Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India

Synopsis

Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in "Document Raj," uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India CompanyOCOs administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstractOCoand the power, both economic and cultural, this created. aIn order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the companyOCOs reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, "Document Raj" maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.

Copyright:

2012

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780226703299

Publisher:

The University of Chicago Press

Date of Addition:

11/10/15

Copyrighted By:

The University of Chicago Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Business and Finance, Language Arts, Communication, Foreign Language Study, Politics and Government

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.