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Indian Petitioning and Colonial State-Formation in Eighteenth-Century Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2019

ROBERT TRAVERS
ROBERT TRAVERS*
Affiliation:
Cornell University Email: trt5@cornell.edu
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Abstract

This article explores the role of Indian petitioning in the process of consolidating British power after the East India Company's military conquest of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. The presentation of written petitions (often termed ‘arzi in Persian) was a pervasive form of state-subject interaction in early modern South Asia that carried over, in modified forms, into the colonial era. The article examines the varied uses of petitioning as a technology of colonial state-formation that worked to establish the East India Company's headquarters in Calcutta as the political capital of Bengal and the Company as a sovereign source of authority and justice. It also shows how petitioning became a site of anxiety for both colonial rulers and Indian subjects, as British officials struggled to respond to a mass of Indian ‘complaints’ and to satisfy the expectations and norms of justice expressed by petitioners. It suggests that British rulers tried to defuse the perceived political threat of Indian petitioning by redirecting petitioners into the newly regulated spaces of an emergent colonial judiciary.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Special Issue 1: Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia , January 2019 , pp. 89 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

The research for this article was funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, a Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship, and the Cornell University Department of History. I am very grateful to Philip Stern, Peter Marshall, Paul Friedland, and Nicholas Abbott for comments on earlier drafts, and to all the participants in the 2014 workshop on Petitioning and Political Culture in South Asia at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge.

References

1 Letter from Charles Stewart to the Court of Directors, 11 October 1824, British Library, London (BL), India Office Records (IOR), J.1.39, f. 421.

2 Ibid., pp. 1, 4.

3 Stewart, Charles, Original Persian Letters and Other Documents with Facsimiles, William Nicol, London, 1825, pp. 4Google Scholar, 6, 14.

4 Petitions in early colonial Bengal were also presented in other languages, including Bengali and English. For some eighteenth-century examples of Bengali petitions, with English synopses, see Sen, Surendranath, Pracin Bangala Patra Sankalan (Records in Oriental Languages. Volume 1: Bengali Letters), Sri Saraswaty Press, Calcutta, 1942Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., pp. 18–19, 29.

6 Ibid., p. 62. The Mirat-ul-Istilah, an eighteenth-century Persian dictionary written by a Hindu munshi, make a similar distinction between ‘arzi (which ‘describes the circumstance with a request’) and ‘arzdasht, which was a form of letter or address written ‘by nobles to kings and by young ones to their elders’ or, more broadly, from inferiors to superiors, and was often adorned with red and gold lace. See Ahmad, Tasneem and Desai, Ziyaud Din A., Encyclopedic Dictionary of Medieval India. Mirat-ul-Istilah, Sundeep Prakashan, Delhi, 1993, p. 22Google Scholar. Though ‘arzi and ‘arzdasht seem to have been the most common Indo-Persian words for petitions in colonial era records, there were several other commonly used Persian terms with similar meanings, such as iltimas, darkhwast, and talab, and still other terms such as istighasat, shikayat, or mudda‘a, which carry more the sense of ‘complaint’ or ‘lawsuit’.

7 Stewart, Original Persian Letters, pp. 82–84.

8 For example, Chapter 7, ‘Letters to and from the Court of Persia’, began with a letter from the Safavid emperor Shah Abbas II to the Mughal prince Dara Shukoh from 1659, before including specimens of more contemporary correspondence between British and Persian officials. Ibid., p. 170. For adab, see Metcalf, Barbara (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority. The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, University of California, Berkeley, 1984Google Scholar.

9 This article follows contemporary sources, including Stewart's text, in defining the ‘petition’ or ‘arzee’, in broad terms, as encompassing a range of different forms of address that made a request or represented a grievance, though it focuses mainly on everyday forms of petitions, often also called ‘complaints’, presented to early colonial revenue offices (kachahris) and law courts (‘adalats). Stewart's distinction between administrative petitions made to revenue committees, Collectors, and magistrates, and ‘legal’ petitions used in the course of court cases reflected the greater differentiation of the ‘revenue’ from the ‘judicial’ branch of the Company government following Lord Cornwallis's judicial reforms in the 1790s. In the earlier period, so-called ‘judicial’ and ‘revenue’ powers were often united within the same administrative agencies (Collectors or committees) and it is therefore harder to draw a clear line between ‘judicial’ proceedings’ and other forms of bureaucratic petition, inquiry, and decree.

