The Structure of Colonial Power: South Asia since the Eighteenth Century

How did the colonial encounter shape the making of modern South Asia? Was colonial rule a radical rupture from the pre-modern past or did it embody historical continuities? Did colonial rule cause the economic underdevelopment of the region or were regional factors responsible for it? Did colonial forms of knowledge shape how we think of social structures in the Indian subcontinent? Did the colonial census merely register pre-existing Indian communities or did it reshape them? Did colonialism break with patriarchal power or further consolidate it? How did imperial power regulate sexuality in colonial India? What was the relationship between caste power and colonial power? How did capital and labor interact under colonial rule? How did colonialism mediate the very nature of modernity in the region?This lecture-based survey course will explore the nature of the most significant historical process that shaped modern South Asia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries -- colonialism. It primarily deals with the regions that constituted the directly administered territories of British India, specifically regions that subsequently became the nation-states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.