Papers by Indrani Chatterjee
The essays in this volume explore crucial intellectual and cultural exchanges between Asia and Eu... more The essays in this volume explore crucial intellectual and cultural exchanges between Asia and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Examining the increased mobility of people and information, scientific advances, global crises, and the unravelling of empires, Eurasian Encounters demonstrates that this time period saw an unprecedented increase in a transnational flow of politically and socially influential ideas. Together, the contributors show how the two ends of Eurasia interacted in artistic, academic, and religious spheres using new international and cosmopolitan approaches.
The Straits of Malacca were a central waterway connecting the Indian and the Pacific Oceans since... more The Straits of Malacca were a central waterway connecting the Indian and the Pacific Oceans since the tenth century. Until the fifteenth century, Persian, Arabian, and Malay Muslims dominated the trade that passed this way, alongside a few Chinese merchants and sailors. The vibrant economy also attracted Europeans. The Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511 had two consequences. First, it led to the scattering of the Muslim merchants to the port of Banda Aceh, in the north of Sumatra, and the foundation of the Sultanate of Johor. Second, it intensified a trade in people both into and out of the region. By the eighteenth century, all Europeans, Chinese, Arabs, Indians participated in this trade. In 1786, when the British East India Company acquired the island of Penang, slaves were involved in various social and economic structures of the colony. By 1791, the East India Company's treaty with the king of Queda committed the company to recognize all property in slaves, and to return runaways to erstwhile owners. Perhaps in response to this, a British officer began to register all slaves in the British settlement in 1795. The beginning of revolutionary warfare in Europe, British Parliamentary prohibition of trade in slaves in 1807, followed by the British acquisition of Singapore, all pressured British colonial officers to persecute their rivals' trades more aggressively. The contradictions of British antislavery became apparent under these conditions. By 1824, the largest slaveholders in the Straits Settlement were primarily Dutch burghers (117), followed by the Chinese and the Malay. Using the British Parliamentary Papers, East India Company correspondence, and published memoirs of officials, Shawna Herzog sets out to highlight the ideological and economic Deleted: English
Journal of British Studies
History of the Present, 2020
The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2016
This essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumit Guha and James C. Scott by arguing that all of them ... more This essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sumit Guha and James C. Scott by arguing that all of them overlook a historically well-evidenced set of subject positions and concepts of space. This was monastic governmentality. Lay and ordained populations attached to monastic teachers and lineages moved and interacted across a vast network of societies till the eighteenth century. The arrival of colonial European armies in the terrain marked by monastic geographicity led to the creation of sites set apart as ‘Nepal’, ‘colonial Assam’, ‘Burma’ and so on. Hitherto pastoralist but Bon-Buddhist monastic subjects were separated from their ‘brothers’ in monastic subjecthood. Such physical separation was reinforced by historical writing as well. In the twentieth century, colonially educated native scribes embraced both geographical and epistemic projects enthusiastically. Bhuyan, the foremost practitioner of this mode of history writing, thus failed to recognise the Buddhist and Bon Tantric cohabi...
Modern Asian Studies, 2015
This article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighte... more This article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter prevailed. The results were the establishment of coverture and wardship laws interpellated from British common law courts into Company revenue policies, the demolition of buildings. and the relocation of the markets that were attached to many of the buildings women had sponsored. Together, these historical processes made women's commercial presence invisible to future scholars.
Page 1. Slavery South aSian hiStory & Edited by indrani Chatterje... more Page 1. Slavery South aSian hiStory & Edited by indrani Chatterjee and richard M. eaton Page 2. Slavery and South Asian History Page 3. Page 4. Slavery& South Asian History Edited by Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton ...
Rarely do the same apparitions inhabit the work of modern theorists of subjectivity, politics, et... more Rarely do the same apparitions inhabit the work of modern theorists of subjectivity, politics, ethnicity, the Sanskrit cosmopolis and medieval architecture at once. However, the South Asianist historian who ponders the work of Charles Taylor, Partha Chatterjee, James Scott and Sheldon Pollock cannot help notice the apparitions of monastic subjects within each. Tamara Sears has gestured at the same apparitions by pointing to the neglected study of monasteries (mathas) associated with Saiva temples. She finds the omission intriguing on two counts. First, these monasteries were built for and by significant teachers (gurus) who were identified as repositories of vast ritual, medical and spiritual knowledge, guides to their practice and over time, themselves manifestations of divinity and vehicles of human liberation from the bondage of life and suffering. Second, these monasteries were not studied even though some of these had existed into the early twentieth century. Sears implies that...
Journal of Global Slavery, 2021
Indrani Chatterjee’s ground-breaking research has shown the centrality of obligation and provisio... more Indrani Chatterjee’s ground-breaking research has shown the centrality of obligation and provision to historical forms of slavery in South Asia, deepening our understanding of slave-using societies beyond the plantation systems that have dominated historiography, as well as historical memory. In this interview, Chatterjee explains why the crucial question in the context of South Asian slavery was: who do you serve and for what purpose? Enslavers were obliged to materially provide for their slaves, in return for the enslaved person’s service, labor and loyalty, creating varied relationships of dependence. By foregrounding the complex set of relationships and obligations in which slaves were enmeshed, Chatterjee seeks to “make people out of laborers.” This has led her to rethink the ways that resistance and agency have been conceptualized in slavery studies and Subaltern Studies, emphasizing the relationships within which a person became an agent. Her research has also deepened our un...
This thesis outlines a political economy within which slaves lived and worked, within the househo... more This thesis outlines a political economy within which slaves lived and worked, within the households of the hegemons in Bengal between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth. Within household-polities that contained slaves, there were many distinctions according to skill, age, area of origin, and principally of gender. Female slaves, of great importance within the inner slaving economies of India, were however differently thought of, and their work differently conceptualised in the indigenous and colonial regimes. This led to a conflict of laws around issues of legitimacy, marriage, succession and inheritance in the period under study. Where colonial administrators thought of marriage rituals as absent from slave social relations, indigenous holders spoke of female slaves as daughters, and secondary wives. Where the British colonial legal systems had no place for the peculium of the slave, indigenous systems relied on the income-generating and maintenance-pr...
The American Historical Review, 2001
View related articles well as a bibliography and an index. It is well worth reading by the intell... more View related articles well as a bibliography and an index. It is well worth reading by the intellectual public, serious students, and scholars.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
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Papers by Indrani Chatterjee