‘Cooking’ the books: American anthropologist picks up in Sindh where the British left off

The Police Act of 1861 was used in Ireland to control a ‘rebel’ colony.

KARACHI:

Local anthropologists and historians are a rare and dying breed in Pakistan. This is why it is so heartening to find someone from another country go to great lengths to uncover archival information that could help redefine the history of our present.

One such anthropologist is Matthew Cook who has a peculiar interest in Sindh and its history under British rule. “A lot of researchers study the annexation of Sindh and then just stop,” he told The Express Tribune in an interview. “So, they usually have studies up to 1843 and then just stop. An anthropologist, I saw this as an opportunity to explore the socio-cultural aftermath of the annexation in Sindh.”

Cook studied anthropology at the University of California in Santa Cruz where he took a course on South Asia with an Indian professor who inspired him to scratch beneath the surface. What followed was an academic study of South Asia, its history, comparative politics and nationalism during a Master’s degree at the University of Texas. After meeting and interacting with Sindhis and people belonging to Sindh, Cook then decided to focus on this area.

For his dissertation, Cook took up the socio-cultural aftermath of colonial Sindh from 1843 to 1848. This, Cook describes, was a period when the British started administrating Sindh. He received a Fulbright scholarship for the dissertation and proceeded to uncover official correspondence and personal letters in the British Library in London and at the Maharashtra State library in Mumbai, which have the most records from the British period in India.

“Due to restrictions by the US government on Pakistan, for the nuclear [testing], the Americans are not allowed funding to come to research in Pakistan,” lamented Cook. The restrictions have been relaxed since 2008, but Karachi, and Sindh are still in the red zone.

The Sindh Police Act of 1861

Ironically, Cook’s timing could not have been better. The British commissionerate system and the Police Act of 1861 were restored just days before he landed in Karachi. “You would not have asked me this question if I was here a week earlier,” he joked about how history had managed to become news again. In fact, he was the chief guest at the launch of Altaf Hussain’s book on Saturday. Altaf Hussain’s party has been opposed to the recent changes to bring in the Police Act of 1861 and the commissionerate system.

Cook’s research focuses on the period when Charles Napier was the governor of Sindh and Sindh, along with the rest of India was being transferred from the British East India Company to the British Empire. Napier, Cook says, was a British man who had grown up in Ireland, a country that had faced British colonisation, that was similar to what was being done in Sindh.

The Police Act enforced in 1861 was a law to control the public that the British had created to control the population in Ireland.

Napier, who was eager to impress the governor general with his innovative methods, suggested that the police force be created to ‘tackle the locals’.

Cook said that while Napier was long gone before the Act was enforced by the British Empire, many of its policies which were in practice or in the process of being implemented under the East India company, were simply “rolled on” under the Empire. “The implementation of many policies were just rolling over from the East India companies, and this was not an isolated event, as the British had implemented many of the laws and policies elsewhere (other colonies),”  he said.

This meant that the police law, which was reminiscent of the military, was enforced in Sindh. Cook said that for the British, all that mattered was themselves, while the colonised people were of no value to them. Hence, for the British it was nothing more than an experiment in which system yielded the best results while dealing with a colonised population and who, for as far as the British were concerned, were an unruly bunch that needed to be tamed by force so they could provide profit.

Within this era, Cook’s research focussed on how the British subdued local tribes. They used tactics such as stopping food supplies for some tribes, forcing them to reconcile with the British, waging violent campaigns against those who chose to fight back. His research uncovered how in some instances the British carried out massacres.

In his study, Cook found that brutality was at the core of the British colonial empire. “I find it important to tell people and make them realise that brutality was a core part of the British colonial empire,” he said.

Sindhi nationality

Cook initially meant to focus on the social and cultural aspects of colonisation in Sindh, especially the use of language.

“Even when I got married to my Rajasthani wife in India, I had to get married according to the 1862 marriage law created by the British to tackle interfaith and cross-community marriage,” reminisced Cook.

According to Cook, the British were trying out a more “enlightened” approach in Sindh. After replacing the Mughals as the masters of India, they had administrative problems with the use of Persian as an official language.

The British realised that this was bad practice and created problems in dealing with the locals who often used a vernacular language diametrically different to Persian.

Following a relatively successful experiment in introducing Urdu as an official language in Punjab, the British decided to implement Sindhi as an official language in Sindh. The only problem was that there were some 17 to 18 dialects of the language that were being used, along with a number of scripts including the Persian-Arabic script and the Sanskrit-based scripts.

Cook said that the British had a choice between the two script system as proposed by George Stack and Richard Burton. They proposed the Sanskrit-based script and a Persian-Arabic script, respectively.

“The British had originally planned to implement Stack’s Sanskrit-based script, however, since Stack had died by the time they decided to implement it, they reverted to Burton’s system consisting Persian-Arabic script,” he explained.

The more difficult choice was the dialect of Sindhi that the British would choose to implement as the official language. Cook revealed that the British worked on a rewards-based system, and chose to reward those tribes from whom they profited the most and with whom they had the best relations. This also helped the British who then used the rewards system to play up the tribal enmity. And so it was decided under Sir Bartle Frere that the Vicholi dialect would constitute the official Sindhi language, and it would be written in a Persian-Arabic script.

“It strikes me when Sindhis say that their Sindhi national heritage dates back to Moen jo Daro, and I think about how the national identity is in part due to the imposing a Sindhi language in Sindh,” said Cook.

The anthropologist has already published two books on Sindh: Interpreting the Sindhi World: Essays on Society and History (edited with Michel Boivin) and Observing Sindh: Selected Reports by Edward Paterson Del Hoste.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 18^th, 2011.