It now appears that Mamta Bannerjee won't be able to create a dynasty such that her nephew becomes Chief Minister of West Bengal.
This givea a particular pathos to a paper by Milinda Banerjee titled-
How ‘Dynasty’ Became a Modern Global Concept: Intellectual Histories of Sovereignty and Property
Dynastic monarchies or Chiefdoms have existed for thousands of years. The Egyptian first dynasty dates from 3100 BC. It is foolish to pretend there were no dynasties and no private property and no heterosexual dicks before all these things were invented in Capitalist Europe and forcibly transferred to other parts of the world by Imperialism.
argues that the concept of ‘dynasty’ – nowadays associated especially with ‘premodern’ and non-Western societies – does not offer a value-neutral description for political forms.
Milinda comes from a part of the world where political dynasties flourish. He lives in a Kingdom with a ruling dynasy.
Is 'dynasty' pejorative? Maybe. But if we simply mean hereditary succession, it is merely descriptive.
Rather, the modern concept of ‘dynasty’ has been a politically-motivated and highly ideologically-charged modern intellectual invention.
There is no 'modern concept of dynasty'. Hegel wrote some stupid shite which nobody now recalls.
This article focuses on select discourses from France, Germany, Britain, India, and Japan to explore how the concept, in its modern form, got globalized.
It hasn't got globalised. Austalia never had it and does not now have it except in the purely ceremonial sense that King Charles III is the monarch there.
For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, ‘dynasty’ offered a pillar for imagining the ‘national’ past:
Nonsense! Nations endure. Dynasties come and go.
the ‘dynastic’ past as a prehistory and/or backbone for national sovereignty.
Tribal, maybe. Dynastic- not so much.
‘Dynasty’ was used to imagine the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty.
Race- maybe. Not Dynasty.
G. W. F. Hegel’s references to ‘dynasty’,
he thought male, dynastic, primogeniture superior to Elective monarchy. Prussia was strong ; its Kings were hereditary. Poland's Elective Monarchy had weakened it. Thus, it had been divided by its conquerors. Hegel was a Professor in Berlin and thus a 'beamte' subject to the Prussian King. It was part of his job to praise Prussia and say it had the best constitution.
as well as Karl Marx’s critique of Hegel,
Dynasties are about inheritable property. That's totes bougie. Nobody should own anything let alone get to inherit stuff.
when juxtaposed with other modern discourses, show how ‘dynasty’ encoded a major point of intersection of sovereignty and big property, indeed the coming into self-consciousness of their mutual identification-in-difference in the age of capitalism.
Only for Marxist nutters. Interestingly, an ex-Communist, John Maynard Smith, explained that uncorrelated asymmetries (e.g. who is the eldest son of who) dictate 'bourgeois strategies' which are 'eusocial' by reducing wasteful, or mutually injurious conflict.
Put simply, if you have a dynasty with primogeniture, then you don't have a civil war everytime the King dies and different Princes stake their claim to the throne.
Imaginaries about ‘dynasty’ further reveal the contiguity between ideologies of national sovereignty and patriarchal authority, sharing the obsession with founding fathers and bloodlines.
Did you know that Neo-Liberalism caused penises? Previously, everybody had lots of vaginas and there were heterosexual men whose testicles cause them to vote Republican and rape the Environment & do elite historiography & say mean things about subalterns.
European colonialism helped globalize the concept of ‘dynasty’ in the nonEuropean world, while building modern forms of sovereign statehood, maximising fiscal exploitation, and coercively ‘pacifying’ militant and rebellious populations.
That happened first in Japan where there was no European colonialism. Modern states minimize 'fiscal exploitation'. Why? It kills the golden goose. It means you won't have enough treasure in the future to win wars.
Colonial India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates, even pitting certain British administrator-scholars against the empire’s monarchizing and dynasticizing programmes.
It had no such thing. Under the doctrine of lapse, the number of Princes fell.
By exploring these case studies, I argue that the globalization of the abstraction of ‘dynasty’
which didn't happen. The US did not become a dynastic Monarchy or dynastic Presidency. Yet it was more capitalist and became more industrialised and 'financialised' than any other part of the world.
was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, and exploitation.
Globalisation happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Mexican silver tended to strengthen Asiatic Empires.
