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Q. Discuss the role of native intermediaries in the production of colonial knowledge

with case studies.

The colonial rule was understood to be premised upon superior military technology. It was
believed that the superiority of arms and ammunitions was responsible for a seamless control
and subordination of the natives. However, several scholars have pointed to how European
colonial conquest was dependent not just upon superior military, political and economic
power. It was also dependent on what Nicholas Dirks formulates as “cultural technologies of
rule”. There is a consensus among historians on the point that colonial apparatus was as much
dependent on institutions as it was on ideas and ideologies.

However, there is a debate on the process of production of colonial knowledge or colonial

“knowledge production”. There are two schools on these issues – postcolonial school and the
revisionist school. The two schools confront each other on the kind of role that native
intellectual played in production of colonial knowledge. The crux of the issue is whether the
indigenous intellectuals were mere “information gatherers” or “collaborators” in the process
of knowledge formation.

According to post-colonial school, the natives were passive informants who only provide raw
information to the active European colonizers. The colonial knowledge came about through
conjunction of pre-defined imported forms of knowledge. Hence, a kind of “epistemological
violence” was imposed by the colonial state upon its colonised subjects. This led to a rupture
in the historical fabric of the society subject to colonial rule.

The revisionist school challenges these presumptions of the post-colonial school. According
to proponents of revisionist school, indigenous intellectuals were not merely passive patients.
They contributed actively to the process. Colonial knowledge was hence, produced through
complex forms of collaboration between colonized and colonizers. Consequently, there were
significant elements of continuity across the presumed colonial divide.

Such a divide of post-colonialist and revisionist has been put forth by Philip B. Wagoner. The
post-colonial school held sway until the 1990s in the writings of Edward Said (1978), Ronald
Inden (1986, 1990) Bernard Cohn (1987, 1996), Nicholas Dirks (1989, 1993, 2001), Gauri
Viswanathan (1990), and Thomas Metcalf (1994). After that revisionist works began to be
published - Eugene Irschick (1994), C. A. Bayly (1996), Thomas R. Trautmann (1999a,
1999b), William R. Pinch (1999), Richard M. Eaton (2000), Norbert Peabody (2001),
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi (2001).

The term ‘post-colonial’ suggests that this school of historiography was interested in
revealing gaps and flaws in colonial imagination and representation of the third world.
However, in its enthusiasm to develop a critique of the various strategies of imperial
domination, it ended up theorising the colonised as prostrate, helpless and inert agents.
Edward Said’s work was one of the earliest one in the post-colonial tradition. Said in his
influential study Orientalism argued that Europe’s imagination and representation of Orient
was a part of wider programme of imperial domination.

While such questions and debates can arise in many regional contexts which saw colonial
rule, nowhere was the study of colonial knowledge more fruitfully received than in South
Asian studies. However, there is another case study of Oaxaca in Mexico in the book
Indigenous Intellectuals edited by Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis. They argue that
relation between conquerors and conquered was not a one-way process.

Spaniards in Oaxaca maintained an ambiguous relation to colonial intellectuals. They often

feared indigenous knowledge and longed to capture, control and make it their own. Native
people too did not cling obstinately to their traditional beliefs and values. Native people
quickly engaged with and adapted to new media and ideas to advance their own interests. As
is written in the introduction, “Colonization thus involved mutual loans, thefts, struggles, and
negotiations over knowledge.”

An oft-cited case study in the production of colonial knowledge is that of Colin Mackenzie
and his assistants i.e., Kavelly brothers. P.B. Wagoner (2003) and C. Vijaysree (2011) have
talked about it in their respective articles. P.B. Wagoner has argued that these Niyogi
brahmins were part of the bureaucracy of Maharaja of Arcot. They had heightened critical
awareness of language and writing. Mackenzie allowed his assistants considerable latitude in
his investigations. Hence, it can’t be said that natives were merely ‘passive patients’ in the
production of colonial knowledge.

However, these studies have largely been conducted in the realm of epigraphy. An important
factor that would decide the role of native intermediaries was the kind of knowledge being
produced. If it was about deciphering the “Ancient Constitution” of Hindus, then the role of
classes like the Niyogi brahmins, the priestly class and moulvis would be greater. However,
when it comes to modern forms of mapping, surveying and administering, then it becomes a
complicated question.

Mathew H. Edney has in his book Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of
British India talked about precise technologies like cartography, trigonometric surveys etc. In
such exercises, indigenous inhabitants often greeted British curiosity with “friendless
suspicion”.1 Surveying in India was thwarted over and over again by local resistance,
prohibitive expense and lack of manpower.

