Colonial Clerks: A Social History of Deprivation and Domination

This book reconstructs experience of deprivation and domination on the part of clerks in East-India Company employment and later in colonial civil service. The Bengali clerks were economically impoverished and bureaucratically dominated. Surprisingly, the English-educated, upper caste, urban or semi-urban, politically and culturally progressive middle class Bengalis, who first joined this modern occupation, were always at the receiving end of social stigma. At home they were subjected to their wives ‘rebukes and banters due to their low pay and low social esteem. Even the keranchi-drivers and the prostitutes, though definitely placed much lower in the social scale, did not spare them. This book examines the process of their identity formation (both at office and at societal level), their appalling work condition (discrimination in recruitment, pay, promotion, and even in seating arrangement within office and a good measure of bureaucratic domination by British office masters), and their wretched existential situation (reflected in their food-intake, attitude to health and hygiene, access to accommodation and transportation, provision for education and culture for self and family, their mentality and in their sexuality and conjugality). Triangulation of a number of methods, techniques and data is used in this research. This includes colonial official documents, documents of relevant associations and unions, newspapers, novels, poems, dramas, satires, proverbs, drawings and sketches. This work is actually a part of a larger project on social history of government clerks between the time of East-India Company and 2000.