Oral History vs. Official Archive: Two Ways of Knowing Mahua Dabar

 

Oral History vs. Official Archive: Two Ways of Knowing Mahua Dabar

 

Shaleen Kumar Singh,

Professor,

Department of English,

Swami Shukdevanand College, Shahjahanpur,

Uttar Pradesh, India.

 

Abstract:

This article examines the contrasting epistemologies of colonial archival records and oral tradition through the historical case of Mahua Dabar, a village implicated in the killing of five British officers during the uprising of 1857. The official colonial record—particularly the 1860 judicial proceedings concerning Mehurban Khan—represents what may be termed the colonial archive: a bureaucratic and juridical system designed to produce legally verifiable truths. Drawing on theoretical insights from Michel Foucault, the study argues that such archives function as technologies of power that determine what can be recorded, heard, and recognized as historical evidence. Within this framework, individuals appear primarily as administrative subjects—defendants, witnesses, or suspects—while broader experiences of community life remain structurally excluded.

In contrast, the article explores oral tradition as a distinct mode of historical knowledge grounded in communal memory and social practice. Using Walter Ong’s theory of the psychodynamics of orality and Paul Connerton’s concept of embodied social memory, the study shows how oral narratives preserve dimensions of the past that archives cannot capture, including motive, grief, moral meaning, agency, and collective identity. Oral traditions of Mahua Dabar transmit memories of the 1857 events through narrative performance, ritual commemoration, and shared social practices that sustain community identity despite the colonial destruction and dispersal of the village.

Engaging with the methodological debates of Subaltern Studies scholars such as Ranajit Guha, Shahid Amin, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the article argues that archival and oral sources represent two distinct “grammars of memory.” Rather than privileging one over the other, it proposes a dialogical methodology that critically juxtaposes both modes to produce a more nuanced understanding of subaltern pasts.

Keywords: Oral Tradition, Colonial Archive, Mahua Dabar (1857 Uprising), Social Memory, Subaltern Historiography

Introduction: The Archive and Its Silences

During the fall of 1860, the Lieutenant Governor of the North Western Province in the then colony of Nynee Tal had an administrative precinct put together a corpus of judicial transcripts recording the trial of Mehurban Khan who was alleged to have participated in the 1857 murder of five British officers in the village of Mohwa Dabur. These are the documents of deposit, cross-examination, administrative correspondence that make up what could be called the official record of Mahua Dabar which is a monument of text constructed by the colonial apparatus to prosecute, punish, and hold administrators accountable.

It is not merely the juxtaposition of the official colonial archive and the oral tradition that coexists with it that adds to the historiography, but rather gives rise to two different ontologies of knowing, each driven by different epistemological logics, which maintain different categories of truth and each of which authorizes different types of claim over the events in question and their importance.

The current work falls into this epistemological split by turning to the psychodynamics of the oral (Walter Ong), the sociology of the social memory (Paul Connerton), and the body of subaltern oral-history writing scattered across South Asian studies, especially to the writings of Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty. The main interrogatives are therefore: how do each of the modalities produce truth? What do the official archives hold that the oral tradition can never hold and the reverse holds true as well. Which stories do the oral traditions hold alone?

The argument is presented in five different parts. Section II describes the epistemic design of the colonial archive and uses Foucauldian canon analysis to shed light on the colonial archive as technology of power. Part III uses the schema of Ong to question the cognitive and social roles of oral tradition in societies with no or no access to literary culture. IV sets in motion Connerton and his construct of social memory to explain how the collective past of the Mahua Dabar people is actually being passed down by corporeality, ritual and commemorative praxis and not by textual artifacts. Section V interprets the conflict of the colonial record of Singh and the oral record of Ansari as a methodological instance of the epistemological politics of the oral-history practice of South Asia.

Part VI ends by reflecting on an authentic dialogic approach - an approach that does not privilege either of the registers - and theorizes about its possible forms once it is deployed to examine the communities designated for exclusion in the written record.

