut tree, and for how
many years they continue to be productive.” 53 His successor Dickenson
who took over from Hawkins in 1812 submitted a plan that was suppos-
edly comprehensive for every revenue purpose. The plan showed not
only “the exact contents and boundaries of each estate, but every species
of property, and was accompanied by two books, one for registering the
tenures, and containing the rental amounts of every part of the Island
that was let out on lease, and the other book was a census specifying the
number of men, women, and children by caste.” 54 A few years later, the
Bengal Council thought the Bombay system was too elaborate and expen-
sive, and so sought for a simpler procedure.
Surveys not only instituted a panoptic gaze, but also brought different
knowledge practices into conflict that indicates that there were indeed
different ways of imagining land between the colonial and precolonial
rulers. Despite the historical evidence that suggested that different kinds
of rights on land existed though often in an attenuated form depending
on the degree of social control, the colonial administrators assumed as an
almost universal truth the absence of private property in land in the
East. 55 The different ways of imagining land reflected the different mo-
dalities of control over land, and the practices of control over land shaped
in turn the popular imagination. Rulers in the precolonial era made gifts
of revenue-free land, to Brahmans and other subjects in return for various
services of loyalty to the king. Here I illustrate from a particular land
deed the lack of precision in the measurements of such gifted land and
the kind of moral rather than bureaucratic control of such land that was
established. A translation of the land deed notes:
All the land that belongs to us, together with the Yalichi tank, west-
ward from the Arali tree, lying on the east side of the Yalichi tank, as
far as the tamarind tree on the edge of the cultivated ground.
98 Chapter 2

The land deed ends with a Sanskrit verse, which translated as follows:
He who seizes on the wealth yielding land* given either by himself or
by another, shall be born a worm in dung for sixty thousand years--Of
the two acts, giving and protecting that which has been given, protec-
tion excels gift; by gift the lower heaven is obtained, by protecting that
which has been given, an exalted station from there is no descent.
(*Land productive: land allowed to become waste by the negligence or
inability of the holder may be resumed without incurring sin.) 56
In most instances, land was held in common by village communities and
in some areas land rotation was practiced, such that no fixed plot of
cultivable land was assigned to an individual as an alienable or inalien-
able right. The fluidities in land assignments matched with the fluidities
in land classifications that varied seasonally or annually and diverse
measurement practices coexisted.
The conflicts between knowledge practices that colonial control over
land brought forth did not always ensure the victory of European meth-
ods. Particularly with the revenue surveys, the European and indigenous
methods remained juxtaposed rather uneasily, unlike the topographical
and trigonometrical surveys that entailed the application of modern sci-
entific principles and measurements. The ways in which these conflicts
were resolved indicate how differences were erased or remained resilient
in the production of abstract space. If homogeneity is the goal of abstract
space, its production entails unifying divergent spaces, thus leading to
the erasing of many kinds of differences between them, what James Scott
calls as “state simplification” and “legibility.” 57 The differences that the
colonial state encountered in producing its political space were those
relating to diversities in land tenure arrangements and in the practices of
measurement and classification. Scott makes a distinction between state
and nonstate forms of measurement, the latter arising from the logic of
local practice, and scientific surveys became a metaphor for erasing those
differences of local practices. 58
The revenue surveys sought to introduce measurements that were
deemed more rational, and although not fully successful, uniform meas-
ures and standard classifications. Let us consider the case of the adoption
of a standard measure for land. In October 1800, Munro instituted a
survey of some of the ceded districts covering Bellary, Kurnool, Ananta-
pur, and Cuddapah for purposes of revenue assessment. All lands of
whatever kind including roads, sites of towns and villages, bed of tanks
and rivers, and wastes and jungles were for the first time measured using
a standard measure, a chain of thirty-three feet, forty of which made an
“acre.” Out of this survey Munro evolved a Code that was followed
during the introduction of the ryotwari settlements in the 1820s suggest-
ing that the “acre” as the scale of measure be adopted not only in the
English accounts but in all the native village accounts as well. Given the
 The Production of Space 99

diversities in measures not only in the various districts but even between
the villages in a district, Munro was of the opinion that it did not really
matter what uniform scale was adopted as the inhabitants would soon
figure out for themselves the difference between their scales and the stan-
dard one. 59 The colonial state thus restructured the fuzziness and vari-
ability in indigenous measurement practices as it sought to institute its
hegemony.
Apart from the question of introducing an English unit of measure in
the village accounts there were other differences as well. While the prin-
ciples of the “native” survey were purely geometrical, those of the Euro-
pean surveys used trigonometrical methods for the calculations of areas.
Not only were the principles of the two kinds of surveys at variance, the
native surveys were always doubted for their reliability. The unreliability
of the native systems and of the natives themselves became a discursive
tactic in the attempt to both assert the superiority of the English methods
and to impose greater control. Although it was felt that surveys under-
taken for revenue purposes should be directed by European surveyors
under the professional control of the surveyor general, the indigenous
system could not be done away with, as it was economical, and the in-
dexation of village plots in the native surveys were far more useful for
revenue purposes. The two surveys needed to be integrated, the village
boundaries generally being done by a professional survey using Euro-
pean methods and by a European surveyor, and the khasrah surveys
which were the field surveys of the village done by indigenous methods
with native measurers. In actual practice, the Khasrah surveys were car-
ried out with little reference to the professional survey that it was later
decided that the professional surveyor was to hold charge of both the
professional control survey and the detailed khasrah, or field survey. A
Khasrah survey was usually done with bamboo rods, nals, or with chains
or ropes, jaribs. Areas were taken out by simple geometry in bighas or
other units and its primary task was an exact survey of the boundaries of
estates or plots, belonging to an owner or a group of owners.It was so
constructed as to enable a person at once to find in it any field. Each field
had a number corresponding to, which was an entry in the khusruh show-
ing the size, the occupant, and the nature of the soil, the crop, and the
rent.
Most of these early surveys proved useless for revenue assessment
and collection for officials from outside the village, as there was a signifi-
cant blockade of information flow from local officials to the headquarter
as the surveys did not define field boundaries. When the settlement sur-
veys were taken up in 1871, the surveys were carried out entirely anew in
the form of cadastral, or field-to-field survey, as it was decided that reve-
nue surveys should be connected by minor triangulation with the trigo-
nometrical survey to ensure accuracy and permanence.
100 Chapter 2

Measurement and classification of lands were to become issues of

contention in these field surveys. Some officials felt that the field surveys
should be comprehensible to the natives and must carry the conviction of
the fairness of measurement to the occupants of the land, since they were
neither accustomed to surveys or the English mode of calculating areas.
Also that the native language should be used and the information should
be recorded in the manner they were accustomed to. 60 Adapting the
survey proceedings to make them comprehensible to the natives every-
where meant having to reckon with the indigenous methods that were
considered imprecise, to reconcile with the variations in measures across
space and time, and to retain the indigenous units of measurement. In the
Bombay Presidency, which was considered to be ahead of others in scien-
tific surveying, the minimum area to be measured separately and consti-
tuted a “number” was fixed at “what two bullocks could plough,” and
the maximum area was fixed at “what four bullocks could plough.” The
common understanding then was that one pair of bullocks was able to
plough—twenty acres of light dry crop soil, fifteen of medium, and
twelve of heavy soil. In Punjab, the colonial administrators in their eager-
ness to establish a fixed basis for revenue apportionment in a village only
took the abstract sense of “plough measures” ignoring the multiple con-
notations in local usage, where the term “plough” often signified “at the
same time possession of plough oxen, a certain area of cultivation, the
input of animal and human labour required to cultivate that area, a pro-
portionate share in the common agricultural resources of a village and a
certain relative standing within a community.” 61
Classification of lands was another area of native imprecision that the
revenue surveys had to tackle in the attempt to classify soils to fix the
revenue assessments. In some areas in southern India, wetland was clas-
sified into eight sorts based on the proportion of the produce to the seeds
sown in a given unit of land. Since a single field often comprised of
different kinds of soils, some kind of average was worked out, and these
too varied every year depending on the availability of water. The classifi-
catory logic of the revenue surveys was to make definite and permanent
of what was considered vague and fluctuating.
As colonial governmentality’s spatial figuration the vast apparatus of
revenue assessment was as Arjun Appadurai noted “a complex appara-
tus of discipline and surveillance in and through which native function-
aries were instilled with a whole series of numerical habits, (tied to other
habits of description, iconography, and distinction) in which number
played a complex set of roles, including those of classification, ordering,
approximation and identification.” 62
The space of appropriation the colonial state sought to produce
brought forth the difficulty of rendering spaces homogeneous. In the
numerous controversies over measurement, classification, and methods
of land revenue assessment the resilience of precolonial customs and
 The Production of Space 101

habits meant that the attempts to produce the abstract space contained
within it certain contradictions that signified the emergence of a differen-
tial space. Cognizing such differential space that was bound to the local
idioms and traditions prompted the peasantry in numerous instances to
resist the colonial state and its brutality. 63 Resistance signifies the pres-
ence of power and it suggests that the abstract space serves more than
metaphoric roles of state power, acting especially as a “means of con-
straint.” 64

MAPS AND POLITICAL POWER

Foucault noted that representation underwent a change in the shift from

the classical to the modern episteme. 65 Whereas in classical representa-
tion, the phenomenal presence of objects in the circuit of representation
was crucial to the production of meaning, in modern representation
meaning is the property of imagination rather than phenomena. 66 Mod-
ern maps emerged as a discursive analytic because of this property of
imagination facilitated by mapping techniques like scale. John Locke
noted that scaling provided the “power of repeating or doubling any idea
we have of any distance, and adding it to the former as often as we will,
without being ever able to come to any stop or stint . . . is that which gives
us the idea of immensity.” 67 Scaling is important in representing heteroge-
neous spaces as homogeneous to render universal the liberal technolo-
gies of governmentality and to measure their effects.
Visual representation like maps contains the logic of visualization, of
which both the written word and the process of spectacularization are its
functions, one serving metaphoric and the other metonymic roles. As the
visual gains the upper hand it creates the effect of totality, for a part of
the object that the visual offers is taken up for the whole. Not only are
objects rendered passive but also space itself has no social existence inde-
pendently of an intense, aggressive and repressive visualization. The
two-dimensional Euclidean representation of space not only renders
space passive but serves these metaphoric and metonymic purposes as
well. Maps as action produce certain truth effects both by their utterances
and their silences that could be political and epistemological. Modern
systematic maps rely on a standardized form of knowledge, which estab-
lishes a prescribed set of possibilities for knowing, seeing, and acting.
They create a knowledge space within which certain kinds of under-
standings and of knowing subjects, material objects, and their relations in
space and time are authorized and legitimated. 68 “Compilation, general-
isation, classification, formation into hierarchies, and standardization of
geographical data, far from being mere neutral technical activities, in-
volve power-knowledge relations at work, that the map-maker can be
seen as normalizing the phenomena of place and territory. 69
102 Chapter 2

There were indigenous traditions of cartography in India and terres-

trial globes also became visible pictorially for the first time in Mughal
India. As Sumathi Ramaswamy noted, the visual display of globes in the
Mughal court elicited social and political affect by marking the singular-
ity of the royal personage in conceited ways that marked complex local
and trans-regional assertions of power and prestige but not one of ag-
gressive aggrandizement. 70 The purposes of early Indian maps were
clearly not the proportional representation of land, as they seem not to be
drawn to scale perhaps on account of the diversities in measurement
practices, even if the notion of scale was well understood. Though they
had symbols and colors, these were not standardized and conventional-
ized nor was there a legend. 71
The early European maps in the sixteenth century framed India either
partially or as a whole expanse up to Indo-china. These partial framings
merged to form a whole in d’Anville and Rennell’s maps. Rennel’s maps
and the accompanying Memoir provided the definitive image of India for
the European public, making possible an aggressive visualization al-
though he used only data that was already available. 72 The aggressive
tendencies become more explicit over time, when for instance, the direc-
tors instructed that maps be prepared annually, showing the district
boundaries and headquarters and also the military posts and the number
and description of troops stationed in each. 73 If the reduction of real
space to abstract space served the purposes of administration, the maps
enabled a discourse of long-distance governance and administration
from the beginning of the nineteenth century, even if their importance
were not recognized in the early years. Although mapping was an impor-
tant follow-up of the surveys, it was not always efficiently executed. In
some districts, surveys were copied on their original scales, as there was
no appreciation that maps on a reduced scale would be useful for pur-
poses of administration, as it was still a stage when the functions and the
utility of maps for administration had to be comprehended. Even around
1823 the directors noted from London that they were surprised to find
that the collectors and judicial authorities were not furnished with maps
of their respective districts and recommended that the surveyor general
prepare in all practical cases, maps of the several revenue districts for the
use of the local authorities. 74
From the 1830s onward, a large number of maps were produced to
suit different purposes. It was, however, with the series of illustrative
maps by E. A. Prinsep, the settlement officer in the Sealkote district of the
Punjab in 1863 that maps as an instrument of knowledge acquired its new
epistemic height, a feature that was constantly developed for nearly a
hundred years since Renell’s maps. Prinsep’s Statistical Account of the
Sealkote District contained maps showing the agricultural tribes arranged
according to occupancy of land, political and fiscal divisions, rent-free
aspect of the district, physical features, and zones of fertility, productive
 The Production of Space 103

power as influenced by rain or aided by irrigation, different kinds of

soils, acres under different kinds of produce, police divisions, and haunts
of criminal races, roads and lines of traffic, statistical aspect of area, agri-
culture, and population, prevailing tenures, and modes of assessment. 75
In 1870, Prinsep published yet another series of maps all relating to the
irrigation aspects of the district. Maps began to proliferate as the era of
geographical and topographical surveying ushered numerous other sur-
veys on the botany, geology, forests and other natural resources as well
as on the antiquities and archeology. Knowledge of all these objects en-
framed in their spaces was necessary for new modalities of intervention
to mold and shape them for specific objectives.
Colonial cartographic efforts sought to legitimize colonial rule and
helped “to bolster a British sense of entitlement to overseas power.” 76
Political spaces represented by maps became progressively amenable for
manipulation and intervention as a new discourse of spatiality became
possible with the emergence of carto-statistical techniques. The practices
of naming are an indication that maps constitute a political discourse.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British maps used
the term “Hindustan” to refer at times to the domains of the Mughal
emperor, at others to British India or just to parts of northern India; in all
cases though, the term was to indicate foreignness—Mughal, Muslim, or
Hindu. This othering term could not be sustained once the British consol-
idated their political position and all other official transactions used the
name “India.” 77
Maps function as a measure, as a means of inquiry, and as a method of
examination although these functions did not arise at the same time nor
are they discrete and nonoverlapping functions. 78 Maps as a method of
examination followed only after the first two functions, which were inte-
gral to the formation of the bureaucratic practices of the modern state.
Much of the carto-statistical techniques that developed in Europe in the
nineteenth century arose in the context of quantitative representation of
disease and crime and of evolving administrative modalities to cope with
them. 79 The use of nontopographical maps indicates how maps served
liberal governmentality if certain prerequisites existed such as the infra-
structures for assembling, abstracting and analyzing the information. 80
From the 1850s onward, even Indian plaintiffs began to use maps in court
cases against British magistrates and collectors. 81 Although population
was not the object of concern in the topographical, trigonometrical, and
revenue surveys, it became important by the midnineteenth century
when governance acquired new directions. From mapping territories, the
epistemological concerns and administrative requirements shifted to
mapping populations. Maps showing the distributions of population be-
came an integral aspect of administrative discourses as for instance, dur-
ing the control of epidemics “cholera maps” and “plague maps” were
prepared to demarcate the affected territories and the population.
104 Chapter 2

The evolution of carto-statistical techniques that accompanied the de-

velopment of cartography enabled the representation of objects in terms
of their locational property, and ordering relationships between entities
followed from this idea. The quantitative characteristics of the locational
property of objects could be ascertained by the use of the order property
of numbers. In fact, mapping the economy was an outgrowth of the tech-
nique of prototypical navigational maps. William Playfair’s Commercial
and Political Atlas published in 1776 introduced relational graphics that
linked two variables imploring the viewer to assess the possible causal
relationship between the plotted variables, making possible knowledge
of political economy based on statistical correlations. 82
Carto-statistical techniques are undoubtedly of importance in the
creation of a science of government. Such a science according to J. S. Mill
“although it could never be precise, offered sufficient guidance about the
operation and processes of change in society to understand the causes,
tendencies, and changes obtaining at any particular time, ‘and by what
means those effects might be prevented, modified, or accelerated or a
different class of effects superinduced.’” 83 As a liberal technology of
governmentality, carto-statistical techniques enabled population to be
governed by statistical norms and the “average man” became the index
for measuring progress and other governmentality-effects. Colonial
governmentality’s use of surveys, maps, and carto-statistical techniques
along with its classificatory discourses of population enabled it to disem-
place subjects and relocate them in a new space of administration.

GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF SPACE

The space the colonial state sought to produce was the instrumental
space which it can control, manage, regulate, and appropriate according
to its principles of governance. In the evolving imperialist world econo-
my of the nineteenth century in which colonial states were facilitators, the
political space that they sought to produce was one where both the accu-
mulation rationality and the state rationality were conjoined. The produc-
tion of this space entailed demarcating boundaries and locating places in
a grid of scientific precision in an attempt to create a fetishized space
reductive of differences that would increasingly serve important roles in
the evolving world economy of exchange and accumulation. Within this
fetishized space, particular spaces were demarcated and hierarchized,
and made manageable to control and negotiation. The underlying princi-
ple was to reconstitute divergent spaces in homogeneity, so that the state
could hegemonize them under its centralizing control. Hence, local diver-
sities in measurement and classification were rendered uniform. The rev-
enue surveys exemplify how the accumulation rationality was implicated
in the production of abstract space, for the definition of property was at
 The Production of Space 105

its core. Further the practices of appropriation of the colonial state were
suffused with the discourses of scientific rationality. Simultaneously, this
same space was fragmented and fractured in accordance with the de-
mands of the division of labor and of the division of needs and functions.
This abstract space is not only quantifiable as geometrical space, but
as a social and administered space too, it is subject to quantitative manip-
ulation. Often the qualitative aspects of social space resist absorption by
the quantitative because social spaces as representational spaces are “di-
rectly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the
space of inhabitants.” 84 This was most evident in the sphere of colonial
urban governmentality where “place-making” as resistance were even
incorporated in governmental problematizations. 85 New “norms and
forms” that were introduced as part of urban planning and served as a
technology of social control carried assumptions that were vastly differ-
ent for the British colonial administrators and for the Indians. 86 While
roads were for the colonial administrators a signifier of mobility (espe-
cially for the rapid movement of troops and raw materials), for the In-
dians the street was “a public space with social and recreational func-
tions.” 87
The divergent perceptions of space by the colonial administrators and
the colonial subjects locate the contradictions of abstract space by reveal-
ing two imminent features. One, the reinstitution of place as experienced
by the colonial subjects themselves in the imaginaire of the colonial state,
and secondly a different order of fragmentation and hierarchy of the
abstract space that the colonial subjects felt was less brutal to their experi-
ences. Such contradictions of space were most explicit in the numerous
functional sites of governance created by the colonial state and the norms
and regulations that ordered those sites. No doubt spatial practices resist
being fitted into geometrically rigorous grids and be made homogeneous
especially when the space of inhabitants is filled with images and sym-
bols that bestow meanings to them. The new social spaces created by the
colonial state such as the spaces of sanitary regimes were amenable to
geometric representations in the form of maps even as the population
resisted being circumscribed to those spaces by the colonial strategies of
epidemic and public health management.
Mimetic representations of maps generally attempt to stabilize essen-
tialist views of the world reinforcing the privilege and the dominant
position of the authorizing power. Jose Rabasa has noted that critiques of
colonial cartographic discourse seek a working alliance between “decon-
struction as a process of displacement which registers an attempted dis-
sociation from a dominant discursive system and decolonization as a
process of cultural transformation, which involves the ongoing critique of
colonial discourse.” 88 Such a process of displacement and decolonization
was effected by nationalist imaginations of the nation through the de-
ployment of cartographic images of India by turning maps into body-
106 Chapter 2

scapes of goddess “Mother India,” portraying the nation as a woman and

evoking emotions of devotion, desire, and patriotism, making it evident
that maps need not signify an empty social space as understood in scien-
tific cartography. 89 Mahatma Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement also invoked
visual images of the nation using cloth and khadi Charka (spinning wheel)
as symbols with or without the cartographic image of the nation, and
produced maps of economic exploitation and other pictorial devices to
signify British colonial domination. 90

NOTES

1. Ainslee T. Embree, “Frontiers into Boundaries: From the Traditional to the Mod-
ern State,” in Realm and Region in Traditional India, ed. Richard G. Fox (New Delhi:
Vikas Publishing House, 1977), 256–57.
2. Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British
India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 333.
3. Stuart Elden, “Governmentality, Calculation, Territory,” Environment and Plan-
ning D: Society and Space, 25 (2007): 563. Elden thinks it is not a shift in accent but both
a substitution and a change in Foucault’s preoccupation.
4. Latour, Science in Action; and Rose, Powers of Freedom.
5. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. (London: Verso, 1983/ 1991); and Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped:
A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
6. Edney, Mapping an Empire.
7. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Cam-
bridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
8. Lefebvre clarifies:
Coinciding neither with the abstraction of the sign, nor with that of the
concept, it operates negatively. Abstract space relates negatively to that
which perceives and underpins it—namely, the historical and religio-politi-
cal spheres. It also relates negatively to something which it carries within
itself and which seeks to emerge from it: a differential space-time. It has
nothing of a “subject” about it, yet it acts like a subject in that it transports
and maintains specific social relations, dissolves others and stands opposed
to yet others. It functions positively vis-à-vis its own implications: technolo-
gy, applied sciences, and knowledge bound to power. Abstract space may
even be described as at once, and inseparably, the locus, medium and tool
of this “positivity.”
See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 50.
9. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Unrevised text of a lecture given in March
1967. Trans. Jay Miskowiee Diacritics 16, 1 (Spring 1986): 22–27.
10. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 22–27.
11. Edward S. Casey, “Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places: The Hidden Histo-
ry of Place,” The Review of Metaphysics 51, 2 (1997): 291.
12. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 193,
197, 227, 231.
13. Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 204, 205, 243.
14. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 27.
15. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
16. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
17. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 32.
 The Production of Space 107

18. Michel Foucault, “Security, Territory, and Population” in Ethics: Subjectivity and
Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 67–71. Cited in Elden,
“Governmentality, Calculation, Territory,” 565.
19. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge.
20. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 38–39.
21. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. L. H.
Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1988).
22. Edney, Mapping an Empire, 316–317.
23. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments.
24. Bayly, Empire and Information, 10.
25. Bayly, Empire and Information, 20–21.
26. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, 367–368.
27. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India.
28. Michael Biggs, “Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory and Euro-
pean State Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, 2 (April 1999): 374.
29. Chandra Mukerji, From Gravern Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge and
Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design
and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 277–312.
30. For a lucid account of how the project of geography and information gathering
were linked in colonial India, read Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformation
of Colonial Knowledge.” For particular emphasis on the work of Colin Mackenzie,
and the politics associated with the writing of new histories and the denial of historic-
ity and the erasure of the histories of the colonized, read Nicholas B. Dirks, “Colonial
Histories and Native Informants: Biography of an Archive” in Orientalism and the
Postcolonial Predicament, ed. Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 279–313.
31. See the chapter on the Akbari Measure of distance called “The Karoh or Kos” in
Abul-Fazl Allami, The A-IN-I Akbari, vol II, trans. H. Blochmann (Delhi: Low Price
Publications, (1927–1949/1988). Original publication date unknown.
32. K. Sivaramakrishnan, “Colonialism and Forestry in India: Imagining the Past in
Present Politics,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, 1 (January, 1995): 3–40.
33. R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India vol. 11, 1800 to 1815
(Dehradun: Survey of India, 1950), 251.
34. Sven Widmalm, “Accuracy, Rhetoric, and Technology: The Paris Greenwich
Triangulation, 1784–88,” in The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century, ed. Tore Frang-
smyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin. E. Rider (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), 179–206.
35. Gloria Goodwin Raheja,”The Ajaib-Gher and the Gun Zam-Zammah: Colonial
Ethnography and the Elusive Politics of ‘Tradition’ in the Literature of the Survey of
India,” South Asia Research 19, 1 (1999): 29–51.
36. Bayly, Empire and Information, 56.
37. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 11.
38. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 11, 91.
39. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 11, 92.
40. Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1980); Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India; Alam
and Subrahmanyam, “Introduction” in The Mughal State 1526–1750; Cohn, An Anthro-
pologist among Historians and Other Essays; Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an
Indian Kingdom, Fox, Kin, Clan, Raja and Rule: State-Hinterland Relations in Pre-industrial
India; Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, and Wink, Land and Sove-
reignty in India among others deal with the nature of precolonial states in India and
their governing rationales and structures.
108 Chapter 2

41. Richard Saumarez Smith, Rule by Records: Land Registration and Village Custom in
Early British Panjab (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); and B.H. Baden-Powell,
Administration of Land Revenue and Tenure in British India (New Delhi: Ess Ess Publica-
tions, 1978). Originally published in 1907.
42. Captain Read’s first report of the Colar District dated January 1792. Manuscript,
Madras Records Office.
43. Letter to Governor-general Cornwallis by Alexander Read dated 15th Novem-
ber, 1792. The Baramahal Records, Section I–Management.
44. Report, No. XXVI appended to the letter to David Haliburton, President and
Members of Revenue Board by Alexander Read, dated 10th August 1794. The Barama-
hal Records, Section I–Management.
45. Extract of letter from the Honorable Court of Directors dated 4th October 1797
appended to the letter to Colonel Read by I. Webb, Secretary to Government, Fort St.
George dated 12th May 1798. The Baramahal Records, Section I–Management.
46. Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent
Settlement (Paris: Mouton, 1963).
47. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 11, 178.
48. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 11, 178.
49. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 11, 178.
50. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 11, 179.
51. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India; Burton Stein, “Idiom and Ideology in
Early Nineteenth Century South India,” in Rural India: Land, Power and Society under
British Rule, ed. Peter Robb (London: Curzon Press, 1983), 23–58; and Stein, Thomas
Munro.
52. Minute of Sir Thomas Munro presented along with Extract Revenue Letter to
Fort St. George dated 29th September 1824. Selections of Papers from the Records at the
East-India House- Revenue, Police, Civil, and Criminal Justice, Company’s Government in
India, Vol. II, 1826.
53. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 11, 186.
54. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, vol. 11,186.
55. Dharma Kumar, “A Note on the Term ‘Land Control,” in Rural India: Land,
Power and Society under British Rule, ed. Peter Robb (London: Curzon Press, 1983),
59–75; Dharma Kumar, Colonialism, Property and the State (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1996); Peter Robb, “Land and Society: The British ‘Transformation’ in India” in
Rural India: Land, Power and Society under British Rule, ed.Peter Robb (London: Curzon
Press, 1983), 1–22; and Jacques Pouchepadass, “Land, Power and Market: The Rise of
the Land Market in Gangetic India” in Rural India: Land, Power and Society under British
Rule, ed. Peter Robb (London: Curzon Press, 1983), 76–105.
56. This land deed was contained in the Appendix of Replies from Mr. F.W. Ellis,
Collector of Madras to the Mirasi Questions, dated 30th May, 1816.
57. Scott, Seeing like a State.
58. Scott, Seeing like a State, 25.
59. Minute of Sir Thomas Munro, President, Board of Revenue. Extract Fort St.
George Revenue Consultations dated 14th May 1822. Selections of Papers from the
Records at the East-India House- Revenue, Police, Civil, and Criminal Justice, Company’s
Government in India, Vol. II, 1826.
60. R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India vol. IV, 1830 to 1843
(Dehradun: Survey of India, 1958), 206.
61. Smith, Rule by Records, 21.
62. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, 324.
63. Ranajit Guha has shown that the peasantry experienced colonial power and
brutality often not directly as state intervention but by the realignment of the state and
landlord power. Peasant resistances also highlighted peasant notions of territoriality
and indeed alternate conceptions of the state as well. See Ranajit Guha, Elementary
Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
 The Production of Space 109

64. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 287.

65. Foucault, The Order of Things.
66. Eugenie Shinkle, “The Troping of (the) Landscape: Nature and the Politics of
Representation,” Cultural Dynamics, 8, 3 (November, 1996): 220.
67. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. D.Woozley (Lon-
don and Glasgow: Wm. Collins, 1975), 136.
68. David Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping
the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996), 7.
69. J. B. Harley. Cited in Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern
Europe,” 6.
70. Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Conceit of the Globe in Mughal Visual Practice,” Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 49, 4 (2007): 751–82.
71. Susan Gole, “Size as a Measure of Importance in Indian Cartography,” Imago
Mundi 42, (1990): 104; and P.P. Gogate, and B. Arunachalam, “Area Maps in Maratha
Cartography: A Study in Native Maps of Western India,” Imago Mundi 50, (1998):
126–40.
72. For more on Rennel’s maps and an account of mapping India, see Edney, Map-
ping an Empire, 9–16. Also see Clements R. Markham, Major James Rennell and the Rise of
Modern English Geography, The Century Science Series (London: Cassell and Company
Ltd), 1895.
73. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India vol. IV, 1830 to 1843, 282.
74. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India vol. IV, 1830 to 1843, 276.
75. Markham, R. Clements, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys (London: W. H. Allen
and Co, 1871), 273.
76. Ian. J. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c.
1756–1905 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2.
77. Ian. J. Barrow, “From Hindustan to India: Naming Change in Changing
Names,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 26,1 (2003): 48–49.
78. Foucault, Power/Knowledge.
79. Norman. J. W Thrower, Maps and Man: An Examination of Cartography in Relation
to Culture and Civilization (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1972).
80. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom; and M.G. Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of
Territory in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000).
81. Bayly, Empire and Information, 161.
82. Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,” Criti-
cal Inquiry 21, 2 (Winter 1995): 434–67.
83. John Stuart Mill, “Nature” and “On Liberty” in Essential Works of John Stuart
Mill, ed. Max Lerner (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 361. Cited in Shinkle, “The
Troping of (the) Landscape: Nature and the Politics of Representation,” 245–46.
84. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39.
85. Stephen Legg analyzed the colonial ordering of Delhi where resistance was
shown to be internal to government, and entering into the apparatus as problematiza-
tions. As most policies were not the result of an Enlightened, progressive ethos but of
a government responding to a threat to security, he introduces agency of city dwellers
and “place making” into governmentality approaches that generally focus on spatial
geometries and abstract processes of territorialization. See Stephen Legg, Spaces of
Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 211.
86. Examining postcolonial urban management, Ghertner observes a shift in calcu-
lative practices from “statistical” to “aesthetic.” See Asher, D. Ghertner, “Calculating
Without Numbers: Aesthetic Governmentality in Delhi’s Slums.” Economy and Society
39, 2 (May 2010): 185–217.
87. Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877 (New Del-
hi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 39. Originally published by Princeton University
Press, 1984.
110 Chapter 2

88. Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map: Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism

and the Cartographic Connection,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 20,
4 (October 1989): 119; and Jose Rabasa, “Allegories of the Atlas” in Europe and its
Others, vol. 2, ed. Francis Barker et. al. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985),
1–16.
89. Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India,” Imago
Mundi 53 (2001): 97–114.
90. Lisa N. Trivedi, “‘Visually Mapping the “Nation’: Swadeshi Politics in National-
ist India, 1920–1930,” The Journal of Asian Studies 62, 1 (February, 2003): 11–41.
 THREE
Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and
History

The conditions that made possible the emergence of modern historical

narratives in postcolonial societies has in recent years been a lively con-
cern. But G. W. F. Hegel’s remark that the narration of history and histor-
ical deeds and events appear at the same time and that “it is the State
which first presents subject matter that is not only appropriate for the
prose of history but creates it together with itself” requires a greater
critical scrutiny in the context of colonially instituted modern state than it
has received so far. 1 This Hegelian insight is explored here to show how
colonial state practices reconstituted temporalities and ushered new
modes of temporal discourse using Foucault’s notion of governmentality
that suggests a way to explore the conditions of the possibility of knowl-
edge in terms of the interventionary roles of the colonial state.
Meanwhile, colonialism is a missing moment in Foucault’s own di-
alectic of modernity. This “Foucauldian forgetting,” this disavowal of the
colonial moment as contingent to Western modernity enabled him to
constitute a “doubling of ‘man’ that is strangely collusive with its disper-
sal.” 2 Homi Bhabha has perceptively noted that in the terrain of colonial
discourse, the doubling of “man,” manifests itself in a tension between
the “synchronic panoptical vision of domination . . . and the counter
pressure of the diachrony of history,” which results in colonial mimicry,
that is, “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of
difference that is almost the same but not quite.” 3 Mimicry in disclosing the
ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. This results
in “the splitting of colonial discourse so that two attitudes towards exter-
nal reality persist; one takes reality into consideration, while the other
disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticu-
lates ‘reality’ as mimicry.” 4 Integrating these ideas of postcolonial theory
111
112 Chapter 3

with the Foucauldian perspective on power and knowledge, I show how

a pervasive state temporality was effected through colonial administra-
tive practices despite resistances, and how new discourses of temporality
were thereby introduced.
The colonial state reconstituted temporalities as certain practices and
domains of activities were provided with a new focus and framework of
observation such that their temporalities hitherto perceived and experi-
enced as cyclical, nonsecular, subjective and local were now seen to be
either transformed, subordinated or made to co-exist with linear, secular,
objective and universal time. 5 Charles Tilly in his analysis of the role of
the state in the constitution of time in the European context has noted
that the move from “particularized weak times” to “generalized strong
times” was made possible by “consolidated” states through two related
aspects of state power, namely “circumscription” and “central control.”
While “circumscription” refers to the increasing capacity to regulate
stocks and flows of resources within and across national frontiers, “cen-
tral control” refers to the state’s penetration of existing groups and activ-
ities at all levels by means of command, coordination, and surveillance. 6
The colonial state also generated times through “circumscription” and
“central control,” as many aspects of daily life like regulating trade and
labor, or the regimentation of population in prisons, factories, barracks,
and schools could only be colonially administered by applying or invent-
ing a new temporal regularity, despite the many varied forms of opposi-
tion from those it sought to govern. Colonial administration and long-
distance governance with its inscription and accountability procedures
also entailed keeping records. These enabled both the reconstitution of
temporalities as well as new discourses of temporality.
A diachronic discourse of history and change is possible only if en-
tities and categories that constitute and translate experience into knowl-
edges are temporalized. Such temporalization through colonial adminis-
trative practices resulted in significant epistemological gains as it made
possible the discourse of “history,” and “progress.” While such epistemo-
logical options were opened up through colonial state practices enabling
the project of Universal History to unfold, a “hyperreal” Europe was
instituted at the center of it as Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted, such that it
no longer became possible to write other histories without reference to
that Europe. 7 Such a colonially constructed project evoked many nation-
alist responses for proprietary claims over history to both imagine the
nation and to carry forward the project of modernity.

RECONSTITUTING CHRONOLOGY

Since gaining control over temporal frameworks that organize social life
is important for achieving dominance, ensuring the comparability of dif-
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 113

ferent eras has always been of concern to the rulers, so as to enable them
to master and govern a new realm of territory, people and things. British
colonial power too had to contend with the issue of chronology to evolve
its regulatory frameworks, as at the beginning of the colonial period there
were thirteen calendrical systems in what was then identified as the In-
dian subcontinent. 8
Chronology is one of the basic aspects of time-consciousness of society
signifying an awareness of the sequential flow of time, the ability to
locate events in a temporal framework, and of the possibility of retrieving
memory into history. Reinhart Koselleck has noted that chronology bor-
rowed from natural time is “indispensable for a historical reality that is to
be redeemed empirically, whether approximation to the absolute exact-
ness of data establishes meaning, or whether the cogency of the relative
before and after, which is unalterable in itself, is the prerequisite for a
meaningful reconstruction of historical events.” 9 The collapse of the short
biblical chronology with the discovery of ancient fossils, what Thomas
Trautman refers as the “revolution in ethnological time,” opened up the
period of pre-history to an infinite period and assigned to anthropology,
in its division of labor with history, the task of reconstructing universal
histories although both history and anthropology in the post-Enlighten-
ment period believed in the idea of “progress” as the telos of mankind. 10
That there was a well-developed notion of Hindu chronology that
enabled the location of events in an epoch is obviously beyond dispute. 11
But this did not lead to a historical consciousness that is familiar to us in
contemporary times. 12 The existence of chronology, although essential, is
not sufficient for a historical consciousness to develop. 13 Reinhart Kosel-
leck has noted that the discovery of subjective historical times is itself a
product of modernity, and such times tied to social and political units of
action, to acting human beings, and to their institutions and organiza-
tions, occurs within the difference between the “space of experience” out
of which one acts and in which the past is present or remembered and the
“horizon of expectations” which serves as a reference to one’s action. 14
With this difference between experience and expectation not clearly con-
ceptualized in premodern times, it is difficult to grasp historical times.
History writing in pre-nineteenth century India was therefore not
common in the form it is known today, although Ashis Nandy argues
that they did have a different way of arriving at the past. 15 A plausible
explanation for the lack of historical consciousness proferred from classi-
cal Indian epistemology is that knowledge claims are based on episodic
experiences and are presentational rather than representational, and also
only those cognitive-episodes are considered knowledge-episodes that
lead to liberatory knowledge. 16 But indigenous texts and traditions did
concern themselves with the past. Nicholas Dirks has suggested from his
analysis of the family histories (Vamcavali) of one South Indian little king,
that these “be classified and analysed in terms and categories that are
114 Chapter 3

consonant with the particular modes of ‘historical’ understanding posit-

ed by the texts and traditions themselves” which he terms “Ethnohisto-
ry.” 17 Other such indigenous texts are the prolific Marathi “bakhar” from
about 1600, identified by Sumit Guha, which are narratives produced in
judicial disputes and grounded in witness testimony, documentary evi-
dence, and the “common knowledge” of the local community. 18 Rao,
Shulman and Subrahmanyam have also highlighted that between
1600–1800 A.D. south India possessed considerable and diverse historical
traditions and that these histories compiled by a scribal class called kara-
nams (village accountants) were couched in a variety of genres and can be
identified by deploying a set of subgeneric markers that they call “tex-
ture,” and which they claim was comprehensible to their intended audi-
ence. 19 These no doubt seek to challenge the view that history is a Euro-
pean concept, which evolved at the time of the Renaissance, and is part of
the Enlightenment legacy to the modern world. However, there is no
historical time in these genres as that encapsulated in the notion of
“progress” as in the modern concept of history.
The modern and secular sense of history, what Peter Burke calls “the
Renaissance sense of the past,” became absolutely essential to the rela-
tions and structures of power that the British set up in India, as the
colonial civilizing agenda with its idea of “Improvement” sought to set
up a horizon of expectations that was far removed from the space of
experience of the colonized. 20 The early colonial agenda was to under-
stand the complexity of Indian social relations so as to reduce them to a
series of pithy rules that could be rendered legible in courts of law and be
made applicable across a vast territory. Colonial administrators’ attempts
to recover histories from all extant genres in their search for information
or facts to enable the reconstruction of historical narratives also delegiti-
mized precolonial modes of historiography claiming that mythic ele-
ments formed part of it. 21
The concern to comprehend the Hindu chronology resulted in numer-
ous publications in the late eighteenth century such as those of Jones,
Bentley, and Wilford in the Asiatic Researches, and Marsden in the Philo-
sophical Transactions, which differed in a few aspects from some of the
earlier accounts of Halhed, Bernier, Anquetil Duperron, Rogers, and le
Gentil, to name a few. Horace Wilson, the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at
Oxford, was to admit in the mid-nineteenth century that the Hindu
chronological system, though wholly mythological was not devoid of
explanation, as he noted, it originated, in the descending arithmetical
progression according to the notions of diminishing virtue in the several
ages, applied to a cycle of 12,000 divine years, each divine year equaling
360 mortal years. The colonialist view was that the Hindu notion of time
was cyclic and not linear. 22
Yet, until it could be fully comprehended within the Western rational-
ist framework, it evoked contemptuous remarks. S. R. Lushington, Col-
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 115

lector of Poligar Peshkash Southern Pollams in 1800, remarked “From the

little attention given by the natives of India to History, or tradition, his-
torical subjects are generally involved in dark obscurity or embellished
with unintelligible fables.” 23 Based on such accounts of colonial adminis-
trators, James Mill in the chapter on “Chronology and Ancient History of
the Hindus” in his History of British India noted with some disdain that
the fifty-five mythological princes of the Satya Yuga must have reigned
for an average of 23,000 years each, and in the next Dwapara Yuga the
average years of reign was 29,793 years, and with a “wonderful change”
to an average of thirty-three years in the last, the Kali Yuga. 24 Mill went
on to remark:
The wildness and inconsistency of the Hindu statements evidently
place them beyond the sober limits of truth and history. . . . The Hindu
legends still present a maze of unnatural fictions, in which a series of
real events can by no artifice be traced. . . . The offspring of a wild and
ungoverned imagination, they mark the state of a rude and credulous
people, whom the marvelous delights; who cannot estimate the use of a
record of past events. 25
Mill believed that “rude nations” derived a peculiar gratification from
pretensions to a remote antiquity. He further elaborated that “uncultivat-
ed minds” were not sufficiently capable of reflection to know the value of
an accurate record of antecedent events, yielding lessons for the future by
the experience of the past. He bemoaned the fact that the monstrous
period of the years which the Hindu legends involved, in which actions
of men and of the deities were mixed together, not only described events
that were “most extravagant and unnatural” but that these events were
not even connected in chronological series. 26 He thus concluded that the
Hindus were “perfectly destitute of historical records,” and that there
was not a single production in the ancient literature to which the “histori-
cal character” belongs. 27
Mill’s History was apparently an exercise in disenchantment that was
necessary to cut through a set of constraining identities that were in
collusion with new set of attitudes that he upheld. 28 His multi-volume
history was a critical assessment of British performance in India with the
object of making colonial rule efficient, and appeared just about the time
when new administrative modalities inspired by the utilitarian thought
of Bentham and Mill himself were to find their place in colonial govern-
ance. The verification of land rights was crucial at this point for institut-
ing systematic modes of revenue assessment. This endeavor starting from
the latter half of the eighteenth century resulted in the production of the
first European archive of Indian history.
Even as Mill was indulging himself in exaggerated criticisms that the
Hindus were destitute of historical records, what Ranajit Guha has called
as an act of “spiritual violence” that robbed the subject people of their
116 Chapter 3

principal means of self-identification, the colonial government retrieved

different kinds of documentary evidences from various inscriptions and
other sources. 29 It appears that there was no dearth of records, merely
that these had hitherto not been used as evidence for constructing ration-
al and objective histories.
Despite the “monstrous period of years” in the Hindu chronological
system, there were no difficulties in locating events in an epoch. The
revenue settlement process invariably led to verifying rights to land, and
it was necessary to have a chronology of the ruling dynasties to verify
these claims. In this endeavor, the first step was the attempt to cognize
“events” in the temporal framework that they were familiar with. Nine-
teenth-century views of chronology including that of Mill and Hegel
were “secularized renderings of the Christian culture of time, in which
the subject and the object of the Christian discourse are replaced by Eu-
rope and not-Europe.” 30 This meant retrieving from collective memory
and reordering the events in a new temporal framework.
All events were now wrenched from the time scale starting from the
birth of Brahma to the time scale that enabled reckoning both forward
and backward from the still point of the birth of Christ. 31 With the intro-
duction of the Petavius’s system of chronology, rational history could be
written using a temporal grid that closely resembled the Newtonian
one. 32 Reinhart Koselleck has noted that with the coming of the French
revolution the unknown future of the Biblical chronology was replaced
by the concept of an open future. The modern Western sense of history
conceives it as a statement of positive facts, which itself underwent a
change from pre-Enlightenment conception wherein it was seen to have
exemplary and didactic function like poetry. 33 Facts, too, had to be col-
lected from wherever they were nested in the folds of myths, mythogra-
phies, and “puranic histories” and fitted into the framework of rational
history. 34
For the community, history was indistinguishable from memory and
myth, memories being limited to what is ethically permissible as some
cultures abided by tacit “theories of principled forgetfulness and si-
lences.” 35 Whereas myths, legends, and epics grant moral if not objective
and empirical certitude, history guides moral action by denying a moral
framework and giving an objectivist framework supposedly based on
empirical realities. 36 Although it is generally believed that the dateability
of events marks the important transition from mythic knowledge to his-
torical knowledge, this only holds if one posits a sharp disjunction be-
tween the two. History and myths need not be exclusive modes of repre-
sentation if the Enlightenment concept of rational history is relaxed as the
norm. 37
Mill and Hegel not only noted that the Indian mind is insensitive to
history and has an ahistorical stance, but that the philosophical concern
with history is missing in the various philosophical schools. The classical
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 117

Indian understanding of history is the itihasa; an arrangement, in the

form of stories and past happenings, the “fabulous legends” of Mill con-
veying instructions in dharma, artha, kama, and moksa (i.e., righteousness,
wealth, sensuous love, and spiritual freedom). While it did comprise po-
litical, social, economic, and religious histories, it also had cosmography
and the genealogy of sages and of gods; thus profane and sacred history
was inseparable. William Jones, whose views ostensibly provided the
critical basis for Mill’s History, had expressed his conviction that some
sort of historical narrative could be recovered from Indian legends. 38
However, there were proto-historical works, which contained a concep-
tion of rational history, as for instance in Kalhana’s poetic work Rajataran-
gini. 39 Thus historical knowledge fostered through a mytho-poetic cogni-
tive mode was meant to accept change but not to intervene. 40 The idea of
fate, of things beyond “will” dominated the notion of history in classical
Indian thinking.
Colonial rule was to dramatically alter this notion of history. History
would henceforth be a process of achieving new values that were not
achieved before. Such histories were of course yet to be written. But in
order to do so, chronologies, dynasties, and events had first to be taken
cognizance of, and then verified. This activity became part of colonial
rule and administration. As part of colonial topographical surveys, epig-
raphers collected and interpreted inscriptions to reconstruct chronologies
and history, an activity that was institutionalized with the setting up of
the Archeological Survey of India in 1861. 41
This process of constructing a chronology in the new temporal frame-
work started right from the beginning of colonial rule, so that by the end
of the eighteenth century a few volumes on the history of India started to
appear in print. 42 Toward the end of the ninteenth century it was possible
to present the dynasties, dates, and genealogies for most regions. For
instance, Maclean’s Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency,
published in 1885, could carry two appendices, one dealing with the lists
of south Indian rulers whose dates or succession could be “at all approxi-
mately ascertained,” the other entitled “Madras Chronological Annals
with inclusion of the principal dates of general Indian history” which had
recorded entries from 3102 B.C. marking the beginning of the Kali Yuga
and the Aryan invasion of northern India.
The agenda of colonialism was conquest, rule, and administration,
and not the activity of writing histories, although many administrators
did write histories. 43 But rational history was seen as necessary to the
formation of a rational political system, one in which the present could be
rationally (read instrumentally) governed for certain ends, and the future
could be goal oriented as well. Thus knowledge of the past, as James Mill
noted, could guide the future. The immense exercise of recasting chronol-
ogy played an important role in shaping the historical narratives in the
so-called rationalist mould.
118 Chapter 3

The existence of chronology presupposes the existence of methods of

time-measurement. Although time was measured with great precision in
astronomical, ritual, and astrological calculations (jyotisa sastra) and in
the medical text Caraka Samhita, measurable time had only a minimal role
to play in the everyday life of the majority in precolonial India, nor was
there anything like a state-regulated time. All this was to undergo a
change with the onset of colonialism. New temporal regularities that
were invented for many practices to facilitate colonial administration also
required an alteration in the reckoning of time. Once modern systems of
transport and communication such as the railways, posts and the tele-
graph were installed, the need for coordination over spatial regions and
of schedules laid out in timetables became important to establish
rhythms, impose particular occupations, and to regulate the cycles of
repetition.
Time measured with precision, and uniform over a defined space, was
considered necessary for modern systems of regulation, and, there were
many other areas of governance where new temporal regularities were
invented. Almanac predictions and local times were now relegated to the
sphere of the private and the religious, whereas uniform, standardized
time governed life in the modern public realm. If we are to consider how
perceptions of a cyclical view of time, presumably informed by religious-
ly governed teloses of mankind, were supplanted by a linear homogene-
ous view of time containing a secular notion of progress, it is the tempo-
rality of governing practices in the modern public realm created by the
colonial state that will provide the understanding. Representations of
time and temporality in the bureaucratic practices enabled the emergence
of a national temporality as a “homogenous empty time,” a temporality
of “meanwhile” in Bhabha’s term, that permits a narrative of the “mean-
while” marked by temporal coincidence, and measured by clocks and
calendar. 44

TIME AND BUREAUCRATIC PRACTICES

The organization of the bureaucratic practices of the colonial state neces-

sitated the reorganizing of time and temporalities in many other in-
stances as well. In the predominantly agrarian economy of pre-British
India, the single most important state activity was land revenue assess-
ment and collection, the quantum of it and its mode of payment allowed
the colonial state to insert itself into the “lived” and “working” times of
the peasantry, even though their working hours could never be directly
regulated by the state. It was, however, in the so-called modern institu-
tions of railways, factories, schools, and prisons that time discipline, time
regulation, time contestations, and a new temporal consciousness
emerged, as new disciplinary regimes of modern power sought to manip-
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 119

ulate temporalities to produce normalized subjects. Travelers on the rail-

ways came under the discipline and surveillance of the Railway Acts, the
railway staff, and the railway timetable even as they had to cope with a
new discrimination of racially segregated travel and the breakdown of
caste segregation.
Yet another example is the prison system where in the shift from one
disciplinary regime to another, time emerges as a significant controlling
variable. 45 In pre-British India, imprisonment as a method of punishment
was not a normal feature of the legal system in official punishments.
Even when imprisonment was used as punishment, there were no specif-
ic fixed rules for it. Under the modern prison system that emerged under
British rule, imprisonment became the most common form punishment,
and it was deemed necessary “to establish such regulations as shall make
imprisonment a terror to wrong doers.” 46 Based on Macaulay’s sugges-
tion, a new plan of prison discipline was prepared. India became the
experimental site for the Benthamite Panopticon; which idea entails a
whole new modality of power. Prison discipline thus became paradig-
matic of the modern discipline of the timetable. 47
When modern factories started functioning from the latter half of the
nineteenth century, a new time-discipline was instituted, as the factory
system requires time to be broken down into subdivisions that could be
brought under the gaze of supervision to accelerate the operation for
maximum productivity. Although in the initial stages there was not a
great deal of concern to regulate work routines, it became increasingly
evident that industrial capitalism needed to create conditions of equal
competition. The idea of the state regulating the conditions of work
gained acceptance, and the colonial state then began to subject the worker
to its gaze. 48 Seventy years after the first modern factory was set up, the
adult male hours were for the first time restricted to eleven hours, and
there was along with it a radical shift in thinking about labor. Hoping to
create an efficient labor force, the state sought to give labor a legal frame-
work, which ushered a whole series of regulatory measures. The newer
and older modalities of power produced a complex signification of au-
thority within the factories, which in turn produced equally complex
forms of resistance to such power and authority. Efficiency was from
then on seen as a function of working-class conditions, which included
such aspects as spare time, and the state was to ensure not only that the
workers were given spare time but also ensuring that the workers made
proper use of it. 49 While temporal disciplinary methods reveal a linear
time whose integrated moment constitute “evolutive” time, at the same
time, the administrative and economic techniques of control reveal a so-
cial time of a serial, orientated, cumulative type in terms of “progress.” 50
“Rule by record” and “rule by report” (phrases popularized by Rich-
ard Saumarez Smith) also meant temporal standardization in both the
administration of rules such as the time fixed for tax payment and reve-
120 Chapter 3

nue collection and in accountability through instruments like financial

budgets and departmental reports. This temporal standardization of bu-
reaucratic rules and procedures in which time is recknoned linearly in
repetitive practices make it appear that the temporal space of the modern
colonial state is one of “homogenous empty time.” However, the subjects
who are governed lead their lives situated in heterogeneous time, of var-
ying and different temporalities, which creates a hiatus between state
practices and lived practices. 51 Such differences means that “the continu-
al attempt by the state to categorize, codify and reform, to make sense of
personal, dynamic processes by seeing them as particular instances of
general rules, needs to remain a project that is continually deferred.” 52
Record-keeping activities multiplied in consequence of regulatory
practices, and were progressively streamlined. Although data generated
through a hierarchical bureaucratic structure suffered from many inade-
quacies, the issue here relates to the conditions for the possibility of pro-
ducing such knowledge. But not all aspects of the working life attained
the epistemic status of “knowledge,” some remained at the level of mere
“lived experience.” Regulatory practices generate knowledge necessary
for regulation but do not translate all experience to social knowledge.
Nevertheless these regulatory practices of the modern state ushered in
significant epistemological shifts, in turn allowing the conceptualizing of
“society” and “economy,” and the creation of new discourses of tempo-
rality, history and progress. Foucault has observed that with new tech-
niques of subjection through temporal disciplinary methods, the “dy-
namics” of continuous evolution, “evolutive” historicity, tends to replace
the “dynastics” of solemn events associated with “history-remember-
ing.” 53 We now consider some of the issues relating to the translation of
experience into social knowledge.

FROM EXPERIENCE TO SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE

The main problematic of Western epistemology, as Richard Rorty once

clarified, is the relationship between contingent truths derived from sen-
sory intuitions, and necessary truths derived from concepts. 54 Concepts
and categories, though generally reductive of experience enable the con-
stitution of scientific knowledge. The category of “time” assumes impor-
tance for the construction of temporal knowledge. As a category of philo-
sophical analysis, it was for Kant, an apriori intuition, a pre-condition for
experience, while for Hegel it was “intuited becoming” bound with hu-
man reflexivity and self-consciousness. For phenomenologically-oriented
thinkers, the pure experience of time (i.e., absolute time) can never be
objectified. Heidegger, for instance, was critical of a beschrankt idea of
time. However, positivist social science has conceptualized time as a neu-
tral quantity and as a universal measure, and in so doing has denied
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 121

certain kinds of temporality, especially experiential time. Dipesh Chakra-

barty notes, “History’s own time is godless, continuous and to, follow
Benjamin, empty and homogenous.” 55 Despite social theory’s concern
with issues of time, of synchrony and diachrony, statics and dynamics,
process and order, and change and stability, the erasure of the time creat-
ed by the event of consciousness, or subjectively perceived temporalities
while often acknowledged, has never been fully explained. 56
I venture to suggest that in certain spheres the bureaucratic practices
of the modern state that were responsible for the progressive rationaliza-
tion of the world were instrumental in introducing this aspect of positi-
vism, with its associated conception of time as objective and measurable,
and therefore fitting into a unilinear law of time. It is with the emergence
of the modern state that the idea of intervening in social processes is
crystallized. The particular conception of a uniform and objectified time
arises out of the necessity to identify repetitions and patterns in events
that were to be progressively brought under control. 57
Experiential knowledge now has to be transformed into social facts.
Let us consider birth and death as an illustrative case. The self-awareness
of time, the telos of life from birth to death that constitutes “being,” and
provides each individual the “authentic” experience, is exteriorized
when birth and death gets transformed into social facts, that is, facts that
could be constituted by bureaucratic frameworks and become progres-
sively amenable for calculation and intervention, and on which the telos
of society is then defined. The transformation of the life process of birth
and death into a social fact, the transformation of a metaphysical idea
into an epistemological one, was achieved by the colonial state through
some of its regulatory practices relating to population such as the cen-
suses, health and epidemic control, and by the collection of demographic
information such as the recording of births and deaths.
As new modes of intervening in social and economic processes be-
came possible, it was necessary to know the size and characteristics of the
population. Sporadic population censuses became more systematic in the
latter half of the nineteenth century, and as more and more life-statistics
were collected, it became possible to conceive of society as an entity that
can progress or decline. The subjective experience of life-cycle time could
now be projected onto a new epistemic domain rendering it objective,
measurable and linear. Along with the facts of birth and death, the consti-
tution of “age” as such a fact made it possible to construct tables of life
expectancy and to compare such with other parts of the world, although
as is evident from the various censuses, they often acknowledged that
age was to the masses “a matter of no importance.” 58 In the course of
time, “age” was to become important when factory work and marriage-
ability were regulated by age. The collection of such social facts was thus
implicated in the regimes of modern power.
122 Chapter 3

Both the constitution of a social fact, and the temporalization of social

entities, enabled a new discourse about society. It would henceforth be
possible to talk about the birth and death rates in societies. It would give
the picture of society as an organic entity that could grow or diminish in
size, and furthermore such organic evolution need not all be a natural
process. It is possible to intervene in such processes. From the beginning,
there was an emphasis to record the “cause of death; the diseases being
caused under very general well known heads” such as “Cholera,” “Fe-
ver,” “Small Pox,” “Other diseases,” and “Old Age.” 59 Establishing cause
of death was necessary as there were ongoing debates about diseases,
epidemics and the sanitary measures to be introduced. Once it becomes
evident that the population could be spatially delineated, enumerated
and classified according to afflictions, and scientific knowledge about
causes established, the methods of intervention could be applied.
The concern here has been to demonstrate the transference of individ-
ual experience and the perception of life-cycle time to the epistemic do-
main of a social fact, a domain constituted within a field of power rela-
tions. Whereas experience takes place in absolute time, the relocation of
the whole or part of it to the epistemic domain of facts is in objective time.
It is such a concept of objective time, however, that has rendered public
the whole domain of social facts. For as Heidegger has with insight
noted, objective time, (i.e., measured time) is public, and social facts, too,
thus become public. 60

THE TEMPORALIZATION OF ENTITIES

Modern temporality, as Bruno Latour noted, is the result of disciplining

and retraining imposed on entities that would otherwise pertain to all
sorts of time and possess all kinds of ontological statuses. 61 Modernizing
progress is conceivable only if all the entities of a complete and recogniz-
able cohort that are contemporary according to calendar time belong to
the same time. 62 If “society” and “economy” are to be conceived as a kind
of an organic entity subject to change, growth, evolution, progress, devel-
opment or decay, the entities that make up the representation of “soci-
ety” and “economy” have to be temporalized. This means that the tempo-
ral nature of the entities has to be inserted in discursive formations
through appropriate representations. Recognizing the temporal nature of
entities is to acknowledge that such entities can be placed in a sequence
in which a “before” and an “after” state can be identified.
The procedures of accountability and the regular rendering of ac-
counts were the important modalities that temporalized social and eco-
nomic entities. Right from its early days, the East India Company was
preparing and sending trade accounts, as well as revenue and tax re-
ceipts, for areas under its control. These early trade accounts however,
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 123

were more in the nature of book keeping accounts and are not sufficiently
indicative of the temporalization of economic entities, and no such entity
as the “economy” itself seems to have emerged in the Company dis-
courses at the time.
To have a dynamic conception of the “economy,” the entities used to
construct it have to be temporalized as well. A whole range of statistics
was sought regularly, enabling such a conception of the “economy” to be
realized. Political geographical statistics pertaining to area, population,
the number of villages, the number of judges, magistrates and police, and
gross revenue from land were collected. Population data were gathered
and tabulated by districts in terms of the number of inhabited houses,
and of the classification of population by broad age, sex, religious, and
occupational groups. Fiscal geography provided statistics relating to sur-
vey and settlement. The area surveyed was classified into cultivated, un-
cultivated, and irrigated, and also those assessed for land revenue and
the rate of assessment. This way of temporalizing the entity “land” had
two implications. First it was meant to yield a flow of revenue, a flow that
is not invariant with time. Secondly, it sought to record the varieties of
tenure. Here we see the representation of land as a commodity. Similarly,
all commodities need to be indexed by time for a dynamic conception of
the economy. The time-indexation of stocks and flows of resources and
commodities is an important characteristic of a market economy. The
regulatory practices of the colonial state rendered such indexation pos-
sible.
It is only when the administrative apparatus of the colonial state is
fully developed that administrative accountability becomes streamlined
and pervasive, and this process of temporalization of social and economic
entities takes place on a significant and distinctive scale, thus making it
discursively possible to represent “economy” or “society.”
In 1863 the government appointed a Statistical Committee to recom-
mend ways of compiling the mass of statistics contained in the Adminis-
tration Reports of the local governments on a “uniform” plan so as “to
show the statistics of the Empire” and to “show the progress of India in
such a manner as may be readily understood, and enable a comparison to
be made with the progress of other countries.” 63 The Statistical Commit-
tee also sought to render in tabular details the annual records pertaining
to all other aspects of social and civil existence. Rendering all aspects in a
tabular form and consolidating them district wise for all provinces ena-
bled a representation of “economy” and “society” that was temporal as
well. The Annual Administration Reports that were instruments of regu-
lation and control of the vast bureaucratic edifice of the colonial state also
became the instruments for generating knowledges. Thus the system of
“rule by records” and “rule by reports” contributed in no small way to
the colonial epistemological projects. 64
124 Chapter 3

The significant epistemological gain arising out of this endeavor was

the temporalization of entities. That history emerges in an unintended
shape as a result of practices directed to immediate, practical ends is
proven here. 65 Ideas of “history” and “progress,” that are crucial to the
discourse of historical modernity as an epistemological structure are ar-
ticulated through this process. While ontologically the world is reduced
to a world of “entities as a whole [as the totality of objects],” epistemolog-
ically the relationship to that world is “reduced to the capacity of
know[ing] . . . states of affairs . . . in a purposive-rational fashion.” 66
“History” and “Progress,” if it is to be more than an event history, needs
the notion of anachronism without the presumption that institutions,
practices, discourses, meanings and signification of concepts are the same
in earlier periods as at present, which is possible only with a temporal
continuity to the entities that represent an event. 67 In representational
terms, the temporalization of entities provided the possibility of the com-
pilation of time series data on various social and economic entities, and
which permitted the discursive construction of “economy” and “society”
at any level of aggregation, whether the village, district, province, presi-
dency, or the nation as a whole. As Reinhart Koselleck noted, statistical
time-series live on concrete individual events that possess their own time,
but gain structural expressiveness within the framework of long peri-
ods. 68 As each event constituting the series is governed by its own time, it
is evident that historical fact is not the arrangement of events in order but
is governed by chance. With chance making expectations more unstable,
it drifts further away from experience. 69
This now rendered possible a new discourse about “progress,” a
progress that is not something subjectively perceived or experienced, but
progress that is statistically representable, measurable, and which made
it possible to intervene and alter the course of that progress. Kant has
even suggested that “predictive history,” a history not drawn from past
but future time can influence history’s progress toward its ultimate desti-
nation, his ideal of “Perpetual Peace.” From around the middle of the
nineteenth century onward, annual reports entitled “Memorandum on
the Moral and Material Progress” of the different presidencies were pre-
sented to Parliament. It is through these procedures of representation
that “particular histories,” the outcomes of particular events and contin-
gencies could be made to fit into the grand narrative of Universal Histo-
ry. The doubling of “man” is thus effected in colonial discourse such that
differential history is returned to the power of the “Same” through a
timelag. 70 The modern European notion of “progress” thus became part
and parcel of the colonial apparatus, out of which standardized teloses
could henceforth be created.
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 125

UNIVERSALIZING PARTICULAR HISTORIES

The acknowledgment of the idea of progress in the project of Universal

History enabled the future to be inserted as a goal attainable through
rational means by making the unknown into a known through planning,
control and prediction. While arguing that the notion of progress needs
to be historicized, Reinhart Koselleck has pointed out that it is with histo-
ry experienced as a new temporality “that specific dispositions and ways
of assimilating experience emerge.” 71 In the West, this new temporality
was affected by a “new arrangement of politics and religion” in the post-
Reformation period. Religious expectations of the future, carried out in
prophetic terms were supplanted by predictive struggle on the terrain of
politics, and the future was constituted as a domain of finite possibilities
arranged according to probabilities. Koselleck notes “Progress opened up
a future that transcended the hitherto predictable, natural space of time
and experience, and thence-propelled by its own dynamic-provoked
new, transnatural, and long-term prognoses.” 72
Notions of history and progress brought the traditional “ahistorical”
societies within the framework of Universal History through an “alloch-
ronic” discourse that denied them coevalness. 73 Kant in his 1784 essay on
the “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View”
noted that “freedom of will” which appears as human actions, like every
other natural event is determined by universal laws, and that history
which is concerned with narrating these appearances will be able to dis-
cern a regular movement in it, if the play of the freedom of the human
will in the large is reckoned. Thus according to him, what seemed “com-
plex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint
of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow
evolution of its original endowment.” 74 It therefore might be possible to
have “a history with a definite natural plan” for creatures who have no
plan of their own.
In Kant’s conception of Universal History two ideas are embedded:
first, the idea of human actions being made comprehensible within a
framework of laws owing to their regularity; and second, the notion of
progress, which seems to imply the acquisition of capabilities for actions,
i.e., the realization of potential originally endowed. This idea of world
history, which Kant recognized as to “some extent based upon an apriori
principle” in which a philosophical mind could engage, was a major
preoccupation for Hegel. 75 History, according to Hegel, requires “Under-
standing, i.e. the power of looking at an object in an independent objec-
tive light, and comprehending it in its rational connection with other
objects.” Further, only societies in which individuals comprehend their
own existence as independent, i.e. possess self-consciousness, are capable
of History and of prose. History, by presenting a people with their own
image reinterpreted makes it objective for them, and in as much as it sets
126 Chapter 3

up a permanent object for the conceptual power, it is an empirical meth-

od of producing the Universal. Hegel further emphasized that it was an
essential instrument in developing and determining a rational political
condition. 76
Methods of producing the Universal concerned other philosophers as
well. Developing along Kantian lines, perhaps anticipating some of the
postmodernist criticism of Enlightenment narratives, Georg Simmel has
given us some brilliant insights on the conceptual rendering of history. In
his essay “The Constitutive Concepts of History,” he noted that only
phenomena that are classified in temporal sequences can come within the
province of history, although the criteria used to classify phenomena are
trans-temporal, and are based on logically defined concepts of the objec-
tive content of these phenomena. When such concepts are used, what is
constructed is not the development of a total event that develops multi-
dimensionally, which allows these dimensions to be seen from a single
perspective, but one-dimensional, independently identifiable lines of de-
velopment that are juxtaposed to one another. Paul Veyne made a similar
point when he noted that history is not interested in the “individuality”
of individual events as it seeks to find among them “a kind of generality
or, more precisely specificity.” 77 Simmel thus concludes that Universal
History or world history is a superficial or extrinsic synopsis of fragments
from these different lines of development within the space of a single
literary work. 78
Further, Simmel’s insights on the idea of progress resonate with Heg-
el’s views. For Simmel the concept of progress presupposes the idea of a
final state, which is logically distinct from mere change. This final state is
an ideal, subjectively given and extraneous to the historical process. The
entities to which progress is ascribed must be a homogenous substance,
and the peoples and individuals perceived as an evolving totality have to
be subjectively synthesized as a homogenous subject. 79 Although Hegel
is far clearer on how the synthesization of the homogenous subject is to
be achieved, we do know now that the notions of “progress” and “histo-
ry” evolved historically.
Universal histories concern the writing of history in its epistemic rath-
er than its ethical aspects, of the impossible promise of justice to the
other. 80 But Kant, Hegel, and Simmel have not given us a complete per-
spective on the method of producing Universal History. The Kantian
“possibility” argument, in emphasizing “freedom of will” in human ac-
tions cannot accommodate the Foucauldian perspective of the mutual
determination of power and knowledge. Nor do Hegel’s insights on state
and history indicate how the “doubling of man” is implicated in the
construction of the modern state. In the context of colonial India, a new
experience of temporality was ushered through the bureaucratic prac-
tices of the colonial state, and this new experience afforded both a ration-
al history as well as the idea of “progress” to take hold of the colonial
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 127

imagination. The steady movement of calendrical time gives the ima-

gined world of the nation a “sociological solidity” by linking together
diverse acts and actors on the national stage who are unaware of each
other, except as a function of this synchronicity of time, a form of “civil
contemporaneity.” 81 As the perceived lack of progress deferred granting
of self-rule to the colonized even as it propelled their expectations, na-
tionalist imagination of history and nation sought to bridge the difference
between expectations and experiences.

