Document Raj. Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India.

Raman, Bhavani.

ISBN 10: 0226703274 / ISBN 13: 9780226703275

Published by The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2012

About this Item

xii, 278pp, index, bibliography, notes. Or green cloth in jacket. Near new. Explores the power of bureaucracy in colonial south India. Size: 8vo. Seller Inventory # 042046

Bibliographic Details

Title: Document Raj. Writing and Scribes in Early ...

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Publication Date: 2012

Binding: Hard Cover

Condition: Near Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

Edition: First Edition.

About this title

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 Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In 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 company’s 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.

About the Author:

Bhavani Raman is assistant professor of South Asian history at Princeton University.