Ghair-Chiragi: The Poetics of Erasure and the Language of Desolation of Mahua Dabar Massacre narrative

Abstract

The paper will look at the colonial order of ghair-chiragi, which means without lamp, of the village of Mahua Dabar in the Gorakhpur district after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Based on the proceedings of the North Western Provinces Judicial (Criminal) Department (1860) in October it is argued that ghair-chiragi was not only an administrative method of punishment but a performative linguistic action which created a legal and symbolic erasure of a community. The paper applies the theoretical ideas of speech-act theory and deconstructive legal philosophy to the interpretation of the decree as a type of colonial performative violence: a speech act which turned inhabited space into an administratively blank terrain. The analysis places the word in context of the larger symbolic and literary culture of South Asia poetics wherein the chiragh (lamp) is a symbol of continuity of the home, of spiritual enlightenment and of the community living in the house. The colonial decree brought an ontological dislocation to the village by rejecting this symbol using the prefix ghair, which turned the village into a place of nothingness. The work also incorporates archival witnesses, names of suspects, and documentation of dispersion as a kind of unintended elegiac fiction that is more reminiscent of the Urdu classical form of shahr-ashob that is poetry about the ruin of cities and communities. By contrasting two concepts of colonial law, terra nullius and the theory of waste land, the paper shows how linguistic names were used as a tool of spatial erasure of imperial rule in the world. Finally, the article concludes that the colonial archive is an unwitting archival of the same community that it was aimed at destroying. The study is based on reading of both legal records and literary traditions of lamentation to construct the repressed historical presence of Mahua Dabar and the paradox of erasure that creates traces of remembrance at the same time.