COLONIAL ARCHIVES AND STATE POWER: A
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ENQUIRY
Skand Priya1
Abstract
Till the present day colonial archives remains a dominant source of history writing in south Asia. The privileged status of the colonial archives over other unconventional sources is mostly due to their unbreakable relationship with the state. The reposition and writing of history for long has remained a task under the purview of state and the post-colonial states have also not been able to keep themselves away from producing legitimizing histories. But there have been variations in how the historians have looked at these repositories of past. Serious criticism of the imperial archives and their rereading in different context by western as well as south Asian scholars alike has emerged in past four decades. This paper attempts to have a critical look at how the historians of different genre have looked at the colonial archives. Moreover with the coming of subaltern studies project from 1980s onwards, various alternatives have also been developed as a source of writing history in south Asia. This paper also seeks to explore those alternative sources specially the oral one.
KEYWORD: ARCHIVES, COLONIAL, HISTORIOGRAPHY, SOUTH ASIA.
“History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The
ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.” –
Michel-RolphTrouillot (1995)1
“As a rule, our memories romanticize the past. But when one has renounced a creed or been betrayed by a friend, the opposite mechanism sets to work. In the light of that later knowledge, the original experience loses its innocence,
becomes tainted and rancid in recollection.”2
Introduction
Archives as we imagine it today speaks of both the collection of social memory and the housing
of this memory as tangible records in the form of a repository of history. A study of both this
process of archiving and its housing in a space have changed meaning and form over the last two
centuries forcing us to take into consideration the ways in which we imagine and constitute
archives. With the Foucauldian intervention that foregrounded the interaction between power and
knowledge and discursive formations visible in historical records, the archive came to be seen as
a site where power is articulated, negotiated and contested continually. What finds place in an
archive, who finds voice within it, and the ways it is organized, preserved, and provides access to
information reminds us of subjective interventions made at every stage of documentation and
interpretation. An understanding of these processes allows us to read the past(s) of peoples and
communities that have been silenced in the record in ways that break the conventions set by the
dominant Western discourse. Looking at the archive alongside the process of the
professionalization of the discipline of history, colonialism and the production of knowledge,
there is a need to move beyond analyses that interrogates the constitution of the archive. While
the archives need to be placed in their temporal and spatial contexts, there is a concomitant need
to look at the form in which the archives take shape and the conventions associated with its
constitution, and what finds place within the archive as the content are questions that are linked
with notions of modernity, facticity and modes of narrativizing pasts. Thus, one is faced with the
need to critically question of the neutrality of the archive at the levels of its content, constitution,
its arrangement, the way it is read and finally the ways in which it is utilized in historical writing.
Archives and History
The positivist truth claims of the archive as an objective repository of scientifically collated facts
and historical narratives assumes that facts exist independently of the historian who writes it. But
the record of the past is mediated when it is interpreted and narrativised in historical discourse.
History can be seen as narratives reflecting social memory of a time in a time where the audience
and its concerns continually change. Reminding us of plots within a narrative of an event,
Hayden White finds that representation of reality in historical discourse that appears as narratives
reflect the ways in which the historian sees the past, the context within which it appears and its
discourse, White forces us to address the question of the neutrality in the ways in which pasts are
written.
The structuring of narratives becomes significant when looking at remembered experiences of
individuals. As in the case of letters of remissions and pardon tales from sixteenth France,
mediated by legal or sacral officials of the state the narratives blur the lines between history and
fiction4. The utilization of the archives to assess these letters needs to keep in mind the role of
the king, the state, and the meaning of legal pardon, the common understanding of the juridical
process and the social recognition of the value of pardoning. The stories of pardon are shaped for
a perspective amenable to the one pardoning. Thus, the archive keeps records of stories as
documents with social and legal significance.
The utilization of facts for the purposes of historical narratives needs to keep in mind the
processes of knowledge production available to us in the context of a post-colonial world. While
distinguishing facticity from modernity, Mary Poovey establishes the relationship between
knowledge production and governance in producing „systematic knowledge‟5
. Through an
assessment of the “intellectual history” of facts, she attempts to break presumptions about the unbiased nature of numerical evaluation that “acquired the connotations of transparency and impartiality” as part of the “knowledge making projects”6
of the West while recognizing the
impact of social considerations of this project; thus, emphasizing continuities between social
reality and contemporary forms of knowledge.
