Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa’s evocative archive poses more questions than it answers, characterized by its emphasis on recording her husband Gerard Gustavus Ducarel’s life and relationship of patronage to her brothers. Silence regarding her thoughts, movements, and preferences still characterize this archive, complicating our attempts to understand the life of the woman spoken about in its letters. Even the items owned by Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa are most significant when they gesture at the many ways in which her presence was erased from institutional archives of the East India Company, official news reports of travellers from India to Europe. Even when she appeared in written correspondence, she typically was relegated to the margins. Anjali Arondekar in her book [For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive](https://muse.jhu.edu/book/68904) demonstrated justified skepticism at historians’ attempts to “recover” evidence of women’s sexuality in the colonial archive. She compellingly observes that the logic compelling historians to seek out women’s “invisible” sexualities in the archive rests upon a logic in which a desire for limitless access is justified. She takes as the subject of her research, instead, the troubling logic of historians that presumes an entitlement to access of increasingly spectacularized sexuality. Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa’s sexuality is not available to us in this archive, nor do we seek to recover or make claims about her sexuality beyond observing the troubling fact of her young age at the time of the birth of her first child, indicating that she was a child of twelve when she first cohabited with Gerard Gustavus Ducarel. Keeping the caution of Arondekar’s research in mind, this archive attempts to encourage an ethical approach to “recovered” items that promise to fill in crucial gaps in the historical narrative. Users of this archive should cultivate awareness of the silences that remain in the family archive, paying close attention to the ways in which her memory was, and was not, preserved in a family archive.
In literary readings of colonial archives, Gayatri Spivak famously critiqued the ways in which “The Third World Woman” in the form of the Rani of Sirmur “emerges [in the archive] only when she is needed in the space of imperial production” (270). What happens when an individual like the Rani of Sirmur, a woman associated with the typology of “third world women” that historians have become accustomed to characterizing as the voiceless and nameless, suddenly seem to have recovered, however faintly, a voice and a name? How do we accommodate additional evidence of native women who were intentionally erased from the colonial archive, while resisting the temptation to make the “end of the story” anything but necessarily provisional (the phrase “end of the story” is taken from Spivak, p. 270.)?
A revisionist approach to the Rani of Sirmur, written by Arik Moran, demonstrates that on closer examination of colonial archives along with local and oral histories, there are many archival remnants of Guleri Rani that are ambiguous or even contradict Spivak’s reading that characterizes her threat to become sati as the only “Speech Act” available to her. At the same time, Moran’s revisionist history of Guleri Rani, which successfully demonstrates the porousness between European and Pahari attitudes to sati, risks depending on facile assumptions that “intermarriage” between a European and a native woman is somehow inconsistent with the European man’s absolute commitment to the imperial project.The revisionist approach argues that expanding one’s field of enquiry to new, previously under-appreciated source material, can recover aspects of the “real Rani” or other native women and furthermore demonstrate the presence of female agency under-estimated by some postcolonial approaches.
The approach of this digital archive has much in common with Morak’s revisionist approach, in that it asks “what can we learn from new material scholars have not yet considered? How might these new sources complicate existing narratives and posit more productive explanations for how women lived in relationships of cohabitation?” However, there are also several risks posed by the approach that we remain guarded against. Company servants’ deep, even intimate knowledge of a locality (represented most evocatively through cohabitations with women) did not erase the inescapable dynamics of imperial power. Nor did the existence of sentiment render relationships with native women equal or ipso facto confer upon the women uncommon power. This archive, and the research growing out of it, is the latest iteration of what should be an on-going, ever-unfolding conversation about women who could wield social and political power within the strict confines of imperial power dynamics.
Arondekar, Anjali. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).
Moran, Arik. “‘The Rani of Sirmur’ Revisited: Sati and Sovereignty in Theory and Practice,” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 2 (2015): 302–335.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Rani of Sirmur,” History & Theory 24, no. 3 (October 1985): 247–272.