RETRIEVING HISTORY AND THE NATION

Retrieving history and the nation was contentious as nationalist

historiography questioned the assumptions of colonialist historiography,
which in turn faced contestations from non-elite and minority discourses
that refused to “celebrate the monumentality of historicist memory, the
sociological solidity or totality of society, or the homogeneity of cultural
experience” even as they accepted the premises of modern historiogra-
phy and imagined their nation. 82
The reconstruction of local and regional histories was integral to colo-
nial rule and administration. Rudimentary colonialist historiography is
evident in the record of property relations at the time of the permanent
settlement of Bengal in the 1780s and was thereafter followed up in all the
newly annexed territories. Be it in clarifying land rights, identifying au-
thentic traditions, or “ancient usages and custom,” it must no doubt have
been a dialogical process. Many have argued that the natives were more
than informants in colonial knowledge production; they were in most
instances collaborators. The vast Mackenzie collection of inscriptions and
texts used in reconstructing the history of south India were the work of
his team of knowledgeable Niyogi (a caste group with multi-lingual pro-
ficiency) assistants who even seem to have devised their own epigraphi-
cal methods. 83 Eugene Irschick has shown that colonial knowledge pro-
duction in south India, in particular the formulations of territory and
identity was dialogic and heteroglot, while Ranajit Guha drawing evi-
dence from early colonial Bengal has cited the colonial official James
Grant’s complaint of “the collusive chicanery of native agents” who with-
held official intelligence from their English masters, such intelligence
concerned wih information about the volume and value of agricultural
produce, the nature of land tenures and other agrarian matters. 84 In south
India, Thomas Munro once wrote a frustrated letter to the chief secretary
after meeting with the mirasidars of Mayavaram taluk that “they had all
preconcerted their answers and that they acted under the influence of
some of their number, or some leading men of the country who directed
them. . . . I thought it advisable to have no more meetings with bodies of
principal inhabitants.” 85
128 Chapter 3

Under conditions of unequal power such a process could only have

resulted in varying perceptions, from dominant and hegemonic to those
suppressed, marginalized, and silenced. The hegemonic construction was
in every instance to facilitate, rationalize and legitimize colonial rule, and
to trumpet the glories of colonial rule. While “mercantalist historiogra-
phy” of the early colonial period that lasted till the end of the eighteenth
century and marked by such works as Alexander Dow’s The History of
Hindostan was concerned merely with tendering political information to
the Company to further its conquests, the historiography of the later
decades was affected by the idiom of “Improvement” of the colonized as
seen earlier in the writings of James Mill and others. This, Ranajit Guha
notes, assimilated Indian history to the history of Great Britain and was
used as a comprehensive measure of difference between the colonizer
and the colonized. 86 If James Mill gave little weight in his History to the
pasts of both India and Britain, it was because his was an exercise in
“disenchantment” to counter the dominant ideology of the time and pur-
poted to be a liberating critique. 87 But such (mis) appropriation of the
past was never complete as the dominated histories in their reconstruc-
tions and articulations were pregnant with resistances and forced ac-
quiescences.
Colonial governmentality needed to normalize colonial subjects, and
the techniques of governing population that were drawn from Western
rational principles of governance needed a reformed and recognizable
“Other.” But caught in “the tension between the synchronic panoptical
vision of domination—the demand for identity, stasis—and the counter-
pressure of the diachrony of history—change, difference,” colonial mim-
icry, “the desire for a reformed recognizable Other, as a subject of differ-
ence that is almost the same, but not quite,” was the ironic compromise. 88
As Partha Chatterjee has noted, the forms of objectification and normal-
ization of the colonized reproduced within the framework of universal
knowledge, the truth of colonial difference. Colonialist historiography
thus became a site of colonial mimicry.
Colonialist representations of the immediate past, as well as that of
the earlier periods of Muslim rule, were uniformly seen as responsible for
the decay of society, which the early administrators sought to redress.
The diversity of Indian pasts was represented in a homogenizing narra-
tive of transition from a medieval period to modernity, a transition narra-
tive that privileged the modern state and the theoretical subject of Eu-
rope. 89 Such essentialized representations of the past sought to construct
a normative past to serve the projects of their imagined future. Each new
institution, regulation, or practice that the colonial government sought to
introduce was legitimized as an attempt to bring “order” to what was in
the past seemingly unorderly. Even while all these hegemonic construc-
tions of local and regional histories were being set in place to constitute
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 129

the new episteme of rational history, they simultaneously created the

field as a contested one.
As colonialist historiography became a site of colonial mimicry, it
undermined its own authority by disclosing the ambivalences in mimic-
ry. By the middle of the nineteenth century when the colonialist
historiography of India had gained considerable strength, an agenda for
an alternate, “an Indian historiography of India” was to develop. 90 This
alternative was in due course to constitute itself as nationalist historiogra-
phy. 91 The splitting into colonialist and nationalist historiographies is
indeed the outcome of the effects of mimicry, the reason why Partha
Chatterjee poses the question if nationalist discourse is a “derivative dis-
course.” 92 Chatterjee’s accomplishment was to show the creativity of na-
tionalism to craft a historical discourse that was “modern” but not West-
ern. 93 There are divergences between the two, especially of the concep-
tion of the nation, but they share the premises of rationalist historiogra-
phy with its constituent requirements of anachronism, the use of evi-
dences, the ordering of events and establishing causal connections be-
tween them. 94 For the first time, rational histories of India and of the
British rule, that is, history that “abandoned the criteria of divine inter-
vention, religious value, and the norms of right conduct in judging the
rise and fall of kingdoms,” were written by English-educated Indians. 95
Moreover, they shared the belief that such a rational history was neces-
sary for the formation of a rational political condition, and neither of
them comprehended the malaise of liberalism in the illiberal context of
colonialism. Whereas the British could write histories of India quite un-
problematically as India was defined by the boundaries of British India
through conquest and political unification, for the nationalists writing the
history of India first entailed that the nation be collectively imagined. 96
This in turn entailed for both the existence of a modern state, one envis-
aging it in the confines of a colonial space granting subjecthood to the
people, and the other imagining such a state within a national space not
of subjects but of citizens. Correspondingly, the teloses envisaged for
such a community varied between the two.
While colonialist historiography used history as a site for the con-
struction of the modern state, but a state in which citizenship not having
been evolved, the project of modernity was to remain in the hands of the
colonial power, nationalist historiography used history as a discursive
site of the power struggle to both imagine a nation and to recover it from
colonial rule. 97 Nationalist historiography in trying to recover the nation,
also tried to appropriate the task of completing the project of modernity,
and thus tried to posit itself as the sovereign subject of history. 98 There
were varied imaginations of the “nation,” but as the nationalist move-
ment consolidated itself, it set in place a hegemonic construction of both
the nation and the history of the nation. For instance, nationalist
historiography constituted under Brahmanic influence privileged the
130 Chapter 3

Sanskritic-Aryan origins of Indian civilization, much in concurrence with

the perspective of colonialist historiography informed by the erudite
scholarship of Orientalists such as William Jones. Yet another strand of
nationalist thought evoked the past as an anteriority and not as an origin
by claiming that ancient Hindu religion had discovered and incorporated
scientific truths and this idea of Hindu science functioned as a project to
constitute a modern national subject as “homogenous, whole, and
pure.” 99 In the multifarious struggles in colonial India, antihistorical and
antimodern constructions of the past have also provided powerful forms
of collective memory. 100
But such perspectives of the singularity of national history did not go
uncontested as seemingly homogeneous nationalist histories elicited the
question of “history for whom.” 101 If nationalist historiography deemed
colonial historiography to be mimicry and sought to write the truth of
civilizational difference, it in turn was perceived as mimicry by radical
historiography, which produced other spaces of subaltern signification.
Homi Bhabha has articulated the tensions caused by the ambivalence in
nationalist discourse, which leads to “endless oscillation, continually slip-
ping from the symbolic to the system of signification, from the constative
to the performative, from the object to the subject of narration.” 102 The
tension signifies “the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogi-
cal object; and the people constructed in the performance of narrative.” 103
Bhabha notes “The pedagogical founds its narrative authority in the tra-
dition of the people. . . . The performative intervenes in the sovereignty of
the nation’s self-generation.” This slipping opens the space of “liminality”
in which the discourse becomes dislocated, people must be thought in
double-time, and the “nation turns from being the symbol of modernity
into becoming the symptom of an ethnography of the ‘contemporary’
within culture.” 104
New agendas of histories emerged in both imperialist and colonial
sites as more and more actors within the historically defined nation state
contested the roles they had been assigned on the fringes of public politi-
cal life, and as marginalized groups emerged from the shadows of domi-
nation to become enfranchised as political actors. 105 Muslims writing the
history of the nation in the nineteenth century made other claims to the
past and of its Muslim rulers. 106 As the idea of modern rationalist history
gripped the imagination of the Tamil country for instance, non-Brahman
intellectuals put forth their claims for the Dravidian origins of the Indian
civilization making it possible to posit the Brahmans as the Aryan “Oth-
er,” and indicated the possibility that such a historical perspective could
be developed out of Tamil literary and hagiographical materials. The
non-Brahmin movement sought to counter Brahmanic hegemony espe-
cially in public service employment and elected representation in provin-
cial legislative councils. 107 A more radical historiography privileging Dal-
its (the outcastes) was to equally contest the “Aryanist” perspective. This
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 131

splitting of historiographical discourse created new enunciative spaces

for subaltern agency. It is in these spaces that antihistorical devices of
memory and the antihistorical narratives of the subaltern classes were
appropriated to represent the “difference” and the “originality” of “In-
dian” history. 108 As such contestations emerged in other parts of the
country, they ushered in a radically new politics of culture and identity in
the terrain of nationalist politics, which could consistently articulate a
counter-hegemonic project of “modernity,” “nation,” and “history.” 109 In
recent years a more radical call of history writing has been provoked to
provincialize Europe by overriding the modern state and its privileged
narratives of rights and citizenship such that the world may once again
be imagined as radically heterogeneous. 110

NOTES

1. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the

Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New
York: Routledge, 1990), 291–322; Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments; Ashis
Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 34: World Histo-
rians and their Critics (1995): 44–66; Guha, Dominance without Hegemony; Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe; and Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, Reason in History, trans.
Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1837/1978).
2. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 196. Foucault explains how in the shift from the
classical episteme to the modern episteme, man in the analytic of finitude was consti-
tuted as an empirico-transcendental doublet. He notes “As a matter of fact, the uncon-
scious, and the forms of the unthought in general, have not been the reward granted to
a positive knowledge of man. Man, and the unthought are at the archeological level,
contemporaries. . . . In any case, the unthought has accompanied man, mutely and
uninterruptedly, since the nineteenth century. Since it was never more than an insis-
tent double, it has never been the object of reflection in an autonomous way.” Fou-
cault, The Order of Things, 326–27.
3. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.
4. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 91.
5. Barbara Adam has persuasively argued against the setting up of dualities and
dualistic theorising such as traditional cyclical time and modern linear time, and sug-
gests that it is relative to the focus and the framework of observation and ought not to
be located in logically distinct experiences. See Barbara Adam, Time and Social Theory
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 168.
Akhil Gupta also notes that differences predicated upon the opposition between
the Western notion of time and Oriental concepts of cyclicality, rhythmicity, concrete-
ness, and rebirth was employed by Orientalism in constructing the Self and Other, but
that it proceeds by taking a partial view of the Other, a partial view of the Self, and by
exaggerating both. See Akil Gupta, “The Reincarnation of Souls and the Rebirth of
Commodities: Representations of Time in ‘East’ and ‘West,’” Cultural Critique 22 (Au-
tumn 1992): 187–211.
6. Charles Tilly, “The Time of States,” Social Research 61, 2 (Summer 1994): 286–87.
7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks
for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 1–26; and Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe.
8. These were the Bengalee, Moolkee, Muggee, Shaka, Burmese, Amli or Vilaity,
Tamil, Malayalam, Nauroz, Fuslee, Sumbat, Telugu, and Hijree eras.
132 Chapter 3

9. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing

Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002), 109.
10. Thomas R. Trautmann, “The Revolution in Ethnological Time,” Man, New Se-
ries, 27, 2 (June 1992), 379–97.
11. In the Hindu chronology, the creation of Brahma is taken as its commencement
and each of his days is an epoch. When seventy kalps are completed, each consisting of
four Yugas and the total of these is 4,320,000 years, a Manu appears. The first Yuga is
the Satya or Krita and it comprises of 1,728,000 years, the second is Treta of 1,296,000
years, the third is Dwapara of 864,000 years, and the fourth is Kali of 432,000 years. In
the beginning of the present Kali Yuga King Yudhishthira constituted his own era
which continued for 3,044 years. Then King Vikramaditya reckoned from his own
accession and this era is called Sanvat or Sambat. Salivahan, a mythological prince of
Deccan who opposed Vikramaditya and emerged triumphant started another era from
his birth date called the Saka era, even while he retained the earlier one. The Hindus
believe that after the Saka era King Vijiyabhinandan will institute a new era for 10,000
years, and then Naga Arjun will come to the throne and promulgate another era which
will last for 400,000 years, and Lord Vishnu in his tenth avatar as Kalki will establish a
new era for 821 years. After these six, the Satya Yuga will recommence. See the section
“Era of the Hindus,” in Allami The A-IN-I Akbari vol II, 15n–16n.
12. Roy Perrett claims that the Muslim traveler Alburuni who traveled to India in
1020 CE was the earliest to remark that Hindus do not pay much attention to the
historical order of things, and that they are very careless in relating the chronological
succession of their kings. See Roy W. Perrett, “History, Time and Knowledge in An-
cient India,” History and Theory 38, 3 (October 1999): 308.
13. For some general ideas on chronology and historical consciousness in the Indian
context, read the chapter “The Nation and its Pasts” in Chatterjee, The Nation and Its
Fragments, 76–94.
14. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 110–11.
15. Ashis Nandy observes “Traditional India not only lacks the Enlightenment’s
concept of history; it is doubtful that it finds objective, hard history a reliable, ethical,
or reasonable way of constructing the past.” See Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Dou-
bles,” 63
16. Perrett, “History, Time and Knowledge in Ancient India.”
17. Nicholas. B. Dirks, “The Pasts of a Palaiyakarar: The Ethnohistory of a South
Indian Little King,” The Journal of Asian Studies 41, 4 (Aug 1982): 656.
18. Sumit Guha, “Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narra-
tion in Western India, 1400–1900,” The American Historical Review 109, 4 (October 2004):
1084–1103.
19. Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subramanyam, Textures of
Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001).
20. Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold,1969).
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “History as Critique and Critique(s) of History,” Economic and
Political Weekly 36, 37 (September 14, 1991): 2162–66.
21. Rama Mantena, “The Question of History in Precolonial India,” History and
Theory 46, 3 (October 2007): 402.
22. Thapar has engaged with Puranic texts like Vishnu Purana and also Mahabharata
and finds that these contain both cyclic and linear concepts of time, which were not
parallel and unrelated but intersecting concepts based on the functions they per-
formed. The same texts used cyclic time for cosmological matters, and linear time for
genealogical matters thereby incorporating generational time. Genealogical texts writ-
ten by bards were over time revised by Brahmans who foregrounded cyclic time in
their cosmological matters, and she is of the view that it was from these revised texts
that Orientalists concluded about the lack of the notion of linear time. See Romila
Thapar, “Cyclic and Linear Time in Early India,” in Time, ed. Katinka Ridderbos
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 27–45.
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 133

23. Dirks, “The Pasts of a Palaiyakarar,” 655.

24. Mill, The History of British India, vols. I and II, 110.
25. Mill, The History of British India, vols. I and II, 115, 116. Inspired by Mill, Hegel
also remarked: “Periods of time are mentioned in the Hindoo writings, and large
numbers which have often an astronomical meaning, but which have still oftener a
quite arbitrary origin. . . . In their poems Kings are often talked of: these may have
been historical personages, but they completely vanish in fable; e.g. they retire from
the world, and then appear again, after they have passed ten thousand years in soli-
tude. The numbers in question, therefore, have not the value and rational meaning
which we attach to them.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History
(New York: Dover Publications, 1830–1831/1956), 163.
26. Thomas Trautmann persuasively argues that the bottom-less chronology of the
past in the Indian conception of world cycles was completely at odds with the date of
creation, which, for English speakers, had been determined by Archbishop Ussher to
be in 4004 BC. The trope of “Oriental exaggeration” evident in Mill’s comments was
predetermined by more than a millennium in the defense of the Bible narrative against
competing longer narratives of world history. He argues that European sentiment on
this issue was unanimous and Mill was no exception. Along with Indian chronology,
Mill also criticized the Chaldian, Chinese and Egyptian ones for the same reason. See
Thomas R Trautmann, The Clash of Chronologies: Ancient India in the Modern World
(New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2009), xxiii, 25–52.
27. Echoing Mill, Hegel noted, “This makes [the Hindoos] incapable of writing
History. All that happens is dissipated in their minds into confused dreams. What we
call historical truth and veracity—intelligent, thoughtful comprehension of events,
and fidelity in representing them—nothing of this sort can be looked for among the
Hindoos.” See Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 161–62. Max Weber also noted in The
Religion of India that historical science was altogether lacking in India.
28. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, has noted that Mill’s History was shaped in part
by the growth of revitalized conservatism in Britain as a reaction against the French
revolution of which Burke was an influential spokesman. This conservatism was mir-
rored in the institutions of the British Empire abroad. The Orientalist views of William
Jones were seen as a reflection of that conservative ethos.
29. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 78.
30. Trautmann, The Clash of Chronologies, 37.
31. Trautmann has noted that in this biblical culture of human time, “time is short
and linear, directional, possibly progressive, possibly unicyclic but in any case not
recursive, is perpetuated in a secularized transformation surviving at least till the
Brixham Cave excavations of 1859, which made the short chronology for human histo-
ry difficult to sustain.” Trautmann, The Clash of Chronologies, 37. Also see Trautmann,
“The Revolution in Ethnological Time.”
32. Peter Munz, “Review of “The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronolo-
gies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time,” by D.J. Wilcox,” History and Theory, 28, 2
(1989): 292.
33. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith
Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
34. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 77.
35. Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” 66.
36. Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” 56.
37. Gananath Obeysekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in
the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
38. For more on Jones and his views on history, see Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings.
39. For more on Kalhana as historian, read Guha, Dominance without Hegemony,
8–12.
40. Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought: An Essay on the
Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
134 Chapter 3

41. See Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowl-
edge.”
42. Some of the important works of history may be noted: Alexander Dow, The
History of Hindostan 2 vols (London, 1770 and 1772); Robert Orme, Historical Fragments
of the Mogul Empire (London, 1805); Wilks and Bruce, Historical Sketches of the South of
India (London, 1810); James Mill, The History of British India (London, 1817); Mountstu-
art Elphinstone, The History of India (London, 1841).
43. Eric Stokes, “The Administrators and Historical Writing on India,” in Historians
of India, Pakistan and Ceylon ed. C. H. Phillips (London, 1961): 385–403.
44. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Na-
tion,” 308.
45. Foucault dramatizes how when the economy of punishment was redistributed
“the gloomy festival” of public execution was replaced by the timetable. See Foucault,
Discipline and Punish, 3–31.
46. Minute of T.B. Macaulay, dated 14 December 1835, in A.P. Howell—Under Sec-
retary to Government of India—Note on Jails and Jail Discipline, 1. Cited in R. N. Datir,
Prison as a Social System (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1978), 75.
47. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
48. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
49. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940.
50. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 160.
51. See the chapter “The Nation in Heterogeneous Time” in Chatterjee, The Politics
of the Governed.
52. Wilson, “The Domination of Strangers: Time, Emotion and the Making of the
Modern State in Colonial India,” 46–47. Talal Asad provides a poignant illustration of
this in the administration of French immigration rules on a particular French-Algerian
first generation immigrant. See Talal Asad, “Where are the Margins of the State?” in
Anthropology in the Margins of the State, ed. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (Santa Fe,
NM: School of American Research Press, 2004) 279–88.
53. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 160–61.
54. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1979).
55. Chakrabarty further notes “I would suggest that the idea of a godless, continu-
ous, empty, and homogenous time, which history shares with the other social sciences
and modern political philosophy as a basic building block, belongs to this model of a
higher, overarching language. It represents a structure of generality, an aspiration
toward the scientific, that is built into conversations that take the modern historical
consciousness for granted.” See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 73, 75.
56. Chakrabarty notes “Yet historicism carries with it, precisely because of its asso-
ciation with the logic of bureaucratic decision making, an inherent modernist elitism
that silently lodges itself in our everyday consciousness.” See Chakrabarty, Provincial-
izing Europe, 87.
57. Chakrabarty explains how life-world experiences of nonsecular time are trans-
lated into secular time narratives and history such as of religious festivals being fitted
into secular calender time as public holidays. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
58. Census of India, 1891: General Report, by J. A.Baines. (London: Eyre and Spotts-
woode, 1893): 274–275.
59. Home (Public Dept) G.O. N0 5274, Letter from Secretary to the Board of Reve-
nue dated 17th August 1864.
60. Martin Heidegger notes “The measurement of time gives it a marked public
character, so that only in this way does what we generally call ‘the time’ become well
known.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Rob-
inson (New York: Harper Collins, 1962), 471.
 Temporalities, Routines of Rule, and History 135

61. Bruno Latour remarks that temporality is a means of connecting entities and
filing them away, with changes in classification principle giving a different temporal-
ity on the basis of the same events. See Latour, We have Never Been Modern, 75.
62. Latour, We have Never Been Modern, 73.
63. Letter from S.H. Northcote, Secretary of State for India to the Governor General
of India in Council, G.O.N0 89 (Financial), dated India Office, London, the 23rd March
1867 (New Delhi: National Archives of India).
64. Richard Saumarez Smith, “Rule by Records and Rule by Reports: Complemen-
tary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law.”
65. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
1986).
66. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1990), 311.
67. Read the section “What is Invested in Anachronism” in Chakrabarty, Provincial-
izing Europe, 244–249.
68. Koselleck, Futures Past, 109.
69. Anders Schinkle argues that Koselleck is mistaken in noting that experience and
expectation drift apart in modernity, for they cannot drift apart as imagination con-
nects the two. See Anders Schinkel, “Imagination as a Category of History: An Essay
Concerning Koselleck’s Concepts of Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont,” History
and Theory 44, (February 2005): 42–54.
70. The “doubling of man” arises because modern thought “moves no longer to-
wards the never-completed formation of Difference, but towards the ever-to-be-ac-
complished unveiling of the Same.” See Foucault, The Order of Things, 340.
71. Koselleck, Futures Past, 17.
72. Koselleck, Futures Past, 17.
73. Fabian, Time and the Other.
74. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of
View,” in Philosophical Writings, ed. E. Behler, 249–262. (New York: Continuum, 1784/
1986), 260–261.
75. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” 261.
76. Hegel, The Philosophy of History.
77. Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore Rinvoluri,
(Connecticut, 1984), 56.
78. Georg Simmel, Essays on Interpretation in Social Science, trans. and ed. Guy Oakes
(New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980).
79. Simmel, Georg The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay
trans. and ed. Guy Oakes (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 178–84.
80. Using Derrida’s distinction between law (le droit) and justice (la justice), Mark
Jackson argues that writing and naming enframes domains of discursive possibility
producing a supplement, which is excluded from that writing. Justice is the reflexive
attention to both “singularity” and the ways in which the singular or “other” is pro-
duced within any discourse. See Mark Jackson, “The Ethical Space of Historiography,”
Journal of Historical Sociology 14, 4 (December 2001): 467–80.
81. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Na-
tion,” 308.
82. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Na-
tion,” 307.
83. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowl-
edge.”
84. Eugene Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India 1795–1895 (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1994); and Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 157.
85. MC F/151/135 f. 214. Cited in Stein, Thomas Munro, 208.
86. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 3.
87. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 200.
88. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.
136 Chapter 3

89. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 32.

90. Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth-Century Agenda and
its Implications (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1988).
91. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments.
92. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.
93. Mongia, “Historicizing State Sovereignty: Inequality and the Form of Equiv-
alence.”
94. Guha notes “But historicization, like the formation of the colonial state, could
not be achieved except by the operation of metropolitan rules and models on native
material. The material which had to be historicized was of course the sum of all
existing narratives like annals, chronicles, anecdotes, and folklore, but the narratology
brought to bear on such material was that of contemporary European and particularly
whig historiography.” See Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 163.
95. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 90.
96. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India” in Subaltern Studies: Writ-
ings on South Asia VII, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyan Pandey (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 16.
97. See the chapter “An Indian Historiography of India” in Guha, Dominance with-
out Hegemony.
98. In the chapter “The Nation and its Pasts” Chatterjee traces in the Bengali history
textbooks of the nineteenth century the changing perspectives of the Bengali historians
from being colonialist to nationalist. See Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments.
99. Gyan Prakash, “The Modern Nation’s Return in the Archaic,” Critical Inquiry23,
2, Front Lines/ Border Posts (Spring 1997): 536–556; and Gyan Prakash, Another Reason:
Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999).
100. Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘In-
dian’ Pasts?” 18.
101. For more on the structure of nationalist thought and historiography, see Kaviraj,
“The Imaginary Institution of India;” and Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Coloni-
al World.
102. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Na-
tion,” 298–99.
103. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Na-
tion,” 298–99.
104. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Na-
tion,” 298–99.
105. Cohn and Dirks, “Beyond the Fringe: The Nation-State, Colonialism and the
Technologies of Power,” 226.
106. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 106.
107. V. Geetha, and S. V. Rajadurai, “One Hundred Years of Brahminitude: Arrival
of Annie Besant,” Economic and Political Weekly 30, 28 (July 15, 1995):1768–73.
108. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 40.
109. In the 1980s, the Subaltern Studies project announced its objective as the study
of the “historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due to inadequacy of
the bourgeoise as well as of the working class to lead it into a decisive victory over
colonialism and a bourgeois-democratic revolution of the basic nineteenth century
type . . . or [of the] ‘new democracy’[type]-it is the study of this failure which consti-
tutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India.” See Ranajit
Guha, “Preface” in Selected Writings in Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 35–43.
110. Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘In-
dian’ Pasts?” and Provincializing Europe, 45–46.
 FOUR
Colonial Governmentality and the
“Economy”

Colonial governmentality and its discursive practices, in particular the

modalities of counting, classification, measurement, calculative practices
and accounting enabled the constitution of the economy, even as it
brought forth a new relationship between resources, population and dis-
cipline. 1 In recent years thinkers as diverse as Karl Polanyi, Louis Du-
mont, Keith Tribe, and Michel Foucault have pointed out that the “econo-
my” is a constructed entity. 2 Many economists too have noted the same,
but few have examined the conditions for that possibility. 3 Drawing in-
sights from Weber and Foucault about the relationship between account-
ing, organizations and society, the focus here is on the genealogies of
calculations that led to the emergence of a new kind of calculating ration-
ality in colonial India. Such an exercise entails revealing how the catego-
ries of economic thought were constituted, not in the abstract frame-
works of political economy but in the myriad of economic transactions
that enveloped the colonial economy. Colonial governmentality thus
made it possible to conceive the Indian economy in the modern economic
categories of income, wealth, production, exchange, distribution, and
consumption.
In an insightful article, Susan Buck-Morss noted that the conception of
the progress of civilization as the unlimited increase of objects produced
for sale was the defining moment of modernity, and that this moment
enabled a revisioning of the social body with the discovery of the “econo-
my,” with its profound epistemological significance, for the economic
realm could now be appropriated from the realm of political power and
police control. 4 Timothy Mitchell argues that the twentieth-century emer-
gence of the economy was because the world was reorganized around a
new axis that divided the world into representation and reality, and with
137
138 Chapter 4

the representational practices of calculation, classification, and enumera-

tion embedded in new regulatory practices, it rendered the “economy” as
statistically visible. 5 He acknowledges though that it arose not merely
because of transformation at the level of representation but many real
things and powers were reorganized to effect that separation of reality
and representation. Foucault’s notion of governmentality has instantiated
an understanding of how in the development of the modern state; the
“economy” could be constituted as an object of government. 6 Ute Tell-
mann has cautioned that the governmental understanding of the econo-
my should not lead one to presume that “economy” has been decentered,
as it would entail further understanding to unravel it. 7
Even before the eighteenth century when the art of government
underwent a transformation in the West, it was realized that the State
was governed by principles of rationality. The art of government was,
however, caught between a theory of sovereignty in which the social
contract between the ruler and the subjects provided the matrix for inte-
grating the art of government, and that of the family, which provided the
model for the economy; and in the eighteenth century through a subtle
process of interlinked developments in the economy, the art of govern-
ment transformed itself into a science of government. The literature on
governmentality associates the emergence of the “economy” with liberal
rationalities of government, for as Foucault noted, “economics shows a
basic incompatibility between the optimal development of the economic
process and a maximization of governmental procedures.” 8 Ryan Walter
questions the liberal bias of the governmentality approach, arguing that
Adam Smith provided a disjunction between “reason of state” and politi-
cal economy, causing the notion of “wealth” an autonomy from “reason
of state” even without the emergence of the economy or of economic
agency, while David Ricardo attributed economic agency to the class
interests of those among whom national wealth was distributed. 9 Ac-
cording to Walter, neither Smith nor Ricardo attributed liberal agency to
self-interested economic actors the way governmentality theorists like
Colin Gordon and Graham Burchell have attributed and suggests that the
rise of a generalized liberal self-interest that renders the constitution of
the economy is a fait accompli.
Clearly theoretical treatises cannot set up the economy as an autono-
mous domain for management, but a whole set of practices including
those of government and the science of statistics based on Baconian meth-
ods of induction have caused it into being. Richard Jones, an anti-
Ricardian envisaged a science “beyond political economy,” a synthetic
and holistic summation of social structure and process through statistical
inquiries, that met with fierce criticism from James McCulloch, a popular-
izer of Ricardian ideas, who distinguished statistics from political econo-
my by noting that the object of political economy was to discover the
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 139

causes and the reasons by which a country’s wealth and riches may be
indefinitely increased. 10
When population emerged as a field of intervention and an object of
governmental techniques, the problem of the “economy” was simultane-
ously reconfigured from the model of the family to one in which the
specific problems of the population relating to the economy provided the
framework for government. This brought a tension between the liberal
and pastoral elements of modern state power, the liberal element con-
cerned with ensuring commercial freedom, and the pastoral element con-
cerned with ensuring the welfare of the population. 11 The new govern-
mental problematic was to ensure that the pursuit of self-interest by indi-
vidual economic actors was compatible with the reproduction and useful
employment of the population. The link between population and nation-
al wealth provided for a greater coordination between different adminis-
trative departments even as it for the first time brought together a whole
ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses, reflections, calculations,
and tactics.
The colonial career of the modern state in India forces us to rethink the
nature of colonial governmentality, the link between population and na-
tional wealth in the colonial context, and the nature of tensions if any
between the liberal and pastoral elements of power. Colonial governmen-
tality was not merely governance from a distance but was fundamentally
one in which governance by the modern state sought to supplant earlier
forms of pre-modern rule through the autonomous rationality of the
government. 12 In doing so, the colonial state had to contend not only
with extant cognitive frameworks and the practices associated with the
political rationalities of earlier forms of pre-modern rule that rendered
the terrain of governance intelligible, but also encounter the difficulties of
introducing universalistic framework of knowledge into a colonial order
of difference. Hindess notes that Foucault’s idea of the autonomous ra-
tionality of government is predicated on an understanding of the state,
first as a distinctive institution and secondly as containing its own ration-
ality. 13 He further argues that the importance of the idea of an autono-
mous rationality of government for Foucault’s analysis is that it enables
him to develop a perspective on the government of modern states which
is not dominated by discourses of sovereignty and legitimacy; although
he also points out that the idea of the autonomous rationality of the
government seemed to suggest that the population consisted of free indi-
viduals and not of subjects. Clearly the colonial subjects did not perceive
the colonial state as legitimate, nor were colonial subjects free individu-
als. Colonial governmentality with its singular aim of augmenting the
economic strength of the state performed its extractive and regulatory
functions on individual and mass bodies not directly through force,
though that may as well been so in instances, but through modern forms
of regulatory discipline. The liberal and pastoral elements of power did
140 Chapter 4

not exhibit a tension in the colonial context for the nature of pastoral
power complemented the aims of liberal power. Borrowing once again
from Hindess, we note that in Foucault’s representation of pastoral pow-
er as that of the shepherd and his flock, the shepherd as a human being
was “a distinct and superior kind of being” than the flock. 14 The colonial
rulers likewise saw themselves as superior to the colonized subjects,
which implies that the modern colonial state sought to introduce new,
albeit superior, forms of knowledge regimes as part of its governance.
Such knowledge regimes that were constitutive of the technologies of
governance were universally applicable, or so it was assumed.
The colonial order of difference was thus fitted into universalistic
frameworks of knowledge through a process of normalizing the colo-
nized terrain done through the dual techniques of disciplinary power
and risk-based or actuarial power. While disciplinary power entailed the
creation or specification of a general norm in terms of which “individual
uniqueness can be recognized, characterized and then standardized,”
risk-based techniques of normalization sought to set norms by dividing
the “population into statistical and behavioural categories organized
around risk.” 15 These techniques of normalization entailed erasing differ-
ences through a process of constructed uniformity. Standardization of
units of measurement was an important part of the normalizing process.
Also the practices of governance itself rendered accountability and ac-
counting as prerequisites and these made possible the constitution of
calculable and governable selves. Making up “individuals” was an im-
portant agenda of nineteenth century liberalism; but liberalism in the
colonial context did not seek to create the citizen-individual, i.e., the indi-
vidual as bearer of rights, but an individual who by being forced into a
new sphere of commercial exchange would become colonial subjects and
the Homo-economicus of the market economy.

MEASUREMENT AND THE IDEA OF “ECONOMY”

Colonial governmentality as a knowledge-producing activity generated

numbers, classifications, and measurement in vast quantities in the nine-
teenth century; such new forms of statistical knowledge and new ways of
producing it helped to create what was to become the principal object of
political practice, the idea of the “national economy.” 16 Its regulatory
practices set in not only standardized units of measurement of money
and goods, and calculations that were considered more rational, but gen-
erated a vast administrative record of commercial transactions on a scale
never done before, as the colonial economy was integrated into the
emerging capitalist world economy. New kinds of book-keeping catego-
ries and practices emerged, and an increasing number of goods and ser-
vices were subjected to normalizing surveillance and brought within the
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 141

disciplinarity of accounting. Procedures of accountability insisted on reg-

ularity of accounts, which made it possible to construct temporal se-
quences of the volume and value of production and trade.
With the progressive streamlining of the colonial administrative sys-
tem the discourses were to exhibit greater sophistication regarding ac-
countability procedures and the manner of rendering accounts. The colo-
nial administrators at all levels took up the issue of standardization to be
theorized and applied, as this was the core issue in the framing of ac-
counts to render commensurable the enormous diversities. It is in these
discourses that one can trace the genealogy of the “Indian economy,” as
these provide the first proto macro-economic accounting framework.
Whatever forms of accounting that existed previously were only at the
level of household, enterprise, village, and the royal households. An ac-
count of the “economy” at a macro level did not exist, as cognitive limita-
tions render it difficult to move beyond a single village in a village ac-
count, and the royal accounts are very far from the idea of the fiscal
accounts of the economy. As elsewhere in the colonized world, the emer-
gence of the “economy” is the outcome of colonial practices and dis-
courses, and it was constructed as a “national” rather than as “imperial”
economy. 17
An examination of the early trade discourses indicate that these con-
tained the possibility of discursively articulating the “economy,” even
while preparing the ground for a complex system of accountability. From
a situation when the parties did commerce voluntarily, colonial power
brought about a system of forced commerce. Such forced commerce
caused transactions to be enframed in a bureaucratic discourse of surveil-
lance and accountability, and commodities came to be marked, classified,
and catalogued. But it was with the rationalization of the units of meas-
urement of both commodities and money brought about by the regulato-
ry practices of the colonial state that a modern economic discourse of the
economy could be constituted. As new forms of accounting evolved, it
became possible to represent the accounts of the nation, and thus to cal-
culate the national and per capita income.

ACCOUNTING AND THE DISCOURSES OF TRADE

In the more than hundred years of trade carried on by rival European

powers, and in which the East India Company progressively established
its political supremacy and its almost exclusive monopolistic trade be-
tween Britain and India, the accounting discourses relating to trade set
the precedent, and laid the groundwork for what was to evolve into a
complex system of accountability under conditions of long distance colo-
nial governance. The trade discourses of the East India Company are
imbued with the issue of the profitability of its operations. The preoccu-
142 Chapter 4

pation to sort the “profits” and “losses” of India engaged some of the
most brilliant minds in the India Office such as James Mill, J. S. Mill, and
J. M. Keynes. Even David Ricardo, whose theories of rent found ready
acceptance and justification in the hands of the colonial administrators in
framing the land revenue policies in India, had on several occasions
made presentations to the Court of Directors, and he being a stockholder
had an immediate interest in the profitability of the Company’s opera-
tions. The British parliament had often witnessed debates on this subject
by such men as Edmund Burke and others.
As early as the seventeenth century, Streynsham Master, an employee
of the East India Company, devised a new system of book-keeping for the
Company’s factories that “had a commanding influence on the public
accounts of the English in India for a long time afterwards.” 18 Master set
in place as part of his task of regulating the accounts of the factories the
following measures. These were two sets of printed rules made in 1667
for “Christian and sober comportment” and for the management of busi-
ness and the accounts that were prominently and publicly displayed in
every factory, established uniform accounting practices in all the facto-
ries, which linked their books into a single accounting system with all the
books being sent to England annually, standardized new methods of
conducting meetings and of keeping records of decisions and discus-
sions, established mechanisms for archiving documentation that bound
all the factories into a single system including the establishment of offices
at each factory where all writing and accounting was to be done and
where all documentation was to be kept as the record of the factory and
not of particular merchants. 19
Master’s regulation is a case of how local inscriptions were transmit-
ted to the centers of calculation. In the excerpt of the regulations given
below, it is evident how the practice of bureaucratic authorization
through signature and attestation emerged from the trade account as it
indicates how accounts were to be maintained ensuring uniformity
across factories and consolidated to render them legible and visible, bear-
ing the imprint of authority within a hierarchy of examination and ac-
countability. It reads:
That in the Titles of the Journall it be expressed who is Chiefe, and by whom
the bookes are kept, and at the end of the Journall and Leidger the person by
whom they are kept doe set his firme [signature] and the Chiefe to signe them
as approved and allowed by him.
For all the moneys paid out of cash, it is thought Convenient that, according to
the custome used at Suratt, the second or book-keeper doe draw a bill upon the
Cashkeeper, in the which he is to express the parties names to whome, and the
accompt upon which the money is payable, which bill the Second is first to
subscribe, leaving place for the Cheife, and the Cheife having signed it, the
money to be paid accordingly, the Cheife or Cashkeeper takeing a receipt for the
same; and if there be money to be sent for Inland Investments, to take attesta-
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 143

tions of two of the Companyes servants of the delivery of the summe, and the
said bills and attestations to be read and passed in Councell every week and
then noted in the Consultation booke.
The accounts were to record place-specific transactions at specified times
as it noted:
if money be remitted from Cassambazar to Pattana, the Cassambazar bookes
must charge Pattana and not Hugly for the same; and the Pattana bookes must
Creditt Cassambazar and cleare that accompt by Hugly accompt Currant
upon the close of their bookes, and the like in other cases.
The Bookes of Accompts of all the respective Factoryes in the Bay, it is agreed
to be most convenient to be balanced the last Aprill yearely, and to be kept in
the method now proposed.
Each ship’s accounts of trade was to be summed up into an annual ac-
count of the factory
One Booke to Comprehend the accompts of Charges Gennerall and Dyett, the
Sloopes and Vessells accompts, and the accompts of stores provided for them,
and what is on board them, and the mens wages belonging to the said Vessells,
which accompts are to be monethly given in to the Second, to be entered in the
Gennerall bookes, and at the end of that booke to make a table of the whole
yeares expence in distinct collumes under the heads entered in the Gennerall
booke, by which the same may be more readily compared. 20
Clearly the genealogy of the accounting and documentary practices of the
colonial bureaucracy in the later period can be traced to these rules of
inscription of early colonial trade. Examining the different forms of writ-
ing in and around the East India Company reveals power and knowledge
in mercantile and imperial worlds as they were in the process of being
made. Miles Ogborn observes that Streynsham Master and the Company
officials at all levels, attempted “to control the responsibility for docu-
ments, the construction and use of archives, the formats of writing, the
ways in which written material was produced, how documents should be
read and by whom, their content, and also their style” and further these
inscriptions and actions shaped the world of the factory in India. 21 Og-
born argues that Streynsham Master’s regulation are to be “understood
as active in the construction of economic and political relationships—of
collectivity, order, and authority—rather than simply being the more or
less practical and mechanical, albeit logistically problematic, means of
representing them to others.” 22 Writing practices in their repeated perfor-
mance and reinscription were intended to constitute a distinction be-
tween the “public” world of the Company’s business and the “private”
actions of its servants even as it solidified into institutional routines and
forms of rule.
Edmund Burke praised the “mercantile constitution” and methods of
the East India Company, as these pertained to its strictly commercial
operations, and especially its system of exact record keeping. 23 He even
144 Chapter 4

argued that the Company’s business methods lent themselves to the de-
velopment, in its hands, of a relatively efficient system of imperial ad-
ministration. 24 The state could learn valuable lessons from businessmen
about procedural regularity, rational accounting, and the like, but it did
not follow that a commercial company should be the state. Burke ob-
served:
It does so happen that there the Counting-house gave lessons to the
State. . . . The regulations made by mercantile men for their mercantile
interest, when they have been able, as in this case, to be applied to the
discipline and order of the State, have produced a discipline and order
which no State should be ashamed to copy. . . . It is perhaps the best
contrivance that ever has been thought of by the wit of men for the
government of a remote, large, disjointed empire. 25
More significantly, the trade accounts of the mercantilist period were to
provide an image of order out of chaos. The underlying mercantilist phi-
losophy was that the wealth of the world was finite, and an increase in
any one nation’s wealth was a zero-sum game. The rationale for the pro-
gram of government in the mercantilist era was the orderly movement of
resources internally and externally, and accounting was linked to prac-
tices of government in such a program through the valorization of order
in commerce that was materialized in its calculative routines. 26
The valuation of goods traded, which included the unit of measure-
ment as well as the price, and the use of money in the transactions, as
well as the manner of accounting form the complex mercantilist dis-
course of early European trade in India. The notion of “wealth” was the
privileged category of mercantilist thinking, and this was represented in
the quantity and quality of precious metals that could be accumulated
through trade. The mercantilist logic of prices made it dependent directly
on the volume of money, and indirectly on the volume of transactions.
The early trade discourses provide insights into the thinking that under-
gird the economic transactions of that period.
As bullion was imported from England and minted into coins in India
for payment transactions, the quality of the metals was an important
issue in the trade discourses. The main accounting problem of mercantil-
ist monetary economics was to ensure equivalence of gold worth, which
also meant the quality of metal content in transactions around the world.
There were frequent occurrences of differences in the assays of imported
gold provided by different merchants, which caused much concern. In
practice, this must not have been an insignificant problem, for even with-
in a region there were so many different varieties of coins circulating.
With transactions being conducted with different varieties of coins, it is
difficult to keep accounts. The Dutch for instance kept their accounts in
an imaginary guilder or florin which was a silver coin weighing 150
grains or five-sixths of a rupee. Measures also varied with the different
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 145

colonial powers, the Dutch pound equaling 1.09 English pounds and
there were other weights such as the “catti” and the “picol” introduced
from the Malayan Archipelago. There were a large number of indigenous
measures as well. For instance, when the Dutch traded on the West coast
of India they confronted the Malabar measures of “candy,” “parra,” and
“palam” for pepper, grains, and cloths and there were local variations in
these as well, as the Travancore “palam” was not exactly equal to the
Madura “palam.” 27
Apart from these issues of measures and money, there was the ques-
tion of ensuring that supplies of the needed goods were forthcoming, as
exchange was purely volitional. A Dutch governor, Stein van Gollenesse,
noted around 1743 that often contracts made with the king and his sub-
jects to supply the Company with pepper were not complied with, and
pepper used to be exported outside of the region by the people when
they considered it profitable. 28 The king, with whom the contract was
signed, could not really enforce the contract, as the king deriving his
power from divine authority could not issue orders that were considered
prejudicial to the interests of the whole community. The volitional char-
acter of exchange was to drastically change into one of forced commerce
as colonial power penetrated and entrenched itself firmly.
The English at the same time competing with their rivals were trying
to make their trade profitable in India. Profitable operations needed accu-
rate accounts as a prerequisite. Book-keeping practices to maintain the
accounts accurately were either constantly devised or were improved
upon. Accounts of goods received and sent by each ship were maintained
through a complex manner of record keeping. The differing systems of
measurement as well as account-keeping practices added no less to the
problems. These early trade discourses provide insights into the issue of
standardization arising out of accounting concerns. Weights and meas-
ures, commodity classifications, and accounting procedures were to all
come within the purview of standardization.
The nature of the Company commerce in India was to undergo a
change once the Company acquired the control over the revenues of
Bengal. A certain proportion of the revenues of Bengal were set aside as
“investment” with which the Company bought its goods for trade. This
new form of trade through the medium of power and public revenue
disrupted the mercantile system by diverting a considerable proportion
of native manufactures to the Company “investment.” In understanding
Company accounts as a proto-macroeconomic account, it has to be noted
that Company “investment” only constituted of mercantile capital rather
than productive capital.
A complex intermeshing of commercial interests with other European
companies meant more of accounts and record keeping, and there was
around this time an awareness of improving the accounts of trade. In
1796 Edward Thomas Jones published in Bristol his Jones’s English System
146 Chapter 4

of Book-keeping, by single or double entry, in which it is impossible for an error

of the most trifling amount to be passed unnoticed; calculated effectually to
prevent the evils attendant on the methods so long established; and adapted to
every species of trade, a pamphlet that men like Bentham were to become
familiar with.
As the company trade ran into difficulties, Hastings and his men de-
vised new methods of keeping up the “investment.” Burke who was very
critical of these plans and the general state of the Company trade was
eager to reinstate the “principles of profit and loss” as he considered it to
be the “mainspring of the commercial machine.” 29 Needless to say for
such a principle to take effect, book-keeping practices were important.
Although at that time modern book-keeping practices had not yet ap-
peared on the scene, the existing accounts of the Company were in need
of a great deal of straightening and streamlining. 30 Around 1787 the
governor of Madras found rampant corruption and a situation of govern-
mental insolvency on account of improper accounts. The Company’s ac-
counting problem was extremely complex as business was transacted
with every kind of silver rupee and gold pagoda circulating in southern
India. A large number of Indian clerks were employed by the Company
to bring hundreds of transactions into some semblance of order to enable
the Company to keep its books in terms of the “current” or “star”pagoda.
The Company’s books of accounts in Bombay for the mid 1780s show that
the forms of book-keeping used in the seventeenth century were still
preserved and the accounting methods were not revised to fit the new
realities. In modern accounting practices, a balance sheet shows the assets
and liabilities. Fixed assets representing immoveables are subjected to
depreciation as well as obsolescence, an important aspect of capital bud-
geting, but the notion of “depreciation” had not then evolved. Thus the
Company accounts in Bombay carried an asset item “Dead Stock” which
showed that what was paid for the Fort and other fixed assets was never
written off as “depreciation.” It similarly carried an asset item in the hope
of recovering it from the English government as “expeditions,” which
was the total military expenses Bombay had incurred. There was the
category of “Old and Doubtful Debts” with a long list and “Money and
good Debts,” none of which were really recoverable; and if these ficti-
tious items had been removed the liabilities would have exceeded the
assets. 31 The book-keeping practices then in vogue were merely meant to
provide a detailed description of possessions rather than being a check
on capital and profits. To reinstate the “principle of profit and loss” as
Burke would have wanted it, first meant that these accounting practices
had to be changed, so that the true “profits” and “losses” of the Compa-
ny’s operations were represented in the account books.
The Company prepared the consolidated sets of accounts in England.
The account books of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, which supplied the
information often mixed up the political and commercial accounts. Also
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 147

the Company’s statement of receipts and expenditures did not enable a

separation of the India account from the China account, as the East In-
dies, comprising of the entire region that included China as well, was
treated as an indivisible economic unit. The master set of home ledgers
and journals that were prepared from the subordinate ledgers often re-
vealed the fact that the idea of balancing the books was not clear to the
clerks who prepared the master set. Amounts shown as “Profit and Loss”
in the subordinate ledgers known as “Calico,” “Drugs and Chinaware,”
and “Tea” ledgers were brought into the main set of books infrequently
thus vitiating the “Profit and Loss” account standing in the main books. 32
Even as late as 1810 efforts were made to clear the many obscurities in the
Company accounts by a committee of the House of Commons formed for
such a purpose.
British parliamentary debates of this time were often concerned with
the profitability of the Company affairs, and as an exemplar of this dis-
cursive moment, the last chapter of Mill’s The History of British India enti-
tled “Financial Results” would stand out. Mill noted in no uncertain
terms the accounting logic underlying colonial rule:
If India affords a surplus revenue which can be sent to England, thus
far is India beneficial to England. If the revenue of India is not equal to
the expense of governing India, then is India a burden and a drain to
England. 33
Mill, of course, was merely trying to clear an accounting principle of how
the expenses of war in the acquisitions of new territories should be dealt
with, and in so doing provided a narrow view of the advantages of colo-
nialism. With a trenchant for an objective analysis, Mill’s analysis steered
a middle path between the two opposing views that existed then. One
was the optimistic position of Dundas who saw the possibility of a large
sum of profit every year from India, and the other was the pessimistic
position of Burke who, even while arguing for ending the monopoly
privileges of the Company, noted in his famous “Ninth Report” that
trade carried out of revenue was tantamount to plunder.
The debate over the East India Company accounts was to become an
issue once again at the time of the renewal of the Charter of the Company
in 1833. Whereas English legislators insisted on collection of data preced-
ing parliamentary action in the case of domestic issues, when it came to
legislating on British India, they preferred to ignore whatever data and
information was available, preferring to base their decisions on some
universally valid principles that indicate a subversion of the universalist
knowledge project. 34 Although Thomas Macaulay disputed James Mill’s
deductive approach claiming that it was impossible to deduce a science
of government from the principles of human nature, he also came close to
arguing, that such data was unnecessary in the case of India as it was
simply sui generis “a state which resembles no other in history, and which
148 Chapter 4

forms by itself a separate class of political phenomena.” 35 Noting the lack

of relevant data and based on such principles, Macaulay argued for the
curtailment of the Company’s monopoly trade with China and in so do-
ing observed that legislators should desist from basing their decision on
an assessment of how much the Company’s revenues came from com-
mercial trade and how much came from its administrative and territorial
activities, especially because such differentiation was not possible as the
past activities and accounts of the Company had inextricably mixed the
two sources of revenue together. 36 James Silk Buckingham who had
spoken before Macaulay in the House of Commons insisted that such
data was indeed available and that the land revenue surveys could have
been used to distinguish between territorial revenue from commercial
profits. Instead, Buckingham argued that the land revenue surveys were
used to impose an oppressive system of taxation and cautioned the
House in handing over India to the Company for another twenty years.
Macaulay was even chided by the Tory legislator Alison for the “shallow
sophistical style of oratory” insisting that legislators ought to use statisti-
cal returns and government documents to plead their case. Although
unsuccessful in retaining the monopoly privilege that he pleaded for,
Alison presented five numerical tables that he claimed indicated that the
profits of China trade supported the administrative activities of the Com-
pany.
It is not surprising that the East India Company, which was basically a
joint-stock company, should be concerned with accounts of its opera-
tions. The more important point is that the trade accounts, the manner in
which they were presented, and their accountability to the Company at
different levels and to the British Parliament brought together for the first
time a broad range of goods within a single accounting framework. Since
accounts had to be submitted regularly, it rendered possible the construc-
tion of temporal sequences of the volume of trade and the movement of
goods, thus making it possible to statistically represent global commodity
flows. 37 Once again, this is an early precursor to a macroeconomic ac-
count of the economy. The trade carried on by the Company being part of
the colonial system came under scrutiny with respect to the privileges
granted to it such as monopoly trade; the more the scrutiny the greater
the documentary evidence that was produced. William Bolts’ Considera-
tions on India Affairs, particularly respecting the present state of Bengal and its
Dependencies (ed.) 1772 provided for instance, the source material for
Adam Smith’s reflections on the East Indies.
Britain had maintained trade accounts at least since 1696 when rates
were fixed at which the “official value” of exports was estimated, which
rates by the early nineteenth century had become outdated. Nevertheless,
Britain’s export trade statistics in the first half of the nineteenth century
were classified as “Exports of British and Irish produce and manufactures
from Great Britain” with “official value” and “declared value” respec-
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 149

tively and “Foreign and Colonial Merchandise from Great Britain” in

“official value” and imports as “Imports into Great Britain” from each
country, colony and other British possessions all temporally standardized
as on 5 January for each year so as to form time series data on trade. 38
Export figures of Great Britain for each country in the different regions of
the world as Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and America as also the real
value of export, import, and the net revenue for each product were also
compiled annually and accessed by the British parliament. The gross and
net Customs duty collected annually at each British port temporally stan-
dardized, and the number and tonnage of ships coming into and going
out of Great Britain from each country and its colonial possessions were
also compiled. Colonial economic space was thus folded into the imperial
space and was not definitively demarcated as a bounded colonial econo-
my.
From the late 1860s onward “external” trade statistics were compiled
for British India on a uniform basis so as to make it comparable with the
rest of the world, thus helping to diffuse information on the extent of
market for products by tracking the source and destination of merchan-
dise. The demarcation of external and internal trade subsumed trade
with the native states and non-English colonial territories of the country
under “internal” or domestic trade. Although pre-colonial administra-
tions have imposed taxes on shops and houses, an aggregative picture of
commodity flows never emerged as those record-keeping activities un-
like the trade accounts had not the systematicity, regularity, or account-
ability.
As Marx noted, as “things” move in their trajectory to the status of
“commodities,” it entails an involvement in the circuits of money ex-
change. The end of the monopoly trade with China meant a regime of
free trade, and the decline in the rate of profit over time with increased
competition signaled the contradiction of capitalist expansion that Marx
had highlighted. But the “India trade” was one huge system of credit in
which the ubiquitous Bills of exchange created monetary value wildly in
excess of the profits actual commodities could yield. 39 Such involvement
would not merely transform “things” into “commodities,” but make
them into objects of knowledge and bring them into the discursive fold of
political economy. As colonial power entrenched itself firmly, the new
kind of accounting discourse was to spread over many other areas as
well.

ACCOUNTING, ADMINISTRATION, AND ENTERPRISES

Accounting as the “master metaphor of economics” was to play the most

important role both as a form of discipline and in the constitution of a
disciplinary knowledge. 40 Accounting in the sense of both budgetary
150 Chapter 4

management and capital accounting was central to the spread of the

“specifically modern calculating attitude.” 41 While Max Weber believed
that rational book-keeping and the separation of business from the
household were responsible for the modern rational organization of capi-
talist enterprise, Werner Sombart was of the view that double entry book-
keeping gave rise to capitalism. 42 Both governmental and enterprise ac-
counts recording all transactions is therefore a precondition for the mod-
ern economic discourse of the “economy.” Accounts of the government
as well as that of the enterprises not only provide access to “practices,”
but also constitute those practices, when new forms of accounting rede-
fine new practices of governance and the conduct of business. 43
From the middle of the nineteenth century as administrative proce-
dures of the colonial state were streamlined, the discourses of correct and
regular accounts in every branch of the government became more perva-
sive. The most significant accounting practice transmitted to India in the
nineteenth century was the double-entry system of book-keeping, a sys-
tem in which every transaction is entered twice in the account books
appearing once on the credit side and again on the debit side, thus pro-
viding an effective check on fraudulent practices. Although scholars have
noted that the procedures of accounting used in India were only slightly
less sophisticated than those that emerged in Europe during those centu-
ries when commerce developed rapidly, and the single entry system was
considered quite adequate for enterprise accounts and was widely used
in the West until the nineteenth century, the double-entry system was
considered more scientific and rational. 44
The colonial state constituted by the ensemble of technologies and
practices of governance was no less subjected to the discursive practices
of accounting with respect to its receipts and expenditures, just as the
enterprises were. The colonial official discourse is suffused with the con-
cerns of improving the accounts of the administration, although it was a
derivative of such discourses in England. The desirability of the double-
entry system for the governmental accounts provides an illustration of
the kind of debate going on then in England. In response to a suggestion
made by the Select Committee on Public Income and Expenditure of 1828 to
the Treasury to appoint a commission to examine the practice of keeping
public accounts, a commission consisting of three members—Brooks-
bank, Beltz, and Abbott—was appointed. While the first two members
supported a complete overhaul of the system using a modified version of
the double-entry system, the last member supported an unqualified
adoption of it. Bentham was very critical of the suggestions on the
grounds that it was incompatible with “rendering the state of the ac-
counts in question more effectually and extensively understood,” and
that if introduced would “of itself produce deterioration, to an unfathom-
able degree, in a form of government which assuredly stands not in need
of any such change.” 45 Bentham was stating the basic principle of public
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 151

accounting, that it be understood by all. He had in fact earlier in his

Constitutional Code laid out a design for “an all-comprehensive set of
books, for the exhibition of the accounts, pecuniary and quasi-pecuniary,
for any Government whatsoever.” 46
Annual data on the total revenue and the total charges for the British
possessions in India have been available to the British Parliament at least
since 1814 and James McCulloch compiled time series data of the revenue
and charges in 1847 from various parliamentary papers that also indi-
cates for Bengal the revenue receipts under different heads. But the data
on revenue and charges under different heads were compiled from what
was presented for the different provinces independently. The excess of
charges over receipts meant that public debt was incurred and data on
the quantum and kinds of debt were also available for the provinces in
the parliamentary papers. From the late 1850s, fiscal accounting systems
were rationalized with “each Presidency, each local government, each
department under the Supreme Government” being directed to transmit
uniformly organized and temporally standardized budget in prescribed
methods to the Central Revenue Department located in Calcutta, which
was charged with compiling the all-India budget. 47 The inaugural gener-
al all-India budget was presented in 1862. The move to the all-India rep-
resentational scale in the production and circulation of the annual budget
is remarkable as it enabled the envisioning of the colonial economy as a
macroeconomic aggregate.
The vast metrological accounting system, consisting of tools, calcula-
tions, proceedings, and “incorporated competencies,” contribute to the
disciplining of behavior and decisions. 48 Such disciplining is not irrever-
sible or irrevocable as the tools themselves are reconfigured allowing
varying modalities of framing and calculating. Attempts were made to
make enterprise accounts too more rational in colonial India. The charac-
teristic feature of a modern enterprise is the ability to calculate anticipat-
ed profits, undertake risk protection and investment planning. The
growth of an enterprise is crucially dependent on the ex-ante and ex-post
calculations of profits and losses, and for which costing becomes ex-
tremely important. The mercantile classes in India had always kept ac-
counts, which certainly informed them of the profits and losses for each
year, even as they were subjected to trading risks. But so long as it was
merely commerce, the idea of the growth of the enterprise was not in the
cognitive domain.
As banking activities developed, the idea of “double-entry” book
keeping for enterprises emerged. 49 In 1840 Charles Northcote Cooke,
deputy-secretary and treasurer of the Bank of Bengal, published his book
entitled The American System of Book keeping Adapted to the Commerce of
India Comprising All the Modern Improvements in the Practice of the Art and
Exemplified in One Set of Books Kept by Double Entry Embracing Five Different
Methods of Keeping a Journal Designed for the Use of Schools to Which is Added
152 Chapter 4

Some of the Latest Acts of the Legislative Council and a Short Treatise on
Banking in India. It is from the latter half of the nineteenth century and
following the developments in Britain that a rational capitalistic enter-
prise, in the Weberian sense, emerged in India. For Max Weber, a rational
capitalistic enterprise was one that featured “capital accounting,” that is
one in which its income-yielding power is determined by calculation
according to modern methods of book-keeping and the striking of a bal-
ance. 50 Along with this arises the modern notion of capital stock, invest-
ment, depreciation, cash flow, etc., all of which enables the representation
of an enterprise in static and dynamic terms. A distinctly modern under-
standing is that without the anchor of double entry, the analysis of cost-
ing would tend to drift aimlessly. Standard costing was not an isolated
phenomenon but was closely allied to the vast project of standardization
and normalization within the enterprise, and is a key component in the
“ensemble of practices that sought to make actions of individuals visible
in relation to norms and standards.” 51
Britain did have joint-stock companies in the first half of the nine-
teenth century, and shares of these Companies were publicly traded and
exchanged as instruments of investment that resembled contemporary
modern stocks. But in nineteenth-century England there was no statistical
composite index to the shares traded on the stock exchange. Consequent-
ly as Mary Poovey has remarked, it was not possible in the early nine-
teenth century to conceptualize “the market” as a unified and animated
social agent. 52 In the middle of the nineteenth century, people who
bought shares in an individual company could only with difficulty follow
that company’s profits and losses since regular earnings reports were not
widely circulated, but they could not gauge the well-being of the market
as a whole because no representation that could be taken for the market
as a whole circulated in the public sphere. 53 Poovey observes that nine-
teenth-century Britain’s lack of market averages and prices led to concep-
tualizing social agency in individual terms with excessive risk-taking and
speculation being discouraged through an evangelical view of economy
that imbued events in the fiscal domain with moral significance even as it
doubted the significance of economic growth for national prosperity. 54
Only with the passage of new company laws including laws that limited
personal liability for an enterprise’s collapse, and statutes that encour-
aged new company formation between 1855 and 1862 did it become in-
creasingly difficult for clergymen to persuade their parishioners to con-
ceptualize economic transactions primarily as signs of spiritual worth. 55
Simultaneously, from about the 1870s in Europe, the discourse of political
economy was recast to institute the idea of a placeless notion of exchange.
Around that time, new legal measures in colonial India instituted the
market as a public venture, as a supra-local terrain, and as a new object of
sovereign management. Between 1870 and 1930 a slew of foundational
legal measures pertaining to companies law, negotiable instruments, in-
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 153

come tax, charities, pension funds, insurance, laws on gambling, specula-

tion and futures trading were promoted as measures of “general public
utility.” Ritu Birla has noted that these enabled a vision of society as
gesellschaft, a public engaged in exchange and contract even as the laws of
modern market practice established exceptions for vernacular capitalism,
treating it as gemeinschaft even as they were brought within the sway of
colonial capitalism. 56 From the late nineteenth century, written contracts
distinguished between supra-local transactions as an arena for free circu-
lation of capital from transactions that benefited only private, familial
interests. Colonial law on market practice thus served to govern the con-
duct of conduct.
Merchant accounting system in India by the eighteenth century was
quite elaborate spawning cash account books, credit account and person-
al accounts, and large merchant houses employed many clerks to write in
Persian and local languages alongside junior partners who would do
accounts in Hindi. 57 But as modern enterprises came up in colonial India,
new forms of accounting and accountability were instituted. Theodore
Porter has argued that the form of knowledge resulting from this kind of
relatively rigid quantitative protocol is public in character. 58 The earliest
piece of companies legislation, the Act of 1857, did not contain elaborate
provisions dealing with the keeping and making of accounts or of its
audit and circulation, but Act X of 1866 and the Indian Company Act of
1882 that incorporated amendments made in England since 1860 made it
mandatory for joint-stock companies with limited liability to present, at
the annual general meeting of its members, statements of their income
and expenditure as also a balance-sheet in the prescribed format, and
certified by the auditors. 59 As the idea of joint stock companies with
limited liability gained acceptance, the accountability procedures were
made more stringent, and the Indian provisions were made stricter than
the English ones in order to protect the more ignorant public, although
subsequently, in 1907, the Board of Trade issued a memorandum on the
desirability of uniformity in Company Law in different parts of the Em-
pire and advocated the assimilation of English law everywhere. Such
regulatory injunctions on uniformity not only subordinated the colonial
space of policy to the imperial hierarchy but also ensured conditions that
would be conducive for the global competition and transnational opera-
tions of capital.
Accounting is an act of translation, a process by which things that are
different are made equivalent to financial quantities through the creation
of homologies and convergences. 60 For how else could a balance sheet
represent an assortment of assets and liabilities, of movables and immov-
ables, of plant and equipment of diverse sorts in a unifying frame? If the
accounts of commerce were to provide the image of order out of chaos
and the inscriptions and numbers were to facilitate control over long
distances, the accounts of the enterprise could make it appear as an en-
154 Chapter 4

tity, the activities of which could be manipulated, controlled and pre-

dicted. Both these features appear in the accounts of the government at
all levels of the administration, which in its scope and coverage was far
greater than that of the precolonial states. Numbers, measurements, cal-
culations, and accounts were produced by the governmental machinery
in such vast quantities in nineteenth-century India, a true “avalanche of
numbers” as Hacking has described in another context, that a scientific
discourse of the “Indian economy” was soon to emerge. 61
Innovations in accounting had indeed an epistemological significance
for the conception of the enterprise and the economy. 62 Although there
are differences in the way the relationship between accounting and social
sciences are conceived, Poovey has argued that by aligning precision
with accuracy the double-entry system constituted the site where “mod-
ern facts” first appeared, and where the question of the relationship be-
tween particular observed quantifiable details and general theories, i.e.,
the problem of induction, could be posed. 63 The epistemic possibilities
associated with double-entry system render it a unique system attained
as a result of Western rationality. 64 Mary Poovey notes that double-entry
book-keeping as a system of writing produced social and epistemological
effects that exceeded their functions of transcription and calculation. The
rationalization along imperial lines of the trade accounts, enterprise ac-
counts and governmental accounts necessitated by the new articulations
of state and economy enabled the cognitive reckoning of the colonial
economy as spatially bounded and dynamic.

COLONIAL LIFE, COMMODITIES, AND RATIONAL

CALCULATIONS

Commercial transactions and contract negotiations presuppose a framing

of action through measures and accounts, as without such framing it
would be impossible to reach an agreement. 65 Concepts relating to eco-
nomic transactions such as profit and loss, rates of exchange, credit notes,
and book-keeping being common to both sides of the Indo-European
trade were easily translatable into European economic language. 66 Colo-
nial administration was not only accompanied by discursive practices of
accountability, but as more and more of the internal commerce lost its
volitional character, they came to be subjected to the circumscription of
the colonial state; such regulatory practices producing a body of knowl-
edge about such transactions as well. The density of accounting dis-
courses ushered a new sociality for things and persons, and a widespread
calculating rationality, which despite its nature of forced commercializa-
tion, rendered it possible to discursively articulate economic transactions
in a manner never done before.
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 155

To think of exchange as advantageous to both parties represented

according to Louis Dumont, a basic change and signaled the advent of
economics. 67 The colonial regime of commerce was however one of
forced commerce, rendered possible by forced revenue collections from
the peasantry at large. From Edmund Burke’s dramatized testimony in
1788 of the horrors of land revenue extraction to James McCulloch’s as-
sessment in the 1840s that land revenues were oppressively high keeping
the cultivators in a wretched state, culminating in the mutiny of 1857 that
was supported by peasants in large parts and which was followed by a
more rigourous and systematized land revenue assessment and restora-
tion of the power of landlords in some regions, all signify the tumultuous
changes wrought about in the rural countryside that violently disrupted
the precolonial regime at all levels to accommodate the new one. 68 The
nature of forced commerce took on so many different forms at different
times with the full complicity and knowledge of the colonial rulers, and
active but often futile resistance from the peasants and artisans. 69 As
complicity transformed into policy, its administration was accompanied
by the discursive practices of accounting.
The construction of accounts necessitates the classification of things.
Simultaneous with the spread of accounts, classifications of things began
to proliferate. If the link between exchange and value is politics, and if
things-in-motion illuminate their human and social context as Arjun Ap-
padurai claimed, one can note that the colonial regime of value subjected
an increasing number of commodities and human actions to greater and
greater surveillance. 70 Soon after annexing a territory a statement was
usually prepared of the articles of trade from and to that region as well as
the manufactures of that region. One can consider these statements as the
early precursor of the National Income Accounts, for the produce and
manufactures of the region were generally listed item-wise and, for each,
the proportion used up in home consumption and the proportion ex-
ported to the adjoining areas were noted along with the prime costs,
custom duties, sales revenues and profits.
Preparing such statements of accounts entailed the British familiariz-
ing themselves with the styles of classifications and forms of taxation
prevalent in the pre-colonial local economies. Identifying things and
marking out their utility was so integral to colonial exploration and ex-
ploitation that many of the early surveys, such as those of Francis Bucha-
nan on Mysore and Bihar in the early nineteenth century, contained copi-
ous references to the varieties of things found in different regions and
their uses. The proliferating knowledge of commodities became more
and more systematic, with increasing markets for raw materials as the
industrial revolution in England gained momentum, and, by the end of
the nineteenth century George Watt could compile a multi-volume dic-
tionary on the economic products of India. 71 Not only did the innumer-
able survey and statistical reports contain valuable information on re-
156 Chapter 4

sources and manufactures located in different regions but also these were
systematized over time in the district, provincial and imperial gazetteers.
As commercialization spread over more and more areas, the classifica-
tory necessity extended as well. With advancing industrialization in Eng-
land the search for raw materials across the Empire also advanced, and
industrial raw materials and minerals came to be made the objects of
knowledge and the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal carried accounts
of many products and resources found in different parts of the country,
even before their systematic compilation in the gazetteers of the Hunter-
ian period. The collection and classification of products became more
vigorous in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as agricultural and
industrial exhibitions became a regular feature at provincial, national,
and international levels. While these exhibitions stressed the principle of
the “function” of knowledge, i.e., to instruct the viewers on improved
methods of production and the use of machinery, these aspects of “func-
tion” grew more important in the growing global commercial world. 72
Exhibitions became the spectacle of the age of commodities, and it could
become possible only by generating a vast body of knowledge about
them. 73
In fact, as “things” move into the status of “commodities” and when
the exchange-value of the thing acquires significance, they also come
within a new regime of knowledge. Their names, functions, methods of
production, measurement, production, consumption, trade patterns all
come together and cohere to form the regime of value. When such a value
regime becomes widespread, more and more “things” acquire the status
of “commodities” and are brought within the fold of exchange, the “econ-
omy” also gets constituted thereby. The knowledge of commodities is
therefore a precondition for constituting knowledge of the economy.
The colonial state played an important role in generating such knowl-
edge. Instructing the local officers to familiarize themselves with the agri-
cultural commodities, the Bengal government for instance, noted quite
clearly in 1874:
Local officers must be able to recognize with precision the various
grains and other products of their districts, to enable them to deal with
agricultural statistics in an intelligent manner. At present it is almost
ludicrous to observe . . . how often the same things are called by differ-
ent names, and different things by same names. 74
Linguistic diversity and local variety would no doubt cause this “ludi-
crous” situation but the above instruction more clearly refracts the anxie-
ty that gripped botanists in 1860s of the “galloping synonymy,” the pro-
liferation of many names for the same plant species which led in 1867 to
institute a series of international codes of nomenclature that sought to
stabilize the names of plants. 75 Such exhortations were to result in the
enthusiastic productions of glossaries and compendiums. William
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 157

Crooke’s Materials for a Rural and Agricultural Glossary of the North-Western

Provinces and Oudh though compiled in 1879 but never published until
recently, and his dictionary entitled A Rural and Agricultural Glossary for
the N.W. Provinces and Oudh published in 1888 are just two examples of a
wide array of such materials compiled for most regions of the country. 76
Using the English alphabet as a means of ordering the materials in differ-
ent groups and overriding all other possibilities of native classifications
that could have highlighted the social and economic relations of the re-
gion, the glossary according to its editor, Shahid Amin, fitted into a posi-
tivist knowledge system promoted by the colonial administration to
make the country knowable to its officials. 77 Given that the territorial
scope of such a work coincided with the administrative boundary of the
district rather than the linguistic or dialectal boundaries, such a glossary
was intended to produce the effect of a homogenized representation of a
heterogeneous rural life. Nor were names the only problem and neither
was the problem of administering an economy and constituting a dis-
course of the “economy” was to remain merely one of naming and order-
ing the goods, as the following indicates.

MEASURES, MONEY, AND THE RECKONING OF VALUES

Peasants, artisans, and weavers were not merely forced into commerce
and exchange, even the mode of commerce underwent changes. Cowries
(sea shells) used in petty commerce were replaced with copper coins,
metallic money was standardized, paper money was created, and new
financial instruments made their appearance along with the new institu-
tions of the banking system, and new methods of rendering accounts.
Weights and measures and the monetary systems that are crucial in the
reckoning of values entered a new regime of politics, as they were regu-
lated and made uniform in the interest of administering the economy,
once the colonial administration was streamlined. It was not merely one
of diversity, but the measures themselves were deemed not rationally
devised as length was based on bodily parts and distance measured by
the bellow of the cow or similar physical and natural phenomenon. James
Scott has observed that nonstate forms of measurement grew from the
logic of local practice, were tied practically to particular activities, re-
flected variety of local interests and were often “illegible” to the state in
their raw form. 78 This is not something unique to India as even in Britain
diverse weights and measures prevailed until the mid-nineteenth centu-
ry. 79 In Europe too such diversities existed, and it was the Napoleonic
Code of the early nineteenth century that rationalized the linear, capacity,
and weight measures for much of continental Europe.
Such diversities in weights and measures also prevailed in India.
Weights in southern India were deduced originally from the weight of
158 Chapter 4

some stamped or coined piece of metallic money, and since these tokens
have varied in weight according to the mints that produced them, the
scales that combined them similarly fluctuated. 80 The measures of capac-
ity also differed; several measures bearing the same name in the same
place had different struck contents, but all of them often coincided when
heaped. Such enormous diversities posed problems before 1870 when the
provincial governments were asked to submit returns of food prices reg-
ularly to the government of India, for the bimonthly returns submitted
from the district offices showed the number of measures of each com-
modity sold for a rupee but the measures themselves were not strictly
comparable and hence not aggregable. The compilation of agricultural
statistics on a uniform basis for all India that began in 1884 also required
uniform measures to estimate crop yields. Attempts to reform the
weights and measures were taken up on a number of occasions by some
local governments, market legislations did try to regulate them, but the
model laws prescribing standardized weights and measures by district
boards and municipal councils were never put in practice on account of
the strength of local customs and lack of verification; and uniformity
across the country eluded the state for long. Even in 1928, the Royal
Commission on Agriculture in India referred to the hampering effects of
diversities in weights and measures. 81 The colonial State, it must be
noted, was primarily interested in intervening in the ongoing economic
processes rather than the discourse of the economy. The statistical repre-
sentation of regional prices on a longitudinal basis along with an array of
agricultural statistics including area under cultivation, crop yields and
crop forecasts was however an important step in the discursive construc-
tion of the economy.
Along with the standardization of weights and measures, the financial
space of the colonial economy was also homogenized through a new
monetary framework. Money, the medium of exchange, underwent
changes to accommodate the needs of a complexly evolving circuit of
exchange. Although monetary exchange was quite widespread in the
precolonial and early colonial period it was more a patchwork of discrete
currency systems bound together by an overarching credit network of
indigenous merchants with their negotiable instruments and trust based
on kin and caste affiliations. Money’s function as a measure of value
lacked visibility then. As the British consolidated their territorial power,
the imperial coinage system was introduced. Under Act XVII of 1835 gold
coins were no more legal tender and silver coins represented the weight
of pure silver as their value, and were legal tender only if their purity and
weight were maintained. It was with the imperial system that it was
possible to state the value of the total coinage and therefore of money as
measure of value, a crucial first step, in understanding transactions not as
isolated events but within the context of a dynamic national economy.
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 159

The most revolutionary aspect of monetary arrangements was the

introduction of paper currency under Act XIX of 1861. The spread of
paper currency was uneven, evoked less trust than the numerous indige-
nous financial instruments and was contested. 82 Paper currency in the
form of bank promissory notes had been in circulation in England since
the end of the seventeenth century. By mid-nineteenth century and with
the Peel’s Act of 1844 a few private banks and joint stock banks along
with the Bank of England were permitted to issue notes for circulation
with regular monitoring through weekly submission of the quantity of
notes in circulation. In India however, James Wilson, the secretary of
finance, deemed that state issue of paper currency would be the best
option thus monopolizing the right of note issue and the Indian currency
system was strictly tied to the bullion in the state coffers. 83 The financial
relationship of the colonial state to the imperial state was articulated
through the annual sterling obligation or “Home Charges” that was to be
remitted by the colonial state. With the annual fixation of the exchange
rate of the silver rupee against the pound sterling by the secretary of state
for India in Britain, the economy could be represented not as an isolated
entity but as part of an imperial space. The colonial money market was a
segmented one with indigenous traders and merchants functioning as a
parallel banking system who calibrated their interest rate, known as the
bazaar rate, according to the official bank rate. From 1921 onward, the
controller of currency published the bazaar rate thereby incorporating the
indigenous financial system in the statistical representation of the coloni-
al financial system.
John Maynard Keynes has succinctly analyzed the manner in which
paper currency was introduced even as he defended the sterling ex-
change standard in his early publication Indian Currency and Finance after
his two-year stint at the India Office. 84 Like in the case of coinage, the
presence of paper money afforded the statistical presentation of the
“gross,” “net,” and “active” amount in circulation, though since credit
money did not then appear on the scene, the notion of “velocity” of
money, that is money as a “flow” concept rather than as a “stock” one, so
important to understand aggregate price variations did not emerge clear-
ly in the early economic analysis. Keynes is the founder of macroeconom-
ics, a field of economics that explicitly analyzes the management of the
economy through government interventions, and his work on Indian fi-
nance played a significant role in his conceptual work on the “econo-
my.” 85 Thus governmental practices in regulating weights and coinages
and the new monetary system could enable the possibility of a modern
economic analysis of the Indian economy. Crucial economic variables
such as prices and wages got to be recorded and analyzed in their tempo-
ral sequences only from the latter half of the nineteenth century once the
administrative apparatuses were streamlined, accountability procedures
160 Chapter 4

established, and district level data was forthcoming regularly in stipulat-

ed statistical forms.

