Directing Dead Letters: Authority and Subversion in the Colonial Post Office

This article reconsiders Indian post office scribes’ linchpin position in the colonial administration. Working outwards from the interviews conducted in 1850 by the Commission for Post Office Enquiry in India, it argues that scribal authority was implemented in contradictory ways: government officials relied on local postal scribes’ expertise to advance colonizer agendas, whereas local scribes used their authority to create their own postal procedures and defy government directives. Indian post office scribes were central to a production of colonial authority that negotiated between the colonizer government, the post office bureaucracy, and the interests of the Indian public.