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Silencing and Languaging in theAssembling of the Indian Nation-State:British Public Citizens, the EpistolaryForm, and HistoriographyVaidehi Ramanathan aa University of California-Davis ,Published online: 23 Jun 2009.

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Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 8: 203–219, 2009Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1534-8458 print / 1532-7701 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15348450902848874

HLIE1534-84581532-7701Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, Vol. 8, No. 2-3, May 2009: pp. 1–43Journal of Language, Identity, and Education

Silencing and Languaging in the Assembling of the Indian Nation-State: British Public Citizens, the Epistolary Form,

and Historiography

Silencing and Languaging in the Assembling of the Indian Nation-StateRamanathan Vaidehi RamanathanUniversity of California-Davis

Taking the case of postcolonial India, this paper explores ways in which present temporal juncturespermit a probing of historical boundaries to speak of voices largely silenced from Indian historiogra-phy, namely those of British (Indian) public citizens who were committed to the assembling of “anIndia.” In particular, the paper discusses ways in which letters to and by Charles Andrews, EdwardThompson and John Amery debated ideas about carving an India out of the Empire and how thisepistolary form in all its incompleteness mirrors the ongoing suspension of a collective assemblysuch as that of a nation. Heeding Radhakrishnan’s cautions (2003) about turning history pages inother ways, the paper meditates on the dangers of the hardening borders of (postcolonial) nations—particularly India—and brings to the center silenced minor histories that at an earlier junctureescaped the historian’s archive (Chakrabarty, 1998). Threaded through the exploration are alsometaphysical ruminations on the relations of the silenced and languaged, silencing and languaging,and more general, silence and language. The paper also raises issues about the discursive construc-tion of (postcolonial) nations through language and policies (Ricento, 2003; Wiley, 2004; Wodak,2001).

Key words: postcolonialism, nation building, national identities

Language can redeem as well as destroy; it redeems when the Word itself speaks in the silence ofour words. (Mackey, 1997, p. 9)

I will give only one example of a “slipping” word. I say word: it could just as well be the sentenceinto which one inserts the word, but I limit myself to the word silence. It is already . . . the abolitionof sound which the word is: among all words it is the most perverse, or the most poetic: it is thetoken of its own death. (Bataille, 1986, p. 264)

The figure of return functions . . . a paradoxical, but fatal and fateful exigency, one that reveals in theinevitability of death, the impossibility of dying, in the law of repetition the excess of difference, in reasonmadness, and in the temptation to conclude, the necessity of infinite incompletion. (Hill, 1997, p. 193)

Silence is at once deafening and stilling, and falls like rain when we permit ourselves to hear it inour language-engulfed worlds. It spills over and out of our enclosed spaces, running first like

Correspondence should be sent to Vaidehi Ramanathan, University of California-Davis, Department of Linguistics,One Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616. E-mail: Vramanathan@ucdavis.edu

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streams and then gushing waters—taking over our words and thoughts only to remind us that whatis encoded in our words is forever eluding our grasps. The death of language is encoded in eachword’s syllable because of silence. Silence, like language, both kills and awakens; like language itboth redeems and destroys. Forever present, it does not really return except perhaps to remind us ofwhat we have forgotten or chosen to erase by not languaging.

These metaphysical notions of silence may at first glance strike one as being unrelated tosilences in the world of action. The “practical” world—where engagements with people,actions, experiences, and data count—underscore a wrestling with language-related issuesthat is more “pragmatic,” more “outcome oriented” in the more traditional sense of the term,with tangible “consequences” being a measure of “success.” While the world of action is oftenseen as incommensurable with the world of contemplation, it need not necessarily be so, andone space where the two can be seen to intertwine is in spaces relating to the assemblage ofnational (group) identities (Ricento, 2000, 2003, p. 1–24; Wodak, 2001; Wiley, 2004; Wiley& Wright, 2004). There is “death” encoded in the silences of all history writing (a discursivespace central to the formation of national/collective identities), since such formations hingeon validating some voices and marginalizing others (see Hayden White [1989] for a fullerdiscussion of the selectivity in history writing). Relegating particular voices to the margins ofa nation’s history, to not give them a voice or enough of one, is often tantamount to not justrendering them irrelevant but silencing them, and in this sense rendering them “dead” in col-lective memory.

One realm where fraught connections between silences, history, and collective identitiesbecome obvious is in the creation of colonized nations (Anderson, 2006; Makoni &Kamwangamalu, 2000), where in the aftermath of colonialism, nations have had to deliber-ately assemble a sense of themselves by grafting their history in certain ways. This is particu-larly true in the case of Indian history and nation-building efforts after 1947, when the countrybecame independent and the Raj officially came to an end. Indian historians writing the coun-try’s history at the time needed to do so by valorizing, among other things, the efforts ofIndian public figures in the freedom struggle (Chakrabarty, 1998, 2002; Chatterjee, 1993;Dube, 2004; Kaiwar & Mazumdar, 2003). But there were silenced voices at the borders ofIndian history making—voices of British (Indian) public citizens1—and it is the implicationsof moving these voices into the languaged worlds of Indian nation-building, of an “Indiannational identity,” that this paper is devoted to (Ramanathan, 2008). Specifically, then, in thisarticle I address: (1) the discursive nature of postcolonial nation-building and (2) ways inwhich the idea of “an India” was an emergent one that was negotiated through lettersexchanged between some of the very citizens that Indian historians deemed marginal at acertain time. Details regarding each follow.