POPULATION AND GOVERNMENTALITY

The futurity of the economic subject are engendered through passions of

“fear” and “hope” that are integrated into governmental rationalities of
“progress.” 86 The relationship of the modern state to the economy that it
seeks to manage is generally in terms of the objective of increasing the
national wealth and improving the welfare of the population and which
through its labour could further augment the national wealth. The coloni-
al state established a parasitic relationship, not of increasing the national
wealth but the wealth of the alien rulers even as it retained the idea that
population could power production. Colonial governmentality was thus
premised on a rather unique relationship of the State to the economy as it
governed the population through techniques of disciplinary and bio-
power with the consequent effects on shaping the conduct of colonial
subjects. Correspondingly its relationship to population based on increas-
ing the productivity of labor was set within the parameters of increasing
the disciplinary control over labor rather than through the enhancement
of human capital or labor welfare despite its attempts to introduce mod-
ern education, sanitation and modern medicine. Colonial governmental-
ity thus needed to know the characteristics of the population in detail so
as to evolve its regulatory mechanisms. Occupational classification preoc-
cupied the census administrators to provide a sectoral overview of the
population, and so did other aspects of the population such as age, civil
status, caste, and religion, among others. Colonial censuses thus served
the epistemic function of rendering perceptible the aggregate of popula-
tion and its subsets as dynamic entities that could grow or decay, that
could be monitored and acted upon for various ends, and that could
index “moral and material progress.”
Francis Buchanan’s survey of Bihar of 1807 carried out on the orders
of the Court of Directors of the Company and published partly by Robert
Montgomery Martin in 1838 as The History, Antiquities, Topography, and
Statistics of Eastern India, had collected statistics on housing, health, occu-
pation, family size, and education, among others, and even attempted to
estimate standards of living for various classes of laborers. Buchanan’s
surveys have even been used as baseline in subsequent surveys to meas-
ure changes in economic well-being. 87 Such sporadic enumeration of
population was made systematic and regular with the decennial censuses
from 1871. A crucial aspect of population data was the size of the labor-
ing population and those who were dependents, i.e., the nonlaboring
population. While such aggregate categories as “laboring” and “nonla-
boring” erased the many nuances of workforce characteristics, it was an
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 161

important step in establishing the connections between population and

wealth. The Census was the first attempt to grapple with the question of
who is a “worker.” While the market economy considers those engaged
in “waged work” as a worker, there were many different kinds of “non-
waged” working people. Especially for female workers the classification
of “worker” and “housewife” and the treatment of domestic labor had
far-reaching implications for the way women’s roles were normalized
and their implications for wage fixation and regulation in the newly
emerging sectors of industry and plantation. The census data on female
workers had much nearly the same effect that Hacking has noted, namely
that data about populations, accurate or inaccurate, is “seldom effective
in controlling or altering the populations of study in the ways intended,”
but rather has the “subversive” effect of “creat[ing] new categories into
which people had to fall . . . render[ing] rigid new conceptualizations of
the human being.” 88
Deriving from the laissez-faire doctrines of classical liberalism that
sought to do away with traditional privileges and to open opportunities
for all on the market principle, William Farr who was responsible for the
British Census of 1861 included all women who had no occupation pro-
ducing wages or fees (that is, the wives and daughters of the mass of the
population) in the “domestic” class of occupation. Basing his conception
of “productive work” on the view that population was “living capital”
and the unit of productive activity was the individual rather than the
family, Farr’s view was that domestic work was important to the nation,
and that such labor should be placed among the productive classes along
with paid work of a similar kind. The Scottish census officials opposed
this idea, and the 1871 Scottish Census eliminated the domestic class and
redistributed its members to show how many were dependent on each
occupation. Such ascriptions of value to women workers in statistical
representations and thence to policy were influenced by moral considera-
tions, especially those concerning the relationship between industrial
work and moral character.
The official construction of the “dependent woman” in Britain was
extended to other parts of the Empire. The debates on the censuses in
Britain influenced the debates in many of the British colonies, and the
census of India in 1891 also adopted the notion of “dependent” woman.
In the 1911 Census, Bertillon’s 1889 scheme of occupational classification
approved by the International Statistical Institute was adopted, which
was far more industrial than occupational, and although Bertillon’s origi-
nal proposal was to include all married female workers in the “Domestic
service” category, this idea was abandoned. Thus, the social identity of
women as workers both in the metropolis as well as in colonies was
shorn of value. 89 The relegation of gainful female employment as a resid-
ual category in the imperial censuses can be linked to the schemes of
Alfred Marshall in the 1880s to remove “a section of the urban population
162 Chapter 4

which was both superfluous to the local labour market requirements and
biologically and morally incapable of productive labour,” an idea that
was transposed into the colonial setting as part of a myth of the indolent
and lazy native. 90 Even if migrant women were visible in the moral land-
scape of “cooliedom,” their work was rendered invisible in statistics. 91
Governmentality is concerned with the manner in which the link be-
tween population and wealth is translated into policy. While “political
arithmetik” in seventeenth-century Britain calculated the financial worth
of the population, 92 what was central to nineteenth-century governmen-
tality in Britain, was “knowledge of the body through statistical calcula-
tion of the amount of labour various sized and gendered bodies were
capable of and what amount of food was necessary to sustain them.” 93 As
modern industries were established, labor time was regulated in terms of
the working hours. 94 With the passing of the Factories Act from 1881
onwards with periodical amendments, it became obligatory on factory
owners to submit information relating to employment, hours of work,
and accidents in prescribed forms that were compiled annually as pro-
vincial reports, but had little information in it on workers’ wages and
matters relating to their welfare. The Royal Commission on Labour in
1931 noted that as hardly any enquiries had been conducted on the stan-
dard of living of workers, it was impossible for any quantitative analysis
even on such a basic question as to whether workers’ earnings sufficed to
provide for their necessities, clearly revealing the colonial character of the
state for such working class surveys were quite common in England from
the 1830s onward. 95 The colonial state did not consider population itself
to be human capital, and aspects such as education, health, and nutrition
that figure so prominently in contemporary development discourses
were in fact quite marginal till the end of the nineteenth century.
Perhaps the best instance of how colonial governmentality sought to
establish a numerical discourse linking population, resources, and wealth
is to be found in the famine discourses of the colonial government. Indian
rulers had in the past responded to famine situations but evidence is hard
to come by of pre-colonial states responding at the local level in a “secu-
lar” manner through the involvement of a bureaucracy in famine relief on
the basis of impersonal institutional structures. 96 Influenced by the
Smithian idea of laissez faire, the colonial state followed in all the famines
that repeatedly ravaged the country for the greater part of its rule, the
principle of non-intervention in the grain market thereby giving a free
hand to mercantile speculation even as the pastoral element of modern
state power compelled it to show concern for the welfare of the popula-
tion. Even when a policy of non-intervention was followed, there was a
spectacular extension of the colonial state’s material power, and its physi-
cal, statistical and ideological infrastructure in the attempt to administer
famine relief. 97 The administrative discourses on famines are replete with
assessments of costs and benefits. Even in the famine in Bombay presi-
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 163

dency in early 1813 when it had adopted the policy of non-intervention,

the government’s response to a report from the Kaira Grain Committee
that it had established a hospital “for the aged & infants & those absolute-
ly incapable of working” was to request a financial report, and even
increased the land revenue in the famine year! 98 In the famine of
1837–1838, relief was organized around the idea of providing employ-
ment on “works of public utility,” and this laid the foundations of state
sponsored famine relief on the assumption that famine was primarily
caused by lack of work.
Colonial biopolitics is revealed in the famine discourses of the latter
half of the nineteenth century when the tension between the liberal and
pastoral modes of power became most evident, as there was then no
uniform plan of dealing with famine until the Famine Code of 1880 was
drawn up. Actively intervening during the famine of 1876–1878 that is
estimated to have killed over five million people in southern India, the
central government under Viceroy Lytton imposed a dogmatic policy of
minimal state relief and rigid tests upon recalcitrant provincial govern-
ments in which statistics became the evidentiary basis for both adminis-
trative action and accountability. Upon hearing from the Madras provin-
cial government of the distress in certain districts, the provincial govern-
ments were requested to submit statistics in “separate statements regard-
ing each taluk in the distressed districts, showing its area, population,
government, realizable revenue in 1875–1876, rough proportion of early
to late cultivation, average annual rainfall, actual rainfall this season,
ordinary price of staple food of the taluka at this season, actual present
price of the same, probable extent of failure of crops and amount, if any,
sanctioned for relief works and other relief.” 99 As crimes were known to
increase under famine conditions, statistics on crimes were collected,
monitored and compared. Distress was reckoned in terms of the monthly
statistics of value of silver ornaments melted, such ornaments having
been put up as distress sale by the population. Monthly returns of mortal-
ity were submitted from each district by the local administration to the
provincial and central government to gauge the intensity of famine and
to calibrate the quantum of relief, keeping in view the principle of mini-
mal cost to the exchequer. But such mortality data was even officially
acknowledged as being inaccurate as it did not include deaths due to
diseases like smallpox and cholera that scoured the famine regions, or
were understated on account of the reticence of the bureaucracies and
one famine official noted that the mortality data for Bombay had to be
“wrung out of the Sanitary Commissioners by great oppression.” 100 The
bureaucratic submission of information was also at times overlooked at
higher levels of decision making as when the chief commissioner of My-
sore realized that his monthly submission of the deepening famine crisis
in 1875 was not included in the Blue Books presented to the parlia-
ment. 101
164 Chapter 4

The administration of relief works in the famine of 1876–1878 presents

colonial biopolitics starkly, as starving and emaciated people had to be
classified into those entitled to gratituous relief and those to be engaged
in relief works in every village and town. Believing in the effective agen-
cy of native officers to rescue people from crossing the boundary between
distress and starvation, Richard Temple, an administrator of famine who
strictly abided by the principle of liberalism and the other officials were
far more anxious to ensure that able-bodied who could find means of
sustenance were not coming into relief works and those able to do relief
work do not claim gratuitous relief so that the total cost to the state could
be minimized, as in their view the right of the state was only to ensure
survival of those who would otherwise die. It was “bare” life that the
state was to let live. Wedderburn, the collector of Coimbatore was to
remark, “If orders could make returns perfect and tahsildars efficient, the
returns would be unassailable; as it is I am at the mercy of tahsildars,
who cannot understand the intense anxiety about the numbers enter-
tained on relief works.” 102 Not only was a choice to be made of the kind
of relief works to be undertaken keeping the pecuniary concerns of the
state rather than developmental interests, the quantum of wages to be
paid on relief works that would enable bare survival and yet secure pro-
ductive labour on the relief works from the weak and emaciated necessi-
tated classifying relief workers according to their likely productivity.
Those capable of rendering above 75 percent of normal work receiving
slightly higher wages from those who could render at least 50 percent of
normal work, with the stipulation that those not capable of rendering at
least 50 percent should not be employed on relief works but sent to relief
camps where they may likely be turned away as being not quite in a state
of starvation. As the role of the state was to prevent people from dying of
starvation, the minimum quantity of food that would be required for an
individual to survive was an issue that was debated and contested. Price-
related cash wages were determined based on the minimum quantity of
rice required for the daily survival of men, women, and children.
Impressed by Temple’s strictures that the state’s resources should be
carefully spent and waste and extravagence avoided, an official in charge
of famine operations in Bellary wrote to the Central and provincial
governments that the rate of wages is “fixed upon the supposition that it
will purchase 1 ½ lbs of grain per diem—a quantity which is deemed
essential for a man while at work. There might indeed be a question
whether life cannot be sustained with 1 pound of grain per diem, and
whether the Government is bound to do more than sustain life.” 103 Tem-
ple urged that one common motive of all engaged in famine relief works
was “the preservation of life and the mitigation of extreme suffering at
the smallest cost to the State consistent with the attainment of the object
in view, that the enquiry as to whether the reduced scale of wages is
sufficient to enable the people to tide over the next few months without
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 165

serious danger to themselves should be decided not by preconceived

physiological theories, but by practical examination of the people them-
selves, with a view to ascertain whether there is in fact any, or any seri-
ous, change in their physical condition under the new scale as compared
with their average condition in ordinary times.” 104 One surgeon in Nel-
lore even recorded the weights of coolies in relief works and provided
statistics on them. Based on an inquiry by the British Association for the
Advancement of Science in 1863 as to the quantity and quality of food
necessary in India, Cornish, a medical officer, contested Temple’s reduc-
tion of the ration to one pound of rice with scientific evidence. Lessons in
famine management were, however, not carried over even if the regula-
tory practices were, for nearly three million people died in the Bengal
famine of 1943!
These discourses on the colonial biopolitics of famine help in delineat-
ing a genealogy of the government of poverty as Mitchell Dean did in the
context of the discourses of the poor in England. 105 Just as numbers were
central to the discourse of the poor in England, colonial governmentality
too framed the discourse of famine regulatory measures in terms of the
numbers of the poor. Linked as it was genealogically to the Poor Laws of
nineteenth-century England and to Bentham’s Pauper Management Im-
provement, the Indian Famine Code of 1880 sought to introduce a “self-
acting test” of relief-worthiness. 106 Such “self-acting” test as a labor test, a
distance test and a residence test was meant to screen the really destitute
from the nondeserving poor, for such tests acting as a deterrent would
refrain the nondeserving poor from voluntarily submitting to those con-
ditions of labor, distance, or residence. Idlers, that is, those persons fit to
work and who refuse labor were to be discouraged from nongratuitous
relief and in the case of gratuitous relief where no self-acting tests were
applicable, the famine officers were instructed to “hit the happy mean.”
Not only did these tests lay emphasis on the number of poor deserving
relief from nongratuitous sources, it also individualized and criminalized
poverty that was otherwise perceived as a collective phenomenon by the
peasants themselves. As peasant notions of provisioning for the future
derived from cyclic notions of time were replaced by bureaucratic no-
tions of administration and planning for the future based on linear no-
tions of time, such substitutions were clothed in a discourse of bureau-
cratic rationality that framed peasant behavior as “fatalistic” and “super-
stitious.” Colonial governmentality in setting its own norms disrupted
the norms that governed the moral economy of peasants. 107
The government of food in colonial India developed alongside an
imagination of hunger, and in both of these the language of nutritional
science prevailed. When the colonial state failed to prevent mass starva-
tion deaths during the famines of the late nineteenth century, Indian
intellectuals seized the opportunity to highlight the problems of endemic
hunger prevailing in everyday life using the famine statistics of the
166 Chapter 4

state. 108 Nutritional and dietary surveys soon caught on, complementing
the surveys of working class budgets especially as scientific authority in
the League of Nations sought to establish norms of universal minimum
needs. Food thus acquired the “character of calculability” in an economy
of equivalences that sought to reduce men, women and children into
standard consumption units that had far reaching implications in wage-
setting policies later. 109 Colonial governmentality’s bureaucratic practices
served the epistemic function of constituting the “economy” in dynamic
terms. This led to the idea of how poverty could be managed, which
became crucial to the later postcolonial problematic of the economy and
the management of poverty. 110

THE INAUGURAL DISCOURSES OF THE ECONOMY

Every single regulatory mechanism that was instituted as part of colonial

governmentality needed to first discursively constitute the object and the
field of governance as amenable to such interventions. The accountability
procedures in turn generated vast quantities of numbers in every depart-
ment of the governmental machinery. The annual administrative reports
and the statistical abstracts became important repositories of economic
data, not to mention the numerous other sources generated through the
bureaucratic procedures. The vast amount of statistical data generated by
the administration, the conceptual innovations in accounting, as well as
developments in statistical techniques promoted for the first time in the
latter half of the nineteenth century and thereafter, debate over the per-
formance and progress of the economy in quantitative terms. The idea of
national income calculation carried out by national official statistical bod-
ies mooted at the Quetelatian Congress in Hague in 1869 launched the
quantification of theoretical economic concepts in Europe, aided by the
development of statistical index numbers. This was an important step
toward the quantification of economic analysis on global level rendering
it epistemically possible to reckon and compare a nation’s economic per-
formance as a unit of the global economic system. 111 Timothy Mitchell
has argued that the concept of the economy as “a dynamic, self-contained
machine whose internal parts can be manipulated from outside and
made more rapid, efficient and productive” is a development of the mid-
twentieth century. 112
Dadabhai Naoroji’s 1873 paper Poverty of India inaugurated a national-
ist discourse of the Indian economy. 113 Revealing a heightened sensitivity
to the quality of governmental statistics then available, Naoroji noted that
the governmental practice of representing the average of prices and
quantities in their statistical returns was not only fallacious as it con-
cealed the variations, but mischievous as well, for it enabled an imprecise
discourse based on opinions rather than facts. Nevertheless, using these
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 167

statistics contained in the administration reports, he estimated the per

capita income of India around 1870 as in the range of thirty to forty
shillings annually, and proceeded to formulate his ideas about the “Drain
to England” providing multiple interpretations of the deficit of imports
over exports and profits over a period of thirty-eight years, drawing his
statistics from Parliamentary Returns. Although there had been earlier
attempts to present the average income in India, such as that of John
Crawfurd in 1837, it was from around the 1870s when administrative
accountability procedures were streamlined and statistics were systemat-
ically compiled on an annual basis that marked the moment when the
Indian economy was brought into the discursive fold of modern econom-
ics. 114 Naoroji’s paper was soon followed by William Digby’s publication
Prosperous’ British India; a revelation from official records in 1901. There fol-
lowed a debate between Curzon, Digby, and others contesting each oth-
er’s claims based on hard statistical facts on such matters as the yield per
acre of food crops, and agricultural and non-agricultural income per
head. While Curzon conceded an “element of conjecture” in his statistical
inference, Digby took him to task for conjecturing with his remark “No-
where in the world, perhaps, could more accurate statistics concerning
the people of a country and their condition be more readily obtained than
in India, if a real desire to possess them were only felt. . . . The available
material is not a thing of yesterday. . . . With such quarries of readily
verifiable facts it is worse than idle for the Viceroy to take refuge under
the phrase ‘element of conjecture.’” 115 Digby’s presentation of a diagram
in his book that showed the nature and distribution of national income
indicating the sectoral and product composition as a flow between the
sectors along with an explanatory statement is a pioneering one for the
time, and at the 1902 meeting of the Royal Statistical Society, William
Digby contested Fred Atkinson’s paper “A Statistical Review of Income
and Wealth of British India.” 116 A genealogy of the modern economic
discourse of India thus cannot ignore the political rationalities of the
colonial state and of its technologies of inscription and control through
numbers, calculations and accounts.

NOTES

1. Peter Miller notes that in referring to accounting as a social and institutional

practice it is possible to draw attention to the ways in which the “economic” domain is
“constituted and reconstituted by the changing calculative practices that provide a
knowledge of it.” He also notes “Accounting can be regarded as an intrinsic and
constitutive component of the government of economic life. . . . Such modes of govern-
ment can be regarded as characteristic of liberal democratic societies. In so far as such
societies mark out the economy as a distinct sphere with its own laws and regularities,
and make the individual a fundamental locus of responsibility, accounting has a cen-
tral place.” Peter Miller, “Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice: An Introduc-
168 Chapter 4

tion,” in Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice, ed. Anthony G. Hopwood and
Peter Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4, 29.
2. Louis Dumont notes: “It should be obvious that there is nothing like an econo-
my out there, unless and until men construct such an object.” See Louis Dumont, From
Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1977), 24. Also see Keith Tribe, Land, Labour, and Economic Discourse
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
3. Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi are some exceptions. For a political genealogy of
political economy, read Denis Meuret, “A Political Genealogy of Political Economy,”
Economy and Society 17, 2 (1988): 225–50.
4. Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display.” For more on
how the “science of police” constituted the social and the economic realm in eight-
eenth century Europe, read Pasquale Pasquino, “Theatrum Politicum. The Genealogy
of Capital-Police and the State of Prosperity,” Ideology and Consciousness, 4 (Autumn
1978): 41–54. Also published in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,ed. Gra-
ham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press), 105–18.
5. See the chapter “The Character of Calculability” in Timothy Mitchell, Rule of
Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002).
6. Michel Foucault, “Politics and Reason,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews
and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988),
57–85. Ritu Birla notes a slippage in Foucault’s use of the term “economy” as it refers
at times to a practice of managing, at others to an abstract arrangement, and even to a
specific sector of reality. See Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market
Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
7. Ute Tellmann, “The Economic Beyond Governmentality,” in Governmentality:
Current Issues and Future Challenges, ed. Ulrich Brockling, Susanne Krasmann, and
Thomas Lemke (New York: Routledge, 2011), 285–303.
8. Foucault notes “whether it is a question of the physiocrats’ Table or Smith’s
‘invisible hand;’ whether it is a question, therefore, of an analysis aiming to make
visible (in the form of ‘evidence’) the formation of the value and circulation of
wealth—or, on the contrary, an analysis presupposing the intrinsic invisibility of the
connection between individual profit-seeking and the growth of collective wealth—
economics, in any case, shows a basic incompatibility between the optimal develop-
ment of the economic process and a maximization of governmental procedures.” See
Foucault, “The Birth of Biopolitics” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 76.
9. Ryan Walter, ‘Governmentality accounts of the economy: a liberal bias?’ Econo-
my and Society 37, 1 (2008): 94–114. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
10. Lawrence Goldman, “The Origins of British ‘Social Science’, Political Economy,
Natural Science and Statistics, 1830–1835,” The Historical Journal 26, 3 (September
1983): 587–616.
11. Ann Firth, “From Economy to ‘The Economy’: Population and Self-Interest in
Discourses on Government,” History of the Human Sciences 11, 3 (1998): 19–35.
12. Partha Chatterjee poses the question as to whether there is any analytical use in
distinguishing between the colonial state and the forms of the modern state. He makes
the intriguing suggestion that if the colonial state was not in fact distinct, then it is not
a necessary part of the historical narrative of modernity. For Chatterjee, it is the racial
difference between the ruler and the ruled that makes the colonial state distinct. See
Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 14. David Scott has discussed the conceptual
inadequacy of Chatterjee’s formulation. He reinstates in its place a strong foucauldian
formulation of the political rationalities of colonial rule. See Scott, “Colonial Govern-
mentality.”
13. Hindess, “Politics and Governmentality.” A similar idea is expressed by Peter
Miller and Nikolas Rose when they note, “Rather than ‘the State’ giving rise to govern-
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 169

ment, the state becomes a particular form of government that has taken, and one that
does not exhaust the field of calculations and interventions that constitute it.” See
Peter Miller and Nikholas Rose, “Governing Economic Life,” Economy and Society 19, 1
(1990): 3.
14. Hindess, “Politics and Governmentality,” 260.
15. Pat O’Malley, “Risk, Power and Crime Prevention,” Economy and Society 21, 3
(1992): 252, 254.
16. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, (1993) and Timothy Mitchell, “Statisti-
cal Knowledge and the ‘National Economy,’” paper presented at a seminar in the
Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1997.
17. Mitchell, Rule of Experts; and Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial
Economy to National Space (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).
18. Richard Carnac Temple, ed., The Diaries of Streynsham Master-1675–1680 and oth-
er contemporary papers relating thereto vol. II: The First and Second ‘Memorialls’ 1679–1680,
published for the Government of India (London, John Murray, 1911).
19. Miles Ogborn, “Wherein Lay The Late Seventeenth Century State? Charles Dav-
enant Meets Streynsham Master,” Journal of Historical Sociology 16, 1 (March 2002):
96–101.
20. Excerpted from Temple, The Diaries of Streynsham Master-1675–1680 and other
contemporary papers relating thereto.
21. Ogborn, Indian Ink.
22. Ogborn, Indian Ink, 71, 100–101.
23. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India, 96–97.
24. Mary Poovey has argued that it is a historiographical misrepresentation to as-
similate early modern accounting with governmentality, administration and disci-
pline. See Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact.
25. Edmund Burke’s Speech on Opening of Impeachment (1788) in The Writings and
Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 6, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
26. Peter Miller, “On the Interrelations between Accounting and the State,” Account-
ing, Organizations and Society 15, 4 (1990): 333.
27. Keith Thomas has noted the prevalence of different units of measurement for
different commodities in early modern England as well. See Keith Thomas, “Numer-
acy in Early Modern England,” The Prothero Lecture, Transactions of the Royal Histori-
cal Society, London, Fifth Series No. 37 (1987): 103–32. Witold Kula (1986) also deals
with such diversities in Europe. See Witold Kula, Measures and Men (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1986).
28. “Memorandum on the Administration of the Malabar Coast,” compiled by Ju-
lius Valentijn Stein van Gollenesse in the year 1743 A.D. Records of Fort St. George,
The Dutch in Malabar (Madras: Government Press, 1910).
29. S. K. Sen, ed. Edmund Burke on Indian Economy (Calcutta: Progressive Publishers,
1969), 66.
30. Holden Furber, John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in
the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1948).
31. Furber, John Company at Work, 207–24.
32. Furber, John Company at Work, 266.
33. James Mill, The History of British India v ol. VI (New York: Chelsea House Pub-
lishers, 1818/1968), 471.
34. Poovey, “The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the
East Indiamen.”
35. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3d series, 19 (1833), 536. Cited in Poovey, “The
Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East Indiamen.”
36. Thomas B. Macaulay noted “A chest of tea is not necessarily commercial proper-
ty; it may have been bought out of the territorial revenue. Fort is not necessarily
territorial property; it may stand on ground which the Company bought 100 years ago
out of their commercial profits.” Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, 19 (1833),
170 Chapter 4

508. Cited in Poovey, “The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India
and the East Indiamen.”
37. Mary Poovey has cautioned that these accounts were more likely to be incom-
plete and inexact simply because in the long journey to and from the East goods often
went missing and unlisted cargo made its way on and off the ships. See Poovey, “The
Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East Indiamen.”
38. J. R. McCulloch presents time series trade data from 1799 to 1846. See J.R.
McCulloch, A Descriptive and Statistical Account of The British Empire, vol. II (London:
Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1847), 18–19.
39. For an insightful analysis of this phenomenon, see Poovey, “The Limits of the
Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East Indiamen.”
40. Arjo Klammer and Donald McCloskey, “Accounting as the Master Metaphor of
Economics,” European Accounting Review 1, 1 (1992): 145–60. Mary Poovey has noted
that at least since the seventeenth century, British efforts to formulate the new “sci-
ences” of wealth and society was pervaded by the metaphor of accounting and was
made explicit in Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). See Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact;
and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929/1651).
41. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 2 vols, ed. G.
Roth and C. Wittlich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978/1956), 86.
42. Peter Miller, “Governing by Numbers: Why Calculative Practices Matter,” Social
Research 68, 2 (Summer 2001): 379–96.
43. Peter Miller discusses how the emergence of cost accountancy in the early twen-
tieth century made it possible to govern the future actions of the individual according
to prescribed standards and deviations from an economic norm. See Miller, “Govern-
ing by Numbers: Why Calculative Practices Matter.”
44. Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996); and Bayly, Empire and Information. Mary Poovey has noted that the epistemolog-
ical effects of the double-entry system was to make its formal precision that was
drawn on the rule-bound system of arithmetic to seem to guarantee the accuracy of the
details it recorded. See Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact.
45. Jeremy Bentham, “On Public Account Keeping” in Official Aptitude Maximized
Expense Minimized, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Philip Schofield, (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993), 293–301.
46. See Bentham, “On Public Account Keeping” in Official Aptitude Maximized Ex-
pense Minimized, 300.
47. Goswami, Producing India.
48. Michel Callon, “Introduction: the Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Eco-
nomics,” in The Laws of the Markets, ed. M. Callon (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998),
25–26.
49. David Rudner has examined the accounts maintained by the indigenous bank-
ing community of Chettiars and notes that although some members consider their
accounts to conform to the double-entry system, they do not appear to comply with
the principles of double-entry book-keeping. See David Rudner, “Banker’s Trust and
the Culture of Banking among the Nattukottai Chettiars of Colonial South India,”
Modern Asian Studies 23, 3 (July 1989): 417–58.
50. Max Weber, General Economic History (New York: Collier, 1961), 207.
Also read Richard Colignon and Mark Covaleski, “A Weberian Framework in the
Study of Accounting,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 16, 2 (1991): 141–157.
51. Peter Miller and Ted O’Leary’ “Governing the calculable person,” in Accounting
as social and institutional practice, ed. Anthony G. Hopwood and Peter Miller (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 111.
52. Mary Poovey, “For Everything Else, There’s . . .,” Social Research 68, 2 (Summer
2001): 397–426.
53. Poovey, “For Everything Else, There’s . . .,” 406.
54. See the chapter “Speculation and Virtue in Our Mutual Friend,” in Poovey,
Making a Social Body.
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 171

55. Mary Poovey observes that the desacralization of the economy was achieved in
part by the development of modern science of economics which sought to displace the
logical rationale that persisted in mid-century political economy with the abstract and
apparendy value-free language of mathematics, and the rise of statistics, which made
it possible to think of groups of individuals as statistical populations whose activities
could be tabulated as mathematical regularities. See Poovey, “For Everything Else,
There’s . . .,” 411–12
56. Birla, Stages of Capital, 4–6.
57. Bayly, Empire and Information, 41.
58. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 97.
59. G. P. Kapadia, History of the Accountancy Profession in India (New Delhi: The
Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, 1973).
60. Keith Robson, “On the Arenas of Accounting Change: the Process of Transla-
tion,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 16, 5/6 (1991): 547–70.
61. Hacking, “Bio-Power and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers.”
62. Keith, W. Hoskin and Richard H. Macve, “Accounting as Discipline: The Over-
looked Supplement,” in Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity, ed.
Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway and David J. Sylvan (Charlottesville: Uni-
versity of Virginia Press, 1993), 25–53.
63. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, 30.
64. Max Weber has noted that even if the decimal system was invented and algebra
was used in India, it was fully utilized only by the developing capitalism in the West
and it did not lead to modern arithmetic, or book–keeping in India. See Max Weber,
“The Uniqueness of Western Civilisation,” in Max Weber: On Capitalism, Bureaucracy
and Religion–A Selection of Texts, ed. Stanislav Andreski (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1983), 21–29.
65. Michel Callon, “An Essay on Framing and Overflowing: Economic Externalities
Revisited by Sociology” in The Laws of the Markets, ed. M. Callon (Malden, MA: Black-
well, 1998), 250.
66. Bayly, Empire and Information, 46.
67. See the chapter “The Conditions of Emergence of the Economic Category,” in
Dumont From Mandeville to Marx.
68. Siraj Ahmed, “The Theater of the Civilized Self: Edmund Burke and the East
India Trials,” Representations, 78 (Spring 2002): 28–55; Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peas-
ant Insurgency in Colonial India; McCulloch, A Descriptive and Statistical Account of The
British Empire, vol. II; and Thomas R. Metcalfe, “The Struggle Over Land Tenure in
India, 1860–1868,” The Journal of Asian Studies 21, 3 (May 1962): 295–307.
69. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India.
70. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The
Social Life of Things ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 4–5.
71. See the seven volume work of George Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic Products
of India (London, 1889–1892); and George Watt, The Commercial Products of India (Lon-
don: John Murray, 1908). Similar works for the different regions were prepared as well
much before Watt’s works, such as the one by B. H. Baden-Powell, Handbook of the
Economic Products of the Punjab, Vol.1and Vol. 2 (Roorkee, 1868–1872).
72. Gyan Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India,” Representations, Special
Issue: Seeing Science 40 (Fall 1992): 153–78.
73. Timothy Mitchell notes that Egypt’s first Bureau de Statistique established in 1870
was done so after the khedive’s visit to the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where the
presentation of statistical data on each country in the world was one of the organizing
principles of the exhibition. See Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts.
74. Government of Bengal, Financial Department (Industry and Science), Proceed-
ing no.2.1, May 1874, India Office Library and Records, London (IOLR), p/186. Cited in
Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India.”
172 Chapter 4

75. Lorraine Daston, “Type Specimens and Scientific Memory,” Critical Inquiry 31, 1
(Autumn 2004): 153–182.
76. William Crooke, A Glossary of North Indian Peasant Life, edited Sahid Amin (Del-
hi: Oxford University Press, 1989).
77. Shahid Amin, “Introduction,” in A Glossary of North Indian Peasant Life–William
Crooke.
78. See the chapter “Nature and Space” in Scott, Seeing like a State.
79. Julian Hoppit examines the diversities in weights and measures in Britain from
the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century and the measures taken to
standardize them. Apparently three Royal Commissions apart from select committees
looked into the matter. See Julian Hoppit, “Reforming Britain’s Weights and Meas-
ures, 1660–1824,” English Historical Review (Jan 1993): 82–104.
80. C. D. Maclean, Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency, vol II (Ma-
dras: Government of Madras Press, 1885). Reprint (New Delhi: Asian Educational
Services, 1989).
81. Royal Commission on Agriculture in India Report of the Royal Commission on
Agriculture in India (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1928), 396.
82. Goswami, Producing India.
83. For the introduction of paper money in the colonial context of Egypt, see Mitch-
ell, Rule of Experts.
84. John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings, vol.1: Indian Currency and Finance
(London: Macmillan, 1971, Originally Published in 1913). As member of the Royal
Commission on Indian Currency and Finance of 1913–1914 Keynes reiterated his sup-
port of the sterling exchange standard and which was to become a point of contention
in the nationalist critique of colonial economic policies. See Goswami, Producing India.
85. For more on the colonial influence on Keynes’s conceptualization, read Mitchell,
Rule of Experts.
86. Tellmann, “Catastrophic Populations and the Fear of the Future: Malthus and
the Genealogy of Liberal Economy.”
87. Bernard S. Cohn, “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and
Culture” in An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1968/1990), 153; and Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj, 114–15.
88. Hacking, “Bio-Power and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” 280–81.
89. Frederick Cooper indicates that a similar phenomenon was taking place in Afri-
ca under the colonial stabilization policy as in the officials’ eyes the industrial worker
was always a man. See Frederick Cooper, “Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and
Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks
(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), 209–45.
90. M. S. Kumar, “The Census and Women’s Work in Rangoon, 1872–1931,” Journal
of Historical Geography 32, (2006): 383.
91. Jan Breman and E. V. Daniel, “The Making of the Coolie” in Plantations, proletar-
ians, and peasants in colonial Asia, ed. E. Valentine Daniel, Henry Bernstein and Tom
Brass (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 268–95.
92. Charlotte Sussman examines the statistical rhetoric in William Petty’s Political
Arithmetik and his emphasis on the quantifiable value of subaltern bodies that con-
strued such population as transportable. See Charlotte Sussman, “The Colonial After-
life of Political Arithmetic: Swift, Demography and Mobile Populations,” Cultural Cri-
tique 56 (Winter 2004): 96–126.
93. James S. Duncan, In the Shadows of the Tropics: Climate, Race and Bio-power in
Nineteenth Century Ceylon (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 86, n91.
94. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History.
95. Royal Commission on Labour in India Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in
India (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931), 196.
96. Sanjay Sharma, Famine, Philanthropy and the Colonial State: North India in the early
nineteenth century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 169.
 Colonial Governmentality and the “Economy” 173

97. David Nally observes that in Ireland too the difficulties of superintending a
colonial population during the Irish famine of 1845 became a powerful reason to
expand the pastoral role of the state. The government’s role included administering
aid, managing relief structures, building pauper institutions, directing famished bod-
ies, sanctioning “relief laws,” and mobilizing ideologies and policies to secure particu-
lar outcomes. It involved a high degree of regulation and government intervention in
which the Irish Poor Law was to play a very major role, and these institutions, laws,
and disciplines permitted the colonial state to target the subaltern body in novel and
powerful ways. See David Nally, “‘That Coming Storm’: The Irish Poor Law, Colonial
Biopolitics, and the Great Famine,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98,
3 (2008): 714–41.
98. Neil Rabitoy, “The Control of Fate and Fortune: The Origins of the Market
Mentality in British Administrative Thought in South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 25, 4
(October 1991): 757.
99. William Digby, The famine campaign in southern India (Madras and Bombay presi-
dencies and province of Mysore) 1876–1878, v. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.,
1878), 8.
100. Peter Gray, “Famine and Land in Ireland and India 1845–1880: James Caird and
the Political Economy of Hunger,” The History Journal 49, 1 (March 2006): 204.
101. In this bureaucratic edifice of “rule by record” and “rule by report” to use
Richard Saumarez Smith’s phrases, selectivity in information retrieval from lower to
higher levels of administration appears to have been prevalent in other departments
such as police and judicial as noted by Bhavani Raman. See Bhavani Raman, “The
Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colo-
nial Madras,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 2 (April 2012): 229–250.
102. Digby, The famine campaign in southern India (Madras and Bombay presidencies and
province of Mysore) 1876–1878, v. 1, 92.
103. William Digby, The famine campaign in southern India (Madras and Bombay presi-
dencies and province of Mysore) 1876–1878, v. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.,
1878), 172.
104. Digby, The famine campaign in southern India (Madras and Bombay presidencies and
province of Mysore) 1876–1878, v. 2, 183.
105. Mitchell Dean, “A Genealogy of the Government of Poverty,” Economy and Soci-
ety 21, 3 (1992): 215–51.
106. The word “self-acting test” used in the Indian Famine Code of 1880 is a replica-
tion of the same phrase used by the English Poor Law Commission of 1832–1834. See
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, “The Labouring Poor and their Notion of Poverty: Late 19th
and Early 20th Century Bengal,” Labour and Development 3, 1 and 2 (1998): 1–23.
107. A similar point is made in the context of the liberal conception of poverty in
England. Dean notes that the opposition between moral and economic conceptions of
poverty is a result of the transformation in modes of government it seeks to explain.
See Dean, “A Genealogy of the Government of Poverty.”
108. S. S. Amrith, “Food and Welfare in India, c.1900–1950,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 50, 4 (2008): 1013; and David Arnold, “Discovery of Malnutrition
and Diet in Colonial India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 31, 1 (1994): 1–26.
109. Amrith, “Food and Welfare in India, c.1900–1950,” 1022–23.
110. For understanding the emergence of the pauper in the discourses of political
economy in Europe, read Giovanna Procacci, “Social Economy and the Government of
Poverty,” Ideology and Consciousness (1978): 55–72. Also published in The Foucault Ef-
fect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 151–168.
111. Robert. A. Horva’th, “The Rise of Macroeconomic Calculations in Economic
Statistics,” in The Probabilistic Revolution vol. 2, ed. Lorenz Kruger, Gerd Gigerenzer,
and Mary Morgan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 148.
174 Chapter 4

112. Timothy Mitchell, “Origins and Limits of the Idea of the Economy,” Advanced
Study Center, Working Papers Series, no. 12 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1995).
113. There is a section “Poverty of India” subtitled “Papers read before the Bombay
Branch of the East India Association of London in 1876” in Dadabhai Naoroji’s book
Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in which he states in the first footnote:”These notes
in their original draft were placed before the Select Committee on Indian Finance in
1873. They were taken, but not published with the Report, as they did not suit the
views of the Chairman (Mr. Ayrton), and I was led to suppose, also of Sir Grant Duff,
who was then the Under-Secretary of State for India.” See Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty
and Un-British Rule in India (New Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers, 1901/1988).
114. John Crawfurd, “A Sketch of the Commercial Resources and Monetary and
Mercantile System of British India, with Suggestions for their Improvements by means
of Banking Establishments, 1837,” in The Economic Development of India under the East
India Company 1814–1858: A Selection of Contemporary Writings, ed. K. N. Chaudhuri
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Economic
History of India Under Early British Rule 2 vols (New York: Burt Franklin, 1902/ 1970).
115. William Digby, “Prosperous” British India; a revelation from official records (Lon-
don: T. F. Unwin, 1901), 439–40.
116. Alan Heston, “National Income” in The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol.
2: c.1757–c.1970, ed. Dharma Kumar and Meghnad Desai, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), 376–462.
 FIVE
Classification and Society

The administrative requirements of colonial governmentality to have an

empirical view of Indian society that can be classified and enumerated
resulted in effect in a reconstruction of both society and subjectivity
through statistical discourses and regulatory practices. The framework of
colonial governmentality helps to understand the emergence and signifi-
cance of this new classificatory logic in terms of its knowledge and sub-
jectivity effects. As the colonial administrative modalities developed dur-
ing the nineteenth century, classifications emerged in every regulatory
site. New regulatory sites needed new objects to come into being and be
named, and old regulatory sites underwent transformations as much as
in the nature of accountability as in the governance of conduct resulting
in new social classifications. A new classificatory logic evolved as social
classifications multiplied and were used to classify society. Social classifi-
cations that emerged in the nonregulatory discursive sites were the result
of a new social and political imaginaire that linked order and control to
objective and precise information about the population. These had impli-
cations for the kinds of knowledge of Indian society that were generated.
The classification and enumeration of population by race, caste, religion,
and occupation through the censuses and surveys provided for the first
time the possibility of discursively articulating “society,” the dynamics of
social change, and a colonial sociology of India.

CLASSIFICATION AND MODERN THOUGHT

As modern sciences developed, the quantifying spirit also spread and

classifications multiplied. Ian Hacking notes “When the avalanche of
numbers began, classifications multiplied because this was the form of
this new kind of discourse. Even though any single new classification
175
176 Chapter 5

usually had a straightforward motivation that can be reported by an

external historian, the very fact of the classifications and of the counting
was internal to a new practice.” 1 In the period 1820–1840, England and
other industrialized countries witnessed an exponential rate of increase
in the printing of numbers whereas the rate of increase in the printing of
words was merely linear, and the avalanche of numbers was not merely a
quantitative fact but a change in “feeling about the sort of world in which
we live.” 2 This quantifying spirit ushered a new style of statistical reason-
ing that further advanced with the developments in probabilistic think-
ing. Hacking notes, “Every style of reasoning introduces a great many
novelties including new types of objects, evidence, sentences, new ways
of being a candidate for truth or falsehood, laws, or at any rate modal-
ities, possibilities. One will also notice, on occasion, new types of classifi-
cation and new types of explanations.” 3 “Styles of reasoning” are stable,
enduring, and accumulating over the long haul and in the short run, the
knowledge that is acquired using them is moderately stable.
Jeremy Bentham realized the usefulness of classification in his concep-
tion of his administrative state, and acknowledged his debt to Francis
Bacon. He believed that he was the first writer on legislation by whom
the idea of proportion had been “constantly kept in mind, and held up to
view,” and “the notion of elements or dimensions of value in regard to
pleasures and pains.” By this notion, he claimed, “the precision and clear-
ness and incontestableness of mathematical calculations are introduced
for the first time into the field of morals.” 4 Noting the usefulness of
classification in the long appendix to Chrestomathia entitled “Nomencla-
ture and Classification,” he waxed enthusiastic about the value of ency-
clopedic tables in “assisting and stimulating inventive thought . . . with
an Encyclopedical tree in his hand, suited to the particular object which
he has in view, skipping backwards and forwards, with the rapidity of
thought, from twig to twig, hunting out and pursuing whatever analo-
gies it appears to afford, the eye of the artist or of the man of science may
at pleasure, make its profit, of the labour expended on this field.” 5 And in
the essay on the art of invention, Bentham emphasized that to promote
“facility of confrontation” it was vital that any synoptic table of this kind
should be printed on a single sheet, so that the eye could range on it at
pleasure. 6
Classificatory thinking as an epistemology was consolidated in the
late seventeenth century and was elaborated over the next two centu-
ries. 7 Systematic classification was very much in the air in Bentham’s
time, as Linnaeus had used it in the classification of plants and William
Cullen had used it for classification of diseases. Arguing that induction
and deduction were interdependent stages in a single method of scientif-
ic analysis, John Herschel emphasized the role of classification and verifi-
cation by repetition. 8 Bentham once even said that he had learned more
about the method from books on medicine and natural history and called
 Classification and Society 177

his own classification of offenses a “nosology of the body politic.” He

found analogy to be useful as it highlighted the method of inquiry and
investigation, which he regarded as appropriate to the science of legisla-
tion. However far this approach might fall short of perfect precision, he
noted, “at any rate, in every rational and candid eye, unspeakable will be
the advantage it have over every form of argumentation in which every
idea is afloat, no degree of precision being ever attained because none is
even so much as aimed at.” 9
Intervening in social processes needed a conception of “society.” By
the middle of the nineteenth century Comtean ideas of a science of sociol-
ogy in which observed phenomena is described by general and invariable
laws became well known in England. “Order” and “progress” were the
two key words of Cometean sociology, which in conjunction with Quete-
let’s “social physics” sought to show that mass phenomena may show
statistical regularities without the composing elements following any rec-
ognizable law, which laid the groundwork for modern sociology. Think-
ers like J. S. Mill and H. T. Buckle were influenced by these ideas. 10 The
new political rationalities developed by the modern state in the latter half
of the nineteenth century were premised on the possibility of intervening
in social processes that could be described by laws following statistical
regularities.
Law-like regularities as Hacking argued, could be perceived only
when social phenomena had been enumerated, tabulated, and made pub-
lic. It was still the time when determinism had not been eroded giving
rise to the laws of chance. There were also two traditions in this period of
avalanche of numbers, the Prussian and East European attitudes to nu-
merical data characterized by holism and collectivism, and the West Eu-
ropean libertarian, individualistic, and atomistic conceptions. Statistical
laws were found in the West European data. 11 The censuses, the first
systematic one having begun in the United States in 1790, fitted into the
holistic and collectivist frame as the idea of census evolved when deter-
minism reigned supreme. But enumeration and classification was an im-
portant step in conceiving “society” as an enumerable mass. The collecti-
vist framework of the censuses provided the opportunity for ordering
variety by taxonomy. 12 Classificatory thinking is crucial to the instru-
mental rationality of modernity and liberal governmentality.

COLONIAL CLASSIFICATIONS, STATE, AND “SOCIETY”

Classificatory exercises became implicated in the colonial politics of

negotiating between similarity and difference. What was special about
India was that the orientalist gaze here encountered an indigenous sys-
tem of classification that as Arjun Appadurai has observed “seemed vir-
tually invented by some earlier, indigenous form of orientalism,” an in-
178 Chapter 5

digenous “social imaginaire” that valorized group differences. 13 The co-

lonial construction and ordering of differences was often based on social
theories cobbled together for political purposes, although the enumera-
tive activities did not have the same cultural form as in England because
they did not see themselves as an edifice of exotic communities as they
thought of India. In their attempt to represent the insurmountable differ-
ences, they often eschewed categories that pointed to the similarity be-
tween India and Britain and focused largely on those like caste and tribe
that pointed to how different Indian society was from the British. 14 While
class pointed to the great divide in Victorian England, it hardly figured in
colonial classifications. However, as Sudipta Kaviraj has noted, caste, re-
ligious, and ethnic identities in colonial India were both sharpened and
polarized as they were sought to be defined and demarcated into discrete
entities, transforming what were once “fuzzy” communities into “enu-
merated” ones and provided to caste identity a new publicness in the
emerging modern polity. 15 The colonial census administrators, sociolo-
gist G. S. Ghurye, and anthropologist Bernard Cohn have brought to
attention the manner in which the Census as an instrument of enumera-
tion, classification, and objectification led to the forging of identities. 16 In
recent times, Benedict Anderson attributed to the Census along with
maps and musuems an important role in the imagining of the national
community. 17
Caste or more appropriately jati has always been marker of identity in
Indian society along with other markers such as religion and language
that were often also contextually determined. Caste as a referent of social
identity competed with others referents such as temple communities, ter-
ritorial groups, lineage segments, family units, royal retinues, warrior
subcastes, occupational reference groups, and sectarian networks, among
others. 18 Nicholas Dirks argues that caste has “always been a contingent
social phenomenon” and were in part constructed by the political struc-
tures of the precolonial old regimes. 19 However, what was at a phenome-
nal stage of social relations, perceived and understood in all its subtleties
by the members of the society was objectified by the practices of colonial
governmentality through classification and enumeration. There were not
only regional variations in caste formations but even within a single terri-
tory both the boundaries and the relations between caste communities
were not rigidly drawn and the people themselves were not fully knowl-
edgeable about caste as a societal phenomenon, except as it pertained to
their own social relations.
The “publicness” of caste identity in the older regimes was confined
to particular localities as honor, status, and privileges of each caste were
defined by their relationship to the structures of political authority. Su-
dipta Kaviraj observes:
 Classification and Society 179

The main difference between traditional communities and the modern

community of the nation is not in their size, but an internal constructive
principle, of which the size was a function. Earlier people belonged to
communities, which did not make claims on their identity and strate-
gies of self-description of the type modern states would make. Com-
munities were fuzzy in two senses. . . . To say their community is fuzzy
is not to say it is imprecise. On the appropriate occasion, every individ-
ual would use his cognitive apparatus to classify any single person he
interacts with and place him quite exactly, and decide if he could eat
with him, go on a journey, or arrange a marriage into his family. It was
therefore practically precise, and adequate to the scale of social action.
But it would not occur to an individual to ask how many of them there
were in the world, and what if they decided to act in concert they could
wreak upon the world. 20
Even if the nature of social action called for a precise enumeration, the
appropriate method should have been a genealogical method of collect-
ing information that could have better captured the “fuzziness.” But such
a genealogical reporting that could have recorded the multiple functional
identities of an individual and a cognitive map that could guide behavior
would result in an individualized contextual document, while a decon-
textualized document like a survey enables the unique identification of
each individual’s identity as well as their aggregation, even as it erases
the double fuzziness. The transformation of fuzzy to enumerated com-
munities takes place at the discursive sites of censuses and surveys and
for which classificatory frames are essential. The “official” view of caste
was related to how the colonial administration collected the information
about the caste system. Treating it as a measurable entity with definable
characteristics such as endogamy, commensality rules, fixed occupation,
and common ritual practices, they sought to frame its reckoning within
the modality of the census and its unmanageable overflows or excesses
contained within ethnographic reports. 21
Classifications of people are in a sense fundamentally different from
classifications of nature or objects or other beings, if only for the fact that
the way we classify humans affects the humans, as classifications act on
people, and they in turn act on the classifications. 22 Because of the loop-
ing effects, interactive classifications are fuzzy too as they act on moving
targets. Enumerated communities may therefore not be discreet or fixed,
as Sudipta Kaviraj believes but could as well be continuous and fluid as
in Hacking’s elaboration of the Nietzschean idea that “creating new
names and assessments and apparent truths is eventually enough to
create new things.” 23 Such an interactive process was evident in the cen-
sus objectification as the census questions and classifications led to In-
dians questioning about themselves to make their claims on categorical
validity. 24
180 Chapter 5

The motivations behind the colonial administration’s efforts to enu-

merate and classify the population by castes and religious groups have
been of some concern to the social scientists for a while. Writing in the
year after the 1931 census, which incidentally was the last census to
undertake caste enumeration that was begun since the first decennial
census in 1871, G. S. Ghurye observed that it was “the intellectual curios-
ity” of the officials that was mostly responsible for the elaborate treat-
ment of caste in the Census, and drawing evidence from the reports of
the various census commissioners noted that it had resulted in “a liven-
ing up of the caste spirit.” 25 In the more recent past, Louis Dumont has
opined that studying the caste system was more than just curiosity for
“modern” Western men; he questions his claims to be “modern” if he
gives up the attempt “to grasp other values intellectually,” in this case the
value of hierarchy as opposed to equality and liberty—the quintessential
modern Western values since the Declaration of the Rights of Man. 26
Bernard Cohn in his seminal essay on census and objectification pointed
out that even if the concern with “counting the characteristics of the
Indian population” may have started as an intellectual curiosity of the
officials or as the administrative necessity of knowing the “natives,” the
knowledge to be used particularly in the political, cultural and religious
battles; the process of classifying had the effect of “making objective to
the Indians themselves their culture and society,” and the census played
a key role in that. 27
For Arjun Appadurai classification and enumeration were part of the
“colonial imaginaire,” and the “referential purpose” of the numbers con-
cerning communities was “far less important than their discursive impor-
tance in supporting or subverting various classificatory moves and the
policy argument based on them.” 28 Kaviraj has attributed the need to
enumerate communities to the colonizers desire for control over an alien
population, such techniques of control by the modern state being a prod-
uct of “Enlightenment rationalism,” while Partha Chatterjee on the other
sees it as the outcome of the colonizers’ conceptualization of “difference,”
and of their theory of representation that entailed their enumeration.
According to Chatterjee, colonial discourse is suffused with ideas of dif-
ference that persistently calls into question the universality of the princi-
ples governing modern regimes of power, despite such a belief on the
part of the colonizers. In the establishment of this “rule of colonial differ-
ence,” procedures for “systematically objectifying and normalizing the
colonized terrain” were instituted; the forms of objectification and nor-
malization had to produce the truth of colonial difference within the
framework of a universal knowledge. 29
Indeed, comparative analysis of colonial administrations or even for
that matter the censuses in many parts of the world indicates that such
classificatory exercises were not unique to India. 30 Seen by some as an
attempt to present an unified and coherent British imperial enterprise
 Classification and Society 181

and to tie together the empire abroad in the vernacular usage of the
domestic, ranked social hierarchy, it was as much a replication of same-
ness and similarities originating from Britain as it was an insistence on
difference and dissimilarities originating from elsewhere in the empire.
David Cannadine is of the view that census classification of caste taken in
conjunction with other symbols of “honorific hierarchy” that the British
invented such as the Durbars sought to project the Indian empire as a
“feudal order.” The views of colonial administrators like Henry Maine,
W. W. Hunter, and Alfred Lyall converged on this perspective and their
Burkean agrarian image of Indian society helped to construct a govern-
ment that was “simultaneously direct and indirect, authoritarian and col-
laborationist, but that always took for granted the reinforcement and
preservation of tradition and hierarchy.” 31
Nicholas Dirks has cautioned that the history of the production of
colonial difference does not license all expressions of nativist fundamen-
talism, and by drawing attention to the “wide historical provenance” and
“the deep historical force of colonialism” has shown that caste as it is
known today is not “a residual survival of ancient India but a specifically
colonial form of (that is, substitute for) civil society that both justified and
maintained an Orientalist vision.” 32 As the older political order was re-
placed progressively by colonial rule, caste that had hitherto been em-
bedded into the older structure was disembedded and became amenable
to regulation and administration by the state. In the early colonial sur-
veys of James Buchanan and Colin Mackenzie prior to 1820, the mention
of caste was haphazard and unsystematic, not defining it as India’s dis-
tinctiveness anyway. By 1830s colonial debates came to emphasize caste
as a distinctive feature and much of the mundane reporting in the local-
ities used caste categories although in an ambiguous way by including
occupational and honorific designations. 33 The systematization of caste
was connected with the colonial censuses from 1870s and the develop-
ment of photography from the 1860s. 34 For Cohn, Dirks, and others, the
colonial census enumeration of castes spurred the emergence of this colo-
nial form of civil society as the new political rationalities and technolo-
gies of rule required that individuals be not only counted and classified
but these numerical distributions were to be represented over large blocs
extending across more than one province.
Questioning the views that caste is a colonial invention, an outcome of
the imagination of Western thinkers and their essentializing tendencies
as suggested by Ronald Inden, and that the great Victorian enterprise of
data collection was an one-sided exercise of hegemonic power as Nicho-
las Dirks seemed to suggest, Susan Bayly argues that caste was not an
invention as such but a “meeting ground between Indian reality and
colonial knowledge and strategy,” reshaped or created by colonial ad-
ministrators in different domains of regulation such as the military and
the law. 35 Contradicting the widely-held view that “caste” was the cen-
182 Chapter 5

tral trope in the colonial perception, she argues that it was indeed “race”
nor does she hold that the colonial census of caste was so closely tied to
the colonizers’ need to control and manage the colonized, as believed by
Sudipta Kaviraj and Partha Chatterjee. According to her, the colonial
compilers of caste data were much more concerned with the body of
speculative ethnological scholarship in which biological and moral qual-
ities of “race” were perceived as universal human endowments. From the
late eighteenth century onward, ethnologists sought to classify human
societies based on differential endowments of biological and moral qual-
ities that included European societies as well. Caste was perceived to be
the marker of “race” and caste differences seemed to them to indicate the
differential endowments of “race.” Agreeing partly with Susan Bayly,
Crispin Bates opines that even if the colonial discourse of caste and tribe
was hegemonic, it was not always uncontested and it would therefore not
be quite right to regard it solely as the effect of the colonial project to
normalize society to make it amenable for administrative control. 36 Clear-
ly, Bayly and Bates do not subscribe to Ranajit Guha’s view that the
colonizer could assert dominance without hegemony even under condi-
tions of contestation and resistance. 37
Although each one of these ideas may contain some truth by way of
an explanation, none seem to provide a complete elaboration of the par-
ticular kinds of political rationalities ushered by the colonial state and of
its classificatory needs. The need for controlling an alien population can-
not itself be a sufficient explanation, for even before the systematic census
enumeration from 1871 the people were controlled and governed. Specif-
ic legislations pertaining to castes such as the Caste-Disabilities Removal
Act of 1850 suggest that governing castes did not require their classifica-
tion and enumeration. 38 Although both Kaviraj and Chatterjee have
argued quite correctly that the regime of modern power located in the
institution of the modern state and the discursive needs of such a state
have resulted in classifications and enumerations of population, their
arguments appear to be incomplete for they do not elaborate on the na-
ture and role of such states. It is well known that modern states have been
profoundly interventionist as compared to pre-modern states. The statis-
tical episteme that colonial governmentality instituted provided the
framework of a universal knowledge that was objective, rational, and
scientific. Classification of population became a means of objectification
through the self-identification processes that enumerative practices re-
quired, and generated modal groups that could make normalization pos-
sible through appropriate interventions.
Such normalization of groups was indeed the agenda of the colonial
civilizing mission. If we agree with Foucault that the problem of govern-
ment is best approached, as a rationality of power that directs the con-
duct of individuals and groups, then the governance of “character” or
ethological governance was clearly part of the nineteenth-century liberal
 Classification and Society 183

rationality of government, a specific rationality of rule or ethos of govern-

ment that governs at a “distance.” “Character” established a normative
scale against which the capacity of individuals to practice their freedom
was measured, and was deemed an ethic, a “way of life” that expressed
the constitution of a particular individual and the collectivity or group to
which the individual belongs. Melanie White observes that ethological
governance refers to “the set of practices that is organized by a develop-
mental notion of human conduct (i.e., character) that operates as a stan-
dard of liberal government and serves as an index for the responsible
exercise of freedom.” 39 While the practices of ethological governance in-
dividualize personal character through disciplined self-governance, it
also totalizes it by standardizing conduct across populations. Liberal citi-
zens capable of governing themselves were to display dispositions such
as reasonableness, independence, industry, reliability, trustworthiness,
and autonomy, while the presence of depravity, idleness, and excessive
dependence were marked as subjects for ethological governance and
were to acquire a “liberal” character through training and discipline so as
to enable them to make a choice in order to exercise freedom. The coloni-
al “Other” whose difference was marked as “savagery” or “barbarian” in
ethnological stratification was in need of ethological governance much
like the working class that comprised the metropolitan “Other.” It is
therefore no surprise that the colonial government in India and elsewhere
were to publish annual reports on the “Moral and Material Progress.”
J. S. Mill in his Logic argues that the scientific study of “character” is
possible as it is produced by a system of empirical laws that are suscepti-
ble to observation and verification. Even though Mill construes ethology
as an “exacting” science that reflects universal laws at work, he acknowl-
edges that it is an imperfect one that can generate only hypothetical “ten-
dencies” rather than statements of empirical fact. 40 Nonetheless it is pos-
sible to deduce an individual’s character from their life circumstances.
For Mill the role of one’s interiority is important in producing and ulti-
mately exercising one’s freedom. For he insists that “our actions follow
from our characters” where our circumstances “made us what they did
make us, by willing not the end but the requisite means; and we, when
our habits are not too inveterate, can by similarly willing the requisite
means, make ourselves different.” 41 Mill’s ethological concerns are con-
sistent with his general preoccupation with the generative capacity of
character for liberal rationalities of rule as it provides the link between
techniques of character formation and the desire for self-improvement. 42
Ethological governance requires that population be classified by a set of
“dividing practices” that produce subjects and differentiates groups by
dispositions. While traditional communities are marked by differences in
customs and habits that shape dispositions, habits are marked as “good”
or “bad” only when they are situated in relation to the dividing practices
of character that develop over time.
184 Chapter 5

Caste is a set of dividing practices that differentiates the population in

terms of customs and habits and was thus a ready reckoner for the coloni-
al governance of conduct. The scale of social action determined the man-
ner in which communities were cognized, and reciprocally particular
ways of reckoning the community engendered possibilities for collective
action. There are no doubt differences between traditional and modern
communities and the kinds of claims on identity the modern state makes
upon individuals. Both Chatterjee and Kaviraj argue that it is in the na-
ture of the political discourse of the “modern” kind to insist on collectiv-
ities having a fixed, determinate form, which often results in erasing the
contextualities of concepts. Intervention by the modern state requires the
framework of universal knowledge, and such a framework disembodies
concepts from their contextual situatedness precisely to make them objec-
tive, enumerable and therefore universal.
The census enumeration of caste made it into bounded and enumer-
able groups and its classification and enumeration disembodied it from
its local contextualness so as to order and compare caste data at regional
and national levels, even as the numerous ethnographic reports on castes
and tribes prepared by colonial administrators sought to retrieve the so-
cial and local contextualness of caste. 43 The proliferating ethnographic
knowledge of castes and tribes through surveys and reports in the latter
half of the nineteenth century makes Nicholas Dirks to remark that
anthropology supplanted history as the principle colonial modality of
knowledge and rule and that “the colonial state in India can be character-
ized as the ethnographic state.” 44 He notes that caste was “a central trope
for India, metonymically indexing it as fundamentally different from oth-
er places, synecdochically expressing its essence.” 45
Since Hegel, it has been a fundamental aspect of Western thinking that
the “Hindu” principle is substantialized in the “caste,” which denies free-
dom both as abstract will and as subjective freedom, and therefore the
principle of freedom which is the proper basis of the State is altogether
lacking in India. Caste was seen to be close to nature and therefore ap-
peared irrational and had to be made into something akin to class which
embodied reason and in which subjectivity could manifest itself as con-
sciousness in contrast to nature. 46 There was the tendency first to see
caste as the economic basis of organizing society leading to the adoption
of the functional classification of castes in the early censuses, then re-
placed with the understanding that it was a religiously sanctioned basis
of social organization leading to the adoption of classifying by social
precedence in the later censuses and thus of religiously sanctioned hierar-
chy.
In either case, Dirks argues, the colonial understanding disembodied
caste from its political moorings, as in order to consolidate its sovereign-
ty, the colonial state needed to override the authority of caste and all
other communities. The censuses as an instrument of objectification of
 Classification and Society 185

caste played an important role in that disembodying process, as the pro-

cess of objectification entailed translating qualitative data on a range of
issues into numerically quantifiable ones. The perception of caste as dis-
crete communities with its internal rules promoting its cohesiveness was
the underlying basis of this enumerative approach, even as it erased the
political contexts of these communities.
Evolving a classificatory framework or taxonomy of caste and relig-
ious categories posed problems, along with the resistance of the data to
fit the taxonomic grid. Theories of the origins of caste framed both the
classificatory approach pointing to the success and limitations of the pro-
cess of objectification and the agenda of ethnographic research that was
to complement the statistics provided by the censuses. The extent to
which social classifications and enumeration of caste, religion and occu-
pation was the outcome of colonial governmentality serving the purposes
of administration requires examination.

CASTE AS TAXONOMIZER

The early encounters of the British with the local population that pro-
vided the opportunity to record details of caste were the topographical
and revenue surveys. In many of these surveys the category of the popu-
lation was merely enumerated in a manner not very different from other
things such as water works, or religious establishments, or heads of reve-
nue. While castes were enumerated following the broad four-fold varna
classification, within each class they were enumerated just as the survey-
or encountered them in the respective villages, with the particular village
dialect or name. There was not even an attempt to list them alphabetical-
ly. In some instances the occupational association of the caste is given
such as barbers, potters, washermen, toddy drawers, or dancing caste.
There was no attempt to separate tribes except to mention, say for in-
stance “Punchanum” as “five tribes of artificers,” or even for that matter
Muslims from the caste list. 47 However simple-minded this classification
may appear today, it was an early attempt to provide the term jati
(though not used as a term in the listing was nevertheless implied in it)
with a restricted meaning from its very wide semantic coverage. The
term jati can be used in the sense of origin by birth, classes of living
species, varna, lineage or clan, or human collectivities bound by loyalty to
state, nation or province. 48
Well after a hundred years of British presence in India, systematic
caste enumeration on an all-India basis began with the decennial cen-
suses starting from 1871, although a number of surveys and settlement
reports did at times enumerate the castes in the different regions. The
phenomenal nature of caste was not clearly perceived by the British until
the later half of the nineteenth century, and even when it became a con-
186 Chapter 5

cern, they adopted the perspective that castes were relatively discrete
communities with members sharing certain modes of worship, food,
dress, occupation, and an assigned ritual-political standing which deter-
mined their relationships with members of other groups. 49 This led to the
administrative thinking of ordering and counting the castes motivated
perhaps by the objective of ethological governance.
The attempts to fit castes into a rigid classificatory framework of the
censuses had to grapple with numerous issues, as there were a very large
number of jatis in each region. Although not infinite, the problem was
aggravated by the impreciseness and flexibility of caste categories both in
the indigenous nomenclature and in the popular vocabulary. As Rashmi
Pant illustrates, “a Brahman who in Kumaon was a Pant, in Benares
would refer to himself as a Deshashtha Brahman; while a Joshi Brahman of
Kumaon could in Benares call himself by his section and geography as
Kanoujiya Kurmachali, particularly as the Joshis of the plains were consid-
ered very inferior.” 50 Also caste names had to be standardized for pur-
poses of comparison. 51 Because of the large number of jatis emphasis was
placed only on the numerical majorities and selective minorities. 52 The
tabular representation of such majorities and minorities afforded by the
censuses provided a visual numerical display of caste in striking contrast
to the earlier forms of visual display such as portrait sketches found in
Colin Mackenzie’s collections. 53 For instance the 1881 census noted:
The object of the arrangement in the Imperial form was to present to
the eye the distribution of only the major castes by districts, leaving to
the reporter to show in the body of his report either in tabular shape or
otherwise, so much of the information connected with the distribution
and the number of the remaining castes as might be useful. 54
The purpose of a tabular representation is to facilitate comparison for
which uniformity is needed. The 1871–1872 Census sought to classify the
myriad array of jatis by clubbing together the analogous ones and arrang-
ing these hierarchically according to their respective ranks. However,
Henry Waterfield of the Statistics and Commerce Department concluded
that the outcome was “not satisfactory owing partly to the intrinsic diffi-
culties of the subject, and partly to the absence of a uniform plan of
classification, each writer adopting that which seemed to him best suited
for the purpose.” 55 At the 1881 Census, based on the recommendations of
the Census Committee of 1877, a pan-Indian representation of caste struc-
ture was proposed “by aggregating castes, smothering their specific-
ities—hierarchical and interactional, occupational, etc.—and universaliz-
ing certain characteristics on the basis of which castes from disparate
localities could be rendered comparable.” 56 But the envisaged uniformity
was not achieved because of differing principles identified by ethnogra-
phers as underlying the social arrangements, nor could they reject the
 Classification and Society 187

four-fold varna model and exclude the influence of the Brahmanical mod-
el from their explanation.
Although J. A. Baines, as the chief Census commissioner of the 1891
Census, had earlier been a protagonist of the view that descent and occu-
pation were the determining criteria of caste status, he directed that the
caste groups be organized within the 1891 imperial tables on a principle
based mainly upon function. What was aimed at in this method, the
Census Commissioner wrote, “was as much uniformity as the nature of
statistics will show, so that the return of each province might be dealt
with on the same basis.” 57 Once again the Census ,ommissioner argued
for uniformity in classifying castes “so that the circumstances of the prov-
inces in respect to sex distribution, education, and marriage customs,
were abstracted, and the prevalence of the selected infirmities . . . may be
accurately compared.” 58 This in turn led first, to the issue of standardiz-
ing names of caste groups and subgroups so that clearly demarcated
categories could emerge, and second to the issue of evolving a hierarchy
of first-order caste names as a series that would have both an all-India
applicability as well as remain stable, that is be unaffected to economic
and political changes of status or to organized lobbying the way the local
variants of caste were subjected to. 59
Although the functional or occupation-based classification of caste
was proposed at the 1891 Census, local officials often used the varna
scheme to hierarchize the castes. The ranking of the Sudra castes posed
particular difficulties. For instance, the relative position of the Gwala caste
in Bihar was fixed by assessing whether customs discouraged by the high
castes such as widow-remarriage were prevalent or not among them; and
by establishing whether Brahmans accepted water from them, and the
other criteria for ranking included whether the caste in question was of
“criminal,” “litigious,” or “peaceful” disposition, the attitude of high
castes towards it, and the period of impurity observed by its members
following the death of a kin. 60
Although right from the beginning there was sensitivity to the issue of
standardizing caste names, the problem never seemed to resolve even
over time. The Commissioner for the 1865 Caste Census of NWP com-
plained that while one collector sent in a return of castes containing more
than 300 different headings, another would condense all the different
castes of his district under half a dozen entries. 61 The Census Commis-
sioner of 1911 for the same region reiterated the same complaint after
more than forty years when he pointed out that respondents often re-
turned names as varied as titles, surnames, the endogamous group, or
the occupation followed when asked to name their caste, which may have
been on account of the flexibility in the indigenous nomenclature, and
being done with the Indian enumerators 62 In order to avoid overlapping
terms and to create unambiguous categories, practical techniques were
evolved for standardizing and hierarchizing caste names.
188 Chapter 5

If caste was to be an indicator of something more than caste, that is

become a space in which all other attributes can be made to cohere to
provide an understanding of social processes and behaviors and be
amenable to control, the space of caste should for comparative purposes
be made homogeneous across regions, and this was an attempt to make
homogeneous what was basically heterogeneous. The attempt to evolve a
classification for the all-India level was to prove far more intractable than
standardizing and hierarchizing at the provincial levels, for while the
varna categories were stable, the jati categories resisted all attempts at
stabilizing. While the substantiality of castes was sought to be identified
by defining a social morphology through the fixing of a name, number of
members, physical characteristics, cultural practices, and territory occu-
pied, the resistances to the tendencies to essentialize them were equally at
work.
The classificatory framework that was adopted depended very much
on the understanding of the origins of the caste system. The 1871 and
1881 censuses adopted the Brahmanic four-fold varna classification, and
all the subcastes of the “non-twice born” castes were grouped together
regardless of the social distance between them. At the 1891 census Denzil
Ibbetson based on his work in the Punjab put forth a claim that the caste
system evolved from the occupational division of labor, an idea that
gained the support of J. C. Nesfield who devised a classificatory scheme
based on occupational divisions. Herbert Risley who provided a theory
of the racial origins of caste criticized it, as a great deal of data did not
quite fit that framework. The racial theory upheld the view that since
racial intermixing was not allowed between the upper and lower castes,
there evolved complex rules in society whereby the distances between
the castes were maintained. Risley thus devised a classificatory scheme to
group castes by the order of social precedence based on prevailing opin-
ion. This theory of the origins prompted Risley at the 1901 Census to
attempt a mapping of race and caste using anthropometric methods.
Essentialism, as “a philosophy of marked discontinuity,” is resistant
to change both as a means of representation and with regard to what is
represented. 63 Deeming certain properties as essential, ignoring the vari-
ations of the taxa, and exaggerating the sharpness of the gaps and differ-
ences are ways of succumbing to essentialism. The logic of the classifica-
tion of the races and castes was caught in the tension of grappling with as
much diversity as possible as well as that of reducing the diversities to a
manageable number of “types.” The ways in which the classification of
caste eluded attempts at typification, while at the same time it became a
subject of not inconsiderable knowledge is worthy of some exploration.
Not content with identifying through anthropometric measurements
the “physical types” and displaying their distribution through colorful
ethnological maps, Risley’s ethnographic survey at the 1901 census
sought to provide the social grouping in the different regions identified
 Classification and Society 189

by the predominance of a particular racial type. While the Turko-Iranian

tract in Baluchistan and North-West Frontier Province posed no prob-
lems in the classification of its social group peopled as it was by Muslims
of different tribes, in all other areas of Hindu population where the caste
system prevailed such identification was not at all easy. The specification
of the social distance between different castes, particularly of the “not
twice-born” or “Sudra” castes, being as they are of such varying nature in
different regions, no uniform criteria could be adopted. The classes into
which they were grouped provided interesting insights into the manner
of social differentiation.
In the Indo-Aryan tract of Ajmer-Merwara, Rajputana, the Punjab,
and Kashmir they were categorized as “castes from whom members can
take pakki (cooked) food and water,” “castes from whom some Brahmins
take pakki and Rajputs take kachhi (uncooked),” “castes from whose lota
(glass) the twice-born will not take water,” and the untouchable castes.
The Muslims in the same region were divided into the “better class,” the
“lower class,” and the “degraded class,” the last comprising mostly of
converts. In the Dravidian tract of the Madras Presidency the “not twice-
born” were classified as “Sat (good) sudras,” “sudras who habitually
employ Brahmans as purohits (priests) and whose touch is supposed to
pollute,” “sudras who occasionally employ Brahmans as purohits but
whose touch does pollute,” “sudras who do not employ Brahman puroh-
its and whose touch pollutes,” “castes which pollute even without touch-
ing, but do not eat beef,” “castes eating beef,” “castes eating beef and
polluting without touching,” and “castes denying the sacerdotal author-
ity of Brahmans.” In the Chota-Nagpur regions there was apart from
“clean” and “unclean sudras,” a category of castes identified as “scaven-
gers and filth-eaters,” and in the United Provinces and Bihar groupings
such as those with “suspected criminal practices” and “lowest castes eat-
ing beef and vermin.”
The difficulty of identifying a set of criteria that could adequately
represent the arrangement of castes for social purposes was caught in the
contradictions of choosing criteria that would uphold the arrangements
specified by shastras, which is to view such arrangements as immutable
and changeless; or opt for criteria that takes cognizance of the changes
and rely on the prevalent public opinion for the social estimation of the
different castes. While it was felt that social estimation can be gauged by
the degree to which the food and water touched by the various castes will
be accepted by others; by the extent to which the barbers and washermen
will do service for them; by the length of the period of pollution observed
by them after births and deaths; by their occupations; by their wearing or
not wearing the sacred thread; by their allowing or not allowing infant
marriage and widow re-marriage; by the distance within which they are
permitted to approach the innermost part of the temples, the practices
190 Chapter 5

regarding these matters often differed even within different sections of

the same caste. 64
Eventually the 1901 Census adopted a standard which was a combina-
tion of three considerations, acceptance of food and water from other
castes, the sacerdotal authority of Brahmin priests, pollution based on
touch, and diet based on beef eating which formed the basis for Risley’s
tables on social groupings in the different racially identified regions. But,
as the Census commissioner for Madras pointed out, even these three
criteria (which for the Madras Presidency excluded the acceptance of
food and water) did not have that universal applicability to all parts of
the Madras Presidency alone, let alone the other regions. The “Idigas,”
who are Telugu toddy drawers figure higher in the ranking than the
“Tiyans” who are also toddy drawers but from Malabar. The gradations
of pollution that are observed also made the distinction difficult, particu-
larly between groups such as “Sat Sudras” and “Sudras who employ
Brahmans as purohits but whose touch only pollutes to a slight degree.”
The Census commissioner for Madras noted, that a wide variety of
circumstances had to be considered before placing a caste in either of the
above groups, and came to the conclusion that an “attempt to arrange all
the castes in the Presidency in the absolute order of the social estimation
in which they are held would be a difficult and invidious task.” 65 He was
of course perspicacious to point out that, even if it were possible to so
arrange, there were further subdivisions within each group, splitting into
different endogamous divisions, and sometimes exogamous sections
within endogamous divisions, all making the internal construction of
these groups very difficult as there was “no rule or system running
through these subdivisions, and they were usually founded merely upon
a territorial basis.” 66 Also the accretion of castes through mixed unions,
through anuloma and pratiloma marriages, makes the classificatory frame-
work unstable across regions and over time. 67 There was further a group-
ing of castes, peculiar to the Tamil country that did not fit into a system of
vertical classification, and which the 1911 Census Commissioner, Malo-
ny, deemed as utterly senseless to European eyes. This was the division
into the Right and Left Hand Castes, and is associated with contests for
precedence in social matters, with the further complexity that in the case
of two inferior castes, the “Pullies” and the Leatherworkers, the male and
female members belong to different groups. 68
At the time of the Lahore Conference on Ethnography in 1885, Denzil
Ibbetson, J. C. Nesfield, and Herbert Risley sought to clarify some doubts
about ethnographic nomenclature. Accordingly caste was defined as the
largest group based upon “community of occupation” and tribe as the
largest group based upon “real or fictitious community of descent, or
upon common occupation of territory.” Within the “caste” was contained
the “subcaste,” and within the “subcaste” the “section.” The “subcaste”
was the smallest endogamous group, and the “section” was the largest
 Classification and Society 191

exogamous group within the caste, and noted further that “no lower unit
than the ‘section’ need be regarded.” That there could be exceptions to
this neat taxonomic structure of species, genus and phylon was recog-
nized by noting that the limits of “caste” and “subcaste” will occasionally
be identical, there being no smaller endogamous groups included under
a common caste name based on occupation. It was also noted that within
the “tribe,” there were many subdivisions, the smallest endogamous
group called the “subtribe,” which will occasionally coincide with the
tribe; and the largest exogamous group within the tribe called the “sept,”
with no lower unit to be taken into consideration. Divisions intermediate
between the “subtribe” and “sept” were to be termed “clans” and “sub-
clans.” 69
Not only would there be exceptions to this hierarchic grouping, it was
noted that even the caste-tribe dichotomy was not that rigid. There could
be cases in which the two types run into each other, “the caste based
upon occupation being made up of tribes or tribal fragments based upon
community of descent.” In these cases, it noted, “the terminology of each
type will be followed so far as the organization stands upon the same
basis as the type, and no further.” The note also explained that in many
cases, the Brahmanical gotras have been adopted or imposed upon castes
and tribes in addition to their proper caste or tribal divisions, and that in
those instances the gotra was not what was wanted but the organic divi-
sions and subdivisions of the caste and tribe, generally called got by the
people themselves as distinguished from gotra in the strict Brahmanical
sense. Here too, there were the exceptions, as occasionally these organic
divisions and the gotras were identical, but where they were distinct,
several gotras ran through the same got division or the same gotra through
several gots, but their identification was not difficult as the people them-
selves often did not know the gotra, their being used only by the officiat-
ing Brahman priests. 70
A set of twenty-seven questions to identify the essential traits of each
of the castes and tribes followed their note of suggestions clarifying the
ethnographic nomenclature. The inquiry ranged from marriage practices,
origin of the caste, whether settled or wandering, admission of outsiders
into the fold, practice of infant and adult marriage, polygamy and poly-
andry, marriage ceremony, widow remarriage, permittance of divorce,
inheritance practices, religion and forms of worship, disposal of dead,
employment of Brahmin priests, propitiation of ancestors, totemism, the
castes’ belief as to their original occupation, details of occupations prac-
ticed, prevalence of prostitution, dietary habits, the relationship with oth-
er castes as to eating, drinking, and smoking. The instructions took care
that the answers to all these questions were properly authorized by “gha-
taks, genealogists, heads of panchayats, or . . . any hereditary official,” it
only took care to establish the authenticity of a custom, tradition or prac-
tice. The more difficult problem of the quantum of information that must
192 Chapter 5

have come forth on the wide range of issues for all the castes would have
dismayed even the most skilled in fitting a taxonomic structure to them.
The other problem was that there were constant changes going on day
by day in the customs of the subdivisions of each caste, and these affected
the social position of the members, even of a caste change, or the emer-
gence of a new caste. The adoption of Brahmanical customs of infant
marriage and vegetarianism by one section of a caste, the phenomenon
popularized by Indian sociologist M. N. Srinivas as “Sanskritization” and
to which ample illustrations are provided in the early census reports, will
in due course raise the status of the caste in the social estimation. New
castes evolve not only through the adoption of the customs of the superi-
or castes, but owing to changes in the occupation as a common occupa-
tion will combine members of different castes into a new caste over time,
even if Molony, the 1911 census commissioner of Madras exaggerated
when he observed, “the idea of innate superiority or inferiority is being
exploded from underneath,” and that “Paraiyan Brahmans” may mani-
fest themselves in a few decades.
If the early censuses exhibited optimism about the possibility of clas-
sifying and enumerating castes, the later censuses recognized the com-
plexity of that task even while attempting to do so. The project of compil-
ing glossaries of castes and tribes evolved out of this difficulty. Risley’s
survey of Bengal published in four volumes as the Tribes and Castes of
Bengal; and subsequent glossaries of communities under the generic title
of Tribes and Castes were published between 1896 and 1916 for North-
Western Provinces, Southern India, Punjab and Noth-Western Provinces,
and the Central Provinces sought to investigate the defining features of
each caste and tribe by which they could be identified as a discrete group
and be enumerated. The 1891 Census report for the Madras Presidency
carried a Caste Index indicating all the recorded subcastes for each of the
main castes. A Tamil cultivating caste group Ambalakkaran had a total of
167,421 members and were divided into twenty-five subcastes. 71 Another
cultivating caste, Agamudaiyan, which though the 1901 glossary indicated
had depleted considerably in the previous thirty years having probably
risen in the social scale and calling themselves as Vellalas, had neverthe-
less 234 subcastes listed under it in the 1891 Caste Index, with the further
problem of a not inconsiderable repetition of subcastes between two ma-
jor caste groups. 72 By the time of the 1911 census the need to contain
them in fewer and fewer subcastes was recognized, and the 1911 chapter
on Caste in the report of the Madras Presidency opened with the state-
ment that there were “479 sets of people, each wearing a distinctive la-
bel,” a not inconsiderable reduction given the fact that the 1891 index had
over 800 subcastes for just Kapus and Vellalas, and noted that this formid-
able total would have “swollen indefinitely, were the titles returned by
each and every person duly recorded.” 73
 Classification and Society 193

At least in the later census years, the Census officials were aware of
the effects of their classificatory exercise, as Middleton, the Census Super-
intendent for Punjab, at the 1921 Census noted:
Caste in itself was rigid among the higher castes, but malleable
amongst the lower. We pigeon-holed every one by caste, and if we
could not find a true caste for them, labelled them with the name of an
hereditary occupation. . . . Government’s passion for labels and pigeon-
holes has led to a crystallization of the caste system, which except
amongst the aristocratic castes, was really very fluid under indigenous
rule. 74

THEORIES OF CASTE

Every attempt at classifying castes sought to justify the classificatory

frame by invoking theories of the origins of caste, and these provided the
conceptual basis for characterizing social and economic change. Theories
of caste were caught between functionalist and metaphysical explana-
tions, and both explanations placed Europe in a superior position.
Whereas the functionalist explanation did not grant a uniqueness to the
caste system and saw it merely the outcome of a division of labor with a
rather slow differentiation process, not unlike Europe’s past; the meta-
physical explanation along with its emphasis on the racial origins
granted to the caste system its uniqueness among all other civilizations.
In drawing a comparison between the colonial present and Europe’s past
as regards the division of labor, the functionalist explanation denied co-
evalness and marked Europe as progressive, while the metaphysical ex-
planation by conferring uniqueness orientalized the caste system.
Denzil Ibbetson and J. C. Nesfield, credited as being the originators of
the application of the sociological method to the study of caste, traced its
origins to occupational divisions. Nesfield’s Brief View of the Caste System
of the N. W. Provinces and Oudh published in 1885 proposed that long
before castes came into existence, there was a social division of labor and
the hereditary classes were “simply the concrete embodiments of these
successive stages of culture which have marked the industrial develop-
ment of mankind in every part of the world,”and these were converted to
castes by the Brahmans who formulated the rule for the first time that the
name and status of the Brahman could be inherited only by Brahman
parentage on both sides, thus adding the principle of marriage unionship
to that of functional unionship. 75 He, however, emphatically denied the
racial origins of caste. For Ibbetson, the institution of caste in India was
similar to the guild institutions all over the world and caste was a social
rather than a religious institution and it had no necessary relationship
whatever with the Hindu religion, other than the fact that under it “cer-
tain ideas and customs common to all primitive nations” had been devel-
194 Chapter 5

oped and perpetuated to an unusual degree; that the four-fold caste clas-
sification of Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya, and Sudras was quite anachron-
istic, and that the number of castes which can be classed under any one or
under none of the four heads was almost innumerable, and that nothing
could be “more variable and more difficult to define than caste.” 76
Exploring the origins of caste afforded the opportunity of recasting
the mythic past into a historical one drawing from Orientalist knowledge,
as when Ibbetson noted the two distinct epochs in the post-Vedic history
of Hindu nations. The earlier one of the Brahmanas and the Upanishads
was one in which Hinduism was a single and comparatively simple
creed, during which caste distinctions were primarily based upon occu-
pations but in which there existed considerable flexibility for castes, and
individuals could rise from one caste to another. In the later epoch of the
Puranas and Tantras, the caste system became strict and occupation as-
sumed a cardinal importance. The hereditary nature of occupation be-
came a feature only later when Brahmanism substituted Hinduism, a
phenomenon clarified by Ibbetson in the simple sentence—“In the earlier
epoch the priest was always a Brahman; in the later the Brahman was
always a priest.” Noting that the contemporary period was not very dif-
ferent from the early phase as caste restrictions made change in the up-
ward direction infinitely slow and more difficult, Ibbetson remarked:
As in all other countries and among all other nations, the graduations
of the social scale are fixed; but society is not solid but liquid, and
portions of it are continually rising and sinking and changing their
position as measured by that scale. . . . There cannot be the slightest
doubt that in a few generations the materials for a study of caste as an
institution will be infinitely less complete than they are even now. 77
Colonial knowledge needed to unravel the puzzle of the caste-
occupation nexus not only to explain the origin of caste but also to ensure
the supply of skilled and unskilled labor as new industrial activity was
spurred by the colonial capitalist development in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. Both at the 1871 and 1881 Census castes were clas-
sified under occupational groups under seventeen main and 254 sub-
groups in the Madras Presidency, an arrangement that did not distin-
guish the high castes from the low. Again at the 1891 Census for instance,
the castes were grouped into the functional classes of Agricultural and
Pastoral, Professional, Commercial, Artisans and Village menials, Va-
grants, and Races and Indefinite titles; each of these classes were divided
into many subclasses of occupations. The classifying officers were given
to understand clearly that the occupation to which the caste in question
was to be credited was not necessarily that actually exercised by the caste
in the present day but that which was assigned to it by tradition.
 Classification and Society 195

The 1891 Census Commissioner for India J. A. Baines, while admitting

that the general scheme of arrangement was devoid of pretension to eth-
nological order noted;
an arrangement purely according to the position occupied by the caste
in social estimation would only be possible for each province or state
taken separately, as there is but little uniformity in this respect if we
regard the circumstances of the country as a whole. . . . There are,
however, obvious flaws in the grouping itself, due in great measure to
the adoption of functional classification to an excessive extent. 78
Except the lowest class, in all the others the members of the caste were
seen to diverge widely from the means of subsistence from which their
caste appellation took its name, and the divergence was often indicated
by the establishment of a fresh subdivision, higher or lower according to
the occupation in question. In the 1901 Census the functional classifica-
tion of castes was given up for classification by social precedence, and it
noted, “a really scientific classification requires full materials from the
fields of early Vernacular literature, history, folklore, customs, archaeolo-
gy, epigraphy and anthropometry, and none of these have yet been
thoroughly explored.” 79
The question of the racial origins of caste was framed at the intersec-
tion of the interests of Victorian anthropology and the issue of “race” that
dominated late nineteenth-century ethnological thinking, and the enu-
merative concerns of the colonial state. What propelled a significant
amount of inquiry was not merely classifying and counting castes to
serve the administrative requirements but the attempt to understand all
aspects of the ethnology of the people. According to the racial theory of
caste, the Dravidians who were the original inhabitants of southern India
and the hill tribes of central India encountered the invading Aryans from
the north who then settled and perpetuated the caste system arising out
of the intermixing of the races and through the strict rules of endogamy,
permitting and prohibiting such intermixing. The extent of Aryan blood
determined if one was a Brahman or a Kshatriya, while the conquered
tribes and indigenous populations were absorbed in the lower rungs of
the caste system. Those who fled from the invading Aryans and settled in
the forest regions were considered as “tribes.” 80
Risley emphasized the racial origins of caste and attempted to get a
correlative map of the two. Tracing the racial origins of castes proved
formidable with different ideas and classifications prevailing, more espe-
cially in southern India with the contending Aryan and Dravidian per-
spectives. The Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency by
Maclean published in 1885, noted that there were three views of caste
classification, what it termed as “the philosophical, the traditional clas-
sification of the Brahmans, and the popular,” and admitted that the sub-
ject was then still indeterminate. The Manual has a copious chapter “Eth-
196 Chapter 5

nology,” a representative sample of ethnological writings of that period.

