Reading Information

Cohen, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Chapter Three: “Laws and the Colonial State in India”

Overview

In chapter three of his book, Cohn talks about the British colonizing India and figuring out how to rule over that territory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It starts with the description and details about the East India Company in India, its importance and functions. It became the center of rule in India and acquired many of the attributes of a state. The East India Company could wage war, make peace, raise taxes, and administer justice to its employees and to some Indians. Further, Cohn talks about Warren Hastings, who was appointed in 1772 as a governor-general and was instructed by the Court of Directors to place the government of Bengal territories “on a stable footing” (Cohn, 60). He played a big role in the development of understanding the Indians in order to penetrate into their culture and rule over them. The rest of the chapter proves that and talks about their (the British) ways of finding a solution for a challenge they faced by taking over India: the differences between India and the previous nations that they had invaded before and a problem of ruling a country that had a long and eventful history.

Cohn also tells us about Sir William Jones and H.T. Colebrooke, who were scholars and cooperated with the British (worked for East India Company) in order to find the authentic Hindu law, translate it into Persian from Sanskrit and then into English, so that the British judges could read it and make their rulings based on that. This way they thought they kept the Indian culture and spirit in English law. It tells and shows us how deep the process of colonizing was in the past and that there is much more to that than just an invaded territory.

Keywords

Despot, to govern despotically – to rule “as a master over a slave”.

East India Company – existed in 1600–1858; it was originally a private company granted a trade monopoly with the East Indies by Queen Elizabeth I. and later got control over much of modern India between 1757 and 1858.

Hindu Law – the code of laws applied to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs in British India.

Argument

“The people of India, unlike the Indians and slaves of the New World had an ancient civilization and forms of local self-governance that were stable and deeply entrenched” (Cohn, 58). Cohn talks about this challenge for the British and how they could over-rule the old Indian government, he also says that Hastings’s goal was to help British identify what was specifically “Indian” and wanted to come up with a system of rules, which would be a good fit for Indian culture.

Evidence

As evidence Cohn’s quoted Sir William Jones directly from his letter to Edmund Burke: “British law could not become the law of India because that would be counter to the very nature of an established legal system”, “a system of liberty, forced upon a people invincibly attached to opposite habits, would in truth be a system of tyranny” (Cohn, 68).

Another evidence. This is a reliable source of evidence, since it was taken from a letter and it proves the idea that the British needed to better understand Indian culture and society in order to implement their laws. Cohn also references Robert Orme’s description of the process of the administration of justice in India from his work “General Idea of the Government and People of Indostan”.

Historiographical Debate

“I am not sure if and how the author is situating him/herself in a wider scholarly debate.”

Contribution to Our Understanding of Colonial Rule

In his chapter three, Cohn is focusing on law and the colonial state. It contributed to my understanding of how the law should be and was implemented in the colonized India. By reading about the instrumentalities of Rule in colonial India, the despotic model, the classical model of the Indian state and the ideas of Hasting’s, I learnt about these concepts in more depth.

This chapter also helps to understand what is meant by an epistemological space, why it was important to “conquer” it and how the British decided to do it. While describing the difference between India and other lands that the British have conquest, Cohn states about this: “the people of India, unlike the Indians and slaves of the New World had an ancient civilization and forms of local self-governance that were stable and deeply entrenched”(Cohn 58). To me, this chapter showed that the British put a lot of weight on translation, because they believed that this is the way to explore and understand the real Indian culture in order to implement their laws.