10 For a brief but highly suggestive account of Indian petitioning as a feature of early colonial politics in Bengal, which notes that ‘British officials were inundated with petitions’, see P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empire. Britain, India and America 1750–1783, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, pp. 266–270. Two important recent studies have highlighted the role of Indian petitioning in the expansion and consolidation of British power in South India. Brimnes, Niels, Constructing the Colonial Encounter. Right and Left Hand Castes in Early Colonial South India, Curzon Press, Richmond, Surrey, 1999Google Scholar, focuses on disputes between right-hand and left-hand caste groups, arguing that Indian petitioners addressed European rulers of port cities as if they were operating in the place of Hindu kings. For the Company's use of written petitions (in English and Tamil) to create a new form of bureaucratic order in early colonial South India, see Raman, Bhavani, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2012, pp. 161–191CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a study of petitions of appeal within the emergent colonial judiciary of western India in the early nineteenth century, see Jaffe, James, The Ironies of Colonial Governance. Law, Custom, and Justice in Colonial India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a study of how native women attached to the Company's army as wives and widows of British soldiers petitioned early colonial authorities for financial support and, in so doing, made themselves ‘into particular kinds of subjects’, claiming rights ‘as members of the “service family” of the Company’, see Ghosh, Durba, Sex and the Family in Colonial India. The Making of Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 206–245CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other studies of petitioning in colonial India have focused on the later nineteenth-century Raj and the rise of provincial and national politics; for examples, see Siddiqi, Majid, The British Historical Context and Petitioning in Colonial India with an Introduction by S. Inayat A. Zaidi, XXII Dr M. A. Ansari Memorial Lecture, Jamia Millia Islamia, Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2005Google Scholar; and Haynes, Douglas E., Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India. The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991Google Scholar.

11 For a study of petitioning in the early modern Mediterranean, which suggests that petitions were ‘the main vehicle through which early modern subjects engaged officialdom’, see Rothman, Natalie, Brokering Empire. Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2012, p. 22Google Scholar.

12 For a useful survey, see Knights, Mark, ‘Participation and Representation before Democracy: Petitions and Addresses in Pre-Modern Britain’, in Shapiro, Ian et al. (eds), Political Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 35–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For petitions as a vehicle for articulating subjecthood in the Atlantic territories of the eighteenth-century British empire, see Weiss-Muller, Hannah, ‘Bonds of Belonging. Subjecthood and the British Empire’, Journal of British Studies 53, January 2014, pp. 29–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 For an overview of the East India Company's structures of corporate governance, see Stern, Philip J., The Company State. Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011Google Scholar; and for a ‘culture of appeal’ within early modern English corporations, see Bilder, Mary Sarah, ‘Salamanders and Sons of God. The Culture of Appeal in Early New England’, in Tomlins, Christopher L. and Mann, Bruce H. (eds), The Many Legalities of Early America, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2001, pp. 47–77Google Scholar.

14 For a recent study of how different forms of writing mediated and structured the commercial and diplomatic world of the East India Company, see Ogborn, Miles, Indian Ink. Script and Print and the Making of the English East India Company, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And for a classic study of the ‘information order’ of early modern South Asia, which situates colonial state-formation in the context of a pre-colonial Indian ‘ecumene’, see Bayly, C. A., Empire and Information. Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996Google Scholar.

15 For the idea of ‘bridges’ that mediated intercultural encounters and exchanges, see Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Courtly Encounters. Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2012, p. 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who emphasizes that ‘bridges between cultures have to be built rather than naturally existing in a state of nature’.