Its section on “Race” first grapples with the term “Hindoo” noting that
there is no fixed meaning to the term. Whereas the Europeans used the
term to designate all those who were not “foreigners” to the country and
by that they meant “Mussalmans, Parsees, Europeans, & c.,” the native
population excluded the hill and out-castes but included Jains and Bud-
dhists whose religions were not Brahmanical. Setting aside the term
“Hindoo” as incapable of designating race they instead opted for “pre-
Tamulian, Tamulian, Aryan and foreign” in which the first two was
grouped as “Dravidian.” The discussion is then followed by a long foot-
note purporting to be a “Sketch Account of the Place to be assigned to
South Indian Races among the Races of Mankind.” Noting that it is neces-
sary to get to “the first principles” connected with the subject both be-
cause of the “want of definition” and the “cross divisions” in terminology
arising out of the adoption of different methods of classification, it at-
tempted to show the place assigned to the South Indian races in the
leading classifications of Blumenbach, Retzius, Prichard, Latham, Agas-
siz, Huxley, and Haeckel.
That a Manual on Administration should contain detailed notes on eth-
nology ought to be a surprise. But if we recall Latham’s classification and
his emphasis on the influence of different races on the history of the
world in “moral and material” terms, the underlying agenda of ethologi-
cal governance is quite obvious. Nineteenth-century evolutionary pro-
gressivism saw material and moral progress as the two sides of a coin; for
the control of external nature, on which material progress depended, also
required the control of nature within. 81 This posited an inherent tension
between human reason and human biology. Latham’s classification of the
races in “moral” terms was the association of races in different stages of
civilization with different degrees to which the “nature within” had been
controlled or amenable to control.
This Victorian ideology of controlling “nature within” informed the
administrative practices, legal structures, and measures of social control.
While the “civilizing mission” of colonialism attempted to lift up the so-
called “degraded civilizations” in the scale of progress, “Improvement”
as liberal rationality of governance sought to mould the character of indi-
viduals and communities so that they would be able to govern them-
selves once “improved.” Customs and habits shape dispositions, and
“improvement” attempted to reshape dispositions. Although habits lack
moral or ethical significance for the individual concerned, as habits are
devoid of “will,” they play a significant role in the cultivation of charac-
ter. Melanie White has noted that only when habits become organized in
relation to a normative scale that distinguishes “good” habits from “bad”
habits that they come to reflect usually shared claims about the kinds of
dispositions that constitute the good person or the good life. 82 The liberal
rationality of ethological governance motivated in part the compilation of
 Classification and Society 197

“customs” and “habits” in the glossaries and ethnographic accounts of

castes and tribes. Thus the ethnological interests and administrative
interests were enmeshed, although ethnological interest was also to be-
come an independent area of interest. 83
At the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists held in 1892 (the
non-statutory one), Risley presented an account of the state of ethnologi-
cal research in India, 84 reiterating what he had noted at the meeting of the
British Association in 1889 that India offers to the scientific inquirer
“great masses of anthropological data” for the races were in “full vigor,”
and the caste system tended to “maintain a certain persistence of types;”
and that “observations can be multiplied, and repeated, and tested over
large areas of country.” Noting that the “open-air bureaucracy” by which
India was governed provided the best agency for carrying on anthropo-
logical and ethnographic inquiries, he enthusiastically appealed for a
“more systematic study” of anthropology in India, at which suggestion
the British Association formed the “Committee on the Habits, Customs,
Physical Characteristics, and Religions of the Natives of India.” 85
Risley’s anthropometric research led to the construction of eight indi-
ces and eleven measurements for twenty-three tribes and castes which
were published in the second volume of Risley’s Anthropometric Data and
formed the fourth volume of The Tribes and Castes of Bengal. Much to
Risley’s disappointment the government of Madras, in April 1892, in-
formed the government of India that it was not possible for it to “arrange
for any systematic prosecution of inquiries of the kind.” Especially as the
Presidency was “almost wholly untouched” and was likely to be “pecu-
liarly rich in survivals of primitive culture,” Risley hoped that the Con-
gress of Orientalists and the Indian Committee of the British Association
would be able to prevail upon the Madras government. In 1901 when
Risley was the director of ethnography for India, he lost no moment to
appoint Edgar Thurston, who was the director of Madras Museum, as the
superintendent of ethnography for the Madras Presidency whose zeal for
anthropometry was so widely known and it was even once remarked that
“he seized every man, woman, or child” who visited the Museum in
order to measure them. 86
Risley hoped that interesting results bearing on the speculations of the
origin of the Aryans would be obtained from the region of the Punjab.
The preliminary measurements in Lahore done by a Civil Hospital As-
sistant under Risley’s supervision in 1887-88 on nine tribes and castes
appeared to correlate with the measurements he claimed to have done on
a number of Kafirs, Hunzas, and Nagars. In trying to validate the claims
that these ‘wild tribes’ were descendants of Alexander, Risley noted;
Among the men measured by me were two Nagar Chiefs with fair
complexions, light brown eyes, eyelashes, and moustaches, and limbs
of perfect proportions, who looked as if the figures on a Greek vase had
198 Chapter 5

by art-magic been endowed with life. They claimed descent from no

less a person than Alexander himself, and one of them bore the name of
Iskandar Khan. 87
Racial taxonomy and the application of anthropometric methods for clas-
sifying races superseded the taxonomy based on philology, and Risley’s
The Tribes and Castes of Bengal followed the work of Dalton’s Descriptive
Ethnology of Bengal, which was based on philological taxonomy. William
Crooke, the representative to the Oriental Congress from the Northwest-
ern provinces pointed out that the classification based on linguistic differ-
ences tended to exaggerate the differences between groups that were not
physically very different. 88 Whereas in Bengal some of the tribes were
classified as Kolarian and some as Dravidian by the philological meth-
ods, anthropometry proved that distinction untenable, and the term Ko-
larian was replaced by Dravidian for the tribes.
The British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS)
pushed for the inclusion of ethnological data as part of the Census. While
their suggestion did not meet with accord in the 1891 census, the 1901
census made it a part of the census operation, largely due to its promo-
tion by Risley. The letter that the BAAS sent to the secretary of state for
India suggesting the incorporation of ethnological data in the Census
noted that it would be a “great step” toward establishing a “uniform”
method of ethnographical observation, and would furnish the basis for a
true estimate of the number and distribution of the tribes in question, and
thus powerfully contribute to a “sound classification of the races in In-
dia.” It also wanted photographs of “typical” individuals of the various
races, although at that time there was in the India Office library sixty
portfolios of nearly 6,000 photographs and other pictures of “Indian peo-
ple, Indian buildings and scenes, Indian crafts and other Indian ob-
jects.” 89
Such efforts and suggestions led to the census publication of a volume
in the form of appendices Ethnography of India by Risley that sought to
provide anthropometric measurements of the different racial types upon
which the caste chapter was based, the social grouping in the different
regions in which the races were distributed as well as a series of maps
illustrating the distribution of tribes and castes by physical types, a series
of accounts from different sources on the origins and socio-cultural fea-
tures of different castes and tribes, as well as the theories of caste pro-
pounded by Nesfield, Ibbetson, and Senart. The anthropometric meas-
urements were confined to the construction of three indices—the cephalic
index (dealing with the head size), the nasal index (showing the propor-
tion of the nose), and the orbito-nasal index (on the relative prominence
of root of nose). Although the number of subjects for each racial type was
small, and there is no indication of the nature of sampling technique, the
Mean and the Range (a measure of dispersion around the Mean) was
 Classification and Society 199

used to typify each race. This was done for the different tribes and castes
in each racial type. The colorful ethnological map indicating the distribu-
tion by physical types divided the subcontinent into seven racial types—
the Mongoloid, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Mongolo-Dravidian, Aryo-Dra-
vidian, Scytho-Dravidian, and Turko-Iranian. 90 Risley observed that if a
series of castes were taken in Bengal, Bihar, the United Provinces, or
Madras and arranged them in the order of the average nasal index with
the finest nose at the top, the order corresponded with the accepted order
of social precedence. 91 Risley believed that caste endogamy preserved the
physical differences between various castes, endorsing Dirk’s opinion
that Risley’s views on caste not merely marked his “imperial conceit” but
that he “fashioned a peculiar symbiosis between the racial anxieties of
imperial Britain and the ritual anxieties of the Brahmans and other higher
castes at the turn of the century.” 92
Thirty years later, at the 1931 census, Risley’s conclusions were found
unsatisfactory and open to doubt. The archeological evidence from Mo-
henjodaro had disproved his conception of India as isolated from the rest
of Asia and inhabited by barbarous tribes until the Aryan invasion of
circa 1500 B.C. Also his explanations that brachycephaly in the west of
India was due to Scythian invasion in historic times was called into ques-
tion on the ground that the population so introduced was never so nu-
merous as to make so dramatic a change in the somatic characteristics of
the population, and brachycephaly in Bengal as Mongolian was also
found to be untenable. 93 Not only were some of his conclusions ques-
tioned, but his methods as well. Although he had prepared a book on
Anthropometric Measurements and taught the measurers himself both the
techniques of measurement and the use of instruments, his method of
choosing subjects raised doubts for serious statistical analysis. He had
advised the rejection of men of “very black complexion with broad de-
pressed noses,” and “of very fair complexion with high-caste type of
features” in samples respectively of the upper and lower castes. While it
was felt that a measure of caution was necessary to exclude spurious
cases from the samples, it was felt that there was no justification for
excluding persons on grounds of physical appearance alone, and was
seen as an attempt to set up a preconceived “standard type for each
caste.” 94 Also the number of measurements and what was measured of
each individual in different regions in Risley’s survey was not uniform.
Although the International Agreement of Monaco set standards for meas-
urement based on the system propounded by the French anthropologists
Broca and Topinard, and many of Risley’s techniques of measurement
conformed to that, there were many measurements that were not spec-
ified in it as well. For instance whether the nasal root should be the
deepest point of the nasal depression as Risley took it to be, or whether it
should correspond to the median point in the fronto-nasal stature as
Topinard seemed to indicate, came up for discussion. Above all, Karl
200 Chapter 5

Pearson showed that there were errors in Risley’s calculations of means

and indices. 95
By the time of the 1931 Census new developments had taken place in
anthropometry. Although there was then no international agreement for
recording the shades of the colors of the skin, eye and hair, a number of
scales had been developed such as von Laushan’s scale for skin colors,
Fischer’s Haarfarbentafel for hair color, and Martin’s Augenfarbentafel
for eyes, and not all of these were necessarily suitable for the predomi-
nantly brown Indian population. Similarly statistical tests for the degree
of resemblance and divergence of two races were developed, of which
Karl Pearson’s Co-efficient of Racial Likeness gained wide acceptance.
Although recognized as the best available criterion of racial divergence, it
was noted to be not an “absolute test, but only a rough measure of how
far on the given data significant resemblance or divergence can be as-
serted.” 96 Modifications of the Co-efficient to take into account both the
sample size and the probable error, led to the choice of the standard
deviation for the largest sample of living subjects as the population stan-
dard, which happened to be that of a Swedish group, and as the standard
deviation of the Nagar Brahmins were to approximate that of the Swed-
ish large sample group, it was chosen as the norm to compare the other
racial pairs.
The need to establish resemblance and divergence was part of the
endeavor to trace the origins, and to understand the caste system, espe-
cially whether all Brahmans were Aryan descendants, and the nature of
the racial movements in southern India. To explore these issues, the 1931
Census restricted itself to groups among whom the chances of miscegen-
ation would be the least, and those with whom such blood mixing could
have taken place. Under the social conditions, this translated into a com-
parative study of the somatic features of Brahmans with the castes next in
order of precedence, though it also included the lowest castes and the
aboriginal groups. In the attempt to produce “racial types” among the
upper and the lower castes, the intermediate castes were omitted as not
of the same strategic importance. 97 But the identification of subjects for
measurements was not all that easy due to the lack of uniformity of castes
in all regions, and of the tendency of the lower castes to impersonate as a
higher caste.
These measurements and statistical techniques provide interesting in-
sights into the ways by which identities and differences were established.
Whereas the identification of caste by “racial types” veered more to es-
tablishing identities between different groups, typification of castes by
social factors resisted such moves and remained stubborn with the differ-
ences. The conclusions provided by anthropometry and Pearson’s statis-
tical methods to establish incontrovertible truths about the origins of
races and castes in India were stated only with some degree of probabil-
ity. 98 Anthropometry resulted in the reconstruction of racial histories,
 Classification and Society 201

and archaeological evidence from pre-historic sites became one source of

evidence. Discovering the sites and remains of Neolithic, Chalcolithic,
and megalithic man in different regions were taken up by colonialist
scholars, and the Archaeological Survey of India since the 1860s, unmind-
ful of the fact that they dug up graves and burial sites and opened burial
urns; and the annual reports of the Archaeological Survey of India kept a
continuous update of all the finds.
Although racial discourse dominated the anthropometric researches,
and much of those classifications did not in any direct manner serve the
purposes of administration, it appeared important to an understanding
of the origins of the caste system. If in the colonial context concepts of
race were deployed quite instrumentally, Hindu nationalists too seized
upon them to serve their purpose. Viceroy Dufferin observed in 1887 that
the diversity of races in India and the presence of a powerful Mohame-
dan community were undoubtedly favourable to the maintanence of Brit-
ish rule. The Aryan invasion theory by minimizing the racial difference
between the European rulers and the higher caste Indians provoked anx-
iety among the colonial rulers as evident from Vicreoy Lytton’s remark,
“[G]reat mischief has been done by the deplorable tendency of second-
rate Indian officials and superficial English philanthropists to ignore the
essential and insurmountable distinctions of race qualities, which are
fundamental to our position in India.” 99 These racial theories served the
Hindu nationalists of the Arya Samaj in the early twentieth century to
regain self-esteem by claiming that their Hindu ancestors once dominat-
ed the world. The influential ideologues of Hindu nationalism Veer Sa-
varkar and Golwalkar extended these ideas of race and territory in their
conceptions of both the “Hindu” and the “nation.” 100

CLASSIFICATION BY RELIGION

Religion, like caste, was a marker of “Otherness” as is obvious from the

fact that whereas the British censuses exhibited either a disinterest in
religion or a reluctance to enumerate by religious categories, it was a
fundamental category in the Indian censuses. Like the caste classifica-
tions, the census attempts to classify by religion also encountered similar
problems, although much in the same way as caste, it was an opportunity
to enfold within it a strong ethnological orientation to describe the cul-
tures and to trace the changes in the culture. By the early nineteenth
century, both through Orientalist textual knowledge and through obser-
vations of religious practices by Christian missionaries, the colonial ad-
ministrators and the British in India were aware of the heterogeneity of
beliefs and practices among the Hindus. 101 Walter Hamilton had in his
1820 Geographical, Statistical and Historical Description of Hindostan and the
Adjacent Countries derided the religious plurality of the Hindus by re-
202 Chapter 5

marking that “a little red paint smeared over a stone, a lump of clay, or
the stump of a tree converts it into a god worshipped by the lower classes
and saluted by the upper with much apparent devotion.” 102 Many sur-
veyors engaged in the trignometrical surveys in the first half of the nine-
teenth century also made similar observations. According to Ronald In-
den, “Hinduism” became one of the master tropes for understanding and
controlling a mass of population that claimed some shared religious be-
lief and yet followed widely differing practices. 103 Needless to say, this
master trope contained the potential for reification in large-scale surveys
of enumeration and classification such as the census that classifies ac-
cording to discrete religious categories, thus attempting to straitjacket
ecumenical diversity into a unified and rigid framework.
Recently, both Norbert Peabody and Sumit Guha have provided evi-
dence of precolonial and early colonial efforts at enumerating and regu-
lating communities by religion. The Mughal ruler Aurangazeb imposed a
poll tax on non-Muslims that could have been possible only if the com-
munities were enumerated. The Maratha rulers from the mid-eighteenth
century onward sought to maintain the boundaries of communities bas-
ing on the ideals of their founding ruler Shivaji, and a Maratha official in
the late eighteenth century intervened when it was found that there was
intermarriage between the tailors group and indigo-dyers group, who
presumably were Muslims and Hindus. 104 Peabody has shown that
household enumeration by Munhata Nainsi of the towns of Marwar in
1664, though local and segmented, was caste-sensitive in which Muslims
were regarded as one among the castes. The functional requirement of
such a household inventory was attuned to the taxation needs of the time,
wherein hearth taxes and other occupation related taxes like wheel tax,
anvil tax and tax on carded cotton were imposed. Peabody notes that
such castewise listing of households was characteristic of all Khanasumar-
is, the traditional statistical system that was prevalent in most regions.
Comparing Nainsi’s household inventory with a later colonial enumera-
tion of Boileau, the 1835 census of Merta and Pokharana, Peabody has
noted that in Boileau’s census the first-order classification of nonpurify-
ing castes and purifying castes is replaced by an alphabetic listing of all
castes, and the first-order classification for Boileau becomes “Hindus”
and “Muslims.” In the language of taxonomic classification, whereas in
Nainsi’s census, Hindu castes and Muslim castes were made to differ at
the level of species; in the Boileau classification, they were made to differ
at the level of genus. Peabody observes, “through this re-ordering of the
data, Boileau took a very real, but relatively narrow basis of distinction
and made it far wider.” 105 Although it is not clear on what basis he claims
it as a “relatively narrow basis of distinction,” he may be on the mark
when he notes that this move was reproduced countless times in subse-
quent enumerations which would have had some consequences for com-
munal relations in the later period.
 Classification and Society 203

At the 1871 Census, the first all-India one, the census officials sought
to collect only eight pieces of information: age, name, caste, religion, type
of dwelling, race or nationality, literacy, and infirmities. Confident that
they would have no difficulties in defining Hinduism, religion was one
among the three questions with pre-coded response categories. Provin-
cial commissioners were instructed that every individual should be
classed into one of the five categories—Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Mus-
lim, and Other. Several provinces prepared substantive checklists for
each religion so as to enable enumerators to identify the religion of the
respondent. While for Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim there was at least
one unambiguous substantive characteristic such as reverence for Bud-
dha, or Jesus, or Allah, there was no such unique characteristic for the
Hindu. Different provinces had different substantive characteristics on
the checklist such as reading the Vedas, worship of Siva, receiving in-
struction from a Brahman or caste affiliation, but all of these were not
sufficiently discriminatory or inclusive of all Hindus and had to be
dropped. Aware that the definition of the Hindu had to be relaxed to be
more inclusive, the category of “Hindu” in the Madras Presidency in-
cluded “all the aboriginal and mountain tribes, whether they observed
caste distinctions or not.” 106 In Bombay, enumerators were instructed
that “all believers in the Vedas must be entered as Hindoo, and so, too,
must those wild tribes whose original religions are lost, and who now, to
all intents and purposes are Hindoo by religion but not by race.” 107 The
definition of a Hindu used in the Bombay Presidency was even vague as
a Hindu was anyone “who simply worship [s] some god or goddess
without knowing anything of the theology.” 108 In the province of My-
sore, the 1871 census recorded the sub-sects of Hindu whose faith and
practices differ from each other such as “Saivas,” “Lingayets,” “Madh-
vacharis,” “Ramanujas,” “Swami Narayens,” “Wallabhacharyas,” “Kabir
Panthis,” and “Brijmargis.” The Coorg Census of 1871 also listed the
“Jain” and “Coorgs” with other subsects of Hindus.
At the 1881 Census it was resolved that the subsects of Hinduism
would not be recorded though the definition of “Hindu” eluded census
officials for there was no single identifiable characteristic to qualify one
as a Hindu. For every potential Hindu trait, there were groups of popula-
tion that were exceptions. Yet the category “Hinduism” remained even if
many census officials were dissatisfied with it. At the 1891 Census, the
Arya Samaj, a Hindu revivalist organization then in north India, raised
objections to the category “Hinduism” as it felt it to be a negative conno-
tation ascribed by the Muslim rulers of those living beyond the River
Indus, and who did not belong to the Muslim faith. Although its appeal
to reject the term from the census schedule was rejected, it did ask its
followers to identify themselves as “Arya.” By the time of the 1901 Cen-
sus, the category and enumeration of “Hindus” became more politicized
as some among Muslims contested that an overly expansive notion of
204 Chapter 5

“Hindu” included those practicing some form of animistic and other mi-
nor religions that inflated the numbers of the majoritarian group, with a
corresponding decrease in the proportion of Muslims in the population,
which they felt was unfavorable to the Muslims in the context of propor-
tional representation to Legislative Councils that was to take effect as also
in the distribution of educational resources and other privileges. 109 Antic-
ipating an intensification of dissent at the 1911 Census, the Imperial Cen-
sus commissioner E. A. Gait sought to tweak the categories suggesting
first that provincial census commissioners “report as to the criteria which
might be taken to determine whether or not a man is a genuine Hindu in
the popular acceptation of the term” (and that they might consider intro-
ducing a new category “debatable Hindus.” 110 As most provincial com-
missioners were not pleased with the category “debatable Hindus,” it
was withdrawn. Regarding the criteria for determining a genuine “Hin-
du,” some census officials felt that race or the caste test would determine
who is a “Hindu,” while others opined that it was “religious beliefs and
deeds.” The Census commissioner had relative omnipotence to define the
category, as he rejected each of these suggestions but combined them all,
and defined a “Hindu” as one who behaved like a Hindu (worshipping
certain deities or claiming allegiance to a caste), looked like a Hindu (by
being of Aryan descent), or lived among Hindus. Michael Haan observes
that this definition marked the emergence, at least in the census, “of the
idea that being Hindu meant being Indian.” 111 The 1921 Census Commis-
sioner endorsed this definition noting “Hindu is an unsatisfactory cate-
gory in the classification of religion, but one that would remain. In the
first place, Hinduism is not only or essentially a religion. The term also
implies country, race and a social organization.” 112 Noting that an Indian
journal has suggested that all Indians should call themselves Hindu, the
Census commissioner Marten further observed “[T]his extreme territorial
view of the term Hindu emphasizes an underlying feeling that, apart
from those who are definitely assignable to some other religious commu-
nity, every man born into a recognized Indian racial or social group has
an indigenous right to be or become a Hindu of some kind, and it is on
some such vague and almost negative conception as this that the census
classification of Hindus has necessarily to be based.” 113 What for Marten
was an “almost negative conception,” namely “the indigenous right to be
or become a Hindu of some kind” has evolved into a contentious issue of
religious conversion in postcolonial India.
The difficulty in classifying “Hindus” favored the colonial administra-
tion, as granting an autonomous identity to the majority population
would have posed a menacing threat to them, while it was less risky for
them to focus on local customs and castes to make sense of Indian soci-
ety. 114 Such difficulty in classifying a “Hindu” has in recent times led to a
vigourous debate, much like in the case of caste, as to whether “Hindu-
ism” itself is a construct of the colonial censuses. 115 The lack of consensus
 Classification and Society 205

among colonial census officials over a substantial definition of “Hindu-

ism” would suggest that colonial administrators could not successfully
construct it. The debate is, however, less about the category itself, al-
though from the census problems it may appear to be so, and is more
about the construction of “Hindu” identity of a large aggregate of popu-
lation so as to emerge as a pan-Indian identity. The precolonial and early
colonial enumerations discussed earlier indicate that communities could
indeed be identified and enumerated at a local level based on their self-
representation, as “Hindu” and “Muslim.” Drawing evidence from in-
scriptions from medieval Andhra Pradesh, Cynthia Talbot argues that
supra-local identities as “Hindu” and “Muslim” evolved historically with
the growing encounters occasioned by Muslim invasions. 116 While the
construction of self-other identity is evident in the inscriptions of the
defeated Hindu kingdom wherein the alien conquorers are presented as
evil forces, such differentiation was not based on religious identity as
much as it was the construction of ethnic identity through a process that
varied over time.
The census provided a new conceptualization of religion “as a com-
munity, an aggregate of individuals united by a formal definition and
given characteristics based on qualified data.” 117 Religions thus became
communities that could be mapped, counted, and compared; and nor
was it a static concept as with successive censuses the communities could
be sized and reshaped with new definitions. This has in the view of many
scholars resulted in the construction of identity based on religion, in
which enumerated religious communities are constituted as “majority”
and “minority,” impacting on communal relations since the late nine-
teenth century, especially as political representation in governing institu-
tions became a contentious issue. 118 Attesting that minority concerns
over statistics was not only about competing claims to resources but in
fact about competing claims to truth, M. A. Jinnah as president of the
Muslim League took the public stand at the 1941 Census that Muslims
were not a “minority” but constituted a “nation,” which fuelled the de-
mand for a separate Muslim state culminating in the partition of the
country with the formation of Pakistan.

OCCUPATIONAL CLASSIFICATION

The caste-occupation nexus having been proven to be not as rigid as the

functional theory of caste would suggest, the classification and tabulation
of occupations assumed greater significance than would otherwise have
been conceded to them. A committee appointed to consider suggestions
for the 1881 Census noted as regards the classification of occupations that
although the 1871 Census returns on occupations was not very helpful,
such information would tend to become more accurate and valuable at
206 Chapter 5

each succeeding census. Noting that there was already a classification of

occupation by William Farr that was used in the British census, even if
open to criticism in some places, which if altered would destroy the basis
of comparison all over the Empire, it helped to secure uniformity in clas-
sification. If caste was to tease the skills of a taxonomist, the classification
of occupations was no less easy. Not only did the circumstances vary so
widely as to make it difficult to frame questions, instructions and illustra-
tions comprehensive enough, but often the terms used were too indefi-
nite to indicate the precise nature of the occupation; or local significations
of terms differed from the usual meaning, and given the enormous
amount of detail to be classified and tabulated, almost every classificato-
ry framework seemed to fall short. 119 J.A. Baines noted in his 1891 Census
Report that although specialization of functions and occupational diffe-
rentiation had not proceeded very far unlike in the advanced countries,
yet “from a census point of view, the very simplicity of this almost exclu-
sively agrestic community has its drawbacks, and the complication that
arises is largely due not to the manifold differentiation of occupations, as
it might be in England, but to their combination.” 120
Even defining a worker was fraught with problems, and the classifica-
tion schemes needed an all-too-fine differentiation of occupations which
given a population with only “rudimentary notions of exactness” that can
fix the time of the day by “when the sun was so many Palmyra trees high
in the heavens,” a clear account of the means of subsistence, particularly
when they were numerous and complex posed a challenge. A person
reporting as being in “cotton business” could be a weaver of cotton
cloths, cotton carpets, cotton tape, cotton-cleaner, cotton-spinner, cotton-
seizer, cotton-dyer, cotton calenderer, fuller, printer, a dealer in cotton,
cotton-cloths, or cotton-thread.
The classification schemes were also at times ahead of what the real
social process would suggest, as for instance differentiation between
“makers” and “sellers” when in fact production and exchange had not
separated into independent spheres, or the trader who deals with many
different commodities with each being assigned places in the classificato-
ry scheme. The schemes were to also display what Hacking has referred
to as a “dynamic nominalism,” i.e., a category coming into existence, as
the person was being made. 121 In other instances, Vernacular terms were
too aggregative and resisted translation into the multiple slots assigned
in the scheme, as the Tamil term Chakkiliyan meaning “cobbler” could be
fitted in the scheme as leather-dyers, shoe, boot, and sandal makers, tan-
ners and curriers, sellers of manufactured leather goods, sellers of hides,
horns, bristles and bones, water-bag, well-bag, bucket, and ghee-pot
makers. Seemingly improbable categories were at times used to record
local phenomenon such as “witches, wizards and cow-poisoners” for
devil-dancers and sorcerers of the West coast. 122 Things cannot be made
the same by giving the same name, though the temptation to do so for
 Classification and Society 207

purposes of comparison is always strong. At the 1891 Census a sugges-

tion was made, as earlier in 1881, to conduct the Census in India synchro-
nously with that of the Britain, “in order to emphasize the imperial char-
acter of the operation.” 123
The decennial censuses were to always evoke the possibility of effect-
ing international comparisons, though the specificities and uniqueness of
national and local situations were to effect restraints on such compari-
sons. But with the diversities in the country, even national level aggrega-
tions of data was considered a fiction, let alone effecting international
comparisons, though the law of large numbers makes such aggregated
data more reliable than village level statistics. J. A. Baines, the 1891 Cen-
sus commissioner, while drafting the General Report for the country
noted:
the main standpoint was the diversity, not the unity, of the conditions
that had to be dealt with, and that India could not be statistically treat-
ed as a single whole, so throughout the work it has been ever an object
to avoid as much as possible the use of the Indian total otherwise than
as a blank wall on which to chalk the differences of the various parts of
the country. By this means it has been possible, no doubt, to collect
certain similarities into something of the nature of a general average,
though not one that can be circumscribed within the crisp conciseness
of an arithmetical expression. The most that can be claimed for it is that
it represents a point from which the divergences on each side are prob-
ably the least. 124
Twenty years later a mere statement of numerical variation, “without
appreciation of the uncertainty of the actual figures, and without an ex-
pert knowledge of the causes which produce such variation” was
deemed as of not much value as ideas of probability and sampling gained
importance. 125

CLASSIFICATION AND GOVERNMENTALITY

All intentional acts are acts under a description, and as new modes of
description come into being, it also brings in consequence new possibil-
ities for action. 126 The new possibilities of governance that were rendered
possible by classifying and enumerating Indian society were premised on
the principles of the modern State, which principles in the European
context since Hobbes has meant the end of civil strife, a government of
laws, a dichotomy between sovereign and subject, and between public
policy and private morality. These enabled the state to intervene in both
the sphere of morality and of politics, first by transforming issues of
morality into social phenomenon, postulating social laws governing be-
havior and modifying the latter through techniques of control, planning
208 Chapter 5

and prediction, and bringing more and more of the sphere of morality
into the former sphere by a process of secularization.
In the colonial context, the institution of the colonial state entailed a
redefinition of the spheres of policy and morality. As individuals existed
not under situations of equality and autonomy but with primordial ties
of caste and were subjected to rule-governed behavior, in fact a kind of
social discipline imposed by the caste communities, it was necessary to
first understand the institution of caste as new forms of political rational-
ities were to undergird practices of governance. Bernard Cohn’s view is
that reducing whole demographic groups to their caste characteristics
was especially attractive to the colonial administrator as “it gave the
illusion of knowing the people; he (the administrator) did not have to
differentiate too much among individual Indians—a man was a Brahman
and a Brahman had certain characteristics.” 127 While caste had existed for
long, there were certainly changes in the form and content of that social
discipline as those seemingly “modern solvents” of the system, i.e., the
institutions, practices, and processes of modernization were to take roots.
From the latter half of the nineteenth century, the railways brought peo-
ple of different castes in close proximity, but other institutions such as the
schools and the prisons were for a long time grappling with the issues of
segregation and desegregation. There were many other instances that
modern life posed for the issue of castes. As British administrators, fol-
lowing the then-widely prevalent practice, used caste names as a mode of
description of persons, there were a large number of governmental
records that gave caste details. The police reports gave details of the caste
of the offender, and the railway risk-note had an entry for caste and
expected every sender of parcels to record their caste. Such caste entries
became a quick and easy way to form a rough estimate of the moral
character of the persons, based on typified understanding of caste
groups. 128 In the post-mutiny period, the categories embedded in cen-
suses, gazetteers, and revenue books, became ever more closely tied to
the administrative concerns of the state. 129 But mere enumeration and
classification of population alone was not sufficient as more information
was needed to “interpret” the statistics, indeed as we have well illustrat-
ed, even to constitute the statistics. Detailed ethnographic notes compiled
as glossaries and gazetteers were needed, and group studies were initiat-
ed to identify those likely to be loyal to the British or not.
In 1881, Ibbetson, the Census commissioner of Punjab observed, “Our
ignorance of the customs and beliefs of the people among whom we
dwell is surely in some respects a reproach to us; for not only does that
ignorance deprive European science of material which it greatly needs,
but it also involves a distinct loss of administrative power to our-
selves.” 130 Summarizing the advantages expected to flow from Risley’s
ethnographic survey, C. E. Buckland, officiating secretary to the govern-
ment of Bengal, wrote:
 Classification and Society 209

The more Government officers know about the religious and social
customs of the people of their districts, the better able they will be to
deal with either the possible social problems of the future, or with the
practical questions arising in their ordinary work, such as the relations
of different castes to the land, their privileges in respect of rent, their
relations to trade, their status in civil society, their internal organiza-
tion, their rules as to marriage and divorce, and as to the giving and
receiving of famine-relief. 131
The statement in the Government of India Resolution at the time of the
announcement of the ethnographic survey of India indicates the political
importance attached to caste, as it noted:
It is unnecessary to dwell at length upon the obvious advantages to
many branches of the administration in this country of an accurate and
well-arranged record of the customs and the domestic and social rela-
tions of the various castes and tribes. The entire framework of native
life in India is made up of groups of this kind, and the status and
conduct of individuals are largely determined by the rules of the group
to which they belong. For the purposes of legislation, of judicial proce-
dure, of famine relief, of sanitation and dealings with epidemic disease,
and of almost every form of executive action, an ethnographic survey
of India, and a record of the customs of the people is as necessary an
incident of good administration as a cadastral survey of the land and a
record of the rights of its tenants. The census provides the necessary
statistics; it remains to bring out and interpret the facts, which lie be-
hind the statistics. 132
Classification of the population through the Census was by no means the
only instance of classifying population, but the decontextualized enumer-
ation, aggregation and systematization afforded by the censuses along
with the mass of ethnographic information collected in the volumes on
“Castes and Tribes,” District Manuals and Gazetteers provided for the
first time the possibility of discursively articulating “society” and social
change that was necessary to report on the “moral and material
progress.”
The classificatory logic borrowed at times from prevalent European
ideas framed policies of colonial rule and defined the behavior of popula-
tions to suit the administrative ends. For instance, British ideas of native
criminality evolved around race, caste and groups in part because preco-
lonial Indian notion of policing and justice was in tandem with the caste
hierarchy as stipulated in the Code of Manu (Manusmriti) wherein of-
fences were defined and punished according to caste, respectability and
social norms. Instances such as prison administration and the administra-
tion of “Thugee” and the so-called criminal tribes required identification,
classification, and enumeration even though the notion of “Thug” lacked
precision and the defining line between “thugee,” dacoity, and highway
robbery was not so clear. 133 Even so, the notion of communities social-
210 Chapter 5

ized into criminal activities did not emerge suddenly in the 1830s but was
coterminous with the start of judicial activities by the Company in Ben-
gal. Many communities across the length and breadth of the country
were identified as criminal communities. 134 Warren Hastings introduced
Article 35 of 1772 which extended punishment for dacoity from the indi-
vidual offender to his family and village, justifying it on the grounds that
the dacoits of India were not like other criminals, being “robbers by pro-
fession, and even by birth; they are formed into regular communities.” 135
The primary objective of such categorizations was to construe the col-
onized as a population of degenerate type on the basis of social origin in
order to justify conquest and to establish a system of administration. In
order to introduce Western legal systems, native legal systems were
deemed inferior. Malcolm, in his Memoir of Central India, in 1823 classified
the Pindaris (marauder remnants of the Maratha armies who became
predators or robbers) into the “peaceful” and “predatory” with a further
subdivision as those who plundered because of political anarchy and
those “tribes brought into Central India in a military capacity who had
turned mercenaries.” Recognizing that certain “predatory” associations
did not fit into any distinct social class or tribe, he placed the thugs in a
category of “associations of men of all tribes . . . whose object is to live
upon the community.” Criteria such as dietary habits and a wandering
way of life were deployed to lump diverse groups into one social catego-
ry, as for instance under the term “Badhak.” 136
The imprecise definitions of the criminal community and the increas-
ing range of targeted collectivities such as thug gang, dacoit tribe/gang,
and wandering gang meant enfolding a flexible space for prosecutorial
license right within a legal framework. 137 Administration of the Thugee
involved devising appropriate strategies for policing these communities
and of ways of “reclaiming” them to a more settled way of life. Phrenolo-
gy was used to assess the effect of caste and religion on the brain that
causes them to indulge in dacoity and robbery. Henry Spry, medical
officer at Sagar in 1832–1834 sent seven skulls of thug leaders who were
executed to the phrenological society at Edinburgh to contribute to the
knowledge about the influence of caste and religion on the “lower feel-
ings” in the human brain. 138
The colonialist construction of “criminal tribes” resulted in the Crimi-
nal Tribes Act of 1871 with periodic amendments to the Act embodying
the assumptions of inborn criminality that underwent changes in some
instances with the search for “scientific explanations” of crimes in the
later decades. These Acts regulated the movement of certain groups of
wandering and vagrant populations and subjected them to surveillance
thus illustrating the utility of classification. 139
The identification of the criminal castes and tribes was not unlike the
other instances of typification as in one instance, it was noted that the
physique of the criminal castes, when fed properly, differed very little
 Classification and Society 211

from that of the other castes as they do not have that flattened head with
ears low down and long, which suggests a criminal. The ethnographic
entry for the caste “Kallan” in the 1901 Census glossary of Madras Presi-
dency introduced the caste with a long paragraph of the incidence of
purported crimes committed by the caste members in the different dis-
tricts from the police records. Attempts to reform the hereditary, habitu-
al, and incorrigible criminals coincided with the need to find easy labor in
the newly established quarries, mines, factories, mills, and tea and coffee
plantations.
Such immediate uses of caste data for administration were probably
not too frequent, leading to the view that a surplus of caste information
was generated. No sooner was the census data on sex ratios cross-
tabulated with caste, it became easy to identify groups that practiced
female infanticide, and the legislation banning such a practice could be
implemented by monitoring those groups. Other categories of caste such
as money lending, agricultural, or “martial” were used as a basis for
legislation controlling land transfers, the grant of proprietary rights, and
the regulation of rents, as well as a basis for distinguishing between the
loyal and the disloyal, and for recruiting to the armed forces. 140 The
attempt to define a social morphology in terms of caste and to under-
stand behavioral patterns in terms of caste groups was derived from the
basic understanding that the “individual” in the strict sense had not
evolved, and it was these caste communities that were made to appear
discrete that could be the units of control.
Even as colonial rule brought, on the one hand, legislations that were
to dissolve the caste principle, such as the Special Marriage Act of 1872
permitting intercaste marriage, there were others, the army and the civil
service, that strengthened the caste principle. After 1857, the colonial
administration diversified the composition of lower castes in the army as
it suspected that upper caste recruits had instigated the rebellion. As
increasing number of Brahmans were recruited in the civil service and
they quickly perceived the benefits of English education, the non-Brah-
man castes began to raise objections. Provincial governments were then
advised to seek the caste and subcastes of the applicants thus becoming
potential sites of ethnic nationalism. 141
The occupational classification was to render itself useful to define the
productive labor force distributed in different sectors, especially for the
newly emerging sectors of production. This suggests that conceptions of
“society” were evolved to promote administration and those of the
“economy” was dictated by logics of the colonial economy.
The most potent effect of classifying and enumerating population was
the formation of collective subjectivities, what Benedict Anderson has
highlighted by consideration of the material, institutional and discursive
bases that generate two contrasting types of seriality—unbound and
bound. 142 For Anderson, “unbound seriality” has its origins in the print
212 Chapter 5

market, especially in newspapers, and causes the formation of “open-to-

the-world plurals as nationalists, anarchists, bureaucrats, and workers,”
while “bound seriality” that makes “United Ethnicities or United Iden-
tities” unthinkable, has its origins in governmentality, especially in insti-
tutions like the census and elections. Anderson is of the view that the
census conventions of counting rendered every countee as an anonymous
integer, which along with the convention of totality, rendered possible
“serial, aggregable, counterposed majorities and minorities, which start-
ing as formal entities, were positioned in due course to assume political
reality.” 143 Further, the act of voting and electoral ballot is for Anderson
“isomorphic with the census schedule in its refusal of fractions, its stud-
ied aggregable anonymity, and its ensconcement, in due course, in strict-
ly bounded totals.” 144 While affirming the politics of governmentality,
Partha Chatterjee has questioned the validity of the difference between
the two serialities, for one kind of seriality and collective could plausibly
generate the other. 145
Scholars of earlier and recent times have affirmed that the colonial
censuses of castes did have the bounded seriality effect indicating the
intertwining of social identities and state identifications. 146 From 1870 up
until 1931, the census categorizations of caste led to caste associations and
caste-based organizing and lobbying to improve official caste stand-
ing. 147 The census authorities were often requested by petitioning associ-
ations to enlist their members under names that often used terms like
“Kshatriya” or “Brahman” as suffixes. Thus the associations of the Koeris
and Kurmis in Bihar petitioned the provincial census authorities to redes-
ignate these castes as “Kushawaha Kshatriya” and “Kurmi Kshatriya,”
respectively. 148 As the census caste classification moved from occupa-
tional to social ranking by the scheme suggested by Risley, it invoked in
most parts of the country, similar petitions from caste members invari-
ably seeking a caste ranking higher than the one assigned, contributing in
no small manner to the emergence of a caste consciousness in modern
politics. 149 Risley reflected that “[t]he best evidence of the general success
of the experiment, and incidentally of the remarkable vitality of caste at
the present day, is to be found in the great number of petitions and
memorials to which it gave rise.” He went on to argue: “If the principle
on which the classification was based had not appealed to the usages and
traditions of the great mass of Hindus, it is inconceivable that so many
people should have taken so much trouble and incurred substantial ex-
penditure with the object of securing its application in a particular
way.” 150
At the 1931 Census many social reform associations campaigned ac-
tively against the inclusion of caste in the census, and official opinion was
also veering toward it. 151 Although up until the 1921 Census, the castes of
Muslims were recorded, it was not done so at the 1931 Census except to
classify them as “Momins” or “non-Momins” as the Muslim League was
 Classification and Society 213

against the mention of castes among Muslims. At the 1941 Census, Jin-
nah, president of the All-India Muslim League sought to do away even
with the “Momins” and “non-Momins” classification. Although the 1931
Census retained the caste column, individuals were given the option of
not recording their caste if they so wished. In March 1939, Indian legisla-
tor S. Satyamurti remarked in the Central Legislative Assembly that the
government must not divide up the country into castes, and should drop
all information about castes considering the public opinion on the issue.
With the emergence of dyarchy and proportional representation caste
consciousness would feed into the representational politics. Language
entries in the census whether Urdu or Hindi or other languages and
dialects also became contentious as communal politics intensified. Even
the classification of “Tribes” has been seen to result in the reduction of
the Hindu and Muslim population with its implications for communal
representation from those parts. 152 As ethnic and nationalist politics
sought to delegitimize colonial rule, caste and religion moved in its func-
tion as the site of control to being a potent weapon of “divide and rule.”
What Hegel saw as inhibiting the development of the State was made
integral to its politics!

FROM COLONIAL TO NATIONALIST

SOCIOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY

The enumerative moment ushered by the censuses and the codification of

the customs of different castes for the formulations of criminal and civil
law were the two crucial moments in the constitution of the colonial
sociology of India. Whereas for the codification of customs, native opin-
ion was elicited, in the case of caste enumeration the natives themselves
began to write tracts. The question of the origins of races and castes
provided an opportunity to reconstruct the origins using the Hindu
scriptural texts, constituting an indigenous textual tradition that uneasily
complemented the Orientalist oeuvre. This coincided with the phase of
the social reform movement, in which debates on reforming religion and
society were to exercise the minds of the early nationalists. Following
Jogendranath Battacharya’s Hindu Castes and Sects published in 1896, S. V.
Ketkar published two books, one on the history of caste in 1909, and the
other on the history of Hinduism in 1911. 153 Around the same time, B. R.
Ambedkar’s essays on the caste system linked caste and gender oppres-
sion to Brahmanical patriarchy. G. S. Ghurye’s writings in the 1920s cul-
minating in his Caste and Race in India in 1932 inaugurated the birth of a
nationalist sociology.
The colonial official sociology/anthropology of India set the agenda
for the discipline in the subsequent decades, although the enumeration of
castes was given up after the 1931 Census. Even a casual reader of the
214 Chapter 5

colonial census reports would not fail to notice the numerous references
to the lower castes’ emulation of the habits and customs of the higher
castes in order to gain a higher social status. Both Max Weber’s ideas on
the Hinduization process and the thesis of Sanskritization propounded
by sociologist M. N. Srinivas bear the influence of these colonial census
reports. The failure of the censuses to fit a taxonomy to castes that was
applicable at the all-India level generated an interest in doing so at vil-
lage, local, and regional levels, even as it inspired the grand treatise of
“Homo Hierarchicus” by Louis Dumont. McKim Marriott’s successful
attempt at finding hierarchy in the caste structure of a set of villages
based on a transactional matrix, much like Risley’s order of social prece-
dence, was pursued by a number of other non-Indian scholars, even as
some examined both hierarchy and dominance in the rural social struc-
ture. 154 In the shift of focus of caste analysis from the all-India to the
village level, M. N. Srinivas restored to caste its political character in the
sociological analysis, what the census tables and the caste glossaries had
erased. 155 He argued that precolonial political systems placed territorial
limitations on horizontal extension of caste ties which were freed under
colonial rule. The development of roads, railways, posts, telegraph, avail-
ability of cheap paper and printing in regional languages enabled castes
to organize as never before, emphasizing that the availability of cheap
paper enabled caste disputes to be recorded which gave permanent form
to rules and precedents, which till then had depended on the falliable,
and therefore challengeable, memory of the elders. 156
As the unfulfilled aspirations of development, equity, and justice con-
front the postcolonial nation-state, enumerative politics has acquired new
dimensions. 157 The ordering of castes at the country level still remains a
problem for the state as it unrolls its policies of protective discrimination.
In the last two decades, the politics over the Mandal Commission recom-
mendations for reservation of government jobs and seats in educational
institutions to OBCs (Other Backward Classes) has witnessed demands
by communities to be deemed “backward,” in striking contrast to the
earlier colonial census counts where the clamor was to gain higher social
status. 158 As these demands propel a neverending series of like demands,
the state has embarked once again at the 2011 Census to record and
classify castes that was suspended after the 1931 Census. The state initiat-
ed new People of India project that completed its multi-volume ethno-
graphic compedium in the last two decades retained and updated many
characteristics of the colonial classificatory methods much like the earlier
one undertaken by Risley except for its emphasis on national unity and
the linkages between communities. 159 Clearly the classificatory rationales
of the modern state are tied to state projects of simplification, to render
visible and legible the complex space of governance.
 Classification and Society 215

NOTES

1. Ian Hacking, “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” Ideology and Con-
sciousness, 1979. Also published in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed.
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 192.
2. Hacking, “Bio-Power and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” 282.
3. Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002),
189.
4. J. R. Dinwiddy, “Bentham on Invention in Legislation,” in Jeremy Bentham: Criti-
cal Assessments vol. 3, ed. Bhikhu Parekh (New York: Routledge, 1993), 814.
5. Jeremy Bentham, “Chrestomathia,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham 11 vols, ed.
John Bowring (Edinburgh, 1843), 216.
6. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol VIII, 278–79.
7. Mary Poovey, “The Social Constitution of ‘Class’: Toward a History of Classifi-
catory Thinking” in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations ed. Wai Chee
Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 16.
8. John Herschel Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1830, cited
in Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact.
9. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. IV, 542.
10. F. A. Hayek, “Sociology: Comte and his Successors,” in The Counter-Revolution of
Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Chicago: The Free Press, 1952).
11. Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 4.
12. Hacking, following A. C. Crombie, notes that ordering of variety by comparison
and taxonomy is a style of reasoning like statistical analysis of regularities of popula-
tion. See Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 6.
13. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament, 318.
14. Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj, 114.
15. Sudipta Kaviraj, “On the Construction of Colonial Power: Structure, Discourse,
Hegemony,” Occasional Papers on History and Society (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library, (February 1991), 29–30.
16. The locus-classicus of this viewpoint is Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social
Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in An Anthropologist among Historians and
Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987/1990), 224–54.
17. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
18. Nicholas B. Dirks, “Castes of Mind,” Representations 37 Special Issue, Imperial
Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter 1992): 60.
19. Nicholas. B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 79.
20. Kaviraj, “On the Construction of Colonial Power: Structure, Discourse, Hege-
mony,” 29–30.
21. Cohn, “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture,” 154.
For a conceptual understanding of “frame” and “overflow,” see Callon, “An essay on
framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology,” 244–69.
22. Hacking, Historical Ontology.
23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1887/1974), Aphorism 58.
24. See Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia” in
An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays, 230.
25. G. S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner and
Co, 1932).
26. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
27. Cohn, An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays.
28. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament.
216 Chapter 5

29. See Kaviraj, “On the Construction of Colonial Power: Structure, Discourse, Heg-
emony;” and Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 16–22. The colonial construction
of difference has also been analyzed in Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj.
30. M. Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000); and Christopher, “The Quest for a Census of the
British Empire c. 1840–1940.”
31. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001), xix, 43–46.
32. Dirks, Castes of Mind, 60.
33. Bayly, Empire and Information, 168.
34. Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj, 116–17.
35. Susan Bayly, “Caste and ‘Race’ in the Colonial Ethnography of India,” in The
Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997),
166; Nicholas. B. Dirks, “The Invention of Caste: Civil Society in Colonial India,” Social
Analysis 25 (September 1989): 42–51; and Ronald Inden, Imagining India (London:
Blackwell, 1990).
36. Crispin Bates, “Race, Caste, and Tribe in Central India: The Early Origins of
Indian Anthropometry,” in The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 219–59.
37. Sumit Guha, “Lower Strata, Older Races, and Aboriginal Peoples: Racial
Anthropology and Mythical History Past and Present,” The Journal of Asian Studies 57,
2 (May 1998): 423–41.
38. This Act of 1850 did not remove civil disabilities existing between castes but
facilitated the conversion and admission to another religion or caste, by way of pro-
tecting the person’s ordinary property rights. See Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, 152.
39. Melanie White, “The Liberal Character of Ethological Governance,” Economy
and Society 34, 3 (August 2005): 476.
40. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a connected
view of the principles of evidence and the methods of scientific investigation (London: Long-
mans, 1843/1974), 457.
41. Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, 440–1.
42. White, “The Liberal Character of Ethological Governance.”
43. Stuart Woolf indicates that the structural tie between ethnography and statistics
was a characteristic feature of nineteenth century collection of state-sponsored statis-
tics in France, although not so in Britain. The vast official statistical enquiries would
include the exploration of social customs and practices. See Stuart Woolf, “Statistics
and the Modern State,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, 3 (July, 1989):
588–604.
44. Dirks, Castes of Mind, 43.
45. Dirks, “Castes of Mind.”
46. Hegel, The Philosophy of History.
47. These points are made after examining Memoir No 88, (p. 1), (p. 45) p. 45(2),
Survey of India volume no 231 (1825–1830), 45.
48. See the chapter “Communities and the Nation,” in Chatterjee, The Nation and its
Fragments, and note the references to the various dictionaries from which he draws the
multiple senses of the term.
49. Rashmi Pant, “The Cognitive Status of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Re-
view of some Literature on the North-West Provinces and Oudh,” Indian Economic and
Social History Review 24, 2 (June 1987): 145–62.
50. Pant, “The Cognitive Status of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of
some Literature on the North-West Provinces and Oudh,” 154.
51. These issues have been succinctly analyzed in Pant, “The Cognitive Status of
Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of some Literature on the North-West Prov-
inces and Oudh.”
52. It appears that even in the first caste census of NWP in 1865, only the most
numerous subcastes of Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras were recorded in the
 Classification and Society 217

report. In the 1872 census again, only the numerically dominant castes were recorded
by “pargana” as the “Great Castes.” Out of 304 separate subdivision names recorded
for the non-twice born castes, the district-wise tabulation was made up of only fifty
subdivisions which comprised “the main body of the persons classed under ‘other
castes.’” The 1881 Census presented tabulations separately for the “Eleven Large
Castes,” “Ten Large Agricultural Castes,” and thirty-seven castes not of the twice-born
category whose numbers exceeded 1,000,000. (See Census NWP & O, 1865, Report, pp.
81–83; Census NWP & O, 1872, Report, pp. 288–95; Census India, 1881, Report, pp. 281–82.
Cited in Pant, “The Cognitive Status of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of
some Literature on the North-West Provinces and Oudh.”
53. See Dirks, “Castes of Mind;” and Christopher Pinney, “Classification and Fanta-
sy in the Photographic Construction of Caste and Tribe,” Visual Anthropology 3, 2–3
(1990): 259–88.
54. Census of India 1881, Report, p. 277. Cited in Pant, “The Cognitive Status of Caste
in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of some Literature on the North-West Provinces
and Oudh.”
55. H. Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census of British India of 1871–72 (London:
George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1875), 20. Cited in Padmanabh Sama-
rendra, “Classifying Caste: Census Surveys in India in the Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 26, 2 (2003): 141–64.
56. Samarendra, “Classifying Caste: Census Surveys in India in the Late Nineteenth
and Early Twentieth Centuries,” 146.
57. J. A. Baines, Census of India, 1891, General Report (London: Eyre and Spottis-
woode, 1893), 188–89.
58. Census of India, 1891, Report, p. 188. Cited in Pant, “The Cognitive Status of Caste
in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of some Literature on the North-West Provinces
and Oudh.”
59. Pant, “The Cognitive Status of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of
some Literature on the North-West Provinces and Oudh.”
60. Samarendra, “Classifying Caste: Census Surveys in India in the Late Nineteenth
and Early Twentieth Centuries.”
61. Census NWP & O, 1865, Report, pp. 6–7. Cited in Pant, “The Cognitive Status of
Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of some Literature on the North-West Prov-
inces and Oudh,” 151.
62. Census NWP & O, 1911, Report, p. 327. Cited in Pant, “The Cognitive Status of
Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of some Literature on the North-West Prov-
inces and Oudh,” 151.
63. Scott Atran, The Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology
of Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
64. Chapter VIII, “Caste, Tribe or Race,” in Census of India, 1901, vol XV–Madras, Part
I, Report, W. Francis (Madras: Government Press, 1902): 129.
65. Census of India, 1901, “Caste, Tribe or Race,” 130.
66. Census of India, 1901, “Caste, Tribe or Race,” 131.
67. Stanley Tambiah, “From Varna to Caste through Mixed Unions,” in Culture,
Thought and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1985), 212–51.
68. The Left Hand Castes are Chetties, artisans (also called “Punchaular” and con-
sisting of goldsmiths, ironsmiths, coppersmiths, carpenters, and masons), oilmongers,
weavers, Patnavar, male leatherworkers, and female pullies. The Right Hand Castes
are Vellaular, Cavarays, Comaties, accountants, silk-weavers, male pullies, Pariahs,
and female leatherworkers. See the chapter “Ethnology,” in Maclean, Manual of the
Administration of the Madras Presidency vol. 1, 69. For more on this, also see Niels
Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Right and Left Hand Castes in Colonial South
India (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1999).
218 Chapter 5

69. See “Suggestions regarding some doubtful points on Ethnographic Nomencla-

ture,” Extracts from Proceedings of Conference on Ethnography of Northern India held at
Lahore, 18th to 22nd March 1885.
70. See “Suggestions regarding some doubtful points on Ethnographic Nomencla-
ture,” Extracts from Proceedings of Conference on Ethnography of Northern India held at
Lahore, 18th to 22nd March 1885.
71. These were Ettaraikoppu, Kallan, Kavalkaran, Kudiambalakkaran, Mutracha,
Muttiriyan, Nadan, Podar Kapatti, Raja Agamudaiyan, Rudradasakamalam, Sarugaiy-
an, Servaikkkaran, Sirukudiyan, Sozhiyan, Suryakulam, Talaiyari, Telugu, Tottiyan,
Uppalakkaran, Urali, Vadagalai, Valaiyan, Vannian, Vesanam, and Viramushti. See
“Caste Index,” Census of India, 1891, vol XIII, Madras: The Report on the Census, H. A.
Stuart. (Madras: Government Press, 1893). Notice that between the 1891 “Caste Index”
and the 1901 “Glossary of Castes,” there is a reduction in the number of subcastes
specified for this caste.
72. For instance, Ettaraikoppu, Kallan, Mutracha, Servaikkaran, Sozhian, Telugu
appear as subcastes under both “Ambalakaran” and “Agamudaiyan.”
73. See Chapter XI–“Caste,” Census of India, 1911, vol. XII, Madras, Part-I, Report, J. C.
Molony (Madras: Government Press, 1912).
74. Punjab Census, 1921, 343–44. Cited in Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, 160.
75. See “Mr. Nesfield’s Theory of the Origin and Nature of Indian Caste,” in Census
of India, 1901, vol I–India, Ethnographic Appendices, Herbert H. Risley (Calcutta: Office of
the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903).
76. See Denzil Ibbetson, “Caste in the Punjab,” in Census of India, 1901, vol 1, India:
Ethnographic Appendices, Herbert H. Risley (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1903).
77. Ibbetson, “Caste in the Punjab,” 238.
78. See the chapter,”Caste,” in Census of India, 1891, General Report, J. A. Baines
(London: Eyre and Spottswoode, 1893), 189.
79. See chapter VIII–“Caste, Tribe or Race,” in Census of India, 1901, vol. XV, Madras,
PartI-Report, W. Francis (Madras: Government Press, 1902), 125.
80. This theory has been criticized in recent years. Crispin Bates is of the view that
“adivasis” (indigenous people or tribes) are not to be viewed as specimens of the
colonial era but their anti-colonial resistance must be examined, as also the history of
the rise and fall of tribal kingdoms in a period when they were very much their own
masters. See Bates, “Race, Caste, and Tribe in Central India: The Early Origins of
Indian Anthropometry,” in The Concept of Race in South Asia. Sumit Guha. has argued
that archeological evidence offers little support for the mythic history of clashing races
and that it was the “white” man’s fear of the instability of social hierarchy that was the
motivation to give it a biological basis and project it onto a past so as to “cover extant
hierarchies with the mantle of the natural and the primordial.” See Guha, “Lower
Strata, Older Races, and Aboriginal Peoples: Racial Anthropology and Mythical Histo-
ry Past and Present,” 438.
81. George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987).
82. White, “The Liberal Character of Ethological Governance.”
83. The Resolution of the government of India in 1901 noted “It has come to be
recognized of late years that India is a vast storehouse of social and physical data
which only need to be recorded in order to contribute to the solution of the problems
which are being approached in Europe with the aid of material, much of which is
inferior in quality to the facts readily accessible in India, and rests upon less trust-
worthy evidence.” Extract from the Proceedings of the Government of India in the Home
Department (Public), Simla, 25th May 1901.
84. See Herbert H. Risley, “Anthropology in India,” in Transactions of the Ninth
International Congress of Orientalists vol. 2, ed. E. D. Morgan (London: Committee of the
Congress, 1893).
85. Risley, “Anthropology in India,” in Transactions of the Ninth International Con-
gress of Orientalists vol. 2, 864.
86. Dirks, “Castes of Mind.”
 Classification and Society 219

87. Risley, “Anthropology in India,” in Transactions of the Ninth International Con-

gress of Orientalists vol. 2, 868.
88. William Crooke, “Scientific Ethnography in Northern India,” in Transactions of
the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists 2 vols, ed. E. D. Morgan (London: Com-
mittee of the Congress, 1893).
89. Correspondence relating to Proposal of the British Association regarding Ethnogra-
phy, etc in connection with the Census of 1901. No 5 (Revenue) dated 18th January 1900 in
Risley Collection (Microfilm), National Archives of India, New Delhi.
90. Herbert H. Risley, Ethnography of India, Census of India, 1901, vol 1 India (Calcut-
ta: Government Printing, 1903).
91. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, 108.
92. Dirks, Castes of Mind, 225.
93. Read the preface of Census of India, 1931, vol 1–India, part III–Ethnographical, B. S.
Guha and J. H. Hutton, Delhi, 1935.
94. See “The Racial Affinities of the Peoples of India,” ii, in Census of India, 1931,
vol.I–India, Part III– Ethnographical B. S. Guha (Simla: Government of India Press, 1935).
95. A revised list of Risley’s figures was published by P. C. Mahalanobis in Sankya
vol. 1, Part 1, Calcutta, 1933.
96. See B. S. Guha, “The Racial Affinities of the Peoples of India,” ii, in Census of
India, 1931, vol.I–India, Part III– Ethnographical, ix.
97. A similar point was made by W. Francis in his account of the Vellala caste,
which is a dominant cultivating caste in Tamilnadu, when he raised doubts on the
variations in the cranial measurements of a group such as Vellala in which the infiltra-
tion of other castes into its fold, and its diffused nature in the region is likely to have
led to a significant mixture of blood. See Risley, Ethnography of India, 129–30.
98. Guha notes,”The problem of unravelling racial kinships is a very complicated
one and involves many elements, and though the help given by the statistical method
is a substantial one it is still only a rough measure and the results obtained by its aid,
should be taken with a little caution unless corroborative evidence is forthcoming.”
B. S. Guha, “The Racial Affinities of the Peoples of India,” ix.
99. IOR, Lytton Collection, MSS.Eur.E.218/4–3:Lytton to Caird (3 December 1879)
and Lytton to Clarke (26 April 1878). Cited in Bates, “Race, Caste, and Tribe in Central
India: The Early Origins of Indian Anthropometry,” in The Concept of Race in South
Asia.
100. Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Idea of the Hindu Race in the Writings of Hindu
Nationalist Ideologues in the 1920s and 1930s: A Concept between Two Cultures,” in
The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997),
327–354.
101. The word “Hindu” (deriving from Indus) is a term attributed to Persian origins
to refer to people living beyond the river Indus (Sindhu in Sanskrit) and remained for
long as an ethno-geographic category. Over time, with the Muslim conquests of India,
it acquired the category of a religious identity as a process of “othering” in interactions
with the Muslims. See Cynthia Talbot, “Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hin-
du-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History
37, 4 (Oct., 1995): 692–722; and David N. Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?” Com-
parative Studies in Society and History 41, 4 (October 1999): 630–59.
102. Hamilton, Geographical, Statistical and Historical Description of Hindostan and the
Adjacent Countries, xxv. Cited in Michael Haan, “Numbers in Nirvana: How the
1872–1921 Indian Censuses helped operationalise ‘Hinduism,’” Religion 35 (2005):
13–30.
103. Inden, Imagining India.
104. Sumit Guha, “The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600–1990,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, 1 (Jan 2003): 148–167.
105. Norbert Peabody, “Cents, Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial
and Early Colonial India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, 4 (October
2001): 836.
220 Chapter 5

106. Census of the Madras Presidency 1871 part 1 (1874), 71.

107. Census of Bombay 1872 part 1 (1875), 87.
108. Census of the Bombay Presidency 1871 part I (1875), 222.
109. Haan, “Numbers in Nirvana: How the 1872–1921 Indian Censuses helped oper-
ationalise ‘Hinduism.’”
110. Census of India, 1911, 116.
111. Haan, “Numbers in Nirvana: How the 1872–1921 Indian Censuses helped oper-
ationalise ‘Hinduism’,” 25.
112. Census of India 1921 vol. 1, 113.
113. Census of India, 1921, vol.1, 113.
114. Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj, 137.
115. David Lorenzen provides an overview of the debate and his arguments as to
why it is not a colonial construction and that at various historical times, the Hindus
had developed a consciousness of their common religious identity despite the hetero-
geneity of beliefs and practices and the broad contours of Hindu religion have even
been written in very early Arab and Christian missionary writings much before 1800.
See Lorenzen,”Who Invented Hinduism?”
116. Talbot, “Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in
Pre-Colonial India.”
117. Kenneth Jones, “Religious Identity and the Indian Census,” in The Census in
British India, ed. N. Gerald Barrier (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1981), 84.
118. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia; Cohn, An Anthropologist among Histo-
rians and Other Essays, and Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in
Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). Also see Frank Conlon,
“The Census of India as a Source for the Historical Study of Religion and Caste,” in
The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. N. G. Barrier (New Delhi: Manohar,
1981), 103–17.
119. See chapter IV, “The Occupation of the Population,” in Census of India 1891,
General Report, J. A. Baines (London: Eyre & Spottswoode, 1893), 86.
120. “The Occupation of the Population,” in Census of India, 1891, 86.
121. Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy,
Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and
David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222–36.
122. All these examples are from chapter IX, “Occupation,” Census of India 1901 vol.
XV Madras, Part I–Report W. Francis (Madras: Government Press 1902).
123. Chapter 1, “Introductory and Descriptive,” in Census of India 1891 General Report
J. A. Baines (London: Eyre and Spottswoode, 1893).
124. Baines, Census of India 1891 General Report, 287.
125. See chapter XII, “Occupation,” Census of India 1911 vol XII Madras Part–I Report J.
C. Molony (Madras: Government Press, 1912).
126. Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Indi-
viduality, and the Self in Western Thought.
127. Cohn, “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture” in An
Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays.
128. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, 156.
129. Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj.
130. D.C.J. Ibbetson, Report on the Census of Punjab 1881, vol.1 (Calcutta, 1883). Cited
in Bates, “Race, Caste, and Tribe in Central India: The Early Origins of Indian Anthro-
pometry,” in The Concept of Race in South Asia.
131. Government of Bengal, General Department, Miscellaneous Branch, A Proceed-
ings, no. 55, May 1892, “Enquiry into Castes and Occupations Of the People Of Ben-
gal,” Bihar State Archives, Patna. Cited in Samarendra, “Classifying Caste: Census
Surveys in India in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.”
132. Extract from the Proceedings of the Government of India in the Home Depart-
ment (Public), Simla, 5 May 1901 (MPCRO, Berar, Miscellaneous, Census Department,
 Classification and Society 221

10/1901, Subject: ‘Ethnographic Survey of Caste and Tribes in British India’. Cited in
Dirks, “Castes of Mind,”67; and Bates, “Race, Caste, and Tribe in Central India: The
Early Origins of Indian Anthropometry,” in The Concept of Race in South Asia, 259.
133. Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
134. Anand Yang, “Castes and Tribes: The Criminal Tribes Act and the Magahiya
Doms of Northeast India,” in Crime and Criminality in British India, ed. Anand A. Yang
(Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 128–39; Sanjay Nigam, “Disciplining
and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth,’ Part 1: The Making of a Colonial Stereotype–The
Criminal Tribes and Castes of North India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review
27, 2 (1990): 131–164; Sanjay Nigam, “Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by
Birth,’ Part 2: The Development of a Disciplinary System, 1871–1900,” Indian Economic
and Social History Review 27, 3 (1990): 257–87; Sandria B. Freitag, “Crime in the Social
Order of Colonial North India,” Modern Asian Studies 25 (1991): 227–61; and Santhosh
Abraham, “Colonialism and the Making of Criminal Categories in British India,” NAL-
SAR Law Review 6, 1 (2011): 151–65. Andrew Major indicates that at the time of inde-
pendence in 1947 there were 128 tribes and castes deemed as “criminal” numbering
about 3.5 million persons (roughly 1 percent of the population) as part of the colonial
legacy of administering criminal communities. See Andrew J. Major, “State and Crimi-
nal Tribes in Colonial Punjab: Surveillance, Control and Reclamation of the ‘Danger-
ous Classes,’” Modern Asian Studies 33, 3 (July 1999): 657–88.
135. Committee of Circuit to Council at Fort William, 15 August 1772. Cited in Rad-
hika Singha, “‘Providential’ Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and
Legal Innovation,” Modern Asian Studies 27, 1 Special Issue: How Social, Political and
Cultural Information is Collected, Defined, Used and Analyzed (February 1993):
83–146.
136. Singha, A Despotism of Law.
137. Singha, A Despotism of Law.
138. Marc Brown has pointed out that ideas about “criminal types” and the develop-
ment of scientific understanding of native criminality in India were based on the
principles and measurement systems of race theory. See Marc Brown, “Race, Science
and the Construction of Native Criminality in Colonial India,” Theoretical Criminology
5, 3 (August 2001): 345–68.
139. Nigam, “Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth,’ Part 1: The Making
of a Colonial Stereotype–The Criminal Tribes and Castes of North India;” and “Disci-
plining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth,’ Part 2: The Development of a Discipli-
nary System, 1871–1900.”
140. Bates, “Race, Caste, and Tribe in Central India: The Early Origins of Indian
Anthropometry,” in The Concept of Race in South Asia, 228.
141. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, 156. Dietrich Reetz has shown how ethnic and
religious parties in Punjab and Tamilnadu evoked solidarity to make their claims for
civil service employment and political representation in the legislative councils. The
recognition of a separate group identity assumed a critical importance both for the
Sikhs in Punjab and the non-Brahmin castes in Tamilnadu during the hearings of the
Public Service Commission of 1913. See Dietrich Reetz, “In Search of the Collective
Self: How Ethnic Group Concepts Were Cast through Conflict in Colonial India,”
Modern Asian Studies 31, 2 (May 1997): 285–315. Dick Kooiman has argued that similar
tendencies of communalism and ethnicity prevailed in the Princely states of Baroda,
Travancore and Hyderabad in the clamour over government employment wherein the
strength of enumerated communities was affirmed. See Dick Kooiman, “The Strength
of Numbers: Enumerating Communities in India’s Princely States,” South Asia: Journal
of South Asian Studies 20, 1 (1997): 81–98.
142. Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons.
143. Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, 38.
144. Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, 38.
222 Chapter 5

145. Partha Chatterjee, “Anderson’s Utopia,” Diacritics 29, 4 Grounds of Comparison:

Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (Winter 1999): 128–34.
146. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India; Cohn, An Anthropologist among Historians and
Other Essays; M. N. Srinivas, The Dominant Caste and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1987); Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India;
Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Orientalism and the Post-Colonial
Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Modernity and Eth-
nicity in India,.” South Asia XVII Special Issue (1994): 143–55.
147. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); and Lucy Carroll, “Caste, Social Change, and
the Social Scientist: A Note on the Ahistorical Approach to Indian Social History,” The
Journal of Asian Studies 35, 1 (Nov 1975): 63–84.
148. See Government of Bihar and Orissa, Revenue Department, Census Branch, File
No.VC–89/31 of 1931, and VC–4/32 of 1932.
149. Imtiaz Ahmad informs us that the number of castes advancing new status
claims in the regions of United Provinces, Bengal and Sikkim, Bihar and Orissa, and
Central Provinces and Berar, went up from 21 to 148 between 1901 and 1931. See
Imtiaz Ahmad, “Caste Mobility Movements in North India,” Indian Economic and Social
History Review 8, 2 (June 1971): 164–191.
150. Herbert Risley, The People of India (Calcutta, Simla, and London: Thacker and
Spink, 1915), 112.
151. One such association that campaigned against inclusion of caste in the 1931
Census was the “Jat-Pat Torak Mandal” (Society for the Breaking of Caste among
Hindus, a wing of the Arya Samaj) that sent a petition to Census Commissioner Hut-
ton. See S.R. Maheshwari, The Census Administration Under the Raj and After (New
Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1996).
152. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India.
153. The titles are The History of Caste in India; Evidence of the Laws of Manu on the
Social Conditions in India during the Third Century A.D., Interpreted and Examined; with an
Appendix on Radical Defects in Ethnology, vol. I (New York: Ithaca, 1909); and An Essay
on Hinduism, its Formation and Future; illustrating the Laws of Social Evolution as reflected
in the History of the Formation of the Hindu Community, History of Caste in India, vol. II
(London: Luzac, 1911).
154. McKim Marriott, Caste Ranking and Community Structure in Five Regions of India
and Pakistan (Poona: Bulletin Deccan College Research Institute, 1958).
155. Srinivas, The Dominant Caste and Other Essays.
156. M. N. Srinivas, “Caste in Modern India,” The Journal of Asian Studies 16, 4 (Aug
1957), 529–48.
157. Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1984).
158. The Mandal Commission Report listed 4,693 communities in all of India of
which it deemed more than 3,000 communities as backward. Another study by the
Anthropological Survey of India scaled the number of backward communities down to
1,051. See Laura Dudley Jenkins, “Another ‘People of India’ Project: Colonial and
National Anthropology,” The Journal of Asian Studies 62, 4, (November 2003): 1143–70.
159. Laura Jenkins critically observes, “The current project justifies the notion of a
unified people of India by drawing on methods such as nasal indexes and trait count-
ing, as well as colonial-era assumptions, such as the essentially communal nature of
India. The project both classifies the people of India and optimistically argues that, in
the end, the people occupying these various categories are, really, quite similar.” See
Jenkins, “Another ‘People of India’ Project: Colonial and National Anthropology,”
1147.
 SIX
Bio-power and Statistical Causality

An integrated technology of power was incorporated into the govern-

mentality of population’s health through epidemic and sanitary manage-
ment in colonial India that was to radically reconstruct science, society,
and the state. The governmentalization of the health of the population
resulting in the emergence of public health as an administrative domain
is something very unique to the modern state. 1 Foucault provides the
rationale for analyzing medical regulation under the rubric of political
rationalities and technologies of government, which approach affords
new forms of intelligibility. 2 The governmentality framework enables the
replacement of a negative discourse of medicine as a form of social con-
trol with a positive one about the specification of the varied fields of
application and modes of objectivation that are characteristic of particu-
lar medical programs, and with the ways in which such programs are
tied or seek to tie themselves to wider rationalities of government.
Governmentality’s concern with population arose as Foucault has
noted, on account of the transformations political right underwent in
nineteenth-century Europe. Sovereignty’s old right—to “take life” or “let
live”—came to be complemented by a new right, the power to “make”
live and “let die” which interlinked with the old right. He traces the
transformation of this right at the level of the mechanisms, techniques,
and technologies of power that ushered in “biopolitics,” which unlike
“discipline” treats population as a political problem. Biopolitics intro-
duces mechanisms that are very different from disciplinary mechanisms,
and include forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures with the
aim to intervene at the level at which general phenomena are deter-
mined, allowing for security mechanisms to be installed around the ran-
dom element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a
state of life, to regularize biological processes. The emergence of bio-

223
224 Chapter 6

power renders it possible to inscribe racism into the mechanisms of the

state. This technique of power integrates with those techniques essential-
ly centered on the individual body that includes devices used to ensure
spatial distribution of individual bodies, “their separation, their align-
ment, their serialization, and their surveillance and the organization,
around those individuals, of a whole field of visibility.” 3 These tech-
niques could take control over bodies, and with a whole system of sur-
veillance, hierarchies, inspections, book-keeping, and reports, power
could be exercised over individual bodies in a rational, economical, and
least cost way.
Disease was not unknown in pre-colonial India, nor for that matter
their cures. Indigenous epistemologies of disease sought to understand
both causation and cure in terms of restoring equilibrium between differ-
ent forces within an individual body as well as to restore a kind of cosmic
equilibrium through the propitiation of the appropriate gods and god-
desses. Although regularity of diseases in certain regions was conceded,
epidemic diseases were considered rare, and state intervention in the
realm of disease control was non-existent. Kings and subjects equally
propitiated the gods to appease their anger when famine and pestilence
ravaged their kingdoms. But disease entered a new epistemic and admin-
istrative domain in the colonial period. Modern scientific developments
in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe sought to understand the
causes of diseases either in terms of the contagion theory or the theories
of miasma, and sought to examine the effects of environment on diseases.
Such epidemiological work culminated in the understanding that differ-
ent communicable diseases spread through different means. If the conta-
gion theory supported the institution of quarantine and cordons sanitaires,
theories of miasma highlighted the need for hygienist and sanitary meas-
ures. Once the germ theory of disease gained acceptance, there arose the
need to test the varieties of prophylactic vaccines on controlled groups of
population. In all cases, modern medical practices in the containment of
diseases implicated the modern state in numerous ways. While the colo-
nial context facilitated the transmission of modern medical science from
Europe to the colonies, it also created a hiatus by introducing a set of
local contingencies imposed by the colonial epidemiological terrain and
the native population, which in many ways shaped the way medicine
was practiced in colonial settings.

