Hobson Jobson

In lieu of a more sober look at the work which stretches ahead and the files in which he seeks salvation, Hobson Jobson instead presents his readership (close to eighty percent of whom he may have shared a meal with in the last month) with a selection of street vignettes from the Northwest Provinces and Oudh from the Report on Native Newspapers c. 1876. One may find much familiar — and much amusing — in the following accounts.

First, the kind citizens of Lahore call for a restoration of gentility:

The Akhbar-i-Am, Lahore, of the 16th July, states that the educated and responsible inhabitants of Lahore lately submitted a petition to the Panjab Government praying that prostitutes and dancing girls should be expelled from Annarkali and other public streets and thoroughfares, and he assigned a retired place for their residence, and inquires what action has the Government taken on that petition?

Over in Lucknow, a haze of opium hovers thickly:

The Oudh Akhbar of the 21st July complains that the shops for the sale of chandu, madak, &c, are situated in streets and thoroughfares at Lucknow, and are always a great public nuisance. A large number of men is always collected at each shop, who smoke chandu and indulge in indecent language. All the chandu shops should be removed one or two miles from the town.

Jaipur residents contend with a taxed and taxing post:

The Jaipur correpondent of the Khair Khwah-i-Alam of the 8th August states that the letter boxes placed by the potsmaster of Jaipur at different places in the town are very small, and urges that two boxes should be placed at each place instead of one.

The poor denizens of Aligarh cry foul to the frenzied and fallacious felt-sellers in their midst:

The Bharat Bandhu, Aligarh, states that some men, one of whom is a Eurasian and the others natives, have lately arrived at Aligarh. They put a table and some chairs at some thoroughfare, and sell cloth in the morning and evening every day by auction. Some of them make bids in order to increase the price, and the purchasers have to pay four or five times the proper price. The district officers should see to this.

And finally, back in Lucknow, the ill and infirm patronize the “Canadian pharmacies” of their time:

The [Maraqqi Tahzib], in its local news column, refers to the prevalence of sickness at Lucknow, and complains that the attars or native druggists sell old and adulterated medicines. The writer doubts that the poor get pure and unadulterated medicines even at the charitable dispensaries or from the municipal hakim.

Hobson Jobson’s is not a confessional journal, yet at this juncture, as the aforementioned finds himself in the Indian capital once more, an honest word seems apt: graduate school, for its many stated and unstated perquisites, can more often than not feel somewhat akin to staring, unmoored over the edge of an open precipice.

Those around are keen to offer advice as to the best trajectory and chances for landing, and some even helpfully shout upwards as they tumble down. (I shall not stretch this metaphor far enough to those splattered on the ground, who can only logically be compared with professors, particularly of the tenured sort).

It is clear that one will eventually have to jump, and it is incumbent upon one to do so as quickly as possible so as to not prolong the fall unnecessarily. Yet the pressure, while occasionally exhilarating, can often as not feel a striking burden — even if others’ are, by comparison, far graver.

Such has been on Hobson Jobson’s mind as he relocates to the wonderful but daunting National Archives of India, one of the several collections upon which he hopes to identify a dissertation topic. (An acquaintances’ remark in London last week that one might logically finish training in both commerce and law in the same time required of a history doctorate did little to settle the nerves.) The collection amassed therein makes the heart flutter: a trove of Home Office records, foreign correspondences, political memos, and sundry materials that paint a far richer portrait of Empire’s grist than the British Library’s more staid collections from the former India Office.

Finding things, of course, proves somewhat more burdensome. Once you’ve located the building — to the east of Shashtri Bhavan, and with a far more institutional interior than its grand facade would suggest — you must go through the requisite bureaucratic channels, armed with letters from department and embassy alike. (As a price comparison, with what one pays for that letter at the embassy, one could purchase about 141 full lunches at the Archives’ canteen.) This process is militated by the kindness of the Research Room director, who has overseen at least a generation and a half of Indian scholarship. One must not, of course, neglect a careful reading of the Research Room rules, which state in part:

7.4 No person will be allowed to bring eatable into the Research Room. Smoking, chewing ‘Pan’ etc., is strictly prohibited in the Research Room. A lounge adjacent to the Research Room has been provided for these purposes.

Hobson Jobson has just begun the process which follows: a search for materials that often appear untouched for close to or just beyond a century, unaided by either computer or card catalogue. There are a mix of finding aids, ranging from the meticulous indexes of the Home Office to handwritten lists of Raj miscellanea. There is deep excitement in this process; yet as one seeks to identify that annal which has not yet been explored, a certain fear wallows up, ever as certainly. One might look to the above document, a requisitioning form for archival materials (collected thrice daily and consummated some three hours after receipt), and imagine the journey to follow.

Archival hounds will no doubt be familiar with that pithy mix of thrill and sadness which stems from chancing upon a linked document or two which hints at something small but compelling — and leads to little more. The Ginzburgian talents among us might make more of these pearls, yet lesser minds must content themselves with the contained satisfaction of an irregular glimpse. For Hobson Jobson, enmeshed in files yet bereft of destination, these are but the only pearls during this brief detour in the India Office.

Today’s glint concerns Frederic Pincott: according to today’s research, a celebrated Hindustani philologist, friend of Gandhi late in life, and by this discovery, impatient moralist unceremoniously dismissed by the various officials to whom he indignantly petitioned. The subject of Pincott’s ire was no less than the felling of Indian fetuses in the vernacular, and your correspondent found his supplications both quaint and irksome — as, it appears, did the Earl of Kimberley.

