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Petitions, the City, and the Early Colonial State in South India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2019

APARNA BALACHANDRAN
APARNA BALACHANDRAN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Delhi Email: aparna.balachandran1@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article explores the entwined history of early colonial urbanism and the articulation of legal subjectivity under East India Company rule in South India. More specifically, it looks at petitions from outcaste labouring groups to the Madras government in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although early colonial petitions were unequivocally products of colonial rule, which derived their distinctive form and language from colonial law, a reading of the petition archive is one of the only ways to achieve a historical understanding of the city of Madras as it was experienced by its less privileged inhabitants. This article looks at the delineation of the communal selfhood of subaltern urban communities through petition narratives, arguing that the variety and innovativeness displayed by petition writers is testament both to the acceptance of colonial legality and to the agency of native subjects in negotiating with, and appropriating the language and rationale of, the colonial legal regime.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Special Issue 1: Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia , January 2019 , pp. 150 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 Petitioning was, of course, not restricted to Madras or to South India and was a common activity all across British India. The petition was also a feature of pre-colonial political orders where subjects sought redress through writing in arzis, arzdashts, vinnappams, etc. For an account of the transformation of petitions and petitioning under colonial rule, see Raman, Bhavani, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012), pp. 161–191CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 East India Company records, particularly from the Public, Judicial, Revenue, and Board of Revenue departments are replete with petitions that date from the earliest period of an English presence in the area. Examples of petitions from the East India Company's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century archive can be found in several printed compilations from the official records. See, for instance, Love, H. D., Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800; Traced from the East India Company's Records Preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office, and From Other Sources. Vols 1–3 (London: J. Murray, 1913)Google Scholar; and Wheeler, Talboys, Madras in Olden Times: Being a History of the Presidency From The First Foundation. Vols 1–3 (Madras: Higginbothams, 1861).Google Scholar Kenneth Balhatchet has a particularly interesting discussion on the rivalries between the various Catholic denominations in the city: see Balhatchet, K., Caste, Class and Catholicism in India, 1789–1914 (London: Curzon Press, 1998), pp. 79–110Google Scholar.

3 For an overview of the relationship between the early colonial administration and indigenous society in South India, which has extensively used petitions as a primary source, see Mukund, Kanakalatha, The View From Below: Indigeneous Society, Temples and the Early Colonial State in TamilNadu 1700–1835 (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005)Google Scholar.

4 The practice of petitioning the Company state in early colonial South India was, of course, by no means restricted to urban areas. However, this article focuses on petitions from Madras city because, in addition to the author's interest in early colonial urbanism, they illuminate the experiences of urban subaltern lives in a way that few sources from the period are able to do.

5 The ‘urban’ character of colonial Madras has been the subject of some speculation among historians. With four urban cores, which retained many of their agrarian features, and the presence of several villages in its environs, its appearance could well be seen as rural in character. However, by the late eighteenth century, the needs of a growing territorial and military state had substantially altered land ownership and use in Madras city. The period saw the emergence of an urban property market with an increase in the importance of commercial gardening and a need for land for building that would substantially impact on social relations in the city. Ahuja, Ravi, ‘Expropriating the Poor: Urban Land Control and Colonial Administration in Late Eighteenth Century Madras City’, Studies in History 17 (1) (2001), pp. 81–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an account of the spatial features of early colonial urbanization in Madras, see Basu, Susan Neild, ‘Colonial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Modern Asian Studies 13 (1979), pp. 217–245Google Scholar.

6 Kumar, Dharma, ‘The Forgotten Sector: Services in Madras Presidency in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 24 (1987), pp. 367–393CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Possibly the most important of these settlements was the village of Chintadripettah which was set up in the 1730s and was populated by communities of weavers and spinners who would, it was hoped, be engaged in the peaceful production of textiles for the government. Marked by planned streets, trees, markets, and temples, Chintadripettah was intended to replicate agrarian residential layouts to prevent clashes between different castes who were settled there. In fact, however, contrary to the fond expectations of Company officials, the locality was, from the very beginning, a hotbed of trouble, a problem which grew through the eighteenth century as more and more people settled there. While the trigger for the tensions differed from incident to incident, certainly one central issue was the attempt by colonial officials, to determine, fix, and transplant the dictates of tradition from the agrarian context to the new urban one. For details on the different ‘settled’ villages in the city, see Maclean, Charles D., Manual of the Administration of Madras Presidency (Madras: C. E. Keys, 1893), Vol. 3, pp. 447–450Google Scholar.

