Animals and Colonial Indian Archives: Locating Nonhuman Agency and Subjectivities

Abstract

Despite being ubiquitously present in the official colonial archives of India, animals do not usually feature in historians’ narratives as historically participative beings with agency and subjectivity. Historians usually seem reluctant to give animals agency and subjectivity. This reluctance, I argue, is linked to ideas about history as a discipline and related conceptual frameworks (such as agency). To interrogate these aspects, this chapter locates nonhumans within the matrix of the term agency and its conceptualisations, and attends to the colonial archives as ‘repositories of the past’, and their links to power, knowledge construction and marginality. It does so by analysing correspondence of the Commissariat (Transport) Division of the Military officials in 1886 in British India regarding rules for the purchase of transport animals, which resulted in a set of instructions titled Purchase of Transport and which delineated extensive details about animals who were to be used for military and other transport. It provides insight into how animals were selected and used, and how colonists conceptualised animals. This research foregrounds animals in colonial sources by highlighting an animal-centred vantage point to explore colonial Indian history, and proposes methodological interventions to draw attention to the ‘animal turn’ within Indian history.