PRESENTERS AND ABSTRACTS
William Gould is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds. His latest books are on the history of
the everyday state and corruption – Bureaucracy, Community and Influence: Society and the State in
India (Routledge, 2012) and religious conflict – Religion and Conflict in Modern South Asia
(Cambridge, 2012), and he has also worked on Hindu nationalism and the Congress in Uttar Pradesh
– Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge, 2004). He is
currently working on a collaborative project exploring the experiences of Denotified Tribes over
India’s independence, which involves the making of a historical documentary.
Patronage, Publicity and the Black Market: The politics of Food and Civil Supply and ‘anticorruption’ in 1940s UP cities: In 1943 India’s food and civil supply bureaucracy was near
the centre of one of the most devastating famines of the twentieth century. In Uttar Pradesh,
this administrative machinery was also a key mechanism in the working of political
patronage. This paper explores the unusual position of these government servants of the
early ‘license-permit-raj’ system, and looks at how the specific exigencies of war-time India,
created the conditions for the more direct exploitation of supply officers by local politicians
after 1947. But just as Town and District Supply Officers formed connections with Members
of the Legislative Assembly, so too did ‘citizens’ movements in UP cities begin to develop
media-driven campaigns against their ‘corruption’, and the blackmarkets in which they were
immersed. The administration of Food and Civil Supply became one of the central planks in
the development of the early post-colonial Indian project of ‘Anti-Corruption’ in urban
spaces, even while rationing and civil supplies continued as the archetypal machinery of
political patronage and clientelism.
Justin Jones is Lecturer in South Asian history at the University of Exeter. He specialises in South
Asian Islam since c.1850, and has worked extensively on Islamic reform in the urban public sphere of
colonial north India.
Nationalism in the city, and the city in nationalism: political fashions in Lucknow, 19091939: In the early 1920s, Lucknow became the capital of the colonial United Provinces.
Thereafter, through the interwar years, the city became central in the stories of both the
expansion of formal political arenas, and the emergence of the north Indian plains as the
centre of popular nationalism. This paper will examine the ways in which political life in the
city was informed by language, ritual and imagery rooted in the city’s perceived character
and past. Discussing a range of public sphere associations and debates, this paper examines
how political discourse in the city often incorporated a distinctively ‘Lucknawi’ character and
rhetoric. Not only did public intellectuals construct a notion of Lucknawi cosmopolitanism as
a component of nationalist discourse, but nationalist political activity in Lucknow often
found itself taking on distinctive ideas and imagery in the Lucknawi setting. The paper, then,
emphasises how the city itself exercised a particular influence upon nationalist politics and,
conversely, how wider nationalist politics often found itself refracted through local motifs
and senses of belonging.
Prashant Kidambi is Senior Lecturer in Colonial Urban History in the School of Historical Studies,
University of Leicester. His research explores the interface between British imperialism and the
history of modern South Asia through the prism of the urban. In addition to a number of journal
articles and book chapters, Dr. Kidambi is the author of a major study of colonial Bombay, The
Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920
(Ashgate, 2007).
Nationalism and Municipal Politics in inter-war Bombay City: In the inter-war years
nationalism increasingly claimed the colonial city as the site of its own sovereignty. Notably,
popular nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s spawned an extensive repertoire of collective
performances and extra-constitutional forms of public action and protest that sought to reterritorialize the city as nationalist space. Simultaneously, however, nationalists also began
to exercise institutional power in the municipal sphere. Yet, save for a few studies (notably,
Ray 1979; Haynes 1991; and Gooptu 2001), this development has seldom been scrutinised
closely. The teleological framework underpinning many of the writings on the nationalist
movement have tended to construe the politics of the urban arena as an increasingly
inconsequential side-show to the anti-colonial struggle as it unfolded at the national level
during the inter-war years. This paper redresses this neglect and examines the interplay
between nationalism and municipal politics in colonial Bombay between the wars. In
particular, it shows how municipal politics in the city were reshaped by nationalist
mobilization, projects of reform and conceptions of urban citizenship.