Such a focus straddles several disciplinary strains. To some extent, it is part of postcolo-nial scholarship in the field that has addressed aspects of the Empire-nation relationshipin the area of education (cf. Canagarajah, 1997; Pennycook, 1998; Phillipson, 1992;Kumaravadivelu, 2005; Ramanathan, 2005). It contributes to scholarship in identityresearch in the field, an area that has gained considerable cache with applied linguists writ-ing both about national and personal identities. One area of language-policy scholarship

1By “British (Indian) public citizens” I mean people of English ethnicity who were either born in India or who out ofyears of engagement in that space spoke of Indian interests as their own.

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focuses on ways in which national identities get shaped by “officialized” languages(Errington, 2008; Heller, 2007; Pauwels, Winter, & Lo Bianco, 2007; Ricento, 2000;Schiffman, 1996; Wiley, 2004), which is often cast into place by top-down language poli-cies. In discourse analysis, researchers have called attention to the discursive constructionof nations (through close examinations of historical documents, for instance; cf. Ricento,2003; Wodak, 2001), and ways in which national identities and citizenship get evokedthrough particular language use. Research on individual identities, on the other hand, hassought to take a more agentive stance, with Norton’s seminal work (2000), and the work ofothers, on connections between gender, identities, and language learning also picked up bya host of other scholars (for example, see Block, 2007; Kanno, 2003; Kramsch, 2000, 2003;Kramsch & Lam, 1999; Menard-Warwick, 2004; Morgan, 2004; Pavlenko, 2001; Pavlenkoet al., 2001).

SOME RELEVANT BACKGROUND: TEMPORAL CONDITIONS, THE EPISTOLARY FORM, AND THE POLITICS OF (INDIAN) HISTORY MAKING

The current temporal conditions that permit this probing are crucial to note.2 If the acts ofassembling an Indian national self took place at a particular (post) colonial juncture, withIndian historians grafting Indian history in certain ways (Chakrabarty, 2002; Chatterjee,1993; Dube, 2004), then acts of understanding these assemblages (as in the present case)have distinct temporal codings in them, too, and openly articulating the politics around tem-poralities opens up ways for the archivist wishing to tell past interpretations differently, orto call attention to materials and voices that have been silenced. In the 62 years sinceIndia’s independence, with notions of an Indian identity being scribed and assembled byIndian historians through distinct genres (novels, anthems, independence-related songs), asense of “Indian-ness” has emerged that has assumed distinct forms in the South Asian con-text, and that has, through repetition and enactment, led to particular sedimented notions andcultural scripts, creating what Barthes would refer to as the “reality effect.” While postcolo-nial communities have needed to harden boundaries during their crucial nationalist stages(Chakrabarty, 1998; Moore-Gilmore, 1998), my positioning several generations since Inde-pendence makes me now probe the fears and threats that disallowed full articulations of andaround some voices.3, 4 The present act of writing about the silenced voices (of British [Indian]public citizens) in Indian history and the forms in which their participations (in Indiannation-building) occurred emerges from an awareness of how lapsed-time positions us in

2Lines between “narrated time” and “constructed” time can, as Ricouer points out, get blurred; neither can bereduced to match our notions of universal time or geometrically measurable spaces.

3Temporal distance and a firm enough “Indian” self now opens up the possibility of meditations on the silenced andlanguaged in the scripting of national identities.

4I thank Dipesh Chakrabarty, R. Radhakrishnan, and Simon-Gilbert who through emails and their writing havealerted me to the fact that the issue of the borders of Indian history writing have to first be contested by Indians beforethey get picked up for wider contestation. Hence, while one can well ask: “How can you as an Indian speak of this?,” Icounter: “It is because I am Indian that I can speak of it; it is also because of how I am generationally placed that I can do so.”My interest in the lives of the English that contributed to India is intended to begin a debate about the dark lines ofIndian history writing.

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alternate spaces with altered consciousness.5 Blanchot (1993) reminds us that languageneeds silence to exist. So too histories: our awareness and the telling of some stories(through certain forms) hinge on the silencing of others. These voices are Indian history’sabsences that we need now to bring into Indian spaces, histories, times, and presences(Harootunian, 2007).

THE EPISTOLARY FORM: THE PARADOXES OF A PRIVATE FORM FOR PUBLIC PURPOSES

As much literary criticism has underscored, the epistolary form is historically and culturallyspecific: the letters that come to us, what we write of them, rely on and bear traces of what wasavailable at any given time. In terms of their ideological markings, letters are documents thatpoint at once to what they were seeking to accomplish at the societal realm at a certain temporalmoment. Why they may have remained forgotten or sidelined by historians, and how readingthem decades later annotates them differently opens up both the content and mode of newinquiry, according them a place in world consciousness that it did not at an earlier time have(the politics of the temporal aspects of this will be addressed presently).

As with all narratives, letters are individuated spaces that have the temporal encoded in them(the writing time, reading time, experiencing time; Ricouer, 2007). Evident too is the ongoing,unsettled nature of both the form and its contents. The present moments dominate, with the futurealways being held at bay, features that do not provide for any sense of closure to the texts. Unlike anovel or a book, the authorial self of the writer, which the reader is left with, is not an extendedone, developed across many pages, but one that emerges in bits and pieces, depending on thelength of the letter, the time taken for the letter to reach the intended reader, and the evolving rela-tion between writer and reader.6 There is, also, always a pronounced sense of incompleteness andsuspension; the reader is not (necessarily) present when the writer writes, and the writer is notpresent when the reader reads. All meanings, relationships, engagements, and discussions, then,are simultaneously protracted and shortened: begun but never finished, with presences of writersemerging to their readers long after the text was written, with news in the texts rendered both “old”by the time it reaches the reader, but interpreted as “new” when the reader breathes life into it.

