A land of climatic extremes, contending religions, and over 300 castes and tribes, few territories afforded ‘so many points of interest to the historian, the ethnologist, or the student of ancient institutions’Footnote 1 as the colonial Punjab. To the west of the Indus River lay a seemingly ungovernable borderland inhabited by PathanFootnote 2 and Baloch tribal nomads; to the east the colonial government pioneered canal construction projects and established agricultural land tenures. Colonial expansion after the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848–9 necessitated the acquisition of geographic and linguistic knowledge to aid in political consolidation. The post-Mutiny era specifically saw the rise of an ‘ethnographic state’ that utilized empirical data on caste affiliation furnished by the census and anthropometric reports to facilitate surveillance, military recruitment, and social reform.
Yet scholars continue to debate whether hegemonic forms of colonial knowledge were sustained by ethnographic enquires conducted on the Indo-Afghan border. Whereas the Russians trained their scouting parties with some ethnographic skills, the colonial administration instead committed its resources to charting a ‘scientific’ frontier. Agents involved in ongoing mapping expeditions concluded that ‘surveyors are not anthropologists, and their time for inquiry in this particular branch of science is short’.Footnote 3 Moreover, Baloch and Pathan tribes existed at the outermost reaches of colonial influence where a civilizing mission premised on sedentarization could hardly be sustained. Following a treaty brokered in 1876, Baloch tribes instead began to operate as semi-independent vassals of the colonial administration by furnishing work levies and escort guards in exchange for subsidies and the affirmation of chiefly power.Footnote 4
With these regional ambiguities in mind, I aim to demonstrate that a methodological revolution in the early 1870s prompted a shift from the study of pre-modern texts to the socio-cultural analysis of present native life-worlds on the frontier.Footnote 5 Evidencing this transition necessitates the demarcation of borderland ethnographic production into two periods. The antiquarian works of Henry George Raverty and Henry Walter Bellew are representative of an initial era of orientalist scholarship (roughly 1850 to 1890), while the ethnographies of Septimus Smet Thorburn and Mansel Longworth Dames (1875 to 1910) reflect a preoccupation with oral tribal culture that accorded with the principles of the new metropolitan intellectual societies. By isolating alternative impetuses for folklore and proverb study, I will suggest that an awareness of individual biography and the micro-politics of knowledge production must precede any conceptualization of cultural representation in this region.Footnote 6 As the model of the caste-based ethnographic state does not adequately speak to the particularities of the frontier, this article will recast focus on the intentionality of culture-study rather than assuming any implicit connection between ethnography and state power.
This assertion runs somewhat counter to Nicholas Dirks's logic in Castes of mind, where he outlines the colonial reinterpretation of caste as a basic element in the social fabric of Indian society. Once maligned by missionary narrators as evidence of Hindu barbarism, the ethnographic state formulated a hierarchical conception of caste to support a broader ‘divide and rule’ form of governmentality after 1857. The census, which was instituted on an India-wide basis in 1871, signalled ‘the final conversion of barbarism into civilized data’Footnote 7 and offered a framework that associated particular castes with inherited cultural traits. Dirks in particular dwells upon the career of H. H. Risley, a leading ethnologist who advocated the use of anthropometric techniques to establish the distinct racial origins of different castes based on physiological measurements. Yet funding woes bedevilled Risley's scheme for a countrywide ethnographic survey; the beleaguered Punjabi government at one point could not even afford to subsidize the scientific instruments necessary for anthropometric enquiries.Footnote 8 Information on nasal indexes and body statures that had been returned, moreover, did not accord with Risley's established models. An anthropometric survey of Balochistan conducted in 1903 further testified to this paucity of information, as the amount of returned data varied wildly depending on the particular tribe in question.Footnote 9
In probing the nexus of colonial knowledge and repressive policy-making, historians have followed Dirks in gesturing to the state's instrumentalist affirmation of caste and tribal identities to facilitate its rule. Certainly, the Indian government increasingly relied on the so-called ‘martial races’ of the Punjab to repel an imagined Russian invasion in the post-Mutiny period. In contending with endemic issues like rural debt, the administration also designated certain ‘agricultural tribes’ as the sole recipients of alienated property. The elevation of collective identities similarly underscored policing measures like the Criminal Tribes Act that attributed disorder to hereditary factors, while the Punjab Laws Act of 1872 declared the customs of the patrilineal tribe to be constitutive of a new colonial legal code.
And yet, officials operating in the western Punjab and borderland generally did not employ caste-based ethnology to support a strategy of divide and rule. While Risley conceived of each caste as a racially homogeneous, endogamous unit, these administrators concluded that caste functioned essentially as a sociological group based on occupation and linked physiological differences amongst the population to environmental factors. Census commissioners further averred that such identities in the Punjab were mutable and did not conform to the system of caste ‘as enunciated in documents or by Brahmans from Gangetic India’.Footnote 10 Not only did the terms for tribe, caste, and clan differ between regions, but the natives questioned often manufactured their original caste designations to reflect their present socio-economic standing. As Denzil Ibbetson sardonically remarked, a Muslim could elevate his position from a weaver to a respected Sayyid within a few years if the prices for his wares rose sufficiently.Footnote 11 The trials of the 1881 census clearly indicated that it ‘was almost impossible to define a caste and difficult to define a tribe, and that it [was] often impossible to draw a clearly marked line between two castes of similar standing’.Footnote 12
If the distinction between caste and tribe could not be clearly ascertained in the borderland and empirical data remained elusive, it logically follows that culture-study in this region did not necessarily engender caste categorization. Yet scholars have been loathe to abandon Dirks's instrumentalist paradigm; Gloria Raheja notes that ethnographers Ibbetson, Risley, and William Crooke held incongruous views on the origins and social role of caste, but concludes that the imperial agents' reliance on caste essentialization ‘eclipsed some of these important theoretical differences among them’.Footnote 13 Venturing beyond a Foucauldian reading of colonial governmentality, a possible resolution to such contradiction lies in the interrogation of broader transregional networks of intellectual exchange that began to coalesce in the 1870s. One may follow Tony Ballantyne in viewing empire as a system of ‘webs’ that facilitated the transmission, refashioning, and reappropriation of particular theories; such an approach cautions against reducing colonial knowledge to being ‘an instrument deployed at will to protect and maintain imperial authority’.Footnote 14 The socio-cultural exploration of folklore and proverb usage could just as easily furnish a critique of the colonial administration as it could manufacture ‘a discourse about the supposedly consensual nature of caste ideology’.Footnote 15 Whether they were promoting ‘scientific governance’, supplying material for metropolitan intellectual societies, or bemoaning the imminent extinction of village communities, ethnographers in the borderland operated as autonomous individuals rather than as bureaucratic automatons.
