Inhabiting a Moth-Eaten Method

Abstract

Inhabiting a Moth-Eaten Method Anila Gill (bio) The Punjab Civil Secretariat Library is housed in one of the many narrow back alleys near the Walled City in Lahore. It contains governmental records dating from the colonial era to the contemporary moment. Though the records pre-date the Partition of India and Pakistani Independence, they can only be accessed with Pakistani governmental approval: the archive, too, remains bound by state borders. From previous archival work in the region, I knew that material regarding the origins of the 1947 Partition form a fragmented, dismembered corpus. At the Punjab Civil Secretariat Library, I asked a librarian for all records pre-dating 1947. Some records I had seen before—the Indian Cinematograph Committee report from 1918 and its resulting Indian Cinematograph Act1—but the regional reports about cinematic regulation from the region of Punjab were new archival treasures that filled many of the historical gaps that had occasioned my research. Amongst these findings were ethnographic surveys from 1927 about the Punjab region that evince the colonial desire to know, categorize, and conquer the Indian subject. These surveys were the most decayed materials amongst the stack of records that the librarian laid down in front of me, but their decomposition was not the result of overuse or the erosive touch of human hands. Rather, insects had bored through each bound copy, cover to cover, leaving tunnels that appear at first as punctuation. These small creatures inhabit the archive while contributing to its destruction, modeling an anti-colonial orientation to research methodology. Their pestilent presence in the archive corrodes the justifications for colonial power affirmed in records from the colonial era; the historian must follow the [End Page 77] example of these moths to live in, pierce through, and inevitably destroy the colonial structures still managed and regulated by the postcolonial state. As the content of these ethnographic records consecrate and justify the colonial project, the holes puncturing these documents offer a form that configures an anti-colonial research method by centralizing absence and accounting for loss—a method that peers through the immaterial holes of the archive while looking askance at the material bounding it. A moth-eaten method is also a matter of perspective. The ethnographic survey identifies a man from the Jat tribe, native to the Punjab region, as "the most impatient of tribal or communal control, and the one whom asserts the freedom of the individual most strongly […] a Jat is a man who does what seems right in his own eyes, and sometimes what seems wrong also, and will not be said nay by any man […] He is independent, and he is self-willed, but he is reasonable, peaceably inclined if left alone, and not difficult to manage."2 With these spurious observations, the survey unveils its ultimate purpose: to characterize cultures that would comply with, and ultimately facilitate, the exigencies of the local colonial administration's regimes of control. While nakedly deploying the process by which colonial ethnographers leveraged their discipline to further affirm the means of domination over such regional tribes, the survey also reveals the contradictions of its analysis. The Jat does what is right, except for the times when he does what is wrong; he is deeply committed to personal freedom, yet compliant to managerial oversight in nature; reasonable yet unpredictable; unique but knowable, i.e., just as complex and uncategorizable as any other culture. The survey shows its seams, the survey has holes in its logic. The colonial conceit is one that imagines an absent other in need of settler presence. These holes are immanent with the possibility of an anti-colonial research method as they describe the absences of displaced populations during the decolonial Partition era, and they embody the historical moment as a diffractive and delayed punctum rather a documented, material event.3 In a public radio broadcast,4 Muhammad Ali Jinnah famously described Pakistan as "moth-eaten" to account for the absences left by displaced populations. As these absences continue to play out in ongoing sectarian violence within the ethno-religious nation-states of India and Pakistan, moth-eateness as a methodological metaphor offers a perspective on border history that allows...