Abstract
The ‘colonial archive’ of India is famous for its elisions and silences, particularly where the ‘domestic’ is concerned. If even textual evidence for women’s lives or the details of everyday household life is scarce and fragmentary, then surely there would be nothing more difficult than searching for physical traces of a vanished world in an archive whose architects professed a policy of indifference to the domestic lives of their subjects. Yet this is far from the case. As part of a larger project to reassess textual constructions of family and household by comparing these with records of material culture and domestic space, I found myself engaged in just such a search. I wanted to compare new uses of space and material culture to new ideas about private and public lives in colonial north India, to see whether textual rhetoric and visual representations told the same stories.
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Notes
See for example Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003);
Susie J. Tharu and K. Lalita, Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, 2 vols (London: Pandora, 1993).
John M. Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender, ed. Catherine R. Stimpson, Women in Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Ch. 3, esp. pp. 92–96.
This argument is indebted to Seema Alavi’s interpretation of the Company Army and its relationship with Indian society. See Seema Alavi, ‘The Company Army and Rural Society: The Invalid Thanah 1780–1830’, Modern Asian studies 27, 1 (1993), pp. 147–78;
Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770–1831 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
See for example the detailed descriptions of the Company army in Thomas Duer Broughton, Letters Written in a Mahratta Camp During the Year 1809: Descriptive of the Character, Manners, Domestic Habits, and Religious Ceremonies, of the Mahrattas, A new ed / ed., Constable’s Oriental Miscellany of Original and Selected Publications; Vol. Iv (Westminster [London]: A. Constable and company, 1892).
No. 674 From Lt. Col E Hardy, Quarter Master General, to the Chiefs Secretary to Government, dated 16 Dec 1833, in Board’s Collections, IOR/F/4/1465/57591, April 1833–March 1834, India Office Library [herafter IOL].
Mil Letter from Bombay, dated 5th March 1834 No 20, in Board’s Collections, IOR/F/4/1465/57591, April 1833–March 1834, IOL.
Extract Mil Letter to Bombay, dated 10th Apr 1833 No 26, in Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. para. 16: ‘Privates 10 by 10 ft, 11 rupees; Havildars 10 by 15 ft, 17 rupees; Native officers 10 by 20 feet,; 23 rupees; Walls: 1 foot thick 6 ft high; Gable ends: 9 ditto; Floor: 1 ft raised within; Total estimate for a complete regiment: 8792 rupees.’
Ibid. para. 18.
The Bengal Government instituted an inquiry for a report on the housing requirements of Indian regiments in 1832.
For the importance of the military in colonial information gathering projects in India, see Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
See Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770–1831, Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy: The Evolution of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850, University of Cambridge Oriental Publications; No.43 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
Sitaram, From Sepoy to Subedar: Being the Life and Adventues of a Native Officer of the Bengal Army Written and Related by Himself, ed. Douglas Craven Phillott, trans. Lieutenant-Colonel Norgate (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1911; reprint, 3rd).
Indu Banga (ed.), The City in Indian History: Urban Demography, Society, and Politics (New Delhi: South Asia, 1991);
Narayani Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires 1803–1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981);
Siddhartha Raychaudhuri, ‘Indian Elites, Urban Space and the Restructuring of Ahmedabad City’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1997).
See Sandra Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 25.
James Prinsep, ‘Census of the Population of the City of Benares’, Asiatic Researches, 1 (1832), p. 475.
Ibid.
Ubbas Alli, The Lucknow Album. Containing a Series of Fifty Photographic Views of Lucknow and Its Environs: Together with A … Plan of the City Executed by Darogha Ubbas Alli, Etc. (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1874).
The Commission’s chief recommendations included the appointment of a sanitary commission in each of the presidencies, and contained detailed instructions on the selection of sites for new barracks and hospitals and the modification of existing buildings according to the sanitary principles laid out in the report.
See chapter 1, ‘Historical Perspective of Urban Local Government in India’, Debidas Nanda, Municipal Administration in India (Varanasi: Ganga Kaveri Publishing House, 1998).
See for example ‘Erection of a New Dwelling House for Prince Muzaffar Bakht at Fatehgarh.’ Apr–Jul 1817, Board’s Collections, IOR/F/4/603/14493, IOL. 23. No 318/XX1, dated 5th April 1888 From FS Growse, Collector Farukhabad, to Commissioner Agra Division. In Allahabad Sanitation Dept Proceedings, NWP and Oudh Sept 1891, Nos 1–134, UPSA.
