The Career of Inspector Pakiri

Abstract

The relationship between the colonial state and its subordinate employees was a complex one. Part of the complexity is neatly captured in Hobbes’s phrase, quoted in the epigraph above, that subordinate officials were ‘the matter thereof, and the artificer’ of the colonial state.¹ In other words, subordinate officials were not only employed by the colonial state, but also they made the state. This was apparent in the banal sense that the vast majority of state employees were indigenous subordinate officials. British members of the Indian Civil Service made up a tiny minority of colonial state officials across British India.² Additionally, the army in Burma contained indigenous Burmese soldiers and was predominantly made up of Indian subordinates.³ There would have been no colonial state but for its overwhelmingly Burmese and Indian subordinate employees. But the proposition that the colonial state was made by its subordinate officials also has a more sophisticated implication. Subordinate officials through their everyday acts performed and enacted the colonial state.⁴ Hobbes’s notion of the state being created through art is apt for characterising this role of subordinate officials in making the colonial state. There was a theatrical and creative aspect to subordinate officials’ everyday practices through which the colonial state was enacted. It is the nature of this performative enactment of the colonial state by subordinate officials that is being explored in this chapter.

For by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State (in Latin, Civitas), which is but an artificial man … To describe the nature of this artificial man, I will consider — First, the matter thereof, and the artificer; both of which is man.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)