Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India 9780226703275, 9780226703299, 0226703274, 0226703290

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Document Raj

South Asia Across the Disciplines A series edited by Muzaffar Alam, Sheldon Pollock, and Gauri Viswanathan Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press.

Also in the series: the powerful ephemeral: everyday healing in an ambiguously islamic place by Carla Bellamy (California) extreme poetry: the south asian movement of simultaneous narration by Yigal Bronner (Columbia) conjugations: marriage and form in new bollywood cinema by Sangita Gopal (Chicago) secularizing islamists?: jama’at-eislami and jama’at-ud-da’wa in urban pakistan by Humeira Iqtidar (Chicago) the social space of language: vernacular culture in british colonial punjab by Farina Mir (California) unifying hinduism: philosophy and identity in indian intellectual history by Andrew J. Nicholson (Columbia) unfinished gestures: devadasis, memory, and modernity in south india by Davesh Soneji (Chicago) islam translated: literature, conversion, and the arabic cosmopolis of south and southeast asia by Ronit Ricci (Chicago)

South Asia Across the Disciplines is a series devoted to publishing fi rst books across a wide range of South Asian studies, including art, history, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences. Series authors all share the goal of opening up new archives and suggesting new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal.

Document Raj Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India

b h ava n i r a m a n

the universit y of chicago press

chicago and london

bhavani raman is assistant professor of South Asian history at Princeton University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2012. Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-70327-5 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-70329-9 (e-book) isbn-10: 0-226-70327-4 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-70329-0 (e-book) Parts of chapters 1,3, and 4 of the present work have previously appeared in a different version as the following: “The Familial World of the Company Kacceri in Early Colonial Madras, 1780-1860,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9, no. 2, 2008; “Tamil Munshis and Kacceri Tamil under the Company’s Document Raj in Early NineteenthCentury Madras,” in The Madras School of Orientalism, edited by Thomas Trautmann, 209-32 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009); and “Disciplining the Senses, Schooling the Mind: Early Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on Inhabiting Virtue from the Tamil Tinnai School,” in Ethical Life in South Asia, edited by Anand Pandian and Daud Ali, 43-60 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). The author thanks the publishers for the permission to reprint these materials. A slightly different version of chapter 5 appeared as “The Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colonial Madras,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 54, issue 02 (April 2012): 229-50. Copyright © 2012 Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Raman, Bhavani Document Raj : writing and scribes in early colonial south India / Bhavani Raman. pages ; cm. — (South Asia across the disciplines) isbn 978-0-226-70327-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-70329-9 (e-book) — isbn 0-226-70327-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) — isbn 0-226-70329-0 (e-book) 1. Scribes— India—Tamil Nadu—History—19th century. 2. Tamil language—Writing—History— 19th century. 3. Documentation—India—Tamil Nadu—History—19th century. 4. Public administration—India—Tamil Nadu—History—19th century. 5. Accounting— India—Tami Nadu—History—19th century. 6. Bureaucracy—India—Tamil Nadu— History—19th century. 7. East India Company—Records and correspondence— History—19th century. I. Title. II. Series: South Asia across the disciplines. DS485.M28R317 2012 954′.82031—dc23 2012011879 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents List of Abbreviations vii Preface

ix

Note on Transliteration and Conventions Introduction 1 PA RT I .

Scribal Practice

chapter 1. Cutcherry Scribes

23

chapter 2. Scribal Skills 53 PA RT I I .

Writing and Pedagogy

chapter 3. Cutcherry Tamil

81

chapter 4. Schools and Writing PA RT I I I .

106

Document Raj

chapter 5. Duplicity and Evidence 137 chapter 6. Addressing the Raj Conclusion Notes

193

203

Bibliography 251 Index

273

161

xiii

Abbreviations AHR APAC BOR CSSH EPW GOML IESHR JAS JESHO MAS SIH TNSA

American Historical Review Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection, British Library Board of Revenue Consultations Comparative Studies in Society and History Economic and Political Weekly Government Oriental Manuscripts Library Indian Economic and Social History Review Journal of Asian Studies Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient Modern Asian Studies Studies in History Tamil Nadu State Archives (Chennai)

Preface

P

aperwork in contemporary India, as elsewhere, is a ubiquitous fact of everyday life that appears to resist history. Indian red tape, more often than not, is associated with long stretches of time in crowded government offices and waiting for an official signature, which must often be bought with the services of a middleman. Indeed, India’s dissatisfaction with the trade in paper that defi nes its bureaucracy has now become a national passion of sorts. There are calls for stricter laws to hold bureaucrats more responsible to those they serve. Demands for greater transparency are heard from a range of political perspectives. Transparency and accountability, however, are not new demands, and in themselves, they do not represent a particularly sufficient critique of bureaucratic power. Such demands, in fact, have a long history of triggering bureaucratic expansion when they have operated in isolation from the critique of the policing and evidentiary practices that make up bureaucratic order. Postcolonial India’s tryst with bureau rule has been an engagement with an administrative system fi rst established for the efficient transfer of resources from the colony to those wielding imperial control. The forefather of today’s multinationals, the British East India Company, installed these structures when it came under parliamentary oversight in the late eighteenth century. Elite appropriation of these structures of resource transfer after independence ensured a devastating administrative continuity in two registers: everyday encounters with the state characterized by petty corruption, and the capacity of a few to accumulate resources in the production of a state-driven market economy. Corruption has not diminished with the deregulation of the market in recent times. This book is an effort to understand how colonial rule fashioned the

x

Preface

bureaucracy, in part, as a techno-fantasy in the subcontinent. It pays particular attention to how new dispositions to writing and paperwork emerged in the early nineteenth century by examining a range of practices consolidated by colonial bureaucratic order, such as the signature and the exercise of discretion, pedagogy conducive to clerical employment, and the expanded power of expertise. The government of writing was introduced to check the abuse of power and facilitate the spread of the market under colonial rule. In the process, official intervention to modify conduct and install new expectations of writing generated a textual habitus and an orientation to knowledge that rewrote the normative relationship between written recordkeeping and memory, and written and spoken declarations. Clerical employment formed the grounds of the colonial middle class and its caste affi liations. Middle-class Indian piety came to accrue from the gains of clerical office, while the office itself fundamentally shaped the new notion of productive work and the virtues of gainful employment in line with a market economy. These developments have shaped the field of social struggle in the last two centuries. The insidious articulation of corruption with this clerical modernity demands attention to the ways in which a modern bureaucratic order installed through writing shaped orientations to caste, pedagogy, dissent, and policing. The narrow history of administrative reforms has usually characterized the history of the bureaucracy in India. Developments in the early nineteenth century across a number of domains, however, remain crucial to understanding this bureaucratic modernity. Document Raj tells this story in the Tamil region of southern India. This book could not have been written but for the generosity of several individuals and institutions. Professors K. N. Panikkar, Majid Siddiqui, Neeladari Bhattacharya, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya at the Center for Historical Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, were inspiring teachers. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, I was privileged to be supervised by an extraordinarily supportive dissertation committee, Professors Sumathi Ramaswamy, Thomas Trautmann, Frederick Cooper, and Kathryn Babayan. Many of the ideas of the book are the fruit of innumerable conversations with Sumathi and Tom, and I remain indebted to their insights. I am grateful to Professor S. Karunakaran at the University of Michigan and Dr. Pu. Subramanian at the Institute for Asian Studies (Chennai) for sharing their knowledge of Tamil linguistics and literature.

Preface

xi

The primary research for this book was conducted in several archival institutions and libraries. In India, I would like to thank the staff and librarians of the Tamil Nadu State Archives (Chennai), especially Mr. Sivakumar, Mr. Ravi, Mr. Kannan, Mr. Suresh, Mr. Neelavannan, Mr. Krishnan, Mr. M. Namasivayam, and Dr. M. Sundaraj; the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library (Chennai), especially Dr. Soundarapandian; and the United Theological College Library (Bangalore). In the United Kingdom, I would like to thank the staff and librarians of the British Library’s Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection; the School of Oriental and African Studies (London); and the Library of the University of Birmingham. At the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mary Rader and Susan Goh; and at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, Elizabeth Bennett and Gary Haussmann provided crucial bibliographic assistance and went out of their way to trace uncatalogued printed materials. The Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the University of Michigan’s Graduate School and the Institute of Humanities, and Princeton’s University Committee of Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences provided funds for archival research and writing. I am grateful to the Department of History at Princeton for giving me generous periods of leave to fi nish the book and to the University of Toronto’s South Asia Program for institutional affi liation and library facilities while I was on sabbatical. In Chennai, Professor V. Arasu, V. Geetha, and the late Professor K. Sivathamby inspired many new questions about Tamil history, politics, and memory. M. Kannan at the French Institute at Pondicherry, and Pulavar Kannaiyan, Mailam, South Arcot, shared many insights on textuality and history. Julia Adams, Muzaffar Alam, Daud Ali, Darshan Ambalavanar, Shahid Amin, Barnard Bate, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sharad Chari, Prachi Deshpande, Geoff Eley, Sumit Guha, Dirk Hartog, William Jordan, Malavika Kasturi, Rama Mantena, Lisa Mitchell, Hannah Weiss Mueller, Anand Pandian, Prasannan Parathsarthi, Gyan Prakash, Radhika Singha, Philip Stern, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and A. R. Venkatachalapathy read portions or all of the manuscript, made key suggestions, and pointed to references that helped develop its ideas. I am grateful to Rosalind O’ Hanlon, Anand Pandian, Daud Ali, and Philip Stern for inviting me to present my work at workshops they organized on scribes, ethical life, education, and the East India Company respectively. T. David Brent and Priya Nelson at the University of Chicago Press

xii

Preface

warmly supported the publication of the book, and two anonymous reviewers provided valuable insights for refi ning its arguments. Lisa Nichols, Kristina Kyser, B. Nagalakshmi, and Lisa Wehrle have, at different stages of rewriting, provided greatly appreciated copyediting assistance. This book could not have been written without friends. Senthil Babu’s questions, his love for beer, and the many pillion-ride discussions about books, kanakku, and futures fueled the ideas in this book. Kaushik Bhaumik, Ruchi Chaturvedi, Prachi Deshpande, V. Geetha, Chandan Gowda, Olivera Jokic´, Emil Kerenji, Kamal Lodaya, Teena Purohit, Aruna Rathinam, Swati Shresth, Deborah Sutton, Samira Sheikh, and Lee Schlesinger have been a source of warmth and affection. At Princeton, I could not have asked for better companions than Arudra Burra, Vera Candiani, Mariana Candido, Janet Chen, Joshua Guild, Judy Laffan, Michael Laffan, Gyan Prakash, and Max Weiss. My students who took my graduate seminar pushed me with their questions as I worked on the manuscript. Girish Daswani, Naisargi Dave, Sudharshan Durayappah, Kajri Jain, Malavika Kasturi, William Nelson, Alejandro Paz, Srilata Raman, and Natalie Rothman made my short stays in Toronto feel more permanent. My parents, Mohan and Uma Raman, have supported this project in too many ways to acknowledge. Along with Madhav, Vivek, Geetha, and Shankar, their care and their love for books have meant the world to me. I cannot imagine my efforts to research and write about the past without Aparna Balachandran. My best friend and worst critic, her journeys and insights have shaped my own. Finally, but not the least, I remain indebted to Francis Cody, whose work inspires me and whose gentle love brings me infi nite joy. His constant presence has made this book possible.

Note on Transliteration and Conventions

A

ll Tamil/Persian terms in transliteration appear in italics and without diacritics in the fi rst instance—e.g., “kanakkuppillai,” “munshi,” or “tahsildar” but with possessives, munshi’s. I have indicated the correct transliteration in the Madras Lexicon style for Tamil and Library of Congress for Persian/Urdu in parentheses with italics the fi rst time the word is used. Subsequent iterations are in Roman script without diacritics. Some terms for writing practices and text genres appear with diacritics and in italics in the fi rst instance and then in italics. Conventional spellings are used for proper names for example, “Mahalingam” rather than “Makalinkam.” Book titles in Tamil appear in italics with diacritics. For the sake of readability, proper names, caste and religious names, and place names appear in uppercase in plain text—e.g., “Vellalar” or “Tanjavur.” English official titles and functional titles are not capitalized except when they become part of a person’s name—e.g., “collector,” but “Collector Harris.” Official departments of Company administration are capitalized—e.g., “Board of Revenue.” Depending on context, “Madras” denotes the city of Madras (now Chennai) or Madras Presidency, the territorial administrative region directly ruled by the English East India Company in the early nineteenth century in South India. In footnote references to Company documents from the Tamil Nadu State Archives, Madras, I have referenced the location of the collection as Chennai. References to archival sources from Company collections appear in a form for ready reference by series, date, volume, number, page, and location. Private papers and missionary sources appear in the convention used by the catalogues of the collection. I have used abbreviations for archival series and for journal names.

Introduction

T

he early 1850s saw an acrimonious metropolitan debate over the fate of the British East India Company. As on previous occasions, debate had erupted over the renewal of the Royal Charter that allowed the Company to rule over its Indian territories. This time, however, the usual dissensions about Company corruption and despotism were dominated by arguments about paperwork and political rule. Karl Marx, writing in the New York Herald Tribune on the issue, observed that for the fi rst time the British Parliament had raised the irregular question about India: “Who among us is the actual governing power over that foreign people of 156 millions of souls?”1 Marx observed that the “real” governors of India were not those vested with political authority—that is to say, the British Parliament or the Court of Directors of the Company— but those who were the Company’s clerks in Leadenhall, “the creatures of the desk and the creatures of favour.” When the Company’s factories grew into an empire and commodities were replaced by shiploads of correspondence, the Leadenhall clerks had continued on in their system. The directors and the board became their dependants, “transforming the Indian Government into one immense writing machine.” 2 “No wonder,” he marveled, “that there exists no government by which so much is written and so little done.”3 A few years after Marx wrote this newspaper piece, parliamentary oversight gave way to direct rule. Following the Revolt of 1857, the Crown took over the Company’s Indian territories.4 A wave of administrative reform quickly followed, but the Company’s most durable legacy remained its bureaucratic forms: its revenue offices or the cutcherry (Anglo-Indian: office of administration) and the courtroom, the adalat (ada¯lat). The Company’s bureau rule was the linchpin of empire.

2

Introduction

This book is about how the British East India Company assembled its administrative offices or its “lettered city” in the Tamil-speaking hinterlands of its South Indian colony, Madras Presidency. 5 I call this lettered city of writing and protocols “document raj.” Writing, fi les, scribes, and clerks are not the mere technological bases of the modern state and its rule of law. As this book shows, the very protocols of law that underwrote the modern state are constituted in the micropractices of writing. The media theorist Cornelia Vismann describes the relationship between law and writing well when she observes that fi les and law determine each other, but the self-founding mythological fiction of Western law derives from its claim to turn fi les from visible signs of power into the underbelly of administration. From their moment of banishment into offices, fi les execute and administer, while law transcends and becomes abstract. Files then serve law and become, eventually, objects of regulation, accessible only through law and by law from archives where they accumulate.6 Vismann traces this founding story about the relationship between law and the fi le to a Roman imperial exemplar. This book is about its historical constitution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in early colonial India. From the late eighteenth century, the Company instituted a government of writing under parliamentary pressure to perpetuate the mastery of the Indian subcontinent for the metropole’s fi nance and manufacturing empires. From the 1830s, the Company lost its monopoly over the India trade and thereafter administered its territories in trust for the British government. By the 1850s, at the moment of its dismantling, the Company’s bureaucracy had not only expanded in size, but its European civil servants had come to provide a template for Victorian notions of bureaucracy and Englishness, especially the idea that bureaucratic work was a moral vocation, suffused with neutrality, honor, and integrity.7 To study the Company’s “civil rule” is thus to study a set of practices and orientations to written accountability that shaped the framework of public administration in the British Empire. This book studies the political, linguistic, and pedagogic connotations of written accountability by attending to its colonial career. The Company’s bureaucratic state coincided with a time when the conceptual term “bureaucracy” acquired currency as a powerful organizational form of office holding, expertise, corporate management, and rule-based government. Continuous writing in these years became the idealized solution to the problem of managing trust and reliability across

Introduction

3

distance. The idea that writing could ensure political accountability and limit the abuse of power by making actions transparent and legible has since fueled the moral steam engines of the bureaucratic state. Such an orientation to writing might be termed “papereality,” or the exclusive reliance on official written documents to represent the world.8 Papereality subsumes reason under the technical procedure of standardized control. It is, in part, an empirical description of bureaucratic logic and in part, a reflection of the bureaucracy as it exists in its own view.9 Papereality makes invisible the artifice of writing. The self-evidence with which writing is associated with legibility and storage, it seems to me, warrants scrutiny. My endeavor draws on recent studies of paper and signature that have shown how writing offers new strategies of subversion and new ways of understanding the articulation of law in the same moment that it is normatively associated with procedure.10 Files are variables that control the formalization and differentiation of the law.11 Far from fi xing, codifying, and stabilizing or reconciling the contradictions of rule, acts of fi ling, listing, and registering generate domains for all manner of transactions at the margins of the documentary state.12 Attention to such infelicitous documentary practice that is derived from writing’s iterable qualities has shown that the “illegibility” of written documents endemic in bureaucratic states instantiates a peculiar paradox. When the state, Veena Das argues, “institutes forms of governance through technologies of writing, it simultaneously institutes the possibility of forgery, imitation, and the mimetic performances of its power.”13 For Das, the realm of illegibility or the gap between the rule and its performance in the margins of the everyday reveals how the state is reincarnated in the life of communities by simultaneously manifesting itself as the bearer of rules and as a spectral presence rendered visible in documents.14 Drawing on these insights, I explore how the cutcherry’s micro-practices of writing reordered the production of juridical truth and interlocked the rule of paper with a subtle but devastating discretionary authority. I have not attempted to emulate the detailed concern with the interpretative latitude that accompanies archival taxonomies and the disregard and anxiety that animate paperwork. These concerns have preoccupied those scholars whose work has preceded my foray into the colonial archive and its documents.15 The story of the Company’s lettered city that follows is also not about how colonial officers abstracted legal categories from everyday administration to constitute state mandated space, though these are crucial ideas.16 In-

Introduction

4

stead, I focus on issues such as the hierarchies and protocols of knowledge, linguistic transactions, and problems of attestation. These issues adumbrate the textual habitus produced by the force of colonial rule.17 In this book, I consider how writing is integral to changing relations of production and not just an inanimate means of representing changes happening in other domains.18 The world I sketch is the world of the subordinate clerk, and through it, the subterranean spaces of documentary transactions that surrounded the cutcherry. And so to the colony, Madras Presidency, and a story composed in Tamil about a clerical encounter.

The Cutcherry’s “Lettered City” In 1859, a year after the Crown regained control of India, a Tamil munshi (teacher) named P. Singarabalaventhiram Pillai composed a language manual for Europeans learning the language of colonial command. The manual, among other things, included stories in Tamil for reading practice. In one story, Ponnambalam, a Tirunelveli cultivator, responded to his friend’s inquiries by recounting his recent troubles with local government officials in the cutcherry: When I went on business to give a petition (arici taricima¯)19 in Tenkasi, there I saw wealthy men lounging like a herd of cattle and dubashes (tupa¯s.i, official translators and information brokers) who had arrived on palanquins. As I was telling them all about my troubles, all the injustices occurring in our village, a writer (oru lait.t.araiya¯)20 took pity on me and asked me what the situation was now. My lord [I replied], for about 10 measures (can˙kili) of land, my aged father mortgaged his ancestral wealth to pay for a lease deed (pat.t.a¯) and, in his impoverished state, ate only rice gruel. He suffered even more losses, but didn’t speak back to the Government. At such a time, the village accountant (kira¯ma kan.akkuppil.l.ai) and his assistant came from the subdistrict officer’s establishment to collect tax (kist); they harassed him further by revaluating the land and issued a new lease deed. Unable to pay, now he was completely ruined and humiliated. Seeing the blind (kan.teriya¯ ta), illiterate (pat.ippila¯tap pat.t.ikka¯ t.u)21 poor threatened, taxed, and driven off the land like this, I couldn’t stand it. I went to that building across the bridge (pa¯lattukkat.uta valavilirukira tarcima¯rai kan.t.u) and said, “All of you responsible for ˉ this cruelty are disgraceful!” The creep village accountant narrowed his eyes

Introduction

5

and told his assistant to capture me. I shouted, “Let’s see you touch me! No chance!” But the bastard grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and took me to the tahsildar and told him false stories against me. That stupid ass of a tahsildar screamed at me, “Don’t talk to government officials like that!” Then he beat me up and threw me out. I was not going to take this lying down, so I went to another official and complained, “This is your fault and your duty to protect me.” He said, “You are speaking to the district officer (sheristadar).” Wearing a new white cloth (ve¯s..ti), he wrote a detailed petition (arici taricima¯) and told me to come to the collector’s office. I am sick of beating my breast trying to get out of this useless mess. I should leave all this and run away to Madras (pat..tinam) or to some foreign country (cı¯ mai), where I can haul loads ˉ like a coolie and drink myself into oblivion. 22

Ponnambalam’s diminishing ability to fi nd justice and to have his story deemed credible is expressed in the word he uses for the office

figure 1. Anon., “Prisoner before a court” (ca. 1850). Gouache mica, Trichinopoly style. © British Library Board, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, Add.Or.2453.

6

Introduction

building, tarcima¯rai, which literally means “a room for submission” or a place to deposit. It is a quintessential “cutcherry Tamil” word, a language variety associated with the colonial office and made up of Persian, Hindustani, Tamil, Telugu, and English loan words. For Ponnambalam to enter the cutcherry was to enter a distinct spatial and discursive form by submitting a petition. Hierarchy and a self-contained appearance preserved the lettered city’s mystery. It had impenetrable protocols of conduct, fi lled with upper-caste clerks, modes of interaction, and ways of speech—that was, above all, saturated with writing. In Ponnambalam’s tale, law appears as the threat of imprisonment precisely at the moment of a documentary transaction. It offers a new point of entry into old questions about colonial modernity associated with the figure of the Indian clerk.

Framing Paper Rule The story of the colonial clerk or babu is intimately braided with the historical problem of how a small group of Europeans established everyday control over a vast colony with the assistance of native subordinates. It is thus that the collaborating babu, the infamously complicit Indian clerk, serves as an iconic metonym for a split modern subjectivity birthed by colonial ledgers, the English language, and European-style schools. The complex terrain of this split clerical modernity has invited innumerable genealogies. The most interesting was proposed by Sumit Sarkar who has shown how new temporalities and modes of ambiguously gendered self-fashioning were triggered by burgeoning desk drudgery. 23 Along with European ideas, the petty life of salaried employment provided the frame for the social reform and self-improvement that was the distinguishing mark of the colonial middle classes in the long nineteenth century. More recently, the ethical preoccupations of early modern scribes of Persianate and Maratha polities, called munshis, have attracted the attention of scholars interested in writing new intellectual histories of the subcontinent. 24 The research for this book has taken a different direction. Clerical modernity invites us to look back, as we will, to the years before the institution of the colonial office. This book however, is not a study of the longue durée origins of middling groups that identifies their employment in the colonial office as a sign of historical

Introduction

7

continuity between the precolonial and the colonial. It is, rather, a delineation of a textual habitus produced by the interrelation of scribal power and bureaucratic discretion under early colonial rule.25 This scribal habitus fashioned in the early nineteenth century, embodied in gesture, in writing materials, and in instruments of torture, reveals a complex terrain of modern temporal power for our consideration. The publicists of anti-Brahman social movements in South and West India, in Madras and Bombay Presidencies, were among the earliest to reveal the operation of clerical power between brute force and due process in ways that summoned up centuries of epistemic and ritual hegemony within the framework of British rule in figures like the “cutcherry Brahman.” 26 It is this understanding of the scribal habitus that informs my analysis of the Company’s government by writing. Attending to the scribal habitus suggests several points of departure from the debates on the collaborative role of native intermediaries. These debates, triggered by the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, ranged widely from the role of native assistants in producing the taxonomies of modern colonialism to the colonial genealogies of the cultureconcept. At their core, they have turned around whether nominally subordinate agents substantively ran the colonial show or whether colonial interpellation meant the violent imposition of cultural difference as the very frame of governance and modernity. The former position taken by Christopher Bayly in Empire and Information depicts the early colonial state form as ill-informed but paper obsessed and beset by information panics. 27 A seam of scholarship, following the work of Bernard Cohn, has countered Bayly’s vision of official anxiety by underscoring how the investigative modalities of colonial rule enabled the targeting of populations along lines of racial and ethnic difference for all manner of differentiated projects that we associate with colonial governance. 28 Several studies have since argued that the anthropological imperative of liberalism in its colonial career produced, in full measure, the iron cage of cultural alterity, even if knowledge was produced with the aid of native assistants. 29 The debates about the collaborative role of colonial intermediaries were motored by the critique of the epistemological underpinnings of the historical and anthropological study of non-European regions. 30 The discussion, in other words, coincided with a call to think the metropole and the colony together. 31 More recently, however, a new historiographic

8

Introduction

turn has proceeded to reappropriate the colonial intermediary. A resurgent interest in information brokerage has placed the intermediary at the center of value production in the making of scientific knowledge and empire. 32 Such a view presents European scientific knowledge as exchangedriven and ecumenical by erasing the shadow of violence and inserting in its place an eager exploration of the stimulation of learning and knowledge offered by global interconnections. 33 This is not the place to consider how the present dilemmas of globalization and market-driven knowledge produce entire historiographic efforts to retain the narrative of discovery through the trope of intercultural collaboration. But it is important to underscore that this new interconnected historical narrative uses the collaborating intermediary to assert the embodied competence and capricious transmission through which science and commerce proceed, often at the cost of critiquing the modern relationship of expertise and power. So this book is, in part, an effort to engage the colonial knowledge debates through a consideration of scribal expertise. Many of the scribes described in this book were men, generally upper caste and educated, whose competence with languages and numbers, and whose capacity to extract obedience, was invaluable to colonial state making and its knowledge apparatus. In contrast to a number of studies that detail the collaborative nature of colonial knowledge, however, this book excavates how an insatiable appetite for knowledge to aid good governance and for ensuring accountability through writing made for a range of subtle official interventions in textual practice. From within the power-laden hierarchy of colonial knowledge administration emerged a new regime of differentiation and localization of expertise. The simultaneous feeling of exclusion and indispensability as knowledge brokers came to be instantiated in figures like the clerical aspirant or umedwar (Tamil: ume¯tuva¯r) that you will meet in these pages. The official effort to tutor and shape conduct through interventions in textual practice has left its lasting legacy in orientations to knowledge, law and the protocols of attestation.

A Government by Writing The government by writing installed under colonialism stemmed from the East India Company’s peculiar “corporate sovereignty.”34 From its

Introduction

9

very inception in the seventeenth century, the British East India Company’s political dominance was forged by the sword, built on the spine of the accountant’s ledger, and held together by written correspondence. Like other European joint-stock companies of its time, the Company was not a benign trader who stumbled into an empire, but, as Phillip Stern emphasizes, it was a mercantilist corporation empowered by charter to found settlements overseas, monopolize sea trade, make treaties, and defend itself militarily against its rivals and opponents abroad. 35 Paper assuaged the anxieties of distance felt by the Company’s board in London while serving to sustain the geography of empire in the metropolitan imagination. 36 As a militarized corporate institution, the Company played a vital role in the debates about sovereignty in Britain. The Company’s peculiar role was due to its relationship to the Crown. As a corporation, the Company held what English law deemed a “franchise.” Institutions like counties, palatinates, local warrens, and corporations were empowered by means of a franchise to exercise the king’s rights as private persons and enjoyed various delegated jura regalia. 37 The powers of the franchise enabled Company officials to fashion a substantially independent political system dependant on multiple political relations and thus subject entirely to none, even as opinion remained divided on the justness of the Company’s monopolies and the jurisdiction over subjects.38 These legal powers enabled the Company to develop a model of war finance that during the eighteenth century turned it into an insatiable machine at the Georgian frontier, continually engaged in battle. 39 Financial brokerage provided the Company with its working capital. A spiraling bond market sustained by private credit brought the Company political advantage over princely courts and was leveraged with the application of force. The sword and mortgage bonds enforced revenue collection privileges and tributary relations. European agency houses and private creditors, who ranged from European fortune seekers and Indian and Armenian fi nanciers, pocketed the profits from these fi nancial transactions. Company officials opened private trade portfolios to supplement their wages and made undisclosed profits. By the second half of the eighteenth century, in the meantime, these costly wars forced the Company to seek bailouts. Emergency subsidies periodically rescued shortfalls, large transfers of cash from Bengal in 1786–87 to Madras being a case in point. In consequence, metropolitan criticism of the Company’s monop-

10

Introduction

oly over the India trade was equally spurred by calls to check the abuse of official power and curtail profiteering. Indeed, the proper separation of state and civil society that marked the onset of free markets as a governing ideology was concretized in the debate about Company corruption.40 Coded as an ideologically spent force of old-world corruption, the Company began to be seen as an obstacle to the now universal ideas of liberty and free trade.41 Dogged by scandal and allegations of despotism, the Company stood at the center of British debates on the proper place of government and the moral burdens of empire—two challenges assumed remediable through parliamentary intervention and greater adherence to written procedure. The moral regeneration and collective renewal of the intertwined projects of empire and nation propelled a faith in writing as a tool of political accountability from the late eighteenth century. From that time, the machinery of the rule of law in India and the Company’s reputation in metropolitan Britain would turn around continuous writing and the problems produced by writing’s iterability.

Perfect Recordation and a Clerical Modernity Political liberals justified the explosion of writing as an appropriate way to govern a society they deemed incapable of civil debate. In the 1852 debates about the Company’s charter renewal, John Stuart Mill drew on his experience in Leadenhall to defend the Government of India’s working because it was a government that was carried out in writing. “All the orders given, and all the acts of the executive officers, are reported in writing.”42 To Mill, writing made for a greater security for good government than that which existed in almost all other governments of the world, because no other, he argued, probably has “a system of recordation so complete.” Ten years later, Mill would champion ideal government as one that balanced the institutions of representation with trained officials. In the colony, he argued, such equilibrium was unrealizable. The British Parliament was too distant from India and could not apprehend and hence adequately represent Indian interest. Indian society did not possess appropriate institutions that could successfully communicate its problems. For Mill, writing was an inadequate but necessary substitute for reasoned debate and civil conduct that he deemed absent in the colony. Ceaseless writing was intended to check the abuse of power, but

Introduction

11

it would always remain insufficient. “The practice of writing as a strategy of colonialist regulation,” Homi Bhabha observes, left the “mimetic adequacy of draft and dispatch somewhat in doubt.”43 In such a situation, when writing formed the sinews of government while acting as oversight on that government, the proliferation of paper came to be intimately tied to expansive official discretion. The Company’s emphasis on continuous writing mandated by parliamentary oversight had a different set of political connotations from those surrounding earlier regimes of writing.

Genealogies of Cutcherry Scribal Practice The Company cutcherry’s scribes were by no means the fi rst professional writers of southeastern India. The fi nancial networks that fueled Company expansion in Madras were embedded in an older polyglot scribal interface. For centuries, scribes, like scholars, followed armies, traders, and pilgrims creating a robust traffic in manuscripts, that Sheldon Pollock calls “script mercantilism.”44 From the sixteenth century, a complex inscriptional ecology cut across the domains of liturgy, commerce, jurisprudence, and revenue accounts. Texts made their way over large geographical terrains through different scripts and different languages.45 There was no easy correspondence between language and script. By the seventeenth century, a relatively developed scribal market had emerged all over the subcontinent. Writers could range from powerful courtiers to those who eked out a living by reproducing texts or writing accounts. Mirroring the fortunes of Persian-writing munshis under the Mughal Empire, South Indian scribes aspired to political prominence, benefiting greatly from state making that relied on commerce and fast-flowing credit to fund military campaigns.46 Great variation marked the mastery of language among scribes of the Coromandel hinterland. Tamil and Telugu languages acquired prominence by about 1400, and continued thereafter along with the entry of European languages, Marathi, and some Persian through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The southern expansion during the seventeenth century of the Bijapur and the Maratha polities from peninsular India saw Persian and Persian-inflected Marathi enter the scribal vocabulary. Mughal conquest in the 1680s intensified Persian. The Arcot state, established by a former Mughal governor, further integrated the Coromandel region into

12

Introduction

the Persian cosmopolis.47 Yet the scribe who kept records in Modi script, along with writers of Telugu and Tamil, provided the polities of southeastern India with account keeping and credit expertise, albeit under a Persianate ethos. Daftars, or registries, devised elaborate protocols of certification etched on a variety of materials and scripts. Peripatetic revenue-collecting entourages called kachahri (Hindustani: kachahrı¯), a pan-subcontinental term for an office on the go, collected revenue on behalf of the princely household.48 Moreover, European trading enclaves along the coast in Madras, Cuddalore, and Pondicherry as well as Jesuit and Lutheran mission stations generated their own pools of scribal intermediaries, adept at copying Roman script. Although scribes writing in Persian, Modi, and Telugu script used paper, palm leaf (olai) remained ubiquitous for Tamil. The most lowly scribe called karanam or kanakkuppillai (crikaran.am, karan.am, or kan.akkuppil..lai), if he wrote in Tamil, used palm leaf. This office fi rst appears in the records of the earliest South Indian kingly polities of the Pallava, Pandya, and Chola dynasties in the fi rst millennium.49 Modern histories of these empires rest on the classical kanakkuppillai’s text artifacts preserved for posterity in inscriptions carved on copperplate and stone. 50 These stone and metal inscriptions mainly recorded important royal edits and temple donations. Palm leaf, however, remained the quotidian material of choice for taxes, deeds, leases, and bonds, as well as liturgy, poetry, treatises, and epics. 51 The textual tradition that flourished around palm leaf was restricted to a small circle of stylus wielders and prized the ability to recite— particularly to recite from memory. Prosody, poetics, and grammar were taught along established teacher-disciple lineages. 52 Palm-leaf texts (olai cuvat. i) are also quick to disintegrate. Preservation lay in regular use, renewal, and reproduction. Repeated recitation fi xed texts in the mind; writing made copies and compilations; lamp black and preservative oils kept palm leaf supple. The philological researches conducted by orientalists and missionaries into the subcontinent’s languages reorganized this dynamic inscriptional ecology by mapping language and script onto a conceptual grid of territorially demarcated ethnic homelands. 53 Although these alignments did not end transactions between languages, the conceptual realignment of land to language speakers marked a new era of intellectual production concerning the historical pasts of language. A cartographic imagination, nurtured by print, produced a new template of relations between

Introduction

13

figure 2. “Preserving revenue accounts on palm-leaf” (photograph taken by author, courtesy Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai).

languages mediated by English. Languages now materialized as mothers and goddesses who required devoted masculine protection and were endowed with unique histories and qualities of terroir. 54 These new conceptions of language were widely mobilized by the subcontinent’s many regional language nationalisms. 55 These new orientations to language formed the grounds of a new habitus or disposition to writing. 56 As studies of “voice” have shown, the onset of modernity cannot be mapped in terms of new communication technologies per se. Scholars of performance, for example, criticize attempts to plot a large-scale societal shift from orality to writing by arguing that the oral acquires its categorical distinction only in the context of a scriptural economy. 57 To foreground a similar concern with the disposition toward writing is thus not to posit a study of writing in contrast to speech or to print culture. Rather it is to elaborate how dispositions to writing, as art and artifice, are revealed at the interstices of the disciplining and epistemic practices of the state, of textual form and authority, and of those who could write and those who depended on scribes. I trace the transformation of

14

Introduction

these dispositions by reentering an official archive of documents usually mined for content. The diversity of archival document genres, the multiplicity of script and language, and the tenuous ways through which attestation secured their authenticity in the Company’s offices present an opportunity to push against the conventional treatment of writing as a tool of instrumental reason and storage. The distinctions between protocols of verification and ascertaining verisimilitude, the subtle changes in attestation practice reveal instead inscription’s profound links with mnemonics and its reordered authority in the office. Cutcherry practices are treated in this book as a palimpsest of orientations to writing, as these were substantially reworked to serve new expectations.

The Company Office or Cutcherry Parliamentary oversight exerted to check the abuse of power transformed the Company’s employees into collectors, magistrates, and judges in India and rendered the Company’s London offices accountable to Parliament. 58 Two parallel judicial systems, representing the Crown and the Company respectively, were installed in Company territories: Bombay, Bengal, and Madras. 59 Under Lord Cornwallis (1738–1805), the district administration office (District, or Huzur cutcherry) was made the heart of Company governance. Cornwallis advocated the strict separation of powers among the executive, the collector’s office, and magistracy work. A district administration capped by a Huzur cutcherry headed by a European collector was devised as an assembly, a record room, and a revenuecollecting organization. Cornwallis’s largely Bengal-based efforts found their way into Madras through a discussion of corruption. Many revenue farmers were powerful merchant-magnates and dubashes, commercial brokers and translators, who shared a fi nancially symbiotic relationship with European Company traders.60 By the 1790s, accusations of Company corruption began to be deflected onto these intermediaries amid calls to eradicate their “evil influence.”61 Thus began a series of inquiries into extant revenue systems that exposed “abuses” in revenue management and a variety of experiments with new methods of land settlement to ensure the security of property, institute techniques of improvement, and smooth revenue flow. The cutcherry form arrived by regulation in Madras in 1802 as part of reforms undertaken to represent a regard for

Introduction

15

rules that “would be free of influence or control from the government itself.”62 Madras administrative structures soon evolved at some variance from Bengal. Initially, following the Bengal model, the Madras government separated the executive from magistracy duties and made efforts to introduce a permanent settlement in land. Madras officials, however, were skeptical of Cornwallis’s policy of creating an impersonal bureaucracy, believing that Indian society required a direct personal paternalism and its village republics required to be restored to their former glory. Such opinion made for a sustained ideological commitment to the personal authority of individual collectors that gave them great latitude.63 After some vigorous debates and experiments with settlement, official policy culminated in the creation of the Ryotwari system of land tenure and complementary judicial reforms that in 1816 transferred the magistracy from judges to the collector.64 The reforms (the brainchild of Thomas Munro, a vociferous critic of Cornwallis) consolidated revenue and police powers within one institution, making the cutcherry the powerful nerve center of the new dispensation. Munro essentially saw his basic innovation, the Ryotwari settlement—an annual “direct” documentary settlement between Company officers and individual tillers for a tax paid in cash—as a way of encouraging monetization, ensuring the security of property, and protecting the tiller from rapacious rentiers, all while securing the state as a sovereign rent-collecting land proprietor.65 This political structure meant that although much official discussion surrounding cutcherry practice turned on the problem of how to communicate directly with subjects, cutcherry records were primarily readied for a new set of eyes—Company directors and stockholders and the British Parliament. To be sure, time delays in paper traffic between India and Britain allowed Indian officials a fair amount of latitude in decision making. But nonetheless, metropolitan scrutiny meant that strictures about private trade “corruption” and written accountability conceptually separated the Company cutcherry from the institutions of the credit bazaars, which until then had driven the Company’s military-fiscal expansion. So although the Company remained heavily dependent on the credit networks of the bazaar, the administrative office was reimagined at a distance from the bazaar, which rendered these intricate relationships of credit into various registers of corruption. This reimagination allowed new conceptual objects such as landed property to govern the regulation of public and social spaces.

16

Introduction

The Investigative Modalities of the Documentary State Company officials appropriated extant scribal practices for the new purpose of garnering knowledge that would enable the assessment of risk and produce new state-space. For example, the Madras government’s polyglot survey, the pymaish (Persian: paima¯yish) survey, appropriated preexisting techniques but rendered the topography of entitlements and produce shares into a new template of rent, tenancy, and landless wage work by abstracting labor from hierarchical reciprocity. The grandly imagined, detailed, and laborious land survey of Ryotwari swelled ranks of surveyors, but the rampant inaccuracy and underreporting precluded the ability of the survey to become a tool to unlock (and check) the village officials’ records.66 The new logic of property reentered everyday life in the material medium of documents, like lease deeds (pat.t.a¯) and petitions.67 The dense semiotics of the survey process, the arrival of surveyors armed with the English rod and the flag, and the wide latitude given to collectors to modify survey modes dispersed this logic of productivity as document raj. Cutcherry administrative procedure yoked the technology of writing to new ways of securing credible testimonies and confessions and judging the reliability of claims. The relations between the Company government and the inhabitants calibrated around land rent produced its lasting effect in intense petty transactions around the classification of land, the boundaries of waste, and the estimation of productivity and lease deeds. Claims, now closely imbricated in the language of rights, came to be inextricably bound with paper: survey accounts, lease deeds, and petitions. Labyrinthine recordkeeping was to generate a new social arena of the civil suit. Well after the survey ceased to inform the cutcherry’s land recordkeeping, its registers appeared in civil suits, where they were fi led as evidence especially in cases where upper-caste landowners staked their claim over Dalit homes and land.68 At the same time, counterfeit and tampering became the abiding conditions for the formulation of juridical truth. The forms of brokerage and circulation that lay at the heart of cutcherry business created novel overlapping types of informal activity. As documented possession began to defi ne property, as the ability to write petitions became the only way to seek the Company’s favor, as documents became the mode of a new sociability, a whole gray market of

Introduction

17

writers and writing—candidates, fi xers, informers, and forged documents—came into being. The gray market, with its connotation of unofficial or parallel trade, was really a “document bazaar” characterized by small-scale exchanges that sustained the petty economy of document writing. The artifacts of the document bazaar—applications, title deeds, petitions—not only represented a new culture of “official” rule but made up some of the texts that came to constitute “tin-trunk literacy.”69 It also generated a new relationship between the rulers and ruled in the figure of the petitioner, who occupied the preeminent place as a legitimate subject of rule by the mid-nineteenth century.

Corruption, Writing, and Discretion This book is about how the quest for an invigilated process of adjustment between productive activity and means of communication in the colony generated optimum conditions for the operation of abuses and operated through a moral discourse on corruption. The social sciences conventionally associate corruption with a weak state. Mid-twentiethcentury modernization theory about colonial and postcolonial corruption, moreover, imply that the infelicities of modern governance are endemic to non-Western societies, borne out of the imposition of the alien modern bureaucratic state form. They might cite deep cultural differences—such as a dissimilar attitude to economic exchange among Indians or primordial ties of kinship, caste, or tribe—as the reasons for factionalism or clientalism. Far from enabling a critical study of the modern bureaucracy, such culturalist imputations imply that both state agents and subject citizens still need to be schooled to become properly modern. Culturalist corruption talk in fact echoes the very moral discourse of “asiatick despotism” and “tyranny” that British critics leveled against the Company and that the Madras officers, in turn, deflected onto their clerical subordinates. The language of anticorruption that in this idiom targeted the “abuse of the powers of office” expanded state legality, while pervasive discretionary powers granted to colonial officers and their subordinates created the forms of inequality that would compel seeking of favors at the margins of law. The great emphasis placed on a powerful collector overseeing a hierarchically ordered recordkeeping and administrative machine illustrates for our purposes how the concentration of discretion went along with the

18

Introduction

official faith in writing. The absolute faith in paternal governance fashioned under Company rule created a power-laden world of documentary transactions, along with the burgeoning document bazaar. Continuous writing and discretion, in other words, do not negate each other. They are better considered to be contradictions inherent to the moral claim of paper procedure, a central problematic for the colonial state and central to its making. The contradiction between rule and discretion, public office and personal gain, made for an enduring clerical modernity fashioned under early colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent.

