Financial Affect: Bodies of Remuneration

Colonial pensions were the financial forms through which claims to intimacy were adjudicated, and consolidated in law.  This paper examines political, military and civil pensions given to “faithful” soldiers, mutineers and political pensioners who were both inside and outside the battles of 1857.  In the aftermath of 1857, I argue that differentiated notions of self and family, producing genealogies of origin and reproduction, are carefully constructed and carried over from pre-1857 discussions of fraud and pensions. Some of the questions I raise are: How does the embodiment of sexuality transform these concepts of self-hood, and kinship ties? How can renumeration of a (native) body inform us about its failure and its worth?