Emergence and Exclusion: Peasant as Alibi in Colonial Panjab | Sikholars 2013

Описание: In this essay, I examine the emergence of the figure of the peasant in late nineteenth-century colonial Panjab. Throughout a variety of mediums - colonial reports and legislative acts, scholarly and mainstream histories, popular songs and films, colloquial proverbs and jokes - the Panjabi peasant occupies a position of overwhelming prominence. Rather than accepting this as natural or normal, however, I argue that the logic of peasant as alibi is in part a reflection both of the Orientalist claim about the essentially agrarian character of Panjab and a more diffuse economism that renders agricultural production a self-evident activity. From either perspective, the focus on all things peasant appears as a neutral reflection of the most important aspect of society. After marking the discrepancies between English and Panjabi understandings of the word "peasant," I go on to investigate the exclusions that the term inheres. In other words, if agriculture is simply an innate or obvious feature of colonial Panjab, what explains the paucity of attention to the indispensable contributions of low-caste rural field laborers who actually made agricultural production possible? In order to explicate this problem, I explore two articulations of peasant primacy: the writings of Malcolm Darling, an influential colonial officer/author, and the colonial settlement report, a means by which much of Panjab became knowable and worth-knowing. Together, these different genres of writings contributed to the process of ordering and re-ordering society with the peasant at its zenith. I conclude by questioning how such an alibi separates histories of religion/culture from caste/labor - the split between society and economy - and what it might mean to overcome such divides.

Navyug Gill received a BA from the University of Toronto and is currently a doctoral candidate in the History department at Emory University. His work deals with caste identity, political economy and the division of labor in colonial Panjab.

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