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From South Asia to World History through C. A. Bayly's Work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2019
Extract
Using the term “legacy” for a career as productive, insightful, and pathbreaking as Chris Bayly's is doubtless an understatement. The movement in his publications from the transitional world in the Indian subcontinent leading to British imperialism, through aspects of high empire in India, to world history through both case studies and broader context for grasping the implications of a changing world, provides valuable analyses for all of us, if not a pattern many could replicate. Perhaps what ought to be noted here is the experience, common to many of us working across a very broad range of problematics and focal points, to have found Bayly there, before us.
Keywords
- Type
- Forum—C. A. Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015: Interpretations from Asian Studies
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- Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2019
References
1 Bayly, C. A., Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015: Global Connections and Comparisons (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley Blackwell, 2018)Google Scholar.
2 Bayly, C. A., Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
3 Bayly, C. A., ed., The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990)Google Scholar.
4 Bayly, C. A., Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
5 See, for instance, Ranger, Terence, “African Reactions to the Imposition of Colonial Rule in East and Central Africa,” in Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960, Vol. 1, The History and Politics of Colonialism, 1870–1914, eds. Gann, L. H. and Duignan, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 292–324Google Scholar; Smith, Tony, The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain, and the Late-Industrializing World since 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 5Google Scholar: “Decolonization,” 85–137.
6 Bayly, C. A., “Two Colonial Revolts: The Java War, 1825–30, and the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857–59,” in Two Colonial Empires: Comparative Essays on the History of India and Indonesia in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Bayly, C. A. and Kolff, D. H. A. (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 These are two volumes in the same series, treating world history sequentially, published within the Blackwell History of the World series; they include Bayly's earlier volume, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), as well as the volume on the twentieth century under discussion here.
8 See R. I. Moore, “Series Editor's Acknowledgements,” in Bayly, Remaking the Modern World, op. cit. note 1, xi: “[Bayly] died suddenly in April 2015, leaving it unfinished.…”
9 To be clear, this is a lament regarding Bayly's untimely demise; it is most emphatically not a criticism of the extraordinary efforts for the field accomplished by Susan Bayly and those with whom she worked, identified in the series preface and acknowledgements.
10 Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism, op. cit. note 5.
11 It is eerie how so many developments in individual countries—around, for instance, populist nationalism and the resultant fraying of the European Union—had not emerged when Bayly put these analyses forward.
12 For India, for instance, see essays in two special issues: (1) in the journal South Asia, vol. 37, no. 3, September 2014, “The Visual Turn in South Asian Studies,” edited by Sandria B. Freitag; and (2) in the issue of South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 11, 2015, “Contemporary Lucknow: Life with ‘Too Much History,’” edited by Raphael Susewind and Christopher B. Taylor.
13 At a minimum, we might note two references Bayly makes, in conclusion, to what he regards as seminal, “iconic” images (p. 332): the (in)famous image of the hydrogen bomb exploding over the Pacific in 1954; and the image that provides the ability to “see” the earth from the moon, taken during the first moon landing in 1971, a viewpoint endlessly reproduced over the remainder of the century. Curiously, however, neither of these images are reproduced, nor are they discussed as such by Bayly, though he uses references to them to discuss “a range of creativity” in literature, art, space exploration, and more.
14 Many popular-culture images were free or very inexpensive to the consumers who took them home. Either intermediaries, such as shopkeepers, paid for them to give away free, or costs were drastically reduced when those creating cheaply made versions of “bazaar art,” such as postcards, placed them within reach of poorer purchasers.
15 See the following discussion that builds on Daniel Miller, Christoph Asendorf, and Christopher Pinney; citations follow.
16 Not least of importance here is that the desire to “acquire” can be reflected in picturing items that the ostensible consumer could not actually purchase, such as posters of residences or props within a domestic interior that are far beyond the reach of those who display them.
17 See, for example, Miller, Daniel, A Theory of Shopping (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, and several other works by this author. While not intended for the context discussed here, his observations fit especially well consumers located not only in the West but in imperialized areas, and thus contribute to our goal of showing how analyses connected to consumption could form part of the basis for a non-Eurocentric analysis. For an overview of complementary studies, see, for instance, Storey, John's Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
18 Miller, ibid., 113 et seq. Parenthetical numbers added.
19 Asendorf, Christoph, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, translated by Reneau, Don (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
20 Ibid., 5, 6, 192.
21 Ibid., 47, 61; emphasis added.
22 Christopher Pinney, “Nationalist Icons: Visual Propaganda from the Cow Protection Movement to the Indian National Army,” presentation (1994): 9.
23 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar.
24 One powerful characteristic of the visual is its accessibility not only to illiterate viewers, but also to those with literacy in languages other than the one(s) used in areas where images are disseminated and consumed.
25 These two arguments—about the significance of technology, and about the imagined elsewhere—are implicitly elaborated most effectively in Pinney's recent Lessons From Hell: Printing and Punishment in India (Marg 69, no. 3, March 2018). While not using the term “imagined elsewhere” directly, Pinney's discussion of how “hell” and, to a lesser extent, “heaven” are grappled with by Hindu consumers of kharni bharni (reap as you sow) punishment posters makes clear how the larger dynamic of elaborating beyond dharmic understandings to incorporate these “elsewheres” was probably influenced by Christian and Islamic cultural referents.
26 Gell, Alfred, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
27 Pinney, Christopher and Thomas, Nicholas, eds., Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment (Oxford: Berg, 2001)Google Scholar.