Testing the local against the colonial archive

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 214-224

  Chatterjee, Indrani ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 53149144348     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1997.44.215     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. This is a substantially unrevised version of a paper read at the British Records Association Conference on Sources on Women's History, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, 17 December 1995. Part of a doctoral dissertation completed in September 1996, the ideas contained here have been more fully worked out in a forthcoming monograph from Oxford University Press, Delhi, Gender and Slavery in Early Modern India. I would like to thank Anne Summers, Rosemary Seton and Prof. David Arnold for their enthusiasm and encouragement.
2. Bamindangah was part of district Rangpur in north Bengal. The zamindar Bhyrubchund Chowdhry was described as being 'of the highest rank of any of the zamindars of this district' by the English Collector in his letter of 17 April 1793, to the President of the Board of Revenue in British Library Oriental and India Office Collections (hereafter OIOC), Miscellanous Revenue Consultations (Wards), P/89/58, 3 July 1793.
3. See contrasts between the genealogical accounts submitted by the contending parties in Bengal Revenue Consultations, OIOC P/50/24, 23 May 1780, and P/50/25, 6 June and 20 June 1780, the Board of Revenue Minute of 1790 that the elder male in the collateral branch would have succeeded to the zamindari in P/89/59 17 April 1794, and the silence regarding the collateral branch in E.V. Westmacott, 'The Territorial Aristocracy of Bengal - The Dinagepoor Raj' in Calcutta Review, vol. LV, 1872, pp. 205-224.
4. The genealogy and the decisions in the dispute are discussed in B.B. Misra, The Judicial Administration of the East India Company in Bengal, 1765-1782, Delhi, 1961, pp. 83-89.
5. John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 157.
6. Acting Preparer of Reports to Governor-General in Council, 5 June 1788 in Bengal Revenue Consultations, OIOC P/51/22, 30 July 1788, unnumbered, p. 291.
7. Durgadas Lahiri, Rani Bhavani (3rd ed. Calcutta, 1910), pp. 356-59.
8. Yet another vernacular history, first published in 1903, mentioned neither the daughter nor the story of the adoption, c.f. Haranchandra Rakshit, Rani Bhavani (2nd ed. Calcutta, 1909).
9. See Bernard Cohn's warning to American anthropologists confronted with such 'mythical' ancestry which could not be demonstrated, 'African Models and Indian Histories' in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 203.
10. Memorial of the Raja of Datia, n.d., in OIOC, Board's Collection, F/4/1498/588823. Emphasis added. A slightly different, and secular, origin-myth was recorded by W.H. Sleeman, a military officer and civil official in Central India in the mid-thirties. According to this, the infant was found in the grass by the old chief himself while on a hunt; see Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official (London, 1844), vol. I, note, p. 314.
11. In another contemporary retelling of the story, Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India, represents the Governor-General's Agent, an official of the Company, as having found the child while on his morning ride, and contemporary innuendo that the Agent 'knew exactly under which tree he was to look for a forsaken child'. However, she also reported that the old Raja said the child was the 'gift of God, and that he would adopt him'; see Up the Country: Letters Written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India (first ed. 1866), reprint Virago, London, 1984, p. 380.
12. A note by the Agent in Bundelkhand to the Chief Secretary, dated 14 July 1833, clarifies that the old Raja was himself the child's father, and the mother was a 'connexion' (not wife) of the Raja; hence the child was 'illegitimate'; OIOC, L/P & S/20/F60, pp. 115-16.
13. Lokenath Ghose, The Modern History of the Indian Chiefs, Rajas, and Zamindars, Calcutta, 1881, vol. II, p. 2.
14. Abinash Chandra Das, Nahar Vamsavrittanta, Calcutta, 1895, p. 2.
15. McLane, Land and Local Kingship, p. 317, fn. 27.
16. C.f. Nistarini Devi, Shekele Katha, pp. 3-49, in Nareshchandra Jana, ed., Atmakatha, Calcutta, 1982, vol. II, p. 6.
17. Translate of Proceedings of Magistrate of Ramghur, in Progs. 8-9, 12 Jan. 1798, Bengal Criminal and Judicial, OIOC P/128/36.
18. S.N. Sen, Eighteen Fifty-Seven, Government of India, 1957, pp. 37-38;
19. for contemporaneous colonial discussion of disallowed adoptions and consequent annexations, see Charles Jackson, A Vindication of Lord Dalhousie's Indian Administration (first ed. 1865), reprint Allahabad, 1975;
20. William Lee-Warner, The Life of the Marquis of Dalhousie K.T. (first ed. 1904), reprint Irish University Press, 1972, vol. II, pp. 145-81.
21. Letter from Provincial Council of Murshidabad to Governor-General and Supreme Council, 19 Feb. 1778, Bengal Revenue Consultation, OIOC P/50/9, 5 May 1778, letter 376.
22. For an illustration of these double flows of progeny and inanimate wealth, see I. Chatterjee, 'Slavery and the Household in Bengal, 1770-1880', Ph.D. thesis, S.O.A.S., University of London, 1996, Chapters III and IV.