Autobiography of an Archive

A Scholar's Passage to India

Nicholas Dirks

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231538510
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

The decades between 1970 and the end of the twentieth century saw the disciplines of history and anthropology draw closer together, with historians paying more attention to social and cultural factors and the significance of everyday experience in the study of the past. The people, rather than elite actors, became the focus of their inquiry, and anthropological insights into agriculture, kinship, ritual, and folk customs enabled historians to develop richer and more representative narratives. The intersection of these two disciplines also helped scholars reframe the legacies of empire and the roots of colonial knowledge.

In this collection of essays and lectures, history's turn from high politics and formal intellectual history toward ordinary lives and cultural rhythms is vividly reflected in a scholar's intellectual journey to India. Nicholas B. Dirks recounts his early study of kingship in India, the rise of the caste system, the emergence of English imperial interest in controlling markets and India's political regimes, and the development of a crisis in sovereignty that led to an extraordinary nationalist struggle. He shares his personal encounters with archives that provided the sources and boundaries for research on these subjects, ultimately revealing the limits of colonial knowledge and single disciplinary perspectives. Drawing parallels to the way American universities balance the liberal arts and specialized research today, Dirks, who has occupied senior administrative positions and now leads the University of California at Berkeley, encourages scholars to continue to apply multiple approaches to their research and build a more global and ethical archive.

Part I

Autobiography

1

Annals of the Archive

Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History

History is the work expended on material documentation (books, texts, accounts, registers, acts, buildings, institutions, laws, techniques, objects, customs, etc.) that exists, in every time and place, in every society … in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments … in our time, history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument.

—Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge

It is the state which first presents subject-matter that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but involves the production of such history in the very progress of its own being.

—G. F. W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Ethnography of the Archive

The first time I entered an archive, I panicked. My historical zeal inexplicably vanished as I desperately stemmed a welling desire to exit immediately and search for the nearest pub. I saw before me the thousands of documents I could indent, the books I might read, the files I had to wade through. I tried to imagine which index to consult, what department to decipher, how best to control the chaos of what seemed an infinite chain of documents. My proposal for research, so lucid a minute before, seemed inappropriate, unwise, nigh impossible. I felt embarrassed to expose my ignorance in front of professional archivists, helpful though they were. My interest in the small voices, cultural forms, and contradictory ruptures of history seemed designed neither for easy recognition nor ready access. My proposal to understand the essential relationship between political authority and social relations in early modern South India was vast and suddenly incoherent. It could take me to any fragment, yet I knew that all fragments were not equal, that most documents by themselves were mere reminders of the quotidian tedium of history, that I not only needed to start somewhere, I needed to start somewhere promising. The archive is a glorious monument of history, but the documents within are for the most part endless and banal.

Most historians write history before they enter the archive, beginning their professional apprenticeship by using those secondary sources in libraries that are already contaminated by interpretation and selection. Even then, however, such sources establish their authenticity through referencing an archive that demarcates the partial and secondary nature of all sources from outside. The archive is constituted as the only real space that is free of context, argument, ideology—indeed history itself. Accordingly, historians can only really become historians or write history once they have been to the archive. The originary arrival of the historian in the archive is much like the arrival of the anthropologist in the field—that threshold of disciplinary certification—the magical moment when the scientist-scholar sets down upon a shore that beckons with the promise that one can finally engage in the act of discovery, at last come face to face with truth and the realm of unmediated evidence. But while anthropologists have famously subjected their arrival stories to narrative scrutiny—some would say carried away too much by the reflexive turn—the historian’s arrival story is still largely untold, shielded by the fact that while the archive has often seemed mystical, it has never appeared exotic. Travelers’ tales and adventurers’ yarns have never rendered the archive a major source of memoir, yet the monumentality of the archive is enshrined in a set of assumptions about truth that are fundamental both to the discipline of history and to the national foundations of history. While basic assumptions about truth and history have been critiqued in relation to historical writing (and the use of sources), they have rarely been examined in relation to the institutional repositories for the sources themselves, except inside the very historical footnotes that summon the greatest respect for the archive as a repository of ultimate value.¹ The archive is simultaneously the outcome of historical process and the very condition for the production of historical knowledge. What follows is my own archive arrival story.²

My formal acquaintance with the archive was prefaced by several years of working with original documents that themselves preceded the establishment of the modern archive. I began my graduate career as a historian by reading epigraphical series and reports, transcriptions and translations of inscriptions that were for the most part etched into either stone or copper surfaces, many dating from the years between 600 and 1400 AD. Stone inscriptions typically recorded endowments to temples and were inscribed on the stone walls of the shrines where worship was to be conducted or on the walls surrounding the centers of worship. Copper-plate inscriptions were typically held by the descendants of kings, landlords, and various other magnates whose entitlements to land, tribute, office, and honor were itemized, publicly declared, and permanently instantiated by the presentation of the material text. In addition to recording details of landholding rights and relations, political positions and perquisites, ritual emoluments and entailments, these inscribed surfaces provided occasions for textual performances of various kinds, most significantly when the pedigree of the presenter became the basis for historical narrations of the exploits and exemplariness of certain families and their forebears. Inscriptions thus provided the stuff of history—the details of property and politics, identity and institutions—at the same time that they were themselves historical texts, recording in genealogical form the claims made by history itself for and about authority. History was already monumental, most particularly in the elaborate and sometimes enormous temple complexes that yielded surface after surface for textual inscription, but also in the use of precious metals to insure the permanence of the text (though its very preciousness meant there was always the temptation for textual meltdown). In one sense history in this premodern moment could only be monumental, for the myriad other texts that must have been etched on the evanescent surfaces of palmyra palm were consigned to certain obsolescence in ways that meant that if history was to last, it had to be written on, or as, a monument.

