Heteronomy and the Archive: The Ambiguities of Welfarism in Colonial Madras

The salient differences among strata of the colonial archive provide graphic evidence not simply of the contradictory forms of statecraft at play, but of the profound variances in the state’s relations to different sections of Indian society; the strata are distinct because officers of the state —themselves in the vast majority of cases members of Indian society— had diverse relations to different segments of society, and therefore to the kinds of knowledge they were charged to produce.  This paper asks whether a key trope in historical analyses of the colonial state’s relationship to Dalits, divide et impera, can withstand the implications of that observation.  By means of the rhetorical figure of divide-and-rule, the new welfarism of the 1910s directed at Dalit subpopulations in Madras is often linked to the simultaneous introduction of representative governance, and the conclusion is quickly drawn that the former was a means to prevent unified nationalist political participation.  But local records repudiate the state­–society dichotomy upon which such an analysis rests.  Welfarism was in fact directed to a variety of political problems other than nascent nationalism.  And because of their own complicated relationships to Indian society, state agents were engaged in —and at various times on different sides of— violence between Dalits and caste people that attended the implementation of the new welfare regime.  This paper attempts to articulate, therefore, observations on the heteronomy of the state with the arrangement of the tiers of its graphic record.