00:00:06.590 - 00:00:19.770

APARNA BALACHANDRAN: I teach at the post-graduate department of history at Delhi University. I've been teaching there for more than a decade. And I did my PhD at Columbia University

00:00:19.770 - 00:00:34.500

and I worked on the colonial port city of Madras in the 18th and 19th centuries. As far as my teaching and research is concerned, I'm interested in the legal and urban histories of South Asia,

00:00:34.500 - 00:00:47.370

in particular South India, in the history of archives and archiving practises. And recently I've become interested in the history and anthropology of the sonic in South Asia.

00:00:56.020 - 00:01:12.750

So very broadly, a colonial archive refers to archival repositories that were developed by European powers and later by the United States in to store records that

00:01:12.750 - 00:01:29.680

dealt with their colonies. So these could include a variety of texts, administrative records, maps, surveys, ethnographic records, photographs, and other visual materials, et cetera.

00:01:29.680 - 00:01:47.130

But the colonial archive also could also refer to two non-official sources. For instance, you could have published and unpublished memoirs, and biographies of colonial administrators,

00:01:47.130 - 00:02:03.600

travelogues, photographs taken by visitors to the colonies, and other kinds of visual materials, et cetera. Another genre, for instance, is a mission records because during the colonial period in different parts

00:02:03.600 - 00:02:15.890

of the world you have Protestant and Catholic missions that followed their governments to these colonies, and they have produced a vast corpus of documentation that is now available for the historian to research.

00:02:24.340 - 00:02:36.520

So the visual is a very important component of the colonial archive. And we find, for instance, illustrations paintings, photographs, scientific drawings, botanical drawings,

00:02:36.520 - 00:02:47.820

et cetera as a part of the archive. And visuals are a very important lens for us to understand the changing ideology of the colonial state.

00:02:47.820 - 00:03:02.770

So, for instance, if you look at 18th and 19th century, or early 19th century paintings, you will see a more will see more exotic Orientalist depictions of India.

00:03:02.770 - 00:03:18.660

For instance, in the work of the Daniell brothers, right? Whereas in by the time photography becomes an important part of the arsenal of colonial rule, you will see that there is a great deal of emphasis

00:03:18.660 - 00:03:33.550

on scientific ethnographic representations of native subjects. And it's I think photography is particularly interesting because we need to understand the photograph

00:03:33.550 - 00:03:54.760

as a product of a particular kind of cultural encounter between the state or between the photographer and the subject. And this is an encounter which is suffused with power. And you will see, for instance, that ethnographic photographs

00:03:54.760 - 00:04:11.170

from the 19th century are meant to produce images, stylized images, ethnographic images, of different sections of Indian society, castes, tribes, et cetera that will allow the state to be

00:04:11.170 - 00:04:32.940

able to control the population more effectively. So we find colonial records in metropolitan libraries and other kinds of repositories. For instance, the British Library in London

00:04:32.940 - 00:04:49.080

has a very large number of records pertaining to the period of East India Company rule in India but and also the British Raj after 1857. But you will also find these records in the colony,

00:04:49.080 - 00:05:04.920

in the former colony. So for instance, in India we have a big colonial archives in places like Madras, Bombay, Kolkata, and of course Delhi because these were big administrative centres.

00:05:04.920 - 00:05:23.090

But you will also find repositories in smaller places. In places in Punjab, in Gujarat, in Rajasthan, et cetera. So wherever the British administered the country, these centres of administration would produce records.

00:05:23.090 - 00:05:33.400

One thing that we have to keep in mind is that these records have moved around a lot. And the way in which they have moved around, particularly after Independence, has

00:05:33.400 - 00:05:46.790

followed the sort of political logic of the modern nation state. So for instance, a lot of records after partition, India and Pakistan shared records.

00:05:46.790 - 00:06:00.680

You also had, for instance, one very big moment when records were sort of split and shared amongst different archives is after the linguistic reorganisation of India in the 1950s.

00:06:00.680 - 00:06:14.260

So for instance, take the Tamil Nadu State Archives, which would have been the presidency archive of Madras. So records from Madras would have then travelled to Kerala,

00:06:14.260 - 00:06:28.450

to [? Erisa, ?] to Karnataka, so and along linguistic lines. So records are not necessarily found in the places in which they were originally located. They have moved around since then.

00:06:37.130 - 00:06:50.410

So in my own work, I work on the city of Madras in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I'm actually looking at the city as it was transformed from being a sort of city state, a commercial hub,

00:06:50.410 - 00:07:03.820

to becoming the capital of a territorial empire. And I'm interested in two things broadly. One is I'm thinking about the vision and practises of everyday rule as far as the East India Company's government

00:07:03.820 - 00:07:17.500

in Madras is concerned. And on the other hand, I'm interested in how different social groups in the city negotiated with the everyday forms of governance

00:07:17.500 - 00:07:28.870

of the colonial state at that time. And I'm particularly interested in artisanal and labouring groups in the city. So I look at a variety of documents.

