Colonial Corruption and Caste: A Study of Late Nineteenth Century India

SCIS invites you to a seminar by Dr Anubha Anushree titled Colonial Corruption and Caste: A Study of Late Nineteenth Century India on 27 March 2025.

The Southern Centre for Inequality Studies invites you to a hybrid seminar by Dr Anubha Anushree who will discuss Colonial Corruption and Caste: A Study of Late Nineteenth Century India on 27 March 2025, at 12:30 to 14:00 (SAST). 

Abstract:
This presentation considers a particularly flagrant example of corruption in 1888 colonial Bombay, involving a powerful English officer Arthur Crawford and several of his subordinates (Mamlatdars). The principal argument is to demonstrate how the so-called British professional culture ironically expanded opportunities for corruption. Unlike the regulation of corruption in the early half of the nineteenth century in colonial India, which was directed at controlling corruption in instances of colonial contact with the natives, this chapter locates corruption within the colonial rational administrative structure. It argues that corruption was not just a matter of professional lapse but also a reflection of the homoerotic intimacies such administrative structures engendered. 

The paper argues that the colonial treatment of Crawford-Mamlatdar corruption was informed by the anxieties to produce imperial distinction and supremacy. At the same time, the Indian challenge to the dismissal of officials signaled the selective emergence of upper caste and bourgeois notions of public virtue, which essentially acknowledged the colonial state as an apparatus of moral and affective control. Premised on a fantastical moral high ground, both these views failed to recognize the complex moral agency and subjectivities of the Mamlatdars themselves.

About the speaker:
Dr. Anubha Anushree teaches at the Department of English, Rajdhani College, University of Delhi. She is also the Editor (Asia) of the journal Review of Democracy. Before joining Delhi University, she was a lecturer in the COLLEGE Program at Stanford University, where she also earned a PhD in History. Her
dissertation, “The Moral Republic: Corruption in Colonial and Postcolonial India,” examines issues of political trust and public mobilisation in colonial and independent India. 

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