THE VITAL AND THE POLITICAL SPHERES

The governmentality framework replaces the antinomy between the

medical and the social spheres that is part of the discourse of medicine as
a form of social control with one of understanding the relations between
the vital and the political spheres. Specifically, the “social” is not a
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 225

transcendental domain that is colonized by the “medical” but medical

knowledge and technology are constitutive of the “social.” 4 Nikolas Rose
notes that medicine in the nineteenth century was perhaps the first “so-
cial” science that contributed to the ways in which society was imagined
as a “social body,” which was mapped out through statistics of birth,
death, rates and types of morbidity, and administered in the name of
norms of life and death. 5 Even as early as the seventeenth century, Fran-
cis Bacon highlighted the role of vital statistics for broad improvements
in the human condition. In his book The History of Life and Death he called
for quantitative studies that would help physicians to move from com-
mon cures and “to become the instruments and dispensers of God’s pow-
er and mercy in prolonging and renewing the life of man.” 6 William
Petty had argued that it was possible to ascertain from Graunt’s data on
population and diseases the number of preachers and medical practition-
ers that would be required in England. 7 The focus of nineteenth-century
liberal English society was not the territory or body but the “ensemble of
a population,” and public health was a strategy of security appropriate to
a liberal rationality of government. Such mechanisms of security were to
assure the integrity of “natural phenomenon, economic processes of pop-
ulation” even as it acknowledged the vulnerability of such natural pro-
cesses and the need for interventions. 8
The notion of biopolitics instantiates an understanding of the vital
sphere as something more than merely medical including such aspects as
vital regulation, health, welfare, security, and longevity, and has been as
much a province of doctors, statisticians, bureaucrats, and architects.
Foucault notes that a kind of “great transformation” occurred in the mod-
ern period in the West with regard to the relation between the domain of
politics and the sphere of human vitality with “the entry of life into
history,” through an anatomo-politics of the human body and through
“regulatory controls,” or “a biopolitics of the population.” 9 He writes:
A “medico-administrative” knowledge begins to develop concerning
society, its health and sickness, its conditions of life, housing and hab-
its, which serve as the basic core for the “social economy” and sociolo-
gy of the nineteenth century. And there is likewise constituted a politi-
co-medical hold on a population hedged in by a whole series of pre-
scriptions relating not only to disease but to general forms of existence
and behaviour (food and drink, sexuality and fecundity, clothing and
the layout of living space). 10
The contrast between a totalizing political rationality such as the
eighteenth-century science of “police” in the German states with a nonto-
talizing one such as liberalism is that in the case of “police” everything
was administered and nothing was impervious to the gaze of knowledge
as the exercise of power required an instrumental command of the do-
main to be governed. 11 Liberalism as a “general critique of State reason,”
226 Chapter 6

and as a form of government detached from “totalizing forms of sove-

reignty” on the other invoked a kind of habitual suspicion relating to the
means and ends of government, to let knowledge confront domains with
their own normativity. 12 Liberal governmentality therefore seeks to ex-
plore the natural laws of society and norms proper to it, and the purpose
of knowledge is to inform government of the norms proper to domains,
rather than to provide the direct rationale for government itself.
A liberal governmentality of public health acknowledges the conse-
quence of possible conflict between the aims and desires of government
and the norms of the domain to be governed, and so both accepts and
desires a space of indetermination. 13 Clinical rationality as a particular
kind of technology that is both “individualizing” and “totalizing” is ap-
propriate and immanent to liberal governmentality. 14 The politics of bio-
politics within liberal political discourse ensures that public debate over
the regulation of life could serve to delimit state power. Public health
could also be integral to the establishment of mechanisms of security
within a liberal order, as the focus of liberal security is not the territory or
the body, but the “ensemble of a population.” 15
The nineteenth-century British revolution in public health and sanita-
tion is to be considered within the development of liberal technologies of
government, as it represented a strategy of security appropriate to a liber-
al rationality of government, combining an emphasis on the economy, of
both finance and government intervention, with an emphasis on the nat-
uralism of the processes to be regulated. 16 Naturalistic objectivations of
the domain of government insured that the liberal governmentality of
these domains would create as minimal a disturbance to the natural
norms of the vital sphere, and statistics became the political economy of
Victorian vital conscience. Statistics constructed the vital domain of pop-
ulation as natural with its own regularities and was then taken up by
public health and sanitary science to become its proper object.
Public health in nineteenth-century England was also intrinsically
concerned with the economy, and disease and its prevention was ac-
knowledged to cost money and divert resources from other sectors of the
social order. The implementation of sanitary regulations was achieved
along the principles of economy, as for instance, in Chadwick’s ideas of
linking the sewerage and drainage systems into a single network. While
the political rationality of “police” could not have a concept of a public
health as the population was conceived not as a natural order but as a
consequence and target of political technique directly by the government,
public health in nineteenth-century England was perceived as a domain
in which regulation was something positive in its own right, and which
was monitored as some kind of a dependent variable.
Public health entered the public domain in Victorian England through
blue books, reports, and debates; and disease, both endemic and epidem-
ic, became a public issue not only because it affected public finance but
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 227

also because of the spread of disease across more areas. 17 In the

nineteenth-century governance of health, systematic correlation was
sought between disease and poverty, not to medicalize poverty but in the
sense of “de-pauperization of disease” and the “naturalization of pover-
ty,” so as to effect a separation of the government of disease from the
government of poverty. Such separation was made possible by the homo-
geneous concept of “fever,” which enables masses of facts to be accumu-
lated over the years relating to the statistics, the types, the symptoms, the
cases, the diagnosis, the pathology, and the treatment of the disease. 18
With such accumulations of observations fever came to be understood
not as an essence or genus, but as a name given to a characteristic “series
of events,” a series observable only through techniques of autopsy.
This decoupling of fever from the notion of genus also signaled a shift
in the relation of fever to its environment. When fever was coupled with
the notion of species and genus, different environments determined the
singularity of fevers, and with the changed notion of fever, environment
became a determinant of disease. The emphasis in nineteenth-century
Britain on the spatial mapping of disease across urban environments mir-
rored in macrocosm the detailed mapping of the disease across the spa-
tial fabric of the body. 19 Sanitary intervention being apparently not so
much a normalization of vital capacities but the regulation of their nor-
mativity through the medium of environmental regulation, led to the
realization that the environmental norms could be levied, that is, the
establishment of biological normativity could become a political objec-
tive. The Victorian vital conscience and the hydraulic society it set up
induced cleanliness and good moral habits to the population not through
discipline but by a strategy of indirect governance that is characteristic of
a liberal political rationality.
At the same time in India, the political rationalities and technologies
of colonial rule determined the relationship between the vital and the
political spheres. Colonial power is distinctive for its deployment of a
“rule of colonial difference” in which race is the defining signifier of this
rule of difference. 20 While colonial medical, public health, and sanitary
administration in India amply testify to “race” as the marker of the “colo-
nial rule of difference,” it is necessary to understand the political rational-
ities of colonial structures, projects, and targets within which such a raced
rule of difference operated that makes colonial modernity appear as a
discontinuity in the organization of colonial rule characterized by the
emergence of a distinctive political rationality. 21 David Scott has noted
that the rationality of a colonial governmentality is that power comes to
be directed at the “destruction and reconstruction of colonial space so as
to produce not so much extractive-effects on colonial bodies as govern-
ing-effects on colonial conduct.” 22 This project of colonial modernity is
clearly evident in the management of the vital sphere. Earlier notions of
health and ontological conceptions of disease were replaced with modern
228 Chapter 6

ideas of disease and death and of the means of containing such diseases
leading to what Foucault has described as a “medico-administrative”
knowledge of the society and simultaneously to a “politico-medical” hold
on the population that is now governed by a new set of prescriptions
relating to existence and behavior, and affecting such aspects as food and
drinking habits, dress, habitat and environment.

NORMS AND NORMALIZATION

In his book The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault identified three forms of spa-
tialization. The location of a disease in a family of disease and the body
are the primary and secondary spatialization, and relate to taxonomies of
disease and their concrete manifestations in the organs. The tertiary spa-
tialization is “all the gestures by which in a given society, disease is
circumscribed, medically invested, isolated, divided up into closed, privi-
leged regions, or distributed throughout cure centers, arranged in the
most favorable way,” a place of political struggles, economic constraints,
and social confrontations. 23 Biopolitics is central to the tertiary spatializa-
tion, and all these three forms of medical spatialization are governed by
norms, normality and normalization. “Norm” is the principle that allows
discipline to develop from a simple set of constraints into a mechanism of
regulation, designates both rules and a way of producing them, and a
principle of valorization. 24 Normalization produces procedures that lead
to consensus on the choice of norms and standards. With statistical
norms supplanting the juridical mode of governance, and the “average
man” as a modern way of individualizing members of the population,
the state is increasingly conceived in terms of the actuarial view of society
and becomes a vast system of social insurance that brings in new kinds of
intervention to regulate population.
For Foucault, the rise of a “normalizing society” is bio-power’s central
diacritic for modernity. 25 The emergence of such a “normalizing society”
with modernity also engendered the Comtean project of sociology that
sought to establish a scientific practice of social intervention on a medical
model working with a definition of the field of social pathology. 26 With
the medical discoveries of Broussais, a new field of knowledge was
opened up by statistical applications in the medical and social sciences. 27
The idea that statistics could bridge “the chaos of the particular and the
transparency of the whole” was irresistible. 28 Quetelet’s ideas that hu-
man variation definable in quantitative terms and interpreted as devia-
tions from a norm not only became a legitimate concern of the state but
also effected a fundamental epistemological displacement of absolute de-
terminism that had characterized social science until then. 29 Norms be-
came the objects of a science of sociological abnormality and the idea that
the normal could be conceived statistically became popular. 30
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 229

Since the work of George Canguilhem, the thinking of life and norms
has undergone a major reversal. 31 By questioning the validity of the con-
stancy of norms, the context-free object standards set by these norms, and
also the attempts of medical practice to scientifically establish these
norms, Canguilhem launched a frontal attack on the historical “edifice of
normalization” that were so essential to the procedures of a positivist
science and medicine. Whereas in the 1943 publication, Canguilhem
argued that normality is an activity and not a steady state, he shifted his
position twenty years later from a background normality to an active
normativity, implying that norms were not only active but were histori-
cal and linked to normalization. 32 He also distinguished between social
and organic norms, their modes of regulation and their finalities. Medical
normality tended to support the positivist contention that the normal can
be known and laid down as law prior to the pathological. 33
Inquiring into the ideological aspects of modern medicine in relation
to other disciplines and social practices, Thomas Osborne has suggested
that medical norms have a capacity to “stray beyond themselves, infil-
trating into other forms of rationality.” 34 The very notion of disease in
modern medicine is unstable, and can only figure as an event and not as
an entity, essence, or abstraction. This notion of disease as “event” led to
the proclivity of numerical approaches arising out of the need to identify
consistent regularities and norms as the disease have only a statistical
probability of a certain regularity that would otherwise appear as a sin-
gular mutation in the individual. The world of disease thus entered the
language of mutliplicities and probabilities. When this logic of pathologi-
cal becoming was reterritorialized into other fields of experience, it pro-
moted a new style of reasoning that was not henceforth based on an
understanding of human nature but on normal states, leading to an “in-
surgence of normality” in various spheres. 35
This tended to homogenize the social body even as it played a part in
classification, hierarchization, and in the distribution of rank. Moreover,
a society regulated according to norms mimics both the order and coher-
ence of the organism through a set of interdependent norms. 36 In cases
where there is no single norm to orient normalization, then the several
plausible and different norms do not cohere but exist in tension, suggest-
ing in fact that there are various modes of ordering that diffract and
interfere with each other, as it would in non-singular complex societies.
Medical norms, even if they are those of the organism, become a social
norm that is both set and maintained through a set of social practices as
in the case of colonial public health and sanitary reform that sought to
change conduct and personal habits at the most intimate levels thereby
setting new norms of hygiene and cleanliness. Equally, social norms are
often internalized into medical thought as in the case of the relation be-
tween medicine and insurance. 37 Also, when social and moral demands
are experienced as “determinisms” rather than as “constraints” by the
230 Chapter 6

living being, the organism mistakes it as a vital norm rather than a social
norm. 38 Foucault has shown how normalization, holds up normality as a
norm and an ideal for each and every body to attain, by clarifying the role
of the “norm” in disciplinary and regulatory modes of power as follows:
In more general terms still, we can say that there is one element that
will circulate between the disciplinary and the regulatory, which will
also be applied to body and population alike, which will make it pos-
sible to control both the disciplinary order of the body and the aleatory
events that occur in the biological multiplicity. The element that circu-
lates between the two is the norm. The norm is something that can be
applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one
wishes to regularize. The normalizing society is a society in which the
norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an or-
thogonal articulation. 39
The emergence of bio-power enabled both individual bodies and mass
bodies to be normalized and pathologized that involved the convergence
of modern medical science, statistical norms, and the disciplinarity of
sanitary administration. The latter entailed a public understanding of
epidemiological terrain and of the means of controlling the terrain such
that diseases are contained and restrained, often entailing populations to
adopt new standards of health and hygiene and new conditions of habi-
tat and environment brought by modern methods of sanitary manage-
ment. The colonial rule of difference constituted the bodies to be normal-
ized and the epidemiological terrain as a vastly different one in the colo-
nized terrain that needed both modern science and modern governance
for its normalization. Famine deaths did not afford the same possibility of
constituting a rule of difference and not surprisingly the state’s concern
was far more in the case of epidemic deaths than famine deaths. These
technologies of power and normalization rendered both the individual
body and the “social” body amenable to observation, intervention, and
manipulation in a manner that was hitherto not available or even at-
tempted before. What occurred was “change of scale and the deployment
of a whole new range of objects” and a “new way of asking questions”
that redrew the “bounds of truth” within medicine and in other disci-
plines. 40

DISEASE, GOVERNANCE, AND STATISTICAL CAUSALITY

In late nineteenth-century colonial India, disease for the first time con-
fronted the public gaze just as it had done a few decades ago in England.
Until the 1840s, India was not set apart from England by its smell or its
drains, as the early colonialists believed that India was made pestilential
by its climate, not the sewage in its streets. This climate determinism was
first challenged by the Royal Commission on the State of the Army set up
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 231

in 1859 that initiated the setting up of “foundational institutions” on

sanitary improvement and the collection of health statistics on the civil-
ian population in the provinces. 41 With the coming of the Victorian ad-
ministrative state and as Chadwick’s sanitary movement took hold in
England, filth and the epidemic diseases linked to it were progressively
brought under control. Such measures were enacted only fitfully in India
as works of improvement had to meet the criterion of pecuniary profit-
ability and hence a clean environment could not be secured. 42 Disease
and dirt then became markers of enduring “difference” between England
and India. India had to be as distinct epidemiologically as it was racially
and culturally. Although the new bacteriological explanation of diseases
inevitably challenged the whole ideology of “difference,” Indian bodies
began to be perceived as filthy carriers of contagious diseases, which
ushered in an ideology of “distance,” built upon an enduring sense of
difference in the later decades of the nineteenth century. 43
Medical and public health policy in colonial India combined the char-
acteristics of both the “police state” and the liberal political rationality of
nineteenth-century public health policy in England, thereby imparting
colonial governmentality of the vital sphere its own distinctive rational-
ity. 44 Vital statistics of the population was collected regularly only from
around the 1860s onwards although estimates of disease mortality for
earlier decades have been attempted in several instances. Despite its at-
tempt both to normalize the vital capacities through periodic population
counts through the decennial census and to record births and deaths, and
to regulate their normativity through environmental norms by supplant-
ing what were already prevalent, the high mortality rates that increased
from 40 per million in 1871 to 50 per million in 1921 indicate that public
health measures were only partially successful in urban areas and may
have failed in rural areas, even as sanitary commissioners toured the
provinces and submitted reports, assistant civil surgeons manned hospi-
tals, and sanitary engineers constructed modern water supplies in cities.
Cholera deaths are estimated to be 23 million between 1865 and 1947. 45
Malaria took 20 million lives between 1890 and 1920, plague took an
estimated 10 million lives, and influenza epidemic another 13 million
lives along with deaths on account of other diseases. 46
Colonial medical governance in India provided for the first time the
possibility of apprehending biological and social phenomena through
methods of inductivism and this enabled the understanding of such phe-
nomena in causal terms. The collection of statistical data on medicine and
public health leading to quantification, classification, and bureaucratic
kowledge was crucial to that epistemological transformation that was
rendered possible by colonial governance. The vital statistics of the Em-
pire comprised data on vaccination and communicable diseases, health
returns detailing longevity and fecundity as well as mortality and mor-
232 Chapter 6

bidity rates for a myriad of population groups classified by sex, race,

region, occupation, age, religion, and so on. 47
Although simple ideas of enumerative inductivism and notions of
probable occurrence of events must have formed part of the general com-
mon sense arising out of human experience, the idea of “fate,” and of
things beyond “human will,” predominated Indian thinking. Even in the
West, inductive method of reasoning as applied to social phenomena is of
fairly recent origin having evolved only in the nineteenth century. Politi-
cal Arithmetik of Petty and Graunt was predicated on nominalist assump-
tions that the world was made of discrete entities with no intrinsic rela-
tions between them, and the role of mathematics was to create order
rather than discovering its immanent principles. 48 While eighteenth-
century mathematical probability was closely linked to Enlightenment
moral sciences and was therefore individualistic and psychological, lead-
ing to the view that society being an aggregate of rational individuals
was law-governed, nineteenth-century probabilists by stressing statistical
frequencies sought to obtain regularities at the macroscopic level of soci-
eties rather than at the microscopic level of individual action. Quetelet’s
Physique Sociale called upon governments to act upon the collective rather
than the individual and in so doing elaborated upon a science of social
causality. 49
Medicine in Europe was to undergo profound changes in the eight-
eenth and early nineteenth century such as the move from bedside medi-
cine to hospital setting, cadaver dissection, and the organ localization of
disease, mapping the body in three-dimensional anatonomical space, and
the rise of medical authority and hierarchy within. British biomedical
identity was in part constituted by their experience of colonial disease.
Medicine in colonial India and elsewhere in the colonies also underwent
a transformation from eighteenth-century medical geography to what in
the Victorian era came to be known as “tropical medicine,” which de-
fined a new strategy of targeting specific diseases and pathogens that
racialzed and hierarchized bodies and constructed native bodies as car-
riers of microbes through laboratory reports that detailed methods and
techniques, and marshaled statistical evidence; the laboratory was often
colonial society itself. 50 The era of bacteriology and parasitology that
ushered in the search for microbes and the medium (vector) provided the
colonizers with a sense of purpose and a program for action even as
pathological anatomy made them search within the human body for dis-
tinct racial traits.
Despite the efforts of the indigenous systems of medicine to accom-
modate and model themselves after the Western system, as in the attempt
to replace the personalized didactic settings of family homes for medical
learning with formal institutionalized settings, their humoural theory of
disease appeared powerless in the face of the new science of bacteriolo-
gy. 51 Even indigenous scholars had noted that the development of nosol-
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 233

ogy in indigenous systems of medicine was deeply deficient, and hence

physicians wrote about the cures of the diseases rather than their
causes. 52 In 1837 a colonial writer observed, “The inductive method of
reasoning is unknown to the Brahmans . . . they have never been discov-
erers of common facts: there are no treatises on particular diseases: all
they have of record in medicine is in the shape of diffuse general sys-
tems . . . of which the greater part relates more to mythology than medi-
cine.” 53
Rendering disease as “event” made it possible to cognize “epidemics”
in statistical terms as the occurrence in a community or region “of cases
of illness, specific health-related behaviour, or other health related events
clearly in excess of normal expectancy.” 54 Statistics of mortality of troops
and pilgrims in epidemic areas of cholera were recorded from the early
1840s. With the publication of the report of the Royal Sanitary Commis-
sion in 1863 highlighting the causes of mortality among the British troops
in India as more due to fevers and diseases than to war, the colonial
government became more concerned both with the causes of deaths and
the causes of diseases. 55 International sanitary conferences held between
1866–1885 called for investigation into the cause of diseases like cholera
and deliberated on quarantine measures. 56 Believing that disease posed a
greater danger to the British troops than the Indians themselves, the
government initiated research into the causes of diseases like cholera,
malaria, Beri-Beri, and kalazar in 1869, and in the next few decades ex-
tended the practice of appointing officers to conduct field enquiries on
the causation and prevention of disease, seeking in addition the aid of
international experts in bacteriology. The outbreak of the plague in Bom-
bay in 1896 was a compelling factor in the establishment of a medical
research organization in India. 57 While curative medicine made some
progress, preventive medicine for the natives remained only a pretense
despite the introduction of a host of sanitary measures based on the prin-
ciples of metropolitan sanitary science and the setting up of segregated
enclaves for British residents and troops.
The knowledge of disease causation was important for the kind of
administrative actions or inaction, which in the case of cholera and ma-
laria exemplify the contradictions of colonial biopolitics. Colonial govern-
mentality premised on the political rationality of the profitability of the
Empire preferred always a least-cost combination of interventions even
to the detriment of the welfare of the governed. Rival theories about the
cause of cholera as the “water-borne” theory and the “aerial miasmatic”
theory meant either the disease was contagious or noncontagious. Ac-
cepting the contagious nature of cholera would have demanded sanitary
interventions of a scale and order unacceptable to the government and
hence in order to detach itself from public health, it went to extraordinary
lengths of manipulating the flow of information and theoretical discus-
sion in official circles, and dealt harshly with medical officers who
234 Chapter 6

stepped out of line. Understanding the causes of epidemic diseases

prompted the government to introduce new methods of epidemic control
such as the public demonstration of new biomedical techniques, and the
emergence of administrative records alongside that marked the social
space of disease and statisticalized it as well. 58
Spatializing the disease through carto-statistical techniques became a
necessity for administration as an epidemic often spread far and wide on
account of railways and steamships. 59 Charles Morehead’s researches on
malaria in the 1850s spatialized and temporalized the disease by showing
its association with rain, heat, and wind, but the spatializing did not
result in appropriate intervention as profitability was at stake. 60 As new
irrigation projects and railway embankments came up with infrastruc-
ture development in the post-1860 period, waterlogging and poor field
drainage caused mosquito breeding. Even after the discovery by Ronald
Ross of mosquitoes causing malaria in 1897, investment in better field
drainage was not undertaken nor was the government keen to undertake
the recommended regional surveys to establish the precise connection
between mosquito and deficient drainage. The colonial government’s
paid expert on malaria scuttled all suggestions for effective drainage sys-
tem that would have eliminated mosquito infestation suggesting instead
that people in malaria-prone areas protect themselves by taking qui-
nine. 61
By the end of the nineteenth century, the reports of the sanitary com-
missioners of different provinces contained statistical data on the number
of vaccinated people, the costs per person for vaccination, deaths due to
the various diseases among others. Prior to the accumulation of statistical
data as evidence to prove causation, ingenious methods were used by the
British for administrative convenience to secure the Indians’ conviction
over causation, such as their appeal to the rationality of tradition and
custom rather than proof through inductive methods of statistical reason-
ing. When the colonial officials were convinced about the efficacy of Jen-
nerian vaccination they composed poems in Sanskrit and tried to claim
an antiquity to the practice. 62 Tradition seemed to contain within it the
logic of inductive rationality of “ordinary” experience based on chance
observations, and the fact that the inventedness of tradition would rup-
ture that rationality was perhaps not always within the cognitive domain
of those who were persuaded by the inductive logic contained within
tradition. Such methods of persuasion could only have been used if in-
ductive methods based on “ordered experience” and of statistical reason-
ing to understand causality and social phenomenon were not yet in the
public domain of cognitive accessibility. 63 By the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century, there was a considerable shift in the understanding of
causality on account of the availability of statistical data in the public
domain. Discarding the Humean conception of causality and its assump-
tion that belief and action are separate, as a “reductio ad absurdum” as
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 235

Alisdaire MacIntyre once suggested, it becomes evident that a redefini-

tion of the field of action and the institution of new set of actions by
colonial governmentality also entailed a new set of beliefs about the dis-
ease displacing the preexisting ones. 64 While the older sets of beliefs and
actions were perhaps constituted by an inductive rationality of “ordinary
experience,” they nonetheless succumbed to the power of statistical cau-
sality, a power that in the colonial context was inseparable from govern-
mentality itself.
Statistical inference played a crucial role in both generating knowl-
edge of the disease as well as in the administrative management of the
disease. The statistical delineation of the disease encompassed such as-
pects as correlating the spread of the disease to climate on a season-wide
basis, statistical corroboration of the efficacy of vaccines on different con-
trol groups, statistical correlation of the number of purported causes of
the disease to the cases under analysis, and statistical analysis of possible
modes of disease transmission among others. Although the statistical
analyses did not entail probability calculations, as one would have ex-
pected, they nevertheless subscribed to a simple numerical inductivism
or even to merely ensuring the conditions for such an inductive approach
or appealing to an inductive logic.
Statistical inferences in sanitary administration may not in themselves
be of unique epistemic interest were it not for the fact that these inferen-
tial outcomes sought to redefine the field of action upon which colonial
governmentality could extend a politico-medical hold on the population
and alter their conditions of life and living. Colin McFarlane has illustrat-
ed how colonial administrators used the method of “colonial compari-
son” in the absence of colonial statistics, through his reading of Henry
Conybeare’s 1852 Report of the Sanitary State and Sanitary Requirements of
Bombay, a report that was important to the governmental understanding
of sanitation as a problem and solution. Conybeare, the superintendent of
repairs to the Board of Conservancy in Bombay in the 1850s, was like
some others deeply influenced by the public health movement in Victo-
rian Britain. Identifying himself with British reformers like Edwin Chad-
wick and John Simon he made a strong argument for the role of drainage
as central to sanitation and recommended drainage provision to both
European and native quarters of the city. He explicitly deployed the
method of colonial comparison and conceived sanitation in a relational
way with the metropole thereby providing a metric for the government
to frame its policy. Noting the lack of sanitary statistics for Bombay at
that time, he relied on English sanitary statistics from London, Manches-
ter, and Charlton to show what would be the effect of sanitary improve-
ments in diminishing the annual death rate of Bombay, unwittingly up-
holding Eurpean standards to the civic authorities. MacFarlane notes that
Conybeare’s argument was that if in London a geography of drainage
maps on to a geography of mortality, fever, and illness, so too does it
236 Chapter 6

apply to Bombay, as he pointed to differences between the elite A divi-

sion (Fort, Esplanade, and Colaba) to the south compared to E division
(Mazagon, Tarwary, Parell, Cammatee Poora, and Sewree) to the north as
differences between drained and undrained spaces. 65
Colonial comparisons both implicit and explicit constituted the coloni-
al order of difference and the racial strategies of colonial governmental-
ity. Martin Beattie has noted that from the earliest attempt to improve
sanitation in Calcutta as stipulated in Wellesley’s Minutes of June 1803
that set up an Improvement Committee to survey the town and suggest
improvements to the public drains and water courses, among others, in
Ranald Martin’s 1837 Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta, the writ-
ings of Fabre-Tonnerre in 1872 as the health officer for the Calcutta Mu-
nicipality, the Frank G.Clemow and William C. Hossack’s Report upon the
Sanitary Condition of Ward VII (Burra Bazaar), Calcutta in 1899, and the later
1912 City Improvement Trust Report On the Condition, Improvement and
Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas, the native quar-
ters of the city were seen as the source of all diseases, especially epidemic
cholera, and the suggestions for the improvement of the bustees (slums)
were to pull down structures, to widen streets to let in air and sunlight,
and to improve the drainage system. 66 Such an approach to town plan-
ning met with resistance both from the natives with their hybrid notions
of modernity as well as a European town planner like Patrick Geddes
who emphasized the incorporation in town planning of the natives’
views on space and place in their everyday lives. Colonial town planning
and sanitary management in sharing some of the perspectives of quaran-
tine and cordons sanitaires during epidemic management regarding the
spatial control of the population was an integral part of colonial biopoli-
tics.
Cholera was the single most important disease accounting for the high
mortality of British troops in the 1850s. The Royal Commission on the Sani-
tary State of the Army in India (1859) that was set up to inquire into this
matter recommended the creation of a sanitary commission in each presi-
dency to advise on all questions relating to the selection and laying out of
military stations, the proper construction of barracks, hospitals, and other
buildings, and additionally advise on the provisions for water supplies,
drainage, cleansing, and on the general sanitary supervision in stations,
cities, and towns. The commissions were to also advise on the prevention
of epidemic disease in India. 67

CHOLERA, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE, AND BIOPOLITICS

It should not be surprising that colonial biopolitics varied over time, as in

the early phases of colonial rule there were perceived congruences be-
tween Western medicine and indigenous medicines like Ayurveda and
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 237

Unnani and the British were eager to learn the indigenous medical cures
for diseases that were unknown to them. Over time, the rift between the
two widened partly on account of the missionary hostilities to heathen
religious practices which in Hindu India was associated with the huge
gatherings of pilgrims at religious festivals and their perceptions of the
natives’ lack of hygiene on account of the dirt and filth they saw in
pilgrimage centers and the association of disease with it. More important-
ly, both as Western medical knowledge gained strides in pathology, or-
ganic chemistry, and disease classification and causation, and as the Brit-
ish consolidated their power in India, they began to dominate with feel-
ings of superiority. 68 From the mid-1850s onward, sanitary management
and scientific research on diseases gained momentum. What is surpris-
ing, though, is that biopolitics, and by that is implied the discourses and
practices that connect the vital and the political spheres, varied across the
diseases that they sought to control. Thus the biopolitics of cholera,
which includes the production of scientific knowledge and the nature of
state intervention, was in striking contrast with that of the plague as
explained here.
Cholera, considered an indigenous disease endemic to the lower Ben-
gal region, became an epidemic disease in the nineteenth century spread-
ing to regions in India and across the world to Europe and America.
From the early nineteenth century mortality from cholera epidemics was
to disproportionately affect the British troops, the pilgrims in pilgrimage
sites, and the poor. Although statistics on cholera morbidity and mortal-
ity was sparse and irregular, attempts to understand the patterns of the
cholera epidemicity gave rise to a widespread understanding in the early
years that it was caused by climatic or meteorological factors and later to
the view that it was on account of dirt, lack of hygiene, and environmen-
tal factors. Miasmatic and localist theories of the spread of cholera con-
vinced the colonial officials that it was noncontagious and was airborne.
Anti-contagion views were also popular in Britain in the liberalism of the
1830s and the political culture of liberalism served to oppose quarantines
and cordons sanitaires especially after its failure to prevent cholera epi-
demic in the 1830s. 69 James Cunningham as sanitary commissioner of
India from 1866–1884 held steadfast to the localist and environmental
theory of disease causation especially drawing his support from the work
of the German hygienist Pettenkofer who had argued in the 1860s that it
was the soil conditions that caused germs to develop their pathogenic
qualities and that the mere presence of germs would not cause a disease.
This perspective of anti-contagion served Pettenkofer to oppose all meas-
ures of quarantine and cordons sanitaires, a position that appealed to
James Cunningham as quarantines would have affected maritime trade,
and as well, the curtailment of population movement within the country
would have been difficult to enforce as much resistance from the people
was anticipated. This was at a time when international sanitary confer-
238 Chapter 6

ences on cholera sought to standardize quarantine procedures across na-

tions with its categorizations and surveillance of border crossers to devel-
op new models of borders and border protection from the traditional
quarantines and cordons sanitaires for the defence of Europe from the
Asiatic evil of cholera. 70
James Cunningham sought to substitute physical modes of surveil-
lance through statistics and reports that were presented annually in the
sanitary commissioner’s report, thus keeping the army and the popula-
tion under surveillance for epidemic diseases. This helped to buttress his
localist theories of disease and to espouse a sanitary regime of good
hygiene and the removal of filth. 71 Except for a few dissenters, most of
the Indian medical and sanitary establishment concurred with James
Cunningham’s views. Bryden, a civil surgeon and statistical officer to the
government of India favored the method of statistical epidemiology to
construct the “natural” history of cholera through collection of data in the
form of statistical tables to delineate the geographic boundaries within
which cholera was distributed, the topographical and meteorological fac-
tors responsible for its propagation, and the mode of transmission. Al-
though influenced by William Farr, the registrar general in London, who
was convinced through the evaluation of statistical data that cholera was
water-borne, Bryden insisted that in India it was the result of atmospher-
ic and environmental influences and not propagated through contagion,
thereby supporting James Cunningham’s views. 72 On the contrary, the
sanitary commissioner for Punjab A. C. C. DeRenzy wrote in the sanitary
report of 1868 that cholera was a water-borne disease and made a case for
piped water supply in the towns of Punjab. De Renzy was influenced by
the scientific research of John Snow in England who in the late 1840s had
demonstrated that sewer-polluted waters of the Thames River that was
supplied to parts of London city contained cholera germs. In differing
from James Cunningham, DeRenzy incurred his displeasure and was
transferred from his post, thus keeping in abeyance for a few years the
proposed scheme of piped water supply even when it was statistically
evident that piped water supply in Bombay had by then reduced the
cholera mortality in the city. 73
With over 100,000 deaths on account of cholera after the 1867 Harid-
war religious mela (fair), the British government undertook research on
the aetiology of cholera in India under the direction of James Cunning-
ham as some British physicians believed that ingestion in the intestines of
fungus spores present in human excreta could be the cause of cholera.
The prospect of isolating a pathogenic organism as the cause of a disease
was then exciting in the medical field and as none in the Indian medical
fraternity then possessed the skills to perform a study involving special-
ized microscopic and botanical research two medical doctors, D. D. Cun-
ningham and T. R. Lewis, were sent from England to work on this study
under the direction of James Cunningham. The two doctors were already
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 239

under the influence of Pettenkofer’s environmental theories of disease

when they arrived in India to work under the direction of James Cun-
ningham who also believed in environmental theory. These, along with
the expectations of the Anglo-Indian medical community that the two
doctors first familiarize themselves with the knowledge of the cholera
disease already produced in the Indian terrain, predisposed them to be
biased to the environmental theory. They investigated the influence of
vast array of environmental factors like atmospheric pressure, tempera-
ture, rainfall, humidity, and water levels in the soil and endorsed a loca-
listic response to disease control, thereby validating the colonial sanitary
policy that was in effect. 74 Their laboratory experiments required famil-
iarity with the evolving “germ theory” of Pasteur. D. D. Cunningham’s
enduring work Microscopic Examinations of Air that was enthusiastically
received sought to establish correlations with the daily “catch” of organ-
isms on the glycerine-coated microscope slides exposed to the air for
twenty-four hours with the incidence of ague, dysentery, diarrhea, den-
gue, and cholera in the adjacent Presidency jail. Although unable to con-
firm any relationship statistically, he was able to demonstrate the in-
creased presence of fungal spores present in the air after rain. 75 With the
discovery by the German bacteriologist Robert Koch in February 1884 of
the comma-bacilli as the causative germ-agent of cholera in a water tank
in Calcutta, the germ theory of disease gained preeminence challenging
the environmental views of Pettenkofer, James Cunningham and the san-
itary management of cholera epidemic based on the assumption of it
being noncontagious. But the Indian medical and sanitary authorities
resisted the implications of Koch’s discovery. The editors of Indian Medi-
cal Gazette expressed fears that strict quarantine measures would hence-
forth be enforced on Indian ships by European countries imposing pecu-
niary loss upon Indian commerce. 76
Numerous researches were undertaken in India on the presence of
cholera vibrio in different water sources by those who opposed Koch’s
findings and those who supported it. D. D. Cunningham, who was op-
posed to Koch’s finding, propounded a theory of polymorphism that
comma-bacillus was capable of existing in different morphological forms
and that different cultures produced different types of comma-bacillus
and refused to accept the link between comma-bacilli and cholera at least
until 1897 and argued that any proposed cause of the disease must be
able to explain the behavior of the disease in epidemic conditions thus
marking a shift from laboratory findings to the field. 77 He was at pains to
argue that a sanitary policy concentrating on water supply was not
needed. D. D. Cunningham and his Anglo-Indian associates were eager
to resist the universalizing tendency of European bacteriology by claim-
ing a special status to the Indian terrain. M. E. Hankin, a government
bacteriologist and germ theorist, conducted tests in the 1890s on numer-
ous water sources to find the presence of cholera vibrio and came to the
240 Chapter 6

interesting conclusion that the upstream waters of the rivers Ganga and
Jamuna had bactericidal properties and was remarkably free from chole-
ra vibrio. 78 His arguable suggestion was that the dangers posed in pil-
grimage sites like Haridwar would disappear if the existing wells nearby
could be closed and the people encouraged to use river water. No doubt
all these experiments under different conditions required vast collection
and analysis of statistical data to draw inferences.
The germ theory shifted the focus from the field to the laboratory,
emphasizing appropriate methods of visualization and controlled experi-
ments. More importantly, identifying the causative agent of cholera was
necessary to find the preventive and curative methods, and the identifica-
tion of comma-bacilli gave hope for the production and testing of a vac-
cine that was to also become contentious. Louis Pasteur had in France
successfully produced vaccines for anthrax and rabies, and once the
comma-bacilli was identified as the causative agent it was hoped that it
would be possible to develop cholera vaccine as well. Jennerian vaccina-
tion that was developed for small pox using live culture of cow pox met
with only mild resistance in India as the Indians already had a similar
procedure of variolation that even the British used in their early years in
India, and they could also seek rationale and justification within a relig-
ious framework as small pox goddesses were worshipped all over the
country. But cholera did not have such a goddess although some ritual
practices were developed in certain regions in the nineteenth century
lending certain cultural meanings to the disease. 79 Early in 1892, D. D.
Cunningham sent a particularly virulent strain of comma-bacilli to Paris,
to aid Waldemar Haffkine, a Russian émigré working at the Pasteur insti-
tute, to aid in the production of an effective vaccine, although Cunning-
ham believed that the vaccine would not be effective in preventing the
occurrence of the disease and would only modify its behavior like the
way hygienic improvements do. 80
When Haffkine came to India in 1893 to test his cholera vaccine that
was “attenuated” rather than live culture, there was no statistical evi-
dence about its efficacy as it was at an experimental stage. While the
government granted him the permission to test his vaccine on the popu-
lation it insisted that it had to be on a voluntary basis with the subjects
being made to understand its effects. Debates ensued between various
officials about granting permission to inoculate on voluntary basis even
after the vaccine was proven to be safe with no harmful effects on native
soldiers, prisoners, school children, emigrants to Assam, coolie workers
in mines, railroads and public works, and in famine camps as it was
debatable if such categories of people could really exercise a choice when
placed in coercive contexts. Even after the colonial government prohibit-
ed the inoculation of prisoners, many prisoners in jails in Gaya, Bilaspur,
and elsewhere where inoculated by Haffkine as the jail authorities
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 241

claimed no knowledge of such government orders clearly indicating how

in colonial context liberal intentions could turn into illiberal practices. 81
Haffkine was aware that in order to statistically prove the efficacy of
inoculation he needed comparable groups of inoculated and uninoculat-
ed persons that he tried at best to bring together. It also entailed detailed
recording of cases and deaths among the inoculated and uninoculated
according to certain characteristics of the population. The inoculation
registers of North Western Provinces deposited in the Bacteriological La-
boratory at Agra contained the names, father’s name or regimental num-
bers, sex, age, nationality, birthplace, religion or caste, profession, ad-
dress, and date of inoculation. In case of troops the fact of inoculation
was entered on the medical history sheet and in the case of prisoners on
the jail ticket. The Calcutta records included for each house the number of
inoculated and uninoculated and those affected by cholera in each of
these two groups. The religion and caste details were also mentioned.
Haffkine too in his reports took care to mention the number of Brahmans
inoculated in each town among the total inoculated. Kavita Misra opines
that from the kind of information elicited it was clear that “a certain
imagination of the social order determined the course of the operation,
and the way in which scientific as well as administrative recording was
done.” 82
Haffkine returned to India in 1896 after a brief sojourn to England in
1895 for further trials of the cholera vaccine. However, the outbreak of
the plague epidemic in 1896 diverted his attention to the production and
testing of the plague vaccine that ran into a different course from the
cholera vaccine as indicated in the following discussion which clearly
suggests that the links between the vital sphere and the political sphere
that constitute biopolitics was in the colonial context contingent, and
negotiated. The relations between state, science, and subject were a com-
plex network of power relationships in which knowledge and consent
was sought to be produced.

PLAGUE, STATISTICS, AND SANITARY ADMINISTRATION

Not since the Indian mutiny in 1857 had the colonial government been
gripped with such panic as with the outbreak of the plague in 1896.
Known locally as mahamari, plague had supposedly been endemic in the
Himalayan foothills and colonial medical officers had in fact recorded the
years when it erupted, the localities and the mortality. 83 Coupled with
the crisis faced by Western medicine on account of its lack of knowledge
about its causation, cure, and prevention, the plague in 1896 evoked anx-
ieties among the colonial officials of the hidden dangers of the country
that called for struggles “to be waged individually against moral and
physical sickness, collectively against intrigue, conspiracy and rebel-
242 Chapter 6

lion.” 84 Examining the colonial archive relating to plague administration

I show how epidemic management and sanitary administration consti-
tuted colonial power as a directly intrusive one on the colonized bodies
even as it rendered them as sites of statistical knowledge for the emerg-
ing field of tropical epidemiology and public health.
Following the outbreak of the plague in Bombay and the adjoining
areas between August and September 1896, allegedly transmitted
through a ship from Hong Kong, it spread over the course of the next two
years to a greater part of the Bombay Presidency and in the course of time
to regions of Madras, Bengal, United Provinces, and Punjab taking a toll
of more than 12 million lives between 1896–1930. 85 Although plague epi-
demics have ravished many parts of Europe, the Mediterranean, and
parts of the New World from the Middle Ages onward, very little of the
aetiology of bubonic plague was then known when it struck Bombay. The
Indian Plague Commission of 1898–1899 was set up to inquire into aetio-
logy and epidemiological aspects, the effects of curative serum, as well as
that of the sanitary administration of the bubonic plague. With T. R.
Fraser, a medical doctor and with five other members, the Committee
had in its seventy-two days of sitting posed and obtained answers to over
twenty-seven thousand questions from a large section of the administra-
tive personnel and doctors involved in combating the plague epidemic. 86
The analysis of epidemic, as Foucault noted, is the “discovery, be-
neath the general signs, of the particular process, which varies according
to circumstances from one epidemic to another, and which weaves from
the cause to the moribund form a web common to all the sick, but pecu-
liar to this moment in time and this place in space.” 87 The Indian Plague
Commission tried in effect to do such an analysis of the plague epidemic.
The body of evidence contained in the five volumes is the discursive site
of tensions between the universalizing discourse of modern science and
Western medicine, the colonial administrators’ assumptions of modern
statecraft, and the Orientalist perspective of the uniqueness of the Indian
epidemiological terrain as regards climate, bodies, and classes of peo-
ple. 88
State medicine and the sanitary power of colonial bureaucracy sought
to negotiate between “Occidental therapeutics” and “Oriental bodies”
through the discourses of science and statistics providing an understand-
ing of colonial governmentality’s complex nexus of power and knowl-
edge. 89 The authorizing power of epidemics, of who observes and reports
on the epidemic and the methods of doing so constitute the epistemic and
governmental sites of “epidemic struggles” as states make appear or dis-
appear “epidemics,” its causes, and its effects. Such epidemic struggles
overwhelmed colonial biopolitics in plague, cholera, and malaria man-
agement exposing the limits and contradictions of liberal governmental-
ity in the colonial context.
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 243

Statistics became the language to establish truths about the disease

and to delineate the borders of epidemics, of when they begin and end,
and of its nature, whether porous and shifting. Evident from the ques-
tions posed and answers provided to the Plague Commission, the report
is striking for its insistent demand for statistics, its presentation of tables,
and the use of maps to establish relations and correlations. Authoritative
statistical language mobilized through the officializing procedure of
tending evidence before an inquiry commission no doubt obliterates and
invisiblizes human encounters and experiences of disease to serve biopo-
litical governmental rationality. The manner in which statistics was de-
ployed in both the management and in the production of knowledge of
the plague epidemic indicates how the hallmarks of “plague” such as
shame and blame, stigma, isolation, fear of contagion, and end-of-the
world scenarios are transmuted into the rational language of bureaucratic
administration devoid of the subjectivity of the subjects of rule.
On the first day of the Commission’s sitting on Tuesday, 29 November
1898, Wingate, the acting chief secretary to the Bombay government in
the Plague Department and also the plague commissioner, indicated to
the Commission using Nathan’s map, “The Plague in India 1896–1897,”
the geographic spread of the disease in the first year, which was then
confined to the coastal areas and the chief towns of Poona, Karachi, and
Bombay. For the second year, he produced a series of district maps,
which enabled a visual cognition of the spread of disease noting that
while each village is not shown “we have underlined every village that
we can in red, so that by turning over the leaves you will immediately get
an idea of the extent of the plague at present in the presidency.” 90 He
inferred from this density map that plague spread over a wider geo-
graphic area during the rainy season than at other times, although it was
difficult to foretell when particular towns could be attacked, or of the
second round of epidemics. Mortality statistics of different towns and
districts for two consecutive years 1897 and 1898 indicated the possibility
of its decline toward November 1897 with the ending of rains, which
made large-scale evacuation of the affected towns either wholly or par-
tially possible, which measure appeared to have produced an immediate
effect upon the mortality. Correlating the occurence of the epidemic with
the climate measures he noted with circumspection, “I always hesitate to
attribute positively either an increase or decline to anything that is done
in plague.” 91
Epidemic intensity expressed statistically by mortality figures was de-
termined by spatial demarcation as Wingate’s remark indicates, “if we
were to exclude the big towns, the number of deaths spread over the
village would not be a particularly heavy average.” 92 Maps with appro-
priate color markings were provided as evidence to show when “im-
ported” cases and “indigenous” cases of plague surfaced in particular
places, although it could not indicate the rate at which plague spread, the
244 Chapter 6

quantum impact of “imported” cases on “indigenous” cases, or when

“indigenous” cases appeared after the “imported cases;” information that
would have been crucial for timely intervention. Plague maps simply
signified rational governmental power even if the rhetoric served little
use in administration.
Suffice it to say, the statistical cognition of plague mortality needed
other corroborative evidence since underreporting of plague deaths in a
densely populated town as Bombay, and the error of over reporting else-
where, of attributing all deaths to plague by village officers with “no
medical training,” constantly undermined the accuracy of statistics. 93
Further, norms of intensity could be comprehended only against the
backdrop of the statistical universe as in Wingate’s remark that “151,000
deaths spread over three years in the large Presidency of Bombay does
not mean that plague has been particularly bad if you look at it as a
whole.” 94 But the nesting character of the disease needed an appropriate
statistical universe to be defined. While small universes such as “family,
town or district” made the disease appear virulent and dangerous, larger
universes diluted its impact, and the kinds of interventionary action de-
pended upon the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the statistical
universe.
The treatment of plague required scientific research involving induc-
tive methods on the preparation of plague prophylactic, its administra-
tion, and its effects. Waldemar Haffkine who was attached to the Bombay
Municipality and serving under the Home Department of the govern-
ment of India prepared a prophylactic, preferring to keep the theorizing
that went into it strictly within the bounds of his laboratory, for he be-
lieved that “the ideas which different experimenters have, as to the essen-
tial and inessential circumstances which determine artificial immunity,
are widely different.” 95 Such secrecy as to its preparation did not guaran-
tee its efficacy for he had no information about the immediate physiologi-
cal or pathological effect of this vaccine when injected into man, nor did
he know the amount that would be required to be injected in a man to
produce any useful resistance against the disease. Also, the time required
after the treatment for the sought immunity and for how long it would
last needed to be established. Such knowledge could only be established
by testing on a large number of people till such point that experience,
statistical average and common sense begin to converge, since in these
instances there is no a priori knowledge of what the appropriate sample
size ought to be.
After having first tested the vaccine upon himself with the principal of
Grant Medical College acting as a witness, Haffkine offered it to the
public, and reported to the Plague Commission that in the course of the
first three weeks several hundred persons of all ages and sex offered
themselves to be inoculated and the effects were carefully observed on
them. In the course of the first part of 1897, more than eight thousand
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 245

people had been inoculated voluntarily, and Haffkine went on to argue

that these tests enabled him to infer about the immediate symptoms pro-
duced by the prophylactic and also to arrive at the maximal dosage to be
administered. The outbreak of plague in the Byculla prison in Bombay
toward the end of January 1897 made it possible to test the effectiveness
of the vaccine controlling for the incubation period and the time the
vaccine was administered. After two dozen professors and students of
the Grant Medical College demonstrated to the prisoners the “painless-
ness and harmlessness” of the inoculation, a little under half of the 327
prisoners volunteered, creating a sample group that could be compared
with the control group. Haffkine claimed “The prisoners were, before the
inoculation, all under identical conditions: they lived in the same jail, had
the same food and the same hours of rest and work. During the rest of the
epidemic, which lasted seven or eight days only, they were again left to
live under conditions as identical as possible in a human community.” 96
Observing the two groups every day over a period of a week enabled him
to infer that “from the next morning after inoculation, there were alto-
gether twelve cases of plague, of whom six proved fatal among the non-
inoculated, and two cases both of whom recovered amongst the inoculat-
ed lot,” and he claimed that the epidemic ceased after that. 97 From this
“single instance” Haffkine noted that he drew “all the conclusions which
were possible,” though admittedly only “temporary,” relating to both the
dosage of the prophylactic and the fact that the prophylactic was power-
less to resist the symptoms already set in or that developed within a “few
hours” after inoculation. Haffkine further concluded from this experi-
ment that the prophylactic influences the course of the disease during the
incubation period as the number of cases infected among the inoculated
was far lower than among the uninoculated, assuming that a large pro-
portion of those affected, are likely to have been infected at the time of
the inoculation itself, and given the fact they were a group, all of them
being long time inmates of the prison with no recent entrant.
The Commission also tried to decipher statistical medical norms and
conditions of normality from temperature readings of inoculated per-
sons. Watson, an officer of the IMS (Indian Medical Service) who deposed
before the Plague Commission was asked to provide temperature charts
of all prisoners who were inoculated in the Umarkhadi Jail in January
1898, which record he claimed was not maintained under the pressing
circumstances of the epidemic. In February 1899, Dr. Mayr was asked
details of temperature changes after inoculation of different brews of the
two hundred jail patients he had examined. Following are the questions
posed by the Plague Commission and answers given by Dr. Mayr that
indicate the ambiguities in norm-production. 98
Q. Have you seen any severe results following the inoculation?
A. Never.
246 Chapter 6

Q. How many of these patients have you seen twice?

A. I took a series of 200 people in the jail, who were inoculated by
Professor Haffkine and myself and I examined them [approximately] 7
hours after inoculation, 24 hours and 48 hours. I took their tempera-
tures and examined them thoroughly.
Q. Were they all inoculated with the same brew of fluid?
A. They were inoculated with two different brews made at the same
time?
Q. Did you find that the same brew of fluid produced the same rise of
temperature in all the patients?
A. No, it varied with the patient.
Q. How much did it vary?
A. The lowest temperature I recorded was 99 and the highest tempera-
ture was 104.6.
Q. What were the temperatures between these two limits: was there an
average temperature?
A. Yes. The average of the maximum temperatures was 101. The aver-
age temperature for the whole lot of observations was just over 100.
Q. We had it in evidence that a temperature of 102 is the ideal tempera-
ture?
A. Yes.
Q. In these cases you did not get that?
A. I probably did not get every man at the time when his maximum
temperature occurred.
Q. We have been told that one of the principles of inoculation was that
you should produce a temperature of 102, but if you get a difference
between 99 and 104, how can the rise of temperature be used as a
standard?
A. In most instances we have not been able to follow out the case
completely. I inoculated my servant and had him completely under
observation after he was inoculated and I took his temperature every
half hour. His temperature reached 102.3, that was the maximum eight
hours after inoculation.
Q. But supposing you take 100 cases as you have done in the jail and
the temperatures vary from 99 to 104, how can the temperature be the
standard of efficient immunization?
A. My experience of the work is insufficient to allow of my judging the
question accurately.
Clearly, the foregoing vindicates Canguilheim’s views on medical nor-
mality and normativity as being not fixed but flexible. I have reproduced
this set of questions and answers to indicate how the authorizing power
of medical norms that ought to have been the domain of scientists is here
appropriated by the state-appointed Commission that consisted of non-
medical civil service members with no bacteriologist or any member of
the Indian Medical Service. The political motive of such related to how
the epidemic situation was seized upon to constitute a new modality of
power, a liberal governmentality of colonial health. In usurping the pow-
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 247

er to authorize medical norms, it makes possible to transmit such norms

into social norms through sanitary and environmental administration,
which is generally of low priority to medical persons concerned with the
bacteriological causation of disease and the cure of patients.
Statistical inference through such scientific experiments depersonal-
ized subjects as they were identified as numbered subjects such as, “Pris-
oner 672 had at the time of inoculation a painful gland in the left groin”;
and “Nos. 1356 and 2722 developed painful glands in the left axilla the
same evening. These two cases have also proved fatal.” Pain and death
were no more subjective states of individuals but countable statistics of
depersonalized subjects.
If prisoners were depersonalized subjects, those outside and being
tested and/ or affected by plague were marked by social class and ethnic
differences as disease incidence was being correlated by living condi-
tions. The majority of the lowest class in Bombay who were inoculated
were described as those who could “read newspapers” and had “physi-
cians to consult,” and was presumably aware of the “novelty” of Haff-
kine’s treatment. Not only would the conditions of living be an important
issue for understanding the spread of the disease and the administration
of sanitary discipline but the other conditions such as age, sex, caste,
religion, and occupation as revealed in Haffkine’s registers of inocula-
tion, which mirrored the administrative records, were also to signify dif-
ferences in the incidence of the disease, the social acceptability of inocula-
tion, and the kinds of the intervention needed. 99 This necessitated, as in
the case of Lanauli in July 1897 a detailed census of the population of the
epidemic affected area, and in fact such house-to-house census was often
repeated periodically during the entire period of the epidemic to ascer-
tain the exact number of deaths. Data on morbidity and mortality of
inoculated and non-inoculated groups from different towns and rural
areas conducted by differing survey procedures only provided confusing
statistical evidence making it difficult to draw clear inferences.
The correlations proved contentious as the experimental conditions
varied. Often the population could not all be inoculated at the same time
but at different times and with varying affects that had to be accounted
for in the experimental result. The experiment on the effectiveness of the
prophylactic conducted in Kirki established a direct connection between
the strength of the prophylactic and the effect of immunity it produced.
More interesting was the issue of variability, as for a given material and
fixed dose, there were variations in reaction according to individual
properties of the person inoculated, which meant that a person be inocu-
lated twice, first with a tentative dose to study the nature of the reac-
tion. 100 Medico-administrative practice often took priority over experi-
mental research and was reflected in the kind of records generated. Al-
though Bannerman who was working with Haffkine on the prophylactic
in Bombay knew well the importance of proper records, yet his object
248 Chapter 6

when he went to Belgaum was to start the inoculation in the plague

stricken locality, and the records he maintained were only in the form of
“accurate description of every inoculated person” and not “comparative
observations” of cases that had occurred after the introduction of inocula-
tion. The duration of protection after inoculation also needed to be statis-
tically inferred which Haffkine noted was being “submitted to an accu-
rate investigation” for the recurrence of the disease after the inoculation
among the many small communities, such as the Khojas in Bombay. 101
Not surprisingly Haffkine’s list of illustrative experiments provoked the
president of the Plague Commission T. R. Fraser to inquire as to whether
his examples were “average examples” or whether he had results “which
fell lower in apparent good” than those which were stated. 102 In the end
Haffkine’s vaccine was not viewed favorably by the Indian Plague Com-
mission on account of the unsystematic standardization in the prepara-
tion of the prophylactic and the dosage, although it found that it “sen-
sibly diminishes” the plague attack and “greatly diminishes” the death
among the inoculated.
Foucault has suggested that unlike the rituals of exclusion for the
leper, plague gives rise to “disciplinary diagrams,” which way of dealing
with disease is not “a massive, binary division between one set of people
and another,” but one that involves “multiple separations, individualiz-
ing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an
intensification and a ramification of power.” 103 Such segmentation gives
rise to forms of political power and administrative strategies that rely on
selection, normalization, hierarchization, and centralization. 104 Soon after
the onset of the epidemic in Bombay, powers entrusted to the municipal
commissioner of Bombay under the Municipal Act of 1888 was extended
that authorized him to enforce segregation and hospitalization of plague
cases and granted municipal health officers’ right of entry into infected
buildings. The Epidemic Diseases Act passed in February 1897, with little
debate or consultation, to cover the whole of India authorized civil and
military officers to inspect ships and its passengers, detain and segregate
plague suspects, destroy infected property, search, evacuate, disinfect,
open up for ventilation or destroy dwellings harboring plague, prohibit
fairs and pilgrimages, and examine and detain road and rail travelers-in
short whatever official and medical opinion considered necessary to sup-
press plague. 105 This was the first time that such an Act on epidemic
disease covering the entire population was passed. 106
As the cause of plague was not determined until 1908, there was at the
time of the outbreak in 1896 a mere conjectural association between rats
and plague. This resulted in severe policing of space armed with powers
to administrative authorities to effect measures like evacuation, segrega-
tion, and disinfection even resulting in digging up the floors of houses on
suspicion that damp floors harbor plague and demolition of homes sus-
pected of having plague victims. Interfering with customary funeral prac-
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 249

tices, the authorities tried to enforce the requirement that plague corpses
be wrapped in a sheet soaked in perchloride of lime or covered with
quicklime. The tendency to conceal the dead through stealthy disposal of
corpse compelled the authorities to initially inspect corpses at the homes
and cemeteries to determine the localities and homes of plague victims,
which measures met with fierce resistance. Problems of segregation in
smaller towns and rural areas were no less than in the crowded urban
centers as the unaffected population who on being moved to open-air
camps stealthily went back to their supposedly infected homes under
cover of darkness to retrieve their belongings. With wild rumors circulat-
ing on many different aspects of the epidemic causing panic and resis-
tance at all levels of society and state, epidemic management also had to
contend with managing rumor-induced behavior and action. 107
The authoritatian nature of epidemic management can be surmised
from the evidence given to the Commission as the following.
In Bombay with its immense chawls full of lodgers, who have little kit,
and can shift at any moment, house-house visitation is of comparative-
ly little use, and the only way to discover cases of plague seems to be to
employ spies, and to keep as careful a watch as possible on the cemeter-
ies. Many cases have been discovered in large searches with troops, but
such searches cause great alarm, and I would not use troops until there
is good reason to believe that the area is badly infected and other
means of discovering cases have failed (emphasis mine). 108
To another question on corpse inspection at the cemeteries, another re-
spondent observed, “I do not mean the corpses should be inspected, but
you should see that no body is buried or disposed of at the cemetery until
the fact of the death is known to the authorities in the town. I mean, keep
a watch so that people do not take away corpses and dispose of them
without you knowing where they came from.” 109 Noting that very often
friends give the wrong address of the corpse at the cemeteries, the re-
spondent acknowledged that it was difficult to give any accurate figures
of the proportion of the cases, which he thought must be about 5 percent.
With such authoritarian policy and practices in place and popular
resistance to them, with uncertain scientific knowledge of the cause and
cure of plague, and with pressures heightening on the international front
to stop external trade with India on account of the epidemic, the Indian
Plague Commission played a significant role in retrieving the power of
the state to constitute a liberal governmentality of health and sanitation
even if it had wrongly assumed that its illiberal measures would have
been possible in the colonial context.
Such liberal governmentality of health once again emphasized the
need for statistics. The census of 1901 soon after the plague outbreak, and
the census of 1911 collected for the cities of Bombay and Calcutta detailed
ward-wise and street-wise data on aspects like population by sex, relig-
250 Chapter 6

ion, employment sectors, housing conditions, and number of inhabitants

per room that called for stupendous efforts to organize the collection and
collation of the data. Such small-area statistics were collected in the Unit-
ed States only forty years later and in the United Kingdom fifty-five years
later. 110 Clearly, the early and detailed small-area information produced
by the British in India seems to support Arjun Appadurai’s contention
that the anxieties of colonial rule were in part the cause of such monu-
mental data-gathering rather than the usefulness of such data for govern-
ance, as these detailed census data for small areas did not play a signifi-
cant role in town planning decisions even if the Bombay Improvement
Trust was established in 1898. 111
While sanitary measures were contemplated and executed widely
from the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial state kept its share of
costs to as little as possible by delegating the municipal and local bodies
to undertake such works and recovering the costs through taxes and
rates. While these measures faced opposition from local politicians, small
landlords, and Indian-rate payers in most colonial cities, similar meas-
ures did not evoke the same opposition in the princely states. Although
the administration of health and sanitation was to progressively involve
Indians in the decision-making process, the native areas of towns were
not accorded the same treatment as European enclaves. 112 Liberal
governmentality’s projects of “improvement” in the colonial context was
racialized and marked by colonial “difference,” foregrounding always its
own pecuniary interests ahead of the welfare interests of the population
it governed. 113

RESISTANCE AND THE LIMITS OF GOVERNMENTALITY

Widespread and violent resistance to plague measures were reported in

such far-flung regions as Bangalore, Nasik, Bombay, Kanpur, Lucknow,
Patna, Punjab, and Midnapore, in most instances resulting in violence
and deaths. 114 The plague commissioner of Pune, W. C. Rand, who intro-
duced the most draconian measures was even murdered in retaliation in
1897. In Bombay, riots took place when the authorities tried to remove a
suspicious case of a Jhulai girl to the hospital. The commissioner of police
then noted that the Jhulais have always been “the most turbulent among
the inhabitants” and “a sect of fanatical and bigoted Mussalmans” who
was more opposed than others to the plague measures apparently on a
misguided view that the plague measures enforced corpse inspection.
Everywhere there was resistance to inspection of women’s body parts
like neck, underarm, and groin that violated both Hindu and Muslim
purdah norms.
In Bombay province it was reported that when the plague hit a village,
the villagers ran away from the village including those affected in order
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 251

to avoid segregation or due to fear. On 11 February 1899, Stewart, a

colonial official who deposed before the Plague Commission noted that
when people ran away from Igatpuri to Ghoti, he had heard rumors of
cases there and so sent the Mamlatdar to make inquiries. On reaching
there with an assistant surgeon and others, they were assaulted, several
of them badly hurt. 115 Similar cases of being manhandled and threatened
with dire consequences were reported in many other places as in Chick-
ballapur when a doctor from Bangalore who was sent there to inoculate
willing people was driven out of the town. Stewart who was in charge of
two large wards in Bombay in Byculla and Mazagon with population of
about 185,000 each, told the Commission that when he sent the infected
persons to the hospital and those who had contacts with the infected to
the camps for segregation, it was interrupted by a riot after which they
avoided the wholesale evacuation of all people from the large chawls.
In Kanpur and elsewhere, plague riots broke out on rumors and pur-
portedly misguided views about segregation of the sick. Even the high-
class Muslims of north India and elsewhere held the view that plague
was a “god-sent dispensation” against which it was futile to contend, that
it was not contagious (adwa), and resisted the breaking of purdah that
compulsory segregation entailed even though a few Muslim medical men
believed it to be contagious and offered some alleviating measures. 116
Diaries and chronicles maintained by Muslims at that time did not give
the plague events its attention as they did to communal relations reveal-
ing perhaps a divergence between official perception of a calamity and
that of local communities. 117 Petitionary prayers among Hindus and
Muslims well indicate that their reaction was not one of fatalism but
action, even if the action was prayers to god.
Reporting on the plague riot in Ganjam village in Srirangapatnam
near Mysore city, the Pioneer of 16 November 1898 noted that while the
local authorities made arrangements for the burial of a “Mahomedan”
from Bangalore who had died in a plague shed on 10 November, a large
crowd of natives chiefly “Mahomedans” assembled at the shed and op-
posed the removal of the body. According to the Pioneer, “They appeared
really to have no concern with the deceased, but to be bent on creating a
disturbance.” After handling the ambulance staff and the police roughly,
the report noted, that they “succeeded in carrying away the body, which
they threw into the river Cauvery.” Surely, if the “Mahomedans” had no
concern for the deceased as reported by the Pioneer, it seems surprising
that they removed the body. In throwing the body into the river and
violating their own practice of burial, they were merely retrieving the
community’s claim over body and death from the state.
Although the colonial state could never aspire to an absolute and
exclusive control over every body of the colonized subject, there was a
latent claim that became operative in certain administrative, judicial and
medical contexts. 118 The plague administration was one such instance
252 Chapter 6

when that latent claim became manifest. In all instances, the resistance
sought to protect the inviolability of the body, both live and dead, from
intrusive governmental power. The body was perceived to belong to the
community and attempts at individualizing the body by the plague
measures provoked resistance to reclaim the body for the community.
The measures were perceived by all sections of the population both as a
violent intrusion on their cultural practices giving scant regard to matters
of caste and religion in evacuation and segregation, and as an appropria-
tion of their bodies, the intimate space of the family, and even their mean-
ings of life and death. The body became a contested site of colonial
governmentality and the community. Bio-power thus reached its limit
when the colonized body, marked as it was by cultural and religious
differences, refused to be negotiated or trampled for the sake of a univer-
sal science or for modern sanitary technologies.
As a consequence of the resistance, the colonial government in 1898
and 1899 made compromises in its plague policy eschewing compulsion
and the use of troops. Other unpopular measures such as compulsory
segregation and hospitalization, and corpse inspection were abandoned
in favor of voluntary segregation and inoculation, house-cleansing based
on customary beliefs and practices, and the use of “leading men” from
various communities as agents of persuasion. Nowhere is the Foucaul-
dian insight that power can be read off resistance more true than in the
case of resistance to plague measures. While the sanitary power of coloni-
al governmentality sought to normalize the colonial epidemiological ter-
rain, resistances to such normalization were indicative of the limits of
bio-power’s capacity to act on individual and mass bodies. Such limits
were set as much by the resoluteness of colonial “difference” as by the
violent negation of the subject-constituting effects of sanitary power. That
no other colonial medical intervention evoked as much resistance as the
plague measures suggest that colonial “difference” was indeed able to
constitute itself as a resistant “difference” that could in fact negate
governmentality’s subject constituting effects.
The resoluteness of colonial “difference” and the negation of govern-
mentality’s subject-effects resulting in resistance compelled liberal
governmentality at times to acknowledge its failure through violence, to
exercise a form of Clausewitzian power on the people, in which the posi-
tions of attackers and defenders, and guns and bayonet were of strategic
importance than the liberal rationalities of government. The nationalist
response to the excesses of epidemic administration clarified both to the
rulers and the ruled of how governance ought to be, as evident in Tilak’s
comments in his newspaper Kesari on 13 July 1897, that the “policy of
governing by making a parade now and then of the physical power was
unjust. . . . To govern is not to unsheath the sword and to threaten the
people with death and destruction at every moment.” 119 If nationalists
seized the opportunity to let it be known how governance ought to be, it
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 253

was also evident that the colonial state was learning through this epidem-
ic manangement of how to constitute a liberal governmentality of a colo-
nized population, of how much access it can have to individual and mass
bodies, in what ways it can access them, and of where to draw its limits
that exposed in the process the contradictions of a liberal governmental-
ity in the colonial context.

