Saurabh Dube

Untouchable pasts : religion, identity, and power among a central Indian community, 1780-1950

Asia is high, but there is also a considerable flexibility in this informal relationship. The nominal interest rates are often extremely high, but effective interest rates are usually lower, as the creditor must see to it that his debtor survives. David Hardiman has shed a great deal of light on the intricacies of this relationship. He begins his account in precolonial times and shows that a state dependent on land revenue collection relied throughout on the baniya (moneylender) as crucial intermediary. With the rise of tax farming and the spread of the commer- cialization of power, some moneylenders achieved great prominence, but, as Hardiman stresses, money- lenders and traders as a class never aspired to the kind of political power attained by the European bourgeoi- sie. They knew their limits. In an illuminating chapter on The Baniyas Life and Faith, he describes these limits. There was a strong solidarity among baniyas and a deep consciousness of abru, which means both honor and credit-worthiness. The peasant also cherished his abru but conceived of it in terms of his standing in his rural community. This depended on his control of land, on marrying his children well, and on his access to credit. As far as the latter was concerned, he relied on the moneylender and would normally refrain from offending him. British colonial rulers made full use of the symbiotic relationship between peasant and moneylender, be- cause it helped them to collect their land revenue. They strenghtened the grip of the moneylender by introducing a law that had fortified the security of credit in their own country. lt assumed that debtor and creditor were contracting partners of equal stature, which, of cour.se, did not apply to Indian peasants and moneylenders. Nevertheless, this theory was upheld for a long time, until peasant indebtedness and the transfer of land to moneylenders emerged as a political danger to colonial rule. Unfortunately, Hardiman does not deal with this aspect in detail. He neglects the available literature on the debates preceding the Dec- can Agriculturists Relief Act and similar measures. As a subaltern historian, Hardiman is more interested in the articulation of peasant resistance. He devotes much effort to showing that the Deccan Riots of 1875 were not riots but a peasant revolt; be also documents that this revolt was not an isolated instance but that there were similar revolts before and after 1875. In tracing the evidence for such revolts, Hardi- man is at his best. Chapter thirteen, Usury Under Late Colonial Rule, is more sketchy. Hardiman almost completely ignores the impact of the Great Depression, which forced the British to interfere with the business of the baniya in various ways by introducing debt conciliation and registering moneylenders. At the same time, the fall in prices completely ruined the British land reve- nue system. In earlier times, the peasant had been able to resort to the moneylender whenever the revenue demand was due, but this mechanism broke down. Moreover, the connection between credit and the AMERICAN HISTORICAL R EVIEW trade in grain was interrupted by panic sales at the time of the Depression. A look at the relevant litera- ture would have helped Hardiman to improve this chapter. It would have also provided some background for his interesting description of the decline of the business of village moneylenders. In his final chapter, Hardiman discusses The Meta- morphosis of Usury and arrives at the conclusion that although the old-style baniya is only of marginal importance nowadays, there has been a baniyaiza- tion of the new rural middle class, which uses credit to tighten its hold on dwarfholders who must offer their labor to richer neighbors. In conclusion, Hardiman returns to the theme of hegemony taken up in his introduction. Antonio Gramscis concept of hegemony has been debated by subaltern historians. Some of them have argued that neither any one class nor the colonial nor the postcolonial state has achieved hege- mony in India on Gramscis terms. These historians have not stated whether this finding would also make the category subaltern meaningless in the Indian context, because the subaltern is defined as one who accepts hegemony. Hardiman is careful in his use of these terms. He agrees that India never produced a bourgoisie of the European type, and instead of speak- ing of the subaltern position, he stresses the men- tality of dependence on the superior provider (p. 336). This fits in well with his study of the baniya, but he has also shown that this mentality can occasionally turn into a spirit of revolt. This spirit rarely persists for long, as the facts of life reassert themselves. The baniyas knew this; they ususally refused to give evi- dence against rebellious peasants and returned to do business as usual. By providing such insights, Hardi- man greatly enriches the knowledge of his readers. DIETMAR ROTHERMUND University of Heidelberg SAURABH D u BE. Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780- 1950. (SUNY Series in Hindu Studies.) Albany: State University of New York Press. 1998. Pp. xvii, 308. Saurabh Dube aimed to produce more than an Indian history, an ethnograplhic history that works with South Asian materials, articulating a wider set of concerns to carve out a theoretical third position, apart from Eurocentric imaginings and also from anti-Enlightenment rhetoric (p. xi). He wanted to show the construction of multiple Hindu identities ... particularly by groups and communities who stood on the margins (p. 5), by exploring the past of an untouchable subcaste that is also a guru-led sect, the Satnamis of Central India, from 1780 to 1950. Dube is a captivating writer who promises much in his intro- ductory chapter. Significant tensions in Dubes endeavor needed fuller discussion. The tension between sources pro- duced by outsiders (colonial officials and interested FEBRUARY

Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles

Destined to become a key work of subaltern studies and a crucial intervention in postcolonial scholarship, Stitches on Time probes the relationships between empire and modernity, nation and history, the colonial and the postcolonial, and power and difference. Saurabh Dube combines history and anthropology to provide critical understandings of the theory and practice of historical ethnography and contemporary historiography. Drawing on extensive archival research and innovative fieldwork as well as political economy and social theory—including considerations of gender—he unpacks the implications of specific Indian pasts from the middle of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Dube provides incisive accounts of the interactions between North American evangelical missionaries and Christian converts of central India, and between colonial legal systems and Indian popular laws. He reflects on the difficulties of history writing by considering the production and reception of recent Hindu nationalist histories. Assessing the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, he offers substantial critical readings of major writings by Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, and others. Dube develops the concept and practice of a“history without warranty” as a means of rigorously rethinking categories such as modernity, colonialism, the West, the postcolonial, and the nation.

Introduction: Enchantments of Modernity

The idea of modernity rests on rupture. It brings into view a monumental narrative—the breaching of magical covenants, the surpassing of medieval superstitions, and the undoing of hierarchical traditions. The advent of modernity, then, insinuates the disenchantment of the world: the progressive control of nature through scientific procedures of technology, and the inexorable demystification of enchantments through powerful techniques of reason. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the privileged dispensation of legislative reason within regimes of modernity gathers together nature and humanity as conjoint attributes of a disenchanted world. Yet processes of modernity also create their own enchantments. Enchantments that extend from the immaculately imagined origins and ends of modernity, to the dense magic of money and markets, to novel mythologies of nation and empire, to hierarchical oppositions between myth and history, ritual and rationality, East and West, and tradition and modernity. Intensely phantasmic but concretely palpable, tangible representations and forceful practices, such enticements order and orchestrate the past and the

Presence of Europe: An Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty

The work of Dipesh Chakrabarty offers critical reflections on history and modernity. His recent book, Provincializing Europe (hereafter, PE), broaches several questions at the heart of this special issue.1 An interview with Chakrabarty seemed the best means to highlight these arguments.The interchange took place via e-mail in June . It briefly touches on Chakrabarty’s earlier concerns—as expressed, for example, in Rethinking Working-Class History (RWCH)— while primarily tracking considerations that arise from PE, a multilayered and intriguing work, defying conventional summary.2 The questions in this interview are expressed in the form of clusters of queries that also attempt to outline the work’s key emphases in dialogue with ‘‘Enduring Enchantments.’’ There has been very little editing of the questions and the answers as they were originally articulated, although I have added notes, primarily as a means of clarification. As an abiding measure, the entire exchange circulates in cyberspace.

Paternalism and Freedom: The Evangelical Encounter in Colonial Chhattisgarh, Central India

This paper traces aspects of the evangelical encounter in Chhattisgarh, a large region bound through linguistic ties in Central India. Evangelical missionaries, bearing the Cross and signs of civilization, arrived in Chhattisgarh in the 1860s. Oscar Lohr, the pioneer missionary of the German Evangelical Mission Society, chanced upon a group of heathens, the Satnamis, whose faith enjoined them to believe in one god and to reject idolatory and caste. Was this not the hand of ‘divine providence’? The missionary, it seemed, had only to reveal the evangelical ‘truth’ to the Satnamis before they would en masse ‘witness’ and be redeemed by Christ-the-Saviour. The group did not see the coming of the millennium. It did not go forward to meet its destiny. The missionaries persevered. The halting enterprise of conversion in the region grew primarily through ties of kinship among indigenous groups and the prospects of a better life under the paternalist economy of mission stations.

