Bernard cohn- Summary of the essay

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Overview

Bernard Cohn, Professor Emeritus in Anthropology and a pioneering scholar of the British colonial period of India.

Barnard Cohn was interested in questions of history and power during the colonial period long before other anthropologists were studying those questions.

Cohn’s work provided a new understanding of India’s caste system. His work revealed that although the caste system had existed in India before the British took control, the system took on new meaning when the British established laws to codify it.

Cohn showed that the British imagined India as a very hierarchical society and used laws and rituals to control the country that made it more hierarchical

His work influenced a wide range of scholarship in both disciplines, especially in studies of South Asia and of Colonial societies.

He wrote and published extensively on a wide range of topics related to India, including the titles Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (1996), An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (1987) and India: The Social Anthropology of a Civilization (1971)

He conducted fieldwork in India between 1952 and 1953 as a Social Science Research Council World Area Training Fellow and as a Fulbright Fellow.

Cohn conducted his fieldwork in a North Indian village and concentrated on an ethnography of the disadvantaged castes and their relation to other castes in the village.

He returned to India for archival fieldwork between 1958 and 1959 as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow.

archival work on such topics as British colonialism, including the superimposition of the British legal system on the Indian system, the Indian census, as well as Indian clothing and textiles.

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Orientalism- Edward said

The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 is commonly viewed as inaugurating trends which have ever since been rather dominant, howsoever widespread the uneasiness and, indeed, resistance which Said’s ideas have increasingly generated. Said argued that, alongside their military triumphs and economic conquests of “the Orient”, Europeans created an entire body of knowledge which enabled them to represent the Orient; such representations, moreover, far from having any necessary relationship to the Orient, reveal more about Europeans than they do about the ‘natives’ and their social institutions, cultural practices, and the like. Orientalism is, in short, a style of thought, the “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient,” [1] and by means of Orientalism, Europeans sought to categorize, analyze, dissect, measure, dominate, rule, and instruct the native. The capsule summaries of Orientalism, when undertaken in reference to the “Saidian” frameworks which have informed the study of Indian history, do not fail to mention that in Orientalism Said only very infrequently had occasion to refer to Indian history, [2] and that, notwithstanding Said’s enthusiastic advocacy of subaltern history nearly a decade later, [3] Said had only a peripheral interest in Indian history or even India. Nonetheless, Said became a figure of paramount importance for those who sought to understand British India not through military history, policy studies, and economic history, but rather through, in the language of Foucault, the ‘discursive formations’ that were put into place by the colonial regime and, subsequently, the nationalist elites.

From the standpoint of Indian historiography, Said’s work had at least one other, usually less commonly noted, consequence whose reverberations would eventually be felt deeply in the India study circles in the American academy. At least a decade before the publication of Orientalism, Bernard S. Cohn, then professor of history and anthropology at the University of Chicago, had already anticipated the arguments of Foucault and Said in his work on representations of Indian society. [4] Said, to take one example, also described Orientalism as a kind of textualist fetish. [5] The Orientalist scholar, who generally began his career as a philologist, viewed the societies that fell under his gaze as easily appropriable through their texts, indeed as societies that perforce had to conform to texts, particularly those that, in the Orientalist view, were authoritative for native people. In a lengthy piece entitled “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture”, Cohn, pointing to the extraordinary importance that Orientalists attached to such texts as the Manusmriti as “accurate guides to the culture and society of the Hindus”, observed that “the acceptance of a textual view of the society by the orientalists also led to a picture of Indian society as being static, timeless, and spaceless.” [6] (1). Alongwith military triumphs and economic conquests of “the Orient”,the occident created an entire body of

knowledge. (2).The representations of the orient reveal more about Europeans than they do about the ‘natives’ and their

social institutions & cultural practices.(3). Aim was to categorize, analyze, dissect, measure, dominate, rule, and instruct the

native. (4)extraordinary importance attached to such texts as the Manusmriti as “accurate guides to the culture and society

of the Hindus. (5)observed that the ACCEPTENCE OF THE TEXTAL VIEW OF THE SOCIETY. (6). It led to a picture of Indian

society as being static, timeless, and spaceless.