NOTES

1. Michel Foucault notes “We have two series: the body-organism-discipline-

institutions series, and the population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-
State. There is no strict dichotomy between institutions and State because disciplines
tend to escape institutional framework and acquire Statist dimensions and regulations
can exist at the substate level of institutions as well. The two mechanisms are not
mutually exclusive but could be articulated.” See Foucault, Society Must be Defended,
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, 242.
2. Not only did Foucault show in his Birth of the Clinic that clinical rationality is
both “individualizing” and “totalizing,” he also noted in another text the following:
“the emergence of a clinical medicine strongly centred on individual examination,
diagnosis, and therapy, the explicitly moral and scientific—and secretly economic—
exaltation of ‘private consultation,’ in short the progressive emplacement of what was
to become the great medical edifice of the nineteenth century, cannot be divorced from
the concurrent organization of a politics of health, the consideration of disease as a
political and economic problem for social collectivities which they must seek to re-
solve as a matter of overall policy.” See Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings 1972–1977, 166.
3. Thomas Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the
Nineteenth Century,” in Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Os-
borne and Nikolas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996), 99.
4. Nikolas Rose, “Expertise and the Government of Conduct,” Studies in Law, Poli-
tics and Society 14, (1994): 359–97; and Thomas Osborne, “Medicine and Epistemology:
Michel Foucault and the Liberality of Clinical Reason,” History of the Human Sciences 5,
2 (1992): 63-93.
5. Nikolas Rose, “Life, Reason and History: Reading Georges Canguilhem Today,”
Economy and Society 27, 2 (1998): 164.
6. Francis Bacon, “The History of Life and Death” in The Works of Francis Bacon vol.
X, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath (Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1863),
11. Cited in Buck (1977), 77.
7. Buck, “Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital Statis-
tics,” 68.
8. Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the Nine-
teenth Century,” in Foucault and Political Reason, 102.
9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79,
ed. Arnold I. Davidson and trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), 139.
10. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 176.
11. Osborne, “Security and Vitality: drains, liberalism and power in the nineteenth
century,” in Foucault and Political Reason, 100-101.
12. Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the Nine-
teenth Century,” in Foucault and Political Reason, 101.
13. Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the Nine-
teenth Century,” in Foucault and Political Reason, 101; and Colin Gordon, “Governmen-
254 Chapter 6

tal Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed.

Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 15–16.
14. Osborne, “Medicine and Epistemology: Michel Foucault and the Liberality of
Clinical Reason.”
15. Thomas Osborne notes that the concern with technologies of security, as op-
posed to those centring upon discipline or the sovereignty of a territory, is a distinctive
feature of liberal political rationalities. See Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains,
Liberalism and Power in the Nineteenth Century,” in Foucault and Political Reason,
101–102.
16. Thomas Osborne provides examples of such naturalisms. These are the asser-
tion of the natural domain of vital laws that sanitary discourse took as its object; a
detachment of organic disease and poverty from the preventable circumstances of
pathology directly due to the environment; the development of a sanitary infrastruc-
ture itself modeled on quasi-organic principles; a naturalization of the private space of
the home as the domain protected from the direct impact of the government; and a
naturalization of modes of describing sanitary and social conditions themselves. See
Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury,” in Foucault and Political Reason, 116–17.
17. Thomas Osborne has noted that eighteenth-century England was not particular-
ly preoccupied at the discursive level with endemic disease, at least, not as a general
problem for government unlike that of the early Victorian period. The exception was
the problem of fever in enclosed spaces. This concern with fevers was also tied to
issues of public security. The medicine of enclosed spaces of the eighteenth century
was associated with the establishment of right conduct and discipline rather than with
the provision of urban infrastructure as in the nineteenth century. See Osborne, “Se-
curity and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the Nineteenth Century,” in Fou-
cault and Political Reason, 107–108.
18. Thomas Osborne has noted drawing insights from other scholars that the Lon-
don Fever Hospital worked as a kind of apparatus for making fever visible as a
homogeneous entity, receptive to theory. See Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains,
Liberalism and Power in the Nineteenth Century” in Foucault and Political Reason, 112.
19. See Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the Nine-
teenth Century,” in Foucault and Political Reason.
20. Partha Chatterjee notes “the more the logic of a modern regime of power
pushed the processes of government in the direction of a rationalization of administra-
tion and the normalization of the objects of its rule, the more insistently did the issue
of race come up to emphasize the specifically colonial character of British dominance
in India.” See Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 19.
21. Anil Kumar notes “Science conducted under a colonial framework, could not
have provided a better spectacle. Considerations of efficiency, availability, and econo-
my, thus, were all subordinated to racial vanity.” See Anil Kumar, Medicine and the Raj:
British Medical Policy in India, 1835–1911 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998), 154.
22. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 40.
23. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (New York, 1963/1975), 14–15.
24. Francois Ewald, “Norms, Discipline, and the Law,” Representations 30, Special
Issue: Law and the Order of Culture (Spring 1990): 140.
25. Paul Rabinow, “French Enlightenment: Truth and Life,” Economy and Society 27,
2 and 3 (1998): 194.
26. Mike Gane, “Canguilhem and the Problem of Pathology,” Economy and Society
27, 2 and 3 (May 1998): 299.
27. Joshua Cole presents the debates in the Academy of Medicine in 1837 over the
use of statistics in medicine. See Joshua Cole, “The Chaos of Particular Facts: Statistics,
Medicine and the Social Body in Early 19th Century France,” History of the Human
Sciences 7, 3 (1994): 1–27.
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 255

According to Joshua Cole, the debates mirrored what Foucault has called as the
“great bipolar technology” of early ninteenth-century medicine, “anatomic and bio-
logical, individualizing and specifying, directed towards the performance of the body,
with attention to the processes of life.” See Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Inter-
views and Other Writings 1972–1977, 139.
28. Joshua Cole notes on the space of knowledge opened up by Broussais: “A new
order had emerged from the assembled figures and tables, which gave structure and
form to the infinite variety of human experience. When grouped together in series, the
most random events of social life were found to exhibit recognizable and consistent
patterns, hinting at an unsuspected universe of exquisite precision.” See Cole, “The
Chaos of Particular Facts: Statistics, Medicine and the Social Body in Early 19th Centu-
ry France,” 1.
29. Joshua Cole goes further to say that Quetelet’s Physique sociale “marked a rhetor-
ical transition in the treatment of numbers as signs of social phenomena” by eliminat-
ing the one-to-one correspondence between objects in the world and digits in the
statistical table through his averages. Cole, “The Chaos of Particular Facts: Statistics,
Medicine and the Social Body in Early 19th Century France,” 13.
30. Mike Gane has highlighted how Comte took from Broussais the conception of
the relation between normal and pathological phenomenon and regarded him the true
founder of positive pathology. Mike Gane notes, “Progress requires the control of
imagination by observation, says Comte, and the idea that disease is the ‘excess or
deficiency of stimulation . . . either rising above or below the degree which constitutes
the normal condition’ opens the way to the analysis of pathology as a study of ‘inten-
sity in the action of stimulants indispensible for maintaining health.” See Gane, “Can-
guilhem and the Problem of Pathology,” 302.
31. Mike Gane explores Canguilhem’s relation to Comte. Nearly twenty years prior
to the publication of The Normal and the Pathological, Canguilhem wrote a thesis on
Comte’s notion of “order and progess” under Celestin Bougle’s supervision. Bougle
was considered a leading member of the Durkheimian school. See Gane, “Canguilhem
and the Problem of Pathology.”
32. Rabinow, “French Enlightenment: Truth and Life,” 198.
33. George Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books,
1989, Originally published in 1943). Canguilhem’s ideas of the normal and the patho-
logical have been discussed in some recent critical writings. Annemarie Mol discusses
how the multiplicity of medical normalities relates to each other. She notes “If multi-
ple normalities come to figure as competing goods, normalization is no longer capable
of providing a coherent order.” Annemarie Mol, “Lived Reality and the Multiplicity of
Norms: A Critical Tribute to George Canguilhem,” Economy and Society 27, 2 and 3
(May 1998): 283.
34. Thomas Osborne, “Medicine and Ideology,” Economy and Society 27, 2 and 3
(May, 1998): 260.
35. Osborne, “Medicine and Ideology,” 269.
36. In the essay “From the Social to the Vital” that George Canguilhem added in the
second edition of The Normal and the Pathological in 1966, he compares the norms of life
with those of society.
37. Rose, “Life, Reason and History: Reading Georges Canguilhem Today,” 165.
38. Monica Greco, “Between Social and Organic Norms: Reading Canguilhem and
Somatization,” Economy and Society 27, 2 and 3 (1998): 234–48.
39. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. For
Foucault’s use of “normalization,” see Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
40. Francois Delaporte, “Foucault, Epistemology and History,” Economy and Society
27, 2 and 3 (1998): 296. Nikolas Rose helps to understand how scale changes lead to
new formulations of a problem, as he shows illustrating with the case of medicine,
how new techniques of visualization changed the scale of clinical vision, such that
“the body” no longer appears as a system, a system of systems, even as an “open
256 Chapter 6

system.” See Rose, “Life, Reason and History: Reading Georges Canguilhem Today,”
162.
41. Samantha Iyer, “Colonial Population and the Idea of Development,” Compara-
tive Studies in Society and History 55, 1 (2013): 71–72.
42. Vijay Prashad, “The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi,” Modern Asian
Studies 35, 1 (Feb 2001): 116.
43. Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj, 172–77.
44. Michel Foucault suggested that a medicine of epidemics could exist only if
partnered by a police, which meant the “ensemble of mechanisms through which
order is ensured, the channeled growth of wealth and the conditions of preservation of
health ‘in general’.” Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 25.
45. David Arnold, “Cholera and Colonialism in British India,” Past and Present 113
(Nov 1986):120.
46. Ira Klein, “Death in India, 1871–1921,” The Journal of Asian Studies 32, 4 (August
1973): 639–59.
47. Alison Bashford, “Medicine, Gender and Empire,” in Gender and Empire, The
Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Phillipa Levine (Oxford University Press, 2004),
112–13.
48. Buck, “Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital Statis-
tics,” 67.
49. Recent authors have questioned Quetelet’s contribution to understanding social
causality. Gigerenzer and others have noted that Quetelet’s theory was “the purest
form of positivism, requiring no knowledge of actual causes but only the identification
of regularities and, if possible, their antecedents.” See Gerd Gigerenzer, et.al. The
Empire of Chance: How Probability changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989), 42. Stephen Stigler noted that Quetelet’s method ulti-
mately failed to provide an analytically coherent method for distinguishing between
mere regularity and significant evidence of causal influence. See Stephen M. Stigler,
The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900. (Cambridge: Bel-
knap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), 203–20. Ian Hacking noted that in
Quetelet’s theory of the average man “the mathematics of probability and the meta-
physics of underlying cause were cobbled together by loose argument to bring an
‘understanding’ of the statistical stability of all phenomena.” See Hacking, The Taming
of Chance, 112. Joshua Cole however suggests that Quetelet’s average man “should be
read as an essentially allegorical figure, even as an attempt to assert the power of
statistical allegory as a privileged mode of social description.” See Cole, “The Chaos of
Particular Facts: Statistics, Medicine and the Social Body in Early 19th Century
France,” 12.
50. Mark Harrison, “Tropical Medicine in Nineteenth-Century India,” The British
Journal for the History of Science 25, 3 (Sept 1992): 299–318. Warwick Anderson suggests
that even the American colonial encounter in the Philippines was similar where labor-
atory texts became not merely a medium to inscribe racial differences of colonial and
native “bodies” but in fact as a sign of difference. See Warwick Anderson, “‘Where
Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man is Vile’: Laboratory Medicines as Colonial Dis-
course,” Critical Inquiry 18, 3 (Spring 1992): 506–29.
51. Kumar, Medicine and the Raj, 71–72.
52. Kumar cites the Telugu writer B. G. Devara on this point. See Kumar, Medicine
and the Raj, 72.
53. Mark Harrison, “Medicine and Orientalism: Perspectives on Europe’s Encoun-
ter with Indian Medical Systems,” in Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Coloni-
al India, ed. Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001),
64.
54. Ann Herring and Alan. C. Swedland, “Plagues and Epidemics in Anthropologi-
cal Perspective,” in Plagues and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present, ed. Ann
Herring and Alan. C. Swedland (New York: Berg Publishers, 2010), 4.
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 257

55. Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Sanitary State of the Army
in India 1859, Vols. I and II (London, 1863).
56. Valeska Huber, “The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International
Sanitary Conferences on Cholera 1851–1894,” The Historical Journal 49, 2 (June 2006),
453–76.
57. Anil Kumar notes, citing one Sir Pardy Lukis, that plague played a role for
medical research in India like what cholera did for sanitation in England some sixty
years before. See Kumar, Medicine and the Raj, 159–60.
58. Anil Kumar points out that the introduction of the “Bombay System of Vaccina-
tion” by the GOI in 1854 and subsequently to other parts of the country marked the
beginning of the alliance between the public demonstration and the emergence of the
administrative attempt to map the social space of the disease. The salient features of
the Bombay system were the attempt to overcome native prejudice by personally
explaining the disease and to visit hitherto unapproached areas of a district. See Ku-
mar, Medicine and the Raj, 166–67.
59. Anil Kumar notes that the cholera epidemic of Bengal in 1817 spread to many
parts of the world including the United States and Cuba over the next two decades.
See Kumar, Medicine and the Raj, 171.
60. Charles Morehead, Clinical Researches on Diseases in India, Vol. 1 (London, 1856).
61. Sheldon Watts, “British Development Policies and Malaria in India 1897–c1929,”
Past and Present 165 (1999): 141–81.
62. Kumar, Medicine and the Raj, 165.
63. Around 1600 A.D. Francis Bacon distinguished between “ordinary experience”
based on chance observations and therefore subjective, and “ordered experience”
based on methodological investigation and aspiring to a certain form of objectivity.
These new techniques of knowledge fundamentally reconstituted Indian medicine as
well. Bengali intellectuals in the nineteenth century like Akshay Kumar Datta and
Rajendralal Mitra openly declared that India needed a Bacon and Baconian ideas. See
Jayanta Bhattacharya, “The Body: Epistemological Encounters in Colonial India,” in
Making Sense of Health, Illness and Disease, ed. L. Twohig Peter and Vera Kalitzkas
(Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), 31–54; and Deepak Kumar, Science and the
Raj (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 60.
64. Alisdaire MacIntyre, “A Mistake about Causality in Social Science,” in Philoso-
phy, Politics and Society, ed. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, 48–70. (Oxford: Black-
well, 1962/1972), 48–70.
65. Colin McFarlane, “Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanita-
tion in Colonial and Postcolonial Bombay,” International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, 32 2, (2008): 415–35.
66. Martin Beattie, “Colonial Space: Health and Modernity in Barabazaar, Kolkata,”
TDSR, XIV, 11 (2003): 7–19.
67. John Chandler Hume, Jr., “Colonialism and Sanitary Medicine: The Develop-
ment of Preventive Health Policy in the Punjab, 1860 to 1900,” Modern Asian Studies 20,
4 (1986): 703–24.
68. Harrison, “Tropical Medicine in Nineteenth-Century India;” and Kavita Misra,
“Productivity of Crises: Disease, Scientific Knowledge and State in India,” Economic
and Political Weekly 35, 43/44 (Oct.21–Nov.3, 2000): 3885–97.
69. Huber, “The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary
Conferences on Cholera 1851–1894,” 456–57.
70. Huber, “The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary
Conferences on Cholera 1851–1894.”
71. Jeremy D. Isaacs, “D. D. Cunningham and the Aetiology of Cholera in British
India, 1869–1897,” Medical History 42 (1998): 279–305.
72. Misra, “Productivity of Crises: Disease, Scientific Knowledge and State in In-
dia,” 3887.
73. Hume, Jr., “Colonialism and Sanitary Medicine: The Development of Preventive
Health Policy in the Punjab, 1860 to 1900.”
258 Chapter 6

74. Isaacs, “D. D. Cunningham and the Aetiology of Cholera in British India,
1869–1897.”
75. Isaacs, “D. D. Cunningham and the Aetiology of Cholera in British India,
1869–1897,” 289.
76. Isaacs, “D. D. Cunningham and the Aetiology of Cholera in British India,
1869–1897.”
77. Isaacs, “D. D. Cunningham and the Aetiology of Cholera in British India,
1869–1897.”
78. M. E. Hankin, “The bactericidal action of the waters of the Jamuna and Ganga
rivers on Cholera microbes,” translated from the original article published in French,
Ann. De I’ Inst. Pasteur, 10.511, (1896).
79. Arnold, “Cholera and Colonialism in British India.”
80. Isaacs, “D. D. Cunningham and the Aetiology of Cholera in British India,
1869–1897,” 298–299.
81. Misra, “Productivity of Crises: Disease, Scientific Knowledge and State in In-
dia,” 3890–91.
82. Misra, “Productivity of Crises: Disease, Scientific Knowledge and State in In-
dia,” 3894.
83. R. Nathan, Plague in India, vol. 2, (Simla: Government Press, 1898), 60–61.
84. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India
1896–1914,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, ed.
Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 211.
85. Annual Report of the Public Health Commissioner with the Government of India, 1929,
I (Calcutta, 1932), 69. See also I. J. Catanach, “Plague and the Indian Village,
1896–1914,” in Rural India: Land, Power and Society under British Rule, ed. Peter Robb
(London: Curzon Press, 1983), 216–43.
86. The findings of the Indian Plague Commission in turn informed interpretations
of the European Black death although some hold the view that medieval plague in
Europe could not have been a rat-based bubonic plague. See Herring and Swedland,
“Plagues and Epidemics in Anthropological Perspective,” in Plagues and Epidemics:
Infected Spaces Past and Present.
87. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 22–26.
88. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vols. I–V . . . Indices to the Evidence, Also Glossary, Maps and
Summary of the Report and Appendices (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office,
1900–1901).
89. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nine-
teenth Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
90. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vol. I, 2.
91. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vol. I, 1.
92. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vol. I, 2.
93. The accuracy of plague mortality statistics due to concealment even during the
great plague in Europe has been mentioned by Graunt in his Observations on Bills of
Mortality published in 1662. See Buck, “Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civ-
il Strife and Vital Statistics,” 70.
94. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vol. I, 2.
95. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vol. I, 4.
96. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vol. I, 5.
97. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vol. I, 5.
 Bio-power and Statistical Causality 259

98. These questions are numbered from 17487–17496. Indian Plague Commission,
Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Commission, with Appendices Vol. III,
23–24.
99. Kumar (1998), 221.
100. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vol. I, 11.
101. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vol. I, 12.
102. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices vol. I, 11.
103. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195–225.
104. Stuart Elden, “Plague, Panoptican, Police,” Surveillance and Society 1, 3 (2003):
240–53.
105. David Arnold, “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague,
1896–1900,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 395.
106. Although the earlier Military Cantonment Act XXII of 1864 (also Contagious
Diseases Act) was the first comprehensive piece of legislation pertaining to health to
be effected in colonial India, it only targeted Indian prostitutes and English soldiers to
curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and contained a set of codes and
regulations modeled on the British Public Health Acts that instituted sanitary police
under the overall supervision of medical officers and approved the registration of
deaths and recording of observations regarding diseases in the interest of public
health. See Misra, “Productivity of Crises: Disease, Scientific Knowledge and State in
India,” 3886.
107. For the kinds of rumors that circulated about the plague epidemic read Arnold
“Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–1900,” in Selected Subal-
tern Studies.
108. Answer to Q#16987, Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by
the Indian Plague Commission, with Appendices Vol. III , 2–3.
109. Answer to Q#16999, Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by
the Indian Plague Commission, with Appendices Vol. III, 3.
110. Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, “Colonial Anxiety Counted: Plague and Cen-
sus in Bombay and Calcutta, 1901,” in Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cul-
tures of Planning in Asia, ed. Robert Peckham and David M. Pomfret (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 62–63.
111. Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Orientalism and the Post-
Colonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia.
112. Prashad, “The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi.”
113. Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison, “Introduction,” in Health, Medicine and Em-
pire: Perspectives on Colonial India, ed. Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (Hyderabad:
Orient Longman, 2001), 4–5.
114. For accounts of plague resistance in colonial India, read Arnold, “Touching the
Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–1900” in Selected Subaltern Studies; and
Colonizing the Body; and I. J. Catanach, “South Asian Muslims and the Plague
1896–c1911,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies XXII (Special Issue 1999): 87–107.
115. Indian Plague Commission, Minutes of Evidences Taken by the Indian Plague Com-
mission, with Appendices Vol. III, 2.
116. Catanach, “South Asian Muslims and the Plague 1896–c1911,” 88.
117. For comments on Gyanendra Pandey’s analysis of one such diary, see Catanach,
“South Asian Muslims and the Plague 1896–c1911,” 105.
118. Arnold, “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–1900” in
Selected Subaltern Studies, 393.
119. Arnold, “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–1900” in
Selected Subaltern Studies, 420.
 SEVEN
Colonial Governmentality and the
Public Sphere

Colonial governmentality reconstituted the public sphere in radically

new ways with its distinctive constitutive features of modern political
rationalities and technologies that both engendered and sought to regu-
late the public sphere in colonial India. The public sphere is the sphere
between the state and civil society that functions as the bearer of public
opinion on matters relating to the state and society. While on the one
hand, the growing print media of the nineteenth century, especially of
newspapers, indicates the evolution of the bourgeois public sphere, on
the other, varieties of “public” emerged as bearers of authoritative public
opinion in what have been described as “public arena activities.” 1 Na-
tionalist thought evolved in the discursive space of this public sphere.

LIBERALISM AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Surprisingly even in the West, the literature on the public sphere that
followed Jurgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere ignored the obvious fact that such transformations in the public
sphere were often the effect of the transformation of the State itself and of
the changes in the political rationalities and technologies of governance. 2
This is indeed surprising, for ever since Kant, the rise of public opinion
has been associated with the rise of liberalism. The Kantian doctrine of
freedom as reason is uncompromisingly part of the moral order of liber-
alism, and therefore normatively inscribed in the historical ascendancy of
liberal democracy. For Kant, the actualization of freedom as reason de-
pends not on private autonomy but on public autonomy. In his essay
“What is Enlightenment?” Kant wrote that the promise of self-

261
262 Chapter 7

determination was essentially contingent on using one’s reason in public.

Freedom as reason, however, is possible only in a particular kind of polit-
ical order and within particular kinds of public arrangements. The “prin-
ciple of publicity,” which Kant described as a “transcendental [i.e., uni-
versal] concept of public right,” requires for its rule the widespread inclu-
sion of citizens in public debate as well as their rights to be informed,
without which the State forfeits its legitimacy. 3 The principle of publicity
reconciles the requirements of general interests with the requirements of
political legitimacy. The modern liberal state not only transformed the
public sphere but also sought to induce certain effects on the conduct of
citizens in order to draw them into public debates and that would also
simultaneously produce the required legitimacy for the state. Habermas’s
attempt at retrieving public reason grounded in a dialogical context of
inter-subjective understanding however elides the subject constituting
aspects of modern power. 4 Foucault’s notion of governmentality and his
conceptualization of the political rationality of government suggest the
emergence of a new field of the “social” for producing certain effects of
power, much like the way Hannah Arendt argued about “the rise of the
social” with modernity. 5
If liberalism is instrumental in the emergence of the modern public
sphere, and if it operates through the emergence of a new and modern
political rationality that constitutes citizens as rational and autonomous
agents capable of exercising their free will, then it is of interest to explore
the relationship of liberalism to colonialism and the constitution of the
colonial public sphere, which relationship as scholars have noted recently
is mired in contradictions, of what Ranajit Guha notes as fitting “the
roundness of colonial autocracy to the squareness of metropolitan liberal-
ism.” 6 These contradictions arose when British liberalism that had self-
consciously styled itself as a universal political creed, faced challenges
from the strangeness and unfamiliarity that the colonial empire in India
offered. 7 To the extent that British liberalism itself was not a uniform and
homogenous creed over more than two centuries of its rule in India and
that in its nuances and inflections it harbored both the anti-colonial sym-
pathies of Edmund Burke as well as the reform-minded thinkers like
Bentham, the Mills, and Macaulay who in effect shaped a civilizational
agenda for colonialism refer us back to the emergence of British liberal-
ism as a set of practices of governance in the long historical evolution of
the English state, the complexities and ironies of which have been admir-
ably analyzed by Phillip Corrigan and Derek Sayer. 8
Liberal conceptions of governance that informed colonial administra-
tive practices were drawn from the liberal philosophical tradition of John
Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment rather than that of Kant. Kant of
course was of the view that the State “has its own roots, and to graft it on
to another state as if it were a shoot is to terminate its existence as a moral
personality.” 9 Locke’s introduction of his “law of private censure” or
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 263

“law of public opinion” ensured that citizens constantly pass judgments

on what is morally right or wrong for the State, and in so doing he gave
“political charge to the interior of human conscience which Hobbes had
subordinated to State policy.” 10 For Locke, the exclusionary basis of liber-
al universalism was on account of the hiatus between the anthropological
capacities of human nature that are allegedly universal and the necessary
conditions for their political actualization, thus justifying the centrality of
education as a liberal strategy. 11 In the colonial context, liberal thinkers
like the Mills and Macaulay defended the justification of liberalism’s ex-
clusionary strategies in terms of the political incompetence of those ex-
cluded on grounds of civilizational infantilism. Colonialism’s civiliza-
tional agenda was thus a project demanding infinite patience. 12 Whereas
in Britain it was public discussion that acted as the great check against
misgovernment, in the case of India, J. S. Mill observed, “the only means
of ensuring the necessary discussion and collision of opinions is provided
from within the governing body itself.” 13
Not surprisingly therefore, the structure and project of colonial power
was consciously directed upon colonized society itself to produce certain
governing effects on colonial conduct. 14 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has
described the constitution of the colonial subject as “the violent and nec-
essary constitution of an abstract subject of a limited access civil society—
the core of the colonial infrastructure,” which both required and indeed
constructed the domain of “society itself.” 15 The conduct of colonial sub-
jects was governed in this new field of the social by the arrangement and
disposition of the instrumentalities and institutions that sustain it such as
public opinion, private property, division of labor, market, and the judici-
ary. 16 Colonial governmentality enabled the identification of interests
among the colonial subjects primarily through the processes of transcen-
dence from particular and local interests to general and supra-local inter-
ests. 17 The centralizing tendencies of the colonial administrative state
sought to integrate the disparate and diffused state structures of precolo-
nial times and in the process affected the transcendence. 18
A new field of the “social” was thus created, rendering earlier forms
of the “social” anachronistic to the new structure and rationality of the
colonial state. Correspondingly, new knowledge of the “social” and new
ways of intervening in the “social” complemented the new rationalities of
the state. The institutionalization of the public use of reason through a
liberal political public sphere by the colonial state sought to achieve the
dual goals of both improving the moral conduct of the people as well as
have an effect on the government of the state and in the process tried to
reconcile the requirements of general interests with the requirements of
political legitimacy. In this context, David Scott notes:
a more public circulation of reason would serve to undermine and
break down the supports of native knowledges, to disqualify them. It
264 Chapter 7

would, in effect, help to put in place a public sphere in which only

certain kinds of knowledges-and not others -could circulate with any
efficacy; a sphere in which fluency in these knowledges (in part deter-
mined by the ability to point out the unreason in the old) would be a
condition of participation; and in which participation would be the
only rational and legal way of exercising influence in what now
counted as politics. 19
Christopher Bayly has argued that while the changes brought in by colo-
nial rule such as the introduction of public instruction, printing press,
public debate in newspapers, and the English language appear to have
transformed Indian society far more than colonial capitalism transformed
its economy, the Indian response to these “modern forms of information
diffusion and retrieval was determined to a considerable extent by exist-
ing communities of knowledge, styles of reasoned debate and patterns of
social communication.” 20 Moreover, the public use of collected reason
also manifested itself in numerous public arena collective activities in
which native knowledges based on religious beliefs were not disqualified
and which increasingly began to influence politics with the emergence of
communalism. 21 Also, as the nationalist movement gained momentum, a
Gandhian public sphere of the print media emerged gaining popular
appeal through the use of Hindu religious metaphors. 22 But colonial lib-
eralism’s encouragement to the use of reason in public was wrapped up
in its own contradictions. The presumed infantilism of colonial subjects
not only rendered them politically incompetent and hence had to have
their claims for representative government deferred, they were also, as a
corollary, not considered mature enough to possess opinions on matters
of the state until such time they were educated and reformed; and once
they acquired the capacity to do so, it raised another set of contradictions
that is best expressed in Fitzjames Stephen’s own words:
How can you possibly teach great masses of people that they ought to
be rather dissatisfied with a foreign ruler, but not much; that they
should express their discontent in words and in votes, but not in acts;
that they should ask from him this and that reform (which they neither
understand nor care for), but should on no account rise in insurrection
against him. 23

THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN COLONIAL INDIA

Colonial governmentality in India ushered in a new game of politics. The

liberal public sphere became vital to that game, to circulate both public
opinion and new knowledges, for only an effective participation in the
new game could ensure the efficacy of colonial power itself. Indeed, it
was in the public sphere of newspapers that the new knowledges of the
economy and society of India could in fact be legitimated as knowledges
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 265

by the Indians themselves as the colonial education project had still to

ground disciplinary knowledge in their social context. But it was in the
routines of administration—of the legislature, executive, and judiciary
that new conceptions of the “social” evolved. A variety of “publics”
emerged in consequence, some as enactment in public arenas. Public
opinion not only sought to influence the government, but such opinion
was often even perceived as a threat to the government, urging the colo-
nial state to retract from moral liberalism to an utilitarian illiberalism that
curtailed the freedom of expression. The struggle to reclaim the public
sphere and the legitimacy of public opinion led the Indians in turn, to
assert themselves as sovereign subjects and to move progressively to
actualizing the ideal of self-determination, thus proving that colonial
power did indeed succeed in governing colonial conduct.
The genre of newspapers and periodicals which, in the late eighteenth
century, were few in number increased considerably by the end of the
nineteenth century, and introduced for the first time a new way of elicit-
ing and shaping public opinion. Certainly rulers of precolonial kingdoms
had enlisted many intelligence communities to convey policies of the
rulers to the population and have accessed public opinion on what the
subjects felt about rule and kingship through courtly messengers and the
holding of the “Durbar.” But they were never under any compulsion to
regularly make public the various aspects of their rule, or to take upon
the responsibility of forming or curtailing opinions on rule and other
matters. Writing on the “Indian ecumene,” Bayly has shown that there
existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a tradition of
communication and debate within the Indian population that was also
able keep government and society under critical surveillance; these were
discursive terrains of “little public spheres” that served as “loosely-knit
constellations of powers in society.” 24 This public sphere worked
through oral and scribal modes of communication, for there was no print-
ing press as the Mughal emperors had shown little interest in it, as the
scribal tradition was quite strong. 25
In the context of intelligence gathering and access to social exchange
in British India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Bayly
notes that information, knowledge, and debate were not necessarily con-
strained within segments and hierarchies and was open to dialogue and
debate, and that public opinion or reasoned debate was not the preserve
of modern Western polities alone. While religious polemic dominated
these debates, they were also concerned with political and popular mat-
ters. Even in the later part of the nineteenth century, Western style public
debates did not completely subsume indigenous discourses on rights,
duties and good kingship. 26 Bayly therefore suggests that positing a
sharp break between tradition and nationalist modernity or between
West and East is an impoverishing perspective. The Mughal system of
court diarists produced daily chronicle of occurrences in the Court as
266 Chapter 7

well as newsletters written by Waqianavis, a system that was also fol-

lowed by the Maratha power. These underwent changes and merged
with the medium of printed newspapers introduced by the British. 27 On
the contrary, many believe that viewing the modern Indian press as a
lineal descendant of the medieval newsletters of the Mughal age pro-
duced by the official class of Waqianavis, would be “nearly as good as to
compare modern chemistry with medieval alchemy,” as these medieval
newsletters were meant to report attested facts without opinion. 28
Colonial governmentality guided by liberal principles needed to keep
the public informed about its practices of governance, unlike precolonial
states which did not function under this compulsion of making known to
the public all aspects of governance. Liberal technologies of government
require “public right” and that means a system of laws, which need to be
made public. A state, as is well known, is a union of an aggregate of
individuals under rightful laws; what is distinctive of the colonial state is
that the legislative, executive, and judicial powers did not belong to the
united will of the people governed by the state. While publicity of laws
was required and concomitantly public opinion emerged, the colonial
state did not immediately encompass the entirety of population as au-
thoritative bearers of public opinion. The colonial state did make use of
representatives of communities, the so-called “natural leaders,” to elicit
their opinions on state activities, which in some instances resulted in a
novel mode of political action that combined accommodation and resis-
tance to colonial power. 29
Newspapers emerged as the medium of publicity and hence were
restricted to the reading public. Newspapers of colonial India can be
classified into three divisions: the Anglo-Indian or English, published
largely for the resident British; the Indian-owned English-language
papers, written principally for Indians educated in English; and the
Indian-language papers also referred as “native newspapers.” Although
public opinion and modes of expressing them through the print media
had significantly enlarged in the colonial period, it is contrary to the facts
to think that the colonial government always favored its growth and
expression. The history of the Anglo-Indian or English press in India
suggests that the colonial government was, right from the beginning,
anxious to curtail the freedom of the press. 30 Although in the early years
there were no regulations specifically for the press, the executive author-
ity did take measures such as deportations of editors to England who had
incurred the displeasure of the executive authority. Among the issues
that the newspapers were forbidden to report were all matters relating to
the public revenue and finances of the country. In 1818, Warren Hastings
relaxed the draconian censorship control of the English press in the hope
that public discussion of governmental policies would mobilize support
from the European community for these policies. But the Court of Direc-
tors opposed Hastings’ measures, noting:
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 267

Under a free government the press is at once the organ of expressing

and the instrument of influencing public opinion. But in India public
opinion cannot be said to exist. . . . How can a Government devote its
individual energies to the greater interests of the state when it permits
itself to be daily harassed and irritated by attacks of journalists, and
how can it preserve unity and vigour of action when the press becomes
at once its rival and opponent? 31
Many other colonial administrators too opposed press freedom at that
time. Thomas Munro for instance remarked, “A free press and the domi-
nation of strangers are things which are incompatible, and cannot long
exist together.” 32 Despite such curtailment of their freedom, the English
press in India grew rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century and
primarily expressed the opinions of the colonialists themselves on mat-
ters relating to administration and commerce. Public opinion in the liber-
al public sphere was initially only expected to comment on matters of
administration with a view to its improvement, and the English news-
papers in the early years merely fulfilled that task. The Indian-owned
English and Vernacular papers that started emulating the Anglo-Indian
(English) newspapers also focused more on the improvement of adminis-
tration in the beginning. After the 1857 mutiny, as governance became
more disciplinary and as racial feelings hardened, public opinion was
increasingly defined as the opinion of the “non-official” European com-
munity, and the European community of planters even mobilized to
protest and oust colonial administrators who seemed to engage with “na-
tive opinion” as illustrated in the Nil Durpan affair. 33
The scope of native public opinion enlarged with the growth of the
nationalist movement and accommodated within its fold a diverse range
of nationalist opinions. As nationalist mobilization on linguistic basis be-
gan in the late nineteenth century, the Vernacular or Indian-language
newspapers multiplied. According to one estimate, the number of maga-
zines and newspapers in circulation in the vernacular rose from 225 to
about 1,000 between 1868 and 1900. 34 Although in the beginning the
English papers and periodicals had practically no Indian subscribers and
was considered by Harish Chunder Mookerjee to represent “neither the
opinions nor the interests of the vast mass of the Indian population”
(Hindoo Patriot, 3 May 1855), they no doubt extended their support and
played an educative role to the Indian press, at least in the early years.
The Bengal Hurkaru (26 August 1834) argued the case for the encourage-
ment of the Indian press so that the natives can through the bestowal of
anonymity overcome their fears of expressing their opinions, when it
noted:
It requires little experience to discover, that in verbal communications
with European functionaries, the natives generally express, not what
they think, but what they believe, will be agreeable to those whom they
268 Chapter 7

address; but . . . the press is a medium of communication through

which they . . . fearlessly state their opinions assured that they will
meet the observation of their rulers. 35
Setting for itself high standards of reporting such as presenting “impar-
tial accounts of both sides of any important measure” (Bengal Herald, 13
June 13 1829), the Indian-owned English press reflected the growing spir-
it of nationalism when, for instance, the Reformer (20 September 20 1835)
articulated the idea of the “independence of India” as “when the people
of this country are more improved, they will naturally desire to govern
themselves and will become unwilling to receive order from . . . Eng-
land.” (emphasis mine) If colonial governmentality sought to govern co-
lonial conduct, the emerging bourgeois public sphere of the native media
accepted the premise of governing colonial conduct, and sought to im-
prove the techniques of colonial governmentality even as it tried to
undermine its rationality.
Considering that public opinion was important for improving admin-
istration, all newspapers carried opinions that often, in varying degrees,
were critical of government policy. The Bombay Times and Standard (7 May
1860) noted, “The curse and weakness of our Indian administration has
ever been the want of free discussion, and of an articulate public opin-
ion.” It went on to recollect with nostalgia, William Bentinck’s openness
to suggestions for the improvement of administration, noting:
The remarkable series of letters to the newspapers that followed, from
the pen of the late Hon Frederick Shore, each letter surpassing its pre-
decessor in unsparing exposure of the faults of our system, awakened
yet more surprise, while Lord Bentinck, with the instinct of a states-
man, instead of shrinking from the trial, threw open authentic sources
of information to the public and gave his countenance and assistance to
every man who interested himself in the condition of the country. (The
Bombay Times and Standard, 7 May 1860)
The occasion for such a nostalgic reminiscence was prompted by the
action of Charles Trevelyan, governor of Madras, who had submitted to
the press his opinions about the government’s proposal for a set of new
taxes. Anticipating a revolt from the Indians, Trevelyan opposed the pro-
posed tax measures. The debate that ensued over the appropriateness of
Trevelyan’s disclosure of his report to the press first, rather than to the
Legislative Council of Madras found some of the Anglo-Indian news-
papers of Calcutta criticize Trevelyan’s actions, condemning it as “indis-
cretion.” For The Bombay Times and Standard (7 May 1860) such condem-
nation was misplaced as it declared:
The press of India occupies legitimately, and with advantage in this
country, the place of an opposition in representative assemblies, and
instead of there being any impropriety in the publications of such doc-
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 269

uments as that just given to the world, every instrument of the kind
should be made public.
For the exercise of modern power, colonial governmentality needed the
edifice of the modern state such as the legislature, executive, and judici-
ary, but precisely because it was the colonial modern, it sought to govern
subjects rather than citizens. Thus colonial governmentality rendered
superfluous the need for representative assemblies, in the sense of repre-
sentatives of the governed, as in the way modern democracy functions,
up until the second decades of the twentieth century. Indeed as J. S. Mill’s
famous quote on Representative Government urged all to believe, the In-
dians must first be constituted as modern subjects before they can be
given a role in representative government. The newspapers sought in
effect to shape a new public sphere that would both generate public
opinion and substitute for the representative assemblies. In the course of
time, this liberal technology of creating public opinion to serve the politi-
cal rationalities of modern colonial power socialized Indian public opin-
ion into increasingly proving the illegitimacy of colonial rule.
The different segments of the newspapers—Anglo-Indian, the Indian-
English, and Vernacular—tried to grapple their role of “an opposition in
representative assemblies,” although they underwent complex changes,
reflecting the complexities of the colonial situation over time. Whereas
bilingual papers such as the Bombay Durpan in the 1830s sought to pro-
vide a symmetrical translation of their publications in English and Mara-
thi, the bilingual papers after the 1860s did not do so but merely allocated
the various issues that were considered appropriate for English or Ver-
nacular publication reflecting the new hierarchies of language and power
established by the colonial education project in the meantime. 36 The ver-
nacular papers too shifted their focus over the period from mere dissemi-
nation of new knowledge to the vernacular readership to consolidating
their presence as authentic representatives of native opinion. Such native
public opinion was needed for colonial governmentality to “cultivate a
good understanding with the people” if its exercise of power was to “rest
as little as possible upon the exhibition of force,” for as the report on “The
Madras Protest” observed, “if the time ever come when the taxes have to
be collected at the point of the bayonet, the days of our empire in India
are numbered” (The Bombay Times and Standard, Original selections, 12 May
12 1860).
More importantly, colonial governmentality needed to reconstitute
the “social” as amenable to its intervention not by any manipulation of
discrete behaviors, but by reshaping the entire social order. Not surpris-
ingly therefore, and despite their identification with colonial interests, the
Anglo-Indian newspapers often assumed a mentoring role to the native
ones, especially on how the “social” issues were to be discursively articu-
lated. Urging the native press to play the role of the “preacher” and the
270 Chapter 7

“moral essayist,” the Bombay Times and Standard (7 January 1861, p. 2)

remarked that the Anglo-Indian newspaper press was restricted to an
extremely narrow range of topics largely because the objects of human
thought have been subjected to the principle of division of labor. Such
divisions of thought, it noted, would not be desirable in a less advanced
society, especially that of Hindu society, “where a civilization, solid and
symmetrical in itself, and defective chiefly in being built upon too narrow
a basis, has to be supplanted by a system which proceeds upon principles
in some respects essentially different, and presenting much that is
strange and repulsive to native prejudices” (Bombay Times and Standard, 7
January 1861, p. 2). To effect the necessary change, the paper noted that
“leaders equally comprehensive in knowledge and in sympathies, should
introduce it to their less enlightened countrymen; and in doing so, they
will naturally have to deal with topics, and deal with them in a way, for
which the European press affords no exact precedent” (Bombay Times and
Standard, 7 January 1861, p. 2). It noted that it was necessary to go back to
first principles, as the native press had to “attract and fix the attention of
readers untrained to habits of steady thought, or to control the flights of imagina-
tion, by an instructive perception of the possible” (emphasis mine), and only
when this is done for a generation or two by men of wide information,
who are thoroughly familiar with the mental constitution of their coun-
trymen that a broad and solid basis of positive knowledge would be laid
down. Such positive knowledge, it noted, would then require competent
writers to take up the chief branches of knowledge separately, and the
functions of the newspaper writer for native readers, will resemble those
prescribed for the European writers. The mentoring role of the Anglo-
Indian newspaper was to facilitate the colonial project of producing a
new native subjectivity.
The public in colonial India was as much an arrangement of economic
men as it was a site of political performance, making matters of the mar-
ket and political representation as grist for the mill of public opinion.
Information and public opinion set colonial governmentality to affect a
smooth sphere of social exchange and social subjectivity. The Anglo-
Indian papers particularly covered a great deal on the emerging imperial-
ist world economy. The dissemination of market information was crucial
to promote a smooth social exchange in the imperial world order. While
some newspapers like the Bombay Times and Standard gave a far greater
prominence to market information, others like the Bengal Hurkaru sought
to balance market information with that of governmental information.
For the Anglo-Indian papers however, “the pride of place went to news
from ‘home,’ and Parliamentary speeches, literary and theatrical events,
and comments on the social season seemed never too stale for publica-
tion.” 37
Years later the nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru was to remark in
his book The Discovery of India:
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 271

I remember that when I was a boy the British-owned newspapers of

India were full of official news and utterances of service news, transfers
and promotions; of the doings of English society; of polo, races, dances
and amateur theatricals. There was hardly a word about the people of
India, about their political, cultural, social and economic life. Reading
them, one would hardly suspect that they existed. 38

GOVERNMENTALITY, PUBLIC OPINION, AND THE NEWSPAPERS

Colonial governmentality not only needed information for governance

but also needed equally to disseminate information on governance. The
perceptions of the governed regarding the various technologies of rule
and regulatory practices, such as legal regulations, statistical practices, or
modalities of enforcing “order” were important to ensure congruence of
meanings and objectives between those who governed and those who
were to be governed. Granted that colonial governance was not meant to
be a democratic practice; even so, the contradictions set forth in extend-
ing an apparently universalistic framework of rule and knowledge to
encompass conditions of colonial “difference” required that such congru-
ence be sought, even as was often the case that such congruence was not
obtained.
Newspapers became the sites of persuasion and consensus generation
often drawing the support of the Indians themselves, and they served not
merely as sites of consensus generation but also as channels of informa-
tion from unknown people and places on the need and efficacy of
governmental actions. The publicness of “news” enabled it to enter into
the domain of public opinion, a possibility denied to privately held views
however true or rational they may be. Although native views were not so
often articulated through letters in the Anglo-Indian newspapers, even
the ones written by the English, enabled governmental actions to be
brought into the ambit of public discourse. The Bengal Hurkaru (3 July
1866), for instance, carried a letter from an Englishman who sought to
provide information to the readers on the famine conditions in Balasore.
His information, he claimed, were extracted from personal letters sent to
him by his friends. Using the rhetorical devices of ethnographic descrip-
tion and hard statistics on food prices to portray the grim reality of fa-
mine, the letter noted, “Numbers die daily, twenty or thirty in the station
only, to say nothing of the neighbourhood. The tanks near the Dhurmsala
are almost filled with dead bodies. Vultures, dogs, and jackals appear
tired of eating them and cartloads of them are daily carried and thrown
near the Baloo Ghat.” The colonial government committed to Smithian
principles of laissez-faire in famine policy is compelled by such news
reporting to be drawn into a public discourse on the matter.
The role of Vernacular newspapers in generating critical opinion on
governmental actions and inaction was acknowledged by the provincial
272 Chapter 7

and imperial governments, when from 1875 at least, the Vernacular

newspapers in all the provinces were examined by translators appointed
by the governments, who submitted reports to the governments contain-
ing extracts from Vernacular newspapers translated into English on a
fortnightly basis. Although this practice arose more out of the need to
keep Vernacular papers under surveillance for “seditious” writing, re-
spective governmental departments were informed of particular news
items pertaining to their tasks. These reports were then compiled and
published on a regular annual basis serving as an illustration of liberal-
ism in practice, of how publicity of governance and public opinion on
governance were in mutual determination. Differences in the reports of
the various provinces may as well have been due to selective extracting
by the translators as much as to the differences in the newspapers’ report-
ing themselves, for certainly newspapers from Madras were much more
vigilant on the functioning of various governmental departments, while
newspapers from the Bombay region gave a greater predominance to
reporting on political events in the post-1880 period.
The effects of a particular governmental policy, the merits of a pro-
posed policy, and the advisability of the introduction of a new policy
were considered legitimate subjects of commentary and discussion by the
Vernacular newspapers. Indian papers, both English and Vernacular,
took great interest in the affairs of the princely states and were ever ready
to defend the princes, while the Muslim papers showed affinity for the
Ottoman Sultan as Caliph and champion of Islam after the demise of the
Mughal court. During the post-mutiny decades, any act or comment that
indicated racial slight or slur also attracted widespread publicity. The
twin themes of the exploitative character of the colonial state and of its
indifference to the welfare of the people formed the leitmotif of public
discourse in the Indian-owned newspapers, especially the Vernacular
ones, although the intensity of debates varied between the papers. Often
such complaints were articulated through the rhetoric of the nature of
pre-colonial governance. The Swadeshabhimani (15 March 1888) contended
that under native rule, sufferings on account of taxation and similar mat-
ters did not exist, as the native rulers took direct cognizance of the wants
of the people and adopted suitable remedies, while under the colonial
situation the only procedure available to the people was to constantly
petition the government to make known their wants and grievances.
The newspaper was one mode of letting their wants be known to the
government, and all Indian-owned papers performed this role. More of-
ten than not, such demands were very specific, such as the need to im-
prove the condition of the roads, to put up a school building or the
opening of a hospital and so on. Yet another domain of concern was the
roles and performance of government functionaries as also the recruit-
ment of different social classes of natives in the administration. The
lapses in the functioning of the various departments also merited their
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 273

attention. As the scale of governmental presence was so widespread,

regional language papers in different provinces fixed their critical gaze
mainly on regional governmental matters.
As the notion of the “economy” underwent a change to become an
autonomous sphere that could be influenced by state interventions by
way of policy, public opinion became important to reveal the nature of
this autonomous sphere as also to suggest appropriate kinds of interven-
tions. Certainly compared to contemporary ideas on economic manage-
ment, the ideas of nineteenth century colonial India were rather rudimen-
tary. Yet taxation formed an important aspect of state intervention in the
economy on which public opinion was quite articulate. Other aspects of
the economy such as the surveillance and regulation of petty commerce
was also of concern as evident from the Tamil newspaper Vettikkodiyon
(13 January 1894) that brought to the attention of the provincial govern-
ment of the butchers’ practice of selling meat in the market by the seer
while using weights that are a fraction of the viss and thereby deceiving
the public. The new conception of economy entailed that population be
the object of government, and was particularly evident with regard to the
new thinking on labor that was hitherto not part of the discourse of the
state. Increasingly the condition of labor became a contested terrain be-
tween the state and the people. The Vernacular newspapers especially,
mobilized public opinion on the conditions of labor and employment
although the Indian-owned English papers too reported on labor issues
such as strikes. For instance, the Calicut based Malayalam Manorama (5
February 1894) drew the government’s attention to the violation of the
Factory Act rules at the Calicut Cotton Mill. Colonial governmentality
also rendered possible a new discourse of poverty in statistical terms of
the income necessary to meet the survival requirements, and contrary
claims between the government and the people on the level of income
and wages necessary for survival were reported in the papers. A report in
Vettikkodiyon (24 October 1896) contested the claim that Rs 2-8-0 would be
sufficient for an Indian to maintain himself for a month. Although at that
time there was no regulation on minimum wages for all workers, such
contests became necessary as wages for certain classes of labor such as
army men and constables were determined on this basis.
The single most debated aspect of the economy in the Vernacular
newspapers in the late nineteenth century was however the question of
the drain from India initiated by the publication of Dadabhai Naoroji’s
paper Poverty in India. Commenting on the appointment of the Royal
Commission to inquire into the expenditure in India, the Karnataka Praka-
sika (27 January 1896) noted that forbidding the Commission to enter into
details of policy was a “grand mistake” as it was the policy of the govern-
ment that determined expenditure and went on to remark that “the Com-
mission will not do much good, more especially as the press is excluded
from its proceedings.” At no time in the pre-colonial period were particu-
274 Chapter 7

lar state policies ever subject to such public scrutiny and debate. Indeed,
the notion of public policy as purposive state intervention toward attain-
ment of certain goals and targets is premised on the existence of a mecha-
nism to arrive at a consensus on goals which is generally provided by the
legislative branch of the government, an executive body to transform
legislative desires into executive will and a bureaucracy to implement
them. What is distinctive about the colonial State is that the sovereignty
of the state was independent of the popular will. Colonial governmental-
ity was thus not covered by the covenant of a social contract between the
state and its subjects. 39

THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND THE RECOVERY OF THE COVENANT

The public sphere of governmental discourse became a site of contests to

recover the covenant. The criticism on the illegitimacy of the colonial
covenant and the authoritative agent of the Indians that could articulate
the Indian perspectives on governance gained acceptability with Indian
newspapers with the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885
and played a crucial role in the shaping of Indian public opinion. The
Swadeshamitran (11 January 1888) stated that the object of the Congress
was to obtain a share in the administration. It noted:
If we are men, we would understand that Government is but an instru-
ment for our good, that the Government, which does not follow our
wishes, is like the domination of the lion of the desert, and that the
people who cannot carry out their wishes in the administration are but
beasts or Negro slaves. . . . Ideas like these have not sprung up among
our people. It is the duty of those who have assembled the Congress to
disseminate them. They should not be idle, but should spread these
ideas broadcast by means of pamphlets and publications in news-
papers.
A few years later, the Mahratta (7 January 1894) observed, that the Con-
gress as “a representative of the best intellects of the nation and an expo-
nent of public opinion,” its chief business at the annual Congress session
was to “take a sort of non-official review of the past year’s administra-
tion, and thus present the popular view of the political situation of the
country in its latest form.” While the Hindu Janabhooshany (7 January
1888) believed that such movements as the Congress “are owing to the
establishment of Native newspapers, for they are the principal means of
infusing into the people the ideas relating to Government,” the Mahratta
(7 January 1894) while not disagreeing, remarked that the Congress “does
for the whole of India, and in a far better manner, what each journalist
has been in the habit of doing for his limited circle.” Explicitly stating the
role of the Congress, it noted, “The National Congress is not merely an
association started to agitate for this or that grievance; it is meant to
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 275

represent intelligent public opinion in all matters and to put a stop to

official vagaries of whatever sort they may be. It is ultimately intended to
be a sort of people’s organization, corresponding with and opposing the
administrative hierarchy of the Indian Government.” This subtle shift in
the institutionalization of public opinion from newspapers to a represen-
tative political association is indeed significant for understanding the link
between the dual meanings of representational politics that colonial
governmentality engendered.
Liberalism provided colonial governmentality its political philosophy.
While liberalism constituted the public sphere to represent public opin-
ion, liberalism also entailed that the legislative power of the state be
represented by the united will of the people. Colonial governmentality
thus had to grapple with its inherent contradiction. For the Indian news-
papers it was important not only to generate public opinion but also to
convey to the government that such public opinion existed on all the
important matters of administration and their conviction that it could be
best represented only through their participation in legislative power.
The perceived illegitimacy of the colonial covenant was in part owing to
the perceived divergence of interests between the state and the subjects.
The Coodandeymitran (14 January 1888) observed that what the people ask
through the Congress is that the members in the Legislative Councils be
increased in number, and that half of them be chosen from among the
Indians. It also noted that the people desired that “the Legislative Coun-
cils should not be confined solely to legislating, but that the members
should have the right of interpellation in matters relating to administra-
tion.” Only when these, as well as the free discussion in the councils on
matters relating to Indian finance are permitted, will “the promise held
forth by the Queen-Empress be fulfilled that India was taken possession
by the crown for the Indians.” Kanara News (23 December 1920), best
expressed the lack of congruence of interests while decrying over the
prevailing state of demoralization of the people, which it claimed was
“due to the crafty nation which is now wounding our feelings in various
ways.” It noted “Like a weevil, they have turned India into a rotten fruit
with a beautiful exterior.”
Recovering the covenant was a long process as the facts of history
now testify. This long process was no doubt a conflictual relationship of
accommodation and resistance in general to the categories and structures
of the colonial state and of its modern political rationalities; in the public
sphere of contending opinions it meant both acceptance and rejection of
colonial governmentality. While colonial power aimed to transform the
moral condition of the colonial subjects in an improving direction, coloni-
al governmentality with its political rationalities and instrumentalities of
rule made the idea of “progress” a desirable goal for the colonial subjects
Thus Charles Trevelyan’s suggestion, in those heydays of liberal opti-
mism of the 1830s, “to set the natives on a process of European improve-
276 Chapter 7

ment” so that they “will then cease to desire and aim at independence on
the old Indian footing” proved true when the idea of “progress” interpel-
lated colonial subjects, and obliged them to argue for self-government
from within the discursive site of “progress,” thus compelling them as
participants in a new game of politics. 40
Standard print cultures like the newspapers were powerful forces in
Asian and African contexts in forging national identities among the colo-
nial intelligentsia. 41 As the game of politics became more complex, more
players emerged representing the various streams of the nationalist
movement such as the liberals, revivalists, communists, and socialists,
each with their different perspectives on self-government. Mahatma Gan-
dhi, the most radical anti-modernist was the only one who refused to
play the new game of politics, and conceived his political claims for self-
government not from within the modernist site of “progress” but upon
claims on the collective nostalgia for Ramarajya, a deep-rooted cultural
longing for a Utopia representing a perfect harmony of politics and mo-
rality. 42 Acknowledging that the Indians were compelled to play the new
game of politics having been subjected to modern governmental power,
Gandhi sought to radically overturn colonial governmentality and its
practices of governing colonial conduct through advocating a complete
boycott of courts and government educational institutions, the quintes-
sential institutions of colonial modernity. Gandhi no doubt realized that
colonial governmentality needed the complicity of colonial subjects, for
he once noted “our share in the sins of the Government is not a small
one” (Navajivan, 27 January 1921). 43 Gandhi believed that when public
opinion has become pure and the people have decided to get rid of their
sins, that very day the colonial Government will be defeated. For Gandhi,
the Congress resolution on noncooperation was accepted as a method of
self-purification, for otherwise, it would certainly be a sin.

THE GOVERNANCE OF COLONIAL CONDUCT

Nowhere is this dialectic of acceptance and rejection more evident than in

the public discourses of social reform. The discourses of social reform in
the public sphere were indeed crucial to the reconstitution of subjectiv-
ities and to governing colonial conduct, although colonial ambivalence
and colonial indifference marked these discourses. While there was wide-
spread recognition in the Indian press that the conditions for the possibil-
ity of such reform discourses were instantiated by the colonial encounter,
there was equally the growing desire to overthrow colonial rule. Al-
though colonial governmentality created the new field of the “social” and
sought to interpellate colonial subjects as modern individuals through
the discourses of social reform, it also sought to restrain itself from direct
interventions in the social and religious domains. 44 The pressures to re-
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 277

strain it were as much the result of public opinion as it was of the pro-
claimed British policy itself.
The colonial administrators’ practice of seeking opinions on govern-
mental affairs from the “natural leaders” of communities created condu-
cive conditions for the collaboration between the colonial and the native
elites. In return for extending their support to the colonial government,
the native elites were able to bargain for an inviolable and autonomous
private sphere free from the intrusions of the colonial state. This resulted
in the emergence of a revivalist nationalism among both the Hindus and
the Muslims with far reaching impact on the public sphere that have
reverberated in the contemporary politics of the nation-state. 45
While colonial governmentality set its agenda of transforming coloni-
al conduct, the colonizer’s indifference to the social transformation also
grew out of a sense of being resolutely alien. The Bombay Times and Stan-
dard while reporting of a controversy between reformers and traditional-
ists among the Hindu Vaishnavite sect in Bombay remarked how the
contests between the two groups broke down over their disagreement
over the Shastras as the final appeal; the reformers rejecting the Shastras as
a final appeal, in matters where they manifestly contradict reason. The
report went on to acknowledge the indifference of the English to transfor-
mation in Indian society when it noted:
We have set this community in a ferment by our schools and our news-
papers, our preachings and our literature, and now how many
amongst us have a thought of sympathizing with them, or of identify-
ing ourselves with them in the strife, or even countenancing them in it?
Difference in language, and manners, and customs separates us from
them so completely, that we not merely do not know what is going on
amongst them, but do not care to enquire. (The Bombay Times and Stan-
dard Overland Summary, 11 September 1860, p. 3)
This rather frank admission makes clear that the colonial project of trans-
forming colonial conduct in an improving direction was not really meant
to bring the colonial modern closer to the English, for these relationships
were already over-determined by “race,” euphemistically referred to in
the report as “difference in language, and manners, and customs.” What
the project of colonial modernity sought indeed was the transformation
of desires, wants, and manners that would suit the needs of both a grow-
ing market economy as well as the needs of modern colonial governance.
Such a project of transforming colonial conduct was no doubt mired
in conflicting tendencies. Print languages and literatures that were vital
instruments for crafting social identities in colonial India constituted pro-
cesses of social ordering and social representation, and became the earli-
est sites of struggles among competing social groups, even before these
were played out in the political arena of the modern nation. 46 As society
was divided on the basis of religion, caste, and social position, and there
278 Chapter 7

were different nationalist tendencies such as the liberal and revivalist,

there were both those who opposed social reforms and those who sup-
ported reforms. The Vernacular newspapers of the period being embed-
ded in these conflicting social forces became the medium of letting both
the government and the people know what a particular group felt about a
particular social issue. 47 Particular social groups often had their own
papers and periodicals, especially among the Muslims, and there were
caste papers as well. For instance, the Kayastha community of north India
had numerous periodicals like Kayastha Samachar, Kayastha Hitkari, Kayas-
tha Mitra, and Kayastha Pratap among others, each supporting different
factions within the Kayastha movement. Kayastha Samachar for instance,
published on issues relating to the Kayastha community such as educa-
tion, caste agitation, Risley’s ranking of castes, district level caste meet-
ings, adoption by the community of sanskritic ritual practices among
other national and political issues. Considered a leading organ of the
Kayastha community, it was even invited to the Coronation Darbar in
Delhi in 1903 along with a few other organs of north India. 48 Newspaper
editors were often in the forefront of reform and anti-reform movements,
like Tilak who edited Mahratta and Kesari, Syed Ahmed Khan the Aligarh
Institute Gazette, and Muhammed Ali the Comrade.
As colonial governmentality was seeking to effect a “moral improve-
ment” and transform the entire social order, public opinion in the Indian
newspapers debated incessantly on the efficacy of particular government
interventions in the social domain. Responding to a letter on the evils of
brothels, cinema-houses, drinking and smoking, Gandhi observed, that to
regulate these things by law, whether of the State or the Congress, would
be a “remedy probably worse than the disease.” Gandhi was of the view
that legislation in advance of public opinion was often worse than useless
whereas noncooperation was the quickest method of creating public
opinion. What Gandhi wanted was “an intelligent, sane, healthy and pure
public opinion” (Young India, 9 July 1925). 49 He did acknowledge that the
evolution of public opinion was at times a tardy process but that it was
the only effective one. Such tardiness was at times accentuated by coloni-
al governmentality’s attempts to stifle public opinion.

THE THREAT OF PUBLIC OPINION

The paradox of liberalism under colonial governmentality was that the

liberal public sphere that it sought to create for the governance of colonial
conduct could equally be foreclosed by its technologies of rule, especially
when the colonial order of “difference” became more unruly and less
amenable to governmentality’s subject-constituting effects, such unruli-
ness often termed “sedition.” Indeed, under colonial conditions, public
opinion itself was classified as those meriting their space in the liberal
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 279

public sphere and those that did not. The Press Act of India of 1857,
popularly known as the “Gagging Act” drove the wedge between
English-language and Indian-language papers, although Governor-Gen-
eral Canning earned the wrath of the European community for his refusal
to discriminate between the so-called “disloyal native” and the “loyal
British” in the Press Act. 50 The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 that com-
pletely fettered the Indian press in its short reign of three years was
recognized by the Indian press as a penal response by Eden, the lieuten-
ant governor of Bengal, for his inability to make the Indian-owned An-
glo-Vernacular paper the Amrita Bazar Patrika to toe his line. Supporting
the discriminatory Vernacular Press Act of 1878, Eden noted, “What
Government does object to is the sedition, and gross disloyalty of some of
the Vernacular papers, and their attempts to sow the seeds of disaffection
to the British rule in the minds of ignorant people.” 51 For Eden, the licen-
tiousness of the press had, “under false ideas of freedom and indepen-
dence,” been allowed to reach a stage, which “in the interests of the
public at large,” called for interference of the legislature. 52
For Eden, the governing effects of colonial conduct that the liberal
public sphere produced were indeed contrary between the English
papers and the Vernacular papers, as he noted, “The papers published in
this country in the English language are written by a class of writers for a
class of readers whose education and interests would make them natural-
ly intolerant of sedition; they are written under a sense of responsibility
and under a restraint of public opinion which do not and cannot exist in
the case of the ordinary native newspapers.” 53 Although Eden admitted
that the Indian-owned English papers too criticized the government, he
discounted the view that the government showed undue partiality to
papers written in the language of the ruling power.
Clearly, the colonial anxieties were not on account of the incompre-
hension of Vernacular languages but on account of the responses of Ver-
nacular subjects who being perceived as ignorant were seen to be inca-
pable of conducting themselves as autonomous agents and hence likely
to be swayed by sedition. The criminal charge of “sedition” became a
powerful liberal instrument of control to suppress the nationalist move-
ment. Even when sedition targeted the colonial state, it was interpreted
by the colonial authorities as engendering communal riot. In the colonial-
ist discourse, the violence of the “native” was marked by certain Oriental
characteristics as being “helpless, instinctive violence” in the form of con-
vulsions and was almost always related to sectarian strife. 54
Censorship though, was often counterproductive as newspaper edi-
tors in order to evade prosecution resorted to parody, innuendo, and
indirect criticism of the government, contrasting the despotism of coloni-
al rule with the “true” British government in the metropolis, and drawing
analogies between “Mahommedan” and British despotisms. As Bayly has
noted, radical criticism of the state was masked by invoking a broad
280 Chapter 7

hostility to distant or unnamed despotisms or by reworking the concept

of “progress” in their terms as a hybrid of Hindu Vedantism and evolu-
tion. Sometimes they risked imprisonment by a direct criticism of the
country’s impoverishment. 55
Even after the repeal of the Vernacular Press Act, liberal administra-
tors who believed in the role of the press often felt that the native press
either “talked without thinking” or had “disregard for reasonable re-
straints of truth and moderation.” 56 Even two decades later, the colonial
administration’s view did not change, and it was widely held that Ver-
nacular language newspapers instigated a feeling of overt hostility to
government and was calculated to have a harmful effect on the relations
between the government and the people. This is not surprising since with
the assertion of linguistic identities, language-oriented nationalism be-
came a powerful force of anti-colonial mobilization.
Colonial governmentality’s volte-face of its liberal principle, or in oth-
er words, liberalism’s apparent failure in the colonial setting “to live up
to its profession of freedom” is however not as contradictory as it may
appear, if indeed we agree that liberalism’s commitment to liberty is
compatible with its practices of authoritarian rule in many settings. 57 In
striking agreement with Uday Singh Mehta’s argument of liberalism’s
presumed civilizational infantilism in colonial contexts, Barry Hindess
argues that those settings where it was believed that individuals left to
their own devices could not be trusted to behave as autonomous rational
agents generally invited authoritarian practices of rule. 58 Although the
nationalist movement by projecting the Congress as the authoritative
bearer of public opinion sought to claim the Congress as a collective
agent that was both autonomous and rational, it was the brilliance of
Gandhi’s ethical imagination that claimed all individuals as autonomous
and rational agents. Gandhi’s own kind of journalism in Young India,
Navajivan, Harijanbandhu and others became potent vehicles for the dis-
semination of the ideas of the Congress and the nationalist movement,
even while English and Vernacular newspapers enthusiastically partici-
pated in making him a “Mahatma.” 59 His call for both nonviolence and
noncooperation addressed to all individuals-journalists, peasants, Hari-
jans, women and all-sought to overturn liberalism’s anxieties of the colo-
nial “other” and reaffirmed the status of Indians as autonomous and
rational agents.