Mirrors of Modernity: Time–Space, the Subaltern, and the Decolonial

This essay is cast as something of a personal narrative. It recounts how I have arrived at inklings and intimations of space and time, particularly pervasive procedures of the spatialization of time and the temporalization of space, in tandem with understandings of disciplines and subjects of modernity. The account begins with my pre-apprentice days in Delhi, moves onto my apprenticeship at Cambridge, covers my journeyman sojourns in Mexico, and extends unto my artisanal concerns in the present. At stake especially are encounters and entanglements with time and space as folded within the creases of subaltern studies and de-colonial understandings (yet also postcolonial perspectives and historical anthropology). On the one hand, I explore how these shifting orientations have drawn upon hegemonic representations as well as non-certified imaginations of time and space, to now press familiar associations and now unravel unusual enunciations of these concepts and processes. On the other hand, I track the active construal, the exact production, of space and time within the epistemic practice of these critical perspectives. At stake throughout are wider issues of meaning and power, alterity and authority, difference and disciplines.

Idioms of authority and engendered agendas: The Satnami Mahasabha, , Chhattisgarh, 1925-1950

This paper discusses the play of idioms of law and authority, agendas of gender and the refraction of upper caste impositions through the grid of local categories in the reform of a community, the Satnamis of Chhattisgarh, central India. In the early 1920s, 100 years after the initiation of Satnampanth had reconstituted the Chamars of the region as Satnamis, a set of influential members of the sect got together with local and provincial politicians to set up an organisation called the Satnami Mahasabha. Its aim was to press the government of the Central Provinces and the local authorities for demands made on behalf of the community and to reform the

Conversations: Questions of reading

Prathama Banerjee has written an imaginative and generous review (CIS, 44 (3) 2010: 431–34) of my edited Historical Anthropology (OUP, 2007; henceforth, HA), especially when discussing the volume’s five sections comprising twenty chapters. At the same time, her comments— appreciative and critical—on my Introduction to the book raise key questions. At stake, indeed, are intriguing issues of the protocols of scholarly readings. It is some of these considerations that I wish to highlight here. Concerning my Introduction, Banerjee states that ‘while one can indeed write of history and anthropology in terms of their mutual borrowing and increasing overlap through time, one must also write the story of their fraught relationships, their theoretical and methodological antagonisms, and their respective deployment of norms and techniques by which they sought to recurrently pull a part as disciplines’ (p. 434). These are well formulated but curious criticisms, since my Introduction exactly avoids what Banerjee avers it is doing and actually undertakes what she claims it is not doing. Put simply, I approach historical anthropology in a manner that rethinks its constituent disciplines and their wider interplay. Of the three main parts that make up the Introduction, the first explores formative orientations of anthropology to time and temporality and of history to culture and tradition. I do this ‘by approaching anthropology and history not narrowly as hermetic disciplines, but as configurations of knowledge and modalities of knowing that have often entailed mutual presuppositions about social worlds that shore up and shelter them. Of critical import here are temporal hierarchies and oppositions as well as epistemological ambivalences and excesses of anthropology and history under formations of modernity’ (HA, p. 3). Unsurprisingly, the second part of the Introduction turns to the more recent transformations of anthropology and

Marine Carrin and Harald Tambs-Lyche, An Encounter of Peripheries: Santals, Missionaries, and their Changing Worlds, 1867–1900 (New Delhi: Manohar Publications), 2008, pp. 386