5That like language, silences are multifunctional is an obvious point to make. There are numerous senses in whichsilences can be interpreted: one can speak of being rendered silent because the complexities in one’s immediate context aretoo numerous, and entangled, and because voicing in those conditions would seem like a fabrication. (What in the knotwould one pick and hold up to the light to say that it is the reason or cause of certain events/emotions/consequences?). Orone can be silenced because others in our environments may regard our individual positionings as irrelevant, or not worthgathering into recits/narratives (historical ones, for instance) being grafted. In still other instances, our silences may be theonly critical response we can make that will permit us to both live with ourselves while also moving forward. It is silence,then, that gives our language-related work its paradoxical rigour, a silence that Blanchot and Derrida would insist flowsbeneath the space in which we write (nay, is the space, perhaps?) and away from it. Its uncontainability is matched only byGod; silence calls to language, and to keep silent would no more preserve silence than would the speaking and writing of it.

6MacArthur (1990) maintains that it is important to note that the presence of the author in a letter is almost always animplied presence: “Narrators do not merely decide which events to recount and in what order, they also recount these eventsthemselves. They tell the whole story, and the voices of the other characters are mediated by, or even reported in the wordsof the narrator” (p. 10). The reader, then, is left to interpret and to read between the lines a whole host of assemblages fromthe missive: the writer, other voices, local events, all of which are rendered present (by their absence) in the letter.

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These points make themselves evident in different ways in the letters discussed here. As willbe evident, degrees of incompleteness and suspension written into the assembling of a collectiveare matched by the unfinished, open-endedness of the epistolary form, with both form andnation reflecting in Chinese-mirror fashion the endless deferral of each and the other. The silentvoices of certain British (Indian) public citizens are sutured into these infinite reflections andneed, as Michelet (1967) puts it, to be allowed to speak for themselves, with their letters beingread not as “dead indices of events now past” but as “fragments of the past still living in thepresent” (cited in White, 1994, p. xvi).

MY RAW MATERIALS AND ANALYSES

While historians have extensively documented the nitty-gritty workings-out of the India-Empirerelationship (Chakrabarty, 1989; Chakrabarty & Sartori, 2007; Cohn, 1986; Dalrymple, 2004;Gandhi, 2007; Guha, 2007; Metcalf, 1989; Metcalf & Metcalf, 2002), essays interpreting corre-spondences by British (Indian) public citizens about India’s assembly have tended for complex,political reasons to remain silenced. These letters are to be found in the Bodleian library andRhodes House at Oxford University, and some of them are pieces that I have not yet seen in his-torians’ archives. A total of 31 letters were copied in June and July 2007, and all of the letterswere exchanges between key Indian and British public figures who were intensely involved innegotiating what an “India” would look like. While there were plenty of letters exchangedbetween British and Indian public figures at this time and while my pool of materials has anextensive amount of this correspondence, I am, for the purposes of this paper, devoting the dis-cussion to sample representatives written by and to 3 public figures, namely Charles Andrews,Edward Thompson, and John Amery. The first, Charles Andrews, was one of Gandhi’s closestfriends and was committed to the Non-Cooperation movement in every possible way. The second,Edward Thompson, was a close acquaintance of Rabindranath Tagore, another key figure in theNon-Cooperation movement (with whom he is known to have had a difficult but intense relation-ship; see Lago [2001] for a detailed biography). John Amery is perhaps the least known, but, as isevident in the letters, was intensely committed to the working out of an Indian nation-state.

The exchange of missives took place across thousands of miles, spanning 2 cultural spaces, andacross several decades, and, as they reveal, ideas of what “an India” would be like emerged fromhighly debated and contested arguments about being part of the Empire or not, about how to bringa self-sustaining democracy into India, and about how to ensure that the committees being put inplace adequately represented the heterogeneity of the country. The intensely negotiated aspects ofthis endeavour at once challenge discourses of nations and nationalities as a priori and point totheir historically fluid and undecided states (Bhabha, 1990), while also ironically underscoring theidea that “an India” was partially grafted (through letters) by voices that Indian nation-building andhistoriography once rendered silent.

The following discussion will address 3 key themes relating to the grafting of an Indiannation(al identity). These letters were exchanged at what are today considered significant tem-poral spaces in Indian history (1920–1950s) when a “sense of India” was beginning to be nego-tiated, and when the idea of breaking away from the Raj was being entertained. I do need to notehere that I am not offering a discourse analysis of these letters; my aim isn’t to do an in-depthanalysis of the language of these letters as much as it is to pose a set of alternate interpretations

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to counter particular historical “truths” in the Indian historical context. This kind of analysis andalternate interpretation is common in current scholarship in critical historiography (Chakrabarty,1998, 2000; Gandhi, 2006; LaCapra, 2000, 2001; Nigam, 2006), where researchers draw on par-ticular strains of critical and philosophical thought to speak against normative ways of historyand “truth” telling. (These modes of thinking are crucial for national identity issues in our field,hence my drawing on them for the present discussion). Also, while several of the issues in theletters are steeped in India’s and Britain’s (conjoined) histories and so may read like details forwhich the reader has little background, it is the larger themes that these local concerns speak tothat are relevant here.

Debates About Transferring the British Political System Into the Indian Context

While 1947 was the year India became independent, negotiations about how an India could beformed had already begun more than a couple of decades earlier, with perhaps the 1919 Jalian-walla Bagh massacre being the horrific “trigger” (more on this presently; see Ramanathan &Pennycook [2007] for a detailed discussion of individual positionings vis-à-vis momentouspolitical movements). The following 2 letters in Table 1, written by John Amery to EdwardThompson, speak to some of the very local concerns that they were wrestling with as theythought about a sustainable Indian democracy. I deal with each one separately.

