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Satadru Sen, Disciplined Natives: Race, Freedom and Confinement in Colonial India, Primus, Delhi, 2011, 359 pages, Rs 995
The march of'progress', as envisaged by a civilising imperialist force, was accompanied by building of prisons. Satadru Sen's book, Disciplined Natives: Race, Freedom and Confinement in Colonial India, begins with this rueful observation of George Orwell in order to emphasise upon the repressive apparatus of the colonial state which was an essential component of the 'civilising mission' of the British Raj .The historian ,in this volume of twelve essays, which draws upon research spanning over a period of fifteen years, emphasises upon the tensions and contestations between race »freedom and incarceration in colonialism in India.
Drawing upon Partha Chatterjee's formulation of 'rule of colonial difference' which emphasises upon race as its the chief marker that limited the universalising project of the modern-state of the West, Satadru Sen complicates this premise by supplementing it with a history of confinement and rendering the category of'race' fluid. The author suggests that the imperial project of racialisation of native subjects was subject to contestation and re-interpretation which is encapsulated by the deployment of the term 'deracination' in many of his essays. The agency of the colonised subject is located in the gap between imperial ideology and colonial practice. The porous nature of the disciplinary apparatus of the colonial state -the failure of the institutions-is emphasised to mark the liberty of the subject.
Describing himself as a 'colonial post-Foucauldian', Satadru Sen draws attention to the non-contemporaneity of the East and its different historical trajectory by exemplifying the disconcerting stare of the crowd in public spaces which subverts the Panoptic gaze .The deferred colonial modernity in the East, suggests Sen, re-shapes and re-aligns the arrangement of imperial power. This re-alignment of socio-political hierarchy is best described in the first four essays which engages with the space occupied by the colonised elite who re-inscribed the pedagogic lessons of colonial power.
In the first essay, 'Anarchies of Youth: The Oaten Affair and colonial Bengal,' Satadru Sen recounts the episode of assault on a white history Professor Edward Oaten, by a group of students, one of whom was incidentally the eminent Subhas Bose, who were labelled as 'anarchists' by the colonial state-administration. Sen brings attention...