00:07:28.870 - 00:07:40.190

So obviously I look at administrative documents. And I'm particularly interested in everyday records, the records of everyday rule. So I look at police records, judicial records.

00:07:40.190 - 00:07:55.610

And I also look at records like petitions that were sent by different kinds of groups in the city to the Madras government making particular kinds of claims, asking for support and protection from the state.

00:07:55.610 - 00:08:04.520

So these are the kinds of records that I use in my own work. I think a particularly interesting genre for me as far as my own research is concerned

00:08:04.520 - 00:08:16.370

is the colonial petition. And I looked at these 19th century petitions from outcast labourers in the city of Madras. And they were able to negotiate with the state,

00:08:16.370 - 00:08:27.860

ask for special protection from the state, on the basis of their having been an important part of the town development process as labourers, as military men,

00:08:27.860 - 00:08:42.400

as construction workers, et cetera. So it gave me a sort of insight into their world view and insight into their voices. And that I thought was particularly interesting.

00:08:49.500 - 00:09:02.870

So modernity has been always been associated with visuality. But new scholarship by historians has argued that, in fact, modernity is a multi-sensorial experience and that sound

00:09:02.870 - 00:09:15.360

is as important as the visual in the way in which we've encountered the modern. Now my own work, as I've said earlier, is on the city of Madras in the 18th and 19th centuries.

00:09:15.360 - 00:09:34.520

And I was interested in the ways in which the Protestant mission, which becomes very important in South India in the 19th century, used sound in order to categorise and classify a native society

00:09:34.520 - 00:09:45.000

and to understand itself. Now it was very interesting because we're talking about a period before the advent of recording technology.

00:09:45.000 - 00:09:57.630

So I actually had to look at written records, records belonging to the Protestant archive in South India at that time, in particular, the records of the Church Missionary Society and the London Missionary

00:09:57.630 - 00:10:12.600

Society. And I had to access the sonic through the written. So it was a sort of it's an interesting project. And I found that sound was used by Protestant missions

00:10:12.600 - 00:10:25.660

to understand themselves, to see themselves as different from the Catholics, to discuss the nature of their belief, and to distinguish themselves from heathenism, for instance.

00:10:28.210 - 00:10:43.200

And so this is something that I encountered in the archive. And I've used the mission archives previously. But when but when I entered the archive with the express sort of the express desire

00:10:43.200 - 00:10:54.120

to find the sonic in it, I found that it was suffused with sound. So this is an example of the ways in which I think the colonial archive actually

00:10:54.120 - 00:11:12.330

allows us to do different kinds of histories if read critically and creatively. Colonial records have been called a form of colonial knowledge.

00:11:12.330 - 00:11:26.440

By which I mean that the colonial records have been produced because the colonial state needs to understand its subject population. And through that understanding, it hopes to control them,

00:11:26.440 - 00:11:37.700

right? Whether they do or do not is another matter. And archival knowledge is both extremely Eurocentric in character.

00:11:37.700 - 00:11:51.940

It can also be transformative. By which I mean that the classificatory patterns the categories that are used that were used by colonial states have in many have in many cases

00:11:51.940 - 00:12:08.320

transformed native societies. So for instance, if you look at modern Indian society, the British considered caste and religion as the primary markers of social identity.

00:12:08.320 - 00:12:19.710

And they ruled India through these markers, right, whether it was through the census or other kinds of bureaucratic tools. And we find today that the legacy of that rule

00:12:19.710 - 00:12:31.220

still manifests in society, right? Not just in the ways in which the post-colonial state understands its population, but also in the ways in which Indians understand themselves.

00:12:31.220 - 00:12:45.110

So this is profoundly transformative knowledge, which is something that we have to remember when we think about colonial records. Something that is often said about the colonial archive

00:12:45.110 - 00:12:56.790

is that it is often silent about groups that the state is not interested in, very often underprivileged groups, women, et cetera. On the one hand that is true but what is equally interesting,

00:12:56.790 - 00:13:09.200

of course, is that whether we're talking about peasants or workers, they do enter the archive. But they enter the archive in another register. They become a part of judicial records, police records, et

00:13:09.200 - 00:13:23.810

cetera as the state attempts to control its population, right? So as the colonial state attempted to impose law in order to deal with strikes, and riots, and rebellions, these groups then

00:13:23.810 - 00:13:34.550

entered the colonial archive. They entered its judicial records. They entered its police records. So as historians what we need to do is to look at these records

00:13:34.550 - 00:13:44.910

but read them critically. In the words of the great historian Ranajit Guha who recently passed away, we have to read the archive against the grain

00:13:44.910 - 00:13:59.120

so that we do not repeat the assumptions of the colonial state, right? We have to retrieve the voices of these groups of these groups that are embedded in the state's narratives.

