Abstract
The third chapter continues to study the makings of colonial knowledge by focusing on the transmission of colonial knowledge, as well as by investigating how Sufism is placed in it, or not. It argues that the British used their knowledge of other parts of India and imposed those frames on Sindh, such as the Brahmanical caste system. The transmission of colonial knowledge was diffused through various means: education, official reports compiled by the British officers, and commercial and independent publications. In the first phase, there was no real policy in terms of education. The Christian religious organizations were the first to open schools. The most active was the Church Missionary Society (CMS). It was only in the 1870s that the British government, in this case, the Sindh Commissioner, began to take charge of publications. The implementation of the censuses from the 1870s onward was a turning point in the colonial knowledge of India. The gazetteer was supposed to summarize the British colonial worldview of Sindh and thus, it was an essential tool for the colonizers. Over the years, the structure of the gazetteer did follow the evolution of the nascent social sciences, including anthropology. Here again, the chapter uses untapped sources, such as “private” reports of the Commissioner, and reports published by the CMS that have never been used before.
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Notes
- 1.
The Naqshbandis belong to one of the most influential Sufi order in South Asia. Usually, they strictly follow the sharia, and ban music. For an introduction to Sufism in Sindh, see Boivin 2016.
- 2.
The relationship between the Nanakpanth and the Khalsa and its evolution will be studied in the ninth chapter.
- 3.
In North India, Pernau also shows the closed link between colonial power and the missions (Pernau 2013: 306–307).
- 4.
John Jacob (1812–1858) was Commander of the Sindh Irregular Horse from 1841 to 1856. See Cook 2016.
- 5.
In 1948, the Jai Hind College was created in Bombay by professors of the D. J. College who had had to leave Pakistan. They wanted to duplicate it in India. See Bhavnani 2014.
- 6.
In his listing of colonial ethnographic works, Fuller did mention census reports, handbooks of tribes and castes, and the gazetteers, but he did not really deal with the gazetteer, in his study of the building of colonial knowledge on India (Fuller 2016: 221).
- 7.
A text having the force of an edict or ordinance in India.
- 8.
A tabut is a replica of a coffin that is paraded during the Moharram celebrations. It symbolizes the people of the Prophet family through his grandson Husayn who were killed during the battle of Karbala in 680.
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Boivin, M. (2020). The Transmission of Colonial Knowledge. In: The Sufi Paradigm and the Makings of a Vernacular Knowledge in Colonial India. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41991-2_3
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