It is here that one finds certain twentieth century concerns need to be seen in its time. Poovey
finds that though one may not be able to see the past exactly in its terms or judge on the basis of
contemporary perspectives as they may not have been imaginable, there is a need to
acknowledge the value of understanding “the dynamics of epistemological change” of one‟s own
context7. This brings us to the unthinkability of some kinds of history while others are “powerful
enough to pass as accepted history if not historicity itself”8
. Michel-RolphTrouillot compels us to
imagine and take note of notions of historicity that are at variance across societies in the past and
the present. Thus, the way we look at the past, the way we narrate it, and the ways we
Focusing on the production of history, Trouillot places narratives firmly within its context of
conception, production, and representation of historically situated subjects by active agents or
narrators. Here, we find that history as narratives produced in areas outside of the dominant
discourse, or in spheres outside academia continually collide on questions of authenticity and
significance when posited against professional historians allowing us to imagine the range of
possibilities for silencing. Thus, power operates at multiple levels of historical discourse. In his
assessment of the representation of the Haitian Revolution in Western historiography, Trouillot
finds certain narrative plots and facts were “unthinkable”. He reads this as reflective of the
system of domination within historiography to silence histories that defies the logic of those
writing it and their political interests. The incapacity to express the unthinkable, this process of
erasure or trivialization of narratives that are difficult to conceive are seen by him as “formulas of banalization”9
. Thus, prioritization and erasure in the epistemology of pasts leads to silences
in available records and from historiography as well.
South Asian Context
Keeping in mind the impact of systems of knowledge on how archives are conceived and the
silences built into the form of these apparently neutral repositories of histories, an attempt to
understand history writing within the colonial context would illustrate the negotiations of power
within the archives. The making of colonial archives in South Asia over the eighteenth and
nineteenth century needs to trace continuities with existing forms of archives in the subcontinent.
Taking from Bernard Cohn‟s work on colonial knowledge production and the emergence of
disciplines, Nicholas Dirks and Phillip Wagoner both begin their assessment of the making of the
colonial archive alongside the nature of colonial knowledge. Utilizing the Mackenzie Archive of
the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century, they attempt an understanding of the ways in which
the colonial officials created archives, the process of collecting archival material, the interaction
between the existing historical sources and its interpretation. Dirks saw Mackenzie as an
archivist-official who had a sense of the way history was affected by the cultural and political
context of rule. Here, he had a sense of the narrative value of inscriptional records for a
subcontinent that seemingly lacked authoritative accounts of political histories. Besides
architectural records, and ethnographic drawings of the inhabitants of the subcontinent.
Mackenzie was aware of the historical significance of these sources, the role of local knowledge
and archiving in general. This led him to archive a wide range of sources with the help of native
assistants that looked beyond the immediately identifiable chronology that established
historicity10. By developing his own process of archiving that continually changed according to
the nature of the sources, Mackenzie was able to incorporate a wide range of voices within the
archive. When looking at the conventions of archiving that emerged in the subsequent century of
colonial rule over the subcontinent, the dominant British notion of history-writing, the impact of
the legal right to rule over the colonized nation of British India, one finds that this process of
colonial knowledge production served the interests of the colonial state.
Wagoner took this view forward to see beyond the personhood of Colin Mackenzie in his
assessment of the Mackenzie archives. The role of the indigenous assistants who actively
participated in the collection and transcription of inscriptions and genealogies, ethnographic data,
land surveys, caste surveys are seen as that of collaboration and not merely passive colonial
subjects. Further, Wagoner stresses the significance of looking at the caste and social position of
Mackenzie‟s assistants as this indicates the social position accorded to those participating in such
collaborative ventures with the colonial officials. These considerations would find reflection in
the way the archives are formed as well as in the content of the archives. Thus, the interaction
between the Indian and European conceptions of categorizations in colonial conditions created
“shared body of experiences and orientations”11
as well as knowledge now visible in the archives
spread across the subcontinent. Yet, he finds that one cannot make sweeping generalizations for
all archival sources as Oriental scholarship in the Madras Presidency differed from Calcutta in
terms of administrative intervention and institutionalization. Thus, when looking at the
prehistory of archives, the changing form of the colonial project of knowledge production and
archiving is seen as dictated by political interests of the state.
By the nineteenth and the twentieth century, the utilization of the colonial archive expanded into
the legal sphere and legitimized the colonial rule over India. The content and form of the archive
expanded to include governmental correspondence on matters of law and order and local
As in the case of peasant rebellions in the nineteenth century, the archival records see these
events as spontaneous outbursts against local land practices and exploitative zamindars rather than as a conscious, organized act of armed rebellion after concerted efforts to appeal to the local
administration for reprieve. RanajitGuha12 reminds us that there is a need to see how and when
the peasant appears in the archive and under what conditions. The colonial records reflect the
urgency of the colonial officials to tackle an ostensible law and order problem that takes the form
of a rebellion against the existing state. These leave behind “ideological birth-marks”13 of the
anxieties of the colonial official in charge of local law and order. Guha finds that the manner of
reading the archives must not merely locate the position of the colonial official corresponding
with the colonial administration but “criticism must therefore start not by naming a bias but by
examining the components of the discourse, vehicle of all ideology, for the manner in which
these might have combined to describe any particular figure of the past”14
. The intended
audience of correspondence of this kind, official reports and historical accounts has already been
decided even as the narrative in the garb of impartiality speaks of objective truths. Thus, “the
discourse of history, far from being neutral, serves directly to instigate official violence”15.
