Histories of Ubiquity: The bureaucratic microcosm in the Empire

Ever omnipresent in ubiquitous environments, the clerk in an office space is an almost universal anthropocene representation of the exasperation and frustration experienced on a daily basis by us, a symbolic manifestation of bureaucratic red-tapism and general tardiness. This annoying figure has hitherto been marginalised and neglected almost in disregard in historiography dealing with colonial temporalities. Proceeding with almost a Hobsbawmian concern to rescue such disregarded figures from the “condescension of posterity”, Sumit Chakrabarti deftly traces the genealogy of the colonial clerk or kerani in 19th century colonial Calcutta vis-a-vis its counterpart in the imperial metropole of 19th century London. Chakrabarti places his genealogical attempt within the broad framework of cultural history. Though it does situate the figure of the Bengali kerani in a comparative framework juxtaposing him vis-a-vis both the scribal predecessors in the subcontinent and contemporary counterparts in the metropole, the focus has largely been on the former. This article shall seek to provide a brief book review, trying to extend the author’s arguments and situating it in a broader dialogue with theoretical frameworks of culture studies dealing with the contestations surrounding the advent of colonial modernity.

The interesting and almost exasperating situation that the kerani occupies in the colonial bureaucratic and social status-quo is perhaps the reason for his marginalisation in the newly emergent colonial modernity. This is essentially a dilemma in the identity along the multiple fractured faultlines of the colonised citizenry, much reflected on in perhaps similar contexts by Homi J. Bhabha and Ashis Nandy. Essentially a child of colonial modernity, the kerani occupied a frustrating niche within it. Keen to perhaps to underline their new positionality in the new modern colonial status-quo, the keranis adopted a strategy to foreground their disjunct from their subcontinental scribal predecessors in the precolonial times. However, they occupied a frustrating position of liminality, for they were generally scorned at by the hierarchy of the newly emerging nouveaux-riches bhadralok population of Calcutta, and could neither be neatly placed in the development of a new labouring class and labour economy in the new urban space of nineteenth-century Calcutta. As such, though a product of colonial modernity, the colonial clerk occupied a space of rather annoying ambivalence within the networks of the colonial administration, contesting, negotiating, reclaiming and subjugating themselves to the same, an unreliable personification of complex, multi-layered modernity. This could perhaps be part of the reason why, as the author terms it, the “kerani has remained a problem child of colonial history in the subcontinent”.

The changing socio-cultural rubric of colonial modernity in the 19th century saw the Bengali kerani “foreground(ing) the sociological or the cultural over the historical”, to carve out and claim his space as an aberration within the dubious and irregular crevices of a gradually unfolding colonial modernity. Chakrabarti argues that the kerani, despite having a salaried job, is not a bhadralok. Emerging out of the colonial anxiety to subjugate and control the confusing mess of the subcontinent via surveillance and the congruent bureaucratic structure, the kerani was an indispensable automaton of the colonial apparatus but could not escape the same. A shapeshifting figure who transcended anxieties on both sides of the colonial divide, the kerani remained an indispensable part of the colonial dispensation, occupying a liminal position, sitting on the fence in the dynamic crevices of colonial modernity.

Primarily a work of cultural history, the author however draws on a rich corpus of several archival and literary sources. Chakrabarti’s training and expertise as a literary critic probably informs and acts as the premise of this scholarship. In so doing, he borrows from several theoretical frameworks, an inexhaustive list of which includes postcolonial theory and Foucauldian subjectivity in terms of corporeal disciplinary practices. The liminal and unstable self that the kerani embodies in the author’s view serves as the epitome of the Foucauldian ‘docile body’, his corporeal self representing all the four elements of constraints vis-a-vis the spatial, coded (in)autonomy, a bereft temporality and strict behavioural injunctions. Perhaps a related query could have been possibly whether the kerani occupied a heterotopia within 19th century colonial Calcutta, but the obvious drawback in such an assertion would possibly be revolving around the joint axes of selective inclusion and resistance in emplacements and heterotopias of crisis and deviation? Going further on this subject, the question of agency naturally arises with respect to the kerani’s subjectivity and selfhood. Here the fundamental question that Chakrabarti explores is whether the kerani is a subaltern or not vis-a-vis his position in the crevices of modernity. Though he answers in the negative, he does concede that the kerani possesses the necessary positional instability of possessing subalternity. The fundamental reason for this he argues is again the kerani’s unique aberration with respect to traditional discursive epistemes of identity registers, viz, class, caste, religion, gender, etc.

However, this representation of marginality needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. While the author displays a remarkable sensitivity towards humanising the kerani and foregrounding the associated conundrums brought about by modernity experienced by him, the book doesn’t entirely go towards breaking out of the casts of stereotypes surrounding the ubiquitous annoying clerk. The daily material experiences that shape and condition the everyday experiences of the clerk are read in significant detail, however as Lakshmi Subramanian rightly remarks, no identity or lived experiences are ever static. Perhaps a closer reading would reveal the shifts in the ambivalence, liminal positionality and selfhood understood and projected by both the kerani himself as well as either side of the colonial divide. Further, and this is meant in any way to discount the work’s chosen temporal and spatial comparative frames, a further area of research could have also been explored with respect to China’s dialogues with colonial modernity in the 19th century and its effects on the positional niches experienced by such liminal figures in the Chinese bureaucracy in that temporal-spatial context to better situate the figure of the kerani.

Circling back to the start, Chakrabarti indeed displays a marked sensitivity towards humanising and rescuing the marginal figure of the kerani, showcasing a rigorous attention to methodology and an impervious command over theoretical frameworks. The work is a necessary addendum to the wealth of the scholarly corpus dealing with early colonial Bengal, and opens up further possible avenues of research, maintaining an insatiable grip on the attention of the reader.

The Calcutta Kerani and the London Clerk in the Nineteenth Century: Life, Labour, Latitude
Author: Sumit Chakrabarti
Publisher: Routledge India
Year: 2021
192 pp.
1295 INR (hardback)
ISBN: 9780367556631

References:
1. Chakrabarti, Sumit. The Calcutta Kerani and the London Clerk in the Nineteenth Century: Life, Labour, Latitude. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2020.
2. Mukherjee, Ankhi. 2023. “The Calcutta Kerani and the London Clerk in the 19th Century: Life, Labour, Latitude: By Sumit Chakrabarti, New York, Routledge, 2021, 192 Pp., £96.00 (Hardback), ISBN: 9780367145729.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 59 (5): 708–9. doi:10.1080/17449855.2023.2171584.
3. Subramanian, Lakshmi. “In between Worlds.” The Telegraph Online, May 7, 2021. https://www.telegraphindia.com/culture/books/review-the-calcutta-kerani-and-the-london-clerk-in-the-nineteenth-century-life-labour-latitude-by-sumit-chakrabarti/cid/1814769.

Rik Bhattacharya
Intern, Asia in Global Affairs

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, in his personal capacity. It does not reflect the policies and perspectives of Asia in Global Affairs.