HIMACHAL PRADESH NATIONAL LAW

UNIVERSITY

A Critical Review on Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge

SUBMITTED TO : SUBMITTED BY:

Dr. Amit Chaturvedi Aditya Chaturvedi

(Assistant Prof. Sociology) Roll No. 1020192011
BA LLB (2nd Sem)
For a colonial power to maintain its dominion status over a country, it requires not only
the military power and the capacity to coerce the voices of the masses but also have the
knowledge of the local, how they developed and what their thoughts are. Since the advent
of the Britishers in India in the form of East India Trading Company, it has been trying to
know more about our culture, customs, language, society, et cetera. Starting from the war
of Plassey their zeal to know has been increased for their administrative convenience.
Cohn has used the traditional orientalist method to do his research about India, for which
he has used various modalities such as that of Museological Modality, Histographic
Modality, The Survey Modality, Enumerative Modality, Surveillance Modality,
Observational Modality, and the Investigative Modality in the Post-Colonial World in this
text. Cohn has shown the discrimination of the orientalists against India in their writings,
by giving the examples like, “It seems India doesn’t have a history of its while at the
same time comparing the Sanskrit language with other ancient languages”.

Since the advent of the Britishers they have thought that all the objects has a value or
price thus they created various posts such as dalal, bania, pandit, vakil, et cetera. These
posts were created according to their specialization in various fields such as law,
accounts, interpreters, and many other such posts. Among all these tasks, the task of
translation due to the presence of a number of local and official languages, translation of
texts was a tedious job. The Britishers have a long history of maintenance of a high level
of secrecy in its tasks, as a result trusting the local people in highly classified negotiation
and meeting became a serious issue for them. Cohn has very eloquently shown us the
same through Thomas Roe’s account at Jahangir’s Court. As a result they started to learn
the local languages such as Persian, Hindustani, Bengali, Urdu so that they don’t need to
rely over the natives, who may leak the state secrets. Later the same issues were faced by
the courts, where Pandits and Maulvis translate the law, while working as lawyers, which
had been defined in their religious texts. The Judges used to think that these native
lawyers use their inability to translate the texts, hence utilizing it intheir favour and
destroying the true meaning of justice. Thus, they started to translate the texts into Persian
and English along with the help of local translators such as Pandits and Maulvis.

After gaining the adequate knowledge of various native languages they started to codify
the laws and forming rational basis of providing justice. As a result William Jones
decided to make a digest containing the laws with the help of Pandits and Maulvis and
codify the law. During this process the Britishers realised that India already has a legal
 system which was guided by Manusmritis made by the sages, but it has been on the
decline since the medieval period, hence requires a modern system to accommodate with
the modern needs. The Britishers first formulated the land revenue system which for
which they used the scientific methods of calculating the amount of produce at a
particular place according to the fertility of the land. In the year 1772, Warren Hastings
the Governor General of Bengal formed the post of Collector for the purpose of
maintenance of law and order in a province and to collect the revenues. During the
process of formation of digest the Britishers thought that India did not have a past and
have been stagnant at a point since time immemorial, hence they concluded the best gift
would be to present them with a history. The beginning of searching of India history lead
to the formation of an Archaeological Survey Commission in India whose job was to
search for India’s past through Histographical Modality and Museological Modality,
consequently we started learning the value of objects and their relation in our life.

For the sake of showing themselves as superior the Britishers had also maintained the
rules for the clothes of the natives. The natives had been directed to wear a gentleman’s
clothes in courts and at official places 1, while the Princes were directed to come in their
traditional clothes while coming for an official gathering. Taking the experience from
Thomas Roe’s experiences in Jahangir’s Court the clothes and Jewellery were considered
as the best gifts by the Britishers, which they took forward in the relationships with Indian
rulers. During the Non-Cooperation Movement this same cloth became a reason of agony
for Britishers, people stated wearing Gandhi cap to their work places like Court Rooms,
Offices, Schools, and Colleges so as to show their content towards Britishers. This became
a serious and un-controllable problem for them.

In this book Cohn has not only dealt with the cultural dimensions of colonialism but also
related these works with the repressive and imperial functionaries to rule over the subjects
in an eloquent manner. How they imposed their own conceived history of India over India
and how the law which is formed and followed till now, under the name of India was
formed for convenience of Britishers to rule over us. How they dictated their own
definitions of etiquettes, dress code, education, and customs and now we can’t even
imagine anything beyond it. How they made us believe that we do not have any history of
our own we blindly believed it all and now, we have a history which has been written by

1
Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge- Bernard S. Cohn (1996) Page-129; paragraph-2, line- 6.
Though it hasn’t been stated directly for the Princes, but can easily deduce the same from the text.
those who didn’t even knew the meaning of word civilization when we had our own
towns, cities and religion.