2017/01/01 by Sumit Chakrabarti · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Art history #Asian studies #Bengali #Caste #China #Class (philosophy) #Epistemology #Gender studies #Genealogy #History #Law #Linguistics #Memoir #Philosophy #Political science #Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies #Raja #Salary #Section (typography) #Sociology #South Asian Cinema and Culture #Space (punctuation)
paper · doi:10.1163/15685314-04501003
crossref issued 2017/01/01 · crossref published 2017/01/01 · crossref published-print 2017/01/01 · openalex publication_date 2017/01/01 · crossref created 2017/02/03 · crossref deposited 2021/12/14 · crossref indexed 2025/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/07
A much neglected section of the 19th Century imperial bhadrolok population during British rule in India was the Bengali clerk or the kerani. While his English education and caste identity likened him to the middle-class gentleman, his pattern of work, low salary, lack of opportunities for improvement, pushed him closer to the labour class. But was this neglected section of the “bhadrolok” always without his representational space? In this paper, I shall study examples from clerks’ memoirs and from contemporary literature and read them alongside the violently repressive The Clerk’s Manual published in 1889, to see if the clerk was secretly discovering a heterotopia of his own.