A much neglected section of the 19th Century imperial bhadrolok population during British rule in India was the Bengali clerk or the kerani. While his English education and caste identity likened him to the middle-class gentleman, his pattern of work, low salary, lack of opportunities for improvement, pushed him closer to the labour class. But was this neglected section of the “bhadrolok” always without his representational space? In this paper, I shall study examples from clerks’ memoirs and from contemporary literature and read them alongside the violently repressive The Clerk’s Manual published in 1889, to see if the clerk was secretly discovering a heterotopia of his own.

中文翻译：

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剥夺空间

在英国统治印度期间，19 世纪皇家巴德罗洛克人口中一个被忽视的部分是孟加拉文员或 kerani。虽然他的英语教育和种姓身份将他比作中产阶级绅士，但他的工作模式、低薪、缺乏改进机会，使他更接近劳动阶级。但是“bhadrolok”的这个被忽视的部分总是没有他的表现空间吗？在这篇论文中，我将研究文员回忆录和当代文学中的例子，并与 1889 年出版的暴力镇压的《文员手册》一起阅读，看看文员是否在暗中发现自己的异位。