Colonial Archives and the (Re)Constitution of Historical Fact

Starting in the late-eighteenth century, archives were compiled by collector-antiquarians to expand historical knowledge of India. The establishment of colonial archives stimulated debate over historical method and historical truth, particularly in southern India. This paper will consider how the construction of one particular colonial archive brought about a crisis in historiographical practices in south India. Colin Mackenzie amassed an archive that is now housed in both Britain and India which contained manuscripts of literature and history in southern India as well as sketches and drawings or ruins and archaeological remains of religious sites. One of the enduring consequences of Mackenzie’s archival projects was the emphasis on the recovery of south Indian history through the search for raw information or “facts.” What ensued was an elaborate process of converting texts into raw information and then constructing them as facts. This process had the effect of delegitimizing pre-colonial practices of history and rendering them ahistorical (or non-verifiable) in light of a newly emerging historical method.