16 Raman, Document Raj, pp. 17–18, 178–182; Swarnalatha, Potukuchi, ‘Revolt, Testimony and Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra’, in van Voss, L. Heerma (ed.), Petitions in Social History, International Review of Social History Supplement 9, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 107–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 For the idea of British India as a kind of ‘despotism of law’, see Singha, Radhika, A Despotism of Law. Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2000Google Scholar. And for an extended discussion of British imaginings of their rule in India as a kind of enlightened or benevolent despotism, see Robert Travers, ‘Contested Despotism: Problems of Liberty in British India’, in Greene, Jack P. (ed.), Exclusionary Empire. English Liberty Overseas 1600–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 191–219Google Scholar.

18 For petitions in early modern Rajasthan, see Sahai, Nandita, Politics of Patronage and Protest. The State, Society, and Artisans in Early Modern Rajasthan, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a brief discussion of petitioning in the Mughal empire, see Inayat, S. Zaidi, A., ‘Introduction’, in Siddiqi, The British Historical Context, pp. 9–16Google Scholar.

19 Chatterjee, Kumkum, The Cultures of History in Early Modern India. Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 Darling, Linda T., ‘“Do Justice, Do Justice, for that is Paradise”: Middle Eastern Advice for Indo-Muslim Rulers’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 22, 1, 2002, pp. 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Ibid., pp. 10–12.

24 Hasan, Farhat, State and Locality in Mughal India. Power Relations in Western India 1572–1830, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994Google Scholar. For other recent studies of claims-making, judicial process, and state-formation in the early modern period, see Guha, Sumit, ‘Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Dakhan, 1500–1800’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, 2, 2004, pp. 23–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guha, Sumit, ‘Historically Speaking: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400–1900’, American Historical Review 109, 4, October 2004, pp. 1084–1103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Hanlon, Rosalind, ‘Performance in a World of Paper: Puranic Histories and Social Communication in Early Modern India’, Past and Present 291, May 2013, pp. 87–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Chatterjee, Nandini, ‘Mahzar-namas in the Mughal and British Empires: The Uses of an Indo-Islamic Legal Form’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, 2, 2016, pp. 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Sahai, Politics of Patronage and Protest.

26 See especially Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, The Mughal State 1526–1750, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998, pp. 46–55Google Scholar.

27 See, for example, Balfour, Francis, The Forms of Herkern corrected from a variety of manuscripts, Calcutta, 1781Google Scholar. For a larger treatment of the circulation of bureaucratic manuals in the late Mughal era, see Greene, Nile, ‘The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya: Persianate Knowledge between Person and Paper’, Modern Asian Studies 44, 2, 2010, pp. 241–265CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 For an example, see the farman of Aurangzeb from 1690, in Stewart, Charles, History of Bengal, Black, Parry and Co., London, 1813, p. 541Google Scholar.

29 Yule, Henry, Burnell, A. C., and Crooke, William, Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive, John Murray, London, 1903, pp. 344Google Scholar, 959–960.

30 Surat has been especially well-studied in this regard. See Hasan, State and Locality, pp. 42, 62; and Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual, pp. 87–89.

31 J. Long, Selections from the Unpublished Records of Government, first edition, 1869; repr. K. L. Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta, 1973, p. 374.

32 Fraas, Arthur Mitchell, ‘Making Claims: Indian Litigants and the Expansion of the English Legal World in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15, 1, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 For a wide-ranging discussion of forms of ‘ritualized protocol’ in diplomacy and law, defined as ‘a complex set of highly stylized actions and behavior that had to be performed correctly to derive a result’, and which ‘provided a basis for cross-polity interactions in the early modern world’, see Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow, ‘Legal Encounters and the Origins of Global Law’, in Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Merry E. Wiesner Hanks (eds), The Cambridge World History. Volume 6: The Construction of a Global World 1400–1800 CE. Part 2, Patterns of Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015, pp. 80–100.

34 Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin, Or View of Modern Times, Nota Manus (trs.), 3 vols, Calcutta, 1789; repr. Sheikh Mubarak Ali Oriental Publishers and Booksellers, Lahore, 1975, Vol. 3, pp. 198–199. For the Persian text, see Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i, Siyar al-muta'akhkhirin, Calcutta, 1833, 2 vols in 1, p. 416.

