Mitch Numark | The East India Company's Jewish Sepoys

Date
Wed May 25th 2016, 4:45 - 6:00pm
Event Sponsor
Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Center for South Asia
Location
Braun Music Center, Room 131

Through an examination of Bene Israel Jews in the East India Company’s Bombay army this paper elucidates how the specificities of place, the particularities of subject and the Indian experiences and encounters of Bombay-based Britons could generate representations that undermine the totalizing agentive and generative power attributed to colonial discourse. The paper uncovers the Bene Israel Jews’ actual presence in the Company’s Bombay army and demonstrates that in contrast to the predominant depiction of Jews as unscrupulous and avaricious merchants, financiers, and moneylenders, nineteenth-century Britons consistently represented Bene Israel Jews as brave sepoys and trustworthy native officers. These divergent representations were connected to Bene Israel Jews and British Jews’ different occupational profiles. This situation, in conjunction with an imperial vision linking colony and metropole within an unified British world, gave rise to a hitherto unnoticed element of Jewish emancipation rhetoric in which British Jews sought to prove that they were or should be considered trustworthy, brave, and patriotic British soldiers, subjects, and citizens by pointing to India’s Bene Israel Jews. By bringing together subjects that have been overlooked or treated separately, the paper illuminates unrecognized connections between Bombay and Britain and aspects of South Asian, Jewish, and British history that have been largely unnoticed and rarely linked. 

Mitch Numark is Associate Professor of History at California State University Sacramento. He received his PhD is South Asian history from UCLA. He has taught South Asian and Jewish history at Pitzer College, the University of Oklahoma, Bowdoin College and Sac State. He has published research articles in Jewish Social Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, and the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies. His “Scottish ‘Discovery’ of Jainism in Nineteenth-Century Bombay” won the 2012 De Nobili Research Library Prize for best essay on the topic: “Dimensions of the Christian Encounter with the Religions of India.”

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