I
Throughout the nineteenth century, colonial opinion clung to the axiom that the personalities of individual officers on the frontier exerted a greater influence over tribal politics than any legislative orders. The very mention of popular British agents like Mountstuart Elphinstone continued to elicit approbation from natives long after their deaths. But while the legacies of these officers endured, we cannot assume any strong association between individual ethnographic scholarship and administrative policy in the interim between the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars. This intellectual isolation, however, would dissipate in the 1870s as metropolitan organizations like the Anthropological Institute and Folk-Lore Society linked scholars from all corners of the empire and allowed for the germination of new ethnographic methodologies. Examining the contributions of ‘first-generation’ scholars H. G. Raverty and H. W. Bellew will allow us to chart the gradual evolution of borderland studies and gauge the effect of socio-cultural ethnography on colonial discourse.
The son of a navy surgeon, Raverty (1825–1906) experienced frontier life early on in his career as a soldier in the Bombay infantry; following service in the Second Anglo-Sikh War, he soon after obtained a civil service position as assistant commissioner for the Peshawar district of the Punjab. In surveying Raverty's career, one may discern a talented if somewhat egotistical scholar attempting to secure professional recognition from a fickle colonial establishment. Indeed, the handful of obituaries published upon his death hearkened to the leitmotif of a brilliant academic reduced to near anonymity. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society declared Raverty to be a poor man, having only received a prize of 1,000 rupees for High Proficiency in Urdu despite his considerable labours.Footnote 16The Times, too, reflected on Raverty's failure to garner accolades from any university, government, or learned society, despite his reputation as the ‘father of Pashto studies’.Footnote 17 This marginalization, however, is not merely a historical footnote, but rather led the self-trained Raverty to adopt a combative expositional style. Detractors of his ‘trenchant pen’ gestured to Raverty's dabbling in comparative philology to confirm his neophyte status, or else noted his predilection for trivialities.
Raverty's tribulations began early in his career following his compilation of a dictionary and grammar of the Pashto language. Although these works would win him acclaim from prominent European orientalists,Footnote 18 Raverty struggled to solicit official support for his project and after some rigmarole was beaten to the punch by a Lieutenant Vaughan, who circulated his own grammar under the auspices of the colonial government in 1854. Yet Raverty, a self-described man of ‘some patience, and a good stock of perservance and industry’,Footnote 19 would not admit defeat and published both texts with the assistance of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1855. This collection was accompanied by the appearance in 1860 of the Gulshan-i-roh, a compendium of historical Pashto poems intended to operate as a future textbook for aspiring students. Raverty would later translate these poems in an 1862 text, where he further explored their role in conveying Sufi philosophical beliefs.
In producing this material, Raverty gestured to the manifold strategic uses of Pashto language skills. The conclusion of a non-aggression treaty in 1855 between Afghan emir Dost Mohamed and Chief Commissioner John Lawrence signalled the commencement of a new era of potential intercultural exchange. To facilitate this process, Raverty advocated the implementation of Civil Service exams in Pashto (which were eventually held beginning in 1863). Colonial incompetence in borderland languages, he presumed, would continue to result in disastrous gaffes reminiscent of the ill-fated First Anglo-Afghan War. But in his attempts to popularize Pashto-study, Raverty exhibited scant interest in the contemporary life-worlds of frontier populations, which he denigrated as culturally barren. Instead, he latched onto written language as an ‘unerring guide’ that served as a ‘barometer of a people's civilization or barbarity’.Footnote 20 Raverty thus located the apex of Afghan civilization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period captured in the poems of warrior-poet Khushal Khattak Khan and Durrani dynasty founder Ahmed Shah, who respectively warded off Mughal expansionism and lay the foundations for a nation-state. Poet Mirza Khan Ansari, the grandson of heterdox religious reformer Bayazid Ansari, also clashed with the imperious Aurganzeb and was persecuted by his mullahs. Although Raverty elevated these historical figures to the status of legend, he failed to identify any contemporary Afghan poets who exhibited such laudatory traits. The mid-nineteenth century had inaugurated a ‘dark age of oriental literature; when that Sun, which ever diffused its rays of support upon the cultivation of Eastern lore and Asiatic subjects, has set; and naught but dark, lowering and ungenial clouds remain’.Footnote 21
Raverty's decision to circumscribe a golden era of literary production was also pragmatic, in that it enabled him to claim sole access to rare unpublished manuscripts. Indeed, he frequently spoke to his role as a cultural preservationist, safeguarding foundational texts that the Pathans would likely have destroyed through internecine warfare.Footnote 22 Such self-promotion reflected Raverty's fervent desire to evidence his scholarly credentials. In 1863, he became embroiled in a feud when Princeton-educated missionary Isidore Lowenthal questioned Raverty's facility with Pashto in an article for the Lahore Chronicle. Footnote 23 Never one to balk at conflict, Raverty published a refutation that dissected Lowenthal's translation of the New Testament line by line, all the while highlighting various mistakes and ambiguity. Moreover, he filed a suit against his own publisher, Stephen Austin, who had allegedly colluded with Lowenthal to publish derivative translations in England using Raverty's own expanded Pashto typeface.Footnote 24 Lowenthal soon after died from an accidental gunshot wound inflicted by his sentry, but Raverty continued to chastise his ‘imitators’ operating on the frontier. In the preface to his 1871 translation of Aesop's fables, he brazenly took the people of Peshawar to task for pirating copies of his texts and vowed to register his future publications under the new India Copyright Act.Footnote 25
