Unarchived Histories: The "mad" and the "trifling" in the Colonial and Postcolonial World 9781317931492, 1317931491

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Preface and acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Unarchived histories: The “mad” and the “trifling”
The limit of history
Reason and unreason
“Trifling” violence
Telling it “as I saw it then”
“How do you talk about it . . .?”
The history of the commonplace
The Chapters that follow
Notes
Part I: The state and its record(s)
2. Peasant as alibi: An itinerary of the archive of colonial Panjab
The will-to-curiosity of colonial ethnography
Bhaiya bandobast aya/te chura chhalla lahya!
A genre of power
By force of numbers
History, subalternity and the peasant monopoly
Notes
3. A death without cause: Mary E. Hutchinson’s un-archived life in certified death
The absence of an oeuvre
Relationship: Friend
A death without cause
Acknowledgments
Notes
4. “Standard deviations”: On archiving the awkward classes in northern Peru
APRA’s unbreachable wall of discipline
Power, knowledge and representation in crisis
Conclusion
Notes
Part II: Everyday as archive
5. Feminine écriture, trace objects and the death of Braj
Some problems in theorizing unarchived histories
Statism
Status of evidence
Zone of unintelligibility
Statism in colonial analysis of gender violence
Everyday speech
Historicality of Mahadevi’s scenes of childhood
Historicality of Mahadevi’s language
Notes
6. Brown privilege, black labor: Uncovering the significance of Creole women’s work
Daughters of privilege
The demands of keeping house
Homemakers and breadwinners
Keeping their distance
From the home to the factory
Holding on to the past, shaping the future
Notes
7. Unfriendly thresholds: On queerness, capitalism and misanthropy in nineteenth-century America
The recluse in history
The “queer” recluse in the Gilded Age
The female hermit
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Part III: Signs of wonder
8. Of kings and gods: The archive of sovereignty in a princely state
The “state” and the “primitive” in history
Administrative records: Archiving the “state,” un-archiving the “people”
The iqrarnama: Intimations of “un-state-like” sovereignty
Gond peoples and their ancestral deities in colonial anthropological writings
Anga Dev accounts of the past: Negotiating sovereignty
Notes
9. Geography’s myth: The many origins of Calcutta
Historical closures
Historical disclosure
Conclusion
Notes
10. Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak
Un-archiving Algeria
An un-archived history of the vanishing present
Coda
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Unarchived Histories

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, Europe and North Africa, this innovative work 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. Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Interdisciplinary Workshop in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, at Emory University, USA. He is the author of Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006) and A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste and Difference in India and the United States (2013), and editor of Subaltern Citizens and their Histories (2010) and Subalternity and Difference (2011), both published in the Routledge series, “Intersections.”

Intersections: colonial and postcolonial histories Edited by Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University, USA

Editorial Advisory Board: Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University/Calcutta; Michael Fisher, Oberlin College; Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania; David Hardiman, University of Warwick; Ruby Lal, Emory University; and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University/Bangalore This series is concerned with three kinds of intersections (or conversations): first, across cultures and regions, an interaction that postcolonial studies have emphasized in their foregrounding of the multiple sites and multi-directional traffic involved in the making of the modern; second, across time, the conversation between a mutually constitutive past and present that occurs in different times and places; and thirdly, between colonial and postcolonial histories, which as theoretical positions have very different perspectives on the first two “intersections” and the questions of intellectual enquiry and expression implied in them. These three kinds of conversations are critical to the making of any present and any history. Thus the new series provides a forum for extending our understanding of core issues of human society and its self-representation over the centuries. While focusing on Asia, the series is open to studies of other parts of the world that are sensitive to cross-cultural, cross-chronological and cross-colonial perspectives. The series invites submissions for single-authored and edited books by young as well as established scholars that challenge the limitations of inherited disciplinary, chronological and geographical boundaries, even when they focus on a single, well-bounded territory or period. 1. Subaltern Citizens and their Histories Investigations from India and the USA Edited by Gyanendra Pandey 2. Subalternity and Religion The prehistory of Dalit Empowerment in South Asia Milind Wakankar 3. Communalism and Globalization in South Asia and its Diaspora Edited by Deana Heath and Chandana Mathur

4. Subalternity and Difference Investigations from the north and the south Edited by Gyanendra Pandey 5. Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India Changing concepts of hybridity across empires Adrian Carton 6. Medical Marginality in South Asia Situating subaltern therapeutics Edited by David Hardiman and Projit Bihari Mukharji 7. Hindi Cinema Repeating the subject Nandini Bhattacharya 8. New Indian Cinema in Post-Independence India The cultural work of Shyam Benegal’s films Anurada Dingwaney Needham 9. Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought The radical unspoken Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh 10. Unarchived Histories The “mad” and the “trifling” in the colonial and postcolonial world Edited by Gyanendra Pandey

This page intentionally left blank

Unarchived Histories The “mad” and the “trifling” in the colonial and postcolonial world Edited by Gyanendra Pandey

Routledge Taylor & Francis C ro up LO N D O N A N D N E W YO RK

First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Gyanendra Pandey The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Unarchived histories / edited by Gyanendra Pandey. pages cm. — (Intersections: colonial and postcolonial histories ; 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Archives — Social aspects — Cross cultural studies. 2. History — Methodology — Cross-cultural studies. 3. Historiography — Cross cultural studies. 4. Social history — Archival resources — Cross-cultural studies. I. Pandley, Gyanendra, editor. CD971.U53 2014 907.2 — dc23 2013023823 ISBN: 978–0–415–71775–5 (hbk) ISBN: 978–1–315–85669–8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors Preface and acknowledgments

ix x xiii

Introduction

1

1

3

Unarchived histories: The “mad” and the “trifling” GYANENDRA PANDEY

PART I

The state and its record(s) 2

Peasant as alibi: An itinerary of the archive of colonial Panjab

21

23

NAVYUG GILL

3

A death without cause: Mary E. Hutchinson’s un-archived life in certified death

41

JAE TURNER

4

“Standard deviations”: On archiving the awkward classes in northern Peru

58

DAVID NUGENT

PART II

Everyday as archive

73

5

75

Feminine écriture, trace objects and the death of Braj RASHMI DUBE BHATNAGAR

viii

Contents

6 Brown privilege, black labor: Uncovering the significance of Creole women’s work

96

NATASHA L. MCPHERSON

7 Unfriendly thresholds: On queerness, capitalism and misanthropy in nineteenth-century America

110

COLIN R. JOHNSON

PART III

Signs of wonder 8 Of kings and gods: The archive of sovereignty in a princely state

125

127

ADITYA PRATAP DEO

9 Geography’s myth: The many origins of Calcutta

144

DEBJANI BHATTACHARYYA

10 Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak

159

LYNNE HUFFER

Index

179

List of illustrations

Figures 3.1 Death certificate for Mary E. Hutchison 3.2 Self-Portrait (c. 1927) 3.3 Dream of Violets (c. 1942) 3.4 Mirrors for Reality (c. 1944)

43 45 46 50

Table 8.1

Short descriptions of the content of the iqrarnama

134

Contributors

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar’s primary expertise is in critical philology relating to early modern north Indian languages and literatures, female infanticide and women’s writing, and Swiftian satire. Her publications include a book on Female Infanticide in India: A Feminist Cultural History (2005), and articles on Meera’s lyric in Brajbhasha (boundary 2, 31.3, 2004); Braj and Hindi in the works of Bhartendu Harischandra (Critical Quarterly, 52.3, 2010); and the invention of modern Hindi from Braj in Premsagar (boundary 2, 39.2, 2012). She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Humanities Center, University of Pittsburgh, and is completing her second single-authored book, entitled World and Bhasha Literatures: Revolutions in Philology. Debjani Bhattacharyya completed her Masters in Literature at Jadavpur University (Kolkata, India) and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in History at Emory University. Before Emory she had a Lehrauftrag (Adjunct Instructor) at the Südasien Institut, and was Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (Research Fellow) at the Anglistik, Heidelberg University (Germany). She was a Junior Research Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies from 2011–12. She is currently writing her dissertation, entitled “Beyond the Paper-Regime: Ownership, Property and Speculation in Colonial Calcutta.”

Aditya Pratap Deo teaches History at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. He did his M.A. and M.Phil. in History from Delhi University and completed his Ph.D. at Emory University. His dissertation is titled “Spirits, State Effects and Peoples’ Politics: Negotiating Sovereignty in 20th Century Kanker, Central India.” He has contributed an introductory chapter “Reflections on the History of Chhattisgarh” in Hiltrud Rustau and Katja Eichner’s Chhattisgarh: Schatzkammer Indiens, Ein kulturhistorisches Reisebuch (Trafo, Berlin, 2009). Navyug Gill received a B.A. with honours from the University of Toronto and is currently completing a Ph.D. in History at Emory University. His research explores the figure of the peasant and the division of labour through the career of capitalism in colonial Panjab, and is based on archival research and fieldwork in Chandiagrh, Moga, Amristar, Delhi and London. His dissertation

List of contributors

xi

is titled “Production without Labor: A political economy for peasant differences in colonial Panjab.” Lynne Huffer is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her most recent book, Are the Lips a Grave?A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex, explores the problem of ethics in feminist and queer theories, with a particular focus on the concrete political dilemmas of our contemporary age. Her other books include Mad for Foucault (2010), Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (1998), and Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing (1992). Huffer has taught feminist theory, queer theory, gay and lesbian studies, sexuality in literature, and Foucault at Yale, Rice, and Emory Universities. Colin R. Johnson is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor American Studies, History and Human Biology at Indiana University Bloomington. He holds a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. His research focuses primarily on the history of same-sex sexual behavior and gender non-conformity in rural American during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His first book, Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America, was published as part of Temple University Press’ Sexuality Studies series in 2013. Natasha L. McPherson is a visiting professor of History at Spelman College where she teaches US and African-American history. Prior to joining Spelman, she was a Mellon Teaching Fellow at Dillard University in New Orleans where she taught modern US history. Dr. McPherson’s research interests include Afro-Creole communities, Southern women’s family and labor history, race and ethnicity in American society, and issues of “respectability” and morality in African-American history. McPherson earned both her masters and her doctorate degrees in History from Emory University. David Nugent holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University, and is currently Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Master’s in Development Practice Program at Emory University. He is author and editor of several books, including Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885–1935 (1997), Locating Capitalism in Time and Space: Global Restructurings, Politics and Identity (2001), and (with Christopher Krupa) Off-Centered States: Political Formation and De-Formation in the Andes (in press). Nugent’s most recent project is a two-volume work that examines the emergence of alternative forms of democracy and underground, shadow state organizations in twentieth century Peru, entitled, Appearances to the Contrary: Fear, Fantasy and Displacement in Peruvian State Formation, and Dark Fantasies of State: Discipline, Democracy and Dissent in Northern Peru. Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, and Director

xii

List of contributors of the Interdisciplinary Workshop in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, at Emory University, USA. He is the author of Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006) and A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste and Difference in India and the United States (2013), and editor of Subaltern Citizens and their Histories (2010) and Subalternity and Difference (2011), both published in the Routledge ‘Intersections.’ series

Jae Turner holds a Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University. Her dissertation, “Mary E. Hutchinson: The Absence of an Oeuvre”, is the first scholarly study of Hutchinson. She is currently revising it for publication as a book. An important article entitled “Mary E. Hutchinson, Intelligibility, and the Historical Limits of Agency” appeared in Feminist Studies 38.2 (Summer 2012).

Preface and acknowledgments

The essays published in this volume were first presented at two workshops held at Emory University in February 2011 and September 2012. I owe thanks to the participants in the two workshops and to my graduate students—to the colleagues and friends whose essays appear in this collection, as well as many who were unable to write for it (among them Angelika Bammer, Clifton Crais, Rita CostaGomes, Leslie Harris, Abdul JanMohamed, Bruce Knauft, Ruby Lal, Kristin Mann, Mary Odem, V. Narayana Rao, Jonathan Prude, Milind Wakankar and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders)—for their critical part in the proceedings. Not least, for their helpful comments on previous drafts of the introduction. (An earlier version of the introductory essay appeared in Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai, Vol XLVII, No.1, January 7, 2012: I am grateful to the editors and publishers of EPW for permission to reproduce some of that material here.) I wish to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Emory University, and especially to Emory College of Arts and Sciences, the History Department, and the Provost’s Office, for their generous assistance in the organization and funding of the workshops and the preparation of this anthology. Warm personal thanks to Robin Forman and Michael Elliott, Deans of the College of Arts and Sciences, Claire Sterke, Provost of Emory University, and Marcy Alexander and her colleagues in the History office, for their unflagging interest and unfailing support. Also to three graduate students for invaluable support: Pankhuree Dube and Kelly Basner, for enthusiastic assistance in the organization and conduct of the two workshops; and Navyug Gill, not only for his participation in the second workshop and his contribution to this volume, but the additional tasks he has taken on, in the preparation of the final manuscript and the index. A special note of gratitude for Bhavna Sonawane, the wonderful young painter from Mumbai, for her great generosity in allowing us to use her beautiful painting, Passion, for the cover. Last, but not least, to Dorothea Schaefter, Jillian Morrison and their colleagues at Routledge for their continued support and collaboration in the production of our work. Gyanendra Pandey (Atlanta, April 2013)

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

This page intentionally left blank

1

Unarchived histories The “mad” and the “trifling” Gyanendra Pandey

The unarchived histories of our title refer not to histories for which there is no archive, but rather to histories that have been un-archived—or disenfranchised— in the very process of archiving particular aspects of the human past and present as history. The present anthology investigates the extensive domain of such unarchived histories. For more than a generation, historians have shown that the archive, like history, is less a (passive) repository—or to change the metaphor, a mirror of something that is simply out there—than an active construction of a politically interested representation of past times and our times. They have noted too that the status of archives, like the status of history, is always open to contest and transformation.1 Philosophers, genealogists, and scholars in other disciplines, have reinforced the argument. Derrida, for one, helped put a question mark on the apparently simple equation, history → archive/archive → history, through a pointed argument about the place of the archive in modern times, and the work it does and undoes in the practice of history and politics. Political power entails control of the archive and of memory, Derrida observes. Democratization may be measured, then, in terms of the extent of the access of different groups and classes to the constitution and interpretation of the archive. The “unarchived histories” of our title are, precisely, those to which we are denied access. Wherever secrets and heterogeneity exist, Derrida argues, wherever they are not already gathered into a consignation (a single corpus, united in its ideal configuration), it is a “menace” or challenge to the theory of the archive; to the archive as “commencement” (origin) and “commandment” (authority), as well as the unified, that is to say, the exclusive and unquestioned, ground for historical knowledge. Derrida’s idea of a “trouble,” sickness, fever of (for) the archive— trouble de l’archive, mal d’archive—refers to the passionate, restless, interminable search for the (authoritative, commanding, originary) archive, “right where it slips away . . . . right where something in it unarchives itself.”2 For the disciplinary historian, the archive may fairly be described as a site of selection and classification, of framing and authorizing—and hence making intelligible. In Foucauldian terms, the archive authorizes what may be said, laying down the rules of the “sayable,” negating (making inaudible and illegible) much that comes to be classified as “non-sense,” gibberish, madness, and is dispatched

4

Gyanendra Pandey

therefore to a domain outside agential, rational history. In this process of selecting, framing, authorizing, as even the most hard-boiled of traditional historians will acknowledge, every archive necessarily excludes a great deal that is not of direct interest to its custodians. Thus, in South Asia, the early modern and the colonial state’s archive of land relations was sharply focused on the question of revenue and its enhancement, just as the colonial state’s archive of peasant protest and rebellion was built around the category of crime (law and order).3 Again, census operations, classification and counting, have been ways of fixing and managing diverse populations, hence of reducing population groups to a few clear-cut, manageable and statistically accountable categories. In more recent times of “representative” government, they have also provided a means of staking claims (and counterclaims) in the matter of differential access to state resources and political power.4 Similarly, the modern archive of linguistic practice has been concerned with the fixing of various means and codes of communication as particular objects called “languages”—pure or (more or less) mixed. It may help to illustrate the last, and apparently most technical (hence scientific?), of these archiving processes through one example, that of Hindavi as the sign of a language community and medium of communication in pre-colonial north India. Rather than enjoying a continuous, autonomous existence—a designated place in a linguistic continuum or thoroughfare—Hindavi inhabited a zone of pronounced indeterminacy before the now well-documented nineteenth century Hindi–Urdu divide. It was only in the late eighteenth and more clearly in the nineteenth centuries that this particular linguistic/cultural inheritance came to be seen, simultaneously, as more or less Persianized and Sanskritized. As Rashmi Bhatnagar, one of the contributors to this volume put it in an essay written for the first of our two workshops on “Unarchived Histories,” the concept of a linguistic continuum—which is vital to the archive of languages—tells us nothing about what fills out the Hindavi literary imaginary, “the histories that are remembered by keeping open the channel between languages [the relevant ones in the case of Hindavi include Persian, Awadhi and Braj], nor [about] . . . the poetics of this open passage between vernaculars.” The production of Hindavi as an archive object defined by script and religion, as it was in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, erases, in her words, “significant dimensions of its material existence as bodily, performative, musical, affective and narrative practices.”5 In a word, the very process of archiving is accompanied by a process of “un-archiving,” rendering many aspects of social, cultural, political relations in the past and the present as incidental, chaotic, trivial, inconsequential, and therefore unhistorical. The archive, as a site of remembrance—doing the work of remembering—is also at the same time a project of forgetting. What are the implications for our constructions of the past?

The limit of history “The necessity of madness throughout the history of the West,” Foucault writes, in the preface to the 1961 edition of his History of Madness, “is linked to that

Introduction 5 decisive action that extracts a significant language from the background noise and its continuous monotony, a language which is transmitted and culminates in time; it is, in short, linked to the possibility of history.” For Foucault, that “background noise” is unreason, from which reason has to extract itself. He notes, further, that “the perception that Western man has of his own time and space allows a structure of refusal to appear, on the basis of which a discourse is denounced as not being language, a gesture as not being an oeuvre, a figure as having no rightful place in history.”6 Disciplinary history has worked, insistently and to a large extent successfully, to textualize and order a “usable” past. There are several dimensions to this process of textualizing and ordering. What comes to be privileged, first and foremost, are particularized and quite distinct identities—clearly marked boxes, labels, domains of activity with recognizable characteristics, procedures and practices (states, nations, communities, religions, social structures, cultures, economies, and the processes and events supposedly sustaining and transforming these objects of inquiry). The discipline relies on metaphors and tropes drawn from the great texts of history and mythology: texts of religious and national liberation; of the flood (destruction, or pralaya in Sanskrit and several modern Indian languages) that carries all before it; of the punishment that is meted out to men and women—even Great Men and Women; even of Incarnation—of saviors, or gods among men; of Planning (by gods and men) and Failure (of gods and men). At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, historical science strives to establish reason as the motor force of history. All history tends towards a history of Reason, of identifiable cause and effect, motivation, human drive. Yet, and here the paradox undoes itself, the unfolding of the world is a continuous, linear unfolding— fundamentally predictable, humanistic and Enlightened, leading in Hegelian terms to the present as the logical culmination of all that has gone before. An inevitable consequence is the effacement of a great deal of the variety, creativity, negotiation and uncertainty that is central to human history, past and present. There will be other articulations of our inherited “common sense” of history. However, it seems to me that once the disciplinary frames have been established— the Texts, the Reasons, the Volition and the Identities that make for history, or what History is about—everything else (or, at least, a great deal else) can be consigned to the trifling, hardly worthy of notice: the unarchived and unhistorical. For Foucault, madness (or un-reason), logically enough, designated the limits of reason and history, hence too the limits of the archive. What I want to do in the following pages is to draw attention to another boundary of history and the archive, a boundary marked not by the exile—a position outside society and, thereby, history—but by the ordinary, the everyday, the ever-present, yet trivialized or “trifling”: exiled within. This boundary or limit is formed by prejudices, procedures and activities so fundamental as to not even be noticed. It is a limit that is not far removed from Foucault’s suggestion of a “calm . . . knowledge which, through knowing [something] too much, passes it over.”7 However, “knowing [something] too much” is a formulation that requires further unpacking, as does the matter of “pass[ing] it over.”

6

Gyanendra Pandey

The issue of legibility/intelligibility is crucial here. Knowledge, as we now admit, is always power-knowledge. Intelligibility itself is a function of power. Hence “knowing something too much” can lead us to miss it—to “pass it over”— precisely because our knowledge constructs grids of intelligibility that filter out what we do and do not notice about things. In that sense, there is a curious kind of “knowing” involved in the routine and the everyday, which we focus on in this anthology. For the things it passes over are almost not-knowledge. A “knowledge” beneath notice, not worthy of the designation. Trifling. Trivialized. It will help to spell out some of the implications of this proposition.

Reason and unreason In the matter of archiving, or authorizing as knowledge, elements of the human past and present, I suggest, we are dealing with events, attitudes, interactions that may for heuristic purposes be divided into three different realms, which I will call the realms of “reason,” of “madness” and the “trifling.” What academics and political commentators have long accepted as knowledge, history, politics, sociology, etc., belongs to the domain of Reason, State, History, the Archive. The point needs little elaboration. In its preponderant mode, the story of humankind has been presented as a narrative of progress, found in the archived histories of state—or nation/state—and civilization: the story of capitalism, liberalism and modernity; the unfolding of human potential; the fulfillment of (God’s, and in more recent times, the State’s) grand designs. This progress is achieved, in the received account, by the planning and struggle and reason of Man, the authorized, legible and obvious agent of history. The other side of this coin, the obverse of the empire of reason, planning, progress and history, the background from which it seeks to extricate itself and against which it posits itself, is a world of unreason. This background becomes visible at times, as a precipitate or object of investigation, around a node of “madness,” and is in that distorted and condensed form appropriated to the world (or, should one say, the play) of reason. Part of that same background, the underside of the world of reason—beneath it, supporting it, suffusing it—is also a world that we only occasionally recognize around the node of the “trifling.” The precipitate of madness (or state of exile from reasoned, reasonable and legible society and history) appears under many names. It is categorized at times as the colonized or subaltern other; at others, as the primitive, the mad and the abnormal; and always, as fundamentally out-of-sync. Needless to say, the account of “misfits,” “relics,” or those whom history has left behind, has been archived and given a certain historical depth by the state and the historian. Importantly, however, agency here belongs to the classifiers, the rational order and its experts, who identify, locate, chart and seek to discipline madness/abnormality, in order to bring it into historical time and civilization. There is a temporality ascribed to madness, but it is not the temporality of reasoned, predictable, linear progress, but something rather more capricious and erratic—the temporality of an age gone by, or of lives and practices gone awry.

Introduction 7 However, the process of archiving received histories of social, cultural, political and economic formations and malformations in the past and the present (of reason, civilization, modernity, nation-state, on the one hand, and madness, on the other), still leaves unacknowledged an immense and critical arena of human being and interaction, described under duress as trivial, scarcely worth mentioning. A structure of refusal reappears here: and the significance of a language, and an archive, is denied. It is at this point that one may begin to sense the uncharted domain of the trifling. First, reason/state/order are not readily able, or willing, to reckon with the contingency and unpredictability, the endless creativity and multiplicity of societal life. In addition, the archivist (reason, state, order) has always found it difficult to apprehend, classify, document and represent evidence of human activities and relationships found in everyday, but intimate, signs and traces. Even after the rise of specializations like social history and the history of mentalité, an archival hierarchy persists, privileging identities, movements, datable events, the struggle over resources of state—documenting “hard” historical facts, and underplaying those that are more difficult to grasp. When and how do we archive the body as a register of events; or gestures, pauses, gut-reactions; or deep-rooted feelings of ecstasy, humiliation, pain? As the tortured body, in the time of human rights; or the disease of “ecstasy” in the age of psychiatry? In our “modern,” “rational” times, the amorphous, fleeting, intangible—and hence “un-archivable”—also include the “fragmentary” consciousness at work in dreams (and visions), as well as stories of ghosts and spirits, fables, miracles, gods. Reports of these, which are considered at length in several of the contributions below, typically remain unarchived, except as a part of folklore and the fund of exotic knowledge we might turn to for entertainment. The situation changes only when such stories, fables, beliefs come to be seen as posing a threat to state and society (“law and order”), and are assigned therefore to the realm of madness—or sometimes to the history of rebellion, corresponding in an unexpected way with the politics of torture or of disease-control. The larger point I want to underline is this. The “ephemeral,” “insignificant” and “obscure” elements of our lives referred to above provide only a first glimpse of what has been elided and marginalized in the archiving and memorializing of the more objectified structures and well-marked events of the past and the present. As I have indicated, the domain of the trifling thus rendered invisible covers all those attitudes and actions that are so utterly ordinary and routinized as to be taken as being “always so”; the unmarked, and usually un-remarked, social circumstances in which people live and make “moral” and “immoral” choices; conditions, practices, relationships, expectations and agendas so common as to be beneath notice, subterranean—“natural,” eternal and hence unhistorical. Among these conditions and practices is the daily reinforcement of hierarchy and privilege in face-to-face communications through subtle and not so subtle acts of selfassertion and demand, the marking out of space for the dominant and the subordinate, the (barely conscious) humiliation and keeping-in-their-place of the poor and the weak.

8

Gyanendra Pandey

“Trifling” violence The argument about the realms of intelligibility and unintelligibility, audibility and inaudibility, produced by reason, archive and inherited texts, may perhaps be clarified through a quick recapitulation of certain moments in recent debates on the history of violence—an aspect of our individual and collective pasts with which we have had to engage extensively in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A good starting point for this clarification is the issue of the provenance of what is called “violence.” Where in the commonly received accounts of our pasts and presents does violence occur? When is it recognized as violence, given the name and accorded a certain historical depth?8 We may begin by parceling out into three domains of apprehension and analysis (though analysis is rarer!) actions and events that would, in a widely shared commonsense understanding, be categorized as violent. The first relates to the realm of the state, of ruling classes and other powerful individuals and groups in human society—the forces of reason and progress as they have pronounced themselves—whose actions are regularly passed off as “punishment” and “discipline,” as “law and order” and (in the case of states and kingdoms) as “war.” There is a second order of violence that is more widely cognized as “violence.” This is posited by the first, in fact necessary to its own existence as reason, state, order. It is located quintessentially in what I have called the precipitate or pole of madness, of the primitive and the other, living in antiquated or abnormal time. Plainly enough, the conduct of the mad, the primitive and the subaltern (inmates of psychiatric wards and prisons, rebellious peasants, “desperate” tribals and aboriginals, “hysterical” women), as well as that of cultural or civilizational others (Reds, Chinese, Muslims), is regularly described as “violent”—unreasoned, unreasonable, sometimes fanatical and uncontrollable, except by much greater counter-violence, or “disciplining”! In addition, I am proposing further, there is at least one other pole around which we might apprehend social behavior and interaction (and violence, if we can separate out the category): this is what I have called the domain of the trifling. As already stated, this is a domain of activity, interaction and negotiation so fundamental to the existence of human society, and its production and reproduction, so commonplace and ever-present, that it remains beyond notice, as does its “natural” and everyday violence. Consider the matter of domestic violence; of rape in the family; of forced—and indeed “unforced”—labor in local communities, including women’s labor (reproductive and productive), seen as being both obvious and immanent.9 What is the place of domestic violence or domestic labor in the world of the historical and the memorialized? What is its archive, and its temporality? These are naturalized activities, too familiar it seems to have been worthy of comment for the longest time in human history, too pervasive (and too “normal”) to have been the object of public discourse until very recently. Much the same may be said about traditional domestic arrangements, hierarchies and expectations, reckoned, for the longest time, as being preordained and timeless. This is, in the inherited

Introduction 9 common sense, just the order of things: without cause or condition, unclassified and un-textualized, beyond the domain of collective (identity-making?) memory or history. A great deal of the stuff of human history thus comes to be unarchived because of the everydayness and endless repeatability, the common knowledge and the “triviality” of most of our social and political relations and procedures.10 It has required the emergence of insurgent political movements, and insurgent thinking, to challenge the structures that work to exclude these dynamics from history and memory. It is only with the rise of the women’s movement, and other movements of the subordinated, the “naturalized” and the “routinized,” that the personal can even come to be conceived of as political; or it can be argued that domestic labor is work, unpaid and unrecognized; or that domestic servants are part of the working classes and need to be organized and represented, or better still to represent themselves; and that domestic violence and rape (including rape within the family) requires public notice, historical reconstruction, political recognition and legal intervention. I have written about the contest over these matters in earlier work on memory and history, relating to the Partition of British India in 1947, and to the violence that constituted the event called Partition. I suggested in those writings that a great deal of what happens in moments of extreme violence, such as Partition, is passed off as aberrant or mundane: too inconsequential to be worthy of remembrance, and too difficult to accommodate in the received narratives of nation and community.11 Rather than revisit that moment of extraordinary violence, and the various forms of textualization that go into the making of its memory and history, I want to turn here to the memoirs of two “ordinary” (that is to say, not already famous) women—one from South Asia and one from North America—to illustrate my argument about the erasure of the “trifling,” and about textualization as a condition of articulated, verbalized or written memory and history—and, thus, “knowledge.”

Telling it “as I saw it then” The first of my examples comes from the extensive, and unpublished, notes and reminiscences of Viola Perryman Andrews, now preserved in the Manuscripts and Rare Books section of the Emory University library. A relatively unknown woman, mother (and successively) sharecropper, seamstress, writer and religious educator from the state of Georgia in southern USA, Viola Andrews began writing down her memories in the mid-1960s, at the time of the most visible and effective phase of the Civil Rights movement, in Atlanta, the birthplace and home of the most important leader of the struggle. Several of her children became active in the movement: one, Benny, as a leader and organizer of the struggle for the rights of black artists; another, Harold, as a Black Muslim minister. Viola writes about these developments in her children’s lives, and (as a fervent believer in Christ) expresses some anxiety about what it means for a son of hers to become a Muslim brother. But she spends remarkably little time on the question of civil rights and the African-American struggle in general.

10

Gyanendra Pandey

In putting together an account of her life, Viola’s “memory-bank” (as she calls it) is focused on the fortunes of her immediate family, and the effort to find the minimum resources necessary for survival and the education of her children. Not surprisingly, however, given the times and the location—rural and small town Georgia for the first forty years of her life, and Atlanta after that, all in the Jim Crow South—her writing is rarely far removed from what “whites” and “blacks,” men and women, rich and poor, had given to them by law and inheritance. “The white man could not loose [lose]”, she writes in her notes on “growing up,” “pryor to 1920,” repeating the proposition three times on one page. “The colored man could not win.” The whites bragged that they were “Free, White and Twenty-one,” young and powerful. “They looked down on everyone else,” she notes: not only “Niggers” as they called them, but all races, “Orientals, Asians.”12 White men, at least the wealthy and privileged among them, lived a double life. On the outside, the white man had a “clean life,” with his wife, children, church and work. Behind the scenes, “he had his colored concubines.” Colored folks knew that “all well to do white men had their colored concubines.”13 The bottom line was that the white man, especially the rich white man, was immoral. The matter of race was a running battle inside the Andrews’ home as well. Viola’s husband, George, fair-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed, yet socially and officially black—since he was the son of a white man and a black woman—was desperate to fit in with the local African-American community, “Deadly against Educated Niggers” (Viola’s words), and a firm believer that African-Americans should never try to be “above themselves”. Viola was exactly the opposite, ferociously ambitious for her children (and, more quietly, for herself). Constant strife was thus a feature of their rural home. Viola Andrews’ autobiography recalls her father-in-law as being “mean and cruel” during the time that they lived on his land in the 1930s, dependent on him. When a cow got loose, she recalls, he cursed her soundly. She had to accept this quietly for fear that he would hit her, even if no damage was done. “Anyway he was a white man and I was on his place, also I was Black.”14 Viola’s artist sons, Benny and Raymond, the first readers of the earliest parts of her autobiography, wrote more than once to ask why she didn’t write about the black struggle. “Negroes progress . . .,” she responds in a letter of April 1965: “It is such a big thing and such a miracle. I do believe in miracles. . . .”15 She notes the major changes that could be seen in Atlanta—African-American policemen on the streets of the city, bus drivers, firemen, store clerks, nurses—and follows up with proud comments on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Selma march, and the large numbers of young blacks ready and organizing to help Dr. King. However, she says in the same letter, she “never remember[s] to mention” the matter of race relations and black progress in the “[auto]-biography” she is so meticulously putting together. She explains this omission at a later point in the writing of her life-story: “I am writing as I knew and saw it then and there. In our community, all the colored owned or rented their land. . . . I was young and I knew nothing about Race Relationship.”16 There is no recognizable genre into which Viola’s “biography” (as she frequently calls it), or her retrospective “diary”, scattered notes, repetitive descriptions

Introduction 11 of dreams and struggles, and continuous exhortations to God (however we might characterize the writing), readily fits. Indeed, her writing reminds us of the early twentieth-century feminist conundrum that Virginia Woolf so beautifully articulated in A Room of One’s Own, when she reacted to the critique of early nineteenth century women’s writing being bad and not worth reading: But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing – and I believe that they had a very great effect – that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them . . . when they came to set their thoughts on paper – that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. . . . The ape is too distant to be sedulous.17 Viola’s autobiography is not a slave narrative, although she employs the trope of escape to freedom from the slavery in which her husband (and not quite legal in-laws) had held her. It is not a coming-of-age story, with or without strong political overtones, like that of Ann Moody.18 It is not a political autobiography of struggle against segregation and racial discrimination of the kind that the Civil Rights struggle gave rise to in plenty. It is not even the record of a devout Christian’s inner strivings and continuous communion with God, although Viola suggests that that’s part of how her musings began. It partakes of all of those traditions—and more; for Viola is not bound either by a too sophisticated, and therefore limiting, education in writing the self or understanding the political. One of her appeals to the reader/editor (once her papers come to be acquired by Emory University, and she begins to dream of having her memoirs published “one day”) is to be sure not to change anything in them, not to raise it to his or her “academic” level, for then (she says) “it will not be me (mine)”. When Viola Andrews, and her sons, write that she has not attended to race relations, they are plainly thinking of demonstrations, sit-ins and other dramatic events of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The theme of Viola’s writing is her family, and its struggle to make good in an exceptionally difficult environment. For her sons, as for herself, this does not qualify as being an account of something as significant as “race relations.” It is, instead, merely personal and familial: mundane, routine, perhaps even trivial (although clearly, at some level, they are far from that for Viola). In spite of Viola’s desire and determination to write down “how things were,” which her children and her children’s children may otherwise never know, there is, for her, no ready inheritance that allows a framing and conceptualization of this past as politically (or “publicly”) significant, or an articulation of it as a history, or memory, of race relations.

“How do you talk about it . . .?” Let me turn from that to my second example, Baby Kondiba Kamble’s portrayal of Dalit life and history in the rural areas and small towns of Maharashtra, western

12

Gyanendra Pandey

India, in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Baby Kamble writes in the tradition of Dalit life-writing that developed powerfully, especially in western India, in the 1980s and 1990s. With the emergence of the great Dalit leader, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, as a towering national figure, in the period after the 1950s even more than in his lifetime, and his recognition as a remarkable intellectual, visionary and leader, Dalits all over India have come to invoke his example, and Dalit life-writings have appeared in the form of fairly direct political commentary and inducement to Dalit mobilization. The figure of Ambedkar is critical, and the writings take on the temper of early modern charitra (literally, “character”)—biographies, or hagiographies, of the lives and character of saints, written in order to claim disciple-ship and an empowering connection with the saint. Baby Kamble (or Baby Tai as she was affectionately called as an elder) is passionately committed to the struggle for the liberation and advancement of the ex-Untouchables (now called Dalits), and she writes of Ambedkar and the Ambedkarite struggle as an integral part of her family story. Although her own family escaped the extreme condition of discrimination and deprivation in which the majority of Mahars lived, what Baby Tai gives us in Jina Amcha (Our Lives)— first serialized in a Marathi journal in 1982, and published as a book in Marathi in 1986—is a detailed account of the poverty of the lowest castes, of the oppression of women, especially daughters-in-law, and, with that, of an increasingly public and popular struggle against upper-caste dominance and privilege. In this rendering her immediate family and the wider caste group are continuously interlinked, in spite of her family’s relatively comfortable circumstances. “The maharwada [Mahar neighborhood] symbolized utter poverty and total destitution.” “All the dirty and laborious jobs were the privilege of the Mahar!” “Poverty oozed out of their house[s].” During epidemics, she writes, when they heard news of cattle having died, “the joy of the Mahars knew no bounds. . . . The inside of some animals would be putrid, filled with puss and infected with maggots. There would be a horrid, foul smell! . . . But we did not throw away even such animals. We cut off the infected parts full of puss, and convinced ourselves that it was now safe to eat the meat.”19 The majority of Mahars—laborers and servants—were “like insects crawling around in hunger. With no food to eat, at least a couple of people would be ill in each house, lying down in rags. . . . almost lifeless with hunger. . . . They breathed, therefore they were supposed to be alive.” Further: “The entire community had sunk deep in the mire of . . . dreadful superstitions. The upper castes had never allowed this lowly caste of ours to acquire knowledge. Generation after generation, our people rotted and perished by following such a superstitious way of life”.20 Liberation in this account comes in the form of a miracle wrought by a savior, the great Dalit leader, Babasaheb Ambedkar: “[He] breathed life into lifeless statues, that is, the people of our community. It was he who lighted a lamp in each heart and brought light to our dark lives. . . . he made us human beings. . . . He made it possible for us to receive education. . . . it is because of him that the

Introduction 13 age-old suffering of millions of people could be wiped out within fifty years.” “Suddenly the times changed,” says Kamble, summing up the gifts bequeathed by Ambedkar and his struggle: “The struggle yielded us three jewels—humanity, education and the religion of the Buddha. . . . We began to walk and talk. We became conscious that we too are human beings.”21 Two kinds of subaltern body appear in Baby Kamble’s narrative. The first is the body of the poor (child, laborer, woman)—with runny noses, sweat pouring down emaciated and exhausted bodies, blood and dirt (from meat and refuse) running out of baskets they must carry, and seeping into their hair and down their faces. The second is that of the girl/woman, most dramatically embodied in the figure of the daughter-in-law and the wife—who is constantly exploited, overworked, disciplined, punished by a jealous patriarchal order, which doesn’t hesitate to show its manliness by cutting off the noses of women for real or imagined transgressions. Outside the home, we are told, poor, laboring Mahar women walked on the side of the village roads “with utmost humility so as not to offend anyone. They tried to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible, hiding themselves from all others.” Inside the home, they bore other burdens: “A Mahar woman would continue to give birth till she reached menopause. Perhaps, this became possible because of the inner strength that she had. . . . Hardly a few of the babies would survive. . . . But somehow the cycle of birth and death would go on.”22 Women and girls are utterly central to Baby Kamble’s narrative. In the account of the liberation struggle set in motion by Ambedkar, they appear as major protagonists (and, as she notes, it is a woman who gives birth to Babasaheb). In the depiction of Ambedkar’s achievements, again, the matter of the liberation of women from age-long oppression is underscored: the author refers to the Hindu Code Bill, which “tore off the net in which men had trapped women for ages.” Yet women, and Baby Tai herself, figure less as an independent, guiding force in the community and its struggle, than as humble interpreters of a supernatural leader’s vision. Baby Tai observes that she was caught up in the Ambedkarite movement from an early age, attending meetings along with her husband and helping to mobilize Dalits in the small town of Phaltan. Following Ambedkar’s advice that Dalits should try to set up small businesses rather than look for service jobs, she persuaded her husband to begin selling grapes, buying loose grapes from the surrounding countryside and selling them at a small profit. With that start, they went on to open a small grocery shop (in an additional room built on the front of the house) that quickly became a center of trade and political discussion, located as it was just opposite the Mahar chawdi (or public gathering-place) of the neighborhood. It was during the long hours spent sitting at the shop, waiting for customers, that Baby Kamble began writing her memoirs—in hiding. Asked by the translator of her autobiography into English why she hid her writing for twenty years, she said: “Because of my husband. He was a good man but like all the men of his time and generation, he considered a woman an inferior being.” She recalls how deeply

14

Gyanendra Pandey

suspicious her husband was of her littlest moves, and how he beat her repeatedly on flimsy grounds. “In fact,” she states, “this was the life most women led. . . . Women are still slaves. . . . (They) used to be afraid of even looking up at their husbands.” “Fathers used to teach their sons to treat their wives as footwear! A wife’s place was near her husband’s feet.”23 Pressed to explain why she never felt the need to write about all this in her memoir, the memoirist says simply: “Well, he was my husband after all! . . . Besides I had my community to consider, our lack of education, progress. It would be so demeaning.” And further: “I had to suffer like many other women. But how do you . . . talk about it when everyone is suffering?”24 It is noteworthy that Baby Tai makes exactly the opposite argument regarding “community” in describing the condition of the Mahars and the wider Dalit population. “I wrote about what my community experienced. The suffering of my people became my own suffering. Their experiences became mine. . . . I really find it difficult to think of myself outside of my community.” The context for this was a strong and widespread Dalit movement. On the other hand, the community of women had still not found very effective political voice, or been forcefully conceptualized, by the women’s movement (or the Dalit women’s movement) in India. There was as yet no readily acceptable text or frame for a narrativizing of Dalit women’s experience. The memory of the exploitation and oppression of Dalit women is not, then, self-consciously articulated or realized, for all of its raw, and immediate, presence.

The history of the commonplace It may help to revisit, in the light of these examples, the history of the daily re-enactment of caste and race discrimination in the post-colony as well as in the colony, in the twenty-first century as well as in the nineteenth. It is notable that even in what are seen as relatively free and democratic societies today, such as India and the USA, a violence that is institutionalized in practices of racism, segregation and untouchability, serves to maintain existing and inherited forms of privilege, and persistent boundaries between racially or socially segregated communities.25 Studies of the African-American middle classes have shown how black middle class areas in most large American cities still remain bound within segregated black communities. In many instances, where black middle class groups have moved out of traditionally black neighborhoods, their relocation has been followed by the phenomenon of “white flight” from the areas they have moved into, leading to the establishment of separate white and black neighborhoods once again.26 Even where this is not so obviously the case in physical terms, as might be claimed for Dalit professionals in India (smaller in number than their African-American counterparts, and less easily distinguished by skin color or physical appearance), it has long been the social-psychological condition under which ex-slave, ex-untouchable, lower-class middle classes have to live and find their being.27 The violence in question is to be found not only in the physical and sexual abuse, rape and flogging of lower caste and class servants and workers; and not

Introduction 15 only in riots and police violence against blacks and Dalits. It may be traced, too, in the upper caste desertion of neighborhoods, clubs, schools, public transport and sometimes even jobs into which the lower castes have been allowed entry. It is seen in actions against affirmative action, in the courts and the legislatures as well as on the streets, and in the continued abuse and punishment of Dalits, blacks and other such stigmatized, “lower class” populations for appearing where they are still not expected to be. The African-American addition to the list of statutory offences relating to drinking and driving in the US (not only DUI, “driving under the influence,” and DWI, “driving while intoxicated,” but also DWB, “driving while black,” which is of course not a legally cognizable offense!), and the Native American version of it (in which DWI becomes “driving while Indian”), is a profound comment on the necessity of being “white,” “modern,” and mono-cultural in a very particular way, to fully access the resources and opportunities of modern civic existence. Even if we work with the narrower view of the archive as depository, or physical site for the preservation of historical documentation, the archive for the kinds of histories referred to above is bound to be unconventional, even subterranean. Put simply, the evidence that identifies or signifies everyday prejudice and discriminatory behavior is fleeting and chancy, scrappy and ambiguous. For it is not always in the form of physical torture or verbal abuse that practices of discrimination, objectification and humiliation are perpetuated, or that instigation to (renewed) violence occurs. Nor is prejudice often proclaimed from the rooftops. Indeed, one might say, it is hardly self-conscious. It appears, instead, as common sense, as the natural order of things. What is, is—and, if all were properly ordered, must be. It is in this way that the idea of the “lazy,” “dirty,” “inefficient,” “slow to learn”, and yet “untrustworthy,” “aggressive,” “clannish,” lower class, lower caste, “migratory,” “aboriginal” and always impoverished denizen of the ghettoes and slums lives on. As one might expect, the common sense of particularly polarized race, caste, class or gender relations is articulated in rarely archived, historically un-pretty, and therefore generally unacknowledged, actions and statements: the derogatory names given to, and the insulting meanings often attached to the names of the lowest castes and classes, or the abusive language used towards them by the privileged, when members of long subordinated groups happen to receive access to education or rapid social mobility, or are able to mount a political challenge to the power of those providentially assigned to rule. Further, given the history of disproportionately skewed access to resources and power in historical societies, such abusiveness and disdain has often not needed to be fully articulated. It has commonly been reserved for the spat-out yet suppressed word-of-mouth, and one might add, for the gesture of disdain, contempt and disgust, the pause and the recoil, the refusal to touch; what in India is called Untouchability. How, we must ask, out of what archive, are we to write a history of these practices, which are not events, not datable, sometimes not nameable either: just routine, everyday—the very stuff of life and, we must insist, of history?28

16

Gyanendra Pandey

The chapters that follow The chapters that follow have been divided into three sections, entitled “The State and its record(s),” “Everyday as archive,” and “Signs of wonder.” The division, and especially the placement of particular chapters in one section as opposed to another, is somewhat arbitrary. For each individual contribution deals with several aspects of the question of unarchived histories, and most of them would have fitted almost as comfortably into other sections of the book. The contributors to this anthology are all centrally concerned with the politics of archive-making or, perhaps more precisely, that of archive-denial. As will be amply clear by now, the “unarchived” in the title “unarchived histories” is, in the sense we give to it, less as an adjective than a verb. What we draw attention to are not histories for which there is no archive—histories without an archive—but rather histories that have been disenfranchised: un-archived, as I have said, in the very process of enfranchising and archiving other histories. In this introduction, I have also highlighted another term that describes the winnowing exercise that goes into the making of our pasts (and our presents): textualizing. For the human story is articulated, verbalized, displayed—made available as history/knowledge—through a process of textualization. That is to say, it is framed, authorized, and indeed made legible, by being fitted into recognizable genres, inherited languages, and accepted grids of intelligibility. All of the chapters that follow are built around the question of textualizing, or framing, and thus providing languages and rules for historical and social scientific inquiry and commentary. Several call for a pointed critique of the methods of a statist, progressivist, monist historiography: among them, Bhatnagar, Deo, Gill and Nugent. A number of contributions focus on the technologies of state documentary practices—some explicitly, others more implicitly: see especially Turner, Nugent and Gill. Many, if not all, attend to traces of other histories, ghosts that cannot be tamed: or what earlier writers have referred to as answers to questions that have not been posed, “foreign words” and “fragments” that crop up unexpectedly to interrupt any narrative.29 Several allude to ascriptions of madness, incomprehensibility, the “absence of an oeuvre” (Johnson, Deo, Bhattacharyya, Turner, McPherson). Almost all call, again, for a close reading of genres and contexts in order to explore the history of archiving and un-archiving: most obviously, Huffer, Bhattacharyya and Bhatnagar. Disciplinary historians, like judges, have long demanded verifiable evidence, identity, determination, motivated authorship—in order to make their case, and arrive at a ruling on history or crime. A critical history, we argue, needs to be a little more historical—aware of the location, context, inheritance and politics of both the historian (the judge) and the archive. It is in this context that we have focused on the process of archiving and simultaneous un-archiving as always politically interested practice, and pointed especially toward routine elements in the past and the present that have not been, and will not readily be, archived. In her contribution to this volume, Lynne Huffer aptly describes un-archiving as “the construction of an alterity that buttresses an Enlightened self whose

Introduction 17 violence is masked by its claims to uphold justice and freedom”30: an alterity, let me reiterate, that is commonly objectified as a madness incapable of speech, which can only be studied and, in the best of worlds, contained.31 Rashmi Bhatnagar, in her chapter, points out that “the mode of existence of unarchived histories is not silence and erasure but rather the zone of unintelligibility, distortion and decrepitude shared by the deviant, the insane, the aberrant and the incarcerated criminal.”32 In one way or another, we are suggesting, “the insane, the aberrant and the incarcerated” include the entire world of subalternized and colonized others. To the domain of the exile, peopled by the “insane” and the “out of sync,” we have added the critical category of the “trifling,” exiled within. We have stressed, at the same time, that neither the self-proclaimed realm of reason, nor that of its obverse or underside—the world of “unreason,” sometimes dismissed as “mad” or “trifling”—is set in stone, clearly demarcated and unalterable for all time. Indeed, the mad and the trifling are recognized, or rather posited, by reason only when they appear in some way to threaten its rule. The motor of all human history may thus perhaps be described, in an emendation of the Marxist proposition about class struggle, as the ongoing struggle of the subordinated and the marginalized to find voice, to obtain a place in—and possibly transform—the realm of reason, legibility and power. That struggle is never easily concluded: perhaps never concluded. It is only when the insurgent political moment—the anti-colonial uprising, the women’s movement, “minority” struggles of Native Americans, African-Americans, Dalits, and other marginalized, borderland and indigenous peoples—arises to challenge inherited grids of legibility and illegibility, knowledge and not-knowledge, that the guardians of the archive and of history open up their gates, even a little. The translation of non-histories into history, of the unarchived into an archive, the search for new histories and new archives in other words, is always a part of such insurgency—bearing in mind that this must also be a struggle for the transformation of the boundaries and the template of history, for part of the problem is the violence of history-making itself.

Notes 1 See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi, 1983); Dominick La Capra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language, (Ithaca, 1983); Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, (New Brunswick, 1987); Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), 773–97; Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915, (Chapel Hill, 1994); Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards the History of the Vanishing Present, (Cambridge MA, 1999), 198–311; Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India, (New York, 1999); Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, 2009), to mention only a handful of scholars. 2 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, 1996), 3, 4, 91 and passim.

18

Gyanendra Pandey

3 Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham NC, 1999); and “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Vol. 2 (Delhi, 1984). 4 Norman G Barrier, ed., The Census in British India: New Perspectives (Delhi, 1981); Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996); Benedict Anderson, “Census, Map, Museum” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, new edition (London, 2006). 5 Rashmi Bhatnagar, “Hindavi as Archive Object and a 17th Century Katha”, presentation at workshop on “Unarchived Histories” (Emory University, Atlanta), 18–19 February, 2011. A similar fate often awaited individual stories and authors too. Thus, as Ruby Lal demonstrates, the later nineteenth century framing of Insha’allah Khan’s remarkable 1803 tale about Rani Ketki as the “earliest example of Hindi prose” served to make it part of an archive of the evolution of the Hindi language, and quite successfully reduced the prospects of it being read for its social commentary, its frank presentation of female (and male) desire, and its own literary playfulness; Ruby Lal, Coming of Age in 19th century India: The Girl Child and the Art of Playfulness (New York, 2013). 6 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London, 2006), xxxii; emphasis in original. 7 Ibid, xxxiv. 8 For an elaboration of the points made in this and the following paragraphs, see my Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge, 2001) and Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments and Histories, (Stanford, 2005). 9 Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London, 1997 [1949]). 10 As M.S.S. Pandian puts it, in a sensitive reading of a number of Dalit autobiographical writings, “The everydayness and repeatability of untouchability in these texts [as of racial and sexual humiliation in others] place them outside the domain of history”; M.S.S. Pandian: “Writing Ordinary Lives” in Gyanendra Pandey, ed., Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA (London, 2010), 101 and passim. 11 See Remembering Partition, passim. 12 Emory University, Manuscripts and Rare Book Library, Viola Andrews Papers, Mss 813, Box 17, FF 7 and 8; and Box 21, FF 8. 13 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 10 and 7. 14 Mss 813, Box 17, FF 12. 15 Mss 845, Box 115, Viola to Benny, April 28, 1965. 16 Mss 813, Box 17, FF9. 17 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (New York, 1929), 76 (emphasis added). I owe thanks to Debjani Bhattacharyya for reminding me of Woolf’s comment. 18 Ann Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, (New York, 1968). 19 Baby Kamble, The Prisons We Broke, trans Maya Pandit (Chennai, 2008) 46, 76, 80, 83, 85; Jina Amcha, (Pune, 1986), 66, 68. 20 Ibid, 103–104, 37. 21 Ibid, Prisons, 118, 122. 22 Kamble, Jina Amcha, 78, 54, 82 and passim. 23 Kamble, Prisons, 147, or 154–7. 24 Ibid, 147, 154–7. 25 As Paul Gilroy notes, this is a situation in which the lines between public and private violence have often been very hard to draw; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge MA, 1993), 175. 26 The literature on this theme is considerable. For two important recent studies, see Mary Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago, 1999) and Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005).