The Colonial Archive as Technology of Truth

In analyzing the October 1860 Proceedings of the North Western Provinces Judicial (Criminal) Department through the perspective of historical methodology, what one might think of is essentially a legal document: a precise take on the depositions, an encrypted series of administrative letters, and a collection of judicial resolutions confirming the sentence of life-long transportation that was to be enforced on Mehurban Khan. However, they operate in a closer way to the Foucauldian vision of an archive as formulated in The Archaeology of Knowledge. The Proceedings as such are a regime according to which the manifestation of statements appears, according to which the discourse can permit such and such, and which consequently define the verities about Mahua Dabar which can be reached by the historical discourse (Foucault 126-31). This is not just an archival arrangement that documents events, but it creates them as historical objects.

A number of characteristics of the Proceedings shed light on the productive character of this archival system. To begin with, the archive is built on the basis of one juridical question the guilt or innocence of Mehurban Khan and all the testimonies are shaped under this question. The deposition of Badal Khan about the scattering of the Mohwa Dabur inhabitants is thus rendered important also in as far as it connects the web of links by which the village was engaged in the massacre of British officers. The fact that his catalogue of locations where shopkeepers moved is: some at Kulwaree, some at Buhadorpore, some at Runwapore, some at Gobindgunge, some at Nuggur, some at Gai Ghat, and some at Coosowry, is thus recorded as evidence of communal complicity, and not as a simple human geographic description. Epistemological scheme of the archive determines what elements of the community life should be allowed to be included.

Second, the archive gives a grammatical arrangement to the subjects. Every deposition begins with what the Proceedings refer to as the usual question a formulaic inquiry into the name of the witness, the name of his father, his caste, his age, his residence and occupation. This formula not only accumulates administrative data, but also scripts the witness into a taxonomy of legible, recognizable subjects in a colony. According to Bernard Cohn currently writing in Paula Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, the British project in India was an endeavor of knowledge-making no less than political domination: the census, the gazetteer and the judicial record were jointly a command of grammar over colonial subjects (Cohn 4-5). The formulaic opening of the proceedings, therefore, serves as a grammatical command, which makes a person a member of the categories, caste, profession, residence by which the colonial state perceived people as legible subjects.

Third and, perhaps, what is most important in epistemological argument of this paper, the archive structurally cannot record what it does not pursue. The canonical expression of Gayatri Spivak, the subaltern cannot speak, should be understood not to mean the literal silence of people in colonialism, but rather as an observation of the unequal nature of the archive discourse: speech is a relation between an utterer and an audience, and the colonial archive is designed to hear only that which can be used to its juridical benefit (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak? 308). Mehurban Khan writes at some length in his depositions, but his evidence is filtered through the requirements of legal self-defence, the subjectivity of his relation to Mahua Dabar--the flavour of his life there, his understanding of what and why has happened--is not inquired into and so is not forthcoming. The archive is the record of the skeletal outline of events; it cannot maintain the living body of community experience.

The Psychodynamics of Oral Tradition: Ong and the Living Word

The most comprehensive theoretical explanation that has been given on the differences between oral and literate modes of preservation and transmission of knowledge is that provided by Walter Ong in his book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). The main argument that Ong puts forward is that literacy is not merely a more effective embodiment of orality, but rather, a unique form of cognitive technology that reconfigures the human consciousness, hence altering how communities arrange, store and retrieve their knowledge (Ong 78 82). To know what oral tradition can tell us about Mahua Dabar that the archive fails to do, we need to first comprehend what Ong has meant by his notion of the psychodynamics of orality.

Ong argues that oral cultures cannot store information outside their bodies, there are no records to go through, no index to look, no paperwork to save. Knowledge therefore has to be retained in forms of mnemonics which cannot be embodied in literate cultures: formulaic, rhythmic, narrative repetitive, and most importantly the implementation of knowledge in human relationships and performance of life (Ong 33-36). So what an oral community retains is not a record but a living, socially inculcated tradition - knowledge which is still alive precisely because it is still used to serve the current needs of the community and it is constantly practised in situations that give it meaning.

This has two implications on the case of Mahua Dabar that should be highlighted. To begin with, oral tradition maintains what is communally important but not what is juridically important. What was significant to the prosecutorial apparatus was documented in the colonial archive, what was important to the community itself became memorized in oral tradition: the names of the dead, the reasons why they resisted, the memory of dispossession, the moral meaning of what happened in June 1857. These are not only various contents, but various epistemological types. The question in the archive is who is guilty? Oral tradition poses: so who are we, and what is become of us?

