The idea of competition: Contextualising the debate over changing methods of recruitment in the Indian civil service during company rule

Posted on 7 August 2023 by Gautam Chandra

The Indian Economic & Social History Review, Volume 60, Issue 3, Page 335-363, July–September 2023.
Public examinations were one of the great initiatives of the nineteenth-century Englishmen. The idea of a competitive examination, which was first implemented in the Indian civil service during East India Company rule, was shaped in post-industrial Britain by liberal-utilitarian thinkers like Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, and others. The idea of competition, initially implemented in the field of economics, soon came to be applied to administration and governance. Studies on the Indian Civil Service have mainly focussed on its administrative and bureaucratic development. However, the historiography is silent about the role of English liberal-utilitarians, political-economists, and parliamentarians in applying the idea of competition to public services. In this context, this article tries to understand the concept of competition, as well as the ideological background and parliamentary debates behind the introduction of competitive examinations, and their impact on the socio-educational structure of colonial India during the three stages of foundation (1757–813), discourse (1814–53) and institutionalisation (1854 onwards).

Linguistic minorities and strategic mobilisation in eastern India: Bengali-Biharis during the era of linguistic territorialism (1935–57)

Posted on 7 August 2023 by Medha Bhattacharya

The Indian Economic &Social History Review, Volume 60, Issue 3, Page 275-300, July–September 2023.
This article analyses how linguistic minorities in the province of Bihar navigated the era of linguistic territorialism, when mainstream political organisations and figures within India largely agreed that specific linguistic communities ‘belonged’ in particular regions. Indian scholarship has tended to focus on the mechanisms that brought about the linguistic reorganisation of states in India, therefore, concentrating largely on the ways in which territory and language became intrinsically connected. This article will examine the link of language and belonging with regard to a ‘community’, which demanded that states remain linguistically and culturally heterogenous. It focuses on the section of Biharis that identified Bengali as their ‘mother-tongue’ and tracks the transformation of Bengali politics within the province/state during the transition from colonial rule to independence. It explores the ways in which narratives of historical Bengali settlement were deployed for different reasons across this period, and argues that Bengalis in Bihar conceptualised the ordering of the Indian nation in a way that was inherently different from mainstream understandings of how the country should be ordered during this period. Bengali-Bihari figures and publications deployed rhetoric that attached much greater value to territorial belonging than to linguistic or cultural belonging. This article demonstrates that contrary to common assumptions, there were large groups of people who conceptualised India not just as a linguistically heterogenous nation, but one that consisted of linguistically heterogenous states that protected minority linguistic communities.