GANDHI’S IDEA OF PURE PUBLIC OPINION

Governmentality is a kind of power that is both totalizing and individu-

alizing, and public opinion can both sustain and mitigate this duality of
modern governmental power. The capacity of public opinion to sustain
liberal governmentality by functioning as a site of legitimation of the
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 281

rationalities of governance is what fundamentally allows the emergence

of the liberal public sphere. Equally, its capacity to mitigate governmen-
tal power implies that the site of public opinion could delegitimize the
rationalities of rule as well. The capacity of public opinion to either sus-
tain or mitigate governmental power is signified by the strength of public
opinion; such strength often being tested by numerical majorities and
minorities that are in fact rendered possible by individualizing tenden-
cies of modern governmental power.
Although Gandhi recognized the tremendous power of public opinion
in modern societies, he was deeply skeptical of the nature of public opin-
ion that was generated by liberal governmentality, which created the
strength of majority and minority. Instead he proffered an alternate con-
ception of public opinion, a pure public opinion that was generated
through truth and nonviolence. For Gandhi, different kinds of State gen-
erated different kinds of public opinion. While modern democracies gen-
erated public opinion that rendered them countable, it was only in the
Ramarajya that pure public opinion could be generated. While Ramarajya
refers to the reign of the virtuous king Rama in the Hindu epic Ramaya-
na, it also signifies a reign of justice, peace, and prosperity. 60 Gandhi’s
skepticism over numericized public opinion in modern democracies is
surely not the same kind of ambivalence expressed over “the tyranny of
majority” by Alex de Tocqueville or J. S. Mill; rather it was the ethical
dilemma of aggregating individual selfishness into the common good.
In a remarkable speech at Morvi in 1928, Gandhi observed:
The concept of swaraj is no ordinary one; it means Ramarajya when both
the ruler and his subjects are straightforward, when both are pure in
heart, when both are inclined towards self-sacrifice, when both exercise
restraint and self-control while enjoying worldly pleasures, and, when
the relationship between the two is as good as that between a father
and a son. It is because we have forgotten this that we talk of democra-
cy or the government of the people. Although this is the age of democ-
racy, I do not know what the word connotes; however, I would say that
democracy exists where the people’s voice is heard, where love of the
people holds a place of prime importance. In my Ramarajya, however,
public opinion cannot be measured by counting of heads or raising of
hands. I would not regard this as a measure of public opinion; the
verdict of the panch should be regarded as the voice of God. Those who
raise hands are not the panch. The rishis and the munis after doing
penance came to the conclusion that public opinion is the opinion of
the people who practise penance and who have the good of the people
at heart. That is the true meaning of democracy. It is not democracy but
something else that is reflected in the support secured by someone like
me who makes a vote-catching speech. The democracy that I believe in
is described in the Ramayana . . . (Navajivan, 29 January 1928; speech at
Morvi, 24 January 1928). 61
282 Chapter 7

Ajay Skaria has recently elaborated the conceptual arguments for Gan-
dhi’s rejection of republican democracy in favor of Ramrajaya through his
interpretive analysis of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. Not only did Gandhi op-
pose majority rule as the “major” perpetrated domination and he wanted
a rule that ensured perfect justice for the “minor,” he was also opposed to
the order of general responsibility that relied upon a judge, exemplary of
a sovereign, as a measure of justice as such an order associated with
republican democracy served the purpose of domination. The Ramarajya
reflects Gandhi’s conceptual struggles to think through another order
and responsibility that ensured perfect justice to the minor and is insepa-
rable from Satyagraha or passive resistance. 62
There is an interesting similarity here between the views of Gandhi
and Edmund Burke for Burke also noted that men are qualified for civil
liberty “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon
their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their
rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding
is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more
disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to
the flattery of knaves.” 63
Gandhi’s critique of liberal public opinion is not merely about the
normalization of majoritarian politics through the transparency of num-
bers in modern democratic governance but is equally a critique of mod-
ern governmental power that in effect creates the liberal public sphere. 64
Uday Singh Mehta has rightly argued that Gandhi’s ambivalence to de-
mocracy was rooted in the links he perceived between violence and mod-
ern politics with its concerns of progress and transformation that “de-
tracted from an attentiveness to the ethical gravity and context of every-
day life” by adopting an instrumentalizing view towards everyday ac-
tions and incorporating them in the collective calculus of benefit, free-
dom and security. 65
It is possible to draw both comparisons and relations between the
critique of colonial governmentality in Gandhi’s Ramarajya and the cri-
tique of bourgeois liberties in Edmund Burke’s reflections on the French
revolution of 1789. Arguing in favor of a state and constitution set up as
part of Britain’s ancient tradition in opposition to the bourgeois revolu-
tion that overthrew the French monarchy, the landed nobility and the
clergy, Burke noted:
Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in
what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are
never wholly obselete. . . . Always acting as if in the presence of canon-
ized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and
excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent
inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that
upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those
who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 283

becomes a noble freedom. . . . It has a pedigree and illustrating ances-

tors. 66
Gandhi’s views on democracy also bear comparison with Burke, who
remarked:
I am certain, that in a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable
of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority, whenever
strong divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must; and
that oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and
will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be
apprehended from the dominion of a single scepter. 67
There is, however, a difference in the ethical sensibility of Gandhi and
Burke. Whereas Gandhi relied on the “voice of God” for the rishis (sages)
to arrive at a pure public opinion that reflects what is good for the people,
Burke relied on rational thinking. 68 Burke noted, “steady independent
minds, when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as
government, under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the part
of satirists and declaimers. . . . They will sort out the good from the evil,
which is mixed in mortal institutions as it is in mortal men.” 69
The creation of a pure public opinion was indeed Gandhi’s political
mission. 70 For Gandhi, the subject-constituting effects of colonial govern-
mentality could be resisted not through participation in the liberal public
sphere in which participants are already constituted as subjects of mod-
ern governmental power, but through the cultivation of a pure public
opinion that is the outcome of technologies of the self, such as the prac-
tices of “ahimsa” (nonviolence) and “satyagraha” (passive resistance). It is
such a pure public opinion that can transform the rationalities of liberal
governmentality as well. Gandhi thus offers a new and radical alternative
to the Kantian idea of “freedom as reason,” which is primarily deter-
mined by public autonomy rather than private autonomy. Not only is the
distinction between private and public autonomy anomalous for Gandhi
but also the doctrine of “freedom as reason” needed to be complemented
with “truth as reason.” Like the Kantian doctrine, Gandhi’s idea too is
uncompromisingly part of the moral order, but it is a moral order that
enjoins the obligation of “truth” and “goodness” on the part of both the
ruler and the ruled. Much like the way Kant’s notion of “perpetual
peace” sought to restore the harmony of politics and morality in a liberal
state, Gandhi sought to transcend the limits of liberal reason in his ethical
imagination by his doctrine of nonviolence and his idea of pure public
opinion. Engaging with this dilemma of truth and opinion in politics, the
modern philospher Hannah Arendt does not dismiss truth from action
but seeks to comprehend which “uses of truth cancel political lucidity
and which conversely, warrants political lucidity,” in short to “make doxa
truthful.” 71
284 Chapter 7

NOTES

1. Sandria B. Freitag, “Enactments of Ram’s Story and the Changing Nature of

‘The Public’ in British India,” South Asia 9, 1 (June 1991): 65–90; Pamela G. Price,
“Acting in Public versus Forming a Public: Conflict Processing and Political Mobiliza-
tion in Nineteenth Century South India,” South Asia 14, 1 (1991): 91–121; and Narayani
Gupta, Delhi Between Two Empires: 1803–1931 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981/
1998).
2. Jurgen Habermas recognized this relationship to the nature of the state when he
noted, “As a consequence of the constitutional definition of the public realm and its
functions, publicness became the organizational principle for the procedures of the
organs of the state themselves; in this sense one spoke of their publicity.” See Jurgen
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society trans. Thomas Burger (London: Polity Press, 1989), 83. Also see
Jurgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere” in Habermas and the
Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992),
421–61; Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradi-
tion, and Jurgen Habermas,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 73–98; Craig Calhoun,
“Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere,
1–48; Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere 109–42; and Alexan-
dra Halasz, The Marketplace of print: Pamphlets and the public sphere in early modern
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
3. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Political Writings, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by
Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970/1987), 125. Whereas Kant
grounds his notion of publicity in the moral sovereignty of individual citizens, Mill
provided a utilitarian argument for freedom of expression in that it was necessary for
peaceful coexistence and to individual self interest. Both Marx and Weber evaluated
liberalism’s promise of freedom with the reality of modernity’s social order and con-
cluded that it did not fulfil its promise. Habermas’s attempt to restore the principle of
public reason in modern liberalism by grounding a theory of rationality in communi-
cative action that is inter-subjective and dialogical leads him into a familiar narrative
framework, of what David Scott has noted as the “progressive emancipation of an
enlightened domain of unrestricted and rational discussion of matters of general inter-
est.” Scott, Refashioning Futures, 35.
4. Pointing to the limitation of Habermas’s analysis, David Scott notes “More spe-
cifically, what gets elided is the emergence of a new—that is, modern—political ra-
tionality in which power works not in spite of but through the construction of the
space of free social exchange, and through the construction of a subjectivity norma-
tively experienced as the source of free will and rational, autonomous agency.” Scott,
Refashioning Futures, 36.
5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958).
6. Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” 485.
7. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire.
8. Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch.
9. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kant’s Political
Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1795/1991), 94.
10. Reinhart Koselleck, “Locke’s Law of Private Censure and its Significance for the
Emergence of the Bourgeoise,” in Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis
of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 53–61.
11. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 47.
12. Uday Singh Mehta notes: “This project is infinitely patient, perhaps even secret-
ly counting on its own extended incompetence, of not getting there and hence perma-
nently remaining in between, By the nineteenth century virtually every liberal justifi-
cation of empire is anchored in the patience needed to serve and realize a future. And
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 285

that future is invariably expressed through the notion of progress.” Mehta, Liberalism
and Empire, 30.
13. Parliamentary Papers 1852–53, XXX, p. 313. Cited in Ryan, “Utilitarianism and
Bureaucracy: the views of J. S. Mill,” in Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-century
Government, 49.
14. For an understanding of the “structure” and “project” of colonial power, see
Scott, Refashioning Futures, 31, 41.
15. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” in The Decolonization of
Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, ed. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu
Parekh (London: Zed Press, 1995), endnote 12.
16. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 38.
17. Sandria Freitag argues that there are important differences between the Euro-
pean and Indian experiences of the way the transcendence from particular and local
interests to general and supra-local interests was affected. Whereas in both, collective
and symbolic activities provided an enlarging ideological frame of reference by which
popular identification with local “community” became transmuted into identification
with a larger entity, the way in which connections were forged between elite public
opinion and mass collective activity differed. State-focused institutional activities and
collective action of public arenas often remained separate in colonial India. See San-
dria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of
Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
18. Dirks in The Hollow Crown argues that the introduction of property and bureau-
cracy in nineteenth-century India introduced complexities and contradictions that ulti-
mately reduced the local kings into figureheads through the process of bureaucratic
rationalization and centralization of the state. Cohn in Colonialism and its Forms of
Knowledge: the British in India highlights how the codification of law by the colonial
state in its attempt to base a system of jurisprudence on prevailing Hindu and Muslim
law preferred fixity to regional variations and hence accorded authority to the oldest
extant law as the norm. This in turn contributed to the centralization of disparate and
diffused tendencies prevailing at the local level. Price mentions one such illustration of
transcendence from particular or local to the general or supra-local interest in the shift
from vertical mobilization of castes to horizontal mobilization of castes. See Price,
“Acting in Public versus Forming a Public: Conflict Processing and Political Mobiliza-
tion in Nineteenth Century South India.”
19. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 46.
20. Bayly, Empire and Information, 9.
21. Freitag, Collective Action and Community.
22. Read Douglas Haynes for more on how the Gandhian rhetoric through the use
of metaphors drawn from Hindu and Jain religious experience in the sphere of public
politics forged powerful psychic connections between critical indigenous values and
the notion of nationalism. Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in a Colonial City: The
Shaping of Public Culture in Surat city 1852–1928 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991).
23. James Fitzjames Stephen, “The Foundations of the Government of India,” The
Nineteenth Century 14, (October 1883): 562–63. Also cited in Mehta, Liberalism and Em-
pire, 29.
24. Bayly, Empire and Information, 5. Bayly notes “I use the word ‘ecumene’ to de-
scribe the form of cultural and political debate which was typical of north India before
the emergence of the newspaper and public association, yet persisted in conjunction
with the press and new forms of publicity into the age of nationalism. . . . The Indian
ecumene, however, does bear comparison to the modern European public in the sense
that its leaders were able to mount a critical surveillance of government and society.”
Bayly, Empire and Information, 182.
25. Ogborn, Indian Ink.
26. Bayly, Empire and Information; and Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in a Colonial City.
286 Chapter 7

27. Michael H. Fisher, “The Office of Akhbar Nawis: The Transition from Mughal to
British Forms,” Modern Asian Studies 27, 1 Special Issue: How Social, Political and
Cultural Information is Collected, Defined, Used and Analyzed, (February 1993):
45–82.
28. Mrinal Kanti Chanda, History of the English Press in Bengal: 1780–1857 (Calcutta:
K. P. Bagchi and Company, 1987), xiii.
29. Freitag, Collective Action and Community; and Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in a
Colonial City.
30. Read the chapter “Struggle for the Freedom of the Press” in Chanda, History of
the English Press in Bengal: 1780–1857, 413–51.
31. Stein, Thomas Munro, 284.
32. Stein, Thomas Munro, 285.
33. See Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 22.
34. Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and
Culture in a Colonial Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).
35. Chanda, History of the English Press in Bengal: 1780–1857, xxii.
36. Veena Naregal, “Colonial Bilingualism and Hierarchies of Language and Pow-
er: Making of a Vernacular Sphere in Western India,” Economic and Political Weekly 34,
49 (December 4, 1999): 3446–56.
37. Edwin Hirschmann, “Using South Asian Newspapers for Historical Research,”
The Journal of Asian Studies 31, 1 (November 1971): 146.
38. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 293.
39. I use the term “covenant” as a substitute for Locke’s “compact.” The compact
refers to the implicit act of consent and trust whereby men unite together under “one
body politick under one government.” See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed.
Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 332. Peter Laslett notes
“Locke’s insistence that government is defined and limited by the end for which
political society is established, that it can never be arbitrary or a matter of will, can
never be owned, is expressed in a particular and exact application of his doctrine of
natural political virtue—the concept of trust.” See Locke, Two Treatises of Government,
113.
40. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, 47; and in Scott, Refashioning Futures, 52.
41. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
42. Partha Chatterjee notes “Gandhi does not even think within the thematic of
nationalism. He seldom writes or speaks in terms of the conceptual frameworks or the
modes of reasoning and inference adopted by the nationalists of his day, and quite
emphatically rejects their rationalism, scientism and historicism.” See Partha Chatter-
jee, “Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society,” in Subaltern Studies III: Writings on
South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1984), 167.
43. M. K. Gandhi, The Collected Works Volume Nineteen (New Delhi: The Publications
Division, Government of India, 1966), 284.
44. Sinha points out the shift in British policies after 1857 from the Anglicist aim of
creating a class of westernized Indians as conceived by Macaulay in his 1835 Minute on
Education to a conscious courting of the traditional and orthodox Indian groups. Mrin-
alini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly’ Englishman and the ‘Effeminate’ Bengali in
the Late 19th Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
45. A. Ali, “Evolution of Public Sphere in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 36, 25
(June 30, 2001): 2419–25.
46. Ghosh, Power in Print.
47. For the debates carried in the various newspapers on the Age of Consent Bill,
see Tanika Sarkar, “Rhetoric against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and
Death of a Child Wife,”‘ Economic and Political Weekly 28, 36 (September 4, 1993):
1869–78.; and Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
48. Carroll, “Caste, Social Change, and the Social Scientist: A Note on the Ahistori-
cal Approach to Indian Social History.”
 Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere 287

49. M. K. Gandhi, The Collected Works Volume Twenty–Seven (New Delhi: The Publi-
cations Division, Government of India, 1968), 347–48.
50. The curbs on the freedom of the native press were many and continued
throughout the colonial period. See Kirti Narain, Press, Politics and Society: Uttar Pra-
desh 1885–1914 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998).
51. S. Natarajan, Rise of Journalism: A History of the Press in India (Bombay: Asia
Publishing House, 1962), 101.
52. Natarajan, Rise of Journalism, 101.
53. Natarajan, Rise of Journalism, 102.
54. Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, 65.
55. Christopher A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism
and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 8.
56. Vernacular Newspaper Reports (VNR) of North Western Provinces and Oudh,
Hindustani, Lucknow, 25th July 1894. Narain,Press, Politics and Society, 63, 25.
57. Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,”490; and Barry Hindess, “Not at Home in the
Empire,” Paper presented at the Habitus 2000 seminar, Curtin University, Australia,
2000a.
58. Barry Hindess, “The Liberal Government of Unfreedom,” Alternatives: Global,
Local, Political 26, 2 (April–June 2001): 93–111.
59. Shahid Amin has brilliantly portrayed how the making of the Mahatma entailed
widespread dissemination of his miraculous powers, which often were only rumors.
See Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–22,” in
Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Del-
hi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1–61.
60. Ajay Skaria has observed that for Gandhi Ramarajya is not necessarily Hindu as
Gandhi himself has remarked in the presidential address at Kathiawar Political Con-
ference, “The race of Rama is not extinct. In modern times the first Caliphs may be said
to have established Ramarajya.” See Navjivan, 8 January 1925, Akshardeha, vol. 25, 521;
CWMG, vol. 30, 62. Ajay Skaria, “Relinquishing Republican Democracy: Gandhi’s
Ramarajya,” Postcolonial Studies 14, 2 (2011): 203–229.
61. M. K. Gandhi, The Collected Works, Volume Thirty Five (New Delhi: The Publica-
tions Division, Government of India, 1969), 489–90. It is a moot question as to whether
the use of Hindu religious metaphors in the Gandhian rhetoric did or did not contrib-
ute to suffusing the liberal public sphere with majoritarian values, symbols and
norms.
62. Skaria, “Relinquishing republican democracy: Gandhi’s Ramarajya.”
63. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 289.
64. For a contemporary critique of the numerico-probablistic basis of liberal democ-
racy, read“Community, Number, Ethos of Democracy,” in Scott, Refashioning Futures,
158–89.
65. Uday Singh Mehta, “Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of Everyday
Life,” Modern Intellectual History 7, 2 (2010): 357.
66. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 34.Edmund Burke noted “Each
contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of
eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and
invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which
holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.” See Burke,
Reflections on the Revolution in France, 97.
67. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 126.
68. Faisal Devji argues that the dharma-yuddha of the Bhagawad Gita served as the
arena of moral action for Gandhi to construct his ethical universalism. Faisal Devji,
“Morality in the Shadow of Politics,” Modern Intellectual History 7, 2 (2010): 373–90.
69. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 126.
70. Partha Chatterjee has noted that Gandhism that was originally a product of
anarchist philosophy of resistance to state oppression itself became a participant in its
288 Chapter 7

imbrication with a nationalist state ideology. See Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the
Colonial World.
71. Corinne Enaudeau, “Hannah Arendt: Politics, Opinion, Truth,” Social Research
74, 4 (Winter 2007): 1029–44.
 Conclusion
Modern Freedom and Governmentality

The effects of colonial governmentality have extended far beyond the

colonial period signifying the importance of the colonial political and
epistemological project. 1 Postcolonial states seek to effectively reclaim
the regulative political concepts coded within the legacies of imperialism
such as nationhood, constitutionality, citizenship, democracy, albeit with
edited scripts so as to enable citizens to access more freedom. 2 Such
epistemological practices are contained within political projects of
governance as new political rationalities underwrite new kinds of ration-
al discourses. Postcolonial studies, some have argued, ought not to re-
main merely confined to epistemological issues of deconstructing the Eu-
ropean categories of our political modernity but that it should fold into
this strategic space of criticism the target of rethinking the political fu-
tures of postcolonial societies. 3 This is in fact intrinsic to the analysis and
understanding of the knowledge-effects of governmentality. The liberal
idea is that civil society as modern associational life is the realm where
individuals and collectives act on their own initiative on their own behalf,
but the kind of civil society and the degree of freedom that will be al-
lowed for such bourgeois initiatives is determined by the state which
could be repressive of freedom in civil society. 4
Foucault’s idea of governmentality does not allow for this liberal de-
marcation of the state as a domain of coercion and civil society as the
domain of freedom. 5 Liberal governmentality makes possible a realm of
possibility for individuals to act in unconstrained manner only within a
realm of possibility rendered accessible to them. Governmentality brings
forth that realm of possibility and actualizes certain freedoms depending
on the political rationalities, strategies, and its effects. If freedom is
viewed in this perspective, then it is valid to posit that governmentality
itself constitutes and instrumentalizes freedom. 6 As Nikolas Rose notes
“The freedom upon which liberal strategies of government depend, and
which they instrumentalize in so many diverse ways, is no ‘natural’
property of political subjects, awaiting only the removal of constraints for
it to flower forth in forms that will ensure the maximization of economic
and social well-being. The practices of modern freedom have been con-
structed out of an arduous, haphazard and contingent concatenation of
problematizations, strategies of government and techniques of regula-
289
290 Conclusion

tion.” 7 Although colonial governmentality shaped the conduct of coloni-

al subjects in a context of political unfreedom, its knowledge-effects creat-
ed the conditions for the possibility of the attainment of liberal goals of
economic and social well-being under more favorable conditions of polit-
ical freedom.
Contemporary practices of governance in postcolonial India is in
many ways linked to colonial governmentality, as the modern nation
state not only draws its categories of political modernity from it but ima-
gines its teloses in terms of the Enlightenment goals of progress, rational-
ity, and individual freedom. The technologies of government of the post-
independent nation-state both continue and extend in significant ways
the liberal technologies of rule instituted by colonial rule. If colonial con-
duct sought to transform its subjects by instilling in them the desire for
reform and modernity, the postcolonial nation-state constituted individu-
als as citizens aspiring for development. The notion of “development,”
like its predecessor “progress,” is suffused with teleological and progres-
sivist assumptions as regards the expansion of capabilities to satisfy the
ever increasing want. Thus the postcolonial aftermath has witnessed an
obsessive preoccupation among nations, international agencies, and citi-
zens to define development and to understand its process. From an un-
abashed endorsement of increasing the goods and services available for a
society’s consumption, often expressed in the magical figure of Gross
National Product to an acknowledgment that the satisfaction of the mini-
mum needs of the population is an ethical and political demand that
states can ignore only at their own peril, there is an increasing conver-
gence of views that development ought primarily to ensure that human
capabilities are enhanced and their entitlements to material well-being
enlarged.
Statistical indices of the status and the attainment of needs and desires
evolved from indices of income and wealth to poverty lines and the count
of the poor, to the contemporary Human Development Index that im-
poses a universal standard on all countries on their attainment of the
liberal goals of economic and social well-being. Statistical indices also
signify the role of purposeful interventions for the attainment of goals in
a gradualist rather than a revolutionary approach. Liberal strategies of
government seek to effect transformations in the conduct of individuals
even as it constitutes them as free individuals; thus governmentality aims
only at gradual effects through changes in norms and the norm-governed
behaviors of free individuals. Such changes in norms and the conduct of
citizens that governmentality sought to effect in post-independent India
is part of the narrative of modern freedom that the nation-state held forth
as a promise and is part of the implicit contract between the modern
nation-state and its citizens, a contract that has eluded fulfillment for the
greater part of the postcolonial period and is increasingly under stress
with the new political rationalities of neoliberalism.
 Conclusion 291

INSTRUMENTALIZING FREEDOM

The visionaries of modern India who drafted the Indian Constitution

projected their conception of the destiny of the nation. Independence
from colonial power was not the fulfillment of freedom for the citizens
but just the beginning for the pursuance of such a goal. Freedom in mod-
ern India was to be achieved on economic, social, and political fronts
simultaneously, and the practices of modern government were to facili-
tate the attainment of such freedoms. The Constitution of India represented
the collective vision and articulation of the freedom by the Indians them-
selves that was henceforth to propel the nation towards its fulfillment. 8 It
was at once, both “a declaration of social intent” as well as “an intricate
administrative blueprint.” 9
The liberal notion of freedom as Isaiah Berlin has popularized con-
notes both “negative freedom” as well as “positive freedom.” 10 As the
colonial encounter made liberalism an ideal worthy to aspire for, even if
colonial governmentality rendered it paradoxical, the Constitution of In-
dia grasped the liberal ideals and imposed a set of negative obligations
on the State such that individual liberty is not encroached upon by the
State as well as a positive obligations on the State to ensure that these
rights are not encroached even by society itself. These negative obliga-
tions of the State framed as the Fundamental Rights of the citizens en-
sured that all citizens were equal before the law and were to enjoy free-
dom of religion, assembly, association, and movement. The Right Against
Exploitation ensured the constitutional provisions on the abolition of un-
touchability, removal of disabilities in the use of public spaces on account
of an individual’s marker of status such as religion, race, caste, sex, or
place of birth. The negative freedom that the Constitution guaranteed
was to foster a social revolution in creating a socially egalitarian society.
The positive freedom as Berlin described, derived from the wish on the
part of the individual to be his own master, a desire undoubtedly in-
stilled by liberal reason in the making of individuals. These articulated as
the Directive Principles in the Constitution sought to free the Indian
masses “from the passivity engendered by centuries of coercion by soci-
ety and by nature, free from the abject physical conditions that had pre-
vented them from fulfilling their best selves.” 11 Some of the provisions of
the Directive Principles are adequate means of livelihood for the citizens,
compulsory primary education for children, the operation of the econom-
ic system and the ownership and control of material resources in the
country to subserve the common good, and the state’s role in raising the
general standard of living of the people. Although these principles are
not justiciable, the Constitution considered them as “fundamental in the
governance of the country,” and acknowledged that welfare of the people
could only be promoted by ensuring a just social order. 12 Expressing the
292 Conclusion

essence of the Directive Principles, Article 38 of the Constitution of India

states:
the State shall strive to promote the welfare of the people by securing
and protecting as effectively as it may a social order in which justice,
social, economic, and political, shall inform all the institutions of the
national life.
In separating the positive and negative obligations of the State into the
Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles, the Constitution ac-
knowledged that freedom in effect was the outcome of governance, and
modern governance by ensuring justice in institutional life would pro-
mote the welfare of people. Neither individual freedom in terms of liber-
ty or equality, nor collective freedom in the sense of welfare was possible
without justice. No wonder the well-known sociologist Andre Beteille
once wondered whether Indians have a stronger sense of justice than the
Americans or a radically different one and observed that it was not an
easy question to answer. But he perceptively noted that the Dharmasas-
tras, by which Hindus were governed over the many centuries of precolo-
nial and pre-Mughal rulers were animated by a different sense of justice
than the one on which the Indian Constitution was based. 13
Justice thus became the distinguishing principle of postcolonial
governmentality, thus marking it fundamentally different from colonial
governmentality. Not only did the alienness of colonial rule on the sub-
ject population preclude the possibility of a rule of justice but also coloni-
al rationality itself was premised on the unjust economic exploitation of
the colonized. Although Partha Chatterjee speculates the nationalists
would argue that “alienness had acquired the stamp of illegitimacy be-
cause it stood for a form of exploitation of the nation” such as the drain of
national wealth, the destruction of its productive system, the creation of a
backward economy and so on, the contention here is that such a form of
exploitation was possible only because colonial governmentality lacked
the ethical principle of justice. 14 The notion of welfare under colonial
liberalism was contained within a means and ends framework of the
colonial state, in which the welfare of the colonial subjects was a means to
strengthen the ends of the colonial state, rather than an end in itself. For
the nation-state, the welfare of the citizens is an end in itself, an end that
is always being determined and approved by democratic sovereignty,
while the strategies of the state informed by the principle of justice are
the means for the attainment of such sanctioned ends.
Postcolonial governmentality is therefore both a continuation as well
as a rupture from colonial governmentality. Partha Chatterjee notes that
for various reasons attributed to political contingency, the new state
chose to retain in a virtually unaltered form the basic structure of the civil
service, the police administration, the judicial system, including the codes
of civil and criminal law, and the armed forces as they existed in the
 Conclusion 293

colonial period. He further noted that as far as the normal executive

functions of the state were concerned, “the new state operated within a
framework of rational universality, whose principles were seen as having
been contained (even if they were misapplied) in the preceding state
structure.” 15 The legitimacy for the civil and criminal administrations in
the new national state is provided by the universal function of “develop-
ment” of national society that the postcolonial state set for itself as a
distinctive goal; such a universal function undoubtedly follows from the
principle of justice. Although the techniques of colonial governmentality
informed postcolonial governance, it marked itself as different by basing
its legitimation on the principle of justice. Whether the state subscribed to
justice in governance was left for the masses to decide by democratic
sovereignty through a system of adult franchise and parliamentary de-
mocracy.
The constitutional inscription of justice as a principle of postcolonial
governmentality unarguably produced subject and object effects in ex-
cess, the accretion of which over time produced a self-fulfilling goal for
the nation-state, especially that its development and democratic projects
that lent legitimacy to its existence were well within the realm of possibil-
ity, if only the targets and strategies of these projects could be appropri-
ately and rationally designed. With hindsight, the Indian demand for the
inclusion of a list of rights since The Constitution of India Bill of 1895, and
quite contrary to the British position that was most strikingly expressed
in the Report of the Joint Parliamentary Committee of 1934 that abstract
declarations are useless, unless there exists the will and means to make
them effective as well as the British fear that written rights might put
embarrassing restrictions on the legislature seem at best a struggle over
different conceptions of governmentality that would be relevant in the
postcolonial context. Not only did the British position mistakenly dis-
count the existence of the will among the Indians then, and as well the
possibility of will-formation over time, but more importantly it rendered
apparent the limitations of a colonial liberalism. Restrictions on legisla-
tive power arising on account of the principle of justice embodied in
rights were in the British view a curtailment of the liberal technologies of
rule. This is not surprising, as colonial governmentality never relied on
the sovereignty of the people for its legitimacy. Quite contrarily, the In-
dian insistence for written rights in the Constitution was a far-sighted
anticipation of the “written effects” on an unequal social order that had
embarked on the libertarian project.
Constitutional socialism in India whether inspired by the modern Eu-
ropean experience or by ancient Hindu ethic provided for the incorpora-
tion of a set of moral precepts, in the nature of positive freedom, as in
many other modern constitutions. These moral precepts in the form of
the Directive Principles although without legal force served as a guiding
principle for governance, which according to K. M. Munshi, a member of
294 Conclusion

the Constituent Assembly, were necessary in order to form the basis of

protest against arbitrary legislation, and a body of doctrines to which
public opinion can rally. As subject-effects, the mass of Indians, both
literate and illiterate, were in due course to become aware of their rights
and the obligations of the state toward them; rather such awareness-
building itself became a political project, albeit with contesting claims
and results among different sections of the civil society. Postcolonial
governmentality was involved to some extent in the governance of citi-
zens’ conduct, or to put it more appropriately shared this role with other
agents, quite like colonial governmentality, which sought to govern colo-
nial conduct through the discursive practices of law and social reform.
Thus reconfiguring the terrain of the “social” with new rights-bearing
individuals as citizens, who become eager to participate in its develop-
ment and democratic projects became an agenda for postcolonial govern-
mentality in India. The object-effects of specifying rights and obligations
as positive and negative freedom required postcolonial governmentality
to define its fields and objects of power and to specify its strategies.
Drawing upon the epistemic foundations of colonial governmentality,
especially in those of the Enlightenment knowledges in which objects of
knowledge are constituted scientifically in a manner amenable for ma-
nipulation and intervention, postcolonial governmentality sought to con-
stitute its objects of knowledge, while a discourse of justice animated
both the political rationalities and technologies of governance as well as
the discourses of civil society.

PLANNING, KNOWLEDGE, AND JUSTICE

The debates in the Constituent Assembly on rights testify to the fact that
the relationship between “liberty and the shape and form of the economic
structure” preoccupied many of its members. 16 B. R. Ambedkar, the fore-
most leader of the Scheduled Castes, those occupying the lowest rungs of
the Indian caste structure, submitted to the Constituent Assembly as its
member, a social scheme that envisaged an extensive state ownership
and operation of the economic sectors. Although his scheme was rejected,
the Rights sub-committee enthusiastically endorsed positive rights that
included among others the state’s responsibility in securing an adequate
livelihood for all its citizens and its control over the nation’s economy
and material resources in the common interest. Since 1951, planning has
been integral to the nation’s hopes and aspirations and to the state’s
means for realizing them, an important technology of rational govern-
ance that also involved shifts in the plan perspectives over the decades.
While the achievements of planning for over fifty years have preoccupied
economists, few have concerned themselves with the epistemological
project that the nation-state sought to carry forward, which in important
 Conclusion 295

respects both continued and modified the colonial epistemological pro-

ject. Planning became the crucial institutional modality by which the state
determined the material allocation of productive resources within the
nation, for the market though allowed to operate was either viewed with
suspicion of improper allocations violating national priorities or were
considered to be only weakly developed. Although planning was integral
to the federal political process it was perceived to be outside the immedi-
ate political process, being conducted by a body of experts and adminis-
tered through the bureaucracies of various ministries. 17
Planning also sought to embody the political rationality of the postco-
lonial state of ensuring a just social order. Development as a process
implying a progression to higher standards of living, with an increase in
income and wealth leading to an increase in the well-being of the people
was considered necessary to ensure justice and became a universal goal
of the nation. What made the developmental ideology to rely on the state
as the principle vehicle for its historical mission is unarguably the politi-
cal rationality of justice of the postcolonial state. This political rationality
connected the legal-political sovereignty of the state with the sovereignty
of the people by a double criteria of representation, that is, through the
procedural forms of representative government and the acquisition of
legitimacy by directing a program of economic development on behalf of
the nation. 18 Planning as a method of “instrumental inference,” to bor-
row Adolph Lowe’s phrase, rather than as an alternative to the market
system in terms of “command and fulfillment” fitted into the matrix of
liberal technologies of postcolonial governance.
The bureaucracy of the national state that was to implement planning
assumed an altogether new function of development administration that
colonial bureaucracy had no necessity being limited as it was to the func-
tions of extraction of material surpluses and of disciplining colonial sub-
jects to ensure efficiency in such extraction. Planning set goals and targets
and decided sectoral allocations of resources, even as it was instrumental
in devising the bureaucratic structures of the government in terms of the
various ministries and their roles, as also in the financing of various
interventionist activities of the state within the federal structure. It also
ushered in a new language of finance in governmental operations, the
ubiquitous “plan” and “nonplan” expenditures that affected the nature of
governmental interventions as bureaucratic actions were in each instance
cognized differently, affecting the performance of institutions. With the
requirements of statistical data expanding with the demands of planning,
bureaucracies collected more and more statistics.
Planning entailed cognitive exercises at two levels. One, sectoral re-
source allocations ought to be consistent and fulfill some optimizing
goals, and secondly, the sectoral optimizing strategies need to be translat-
ed into bureaucratic action plans in terms of policies and programs. The
informational requirements at both levels constitute objects of knowl-
296 Conclusion

edge, which knowledge in turn determines the techniques of govern-

ment. Under “commodity-centered” planning, the emphasis was on in-
creasing the capital stock and the savings rate, with its associated infor-
mational requirements. When the plan perspective shifted to poverty al-
leviation, it entailed new informational requirements on the poor and
appropriate numerical measures of poverty and inequality. “Information
failures” can lead to failures in plan implementation by misdirecting stra-
tegic or goal-oriented behavior, and the “parametric” behavior of agents
involved in the implementation and realization of plans. At a more gen-
eral epistemological level, “information failures” can arise either because
the possible objects of planning have not been cognized at all or have
been cognized inadequately or inappropriately.
Partha Chatterjee has observed the paradox that a “science” of plan-
ning can never unravel from within its own disciplinary boundaries “the
very subjects of social power which the rational consciousness of the
planner seeks to convert into objects of its knowledge by attributing to
them discrete capacities and propensities and can turn the planning au-
thority itself into an object of their power.” 19 No doubt, social power
exercised and contested within the political process impacted on plan-
ning, as in the shift from a “commodity centered” planning in the first
three five-year plans to the poverty alleviation approach at the beginning
of the Fifth Plan that was unarguably the outcome of a political process
that foreground the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s election slogan
“Garibi Hatao” (“Banish Poverty”).
Planning techniques for poverty alleviation needed to know the peo-
ple who were poor, the occupations, economic sectors, geographic loca-
tions, and social groups they belonged, why they were poor, the meas-
ures that could alleviate their poverty, how to best implement the meas-
ures, and the evaluation methods to judge the efficacy of the measures
and so on. These required the objects of planning and bureaucratic inter-
ventions to be first conceived and such conceptions entailed both meas-
urement and enumeration to render bureaucratic manipulations feasible.
Thus the invention of the categories of “poor” and “poverty” in its mani-
fold ramifications owes much to the political rationalities and technolo-
gies of postcolonial governmentality than to those suggested by nine-
teenth century British liberalism, Keynesianism, or the welfare state. The
genealogy of poverty in peasant India suggests that it is governmentality
that transformed poverty that was hitherto experienced as a collective
phenomenon, a cyclical visitation of fate or God’s fury, into a characteris-
tic of an individual’s or group’s failure or lack that could be rectified
through targeted interventions by the state. Counting the poor, however,
remains a formidable task even as varied indicators of poverty such as
“income poverty” or “nutritional poverty” capture the many dimensions
of a deprived life, for the poor can never be counted without first decid-
ing who is to be considered as poor. Arbitrarily defined “poverty lines”
 Conclusion 297

that enabled a numerical conception of the poor became the most power-
ful instrumentality by which the techniques of governmentality generat-
ed objective and statistically measurable knowledge of the poor, and
which have been a recurring source of contestation in the public sphere.
Poverty lines helped not only to count the poor but also to know how
poor they were. Such a numerical conception of poverty enabled the state
to devise techniques of government such that a targeted number of the
poor could be lifted above the poverty line within a stipulated time.
Based on a “target approach,” it sought to identify the poor by income
which if supplemented through other income-earning activities could be
lifted above the poverty line, thus making a distinction between the
“worthy poor” who deserved credit and employment assistance and the
“unworthy poor” who did not deserve such assistance. The essence of the
target approach is to define the target in a fixed and discreet way such
that when the techniques act upon the object, they can be made to pro-
duce the desired effects. Even if the poor could be defined in fixed and
discreet ways, the target approach elided the possibility that objective
identification could be at variance with subjectively constituted iden-
tities, for many “non-worthy non-poor” who subjectively identified as
the “worthy poor” could fit themselves into the target group through the
command of social power, thus jostling out many objectively identified as
the “worthy poor.”
In the early phase of planning, the target approach enabled a hitherto
unknown terrain of bio-power and biopolitics inspired by a Malthusian
approach to curtailing population growth. Setting up sterilization camps
and using monetary incentives to persuade people to accept family plan-
ning methods, the vasectomy camps of the 1960s and 1970s gained initial
popularity and subsequent notoriety as the setting of targets for the num-
ber of acceptors propelled an excess of bureaucratic enthusiasm aided by
incentive schemes to transgress bounds of voluntarism to coercion. In the
process, a vast amount of statistical data was generated on population
categorized into “acceptors” and “nonacceptors” and framing target
groups by age, sex, religion, region, habitat, and so on for subsequent
“camp” interventionism. 20
The target approach folded within techniques of government thus
wrapped within it bureaucratic accountability and was on that account
especially amenable to statistical representations. Even as the statistical
bureaucracy enlarged to produce statistical knowledge and to transform
them into policy inputs, it simultaneously popularized the notion that
economic freedom is statistically measurable. Gone are the days when a
simple statistic as real wages or minimum wages signified economic free-
dom. Today, complex measures such as Gender Empowerment Human De-
velopment Index are devised as a measure of economic freedom. By ren-
dering invisible and therefore as insignificant, the social power relations
that circumscribe and constrain agents in the attainment of freedom and
298 Conclusion

which are never directly perceptible from statistical data, these tech-
niques of government are deemed as value-neutral and scientific. Femi-
nist critiques of the notion of justice that underpinned the development
strategies reconstituted the technologies of government by making them
more gender sensitive both to the forms of representations as well as
interventions.
The power of the numerical approach to render objects precise, mea-
surable, and objective meant that the “target approach” became the pre-
ferred tool of postcolonial governmentality in many other realms such as
family planning, public distribution of essential commodities, other in-
come-transfer schemes, rural development and urban planning. Planning
rendered the target approach a preeminent technique of government as it
made it feasible for ex-ante calculations to match with ex-post outcomes,
even if they more often did not match in practice. In turn, the “target
approach” became a convenient tool to evaluate bureaucratic perfor-
mance and more importantly enabled the rise of “political society.” The
“target approach” to delivering publicly supplied goods and government
services often missed the intended targets because the target group was
either not properly specified, unidentified, not properly classified or was
the effect of bureaucratic indifference and corruption. Individuals and
groups by-passed from the targeted programs could mobilize together to
make their claims of entitlements to the state, and under circumstances
could leverage political clout through their democratic voting right. As
the conditions of such mobilization are different from that of civil society,
Partha Chatterjee identifies it as “political society” noting that it could
even encompass survival activities of the poor and marginalized that is in
violation of law. 21 The effects of a governmentality informed by the prin-
ciple of justice has been the rise in demands from the “political society,”
which in turn has spawned yet more measures of enumeration, classifica-
tion, and discipline. Ration cards and voter identification cards that until
now decided the claim of a squatter to occupy an unauthorized squatter
settlement are being replaced with biometric smart cards with unique
identification numbers that would normalize the population of citizens
with varying shades of actually-realized citizenship rights from the non-
citizen refugees from neighboring countries and could as well regulate
movements of population within as an apparatus of security. 22

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL FREEDOM

If colonial governmentality reconstituted the “social” and made the

governance of colonial conduct its central focus such that colonial sub-
jects would on their own begin to desire social reform, the idea of social
freedom from the oppressive social relations of caste dominance and ex-
ploitation did not prefigure in the rationale of colonial governmentality,
 Conclusion 299

committed as it was to non-interference in the sphere of custom and

tradition. For nationalist leaders, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Phule, and Ramaw-
samy, social freedom as much as social reform mattered as they took up
the cause of the untouchable castes and the whittling down of Brahman
hegemony. As the nationalist and reform movements of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries indicated, the uneven spread of such desire
for reforms, the nationalist leadership made the idea of social freedom
integral to national freedom, thus irreducibly linking up social with polit-
ical freedom. The Constitution of India crystallized the nation’s vision of
social freedom by stipulating as a Fundamental Right that no citizen shall
suffer any disability in the use of shops, restaurants, wells, roads, and
other public places on account of his religion, race, caste, sex, or place of
birth. Minority rights that were specified in the Constitution were
deemed necessary for the attainment of social freedom so that no one
group dominates over another. Both the abolition of untouchability that
figured as a fundamental right and the principle of universal adult suf-
frage that was accepted as essential to parliamentary democracy pro-
moted the intertwined goals of social and political freedom, by acknowl-
edging that the untouchable castes would never be really free, either
suffering their untouchable status or without their right to political par-
ticipation. Recognizing that mere constitutional assertions of social free-
dom were unlikely to ensure such freedom in practice, postcolonial
governmentality sought to translate it into practice. Even if Gandhi and
the Gandhians believed that the impetus for social justice must not come
from above by the government but proceed from the character reforma-
tion of each individual, techniques of postcolonial governmentality have
attempted social engineering to promote social freedom.
Like the target approach to poverty alleviation to render economic
justice, techniques of governmentality sought to effect social justice
through policies of protective discrimination. Reservations in modern
educational institutions, in government sector jobs as well as representa-
tion in grassroots political institutions for classes of people considered to
have been historically deprived, did more than any other intervention to
effect new kinds of identity-bearing citizens such OBCs (Other Backward
Classes), SCs (Scheduled Castes), and STs (Scheduled Tribes) who could
negotiate their historical deprivation into a resource for accessing more
power, even if the capacities for this leverage are unequally distributed
by caste and gender. 23
Situating within the philosophical premises of rights-based liberalism
and noting that equality of opportunity rather than setting-right histori-
cal wrongs as the desired objective, democratic theory has considered the
justification of protective discrimination as policy or as a right. Arguing
from the Rawlsian position of justice as fairness, Dipankar Gupta argues
that protective discrimination established as Constitution-based First
Principles helps to build a national fraternity, based on a basic set of re-
300 Conclusion

semblances, which are understood as certain practices that are common

to all such that the equality of opportunity can be effectively realized,
through a Durkheiman reading of Rawls that links the circumstances of
justice with the conditions of constitutional democracy and citizenship
such that national fraternity and individual rights are on par. 24 The con-
stitutional discourse seems to have anticipated much of the impasse that
liberalism was to run into for it sought to render justice through protec-
tive discrimination partly as a right and partly as a policy, recognizing
the importance both of rights and fraternity, only leaving its fulfillment
to the democratic process.
Much depended on the kind of political community that was to
evolve, for the process of constituting a national fraternity depended also
on a variety of other practices. The two ways of achieving justice, namely
rights and policy was marked out in the Constitution as the “fundamen-
tal rights” of citizens that are justiciable, and “Directive Principles of
State Policy” which though nonjusticiable ought to serve as guidelines for
policy. While fundamental rights were largely individual rights, it did
seek to grant minority rights, thus transforming the numerical discourse
of majority and minority, what David Scott defines as the “secular-ration-
alist morality of number” into an attempt at building fraternity through
recognition of cultural difference. While minority rights such as the valid-
ity of religion-based personal laws were upheld to acknowledge the relig-
ious and cultural differences and their corresponding moralities, the
practice of untouchability towards the scheduled castes was not given the
status of a cultural practice but considered a socially oppressive practice
that hindered the formation of the fraternity and thereby making free-
dom from the practice of untouchability as a fundamental right of the
citizens.
Implicit in this distinction is the idea that the fraternity that was to be
built could accommodate difference only within limits, to the extent that
difference and diversity does not rupture the imagined unity of the fra-
ternity. Cultural differences were to be translated as much into economic
and social inequalities such that a level playing field of difference-bearing
citizens could all enjoy equality of opportunity. The national fraternity
had overcome its infantilism, overcome the charges made by Thomas
Macaulay and J. S. Mill, and was fit enough to govern itself, and the
liberal democratic project by transforming subjects into citizens would
set them all on the developmental trajectory in which progress and justice
would be equally aspired by all. Protective discrimination was designed
to deal with “competing inequalities” in a “compartmental society.” 25
Guaranteed as rights, it was to govern the conduct of disadvantaged
groups in an improving direction so as to bring them into the fold of the
national fraternity. But in Hindu society organized hierarchically by
caste, almost all excepting those on the top could lay claims to such
cumulative disadvantage on account of social backwardness, causing a
 Conclusion 301

conceptual hurdle for the liberal technology of justice. Such competing

claims to cumulative disadvantage were accommodated within a policy
framework that treated protective discrimination for backward classes as
a justifiable claim and not within a rights framework. Competing notions
of justice entered the public domain and the choice between them was no
more a matter of the First Principles of liberalism, but part of the demo-
cratic politics of negotiations, a “politics of settlement.” 26

POLITICAL SOCIETY AND LIBERAL JUSTICE

Liberal technologies of government and liberal justice require a fraternity

of rights-bearing citizens who are only minimally bearers of cultural dif-
ference. The techniques of governmentality that are uniform and undif-
ferentiated, being also rationally conceived, have to be made effective in
their governmental functions over seemingly homogenous subject popu-
lations to render justice to individuals and to propel the fraternity to-
wards progress and development. Liberal techniques of government
sought to transform “otherness” into differences that can be measured,
classified and be made amenable to uniform and rational interventions.
For instance, the caste-tribe dichotomy, which has been more of an ad-
ministrative classification than socially cognized differences among the
low castes and tribal population, served more the needs of mainstream-
ing populations and rendering justice through policy. Even when the
Indian Five-Year plans addressed the concerns of the tribal population,
these were introduced only as special components of the plan with
schemes for poverty alleviation such as Tribal Areas Development pro-
grams that were constituted by the liberal rationality of numbers. “Sched-
uled Tribes” in the administrative jargon lost the particular identities of
different tribal groups, each with their specific cultural attributes, not-
withstanding the cultural changes that have set in, as well as their specif-
ic histories which have been erased from institutional memory, such that
the fifty-four million scheduled tribes and the nearly hundred million
scheduled castes have all become to use Eric Wolf’s phrase “a people
without history.” Whether rendering people history-less is part of the
marginalization or mainstreaming process, in which one national history
suffices to cover all histories, is beside the point. What is necessary to
acknowledge is that it is a liberal technique of normalization that enables
both the applications of homogenous and undifferentiated techniques of
government in the present and to posit a singular and uncontested goal
for the future.
The crisis of liberalism is not the inability of rendering justice effec-
tively to members of the fraternity such as women, minorities, oppressed
groups, aboriginal and ethnic populations, and immigrants in plural
democratic societies, but is also equally a governmental crisis. One such
302 Conclusion

instance is the disjuncture between juridical sovereignty and governmen-

tal technology especially in those sites of application of power where
governmentality is unable to successfully encompass sovereignty, as in
the realm of minority cultural rights where the right is asserted against
governmentality. 27 Another instance could be when other notions of jus-
tice that civil society deems desirable challenge a notion of justice under-
pinning a political rationality and the technologies of government, and
are reconciled or accommodated into governmental techniques through
the democratic process.
Postcolonial governmentality also poses significant challenge to liber-
al justice in the realm of human rights. Human rights provide both useful
instruments for mitigating harm and can also serve imperializing ven-
tures. Just like colonial government sought to introduce liberal tech-
niques of government as part of their civilizing agenda, so too does the
national state restructure its governmental techniques to serve its devel-
opmental agenda and constitute citizens as modern rights-bearing sub-
jects. The production of citizens out of members of diverse communities
not only inflicts sufferings by displacing practices of traditional cultures
in the direction of modernity so as to redeem individuals much like the
colonial civilizing agenda; it also raises hopes and expectations that hu-
man suffering caused by deprivation and unmet needs would be alleviat-
ed by the state. 28 The fulfillment of such hopes, as the Human Develop-
ment Index indicates, will challenge the state for a long time and until
then human rights are in a double jeopardy. This moment beckons us to
think of moving governmentality in a post-liberal direction, but it ap-
pears to be a lost cause when neo-liberalism is propounding strategies of
market-led governance.

NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY AND RISK

Liberalization of the Indian economy since 1991 underpins a new govern-

mental rationality from the earlier developmental state, as the role of the
state is now perceived not as amending market failures but as providing
a regulatory framework to ensure that markets perform efficiently. The
ascendancy of market rationality implies that all normative claims and
relationship between persons and things could be governed by values
determined by the market and be made to score on equity principles as
well, without the state making equity as its overriding concern. The
governmental rationality now is to ensure the greatest good of the great-
est number by transforming citizens into willing market participants and
efficient market players as laborers or investors, with the individual bear-
ing the risks of market participation and the state meeting deficits or lack
in individuals through programs like the Millennium Development
Goals.
 Conclusion 303

Apart from conventional market risks, contemporary global society

faces financial, ecological, and terrorist risks. The nature of these risks
have changed from being merely chance and probability that need to be
tamed, to being risks generated through human action and volition, dis-
tributed unevenly and perceived differently in different risk cultures.
Neoliberal governmentality has now to factor in the nature of risks in
both its rationalities and technologies of governance. Neoliberal govern-
ance of conduct requires that the subjects be orientated towards the risk
society. Risk education and risk governance as part of neoliberal govern-
mentality have spawned a whole range of informational requirements
that cause and effects a range of techniques of surveillance that liberal
governmentality hardly reckoned. Liberal governmentality of the welfare
or the developmental state cognized risk as chance that could be tamed
through probabilistically informed interventions in the sphere of biopoli-
tics, and such kinds of modern governmental interventions in effect en-
larged the domains of freedom. 29 Today, the systemic risks are idiosyn-
cratic and their chaotic dynamics give only a deceptive hope of being
controlled through probabilistic reckoning that in actuality are more
prone to failures of such attempts. Both the illusions of controllability and
the inability to do so provide opportunities for yet more information to
be generated and be made accessible, putting in place newer techniques
of surveillance as well. Information and surveillance become mutually
determining as power and knowledge. With more of the information
becoming digitalized and numerical it makes possible global access, glo-
bal networking, interpenetration of surveillance systems, instantaneity
and simultaneity.
As citizens are bared to the risks of the world with the rolling back of
the state’s developmental roles, the realignment is simultaneously ac-
companied by a change in the nature of sovereignty of the state. This
change in sovereignty implies a move from Hobbesian social contract
that foregrounded “people” as one, to a notion of “multitude” suggested
by Spinoza. 30 Although the “multitude” is united by the risks they face in
the changed world, the risks vary for the “multitude” depending on fac-
tors like race, class, caste, gender, age, religion, and region.
Neoliberal governmentality seeks to govern conduct of the “multi-
tude” to orientate them to the world of risks. Feeding information as an
act of social communication is crucial to that orientation to constitute
neoliberal subjects, and subjects access information through the Heideg-
gerian modes of “idle-talk” and “curiosity,” which provide the “multi-
tude” the ability to manage amid continual innovations. 31
Policy spaces are now reconfigured as a rights domain, which provide
the space for struggles in the complete realization of the rights that is
never completely realized, but in which the neoliberal subject moves to-
ward constituting a new subjectivity, at times even a transformative one.
The “multitude” of risk society could be viewed as an instance of the
304 Conclusion

intersection of “bound” and “unbound” serialities, the effects of govern-

mentality and the media-spurred imaginations. The spaces of civil and
political society provide the “multitude” the publicness even as it contin-
ually needs to carve out a public sphere for itself to engage both with the
state and the market. The liberal conundrum of how much or how little to
govern the “normalized” population is transformed under neoliberal
governmentality of how to govern less to let the “multitude” to govern
itself more, as normalizing the population under variegated risk struc-
tures recomposes them into a “multitude.” Whereas under liberal
governmentality the state required information on the population to gov-
ern, under neoliberal governmentality information has to be fed to the
“multitude” so they can govern themselves.

NEOLIBERAL SUBJECTS AND INFORMATION

Drawing from empirical evidence of contemporary India relating to pub-

lic health, financial markets, poverty, agrarian crisis, and rights dis-
courses I indicate how neoliberal governmentality is constructed by de-
ploying specific kinds of information. The media blitz over the dengue
and chickungunya deaths in 2006 indicates how in the present day of
global risks, the responsibilities and roles of public health are being re-
constituted. 32 The media relentlessly presented statistics on the number
afflicted with dengue and the number of deaths in different states, fre-
quently accompanied by a visual of a mosquito as risk education that
almost amounted to a media-generated hysteria. Compared to the Plague
Commission reports of the colonial days, in which such region-wise sta-
tistics was supposed to provide an understanding of how and through
what medium plague spread, such was not the case with this reporting; it
was just “news” toward orienting the subjects towards the risk. One of
the television channels even aired a program bringing in experts to know
how prepared were the government and the citizens to face the risks.
Simultaneously the state put out advertisements in the leading news-
papers that Aedes mosquitoes that breed in “clean water collections” are
the carriers of dengue and chickungunya. Noting that “water coolers,
storage tanks, old tyres, plastic containers and junk materials, flower
vase, bird-bath, pets bowls, dustbins, ornamental tanks, coconut shells
and construction sites” are breeding sites, and that most of these being
items in the household, it was the individual responsibility to prevent
mosquito breeding. Further advising the people to use insecticide treated
mosquito nets while sleeping and using repellents, knowing fully well
that the many millions in the country cannot afford the luxury of mosqui-
to nets, the state shifted the responsibility onto individuals, and absolved
itself of maintaining clean environment in the urban centers and villages
that all know are filled with mounds of garbage, open drains, and pud-
 Conclusion 305

dles of water. Risk protection that is individualized and marketable have

a greater promotional edge under neoliberal rationality than those risks
that need to be managed at the level of the collective, and which become
an issue of public action, deliberative democracy and the contestation of
biopolitics.
Media and experts now have a greater role in preparing citizens for
risk education even if media risk education sometimes runs into the risk
of creating panic when not sufficiently well understood or attempts made
to clarify, which in a way is tantamount to feeding misinformation. Such
misinformation could also be aligned with commercial interests, signify-
ing the dubious role of experts and the larger issue of how science, state,
and commerce are intertwined to a greater extent than ever before. This is
particularly true in the contemporary world of finance in which a new
calculative ethos has developed. 33 Moreover, as the “techniques of calcu-
lability” have far outgrown the organizations and tools for its manage-
ment, it has opened a new distance between expert and popular under-
standings of risk and is the space of the new location of uncertainty on
which financial business thrives. 34 In the sphere of financial risks where
instinct and foresight determine risk-taking or risk-averse behavior, pre-
paring neoliberal subjects to anticipate, decipher and strategize about
financial risks requires information and offset opportunities. A small re-
tail investor has to gain in addition a certain amount of self-knowledge,
relating to her risk profile that depends on the finite time horizon of her
life span and perhaps even intergenerational bequest considerations that
would extend the time horizon, and her lifetime earnings profile adjusted
for all kinds of risks. Her risk positioning would depend upon the
amount of risk exposure that she would desire, given her risk profile and
her expectations of future market returns. Financial market subjects are a
differentiated lot and risk education is therefore one of putting out nu-
merical information on market movements allowing the subjects to draw
their inferences from their own strategies of reading the market signs.
The media indicators of financial markets are meant more to spur herd
behavior on the market than to be a valid statement on risks, and the
players being so varied, the readings of market risks from the market
indicators are individualized readings with corresponding risk position-
ing behaviors. An example of the media attempts to constitute the finan-
cial “subject” who can both process information and hone her skills in
drawing appropriate inferences on market risks is a relatively new con-
test held by the newspaper Hindu Businessline on picking the best stock,
where those who are able to correctly identify the equity stock that
records highest increase in value at the end of the month are declared
winners.
Class classification in risk society can become almost irrelevant as the
population is classified on the basis of risk positions that people adopt.
Today, new statistical indices are constantly publicized ranking regions
306 Conclusion

and individuals so as to make them efficient actors in the global capital-

ism of risks and opportunities. An index of Economic Freedom is now an
indicator of how business-friendly a particular region is taking into ac-
count its regulatory practices for property rights and labor, rather than
what was hitherto widely understood as freedom from want and hunger.
Media publicity of the rich with their global ranking suggests that becom-
ing rich is possible, if one successfully adopted a risk positioning strate-
gy. Such myths of becoming rich translate in popular life into playing
lotto, casino, racetrack betting, and gambling through a steady process of
“hybridization of the ideologies of calculative action” thus confusing the
spheres of chance and risk. 35 These illusions are belied when one reads of
farmer’s suicides and starvation deaths, which the same media keeps a
tab on, signifying how risks have been socialized and the extent to which
it increasingly constitutes social life. Farmer’s suicides are also due to
precarious risk positioning arising out of a combination of bank loans,
choice of commercial crops, and crop-price movements. Although the
“poor” and the “vulnerable” are identified and enumerated, techniques
of governmentality have still not been devised to facilitate preventive
interventions so as to discourage suicides, and would require setting in
place apparatuses of surveillance that track the “vulnerable.” 36 A minis-
ter in a region where farmers’ suicides have been rampant opined that
farmers needed training in stress-busting and harmonious-living through
techniques of meditation, a psycho-spiritual intervention for risk prepar-
edness.
Devising appropriate interventions requires neoliberal governmental-
ity to bring onto the policy agenda the issue of the extent of risk exposure
desirable for “vulnerable” groups and then carry on simulation as a pre-
dictive method to identify potential subjects who are likely to show unfa-
vorable behavior, who could then be identified for preventive interven-
tions through “systematic predetection.” 37 The new space of risk is one
where risk is made autonomous from danger. Robert Castel notes “A
conception of prevention which restricted itself to predicting the occur-
rence of a particular act appears archaic and artisanal in comparison with
one which claims to construct the objective conditions of emergence of
danger, so as then to deduce from them the new modalities of interven-
tion.” 38 Whereas the liberal developmental state presumed that statistical
data on poverty could help to predict the numbers of poor to help frame
intervention strategies, it is clearly insufficient in the neoliberal era.
Discursive spaces that enable one to gain knowledge of, understand,
and cope with the risks are increasingly of the generic logical-linguistic
forms, which establish the pattern for all forms of discourse much like
Foucault’s “episteme.” Statistics is a vital part of these logical-linguistic
forms. These linguistic structures become instrumental for orienting
one’s conduct and one of the conditions that define the contemporary
“multitude.” The information deluge, numbers, statistics, and indices
 Conclusion 307

that proliferate in the media in order to orientate one to face the risks, and
the proliferation of the rights discourse that emphasizes the anguish of
the “multitude” on account of the differentiated nature of risks, chance,
opportunities, and offsets constitute the neoliberal construction of the
citizen-subjects.
However, not all information that is needed to orient one to the risks
is available nor the information required to monitor governance by the
“multitude,” which is crucial to grant some agentic power to the “multi-
tude,” as they seek to be not just subjects of surveillance by agents and
institutions of sovereignty, but would like in turn to be granted the recip-
rocal power to be agents of surveillance themselves of those very same
agents and institutions. 39 The Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005
passed in the neoliberal era of governance has made it possible for citi-
zens and civil society organizations to monitor governance by the state
through granting access to information that the state and its bureaucracy
had hitherto been reluctant to make public. Bringing to light such laxity
could presumably lead to better statistical data and effective interven-
tions. Extending beyond governance by the nation-state, neoliberal
governmentality includes the supranational agencies of global sovereign-
ty, the civil society organizations that seek to provide a publicness to the
“multitude” and to diffuse the state’s monopoly over decision making,
the strategies of mass media to orientate the subjects to the various risks,
and the techniques of governing the conduct of oneself as well.

NOTES

1. Michael Dutton, “The Paradoxical After-Life of Colonial Governmentality,” So-

cial Identities: Journal of the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 16, 5 (2010): 635–649.
2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York/ Lon-
don: Routledge, 1993), 48.
3. Scott, Refashioning Futures.
4. For an understanding of civil society in India, read Partha Chatterjee, “On Civil
and Political Society in Post-Colonial Democracies,” in Civil Society: History and Pos-
sibilities, 165–78; and Sudipta Kaviraj, “In Search of Civil Society,” in Civil Society:
History and Possibilities, ed. Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), 287–323.
5. Partha Chatterjee, “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?” Social Text 16, 3 (Fall 1998):
56–69.
6. Colin Gordon remarks “Foucault also found that in the history of Western
governmental practice and its rationalities is the idea of a kind of power which takes
freedom itself and the ‘soul of the citizen,’ the life and life-conduct of the ethically free
subject, as in some sense the correlative object of its own suasive capacity.” Gordon,
“Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govern-
mentality, 5.
7. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 61–62.
8. The constitutions of many of the former British colonies such as Nigeria, Ghana,
and Malaya were drafted in conjunction with officials of the British Colonial Office.
9. Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Bombay: Ox-
ford University Press, 1966), xv.
308 Conclusion

10. Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
11. Austin, The Indian Constitution, 51.
12. Vide Article 37 of the Constitution of India.
13. Andre Beteille, “Distributive Justice and Institutional Well-being,” in Democracy,
Difference and Social Justice, ed. Gurpeet Mahajan (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1998), 463–488.
14. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 203.
15. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 204.
16. B. R. Ambedkar, States and Minorities–What are Their Rights and How to Secure
Them in the Constitution of Free India (Bombay: Thacker and Co, 1947).
17. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 205.
18. Partha Chatterjee has noted that this duality could in practice lead to contradic-
tions. For what the people may express through the representative mechanisms of the
political process as their will may not necessarily be what is good for their economic
well-being, and what the state thought as important for the economic development of
the nation may not be ratified by the representative mechanisms. See Chatterjee, The
Nation and Its Fragments, 203
19. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 208.
20. Hidam Premananda, “Administration, Statistics and Population: The Sterilisa-
tion Camps in the Early 1970s,” Economic and Political Weekly XLVIII, 12 (March 23,
2013): 69–74.
21. Chatterjee, “On Civil and Political Society in Post-Colonial Democracies” in
Civil Society: History and Possibilities, 177.
22. A newly introduced law in 2012 requires passengers traveling in all reserved
railway compartments to carry government authorized photo idenitification cards!
23. Dipankar Gupta, “Recasting Reservations in the Language of Rights,” in Democ-
racy, Difference and Social Justice, ed. Gurpeet Mahajan (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1998), 509–26.
24. Gupta, “Recasting Reservations in the Language of Rights,” in Democracy, Differ-
ence and Social Justice, 516.
25. Galanter, Competing Equalities.
26. Scott, Refashioning Futures.
27. Chatterjee, “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?” 56–69.
28. Talal Asad, “What do Human Rights do? An Anthropological Enquiry,” Theory
and Event 4, 4 (December 2000).
29. Rose, Powers of Freedom.
30. Paolo Virno observes that the contemporary multitude is composed neither of
“citizens” nor of “producers” but occupies a middle region between “individual” and
“collective” and for that reason the “public” and “private” too have been decoupled.
Hence it is no longer possible to speak of a people converging into the unity of the
state. See Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary
Forms of Life (New York: Semiotext (e), 2004). Michael Hart and Antonio Negri in
Empire note, ‘The “multitude” is a multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open set of
relations, which is not homogenous or identical with itself and bears an indistinct,
inclusive relation to those outside of it. The “people,” in contrast, tends toward iden-
tity and homogeneity internally while posing its difference from and excluding what
remains outside it. Whereas the “multitude” is an inconclusive constituent relation,
the “people” is a constituted synthesis that is prepared for sovereignty. The “people”
provides a single will and action that is independent of and often in conflict with the
various wills and actions of the “multitude.” Every nation must make the “multitude”
into a “people.” See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Empire (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 103.
31. For explanations of “idle talk” and “curiosity,” see Heidegger Being and Time,
211–17. I have no hesitation in juxtaposing Heidegger with Foucault, as Foucault
himself has acknowledged the determining influence of Heidegger on his philosophi-
cal thought. See Michel Foucault, “Final Interview,” Raritan 5, 1 (Summer 1985).
 Conclusion 309

32. Dengue epidemics in Delhi in certain months of the year have been fairly recur-
rent but the newer viral strains have brought it into the vector of the risk society,
although not a global but a localized one. Chickungunya is supposedly from East
Africa, and is a recent disease that in 2006 moved up north from the southern states of
India.
33. Arjun Appadurai, “The Spirit of Calculation,” Cambridge Anthropology 30, 1
(Spring 2012): 3–17.
34. Appadurai, “The Spirit of Calculation,” 9.
35. Appadurai, “The Spirit of Calculation,” 10.
36. A nongovernmental organization’s exposé through the Right To Information
(RTI) Act revealed that information on farmers’ suicides in Bundelkhand in north
India was distorted by the state bureaucracy as out of 1,667 suicides recorded in the
administration reports for the five years preceeding 2006, it had in 1,556 cases re-
corded the reasons for suicide as “unknown.” See Hindustan Times, 3 Nov 2006.
37. Robert Castel notes “A risk does not arise from the presence of particular precise
danger embodied in a concrete individual or group. It is the effect of a combination of
abstract factors which render more or less probable the occurrence of undesirable
modes of behavior. On the basis of the probabilistic and abstract existence of risks,
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 Name Index

Abbott, 150 Berlin, Isaiah, 291

Abdel, Malek A., 17 Bernier, 114
Abrams, Philip, 73n5 Beteille, André, 292
Adam, Barbara, 131n5 Bhabha, Homi, 3, 66, 70, 111, 118, 130
Ahmed, Imtiaz, 222n149 Birla, Ritu, 153, 168n6
Akbar, Muhammad, 35, 36, 43, 87 Bodin, Jean, 30
Alburuni abu Rayhan,3n12 Boileau, Alexander, 202
Ali, Muhammed, 278 Bolt, William, 148
Alison, 148 Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 30
Allami, Abul-Fazl, 36 Bougle, Celestin, 255n31
Altekar, A. S., 74n25 Broca, Paul, 199
Ambedkar, B. R., 213, 294, 299 Brooksbank, 150
Amin, Samir, 4 Broussais, 228, 255n28, 255n30
Amin, Shahid, 157, 287n59 Bryden, 238
Anderson, Benedict, 16, 55, 178, 211, Buchanan, Francis, 155, 160, 181
212 Buckingham, James Silk, 148
Appadurai, Arjun, 2, 20, 23n33, 71, 72, Buckland, C. E., 208
75n47, 100, 155, 177, 180, 249 Buckle, H. T., 177
Arbuthnot, John, 60 Buck-Morss, Susan, 137
Arendt, Hannah, 262, 283 Burchell, Graham, 138
Asad, Talal, 1, 13, 17, 134n52 Burke, Edmund, 19, 29, 40, 41, 42, 44,
Atkinson, Fred, 166 46, 62, 133n28, 141, 143, 144, 146,
Aurangazeb, 35, 36, 202 147, 155, 262, 282, 283, 287n66
Burke, Peter, 114
Bacon, Francis, 10, 176, 225, 257n63
Baines J. A., 187, 195, 206, 207 Canguilhem, G., 229, 246, 255n31,
Bannerman, 247 255n33, 255n36
Bates, Crispin, 182, 218n80 Cannadine, David, 181
Battacharya, Jogendranath, 213 Castel, Robert, 306, 309n37
Bayly, Christopher, 6, 22n13, 88, 264, Castells, Manuel, 6
265, 279, 285n24 Chadwick, Edwin, 59, 63, 66, 226, 231,
Bayly, Susan, 181, 182 235
Beattie, Martin, 236 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 1, 3, 112, 121,
Beltz, 150 134n55, 134n56, 134n57
Benjamin, Walter, 78n113, 121 Charlemange, 43
Bentham, Jeremy, 19, 30, 46, 47, 50, 51, Charles II, 29
57, 58, 59, 65, 66, 74n12, 115, 146, Chatterjee, Partha, 49, 87, 128, 129,
150, 165, 176, 262 136n98, 168n12, 180, 182, 184, 212,
Bentinck, William, 43, 67, 96, 268 254n20, 286n42, 287n70, 292, 296,
Bentley, Arthur, 6, 114 298, 308n18

333
334 Name Index

Clemon, Frank G., 236 Dumont, Louis, 34, 137, 155, 168n2,
Clokie, Hugh Mc Dowall, 79n142 180, 214
Cohen, Patricia Cline, 80n147, 80n148 Dundas, Henry, 147
Cohn, Bernard, 1, 3, 18, 39, 69, 178, 180, Duperron, Anquetil A. H., 114
181, 208, 285n18 Durkheim, Emile, 11
Cole, Joshua, 254n27, 255n28, 255n29,
256n49 Eastwood, David, 59
Comte, Auguste, 255n30, 255n31 Eden, 279
Conybeare, Henry, 235 Edney, Mathew, 87
Cook, James, 24n57 Everest, George, 91, 93
Cooke, Charles Northcote, 151 Evola, Julius, 31
Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 31, 32, 33
Cooper, Frederick, 172n89 Fabre-Tonnerre, 236
Cornish, 165 Farr, William, 161, 205, 238
Cornwallis, Charles, 19, 65, 95 Filmer, Robert, 30
Corrigan, Philip, 18, 51, 262 Fortes, Meyer, 24n48
Crawfurd, John, 166 Foucault, Michel, 1, 2, 8, 9, 12, 18,
Crombie, A. C., 215n12 23n40, 27, 52, 53, 54, 55, 70, 74n14,
Cromwell, 29 79n124, 79n128, 83, 84, 85, 101, 111,
Crooke, William, 156, 198 120, 131n2, 134n45, 137, 138, 139,
Cullen, William, 176 140, 168n6, 168n8, 182, 223, 225, 228,
Cunningham, D. D., 238, 239, 240 230, 242, 248, 253n1, 253n2, 254n27,
Cunningham, James, 237, 238, 239 255n39, 256n44, 262, 289, 306, 307n6,
Curtis, Bruce, 61, 79n128 308n31
Curzon, George Nathaniel, 48, 67, 68, Fox, Charles James, 41
166 Fox, Richard, 40
Francis, W, 219n97
D’Anville, 102 Fraser, T. R., 242
Dalhousie, James Andrew B. R., 29 Freitag, Sandria, 285n17
Dalton, Edward T., 198
Das, Veena, 82n192 Gait, E. A., 204
Datta, Akshay Kumar, 257n63 Gandhi, M. K., 106, 276, 278, 280, 281,
De Renzy, A. C. C., 238 282, 283, 286n42, 287n60, 287n68,
De Tocqueville, Alex, 281 299
Dean, Mitchell, 165, 173n107 Gane, Mike, 255n30, 255n31
Derrett, Duncan J. M., 34 Geddes, Patrick, 236
Derrida, Jacques, 2, 70, 82n192, 135n80 Gellner, Ernest, 11
Descartes, René, 10 Ghertner, Asher D., 109n86
Devji, Faisal, 287n68 Ghurye, G. S., 178, 180, 213
Dickenson, 97 Giegerenzer, Gerd, 256n49
Diderot, Denis, 13 Gordon, Colin, 138, 307n6
Digby, William, 166 Grant, James, 42, 127
Dirks, Nicholas, 38, 70, 113, 178, 181, Graunt, John, 10, 60, 225, 232, 258n93
184, 199, 285n18 Guha, Ranajit, 63, 70, 71, 108n63, 115,
Dow, Alexander, 128 127, 128, 133n39, 136n94, 182, 262
Dr. Mayr, 245 Guha, Sumit, 114, 202, 218n80, 219n98
Dufferin, 201 Guillory, John, 79n132
Dumezil, Georges, 33, 34 Gupta, Akhil, 131n5
Gupta, Dipankar, 299
 Name Index 335

Haan, Michael, 204 Kalhana, 117, 133n39

Habermas, Jurgen, 261, 262, 284n2, Kant, Immanuel, 10, 11, 13, 120, 124,
284n3, 284n4 125, 126, 261, 262, 283, 284n3
Hacking, Ian, 79n141, 154, 161, 175, Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 74n20
176, 177, 179, 206, 215n12, 256n49 Kautilya, 10, 31, 34
Haffkine, Waldemar, 240, 240–241, 244, Kaviraj, Sudipta, 178, 179, 180, 182, 184
245, 246, 247, 248 Ketkar, S. V., 213
Halhead, Nathaniel B., 114 Keynes, John Maynard, 141, 159,
Hamilton, Walter, 201 172n84, 172n85
Handelman, Don, 77n105 Khan, Syed Ahmed, 278
Hankin, M. E., 239 King James, 35
Hart, Michael, 308n30 Koch, Robert, 239
Hastings, Warren, 40, 41, 44, 62, 146, Kooiman, Dick, 221n141
210, 266 Koselleck, Reinhart, 113, 116, 124, 125,
Hawkins, 97 135n69
Hayek, Friedrich von, 15 Kumar, Anil, 254n21, 257n57, 257n58,
Haynes, Douglas, 285n22 257n59
Hegel, G. W. F., 111, 116, 120, 125, 126,
133n25, 133n27, 184, 213 Lambton, William, 91, 92
Heidegger, Martin, 120, 122, 134n60, Laslett, Peter, 286n39
308n31 Latham, 196
Herder, Gottfried, 13 Latour, Bruno, 4, 5, 6, 10, 22n16, 22n20,
Herschel, John, 176 61, 80n160, 122, 135n61
Herzfeld, Michael, 77n105 Le Gentil, Guillaume, 114
Hindess, Barry, 139, 140, 280 Lefebvre, Henri, 84, 106n8
Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 45, 50, 170n40, Legg, Stephen, 109n85
207, 263 Lewis, T. R., 238
Hocart, A. M., 31 Linnaeus, Carl, 176
Hoppit, Julian, 172n79 Locke, John, 27, 28, 45, 46, 101, 262,
Hossack, William C., 236 286n39
Hume, L. J., 50 Lorenzen, David, 220n115
Hunter W. W., 181 Lushington, S. R., 114
Lyall, Alfred, 181
Ibbetson, Denzil, 188, 190, 193, 194, Lyotard, Jean Francois, 11
198, 208 Lytton, Edward R. B., 163
Inden, Ronald, 181, 202
Irschick, Eugene, 127 Macaulay, Thomas B., 30, 119, 147, 148,
169n36, 262, 263, 286n44, 300
Jackson, Mark, 135n80 MacDonagh, Oliver, 80n157
James, Richard, 60 MacIntyre, Alisdaire, 15, 16, 234
James, William, 117 Mackenzie, Colin, 93, 107n30, 127, 181,
Jenkins, Laura, 222n159 186
Jinnah, M. A., 205, 213 Maclean, C. D., 117, 195
Jones, Edward Thomas, 145 Maine, Henry, 48, 67, 74n9, 181
Jones, Richard, 138 Majeed, Javed, 43, 81n176, 133n28,
Jones, William, 19, 40, 42, 114, 130, 133n38
133n28, 133n38 Major, Andrew, 221n134
Joyce, Patrick, 59 Malcolm, 46, 47, 210
Marsden, William, 114
336 Name Index

Marshall, Alfred, 161 Pant, Rashmi, 186

Marten, 204 Pasteur, Louis, 239, 240
Martin, Ranald, 236 Peabody, Norbert, 21n5, 202
Martin, Robert Montgomery, 160 Pearson, Karl, 199, 200
Marx, Karl, 15, 149, 284n3 Perrett, Roy, 132n12
Master, Streynsham, 142, 143 Pettenkofer, Max Joseph, 237, 238, 239
McClure, Kirstie, 13 Petty, William, 10, 60, 80n148, 172n92,
McCulloch, James, 138, 151, 155 225, 232
McFarlane, Colin, 235 Phule, Jyotibhai, 299
Mehta, Uday Singh, 280, 282, 284n12 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 16
Middleton, 193 Playfair, William, 104
Mill, James, 19, 42, 43, 46, 47, 63, 65, 67, Polanyi, Karl, 137
115, 116, 117, 128, 133n25, 133n26, Poovey, Mary, 57, 59, 152, 154, 169n24,
133n27, 133n28, 141, 147, 262, 263 170n37, 170n40, 170n44, 171n55
Mill, John Stuart, 19, 43, 44, 45, 46, 57, Porter, Theodore, 153
60, 63, 65, 66, 81n176, 104, 141, 177, Prakash, Gyan, 4, 5
183, 262, 263, 269, 281, 284n3, 300 Price, Pamela, 38, 285n18
Miller, Peter, 167n1, 168n13, 170n43 Prinsep, E. A., 102, 103
Minto, 48 Prony, Gaspard de, 13
Misra, Kavita, 241
Mitchell, Timothy, 80n162, 137, 166, Queen Anne, 29
171n73 Quetelet, Adolphe, 177, 228, 232,
Mitra, Rajendralal, 257n63 255n29, 256n49
Mol, Annemarie, 255n33
Molony, 192 Rabasa, Jose, 105
Montagu-Chelmsford, 48 Raman, Bhavani, 173n101
Montesquieu, 40 Ramaswamy. E. V., 299
Mookerjee, Harish Chunder, 267 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 102
Morehead, Charles, 234 Rand, W. C., 250
Moreland, W. H., 35 Rao, Velucheru Narayana, 114
Munro, Thomas, 20, 46, 96, 98, 99, 127, Rawls, John, 300
267 Read, Alexander, 95
Munshi, K. M., 293 Reetz, Dietrich, 221n141
Rennell, James, 89, 90, 91, 102
Nair, Rukmini Bhaya, 70, 82n192 Ricardo, David, 138, 141
Nally, David, 173n97 Risley, Herbert, 188, 190, 192, 195, 197,
Nandy, Ashis, 113, 132n15 198, 199, 208, 212, 214, 278
Naoroji, Dadabhai, 166, 174n113, 273 Robinson, William J., 79n142
Nathan, R., 243 Roe, Thomas, 35
Negri, Antonio, 308n30 Rogers, 114
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 270 Rorty, Richard, 120
Nesfield J. C., 188, 190, 193, 198 Rose, Nikolas, 54, 86, 168n13, 225,
Northcote-Trevelyan, 57 255n40, 289
Ross, Ronald, 234
Obeysekere, Gananath, 24n57 Rudner, David, 170n49
Ogborn, Miles, 143
Orme, Robert, 89 Sahlins, Marshall, 24n57
Osborne, Thomas, 229, 254n15, 254n16, Said, Edward, 1, 2, 3, 5, 17, 21n7, 22n19,
254n17, 254n18 84
 Name Index 337