Although Raverty's grammar and poetry collections were well received by the metropolitan intelligentsia, his ruminations on other ethnographic matters undermined his standing. Lord Strangford, for instance, applauded Raverty for his linguistic labours before the Royal Asiatic Society,Footnote 26 but questioned Raverty's tact in speculating upon the ‘curious delusion’ of the Afghans' Jewish origins. This theory had originated in the late eighteenth century when orientalist William Jones proposed a philological similarity between Pashto and Chaldean, but had largely fallen into disfavour due to a lack of corroborating historical evidence. Concluding that Jones's thesis was ‘hastily conceived, without more than a mere cursory examination of the language’,Footnote 27 Strangford and later ethnologists pointed to a sociological process whereby ‘rude and uncultivated people…brought within the pale of Islam’ connected themselves with ‘the traditionary quasi-Biblical ethnology of their conquerors or spiritual instructors through some patriarch or hero of Scripture’.Footnote 28 Such claims anticipated the socio-cultural ethnologists' elevation of behavioural study over the findings of text-based philology. A new recognition of human agency and adaptability invalidated Raverty's assumptionFootnote 29 that pre-modern poems and chronicles furnished accurate information on modern tribal life-worlds.
While one may critique Raverty's dilettantism and lack of formal academic training, it is more difficult to label him as a cultural imperialist. There is very little content in his oeuvre that seems to support colonial expansion; his most ‘civilizing’ gesture appears in his translation of Aesop's fables, which he framed as a potential source of moral education for untutored Afghan women. As tensions between the Indian government and the Afghan emirate mounted in the 1890s, Raverty joined famed orientalist G. W. Leitner in calling for the cessation of Viceroy Lansdowne's ‘vigorous frontier policy’.Footnote 30 In an editorial for the Asiatic Quarterly Review, he utilized genealogical records to demonstrate that the majority of tribes in Balochistan were ethnically Afghans and therefore subjects of the land-hungry Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman. To quell British discomfiture with the emir's iron rule, he classified the persecuted Hazara tribes as non-Afghan military settlers who were likely in collusion with Russian authorities. This old-school emphasis on origin theory produced a cut and dry narrative of ‘pure’ Pathans and foreign intriguers, overshadowing any concern for the political affinities of contemporary tribes.
II
Dr Henry Walter Bellew (1834–92) officially entered into the pantheon of notable Anglo-Indian government servants with the unveiling of his bust at both the London-based East India United Service Club and the United Service Institution at Simla. Speaking at the latter location, Bellew's son lauded his late father's facility with Persian, Turkish, and Pashto dialects and noted his participation in numerous diplomatic endeavours between 1857 and 1880.Footnote 31 Following his participation in General Henry Lumsden's mission to Kandahar shortly before the Indian Mutiny, Dr Bellew assisted in the resolution of territorial disputes over the Sistan region in 1871 and later joined Forsyth's expedition to Yarkund in 1873. These contributions to the charting of Central Asia ultimately earned him the position of chief political officer to Kabul during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, which he was forced to relinquish in 1880 on account of ill health. One might argue that Bellew's medical services as sanitary commissioner of the Punjab were overshadowed by his expansive data collection projects that melded geographical knowledge, linguistic analysis, and tribal lineage charting. His ethnographic labours, however, served a tendentious purpose as his output grew politicized with the resurgence of the ‘Central Asian Question’ in the late 1860s.
While colonial agents like Elphinstone had valorized the martial character of the Afghan ‘highlander’ in the early nineteenth century, Bellew depicted a society under the thrall of corrupt priestly classes. This rendering contributed to the historical narrative of an accidental Afghan empire that remained dependent on the looting of non-Muslim groups while neglecting domestic investment and improvement.Footnote 32 According to the doctor, the Afghan rulers had rendered their kingdom ‘a closed borough of Islam, stationary in the ignorance of the middle ages, and pervaded with the religious bigotry of that period’.Footnote 33 Such commentary echoed the rhetorical output of certain colonial ‘experts’ who castigated reigning emir Sher Ali for his reluctance to instal a British envoy at the Kabul court in the 1870s and cast aspersions on his mental stability.Footnote 34 Bellew gave credence to these rumours in his later writings by denouncing the emir as a Janus-faced reactionary who was either shut up in his harem with drugs and wines or else was preaching the merits of jihad as a dutiful warrior-priest.Footnote 35
The increasing impoverishment of the Muslim gentry, the assassination of Viceroy Mayo in 1872, and pervasive fears of fanatical conspiracies after the Mutiny all contributed to a reconceptualization of India's Muslim population as an ‘an implacably oppositional and corporate community’Footnote 36 eager to overthrow its colonial oppressors. Colonial writers like Bellew gestured to the degeneration of Islamic practices and asserted that sectarian strife in the Indo-Afghan borderland resulted from the ignorant masses being misled by corrupt preachers who misrepresented the tenets of ‘true’ Islam for the sake of materialist gain. The trope of the avaricious cleric was conveniently vague and could be used to describe the Wahhabist mullahs on the frontier, the Afghan political elite, or the hereditary pirs who claimed property on account of their saintly lineages. This discursive construction of the ‘bad man’, however, was not unique to the borderland, but also served to depoliticize peasant insurgency elsewhere in India. Discussing the Pabna uprising of 1873, administrator W. W. Hunter was convinced that ‘the rural population [had] proved themselves quick to appreciate and to act upon the right which English rule secures to rich and poor’; their lawlessness was merely the product of external manipulation.Footnote 37 A similar focus on individual malcontents explicated the Muslims' supposedly ‘senseless violence’ and eclipsed any concern for subaltern group consciousness.