Introduction 19 27 Darryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Erving Goffman, Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York, 1963); Gopal Guru, ed., Humiliation: Claims and Context (New Delhi, 2011). 28 Some of the arguments presented in this section are elaborated in my A History of Prejudice. Race, Caste and Difference in India and the United States (New York, 2013). 29 Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 2009); Theodor Adorno, “Words from Abroad”, Notes to Literature, Vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1991), 185–99 and “On the Use of Foreign Words”, Notes to Literature, Vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1992), 286–91; Gyan Pandey, Routine Violence, 16–44 and passim. 30 See Chapter 10, this volume. 31 Cf. Gayatri Spivak’s classic discussion in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (UrbanaChampaign, 1988), 271–316; revised and updated in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 198–311. 32 See Chapter 5, this volume.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

The state and its record(s)

This page intentionally left blank

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

24

Navyug Gill

“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 newlyestablished 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

Peasant as alibi 25 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; moneylenders 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 ethnographic 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

26

Navyug Gill

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 officerturned-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

Peasant as alibi 27 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, “that it [the demand for revenue] is not an important cause of debt.”20 Responsibility for indebtedness— possibly the most pressing issue in late nineteenth-century colonial Panjab—is thereby relocated elsewhere, on either irresponsible native extravagance or impersonal market forces. As a result, the state is rendered innocuous, appearing only occasionally to assist with the abstractions of infrastructure, jurisprudence and welfare, but otherwise largely absent. This despite the fact that the early decades of the twentieth-century marked a period of unparalleled turmoil in Panjab: the mass agitation for landed rights in 1907, the attempt at armed rebellion by the Ghadar party in 1915, the deep popular unrest over the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919, the struggle for control of Sikh gurduare in the 1920s, and the growing influence of anti-colonial nationalist and communist politics throughout the 1930s. Darling is therefore “sympathetic” to Panjabis not as subjects of a coercive state but through the paradox of natives in a condition that elides the very force that produces them as natives in the first place. The omission both of discontent and the colonial state conceals yet simultaneously enables perhaps the most important effect of Darling’s work: the instantiation of the peasant as alibi for Panjabi society. That is, what appears as a broad corpus of writing on colonial Panjab is ultimately a sustained exposition on the peasant. Darling’s discourse normalizes through its very operation the primacy of this one figure atop a largely undifferentiated and apolitical society below. As Mitchell explains from another context, the denial of colonial presence produces not only a false objectivity, but also transforms the subject at the center of such narratives. If through certain American writings on Egypt “the figure of the peasant is [merely] given a place in the monologue of the West,”21 then it is through Darling that Panjabi society is cast into the ventriloquized monologue of the peasant. This logic of alibi becomes apparent in how the different facets of rural life Darling covers on his tours actually lead back to, and revolve around, the figure of the peasant. Legal problems, for instance, are almost wholly concerned with the increase of litigation over land titles, disputes over property inheritance and the effects of paternalistic legislation. Similarly, economic issues are often a guise for discussing changes in the price of agricultural produce and labor remuneration, landowners’ wedding expenditures and the value of land, as well as the aforementioned crisis of indebtedness. Social questions, too, reflect the generalization of the peasant’s consumption patterns, dress and hygiene, religious

28

Navyug Gill

practices and family relations. Even the environment is explained through this optic, with emphasis on rainfall levels, soil qualities, harvest schedules, irrigation schemes and planting seasons. For all the variety of interlocutors, themes and venues Darling seems to cover, the undeclared object of inquiry nonetheless remains the peasant. It is therefore more redundant than revelatory when he suggests that “the peasant is still the predominant unit of society.”22 Darling’s writings are independent of its raison d’être, exemplary of a particular peasant narrative masquerading as a study of Panjabi society as a whole. Bhaiya bandobast aya/te chura chhalla lahya! [The settlement came, brothers/and fleeced us of our [wives’] bangles and ring[s]!]23 The figure of the peasant as a stand-in for Panjabi society did not commence with Malcolm Darling. His work is not simply erroneous or insidious, but neither is there an expectation for it to be any different. Instead, it is a popular manifestation of a more expansive if elusive discourse that profoundly shaped how native society came to be observed, organized and depicted. Darling’s work, in other words, emerges from an archive. As Gyanendra Pandey notes, this “site of selection and classification, of framing and authorizing,”24 establishes what is worth knowing about native society as much as how it becomes knowable. Yet just as prejudice is seldom proclaimed from rooftops,25 un-archiving too is rarely an explicit or even necessarily a deliberate exercise. The importance of the peasant is always relational, always in contrast to the range of other castes and classes rendered un-important. Attending to the politics of the archive thereby makes appreciable this act of displacement and the economy underlying its endurance. A vital element in the constitution of the archive of Panjabi society was the colonial settlement report. Almost immediately after (and in some places prior to) the British conquest in 1849, settlement officers conducted expeditions throughout the countryside to examine, classify and catalogue the wealth of the province and its inhabitants. The explicit purpose was to determine the amount of revenue entitled to the new sovereign.26 Unlike the Bengal Presidency, where the 1793 permanent settlement attempted to fix the proportion of demand from a singularized owner in perpetuity,27 the amount to be taken in Panjab underwent periodic re-assessment due to the expansion both of cultivation area and irrigation methods, as well as the worldwide rise in prices for agricultural produce. The significance of the settlement report, however, lies beyond the obvious intent of increasing revenue extraction. Instead, it was often the first exercise of discursive force, the medium for the encounter between colonizers and colonized, and the means by which Panjabi society became an object worth-knowing/knowable to the British imagination. The settlement report is therefore an instrument of power that doubles as a report on the making of an archive. The authority of this genre relied foremost on its claims of direct access to the native population. Abstract generalizations were insufficient for the precision required for proper revenue policy. In the 1852 settlement of Hoshiarpur district

Peasant as alibi 29 in eastern Panjab, P. S. Melvill outlines a few of the calculations involved in making an accurate assessment. “During the course of the measurement of each pergunnah [a large administrative unit],” he explains, the settlement officer “visited each village and made careful inspection of its soil, inhabitants, and general capacity.”28 Although the report does not initially state which particular inhabitants were inspected, their location in this series between soil quality and productive capacity suggests a homology of population to peasant. The total area, Melvill continues, was then divided into chuks [smaller grouping of villages] based on distinctions of soil, but also taking into account “the caste of the proprietors and cultivators, their condition as affected by past collections, and the relative amount of the summary jumma [payment] to be weighed.”29 Such neat classifications were often complicated, however, when; Estates containing the most fertile soil were owned by Rajpoots, or were dependent for cultivators on other villages, or belonged to non-resident proprietors [which] would probably render it necessary to place such villages in one of the lower classes.30 Or the opposite could occur, where; Estates composed of inferior soil, but owned by the more industrious and highly cultivating castes would be removed and placed in the highest class. [. . .] Thus, while the natural productive powers of a village were primarily regarded, the classification was modified so as to meet the capacity of each estate to pay revenue.31 After this initial estimate of revenue potential was made, Melvill goes on to list several other qualities taken into considerations: the means of irrigation (wells, rainfall, canals), whether the land supported one or two harvests per year, and if portions were covered by fruit trees or sugarcane. Only then, when “class after class was worked through” and cross-referenced with similar chuks elsewhere was the new assessment “deemed trustworthy”and fit for implementation.32 Once the revenue demand was determined, however, there remained the task of correctly assigning the responsibility for its payment. The omnipresence of native perfidy meant uncertainty stalked the process of verifying knowledge.33 H. Davison’s 1859 settlement of Ludhiana district south of the Sutlej river offers a lesson on the uses of surveillance to procure truth. Confusion over boundaries between fields, overlapping ownership claims and terminological differences presented just some of the difficulties in determining the correct proprietor of a plot of land. As Davidson narrates; [W]hen asked whether two contiguous plots of land were one and the same, or whether they were separate fields, if they belonged to one and the same owner, [the villagers] would reply that it was one field; [but] if they were the properties of two distinct persons, they would reply that they were distinct.34

30

Navyug Gill

But this was unsatisfactory since the people interviewed often conflated ownership with cultivation, and possibly many other claims, thereby skewing the results and preventing an accurate assignment. Davidson’s solution was to instruct that “wherever doubt existed,” the settlement officer should “ascertain by questioning the parties on the spot, whether, at ploughing time, the limits in question were ploughed over or not.” Based on that answer, and vigilant inspection, he relates that; [I]f it was that the plough turned at the doubtful limit, and left it untouched, why, of course, it formed the limit of a separate field; it was in fact pukka [official], but; if the plough crossed it indiscriminately, it was cucha [unofficial], but—merely a temporary ridge, formed probably to retain water and not forming the limit of what was to be recorded as a separate field.35 The actual gaze of the officer was thus the corrective applied to the enigmatic movement of a plough across a field. In this way, though hardly in this way alone, the relationship between land and its many contributing cultivators—separated, scrutinized and re-structured—was mediated by an active and personal presence among (some of) the people of Panjab. Settlement work occurred as an exercise of economic intimacy. While the immersion of colonial officials was a means of checking the dishonesty that constantly challenged the accuracy of the settlement reports, this suspicion was expressed as an act of benevolence. In other words, the acquisition of knowledge about Panjabi society was paradoxically described as a gesture of disinterested concern. “If there is one official whom the people learn to trust,” explains M. W. Fenton in the 1897 proposal for the re-settlement of Dera Ismail Khan district in south-western Panjab, “it is the Settlement Officer.”36 They do so because he “patiently investigates all their agricultural conditions, and learns thoroughly to understand their feelings on all subjects connected with those conditions.”37 Again, the universal category “the people” acquires a particular character when refracted through the common sense of “agricultural conditions.” Such intrusive practices, moreover, would be impossible at a distance; to fulfill the duty of assembling a reliable knowledge of Panjabi society, one that addressed all that was considered important to the colonial state, immanence was essential. Indeed, Fenton adds that “the schemes which involve intricate questions of tenure and title will never be carried to completion unless a special officer is at hand to meet all the difficulties which lie in the way.”38 The authority of the settlement report therefore resided in the premium placed on engaging with natives. A settlement officer confronting a villager—questioning, examining and copiously recording—personified the method of producing a new archive. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls this asymmetrical engagement between British official and native subject the “worlding [of] their [the native’s] own world . . . anew,” a process which “generates the force to make the ‘native’ see himself as ‘other.’” 39 She describes how an officer named Geoffrey Birch journeyed from Delhi to Calcutta in 1815, “riding about the hills with a single native escort,”

Peasant as alibi 31 appearing as “a slight[ly] romantic figure if encountered in the pages of a novel or on the screen.” But the ability to document at will while moving freely throughout a foreign space was no ordinary act of journalism or travelogue. Rather, as Spivak points out, it is through Birch that the “truth value of the stranger is being established as the reference point for the true (insertion into) history of these wild regions.”40 The trope of presence among the people, central to establishing the legitimacy and accuracy of the settlement report, was an expression of economic interest and its surplus under the guise of intellectual curiosity.

A genre of power The importance of the settlement report is also underpinned by its panoramic pretensions. As the technique for determining agricultural wealth as revenue potential, this genre of writing was perhaps the single most consistent, as well as voluminous, instrument of British rule. Throughout this regularity, a gradual rationalization of method and generalization of scope furthered the settlement reports’ evolution into a body of material about all (that mattered) of Panjabi society. Revenue collection for a particular area began with a summary settlement. An initial demand was established based on an expedient use of existent native records, cooperative local leaders and perfunctory land evaluations. This could hold for several years until administrative and military conditions allowed a more thorough regular settlement to be implemented for a fixed term of twenty to thirty years. As mentioned earlier, however, rapid changes in revenue potential might necessitate a revised or even fluctuating settlement to modify demand for different lengths of time.41 For example, Septimus Thorburn’s first regular settlement of Bannu district in 1872 followed two previous summary settlements (1853–54 and 1860–61), took over six years to complete, cost almost five lakh rupees (a sum not to be recovered by the projected seven percent increase in revenue returned for at least twenty years) and was valid for a thirty year term.42 Reports such as these were continuously commissioned for administrative units of varying sizes covering the entire territory and population under the British. In effect, there was hardly a moment when settlement activity of one sort or another was not being conducted in some part of Panjab during the full durée of colonial rule. What was the purported range of information collected through such systematic and detailed processes? The changing tables of content for the settlement report genre point toward an answer. Richard Temple’s early 1852 settlement of Jalandhar district, for instance, lists six sections each with several subcategories: Preliminary and Geographic (district and village boundaries, geography of the district, results of field survey); Statistical (preparation methods, area-agriculture-population, census); Fiscal (rent rates, produce estimates, soil rates, caste of agriculturalists); Revenue Administration under Native Government (the status of property under Sikh Government, landlord and tenant, internal economy of the village communities); Judicial (rules for the guidance of settlement courts, statute of limitations,

32

Navyug Gill

suits arising out of resumption and release of lands, descent and inheritance, prerequisites to proprietorship, tenant rights); and Amount of Work and Expenditure (amount of litigation, appeals, comparisons).43 Covering such a wide range of topics, this first table appears equally haphazard and without a clear order or themes. By the 1878 revision of the settlement of Montgomery district, content is organized sequentially and with greater discretion. Three divisions contain specific chapters under which a narrower collection of topics are arranged. The first division, Description, is organized as follows: The Country (rivers and irrigation, climate, towns and communications); The People (history of the district, account of principle tribes, household furniture, clothing, food); and Agriculture (soils, irrigation, implements, agricultural calendar, indebtedness). Here again, at the level of organization, the sequence of Country and People to Agriculture evinces a telescoping of society into the peasant. For the second division, Fiscal, there are only two paired chapters: Formerly (the Sikh revenue system, previous settlements, subsequent changes) and Now (introduction and the assessment of different administrative units). And lastly, The Record of Rights division eschews chaptering altogether to list directly: records prepared, local officials and an account of settlement operations.44 The assortment of topics begins to be ordered in a successive and comprehensive format. The 1915 revised settlement of Ferozepur district reflects a culmination of the rubric. Detailed chapter headings now contain corresponding information in a successive format: General Description (boundaries, natural divisions, assessment divisions, rainfall, irrigation); Fiscal History (political history, rise of British power, pre-British revenue system); Development and Data for Assessment (agricultural population, value of land, cash rents, grounds for enhancement of revenue); Revision of the Record of Rights (unit of measurement, scale, mutations, partitions); and Revision of the Assessment (true half-net assets, the assessment of each individually named circle). In addition, two unique chapters follow: Other Matters Connected with the Assessment (suspensions and remissions, market assessments, extra taxes) and Miscellaneous (patwaris and kanungos [village- and circle-level accountants], village notebooks, training of officers, cost of settlement).45 By this time, then, the accumulated data on Panjabi society becomes a much more coherent and purposeful narrative. What the evolution of the tables of contents demonstrates is the intersection of two trajectories. On the one hand, the form of the settlement report becomes disciplined. Chapters follow a processional rhythm and adhere closer to chronology, sub-headings have more precision and are grouped with greater relevance, and the repetition of topics is eliminated. On the other hand, the theme of the settlement report appears more expansive. A narrow category such as “Revenue History under Native Government,” for instance, is subsumed under the much more general heading “Fiscal History”—yet both cover the land revenue policies prior to British rule. Furthermore, the creation of a separate miscellaneous section, which seems to imply a broad variety, in fact only contains the ancillary issues of revenue settlement. In this way, the rationality of form posed as a

Peasant as alibi 33 generalization of content that actually remained parochial. Thorburn’s remark, that “[w]hatever is interesting in the history of the district [. . .] is connected with its revenue,”46 therefore reflects as well as enacts the truth-claim of the settlement report—while at the same time betraying that there is a politics to what is considered “interesting.” To be sure, there was never doubt that the focus of these documents was to maximize the workings of the revenue system. What changed, however, was the way this partial account of the peasant acquired the ability to represent all that was worth-knowing about native society. That the genre of the settlement report serves as the first history of so many districts of Panjab is but an abiding expression of this authority.

By force of numbers A peculiar deployment of empiricism furthered the way in which the settlement report shaped both the possibilities and value of a certain form of knowledge. The manipulation of numbers was as vital as it was subtle in producing the truths that adjudicated importance in Panjabi society. Formal census operations were only the most obvious locus of this discourse, and that too not without recognized shortcomings.47 The earliest censuses of Panjab, taken in 1855 and 1868, were quickly faulted for lacking systematic rigor, relying on volunteered native responses and extrapolating from small aggregate figures.48 Similarly, the first decennial census of British India in 1871 (which did not entail any new enumeration in Panjab) was also almost immediately criticized for not being comprehensive and using inaccurate and outdated data.49 On the other hand, the 1881 Panjab census conducted by Denzil Ibbetson, which includes the famous chapter “The Races, Castes, and Tribes of the People,” was heralded at the time as a crowning achievement of statistical might, scientific method and detailed prose.50 While the major censuses were the overt form of data-producing/gathering, and constitute a staple of the archive, what these various efforts also show is that such activities were mired in contestation and doubt at their very inception. Below the scrutiny at the pan-Panjab or pan-British India level, however, the compilation and analysis of data occurred as much with patience and precision as without fanfare. Numbers were of concern to settlement reports not only prior to the census, but also with more frequency and less controversy. The scores of charts appended to each report presented quantified information on a range of topics for every chuk, pergunnah and district of Panjab. It is here that minute data on cultivation levels, produce per acre and prices per crop were abstracted into the larger patterns of land holding returns, demographic shifts and revenue forecasts. By virtue of its regularity, reach and dispersion, each settlement report was in a sense a micro-census of macro-effect. And it is through this medium that the power of numbers and the truths they generated found their most consummate expression. The activity of gathering, tabulating, arranging and expressing empirical data was a laborious enterprise. The various charts included with Temple’s 1852 settlement of Jalandhar district illustrate the extent and purpose of this accumulation of

34

Navyug Gill

detail. We learn, for example, that the produce return per acre on class I soils in the Nakodar chuk was sixteen rupees for wheat, while almost twelve rupees for masur (a lentil), and only nine rupees for sarson (mustard). Comparatively for the same crops, the rates on class II soils in Bangeh chuk was seventeen (wheat), ten (masur) and ten (sarson), whereas on class III soils in Cham it was only six (wheat), two (masur) and six (sarson). The more intensive yet remunerative growing of tobacco, on the other hand, returned seventeen rupees in Nakodar, twenty-one in Bangeh and fifteen in Cham on the same respective classes of soils.51 While this data may appear arbitrary, or at any rate tedious, the column immediately adjacent to each of these twelve figures explains its importance. The revenue rate in this report, the proportion claimed as tax by the colonial state, was calculated as one-fourth of the gross produce return. This meant that each return column was accompanied by a rate column of one-quarter its value. In other words, a settlement report’s chart represented the monetary value of a crop in relation to the amount the government claimed as its right to extract. Knowledge generated in this way found overt material expression in the objective of fiscal results. Another chart applied the revenue rates to the amount of land growing each crop in order to obtain specific revenue returns. To return to class I soil in Nakodar, wheat grown on 6,660 out of 13,320 total acres, assessed at four rupees per acre (a quarter of the gross produce of sixteen rupees per acre), was calculated to return Rs. 26,640 to the state.52 A similar calculation occurs for each kind of crop (thirty in this case), on each different class of soil (three in most areas), for every chuk (fourteen) within the (four) perugunnahs in the district— and, again, was repeated at regular intervals throughout all districts of the province. Such equations constitute an elementary form of colonial accounting: a revenue official could calculate the size of a land holding, its class of soil and the type of crop grown in order to determine the exact amount its designated owner was required to pay each season during the years a settlement was in effect. This stands in contrast to the collection practices during the reign of Ranjit Singh and earlier Mughal and Afghan governors, where layered and collective forms of responsibility, proportional demands on standing crops, payments made in-kind (and occasionally as cash-values), and the delegation to various types of taxfarmers precluded systematic and inflexible extraction.53 By deriding their antecedents as whimsical and even tyrannical in nearly every settlement report’s chapter on pre-British rule,54 the colonial state articulated the legitimacy of its revenue policy in part on the basis of uniform accuracy. Extraction by British rule was presented as the antidote to despotism, a demand of rational arithmetic. The use of such complex equations reveals more than the straightforward priorities of the colonial state. A chart within a settlement report was not a mathematical demonstration of interest in crop values or cultivated acreage or revenue potential alone. Rather than a means of acquiring information on agriculture, it was both an expression of how “agriculture” itself was produced as an object of inquiry and the ways in which certain aspects were rendered worth-knowing/ knowable. The compilation of data on an object of inquiry is, in other words, constitutive rather than merely reflective of that object. Wheat, to return once

Peasant as alibi 35 more, enters the archive not as plant but as a crop: something sown in certain locales, nurtured by deliberate means, harvested in specific ways, fixed with a market value, and made to fulfill particular expectations. In a similar way, rain is transformed into a component of irrigation;55 land becomes but degrees of potential cultivation. The empirical chart therefore provides a summary of how processes of ordering and relating are implicated in the production as much as the depiction of data becoming knowledge. A profound consequence of the settlement report’s engendering through empiricism also concerns the colonial perception of population. Temple’s charts of Jalandhar offers insights into the construction of “the people” through processes of calculating and allocating different categories of people. The first chart inaugurates a fundamental divide between those considered “agricultural” and “non-agricultural.”56 The number of villages and names of each pergunnah are listed, followed by columns for each kind of people further separated between “Hindoo” and “Mussulman.” While much can be said of the latter, of presenting the total population of 567,991 as 317,283 Hindus marked distinct from 250,708 Muslims, the former layout is more significant at present. We learn that while 298,211 people are designated “agricultural,” 269,780 are defined by the negation “non-agricultural”—without any substantive explanation. The method used to make this distinction is not disclosed anywhere on the chart or in the rest of the report, thereby giving the impression of a natural divide not requiring comment. Furthermore, after this brief appearance, the “non-agricultural” peoples are by and large ignored in the rest of the report. Except for abbreviated mention in a later chart dealing with traders and professionals, nearly half the population of the district is not analyzed, categorized or explained. “Non-agricultural” people, in other words, exit almost as soon as they enter the archive. Further charts reveal the elaborate series of subtractions and divisions that went into calculating the “agricultural” population. Of the 567,991 total people, approximately thirty-six percent are removed as “children of both sexes” followed by a forty-seven percent deduction of those designated “women.”57 They too have no further place in the archive, set aside as a matter of routine exclusion. The remaining figure of “agricultural” adult males then undergoes complex qualification. Two new symmetrical categories emerge in another chart, “Proprietors Cultivating Land” (66,234) and “Cultivators Not Proprietors” (38,389).58 To each, the earlier Hindu/Muslim divide is again performed in combination with a more comprehensive caste allocation. The former figure of 66,234 is distributed across Hindu “Jats,” “Goojars,” “Rajpoots” and “Kumboo” (totalling 34,131), as well as Muslim “Jats,” “Goojars,” “Rajpoots,” “Rain,” “Awan,” and the combine “Sheiks, Syud, Mogul, Pathan” (25,747). In this articulation, the peasant-proper59 thus comes into being at a confluence of occupation, religion and caste. There remains within this category, however, a surplus of 6,356 people, those not fitting any of the crucial caste distinctions and thereby relegated as “miscellaneous” for both religions. In effect, over ten percent of the proprietors who cultivated their own land also lacked a key element to mark them as peasants. This is all the more striking alongside the parallel calculations for the latter category,

36

Navyug Gill

“Cultivators Not Proprietors.” This total of 38,389 is again split between 10,189 Hindus and 7,982 Muslims of similar caste categories—but with the result that a 20,218 surplus is labeled as “miscellaneous” Hindus/Muslims. This meant that over half of all non-proprietary cultivators too remained without caste appellation. Taking both figures together, a quarter of the people identified as “agricultural” adult males were in fact “miscellaneous” in this settlement. The faintest of (mis)recognition, miscellany served to consign a plethora of laboring castes to the unimportance of non-peasants. With no further mention in the rest of the report or its charts, these miscellaneous men join all the women, children and non-agriculturalists at the precarious, brimming margins of the archive. Finally, the link between population and agriculture was effected through the simplicity of association as much as the intricacies of exclusion. Perhaps the most widely used chart of the Jalandhar settlement was the basic population list, as it is referenced repeatedly in the early paragraphs of the report. Again, the village numbers for each pergunnah are followed by numbers in different columns for men, women, children and houses. This generic ordering of data occurs without any equations, deductions or cross-referencing. What is significant, however, is the inclusion of two additional columns—“Number of ploughs” and “Number of bullocks employed in cultivation”—and how they shape the understanding of the information presented. Knowledge of Philor pergunnah, for example, is sequenced as 43,552 men, 37,228 women60 and 39,456 children, living in 32,340 homes with 15,434 ploughs and 34,842 bullocks between them.61 Such a modest, uncomplicated line of continuity in fact masks the assumed terrain upon which this association operates: people–homes–agriculture. Even a glance at the chart forces this particular logic to the fore, so that population comes into empirical life as a relation to the specific means of agrarian production. As a result, the peasant household—now a family of a certain caste living with agricultural implements— constitutes not just the basis but the entire extent of Panjabi society insofar as it becomes demographically knowable. As a product either of the only “agricultural” people worth-knowing, or as the ineluctable outcome of the population/agriculture couplet, the archive comes to be populated by peasants.

History, subalternity and the peasant monopoly One way to appreciate how the settlement report contributed to producing the peasant as alibi is by recourse to the work of someone who has a very different place in the colonial archive: James Mill. What the techniques of these reports demonstrate is at odds with his famous claim in the preface to the first volume of The History of British India (1817): Whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India can be expressed in writing . . . [so that] a man duly qualified may attain more knowledge of India, in one year, in his closet in England, than he could obtain during the course of his longest life, by the use of his eyes and his ears in India.62

Peasant as alibi 37 Observing and listening, according to Mill, were inferior to the real faculties critical to the historian’s enterprise: “the powers of combination, discrimination, classification, judgment, comparison, weighing, inferring, inducting, [and] philosophizing.”63 And unlike the immersion of settlement officers within Panjab a half century later, he believed the writing of history required skills best developed and exercised in isolation from their object of inquiry. For Mill, the art of producing knowledge was enhanced rather than impeded by one’s lack of first-hand exposure to its people, unfamiliarity with its languages, and dearth of self-accumulated data. Distance, and all that it entailed, was the precondition for historical truth. For precisely this reason, the status of the knowledge produced by Mill stands apart from that of the intrusive officers of Panjab. Today his work is considered obviously antiquarian, no doubt useful for understanding aspects of the ideology of British rule in South Asia, but otherwise dismissed in and of itself as contemptuous rambling. Settlement reports, on the other hand, remain an invaluable resource for nearly every modern history of colonial Panjab, and are even regarded by some as pioneering efforts of historical research in their own right. A crucial reason for this difference is that the techniques of the settlement report—intimacy, comprehensiveness and empiricism—are the same as those valued by the discipline of history to this day. Thus, a footnote reference to Mill will usually be for a provocative epigram; one to Melvill or Ibbetson or Temple, or even Darling, will be for a proper fact. It is these facts that confront the historian concerned with exploitation and exclusion among natives within colonial society as much as between colonizers and colonized. What this monopoly of the archive effects, in a sense, is to naturalize Panjab as agricultural and eternalize the figure of the peasant at its center. By insinuating and infiltrating the very elements that make historical investigations possible, the alibi of the peasant operates to displace the question of the rural field laborer—as menial, landless, non-agricultural, miscellaneous—from importance to the narrative of history. Indeed, this predominance is detectable even in the invaluable debates around peasant ir/rationality, morality, pre/modernity, agency and insurrectionary potential. A history that attempts to interrupt this alibi, that takes seriously the relational quality of all subalternity, is therefore less a matter of substituting the rural field laborer for the peasant. Rather, it might begin with efforts to re-politicize the economy of knowledge production and its disparate operations.

Notes 1 The politics of describing some groups as rural field laborers requires its own investigation. Here, it is useful to note the more prominent shifts in nomenclature. British administrators in Panjab refer to village menials, village servants and menial laborers; both colonial and postcolonial state discourse use the terms depressed classes, scheduled castes and (ex-)untouchables; harijan was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s patronizing formulation, whereas dalit was deployed by activists in the latter half of the twentieth-century; in Panjabi, the colloquial terms siri, kamin, lagi and khet mazdoor circulate along a spectrum of meanings, while be-zemin kisan (landless peasants) is a

38

2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19

Navyug Gill more recent articulation by leftist unions and political parties. For a history of the sequential changes in conditions and terms of one caste group in north India, see Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community (New York, 2000). For reference, see the entries in Punjabi University’s English–Punjabi Dictionary (Patiala, 1968), the Punjabi–English Dictionary (Patiala, 1994), and Kahn Singh Nabha, Gur Shabad Ratnakar Mahan Kosh (Amritsar, 1930). All translations from the latter are my own. My focus on operation rather than intent follows Birla’s insightful study of how the negotiation between vernacular capitalists and colonial law produced a new form of market society. “Rather than assessing the rule of law based on the criteria it sets up for itself, or reproducing its claims” and intention, she argues, it is important to investigate “the operation [. . .] of colonial law: its production of subjects and parameters of legality and legitimacy.” See Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, 2009) 38 and chapter 1 passim. Gyanendra Pandey describes this as “a process of un-archiving,” the “rendering [of] many aspects of social, cultural, political relations in the past and the present as incidental, chaotic, trivial, inconsequential, and therefore unhistorical.” See Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume. Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London, 1993), 170. See Dewey, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Malcolm L. Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt (Delhi, 1977). All subsequent references are from the original 1925 edition unless otherwise stated. Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, viii, and “Editor’s Introduction,” x, iii. Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, 172. Ibid., 173. See the review by David Washbrook, The Economic History Review, 34, 2 (May 1981) of the 1977 reprint of Darling’s The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt. The comments are also taken from the following reviews of the 1977 reprint; see ibid; David Gilmartin, The Journal of Asian Studies, 41, 1 (November 1981); and Peter Robb, Modern Asian Studies, 15, 2 (1981). Darling, Wisdom and Waste in the Punjab Village (London, 1934), vii. Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt (London, 1928), 15. Darling, Rusticus Loquitur: or, the Old Light and the New in the Punjab Village (London, 1929), 341. Darling, Wisdom and Waste in the Punjab Village, 74. One commentator at the time described Darling’s work as “a deeply thoughtful [and] sincere study by one who has the betterment of Indian life at heart,” while another regarded it as “the result of a long intimate and first-hand acquaintance with the people, for whom the author has a real affection.” See the reviews of Darling’s work by W.W.J., Geography, 18, 2 (June 1933) and W. S. Thatcher, The Economic Journal, 35, 140 (December 1925), as well as V. Antsey, Economica, 16 (March 1926). Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, viii and 174. Timothy Mitchell, “The Invention and Reinvention of the Peasant,” in Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002), 141. This formulation relies on Ranajit Guha’s illuminating, if amplified, binary of dominance/hegemony to explicate the difference between the operation of power in the colony and metropole. “Dominance under colonial conditions has quite erroneously been endowed with hegemony,” he writes, which makes “the rule of British capital in India appear as a rule based on the consent of the subject population.” As a result, “there is little in this sweet and sanitized image of dominance to expose or explain the harsh realities of politics during the raj.” See Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Delhi, 1998), 19 and chapter 1 passim.

Peasant as alibi 39 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, 19. Mitchell, “The Invention and Reinvention of the Peasant,” 144. Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, xvi, emphasis added. This saying is identified as from Amritsar district in a collection of proverbs published by another enterprising colonial official in the late nineteenth-century. I have modified the translation to reflect how it is the authority of the law rather than the force of arms that compels a man to remove and sell his wife’s ornaments in order to pay the new demand. More important, however, is the implied universalism of such a particular lament. All men and all wives in all of Amritsar? It is doubtful, in other words, whether landless agricultural laborers would share with landowning peasants the same opposition to the demand for land revenue, much less the possibility of selling anyone’s jewelry to pay it. See Robert Maconachie, ed., Selected Agricultural Proverbs of the Panjab (Delhi, 1890), 208. Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume. Ibid. For an exhaustive study of settlement politics in the Ludhiana district, see Richard Saumarez Smith, Rule by Records: Land Registration and Village Custom in Early British Panjab (Delhi, 1996). See Guha, A Rule for Property in Bengal (Paris, 1963), chapters 1 and 5, and cf. B.H. Baden-Powell, The Land-Systems of British India, Vol. 1 (Oxford, 1892), book I, 284–90 and book II, 394–442. G.C. Barnes et al., Report on the revised settlement of the Oonah, Hushiarpur, Gurshunkur, and Hurriana purgunahs, of the Hushiarpur district, in the trans-Sutlej states (Lahore, 1860), 25. Ibid., 26. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. The early work of James C. Scott offers a way of appreciating the political quality of such seemingly deceitful, pusillanimous actions, even if translating them as resistance presupposes the category peasant. See especially Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985). H. Davidson, Report of the revised settlement of the district of Ludhiana in the cisSutlej states (Lahore, 1859), 45. Ibid., 46. National Archives of India, Revenue and Agriculture Department, Land Revenue Branch, “Proposed re-settlement of the Dera Ismail Khan district,” October 1897, pros. 44–5, file 282, 2. Ibid. Ibid., emphases added. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge MA, 1999), 211, emphasis in original. Ibid., 213. For an administrative summary of Panjab’s early revenue settlement from the perspective of yet another colonial literati, see Baden-Powell, Vol. 2, book III, 541–5. Septimus Thorburn, Report on the first regular land revenue settlement of the Bannu district in the Derajat division of the Punjab (Lahore, 1879), 5–13. Richard Temple, Report on the settlement, under regn. IX, of 1833, of the district of Jullundhur, trans-Sutlej states (Lahore, 1852), ii–iii. W.E. Purser and C.A. Roe, Report on the revised land revenue settlement of the Montgomery district in the Mooltan division of the Punjab (Lahore, 1878), i–ii. M.M.L. Currie, Final report of the revised settlement, 1910–1914, of the Ferozepore district (Lahore, 1916), i–ii. Thorburn, Report, 28.

40

Navyug Gill

47 For a brief overview, see N. Gerald Barrier, ed., The Census in British India: New Perspectives (New Delhi, 1981), and Bernard S. Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi, 1987). 48 See Denzil Ibbetson, Report on the census of the Panjab taken on the 17th of February 1881, Vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1883), 8. 49 See Memorandum on the Census of British India of 1871–72 (London, 1875), 5. 50 See Census of India, 1911: Volume XIV, Punjab by Harikishan Kaul, part 1 (Lahore, 1912), 39. 51 See Temple, Report, “Produce Statement No. 1: Showing the average produce per acre with price thereof and the revenue rates derivable therefrom.” 52 See Temple, Report, “Produce Statement No. 2: Showing the fiscal results of produce rates.” 53 See Indu Banga, Agrarian System of the Sikhs: Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century (Delhi, 1978), chapters 5 and 8, and Pervaiz Nazir, “Origins of Debt, Mortgage and Alienation of Land in Early Modern Punjab,” Journal of Peasant Studies 27, 3 (2000), 57–65. For an early native critique of British revenue policy, albeit loyalist to the extent of focusing only on “excesses,” see Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age, Vol. 2 (London, 1904), book I, chapter 6. 54 See especially Temple, Report, 31 and Barnes et al., Report, 19, and cf. Baden-Powell, Vol. 1, book I, 194–7, 280–4, and Vol. 2, book III, 539–42. 55 For an intriguing explication of this process, see M.S.S. Pandian, “Rainfall as an Instrument of Production in Late Nineteenth-Century Nanchilnadu, India,” Journal of Peasant Studies 15, no. 1 (1987): 61–82. 56 See Temple, Report, “Census Statement No. 1, Zillah Jullundhur” for the figures used in this paragraph. The long, lively career of the divide between agricultural and nonagricultural tribes is to be explored elsewhere. 57 See Ibid., “Census Statement No. 2 Zillah Jullundhur,” “Statement showing the castes of the agriculturalists in Zillah Jullundhur” and “Statement showing details of proprietary holdings, cultivation, and revenue liabilities in the pergunahs of Zillah Jullundhur” for the figures used in this paragraph. 58 There is also a much smaller third category of 277 “Proprietors Not Cultivating,” presumably absentee landlords. 59 For an authoritative definition of the peasant, as prominent as it is inadequate, see Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society, Russia 1910–1925 (Oxford, 1972) 39, and its elaboration in the Introduction to Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies, 2nd edition (Oxford, 1987), 3, 5–7. 60 A note on the disproportion of women to men briefly mentions the “notorious crime of female infanticide” among the “Rajpoot tribes” and “religious classes of the Sikh nation,” but also goes on to emphasize the “the well-known reluctance of Indians to record their women and with the ignorance of a people lately emancipated from native rule” – a minor reflection of the collusion between statistical accuracy and cultural deficiency in the colony. See Temple, Report, “Census Statement No. II, Zillah Jullundhur.” And cf. Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (New York, 2002). 61 Temple, Report, “Census Statement No. II, Zillah Jullundhur.” 62 James Mill, The History of British India, Vol. 1 (London, 1817), xv. 63 Ibid.

3

A death without cause Mary E. Hutchinson’s un-archived life in certified death Jae Turner

Birth and death certificates developed in the late nineteenth century as one of the new regime of discourses and practices that Foucault considers “an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population.”1 Bodies, life, and death became subject to administration and management through new tools of statistics. Vital statistics of the social body captured population and reproduction.2 Life and death became certified events publicly and legally recorded. Birth and death certificates began systematically normalizing natality and mortality around the same time that Foucault suggests the homosexual became “a species,” along with “all those minor perverts whom nineteenthcentury psychiatrists entomologized by giving them strange baptismal names.”3 These new discursive productions and dispositifs (grids of intelligibility)—these newly archived documents—administered many forms of un-archiving alongside captured data.4 As Gyanendra Pandey reminds us, “in Foucauldian terms, the archive authorizes what may be said, laying down the rules of the ‘sayable,’ negating (making inaudible and illegible) much that comes to be classified as ‘non-sense,’ gibberish, madness, and is dispatched therefore to a domain outside agential, rational history.”5 In retrospect, things left unsaid drew my curiosity to Hutchinson’s life in the first place. Several years ago, as I toured the historic home of a stranger to offer my expertise in architecture and preservation, stories emerged in fractured bits and pieces. The story fragments made confusing segments, which refused to fall into neat piles of “normal” family life. My “queer” antenna stretched out intuitively. Hutchinson’s paintings hung from every wall. The characters developed: Dottie, who had owned the house that had been built by her grandfather; and Dottie’s artist friend, Mary. They lived here together? No, no, they lived in an apartment in Atlanta, but Mary visited Dottie’s family here. When Mary died, Dottie moved back to the family homeplace that she inherited. Years later when Dottie died she left her estate, which included Mary’s things, to her godchild— my host. Archives are central to my discovery of Mary E. Hutchinson’s life and work. Letters, photographs, exhibition programs, and clipped articles from Art Digest, the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal, and other newspapers, that I later pulled from trunks and closets, outlined her success as an artist in the US during the

42

Jae Turner

mid-twentieth century.6 During this time, the New York art world of critics, galleries, and other artists recognized her as a professional artist, as did Atlanta’s arts community. Between 1926 and 1953, she produced more than 250 works of art. Yet Hutchinson’s work is unknown today. She has no oeuvre—no body of work. A few scattered pieces are beginning to show up on eBay and in exhibitions, but they remain isolated fragments of indeterminable meaning. Hutchinson and her work are not only lost, they have become unintelligible. By unintelligible, I mean that her art is now difficult or even impossible to read through available frameworks in meaningful ways. Making sense of Hutchinson’s work is particularly hard because her figurative representation (which some might categorize as realism or even kitsch) appears to be clearly legible. However, reading her paintings through available interpretive frameworks (such as American Scene painting, New Deal art, feminist art, or even lesbian art) produces meanings that are incongruent with their historic conditions of production. The meanings available make no sense when placed in context with Hutchinson’s lived experience and her other work. Understanding her artistic production is more about perception and recognition than it is about legibility. Specifically, available frameworks fail to recognize Hutchinson’s representation of gender and sexuality. Furthermore, Hutchinson herself became unintelligible as an artist within her own lifetime. Hutchinson’s death administrator categorized her as a teacher rather than an artist in order to make sense of her life. When asked in Section 11, USUAL OCCUPATION to “give kind of work done during most of working life, even if retired,” the grid-like form of her death certificate declares “art teacher” (See Figure 3.1). With this stroke of classification, Section 11 un-archives even the conditions of possibility required of an oeuvre—that is the identity of artist. In this essay, I will read three un-archiving events produced by the death certificate of the artist Mary E. Hutchison (1906–1970). The first is this transformation of artist to teacher, which produces what Foucault calls “the absence of an oeuvre.” The second invokes what could be officially said or codified about sexuality, and what the state relegated outside the limits of history in categorizing Mary Hutchinson’s relationship to Dorothy King as “friend.” The final un-archiving event undoes the archiving of Hutchinson’s death itself.

The absence of an oeuvre The transformation of Hutchinson from artist to art teacher entails more than a clerical notation. It is an issue of intelligibility that emerges in epistemological rupture. Her life as an artist challenged the normative limits of gender, sexuality, art, and agency codified by the state, and the certification process itself produced a complex play between intelligibility and unintelligibility in the document archived by the Department of Vital Statistics.7 The recognition of Hutchinson’s life and work falls through the ambiguous cracks of history in complex games of truth around intelligibility and unintelligibility. In History of Madness, Foucault associates this “space both empty and peopled at the same time”8 with “the absence of an oeuvre” or madness. As is typical of Foucault’s work, he refuses to

A death without cause: Mary E. Hutchinson 43

-

h h h h h h h UΗUJ41·J' .-■·ΙΚΙ·.ΜΗ „.0.1 -- UUJ41·J' .-■-·ΙΚΙ·.Μ -- UUJ41·J' .-■·ΙΚΙ·.ΜΗ Figure 3.1 Death certificate for Mary E. Hutchison.

pin “the absence of an oeuvre” down to any single clean definition, but rather uses the concept in overlapping gestures that associate intelligibility with the limits of history and the limits of language. The limits of language may also be understood as the limits of art.9 Foucault brings us to the artist and madness through Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.10 Even though he cautions against the lure “of the emotional appeal of the accursed artist,” he points toward the “accursed artist” with the absence of an oeuvre.11 Unlike the leper and the libertine, Foucault does not hold the artist up as a figure of madness. Instead, he presents these specific artists as subjects on the edge of madness in the modern world to suggest a recurring theme in the space between intelligibility and unintelligibility, between sense and nonsense, and I suggest in Hutchinson’s case, between art and kitsch. Foucault argues that, as examples, these oeuvres that disappear into unintelligibility are not historical evidence of any movement or grand event. “The frequency in the modern world of these oeuvres that explode into madness no doubt proves nothing about the reason of this world, the meaning of these oeuvres, nor even about the relationships that are made and unmade between the real world and the artists who produce such oeuvre.” Yet he urges that they be taken seriously, not because of an emotional appeal or through “the inverse and symmetrical danger of psychoanalysis,” but because of “the constantly repeated presence of that absence.”12

44

Jae Turner

Foucault contends that artists—“writers, painters and musicians”—fell into madness more frequently in the modern world through an epistemological split between the tragic and the critical.13 Foucault traces the split as: The paths taken by the figure of the cosmic vision and the incisive movement that is moral reflection, between the tragic and the critical elements, now constantly diverge, creating a gap in the fabric of the experience of madness that will never be repaired. On the one side is the ship of fools, where mad faces slowly slip away into the night of the world, in landscapes that speak of strange alchemies of knowledge, of the dark menace of bestiality, and the end of time. On the other is the ship of fools that is merely there for the instruction of the wise, an exemplary, didactic odyssey whose purpose is to highlight faults in the human character.14 He describes the silhouette of the same ship of fools as it simultaneously diverges in two different ethical universes rather than progressing over linear time. The “gap in the fabric of the experience of madness that will never be repaired”15 is intelligible as neither wholly tragic nor critical and becomes lost in “the great oeuvre of the history of the world [which] is indelibly accompanied by the absence of an oeuvre.”16 Similarly, Hutchinson’s identity diverges in two different, yet momentarily overlapping, art worlds. On the one side is a credible political subject recognized as an artist. On the other is a troubled psychological subject whose oeuvre becomes lost in the psychological paradox of the “woman artist.” Three of Mary E. Hutchinson’s self-portraits trace the figure of the “woman artist” as it ruptures: Self-Portrait (ca. 1927), Dream of Violets (ca. 1942), and Mirrors for Reality (ca. 1944), (Figures 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4). Hutchinson most likely produced Self-Portrait (ca. 1927) as a rite-of-passage associated with student promotion in the National Academy of Design. She presents herself as an artist marked by the tools of the trade in the brief moment of closure before an unseen canvas still wet with paint—a decisive moment of knowing when a work is complete. The moment of closure is implied by the way she holds her artist’s tools—paint-smeared palette and brushes withdrawn from the act of painting, in hand but not at rest. Her hair is neatly pulled back, yet a few strands have worked free as a telling sign of recent activity. The artist’s canvas lies outside the picture frame of the self-portrait while at the same time the image presented to the viewer denotes the artist’s canvas. The painting and the act of painting reference each other through color. The light blue of the artist’s smock remains fresh on her brush, as does the red of her lips, while the third brush blends diffusely into the background. Hutchinson’s first self-portrait represents the independent woman artist as a political subject. In other words she is a subject with agency— particularly economic independence—in the public world. Around the same time she painted Self-Portrait (ca. 1927), she vividly describes her active life as an artist:

A death without cause: Mary E. Hutchinson 45

Figure 3.2 Self-Portrait (c. 1927).

In the morning I paint on a commission from 9 to 12:30. I walk with my things sixteen blocks there and sixteen back. I rush to eat my lunch (I cook all my meals always, except rare occassions [sic] when my aunts have me out to dinner). I catch a subway after lunch and go down to 11th Street. I stand all the way (still with my paint box and easel, etc.), then walk eight blocks to the home where I am painting another commission (a little girl four years old). I leave at five, come home in the subway jam, cook dinner and rush over to night school, for my modeling class. All three times I work entirely standing, and I walk over 60 blocks a day.17 She sums it up by saying, “I am making money up here now.”18 However, Hutchinson’s agency as a political subject and her initial success as an artist cannot be read into her self-representation only fifteen years later. Instead, she engages the psychological construction of woman as a non-normative sexual subject in Dream of Violets (Figure 3.3). This formal work has no exhibition history and remains in the artist’s estate. The painting depicts Hutchinson’s exaggerated surreal head resting on the iconic scrolled headrest of the psychoanalyst’s couch. The background is framed by two fluted classical columns of western civilization. One column stands erect, but the other is fractured and beginning to tumble. Two hands stretch towards one another from behind the columns with an array of violets between them.

46

Jae Turner

Figure 3.3 Dream of Violets (c. 1942).

Hutchinson portrays herself as nothing but a head within a psychological paradigm. The only connection between artist (marked by the iconic signature of the artist) and subject is to be found in Hutchinson’s surreal likeness. She holds no brushes and even her bodily hands seem to be replaced by those of her dream. She is only a giant psyche and her dream—not her artistic production—is positioned for analysis. She dreams of violets. The flower stands in as an icon for woman and the gendering of colors marks these particular flowers as a blend of pink (femininity) and blue (masculinity). Given Hutchinson’s gendering of color in other works, I believe she invokes shades of purple and lavender consistent with our contemporary association of the color with lesbian identity. In Dream of Violets, Hutchinson represents herself as a woman whose dream, her sexual desire, threatens the very structure of civilization from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory. Self-Portrait (ca. 1927) resonates with the politically minded “New Woman” who won suffrage, but Dream of Violets evokes “modern woman” as a psychological, and thus sexual subject. Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the independent woman as artist is helpful in tracing this “gap in the fabric of experience”19 between political and psychological subjects in Hutchinson’s self-representations.

A death without cause: Mary E. Hutchinson 47 Beauvoir’s independent woman is not a fixed framework, but rather many potential configurations of woman that reside at the limits of agency in viable yet conflicted situations. 20 Because she challenges the limits particularly around economic and sexual freedom, the independent woman inhabits ambiguities. Beauvoir theorizes the independent woman as artist as a particularly vexed configuration. According to Beauvoir she must struggle between economic security and creative risk. The woman artist, she asserts, works from an unstable and tenuous position. She is pulled by two contradictory impulses: the need for social and economic security and the ideal of creative expression. The independent woman artist approaches paradox in the added contradiction between creativity and the perceived limits of femininity. The limits of femininity present two separate but entangled points of tension between art and gender: the limits of acceptable “feminine” behavior and the gendered limits of “genius.” First, Beauvoir suggests that in order to act within the bounds of acceptable feminine behavior, the woman artist must compromise her creative expression. The desire for social and economic security motivates her to put on “her best behavior; she is afraid to disarrange, to investigate, to explode,” and thus remains aligned with “the bourgeoisie since they represent the most conservative element in this threatened class.”21 In seeking economic security, Beauvoir asserts that women artists tend to “exalt the middle-class ideal of well-being and disguise the interests of their class in poetic colors; they orchestrate the grand mystification intended to persuade women to ‘stay womanly.’”22 The independent woman artist who compromises her creativity in favor of economic stability may indeed achieve the façade of success. But because she is a subject who lives “marginally to the masculine world . . . [who] sees it not in its universal form but from her special point of view,”23 she “can acquire real competence [technical skill]; but she will be forced to repudiate whatever she has in her that is ‘different’ [creative].”24 Second, Beauvoir argues that the independent woman who risks original creative expression is inherently denied access to the category of “genius.” Rather than genius, her creativity would be seen as madness since it comes from a marginal position. To return to the language I use to frame this essay, her creative originality would be rendered unintelligible from the universal perspective. Although Beauvoir does not directly engage the biography of the artist, her understanding of the independent woman as artist counters twentieth-century psycho-biography, which frames the artist as a special personality type defined by genius. He is no longer the nineteenth-century Romantic genius, but a newly transformed psychological subject. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz singled out the biography of the artist in Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist as a distinct psychological form in 1934 just as Hutchinson achieved professional success. Their image of the artist established a twentieth-century paradigm through the interpretation of anecdotal narratives as psychological and sociological events. Ultimately, Kris and Kurz construct the artist as a special psychological subject inherently gendered as male. Around the same time that Kris and Kurz defined the image of the artist in terms of psycho-biography and genius, Clement Greenberg reformulated the

48

Jae Turner

language of modern art into a new dual discourse with his now canonical essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939).25 Building on decades of debate over the merits of “academic” versus “modern” art and “objective” versus “non-objective” art, Greenberg transformed not only the artist, but art as well, from formations of public or political relations to psychological ones. I argue that this transformation played out in what Foucault calls “games of truth”26 in art, which hinged on gendered concepts of genius. This is extremely important for all mid-twentieth century women artists because Greenberg’s theory of avant-garde and kitsch dominated art criticism for decades. Since Greenberg injected kitsch into the lexicon of American visual culture, the two concepts have been inextricably linked. Avant-garde and kitsch have presented an enduring asymmetrical dual discourse. The definition of “avant-garde” depends on the existence of “kitsch” as its “other.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains this asymmetrical relationship operating in a series of binarisms associated with the “enduring chain” of the closet, including art/kitsch as well as heterosexual/ homosexual: . . . categories presented in a culture as symmetrical binary oppositions— heterosexual/homosexual, in this case—actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but subordinated to term A; but second, the ontologically valorized term A actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is constituted as at once internal and external to term A.27 The discourse of kitsch, which is integral to the avant-garde, produces a dispositif or grid of intelligibility available to the avant-garde viewer. This new grid of intelligibility empowers the avant-garde critic, such as Greenberg, to know kitsch from a distance. Although both terms—avant-garde and kitsch—probably circulated within the American vernacular, Greenberg introduced them into the formal language of American art criticism.28 Both are terms and concepts that have a history rather than signifying essential or universal truths. The cultural work of this dual discourse during the mid-twentieth century is particularly difficult to trace because both terms have been applied retrospectively to explain historical events. The avant-garde is understood to have originated in the late nineteenth century with the European patriarchs of modern art, and kitsch is similarly associated with nineteenth-century Romanticism.29 In this essay, I am not particularly concerned with the truth or fiction of the avant-garde and kitsch, but rather with the way this dual discourse worked during the mid-twentieth century as a dispositif to render unintelligible Mary E. Hutchinson’s life as an artist along with her work. In this regard avant-garde and kitsch begin their cultural work in the United States in 1939, which is around the

A death without cause: Mary E. Hutchinson 49 same time that Hutchinson’s public profile began to diminish. Prior to this time, kitsch appears to have been most closely associated with music in popular culture. Likewise before 1939, critics occasionally attached the term avant-garde to experimental music and film, rather than art. However, after the publication of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in the Partisan Review, members of the American Abstract Artists group, including G.L.K. Morris who also worked with the Partisan Review, referred to themselves as the avant-garde.30 The term avantgarde soon became synonymous with abstract art. In the polarized language of the dual discourse, everything else fell to kitsch, or in other words, not art. The dual discourse of avant-garde and kitsch locates truth in the process of creation rather than strictly confined to the art object. As opposed to kitsch, the avant-garde process of creation must be considered as distinct from its effect. This enables the avant-garde critic to distinguish parasitic kitsch from genuine modern art. Avant-garde art seeks “an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point.”31 In other words, the canvas is not the place to critique unstable social or ideological truths, but rather to assert absolute and universal truth about art. According to Greenberg, “It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at ‘abstract’ or ‘nonobjective’ art.”32 In seeking the absolute, the artist approaches divine creation and “content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art . . . cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.”33 The creativity of the avantgarde artist is genius, and it cannot be transferred through mechanical or formulaic imitation. Since as Beauvoir argues, the independent woman artist is inherently denied access to the category of genius, the relationship of genius to truth in art introduces a highly gendered limit separating avant-garde from kitsch. In her final self-portrait, Mirrors for Reality (ca.1944), (Figure 3.4), Mary E. Hutchinson critiques the position of modern woman as artist constructed by the dual discourse of avant-garde and kitsch, or in other terms between abstraction and realism. Although the location of the painting is unknown, Hutchinson retained a professionally produced, eight-by-ten, black and white photograph through which it may be read. In the image, the artist confronts herself through a multi-faceted hinged mirror which resembles that of a dressing table, but which produces multiple reflected and refracted images of herself. Hutchinson confronts not one image of herself, but rather many inflected images of images. A central mirror image is positioned as the focal point which suggests it to be the primary subject of the work. Within this frame Hutchinson’s reflection dominates the foreground. The artist looks out from the center mirror frame in a conventional bust pose with her head and shoulders squarely facing forward. Her hair is short and wavy showing highlights, perhaps the first maturing shades of grey. Her lips hold a neutral position and form neither a smile nor frown. Though she holds her head straight forward, she gazes upward, which seems to accentuate deep shadows beneath her eyes. Her blouse is an unadorned pullover with a simple round collar. Behind Hutchinson’s figure, a bookcase covers one wall as a symbol of intellect and education. From the other wall, a single painting of a shrouded woman holding a cross in the gesture of prayer watches over Hutchinson’s shoulder. The

50

Jae Turner

Figure 3.4 Mirrors for Reality (c. 1944)

painting depicted within Mirrors for Reality is one of Mary E. Hutchinson’s own, entitled Prayer (c.1940). Its presence within the self-portrait signals an overt engagement with her relationship to the realm of art. The hinged, oblique and faceted mirrors refract Hutchinson’s central reflection into multiple images of herself gazing back at herself. The symbols of her intellect and profession fail to survive this process of refraction and replication. None of the refracted images flawlessly replicates another, but rather create multiple variations of the subject watching herself. Only an inverted reflected figure blinded by the mirror’s limits fails to gaze back upon herself. Hutchinson’s signature appears at the bottom edge of the canvas like a white ghost beside her disembodied face. It is the one image of the artist that lies outside the mirror’s frame. Mirrors for Reality asks which version of Mary E. Hutchinson is “real” and provides no clear answer. Hutchinson further complicates the subject with

A death without cause: Mary E. Hutchinson 51 questions of epistemology by way of the mirror’s frame. The mirror operates simultaneously at multiple levels in women’s self-portraiture.34 First, the mirror, particularly in the guise of the dressing table, is a highly gendered frame associated with women. Although the mirror is a tool employed in the production of most self-representation, it appears on canvas as a device of representation much more frequently in the self-portraiture of women than men.35 Beauvoir associates the scene of the mirror with sexual self-awareness or “erotic transcendence” in which the young girl discovers herself as an “object.” According to Beauvoir, “it seems to her that she has been doubled; instead of coinciding exactly with herself, she now begins to exist outside.”36 Hutchinson complicates replication and questions of inside and outside. Her fractured mirror not only doubles the subject but doubles her again and again until the original is hard to find and ambiguous even then. A single distorted disembodied face lies outside the frame of mirrors. Juxtaposed with the iconic artist’s signature, Hutchinson’s strange face gazes down like the mythical god-like artist who reproduces nature with perfection. This alludes to the artist as genius that persistently excludes women. Hutchinson as an independent woman artist has become fractured and distorted between gendered epistemologies of political subjects and psychological ones. The mirror is also conventionally associated with an objective way of knowing the world and mimesis in the representation of that knowledge. As we have seen, art criticism participated in games of truth during the mid-twentieth century with significant implications for “realism” in art. Realism as a mode of representation implied mimesis of nature which could be known objectively through science. Realism became equated with academic art, objective art, and finally kitsch. In other words, realism became the antithesis of modern art, abstraction, and the avant-garde. Hutchinson’s many versions of herself question the notion of any one objective reality. Furthermore, Mirrors for Reality challenges the binary construction of truth in art through the interjection of a third epistemology. Her painting within the painting, Prayer, brings a spiritual way of knowing the world into the frame. Late in her life when Hutchinson reflected on the relationship of art and communication, she also thought about her epistemological position. “I understand and admire good abstract art, – but I am not an abstractionist myself. I could fake it jolly well, and convincingly if I wanted to, – but I would not want to. . . . Now don’t get me wrong. I am not an academic painter. . . . I am millions of miles away from being a human color camera.”37 With Mirrors for Reality, Hutchinson positions herself as an artist in a highly gendered ambiguous space challenging the limits of abstraction, realism, genius, and the avant-garde. Clement Greenberg’s essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” marks a significant paradigm shift in art criticism, and it finalized the debate over truth in art during the mid-twentieth century. While this shift manifested in new language which replaced other terms (kitsch standing in for “academic art” and “realism”), it emerged out of complex games of truth that constituted new psychological subjects. Foucault explains games of truth as “a set of rules by which truth is produced. It is not a game in the sense of an amusement; it is a set of procedures that lead to a certain result, which, on the basis of its principles and rules of procedure,

52

Jae Turner

may be considered valid or invalid, winning or losing.”38 In the words of feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, the epistemological shift that crystallized in twentieth-century notions of the avant-garde produced a “transvaluation” of truth in art. In her early, and perhaps pre-feminist, survey of Realism in art, Nochlin reflects on the disappearance of realism in the face of avant-garde and kitsch: Probably the most interesting, and significant, of all these . . . transformations of Realist values, as far as the painting of the future was concerned, was the transformation of the Realist concept of truth or honesty, meaning truth or honesty to one’s perception of the external physical or social world, to mean truth or honesty either to the nature of the material—i.e. to the nature of the flat surface—and/or to the demands of one’s inner ‘subjective’ feelings or imagination rather than to some external reality.39 The dual discourse of avant-garde and kitsch transformed the subject of art from political configurations to psychological ones. Art and artists became the subjects of psychological grids of intelligibility in games over relationships between human subjects and truth. By the time Hutchinson died in 1970, the rules of the game—the “set of rules by which truth is produced”40—no longer recognized her as the credible political subject who had once exercised agency as an artist. Rather, Hutchinson’s death administrator pushed her identity to the gendered limits of art and genius as “art teacher.” In these games of truth, Foucault asks, what signals “the point at which it [oeuvre] becomes impossible, and where it must begin to silence itself?”41 How is an oeuvre unmade, abolished, annulled, done away with, destroyed? Perhaps for Mary E. Hutchinson it unraveled when the language of art turned in upon itself in pursuit of pure abstraction as though reason and unreason folded inside-out in a transvaluation of truth, as Linda Nochlin suggests.42 In Hutchinson’s way of thinking, “To make a painting that only says something about paint, seems to me a waste of time and paint.”43 She stopped painting long before her death. Hutchinson’s oeuvre silenced itself.

