No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Information and Idioms in Circulation: Engaging the Minority Classification in 1930s India
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2024
Abstract
Several studies have shown how a system of social classifications influenced the bureaucracy of British India when dealing with Indian society on a day-to-day basis. We know less, however, about how representatives of Indian society engaged such classifications and the information accompanying it to advance their own political agendas. This article examines how the classification of “minorities,” along with data connected to it, impacted discourse of Indian political actors in the early 1930s. The article presents a novel method to analyse first-person speech for themes and information content. It then applies the method to interventions by Indian delegates to the Sub-committee on Minorities of the India Round Table Conference, held in London, 1930–2. The article places the empirical investigation within a conceptual frame inspired by Ian Hacking's “looping effect.” Hacking attempts to capture how those classified negotiate imposed designations to advance agendas beneficial to themselves. The following study shows how Indian delegates engaged minority classification in a variety of ways in their political argumentation. The study also shows how information related to the minority classification was “looped” in speech by Indian actors to advance political claims and consolidate identities.
- Type
- Article
- Information
- Itinerario , Volume 48 , Special Issue 2: Looping Bureaucracies. Imperial Administrations and Socio-Political Change in Asia (1750–1950) , August 2024 , pp. 202 - 221
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Leiden Institute for History
References
1 Seth, Sanjay, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
2 Mamdani, Mahmood, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Cohn, Bernhard S., Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1996)Google Scholar; Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Chatterjee, Partha, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics of Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Kaviraj, Sudipta, The Enchantment of Democracy and India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014)Google Scholar.
4 Kaviraj, The Enchantment of Democracy and India, 189.
5 Appadurai, Arjun, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of anger (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 49Google Scholar.
6 Housden, Martyn, “Inhabiting Different Worlds: The League of Nations and the Protection of National Minorities, 1920–1930,” in The League of Nations’ Work on Social Issues: Visions, Endeavours, and Experiments, ed. Rodriguez, M. Garcia, D. Rodogno, and L. Kozma (Geneva: United Nations, 2016), 121–36Google Scholar.
7 Jensenius, Francesca R., “Mired in Reservations: The Path-Dependent History of Electoral Quotas in India,” Journal of Asian Studies 74:1 (2013), 85–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Madsen, O. J., Servan, J., and Øyen, S. A., “’I Am a Philosopher of the Particular Case’: An Interview with the 2009 Holberg Prizewinner Ian Hacking,” History of the Human Sciences 26:3 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 The method has been co-developed with Nirjhar Mazumder, who has also coded the debates in MAXQDA and designed the figures and graphs.
10 Government of India, Proceedings of the Federal Structure Committee and Minorities Committee, vols. 1–3 (Calcutta: Central Publication Branch, 1932).
11 Mushirul Hasan, “The Muslim Mass Contacts Campaigns: Analysis of a Strategy of Political Mobilization,” in India's Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization, ed. M. Hasan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 133–59.
12 Bhimrao R. Ambedkar, “On Franchise and Framing Constituencies (Evidence before the Southborough Committee 1919),” in Ambedkar Writes, vol. 1, Political Writings, ed. Narendra Jadhav (New Delhi: Konark, 2014), 17–35.
13 Legg, Stephen, “Imperial Internationalism: The Round Table Conference and the Making of India in London, 1930–1932,” Humanity 11:1 (2020), 32–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Sarkar, Sumit, Modern India: 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 2005), 308–9Google Scholar.
15 Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 231Google Scholar.
16 Raj, Kapil, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Sheila Jasanoff, “The Idiom of Co-production,” in States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order, ed. Sheila Jasanoff (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–12.
18 Bajpai, Rochana, “Rhetoric as Argument: Social Justice and Affirmative Action in India, 1990,” Modern Asian Studies 44 (2010), 675–708CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wiesner, C., Haapala, T., and Palonen, K., Debates, Rhetoric and Political Action: Practices of Textual Interpretation and Analysis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sophia Hatzisavvidou, “Studying Political Disputes: A Rhetorical Perspective and a Case Study,” Politics, August 2020, 1.
19 Bajpai, Rochana, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; I. Fairclough and N. Fairclough, “Practical Reasoning in Political Discourse: The UK Government's Response to the Economic Crisis in the 2008 Pre-Budget Report,” Discourse & Society 22:3 (2011), 243–68.
20 E. De Cilla, M. Reisigl, and R. Wodak, “The Discursive Construction of National Identities,” Discourse & Society 10:2 (1999), 149–73.
21 Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds., Cosmopolitan Thought Zones (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
22 Legg, Stephen, “Political Lives at Sea: Working and Socialising to and from the India Round Table Conference in London, 1930–1932,” Journal of Historical Geography 68 (2020), 21–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Hasan, Mushirul, “Minority Identity and Its Discontents: Response and Representation,” Economic and Political Weekly 29:8 (1994), 442Google Scholar.
24 Nair, Neeti, “Partition and Minority Rights in Punjabi Hindu Debates 1920–1947,” Economic and Political Weekly 46:52 (2011), 61–9Google Scholar.
25 Parekh, Bhikhu, Debating India: Essays on Indian Political Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 107–9Google Scholar.
26 Rosalind Parr, “Solving World Problems: The Indian Women's Movement, Global Government, and the ‘Crises of Empire’ 1933–46,” Journal of Global History 16:1 (2021), 122–40.
27 Carolien Stolte, “Bringing Asia to the World: Indian Trade Unionism and the Long Road towards the Asiatic Labour Congress, 1919–37,” Journal of Global History 7 (2012), 257–78.
28 Plantin, Christian, “Argumentation Studies and Discourse Analysis: The French Situation and Global Perspectives,” Discourse Studies 4:3 (2002), 343–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Finlayson, Alan, “Proving, Pleasing and Persuading? Rhetoric in Contemporary British Politics,” Political Quarterly 85 (2014), 428–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Besnard, P. and Hunter, A., Elements of Argumentation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Glaser, B. G. and Strauss, A. L., The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (London: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Teun A van Dijk, Discourse and Knowledge: A Sociocognitive Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
32 Ruth Wodak, Rudolf De Cilla, martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart, The Discursive Construction of National Identity, 2nd ed., trans. Angelika Hirsch, Richard Mitten, and J. W. Unger (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); N. Fairclough, J. Mulderring, and R. Wodak, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” in Critical Discourse Analysis, vol. 1, Concepts, History, Theory, ed. Ruth Wodak (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013), 79–102.
33 Humphreys, A. and Wang, R. Jen-Hui, “Automated Text Analysis for Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research 44 (2017), 1274–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Government of India, Proceedings, 58.
35 Stephen Legg, “Imperial Internationalism,” 36–43.
36 E.g., Dirks, Castes of Mind.
37 Government of India, Proceedings, 13.
38 Ibid., 133.
39 Ibid., 43.
40 De Souza, P. R., Ahmed, H., and Alam, M. S., Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India (London: Bloomsbury, 2019)Google Scholar.
41 Kaviraj, The Enchantment of Democracy and India.
42 Parekh, Debating India, 109.
43 De Cilla, Reisigl, and Wodak, “The Discursive Construction of National Identities,” 159.
44 Eileen J Yeo, “Central Not Peripheral: Social Science, Class, and Gender, 1830–1930,” in Social Science in Context: Historical, Sociological, and Global Perspectives, ed. R. Danell, A. Larsson, and P. Wisselgren (Nordic Academic Press, 2014), 21–32.