Meanwhile, Indian peasant and ‘tribal’ populations brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality and lineage selfhood, expressed through terms like ‘rajavamshi’ and ‘Kshatriya’.
Nothing wrong in raising your status by saying your people are descendants of great Kings or even Gods. But, this had been done for thousands and thousands of years. Almost everybody in India is descended from an ancestor of Emperor Bharata or Lord Ram of Lord Krishna etc. We are 'all Kings sons' as the Irish used to say. In their case, it is true that the most prolific common ancestor of the European population was Niall Noígíallach, a 5th-century High King of Ireland, who is believed to have 3 million male descendants.
These concepts destabilized colonial and elitist constructions of sovereignty,
they made no difference whatsoever.
and helped produce new notions and practices of democracy in modern India.
Fuck off! Guys who claimed to be of Warrior Status now claim to be of Untouchable origin.
The paper concludes that global intellectual history optics can help us problematize the constructions of power which underlie the processes of conceptual abstraction and globalization through which radically different political systems are coercively straitjacketed and rendered commensurable through a monolithic concept (like ‘dynasty’).
In other words, this paper is about making up stupid lies of a pointless type.
Global intellectual histories can expand radical political thought
screaming your tits off over imaginary grievances
today by provincializing and deconstructing regnant Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern imaginaries of collective and polyarchic power.
Just say 'Lord Macaulay- an elite White Male Historian- invented the dick. Dicks cause heterosexuality & RAPE of the Environment. By deconstructing concept of Dynasty we can scotomise the sodality of the socioproctology of the sclerosis of the thing I talked about in my next paper'.
Connecting Europe and North India:
The connecting was done by the Royal Navy and Merchant Marine. What Political Agents or ICS officers did in India didn't matter very much. All that mattered was whether expenditure on the Royal Navy more than paid for itself.
James Tod and Alfred Lyall on Rajput Polities
Tod favoured Rajputs over Marathas but it was the latter who were spread more widely. Tod left India in 1823. Lyall came to India in 1856 and had a long career there.
In the nineteenth century, Britain commanded the largest empire known in world history and was the economic powerhouse of global capitalism.
Because it was the greatest naval power by far.
David Cannadine’s classic Ornamentalism shows how the empire was based on constructing or intensifying local hierarchies of power,
that didn't matter at all. There are many ways to skin a cat. What was cheapest or easiest was what prevailed in a particular place. This varied greatly and was of no great significance whatsoever.
with monarchy, aristocracy, and land-ownership providing basic organizing principles. The colonial Indian model of the princely states provided the exemplar par excellence for engineering similar regimes across late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Malaya, Africa, and the Arab world.
No. Britain did the things the way they had always been done though, over time, there was some streamlining for the sake of economy.
Analysing British discourses about India reveals the material stakes underlying the globalization of the concept of ‘dynasty’.
India had plenty of very ancient dynasties as well as some very new ones.
In India, Sanskritic and Islamicate terms which are today translated as ‘dynasty’, traditionally possessed a wide range of meanings, moving from broad collectives – with thousands or even millions of potential members – to narrower structures of ruling lineage.
The English word 'Dynasty' may refer to an extended family which owns a particular big enterprise or which inherited a fortune from a billionaire ancestor. Alternatively, it may mean a particular Royal House- more particularly the line of succession. In India, by 'the Dynasty' we generally mean the Gandhi family where, by happenstance, primogeniture has prevailed.
Thus the Perso-Islamic term ‘khandan’ was used for Mughal rulers as well as for local lineages of humbler status.
Smith may say he belongs to the House of Smith and Jones may say he belongs to the House of Jones. Similarly Mr. Choudhury may say he belongs to Choudhury khandan and Mr. Patel may say he belongs to Patel khandan
The Sanskrit-origin ‘vamsha’/‘rajavamsha’ is used to translate ‘dynasty’ today in Bengali, Hindi, and most other Indian languages.
vamsha means lineage. People related to each other tend to live in the same House. Thus House of Smith means the same thing as 'Smith lineage'.