Relationship: Friend Foucault pays attention to the work of silence, and the subject dominates the opening questions of an interview with Stephen Riggins (1982). “One of the many things that a reader can unexpectedly learn from your work is to appreciate silence,” Riggins begins.44 Foucault responds at length in appreciation of a kind of silence “which meant deep friendship, emotional admiration, even love.” He elaborates on the potential of silence in personal relationships, and goes so far as to endorse cultivation of this personal form of “silence as a cultural ethos.” However, he also acknowledges the experience of “some kinds of silence which implied very sharp hostility.”45 The many silences that play out in Foucault’s Sexuality One assume this hostility enacted in the public relationship between individuals and the state. Foucault suggests that hostile silence shadowed sexuality

A death without cause: Mary E. Hutchinson 53 in a grid of intelligibility as “sex became an issue [between the state and the individual], and a public issue no less; a whole web of discourses, special knowledges, analyses, and injunctions settled upon it.”46 The forms of silence imposed on and around sexuality that interest Foucault in Sexuality One were not always as obvious as the stifled laughter of boisterous and precocious children: Rather, it was a new regime of discourses. Not any less was said about it; on the contrary. But things were said in a different way; it was different people who said them, from different points of view, and in order to obtain different results. Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all [sic] strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.47 The limits of discourse in certifying Mary E. Hutchinson’s death silenced or un-archived sexuality as well as her oeuvre; section 20 documents INFORMANT— Miss Dorothy King; RELATIONSHIP—friend (see Figure 3.1). Alongside what is said—“friend”—are “the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name.”48 Here “deep friendship, emotional admiration, [and] even love”49 vanish in the indifferent silence of bio-power. “I have been unrestrained in my grief . . .,” Dorothy King begins a letter to herself in the wake of Mary Elisabeth’s death. “I have been unrestrained in my grief—and I know that the loss of my beloved friend is beyond measure of words—but somehow—the words have been an outlet—a release—which I have seemed to depend upon for some kind of comfort—talking—talking—talking—thinking—re-living—longing. . .”50 The stated—“friend”—is not in opposition to the silence of sexuality. The relationship is not false. “There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say”51—lover, partner of twenty-five years. Little love notes shared through slips of paper and left on kitchen counters, tucked into pockets, or laid softly on pillows murmur through the silence of history as a persistent white noise: • • •

Cheers, darling! See you early Sat. aft.—Love ME Love to your Mother. Remember darling that love heals, and love is accumulative, and I love you more than ever—ME. D Smell the rose, darling, and look deep under the petal. It will tell you, tonight will unfold for us as sweetly and richly as the rose petal unfolds—ME.52

54

Jae Turner

Three casual notes—never intended for public eyes, never meant for my eyes— ink the contours of RELATIONSHIP. Tiny slips of paper folded, saved and cherished, not to be discarded. Moments of absence anticipating presence infused with emotion, memory, metaphor, layers of living, injury, imagination, and desire. Section 20 INFORMANT—Miss Dorothy King; RELATIONSHIP—friend. Grief overflows Section 20’s grid. Dorothy, or rather Dottie to her friends, reminds herself, “my continued lack of restraint could be so easily misunderstood—as indeed it might well already have been—so I must guard my words zealously— and in so doing—I will protect my love and devotion.”53 Danger is present. The administrative gaze remains vigilant against any signs of deviance to ensure the health of the social body. Section 20 exerts positive concepts of power and techniques of normalization through a dispositif that Foucault describes as the plague model of quarantine and surveillance. The model worked on the assumption that the individual exposed to plague might survive and be recovered into the community. Rather than exclusion as in the case of the leper, the neighborhood partitioning of quarantine facilitated continuous surveillance and administrative control by summoning the healthy to appear at their windows.54 The plague model seeks to “maximize the health, life, longevity, and strength of individuals” within the community in order to produce a “healthy population” by recovering or re-qualifying questionable individuals.55 The plague model creates a standard of health, a “norm of health,” and demands conformity through constant processes of observation and analysis.56 The “norm of health” required Miss Dorothy King (Section 20 INFORMANT) to publicly conform to the limits of her window labeled “friend.” She and the DECEASED (Section 1) Mary E. Hutchinson, NEVER MARRIED (Section 10), a statement which marked them publicly as questionable individuals who failed to contribute (and had never contributed) to the production of a “healthy population”57 through the heteronormative institution of marriage. Dorothy “must guard . . . [her] words zealously. . .”58 Dorothy’s compelled discretion scrapes against a grievable life. Judith Butler asks in Precarious Life, “What makes for a grievable life?” and reminds us of the social hierarchy of grief.59 She says, “We have seen it already in the genre of the obituary, where lives are quickly tidied up and summarized, humanized, usually married, or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, monogamous.”60 In my research, I read through scrolls of microfilm looking for that humanized, summarized portrait of Mary Elisabeth Hutchinson’s grievable life in her obituary. I found only a terse report of her death in the public record: HUTCHINSON—Miss Mary E. of 124 LaFayette Dr. NE died July 10, 1970. Surviving is a cousin, Miss Geraldine Andrews, DeWitt, N.Y. Private services were held Saturday July 11, at Spring Hill. The remains were taken to Melrose, Mass. for interment.61 Sexuality haunts the limit of discourse as “something akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative, a thing abusively reduced to silence.”62

A death without cause: Mary E. Hutchinson 55

A death without cause Hutchinson’s certified death is also silent regarding its cause. Section 22 CAUSE OF DEATH remains un-archived. Foucault suggests that “death is power’s limit.”63 What limits of discourse and power did Robert R. Stivers, M.D. bump against to reduce Section 22 to a silence—literally left blank. Hutchinson’s death is a death without cause.64 Section 22, cause of death, opens the MEDICAL CERTIFICATION of death. Robert R. Stivers, M.D. is after all the Medical Examiner. Death becomes a medical matter folded forcefully back into health though paradoxically “separated by a strict boundary”65 from life. A paradox only in relation to a single life, such as Mary E. Hutchinson’s life, but not a contradiction at all in relation to the life of a population, the subject of bio-power. CAUSE OF DEATH, PART I and PART II produces a two-part death with sub-sections (a), (b), and (c) including strict instructions to “Enter only one cause per line.” What was the IMMEDIATE CAUSE (a) and what were the “Conditions, if any, which gave rise to above cause (a), stating the underlying cause last.” If three causes still leave death incomplete, list in PART II “Other significant conditions contributing to death but not related to the terminal disease condition.” It is all about disease made intelligible within the rigidly enforced confines of carefully measured boxes (or windows) within the grid of a form (or the form of a grid). Section 24 takes up the social side of death: ACCIDENT, SUICIDE, HOMICIDE. Just check the appropriate box. If as Foucault claims, “death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private,’”66 then the death certificate seeks to reclaim for society that moment of escape, the event of death. It stabilizes the limits of discourse in the archive in much the same way that Foucault’s notion of “the absence of an oeuvre” stabilizes the limits of history. What CAUSE OF DEATH pushes beyond “the absolute limit of discourse”?67 Even in certified death, Mary E. Hutchinson hovers on the edge of undecidability, the edge of intelligibility, perhaps even queer. For the historian interested in the queer, the silence, and the un-archived, the question becomes how to trace their unfixed limits without simply filling in the blanks with new forms of imposed knowledges. Making sense of Mary E. Hutchinson’s life and artistic production, including her persistent absence from art history, brings this question to the foreground in particularly salient ways. Hutchinson’s absence of an oeuvre is not to be resolved through a lostand-found process of recovery. The disconnect between her historic identity as an artist and her lack of recognition today is not only a matter of forgotten events, it is also an issue of incongruent epistemologies. It is about the meanings attached to events in Hutchinson’s life and the ways in which these meanings changed over time. Like Foucault’s ship of fools split between two ethical universes, Hutchinson’s lived experience splits and loops through different epistemologies.

56

Jae Turner

Acknowledgments I thank the Mary E. Hutchison Estate and Dorothy Cohen for granting permission to use Hutchison’s artwork, Self-Portrait (c. 1927), Dream of Violets (c. 1942), and Mirrors for Reality (c. 1944), in this essay.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978),138. Emphasis in original. 2 The State of Georgia began maintaining birth and death certificates in 1919. Some counties recorded vital events before it became a requirement of the state. See Georgia Department of Public Health, “Vital Records,” accessed August 7, 2012, http://health. state.ga.us/programs/vitalrecords/. 3 Foucault, Sexuality One, 43. 4 Foucault, Sexuality One, 12. 5 Gyanendra Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume. 6 Since my initial encounter, Hutchinson’s estate has generously donated her papers to Emory University for preservation. See Mary E. Hutchinson and Dorothy King papers, 1900–1988, Emory University, MARBL, http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8zgpd. Abbreviated as MEH papers hereafter. 7 Certificate of Death, State file no. 22672, Mary E. Hutchinson, Georgia State Office of Vital Records. 8 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London, 2006), xxxi. 9 Foucault, Madness, xxvii-xxxvi. 10 Foucault, Madness, 535–8. 11 Foucault, Madness, 537. 12 Foucault, Madness, 536–7. 13 Foucault, Madness, 536. 14 Foucault, Madness, 26. 15 Foucault, Madness, 26. 16 Foucault, Madness, xxxi. 17 Mary E. Hutchinson to Marion Otis, March 5, 1928. MEH papers. 18 Mary E. Hutchinson to Marion Otis, March 5, 1928. MEH papers. 19 Foucault, Madness, 26. 20 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York, 1989 [1949]). 21 Beauvoir, Second Sex, 708. 22 Beauvoir, Second Sex, 709. 23 Beauvoir, Second Sex, 704. 24 Beauvoir, Second Sex, 708. 25 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6 (1939): 34–49. 26 Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1977), 297. 27 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), 9–10. 28 Greenberg’s recent biographer especially notes his introduction of kitsch into the language of art criticism. See Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg: A Biography (Boston, 2006). 29 Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” in Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (London, 1969), 72–3. 30 “Artists Denounce Modern Museum,” New York Times, April 17, 1940, 23. ProQuest. 31 Greenberg, 36. 32 Greenberg, 36.

A death without cause: Mary E. Hutchinson 57 33 Greenberg, 36. 34 Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996), 1–10. 35 Frances Borzello, Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self Portraits (New York, 1998). 36 Beauvoir, Second Sex, 337. Emphasis in original. 37 Mary E. Hutchinson, memoir fragment, first draft, ca.1960–1970. MEH papers. 38 Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1977), 297. 39 Linda Nochlin, Realism (Harmondsworth UK, 1971), 236. 40 Foucault, “Ethics of the Concern for Self,” 297. 41 Foucault, Madness, 536. 42 Nochlin, Realism, 236. 43 Hutchinson, memoir fragment, second draft, ca.1960–1970. MEH papers. 44 Michel Foucault, “Michel Foucault: An Interview by Stephen Riggins,” in Michel Foucault Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York, 1997), 121. 45 Foucault, “Interview,” 121–122. 46 Foucault, Sexuality One, 26. 47 Foucault, Sexuality One, 27. 48 Foucault, Sexuality One, 27. 49 Foucault, “Interview,” 121. 50 Dorothy King, “A Letter to Myself” July 30, 1970. MEH papers. 51 Foucault, Sexuality One, 27. 52 Mary E. Hutchinson to Dorothy King, undated notes. MEH papers. 53 King, “A Letter to Myself.” 54 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1974–1975, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York, 2003), 45–7. 55 Foucault, Abnormal, 46. 56 Foucault, Abnormal, 47. 57 Foucault, Abnormal, 46. 58 King, “A Letter to Myself.” 59 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London, 2004), 20. Emphasis in original. 60 Butler, Precarious Life, 32. 61 Atlanta Journal and Constitution, July 12, 1970. Under funeral notices. 62 Foucault, Sexuality One, 34. 63 Foucault, Sexuality One, 138. 64 My “receipt of services” from “Vital Records” that accompanied the requested copy of Hutchinson’s Certificate of Death, State file no. 22672, includes the clerical notation by SR of “Death w/o Cause.” 65 Foucault, Sexuality One, 27. 66 Foucault, Sexuality One, 138. 67 Foucault, Sexuality One, 27.

4

“Standard deviations” On archiving the awkward classes in northern Peru David Nugent

The Apristas were always very organized. They had [party] cells everywhere, where they trained their followers and planned their activities. We were never able to find their cells, or to discover how they communicated with each other. . . . But it cannot be denied that the Apristas were very disciplined, that they were totally committed to the party cause. They were fanatics. This is what made [APRA] different [from other parties]. This is why we could never defeat them. (Mariano Iberico Torres, Congressional Deputy, 1956–62) In this paper I examine the forces that structure what may be known and recorded about groups and activities that do not fit within the normative political projects of governing regimes. I suggest that official representations of such awkward groups of people and kinds of social activity (hereafter, the “awkward classes”) tend to follow a standardized script, in which what is knowable is refracted through a lens or filter of a very specific sort.1 It is officially endorsed understandings of the ordinary and the everyday, I suggest, that act as the prism through which groups and activities deemed awkward, suspect, or out of place come to be seen, understood and recorded. It is not difficult to understand why officially endorsed understandings of the normal and the routine play such a crucial role in structuring what may be known and recorded about classes of people and kinds of activity considered suspect. Gathering and storing information about such groups, I contend, and confirming their awkward nature, is an integral part of the process of state formation—is integral to the unending conversations regimes have with themselves and the populations they would administer about the legitimacy of rule. A characteristic feature of virtually all these conversations is their inversion of the prescriptive and the descriptive. Governing regimes are compelled to present highly interested and arbitrary claims about how national life should be lived as if they were neutral, disinterested descriptions of how it is lived.2 If such regimes are to transform should into is, it is essential that they employ a clear and unambiguous definition of the normal and the everyday—of appropriate and inappropriate kinds of activities in which people may engage and kinds of people they may be. It is equally important that they be in a position

“Standard deviations”: Northern Peru 59 to identify, monitor and when necessary eliminate deviations from the norm thus defined. A commitment to the preservation of the ordinary and the routine is therefore anything but ordinary or routine. Rather, it is a matter of grave concern to the forces of order. Indeed, this concern necessarily colors official perceptions of virtually all groups and activities that do not conform to normative definitions of what should be. To the extent that the authorities become aware of such groups, what is important about them is the ways in which they diverge from normative prescription—the ways in which they trouble, unsettle or challenge the regime’s definition of the ordinary and the everyday. The fact that it is their implicit challenge to routine that makes such groups and activities relevant to the forces of order means that the latter tend to see the awkward classes in very specific terms—and in ways that vary according to how, and how far they appear to deviate from the norm. It also means that much of what the awkward classes do and are is beyond state interest or recognition—that the official gaze remains blind to those aspects of awkwardness that raise no questions about the arbitrariness of the everyday. It is these that remain unarchived, and apparently unarchivable. In the pages that follow I draw upon ethnographic materials from the northern Peruvian Andes in the middle decades of the twentieth century to explore regularities in the process of recording information about groups and activities that are regarded as “awkward”—as a threat or challenge to the normative political project of the governing regime. The focus of my analysis is an illegal political party called APRA, which had been driven underground by government repression virtually from its inception in 1930.3 The Party of the People (as APRA called itself) troubled virtually every aspect of the normative order promoted by the central government, and as a result was subject to systematic persecution by the forces of order. Even so, APRA enjoyed broad support from much of the general populace.4 I use the term “standard deviations” to capture the regularities in the process by which the authorities organized their perceptions of the party. My findings suggest that official representations of APRA as one of the awkward classes alternated between three standard forms.5 What characterized official views of the party as a 1st Order Standard Deviation was denial. During much of the twenty-five years (1930–1955) that is my focus, the proscribed status of APRA meant that it remained hidden, underground. Nonetheless, government officials were in possession of overwhelming evidence that the Party of the People was a serious threat to the established order.6 As long as the party was content to remain invisible, however, the government repeatedly chose to minimize that threat or to ignore it completely—at times in ways that were delusional, and that put the very survival of the government at risk. In other words, as a 1st Order Standard Deviation the forces of order considered APRA unworthy of being archived at all. It should come as no surprise, perhaps, that as long as the party remained out of the public eye, the government tended to minimize the threat represented by

60

David Nugent

APRA. To openly acknowledge the influence exercised by the Party of the People—to acknowledge the existence of a large-scale social movement with a huge number of members that rejected the government’s definition of the ordinary and routine—would be deeply problematic. It would call into question the takenfor-granted-ness, and thus the legitimacy of the entire political project to which the governing regime had committed itself. To the extent that APRA remained in the shadows, it was inevitable that the authorities’ perceptions of the party were filtered through a lens of denial. The government’s insistence on minimizing or disregarding the party’s influence led to a second standardized response to the deviation that was APRA. When it became clear that the Party of the People was testing the limits of official denial, and was surreptitiously seeking to climb out of the shadows the authorities responded with a strategy of containment. The goal here was not so much to know the party as to monitor and control it—especially to ensure that APRA was not able to spread any further into the public sphere, or into the institutions of civil society (especially labor unions) or the government (especially the armed forces). In other words, how APRA came to be known, understood and archived as a 2nd Order Standard Deviation was a function of official concerns with maintaining the boundary between order and disorder.7 But officials also employed a third standardized script to represent and record information about APRA. During periods of political crisis—when the barriers erected to contain the Party of the People were overrun—the authorities became deeply paranoid about APRA. In this context not only did the forces of order indulge in greatly exaggerated fears about the dangers posed by the party. They were also possessed of a burning desire to resolve their fears—to gather the intelligence necessary to convert anxiety into control. During times of crisis officials suddenly became convinced of the relevance of wholly new kinds of knowledge about the party. Rather than limit themselves to surveillance intended to prevent the spread of party influence, they did everything in their power to expose party activity in every detail. They sought to collect information that would break through the wall of secrecy behind which APRA concealed itself, to make the party visible, transparent and knowable. Government reactions to the Party of the People as a 3rd Order Standard Deviation had much in common with the responses of other regimes reacting to groups regarded as a serious threat to order. The authorities responded to their fears about APRA by attempting to “see (the party) like a state.”8 They sought to produce a series of simplifications about the party that would allow them to fix it in time and space. The authorities sought to discover, for example, the identities of the APRA leadership and its rank and file. They also sought to ascertain how many party cells were in operation, when and where they met, and what transpired at these meetings. Faced with what appeared to be a complex organization that managed to coordinate its far-flung activities with great effectiveness, the forces of order also sought to penetrate the subversives’ underground system of communication. Intelligence of this kind was considered essential to the government’s efforts to eliminate APRA.

“Standard deviations”: Northern Peru 61 Had they succeeded in gathering this information, however, the authorities would still have been in the dark about what was most important for them to understand. Even the most detailed of information about the party structure would not have made Aprista agency comprehensible to the forces of order. It would not have explained to government officials why the Apristas insisted on doing what they did despite the most severe of consequences. It would not have explained, for example, why party members were so devoted to the cause—why they appeared willing to make virtually any sacrifice in its name. Nor would such information have revealed how a political movement that was proscribed by the central government could survive and even thrive in the face of systematic and quite brutal repression by the forces of order. It was not just that the authorities failed to comprehend their adversaries. It was that the forces of order rejected out of hand the notion that comprehension was even possible. Committed as they were to their own version of the rational, officials were compelled to regard APRA’s opposition to their activities as wholly irrational—as motivated by fanaticism, extremism, the desire to subvert. This understanding of the party and its members, however, carried with it alarming implications. On the one hand, it suggested that a great many people did not embrace government definitions of the normal and the everyday, despite official assertions to the contrary. On the other, it implied that much of the population was not to be trusted—that it was made up largely of fanatics or extremists. Indeed, the forces of order ultimately came to regard themselves as surrounded by a veritable sea of subversives. The authorities reached this conclusion as they came to regard APRA as a 3rd Order Standard Deviation. It was not difficult to understand how a small group of committed fanatics could survive underground as long as the forces of order were content to leave them be (i.e., as long as the authorities had dealt with the party as a 1st or 2nd Order Standard Deviation). But the Apristas’ ability to thrive in the face of an all-out campaign to eliminate them was inexplicable. In such a context, government officials came to believe, the fanaticism of its members would not have been enough to protect APRA. Rather, the subversives would need extensive support and protection from groups that were not openly Aprista. The authorities thus came to suspect that the party was not acting alone—that it was receiving crucial assistance from groups that claimed to be loyal to the government. The forces of order applied various litmus tests to assess the loyalty of these groups. Motivated as they were by paranoid fear, however, officials came to distrust the very tests they devised. Indeed, as we will see, the forces of order ultimately came to believe that virtually everyone was an Aprista. It is striking just how little the forces of order came to know about APRA despite the fact that they were in many ways obsessed with the party. What the authorities understood least of all, however, was how and why APRA could have such broad appeal to such large numbers of women and men. Government officials were unable to come to terms with this problem for a quite simple reason. Their deep commitment to a particular version of the ordinary and the routine compelled them to treat the party and everything associated with it as a dangerous and

62

David Nugent

irrational aberration from the norm. From the perspective of the official powers, it was simply impossible that the Party of the People could represent aspirations that were valid or legitimate. As a result, there was no reason to try to understand APRA in these terms. In the present paper I focus on the “3rd standard deviation”—paranoia, when the authorities became obsessed with breaking through APRA’s wall of secrecy in order to gather the intelligence necessary to know and destroy the party. The immediate event that precipitated the government’s obsession with the Party of the People was a failed coup attempt, in October of 1948, in which radical elements of APRA had allied with disaffected groups in the armed forces in an effort to seize control of the government. The coup was especially unsettling to the forces of order because of the context in which it occurred. During the previous three years the party had been allowed to operate legally, and had formed part of a coalition government. During the period of its legality APRA had purported to have set aside the revolutionary goals of its early years, and had promised to respect the procedures and the principles of representative democracy. The government’s obsession with eliminating APRA after the failed coup was thus informed by a powerful sense of betrayal—a sense of betrayal informed by two decades of accumulated experience with the Party of the People. Based on that experience, the authorities came to the conclusion that the party was perversely dangerous and subversive. The Apristas had only pretended to be reliable, trustworthy and law-abiding, officials concluded, in order to mask their true intentions—total domination of the national power structure. Indeed, the coup attempt confirmed what some government officials had long suspected— that the Apristas had an unwavering, single-minded commitment to the violent overthrow of the government. In the following sections of the paper I offer an account of the authorities’ efforts to know and control the Party of the People as a 3rd Order Standard Deviation—in the aftermath of the failed coup attempt of October, 1948. I pay special attention to what disturbed government officials the most—what they experienced as an unbreachable wall of party discipline, which frustrated official efforts to know APRA. Distorted though the authorities’ responses were to encountering this obstacle, however, I also argue that the government was on to something. What state officials struggled to understand, but were fated to misconstrue, were the sources of the discipline that they found so troubling. Indeed, refracted as it was through the prism of the 3rd Standard Deviation, Aprista discipline remained opaque, unarchived and unarchivable, as did APRA itself. Thus did the forces of order ensure that they would be incapable of understanding what they most needed to comprehend if they were to defeat the Party of the People.

APRA’s unbreachable wall of discipline On October 13, 1948, contingents of Peru’s National Police (the Guardia Civil) descended upon the homes of some two-dozen residents of the town of Chachapoyas, capital of the department of Amazonas in the northern sierra. The

“Standard deviations”: Northern Peru 63 police arrived in groups of three or four, knocked at the door, and politely but firmly requested that the individual they sought accompany them to the Prefecture. By the next day 13 people had been arrested, and were being held in the town jail. All were high-ranking members of APRA. At about one the next morning (October 14) the Chief of Police, Major Constantino Comeca Tejada, arrived at the jail. In order to soften the prisoners up before interrogating them, Comeca employed a form of torture known as the “tina.” The prisoners were woken and submerged in a large tank (or tina) of icecold water, with their hands tied behind their backs, and the water level maintained just at their mouths. A lattice framework made of bamboo was then placed over the top of the tank so that the prisoners could not lift their heads more than a fraction of an inch above water level. Struggling to breathe, and trying to endure the numbing cold of the mountain water, the Apristas were kept in the tank for several hours. One by one they were removed and taken to an adjoining room where Comeca interrogated them. He began by asking each prisoner to confirm that he was an Aprista. Elderly informants who lived through this ordeal still recall his threats and demands: “If you do not give us what we want we will send you to [the jungle prison colony of] Pomará. We are told that you have the [APRA] archive. You must give [it] to us.” Comeca bullied and threatened each man for about half an hour before returning him to the tank. His objective throughout was the same—to obtain the Party archive. As he questioned the APRA leaders they all gave him the same response. There was no archive for them to surrender: it had been impossible to maintain one due to the intense, long-term persecution the party had suffered ever since it had been established. By October 16 the leaders of APRA had endured three days and two nights of torture, but had still not confessed to the police the existence of their archive. That same day the Prefect received a telegram from the President’s office in Lima, ordering that the prisoners were to be released.9 The arrests in Chachapoyas followed on the heels of a failed coup attempt hatched on October 3, hundreds of miles away at a naval base in the port city of Callao, just outside Lima. The instigators were a small group of militant Apristas, who had split from the rest of the party, and a group of junior officers and enlisted men in Peru’s armed forces who had been deeply influenced by Party of the People. Although the coup did not succeed, both the senior military command and the President viewed it with great alarm. High-ranking military officers regarded the coup with great concern because it revealed that they had been unable to check the spread of party influence within the armed forces—and thus that their strategy of containment toward APRA (as a 2nd Order Standard Deviation) had failed. President José Luis Bustamante y Rivero viewed the coup with concern because in turning against him APRA showed itself to be quite treacherous. It had been Bustamante y Rivero who had allowed the party to climb out of the shadows. APRA gained its legality in 1945 only because it agreed to a secret electoral pact with then-Presidential-hopeful Bustamante. When the APRA vote secured the Presidency for him, Bustamante honored his side of the agreement by declaring APRA legal, and by allowing the party the unprecedented opportunity

64

David Nugent

to compete in Congressional elections (in 1945). In the event, APRA won so many seats that it dominated both houses of Congress—a position from which it was able to push for a series of pro-labor reforms that were very alarming to the agroexport elite and senior military command who were committed to Peru’s international, export approach to development. The attempted coup had been led by radical members of the party and the military who, ironically, were disgruntled by what they regarded as the slow pace of change initiated by the APRA-dominated Congress. Nonetheless, the failed coup presented senior military officials with the excuse they needed to crack down on the party. Shortly thereafter they staged a coup of their own, deposed Bustamante, and installed General Manuel Odría as the country’s new leader. General Odría immediately unleashed a nationwide reign of terror against the party in an attempt to rid public administration and public life of APRA. In addition to expelling and arresting Apristas in both houses of Congress, he appointed military men as Prefects in departments where APRA was especially strong. His government also claimed sweeping powers of search and seizure, suspended civil liberties and constitutional guarantees, and passed decrees that once again made APRA a proscribed organization. These changes resulted in widespread insecurity, the imposition of narrow limits on what was do-able and say-able, and the extension of government surveillance into the most intimate spheres of everyday life. The military conceived of its struggle with APRA as a war being waged with the intention of eliminating the party. From the beginning the government recognized that this would require engagements along multiple fronts, including the public domain. The clear objective of the authorities was to purge the public of all affirmative references to the party. Government officials faced major challenges, however, in doing so. From 1945 to 1948 the party had made the most of its position of legality. APRA had done so by organizing extensively across a number of social domains. To name only the most important of these organizing activities, the Apristas had published their own widely read newspaper (La Tribuna), and had formed an extensive network of Community Centers and youth groups that spanned much of the country. They had also conducted a broad-based popular literacy campaign (in “Popular Universities”), and had provided legal aid, health services and social assistance to the poor. All these activities had extended the movement beyond APRA’s original base in organized labor.10 The military government employed several tactics in waging war with APRA over the public domain. Viewing the party’s newspaper, Community Centers, Popular Universities, and social service organizations as points from which APRA’s insidious ideas radiated outward into the population, government officials ordered that all be closed down. But these actions alone were considered insufficient to purge the public domain of the influence of the Party of the People. The authorities feared that APRA was so insidious that it had established itself in organizations that were not openly linked to the party. As a result, the military also cast its gaze upon entities of a seemingly wholesome and innocuous nature— neighborhood organizations, rotating credit associations, unions and mutual aid

“Standard deviations”: Northern Peru 65 societies, sports clubs, reading groups and debating societies—going so far as to scrutinize them for any telltale signs of party involvement or sympathy. The authorities did not limit their campaign, however, to purging the public domain of party influence. The military was also convinced of the need to subject the state apparatus itself to surveillance—to rid it of all party members, and to replace them with individuals loyal to the current regime. To be successful, however, the government needed detailed information about the identities of all Apristas. In Amazonas, when interrogation and physical abuse failed to provide the police with party membership lists, government officials took a different approach to producing the intelligence necessary to know, control and ultimately defeat APRA. They transformed the apparatus of state into a vast mechanism for the production of secret military intelligence. Functionaries at each level of the government hierarchy were ordered to provide their immediate superiors with the names of all Apristas under their jurisdiction. Within short order information began pouring in from all corners of Amazonas—from remote rural districts, to provincial towns, to the capital of Chachapoyas. Based on this secret intelligence, the Prefect compiled a master list of all Apristas.11 As state offices reported back to the Prefect an alarming picture began to emerge. It became clear that large numbers of Apristas were to be found in virtually every branch of government—including the judiciary and the National Police: in principle, the spearhead of the war against APRA. The secret intelligence thus revealed that the boundaries of the state apparatus had been deeply compromised. This intelligence made it equally clear that drastic measures would be needed if the state were to purge itself of party influence. Despite the gravity of the problem, however, the Prefect’s subordinates had provided him with the intelligence necessary to act decisively. On the authority of the central government, the Prefect did so by “cleansing” the state. Beginning in January of 1949 and continuing for several months thereafter, all Apristas in public service in Amazonas were fired. Many were also arrested, and some were tortured. The military had been quick in ridding the public domain of all manifestations of APRA. They were equally quick in filling the discursive space they had left vacant. The government was at great pains to establish the conditions under which a particular image of APRA, the military, and Peruvian society would appear to emerge spontaneously in key discursive arenas. In this most recent of the government’s efforts to establish a normative political order—and in the process to turn should into is—the military asserted that Peruvian society consisted of a loyal public that stood united against APRA, a subversive organization of fanatics, criminals and extremists. The military, on the other hand, was a noble and selfless organization whose historic mission it was to protect all wholesome social elements from the evils of APRA. The government took anything but a passive role toward waging this war of representation. They employed discursive weapons to effect a familiar military strategy—bombardment. Government officials arranged for the public sphere to be repeatedly and systematically bombarded with new kinds of truth claims in

66

David Nugent

order to demonstrate that most Peruvians really did reject APRA, that there really was a loyal public, and that the military was duty-bound to serve and protect that public. The government’s control over the means of public discourse—especially Chachapoyas’ sole newspaper, The Families’ Friend, allowed it to deploy a series of discursive weapons against APRA. The first consisted of open letters, signed by virtually all the town’s prominent (male) citizens, pledging undying allegiance to General Odría and unconditional opposition to APRA.12 By publishing these letters in The Families’ Friend, where they would be widely read, the government attempted to define what was normal—a public that was loyal to the military—and to show that “most people” embraced this normative construction. That a series of such letters appeared in the paper meant that the military’s normative representation was continually and repeatedly asserted as authoritative, definitive and true. The second discursive weapon deployed against APRA consisted of an oath of loyalty to the Odría regime, which public employees were “asked” to sign. Virtually all government functionaries acceded to this request since refusal meant losing one’s job, arrest, and possible torture.13 One after another these oaths were published in The Families’ Friend. The third discursive weapon used against the party was based on an offer of amnesty. The military government announced that subversives who were willing to renounce the party, and to do so with honesty and sincerity, would be granted a clean slate. Knowing that the amnesty program represented their best chance of avoiding jail or blacklisting, many Apristas took advantage of the government’s offer, and renunciations began to pour into the Prefect’s office from all over the department.14 These, too, were published in The Families’ Friend, and in a steady stream, showing that Apristas were defecting from the party in droves—that even Apristas had grave doubts about the party, that they were ready to join the broad social consensus that viewed APRA as a dangerous evil. The open letters and the oaths of loyalty were published to demonstrate the existence of a loyal public that embraced the government’s definition of what was normal and right. The renunciations were published to demonstrate that more and more people, even former subversives, were joining this public.

Power, knowledge and representation in crisis The military government’s offensive against APRA appeared to have swept the enemy from the field. Large numbers of subversives had been arrested, APRA institutions had been dissolved, potentially sympathetic organizations were under police scrutiny, and the party itself appeared to be in deep disarray. So successful did the campaign appear to have been that, within just months of the attempted coup the military began to speak confidently of the “death” of APRA, began to refer to it as “the recently defunct Party of the People.” Government officials were to discover, however, that the party was not so easily defeated. The military soon realized that the war was far from over—that what

“Standard deviations”: Northern Peru 67 appeared to be decisive victories were little more than skirmishes in what threatened to be a long, protracted struggle of an unfamiliar and disturbing kind. Officials ultimately came to believe that not only had they failed to defeat APRA, but that they had been only partially successful even at engaging the enemy. They came to believe, for example, that they had failed to purge either the public domain or the state apparatus of party influence, despite the multiple strategies they had employed in order to do so. Government officials also came to suspect that they had lost the war of representation with APRA, despite (or rather because of) having employed a series of discursive weapons in mounting a bombardment of the public sphere. The difficulties that the military experienced in waging war against APRA were a function of its failure to carry out what many theorists of the state regard as crucial governmental functions: the ability to identify key “objects of regulation” (subversive threats), to draw on a body of experts or authorities (government functionaries) charged with political surveillance to monitor the behavior of these objects, and to produce reliable knowledge about these objects (Apristas) that could be used to effect strategies of control. Officials’ failure to carry out these crucial tasks of government wreaked havoc with their efforts to do battle with APRA. Especially debilitating to state projects and plans was the fact that officials had extremely faulty information about who was and was not a party member. It was the inability to know APRA that made it so difficult to control—or even engage—the enemy in any systematic manner. On any number of occasions government officials were convinced they had dealt a mortal blow to the party, only to learn subsequently that they had mistaken their quarry—that they had been striking out against the wrong people. Government officials began to question the reliability of their knowledge about the party, and the effectiveness of the war they had waged on the basis of this knowledge, for a quite simple reason. A great many people who had been denounced as Apristas wrote to the Prefect protesting their innocence, and swearing their allegiance to the military regime. These letters made officials question their secret intelligence about APRA for two reasons. First, those writing the letters made the disturbing claim that the individuals who had falsely accused them were the very state functionaries that the Prefect had relied on to provide him with accurate, impartial information about APRA. Second, the letters made the equally disturbing assertion that it was no accident that these public employees had given the Prefect so much faulty intelligence—that in making accusations, functionaries had been utterly indifferent to the state’s desire to learn the truth about APRA, but had been motivated by vengeance, greed, or the desire to obey the orders of an elite patron and, possibly, advance their career prospects. The Prefect should not have been surprised at this discovery (although he was). Most government employees were people of humble means who owed their positions to the patronage of one of the region’s powerful elite families—each of which struggled continuously to prevail over the other families.15 Government functionaries throughout the entire state bureaucracy, it appeared, had violated the

68

David Nugent

public trust. It had not been beneath them to make false accusations if doing so would result in an adversary being jailed, removed from his job, or punished in some other way. Nor had it been beneath them to conceal the identity of Apristas if it served their purposes to do so—as it often did. As a result, it appeared, the Prefect’s entire corpus of intelligence was to be regarded as highly suspect. So too were the results of the war he had waged on the basis of this intelligence. It was difficult for the Prefect to ignore the implications of these findings. Indeed, these revelations produced in government officials what might be thought of as a “crisis of faith,” in the intelligence they had compiled about APRA, and in the personnel that had gathered that intelligence. Officials’ doubts about their subordinate personnel led them to see the state apparatus as deeply compromised. Their doubts about the reliability of their intelligence led them to suspect that they had failed in the all-important task of delimiting the subversive social element. They suspected that a great many party members continued to operate sub rosa, placing in grave jeopardy the state’s entire project of ridding public service and public life of APRA’s influence. Indeed, believing that they had failed in their effort to identify Apristas, and that there was no dependable body of experts or authorities on which they could rely to monitor the behavior of the subversives, government officials experienced a crisis about their ability to know, and therefore to control or contain the Party of the People. That is, they experienced a deep and profound crisis of power/knowledge/control. A second crisis associated with government efforts to defeat APRA focused less on the accuracy of its secret intelligence and more on the reliability of its public representations. As part of its efforts to represent itself as defending a broad social consensus that regarded APRA as a dangerous evil, and in the process to turn should into is, the military used its control over discourse in order to construct a “loyal public” united in its opposition to the party. This public had been constructed on the basis of public testimonials of loyalty made by both rehabilitated Apristas, and forthright and trustworthy social elements that claimed to be staunch defenders of the ruling regime. After these diverse social groups had sworn before society-at-large to be a part of the broad, anti-APRA consensus, however, it became common knowledge that their testimonials indicated little about their true political inclinations—that many had testified in order to conceal rather than reveal their actual beliefs. For example, police intelligence revealed that many Apristas who had sworn to leave the party, and whose testimonials to that effect had been published in the newspaper, could not be counted among the supporters of the government. They had in fact continued their involvement in APRA, but in secret, despite public claims to the contrary. Police intelligence also revealed (and it became common knowledge) that many people who had signed loyalty oaths and open letters of allegiance were not part of the “loyal public” in spite of what they had asserted in their public testimonials. Some of these people were out-and-out Apristas, so committed to the party that they had been willing to perjure themselves before society at large in an effort to continue with their secret, underground lives. Others, while not themselves party members, appeared to be alarmingly sympathetic to APRA because they had privileged information about

“Standard deviations”: Northern Peru 69 the illicit activities of Aprista friends, relatives and spouses, but refused to divulge this information to the police. Once government officials discovered that many people had used the letters of allegiance, oaths of loyalty and renunciations in order to conceal their actual political inclinations, what suffered was not simply the credibility of these individuals. In a broader context in which officials had come to doubt that they could state with confidence who did and did not belong to the party, they were forced to look with suspicion upon everyone who had claimed to be trustworthy supporters of the military government. They came to doubt their ability to distinguish between people who really were loyal to the regime and those who only pretended to be—cynically trading on the image of the model citizen or the penitent Aprista in order to deceive the police. As the boundary began to blur between healthy and subversive social elements, officials were compelled to regard as potentially suspect the very act of representing oneself as loyal, honest and forthright. They were forced to wonder whether or not public proclamations to this effect did not indicate the opposite of what they claimed. In other words, government officials came to believe that APRA was alive and well in a deep, subterranean realm lying beneath the surface of things—a realm that their campaign against the party had been unable to touch. Untold numbers of people continued to inhabit that realm, they suspected, and remained loyal to APRA despite the grave risks involved in party membership. Although these individuals represented themselves to society at large as part of the loyal public, officials came to believe that they could not trust the level of appearance—that an unknown number of these very people remained deeply committed to the party and everything it stood for. They ultimately concluded, then, that they had failed to purge society of APRA influence, despite having done away with all overt expressions of solidarity with the party, despite ongoing proclamations of loyalty to the military government, and despite a surface appearance of tranquility and calm. Government officials responded to these discoveries by extending their surveillance to society as a whole, and in the process showed that they doubted the existence of the very loyal public they claimed to be defending. As a result, it became clear that even the state did not believe what the “state stated.”16 As state and general populace held each other in mutually intersecting gazes of awareness concerning this fact, the state experienced a deep and profound crisis of representation. By the time they had concluded their intelligence gathering activities, government officials had compiled a considerable body of data about APRA. While much of their intelligence was inaccurate or incomplete, they had gathered information about who belonged to the party and who occupied positions of leadership. They had compiled information about where party cells met, and what activities were planned at those meetings. The forces of order had even classified the leadership according to degree of fanaticism—to ascertain who represented the gravest danger to the government. What the government remained completely in the dark about, however, was why so many people were drawn to the party, and why so many remained devoted to it despite the very real dangers

70

David Nugent

involved in party membership. Although the authorities used labels like “terrorist” and “fanatic” to discredit party members, it cannot have escaped the attention of the government that there were an awful lot of terrorists around. Such a large number of people who rejected the normative order, of course, called into question the very existence of a legitimate realm of the ordinary, the rational and the routine.

Conclusion In the preceding sections of the paper I have sought to shed light on a topic that the authorities found endlessly perplexing and profoundly disturbing—what they experienced as an unbreachable wall of party discipline that frustrated their efforts to know and eliminate APRA. I have also sought to explain why the forces of order became so preoccupied with knowing the party in every detail after having paid virtually no attention to this matter for decades. It was the failed coup attempt of October 1948, and the powerful sense of betrayal that accompanied it, that elevated APRA to the status of a 3rd Order Standard Deviation—and in the process, compelled the authorities to focus attention on issues that had formerly been of no concern. The coup attempt convinced government officials that there was a great deal going on behind the façade of conformity and respectability that the party had sought to cultivate. Once that façade came down, officials still found themselves unable to break through the shroud of secrecy behind which APRA concealed its activities. Furthermore, government officials found themselves unable to do so despite the extensive use of arrest, interrogation and torture. It was the ability of the Apristas to endure these abuses, and the fanaticism suggested by their willingness to do so, which produced in the forces of order such deep fears and anxieties. I have argued that the paranoia that possessed the authorities may be understood as the most extreme of three standardized responses to APRA as one of the awkward or dangerous classes. Among the most interesting aspects of the fears that seized the forces of order was that they were largely self-imposed. The inability of the authorities to make APRA legible was not exclusively a function of the party’s secretive nature. Virtually all the information that the authorities needed to understand what seemed so inexplicable—on what basis APRA sought to appeal to the general population, how it recruited and indoctrinated members, what the party regarded as rational and routine—was readily available, and had been for decades.17 Indeed, much of this information had been published by APRA itself. Furthermore, it would have taken little effort by government officials to familiarize themselves with those aspects of party activity that were not available in print. For despite the efforts of the Apristas to avoid direct confrontations with the authorities, party members were carrying out their underground activities on a regular basis under the very noses of government officials.18 Intermittent encounters between these two adversaries were therefore inevitable, and they occurred throughout the period considered in this paper. When these encounters did take place—when the police stumbled upon party members painting APRA slogans on public buildings in the dead of night, for example, or when high school teachers inadvertently discovered that their students were in possession of

“Standard deviations”: Northern Peru 71 party literature, or even when the police encountered party members traveling to the countryside to organize among the peasantry—the authorities responded to APRA as a 2nd Order Standard Deviation. They were careful to address the incident itself. They might also expand their surveillance activities in an effort to better monitor party activity, and prevent APRA’s efforts to expand. But government officials failed to ask themselves why they kept having encounter after encounter with the “subversives.” Rather than seek to comprehend the logic that motivated the Apristas and sustained their party, the forces of order assumed that APRA was beyond comprehension—that party members were nothing more than fanatics. In this way the authorities were able to avoid confronting a more disturbing possibility: that the popularity of the Party of the People was a reflection of the failure of government—that APRA was addressing the legitimate needs and concerns of large numbers of people in a way that the government could not. The authorities were thus unable to view the party as anything other than a dangerous aberration. As a result, at times of political crisis—when it became clear that there was indeed a kind of general plan orchestrating many different party-backed events and occurrences—the forces of order had no way of comprehending APRA that made any rational sense. Instead, officials had little choice but to view the party in paranoid terms that fueled their own fears. Interpreting the Party of the People as a fanatical organization of irrational extremists bent single-mindedly on the total domination of society certainly preserved the government’s view of itself as legitimate. But it left the authorities incapable of understanding what they were so desperate to understand: how APRA managed to exercise such a powerful hold on so much of the population. I have suggested that the central government was incapable of understanding APRA because of the authorities’ commitment to a particular vision of the normal and the everyday. Implicit in this view were appropriate and inappropriate kinds of activities in which people would engage and kinds of people they would be. The Party of the People had no place within the normative political project being advanced by the central government. To the contrary: the Apristas challenged virtually every aspect of that project. As a result, they became regarded as one of the awkward or dangerous classes. The degree to which the party was regarded as dangerous changed according to circumstance. So too did official responses to the Party of the People. Whether the government sought to ignore, contain or eliminate APRA, officials insisted on fitting their interpretation of party activity into preexisting scripts, each of which represented the party in terms of a standardized deviation from normative prescriptions. It was these standardized scripts that structured what could be known and recorded about APRA. It was these same scripts that determined what would remain unarchived, and unarchivable, about the Party of the People.

Notes 1 Groups and activities that do not fit within the normative political projects of governing regimes are “awkward” only to the governing regimes. It is in this sense, and this sense alone, that I use the term “awkward” in the present paper.

72

David Nugent

2 Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985). 3 For useful works on APRA see Francois Bourricaud, Ideología y Desarrollo: El caso del partido Aprista Peruano (Mexico City, 1966), Peter F. Klaren, Modernization, Dislocation and Aprismo: Origins of the Peruvian Aprista Party, 1870–1932 (Austin, 1973), Nelson Manrique, Usted Fue Aprista! Bases para una historia crítica del APRA (Lima, 2009), and Imelda Vega-Centeno Bocangel, Aprismo popular: Cultura, religion y política (Lima, 1991). 4 APRA planned to nationalize land, mining and industry (Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, Por la Emancipación de América Latina: Artículos, Mensajes, Discursos, 1923–1927 [Buenos Aires, 1927]), form workers’ cooperatives in these sectors, abolish the Congress and establish a participatory democracy in which representatives of the cooperatives would decide national policy. Such policies were a direct affront to the laissez faire, export oriented policies upon which the national political economy was based (see Rosemary Thorp and Geoffrey Bertram, Peru 1890–1977: Growth and Policy in an Open Economy [New York, 1978]). 5 For purposes of clarity, I have presented standard deviations as discrete, and as occurring in sequence. In actuality, the processes in question were not always so regular or orderly, although they certainly tended to be. 6 For example, APRA had conspired to overthrow the government in December of 1931, had been involved in a large-scale armed uprising intended to do the same in July of 1932, and attempted a similar seizure of power in November of 1934 (see David Nugent, Dark Fantasies of State: Discipline, Dissent and Democracy in the Northern Peruvian Andes [n.d.]). 7 David Nugent, “States, Secrecy, Subversives: APRA and Political Fantasy in mid-20th Century Peru,” American Ethnologist, 37, 4 (2010). 8 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998). 9 Archivo Subprefectural de Amazonas, Oficios Remitidos. personal y Secretos. Años 1947–48–49–50–51–52 y 53, 16 de Octubre de 1948. 10 Klaren, Modernization. 11 Oficios Remitidos, 5 de Febrero de 1949. 12 Oficios Remitidos, 9 de Marzo de 1949. 13 Oficios Remitidos, 26 de Febrero de 1949. 14 Oficios Remitidos, 17 de Marzo de 1949. 15 The Chachapoyas region had long been dominated politically by a handful of landed families, each of which was the center of its own patronage network. See David Nugent, Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes (Stanford, 1997). 16 Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, 3. 17 For example, see Rómulo Meneses, Aprismo Feminino Peruano (Lima, 1934); Partido Aprista Peruano, Código de Acción FAJ (Lima, 1934); Programa Mínimo o Plan de Acción Inmediata (Lima, 1931); Magda Portal, El Aprismo y La Mujer (Lima, 1933). 18 The details of these processes are beyond the scope of the present paper. See Nugent, Dark Fantasies.

Part II

Everyday as archive

This page intentionally left blank

5

Feminine écriture, trace objects and the death of Braj Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

Some problems in theorizing unarchived histories For postcolonial philology and history, the examination of unarchived histories carries a certain poignancy and urgency. It bears the burden of providing historical explanations for some of the most intractable and opaque events of violence that have formed linguistic identities and gender identities. Recent criticism of postcolonial theory as encouraging an unexamined and indiscriminate predilection for “making the British the whipping boy” in colonial studies misreads the rage for historical understanding and memory that constitutes a greater part of postcolonial desire, a rage and a longing that drives the theory and praxis of new work on South Asian literary cultures.

Statism For the specific contexts of the historical and philological projects relating to formerly colonized societies, there is an error in conceptualizing the processes of unarchiving in the form of that which has not already been technologically processed as digitally available information, or alternatively not been epistemologically configured as new fields of knowledge. The field of digitized archives is not the subject of this essay, I am simply making the commonsensical point that the problems posed by unarchived histories are not fully solved by digitized archives. Although knowledge practice is driven by the search for new frontiers of science and history, nevertheless unarchived histories cannot be defined simply as that which has yet to be documented. What is the difference between the scholar’s enthusiasm for new fields and objects of knowledge and the digitization of the colonial archive as distinct from a theory of the processes of unarchiving? Adapting Marx’s dictum that the prerequisite for all criticism is the criticism of religion, we might describe one of the central principles in Ranajit Guha’s work in the following way.1 The elementary principles for an investigation of itihaas (history) that wishes to avoid the errors of nostalgia, sentimentalism and messianic utopianism consist of an ongoing, agonistic, self-critical and deconstructive critique of statist historiography. The archaeology of knowledge as recovery remains enmeshed in Orientalism and nativism, unless and until the critique of

76

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

statism shapes the projects of unarchived histories by an examination of the statist impulse in history writing that Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the transformation of peoples’ histories into the biography of the nation state.2 My own developing understanding of statism is deconstructive—the particular burden of fashioning new pasts and legal-juridical identities in the postcolony requires that we conceive the state in a doubled imaginary, as the realization of the new thought produced by social movements and cultural debate and, at the same time, as the apparatus of repressive technologies. Both parts of this movement of state power must figure in a discussion of gender violence. The critique of statism is not therefore tantamount to the anarchist or libertarian abolition of the state. The conversion protocols that Chakrabarty describes have less to do with the denial of the state and its powers for historical change, and much more to do with the view of the state as a miraculating agent and the story of South Asian women (for example) as folded into the story of the coming into being of the nation. In the absence of a critical, political and theoretical approach to the formation of itihaas, bhasha (vernacular) and sahitya (literature), the scholar’s search for unarchived histories runs the danger of information retrieval.

Status of evidence Unarchived histories suffer the antagonistic and hostile vigilance of dominant (colonial and nationalist) archives and their regimes of classification. It is this structural and decentered relation to dominant modes of archiving history and language that is foregrounded in Gyanendra Pandey’s introductory chapter through the problem that concerns every historian and philologist—the problem of historical evidence.3 The problem posed by the processes of unarchiving in postcolonial studies may also be characterized as the ongoing struggle for earning the status of historical and philological evidence. For it is only as hard evidence that unarchived histories can play a constitutive role in the formation of literary, cultural and historical memory and the anterior future of the postcolony. It is only through assuming the status of evidence that peoples’ histories can distinguish themselves from the pseudo-history and pseudo-philology propagated by a variety of fundamentalisms. The mode of existence of unarchived histories is not silence and erasure but rather the zone of unintelligibility, distortion and decrepitude shared by the deviant, the insane, the aberrant and the incarcerated criminal.