Satyamurti, S., 213 Tellmann, Ute, 138

Savarkar, Veer, 201 Temple, Richard, 164, 165
Sayer, Derek, 18, 51, 262 Thapar, Romilla, 132n22
Schinkel, Anders, 135n69 Thomas, Keith, 169n27
Schoolman, Morton, 25n73 Thomas, Nicholas, 22n14, 25n58
Schwarz, Henry, 73n6 Thurston, Edgar, 197
Scott, David, 168n12, 227, 263, 284n3, Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 252, 278
284n4, 300 Tilly, Charles, 112
Scott, James, 98, 157 Topinard, Paul, 199
Senart, Emile, 198 Trautmann, Thomas, 113, 133n26,
Shahjahan, Shahabuddin Muhammad, 133n31
35 Trevelyan, Charles, 268, 275
Shivaji, Bhonsle, 202 Tribe, Keith, 137
Shore, Frederick, 268
Shulman, David, 39, 114 Veblen, Thorstein, 16
Simmel, Georg, 63, 126 Veyne, Paul, 126
Simon, John, 235 Virno, Paolo, 308n30, 309n39
Sinha, Mrinalini, 286n44
Skaria, Ajay, 282, 287n60 Walter, Ryan, 138
Smith, Adam, 138, 148, 168n8 Warwick, Anderson, 256n50
Smith, Richard Saumarez, 71, 119, Waterfield, Henry, 186
173n101 Watson, 245
Snow, John, 238 Watt, George, 155
Sombart, Werner, 150 Weber, Max, 6, 15, 24n52, 34, 52,
Spinoza, Benedict de, 303 133n27, 137, 149, 152, 171n64, 214,
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 263 284n3
Spry, Henry, 210 Wedderburn, William, 164
Srinivas, M. N., 192, 214 Wellesley, Richard C. W., 236
Stein, Burton, 34, 37, 38 White, Melanie, 183, 196
Stephen, Fitzjames, 47, 264 Wilford, 114
Stern, Philip, 29 Wilson, Horace, 114
Stewart, 250 Wilson, James, 159
Stigler, Stephen, 256n49 Wilson, Jon, 63
Stokes, Eric, 19, 67 Winch, Peter, 15, 16, 24n52
Stoler, Ann Laura, 7, 20, 66, 70, 73 Wingate, Andrew, 243, 244
Strachey, John, 47 Wink, André, 39, 75n42
Subramanyam, Sanjay, 114 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15
Sultan, Tipu, 10, 95 Wolf, Eric, 301
Sussman, Charlotte, 172n92 Woolf, Stuart, 216n43
Swift, Jonathan, 172n92
Zafar, Bahadur Shah, 29
Talbot, Cynthia, 205
 Subject Index

absolute, 30, 32, 67, 82n192; monarchy, 157; classification, 301; concerns,
33; time, 120, 122 208; controls, 91, 182; Corps, 64;
absolutism, 30 department, 50, 139; developments,
abstract, 84, 85; regularities, 63; space, 58; devices, 58; discourses, 5, 7, 8,
83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 94, 98, 101, 102, 17, 103, 162; domain, 223, 224;
104, 105, 106n8 efficiency, 60; ends, 209; hierarchy,
account books, 146, 150, 153 275; interests, 197; machine, 67;
accountability, 7, 8, 9, 18, 41, 51, 58, 65, management, 235; measures, 62, 68;
70, 71, 85, 120, 140, 141, 142, 148, modalities, 103, 115, 175; necessity,
149, 153, 154, 159, 163, 175; 180; power, 208; practices, 8, 10, 196;
procedures, 112, 166 principle, 58; procedures, 20, 150;
accounting, 9, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, process, 80n157; record, 140, 234,
144, 145, 149, 150, 153, 154, 155, 166, 241; reforms, 57; reports, 166;
167n1, 170n40; discourses, 141, 149, revolution, 57; routines, 57; state, 54,
154; framework, 148; logic, 147; 176; strategies, 248; structures, 68;
methods, 146; practices, 145, 146, system, 141; techniques, 88;
150; principle, 147; problem, 146; thinking, 186; triplicate, 70; unit, 88
procedures, 145; system, 142, 151 aetiology of bubonic plague, 242
accounts, 10, 65, 95, 96, 98, 99, 122, 141, aetiology of cholera, 238
142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, aggregate of individuals, 266
153, 154, 155, 157, 166, 170n37, aggregate of population, 87, 160, 205
170n49; of commerce, 153 agricultural statistics, 156, 158
accumulation rationality, 104 aim of government, 47
act at a distance, 5, 6, 22n16, 61 Aini-i-Akbari, 36
acting at near, 6 Akbar Nama, 36
administered space, 105 Aligarh Institute Gazette, 278
administration, 9, 43, 49, 51, 57, 58, 61, All-India budget, 151
62, 64, 66, 67, 86, 102, 117, 127, ambiguous epistemic space, 71, 72
134n52, 149, 150, 154, 155, 165, 166, ambivalence, 61, 129, 130, 281, 282; of
169n24, 173n101, 181, 185, 201, 209, colonial discourse, 111
210, 211, 230, 234, 244, 267, 268, 272, Amrita Bazar Patrika , 279
274, 275, 292; of health, 250; of anachronism, 124, 129
justice, 50; of relief works, 164; of analytic reason, 14
state security, 64; of the Thugee, analytics of government, 56
210; reports, 123, 166, 309n36 anatomo-politics, 225
administrative, 63, 148, 175, 195, 247, Anglo-Indian, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270,
251, 274; accountability, 14, 123, 166; 271
actions, 148, 163, 233; apparatus, 28, annual account, 143
123, 159; areas, 66; attempt, 257n58; annual budget, 151
blueprint, 291; boundaries, 91, 93, annual records, 123

339
340 Subject Index

annual reports, 51, 58, 79n141, 124, 183, autonomous, 280, 306
201 agency, 284n4; agents, 262, 279;
anthropological capacities, 263 identity, 204; rationality, 139;
anthropological data, 197 sphere, 273, 277
Anthropometric Measurements, 199 autonomy, 208
anthropometry, 195, 197, 198, 200; avalanche of numbers, 12, 154, 175,
measurements, 188, 198; methods, 176, 177
188, 198; research, 197, 201 average man, 104, 228, 256n49
anti-colonialist nationalist discourse, 8
anti-contagion, 237 BAAS. See British Association for the
anti-modernist, 276 Advancement of Science
anxieties of colonial rule, 249 backward societies, 45
anxiety, 61, 63, 201 Baconian: ideas, 10, 257n63;
apparatuses: of power, 9; of security, inductivism, 58; methods, 138
53, 83, 298; of surveillance, 306 bacteriology, 232, 233, 239, 247
arbitrary legislation, 294 balance sheet, 146, 153
arbitrary power, 41 barbarian(s), 43, 44, 69, 183
Archaeological Survey of India, 201 Barthesian image, 70
archeological evidence, 218n80 Battle of Plassey 1757, 29
archival collections, 70 Being and Time, 308n31
archival forms, 56 Bengal Atlas 1781, 89
Archival power, 70 Bengal Herald, 268
archive, 56, 70, 115, 143 Bengal Hurkaru, 267, 270, 271
archives of governance, 20 Benthamite, 60, 63; ideas, 46, 58; ideas
archives of information, 63 on government, 50; panopticon, 119;
archiving documentation, 142 principle, 71; reforms, 57
Aristotelian, 85 Bhagavat Gita, 31
art of government, 30, 53, 138 Biblical chronology, 113, 116
Arthasastra , 10, 31, 33, 34, 75n42 biography of the archive, 70
Aryan, 130, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, biological, 254n27; multiplicity, 230;
204 normativity, 227; processes, 253n1
Aryanist perspective, 130 biopolitics, 223, 228, 236, 237, 241, 243,
Asiatic Research, 114 297, 303, 305; of cholera, 237; of the
assemblage of persons, 74n12 population, 225
assemblages, 70 bio-power, 53, 160, 224, 228, 230, 252,
attributes of sites, 85 297
audit culture, 66 bi-polar sovereignty, 34
authoritarian, 181, 249, 280 bi-polar technology, 254n27
authoritarian liberalism, 47 The Birth of the Clinic, 228, 253n2
authoritarian rule, 280 Blue books, 58, 61, 163, 226
authoritative, 243, 261, 280 body natural, 74n20
authoritative agent, 274 body politic, 74n20
authoritative bearer, 266 body-organism, 253n1
authority, 30, 68, 69, 72, 111, 119, 129, body-scapes, 105
142, 143, 189, 190, 249, 250, 279, Bombay Durpan , 269
285n18; grants of, 41; nature and The Bombay Times and Standard, 268,
degree of, 44 269, 270, 277
authorized, 101, 191, 248 book-keeping, 142, 150, 151, 152, 154,
authorizing power, 105, 242, 246 171n64, 224; accounts, 123;
 Subject Index 341

categories, 140; practices, 145, 146 calculating rationality, 20, 86, 137, 154
bound seriality, 16, 55, 212; effect, 212 calculation, 18, 54, 59, 60, 73, 87, 90,
bourgeois : liberties, 282; public sphere, 118, 121, 137, 139, 140, 142, 151, 152,
268; revolution, 282 154, 166, 168n13, 199, 235, 298; and
brahmanical model, 187 tactics, 9
Brief View of the Caste System of the calculative : action, 306; ethos, 305;
N.W.Provinces and Oudh, 193 practice, 109n86, 137, 167n1;
British: administration, 40, 49; Census routines, 144
of 1861, 161; British censuses, 201, calculus of benefit, 282
205; Empire, 29, 48, 61, 62, 64, capital accounting, 149, 152
133n28; government, 57; capital budgeting, 146
governmental machinery, 57; capitalist enterprise, 150, 152
governmental practices, 27; imperial Cartesian man, 11
enterprise, 180; imperialism, 42, 45, cartographic images, 105
47, 262, 296; state, 62, 63; statistical cartographic representations, 84
movement, 60 cartography, 6, 86, 90, 102, 104
British Association for the carto-statistical techniques, 87, 103,
Advancement of Science, 60, 165, 104, 234
197, 198 caste, 40, 54, 64, 90, 159, 160, 175, 178,
bureaucracy, 35, 51, 52, 57, 58, 60, 64, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 188,
66–67, 68, 71, 77n105, 85, 143, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 199,
162–163, 274, 285n18, 295, 307, 200, 201, 204, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211,
309n36 212, 213, 216n51, 216n52, 219n97,
bureaucratic, 65, 67, 88, 123, 165; 241, 247, 252, 277, 285n18, 298, 299,
accountability, 297; action, 295; 300, 301, 303; associations, 212;
administration, 243; authority, 52; categories, 181, 186; classification,
authorization, 142; 194, 195, 201, 212; communities, 178,
communications, 52; control, 20, 97; 208, 211; consciousness, 212, 213;
culture, 82n192; decision-making, data, 182, 184, 211; distinctions, 194,
134n56, 163; disciplines, 52; 203; endogamy, 199; enumeration,
discourses, 141; edifice, 173n101; 180, 185, 213; functional theory of,
enthusiasm, 297; exactitude, 77n105; 205; glossaries, 214; groups, 187,
frameworks, 121; hierarchy, 71; 208, 211; hierarchy, 209; identity,
indifference, 298; intervention, 296; 178; list, 185; names, 186, 187, 208;
knowledge, 231; manipulation, 296; origins of, 193, 194; principle, 211;
performance, 298; practices, 56, 103, racial origins of, 193, 195; ranking,
118, 120, 121, 126, 166; procedures, 212; and religion, 203; segregation,
166; procedures of writing, 27; 119; status, 187; structure, 186, 294;
productions, 58; rationality, 165, system, 37, 38, 179, 180, 188, 189,
285n18; regulation, 38; rules, 120; 193, 194, 195, 197, 200, 201; theories
signature, 82n192; structures, 67, of caste, 193, 198; and tribes, 190
295; system, 58; writings, 51, 52, 70 Caste and Race in India, 213
bureaucratic-legal order, 6 Caste Census of North Western Provinces
bureaucratized modern state, 55 1865, 187
Burkean, 96; agrarian image, 181; caste-occupation nexus, 194, 205
phrase, 19; thinking, 19 causal, 231, 256n49; laws, 15;
relationship, 104
cadastral, 99; surveys, 86, 209 causality, 1, 7, 8, 20, 21, 73, 224, 233,
calculable man, 85 234, 237, 241, 242, 247, 248, 249,
342 Subject Index

256n49 civilizational agenda, 262, 263

censorship, 266, 279 civilizational difference, 130
Census 1871, 194, 203, 205 civilizational infantilism, 263, 280
Census 1871-72, 186, 216n52 civilized societies, 45
Census 1881, 186, 194, 204, 205, 216n52 civilizing agenda, 49, 302
Census 1891, 161, 187, 194, 198, 204, 206 civilizing mission, 46, 48, 69, 196
Census 1901, 188, 190, 195, 198, 204, 249 civilizing power of law, 47
Census 1911, 161, 192, 204, 249 classical episteme, 23n40, 131n2
Census 1921, 193 classical liberalism, 161
Census 1931, 199, 200, 212, 213, classical representation, 101
222n151 classification, 1, 21, 51, 52, 56, 57, 73, 92,
Census 1941, 205, 213 98, 100, 101, 104, 135n61, 137, 140,
Census 2011, 214 145, 155, 156, 161, 175, 176, 177, 178,
census, 17, 62, 80n148, 97, 160, 161, 177, 180, 182, 184, 185, 188, 189, 196, 198,
178, 180, 181, 182, 184, 193, 198, 201, 201, 202, 204, 206, 207, 209, 212, 213,
202, 204, 205, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 229, 231; by social precedence, 195;
231, 247; caste index, 192; of caste, 181, 188; of lands, 100; of
classification, 204; Committee 1877, occupation, 205; of population, 123,
186; enumerations, 61; 182, 208; of races and caste, 188; of
objectification, 179; schedule, 204, tribes, 213; schemes, 206; systems,
212; statistics, 62; tables, 214 62
centralized, 46, 55; despotism, 48; classificatory discourses, 104
government, 59; imperial classificatory : framework, 12, 179, 185,
government, 60; information, 59 186, 188, 190, 193, 206; logic, 100,
chance, 124, 303, 306, 307 175, 209; rationales, 214; scheme,
chance observations, 234, 257n63 188, 206; thinking, 176, 177
character, 183, 196 classify, 57, 70, 113, 122, 123, 141, 164,
character of government, 44 175, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 194,
Charter Act 1813, 28 198, 202, 206, 212, 222n159, 298, 301;
Charter Act 1833, 28, 46 religion, 201; castes, 214
China account, 146 clinical medicine, 253n2
cholera, 122, 163, 233, 236, 237, 238, clinical rationality, 226, 253n2
239, 240, 241, 242, 257n57; deaths, clinical vision, 255n40
231; epidemic, 237, 239, 257n59; Code of Manu (Manusmriti), 209
epidemicity, 237; maps, 103; codes of nomenclature, 156
morbidity, 237; mortality, 238; codification of law, 285n18
vaccine, 240, 241; vibrio, 239 Co-efficient of Racial Likeness, 200
Chrestomathia , 176 collective freedom, 292
chronological: series, 115; succession, collective memory, 116, 130
132n12; system, 116 collective subjectivities, 211
chronology, 90, 112, 113, 116, 117–118, collectivism, 177
133n26 colonial administration, 18, 97, 112,
circulation of reason, 263 118, 154, 157, 179, 180, 204, 211;
civil contemporaneity, 127 discourse, 5; practices, 83, 112, 262;
civil liberty, 40, 282 state, 263; writings, 70
civil society, 51, 58, 181, 209, 261, 263, colonial: ambivalence, 276; anxieties,
286n42, 289, 294, 298, 302, 307, 279; apparatus, 124; archives, 7, 27,
307n4 69, 70, 73, 241; autocracy, 262;
civilization, 137 biopolitics, 163, 164, 165, 233, 236,
 Subject Index 343

242; bureaucracy, 45, 242, 295; 162, 165, 166, 175, 178, 182, 185, 227,
capitalism, 153; cartography, 89, 92, 231, 233, 235, 236, 242, 252, 261, 264,
103, 105; categories, 70; census 266, 268, 269, 270, 271, 273, 274, 275,
enumeration, 181; censuses, 160, 276, 277, 278, 280, 282, 283, 289, 290,
181, 182, 204, 212; character, 254n20; 291, 292, 293, 294, 298
civilizing agenda, 114, 182, 302; Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge:
comparison, 235, 236; conduct, 227, the British in India, 285n18
263, 265, 268, 277, 278, 279, 290, 294, colonialist historiography, 127, 128,
298; covenant, 274, 275; difference, 129, 130
55, 87, 128, 181, 250, 252, 271; colonized population, 253
discourse, 5, 12, 17, 105, 111, 124, colonized society, 263
180; discourse of caste, 182; colonized terrain, 140
documentary system, 61; combinable mobiles, 61
documents, 70; domination, 106; commensurability of cultures, 16
economy, 137, 140, 149, 151, 154, commercial accounts, 146
159, 211; education project, 265, 269; Commercial and Political Atlas, 104
empire, 54, 84; epidemiological commissions, 58, 59, 66, 68
terrain, 224; epistemological project, communal politics, 213
295; financial system, 159; form of communal representation, 213
civil society, 181; historiography, communalism, 221n141, 264
130; indifference, 276; invention, communicable diseases, 224, 231
181; liberalism, 264, 292, 293; communicative action, 284n3
medical intervention, 231, 252; communities, 179, 180, 184
mimcry, 111, 128, 129; modality of compact, 286n39
knowledge, 184; modernity, 227, comparable groups, 241
269, 276, 277; office, 61; official comparative observations, 248
sociology/anthropology, 213; order, comparative statistics, 12
80n162, 109n85; order of difference, Comptroller and Auditor General, 58
236; power, 84, 113, 264; practices, Comrade, 278
141; project, 49, 63, 87, 270, 277; Comtean ideas, 177
public health, 229; public sphere, Comtean project, 228
262; rationality, 292; rule, 128; rule Comtean sociology, 177
of difference, 18, 230; sanitary conceptions of kingship, 74n20
policy, 239; society, 232; sociology, condensation of regulative functions,
175, 213; spidemiological terrain, 51
252; stabilization policy, 172n89; Congress of Orientalists, 197
state, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 20, 23n33, 49, consciousness, 134n56, 220n115
56, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 87, 94, constative, 130
96, 98, 99, 104, 105, 112, 118, 119, Constituent Assembly, 294
121, 123, 126, 136n94, 139, 141, 150, constitution, 42, 291, 292, 293, 299
154, 156, 158, 159, 162, 165, 166, Constitution of India, 291, 312
168n12, 173n97, 182, 184, 195, 208, Constitutional Code, 50, 58, 150
251, 252, 263, 265, 266, 272, 274, 275, construction of modern power, 17
279, 285n18, 292; temporality, 66, 70; constructivism, 12
truth claims, 70; violence, 94; wars, contagion theory, 224
49 contextual document, 179
colonial governmentality, 1, 18, 21, 27, contingencies of chance, 13
49, 53, 55, 69, 70, 73, 87, 88, 94, 100, contingent, 241
104, 105, 115, 128, 137, 139, 140, 160, contradictions of abstract space, 105
344 Subject Index

contradictions of space, 104, 105 power, 40; rule, 40, 41, 44

control groups, 235, 245 determinism, 13, 177, 229
Coodandeymitran , 275 development : administration, 295;
cordons sanitaires, 224, 236, 237, 238 agenda, 302; state, 302, 303, 306;
Cornwallis settlement, 64 strategies, 298; trajectory, 300
correlation, 243, 247 diachrony of history, 111
correlative map, 195 dialectic of modernity, 111
corroborative evidence, 219n98, 244 dietary surveys, 165
cost accountancy, 170n43 difference, 42, 46, 49, 64, 128, 130,
counterposed majorities, 212 135n70, 139, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184,
covenant, 274, 275, 286n39 200, 231, 277, 278, 300, 308n30;
criminal, 189, 210, 221n134; castes, 210, reductive of, 92
211; communities, 210, 221n134; differential history, 124
tribes, 209, 210; types, 221n138 differential space, 84, 85, 87, 101
criminality, 221n138 differential space-time, 106n8
cross-sectional, 14 differentiation, 205, 206
cultural difference, 25n58, 300, 301 differentiation of occupations, 206
cultural practices, 188, 252, 300 Directive Principles, 291, 292, 293, 300
cultural transformation, 105 disciplinarity, 140, 230
cultural translation, 4, 22n14 disciplinary, 49, 85, 160, 230, 267;
cultural wholes, 13, 16 control, 160; diagrams, 248;
curative, 240 knowledge, 149, 265; legitimation,
curative medicine, 233 70; mechanisms, 65, 223; methods,
cycle of enforcement-inspection- 119; power, 49, 67, 140; regime, 118,
amendment, 58, 71 119; roles, 71; techniques, 86;
cyclic time, 132n22 technologies, 70, 86
cyclical time, 131n5 discipline, 9, 38, 53, 64, 67, 100, 119,
137, 144, 149, 169n24, 173n97, 183,
Dastur ul-amal, 35 213, 223, 227, 228, 230, 253n1,
Declaration of the Rights of Man, 180 254n15, 254n17, 298
decolonization, 105 Discipline and Punish, 255n39
deconstruction, 105 disciplines of calculation, 52
decontextualized document, 179 disciplining, 122, 151, 295
decontextualized enumeration, 209 discourse, 122, 276; of medicine, 224; of
de-facto sovereignty, 28 poverty, 273; of civil society, 294; of
deified sovereignty, 34 justice, 294; of space, 84; of
deliberative democracy, 305 temporality, 112
democracy, 172n92, 281, 282, 283, 289 The Discovery of India , 270
democratic sovereignty, 292, 293 discrete behavior, 269
density maps, 243 discrete communities, 186
departmental reports, 120 discrete entities, 178, 232
departmental subordinates, 66 discursive formation, 7, 9, 122
de-pauperization of disease, 227 discursive practices, 7, 9, 20, 137, 154,
de-personalized subjects, 247 155, 294
derivative discourse, 129 discursive practices of accounting, 150
desacralization of the economy, 171n55 discursive regularities, 8, 9
Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal , 198 disease, 103, 122, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228,
despotism, 40, 43, 279, 280; 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236,
instrumental necessity of, 44; 237, 238, 239, 240, 243, 244, 245, 247,
 Subject Index 345

248, 253n2, 255n30, 259n106; empire, 36, 41, 42, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 84,
causation, 233, 237; classification, 89, 144, 153, 156, 161, 181, 206, 231,
237; control, 224, 239 233, 262, 269, 284n12
dislocated liberalism, 69 Empire , 308n30
disposition, 125, 183, 187, 196, 263, 282 empirical laws, 183
dividing practices, 183, 184 empirico-transcendental doublet,
divine authority, 145 23n40, 131n2
divine kingship, 31, 32 end of government, 47
divine pastor, 32 English: newspapers, 267; Poor Law
divine right, 30 Commission 1832-1834, 173n106;
divinely illumined right, 36 press, 267, 268; sanitary statistics,
division of labor, 188, 193, 263, 270 235; state, 58, 60
doctrine of lapse, 29 Enlightenment, 10, 85, 114, 116, 126,
doctrine of natural political virtue, 132n15, 232, 261, 290, 294; anti-
286n39 imperialist thinkers, 12; knowledge,
doctrine of public trust, 58 11, 12; rationalism, 180
document, 52, 69 ensemble of population, 225, 226
documentary evidence, 114, 116, 148 enterprises, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154
documentary practices, 52, 143 enterprise accounts, 150, 151, 154
documentary system, 61 enumerable, 177, 184
documentation, 56, 57, 66, 70 enumerable groups, 184
documentation by the state, 51 enumerate communities, 178, 179, 180,
documentation record, 142 221n141
documents, 56, 59, 72, 80n147, 143, 268 enumerating population, 211
domain of strategies, 54 enumeration, 36, 62, 90, 137, 160, 175,
domains of administration, 86 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 184, 185, 202,
Dominance without Hegemony, 133n39 204, 208, 209, 296, 298; of caste, 184,
dominance without hegemony, 182 192, 213
domination of strangers, 267 enumerative, 1, 18, 195
double-entry, 145, 152; book-keeping, enumerative inductivism, 232
150, 151, 170n49; system, 150, 154, enumerative moment, 213
170n44, 170n49 enumerative politics, 214
doubling of man, 12, 111, 124, 126, enumerative practices, 13, 14, 182
135n70 environmental norms, 227, 231
Dravidian, 195, 196, 198 environmental regulation, 227
Durkheimian, 255n31, 300 epidemic, 66, 67, 103, 105, 122, 223, 230,
dynamic nominalism, 206 233, 234, 242, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248,
249; administration, 252; areas, 233;
East India Bill, 41 cholera, 236; conditions, 239;
East India Company, 28, 29, 36, 40, 41, control, 121, 234; disease, 209, 224,
42, 61, 64, 67, 122, 141, 142, 143, 147, 231, 234, 236, 237, 238; Diseases Act
148 1897, 248; intensity, 243;
economy, 8, 21, 53, 120, 122, 123, 124, management, 236, 241, 249, 253
137, 138, 139, 141, 148, 150, 152, 154, epidemiological terrain, 230, 242
156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 166, 167n1, episteme, 1, 7, 9, 70, 89, 94, 129, 242, 306
168n2, 168n6, 211, 226, 254n21, 264, epistemic, 54, 166, 224, 294; agendas,
273; of equivalences, 166 89; categories, 73; concerns, 69;
ecumene, 285n24 discontinuities, 27; domain, 122;
embodied knowledge, 6, 63 foundation, 10; function, 160, 166;
346 Subject Index

gaze, 87; practices, 73; space, 27; executive government, 30

uncertainties, 70; warrant, 70 exemplificative, 59
epistemological, 56, 101, 103, 112, 121, expectation, 73, 124, 127, 135n69
137, 154, 295; anticipations, 89; experiential time, 121
conquest, 4, 8, 9, 22n13, 87; externality, 28
consequences, 84; displacement,
228; domains, 8, 11; effects, 154, facts, 166, 209, 218n83, 266
170n44; figures, 9; gain, 124; issues, famine, 66, 67, 71, 162, 163, 164, 165,
23n27; issues, 289; practices, 289; 224, 230, 271; administration, 71, 72;
projects, 123, 289, 294; shifts, 17, 84, codes, 67, 163; crisis in 1875, 163;
87, 120; significance, 89; spaces, 55; discourses, 162, 163; intensity, 163;
strategy, 22n13; structure, 124; management, 165; relief, 162, 209;
transformation, 231 statistics, 165
epistemology, 120, 176 fetishized space, 104
erosion of determinism, 13, 14 fever, 122, 227, 233, 254n17, 254n18
essentialist, 105 field of governance, 166
essentialized representation, 128 field surveys, 99, 100
ethical: imagination, 280, 283; filing systems, 70
sensibility, 283; universalism, finality of government, 53
287n68 financial instruments, 157, 159
ethnic differences, 247 financial quantities, 153
ethnic identity, 205 financial regularity, 58
ethnic nationalism, 211 financial report, 163
ethnographic : accounts, 197; authority, financial risks, 305
72; entry, 211; information, 209; financial space, 159
inquiries, 197; knowledge, 12, 13, fiscal accounting system, 151
184; nomenclature, 190, 191; notes, fiscal accounts, 141
208; reports, 179, 184; state, 70, 184; fitna, 39, 75n42
survey, 188, 208, 209 formations of norms, 14
ethnography, 24n48, 130, 216n43 formations of populations, 9
Ethnography of India , 198 forms of government, 45
ethno-history, 114 forms of rule, 143
ethnological, 201; data, 198; map, 188, forms of sovereignty, 226
199; order, 195; time, 113; Foucauldian, 1, 7, 8, 70, 112, 126,
governance, 182, 183, 186, 196 168n12, 252; forgetting, 111;
ethology, 183 thought, 63
Euclidean representation, 101 Fox Bill, 42
Euclidean space, 85, 92, 94 framework of knowledge, 139, 140
Eurocentrism, 4 framing, 151, 154
European: improvement, 275; maps, fraternity, 300, 301
102; methods, 98; survey, 99 free press, 267
evacuation, 248, 251 freedom, 69, 183, 184, 265, 267, 279,
evolutionary scale, 49 280, 282, 283, 287n50, 289, 291, 292,
evolutive historicity, 120 297, 300, 307n6; as reason, 261, 262,
evolutive time, 119 283
exception, 51 French Revolution (1789), 116, 133n28,
Exchequer and Audit Department, 58 282
executive, 51, 64, 68, 265, 266, 269, 274 functional classification of castes, 184,
executive authority, 266 195
 Subject Index 347

functional identities, 179 83, 85, 87, 104, 109n85, 111, 138, 160,
functional sites, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 162, 169n24, 207, 212, 223, 235, 250,
94; of governance 105 252, 262, 271, 278, 280, 289, 290, 293,
Fundamental Rights, 291, 292, 299, 300 296, 298, 302, 304; framework, 224;
future-oriented projects, 63 effects, 104; history of, 54; theorists,
fuzzy communities, 178, 179 138
governmentalization, 223
game of politics, 276 governmentalization of the state, 9, 14,
gazetteers, 155, 156, 208, 209 35, 54
Gemeinschaft, 153 governmentalized rule, 53
genealogy, 141, 143, 165, 166; of gradations of morality, 59
calculation, 137; method, 179; of gradations of unfreedom, 59
poverty, 296 Grammatology, 70
geographic archive, 84, 89, 90 graphic artifacts, 52, 61
germ theory, 224, 239, 240 Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS),
Gesellschaft, 153 92
Glas, 70
global risks, 304 Harijanbandhu, 280
global sovereignty, 307 health statistics, 231
Glossaries, 156, 157, 192, 197, 208 Hegelian, 111
good government, 44, 45 Heideggerian, 303
goodness of a government, 44 heterogeneity: of beliefs, 201; of spaces,
govern conduct, 303 91, 101; of temporalities, 52; of time,
govern the conduct, 94, 300 120
governable space, 86 heterotopias, 84–85
governance, 83, 85, 86, 88, 118, 230, 289; hierarchization, 229, 248
from a distance, 43, 73; of castes, Hind Swaraj , 282
182; of character, 182; of colonial Hindoo Patriot , 267
conduct, 87, 276; of conduct, 86, 175, Hindu Castes and Sects , 213
184, 303; effects, 227, 263, 279; of Hindu Janabhooshany , 274
health, 227; of human conduct, 55; Hinduization, 214
of populations, 9; practices, 118; of Hinduism, 202, 203, 204; chronology,
spaces, 84; strategies, 73, 88; 113, 114, 132n11; kingship, 30, 31
structures, 94 historical: consciousness, 113, 132n13,
government, 41, 46, 50, 83; accounts, 134n55; contingency, 54; deeds, 111;
150, 154; action, 72, 271; of disease, epistemologies, 56; events, 113;
227; of economic life, 167n1; of food, knowledge, 89, 116, 117; maps, 89;
165; growth of, 57; interventions, modernity, 124; narratives, 111, 114,
295, 303; of leading strings, 45; of 117, 168n12; nominalism, 54;
modern states, 54; of poverty, 165, practice, 7; reality, 113; records, 115;
227; power, 252, 281; practice, 55, science, 133n27; time, 113, 114,
159, 166, 307n6; problematics of, 55, 220n115; truth, 133n27;
105; procedures, 138, 168n8; understanding, 114
rationalities, 160, 243, 302; of record, historicism, 134n56, 286n42
65; signature, 70; sites, 242; historicist memory, 127
statistics, 166; techniques, 9, 53, 139, historicity, 107n30, 127
302; technologies, 54, 302 historiography, 114, 128, 130, 136n101,
governmentality, 1, 8, 9, 11, 14, 18, 53, 136n109, 136n94, 169n24
54, 55, 56, 62, 63, 67, 68, 73, 79n128,
348 Subject Index

The History, Antiquities, Topography, and immanent principles, 232

Statistics of Eastern India, 160 immutable and combinable mobiles, 6
The History of British India, 43, 65, 115, imperial : administration, 144;
117, 128, 133n28, 147 agencies, 61; archive, 56; censuses,
The History of Hindostan, 128 161; contact, 42; despotism, 48;
The History of Life and Death, 10, 225 dilemmas, 48; economy, 141;
history, 21, 67, 78n113, 111, 112, 113, governance, 61; ideology, 48;
115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, mission, 43; space, 83, 149, 159;
127, 129, 130, 132n15, 133n27, state, 159; system, 159
133n38, 134n55, 134n57, 184 impersonality, 30, 36, 52
history-remembering, 120 improvement, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 69,
history-writing, 113, 130 95, 114, 128, 151, 196, 231, 236, 250,
Hobbesian, 303; thinking, 50 267
The Hollow Crown , 285n18 improvement of administration, 267,
Home Charges, 159 268
homo hierarchicus, 214 improving direction, 87, 275, 277, 300
homo economicus, 140 inaugural discourses, 166
homogeneity, 127, 308n30; of spaces, incommensurability of cultures, 12
92; of empty time, 52, 78n113, 118, India account, 146
120; of time, 121, 134n55 Indian: administration, 61, 268;
hope, 160 Constitution, 291; economy, 141,
horizon of expectations, 113, 114 154, 159, 166; ecumene, 265; empire,
horizontal mobilization, 285n18 48, 181; epistemology, 113; Famine
House of Commons, 28 Code 1880, 165, 173n106;
House of Lords, 65 historiography, 129; National
household enumeration, 202 Congress 1885, 274; Plague
household inventory, 202 Commission 1898-1899, 242, 243,
human improvement, 44 248, 249, 258n86; press, 267, 276;
human pastorate, 32 public opinion, 269; society, 175,
human time, 133n31 178, 204, 207, 264, 277
human vitality, 225 Indian Currency and Finance, 159
Humean conception, 234 indigenous: disease, 237; financial
humoural theory of disease, 232 system, 159; forms of orientalism,
Hunterian, 156 177; maps, 88; measurement
practices, 94, 99; measures, 145;
idea of economy, 140 medicine, 236; nomenclature, 186,
idea of progress, 125, 126, 275, 276 187; populations, 195; practices, 89;
ideal administration, 50 rule, 193; system of classification,
ideal form of government, 45 177; systems of medicine, 232, 233;
ideality of the state, 54 units of measurement, 100
identity(s), 55, 178, 179, 184, 200 Indische Studien, 34
idle talk, 303, 308n31 individual: freedom, 290, 292; liberty,
Illbert Bill 1883, 49 45, 291
illegitimacy, 269, 274, 275, 292 individualism, 57
illiberalism, 265; forms of governance, individualized, 165, 179, 305
44, 69; measures, 249; practices, 240 individualizing, 91, 92, 226, 228, 252,
imaginary, 70 253n2, 255n28, 280, 281
imagination, 255n30, 304 individualizing distributions, 248
imagination of hunger, 165 indivisible sovereignty, 37
 Subject Index 349

Indological discourse, 21n5 juridical, 30, 53; framework of

inductive rationality, 234, 235 sovereignty, 53; mode of
infancy, 45 governance, 228; model of
infantilism, 264, 300 sovereignty, 27; sovereignty, 33, 302
infinite space, 85 juridico-poiltical theory, 31
Influence of Time and Place, 19 justice, 42, 135n80, 209, 214, 281, 282,
influenza epidemic, 231 292, 293, 294, 295, 298, 300, 301, 302;
information failures, 295 as fairness, 299
information gathering, 6, 20 justiciable, 291
information order, 6
inoculation, 241, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, Kanara News, 275
252 Kantian, 126; doctrine, 261, 283;
inquisitorial insistence, 66 epistemology, 10; idea, 283
inscribing, 84 Karnataka Prakasika , 273
inscription(s), 5, 6, 61, 80n160, 84, 112, Kayastha Hitkari, 278
116, 117, 127, 142, 143, 153, 205, 293 Kayastha Mitra, 278
inspectability, 65, 66 Kayastha Pratap, 278
inspection, 50 Kayastha Samachar, 278
institutional knowledge, 6, 63 Kesari, 278
institutional routines, 52 Keynesianism, 296
instrument of objectification, 184 king’s divinity, 74n25
instrumental, 67; rationality, 177; kingship, 37, 38, 88, 94, 265
space, 104 knowing subject, 11, 13
instrumentality, 86, 91, 96, 263, 275, 297 knowledge practices, 97, 98
instruments of government, 53 knowledge-effects, 289
insurance, 229 knowledge-producing, 140
insurgence of normality, 229
intentional acts, 207 laboratory of power, 85
interdependent norms, 229 laboratory reports, 232
internal colonization, 69 laissez faire, 162, 271
International Sanitary Conferences, land classifications, 98
233, 237 language entries, 213
intervention(s), 55, 168n13, 184, 225, language of finance, 295
230 language-games, 11, 12
interventionist, 182 language-oriented nationalism, 280
interventionist state, 66 large-scale surveys, 202
invisible hand, 168n8 law of large numbers, 207
Irish: famine 1845, 173n97; poor law, law of nations, 42
173n97 law of private censure, 262
irreal spaces, 86 law of public opinion, 263
Itihasa , 117 law-governed, 232
law-like regularities, 177
jati, 178, 185, 186; categories, 188 laws of chance, 177
Jennerian vaccination, 234, 240 laws of phenomenon, 13
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, laws of society, 226
156 League of Nations, 165
judicial, 51, 64, 68, 251, 265, 266, 269; Left Hand castes, 217n68
and executive powers, 46; legal despotism, 40
procedure, 209; structures, 46 legal framework, 119
350 Subject Index

legal norms, 38 liberalism, 19, 27, 40, 46, 48, 53, 55, 69,
legal-political sovereignty, 295 129, 140, 164, 237, 261, 262, 263, 275,
legibility, 98 278, 280, 284n3, 291, 300, 301; as a
legible, 142 historical event, 49; in practice, 272;
legislation, 50 anxieties, 280
legislative, 50, 64, 68, 265, 266, 269, 274, liberatory knowledge, 113
279, 293 libertarian project, 293
Legislative Councils, 275 liberty, 43, 46, 47, 69, 180, 280, 282, 292,
legitimacy, 29, 30, 39, 54, 73, 73n6, 139, 294
262, 265, 293, 295; of the state, 51 limited government, 41
legitimate mode of government, 43 lineage, 39, 40, 94, 185
legitimate sphere of government lineage control, 39
functions, 44 lineage segments, 178
legitimate subjects, 272 lineage system, 38
legitimized powers, 51 linear time, 119, 131n5, 132n22
Leviathan, 45, 170n40 linguistic surveys, 90
liberal, 44, 49, 55, 63, 139, 163, 167n1, “little” public spheres, 265
173n107, 196, 225, 226, 240, 262, 263, local contingencies, 224
275, 278, 280, 282, 289, 291, 304, 306; localist theories, 238
agency, 138; agenda of education, localistic response, 239
48; democracy, 261, 287n64; localization, 232
democratic project, 300; The Location of Culture, 3
governance, 69; government, 59, Lockean imagery, 13
183; contradictions of, 242; Logic , 183
governmentality, 17, 18, 69, 103, 138, logical-linguistic forms, 306
177, 226, 246, 250, 252, 253, 280, 281, London Statistical Society, 13, 60
283, 289, 303, 304; governmentality long-distance colonial governance, 141
of health, 249; idea, 289; ideals, 291; long-distance governance, 102, 112
imperialism, 48; justice, 301, 302; lower castes, 188, 211
political rationalities, 227, 254n15;
political reason, 59; public opinion, Machiavellism, 50
282; public sphere, 264, 267, 278, magical sovereignty, 33
279, 281, 282, 283, 287n61; magico-religious risks, 33
rationalities, 55, 138; rationalities of magico-religious sovereignty, 33
government, 55, 183, 225, 226, 252; Magna Carta, 41, 42
rationalities of rule, 183; rationality Mahratta, 274, 278
of ethological governance, 196; majoritarian group, 204
rationality of numbers, 301; reason, majoritarian politics, 282
283, 291; security, 226; strategies of majoritarian values, 287n61
government, 289; technique of majority, 204, 205, 281, 283, 300
normalization, 301; techniques of malaria, 231, 233, 234
government, 301, 302; technologies, Malayalam Manorama, 273
85, 269, 295; technologies of Malthusian approach, 297
government, 55, 266, 301; Manual of the Administration of the
technologies of rule, 290, 293; Madras Presidency, 117, 195
technology of governance, 84; manufacture subjects, 27
technology of governmentality, 91, Manusmriti, 34
101, 104; technology of justice, 301; map(s), 52, 84, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 101,
universalism, 263 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 178, 198, 243,
 Subject Index 351

257n58 monetary economics, 144; period,

Map of Hindoostan 1788, 89, 90 144; philosophy, 144; thinking, 144
mapping, 83, 87, 89, 91, 93, 102, 104; merchant accounting system, 153
techniques, 101 Merchant Shipping Act, 61
market failures, 302 merit of a government, 44
market-led governance, 302 meta-narratives, 11
master metaphor, 149 method(s), 143, 146, 151, 157, 179,
master trope, 202 256n49
material and moral progress, 196 metrological, 237; realism, 12
materialities, 5, 52, 70 metropolitan governmentality, 69
mathematical calculation, 176 metropolitan liberalism, 262
mathematical probability, 232 metropolitan sanitary science, 233
mathematical regularities, 171n55 mimetic performances, 82n192
measurable, 121, 124, 298 mimetic representations, 105
measure, 7, 8, 59, 99, 101, 103, 118, 243 mimicry, 129, 130, 229
measure of difference, 128 ministerial department, 57
measured time, 122 minority(s), 186, 205, 212, 281, 283, 300,
measurement(s), 1, 10, 35, 51, 73, 86, 87, 301, 302
89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 98, 100, 104, minority discourse, 127
137, 140, 141, 144, 145, 154, 156, 157, modalities, 176; of administration, 62;
169n27, 197, 199, 200, 219n97, of intervention, 103; of power, 119;
221n138, 296 of knowledge, 89; of power, 119,
measurement practices, 98, 102 246; of the census, 179
measures, 99, 144, 145, 154, 157, 158, modern accounting, 169n24
159, 172n79, 223, 249, 266, 296 modern bureaucratic instruments, 38
mechanism of regulation, 228 modern colonial governance, 277
mechanisms of security, 225, 226 modern colonial state, 1, 7, 9, 11, 28, 63,
medical, 224, 225, 227, 228, 251; 87, 88, 120, 140
discoveries, 228; knowledge, 225; modern democracies, 269, 281
normality, 229, 246, 255n33; modern episteme, 23n40, 101, 131n2
practice, 229; regulation, 223; modern facts, 154
spatialization, 228 modern forms of governance, 83
medicalize poverty, 227 modern freedom, 290
medicine, 160, 176, 223, 224, 225, 229, modern governance, 85, 91, 230, 292
230, 231, 232, 241, 254n27, 255n40; of modern governmental power, 276, 280,
enclosed spaces, 254n17; of 281, 282, 283
epidemics, 256n44 modern historiography, 89, 127
medico-administrative knowledge, modern individuals, 276
225, 228 modern knowledge, 12
medico-administrative practice, 247 modern liberal state, 262
melioration of governments, 65 modern liberalism, 284n3
melioration-suggestive function, 50 modern maps, 84, 87, 89, 101
Memoir , 89, 90 modern nation-state, 55, 83, 290
Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan, 90 modern political rationalities, 275
Memoir of Central India , 210 modern power, 11, 12, 262, 269
memory, 113, 116, 130, 301 modern regime of power, 254n20
mercantile capital, 145 modern sanitary technologies, 252
mercantilist: discourse, 144; modern science, 242
historiography, 128; logic, 144;
352 Subject Index

modern state, 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 18, identities, 90, 276; income, 166;
30, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 62, 68, Income Accounts, 155; society, 293;
75n42, 86, 88, 91, 103, 111, 120, 121, space, 129; temporality, 118
126, 128, 129, 130, 138, 139, 160, nationalism, 268, 285n22, 285n24;
168n12, 179, 180, 182, 184, 207, 223, discourse, 21, 129, 166; histories,
224, 269; as subject, 51; formation, 130; historiography, 127, 129, 130;
51; space, 84; regulations of, 52; imagination of history, 127;
representations of, 52 movement, 48, 264, 267, 276, 279,
modern subject, 85 280; sociology/anthropology, 213;
modern temporality, 122 thought, 261
modern thought, 175 nationhood, 90, 289
modernist site of progress, 276 nations, 194, 237
modernity, 130 nation-state, 214, 277, 290, 292, 293, 294
modes of inscription, 6 native classification, 157
modes of signing, 82n192 native criminality, 209
monarchical absolutism, 30 native knowledges, 263, 264
Moral and Material Progress, 8, 160, 183, native newspapers, 266, 274, 279
209 native press, 269, 270, 280, 287n50
moral improvement, 47, 278 native subjectivity, 270
moral liberalism, 265 native survey, 99
moral scale, 42 natural history, 176, 238
moral sovereignty, 284n3 natural law, 42
morbidity, 232, 247 natural rights, 27, 41
mortality, 231, 232, 233, 236, 237, 241, naturalization, 254n16
243, 247 naturalization of poverty, 227
Mother India, 106 Naturall Person, 46
Mughal: administration, 35, 69; Navajivan, 276, 280
authority, 36; charters, 29; Empire, negative freedom, 291, 294
39; power, 65; state, 35, 36, 69; neoliberal, 306, 307
system of government, 40 neoliberal governmentality, 302, 303,
multiform tactics, 53 304, 306, 307
multiplicities, 229 neoliberal rationality, 305
multitude, 303, 304, 306, 307, 308n30, neoliberal subject(s), 303, 304, 305
309n39 neoliberalism, 290, 302
Muslim(s), 185, 189, 202, 204, 205, 212, new game of politics, 73, 264, 276
213, 219n101, 250, 251, 277, 278 newspaper, 261, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268,
Muslim League, 205, 212 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 275, 276, 277,
mythic history, 218n80 278, 279, 285n24
mythographies, 116 Newtonian, 11, 116; anthropology, 11,
mythology, 233 12
Nietzschean idea, 179
Napoleonic Code, 157 Ninth International Congress of
narrative authority, 130 Orientalists, 197
narrative framework, 284n3 nominalist assumptions, 232
nation, 105, 106, 124, 127, 129, 130, nonage, 45
136n109, 161, 179, 185, 201, 205, non-Brahman castes, 211
221n138, 274, 275, 291, 292, 294, 295; non-contagious, 233, 237, 239
economy, 140, 159; fraternity, 299, non-purifying castes, 202
300; freedom, 299; history, 130, 301; non-secular time, 134n57
 Subject Index 353

non-state forms, 157 occupation-based classification, 187

non-state forms of measurement, 98 ocular inspection, 59
norm(s), 14, 24n48, 40, 45, 55, 69, 92, official documentary systems, 60
105, 116, 140, 152, 165, 200, 226, 228, official documentation, 61
229, 230, 244, 285n18, 287n61, 290 official reports, 58, 59
normal, 14, 228, 229, 255n30, 255n33, official secret, 52
293; states, 229 officializing procedures, 50, 57, 243
The Normal and the Pathological, 255n31, On Liberty, 43, 81n176
255n36 ontological conceptions of disease, 227
normality, 228, 229, 230, 245 ontological status, 122
normalization, 83, 101, 128, 140, 152, oppression of the minority, 283
180, 182, 227, 228, 229, 230, 248, 252, order, 44, 53, 100, 128, 177, 186, 215n12,
254n20, 255n33, 255n39, 282, 304; of 229, 232, 255n31, 271
groups, 182; frame, 71; of objects of ordered experience, 234, 257n63
rule, 49; society, 182; population, ordinary experience, 234, 235, 257n63
304; power, 12; process, 140; society, organic norms, 229
228, 230; subjects, 119; surveillance, Orient, 2, 4, 5, 22n19
140 oriental, 131n5, 133n26, 242, 279
normative scale, 183, 196 Oriental Congress, 198
normatively, 261, 284n4 Oriental despotism, 35, 40, 76n53
normativity, 226, 227, 229, 231, 246 Orientalism, 2, 3, 21n7, 22n19
norm-governed behaviors, 290 orientalism, 2, 4, 5, 131n5
norm-production, 245 orientalist(s), 5, 22n19, 40, 73n6, 76n53,
norms of life, 225, 255n36 130, 132n22, 133n28, 194, 201, 242
Notes on the Medical Topography of orientalist discourse, 21n7
Calcutta, 236 orientalist gaze, 177
Novum organum, 10 orientalist knowledge, 6
numbers, 140, 154, 166, 282; discourse, orientalist oeuvre, 23n34, 213
162, 300; distributions, 181; orientalist vision, 181
inductivism, 235; majorities, 186, origin of caste, 185, 188
281; measures, 295; variation, 207; origins of race and castes, 200, 213
world view, 7
numericized public opinion, 281 Pannomion, 46
numeric-probabilistic basis, 287n64 panoptic: administration, 51;
disciplines, 52; gaze, 85, 97;
object of government, 44 principle, 77n105; vision, 111
objectification, 12, 94, 128, 180, 182, 185, Panopticism, 52
223; time, 121, 122; histories, 116 paramount power, 29
objectivist framework, 116 parasitology, 232
Occident, 2 particularized weak times, 112
Occidental, 242 pastoral, 139, 162, 163
occupation, 160, 175, 179, 185, 186, 187, pastoral power, 139, 140
191, 192, 193, 195, 202, 205, 206, 232, pastoral role, 173n97
247 pathological, 255n30, 255n33
occupational, 181, 186, 188; pathological anatomy, 232
classification, 160, 205, 211; pathology, 254n16, 255n30
differentiation, 206; divisions, 188, patience, 284n12
193; groups, 194; reference-groups, Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings,
178 30
354 Subject Index

patrimonial, 58 politics: of biopolitics, 226; of health,

People of India project, 214 253n2; of negotiations, 301; of
performative, 130 settlement, 301
Perpetual Peace, 283 population, 9, 11, 13, 14, 20, 30, 36, 48,
Petavius system of chronology, 116 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68,
philological taxonomy, 198 79n128, 80n162, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90,
Philosophical Transactions, 114 93, 103, 104, 105, 112, 121, 122, 123,
phrenological Society, 210 137, 139, 140, 160, 161, 162, 163,
phrenology, 210 172n92, 175, 180, 182, 183, 184, 189,
physical types, 188, 198, 199 196, 199, 200, 202, 204, 206, 209, 210,
physiocrat’s Table, 168n8 213, 215n12, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227,
Physique Sociale, 232, 255n29 228, 230, 231, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240,
place, 87, 88, 105, 236, 242 241, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252,
place-making, 105, 109n85 253n1, 265, 266, 273, 290, 292, 297,
placialization of space, 85 298, 301, 304, 305; changes in, 15;
plague, 231, 233, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, standard, 200; management of, 67
247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 257n57; positive freedom, 291, 293
administration, 241, 251; possibilities of governance, 207
Commission, 244, 245, 251, 304; postcolonial, 11, 204, 214, 289, 290, 293;
epidemic(s), 241, 242, 243, 259n107; governance, 293, 295;
maps, 103, 243; riots, 251; vaccine, governmentality, 292, 293, 294, 298,
241 299, 302; societies, 289; state, 295;
police state, 231 studies, 2, 3, 289; theory, 111
policing of spaces, 248 post-Enlightenment, 113
political: arithmetic, 12, 17, 60, 80n148, post-liberal, 302
162; authority, 29, 34, 88, 178; postmodern knowledge, 11
contingency, 292; economy, 9, 86, The Postmodern Condition, 11
104, 137, 138, 149, 152, 168n3, postmodernist, 126
171n55, 173n110, 226; freedom, 298, post-Vedic history, 194
299; genealogy, 168n3; poverty, 166; alleviation, 295, 296, 299,
homogenization, 77n105; 301
legitimacy, 262, 263; life, 88; Poverty and Un-British Rule in India,
performance, 270; power, 101, 248, 174n113
296; practice, 38, 73n5, 140; process, Poverty of India , 166, 273
295, 308n18; projects, 289, 294; poverty-lines, 290
rationale, 37, 88; rationalities, 5, 18, power/knowledge, 8, 18
54, 69, 83, 85, 86, 87, 139, 168n12, practical reason, 14
177, 181, 182, 208, 223, 225, 226, 227, practice(s), 40, 41, 45, 46, 51, 57, 58, 62,
233, 261, 262, 269, 275, 284n4, 289, 63, 84, 90, 112, 118, 124, 128, 138,
290, 294, 295, 296, 302; reason, 139, 140, 142, 144, 150, 151, 152, 176,
79n128; representation, 205, 178, 183, 189, 208, 211, 220n115, 234,
221n141, 270; right, 223; society, 30, 237, 249, 276, 277, 280, 283, 298, 300,
74n12, 286n39, 298, 301, 304; state, 302, 308n18; of governance, 9, 10, 56,
88; system, 39, 88, 117; technique, 140, 150, 208, 262, 266, 290, 291; of
226; technologies, 1, 68, 87 government, 50, 144; of modern
Political Arithmetik , 172n92, 232 freedom, 289; of social observation,
Political History, 47 79n128; of surveying, 92
political-geographical statistics, 123 pragmatics of rule, 46
politico-medical, 225, 228 pragmatism of accounting, 12
 Subject Index 355

predictability, 6, 15 economy, 57, 58; health, 223, 225,

predictive history, 124 226, 227, 231, 233, 235, 242, 259n106,
press, 65, 267, 268, 269, 273, 279, 280, 304; health management, 105;
285n24; freedom, 267 interest, 58; law, 53; opinion, 68, 189,
principle of public reason, 284n3 213, 261, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269,
principle of publicity, 262 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277,
prison discipline, 119 278, 279, 280, 281, 294; realm, 118,
private autonomy, 261, 283 284n2; reason, 262; right, 262, 266;
probabilistic, 14, 89, 303, 309n37 scrutiny, 273; security, 254n17;
probabilistic thinking, 13, 176 space, 105, 291; sphere, 21, 55, 152,
probability(s), 125, 200, 207, 229, 235, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 269, 274, 275,
303 276, 277, 304; sphere of newspapers,
problem of government, 182 264; use of collected reason, 264; use
problematization, 109n85, 289 of reason, 21, 263
procedural regularities, 52, 144 publicity, 65, 266, 272, 284n2, 284n3,
procedure(s), 6, 9, 18, 20, 49, 54, 85, 94, 285n24; of governance, 272; of laws,
95, 120, 139, 141, 150, 153, 159, 180, 266
228, 229, 237, 247, 272, 284n2; of publicness, 178, 271, 284n2, 304, 307
accountability, 122, 140; of modern pure public opinion, 278, 280, 281, 283
governance, 85; of representation, purifying castes, 202
124
The Process of Government, 6 qualities of a good government, 44
production of abstract space, 85 quantification, 10, 18, 20, 23n33, 59, 60,
productive capital, 145 80n147, 166, 176, 231; episteme, 6, 9,
program of government, 144 10; spirit, 175, 176
progress, 21, 43, 44, 46, 52, 62, 69, 87, quantitative, 84, 104, 105, 153, 162, 166,
94, 104, 113, 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 225, 228; fact, 176; reports, 80n148;
122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 137, 160, representation, 103
166, 177, 233, 255n30, 255n31, 276, quarantine, 233, 236, 237, 238, 239
280, 282, 284n12, 290, 300, 301 quasi-state technologies, 58
project of colonial power, 263
project of modernity, 112, 129 race(s), 47, 48, 49, 72, 175, 182, 195, 196,
project of Universal History, 112 197, 198, 201, 203, 204, 209, 218n80,
promise of freedom, 284n3 227, 232, 254n20, 277, 287n60, 299,
prose of cadastral administration, 72 303; theory, 221n138
prose of counter insurgency, 71 racial, 188, 267, 272; anxieties, 199;
prose of history, 111 difference, 168n12, 201, 256n50;
Prosperous British India: a revelation from discourse, 201; divergence, 200;
official records, 166 intermixing, 188; kinships, 219n98;
protective discrimination, 214, 299, 300, origins, 193; pairs, 200; strategies,
301 236; taxonomy, 198; traits, 232; type,
provincialize Europe, 130 189, 198, 199, 200
public, 52, 55, 65, 68, 102, 122, 150, 153, radical historiography, 130
177, 261, 262, 263, 266, 268, 270; Ramarajya , 276, 281, 282, 287n60
accounts, 60, 142, 150; arena(s), 261, rates of population change, 15
264, 265, 285n17; autonomy, 261, ratiocinative, 59
283; criticism, 65; debate(s), 226, 262, rational: accounting, 144;
264, 265; debt, 151; discourse, 263, administration, 49; agents, 280;
271, 272, 276; domain, 234, 301; bureaucracy, 36; calculation, 154;
356 Subject Index

discourses, 289; discussion, 284n3; regulation, 58, 79n124, 118, 120, 128,
forms of administration, 49; 142, 143, 161, 173n97, 181, 226, 227,
governance, 64; governance of the 230, 273; of life, 226; of
population, 68; history(s), 116, 117, mercantilism, 80n148; domains of,
126, 129; ordering of spaces, 85; 181
techniques, 88; thinking, 283; regulations, 105, 119, 142, 144, 253n1,
universality, 293 259n106, 266
rationale for government, 226 regulative practices, 154
rationalist historiography, 129 regulative scheme, 55
rationalist history, 130 regulatory, 230; activities, 18; controls,
rationalist paradigm, 8 225; discipline, 139; framework, 113,
rationalities, 1, 263, 283, 303, 307n6; of 302; functions, 139; injunctions, 153;
calculation, 27; of governance, 196, measures, 119, 165; mechanisms, 55,
281; of government, 223; of power, 160, 166, 253n1; practices, 8, 17, 120,
182; principles of, 53 121, 123, 138, 140, 141, 165, 175, 271,
rationalization, 95, 121, 141, 154; of 306; site, 175; techniques, 17
administration, 49, 254n20 Reflections on the Revolution in France,
Rawlsian, 299 287n66
real space, 102 relief works, 163, 164, 165
reason of state, 30, 50, 55, 138 religion, 160, 175, 185, 201, 202, 203,
reconstructing histories, 90 204, 205, 210, 213, 216n38, 220n115,
record, 71, 115, 143, 185, 206, 214, 233, 232, 241, 247, 249, 252, 277, 291, 297,
245 299, 303; categories, 185, 201, 202;
recordation, 1, 18, 27, 61, 70 communities, 205; histories, 117;
righteousness of Recordation, 66 identity, 205, 219n101, 220n115
recording of information, 18, 20 The Religion of India, 133n27
recording of observations, 259n106 Renaissance, 89, 114
record-keeping, 10, 38, 143, 145, 149; Report of the Sanitary State and Sanitary
activities, 120; practices, 68 Requirements of Bombay, 235
records, 65, 69, 71, 95, 96, 116, 247 Report on the Census of the British Empire
reform commissions, 60 1901, 62
reform discourses, 276 Report upon the Sanitary Condition of
Reformer, 268 Ward VII (Burra Bazar), Calcutta
regime of knowledge, 156 1899, 236
regimentation, 112 report(s), 50, 52, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 65,
regimes of modern power, 121 66, 67, 71, 184, 186, 224, 226, 238,
regimes of truth, 56 251, 266, 272, 277
regional histories, 127, 128 representation, 73, 85, 86, 101, 116, 122,
regional surveys, 234 123, 137, 138, 152, 180, 188, 295, 298,
Registrar General, 62 299; of objects, 104; politics, 213, 275;
registration of deaths, 259n106 practices, 137
Regnum, 31, 33 representative: assemblies, 268, 269;
regular accounts, 150 government(s), 47, 48, 264, 269, 295;
regularity(s), 125, 141, 149, 167n1, sample, 14, 196
215n12, 226, 229, 232, 256n49; of Representative Government , 269
disease, 224; of observation, 51 representing, 55, 133n27, 143, 166
regulating the accounts, 142 republican democracy, 282
regulating weights, 159 revenue accounts, 97
revenue administration, 96
 Subject Index 357

revenue books, 208 sample group, 245

revenue bureaucracy, 72 sample size, 200, 244
revenue state, 87, 90, 94 samples, 199
revenue survey(s), 91, 94, 96, 99, 100, sampling, 80n160, 207
103, 104, 185 sampling techniques, 13, 198
revolution in government, 59 sanitary, 230, 246; administration, 227,
Ricardian political economy, 60 235, 241, 242; authorities, 239;
right hand castes, 217n68 commission, 236; discipline, 247;
right of life and death, 31 discourse, 254n16; establishment,
Right to Information Act 2005, 307, 238; infrastructure, 254n16;
309n36 intervention, 227, 233; management,
rise of the social, 262 223, 230, 236, 237, 239; measure, 122,
risk(s), 140, 151, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 224, 233, 250; modalities, 18;
307, 309n37; education, 303, 304, movement, 231; police, 259n106;
305; governance, 303; preparedness, power, 242, 252; reform, 229;
306; averse, 305; based, 140; note, regulations, 226; science, 226; State
208; society, 303, 305, 309n32; of the Army, 236; statistics, 235
taking, 152, 305 sanitation, 160, 209, 235, 236, 249, 250,
ritual anxieties, 199 257n57
ritual practices, 179, 240, 278 Sanskritization, 192, 214
ritualized practices of verification, 66 savagery, 183
ritual-political standing, 186 savoir , 9
routines, 7, 143 scalable approach, 54
routines of administration, 265 scalable models of civilization, 44
routines of rule, 51 scalar fidelity, 88
routinization of charisma, 70 scalar models, 42
Royal Commission(s), 58, 59, 66, scale(s), 61, 99, 101, 102, 151, 158, 165,
172n79, 236; on Agriculture, 158; 194, 200, 255n40, 272
Royal Commission on Indian scale of civilization, 42, 43, 46
Currency and Finance 1913-1914, scale of progress, 196
172n84; on Labour (1931), 162 Schmittian, 51
Royal Sanitary Commission, 1863 233 Science in Action, 4
Royal Statistical Society, 166 science of government, 32, 33, 53, 104,
rule by record(s), 71, 119, 123, 173n101 138, 147
rule by report(s), 71, 119, 123, 173n101 science of statistics, 138
rule of colonial difference, 49, 180, 227 scientific cartography, 106
rule of difference, 227 scientific classification, 195
rule through freedom, 69 scientific discourses, 8
rule-bound, 170n44 scientific rationality, 91, 105
rule governed behavior, 15, 208 scientific surveys, 90, 91, 98
rules, 61, 71 Scottish: census, 161; Enlightenment,
rules of reliability, 73 42, 262
ryotwari, 46, 64, 96, 98 scribal modes of communication, 265
scribal tradition, 265
Sacerdotal, 33 secular sense of history, 114
Sacerdotium, 31, 33 security, 83, 84, 86, 225, 282
sacral kingship, 37 security mechanisms, 223
sacred: history, 117; kingship, 34; ruler, sedition(s), 272, 278, 279
37 segmentary, 88
358 Subject Index

segmentary forms of state, 39 265, 270, 277, 281, 285n24, 290, 291
segmentary state, 37, 38 sovereign, 74n14, 207, 282
segmentary state framework, 38 sovereign powers, 28, 30
segmentary system, 39 sovereign ruler, 29
segmentation, 248 sovereign subject(s), 129, 265
segmented, 85 single and indivisible sovereignty, 50
segments, 37, 265, 269 single sovereignty, 36
segregation, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252 sovereignty, 9, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 35, 36,
Select Committee(s), 58, 59, 65, 172n79; 37, 39, 40, 41, 53, 54, 61, 63, 64, 65,
Select Committee on Indian Famine 67, 74n14, 75n42, 88, 130, 139, 184,
(1873), 174n113 223, 274, 293, 295, 302, 303, 307,
seriality(s), 211, 212 308n30; gradations of, 34; divisible,
series, 187, 199, 227, 253n1, 255n28 74n9; indivisible, 51; of a territory,
series of events, 227 254n15; nature of sovereignty, 88;
settlement reports, 185 norms and forms of, 16; thematics
sign of difference, 256n50 of, 53; theory of, 31, 138
signature, 70, 82n192, 142 sovereignty-governmentality-
signification of concepts, 124 discipline, 9
similarities, 69, 86, 177, 181, 207 sovereignty-territoriality-discipline, 9
single sovereign, 41 space(s), 1, 7, 8, 21, 73, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89,
singular, 135n80 90, 91, 94, 100, 101, 103, 104, 236,
singular subjectivity, 82n192 242, 278, 284n4, 304; of
singularity(s), 130, 135n80, 308n30; of administration, 87, 104; of
fever, 227 appropriation, 94, 100; of
site(s), 9, 85, 91, 94, 129; of legitimation, domination, 85; of experience, 113,
280; of public opinion, 281; with no 114; of governance, 214; of the
places, 85; space, 85 modern state, 84; nature of, 88; of
sly civility, 70 political economy, 87; of sanitary
small-area statistics, 249 regime, 105; of risk, 306; of Utopia,
Smithian: idea, 162; principles, 271 84
social, 224, 225, 262, 263, 265, 269, 276, spatial: control, 236; distribution, 224;
294, 298; causality, 10, 232, 256n49; knowledge, 83; mapping, 227;
classifications, 175, 185, 198; practices, 105; strategies, 94
contract theory, 53; discipline, 208; spectacularization, 101
freedom, 298, 299; groups, 277, 296; sphere of morality, 207
histories, 200; identity(s), 178, 212, spheres of administration, 67
277; justice, 299; morphology, 188, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power
211; norm(s), 59, 209, 229, 230; in the Indian Theory of Government, 31
order, 269; phenomenon, 10; splitting of colonial discourse, 111
physics, 177; practices, 84, 229; standard(s), 152, 170n43, 190, 228, 246,
precedence, 188; reform(s), 276, 278, 276; classifications, 98; consumption
294, 298, 299; space(s), 85, 105, 106, units, 166; deviation, 200; of living,
234, 257n58 160, 162; type, 199
Social Science Association, 60 standardization, 70, 101, 140, 141, 145,
sociality, 154 152, 159, 248; of caste names, 187; of
society(s), 8, 21, 55, 79n124, 120, 121, conduct, 183; of names, 187; of
122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 137, 175, 177, procedures, 57
178, 188, 194, 209, 211, 213, 223, 225, standardized: classifications, 62; forms,
228, 229, 232, 255n36, 261, 263, 264, 61; teloses, 124; time, 118
 Subject Index 359

state: apparatuses, 9; of civil society, statistics, 11, 14, 17, 20, 24n48, 55, 59,
54; documentation, 61; formation, 60, 62, 66, 69, 71, 72, 79n141, 80n162,
53; forms, 54; identifications, 212; 88, 123, 138, 160, 162, 163, 165, 166,
medicine, 242; of civilization, 43; 171n55, 185, 187, 205, 208, 209,
order, 40; practices, 120; projects of 216n43, 226, 227, 228, 237, 238, 241,
simplification, 214; rationality, 104; 242, 243, 249, 254n27, 258n93, 295,
reason, 225; simplification, 98; 304, 306; of birth, 225; of mortality,
sovereignty, 14, 16, 61, 63; 233; of the Empire, 123; on crime,
surveillance, 6; technology, 66; 163; worship of, 59
temporality, 112 stochastic: methods, 13; thinking, 14
statecraft, 39, 54, 59, 242 stranger, 63
state-economy relation, 54 strategies, 27, 49, 56, 84, 105, 289; of
state-idea, 73n5 government, 289; of security, 226
state-like actions, 29 strong languages, 17
state-like conduct, 29 structure: of a state, 50; of governance,
state-like function, 29 38, 94; of government, 48; of power,
state-making, 18, 64, 67 49, 114
statistical, 20, 61, 103, 140, 152, 159, 162, The Structural Transformation of the
235; abstracts, 166; aggregates, 13; Public Sphere, 261
analysis, 14, 199, 215n12, 235; styles: of reasoning, 16, 176, 215n12,
categories, 14, 256n49; causality, 229; of language, 12
230, 235; Committee, 123; subaltern: signification, 130; studies,
correlation, 104, 235; corroboration, 23n27, 136n109
235; data, 10, 13, 14, 166, 171n73, subject, 106n8, 207
231, 234, 238, 240, 295, 297, 298, 306, subject of narration, 130
307; discourse(s), 13, 175; enquiries, subject-constituting effect(s), 252, 278,
216n43; enumeration, 5; episteme, 283
182; epistemology, 238; estimates, subject-effects, 252
223; evidence, 232, 240, 247; facts, subjecthood, 129
13, 166; forms, 159; frequencies, 232; subjectivity(s), 54, 57, 175, 184, 243, 276,
index numbers, 166; inference, 166, 284n4, 303
235, 247; information, 7, 20, 60, 93; subjectivity effects, 175
knowledge, 8, 12, 18, 70, 140, 242, subjectivity of the state, 51
297; laws, 15, 177; medical norms, supreme sovereignty, 32
245; methods, 20, 200, 219n98; surrogate statehood, 29
modes, 14, 17; movement, 60; surveillance, 9, 18, 88, 93, 100, 112, 119,
narratives, 13; norms, 104, 228, 230; 141, 155, 210, 224, 237, 238, 248, 265,
practices, 21, 271; probability, 229; 272, 273, 285n24, 303, 307, 309n37
procedures, 24n48; reasoning, 234; survey(s), 20, 46, 63, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95,
regularity(s), 15, 177; repetition, 13; 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104, 117, 123, 155,
reports, 155; representation, 12, 13, 175, 179, 181, 184, 185, 199, 236, 247
158, 159, 161, 297; rhetoric, 172n92; survey(s): methods, 94, 96; modality,
survey(s), 20, 56, 59; table(s), 59, 238, 18; of territories, 20
255n29; tests, 200; time-series, 124; Swadeshabhimani, 272
universe(s), 13, 244; world-view, 9 Swadeshamitran, 274
Statistical Account of Sealkote District, synchronized census, 62
102 synoptic table, 176
statistically generated laws, 15 system of enunciabilities, 70
system of recordation, 65, 66
360 Subject Index

systematic classification, 176 temporality, 111, 112, 118, 119, 120, 121,
systematic predetection, 306, 309n37 125, 126, 135n61
systematic regularities, 15 temporalization, 112, 122; of economic
systematization of caste, 181 entities, 123; of entities, 124; of
systems of verification, 66 social and economic entities, 123
temporally standardized, 149, 151
table(s), 143, 148, 190, 243, 255n28 territorial, 38, 88, 157, 190; accounts,
tabular representation, 186 148; representations, 87;
tabular shape, 186 sovereignty, 29, 37; state(s), 40, 83
tactic of government, 68 territoriality, 9, 37, 38, 40, 64, 67, 83, 87
tactics, 49, 54, 55, 139 territory(s), 47, 64, 83, 87, 90, 93, 94,
taming chance, 71, 73 101, 103, 113, 114, 127, 147, 149, 155,
target approach, 297, 298, 299 178, 188, 190, 201, 225, 226
taxonomic, 177, 185, 198, 214, 215n12, time, 1, 7, 8, 21, 47, 73, 85, 100, 101, 118,
228; classifications, 202; structure, 119, 120, 122, 123, 131n5, 133n25,
191, 192 133n31, 134n60, 143, 165, 166, 176,
technique: of government, 8, 18, 242; contestation, 118; discipline,
79n124, 295, 297, 298, 301; of 118, 119; series, 14, 149, 151; series
autopsy, 227; of calculability, 305; of data, 124; self-awareness of, 121
character formation, 183; of colonial time-indexation, 123
governmentality, 268, 293; of time-measurement, 118
control, 119, 207; of governance, 9, time-table, 118, 119, 134n45
128; of governmentality, 17, 89, 297, topographical, 91, 92, 98, 103, 117, 185,
299, 301, 306; of knowledge, 257n63; 238
of measurement, 199; of topographical survey(s), 91, 93
normalization, 140; of postcolonial totalizing, 91, 225, 226, 253n2, 280
governmentality, 299; of rule, 69; of trade accounts, 122, 142, 144, 148, 149,
security, 84; of subjection, 120; of 154
surveillance, 303; of visualization, trade statistics, 148, 149
255n40; of writing, 55 traditional communities, 179, 183
technologies: of colonial governance, transcendence, 263, 285n17, 285n18
86; of colonial rule, 227; of control, transcendental, 262; domain, 225;
94; of governance, 5, 8, 52, 83, 86, 88, subject, 7, 10
140, 261, 294, 303; of government, triangualation, 92, 99
86, 223, 226, 290, 298, 302; of tribe(s), 178, 182, 184, 185, 189, 191, 192,
inscription, 166; of power, 223, 230; 195, 197, 198, 203, 209, 210, 218n80,
of postcolonial governmentality, 221n134, 301
296; of rule, 27, 56, 68, 181, 271, 278; Tribes and Castes of Bengal, 192, 197, 198
of security, 254n15; of state trigonometical survey, 91
formation, 89 trigonometrical surveys, 92, 98, 99, 202
temporal: calendar, 118; categories, 20; tropical epidemiology, 242
consciousness, 118; continuity, 124; tropical medicine, 232
difference, 85; disciplinary methods, trust, 71, 73, 159, 286n39
120; discourse, 111; framework(s), truth: claims, 70; of colonial difference,
112, 113, 116, 117; grid, 116; 180; as reaon, 283; regime, 42
knowledge, 120; nature, 122; typification, 188, 210; of castes, 200
regularities, 112, 118; regulation, tyranny of majority, 281
123; sequences, 126, 141, 148, 159;
standardization, 119, 120 unbound seriality(s), 16, 55, 211, 304
 Subject Index 361

undivided authority, 30 Varna categories, 188

undrained spaces, 236 Varna classification, 185
Ungoverned Imaginings, 133n28 Varna model, 187
unicyclic, 133n31 verification, 66, 158, 183
uniform, 46, 93, 104, 118, 121, 123, 149, Vernacular, 267, 269, 272, 279, 280;
157, 158, 189, 198, 199, 262, 301; capitalism, 153; newpapers, 267,
accounting practices, 142; 271, 272, 273, 278, 280
administrative structure, 67; census, Verstehen, 15, 24n52
61; measures, 98; plan, 163; plan of vertical classification, 190
classification, 186; principles, 58; vertical mobilization, 285n18
scale, 99 Vettikodiyon, 273
uniformity, 58, 92, 93, 140, 142, 153, Viceroy Lytton, 201
158, 186, 187, 195, 200, 206 Victorian administrative state, 231
unifying frame of maps, 90 Victorian anthropology, 195
unilinear law of time, 121 Victorian governments, 58
unitary power, 30, 31 Victorian state, 50, 58
universal: applicability, 190; function, Victorian vital conscience, 226
293; histories, 113, 126; History, 4, Vijayanagara: kingdom, 38; rule, 39
21, 124, 125, 126; justice, 42; village accountants, 114
knowledge, 180, 182, 184; laws, 125, village level statistics, 207
183; time, 112; validity, 67 visual images, 106
universalism, 39, 69 visual representation, 94, 101
universalist, 48; framework of visualization, 101, 102, 240
knowledge, 87; project of vital, 224, 227, 237, 255n36; capacities,
civilization, 48 227, 231; conscience, 227; laws,
Universalist Knowledge Project, 18, 254n16; norm, 230; regulation, 225;
147, 170n37 sphere, 225, 226, 227, 231, 241;
universalistic, 139, 140 statistics, 10, 225, 231
universalistic framework of rule, 271
universalizing tendency, 239 War of Delhi 1803, 29
unmitigated despotism, 44 Weberian, 58, 152
unpredictability, 15 weights, 157, 158, 159, 172n79
unreal spaces, 84 working class surveys, 162
untouchable castes, 189, 299 working times, 118
utilitarian, 19, 20, 43, 46, 51, 58, 67, 88, works of public utility, 163
96, 115, 265, 284n3; passion for writing histories, 117
legislation, 20; passion for written routines, 58
uniformity, 46; philosophy, 46; written rules, 63
reform, 46
Utopia, 276 Young India, 280

Varna, 185, 187 zamindars , 38, 39

 About the Author

U. Kalpagam is professor at the G. B. Pant Social Science Institute, Uni-

versity of Allahabad, Allahabad, India. She has published in Gender
Studies, Development Studies, and Anthropology.

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