Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-03T13:56:17.109Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tod's Rajast'han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Norbert Peabody
Norbert Peabody
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This essay concerns the labile boundary between the familiar and the exotic in an early nineteenth-century Orientalist text, entitled Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han, by James Tod. Written by the first British political agent to the western Rajput states, Tod's Rajast'han, particularly the several chapters he devoted to the so-called ‘feudal system’ of Rajasthan, remained implicated in colonial policy toward western India for over a century. By situating Tod's Rajast'han in the specific circumstances in which it was written and then tracing the fate of that text against a historical background, this essay aims to restore an open-ended, historical sensibility to studies on Orientalism that most critics of Orientalist writing have ironically forfeited in their laudable efforts to restore history to the indigenous peoples who have been the objects of Orientalist discourse.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , February 1996 , pp. 185 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anonymous. 1829. ‘Review of Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han. By James Tod. Vol. I’ The Asiatic Review and Monthly Register 28:187–98.Google Scholar
Anonymous. 1830. ‘Review of Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han. By James Tod. Vol. I’ The Edinburgh Review 52:86–109.Google Scholar
Anonymous. 1832a. ‘Review of Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han. By James Tod. Vol. II’ The Edinburgh Review 56:73–98.Google Scholar
Anonymous. 1832b. ‘Review of Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han. By James Tod. Vols I and II.’ The Quarterly Review 48:1–39.Google Scholar
Anonymous. 1839. ‘Memoir of the Author.’ In Travels in Western India, Combining a Visit to the Sacred Mounts of the Jains and the Most Celebrated Shrines of Hindu Faith Between Rajpootana and the Indus: with an Account of the Ancient City of Nehrwalla, by Tod, J., pp. xvii–ix. London: Wm. H. Allen and Co.Google Scholar
Alavi, Seema. 1993. ‘The Company Army and Rural Society: the Invalid Thanah, 1780–1830.’ Modern Asian Studies 27, 1:147–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
al-'Azm, , Jalal, Sadik. 1981. ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse.’ Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East 8:5–26.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 1991 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal, ed. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Humanities Press.Google Scholar
Batbedat, Jean. 1990. ‘In the Service of Indian Princes.’ In The French in India, Vincent, R., ed., pp. 96–121. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A. 1983. Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A. 1989. Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A. 1993. ‘Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India.’ Modern Asian Studies 27, 1:3–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayly, Susan. Forthcoming. ‘Caste and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography of India.’ In The Concept of Race in South Asia, Robb, P., ed. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bentinck, Lord William Cavendish. 1977 [1835]. ‘Minute on Military Policy.’ In Philips, C. H., ed. The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck: Governor-General of India, 1828–1835, Volume II, pp. 1440–57. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. An Outline of a Theory of Practice. Nice, R., trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burrow, J. W. 1981. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, Barun Kumar. 1984. Tader Rajasthan o Bangla Sahitya [Impact of Tod's Rajasthan on Bengali Literature]. Calcutta: New Kamala Press.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: a Derivative Discourse? London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Galaty, John. 1982. ‘Being “Maasai”; Being “People-of-Cattle”: Ethnic Shifters in East Africa’. American Ethnologist 9, 1:1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Stewart. 1977. ‘The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire, 1720–1760.’ Modern Asian Studies 11, 1:1–40.Google Scholar
Guha, Sumit, 1994. ‘Crimes, Culprits, and Punishments: the Maratha Penal Regime.’ A Paper Presented to the Centre of South Asian Studies Seminar, University of Cambridge, 16 February 1994.Google Scholar
Hallam, Henry. 1819 [1818]. View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (3 vols), London.Google Scholar
Heber, Bishop Reginald. 1828. Narrative of a Journey Through the Upper Provinces of India, from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824–25, (with Notes upon Ceylon), an Account of a Journey to Madras and the Southern Provinces, 1826, and Letters Written in India (2 vols), London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Herzfeld, Michael. 1982. Disemia. In Semiotics 1980, Herzfeld, M. and Lenhart, M., comps., pp. 205–15. New York: Plenum Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herzfeld, Michael. 1987. Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography on the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, E. J. 1991 [1990]. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Inden, Ronald. 1986. ‘Orientalist Constructions of India.’ Modern Asian Studies 20, 3:401–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inden, Ronald. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kolff, Dirk H. A.. 1990. Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: the Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kuklick, Henrika. 1984. ‘Tribal Exemplars: Images of Political Authority in British Anthropology, 1855–1945.’ In Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology, History of Anthropology 2, Stocking, G. W., ed., pp. 59September82. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Leask, Nigel. 1992. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lyall, Sir Alfred C. 1882. Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Majeed, Javed. 1992. Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Metcalfe, Sir Charles. 1977 [1829]. ‘Minute on the Future Government of India.’ In Philips, C. H., ed. The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck: Governor-General of India, 1828–1835, Volume I, pp. 309–21. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rosselli, John. 1974. Lord William Bentinck: the Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774–1839. London: Sussex University Press.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Schwartzberg, Joseph E. 1992. ‘South Asian Cartography.’ In The History of Cartography, Volume II, Book I, Harley, J. B. and Woodward, D., eds., pp. 293–509. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Seal, Anil. 1968. The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sen, S. N. 1944. ‘Why Tod Resigned?’ Indian Historical Record Commission, 21st Session (Udaipur). New Delhi: Government of India Press.Google Scholar
Tambiah, S. J. 1973. ‘From Varna to Caste through Mixed Unions.’ In The Character of Kinship, Jack, Goody, ed., pp. 191–229. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tambiah, S. J. 1990. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lt.Col. Tod, James. 1827. ‘De l'Origine Asiatique de Quelques-unes des Anciennes Tribus de l'Europe Etablies sur les Rivages de la Mer Baltiques, Surtout les Su Suedi Suiones, Asi, Yeuts, Juts ou Gètes-Goths, etc., etc.’ Journal Asiatique 10:277–309.Google Scholar
Lt.Col. Tod, James. 1829. Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han or, the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India, Volume I. London.Google Scholar
Lt. Col. Tod, James. 1830. ‘Observations on a Gold Ring of Hindu Fabrication Found at Montrose Scotland.’ Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society III:559–72.Google Scholar
Lt. Col. Tod, James. 1832a. Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han or, the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India, Volume II. London.Google Scholar
Lt. Col. Tod, James. 1832b. ‘Letter to T. Hyde Villiers, Esq.’ In Parliamentary Papers. 1831–1832. Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, Vol. XIV, Appendix VI, no. 13, pp. 122–38.Google Scholar
Lt. Col. Tod, James. 1839. Travels in Western India, Combining a Visit to the Sacred Mounts of the Jains and the Most Celebrated Shrines of Hindu Faith Between Rajpootana and the Indus: with an Account of the Ancient City of Nehrwalla. London: Wm. H. Allen & Co.Google Scholar
Lt. Col. Tod, James. 1914. Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han or, the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India (2 vols), Sladen, D., ed. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lt. Col. Tod, James. 1920. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan or, the Central and Western Rajput States of India (3 vols), Crooke, W., ed. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Washbrook, David. 1990. ‘South Asia, the World System and World Capitalism.’ Journal of Asian Studies 49, 3:479–508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Sir Robert. 1861. Private Diary of Travels, Personal Services, and Public Events, during the Mission and Employment with the European Armies in the Campaigns of 1812, 1813, 1814 (2 vols), Randolph, H., ed. London: John Murray.Google Scholar