Butchers between archives: community history in early twentieth-century Delhi

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the Risālah-yi Banī Quṣṣá, a 1924 Urdu-language history aimed at Muslim butchers in Delhi, alongside archival records produced for the colonial state and municipality in the same period. The Risālah-yi Banī Quṣṣá asserted regional and local Islamic pasts for butchers, in an effort to improve their social standing within Delhi’s Muslim communities. On the other hand, when Delhi’s Muslim butchers appeared in the colonial archive, they were portrayed as sources of communal violence and unsanitary urban practices. This article analyses the distance and gaps between these two archives, asking how we should approach vernacular histories and the colonial record when they address the same communities but position them within divergent social contexts. It argues that reading the two archival forms together, and analysing the gaps between them, allows us to ask how urban working-class communities understood their own histories and social positionalities within the colonial city.