In both of these letters, Amery writes about several very local concerns, including theformation of a cabinet that had adequate Indian representation, and concerns about offeringa premier post to a Muslim (when Jinnah around that time was concerned about Hindudomination and was agitating for an all-Muslim state—now Pakistan). In the second letter,he seems to take issue with Thompson about how to work with India’s diversity. What isevident in both letters is a genuine concern about leaving India a working democracy, wor-ries about a simple transference of the British political system not being a workable solu-tion, and the need to keep local considerations of minorities in mind. Indeed, in Letter 2,Amery writes of the English political system in reductive terms (“you cannot talk of“beaten sides” as you can in a homogeneous country like ours . . .”) to drive home the pointthat one could not speak of “beaten sides” in a possible India that had so many minoritygroups. It is quite clear that the two men do not agree about some key issues being dis-cussed. While we do not have access to Thompson’s responses to Amery, we can tell fromAmery’s opening sentences in both letters (“I wish I felt that the solution was as easy as yousuggest” and “there are one or two things in your letters that have frankly shocked me”) thatThompson’s responses to his letters were ones he (Amery) felt he needed to contend. Asjust mentioned, we can “read” Thompson’s orientation through his absence and throughAmery’s positionings: that Thompson was not as mindful about keeping in mind very localconcerns about minority groups when considering establishing a democracy, that he saw theelections as a farce (when Amery did not), that he was able to speak of “beaten” sides(when Amery felt it was impossible to), that his views of determining “majority rule” basedon numerical realities were not credible.

While it is not clear where Amery and Thompson were at the time of this exchange (wedo know that Thompson spent a big part of his working years in India; see Lago [2001]),and while these very localized concerns may read as “too local,” the larger issue here is that bothmen are engaged in debating about the carving-out of an India—politically, metaphorically and

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TABLE 1Correspondence between John Amery and Edward Thompson

Letters from John Amery to Edward Thompson

Letter 1 Letter 2

4th November, 1940 15th November, 1940

Dear Mr. Thompson, Dear Mr. Thompson,I wish I felt that the solution was as easy as you

suggest. We did in fact offer something as near a NationalGovernment at the Centre as present circumstancesallow; a Cabinet in which the Indian representativeswould have been something like three to one as againstthe three Englishmen who would have remained. Such abody taking an effective part in the war effort, responsiblyin charge of Government departments, would not onlyhave gained experience in government at the Centre, butwould undoubtedly have exercised an increasingly strongcollective influence. It is perfectly true that technicallythey would have been responsible to the Viceroy and notto the Legislature, but that would not alter the fact that ifthey differed from him on good grounds it would havebeen very difficult for him to dismiss them or face theirresignation. On the other hand, to make them responsibleto the elected members of the existing Legislature doesraise precisely the issue on which not only Jinnah, but themain block of Muslim opinion, is not prepared to acceptthe Congress view. To offer the Premiership to a Muslimas such would not be a real concession if the governmenthe formed were liable at any moment to be upset by ahostile vote of the Legislature. In this respect it seems tome Congress committed the same mistake that itcommitted when bringing in Muslim ministers in theprovinces who were not representatives of the MuslimLeague, or indeed in appointing a Muslim President toCongress itself. That no more conciliates the main blockof Muslim opinion than the fact that Parnell was aProtestant conciliated the Ulstermen.

The essence of the problem is after all that a unitedIndia, however, loosely united, is no longer possible onself-governing conditions on the basis of pure numericalmajorities, and some way has got to be found by whichthe system which we have made work in this country canbe modified to make it work under Indian conditions. Thatdifficulty would have to be avoided for the time being, aswell as its solution hastened, if Congress and MuslimLeague had been willing to come into the kind ofGovernment we have offered them

I have not been able to answer your letters of November6th and 7th and am afraid I cannot do so properly even now.But there are one or two things in your letters which havefrankly shocked [crossed out and inserted “surprised”] me.One is when you say that “elections become a farce if thebeaten side is to be entitled to the same power as if it hadwon”. Surely the whole essence of the Indian situation or ofany situation in which, e.g. Palestine or Central Europe,profoundly different elements live side by side, is that youcannot talk of “beaten sides” as you can in a homogeneouscountry like ours and that therefore ordinary conceptions ofmajority rule are beside the point, and in some way or otherconstitutional forms must be devised through whichcompromise and cooperation can be affected.

Again you speak of Congress “waiving its electionrights and accepting Moslem League Cabinet Ministers.”But if those Moslem League Ministers are to beresponsible to a legislature with a Congress majority andliable to be turned out by it, the concession amounts tovery little. I fear that we have still got to face the fact thatour ordinary political methods and conventions willrequire a great deal of revision if we are to secure an Indiaboth free, united and at peace within itself.

Yours sincerely,J. Amery

(Continued)

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spatially. The fact that these negotiations happen through letters is crucial to note. Theepistolary exchange—laden with suspension and replete with incompleteness—captures thebecoming of a nation, the incompleteness, and this exchange about India being a“concrete,” discursive construct is the space between England and India, Empire andnation, where ideas of India’s spatial and metaphorical designing occurs. Both writers aretexting not just letters, but ideas for a country, and while on the one hand we can interpretthem as assuming paternalistic stances—where they feel they need to speak for “anIndia”—the present temporal junctures prod me to consider an alternative interpretation,namely that in their exchanges we glimpse the mergings of engagement, writing, and state.As invested British (Indian) public citizens, Amery and Thompson are writing about theirengagements for an India at a given colonial moment, and my reading of their letters at thispostcolonial moment allows me to speak of their forgotten status and of a key paradox: thata sense of India was also partially cobbled together by the very voices once deemed irrele-vant during and after Indian Independence, when the nation’s national identity was beingwritten in place; that group and national identities, evanescent as they are, are both thereand not there, composed at once of singularities and individuals that have merged and whosemergings are perpetually becoming. The voicing and hearing and being of these mergings/collectivities operate always on a dynamics of exclusion, hinging forever on the voices ofthe excluded, silent and absent.

