Subsections
[Cr:4, Lc:3, Tt:0, Lb:0]
This course acquaints us with the nature and the culture of the colonial archive in South Asia. It proposes to study samples from different genres of English Language record. It reads records along and against the archival grain to study the “politics of truth”.
- Key Categories: Archive, Document, File, Record, Context, Text, Footnote.
- Sources of History and Histories of Sources.
- “Alternative Records”: News Paper, Diary, Photographs, Street Signs, Proverbs.
- Reading Revenue Records: Site—Bengal, 1792-1956.
- “Prose of Counter-Insurgency”: Site—Bengal, 1792-1857.
- Primitive Accumulation of Capital and Indentured Labour in South Asia, 1890s-1930s.
- Reading Colonial Urbanism: Site—Calcutta and Bombay, 1857-1947.
- Reading the Partition Records: Site—West Bengal, 1950s.
- Postcolonial Passages.
- A. L. Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, Duke University Press (2016).
- A. L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University Press (2010).
- B. Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, University of Chicago Press (2012).
- M. S. Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, UC Press (2012).
