Our next post in ‘The Voices of the People’ symposium (full programme here) is by Gajendra Singh, Lecturer in South Asian History at the University of Exeter. Gajendra explores another potential source of the ‘voices’ of subordinates – the letters of Indian Muslim soldiers written during the First World War – and again reveals the complex vectors of power that operated around a medium of communication that was on the one hand designed as a means of monitoring the speech of subordinates, but on the other provided a space for communication that frustrated and eluded such designs.

Gajendra Singh*

I ought to start with an apology. I feel conscious of writing to an audience that will contain many English/British social historians. For South Asianists, English social history (particularly the work of EP Thompson) provided first the model of how one could listen to and write (re-write) the ‘voices of the people’[1] and then, following a closer synthesis between postcoloniality and poststructuralism, the precise model that exposed the impossibility and hubris of such an endeavour. Further, the substance of this post is a distillation of some of the ideas that emerged from my previous work rather than an articulation of my current research. This previous work of mine focused on the war testimonies of Indian soldiers – of the 1.7 million Indian sipahis (or ‘sepoys’) that were enlisted by the Imperial Government of India to fight in the First World War. Traces of this Indian presence can be found in the Imperial propaganda and in the Imperial ephemera of the day.

This post will not, however, offer a further analysis of these Indian ‘presences’ in wartime imagery. I will instead discuss those spaces and moments when soldiers were not fighting, and in which they could write and share their war experiences in their letters. This post will relate the production and circulation of colonial Indian soldiers’ testimonies to the porous and impermanent nature of their identities. It will talk in particular about Indian Muslim soldiers’ identities and of their appraisal and re-appraisal of Islam in the trenches. And, it will end by explaining why, and what I mean, when I choose to read such texts as embattled.

Indian Wounded at Brighton, 1915. Q53887. Photograph Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum

On the 11^th July 1916, Captain G. Tweedy, the Chief Censor of Indian military correspondence in France, alerted his superiors to a slip of paper he had found hidden in an otherwise anodyne letter by a Punjabi Muslim sipahi. It was the nature of the concealed missive, as much as the fact that it was hidden, that alarmed Tweedy. It took the form of a message that had been relayed from the Prophet Mohamed, and the injunctions contained therein directed the Muslim soldiery of British India to put their loyalty to their faith before any loyalty to their Sahibs: Continue reading →

Our next post in ‘The Voices of the People’ symposium (full programme here) is by Emily J. Manktelow, Lecturer in British Imperial History at the University of Kent. Emily moves our discussion into a consideration of the particular difficulties of retrieving ‘voices’ from the colonial archive, and examines ‘gossip’ as a category of speaking that can provide the historian with considerable insights into the operation of power, authority and speech. 

Emily J. Manktelow

Catching the voices of those marginalised by the authority of the archive is an important and sometimes difficult project – as this online symposium has been pointing out. These problems can become even more daunting when the marginality of the object of our investigations is multiplied by differences not only of class, but of race, ethnicity, and subjugation as well. The colonial archive is a space fraught with complex methodological problems, which students of colonialism and postcolonialism have been grappling with for a long time. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was the title of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous 1988 chapter, which questioned whether we can ever recover the voices of the oppressed from a source-base compiled and created not only by the powerful, but as a means to power. Knowledge creation and collection were part of the colonial regime not only as an exercise in record-keeping and bureaucracy, but as a means to create understandings of selfhood and otherness that justified and consolidated the colonial project. The archive itself, then, is an exercise in oppression and marginalisation – what does that mean for those of us who use it? Are we simply replicating the regimes of power and authority encoded through the past?

You won’t be surprised to learn that historians of empires and colonialism have not fully ascribed to this view. After all, it would mean the euthanasia of our field. Rather, proponents of what is increasingly being called “critical colonial history” are constantly alive to new ways of thinking with and against the grain of the colonial archive – of recovering lost or marginalised voices, and of reading and understanding the “common senses” of the colonial past. This requires sensitivity and thoughtfulness (something which some of those engaged in more traditional imperial history seem sadly to lack), but can enrich our understanding of the complex colonial history that unites Britain (among others) with so many parts of the globe in diverse, and sometimes unsettling, ways. The archive is not something to be avoided in colonial history, but something to be interrogated, problematized, and questioned – not least because recent revelations have shown that the UK government has taken direct steps to obscure its availability and content, and hide documents (as many as 1.2 million files) from historians, victims, and the general public. The colonial archive is a place of authority and memory-making: not just in the past, but in the present too. Continue reading →

Our next post in ‘The Voices of the People’ symposium (full programme here) is by Nicholas F. Radel, Professor in the English Department at Furman University. In the first of a batch of posts focused in particular on the power dynamics of voice and voicelessness, Nick examines seventeenth-century anxieties about allowing male same-sex activity a voice – and in the process picks up on the theme of Will Pooley’s post about the importance of attending to silences as much as voices when studying marginalised groups and individuals.     

