Unarchived Histories

The "mad" and the "trifling" in the colonial and postcolonial world

Gyanendra Pandey

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780815373483
• eBook ISBN: 9781317931485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

For some time now, scholars have recognized the archive less as a neutral repository of documents of the past, and rather more as a politically interested representation of it, and recognized that the very act of archiving is accompanied by a process of un-archiving. Michel Foucault pointed to "madness" as describing one limit of reason, history and the archive. This book draws attention to another boundary, marked not by exile, but by the ordinary and everyday, yet trivialized or "trifling." It is the status of being exiled within – by prejudices, procedures, activities and interactions so fundamental as to not even be noticed – that marks the unarchived histories investigated in this volume.

Bringing together contributions covering South Asia, North and South America, and North Africa, this innovative analysis presents novel interpretations of unfamiliar sources and insightful reconsiderations of well-known materials that lie at the centre of many current debates on history and the archive.

Part I

The state and its record(s)

2 Peasant as alibi

An itinerary of the archive of colonial Panjab

Navyug Gill

The figure of the peasant consumed the imagination of British officials in late nineteenth-century Panjab. An indication, as well as manifestation, of this is evinced by a quick inventory of the colonial record. There is, on the one hand, an abundance of government reports, legislative acts, administrative commentaries, census data, private correspondence, journalistic articles and published books that all contended with the peasant as the natural corollary of agriculture. On the other hand, there is a lack of equivalent material dealing with urban merchants, professionals and workers; or on rural pastoralists, religious notables and traders; or on artisans such as carpenters, blacksmiths, weavers and potters; or especially on the leather-workers, sweepers and water-carriers occupying the lowest levels of village hierarchy. From the vantage of the archive, then, much of Panjabi history is the intractable one-act theatre of those deemed peasants.

What explains such disproportionate emphasis on this single category of people? The colonialist claim about the essentially agrarian character of native society is supplemented by a more diffuse economism that renders agricultural production a self-evident activity. From either perspective, an archive focused on all things peasant appears as a neutral reflection of the most important aspect of society. If agriculture is simply an innate or obvious feature of colonial Panjab, however, what explains the paucity of attention to rural field laborers¹ whose contributions actually made agricultural production possible? In other words, what does it mean for the archive to disclose, say, the amount of rain in inches for most districts in Panjab for over half a century, while hardly anything about the myriad castes not identified as peasants yet intimately connected with the labors of ploughing, planting, irrigating, weeding and harvesting?

There is in fact nothing entirely logical or natural about the importance ascribed to the peasant. Indeed, it is a reflection of a largely unexplored problematic that a word of such significance in the history and historiography of modern Panjab has neither a singular nor stable equivalent in Panjabi. “Peasant” is translated as kisan, although kashtkar and khetikar are also less-popular synonyms. All three are defined as “one who toils” or “one who cultivates land” in Kahn Singh Nabha’s monumental Gur Shabad Ratnakar Mahan Kosh (1930). When kisan is rendered back into English, however, the entries are not only “peasant,” but also “farmer,” “tiller of land,” “agriculturalist” and “cultivator.” This terminological plurality is further complicated by incongruence with the colloquial. The notion of peasant in Panjabi is usually conveyed not as kisan or its cognates but with either the term zemindar or a caste category such as jatt. Again, when zemindar is rendered into English, the dictionary reads: “landholder,” “farmer,” “landowner,” “landlord,” “agriculturalist” and, finally, “peasant-proprietor” and “peasant.” Even more confounding is jatt, translated as “name of an agricultural class in north-west India,” “farmer,” “agriculturalist,” and at the same time “peasant.” The glossaries of various colonial reports contain greater heterogeneity, as “peasant” circulates both as and amidst cultivator, zemindar, agriculturalist, proprietor and jatt, among others.² Since a fuller exploration of the constellation of meanings for peasant requires a different kind of investigation, here I use the word “peasant” provisionally in its common occupational sense.

