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Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (South Asia Across the Disciplines) by Bhavani Raman is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (South Asia Across the Disciplines) about?

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 scr

Who reads Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (South Asia Across the Disciplines)?

Author

Bhavani Raman

Publisher

The University of Chicago Press

Published

2012

Language

EN

ISBN

9780226703299

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Literary Criticism, Business