Week 7- Shahid Amin

Shahid Amin's article, "The Approver's Testimony" speaks to several of the themes we have been discussing in this course.

First, it addresses the construction of the narrative that Guha talks about in the Prose of Counter Insurgency. More specifically, he talks about how, when constructing or giving a background to an event, there is a process of selection that automatically excludes all other possible narratives. So in the approver's testimony, the specific questions asked and answered, the names mentioned (as well as their past interactions with the approver)- create a very specific kind of narrative. And that this construction is no accident, but an act and an interplay of power. This also links to our discussion of justice in the last class- can the law account for exceptions to the rule? Or do extend to colonial law an understanding that it recognizes criminal acts- murder, arson- and doles out punishment accordingly? That this is a way or ordering, understanding and structuring society, but that power and violence were an essential tool in this method, whose importance can not be understated? These acts of power- no matter their motivations- were crucial in constructing a specific narrative, which do exclude other understandings of the incident.

This is where the importance of asking new questions of existing archives comes in- which is a thread common in a lot of the articles we have read. Where I felt Amin departs from writers like Guha, however, is that he does not pay as much attention to "reading against the grain". For Amin, it is not so much about constructing an alternate narrative- which he dismisses as a futile project, for there is no "true" event or occurrence that can be reconstructed, no matter the imaginative leaps.

Amin also seems less concerned with giving agency to the subaltern in the way some of the authors we have read do. He does not state whether the approver was simply coerced, whether he willingly chose to give testimony out of fear or whether he was driven by past enmities- we don't really see a discussion of motives. And perhaps this is an adequate approach to take. The fact that the struggle and rioting was organized, that it did have some element of planning in it, automatically gives the rioters the "political consciousness" that writers like Guha and Thompson take so much care to outline. At the same time, though, there is the element of a "mob" mentality- implied in the narration of the event, where there seems to be an element of the inexplicable in the way events unfolded. Can we then move past just "with the grain" or "against the grain" and begin to recognize dualities and an interplay in power?

 Amin, here, is more in line with Trouillet; he points out the existing silences and lets them speak for themselves.

In mentioning those silences, however, there is a great focus on method. He focuses extensively on the way the testimony was recorded, the differences that existed in the first testimony compared to the later one, the language used and who it belonged to, the paradoxes in the judicial processes. Amin mentions the how, instead of the "what" and lets it speak for itself.


How does this help our understanding of the Subaltern? In a situation where the archives are silent, how do we write subaltern histories? This is when, perhaps, the recognition of the acts of power before the acts of recording (that Trouillet speaks of) become important.