Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The LureoftheArchive: New Perspectives from South Asia RubyLai The question of the archive has long occupied historians and non-historians alike, who have theorized the politics of archival research, unfolded the many meanings of the "archive," and questioned the politi cal and intellectual implications of its enticements. For a while now, scholars of South Asia have made key contributions to this critical explo ration. They have investigated the question of the archive and its relation to historiography; challenged the grand narratives (nation, empire, community, history, "family"1) assumed to be easily visible in the official archives; worked with the idea of the "fragment" (as something that inter rupts and opens up new questions and avenues of inquiry); raised critical questions about speech and silence ("the woman question"; "can the subaltern speak?"); and focused on understanding and troubling everyday forms of resistance and theorizing on behalf of the other.2 This array of writings has not only contested the category of what is "admissible" into the historical record but has also raised profound concerns about what constitutes the "real," problems of representation and chronology, the boundaries of history, and history's relationship to modernity. So why turn to the question once again? Perhaps because the question of the archive is not—and cannot be— obsolete. Three recently published studies that I discuss in this article are a testimony to its compelling power as concept and as material reality. The FeministStudies37, no. 1 (Spring 2011). © 2011 by Ruby Lai 93 94 RubyLai archive continues to obsess the historian and the non-historian (one of the authors under discussion here is a literary critic; the other two are historians) in productive ways. What we have in the writings of these three authors are three rather different kinds of engagement with the archive and with the question of the archive. In this essay, I underline the innovative possibilities for thinking histories, lives, figures, spaces—and the archive—that they open up. Even though only one of the three books under review deals directly with the question of the archive, all these works engage with archival uncertainties and conundrums in ways that make their projects even more fascinating. The subjects that these authors investigate are not "obvious" in any way. Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India opens with a discussion of a report on the male brothels of Karachi Books Discussed in This Article For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. By Anjali Arondekar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo-Indian MP and "Chancery Lunatic." By Michael Fisher. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. By Rochona Majumdar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. that nineteenth-century scholar and explorer Richard Burton is supposed to have written but which has never been located; Michael Fisher, in The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Victorian Anglo-Indian MP and "Chancery Lunatic," analyzes the "identity" of a "prince" (who is not a prince by birth) in nineteenth-century colonial India; and Rochona Majumdar, in Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, examines the imagined tradition of arranged marriages. These are not the standard stories or familiar figures we usually meet in accounts of imperialism and of the colonial archive. When the sexual practices of colonized subjects, Begum Sombre, David Dyce, or the "traditional" Bengali family—what might be classed as the general subjects of these books—come into view in the colonial record, it is often as evidence of debasement, backwardness, insanity, or orientalness, as RubyLai 95 if they were already fully known and justifiably disparaged. What is more, even the most complex scholarly involvement does not always avoid an orientalized construction of people such as harem folk or "prostitutes." Often, in cases such as these, scholars have simply assumed that we already know all there is to know. Or perhaps the real problem is that we have failed to investigate many of these themes and figures on the assumption that there is little that they can tell us about "real" history. Arondekar's For the Record is...