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Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube met William Crooke sometime in 1891 or 1892, and somewhere in the then North Western Provinces and Oudh. Chaube was a graduate of Presidency College, Calcutta. To compatriots in his village of Gopalpur, Gorakhpur district, and to scholars of Hindi and Persian in the region, he was known as a linguistically and poetically talented man, able to turn even newspaper headlines into English verses almost instantly. Gopalpur was the estate of the raja, who had remained dubiously loyal to the British during the Revolt of 1857.1 Ram Gharib had been born into the traditionally learned family of Chaube, probably in the late 1850s. He may have received his primary education at home and in schools nearby; then he went to Calcutta, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. He was learned in both Indian tradition and the modern British, or colonial, system of knowledge, and his linguistic and literary horizons stretched from the dialects of Awadhi and Bhojpuri to Hindi/Hindustani, Persian, Sanskrit, and English. In his efforts to earn a livelihood through scholarship he returned to the North Western Provinces and Oudh, reaching Mirzapur (Shukl 1952, 35). It was there that he met William Crooke, Mirzapur’s district collector of revenues. Crooke was “mesmerized ” by Chaube’s talents and asked Chaube to join him in collecting folklore. (Shukl 1952, 95). William Crooke had just begun the journal North Indian Notes and Queries, and Chaube enthusiastically joined in the project (Crooke and Chaube 2002, xxx–xxxii). At this time, William Crooke had been in India for two decades. He was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and had quali¤ed for the Indian Civil Service in 1871. Born in 1848 to an English family settled in Ireland, Crooke is known to have been a dedicated student of anthropology in college. It can be assumed that this interest was related to his plans to compete for a place in the Indian Civil Service—one of the most powerful bureaucracies in the world. “In their heyday they [Indian Civil Service of¤cers] were the most powerful of¤cials in the Empire, if not in the world. A tiny cadre, a little over a thousand strong, ruled more than 300,000,000 Indians. Each Civilian had an average 300,000 subjects; and each Civilian penetrated every corner of his subjects’ lives, because the Indian Civil Service directed all the activities of the Anglo-Indian state” (Dewey 1993, 3). When William Crooke joined the Indian Civil Service in 1871 he was posted to Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke 1 1. The loyalty of the raja of Gopalpur wavered in the following years. In the chaos of 1857 the local treasury was handed over to him; he emptied it and claimed to have spent the money in saving and giving refuge to ®eeing British families. His claim was contested by some after 1857. the North Western Provinces and Oudh. This area had been the epicenter of the Revolt of 1857, which shook and nearly toppled the British Empire in India. Consequently the British crown had taken over the direct governance of India. When William Crooke arrived, the 1857 revolt was still alive in the lore of the people, and also in the lore of the British, who continually feared that another such revolt might be lurking around the corner. A young civil servant like William Crooke had judicial and revenue powers over some three hundred thousand people, spread across many villages of a district. The post-1857 colonial state needed a better understanding of the rural populace and their mind. Crooke’s contemporaries, such as Richard Carnac Temple, felt that a collection of folklore would reveal the mind of the people (Naithani 1997, 3–4). Like almost all the other British in India, William Crooke related to the society around him through three conduits: ¤rst, through other English of¤cers and institutions; second, through of¤ce clerks, peons, and domestic servants; and third, through the recourse of the intellectual—anthropological and orientalist literature. In William Crooke’s case the second and third factors predominated throughout his two decades of service in this region. His administrative subjects were also his anthropological objects. Thus he saw domestic servants, staff, villagers, and tribes, as also trees, rivers, and animals, as matters to be administered on the one hand, and on the other as sources of knowledge. By 1888 this knowledge had resulted in his Rural and Agricultural Glossary, published by the Government...

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