The primacy of the Panjab peasant, I argue, emerged in part through specific techniques of colonial observation, arrangment and representation. A prominent British officer/author’s writings offer a popular expression of a more elaborate if contingent process evident in the genre of the colonial settlement report. In this essay, I examine what Ritu Birla distinguishes as the operation of a body of statements;³ how their articulation and circulation, subtle yet powerful and enduring, shaped the peasant into an object as much worth-knowing as knowable. This same process also rendered other groups miscellaneous or non-existent,⁴ unworthy of even a sustained colonial gaze and thereby peripheral to the narrative of Panjabi history. Examining the politics of the archive—the simultaneity of archiving and un-archiving—therefore offers an entry point into challenging the economy of importance that identifies the peasant both at the zenith and as the whole of Panjabi society.

The will-to-curiosity of colonial ethnography

Of the British figures associated with colonial rule in Panjab—James Lawrence, Robert Montgomery, Charles Tupper, Richard Temple, Denzil Ibbetson, Septimus Thorburn, Frank Brayne, Michael O’Dwyer—perhaps none is considered a more dedicated, sympathetic proponent of its people than Malcolm Lyall Darling (1880–1964). Born to an enterprising and well-connected upper class Scottish family in London, he was educated at elite boarding schools and attended Cambridge before taking employment in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in 1904. In order to avoid what he perceived as the suffocating social circles of Lahore, Darling purposefully accepted major appointments in remote areas. He began duties in the town of Rajanpur among the Baluch tribes of the north-west frontier, transferred to the hill states along the Himalaya foothills, and ended up in Sirsa along the fringes of the Rajasthan desert.⁵ Darling also served as guardian to a young Maratha ruler of a princely state near Bombay, advised the newly-established Reserve Bank of India in 1935 and acted as the long-time Registrar of the Co-operative Societies in Panjab. In 1936 he became Financial Commissioner, the second-most senior position in the province, before an increasing disillusionment both with Anglo and Indian society led to retirement in 1939 and eventual return to England in 1940.⁶

The exceptionality of Darling and significance for the question of the archive, however, lies in his extra-curricular rather than official activities. Clive Dewey describes him as a “genuine scholar” and “scholar-civilian,” notable for a unique sense of mission as much for dissatisfaction with British rule, an officer driven by a “burning desire to understand the problems of the peasantry.”⁷ The means to fulfill such desires was that quintessential exercise of colonial knowledge production: the horseback tour. On several occasions throughout his career, Darling left the confines of office and bungalow for nomadic immersion in the rural expanses of Panjab. Dewey provides a vivid account of what such excursions entailed:

[T]he moving on, day after day, through the foothills of the Himalayas; climbing over high passes, dipping down into valleys full of ricefields [sic] and orchards, fording foaming rivers, crossing chasms on swaying rope bridges, riding through ramshackle bazaars, with every vista ending in an ancient fort or a snow-clad mountain.⁸

More than a journey across exquisite landscapes, the larger purpose was to engage the mass of bewildered and bewildering natives along the way. Dewey again ecumenically lists the breadth of Darling’s informants:

He questioned cultivators and craftsmen; labourers and landlords; money-lenders and priests; high-ranking Rajputs and low-ranking Mazbhis; aged patriarchs and young housewives; emigrants who had made money in Australia; soldiers who had seen action on the Western Front; political activists who supported Congress.⁹

How Darling made sense of such diversity is equally significant. A 1981 review by a contemporary historian argues that although he at times wrote in “character stereotypes,” these were “not based on assumptions about racial or genetic inheritance,” but rather “derive[d] from analysis of the social structure.”¹⁰ What most distinguishes Darling from his peers, in other words, was not any unique administrative acumen, but what might instead be considered an incipient form of ethno-graphic research. A congenial will-to-curiosity appears to have informed the particular means by which Darling explored and acquired information about native society.