Zone of unintelligibility The theoretical position that posits an absolute erasure of peoples’ histories and the silenced subaltern presupposes that the dominant archives have succeeded in their taxonomies by leaving no area of peoples’ lives and historical experiences unmapped and unclassified. Drawing on his reading of Gramsci, Guha challenged this view by characterizing British colonization of South Asia as a state of domination without hegemony. How can we come to understand the modalities of domination specific to the nationalist archive in South Asia? The nationalist

Feminine écriture, trace objects and Braj 77 archive has a weak messianic power, for it views the past as redemptive. As Walter Benjamin puts it, “only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments” since “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”4 The redemptive and appropriative character of the nationalist archive has its source in the fear that it must make the early modern languages, literatures and histories citable in all its moments in order to make good on its claim to cultural and political representativeness and power: this fear is conjoined to a messianicity and self-construction as the redemptive angel of history. This way of looking at the statist historiography of Braj and the gender violence of female infanticide and foeticide enables us to conceive the processes of unarchiving as existing in structural relation to the taxonomies of the archive, inhabiting a zone of unintelligibility and distortion rather than total erasure. Were the domination to be total, the deforming would be total as well. In fact, however, the failed hegemony of the dominant archives produces a partial, incomplete and continually reworked unintelligibility. In order to piece together an account of language and gender violence I have, in this chapter, taken recourse to the non-science or soft evidence of modes of the historical imaginary: speech in everyday practice and the histories embedded in it, the birth narrative recounted to daughters in North India that is a mode of creativity in everyday speech, the crafting of the idiom of the birahani by a woman writer, and the trace object of Braj and the attenuated and yet persistent historical existence of the gender imaginary of Braj in the Hindi prose composed by Mahadevi Verma. As a concrete example of the zone of unintelligibility in Mahadevi’s prose works, I name a feature of her prose—the trace object. The trace object belongs in the realm of the everyday and does not call attention to itself as figuration or topoi because its mode of secrecy lies in its appearance as naturalistic detail. Both in everyday speech and in literary texts it often appears as an item of clothing: rag or scrap, zari border, salwar or chunri (head scarf). Even when the trace object enters the circuit of exchange between women, or adult woman and child, or two girls, and is invested with meaning and affect, it does not relinquish its alias as realist detail. It is only through philological analysis of the irreducibly hybrid language of everyday speech and sahitya, and the flight of one language into the innermost recesses of another, that the trace object is unmoored from its dwelling in language. Since the trace object does not herald its arrival with the conventional markers of loan words, tadbhava and tatsama, syntax, morphology or phonemes, it is not readily recognizable as the linguistic bearer of history. It evokes the early modern in its persistence into the twentieth-century modern by a flash of illumination in which characters, bodily gesture, the perceiving eye combine with the trace object to compose a visual ekphrasis of language as set of moving pictures. Historically, how might we alter our conventional understanding of how languages of North India work to gender the speaking and writing subject in order to make these idioms of threatened violence, warning, tenderness, sadistic disciplining and humiliation between women assume the status of evidence in

78

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

history and philology? My third and final point concerning the theory of unarchived histories involves the division between the historical life of archived histories versus the suspicion that unarchived histories exist in a realm of ahistoricity. If archived histories of gender violence in North India such as colonial infanticide reform are available to the historical imagination as stored data and evidence and as the currency of historical debate, then what is the mode of historical existence of unarchived histories? It is an error to conceive of the processes of unarchiving either in the poetics of loss as dead languages and extinct life forms, or conversely to confer on unarchived histories the petrified, ahistorical and static status of tradition. Guha provides two theoretical and methodological principles that are suggestive for the concept of unarchiving specific to formerly colonized societies. I interpret these principles for unarchived histories in the following way: (a) We cannot grasp the history of a society that was deemed as having no historical consciousness and no tradition of history writing unless we have a theory of bhasha, zuban (Urdu) and boli (speech) that is decathected from what Guha calls the epistemic spreadsheet of language that Europe brought to non-European vernaculars. (b) The processes of unarchiving becomes faintly visible in its contours to the historian and literary critic by delinking sahitya from the specific European development of the canon of literature. For it is only by paying attention to sahitya and sahityaaitihasikta (historicality of literature as opposed to conventional literary histories) that Guha discerns a historiography adequate to the historicality of peoples’ histories in that which is unthought.

Statism in colonial analysis of gender violence As the preeminent vehicle of verse and song, Braj was at the center of Lakhnavi innovations in language and the gender imaginary of each language. The Awadh ruler Wajid Ali Shah was the last Nawab of Awadh and ruled for nine years between 1847–1856, he presided over a nominally independent state until the annexation of his kingdom by the East India Company. The literary language of Braj and the court poetry of Wajid have a significant relationship.5 The literary innovations that circulated around Braj in the Awadh court can be gauged from the fact that Wajid reimagined the rasleela that is at the heart of the gender imaginary of Braj in the Indo-Persian genre of the qissa and titled it Radha Kanhaiyya ka Qissa (Story of Radha and Krishna) and gave a Persianate cast to Brajbhasha through an entire range of interpretations and adaptations in poetry, music, dance style of Kathak and dance dramas by calling them Rahas. Indeed, the colonial charge of effeminacy for the political culture of the court had everything to do with a certain hostile view of the gender imaginary that evolved at the Awadh court and included the cultural life of the city of Lucknow and its hinterland. W.H. Sleeman’s account of his journey through the countryside of Awadh in 1849–1850 is a key document for statist history because it is designed to provide irrefutable empirical evidence through eyewitness accounts and reported conversations with

Feminine écriture, trace objects and Braj 79 landowners in the rural parts of Awadh that the ruler of Awadh was unfit to rule and did not enjoy the good opinion of his subjects.6 The figuration Sleeman chose for developing his political critique of Awadh’s misrule was a crime that far exceeded in horror and cruelty the conventional images of unimproved agriculture and neglect of peoples’ welfare. The reason that the people of Awadh did not testify against the corrupt and decadent Awadh court, Sleeman’s diary implied, was that they resembled slaves who had over time become inured to their condition of slave-like subordination. Sleeman saw the people of Awadh as symbolized in the birthing mother of infanticidal clans who at first wept and protested at the killing of her newborn daughters, but over time became slavish and acquiescent. An explicitly political judgment about the Awadh rulers was constructed through the metonymy of the Awadh state as the space of criminal disorder that mirrored the family space of daughter-killing in the extract below: The infant is destroyed in the room where it is born, and there buried. The floor is then plastered over with cow dung; and, on the thirteenth day, the village or family priest must cook his food in that room . . . after the expiation, the parents again occupy the room, and there receive the visits of their family and friends, and gossip as usual!7 A sense of horror and repugnance is evoked by this scene and conjures up a late nineteenth century Awadh society where gender crime is rampant, and there are no idioms mobilized to oppose this crime. After six years of study of the documents of colonial infanticide reform in 1998–2004 for my first book, I have come to believe that, following Benjamin, we have to brush history against the grain. For me, the more important question therefore is: are there other kinds of truth that the diary’s evidence attests to without overt explanation? The testimonies Sleeman collected indicate that in nineteenth-century Awadh there was a vigorous, articulate secular and religious idiom of critique of daughter-killing. The colonial documenting of infanticide posits the colonial state as the sole agent of change and reform, although there are a few indications in Sleeman’s diary that he found evidence of a contestation of this gender crime in the conversations he reported in his diary.8 Colonial administrators’ recorded conversations constitute an important genre in the annals of empire; the genre dissipates readerly skepticism concerning the problems of mistranslation by positing the model of Lockean empiricism—sensory data is collected first-hand by the administrator, he sees with his own eyes the material evidence of what he calls maladministration in the Oudh kingdom. The diary evokes the truth status of an Englishman traveling in Oudh and hearing conversations without the filter of administrative dispatches. The landlord Bakhtawar Singh who accompanied Sleeman in his journey through the Awadh countryside gave a detailed glimpse of this critique, which Sleeman recorded. Challenging the statements of landlords like Nau Singh who told Sleeman that the preservation of daughters destroyed the prosperity of a clan, Bakhtawar Singh argued instead that infanticide itself caused kulnaash or clan annihilation as infanticidal families suffered from sterility, early death and

80

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

disease of sickly male children, and the necessity of marriage alliances with girls from lower-caste families in the hope of preserving the male line. The colonial archive makes the evidence of this popular contestation between daughter- cherishing and daughter- killing practices appear uneventful and fitful before the historical drama of state-centered reform, together with the intelligibility of a crime punishable by law. Both the colonial archive and the intercession of the colonial state bolster arguments and solutions based on the construction of the women of Awadh as a unified and monolithic category, and therefore as a form of gender violence “men” do to “women.” It would be truer to say that it was a practice in which men and women who opposed the practice of infanticide were arraigned against men and women who colluded in it. The data Sleeman collected also contradicts the image of a united female community in the infanticidal clan, victimized in a uniform way. For his records show that the practice required the active intercession of the women of the family, and was rarely executed by men alone. In the next section, I examine everyday speech in North India as a repository of traces of arguments between men and women who upheld the value of daughters, on the one hand, and men and women who defended the practice of infanticide, on the other—an itinerary of traces that cannot be accorded the status of evidence through dates, periodization, authorship and the historical event.

Everyday speech The realm of the everyday in peoples’ lives is the unit of history that is most saturated with multiple, intersecting and colliding idioms that mutate and acquire a new historical context in utterance. Gender histories oriented towards the extraordinary, the eventful and the momentous rarely develop tools of analysis sensitive enough to sift through this data. I do not approach everyday speech as a source of idealization and nostalgia, nor as anti-modern by default. For if the spoken languages of North India are in some sense a record of the collective life of a people—a record that we do not know how to analyze since it escapes our conventions of literary-historical analysis—then what is intriguing is that each adage about betis (daughters) in the languages of Hindi, Urdu, Marwari and Bhojpuri is an argument that can be mobilized in different contexts about the value of a daughter, rather than a reified remnant of settled conflicts and victories. And every such proverb is at loggerheads with other proverbs, thus recording what Gramsci calls the collective wisdom, the common sense of people transmitted over generations, acquiring a new historicity and rhetorical situatedness whenever it appears in everyday speech. For example, a well-known folk proverb posits the value of beti in materialeconomic terms, as the embodiment of wealth, but wealth that belongs to another family—beti paraya dhan (“a daughter is another’s wealth”). Manjira Datta’s documentary film Rishte (1995) shows us how this proverb is invoked in everyday speech to justify femicide. The film narrates the story of Lalli Goel, a Delhi housewife, who fatally poisoned two of her four daughters and committed suicide in 1993 because she was misled, after several sex determination tests, into aborting

Feminine écriture, trace objects and Braj 81 her male foetus. Her father-in-law speaks before the camera and explains the rationale behind Lalli’s action: “In our country, society, way of life, girls cannot do without brothers. Whose house will married girls go to for their natal home? Daughters mean the dispersion of property.” Goel concludes by citing the proverb beti paraya dhan, the daughter devalued almost as if she devours the family’s resources from the day she takes birth. The re-contextualization of this proverb does not simply link the modern form of gender violence of femicide to an ancient inheritance; in the changed circumstances of women’s relation to property, the proverb acquires a new meaning. What is so remarkable about idiomatic speech in the vernaculars of North India, however, is that each proverb is challenged by another proverb asserting a different notion of economic value. Proverbs that portray daughters as the source of parental worry (chinta) are ranged against prowoman proverbs that counter this idea by asserting that daughters alleviate parental worry through acts of tenderness, or that mothers and fathers may find more empathy in their daughters, more value in affect than from their sons. And beti paraya dhan is opposed by the equally common saying, beti ghar ki Lakshmi (“the daughter is the wealth [literally, the goddess of wealth] of the family”). How do these pairs function in everyday speech, within members of the same family as well as in literary deployment of proverbs? The Crow’s Way, a folk tale translated into English from the Rajasthani vernacular by the folklorist and Charan bard Vijaydan Detha offers us a clue.9 For the purposes of our present argument, both texts in Rajasthani vernaculars and their translations carry a special weight of significance, given that the nineteenth-century colonial archive made no secret of the fact that the greatest concentration of infanticide-endemic districts were found in the princely states of Rajputana. In 1998 the state of Rajasthan had one of the nation’s lowest sex ratios (913 females to a thousand males) and the village of Deora practiced female infanticide for 115 years, a few of the 150 families ending the practice a decade ago. Folktales in the Rajasthani vernaculars are therefore an ideal site to make sense of the logic supporting and challenging daughter-killing. In the tale we are presented with two mothers: the biological mother of a young woman abandoned by her husband repudiates her daughter’s plea for refuge by invoking what I call “method sayings,” proverbs that openly state one of the traditional methods of female infant killing (chullu bhar paani mein doob mar—“go, drown yourself in a handful of water”). The tale juxtaposes the method saying with an old woman who has seven sons but does not experience nurture from her male children. Nancy Chowdorow refers to the paradox of woman as the nurturer who is herself never nurtured.10 Chowdorow’s insight holds true for the allegedly fulfilled woman who lives amidst her seven married sons and grandchildren, yet experiences self-nurture only when she adopts an abandoned girl. Pro-woman folklore suggests that the daughter has an inherent value, she is cherished not for her wealth or for continuing the male line. Rather she in herself delights the family. Such histories appear to be unintelligible according to the laws of historical evidence; yet they possess a historical life as gendered linguistic

82

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

trace in everyday speech in North India. These traces both affirm and deny historicity by existing as the counter-rationality of common sense available in proverbs and idioms in everyday speech. As the counter-rational that posits itself as immemorial tradition, these linguistic traces carry vestiges of a gender history that we do not have access to through traditional modes of historical apprehension and narration, a history whose major and minor events occurred inside families. Yet even though the traces in vernaculars cannot serve as evidence, the undated, unverifiable and anonymously authorized idioms and sayings found in everyday conversation and reported speech in folktales and women’s fiction contain fragments of a critically important gender history. How did women make sense of this mode of violence and what are the idioms in which they articulated their dissent from, or capitulation to it? The colonial documents relating to infanticide reform represent all women of the infanticidal clans as victims. The historical evidence of peoples’ language, and the pointcounterpoint relationship in the pairing of daughter devaluing and daughter cherishing proverbs suggests a more complex picture of an ongoing contestation in everyday speech, popular culture, womens’ songs and festivals and vrat katha (tales told during the fasting season) between opposing views of the patriarchal family. Several challenges attend the historicizing of everyday speech. In the contexts of the stellar work by feminists on the everyday, it is arguable that we require a methodology for the histories that are constantly remembered and renewed in women’s daily interactions with female children, histories that we can glimpse in the words of motherly concern interlaced with pretended threats or a lullaby in which tenderness is leavened with worry (choti si gudiya, aafat ki pudiya – “beautiful, little doll, harbinger of troubles”).11 Here it may be noted that the genre of method sayings, within which a traditional method of killing newborn daughters is described as a mock threat, are rarely used in the language for disciplining male children.12 I am suggesting that the processes of unarchiving function through the colonial archive as its silences as well as through the relatively untheorized realm of women’s speech and the circulation of vernaculars in the everyday. Everyday speech is a storehouse of unarchived histories that might help us glimpse the knowledge in circulation and exchange between women as mothers, grandmothers and aunts and female children. Within the terms of the female emancipation narratives of nationalist discourses, these language traces were deemed as symptoms of pre-modern, feudal forms of cruelty that would in time disappear and give way to the public and private language of modernity and the New Woman produced by nationalist reform. I want to challenge this ameliorist view of gender history in language by turning to a genre of everyday speech within which there is a ceaseless, inventive, conflictual narrativizing of the hypothesized moment of birth of the female child. Birth narratives are often indistinguishable from the umbrella genre of family reminiscences and family history passed down word of mouth. A representative example of a birth narrative for daughters occurs in the opening pages of Ismat Chugtai’s Terhi Lakir (Crooked Line) in the Rekhti language that

Feminine écriture, trace objects and Braj 83 was the everyday speech among women in ashraf Muslim households, appropriated and made into a literary language by male writers.13 I draw attention to the ways in which the circumstances of the central character’s birth, and the responses of women that are presented as reported speech combine with the narrative voice that mimes how women narrate stories in the family. Birth narrative institute a certain logic of premonition—a wild and undisciplined terhi or crooked trajectory for the life of this female child is anticipated by the ill-grace with which she arrives into the world and upsets the plans of her mother and sisters. The implied reader of the novelized birth narrative intrigues me, and the question I wish to pose to Ismat Chughtai’s novel is the following: is it not the adolescent girl-child on whom such a narrative has the greatest effect? The hidden auditor of this narrative is the child herself who will in the course of family conversations hear this story over and over again. In the excerpt below I have drawn on the English translation as well as added key phrases from the original Rekhti: To begin with, her birth was ill-timed ( vo paida hi bahut bemauka hui). Bari Apa, whose friend Salma was to be married soon, was working briskly on a crepe dupatta, stitching gold lace to its borders . . . Suddenly, dark clouds rolled in and in the ensuing commotion the longstanding desire (armaan) to send for an English midwife came to nought and “she” appeared. The minute she arrived into the world she let out such a thunderous howl . . . God help us! Who had time for weddings now? ‘May God curse this baby sister!’(Khuda gaarat kare is munni si behn ko). . . . ‘All these girls—will fortune smile on them?’ (Aakhir yeh itni dher si lariat ka nasiba kaha khulega). Shamman’s navel did not get infected, nor was she ever sick, and with each passing day she became healthier and plumper. The first two or three babies had been pampered and coddled, but now Bari Apa had had her fill and was exhausted.14 What this passage does is to provide us in women’s writing in Rekhti a literary and ethnographic account of precisely that which is not simply missing or erased in the colonial document, rather the colonial document actively pushes women’s speech and writing in all its complexity into the domain of unarchived histories. In its place Sleeman’s diary constructs acquiescent slave-like women. The recalcitrance of Chughtai’s archiving of family life lies in one crucial respect— the ways she disrupts the picture of a quiet, willing and complicit violence between women and girls. Instead Chugtai suggests that everyday speech among women is alive with the possibilities of constantly re-enacted linguistic violence. The birth narrative can be defined as the literary in the everyday, it refers to a story that is designed to explain and justify the irritation and mourning in the very moment when the sex of the child was socially constructed. The birth narrative for girls is a genre of storytelling that can function in opposing ways. It can confer symbolic protection and narrate the miracle of her birth, alternately the birth narrative can be narrated by aunts, cousins, mothers or siblings as a form of disciplining by making the girl imagine the violence she escaped.

84

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

The implied listener of the narrative, the adolescent or adult woman herself, is invited to contemplate the moment of her birth as miracle, averted violence, or as in Chughtai’s story as the object of women’s curses, worry and exhaustion. In 1998 an academic colleague told me this story after I gave a talk on the colonial records of infanticide reform. On a visit to India she attended the mourning ceremonies for the death of her paternal grandmother, a lady who had wielded tyrannical authority as mother-in-law over my friend’s aunt.15 The aunt said she was present at my friend’s birth and remembered the grandmother advising the mother to put stones in the infant’s mouth. This advice was ignored, perhaps because the newborn girl already had an older brother. Reading Chughtai’s representation of Shammam’s birth narrative through the prism of this story of a woman professor to whom her birth narrative is re-narrated, I found myself paying attention to the bodily and oral performative dimension of everyday language that is always under threat of invisibility or falsely venerated as the trace of the past. In everyday speech the bodily practices that accompany speech provide vital clues to the rhetorical situatedness and ascription of meaning in the speech act, precisely that which endows the words with meaning and provides clues to the first order and second order listener also happens to be the bodily practices around the vernacular that are always under threat of being rendered unintelligible. Chughtai’s description of women’s narratives in a family in the 1940s, as distinct from my colleague’s recalling of her aunt’s narrative in the late 1990s, are located differently in their own historical present; both attempt to make visible the unarchived histories of linguistic violence and the historicality of unarchived histories. Birth narratives in North Indian languages are not sealed accounts of the family past, they are continually refashioned in family reminiscences and life narratives because they are given new associations and fresh meanings with each phase of the woman’s life, they are more in the nature of a living past that is remade in the historical present.

Historicality of Mahadevi’s scenes of childhood The unarchived histories that may help illuminate some of the constitutive concerns in Mahadevi’s prose relate to the destabilizing uncertainty around the social construction of sex in the infanticidal clan, and the ways in which women in everyday speech and in their poetic and prose compositions made sense of these crucial life-granting or life-denying differentiations internal to the female sex. This internally differentiated female sex is, to borrow a term from Luce Irigaray, not one but at least two. The criteria for distinguishing between women survivors and unwanted female children was often in practice arbitrary, depending on any one of the following variables: birth order and whether the daughter was born after or before the birth of a son; whether the birth took place in nanihaal or sasuraal (natal home or marital home); the authority wielded by a grandfather or head of the clan; an unsuccessful first or second attempt at infant killing that was then read off as a sign that the child was destined to live. The literary corpus of feminine écriture requires a theory of women’s speech

Feminine écriture, trace objects and Braj 85 that can attend to the processes of unarchiving of linguistic violence and women’s linguistic, narrative and literary resistances to these forms of violence. We cannot gain unmediated access to the historicality of Mahadevi Verma’s prose works, and delink her from the nationalist canon in which she is located, without an investigation of the histories of gender and language to which she responds. The idiom of birahani in her prose tracks the psychosocial processes of this ontological self-alienation in the imaginary of the girl who confronts patriarchal disciplining, for it is the child’s imagination that is the battleground in the contestation underway in everyday speech, it is the imaginative freedom of the female child that is the coveted prize and goal of this form of gender violence. After several decades of studying and writing about statist historiography in colonial and national histories, Ranajit Guha came to believe that one of the crucial sites at which the object-historical conventions of statist historiography reached its limit was in the primal scenes of childhood drawn by Rabindranath Tagore. For it was here that a history of creativity, seeing as self-making, offered a substantial challenge to the factuality of history by unfolding an alternate set of terms for the personal and no less historically significant account of a poet’s earliest memories of remaking the world through his imagination and keen perception. Guha’s search for historicality enables us to better understand the extraordinary investments in the prose work of Mahadevi Verma (1907–1987), in particular her obsessive return to the notion of memory as atita and smriti (Atita ke Chalchitra and Smriti ki Rekhayen) and to “bacchpan ke din” in her own and others’ childhood.16 For Mahadevi, a girl’s childhood in the early years of the twentieth century was a place where an untold history was made and remade, because it was here that a fissure internal to the female sex was instituted between the female child of privilege and the female child of scarcity and deprivation. An expository version of this history of childhood can be found in Bachpan Ke Din where Mahadevi observes that the girls born into a family that considers daughters as a burden (bhoj) often enjoyed a compensatory privilege.17 Mahadevi was born in 1903 or 1907 in the United Provinces in a small town named Farukkhabad near Allahabad; her family belonged to the Kayastha caste and had not had a daughter for several generations. There is an apocryphal story that Mahadevi’s paternal grandfather expressed the wish for a grand-daughter as there had been no daughters born into the family. All we know as certainty from Mahadevi’s Hindi and English biographers like Karine Schomer is that she grew up in a family that did not have traditions of female child rearing.18 In chapter two of Atita Ke Chalchitra, Mahadevi experiments with the everyday genre of the birth narrative by narrating another kind of birthing—the event in her own personal history when she came to experience the division between herself as the child of privilege and another girl who was a child widow from a Marwari family and who, unlike Mahadevi, worked as unpaid drudge for her married family. It is clear that there were established conventions for representing the subalternity of girls who were doubly alienated—removed from their natal home at an early age and sent as a bewildered child into her married home, and removed again from the status of a married girl and into the harsh incarceral regime of the

86

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

punishments and proscriptions that regulated a widow’s everyday. In the 1940s when she wrote this prose sketch Mahadevi inherited a rich and voluminous body of nationalist writings devoted to the plight of the child widow, widow remarriage and sati (widow immolation). To the extent that the story highlighted the familial violence on the unprotected child widow as a critique of the unreformed Hindu upper caste family, Mahadevi signaled her own participation in this discourse. However, the story is told aslant. While situating itself in the nationalist life narratives of widows the story focuses much more on the unrecorded, insignificant, everyday practices of girls who unknowingly break taboos concerning the child widow who is not allowed to wear good clothes or finery as a bodily mark of perpetual grief and loss. In the story Mahadevi is a boldly imaginative child; the unrestricted sway of her imagination is the point of the story. History and the disciplinary regimes of patriarchal order intercept the child’s imagination at the precise moment when she reimagines the world around her, creatively participates in it, realigns the North Indian family in the early years of the twentieth century closer to her own image of it. This act of imaginative worlding is otherdirected—the child Mahadevi decides that she will stitch and embroider a brightly colored chunri (scarf) for her friend. In the story Mahadevi’s friend is seen accepting the gift, trying on the scarf and admiring herself in the mirror by her sister-in-law. The beating of the child widow that follows is so severe and prolonged that Mahadevi faints (murchit ho jaati hain). In this unconscious state she is carried away by the family servants to her own home, where she lies for days in a state of delirium. The story does not end in the usual fashion with an exhortation for the emancipation of widows; instead it returns to what Guha calls the poet’s seeing as self-making of the world around him. Months later when Mahadevi is allowed to visit her friend, the writer describes the self-alienated sexed subject through composing the female gaze of a child who looks out into a social world that she now knows cannot be remade and aligned to her imagination. The child of privilege looks at the child of deprivation without the intersection of their gaze: the child Mahadevi notes that her friend’s eyes are turned away from her and filled with gehra vishaad (deep sorrow). The historicality of gender history is hinted at here, which is not identical to the emancipation narrative favored by nationalist discourses concerning the New Woman. The story records another and relatively unarchived history (and when archived rendered partially intelligible as a history of protest that does not primarily derive from nationalist and colonial emancipation narratives): the tiny everyday acts of dissent and disobedience through which the poet refuses to accept this lesson through the self-fashioning as birahani.

Historicality of Mahadevi’s language The final portion of my essay returns to the place where it began, the making of modern Hindi and the gender imaginary of the modern vernacular. Much of the work on the Hindi Urdu divide circles around male writers and polemicists, it is necessary to also view this history of the modern vernaculars through the literary

Feminine écriture, trace objects and Braj 87 choices made by a woman writer. The deliberate and purposeful construction of Hindi as a national language together with the category of national literature can be traced in one of its trajectories to the ways nationalist discourses sought to contain the unbridled imagination of woman writers like Mahadevi Verma while also releasing their powers as poets, educationists and policy makers into the public sphere as nationalist sewa (service to the nation). As a woman writer who came into prominence in the nationalist period of Gandhian mobilization Mahadevi’s prose works have been praised as models of statist realism, evoking in concrete detail representative figures of subalternity like the child widow (the Marwari child widow called Bhabhi) the Pahari orphan girl from Uttarkhand who worked to support her brothers and sisters (Lacchama) the domestic servant (Bhaktin) and the immiserated bard (Pandhari Baba). In the lens of statist realism the histories Mahadevi’s prose appears to evoke belong to the idiom of the leadereducator who travels the length and breadth of rural India from Uttarakhand to Kashi Mela and back to Prayag Mahila Vidyapeeth at Allahabad where she was the Vice Chancellor; in the course of this nationalist cartography the woman poet gazes with empathy and imaginative power at the wretched and dispossessed sections of society. History making in the nationalist agitation is a palpable presence in Mahadevi’s prose. For instance, one prose sketch ends with the writer imagining the imminent possibility of being jailed for her part in the freedom struggle. Seen in this way it would appear that there is overwhelming evidence that Mahadevi’s non-fiction manifests its view of history as the prose of the world in the idioms of the high nationalist phase from mid-1930s to 1950s—social reformist, concrete particularity of nationalist realism, an ideological commitment to the rural or grameen as the mainspring of Gandhi’s India, humble characters, and a Hindi prose characterized by high seriousness and the plain style. Mahadevi’s movement between sahaj Hindi (simple, rural Hindi) and Sanskritized syntax for Hindi appears at first blush to fully accord with her fellow poet and close friend Sumitranandan Pant’s critique of Brajbhasa as a linguistic symptom of a feudal love for luxury and ornamentation, excessive love for metaphor and an obsessive preoccupation with shringar rasa.19 Mahadevi’s prose appears to be designed as a model of the rasa reworked by Hindi publicists, namely the rasa of raudrya or militant and active agitation for realizing the freedom of the nation and its people. In the conventional reading of the big three poets of Chayyavad poetic movement, Mahadevi embodies the nationalist New Woman whose linguistic, social and political sympathies are isomorphic with Gandhian nationalism. In fact, however, the idiom of birahani signaled Mahadevi’s break from the antiBraj position adopted by her fellow poet Pant. A definition of the birahani may be useful here; the term refers to the poet’s description of the women’s separation from the beloved as a state of being through which she comes to an understanding of the world via the stages of loneliness, alienation and solitude. In Mahadevi’s prose biraha, normally associated with the literary vernacular of Braj, was linked to a woman’s everyday: loneliness as the condition of life. Poets explored the minutiae of women’s daily experience. This was not an idiosyncratic poetic choice

88

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

but rather a historically informed literary choice, for in early modern Braj poetry the everyday of a woman’s life—fetching water, talking to friends, going to meet her lover, sleeping with her face covered by her hair, her household duties—were transfigured with poetic signification and invested with a range of Vaishnava and Sufi meanings.20 For Mahadevi’s self-fashioning as a modern feminist poet, the Brajbhasha poetry by the fifteenth century saint poet Meera was a crucial resource for articulating her protest against the oppressive condition of women. The Meera lyric had redefined the birahani as one who disavows the identity of a daughter and severs her own identity from her mother, father, brother and kinsmen (maat pita bhrat bandhu/apno na koi/ chaar gayi kul ki laaj/ka karehe koi – Mother, father, brother and kinsmen I have none, having left behind the clan and its honor, what can anyone do to me). It is this idiom that enabled Mahadevi to articulate her own restless discontent and alienation, noted most publicly in her disavowal of her marriage as well as her lifelong search for a religion that would accommodate women, leading to her experiments with the order of Buddhist nuns. Why is it important for our understanding of unarchived histories to recalibrate the ways in which Mahadevi’s poetic explorations of the birahani was contained or uncontained by elite nationalism? The principal marker of Hindi’s statist realism was that the relationship between the writer and the dispossessed characters she drew in her writing mirrored the relationship between elite nationalism and the masses. The characters she evoked seemed, in the lens of statist realism, to look up through the transparent watery medium of the prose at the god-like writer who made the conditions of their lives and their aspirations the subject of her work. The fulcrum of this relationship between writer–subaltern characters– readers lay in a certain ideology about Mahadevi’s language. I quote an extract from Susie Tharu and K. Lalita’s anthology for women’s writing that has been, for several generations of feminists including my own, a very significant attempt at creating an archive for feminine écriture under the aegis of The Feminist Press.21 The dominant nationalist ideology concerning Mahadevi’s language is articulated in the passage below as a choice between English as the language of the Westernized elite and Hindi as the vernacular of the masses in the Hindi heartland: Inspired by nationalist ideals and following Gandhi’s example, she [Mahadevi Verma] gave up speaking English, with the result that she developed a facility of verbal expression in Hindi that was rare among the Hindi-speaking intelligentsia. It was while she was teaching in the villages that she began writing the short personal sketches about people from the lowest and most oppressed sections of society that are now so well known. A combination of biography, memoir, personal essay, and fiction, these sketches introduced a new genre into Hindi literature.22 There are several assumptions about literary language in the above extract. The most obvious assumption is that the Hindi speaking intelligentsia must unlearn

Feminine écriture, trace objects and Braj 89 their privilege by learning to speak in Hindi as fluently as they do in English. Fluency in speech and “a facility in verbal expression” is the marker of the nationalist language ideal in this extract because Mahadevi’s literary language is judged by the criteria that she could speak and be understood by “people from the lowest and most oppressed sections of society.” Literary Hindi acquires the historicality of the prose of the world through an achieved simplicity designed to make literary prose approximate to the speech of the people in India’s villages. Only through this language ideal can the silence of the subaltern become transmuted into voluble speech by a literature that evokes the imagined community of the nation. The elisions in this view of Mahadevi’s Hindi is that it neglects the histories of modern Hindi and the unstable, contested and multiple definitions of Hindi at the time of Mahadevi’s emergence as a writer. Which of the many Hindis that are engaged in Mahadevi’s prose and poetry can we refer to as Mahadevi’s Hindi? This is not a mere quibble, because the category of nationalist women’s writing depends on a conception of the nationalist literature that consciously cultivated the language of the people. For the construction of this category therefore the linguistic landscape of the 1930s–1950s is an essential component of their argument. The binaries of Westernized English-speaking Hindiwallahs versus the poet of the people makes Mahadevi’s literary world unintelligible. The historical fact is that literary work in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s had as one of its central preoccupation a writer’s enactment in her poetry and prose of key ideological positions on the severance of Hindi from Urdu, and the division of both Hindi and Urdu from Braj, as part of the larger historical dilemma of how to deny or provisionally accept selected portions of the early modern languages and literatures. Given that a nationalist poet’s linguistic choices are central to the constitution of women’s literature, I would like to briefly gesture towards the historical debates that were underway in a poet’s choices among the many Hindis in this period. Mahadevi’s earliest literary efforts were in Braj, Awadhi and Sanskrit in imitation of her mother’s composing of devotional couplets and recitation of Ramayana. It was at the Crosswaithe Girls School in Allahabad that Mahadevi first began, under the influence of her friend Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, to write in Khari Boli. It is noteworthy that Khari Boli Hindi was not an organic language entity of the villages of North India in this period, nor was it the mother tongue of Mahadevi and Subhadra. A certain history was being constructed through the historically determinate and purposeful choice of Khari Boli, as well as in the markedly different ways in which this language of nationalist Hindi involved a series of choices concerning early modern language literatures that each woman writer’s Khari Boli would invoke and rework. My second point is to draw attention to the aggressive scope of their imagination. Both writers Mahadevi and Subhadra would divide up the literary world of Hindi letters between them; Subhadra chose to forge a nationalist poetry that reworked the early modern idiom of the virangana or warrior woman; conversely Mahadevi chose to create a modern, nationalist and secular reworking of the early modern idiom of the birahani as a poetic, spiritual

90

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

and political language for female disaffection and alienation from the traditional understanding of the grihastin or married woman and the patriarchal family. The historicality of Mahadevi’s writings depends in some measure on the ways we grasp her overt and much publicized filiation to the Bhakti poet Meerabai.23 After the publication of her volume of poems Rashmi (1932) there was a widespread critical recognition in the Hindi public sphere that Mahadevi was creating a poetics of birahani. In a later prose piece, Mahadevi would essay a rational exposition of the poetics and politics of the birahani by arguing that women who wished to commit themselves to realizing their full imaginative possibilities had to renounce the role of the grihastin with its related duties and obligations in the patriarchal family. This nationalist and modern reworking of the birahani was not nostalgia for tradition or a sign of female piety. It signified the self-insertion of the nationalist woman writer in a matrix of female creativity that extended back to the fifteenth century padavalli by Meera and included the traditions of co-composing in Meera’s poetic footprint by ordinary men and women in North India.24 Hindi criticism acknowledged the modernizing impulse in her deployment of the poetic idiom of birahani by calling her the modern Meera. In the extract below Mahadevi’s eligibility in the category of women’s writing depends on Tharu and Lalita’s delineation of a clear-cut dichotomy between those parts of Mahadevi’s understanding of women’s history that relate to early modern participant devotional forms of Bhakti poetry, versus those dimensions of her work that seem to them to be feminist. The complex ways in which Mahadevi forged a relationship with peoples’ histories associated with Meera’s padas becomes somewhat unintelligible within the terms of this dichotomy. One of the markers of the zone of unintelligibility through archival configuration is that substantive and formal filiation is reduced to mystique. Thus the literary traces of Meera in Mahadevi’s writing appear as the creation of an obfuscatory mystique and a pre-modern hagiography that drains Mahadevi’s work of its critical force and modern relevance. The introduction states: A certain amount of disservice has been done to Mahadevi Verma’s work and her writing by the mystique that has grown around her as a modern day Meerabai. As a result her poetry has been discussed mainly in devotional terms, the critical emphasis placed on its Romantic agony rather than on the cultural renaissance it augured or indeed on the explicit and vigorous feminist concerns it embodied.25 A critique of the making of the category of women’s writing in statements like the above is vital for our understanding of the histories that continue to persist in attenuated form in spite of the dominant taxonomies of South Asian language literatures. There is a repressive archival classification at work here: Mahadevi is classified as a “modern feminist” when she spoke of women’s education and wrote editorials titled Sahitya aur Striyon Ka Sthan (Literature and the Place of Women in Literature); in other parts of her work Mahadevi is classified as a regressive traditionalist when she spoke of her wish to write like Meera. This

Feminine écriture, trace objects and Braj 91 taxonomy renders her opaque and partially intelligible: the problem of women’s education, their place in sahitya, their rights in the family were for Mahadevi continuous with the problem of how to both link herself with the traditions of women’s dissent around Meera’s poetry and how to adapt early modern idioms of dissent to the changed historical circumstances of her own time. The dismissive term mystique also makes light of the histories of struggle by writers to covertly protest in specifically literary ways the death of Braj narrative. Mahadevi’s Meera was, in a fundamental sense, her allegiance to Meera’s Brajbhasha. The mode of existence of this historically informed and modernized life of Braj in her Hindi belongs to the realm of the persistent and yet attenuated unarchived histories. The lives of Braj in the twentieth century, and the spectral traces of Braj in modern vernaculars, continued to grow, evolve, change and adapt as a historical entity. However Braj’s mode of historical existence was as trace objects, fragments that are decayed and unintelligible and do not occupy center stage in the terms of debate about women’s writing. I want to conclude my paper by looking at three trace objects in the second chapter of Atita ke Chalchitra because they provide us with a glimpse of the historical mode of existence of the processes of unarchiving of Braj in the formation and reception history of nationalist Khari Boli Hindi. In Brajbhasha poetry women’s everyday activities are irradiated with significance as the locus of creativity that is divine, pantheist, woman-centered and materialist. The subject/object division between the creativity imagined as issuing from a woman’s mind and heart and way of being is not marked off from the creativity available to the male or female poet in putting her full poetic powers to the test to describe and invest with meaning the nakh shikh varnan (poetic description from head to toe) for virtuoso descriptions of the nayika (heroine). Meera’s influence on other writers derives in part from the way she reworks the grounding presuppositions for female creativity by suggesting that women have to first imagine themselves as creative beings in the most ordinary everyday actions of daily life. This may explain why in the prose sketch Mahadevi does not choose the objects of the slate, pen, paper, textbook and notebook to signify her birth narrative and the birth pangs that attend her first attempts to write/embroider the world around her. Instead she chooses to signify the birth of her creativity in the stitching and embroidering that women performed for the purpose of gifts of an embroidered pillow case, handkerchief, salwar, chunri, doll’s clothes or kapre ki ghuriya (doll made of patchwork), quilts or zari border on saris for the purpose of gifts to other women.26 In choosing to invest the making of the chunri with the first stirrings of her writerly powers, instead of the historically resonant literary image of the schoolgirl in school uniform or bent over the desk with pen in hand, Mahadevi was both reviving and modernizing the Braj poetic convention within which women’s daily work and festival activities were seen not as routinized work but as the working out of women’s essentially creative relation to the world around her. The second trace object in the story unobtrusively introduces Meera’s Brajbhasha into the story as the child widow accepts the gift. Why is the gift of ornament endowed with significance by a writer who herself decided to eschew

92

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

the wearing of jewelry and adopted khadi as a Gandhian swadeshi? Something else is going on in this ordinariness that cannot be dismissed as mere naturalistic detail or a celebration of female narcissism. Mahadevi’s prose pauses over this moment as the deprived child admires herself in her new finery. The divergence— between the interpretive protocols of statist realism versus the historicality Guha perceives in Tagore’s description of the quotidian data of reality as the privileged and cloistered boy child gazes at nature and the world outside his home—can be marked as the conventions for intelligibility. For statist realism the child widow’s wearing of the chunri is meaningful as naturalism (i.e., this is meaningful because this is how it happened in real life in this autobiographical story). Another ordering of meaning obtains in Brajbhasha within which the action of chunri orna (pulling the chunri over the head and body) acquires its significance from an everyday act that contains a host of poetic descriptions invested with the meaning systems of Vaishnava devotion, or the markers of heterosexuality, or in Meera’s case with the radical transformation of Shringar, the staple of Sanskrit kavya and Braj poetry that refers to themes of the human body as well as the world seen through a woman’s point of view. The Meera lyric describes self-adornment as the assertion of female jouissance in a gesture of defiance against patriarchal norms that designate that upper caste Hindu woman should adorn herself only to please her husband and widows have no right to the simplest pleasures. The Meera lyric radicalizes shringar into a celebration of ascetic dress, wearing flowers rather than jewelry, coarse spun cloth rather than silks. The final trace object in Teej comes at the conclusion of the sketch. The story does not end with the nationalist literary exhortation to join the agitation to raise the age of marriage for girls, break from the social practices of maltreatment of widows, ban sati and encourage widow remarriage. All of these nationalist ideals are implied in the ways the personal history rejoins the larger history of the nation. However the affect structure that dominates the story is of separation, selfalienation and the eyes of the child widow that are filled with sorrow. Meera’s literary daughters were profoundly influenced by her reinterpretation of the separation from the beloved. What the Meera lyric did was to invest this state with a female subjectivity that must first experience separation, disaffection from the patriarchal family and then in a parallel movement experience separation from the lover or god as love object in periods of great spiritual torment. Only by confronting this state of longing and separation (biraha)—in one of her padas Meera states: “Friend who shall I tell my katha/story of biraha – biraha katha kaasu kahu sajni”—can the female dissenter arrive at a contemplation of, and a readiness and openness towards, what can be an alternative family, and alternative kinship. Meera teaches her readers/listeners that the suffering of biraha is the ontological condition and prerequisite for realizing the alternative community of Brindavan (pastoral idyll) on earth. By making the birahani central to her poetry and prose Mahadevi was not practicing a poetic schizophrenia in which she was feminist when she talked in the idioms of secular nationalist modernity about the need for schools and colleges for girls, and regressively pre-feminist and religious when she affiliated herself to an early modern poetic practice.

Feminine écriture, trace objects and Braj 93 Vernacular notions of birahani do not function as part of the conversation in postcolonial India about solutions to prevent foeticide. The tele-serial Satyamev Jayate garnered huge accolades and popular television audience when it opened its first episode in May 2012 with an intelligent, well-researched and hard-hitting examination of the declining sex ratio and the message that the practitioners of sex-selective foeticide are not backward people in the villages but are “among us” as members of the educated Indian middle class.27 Letters poured in for the host, Aamir Khan, from television spectators who said they had been educated through the episode and sensitized to the social issue of daughter-killing. However neither the research team of Satyamev Jayate, nor the experts who were brought to speak at the show, nor members of the television audience, displayed any awareness that the Hindi-Urdu they spoke in the show carried an unarchived record of the contestation in the languages and literatures of North India between daughter-devaluing and daughter-cherishing proverbs, folklore and early modern poetry. The historical subjectivity of post-liberalization India is regulatively amnesiac as the idioms for mobilizing the fight against foeticide is conducted without a clearly articulated historical memory of how the generation of Mahadevi and Subhadra had modernized a set of terms for that struggle. The overtly nationalist tele-serial Satyamev Jayate produces statist realism by offering solutions such as inviting television audiences to start a signature campaign to call for the punishment of doctors who conduct ultrasound scans, and congratulating the IAS officer in Haryana who succeeded in raising the sex ratio in his district. The message is that foeticide can be solved by cleansing society of corrupt bureaucracy, judiciary and greedy doctors. The state apparatus had to be cleansed: there is no need to understand the history of the practice, and there is no need for a theory of language. It is by describing and reporting on the social construction of the sexed subject of violence that statist historiography and statist realism produces a form of historical thinking that de-legitimates the non-science of Brajboli and the common sense of proverbs in North Indian languages as unusable, unverifiable, superstitious and apocryphal, and replaces it with the rational common sense of post-liberalization modernity, together with the intelligibility of a crime punishable by law amidst the dazzling clarity of the sex ratio.

Notes 1 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (New York, 2003). 2 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “History as Critique and Critique(s) of History” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol xxvi No. 37. September 14, 1991. 3 Gyanendra Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume. 4 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York, 2007 [1947]). 5 For an excellent book on Braj as court poetry see Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India (Delhi, 2011). 6 See also the discussion of Sleeman’s representation of female infanticide in Awadh in my co-authored book, Female Infanticide in Colonial India; A Feminist Cultural History (New York, 2005). 7 W.H. Sleeman, A Journey Through the Kingdome of Oude, 1858, Vol. 2, 38.

94

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar

8 For example, one of the fragments of historical evidence stored in the diary is that the Sengur Rajputs practiced female infanticide in those branches of their clan that resided in Bundelkhund, Baghelkhund, Rewa and the Sagar territories but had discontinued the practice among those clan members who had migrated to Awadh. Sleeman makes nothing of this “fact” except to record it. 9 Vijaydan Detha, The Dilemma and Other Stories (New Delhi, 1997). 10 Nancy Chowdorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, 1978). 11 I am grateful to Gyan Pandey for his dissatisfaction with my translation of this saying and for composing a superior version. 12 The idiom for the relation between sons and the patriarchal family are imaged as ummeed (hope), as ghar ka chirag (the flame of hope for the house) and kul ka deepak (the source of the clan’s future) and the idiom for disciplining sons through verbal and physical means is also marked off from the regime for disciplining daughters. 13 Ismat Chughtai’s semi-autobiographical novel is set in the 1940s in an elite ashraf Muslim family of North India. The novel was published in English translation as The Crooked Line, trans. Tahir Naqvi (Delhi, 1995 [1947]). For the Rekhti original in Nagri script see Ismat Chugtai, Tehri Lakir (Delhi, 2000). 14 The gold lace on the dupatta or scarf in this passage functions as trace object signifying memory of family pasts when daughters may not have been a burden, and contrasting with the mother’s desire for an English midwife instead of the traditional dai. 15 As a mark of respect for my colleague as well as to follow well known conventions in feminist work, I have decided to omit details of her name. 16 This paper follows the convention of Hindi critics who refer to Mahadevi Verma with respect and affection by her first name. 17 See Mahadevi Verma, Shrinkhala ki kariyan: Bharatiya nari ki samasyaon ka vivecana (New Delhi, 1999). All quotations from chapter two which recounts the story of the Marwari child widow are from Mahadevi Varma, Ateet ke Chalchitra (Allahabad, 2008). 18 Karine Schomer, Mahadevi Verma and the Chayyavad Age of Modern Hindi Poetry (Berkeley, 1983). 19 Sumitranandan Pant, Pallav (Delhi, 2006). In the preface to this anthology of poems, Pant famously constructed an antithesis between Braj bhasha, which he described with affection as possessing mithas (sweetness) but a linguistic and literary nectar that belonged to the sweetness of sleep, in marked distinction from Khari Boli Hindi that made possible the sensation of nationalist awakening (jagriti). 20 See also the discussion of the theme of birahani in Anita Anantharam ed., Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and Nation (Amherst, 2010). 21 In a private conversation at a conference in Hyderabad this year Susie Tharu told me that in retrospect she viewed the anthology as a beginning and welcomed the work of addition and clarification and critique that followed. In particular her own work on Dalit womens’ literature is in one sense a corrective to the elisions in the earlier anthology of women’s writing. My critique of the introduction to Mahadevi Verma is also a homage to the importance of the anthology in its own historical moment. 22 Susie J. Tharu and K. Lalita, Women’s Writing in India: 600 BC to the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 1991). 23 The Mahadevi–Meera literary relation has been analyzed with considerable sympathy and insight in Hindi language scholarship on Mahadevi Verma. See Anamika’s essay “Mahadevi ki Meera: Manchite Purush Ki Khoj” Pratimaan (Jan–June 2013): 126–48. 24 A fuller treatment of the argument about traditions of co-composing in Meera’s name can be found in my co-authored essay, “Meera’s Medieval Lyric Poetry in Postcolonial India,” boundary 2 31: 3 (Fall 2004): 1–46 25 Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, eds., Women Writing in India Vol. 1, 1991. 26 I am thinking here of the trace object of the gold lace that Bari Apa stitches on her

Feminine écriture, trace objects and Braj 95 dupatta in Ismat Chughtai’s novel mentioned earlier, and the black trousers in Manto’s short fiction Kali Shalwar (1940) where another festival gift of traditional black clothes to mark the month of mourning for the festival of Mohurram is conveyed from one woman to another. See also Aamir Mufti’s analysis of this piece of short fiction in “A Greater Story-Writer than God: Genre, Gender and Minority in Late Colonial India,” Subaltern Studies, Vol. XI, eds. Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan (Delhi, 2007), 1–36. 27 The 2001 Census indicated that the sex ratio in India has declined from 1901 when it was 972 women for a thousand males, compared to 933 women for a thousand males in the most recent census. See Rajeswari Sundar Rajan’s chapter “Children of the State? Unwanted Girls in Rural Tamilnadu” in The Scandal of the State (Durham, 2003), 177–211 for a meticulous diagnosis of the failure of state measures.

6

Brown privilege, black labor Uncovering the significance of Creole women’s work Natasha L. McPherson

If, for the disciplinary historian, the archive determines what is “sayable,” then conventional archives have been remarkably silent on the lives of New Orleans’s colored Creole women in the post-Reconstruction era. While there is a solid body of evidence on the women’s antebellum ancestors, the femmes de couleur libres (free women of color), the dearth of postwar archival resources seems to suggest that the women slipped into obscurity after emancipation. In the antebellum era, official documents often identified colored Creole women as “f.c.l.” or “f.w.c.”, indicating their status as free persons of color; however, without the legal designation distinguishing colored Creoles from other women in the postwar era, Creole identity practically disappears from public records. This paper works to un-archive the history of New Orleans Creole women in two ways. First, by using “Creole” as a category of analysis, the lives of Creole women are recovered from archival obscurity and placed at the center of my study. An extensive analysis of Creole women in the federal census records, spanning five decades after Reconstruction, reveals important patterns of continuity and change in women’s labor and wage earning practices. Then, by reading critically through the patterns and practices that emerge from the census, examining both the statistics and the silences—in other words, the sayable and what has yet to be said—a complex narrative of ordinary women’s lives emerges. Perhaps most striking is the significant effort made by Creole women and their families to keep the women from performing domestic service in white homes, which was generally considered black women’s work. By focusing closely on the seemingly trivial, everyday routines of ordinary Creole women, including the drudgery of housework, the demands of skilled and unskilled paid labor, and the women’s efforts to earn income from the privacy of their homes by performing backbreaking physical labor, it becomes apparent that while Creole women may have distinguished themselves publicly from black women by embracing their privileged social status as homemakers, the physical demands of domestic labor performed privately in their homes actually bound them closer to their darker sisters. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, women’s work remained one of the most significant markers of social distinction between colored Creole and non-Creole black women in New Orleans. In the antebellum era the women had

Brown privilege, black labor: Creole women 97 been largely separated by legal status, with most Creole women of color being free and most black women remaining enslaved. The women’s legal status as slave or free decidedly shaped their lifestyle and ability to earn wages. In the years following emancipation, race replaced slavery as the primary marker of freedom, citizenship, and social mobility in the South, thereby eliminating the differences in legal status between Creole and non-Creole blacks. This important shift prompted Creole women to reexamine the social boundaries that distinguished them from non-Creole black women. Creole women’s privileged status depended, in part, on their ability to avoid performing black women’s work; however, after Reconstruction, the disparity between Creole and non-Creole black women’s work notably diminished, making women’s work a hotly contested issue. To understand the ways in which the women resisted and adapted to shifting labor opportunities, it is necessary to use “Creole” as a category of analysis. Although Creole ancestry is not noted in census records or civil documents, I have identified women of Creole ancestry by using similar standards by which colored Creoles themselves measured Creole identity: skin color, surname, occupation, and birthplace.1 I have made every attempt to accurately distinguish colored Creole women from non-Creole black women; however, “Creole” is admittedly not a fixed category. Within the limits of my data collection, I have likely included some non-Creole blacks with French or Spanish surnames and excluded some colored Creoles with American surnames. I can only acknowledge these problems, not fix them. Despite the limitations, using Creole as a category of analysis has made it possible to create a more complex narrative of labor practices among women of color in New Orleans.

Daughters of privilege In the late nineteenth century, the persistent disparity between colored Creole and non-Creole black women’s work suggested that even after Reconstruction Creole women continued to enjoy freedoms and privileges denied to black women. In the 1880 census, fully 72 percent of colored Creole women claimed no occupation; among those who did, approximately half earned money through skilled or professional occupations, including seamstresses, nurses, hairdressers, and teachers. In contrast, 60 percent of black women claimed no occupation; however, among those who did, approximately 80 percent worked as servants, cooks, and laundresses.2 Not only were colored Creole women less likely than black women to work outside the home but they were also much less likely to work in domestic labor, which in the South continued to be predominantly black women’s work. Creole women regularly resisted southern whites’ attempts to group them together with black women; their avoidance of domestic labor was a manifestation of that resistance. Colored Creole and black women increasingly saw domesticity as an important component of female respectability and, with relatively few Creole women working outside the home, they readily claimed their roles as homemakers as an expression of their privileged social status. Although many Creole women who claimed no employment undoubtedly still earned some

98

Natasha L. McPherson

form of income, their ability to stay home gave them opportunities to embrace middle-class notions of respectable womanhood in ways that many black women could not. For women of color, domesticity was more than an expression of respectable womanhood—it was also an assertion of freedom and citizenship. Black and colored women who toiled by day in white southern homes under the watchful eye of the mistress particularly enjoyed having the liberty to run their own households as they saw fit. Black women’s efforts to become homemakers were simultaneously reinforced by many of the public policies established under Reconstruction. Throughout the South, government officials sought to supervise African American family life and regulate their codes of conduct and morality as a means of maintaining social order (and social supremacy). Reconstruction policies attempted to regulate the private lives of African Americans, including social conduct, marriage and cohabitation, inheritance and property rights, and child custody, all under the pretext of maintaining social order and stability.3 As historian Thomas Holt asserts, Reconstruction agents did not simply desire to create a class of African American workers, but they sought “to make them into a working class, that is, a class that would submit to the market because it adhered to the values of a bourgeois society.”4 For women of the middle and aspiring classes, embracing bourgeois values also meant embracing women’s domestic roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers. Prescriptive literature regularly praised black and colored homemakers for their feminine virtue and domestic responsibility. An 1880 article titled “What a Woman Can Do,” published in The New Orleans Weekly Louisianian, a local newspaper for people of color, highlights the growing importance of women’s domestic roles and credits them with being the source of “true happiness [in] the family.” Another article in 1881 titled, “Homekeeping and Housekeeping,” describes the significant responsibilities of homemaking. According to the article, a homemaker was not meant to simply cook and clean all day but should attend to all matters of the “domestic machinery,” including social entertaining, home decorating, raising the children and attending to her husband. Housekeeping was undoubtedly part of homekeeping but whether a woman performed domestic labor only in her own home or in other people’s homes for income, the articles suggest, her main priority should be to effectively manage her own home and family.5 But even as African American prescriptive literature hailed homemakers as the embodiment of “everything pure, sweet, and beautiful,” non-Creole African Americans had fewer opportunities than colored Creole women to stay home and embrace domesticity.6 Colored Creoles, particularly those from families with a long history of freedom, were generally wealthier than non-Creole blacks and were more likely to afford to stay home. Yet, since the establishment of a colored Creole community in New Orleans in the late eighteenth century, colored Creole women had openly embraced homemaking and domesticity as an important feature of Creole womanhood and a visible marker of their free status. In the antebellum era, white suitors of colored concubines greatly valued the homemaking skills of their Creole lovers. As one traveler noted in the 1850s, a free colored

Brown privilege, black labor: Creole women 99 concubine “did all the marketing, and performed all the ordinary duties of housekeeping herself; she took care of his clothes, and in every way was economic and saving in her habits.”7 As homemakers and housekeepers colored Creole women not only asserted their free status but they used their domestic skills as social capital to form and maintain intimate relationships with men who could afford to keep them at home.