Nicholas F. Radel

A few years back I published an essay on the 1631 trial of the Earl of Castlehaven whose title, like that of the present post, tropes Gayatri Spivak’s famous question about the subaltern in postcolonial society. In the essay I thought about the ways one particular servant in Castlehaven’s household, Laurence (or Florence) Fitzpatrick, was made to speak as a type of voluntary agent of sodomy when he presumably had little power to stage the monstrous inversions of social, civic, or moral order for which that particular sexual crime has been said to stand symbolically in early modern England. As the title of Cynthia Herrup’s superb work, A House in Gross Disorder, suggests, accusations of sodomy against the Earl did not arise primarily in response to his sexual habits with men but his mismanagement of house and patrimony. So what did it mean that Fitzpatrick, who had little control of either, was convicted of and executed for sodomy as well?

In the proceedings of the trial Fitzpatrick was labeled a “voluntary prostitute” (Cobbett, State Trials, vol. 3, col. 420). His confession of sexual acts with the Earl were assumed to imply his agency and consent to a crime that was, so the story goes, usually identified as an offense observable in others but rarely imagined as a subjective position from which one might act or speak. As regards his sexual actions, Fitzpatrick surely was not a subject but rather a young man subjected to the Earl and the social system that privileged his betters. Fitzpatrick himself seemed to understand as much, for in his forlorn speech from the scaffold he says that “he was not only sorry for [his sins], but also resolved never to come into my lord’s house again; but it was through frailty, and because he was not furnished of another place” (State Trials, col. 422). Nevertheless, because the justices depended on Fitzpatrick’s testimony to corroborate the charges of sodomy against Castlehaven, they seemed to privilege his confession (which was probably unfairly obtained) with an agency the otherwise disenfranchised underling wouldn’t have had. Of course, this agency was imposed on Fitzpatrick, but in my reading the Castlehaven case provided evidence that sodomy, by which I mean for the purpose of this post illicit male same-sex activity, could be imagined and represented as speaking on its own behalf, in its own voice. Continue reading →

Our next post in The Voices of the People symposium (full programme here) is by William Pooley, currently a Past and Present Fellow at the IHR and soon to take up a Lectureship at the University of Bristol. In another example of the kind of thoughtful reflection on the practice of writing ‘history from below’ that Tim Hitchcock called for in our opening post, Will asks whether ‘silences’ might have as much to tell as us ‘voices’, and addresses some of the methodological issues involved in pursuing and interpreting them.

Will Pooley

Are voices really what we should be looking for?

There is a cultural critique to be made here. In her post, Julia Laite warned against the danger of ‘rescuing’ historical voices who might not want to have been rescued. Many of the participants in this symposium will discuss humble individuals compelled to speak by external authorities. These people did not want ‘voices’, they wanted bread, security, or just to be left alone.

My post adds a more theoretical critique to this cultural one.

‘Voice’, after all, is a slippery concept, run through by an inescapable tension between tangibility and evanescence. It is somehow real, physical, and bodily, yet also unseizable and temporary. No historian working on the period before sound recordings can do anything other than read the writing of the people, or the writing about them. We study the pictures of the people, their material culture, perhaps their remains, or their genetics. And even when recordings or living people are available as sources, there is no way to fix their orality in satisfying and absolute permanence.[1]

Might it be fairer to say that many historians of popular culture (or whatever we would like to call what we do) study the silences of the people more often than their voices?

Two rural workers bow their heads in silence as the church bells ring in this painting by Jean-François Millet. But what does their silence mean? Are they praying for the potato harvest, or, as Salvador Dali maintained, praying over the grave of their dead child?

Continue reading →

Our opening post in The Voices of the People symposium (full programme here) comes from Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex. Tim addresses the recent high profile debates about the role academic history writing has to play in our society, arguing that ‘history from below’ has a particularly important contribution to make – and outlines an agenda for how it can do so.

Tim Hitchcock

The purpose and form of history writing has been much debated in recent months; with micro-history, and by extension history from below, being roundly condemned by historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage as the self-serving product of a self-obsessed profession. For Guldi and Armitage the route to power lies in the writing of grand narrative, designed to inform the debates of modern-day policy makers – big history from above.   Their call to arms – The History Manifesto – has met with a mixed reception. Their use of evidence has been demonstrated to fall short of the highest academic standards, and their attempts to revise that evidence sotto voce has been castigated for its lack of transparency.[1]

Regardless of the errors made along the way, of more concern to practitioners of ‘history from below’ is Guldi and Armitage’s assumption that in order to influence contemporary debate and policy formation we should abandon beautifully crafted small stories in favour of large narratives that draw the reader through centuries of clashing forces to some ineluctable conclusion about the present. I have no real argument with the kind of history they advocate – and the success of recent works such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital, suggest that it can both do justice to the evidence, and contribute to modern policy debate. And I am sure with a couple of decades’ hard work (there were 19 years between the publication of the Communist Manifesto, and Das Kapital), Guldi and Armitage will produce a book that lives up to the hype.

But, they fundamentally misrepresent the politics of history writing, and of micro-historical analysis in particular. And what they seem to miss is a simple appreciation of the shock of the old. The lessons of history are very seldom about ‘how we got here’ with all its teleological assumptions, but more frequently about how we can think clearly about the present, when we cannot escape from it. Continue reading →