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The Challenge of Gau Mata: British Policy and Religious Change in India, 1880–1916

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Peter Robb
Peter Robb
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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Extract

That people get the governments they deserve is a saying born out of the expectation of citizens to influence the choice of rulers, or that societies mould states. Perhaps, conversely, when governments are imposed on people, especially by outsiders, they are likely to be more than usually influential. Certainly, in India, social and religious changes are thought to have occurred under British rule. Official records provide much of the evidence for this. Yet British policy and attitudes in this area have not been very fully analysed. This essay is an attempt to start closing the gap, and it is hoped will provide some insight indirectly into how the records were produced and what was seen of social and religious change in the later nineteenth century—both matters ultimately of importance to the understanding of the period. Special attention will be paid to the cow-protection movements between 1880 and 1916.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 1986 , pp. 285 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

1 Poll, H.. A 19–20, 04 1911.Google Scholar In this discussion I do not mean to dissent from the claim made by one scholar that the caste associations, in so far as they attended to ritual questions at all, did so to define their community or the illusion of one, as much as or more than to improve their position in the hierarchy. See Carroll, Lucy, ‘Caste, Social Change, and the Social Scientist’, Journal of Asian Studies XXXV, 1(11 1975), pp. 63–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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6 PCR 335, 33/3 (1881).

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