35 British Library (BL), Manuscripts room, Additional Manuscripts (Add. MSS) 12,565, ff. 2v, 3r. This text is further discussed in Khan, Abdul Majed, The Transition in Bengal, 1756–1775. A Study of Muhammed Reza Khan, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969, p. 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Travers, Robert, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India. The British in Bengal, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 159CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Ibid., 16r–17r. For a recent survey of forms of legality in the Mughal empire, emphasizing the creation of a system of ‘justiciable rights’ through the extension of an overarching imperial law, see Chatterjee, Nandini, ‘Reflections on Religious Difference and Permissive Inclusion in Mughal Law’, Journal of Law and Religion 29, 3, October 2014, p. 408CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 For these reforms, see Misra, B. B., The Judicial Administration of the East India Company in Bengal, 1765–82, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1961Google Scholar; and Travers, Ideology and Empire, pp. 100–140.

38 Judicial Regulations, 15 August 1772, in Colebrooke, James Edward, Supplement to the Digest of Regulations and Laws enacted by the Governor general in council for the civil government of the territories under the Presidency of Bengal containing a collection of the regulations anterior to the year 1793 and completing each article of the digest to the close of the year 1806, Calcutta, 1807, Vol. 3, pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

39 General Clavering to his brother Thomas, 5 August 1775, Clavering Papers, Northumberland County Record Office, NRO 309, G.4, Box 1, 5.

40 Bengal Revenue Consultations (BRC), 3 June 1777, BL, IOR, P.49.72, pp. 102–103. The fear of violence surrounding the practice of petitioning lasted beyond the early years of the Company's government in Bengal. In 1797, Governor-general John Shore reported that his colleague Peter Speke had narrowly escaped being assassinated by a Sikh man who had ‘religiously devoted himself to Death’. Shore claimed that the ‘only apparent cause of his violence’ was that Speke had refused to receive a petition on the man's behalf, asking for the return of some confiscated weapons. The petition had been presented to Speke ‘as he was passing in his Carriage’. Furber, Holden (ed.), The Private Record of an Indian Governor-generalship. The Correspondence of Sir John Shore, Governor-general, with Henry Dundas, President of the Board of Control 1793–98, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1933, pp. 126–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Bengal Sudder Dewannny Adawlut Proceedings, 28 April 1773, BL, IOR, P.154.37.

42 BRC, 30 November 1779, BL, IOR, P.50.20.

43 Under the Mughal empire, this office had particular authority over khalisa land (lands retained directly by the emperors for the support of the state). See Richards, John, The Mughal Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 76–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In eighteenth-century Bengal, the khalisa functioned as the central revenue office where accounts, title deeds, and other revenue records were stored.

44 Marshall, P. J., ‘Indian Officials under the East India Company in the Eighteenth Century’, Bengal Past and Present 84, 1965, pp. 99–102Google Scholar.

45 Superintendent of Khalsa Record Proceedings (henceforth SKRP), West Bengal State Archives (Historical Division), Bhavani Dutta Lane, Kolkata. There are 17 volumes of khalsa proceedings dating from December 1772 to 1781. In February 1781, the position of khalsa superintendent was renamed ‘Preparer of Reports for the Revenue Department’, and there are a further 36 volumes of the Preparer's proceedings dealing with the period from 1781–1789. See Guide to the Records in the State Archives of West Bengal. Part I: 1758–1858, Government of West Bengal, Calcutta, 1977, pp. 32–33.

46 Petitioners (especially elite figures) in the early years of the Calcutta khalsa occasionally presented English-language petitions in the formal style of a ‘humble petition’. See, for example, ‘The Humble Petition of Rajah Nobkissen’, SKRP, 23 July 1773, Vol. 2, pp. 34–35. ‘Nobkissen’ or Nabakrishna was formerly the banyan or agent to Governor Robert Clive and was a wealthy landowner and power-broker in early colonial Calcutta.