The demands of keeping house Although women of color considered homemaking as an essential expression of their womanhood, keeping house required long hours of hard physical labor. Women who kept house spent their days cooking, cleaning, tending to children and interacting with family members and other neighborhood women. Daily household chores kept women on their feet all day trimming candlewicks, gathering pounds of wood and coal, fetching water from the cistern, clearing fireplaces, sweeping and scrubbing floors, emptying chamber pots, cooking meals for the family, and doing the family’s laundry. Despite the technological advancements made in the late nineteenth century, industrialization made little improvement in the drudgery of housework, particularly for women of modest means. Without electricity, indoor plumbing, running water, or any of the modern appliances beginning to appear in major cities in the northeastern United States in the late nineteenth century, southern colored women from all social classes toiled in their households from sunup to sundown. Without the assistance of hired domestic laborers, women who kept house relied on their own efforts as well as the efforts of other women in the house to complete the daily chores and to help balance their roles as both homemakers and housekeepers.8 Cooking was among the most arduous tasks. Preparing meals for a family took a considerable amount of time; women spent hours sifting flour, mixing batter, plucking chickens, cleaning seafood, shelling nuts, peeling vegetables, and performing other routine cooking tasks. With little refrigeration in New Orleans’s hot and humid climate, women went to the market practically every day to buy fresh meats, dairy, and produce. Sunday dinners and social celebrations sometimes featured elaborate dishes with seafood, game, and meats purchased from the neighborhood butcher, but for day-to-day cooking, Creole women saved time and money by cooking economical, one-pot meals that incorporated leftovers, vegetables from the garden or the local grocer, bits of cured and salted meats, and a dietary staple, usually beans or rice. But even a slow simmering pot of red beans had to be watched—kitchen fires frequently burned down homes and claimed lives. Women relied on the help of other family members in the household to complete the kitchen chores. Grandmothers tended to boiling pots while older children fetched water, peeled vegetables and made trips to the corner grocery. The lady of the house supervised the kitchen and may have acted as head chef, but because she relied on the voluntary efforts of other women in the household rather than on hired domestic help, she had to remain somewhat flexible in her demands and expectations of the household.9

100

Natasha L. McPherson

Cooking was certainly laborious but washing clothes was arguably the most miserable household task. Washing clothes was both physically exhausting and time consuming. A woman had to first gather water and heat it in a basin over a fire; with a large paddle, she agitated the clothes as they boiled and then transferred them to an empty basin where she used lye soap to scrub the clothing against a washboard. She then gathered more clean water to rinse the clothes and then wrung them out and hung them to dry. Once the clothes were dry, they had to be pressed by heating an iron over a fire or stove and then carefully moving the iron across the fabric so as not to burn it. Washing clothes for an entire family typically took two or more women an entire day to complete. It is likely that most elite and middle-class women occasionally relied on hired help as well as the unpaid efforts from female kin in the household in order to complete the household chores and still have some leisure time to participate in community activities and events.10 Although women who stayed home generally claimed a higher social position than women who worked outside the home, the repetitive, backbreaking work of cooking, cleaning, and laundry hardly suggests a leisurely life for Creole homemakers. Prescriptive literature about women of color keeping house tended to focus more on maintaining the aesthetics of a beautiful home and playing the role of respectable mother, wife, and gracious host. For white women, who often hired domestic help, decorating and entertaining were arguably more essential to their roles as homemakers. But for women of color, the drudgery of housework consumed the better part of the day. Because housework was considered women’s work—black women’s work, specifically—it is possible that Creole and non-Creole blacks assumed this work to be a “natural” part of the homemakers’ daily routine and subsequently overlooked or trivialized the physical demands of keeping house. No matter how difficult the labor, Creole homemakers vastly preferred to toil all day in their own homes than to work sunup to sundown, performing domestic services, returning home only in the evening to do the work all over again for their own families. Understanding that they were in a significantly better position than domestic servant women, Creole homemakers themselves may have trivialized the difficulty of domestic chores, preferring to emphasize the more genteel aspects of domesticity that escaped domestic servant women. A small minority of colored Creole women eased their burdens by hiring black domestics. In 1880, twenty-three-year-old Creole homemaker Josephine Deslandes [née Azaretto] had a one-year-old daughter and a newborn baby at home. With no other women living in the house to help Josephine care for the children and do the housework, her husband, a colored Creole cigarmaker named Raoul, hired a black live-in servant woman named Felicite Lacour to assist with childcare and the daily chores. On Hospital St. in the Tremé, Creole housewife Mayolla (spelled Magnola) Leblanc Chevalier tended to her home with the help of a live-in domestic servant, an eleven-year-old black girl named Mary. In a Seventh Ward household, Creole widow Philomene Dellande [née Pedlove] employed a black live-in servant woman named Leticia Abrams for more than ten years. After her husband’s death, Philomene lived with her two adult sons who

Brown privilege, black labor: Creole women 101 helped support her financially, but it is likely that Philomene continued to rely on Leticia to provide daily personal assistance and to clean the house. In addition to the small number of Creole women who could afford live-in domestic help, a few others may have occasionally hired washerwomen for the day. Although few colored Creole women afforded domestic help, those who could almost invariably hired non-Creole black women to do the work. By hiring black women to perform domestic labor in their households, Creole women (consciously or inadvertently) reinforced the boundary between themselves and non-Creole black women. However, the majority of Creole women performed their own domestic chores with only the help of other women in the household.11

Homemakers and breadwinners With or without domestic assistance, relatively few colored Creole women could afford the social privilege of staying home without also earning income themselves. Creole women’s work typically consisted of a variety of short-term, proprietary or individually contracted jobs that perpetually shifted and changed depending on the availability of resources and the woman’s familial responsibilities. Certainly, some women had the same employer for many years, but most colored women in New Orleans earned income from multiple sources, working both formally and informally to meet the family’s economic needs. Creole women reported a wide array of occupations including nurse, schoolteacher, hairdresser, music instructor, and business proprietors, but seamstress work was by far the most common. In 1880, the majority of single Creole working women were employed as seamstresses, as were a notable number of married and widowed women.12 In 1880, 65.5 percent of all single Creole women who reported employment claimed to be seamstresses, as did 31.6 percent of married working women, and 28.0 percent of widowed women. Seamstress work was considered respectable in part because it required training and skill, unlike most occupations available to women of color. Colored women also preferred sewing and dressmaking because it could be done from home on a flexible schedule, thus allowing the women to earn money while still caring for their households and their children.13 Sewing became particularly popular among women living in middle-class Creole enclaves where most women did not work outside the home but many still needed additional income. In 1880, colored Creole widow, Phelicite Esteve, lived on New Orleans Street with her three adult children. Phelicite and her two daughters worked as seamstresses while her son earned money as a brick mason. In a neighboring house, Josephine Toussaint and her three daughters worked as seamstresses while her husband worked as a carpenter. On the same block, the two teenage daughters of the Widow Octavie St. Alexandre worked as seamstresses as did her neighbor Pauline Franville, wife of Creole carpenter Ernest Franville.14 Wives and daughters of Creole tradesmen earned money through seamstress work while maintaining the standards of ideal middle-class womanhood that discouraged women from working outside the home.15

102

Natasha L. McPherson

Although seamstresses worked on a more flexible schedule, the work was physically demanding and working conditions were often less than ideal. Unlike middle-class Creole women who worked for private families, some poorer women sewed for retail clothing and tailor shops, working long hours for little money. Before widespread industrialization in New Orleans, Creole women set up their own sewing “factories” at neighborhood homes where women could come and do piecework sewing for money. Mothers and daughters as well as other women from the neighborhood would rotate in and out as their daily schedules permitted, spending time at the sewing machines making ready-to-wear clothing and getting paid by the dozen. In an interview with Creole scholar Arthé Anthony, one young colored Creole woman who sewed from home with her mother and sisters around the turn of the twentieth century later recalled practically being “chained” to the sewing machine, spending many hours making clothes for local retailers.16 Even though seamstresses typically earned a modest income, the autonomy and flexibility of such labor did not exist in most types of black women’s work. For Creole women, home-based sewing was so popular that one of the major local department stores, Haspel’s, capitalized on their labor by formally establishing a sewing factory in the heart of the Seventh Ward.17 Small dressmaking and tailoring shops sometimes employed several Creole girls to sew directly from the shop. Working in groups, the women could ply their craft in the security of one another’s company while talking about neighborhood happenings, sharing information about family and friends, and even exchanging information about social or employment opportunities. Home-based sewing and communal sewing factories allowed Creole women to earn income on a flexible work schedule but they also provided a dynamic space for social interaction and mutual support.18 It was not uncommon for Creole women to conduct their business directly from the household. Creole ladies ran “sweet shops” in their homes, selling candy, beverages, and frozen treats to neighborhood children, often from the front window of the house.19 Creole hairdressers typically serviced clients in their own homes, as did some seamstresses and music teachers. In 1912, twenty-one-yearold Creole hairdresser Rita Barrois worked from her parents’ home on St. Philip Street in the Tremé where she offered hairdressing services as well as “massage and scalp treatments”; Creole matron Victoria Gaspard worked as a “fashionable dressmaker” from the Frenchmen Street home she shared with her husband, elderly mother, and her nephew; Naomi Verrett and her sister Fabiola Franklin both worked from the family home—Naomi gave music lessons and Fabiola worked as a dressmaker.20 All of the women mentioned above lived in homes headed by their fathers or husbands. Although Creole patriarchs could not always sustain the household without the help of other wage earners, most managed to keep their wives and daughters from working outside their homes. Creole women may have desired to work from home and to negotiate their own work schedules, but by the turn of the twentieth century the spectrum of labor opportunities for Creole women began narrowing significantly. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of Creole women in the workforce rose eleven percent and at the same time the diversity of female occupations diminished. In 1880, half

Brown privilege, black labor: Creole women 103 (49.3 percent) of all working Creole women reported a skilled occupation. By 1900, that number declined to 42.1 percent. Single women were affected the most; in 1880, thirty-six percent of single women were employed, of which 65.5 percent worked as seamstresses. By the turn of the century, about half of all single women claimed employment yet only 38.2 percent worked as seamstresses. At the same time, unskilled labor rose from 24.1 percent to 41.2 percent among single women.21 As Creole social and economic status diminished, fewer men could keep their female kin at home without supplementary income. Women who kept house often earned money from home to help support the household. Census records provide a rather static and incomplete picture of women’s work. The records are particularly silent on wage-earning strategies for women who did not work outside the home for wages. Interviews with Creole residents of the Tremé and Seventh Ward conducted in the 1970s by the St. Mark’s Ethnic Heritage Project shed some light on the resourceful ways Creole women earned income from home in the early decades of the twentieth century. According to the residents, one of the most common ways women earned money was by taking in laundry. Women who had the space and equipment at home to wash, dry, and iron large amounts of laundry often did so to supplement income. One Creole resident, Gerald Emelle, recalled his mother and grandmother doing other people’s laundry from the family home. Washing clothes for wages did not bring in much money but women preferred the freedom and security of working in their own homes on their own schedules, away from the watchful eye of white employers. Gerald Emelle’s grandmother ironed clothes for the same white man for more than twenty years but she never let him in her house. According to Emelle, “she always met him at the door. She always taught us never to let white people in your house.”22 By keeping out white employers, colored Creole women could maintain the integrity and privacy of the family home, while also diminishing the perceived negative associations of performing domestic service for white families, like black women.23

Keeping their distance Maintaining good standing in the Creole community depended, in part, on preserving those characteristics that distinguished colored Creoles from nonCreole blacks. Men and women had to be constantly vigilant of one’s proximity to blackness, both physically and socially. Children of Strangers, Lyle Saxon’s novel about a rural Creole community in the early twentieth century, highlights the link between blackness and social status. In the beginning of the novel, Saxon describes his near-white Creole protagonist, Famie, as looking like a “Spanish girl,” with only the faintest trace of African blood, claiming that, “nobody in the world—unless he looked mighty close—could tell that she was a mulatto.” Famie enjoyed the social and economic benefits of her privileged Creole status even after she had an illegitimate child with a white man. Eventually, Famie sold her property—including land that had been in her family for generations—and began working as a poor laundress while living in common-law union with a black man. Famie’s social transgressions ultimately caused her to be cast out of the Creole

104

Natasha L. McPherson

community. As her social status declined, Saxon began to describe Famie’s physical appearance like that of a black woman: “Day by day she grew more like the negroes among whom she worked: exposure darkened her skin, and nowadays she tied her head up in a tignon as negro women do.” In her degraded state, a white couple, who had once mistaken Famie for a white girl when she was a child, took her for a negress. As Famie’s life more closely resembled that of a black woman, her blackness began to manifest in her physical appearance. Few things embodied the black female experience like domestic service and colored Creole women tried to avoid it at all costs.24 Creole mothers also actively sought to protect their daughters’ honor, virtue, and social standing by keeping them at home whenever possible. Instead of sending their daughters to work in white homes, some Creole mothers forfeited their position as homemaker and went to work in place of their daughters. Mary Celile Joseph spent her life as a wife, mother, and homemaker until her husband died in the 1870s. After Louis Joseph’s passing, fifty-five-year-old Mary Celile took a job as a cook while her twenty-year-old daughter Josephine kept house. Josephine appeared to be healthy enough to go to work but she stayed home while her elderly mother worked as a domestic laborer. Perhaps after the death of her husband, Mary sought to secure her daughter’s future by improving her marriage prospects; by staying home, Josephine could “keep house” and perform the role of a respectable, middle-class woman. Mary’s efforts did not go in vain: sometime around 1880, Josephine married Robert Collins and the couple went on to have eleven children together.25 Most mothers who headed their own households did not have the luxury of keeping their daughters out of the workforce. Without a husband or father present to provide economic support, female heads of household relied on adult children, relatives, and boarders in the household to earn income. Until the death of her husband Eugene, Stella Demaziliere [née Alliod] had stayed home and taken care of her children. Only one year after Eugene Demazilliere passed away, every member of the Demazilliere household had a job, including Stella. For the first time since she was married, Stella Demazilliere worked outside the home, working as a seamstress for a tailor’s shop. Stella’s three daughters worked as dressmakers and laundresses and her son worked in a warehouse. In Eugene’s absence, the family took the necessary steps to sustain itself through hardship, but it is likely Stella would have kept her daughters at home until they found husbands if it had been economically feasible.26 For many poor and destitute Creole women, domestic service was their only option to earn income. In 1880, approximately 64 percent of Creole wives and widows who reported an occupation were domestic laborers, suggesting that even though domestic employment for women was frowned upon, the majority of married and widowed women who worked outside the home had few other viable options. The death of a husband often forced Creole widows, most of who had never formally worked outside the home, to take domestic service jobs cooking and cleaning for other women’s families. When 35-year-old P. Deterville became widowed, she could no longer care for herself or her family without additional

Brown privilege, black labor: Creole women 105 support. She and her four young children became live-in domestic servants for wealthy white banker, J.B. Montreuil and his two adult sons. It is unclear if the relationship between Widow Deterville and the Montreuils remained strictly professional; however, with limited labor opportunities available to her and no husband, she was vulnerable to the impulses and demands of her employer.27 The real dangers of domestic work as well as the potential social consequences of performing black women’s labor prompted colored Creole women to stay home whenever possible and develop resourceful ways of earning money. The small but significant number of female-headed households with no visible means of support indicates that the actual breadth and scope of women’s work is obscured in the records. Although the majority of colored Creole women between 1880 and 1930 reported staying home, many of those women earned some form of income even though they did not report it. Households with several women could perform multiple types of labor from home at the same time: washing and ironing clothes, selling eggs from the chicken coops and vegetables from the garden, performing seamstress work, or teaching piano lessons from the front room. Wives who cooked lunch for their husbands sometimes made enough food to sell to other hungry workers at the job site. Even adolescent girls contributed to the household economy. Girls earned money sweeping the banquettes [sidewalks] and carrying groceries home for neighbors. Creole women were rather adept at earning money while remaining in the safety and security of their own homes. Working from home and negotiating one’s own working conditions was central to Creole notions of womanhood; it not only allowed women to provide for their families but they could still lay claim to the higher social status that accompanied the role of homemaker.28

From the home to the factory Creole women’s work underwent subtle yet important changes in the early twentieth century. Advances in technology and mechanization forced some types of women’s work into factories. Some women who previously contributed to the household economy by working from home were obliged to earn income outside the home, often performing similar types of labor in factories. At-home seamstresses began working in clothing factories and laundresses took jobs in commercial laundries. In 1920, Louise Alexander worked as a laundress from her home, but by 1930 Louise worked in a commercial laundry as a “mangler,” or laundry wringer. In 1920, Creole widow Elizabeth Montreuil and her sister Ophelia Nicholas worked as laundresses for private families. Ten years later, Elizabeth’s daughter Viola also worked as a laundress but she was employed by a commercial laundry. Elizabeth’s son Andrew also worked in the laundry business as a clothing presser.29 Although home production continued to be a popular way for Creole women to earn income, noticeably fewer married women could afford to support their families by working inside the home.30 The declining number of Creole dressmakers, tailors, and seamstresses who worked from home indicates a major shift in Creole women’s employment.

106

Natasha L. McPherson

Between 1900 and 1930, the percentage of women employed in seamstress work declined. At the same time, the performance of seamstress work also underwent major change. In 1930, 23.9 percent of Creole workingwomen were employed as seamstresses, down from 33 percent in 1900.31 And for the first time, the majority of seamstresses worked in clothing factories rather than sewing from their own homes. Part of what had made seamstress work attractive to women was the flexibility of the work schedule and the ability to earn money from home while still tending to the family. By moving into the factories, women not only lost personal autonomy but they also lost some of the skills required for handmade sewing— skills that had been passed down from Creole mothers and grandmothers for generations. Industrial sewing reduced seamstress work from a skilled craft to routine factory labor. Women in factories sewed clothing parts rather than whole tailored outfits. In 1930, Estelle Roques reported herself as a seamstress in a pants factory. It is unlikely that Estelle made the whole pair of pants; she probably sewed only the inseam, or inserted the zipper. Some Creole women who worked in clothing factories listed more specific jobs, including making collars, trimming fabric, and cutting thread.32 Creole women’s persistent desire to work as seamstresses, despite the declining skill involved, may have been more about maintaining tradition. Not only did factory seamstresses avoid domestic service but they continued to work in the same profession as their mothers and grandmothers did before them. The rigors of factory labor likely contributed to the decline among single and widowed seamstresses. Factory women had to abide by their employers’ schedules, rules, and regulations and were often made to work under harsh physical conditions. The women were also vulnerable to the inappropriate demands of employers or supervisors who sometimes took advantage of their female employees. The sharp decline of widowed seamstresses may be due to the inability of elderly widows to maintain the fast pace of factory work. Many older women continued to perform seamstress work from home. In 1930, elderly Creole widow Marceline Faure owned her own home on Pauger Street where she worked as a dressmaker. Fifty-seven-year-old Creole widow Marcelin Patin worked as a seamstress from her home on Allen Street where she lived with her divorced daughter, Leontine Boidore (also spelled Boisdore). The thirty-five-year-old Leontine worked as a factory seamstress at the nearby Haspel Company on St. Bernard Avenue in the Seventh Ward. It is possible that elderly women could not readily meet the demands of the factory, but the tendency of older women to continue sewing from home while younger women moved into the factories indicates something further. The growing demand for factory seamstresses diminished young Creole women’s need to retain the sewing skills of their mothers and grandmothers and highlights an important shift away from skilled female labor.33

Holding on to the past, shaping the future Perhaps even more significant than the increase of unskilled factory labor among Creole seamstresses is the women’s persistent desire to cling to seamstress work, even when the work became more physically demanding and less respectable.

Brown privilege, black labor: Creole women 107 Factory seamstresses at Haspel Company were little more than wage laborers, but they likely preferred the factory to domestic service. To be sure, factory labor was certainly not free from danger or exploitation. Women workers remained vulnerable to the demands of their employers. In a telling moment, Olga Jackson, a former employee at Haspel’s, recalled her employer’s affinity for the girls he hired in his factory: “Joe Haspel—we used to call him Papa Joe—he’d look over his [sewing factory] plant at all the women working and he’d say, ‘Look at that flower garden’. That was his cliché [sic]. He meant all of the light-skinned Creoles.”34 While Joe Haspel’s comment may have been little more than an admission of admiration for his workers, other employers of Creole factory girls likely took advantage of their power and authority. By becoming more industrialized and less skilled, seamstress work no longer garnered the same degree of respectability it had in the nineteenth century; however, by continuing to claim the occupation of seamstress, Creole women symbolically maintained the traditions of their foremothers for whom seamstress work was considered privileged and respectable. Although occupational opportunities for colored Creole women narrowed during the early twentieth century, a close analysis of the federal census reveals that Creole women actively worked to maintain their social distance from black women and black labor. Arguably, their efforts were successful because the received narrative of the Creoles and their free colored ancestors continue to reinforce the women’s privileged status by highlighting their roles as homemakers, seamstresses, and entrepreneurs. While those aspects of Creole women’s work are undoubtedly significant and worthy of further exploration, focusing exclusively on the women’s privileged status ultimately trivializes the backbreaking physical labor the women performed in their homes every day. By placing greater emphasis on the seemingly trifling matters of keeping house and the significant physical demands of the women’s everyday routines, it becomes clear that the presumption of Creole women’s privileged status did not come from their ability to simply avoid black women’s work, but rather was greatly influenced by the women’s ability to conceal their performance of black women’s work from the public eye by keeping it in the privacy of their homes.

Notes 1 All census figures included in this article come from the U.S. Federal census. The present author sampled census records for colored Creole and non-Creole black households in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward in 1880, 1900, and 1930. 2 Although fewer black women worked in skilled or professional occupations than Creole women, women of color in the Seventh Ward were more likely to work in skilled or professional occupations than other urban black women in the South. Jacqueline Jones asserts that between 1880 and 1915, fewer than four percent of urban black women in the South worked in skilled or professional occupations. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (New York, 1985), 143. 3 For more on the impact of Reconstruction-era policies on African American gender roles and family life, see Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana-Champaign, 1997), 234–68;

108

4 5 6 7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18

Natasha L. McPherson

Thomas C. Holt, “‘An Empire over the Mind’: Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British West Indies and the American South,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1982); Thavolia Glymph, “Freedpeople and Ex-Masters: Shaping a New Order in the Postbellum South, 1865–1868,” in Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy, eds. Thavolia Glymph and John J. Kushma (College Station, TX, 1985); Mary J. Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation, 4th ed. (New York, 2010), 1–34. Thomas C. Holt, “‘An Empire over the Mind’: Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British West Indies and the American South,” 287–8. “What a Woman Can Do,” New Orleans Weekly Louisianian, February 14, 1880, sec. pg. 2, col. 4; “Homekeeping and Housekeeping,” New Orleans Weekly Louisianian, July 23, 1881, sec. pg. 1, col. 3, 5. “A Truly Happy Home,” New Orleans Weekly Louisianian, November 26, 1881, sec. pg. 2, col. 3. Rev. Philo Tower, Slavery Unmasked: being a truthful narrative of a three years’ residence and journeying in eleven southern states: to which is added the invasion of Kansas, including the last chapter of her wrongs (Rochester, 1856), 320–1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880; Louise McKinney, New Orleans: A Cultural History (New York, 2006), 39–40; Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982), 111; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982) 50–66, 85–124. For more on Creole women and cooking, see interviews with Anna Johnson, Irma Williams, and Leah Chase in St. Mark’s Ethnic Heritage Project, New Orleans, Louisiana, Tremé and Seventh Ward, 1978, Collection 327, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University. Arthé A. Anthony, “The Negro Creole Community in New Orleans, 1880–1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1978), 120–30; Lyla H. Owen and Owen Murphy, Creoles of New Orleans (New Orleans, 1987), 27–30. Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework, 104–9; Alice KesslerHarris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States, 111–13; Mary L. Widmer, New Orleans 1900 to 1920 (Pelican Publishing, 2007), 44–5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880. In 1880, 33.3 percent of married Creole working women reported employment as seamstresses and 30.4 of widowed Creole working women reported employment as seamstresses. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880; Arthé A. Anthony, “The Negro Creole Community in New Orleans, 1880–1920,” 71–87; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework, 105–44. Although Josephine Toussaint is listed as white in the 1880 census, she appears colored in birth records and city directories. [Marie Josephine] Octavie St. Alexandre claimed to be married in 1880, but her husband, Jules DuGardin St. Alexandre died in 1878. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880; Orleans Parish Death Index, 1877–1895. Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 47–8; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860, 43–54; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework, 134–44. Arthe A. Anthony, “The Negro Creole Community in New Orleans, 1880–1920,” 73–6. Haspel’s department store was first established in 1909 by Joseph Haspel Jr. By the 1920s, Haspel established a sewing factory at Broad St. and St. Bernard Ave. Although Susan Strasser does not specifically address the seamstress work of African American women, she highlights the collaboration and camaraderie among

Brown privilege, black labor: Creole women 109

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34

seamstresses. Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework, 125–44. “Black Tour of Tremé,” audiocassette transcribed by the present author, “St. Mark’s Ethnic Heritage Project, Oral History of the Tremé and Seventh Ward.” Wood’s Directory: Being a Colored Business, Professional, and Trade Directory of New Orleans Louisiana (New Orleans, 1912), 30, 35, 44. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900. Interview with Gerald Emelle, audiocassette transcribed by the present author, “St. Mark’s Ethnic Heritage Project, Oral History of the Treme and Seventh Ward.” African American women and working-class women of all colors regularly performed various types of informal, wage-earning labor from home. See Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 112–14; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860, 46–52; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework, 110–12; Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870– 1918 (New York, 1993), 44–7. Lyle Saxon, Children of Strangers, (Gretna LA, 1937), 6, 246. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880. In 1910, Robert and Josephine Collins claimed to have been married for thirty-two years, which would have been 1878—two years before the 1880 census. Orleans Parish Death Index, 1877–1895; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States, 1880. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework, 18, 47; Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of WageEarning Women in the United States, 119–20, 228–9. Alice Kessler-Harris details the impact of technology and mechanization on domestic work and household production. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 108–13. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 108–37. Although the percentage of Creole seamstresses declined among women of all marital statuses, the following is a breakdown of the decline: Between 1900 and 1930, the percentage of married workingwomen employed as seamstresses declined from 27.8 percent to 22.2; among single women, the percentage declined from 38.2 percent to 27.8 percent; and among widowed women, from 29.6 percent to 20 percent. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Ibid. Interview with Olga Jackson, transcribed from audiocassette by the present author, “St. Mark’s Ethnic Heritage Project, Oral History of the Tremé and Seventh Ward.”

7

Unfriendly thresholds On queerness, capitalism and misanthropy in nineteenthcentury America Colin R. Johnson

Frank Norris is perhaps best known as the author of The Octopus, a 1901 novel that examines the rise of the railroads and the concomitant subordination of agricultural laborers in California during the late nineteenth century. Before he took on the various social and economic perversities that attended the rise of corporate capitalism in the American West, however, Norris might be said to have taken on the corporal perversities that attended the rise of capitalism generally during a slightly earlier period in US history. Specifically, in McTeague, his 1899 “Story of Francisco,” Norris tells the tale of a woman’s gradual descent into an embodied form of fiscal acquisitiveness so extreme that she ultimately ends up rejecting her husband’s affections in favor of making love to her savings instead. “At times,” Norris writes of Trina McTeague, the woman in question, when she knew [her husband] was far from home, she would lock her door, open her trunk and pile all of her little hoard on her table . . . Trina would play with this money by the hour, piling it, and repiling it, or gathering it all into one heap, and drawing back to the farthest corner of the room to note the effect, her head on one side. She polished the gold pieces with a mixture of soap and ashes until they shone, wiping them carefully with her apron. Or, again, she would draw the heap lovingly toward her and bury her face in it, delighted at the smell of it and the feel of the smooth, cool metal on her cheeks. She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth, and jingled them there. She loved her money with an intensity that she could hardly express. She would plunge her small fingers into the pile with little murmurs of affection, her long, narrow eyes half closed and shining, her breath coming in long sighs. “Ah, the dear money, the dear money,” she would whisper. “I love you so! All mine, every penny of it. No one shall ever, ever get you. How I’ve worked for you! How I’ve slaved for you! And I’m going to get more; I’m going to get more, more, more; a little every day.”1 In fact, Trina has not worked or slaved to earn all of her money. The bulk of it, five thousand dollars’ worth, she actually wins in the lottery very early on in the novel. And it is this money—money she initially invests—that Trina slowly and painfully

Unfriendly thresholds 111 withdraws from her account in order to replace the shiny gold coins she caresses so lovingly in the passage above after her husband betrays her by stealing this first “little hoard” and absconding with it into the night. Not that his absence particularly upsets Trina, of course; with her husband finally out of the way, and her money purse newly engorged, she is free to pursue her erotic investments by literally bedding down with her assets. “One evening,” writes Norris, “she had even spread all the gold pieces between the sheets, and had then gone to bed, stripping herself, and had slept all night upon the money, taking a strange and ecstatic pleasure in the touch of the smooth flat pieces the length of her entire body.”2 McTeague was not especially well received when it was published in 1899 for reasons that are probably relatively obvious. With the notable exception of William Dean Howells, who publicly professed his admiration for the book, most critics panned Norris’ story for what they saw as its hyperbolic brutishness and morbid fascination with sex perversion, of which there is arguably a great deal in the book.3 Still, if Norris’ goal in writing his novel was to try and capture something important about the spirit of his age, then he certainly hit his mark. For as it turns out, Trina McTeague was more than a literary contrivance; she was instead a literary emblem for an entire class of curious and troubling individuals who began to emerge from the shadows of American society during the second half of the nineteenth century. Trina McTeague is hermit. More specifically, she is a reclusive miser whose growing obsession with money gradually displaces her need for anything else including food, comfort, respectability, or even casual contact with other human beings. Although she begins the novel as an outgoing, orderly and fairly attractive young woman, by its conclusion she becomes disheveled, physically maimed and virtually mute—an all but apparitional scrub-woman who shuttles silently back and forth between the Pacific Street kindergarten she cleans in order to make money and the small, sparsely-appointed room she calls home. Trina “saw no one,” Norris tells us. “Nobody knew her. She went about her work from dawn to dark, and often entire days passed when she did not hear the sound of her own voice. She was alone, a solitary, abandoned woman, lost in the eddies of the great city’s tide—the tide that always ebbs.”4 And yet Trina McTeague was never really alone, at least not historically speaking. During the second half of the nineteenth century, reclusive misers emerged as stock figures within American popular culture. While some, like Trina McTeague, were the inventions of writers and artists struggling to capture the spirit of their era—a moment of historically unprecedented social, technological and economic change—many others were living, breathing individuals whose pronounced misanthropy and compulsive thrift marked them as being highly peculiar, to say the very least. If the popular press of the day offers any indication at all, latenineteenth-century Americans became fascinated with these individuals in part because their self-imposed isolation necessarily entailed an active renunciation of any interest in communion with other people, including people of the opposite sex. This was a telling idiosyncrasy, one that was often commented upon at some

112

Colin R. Johnson

length in local and national newspapers. At the same time, Americans also seem to have been fascinated with reclusive misers because the very same behaviors that made them so pathetic and unenviable also made them rich. Or, at the very least, such behaviors came to be viewed as suggestive evidence that misanthropic individuals might be rich, albeit secretly, and in ways that justified the Americans’ interest and fueled their speculation. The result of this heightened interest in reclusive misers was a surprisingly public discussion about the intimate lives of emphatically private individuals. This essay considers the figure of the reclusive miser from two perspectives: first, as a queerly misanthropic individual whose antipathy toward others literally set her or him apart from the rest of the American public in a way that raised predictable questions about the relation between sociability and sexual desire; second, as an unexpectedly successful economic actor whose obsessive relation to money often had the effect of thrusting her or him squarely into the American public’s view. I also consider the reclusive miser’s pronounced association with death, a consequence of the fact that such individuals typically entered public consciousness by way of their obituaries. As a result, the lives of reclusive misers were almost always spoken about in retrospect as narratives of accumulation, albeit a sad, strange form of accumulation that seemed to pervert the naturalistic logic of late-nineteenth-century capitalism to decidedly unnatural ends. As none other than Adam Smith explained in his 1776 magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, there are but three reasonable uses to which accumulated wealth or “stock” can be put under the logic of capitalism: it can be used to procure what he referred to as “present enjoyment” through consumption; it can be used to procure future profit through “fixed” investment in one’s own productive capacity; or it can be used to procure future profit by being put into circulation. A person who would proceed in any other manner must necessarily be dissipated, Smith insisted, or would become so in relatively short order. Indeed, he wrote, “A man must be perfectly crazy, who, where there is tolerable security, does not employ all the stock which he commands, whether it be his own or borrowed of other people, in some one or other of those three ways.”5 Strictly speaking, reclusive misers failed at least two of Smith’s three tests of fiscal sanity. They did not consume, and they rarely made fixed investments in their own productive capacity for the simple reason that most of them rarely left their houses. Some reclusive misers did circulate their money by making capital investments, and many of these profited handsomely as a result. But even when reclusive misers played by the “rules” of modern capitalism in this way, their lives still somehow failed to add up properly, probably because they appeared to live without any designs on the future. Rather, reclusive misers seemed to exist in a state of perpetual presentness: even as their fortunes quietly grew, their lives effectively wore out. Clothing became tattered and threadbare. Houses became filth-laden or fell into disrepair. Weeks and months stretched into years. And in the end, all that was usually left was a pile of money and a suggestive newspaper account about a “queer” individual who had lurked by choice at the margins of the

Unfriendly thresholds 113 modern social order—a kind of hole in the archive where the record of a life should be. Traditionally, figures like the reclusive miser have quite often been dealt with under the sign of eccentricity or insanity. Yet, as Gyan Pandey rightly notes in the introductory chapter to this volume, the act of designating any historical figure “trifling” or “mad” is almost always an act of displacement in which historical complexity is effectively explained away through the application of designations that stand in for narrative coherence and interpretive certainty in cases where such things are difficult or impossible to come by. In other words, although evidence of “madness” may be easy to find in the archive, such evidence is, in most cases, also evidence of something that has been unarchived—some more complex reality whose meaning has been covered over with a term that, quite frankly, says very little except, perhaps, that power is in operation here. In this essay, I want to suggest that conceding to such categorical vagueness where the figure of the reclusive miser has the potential to cause us to miss certain connections and, in doing so, to distort our understanding of the past. Specifically, I argue that doing so could easily cause us to overlook what are, at least from my perspective, the obvious resonances that exist between these decidedly antisocial figures and another group of individuals whose “perversity” has, at various moments in a variety of ways, been characterized in terms of compulsive obsession, dissipation, avarice and a pronounced aversion to members of the opposite sex—namely, modern homosexuals. In order to reconstitute this particular unarchived history, then, we need to rebuild a connection that was arguably severed once “homosexuality” became a discrete configuration of the self, one defined exclusively in terms of sexual object choice. Before we do that, however, it may behoove us to reacquaint ourselves with some basic facts regarding the history of reclusiveness as such.

The recluse in history Although I will be focusing my attention in this essay on developments during the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States, it is worth noting from the outset that, in a general sense, what I am referring to as reclusiveness has a much, much longer history. Indeed, the figure of the recluse or hermit arguably dates back to the very beginning of recorded human history. Etymologically, the term hermit has its roots in the word ĕrēmīta, a latinized form of the Greek ἐρημίτης (erēmitēs) meaning “of the desert,” a reference (supposedly) to the Desert Theology of The Old Testament and its various historical adherents, most notably Paul of Thebes. It would therefore be difficult to claim that the act of intentionally isolating oneself from other people was anything new in nineteenth century America. What was new, however, was the manner in which such behavior was read and understood, particularly when it could not be explained as an act of religious devotion. During the early to mid-nineteenth century, Americans seem to have been inclined to explain the impulse to withdraw from society primarily in terms of

114

Colin R. Johnson

spoiled affection. Thus, reports about people who turned their backs on society and locked themselves away from regular contact with their fellow countrymen tended to take the shape of decidedly sentimental narratives about wounded feelings, romantic abandonment, and youthful love affairs cut short by the tragic and premature death of one of those involved. So, for example, in 1860 the Chicago Tribune offered its readers a brief notice about the recent death of one Daniel West of McMinnville, Tennessee, who had “lived for a number of years in the hollow of an American popular tree . . . In the center of the hollow,” the newspaper went on to explain, “he would build his fire in winter for cooking his plain meals.” The hollow reportedly also served as West’s bedroom where he was apparently known to rest in “a sitting position, reclining against the wall of the house.”6 If Daniel West’s story is captivating because it makes him sound like nothing so much as a nineteenth-century version of Winnie the Pooh, it is representative of its historical moment because of the circumstances that supposedly prompted West to adopt this peculiar way of life. Specifically, West had reportedly married a woman who believed she was a widow at the time she and West first became acquainted. After a number of years of marriage, however, “the former husband returned and claimed his wife; he [West] told her to make her choice; if she loved him most to remain with him, and she would never repent it; if, however, she loved and preferred to go with her first husband, to do so, and he would never blame her.”7 Predictably enough, Mrs. West (nee whatever) apparently opted for non-bachelor number one, and left. Interestingly, and characteristically as it turns out, this early- to mid-nineteenthcentury American recluse did not end up going money-mad as a result of his romantic catastrophe. In fact, West’s story was depicted primarily as one of gradual abandonment of worldly concerns. Though he had reportedly been in “comfortable circumstances” during his youth, owning a “quantity of stock” that had been “adding to his substance every year,” West was said to have ignored his financial interests after his jilting, allowing his “property run to ruin.” Indeed, as the Tribune’s account was at pains to point out, West’s decision to live out what the newspaper characterized as the “strange and secluded life of a hermit” was essentially a romantic gesture of lovelorn asceticism. “When questioned as to why he preferred such a mode of life,” the newspaper noted, “he only answered that, ‘the world had not used him well.’ And yet he did not appear to be soured in his disposition or embittered in his disposition toward it.”8 It is perhaps in this respect more than any other—his apparent lack of bitterness toward the world—that Daniel West differed from many of the reclusive Americans who would come after him during the second half of the nineteenth century. As the century wore on, and as “lifestyle” choices such as arboreal living and cave dwelling (another popular choice among reclusive men especially) began to seem less charming and more bizarre, many Americans appear to have found it increasingly difficult to romanticize reclusiveness in their fellow countrymen, or even to accept it as a form of benign variation in human behavior. Instead, averseness to sociality began to be regarded as a kind of mania, an illness or disorder with a symptomology of its own.

Unfriendly thresholds 115

The “queer” recluse in the Gilded Age There were two key features to the mania characteristic of late-nineteenth-century recluses: an unusual relation to money, and a pronounced aversion to the opposite sex. Whereas recluses during the first half of the nineteenth century tended to be characterized as romantically-devastated melancholics, late-nineteenth-century recluses were more often described as bitter and spiteful victims, “man haters” or “woman haters” who transformed their misfortunes in love into a generalized and very pronounced dislike for the opposite sex. For example, Elisha Morrison was reportedly quite prosperous at the time he became engaged to wed Kate Kirby, having amassed a small fortune in his youth founding grain exchanges in states along the east coast. When Kirby suddenly broke off her engagement to Morrison and instead married one of his friends just a week later, however, Morrison retaliated by ordering his lawyer to purchase the ex-fiancé’s ancestral farm near Long Branch, New Jersey. He then abandoned New York City where he had been living and “erected a dwelling or, more concretely a hut, near the centre [sic] of the farm, and settled down to live in seclusion. From that day to this,” the New York Times reported in late October of 1886, “no other human being has ever been known to set foot across his threshold.” 9 The newspaper also observed that Morrison’s “chief dislike is a woman, and he will never, if he can help it, look at one.”10 Just three years later, a very similar observation was made about Leonard Coe, otherwise known as the “Bowery Hermit,” a veritable fixture for over a decade in the New England Hotel, one of many cheap lodging houses that dotted the Bowery during this period. “If Coe had a hobby . . . it was his antipathy to the fair sex,” reported the New York Times in July of 1889, just after it was discovered that Coe, whose real name was John A. Baer, had actually been in possession of nearly $25,0000 in cash at the time of his death. “To be sure, he possessed no charms,” the newspaper continued, “but even he had been neat and natty susceptible women would have found no encouragement. His heart was of stone. There are recollections of many bitter and eloquent speeches by Coe showing him to have been a profound woman hater. What produced this feeling is a matter of conjecture, as even his relatives declare he was always an enigma to them. Never did Coe, so far as known here, utter a kind word about women, and little children made no impression on him.”11 Of course, male hermits had no monopoly on romantic misfortune or antipathy toward members of the opposite sex. For instance, in 1882, a woman named Rhoda Mitchell left Montgomery, Ohio, and moved west to the neighboring state of Indiana after being abandoned at the alter on her wedding day by a man who then ran off with another woman. Although she was not described explicitly as a miser, Mitchell apparently was a woman of at least modest means. We can surmise this in part because she was able to purchase a moderately-sized farmstead seven miles east of the town of North Vernon in rural Jennings County, immediately upon her arrival in the Hoosier state. Mitchell was definitely perceived as unfriendly, though, and once settled, she quickly earned a reputation for being “a singular character.”

116

Colin R. Johnson

Mitchell’s singularity was quite literal insofar as she lived on her farm entirely alone. It was also figurative in the sense that she reportedly demonstrated a conspicuous disinclination toward any form of socializing with the people around her. For instance, at one point shortly after her arrival in North Vernon, a group of local women were said to have attempted a neighborly call on Mitchell at her home, but it was reported that they were “so coolly received that the visit was never repeated.” 12 If Mitchell disliked women, she apparently loathed men and “never allowed a man to enter her house.” As it turned out, Mitchell had good reason to weary of men: in January of 1891 she was found murdered in her barn. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mitchell’s well-known “hatred of men” was cited explicitly as the likely cause of her death. “It is believed,” a correspondent for the Chicago Herald wrote, “that she went to the barn on the evening of the 10th and found a tramp there. Being entirely fearless, she probably attacked him and he killed her in the struggle.” 13 In a gesture that carried the whiff of warning to others, Mitchell’s misanthropy was also pointed to as the reason her lifeless corpse remained undiscovered for several days. One suspects a certain degree of hyperbole at work in reports such as these, not least of all because the “news stories” that make Morrison, Coe, Mitchell and hundreds of others like them available to us as historical subjects were essentially character sketches suffused with a distinctly yellow aura. Nevertheless, and despite the obvious editorializing, embellishment and sensationalist histrionics, it seems highly unlikely that these stories were wholesale fabrications. Undoubtedly there were a lot of lonely, bitter people in late-nineteenth-century America, just as there are lot of lonely, bitter people in America now. And just as we are quite often inclined to pause and speculate about how certain people we encounter got that way, late-nineteenth-century Americans seem to have been profoundly curious about the origins of antisocial sentiment as well. As I have already suggested, the various explanations that were offered changed gradually over time such that, by the second half of the nineteenth century, recluses tended not to be represented as sympathetic lonely hearts. Instead, they became career misogynists and shrews. Increasingly, they were also characterized as secretive, deceptive, inclined toward solitary intellectual pursuits such as reading and, perhaps most importantly for my purposes here, obsessively parsimonious. This shift in Americans’ thinking about hermits and recluses did not just happen on its own. Rather, it reflected real changes in the way that reclusive individuals conducted their lives. At the same time, it seems relatively obvious from the available evidence that Americans’ shifting perception of recluses also drove many recluses to become more secretive and deceptive than they had been before. By the second half of the nineteenth century, then, the impulse to withdraw from regular contact with other people, or to sever such contacts altogether, was understood to indicate something very different about the individual who did so than it would have earlier in the century. Arguably, this shift in the implicit meaning of demonstrably antisocial tendencies had a great deal to do with contemporaneous shifts in the nature of the economy. As American capitalism matured during the late nineteenth century, it

Unfriendly thresholds 117 brought with it an implicit obligation for people to participate in the economy in a number of different ways: as workers, as consumers and, when possible, as profit-seeking investors intent upon multiplying their money so as to allow them to better display their wealth, and by extension their relative worth. That reclusive individuals tended to do none of these things—indeed, that their chosen way of being in the world seemed to involve an active repudiation of all such imperatives— put them squarely at odds with the logic of dominant culture in America during the late nineteenth century, a period that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warren famously dubbed “The Gilded Age.” What made matters worse was the fact that, by minimizing their social obligations, recluses simultaneously reduced their fiscal obligations, often to a point where they could save anything and everything they earned or inherited. The result, in some cases, though of course not all, was the formation of a class of individuals who looked by all outward appearances to be desperately poor, but who were in fact quite wealthy. In the eyes of many, such behavior made absolutely no sense. To be sure, there had always been justifications for self-deprivation and thrift. But this was self-deprivation without object, ideology or creed. Whereas mid-nineteenth-century recluses had been romantic figures, late-nineteenth-century recluses were more often characterized as sick or perverse. In the most general sense we might say that Americans during the second half of the nineteenth century simply began to regard recluses as crazy. But the term “crazy” implies a much greater sense of disordered-ness than most discussions about hermits during this period actually reflect. Instead, it probably makes more sense to conceive of late-nineteenth-century Americans’ understanding of reclusiveness as something like a syndrome made up of various phobias, fetishes and paraphilias, a term Wilhelm Stekel would coin in the 1920s to describe unusual sexual interests. What I find most promising about conceiving of Americans’ late-nineteenth-century understanding of reclusiveness in this manner is that helps to explain the curious way in which a whole host of issues that seem on their face to have little or nothing to do with each other came to be associated with the figure of the recluse including a love of money and an antipathy toward members of the opposite sex, both of which I have already discussed, but also concerns about secrecy, deceptiveness, loneliness, and death. As anyone who knows anything about the history of sexuality in Europe and the United States during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries will immediately recognize, this particular litany of antisocial behaviors is precisely the same amalgam of themes that has recurred over and over again in connection with discussions about the origins and cultural significance of same-sex desire for nearly two centuries. For example, in the context of the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, one immediately thinks of Freud’s theories regarding the psychosexual implications of anal-retentiveness. One also thinks of what historian George Chauncey has characterized as the “myth of isolation” that prevailed among gays and lesbians themselves for decades throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century there remains an implicit yet powerful association between antisociality and homosexuality. Just consider

118

Colin R. Johnson

Lee Edelmen’s recent contention that what the term “queer” actually names, more than a mode of sexual difference, is a kind of obstinate refusal to comply with ostensibly life-affirming narratives of biological and social reproduction.14 In the book-length version of this project I intend to say a great deal more about the longstanding connection between these seemingly unrelated themes. Here, however, my main goal is to try to try to tease out a few of the major tropes that came to inform late-nineteenth-century Americans’ understanding of reclusive behavior. Only in this way, I would argue, will we begin to be able to see reclusiveness in the way I believe many late-nineteenth-century Americans did—which is to say as an extremely peculiar, highly embodied mode of capitalist practice in which certain abstract economic principles became overly literalized in ways that resulted not in efficiency and prosperity, but disorder, squalidness and even death. With that task in mind, the first thing to note about late-nineteenth-century recluses is that they were notorious hoarders—of money, as I have already mentioned, but of other things as well. This was not itself unusual, especially in light of the capitalist imperative to be thrifty and save. But recluses did titans of industry one better where money in particular was concerned by eschewing banks and keeping their riches close at hand. In the most extreme cases this meant literally carrying the whole of one’s wealth on one’s person as it was discovered Patrick Kearney did after “[a] bag containing $700 in gold was found tied around his [at that point dead] body” in Pittston, Pennsylvania, in January of 1898.15 In many other cases it entailed stashing money in secret hiding places located within one’s home. The case of Peter Kelly, an eighty-four-year-old hermit who lived in “a hut at the corner of Douglas Street and Kingston Avenue” in what is today Inwood, New York, was seized upon and publicized by local newspapers for precisely this reason. “A search was made by a policeman with the result that money was found everywhere,” the pages of the New York Times informed undoubtedly curious readers during the spring of 1898. “It was in tin boxes, in an old stove, in pots, kettles, the clock, and every nook and cranny in the hut. Most of it was mildewed with age. Some of it was Treasury notes, many of which were full of holes. Most of it will have to be redeemed, as it is no condition for circulation. Altogether it amounted to $351, and Kelley said he did not know whether there was any more or not.”16 This last comment is worth paying particularly close attention to because it offers some hint as to why late-nineteenth-century Americans may have been as interested in news about the death of reclusive misers as they demonstrably were: to the extent that reclusive misers were believed to stash their money in their homes, and even in everyday household objects, every advice about a hermit’s passing was potentially a map to hidden treasure. This is something that newspaper editors seem to have been quite conscious of, and it probably explains why they were so eager to inform their readers whenever unexpected hoards of cash were discovered ferreted away inside items that had once belonged to hermits. Editors also informed their readers when some sort of treasure was accidentally dug up on land that had previously been inhabited by recluse. Benjamin Stevens and John Burrys enjoyed precisely this sort of good luck when the pair hit upon a buried teakettle containing three thousand dollars’

Unfriendly thresholds 119 worth of gold while they were plowing a field a few miles southeast of Powderly, Texas, during the spring of 1895. “An old hermit lived on the place two years ago,” the New York Times reported on its front page day after the discovery. “When he died, no money was found in his cabin, and it is thought this treasure was buried by him.”17 On some level, late-nineteenth-century commentators seem to have admired hermits and recluses for their ability to amass large fortunes over time through disciplined saving and extreme frugality. During the 1890s especially, journalists often marveled over how such extreme wealth could be built up by people who worked only sporadically, often for modest wages. What these commentators clearly did not admire, however, or even understand, was the recluse’s wellknown tendency to try to superintend such fortunes themselves. In fact, the recluse’s suspicion of banks, and his habit of keeping large sums of money on his person or his house, provided the context for numerous cautionary tales regarding the dangers of failing to manage wealth in an appropriately modern way. Generically speaking, the most popular of these tales was the story of the reclusive individual who was robbed of their entire life’s savings in one fell swoop precisely because it was physically there for the taking rather than safely deposited in a bank. So, for example, in April of 1887 the Washington Post ran a story entitled “What His Distrust of Banks Cost Him,” in which the tragedy of one Pennsylvania man’s disastrous encounter with a pair of con artists was recounted as proof of the danger inherent in trying to go it alone where the management of assets was concerned. The man’s name was James Nixon and he was characterized as “an old hermit living near Harmansville, who had no faith in banks.” As the newspaper explained, Nixon had been “robbed several days ago of $5,800 in cash and Government securities, which he had secreted in his house. One day last week he was decoyed away from his home by two men, who represented that they were real estate speculators, and during his absence a confederate entered the house and secured the treasure.”18 Nor was being robbed the worst fate that hermits had to worry about. Increasingly throughout the late-nineteenth century, reports about elderly recluses being murdered for their money began to saturate the national press. While these crimes seem to have occurred with some regularity throughout the nation, considering two cases that occurred in Michigan during the autumn of 1894 alongside one another may help to explain why many Americans began to associate reclusiveness with the prospect of a violent death toward the century’s end. In September of 1894 Charles Chauvin, “an aged and wealthy hermit,” was found brutally murdered in Grosse Point, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. “The small house of three rooms in which Chauvin lived had been thoroughly ransacked by his murderers in search of gold, which he is said to have possessed in large quantities,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “He owned a large quantity of valuable land and was also known to have possessed a large quantity of money in gold, but how much or where it was concealed no one knows.”19 Several months later, in what must have seemed like a rash of murders targeting elderly hermits, yet another Michigan recluse, Michael Goyt, was found dead in his Locke Township home.

120

Colin R. Johnson

“It is evident the murderers entered the house through the cellar and killed the old man with a club,” the Chicago Daily Tribune reported. “The motive was robbery.”20 If reports about recluses being brutally murdered for their money reflected a current of anxiety in late-nineteenth century Americans regarding the potential hazards of trying to live outside the emerging economic system, they obviously also reflected the occurrence of actual crimes involving actual criminals and actual victims. What is interesting is that, over time, the idea that reclusive individuals would be targeted as a class by criminals and con men because it was perfectly reasonable to assume that they probably possessed riches ripe for the taking seems to have become naturalized to such an extent that misanthropic hermitage effectively became synonymous with miserliness. Indeed, in a way, recluses seem to have been gradually repositioned over the course of the late-nineteenth century as sites of potential economic opportunity and profit in and of themselves. That is, they actually came to represent an embodied site of capital accumulation. Thus, when a recluse died, or in some cases even before he died, there seem always to have been speculators who were willing to venture their time sorting through the rubble of the recluse’s enigmatic life in exchange for the opportunity to stake a claim to the strange accretions of wealth that hermitic tendencies were widely thought to produce, and indeed did produce in more than a few instances. Hence the many reports of people flocking to the dismal apartments of deceased hermits in hopes that they might be allowed to sift through the refuse that often filled them in search of the hermit’s as-yet-undiscovered “hoard.” Hence too the extensive discussion within the national press of all the long-lost friends and relatives who tended to emerge in the wake of a recluses’ passing, usually just in time to make a legal claim on the deceased’s estate. American newspapers followed hundreds of such cases during the 1880s and 1890s, and with considerable interest. What is notable about these reports is not the fact that what were essentially high-profile probate cases would receive such attention, or the fact that distant relatives of the deceased would come to be involved in them. Rather, what is most striking is the openly cynical way in which such individuals were typically represented as gold diggers who emerged from the shadows just in time to profit from the deceased’s thrift. Thus, when Patrick Woolf, who was “thought to be a pauper” and whose “household effects were appraised at $8,” died at Noona, Missouri, in February 1895 with an estate estimated to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $80,000, the New York Times felt it appropriate to quip that “[r]elatives are beginning to appear. Two sisters, one in Kansas City, and one in New York, have been heard from.”21 Like skillful entrepreneurs, the newspaper seemed to imply, Americans were far more likely to invest time in their disgracefully misanthropic relations once it became clear that doing so was likely to result in a respectable profit.

