Session 46: Archives, Books, Languages, and Educational Institutions as the Actual Sites for the Production of Colonial Knowledge

Organizer: Michael H. Fisher, Oberlin College

Chair: Ronald Inden, University of Chicago

Discussant: Sudipta Sen, Syracuse University

Colonial knowledge emerged in South Asia out of contests and interactions among specific people, both Britons and Indians, at particular sites and times. Each of the panel’s papers concentrates on a distinct set of people at a crucial moment during British colonial rule. Dirks focuses on the relationship between Colin Mackenzie’s project of collection and the early British colonial desire to write a unified political history of India. Kumar considers three leading Indian intellectuals who grappled with English language and culture in their search for their own identities and models for secular nationhood. Fisher examines how Indian scholars, trained in high Persianate culture, educated Britons both in India and in England, even as Britons attempted to control Persian as their language of imperial command. Lelyveld analyzes Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s history of Urdu as a statement about his own cultural heritage. Collectively, these papers demonstrate how individuals actually produced colonial knowledge out of their specific historical contexts. Since these papers will circulate in advance, they will speak to each other especially effectively. Each paper also engages each other particularly well since their authors are all students of the late Bernard Cohn and have deliberately taken up issues central to his own groundbreaking work. The South Asia Council of the AAS feels it especially fitting that such a panel be offered when the Association’s Annual Meeting is being held in Chicago, where Professor Cohn led South Asian studies in the departments of History and Anthropology; SAC provided the initial impetus for this panel.

Early Colonial Archives and the Production of a History for India

Nicholas B. Dirks, Columbia University

This paper focuses on the relationship between Colin Mackenzie’s (1753?–1821) extraordinary collection of historical and textual materials and his interest in constituting the archive for the preparation of a unified political history of the subcontinent. Mackenzie was more interested than many other official contemporaries in the political history of India, in part because of his direct involvement in the British conquest and revenue settlement in the Deccan, and in part because his very interest in the collection of his archive acquainted him with the extent to which historical texts and traditions were not only alive and well, but also deeply tied to structures of political authority in southern India. Mackenzie was also more aware than many textual Orientalists that historical genres were attentive to local conditions; some "prophecies" and "popular tales" were less formally historical than they might otherwise have been because of their inherently political, and thus dangerous, nature. The paper evaluates Mackenzie’s own sense of what a unified political history of India would consist of and look like, even as it analyzes the kinds of historical sensibilities, genres, and forms of understanding that made up Mackenzie’s archive, critiquing along the way some of the recent arguments in V. Narayana Rao, Sanjay Subrahmaniyam, and David Shulman, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800 (Permanent Black, 2001). The paper thus continues Cohn’s work, as collected and edited by Dirks in Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 1996).

The Fantastic World of English and Its Colonial Legacy

Nita Kumar, University of Michigan

As this panel highlights, Professor Cohn triggered the imaginations of South Asianists regarding the power of languages and categories, stressing in his own work the wielding of this power by the colonial state. This paper follows up on Cohn’s suggestion in his Introduction to Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge that Indians too wielded such power for their own purposes. This paper argues that, if knowledge is power, the Indian intelligentsia’s dual knowledge of Indian languages and of English, as cultural spaces and subject areas as well as actual sites of knowledge, gave them if not a doubled power, then a greatly enhanced one. It specifically explores how the study of English enabled reformers to envisage and approach the violence in their communities. The paper looks at the cases of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1857–1920), Bipin Chandra Pal (1858–1932), and Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), a famous trio of reformer-nationalists. Their different histories, ideologies, and "fantastic" proposals may be better understood by looking sympathetically at the specific way their discourses were products of their language learning. This paper asserts that their English education had profound constructive results. Despite the existing arguments of other scholars, these results can be fully explained neither as produced by colonial domination nor by the nationalist response to the that domination. Instead, this paper concludes that a study of how English gives educated Indians an impetus to their imaginations helps us more effectively comprehend secularism and nation-building today.

The Production of Persian as a Language of Command in Colleges in India and England

Michael H. Fisher, Oberlin College

Persian teaching became highly contested during early British rule over India. Indian scholar-officials, who for generations had served the Mughal Empire or a successor state, sought to perpetuate the Persianate high culture that they embodied. In both India and Britain, they worked to instruct Britons in Persian language, literature, and high culture generally. However, as Britons rapidly extended their control across India, they sought mastery over Persian as the "language of command." In the early 19th century, the East India Company established Fort William College in Calcutta and Haileybury and Addiscombe colleges in England to educate its newly-appointed British officials and officers in Persian and other subjects necessary for rule. In all these institutions, British professors practicing Orientalism asserted their alleged superiority over Asian teachers of Persian. After 1837, advocates of Anglicization made English replace Persian as the official language of British rule in India.

This paper explores the dynamics of Persian teaching in both India and Britain during this transition. It contrasts the educational institutions established in India and Britain to teach Persian, examining the contests and collaborations between their British and Asian professors of Persian. This paper thus complements Cohn’s famous and much republished essay "The Command of Language and the Language of Command," studying not the British students and professors of Persian at Fort William College, Haileybury, and Addiscombe but rather their Indian teachers.

Languages and Buildings as Bricolage in Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Asar us-Sanadid

David Lelyveld, William Patterson University

After descriptively cataloguing Delhi’s buildings in Asar us-Sanadid (Traces of the Notables) (2nd edition, 1853), Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98) appends an account of the Urdu language, followed by a reproduction in various languages and scripts of inscriptions that he found. This paper examines Sayyid Ahmad’s attitude to language and history before the 1857 rebellion and the rise in the 1860s of the Hindi-Urdu controversy. Drawing on Sunil Kumar’s recent critique of Sayyid Ahmad’s account of the Qutb Minar, I consider how Sayyid Ahmad’s treatment of the history of buildings, religion and political regimes relate to his ideas about language. For instance, Sayyid Ahmad treats language as an object of historical study understood in relationship to conquests, rulers, and migrations. But he also accounts for linguistic change as the achievement of exemplary literary figures, such as the 18th-century poets Mir and Sauda, but also the Fort William College munshi Mir Amman, whose own history of Urdu influenced Sayyid Ahmad. Sayyid Ahmad’s concept of Urdu arises from a linear concept of history and ideological assumptions rooted in Mughal culture and Persian literature. This paper engages with Cohn’s influential essay "Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture." The paper also considers Sayyid Ahmad in the light of Amrit Rai and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s conflicting notions of the role of the late Mughal elite and the early British colonial authorities in advancing a concept of Urdu as built on past claims of Muslim hegemony.