Mountstuart Elphinstone, Colonial Knowledge and ‘Frontier Governmentality’ in Northwest India, 1849–1878

Abstract

With the British annexation of the Punjab in 1849 following the disasters of the First Anglo-Afghan War, Mountstuart Elphinstone's "An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul", and those of his intellectual successors, became "useful knowledge", and found a fertile administrative environment in the management of India's northwest frontier. According to this logic of government, frontier spaces could be tamed through adequate knowledge and understanding of their indigenous populations, part of a wider assemblage of power that has been referred to in Foucauldian terms as "frontier governmentality". Taking this concept as its starting point, this chapter turns its attention to the procurement, evolution, and use of colonial knowledge as part of this wider project of frontier governance. If "frontier governmentality" differed from "colonial governmentality", then what made it distinct? By studying the trajectories of the body of colonial knowledge initiated by Mountstuart Elphinstone and his intellectual successors, new understandings of colonial power in frontier spaces start to emerge through the lens of "governmentality", offering key insights into the modalities of colonial government in so-called "peripheral" areas, and the role played by "colonial knowledge" as part of this assemblage of power.