8 See Raman, Document Raj, pp. 161–191.

9 See, for instance, Swarnalatha, Potukuchi, ‘Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra’, in van Voss, Lex Heerma (ed.), Petitions in Social History, International Review of Social History Supplement 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 107–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, Vol. 3, p. 376.

11 For the discussion of the ‘cast head’ as a product of early colonial urban rule in Madras, see Balachandran, Aparna, ‘Of Corporations and Caste Heads: Urban Rule in Company Madras, 1640–1720’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/, [accessed 4 October 2018].

12 My use of the term ‘Pariah’ does not reflect its complex contemporary political significance. It is cited here as a category in the early colonial archive.

13 For details of the transformation of the structure of urban land rights in Madras city in the late eighteenth century which led to the dispossession of low and outcaste sections of society, see Ahuja, ‘Expropriating the Poor’.

14 For a discussion of the opening up of employment opportunities for outcaste groups in South India at the time, see Washbrook, David, ‘Land and Labour in Late Eighteenth Century South India: The Golden Age of the Pariah’, in Robb, Peter (ed.), Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 68–86Google Scholar.

15 ‘The Humble Petition of the Head Pariahs and Inhabitants of the Great Parcherry’, Public Consultations, 6 April 1810, Tamil Nadu State Archives (hereafter TNSA).

16 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, Vol. 3, p. 135.

17 Notable exceptions include Chatterjee, Indrani, Gender, Slavery and Law in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Ghosh, Durba, ‘Household Crimes and Domestic Order: Keeping the Peace in Colonial Calcutta, c.1770–c.1840’, Modern Asian Studies 38 (3) (2004), pp. 599–623CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 A long and fraught relationship existed between the Madras government and the churches that belonged to various Catholic denominations in the city which, in turn, were also in bitter competition with each other. These churches included those run by the French Capuchin mission under the Propaganda Fide and the Portuguese churches that fell under the jurisdiction of the Padroado; a large number of low and outcaste Christians were affiliated to both. See Balhatchet, Caste, Class and Catholicism, pp. 79–110.

19 ‘The Humble Petition of All the Christian Pariarrs residing at St Thomas Mount’, 27 October 1812, TNSA; for a slightly later case, see ‘The Humble Representation of All the Christian Pariars of the Great Parcherry of Madras’, 23 September and 4 August 1814, TNSA.

20 The case was finally settled in favour of the boatmen by the Madras government. Madras Public Proceedings, 19 August 1806, India Office Records, British Library.

21 For a perspective that argues that low and outcaste Christian protests in early nineteenth-century Madras represented an assertion of a distinctly subaltern, native Christianity, see Balachandran, Aparna, ‘Catholics in Protest: Lower Caste Christianity in Early Colonial Madras’, Studies in History 16 (2000), pp. 241–253CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Singha, Radhika, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

23 For descriptions of this mercantile world, see Arasaratnam, Sinnappah, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coramandel Coast 1650–1750 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Mukund, Kanakalatha, The Trading World of the Tamil Merchant (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1999)Google Scholar; Parthasarathi, Prasannan, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See Stern, Philip J., ‘Power, Petitions, and the “Povo” in Early British Bombay’, in Balachandran, Aparna, Pant, Rashmi and Raman, Bhavani (eds), Iterations of Law: Legal Histories from India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 187–209Google Scholar.

25 Balachandran, ‘Of Corporations and Caste Heads’. For another discussion of law and administration in this period that includes a detailed investigation of the functioning of early colonial law courts, see Arthur Mitchell Fraas, ‘They have Travailed into a Wrong Latitude: The Laws of England, Indian Settlements and the British Imperial Constitution’, PhD thesis, Duke University, 2011. For an exposition on the nature of the East India Company as a corporation that exercised sovereign political power, see Stern, Philip, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 See Aparna Balachandran, ‘Petition Town: Law, Colonialism and Urban Space in Colonial South India’, in Balachandran, Pant and Raman (eds), Iterations of Law, pp. 147–167.