No 318/XX1, dated 5th April 1888 From FS Growse, Collector Farukhabad, to Commissioner Agra Division. In Allahabad Sanitation Dept Proceedings, NWP and Oudh Sept 1891, Nos 1–134, UPSA.
Allahabad Sanitation Dept Proceedings, NWP and Oudh Sept 1891, Nos 1–134, UPSA.
Ishuree Dass, Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindoos of Northern India, or, More Strictly Speaking, of the North-West Provinces of India (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1860), pp. 118–19.
Ibid., pp. 118–19.
In the preceding period, local officials compiled lists of books published in each presidency on a quarterly basis.
These manuals and stories have been explored in the work of Gail Minault and Charu Gupta in North India, and Judith Walsh on Bengali domestic manuals. Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 2nd ed., Comparative Feminist Studies (New York: Palgrave, 2002),
Khwaja Altaf Hussain Hali, Voices of Silence: Hali’s Majalis Un-Nissa and Chup Ki Dad, trans. Gail Minault (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1986),
Gail Minault, ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms: The View from the Zenana’, in Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories, ed. Nita Kumar (New Delhi: Stree, 1994),
Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998),
Judith E. Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004),
Judith E. Walsh, ed., How to Be the Goddess of Your Home: An Anthology of Bengali Domestic Manuals (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005).
Nazir Ahmad, The Repentence of Nussooh, Taubat-Al-Nasuˆh, the Tale of a Muslim Family a Hundred Years Ago, ed. C.M. Naim, trans. M. Kempson (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002).
Ibid., pp. 1–2.
Nazir Ahmad, The Repentance of Nussooh, Translated from the Original Hindustani by M. Kempson, trans. M. Kempson (London: 1884).
Circular No 44F/8–1, dated Simla, the 17th August 1887. From Sir EC Buck, Secy to the Govt of India, Rev and Agri Dept (Famine) to Secretary to Government, NWP and Oudh. In: A Collection of Papers connected with an inquiry into the condition of the lower classes of the population especially in agricultural tracts in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh instituted in 1887–1888. [Hereafter Dufferin Report.]
No 263-S Confidential, dated Simla, 23 July 1888. From HC Fanshawe, Officiating Junior Secretary to the Government of the Punjab, to Secretary to Government of India, Rev and Agri Dept. In: Dufferin Report.
‘Note on the food and economical condition of the agricultural and labouring classes in the Etah District’, by William Crooke Esq. Offg Collector, prepared in accordance with the instructions contained in Govt Circular No. 538/I-16 of 12 Jan 1888. In: Dufferin Report.
Appendix A, Precis of the Reports Received on the Inquiry made into the condition of the lower classes of the population, pp. 259–83. In Dufferin Report.
The Commissioner of Allahabad, for example, noted that there was little between the poor and starvation. Most other officers in the North-Western Provinces reported that even those populations who did well in ordinary years faced hardship if a single harvest failed. Sir Auckland Colvin noted that without some margin available the failure of the rains could also provoke serious famine.
Papers relating to the provision of model dwellings for the inhabitants of cities. Misc. Reports Bundle no. 137 8/1907, UPSA.
Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780–1950 (Albany, NY: 1998), pp. 17–8.
Tony Ballantyne, ‘Archive, Discipline, State: Power and Knowledge in South Asian Historiography’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 3, 1 (2001), pp. 87–105.
See Eugene Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795– 1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Testing the Local against the Colonial Archive’, History Workshop Journal [Great Britain], 44 (1997);
Indrani Chatterjee (ed.), Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
For an expansion on this idea, see Katherine Prior, ‘The British Regulation of Hinduism in North India, 1780–1900’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1990).
Also: Katherine Prior, ‘Making History: The State’s Intervention in Urban Religious Disputes in the North-Western Provinces in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 27, 1 (1993), pp. 179–203.
Ranajit Guha, ‘The Small Voice of History’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds), Subaltern Studies Ix, Writings on History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 3–6.
Roland Barthes, S/V, trans. Richard Miller (London: 1975).
Also: Roland Barthes, Pleasures of Texts, trans. Richard Miller (London, 1976).
Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
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© 2012 Leigh Denault
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Denault, L. (2012). North Indian Lives in the Archives of the Colonial State. In: Roque, R., Wagner, K.A. (eds) Engaging Colonial Knowledge. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230360075_3
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