The South Asian Studies Council presents
John Mathew:
“To Fashion a Fauna for British India.”
This talk examines the development of taxonomic zoology in India between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, coincident with British colonisation of the region. In so doing it draws into question conventional dyads of colonising and colonised nations, with the vectors of influence deterministic in one direction by suggesting that the flow of information is in fact reciprocal, if asymmetrical. Central to my argument is the ‘translocate’, a term that I have coined (drawing on classical cytogenetics), to describe a specialist expatriate whose long years in the area of colonisation renders him (I use the word advisedly) dually authorized to speak for it, both to the ‘native’ voice as well as to the distant expert who has never laid eyes on the region in question. Early natural history studies of the region involve French ‘voyageurs-naturalistes’ that visit the Indian subcontinent for relatively brief periods as part of larger expeditions to return material to the central despatching body, ‘Le Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle’, thus contributing to France’s domination in the field during the early nineteenth century. However, functionaries from or working for Great Britain, as employees of the East India Company, and after the Great Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857, of the Crown, come to dominate the study of the increasingly specialised disciplines of zoology, botany and geology over the following century, in the main, however, depending upon their knowledge of the ground under study at first hand. The translocate will continue to play a pivotal role in writing the zoological treatises of South Asia; however, along with the metropolitan taxonomist in London, the voice of the ‘native’ gets belatedly recognised in the twentieth century in a complex and involved series of taxonomic texts grouped under the heading “The Fauna of British India”, even as the region under thrall makes its own concerted bid for independence, an ultimately successful effort that will lead to the formation of the independent nations of India and Pakistan.