Yet, this is a slippery translation. Vamsha, in Sanskrit, originally meant ‘the bamboo cane or any cane’, and acquired the meaning of ‘the line of a pedigree or genealogy (from its resemblance to the succession of joints in a bamboo)’. It has been used to refer to group identities of divergent width, which the nineteenth-century British Orientalist Monier Monier-Williams struggled to capture: ‘lineage, race, family, stock, […] esp. a noble race, a dynasty of kings, a list of teachers &c.’34 Monier-Williams translated the comparable Sanskritic term ‘kula’ as ‘a herd, troop, flock, assemblage, multitude, number, […] a race, family, community, tribe, caste, set, company […]’.35
Monier-Williams knew that any term in Sanskrit had a cognate in almost every language of Europe. Moreover, any type of land-tenure or social unit found in India could be found to some degree or other in Europe. Indeed, gavelkind in Kent was only abolished in 1925.
India’s riverine plains,
are like the riverine plains of Europe or, indeed, England.
hotbeds of agrarian state formation,
& Imperial formations going back over 2000 years- just like Europe
have for centuries been bordered and criss-crossed by dense forests, grasslands, deserts, hills, and mountains.
like Europe.
These harboured pastoral-nomadic, shifting cultivator, and forest-oriented communities which were often only loosely touched by state power.
like Europe.
More generally, across the subcontinent, organized state-based and communitarian hierarchies coexisted with plural sinews of power and pathways of individual and collective autonomy and mobility.
like Europe.
Banerjee doesn't seem to get tha England was only ahead
This explains why the concept of raj/raja-, as in ‘rajavamsha’ – though cognate with rex and Reich – has traditionally been deployed in India by a spectrum of social actors, not just by a sovereign monarch.
Plenty of ordinary people have the surname King. Queenie was once quite a common girl's name. So what?
Terms like ‘Rajput’ (literally, son of a raja) or ‘Kshatriya’ have been appropriated, since precolonial centuries, by broad collectives commanding land and manpower.
So what? I'm welcome to change my name by deed poll to Charles Rex. I don't because I feel that as a member of the Royal Iyers (I live quite close to a Royal Borough) it is beneath me to follow the example of Cunty Iyers who live in fucking Chelsea.
These terms encoded warrior peasant and ‘tribal’ desire for social mobility.
Because they were like people in Europe or America.
These actors frequently drew their ancestry from gods and kings.
As did Caesar
Since the sixteenth century, Mughal emperors and collaborating Rajput rulers often sought to restrict regal power and identity,
Whereas, in Europe, anybody could claim to be the King.
eclipsing the authority of wider kin groups and communities.
Their authority was expressed through Chieftans but subordinated to the King or Emperor with the superior army. England, in the Seventeenth Century, cut off the head of the King and increased the power of the Commons over subsequent centuries. No such thing happened in India.
This trajectory paralleled interventions by state-builders across early modern Eurasia, and was bolstered by shared frameworks of oceanic commerce and monetization, bureaucratization, and military technologies, especially gunpowder.
All of which pre-existed.
However, from the late seventeenth century, peasant-led rebellions, like those of the Marathas, Sikhs, and Jats,
were like the military rise of tribes like the Gujjars, Rashtrakutas, Nayaks etc.
caused the collapse of the Mughal empire.
Invaders like Nadir & Abdali dealth the death blow.
These rebellions re-dispersed vocabularies of rulership and lineage power.
The same vocabularies were recycled. The Rajputs were merely the ruling class of previous tribal groupings.
For Europeans to conceptualize these regional agrarian polities through the optics of monarchy (‘rule of one’) or dynasty, often amounted to misrecognition.
No. Europeans had Kings but also had Republics of different sorts as well areas where Clan Chieftans ruled the roost.
Voltaire was thus perspicacious when he observed about the Marathas in 1773: They choose themselves a chief [chef] whom they do not obey except during war. And yet they obey him very badly, the Europeans have called king [ont appellé Roi] this captain of brigands; so much one lavishes this name.
One could say the ay the same thing of the Cossacks.
James Tod, a Scottish-origin officer who had served as (the British) Political Agent to the Western Rajput States, also detected such misrecognition. Tod wanted to convince the British that they should rely on the Rajputs for military support and political collaboration.
This was foolish. Tod's own account of Princess Krishna Kumari- forced to kill herself at the age of 16 because a dispute as to which Rajput Prince should get to marry her- showed the Rajputs were useless. Some Maratha Princes weren't.