The Organization of This Book This book is an invitation to consider the Company’s documentary regime in the early nineteenth century. Each of its chapters focuses on an aspect of bureau work and writing that generated the Company’s authority. Chapter 1 concerns the corruption and indiscipline of the cutcherry and the development of a gray market in documents. Chapter 2 traces the efficacy of kanakkan skills and records by looking at the processes through which the Company began to incorporate kanakkan documents into the cutcherry system. A new regime of evaluating juridical truth and revenue recordkeeping practices simultaneously coded kanakkan knowledge as territorially localized and indispensable to administration and kanakkan skills as untrustworthy. The two chapters that follow show how new expectations of secretarial work privileged grammatical knowledge and legible prose and detached writing pedagogy from mnemonics. Taken together, these two chapters attend to how the reformation of scribal skills and elementary writing pedagogy recasted the cultivation of memory as mere retention or storage. The anxieties around writing as they manifested themselves in legal domains are traced in chapter 5. The juridical power of records is analyzed through the regulation of forgery and perjury, and the threat of counterfeit and coerced confessions. The fi nal chapter examines the petition as a way to trace the relationship between writing now imbued with a new expectation of sincerity and the creation of a juridical subject, the colonial petitioner. Written documents collated, translated, and copied by an army of scribes into volumes of paper represent active and richly textured political practices. This book revisits the binary between the colonial state archive and vernacular language and writing practices by showing how

Introduction

19

they intertwined with each other in the most quotidian register of daily office work. Its conclusion engages with the problem of the colonial archive as a palimpsest of recordkeeping practice and a way to understand how practices of colonial rule constituted papereality through protocols of attestation.

part i Scribal Practice

chapter one

Cutcherry Scribes

T

he cutcherry or office became the nerve center of the British colonial empire in India at the turn of the nineteenth century. The emergence of this office form was associated with the English measuring rod of land settlement, the cat-o’-nine-tails, and piles of documents. A European revenue “collector” posted at the district headquarters and assisted by an assortment of subordinates and minions held assemblies in tents and in brick buildings. The collector was an emblematic figure, a man “on the spot” who represented the Company government to the inhabitants of a district. In the cutcherry, documents were written, revenue collated, and petty criminals flogged and fi ned. Supplicants arrived in droves only to fi nd pen-wielding scribes and fi xers managing their precious access to the distant European gentlemen (turai). Consider a typical account, this one from the Bombay Presidency, that appeared in the Asiatick Society and Monthly Miscellany, a widely read compendium of news from the colony: A Collector’s Cutcherry in India In the cutcherry the offices are all below, and generally crowded with petitioners, omedwars [sic, hopefuls], loiterers, carcoons [clerks], peons, sibbundies [armed irregular peons], and rogues of all kinds and castes. The desks are like the common tables of a mercantile clerk’s, from which orders are delivered on magisterial and revenue affairs. All is public, no one can be prevented from petitioning. The following are a few specimens which may serve to show the nature of complaints. On the 5th July 18—[sic] the following written petitions were read with an audible voice [sic] by the carcoon of Ratnagiri cutcherry.

chapter one

24

1. From a poor old cultivator begging for the sirkar’s hokum [command] to drive the devil out of a well. 2. From an old Brahmin, stating that his son had beaten him, turned him out of his house, stolen his property. Etc. 3. From a young woman alleging that her husband’s fi rst wife, no longer in possession of beauty, though still overawing her husband, had turned her out of doors, abused and beat her: the old hag and the man, in reply affi rmed that the young wife had thrown the devil into her husband, and the latter deposed that he at times lay insensible for two or three days, possessed by the demon. 4. From an old Mahratta—calling the magistrate Vishnu’s avatar, and the petitioner’s god—requesting a situation for his young son as a peon, stating that Vishnu, in the magistrate’s own shape, had appeared to him, and desired him to make this request. 5. From a Hindu, stating that his caste had expelled him for doing the work of a horse-keeper to an English gentleman, and would not re-admit him, unless he gave them an entertainment, which would ruin him. 6. From an old Brahmin, for leave to bury himself alive. Government allowed this man four rupees per month to hinder him from committing the act.1

British observers of the time satirized the cutcherry’s contradictions as a theater of the absurd, giving full reign to the ambivalence with which they regarded their supplicants and their intermediaries. Scholars have tended to depict the contradictions of the cutcherry as the contrary pulls of bureaucratic imperial integration and local “influence.” Robert Frykenberg, among the earliest to identify district administration or the Huzur cutcherry as a key node of the British Empire, argued that European officers and English paper knitted these offices into metropolitan circuits of bureaucratic rationality, but the cutcherry’s native employees and its vernacular records constantly undermined these modes of integration. 2 Frykenberg’s lens of localization and integration perpetuates an abiding vision of the colonial bureaucracy that depicts European officerprotagonists at their wits’ end, unable to contend with an administrative structure that is silently eaten away by the white ants of caste solidarity, corruption, and secrecy among their native employees. Such a vision of “local influence,” even while it draws attention to wealth accumulation by upper-caste cutcherry Brahmans and magnates, presents certain problems. The narrative of primordial Indian caste obscures how cutch-

Cutcherry Scribes

25

erry management reinvigorated and nurtured caste. An undifferentiated terrain of local influence masks how the cutcherry produced and intensified the “locality” as a governable spatial entity on terms different from preceding administrations. Most importantly, Frykenberg’s model says little about colonial recruitment structures and how authority was produced through the discursively and materially entangled domain of political corruption in which European officers were deeply implicated. More recently, what Frykenberg characterized as centralizing versus localizing forces in administration has been analyzed as the tension between rational and vernacular processes of everyday state building. Sudipta Kaviraj’s influential formulation that the colossal structures of colonial “rationalism” “had feet of vernacular clay” has provided one way to think of how a state built on exemptions conceptually separated a vast lower bureaucracy from a narrow band of European officers. 3 Kaviraj suggests that because the enormous administrative underworld was considered too vast and, ultimately, too insignificant to be transformed, the British essentially underwrote the “precapitalist authority” that continues to cast its troubling shadow over postcolonial structures. Such labeling, however, does not quite attend to the insidious ways in which colonial rule was made to look self-evident and necessary. European officials, for example, did not necessarily regard the corruption of their subordinates as beyond reform, nor did they think that the corrupt scribe was an obstacle to reform. They had a sophisticated view of how their scribal elite could shore up the Company’s sovereign right to rule. Consider what a prominent governor of Madras, Thomas Munro (1761– 1827),4 wrote about the racialized exercise of colonial power: If we are to have corruption, it is better that it should be among the natives than among ourselves, because the natives will throw the blame of the evil upon their countrymen [but] they will retain their high opinion of our superior integrity; and our character, which is one of the strongest supports of our power, will be maintained. 5

When coupled with the ubiquitous attempt to reform scribes, Munro’s comments suggest that colonial officers actively generated their authority by simultaneously targeting the subordinate scribe as deviant and by incorporating him into an enduring frame of tutelage. This double movement was continuously productive for the political project of colonialism. Through this double move of naming and schooling, investigating

26

chapter one

and regulating, Company officers exempted themselves from the allegations of the abuse of power and displaced these onto their subordinates.6 In this manner, the important axiom of modern administrative law—the separation of public business from private profit—became the enduring ground on which Company occupation and its legal regime could be justified and expanded, even as it allowed the other requirement of a colonial frontier—the swift penetration of fi nance capital through unregulated exchange—to thrive.

The Contradictions of Colonial Governance The efforts intended to separate the government from networks of exchange—private trade, the sale of offices, kin relations—generated a set of enduring contradictions in the Madras cutcherry. Whiggish measures to break patrimonial privileges, in fact, entrenched familial ties among the cutcherry’s non-European subordinates. These ties and exchanges were now glossed as a cultural trait, namely “asiatick” corruption, and made illegal, a glossing that expanded the purview of the bureaucratic state’s legality. The racial logic that drove such discussions of venality was remarkable in another manner. Patron-client relationships, familial ties, and the purchase of offices, all of which came to mark the subordinate scribes in the Company cutcherry, had, in fact, dominated the familial states of early modern Europe.7 Since the seventeenth century, for example, wealthy British families had purchased commissions in the army for their sons. Colonial frontiers had long provided opportunities to Europeans of all stripes—mercenaries, missionaries, and traders—to improve or make their family fortunes. The institutional arrangements of European trading companies drew on familial networks.8 By the eighteenth century, middling families of shopkeepers and traders, especially from Scotland, took to East India Company service to rapidly enter into wealth and acquire political prominence. The privileged sent their younger sons, nephews, and black-sheep relatives to fi nd their fortunes and make political careers. The entourage of intermediaries—the “two-tongued” brokers (dubashes), and scribes and accountants of all sorts—who served these Europeans from the seventeenth century also expanded their influence through family ties. In the years before 1800, these go-betweens had managed Company merchants’ investments and

Cutcherry Scribes

27

brokered their deals with other traders, sometimes from rival Companies or private traders. The records of the eighteenth-century Company’s Mayor’s Court in Madras, an institution that opened its doors to trader-residents of the town seeking to sort out their disputes, are replete with such examples. Dubashi links to the revenue-farming and mercantile world were invaluable for fi nancing the British East India Company’s military and commercial concerns, and expanding the lucrative private business of its officers in cloth, grain, revenue farming, and money lending.9 Everyone involved amassed large fortunes. Company officers went home like uncrowned nabobs; dubashes lavishly patronized temples, Sanskrit learning, and poetry in Company port enclaves like Madras and French Pondicherry.10 After the British East India Company prevailed over its European rivals in India in the mid-eighteenth century, the symbiotic relationship between its European employees and their brokers reached ever more fi nancial sophistication. The “private” money lending undertaken by Company officers and various “private creditors” or entrepreneurs with dubashi brokerage facilitated the Company’s territorial expansion, Madras being no exception.11 However, this system of fi nancial brokerage, so important for Company colonization, fell into political disfavor. At the end of eighteenth century, the increasingly visible bourgeoisie in Britain fueled by gains of private enterprise, began to oppose patrimonial privilege.12 Financial irregularities, in the meantime, forced the Company to consider regularizing revenue collection. Various acts increased parliamentary oversight in the late eighteenth century to check the abuse of power. A backlash against the dubashes in Madras ensued.13 The condemnation of the dubashes and the rise of the Madras revenue servant did not end the lucrative tie of kin and cash at the administrative frontier. Such ties extended beyond the Madras Presidency as the British began to administer Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) and Singapore in the early nineteenth century, taking with them the cycle of corruption and reform and discussions of clerical deviance. When the British took over the island of Ceylon, they consolidated their own authority by replacing extant Ceylonese officials with South Indian revenue servants. The new cutcherries empowered to investigate resources and collect revenue unleashed these subordinates and the adventurers who accompanied them in the countryside where they became tax farmers to offset their precarious tenures.14 As the administrative frontier kept moving, something certainly changed in its wake. Examples from Company cor-

28

chapter one

respondence suggests that dubashes, feeling the heat of political controversy, eagerly distanced themselves from the private business of the gentlemen. As a testimony from 1792 shows, those who had used their personal connections to land Company contracts in the Northern Circars now presented themselves as loyal servants to the institution. “It is not my intention,” wrote a former dubash now contractor of a lucrative Company monopoly on arrack, “to serve any individual gentleman but remain disinterestedly as an inhabitant in the Honorable Company’s service and obtain their favour till my exit [sic].”15 The never-ending cycle of scandal and reform set up a new dynamic. European officers trained in the newly established East India College in Hertfordshire, England, were entreated to be morally upright and prohibited from engaging in private trade, but the rapid expansion of Company cutcherries in the hinterland consciously rested on the patrimonial recruitment of “uncovenanted” subordinate employees. As the years wore on and utilitarian ideologues forced the Company to undertake further bureaucratic reform to break patrimonial ties, kin bonds became ever more crucial to securing subordinate employment in the cutcherry.16 Other than the racial logic of patrimonial ties, the unevenness of the cutcherry form was the second enduring contradiction of cutcherry rule. The cutcherry form radically reconstituted the colony as a tiered space by hierarchically ordering the remit of cutcherries along districts, subdistricts, and village administrations. Cutcherry employees and recordkeeping languages within these institutions were highly differentiated and unevenly distributed. Scribal offices could morph quickly, expand, contract, or sometimes disappear according to demand, region, or political scandal. Company recruitment practices, which favored brokerage rather than some precapitalist continuity, sustained and produced both these contradictions, namely, the racialized entrenchment of patrimonial ties and the unevenness of the Company cutcherry. Whereas regulations separated public business from private profit by breaking patrimonial ties, recruitment practices actively used and reshaped these ties. In this manner, Company recruitment strategies reworked venal ties into a masterservant idiom in ways that deepened ties of descent and inheritance and intensified personal loyalty. Scribes were generally upper-caste men, especially if they were Hindu, but they came from varied commercial, ritual, sectarian, and so-

Cutcherry Scribes

29

cial backgrounds depending on the region, the scripts favored by their employers, and the type of work involved. The social demographic of scribal manpower sometimes changed with new patrons. Scribal skills also changed, as some groups learned to work more than one script or acquire new facilities with languages. This is why a simple social history of scribes cannot sufficiently show how writing acquired value or reveal how scribal office articulated with processes of accumulation and mobility. To this end, rather than posit a contradiction between rational and vernacular processes of state building, this chapter revisits the ways in which cutcherry rule reformatted the world of the scribe by actively recasting older administrative cadre and information circuits attached to the domain of the household to new ends.17

The Scribal Office and Familial Circulation in the Eighteenth Century Office holding is not an individual enterprise but is tied to social processes of accumulation and family mobility. This means that scribal office holding in the subcontinent was a field of jati, or caste-kin formation. Prior to the establishment of Company administration, South Indian scribes, like soldiers of the military labor market, were central to warrior polities. They made up the sinews of fi nance, diplomacy, and recordkeeping in Peninsular and South Indian courts from about the sixteenth century. Scribes used opportunities offered by royal patronage, expanding religious sects, and family ties to build networks across imperial polities and regional courts while in some cases consolidating themselves in regional pockets. In turn, their mobility and rising fortunes provided the template for a variety of genealogical narratives that made nominal and normative claims to jati group status.18 Consider, for example, “the narrative of the accountants,” a text of uncertain date and part of the orientalist and surveyor general, Colonel Mackenzie’s collection. The text tells the story of how the Karunikars (accountants) came to settle in the Tamil region. The “narrative of the accountants” stages the moment of the arrival of the accountants into the Tamil country by inserting them into a series of iconic tropes already familiar to the mytho-historical memory of the region. The story is set in the Tamil town of Madurai, described in conventional terms as the cosmological landscape of God Shiva’s play.

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The text claims Atreya, a legendary sage, as a patrilineal head. Such mythological alignments are followed by recounting the accountants’ illustrious ties to the Peninsular kingdoms of Kampili (a thirteenthcentury polity on the banks of the Tungabhadra) and Vijayanagara (established in the fourteenth century), and to a Saivite minister (pradha¯ni) at the South Indian court of the Pandyan king, Kulasekara Pandyan (who ruled Madurai in the early fourteenth century). Following these historical links, the text aligns the accountants to the trope of sectarian violence, namely, the Saivite suppression of the Jains. The arrival of the accountants in the Tamil country is marked by their entry into the Tamil language: the Saivite Pandyan minister is supposed to have commissioned a translation of the Karunikar story from Sanskrit into Tamil.19 Although texts like this elude simple analyses, it is possible to consider a few resonant themes that appear to undergird this narrative. During the early modern period, the relationship between scribal service and state making was forged on the institutional terrain of revenue privileges that could be bought or sold. 20 Like other “venal offices,” scribal office comprised of privileges that were both prebendal (delegated) and patrimonial (inherited rights connected with the office). 21 Frank Perlin’s research on western India relates these privileges to two different but intersecting principles of organization: the personal domain of the royal household and the extrapersonal domain of the royal court’s management of its territories. Rapid monetization and a clusterbased settlement pattern made household domains dynamic engines of upward familial mobility. The rise of elites in the hinterland saw an elaboration of the household that itself created a dispersed, multiplying administration. The linguistic and caste networks of cutcherry scribes suggest that chancery culture in Southeast India followed this logic. Prior to the Company’s cutcherry form, scribe-agents were deputed to collect revenue peripatetically and, for their efforts, secured the entitlements to the revenue of a village or a small settlement cluster. These privileges, a mix of prebendal and inheritable entitlements, could include rentfree lands (shotriums), revenue shares, grain or cash fees, or a mix of the three (mira¯ si or ma¯ niyam). Sometimes, depending on the post, privileges would just include cash commissions and fi nes—for example, customs toll collectors were entitled to a portion of what they collected. In such a system, the scribe could aspire to spectacular upward mobility. The fi rst Tamil novel, Pirata¯ pa Mutaliya¯ r Carittiram (1879), gives

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us one possible plotline of family fortunes in the eighteenth century. The protagonist’s grandfather, a high-status Vellalar of the Tondaimandala Mudaliar caste, was educated but lived in penury. His appointment in the Arcot Nawwab’s administration as a clerical manager allowed him to acquire rent-free villages and lands, which he managed from his home settlement with the help of a large establishment of clerks and accountants. The Sarva-Deva-Vila¯ sa, a Sanskrit text composed around 1800 about the Madras dubashi elite, includes descriptions of Brahman scribes serving as managers and secretaries of the estates of Vellalar brokers. 22 Narratives collected by colonial officials suggest that although revenue privileges were inheritable, and given in writing, they were not secured in perpetuity. A written document, called sanad (Persian: sanad), issued by a chieftain or king periodically renewed appointments. 23 At the most, these permissions were considered valid for three generations, or about a hundred years. 24 Scribal families of different castes and recordkeeping skills often jostled with or displaced each other, or sat in uneasy coexistence. 25 For example, Niyogi Brahman monopolies over the village scribal office in the Deccan displaced Jains, Lingayats, and Kammalar (the goldsmiths and braziers). 26 By the eighteenth century, Niyogis monopolized clerical superintendence, the post of the mutasaddi (Persian: mutas.addı¯) and his agent-assistant, the gomashta (Persian: guma¯ shta). Both posts were crucial to household treasuries, enabling the Niyogis to become powerful kingmakers and go-betweens in South India. 27 In Mysore, Tipu’s mutasaddis, all Deccani Brahmans, had morphed into a large corps of powerful diplomats. By the late eighteenth century, Niyogis parleyed their courtly ties to become players in the revenue-farming system in areas like Chingleput, the hinterland of the Arcot court that was acquired by the East India Company. 28 Magnates and kings seeking to monopolize credit and fiscal networks required scribal expertise; in turn scribes operating as their agents intensified the fiscal domain of subdivisions or new regions. The sharedistribution system allowed “strangers” to enter settlements. We can assume that modest scribes could enter the lowest levels of village service. 29 Ties of credit and loyalty induced a closer integration of the household organization, even as the reproduction of the household pattern into new areas generated its dispersal. Scribal families could come to dominate a particular household’s recordkeeping activities and parlay their influence

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into a concentrated micro-regional sphere of influence. By the eighteenth century, the practice of garnering office posts and tax-free lands resulted in the development of distinct regional clusters of scribal expertise usually in regions of paddy cultivation. The Arcot hinterland’s paddy areas (Chingleput, South and North Arcot) became the region of Niyogis Brahmans, Vellalar dubashes, and Karunikar scribes. Deshastha and Tamil Brahmans dominated Tanjavur (Tanjore). Vellalar Mudaliar families who served the Travancore court clustered in Nancil Nadu, and Niyogi Brahmans settled in coastal Andhra and its hinterland (Nellore, KondavidGuntur, and Ongole). In the entire Chingleput Jaghire, sixty-six households of kanakkan scribes lived in twenty-seven villages, which indicates that particular settlements could have concentrated clusters of scribal households. 30 An evocative example of the growing reputation of the scribe as a wily but indispensable player in the rapidly monetizing economy in South India comes from a Tamil text called the Money Messenger (Pan.avit.utu¯tu). The text is a long poem composed in praise of the Ramnad ruler, Ragunatha Tevar (1673–1710). 31 Its author, Chokkanatha Pillai, belonged to a kanakkuppillai scribe family. In the Money Messenger, the heroine’s maid takes the message of love—money—from her mistress to the hero, the lord of Ramnad. The poem describes a world in which kin, office appointments, and cash are connected and central to state making. Allusions to money dominate as one of the ten attributes of kingship. Verses extol the canny skill of kanakkuppillais who—through writing, calculation, and skill—mobilize money. 32 By the eighteenth century, as the warrior state became more dependent on mercantile credit, the consequent opportunities of overseas trade and internal commercialization fueled the rise of traders and scribal agents. Such dense fi nancial integration meant that the system of privileges— to revenue or to office—was more interlinked with the circulation of money than before. The “farming” of offices was common, echoing developments in regions like Surat in western India. 33 Scribal office was not only a gateway to upward mobility, but it was something that could be bought, sold, and disputed. The collector of the Chingleput Jaghire, John Clerk, wrote in 1792 on a matter of a petition received from the kanakkuppillai—or, as the English called them, “curnum” or “conicopoly”— that these offices were often farmed. Scribes, he noted, were accustomed to alienating their privileges by borrowing money on the mortgage of their offices, sometimes in its entirety or, more often, in shares. These

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alienations resulted in disputes when six or seven families disagreed on the division of entitlements associated with an appointment. 34 The farming of the scribal office not only shows the close links of office farming to credit circulation but also hints at how household clusters articulated with lineage and kin affi liation. The active expansion of the household lordship and more clearly defi ned networks of familial support meant that scribal service families, too, typically narrowed their marriage networks and intensified the attributes of what we identify as a jati. 35 Texts like the Crikaran.icarittiram typically ended with granting of royal grants to family clusters. Such intensifying exchange around scribal office facilitated a substantial deepening of dyadic ties between master and retainer, and was expressed through the idiom of devoted service. How did these dense structures of kin, exchange, and scribal work, fare under the Company’s reforming eye? Let us now enter the Company’s lettered city.

The Spatial Form of the Company’s Lettered City The Company cutcherry installed a new hierarchical order of administration. The offices of the Board of Revenue in Madras closely resembled a scriptorium. An establishment of English-writing scribes (“writers”) and translators, more modestly paid “sectioners,” and margin drawers copied correspondence. The district cutcherries, the main office with which they corresponded, was the central point of contact between officials and inhabitants. 36 This separation of administrative function, meant to discourage inhabitants from running to Madras, made the district collector the nodal authority of early colonial government. The changes wrought by this institutional arrangement were immediate. Peripatetic revenue collection—which tended to be the norm of older polities and followed cycles of war or harvest—was regularized to coincide with the harvest calendar, or fasli (Persian: fas.lı¯). 37 Collectors continued to tour their districts intensively, but brick buildings and regular land assessment reorganized the cutcherry’s spatial form and concentrated it in the district capital. Retinues did not follow overlords like an entourage but had defi ned circuits of operation. Cultivators who were once compelled to pay multiple overlords during the harvest season now paid one authority, organized through district (zilla¯h), subdistrict (ta¯luk), and revenue village (gra¯m) level offices. 38

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District Cutcherry The location of the district cutcherry illustrates the ambition of the new type of state. The Company built many new cutcherry offices at a distance from the settlement and its bazaar or housed the offices in forts or the palaces of deposed kings. European collectors and judges in the district continued to employ personal assistants and translators, but a man called the sheristadar (Persian: sarishtada¯ r, from “record or fi le”) was an all-powerful manager who supervised the day-to-day work of the collectorate office. The Madras cutcherry’s chief native officials, the sherisatadars, were usually polyglot and adept at different scripts. They tended to be from Deccani Brahman families, Deshasthas or Niyogis who rose to prominence as clerks and administrators in the Maratha confederacy and the Qutb Shahi court of the Golkonda kingdom in the seventeenth century and then had worked in the Arcot and Tanjavur courts. 39 Although the collector often had a personal translator, cutcherry sheristadars were the main channel of communication between common people and European officers. They were responsible for making revenue settlements. Many close relationships, fi nancial and personal, developed between British collectors and their sheristadars. As a witty account of this relationship describes it: In the fi ne old days . . . of “John Company, my Jo” when few if any of our European superiors knew the vernaculars, when judges were not ashamed to say in open court, replying to objections raised by counsel, “I must fi rst consult my Sheristadar,” and when Collectors used to sign papers by the score, placed before them by the Sheristadar, simply asking, perhaps with an oath, “Where am I to sign?”40

The hierarchical intimacy of this master-servant relationship was often displayed in the warm personal reports that Company men wrote about their sheristadars. A cash keeper usually assisted the sheristadar and kept revenue receipts and disbursements. They were generally members of the landed gentry or trading elite and sometimes directly related to the sheristadar. The cash keeper was assisted by the shroff (Persian: s.arra¯ f, “money changer”; Tamil: cara¯ ppu), usually a member of a merchant-trader family adept at currency conversion.41

figure 3. Anon., “Letter writer” (ca. 1850). Gouache mica, Trichinopoly style. © British Library Board, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, Add.Or.2431.

figure 4. Anon., “Head clerk with umbrella and pen-case” (ca. 1850). Gouache mica, Trichinopoly style. © British Library Board, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, Add. Or.628.

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District institutions employed several groups of scribes and accountants to keep records in at least two, if not three, scripts.42 Cutcherries employed scribes of English (“writers”), of Persian or Modi (called munshis, jawa¯ bnavı¯ s, mutasaddi, or gomashta) and of “country” languages— Tamil scribes (called sampratis and kanakkuppillai) and Telugu writers (called ra¯ yacam). These departments were arranged hierarchically; each group received a different pay. The best paid were the English writers. Around Madras city, writers tended to be Eurasian Indo-Portuguese of mixed race or high-status Vellalar. They also assisted in early Company surveys.43 David Cooper, a Eurasian writer in the Madras cutcherry in 1816, is a typical example. Born in Sadras, a coastal port, Cooper served as a recordkeeper at the English Land Custom House before joining the Madras cutcherry.44 Eurasians gradually proceeded to lose their monopoly over English-language positions in the revenue office over the nineteenth century. A later writer on Madras Anglo-Indians interestingly ascribed their subsequent disenfranchisement to the devaluation of clerical skills by the advent of the printing press. Until the general introduction of the printing press, he observed, “quill driving” was more than a mechanical use of the pen and hand.45 The Modi scribes (who, like the sheristadars, were Brahman) tended to take supervisory roles in account keeping; they read petitions and took depositions. The lowest-paid scribes were the Tamil and Telugu writing scribes. Unlike the Modi writing scribes, they were generally recruited from the immediate locality. They were petty scribes from village-accountant families or petty landlords, or sometimes, traders like the Telugu Baligas.46 Scribes received their training as apprentices. The palm leaf–writing kanakkuppillais, sent to gather accounting records of villages, recruited assistants from their kin networks.47 Cutcherry gomashtas were usually apprentices to their senior kin, who occupied the posts of sheristadars.48 In addition to office holders and the scribal employees, messengers, lamplighters, binders, ink mixers, and guards worked in the district cutcherry. A number of hangers-on gave cutcherries their air of hectic informal activity and their reputation as clamorous, deceitful spaces. Foremost among these myriad fi xers were the umedwar, or the hopeful volunteers. These men did odds and ends of work as much to oblige “permanent incumbents” as to establish a sort of claim to vacancies.49 The umedwar, as we will see, were at the core of the information-driven

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document bazaar—the gray market of counterfeit, anonymous petitions, and false witnesses. Subordinate Administration At the subdivisional level, tahsildars (formerly amı¯lda¯rs; Tamil: ta¯cilta¯r) supervised subdivisional cutcherries. The tahsildar’s formal functions were myriad, and he, too, was assisted by a cutcherry of scribes. Munro describes him as essential to the cultivation of land, the collection of revenue, and the settling of disputes. This office viscerally yoked uppercaste power to coercive structures of colonial rule. The tahsildars, almost always Brahman, were mostly of the Vaishnavite sect, and appointed by collectors. They were associated with paper—writing notes, hearing petitions, overseeing accounts—and were armed with the apparatus of punishment: whips and the kai-k-kit.t.i, an instrument used to crush the knuckles of revenue defaulters. 50 The tahsildar’s underlings approached him with their hands on their lips, a quintessential ritual gesture of caste subordination, bowing, and saying “Chittam” (your will). 51 Popular poems like the Ta¯cilta¯rkummi attest to his vicious hold over local society under the Company, inseparably associating him in the popular mind with Company rule. 52 Beneath the subdistrict cutcherry lay a vast army of subordinates such as village headmen and the village accountant-scribe, the gramakanakkuppillai, the kanakkan or karanam. Stationed at the bottom rungs of the cutcherry order, the kanakkuppillai kept the records that formed the linchpin of the entire revenue apparatus. Kanakkuppillais were usually upper-caste educated men who supervised local police functionaries— the talaiyar. They were assisted by the nirgunti and vettiyan, usually from Dalit groups, who managed irrigation channels and the chain (can˙kili) used for measuring land.

The Vicissitudes of Cutcherry Recruitment and the Bazaar of Informers and Information The Company appropriated its scribal manpower and offices from an already elaborate administrative system of warrior polities. These appropriations, however, should not mask some very crucial systematic interventions that now reordered clerical life. By far the most important

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intervention in cutcherry management came from the official attempt to curtail revenue farming and the venality of the scribal office. When the Company introduced a regime of property-based tenure, it attempted to legally demarcate and separate the scribal office from the world of exchange, that is, revenue farming. In 1802, following on the heels of the declaration by the governor in 1800 against revenue farming, the Board of Revenue introduced land settlements, as well as a number of rules regulating the work of the kanakkuppillai and regulating positions. This systematization, however, produced new contradictions. The competition that drove the farming of scribal offices rearticulated with the new cutcherry form and began to operate as a type of bazaar or market, now deemed illegal and informal. A market of informers came into being. This bazaar of informers comprised of unemployed aspirants, the “hopefuls” or umedwar, candidates hungry for office. The bazaar of hopefuls trafficked in information under the new cutcherry system. Forwarding a petition to Madras that he received from Gutala Subbiah, a Brahman deshpa¯nde (the Maratha term for a subdivisional scribe), 53 a Company collector noted that deshpande families had branched out considerably from their traditional office-holding privileges in Gutala estate (zamı¯n) and that the competition for scribal posts was intense. There were, he reported, about a hundred families, while the office of the deshpande could support only two! The remainder, he said, earned a scanty subsistence in precarious ways. Many roamed the country instigating inhabitants to complain against those who possessed entitlements and offered to undertake this task for a consideration. He feared that their activities would impede revenue collection. He suspected that Gutala Subbiah was one such man. Subbiah had refused to eat until his petition was forwarded and had been writing letters to correspondents all over the district. 54 Some officers blamed the Company’s “Permanent Settlement”—a tenural system imported from Bengal and briefly imposed in Madras for the state of affairs. The Permanent Settlement allowed a landlord to pay a fi xed assessment to the Company, and the officers argued that it created a pool of unemployed scribes who turned to troublemaking to earn a living. For example, the collector of Tirunelveli, who called scribes “an improvident race,” wrote that the introduction of the Permanent Settlement made many writers redundant. 55 A large number of them, in consequence, waited outside the different cutcherries in the unsettled districts in hope of employment. Their large numbers meant that not everyone

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could expect to be employed. As a result, many would try to oust incumbents by creating distrust, alleging fraud by ingenious means. Well aware of “the frequent instances of infidelity on the part of the native servants and the general difficulty of proving it,” they knew that any charge against a revenue officer operated always to his disadvantage, for there was always a possibility that he was guilty. For the most part, no penalty was attached to these allegations, but sometimes entire establishments could be suspended, and this was eagerly contemplated by these hungry candidates. 56 Other factors contributed to the entrenchment of the umedwar as informer. The ranks of troublemaking informers may have swelled also because official regulations banned European officers from lending money. In 1802, based on the Bengal Regulations of 1793, the Madras Governor in Council prohibited British officers (“Covenanted Civil Servants”) from lending money to inhabitants. This measure rendered many of the credit and cash circuits of cutcherry work illegal. With fewer legitimate fi nancial opportunities, the subordinate scribe and his kin who often brokered these fi nancial transactions via kin ties may have begun to traffic in information, rumor, and allegation. For all the disdain that officers heaped on them, umedwars proved to be very useful to the Company. The hopefuls gathered outside the new cutcherry hoping to take advantage of the Company collector’s hunger for information. In turn, officers encouraged this information flow despite suspecting its credibility. Mr. Harris, the collector of Tanjavur, reported in 1803 that he found informers invaluable to keep an eye on the pecuniary collusion between subordinate revenue officers such as the kanakkan and the village headman. He encouraged informers from among the watchmen and landholders of the district to check fraud. Greater invigilation had essentially come to take the form of an informer’s economy. 57 A few years later, when the annual revenue settlement (Ryotwari) replaced Permanent Settlement, the Company required greater numbers of scribes. The intensification of bureau work, however, only meant an increase in temporary employment. To keep their costs down, collectors often employed scribes for piecework during the high season of land assessment or annual report writing. The body of employees swelled and shrank throughout the year. Kin and friendship networks of the cutcherry’s regular employees provided most recruits. Such recruitment patterns sustained the bazaar of hopefuls.

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The continuing salience of the informer to cutcherry work right through Company rule was not a mere continuation of older systems. Company recruitment had created a shadowy scribal bazaar that provided the labor for the “continuous writing” demanded by metropolitan invigilation. This bazaar furthermore deeply depended on the patronage of individual Company officers, who viewed the scribal family with suspicion. In a market of posts where the expansion and employment of cutcherry scribes was possible only with the patronage of a district collector, cutcherry recruitment—which had earlier worked through familial links—now also worked through an intensified attachment to the collector. The importance of this bond between English officers and their servants found expression in voluminous petitions, their tone distinctly that of a child seeking the benevolence of a father. A tahsildar writing one such letter wrote that he had the good fortune of having been in “his Honor’s service from childhood” and that “he arrived at such a state of intimacy with your Honor that he was allowed to sit in your Honor’s presence. . . . How excellent that fostering care and patronage!” It should come as no surprise, then, that character certificates and letters of recommendation acquired great value and were occasionally forged. 58 The Ta¯cilta¯rkummi provides a more entertaining, if satirical, take on these ties of patronage between the Company collector and his chosen employees. 59 The palm-leaf text’s colophon does not bear a date, but its story about the Company’s arrival in the Dindigul-Palani foothills places the narrative no earlier than the nineteenth century.60 The poem describes an Iyengar Brahman, Cheenaiyyangar, receiving the post of tahsildar from Peter sahib, a Company collector and clearly, a man vulnerable to flattery. Cheenaiyyangar went to see the one endowed with luster and fame, Peter Sahib He even happily saluted the turai (lord) for a tahsil [16] As soon as he did that, the celebrated King Peter sahib, bestowed his loving grace on this Cheenaiyyangar Wherever on this realm praise bloomed, the English lord beckoned it towards him and bestowed abundance [17] [he declared] “In the year of chitrabanu, in the seemai of vaigai let a tahsil also be made” As soon as [Cheenaiyyangar] received the gift of the seal and ring from the turai [he] immediately went to bestow gifts. [18]

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When faced with unrest among the area’s disenfranchised warrior notables, Cheenaiyyangar, the otherwise vain Brahman tahsildar, declares perceptively: As long as my name bears maharaja Peter Sahib’s grace Even if everyone in the whole realm gets together, let them, they can’t shake me! [32]

As scribes sought the patronage of a collector, the district collectors based all their decisions about cutcherry recruitment on the advice they received from their sheristadars. Not only was the process of recruitment systematically personalized, but it now worked through a brokerage market conducted through bazaar gossip and slanderous allegations against incumbents. A collector of Tirunelveli, writing about the slew of allegations against revenue officers, noted that the accusers were former revenue employees, now destitute, who in their desperation had turned to malicious blackmail. They sometimes took money by threatening others with accusations or by promising a situation for candidates waiting for employment. The collector noted in a rare moment of honesty that they tended to prove their charges when they were put into the offices of those they had accused, that is, when they had some authority to procure evidence of their allegations.61 The market of scribes under early colonial rule was substantially different from the earlier period in another way. Efforts to control venality created an informal shadowy brokerage system that depended on the individual patronage of the collector. Yet we should not forget that the collector’s reputation depended on his Indian servant, such that the dishonesty of the latter—or even allegations of it—could bring censure from his superiors. Ties of dependence between the scribe and the collector cut both ways. Collectors feared any allegation of misdoing in the cutcherry because it could invite large-scale investigation and often involve their closest aides, whom they had vouched for during recruitment. In turn, clever petitioners were quick to realize that allegations of embezzlement against the collector would get them immediate attention. Company records thus contain several examples of letters of supplication that threaten Company collectors by accusing their establishments of fraud and corruption. When investigations found employees guilty, collectors increasingly tried to disassociate themselves from their servants or infl icted severe corporal punishment on them.

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Such developments exemplified the contradictions in the cutcherry. The Company goal of running a bureaucratic empire of “public business” and greater invigilation produced its quotidian practice of informal recruitment. One of the primary manifestations of this contradiction of early colonial rule was the systematic depiction of Indian subordinates as corrupt and untrustworthy. Cases that portrayed cutcherry employees as embezzlers and tricksters began to come thick and fast at the end of the fi rst decade of the nineteenth century. It should come as no surprise that the cases that gained notoriety came from the gray zone of credit circuits that drove cutcherry work. It is to one of these that I turn next.

Public Business and Private Trade in the Company Cutcherry Perhaps the most prominent case that generated the discourse about “native corruption” in Madras concerns the scandal of Casi Chettiar, an employee in the Treasury Department of the Coimbatore collector’s office. The activities of Chettiar was acknowledged by the Company as a “scene of malversation, fraud and embezzlement” that was “unparalleled in the annals of British India.”62 Thomas Munro led the investigation of the complaints against the widespread corruption in the Coimbatore office and wrote a detailed report on the activities of the Coimbatore office and Chettiar. In essence, Chettiar’s post as the cash treasurer allowed him to manage and manipulate the entire fiscal regime of Coimbatore district. Chettiar deployed cutcherry employees to establish his monopoly on commodity trade in tobacco, salt, and sandalwood, which he accomplished by overvaluing costs and under-assessing prices to enhance his profits. Further, he levied extra fees on the inhabitants. These included fees paid on the appointment to public office—called nazrana (Persian: nazra¯ na, ˉ originally the fee paid to government as an acknowledgment for a grant of land, gift, offering)—and outlawed by the Company. Chettiar pocketed these fees in the name of the collector. Other than collecting nazrana fees and consolidating his hold over trade in salt and sandalwood, Chettiar undertook the settlement of the district and assigned the most profitable villages to himself so that he could procure grain at prices well below the market rates. He then became an active player in the lucrative grain trade in the region. Much of the capital for his business came in the form of advances from the trea-

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sury to which he helped himself. In 1807–8, for example, he had 204,305 pagodas at his disposal.63 This was a huge sum considering the average clerical wage ranged from 4 to 16 pagodas a month. The most significant aspect of Chettiar’s activities that caught the attention of the investigation was the degree to which his activities converted virtually every person and every thing in the country to benefit his private trade. This trade was carried on with public money and with the agency and assistance of public servants. Chettiar’s power derived from his ability to control scribal recruitments to the office. For example, he began to write to tahsildars to send him the prices of different commodities in their subdivisions. To retain their jobs, they were compelled to become his agents in forming partial monopolies, in interrupting the dealings of established traders, and in exerting pressure on farmers to sell their produce at rates far below market price. Chettiar used his power to ensure the appointment of many of his private agents as tahsildars and to distribute commodities and title deeds. To the Company’s embarrassment, the deceased Mr. Garrow, the former collector of Coimbatore— and reportedly a close friend of Chettiar—willfully neglected his employee’s activities. Consider this observation from the report: We can see no ground of assurance that what has happened in Coimbatore should not happen in any other district, that a collector should not obtain the confidence of the Board of Revenue and becoming the dupe or the accomplice of an artful and fraudulent native, render the whole province subject to his management, the prey of a few men armed with the powers of government. . . . As the death of Mr. Garrow had rendered it unnecessary to decide upon the propriety of his being allowed to continue in our service, it is of less importance to determine the species or degree of his delinquency.64

Indeed, the close intimacy between Chettiar and his patron Mr. Garrow caused much consternation. Several informers—other scribes in the cutcherry—had written petitions complaining against Chettiar, but they were either ignored or punished for casting aspersions on him. Chettiar was able to use his intimacy with the collector to get these complaints disregarded. When the inhabitants of Darapuram appointed Tirumal Pillai, a prominent landholder, as their agent and got him to write up a petition in the district court, they found themselves ignored. Thus, in this case, the system did not generate the transparency or checks and bal-

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ances that the Company government desired, despite working through informers and counterallegations.

The Reform of “Corrupt Natives” and the Failure to Curtail Informers The significance of the Coimbatore investigation lay in its thoroughness, scale, and sheer volumes of reports. Despite the apparent negligence of Collector Garrow, the investigators’ report advocated the enhancement of the collector’s executive and discretionary powers to keep employees in check. Indeed, soon after, the Madras government introduced reforms that would greatly enhance the collector’s powers over his subordinate employees. Collectors were now given unrestricted power over their subordinates. They were endowed with the natural authority of all masters over their servants without any restrictions. The commission report also suggested the improvement of the “character” of the subordinate employees by enhancing their pay and their responsibility or their discretion. The commission allowed Thomas Munro to successfully advocate the creation of a very powerful collector and enhance the executive authority of select employees of the cutcherry— namely the sheristadar, the tahsildar, and the patel (village head), assisted by the kanakkuppillai in the village. The enhanced executive powers of the sheristadar, tahsildar, village head, and accountant, he hoped, would check the bribery and corruption among the cutcherry’s subordinates.65 The reforms, however, did not disaggregate the systems of patronage and recruitment of the scribal employees and subordinate officers of the Company cutcherry. Instead, they extended the hierarchical masterservant relationships of patronage by enhancing the executive authority of the sheristadar and the tahsildar, both of whom, note, tended to be Brahmans. Subsequent regulations passed to enhance the investigation of corrupt revenue employees did little to curtail these powers.66 Most importantly, the reforms introduced to suppress corruption to protect cultivators and create a “transparent” public business (to stave off critics in London) did little to diminish the nurturing of informers. Company administrators continued to yoke informers to their own ends. When the authorities in London severely chastised the Board of Revenue for ignoring the spate of petitions against Casi Chettiar, they observed that “it is

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evident that complaint is the natural, and in many cases the only mode, in which knowledge of abuses can reach the mind of the superintending authorities.”67 Thus the system of informers, created out of the fabric of a familial recruitment system, was channeled into petitions. The volume of such petitions suggests that they remained crucial documents of information circulation and necessary to the everyday work of the cutcherry. Contrary to the Company’s stated ambitions to directly communicate with its subjects in the cause of direct and uncorrupted rule, petition writers and go-betweens became all the more powerful as they brokered the relationships between the Company and its subjects.

Remaking Scribal Circulation: Caste and Power in the Cutcherry Cutcherry recruitment structures buttressed the power of certain scribes and entrenched informers. It also served to reinvigorate caste. The Company cutcherry had now become a node for a new form of circulation and hence, caste consolidation. Older distinctions in scribal expertise now fed into the horizontal hardening of kin ties. Certain groups gained more than others from cutcherry employment. Deccani and Tamil Brahmans benefited the most from the cutcherry. They were able to expand and consolidate their hold over sheristadari and tahsildari and monopolize gomashta offices, all of which were managerial. At the sheristadari level, Deccani Brahmans’ familiarity with recordkeeping and their ability to master several scripts made them indispensable aids to the Company’s goal of controlling regionally disparate and intricate fiscal recordkeeping systems. The skills of supervision parleyed into powerful sheristadaris. The sheristadar would often employ a male relative— usually a nephew or a son-in-law—as his assistant gomashta. Beginning in 1822, almost every district office in the Madras Presidency acquired a Maratha (Modi) department compelling the Board’s office in Madras to add a Modi department to its establishment.68 Compared to an earlier period, this expansion of Modi departments under the Company further ensconced Modi writers, adding to the Brahmanical domination of the Company cutcherry. Similarly, Tamil Brahmans worked in the subdistrict cutcherry or as subordinate gomashtas. An enquiry conducted into the Chingleput cutcherry in the mid-nineteenth century revealed

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the kin ties of several of its upper-level Brahman employees, including, by then, Tamil Brahmans who had risen up after acquiring the post of gomashtas.69 Unlike the Brahmans, the Eurasians, could not amass the revenue privileges, and groups like elite Vellalars, who made up the Madras dubashi class, could not surf the nineteenth-century scribal frontier as well as they had previously. Vellalars remained largely within writerships and translator posts in Madras city or posts where Tamil was an asset. The old Vellalar elite of the city who had served as dubashi brokers or prominent managers for the Arcot kings now consolidated their gains as contractors, by engaging in joint ventures with European capitalists in cash crops and speculating in the city’s burgeoning land market.70 More petty Tamil scribes who did not become English writers entered the cutcherry system in large numbers, but they were restricted to the lower echelons of the administrative order and remained in their familial core region or very close to it.71 This meant that their networks within the cutcherry now intensified locally and dispersed only through the lowest echelons of scribal work. In the past, Company patronage had helped kanakkuppillais enter into construction and textiles, where they were used to oust commercial or artisanal intermediaries (merchants or maistries) in the hinterlands of Madras city.72 Some of these kanakku jobs occasionally led to upward mobility. Jaganatha Pillai, for example, a deputy sheristadar and recordkeeper in the Madras cutcherry in 1816, came from a family that possessed a scribal office in Chingleput.73 But now Jaganatha Pillai’s situation became increasingly rare. Closely tied to the agricultural order and grain trade, many kanakkuppillais in the cutcherry system expanded only horizontally and in the most subordinate of cutcherry positions. These changes marked a shift in scribal fortunes. Prior to Company intervention, the kanakkuppillai revenue share entitlements reveal a spatial unevenness. In Tirunelveli only the privileges of dryland kanakkuppillai were a royal affair. Royal warrior households granted maniams, or shares in revenue, to accountants in their effort to extend the agrarian frontier from the seventeenth century. In the wet, fertile river tracts of older cultivating settlements, the scribes were the servants of inhabitants and entirely dependent on them. Furthermore, not every village set aside entitlements for accountants, and some inhabitants were not in the habit of paying their kanakkans.74 Discussing these entitlements in Tirunelveli, the collector reported that

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for nine hundred and nineteen villages or rather, I may say portions of revenue as some of them comprehended more than one village, eight hundred and thirty five people have been employed . . . the taluk of Nadomundalam alone which was, as before mentioned, the only one in the whole district where there was a regular establishment of curnums.75

As the colonial cutcherry frontier moved into the hinterlands, it sought to prise the wetland kanakkans from their dependence on village entitlements and into its edifice but restricted their upward mobility. Such new separations of horizontal spatial circulation and uneven economic gains deepened hierarchies among scribal groups. Following the reforms introduced by Thomas Munro, the posts of the sheristadar and other “supervisory” positions were paid much more than others, becoming the most lucrative positions for native subordinates. At the same time, the horizontal consolidation of petty village recordkeeping as the basis of Ryotwari greatly restricted the upward mobility of lower-order kanakkuppillais. The self-interest of Company officials perpetuated these horizontal hardenings that now manifested as caste “knowledge.” Company administrators, notwithstanding the critique of their patrimonial rights in Britain, and venal office more generally, assiduously advocated for the extension or deepening of patrimonial rights among the “village officers” and cast them as timeless agents of local government. In the case of kanakkuppillais, the Company officers were of the fi rm belief that, in matters of account keeping, revenue assessment, and so on, hereditary skills were the most suited. As the collector of Bellary wrote in 1792, he always opposed the alienation of office because it displaced “those who from their infancy have been brought up for that station and substitute[d] in their place people totally unqualified to act in their place.” 76 Officers deemed kanakkuppillai skills “hereditary skills” particularly indispensable for land management. For example, in the Madras district cutcherry, which oversaw an elaborate land market, kanakkuppillais were employed as supervisors of survey and assessment. Francis Whyte Ellis, as collector of Madras, wrote that these overseers’ extensive knowledge of the lands under cultivation and their “hereditary” knowledge of the landed tenures of Madras rendered them useful to the Company.77 In turn, kanakkuppillais controlled all manner of rights, shares in produce, inheritances, and land assessments, thereby acquiring a larger-than-life presence among the inhabitants.78

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Company practices entrenched kanakkan patrimony in the idiom of an ancient village office. The effort to rehabilitate and reclaim for the raj an ancient office of the village republic pushed efforts to curtail venality. Company settlement and cutcherry management procedures conceptually removed the kanakkan office from the world of exchange, recasting him in administrative law as a traditional and timeless institution of a rural village community. From the turn of the nineteenth century, the Company reified the hereditary monopoly over village recordkeeping (something that remained unchallenged until the turn of the twentieth century when it was raised by Dalit publicists and political leaders such as Ayotheedasar Panditar and Rettamalai Srinivasan).79 Alexander Read’s 1793 survey of Barahmahal and Salem placed the kanakkan and the village administrative establishment as part of a grid of archetypical inhabitants of a settlement organized along their role in revenue affairs. Read translated the kanakkan as a “village register” and part of the twelve-member “Barrabaloty” establishment of village administration.80 A few years after Read wrote his report, the town kanakkan or Conicopoly of Madras was abolished in 1808.81 Simultaneously, officials began to systematically record kanakkan entitlements as inheritable village offices alone and deemed them to be timeless and exclusively patrimonial. Soon enough, the Court of Directors noted in a letter to the Madras government in 1814: Carnums are the most powerful instrument of government for internal administration and justice. It appears that through them that the frame of village communities has been held [sic]. They are natural and permanent authorities of the country and true policy dictates the expediency of our availing ourselves to their services, for it is thus only that the business of government can be adequately conducted in a foreign country like in India where the population is so extensive and habits and manners of the people so different from our own.82

Such opinions about Indian alterity shored up the patrimonial claims of accountants who took to presenting themselves as natural and timeless authorities on local knowledge.83 But the entrenchment of the idea that kanakkan office was anchored in an ancient village republic also meant that Tamil kanakkans could no longer legitimately partake of the wider relationships of exchange and had their upward mobility restricted within the cutcherry.