Bellew's portrayal of a priest-ridden borderland was a departure from earlier forms of colonial discourse, which had noted a degree of religious equanimity in Afghan society. Elphinstone, for instance, observed that Muslims' interactions with residents of differing creeds were ‘free from all asperity’ in times of peace; generally speaking, the Afghans' ‘religious spirit [was] far from being unpleasing, even in followers of Islam’.Footnote 38 Moreover, the mullahs on the frontier operated as guardians of the social order and mainly used their powers for intertribal conflict resolution. This aspect of the ‘Elphinstonian episteme’Footnote 39 clearly influenced the tone of Bellew's early travel literature, in which he commented on the Afghans' tolerance for ‘other creeds from which no injury accrues to their own religion’. Islamic practices in Afghanistan were hardly bigoted, for a sizeable sector of the population were Sufis who asserted ‘a belief in one Divine Creator, but place[d] no faith in prophets or divine messengers’.Footnote 40 Raverty, too, had notably traced Sufi influence by locating religious symbolism in the work of his pre-modern poets; this foregrounding of minority Sufi elements was not unusual, as British political officers in Sind and the Punjab routinely utilized the pirs as local intermediaries in this period.Footnote 41
Yet Bellew's perceptions of the Afghans' religiosity changed drastically in his 1864 ethnography of the Yusufzai tribes residing in the Peshawar Valley. Here, he donned his orientalist cap to explicate the ‘character’ of the tribesmen by scouring classical manuscripts for evidence of their innate zealotry and antipathy for external authority. In the sixteenth century, for example, the Yusufzais were attracted to the ‘lax and accomodating’ strain of Islamic reformism preached by the heterodox Bayazid Ansari; several decades later, the tribes' refusal to pay tribute to the governor of Peshawar precipitated an armed conflict. These scenarios were replayed in the nineteenth century when the Yusufzais bandied behind Sayyid Ahmed in his jihad against Ranjit Singh and his Sikh supporters. Such historical anecdotes indicated that the Yusufzais were predisposed to bouts of fanaticism stemming from their misplaced support of wily ‘bad men’. Bellew further extended this argument to the contemporary era by arguing that the mujahidin of the Sittana frontier colony were not united in their divine mission, but rather could be separated into three groups: the ignorant masses, the manipulative clerics, and a handful of die-hard fanatics.Footnote 42
Bellew's source material, much like Raverty's, was firmly rooted in classical antiquity or pre-modern manuscripts. By employing such evidence, these scholars presumed that Afghan moralities and social behaviours remained static across the ages. Bellew, for instance, made ample use of a famed Sunni polemical tract from the seventeenth century that chronicled the ascendance of untutored Sufis who had ‘all gained their authority and pre-eminence’ among the Afghans ‘simply by feeding and clothing the masses for a time gratuitously’.Footnote 43 The doctor corroborated this invective by dismissing contemporary clerics as ‘notorious highwaymen and burglars’ who often lacked basic literacy or knowledge of their creedFootnote 44 and exploited their hereditary titles to claim lands free of charge. This materialist perspective coloured Bellew's representations of borderland civilization; tombs, shrines and other architectural landmarks were of scant interest to the doctor, as the Muslims' local histories of saints and miracles were but ‘stupid fictions’.Footnote 45 His ethnographies characterized the ascendance of Islam on the frontier as a purely destructive historical event that had obliterated Buddhist culture and begat societal torpor. Tribes like the nomadic Afridis, who had taken up the banner of Islam but remained ignorant of any religious doctrine, evidenced such intractable decline.Footnote 46
Although Bellew maintained his reputation as an expert on Afghan affairs well into the 1880s, his detractors continued to critique both his curious lack of engagement with present-day Afghan culture and his political hawkishness.Footnote 47 Bellew's heavy reliance on ancient Greek sources, coupled with his fascination for tribal branches, produced an oddly depopulated and ahistorical rendering of Afghan society. By focusing on the etiology of tribal groups, Bellew identified the indigenous Pathans as former Indian Rajputs and cast certain Afghan tribes as migrants from the Levant. His project to resuscitate the controversy of the Afghans' Jewish origins in the early 1880s could perhaps be rationalized as a move to discountenance the tribes' aboriginality and legitimize the extension of the colonial orbit.Footnote 48 This representational strategy ultimately supported a vision of Afghanistan as terra nullius, where generations of invasions had severed any ancestral connection between the people and their soil. Anticipating an incipient British occupation, Bellew further revelled in the fact that ‘tales of heroism and deeds of bloodshed, of which almost any mound and hollow in the country is the site, are now fast becoming traditions’.Footnote 49 But it remained doubtful whether the British administration possessed the resources to annex the Afghan urban centres and ‘shed its luster upon these benighted regions’.Footnote 50 According to one prominent general, to suggest as much was ‘an undertaking which no one but a doctor with a writing mania in him would think of proposing to an all too confiding public’.Footnote 51
While the leading journals questioned the academic merits of Bellew's later works, they nonetheless internalized his portrayal of Islam as a hollow creed in Afghanistan subject to abuse.Footnote 52 At least one reviewerFootnote 53 echoed Bellew's claim that ‘many a secret prayer is offered up for the speedy return of the British, and many a sigh expresses the regret that they ever left the country’.Footnote 54 It should be stressed, however, that these journals were general-knowledge publications that did not reflect the output of any specialized anthropological society. Indeed, Bellew's one dalliance in collective knowledge production may have been his 200-page submission to the 1891 International Congress of Orientalists, which (much to the chagrin of its readers) lacked an index or bibliography with which to disaggregate its mad jumble of philological speculations and tribal genealogies.Footnote 55 By this time, socio-cultural ethnography had given rise to new methodologies and secured a committed following; the origins of this movement are chronicled in the following section.
