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  • Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia
  • Rachel Sturman
Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia. Edited by Indrani Chatterjee (New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 2004) 302 pp. $60.00

Chatterjee opens this volume with an appeal for recognition of the "unfamiliar" nature of the family in precolonial and early colonial India. In Chatterjee's view, the interests and assumptions of the present have obscured the complex relationships and practices that characterized families in the region during these eras. To understand these histories requires a self-consciously multidisciplinary approach, bringing to the study of history the methodologies of anthropology, literature, and political philosophy.

The essays in this volume suggest that this approach is partially inherent to the nature of the family in South Asia at the time, which confounds any attempt by modem scholars to identify a distinct domain of kinship separate from politics, economics, and the like. As Chatterjee comments, "there has been no family in South Asian history that was not simultaneously a political, economic, social and juridical entity" (35). Yet, since the disciplines of anthropology, history, and political philosophy were historically constituted through precisely such delineation of kinship or the family as a distinct object of study, historians of the family in precolonial South Asia face the methodological conundrum that defining or delimiting their object of study is itself a project historically rooted in the colonial encounter, as the essays by Michael Fisher and Sylvia Vatuk in this volume attest. For this very reason, however, the history of the family in precolonial South Asia also lends itself to reflection on different ways of representing family relations across historical, literary, and legal genres and across written and oral texts, as suggested in the essays by Chatterjee, William Dalrymple, Pamela Price, and Ramya Sreenivasan.

The eight essays in the volume, which cover diverse geographical regions of the subcontinent, identify several key ways in which the history of the family in this region challenges contemporary assumptions. All of the essays share an emphasis on the fundamentally public and political [End Page 674] nature of kinship. The strong and suggestive pieces by Sreenivasan on the precolonial consolidation of elite Rajput lineages and by Price on the vicissitudes of relationships within a Telugu lineage in South India demonstrate the centrality of conflict within families and the varied ideological uses of literary narrative (Sreenivasan) and of the legal domain (Price). Similarly, Sumit Guha's work on family feuds in Western India and Chatterjee's own work on oral and literary narratives in the eastern dynastic state of Tripura foreground the intimate nature of conflict, or what Chatterjee terms the "central dialectic of violence and intimacy" (250). Fisher's piece on the extraordinary life of the Begum Sombre (Samru) and Vatuk's on the contested meaning of family in an early nineteenth-century South Indian princely state explicate the multiple indigenous terms for family relations and the varied ways in which indigenous elites drew upon the idiom of family in their attempts to shape relationships and entitlements in the early colonial context.

The essays by Chatterjee and Price—like Dalrymple's essay on the love affair between Muslim noblewoman Khair-un-Nissa and James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British Resident of Hyderabad—also foreground the complexity of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century households, and the ways in which they incorporated "outsiders," creating and structuring both elite and nonelite social relations. The critical presence and agency of slaves, servants, and other dependents within elite households offer different ways of thinking about intimacy and power. However, further discussion and theorization of the ideologies and practices that constituted elite and nonelite categories would enrich the volume. Indeed, all of the essays that touch on the colonial period, with the exception of the final essay by Satadru Sen, deal with "native states," or dynastic realms that retained certain limited forms and symbols of sovereignty in relation to the emerging colonial state. The differences between the family politics of these petty rulers and others not so positioned in relation to the colonial state bear more explicit acknowledgement and discussion.

The final essay by Sen on the colonial project of creating heteronormative families among convicts...

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