IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

This article presents a case study of defactorisation of production in a traditional industry–beedi rolling–in colonial South India. It examines the implementation of the Indian Factories Act and its subsequent impact on Malabar’s beedi industry during 1937–1941, focusing on the interaction between state, capital and labour within the framework of British India’s labour-legal history. Despite resistance from their workers, beedi manufacturers circumvented the provisions of the Factories Act by fragmenting the factory production space. Contrary to the intentions of the state and the workers, both the Act and the ensuing trade union agitations only served to promote the fragmentation of production units and exacerbate the exploitation of workers. The study argues that while union mobilisation raised the political consciousness of the beedi working class, it did not significantly improve wages or working conditions in the long term. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

World University root node

Labor History

Regulation and resistance: defactorisation in the beedi industry of colonial Malabar, 1937–1941

The Keyi Mappila Muslim merchants of Tellicherry (Thalassery) on the Malabar Coast were one of the few early modern Indian merchant groups who succeeded in carving out a powerful political and social configuration of their own on the western coast of the Indian Ocean during the British period. Today, several branches of Keyi families remain a cultural unit in the Islamic community of Kerala. This article attempts to locate the group in the larger theoretical context of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism and argues that the Keyis developed a distinct and significant type of coastal cosmopolitanism in an Indian Ocean setting; Chovakkaran Moosa, an influential merchant from a Keyi family during the colonial period, serves as a representative figure. Through their trade and financial relationships with British and local elites, and the characteristic architecture of their warehouses, residences, and mosques, the Keyis successfully integrated the practices of a global cosmopolitan space into a local vernacular secluded commercial space. This article presents a synthesis of a lively coastal urban and local rural cosmopolitanism that included several networks and exchanges, foreign and native collaborations, and an amalgamation of local and external cultural spheres. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

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Asian Review of World Histories

The Keyi Mappila Muslim Merchants of Tellicherry and the Making of Coastal Cosmopolitanism on the Malabar Coast

The British colonial state in India, as part of establishing key sites of law and order, constructed certain tribes, groups, castes, and individuals as “criminals.” These criminal definitions came to play a prominent role in imperial criminal justice policies in India. This type of construction of criminality in the colonies also portrayed the stereotypical sense of the West, who depicted the indigenous in the East among other things as “criminals,” “robbers,” “rebels,” “docile Hindus,” “fanatic Muslims,” “untrustworthy Arabs,” and so on. Such nomenclatures were invented to describe how those groups reacted against the colonial invasion and were an important tool in delegitimizing such local uprisings. The discourses to label the non-Western population as inherently dangerous in the colony were also to alleviate its own fears and anxieties. An array of colonial scholars have worked on the making of criminal communities and groups in northern India through the discourse of race, caste, and tribe, especially Thuggees and Sansis, who were known for their perceived criminal propensities. Most studies on native criminality in colonial India have focused on the mid or late nineteenth century, with special reference to the ways and reasons by which the native tribes, peasants, and groups were labeled “criminals” by the colonial state. This paper looks into the ways in which “native criminality” was perceived during the early days of British rule in India, with special reference to the British rule in Malabar, where the colonial state maneuvered to classify certain sections of the Malabar population as distinct from the rest. © 2014 by University of Hawai‘i Press.

Journal of World History

Constructing the “extraordinary criminals”: Mappila Muslims and legal encounters in early British Colonial Malabar

This article examines the development of colonial law in Malabar between 1792 and 1810. Within the historical context of emerging colonialism as a pivotal factor, it shows that there was no simple unilinear process in the making of colonial law in this region of India, but rather a series of continuities and discontinuities of practices. A clear shift in the logic of governance is identified, however, as new technologies of power, particularly writing and documentation, resulted in several formalities of practices in the making of the colonial state and legal system in India.

South Asia Research

Colonial Law in Early British Malabar

Department Of Chemistry

Inorganic Chemistry

Reactions of copper(I) aryloxides with phenyl isothiocyanate: steric and ligand control in the oligomerization of [N-phenylimino(aryloxy)methanethiolato]copper(I) complexes