Creating Indian Historical Truths by Validating Very Specific Interpretations

As Marrati (2005) points out, historical “truths” emerge in time, even if its value does notdepend on time. In some ways, historical truths arise from somewhere—particular places,identifiable times—and through repetition and enactments assume what Barthes (1989) wouldcall a “reality effect” that then gets passed down through generations in various forms. Just as

TABLE 1(Continued)

Letters from John Amery to Edward Thompson

Meanwhile there is nothing new to prevent Indiansgetting together and working out the kind of Constitutionunder which they will be willing to live together. But ithas got to be on the basis of compromise, and so long asCongress takes the view that the only kind of Constitutionit will look at is one based on the idea of a Cabinetresponsible both for legislation and administration to anAssembly elected by geographical constituencies, so long,I fear, will the deadlock continue.

Jinnah may have all the defects you mention; but hehas got the Muslim League in his hands and knowssomehow to appeal to their rank and file against theirbroader-minded leaders.

Yours sincerely,J. Amery

Note. Italicized text in the correspondence indicates author emphasis.

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the rhetoric of empires arose and became dominant discourses in certain epochs—thus shapingthe collective identities of some nations—particular interpretations of key events contestingempires got singled out to become historical truths in the South Asian context. And it is in cer-tain letters between British (Indian) public citizens that particular interpretations got negoti-ated, validated and passed down as the country’s essences (Ramanathan, 2008).

Animosity and resentment about the power the English wielded over Indians in the subcon-tinent were growing as early as the Indian Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 (often referred to as the firstbattle for Independence, when, among other things, some Indian soldiers felt pressure bymissionaries to convert to Christianity, and when rumours that the cartridges that the sepoyshad to bite open were greased in pork fat, offensive to Muslims, and beef-fat, offensive toHindus). But it wasn’t until 1919 with the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre when General Dyeropened fire on an unarmed crowd of about 15,000 people that agitations for a free India beganin earnest. It was an event that galvanized the Non-Cooperation movement and saw Gandhi,Andrews, and Tagore jump into action, and their work and the interpretations of this one eventhave gone down in Indian history books in very particular ways and have been intimately tiedto a host of other key events (the heated exchanges between the people and the government, thenegotiation of and between committees, ways in which particular government officials got“read,” the burning of foreign cloth, the salt march, Gandhi’s imprisonment, the fight against“untouchability”). But while Gandhi and Tagore get reified and extensively “heard” in Indianhistory school textbooks, Andrews, a British (Indian), who was very much a part of this “core”group, often gets sidelined. In the following letters (3 of the 8 of Andrews’s letters were copiedin Bodliean; the larger project on which the present study is based also includes vast amounts ofAndrews’s writing in a variety of Indian contexts), Andrews writes from India to Thompson,then in England, about several things, including the massacre and the ways in which he felt themedia was fallaciously presenting the event. He also writes about his take on Lord Reading’sactions and about dispelling misperceptions about the treatment of English men and women. Aswe can see, Andrews was clear that he wanted the “full facts” of the event presented in certainways, that he felt the need to contest misperceptions, and that he saw his role as a missionary tovalidate particular interpretations that would promote the Indian cause.

Andrews’s outrage in Letter 1 (Table 2) about the misquoting of the number of people whodied in the 1919 massacre emerges from a deep-seated concern that Thompson get his(Andrews’s) “correct” interpretation of what happened, and not believe the numbers quoted innewspapers. His views about General Dyer and his deed are quite clear (“absolute hate,” “thereis no other word”). In Letter 2 we are able to sense a disagreement between him and Thompsonabout Lord Reading, when Andrews insists in the last line “No, Edward, I wasn’t sentimentalover that. I saw a great deal of Reading and he had no scruples,” and then in Letter 3, he wantsThompson to understand that contrary to common perception, the missionary cause was beingsupported and that “the Congress Sub Committee Report has condemned every outrage onEnglish men and women in strongest language possible.” In each of these instances, Andrews isclear that he wants the “true” facts told, wants particular interpretations reiterated and that hewants Thompson to aid him in this endeavour by writing/speaking of them in England.

As with the earlier section, it is what these local concerns speak to that is crucial to note here.If historical truths and collective identities can ever be said to have “origins,” then the aboveexchanges point to their negotiated emergence. Andrews’s indignation implies a disagreementbetween him and Thompson on some of these issues. Indeed, as we know from Lago’s biography

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TABLE 2Correspondence between C. F. Andrews and Edward Thompson

Letters from C. F. Andrews to Edward Thompson about how Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre

Letter 1

Bholpur,

1924My dear Thompson,

I was so glad to receive (?) some cuttings. I was in Delhi at once soon as the disturbances began last April and dideverything I could to help Barron and Beadon, the officers in charge and was often thanked by them. I tried again andagain to get on into the Punjab but after Amritsar Sir Michael O’ [???] would not have anyone in, at any cost. The vilestthing he did was to institute a prosecution against a poor little insignificant Editor who had only started a daily paperPratap in Lahore 10 days before Amritsar. This Editor was most circumspect but he gave the number of casualties in theDelhi riots at 40 while the official number was 13. Our [???] warned the Editor, gave the official number and apologizedbut this was not enough. He had him prosecuted by a Martial Law Tribunal and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment.This was at the very time he was hushing up the Amritsar casualties and publishing officially that lie about 200. I see nowin his full letter to the “Times” that he states that General Dyer gave him that ridiculous figure. You know what arson is:you know that 1650 rifle bullets at 100 yards range into 10,000 to 15,000 massed people, directed where the crowd werethickest will do, let alone the fact that least 100, if not more, must have been trampled to death. General Dyer (as hehimself said) meant to kill as many as he possibly could and would have killed more if he had had more ammunition.