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By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the hostility against cutcherry Brahmans began to be articulated and it was interestlingly expressed in petitions alleging fraud and corruption. As we know from the discussion of the informer system, these petitions, although written in the name of the inhabitants of the area and seeking the Company’s protection against avaricious cutcherry employees, were usually submitted by disgruntled cutcherry employees acting with, or at the behest of, the leading inhabitants of the area. But a petition that came from Tirunelveli in 1828 also suggests that from the very voluminous letters alleging fraud also emerged an articulation of local expertise and self-presentation of a Tamil scribal class. The petition, written in 1828, was framed in terms of religious conversion and sought Company intervention in curbing missionary-led subversion of working caste labor in the region. The petitioners, for instance, begin their petition by claiming the following: European missionaries having come to the country, sent teachers to the villages and by means of the books which they have newly and cunningly made and printed, and by exercising various contrivances, many mean caste people such as the Pillies, Parias and Shanars who were as slaves under the inhabitants, thinking that the Honorable Company had come in the character of the Missionaries, became bold and turned to the Religion of Christ. In consequence of this, the Inhabitants were put to great inconvenience from the people not doing their work as before. 84

The petition framed issues of labor in terms of the dangers of religious conversion. It is equally significant that the substance of the petition concerned cutcherry employment and articulated local expertise in caste and linguistic terms. The petitioners made a case for seeking office in ways that resonates with many of the themes discussed in this chapter: they charged incumbents with embezzling public money from public works and temple incomes for private enrichment through a systematic forging of accounts. There was, however, one important difference. Unlike the contributors to the petitions written against Casi Chettiar thirteen years earlier, the Tirunelveli petitioners couched their complaints in terms of the integrity of local scribal families, making conscious use of categories of caste and language. The petitioners claimed that families of respectable Muslims, Pillais, and Mudaliars should be appointed to office because they were more locally knowledgeable and that—unlike

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the “foreign” Brahmans who wrote in “Maratha” and who were expensive—the locals were cheaper to employ and would write accounts in the spoken language of the country, Tamil. They wrote: The late collector Mr. Munro sent for from Coimbatore, one Ramaswamy Iyer, who upon being appointed head Sheristadar, caused many Hindavee Brahmans to be called from Coimbatore and had them appointed as Huzoor Cutcherry servants, tahsildars, musumdars and their gomastahs . . . and in other sundry positions owing to which, such cruelties have been thenceforth practiced that there would be no end of writing them [sic]. It will therefore be a great favor to the poor inhabitants if you will remove the Hinduvee Brahmins who have come from Coimbatore, a foreign country, and who by their being employed have injured the District and also, as this is chiefly a Tamul [sic] country, if you will direct that the records be kept in Tamul which is less expensive, and that respectable Pillaiyar, Mudeliars and Musselmans of the country be appointed as tahsildars etc. These will conduct themselves guardedly, and as they understand the secrets of the districts, the affairs of the devastanum [temple management] and maramat [public works] department etc., the revenue business will be ordered with regularity.85

The argument of the petitioners suggests that, by the late 1820s, casteand language-based distinctions were gaining prominence in the cutcherry. The official distinction between public business and private trade was increasingly intertwined with the salience of caste ties and linguistic expertise. Indeed, the new centrality of language expertise was echoed in the official response to the petition. In his response, the secretary to the Board did not write to the collector of Tirunelveli about the various charges made against the incumbent employees or even about the issue of missionary conversion, topics to which Company men were particularly sensitive. Instead, he wrote to the collector that “if the records are kept in a foreign language there is great room for fraud. It will therefore be a virtue if kept in Tamil.”86 The 1828 petition shows recruitment practices, in conjunction with the official belief that hereditary expertise was most suited to colonial recordkeeping and land management, reinvigorated caste and linguistic solidarities in the cutcherry. Caste and kin ties were not obstacles to rational governance as the officers and subsequent scholars claim but intrinsically nurtured by it. Linguistic expertise had become salient in new ways within the cutcherry and could determine scribal careers.

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Company officials desired to make recordkeeping and written documents resemble the register of the spoken languages as closely as possible. What did the effort to conduct administrative “public” business in the spoken language of the region actually imply for scribal skills? The problem, as I show, was inherently tied to the intelligibility and credibility of vernacular recordkeeping and writing. In the next chapter, I investigate how the official quest for legible writing reframed scribal skills in the cutcherry. The story of kanakkan recordkeeping is a story about changing dispositions to writing.

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fficials took a dim view of the village accountant-scribe, the kanakkan or kanakkuppillai. A collector reported from Masulipatnam:

In this purgunnah [subdivision], the curnum is the principal character. He collects the revenue from the ryots, he pays the revenue to the Circar and as he also keeps the accounts of receipts from the one, and payments to the other, he has it in his power to cheat both.1

The view that kanakkans were cunning was, however, by no means new. A contemporary Tamil proverb recorded by the historian A. Sivasubramanian, “A settlement’s kanakkuppillai brings destruction, alive or dead” (“ur kan.akkan iruntum ket.utta¯n, cettum ket.utta¯n”), echoes a ˉ ˉ ˉ popular saying recorded in a nineteenth-century official manual: “A collector cannot undo with his hands the knots that the kanakkan ties with his feet” (“kan.akkan ka¯la¯l po¯.t.ta¯ mut.iccai kalekt.ar kaiya¯l avil kka ˉ ˉ mut.iya¯tu”). 2 As a mediating figure between the rulers and the ruled, the kanakkuppillai might at fi rst glance resemble the kind of quintessential intermediary figure that has featured prominently in recent studies of colonial knowledge who evaluated how colonial taxonomies and knowledge disciplines were brokered. This chapter, although indebted to these initiatves, takes kanakkan mediation as a point of entry to interrogate the risk of writing and to critically explore the model of colonial supervision that depended on correlating “continuous writing” to the technique of examination. To subordinate extant specialists and know the conquered territories

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independently from intermediaries, Company officers had to appropriate their knowledge systems and convert them into a genre that was accessible to means of verification concurrently emerging in metropolitan domains. 3 As continuous writing became the means to tame chance, the risk of writing permeated the colonial bureaucratic order. In consequence, a deeper understanding of writing’s risk can be recuperated from the ways in which specific protocols of veracity were put into place to secure political accountability and hence colonial authority. Questions of veracity became central to the assertion of political authority under early colonial rule because truth could no longer be a product of virtue defi ned by gentlemanly behavior and face-to-face encounters.4 For good government, writing had to capture the micro-processes of activities like agrarian cultivation and be amenable to wide circulation in order to produce the reliable typologies of objective description (that privileged commodities over relations) that were indispensable for the macro-level accounting required for “forced commerce” and a stable property regime. 5 Carlo Ginzburg has described this orientation as a forensic mode of recordkeeping—underwritten by an evidentiary paradigm that sustains a mode of proof coeval with modern jurisprudence.6 The forensic mode of viewing written records makes the document selfevident, a thing that speaks for itself and something that can be mined for content.7 Making kanakkan writing amenable to metropolitan circulation and to this forensic expectation, however, was a labored task. Official efforts to make writing a tool to manage risk in fact rendered the writing of scribes difficult to supervise. The evidentiary properties of kanakkan records and the scribes who produced them generated anxiety among officers. The variable relationship of kanakkan writing to law, sometimes self-consciously encouraged by self-serving officials, left plenty of room for extralegal transactions around paper and new claims to be made to the state while installing a model of power that rested on discretion. Attending to the “risk of writing” tells us more about colonial state power than might be evident from an analytical frame that privileges recalcitrance or collaboration. How did certain skills threaten new official expectations of writing even as they were rendered subordinate to the statistical gaze? How did these epistemic struggles entangled in languages, scripts, and materials of writing shape the colonial archive that scholars consult today as neatly written fair-copied volumes in English? The Company’s labored attempt to generate conditions for felicitous

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writing in the cutcherry can help us unravel the modern historian’s latent predisposition to view the written record as the transparent evidence of the world it describes.

Cutcherry Recordkeeping The published and manuscript English records in the colonial archive are a material submission to colonial power and are the product of the labor of an army of scribes.8 The Company’s Madras records consulted today are the remains of a scriptorium that copied official correspondence for metropolitan eyes. The Company’s English consultations should be seen as a palimpsest: an overwriting, reordering, and thus selective effacement of the subordinate scribal world it oversaw. The taxonomic and conceptual operations of the East India Company’s cutcherry—the reports, commissions of inquiry, and surveys— cannibalized older genres such as household surveys maintained by village accountants and the petitions submitted to sovereigns in a variety of languages. These fair-copied reports, commissions, and letters written in awkward prose “Babu-English” are but a slice of the cutcherry’s vast documentary enterprise. The remaining documentary operations of the Company especially those conducted in Indian language materials remained uncataloged. To be sure, the Company made targeted collections of Indian language materials on particular issues. Colonel Mackenzie’s vast collection of South Indian language materials to recover the history of the region comes to mind, as does the collection of the Inam Commission in western India. But although the Company sourced Indian language texts and specific genres as keys to the colony’s history and social arrangements, which were later cataloged and accessed by scholars, its everyday Indian language record departments did not attract similar attention.9 Company recordkeeping did not bequeath an archive of registered documents like the notarial archive of colonial Latin America.10 Company interest in registration was selective, not compulsory; it did not derecognize unregistered written conveyances.11 Unlike the documents preserved in the archives of princely households that survived conquest,12 the everyday documents of the Company state—for example, the Tamil palm-leaf records of lower-echelon kanakkuppillai—were rarely ordered systematically, and exist today in

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uncataloged manuscript bundles.13 The expansion of the bureaucracy of letters also did not result in a vast archive of petitions or deeds. Petitions submitted to the Madras offices alone were registered, but originals were often destroyed or returned to appellants unless preserved as exemplars or in private collections. Petitions were translated in English and preserved as enclosures only if they raised a question pertinent to an official discussion. Early reports extensively mined extant princely records and genres for information. Mr. Falconer’s report of Arcot lands in the Karnatak in 1802 was prepared from an examination of original sanads and, when necessary, original transcriptions of vouchers from the palace records of Chepauk.14 But by the mid-nineteenth century, officers complained about the unreliability of the Indian language documents kept by their own institutions. J. H. Nelson, commissioned to write the Madura Manual, writes of his difficulties in fi nding reliable sources for reconstructing Dindigul’s history in the Madurai cutcherry: In the fi rst place the records have never been properly arranged and catalogued. In the second place many of the most important letters and reports forming portions of series have not been copied, or the copies of them have been lost. Next, the copyists who copied the earlier letters and reports were men utterly unacquainted with the English language and therefore committed innumerable blunders, which blunders have never been corrected. Then again, the earlier letters and reports were written apparently by gentlemen who had left school at an earlier age and were not sufficiently well educated to be able to express themselves clearly. . . . Lastly, as the Board of Revenue were for some time, and necessarily, altogether wanting in knowledge of the revenue specialities of Dindigul and Madurai, the early Collectors would seem to have purposely veiled the facts which they reported with a mass of verbiage in order to secure for themselves the enjoyment of a practically unlimited and irresponsible authority.15

The criticism of Company recordkeeping and unchecked official power did not prevent Nelson from writing the Madura Manual. Officials produced new authoritative templates that constituted Indian society through categories such as the village republic.16 Such factualized formulations asserted the epistemological privilege of European expertise that established truths about the colony by actively presenting extant expertise as archaic and by advocating pedagogic disciplining of Indian

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assistants.17 The routine production of numbers and reports continued apace; the discursive practices of accounting surpassed in scale and regularity the enumerative apparatus of individual princely polities.18 Yet such narratives about disorderly record rooms reveal something. Consider that as recordkeeping became central to resource extraction in early nineteenth-century Madras, European officials faced the key problem of determining and controlling the authenticity of documents and the authenticity of what was written. The anxiety over documentary disarray was not, then, an obstacle to the certitudes that peppered reports about knowing Indian society. It indicated a growing official preoccupation with attestation and evidentiary value of documents. Because the Company did not formally dismantle existing attestation practices but attempted to manage them and render them commensurate to new expectations, the mistrust of scribal skills in the cutcherry can be a point of entry for us to consider the epic struggle over the legitimate ways of recalling and deeming true. These struggles came to the forefront as the Company began to survey land and came to see the records of kanakkans, the very corpus that they depended on, as unreliable.

The Textual Habitus of Early Modern Scribes Company officials sought to exert control over land revenue by limiting and subordinating semantic operations that had hitherto enabled the kanakkan to classify, and adjudicate and compile authoritatively. The Tamil lexicon’s entry for root word “kanakku,” from which the word “kanakkuppillai” is derived, illustrates the semantic sweep of a kanakkan’s practices: Kanakku: 1. number, account, reckoning, calculation, computation; 2. the four simple rules of arithmetic; 3. account book ledger; 4. science of arithmetic; 5. order; sequence; 6. stratagem, artifice, expedient; 7. result, consequence; 8. sum; 9. thing, affair, circumstance; 10. limit; count; 11. letter, writing; 12. literature; science; 13. litigation; 14. way, manner; 15. orderly arrangement, system.19

The lexicon suggests that kanakkuppillai writing and hence scribal practice represents an entire mode of thought. “Kanakku” encompassed accurate reckoning or estimation, and issues of order, sequence, and clas-

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sification. As we will see, this scribal practice was a habituation that adjudicated value and was embodied in the scribe’s person by testimonial attestation. The kanakkan textual habitus, however, was not necessarily particular to the Tamil-writing scribe. 20 It overlapped and shared with a broader habitus developed in the early modern regional concentrations of commercial credit and exchange that David Ludden has called “rurban.” 21 From that time, like elsewhere, intermediaries and specialist practitioners of accountancy in the subcontinent integrated credit and commodity circuits into a profitable fi nancial base for warrior kings and magnates in small market centers (Tamil: pe¯.t.tai; Marathi: pe¯.tha) and military camps (Tamil: pa¯.l aiyam; Telugu: pa¯.lemu). 22 Polyglossic textual production proliferated in chanceries. 23 The interplay of stylus, pen, paper, and palm leaf produced a mixed vocabulary of revenue collection terms. Although Tamil-writing kanakkans used Tamil script and wrote mainly on palm leaf, their vocabulary bore the impress of Persianate, Marathi, and Telugu words and document forms, such as the petition (Persian: ‘arz.da¯sht). 24 A sense of linguistic difference certainly permeated early modern courtly enterprise, but these distinctions were not derived from a modular ethnological vision of cultural diversity shaped by a grid of grammars. 25 Interlingual scribal transactions were anchored, instead, in the skills of recitation and memory, and in networks of men and apprenticeship and testimonial attestation. 26 Veracity was a virtue. Practices could be shared across languages and yet differences in genre production could flourish. For example, manuals on the epistolary arts (called Insha¯’ in Persian or the Lekhapaddhati in Sanskrit) were not written in Tamil. 27 Tamil documents, we have to assume, were probably determined by usage and by example; each document was an act of commensuration with established legal-textual principles. 28 The Company’s substantial overwriting of recordkeeping during land settlement discombobulated these everyday scribal practices, making their direct recuperation impossible. In consequence, to build a view of kanakkan practice, I must begin with the footnotes of a colonial history on land proprietorship written by Francis Whyte Ellis. Discerning Kanakkan “Usage” Kanakkan written conveyances were the source base of Francis Whyte Ellis’s essay on proprietorship, written in 1814 with his primary assis-

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tant B. Sankariah and published in 1818 as Replies to seventeen questions, proposed by the government of Fort St. George, relative to Mirasi right: with two appendices, elucidatory of the subject. 29 Ellis was a collector of Madras and a leading orientalist who proposed an early iteration of the autonomous origins of South Indian languages from the Indo-European language family. Ellis is perhaps better known for this essay in which he equated absolute proprietorship with superior ancien régime entitlements called mirasi (mira¯si), thereby rewriting its meaning through historical reasoning. Ellis’s footnotes make clear that the kanakkuppillai attested to the authenticity of written conveyances in the Tamil region. The integrity of writing was attested by the kanakkan’s signature, countersigned by mirasdars or notables (na¯.t.ta¯r) of the settlement, and recorded in the pangu-malai (pa¯ n˙ku-ma¯lai) or register of shares. 30 Notables usually witnessed conveyances. 31 Such tight networks of attestation meant that a conveyance’s efficacy did not rely entirely on its complete and absolute material survival. From a line from a conveyance used by Ellis, we see that conveyance made allowances for blunders arising from the quality of the palm leaf, writing errors, mistakes in words, interlineations, and erasure. 32 The efficacy of deeds did not lie in their pristine preservation in a record room necessarily, but in the performance of their receipt and writing among men who knew each other. Deeds required appropriate marks of consent; they needed to be properly witnessed in a way that would mark them in the collective remembrance of the upper-caste men of the settlement and entered into the pangu-malai register. As a result, written conveyances between individuals were not “registered” in the strict sense of the term in modern jurisprudence. They were artifacts that rested on the attestation of the notables and kanakkuppillais and anchored in memory. Such practices echo practices in eighteenth-century polities in western and northern parts of the Indian subcontinent. 33 Not only did the kanakkuppillai attest documents, he was, in addition, a settlement’s revenue accountant and its primary document writer.34 He submitted evidence in disputes by attesting and submitting investigations. By the late eighteenth century, kanakkuppillais proffered and compiled authoritative written statements or reports like kaifiyats (Tamil: kaipı¯ tu; Persian: kaif ¯ı yat) in consultation with the respectable gentry of the settlement. 35 The kanakkan, like other scribal experts, discerned forgeries by checking that the words of the documents emulated preexisting models. Practices of discerning authentic deeds were

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based on the repeated appearances of words, subject arrangements, and the like. 36 Good document writers required a good hand, a clear understanding of legal context, and the appropriate arrangement of categories. Both Velcheru Narayana Rao and Phillip Wagoner have observed that Teluguwriting scribes had a set of skills distinct from those of the poet-scholar (pandit). 37 Rao observes that scribes, unlike poet-scholars, learned to write informally. That is, scribes were not trained in grammar, which, in keeping with classical defi nitions, was a lexical authority that legislated words for poetic composition. Wagoner, writing about Niyogi Brahmins who left the bankrupt Arcot court to fi nd work in Colin Mackenzie’s cutcherry, similarly suggests that the Niyogis learned to write and decipher scripts through habit. 38 A habituated expertise with the graphological arts enabled Niyogi Brahmans to move between multiple scripts. Such observations require a more institutional elaboration through a discussion of apprenticeship. Scribal apprenticeships were similar to pandit pedagogic models in that they were a form of learning by watching and doing. Unlike teacherdisciple lineages, however, apprenticeships were usually kin-centered. 39 Scribes acquired their training as apprentices, usually to kinsmen. Kanakkuppillais, like Mughal munshis, acquired their skills in graphemes and numeracy through family networks.40 Unlike scholar-poets, scribes did not associate with lineages of learning, and, more so than to their fathers, kanakkuppillai sons began to work as unpaid assistants to their maternal uncles (tai-ma¯man) whose daughters they could wed.41 ˉ (Cutcherry recruitment appropriated these “volunteer” practices but recoded them as archaic and yoked them to an intensely brokerage style recruitment structure.) In the absence of a written guide of formularies, we have to imagine a world of learning around the human transmission of concrete examples of writing.42 Learning through historically contingent examples and by example, the kanakkan apprentice labored with his hand, copying and repeating graphemes to learn, remember, and internalize. Writing skills learned in the absence of prosodic grammar required the sort of somatic mnemonics that connect memory skills to computation. Like other caste Hindu students, kanakkuppillai boys fi rst learned to hold a stylus in the veranda school, or tinnai school (tin.n.ai pal..likku¯.tam). Writing was a bodily technique to create an agile mind in these schools, practices that I discuss later. But for the moment, let me

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note that students learned texts and writing to develop their mental faculties. Under the supervision of their kin, apprentices honed the skills of repetition and copying that privileged mental computational skills in the tinnai school and yoked them to the specialized expertise of revenue accounts. As with any skill or disposition, it is difficult to gloss the scribe’s laukikam or worldliness as secular, given that these were conceptually inseparable from the routines of worship and auspiciousness. Consider that e¯.tel utu, the Tamil gloss for “writing on a palm leaf,” also refers to ˉ auspicious beginnings, the act of ceremonially commencing to teach a child the alphasyllabary on an auspicious day. It also refers to the act of starting to copy a book to learn and to the act of opening an account. The panchangi (pañca¯n˙ki), the Brahman wielder of the almanac usually divined auspicious moments to sign deeds, but it was the kanakkan’s stylus that performed auspiciousness, tying a prognostic temporality to good fortune.43 Kanakkan skills were the product of a trained memory, anchored in an ability to compute quickly. The kanakkan’s skills of assessment, his ability to convert several disparate objects into a single value, and his phenomenal capacity to calculate fractions and shares became crucial to the conduct of business in the early modern period.44 The differential incorporation and evidence of flexibility in measurements (reflected in the frequent complaint of Company surveyors about the absence of standardized measurements) underscore the tremendous skills of calculation exhibited by kanakkans at work.45 Kanakkuppillai writing was thus more than a functional mastery over techniques of storage; it was a skill connected to the recognition of patterns and calibration of assessment through the dexterous conversion of matter and value. The kanakkan was a living concordance. By concordance, I do not refer to the mere fact of being in agreement or harmony, but to a specialist act of rendering disparity equivalent: combining accounts, fi nding parallels, and indexing topics. Kanakkans did not count or write from rote, but they related produce shares to habitation and households. Computational units of produce shares derived from household economy were imbricated with sacred topography of temples, ponds, and river banks. Typically, a settlement’s kanakkuppillai was trained to remember the household genealogies of the settlements he supervised, allowing him to offer authoritative accounts of disputes, capital transfer, and enti-

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tlements. It allowed him, in other words, to recount the past, to account for past events, and to adjudicate the present in concert with a settlement’s notables.46 This was the authority behind karan.aparamparai; the tradition of the kanakkuppillai now glossed as “oral tradition.” Kanakkan computation was not the purely abstract philosophical skill of high mathematics. It was a set of authoritative techniques to convert value. Its mode of representation and abstraction was an attribute of power when seen in relation to the concrete measurement and anthromorphically derived calculation practiced by workers like woddars or tank diggers, nirgunties or irrigation workers, or grain measurers.47 Premetric measures were dense with concrete substantive meaning.48 Since the act of measurement opened up the possibility of deceit and the function of money and measures varied considerably, the kanakkan’s alchemical capacity to convert measures, and authorize a working typology of conversion, compilation, and equivalence endowed his stylus with authority. To argue that kanakkan skills were computational, auspicious, and mnemonic reconceptualizes kanakkan writing practice in relationship to the world. Recall was hardly particular to the kanakkan. Classical and early modern pedagogy from a variety of world regions show it be germane to oratory and the life of the mind. Inscriptional acts such as note taking and indexing facilitated the recall essential for public performance; they were quintessential aide-mémoire. European “commonplace” books were important aids to memory through the seventeenth century.49 Taken together, the optic of recall and hierarchical reciprocity make clear that kanakkuppillai records articulated to proof or evidence in terms other than the “forensic mode” that sustained the transcendental notion of law. The Evidentiary Paradigm of Kanakkuppillai Documents Until the Company introduced the Ryotwari land settlement in Madras, the written artifacts of kanakkuppillai expertise and its enumerative categories were organized along the familial household. A settlement’s accountant-scribe kept a number of different types of accounts. The princely household or its agents sent out a range of inspecting scribes to collate and summarize these records. The kanakkan records of produce shares, land cultivation, and enumeration of habitations and homes formed the detailed accounts of shares: the Tarappat.i-vakai-e¯.tu

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(detailed varieties of accounts of produce) and tokai-e¯.tu (summaries or compounds). Thomas Barnard in Chingleput conducted the earliest Company survey of revenue assessment in Madras in 1760s. Barnard commissioned kanakkuppillai assessments of 2,100 localities and had these palm-leaf Tamil accounts summarized into English. These fair-copy English summaries reflect the taxonomic and spatial logic of Tamil palm-leaf records. 50 From both the English and Tamil records, it is clear that produce shares and land use were braided with the physical geography and social topography of households, and hierarchical reciprocity held them together. Family genealogy was an important category of recordkeeping. 51 Status determined entitlement shares, but entitlements were politically negotiated to a degree. 52 Kanakkans prepared detailed lists of grain and share entitlements, and then summarized, compiled, and computed them in different combinations but within the taxonomic logic of the household. 53 These text genres were the sole provenance of the kanakkuppillai. His ability to summarize accounts on demand, give the substance of an issue, abstract a subject of revenue, and compile information (Tamil: tokuti) were the basis of his capacity to give authoritative witness. Several instances depict Company officers calling on kanakkuppillais to give authoritative testimony that accounted for the history of disputes—that is, attest to genealogical descent and issues regarding entitlements. 54 Much of the kanakkan’s ability to produce credible testimony required knowledge of accounts and the ability to compile them appropriately. Consider the Pal ave¯rka¯.tu kaipı¯ tu, an account of a “local history” about the settleˉ ˉ ment of Pulicat collected by the Mackenzie survey. 55 The Pal ave¯rka¯.tu kaipı¯ tu, a text in the collection of Colin Mackenzie, ˉ ˉ now glossed as locality history, is in fact a testimonial form. 56 The text was translated by one Venkatrow and is attributed to a man, Condappan. Venkatrow, a member of Mackenzie’s cutcherry, probably procured or commissioned the text of testimonial attestation on his master’s orders to collect histories of the country. 57 The kaifiyat is not a single text but consists of a set of three texts. The area’s notables offered the fi rst and last testimonies. Pal ave¯rka¯.tu kaipı¯ tu, the fi rst text, is an account of ˉ ˉ the settlement of Pulicat and ends with the line “this statement of particulars given [kept] in writing by Kuppaiyar and Ottanti Venkatachala Cetti” (“ippat.i kuppaiyyarum, ottan..ti ven ˙ kt.a¯ cala cet..tiyum el uti vaitta ˉ

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kaippı¯ yattu”). 58 The last text is a narrative account of the different occupational and caste groups around Pulicat. It begins with the phrase “the statement as told by Kava Chetti and Thanamudali” (“ka¯ va cet..ti, tanamutali cona kaippı¯ yattu”). The kaifiyat could be written or tranˉ ˉ scribed from an oral inquiry. In the middle of the second text is an extract of the settlement’s accounts, a summary that details household habitations (nat..tam). 59 Termed Pal ve¯r.kat.u Vı¯ .t.tuk Kan.akkum Cenakkan.akkum (“The Computation of ˉ ˉ Households and People in Pulicat”), this text illustrates some of the issues discussed so far. It reads as the authoritative speech of a specialist and illustrates formal computation based on a trained memory. For example, what we now term as enumeration “census” is declared as computation recited aloud: kavarai vı¯ t.u 5kku a¯n.pen. pacan.kal. ul.apat.a cenam 40 ˉ As part of 5 Kavarai houses, men, women, children 40 Akamutiya¯r vı¯t.u 27kku a¯n.pen. pacan.kal. ul.apat.a cenam 200 ˉ As part of Akamutiya¯r 27 houses, men, women, children 200 60

In many cases, such notations would have contained shortcuts suggesting that the computation was conducted mentally, through a mode of recitation.61 Survey and taxation activities were primarily written down to aid a kanakkan in recalling them and in writing them out when called on to do so before an assembly. They aided the archive in his mind. A Company official in charge of a grain warehouse defended himself against allegations of fraud by describing the methods used to secure the accuracy of revenue accounts. He declared that kanakkuppillais proved the authenticity of written palm-leaf records: “They [the records] are identified by the depositions of the conicopolies [kanakkuppillais] who themselves wrote it and declare they are correct.”62 That is to say, kanakkuppillais identified the records and guaranteed their truth through testimony rather than through corroboration established by correspondence with other written records. Written corroboration was subservient to the kanakkuppillai’s testimonial attestation. Such reliance on testimony guaranteed by the kanakkan’s ability to remember was evident when kanakkuppillais offered their formal testimony, as a pair did during a dispute in Chingleput between the castes of the Agamudiyars and Brahmans in 1786. In response to a question, the village kanakkuppillais of Sriperumbudur, declared:

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That before and at the time and after the Jaghire was granted to the Honorable Company, Agoomoody Moodelies, Pullies and Reddies inhabited in the village in the nature of Husbandmen, carried on cultivation, they did not do it as Servants under the church. They neither paid Tundoo of their share nor any Quit Rent for Houses. . . . Thus we are acquainted with this circumstance for forty years and before which time we never heard anything about it from our ancestors. Casava pillay Condapillay63

The reliance on memory and testimonial attestation also implied that kanakkuppillai rarely proffered their detailed accounts for scrutiny. More often than not, the kanakkuppillai produced a summary of accounts for discussions. This system nonetheless allowed for information and categories to be transferred from one language or script to another. A range of supervisory clerks maintained registers to check the kanakkan. Indeed, the qa¯nu¯ngo’s office provided a compendium of registers, account summaries, and the like, thus offering a countercheck to kanakkan computation. Information regarding produce and assessment rates could be transferred from Tamil palm leaf to Modi on paper by recourse to a form of reading aloud. This mode of translation undergirded by testimonial attestation prevailed over word-for-word written correspondence. From the Company records, it is clear that these modes of linguistic transfer and oversight entered the cutcherry. Most often, Company records in English and Modi were constructed from the Tamil accounts. The gomashtas, hearing them out loud, would proceed to transcribe and translate them into Modi script.64 Although it is unclear whether the gomashta actually sight-read the palm-leaf accounts—he probably relied on the kanakkuppillai’s recitation—his own skills of mental computation ensured accuracy. Thus the gomashta who uncovered the grain fraud in a Company warehouse in 1814 was reading aloud the abstract of the accounts to the person translating the accounts “when it occurred to him with reference to a godown that it was deficient in 2 garce of rice in quantity and 200 pagodas”65—an error caught through mental computation. The implications of this system are significant for cutcherry work. The translation and summarization of revenue account keeping was heavily mediated by mental computation and recitation. This mediation is important to bear in mind because it implies that palm-leaf accounts were

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not required to be regularly collated into archival systems that could be referenced at will or by sight. Such a reading moreover, has important implications for our understanding of the prevailing document and scribal culture. Writing preserved the spoken utterances of authoritative figures; these were nonetheless not reducible to a colloquial spoken form that could be sight-read by another person. Instead, these written artifacts of kanakkuppillai expertise could be guaranteed only in his person and were “dictated” to and transcribed by overseers. As the Company efforts extended physical recordkeeping in an attempt to capture every aspect of cultivation, harvest, assessment, and revenue collection, the growing mounds of non-English language records and papers and the laborious work of transcribing and computing became more and more illegible. The kanakkan came to hold the keys to land settlement ever more fi rmly. This was precisely why kanakkan palm-leaf accounts, which made visible the artifice of writing, posed such an insurmountable problem for cutcherry management. Distrusting Kanakkuppillai Accounts When land settlement began in earnest at the turn of the nineteenth century, the problem for Company collectors was not whether kanakkuppillai records were empirically oriented and commensurable with modern accounting or verifiable facts. Rather, the problem was that kanakkuppillai’s specialist expertise, a way of knowing the world and its evidentiary paradigm that relied on testimonial attestation, did not render itself easily to the official supervision, the invigilation, that was the basis of the modern bureaucratic state. Official descriptions often cast this problem as a problem of cultural alterity by contrasting “indigenous” recordkeeping with imperial office routine. One such description from the 1880s notes that “the oldest indigenous method of recordkeeping was practiced by village accountants,” that these scribes tied records together in little arrangements of cotton cloth called dufters [sic], and that their “classification relies on memory.”66 The process of assessing authentic accounts and translating them into English remained opaque to Company officers not just because they did not know the language or the system of account keeping, but because extant modes of scribal knowledge exchange proceeded without indexes. In contrast, the paper records in the English department were appropriate for metropolitan oversight.

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They were arranged by date, and indexed in such a way that the “eye ran through the ledger.”67 The contrast drawn by this observer is particularly striking because Company procedures in some places had in fact destroyed some older forms of registers and oversight in the attempt to render records directly accessible to its collectors. For example, the accountant-scribe’s pangu-malai (compilation of shares) provided a comprehensive record of mirasidar entitlements and their tenants and dependants, and the extent of cultivable lands for the current year. Supervisory clerks (qa¯nu¯ngo) also maintained registers. However, Ellis notes that the East India Company discarded these records in favor of certificates signed by collectors.68 As we saw in the previous chapter, the Company peeled away the office of the qanungo to install its new institution, the Company cutcherry. The destruction of older systems of oversight was undertaken to extend collectorate offices’ system of checks and to ensure that all paperwork was rendered subordinate to the collector signature. As the issue of establishing a veritable correspondence between the English records on paper and Tamil accounts on palm leaf grew, so did the fear of peculation, inaccuracy, and resource concealment take hold of the official imagination. Several problems cropped up during the course of revenue management. Nonspecialists could not read kanakkuppillai documents. Collectors noticed that kanakkans did not sightread each other’s records. Company officials found that the supervisory officers of the cutcherry—namely the “Modi”-writing gomashtas who were supposed to superintend the work of the kanakkuppillai in the cutcherry—were completely reliant on the accountant’s reading aloud of primary estimations and accounts. Gomashtas translated summary accounts that kanakkuppillais “dictated” to them in Tamil into “Hindavi” (Modi). Therefore the Board of Revenue, looking to gomashtas to keep the kanakkuppillais under check, frequently bemoaned that the gomashtas’ only “business was to write, arrange and translate accounts.”69 Against their will, they had to contend with the oral statements of the kanakkuppillais. At stake was a struggle over the acceptable norms of felicity under which writing’s risk could be managed. Collectors wrote in frustrated detail about recordkeeping languages in the cutcherry. One collector wrote that he had to dismantle his predecessor’s arrangements and employ supervisory clerks unrelated to the kanakkans but who knew the language of the accounts and could read palm leaf.

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I need only to show how much my predecessor was at the mercy of the curnums, since I believe not one of his cutcherry and taluk servants could read a cadjan [palm leaf] and were compelled to receive from the curnum whatever accounts be thought proper to give-true or false, his shersitadars were incapable of discriminating and what therefore the curnums dictated, the sheristadars wrote down.70

Company reliance on the kanakkuppillai was compounded by the fact that his skills were based not only on the principles of recall and computation that I just discussed but also on a form of assessment and estimation that did not correspond with standard universal measurement. Kanakkuppillais, for instance, without the aid of actual accounts, could look at an object—a field of grain, a line of earthworks, or an irrigation tank—and habitually assess the value of the work and assess its costs.71 Two issues, one regarding the oversight of cutcherry subordinates and the other concerning land settlements, illustrate how this problem of ensuring surveillance played out and remained the unresolved project that sparked waves of reforms. The Paper Trail of Cutcherry Embezzlement The records and reports investigating cutcherry embezzlement paint a vivid picture of the system and the increasing awkwardness with which Company officers began to view scribal practices. The investigation of the Coimbatore embezzlement in 1815, discussed in chapter 1, is a case in point. Investigation of Casi Chettiar’s activities provides details about the evidentiary weight of records in the cutcherry. Company officials wrote that the accounts offered as evidence in the investigation were not entirely reliable because they were reconstructed from kanakkuppillai memory. Faced with the absence of a paper trail, the investigators Thomas Munro and John Sullivan turned to Chettiar’s associates, mostly scribeaccountants and petty revenue officers, to reconstruct the details of the fraud from memory, computation, and assessment. The investigation relied heavily on the testimony of Naranappah, an accountant employed by Chettiar. Naranappah had produced few papers to substantiate his testimony. The investigators reported that Naranappah could help their work because he had lived in Chettiar’s house for a few months, arranging and settling the accounts. They argued that although Chettiar took the docu-

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ments away, Naranappah was “so completely the master of the subject” that with the help of “the public account and some memorandums of his own [probably a ya¯da¯sht]” he was able to display not only the whole amount embezzled in the repairs but that of each year, and the particular works that were falsely charged.72 In a similar manner, other Chettiar underlings were asked to draw out accounts from memory, showing the particulars of fraud, because they had been personally involved in the superintendence of the activities (such as conducting irrigation repairs) and had assisted in framing the false accounts.73 The investigators of Chettiar’s activities also found themselves relying on account “summaries” rather than on all the details and soon discovered, to their consternation, that account “summaries” were based not on observed measurement but on information collected from other sources. The inquiry into Chettiar’s private trade in sandalwood, for example, was reconstructed from a set of accounts written on “black books” with slate that were kept by accountants in the Mysore hinterlands of Southwest India.74 The black books in question did not contain the details of daily transactions—they were not what merchants called the daily cashbook (tinakkurippu)75—but accounts of total quantities ˉ of cut sandalwood, probably drawn up from the lists given to the head bullock men who transported it.76 These were therefore memos and not logbooks.77 The 1815 investigation demonstrates that Company officers inevitably ended up relying on the kanakkuppillai’s skills of computation and recall and his skills of assessment built out of habitual practice. Finding that they could not check cutcherry fraud through continuous writing and certainly would fi nd it difficult to bring offenders to book, the Company turned to new regulation, incentives with greater pay, and the informer system that I outlined in the previous chapter. The place of the kanakkan in land settlements was, however, an equally tricky and particularly intractable problem. Their land administration apparatus greatly depended on the kanakkan, but how was the Company to tabulate resources, check peculation, and build both a notion of individual property in land and a stable property regime? To better determine the extent of landholdings, assess productivity, determine the nature of claims, and set up a way to verify kanakkan records, the Madras government installed a field-assessment survey. This meshing of these two systems, the kanakkan’s records and the field-based survey, was the basis of the Ryotwari system, the annual direct settlement between the state and the individual cultivator, the ryot (Persian: raiyat).

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The Documentary Apparatus of the Revenue Survey: Ryotwar It was in the early nineteenth century and in South India, rather than Bengal, that colonial surveying rapidly advanced.78 The revenue survey was one of three distinct but simultaneous cartographic surveys, the other two being the topographic and trigonometric. In Bengal, the “permanent” revenue settlement operated through extant methods of measurement. In Madras, after the defeat of the Mysore sultan, Tipu, in 1792, Alexander Read conducted a field-based revenue survey that ascertained norms through an inquiry into the details of metrology. Thomas Munro refi ned Read’s methods in the Ceded Districts in 1801–7 and produced the exemplar survey for Ryotwari settlement.79 The Company revenue survey, or pymaish, appropriated its very name from older Persianate-Maratha land survey practice (Persian: Paima¯yish, “to measure”); it drew on the skills of Maratha gomashta scribes and compiled its vocabulary from a variety of sources including village and supra-local accounts.80 Despite these appropriations, the goals of the Company pymaish were quite different. Read started fashioning the survey because he argued that the “natives” were imperfectly informed about revenue and tenural detail. The Company pymaish’s taxonomic emphasis thus displaced the epistemic place of the household by conceptually separating the social from the economic domain. Recall that the English records of Barnard’s locality survey of Chingleput in the 1760s closely mirrored the kanakkan’s accounts. Kanakkan recordkeeping tabulated a settlement’s produce and entitlements either in shares of grain units such as kalam and pat.i or land units, such as ka¯n.i and kuli. ¯ These measures were measurement units that were heavily shaped by the logic of ratios. The aggregative categories were derived from a broader rubric of entitlements and the hierarchical reciprocity of the household. In contrast to the Barnard survey, the English records of the pymaish separated social typologies from economic information and were rendered into large statistical tables on paper.81 The Company pymaish also addressed itself to a different expectation of recordkeeping from earlier Maratha forms, even if it used Modiwriting gomashtas.82 In contrast to the long rolls of Modi documents, the spatial form of the survey’s information ultimately generated a twodimensional grid like revenue space populated by numbers. These statistical large tables were folded up like the leaves of an accordion, pasted into volumes, and transported to Madras and then to London. Unlike

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Modi documents, which required scribal expertise to be interpreted, speedy inspection of these English fair-copied schedules could be undertaken while seated at a table across oceans. Perhaps most importantly, the abstraction of numbers and the conceptual separation of social and economic information were grounded in a key concrete and conceptual practice. Surveyors were instructed to parcel and measure fields according to the quantity of land that was customarily cultivated by one plough, that is, one standard unit of labor. 83 The micro-practices of measurement by precolonial polities in the subcontinent have not received sustained scholarly attention beyond the introduction of measuring rods. It is clear, however, that the Company pymaish’s logic resonates with the premetrical European measurement practice of measuring land by plough, such as the English acre. The calculation of the acre is suggestive for a number of reasons. The empirical quantity of land per plough could vary because surveyors established it in consultation with the kanakkan and a settlement’s notables. This was a common premetric practice. The acre was an empirical/geographic measure that was also determined qualitatively. It enabled unequal areas to be equated by facilitating the conversion of various units by allowing plenty of room to accommodate variations. Acres varied within Britain and in the United States. The Company pymaish is distinguished from earlier attempts to determine land area not just by its introduction of the category of acreage but in its rescaling of land against a standard labor input, one plough. The resulting information from the survey, remember, was rendered into numbers and written into statistical tables. The introduction of the acre therefore was also the basis of statistical operations. Thus under the Company, a measure like the acre had a vast semantic sweep. It materially enabled commensuration with extant measurements and simultaneously separated land conceptually from the “inputs” of cultivation. The survey method abstracted labor from hierarchical reciprocity and rendered it into a standard input for two goals; in so doing, it brought forth a new regime of property. The calibration of land against the plough standard rendered the density and variability of laboring families’ claims to produce into a flat standard unit. The decision-making logic of resource controllers brought the conceptual basis of proprietorship into the documentary edifice of the state. The measurement of land was undertaken in front of the field’s cultivators, important men of the village, and the kanakkan. The survey could not be undertaken without the expertise of

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the kanakkan, for it demanded a close interaction between the gomashta surveyor and the kanakkan. A register of numbered fields and their cultivators were then correlated to the kanakkan’s accounts. Individuals on the registered list received lease deeds, with the rent they owed, signed by the collector. The lease-deed form called pat..ta¯ was of Persianate provenance. Only now the difference lay in the fact that Company officials distributed it individually. The pat..ta¯ became the material object that installed a new order of property. Further, just as the plough stood in for an abstract unit of labor, the paddy harvest from the most fertile twocrop land set the standard for productivity against which assessment particulars were negotiated. The semantic sweep of the new imaginary of the number contained within it an intention to abstract labor and control the typology of conversion. It is no surprise then, that the Company found that its surveys did not match kanakkan records. Collector Hurdis in Madurai district reported that as the fi rst survey and settlements were undertaken, the accounts of curnums were delivered in the cutcherry as the survey proceeded, and the falsity of them was proved before the village. In what manner these accounts were made up by the curnums, or on what measurement, I cannot fi nd out: but the survey has restored order, and the accounts now with the curnums are those made by the survey.84

Hurdis’s statement makes clear that the Company pymaish was a means by which village records were incorporated into the master frame of property. The Ryotwari survey’s dense semiotics operated through the material objects of everyday life such as the paddy measure, the English rod, and the plough. The survey turned material objects into conceptual categories commensurate with acreage and labor units. Pen and paper turned entitlements into wage, property, and land rent. The recording of minute details and the kanakkan’s own participation in the survey process that “shamed” him in front of the settlement solicited acquiescence and was a threat to recalcitrant defaulters and peculating subordinates. The recordkeeping apparatus also performed continuous writing and inspection over every aspect of cultivation and all the resources of labor, irrigation, soils, fields, cattle at hand. From May or June, when the land was fi rst ploughed and the kanakkan prepared the list of cultivation (fields and cultivators) called the adangal, and until the fi nal assessments and

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collections were collated in an event called the jamabandi held at the collector’s cutcherry almost twelve months later, the work of writing, examining, inspecting, and reporting was continuous.85 The laborious invigilation produced an excess of writing and any number of problems. The scale of documentation and the pressure to coincide survey, inspection, and writing with the harvest cycle left little time for proper oversight. Modi-writing gomashta Brahmans deputed to verify information independently did little beyond receiving kanakkan dictation in the usual manner. The space-time compression enabled repetitive detail to flourish as Taluk and District cutcherry officials demanded extracts and summaries on a whim. At the same time, collectors sometimes declared that minute details were unnecessary for annual settlement. As a result, sometimes jamabandi would proceed from Tamil accounts without the mediation or oversight through Modi. Furthermore, the pressure to increase cultivable area and increase assessment through the survey meant that underpaid revenue officers often used systematic torture to realize the demands placed on them.86 Field assessments were often instituted without proper survey. Estimations of rent, the annual settlement, and distribution of deeds were based on the details of the village accountants’ register of fields rather than direct observations.87 In many districts, the inhabitants’ refusal to participate in aspects of the survey such as the classification of land and the latitude given to the collector resulted in different permutations and combinations in how the revenuewas determined and collected. For all these uneven outcomes, the Ryotwari apparatus secured the logic of property through writing by yoking the kanakkan and his records to the survey axis. The acre and the pat..ta¯, or lease deed signed by the collector, was accompanied by the legal edifice of the courtroom for civil suits (sadr adalat). The logic of individual property now tied formally to the legal system rapidly dispersed over the social terrain through documentary practices, creating spaces for machinations over land categories, and enhancing the kanakkan’s discretion. Ryotwari generated a new domain of politics around land classification—particularly the defi nition of “wasteland” and its arability.88 Kanakkans now solely responsible for the preparation of all the authorized accounts of settlements also decided land classifications, a power they often used for self-aggrandizement and petty extortion.89 The growing inequality of relations meant that the petty bribe became a currency of transaction. Officials had intended Ryotwari to create a direct relationship between

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tillers and the government. In fact, the manner in which the logic of property was installed in Madras fostered land grab and furthered fraud; it was experienced by the Madras inhabitants as kanakkan domination and installed a gray informal economy around documents.90

The Pressure of Metropolitan Circulation and Crisis of Attestation There was much more at stake in the Company’s rule of the ledger than a simple expansion of writing or the codification of “custom.” The absence of a reliable land survey propelled the fear that registration would only enhance forgery.91 (In India and Britain, registration would come only in the second half of the nineteenth century after the institution of the cadastral survey. But these developments did not substantially reduce anxieties about counterfeit documents.) The ambivalence to registration shifted the onus of veracity and evidence away from registration and preservation and to everyday attestation practice. Kanakkan writing, although available in the form of sophisticated and detailed registers, had been ultimately guaranteed in his person. Now a new perception of the risk of writing as a crisis of attestation appeared along with Company rule. The regime of “continuous” writing had ended up strengthening a mode of recordkeeping that was neither readily amenable to circulation nor could it be verified in the old way. Kanakkan writing could be not referenced and verified easily. To a colonial regime invested in the punitive power of paper and the minute knowledge of the particulars of cultivation, securing writing’s detachability was a key concern, for without it, kanakkan notations would not acquire authority of their own as documents, serve as evidence, and become records of a place. In the Company’s revenue and judicial offices, the increasing emphasis on legible writing as a measure of accountability in a society deemed to be incapable of reasoned debate, meant that the official incomprehensibility of kanakkuppillai recordkeeping and its evidentiary paradigm appeared to officers as an intractable obstacle to generating trust within the cutcherry. The 1815 investigation of Casi Chetty made clear that existing cutcherry methods were inadequate to match the metropolitan expectation of written accountability. To be juridicable, or governed by law, investigative reports that circulated back to England not only had to be in a form con-

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sidered fit for debate and discussion in the British Parliament, but they had to produce evidence that could be admitted into a court of law. Although the introduction of the acre enabled the kanakkan revenue documents to enter into the frame of property, the evidentiary paradigm of kanakkan writing would pose a constant threat to Company legal adjudication. In response to such limitations posed by cutcherry management to oversight, officers periodically suggested the establishment of native revenue schools to instruct kanakkuppillais to be morally upright. These high-minded plans typically failed.92 As a result, the Madras officers perpetuated the patronage-informer system to deal with men like Casi Chettiar. They began to accept testimonies from petitioners who had submitted letters of complaint. In 1855 a fi nal set of reforms were undertaken to set the revenue apparatus on a new footing, readying it for the world of printed forms and cadastral survey. The reforms abolished revenue recordkeeping in Modi and made a comprehensive effort to standardize kanakkan accounts. Based on a memorandum prepared by Jayaram Chetty, a head accountant in the North Arcot cutcherry, the Madras government introduced a number of initiatives to simplify accounts, the most important of which was switching village recordkeeping from palm leaf to paper and to Arabic numerals. Chetty wrote up why palm leaf could no longer serve the interests of the government. He observed that a kanakkan’s accounts could not be understood by another, and palm leaf did not lend itself to statistical operations. Comparing palm leaf’s inadequacies to paper, he wrote that the cadjan is the worst sort of material for the preparation of all documents, especially accounts and statements, is so plain that it hardly needs any demonstration. The cadjan commonly used by curnums, is three quarters of an inch in breath, and is inconveniently long, and does not admit of more than four or five lines . . . to obtain the total result of an item, whose entry might occupy thirty or forty lines, every four of those lines will have to be added separately, the amount carried forward. . . . [A]gain, in consequence of the cadjan being not susceptible to being ruled, the figured entries cannot be as orderly as is desirable, so as to admit of easy addition and subtraction. Neither can the heading, &c. be one for all printed, and the labour diminished by mechanical agency.93

At issue, Chetty was careful to note, was not the material medium alone. The reforms intended to bring about a revolution in textual ha-

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bitus through a revolution in materials. Kanakkans, he wrote, had to be schooled to preserve documents with greater care. Although paper lent itself easily to uniformity and provided greater “facility for reference,” mere substitution for “cadjans will be of but little use unless there be also clear arrangement and simplicity in the manner and matter of the accounts.”94 The technological revolution in materials was easy, but it did not further the goal of transparency and legibility, even after the revenue survey was realigned with the trigonometrical survey in the 1860s. The evidentiary credibility of documents posed an ever recurring crisis of attestation and hence a challenge to colonial rule.

