Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India

As the East India Company extended its territorial dominion, the civilizational encounter was sometimes described as one between a society dynamized by trade, enterprise and English liberty and the melancholy stasis of the Hindus. The political despotism of Muslim rulers and the sacredotal despotism of the brahmanical order were blamed for this social involution.l Yet a range of historical work has outlined the process by which British paramountcy and colonial order actually evolved by suppressing a dynamic of competitive state-building in eighteenth century India, and arresting the fluidity of social forms associated with it.2 2