If the temple complex was itself an archive, it was an archive of a very different kind than we imagine when we contemplate the contemporary institution. The walls of the temple complex served in one sense as a local record room—the origins of most modern archives; these records, however, were attached to a preexisting monument and functioned in effect to secure the monument as well as the authoritative relations and figures whose own power was symbolized and deployed through the institutional formation of the temple. And despite the ample epigraphical record, the actual record was slight compared to any modern paper archive, the details of administrative procedure few and far between, only rarely cross-referenced in ways that might genuinely anticipate the surveillance and custodianship of a bureaucratic managerial elite that would seem the sine qua non of modern archives and states.

Nevertheless, the temple complex was an archive of sorts. It preserved records necessary for the maintenance of a polity, even as the polity itself relied heavily on the institutional relations of the temple. And it preserved these records for reference use as well as in ways that worked to monumentalize both history and its documents. The inscriptional texts themselves appear emblematic of a particular kind of archival history, combining the most banal of details with the most glorious panegyrics in praise of kingly dynasties, local rulers, and institutional arrangements (ranging from the banking functions of temples or the maintenance of ritual performances to the memorialization of property relations and honorific offices). At the same time, neither historians nor “history” proper was necessary for the transformation of documents into history, as happened later when the myriad record offices of government still had to be monumentalized into archives in order to transit from the realm of bureaucracy to the domain of history. In southern India, documents literally began their careers as monuments.

It was with this privileged experience of premodern history that I set off on my journey to the modern archive. Even though by then I had shifted my own historical interests from the eighth and ninth centuries to the eighteenth and nineteenth, I still had ambivalent feelings about this shift of focus. Given my interest in precolonial state and society—specifically in charting out the nature of kingly authority and caste relations in southern India immediately prior to the onset of British colonial rule and then tracing its transformations over the first colonial century—I was keen to find documents that existed before the modern colonial state and its entire apparatus of documentation. At best, the archive might have admitted documents from an earlier age as an expression of the colonial state’s need to know how things really were before the British arrived. But I worried that the archive was at least in part about the contamination of the West, or the modern, or both. At the same time, I walked into the archive with all the trepidation of the academic apprentice, worried that I would never penetrate its carefully kept secrets and, worse, that these secrets were impenetrable not because of the daring originality of my line of research but because I had been too ignorant, or not mindful enough, of the archival realities. I knew that historians should not take archives for granted, but I felt for the first time the palpable tension between the archive and the historian.

The archive that formally inaugurated my experience as a historian was the India Office Library in London. Originally the library and record room of the India Office, the agency of the British government that oversaw Britain’s colonial relationship with India until independence in 1947, it had been moved into a separate archive in the early 1970s, placed under the management of the British Library, and, well after I did my initial research, moved to and amalgamated with the archival and library holdings of the new British Library in St. Pancras. Despite the shabby postwar high-rise on “The Cut,” in what was then an especially dreary part of south London, midway between Blackfriars and Elephant and Castle, I walked into the archive for the first time in 1975 with all the excitement that my fellow anthropology students had reserved for the moment they arrived in a “field of their own.” My excitement soon merged with confusion when I realized that I hadn’t a clue about what to do next—whether I should look at the index for the political, public, or home departments, what the mechanisms might be for genealogical research, and how to access either Tamil or English manuscript collections. I remember spending the first day paging through the index of one particular department with a key word that failed to appear for anything more than the most trivial of documents. In frustration, I hand copied one very long letter that seemed vaguely important (only to realize later that I had already photocopied the same passage from a government manual back in the university library at home). I felt a bizarre if momentary envy for the traditional research historian who was assigned a topic on the basis of a specific collection of records or documents their supervisor had preselected for them, at the same time wondering if I should just discard history and go to the field instead, starting my project with anthropological fieldwork, the flip side of my disciplinary training.³ I realized that to be able to use the archive productively, I would have to do extensive research on the archive itself, learning both about the history of British governmental rule at the concrete levels of yearly bureaucratic organization and interaction and about the history of various kinds of collections and record keeping. All historians learn these lessons in their early archival days, yet we rarely confess openly how disconcerting the experience was.⁴

