Organizer: Saurabh Dube, El Colegio de Mexico
Chair: Jael Silliman, University of Iowa
Discussants: Ishita Banerjee Dube, El Colegio de Mexico; Jael Silliman, University of Iowa
For some years now, the dichotomy between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ has been relentlessly reified in influential theories of colonial discourse, and turned into an aestheticized abstraction in varieties of postcolonial writings and literary ethnographies. This panel takes up diverse writings of different colonial subjects—a Muslim traveler, a Christian preacher, and a Hindu prince—in South Asian sites and metropolitan locations to explore the overarching ‘self-other’ dichotomy through filters and materials of critical history and historical ethnography. At stake here is the issue of moving beyond singular renderings of the (generally, western) ‘self’ and homogeneous constructions of the (usually, non-western) ‘other,’ and to focus instead on how different South Asian subjects of empire variously imagined and inscribed (them)selves in the midst of wider constructions of hierarchies of otherness. Indeed, the questioning of this master dichotomy provides a means for the participants on this panel to discuss how colonial boundaries and imperial binaries were straddled and exceeded, and to explore the fashionings of personhood in written-discursive arenas and colonial situations, a theme that has tended to be elaborated in anthropological literature primarily through field-work among indigenous (read, unsullied ‘native’) peoples. The papers on the panel address these themes through discussions featuring concrete contexts and critical categories of empire and evangelization, raja and the rank, gender and community, the personal and the political, blurred boundaries and fuzzy genres, and colonial journeys and local travel.
Representing "His" Women: Mirza Abu Talib Khan’s 1801 "Vindication of the Liberties of the Asiatic Women"
Michael H. Fisher, Oberlin College
This paper analyzes the context and rhetoric of the comparison between the status of Asian and European women, written by an Indian male in 1801. While living in Britain (1799–1802), Abu Talib Khan encountered extensive criticism, particularly from European Christian women, of Islamic and Asian cultures, and therefore of himself. To counter these attacks, he took it upon himself to represent to British society the status and rights of the women of his own culture, as he idealized them. He also asserted his own deep critiques of European treatment and behavior of their women, often contrasting European claims with their practice. While accepting the patriarchal model often deployed by European imperialism, that women serve as the benchmark of a society’s degree of civilization, Abu Talib reversed the prevailing European valorization. Thus, his "Vindication," published in both India and Europe, reveals both how gender and class cross-cut racial difference and also how Asian agency inscribed itself in public discourse in colony and metropole during an early phase of imperialism.
Inscription and Consumption: The Burdwan Tour of Europe, 1926
Paul Greenough, University of Iowa
A 20-year-old rajkumar of the giant estate of Burdwan, Uday Chand Mahtab, accompanied his father, the maharaja, and the latter’s mistress on an extended visit to Europe in the summer of 1926. The maharaja had traveled abroad before, but this was the rajkumar’s first visit. From one perspective jazz-age London and Paris confirmed his expectations: black entertainers in nightclubs, daring young women drinking and dancing, pilots landing biplanes in public squares. The rajkumar—callow but not unobservant—kept up a running commentary in his diary about all that was placed before him. While he sometimes assumed a tone of detached weariness, in fact he struggled with European social expectations and surprised himself with the vehemence of his erotic and patriotic sentiments. Above all his efforts to learn how to "consume" what Europe had to offer—materially, aesthetically, and sexually—show him making and remaking his appearance, opinions, and conduct. In a word, he was learning the western disciplines that accompany "having fun." Accounts of elite Indian travel during the darkest days of the nationalist movement may offend political sensitivities, but the touring prince was only a few decades away from the tens of thousands middle-class Indians youths who would follow and would have to learn how to consume Europe as well as to criticize and mock it.
Revealing Truths: Inscriptions of an Indigenous Christianity in Colonial Central India
Saurabh Dube, El Colegio de Mexico
Between 1908 and 1913 three indigenous catechists wrote detailed accounts of their daily journeys to preach the ‘word’ in the villages and bazaars of Chhattisgarh. These day-books suggest the diverse ways in which hierarchies of difference and boundaries of otherness, involving Christians and non-Christians, white folk and Indian people, were constructed and elaborated within itinerant practices of proselytization and local forms of travel in central India. At the same time, the catechists’ modes of argument and forms of narration, as they coped with familiar queries and ingenious arguments, reveal rearrangements, occasionally alternative articulations, of Christian doctrines that were closely bound to their novel constructions of the divinities, beliefs, and rituals of Hinduism, Islam, and adivasi religions. Indeed, in these manuscripts a distinct mode of writing—certain of ‘truth,’ uncertain of language, which closes in on itself—points to a fluid world, of popular religious discourse. Here, the meanings of a new faith were debated through reinterpretations of old beliefs, and novel imaginings were shaped of the relationship between Christianity and colonialism, ‘pure’ science and ‘impure’ superstition, and western traditions and Indian histories. It was within the interstices of these diverse but overlapping movements that the catechists imagined and inscribed their simultaneously Christian selves and indigenous personhoods, interweaving the texts of their lives with the life of the ‘book,’ while reworking both through their renderings of the ‘word’ and their visions of the world.