Document Raj

图书信息

作者	Raman, Bhavani
出版社	University of Chicago Press
ISBN	9780226703299
出版时间	2012-11-14
字数	56.6万
分类	University of Chicago Press,进口书,外文原版书,文学,自传,回忆录

读书简介

Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company's administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract-and the power, both economic and cultural, this created.?In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company's reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.

目录

Cover

Copyright

Title Page

Series Page

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Note on Transliteration and Conventions

Introduction

Part I. Scribal Practice

Chapter 1. Cutcherry Scribes

Chapter 2. Scribal Skills

Part II. Writing and Pedagogy

Chapter 3. Cutcherry Tamil

Chapter 4. Schools and Writing

Part III. Document Raj

Chapter 5. Duplicity and Evidence

Chapter 6. Addressing the Raj

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index