The female hermit With the exception of Rhoda Mitchell, and of course the incomparable Trina McTeague, all of the hermits I have discussed thus far have been men. There were

Unfriendly thresholds 121 female hermits as well, however, and I would like to conclude by offering a few thoughts about how gender influenced late-nineteenth-century Americans’ understanding of misanthropic reclusiveness. The first point worth making is that the symbolic grammar that surrounded female hermits referred much more explicitly to the conditions of their everyday existence than their actions. The second and perhaps more important generalization that can be made is that female recluses were actually far more likely than male recluses to be characterized explicitly as demented or insane. This will perhaps come as little surprise given the fact that, historically speaking, women have often been more susceptible to such accusations than men. But I do think that both observations are relevant in this context and worth exploring. For its part, the former observation serves to remind us of just how gendered space is—certainly an important consideration in any discussion about the history of physical isolation. The latter observation reminds us of just how vulnerable unattached women have been under conditions of patriarchy, a circumstance in which the inevitability of women’s dependence upon men has traditionally been both assumed and enforced. Where the first matter is concerned—the manner in which female hermits tended to be represented—it seems clear that the state of a female recluse’s home played a much more important role in how her misanthropy was interpreted and assessed than did the state of a male recluse’s home. Correspondingly, accounts of female reclusiveness also tended to dwell upon such matters much more extensively than accounts of male reclusiveness. Indeed, it very much seems as if the filth and disorder of a female hermit’s home tended to be offered up as evidence that her reclusiveness was a bona fide problem—the result, say, of a filthy and disordered mind—rather than a polite inclination to avoid appearing in public without accompaniment. Thus, when Fannie Richardson, an unmarried seventyeight-year-old recluse with assets totaling more than $50,000, died intestate in Taunton, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1897, the New York Times felt the need to represent the woman’s home “a dismal place” that was “scantily furnished.” And it probably was: according to the same account, Richardson had occupied the same residence for “a generation, always with the shutter of her apartment closed and her door locked.” So averse was Richardson to human contact, in fact, that “[h]er milkman and grocer left their goods in a tin pail which the woman lowered from her window every morning by cord.”22 Still, the fact that so much more was typically said about the wretched, Spartan nature of women’s homes at the time of their death in comparison to what was said about men’s homes is certainly indicative of the extent to which the condition of domestic space was read as a direct reflection of the woman who maintained it during this period in American history. Women were more closely associated with the idea of material upkeep than men. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the theme of descent into material wretchedness is one that seems to have been more closely associated with female recluses than male ones, and indeed, it is a theme that emerges quite explicitly in Norris’ McTeague. As Trina begins to descend into her miserly mania, the condition of both her appearance and her home begins to degrade. Whereas at

122

Colin R. Johnson

the beginning of the novel she is described as “very small and prettily made” with hair that looks like “a royal crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara, heavy, abundant, odorous,” by its conclusion she has become “coarse, stunted, and dumpy.”23 In a gesture of almost perfectly symbolic parallelism, Norris writes that “At the last she even neglected her hair, the wonderful swarthy tiara, the coiffure of a queen, that shaded her little pale forehead. In the morning she braided it before it was half combed, and piled and coiled it about her head in a haphazard fashion. It came down half a dozen times a day; by evening it was an unkempt, tangled mass, a veritable rat’s nest.” What is more, Trina’s home becomes a veritable rat’s nest as well: The one room grew abominably dirty, reeking with odors of cooking and “non-poisonous” paint. The bed was not made until late in the afternoon, sometimes not at all. Dirty, unwashed crockery, greasy knives, sodden fragments of yesterday’s meals cluttered the table, while in one corner was the heap of evil-smelling, dirty linen. Cockroaches appeared in crevices of the woodwork, the wall paper bulged from the damp walls and began to peel. Trina had long ago ceased to dust or wipe the furniture with a bit of rag. The grime grew thick upon the window panes and in the corners of the room. All the filth of the alley invaded their quarter like a rising muddy tide.24 Despite the fact that he considered himself to be a naturalist writer after literary figures such as Émile Zola, critics have always recognized in Norris a certain tendency toward excess and exaggeration. Where this particular matter is concerned, however, Norris could just as easily have been writing for the New York Times as literary posterity. In the spring of 1894, for example, the newspaper of record reported that a woman had been found wandering aimlessly along Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn. Confused and disoriented at the time she was found, the seventy-four-year-old was reportedly “emaciated. . . with bare feet, her soiled clothing tied about her waist with a tape.” Eventually, authorities were able to determine that the woman was Bertha May, widow of a very successful, longsince dead wig manufacturer named Edward May. Returning her to her home on Bedford Avenue, investigators discovered that May’s basement apartment was “covered with tins cans and musty papers. The floor and walls are covered with dirt and dust. An old couch that Mrs. May occupies as a bed was covered an inch deep with dirt.” The kitchen, where May apparently spent the majority of her time, was also in terrible condition: “The ashes from the stove had been placed in a heap in one corner, and they were at least 4 feet high.”25 What is especially interesting about Bertha May’s case, and what makes it a suitable place to conclude this essay, is how her situation was handled once it was discovered. While her temperament clearly resembled that of other nineteenthcentury recluses in certain respects—it was observed, for example, that she too detested “men and children” so much that she would not “tolerate them in her house”—the circumstances surrounding both her isolation and her eventuale discovery were notably different, and different in ways that suggest some significant

Unfriendly thresholds 123 changes in Americans’ thinking about sociality and anti-sociality toward the end of the century.26 For one thing, May’s reclusive tendencies were clearly read as evidence of incapacitating dementia. We know this because of the way authorities chose to resolve May’s situation. Instead of allowing her to perish in her own filth as had often been done, the investigating officer in this case rounded up everyone May knew and informed them that they would “have to make arrangements to care for her, or she will be arrested and the county officials will examine into her mental conditions.” In other words, May was deemed incompetent to the task of self-care—a hazard rather than a curiosity—and remanded into the custody of some other party. The question of how her very considerable assets would be disposed of if she were to be institutionalized (May actually owned the entire building in which she lived) was never addressed.

Conclusion When scholars write about the history of capital accumulation in the United States during the nineteenth century they do not typically write about Elisha Morrison, or Leonard Coe, or Charles Chauvin, or any of the reclusive misers discussed in this essay. They certainly never write about Trina McTeague lying naked and alone in her cockroach-infested apartment making love to her money. Rather, they write about big things: railroads; epic conflicts between laborers and captains of industry; John Pierpont Morgan. Undoubtedly, these topics are alluring in part because they are legitimately relevant to the study of capitalism’s development during this period. But they are also alluring because such topics make it easy to see the connection between shifts in the economy and shifts in society. By contrast, and precisely because their very visibility as historical actors is a consequence of their renunciation of sociality as such, the peculiar and in some cases demonstrably queer behavior of reclusive misers has factored much less significantly into our understanding of that history—and this despite the fact that such individuals seem literally to have embodied the sheer perversity of American capitalism during this crucially important period in its history. Mysterious in life, and yet irresistibly intriguing in death, it remains to be seen whether the tattered and fragmentary figure of the reclusive miser can be made to have meaning within the context of the histories of capitalism and sexuality in the United States. My intention in this essay has certainly been to suggest that it should. In the meantime, the reclusive miser will remain an enigmatic figure, arguably even a queer one— unarchived, as it were, and pushed to the far edges of our collective memory. And perhaps this is appropriate enough. After all, the recluse’s threshold was, and in many respects still is, a notoriously unfriendly one.

Acknowledgments Special thanks are due to Alexander Doty, Navyug Gill and Drake Reed for their respective roles in helping me bring this essay to fruition. It was Alex who reminded me about Norris’ obsession with the theme of hoarding in McTeague. In

124

Colin R. Johnson

addition to keeping the production of this volume on track, Navyug was generous enough to draw my attention to the passage in Smith which I’m sure I wouldn’t have come across otherwise since I hadn’t looked closely at Smith myself in well over a decade. Drake did yeoman’s work by assembling and organizing an absolutely stunning archive of hundreds of newspaper reports about recluses and misers that appeared in the national press during the period under consideration here—further proof of both his resourcefulness and my extreme good fortune to be able to claim his as my research assistant.

Notes 1 Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (New York, 1985), 308. 2 Ibid., 360. 3 For example, as Kevin Starr observes in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the book, “the reviewer on the [San Francisco] Argonaut, losing no chance to attack a writer from the rival Wave [the literary monthly for which Norris was writing at the time], opined that ‘seven tenths of the story the normal reader will peruse with a mixture of depression and disgust.’” Ibid., xxviii. 4 Ibid., 352–3. 5 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edwin Cannan, ed. (Chicago, 1976), 301. 6 “Death of a Tennessee Hermit,” Chicago Tribune (25 October 1860), 3. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 “Dying Alone,” New York Times (31 October 1886), 6. 10 Ibid. 11 “Miser and Woman Hater—The Story of John Baer, A Bowery Hermit,” New York Times (19 July 1889), 3. 12 “Rhoda Mitchell, Hermit,” Los Angeles Times (17 January 1891), 8. 13 Ibid. 14 See Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1925); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, 1999). 15 “Hermit Dies with $700 in Gold,” New York Times (11 January 1898), 5. 16 “Wealth in Kelley’s Hut—Police Found Hermit’s Money in Many Odd Places,” New York Times (8 May 1898), 8. 17 “Plowed Up A Kettle of Gold,” New York Times (23 March 1895), 1. 18 “What His Distrust of Banks of Cost Him,” Washington Post (26 April 1887), 2. 19 “Wealthy Hermit Is Found Dead—Murdered in the Suburbs of Detroit and His House Ransacked for Gold,” Chicago Tribune (10 September 1894), 8. 20 “Octogenarian Hermit Murdered,” Chicago Daily Tribune (30 November 1894), 10. 21 “Another Rich Hermit,” New York Times (22 February 1895), 2. 22 “Recluse Dead Worth $50,000,” New York Times (20 May 1897), 4. 23 Norris, McTeague, 23 and 335–6. 24 Ibid., 336–7. 25 “A Rich Old Miser and Hermit: Mrs. Bertha May Has Lived in Squalor in Brooklyn for Years” New York Times (25 March 1894), 16. 26 Ibid.

Part III

Signs of wonder

This page intentionally left blank

8

Of kings and gods The archive of sovereignty in a princely state Aditya Pratap Deo

In 2000, my father Udai Pratap Deo, the last officially recognized “ex-ruler”1 of the former princely state of Kanker in central India, passed away. In the following year, I (a history teacher in a Delhi college) was especially recalled by the community elders of the Gond2 peoples in Kanker to participate as my father’s successor in the two biggest annual festivals of their ancestral deities. The first of these festivals, held in January, is called madai, and the second, held in October, is the Dasehra.3 In these festivals, the “raja” of Kanker plays a very significant role. During the celebrations of these festivals, scores of ancestral deities and their peoples assemble at the palace of the former ruler of Kanker. The descendants of the rulers, still widely called and seen as raja, propitiate these deities. In the main ritual of these events, the ancestral deities, each in the form of two rounded logs of wood joined in the middle by a crossbar, enter the palace on the shoulder of their bearers, and stomp around without care. They sometimes go probingly into various nooks and corners of the palace. During Dasehra ancestral deities draw the raja of Kanker out between them to the maidan (open ground) where the congregation is taking place, and force him to dance with them, often to very frantic rhythms, a distinct one for each deity. After a while you can see only dust swirling up from the ground. It appears as if the raja of Kanker has been surrounded by the ancestral deities, enveloped in their cosmos. I had seen my father in the role of the raja many times, but nothing had prepared me for the tension I experienced in being engaged by the ancestral deities when I donned the mantle of raja. I realized that far from being the dominant entity in the event, the raja of Kanker was at this time being besieged and challenged by the ancestral deities of the Gond peoples. For most of the participating Gond peoples,4 madai and Dasehra are festivals in which their ancestral deities present themselves to the raja of Kanker as other rajas of the realm and thus co-sharers of sovereignty. In the way in which they access the palace and surround and dance with the raja of Kanker, the ancestral deities assert their power and authority alongside and over him. The play between the raja of Kanker and the ancestral deities in madai and Dasehra has an ineffable, ungraspable quality that has been dismissed as esoteric, hived off as “culture” and “religion” in the objectifying gaze of administrative discourses and historical writings.5 For example, madai is advertised by the Chhattisgarh Tourism Board in

128

Aditya Pratap Deo

its public hoardings as a quaint religious event of tourist interest. In J.R. Valyani and V.D. Sahasi’s locally widely read history, Bastar aur Kanker Riyasat ka Rajnaitik evam Sanskritic Itihas (1998), madai and Dasehra are placed in a section called “culture,” completely divorced from the section on “politics” which comprises a discussion of the dynastic succession of rulers and their kingly feats.6 What I want to suggest in this paper, on the contrary, is that the ritual practices of madai and Dasehra comprise memories of the political relationship between the raja of Kanker and the Gond peoples that are sedimented and enacted in bodily performance.7 They represent an articulation of the negotiations of sovereignty between the raja of Kanker and the Gond peoples. Popular oral accounts of the past that inhere in ancestral deity practices of the Gond peoples in Kanker (which too have not been taken seriously by historians8) forcefully reiterate this view of sovereignty as popular and negotiated. Gond constructions of sovereignty stand against dominant understandings of the polity of the princely state of Kanker that recognize only a fully sovereign kingly “state” as political and relegate the Gond peoples to the position of passive “subjects.” These dominant understandings valorize narrow, objective markers of politics and push the intangibility of power and sovereignty to the politically benign domains of “religion” and “culture.” In fact it is precisely through the hermetic definitional separations of “religion”/“culture” and “politics” that the unmanageable and untamable of power is domesticated.9 How can we gesture towards a history of the Gond peoples’ alternate, popular conception of sovereignty and what might its archive be?

The “state” and the “primitive” in history While the “state” in general and the “princely state” in particular are increasingly understood in histories not just as a set of persons and institutions at the top but also in terms of the relationship between “rulers” and “subjects,” sovereignty, power and authority are almost always seen as statist, the people being merely reactive.10 In the case of India’s princely states, sovereignty is often constructed as a matter of the balance of power between the princely and colonial states.11 Studies on sovereignty, in India and elsewhere, have seldom dwelt on the gap between statist claims to sovereign power and authority and its performance.12 On the question of Kanker’s Gond subjects, new histories of tribal peoples, especially writings drawing from Subaltern Studies, have pointed out the de-politicization and culturization of tribal peoples by dominant historiographical practices that have continued to be invested variously in the notion of the “tribal-primitive”13 that constructs the peoples described in these terms as backward and unthinking and incapable of politics.14 One of the most significant reasons for the exclusion of the people from questions of sovereignty in the discussions of “state” in general and the “princely state” in particular has been our inordinate reliance on statist records that are always already situated in conceptions of sovereignty that are statist, where state/ sovereignty is constructed as singular, exclusive and total. This is reinforced by simplistic reading practices that take the statist records literally without attending

Of kings and gods: The archive of sovereignty 129 to what Gyanendra Pandey has called the work of “un-archiving” that necessarily accompanies every act of archiving.15 What is not adequately recognized is that this statist construction of sovereignty was a part of the ruling regime’s claim to all-encompassing power not the result of it, part of the production of a “stateeffect” that sought to silence oppositional political practices that engaged with and resisted this claim. Competing articulations were thus necessarily suppressed in the official records. The latter registered but eventually wrote over the competing claims. The state’s archive therefore appears as a mirror image of statist claims to sovereignty, singular, exclusive and total: the ideas of the “state” and the “archive” benefit from this mutual admiration. The discourse of the “state” in and through its archive is primarily a discourse of order and of discipline. It requires the simultaneous construction of an allpowerful “state” and pacified and ordered “subjects,” for its working and realization. The divesting of people of any claims to sovereignty is therefore a primary task of state-building. The “state” constitutes itself through a state/subject binary where the former completely monopolizes the sphere of politics in relation to its other, the “subjects” or people, who are theoretically entirely subdued. It is therefore important that we mark the statist interest and its operation in the making of the official archive, and attend closely to the process of simultaneous archiving and un-archiving in which much of our history and politics is silenced or rendered insignificant. Statist records from Kanker that present the view of a clear separation between “state” and “people,” have historically been defended on the ground that they are “rationally” constructed and articulated. On the other hand, popular Gond oral accounts of the past that inhere in ancestral deity practices of spirit-divination current among the Gonds in Kanker, and which present a contestatory view of the princely state’s polity, are inspired by and constructed within what historians usually see as a non-historical, “irrational” cosmos. In this paper, I hope to explore a path I could take to claim such sources and the constructions contained in them for the writing of a history of polity in princely Kanker, especially by placing them in dialogue with statist records whose distance from them appears so stark. As Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ajay Skaria, among others, have shown in the case of histories of tribal peoples, this involves questioning the rationalist protocols of History to foreground “subaltern pasts,” or constructions of the past which cannot enter the historical narrative on their own terms as they are deemed in historical studies to be “irrational” in structure and content.16 Chakrabarty has further argued that “rational” and “irrational” are not radically untranslatable positions but are co-constituted, one necessarily defining the other.17 In historical writings, this binary speciously divides up an irreducibly heterogeneous world through relationships of power. Chakrabarty goes on to suggest that the “practice of historicization and subaltern pasts are not mutually exclusive,” the latter act as a “supplement to the historian’s past . . . they enable history to be what it is and yet at the same time help to show what its limits are.”18 Though the argument for multi-vocal histories cannot be denied anymore, the forms they take will necessarily vary. One exceptional attempt to write a

130

Aditya Pratap Deo

multi-vocal history is the contrapuntal narrative of Skaria’s Hybrid Histories (1999) where the narrative proceeds along two different paths but the reader is invited to interrupt one from the other.19 However, I will tread a somewhat different path in this paper. I hope to put the various sources and their constructions mentioned above side by side, or face to face, without assimilating one to the other. I should add that the problem of writing down and thus changing the character of oral accounts is a serious one, and deserves a fuller treatment than I have been able to give it here. At this point I can only recognize the unfortunate inescapability of transcription, and hope that it will not prevent us from hearing at least the intimations of other pasts I draw attention to. This paper is an attempt to study the different constructions of the relationship between rulers and their Gond “subjects” in the princely domain of Kanker in the region of southern Chhattisgarh, central India. Through this study I hope to intervene in the larger debate about the archive, and about state formation and tribal peoples in the princely states and colonial India. I shall begin by considering the ways in which the foremost archival document of the princely state of Kanker, the annual Administrative Report for Kanker State (1941–46), archives the “state” and “un-archives” the people within its rationalizing discourse. I will then bring into focus judicial documents called iqrarnama, moments in the life of the ruling regime where the regime’s dealings with Gond ancestral deities and spirit-divination practices were recorded but rendered illegible beyond being marked as popular religious practices that required regulation. I will argue that these sources contain significant silences and elisions that hide the space of popular politics which, in Gond memory, was constitutive of the princely regime. I will follow this with a brief discussion of tribal ancestral deities as they were being depicted in colonial anthropological writings around the same time as the administrative records were being prepared to continue to mark the process of archiving/unarchiving that is constitutive of statist records. I will finally counter-pose a few oral accounts of the past, recited during ancestral deity ritual practices of the Gonds in Kanker today, to show how popular memory reconstructs the colonial-princely regime (encapsulated in the form of the raja) and the people’s relationship to it.

Administrative records: Archiving the “state,” un-archiving the “people” The princely state of Kanker comprised the larger part (3,706 sq. kms)20 of the present district of Kanker (5,285 sq. kms)21, which lies to the south of Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh, and has a mixed hill and plain topography comprising a middle region between the central Chhattisgarh plains of the river Mahanadi to the north and the hills and plateaus of Bastar to the south. The kingdom of Kanker came under British control in 1818 after the Marathas, who had effectively controlled it until then, were defeated.22 Its population was 1,49,471 and total revenue Rs. 4,02,463 in 1941–42, the year when a regular, printed report of administration began to be archived, about which I shall say more later. Today,

Of kings and gods: The archive of sovereignty 131 more than 50 percent of the population of the Kanker district, which includes a small portion of the former princely state of Bastar, is designated in official classification as Gond.23 The annual administrative reports of the princely regime of Kanker were the most important and comprehensive descriptions of the “state” and its peoples created by the administration.24 Prepared by the office of the Superintendent of Administration, these reports were meant to be mandatorily sent to the Political Department and the India Office; and were commented upon extensively by the Crown Representatives responsible for relations with the princely regime, namely the Resident of the Eastern States and the Political Agent to the Chhattisgarh States.25 The larger part of the reports comprised information about aspects of what we might understand as “administration” narrowly, a “cluster of institutions of political and executive control and their key personnel”26: administration of land and forest revenues, laws and legislation, police and judiciary, finance and budgeting, public health and education, municipal governance, vital statistics regarding all the above, etc.27 Apart from this, the reports carried a prefaratory section titled “General and Political,” which had sub-headings as follows: Situation, Area and Population, Capital, Archaeological Monuments, Climate, Natural and Mineral Resources, System of Administration, Rulers, History, Administrative Reforms, Visitors, Important Events, Tours of Ruler and Diwan, etc.28 Occasionally, there was also a sub-section titled “General Condition of the State and People,” as in the 1943–44 report, under the head “Production and Distribution” with other sub-sections on weather, crop, rainfall, wages, labor, prices, trade and manufacture, public works, electricity, excise, postal arrangements, etc. These aspects of the reports are very short and bare, little more than an overview of the geography of Kanker and a list of its rulers. In the main, the larger administrative sections contained matter of fact data, often statistically organized, about their various subjects, so that the general sense is one of a modern, rational, legal state of the Weberian type, “characterized by a system of administrative and legal order, which claims binding authority, not only over the members of the state . . . but also to very large extent, over all action taking place in the area of its jurisdiction.”29 People, History and Politics, mentioned here, are brushed under the blanket sway of Administration, and become minor, incidental mentions, as pointed out earlier, of little consequence to the defining form and substance of the report. The detailed comments on the reports similarly keep mostly to this mode, discussing strictly points of administration and seeking more information of the same type.30 In this view the princely regime appears as a passive recipient of a predetermined colonial script that it dutifully plays out for the scrutiny of its colonial guardians just as, in turn, its “subjects” appear in the same relationship to it, as passive peoples on whom the guardian regime acts unilaterally. Politics comprises the “state” and vice versa, and both are closed off to the people. This archive-fashioned view has lodged itself firmly in the histories of princely states which in any case have had a marginal position in a British India-centric colonial and postcolonial

132

Aditya Pratap Deo

historiography. 31 Such a view has come to inform and reinforce present day selfprojections of the postcolonial successor state as a neutral, guardianly entity devoted to the “development” of the people, with disastrous consequences.32 However, on closer reading, these archival documents give us glimpses of spaces that could not be brought within the ambit of the “state’s” regime. It appears that the rule of sending regular, typed or printed reports, part of the architecture of a “state,” did not begin in Kanker much before 1941–42. It becomes clear from the discussion in the memorandum of comments on the reports that prior to this year, the reports were handwritten and irregular.33 Further, these comments pertain as much to the form of the report as to its substance, constituting almost a tutorial to a novice on how to prepare the report and create an administration. Printing of the report could not begin before 1943–44 because there was a “shortage of paper and printing material”34; and was then done from Jagdalpur (1943–44) and subsequently from Raipur.35 The larger point is that the reports represent a late quickening of administrative intervention in Kanker as is evident from the fact that all the key administrative measures that constituted the activities of the “state” as reported, most notably those concerned with agrarian and forest revenues, took shape belatedly around and after 1940. Though the “revenue system” was first “started” in 1891–92, only by 1920–21 could two-thirds of the total villages (about 500) be “surveyed and settled”: a final, proper settlement awaiting the measures beginning in 1938 and ending in 1945.36 Similarly, there was no “scientific management” of forests until 1930.37 The reporting and disposal of criminal cases remained poor until 1943–44, when a joint judicial system was worked out with the much larger and better organized administration of princely Bastar.38 There were several reasons for this late blooming of colonial-style governance and administration in Kanker. Lack of financial resources and manpower, and the resistance of local sociopolitical formation, meant that the British had to accede to the concept of “indirect rule,” and had to allow the princely regimes to carry on with their own bandobast (administrative arrangements) for a considerable period of time even after 1857, though their interference and control increased thereafter.39 Since Kanker was neither economically nor politically strategic, and was also remote, it was only in the 1930s and early 1940s that the implementation of a full colonial prescription of rule in this small kingdom could begin. Further, Kanker was under minority rule since 1925 and the ruling chief was given full ruling powers only in 1944.40 Struck undoubtedly by the flurry of administrative activity that accompanied the coming of age of the ruler, a colonial official commenting on the reports observed that under the rule of the superintendents, the “management (of the state) was of only limited efficiency and great improvements were expected now.”41

The iqrarnama: Intimations of “un-state-like” sovereignty The rationalist pretensions of the princely regime get somewhat muddied in the demonstration of its interest in the Gond ancestral deity and spirit-divination practices in the iqrarnama, a statist set of sources that sheds a somewhat different

Of kings and gods: The archive of sovereignty 133 light on the ruler-people relations in princely Kanker. An iqrarnama (or “agreement,” from the Urdu “iqrar” meaning “affirmation”) was a legal document that described the obligations entered into by two parties for any purpose. In this case the iqrarnama were undertakings signed by people who wanted to take the Chhote Pat Anga Dev, an ancestral deity of Gond peoples kept by the raja in the form of idol in his palace, to their villages for spirit-divination for a wide range of purposes. There are hundreds of iqrarnama in the palace of the former rulers of Kanker, from the mid-1940s to the present day, but they were stashed away in trunks in the palace store rooms, the place of the insignificant and forgotten. They were never put out as public records in the official record rooms of the princely regime. When the iqrarnama are prepared these days, a copy is expected to be filed at the local police station of the village where the deity is taken. Interestingly, though a copy is given to the police station, it is not filed but disposed off after a policeman has verbally acknowledged it. In the area of the neighboring princely kingdom of Bastar, within Kanker’s district, where this practice appears in a limited way, they have recently dispensed with all paper work. Whereas this requirement—of informing the police through a document— might not have been in place in the colonial period (although we can not be sure of this) in Kanker, I want to point to the general archival “reluctance” of this document, and the fact that there are very few copies of the iqrarnama in official record rooms in Kanker. From a study of the iqrarnama of the pre-1949 period, of which most of those I have seen are from 1946,42 it can be said that the iqrarnama were hand-written in a standard format on the stamped papers of the princely administration by an official scribe (in this case it was only one) in formal Hindustani with some Chhattisgarhi terms.43 In the seven iqrarnama studied by me (I could not read the others because of their bad condition and/or illegibility), the supplicants described themselves as gaon-wasi (villagers) or kashtkar (tenants). They comprised groups as large as 15 people representing their village (gaon, mauja) to as small as a family of five and spoke of themselves, when “surnames” were mentioned44, as Gond, Thakur, Kalar, Gaita and Nai, community appellations we would identify as tribal or lower caste today.45 The supplicants were from the villages of Nadanmara (2 groups), Makdi, Chivranj, Urkuda from Kanker tehsil (administrative unit into which the territories of princely Kanker were divided) and Pandarwahi and Bhondia from Bhanupratap-pur tehsil, and had put their thumb impressions on the paper. The supplicants asked to be given the Chhote Pat Anga Dev kept in the palace of the Badgahin Rajmata46 (queen mother) for purposes of gaon-banana or gaonsudhar (to “make or restore a village”). Table 8.1 contains short descriptions of the content of these iqrarnama in Hindustan-Chhattisgarhi with translation.47 Can the iqrarnama give us a different view of the relationship between the rulers and their subjects from the formal, rationalist one assiduously produced in the administrative records, now that the faceless “subject” peoples of the administrative records emerge as recognizable persons, with their beliefs and practices, problems and concerns?

134

Aditya Pratap Deo

Table 8.1 Short descriptions of the content of the iqrarnama No.

Village

Date

Specific purpose for taking Chhote Pat Anga Dev: to resolve. . .

Activity to be performed

1.1

Nadanmara

28.01.46

rasum (custom)

1.2

Nadanmara

18.08.46

1.3

Makdi

17.10.46

gaon mein sankat aur beemari (crisis and illness in village), devi-devta ka bandhej theek karne (to repair the system/ arrangement of gods and goddesses) gaon ke dekh-rekh aur sudhar ke liye (for the upkeep and restoration of the village) gaon pe dukh baras raha hai (village is drowned in sorrow)

1.4

Bhondia

03.05.47

1.5

Pandarwhi

26.05.47

1.6

Chivranj

3.11.48

1.7

Urkuda

Undated *

aadmi beemar hain (people are ill), devi-devta bigad gaye hain (gods and goddesses are disturbed), the activities of tonhitonha (witches-wizards) maveshi mein beemari (illness in cattle), the activities of tonhi-tonha ashanti (lack of peace), devi-devta aur gaon ka bandobast sudharne (to restore the proper arrangement of gods and goddesses and the village) gaon ka prabandh theek nahin hai (the organization/arrangement of the village is not good), devi-devta mein aapasi aafat hai (there is internal trouble among the deities), bhai aur anya logon ko nuksan hai (there is loss to our brothers and other people, and to cattle)

* Undated, but uses official Kanker State paper.

rasum, puja (worship)

dekh-rekh (upkeep), puja, paan-phool dena (offer flowers and leaves) puja

seva (propitiation through offerings, often animal sacrifice) rasum, maan-aadar dena (to give respect), tafseel (investigation) dekh-rekh

Of kings and gods: The archive of sovereignty 135 In the iqrarnama, which are legal and therefore statist documents, the princely regime still appears as a rational arbiter, if this time a more familiar one and one closely involved in the people’s daily activities. In fact at the end of all the iqrarnama, the regime can be seen warning the supplicants to desist from any gadbadi (trouble) and danga-fasad (disorder) in the conduct of their activities. The princely regime had custody of the Chhote Pat Anga Dev, a deity of significance to the tribal and caste peoples in the villages. This deity was ritually significant in relation to other deities that resided in the villages among the people, as many of the iqrarnama mention, and its intervention was critical in resolving the serious matters at hand. The activities to be performed were described as different forms of worship in most of the cases save one, where investigation was mentioned. It could be argued that through the iqrarnama and the administrative process related to it, the princely regime was merely regulating a cultural/religious practice. Indeed tribal deities in southern Chhattisgarh, including the ones in question here, have figured only as “religion” and “culture” in the large body of anthropological literature available on the tribal peoples from the colonial period onwards, divorced from the “political.” 48 Yet the iqrarnama broaden the horizon and draw the princely regime into the midst of real people, with names and palpable problems and issues. The peoples’ concerns seem to range from specific matters like illness of humans and cattle to general distress and the proper arrangement of gods and the world. Deities are integral to this world and thus to its problems and their resolution. Can the meaning of the wide-ranging concerns of the people be exhausted by the terms “religion” or “culture” in the limited sense in which they were used in colonial anthropological literature, especially since several specific concerns like health, and law and order, and all things related to the welfare of the people, also appear in the statist documents as clear areas of the “state’s” competence? Further, we are not told anything about the deity Chhote Pat Anga Dev and why the deity was in the custody of the princely regime, or why the activities minimally described in the iqrarnama as worship were important enough to require regulation. The administrative records and other archived documents of the princely regime are completely silent about the deity and its practices. What were these un-statelike regimes of power with which the princely regime transacted but did not own up to?

Gond peoples and their ancestral deities in colonial anthropological writings For more substantial descriptions of the phenomenon represented here by these practices concerning the Chhote Pat Anga Dev and its salience in the life of the people, we must turn elsewhere, to colonial anthropological literature on the tribes of southern Chhattisgarh, for it is here that Gond peoples of this region were written about. Prathama Banerjee has shown how the notion of the “primitive” was constructed through a “culturization” of the tribes in and through the knowledge practices of Anthropology in colonial India.49 In southern Chhattisgarh,

136

Aditya Pratap Deo

the “subject” peoples of the larger and more significant princely regime of Bastar provided the main material for writing about “primitive tribal people.”50 The majority subject population of Kanker, which was similarly termed tribal at this time, figured only marginally in this literature, and conclusions made for Bastar were invariably applied to them, including the blanket application of the tribe name “Gond” for all tribal peoples in southern Chhattisgarh. Let us look at the writings of two pioneer anthropologist-administrators, W.V. Grigson and Verrier Elwin, on Bastar, to study, at one remove, their construction of tribal peoples in Kanker. In his Maria Gonds of Bastar (1938), Grigson, who was Administrator and Diwan (chief minister) of the princely regime of Bastar at the time he undertook this study, discussed what he called “Anga Deo,” “Pat Deo” and “Log God” under the category “clan gods” in the section “Religion and Magic.”51 The historical/ political aspect of the book was contained in the introductory chapter that was, as I have noted earlier in the case of the administrative reports, a list of the rajas of Bastar and their efforts to bring “state” (order, civilization) to the “subject” peoples.52 This was followed by the main parts of the book, on the Maria Gonds, titled “Personal Appearance and Characteristics,” “Domestic Life and Economy,” “Religion and Magic” and “Social Organization, Law and Custom.”53 According to Grigson, clan-gods, one among many types of tribal gods, who embodied ancestral spirits, functioned through divination practices in forming and keeping clan and phratry organization and solidarity.54 Very significantly, he also mentioned in passing that one clan god, the Jhoria log-god of Narainpur, “had a special nose for witches,” so that the raja of Bastar had kept a replica of that god in his palace for witch-hunting, taking a fee of Rs. 5/- whenever the surrounding Muria Gonds “requisitioned its services.”55 Grigson also mentions the Raj-Pat log god of Ghotpal but only as a deity of significance for the clan.56 In his Maria Suicide and Murder (1943), Verrier Elwin wrote that the “Anga gods have a flair for detecting witches and other criminals” and “are often employed to discover thefts and surprise the secrets of black magic” through divination carried out by the gaita (priest) and sirha (intercessor) in the context of the clan gods of Bade Dongar kept by the raja of Bastar.57 Though Elwin gave greater importance to clan gods, he restricted their description to his discussion of religion.58 In these authoritative writings, the invocation and worship of the clan gods, despite the mention of the Bastar raja’s use of it for purposes of criminal justice, was constructed strictly as a “cultural”/“religious” and “social” phenomenon, and one of no pre-eminence over others. It was divorced from the “political” and its function was mainly that of clan organization. A somewhat different and rare view was provided by C. von Furer-Haimendorf, in the context of his study of clan gods among the Raj-Gonds, a sub-group of the Gonds, in Hyderabad in 1945. Furer-Haimendorf used his conclusions to critique the limited understanding of the clan god phenomenon in central India (which would include present day Chhattisgarh) among anthropologists.59 He argued that most of the anthropologists had erred in not recognizing that “the cult of clan gods forms the very core of Gond religion.”60 The clan gods represented the memory of

Of kings and gods: The archive of sovereignty 137 the origin of the clan and the first settlement, and of the life of subsequent generations, and therefore were the keepers of the relationship between the Gond people and their world. Their propitiation, through ritual, was “enormously important for the relations between ancestors and the living.”61 The upkeep of these clan gods was necessary for “unity and well-being,” which “attained their highest realization in the sacramental rites performed for them.”62 Furer-Haimendorf made another and for my purposes a more significant departure. He linked these clan gods to the “secular power of rulers.” He wrote: “Some clan deities stand under the special protection of a family of Rajas . . . Sawera Pen (one kind of clan god) are found in the possession of the Raja’s family . . . Associated with the Pen (clan god) of the Raja are deities that symbolize the secular power of rulers. . .”63 Further, Furer-Haimendorf wrote about how, in cases where we know of Gond rulers (and Raj-Gonds still remembered a past when they were kings), these gods were considered like rajas.64 Furer-Haimendorf noted that the katora (priest) of the Persa Pen (originary Raj-Gond clan god), addressed the Persa Pen in key rituals as follows: “Great King, give me food/May good fortune be mine/May my grain be plentiful/May my house be prosperous/ Give me good fortune.”65 This characterization, with its awkward play of “religious” and “secular,” is not difficult to understand. In 1962, Surojit Sinha, in one of the most under-used anthropological histories of tribes, studied state-like political formations among the tribal peoples in central India, and argued that historically the political experience of many of these tribal communities was not very different from and was in fact deeply enmeshed with the more “advanced” ones of non-tribal, caste communities of the region.66 My ethnographic study of ancestral deity practices in Kanker finds me standing closer to the constructions of clan gods given by Furer-Haimendorf and Sinha rather than Grigson and Elwin. But in the case of the Gonds in Kanker, the “political” and the “religious” merge more fully, so that it might be necessary to fashion a different vocabulary to capture the nature of that cosmos or at least acknowledge that the “religious” was very much “political.” I will however restrict myself to a brief and simplified description of the clan god complex and practices of the Gond peoples of Kanker; and to foregrounding accounts of their past that impinge directly on conceptions of polity. The accounts I present here are among those given to me in hundreds of semi-structured interviews in the course of my participation in anga dev practices in Kanker in the last two years.

Anga Dev accounts of the past: Negotiating sovereignty As Furer-Haimendorf argued with his peers, the clan god system seems to be the central and anchoring principle in the world of the Kanker Gonds. The deceased always remain present among the people as spirits and are deified at every level, from the unit of the family to that of the entire phratry and clan community. These spirits constantly mediate the relationship between the people and their world through rituals of divination (which can be construed as worship) in which they are queried and propitiated. The act of divination consists in the questioning of the

138

Aditya Pratap Deo

deified spirit, including the repeated investigation (jaanch) of its efficacy, and in turn the investigation of the matter at hand by it. In the hierarchy of power and authority among ancestral spirits, the deified spirit of the first settler of the clan is pre-eminent and is called budha dev (old man-god). When an ancestral spirit, whether a budha dev or any other, is seen as possessing special powers of intervention in the world, it is idolized as anga dev (log god), usually in the form of two parallel logs of wood joined in the middle by a cross-bar as mentioned earlier, so that it can be carried on the shoulders of four persons. It is looked after by a gaita and a sirha, and expresses itself through them, usually in a baithak (meeting) consisting of the bhumkal (people) and supervised by the siyan (elders) and the majhi (headman, though this is notional). These baithak often happen within the structure of festivals called madai (fairs) and jatra (gatherings for specific reasons like the marking of the founding of a village or the fulfillment of a task undertaken by a village). The raja of Kanker or his representative, the anga dev kept by the raja, are a necessary presence in these practices, as participants in maintaining the balance of relationships in the world. The accounts that follow are located in this setting. In a jatra of 22 villages at Thema in south-west Kanker, where the presiding anga dev are two brothers, Thema and Medha, the following account was given to me by a group of siyan in a baithak.67 Once, Thema and Medha had ruled without fetters as rajas in this area. A conflict broke out between them and there was much distress among the people as a result of it. When the raja of Kanker, Narharideo (1853–1904)68, who was powerful in the vicinity, heard about it, he had the two brothers captured, chained and brought to him in his darbar (court) in the capital town of Kanker. When the brothers came face to face with the raja they questioned his action by throwing him a challenge. They told the raja that if he thought he was more powerful than them he should try hunting a tiger in any of the 22 villages they controlled. The raja tried hunting a tiger in each of the villages but failed. Every time he shot an arrow, it would turn into water. Defeated, he acknowledged that these villages belonged to the brothers and set them free. From that time, the raja was able to rule in that area only if he acted through the brothers, and propitiated them constantly. Thema and Medha thereafter became barho dev (gods/rajas with control over notionally 12 but in this case 22 villages). The terms raja and dev (god) were used interchangeably for both the brothers and the raja of Kanker in the account, and suggested a mutually agreed as well as somewhat conflictual sharing of power between the two. All anga dev festivals in the area require the presence of the raja of Kanker or, as mentioned earlier, his representatives, the most frequent among them being the Chhote Pat Anga Dev. The Chhote Pat Anga Dev (literally the “younger log god”, in relation to the “Bade” or “elder,” kept in the main Shitala temple in Kanker) is one of the two anga dev of the raja of Kanker. One account of why the raja had come to have custody of these anga dev who have thus become ritually superior to all the other anga dev in Kanker (though this is often contested), was given to me by the dev majhi (head of the godly complex) of 84 villages of mixed tribal and caste peasantry in the Bhanupratap-pur area in eastern Kanker.69 Garh Bansla (or “fort”

Of kings and gods: The archive of sovereignty 139 Bansla), the ritually pre-eminent village among them, houses the temple of Danteshwari, the family deity of both the Kanker and Bastar rulers; and is cited in many accounts as having been the first capital of Kanker under the rulers of the Kandra dynasty (1344–97), one of three to have ruled Kanker.70 The Kandra dynasty is supposed to have come from a Gond sub-group called Nahar, a community of bamboo cultivators. According to the account, once a Nahrin (wife of a Nahar man) was bathing in a pond situated on the side of a glade in the forest. As she was coming out of the pond she saw that the Chhote and Bade Pat Anga Dev, rajas of Garh Bansla, dressed in splendorous attire, were dancing with abandon in the glade. She was awe-struck and forgot to return home. She kept watching this spectacle, mesmerized by the rhythm of their dance. Her husband, the Nahar, annoyed by the delay in her return, went looking for her and saw this scene. Angry with his wife, he shot an arrow at the dancers, wounding one of Chhote Pat Anga Dev’s arms. The anga dev were incensed and told the Nahar that unless he acknowledged their power and looked after them, his people would not know peace. The anga dev have since then been kept with the raja, first at Bansla and then at Kanker. The Chhote Pat Anga Dev is broken in one limb and is thus sometimes also referred to as Khanda Dev (the broken god). The 84 villages of Bhanupratap-pur claim and maintain ritual primacy in anga dev events in Kanker. The dev-majhi also recounted another story he had heard about how the royal anga dev came to be with the raja. In the time of raja Narharideo, there was a struggle between him and the Nahars over land in Garh Bansla. Since the anga dev of the Nahars, the Chhote and Bade Pat Anga Dev, were being unable to help the Nahars, they were set adrift in the river. Traveling down the river, the anga dev floated into the town of Kanker. The people of Kanker were blinded by the light contained in the floating brothers. When he was informed about this, Narharideo had them lifted out of the water and installed in his palace. The royal anga dev are often not given ritual precedence but are considered equal to other anga dev as in the case of Khada Dokra (Old Man-God), the anga dev of the Marai sub-group of the Gonds in Murdongri village in north Kanker. I was given the following account in the baithak of a jatra of the Marais at Murdongri.71 The Khada Dokra originally lived in Dhanora in Bastar. Once the raja of Bastar, angry with his gods because they had failed to bless him with a son, threw all of them into the river. The Khada Dokra, because of his power, survived and swam upstream. Impressed, the raja called him to his court where the anga dev promised that he could get him a son. Distrustful of the promise, the raja decided to imprison the anga dev for nine months, until his queen gave birth. Fearful that his promise might fail, the Khada Dokra managed to escape and fled northwards down the Keshkal valley to the kingdom of raja Komal Deo (1904–25)72 in Kanker where he was given refuge. The raja of Bastar sent horsemen to look for Khada Dokra but was not able to find him. Ever since, the Khada Dokra has managed his raaj-paat (rule) among the Marai folk and in Murdongri in Kanker with the agreement of the raja of Kanker who acknowledged the ancestral deity’s power over his people.

140

Aditya Pratap Deo

A closer relationship of an anga dev with the raja of Kanker, though also a tense one, can be found in the account given to me in the baithak of the dev-bazaar (fair of gods) of the Kaudo sub-group of the Gonds in Gada Gauri village of the Charama region of north Kanker.73 The Raj-Kunwar (prince) Anga Dev of the Kaudos presides over a group of 12 villages of mixed tribal and caste peasantry but in the dev-bazaar other specifically Kaudo anga dev from Bastar and elsewhere had also been invited. According to the account, the raaj-paat of Raj-Kunwar was given to him in Kanker by raja Narharideo when one day, Raj-Kunwar’s jeevranj (spirit) suddenly descended into the raja’s court in a flash of lightning. Some people in the baithak demurred with this version and said that the jeevranj had appeared in a Kaudo baithak in the raja’s Shitala temple in Kanker. In both cases, the raja was dazzled by the brilliance of the spirit but before he could do anything about it, Raj-Kunwar fled and hid in a koh (cave) in the village of Gada Gauri. “What if he had stayed on with the raja?” I asked. “Well,” a siyan shot back, “then he would have enjoyed thaat-baat (grandeur) like Chhote Pat but he would have been a prisoner of the raja!” I am interested here in the ways in which power and authority, and thus sovereignty, obtain differently in the popular Gond accounts of the past. In these accounts, unlike in the administrative records and colonial anthropological writings where “politics” and “religion” are sharply distinguished and “politics” is closed off to the people, sovereignty is multi-dimensional, locally-derived, divided, shared and contested through memories of migration, settlement, clan and phratry relationships, control of land and assertions of rule. Regimes of power get constructed through negotiations and changing relationships between the raja, ancestral spirits and the people, over a terrain of rivers and forests, through the acts of hunting, dancing and flight. The polity of princely Kanker is hardly the exclusive domain of the “state” but appears as a regime of tension-filled negotiations. The substance and nature of sovereignty is reworked quite dramatically. These accounts allow us to widen and deepen the discussion of state formation and tribal peoples in colonial India by providing us with alternate conceptions of polity and sovereignty in which the “state” is not a given finality and tribal peoples are not politically inert but active and creative in shaping the regimes of power they inhabit.

Notes 1 After the merger of their states with the Union of India, the former princes were officially referred to as “ex-rulers” until 1971, when the 26th Amendment to the Constitution of India abolished their privy purses and other privileges. 2 A variety of peoples in central India and its adjacent areas who are described as “Scheduled Tribes” (ST) in governmental classification. The ST population of Kanker is largely classified as “Gond.” 3 Dasehra is a major Hindu festival and is celebrated across India. Like in other places, in Kanker too it takes on a local dimension. 4 I have spoken to participants of madai and Dasehra extensively over several years. 5 The local administration organizes these events as cultural and religious functions and they are presented in the same way in locally written and popular histories like in J.R.

Of kings and gods: The archive of sovereignty 141 Valyani and V.D. Sahasi, Bastar aur Kanker Riyasat ka Rajnaitik evam Sanskritic Itihas (Kanker, 1998); by the same authors, Chhattisgarh ka Rajnaitik evem Sanskritic Itihas (Kanker, 1997). 6 Valyani and Sahasi, Bastar aur Kanker, 180–1. 7 Cf. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989). 8 See Valyani and Sahasi, Bastar aur Kanker. 9 Ibid. 10 A balanced treatment of what is ailing the study of princely states can be found in Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati, eds., India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism (New York, 2007). 11 Ibid. 12 This has been argued in Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Steputtat, eds., States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, 2001); also by the same authors, Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, 2005). 13 The use of the word “tribal” in this essay is only in order to contextualize my work in relation to a large body of work that is marked by it. The term itself is a highly problematic colonial construction that has passed into postcolonial statist and related usage with little questioning. 14. Prathama Banerjee, “Culture/Politics: the irresoluble double-bind of the Indian adivasi” in Gyanendra Pandey, ed., Subaltern Citizens: Investigations from India and the USA (New York, 2009). For the problem of the characterization of many colonized and subaltern populations as “primitive” and “pre-political,” see more generally the early interventions in Subaltern Studies, especially Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1983). 15 See Gyanendra Pandey’s Introduction to this volume. 16 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000); Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forest Frontiers and the Wilderness in Western India (New Delhi, 1999). 17 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 97–113. 18 Ibid., 112. 19 Skaria, Hybrid Histories. 20 “About Kanker,” http://kanker.nic.in, the official website of the Kanker District Administration. 21 Annual Administrative Report for Kanker State, 1941–42, IOR, V/10/1368, London: British Library. 22 Ibid. 23 http://kanker.nic.in. 24 Most of the other archival remains of the Kanker State comprise land records in the Kanker District Record Room of the Land Settlement documents from 1938 onwards and are mere data about land held by peasant cultivators. There are some other documents in the National Archive of India in New Delhi and in the British Library in London concerning matters of dynastic succession, including the dispute regarding the challenging of the adoption and subsequent succession of the last ruling chief of the Kanker State, Bhanu Pratap Deo. 25 Memorandum of Comments on the Administrative Report for Kanker State, 1941–44, File No. R-9–39/43–6431, D/3182, 1943–44, Sub-File: Memorandum from Resident to Crown Representative, Political Department, New Delhi, May 1943, New Delhi: National Archives of India. 26 John Harris, Power Matters: Essays on Institutions, Politics and Society in India (Delhi, 2006), 195. 27 Annual Administrative Reports for Kanker State, 1941–46, IOR, V/10/1368–72, London: British Library. 28 Ibid.

142

Aditya Pratap Deo

29 Max Weber, The Theory of Economic and Social Organization (New York, 1964), 156. 30 Memorandum of Comments, Sub-File: Notes and Orders, Dy. No. 4564, dated 21.4.43 from the Public Accounts Committee (R). 31 This is well argued by Hira Singh, “Colonial and Post-Colonial Historiography and the Princely States” in Ernst and Pati, eds., India’s Princely States, 15–29. 32 Nandini Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854–1006 (Delhi, 1997), 251–2. 33 Memorandum of Comments. 34 Ibid., Sub-File: Political Agent to the Secretary to the Resident of Eastern States, 24th December, 1943. 35 Memorandum of Comments. 36 Annual Administrative Report for Kanker State,1943–44, IOR/10/1370, London: British Library, 6–7. 37 Annual Administrative Report for Kanker State, 1944–45, IOR/10/1371, London: British Library, 34–5. 38 Memorandum of Comments, Sub-File: From the Political Agent to the Secretary of the Resident for the Eastern States, 4th January, 1945, Item 17. 39 Barbara Ramusack, The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire: Dissolution of Patron-Client System, 1914–39 (Columbus,1978), 9–13; Ernst and Pati, eds., India’s Princely States, 1–15. 40 Annual Administrative Report for Kanker State, 1943–44, 1. 41 Memorandum of Comments, Comments on Annual Administrative report for the year 1943–44, Item 28. 42 The Kanker State’s administration was in place till 1948. 43 Anga Dev Iqrarnama, 1.1–1.7, 1946–48, Private Papers, Kanker: Kanker Palace Library. 44 Very few mention their surnames and identify themselves by the names of their fathers. Post-1948, surnames are clearly and almost always mentioned. 45 Ibid. 46 The eldest queen of raja Komal Deo (1904–25) was from Badgaon, Odisha, hence “Badgahin” or “she who was from Badgaon”. The only known surviving queen after 1937, she resided in the main palace until her death in 1976. From around 1934 to 1943, she became the figure who represented the raja. She continued to be important thereafter as the custodian of the Chhote Pat Anga Dev. 47 This translation is not literal, and anticipates some of what I am going to say later about ancestral deity practices. 48 Banerjee, “Culture/Politics.” 49 Banerjee, “Culture/Politics.” 50 I am discussing the full implications of what I call the “Bastar model” for my study elsewhere. 51 W. V. Grigson, The Maria Gonds of Bastar (London, 1938), 193–207. 52 Ibid., 3–19. 53 Ibid., vi–vii. 54 Ibid., 193–207. 55 Ibid., 198. 56 Ibid. 57 Verrier Elwin, Maria Suicide and Murder (Bombay, 1943), 17. 58 Ibid., 174–224. 59 C. von Furer-Haimendorf, “The Cult of Clan Gods among the Raj-Gonds of Hyderabad” in Man in India, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Calcutta, June 1945, 149–86. 60 Ibid., 149. 61 Ibid., 154–5. 62 Ibid., 157, 186. 63 Ibid., 163.

Of kings and gods: The archive of sovereignty 143 64 Ibid., 149–86. 65 Ibid., 171. 66 Surajit Sinha, “State Formation and Rajput Myth in Tribal Central India” in Man in India, Vol. XXXXII, No. 1, Calcutta, Jan-March, 1962, 35–80. 67 Field Notes/Thema-Lendara/1/12. 68 Valyani and V.D. Sahasi, Bastar aur Kanker, 109–15. 69 Field Notes/Bhanupratap-pur/5/12. 70 Valyani and Sahasi, Bastar aur Kanker, 77–80. 71 Field Notes/Murdongri/5/12. 72 Valyani and Sahasi, Bastar aur Kanker, 126–32. 73 Field Note/Gada Gauri/5/12.

9

Geography’s myth The many origins of Calcutta Debjani Bhattacharyya

It follows that the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables. – Giambattista Vico1

This chapter is about stories—“strange” stories and narratives that disrupt the archive of our cities and the claims that inhere in them. It is also about ways of telling, the difficulties of metaphor, and about a reading practice that would not lead to a disenchantment of the worlds of those stories. In order to recount a narrative about Calcutta’s origin, I shall begin with a small vignette about the methods of telling: the eminent theatre director, playwright and founder of “third theatre” Badal Sircar and his theatre group Satabdi staged Sircar’s highly acclaimed, anti-establishment play Basi Khabar (“Stale [or, more idiomatically, ‘old’ or ‘antiquated’] News”) in 1977 in Calcutta. In this play a “killed man” wandered around the stage, walking, gesturing, trying to articulate something to the seven actors on the stage, reciting and reading the current newspaper headlines and enacting the events in successive acts. In a letter to theatre critic Richard Schechner written many years later, Sircar writes about his play: The “killed man” in our play wandered silently from time to time amongst the chorus of performers, sometimes breaking through, holding his bandaged right palm in front of the eyes of a performer to make him read something . . .2 Sircar adds: “It is not a theatre one can perform by ‘enacting’. It can only be performed by ‘state of being.’”3 The task of the killed man in the play was to invoke the space of Damini-Koh (an area in the Santhal Parganas, which was the site of the Santhal rebellion of 1855) into the living-present of the text and its performance.4 The “killed man,” therefore, entered the text/theatre-space to bring an untold history into the living present and offer a commentary on the methodology of story telling.5 Within the reality of the proscenium, the “killed man” performed that excess of reality that entered the realm of phantasm without offering the theatrical spectacles associated with it. Instead, Sircar’s play, situated in the interstices of history, reality and fiction, performs an opening by the spectral

Geography’s myth: The many origins of Calcutta 145 presence of the killed man in the text that refuses to be exorcised. The concern that pushes this chapter forward is the possibility of an enchanted history of space of Calcutta through the various narratives of its naming, and, if it were possible, how might we rethink questions of belonging, dwelling and owning space. Situated both inside and outside the text/theatre-space, the killed man in Sircar’s play utters the unfinalizable, thus resisting contextualization within the familiar narrative framework.6 There is a narrative force encapsulated in the figure of the “killed man,” what Jacques Derrida has called “the ungraspable visibility of the invisible” as something that needs to be acknowledged.7 In this chapter I shall turn to a story about ghost canals under the city that challenges the familiar narrative genres and historical discourses. It is rejected as a trivial tale or a fantastic anecdote, outside the realms of the archive. However, it is precisely acknowledging such narratives, as Gyanendra Pandey argues, that is at the heart of the project of unarchiving histories: “the very process of archiving is accompanied by a process of ‘un-archiving,’ rendering many aspects of social, cultural, political relations in the past and the present as [. . .] inconsequential, and therefore unhistorical.”8 Acknowledging the “unhistorical” or “un-archivable” aspects of the archive requires a radical methodological rethinking and is not merely an additive project.9 By resisting any attempt at a closure in history, these spectral elements open up historiography to a possible disclosure. Sircar’s killed man, or the ghost canals of Calcutta interrupt our histories, and intimate other pasts. In this chapter, I discuss various versions of the origin of the name of Calcutta and the debates around it, not in order to search or argue for many origins, but instead to read the various propositions side by side and ask whether the fantastic and history can overlap in narrating the history of a city. Borrowing from psychoanalytic theories on fantasy, Joan Scott argues that “fantasies are myths cultures develop to answer questions about the origins of subjects, sexual difference, and sexuality.”10 Furthermore, Scott has shown how the theory of fantasy is deployed to make coherent originary claims about our past, which is quite contrary to what I argue in the following sections. By turning to the fantastic, we can unsettle the originary claims made on the space of the city.11 However, in order to do that, we need to turn to the epigraph with which I began. In The New Science (1744), Giambattista Vico stressed the mythopoeic premise of scientific knowledge, and argued that human knowledge was deeply metaphorical.12 While Enlightenment thought faced myth as the enemy that needed to be tamed by reason, to be grasped and explained or explained away, Vico’s fascination with myths took a different route in showing that mythos formed the basis of logos in Western thought. Without summarizing a rich argument, but gleaning what is important for this chapter, it must be mentioned that, according to Vico, Enlightenment thought operates through “intelligible universals” concepts or abstractions that moved from particular to universals through the logic of the excluded middle, while mythic thought employed “imaginative universals” (generi fantastici).13 Contrary to conventional classical notions of rhetoric, which view metaphor as an “irrational” relationship between two things already available to man

146

Debjani Bhattacharyya

conceptually, for Vico metaphor makes it possible to comprehend anything at all through the imagistic capacities. It is not based on analogy, but it is constitutive of the method of comprehending through feeling.14 Therefore myth, according to Vico, is not just about form, but also about content—it renders the world interpretable rather than merely offering analogical description. Thus, following Vico, perhaps we need to attend to the metaphoricity at the heart of the trivial narrative.15 It is not a personal whim or idiosyncrasy that leads me to turn to originary theories about Calcutta’s name. Instead, my interest arises out of a trait peculiar to nearly all histories of Calcutta, ranging from municipal histories to amateur histories, to more rigorous scholarly histories of Calcutta: each of these varied forms of history have the peculiar attribute of dedicating a chapter or at least a substantial section to the origin of the name of Calcutta. In doing so, they typically weigh in on what they take to be the most “convincing” theory in order to set the date and thereby bestow historical relevance upon the geographical space of the city. While earlier theories were more anecdotal in nature, the later theories incrementally became infused with scientificity. As I will show, the ones that come down to us as presenting the only possible account for the origin of the name are the ones that most successfully unground previous theories through a kind of inductive reasoning that weeds out both improbabilities, as well as the competing narratives that do not stand the test of rational narratological framing. Perhaps, more so than the actual content of these various narratives, all of which can be quite fantastic, the strength of their claims most often rests in what can be told and cognitively comprehended vis-à-vis what can only be appreciated within the affective register, through wonder and disbelief. Strangely, what we are left with are various contending theories about the space of Calcutta, a space which has been repeatedly emptied out of its historicality in this search for origins.