27 Ahuja, Ravi, ‘Labour Relations in Early Colonial Context: Madras 1750–1800’, Modern Asian Studies 36 (2002), pp. 793–826CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Board of Revenue Consultations, 23 September 1804, TNSA.

29 There are numerous instances of this mode of protest in Company's records from the early eighteenth century. The withdrawal of essential services by outcaste workers was usually instigated by the upper caste headmen of vertically organized caste collectivities called the right-hand and left-hand groups and were a prominent feature of urban life in this period. These groups consisted of upper caste leaders, with outcastes at the bottom rung of the hierarchy (the Pariahs, for instance, belonged to the right-hand and the Pallars to the left-hand groups respectively). For more details on the left-hand and right-hand castes, see Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Right and Left Hand Castes in South India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 1 (1) (1974)Google Scholar; or, more recently, Brimnes, Neils, Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Right and Left Hand Castes in Early Colonial South India (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

30 See Swarnalatha, ‘Revolt, Testimony’, pp. 109–110; and Raman, Document Raj, p. 163.

31 See, for instance, Saumarez Smith, Richard, Rule By Record: Land Registration and Village Custom in Early British Punjab (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Tarlo, Emma, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003)Google Scholar; Raman, Document Raj; Hull, Mathew, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cody, Francis, The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mathur, Nayanika, Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Petitions were written in clerical English or in ‘cutcherry’ or ‘office’ Tamil with Persian, Hindustani, Tamil, Telugu, and English loan words. They were read aloud to Company officials and, if deemed significant, some of them were translated and filed in the Company records. Raman, Document Raj, pp. 161–192.

33 Ibid.

34 The Madras Registry of Petitions, which began in 1817, listed petitions with some accompanying details, rather carrying the full text, for reasons of space. In some extraordinary cases, the actual petitions were also retained in the archive, but most of these documents have disintegrated because of the poor quality of paper used by native petitioners. As a result, most of our access to petitions comes from references to them by Company officials in the midst of other records. See Katten, Michael, Colonial Lists/Colonial Power: Identity Formation in Nineteenth Century Telugu Speaking India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, Chapter 3. Available at: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kam01/, [accessed 4 October 2018].

35 For instance, in his classic essay, Shahid Amin deconstructs the trial of those accused of killing 23 policeman in a small town in Gorakhpur in 1922 as a result of which Gandhi called off the Non-Cooperation Movement. Central to his analysis is the figure of Shikari, the approver, whose testimony was key to the conviction of those accused of the crime. Amin compellingly argues that Shikari's declaration in court was judicial discourse, a self-implicating narrative marked by a linear cogency that would serve as evidence for the prosecution. Amin, Shahid, ‘Approver's Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case of Chauri Chaura’, in Guha, Ranajit (ed.), Subaltern Studies Vol. V (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 166–202Google Scholar.

36 Zemon Davis, Natalie, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

37 The colonial state in India was committed to the idea of custom at different points of time, in different regions. In the late eighteenth century, the idea of custom referred to uninterrupted past usage and could refer to issues as diverse as taxation and ritual practices. This is to be distinguished from the post-1857 state's investment in custom as ethnographic information. See Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

38 For a discussion of the importance of custom for early colonial law in South India, see Balachandran, Aparna, ‘The Many Pasts of Mamul: Custom, Law and Religious Identity in Nineteenth Century South India’, in Murphy, Anne (ed.), Time and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia (Routledge: New York, 2011)Google Scholar, pp. 84–99; and Balachandran, ‘Petition Town’.

39 Revenue Consultations, 5 January 1827, TNSA.

40 See Mukund, The View from Below, p. 67.

41 Bhavani Raman points out that the documentary verification demanded by the state resulted in a huge number of cases of forgery which dismayed colonial officials in Company Madras. See Raman, Document Raj, pp. 137–160.

42 Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, Vol. 3, p. 384.

43 Yule, Henry, Burnell, Arthur Coke and Crooke, William, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive (London: J. Murray, 1903), p. 549Google Scholar.

44 See, for instance, O'Hanlon, Rosalind, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 See, for instance, Aloysius, G., Religion as Emancipatory Ideology: A Buddhist Movement Amongst the Tamils Under Colonialism (Madras: Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society, 1998)Google Scholar.

