Effeminism charts the flows of colonial desire in the works of British writers in India. Working on the assumption that desire is intensely political, historically constituted, and materially determined, the book shows how the inscriptions of masculinity in the fictions of Flora Annie Steel, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster are deeply implicated in the politics of colonial rule and anticolonial resistance. At the same time, the study refrains from representing colonialism as a coherent set of public events, policies, and practices whose social, political, and cultural meanings are self-evident. Instead, by tracing the resistant and unassailable modes of masculine desire in colonial fiction, the study insists on an explosive revolutionary potential that makes desire often intractable. And by restoring the political in the unconscious and the unconscious in the political, the book proposes to understand colonialism in terms of historical failure, ideological inadequacy, and political contention. This book will interest not only scholars of 19th- and 20th-century British literature and colonial and postcolonial literatures, but also those working in the areas of cultural studies, gender studies, and South Asian studies.“Krishnaswamy uses ‘effeminization’ to describe the complicated paths of colonial sexual desire, stereotypes of Indian male passivity, and how ‘colonizing men used womanhood to delegitimize, discredit and disempower colonized men.’ Reading texts by Rudyard Kipling (a ‘culturally hybrid male’), E. M. Forster (a homosexual), and F. A. Steel (a woman), the author shows how these tactics affect the representation not only of colonized men and women but also of the marginalized writers of the colonizing culture. In the process, she makes intriguing analogies between androgyny and biculturalism.”—Choice

Foreword by James Scott

This classic work in subaltern studies explores the common elements present in rebel consciousness during the Indian colonial period. Ranajit Guha—intellectual founder of the groundbreaking and influential Subaltern Studies Group—describes from the peasants’ viewpoint the relations of dominance and subordination in rural India from 1783 to 1900.
Challenging the idea that peasants were powerless agents who rebelled blindly against British imperialist oppression and local landlord exploitation, Guha emphasizes their awareness and will to effect political change. He suggests that the rebellions represented the birth of a theoretical consciousness and asserts that India’s long subaltern tradition lent power to the landmark insurgence led by Mahatma Gandhi. Yet as long as landlord authority remains dominant in a ruling culture, Guha claims, all mass struggles will tend to model themselves after the unfinished projects documented in this book.
Students and scholars will welcome this paperback edition of Guha’s 1983 original, which was distributed on a limited scale in the United States. It will influence new generations studying colonialism, postcolonialism, subaltern studies, historiography, anthropology, and Indian, Asian, and Latin American history.

A Rule of Property for Bengal is a classic work on the history of colonial India. First published in 1963, and long unavailable in this country, it is an essential text in the areas of colonial and postcolonial studies. In this book, Ranajit Guha examines the British establishment of the Permanent Settlement of Bengal—the first major administrative intervention by the British in the region and an effort to impose a western notion of private property on the Bengal countryside. Guha’s study of the intellectual origins, goals, and implementation of this policy provides an in-depth view of the dynamics of colonialism and reflects on the lasting effect of that dynamic following the formal termination of colonial rule.
By proclaiming the Permanent Settlement in 1793, the British hoped to promote a prosperous capitalist agriculture of the kind that had developed in England. The act renounced for all time the state’s right to raise the assessment already made upon landowners and thus sought to establish a system of property that was, in the British view, necessary for the creation of a stable government. Guha traces the origins of the Permanent Settlement to the anti-feudal ideas of Phillip Francis and the critique of feudalism provided by physiocratic thought, the precursor of political economy. The central question the book asks is how the Permanent Settlement, founded in anti-feudalism and grafted onto India by the most advanced capitalist power of the day became instrumental in the development of a neo-feudal organization of landed property and in the absorption and reproduction of precapitalist elements in a colonial regime.
Guha’s examination of the British attempt to mold Bengal to the contours of its own society without an understanding of the traditions and obligations upon which the Indian agrarian system was based is a truly pioneering work. The implications of A Rule of Property for Bengal remain rich for the current discussions from the postcolonialist perspective on the meaning of modernity and enlightenment.