Table Of Content

autobio gr a ph y of a n a rch i ve CULTURES OF HISTORY CULTURES OF HISTORY Nicholas Dirks, Series Editor The death of history, reported at the end of the twentieth century, was clearly premature. It has become a hotly contested battleground in struggles over identity, citizenship, and claims of recognition and rights. Each new national history proclaims itself as ancient and uni- versal, while the contingent character of its focus raises questions about the universality and objectivity of any historical tradition. Glo- balization and American hegemony have created cultural, social, local, and national backlashes. Cultures of History is a new series of books that investigates the forms, understandings, genres, and histories of history, taking history as the primary text of modern life and the foun- dational basis for state, society, and nation. Shail Mayaram, Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, editors, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 Todd Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India AUT OB IOGRAPHY o f an A RC H I V E t , A Scholar’s Passage to India n i c ho l a s b. d i rk s columbia university press new york Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dirks, Nicholas B., 1950– Autobiography of an archive : a scholar’s passage to India / Nicholas B. Dirks pages cm. — (Cultures of history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16966-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16967-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53851-0 (e-book) 1. Anthropology and history—India. 2. Anthropological archives— India. 3. Education, Higher—Philosophy—United States. 4. Interdisciplinary research—Philosophy. I. Title. GN345.2.D57 2015 301.0954—dc23 2014020993 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Cooonnnttttents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Passage to India 1 Part I. Autobiography 1. Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History 27 2. Autobiography of an Archive 50 3. Preface to the Second Edition of The Hollow Crown 70 Part II. History and Anthropology 4. Castes of Mind: The Original Caste 83 5. Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact 109 6. The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India 132 VI CONTENTS Part III. Empire 7. Imperial Sovereignty 171 8. Bringing the Company Back In: The Scandal of Early Global Capitalism 199 9. The Idea of Empire 211 Part IV. The Politics of Knowledge 10. In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century 231 11. G. S. Ghurye and the Politics of Sociological Knowledge 249 12. South Asian Studies: Futures Past 265 Part V. University 13. Franz Boas and the American University: A Personal Account 293 14. Scholars and Spies: Worldly Knowledge and the Predicament of the University 303 15. The Opening of the American Mind 321 Notes 339 Permissions 371 Index 373 Acknowwwllllleeeedgments T he essays and lectures that make up this book have been written over many years, beginning with a paper that started life as a “job talk” in 1987 for a tenured position at the University of Michi- gan. That paper, entitled “Castes of Mind,” was expanded and fi nally revised for publication in the journal R epresentations and is included here because of its centrality to much of the scholarly work I did during the decade I spent in Michigan. I am grateful to my colleagues in the departments of history and anthropology at Michigan not just for hiring me but for offering an extraordinarily stimulating environment in which to think about the history and anthropology of caste in India as well as the larger comparative and interdisciplinary questions that enabled the writing both of numerous essays (many of them published here) and the book I subsequently wrote by the same title. Among many Michigan colleagues, I would like especially to thank Tom Trautmann, Bill Sewell, Sherry Ortner, Geoff Eley, (the late) Fernando Coronil, and Terry McDonald. I was delighted when Val Daniel and Ann Stoler came to Michigan two years after I arrived. Val has always been my advisor in matters anthropological, and both Val and Ann played important roles in helping me launch the interdepartmental program in anthropology and history; I owe Ann special thanks for her role over many years in helping me think through critical issues in the anthropology of empire VIII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and the ethnography of archives. I have also been indebted to many other colleagues, most importantly Gyan Prakash and Partha Chatter- jee, for intellectual exchange, support, and sustenance over the years. David Ludden has been a friend, critic, and resource. I am also grateful to Arjun Appadurai, Chris Fuller, Sheldon Pollock, and Peter van der Veer for their insights and inspiration over the course of my career. This book also owes a great deal to colleagues at Columbia University, where I taught from 1997 until 2013. In addition to some names already mentioned, I would like to thank David Cohen and Jonathan Cole, who recruited me to chair the legendary department of anthropology, and, among many valued colleagues, offer special thanks as well to Akeel Bilgrami, Mark Mazower, Martha Howell, Alan Brinkley, Tim Mitchell, Mahmood Mamdani, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, Claudio Lomnitz, Jean Howard, Ira Katznelson, and Peter Bearman. My ethnographic encounters with academic administration would never have been possible without the trust, support, and counsel of Lee Bollinger. In the end, my closest interlocutor for everything written here since 1994 has been my colleague and wife, Janaki Bakhle. She reads everything I write and always has the wisest, the sharpest, and most generous advice. She has sustained me through each one of these autobiographi- cal experiments, in every possible way, and I will never be able to thank her enough. I look back on some of my writings—covering as they do a span of twenty-five years—with mixed feelings and responses, including aston- ishment at some of my early concerns and on occasion dismay at some of my early ways of writing. When I think, however, of the scholarly op- portunities I have had, across disciplines, continents, institutions, and friendships, I have only deep gratitude and a sense of enduring good fortune for my life in the academy. As I note in my introduction, my parents have had enormous influ- ence on my life. I dedicate this book to my mother, Annabelle V. Dirks, who played a critical role in supporting me during many stages of my autobiography of an archive, and for much else as well. autobio gr a ph y of a n a rch i ve

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The decades between 1970 and the end of the twentieth century saw the disciplines of history and anthropology draw closer together, with historians paying more attention to social and cultural factors and the significance of everyday experience in the study of the past. The people, rather than elite