III
To what extent did metropolitan ethnographers and their colonial affiliates engineer the subjugation of India's native races? At one end of the spectrum, George Stocking Jr has determined that groups like the Anthropological Institute ‘took for granted the British Empire and the White Man's burden, but [were] not actively concerned with either colonial policy or savage uplift’.Footnote 56 On the other, Theodore Koditschek suggests that the advent of evolutionary theory justified the marginalization of ‘backward’ natives under a ‘precise regime of discipline and dependency’Footnote 57 and supported their forced integration into a global economy. Karuna Mantena's identification of an anthropological turn in liberal discourse may constitute a middle ground between these poles. Per her analysis, Henry Maine's ‘comparative and evolutionary account of property’ reinterpreted traditional social structures as ‘foundational to the coherence and stability of native society’Footnote 58 and reimagined the colonial regime as a trustee able to guide an apolitical India through the throes of modernization. This intervention accords with Dirks's premise that ‘anthropology assumed a history that necessitated colonial rule’ while history writing was reserved for chronicling the ascent of western nation-states.Footnote 59
Although post-colonial analysis succeeds in describing the structural causes and effects of unequal power relations, it does not always account for variability in historical perception. The Victorian era was hardly a period of racial comity, yet amateur folklorists employed by the Indian government often fulminated against bigotry as an obstacle to ‘good governance’. Punjab administrator Richard Temple recognized that the colonial observer would fail in his efforts if he neglected ‘to project himself sufficiently into the minds of the subject of inquiry’ and ‘to read seriously what they hold to be sacred’.Footnote 60 Folklorist William Crooke similarly proclaimed that ‘the study of humanity in India demands an abundance of tact and a temper not be ruffled by stupid misconception or prejudice’.Footnote 61 Such idealism also permeated the orientalist community; some applauded Müller's theory of Aryan migration as the cornerstone of a ‘political rhetoric of love’Footnote 62 supporting affective relations between colonizer and colonized, though Aryanism found little purchase amongst officials in the Punjab who observed the effects of historical miscegenation firsthand.Footnote 63 While these culturally relativist impulses were occasionally eclipsed by a racially incendiary spirit of the age, they nonetheless informed an ethnographic intellectualism that filtered down to the level of the colonial collector.
As emerging disciplines in the mid-Victorian period, anthropology, ethnography, and folklore studies were generally under the purview of the amateur London-based societies rather than any formal academic institutions. And despite the gradual legitimization of these fields, the British government was notoriously loath to fund such specialist endeavours. Well into the twentieth century, scholars unsuccessfully called for the establishment of a central ethnological bureau to compete with similar institutions in Germany and America.Footnote 64 Yet the state's tentative stance on ethnography should not dissuade us from situating metropolitan and colonial culture-study in the same analytical frame. Settlement reports in India often provided a foundation for ethnographic exposition, but colonial observers' political commentaries and scholarly articles were also transmitted to the intellectual societies and reviewed by the metropolitan journals. Associational affiliations and biographical data may therefore explicate alternative motivations for ethnographic publication beyond its use as a colonial technology of rule.
Although the innovation of prehistory in the 1850s had undermined the biblical timescale and invalidated William Jones's ‘mosaic ethnology’, E. B. Tylor's concept of socio-cultural evolutionism provided an alternative substantiation of human commonality by deconstructing cultures and religions as aggregates of individual customs. Certain provincial cultural practices, which he termed ‘survivals’, originated in past eras and could be observed in the folk customs of contemporary ‘savage’ societies. Proverbs, in particular, provided a glimpse into past life-worlds and were ‘to be worked as mines of historical knowledge’.Footnote 65 In order to legitimize this framework, Tylor spoke to a ‘psychic unity’ linking mankind: all races possessed the same mental capacities and would therefore respond to similar stimuli through the invention of particular practices. Colonial folklorists, in turn, employed this framework to attribute the production of analogous proverbs to the ‘common but independent experience of different minds’.Footnote 66
Established in 1878, the Folk-Lore Society pioneered the collection of ‘observable phenomena’ like ‘popular traditions, legendary ballads, local proverbial sayings, superstitions and old customs’ that granted insight into ‘man's mental and social history’Footnote 67 and illuminated the psychology of folk-life.Footnote 68 Gesturing to Tylor, the folklorists avowed that oral artifacts provided an enduring record of ethical thought and clarified cultural norms that existed independently of established theology.Footnote 69 Colonial scholars in India increasingly directed their attentions to native superstitions and folk rituals, while noting that formal Islam ‘sat lightly’ on Muslims in the Punjab and borderland. Configuring the village as the fundamental unit of Indian society, socio-cultural ethnographers argued that folk-tales and proverbs imbedded in rural life could ‘survive the overthrow of empires and the desolations brought by conquerors’.Footnote 70 Maine's support for the theory of Aryan migration and utilization of comparative analysis further encouraged folklorists to link ancient British customs with contemporary Indian social practices and superstitions.Footnote 71
While historians have rightfully interrogated the politics of knowledge production, their conceptual apparatuses remain tethered to Dirks's paradigm of an ethnographic state wreaking ‘epistemic violence’ through coercion. Sadhana Naithani, for one, has challenged the viability of colonial folkloristics on a fundamental level by casting collection as an act of compulsion that acquired a false authenticity from the scholar's association with state power. Rather than enquiring into the marginalization of the bardic classes under British rule, colonial observers perceived these intermediaries to be ‘push-button repositories’Footnote 72 of authentic cultural data. The absence of socio-historical context for this extraction process thereby constitutes a ‘missing discourse’ that obfuscates the many levels of negotiation between the initial articulation of folk knowledge and its subsequent recording. Yet dwelling on these distortive effects positions the colonial observer in a system of power relations that reduces the encounter to an exercise in futility; personal ideology becomes irrelevant in this mechanistic depiction.