in the book, but it also draws on a host of other sources. The erudition displayed is quite staggering, but the concern is that Friedman himself has extracted and used much of the useable material in these very difficult texts in his Introduction. Would any other historian find it profitable to wade through the texts when Friedman and Goitein have already done this and have supplemented the information in the documents with their extremely erudite use of many other sources in many languages? In other words, the texts themselves are often so obscure as to tell us little: we are dependent on the copious footnotes to understand them and on the Introduction to put them in context. This said, there are certainly some entertaining little snippets buried in the bulk of the data. One general and very welcome theme is the lack of communal antipathy. True that Jews tended to use kin and marriage bonds to find business partners, but the references to people of other religions are always respectful, whether they are Hindu, Muslim or even a few Christians. There are several letters raising matters of halakhic law; for example, whether or not porcelain is pottery, for according to some sources this would determine whether a menstruating woman would defile it (pp. 387–9). Other random information: complaints of a drunken Indian servant of a Jewish merchant in Aden (p. 341); a Jewish merchant converts to Islam and divorces his wife (p. 501); stone frying pans are much valued in Yemen (p. 600); a mention of mouse traps (p. 663); an account of the Gulf of Aden: ‘all concur that any ship that sinks in the environs of Aden . . . never surfaces, nor does anyone who was in it survive at all, because of the turbulence of the sea and the force of the waves at the beach and the abundance of sharks.’ (p. 535); and finally an order for a lamp. The writer had sent some copper to the recipient and gives instructions on what to do with any left over: ‘From the rest of the copper make me a lamp, it should be an attractive lamp. Its column should be octagonal and stout; its base should be in the form of a lampstand with strong feet. On its head there should be a copper lamp with two ends for two wicks, which should be set on the end of the column so that it could move up and down. All the three, the column, the stand and the lamp, should be in separate parts. If they could make the feet in spirals, let it be so, for this is more beautiful’ (p. 559).

Book Review: Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007

This is a brilliant book. Drawing on layered archival registers and rich field materials, Laura Bear has written a remarkable historical anthropology of the Indian railways and the Anglo-Indian community, a pre-eminent ‘railway caste’. It is not only that the account imaginatively interweaves the institutional and the individual, power and process, and authority and identity. It is also that in the work history and ethnography – and, indeed, the past and the present – creatively come together yet formatively fall apart, holding up a mirror to (our) inherited understandings and expectations of social worlds. Here are understandings, expectations, and worlds of modernity and morality, empire and intimacy, nation and minority, gender and difference, state and sexuality, citizenship and kinship, race and family, dominance and self-making, and community and subject. Lines of the Nation is among the most salient scholarly works on the Indian subcontinent, a creative study that works with South Asian materials in order to address a wide range of critical concerns. The starting point for Bear is a key contrast. On the one hand, from their very inception the railways have promised to miraculously materialize ‘individual liberty and social progress’. On the other hand, the railways – alongside other institutions of modernity – exactly build upon ‘older practices of rule and social distinction’. This tension is addressed through Bear’s ‘ethnographic research in the railway colony at Kharagpur in West Bengal, with networks of railway families spread across several locations, and in the Eastern Railways Headquarters in Kolkata’ (p. 3), as well as her historical work in the local archives of the Eastern Railway and a simultaneous reinterpretation of these archives through field experiences. Following a closely argued and sensitively crafted introduction – at once accessible and evocative, a characteristic of Bear’s writing throughout – the book is divided into two parts. The first ‘retells the history of the railways’ as providing ‘a unique window onto the process of spatial and institutional formation of the colonial and postcolonial state in India – of the creation of its verticality and encompassment of Indian subjects through its reach along the tracks of the railways’ (pp. 17–18). Unsurprisingly, the establishment of the railways was accompanied by freshly fangled techniques of imperial governance and moral authority, turning on a centralized bureaucracy, military control, political economy and bio-moral management. At the same time, far from an assiduously spun seamless web of imperial power, at stake in this terrain were intricate entanglements between the everyday lives of colonial power and the quotidian configurations of Indian selfhoods. Bear traces such entanglements across a range of distinct yet overlapping arenas: from the experience of rail travel of an Indian public – that itself drew in the hybrid architectonics of the railway station, the multiple distinctions of the railway carriage, and the outraged respectability of an emergent patriotism – through to the ‘effects of railway labor on social identifications and self-fashioning among workers’ (p. 64), especially as gleaned from modalities of recruitment policies and the emergence of railway colonies; and from the public politics of industrial unrest and nationalist agitation through to the intimate ethics of popular nationalism and petition writing along lines of the railways. The ‘railways diffused the authority of the colonial state throughout India’: but ‘they also provoked ethical Book Reviews