Stephen Legg is Associate Professor at the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. His
research focuses on colonial Delhi and explores themes of urban governmentality, nationalism and
social memory, and the scalar politics of prostitution regulation. He has published Spaces of
Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Blackwell, 2007) and edited Sovereignty, Spatiality
and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (Routledge, 2011)
Spatial Histories and Affective Geographies: Forms and Narratives of Nationalism in
Colonial Delhi Delhi has been overwritten in imperial historiographies as a City of Empire,
and the Capital of the Raj. Various works have recently set about exploring the local
geographies of colonialism in the city, but a similar process of spatial recuperation has not
taken place regarding Delhi as a city of nationalism. In this paper I will explore the
methodologies through which we can explore cities as constitutive agents of nationalism. In
part this is a question of spatial history; of paying attention to the intersecting scales of
(inter)nationalism, relational networks with other cities, and the distribution and clusters of
social movements throughout the urban landscape. But, I will suggest, balancing these
narratives, must come attention to the performative repertoire of urban nationalism, spaces
of religious community and (non-)violence, sites of counter-memory, and communities that
threaded the national into daily and domestic routines; that is to say, to affective
geographies.
Eleanor Newbigin is a lecturer in modern South Asian history at SOAS. Her work explores ideas and
practices of citizenship in India, especially during the subcontinent’s transition to independence,
including its partition. She has published several articles that explore the way in which discussions
about religious family (or personal) law in India during the interwar years impacted on the formation
of patriarchal structures and state secularism in post-colonial India (as well as editing a special
edition of the Indian Economic and Social History Review (2009) on 'Personal law, identity politics
and civil society in colonial South Asia'. This paper is taken from her current book project on Hindu
law and the making of the 'modern' Indian state.
Constructing the 'urban' colonial subject: taxation and representation in interwar India:
Limited devolution of power in the first half of the twentieth century paved the way for a
new era in Indian politics that was distinctly marked by the presence and influence of urban,
as opposed to rural, Indian elites. The war effort and the constitutional reforms that
followed it committed the colonial administration to finding new and sustainable sources of
funding to support the much-expanded state structure. The colonial administration sought
to pay for these developments through the introduction of progressive income taxation – a
charge that had historically been levied on non-agricultural incomes. Officials realized that it
was more lucrative to tax wealthy Hindu families as a single financial collective than to break
it down into individual payees. While Hindu businessmen and professionals initially opposed
this move, they soon found that this aspect of colonial policy could be made to work to their
advantage. Exploring the resulting bartering and negotiation, this paper traces the
emergence of a specifically ‘urban’, but also Hindu, economic subject as the central figure of
both colonial fiscal policy formation and Indian nationalist mobilization.
Anish Vanaik is a D.Phil candidate at the Department of History, University of Oxford. His
dissertation work is on property relations in Delhi, 1911-1947.
An Arena of Government: encroachment, public spaces and municipal politics in colonial
Delhi: The commodification of urban space in 20th century Delhi generated a new set of
relationships between space and time. Ownership came to be the idiom through which the
municipality enunciated an idea of public-ness: asserting its authority vis-a-vis individual
owners and neighbourhoods alike through a discourse about encroachment on its land. But,
the diktats of economy in expenditure and rise and fall of property values, in turn, came to
shape the spatial interventions of public defined in this fashion. The range of ways of
creating common spaces that emerged from these contradictory impulses – charity hospitals,
schools, parks and health clinics – generated both a crucible in which nationalist activity was
formed and an arena in which they sought to participate. Its importance is more precisely
limned when contrasted with the agitational idiom through which ideas of the nation as a
common project was also asserted. Agitations like the various hartals, or pickets during the
Civil Disobedience movement, or mass meetings, while spatially spread out were temporally
more restricted marking, then, the municipality as an arena crucial to nationalist activity.