The question of whether the pre-colonial intellectuals had agency in knowledge production
also brings up the issue of the “coloniality” of knowledge. If the colonial knowledge was the
result of a “dialogue” instead of being an “imposition”, then one would expect to find impress
of indigenous conceptual categories. The indigenous forms of knowledge and epistemic
regimes to the dialogue would find a place in colonial knowledge production. It is these
questions that have occupied the institutions like caste and census in India.

For example, Arjun Appadurai has argued that the caste-wise censuses represent a colonial
innovation introduced into India by British. This “enumerative habit” was originated in the
domain of British land surveys. However, Norbert Peabody has argued that using caste as a
criteria in early colonial censuses was dependent on a familiarity with indigenous precolonial
registers of households such as Munhata Nainsi’s ‘Account of the Districts of Marwar’. This
account had already adopted a caste-based form of classification. The reliance of British
officials on native informants and petty officials led to interest in fine-grained caste
distinctions.

Census contributed to the process of ‘objectification’ as Bernard Cohn puts it. The late
eighteenth and nineteenth century was the period when the identities came to be fixed and
frozen. Herbert Risley became the Census Commissioner in 1901. He proposed not only to
enumerate all castes, but also to determine and record their location in the hierarchy of castes.
This appeared to be an official attempt to freeze the hierarchy. The British colonial officials
were animated by scholarly curiosity and administrative convenience. They wanted to collect
systematic information about many aspects of Indian society and economy.

1
The census encountered problems in identifying and defining categories. It was difficult to
assess who was an agriculturalist, a labourer and other occupational categories. It was
difficult to ascertain whether the occupations prescribed in ancient texts were followed in
practice or not. The figures for villages and tahsil were to be tested against information
supplied by chaukidars and patwaris. However, these conceptual problems were built into the
economic categories of the census.

It is worth pointing that caste and religion were the sociological keys to understanding the
Indian people. Categories like caste and religion gave rise to the rise of discipline of colonial
anthropology. Census was not the first attempt to experiment and exacerbate the tensions
within Indian society. In the aftermath of revolt of 1857, the army was beginning to be
reorganized on assumptions about the nature of ‘martial races’.

Padmanabh Samarendra in his article “Census in Colonial India and the Birth of Caste” has
argued that census was a complicated exercise. The acceptance of the varna order in the
census would depend not on the textual citations that could be mustered in its support but on
its observed presence in society. It marked a critical shift in the policy. After almost a
century, the Orientalist imaginings of primordial India as depicted in her ancient texts was
finding its place in the archives of the British administrator.

Bernard Cohn has discussed the impact of Census on the Indians. Census was made possible
by the literate and educated class who were a highly significant group. However, Indians
affirmed the idea of caste in order to progress up the social ladder and earn prestige. The
formation of caste sabhas and their petitions to have their caste status changed indicates this.
For example, a group called Mahtons in Jalandhar district in Punjab wanted to be recorded as
Rajputs in the Census of 1911. Hence, in this process of classification and ‘objectification’ of
Indian culture and society, census played a key role.

Hence, the native assistants and intellectuals contributed not passively but actively to the
creation of colonial knowledge. The coloniser as well as colonised moved tentatively to
understand each other. Moreover, they worked with different interests in mind and did not
always assume antagonistic stance vis-à-vis each other. The colonial knowledge production
was a product of interaction and it can’t be seen as a unidirectional weapon used by
imperialists. The systematic ordering of knowledge led to simultaneous growth of
consciousness among natives as well. The continuity in history was not fundamentally
ruptured by the colonial experience.
References

Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. "The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia." In
An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, by Bernard S. Cohn, 224-
254. New York: Oxford University Press .

Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. "The Textualization of Tradition: Biography of an Archive." In

Castes of Mind, by Nicholas B. Dirks, 81-107. Oxfordshire: Princeton University
Press.

Ramos , Gabriela; Yannakakis, Yanna. 2014. "Introduction." In Indigenous Intellectuals :

Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes , by Gabriela
Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, 1-17. Durham & London: Duke University Press .

Samarendra, Padmanabh. Aug 2011 . "Census in Colonial India and the Birth of Caste."
Economic and Political Weekly 51-58.

Vijaysree, C. 2013. "The Production of Colonial Knowledge and the Role of Native
Intellectuals." In Empire Calling, by Ralph eds. Crane, Anna Johnston and C.
Vijayshree, 148-161. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd.

Wagoner, P.B. Oct. 2003 . "Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial
Knowledge." Comparative Studies in Society and History 783-814.