47 SKRP, 29 September 1777, Vol. 10, pp. 436–437.

48 Ibid., 29 January 1773, Vol. 1, pp. 37–38.

49 Ibid., 2 February 1773, Vol. 1, p. 44.

50 Ibid., 14 July 1773, Vol. 1, pp. 235–236.

51 Ibid., 19 May 1777, Vol. 9, pp. 17–18.

52 Ibid., 5 June 1777, Vol. 9, pp. 127–129.

53 Ibid., 14 July 1777, Vol. 9, pp. 425–426.

54 Ibid., 15 October 1776, Vol. 6, pp. 338–339.

55 Ibid., pp. 340–341.

56 For a vivid account of the ‘document bazar’ that grew up in early colonial Madras, see Raman, Document Raj, pp. 17, 178–182.

57 For recent accounts of these various political crises, see Bowen, H. V., The Business of Empire. The East India Company and Imperial Britain 1756–1833, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008Google Scholar; Marshall, P. J., The Making and Unmaking of Empire. Britain, India and America 1750–1783, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005Google Scholar.

58 Travers, Ideology and Empire, pp. 150–163.

59 General Clavering to his brother Thomas, 5 August 1775, Clavering Papers.

60 Pandey, B. N., The Introduction of English Law into India. The Career of Elijah Impey in Bengal, 1774–1783, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1967, pp. 58–61Google Scholar.

61 For recent accounts of the Court's turbulent early history, see Benton, Lauren, Law and Colonial Cultures. Legal Regimes in World History 1400–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, pp 127–152CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Halliday, Paul, Habeas Corpus. From England to Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2010, pp. 288–290Google Scholar.

62 Elijah Impey to Lord Bathurst, 1 April 1777, Impey Papers, BL, Add. MSS 16,259, f. 52r, v.

63 For a comprehensive account of Indians travelling to Britain in the early colonial era, including many carrying petitions, especially from Indian princes or ruling families, see Fisher, Michael, Counterflows to Colonialism. Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600–1857, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 2004Google Scholar.

64 Kuiters, Willem G. J., The British in Bengal 1756–1773. A Society in Transition Seen through the Biography of a Rebel: William Bolts (1739–1808), Les Indes Savantes, Paris, 2002, pp. 237–250Google Scholar.

65 Hastings to George Vansittart, 5 March 1777, Vansittart Papers, BL, Add. MSS 48,370, f. 41v. For a recent study of the spread of mahzar-namas as a form of legal and political address in early modern South Asia, see Chatterjee, ‘Mahzar-namas in the Mughal and British Empires’.

66 ‘Translation of a Persian Petition from the native Inhabitants of the Subah Azeemabad to the King’, printed in Administration of Justice in Bengal. The Several Petitions of the British Inhabitants in Bengal, of the Governor-general and council, and of the Court of Directors of the East India Company to Parliament, London, 1780, pp. 7–14. This petition and two others were also reproduced in the Appendix to the Comment on the Petition of the British Inhabitants of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa to Parliament, Containing Memorials and Authentick Papers, London, 1780.

67 ‘A second letter to Lord Weymouth, 25 April 1779’, in Administration of Justice in Bengal, p. 5.

68 Raman, Document Raj, pp. 178–181. Wilson, Jon E., ‘“A Thousand Countries to Go to”. Peasants and Rulers in Late Eighteenth Century Bengal’, Past and Present 189, 2005, pp. 81–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 ‘Translation of a Persian Petition’, Administration of Justice in Bengal, p. 8.

70 The most detailed biographical account, based on Ghulam Husain's own writings, is by Khan, Gulfishan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West During the Eighteenth Century, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1998, pp. 84–92Google Scholar. For another short biographical account drawn from Ghulam Husain's history, see Asiatic Annual Register for 1801, London, 1802, pp. 28–32. For recent treatments of Ghulam Husain's life and work, see also Chatterjee, Kumkum, ‘History as Self-Representation. The Recasting of a Political Tradition in Bengal and Bihar’, Modern Asian Studies 32, 1998, pp. 913–948CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, K., The Cultures of History in Early Modern India. Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, Partha, The Black Hole of Empire. The History of a Global Practice of Power, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2012, pp. 78–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Khan, Iqbal Ghani, ‘A Book with Two Views—Ghulam Husain Khan's “An Overview of the Modern Times”’, in Malik, Jamal (ed.), Perspectives of Mutual Encounters in South Asian History 1760–1860, Brill, Leiden, 2000, pp. 278–298Google Scholar.