As time went by, I came to understand considerably more about the nature, classificatory structures, and institutional histories of some of the records and collections that were to become the primary documentation for my thesis. I also began to learn about the complex relationship between archives in Britain and archives in India—what sorts of files, what levels of detail, and what manner of departments could be found to organize materials at the India Office Library in London, the National Archives of India in New Delhi, the Tamil Nadu Record Office in Madras (and eventually the record room of the old Pudukkottai Kingdom in a small district town). As I surveyed the full range of little kingdoms in the southern Tamil countryside, I learned that the one kingdom that became a princely state, Pudukkottai, had many of its imperial records not in Madras but in London and Delhi, where the records concerning the administration of princely states had been housed, while the records concerning the landlords, or zamindars—once peers of the princes—had been kept in the local archive in Madras. The landlords were occasionally taken under direct rule of government, a kind of “receivership,” for reasons either having to do with charges of corruption or the minority of the zamindar. Years of direct management yielded significant records: confidential memos, reports, and accounts, all confirming first the wisdom and then the folly of administrative intervention. Otherwise, the records were primarily made up of accounts of land settlements that implemented the introduction of new forms of property and new relations between “cultivators” and the state. So daunted was I by the stacks of land records when I first encountered them that I found it difficult to anticipate that I would later come to relish them; as it happened, I spent much of my thesis research period looking at records of settlements concerning land that had been held free of tax for reasons that turned out to reveal a complex political structure of entitlements, providing a nuanced picture of the economy as well as the state. When I came to focus on Pudukkottai, in part because the records seemed to be much better kept, I did not at first know that its settlement records had been kept in the Pudukkottai archive itself, never transferred to Madras, Delhi, or London, still part of an active record room that had been transferred to the local district collector’s office, first based in nearby Trichirappalli and later in Pudukkottai town itself. These discoveries, as indeed my sense of the importance of these kinds of records for my research, came much later.

My first experience of the archive had thus been frustrating for several reasons, quite apart from the myriad frustrations that any scholar working in Indian archives in the 1970s took for granted, such as the absence of photocopy machines, the now unimaginable absence of the computer, and the often highly personalized contingencies of archival access, even in state- and national-level record offices. I was frustrated not only because I felt buried under the weight of archival excess but because this excess was distributed in historically contingent ways across states, nations, and continents, with little in the way of indices, guides, or user-friendly catalogues that could help prepare the scholar for the task ahead. Furthermore, both the documentary excess and the archival proliferation of documents seemed to signify the limits on access to some of the most important issues of the past—even leaving aside the difficulties that had to do with political censorship, bureaucratic neglect, and the ravages of time and climate on many of the most important documents. While some of these issues seemed endemic to India, they also seemed to amplify the distortions of a colonial regime, one that either sought to obscure the past or to represent it in ways that seemed at best evidence for tendentious arguments in favor of one or another colonial approach to rule. Even for caches of primary records within single archives that promised greatest access, e.g. land settlement records, it soon became clear that the records could only be read against, and ultimately as, the outcome of arguments among various British colonial officials who had identified landlords, cultivators, village communities, and the like as the primary holders of property for reasons that often had more to do with their own theoretical influences (the physiocrats, the utilitarians, etc.) than with any real empirical evidence on the ground. I was, nevertheless, determined to discover what I could about the nature of state and society in the immediate precolonial period, and the more I looked in colonial archives, the more I felt the impossibility of the project. And so I soon decided to take a break from the archives in Madras and to look instead at textual accounts that had been composed before the British took control of India’s past, and I spent increasing numbers of hours away from the archive in a library of “Oriental Manuscripts” that—based as it was over the library of the University of Madras—housed the manuscript collection of Colin Mackenzie.

Colin Mackenzie, an engineer and mathematician by training, went to India as an army man in the late eighteenth century and soon became known for his extraordinary cartographic talents, first designing a military assault on the fort of Tipu Sultan, who until his final defeat in 1799 constituted a major threat to British rule, then devising a complex plan for the surveying and mapping of newly conquered territories. His surveying skills were recognized: he was designated as the surveyor-general of Madras in 1810, only to become the first surveyor-general of India in 1815. Mackenzie, a Scot from the outer Hebrides who, like many other educated Scots of his time, went to India to find a more flourishing career than would have been available in Scotland, was also an avid antiquarian and became vitally committed to the collection of historical materials about peninsular India. As he surveyed newly conquered territories in southern India, he devoted himself on the side to the task of local historian, spending his own resources to hire and deploy a group of local assistants to help him collect local texts, traditions, artifacts, and materials. By the time of his death in 1821, he had amassed a collection of three thousand inscriptions, 1,568 literary manuscripts, 2,070 local tracts, and large portfolios and collections of drawings, plans, images, and antiquities.⁵

The Mackenzie archive promised unmediated access to the historical mentalities and genres of the late precolonial period. As I attempted to understand the nature of the holdings of the archive through a range of indexes and annotations that were compiled as early as 1828 by H. H. Wilson, I became especially interested in quasi-historical texts that were generally called vamcavali, or dynastic histories of kingly families.⁶ These t...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Passage to India
• Part I: Autobiography
• Part II: History and Anthropology
• Part III: Empire
• Part IV: The Politics of Knowledge
• Part V: University
• Notes
• Permissions
• Index