As one, who has seen slaughter, you know full well that in broad daylight it was impossible for a truthful man tohave given 200 as the figure without gross lying. Every Englishman in authority in the Punjab at that time knew that thecasualties were well over 1000 and a great number were rejoicing in it. What must have been happening is that GeneralDyer and Sir Michael met at once and agreed to tell the lie and, to my own mind Sir Michael is most likely to be theperson to have insisted on it. And look at the sickening way it was done—first it is given “heavy casualties”, then 200casualties, and the last of all a correction (which I certainly never saw in the Press communiqués and I am fairly certainwas never fully published) to 200 killed. And all the while there, almost certainly, between 800 and 1000 killed, both byrifle bullets and by being trampled to death. The Vice-Chairman of the Delhi Chamber of Commerce, a very thoughtfulIndian Gentleman with whom I stayed for weeks, who saw the whole massacre from an upper story window and went atonce . . . searching for a child who was missing has told me that the bodies were piled 8 and 10 on the top of one anotherat the exits and that in the garden itself he feels certain there were not less than 1000 dead . . . there must have been atleast 300 or 400 who [died] in the lanes, and after they reached home; & also it was a burning hot time in April withhardly any medical aid.

As for Dyer, I think he was truthful; but his whole [manner?] showed him as absolute hate—there is no other word.He knew the hideous slaughter, and that there was only a couple of hours to curfew time, and yet he never sent any wordto say that those who tended the wounded through the night or went out to get medical aid would not be shot.

I have word of the an [???] Christian (who passes as a Mr. Lewis) when went to the military camp and outsideAmritsar that night and he told me that there was rejoicing. I am afraid that was actually how the news was taken amongEnglishmen in the Punjab “Serve those devils right” was the only word that went around. . . .

Yours sincerelyCF Andrews

Letter 2

Ketti,Nilgiri Hills

S. IndiaApril 6, 1938

My dear Edward,

I have written at last the article for the B.[???] bringing in your beautiful book “The Youngest Disciple” and I hope theywill take it. I have been very pressed and had quite forgotten to write to you about the Poet. He is quite infirm and

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of Thompson and from Thompson’s own book, entitled The Reconstruction of India (1931),Thompson maintained that India would be best off under the benevolence of the Empire. In thiscase too, then (as with the Amery-Thompson correspondence), we see that the idea of India as aseparate nation was a site of contestation.

But interpretations like Andrews’s began to be picked up and sparked in other realms, and theessences of a nation began to gel. The open-ended, one-sided nature of the letters underscoresthe unfinished nature of this project, with letters from Amery still being awaited, and we havelittle sense from the letters alone how Amery read and interpreted Andrews’s responses. Theincomplete nature of “India-building” also highlights aspects of the journeys postcolonialnational identities make that “begin” from the validation of particular interpretations and moveonward with those interpretations through repetition and enactments, thus building up a sedimented

incapable now of going through any more traveling beyond the shortest & easiest railway journeys. Even the Howrahplatform is too much for him to walk and he gets out at Bally and motors. He is exceedingly infirm. He has written tothe Registrar saying that if it means his being present in Oxford his health does not permit his coming.

Is there no chance of the degree being given him in absentia? That would do more good than I can possibly say!

I have just been reading again your “The Reconstruction of India” and admire greatly your admirable fairness toboth sides. I still disagree with you about Reading’s action in cutting of the Civil Disobedience after Chauri Chaura:I was in the midst of that in Calcutta at the time of his arrest. It was like hitting a man when he was down. No, Edward,I wasn’t sentimental over that. I saw a great deal of Reading and he had no scruples.

With much love to you both,Charlie

Letter 3

Santiniketan

June 23

My dear Thompson,

Yes, I was extremely glad you wrote. I put in my letter first that you had “appealed” to me, but I altered it to“challenged” to make it stronger. Mr. Dewick [sp??] of S. Paul’s Missionary College with Kingsley Williams of Madrasis circulating among missionaries an admirable letter for signature. I hope you will get in touch and express this all youcan. I am writing to Dr. Dalter to get YMCA to join in. One of our teachers was in with me this morning. He is veryeager indeed about it. He says the whole missionary cause in India depends on it.

I want you to understand these facts: (1) the Congress Sub Committee Report has condemned every outrage onEnglish men and English women in strongest language possible. Nothing could have been stronger. All this is publishedand circulated under the names of the Congress President, ex-President, and M. Gandhi etc.(2) The Congress itselfbased a special resolution condemning the acts done by the mob in quite unequivocal language and with no excuse. Thewhole congress did open “pryaschitta” (penance)

If now there is no “pryaschitta from the English side, you will understand how the best Indians will feel. They havebeen drawn very closely to the Missionaries at this time. Some who were very bitter have said to me—“well, the mis-sionaries are our true friends after all.”

I wonder if you could possibly take in this student of ours. He is a good lad and we are very fond of him. He got illin his first year and has not gained his promotion. I enclose his letter.