Conclusion Around the time that colonial officers and orientalists like Ellis and Mackenzie began to use the scribal skills of their assistants for scholastic knowledge, ironically, was also the time when the oversight demanded by parliamentary audit and the science of political economy reframed the kanakkan’s epistemic world. The Company’s land settlement apparatus instituted a property regime that worked through documents and enhanced the kanakkan’s off-the-record power. At the same time, recordkeeping and the evidentiary paradigm of kanakkan records created a prolonged crisis of attestation in the cutcherry. Company officials discredited the kanakkan’s skills, even as they retained him and cultivated the informer system as political oversight over peculation. My exploration of kanakkuppillai skills suggests that they are quite distinct from the conventional understanding of secretarial language skills. Kanakku in this formulation is an entire system of computation and writing that turned on testimonial attestation and mnemonics. In contrast, a distinct investment in writing Tamil—differentiating it from computation and mnemonics—began to appear as the East India Company cutcherry operations began to value written correspondence that was located in the paradigm of the logbook and that could be sight-read by the lay. This new orientation to writing actively shaped a bureaucratic communicative order in the spoken languages of the country. The effort to conduct written transactions in a register that resembled the spoken languages entailed a new kind of “secretarial culture” in Tamil South India that could be synchronized with recordkeeping in English. The project of making Tamil documents intelligible was conse-

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quently tied to the making of an Anglo-vernacular regime: a dual communicative order, one in English and one in the spoken languages that would facilitate free communication between officials and their subjects. The formal institution of the Anglo-vernacular regime took place only in the mid-nineteenth century when, in 1855, Modi was abolished as a recordkeeping script from Company revenue offices. By then, however, this new officially sponsored secretarial culture transformed orientations to written language in the region. The new Tamil secretarial culture was not a straightforward development of standard grammatical prose in pure Tamil. Rather, it developed through a contested domain around a variety of Tamil that proliferated in Company offices and courts and earned the sobriquet “Cutcherry Tamil.”

part ii Writing and Pedagogy

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Cutcherry Tamil

T

he cutcherry’s lettered city became enmeshed in daily life to such an extent that secretarial work in Tamil earned the disdainful sobriquet “cutcherry Tamil.” The missionary G. U. Pope (1820–1908), one of the anointed fathers of modern Tamil, cautioned in his preface to the Tamil Handbook, “If you hear much Christian or Cutcherry Tamil, beware of thinking all you hear to be really Tamil.”1 Pope’s warning to the untutored European ear had, by the mid-nineteenth century, become a cautionary tale for missionaries, officials, and the Tamil literati. Scorn for cutcherry Tamil gained ground among those who were most anxious to produce a written language that closely approximated spoken Tamil. These efforts to craft respectable prose distinct from cutcherry Tamil coincided with a Company-sponsored language-learning model that was based on the knowledge of new-style grammars and embodied in a new figure: the Tamil teacher, or Tamil munshi. From the moment of their emergence in the early nineteenth century, cutcherry Tamil and Tamil munshis became entangled in discussions about written language. Cutcherry Tamil began to serve as a foil for older debates among the literati about language varieties, the use of words, spelling, and pedagogy. Upper-caste literati reasserted their respectability by decrying cutcherry Tamil as ungrammatical and written by new style Tamil teachers. In the meantime, European missionaries sought to distinguish their translations from office language, while Europeans learning Tamil routinely derided their munshis. Julia Maitland, wife of an East India Company officer in 1837, describes her “Moonshee” soon after her arrival in Madras:

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A moonshee seems to be a component part of most English establishments, so I have set up one also. He comes three times a week to teach me Tamul [sic]. He is a very solemn sort of person. . . . When we hired him, he made many salaams [sic] and said he preferred our friendship to any remuneration we could give; but he condescends to accept 5 pagodas a month besides, he comes when I choose and goes away when I bid him. 2

The relationship between European language learners and their teachers, the munshis, has long been emblematic of the unequal intellectual collaborations between the colonizers and colonized. But little is known about a language variety like cutcherry Tamil or the new-style Tamil teacher, the Tamil munshi. Cutcherry Tamil and Tamil munshis were the stepchildren of a world crafted by the cutcherry and the mission station. Both were held in contempt, and so neither has thus far appeared to the scholarly eye as a connected illustration of a transformed field of language use under colonial rule. But a closer examination of munshis and cutcherry Tamil, in fact, takes the story of “vernacular” languages into the realm of everyday use. The disdain for cutcherry Tamil and the munshi adumbrates a novel expectation of linguistic competence—writing prose. I attend to the appearance of munshis and cutcherry Tamil as a way to untie the story of written prose from a quest for its origins in regional language literatures. I shift instead to a discussion about written language varieties, of which literary prose was one, that occurred in the shadow of colonial philology. 3 A new expectation of written languages developed with philological researches of the Company and missionary orientalists in the early nineteenth century. Along with Protestant missionaries of Church Missionary Society (CMS), Company officials began to expect their scribes to read and write what they called “grammatical” prose in the spoken languages of the country. These new expectations of grammatical competence yoked scribal skills to the knowledge of grammar and accompanied a “seminary style” of teaching linguistic competence, a pedagogic orientation that was imagined as an alternative to the textual training offered by both kanakkan and scholar-poets (pulavar/ pandit) apprenticeships.4 My excursion into everyday written language practices through the prism of Company-centered language pedagogy, rather than Companypatronized philological research, builds on Velcheru Narayana Rao’s observation that the Telugu literati celebrated pandit Telugu for its prescriptive grammar and denigrated scribal, karan.am or vyavaha¯rika

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(business) Telugu because it lacked a grammar and was based on usage. 5 A raging controversy ensued between Telugu language conservatives and reformers in the late nineteenth century that fi nally culminated in the tide turning toward a modern Telugu prose distinct from karanam Telugu, but nonetheless indebted to it. Rao’s insights allow us to trace the strange life of language forms and language-learning models authorized by the colonial state. It opens a way to take the project of colonial mastery of languages beyond the formal compilation of grammars and their printing into questions of their circulation and reception. The entry of the munshi and cutcherry Tamil into the imaginaire of both colonial officials invested in tutelage and a literati that was hungry for official patronage, but haunted by the possible loss of caste status, reveals the tensions that underwrote the effort to generate respectable prose in early nineteenth-century Madras.

Polyglot Recordkeeping and the Anglo-Vernacular The East India Company’s interest in “country languages” arose from its desire to establish its political sovereignty by “a medium of intercourse between the government and its subjects, between the natives of Europe who are to rule, and the inhabitants of India who are to obey.”6 Bernard Cohn has shown that the language of command necessitated the command of languages. The illegibility of kanakkan writing, as we saw, provoked calls for the reform of the Company’s modes of account keeping. It also deepened official interest in crafting a bureaucratic language that most closely resembled the spoken language of the region. A Chingleput collector’s letter explains why the Company began to actively desire secretarial scribes who were well versed in the spoken language current in the region where they were employed. The collector wrote that “the recordkeeper’s duties were not unlike those of a Persian munshi. . . . It seems however hardly creditable their assertions that the native records were never placed under their charge although appointed native record keepers, and another thing equally strange is that neither of them knows Malabar [Tamil], one of the principal languages in which the native accounts are kept in the cutcherry.” 7 In the collector’s opinion, a good recordkeeper had to know the language in which the native accounts were kept. Company officials perpetuated polyglot scribal practice by retain-

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ing Modi as a tactic of audit, but they were quick to acknowledge that the introduction of Modi specialists to supervise others did not solve the European experience of incomprehensibility or make the records adequate to the demands of metropolitan circulation. This is why, although Modi lived on in the cutcherry until the mid-nineteenth century, officials continued to develop ideas of linguistic competence that privileged the knowledge of the spoken languages of the country.8 This new expectation of linguistic skills thus marked a shift away from a mode of keeping a computational check on palm-leaf records. Indeed the idea of building new language skills such that records would be ready for a metropolitan readership reveals the underlying transformation of the episteme of recordkeeping itself and the formation of a new textual habitus—what Brinkley Messick describes as “a set of acquired dispositions concerning writing and the spoken word, and the authoritative conveyance of meaning in texts.”9 The effort to produce a linguistic domain of clerical Tamil that would resemble the register of spoken language and function as the obverse of “Babu,” or clerical English, was also accompanied by early efforts to safeguard documents. In the fi rst decade of the nineteenth century, collectors began to request funds for the establishment of a separate “record room.”10 The collector of Chingleput, for example, wrote that in his district no regular “register of records agreeable to the regulations had been kept by the native record keeper. The servants cared for records as they were required because no proper arrangement by record keepers was done, and there were consequent delays when references were needed.”11 He argued that records were frequently altered to favor certain protagonists in their disputes in court. When one such complaint came to light, the collector found on inspection that “many native cadjans [palm leaves] and English dufters were eaten by white ants and other cadjans were broken.” As he put it, “the rendering of property insecure in any manner was a crime but particularly so in the alteration of the public records.”12 Documents had to be secured as official property—essentially, as the property of the state. The establishment of the cutcherry record room thus marked the advent of a system of rule that turned around securing the authenticity of documents: keeping them from unauthorized circulation, tampering, and fabrication, while building a chronologically organized, ordered, and legible archive. The Company’s attempts to institute an Anglo-vernacular regime in correlation with its efforts to secure records set the conditions under

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which a new orientation to clerical writing in the vernacular emerged. Although the Mughals, the Nayakas, and others maintained elaborate scribal establishments, the East India Company administrators wanted records that could be preserved and artifacts that could be circulated, as opposed to transactions that circulated within the restricted groups of employees and tax collectors. I do not want to suggest that this mode of writing or recordkeeping was intended to render the transactions of the administration universally legible—or up for the kind of public scrutiny that would be considered democratic—but rather, to render its activities respectable by making its records legible to metropolitan sight.13 Company servants feared their inability to comprehend Tamil palmleaf documents, which, until then, had been the exclusive provenance of kanakkuppillai specialists. Familiarity with spoken “country languages” was considered essential for the conduct of official business and interaction with subjects, and knowledge of Persian and Sanskrit was considered essential for legal matters. In 1812, Francis Whyte Ellis established the College at Fort St. George, also called the Madras College, thereby founding an institutional apparatus to teach and revitalize South Indian languages. Thomas Trautmann has shown how the need to train the Company’s new European recruits in the useful languages of the country put the teaching of the vernaculars on similar footing to that of Persian.14 This, then, generated the fi rst steps toward the creation of the institutional culture of the Tamil munshi.

The Tamil Munshi Appears in Madras In Bengal, the figure of the munshi from a skilled Persian letter writer morphed into a language teacher or schoolmaster teaching Persian letters under Company rule with institutionalized and orientalist language teaching. From being a scribe, the munshi also became a Persian tutor in Calcutta. When and how did the munshi, hitherto associated with Persian tutoring in late eighteenth-century Calcutta, appear as a language teacher of Tamil, and what transformations in scribal culture accompanied this change? Like in Calcutta, the munshi systematically appears as a Tamil teacher in the employee lists at the College of Fort St. George, or the Madras College.15 The College marked a new era in Company rule in South India because it was not only established to teach European recruits the spo-

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ken languages of South India, but also to train Indian employees in law and grammar in an effort to produce “native law officers” for the newly established courts and language teachers who could train Europeans.16 The College of Fort St. George in Madras was not an outpost of the Fort William College in Calcutta. Trautmann has shown the historically important role played by the College and its fi rst superintendent, Francis Whyte Ellis, in generating the “Dravidian proof,” the idea that the languages of South India had autonomous origins from the Indo-Aryan language family.17 These linguistic discoveries were to resurface many decades later in the intellectual traditions of linguistic nationalism in South India. As Lisa Mitchell argues, the College’s scholarly interest in the indigenous characteristics of particular South Indian languages enabled the idea of a “mother tongue” to gain currency as a marker of political and cultural subjectivity.18 Among the many important legacies brought forth by the College— such as the emergence of a distinct Madras school of orientalism and the revival of the vernacular letters under Company patronage—two elements concerning language instruction are most pertinent to the discussion of scribal skills. The fi rst relates to the appearance of language teaching in the College and the training of Indian candidates in particular vernaculars, and the second concerns the formulation of mastery over language as a mastery over written grammar within College circles. The emergence of the Tamil munshi in the College occurred in the shadow of its exploding “grammar factory.” The College broke away from language teaching in the style of the madrasa (Islamic schools of the Indo-Persian world) that the Company had fi rst emulated. Instead, it instituted a seminary-style institution in which the munshi, formerly the “hegemon” of the madrasa, was now a teacher of one language among many.19 This move, which Trautmann calls a linguistic revolution, emulated the pedagogic practices of a Jesuit-run seminary that had operated in Pondicherry in the eighteenth century.20 The College also patronized a small group of pandits, headmasters who led a print-based literary culture in Tamil and Telugu in the city of Madras. 21 This new literary elite included Tamil scholars like Tandavaraya Mudaliyar, Appu Muthusami Pillai, Vishakaperumal Aiyar, and Mahalinga Aiyar, among others. At least one of them, Muthusami Pillai, came from the Jesuit seminary in Pondicherry. 22 This small group of headmasterscholars of the College wrote early grammars and published early editions of Tamil classical texts. They were also the “teachers of teachers”

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in that they taught local students to be Tamil teachers proficient in English and Tamil grammar. These subordinate Tamil teachers passed proficiency exams and were certified by the College to teach Tamil to junior civil servants. 23 These student-teachers became the mainstay of the munshi class in the Tamil region. Trautmann’s distinction between the headmasters and other Tamil teachers in the College suggests a difference in skills between a small group of headmasters who produced new-style grammars and a larger class of appropriately trained transmitters of the new way of learning language, subordinates who found work as munshis. Although trained for different purposes, all members of the College were upper-caste, highstatus men. 24 When a Dalit candidate applied to study at the College, the Board acceded to the strong repugnance expressed by the upper-caste headmaster to instructing such a student, even if this contradicted its desire to extend education to all classes. 25

Iterations of the Seminary Style: Language Learning as Grammar Learning The linguistic research of the Madras orientalists began when they— along with missionaries working outside the College—deemed extant South Indian grammars to be obtuse and inadequate for learners unfamiliar with the language and began to “repackage” them in new ways to teach European students. These efforts were a long way from founding philological thought in South India, which has a long and erudite history. Orientalists like Francis W. Ellis were not the fi rst Europeans to engage with Indian grammatical traditions. 26 The linguistic labors of European missionaries like the Catholic padre Constantine Joseph Beschi (1680–1747) and the Lutheran Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (1683– 1719) had already produced new-style Tamil grammars and dictionaries. Their efforts had introduced innovations in punctuation, modified script in manuscript, and print in the eighteenth century. 27 But the Company’s initiatives generated the idea that language proficiency acquired without grammar would at best be desultory and based on chance and practice. Grammar, on the other hand, would lay a solid foundation for language mastery so that linguistic competency could be restored with ease despite long periods of disuse. 28 The College did not, however, teach grammar in the way of poet-scholars. Previously, grammar was a specialist

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skill required for poetic composition. The College propagated the idea that grammar should be the foundation for learning languages among lay and nonnative speakers. Recent work has shown that South Indian languages began to be seen as distinct and parallel communicative mediums in early nineteenthcentury Madras, precisely when official and missionary endeavors instituted language learning as an educational objective in its own right. The aspiration to linguistic competency acquired through “use” shifted to a more self-conscious acquisition of language as an object of knowledge.29 In the years leading up to the debate between European orientalists and Anglicists on linguistic mediums and schooling in the 1830s, language had, for the fi rst time, appeared as a discrete subject in which children were supposed to be schooled. 30 These initiatives to produce particular forms of expertise in specific languages—which was at the heart of the College’s pedagogy—changed orientations to writing, and these changing orientations require our greater attention. Writing in a Language The norms of linguistic competency under orientalist philological leadership now turned around grammar and writing prose. Formerly, linguistic competency could be acquired without grammar. Now, grammar was deemed a fundamental tool of language learning, writing, and meaning making. As writing grammatical prose became the normative expectation of scribal efforts, the cultivation of memory began to be objectified and glossed as “mere” rote learning. An intervention in the transmission of knowledge was foundational to the institutionalization of the Anglo-vernacular rubric of the language regime in colonial South India. Munshi Tamil teachers were supposed to know some English so that they could communicate easily with their European charges. They were expected to teach Indian languages through Indian grammar rules, but their work was pedagogically modeled on the European seminary style of grammar teaching. The unprecedented intervention was to reformat grammar transmission rather than grammar itself and represented a new demand. What was now expected were skills such as parsing, writing, and sight-reading. Grammar was now taught for writing “correct” sentences; it was the means of learning a new language. This was quite different from the pulavar tradition, in which native speakers learned grammar, following Velcheru Narayana

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Rao’s argument, to legislate appropriate words and compose classical poetry. 31 These new developments also assumed that the mastery of a language was a skill distinct from the knowledge of other domains such as law or accounts. The College was not alone in trying to produce exemplar figures of new forms of pedagogic expertise. The Protestant mission station was the other institution whose pedagogic interventions shaped a new orientation to writing. The need for translators and language teachers had grown in the second quarter of the nineteenth century as the evangelical missionaries attempted to create an efficient secretarial bureaucracy of Bible translators.

Protestant Iterations: The Munshi in the Mission Station Christian presence in South India goes back several centuries. The pedagogic and language-based interventions, however, gathered force fi rst under the Jesuits, then the pietists, and finally the evangelical Protestants in the nineteenth century. The presence of evangelical missionaries expanded significantly in India only after the Charter Act of 1813 permitted them to preach in the region, but for nearly a hundred years before, Protestants had maintained a presence in the Tamil region through the German pietists based in Tranquebar (Tarangampadi) and had begun to compete with the Jesuits. 32 The propagation of Protestant Christianity in South India involved the conjunction of distinctly different ideologies of Protestantism, with pietism and evangelicalism frequently rubbing up against one another. The institutional origins of the Tranquebar pietists lay in the Lutheran circles of Halle, in Germany. The preacher August Francke (1633–1727) originally founded the pietist mission in Halle, from which the movement spread to royal courts in western Europe and England, where its work was undertaken by Anglican mission societies such as the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in London in 1698. The SPCK was initially concerned with the state of Christianity in the American colonies, but by the late eighteenth century, following the expansion of the British Empire to the east, it had also developed interests in India. In 1701, shortly after the SPCK came into being, a royal charter established a similar society as an offshoot of the Church of England. Like the SPCK, this new Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in

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Foreign Parts (SPG) was primarily interested in propagating Christianity by imparting the skill of reading the Bible and by distributing small tracts and books. Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the decline in Danish interests in South India, these two Anglican societies became the primary institutional sponsors of the older German pietists in South India. Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and Henrich Pluetschau, two of Francke’s German followers, led a small pietist church in Tarangampadi, on the Coromandel Coast. Shortly after the pietists settled in Tarangampadi, they sought and received fi nancial aid from both the SPG and the SPCK. By the end of the eighteenth century, the pietists had made their way north and west of the Tamil country, concentrating around Tanjavur and Tiruchirappalli. Led by missionaries from the SPCK, they built churches and mission stations in the southern districts, especially in Tirunelveli. Missionaries of the evangelical persuasion began to arrive in South India after 1814. Unlike the pietists, who propagated Christian theology through extant idioms and forms, the new missionaries brought in radical ideologies of self-improvement and called for the reform of social practices as a means of moral uplift. These new missionaries arrived as members of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), an offshoot of the evangelical Clapham sect, 33 and began to set up schools and churches in the Tamil area and monopolize public discussions on missionization and empire in metropolitan England. 34 They became institutionally dominant in South India by about the mid-nineteenth century. The tension between pietists and evangelicals—often described by the protagonists and by mission historians as a result of differences between “old” missionaries and “new” missionaries—played out in struggles over the acceptable mode of scripture translation and over the question of caste, 35 but they both shared an interest in creating a written register of Tamil that most closely resembled the spoken form. The pietists sought to formulate written communication in the spoken languages of the region and, unlike the Jesuit Beschi, avoided classical Latin as the via media to write Tamil grammars for nonnative speakers of the language. Instead they initially used Portuguese. The pietist Ziegenbalg engaged a Tamil, Alagappan, to teach him Portuguese, the language of commerce and brokerage of the Coromandel Coast, and Tamil. 36 Thereafter, the pietists wrote their earliest written grammars of Tamil. By the end of the eighteenth century, in step with the expanding sponsorship of the SPCK and the growing needs of the East India

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Company, Ziegenbalg’s successors began to write Tamil grammars and dictionaries in English. 37 Their preference for the “ordinary” variety of Tamil language as opposed to the poetical register is expressed in the preface, “the high, abstruse and poetical Tamul, quite different from the ordinary and common that is used by all the people, we have nothing to do with, and leave it to those that are fond of it.”38 The CMS missionaries further modified their Lutheran rivals’ desire to communicate directly with the people when, in the 1820s, they too appropriated the seminary-style teaching model. Unlike the pietists, the evangelicals placed a greater emphasis on the knowledge of grammar as essential to the mastery of language. They viewed grammar learning as an important tool for writers of prose and translators. For instance, while introducing his grammar for nonnative speakers in 1836, CMS missionary C. T. Rhenius (1790–1838) identified grammatical knowledge as essential for correct syntax and composition. 39 As he said of his illustrious predecessors Ziegenbalg, Beschi, and others: We are greatly indebted to them for the degree of knowledge they have given us of the Tamil language. But they have all failed in giving us pure Tamil; they have mixed vulgarism, grammatical niceties, and left us in want of a regularly digested Syntax. The present work will, I trust, supply these deficiencies. It is not a Grammar of the high, or rather the poetical, Tamil language; in order to study this, the learned Beshius’s second work will still be necessary; but it is a grammar of the vernacular Tamil, as it is spoken and written by well bred Tamulians, yet so as to avoid the errors against grammar which are found among them.40

The knowledge of grammar thus began to be considered essential to scribal skills in the Protestant mission station. The CMS seminary, whose intellectual lineages were derived from pietist and Jesuit interactions, emphasized grammar teaching like the College, but unlike the College it adhered to teaching a Jesuit text: a grammar in Tamil verse, composed by Father Beschi for the native speaker, Tonnu¯l Vil. akkam. The CMS seminary in Mayavaram taught its catechists Beschi’s grammar in verse and some English grammar.41 Teaching English and Tamil grammar to Indian students in a seminary was a revolutionary idea. Tamil grammar was known for its difficult verse, and only small groups of specialized pandits and pulavar ever learned it.42 Grammar was now being taught to Indians who were not go-

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ing to be pulavar. It is unclear, for instance, whether Beschi’s verse grammar was taught to catechists and assistants before the CMS began to do so in its seminaries. It is possible that the munshi engaged by the CMS to teach Beschi’s grammar used a printed edition (there was certainly one by 1838), but it is probable that the seminary used handwritten copies.43 The CMS Mayavaram seminary set up elaborate rules outlining the skills and responsibilities of their school inspectors, schoolmasters, readers, and catechists. The seminary’s rules were a modified version of pietist practices for developing secretarial assistants.44 The seminary timetable privileged regimented timekeeping as a way to institute disciplined reading and writing. Compared to Saivite monastic establishments, which trained Tamil scholars, students in the mission seminary spent more time reading biblical texts than practicing their memory skills per se. A number of textual skills were emphasized such as reading the Tamil Testament, writing English and Tamil copies from written originals, writing by dictation in English and Tamil, learning from lectures, and preparing for the translation of scripture. The CMS Mayavaram seminary, in a manner distinct from the College, produced its own munshi-led language-learning model. Although the seminary functioned in the “European style” such that the munshi was a teacher of a language, students learned their verse grammar in a modified version of an older style. The class read the text aloud with the munshi and then wrote out copies in Tamil. Therefore, students memorized grammar rules in verse and wrote by dictation from grammar exercises. Tamil speakers continued to learn Tamil grammar in verse, but something quite new was taking place. Other than teaching catechists secretarial skills, the Tamil munshi assisted in the production of publications, grammars, and language primers in the CMS mission stations. The work of the munshi in this regard was closely tied to transforming a pulavar-style grammar in verse into a grammar appropriate for learning to write prose. The Reverend C. T. Rhenius wrote his Tamil grammar with the assistance of a Tamil scholar who came from a long lineage of scholastic pulavar but who, over the course of this grammar-writing project, performed munshi-like work for his missionary employer. In contrast to poet-scholars or pulavar who studied grammar to learn an appropriate language register for composing poetry, the munshi model emphasized the knowledge of formal grammar in Tamil and English so that the language could be taught to those unfamiliar with Tamil.45

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The emphasis on grammar stemmed from the new missionaries’ notion that grammatical knowledge was essential for the correct word-forword prose translation of scripture. For instance, Rhenius wrote a controversial tract on the difficulty of Bible translation in which he set out the problems of comparative grammar and literal translation.46 By the mid-nineteenth century, Tamil grammar knowledge was deemed fundamental to the ability to write sentences, compose prose, and write letters. At the same time, grammar remained a moral activity of piety in Protestant circles. H. A. Krishnapillai, a prominent Protestant poet, remarked on his training in Tamil in the following way: If I had not tried to learn Tamil grammar, how could I have become a Tamil munshi? How could I have approached the knowledge of the Christian maarga (path)? Therefore, the melting of my heart in Tamil studies from early infancy was an act of holy will.47

Cutcherry Tamil The shift to recordkeeping in the languages of the country and the need for Tamil-proficient clerks also produced new demands on language training for European officers. The elaborate work in the cutcherry began to include the proceedings of disputes, reports, and testimonies, so that Company officers now had to learn how to read these documents, which required something quite different from the formal language expertise taught in the College. It was for this reason that discussions about a language variety called cutcherry Tamil began to appear more commonly—discussions that were to radically transform the place of the Tamil munshi. The Anglo-vernacular munshis were supposed to revolutionize language learning and solve the intractable problem of everyday communication experienced by European Company officials in their cutcherries or offices. Cutcherry Tamil, on the other hand, has a slightly different genealogy. It was an elaboration of older forms of writing hitherto ubiquitous in the letters of merchants, in daily cash books, and in copperplate and stone inscriptions, but got denoted as an office language when, in the process of extension and elaboration under Company administration, it came to typify an entire mode of office work in the colonial state.48 The language of commerce and the bazaar became the quotidian language of colonial administration.

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Cutcherry Tamil was neither an invention of the Company cutcherry nor a strict continuation of older written forms. Rather, it was an elaboration of older forms of documentary writing that came to represent office work and was thereby deemed cutcherry Tamil. In many ways, then, the language variety objectified as cutcherry Tamil represents the language of exchange and the market: of improvised practice that became increasingly prominent in the new law courts and statistical land surveys through the Ryotwari system. The few extant books referencing cutcherry Tamil—written to tutor the Company’s new European recruits and Indian employees—were printed as late as 1839 and 1855, well after its everyday authority had been established. The fi rst of these manuals was Alexander Robertson’s text published in 1839, called the Compilation of Papers in the Tamil Language.49 Robertson belonged to the Madras Civil Service and— interestingly for our purposes—served as an acting secretary to the College of the Fort St. George in the 1820s. His Tamil teacher, Venkatachala Mudaliyar, a munshi long associated with the College (since 1814), assisted him in his endeavor. 50 The collaboration of Venkatachala Mudaliyar offers a set of clues about the connections between the College and the world of cutcherry Tamil. Robertson, the earliest editor of such manuals, undertook the compilation from “his knowledge of the difficulty experienced by many of the Junior Civil Servants attached to the College in procuring papers in the Tamil language of the approved style, and of such various degrees of difficulty as might lead them to read with ease works abounding in words of the high dialect.” Thus cutcherry Tamil manuals were conceived as stepping-stones that would help learners read appropriate Tamil (“the high dialect”); their contents did not exemplify that high register. Robertson’s cutcherry Tamil manual was also different from the early phrasebook language catechisms produced in Calcutta to aid recruits in speaking Hindustani. 51 Cutcherry Tamil was presented on a continuum with—rather than a direct transcription of—spoken Tamil, with the implication that it resembled the spoken but did not exemplify speech. This is because the manual was essentially a compilation of writing collated to train learners to write rather than to speak Tamil. Moreover, the manual compiled official writings that came from the everyday life of the cutcherry. Thus Robertson’s manual began with small stories culled from a familiar world of spoken tales that were written in a register closely resembling the colloquial, but the bulk of it was made up of specimens

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of Tamil documents: petitions, judgments, and testimonies conducive to “public business.” The last section of the manual consists of a glossary of words: a vocabulary of cutcherry Tamil in which the etymological origins of each word are clearly marked and classified. Seen from the etymological perspective, the words of cutcherry Tamil were a composite of Persio-Arabic, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Hindustani, Maratha, and Gra¯myam (common usage). 52 For our purposes, the manual’s differences from both grammar books and language phrasebooks are extremely important because they reflect that cutcherry Tamil was not considered a key to master Tamil grammar or Tamil speech. It had to be learned from compiled specimens, through practice. Robertson’s cutcherry Tamil manual was like a letter book, copied and reused as a template or workbook. It objectified, via print, what had been passed on through apprenticeship. Robertson’s manual was widely republished in Tamil and English, and indeed the title of the Tamil edition of cutcherry Tamil suggests that

figure 5. Anon., “Five clerks in the Adjutant’s Office, Inscribed: ‘Armogum Pension Writer, Fort Adjutant’s Office, Vellore’; ‘Soobroyloo Pension Writer, F.A. Office, Vellore’; ‘Appoo Moodelien, Head Writer, F.A. Office, Vellore’; ‘Veerasawmy Writer, F.A. Office, Vellore’; ‘Verdamally, Family Writer, F.A.’s Office, Vellore” (ca. 1828). Opaque watercolor, Tanjore/Vellore style. © British Library Board, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, Add.Or.67.

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it must have been extensively used by those who wrote for their livelihood. 53 Thus, to those Tamil writers eagerly seeking clerical employment, the text offered a very useful collation of specimen official documents of the Company government in Tamil and a glossary of words from multiple languages. The implications are clear. Tamil writers entering the world of government correspondence required training in cutcherry Tamil. The reform of a polyglot chancellery ironically produced a polyglot Tamil that had to be taught to the recruits, in terms of both vocabulary and style. It is difficult to determine whether the Tamil munshis—former employees of collectorate schools who were trained in grammar and now seeking cutcherry work after the schools were closed—used the manual. But from the ubiquitous Company correspondence bemoaning the subordinate clerical staff’s inability to parse and compose grammatical sentences, we can assume that few cutcherry Tamil writers were masters of grammar. Paradoxically, then, the creation of the College’s grammar-teaching apparatus in 1812 profoundly changed ideas about how language should be taught and learned, but the most lasting consequence of the College in transforming scribal practice came in the 1830s from the wide-scale distribution of an easy-to-use, memorizable manual of cutcherry Tamil specimens with an etymological glossary.

Cutcherry Tamil and Its Critics The contradictory legacy of the Fort St. George College’s interventions in Tamil language practice is mirrored by the confl icting ways in which cutcherry Tamil was discussed and received among the Tamil literati in early nineteenth-century Madras. Cutcherry Tamil caught the attention of the Company’s scholar-bureaucrats like Robertson, as well as Tamil teachers and Protestant missionaries, all of whom were in search of a new prose register that was close to respectable Tamil speech but not too colloquial. The rather delicate agenda of formulating an appropriately respectable written register of administrative Tamil had no preordained solution, however; it generated varied levels of anxiety and debate among missionaries and the (old and new) Tamil literati about cutcherry Tamil’s status as an appropriate language variety. The creation of cutcherry Tamil was much derided by literary schol-

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ars of the language, such as the famous missionary G. U. Pope. In his preface to the 1855 Tamil Handbook, Pope, who warned his European students about cutcherry Tamil, wrote: Try to cultivate a Tamil ear, so as to detect an unidiomatic expression, as you would a false note in music. You should understand all you hear: you need not use any expression that is not good Tamil. 54

Why should Pope, himself a missionary, render “Christian” and cutcherry Tamil equivalent by dubbing both as not “good Tamil”? Pope’s comments are even more intriguing in light of the fact that his Tamil Handbook was a reference guide to A Tamil Prose Reader, and the latter used specimens of cutcherry Tamil to teach new European recruits the ubiquitous language of the colonial office and law court. 55 What did the Reverend have in mind when he sought to distinguish “real Tamil” from cutcherry and Christian Tamil? Pope’s ultimate goal was to produce European Tamil speakers, indicating a different orientation to that of Robertson’s when he created a manual for office workers. Pope wrote that his handbook has been written with a deep feeling of the vast importance of the acquisition by ALL who sojourn in the land, of the language of the people among whom they dwell. Two hours a day for a year will enable most people to converse freely on ordinary topics with those around them. 56

It is possible, given Pope’s emphasis on the ability to speak rather than merely to read or write, that he did not consider cutcherry Tamil and Christian Tamil appropriate educated speech. A common complaint about European speakers of the language was, indeed, that their speech was inappropriate. Thus, cutcherry Tamil was primarily meant to be read and understood by European learners, and not to be confused with cultured, “real” spoken Tamil, a sign of true mastery over the language. As it happens, commentators on Tamil have long distinguished its more prestigious varieties. One of the most venerated European scholars of the language, the Jesuit missionary Beschi, author of the Tonnu¯l Vil. akkam, wrote two Latin grammars on Tamil in the early eighteenth century: one dedicated to high, or sen, Tamil; the other to low, or kodun, Tamil. Beschi did not draw on the difference between prose and poetry to distinguish between sen Tamil and kodun Tamil. Nor did he draw the

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distinction as one between written and spoken forms. Instead he established the difference between the language of literary composition and everyday language. If the prosody-oriented high dialect of poetry and commentaries was sen Tamil, that which was not—the “remainder”— was kodun Tamil. Ironically, around the time that the munshi became known as the newstyle Tamil teacher, the distinctions of high and low were taken over by a concern with establishing “real Tamil,” in contrast to that of the office or cutcherry. At this time, cutcherry Tamil began to be the foil that set off the virtues of “real Tamil,” in a way that kodun Tamil (defi ned by Beschi as “that which remained outside the high variety”) never did. This inversion of emphasis, in which “real” Tamil was that which was not cutcherry Tamil, was something new. The norms of distinction between language varieties had previously turned around literary poetic registers now began to be calibrated against writing and grammatical prose. These new conceptions of grammar were also an effort to expunge words deemed “foreign.”57 In this context, cutcherry Tamil deemed a variety outside the bounds of Tamil grammar was an everyday language rendered powerful because it was the written register used in a new locus of authority, the Company’s cutcherry. Consequently it is telling that cutcherry Tamil soon became a pejorative term used to denigrate the new prose compositions in the early nineteenth century, especially Protestant Bible translations. 58 Its power came to be displayed when the literati used it as a term of abuse. As the Tamil language scholarly community debated what was or was not cutcherry Tamil, the question began to center on distinctions between grammar and usage. Translators and missionaries gradually developed a consensus that knowledge of “real Tamil” was grounded in the mastery of grammar, while the formality of cutcherry Tamil—built on repeatability and memorization—was occluded when it began to be denigrated for originating in usage. Similarly, the linguistic purity of language received new attention, something that would be important for Tamil language publicists seeking to foreground the autonomy of the Dravidian languages from the Indo-Aryan language family. Distinctions were made between loan words and those inherent to the language. Such a categorization of pure and authentic language meant that cutcherry Tamil was seen as vulgar. Cutcherry Tamil’s polyglot mixed ancestry earned it the sobriquet that it was a language of the bazaar, the army, and the office. 59

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The use of the phrase “cutcherry Tamil” as a slur thus deserves closer attention precisely because it reveals something about the emerging social order represented by the cutcherry and the stir it was causing within upper-caste male literate circles. It was frequently compared to the language of the lowest castes of the Tamil social order. Furthermore, it was most frequently exchanged in Protestant circles. Why was cutcherry Tamil so much a part of conversation? And why were its practitioners, the elite of the Tamil region, most vocal in decrying it? Among the literati of the Tamil Protestant community, including the Tanjavur poet Vedanayaka Sastriar, “cutcherry Tamil” was used as an insult. Sastriar was a harsh critic of C. T. Rhenius’s Bible translation and interestingly accused Rhenius of using the skills of “junior moonshees” to produce a text that resembled cutcherry Tamil. For Sastriar, cutcherry Tamil was a euphemism for the ungrammatical, the unsystematic, and, most importantly, for lacking civility and being mixed or “impure.”60 Those evolving a new language of liturgy had great stakes in whether the language into which they rendered the Bible was “cutcherry-like.” The stakes were high because those employed in creating this new idiom of communication—missionaries especially—had more to lose than anyone else if their work was deemed cutcherry Tamil.61 To understand the slur itself, though, we have to move from the assembled Tamil Protestants to the cutcherry itself. The administrative clerical establishments of the Company’s bureaucratic state had far exceeded the bounds and the reach of their erstwhile royal and mercantile predecessors. The cutcherry or office was now a ubiquitous institution of power, seen in every small town, attached to law courts, revenue offices, custom toll houses, and warehouses. The lettered city was visible in a veritable explosion of administrative documents. Thus the authenticity of “real Tamil” was posed against cutcherry Tamil as the language of the state and the language of the “common.” While cutcherry Tamil was clearly the specialized language of the office and not in any way a normative country language, it was neither private nor secret. It was clearly of a polyglot variety. Tamil elite writers needed to be trained in it, they bought its manuals and took proficiency tests in it, but it was not the purview of a particular caste. I would argue that this was the fi nal reason for it to make its upper-caste practitioners nervous—so nervous that even as their world was heavily shaped by bureaucratic documents like the petition and cutcherry Tamil, they wrote about it in pejorative terms. This manner of distinguishing and

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segregating real Tamil from low caste-ness—the pollution of the army and the “common” space of the cutcherry—is thus deeply significant for understanding the wider repercussions of the Tamil munshi and office language. That the low opinion of cutcherry Tamil appeared well before Robertson’s printed manual and Pope’s Handbook suggests the rapid dispersal of the language variety through copying rather than print. That cutcherry Tamil’s status began to be vociferously debated with the printing up of new type of prose text, the evangelical CMS’s Rhenius’s vernacular Bible, suggests that the anxiety about written prose was rife in the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, when Sastriar decried cutcherry Tamil as the work of munshis, an important reworking of this Tamil teacher was implied. Munshis, especially juniors, were now seen as those producing the usage manuals of a bazaar Tamil rather than knowledge experts of the language. This was quite a different outcome from the respectable future for language teaching seminary style that the founders of the College had envisioned.

Secretarial Culture and Seminary-Style Pedagogy The new secretarial culture was crafted in multiple locations: at the College of Fort St. George by Tamil teachers employed to teach Tamil to the European recruits; by European orientalists and their junior “moonshee” assistants; and by Tamil teachers in the mission stations employed to teach convert catechists. Although the College-sponsored munshi model was supposed to transmit a new form of language teaching to Europeans and even to Indian school students, something else actually ensued. Outside the College, in the world of Tamil Protestant communities and in the Company’s law courts and revenue offices, the Tamil munshi came to be associated with the newly objectified cutcherry Tamil. The outcomes of the appearance of novel scribal skills in the region and the reorientation of textual practice to writing in Tamil thus substantially deviated from the intentions of the College’s founders. Missionaries and orientalists wanted to develop written communication in a register that resembled the spoken and that was grammatical. This new idea did not create a simple domain of written prose and secretaries. The general result of the problem of communication in the early nineteenth-century Madras cutcherries was not the creation of an un-

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complicated Anglo-vernacular regime. First, the Company favored two contradictory processes: the immediate employment of scribes—usually Niyogis working for very high salaries who could conduct themselves tolerably in multiple scripts and languages62—and a simultaneous focus on creating a munshi culture in Tamil that emphasized the knowledge of modern grammar. Second, this munshi model of language learning did not disseminate modern Tamil grammar at large but, rather ironically, led to a situation wherein junior munshis got associated with a polyglot Tamil that did not require the mastery of grammar. As a written language variety, cutcherry Tamil is especially interesting because printed official manuals of it began to appear only in the late 1830s, well after its ubiquity had been established in the offices and after it had been totally denigrated by the Tamil literati. Although it is difficult to ascertain whether Robertson’s manual represented the retreat of the College’s munshi model, Robertson’s innovation in printing up the specialized prose of office work for pedagogical purposes lived on in Pope’s Tamil Prose Reader. Furthermore, since the cutcherry language regime neither quickly nor completely transformed into one dominated by cutcherry Tamil and English, the cutcherry emerged as a site of hierarchically organized but competitive linguistic and social domains in which cutcherry Tamil manifested as a written register of Tamil. A polyglot cutcherry Tamil was the main consequence of a form of administrative expansion that created a burgeoning competitive clerical marketplace.

