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In the Presence of Witnesses: Petitioning and judicial ‘publics’ in western India, circa 1600–1820

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2019

ROSALIND O'HANLON
ROSALIND O'HANLON*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford Email: rosalind.ohanlon@orinst.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

British observers of the nineteenth-century panchayat were convinced that it represented a judicial forum of great antiquity, in which petitioners were able to gain local and direct access to justice. They contrasted the panchayat favourably with the delays and frustrations that beset the eighteenth-century East India Company's attempts to channel all petitions through its own courts. This article examines the history of the pre-colonial panchayat in western India and its early modern predecessors. During the early modern centuries, a diverse array of state-level and local corporate bodies made up the landscape for the submission of petitions and the hearing of suits. Although many suits were local in nature, the process of hearing and adjudication itself gave these judicial spaces a significant ‘public’ dimension, and their forms of argumentation frequently invoked general principles of justice and moral order. From the early eighteenth century, the new form of the panchayat came to supersede these older corporate bodies and to reshape the forms of public that gathered around them. The Maratha state, based in Pune, sought firmer control over revenue and justice. State officials promoted the panchayat as a new type of judicial arena, weakening the local corporate institutions and tying them more closely to the Pune court.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Special Issue 1: Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia , January 2019 , pp. 52 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

Acknowledgements: I thank Robert Travers and Rohit De for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this article to the conference on ‘Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia’ sponsored by the Centre for History and Economics at King's College, Cambridge, and for help in rewriting the article for publication, and to Sumit Guha, David Washbrook, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their useful additional suggestions.

References

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52 The term ‘panchayat’ itself seems to have had a long tradition of use in the subcontinent as one of a number of older Sanskrit-based generic terms—pāñcamaṇdaḷī, śreṇi, gana, kulāni—used to describe tribunals of different kinds: Kane, P. V., History of Dharmaśāstra. Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1973, vol. III, pp. 280–281Google Scholar. See also the suggestion of Sen, Administrative System of the Marathas, pp. 565–567.

53 See, for example, the panchayat held in 1779–80 to resolve the disputed adoption case of the important Chaskar banking family. The proceedings, from scrutiny of the evidence to examination of witnesses, were conducted in a variety of different venues in the peshwa's palace, including the temple to Sri Omkaresvara and the judge's own residence. P. N. Deshpande (ed.), Marāṭhyāncya Itihāsācī Sādhane, part 10, no. 1. New Series. Dhulia: Rājavāḍe Samśodhan Maṇḍaḷ, pp. 3–17.

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