Author: Kanakalatha Mukund
Publisher: Orient Longman
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 206
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8125028005
Description
How did the British colonial administration view the Tamil natives? How did the natives, in turn, view the colonial power brokers? Underscoring a transactional rather than one-way reality of colonial politics, The View from Below is a balancing of scholarship. Kanakalatha Mukund considers the attitudes and responses as dialogic, whereby the colonial state and indigenous society are locked in a fierce but subtle combat for attention and dominance in the Madras region.
The Tamil institution upon which Mukund focuses her study for the most pat is the temple. Moving further on from this politically crucial and socially focal site, the study covers a number of other related phenomena: the staging of sectarian and caste conflicts aimed to seize the control of the temples; the new social leadership and patterns of patronage; the construction of identity by aspiring elite groups of both parties; and the folk representations of Poligar rebellions.
This book will be valuable to historians, anthropologists and specialists on South India, and those interested in the history of Madras.
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ONE
Indigenous Society and the Colonial State: Some Perspectives
TWO
The Colonial City as the Setting of Initial Interactions, 1670-1800
THREE
English Forms of Justice and Indigenous response, 1700-1800
FOUR
Temples: The New Social Order and the Early Colonial State
FIVE
Temple Control as Contested Arena: Indigenous Elite Versus the Colonial Bureaucracy
SEVEN
Dubashes and Patronage: Construction of Identity and Social Leadership under the Colonial State
EIGHT
Indigenous Society and the Colonial State-A Retrospect
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX