Reading the East India Company, 1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender by Betty Joseph (review)

Abstract

802 Reviews to be analysed in terms of York's interest in sophisticated narratology, the relation of fact to fiction, close attention to the specificity of the real world, and a keen desire to report on the condition of their country? The Natural (hardly a narrative so much as a description of characters' sensations, as York argues) is an odd choice to explore the relation of fiction to history. Why not The Fixer? The discussion of Mr Sammler's Planet hardly touches on the Holocaust. Smiley did write a historical novel (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton). Ford's The Sportswriter is only tangentially relevant to the book's subtitle. There is much more to be said about the politics of Doctorow's representation of the Rosenberg case than York allows for,and Blonde (Joyce Carol Oates) would have benefited from some consideration of other discussions of the relation of biography to fiction, and of Marilyn Monroe as icon. Anyone who knows anything about American fiction will find this a deeply disap? pointing book. University of Nottingham Judie Newman Reading The East India Company, 1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender. By Betty Joseph. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. $45 (pbk $18). ISBN 0-226-41203-2 (pbk 0-226-41202-4). In late December 1774 Bishnukumari, the rani of the rich Bengali province of Burdwan , sent a petition to the then governor-general of British India, Warren Hastings. In the petition Bishnukumari, recently widowed, informed the governor-general and his ruling council that she was the victim of a greedy and violent plot concocted by her British East India Company-appointed minister Bridjoo Kishore and John Graham, the revenue collector of the province. Together, they had starved her for a week and by snatching away her young son, compelled her to surrender the family seals, which were required to authenticate all officialdocuments. As a result, they now controlled all her lands, revenues, and in effectthe relationship between Burdwan and the East India Company. The rani's petition split the ruling council, with Hastings and his supporter Richard Barwell dismissing her as a conniving, hysterical subject, but the rest of the members, led by Francis, proposing to conduct a thorough investigation and ordering the accused to respond in detail to the charges. So began the rara's twenty-five-year campaign to keep control of her family's traditional power and her own agency against the overwhelming administrative, legal, economic, military,and cultural firepower of the colonizing forces, all minutely recorded in the archives of the East India Company. What does the trajectory of the rani's fate preserved in the colonial archives tell us about the structural role of gender in the deployment of colonial power? Does a focus on gender in the archives reveal a connection between the literary and historical figurations of colonial power? In many ways, the reading of the rani of Burdwan incident is at the heart of Betty Joseph's fine, nuanced study of what she calls the 'colonial currencies ofgender'. 'Contrary to common perception,' Joseph states in her introduction, 'women are everywhere in the colonial archive, albeit in a fragmented and dispersed way' (p. 3). But it is precisely these partial and incomplete appearances that can provide an opportunity to usher in a new reading of the nature of archives and that of colonialism. The archive's status as one of the pre-eminent sources of colonial power can no longer be doubted aftersuch works as Thomas Richards's The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy ofEmpire (London: Verso, 1993). And by drawing on other seminal works by Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Gauri Vishwanathan, Joseph draws our attention to the existence of another 'unofficial' archive constituted by the literary texts, especially the novel. This second kind of MLR, 100.3, 2005 803 archive, Joseph suggests, 'always challenges the firstone's monopoly over colonial truth, but it is impossible to get at fully' (p. 15). Joseph takes a period of 120 years in which the British East India Company de? veloped its monopoly on South Asian trade into a ruthless colonizing force, and by analysing the exchanges between these two...