Schooling Writing and the Seminary Style of Language Teaching The phenomena of Tamil munshis and cutcherry Tamil show how expectations for written language began to explicitly associate the occupational ability to write with the knowledge of grammar. Here again, the story of cutcherry Tamil and the Tamil munshi reveals the fissures between the pedagogic intentions of the philologists and their outcomes. These fissures were most evident in the Company’s failed pedagogic experiment of the 1820s, the introduction of the two-tier school system of collectorate and tahsildari schools to further seminary-style education in the vernacular with some English.63 From the mid-1820s to 1836, the Company briefly experimented with

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a two-tier schooling system that consisted of district (collectorate) and subdistrict (tahsildari) schools.64 The experiment began when Company officers began to think that the College’s pedagogic innovations in the vernacular could be used to generate trustworthy candidates for public office. Already, Alexander Ross, a protégé of Thomas Munro’s, wrote in 1815–16 that cutcherry scribes were immoral and fraudulent because their training was inadequate, and they were forced at a very young age to seek patrons and a job. He thus criticized apprenticeship and the recruitment system of the cutcherry that operated through kin and patronage, and suggested instead that the government should set up a school— specifically, a seminary for training revenue officials. Ross’s sentiments did not gain concrete form, but some years later, the Company attempted to directly intervene in basic education of Madras inhabitants, to school its more “respectable” high-status subjects.65 In 1826, following a review of the state of education in Madras and at the urging of educated inhabitants who submitted petitions seeking Company intervention in schooling, Thomas Munro established a new type of schooling system. The experiment consisted of a two-tier system of district (collectorate) and subdistrict (tahsildari) schools under the superintendence of the College Board.66 The committee of public instruction used the Fort St. George College to train teachers for these schools.67 The College officials in turn wished to use this school experiment to try to extend their seminary system to the hinterlands by using their headmasters to train teachers and hence serve as agents of intervention in the education of Madras’s inhabitants.68 Company officials thought that the schools would introduce new textual skills. The College trained munshi was to serve as an exemplar for this new initative.69 The Madras College was instructed to train teachers to staff these schools with the intention of using these men as concrete living models of the new textual paradigm and its new virtues and induce wide emulation. The experiment also boosted printed textbook writing. Munro asked the newly established Madras School Book Society to print textbooks for the new schools.70 The two school types had different pedagogical goals. The district schools, one for “Mahomedans” and one for “Hindus,” were bilingual and taught law, in addition to languages. They were supposed to reproduce bilingual munshi-style teachers on the lines of the Madras College and men for public service in law and revenue offices. Teachers for

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these schools were trained under the College’s headmasters.71 The subdistrict schools, in contrast, were to promote training in the vernacular languages and arithmetic, presumably for the lower rungs of the bureaucracy. Their curriculum resembled the “verandah” village schools for which were to serve as exemplars.72 They were to serve as a model of a textual habitus built exclusively within the bounds of a vernacular language. Tirunelveli, for example, had four subdistrict schools: two dedicated to teaching in Tamil, one to Telugu, and one for both Hindustani and Persian. Within each school, the language teaching was explicitly organized according to distinct textual skills, which suggests that the institution intended to distinguish between “reading,” “grammar,” and “writing” as different forms of competency within a language.73 The goal was to introduce new textual skills such as reading at sight in elementary pedagogy, something we will revisit in the next chapter. There was a wide gap, however, between official intentions to generate a new orientation to language learning and actual practice in the subdistrict schools. Although students were ostensibly taught grammar, they were not evaluated for their knowledge of grammar and instead only for reading, writing, and arithmetic.74 The gap between purpose and evaluation in these schools suggests that the attempt to diffuse grammar was not carried through in Madras but was to remain the preserve of a select few. Furthermore, it turned out that the Company had difficulties in recruiting candidates to teach in these schools, and eventually the experiment ended in 1836, about a decade after Munro’s death. The Madras government deemed that the pastoral care of the College had not borne fruit. It withdrew efforts to directly intervene in vernacular schools, canceled its efforts to sustain village schooling, and instead channeled its teacher training resources to higher education modeled on the Hindu College at Calcutta with an emphasis on teaching European sciences like natural history and geometry and in the English medium. Only students with prior grammatical preparation of their own in the English language were to be admitted to the Hindu College. The Madras College in the meantime was demoted and was now charged only with assessing the grammatical preparation of those who sought to enter this elite institution.75 The decisive shift to English language was also accompanied by the installation of a pedagogy centered on invigilated and graded examinations. This lasting legacy of colonial education subordinated pedagogy

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to the interests of maintaining and extending state power and authority. The Madras government wrote that it agreed with the Court of Directors in London that the most compelling method to . . . compel masters to do their duty and of encouraging the pupils by opportunities of distinguishing themselves and of attracting the notice of government is by examination. By this means the government will be enabled to know more effectually than by any other means where the fittest instruments for future plans of education and best qualified individuals to fi ll public situations and what perhaps is almost of equal importance, the natives will be aware that it knows it and that it gives the preference for all public purposes to the best instructed [sic].76

The new norms of learning were now disseminated and installed through a system that created exemplary men through examination and invigilation. With government establishing its monopoly on the expectation of skills entirely through examination, the space of preparatory pedagogic training and early schooling were now entirely privatized and not surprisingly informalized, as it came to be shaped largely by the scribal market and sustained by the market for textbooks, manuals, examination guides, and the like. The advances of the grammar factory and seminary-style teaching provided a breakthrough in the learning of language and greatly befitted universal knowledge disciplines such as linguistics, but its colonial connotations were apparent. The violent installation of elite English medium institutions at the apex and a strong reliance on invigilation changed the course of pedagogy. The fruits of philology lay in the historical claim to the autonomy of South India’s Dravidian languages, something that would be crucial for the ideology of Tamil nationalism. The gains of grammar learning, however, were enjoyed by those would rule Madras epistemologically and rule its institutions, the Europeans and missionaries, and a select bilingual class, at most. As for the rest, was it business as usual? Some textual training, to be sure, would be a point of entry to clerical office in Tamil. It would be cobbled together from older schooling practices and secretarial manuals bought from the bazaar but unmoored from the new disciplines like law, science, and history, which would be necessary for professional employment and would only be accessible to those who could learn English. A quotidian written language

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variety, cutcherry Tamil, authorized by the colonial state in the shadow of the grammar factory thus took on a life of its own. The withdrawal of the government from elementary education did not imply that elementary education remained unchanged. The self-serving needs of colonial authority shifted the burdens of elementary education to the pedagogic initiatives of the Protestant missionaries who interacted with the village schoolmasters. As we will see, the missionaries seeking to bring enlightenment in the figure of Christ wanted to produce catechists and parsers of the New Testament. The failure, rather than the success, of seminary-style pedagogy to teach grammar to prose-writing scribes transformed the place of schooling in Madras and created a peculiar textual habitus. Munro’s failed education experiment of the mid1820s intended to elevate and ameliorate these institutions of elementary education. It marked the state’s direct but brief intervention in a complex pedagogical field where many changes were already underway. To address these issues further, we must turn our gaze more fi rmly to discussions of the pedagogic practices of the verandah schools of South India.

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lexander Campbell, collector of Telugu-speaking Bellary District, undertook a survey of his domain in response to Governor Thomas Munro’s call for a review of the state of education in Madras Presidency. At the end of his tour, in 1823, he wrote a frequently cited report on verandah schools. In Southeast India, verandahs were called tinnai (tin.n.ai) or pial (Tamil: payal, from Portuguese poial, “stone bench at the entrance of a house”), hence the name tinnaippallikutam (tin.n.aippal..liku¯.tam) or pial school. Campbell’s report, one among many written at this time, indicted the extant learning practices in these schools by deeming them institutions of rote learning: Every schoolboy can repeat verbatim a vast number of verses, the meaning of which he knows no more than the parrot that has been taught to utter certain words. Accordingly . . . the Native scholar gains no improvement except the exercise of memory and the power to read and write from the common business of life, he makes no addition to his stock of useful knowledge and acquires no moral impressions. . . . [I]t is no surprise that in writing a common letter, orthographical errors, and violations of grammar may be met with almost every line written by a Native.1

The imperfections of the tinnai school appeared particularly glaring to Company officers, missionaries, and, in turn, Indian reformers, because it invariably fell short of the new markers of a successful education that associated writing skills with the ability to compose grammatical prose. As a result, the tinnai school, which is where most uppercaste boys received their elementary education before entering different

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trades, began to be seen as an institution that ineptly taught the three “R”s—reading, writing, and arithmetic. Official narratives frequently echoed Campbell’s opinion that the verandah school generated goodfor-nothing rote-learning parrots, incapable of explaining what they read, and unable to write a letter. The popularity of Campbell’s report and the enduring idea that existing pedagogical practices produced rote learners suggest that in Company, missionary, and reformist circles, writing was reformulated as a skill to be mastered by schoolchildren rather than a kind of expertise learned by scribal apprentices. The ability to learn to write had begun to be untied from forms of learning that previously adhered to it—namely, the arts of memory. The disdain for mnemonic learning of the tinnai school, coupled with the critique of scribal apprenticeship, repositioned the school as a site in which to teach textual skills of communication, reading, and writing. Ordinary children were now supposed to be able to learn to read and write by going to school. The school was formalized against apprenticeship or home learning precisely when efforts were being made to disperse the seminary style of learning languages and teaching grammar that we encountered in the previous chapter. Although Protestant missionaries had run schools from the eighteenth century in the Coromandel region, missionrun schools multiplied with the lifting of restrictions on religious proselytism in 1813. These missionary schools were the preeminent place to learn English and learn to be textually adept for secretarial and clerical employment. From the 1830s, after the Company’s own district schooling experiment ended, the mission school began to increasingly supply prose-writing clerks to the scribal market. The connection to potential employment made the new-style school both an avenue of social mobility and a contested site of privilege in the mid-nineteenth century. The ideological edifice of this text-centered world reduced tinnai pedagogy to mere rote learning, even as tinnai pedagogy cast its long shadow over the new-style school.

Reframing “Rote-Learning” as Mnemonic Techniques The general anxiety about an apparently Indian propensity to “learn by rote” did not only illustrate the growing power of the Anglo-vernacular

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linguistic regime, but reflected a broader change in the orientation to knowledge. The devaluation of the arts of memory usually accompanied a new orientation to writing pedagogy. In the early modern world, for example, pejorative descriptions of mnemonic practices were simultaneous with the growing laicization of writing in Europe. 2 They were also simultaneous with European colonial expansion and the attendant misrecognition of memory practices. D. F. Mackenzie has shown how missionary and colonial officials misrecognized Maori memory skills as the ability to “read” quickly. 3 In British India, Sanjay Seth has shown that criticisms of memory-centered learning allowed for the assertion of an enduring racialized cultural difference between the colonizers and the colonized. The marshals of progress he notes, invoked Europe’s past in the colonial present to render extant pedagogy archaic and justify the European tutelage of the Indian mind.4 Viewed against this canvas, the discussions around the tinnai school suggest that something very significant was underway in Madras in the understanding of memory and writing. Instead of written texts and writing being aids to the active cultivation of memory, memory work was predominantly described as a form of retention or storage. Cultivating memory was no longer seen as a mode of learning. Memory came to be seen as a medium of transmission and storage, and an outmoded one at that. This is not to say that memory work disappeared from schools, but that mnemonic practices began to be glossed as textual memorization or rote learning and seen through a new lens that tarred them as archaic and the basis of an incommensurable cultural difference. Shifts in pedagogic practices have been described as a shift from memory to textbooks, as a shift from one form of preservation to another, mediated by the printing press. 5 Lisa Mitchell has shown that shifts in orientations to pedagogy occurred in South India, when language began to be considered as a medium of communication or instruction, even as the intellectual project of viewing written texts as fi xed, original, and authentic in print began to represent the scope of knowledge itself. In what follows, I show that what Mitchell identifies as a material function of the printing press was, in fact, symptomatic of a more fundamental shift in orientation to writing. The arts of memory were more than mediums of storage or modes of communicating texts prior to the pedagogic interventions of the nineteenth century. The change in orientation was not just a transfer in storage technology—that is, from memory to print—but the very redefi nition of memory as a mere form of storage or retention.6

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This epistemic change was reflected in a new orientation to writing and written text. Officials and missionaries upheld a communicative order that no longer valued mnemonics or its medium, poems.7 In this new Anglovernacular idiom, cultivating memory was no longer considered a systematic skill used to discipline the mind and the senses. Memory was not considered a stepping-stone to intellectual prowess, insight, and understanding. The new expectation of writing reformulated what it meant to remember in Madras. Changes in the meaning of memory work were not unlike the semantic shifts associated with reading. A. R. Venkatachalapathy has shown that the Tamil verb “pat.i” (“to read”) was glossed as silent reading only once it was distinguished from “va¯cippu,” the practice of “reading aloud” or reciting texts in early twentieth-century colonial India.8 Consider too that the verb “pat.i” means not just to read but to study, to engage in a habituated disciplined training, and to attain a form of learnedness. “Manappa¯t.am” is glossed today as retention, but used to be valued ˉ as a way to school the mind to remember. To “learn by heart” should be distinguished from retention.9 The cultivation of memory was a means of developing comprehension skills that were premised on repetitive recall, but by the second decade of the nineteenth century, memorization was now glossed as “rote learning” and used retroactively to characterize what was essentially a complex pedagogic structure, a sociology of knowledge. The critique of tinnai pedagogy that cast memory work as mere retention articulated, in a more public way, the sort of textual skills crafted in the seminary-style language-teaching pioneered by the Madras College and in the mission stations of the Church Missionary Society (CMS). Missionary interventions from the eighteenth century had introduced new expectations of textual skills, privileging the ability to transmit texts through writing.10 Soon after, the seminary style of education and its privileging of written grammar (essential for composing letters and vernacular prose) began to change attitudes toward the pedagogy of writing in Madras. When officials began to view elementary school pedagogy in the light of the expectations of mission stations and Company cutcherries, the detachment of writing from mnemonics became explicit. The tinnai school, which privileged the cultivation of memory and taught writing as a somatic technique to discipline the mind, came under fi re.

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The Social World of the Tinnai School When Company collectors began their survey of Madras education, they found that old-style tinnai schools were held in the front verandahs of houses that usually belonged to prominent notables or schoolteachers.11 Tinnai schools were set up in towns and big villages by schoolmaster families or by men who could not find any other source of employment. At times, prominent men in a settlement invited savants—in the way Telugu Brahmans were invited to Madras from the northern districts of what is now Andhra Pradesh—to open schools for children of that linguistic community or caste. In the past, tinnai teachers included panchangis (Brahmans who knew the almanac and determined the auspicious times to commence rituals and events), pant.a¯rams (non-Brahman priests), the ubiquitous kanakkan, and pura¯nic reciters (usually textual reciters of long epic poems). By the fi rst quarter of the nineteenth century, tinnai teachers included scribes and accountants who could not get clerical jobs in Company offices, as well as converts educated by Protestant missionaries. A complex relationship among caste membership, wealth, and learning skills animated the tinnai, making the school very much part of the transactive environment of local society.12 Children of artisanal and resource-bearing castes attended the verandah school where they learned to discipline their senses and acquired mental skills appropriate to resource bearers and managers. The ability to pay for a child’s education determined his years in the tinnai. Unlike Brahman boys who, especially as they got older, were fed and clothed by royal and wealthy benefactors and usually completed their years in the tinnai before going on to learn their priestly roles as apprentices, non-Brahman boys were often pulled out from school to help at home or to become apprentices to the family trade. Occasionally we get evidence that wealthy landowning boys actively resented schooling and left without fi nishing their years there.13 Even if schools attracted a multicaste clientele, sectarian and caste distinctions were carefully maintained in learning practices and more so in the kinds of mnemonics that were cultivated.14 Particular texts were used to build specific memory skills even as mnemonic practices were deployed selectively and variously to learn specific texts. These skills were carefully contained within limited circles of learners, reproducing

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figure 6. Anon., “Schoolmaster and pupils in school” (ca. 1850). Gouache mica, Trichinopoly style. © British Library Board, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, Add.Or.2452

caste in a variety of ways. The tinnai schools generally barred lowercaste children, who usually worked as herders and agricultural workers. In the rare circumstances in which they were allowed into the schools, they were made to sit separately and taught different things. These distinctions, however, were undergirded by comparable habit forming and repeated ways of learning to do things in the school—that is, similar ways of learning through repetition, recitation, and apprenticeship. Young boys joined tinnai schools when they were about five years old and then spent the next five years learning to develop their abilities to recollect. All students cultivated their powers of recollection, and all students received some sort of training or learning outside the school through fi lial networks. The tinnai was one among several sources of learning that readied a child for adulthood.

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Writing and Mnemonics in the Tinnai In the absence of furniture, blackboards, chalk, or even classes, tinnai discipline relied heavily on the cane-wielding master, his student assistant (cat..ta¯mpil..lai), and the use of pedagogical techniques that emphasized recitation. Students sat in a big group on the floor. Younger students wrote on sand; older ones compiled their own palm-leaf copies that accumulated in girth as lessons progressed: with each new lesson learned, a leaf inscribed with writing was added to the roped hook that held the palm-leaf texts together in a bundle (cuvat.ittu¯kku). The bundle of leaves would hang high from the rafters as the air resounded with students repeating the lessons they had learned. The master taught by means of a style of call-and-repeat, using a cane to keep time and to prod students to attention.15 From all accounts the rod was not spared, suggesting that students were not passive learners but often tested their master’s authority.16 Observers of the tinnai schools who produced the detailed surveys of the 1820s typically noted that the “schoolmaster fi rst reads and scholars follow in a loud voice. Some don’t even look down but repeat by ear what is said by the master.”17 Although such comments seem merely to reiterate perceptions of the tinnai school’s teaching practices as inept, reading “at sight” was not the aim of these pedagogical practices. If we consider that the primary aim of the tinnai school was the cultivation of memory, we can see that the written word in this instance was basically a mnemonic aid. The observation that the scholars did not look down indicates that recitation was driven by recollection. Mary Carruthers’s well-known study of mnemonic models in medieval Europe suggests that at that time a person with a good memory was not just viewed as sagacious but as possessing great powers of cognition. Carruthers further argues that memory was deeply desired as a representation of learning, but that the proof of a good memory was not mere retention;18 rather, it lay in the demonstration of a computational ability—one had to be able to recollect appropriately and to move backward and forward to demonstrate an agile mind. Agility was the virtue of a clever student. Thus, memory could be trained only through strengthening the calculative ability of the student. Tamil tinnai teachers were also called kan.aka¯yars, a term with the same etymological root as kanakku, or computation. The Tamil script

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was used for Tamil numbers until the East India Company made Arabic numerals compulsory in the mid-nineteenth century. Pedagogic techniques in the tinnai school privileged calculations; riddles and palindromes abound in early arithmetic works and in lexicons, suggesting that computational techniques lay at the heart of tinnai pedagogy.19 Tinnai learning was on a continuum with calculation models practiced by those professions who were barred from the tinnai school—a spectrum glimpsed with astonishment by Charles Gover, who, in his survey of education in Madras, describes the phenomenal mathematical skills of a headman of the “tank digger” or Woddar caste who could do accounts and contracts straight in his head without recourse to pen and paper. 20 Different types of memory techniques were cultivated in the school. Word-for-word reproduction was a preliminary mnemonic technique taught to children. Since what one had learned word-for-word could not be discovered by a heuristic scheme, it was therefore not considered true memory. True memory, in contrast, was stimulated by heuristic mnemonic techniques that were inevitably visual. Similarly, from the descriptions of the Tamil tinnai schools, it is possible to argue that reading, writing, and arithmetic were thus a concordance of techniques or skills that worked simultaneously toward the cultivation of memory, and in themselves did not represent good learning or wisdom. In turn, schooling deployed all three modes of mnemonic technique: the visual, the calculative, and the iterative. The three, if learned appropriately and well, generated clever students. From the records of missionaries and the pages of Company correspondence, we can recover detailed lists of palm-leaf books that were used as mnemonic aids. 21 A cursory survey shows that the Tamil curriculum was dominated by ethical and devotional poetry and by practice-based arithmetic. All tinnai schools did not teach exactly the same thing, and the documentation on the curriculum of schools tends to display a fair amount of variation. The Tamil list collected by Colonel Mackenzie’s cutcherry, for example, does not include a text called the nikan..tu—a glossary or word list (sometimes inaccurately referred to as a dictionary)—or the diva¯karam, a lexicon that is sometimes inaccurately glossed as an encyclopedia. 22 Nonetheless, it is clear that memorization was not a mode through which to learn texts; rather, these texts were used to cultivate memory. The difference in emphasis is of tremendous significance. Not only was writing an aid to cultivate memory, but tinnai

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learning represented a distinctly sophisticated sociology of knowledge suggesting a sensibility wherein virtuosos were persons who could display feats of memory and who were adept at recall. There are immediate visible differences between the texts taught in the Tamil schools and in the Telugu/Sanskrit schools, not the least of which is that it was common to learn Sanskrit in Telugu environments, but uncommon in the Tamil tinnai. Tamil tinnai do not appear to have taught the grammar text, Nannu¯l. Tamil grammar was studied only by advanced poet-apprentices until the nineteenth century. Even when the Nannu¯l was studied, it was learned to facilitate verse composition rather than the writing of prose. From the texts taught, we can see that worldly knowledge was inseparable from language learning. For example, a part of the Telugu Amarakos´a or lexicon contained the names of deities, celestial quarters, different musical instruments, divisions of time, the earth, towns, plants, animals, and so on. Some books of morals in Telugu contained arithmetic and mathematics. Seen through a script-centered perspective, these seem eclectically pulled together. However, if we were to classify the texts according to mnemonic techniques, we would see that the curriculum as a whole rearranges itself in interesting ways. The fi rst thing that the student mastered was the basic units of phonetics, which, in most descriptions from the early nineteenth century, are glossed as the written alphabet. The account of alphabet learning written by a Niyogi Brahman, Subba Rao, of a Telugu/Sanskrit school shares much with descriptions of tinnai pedagogy. Boys were taught the alphabet by writing on sand with their right thumbs. After learning the letters by heart, students began to write with pieces of slate on boards darkened by coals and the juice of certain leaves. At this stage, pupils learned the syllables and learned to spell. Students then learned short names of gods and humans; once they had learned to write down any name, they were taught to write on palm leaves with a stylus. An introduction to texts followed thereafter, which students learned by heart verse by verse. 23 Consider this pedagogy from a non-script-centered perspective and it is clear that students were not learning to write the alphabet but were using and developing several kinds of mnemonic skills with the aid of graphemes. The students learned to remember the cipher by writing it down repetitively; copying it down fi rst on sand so that their fi ngers would remember—making it a very tactile mnemonic technique—while reciting out loud the sounds of the alphabet. The practice of writing the

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grapheme with the fi nger on the sand by schoolchildren has a special name: nilavel uttu. In the case of Tamil, the student was also simultaneˉ ously learning units of calculation. As well, the taxonomic organization of the Tamil phonology, called the net.un.kan.akku, is arranged around the body—in particular, the tongue. Sounds are classified according to those made with the tip of the tongue, soft sounds, hard sounds, and so forth. Therefore, the teaching of the net.un.kan.akku—itself a mnemonic device—would have been built into learning the “alphabet.” Each lesson or pa¯.tam was internalized, impressed on the mind through repetition and writing. Constant repetition made the mind agile, but because models of learning were based on concrete activities, the visual-participative role of these activities created sounder memories. Tinnai learning was learning by doing. The tinnai “order of books” began with the Ariccuvat.i, followed by the A¯tticu¯.ti. Seen from the formal perspective of the verse form, students internalized the taxonomy of the alphasyllabary (the Ariccuvat.i). They then developed their skills by learning single verse lines and couplets in ¯ tticu¯.ti and the simple alphasyllabic sequence (the varukkam style of the A the Konraive¯ntan) before fi nally building on their skills with the Mu¯turai ˉˉ ˉ in the four-line venpa¯ style. Students also learned the lexicon—nikan..tu, ˉ a core vocabulary that contained the names of gods, animals, and so on. The Tamil lexicon assisted the study of the arts and sciences. It divided words into synonyms, sounds and polysemes, and numerical lists bound by a hierarchy of natural and spiritual phenomena, as well as synthetic artifacts and abstractions. 24 Furthermore, texts were learned for different purposes. Consider the list of texts taught in the tinnai, recited by a schoolmaster from the Tamil text, Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am: Ariccuvat. i, a¯tticu¯t. i, ampikaima¯lai, mo¯cikava¯kanam, carasvati to¯ttiram, tiˉ vakaram, nikan.t.u is learned by heart (tutiye¯n caiyta) ka¯rike¯n.ai catakam, ˉ nannul., kampara¯ma¯yanam . . . is comprehended . . . recited in lessons (pat.ipˉˉ ˉ pile¯ collukiratu).9 ˉ

Select texts were retained, the verb used is tutiye¯n caiyta—that is, “to worship, pray, and invoke.” Other texts were glossed by the verb karuttile¯ vaitu—“to comprehend and grasp, internalize, to keep in the mind.” These included longer pieces such as the Ramayanam and traditional grammar. 25

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Recollection as Worship The somatic techniques of recollection fostered in the tinnai resonated with broader worship practices that unearthed reference through repetitive recall. For instance, in the late nineteenth century, Tamil nationalists began to express their devotion to a new goddess, Tamil tta¯y ˉ (“Mother Tamil”) in poetry. 26 Deity-as-nation served as a model for the ritual relationship between the Tamil language and its pious devotee. Poetry clothed the new figure in classical garb, providing a way to somatically relate Tamil to her worshippers and to feminize her. The poems to Mother Tamil are like many older devotional poetic genres that pay homage through the systematic praise of the deity’s body and by visualizing its power. These works are essentially performative acts composed to be sung or recited repeatedly. The poetic form makes for the cultivation of memory. Constant repetition privileges recollection and comprehension. The words of worship are inscribed in a devotee’s heart, ingested completely and recollected. When the devotee was confronted with the image as an idol in a shrine, for example, we can speculate that his memory was triggered, whereby an almost involuntary recitation of the text followed. Such an orientation to devotional texts implies that, on hearing professional reciters and expounders of the meaning of these texts, the devotional power of the recalled words reasserted themselves with new depth. Philip Lutgendorf argues that learning Tulasidas’s Ra¯ ma¯ charitama¯ nas in North India is a transformative experience. Charita experts internalize the text through repetition, similar to the lectio divina of medieval Christian monasteries, until they have not only memorized it but “its language, structure and images come to permeate the mental processes so that there is no occurrence, word or image encountered in life that does not immediately evoke in the devotee some parallel word, phrase or situation from the text.”27 In this way, reference was unearthed through repetitive recall, which gradually uncovered the mysteries of the text. In the same vein, several texts of this order deploy puns, epigrams, or conundra (kat..tuva¯kkiyam), in which a multiplicity of meanings are layered beneath the immediate visual imagery of the text. Devotion helped meaning bloom. Tinnai schooling was part of a continuum of devotionally inclined textual practice. I call it a continuum because devotional practices were also used by those who had no access to formal tinnai learning but cultivated their memory through other means. Young girls, for example, cul-

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tivated their memories without entering tinnai schools but through disciplined work regimes. They memorized texts as acts of devotion when they heard them repeatedly recited by professionals. Placing tinnai learning in this frame shows that writing learned in the tinnai school was primarily used for the cultivation of memory. Certainly, some tinnai students went on to compose letters as scribal apprentices, and many could parlay tinnai learning to “read aloud,” but a man of true learning would, as several apocryphal tales of Tamil savants suggest, display his learning by checking the veracity of the written word against his memory.28 Such a view of textual learning was under some stress by the late eighteenth century.

Anxiety over Tinnai Mnemonics In addition to Company officers and missionary reports, criticisms of tinnai learning came from a surprising variety of sources. Consider, for example, a satire entitled Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am (“A Satire on Schooling”), probably performed in the Tanjavur area in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. The “Satire on Schooling” is a part of the Palaja¯tikam Vikat.am (“the satire of many jatis”), an anthology of social archetypes in Maratha Tanjavur. 29 Replete with the puns and jests characteristic of the vikat. am genre, the Palaja¯tikam Vikat. am uses several contemporary references to make a searing critique of its times. The Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am uses mimicry to great effect. It also uses the teasing and banter conventionally associated with the wordplay between the master, or schoolteacher, and his students to satirize the repetitiveness and mimicry undergirding the elementary mnemonic techniques taught in the verandah school. The unraveling of tinnai learning occurs in the context of a question: what is real learning? The episode begins with the master describing his school and the hardships he faced in running it. The master then shifts gears, describing the modes of ideal learning: his own qualifications, the ideal student, the ideal values of learning, and the proper way of learning. The fi nal third of the skit is essentially a hilarious wordplay between an impudent student and the now increasingly beleaguered master, conducted in the mode of an examination of the student’s memory skills. The text emits tension, for the witty unmasking of the learning of the schools takes place in the looming presence of a mysterious foreign stu-

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dent, a European missionary. The reader cannot help but register the changing times. The poem begins with an oblique reference to new competition that bodes the decline of tinnai learning. The master says: Everyone, other than those who studied in my school, study at another school. Those foreigners (cı¯ maiyiliruntu) who came eagerly to my school to study and learn knowledge, now say it is insufficient. Ten schools now exist. 30

This is a telling reference because Protestant missionaries of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) established schools in Tanjavur in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Missionary Reverend Schwartz, who learned Tamil before setting up schools in the town, was Tanjavur’s royal tutor. 31 The text is naturally ambivalent about these new developments and now speaks through the voice of a student who addresses the master: Sir, I am the student. (Pointing to another.) He who has come from a foreign country with a bag of cash, is he wearing a turban? Do you see him hold a stylus and a paring knife? Does he wear a ve¯t.t.i?32

Tellingly, rather than respond to these questions about the adult foreigner’s peculiar appearance, the master instead begins to describe his school’s achievements and curriculum: Hey! In my school ten students get intelligence, one hundred get memory, three hundred learn awareness, five hundred love, and a thousand, respect.

Clearly an institution that privileges virtuosity for a few and discipline for many appears now as a system of limited success. Sure enough, the text breaks into a snapshot of learning practices that seem to correlate to the school’s impoverished circumstances: There is no cash allowance, there is no grain, there is no income. Only play ensues. Palm-leaf texts are written, lessons are studied, lines are written. The class monitor trains students to write, the younger students read small texts. Children recite loudly. 33

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The children begin with recitation and older children move on to learn lessons by copying lines of script on palm leaf (cat..tam el tukiratu): ˉ ˉ After hanging the cuvat. i tu¯kku [the roped hook that held the palm-leaf texts together in a bundle] correctly, Lessons should be learned by identifying the deep associative relations between them. Truth should be known, after reading the niti texts, all the vulgarism and stuttering will be fi nished.

Tinnai education was suffused with piety, discipline, and ethical action as well as practical things like calculation. By this time in Tanjavur, however, its learning was clearly being understood as impractical. Consider the master’s somewhat pedantic tone while admonishing students: You can’t buy learning with all the wealth in the world, I say seek the blessing of learning! I say, impress good knowledge on to your mind every day The benevolent gods are waiting within! Students need devotion, fear, memory, a good environment, confidence. They should not be tricksters.

It would not have been unusual for the audience to wink at the schoolmaster’s learning and make wicked fun of him. Again, significantly, such a moment of satire is flagged by the student’s reference to the foreigner: Why Ayya¯? Who placed this fi fty-year-old man in school?

The master ignores the question about the mysterious foreigner, but responds with an agitated acknowledgment of the foreign student’s lack of skills, and then commands his student to read. This dodging underscores the sinister presence of an outsider and signals a change of gears in the text. We now move from the master’s soliloquy to a hilarious wordplay between the student and the master. From here on, the repetition characteristic of the elementary mnemonic techniques taught in the school comes in for satirical mimicry. When the master asks the student to recite the Araikka¯l va¯ypa¯.tu (the ˉ arithmetical table of half fractions that was repeated like a formula), the student impudently responds:

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Everything seems like a fraction lesson. The quarter lesson, the lesson on halves, the three-quarters lesson, you do not seem to know these!

The lessons are inadequate and incomplete. Further along in the dia¯ tticu¯.ti book came logue, the student wonders how one could learn if the A apart. After hearing a few more insolent remarks, the beleaguered master observes: The boy seems to be slow to tell the meaning (by telling associations). His learning is not sharp.

Learning, this passage implies, is displayed through speed and accuracy rather than rote recitation. The fi nal part of the text is a subtle satire of the master’s pedagogical technique achieved through the description of a review of a student’s mnemonic skills. When the master asks the student to recite the list of flowers taught the previous day, the student replies by quickly reciting the list that was taught to him. This technique of learning lists of flowers aimed at improving the student’s memory. Like the palace of memory built by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, tinnai technique used elementary images or objects as the basis for later, more complex textual study. Reports on the tinnai school describe the master reciting the list, adding a few additional items every day. The student would repeat after him and memorize the items. Thus, through mimesis the student would improve his memory and acquire the ability to correctly reproduce the master’s list through recitation. The Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am unravels precisely this model of mimetic learning. When the master asks the student to recite the calculations that he learned the previous day, he declares: Master: Hey boy! What calculations were you taught? Student: One measure for one person, ten and a quarter measure for one, subtract eight, add two, sweep the threshing floor and distribute among eleven persons. 34

Thus, the student cleverly repeats the mental mathematical problem but does not give the answer, indicating to the audience his impudence while also hinting at his inability to understand and calculate effectively. When the master asks the student to recount the second calculation that he learned the previous day, the student again mimics the master with-

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out solving the problem. The master responds angrily, threatening to beat the student for insolence and slowness: Hey kid! Bring me the Rattan! Fifty books he has learned in fi fty years!

The Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am was a comment both on the ability of this schooling to cultivate the memory of students and on the criticism this learning received from outsiders, that is, the Protestant mission station. As the tone of the Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am suggests, missionary-run schools created ripples in the social world of learning.

Protestant Missionaries and Scribal Techniques Many years before the College of Fort St. George and the CMS attempted to run seminary-style language teaching, the old pietist and Scottish mission stations of the Coromandel had already begun to appropriate and innovate with tinnai pedagogy. These innovations were to have historical implications for scribal skills in the cutcherry. Mission schools, in the tradition of the Lutheran pietists, initially appropriated tinnai school techniques in the eighteenth century. Rather than flood the countryside with Bibles, a practice favored by evangelicals in the 1820s, the pietists set up schools in the tinnai style and favored the use of palm-leaf and sand writing. Bartholomew Ziegenbalg, the Lutheran pietist missionary in Tranquebar whose philological researches, as we saw, shaped the development of written Tamil and Tamil grammar, played an important role in reshaping pedagogic practices. Ziegenbalg wanted to recreate August Francke’s pietist environment of small circles of learners in his mission school, and indeed the pietist practice of intimate learning fits easily with the extant structure of the tinnai school. The school was to be a bridge between missionaries and inhabitants; for example, the missionaries set several early hymns to tunes familiar to tinnai learners and followed familiar practices. 35 As the early missionaries adopted tinnai techniques and incorporated them into their schools, the techniques themselves were substantially modified as they were yoked to different ends. The pietist appropriation of tinnai techniques led to a reformulation of these practices in the Tranquebar mission school. The most significant modification was that the missionaries taught the students to memorize scripture. In

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emphasizing the memorization of texts, the pietists inverted the tinnai school paradigm of using textual aids to cultivate memory. Furthermore, the pietist system prepared students to serve as new types of textual specialists with scribal skills that were different from those learned through family apprenticeship. When appealing to his sponsors in England—as early as 1712—Ziegenbalg wrote that mission schools were fruitful seed plots of the church that would prepare scholars to serve the mission as “writers, clerks and accountants, schoolmasters and catechists.”36 Robert Frykenberg’s research suggests that by the late eighteenth century, respectable inhabitants, usually Brahmans and Vellalars, flocked to missionary schools in the hope that the new learning offered there would find them a place in the rapidly expanding Company cutcherry, a development confi rmed by the Pal..likut.am Vikat.am. 37 Building on Ziegenbalg’s practices, later missionaries—Scottish Protestants, in particular—began to develop the tinnai method solely to teach children to read and write. The most important site of early innovation in this regard was the Madras Male Asylum in Egmore, Madras, at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Male Asylum School was established by public subscription in 1789 to teach the mixed-race orphans of European soldiers in South India as “Europeans and Christians.” The school’s fi rst superintendent was a Scot, Andrew Bell. Finding it impossible to appoint appropriate teachers, Bell appropriated tinnai techniques to teach his charges. For example, he appointed a class monitor (a young Eurasian of twelve years) to teach younger students by writing on wet sand. The students learned the alphabet very quickly. Impressed and convinced of its success, Bell took this method back to England in 1795 and publicized it as the “monitorial system” or the “Madras school system.”38 Bell’s appropriation of tinnai technique created a stir in the metropole as a cheap and effective way to teach reading and writing. 39 The Madras monitorial system was briefly popular among educationists until, in the mid-nineteenth century, it fell out of favor for using youthful teachers and relying excessively on “rote learning.” But by then, Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker with an interest in formulating methods of public education, began to pioneer similar techniques in his poor schools in London. Within a few years, by 1805, the monitorial system had won the approbation of King George III, who endorsed the idea so that every poor child in the Dominion could learn to read the Bible. Through Quaker networks, it spread very quickly to North America. The mon-

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itorial system was celebrated for its factory-like efficiency that could cheaply teach many students to read and write.40 The monitorial system adapted tinnai learning into a script-centered method for teaching the alphabet. A successor of Reverend Bell at the Madras Male Asylum wrote that Bell’s innovative method was taken from the alphabetical arrangement of letters, which amused while it instructed. The use of the slate to teach boys to write until they were competent before introducing copy books was economical. But perhaps most of all, Bell’s method employed teachers and assistants among the boys exclusive of tutors. The monitorial system was a revelation because it enabled pedagogical force to operate through emulation rather than the rod. It “serves to promote by emulation such advantages in the progress of education as the rod could not well accomplish and which are superior to English schools.”41 The missionaries had reimagined the nilaveluttu so ¯ that children learned the grapheme as the basic unit of a written script. In addition to this innovation, the asylum selectively appropriated the tinnai teaching assistant but eschewed the rod. These innovations, Bell’s advocates claimed, could ensure that everyone, including the poor, would be able to read the Bible for themselves. Bell’s innovation may have briefly taken England by storm; however in Madras, reports from CMS missionaries dating to 1822 suggest that the missionaries found themselves unable to produce adept readers and writers.42 It is difficult to discern why there was resistance and whether the schoolmasters distinguished between the mnemonic orientation of their techniques and Bell’s reformulation. In fact, the direct beneficiary of Bell’s system in India was the East India Company. Many Asylum graduates were employed as draftsmen, illustrators, and surveying assistants for the vast Company-sponsored topographical surveys of the subcontinent. The Mission and “Dictation” In the Tamil region, mission stations may not have reformed the tinnai to their satisfaction, but they formulated a second set of pedagogic innovations that was to cast a long shadow over everyday textual practice. In addition to appropriating tinnai practice to teach writing, missionaries made innovations in transcription. The secretarial skills in question involved the refi nement of written transcription and translation, and, most importantly, made the practice of dictation common in schools.43

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Catechists and Bible readers (upate¯ciya¯r or ve¯ tiya¯r) remained the mainstay of mission institutions in South India long after they disappeared in Protestant congregations in Europe.44 The missionaries depended on catechists and readers for the same reasons that Company officers depended on their assistants: as intermediaries who would facilitate direct communication with inhabitants. The missionaries appointed and trained catechists and readers to give oral instruction in the elements of Christianity according to a catechism, or by question and answer. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the church began to require the services of a well-trained Tamil munshi to help with Bible translation. The catechists were primarily textual transmitters, while the munshis were translators who became more important to the mission station as evangelists stepped up efforts to translate the Bible. As we have already seen, early Protestant communicative practice in the Coromandel Coast selectively appropriated the institutional organization of the Jesuits, their Catholic rivals and predecessors. From the fi rst quarter of the eighteenth century, the Jesuits had run their preaching circles by recruiting assistants and training them in seminaries.45 Protestant catechist training institutions belonged to this long tradition. Despite their deep hostility toward the Catholics, Protestants in Tanjavur and Tranquebar (Tarangampadi) used handwritten copies of Jesuit texts like Ve¯ tiyarolukkam (Manual for Catechists) to train their cate¯ chists.46 Simultaneously, however, they also formulated new techniques that substantially modified scribal skills related to palm-leaf writing.47 Their innovation was to teach catechists to take down sermons quickly in Tamil. When the famous Anglican missionary Dr. Claudius Buchanan visited the Tanjavur congregation in 1806, he observed this secretarial skill: As Mr. Whitefield, on his fi rst coming to Scotland was surprised at the rustling of the leaves of the Bible which took place immediately on his pronouncing his text, so was I here surprised at a noise namely that of the iron pen engraving palmyra leaf. Many persons had their olais in their hands writing the sermon in Tamil short hand. Mr. Kolkoff assured me that some of them are so expert in this that they do not lose one word of the preacher and the sermon of the morning is read in the evening to schools by the catechist from his palmyra leaf . . . . Kolkoff the local missionary, presided over the exercises in the school on which occasion the sermon of the morning is repeated and boys’ class was examined.48

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Buchanan’s description suggests that the techniques used in the Tanjavur mission modified skills that came out of tinnai learning and scribal apprenticeship. Catechists did not compose verse, like the pulavar, nor did they compose sermons or write afresh; instead, they listened and took down in writing what they heard. Learning by heart as they took dictation, they became experts at reproducing the dictated sermon perfectly. In reproducing spoken sermons rather than poems, they were transcribing the spoken register into something not quite written verse, but a commentary, or urai. But unlike older commentarial traditions, in which urai or commentary suffused the text, this mission-station innovation shifted the emphasis of writing from an aid in the cultivation of memory to a technology for memorizing texts. Memorization came to be associated only with textual transmission, which in the mission station was associated with the transmission of sermons. This was, if you will, an inversion of the goals of tinnai pedagogy. By emphasizing perfect transmission through dictation and by making the prose sermon itself a text to be transmitted accurately, the pietists of Tanjavur also made some significant changes to the Jesuit communicative practice they partially emulated. While the practice of taking down in writing the spoken compositions of pulavar and monks was a familiar practice in monastic establishments of the medieval Tamil country and within Jesuit circles, these compositions tended to be expressed in verse. Under the pietists, dictation was yoked to a different end, namely the literal transmission of a sermon, which was written in prose sentences closely resembling the spoken form. Such a formulation marks particularly how Protestant missionaries, in contrast to Jesuits, were invested in communicating written texts in a register closely resembling the spoken languages of the country. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, when the College of Fort St. George and the evangelists of the CMS fi rst appeared in Madras, several new practices regarding writing had already been innovated by the Jesuits, the pietists, and the Scottish mission Christians. Tinnai practices had been appropriated to new ends and modified in the process. The missionary emphasized learning the grapheme, the importance of dictation, and the investment in a form of language that most resembled the spoken, all of which subtly contributed to the occlusion of tinnai mnemonics. Missionary presence and critique of the tinnai in places like the court of Tanjavur had certainly been registered as a threat to the tinnai schoolmaster by texts like the Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am.

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But it was not until the establishment of CMS seminaries and the Munro collectorate schools—discussed in the previous chapter—that the teaching of grammar began to be associated with writing. The critique of elementary school pedagogy—begun in light of the clerical expectations of mission stations and Company cutcherries—alongside the Collegesponsored grammar factory, explicitly detached writing and language learning from mnemonics. Consider, for example, the critique of the tinnai school by V. Subba Rao.

Critiquing the Tinnai in the Shadow of the Grammar Factory Subba Rao was a Niyogi Brahman from Ongole who made his career working as a writer and translator for the recordkeeping offices of the East India Company in the early nineteenth century.49 Subba Rao, in a letter to the then newly established Madras School Book Society, argued that the traditional verandah school failed to provide the systematic comprehension of several languages, the most important object of education. 50 These schools, he added, did not teach grammar systematically, and their teachers were poorly trained. 51 Lisa Mitchell notes that Subba Rao in fact echoed a new ideology of languages pushed by the Madras College in arguing that languages were equivalent to each other and learned through their grammars. Such arguments were also accompanied by the criticism of writing pedagogy. Subba Rao wrote that the institution of scribal apprenticeship was responsible for the inferiority of scribal training in the cutcherry. Like colonial officers such as Alexander Ross who decried revenue scribes, he too believed that home schooling did not generate proficient students, who were then forced to make up their deficiencies by learning on the job. Rao considered that apprenticeship revealed the inadequacies of the school. 52 We can speculate that the grammar factory of colonial philology had forced Subba Rao to critique his own training. Subba Rao’s opinions were not surprising given that his letter was addressed to the School Book Society. He argued that the solution lay in publishing textbooks, abridgements of existing grammars written in prose and explained in “modern language.” Subba Rao’s critique formulated the school as the only appropriate institution for teaching writing because this was the place where students could learn languages systematically. Such arguments would have been music to the official ear. In early

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nineteenth-century Madras, the Company’s gentleman scholars were well known for their craze for printed books, and, indeed, the public records are fi lled with individuals seeking the Company’s patronage to publish books. Orientalism was a new cottage industry, and the printed book was the latest object of novelty. The School Book Society too had announced that it wanted to commission “intelligent natives” to write textbooks. Thus, it is possible that Subba Rao’s letter was an application of sorts by a potential textbook writer. The mere appearance of grammars, munshis, and missionaries and the gleam of a commission could not alone have generated these aspirations. Subba Rao’s vision of language learning came from his experience of learning to write English for his livelihood. In the course of his lifetime, English had fast acquired phenomenal social and economic capital in the language market in South India. Discussing the teaching of sciences in English, the Board of Revenue disparaged the zeal to learn English as the hope for livelihood and not for any love for science for its own sake!53 The eager student looking to learn English for employment followed the same practices as the scribal apprentice who had come to work after a few years in the tinnai school. He learned in the tinnai-apprentice style with schoolmasters and with “alphabet” books (albeit printed ones), memorizing lessons and words. When he mastered a limited vocabulary and he began to write a tolerable hand, he joined an office as an apprentice. Apprentices thus did not learn grammar or composition, and this omission made a strong impression on Subba Rao about the inadequacy of tinnai-style pedagogy to prepare one for the new world of language mastery. Learning English through an older style was inadequate because it did not allow a student to master a language he did not know. Furthermore, the ability to converse in English had begun to determine the ability to secure petty judgeships such as the post of the district munsiff. A petition received from the students of the Madras Government Central School in 1837 suggests that models of apprenticeship that had driven scribal work were no longer sufficient for job aspirants. The students wrote: “Besides it is not our chief aim to come a distance of four or five miles for employing two or three of our best English hours in writing copies. This we knew by the assistance of the best English writers residing by our houses.”54 The problem was clearly that a new norm of being the master of a language was at play. The ability to copy writing accurately—something that the older missionaries had fi ne-tuned in

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their modifications of the tinnai or something that scribes could acquire through apprenticeship—was no longer deemed adequate to the launching of new careers.