I reproduce below the full series of correspondences, found in IOR/L/PJ/6/120, File 565 22 Mar 1884, and IOR/L/PJ/6/122, File 691 22 Mar-7 Apr 1884, respectively. There is little joyful in the topic, of course, yet there is something familiar in the back-and-forth, and it is interesting to imagine the moral fissues within Indian and Raj society: I suspect that Sanjam Ahluwalia’s recent Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1887 - 1947 might have something to say ont he matter.

The first petition, sent by the indignant Mr. Pincott after happening upon a particularly offensive passage in his readings, is as follows, with all emphases Hobson Jobson’s own.

77 Summer Road
Peckham - SE
March 22, 1884

Pt. Hon the Earl of Kimberley

My Lord

I venture to bring to your Lordship’s notice the fact that a book on domestic medicine, in wide circulation in northern India, and printed in the simple vernacular of the country, contains a paragraph instructing women in the various ways of producing abortion. In a country in which the remarriage of widows is forbidden, and in which the practice of child-marriage occasions an enormous number of young widows, such information is peculiarly dangerous; and has led to thousands of crimes held to be equivalent to murder.

The book to which I allude is named Amrita-Sagara, published at Lucknow, by Munshi Nawal Kishore; and at p. 455 of the fourth edition will be found these words: -

“बहुत मैथुन के करने से मार्ग के चलने से ज्वर…” [Hindi text excised.]

The literal translation is as follows:-

“Abortion and miscarriage may be brought on in women by excessive sexual indulgence, over-walking, fever, fasting, a blow, eating during indigestion, running, inducing vomiting, taking violent purges, eating pungent, acrid, hot or harsh things, sitting on an uneven seat, sudden fright, and the insertion of a pointed instrument into the womb.”

Comment, I trust, is needless. The reason for troubling you is this:- when the matter was brought to the notice of the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces, he replied, in an official letter (No. 40(8?)3), 29th Nov. 1883), that he could see no necessity to interfere in the affair!!!

I sincerely trust that this letter to your Lordship will not meet to the usual fate of extra-official communications; for it is a matter that, obviously, ought not to be discussed in Parliament, or the newspapers. A peremptory order should be promptly issued for the suppression of so odious an encouragement to the breach of the laws of both God and man.”

Most respectfully yours,
Frederic Pincott

After two weeks’ silence, the incensed Mr. Pincott took to the pin — eer, pen — once more.

77 Summer Road
Peckham - SE
April 7, 1884

Pt. Hon. the Earl of Kimberley,

My Lord

On March 22 I ventured to call your Lordship’s attention to a criminal paragraph in a Hindi book named the Amrita-Sagara. I have just received from India a copy of a newspaper, called the Bharata-Mitra, dated 3 January 1884, in which the same fact is publicly commented on by a native gentleman called Harischandra. The fear of advertising the improper information can be the only reason which would induce your Lordship to hesitate to interfere in the matter; but that reason can no longer operate now that public notice has been called to the circumstance. The suppression of the paragraph from all subsequent editions of the book seems now positively necessary.

I have the honour to be, my Lord, Your Lordship’s most Obedient Servant.

Frederic Pincott

The I.C.S. secretary who forwarded Mr. Pincott’s letter was bemusedly unsympathetic.

The writer of these letters wishes [the] State to suppress a book on domestic medicine published in Lucknow, because it states various ways in which abortion & miscarriage in women may be produced. But if this book is to be suppressed, apparently half the other medical books in the world might be suppressed also. There is nothing to lead to the conclusion that the subject is referred to in any improper spirit or with any object

The Lt. Gov. of the N.W.P. has already been appealed to [by Pincott] and is stated to have answered that he has no reason to interfere; and a draft reply to the same purpose is now submitted.

J.A. Godley, informed of the matter, shot down the morality play with little ceremony.

30 April 1884

Sir

I am directed by the Earl of Kimberley to acknowledge the receipt of your two letters dated the 22nd of March and the 7th April regarding a medical book entitled Amrita-Sagara published in Lucknow, - and to inform you in reply that his Lordship considers it unnecessary to move in this matter.

H.S.M.
S’d J.A. Godley.

Much of Hobson Jobson’s requests this morning have had to do with the formation — feverish, I would venture — of cooperative societies and banks towards the close of the 19th century in North India. The abundant literature on the aforementioned suggests a radical push towards such organizations by colonial administrators, and one enjoyable document has been a slim, hastily-published volume entitled Hints on the Starting and Management of Central Co-Operative Banks (Provisional), published by one B.A. Collins, Offg. Registrar of Co-operative Societies in Bihar and Orissa. (V/27/340/14, in case anyone’s looking.)

Who should serve on such a cooperative, a reader might ask? Mr. Collins suggests that

Care should be taken that they choose really useful men. The voluble talker who thrusts himself forward or the “clever” one whom the raiyats admire for his smartness should be avoided or at least an intermingling of thrifty and solid men achieved. (4)

Lest irrational exuberance takes hold, we also might note that

No pains should be spared to make [the villagers] understand their relations with hte bank or their liability as shareholders whose shares carry a multiple liability in case of failure. If they understand that their own societies may be called on to pay the debts of an insolvent society up to five or ten times the face value of their shares, they will be less willing to agree to every society getting all it wants and may give useful information. [...] It is worthwhile therefore to make great efforts to disabuse them of the idea that their interests are contrary to those of the central bank, as once free of it, they will be of great assistance and it will be far easier to control the societies. (5)

Hobson Jobson’s italics, of course. Aux armes!