Session 7 - Approver's Testimony

I found the piece by Shahid Amin to be interesting in how it finds a confession made by an untouchable who was part of a riot to become an extraordinary influence on the final decision by the judge. The first quote Amin picks from Shikari's testimony really struck me. It is without any hesitation or remorse that he seems to be selling out his partners in crime. His confession is very formal and robotic. It is almost as if he is being forced to say those exact words which is precisely what leads any reasonable person to question the autonomy of the confession. 

I feel like some of the points Amin makes with regards to the structure of courts, the contextualization of an approver's testimony within Judicial discourse and the qualification of an AT are worth mentioning. 

His main argument throughout the most part of the article is pulling evidence together to prove that the testimony is in fact not autonomous and actually constructed. Shahid Amin makes this point at various instances. The question in my mind about this was how is it so easy to put words in another person's mouth but Amin does a great job of explaining.

The first aspect to understand was the use of "I" and "we" being necessary in the testimony so the approver can implicate himself and his accomplices. Secondly the repeated question with more detail each time led to an elaborate series of events that were exaggerated. Considering that memory derives from the last time you remember the even rather than the event itself, it becomes difficult to be sure of the authenticity of the narration. Also, these confessions manage to make small and scattered events into what Amin refers to as 'risky moments' which are a defining moment for the narrative. Keeping all of these within sight the testimony becomes very difficult to deny. Yet, the structure of the courts from the committing magistrate to the sessions and the high court where the final sentence or acquittal is decided is crucial in transforming the testimony through the layers of the legal system. Each time, it seems to get finer and more acceptable. Amin refers to this as the directedness given to the story by the testimony. Regardless of this Amin points to an effort made to contextualize the AT within the Judicial Discourse by qualifying any unauthentic or partially false statements made by the approver. For example in Shikari's case when he is naming those as accomplices who he knows to be enemies, a question can be raised regarding a personal vendetta. But, the judge will qualify this by stating that the police may accuse him of protecting these men if he doesn't name them. 

All of this points to the very idea that the article begins with. Trials of most or all peasant riots rely heavily on the approvers testimony which is why the police had narrowed down three potential approvers and picked the best testimony out three. This is the major source of material for the judgement and yet it is not autonomous. Evidence for the construction of this narrative isn't found because the police and the prosecution can transform it very early in the investigation. He rightly points out that it is not important to understand what really happened but to understand how it was portrayed by the prosecution through the approver's testimony. 

Week 7-Shahid Amin

The Approver's Testimony by Shahid Amin further problematizes the concept of the subaltern. The subaltern in this case is every person in the mob including the approver, the person who is giving their testimony in court and on whose testimony the judgement for the case of Chauri Chaura is being passed.What is important to the prosecution is not the person of the approver but rather their testimony. The court treats the approver's testimony as something that has no context, no personal motivation but as a stand alone divorced from the circumstances and the producer.

This piece is a great article that delves into the working of the colonial courts. One of the interesting things is the way these people are stripped of all politics and treated as common criminals. This links with what Gramsci wrote about actions being considered personal, and words like madness being used to describe the actions of peasant resistance. The idea is that these people have no capacity for political action; something Guha also mentions while he tries to remove the idea of the prepolitical peasant and give them some agency. In order to do this, the judges are willing to make up economic reasons to justify the actions of the peasants in looting the meat market even if it is not supported by the approver's testimony.

The writer has contentions with the word 'voluntary' and how much of the testimony that the approver produced was actually his. The author is just trying to show one of the powers that dictate the testimony (fact) that is produced (something Trouillot delves into when talking about how all history is an act of power). This power here is not evident to the courts which are looking at this testimony as voluntary, unbiased and un-coerced. The author mentions how the leading questions by the prosecution actually dictate the whole testimony. That might also be why there is no mention of political ideas in any of the testimonies, the questions do not give them that direction. The writer spends some time pointing out the silences in the testimony. This brings up the question of whether there is any 'truthful' testimony? And can any of it be used for further understanding without questioning the power dynamics that produce the history. 

Week Seven

I find Joan Scott's article infuriating and exhilarating in almost equal measure.

She suggests that we begin doubting "experience" itself. We have to be critical not only when we read secondary sources but also when we read the primary sources – including firsthand accounts. Scott believes that historical actors are unaware of the contingency of their experience. For instance if we read someone's account of their experience as a gay black man in 1960s America, the very first thing as conscientious historians we must do is dismantle the categories of "gay" and "black". Scott believes that these categories (and others like them) are byproducts of the hegemonic discourse. This is supposed to be true even when the historical actors in question embrace these identities and use them to create a sense of collective solidarity. They have been duped into adopting them.

I find this remarkably similar to Marxist ideas of false consciousness.
It is up to a historian of Scott's calibre to deconstruct firsthand "experience" and find out what was really going on in the life of the historical actor.

If we take this approach to its logical conclusion we will end up dismantling ALL ideas, including any that Scott invents to replace current epistemological frameworks. If everything is constructed and a product of its time then nothing can help us uncover any truth.

