Self as Other: Amar Singh's Diary as Reflexive ‘Native’ Ethnography

Abstract

Amar Singh at twenty began writing on a daily basis. His diary extends over 44 years, from 1898 to 1942. Its last entry is dated 1 November 1942. He died that night. These days, the 89 quarto-size bound volumes averaging 800 manuscript pages can be found at Kanota Fort, ten miles east of Jaipur off the Agra road, where Mohan Singh, his nephew and heir, keeps them in glass-fronted Victorian cabinets in one of the several rooms Amar Singh called his library. In the essay that follows1 I try to show why and how Amar Singh, a diarist writing reflexively about himself, constructed a ‘self as other’ethnography of turn-of-the-century princely and British India. Through the medium of his diary he becomes a participant, an observer, an informant, a narrator, and an author. I set the stage for Amar Singhʼns self-as-other ethnography by examining the separation and alienation in anthropological discourse of self and other. Common to ethnography since Malinowskiʼns invented participant-observer field work, the separation was questioned, then challenged by postcolonial Indian and by postmodern Western anthropologists. I then show how Amar Singh, a self-conscious and critical ‘native’ self, constitutes the other in constituting himself. It is a story about how a native came to represent, speak for, and know himself.