Reconsidering the Colonial Archive: New Perspectives from Dalit History in North India

Drawing from my work on Dalit society and history in North India, this paper will examine dominant forms of engagement with and understandings of the colonial archive.   An overwhelming focus on the census and related modes of representation of Indian society found in tribe and caste surveys has tended to homogenize the diversity of colonial archival sources into a single and unitary imperial project.  By paying attention to various levels of colonial record keeping and correspondence, and the local level conflicts and contestations that often disappeared by the time reports reached the colonial metropoles, I will demonstrate the ways in which writing new Dalit histories has become possible.  Local, district, and provincial level archival materials frequently paint a picture that looks much different from that suggested by documents found in national-level archives housed in Delhi and London.  

Local-level debates and controversies give us insights that not only run counter to dominant understandings of Dalit history and society, but also offer possibilities for writing alternative histories of the practice of untouchability.  District settlement reports of the 1880s-90s, the 1910s-20s, and the 1940s provide a wealth of detailed information about Chamars, their occupational patterns, and their relationships with agriculture and cultivation.  This previously ignored descriptive and statistical material enables us to question the dominant assumptions--solidified and perpetuated through composite census reports and ethnographic generalizations--that Chamars are, by definition and by traditional occupation, leather workers.  Examining local-level police reports and official inquiries show that this colonial equation of Chamars with leatherwork puzzled officials who had more firsthand experience of these communities and who recognized that Chamars were primarily agriculturalists.  These voices of dissent against colonial stereotypes, though too often silenced before reaching Calcutta, Delhi, and London, are still preserved in district and provincial archives.