Second, oral tradition is not an object. Ong underlines that oral societies keep the past alive by a process which he terms as homeostasis: the things of the past which become irrelevant to the present can disappear and never be reborn again by the oral tradition, and the things of the past which retain their relevance in the present are kept alive and adapted to the present (Ong 46 49). It is not any dearth of memory but rather a different relation to time: oral tradition of Mahua Dabar is not aimed at celebrating a predetermined version of 1857 but rather at maintaining a live relation between the past and the present in the service of self-understanding of the community. Thus when Ansari rediscovers the oral tradition of Mahua Dabar it is not just the rediscovery of a concealed repository; it is the recording of a vitalized cognitive and social activity.

The opponents of Ong, more specifically, Ruth Finnegan, argue that there is a danger of a simplistic reductive dichotomy in the way he frames oral and literate cultures. They underline that the majority of societies are at the continuum, and are not attached to either pole (Finnegan 1415). This fact is particularly relevant to Mahua Dabar in the nineteenth century, which was not isolated by the permeation of literacy, where a Tehsildar clerk, a canangoing (revenue officer) and administrative documents were present in the village points to a community that existed in a complex relationship between oral and written knowledge. Even then, the analytical framework developed by Ong still has significant usefulness in the ability to draw structural differences between what the colonial archive maintained and what oral tradition held on the situation where it is not necessarily absolute.

Social Memory and the Body: Connerton's Framework Applied

How Societies Remember (1989) by Paul Connerton formulates a theory of social memory that is complementary to that outlined by Ong on orality, especially where violent dispersion has taken place within the community. According to Connerton, no forms of social memory are the most persistent and persistent forms of social memory are neither cognitive nor inscribed, but embodied and performative, they are transmitted in gestures, rituals, postures, and commemorative practices, and they are not expressed in words (Connerton 7274). He makes a critical distinction between inscribed memory, which is based on written or otherwise externally marked evidence, and incorporated memory, which is coded into the body itself in the form of habit, ritual and performance.

The shifting about of the population of Mahua Dabar after the Ghair-Chiragi decree, into Bhyropoor, Kulwaree, Bahadorpore, Runwporter, Gobindgunge, Nuggur, Gai Ghat, and Coosowry, as testified by Badal Khan, was an assault in incorporated memory. The characteristic space practices of the community including the common path to the well, the structure of the market, the season of agricultural events and the physical structure of the village by which the body is oriented to its historical story are broken when a community is geographically dispersed: it is the collective experience of space that makes the body age and become a part of the story. The very notion of dispersal is what Connerton, in the idea of the habit-memory, her concept of bodily knowledge transmitted without any teaching by partaking in everyday shared life, is specifically killed (Connerton 89 -94).

But what lasts beyond dispersal can be seen through the paradigm of Connerton as well. The ceremonies of commemoration, the ritual reenactment with which Connerton locates the very core of social memory, are portably so where physical spaces are not. As Mahua Dabar leaks, it did not only carry with it the cognitive content of its past, but also the ritual forms in which that past has been re-enacted and confirmed by the whole community on an annual basis. In that respect, oral tradition cannot only be verbal, but it is a performance. It is not merely that the stories told of June 1857 are conveyed but rather a communal ritual and they are imprinted in the bodies of the people such that they are erosive to the loss of time and place.

The subsequent output of Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (2009), recognizes place memory, the memory that is specifically tied to topography and the connection of the body to physical space, as being especially susceptible to the effects of modernity and the colonial displacement. The ghaire chiragi decree, with its levelling of the Mahua Dabar to the ground, produced just the sort of attack upon place memory, which the model used by Connerton would have predicted: it broke the material support by which the spatial orientation of the community was attached to its own past, and therefore made forgetting a necessity. The fact that the oral tradition survived this attack as evidenced by the fact that Ansari remembers living memory of the events, then, is not just as an event occurring in history but goes to show the strength of the incorporated and performative memory in the face of the archival violence of colonial erasure.

