India Post News Service

LOS ANGELES: "Though choosing a dissertation for our prestigious award is not like picking the Oscars it certainly is more democratic," quipped Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who holds the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian History at UCLA and is the chair of the Sardar Patel Dissertation Evaluation Committee. Dr. Subrahmanyam went on to emphasize that there were a plethora of excellent dissertations to choose from and many readers to thank.

He also expressed some satisfaction that in the years past the distinguished $10,000 award for an outstanding doctoral dissertation on South Asian history has frequently gone to anthropologists, but this year it went to a historian. Her name is Bhanvani Raman and she is currently Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University, specializing in modern South Asian history.

"Less than ten years ago Harvard and Yale did not even teach South Asian history in their curriculum, but the University of Michigan in Anne Arbor (from where Bhavani Raman recently completed her doctoral degree) has a long history of teaching Asian History. Raman focused her winning dissertation on scribal culture, education and bureaucracy under the East India Company rule in the early nineteenth century South India.

"My dissertation examines the relationship between graphic culture and the making of a colonial regime by arguing that English East India Company rule in the early nineteenth century Tamil region was quintessentially a ‘Document Raj,’" explained Raman. "The Company established its domination in this region of Madras Presidency through a new style of state craft: a punitive rule of paper that reorganized the power of written documents and transformed extant scribal practices by generating a new textual habitus."

Raman also emphasized that this resulting "culture of documentation" redefined the use of writing in India where writing moved from a literary purpose to a more documentation or record keeping culture in both positive and negative ways. Through an analysis of micro-practices of document use, Raman studied pre-existing document genres, and how the East India Company rule re-wrote the normative relationship between written recordkeeping and memory.

 "The relationship between written and spoken declarations was reconfigured," underscored Raman. "By studying the petty economy of documents that emerged during the Company rule, it draws attention to the very creation of documentary archive of the English East India Company in Madras." Bhavani’s dissertation also examined the Company kacceri (office) where new writing practices were fashioned from older ones, producing what she called "skeins of correspondence" that linked metropolitan Britain to Tamil hinterland.

These practices transformed the very meaning of what it meant to write. Documents secured the kacceri’s power to punish and discipline its subjects by yoking the technology of writing to new ways of securing oral testimonies, taking confessions, and defining authentic evidence. Excesses and corruption resulted in this environment, a misuse of power, beyond even the British intention in some cases, by local authorities, explained Bhavani.

"In fact some of the whistle blowers of this were Christian missionaries and catechists who saw the problems," she said. Bhavani thanked the committee sincerely for the award, mentioning that academicians in first and third world countries both struggle for funding in various different ways from finding expenses for research to getting the basic books and materials for their students. She also took a few questions from the audience present to explain her research.

Jitu Mehta, one of the key organizers of the Sardar Patel committee, also thanked the gathering, for assembling on an early Saturday morning rather than lounging in the house having breakfast tea. He gave a brief history of the legacy of the Sardar Patel Award. "We established this award with a $250,000 endowment that would generate an award every year, and thankfully it is well established and going strong," he said.

"We are now looking at other areas of support to encourage the study of South Asian history in schools in America and India." A lovely display with refreshments, warm conversation and the relaxing setting of the JD Morgan Center at UCLA furnished a happy and all too brief morning experience. Kudos go to the organizers and the supporters of the prestigious yearly recognition award.