Colonial Narratives and the Kandhas

Writing Life and Writing History in the Victorian Empire

Abstract

The East India Company led a reformist campaign in the middle decades of the nineteenth-century to eradicate the periodical practice of human sacrifice as a fertility rite among certain sections of the Kandha community in the hill tracts of Odisha. The campaign produced a large body of narratives in a variety of genres. The paper offers a reading of two life narratives, which were part of this corpus. These narratives chronicle the careers of two prominent Scottish bureaucrats who led the civilizing campaigns among the Kandhas. Part of a larger project which studies the formation of an imperialglobal public for Odisha in the nineteenth-century, the paper reads these life narratives not so much as to revisit the colonial history of the Kandhas. Rather it aims to provide a description of some of the features of the imperial-global public who wrote about and discussed the affairs of the Kandhas with great ardor. It makes two sets of arguments. Both are concerned with Victorian historical and literary preoccupation with the recent past, with living memory. Contemporary history and regional novel, scholars have noted, were two of the genres in which the Victorians engaged with the recent past. The paper brings the colonial life narratives into a dialogue with these genres, and shows what they contributed to the Victorian discursive preoccupation with the recent past.