Historical closures Early propositions about the origin of Calcutta’s name ascribed in a somewhat facile manner the act of naming to Job Charnock’s letters, and thus constructed the British origin of the city. Meanwhile, the numerous contending debates in the twentieth century pointed towards varied directions in a language of scientificity, a language geologically rich in “evidence” and etymological complexity. Although the name “Calcutta” in this orthography finds its first documentable mention in the letter of Charles Eyre and Roger Bradyll to Job Charnock dated June 22, 1688,16 early British mentions of the place were variously spelled as Calicata, Kaleaghatta, Calicotta and even Golgottah and so on.17 Only after 1689 did Job Charnock use the name of Calcutta in official documents: any reference before that tends to use the name Chuttanutee (Sutanati).18 Charnock’s orthography of “Calcutta” came to be standardized from c. 1704 onwards in the wills of the servants of East India Company.19 While the moment of orthographical standardization became coterminous with the moment of the founding of colonial Calcutta in the received literature, the serious and varied debates about the origin of the name are almost two centuries

Geography’s myth: The many origins of Calcutta 147 younger than the orthographic stabilization of the name. Nisith Ranjan Ray, a historian of Calcutta commented that, since the publication of the Census Report of Henry Beverly, Esq. in 1876, there has been a significant production of writings on the history of the city. However, he claims that such writings are always repetitive: They tell the story of how Charnock “a block of rough British manhood” bodily, as if, lifted a city from out of a marshy unhealthy place on the river, how the Settlement grew to be the centre of a mighty empire and a city of palaces, how successive British rulers adorned the city with splendid edifices, on models imported from their homeland, how the city grew to be the busiest trade emporium, east of the Suez, how streets and squares were laid, and above all, how it grew to be the nerve-centre of cultural activities. Behind the entire facade built by the British writers, and following them the Indian authors, there lurks, dim and distant, the shadow of the Indian town in Calcutta and its inhabitants. Not only authors, but artists too, treated the Indian town as out of bounds. The picture which thus emerges is largely that of a colonial city par excellence—exotic and even bizarre.20 Ray’s statement pithily summarizes the tendency of the early colonial history of Calcutta. While popular British myths often recount a story of an encounter and misunderstood conversation between Job Charnock and a farmer resulting in the birth of the name,21 Orientalist theory ascribes the origin of the name to a Puranic Hindu legend, sanctifying the city by placing it among the fifty-one pithas (sacred Hindu sites), the temple of Kalighat in present Calcutta being one of them.22 Legend has it that the goddess Kali, or Sati, was dismembered into fiftyone pieces and these pieces were scattered through the world; and wherever the pieces fell, it became a sacred Hindu site. One of her left toes, it is recounted, fell in a place called Kalighat, which later became a famous Shaivite pilgrimage site and a temple was built there. According to this line of argument, Kalikata (another name for Calcutta) is a derivative of the term Kalikshetra, meaning the abode of Kali, linked to the name of the sacred pitha of Kalighat. One of the early proponents of this line of argument is A.K. Ray.23 However, both Sanskrit scholars and the social historian P. Thankappan Nair have shown how the text of Kalikapurana dealing with this legend does not mention any place called Kalikshetra, the name from which the word Kalighat and later Kalikata is said to have derived.24 As I will show later, etymologist Suniti Kumar Chattopadhyay later critiqued this line of argument in a series of exchanges with the social historian Radharaman Mitra during the 1950s. Two early Bengali literary sources are also often referred to in order to support this argument, both of which mention the presence of a pilgrimage and trading town in the site of present-day Calcutta.25 However, as Radharaman Mitra and many others have shown, this argument is part of the Brahmanical revival of Bengal’s history.26 If textual sources are what one must go by for the time being, it must be pointed out that the earliest extant mention of Calcutta in any language

148

Debjani Bhattacharyya

is in the Persian language, contained in a Mughal transfer deed, or bainama from 1698, whereby Prince Azim-uz-Shan, grandson of Emperor Aurangazeb, granted the zamindari (landholding) rights to the English over the villages of Sutanati, Kalkatah and Govindapur.27 The nishaan, or the original document authorized by Azim-uz-Shan granting the British zamindari rights to the three towns of Dihi Calcutta, Sutanutti and Govindpur has been lost.28 Early revenue records, mainly the izaradars and ihtimandars of the 24 Parganas (administrative units) showing the annual lands for the later half of eighteenth century still reveal that Dihi Kalikata was part of the Pargana Adilabad and many of the scattered villages under the 24 parganas were later brought into the jurisdiction of Calcutta. There was a Calcutta pargana, which finds mention in 1758, but it did not contain the village Kalikata. A part of the village Govindapore was in the Calcutta pargana. The localities of Sealdah, Tiljala, and Ultadanga were among the villages in the Calcutta parganas.29 This confused and diffuse set of references very clearly points to the futility of even debating the origin of the name or its likely derivation from earlier homonyms. There is, however, an alternative explanation that has emerged more recently: economic and social histories argue that the earliest inhabitants of this area were agriculturalists and fisherman, and the weavers and the traders living in the three villages over which zamindari rights were granted to the British. These inhabitants formed a vibrant “bazaar”—a form of market settlement which became the model for settlement in the predominantly indigenous parts of Calcutta—throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and early-twentieth century.30 Among scholarly debates on the origins of the name, one of the most protracted debates was that between Suniti Kumar Chatterjee and Radharaman Mitra.31 Chatterjee begins by refuting the theory of Kalikata being a corruption of the word “Kalighat,” for he claims that the original and the derivative words could not exist side by side. Somewhat surprisingly, he turns to chemistry and geological findings to establish the “pure Bengali” origin of the name Kalikata, which comes from the word Kali, a term for wetlime, and kata which could mean six different and equally convincing things according to him, most important of them being viz. factories where shells were burnt to produce lime. He then goes on to prove the existence of a thriving lime trade in Bengal by referring to names of streets and squares named after various versions of lime, or chuna: Chunagully and Chunaritolla, for example.32 After almost twenty years, Mitra entered into the debate and categorically refuted all the existing theories, specifically dismantling Chatterjee’s theory in a Bengali journal called Ekshan. Mitra’s critique, in turn, is followed by a rebuttal from Chatterjee in the very next issue of Ekshan. Each argument in this exchange becomes more “scientific” in depth, more etymologically sophisticated, and is notable for the almost acrobatic shoring up of the official archive and evidentiary claims. In the din of these arguments, the specificity of Calcutta, the story of a city, and its character are all lost, leaving us with little more than dates, etymological theories, trade routes, geological facts and a table of historical documents. The accumulation of these various debates takes on such formidable proportions that most histories of Calcutta, amateur, municipal or academic, begin by paying

Geography’s myth: The many origins of Calcutta 149 lip service to these theories and follow up by selecting the most recent and most “rational” arguments as the likely explanation for the origin of the name of the city, each account thereby seeking closure in the debates.33 However, what is worth mentioning here is that in the narratives accounting for the various threads of the debate about the naming of Calcutta, there is often an anecdote, glossed over or summarily dismissed as one of those fantastic anecdotes, or trivial stories that are often in circulation. In the following section I would like to focus on this seemingly fantastic anecdote.

Historical disclosure This “trivial” narrative, which forms a boundary to the archive,34 claims that Calcutta consisted of many canals and fishermen’s villages, and that—to quote one typical account—the earliest settlers of Calcutta were “aboriginal peoples like the Jeliyas, Duliayas, Nikaris and Bagdis—fisherman, falconers and hunters by profession.”35 A.K. Ray, in his introduction to the 1901 census of Calcutta mentions this and immediately follows this statement, by telling us how this is a narrative within the genre of “dark legend” and not an “enlightened historical discourse.” This would appear to be about all we can discern of Calcutta between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, though [sic] the gloom of the traditions of Bengal and the mist of its social chronicles, before the light of history dawned upon its soil and illumined the horizon with the advent of the British merchants.36 Most scholars, like Ray, refute this story as misleading, without necessarily going into detailed treatment of the narrative. Interestingly, it is only in the genre of the essay that the narrative is dwelt upon as one of the possible beginnings of Calcutta. In their collection of essays about Calcutta, Atul Sur and Sripantha (Nikhil Sarkar) recount that, according to this particular narrative, the above-mentioned population were the original inhabitants of the place and that the name originates from the canals they dug throughout the city for navigation—canals in Bengali being khal and the act of digging them being kata.37 To attest to the likely authenticity of this narrative, they mention the presence of Creek Row, a street running through the heart of Calcutta which stands on top of a now disappeared man-made canal. Atul Sur adds the following details to this particular history of the ghost canals that have disappeared under the city, yet still haunt the naming narrative of Calcutta: eta golpo noy, nichak oitihashik satya je aaj anandabajar patrikar barikhana je bhoomikhander opore dnariye aache, tari taladeshe diye ek samay prabahita hoto kalikatar prachin khalta. [This is not a story, it is a historical truth, that the office of the (newspaper house) Anandabajar Patrika is built upon a land under which the ancient canal of Calcutta used to flow].38 [emphasis mine]

150

Debjani Bhattacharyya

Sur can only harness the narrative into the genre of the essay by discarding its status as a story and ascribing to it “historical truth” through the presence of a geographical trace. He deploys the word prachin [ancient] to bring forth the sense of historical consciousness and the passage of time,39 and recounts further details to depict the subterranean riverine landscape on which the city now stands, all the while trying to grapple with the verifiability of his proposition. This particular story of canals is also narrated in the swanger-gaan, the songs and dances of the kaibarta groups (fisherman caste). Before I turn to the work by an amateur historian of the kaibarta caste to explore how memory, fantasy and oral traditions are employed to narrate history, it is first necessary to say a few words about shong and shonger-gaan (songs accompanying shong performances). Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the popular culture of Calcutta was comprised of folk elements, which followed the courtly traditions of Bengal mixed in with the motifs of city. These traditions were mainly practiced by the artisanal classes. As Sumanta Banerjee points out, there were primarily three kinds of popular performances: firstly, bratas, also called panchalis (verbal recitations) performed by women during rituals as well as verbal compositions kobi-gaan and kathakathan, which were mainly poetic contests. Secondly pantomimes, theatrical performances in the streets and market places called swang; and thirdly various forms of humor, proverbs and doggerels. Among the spectacular performances, shongs and shonger-gaan were the most popular, and were mostly performed by people from the jelepara (fisherman colony) and kansaripara (brazier colony). The satirical performances are perhaps some of the richest sources of the social world of Calcutta’s early history.40 Sankar Dnere, an historian of the fishermen inhabitants of Calcutta, who claims to have descended from one of the earliest shong performers, elaborates upon the subterranean riverine landscape of the city in a book published in 2007. Although he designates his book as a social and political history of the old Calcutta’s fisherman colony, he nonetheless calls it a work of memory (smriticharan) written out of the desire to textualize a world he knows, as well as a world that has disappeared.41 In the title and throughout his book, he calls the jelepara a part of adi Calcutta and not puratan/purano Calcutta. While puratan/purano means old, temporally adi comes before purano and can be translated as ancient, primordial, or even “ur.” Although a descendant of the early fishermen settlers of the city or even the ur-city, he does not, unlike Sur, stake any claim to these originary name narratives. Furthermore, he does not try to establish his people as the original inhabitants the area. For him this story exists among and alongside the many things narrated about the city within the kaibarta caste group. Indeed, as he mentioned in a personal interview, he believes that Calcutta is said in many ways.42 Moreover, Dnere’s narrative is a history redolent with the disappeared rivers and canals of Calcutta, not in order to attest to any geographical veracity to his historical claim, but instead to depict how the space is experienced and remembered by the people of his caste-group. The following phrase is scattered and repeated like a refrain throughout his long and winding narrative:

Geography’s myth: The many origins of Calcutta 151 There is a saying in English that—the fish follows the water and the fisherman follows the fish. This means that wherever there are rivers, canals, streams, there are fish, and the fishermen always inhabit spaces close to those water bodies. The present area of Creek Row and Lenin Sarani was once a canal. [. . .] Bhagirathi [a disappeared river] once came up to the present New Secretariat Building. From here, meaning from Chandpal Ghat, this canal would flow upstream towards the West. It would flow through Hastings Street and take a turn at the present Registry Office towards Great Eastern, Anandabajar Patrika Office, to the north of Chadni Chowk and flow over Wellington Square through Creek Row and Sealdah and flow into the Salt Lakes. In those days Salt Lake came up to Sealdah. It was a broad canal. [. . .] In 1737, during a massive thunderstorm, huge boats capsized into the canal, giving the area around Subodh Mallik Square the name Dingibhanga [literally meaning: broken-boats].43 The rivers and canals take over and lead the narrative to mark the fluid space, always shifting and moving. In this account, many of the place names are reminiscent of the disappeared riverine culture of the place. This simple expressionist recollection does not ask to be taken as a historical narrative, nor does it seek to be believed. However, if one listens closely to this “trivial” narrative, one hears echoes of other stories, stories which carry with them echoes of the everyday life around the riverine culture and the histories of the city that have been handed down. This is the only account of the origin of the name of the city where the historicality and texture of the space is alive within the narrative.44 A name like Dingibhanga—broken boats—provides traces of life and loss in this riverine landscape, traces of a reticular pattern left by human labor and frustration upon the land. According to the theorist of space Henri Lefebvre, such “traces embody the ‘values’ assigned to particular routes: danger, safety, waiting, promise.”45 These traces speak to the texture of the city, rather than merely to its textual presence and afterlife. What possibilities does this anecdote open up within the terrain of historiography of urban Calcutta? What manner of historical knowledge is kept valid and alive by not seeking to resolve the tensions that emerge in the debates? Instead of treating this narrative as a trivial or even fantastic anecdote and marshaling a great amount of evidentiary material to prove either its veracity or its failure as a scientific claim, I instead want to open up the possibility of a different historical reading of the narrative. This reading, instead of seeking a closure will open up a historical disclosure. The narrative elicits different kinds of response to the object and the knowledge that the object can produce—a response of wonder perhaps. In a discussion of wonder, Ranajit Guha shows us how the problem of credibility becomes acute precisely because the correspondence between knowledge and its object, between intellect and the thing it wishes to grasp, comes unhinged.46 This unhinging enables a different form of historical opening—one that is not a metaphysical grasping of the purported object of historical knowledge. It is within such an opening that another form of history can happen, one that attempts to go

152

Debjani Bhattacharyya

beyond the boundaries of the archive of town plans, municipal papers, governmental debates, and the built environment. Such a history is attentive to the ephemeral—to the stories often told about the city, even perhaps those that are considered “trivial tales” people narrate about their city. The city is produced in the moment of the telling, and those moments of telling contain new ways of thinking about space, land, ownership and belonging. This is perhaps the moment where the collusion of the disciplines of Geography and History needs to be unpacked. I do not wish to revisit the arguments about the birth of colonial design upon the world, and the birth of Reason in History and inductive reasoning in sciences, especially Geography.47 Suffice it to say that the tools of inductive reasoning that are employed in the arguments about the origin of the name of Calcutta reduce and erase the sense of “elsewhere” that is present in the “where” of our locations. These “elsewheres” haunt the narrative of the city. The above-mentioned historical accounts of the origin of Calcutta’s name fail to accommodate the poetic substrate that is present in Dnere’s narrative. If within a conventional historiographical narrative an event derives significance by being able to fit into the representative narrative account, the radical potentiality of this account lies in its being unintelligible when narrated within such rational historical frameworks. Though perhaps of no apparent historical importance, with very little geographical “evidence” to support its entry into the realm of history, there comes the space of an “elsewhere” called Kalaburo in the history of Calcutta in Dnere’s account. It is of little interest to me where its actual geographical location was, and whether we can cull various archival citations to celebrate its presence. For what is certain is that this space exists in stories handed down to the inhabitants of jelepara, and it is a story often narrated among them. Indeed, Sankar Dnere, even claims to have visited the place in 1936 as a very young boy. In these stories, Kalaburo was a village linked to Kolkata on one side through the Bhagirathi (the river that has disappeared); on the other side, the village was linked to the sea, the water flowing through it was the salt-water of the seas, and the fishermen of the jelepara bought sea-fish (bhetki) from the boatmen of Kalaburo to sell in the Hogg Market in Calcutta. Kalaburo was situated by a river (whose name is never mentioned in the narrative), and one could walk two miles to the Ghuntiyari Sarif station on the local train line to Canning, a port town close to Calcutta. That is as much as we can gather about the site’s geographical location from Dnere’s account. This village neither had a pond, nor a tap for potable water, and the villagers would send a huge boat with drums to the south where there was a pond to collect drinking water for the villagers every morning. However, due to inadequate dredging and the expansion of the city, the Bhagirathi became a subterranean stream and was officially declared dead by 1926. In the jelepara narratives, the disappearance of the river is narrated metaphorically through tales of a dwindling trade in sea-fish, and the slow death of the village of Kalaburo. In 1947 a boatmen from Kalaburo, who had become a religious mendicant, came to the jelepara and narrated the story of the slow disappearance of the village upon losing its

Geography’s myth: The many origins of Calcutta 153 connection to Calcutta in 1943. The dates are important since there are many narratives to be heard within this story—the death of villages during the Bengal famine of 1943, the wandering refugee following the partition of 1947—although Kalaburo could not possibly be anywhere in the eastern part of undivided Bengal, and neither could it have been significantly affected by Partition. It is perhaps not for the historian to seek to correlate and establish one line of explanation for the appearance of the boatman from Kalaburo within the urban space, as Kalaburo receded out of geographical horizon of Bengal. In fact, the space of Kalaburo haunts the text of Dnere’s account; it de-synchronizes the space of Calcutta, introducing an element of anachronism, an element of unfinalizability. These ghosts within the archive need not be exorcised, need not be explained away. Indeed, perhaps different histories are even buried in the ghost canals that gradually disappeared under the expanding city. In our search for a line of reasoning to rationalize this story, we are perhaps losing other ways of remembering. Thus, following Agha Shahid Ali’s statement, “my memory keeps getting in the way of your history,”48 one must remind oneself that a city is made of the myriad stories about it—and we must open ourselves to those stories, their echoes and their pauses. Kalaburo, like the space of Damini Koh, are those ellipses that lie un-archived in our histories and discourses. These echoes and ellipses require a different practice of reading.49

Conclusion Unlike in the other narratives, in Dnere’s account the claim of semantic metonymy that would transform the narrative of Kalaburo into a national drama is absent, for his account of the fishermen’s memories, claims to spaces, and Kalaburo’s destruction are neither fictions, nor are they histories of the state. While it is easy in our scientific world to reject this narrative of Kalaburo, I want to ask what would happen if one were to choose to remain with the fantasy geography of the jelepara accounts of the city.50 Let me now return then to the epigraph at the beginning of the paper. There can be many possible readings of the narratives regarding the origins of Calcutta. Read in a certain way, the content of Suniti Kumar Chatterjee’s argument about the lime trade could sound just as fantastic as the one about Kalaburo’s existence. The difference, however, perhaps lies in the rational language employed by Chatterjee in comparison to Dnere’s metaphorical account. While Dnere’s account textualizes an oral tradition, the rest of the arguments turn to the text as the source of origin and authority, thereby textualizing the origin of a geographical space and producing its textual history. Dnere’s account refuses to fix an origin, and his narrative is as fluid as the space he narrates. Moving beyond the textual life of Calcutta, the texture of the city comes alive in the symbols and narrative strategies deployed in Dnere’s account. The riverine landscape, but also names like Dingibhanga haunt the history of the city. These names and the stories that are embedded in them tell a different story of belonging, refuse to make fixed claims on the geography and remain alert to a certain noncalendrical temporality of the space. This is a story that is keenly aware of the

154

Debjani Bhattacharyya

claims that the river makes on the land, and knows how to read the history of space in human labor—literally in the canals that were dug, in khal-kata. It is important at this juncture to insert a cautionary note and make clear that this paper is not claiming mythologization of a place, nor is it claiming the upper hand of “myth” over “history.” We are all too keenly aware as a result of the Babri-Masjid-Ram-Janmabhoomi debates where such a project can end. When I use the term “myth,” I do not use it in the conventional euhemeristic sense, whereby myths are held as traditional accounts of real events. What I am calling for is a practice of attending to the mythical mentality that makes sense of place through the metaphoricity of language—a critical awareness that Vico brought to the reading of myths that can open up a new methodological proposition for history and the archive.51 Vico proposed myths in opposition to Cartesian abstractions of concepts, but he proposed myths as a way of “thinking through things” and this is perhaps where the originality as well as the confusion of New Science lay.52 Throughout The New Science Vico stresses the importance of the mythic mentality, the logic of imagination, the role of metaphor in the formation and development of language, laws, customs, social forms and places.53 In order to undertake such a task, Vico underlines the significance of “imaginative universality,” by which he means the ability for imagistic or metaphorical thought.54 It is precisely at this point that the question of place becomes critical to understanding Vico’s thought. In conclusion, I would like to suggest that a return to the mythopoeic substrate of our geographical knowledge is needed to write different histories of space and of land, but also in order to understand the question of ownership and landed property differently. If, as Ranajit Guha has shown in his early works, the first colonial histories of Bengal began with the precise motivation to establish land rights for the purposes of the Permanent Settlement,55 then we need different histories in order to begin to grasp the limited nature of property and ownership and heterogeneous ways of belonging. In his analysis of the collusion of colonial history in the expansion of imperialism, Guha reveals the direct links between the project of Permanent Settlement in Bengal and early colonial history. As he shows, the mastery of languages and the labyrinths of Persian estate documents was only a small part of the challenge posed to the British officials of the Bengal Presidency. It was only part of the difficulty that they could not easily master the languages in which the ancient and medieval texts relating to the laws of property were written; for tradition recorded only in memory and customs embedded in a variety of local usages wielded an authority equal to that of any written code.56 I am interested in opening up the term “local usages” and languages of belonging that do not strictly conform either to the traditional power-base of landed proprietorship or the rights-based liberal discourse of private property ownership. The challenge, to put it another way, is to write the history of property through

Geography’s myth: The many origins of Calcutta 155 modes of everyday and ordinary forms of belonging and claims that border the historical archive.57

Notes 1 Giambattista Vico, The New Science [Translation of the third edition, 1744], trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, 1968) § 51, Bk. I. 2 Badal Sircar, “A Letter from Badal Sircar” in The Drama Review, Vol 26, No. 2 Intercultural Performance: Summer 1982. 3 Sircar, “A Letter.” In his Azad Memorial Lectures, he stressed the need to develop new forms of communication within theatre that went beyond the standard format of the proscenium theatre. For more, see Ella Dutta’s “Introduction” in Badal Sircar, Three Plays (Kolkata, 1983). 4 Damini-Koh covers an area of 1,356 square miles in Santhal Parganas in eastern India. It was a forested area cleared by the tribal populations called Santhals living there under harsh conditions of exploitation by the British and the native Mahajans for plantation as well as to lay the lines of Eastern Railways. Governor-General Lord Canning described Damini-Koh thusly: “On the left of Bahawa lies the Damini-Koh, distinguished for its fine scenery; but the hills have been much stripped of trees, in order to supply charcoal to the iron smelters of Birbhum.” Anon. “Rajmahal, Its Railway and Historical Association: Lord Canning’s Speech at the Opening of the Rajmahal Railway,” in Calcutta Review, Vol. XXXVI, March 1861, 121. 5 One of Badal Sircar’s most important contributions was to re-imagine the proscenium by taking his plays out of the stage into the factories, parks, street corners, slums, putting them in the midst of the people. Sircar, a town-planner by training, was extremely imaginative and experimental in his use of space in his theatre. 6 Mikhail Bhaktin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, 1984), 58–62. 7 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London, 2006), 7. Derrida stresses the importance of acknowledging the inheritances that haunt our discourses and histories. 8 Gyan Pandey, Chapter 1 of this volume. 9 My arguments on the archive build upon the works of Gyan Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stanford, 2005); Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (Delhi, 1995); Ajay Skaria Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (Delhi, 2008) and Anjali Arondekar For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Raleigh, 2009). 10 Joan Scott, “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter 2001), 184–204, 288. I would like to thank Lynne Huffer for drawing my attention to this rich discussion of the relation between feminist history and fantasy. 11 Drawing heavily upon psychoanalytic theory, Scott shows how fantasy operates through tightly condensed narrative with the final (but unsatisfiable) goal towards an imagined wholeness or coherence. I am, instead, using the category of fantastic, i.e. a narrative that is categorized sometimes as fantastic and sometimes too trivial— the narrative of ghost canals—to intimate other imaginings of space and belonging to the city. 12 For a discussion of Vico and historiography see Ernst Cassirer’s discussion of the question of history in Vico’s understanding of myths in the following works: The Problem of Knowledge, Vol. 4, trans. W.H. Woglom and C.W. Hendel (New Haven, 1950); “Descartes, Leibniz and Vico,” in Symbol, Myth and Culture, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven, 1979), especially 102–5; see also Hayden White Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973). As

156

13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24 25

26 27

Debjani Bhattacharyya

White points out (52), “Vico alone in his time perceived that the historical problem was precisely that of determining the extent to which a purely ‘fabulous’ or ‘mythical’ apprehension of the world might be adequate, by any criterion of rationality, as a basis for understanding a specific kind of historical life and action. [. . .] The Enlighteners, because they viewed the relationship of reason to fantasy in terms of an opposition rather than as a part-whole relationship, were unable to formulate this question in a historiographically profitable way.” Vico, The New Science, § 349. For a detailed and seminal discussion of Vico’s theory of metaphor see Donald Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination, 69–85. Donald Kunze has called the New Science “truly a science of the a prioris of human experience, and it takes the notion of a priori in both (1) an historical sense, by considering the nature of primitive thought, and (2) a logical sense, by finding the power of metaphor beneath even modern thought.” Donald Kunze, “Giambattista Vico as a Philosopher of Place: Comments on the Recent Article by Mills,” in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1983), 237–48, 241. For a discussion of the metaphor-metonymy axis that defines conventional rhetoric and how Vico’s methods differ from them see Hayden White, Metahistory, 31–3, especially the long footnote n.13. For a detailed discussion on metaphoricity see, Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago 1982 [1972]), 207–71 and “The Retrait of Metaphor” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford 2007), 48–80. Records of Fort St. George: Letters to Fort St. George for 1688, Public Sundries No. 3, Madras 1915, 91 (WBSA); Tarun Kumar Mukhopahyay, Hickey’s Bengal Gazette: Contemporary Life and Events in Calcutta (Calcutta 1988). Beverly, H., Report on the Town of Calcutta taken on April 6th 1876, Bengal Secretariat Press (WBSA). P. Thankappan Nair, Calcutta: The Origin of the Name (Calcutta, 1985), 2–3. C.R. Wilson, Early Annals of the English in Bengal, Vol. 1, (Calcutta, 1900), 221. Nisith Ranjan Ray, “Introduction” to A.K. Ray, Short History of Calcutta: Towns and Suburbs, Census VII, Part 1, 1901 (Calcutta, 1901), vii–viii. As the story goes, Job Charnock asked a farmer what the name of the place was. On being posed a question in an unknown tongue, the farmer thought it might have to do with his stack of rice and said “kal kata”—which means he cut them the day before. Such stories abound about the naming of colonial spaces (e.g. Guatemala) and what such narratives capture is the essence of the colonial encounter—the inability to understand the space the colonizers were to rule. Wilson, Early Annals of English in Bengal, 129–33. Other than the many Tantric texts which A.K. Ray’s Short of History of Calcutta draws upon, his is the most significant history arguing for the origin of the name of Calcutta as a corruption of the word “Kalikshetra.” There have been studies going back to ancient Sanskrit texts like Kavirama’s Digvijaya Prakasha to search for the origin of the name of Calcutta and testify to both its ancient as well as primarily Hindu origin. For more on this see also, Nair, Origin of the Name, 7–8. Nair, Origin of the Name, 7–8. Among the two puranic texts, one is Bipradas Pipilai, “Manasa-Vijaya” in Mansamangal Kabya (dated. 1495–96). This is cited in Subodh Chandra Sengupta and Anjali Bose eds., Sansad Bangali Charitabhidhan (Calcutta, 1976). Scholars of Bengali literary history cast doubt about the date of composition and ascribe it to mid-seventeenth century. The other text is Mukundaram Charabarty, Chandi Mangal (Kavikangkan Chandi) (Calcutta, 1963). Radharaman Mitra, “Kalikata’r Naam Sankranto,” Ekshan, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1970. Nair, Origin of the Name, 3–7. Nair also mentions that there were debates between the three translators of Ain-i-Akbari, viz. H. Blockmann, H.S Jarret and Jadunath Sarkar

Geography’s myth: The many origins of Calcutta 157

28

29 30

31 32

33

34

35 36 37

38 39

about the reading of a particular line within the text debating whether the name of the place under discussion is Kalna or Kalkatta. For details, see Nair, Origin of the Name, 4–5. Nisith Ranjan Ray also mentions that the earliest Persian mention of Calcutta is found in Raja Todar Mall’s Asl-i-Jumma Tumar, in Calcutta the Profile of a City, (Calcutta, 1986), 5. The Persian origin is also attested in the writings of Sripantha Kalikata (Calcutta, 2006), 2 Radha Raman Mitra, Kalikata Darpan (Calcutta, 1986), 7. Standard historical works take this as the beginning of the colonial history of urban Calcutta, however this assumption is based on the bainama (sale deed) and not the nishaan which has been lost. A copy of the Bainama, or deed of purchase from the Savana Mazumdar dated November 9th, 1698 is preserved at the British Museum (Addit. MSS 24039). See Durgaprasad Bhattachara and Archana Bhattacharya, “Records relating to Calcutta, 1750–1800” in Proceedings of the Forty-Seventh Session, Vol. XLVII, Indian Historical Records Commission, Delhi May 1981, 111–17. Durgaprasad Bhattacharya and Archana Bhattacharya, “Records relating to Calcutta, 1750–1800” in Proceedings of the Forty-Seventh Session, Vol. XLVII, Indian Historical Records Commission, Delhi May 1981, 11–17. Pradip Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta, 1978), 16–17, Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteen-Century Calcutta (Calcutta, 1998), 20; for a detailed account of the emergence of the neighborhood of Bhawanipur in Kolkata and its growth around trading centers see Keya Dasgupta, “Genesis of a Neighbourhood: The Mapping of Bhabanipur.” Occasional Paper 175, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (March 2003). Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, “Kalikatar Naam” in Sahitya Parisad Patrika 45th Year, No. 1, 1955 [BS 1345], later republished in Desh, March 9,1968. In order to straighten out any contradictions in his account and produce a neat line of argument for the origin of name along economic and trade lines, he refers to the name of Sutanati, one of the villages which comprise modern Calcutta, which attests to the presence of cotton trade. He then refers to various place names in modern-day India which attest to those places as site of trade. Descriptive Guide Book to Calcutta and its Environs, in Fifteenth Session of the Indian Science Congress (Calcutta, 1928); P.C. Bagchi ed, The Second City of the Empire, in Twenty-fifth Session of the Indian Science Congress Association, (Calcutta, 1938); S.N. Sen ed., Calcutta, in Thirty-ninth Session of the Indian Science Congress, (Calcutta, 1952). The contents of all these books remain the same with mere stylistic changes. The section on the history of Calcutta with its subsection on the origin of the name comes down to us unchanged. Similar narratives about the origin of the name of Calcutta are also found in S.W. Goode, Municipal Calcutta: Its Institution in their Origin and Growth (Edinburgh, 1916), 1–4. Pandey points out that it is not always the unsayable that is exiled from the archive, but rather the common-place and the trivial: “What I want to do in the following pages is to draw attention to another boundary of history and the archive, a boundary marked not by the exile—a position outside society and, thereby, history—but by the ordinary, the everyday, the ever-present, yet trivialized or ‘trifling’: exiled within. This boundary or limit is formed by prejudices, procedures and activities so fundamental as to not even be noticed.”; Chapter 1, this volume. A.K. Ray, Towns and Suburbs: Short History of Calcutta, (Calcutta, 1901), 5. A.K. Ray, Towns and Suburbs, 25. Nisith Ranjan Ray, Calcutta the Profile of a City (Calcutta, 1986); Atul Sur, Kalikata’r Chalchitra, (Calcutta, 1982), 10–13; Sripantha, Kalikata, 5–7; Shankar De (Dnere), Samajik O Rajnaitik Prekhapete Jele Kaibarta: Adi Kolkatar Jelepara, Jelepara-r Swang (Kolkata, 2006). Sur, Kalikatar Chalchitra, 10. Prathama Banerjee, “Introduction,” Politics of Time: “Primitives” and History-writing in a Colonial Society (Delhi, 2006).

158

Debjani Bhattacharyya

40 Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Cultures in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (Calcutta. 1989), 78–146; while his work focuses on the practices and performances, others have worked on the popular press and the extant texts of these performances. For that see, Sukumar Sen, Battalar Chhapa O Chhabi (Calcutta, 1984); Sripantha, Battala (Calcutta, 1997); Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society (Kolkata, 2006); Gautam Bhadra, Nyada Battalai Jai Kaw’bar? (Kolkata, 2011). 41 Interview with Sankar Dnere, April 8, 2012. 42 Interview with Dnere, April 8, 2012. 43 Dnere, Jelepara, 66 [translation mine]. 44 “Texture takes us into the warp and weft of a text and demands attention to each of its threads. A historical quality is something that makes itself felt in the weaving of the work as a whole on the basis of markers internal to its frame or process.” Rao, Schulman and Subramanyam, Textures of Time, 253. An attentive reading of the temporal and narrative “textures” of Dnere’s account can perhaps help us probe and open up urban historiography to new propositions. 45 Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space (Oxford, 1991), 118; For a studying of geographical naming and the hidden routes of history, see Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Writing Past Colonialism (Honolulu, 2008). 46 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (New York, 2002), 64. One has to be attentive to the epistemological charge in the element of “wonder” that this curious narrative invokes. Taking Guha’s brief excursion into wonder further, I treat it not merely as another rhetorical device, but rather attempt to be attentive to its “curious” internal logic and its relation to historiography and knowledge practices. 47 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York, 1988). 48 “Farewell,” in The Country without a Post Office (New Delhi, 1997), 7–9. 49 Vico’s The New Science gives us the conceptual framework to open historiography to these murmurs. Vico scholar Donald Verene has argued that Vico is a philosopher of place—not because his theories produce an ontological primacy of space but a “sense of place” in Vico’s Science of Imagination (New York, 1981), 183. 50 Studies coming out of Australia and Canada help us re-think land ownership beyond the recorded deeds and documents and recognize native rights to the land. Paul Carter shows that, while juridical property rights formalize use and possession of land, native rights in Australia being founded on occupation and connection gives rise to other representations of land and makes us rethink exclusive property rights. Carter, Dark Writing, 103–39. 51 In his readings of Vico, Ernst Cassirer points out that Vico’s contribution to historical thinking is not content-based but methodological. Although Vico saw the importance of myth and imagination, he did not give up the claim to the idea of truth. Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities, trans. C.S. Howe (New Haven, 1960), 52. 52 Vico The New Science, § 338 and § 429 Bk II. 53 Donald Kunze, “Giambattista Vico as a Philosopher of Place: Comments on the Recent Article by Mills,” in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1983), 237–48, 241. 54 According to Vico: “But, giving up hope of knowing how languages and letters began, scholars have failed to learn that the first nations thought in poetic characters, spoke in fables, and wrote in hieroglyphics.” The New Science, § 429, Bk II. 55 Ranajit Guha, Rule of Property in Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Raleigh, 1996). 56 Guha, Rule of Property, 3–4. 57 Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume.

10 Un-archiving Algeria Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak Lynne Huffer

This essay engages the archive of French philosophy to reflect on how it has un-archived Algeria. Returning to one of the most visible debates in the history of poststructuralism, I reflect on a deleted passage about the Algerian Revolution from the 1963 lecture by Jacques Derrida that triggered his famous dispute with Michel Foucault. The vast majority of Derrida’s readers are unaware of the passage in question because Derrida removed it from the definitive version of his lecture, “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” published in 1967 in L’Ecriture et la différence.1 Locating this fairly routine revision as an instance of “archive trouble”—where something in the archive of French philosophy “unarchives itself,” to use Derrida’s words2—I consider the legacy of the Foucault–Derrida debate for us, today, in what some call, rather inelegantly, our post-postcolonial age. I focus on the removal of the 1963 Algeria fragment not to approve or condemn Derrida’s politics, but to explore a broader un-archiving process that has produced what Homi Bhabi calls the “restless and revisionary energy” of the “post.”3 In closely reading the deleted passage, I approach the French poststructuralist un-archiving of Algeria within a larger frame that includes not only the early 1960s philosophical milieu in which Derrida first responded to Foucault, but also a present academic culture whose theoretical ethos has moved “beyond” poststructuralism even as it continues to rely on its tools. Will the “restless and revisionary energy” of our own time “transform the present into an expanded and ex-centric site of experience and empowerment”?4 In 2014, the triumphal political investments of “post”-thinking often seem out of proportion to any realistic assessment of the actual efficacy of essays, books, and lectures in the world. I do not offer these thoughts in the mode of moral correction or as a recipe for a better politics. Nor is my inquiry a side-taking move in the Foucault–Derrida debate. Fifty years later, the dispute feels a bit like a period piece whose details are of interest primarily to specialists. Rather, I want to rethink Foucault and Derrida as fragments of discourse whose emergence and disappearance might be conceived within the frame articulated by Gyan Pandey, where “the very process of archiving is accompanied by a process of ‘un-archiving.’”5 Such a process includes, in my analysis, an engagement with the question of subaltern speech introduced by

160

Lynne Huffer

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her classic essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988).6 Spivak’s repeated, public attempts to rethink her own work display a revisionary impulse she shares with Derrida and Foucault. In her repeated returns to the question of subaltern speech she posed in 1988, Spivak has helped shape the contours of postcolonial theory and its reception of the two thinkers she engages in her famous essay: Foucault (with Deleuze) and Derrida. Whatever one’s position regarding the debate, I suggest that today we read Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak as the residual fragments of a postcolonial archive that can be taken up into the series of events to which they belong.7 Such an undertaking will hardly stabilize—in a better, more complete, less violent archive8—the ground of our historical knowledge. Rather, to riff on Foucault, taking up these fragments can restore to our archival present “its rifts, its instability, its flaws,” un-archiving a ground “that is once more stirring under our feet.”9 Rethinking the Foucault–Derrida debate and its uptake by Spivak in that uneasy, un-archiving, postcolonial interface between history and philosophy, I bring to the fore conceptual and methodological issues that might challenge our received understanding of French poststructuralism and the question of its relevance to our age. Up to the present, and following Derrida’s lecture and Foucault’s 1972 response in “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” commentary on the debate has focused primarily on philosophical questions regarding the two thinkers’ divergent interpretations of Descartes.10 In highlighting the antihumanist stance Foucault and Derrida share in their familiar critique of the epistemic violence of Enlightenment humanism, I want to insist on the historical question of Algeria’s absence from discourse related to their debate. Both Foucault and Derrida asserted that the same humanist ideals which ushered in the Age of Reason also served to justify Europe’s territorial expansion and the subjugation of its supposedly irrational colonial others.11 And yet, neither the debate itself nor the commentary on it has had much to say about the very specific colonial relation that directly affected the Foucault–Derrida generation: the 132-year French occupation of Algeria that ended after a brutal war (1954–1962) in the year that falls exactly between the publication of Foucault’s book and Derrida’s response to it. Examining the un-archiving of Algeria in Derrida’s response to Foucault offers a way to approach the historical “work of remembering” French poststructuralism as what Pandey calls “a project of forgetting.”12 Although Pandey refers to Foucault’s History of Madness and the rationalist limits of the archive in making this point, the formulation is also Derridean: it articulates the Heideggerian disclosure of being in concealment that Derrida reworks, in the late 1960s, as the spacing and temporalization of writing through différance. Regarding Algeria, the particularity of its appearance, disappearance, and reappearance in poststructuralism can be explained, in part, by the temporal disjuncture between events and the discourses that describe them. Un-archiving expresses not only the material exclusions of “untouchability”13 that structure the archive but also the temporal out-of-syncness that separates discourse from lived events. As Foucault famously puts it on the final page of The Archeology of Knowledge: “Discourse is not life; its time is not your time.”14

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak 161 This means, more concretely, that an assertion like Robert Young’s—that poststructuralism is a “product” of the Algerian War—can be helpful but also conceptually reductive. “If so-called post-structuralism is the product of a single historical moment,” Young writes in the first sentence of White Mythologies (1990), “then that moment is probably not May 1968 but rather the Algerian War of Independence.” I am less sure than Young is about the linear causalities that undergird his claim. Only the stability of a present that ends in us can allow us to grasp, in “a single historical moment,” the definitive origin of our own “post”condition. Nonetheless, Young’s statement has been taken up as a starting point for more detailed explorations of the Algerian roots of poststructuralism.15 And although Young himself does not pursue the specific Algerian question with which he opens his book, his provocative statement provides a good place to begin this essay’s inquiry into the implications of the un-archived Derrida passage. How does the received history of French poststructuralism simultaneously bring Algeria into view and, at the same time, make it slip away? And how might this question implicate us, in our own contemporary mal d’archive?

Un-archiving Algeria As a Sephardic Jew whose forebears had lived in North Africa long before the 1830 French invasion, Derrida’s relation to Algeria is complex. As the French historian Edward Baring explains in “Liberalism and the Algerian War” (2010), although the 1940 abrogation of the Crémieux decree by the Vichy regime revoked the citizenship status of French Jews, that loss of citizenship during the Nazi occupation reinforced Jewish allegiance to a French republican ideal and produced, as Derrida himself recalls, “a desire for integration in the non-Jewish community.”16 In Baring’s view, this allegiance to France provides a context for Derrida’s defense of Algerian liberalism in the early 1960s. As Baring explains, in a private letter dated April 1961, Derrida responded to his friend, Pierre Nora, whose scathing condemnation of the Français d’Algérie (1961) had just been published. In the letter, Derrida supports Nora’s pro-independence political position, but regards his condemnation of Algerian liberals as unfair. Derrida had left Algeria in 1949 to attend the elite Parisian high school, Lycée Louis-le-Grand, which would launch him toward his career as a philosopher and academic star. Over the course of the 1950s Derrida supported the expansion of political rights to all Algerians if not actual independence from France. But like many French Algerian liberals, by 1961 Derrida’s position had changed in favor of Algerian independence. Indeed, as the historian of French Algeria Todd Shepard explains, “the conviction that Algeria was part of France remained dominant throughout the 1950s. Legally, as is sometimes forgotten, all Algerians were French citizens and all of Algeria was part of the French Republic.”17 After 1962, however, “French elites came to see Algerian independence as necessitated by the logic of history itself,” the result of what one French report called “that unavoidable and planetary evolution that has been called decolonization.” Baring’s claim that, in the early 1960s, Derrida maintained the position that French republican ideals did not

162

Lynne Huffer

contradict the dismantling of French colonial rule is consistent with French government policy and the prevailing views of the French elite at the time. But as my reading of the deleted passage will suggest, Derrida’s own relation to this position is more complex than this. The 1963 passage that was later removed elaborates the theme of a “revolution against reason” that structures the entire paragraph. In the sentences that precede the un-archived passage, Derrida claims that a “revolution against reason” can only operate, “according to a Hegelian dimension, . . . inside reason.”18 Here then, is the original passage, later removed, in which Derrida develops his point: A bit like the anticolonial revolution can only de facto liberate itself from Europe or the empirical West in the name of transcendental Europe, that is Reason, and first let itself win with its values, language, sciences, techniques, and arms; a contamination or irreducible incoherence, that no cry—I am thinking of Fanon’s—can exorcise, however pure and intransigent it may be.19 Interpreting this 1963 passage both as evidence of Derrida’s pro-French politics and as a “seminal text for deconstruction,” Baring draws attention to Derrida’s proto-deconstructive framing of the possibility of internal disturbance “in terms of the Algerian War”. Baring also singles out Derrida’s replacement of this passage in 1967 by “a more abstract analysis of the rationality of history” as the only instance in Derrida’s extensive revisions to the essays collected together as L’Ecriture et la différence “where such political claims were silenced.”20 Baring’s meticulous archival work, coupled with his sophisticated understanding of phenomenology, Marxism, structuralism, and deconstruction, makes his interpretation of Derrida’s early years invaluable for anyone interested in the history of 20th century French philosophy. At the same time, I want to argue that even as Baring re-archives the deleted passage, “something . . . unarchives itself” in the process of selection, classification, framing, and authorizing21 through which Baring, and perhaps any historian, explores and reconstitutes a history. In the case of Baring’s recuperation of a still retrievable if somewhat obscure published passage, that un-archived “something” is not “outside” the history of French philosophy, but rather one of its constitutive features. Indeed, the journal in which Derrida first published the un-archived passage was the leading philosophical journal of its time and continues publishing to this day. In the year that Derrida published his essay, the journal published another article about decolonization that explicitly discusses the Algerian uprising, as well as a meditation on Islam and Christianity in “Orient and Occident: Ibn ‘Arabi and Kierkegaard.”22 A close reading of the un-archived passage suggests something more complex at work than a politically motivated act of suppression. What has been passed over in our knowing of Derrida? As Foucault points out in History of Madness, passing something over by knowing it too much describes the constitutive absence that structures reason.23 It is reason, we might say, that un-archives. Re-archiving the un-archived does not mean making the invisible appear or making silence speak.

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak 163 As Derrida puts it in Monolinguism of the Other, his own identity as “FrancoMaghrebin” “will never have been given, only promised or claimed,” and “the silence of that hyphen” remains. The silence, moreover, is not empty. Derrida notes: “The silence of that hyphen does not pacify or appease anything, not a single torment, not a single torture. . . . A hyphen is never enough to conceal protests, cries of anger or suffering, the noise of weapons, airplanes, and bombs.”24 And as Foucault famously noted, “there is not one but many silences,”25 that against which “the plenitude of history” erects itself, in a space “both empty and peopled . . . of all the words without language.”26 My reading, then, is inspired by this sense of a restless, un-archiving plurality of silences that can be signaled, like Lyotard’s différend, even if they cannot be directly named or spoken.27 Just as I resist the “suppression” narrative about Derrida’s relation to an Algerian past, so too I resist the recuperative claims of a tenacious tradition of humanist history writing. Anjali Arondekar asks, with regard to sexuality in the colonial archive of nineteenth-century India: “What if the recuperative gesture returns us to a space of absence?” For Arondekar, the critical task of archival work lies in an approach “that articulates against the guarantee of recovery.”28 The recuperative force of such a guarantee not only appears to make silence speak, as Arondekar notes, but also arranges archival fragments into grids of conceptual coherence. In the case of Derrida’s un-archived fragment, Baring’s helpful exposure of the deleted passage inadvertently participates in a recuperative logic that makes Derrida’s Algerian silence speak in an archivally based political interpretation. Baring’s reading of the text as “a classic reaffirmation of the French Algerian liberal creed, of the importance of French ideas, and the necessity of their use in the critique and overturning of French power”29 is an example of the kind of “consignation” Derrida describes as a gathering of heterogeneity into “a single corpus, in a system or synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.”30 Baring’s interpretation rests on an analogy Derrida makes explicit in the 1963 passage between the logic of reason in History of Madness and that of the anticolonial struggle. “In arguing that the critique of reason could only be made from within reason,” Baring writes, “Derrida suggested, in parallel fashion, that anticolonial thinkers were only able to fully extricate themselves from Europe using European ideas.” While Baring’s reading is not technically incorrect, his political interpretation of the paragraph papers over an “irreducible incoherence,” to redeploy Derrida’s phrase, at the heart of the passage.31 In what follows I offer a close reading of the 1963 fragment that complicates the recuperative gesture through which it might be used either to signal Derrida’s suppression of Algeria from the mid-1960s to the 1990s or, concomitantly, as evidence of Derrida’s Eurocentric political commitments. In The Deaths of the Author, Jane Gallop invokes an “ethics of close reading” which, for her, “has something to do with respecting what is alive, what is living in theory, trying to value theory’s life, trying to resist all that deadens it.” She goes on to explain that Derrida’s close reading of Levinas is “a source for [her] ethics of reading.”32 Drawing on Gallop, I want to suggest that there is a relation between un-archiving and the practice of reading that can be conceived in ethical terms. What is more

164

Lynne Huffer

“ordinary” than reading? And yet, as Gallop and other skilled close readers demonstrate, there is more to a sentence than meets the eye. Reading, then, engages the same play of absence and presence, what we acknowledge and what we miss, what deserves comment and what gets passed over in silence. Close reading might be regarded as a methodological choice to signal some of the “silences” in the archive. Let me begin with an obvious observation about the passage as a whole: it is not simply or even primarily a passage about the Algerian War. Although Baring refers to it in these terms, no direct reference to Algeria appears there. This does not mean the passage does not address the question of the French colonial relation to Algeria. But the entire passage, awkwardly introduced by the simile—“a bit like”—is presented in a metaphorical mode: the relation Derrida is about to describe is “a bit like” the Hegelian dialectical structure that produces the revolution against reason as an internal agitation. Thus, concomitantly, both “Algeria” and “France” appear not directly, but through figures of substitution. In the first part of the passage, Algeria appears as “the anticolonial revolution” while France becomes “Europe,” the “West” and, ultimately, “Reason.” In the last part of the passage, Algeria is figured in the “cry” of “Fanon” whose Les Damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth] (1961) about the Algerian nationalist struggle against France had been published the same year as Foucault’s History of Madness. Given that metaphorical structure, Baring’s interpretation of the fragment as marked by an Algerian particularity that is replaced by a “more abstract” passage should give us pause. This is not to say that Derrida should have been more precise or particularistic in order to “capture” the Algerian reference and, in so doing, demonstrate his solidarity with the anticolonial Algerian cause.33 Rather, the philosophical problem of particularity and generality, empiricism and abstraction, frames Derrida’s “political”34 reflections on the role of Europe in the anticolonial struggle. What first appears simply as “Europe” quickly bifurcates into “the empirical West” and “transcendental Europe.” As Baring explains at length in The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, the problem of the relation between the empirical and the transcendental dominated French phenomenology throughout the 1950s. In the passage, that phenomenological pairing reengages the Hegelian dialectic to which Derrida alluded (as “the Hegelian dimension”) in the sentences immediately preceding the passage. This move corresponds to Derrida’s early work on Husserl, where he demonstrates that the Husserlian attempt to dialectically bridge the two Kantian poles of empirical realism and transcendental idealism constitutes a “rupture at the heart of phenomenology”.35 Like Paul Ricoeur, who taught Derrida, Derrida concluded that the Hegelian dialectic was not a solution to that tension. As he put it in his 1954 student thesis, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, dialectic does not “efface the dilemma” but, rather, allows “the aporia [to] ‘understand itself’ as a ‘real’ aporia.”36 And as Baring explains, Derrida repeatedly conceived this aporia as defining the relation between history and philosophy, between empirical and transcendental knowing. As an aporia, the relation between philosophy and history was paradoxical and therefore irreducibly

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak 165 incoherent. “The aim was to show,” Baring writes, “how philosophy both was anchored to its time”—and therefore historical—“and transcended it.” For Derrida, philosophy and history were “both constituted and constituting.”37 From this perspective, one could plausibly argue that in the opposition between an empirical and a transcendental Reason we see in the passage, Derrida is writing not so much about the Algerian War as he is about French Hegelian readings of Husserl in the 1950s and the aporetic knot that moved French philosophy from existential phenomenology to poststructuralism over the course of the 1960s. In the passage, Derrida has much more to say about transcendental Europe than he does about the empirical West, and he has little to say about de facto liberation. Rather, his comments are focused on the problem of thinking, of the law, and what happens, de jure, in the name of a transcendental reason that is inseparably linked to de facto subjugation. It is here that we can begin to link the Derrida passage to its most immediate “worldly” context: a lecture given at the Collège Philosophique in response to History of Madness. It is significant, in that context, that a capitalized “Reason” comes to dominate the logic Derrida exposes. The logic goes like this: either the anticolonial revolutionaries liberate themselves in the name of something other than Western Reason—the same Reason that justified colonial expansion in the nineteenth century—or they fight in the name of something other. Foucault alerts us to the same logic when he calls that “something other” madness. Foucault further articulates the logic in explicitly anticolonial terms that have often been overlooked by readers who, following Spivak, criticize Foucault for “ignor[ing] both the epistemic violence of imperialism and the international division of labor.”38 But Foucault makes the imperialist stakes of his critique of reason clear in the 1961 preface to History of Madness: “In the universality of the Western ratio, there is this division which is the Orient: . . . the Orient offered to the colonizing reason of the Occident, . . . the Orient is for the Occident everything that it is not.”39 The consequence of this logic is that liberation itself becomes intelligible only as a function of Enlightenment thought. That in the name of which the colonized must free themselves is the same Reason that subjugated them. When framed in this way, Derrida’s argument about colonialism is very close to Foucault’s analysis of the “merciless language of non-madness”40 in History of Madness. To speak madness is “doubly impossible”; to speak madness is to betray it, because madness can only speak against itself, in the language of reason. Just as Foucault’s History of Madness debunks the myth of Pinel, the father of modern psychiatry, who on the eve of the French Revolution supposedly “freed” the mad from their chains in the Salpêtrière, so too in the Derrida passage the purity of liberation is demystified. In History of Madness the de facto liberation of the mad from their chains in the name of Reason not only confines them further but, as Foucault’s work throughout the 1970s shows, ushers in a power of normalization that simultaneously produces and represses the mad and the “abnormal.” And while the history of colonization and decolonization is hardly identical to that of the management of madness, the logic Foucault exposes is not irrelevant to the constitutive exclusions of Western reason that postcolonial theorists have explored at length.

