No abstract

No abstract

I. Sewage Under CapitalismThe preservation of the wealth and welfare of nations, and advances in culture and civilisation depend on how the sewage question is resolved.(von Liebig, 1850s).Delhi is a very suggestive and moralising place—such stupendous remains of power and wealth passed and passing away—and somehow I feel that we horrid English have just ‘gone and done it’, merchandised it, revenue it, and spoiled it all. (Emily Eden, 1838).Veena Oldenburg argues that after the Rebellion of 1857 British colonial officials inaugurated a process of urban reconstruction following three imperatives: safety, sanitation and loyalty. To make the cities of India safe, clean and loyal, the colonial regime exerted a measure of ‘social control . . . In an era when tinkering with the structure of society had been officially and unambiguously forsworn.’. If the highest offices of the colonial regime proclaimed its remove from society, she argues, the ‘lowest levels of decision making and action’, intruded effectively to reconstruct the social fabric of urban life. In this essay, we will examine this lowest level of the colonial regime in the local government of Delhi (the Delhi Municipal Corporation [DMC], the commissioner's office, the army, the Public Works Department [PWD], the railway officials) and its relations with the local nobility (the rais and amirs), the merchants, and working people.

In November 2001, I traveled to Washington, DC, for the second Annual South Asian Literary Festival. At a panel discussion, someone asked me a pointed question: ''Last year you had come here to promote your book, Karma of Brown Folk, and spent quite a long time being critical of the concept of the model minority. Now, with all these desis being harassed after 9/11, what do you think of our being a model minority?'' Certainly, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, not to speak of the Indian American press and the social network of rumor, had alerted us to the large number of desis (those who claim South Asian origin) who have been hassled by airlines, by the police, and by strangers-all wary of those of us who look like terrorists. In a comprehensive review of over a thousand hate attacks on Arabs and desis, Human Rights Watch noted, ''This violence was directed at people solely because they shared or were perceived as sharing the national background or religion of the hijackers and al-Qaeda members deemed responsible for attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Summary: In a sub-field of Marxism, A.G. Frank and E. Laclau debated the intricate details of Frank's critique of the "dualist thesis". That thesis argued that capitalism failed to overcome feudalism in its colonial adventure; Frank argued that to posit the duality between capital and feudal forms does violence to the structural integration of feudal forms into the logic of capital. Frank's critique, however, remained wedded to a level of abstraction which was unable to reveal the full implications of his suggestions. In this essay, I attempt to show that the logic of capital during colonial rule produced a municipal sanitation regime which relied upon the control over the labor of manual sweepers mediated through jobbers, overseers and contractors. Far from being the embodiment of "tradition", the sweepers since colonial India bear on their bodies the marks of capital. This essay reveals those marks as well as demonstrating the integral relation between the logic of capital and barbaric colonial rule.Liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honor, patriotism and what have you. All this did not prevent us from making anti-racial speeches about dirty niggers, dirty Jews and dirty Arabs. High-minded people, liberal or just soft-hearted, protest that they were shocked by such inconsistency; but they were either mistaken or dishonest, for with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1961). 2Contemporary social history of colonialism takes as its object of critique a colonial epistemology which sought to render the "East" as something immutable and, therefore, condemned to its own authoritarian logic. This colonial understanding of the "East" was constructed after a prolonged relationship with the peoples of Asia and after a series of bitter debates within the camp of colonialism. By the time the conquering Europeans began to erect a regime on the dustheap of the previous polities, they had adopted the viewpoint that the vanquished natives had no title to the 1 Elisabeth B. Armstrong and Gyan Pandcy read through the essay and gave me very thoughtful suggestions.