Oral History in South Asian Studies: The Methodological Politics

The use of oral history as supplementation and redress to colonial archives is not new to South Asian subaltern studies, but with a long tradition of self-conscious methodology with respect to the epistemological politics it implies. These founding theorists of the Subaltern Studies project, Ranajit Guha, Shahid Amin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and many others, at once understood that the colonial archive was not the discontented guard of data, but ideologically biased matter, and that the reconstruction of subaltern consciousness had necessarily to involve methodological approaches beyond the usual archival work (Guha, Elementary Aspects 117).

The formulation made by Ranajit Guha in his famous book titled The Prose of Counter-Insurgency (1983) is the localization of the structural issue in the most accurate manner: the documents of colonial sources about peasant rebellion are written not only in the prism of power but also in an inability to eliminate the expressions of the same consciousness on which the colonialist rule based its authority. Guha calls this the primary discourse of counter-insurgency and he claims that the historian should read against this discourse - paying close attention to the silences, omissions and contradictions in the archive to reconstruct the voice of the subaltern (Guha, “Prose” 2-4). This approach that Guha refers to as reading the archive against the grain is a kind of reverse oral history: it tries to recreate the oral, social aspect of popular consciousness based upon textual artefacts created specifically to erase it.

The most advanced instance of this kind of approach in the subcontinent is provided in Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992 (1995). This is exactly the precedent that Amin built his project around Mahua Dabar, to compare the colonial and judicial history of a violent incident in 1922, with the oral history of the remaining residents of the area and their descendants, and to analyze how the two ways of knowing create different objects out of the same events. What Amin had found was not simply a case of oral memory keeping what the archive leaves out, but rather of the two modes developing radically different time-images: the colonial record establishes events in a legal series of cause, action, and consequence, whereas oral memory establishes them in a repetitive series of commemoration, narrative re-enactment and self-identification (within a community) (9-15). This distinction in time is epistemologically central: the two modes are not merely the bearers of divergent contents, but they represent divergent temporal organisation logics.

The methodological stakes are further raised at the level of the work by Dipesh Chakrabarty, who in his book, Provincedialising Europe, (2000) wonders whether even the recovery of oral tradition can avoid the epistemological paradigm of Western historicism. His differentiation between the History 1 of the universalising, secularising time of European historical thought and the heterogeneous, non-linear, affective pasts which cannot be reduced to the categories of History 1 is directly applicable to the Mahua Dabar case (Chakrabarty 4771). Oral tradition of Mahua Dabar can possibly represent a kind of historical consciousness that is essentially incommensurable with the time logic of the colonial archive; to homogenize it in the terms of the categories of the archive is to reproduce, at the methodological level, the epistemological violence, which the archive has first performed. Therefore, the project conducted by Singh and Ansari is associated not only with the recovery of the divergent content, but with the negotiation of a root epistemological incommensurability.

Another approach dimension is delivered by {History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000 by Sumit Guha (2019), which establishes a long-term curve on the formation of social memory in the subcontinent and shows that the oral-written divide has never been so vivid in South Asian praxis as it is in European theory (Sumit Guha 12-18). The communities in South Asia have traditionally enjoyed complex, stratified relations between oral and written memory whereby different things are preserved in different ways, fulfilled different social roles: formal written records of juridical and administrative importance, oral genealogies of kinship and community identity, and ceremonies of commemoration of religious and collective self-understanding. The Mahua Dabar case therefore has to be placed in this intricate ecology of memory as opposed to being absorbed in a simple dichotomy of oral versus written.

Since the epistemological framework of every mode has been defined, the section is the direct answer to the fundamental question of the paper what unique types of knowledge does oral tradition hold that the colonial archive is structurally incapable of? There are four categories that deserve special consideration.

The former is the type of motive and meaning. We have what Mehurban Khan did, as far as we can make out by what we have, it is what Mehurban Khan did, not what the people of Mahua Dabar gave their actions. The issue of why the village all took part in the murder of five British officers in June 1857 whether with anti-colonial feeling or local political resentment or village solidarity or some other collective logic of action is exactly the issue that the juridical structure of the archive simply precludes, since it was not the question it was intended to answer. Oral tradition, on the other hand, is able to preserve exactly this aspect: the narratives given about June 1857 in the community will have sorted the events in terms of how the community itself perceived what they were and why they occurred. The fact that these stories have been recovered by Ansari in the oral tradition can thus be said as not only supplementary to the archive but epistemologically incomparable.

The second category is the grief and loss. It is the logic of punishment that is preserved in the colonial archive; but not the experience of being punished. The only remnant, in the record of what it was like to go back to the village that had been burned by the colonial government, is the compressed participial clause of Mehurban Khan, describing how Dabur was thrown to the ground. The entire mass of such a loss: the feel of the lost, the sadness of the scattered folk, the anger and heartache and confusion of the survivors, are accessible only through oral tradition and it does not just conserve the facts of loss but the emotional, affective sides of it. This is exactly the sphere of incorporated memory, according to the framework by Connerton, grief, like any strong emotion, is embodied in the body, it is passed on with the help of the ritual mourning, and it is held in the memorial activities within the framework of which the communities commemorate the dead.

The third category is the alternative agency type. The colonial archive makes the residents of Mahua Dabar less subjects than they are the objects of the judicial action, the suspects, defendants, and witnesses. Oral tradition, in its turn, builds them into agents: into those who made choices, took their actions because of their beliefs, opposed or compromised colonial authority, and survived 1857 with the personality of a human being. Tales of heroism, tales of fear, of ethical ambivalence, and of human sacrifice in the name of resistance, which the archive, preoccupied with proving legal culpability, cannot hold, will be stored in the oral tradition of a people who were engaged in colonial resistance.

The fourth category is the continuity and identity. The archive documents Mahua Dabar as a place - as a position in a colonial map, as an object of crime, as a village designated ghair-chiragi - but it cannot register Mahua Dabar as a community - as an association of relationships, duties, histories of sharing, mutual conceptions of the self which endured through and after the physical destruction of the village. It is oral tradition in particular that enables the community identity to remain in the face of the death of its material ground. Oral tradition is not a storage of information, but is instead a type of social practice, as Ong points out: performance of the past is also performance of communal solidarity, re-presentation of shared identity, and claim of continuity through the discontinuity of dispersal (Ong 45‑46). The primary question of identity, in the community, is the question who are we? and this question, being an oral tradition, cannot be answered by an archive.

VII. Toward a Dialogical Methodology

This epistemological critique of this manuscript does not end up making oral tradition categorically better than the colonial archive in housing knowledge about Mahua Dabar. Every media has its own proficiencies and deficiencies that accompany it. The archive preserves the facts which cannot be preserved in oral tradition: the very wording of the testimonies taken under cross-examination, the names of the people who would otherwise be reduced to oblivion, the definite geographical position of the events on a certain day in June 1857. Oral tradition, on the other hand, possesses things that those who archive cannot grasp: meaning, grief, agency, identity, and continuity of the living relationship of community to its own past. An all-inclusive story of Mahua Dabar therefore must include the combination of the two.

Nonetheless, the project requires a methodology that is acutely self-conscious of the asymmetrical power relations of each mode, as well as the scholarly process that forces them into dialogue with each other. The warning that Spivak issues against even well-intentioned attempts to recover subaltern voices can reproduce the same epistemic violence that it is attempting to dispute is poignantly relevant here: the scholar who translates the oral tradition of Mahua Dabar into the discursive apparatus of academic history accomplishes a translation that will inevitably lose something, a loss that must be done with full awareness of the in translatability of the elements that she is losing (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak? 308-09). The aligning of the study by Singh and Ansari with the colonial archive/ oral tradition articulates that locates itself at a point where the two modalities mutually depend on each other, therefore offers a model of how dialogic will proceed herein: a framework that allows both modalities to question and complicate each other.