In a similar vein, Raheja has enlisted the concept of ‘entextualization’Footnote 73 to explicate how a proverb became a fixed text ‘detached from the situation of its utterance’ and furnished the administration with a usable cultural code. It may be prudent, however, to disentangle the empiricism of the colonial state from the methodological innovations of the metropolitan ethnographic associations. Wary of a potential backlash against dilettantism, members of the Folk-Lore Society went to great lengths to distinguish their field as an independent scientific discipline structured by objective data. Streamlining the processes of collection and classification, however, was no rudimentary task, as folklorists struggled to conceive of a cohesive system that could incorporate oral materials originating in the far corners of the empire. Proverbs, in particular, were exceedingly difficult to categorize as they could evoke various sentiments when uttered in different cultural contexts or times periods. Folk-tales were more difficult to extract than classify, as native informers regularly refuted all beliefs in superstition lest they be labelled as backwards.
If there was a tension in the colonial extension of socio-cultural ethnography, it could manifest in the ethnographers' tendency to fuse elements of Tylor's intellectualism with that of Maine. The peculiarity of this innovation lies in the fact that Maine perceived societies to be systematic wholes structured by specific forms of property ownership, while Tylor studied cultural practices as discrete occurrences indicative of a particular psychological state rather than as imbedded in a specific milieu.Footnote 74 Moreover, Tylor famously classified his branch of ethnography as a ‘reformer's science’ capable of removing bothersome survivals like astrology from modern society; this ‘project of recovering lost meanings for behavioral patterns’Footnote 75 necessitated the acquisition of cultural data on a global level. Groups like the International Congress of Folk-Lore, however, celebrated the presence of survivals in contemporary society by staging children's games, artifact exhibitions, and even highland sword-dances at their annual meetings.Footnote 76 Colonial agents also put Tylorite intellectualism to conservative purposes in the Punjab where the spectre of capitalist individualism threatened to undermine their ‘ma-bap’ paternalistic relationship with the subjects under their jurisdiction.
While Maine's influence on colonial socio-cultural ethnography cannot be denied, one must not assume that practitioners similarly assented to India's (premature) emergence into the contract age. Rather, it was Maine's recognition of historically situated group behaviours and customs that appealed to colonial ‘men on the ground’ who no longer entertained conceptions of political economy linking native uplift with integration into global trade networks. Settlement officers in the Punjab, in particular, increasingly maligned the migration of Hindu moneylenders into the region and bemoaned the upsurge in litigation following the extension of the colonial judicial system. Indeed, Clive Dewey has speculated that Maine would have ‘cringed to see the use his admirers were making of his methods’Footnote 77 to ward off the looming contract age in their rural dominions.
IV
One ethnographer who co-opted Maine's concept of the stable, pre-contract village community was civil servant and occasional novelist Septimus Smet Thorburn (1844–1924). The product of a middle-class Cheltenham education, Thorburn entered the Indian Civil Service in 1863 and served as settlement officer for Bannu and commissioner of Rawalpindi before retiring in 1899 from his lofty post as financial commissioner of the Punjab.Footnote 78 His publishing career began with an 1876 study of the Bannu district's Pathan tribes; this ethnography transported the reader ‘into a well-ordered peasant's household, and invite[d] him to be present at a birth, and afterwards follow the infant in its progress through life’.Footnote 79 Within this fictionalized narrative, Thorburn naturalized superstitious or ‘backward’ practices as habitual affairs in stable rural societies. Rather than following Bellew in characterizing the population as dirty or ignorant, he instead probed deeper into the Pathans’ particular sense of aesthetics, going so far as to detail their make-up and hair care routines.Footnote 80 And unlike Maine, who defended the codification of contract law, Thorburn employed his ethnographic research to scorn the atomistic effects of capitalistic expansion. His material, for instance, established a dichotomy between the indolent urban Bannuchis and the rural Marwats of the rain-fed hinterland who generated agricultural proverbs emphasizing diligence and foresight.Footnote 81 Thorburn further used a cynical application of stadial theory to rationalize this bio-moral divergence: the Marwats were ‘until lately communists, and governed by public opinion’, while the Bannuchis’ irrigated lands attracted local despots and moneylenders who favoured litigation.Footnote 82
In deconstructing Thorburn's ethnography, one may also locate a specific shift in representations of Islamic degeneration on the frontier. The itinerant mullahs who were so maligned in the Bellew literature are now rendered as mere nuisances ever in search of a fee for their services. Although Thorburn excerpted Herbert Edwardes's rather uncharitable musings on the depravity the Bannuchi ulama dating from the 1840s, he nonetheless qualified this account as ‘too highly colored’ at the clerics’ expense.Footnote 83 Contrary to Edwardes's presumptions, Thorburn's proverbial evidence indicated that the peasants were aware that ‘things are accomplished by God's acts, not from the mouths of Moolahs’.Footnote 84 Significantly, Thorburn also followed Tylor in regarding folklore as a guide to non-Western moralities and behavioural norms. Tribal religiosity, then, was not to be evaluated according to its deviation from formal Islam, but as an assemblage of authentic practices that developed organically. This perspective led Thorburn controversially to claim after the Malakand Uprising of 1897 that the Pathans’ alleged ‘fanaticism was merely the inspiration to brave deeds, and that the Mullahs might have preached to doomsday without a trigger being pulled, had not [British] actions forced the tribesmen to fight’.Footnote 85
In casting the Pathans as logical beings, Thorburn actively subverted a presiding belief in ‘fanaticism’ as an innate component of the tribesmen's character. The Pathans could be intermittently roused into religious fervour by charismatic mullahs, but these bouts of frenzy were of short duration. When tribes engaged in cross-border raiding, odds were that these incursions were provoked by a shortage of food rather than anti-Western prejudice.Footnote 86 And although the millenarian Mullah Powindah instigated the tribal uprisings of 1897, his movement capitalized on a general state of panic proceeding from the colonial government's physical demarcation of the frontier. Observing boundary commissions erecting lofty markers, the tribes could only assume that the formal annexation of their territory was nigh.