Yours very sincerely,

C. F. Andrews

Note. Question marks enclosed by brackets ([???]) indicate illegible text in the original. Italicized text in thecorrespondence indicates author emphasis.

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set of collective essences and, thereby, hazing over the idea that collective identities are alwaysin process, forever suspended.

While Indian history, like the histories of other colonized nations, needed to draw firmboundaries, it has done so by scripting its memories, images, and sensations into written texts invery particular ways. A sense of an Indian national identity emerged because particular histori-cal wounds (Chakrabarty, 2007) became focal points, foreshadowing outlines traced in advancewith repeated enactments, thus fashioning through these sedimentizing processes a distinctsense of being “Indian.” While social groups the world over have had to cobble togetheressences to move themselves towards more freedom and equality—the Dalit Movement in Indiaor the Civil Rights Movement in America—they are always, as Freud reminds us of all massmovements, based on idealizations and, thus, threaten to reproduce exactly what Lacan wouldcall the “resurgence of the discourse of the Master” (cited in Bracher, 1993, p. 175). That is, theessences of a group always run the risk of becoming master signifiers that delimit territories andsilence voices. In terms of the present focus, the darkened borders of an Indian national identitywere predicated on the validation of Indian public citizens committed to the freedom struggleand the simultaneous relegation of British counterparts to the margins. But 62 years from 1947now opens up the possibility of alternative visions. What if we were to see these voices asalways having been in the background, of recognizing the assembled borders of nation-building,and of pushing further and further back to where there are no margins? The languaged andsilenced worlds would then flow into each other, but which would dissolve into which?

Creating an India in an Oppositional Space Through Enclosures

This section shifts focus somewhat to address not letters, but enclosures in letters—enclosuresthat need, to some extent, to be addressed on their own terms. Like the letters, enclosures(of memos, plans, draft proposals) occupy an interesting place between Empire and nation.

Among the letters sent to Thompson by Andrews is a memo, or a response to a possible con-stitution of India (perhaps put together by a committee). The document has no date and specifiesno place, and has Andrews’s name written in his hand at the back. Also, it is typed on very thinpaper of foolscap length, the kind that once was used for airmail correspondences. Judging fromthe document, Andrews was reacting to a proposal for a constitution and was clearly opposed toseveral ideas in it. Towards extrapolating what was in the proposal, I lay out in term two col-umns, Andrews’s response and my sense of what he is reacting to. Do note the different leaps ininterpretations here: I am offering here reading of Andrews’s reactions to what might have beenan early version of the Constitution. The Indian Constitution that adopted was written byDr. Ambedkar (a Gandhian public figure of Dalit background, who shattered a key glass ceilingin admittance of Dalit figures in the Indian public space). We can infer several aspects of whatthe proposal may have contained from Andrews’s rebuttal. The two columns that follow lay outAndrews’s response and my sense of what he was reacting to (see Table 3).

While Andrews’s commitment to the Indian cause is obvious (again) in this document, whatis not quite as apparent is the paradoxical role that this particular genre/textual form plays in theconstruction of an idea of India. At one level, it serves an epistolary function: it was part of aletter and thus has those tendrils attached to it. But in other ways, it has to be considered as adocument that is neither a letter, nor a proposal; indeed, it is hard to determine what to call thispiece. And yet it is one that very clearly attempts to get at an idea of India, especially one that

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TABLE 3Correspondence Sent by Andrews to Thompson

Document sent to Thompson by Andrews (no date, place, or stated reason)

What we can discern about the proposal based on Andrews’s rebuttal

1. There is no question of not being in touch with the newConstitution because the very fact of our seeking electionsshows that we are coming into touch with it. What ismeant is and that has been emphasized in the CongressManifesto is that we approach this constitution in no spiritof cooperation. It has been forced down upon us againstour will. We dislike it thoroughly and we propose to makeits functioning as difficult as possible. In particular, theFederal part of it is a monstrosity.

1. That the Non-Cooperationmovement was alreadyunderway (perhaps the document was written in the1930s?); that there were parts of the document thatspelled “Empire” in ways that Andrews wished to contest.

2. The Constitution is bound to fail because it cannot solveany major problem in India. These problems of the land ofpoverty of unemployment insistently demand solution. Wedo not think there can be a proper solution for them underBritish imperialism. We have indicated the way out througha Constituent Assembly.

2. That the proposed constitution did not pay adequateattention to local concerns of poverty, unemployment.

3. The Congress does not ignore the prince’s subjects,though inevitably its activities have largely beenconcentrated in the rest of India. It has clearly stated that itstands for same political, economic, civil, and otherliberties for the Indian states’ subjects as for the others. Inpractice it has not been able to do much of the IndianStates because it had its hands full elsewhere and many ofits leaders did not want to add to their burdens. But theprinciple was admitted and proclaimed.

3. That the proposed constitution seems to treat issuesaround the princely states lightly.

4. I cannot conceive of a genuine independence within theEmpire for India even to the extent of the British Dominions.There is no parallel between the two. I can conceive of a freeIndia coming to a friendly arrangement with Britain.

4. That there seemed to be a possibility of a free Indiawithin the empire; that the rhetoric of “Hind Swaraj” hadby this point taken root.

5. I am entirely against the idea of a dictatorship, moreespecially the idea of a personal dictatorship. I can imaginehowever that in times of grave crises, usually a militarycrisis, a measure of group dictatorship might be necessary.But this should not be extended to a normal period.

