Speaking at the Travancore legislative assembly on February 2, 1938, Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar said: “The federation contemplated in the Government of India Act (1935) was founded on the recognition of the fundamental idea that the Ruler alone represents his state and that the Ruler is the government of the state.” Travancore was one of the oldest princely states in India, which antedated the British occupation and claimed a dynastic rule uninterrupted by any foreign or domestic powers. Its history of constitutional reforms and economic advancement enabled it to occupy a pivotal position in colonial India. As the Dewan (prime minister) of Travancore, Sir C.P. played a crucial role in the constitutional debates on the political form of postcolonial India, especially federation, in the last two decades of the British Empire in India. He argued that Indian states were inherently sovereign, and that the only locus of sovereignty in the states was their rulers. In doing so, he imagined a future Indian federation predicated on the idea of divisible sovereignty, which was given constitutional effect by the Government of India (GOI) Act (1935). Sir C.P.'s expositions on the sovereignty of the states and Travancore's constitutionalism offer analytical lenses to recuperate a history of imperial constitutionalism and the grand political project it enabled: Indian federation.
Book Reviews 183CMS Bhil mission in 1942 and acted as the medical superintendent of the Lusadiya hospital until her retirement in 1963.Hardiman observes that women were given secondary status in the missionaries. During the first half of the nineteenth century, women were not even allowed to work for the missionaries. However, from the second half of the century onwards a new strategy was adopted and female missionaries were expected to gain the support of 'native' women. This was known as 'women work for women' (p. 139). Even Dr Jane Birkett, who had devoted twenty-one years of her life to the Lusadiya hospital and the mission, was not seen to have any valid grounds for pursuing an independent career. Hardiman asserts that as the wife of a missionary, her status within the CMS was to be 'merely an adjunct to her husband in his work ' (p. 80).The book successfully examines in depth the role that the CMS played in the Bhil region of Western India and effectively narrates Bhil encounters with the CMS. They made choices at different levels of rejecting or accepting various facets of missionary modernity. Hardiman succinctly discusses the challenges faced by the CMS, including difficulties faced by CMS officials working in rural terrains without modern facilities. The missionaries will have had their own motives, but at the same time they created opportunities for the Bhils. This book, delving into an unexplored area, is the only existing full-fledged study of missionary medicine in colonial India. It is a must-read for scholars working on social history, the social history of medicine and medical anthropology.
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