Earlier this year, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University, published "Giving Becomes Him: The posthumous fortune(s) of Pachaiyappa Mudaliar" in Modern Asian Studies (January 2018), 35-61. Here is the abstract:
This article explores the ways in which Pachaiyappa Mudaliar (1754?–1794) has been panegyrized as the quintessential benefactor of our times in Tamil prose, poetry, and pictures over the course of the past century and a half. In the bureaucratic and legal documents of the colonial state, he appears as a rapacious moneylender and behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer, a member of that hated class of ‘Madras dubashes’, a ‘most diabolical race of men’. In contrast, Tamil memory work since at least the 1840s has differently recalled this shadowy eighteenth-century man as a selfless philanthropist whose vast wealth financed some of the earliest educational institutions in the Madras Presidency. I track the posthumous fate of Pachaiyappa's bequest to argue that even as the founding of the public trust and its educational philanthropy departed radically from his willed intentions, a new complex of living, dying, and giving for the sake of native education was put in place in the Tamil country in the age of colonial capital and pedagogic modernity.
More information is available here.
Earlier this year, Ritu Birla, University of Toronto published "C=f(P): The trust, 'general public utility,' and charity as a function of profit in India" in Modern Asian Studies (January 2018), 132-62. Here is the abstract:
With an interest in historicizing contemporary philanthropic formations such as corporate social responsibility, this article outlines the modern Indian governmental coding of charity as a function of profit. To do so, it charts a trajectory of legal-fiscal policy on charitable tax exemption in India, especially since the 1940s. Informed by the study of vernacular capitalism, research on economization and on epistemologies of calculation, the analysis maps juridical trajectories on the idea of charity, its relationship with trade, and, more specifically, profit-making. It demonstrates how the legal mechanism of the public trust, which serves in the late nineteenth century to institutionalize a strict distinction and separation between charity and profit-making, later reconfigures and connects them by buttressing the main legal criterion for charity in India, that is, ‘general public utility’. This legal story is deployed to draw attention to philanthropy more broadly as a key terrain for research on processes of economization and neoliberal governing. At the same time, the argument also works against the grain of palimpsests in contemporary public discourse which stage a continuous and direct line from pre-colonial vernacular practices to Indian philanthropy today.
Further information is available here.
