On 4 May 2014, as a tumultuous general election in India drew to a close, the Indian Express newspaper published a column by Tavleen Singh, with the headline ‘No more petitioners: no more petitioners’. The column went on to quote P. Chidambaran, the outgoing finance minister of the defeated Congress government, who diagnosed a historical shift in the mentality of the Indian electorate. ‘India has moved on,’ Chidambaran was reported as saying, ‘from a petitioner society to an aspirational one. Treating people as petitioners is a mistake . . . even the poor demand a better life and are no longer resigned to their fate.’ In India, the column argued, ‘poor people’ now had ‘middle class aspirations’, desiring ‘jobs and development’ rather than ‘charity’ and that this was a major reason for the success of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 elections. To be a ‘petitioner’, in this analysis, was to be ground down by poverty and resignation, and dependent on the ‘charity’ of others. It was a passing historical condition, a sign of underdevelopment that could be sloughed off by the sudden awakening across society of ‘middle class aspirations’.

This article uses a 1741 testimonial document from Kol (present-day Aligarh) to explore the workings of petitions in the local politics of the late Mughal empire. I suggest that even solitary documents such as this can be read as artefacts of the continuing processes of local politics which operated in excess of the administrative logic of the Mughal state. After surveying the place of petitions in the Mughal apparatus of justice from an administrative perspective, I examine the story of a vanished artisan named Hira to demonstrate that even scattered documents from the Mughal archive can reveal traces of the larger political processes of which a petition might be a single example. In this light, I demonstrate how the testimonial at hand can illuminate the everyday workings of the social and political order of the locality, and its relationship with larger structures of ideology and state power in an era of political decentralization.

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.

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.

In recent years, petitioning cultures have attracted scholarly interest because they are seen as germane to the infrastructure of political communication and modern associative life. Using materials from early colonial Madras, this article discloses a trajectory of the appeal which is different from its conventional place in the social theory of political communication. Colonial petitions carried with them the idea of law as equity through which a paternalist government sought to shape a consenting subject, even as this sense of equity was layered by other meanings of justice. In this sense petitions reworked and exceeded the idioms of imperial law and justice. Thus two aspects of the colonial petition are the focus of this article: its genealogies in the institutional history of the early modern corporation that transmitted notions of law as equity, and the recursive and heteroglossic nature of the language of appeal that enabled this text-form to be an enduring site for refashioning terms of address.

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.

Bombay, the hub of Britain's Indian Ocean empire, hosted a ceaseless flow of humanity: sailors and lawyers, street performers and royal refugees. When fate set obstacles in their way, the residents of this teeming metropolis petitioned colonial officials, looking on them as patriarchal providers of last resort. These petitions, which this article terms ‘personal pleas’, adeptly braided different, often contradictory, idioms of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial governance, from stylized imitations of traditional authority to bureaucratic proceduralism. Their functional contribution to Raj governance, however, remains a puzzle since the vast majority of petitions were rejected. For the British, the steady flow of rejections threatened to unmask the disjuncture between the expectations and realities of Raj paternalism. As a result, colonial officials viewed personal pleas with a mixture of ridicule and concern. Yet, while unsettling for officials, personal pleas rarely spurred the collective politics associated with anti-colonial resistance. Thus, where other articles in this special issue focus on petitioning's functional contributions to the consolidation of state bureaucracies and the formation of new publics, this article traces the genre's more emotive dimensions. Even as they failed to consolidate colonial discipline or resistance, personal pleas provided a vehicle for the airing of the lived contradictions and tensions of empire. They allowed rulers and subjects alike to fantasize about the possibility of a more benevolent order, and to vent their frustration when those fantasies crumbled in the face of imperial indifference.

The historiography on colonial petitioning has primarily construed it as an authorized ritual of supplication designed to affirm and reproduce established power relations. This article restores to the analysis of the petition its status as a potential ‘event’ that could exceed its documentary confines and generate new communities of action. Focusing specifically on colonial Bombay, circa 1889–1914, it highlights three ways in which petitioning marked a rupture in the relations between rulers and ruled, and heralded significant shifts in the local constructions of state and society. First, the article shows how Bombay's Indian residents deployed the petitioning process to contest the unprecedented degree of state intervention in their quotidian lives following an extraordinary civic crisis that engulfed the city in the last decade of the Victorian era. Secondly, the article contends that the petitions that ordinary Indians in Bombay submitted to the different agencies of urban government point to a more complex set of orientations to the colonial state than has been acknowledged by scholars. Thirdly, the article argues that by the end of the nineteenth century, collective petitioning in colonial Bombay had become embedded in forms of political action with which it is conventionally regarded as being incompatible.

Cows have been the subject of political petitioning in South Asia for over a hundred years. This article examines the changing relationship between communities and the state in India through the transformation of petitioning practices—from ‘monster’ petitions, to postcard campaigns and constitutional writs—by the proponents and opponents of the cow protection movement from the late nineteenth century through to the first decades of independence. The article shows that, instead of disciplining and formalizing popular politics, petitioning provides channels for mobilization and disruption. As Hindus and Muslims engaged in competitive petitioning to rally a public, persuade the executive, or litigate through the courts, the question of cow slaughter was recast from one of community representation to religious belief, to property rights, to federalism, and, finally, questions of national economic development. In the absence of representative government in colonial India, Hindus for cow protection generated massive petitions which argued that they represented popular democratic will. Despite the lack of a constitution, Muslim petitioners sought to establish a judicially enforceable framework to protect their right to cow slaughter. Independence, which brought both democracy and a written constitution, caused a fundamental break with older claims and forms of petitioning, and led to both Hindus and Muslims seeking to settle the debate through writ petitions before constitutional courts.

In a political culture that experiences inordinately high levels of petitioning, what makes for a successful petition? This article studies petitions that have been efficacious in their appeals to capture or kill big cats in Himalayan India. The rates of success for any appeal against big cats are low in contemporary India, given the stringent legal regime that is geared almost exclusively towards the protection of the charismatic and endangered big cats as well as the hegemonic position occupied by wildlife conservationism. Furthermore, not only is it difficult to petition against cossetted big cats, but it is also not an easy task for any petition to be heard and acquiesced to. Through an ethnography of efficacious petitions, this article makes three related interventions. First, and in the process of attending to the rarity of a handful of efficacious petitions, this article argues for expanding our conceptualization of what, in practice, a petition is. It does so by outlining the changing forms of efficacious petitions, which can range from a telephone call, a register entry, a WhatsApp message from a smart phone, to the more ‘traditional’ paper-based petition. Beyond its ever-evolving medium, this article demonstrates the criticality of folding petitioning into a wider process that involves planning, performance, perseverance, repetition, and the capacity to elicit visceral responses. Finally, through an ethnographic foregrounding of human-big cat interactions, it demonstrates how an acceptance and elaboration of animal agency enriches the study of politico-legal processes.