In an effort to utilize the available archive to read existing social conditions, Guha attempts to
contextualize the record in space, time and social reality, to “pick up traces of subaltern life in its
passage through time”16. Utilizing the record of a criminal case under investigation, he finds that
the voice of the subaltern appears in the narrative as part of the juridical discourse when it is
classified as a crime. In the documentation of the subaltern voices, law changes the sequence and
subsequently the intent of the persons involved thus effectively changing the story to reflect a
position that accepts the patriarchal social norms already in practice. To Guha, this instance of
what came to be constituted as a crime in juridical discourse reveals a solidarity of the
community as well as a solidarity of another kind that remains silenced or ignored in the record,
solidarity of women fighting for a place in society. Thus, even these solidarities can be seen as
ways of registering rebellion in the face of both societal norms and colonial law.
In another instance of reading voices of contention in the colonial archive reflecting conflict
between colonial law and rule, the case of ChauriChaura17 and the Approver‟s Testimony to
thana. With the testimony of Shikari, the approver, the prosecution attempted to establish a pattern by focusing on the prehistory of the event and sees it not merely as a stray act of
violence. Here, the „approver‟ is part of the prosecutions definition of a participant in the criminal act, thus, part of the colonial state‟s juridical discourse follows a determined path set by
the state. Amin reads the juridical discourse as part of the colonial archive as serving the political
interests of the colonial state. Thus, the colonial project of knowledge production produced
silences within the record by dictating what would appear in it through a legal lens as part of the
juridical discourse that endorsed and upheld the colonial rule in India.
Conclusion
Archives can be seen as a state of collecting and preserving historical records for further perusal
while at the same time the archiving process can be seen as “a politics of knowledge that reckons
with archival genres, cultures of documentation, fictions of access, and archival conventions”18
.
In this effort, Stoler suggests that before reading the archive “against the grain”, there is a need
to trace the ways in which the content of what finds place within an archive shapes the formation
of the archive itself. The process of keeping records, the active production of history, and
maintaining administrative correspondence was a need for colonial rule. The archives reproduced
the power of the state in the act of archiving while constituting the power in turn. Yet, there is a
need to keep in mind that archival conventions were not universally practiced and thus, the
archives themselves reveal contentions.
As a matter of enquiry one must look critically at the establishment of the colonial archive as the
nerve centre of all possible knowledge. There exists deep relationship between the archive and
state and. Archive has to be seen “not as a collection of text but the collectively imagined
junction of all that was known or knowable”.19
The knowledge thus produced Bout the colonized
took the form of ruling strategies. The archives became the “fantastic representation of an
'epistemological master pattern', a virtual focal point for the 'heterogeneous local knowledge of
metropole and empire'”.20One has to be cautious about the fact that the ordering of the world and
its knowledge into a unified field moved into the register of representations where the archive
to be nerve centre of all knowledge should be located within the concept of “power” and
“hegemony” which is central to the orientalist understanding.22
Keeping in mind the disciplinary concerns of defining facticity, narratives, modernity,
colonization and modes of recording social memory, the archives need to be seen as constituted
by and responding to the social, cultural and political conditions within which it emerged. The
audience to which it speaks and the conditions under which it does may define the content it
prioritizes. The contents of the archive, seen as a space, as a cabinet of records needs to keep in
mind that, “the contents of our cabinet are neither fixed not accessible at will”23
.
Notes and References
1Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, “Preface”, Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Trouillot attempts to understand the production of historical narratives as expressions of power visible in its materiality that may render invisible other narrations.
2
Koestler,Arthur in Crossmman, Richard H (ed.), The God That Failed, New york: Columbia University Press, 2001, pp. 55
3 White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality (Chapter One)” in The Content of the
Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987. 4 Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Introduction and the Time of Story Telling” in Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and
the their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
5Poovey, Mary, “The Modern Fact, the Problem of Induction, and Questions of Method (Chapter One)” in A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998, pp. 1-3.
6
Ibid. pp. 5-8. 7Ibid. pp. 23-4.
8Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, p. 6. 9Ibid. p. 96.
10
Dirks, Nicholas, “Textualization of Tradition: The Biography of an Archive (Chapter Five)” in Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 97.
11 Wagoner, Phillip B, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge”, Comparative Studies
in Society and History, Vol. 45 No. 4, 2003, p. 799. 12Guha, Ranajit, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” in
Subaltern Studies II, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. 13Ibid. p. 17.
14Ibid. p. 9. 15Ibid. p. 20. 16
Ibid. “Chandra‟s Death” in Subaltern Studies V, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
17 Amin, Shahid, “Approver‟s Testimony, Juridical Discourse: The Case of ChauriChaura” in Subaltern Studies V, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
18Stoler, Ann Laura, “Colonial Archive and the Art of Governance”, Archival Science, Vol. 2, 2002, 87-109.
19Richards,Thomas,“Archives and Utopia” inRepresentations, No. 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and
Postcolonial Histories , Winter, 1992, pp. 104-135 20 ibid
21 ibid
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