Printed Textbooks Reconsidered As we saw, despite the widespread and deep faith expressed by the official class, by reformers like Subba Rao in the virtues of learning grammar, little concrete intervention was made to teach grammar to native speakers. No wonder the tahsildari and collectorate schools were bound to fail. To be sure, the press at the College of Fort St. George printed the fi rst editions of at least two Tamil grammar primers for the Indian teachers and law students of the College. These were Chidambara Desikar’s Ilakkan.a curukkam (1813) and Tandavaraya Mudaliyar’s Ilakkan.a vina¯viˉ .tai (1820) a verse genre in the form of questions and answers. 55 Both authors were Tamil teachers at the College. 56 These texts did not, however, enter the tinnai school as they were meant for adults. The fi rst grammar primer for wider circulation came out from the Missionary Press in Vepery in 1828, a few years after the establishment of the Madras School Book Society. This text was the College pandit Vishakaperumal Aiyer’s Ilakkan.a curukku vin a¯vit.ai. We have very little information on how the ˉ primer was used, but Visakaperumal Aiyer’s preface suggests that he wrote it for children so that they could learn to read clear prose and gain the knowledge required for all sorts of employment. 57 Grammar textbooks in Tamil began to circulate only in the mid-1840s. 58 Rather than teach grammar, official efforts promoted printed versions of old palm-leaf tinnai texts. Neither Subba Rao nor the Europeans proposed a radical change of the curriculum. Instead, they wanted to change how people learned existing texts, and they felt that they could do so by intervening in teacher training and by substituting printed books for palm-leaf texts. The Madras School Book Society secured the official support of the government in the 1820s when Thomas Munro completed the education survey. The Madras College superintendents began to take an interest in the institution. Soon after, with the aid of official grants, the society began to publish and distribute print versions of texts like the Ariccuvat.i, the palm-leaf anthology of Tamil graphemes. The textbook market began to grow, and some private printing presses began

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operations in Madras. Many of these had some links with the Tamil pandit and munshi establishment of the College of Fort St. George and were opened either by Tamil teachers or by their kin. 59 The ultimate beneficiaries of the critique of the tinnai were not its students, but a group of printing presses in Madras. Why was the printed textbook considered a palliative for all pedagogic evils? It is quite clear that the Company had its own strategic investment in the printing press. Thomas Munro theorized the official attitude to the press when he wrote in 1822 that if the inhabitants of Madras were his countrymen, he would have preferred utmost freedom of the press. In the circumstances of forceful occupation, however, nothing could be more dangerous. In place of spreading useful knowledge among the people and tending to their better government, the press he feared would generate insubordination, insurrection, and anarchy. 60 Far from being a force of emancipation, Munro envisaged the press as an ideal mode of reforming conduct, a tool of pacification. A free press was believed to be incompatible with the domination of strangers, but the printing press’s impressive powers could be yoked to disseminate useful knowledge among the natives. There were similar attitudes to prose and its new status as the exemplary pedagogic tool. The interventions of the 1820s envisaged a new idiom of communication: the writing and mastery of the written register of a spoken language. If spoken language could or indeed must be written down, then Campbell’s call for prose textbooks came from an idea that “incomprehension” occurred because the poetic written form of tinnai texts was incommensurate with speech and “business” language. He wrote: All these books in Telugu and Cannada [sic] are in verse, in a dialect distinct from conversation and business. The natives read these books to acquire the power of reading letters in the common dialect of business but the poetical is different from the prose they speak and write and though they read these books it’s for the pronunciation of syllables they attend to not the meaning or construction of words.61

Despite his emphasis on grammar, however, Campbell preferred not to introduce grammar books. Therefore, rather than print up grammar textbooks, Campbell advocated the translation of familiar poems into simple prose:

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The government could not promote the improved education of their native subjects in these districts more than by patronizing versions in common prose and spoken dialect of their popular poets and elementary works now committed to memory. It would greatly accelerate the progress of such schools if Government were to appropriate a moderate annual sum to the purpose of preparing and printing at the College Press, or elsewhere, suitable books. Books of a popular and known character, intelligible to all who read, would thus be procurable at a cheaper rate.62

The project of grammar was, then, the lens through which Campbell evaluated the inadequacies of the tinnai school such that he actually recommended introducing the prose form of known texts to change the textual habitus. Thus, despite his criticism of the tinnai school, Campbell wished his reforms to inculcate “reading at sight” within the extant ideologies of the familiar, a move already brought to our notice by Stuart Blackburn’s research on early print editions of Tamil oral tales.63 Given Munro’s remarks on the strategic benefits of a directed press, we might understand these moves to reflect the belief that print would magically and materially disseminate the authority of written prose and thereby enable the reception of Company law and its documents. Such an attitude to the printed textbook as a technology of reforming conduct would explain why neither the lists of Madras School Book Society publications nor the discussion of textual reform by the Committee for Public Instruction mention grammar schoolbooks.64 Most print runs of textbooks translated “worthy” English books into the vernacular. Alphabet primers and the “pleasing tales” series taken from Indian languages did roaring business in the fledging textbook market, for they could be incorporated well into the tinnai-dominated world. Well into the late nineteenth century, tinnai schoolboys posed for photographs with both palm-leaf and printed school books, and palm leaf continued to dominate schooling well beyond the mid-nineteenth century. Although the textbook market grew larger in the 1840s, observers record that parents opposed printed schoolbooks like the basic catechism. Reverend Elious wrote from Madras in 1838 that parents did not want their children to learn catechism in mission schools; they lobbied schoolmasters privately to use older books. As late as the 1840s, the missionaries found it extremely difficult to persuade schoolteachers to use new textbooks. They complained that schoolmasters, usually caste Hindus, used older texts clandestinely in mission schools. Moreover teachers

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read out translated English lessons the spoken vernacular.65 Did the long shadow of the tinnai persist in these schools because Bell’s innovation remained contained within the Male Asylum? Was it because missionaries, although keen on countering what they deemed idolatry with science, were in fact only interested in producing good catechists and secretaries? It is difficult to say. What is clear however, is that the textbook industry began to serve the new needs of the clerical market. Instead of teaching grammar, the textbook industry came up with printed manuals to teach clerical skills in a world where apprenticeship was devalued and schooling still inadequate. The clamor for jobs and new clerical skills was such that two Tamil masters from the College published literal Tamil translations of English letter-writing manuals.66 These were published, as one explanation read, so that “any person who can use the pen may write letters in every subject with propriety and elegance of style.”67 The letter-writing books took recourse to a literal translation of English letters into Tamil and by instituting such an Anglo-vernacular idiom they circumvented the highly difficult grammar learning that was inaccessible to many clerical aspirants. Both textbooks emphasized orthography, prose, punctuation, and style. The texts must have functioned as guidebooks for aspirants to cutcherry jobs, and they resembled example books of letters. They can be seen as similar but not homologous to the guidebooks of cutcherry Tamil discussed earlier. While we do not know whether the texts had a wide circulation, we can surmise that they were probably used as models to be memorized or copied by the burgeoning petitioning and letter-writing industry that was now visible in the bazaar outside the cutcherry.

Conclusion: Writing Pedagogy The official move to promote printed textbooks cannot be seen solely in terms of recalcitrant schoolmasters refusing to teach new types of learning and the robust continuation of tinnai pedagogy in the textbook market. As I have argued, under the influence of colonial philology, grammar tutelage became the lens through which the inadequacies of the tinnai school were assessed, rather than something that was taught widely either through a textbook (which was seen as an instrument of pacification) or curriculum intervention. Although grammar was not taught, the application of the standard of grammar led to a few important results.

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The critique of the tinnai did not just “devalue” memory practices. The reframing of the school as the only legitimate place to learn to write severed the tinnai from the pedagogic model of memory cultivation that had previously anchored its epistemology. This dismemberment of writing from mnemonics wrenched textual practice from the models of comprehension and meaning that used to embed learning in the social world. Now the schools produced students who memorized textbooks “by rote” to serve a new scriptoral regime. It was as if Campbell’s searing critique of the tinnai was in fact a self-fulfi lling prophecy of colonial intervention in education. A pedagogic system geared toward pacification rather than in radical enlightenment produced a cutthroat competition for jobs and certification and a scribal labor market trained in the bazaar. The demands and activities of both the Protestant mission station and the cutcherry reworked extant mnemonic systems of writing by viewing them through the prism of secretarial skills. These skills mainly turned around the ability to write letters grammatically in a clear hand and were an integral component of a new Anglo-vernacular frame of thinking about written language in colonial India. These skills were essential for a clerical livelihood for those entering the structures of colonial modernity. Our fi nal task is to ask how these changes to writing reformulated the place of schooling in society. The growing laicization of writing made schooling a site of immense social privilege and elite reproduction among the inhabitants of the Presidency because it was now considered the pathway to clerical employment. The unspoken traffic between the mission station and the cutcherry became more explicit in the 1820s as missionaries began to open schools teaching English to attract upper-caste schoolboys. In turn, the Company government, while publicly promulgating the cause of secular education and censuring the use of the Bible in the schoolrooms, subtly benefited from the mission-school training of its Indian servants.68 Most importantly, the encounter between the tinnai environment, the mission school, and Company officers created an Anglo-vernacular idiom wherein English remained highly prized and successfully restricted to the upper classes. South Indians had already acquired a reputation for speaking English, outside and before the South Indian mission-run schools became the biggest formal non government schooling system in the region. But as the mission-run Anglo-vernacular school became the site at which to learn English, the preservation of schooling as an

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upper-caste privilege became a very important node of elite political organization in Madras. Elites began to demand that the Company government constrain missionary efforts to convert upper-caste students and preserve the school from lower-caste incursions. In their turn, missionaries were afraid that if they taught English to their workers, they would lose many of them to the cutcherry. As a missionary wrote in an account of the training schools of the catechists, “they should learn to sing and write shorthand in Tamil but they should not be taught English at the expense of other languages: for they are exposed to the temptation to become translators to English gentlemen with higher salaries that do not compare with the humble salaries of a catechist.”69 Although a steady stream of recruits from mission schools went into cutcherry employment, the brokerage recruitment system meant that upper-caste Hindu men generally dominated scribal offices. Few employees were Christian or former catechists. Finally, the new-style mission school became a site of upper-caste political mobilization. Upper-caste privilege began to be presented as “Hindu” in the hope of gaining the sympathy of Company officials, many of whom privileged the religious autonomy of their subjects and opposed missionary conversion strategies.70 Eager parents sent their sons to these schools, but increasingly articulated their hostility to what they claimed was an underlying rhetoric of conversion in mission schools. A series of public affrays around missionary conversion in the 1820s generated an upper-caste Hindu public through the trope of religious violation. Senior Cutcherry employees were crucial members of this public. They allied with the old mercantile elite and participated widely in these controversies, signing petitions and attending public meetings. Clearly, by the mid-nineteenth century, the school had acquired a new place in society. The tinnai school was widely perceived as an inept teacher of textual practice rather than being recognized as an institution of mnemonic learning. The occlusion of the skills and arts of memory generated the idea that memorization was a technique by which to learn written texts by rote. The discussion about pedagogic intervention widely disseminated a grammar-centered approach to pedagogy, but this remained largely a norm against which Indian education was measured. Concrete interventions were largely restricted to issues of the content of texts and the forms of textbook culture. Second, new schools and textbooks became a lucrative business, thanks to missionary and Company interests in the mental cultivation of their subjects. Missionary reports

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are replete with schoolmasters seeking employment and taking villagers to mission stations to convince missionaries to support a school. The school became a site at which to learn books by heart, and schools arbitrated the distribution of language skills. The scribal activities of Company offices not only produced mounds of paper in the early nineteenth century but also reconstituted the norms of knowledge and acceptable communication at a much deeper level—by generating the idea that one went to school to learn to read and write.

part iii Document Raj

chapter five

Duplicity and Evidence

T

he Company’s efforts to institute “perfect recordation” in the colony did little to abate the crisis of trust in the cutcherry and law courts. Anxiety about the duplicity of paper was acute in the very institutions where procedure was supposed to manage writing’s risk and make transactions transparent and reliable. Company officers were not only deeply enmeshed in the problem of discerning the credibility and evidence of quotidian claims, they also had to secure their own paper from unauthorized duplication. An enduring crisis of attestation expressed the underlying instability of writing’s relationship to law. Officials articulated the limitations of the Company’s documentary capacities most vividly in discussions of forgery and perjury. In 1857, H. Forbes the acting secretary to the Government, Revenue, and Public Works Department, wrote this about the widespread counterfeiting of documents in Madras Presidency: There is probably no part of our whole judicial system, or indeed of our whole system of administration . . . , that is productive of so much evil, or that gives more just cause of dissatisfaction to the people, than the very great facilities which our law and practices give to the production of false evidence, to perjury and forgery.1

Such worries about the Company’s ineffable failure to assure reliable transactions in Madras by the mid-nineteenth century motivated calls for tighter structures of discipline such as better judicial training, legal codification, improved property registration, and police reform. The persistent anxiety over false evidence in official correspondence expressed as cultural alterity—“native” duplicity—sustained the universal

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claim of the rule of law and its application by force. In the nineteenthcentury Madras courtroom, discourses of “native” duplicity provided the grounds for asserting summary control over courtroom procedure. 2 By the late nineteenth century, notions of Indian mendacity helped expand the authority of medical jurisprudence and other truth technologies. 3 Forbes’ memorandum on false evidence, however, hints at some further complexities in the threat posed by counterfeit to bureaucratic authority. The intense concern with crimes of duplicitous writing and speaking—forgery and perjury—demonstrates the degree to which documents and their authenticity were crucial to the Company’s claim to sovereign and bureaucratic authority and at the same time a source of its greatest vulnerability. The bureaucracy of letters rests on protocols of attestation. Attestation protocols, the manner in which official documents are signed, sealed and written, given and taken, form the basis of credible claims. However, at once, they also generate their own refutability. What was so discomfiting to Company officials was that those they accused of being duplicitous, in turn, associated the new government of rules with duplicity. “Respectable inhabitants” told Forbes, for example, that half the civil suits brought before Company courts were “either supported by forged documents and false evidence or answered by an assertion that the documents on which the suit is founded are forgeries.”4 Inhabitants associated Company law courts with fraud. The threat of counterfeit thus framed the very operation of the Company’s bureaucratic authority. The regulation of false claims was crucial to the assertion of bureaucratic authority across the British Empire. An unprecedented moral value had come to be attached to forgery in Britain when worries emerged about the security of paper credit during the age of the fi nancial revolution. 5 The Statute of Frauds of 1677 required conveyances to be in writing. The fear that written instruments were circulating like specie caused a deep anxiety about the risk of paper.6 Indeed, forgery was deemed a capital crime in Britain when the security of private credit came to be considered essential to national prosperity and public debt was institutionalized. By the early nineteenth century, such preoccupations with unauthorized paper had begun to play out differently in the metropole and Madras. Around that time, liberals in Britain had begun to call for the end of capital punishment.7 The controversy around the counterfeit of the Bank of England’s small notes triggered a public outcry in Britain about

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the severe punishment of forgery by capital punishment. Soon after, the strengthening of the adversarial trial restricted the discretionary ambit of juries and gave greater prominence to what legal experts had begun to call the law of evidence in the metropole.8 In Madras, by contrast, the anxieties over duplicity led to a widening of the ambit of the crime of perjury, as Wendie Schneider’s study shows.9 The very question of duplicity was closely bound up with the operation of selective documentation. Important here, as we will see, were recommendations of Thomas Munro that paperwork be actively reduced to expand the police powers of officials and, in consequence, the problem of duplicity in Madras was inseparable from the ways in which growing discretionary power shaped the production of evidence. A regime of conquest that, ironically, idealized perfect recordation as the foundation for the government of rules, had to resort to selective writing to enhance its policing powers. The Company government in Madras began to secure and regularize documentary transactions to counter allegations of its corruption in metropolitan discussions and to install the regime of property rights. However, revenue and police subordinates were given strategic exemptions from the paper trail, to preserve the state’s policing capacity. The interplay between recording and granting exemptions from the record can be termed a form of selective documentation. While the extant textual habits of the kanakkans in the cutcherry and their illegible land records attracted the Company’s ire and inaugurated a relationship of tutelage and discipline, exemption from the record rendered the policing powers of the state off the record. Selective documentation installed signatures, oaths, and other attestation practices as the keystone of everyday bureau rule on the one hand and, on the other, rendered subordinates’ police actions unaccountable. Unlike office secrets held in uncirculated fi les,10 the activities of subordinate police were literally unknowable, except through informers’ letters or petitions. Such an orientation to writing enabled a type of discretion endemic to modern colonial bureaucracy that sits uneasily with Weberian formulations. Weber acknowledges that outside the domain of lawmaking and court procedure, general norms were conceived as barriers to the official’s creative activity to attend to individual circumstances. But this “creative administration” was not “the realm of free, arbitrary action and discretion, of personally motivated favor and valuation,” which he identified with “pre-bureaucratic forms” of administration. Rather, it

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was undertaken in the name of the “specifically modern and strictly ‘objective idea’ of raison d’état.”11 To Weber, even if raison d’état is inseparably fused with power interests and might quickly become arbitrary, in principle it remains a characteristic of a system of rationally debatable reason that stands behind every act of bureaucratic administration. As Radhika Mongia writes, the efficacy of the “unnamed racist strategy of law” lies in the operation of bureaucratic discretion between the letter and spirit of the law.12 In the twilight world created by selective documentation, raison d’état and arbitrary rule were blurred. A government of rules was installed through the exercise of discretion. Furthermore, selective documentation operated such that the governed saw the courts of the colonial state as spaces of duplicity. Under such conditions of mounting police power and inquisition, and a rapidly expanding adalat system, duplicity became an acute and more-than-ordinary crime; it represented counterfeit consciousness.13

Signatures Past: Testimonial Attestation and Credible Writing Practices Company officers were initially less concerned with stabilizing oathtaking practices than with consolidating their political presence in conquered territories. For example, Company officials took a flexible view of oath-taking practices. In the eighteenth century, the Madras Mayor’s Court expected litigants to take the “pagoda oath.” The oath consisted of bathing in a temple tank, solemnly declaring the truth, and then confi rming it by extinguishing temple lamps. When a group of Gujarati merchants refused, the court imprisoned them, but the Madras governor, fearing a breach of peace, released them.14 In 1791, while hearing a case against his assistant, Captain Read readily agreed with the prosecutor’s demand that one of the witnesses who had already taken the oath in court take an oath in a temple.15 Furthermore, at this time, Company officers relied on a settlement’s accountants and notables to give evidence on revenue affairs and arbitrate disputes, even though they felt that “native juries” diminished the Company’s sovereignty and tried to undermine them whenever possible.16 In the hinterland, notable mediation was initially crucial to the early British arbitration of land claims.17 In the politico-juridical realm, institutions of collective attestation adjudicated the relationship of written documents to legally enforceable

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practices of credibility such as the honoring of contracts.18 Attestatory authority was wielded by accountant scribes, assemblies, and prominent notables and was derived from their juridical powers. Recall that kanakkans signed and witnessed bills of sales and other instruments and that these records rested on an evidentiary paradigm of testimonial attestation. This form of testimonial attestation undergirded the ways in which evidence was collected to resolve disputes. Kanakkans helped collective assemblies (maha¯na¯tu) and notables (na¯.t.ta¯r) to resolve large-scale multicaste disputes. In eighteenth-century Company port towns, the dominant merchants and dubashes (private brokers and language translators), who were close to Company traders, frequently led collective assemblies. Notables routinely accompanied investigators to the scene of the crime and attested petitions and testimonies.19 Such modes of testimonial attestation produced the kaifiyat (kaif ¯ı yatna¯ma¯) a report genre usually made up of subgenres. Kaifiyats essentially functioned as “summaries of evidence” publicly attested by the “respectable inhabitants” or notables of the settlement. 20 The Persianate kaifiyat probably entered Tamil and Telugu through Niyogi and Maratha Brahmin bureaucrats. 21 Early modern genres could be subtly modulated. Babu Row’s kaifiyat was by no means the only mode in which we fi nd such documents. A kaifiyat could offer a summary of facts to petition the sovereign. A supplication addressed to Colin Mackenzie by a Brahman monastic head from Senji seeking revenue remission was composed as an account of particulars or a kaifiyat. In sum, kaifiyats were part of a larger category of collectively attested Persianate documents called mah.z.ar. 22 A mah.z.arna¯ma¯ was a publicly attested summary of evidence typically generated as a legal document of proof (for land possession, for example), a recognition of a bona fide claim and documentary evidence in an indictment. Prominent inhabitants of different castes of a settlement collectively attested every part of the kaifiyat. They attested to every step of the investigation and the collection of evidence. Declarations, confessions, and testimonies (Tamil: va¯kkumu¯lam; sometimes called by the Persian word “ikra¯r”) were addressed to them and they would guarantee the veracity of the statement. None of the declarations were made under routine oath. 23 If the assembly or an official suspected them to be false, he usually insisted that the deponent perform a trial of ordeal or take an oath of exculpation. Truth telling was not a matter of sincerity but an action deeply imbri-

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cated with hierarchy and notions of divinity. Truthful and credible attesters belonged to the restricted circle of the powerful who could claim greater proximity to the divine. This meant that other than upper-caste men, only a few select persons, such as non-elite specialists, were deemed capable of truthful speech. Non-elite specialists could give authoritative statements in certain contexts alone, and provided they received divine powers through ceremonial ritual. For example, the testimony of the invariably Dalit boundary runner (ellaiyo¯.t i), was conventionally accepted by disputants. He would demarcate the boundary line only after undergoing ritual ceremonies that would invite divine power into his body and help him discharge his duty like a divine arbitrator. Testimonial attestation was permeated with theological connotations and conceived as a sanctified act in which the divine spoke through the attester. Such an understanding explains why elites viewed the nineteenth-century Company courtroom with great ambivalence. They felt that being asked to take an oath and stand in the witness box was disrespectful. 24 A variety of signature practices flourished in the subcontinent prior to the Company’s intervention because small groups of elites provided an important juridical interface between sovereigns and subjects. 25 Familial networks and friendships anchored the personal credibility of the merchants and bankers who operated through systems like the hundi that would deliver credit at astonishing speed. 26 The credibility of signatures was in the hands of professional scribes and accountants because they alone possessed the specialized expertise to examine handwriting and signatures on financial bonds. While individuals were certainly matched to their handwriting, document authenticity rested on a range of lexical traits and chains of attestation. 27 Scribal practices of discerning forgery did not privilege the veracity of a self-referential signature. Indeed, since only a small group of experts— scribes—could write and verify documents, the norms for discerning the authenticity of writing rested within the domain of those familiar with lexical knowledge and those trained to make such assessments out of habit. Phillip Wagoner observes that the Niyogi scribes of the Arcot court could match individuals to their handwriting and were familiar with practices of verification, but forgery was discerned through a graphological awareness that was in equal parts determined by personal knowledge of handwriting and lexical awareness of documentary language. 28 Wagoner’s observations about the scribal habituation to writing credibility resonate with what we know about the courtly epistolary

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practices of the subcontinent, which would suggest that an authentic document had to contain recognizable recurrent stylistic formulae and other distinctive lexical usages. This meant that forgery involved the lexical transgression of a memorized (and hence remembered) standard of lexical norms. As Narsinga Rao, the scribe and defendant, explained in response to a question at the 1809 Arcot forgery trial in Madras: [My opinion on the genuineness of bonds] has been founded principally upon a knowledge of the hand-writing of the persons in the Nabob’s service, who were generally employed to write Bonds; and I sometimes judged of the spuriousness of the Bonds from the tenor of them, which was different from that in which true Bonds were usually written. 29

The strong traditions of witnessing in the time prior to the establishment of adalat courts meant that documents bore signatures and marks as a form of collective attestation rather than as representations of individually verifiable signs made in a signatory’s own hand. Unlettered marked documents or those from social inferiors were deemed legitimate if men of authority guaranteed their authenticity. Put in other way, it was so difficult for social inferiors to call documents forgeries that, in certain specific cases, collective attestation was not required to enforce an instrument. Village palm-leaf documents collected from the personal archives of landowners from mid-nineteenth-century Tanjavur indicate that many who did not write incised a kaikkı¯ ru or kaina¯.t.tu, a graffito mark. 30 A ˉ slave deed (at. imai pattiram) from 1854, written on palm leaf and binding a Dalit servant to his Maratha Brahman master, illustrates this practice: Sri Rama Jayam. Anandan year, Vaikasi, 9th day. This is the deed of slavery given to Kondayampettai Ramachandra Iyer residing in Mandurai by his panai-pallan, Anandan, on account of marriage. Whereas I borrow this day from you Rs. 13 and 5 kalam of paddy for conducting the marriage of my son Govindan I agree that the said Govindan and his entire family shall become your slaves and work in your farm. This kiral Anandan. Witnesses kiral Arumugam of Nagar, the panai-pallan of Ayyathurai Aiyar and maternal uncle of Govindan. This kiral Channasi of Mandurai. 31

The signatories, all of whom were agricultural laborers, each incised a mark on the document that was neither singular nor unique. 32 Sometimes—especially if the prevalent practice was to write on paper rather

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than to incise on palm leaf—the marks could be specific to a certain caste or community because it was possible to draw monograms on paper or stamp it with seals. Stray references suggest that particular groups used unique signs that distinguished their profession or caste: for example, goldsmiths in Batala, Punjab, drew a flower; low-caste Christians in Nagapattinam used the cross; ironsmiths in Maharashtra used the tongs; and women in Bengal dipped a fi nger in vermilion and used it to stamp the paper. 33 Signing for oneself was distinguished from signing for others by performative phrases. 34 These phrases varied from region to region depending on convention, such that scribes could identify the region of a document’s origin according to the phrases’ variations. By the same token, signatures did not “bind” agreements in perpetuity; it was not unknown for an individual to dispute things like bond obligations notwithstanding his signature. 35

The Regulation of Attestation in Early Colonial Madras The tightening of attestation practices began only when the credibility of the Company’s management of credit networks was severely compromised and public scandals erupted in Britain regarding the circulation of forged bonds in Madras. To be sure, cases of forgery were adjudicated in Company enclaves before the scandal—the Madras Supreme Court adjudicated forgery, and in Bengal, in 1775, the trial at which Raja Nandakumar was sentenced to death for forgery, acquired great notoriety. In Madras’s courts too, forgery and perjury were deemed crimes, but they were not initially considered a general public offense. 36 In 1808, allegations were made that the commission established to settle the debts of a deposed prince, the Nawwab of Arcot, had received forged bills of credit from many people who claimed to be his private creditors. An anonymous pamphlet published in London declared: A few years ago when it was publicly known that an adjustment of the debts of the late nabob of Carnatic was about to take place, a very considerable amount of nabob’s bonds [sic] appeared in the market of Madras, and many of them were daily hawked about at much lower prices than paper of the same denomination was sold for, before it was known that any arrangement of this debt was to take place. It was then reasonably suspected, and it has since

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been proved, that the durbar servants were principally concerned in the fabrication of these spurious bonds, they having enjoyed a greater facility of giving colour to their claims, by connecting them with the real transactions, in the records to which they had free access. 37

The Arcot forgery was the fi rst serious crisis faced by the Madras government after its attempts to reestablish institutional credibility in the wake of severe scandals. The outcry dragged Madras officers through the proverbial mud in London. For the fi rst time, observations were made about the “pervasiveness” of forgery among the natives of Madras. Subordinate scribes became the metonym for the governed. The accused, Reddy Row and Ananda Row, both employees of the Arcot court, were publicly named “forgers” and “perjurers,” and notices of their trial in the Madras Supreme Court circulated widely. By 1813, when writing about the problem of fraud and corruption in the Madras government, F. W. Ellis, a prominent administrator, could take for granted that perjury was “more frequent among the natives of India than among peoples of other countries.”38 An orientation that selectively accepted diverse modes of attestation practice had turned into a political project in search of cultural forms of legality that would elicit truth in revenue offices and law courts. The racialized cultural descriptions of purported “native” deception and dishonesty in Madras coincided with the Company’s regulation of attestation practice. In 1811, a modified version of the Bengal regulations on forgery was introduced. It redefi ned forgery and perjury as “public” crimes against the state. Forgery was now “all fraudulent and injurious fabrications or alterations of written deeds or written or printed papers, counterfeit seals, or signatures and the illicit imitation of any public stamp or stamped paper established by the government.”39 Perjury was “giving intentionally and deliberately, before a court of Judicature, magistrate or other authorized officer, a false deposition upon oath, or under a solemn declaration taken instead of an oath.”40 These redefi nitions sought to control written communicative practice by asserting the Company’s control over attestation practices. The regulation of attestation constituted the art of government by writing under Company rule. The regulations of 1811 capped a series of institutional interventions that subordinated notables, collective assemblies, and scribal accountants by selectively dismantling their juridical powers. The 1802 regulations that brought a settlement’s scribe un-

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der the purview of the crime of forgery also endowed European officers with notarial powers. From 1808, the Madras government, following an empire wide turn, began protracted attempts to enforce stamped documents, essentially stipulating that all legal instruments should be written on stamped paper to be admissible in a court.41 Police powers were also rapidly reorganized in the military consolidation that followed the war against recalcitrant military chieftains, the “poligar” or pa¯.laiyakka¯rar in the early years of 1800. In the hinterland, the Company curtailed the chieftains’ powers by decree, and deposed and transported them overseas if they resisted.42 By 1809–10, in addition to law courts, ad hoc “committees” of British police and revenue officers investigated caste disputes and other events of political disturbance, replacing the juridical powers exercised by multicaste assemblies.43 Thus by 1810, elite inhabitants lost their autonomous juridical powers to collectively attest, marshal, and adjudicate evidence, except as and when directed by European officers. This loss of juridical autonomy allowed the Madras government to encompass attestation practices, yoking them to a new structure of rule whose lynchpin was not the forum of assembled elites but the courtroom and the Company’s office. Company procedure in the fi rst decade of the nineteenth century insisted that all deponents had to index their declarations individually: they had to take an oath before giving evidence and then verify the written version of their testimony by signing or marking it in their own hand in the presence of the Company judge or collector and registrar. Centralizing attestation in this manner meant that only the moment that the testimony was taken in a law court could be attested, whereas previously, a text genre like the kaifiyat could attest to the “facts” of the crime. Now they had to be admitted as evidence. With the institution of adalat courts, the vakkumulam became a stand-alone document, a written testimony or “deposition” subject to interrogation. Kaifiyats, not unlike the Marathi bakhars, acquired another life.44 Collected by orientalists and shorn of their juridical truth, they became literary sources of history remembered by high-caste inhabitants.45 Separated from their powers of attestation, the respectable reappeared in the Company office and courtroom as petitioners who submitted to Company authorities as “respectable inhabitants.” Such petitions contain the shadowy presence of collective assembly spokesmen who, under a previous regime, had been the legitimate keepers of social order, arbitrators of disputes, and, most importantly, gatekeepers of attestation.

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Consolidation of the Signature and Ensuing Struggles The regulation and tightening of attestation reframed the signature as the keystone of governance. The Regulation of 1811, for example, did not distinguish between acts of willed forgery and subornation to forgery. In cases of forged documents, Company courts could henceforth convict both the apparent signatory and the actual document writer. Officers could now decide whether signing for another person, frequent in scribal societies, was an act of forgery. At stake was not just the legal form of documents, which would be assessed or guaranteed by the scribal expert and his signature, but the very act of signing itself. In short, discretionary control over attestation protocols endowed the signature with great and singular force. These interventions, however, created the conditions for the signature act to become the node of a fraught political struggle. In South India, as elsewhere, the circulation of a sovereign’s signature was restricted and it was received ceremonially as an embodied insignia of incorporation.46 Sealing also served as a talisman. Elaborate royal seals, held in the Mughal court by the senior ladies of the harem, stamped the document with the imprint of the king’s person. A king rarely signed in his own hand, except as a mark of special favor, which is why royal documents bearing his hand were received with ceremonial festivities in the presence of a locality’s notables.47 Srinivasakavi’s eighteenth-century Sanskrit poem Aˉnandaran˙ga Vijayacampuh., about the Dubashi broker and translator Ananda Ranga Pillai, describes a Mughal royal patent (farma¯n) arriving in a silver palanquin in French Pondicherry in a Persianate style: fanned with flywhisks, received with ritual salutes (sala¯ms) and by a convivial gathering where betel leaf and perfumes were served.48 In the seventeenth century, grants engraved on copper (pat..tayam) bestowed to headmen and chieftains by Nayaka kings, were venerated and displayed along with other objects of office such as a carpet (kampal.am), a spittoon, a vase for sprinkling water, and a pair of sandals.49 Collective ritualized viewing of the royal signature and restricted circulation anchored the royal person. 50 Writing for oneself was relatively unusual; it tended to be an especially marked performance. This is why, when the Company began to demand routine signatures, local rulers protested that repetitive signature denuded their authority. In 1809, the Raja of Tanjavur felt personally dishonored when a Company judge asked him

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to personally sign and seal his response to legal queries. Protesting this requirement, the Raja wrote: It is the custom to send these papers [from my dufter] with my sirkeel’s [minister] sign . . . but at the present the judge wished my answer to his question with my seal and signature which you know . . . is very disgraceful and dishonor to me [sic]. 51

Signatures also became the object of allegations of duplicity and corruption. In 1797, when chiefs were being compelled to pay tribute to the Company, the Sivagiri chieftain complained that the Company’s Ramnad collector demanded excessive cash tributes and was pressuring him to sign a muchalika (Tamil: muccalikka¯ ; Persian: muchalka) a Persianate document of fealty executed by tenants, which he said demeaned his chieftaincy. 52 Signing a muchalika would turn the chieftain into a Company vassal. Jackson, the collector, in turn accused Sivagiri of sending anonymous letters to Company gentlemen accusing the Ramnad collectorate of corruption. Jackson claimed that the chieftain was dishonorable because the accusations were unsigned: If the poligar had any real cause to complain of measures [sic] . . . stated in the cadjan [palm leaf], . . . if the most malicious rancour Measure [sic] has not actuated him . . . he would not have taken this method to obtain redress, when he could not be ignorant that he had the means easily . . . to lay his grievances before your Board. His signature merely to the olai [palm leaf] would have been sufficient to procure him the most ample redress . . . but . . . he knew he could not go without being detected. 53

By accusing Sivagiri of insincerity, Jackson proffered a preferred way of establishing credibility, where the repetitive signature was the honorable mode of standing in public, being visible and legible to a governing authority. It was in these moments of mutual accusations of insincerity that the signature took on the full burden as the routine sign of an intentional subject and a primary mark of documentary authenticity in early colonial South India. The Company’s documents bore seals and signatures, much like as their Persianate predecessors, but its efforts to stabilize the signature as a repetitive performance of authentication, in addition to a mark of consent, transformed ordinary documentary practices. By the early 1800s,

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Company regulations commanded officers to personally and repeatedly sign documents in their own hand and all their uncovenanted employees to sign muchalikas of loyalty. The flurry of signing led to some insurmountable problems. After many Company officers wrenched many muchalikas of fealty from princes and commoners, servants and subjects F. W. Ellis, as collector of Madras, warned the governor and the Board of Revenue of the ill effects of excessive signing. Commenting on a proposal to regulate subordinates by making them sign written agreements, he noted that taking muchalikas would not deter those predisposed to dishonesty: “The . . . papers may . . . have temporary effect but when constantly demanded under the same circumstances it soon degenerates into mere form and loses all the importance that might adventitiously be attached to it.”54 Ellis’s comments reveal that the struggle over the signature resulted less from a cultural misunderstanding of its significance, or a lack of recognition between the Company and its subjects, than from an official effort to remake its significance. The Company’s insistence on repeated inscription had denuded the value of signature, which had hitherto relied precisely on its restrictedness. In effect, it had formulated attestation in ways that inhabitants could subvert, and subvert at will. Officers also soon found that their own signatures and facsimiles were vulnerable to duplication. Subversive employees used facsimiles without authorization for personal benefit. 55 More blatant acts of misusing official names were not unknown.

Munro and the “Mischief Makers” In 1814, stories began to follow Thomas Munro’s arrival in Tanjavur that disaffected inhabitants had written several letters to the administrator complaining of embezzlement in the revenue office. Change, the rumors went, was imminent. The collector of Tanjavur dismissed these threats because they were spread by “notorious troublemakers,” disgruntled former employees. The rumors resurfaced the next year when news circulated of Munro’s arrival in the area. This time a crisis seemed imminent because the collector found that collecting taxes was difficult when subjects expected him to be indicted for corruption by a person no less than Munro. Munro was reported to have been endowed with powers superior to the

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Board of Revenue and even of the government itself. More disturbingly, the collector wrote that Colonel Munro’s name was misused by some of the “worst characters” of the community for the purpose of extorting money. 56 Apparently this time, letters were now being written under the favor of the Colonel’s name demanding money and grain from public servants. By September 1816, fearing that the authority of the government was under severe threat, the collector wrote to the Board of Revenue in Madras describing the agitated state of the public mind and his inability to verify whether the use of Munro’s name in these letters was authorized. He had been unable to verify his suspicions because Munro disavowed any connection to the letter writer and had refused to entertain further discussion. 57 Although the problem of discerning the identity of the forgers of official letters was a pressing one, there was an additional twist. Several letters were received in the Tanjavur office charging Company offices and the collector with embezzlement and fraud. The collector, with his integrity under question and fearful of the impression it made on his superiors in Madras, alleged that the anonymous letters were written by troublemakers seeking to remove him. A few months later, when responding to a query from Madras about the origins of a recent petition, the collector accused the inhabitants of Tanjavur of an innate duplicity: There is perhaps no district in India, where a knowledge of reading and writing is so common and where the mirasdars [landlords] have so much time to send and write as those in Tanjore [Tanjavur], nor is there any district, where this advantage is more abused. Some . . . consider their knowledge chiefly useful as it offers them means of spreading mischief and calumny. There have been instances of a person writing a petition in the name of his enemies containing false charges, . . . a man who wished to slander his neighbor to defame his enemy to keep possession of what he has unjustly acquired . . . , sits down and dresses up a petition in which falsehood and fact, his own and public concerns, are so artfully intermixed, that a person unaccustomed to such statements supposes real grievances are represented. 58

The collector argued that literacy among his subjects merely enhanced their innate proclivity to be deceitful and to commit forgeries. His racialized explanation is a counterpoint to the Company’s well-documented misuse of the coveted Mughal farman in eighteenth-century Bengal. 59 In Tanjavur, the unauthorized use of Munro’s name by subjects had cre-

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ated a veritable crisis in the everyday work of the colonial state. The crisis was more than a case of colonial anxiety caused by the Company’s inability to control the information. It was also not entirely attributable to an innate cultural misunderstanding over gift and contract. Rather, the Munro incident demonstrates how official interventions to centralize and control attestation, attempts to stabilize official documents, were fraught with danger. Pattayams and farmans were modes of fealty that simultaneously instantiated the political, contractual-economic, and symbolic. In contrast, the Munro episode was the effect of the Company’s commitment to disembed documents from this complex knot of relations while installing a culturally appropriate model for eliciting truth and while reducing the juridical autonomy of their subjects. The official insistence on making writing routine pulled apart the protocols of attesting truth. The new system of documentary attestation—unfettered by the collective validation of respectable inhabitants and bringing about the unrestricted use of signature—had created a world in which writing’s vulnerability to fabrication would persistently threaten colonial authority.