00:13:59.120 - 00:14:12.440

And that is what the historian who uses the colonial records that the historian who uses the colonial archive has to do. Equally, it's important to think about the state itself

00:14:12.440 - 00:14:27.800

as not monolithic but as heterogeneous. The colonial state has to be contextualised. It has to be seen as a historical. That is, you cannot take its assumptions its language

00:14:27.800 - 00:14:37.900

as a priori. But we have to see this the state's own logic as changing over time. The anthropologist Anne Stoller who

00:14:37.900 - 00:14:50.500

has written about the archives of the Dutch East Indies has talked about the importance of reading the archives along the grain, right? To understand the colonial archive ethnographically.

00:14:50.500 - 00:15:04.870

To understand the state's anxieties. To understand the patterns of its narratives its omissions, its tropes, its themes so that what you get then is a more textured sort

00:15:04.870 - 00:15:15.060

of multi-layered and historical understanding of colonial power. So I think these are the things that one has to do when one thinks about reading the colonial archive.

00:15:22.610 - 00:15:34.790

The notion of reading against the grain of the archive comes from the scholarship of Ranajit Guha, who was the founder of Subaltern Studies. And Guha, in his work, was talking

00:15:34.790 - 00:15:46.610

about peasant rebellions in colonial India. But his insights into how to read the archive against the grain could be extended to other contexts and other kinds

00:15:46.610 - 00:15:54.950

of colonial archives. Now what Guha would argue in his work is that if you look at a peasant rebellion, or if you look at a peasant uprising,

00:15:54.950 - 00:16:14.240

and if you look at the records of events such as these, you will find that the way in which the state narrates these events in their texts, whether they are texts produced at the moment of an uprising or a rebellion,

00:16:14.240 - 00:16:27.000

or whether this is an event that is narrated later, for instance, in the biographies of administrators, or judges, et cetera. The way in which these are narrated

00:16:27.000 - 00:16:41.850

are tantamount to what he calls the prose of counter-insurgency. So this is language which converts the rebel into the criminal and the peasant into the fanatic.

00:16:41.850 - 00:16:53.250

And what Guha asks us to do as historians is to read this material closely to pay attention to the language of the state, to read the language against the grain so that you retrieve

00:16:53.250 - 00:17:08.820

from that material the logic of the rebellion in the peasants' own terms, right? You understand the consciousness, the agency, the worldviews of the peasant by reading these archives

00:17:08.820 - 00:17:24.230

against the logic of the state. And this for Guha is extremely important because Guha argues that it is crucial for the historian not to repeat the prejudices, the biases, the stereotypes

00:17:24.230 - 00:17:38.930

of the colonial judge, of the colonial official, right? So and in his both in the introduction to Subaltern Studies as well as in a classic texts called The Prose Of Counter-Insurgency,

00:17:38.930 - 00:17:52.520

Guha reiterates the importance of not allowing the prose of counter-insurgency to seep into the texts of into the work of historians. And that can only be done by paying close attention

00:17:52.520 - 00:18:12.760

to the language of the colonial archive and to read against the logic of that language. So on the one hand, obviously there's the colonial archive allows us to write rich histories of state formation,

00:18:12.760 - 00:18:28.660

of the law, state building, town planning, military and military battles, et cetera. But the archive is also the site of material of all aspects of human endeavour, right?

00:18:28.660 - 00:18:44.170

From economics to cartography to science to linguistics, et cetera. So the material the colonial archive is immense. So critical historian has the scope

00:18:44.170 - 00:18:54.730

to do all kinds of histories based on a critical reading of the archive. Recently there's been some interesting work which has looked at the archive as the subject

00:18:54.730 - 00:19:06.500

of its own history. So for instance, there's been work on the materiality of the archive on the ink and paper which went into the making

00:19:06.500 - 00:19:15.860

of these documentary collections in different parts of the world. There's also been really interesting work on the native intermediaries who were

00:19:15.860 - 00:19:29.660

instrumental in the production of these archives. So these are Indians who became collaborators with the British and helped to or British or other colonial powers and helped to produce these archives and there.

00:19:29.660 - 00:19:49.910

You have native assistants who helped people in the field. You have scribes, clerks, et cetera. So the archive in a sense, was a collaborative exercise that was physically produced not just by the colonial state,

00:19:49.910 - 00:20:03.880

but the state itself was helped by various native subjects in different ways. And a lot of the interesting new material on the archive talks about this aspect of archive making.