A zealous literary historian might take issue with Thorburn's brash language, given that he equated proverb collection to a ‘dissecting knife’ that laid bare ‘the innermost secrets of the brain’.Footnote 87 Such colourful aphorisms, however, did not negate his belief in an underlying cultural unity bridging racial divides. In a defence of monogenesis, he avowed that ‘the Creator has made the “whole world kin” by endowing all men with like minds and passions’. Given the gulf between Pathan and British stages of civilization, the ‘similarity in meaning of many of [their] proverbial sayings’ was truly startling.Footnote 88 Reviewers commended Thorburn for evidencing that ‘human nature is much the same under every guise’; proverbial linkages indicated that ‘tribes accounted barbarous have a good deal of common sense’, having tailored their cultural practices to the demands of their immediate environment.Footnote 89 But while Thorburn may have served on the frontier in relative isolation, his ethnographic theorization was hardly parochial. In 1875, the prominent reverend James Long advocated proverb study before the Royal Asiatic Society as a means of bridging the ‘gulf between Eastern and Western thought’Footnote 90 and soon after produced a compendium comparing Afghan adages with similar phrases in Russian, Chinese, Telugu, and Hebrew.Footnote 91
In generating his curious mixture of culture-study and polemic, Thorburn associated himself with the paternalistic heroes of the Punjab School of governance who generally refrained from social legislation and upheld custom so long as it was not ‘degrading to the weaker sex’.Footnote 92 Thorburn therefore challenged a presiding belief in the efficacy of codification and denounced recent legislation as unintelligible jargon that merely provided ‘ruffles for the shirtless kind’.Footnote 93 More problematic, however, was the metropole's intent to govern as if its Indian subjects ‘were homogenous Westerners of one faith and one common standard of intelligence and education’.Footnote 94 The pitfalls of a liberal approach were made manifest on the borderland, where officials struggled to maintain an unsteady peace between rival tribes, all the while accommodating migratory populations. Thorburn's ethnography also granted him a soapbox on which to decry the rise of bureaucratic despotism as a pernicious force that undermined affective relations between ruler and ruled. Administrators’ quotidian paperwork increasingly left them ‘neither time nor temper to submit to much interviewing’;Footnote 95 this estrangement, coupled with the rapid transfer of deputy commissioners between 1866 and 1871, allegedly incensed the local Waziri tribes and contributed to the Muhammad Khel rebellion.
Yet Thorburn's outrage was also of a political nature, as he brought both the metropolitan Liberal and Conservative parties to task for making Indo-Afghan relations a party issue. The colonial government simply could not generate comprehensive policies on the frontier that kept pace with the ever-changing tides of political fortune at home. While Thorburn did conceive of a gradual civilizing mission on the borderland that entailed the preservation of jirgas and village communities, he continually refuted the likelihood of a Russian invasion and put scant stock in the delineation of a scientific frontier. Seasoned civil servants like Punjab administrator Malcolm Darling lauded his enquiries into rural impoverishment,Footnote 96 but metropolitan reviewers were somewhat less receptive to Thorburn's excoriations of British frontier policy in an era of effusive popular militarism. The Academy notably dismissed his anxieties by cautioning readers not to ‘hastily conclude that the Indian government is neglectful of its duty, merely because the Commissioner of Rawulpindi thinks so, or because he talks like a lady novelist of “the Frankenstein” we are creating in India’.Footnote 97
V
Unlike Thorburn, Mansel Longworth Dames (1850–1922) maintained lasting connections with the metropolitan societies throughout his twenty-seven-year service in the PunjabFootnote 98 and managed to side-step political controversy. Under the auspices of these institutions, he published a prodigious amount of scholarship in the 1890s and early 1900s dealing with Balochi proverbs, folk-tales and tribal histories. While his methods were fully in line with modes of socio-cultural ethnography emanating from the British societies, Dames was also beholden to the principles of James Darmesteter, a French orientalist who had concluded that the traditional Pashto literary canon consisted ‘mainly of imitations and translations from the Persian, Arabic and Hindustani’.Footnote 99 This revelation led Darmesteter to shirk urbane literary production and refocus his efforts on the study of rustic Pashto songs as records of historical change and cultural attitudes. The work of illiterate poets communicated the true feelings of the Pathans without the encumbrances of ‘moral bias or literary afterthought’.Footnote 100 If the minstrels exhibited only a limited range of ideas, they nonetheless possessed ‘one of the highest of all gifts – one which effete Europe has lost – simplicity and directness of expression’.Footnote 101 Metropolitan commentators situated Darmesteter's scholarship firmly in the theoretical tradition of socio-cultural ethnography and called upon practitioners to put all books aside and receive the consummate Afghan's ‘own unconscious confession from the lips of his favorite poets’.Footnote 102
Dames made no secret of his indebtedness to Darmesteter;Footnote 103 indeed, his most notable contribution to borderland ethnography similarly emphasized the pastoral nature of Balochi poetry and valorized its prosaic expression as an authentic mode of cultural representation. Dames therefore rejected historical court poetry and instead favoured the short love songs that prevailed ‘only among the hill-men and tend[ed] to die out in the more settled parts of the country’.Footnote 104 This affirmation of rural oral culture also recalled Thorburn's earlier ethnography, in which he had translated some fifty Pashto stories that found the ‘highest favour with the poorest and most ignorant of the peasantry’ and boasted ‘more flavour and piquancy’Footnote 105 than the refined literature of the urban sphere.