Discretion, Procedure, and Evidentiary Practice The efforts to control the authenticity of written documents continued to elude the Company; the problem of duplication could not be resolved easily. In part, this was because the Company’s adalat system was stymied by the very forms of discretion that had been introduced by regulation. In common law parlance, adalat courts were courts of equity—unlike the Supreme Court of Madras, which was a court of both law and equity.60 As courts of equity, the Madras adalats were enjoined like other equity courts in the British Empire to mitigate the rigors of English common law and to administer justice according to “natural justice, equity and conscience” unless Hindu or Islamic law was in point or a regulation was expressly applied.61 Adalat courts also did not work on the adversarial system. Vakeels were pleaders, not advocates who argued cases; and judges were assisted by Islamic law officers. Trial by jury, even when introduced in criminal courts, was subject to the discretion of the judge in Madras. As many scholars have shown, the incremental modification by regulation of Islamic criminal law consolidated the discretion of judges over courtroom procedure and substantively modified extant modes of dis-

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cerning evidence.62 Judges were empowered to overrule their law officers’ discernment of evidence, as well as any exceptions they may have granted, if these opinions were considered repugnant to justice and conscience, even if legal innovations that followed were sometimes reincorporated as operating within the categories of Islamic law.63 Regulations like the one on forgery and perjury greatly entrenched and further consolidated the sphere of conscience-based judicial action. Unhampered by precedence and trial by jury and empowered by “good conscience,” judges began to view their work as determining “matters of fact” (typically the provenance of juries in Britain) and not “matters of law” like their peers at home. As discretionary powers of judges ran the gamut from determining punishment to overruling the opinions of native law officers on evidence and punishment, decisions often came down to hunches. Julia Maitland, a judge’s wife, joked in her letters home that her husband, a criminal judge in Rajahmundry in the 1830s, “judged by the manner and countenance of a witness rather than by his evidence.”64 Unlike judicial discretion in Britain, which emphasized the judge’s assessment of the evidence for a case, the widening purview of judicial discretion in Madras, as Schneider argues, was determined by the fear of mendacity. The radically different assessments that could emerge about the credibility of witnesses or documents made for low rates of conviction. Yet low conviction rates did not imply that allegations of duplicity had no effect. The court, rather, was saturated with these allegations. The rulers and the ruled viewed each other through the lens of duplicity in a context of selective documentation or the strategic thinning of the official paper trail. In 1816 the Madras government acted on Thomas Munro’s recommendations to “reduce paperwork” in the name of efficiency. In contrast to Lord Cornwallis, who established cutcherry administration in Bengal with his reforms of 1793 and favored the separation of the magistracy and executive, Munro did not favor the separation of the magistracy and executive. To Munro, the separation made government inefficient, the collector indecisive, and governmental practices culturally alien to the inhabitants. The reforms of 1816, his brainchild, consolidated revenue and police powers in the collector’s establishment. Collectors were given magisterial powers, police powers of their particular native subordinates were enhanced, and petty civil cases were devolved to village council elites. Paper trails of executive activity were made harder to arbitrate while the basic system of law courts was

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retained. The regulation of evidence in Madras was rendered subservient to police interrogation and revenue matters.65

Discretion and Interrogation The reforms of 1816 were initiated to enhance the latitude of collectors while also enhancing the authority of native subordinates over inhabitants. The devolution of authority was not a simple case of enabling native self-governance but a peculiar form of indirect rule. Munro argued that the delegation of police and revenue powers to native agents would help improve the character of the elite: Nothing surely can tend more strongly to raise men in their estimation and to make them act up to it, than being thought worthy of being entrusted with the distribution of justice to their countrymen and no motives can be made more powerful in attaching a body of men to a government, than the consciousness that they are not neglected by it—that confidence is placed in them—that though in a subordinate capacity they form a material part of internal administration.66

At the same time, the Madras Board of Revenue described “native corruption and duplicity” as stemming from a lack of proper moral education. Indeed, in 1815, a few months before the introduction of laws delegating judicial powers, the secretary to the Board wrote: We are far from believing that the artful intrigues, corrupt compacts, daring embezzlements, the hardy frauds and the shameless perjuries of the Native revenue officers, which have of late so much disgraced this department, . . . can be traced to any depravity inseparable from the character of the Hindoos. We think they are to be attributed to very different causes; chiefly to the want of any inducement to resist temptations . . . , to their defective education and laxity of morals. . . .67

The worry about duplicity was expressed in a racial stereotyping of natives as corrupt and coupled it with the pious hope that the devolution of administrative powers would generate more honesty among the elite. Munro’s reforms certainly yoked elites to the Company’s paternalistic rule, as T. H. Beaglehole has argued.68 But the delegation of power to native

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elites in 1816 did not curtail the discretionary authority of collectors or exempt subordinates from the frame of paternalistic tutelage. It enhanced the powers of the Company in village society and allowed the revenue establishment to dominate over the demands of justice.69 In effect, the paternalistic reforms made the judicial system as a whole subservient to revenue collection and policing in Madras with severe consequences for the collection of facts and evidence. The issue was not just that the nature of judicial proceedings were reliant on written documents but that legal reforms completely changed the terrain on which evidence was collected and crime investigated. The 1816 reforms empowered collectors with greater authority to deal with civil cases and the power to commit persons to jail for crimes. Collectors relied on the invariably high-caste Brahman tahsildars to investigate crimes, prepare reports, produce culprits, and, most importantly, take preliminary depositions, greatly enhancing their police powers and integrating policing and documentary practice. Unfettered by notables, tahsildar subordinates, now responsible only to European superiors, could defi ne a crime and institute its documentation. Furthermore, in 1821, subordinate officials, in addition to the tahsildars, were allowed to conduct preliminary investigation on a variety of cases, and tahsildars were no longer required to write down depositions, all in an attempt to cut paperwork. The regulations extended the investigative powers of subordinates by arguing that whereas it is also expedient that the preliminary powers of investigation for the discovery of offences and apprehension of offenders which are now vested only in tahsildars or other head officers of the district police should be delegated to competent subordinate officers in different parts of each talook. . . .70

Second, the regulations permitted tahsildars not to take down depositions in petty cases: The same exemption from the necessity of recording depositions is hereby granted to tahsildars and other head police officers of districts in the examination of cases in which it is competent for them to pass decisions.71

In the meantime, committees of village notables or elders, the panchayat, and native judges were allowed to hear civil cases. Village headmen

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could hear confessions and mete out summary punishment in “trivial” cases.72 The devolution of punitive and interrogation functions in the guise of judicial power and revival of ancient custom in the institution of village councils secured the petty official’s immunity from written accountability. The result was a massive reorganization of power relations in Madras. By the mid-1820s, a small number of Company-sponsored rural elite, village headmen, native judges, village policemen, and revenue officers began to possess hitherto unknown powers. They acted in the name of the Company regime, even as the regime operated through their discretionary authority. It also created the problem of “false depositions.” In cases where evidence was taken, the village and district officers’ vice-like grip over rural society and their ability to extract confessions through coercion meant that deponents often went to court and retracted their preliminary depositions or confessions. The problem of coerced confessions, readily acknowledged by the judges in their departmental correspondence right through the early nineteenth century, came to a head when a famous commission of inquiry uncovered routine torture of inhabitants by subordinate officials in 1855.73 By then, judicial pronouncements to mitigate coerced confessions had served only to tighten discretion within a racialized bureaucratic structure. English judges saw contradictory depositions as acts of duplicity or corruption and perjury. In 1827, a new regulation modifying the defi nition of perjury declared that, in numerous cases, witnesses were inclined to give contradictory depositions and that it was difficult to discern the correct declaration: That numerous cases have occurred in which a party or witness has given two contradictory depositions in regard to the same matter or matters of fact, and although in such cases, one of the two depositions must necessarily be false, it is often difficult to ascertain in which the perjury was committed, and this heinous crime thus frequently escapes punishment.74

These measures taken in the courtroom did not legally limit the ample discretionary powers of police subordinates, but instead called for the greater supervision of these officers by European superiors. Consequently, the everyday production of admissible documents such as depositions and confessions remained saturated by the threat of force and counterfeit. Radhika Singha suggests that contrary depositions and ready

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confessions were performances of compliance by offenders, but that they could also have been the result of police coercion or even a healthy trade in false witnesses.75 Official correspondence on the subject suggests that force and counterfeit were now completely imbricated with documents and that allegations of misconduct were entirely deflected onto police subordinates.76 Though tahsildari policing abuses were quickly ascribed to an innate “native” despotism, in fact, they were the result of the policies of selective documentation and the novel structure of power produced to meet the Company’s policing needs. A year after the regulation on prevarication was introduced, judges were empowered to write down depositions at their discretion.77 The consolidation of discretion in this way suggests that the empowerment of local elites was not just the reinstatement of an old-regime social group, or simply a matter of colonial accommodation. These regulations not only materially shaped the law archive of the Company state; they bore a huge consequence for Madras inhabitants. Ordinary people became subject to the discretion of the tahsildar because he became the collator of criminal evidence for courts and arbitrator of petty criminal cases. He could restrain inhabitants without warrant for twenty-four hours, threaten to haul them off to the collector’s office—where they would be subject to the collector’s discretion— without giving any reason, and force them to sign or mark papers under the threat of perjury or forgery. Petty offenders became more vulnerable to harassment, policing, and extrajudicial means of extracting evidence. In turn, inhabitants routinely competed to offer bribes for the tahsildar’s discretion. Company correspondence made frequent observations about native duplicity in terms of rampant forgery and false evidence and the criminality of the lower orders. In 1826, when the Madras government began to consider regulations against false allegations, many collectors and judges wrote listing the proliferation of false evidence and native duplicity, as a mark of cultural alterity. By the 1850s, when calls for judicial and police reform in Madras gained ground, an anonymous pamphleteer noted that in a complaint of cattle stealing, both parties bribed the tahsildar in amounts exceeding the value of the cattle. The tahsildar restored the cattle to the owner, sentenced the defendant to a fi ne or imprisonment, but let him alone and wrote a “false remark that on default of payment of the fi ne he was in jail.” 78

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In cases that ultimately went up to the Company court, native officers avowed that they could establish the right of any party by manufacturing preliminary depositions: The depositions of witnesses are taken down not verbatim but as smoothed down and freed for all contradictions by the dictation of the tahsildar or his subordinates without cross examination and the same statement is put in the mouths of all deponents. The witnesses on the other side are browbeaten . . . their statements give way before evidence of a large number of witnesses on the favored side [that are made] free from contradictions.79

In addition, elite inhabitants resisted taking oaths in public or attending court in person because these acts diminished their honor as men who were true to their word. If the deponents were upper caste, they refused to take an oath, which in the eyes of English judges made depositions suspect.80 Company regulations had to coerce witnesses to appear in court and give evidence, accommodating upper-caste witnesses by allowing them to take a “solemn declaration.”81 On the other hand, indigent, low-caste, or powerless deponents were viewed suspiciously because they were more likely to confess too readily or insist on performing what the judges thought were “irrational ordeals.” In this manner, judicial intervention in attestation actually contributed to two developments. First, the Company yoked subordinate officials more closely to the regime’s bureaucracy by giving them the individual power to extract evidence. In doing so, the Company state created a class of petty tyrants who used extrajudicial means to undertake preliminary investigations and probably extracted written testimonies and confessions prior to trial. The power of subordinate officers that accrued out of Company bureaucratic expansion calls for a significant modification of scholarly interpretations such as Robert Frykenberg’s classic study of district administration, Guntur District. Frykenberg describes the new Company state as subject to the simultaneous pulls of centralization and “local” influence—the power of the traditional kin networks of local leaders who worked in the Company cutcherry. My argument suggests that the power of the village officers was not so much a case of the continuity of older forms but a novel form of influence that was created by the Company administration. Second, because judicial devolution was not accompanied by the reinstatement of collective attestation

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practices, but represented a situation where discerning “facts” turned more on the material impress of recording procedure—the presence of signatures and the routine of oath taking— anxiety over duplication became the permanent condition for documentary transaction. In turn, “doctoring” documents by seeking the discretion of petty officials became a key way in which subjects dealt with the state.

Conclusion: The Making of Counterfeit Consciousness In the proliferation of discourses about duplicity in Madras lies a story of documentary practices of wider import that has remained obscured in conventional accounts of modern bureaucratization. The Company shifted to a more interrogative or commanding mode of eliciting testimony in response to the metropolitan pressure from the Parliament and the science of political economy to not just arbitrate disputes but aggressively determine “facticity” of claims. The subsequent interventions profoundly reshaped attestation protocols and remade signature practice. Although these efforts reordered the relationship between writing and law, they could not stabilize juridical truth. In the 1850s, a slew of fictitious suits were discovered in Cuddapah and in Guntur, north of Madras town. An “ingenious factory” had come to light where official paper was surreptitiously prepared and seal cutters imitated all manner of facsimiles on potstone and other materials. 82 In the town of Kumbakonam, in the Tamil country, the threat of counterfeit hung heavily in the air. Fittingly, Forbes associated the prevalence of forgery with the increasing number of Company courts in a particular district: It is a fact that Combaconum, in which town alone are 8 civil courts, is now among the natives a word synonymous with fraud. In Tamil a common phrase for don’t cheat me is to say “don’t Combaconum me,” its use is not confi ned to the locality but has spread beyond the precincts of the province and I have been told by a missionary scholar of Tamil that he has seen in a newly published dictionary “Combaconum punnoo—to cheat” entered as an ordinary Tamil verb. . . . Nothing could show more clearly how common forgery and perjury have become, than the name of the place where our courts are most numerous should have become among the people a household word for fraud.83

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The lens of attestation when brought to bear on bureau practice opens a range of contexts, particularly well etched in the colony, that show how the government of rules came to be instituted through allegations of duplicity and the exercise of discretion. It is here that we fi nd a story of the resignification of the signature in the modern bureaucratic state. The Tanjavur collector’s counterallegations of “native duplicity” demonstrate the threat posed by forgery to the state and to his own official reputation. Yet, the struggles over attestation—instantiated in the widespread belief shared by the rulers and ruled that documents submitted to courts were false—shaped the very exercise of colonial power. The crisis of attestation became the grounds on which a new political imagination around “publick business” or governance came into being. Quotidian ways of asserting juridical truth—signing, proffering testimony, and acting as a witness—were permeated with counterfeit consciousness even as these scriptural practices acquired a new authority—again, the case in point being the duplication of Munro’s signature by the Tanjavur “mischief makers.”84 Officially sanctioned bureaucratic forms of signature took on lives of their own in transactions outside the courtroom.85 By arguing that allegations of duplicity became a mode for the articulation of law, I do not argue, of course, that the notion of forgery was in any way new in the region. Discerning counterfeit was an old skill. What was new was that attestation protocols began to turn around the signature as Company officials began to claim that their authority rested on procedure. Ideas of proliferating duplicity in the early nineteenth century are less an indication of the operative status of counterfeit “outside” the law and more a point of entry into the workings of law. Indeed, the discussion of duplicity reveals law’s illicitness and law’s ability to compel and counterfeit consciousness, one might say, developed when the signature acquired a power-laden life of its own. The growing discretionary power to judge juridical truth and the procedural ways to deepen investigative powers of officials intensified the personal signature’s equivocal texture. This character of the signature—it was consistently demanded, produced, duplicated, and constantly suspected—became a central feature of document raj in colonial India. The inhabitants, especially those who did not write for themselves, were particularly invested in the document raj. How and why was this the case? The answer, I suggest, lies in investigating how laypeople were mobilized to partake of written communication, making written documents a node of new sociability in the public arenas of the region. One of

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the prominent ways through which documents became central to a new sociability, I argue, is through petitions addressed to Company officers. The next chapter will develop this theme by looking at the ways in which “a scriptural economy,”86 constituted by the writing of petitions and letters to the state, gradually became the privileged mode of addressing state power.

chapter six

Addressing the Raj

I

n the early nineteenth century, ordinary people in the Madras hinterland demonstrated a remarkable ability to use writing to address the cutcherry. As the cutcherry frontier extended the rule of the Company, writing letters of supplication to officials became the most ubiquitous means to appeal for redress, resolve disputes, or stake claims to resources. The popularity of the petition in Madras was in keeping with its currency in other Company presidencies.1 By the late nineteenth century, well after the demise of Company rule, a commentator on “Petitions and Begging Letters” observed that petitioning was a cottage industry in India: “Every town of any importance has its petition writer, as it has its solicitor or its doctor, and the larger towns have scores of the fraternity.” 2 Petitions compel, not only because they persuade through narration, but because they are a wager on what might reasonably work. 3 A petition is a quintessentially hierarchical form of address that is shaped by the constraints on what can be enunciated by supplicants. By extension, the act of writing supplications under constraint turned ordinary inhabitants into juridical subjects. In Madras, like elsewhere in the British Empire, petitioners appropriated categories of ascription that rendered them culturally bound subjects of imperial law.4 And yet these petitions, addressed as they were to a trading company establishing its administrative grip over the hinterlands of its coastal enclaves, walked a fi ne line between appeals and demand, praise and threats, loyalty and dissent. The dense mediations that produced the petition posed an enduring problem to its promise of direct address. Petitions were written in English, often in a turgid, bureaucratic style disdainfully called “ba-

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boo” [sic], or clerical, English by British commentators. When written in Tamil, they were in cutcherry Tamil. Replete with spoken colloquialisms, borrowings from English, and Persian, Sankrit or Tamil words of honorific address like jana¯b or yajama¯n, petitions remained formulaic, and they were authored and copied in an informal scribal bazaar. Interpreters or clerks read them aloud in the open rooms of the district office or courtroom where the English officer heard them in front of everyone. The Company official dealt with the petition in his capacity as collector, judge, or magistrate and noted his response. The scribal establishment registered the petition and returned the original to the petitioner. Supplicants could appeal to Madras only with the permission of the district official. If the issue needed further attention, fair copies of the petitions in English were sent to Madras, where they were fi led into departmental proceedings. These texts are now consulted in the Company Archives in Madras (Chennai). Given that supplicants themselves rarely wrote petitions, colonial officials decided it was a sincere expression of legitimate demands by reviewing the “diction” of the petition. Thus the intricate linguistic, social, and political theological mediation that produced petitions was rendered invisible. Consider this account by the author of “begging letters:” The lower class Indian whether he be a government servant or a domestic in the household of a European, has a great faith in the efficacy of written appeals. It may be a rise of pay, a spell of holiday, or an appointment for some relative that he wants—whatever it is, he avails himself of the epistolary talents of a letter writer, who for a modest sum of money, speedily furnishes him with a moving appeal to his employer or official superior. There is no attempt made to conceal the source of origin of these productions. In the market places and street corners, the ingenious scribe may be seen with his legs tucked under him—a rude writing pad on his knee laboriously writing out, with the aid of a native reed about the thickness of a walking stick, the communication, which his humble patron who squats placidly by his side, pours into his ear. Naturally in the process of translation the sentiments of the customer are curiously presented and as often not the petition furnishes material for the merriment in the family circle of its recipient. 5

These very structures of mediation made petitions suspect and insincere to the official eye. Indeed, Company officers privileged the sincerity of written address. Their quest for sincere petitioners drew its force from

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an idea of civility that from the late eighteenth century instantiated a new relationship between writing and pacification. As Homi Bhabha observes, the notion of civility fashioned at this time did not stem from the direct consent of the colonized to Lockean property or their assent to Hobbesian law, but lay in the pressing but indirect imperial demand for a form of public-spirited discussion: aural, communal, reasonable, and deemed absent among the colonized.6 The colonial petition of this time, in consequence, did not smoothly proceed from prior cultural practices in the subcontinent. It also did not simply extend the English legality of Company factories, and Mayor’s Court into the Madras hinterland. When Company courts and offices became mandatory institutions that ruled over populations, rather than voluntary and arbitrative as they had been through much of the eighteenth century, the sincerity of direct address assumed a new political importance. In a regime that viewed writing as an inadequate but necessary substitute for public discussion, the written petition became the exemplar of agentive enunciation. It began to be burdened by the demand for sincerity. The demand for sincere civil address demarcated and severed the petition from broader practices of expressing dissent and bargaining collectively, and from extant modes of civility. Prior to the fashioning of the bureaucratic state, written petitions were often embedded in modes of protest such as threatening to withdraw from inhabitations or holding armed assemblies of protest. Under the Company’s document raj, the written petition—now privileged for its expression of civility—became the only legitimate mode of expressing grievance. Petitioning the Company officer ritually, however, called up other connotations of supplication. Petitions to the Company often expressed intense forms of praise, invoking non-Protestant practices of articulating grievance against the sovereign. Imbued with the political theology of ritual address to a divine sovereign, these moments of enunciation attracted official suspicion. Petitioners were considered excessive in their use of prose, “litigious” bordering on tumultuous, and potentially insincere. And yet, although officials remained suspicious of the sincerity of petitions, they relied on the petitions to keep information flowing and provide a check on cutcherry employees. What Bhabha calls a “sly civility” was put into place. Officials demanded sincerity from petitions and in turn this expectation meant that they saw the colonial juridical subject as a double figure, simultaneously too compliant and eternally suspect.

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The figure of the petitioner was, moreover, located in the interstices of the juridical and the information order and not in the courtroom alone. This is why attending to the official expectation that petitions express sincerity provides a useful counterpoint to the scholarly tendency to view the petition as a document of uncomplicated agentive action, a window into the mentalité of supplicants, or diversity of petitioning cultures.

The Political Theology of Petitions The demand for sincerity stemmed from the Company’s legal language of equity that came grounded in Protestant ideologies of conscience and toleration.7 The Company’s Protestant tolerance did not preclude intervention in affairs of religious groups under its care. Indeed, the demand for sincerity, as we will see, became the grounds for severe intervention in the form and place of the petition in the early nineteenth century. Appeals, observes Mary Sarah Bilder, were the single most important tool alongside the charter for delegating authority to corporations in the early modern British Empire.8 Charters empowered trading companies and corporations, legally coded by English law as franchises, to develop autonomous court systems with wide latitude. The appeal structured this delegated authority into an administrative edifice, a bureaucracy of letters. The Company’s appeal, like other English corporate appeals, was moored in the ecclesiastical appeal, a textual form that the Church of England had initially appropriated from the Holy See. The ecclesiastical appeal held that justice lay in the ability to seek redress from a superior power through a rehearing and a reexamination into the facts and merits of the case. Under the Stuarts, the ecclesiastical appeal began to be associated with the king’s sovereign power.9 During the seventeenth century, appeals began to be widely used in courts of equity and in chancery courts that had, by then, been established all over the British Empire to rule with speed and flexibility over non-English subjects who could not be ruled by common law. The justice of equity in these courts was, foremost, based on an idea of royal conscience and official conscientiousness that, more than a theory of right and wrong, was a form of applied knowledge of the rules of conduct to the judgment of particulars.10 Indeed, the promise of equity held out by the reexamination of particulars enabled the ecclesiastical appeal shed its “popish” past and become widely prev-

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alent in these institutions. As we saw in Chapter 5, the promise of equity often functioned as judicial discretion in the nineteenth century Company court room. This idea of equity also promoted the appeal’s lasting role in Company courts in Madras from the eighteenth century.11 Seeking redress in writing was hardly new in the subcontinent but had developed along a different but dense semiotics of supplication. Arzdashts (‘arz.da¯ sht) or supplications were integral to the documentary legacy of Persianate administration and included different types of letters relating to matters of statecraft that were submitted by the “servants” of the state to their superior officials and nobles. Model petitions in Persian and Sanskrit letter-writing manuals suggest that writing petitions to superiors was an essential component of the epistolary arts and courtly decorum, in addition to the civil legal process in the Islamic judges’ court under the Mughals. Arzdashts were composed in the context of more localized disputes as testimonial complaints attested by local assemblies to seek redress. A document form described as a paper case or robe (ja¯ma-i ka¯ghaz¯ı-i maz.lu¯ma¯na) is recorded in a medieval ˉ Persian text whereby the oppressed openly laid their complaints against the privileged.12 Seeking direct redress from the sovereign as a loyal attendant or servant, furthermore, dominated petitioning. To be sure, supplicants could appeal decrees. In Tanjavur, supplicants appealed to the Maratha ruler, Pratap Singh (1739/42–1763) if dissatisfied with the chief judge’s decrees.13 Rather than a material form of delegation, the petition embodied the capacity to directly address the sovereign with various complaints and wishes, seeking favor and grace. From studies of Mughal and South Indian kingship, we know that while commoners could view sovereigns as semi-divine presences through practices of darshan (viewing by a devotee) during which texts were sung as praise and supplication, only select courtiers (darba¯ri) had the privilege of directly addressing their speech to the sovereign. Niels Brimnes observes that access to sovereigns was a central feature of the old political order in South India. In the eighteenth century, inhabitants of the Coromandel widely petitioned the highest authority, such as the governors of Company settlements, giving us reason to believe that these older practices shaped modes of polite address in early nineteenth century Madras in ways that Company officers found difficult to control through their regime of equity.14 Examples of arzdashts suggest that they were written texts of praise and/or fealty that simultaneously and reciprocally (and, some would ar-

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gue, coercively) sought the grace of superiors. Not unlike chits of supplication that festoon temples and mosques with their pleas for favor, the terms of address in petitions also tapped into a polyvalent “hierarchical intimacy” that associated petitioning with divine address.15 A clear resonance of the classical Sanskrit praise rhetoric (prasas´.ti) can be seen in the elaborate Banarasi petitions composed in Sanskrit, inscribed on goldflecked paper (Persian: ka¯ghazi zar-afsha¯n, paper sprinkled with gold) ˉ ˉ ˉ eighteenth-century and addressed to prominent Company conquerors like Warren Hastings and Lord Cornwallis.16 The terms of this devotion made the petition equivalent to an efficacious ritual performance. In the specifically Tamil context of the early nineteenth century, petitions bore marks of other influences. Other than arzis and arzdashts (terms of Persian origin that were commonly used over much of the subcontinent), petitioners used the words “manu” or “vin.n.appam” to refer ˉ to their letters to the Company, evoking the “vin.n.appakka¯ran,” who, in the temple, bore the unique duty to sing sacred hymns in the presence of the deity.17 The term “vin.n.appakka¯ran,” traced to late ninth-century Pallava inscriptions, imbued petitioning with the sentiment and tone of a sacred presentation to a higher authority.18 Indeed, stone inscriptions in temples frequently recorded important decrees and collective claims. Letters distinguished by a specific set of epithets performed a gesture of submissiveness that kept with adab, the code of conduct and moral authority. These addresses of hierarchical intimacy relied on elaborate language. Ornate language was an act of transcendence that detached the supplicant from personal and mundane interests.19 Elaborate address by supplicants, in consequence, summoned up dense virtues of respect (mariya¯tai) along with personal service (upaca¯ram) encompassed in an ideology of good conduct or established usage (marapu). 20 Such a range ˉ of values were brought into the correspondence style of the early Company regime through texts such as The Persian & Urdu Letter-writer and the language schools that trained young Company servants in Bengal. 21 This transposition of older idioms into Company practice was not easy or ever complete. Translated petitions could not communicate the adab that underwrote them. For example, T. H. G. Besant’s English rendering of some examples of Persian and Urdu North Indian petitions— accomplished with the help of his munshi, Namat Khan—display how poetic metaphors and adept phrases were transformed into satire and English mirth in official circles. Besant and Khan translated part of a munshi’s petition bemoaning his brother’s death to his English master

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as the “changeableness of deceitful fortune, and the deception of revolving time (which are the prisoners of the cup of happiness and polluters of the pureness of joy and gladness . . .).” 22 Missionary translators and Company officers, seeking sincere address, remained amused by the extravagant respect shown by younger writers to older addressees. 23 Unlike their courtly predecessors, Company administrators in Madras on circuit in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not accept petitions as expressions of fealty and viewed eulogistic addresses with suspicion.

Disciplining Petitioners: The Pathology of Complaint Company officers sought to use the appeal to structure the Company’s delegated authority into a bureaucratic idiom. They thought that petitioners made repeated appeals for trivial favors and that petitions were insincere because they were neither “original” nor individually written. They also considered petitioners insolent because they addressed superior officials like governors directly by deliberately going over the heads of collectors or immediate supervisors. Correspondence from the late eighteenth century shows that as soon as the East India Company undertook direct administration of the Arcot hinterland, its officials received petitions of complaint from local inhabitants on a variety of issues, which created a view among Company men that inhabitants were pathologically litigious. Such ideas clearly underlie the advice tendered by James Landon, secretary to Council at Fort St. George, to John Dighton, the new collector of the Chingleput area, to bear up and deal with the avalanche of petitions that would inevitably follow his arrival. Landon asked Dighton to deal with the “litigious disposition” of the lower orders by shoring up the influence of local mediators like revenue renters (tax farmers) by enabling them to decide common disputes. 24 Many of these renter mediators were dubashes25 who stood to benefit from arbitrational powers over laboring groups and dominate over nattar, or the rural magnates or notables of the locality. 26 Petitioning was one among many forms of dissent. Peasants and artisans would threaten to run away or refuse to work, and sometimes they voted with their feet. Cultivators would absent themselves quickly from the fields or migrate. This was a serious concern in times of labor scarcity in the late eighteenth century and an important reason for why Com-

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pany men took written appeals seriously and at the same time viewed them with hostility. Thus, Dighton was advised to allow only one person to represent petitioners and to listen carefully to every petition. Only then would he be able to curtail the general tendency among the inhabitants to strike work in large numbers over an issue and seek collective redress. 27 Such strictures, in a way, summoned up a seventeenth-century English past when regulations were passed against tumultuous petitions. Although the tax farmer assisted in the arbitration of disputes, Company collectors were already predisposed to favor individual complaints. They often perceived the lack of identifiable authors as an obstacle to confi rming the veracity of the claims and were hostile to unsigned petitions. For example, in May 1788, the Company received a petition from the oil-pressing Vanniars from three areas of the Chingleput Jaghire. The petition complained against two men of authority: the military chieftain, a Vaduga palaiyakkarar—whom, they claimed, interfered in a marriage ceremony—and the renter of the Chingleput area, whom they accused of destroying the temple dedicated to their tutelary deity and demanding more tax at their annual festival. The oil pressers thus appealed to the Company gentlemen to restrain the juridical power of the two archetypical late eighteenth-century forms of authority—the military chief and the renter. The problem for Collector Dighton was that he could not fi nd a headman of the oil pressers answerable to the claims in the petition, nor could he locate the people who wrote it because it was unsigned. Tellingly, based on the tone—the “diction,” as he put it—of the petition, Dighton wrote that some litigious people in Madras who wished to cause disputes to disturb the area had probably fabricated it.28 Like the Tanjavur collector we encountered in the previous chapter, Dighton faced the same impossibility of legally verifying the truth claims of a written text in the absence of a written signature. Considerable numbers of written appeals like this unsigned “anonymous” petition were submitted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such unsigned petitions were probably a product of extant complaint mechanisms that did not require individuals to sign petitions as a routine form of identification because the corporate affi liation of the claim was deemed sufficient. The Madras government refused to entertain such collective “unsigned” documents in the early nineteenth century. Company circles were also hostile to the ways in which petitioners directly addressed superiors. Officials found that suppliants continued to subvert the administrative hierarchy that the Madras government was

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trying so hard to establish. Petitioners went over the heads of district collectors and directly petitioned the Board of Revenue in Madras or the governor himself. This tendency posed an obstacle to official efforts to use the post-ecclesiastical English appeal to organize bureaucratic hierarchy. The Board of Revenue at Madras in consequence, viewed the tendency to write directly to superiors such as visiting governors general from Calcutta as impolite and insubordinate behavior. The Board, in 1813, discovered to their consternation that a group of respectable inhabitants from Madras presented a petition directly to the governor general of India, Lord Minto, the Earl of Moira, and that the tone of this petition violated the expected tenor of politeness. A furious governor ordered the superintendent of police to send for the petitioners and point out to them the extreme impropriety of their conduct in having availed themselves of the accidental presence of the Governor General . . . to remonstrate against the legitimate proceedings of the government under whose authority they live and who were alone competent at that period to have redressed their grievances if any had existed. Consistently with the principles which uniformly regulate the proceedings of the British government, His Excellency in Council is disposed at all times to consider with indulgence complaints founded in fact and submitted with due complaints, but a petition like the one before him insolently framed and most indecently presented, will never fail to awaken his displeasure and to meet with denial and rebuke. 29

To contain the number of petitions and discern the truth value of the collective ones, the Board of Revenue began to insist that petitioners sign and date their complaints. 30 The number of petitions, they argued, tended to embarrass and impeded “more important business”; moreover, the difficulties in identifying petitioners made decisions difficult. Signing and dating would tie the petition to an identifiable person. To prevent petitioners from clogging their Madras office, the Board also began to order petitioners to fi rst address the district collector and then send their “prayers of appeal” to Madras only with his endorsement. The Company told its petitioners in 1808 that they had to address their complaints only on government-approved stamped paper that they could purchase from authorized vendors for a fee. 31 All such control was apparently futile, for petitioners flagrantly dis-

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obeyed these rules and the stream of petitions continued. However, tellingly, the administrators did not respond by ignoring the complaints. Recall that from the perspective of the Board of Revenue in Madras, complaining natives were actually a useful way to check the district collector’s king-like powers and bring corruption to light. As the chief of the Council of Masulipatnam, a town a few hundred miles northeast of Madras, wrote: The distance of an appeal tends to deter the natives from complaining of oppression they may experience in districts under him [the collector] because their complaint . . . can only be against the collector, their servants or the servants of the revenue establishment and your orders, may we apprehend, appear to the natives to constitute collectors in a great degree as judges, as well as parties. 32

In other words, Company officers—eager to check the arbitrary powers exercised by collectors—did not want to make the appeal impossibly difficult to execute. The charge of corruption was a delicate problem of immense significance to the political fortunes of the East India Company in Britain. The Burkean denouncement of Warren Hastings’s private trade and the numerous corruption scandals of Company “Nabobs” had severely compromised the reputation of the Company in Parliament. Because native complaints were regarded as a check on the corrupt rule of revenue collectors and native revenue employees, the Board of Revenue resolved to allow direct appeals without the collector’s assent if the petitioner could prove that his appeals had been ignored. 33 The official stakes in using the petition as a check on subordinates meant that the Madras government quickly got mired in the labyrinthine alleys of written complaints. Perceptive petitioners prefaced their addresses by complaining about corruption in the collector’s office—a case in point being the Tanjavur case of 1816 discussed earlier—or inattention. A frustrated Collector Ravenshaw wrote from South Arcot to the Board of Revenue that most petitioners who had appealed to them from his district had fi rst appealed to him multiple times. 34 They often ignored his decisions if they found them to be unfavorable and went to Madras to present a fresh petition to his superiors. 35 Such troubles led the Board of Revenue in 1815 to establish a committee to determine the disposal of petitions.

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The Bureaucracy of Letters: Procedure, Conscience, and the Juridical Subject The Petitions Committee proved to be the most cogent illustration of the Company’s attempt to render the letters of address into a bureaucracy of letters. Its task was to settle on the most effective way to turn direct appeals into a procedural act. Governor Elliot wrote in a letter that fi rst proposed the necessity of the committee, that it was far from his desire that the “right of petitioning the government which is natural to the subjects of every state should be done away” but he was eager to prevent the abuse of such rights. Elliot wanted to save the petitioners from selfharm by protecting them from “native scriveners,” but he also wanted to minimize the inconvenience to the public service and prevent the wanton infringement of rules so that “the confidence of the government in subordinate Boards and officers may not appear to be diminished.”36 Here again is the subtle work of bureaucratic procedure, tinged with colonial mastery. The natural right to appeal was available only to those who subjected themselves to proper procedure. Elliot viewed the regulation of petitioning as a necessary strategy to discipline the litigious native and turn him into a conscientious subject. The appeal was, equally, a tool used to install and strengthen bureaucratic order. The principle of relevance, as Raymond Williams observes, was crucial to a bureaucracy of letters. 37 In Madras, the Board of Revenue made efforts to discipline petitioners by enforcing the principle of sincerity in addition to relevance. Officers determined the sincerity of these letters by attending to their linguistic register. As we saw earlier, petition writers wrote in an ornate bureaucratic prose that translated somewhat awkwardly into “Babu English.” They used an idiom of civil or respectful language that not only marked hierarchy but also evoked an emotive devotional praise while praying, begging, and demanding the officer’s benevolence. The Committee on Petitions declared this sort of language to be excessive. All petitions, they believed, were written too theatrically, as though the petitioner was seriously maltreated: Every other petition is drawn upon a manner calculated to execute impressions that the party complaining is seriously aggrieved. The public record contains abundant evidence of the propensity of the natives to exaggerate and misrepresent whatever be the motive of this propensity, of its existence there

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is no doubt. At the same time the truth and falsehood of their assertions can be ascertained only by a reference to the subordinate authorities. 38

The quest for sincere petitions was to transform the very field of petitioning. To elicit and induce sincere petitions and hence petitioning subjects, a series of efforts were made to regulate the submission of letters. These interventions were grounded in the idea that ensuring quotidian but hierarchical direct address was the most effective means to establish direct communication and free intercourse between the rulers and the ruled. An incident that took place in Tanjavur early in the 1800s is a case in point.

Reformulating Direct Address, Tanjavur When the Company took over Tanjavur from the Maratha court, complaints were made against its Collector Harris’s English and Tamil translator, Perumal Pillai. Pillai was charged with taking bribes in the cutcherry. Pillai was Harris’s personal assistant who accompanied his master to Tanjavur from Madras. As we may recall, documents were typically attested by a set of respectable notables. Thus, in the Tanjavur region in 1800, petitions were conventionally validated by a known set of respectable gentry who formed an assembly. This is how Harris received complaints from specific social groups or corporate entities against Perumal Pillai. Notwithstanding Pillai’s argument that these charges were false, Harris declared that Pillai should be punished. Given that the Tanjavur district court had not yet been established, Harris conducted his investigations in front of the assembled gentry, and Pillai was flogged for his crimes in front of “the whole assembly of people” (maha¯na¯.tu). Reminiscent of the cases mentioned in the previous chapter, after being flogged, Pillai “confessed” to his crimes in front of the assembly. The incident illustrates how well the violence of the master-servant relationship that undergirded the cutcherry enabled the assertion of Company sovereignty. The flogging, we will see, would ultimately land Harris in trouble, but in the immediate days following the incident, it enabled the collector to pronounce his judicial rule over the region. 39 The Company’s sovereignty was declared through the public display of the collector’s moral and physical control over the body of his assistants. In his declaration to the inhabitants, Harris also broke with older cor-

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porate political forms by signaling the new ethic of the bureaucratic culture of the document raj. He announced that he would employ only the diligent and the able, and dismiss the idle. He also declared his determination to have channels of direct communication with all classes of inhabitants and to curtail the corruption among his subordinates so that the poor and the rich could enjoy the fruits of their labor. 40 The new world of work and “fair communication” rested on petitions. Harris announced that petitioners could attend the cutcherry only at certain times, and he insisted that they write the petitions themselves: All complainants are to attend the cutcherree [sic] between the hours of ten and one o clock. Sundays excepted. Every day, or for importunity and intrusion at any other time or in any other place, they will be severely punished. Those able to read and write may, if they please, give in their complaints written by themselves, but those who cannot read and write are desired never to present a written complaint but to make it by word of mouth, all those presenting English petitions which they cannot write or Malabar petitions which they do not write, whatever be their wrongs or their sufferings will be turned from the cutcharree [sic] and not again admitted until all other complainants placing their dependence only on truth and justice are heard and satisfied.41

The problem of bribes did not go away, however. A debate on Harris’s credibility erupted four years later when a corruption scandal swamped his scribal establishment and his high-handed ways came under investigation. William Bentinck, then the governor of Madras, noted that bribery and corruption in the Tanjavur office was such that no man could complain against the revenue servants. In his remarks to the Board of Revenue, Bentinck recommended that Harris be removed for intemperance. He observed that the episode of public flogging had, in all probability, deterred inhabitants from petitioning. A system of terror must have been established from this time since no man could complain against the Revenue servants. From this time on people had no choice but to collude with Circar servants only to conceal from the collector.42

Bentinck’s remarks suggest that petitions were whistle-blowing reports, but his note also illustrates how the ambit of petitioning was a delicate

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space for the articulation of colonial power. “There is no duty more arduous and difficult,” he observed, “than the government of man.” It was incumbent upon officers not only “to be just,” but to dispose themselves such that “the people should have confidence in the justice, and protection of their governor.”43 Fear and dread was the antithesis of this project of government. Bentinck dismissed Harris’s attempts to defend himself by blaming the corruption in Tanjavur as vestiges of a native “vice” for giving gifts in return for favors. During the investigation, Harris had written that the disposition of the inferior servants and certain inhabitants to make presents to the superior servants spring out of a vice which seems inherent in the character of the people of India and which is exactly the reverse of a principle prevalent in Europe.44

Harris argued that the pre-Company Tanjavur legacy was imperfect and blamed the corruption on badly chosen employees and the Maratha political culture of endemic gift giving. Bentinck remained unconvinced. The breach of trust, he maintained, had been severe and had brought dishonor to the Company’s government, which could not now in good faith continue to condemn its predecessors. Although Harris was removed for ineptness, it is interesting that he shared with Bentinck the idea that transparency ensured through proper petitioning practice would diminish peculation. He wrote he had taken every precaution to conduct public business in the open. He always transacted business in an open cutcherry, denying himself the privilege of writing in silence. He had made his subordinates work in the same room and near him. 45 He keenly asserted his control over Tamil and the zeal with which he invited informers: When informers are admitted, they, in Malabar [Tamil] write and deliver to me their depositions and undergo my examination. Though not a master of the language I read it and understand it sufficiently to prevent false translation and interpretation of it. . . . On common subjects, the inhabitants freely complain to me against anyone in authority over them. The truth is that so long as I continue in my cutcherry to hear information, and the people are inclined to give it to me, no power whatever can prevent, between me and them, a communication which depends on their motion and their voice.46

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These arguments of disavowal and blame actually index the familiar problem of linguistic scribal mediation that was to outlast Harris and that would concern petitioning activities more generally. The Company’s efforts to enable direct address with inhabitants via the petition can be widely traced after the Tanjavur incident in the numerous memorandums to patronize “country languages,” that is, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada, the spoken languages of southern India. New Company recruits who joined as junior civil servants were encouraged to learn these languages along with classical ones like Persian and Sanskrit. Indeed, such attempts were institutionalized in the establishment of the Fort St. George College in 1812.47 Petitions were often the center of this form of learning. The format of language proficiency tests taken by British civil servants in South India included testing their ability to make correct abstracts of Tamil petitions that translators read aloud to them.48 The concern for communicating with their subjects directly rather than through mediators was also central to the establishment of the Petition Department. Governor Elliot’s 1814 memorandum establishing the Petitioning Committee advocated a more organized way of dealing with petitions so that subjects of the Company, especially the inhabitants of distant provinces, would not be detained at the Presidency at the mercy of “intriguing Europeans or of native scriveners and attorneys.”49 In some places the collectors had already put these structures in place. A Tirunelveli collector describes the organization of petitioning in the office. The assistant collector’s principal work was to listen to representations every day. Collectors tried to encourage direct meetings with their supplicants, arguing that many complaints were lost in translation when channeled through mediators. The collector wrote: It was at one time custom here for many written petitions to be given in, but I found that the practice not only caused delay, from the time occupied in reading them, but that it was productive of a heavy expense to that description of people who were the least able to bear it. Very few of the inferior mirasdars and cultivators can read, still fewer can write, and hardly any upon paper, these people were therefore obliged to pay for a written petition, and when it came to be read and the parties questioned as to their grievances, it was often found to be irrelevant to the subject, the writer being paid for writing a petition only, and not responsible for the contents, by which, all the time previously occupied in reading it was lost. 50

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The founding of the Petition Department in 1815 was thus a measure that sought to institutionalize—and hence incorporate—a potentially disruptive practice into a form of direct address that could enter the “ordinary businesses” of the state. As an ordinary business, petitioning came into its own when petition writing became privileged as a procedure for direct address. We must consider, however, whether such a reformulation of the written petition could have taken off without the document bazaar and its scribal transactions.

The Document Bazaar The most compelling evidence for documents becoming a commodity comes from the records of stamp duty. From 1808, all documents, in particular petitions and deeds, were subject to a duty by the East India Company. Until then, kanakkapillais or qa¯zis (Islamic judges) and indeed the Company’s courts undertook document work such as notarization or registration for a fee. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Mayor’s Court of Fort St. George, Madras, followed the same system and charged fees for individual documents: that is, for every petition read, warrant served, and document attested. Fees were levied for summoning persons; delivering judgments; copying papers; sealing and registering written documents; and swearing, examining, and taking depositions. 51 With the establishment of legal courts in the hinterlands, the proposition of charging fees for document writers became untenable, and registration departments were instituted and stamp duties imposed. Following directives from Calcutta in 1808, the Madras government began to establish stamp duties on all official documents. 52 This meant that documents became legally admissible as evidence only if written on stamped paper purchased from appointed vendors. In other words, the East India Company deemed a document authentic only when it became a taxable entity and was written on official paper. Stamp regulations created legible documents, whose value reflected a burgeoning land and capital market. 53 Initially the Company charged a tax on all copies of papers furnished by the Board of Revenue and on all written receipts. However, by 1816, stamp duties were imposed on most judicial written instruments such as rejoinders and agreements (ra¯jina¯ma¯s) , on all written instruments relative to land regulations, and, most importantly, on petitions. The pri-

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mary purpose of introducing stamp paper was not to generate revenue (although stamp revenue was painstakingly accounted for and did make the Company some money) or indeed register documents in ways that would make them easily retrievable. The Company used stamp regulations as a deterrent to forgery and repeated petitioning. The proclamation of 1808 also discussed the need for punishment to deter the use of forged stamped paper because “Mohammedan Law does not prescribe any specific punishment for an offence of the above nature.”54 Punishment for disobeying stamp regulations was not, however, as severe as it was for forgery; for instance, the lasting penalty for evading stamped paper was only a fi ne and the inadmissibility of the document as legal evidence. 55 The ramifications of imposing stamp duties on petitions were complex. On the one hand, stamp regulations were promulgated at the same time as the regulations on forgery (1811) and the establishment of the Petition Department (1815) to create a bureaucratic field for the management of paper flow. Stamp duty like these other regulations also enhanced the discretionary powers of the collectors. When it became clear that petitioners often did not write petitions on stamp paper, regulations allowed collectors to accept unstamped petitions at their discretion. In areas like Coimbatore, for example, petitioners were not required to write their appeals on stamp paper, and in Chingleput, petitions were not required to be written on stamp paper except those for the transfer of property. Moreover, the Company allowed former employees or disgruntled clerks to write on ordinary paper. 56 Thus, commoners paid stamp duties, but former and serving native employees did not, suggesting that the Company did not want to alienate disgruntled technicians of their administration and did not want stamp duty to deter the flow of information from below. It is quite possible, however, that stamp duties may have deterred the laboring poor from frequent petitioning and systematically constrained informal land use and “expropriated the laboring poor of the city”57 alongside the imposition of Ryotwari land settlements in the countryside. The records suggest that while there was, as the Board observed, a boom in individual petitions for relief, pension, and work from subordinate employees, collective petitions from the lower orders regarding land use began to shrink around 1816. 58 Instead, petitioning began to be dominated by individual proprietors, petty traders, and employees such as peons, soldiers, and others who could buy the services of peti-

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tion writers. Very poor groups began to rely on wealthy patrons or, in the case of lower-caste converts, mediators like missionaries or catechists who could write letters for them. By the 1820s, all the elements necessary for the trafficking of documents were in place. This included an expanding postal system that could carry letters of complaint, 59 a spiraling land market with the Ryotwari system that needed written documents, and a colonial regime with a fetish for the written word. Coupled with the growing numbers of scribes in the Company bureaucracy, a shadowy petty economy involving the production and consumption of written documents emerged, and the traffic in written documents around Company offices flourished as never before. Despite official disapproval and attempts to school petitioners, suppliants clutching written paper became the new camp followers of revenue collectors, surrounding the tents set up during the annual revenue settlement and whenever officers went “on circuit.” Recall how these men followed Thomas Munro when he toured districts as a judicial commissioner. These information brokers sent out news and—in the collector’s parlance—made “mischief” and allegedly signed petitions. Many petitioners were out-of-work scribes, which suggests that when documents and petitions became significant capital in their own right, mediators like scribes, informants, or “employees in the know” became fi xers and fi xtures in the landscape. Mrs. Moore was one such quintessential creature of this twilight zone. The Realpolitik of Petitioning, 1834 In August 1834, the superintendent of police in Madras wrote to the governor’s secretary on the nature of Mrs. Moore’s interference in public business.60 Mrs. Moore was reputedly a “bad character” and the mistress of Mr. Daniel, a civil servant in charge of disposing the pension and other small claims made by petitioners to the estate of the Nawwab of Arcot. Mr. Daniel’s job was to wind up the Arcot debts, which had sparked the Burkean denouncement of the East India Company fi fty years earlier and triggered the forgery scandal of 1809 that had swept through Madras. Mrs. Moore, it turns out, regularly conspired with various clerical scribes and was in the habit of receiving petitioners who had come to Mr. Daniel’s cutcherry. In return for remuneration, she exercised her influence to procure favorable decisions for claims.

