An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Professor Geeta Patel (Visiting Research Fellow 2022, University of Virginia)
Decolonizing on Notice: Returning Pensions to Colonial Paupers
In the late 1700s, British colonial employees in India, reduced to bankruptcy and vagrancy at the end of their service, threatened to steal from the East India Company if they were not permitted to start a pension fund; after protracted negotiations, the company acquiesced. Yet eighty years later, overcoming many perils, an Indian soldier in the colonial army walked to Kolkata disguised as a fakir to ask for his arrears in salary and pensions, and he was denied.
In this discussion I will explore this British colonial setting of pensions and social security, one that is rarely recognized as an important and complex source of their modern counterparts. Not only did British approaches to pensions and social security rely on Indian conceptions, pensionary promises made and disavowed assumed other valences under the East India Company’s rhetoric of welfare for its subjects, a raison d’être simultaneously subverted by a systematic policy of extraction. This constitutive contradiction, between care and ruin, holds invaluable keys to what is occurring today across the world, as more and more people are struggling to resolve the tensions between what their pensions mean to them and to the organizations that fund or provide them.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2