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Colonialism's Civilizing Mission: The Case of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Ronen Shamir  and
Daphna Hacker
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Abstract

This paper examines a particular episode in the history of British imperialism in India: the appointment of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission in 1893. We analyze the way a quasi-judicial investigation into the consumption of drugs was differently conceived and executed as a civilizing mission by, on the one hand, British colonizers, and, on the other hand, an aspiring colonized elite. By bringing together the ideological dimensions of a civilizing mission (e.g., the reliance on scientific knowledge, groper procedures, legal techniques) with its social ones (e.g., collaboration between colonizers and a local elite), we show how the very notion of a civilizing mission became a site of struggle over meaning, identity, and desirable forms of governance. The analysis reveals a local elite struggling to position itself at once on a par with British criteria of scientific competence and yet not as a mere proxy for British interests; at once able to articulate itself in terms of enlightenment concepts such as reason and modernity and yet celebrating its own distinct cultural authenticity.

Type
Symposium: Colonialism, Culture, and the Law
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , Spring 2001 , pp. 435 - 461
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2001 

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