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Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India
Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created.
In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about recordkeeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight-of-hand increased the company’s reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.
In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about recordkeeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight-of-hand increased the company’s reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.
278 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2012
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October 26, 2021
Standard disclaimer: Skip the first chapter if you are me.
"It is a fact that Combaconum, in which town alone are 8 civil courts, is now among the natives a word synonymous with fraud. In Tamil a common phrase for don't cheat me is to say "don't Combaconum me," its use is not confined to the locality but has spread beyond the precincts of the province and I have been told by a missionary scholar of Tamil that he has seen in a newly published dictionary "Combaconum punnoo —to cheat" entered as an ordinary Tamil verb.... Nothing could show more clearly how common forgery and perjury have become, than the name of the place where our courts are most numerous should have become among the people a household word for fraud."
"It is a fact that Combaconum, in which town alone are 8 civil courts, is now among the natives a word synonymous with fraud. In Tamil a common phrase for don't cheat me is to say "don't Combaconum me," its use is not confined to the locality but has spread beyond the precincts of the province and I have been told by a missionary scholar of Tamil that he has seen in a newly published dictionary "Combaconum punnoo —to cheat" entered as an ordinary Tamil verb.... Nothing could show more clearly how common forgery and perjury have become, than the name of the place where our courts are most numerous should have become among the people a household word for fraud."
Displaying 1 of 1 review