Imperial Control and the Translation Project

Abstract

This article explores the monumental translation project undertaken by H.M. Elliot and John Dowson in their work The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period (1867–77) consisting of eight volumes. It examines how Elliot and Dowson’s magnum opus facilitated the project of imperial domination and what were the exclusions and silences that marked this project of translation. The imperial historians or administrators treated the project of history writing as a device of imperial control. The history that they wrote was imbued with an element of essentialism that served to demarcate the subject population from the rulers and hence create structures of hierarchy. Their attempt was to classify or label people into neat categories differentiated on the basis of class, caste and religious affiliations which were essential to impose order and discipline on the subject population. All this required a construction of the past of the ruled, steeped in historical evidence within a positivist empiricist frame of reference. This kind of historical reconstruction was undertaken with the objective of legitimating the imperial control and proclaiming its racial superiority as well as lending history an element of objectivity. A careful scrutiny would also be done of the issues of language, power, discourse and the system of equivalences and their role in the translation project to fulfil one’s own political objectives.