Munisipal Darpan: imagining the embodied state and subaltern citizenship in 1890s Calcutta

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This article interrogates the way in which the ‘state’ was imagined in Calcutta of the 1890s. Using a rare pamphlet of municipal sanitary propaganda written in the form of a drama, the article reveals a radically different vision of the state than the one available in the extant historiography. In this vernacular imagination of the state, the abstract institutional realities are recast as specific embodied hierarchies and exclusions. Since the text concerned was one intended for public propaganda, such a vision could neither be an idiosyncratic vision of an individual, nor could it be described as the ‘popular understanding’ of the state. Instead, as a piece of governmental propaganda that was presented as a drama, it had to be both the state's vision of itself and what it thought people usually thought it to be. The text thus becomes a window into what might be called a ‘vernacular state’, i.e. the state as it exists and sees itself existing in everyday contexts. The stark lines between ‘state’ and ‘society’ become blurred and reorganized in this vision of a vernacular state. The two key features that define the vernacular state are a simplified hierarchy of levels and its embodiment in bhadralok officials. The latter in turn signals a convergence between bhadralok authority and state interests and a consequent marginalization of subaltern citizens. Scholarly interest in the everydayness of the state is growing, but where this article seeks to add to that interest is by highlighting the issue of embodiment of the state's authority.