46 Udaya Kumar, ‘Dr Palpu's Petition Writings and Kerala's Pasts’, NMML Occasional Paper, New Series 59 (2014). Very interestingly, Kumar points to the importance of the petition form in the articulation of an alternative history for Kerala that would restore the lost history of the community.

47 Thurston, Edgar, Caste and Tribes of Southern India (Madras: Government Press, 1909), Vol. 6, pp. 86–88Google Scholar.

48 ‘The Humble Petition of the Head Pariahs and Inhabitants of the Great Parcherry, Public Consultations’, 6 April 1810.

49 Ibid.

50 The term ‘literate mentality’ has recently been used by Nandita Sahai in connection with the low caste Mehr Sunar goldsmith community in a discussion on documentary practices in the legal regimes of pre-colonial Rajasthan in the eighteenth century. See Nandita Sahai, ‘To Mount or Not to Mount: Court Records and Law Making in Early Modern Rajasthan’, in Balachandran, Pant and Raman (eds), Iterations of Law, pp. 168–186.

51 See, for instance, Jones, Kenneth W. (ed.), Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages (Albany: State University of New York Press,1992)Google Scholar; Powell, Avril, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Mantena, Rama Sundari, ‘Vernacular Publics and Political Modernity: Language and Progress in Colonial South India’, Modern Asian Studies 47 (5) (2013), pp. 1678–1705CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Naregal, Veena, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001)Google Scholar.

52 For details on the emergence of the Tamil print and association-based literary culture, see Blackburn, Stuart, Print, Folklore and Nationalism in Colonial South India (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2006), pp. 73–124Google Scholar. For an analysis of the administrative and professional elite that emerged in this milieu in the mid-nineteenth century, see Suntharalingam, C., Politics and Nationalist Awakening in South India, 1852–1891 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

53 Price, Pamela, ‘Acting in Public versus Forming a Public: Conflict Processing and Political Mobilisation in Nineteenth Century South India’, in Yandall, Keith E. and Paul, John J. (eds), Religion and Public Culture: Encounters and Identities in Modern South Asia (Surrey: Curzon, 2000), pp. 27–55Google Scholar. For a discussion of how British courts would transform the ways in which individuals and communities represented themselves in public, see Mines, Mattison, ‘Courts of Law and Styles of Self in Eighteenth Century Madras: From Hybrid to Colonial Self’, Modern Asian Studies 35 (2001), pp. 33–74CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

54 I have borrowed this idea of the removal of ‘secrecy’ from instruments of communication through print from David Zaret's analysis of the emergence of the public sphere in seventeenth-century England. Zaret, David, Printing, Petitions, and Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 44–61Google Scholar.

55 Memorial to the Right Honourable Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for India, From Members of the Madras Native Association and others, Hindus, Mohamedans, Inhabitants of the Presidency of Madras, on the subject of Government Interference in Religious Matters (Madras: Hindu Press, 1859).

56 See Hudson, Dennis, Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706–1835 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing, 2000)Google Scholar.

57 We have already seen that upper caste headmen would negotiate with the Madras government by instigating the withdrawal of labour from the city by outcaste members of their collectivities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There are also numerous examples of protests at this time against attacks on outcaste honour that were perceived to be an affront to the dignity of the group as a whole. These protests could be symbolic or were occasionally expressed through physical violence. In one memorable instance in 1707, the heads of the right-hand caste in Madras performed a Pariah wedding on a disputed street with much pomp and ceremony. By the late eighteenth century, such expressions of affinity had all but disappeared. See Public Consultations, 26 June, 7 July 1707, TNSA.

58 Assorted files on the Chingleput Uprising, May 1795, Revenue Consultations, TNSA. For an explanation of the uprising as part of an account of early colonialism in the Tamil country as a dialogic encounter between the colonized and the Company state, see Irschick, Eugene, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

59 Price, ‘Acting in Public versus Forming a Public’, pp. 27–55.

60 There is now a formidable body of scholarship on the public in South Asia. For an early set of provocative essays on the issue, see the special issue ‘Aspects of the Public in Colonial South Asia’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 14 (1991), with an introduction by Sandria Freitag. For a recent reappraisal of the literature on the subject, see Scott, J. Barton and Ingram, Brannon D., ‘What is a Public: Notes from South Asia’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38 (2015), pp. 350–370CrossRefGoogle Scholar.