I would like to argue that even if experience is "constructed", it still is real. It created categories in which the historical actor lived his life and defined how he thought of himself.

Nevertheless, I think Scott has presented a very important idea. We can use it to enrich historical methods if not too replace them entirely. As she hints in the conclusion herself, instead of abandoning the concept of experience, we can study it more critically: we can look at its content along with analysing its constructive currents.

My exhilaration comes from the fact that Scott has opened up the possibilities of existence for historical actors by undermining the "fixedity" of their definitions of themselves. There is much more to being human now.

I also think it's very clever how Scott points out that speaking out against the hegemonic discourse is pointless and hypocritical if one ends up proposing a new equally "fixed" alternative in its place. 

Experiencing Evidence

       Joan Scott says that one of the strategies employed by historians of difference is to document experience and provide evidence so that it becomes a part of the epistemological frame of history. In rendering evidence into narrative, the historian experiences evidence. It sounds convoluted but let me put it more clearly: in working with various archives to identify evidence, the historian experiences not only the archive but also that evidence. Evidence becomes labeled as such because of the historian’s particular experience of it (think of Approver’s Testimony).

         In this sense the historian is a subjective witness of the history that he narrates because he/she experiences evidence and his/her biases, politics and worldviews shape the narrative that the evidence formulates. Consider Chandra’s Death. In telling us the story of the solidarity of Bagdi women, Guha basis it upon his experience of the ekrar. This puts greater emphasis on that which constitutes evidence and the historian’s reading of it. But in the writing of history is it only through the reading of evidence (through which one performs various inclusions and exclusions) that the historian experiences it? It is important to understand the duality present within the reading that I am proposing: evidence constitutes at some level an experience (the subaltern experience for instance) while what is seen as evidence is shaped by the historian’s experience of it. This means that there is no autonomous subject –neither the historical subject nor the historian rather both are mutually affirming subject-positions (particular experience and reading of evidence makes a narrative into history which in turn affirms one’s position as a historian).  It also means that a historian bestows subject-position. In the case of the subaltern collective, in recovering the ‘subaltern’ experience historians create that experience at some level.

          Scott tells us that experience is always political. Evidence too is always political. It is concern with these political aspects of experience and evidence that Guha identifies in the first volume of Subaltern Studies as the grounding upon which the efforts of the collective are predicated (“to rectify elitist bias characteristic of much research and academic work in this particular area”). Some historians actively reflect on their experience of evidence (I think of Darnton, Thompson and Guha).  This allows for alternative experiences to exist which applies both to considering different things as archival evidence and reading (and experiencing) the evidence provided by historians in a different way. What remains ambivalent in that experience of evidence is the visibility of the historical processes that construct evidence. This is one of the questions that subaltern historians try to complicate.

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.

AT

The politics of deciding the “right” approver shows how legality and justice have been historically constructed to serve the state’s interests. The pardoning of Thakur Ahir shows how it was important for the British (or state) to portray themselves as being on the “right side of history”- to construct a narrative that could achieve the exact results that they desired. In this regard, it is not only the testification of the crime that is important, but also its pre-history.
The reading highlights how Shikari’s was "a “competent” testimony against the Chauri Chaura accused, forged from an early stage to feed and fit into the production of judicial discourse". Shahid Amin further reiterates this point when he mentions that the Approver's Testimony "is neither a confession nor a renegade’s perception of past events; it is very much a construct of the prosecution’s view of the event and its pre-history". This episode shows how such judicial discourses have the potential to "create histories" or "erase" them- as befits the ongoing political project.
It was especially interesting to note how subalternity was created in this very domain- it was only the testimony of the approver that occupied any importance in the history- the rest were all labelled as rebels and deemed irrelevant in the dominant historical narratives!

Session 7

Approver's testimony, as Shahid Amin states himself, 'record and reaffirm' the silences of some 200 peasants who took part in the Chauri Chaura incident. It successfuly incriminates protestors, and provides a one dimensional view of the entire event: from a criminal perspective. He shows how the prosecution effects the Approver's testimony, in order to make a cohenrent narrative, and find intent in the protests to damage and harm. One of the key things Amin mentions is the role of the AT to join together different incidents and give them a meaning. Indeed, it becomes the prosecution's peroragative to select and provide meaning to all events through the AT. Thus, reconstructing history through the narrative of reports, we find that everything written is inteneded to incriminate the accused. He also sheds light on (what feels like) the helplessness of the approver, who systematically incriminates himself in order to get a pardon, incriminating others in the process. Thus he becomes the target of the ire of accused. Not only this, the defense too only shreds the approver, his character, his motivations for accusing people in order to poke holes in the prosecution's narrative. Lastly, Amin also indulges in a critique of the judicial system of the time, exposing it's biasness towards authority, forever stripping the rebel from his voice. He does so by quoting a judgement about the AT, where the judges claim that though Mir has gone out of line in places, he is still a man of sound mind, and so for his own benifit did not go too out of line (paraphrasing). The judiciary does one over, they ascribe a conciousness to the approver, all whilst stripping the rebel of his conciousness.