Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India by Nicholas B. Dirks (review)

Through this collection of essays, most of them published previously over the last 25 years, the current Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, who is also a professor of history and of anthropology, offers the reader both an intellectual biography and, by the end, a powerful defense of a liberal arts education. The book, too, bears reading as a study of historical method. Following a brief introduction about his own passage to India, first as the not-quite teenage son of a Yale Divinity professor who received a Fulbright to teach at Madras Christian College for a year in the early 1960s, the collection is organized in five sections, each relating to a particular part of Dirks’s career. The first three of these sections include articles about the concerns of his three major monographs, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (1987); Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001); and The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (2006). The last two sections refer to his work building the academic enterprise of historical anthropology and as a university administrator.

In his doctoral and post-doctoral research on south Indian kingship, Dirks made a crucial intervention in the anthropology of India. At the time of its publication, The Hollow Crown (1987) was recognized as probably the most important single work to have been published since Dumont’s (1970) analysis of the caste system in Homo Hierarchicus, which had, for two decades, set the terms of scholarly engagement among anthropologists of India. Dumont had argued that in Indian society the hierarchical supremacy of the Brahman is a reflection of the way in which power is “encompassed” by religion. Through an analysis of kingship that is rich both historically and ethnographically (and challenging to read), Dirks brought power back in to the understanding of Indian society, stressing its “political logic.” He shows—as he puts it in his Preface to the Second Edition of the book, reproduced here—that “caste neither marks out the fundamental units of Indian society nor defines the essence of Indian social being.” Rather, “social relations were defined in terms of political processes and political referents, the ultimate referent…being the king himself” (74). The three essays in the first section of Autobiography, however, including the one from which the book takes its title and which is the story of the Mackenzie archive on which Dirks has drawn extensively, are not so much about the argument of his work on kingship, as about his early efforts to write a history of pre-colonial India and the dilemmas posed by the historical nature of archives themselves, reflecting as they do, “an archaeology of the state.”

These first explorations thus furthered Dirks’s determination to interrogate colonial constructions of knowledge about Indian society, which have influenced the understandings of historians and anthropologists in ways which, for long, many failed to recognize. This is the subject of his second major book, the argument of which is outlined in an article with the same title, first published in 1992 and reproduced here. The arguments of both—by now well known—are that the colonial sociology of India elevated caste as being at the heart of Indian society, ignoring many other referents of social identity and establishing it as “a specifically colonial form of civil society” (87). For anthropologists it is likely that the second section of Autobiography will be the most rewarding, including as it does an essay drawing on an ethnography of what turned out to be the non-event of a festival in a south Indian village, in which the author discusses arguments on ritual and resistance, as well as a classic article showing the way in which “anthropology in India began its career in India as colonial judgment” (163). The article begins with an examination of archival sources on the problems posed for the colonial government by the...