166

Lynne Huffer

As Baring points out, the Derrida passage applies this logic to the anticolonial revolution. But as mentioned above, I depart from Baring’s conclusion that Derrida’s views simply reflect a “classic . . . French Algerian liberal creed” and a loyalty to “French ideas.”41 Rather than interpreting Derrida’s presentation of Reason as an embrace of French republican ideals, could we not just as plausibly read it as an indictment of transcendental Europe’s “merciless” power to colonize the mind? How does one unthink a colonized thinking? How does one decolonize the mind?42 And what is the relation between that decolonization and de facto liberation? Derrida goes so far as to suggest that de facto liberation requires, first [“d’abord”], allowing oneself to fight with the master’s tools: “its values, language, sciences, techniques, and arms [“armes”]. This may be less an embrace of continuing French influence over its former colonies than a diagnosis of the same constitutive paradox Foucault exposes in History of Madness: in their liberation, in the name of humanism, the mad were once again, and more insidiously, confined. Does decolonizing the mind—unthinking Western thinking—mean a fall into madness? Is that the only option when faced with Reason’s “merciless” language? Derrida alludes to this question in the second half of the passage, where he introduces “contamination” and an “irreducible incoherence.” The former colonies’ “contamination” by Reason is not an impurity that can be surgically removed; indeed, after 132 years of occupation, the anticolonial is constitutively “impure”: the colonial and the anticolonial, Reason and madness, are inextricably connected but in a relation that is radically asymmetrical. Indeed, the “contamination” suggests that the anticolonial is itself irreducibly contained within Reason, within the colonial. The anticolonial is thus also the colonial: an “irreducible incoherence.” And just as History of Madness narrates a shift from the leper model of exclusion “outside” to the plague model of exclusion “within” represented by the Great Confinement, so too the story of a separate, precolonial Algeria that became part of France—and therefore colonial—reveals a similar relation of exclusion within: the Algerian “other” is excluded within France, within the West, within Reason. In this reading, Derrida’s diagnosis of the situation in the immediate aftermath of the Algerian War both aligns with Foucault’s argument and anticipates the later thinking of postcolonial scholars. Like the constitutive paradox of madness as a product of reason, this “contamination” of anticolonial revolution by the colonial produces an “irreducible incoherence” at the heart of the liberation struggle. Indeed, Derrida’s key terms in the second part of the passage repeat Foucault’s in History of Madness: contamination and incoherence are part of the fabric of the historical divisions Foucault traces between intelligibility and unintelligibility and the “purification” of madness by reason. The final part of the passage, where Derrida invokes a “cry—I am thinking of Fanon’s”—both exposes this logic and performs a crucial displacement, unsettling Baring’s reading of the fragment as a pro-French, political claim that Derrida will later have to silence. Thus “Fanon” becomes a metaphor for Algeria itself. More specifically, the proper name, Fanon, stands in for the Algerian revolutionary whose pure cry of

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak 167 freedom can only be heard as something other than a cry or even a “no cry” [aucun cri]: something translated into the language of Europe. Paradoxically, Fanon’s “cry” is both that non-language and, at the same time, the language of Europe. Most immediately, we can take Fanon’s cry to refer to a text, written in French and published in Paris in 1961—a cry then, that appears, in the language of Reason. That text, as I mentioned, is Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published two years before Derrida’s lecture, where Fanon exhorts his comrades to “leave this Europe.” “We must find something different,” Fanon asserts: “We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe.” Fanon concludes: “It is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of their society and their thought. . . . We must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.”43 In reading Fanon’s cry in this way, we could say that Derrida clearly refutes the very possibility of any “pure” revolutionary intransigence vis-à-vis the colonizing power, and that he therefore directly rejects Fanon’s political, anticolonial call at the end of The Wretched of the Earth. But the “cry”—or is it a “no cry”?—is more complex than this. Indeed, the “cry” ricochets out from the lived experience of the Algerian Revolution toward History of Madness, Derrida’s passage, and The Wretched of the Earth to undermine the very Reason whose production and contamination of its Other seems ineluctable and inescapable. Specifically, Derrida links the “cry” to an exorcism that draws together Foucault, Derrida, and Fanon in their exposure of the epistemic violence of Western Reason. Derrida writes that “no cry—I am thinking of Fanon’s—can exorcise” the contaminating incoherence of Western Reason. Here Foucault’s analysis of reason and madness allows us to trace Derrida’s displacement of his initial claim about the inescapability of transcendental Europe. In History of Madness, Foucault repeatedly uses exorcism to describe the operations of Reason as a rite of purification and exclusion.44 Foucault opens the 1961 preface with an image of exorcism: in describing “that other trick that madness plays,” Foucault writes that “we need to identify the moment of that exorcism [conjuration].”45 And again, in the first paragraph of History of Madness itself, Foucault opens the book with a description of the medieval exclusion of lepers into “the domain of the inhuman” through constantly renewed rites of “purification and exclusion.” And finally, with regard to Descartes, over the course of History of Madness Foucault elaborates the productive and repressive logic of exorcism as both a conjuration and an expulsion. Alluding perhaps to Descartes’s own invocation and exorcism of an “evil genius” in the Meditations, Foucault writes, “the Cartesian progression of doubt is certainly the great exorcism of madness.” This act of exorcism—a driving out of the mad demon summoned by Descartes in the repeated incantations that constitute systematic doubt— paradoxically fills in the void produced by the exclusion of madness from the cogito. Thus madness as an absence—as exorcised error, as reason’s negation, as the nothingness that shatters thinking, as the “inhuman”—becomes, paradoxically, the conjured “plenitude” of reason. In a similar fashion, although more elliptically, Derrida’s reference to exorcism exposes the “madness” of Western reason and the violence of its rites of purification

168

Lynne Huffer

and exclusion. When he writes about an “irreducible incoherence” that no pure cry can exorcise, he has displaced the Enlightenment terms through which the colonizer as reason defines itself in relation to a colonized madness. The madness or incoherence at the heart of this passage is the madness of transcendental Europe that both conjures and excludes its colonial other as the “Self’s shadow,” to borrow Spivak’s terms.46 No cry can exorcise the demonic logic of Western exorcism. This means, importantly, that after the first part of the sentence, after the semicolon, after a first attempt at liberation by using the master’s tools, it turns out that the master’s tools will not dismantle the colonial house. Fanon’s exorcising cry cannot undo the conjuring power of Cartesian exorcism because the madness of reason’s colonial other turns out to be the madness—the “irreducible incoherence”—at the heart of colonizing reason. From this perspective, in the second half of the passage Derrida’s apparent refutation of Fanon may in fact be read as an alignment with him. When Derrida writes that “no cry . . . can exorcise” a contaminating Reason he redeploys the same term used by Fanon, who writes in The Wretched of the Earth: “independence is not a word which can be used as an exorcism.”47 In Derrida, however, Fanon’s “word”—“independence”—becomes a “pure” and “intransigent” “cry.” Derrida and Fanon would agree that both “word” and “cry” are powerless in their attempts to undo colonial power: no word, no cry. And yet, in the paradoxical logic of Western reason—where madness is reason and where the anticolonial is colonial—Fanon’s “no cry” instantiates the aporia that not only constitutes reason but also undoes it. Within the logic of madness, the cry signals what Foucault calls the “absence of an oeuvre,” an absence he associates with “Nietzsche’s last cry” when, marking the moment when Nietzsche goes mad, the cry marks “the destruction of the oeuvre itself, the point at which it becomes impossible, and where it must begin to silence itself: the hammer falls from the philosopher’s hand.”48 If the philosopher’s hammer is, indeed, the tool of Reason, wielded “in the name of transcendental Europe,” then perhaps Derrida’s seeming dismissal of Fanon is not a dismissal at all. In the context of the logic of the cry in History of Madness, Fanon’s cry is not an exorcism—his cry is a “no cry”—because exorcism, like language and like Fanon’s “word,”49 is the philosopher’s most “merciless” tool. But if Fanon’s cry is not an exorcism, it might just be, like the Nietzschean cry in History of Madness, “the constitutive moment of an abolition”50 not easily grasped in a wordless space of “physical suffering and terror” that Fanon, Foucault, and Derrida can only name, in the language of transcendental Europe, in their writing. No word can name “the silence of the hyphen,” the sounds without language—“the cries of anger or suffering, the noise of weapons, airplanes, and bombs”51—of Reason’s merciless violence. And no word—no master’s tool—will bring an anticolonial revolution, because the thinking that brings the word is the colonizing thought of Western reason and transcendental Europe. Derrida’s paradoxical invocation of Fanon’s “no cry” signals an absence that is not just the philosophical aporia that both binds and separates the empirical and the transcendental: it is an inscription of a refusal, not of Fanon, but of what Arondekar

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak 169 describes as “the desire to add and fill in the gaps with voices of other unvoiced subalterns.”52 Like Nietzsche’s cry which, for Foucault, marks “the collapse of his thought”,53 Fanon’s cry in Derrida marks the collapse of a Reason whose “irreducible incoherence” cannot be thought.

An un-archived history of the vanishing present What are the implications of this reading for us today, as a way of rethinking what it means to say that the “work of remembering” twentieth-century French philosophy has also been “a project of forgetting”?54 How is this formulation a specifically archival one, and what might it tell us about poststructuralism’s relation to a post-postcolonial mal d’archive? More specifically, what has been forgotten in the decades of commentary on the Foucault–Derrida debate, and how might a return to it help us to negotiate the un-archiving forces of what Spivak calls “the social text as vanishing present”?55 I turn to Spivak here as an influential early theorist of the subaltern and postcoloniality who also, since the 1990s, has increasingly complained about the insidious appropriation of the field she helped to found by a post-Fordist multiculturalism whose “globality is invoked in the interest of the financialization of the globe.” Academic knowledge production—including poststructuralism and postcolonial theory—is, for Spivak, complicit with a logic that continues to un-archive the subaltern even, or especially, through now pervasive “academic assertions” of “difference.” For Spivak, those assertions support “the simulated specificity of a radical position, often dissimulat[ing] the implicit collaboration of the postcolonial in the service of neo-colonialism.” The result, Spivak writes, is that “the racial underclass and the subaltern South step back into the penumbra.”56 This penumbral space is both the same and different than the one Spivak invoked in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” republished with slight revisions in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason over a decade after its initial appearance. In her essay, Spivak brought attention to the figure of the subaltern woman through a meditation on the colonial construction of the spectacle of Indian widow sacrifice or sati. “Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject,” Spivak writes, “the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced. . . . If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.” The “more deeply” refers back to an invocation of shadow earlier in the essay, where she castigates Deleuze and Foucault for their “intellectual complicit[y] in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow.”57 That invocation of shadow in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” repeated in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, signals a recurrence-with-a-difference in Spivak’s text that is the hallmark of her Derridean thinking. In the context of that thinking, how might we reengage Spivak’s explicit commitment to deconstruction over and against the early Foucault in light of my analysis of the 1963 un-archived Algeria passage in Derrida? And how might this reengagement with Spivak via the Foucault–Derrida debate reframe the question of poststructuralism’s relation to postcolonial theory? In “Can the Subaltern

170

Lynne Huffer

Speak?” Spivak argues that Foucault (and Deleuze) are guilty of generalization, epistemic violence, and a utopian desire to allow the other to speak that amounts to an archival silencing.58 Regarding generalization, Spivak argues that the “concealed Subject” of Foucault’s antihumanist critique of the subject “has ‘no geopolitical determination’” and therefore “actually inaugurates a Subject.” On the epistemic violence charge, Spivak asserts that Foucault’s histories of clinics, asylums, and prisons function as “screen-allegories that foreclose a reading of the broader narratives of imperialism.” Spivak singles out History of Madness as the place where Foucault “locates epistemic violence . . . in the redefinition of sanity at the end of the European eighteenth century” while obliterating any trace of the colonial project. According to Spivak, not only does Foucault “ignore” the broader “epistemic violence of imperialism and the international division of labor,” but he, along with Deleuze, indulges in a “reverse-ethnic sentimentality” that “leads to an essentialist, utopian politics.” Foucault thus commits an epistemic violence of his own by simultaneously ignoring imperialism and suggesting that “the oppressed can know and speak for themselves.”59 Third, Spivak’s critique regarding archival silencing—her claim that Foucault implicitly silences the subaltern in his “sentimental” assertion that she can speak for herself as Other even as the West ignores her—brings out the crux of what we might now see as an un-archiving question: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Locating a “violent aporia between subject and object” in the example of sati as the “disappearance” of “woman-in-imperialism,” Spivak concludes in 1988 that “the subaltern cannot speak.”60 And although Spivak repeatedly lays claim to her identity as a literary critic and not a historian, she supports this conclusion on historiographical, archival grounds.61 Reclaiming the archive as a site of political intervention, Spivak argues that our charge is not to make the subaltern speak, as Foucault supposedly does with the mad, but to engage in an “archival, historiographic, disciplinary-critical, and, inevitably, interventionist work” as “a task of ‘measuring silences.’” That task, Spivak knows, is a difficult one, and skirts the danger of invoking the ineffable or what we might call the French sublime. Perhaps the historian’s methodological grounding in the archive is one way to avoid that philosophical danger: the archive is the concrete site where silence imprints its traces. As Spivak points out after consulting the “grotesquely mistranscribed names” of the “sacrificed widows” in the East India Company police reports that record nineteenth-century cases of sati: “one cannot put together a ‘voice’.” “The most one can sense,” Spivak writes, “is the immense heterogeneity breaking through even such a skeletal and ignorant account.”62 While I agree with Spivak’s sense of our archival task, her articulation of that task contra Foucault weakens an otherwise persuasive argument. Regarding Foucault, my purpose here is not to engage in a point-by-point contestation of Spivak’s claims.63 Let me simply summarize what I view as three general problems in Spivak’s critique of Foucault: (1) an inaccurate reading of what Foucault actually writes regarding utopianism, archival silence versus speech, and the othering logic of a “colonising reason,” especially in History of Madness; (2) a non-investigation of the Foucault archive and the numerous instances where

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak 171 Foucault speaks explicitly about capitalism and anticolonial struggle;64 and (3) a theoretical and methodological investment in Derridean deconstruction that structures Spivak’s comments in opposition to Foucault according to the entrenched divisions of an institutionalized debate rather than an actual reading of Foucault’s texts. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and perhaps inadvertently echoing Foucault himself, Spivak’s point is not that Foucault is bad, but that he’s dangerous.65 As she puts it at the end of her essay: “I find [Derrida’s] morphology much more painstaking and useful than Foucault’s and Deleuze’s immediate, substantive involvement with more ‘political’ issues . . . which can make their influence more dangerous for the US academic as enthusiastic radical.” By contrast, Spivak argues, Derrida’s less explicitly political writing “is less dangerous when understood than the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves.”66 Spivak importantly reminds us that the role of the first-world intellectual is a crucial question. But in a world where “everything is dangerous,” as Foucault puts it, it seems unhelpful to weigh the relative dangers of a Foucauldian versus a Derridian position.67 This is not to diminish Spivak’s incisive interventions into the insidious logic through which the Other is constructed and appropriated as the shadow of the radical multicultural Self. No one knows better than she that even the most left-leaning postcolonial intellectual is complicit in that logic. If “Western intellectual production is, in many ways, complicit with international economic interests,” Spivak is aware of “the precariousness of [her own] position”68 as an intellectual producer who straddles a distorting Western/non-Western binarism that, nonetheless, continues to enlist her in its logic. And as Spivak points out in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, even in the terminological and geographical switch of metaphors from West/non-West to North/South, “the Woman from the South” continues to be “the favored agent-as-instrument of transnational capital’s globalizing reach”69 in ways that repeat-with-a-difference an earlier colonial template. Sadly, perhaps, this leaves in Spivak a rhetoric of failure regarding the progressive political project to rethink the postcolonial. The sense of failure is all the more poignant given the immense effort behind what we might call a Spivak archive, stretching over decades, that provides a theoretical foundation for a postcolonial reading of the un-archived Derrida passage. In bringing Spivak forward, as I have in this section, I do not simply re-archive “postcolonial woman” in order to chase away the sadness or soften the failure. As Spivak herself repeatedly points out, there is no triumphalist reversal to be made in which the formerly colonized are, as Fanon puts it, “truly liberated”70 from their colonial masters. There is no replacing silence with voice, because the un-archiving force of silence is constitutive of what we call our archive. In this reading of Derrida, Foucault, and Spivak, I have greatly expanded the concept of the archive, perhaps to the consternation of historians. But if un-archiving means more than the static, material nonpresence of the “voice” of the mad or the subaltern in the official records that form the foundation of our histories, we must attend to its philosophical structure: the

172

Lynne Huffer

construction of an alterity that buttresses an Enlightened self whose violence is masked by its claims to uphold justice and freedom. Whether read, à la Derrida, as a catachrestic origin that forces us to confront our complicity with the forces that assimilate and silence the other or, à la Foucault, as the paradox that frames the speaking of alterity as its constitutive betrayal, I want to insist that this philosophical attention to Enlightenment Reason’s betrayal is also, as Pandey suggests, a “political challenge.”71 Both Derrida and Foucault teach us that we cannot know, ahead of time, where those contestations will leave us. As Spivak puts it in her titular reprise of what is, after all, the Foucauldian concept of a history of the present, she is “one woman teetering on the socle mouvant of the history of the vanishing present, running after ‘culture’ on the run, failure guaranteed.”72 One of the specific names Spivak gives to that failure in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason is “Algeria.” Spivak recounts her experience behind “European podiums” where she “earned the ire” of her audiences because she “warned that much of US academic postcolonialism was bogus.” It was the Algerians, she notes, who reacted differently than the others because, she says, “they were confronting their difference from the failure of decolonization in Algeria.”73 Spivak does not elaborate, but her insinuation that the struggle for Algerian independence might be viewed as a failure is unmistakable. To be sure, we need to nuance this language of failure. From Nelson Mandela to Yassir Arafat, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis, the Algerian Revolution has long functioned as a powerful symbol of liberation for the marginalized and the oppressed. This continues to be the case even today, especially in the Arab world. Nonetheless, Spivak’s story of a vanishing present points to another, less celebratory discourse about the Revolution, especially among Algerians themselves. Within Algeria, there is a gap between the official presentation of Algerian decolonization as a picture of triumph and the less rosy view of Algeria’s people. The fraught reception of the 2012 celebration of Algeria’s fiftieth anniversary of independence illustrates this point.74 The Bouteflika government staged festivities at the stadium of Algiers that included a symbolic reenactment of the French invasion in 1830 and a dramatization of the War of Independence as a story of freedom. At the same time, Algerians themselves continue to criticize the “nebulous nature” of the ruling power of the Bouteflika government and its “paranoid form of neropolitics” as “the paradigmatic symbol of post-colonial power.” As Muriam Haleh Davis sees it, for example, a neocolonial mimicry “rules Algeria” through an “internal colonialism.” After a decade of civil war in the 1990s that suppressed the Islamist party at the cost of 200,000 lives, the result today is a “pervasive bitterness at the fact that, fifty years [after independence], the regime has done very little to improve the lives of the population.”75 Other commentators describe a “collegial despotism” in a contemporary Algerian government whose oil revenues reinforce the regime and pacify the population through the “redistribution of petro-dollars à la Bouteflika.”76 Hamza Hamouchene describes the “thwarted independence” of an Algerian people who “realise that the corrupt pouvoir betrayed the revolution.”77 And if, as Davis suggests, algérianité “has become the buzzword of postcolonial studies,”78 it is also

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak 173 true that Algeria’s authoritarian government is increasingly the darling of the US and the United Nations in the global war on terror. As a 2009 Carnegie Endowment report describes it, especially since 9/11 “Algerian expertise in counterterrorism [is] an international resource to be shared.”79 Not only does Algeria assist the global war on terror through intelligence networks and participation in multilateral counterterrorism projects sponsored by the US and the UN,80 but Algeria is also considered to be of strategic importance as the sixth-largest supplier of oil and gas to the US. And despite the riots that began in Algeria days before Mohammed Bouazzizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia in December 2010, the “Arab Spring” that followed in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya has so far bypassed Algeria. The 2012 parliamentary election that was boycotted by 60–80 percent of the Algerian population was derided by most Algerians as a sham,81 even as US Secretary of State and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, in what Spivak would call “UN-style universalist feminist”82 fashion, “praised the vote and, in particular, the high number of women elected as ‘a welcome step in Algeria’s progress toward democratic reform.’”83 “The failure of decolonization in Algeria”: my brief elaboration of what Spivak’s phrase might mean today is a superficial sketch of the distance traveled between a fragment of a lecture in the early 1960s and our contemporary postpostcolonial moment. But even a sketch makes it clear that there is as much at stake now in the un-archiving of Algeria as there was immediately following independence. If, as Ahluwalia claims, Algeria is the name we can give to a certain “failure of poststructuralism to confront or acknowledge the colonial experience”,84 Spivak’s critique of a “neoliberal” postcolonial reason points to yet another, theoretical “failure of decolonization” that reverberates with the Algerian story.

Coda Let me end this essay with a turn to the ordinary lives of ordinary people. What is the link between these massive “failures”—of revolutions, of attempts to decolonize the mind, of poststructuralism’s postcolonial resistance to Western Reason—and what Khadija Patel calls the lives of “ordinary Algerians”?85 And what is being invoked in this turn to the ordinary? Spivak too makes this move: “I want to dwell on this very ordinariness,” she writes, describing her archival investigations into the Rani of Sirmur who “died a natural death.” Turning toward “the final Foucault” while remaining dissatisfied with the early one, Spivak explains that she wants “to dwell on [this very ordinariness] because work with deconstructive approaches to the subject and with the ethical concerns of the final Foucault have made [her] more and more aware of the importance of the neglected details of the everyday.”86 This “final” convergence of Foucault and Derrida in Spivak’s invocation of the “everyday” death of her archival subject might feel like a stable platform from which to launch a re-archiving project that will take the ordinary into account and, so doing, temper what Derrida calls “archival violence”87 with a heavy dose of ethics. But even if we decide, as so many have done since the 1960s, to closely

174

Lynne Huffer

examine the ethical conditions of our politics, through attention to the local, the particular, and the everyday, I doubt there is much peace or stability to be found in that move. Nor can ethics be an escape from politics. As Julian Bourg puts it in his study of the post May 1968 turn to ethics in French philosophy and “the truly popular explosion of ethical fascination throughout the West during the 1990s”: “ethics is a necessary yet insufficient condition for social and political life.”88 Our ethics, like our politics, will remain unstable, contested, fraught: our only platform is a “moving base” where Spivak stands “as [her] text seeks to catch the vanishing present.” That “moving base” is the same socle mouvant Spivak invoked immediately after her description of the Algerians in Europe and their sense of “the failure of decolonization in Algeria.” The scene at the “European podiums” left her “teetering,” she wrote, “on the socle mouvant of the history of the vanishing present.”89 What better image for the archival foundation of an un-archived present than a thinker teetering before an angry audience, behind a podium that threatens to tip over? The ground of our intellectual work in 2012 is the socle mouvant of a present that disappears. That socle mouvant is as much Spivak’s image as it is Derrida’s and Foucault’s: a “catachrestic concept-metaphor” that Spivak borrowed from Foucault in an earlier essay, “More on Power/Knowledge” (1992) in which, four years after “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” she attempted to think Foucault and Derrida together.90 With the socle mouvant as her guiding metaphor in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak elliptically reclaims her 1992 effort to make Foucault and Derrida converge. At the same time, in republishing the more oppositional arguments that frame “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak reinscribes a Foucault–Derrida divergence. But as the image of the moving base makes clear, neither convergence nor divergence can capture the anti-thinking chill of an “ethical aporia” or “aporetic bind”91 that characterizes this particular vanishing present. Forget the angry audience. In 2014, when the thinker speaks, is anyone there to hear her? Spivak’s socle mouvant offers a perfect metaphor for what un-archiving might mean from such an “everyday, ordinary” academic perspective. No use despairing. Better to keep trying. As Gallop puts it in her reading of Spivak, the moving base describes “the strategic temporality of daily effort that . . . we might call ‘persistent revision.’”92 Persistent revision includes not just the writerly efforts that contribute to knowledge—some of it canonical, some of it not—in which some passages emerge while others disappear. Let persistent revision also describe the rift-restoring, political practice of thinking— un-archiving our present—even as our present, like the ground beneath our feet, tends to slip away.

Notes 1 For the original 1963 Derrida lecture, see Jacques Derrida, “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 68.4 (1963): 460–94, hereafter cited as RMM. For the 1967 version of the essay see “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” L’Ecriture et la difference (Paris, 1967), 51–98, hereafter cited as ED. For the English translation of the 1967 essay see Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and History of Madness,” in Writing

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak 175

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), 31–63. Derrida’s lecture responds to Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa [London, 2006], hereafter cited as HM), originally published in 1961 as Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique [Madness and Unreason: History of Madness in the Classical Age]. The un-archived passage was brought to my attention by Edward Baring in his 2010 essay, “Liberalism and the Algerian War: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” Critical Inquiry 36.2 (2010): 239–61. Baring cites the deleted 1963 passage in the context of his broader analysis of Derrida’s complex relation to the politics of the Algerian anticolonial struggle in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Baring’s book-length study of Derrida’s early formation as a French intellectual devotes several pages both to the 1963 lecture and to the revisions Derrida made to the essays that constitute Writing and Difference, but he does not explicitly discuss the deletion of the Algerian reference from the “Cogito” essay in his book. See Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, 2011), especially 194–7 and 184–9. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, 1996), 91. The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 6. Ibid. Gyan Pandey, Chapter 1 of this volume. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, 1988), 271–313. See especially Michel Foucault, “Preface to the 1972 Edition,” History of Madness, for his description of his book as an “object-event” (xxxviii) that ruptures and disappears. Both Derrida and Foucault describe the archive as violent. See Derrida, Archive Fever: “What is at issue here,” he writes, “is the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence” (7, original emphasis). Foucault’s most sustained reflection on the violence of the archive can be found in his “Lives of Infamous Men” (1977), where he returns to the archive that allowed him to write History of Madness. There he encounters, in the archival traces of “lowly lives reduced to ashes” (158) a “jostling violence” in “the facts they tell” (157). See Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3, ed. James Faubion (New York, 2000),157–75. In the preface to The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970), Foucault, writes: “I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once more stirring under our feet” (xxiv). Michel Foucault, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” Appendix II of 1972 Edition, History of Madness, 550–74. See especially Falguni Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany, NY, 2009), especially Chapter Three, “The Unruly: Strangeness, Madness, and Race,” 65–85. Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume. Ibid, 21, 23. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan (New York, 1972), 211. See especially Pal Ahluwalia, Out of Africa: Post-Structuralism’s Colonial Roots (London, 2010). Jacques Derrida, in Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 246. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, 2006), 7, for this and the quotations in the next two sentences. RMM 466, translation mine. These sentences immediately preceding the deleted passage can be found in Derrida, ED, 59. RMM 466. Here is the French original: “Un peu comme la révolution anti-colonialiste ne peut se libérer de l’Europe ou de l’Occident empiriques de fait, qu’au nom de l’Europe transcendentale, c’est-à-dire de la Raison, et en se laissant d’abord gagner

176

20

21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38

39

Lynne Huffer

par ses valeurs, son langage, ses sciences, ses techniques, ses armes; contamination ou incohérence irréductible qu’aucun cri—je pense à celui de Fanon—ne peut exorciser, si pur et si intransigeant soit-il.” As I explain in note 25 below, I have slightly modified Baring’s translation in the 2010 Critical Inquiry article. Baring, “Liberalism and the Algerian War,” 257. The passage that replaces the deleted passage introduces the concept of history as a rational concept. It also puts forward the concept of a writing which, exceeding the values of origin, reason, and history, cannot be contained by the metaphysical closure of a (presumably Foucauldian) archeology. The replacement passage appears in ED, 59. Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume. See Jacques Berque, “Valeurs de la Décolonisation,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 68.3 (1963): 302–18 and M.A. Askari, “Orient et Occident: Ibn ‘Arabi et Kierkegaard,” suivi de Jean Wahl, “Quelques réflexions,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 68.1 (1963): 1–24. HM xxxiv. Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of the Other; or, Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, 1998), 11. For an extended analysis of Derrida’s Algerian past in Monolinguism of the Other see Lynne Huffer, “Derrida’s Nostalgeria,” in Algeria and France, 1800–2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Patricia M.E. Lorcin (Syracuse, 2006), 228–46. I have since revised my view, presented primarily in the essay’s conclusion, regarding abstraction in Derrida. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1990), 27. HM xxxi. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, 1988). On the differend, the subaltern, and British colonial conceptions of sati see Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” 300. Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, 2009), 1 and 4. Baring, “Liberalism,” 257. Derrida, Archive Fever, 3. Baring, “Liberalism,” 257. Jane Gallop, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time (Durham, 2011), 24 and 24–5. Kristin Ross’s denunciation of structuralist abstraction in the face of anticolonial struggle is an example of a logic that implicitly enlists empiricism as more politically aligned with the goal of liberation than theoretical abstraction. “Structural man,” Ross writes, “takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it in view of creating the general intelligibility underlying the object” (161). This critique of abstraction drives many of the ongoing debates in the guise of a “theory versus practice” divide that is actually about the same empirical versus transcendental opposition Derrida confronts in the passage. See Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge MA, 1995). Baring, “Liberalism,” 257. Ibid, 133. Ibid, 136. Ibid, 143. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 289. For influential critiques see especially Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995) and Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago, 1995). HM, xxx. In a different interpretation, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson read this passage as reinforcing the East–West dualism of a colonial order, concluding that “Foucault was probably an Orientalist” (20).

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak 177 40 HM, xxvii. 41 Baring, “Liberalism”, 257. 42 For a classic exploration of this question see Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (New Hampshire, 1986). 43 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, 2004), 311, 312, 316. 44 For a detailed analysis of this logic see Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York, 2010), especially chapter 3. 45 HM xxvii, translation modified. The quotations in the rest of the paragraph are from ibid, 3, 242 and 244. 46 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 280. 47 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 310. 48 HM, 536. 49 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 310. 50 HM 536. 51 Derrida, Monolinguism, 11. 52 Arondekar, For the Record, 6. 53 HM, 537. 54 Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume. 55 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge MA, 1999), 337. 56 Ibid, 364 and 361. 57 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 287 and 280. 58 Spivak’s critiques of Foucault (and Deleuze) are based on “Intellectuals and Power,” a 1972 conversation between Deleuze and Foucault that was published in English translation (by Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon) in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, 1977), 205–17. The interview was republished under the same title in 1996 in Sylvère Lotringer’s edited collection, Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–1984 (New York, 1996), 74–82. The slippage between Foucault and Deleuze in Spivak’s analysis deserves an extended analysis that is beyond the scope of this essay. 59 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 271, 272, 291, 289, 276 and 279. 60 Ibid, 306 and 308. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak revises what she wrote in her original essay “in the accents of passionate lament: the subaltern cannot speak!” In 1999 she writes that this “was an inadvisable remark”; better to say that “the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” (308). 61 “I am no historian,” Spivak writes (Critique, 222); specifically, she claims to have “no training or aptitude for archival research” (238). 62 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 286 and 297. 63 For a more detailed critical engagement with Spivak’s reading of Foucault, see Pheng Cheah, “Biopower and the New International Division of Reproductive Labor,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York, 2010), 179–212. 64 Foucault’s comments on his experience living in Tunisia during what he describes as a postcolonial student resistance to the repressive Tunisian government in 1968 are especially relevant here. Some of these comments appear in published interviews, while others are tucked away in the unpublished Foucault archive. 65 As Foucault famously puts it: “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.“ See Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1997), 256. 66 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 308 and 292, emphases added. 67 Foucault, “Ethics”, 256. 68 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 271.

178 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79

80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92

Lynne Huffer

Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 200–1. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 310. Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 359. Ibid, 358. See especially Muriam Haleh Davis, “Borders and Bobbing Heads: Postcoloniality and Algeria’s Fiftieth Anniversary of Independence,” Jadaliyya, July 7, 2012, http://www. jadaliyya.com/pages/index/6330/borders-and-bobbing-heads_postcoloniality-andalge, accessed August 4, 2012. Ibid, 2 and 3 for preceding quotations. Hamza Hamouchene, “Algeria and the Arab Spring,” Open Democracy, 25 May 2012, http://www.opendemocracy.net/hamza-hamouchene/algeria-and-arab-spring, accessed August 4, 2012. Ibid, 3. Davis, “Borders and Bobbing Heads”, 1. Mhand Berkouk, “US-Algerian Security Cooperation and the War on Terror,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 2009, http://carnegieendowment. org/2009/06/17/u.s.-algerian-security-cooperation-and-war-on-terror/322u, accessed August 4, 2012. Those multilateral projects include the African Center for Studies and Research on Terrorism (CAERT), hosted by Algeria; the counterterrorist NATO project, Operation Active Endeavor; the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative (TSCTI), and the UN Global Counterterrorism Strategy. See Carnegie Endowment report, 2009. Adam Nossiter, “Algerians Belittle Elections, but Not Enough to Protest,” New York Times, May 19, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/world/africa/in-algeriabelittling-elections-but-no-arab-spring.html, accessed August 4, 2012. Spivak, Critique, 361. “Is Algeria Immune to the ‘Arab Spring?’” Al Jazeera, May 14, 2012, http://www. aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2012/05/201251465357500445.html, accessed August 4, 2012. Ahluwalia, Out of Africa, 19. Khadija Patel, “Algeria: What Arab Spring?” Daily Maverick, May 10, 2012, http:// allafrica.com/stories/201205100807.html, accessed August 12, 2012. Spivak, Critique, 238. Derrida, Archive Fever, 7. Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal, 2007), 17. Spivak, Critique, x, 358, 359. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “More on Power/Knowledge,” in Rethinking Power, ed. Thomas E. Wartenburg (Albany, 1992), 149–73; republished in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York, 1993), 25–52. The term “socle mouvant” comes from a description of power in Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: La Volonté de savoir (Paris, 1976): “c’est le socle mouvant des rapports de force qui induisent sans cesse, par leur inégalité, des états de pouvoir, mais toujours locaux et instables” (122). The English translation by Robert Hurley renders the term as “moving substrate” rather than Spivak’s less metaphysical “moving base”: “it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable” (93). The multiple meanings of “socle” in French include base, basis, pedestal (of a statue), bedrock, core (knowledge), platform, or socket (in information technology). Spivak, Critique 287, 430. Gallop, The Deaths of the Author, 124.

Index

academic knowledge production 169 Administrative Report for Kanker State (1941–46) 130–1 African–American community 10; family life 98; middle class 14; political movements 9, 17; workers 10, 98; see race agricultural/non-agricultural 35; see peasant Ahluwalia, Pal 161, 173 Algeria 160–1, 163–4, 166, 169, 172–4; (failure of) decolonization 161–2, 165–6, 172–4; French occupation 160; un-archiving 160, 169; Revolution/War of Independence 159, 161–2, 164–7, 172 Algiers 172 Ali, Agha Shahid 153 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji 12–3 Andrews, Viola Perryman 9–11 anga dev (log god) 137–40 appearance of poverty 117 APRA (The Party of the People), also known as Aprista 59 Arab Spring 172–3 Arafat, Yassir 172 archive-denial 16 archival configuration 90; fragments 163; hierarchy 7; obscurity 96; present 160; “reluctance” 133; silencing 170; “violence” 173 Arondekar, Anjali 163, 168–9 Art Digest 41 artistic production 42 Atlanta 9–10, 41–2 Atlanta Journal 41 avant-garde 48–9, 51–2 Awadh court poetry 78 “awkward classes” 58–9

bainama (transfer deed) 148 Baldwin, James 172 bandobast (administrative/settlement arrangements) 28, 39n 23, 132; see settlement Banerjee, Prathama 135–6 Banerjee, Sumanta 150 Baring, Edward 161–6; “Liberalism and the Algerian War” 161 Bastar (former princely state) 130–3, 136, 139–40 Beauvoir, Simone de 46–7, 49, 51 belonging 145, 152–5 Benjamin, Walter 76, 79 betis (daughters) 80 betrayal 62, 70, 172 Bhabha, Homi 159 bhasha (vernacular) 76 bio-power 53, 55; “bio-politics” 41 birahani 77, 84, 86–90, 92; definition of 87 Birla, Ritu 24, 38n 3 birth and death certificates 41–2 body 7, 13, 92 boli (speech) 78 bombardment of the public sphere 66–7 Bouazzizi, Mohammed 173 Bourg, Julian 174 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz 172 Braj (or Brajbhasha or Brajboli) 77, 90–1, 93; Lakhnavi innovations 78 Brayne, Frank 24 Buddha 13 Butler, Judith 54 Calcutta: debate about origin 148; elements of popular culture 150; ghost canals 145; Kalaburo village 152–3; lime trade 148, 153; name 146; various early spellings 146

180

Index

Callao (port city) 63 capitalism 6, 112, 171; accumulation in America 112, 116, 120, 123; corporate 110; embodied mode of practice 110, 118, 120, 123; Foucault 171; social capital 99; transnational 171; vernacular 38n 3 categorical vagueness 113 Chachapoyas (town) 62, 65 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 75–6, 129 Charnock, Job 146, 156n 21 Chatterjee, Suniti Kumar 147–8, 153 Chauhan, Subhadra Kumari 89 Chauncey, George 117 Chhattisgarh 130–1, 133, 135–6; Tourism Board 127 Chicago Herald (newspaper) 116 Chicago Tribune (newspaper) 114, 119 Chowdorow, Nancy 81 Chughtai, Ismat 82–4, 94n 26; Terhi Lakir (Crooked Line) 82 Civil Rights movement 9, 11 Clinton, Hillary 173 corpus of intelligence 68 Creole women 96; category of analysis 97; see race crisis of power/knowledge/control 68 Dalit (ex-Untouchables) 11–15, 17; menials in Panjab 37n 1; “miscellaneous” groups 35–7; see Mahars dangerous aberration 71 Darling, Malcolm Lyall 24–8, 37; books authored 25; will-to-curiosity 24 Dasehra (October festival) 127 Datta, Manjira 80 Davidson, H. 29 Davis, Angela 172 Davis, Muriam Haleh 172–3 Deleuze, Gilles 160, 169, 170–1 Deo, Udai Pratap 127 Derrida, Jacques 3, 145, 159–74; “Cogito et histoire de la folie” 159; deleted passage 162, 164; L’Ecriture et la différence 159, 162; Monolinguism of the Other 163 Descartes, René 160, 167 Detha, Vijaydan 81 “development” of the people 132 Dewey, Clive 25–6 différance 160 discursive weapons 66–7 disenfranchised 3, 16

dispositive see intelligibility divination practices (spirit) 129–33, 136–7 Dnere, Sankar 150, 152–3 do-able and say-able 64 domesticity as respectability 97, 101–2; drudgery 99–100; homemaker 105 East India Company 78, 146, 170 Edelmen, Lee 118 ekphrasis of language 77 Ekshan (Bengali journal) 148 Elwin, Verrier 136–7; Maria Suicide and Murder (1943) 136–7 Emory University 9, 11 enchanted history of space 145 Enlightenment humanism 160; thought 145 epistemic violence 167, 170 “ethical aporia” 174 everyday 5–9, 15, 26, 58–9, 61, 64, 71, 77, 80, 85–7, 91–2, 96, 107, 118, 121, 151, 155 173–4; speech 77, 80–5; of daughter-killing 79, 81–2, 84, 93; of daughter-cherishing 79, 82, 87, 93 evidence (or facts) 7, 15–16, 37, 43, 59, 76–82, 87, 96, 112–13, 116, 121, 123, 146, 148, 152, 162–3; unverifiable 93 exiled within 5, 166 exorcism 167–8 failed coup (of October 1948) 62 Fanon, Frantz 164, 166–8, 171; The Wretched of the Earth 164, 167–8 fantasy 145, 150, 153 federal census 97 female infanticide and foeticide 40n 60, 77, 79–83, 92–3 feminine écriture 84, 88 Fenton, M. W. 30 fiscal acquisitiveness 110; sanity 112 Foucault, Michel i, 3–5, 41–4, 48, 51–5, 159–60, 162–74; “absence of an oeuvre” 16, 42–4, 55, 168; The Archeology of Knowledge 160; History of Madness 4, 160, 162–3, 165–6, 168, 170; “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” 160 Foucault–Derrida debate 159–60, 169 Franco–Maghrebian identity 163 free colored concubine 98–9; see race French poststructuralism 159–61 Freud, Sigmund 117 Furer–Haimendorf, C. von 136–7

Index gaita (priest) 136 Gallop, Jane 163–4, 174; The Deaths of the Author 163 “game of truth” 48, 51–2; see truth Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 37n 1, 87–8; mobilization 87–8, 91 gaon-wasi (villagers) 133 gender 15, 42, 46–7, 75, 77–8, 80–2, 84, 86, 121; concept of genius 47–9, 51–2; crime 79; representation 42; violence 76–8, 80–1, 85 geography (discipline of) 152 Georgia (state) 9–10 Ghadar party 27 “The Gilded Age” 115, 117 Gond peoples 127–8; ancestral deity 130; Chhote Pat Anga Dev (“younger log god”) 133, 135, 138; clan gods (“Anga Deo,” “Pat Deo” and “Log God”) 136–7; conception of sovereignty 128; divination practices 129–30 Gramsci, Antonio 76, 80 Greenberg, Clement 47, 51; “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” 47, 51 Grigson, W.V. 136–7; Maria Gonds of Bastar (1938) 136 grihastin (married woman) 89–90 Guardia Civil (Peru’s National Police) 62, 65 Guha, Ranajit 38n 19, 75–6, 78, 85–6, 91, 151, 154, 158n 46 Hamouchene, Hamza 172 Hegelian 5, 162, 164–5 hermit 111, 113–21; female 121; lovelorn asceticism 114 Hindavi 4 Hindi/Urdu 4, 77–8, 80, 86–91, 93, 133; Khari boli (spoken Hindi) 89, 91 Hindu Code Bill 13 Hindu–Muslim population division 35 Hindustani–Chhattisgarhi 133 historical evidence (problem of) 76 historicality 78, 84–6, 88–9, 91, 146, 151 historicity 80–1; realm of ahistoricity 77 history (discipline of) 37 hoarding 110–11, 118, 120, 123 Holt, Thomas 98 homosexual 41, 48, 113, 117; and sexual object choice 113; see queer Husserl, Edmund 164–5 Hutchison, Mary E. 41–2; Dream of Violets (ca. 1942) 44–6, 56; Mirrors

181

for Reality (ca. 1944) 44, 49–51, 56; Prayer (ca. 1940) 50–1; Self-Portrait (ca. 1927) 44–6, 56 Ibbetson, Denzil 24, 33, 37 “imaginative universals” 145 Indian Civil Service (ICS) 24 inescapability of transcription 130 intelligible (intelligibility) 3, 6, 8, 42–4, 55, 79, 86, 90–3, 145, 165–6; grids of 6, 16–17, 41, 48, 52–3, 163; unintelligible (zone of unintelligibility) 8, 17, 42–3, 47–8, 76–7, 81, 84, 89–91, 152, 166 iqrarnama (judicial document) 130, 132–3, 135; content 134 Irigaray, Luce 84 irrational 61–2, 71, 129, 145, 160 “irreducible incoherence” 166, 168–9 itihaas (history) 75–6 Jallianwala Bagh massacre 27 jatt (North Indian agricultural caste) 24 Jim Crow 10 Jina Amcha (Our Lives) 12 Kalighat temple 147 Kamble, Baby Kondiba (Baby Tai) 11–14 Kandra dynasty (of Kanker, 1344–97) 139 Kanker (former princely state) 127–33, 136–40 kashtkar (peasant/tenant) 23, 133 King, Dorothy (Dottie) 41–2, 53–4 King, Jr., Martin Luther 10 kitsch 42–3, 48–9, 51–2 knowledge practices 75 Kris, Ernst 47 Kurz, Otto 47 La Tribuna (newspaper) 64 labor 8, 12–13, 23, 27, 36–7, 64 96–7, 99–100, 105, 107, 123, 131, 151, 154; domestic/women’s 9, 96–102, 104–5; factory 105–7; free 97; international division 165, 170; lost personal autonomy 106; seamstresses 101, 106; un/skilled 96, 103, 106; unions 60, 64 laborers: agricultural 39n 23, 110; rural field 23, 37; Panjabi terms 37n 1 Lalita, K. 88, 90 land relations in South Asia 4, 28 Lawrence, James 24 Lefebvre, Henri 151

182

Lynne Huffer

legibility (or illegibility) 6, 17, 42, 133 liberation (de facto) 165 limits of femininity 47 loyal (loyalty) 61, 65–6, 68–9, 166 Lyotard, Jean–François 163 madai (January festival) 127 madness i, 3–8, 16–17, 41–4, 47, 113, 165–8; colonized 168; speak 165 Maharashtra 11 Mahars 12–14 maidan (open ground) 127 Mandela, Nelson 172 Marathas 130 May 1968 (France) 161, 174 measurement 55, 97, 132; democratization 3; natural and human resources 29, 32; words 53; see silence Meera (or Meerbai) 87–92, 94n 23–4 Melvill, P. S. 29, 37 memory 3, 7–11, 14, 54, 75–6, 81, 85, 93; 123; 128; 130; 136; 140; 150; 153–4; “memory-bank” 10 metaphor 3, 5, 54, 87, 144–6, 152–3, 156n 14, 164, 166, 171, 174; metaphoricity 146, 154 Mill, James 36–7; The History of British India (1817) 36 misanthropy 111–12, 116, 120–1; aversion to sociality 114; and homosexuality 117; as dementia 123 Mitchell, Timothy 26–7 Mitra, Radharaman 147–8 monopoly of the archive 37 Montgomery, Robert 24 Moody, Ann 11 mythos and logos 145 Nabha, Kahn Singh 23; Gur Shabad Ratnakar Mahan Kosh 23 National Academy of Design (USA) 44 nation 5–7, 9, 64, 75–6, 81, 87, 89, 119; national(ist) 12, 27, 58, 62, 72n 4, 76, 82–93, 153, 164; press 112, 119–20, 124; seva (service to the nation) 86 native discontent 26 New Orleans 96 New York Times (newspaper) 41, 115, 119–21 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 43; cry 168–9 Nochlin, Linda 52 “non–sense” 3, 41

Nora, Pierre 161 Norris, Frank 110–11, 121–3; McTeague (novel) 110–11, 121–3; McTeague, Trina 110–11, 120–3; The Octopus (novel) 110 northern Peruvian Andes 59 not-knowledge 5, 17 O’Dwyer, Michael 24 “objects of regulation” 67 Odría, Manuel 64, 66 Old Testament 113 Orientalism 75 out-of-sync(ness) 6, 160 Pandey, Gyanendra 28, 38n 4, 41, 76, 113, 129, 145, 157n 34, 159–60, 169, 172 Panjab: agrarian conditions 23; British conquest 28; census operations 33; history 23–4, 37; landed rights 27; problem of indebtedness 26–7; society 24, 26–8, 30–3, 36; turmoil 27; see settlement report Pant, Sumitranandan 87 Partition of British India 9, 153 Patel, Khadija 173 Paul of Thebes 113 peasant 23–4, 27–9, 32–3, 35–7, 39n 23, 39n 33, 40n 59, 71, 138, 140; as alibi 27, 36–7; Egyptian 26; non-peasants 36; protest in South Asia 4, 8; problem of translations in Panjabi 23–4 persistent revision 174 poetics of loss 78 popular politics (space of) 130 “Popular Universities” 64 postcolonial 75–6, 92, 131, 160, 165–6, 169, 171–3; post-postcolonial 159, 169 post-Reconstruction era US 96 presence among the people 31 presumption of privilege 107 “primitive” (notion of) 135 private property 27, 31, 80–1, 98, 103, 114, 154 problem of writing as changing 130 queer 41, 55, 112, 115, 118, 123; see reclusive miser race/racism 10–11, 14–15, 97, : “driving while black/Indian” 15; “Negroes

Index progress” 10; proximity to blackness 103; segregation 14–15; “white flight” 14–15 Ray, A.K. 149 Ray, Nisith Ranjan 147 reason 5, 6, 7; Age of Reason 160; anti-colonial 165; “colonising” 170; “merciless” 165; transcendental 165; unreason 5–6, 8, 17, 52 reclusive miser 111–13, 118, 123; fetish and phobia 117; recluse 113–24; reclusiveness 117–18 recurrencewith-a-difference 169, 171 Rekhti language 82–3 repressive classification 90; logic 167; technologies 76 residual fragments 160 Ricoeur, Paul 164 Rishte (1995 film) 80 Rivero, José Luis Bustamante y 63 robbery 119–20 Sahasi, V.D. 128 sahitya (literature) 76–8, 90 Santhal rebellion (1855) 144 Sarkar, Nikhil 149 sati (widow immolation) 85, 92, 169–70 Satyamev Jayate (television show) 92–3 Saxon, Lyle 103; Children of Strangers 103 Schomer, Karine 85 Scott, James C. 37n 33; “see (the party) like a state” 60 Scott, Joan 145 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 48 settlement report 28; accounting of crop values 34; categories of report 31–2; Permanent Settlement of Bengal 28, 154; process 31 sex ratio 40n 60, 81, 92–3, 95n 27 Shah, Wajid Ali (Nawab of Awadh) 78; Radha Kanhaiyya ka Qissa (Story of Radha and Krishna) 78 Shepard, Todd 161 shong (songs) 150 Sikh gurduare 27 silence(s) 17, 52–5, 76, 82, 89, 96, 129–30, 162–4, 166, 168, 170–2 Singh, Bakhtawar 79 Singh, Ranjit (Maharaja of Panjab) 34 Sinha, Surojit 137 Sircar, Badal 144–5; Satabdi (theatre group) 144 sirha (intercessor) 136

183

siyan (elders) 127, 138, 140 Skaria, Ajay 129–30; Hybrid Histories 130 Sleeman, W.H. 78–80, 83, 93n 8 Smith, Adam 112; An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations 112 socle mouvant 172, 174, 178n 90 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 30–1, 160, 165, 168–74; A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 169, 171–2, 174; “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 160, 169–71, 174; “Self’s shadow” 168–9 standard deviation 59, 71; 1st Order 59, 61; 2nd Order 60–1, 63, 71; 3rd Order 60–2, 70 state: binary 128; “cleansing” 65; construction of sovereignty 127, 129; contradictions 69; divesting people of sovereignty 129; formation 58; paranoid 60–1, 70 statist historiography 85; critique 75 Stivers, Robert R. 55 subaltern 6, 17, 76, 85, 89, 169–70; body 13; pasts 129; relational 37; speech 159; Subaltern Studies 128 subversive 60–2, 65–9 Sur, Atul 149–50 surveillance 29, 54, 60, 64–5, 67, 69, 71; white Southern homes 98 Tagore, Rabindranath 85, 91 Tejada, Constantino Comeca 63 Temple, Richard 24, 31, 33–5, 37 terror 64, 70, 168, global war 173 Tharu, Susie 88, 90, 94n 21 The Families’ Friend (newspaper) 66 The New Orleans Weekly Louisianian (newspaper) 98 Thorburn, Septimus 24, 31, 33 tina (form of torture) 63 trace object 77, 91–2, 94n 14, 94n 26 trivial 4–11, 38n 4, 96, 100, 107, 145–6, 149–52, 157n 34 truth 29, 33, 37, 42, 48–9, 51–2, 67, 79, 149–50; claim 33, 65; value 31 Tupper, Charles 24 unarchivable 59, 62, 71 unarchiving 75–8, 82, 84, 91, 130, 145; our present 174; question 170 unbreachable wall of party discipline 70 United Nations 173 utopianism (utopian politics) 170

184

Lynne Huffer

Valyani, J.R. 128 Van Gogh, Vincent 43 Verma, Mahadevi 77, 84–93, 94n 16 Vico, Giambattista 144–6, 154; The New Science 145, 154 violence 8–9, 14–17, 27, 62, 75, 77, 82–5, 93, 119, 160, 167–8, 170, 172–3, 175n 8; epistemic 160, 165, 167, 170; see gender virangana (warrior woman) 89 vulnerability (sexual) 105, 106–7, 121 Washington Post (newspaper) 119 West, Daniel 114

woman: artist 44; free women of color (femmes de couleur libres) 96; independent 44, 46–7, 49, 51; liberation 13; “modern” 46, 49; modernity and the New Woman 46, 82, 86–7; ordinary lives 96; work 96 wonder 146, 151, 158n 46 Woolf, Virginia 11 worth-knowing/knowable 24, 28, 33–4, 36 Young, Robert 161; White Mythologies 161 zemindar (landholder) 24

This page intentionally left blank

Taylor & Francis

eBooks FOR

ў т ўўў ттт

LIBRARIES

Over 23,000 eBook titles in th e Humanities, Social Sciences, STM and Law from some of the world's leading imprints. Choose from a range of subject packages or create your own!

ill Benefits for your

user

litlitII-

Free MARC records COUNTER-compliant usage stat istics Flexible purchase and pricing options

III- Off-site, anytime access via Athens o r referring URL II" Pri nt or copy pages or chapters iii'- Fu ll content search

... Bookmark, highlight and annotate text ... Access to thousand s of pages of q uality research

al the click of a button For more information, pricing enquiries or to o rder a free trial, contact your local online sales team .

UK and Rest of World: [email protected] US, Canada and Latin America:

e-refere [email protected]

www.ebooksubscriptions.com

A U > S PA w a rdfo r B tST«B O O K P U B LISH E R 2 0 0 9 FifMlitt

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis C ro up Taylor & Francis C ro up

A flexible and dynamic resource for teaching, learning and research.