The results of these numerous horseback expeditions are found in the books Darling authored while stationed in British India. Published within a decade, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt (1925), Rusticus Loquitur: or, the Old Light and the New in the Punjab Village (1929), and Wisdom and Waste in the Punjab Village (1934) are arguably the most prominent accounts of village life in colonial Panjab. Indeed, historians have considered the first of these texts as “one of the key sociological documents of later British rule in India,” a work that offered “a sense of actuality born of long and concrete experience,” and “in many respects yet to be superseded.”¹¹ Together they relate the findings of scores of interviews with all manner of passersby conducted while traversing hundreds of miles across nearly all districts of the province. Darling himself viewed the three as separate volumes of a single study examining the changing dynamics of rural Panjabi society.¹²

Written in the form of a diary, Darling’s observations range from concrete economic conditions, to converging religious practices, to idiosyncratic social customs. For example, a seemingly incisive insight into the debt problem—that it is the sine qua non of prosperity—is captured by the overheard axiom that “no one but a fool or a philanthropist will lend to a pauper.”¹³ On another occasion, Darling blurs (yet re-inscribes) the boundaries between religious communities by remarking that “Muslims observe untouchability and Hindus observe pardah [women’s seclusion] when living near each other.”¹⁴ Even different methods of everyday tasks such as preserving milk for consumption receives comment, as he explains how those living south of the river Jhelum simmer it for an entire day while to the north it is warmed for an hour at most or not at all.¹⁵ It is these types of statements—pithy anecdotes from native informants across an exotic countryside—which Darling’s contemporaries point to when extolling his talents.¹⁶ Considering them “the best studies of the Indian villager ever written,” Dewey more recently goes so far as to deem them unmatched in the “entire historiography of British India.”¹⁷

There is more to Darling, however, than a supposedly sympathetic officer-turned-author presenting a narrative of quirky native insights. As Timothy Mitchell asserts about a parallel body of writing on the Egyptian peasantry, “there is also something missing.”¹⁸ What is significant about this work, in other words, is that which it does not include: namely, discontent and the colonial state. It is remarkable that Darling encounters virtually no opposition throughout the course of his travels. He seems not to have been challenged, threatened or attacked even once during such long and wayward journeys. These natives—however energetic, stubborn, or cunning—are always presented as deferent toward the authority interviewing them. They relate all manner of their lives, complaints, superstitions, aspirations and satisfactions without signs of animosity or opposition. As a result, the scene of a horse-mounted British official questioning a humble(d) villager is presented as unexceptional, a bucolic occurrence, a part of the normal order of things. And the data provided by the latter to the former is made credible precisely because it is shown to emanate from such pliant interlocutors. In this way, exchanges riven with disparities of power are depicted as nothing more than casual conversations duly recorded by a curious observer. The production of knowledge—always fraught with surplus meanings borne of degrees of contestation—appears as an exercise of coercion-free information retrieval.¹⁹

Aside from discontent, the colonial state, in all of its dominating, exclusionary and extractive capacities, is also largely absent from Darling’s texts. While there are sections on the rewards of the canal colonies, the benefits of military recruitment and the attempts at educational and upliftment schemes, hardly a word is given to any of the deleterious features of British governance. We hear next to nothing about the force of conquest, the suppression of resistance, the manifold extractions, the restructuring of hierarchies, the punitive judicial system, the ignominy of domination—in short, any of the shifting levels of multifarious violence required to sustain colonial rule. It is therefore revealing to note how Darling addresses an issue where the state was unavoidably implicated: the problem of peasant indebtedness. “Much is said in certain quarters about the burden of land revenue,” he says, but immediately goes on to point out that the state demand is less than two rupees per cultivated acre while the debt is over thirty rupees per acre. “This should be sufficient proof,” he concludes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The state and its record(s)
• Part II Everyday as archive
• Part III Signs of wonder
• Index