This article examines the emergence of mass letter-writing in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial north India, a region marked by the growth of an unprecedented labour mobility, postal expansion, vernacular print, and workers' literacy. It narrates how workers' and their family members' abilities and failures to read and write letters shaped their experiences of the emerging transnational labour mobility and explains how the letter-writing by the subaltern produced new sociabilities and anxieties that both colonial and indigenous elites feared and attempted to discipline and control through letter-writing manuals. It argues that the letter-writing culture in India did not merely sustain new mobilities but also produced a dominant social world which ensured that the hierarchies of caste, gender, and class were clearly mapped onto the domain of letter-writing. Hitherto unexplored (Hindi) letter-writing manuals and educational, postal, and labour records are used to challenge the rigidities of labour, communication, and literary histories of modern South Asia where the illiteracy of the labouring poor is an assumed fact.

中文翻译：

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劳动穷人的来信：印度殖民地的写信艺术*

本文考察了 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初北印度殖民时期出现的大量写信，该地区的特点是前所未有的劳动力流动、邮政扩张、白话印刷和工人识字率的增长。它讲述了工人及其家庭成员阅读和书写信件的能力和失败如何塑造了他们对新兴跨国劳动力流动的体验，并解释了下层写信如何产生殖民地和土著精英都害怕和害怕的新社交和焦虑。试图通过写信手册进行纪律和控制。它认为，印度的写信文化不仅维持了新的流动性，而且还产生了一个占主导地位的社会世界，确保了种姓、性别、和阶级被清楚地映射到写信领域。迄今为止，尚未探索过的（印地语）写信手册以及教育、邮政和劳动记录被用来挑战现代南亚劳动、交流和文学史的僵化，在那里劳动穷人的文盲是一个假设的事实。