"Allot me a Father" A History of Family, Private Property and the State in colonial Himachal Pradesh

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08/09/2016

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CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE Jawaharlal Nehru University SEMINAR SERIES ANIKET ALAM Visiting Professor, Centre for Humanities, International Institute for Information Technology – Hyderabad on "Allot me a Father" A History of Family, Private Property and the State in colonial Himachal Pradesh In one of the early years of the second decade of the 20th century, H W Emerson, the Commissioner of the Simla Hill States of the Punjab province, was approached by a young man with a surprising plaint; he wanted Emerson to allot him a father. He belonged to a family where lands, animals, forests, pastures, wives, children and homestead(s) were all owned collectively by the brothers. In this case the brothers decided to partition their joint holdings into individual ones and had divided their lands, cattle and goats, homes, wives and the other children among themselves; but none had taken this young man. Thus his plea. The plea of this young man and a few other cases of marriage dispute in the Western Himalayas will be used as a window to understand the changes in property relations, and the associated forms of family and state power,which came about after the establishment of British rule. An attempt will be made to find clues to how the local peasantry was adapting to the new legal regime of property being put in place through the land and forest settlements, and the commodification of land and labour. I will conclude by suggesting that a more regionally grounded look at the historical specificities of change during the colonial period will help to better understand the "diversity" as well as the "unity" we face in India today. Thursday, 8 September, 2016 ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Aniket Alam is a historian who also has extensive experience as a journalist, editor and publisher. After graduating from the University of Delhi (1992) he joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University for his masters in Modern Indian History (1994). He received his doctorate for a thesis on the history of colonialism in, and its impact on, the western Himalayas from JNU (2002). His book Becoming India: Western Himalayas Under British Rule was published by Cambridge University Press, Delhi under their imprint Foundation Books in 2008. He has presented his research at seminars and conferences in Aligarh Muslim University, Asiatic Society Calcutta, Indian Institute of Advanced Study Shimla, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kings College London, and the University of Copenhagen, among others. He has conducted numerous workshops on academic writing in the social sciences at universities and research institutions in India. He has worked as a journalist with The Hindu newspaper and was executive editor of the Economic and Political Weekly till July 2016. He has also worked as national programme officer of the SwissAgency for Development and Cooperation and as coordinator of Panos International's network of eight organisations. At present he is working on a book on the historiography of the Indian nationand is a visiting professor at the Centre for Humanities of the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. A collection of his writings, both academic and journalistic, are available on his blogs http://leftwrite.wordpress.com and http://aniketalam.wordpress.com. He is married with two daughters and lives in Hyderabad.