From The Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition

Abstract

This collection of essays originated in a conference at the University of Chicago in 2005, held in memory of Bernard S. Cohn (1928–2003), anthropologist and historian, and one of the great pioneers of the modern study of South Asian history and society. Its main concern, apart from celebrating Cohn's seminal intellectual contributions, is to interrogate the notion that 1947, for all its drama, violence and mythic dimensions, was a critical dividing point in the history of the subcontinent. It underlines how deep and long-lasting were the many aspects of the colonial legacy, and how long it took for polities to emerge which were in a real sense ‘post-colonial’. Moreover, it questions the totalising model of decolonisation in the sense of ‘complete freedom from all possible cultural and institutional acts of domination by the colonizer’. Certainly in South Asia (and perhaps everywhere) ‘the colonizer and the colonized are often engaged in a hybridizing encounter’ (p. 3). The broad areas covered in five parts are issues of democracy; imagining minorities; caste, class and nation; law, capital and subject formation; and the imprint of the past on two major regions in India.