While Dames followed Darmesteter in reappraising the significance of borderland orality, he also employed methods in keeping with the Folk-Lore Society's ‘scientific’ standards of data collection. His Poetry of the Baloches, which was published under the auspices of the Folk-Lore and Royal Asiatic societies, evoked the collaborative spirit of the discipline by incorporating the translations of other colonial scholars like T. J. L. Mayer and Robert Leech.Footnote 106 For each poem, Dames often provided multiple translations and acted as arbiter to select the most appropriate version based on his personal experience in the region. His sources also frequently included native informants, whose narrations he personally recorded; following the Society's stipulations, a prefatory note detailing the specifics of the collection process accompanied each published poem, proverb, or riddle. Yet Dames was also concerned with the actual circulation of these specimens and spoke to the social and performative aspects of poetry reading. The significance of recitation was further stressed through the inclusion of sheet music in the text and descriptions of the instruments featured in recitals. By drawing attention to the patterns of cultural transmission between elder and junior minstrels, he further conceived of an unbroken chain of oral tradition that preserved historic Balochi tales and foundational mythology more accurately than hand-copied texts.Footnote 107
The presence of pieces in the Dames collection composed during the current era of British expansion also testified to the dynamic nature of borderland cultural production. One poem, for instance, chronicled Robert Sandeman's bloodless pacification of the hill tribes in 1867. According to Dames, this feat was a new development in local history and therefore ‘struck the Baloch imagination as deserving celebration in song as fully as a successful raid’.Footnote 108 Even love songs referenced the social changes that accompanied the extension of the colonial sphere. One composition concerning women's jewelry dated from the period in which Sandeman ‘first established order in the Baloch Hills, and enrolled the young men in a local militia, so that they received regular pay for the first time’ and could purchase such commodities.Footnote 109 In reflecting on these societal transformations, the Balochs (to quote Dames) displayed ‘a sincere and earnest spirit and a desire to draw moral lessons’, even if that morality was ‘not always in accord with Western ideas’.Footnote 110
VI
By foregrounding the case-studies of Raverty, Bellew, Thorburn, and Dames, this study has ventured beyond the analytic framework of the ethnographic state and its infliction of epistemic violence. This is not to say that caste classification did not enable new policing policies and limit land proprietorship elsewhere in the Punjab, as this selective usage of ethnography was commonplace. On a more abstract level, folklorists who adopted the metropolitan societies’ investigative modalities certainly engaged in a ‘colonial assimilation’ of local knowledge that was premised on the ‘singularity of a European epistemological framework’.Footnote 111 Yet the concept of a monolithic ethnographic state does not adequately account for the development of socio-cultural ethnography on the frontier, where the priorities of individual colonial agents were not always in accordance with the fiscal and military aims of the central government. Thomas Trautmann once cautioned that ‘the politics of knowledge fixes its gaze upon power [and] tends to leave in darkness whatever falls outside the power relation’.Footnote 112 This study has attempted to disperse those shadows by refocusing on both personal motivations and the role of intellectual networks in colonial knowledge production. Discerning authorial personality, however, does not always allow for a total re-creation of the individual. We may speculate, for instance, on Raverty's continued preoccupation with orientalist scholarship during his twilight years of near-penury in Cornwall. We may further ponder whether Bellew's hawkishness was in fact a psychological reaction to his father's early death in the First Anglo-Afghan War.
Still, an awareness of colonial scholars’ ideologies and methodologies enables one to observe the evolution of ethnography on the Indo-Afghan frontier. The transition here is not merely one from textual representation to numerical classification or from a literary source base to antiquarian hard ‘facts’,Footnote 113 but rather a wholesale shift in temporal focus. Following the socio-cultural paradigm shift, pre-modern texts were found to be insufficient aids in ascertaining the dynamic nature of borderland society; ethnographers latched upon proverbs, songs, and observed customs either to engineer new forms of scientific governance or to chastise their own administration for its destabilizing influence. Tribal ‘mentalities’ could still be discerned through such culture-study, although their stability was a matter of debate.
As these case-studies have demonstrated, India was not merely a supplier of raw folkloristics analogous to its role as a cotton exporter. The metropolitan societies may have entertained a universal project of data collection, but the use of their methods in India could yield myriad results, for ethnography remained the purview of amateurs until the professionalization of the discipline in the early twentieth century.Footnote 114 Socio-cultural ethnography was thereby comprised of a host of inputs, ranging from the academic and methodical labours of Dames to the more impressionistic and politicized tracts of Thorburn. Glossing borderland ethnography as a mere technology of power, a strategy of divide and rule based on empirical data supporting caste categorization, occludes the complexities of production, circulation, influence, and motivation that underpin any intellectual labour. Personality, then, must be reinserted into a narrative of power relations if the study of colonial knowledge systems is to have any future beyond the post-colonial theoretical turn.
