‘The Cow is Still the Most Important Figure in Indian Politics!’: Religion,Imperial Culture and the Shaping of Indian Political Reform in the 1930s

This essay assesses the impact of imperial culture, particularly constructions of India and hinduism, on British responses to the Indian nationalist movement in the 1930s. The essay draws on personal and governmental papers, paying special attention to the language and vocabulary employed by British policy makers concerned with Indian affairs. The major issue addressed here is the British presumption that the 1935 Government of India Act, a plan for a federated India with British central control, would defuse nationalist agitation. Such a sanguine view of this proposal seemed misplaced, given the popular success of the nationalists, especially Gandhi, and given the explicit demands of Indians for full self‐government. However, such an optimistic assessment drew on presumptions about Indian political and social behaviour, and especially on conceptions of hinduism. Policy makers in Britain and India argued along well‐established lines, that hinduism inculcated moral and physical weakness, among other deficiencies, and that a British offer of compromise would attract many Indians who feared continuing confrontation with the Raj. Moreover, colonial advisors relied on a belief that social and caste divisions within hinduism would recur within the nationalist ranks as well. This sense that Indians would respond to half‐measures of reform persisted until the 1937 provincial elections. Though British administrators predicted only a moderate showing by the Indian National Congress, the polling proved otherwise, as Congress took power in the majority of the provinces. The Raj lasted another decade, but the confident cultural assumptions sustaining it took a fatal blow.     

Place, Culture and Identity: Summer Music in Upper Galilee

The Kfar Blum festival is an annual chamber music festival at a kibbutz in northern Israel involving three public bodies. Soon after its inauguration, it was dominated by audiences of élite groups who gave it a specific character and made it a highly desirable social event. The demand created for participation caused the festival to change in character, and what had been an artistic celebration became a cultural commodity. This challenged the overall purpose of the festival and brought changes in artistic direction, as new audiences were sought through programmes with wider appeal. The Kfar Blum festival is an example of a contested arena reflecting social trends in Israel. Place becomes a metaphor for social trends.     

(RE)PRODUCING A “PERIPHERAL” REGION – NORTHERN SWEDEN IN THE NEWS

Building on theories of internal orientalism, the objective of this study is to show how intra‐national differences are reproduced through influential media representations. By abstracting news representations of Norrland, a large, sparsely populated region in the northernmost part of Sweden, new modes of “internal othering” within Western modernity are put on view. Real and imagined social and economical differences between the “rural North” and the “urban South” are explained in terms of “cultural differences” and “lifestyle” choices. The concept of Norrland is used as an abstract essentialized geographical category and becomes a metonym for a backward and traditional rural space in contrast to equally essentialized urban areas with favoured modern ideals. Specific traits of parts of the region become one with the entire region and the problems of the region become the problems of the people living in the region. I argue that the news representations play a part in the reproduction of a “space of exception”, in that one region is constructed as a traditional and undeveloped space in contrast to an otherwise modern nation. A central argument of this study is that research on identity construction and representations of place is needed to come to grips with issues of uneven regional development within western nations.