Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India

Bihar, 1760s1880s

By (author) Nitin Sinha

Publication date:

01 September 2012

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780857284488

Through a regional focus on Bihar between the 1760s and 1880s, ‘Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India’ reveals the shifting and contradictory nature of the colonial state’s policies and discourses on communication. The volume explores the changing relationship between trade, transport and mobility in India, as evident in the trading and mercantile networks operating at various scales of the economy. Of crucial importance to this study are the ways in which knowledge about roads and routes was collected through practices of travel, tours, surveys, and map-making, all of which benefited the state in its attempts to structure a regime that would regulate ‘undesirable’ forms of mobility.

Abbreviations; List of Illustrations; Introduction; Chapter 1. From Affective Forms to Objectification: Spatial Transition from Pre-colonial to Colonial Times; Chapter 2. India and its Interiors; Chapter 3. Going into the Interiors; Chapter 4. Knowing the Ways; Chapter 5. Controlling the Routes; Chapter 6. Changing Regime of Communication, 1820s–60s; Chapter 7. Of Men and Commodities; Chapter 8. The Wheels of Change; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index

‘Dr Sinha provides a fascinating study of transportation and communication in Bihar. This book moves, and therefore moves all of us, beyond the published literature. The periodization, the 1760s to the 1880s, enables Sinha to identify better the continuities and discontinuities within the circulation of people, goods and ideas in India before and after the 1850s advent of railways.’ —Professor Ian J. Kerr, University of Manitoba