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In the same essay, Cohn adverted to the empirical and ethnographic knowledge that the colonial state and its functionaries developed about the Indian ‘village’, the ‘caste’ system, and tribal India, and showed how their ideas became part of what Foucault termed a “discursive formation”, [7] or what we might term a dominant style of thought that accommodated seemingly disparate elements and dispersed forms.

Indeed, by the time that Orientalism appeared in 1978, Cohn had published a substantial body of work that offered a visible demonstration of how colonial knowledge produced a certain idea of India. In the introduction to Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Cohn described systematically the various “modalities” by means of which the British established an account of Indian society.

The “epistemological projects” of the state extended to the creation of grammars and dictionaries of Indian languages, map-making and museum displays of Indian artefacts, attempts at thorough histories of the Indian past, the institution of the census, and the creation of such organizations as the Archaeological Survey, the Trigonometrical Survey, the Botanical Survey, and so on.

Many of Cohn’s insights, for which he found the scholarly essay to be more than an adequate vehicle, were embraced by scholars and students who worked these insights into full-length studies, even when they did not agree with Cohn.

Mathew Edney’s Mapping an Empire is a work in this mode, [11] a study of the use of cartographic knowledge by the British in India to render their territories familiar to them, extend their hegemony over the natives, and frame an image of an India unified under the colonial dispensation. Scientific cartography was conceived by the British as a palpable demonstration of representational practices that would give rise to a “Modern India”.

In a similar vein, the work of Richard Davis owes much to Cohn’s enumeration of the “museological modality” and the manner in which images take on new meanings. In Lives of Indian Images, [12] Davis offers a consideration of Indian art objects -- the gates of the famed Somanatha temple, Tipu’s Tiger at the Victoria & Albert in London, among others -- and the cultural politics of the display of such trophies of power.

. Among his earliest students was Ronald Inden, who became Cohn’s colleague at the University of Chicagoand has, in turn, guided a generation of students. In Imagining India (1990), Inden offered a systematic account of how arcane representations of India were put into place by European and later Indian scholars.

One principal purpose that the construction of India as unchanging, static, and mystical served was to transplant agency onto the Europeans. This knowledge of India -- of caste, village republics, Indian communities, Hindu superstition, Vedic ritual -- did not merely enable the British to know the natives and dominate them, but rather furnished the West, by way of opposition, with its own modern genealogy in which ideas of individualism, scientific reason, and the market economy reigned supreme.

Nicholas Dirks, In the Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, [14] Dirks showed the shifting position of caste, conventionally theorized as eternal and unchanging, in the small South Indian kingdom of Puddukottai. The hegemony of the colonial state was experienced as its power to regulate temples and redefine this regulation as a form of religious emancipation, and to will its dispossession of customary land rights as the introduction of progressive property rights.

The Indian sociologist G. S. Ghurye had as early as 1932 suggested that one consequence of the 1857 rebellion was the perception, among colonial officials, that “the safety of the British domination in India was very closely connected with keeping the Indian people divided on the lines of caste.”

This insight informed Cohn’s work on caste, which stressed the British role in the reification, solidification, and politicization of this institution.

Dirks’ most recent book, Castes of Mind (2001), extends Cohn’s principal argument, one contrary to nearly the entire body of conventional Orientalist scholarship, namely the modernity of the institution of caste. Under the British, as Dirks shows, caste became the totalizing feature of Indian society under which were subsumed the diverse forms of India’s social organization.

His work, in its various phases, has not only has remained of singular importance to two generation of students, but also became, in a manner of speaking, the medium through which subaltern studies was introduced into the American academy.

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References

https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Culture/Intellectuals/cohn.html

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/031211/cohn-obit.shtml