Letters of the Labouring Poor: The Art of Letter Writing in Colonial India

Kumar, Arun

Abstract

This article examines the emergence of mass letter-writing in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial north India, a region marked by the growth of an unprecedented labour mobility, postal expansion, vernacular print, and workers' literacy. It narrates how workers' and their family members' abilities and failures to read and write letters shaped their experiences of the emerging transnational labour mobility and explains how the letter-writing by the subaltern produced new sociabilities and anxieties that both colonial and indigenous elites feared and attempted to discipline and control through letter-writing manuals. It argues that the letter-writing culture in India did not merely sustain new mobilities but also produced a dominant social world which ensured that the hierarchies of caste, gender, and class were clearly mapped onto the domain of letter-writing. Hitherto unexplored (Hindi) letter-writing manuals and educational, postal, and labour records are used to challenge the rigidities of labour, communication, and literary histories of modern South Asia where the illiteracy of the labouring poor is an assumed fact.

Citation

Kumar, A. (2020). Letters of the Labouring Poor: The Art of Letter Writing in Colonial India. Past and Present, 246(1), 149-190. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz035

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 23, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Dec 27, 2019
• Publication Date: Feb 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: Aug 10, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 28, 2021
• Journal: Past & Present
• Print ISSN: 0031-2746
• Electronic ISSN: 1477-464X
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 246
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 149-190
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz035
• Keywords: Cultural Studies; History, Labour History, Literary History, Subaltern Classes, Workers' Schooling
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4530509
• Publisher URL: https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/246/1/149/5688049
• Additional Information: This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Past & Present following peer review. The version of record Arun Kumar, Letters of the Labouring Poor: The Art of Letter Writing in Colonial India, Past & Present, Volume 246, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages 149–190 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz035