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  • "Hear the Tale of the Famine Year":Famine Policy, Oral Traditions, and the Recalcitrant Voice of the Colonized in Nineteenth-Century India1
  • Gloria Goodwin Raheja (bio)

We desire to place special emphasis on the immense importance of "moral strategy." There is no greater evil than the depression of the people. . . . A main trait in Oriental character is proneness to succumb to difficulties and to accept them as inevitable. But, if given heart at an early stage, the Oriental will fight upon the side of the Government, which is his own; for his belief in the power of Government is of a kind which to Western ideas is almost profane. The fullest advantage should be taken of this belief at all stages, but especially at the outset, for the moral impetus given should last through the first period of the famine.

Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1901

Jihre lok is raj ich vasdeKai ronde kai hasde.Niaun na kita koi Sarkar.Of the people who live under this government's rule,Some weep, some laugh.The Government has done no justice.

Lines from a song sung by Lalu, a tenant of Dabwali Dhab, quoted in J. Wilson's 1884 Final report on the revision of settlement of the Sirsá District in the Punjáb, 1879-83

Introduction: "Tell Us Why We Are Here"

In "Sly Civility" Homi Bhabha writes about the paranoia of colonial power in India and its ambivalence about its own authority, an ambivalence that produced a demand for native authorization of colonial rule, a demand that the colonial subject "tell us why we are here" (Bhabha 1994:142). Similarly, Sara Suleri (1992:108) has written about how colonial administrators were uncertain about the validity of the knowledge they produced about Indian society. Colonial ethnographic commentary, for example, in Watson and Kaye's The People of India, "hysterically insists on the static readability of physicality" and thus betrays a radical ambivalence about the categories of colonial knowledge of Indian society, and a striking awareness of their inadequacy. Watson and Kaye's 1868-75 work, she suggests, focuses on the supposed fixities of caste-based racial categories and bodily types "as a means to stave off its hidden admission of cultural ignorance" (Suleri 1992:104). In this essay I suggest that these two profound anxieties, coupled with a need to explain away the countless revolts against colonial rule that had occurred in India since the late eighteenth century, prompted an explosion in the collection and entextualization2 of Indian speech in colonial documents, at the very moment in the nineteenth century when the triumph of scientific knowledge of Indian bodies had been uneasily declared. Particular varieties of Indian speech, often characterized as "the voice of the people," were inserted into colonial texts to serve as authorizing narrative, to create an illusion of consent to colonial rule, while other voices, the voices of critique or rebellion, were erased, marginalized, or criminalized. And more generally, as Sharma (2001:38) has argued, famine policy and colonial writing about famine were closely intertwined with the British need "to legitimize its authority in the eyes of its subject people and to itself."

The fact that "ethnographic occasions" (Pels and Salemink 1999) for the collection of native speech often unfolded in disciplinary spaces such as famine relief kitchens, prisons, and court rooms, or involved primarily high caste assistants and informants that also shaped the interaction, was not acknowledged by colonial ethnographers. Words spoken in prisons and relief kitchens and other colonial spaces were taken as exhibiting the invariable "mind of the people," although, as both Homi Bhabha and Partha Chatterjee have reminded us in different ways, native assertions of "tradition" and "claims of conscience" in such spaces might in fact have arisen from the "yeast of modernity" (Bhabha 1994:211), and the possibility must be recognized that they might therefore be local responses to colonial power that "opened to question some of the very procedures in the practice of modernity" (Chatterjee 1995:8). It is certain that peasants had come to know by the latter part of the nineteenth century that the surest way to forestall the progress of a colonial project was...

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