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Hayden J. Bellenoit, Bhavani Raman. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial India., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 834–835, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.834
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Document Raj is a novel and compelling analysis of the role paper played in the formation of the early colonial state in India. Bhavani Raman's work fits within an emergent scholarly literature that examines the Indian scribe. She takes her analysis by affixing it to the process of colonial state formation. Focusing on colonial south India, Raman examines how the early bureaucratic tendrils of governance and administration altered extant practices in writing, memorization, and attestation, which, she argues, was central to the emergence of a “textual polity that represented a new disposition to writing” (p. 193). Raman's main argument is twofold. One is that the creation of a documentary regime was crucial for the early colonial state in south India in establishing its paper mastery and a racialized hierarchy of “trustworthy Europeans” and “mendacious natives.” The second is that the transition to what she terms a “document Raj” created new modes of attestation, documentation, and evidence that rendered most precolonial practices obsolete while privileging others, such as chronologically organized records on veritably attested paper. Drawing on Tamil and English sources, Raman describes precolonial written mnemonic traditions of the village karanam (scribe) and kanakkan (accountant). She diligently describes how these practices were co-opted, transformed, and subordinated during the emergence of British rule across south India.
