Madie Miller

the North-Western Provinces to that of 27. We are glad to find that of contained this reference number. The Punjab.2 I was disappointed to discover the 5,911 Cattle plundered at the Proceedings file itself could be of greater that the Skinner papers were primarily outbreak at Hissar, there remained or lesser value to my research proja draft memoir Skinner made around in November last, only 880 to be ect, which is normal and expected for 1824, in support of his case to be recovered, and that hopes were historical work, but the file is knowable granted permanent commission in place entertained that nearly all would be only by the process of reading the index of his local commission in the British recovered. volumes, which the British Library has Indian Army, and a few letters from high-ranking members of the government of the Bengal Presidency extolling his several virtues; the file was utterly free of any documentation relating to any of the estates Skinner owned, which might have shed some light on his relationship to Lumsdaine or the Farm.3 However, the draft memoir compelled me to ask other questions of Skinner’s personal history, as he was one of the very few Anglo-Indians (as they are now called) to gain rank and privilege in an era (1789-1833) in which mixed-race men were ineligible for positions of rank within the East India Company’s civil and military service, and even mixed-race children were excluded from the schools that prepared boys for such service.4 I put much of the outcome of this investigation into Skinner’s personal history in a draft of a manuscript for Agora this summer, but as that draft passed 7,000 words, I decided to publish it elsewhere, in favor of an essay on research. After working through the Skinner papers at the beginning of January, I shifted over to the other references from my pre-departure searches. Most of these items bore shelfmarks that began with E or more specifically E/4. I quickly learned that these files had little, if any, real content to them. They were, in fact, copies of correspondence sent by the Company’s Board of Control from London, noting actions and decisions taken by the Governor-General in Bengal and usually either giving approval to these actions or asking further questions on an issue, which might allow them more information by which to make a measured decision. For example, one such letter, in response to a report mentioning the plunder of the Government Cattle Farm’s stock in 1857, included only the following paragraphs: 28. We fully approve of the measures to be adopted for the discharge of all servants of the Establishment who quitted their posts at the outbreak; or who had shewn a want of fidelity in their conduct on that occasion.5 In the absence of the report to which this letter responded, it is impossible to find out anything more about this incident—how many of the Farm’s cattle were not plundered, how many of the Farm’s Indian employees were dismissed, and what measures exactly were used to dismiss them. After a day or so spent discovering the limitations of the E/4 files, I abandoned the bulk of those files from my pre-departure list, in favor of a more laborious but much more fruitful strategy. This involved requesting the index volumes of the Bengal Military Proceedings, anywhere from one to four volumes per year. Each volume, until about 1860, consists of handwritten entries, usually sensibly alphabetized, but with no guarantee that the Military Department of the Bengal government transacted any business relating to the Government Cattle Farm that they thought worth setting down for the record. Once I found something interesting in the index, I made a note of its reference number and date in the Proceedings, and then I could request the volume of the Proceedings files that not digitized, and is not likely to. There is no glamor in digitizing indices. Such a consideration would be entirely unworthy of note had not the entire world of historical research not been overturned by the global spread of the novel coronavirus by February 2020. Archives, libraries, and other collections closed rapidly, none of them quite sure when they might reopen or at what level of service. Some countries barred entry to foreigners; others barred entry to those traveling from the United States, as our country’s case load and mortality increased rapidly in the spring. Any plans I might have had to return to the British Library during the summer of 2020 or in January 2021 evaporated immediately. Since July, the British Library has gradually opened up some reading rooms, but one may book only two appointments per week, four hours per day, and limited to five items for consultation per day. The cost of living in London makes these limitations inefficient in terms of time and money. The British Library’s website gamely touts its digitized resources, but not surprisingly these tend to focus on the development of (white) British culture in Britain and do not include government records, much less the index files of government records. Until travel and institutional restrictions change, I am left with what I brought home in January. Let me be clear: my little research problem is infinitesimally small, in the context of a global tragedy that caused widespread human suffering and death; however, it has the potential to prompt major changes to how historians work. In the very short term, it may push Indian cattle breed Hariana, such as is produced today at the Government Cattle Farm in Hissar PAVANAJA, CC BY-SA 3.0/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

historians to revisit sources to which they already have access, or to re-read research notes from years gone by, to ask new questions of those sources or to notice connections that may have lain hidden while the historian’s eyes were trained on a different investigation. In a longer run, it may promote collaborative work in a field that has long valued the singular author. Of course historians have read and listened to each other’s work at academic conferences and other venues, but the need to access archival sources and the rapidly increasing familiarity with video call and videoconferencing software may generate intellectual partnerships that do more than provide a sounding board for an individual author’s work. A recent webinar hosted by the American Historical Association advocated for the use of videoconferencing technology to expand scholarly presentation of research beyond the structural frameworks of academic conferences and for historians to engage more intimately with archival staff regarding research projects, so that archivists may provide more efficiently digitized caches of materials necessary to those projects.6 Perhaps these changes are overly optimistic; institutional practices tend to be very slow to change. Narrating the past is too important a proposition to be left to the historian who last left the archive in January 2020; we must find new ways to discover the past and re-present it to the future.

NOTES

1. In the larger project, I use the

Government Cattle Farm, Hissar, as a locus for two narratives: one which explains the colonial project of breeding animals for the exclusive or primary use of the military (indeed the Farm’s initial purpose), and the other which explains the nineteenth-century intrusion of veterinary medicine into a vibrantly competitive animal care landscape. Both processes had dramatic effects on animal morphology, nutrition, migration, and other activity, and thus they illustrate the means by which British officials and

Indian animal owners and healers used animal bodies as the sites of struggle for power within an evolving colonial structure. Additional discussion of the project may be found in Brian Caton,

“The Invisible Animal and the Visible

Institution: The Government Cattle

Farm, Hissar, 1800-1845,” Agora 26, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 21-4. 2. Captns. J. H. Simmonds and W. Brown,

Map of the District of Hissar, 2d ed. (Agra: Office of the Sudder Board of Revenue, N. W. Provinces, 1858),

India Office Records [henceforth IOR]

Cartographic Items Maps 57540.(16.),

British Library, London. The “four-inch map” refers to the scale of four inches to the mile, a relatively common scale for maps related to revenue work in British

India. 3. James Skinner Papers, IOR Mss Eur 173, British Library, London. The draft memoir became the basis of a biography published after Skinner’s death in 1841:

James Baillie Fraser, Military Memoir of Lieut.-Col. James Skinner, C. B., vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1851). Skinner was ultimately granted a commission as a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1826 and also was made a Companion of the Bath. 4. C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian Community in British

India, 1773-1833 (Richmond, Surrey:

Curzon Press, 1996). 5. Draft Military India No. 47 of 1858, 2nd

June, Reply to Letter dated 1st Feby. 1858, No. 29, IOR E/4/852, British

Library, London, 97. 6. American Historical Association, “Doing

Research During COVID-19,” October 21, 2020.