71 Asiatic Annual Register for 1801, pp. 29–30.

72 SKRP, 24 April 1778, Vol. 11, pp. 421–422.

73 The Patna council had already authorized a debt of half the amount claimed (Rs 30,000) to be recovered from the zamindar, but they reported that the zamindar had no means of paying this debt. When Ghulam Husain's case was discussed by the Supreme Council in January 1779, Governor-general Warren Hastings did try to secure an order for the lands of the zamindar to be sold to pay what was due to Ghulam Husain, but other members of the council resisted Hastings proposal, objecting to the break-up of the zamindari estate and the loss to the zamindar’s rightful heirs. See BRC, 8 January and 15 January 1779, BL, IOR. P.50.15.

74 See letter from the Governor-general in council to the Board of Revenue, 23 September 1791, in BRC, 28 September 1791, IOR P.71.43. For a discussion of Ghulam Husain's career in the context of Bihar politics, see Yang, Anand A., Bazaar India. Markets, Society and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar, University of California, Berkeley, 1999, pp. 66–67Google Scholar.

75 For a pioneering analysis that situated Ghulam Husain's history within a larger corpus of contemporary writings in which the nobility and service gentry of eastern India sought to represent themselves to the East Indian Company as custodians of Mughal tradition, see Chatterjee, ‘History as Self-Representation’. The English quotations that follow are taken from the translation of Ghulam Husain's history: Ghulam Husain, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin, (tr.) Nota Manus, Vol. 3. For the original Persian terms, I have drawn on the Persian text printed in Ghulam Husain Khan, Siyar al-muta’akhkhirin.

76 Seir Mutaqherin, Vol. 3, pp. 190–191.

77 Ibid. Here Haji Mustapha translates the Persian term ‘muhtaj’ (meaning the ‘needy’ or necessitous) as ‘petitioner’. See Ghulam Husain Khan, Siyar al-muta’akhkhirin, p. 414.

78 Seir Mutaqherin, Vol. 3, p. 197.

79 In Mustapha's translation: ‘they [the British] hate appearing in public audiences, and when they come to appear at all, it is to betray extreme uneasiness, impatience, and anger at seeing themselves surrounded by crowds, and hearing their complaints, and clamours’. Ibid., p. 200. See, for the Persian text, Ghulam Husain Khan, Siyar al-muta’akhkhirin, p. 417.

80 Seir Mutaqherin, Vol. 3, p. 200. The Persian reads ‘hama kas hazir shavand wa ‘arz-i hajat khud numayand’. Ghulam Husain Khan, Siyar al-muta’akhkhirin, p. 417.

81 Seir Mutaqherin, Vol. 3, pp. 49–50.

82 Ghulam Husain Khan, Siyar al-muta’akhkhirin, p. 407. Mustapha translates this as ‘listening to the groans and sobs of so many thousands of oppressed ones’: Seir Mutaqherin, Vol. 3, p. 168. Ghulam Husain repeats this plea for the Company to hold more public audiences later in the text: Seir Mutaqherin, Vol. 3, pp. 200–201; Ghulam Husain Khan, Siyar al-muta’akhkhirin, p. 417.

83 Seir Mutaqherin, Vol. 3, p. 153; Ghulam Husain Khan, Siyar al-muta’akhkhirin, p. 403.

84 Ghulam Husain Khan, Siyar al-muta’akhkhirin, p. 403.

85 Ibid. Another near contemporary Indo-Persian author, ‘Abd al-Latif, also applied the term wakil to members of the House of Commons; see Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West, p. 343. For broad application of the term wakil in early modern South Asia, referring to ‘specialists in the art of bargaining, negotiating and pleading cases’, as well as ambassadors or envoys between rulers, see Calkins, Philip B., ‘A Note on Lawyers in Muslim India’, Law and Society Review 3, 2–3, 1968–1969, pp. 403–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Seir Mutaqherin, Vol. 3, pp. 153–154; Ghulam Husain Khan, Siyar al-muta’akhkhirin, pp. 403–404.

