Buried in the Arkheia : Writing the Female Infant into Being

by Pashmina Murthy
© 2008

Abstract:

The colonial discourse on female infanticide in nineteenth-century India was marked by an intense acquiring, transcribing, and compiling of information through statistics, testimonials, translations, hearsay, and essays. All information collected afforded the British government an additional glimpse into a hidden and secret world, a world to which they were not privy. The minute detailing of the various methods of crime, the specific performative aspects of the moments preceding the infant's murder, and the language that a particular community used to speak of the event were fashioned to promulgate the fiction of complete awareness and familiarity. The desire for knowingness manifested itself through a cultural voyeurism that drew a narrative from the aural or textual into the visual and showed its primacy in imagination. In this article, I focus on an early and influential attempt at this knowingness by examining Col. Alexander Walker's observations on the Jahrejah Rajputs in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Through an examination of history, memory, and the archive, I look at the way archival memory in colonial India engages with the absence of the female body and her absence in discourse.