There are three principles which support this dialogical methodology. The first is epistemic humility: each and every medium cannot be said to provide exhaustive knowledge, but only provide an incomplete, perspective depiction of events. In line with this, the colonial archive as well as oral tradition cannot be considered incontrovertibly reliable; both of them should be subject to critical examination. The second principle, structural asymmetry, refers to the fact that the archive was built upon power, and oral tradition was expressed through the power, scholars should be careful not to fall into the trap of re-presenting these modes as symmetrical options to be evaluated. The third principle is that of incommensurability: this principle is taken up by Chakrabarty who argues that the two mediums are not fully synthezised into a single narrative; some aspects of Mahua Dabar history will be intractable to the categorical apparatus of the archive, and resisting the archives is itself a historically significant piece of data. Applied to the Mahua Dabar case, this dialogical approach to methodology would suggest that the official Proceedings were not to be interpreted as a set of corroborable facts or contradictible statements of the oral tradition; instead, they were to be read as documents that revealed the epistemic constraints of the colonial order as it applied in the village it ravaged. As an example, in Mehurban Khan saying that he has returned to his family at Burhampore, Mohwa Dabur being levelled to the ground, the participial absolute by which the agent doing the levelling is pushed out of the sentence is asserted to serve, not as a pathos, but as an archival witness to the archivist’s own epistemology. As oral tradition, then, predestines the very boundaries that the archive disowns, when it claims the agency, its grief, meaning, and identity, which the archive record cannot encompass, it undertakes an act of epistemological critique that is beyond the agency of supplementation.

Conclusion: The Two Grammars of Memory

According to my argument, the official colonial archive and oral tradition are not two versions of one story about Mahua Dabar. They are different epistemological grammars, and both are systems of creating the past as an object of knowledge, and which have their own logic of evidence, veracity and meaning. The colonial archive is the expression of a grammar of juridical accountability: it coordinates events like a series of legal causality, individuals like defendants or witnesses and truth as that which may be decided beyond reasonable doubt in law courts. Instead, oral tradition takes the grammar of communal identity, in which events are represented as nodes in a living grid of meaning and obligation, people as members of a community that has a common past and future, and truth as that which is worth remembering specifically because it still matters.

These two grammars are not divergent, but in certain essential points, are mutually exclusive. The fact that the archive itself asserts the legal culpability or innocence of Mehurban carrier of the legal culpable is directly opposite to the oral tradition of maintaining the self-account of the community, that picture of its agency, and the expenses this entails upon the community. Introducing these modalities to a discourse, as the research by Singh and Ansari attempts to do, thus become not a simple task of supplementation but a truly strenuous task of epistemological translation, which requires full awareness of the power relations that have shaped each of the modalities and still predetermine their acceptance.

The fact that oral tradition plays the role that written expression cannot (Ong 41) is, in the case of Mahua Dabar, not just a hypothetical speculation but also a historical and partisan assertion. The ghairchiragi ordinance attempted to do, by the legal rhetoric, what the incineration of the village had tried to do, by the effects of pyrotechnics, to achieve permanently: never again to have Mahua Dabar appear in the annals of the world. However, oral tradition outlived this erasure and retained in its living memory and commemoration practice a version of the community that the archive was unable to archive and destroy. In that way, it provides the best eloquent witness to challenge the boundaries of the archival power and to certify the strength of the communal memory.

Appendix: Comparative Epistemological Features of the Two Modes

The following table summarizes the key epistemological differences between the colonial official archive (as represented by the 1860 Proceedings) and oral tradition (as recovered by Ansari's fieldwork in Singh's research), across six dimensions of knowledge production.

Dimension	Colonial Official Archive (1860 Proceedings)	Oral Tradition (Ansari's Recovery)
Governing Question	Who is legally guilty?	Who are we and what happened to us?
Temporal Structure	Linear; juridical sequence of cause and legal consequence	Cyclical; commemorative; past folded into present significance
Mode of Transmission	Written; inscribed; preserved in government record-keeping	Oral performance; bodily practice; commemorative ceremony
Construction of Persons	Defendants, witnesses, suspects; classified by caste, profession, residence	Community members; agents; bearers of collective identity
Type of Truth	Juridical (beyond reasonable doubt); administered by authority	Communal (worth preserving); validated by social consensus
What It Cannot Preserve	Motive, meaning, grief, agency, community identity	Precise wording of testimony; specific names and geography
Epistemological Limit	Structurally unable to hear what is not solicited by juridical framework	Subject to homeostatic forgetting; shaped by present community needs
Structural Relationship to Power	Produced by colonial power for colonial purposes	Produced under colonial pressure, against colonial silence

 

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