Indeed, Rajput manpower became a mainstay of the colonial army:
Rajputs were 7 to 10 percent of the Army. Sikhs were double that.
a subcontinental, and eventually global, pillar of imperial domination. Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han (1829-32), published in London, emphasized the ties that connected Rajput rulers in northern India to the broader populace, enabling patriotic bonds to emerge.
Tod was wrong. Rajputs fought each other. The Marathas and Sikhs and Gurkhas and Pindaris posed a bigger headache for the Brits.
Later, Hindu-Indian nationalists, reading Tod’s account of the Rajputs as well as the Scottishnationalist novels and poetry of Walter Scott, identified common strands in Scottish and Rajput/Indian narratives: especially patriotic resistance directed against ‘foreign’ rulers like the English (in Scotland) or Muslim monarchs (in India).
But the Scots became loyal as did the Rajputs. Tod's interest was in Rajasthan but Rajputs are found all over North India and some royal houses in the South. It is believed that the chieftans of different agricultural or pastoral tribes rose into the ranks of the Rajputs. Another theory is that the provincial or district level administrators of various Empires who later established their own kingdoms gave rise to this aristocratic class.
Scott and Tod, and their Indian admirers, attributed this patriotic resistance to a social organization which coalesced around warrior clans and chiefs who inhabited castles and highlands, and were celebrated in bardic poetry.
Bards celebrated anybody who could pay. The bardic history of the Maratha Empire is preserved primarily through Powadas (heroic oral ballads) and Bakhars (prose historical chronicles). Composed and performed by poet-bards known as Shahirs, At a later point such compositions inspired freedom fighters like the Savarkar brothers.
Indian nationalists were ultimately inspired by such narratives to rebel against British rule. In Tod’s own view, the British were damaging the Rajput warrior clan ethos through new ‘monarchical principles’ that supported rulers but disempowered the multitudes.
Historically, this is accurate. The Mughals had great Rajput generals. The chieftains of Scottish Highland Clans, awarded high aristocratic titles, became part of the British ruling class. The extraordinary valour of soldiers from Highland Regiments proved a great benefit to the British Crown.
He testified in 1832 before the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company (which reviewed Indian matters on the eve of the framing of the Charter Act of 1833): Already have the evil effects of our alliances received practical illustration, in a variety of ways, in almost every state of Rajpootana. The first effect is the abolition of all those wholesome checks which restrained the passions of their princes; for, applying our own monarchical principles, we recognise only the immediate power with whom we treated, and whom we engage to support against all enemies, internal and external. Being thus freed from the fear of a re-action amongst his feudatory kinsmen, the prince may pursue the dictates of a blind revenge, assured that no neighbour prince dare give sanctuary to his victims; or, if an insatiate avarice prompt him to visit the merchant and cultivator with contributions or exorbitant taxes on their labour, the sufferers have not even emigration left as a refuge. Marwar and Jessulmer have powerfully exemplified this, our alliance having completely neutralized all the checks that avarice or tyranny had to fear from the hatred of their chiefs or subjects. The ancient balance of power, which often ended in the deposal or death of a tyrant, we have thus completely destroyed. […]
Which is why the British could rule India. Tod was a silly man. On the other hand, as British power grew, the Political Agent could restrain sociopathic Princes, or get them deposed.
we turned a deaf year to the remonstrance of the chief vassals of Marwar when expelled from their estates and country by their prince; and the minister of Jessulmer was allowed to pursue the plunder of his subjects with impunity; but no sooner does the Raja of Bikaner apply to the paramount power to put down disaffection, than the aid denied to his kindred chiefs and subjects is promised to the prince. It never occurs to us that rebellion may be justifiable; it is enough that tumult exists, and that it must be repressed.
The answer to this problem was obvious. As British power grew, Political Agents could push the Princely States in a positive direction. Thanks to Pax Brittanica, Princes began choosing banias (people from the mercantile caste) and, later on, lawyers, as their Dewans. However, as Mahatma Gandhi (whose father and grandfather had been Dewans) said, many Princes lived to rape.
The British supported native rulers in exploiting cultivators and merchants, aiding them militarily and suppressing rebellions.
Rebellions led to new rulers exploiting all and sundry. Why did the Brits not abolish private property and ban heterosexual dicks? Why, all over the world, do we still see men putting their penises into vaginas and owning property and passing it down to their children? Historians should eat their own shit so as to protest against such atrocities.
No comments:
Post a Comment