5. That the proposal had a clause about possibledictatorship under certain conditions.

6. I think would be unfortunate if India was split up into anumber of separate and independent nations. The unit ofIndia is not only desirable but highly necessary and I doubt ifthere are any intelligent people in India who think differently.This unity, however, should not be an oppressive one butshould give full freedom for cultural and other diversity.

6. That the proposed constitution considered thepossibility of several small nations (perhaps in responseto the country’s diversity)?

7. This is a big question which can hardly be answered briefly.But it seems to me that the only way to solve the outstandingIndian problems is to have an all-embracing planned system ofIndian economy dealing with the land, industry—both big scaleand village—social services, etc. Such a planned system canonly take effect when obstructionists in the way of big investedinterests have been removed. Therefore it becomes necessaryto remove most of these obstructions.

7. That there were people opposed evolving a plan thatwould address some of India’s bigger issues with anoverarching plan.

(Continued)

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gets articulated in oppositional terms to a proposal that did not consider some very local issuesthat Andrews felt were crucial. Furthermore, the very vulnerability of this piece (the inability todate it, locate it, and give it a “name” (so to speak), at one level renders it problematic, and froma traditional historian’s point of view, it might well be considered a questionable piece ofevidence. But given the present argument about the assembling of India through the mail, adocument that came as part of a letter such as this is precisely the kind that needs fresh airbreathed into it.

While the document’s ill-defined status and lack of temporal and spatial markers can cast it inthe realm of the “unreliable,” its threat to invisibility is stemmed if we openly articulate its “in-between-ness” and state of suspension; like the letters that carried in them the ideas of a nation,this free-floating, no-name document (that came enclosed in a letter) bears in it the essences of anational self. It captures the consciousness of an intensely committed British (Indian) public citizenwho was convinced of the need to carve out a place for India out of the Raj. The dynamicsaround this somewhat “rizhomatic” document (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Ramanathan, 2006),though, are critical to note. They are different from those around letters, where the addressee isthe “stimulus” for whom the writer assembles details as well as the individual who then puts allthe details together. In the case of this free-floating memo/response, the reader (Thompson andus) was not the stimulus, but some committee that Andrews was rebutting, whose details wedon’t know since the document bears no indication of date or place.

Despite this lack of specificity of details, the document manages to exert a most palpable heat.Its reprimand of the committee’s proposal serves as a moral exhortation, with its efficacy depend-ing, not so much on the relationship between writer and reader (Andrews and Thompson), as thatbetween reader (including us) and content qua content. Its epistolary tendrils (that it cameenclosed in a letter) are then rendered less important than the content it carries—the content, inthis case, a very clear articulation of what a constitution of India might need. The effects of this,needless to say, are double-edged; they extend to the story of a “nation” as a whole while also

TABLE 3(Continued)

Document sent to Thompson by Andrews (no date, place, or stated reason)

What we can discern about the proposal based on Andrews’s rebuttal

8. I do not think the communal problem will present the slightest difficulty when economic questions are being considered. As for the Indian princes, it is absurd to expect that they would carry on their feudal autocratic way because of some treaty they made with representatives of the British Power a hundred years ago. Unfortunately it will be for the people of the States themselves to decide what the position of the princes will be.

8. That the proposal may have had a clause about how thedistribution of economic goods might lead to communalproblems; that the Indian princes may be intransigentabout their powers and princely status.

The army question is no doubt a delicate one but it offersno insuperable difficulty. The army as well as a kind of amilitia will have to be recruited from all over India. Thereis no reason to suppose that the present Indian army willnot be thoroughly loyal to the new order. The British armyof course will have to go.

That there would need to be a new army made up ofIndians.

Note. Italicized text in the correspondence indicates author emphasis.

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making us radically question the notion’s completeness. Indeed, in that the document doubles asboth a naming of a state and an integral part of it, as an address to a commission while alsorebutting it, it puts itself at one and the same time under the jurisdiction of one set of norms,those of literary genres and narratives, while also responding to another set of norms, those of anation’s namelessness. The result is both to uphold shards of a self-identity while also proddingus to acknowledge the most flimsy and precarious textual poses on which these are based. Thisdocument, then, like the idea of India, is pregnant with possibility. Like the letters, this docu-ment and “India” are still becoming. Neither text nor nation has been named and both are inabeyance. Like silence, all—enclosures, letters, nation, ideas—are about waiting, possible butnot yet, there and not there.

SILENCE, LANGUAGE, SILENCING, LANGUAGING—AGAIN

This article has been arguing that nation-building and the discourses of national identities arepredicated on the simultaneous languaging of some voices and the silencing of others. Thearticle also called attention to the ways in which the becoming of a nation—the idea of graftingtogether a (post) colonial space—India—is reflected in the unfinished project and form of letterwriting. The letters and enclosures written by the very people that Indian history has tended (andto some extent, needed) to relegate to the margins—with their cautious yet firm clauses,moments of understatement accompanied by strong assertions, allusions to a concrete “India”when there was none at the time—all serve at this temporal juncture to underscore the limits andsuspense of historiography and texting, languaging and silencing, drawing borders while erasingthem. The voices of British (Indian) public citizens committed to “an India” and the generalsilences around them point to the selective assembly of mainstream Indian historiography, thedynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and the searing binaries around which national identitiesget built, scripted, and enacted. Writing itself neither lives nor dies, and it is that very impossi-bility—that we can locate, date, and entrench some written documents but also then forget anderase others in history-making—that makes the scripting of national/collective identities so utterlyincomplete. It is in the erasure and forgetting, though, that slow but excruciating violences getperpetrated. Blanchot and Derrida are not wrong after all: silence does flow beneath and awayfrom language and in histriography gives the languaged its form, rigour, and punch.

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