87 Letter from Cornwallis to Henry Dundas, 14 August 1781, printed in Charles Ross, Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, 3 volumes, John Murray, London, 1859, Vol. 1, p. 271. For longer treatments of Cornwallis's reforms, see Bayly, C. A. and Prior, Katherine, ‘Cornwallis, Charles, First Marquess Cornwallis (1738–1805)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004Google Scholar; and Aspinall, A., Cornwallis in Bengal, repr. Uppal Publishing House, New Delhi, 1987Google Scholar.

88 Minute of Governor-general, BRC, 11 February 1793, BL, IOR, P.52.55, pp. 203–204.

89 Ibid.; for a printed version, see The Second Report of the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, London, 1810, Appendix 9, pp. 107–125. The Minute was probably drafted by Cornwallis's adviser and the secretary to the Supreme Council, George Hilaro Barlow. For Barlow's authorship, see John William Kaye, The Administration of the East India Company. A History of Indian Progress, first edition, 1853; repr. Kitab Mahal, Allahabad, 1966, p. 2; and Wilson, Jon E., The Domination of Strangers. Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008, pp. 59–65Google Scholar.

90 The classic account of the ideological context of the ‘permanent settlement’ of the Bengal revenues remains Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal, Paris, 1963; repr. Duke University Press, Durham, 1996. For a more recent treatment, see Wilson, The Domination of Strangers, pp. 45–74.

91 Minute of Governor-general, BRC, 11 February 1793, p. 201.

92 For a more detailed treatment of Cornwallis's judicial reforms, see Harington, J. H., An Elementary Analysis of the Laws and Regulations Enacted by the Governor-general in Council at Fort William in Bengal, for the Civil Government of the British Territories under that Presidency, Part 1, Calcutta, 1805Google Scholar; and Jain, M. P., Outlines of Indian Legal History, Delhi University Press, Delhi, 1952, pp. 161–194Google Scholar.

93 Minute of Governor-general, BRC, 11 February 1793, p. 267.

94 Ibid., pp. 222–224.

95 Ibid., p. 230.

96 Ibid., p. 267.

97 Ibid., pp. 228–229. Cornwallis may well have had in mind the long, drawn-out inquiries into a major rural rebellion in Rangpur in 1783, which revolved around accusations of excessive use of harsh corporal punishments by the local Indian revenue farmer, with the alleged connivance of the British Collector. For a recent treatment of this rebellion, see Wilson, ‘“A Thousand Countries to Go to”’.

98 Minute of Governor-general, BRC, 11 February 1793, pp. 283–285.

99 Ibid., pp. 281–282.

100 Ibid., pp. 291–292.

101 Ibid., pp. 286–287. Calkins noted that the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1658–1707), who was known for his efforts at administrative centralization, issued orders to appoint wakils on behalf of the emperor to handle cases on behalf of government and provide legal advice to suitors. Calkins, ‘A Note on Lawyers in Muslim India’. This suggests that Cornwallis's attempt to centralize the appointment of wakils may have been partly anticipated in the imperial strategies of the Mughals.

102 Minute of Governor-general, BRC, 11 February 1793, pp. 203–204.

103 Cornwallis's new court system rapidly became notorious for huge backlogs of cases and bureaucratic delays: see Jaffe, Ironies of Governance, p. 49.

104 Raman offers an especially rich example of how to approach the early colonial archive of petitions as documents saturated in ‘dense mediations’ that were shaped ‘as much by the demands of colonial domination as by the suppliants submitting them’: Raman, Document Raj, pp. 161, 181.

105 For a pioneering attempt to connect the growth of nineteenth-century Indian liberalism to early modern discourses and practices of ethical government, see Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties. Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012Google Scholar. And for the notion of an early modern ‘Indian ecumeme’ or ‘indigenous public sphere’ that ‘long predated the consciously nationalist public after 1860, and was to determine its character to a considerable extent’, see Bayly, Empire and Information, pp. 180–211.