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The depositions of some of the petitioners who were examined by the superintendent of police are striking because they were all ordinary men engaged in petty trade or service. They included a rice seller in Mylapore of Rajput caste; a Brahman umedwar—a “hopeful” or candidate—who was seeking a job as a writer with the East India Company; a peon; a bullock maistry, an ironsmith; and Mariappan, a Dalit man. They all followed a circuitous road to Mrs. Moore as she had a varied circle of underlings who would often solicit business for her.61 Claimants contacted a butler, Gopal Nayak, who served Collector Harris and who introduced supplicants to Mrs. Moore. Two other go-betweens were Mohammad Saib, a Muslim tailor who served another Englishman, and Mr. Daniel’s personal scribe and writer, the Brahman Kanniah. Mrs. Moore lobbied for her clients when her lover visited her. Under her tutelage, claimants like the rice seller wrote four petitions to the highest authorities—the governor general of India, the governor of Madras, the secretary to the Madras government, and fi nally Mr. Daniel himself. In return, claimants presented her with sweets, fruits, flowers, and vegetables. They also paid for her services in cash. Several bonds were signed and witnessed on her verandah. The superintendent of police in Madras claimed that Mrs. Moore’s influence extended to many other cutcherries in the Presidency, creating a network of subterfuge and intrigue. Her business was apparently so successful that many candidates, hopeful of Company employment, knocked at her door. Apparently, in return for an expensive two hundred rupee bond, Mrs. Moore wrote a letter of recommendation to the collector of Chittoor for a candidate who then appointed the man as a tahsildar of a taluk. She also fi xed jobs of the more lowly sort, such as the post of a peon in the saltpans on the northern Coromandel Coast.62 From other depositions, it is clear that all of Mrs. Moore’s clients— even though they were not well-off or even literate, and sometimes Dalit—were nonetheless caught up in the paper trail of claims, counterclaims, and forgery. Like most suppliants, they turned to Mrs. Moore because she had the expertise to ensure a successful request or because the cutcherry had refused to look on their petition favorably. The bureaucratic system generated an informal document bazaar. Mrs. Moore was thus a typical expert mediator who played an important role in the petty economy of the document bazaar. Although Company appointments were ostensibly not sold outright to bidders, her activities suggest the degree to which the commercial traffic of office appointments were taken

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up by the document bazaar. To the East India Company, of course, her mediating presence was criminal and tantamount to a lapse in or failure of efficient transparent governance. For the most part, petitions continued to be produced in this shadowy paper market. In the official discourse from the 1820s onward, the increase in petitioning was associated with the expanded constituency of small landed ryots who were supposed to directly and individually appeal to the state, but the mediating structures of scribes and scribal language grew more complicated. Even as petitioning was reorganized by the Company administration to become the ordinary business of governance, it continued to pose problems for Company officials because it remained a mediated rather than a direct communicative practice between subjects and rulers. The Board of Revenue often blamed inhabitants for failing to understand the rules for submitting and transacting documents. Periodic letters were sent out directing collectors to redouble their efforts to transmit the rules of petition in the language of the district in plain and intelligible terms, and published throughout their collectorates by means of a tom-tom [drum], as well as read out and explained to the ryots when they assembled at the annual revenue settlements. . . .63

The Company also found that if it insisted on names and signatures, petitions often arrived with false ones, with the result that Company collectors often went in search of fictitious petitioners. The collector of Madurai, Viveash, wrote to the Madras office in 1833 that he could not successfully trace the writer of a petition. He had issued a proclamation for the appearance of a Vadamala Moodily of the Mudaliar caste, but found that three such persons lived in the village, and all of them denied writing the petition. He also tried to trace people referenced in the deposition that accompanied the petition, but to no avail. Predictably, the collector thought that the petition had been sent by a disgruntled former cutcherry employee.64 The momentum of “voluminous correspondence” continued to build. Petitioning became so common that the governor in council relayed a message from the Court of Directors in London ordering the Presidencies not to send copies of reiterative petitions to them in London but merely a list of petitions held back in India. Remarking on the increase of correspondence in the form of numerous petitions praying for favors

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and indulgences without any grounds for their claims, the order stated that the government declared it was fully aware of the difficulty of applying a remedy, [is] ever willing to listen to complaints and redress wrongs, but the practice of petitions without ground and reiterating petitions having assumed a considerable magnitude, the Honorable Court desires that after they have once decided on a case no second petitions be forwarded to them unless supported by circumstances which . . . call for a second reconsideration of the case. . . . It will be sufficient if quarterly a list of petitions not transmitted are forwarded to them.65

The “Company petition” lay at the heart of an emergent traffic in documents. I have shown the petition to be a product of a document bazaar that sprang up outside cutcherries in order to satisfy the demands of a regime that privileged written representation as the most acceptable form of communication. Petitioning knitted a variety of supplicants into a scribal political economy. What, though, are we to make of the new colonial petitioner? My discussion has so far suggested that early nineteenth-century petitions call into question the binary opposition of resistance and coercion. Petitions were considered examples of official correspondence—or, as the revenue collectors called it, documents essential to “publick business”—that were shaped as much by the demands of colonial domination as by the suppliants submitting them. Efforts to discipline petitioning as a sincere supplication had disassembled the corporate frameworks of extant petitioning and produced a large informal document bazaar. Company officials justified their regulatory interventions as a pedagogic and disciplinary endeavor to school litigious and insincere petitioners. These claims went along with an equally deep desire to preserve their state by creating an administrative structure that encouraged informers. These interventions upheld an idea of law that operated through exceptions granted on the basis of cultural ascription. This orientation to law helped install a new political economy that had hitherto operated through economic monopolies and juridical exemptions.66 Under pressure to confiscate all false privileges and immunities, the courts ended up preserving privileges, especially hereditary ones, while undermining the traffic between symbolic, social, and economic exchanges of an earlier time. A narrower defi nition of “privileged” rights reinforced everstricter categories of ascription.67 The petition generated a new order of

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subjecthood that articulated rights based on proprietorship and ascription. Petitions were now central to an official effort to hear complaint, but the signatures and marks inscribed on the colonial petition carried the fi ltered imprint of those being schooled into a new form of subject behavior. The most striking feature of the new intercourse of the colonial petition is the normative place and nature of “proper” dissent.

Disciplining Proper Dissent The changing forms of dissent articulated in the petitions—and indeed by the practice of petitioning the Company—reflect a remaking of legitimate political behavior. Early petitions, for example, often adopted a bargaining tone and threatened the Company with desertion. This has been widely documented among the laboring poor of Madras who threatened to leave in early petitions and often followed those threats by deserting the settlement in favor of the neighboring town or a rival patron in the late eighteenth century.68 The upper-caste petitioner also used threats of desertion, albeit deployed through tropes of renunciation. In 1805, for example, the scribe-agent, or gomashta, of the petty Raja of a small principality in present-day Andhra Pradesh sent a letter to the Company magistrate in Ganjam.69 His master, Chandramani Deo, ordered him to send repeated solicitations to the Company to complain about his mistreatment—apparently, he was debarred from the sight of the European officials. Following various offers of renegotiation, the Raja ended his message by threatening that he would renounce the world: “if the Company will not show me favor, I shall turn like an ascetic (saniyasi) and go away where I can.” 70 During the fi rst two decades of the nineteenth century, such threats of desertion and renunciation were to lose their potent charge as a form of negotiation. Ravi Ahuja has demonstrated the degree to which imposition of a colonial economy in Madras at the turn of the nineteenth century entrenched new forms of property ownership and harmed the bargaining position of the laboring classes by curtailing their social and spatial mobility.71 Indeed, as F. W. Ellis was to remark, most petitions concerned the boundaries of land, sought certificates of possession and extent, and argued against displacement.72 Consider how such ways of addressing the raj generated new norms of peaceable behavior through two contrasting examples of document use, one in an urban

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coastal settlement and the other in the hinterland. Both cases illustrate the struggles over the redefi nition of correct modes of disputation and dissent. The Nagapattinam Dispute, 1807 At the turn of the nineteenth century, Nagapattinam was a cosmopolitan port town.73 In the winter of 1806–7, riots seemed imminent when a dispute broke out about whether the Catholic Christians of the town should be allowed to perform a play about the three Kings of the East to celebrate their Christmas feast. Objections to the group’s right to perform a play did not come from the higher castes, but from a few moneyed men and those who ranked lowest in the social hierarchy. The moneyed men in question included a man from Jaffna who was formerly a Dutch slave, a known “troublemaker” called Subrapillai, and another, a Chettiar trader; both men shut down the market by way of protest and got their supporters to boycott the bazaar. The lowest castes were the Dalits—specifically Paraiyars—who, as we know from the studies of urban caste confl ict in similar coastal towns, were the foot soldiers of the right-hand sect of a multicaste moiety that supervised the social order of these spaces. Unlike their opponents, who did not take recourse to writing, the Catholics wrote petitions and procured and displayed written documents to make their claim. Significantly, they took permission to perform the feast in writing from the English magistrate in the form of a sanad, a document widely used by the Mughals to endow privileges or legitimize a practice.74 However, even this case was not an instance of an easy continuance of older documentary forms; the evidence of the town policeman (ko¯twa¯l) suggests that there was a small but significant change. Under the Mughal state, sanads were issued in return for written vouchers that promised good behavior. In contrast, it appears that the Christian inhabitants displayed the sanad to the police officer and told him that since they had brought a Company sanad, they were not obliged to give anyone a written voucher promising good behavior. This detail suggests that while the Christians believed that procuring a sanad was politic, they viewed the Company sanad differently from the documents in the Persianate system. This may well have been a sense more delineated in port settlements where European companies had run citystates for over two centuries. It could also mean that Christians identi-

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fied themselves closely with the Company.75 Thus, by 1807, Christians recognized that the Company sanad represented a distinctly new document culture—wherein the mere possession of a written document endowed the possessor with unimpeachable rights—quite distinct from an older regime that privileged mutual obligation. Objections to the sanad began that very evening. An assembly armed with sticks collected in front of the town policeman in the meeting hall in the middle of town and complained that the Christians were going to perform a play not permitted by the sanad. The Christians, the assembled alleged, were going to mock the local king by dressing up like a “Malabar Raja.” The policeman ignored these complaints, refused to intercede, and instead allowed the Christians to perform their play under police protection. After the play, when the procession entered the church, the angry assembly destroyed and plundered the celebrations. In response, the Christians—fearing that they would be killed if they physically appeared in court—sent a petition to the judge and magistrate. They began by appealing to the justice that the British government held for all its subjects who behave with respect and submit to its authority. After recounting that they had acquired the legitimate right to conduct the festival, they described the event. They argued that a large group of “Paraiyar and Malabar” armed with sticks, pelted the church and the English flag. The crowd then rehoisted the English flag and plundered the petitioners’ homes. The Christians then made their claim: Your petitioners have to remark that they conceive themselves entitled to the protection of the government as long as they conduct themselves as peaceable subjects. They disclaim all intentions to vilify the religion of other castes. As your magistrates signified in your sanad granted to your petitioners and they hoped and expected a similar conduct toward their religion. The hatred and malice of the Nagapattinam inhabitants towards Roman Catholicism has been known on every occasion of festivity to the Christians, the Malabars and Pariahs have been spirited up by their chief Condapah Chettiar. . . .76

Here, the self-ascription of religious affi liation was closely integrated with the claim to “proper” behavior, that is, petitioning peaceably and claiming a Protestant conscience and tolerance. As the local commander of the Company garrison wrote to the district judge, “the Christians have

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every reason to fear the class of rioter because they are so aggressive. They had no business assembling if they had your court to appeal to.” 77 The Nagapattinam petition demonstrates the unique relationship between Catholics and the Protestant Company regime developed through the compact of peaceable behavior. The Catholics succeeded in making the right-hand moiety and its parvenu leaders appear riotous and hence lose their credibility. These large multicaste assemblages had for a long time straddled what we now think of as local/regional or public/private realms. These moieties were corporate bodies endowed with juridical powers; they were armed and operated though fictive kinship, and had played a crucial role in European trading company ports in Southeast India. Their illegitimacy in the new legal system marked the advent of a new era. The petition is therefore a good example of writing remade in wider intercourse. The Christians were not just peaceable (unlike the “unruly” right-hand caste assembly) because they presented the petition and invoked the sanad. Rather, the petition became both the objective form and the content of a new Company-subject behavior that relinquished violence to the state. The petition was no longer a collective declaration of truth before notable gentry, but indeed set out to explicitly challenge collective assemblies by declaring its loyalty to the Company. Most importantly, the petition was not presented by the Catholics in person but sent in lieu of their physical presence. The petitioners claimed that they were afraid to appear in person in the cutcherry, and they also refused to name those who perpetuated violence out of fear that the petition would fall into the wrong hands. Petitions like these often passed through the hands of opponents and the circuit of fi xers and gossip of the document bazaar. Lacking the forms of attestation and witnessing by the “respectable” sections of society that would have legitimized the document as a legal claim under the old regime, the Catholic petition perforce articulated a new form of directly representing the collective through the language of conscience, tolerance, and sincerity in an individually signed document. Individuals came together to speak as a single claimant—as a Catholic subject that metonymically represented an ascriptive community. The petitioners could only articulate a claim as a collective of individual Catholic Christians. The success of this kind of petition is an index of wider institutional changes. In addition to the interventions that installed the traffic in documents, the Company also severely constrained extant corporate juridical

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powers. Just a few years after, by 1810, the East India Company had systematically broken down the official power of collective assemblies in Madras, replacing the assembly of notables and corporate groups with legal courts supervised by a new judicial machine made up of police committees and the law courts. These regulations were issued in response to vicious caste disputes between the left- and right-hand castes that took place between 1808 and 1812 and, possibly, in response to the rapid increase in the expansion of land under Company control in South India. The second set of changes concerned the legitimate categories of selfdescription. Officials thought that religious belief motivated subjects’ actions and conscientious rule required the reasonable accommodation of these different beliefs. The clash between the Panchalar and Dalit—specifically Paraiyar—caste over funerary rituals was met by Company officials with the assurance that disputants could successfully make claims in the name of their unique religious practices. Officers viewed Panchalar claims with sympathy because the Panchalar argued that their rituals were religious in nature. The official reformulation of collective practice within religious belief—viewed together with the attack on corporate assemblies—was to have enormous consequences for the subject position adopted by petitioners. It signaled the demise of the legitimacy of corporate entities of the old regime, such as the assemblage of the left- and right-hand castes and the consolidation of individual authorities or the ascriptive heads of social groups. The privileging of bounded communities of ascription also implied that assemblies and corporate bodies were seen either as “crowds”—faceless, unruly, and prone to creating disorder—or small groups of elite respectables who were allowed to consult with rather than advise the Company. In this context of shrinking mode of civic behavior, the written petition developed into the only acceptable civil and civic political behavior. The new category of religious self-description thus reworked sectarian divides as many petitioners began to explicitly weave arguments about religious belief into their petitions. The legal language used in the petition from this time betrays the marks of Company intervention. Incapable of negotiating the caste moieties, unable to desert, and increasingly prohibited, as we know, from the informal and flexible use of common land,78 low-caste inhabitants increasingly dependent on Company benevolence began to appeal directly to its administrators, especially the magistrate, as religious subjects. In one case, a petition sent in by a group of Dalit fishermen in Madras ob-

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jected to the superintendent of police ordering a road to be built through their fish market and what they claimed was their place of worship since time immemorial.79 They identified themselves in religious terms but, unlike the Nagapattinam petitioners, not as a bounded community of Catholics but as “adversaries of Christians.” In contrast to earlier petitions submitted by Dalit inhabitants in the late eighteenth century (which frequently threatened collective withdrawal and made claims based on the role of their labor in Company towns), this 1832 petition protested dispossession through a claim based in belief. It specifically claimed religious space in the form of an altar. The appeal to equity complained against the arbitrary force exercised by the superintendent of police by arguing that officials acted without documents or a plan. The petition bears the literal and rhetorical marks of the new expectation of sincere civil address and consequently new forms of articulating collective sociability. How did upper-caste inhabitants respond to such mobilizations from below? No longer able to articulate their respectability as heads of multicaste moieties, upper-caste inhabitants increasingly wrote petitions, as respectable “Hindu” men creating, a Hindu collective by the 1840s. While the city of Madras saw a world of challenging petitions, in the rural hinterland, the enhancement of judicial and revenue powers to village elite created a class of petty tyrants. What was the consequence of these reforms of the petitioning process? Let us turn to a case about land possession in Madurai that illustrates a fast-changing rural landscape—a world remade by pacification, sedentarization, and document use under Company rule. Madurai District, 1820 The quarrel in Madurai occurred among archetypical competitors for rural dominance: the Brahman landowners, literate office holders in the lower rungs of the revenue administration, and the Agambadiar an upwardly mobile martial group that began to turn to cultivation in Madurai and Tanjavur during the nineteenth century.80 The dispute occurred over the produce of land recently brought under cultivation and eventually turned on the question of land proprietorship.81 The Board of Revenue received a petition from Kaveri Tevan, a thirtythree-year-old Agambadiar, an upwardly mobile cultivator living in the southern district of Madurai, in Tirumangalam taluk. Kaveri Tevan accused the district cutcherry scribes of malpractice for having intercepted

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and read his earlier petition to the government and the collector for ignoring his letter. We know by now that such a claim would have immediately caught the Board’s attention. The Madras Board of Revenue, interested in investigating the charge, sought a report of the collector. The collector wrote back defending his servants. He said that he followed the established practice of reading out petitions in front of the disputing parties, and he rarely refused a paper handed to him on his way to the cutcherry and forwarded the details of the case that undermined Kaveri Tevan. Kaveri Tevan had complained to the collector against the Brahmans of his locality. The previous year, the tahsildar had given him and some other Agambadiar a written document (a sanad) to cultivate wasteland that was classified as fertile wetland in their village, Chinna Ulagani. Subsequently, the Agambadiar proceeded to clear the forest with laboring groups recruited from the surrounding hills and planted sesame (gingelly).82 Kaveri Tevan claimed that although Chinna Ulagani was an autonomous settlement, the Brahman inhabitants of the neighboring village, Periya Ulagani, forcibly opposed his activities by claiming that the newly cultivated land was actually part of their settlement. Kaveri Tevan furthermore, accused the Brahmans of conniving with their writer kin employed in the cutcherry to persuade the revenue officer to support them. He also alleged that the Agambadiar were made to sign a blank palm leaf on which a false agreement was written and produced as evidence in the newly constituted subdistrict law court. In response, the entire Brahman collective presented a counterpetition to the collector four days later declaring that they had incontrovertible documentary proof that the village of Chinna Ulagani was a dependent hamlet of Periya Ulagani and that the whole of the lands within the bounds of the village belonged to the Brahmins. Kaveri, the petition declared, was merely an upstart ka¯valga¯r (a policeman, a military post in the region) who had no absolute rights whatsoever to the land. Further, the petitioners declared that Kaveri’s petition was untrue and that, in fact, the Brahmans had supervised the clearing and planting of the land. They alleged that one of Kaveri Tevan’s witnesses—Nallatambi Pillai of Kudakovil—pretended to have brought a sanad from the tahsildar and grossly abused the workers. The Brahmans further claimed that they took their case to the tahsildar, procured verification documents from him, and then brought a suit against Kaveri Tevan in the local court. The Brahman presented their case to the collector of the Zillah of Madurai, and claimed to possess proper documents. They argued that

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they had acted according to the custom of the quarter, that they had followed the documentary protocols by using stamped palm leaves when they leased out their lands, that their documents were attested properly by witnesses, and—most damning of all—that they possessed a document of lease signed by Kaveri. They also claimed that they possessed copperplate title deeds demonstrating their hereditary rights to the disputed land and a voucher from Kaveri Tevan’s father, Bhagavati Tevan, demonstrating that he was the village policeman. They ended with an attack on Kaveri Tevan: Although we have now in our possession the above documents and those now possessed by the complainant, yet he imagining that by mentioning the names of the huzoor servants in his complaint, it would occasion a suspicion and displeasure in the mind of the gentlemen and thereby procure orders to make over to him our agraharam village. 83

The second petition from the Brahmans was in the same vein: presenting themselves as honest yeoman farmers invested in the sedentary life and the respect for property, and portraying the Agambadiar as violent disrupters who caused harm to property. A paper trail of countercharges followed. Kaveri Tevan responded by casting aspersions on the authenticity of the documents possessed by the Brahmans. This petition marks a new inversion—namely, of the Agambadiar seeking Company authority to ask Brahmans, their upper-caste superiors, to present themselves in front of an arbitrating council. The collector referred the case to arbitrators. Both parties nominated four arbitrators each, which in addition to the three Company-nominated arbitrators, took the council to eleven. Both parties submitted documents, the Agambadiar relying on the revenue accounts of the local lord, Tanappa Mudaliar. They both presented their claims to the land; the arbitrators disagreed among themselves, and the fi nal word was left with the Company arbitrators, who rejected the Agambadiar claim. The Agambadiar story was that their kin bought Chinna Ulagani many years earlier. Afterwards Tanappa Mudaliar, the local lord, gave them the rights of headmanship and policemanship. However, the Agambadiar had no written proof. The accounts from the Mudaliar’s records were deemed inadmissible. Moreover, they could not prove their claim that the Brahmans had procured documents illegally, under coercion. The final blow against the Agambadiar’s claims came from the status of the

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witnesses who supported the Brahmans—the tahsildar and the village accountant-scribe. Ultimately, the inability of the Agambadiar to make their case through documents stemmed from their mode of land use. At the Company’s subdistrict court when Kaveri Tevan was asked for proof of his right to cultivate the area, he argued that his family had been cultivating for three generations, not as mortgage holders but as saganami, because of which he had no vouchers. On being asked why he thought his family cultivated land prior to the three generations, he responded that “I say so as the lands must have been cultivated by my family in the same manner as I do now.”84 It is unclear what saganami tenure entailed, but we can surmise that it was a form of entitlement given to outsiders (parakut.i), who over generations could become legitimate inhabitant cultivators, or village insiders (ul.kut.i). Kaveri Tevan was now technically an insider, but in the absence of mortgage and other deeds would not be able to deepen his entitlements in the village in the new system of law.85 The petition was now yoked to processes of sedentarization.

Conclusion Many studies have noted that petitions presented to the colonial state were often deemed unreasonable or irrational by the officials who received them.86 My account, in contrast, has focused on how the expectation of sincerity remodeled the value and place of petitions under colonial rule. Petitioning was remade, and made central in Madras, by a government seeking to fashion a new way of communicating with its subjects. The Company reworked both the appeal of equity derived from the post-ecclesiastical English legal tradition and the capacity to directly appeal to the sovereign that permeated subcontinental petitioning cultures. The effort to use the petition to create an administration organization, the effort to discipline petitions into expressions of sincerity, while managing information flow, generated the peculiar form of the colonial petition. Under Company rule, petitioning became a primary mode of effecting and negotiating sedentarization and pacification, even as it sometimes opened up new discursive possibilities for petitioners to fight social hegemonies. The arguments of peaceable respectability alluded to in petitions—while not erasing forms of corporate violence in the streets and the destruction of property by Company subjects— did render these practices “illegitimate.” The petition played a crucial

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role in installing the Company’s monopoly over violence as a legitimate claim. Petitions rendered inhabitants into a specific kind of juridical subject that was always seen as inadequate, but approximate to civil behavior. Given the quotidian ways in which the petitioning process constantly grounded ideas of correct behavior in peaceable civil writing rather than disorderly conduct, petitioning created a world of officially acceptable dissent under colonial rule; but that always referenced a parallel world of the informal, the indecorous, and the disorderly. The story of the colonial petition is symptomatic of the broader transformation wrought by document raj.

Conclusion

T

he arguments of this book have stressed that the East India Company’s document raj is best viewed as a dynamic textual polity that represented a new disposition to writing. Furthermore, through its analysis of the micro-practices of this textual polity, this book has shown writing to be more conducive to the exercise of discretion than is commonly assumed of written procedure. The desire for successful revenue collection and information flow made for the delegation of discretion at the lowest level in acts like recording taxes, collecting evidence, and meting out petty punishment. This tiered exemption from written accountability in the interests of preserving the state enabled a racialized and selective stereotype of native corruption and native duplicity to become the basis of colonial rule. Such operations of colonial rule worked alongside efforts to control juridical truth. Rather than viewing writing as a technology that fi xes, codifies, and stores, this book has assessed how signing, stamping, registering, doctoring, and composing documents shaped juridical truth in early nineteenth-century Madras. A model of political accountability based on continuous writing and geared to assuage the imperial demand of the British Parliament remade the life of documents in South India. Scribal recruits labored under the shadow of new expectations of textual skills, such as the ability to write grammatical prose legible to metropolitan overseers. Subject to distrust and regulation, scribes became key political players in a colonial information economy of surveillance driven by informers. Paperwork’s possibilities, in the meantime, swirling in a discourse of counterfeit, beckoned inhabitants to the cutcherry. Document raj grew out of the activities of informers and delinquent scribes, as well as the acts and products of

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bribery, coerced confessions, supplicatory petitions, and piles of paper and palm leaf in Madras. This study of the cutcherry’s lettered city walks a tightrope between two recent distinct approaches to inscription that have emerged from new historiographies on the official colonial archive and the texts of the scribe. At one end, scholars of colonial governance have begun to view writing and the archives as unsteady sites of statecraft where the historian can attend to the contradictory or ambivalent responses of rulers to a practical and semantic crisis in colonial governance.1 Ann Stoler’s work, for example, argues that the political rationality of colonial regimes was intimately tied to structures of feeling and to the management of affective states. At the other end, a historiography invested in South Asia’s longue durée history has begun to trace the premodern intellectual and cultural past of a class of men—scribes—who became colonial intermediaries/collaborators. Studies of the colonial knowledge apparatus show how native assistants collaborated with their masters in an unequal partnership to build official knowledge about Indian society. In response, studies of the early modern scribe, the lettrado or munshi or karanam, flesh out an upwardly mobile “middling class” of knowledge mediators whose intellectual life prior to colonial political expansion reveals an interest in historically inflected prose, cultural translation, and ethical exegeses on statecraft. At least one of these studies argues that elite scribal entrepreneurs produced an intellectual tradition that under colonial suppression formed the subterranean wellsprings of a vernacular critique of colonial authority. 2 At their most persuasive, one can see how both of these approaches might open new understandings of inscription. For example, by recentering inscription as an essentially affective act, Stoler’s work on the archive disrupts the institutional divide between the official/public narratives of the past and the private making of a racially superior colonial self. In the scholarship on early modern scribes, the scribe appears as an important cultural and intellectual figure who mediated the temporal divide between the early modern and the colonial modern; scribal texts open up the historical consideration of the suppressed past that appeared and reappeared on the margins of official narratives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The genealogies of a modern vernacular historicality that sat in opposition to colonial official histories might thus be traced to older institutional fields that produced early modern textual genres. 3

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The documentary capacities and practices of the early colonial state examined in this book offer a somewhat different perspective from these approaches. Document Raj has focused on the practices of the documentary state in early colonial India to analyze the conditions under which paperwork and political rule came to be so intimately and peculiarly intertwined in the modern colony. It has attended to the remaking of a new terrain of evidentiary practice and attestation in order to adumbrate writing’s relationship to procedure and discretion in a colonial setting. By considering daily office work in the cutcherry, it takes seriously the juridical value of documents that make up the colonial archive. What, then, does this story of paperwork and the juridical value of documents tell us about the divisions between the official and unofficial past and scholarly assessments about the archive itself?

The Juridical Value of Documents In a now-classic essay on colonial recordkeeping, Richard Saumarez Smith begins by observing that historians and sociologists, like the British colonial officials, have viewed Indian village records like photographs. Like photographs, these records were judged to be true or false representations of reality. Smith’s essay argues—in contrast to this way of thinking—that reports and records were modes of governing and as such were two distinct but complementary instruments of British rule in India. Records of “rights” to resources were the basis of a system of rule wherein procedure gradually acquired the status of statutory law in colonial India. On the other hand, reports were the authorized versions of knowledge about Indian society in which statistics reassembled discrete individuals to make up social collectivities, allowing “status” to become the defi ning feature of the colonized. The distinction between everyday records and regulations was not a seamless one, however. Even if records were prepared under the rubric of regulations, as Smith himself notes, a great deal of autonomy was given to each European settlement officer and his “native agents,” that is, petty officials. Furthermore, regulation itself changed and with it the function of records, which implies that records had differing capacities to guarantee truth. Although Smith is alert to the shifting relationship of records to regulations and hence to law, he attributes this unevenness to the vicissi-

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tudes of administrative practice, which he deems to be the a priori divide between English “reporting” at the district level and the recordkeeping of village administration in local Indian languages. European officers had leeway in dispensing with regulations in the interests of securing the truth, while petty officials were increasingly brought under the purview of regulations. Such observations on the everyday division of labor and discretion within the recordkeeping structures of the colonial state are certainly useful correctives to widely held views on the native agency in producing official “investigative modalities.” Smith’s attention to the differences between English reports and Indian language records, however, does not address why an early colonial state came to be so haunted by documentary attestation, forgery, perjury, and signature. Clearly, both the structures of disciplining scribes and the arbitrary discretion given to European officers exacerbated tension over textual practice and the evidentiary qualities of written documents. The Company government in Madras desired greater disciplining of its subordinate employees, but it was well aware that it would benefit from managing the discourse of corruption such that the moral integrity of European officers remained protected. Furthermore, suspicions about “native duplicity” produced a new way of thinking about textual genre and the law. Older testimonial forms such as the kaifiyat became the key to a society’s past and came to acquire literary authority. The vakkumulam became a text that was composed as a response to interrogative questions. Moreover, as we have seen in this book, the colonial state’s investment in the techniques of notation required that it extend its monopoly over the protocols by which writing could be deemed reliable. The forensic mode of viewing writing was introduced into cutcherry practice precisely when the Company began to rely even more deeply on the palm-leaf writing of the kanakkan and viewed his techniques with greater distrust. The delegitimation of kanakkuppillai records, thus was accompanied by a greater official reliance on the kanakkan’s signature. The signature of the kanakkan—and indeed the signature of individual petitioners and applicants—came to acquire a new place in the state’s evidentiary paradigm. Reliance on the signature, the petition, and the confession all spoke of the growing dependence of officials on attestation. In their attempt to create an evidentiary paradigm that sustained a mode of proof coeval with modern jurisprudence, the East India Company officials had created a textual economy of certification.

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The Certificate Regime of the Early Colonial State Cornelia Vismann notes that certification relies on signature, endowing the formalities of attestation with legal force.4 The document raj that I have described in this book produced a certificatory paradigm. Documents become certificates when, in the absence of the legal anchors of registration, they work as precious trinkets binding the possessor to the authority of the issuer. The Company’s documentary regime did not turn around registration but stamp duties. This meant that a document’s very presence instantiated the authority of the issuer. The colonial certificate regime, however, was in some ways distinct both from normative certificatory regimes and from the Persianate world it disassembled. Recall that registers were not unknown to the Mughal munshi or the kanakkan, but their modes of registration operated as part of a system of mnemonic techniques. This orientation was by no means peculiar. European chancery registries in the seventeenth century did not arrange records or documents in calendar time but according to subject. As we saw in chapter 2, organizing information by subject rather than calendar resonated with kanakkuppillai practice in the Tamil region. This attitude toward recordkeeping could produce a sophisticated understanding of forgery. Discerning authentic documents and considering “facts” was not necessarily opposed to a vision of an ideal textual polity in which the king’s command over his dominion was indexed by his ability to command his secretaries to compose letters and to run his eye over written texts. It was perfectly possible that disciplines such as diplomatics—that would propel a “source criticism” that laid the grounds for a new understanding of an objective or a true past as well as registries to manage fi les—could exist without necessarily embedding records in calendar time. Indeed, these older taxonomies were pulled apart by the Company cutcherry. So it is also not difficult to see why village palm-leaf records—when not recorded on stone or copperplate, not stored in palace treasuries under guard or registered—were made completely vulnerable to charges of duplicity and an imagination of counterfeit. Again and again, judicial consultations are fi lled with the words of officials unable to trust the village accountants who brought in palmleaf records that they stored at home, in the rafters of their roofs or in wooden chests. Two elements of Company recordkeeping are relevant to its certifi-

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catory regime. First, Company regulation made the Company collector and other European officials the sole arbitrators of legally valid attestation. This means that the dismantling of attestation protocols operated to render truth-telling practices subordinate to the official signature while denuding the truth-guaranteeing capacities of Indian records, by completely destroying the older logic of recall, organization, and collection. In effect, the destruction of older taxonomies was an epistemic move because the Company required taxonomic indeterminacy to assert its sovereignty while retaining older textual forms that inhabitants would fi nd familiar. Such deliberate indetermination of documents, which required official approval to be juridically valid, rendered kanakkan documents such as conveyances nominally valid but vulnerable to charges of forgery. It was in this context that attempts to centralize attestation enabled the personal signature to acquire a new legal force but denuded the status of Indian language records. Second, chronologically arranged English correspondence, or “consultations,” became the template of governance. This was a legacy peculiar to colonial rule. The volumes of English consultations are essentially transcriptions of the issues discussed by the committees appointed to supervise public affairs, judicial affairs, revenue, and so on. The correspondence, arranged by date, month, and year cross-referenced and indexed, formed the pillar of the Company’s early colonial archive. Until the appearance of discrete fi les in the 1850s, the volumes of fair- copied English correspondence were the media technology by which the state became a permanent entity. The peculiar demands of transport and legibility—a copy was shipped to London for metropolitan scrutiny— meant that the originals were destroyed and Indian language documents, when they entered this realm, entered as translations. The registration efforts of the Company, in the meantime, emphasized the regular circulation and maintenance of “English correspondence” and did not register individual documents in English registers. This meant that the everyday world of petty transactions around inscription were literally unsupervised and the legal provenance of everyday documents remained open to question. Although the documentary state expanded apace, relatively little was done to render Indian language documents into records or render them legally accountable. The official archive documents the daily conversations at Madras, as well as the calendar of correspondence between Madras and district collectors and judges. It does not document the everyday transactions around writing that marked document raj.

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Everyday documents could haunt law. Why was this the case? Epistemic domination went along with summary practices that enhanced discretionary authority. To “reduce” paperwork and make administration cheaper and more efficient, Company reforms delegated power to powerful players such as caste notables, village accountants and native revenue officers, and judicial men. Although all these men’s activities were subject to the ultimate supervision of the European collectors and judges, they were not required to maintain detailed records, which meant that their activities and individual acts of tyranny were rendered invisible. The delegation of discretionary authority marked by the withdrawal of writing from the petty levels of administration under a regime ostensibly dedicated to “perfect recordation” made these native officers not only all-powerful, but massively corrupt. It was these petty officials obviously who handled the documentary state. They wrote out tax slips and lease deeds; they issued court orders; they were in charge of petty crime; they could hold inhabitants without warrant in lockup. How, then, did the Company deal with the problem of the corrupt official? As we saw in chapters 1 and 6, they relied on written complaints and on the creation of an informer economy based on writing. It is not surprising that in a scribal society there was a marked ambivalence toward writing. The kanakkan was a master of all he surveyed. But it is under a certificatory state that upheld the signature that the mediator-accountant becomes an all-important figure subject to no checks from inhabits but the collectorate office.

The Prism of Counterfeit This book has explained how the official search for knowledge about South India’s past and the search for authentic texts was accompanied by the shaping of juridical truth around the signature. The consolidation of this evidentiary paradigm around the signature generated the dominant notion of the colonial document’s counterfeit quality and an inability of subjects to tell credible stories. By the mid-nineteenth century, the plotline of Ponnambalam’s story had become a familiar one akin to a parable, a moral tale, or a lesson in which the kanakkuppillai, the tahsildar, the distant European collector, and the helpful Christian missionary all played a role. In response to periodic famine and heavy taxes, Tamil agriculturists had begun to mi-

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grate from the countryside in fair numbers to fi nd work as indentured labor in the plantation economy sired by the British Empire, which needed to replace its system of slave labor. 5 Numerous petitions had reiterated the suffering of the tiller at the hands of subordinate government officials acting in the name of European officials. The unfair demands of local officials and the enormous power that tahsildars and kanakkuppillais had accrued from Company rule had attracted a lot of attention, most loudly in the controversy surrounding the investigation into the systematic torture that accompanied revenue collection.6 Several important attention-grabbing petitions had circulated under Company rule opposing the activities of Protestant missionaries to convert laborers. In fact, missionaries and catechists had begun to play a large role in these inquiries as whistleblowers or eyewitnesses, sometimes carrying their stories back to their correspondents in Britain. Each time the Company charter came up for renewal, critics in Britain who opposed Company rights to rule India made much of its doublespeak—its “oriental” practices on the ground, its corruption, and its venality—and questioned its claims to be a credible or morally just ruler. When these moments of unmasking led to stringent calls for reform, the Company government increasingly deflected the need for reform onto its Indian subordinates. This was evident in the way that Company officers increasingly viewed the issue of corruption as a “native” problem and considered the unchecked power of Indian subordinates to torture inhabitants as a manifestation of “native” incivility (a lack of “modern” education) or an inherent proclivity to despotism. To be sure, we could attribute the Company’s coercive documentary regime to its accommodation of traditional institutions like the local police necessitated by a paucity of resources—an incomplete bureaucratization, if you will. Douglas Peers argues that the Company ushered in a new notion of de jure sovereignty based on right but was unable to sustain it; it was thereby forced to “compromise” with native institutions. In this manner, the Company incorporated torture unofficially into the quotidian working of its revenue and judicial systems.7 As I have argued, however, the unofficial incorporation of petty coercion—although convenient to the working of the Company’s expanding empire—was in fact simultaneously a product of Company notions of intermediation. Certification that snaked outward from the cutcherry rendered officers unaccountable but made stories subject to new measures of credibility

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and created an obsession with signature among both the rulers and the ruled. In this new world, the supplicant was drawn into a documentary world in which his abilities to generate a credible story were heavily constrained. The East India Company government had successfully created a lasting double vision: a colonial archive of copied correspondence and a certificatory state whose signature was primarily preserved in the individual original documents held in possession. Documents held in individual custody, collected in tin trunks, and carefully preserved came to adhere to a new form of collective memory formed in the penumbra of courtrooms and cutcherries. New narratives of the state emerged that indexed the diminished ability of inhabitants to tell a credible story in courts and offices, and yet inhabitants remained enmeshed in the possibilities opened up by paper. Company cutcherry practices created a world of rule that was different from metropolitan Britain and a world substantially different from its predecessors.

Notes Introduction 1. Karl Marx, “The East India Question,” in On Colonialism: Articles from the New York Tribune and Other Writings, ed. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (New York: International, 1972), 62. 2. Ibid., 67. 3. Ibid. 4. The Company was formally dissolved on 1 January 1874 by the East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act. 5. I borrow the term “lettered city” from Angel Rama’s book, The Lettered City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). It also resonates with “ka¯ghaz pura¯,” a term that means “city of paper” and used in Mughal India. See ˉ Martin Moir, “Kaghazi Raj: Notes on the Documentary Basis of Company Rule: 1783–1858,” Indo-British Review 21, no. 2 (1993): 185–93. 6. Cornelia Vismann, preface to Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), xiii–xiv. 7. Thomas Osborne, “Bureaucracy as a Vocation: Governmentality and Administration in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Historical Sociology 7, no. 3 (1994): 289–313. 8. I draw here on David Dery, “‘Papereality’ and Learning in Bureaucratic Organizations,” Administration & Society 29, no. 6 (1998): 677–89. 9. I draw here on Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State,” in Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1975), 106. 10. Matthew Hull, “The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in an Islamabad Bureaucracy,” Language & Communication 23, nos. 3–4 (2003): 287– 314; Mathew Hull, “Ruled by Records: The Expropriation of Land and the Misappropriation of Lists in Islamabad,” American Ethnologist 35, no. 4 (2008):

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501–18; Benjamin Kafka, “The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of Terror,” Representations 98 (Spring 2007): 1–24. 11. Vismann, Files, 2008. 12. U. Kalpagam, “Counterfeit Consciousness and the Joy of Abandonment,” Sarai Reader 7 (2007): 90–99; Emma Tarlo, “Paper Truths: The Emergency and Slum Clearance through Forgotten Files,” in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. Christopher John Fuller and Véronique Bénéï (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000); Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 13. Veena Das, “Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility,” in Anthropology in the Margins of the State, ed. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), 227. 14. Ibid., 250. 15. Richard Saumarez Smith, Rule by Records: Land Registration and Village Custom in Early British Panjab (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Ann L. Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87–109. 16. Jon Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: The British in Bengal (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 17. I draw on Brinkley Messick’s notion of textual habitus in The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 18. My understanding of writing practices as a constituent element of productive relations draw on Michel Foucault’s discussion of “infra-power,” that power and knowledge play a role in constituting relations of production. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, ed. James D. Farbion (1974; New York: New Press, 2000), 3:87. 19. “Arici taricima¯” is glossed in the text as “vin.n.appam” or “petition.” The word is probably derived from arzi darjna¯ in Hindustani, which means to submit or register a solicitation or complaint. 20. “Lait..taraiya¯” is glossed in the text as “writer,” taken from the English “writer-sir.” 21. The use of the term “kan.teriya¯ ta pat. ippila¯ tap pat..tikka¯ .t u”—literally “blind uneducated hick”—is especially interesting because it reworks classical tropes about blindness, lack of education, and lack of cultivation (ergo a lack of learning as erudition) as manifestations of the inability to read and write functionally. Compare this with my discussion of erudition and learnedness in chapter 4. 22. P. Singarabalaventhiram Pillai, Tamil Vade-Mecum or a Guide to Ungrammatical Expressions Used in Ordinary Conversation, Consisting of the Vulgarisms of the Tamil Language Explained and Illustrated by Copious Examples for the Use of Foreigners (Madras: D. P. L. C. Connor, 1859). This text was brought to my attention by Stuart Blackburn’s book, Print, Folklore, and Na-

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tionalism in Colonial South India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 121–22. My translation departs from Blackburn’s in a few places and cuts the text into paragraphs for readability. 23. Sumit Sarkar, “‘Kaliyuga,’ ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti’: Ramakrishna and His Times,” EPW 27, no. 29 (1992): 1543–66. 24. On scribes in early modern India, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Making of a Munshi,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 2 (2004): 61–72; Rajiv Kinra, “Secretary-Poets in Mughal India and the Ethos of Persian: The Case of Chandar Bhan ‘Brahman’” (PhD, University of Chicago, 2007); Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, “Munshis, Pandits and Record-Keepers: Scribal Communities and Historical Change in India,” special issue, IESHR 47, no. 4 (2010); Rosalind O’Hanlon and Christopher Minkowski, “What Makes People Who They Are? Pandit Networks and the Problem of Livelihoods in Early Modern Western India,” IESHR, 45, no. 3 (2008): 381–416; Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Letters Home: Banaras Pandits and the Maratha Regions in Early Modern India,” MAS 44, no. 2 (2010): 201–40. 25. This terrain of scribal power has been explored by Rama, Lettered City; Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 2nd ed. (1979; Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Bradly W. Reed, Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Benjamin N. Lawrence, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts, eds., Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). 26. An incomplete list includes Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873 to 1930 (Bombay: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976); Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Confl ict, and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in NineteenthCentury Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Calcutta: Samya, 1998); M. S. S. Pandian, Brahmin and NonBrahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007); R. Suntharalingam, Politics and Nationalist Awakening in South India, 1852–91 (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1974). 27. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 28. Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,”

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Social Text, no. 43 (Autumn 1995): 191–220; Radhika Singha, “Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject,” SIH, n.s., 19, no. 1 (2003): 87–126; Radhika Singha, “Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in British India,” SIH, n.s., 16, no. 2 (2000): 151–98. 29. Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and, more recently, Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). For an early discussion of liberal authoritarianism, see Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 30. For a summary of the debate on colonial knowledge/power, see Phillip B. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,” CSSH 45, no. 4 (2003): 783–814. For an engagement with Saidian arguments, see Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives from South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 31. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 32. Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., Introduction to The Brokered World: Go Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770– 1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History, 2009). For an extended critique of this historiography, see Pratik Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest, and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). For a study of cultural brokerage that attends to the production of alterity in the early modern Mediterranean, see E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2011). 33. Schaffer et al., introduction to Brokered World. For a contrast, see the earlier work of at least one contributor, Kapil Raj, “When Human Travellers Become Instruments: The Indo-British Exploration of Central Asia in the Nineteenth Century,” in Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Marie-Noelle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum, 156–88 (London: Routledge, 2002). 34. Philip Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 35. Ibid. Douglas Peers uses the term “garrison state” to refer to the colonial regime’s militarized character in his “Gunpowder Empires and the Garrison State: Modernity, Hybridity, and the Political Economy of Colonial India, circa 1750–1860,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007): 245–58.

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36. Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 37. Mary Sarah Bilder, “Salamanders and Sons of God,” in The Many Legalities of Early America, ed. Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 38. Stern, Company-State, 14; Aparna Balachandran, “Christ and Pariah: Colonialism, Religion, and the Outcaste in South India, 1750–1820” (PhD, Columbia University, 2008); Arthur Mitchell Fraas, “‘They Have Travailed into a Wrong Latitude’: The Laws of England, Indian Settlements, and the British Imperial Constitution, 1726–1773” (PhD, Duke University, 2011); Hannah Weiss Muller, “An Empire of Subjects: Unities and Disunities in the British Empire, 1760–1790” (PhD, Princeton University, 2010). 39. Sudipta Sen, “Colonial Frontiers of the Georgian State: East India Company’s Rule in India,” Journal of Historical Sociology 7, no. 4 (1994): 368–92. 40. Nicholas Dirks, Scandals of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 41. A vast literature exists on the entwinement of imperial and liberal political thought. Other than Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, see P. J. Marshall, “Empire and Authority in the Later Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 15, no. 2 (1987): 105–22. On the life of constitutional restoration among the British in eighteenth-century Bengal, see Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). On “new imperial history,” see Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire. 42. Parliamentary Papers, 1852–53 (41), “Testimony of John Stuart Mill to a Select Committee of the House of Lords,” 21 June 1852, p. 301; Martin Moir, “Kaghazi Raj: Notes on the Documentary Basis of Company Rule: 1783–1858,” Indo-British Review 21, no. 2 (1993): 185–93; Antonia Moon, “Destroying Records, Keeping Records: Some Practices at the East India Company and at the India Office,” Archives 33, no. 119 (2008): 119. 43. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Oxford: Routledge, 1995), 94. 44. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). On polyglot South India, see Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003); David Washbrook, “‘To Each a Language of His Own’: Language, Culture, and Society in Colonial India,” in Language, History and Class, ed. Penelope J. Corfield, 179–203 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Indira Vishwanathan Peterson, “Between Print and Perfor-

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mance: The Tamil Christian Poetry of Vedanayaka Shastri and the Literary Cultures of Nineteenth Century South India,” in India’s Literary History, Essays on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Vasudha Dalmia and Stuart Blackburn, 25–59 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). 45. Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Prachi Deshpande, “Scripting the Cultural History of Language: Modi in the Colonial Archive” (paper presented at the Conference on New Cultural Histories of India, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, January 2010). 46. Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, 19. Other than writing records, karanams borrowed from Persianate chronicling traditions and composed nonpoetic texts in multiple genres, although it should be underscored that karanam compositions do not display the temporality of post-Rankean historical reasoning. 47. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Exploring the Hinterland: Trade and Politics in the Arcot Nizamat (1700–1732),” in Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Lakshmi Subramanian (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 48. “Public Servants employed in the Trivady Soubah under the Dubbeers Management in the 1770. Tanjore Commissioners Report Appendix,” Tanjore Commissioners Report, 31 January 1799, BOR Misc., Tanjore, Inams, vol. 183 (Chennai: TNSA). 49. For an important discussion of inscription as performative and generative texts, see Daud Ali, “Royal Eulogy as World History, Rethinking Copper-plate Inscriptions in Cho¯la India,” in Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia, ed. Daud Ali, Ronald Inden, and Jonathan Walters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 50. Iravatham Mahadevan, Early Tamil Epigraphy from the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); R. Tirumalai, Studies in South Indian Epigraphy and History of Land Organization, Development and Accounts and Select Chola and Pandyan Townships (Madras: Department of Archaeology, Government of Tamil Nadu, 1994). The literature on Tamil epigraphy is too vast to summarize succinctly, but for overviews on epigraphic production, see Leslie Orr, Donors, Devotees and Daughters of God: Temple Women of Medieval Tamil Nadu (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). On the paleography of Tamil inscriptions, see A. Velu Pillai, Epigraphical Evidence for Tamil Studies (Chennai: International Institute of Tamil Studies, n.d.). 51. The region’s scribal culture—like that of Nepal, Malabar, Orissa, Bengal, and parts of Southeast Asia—was characterized by palm-leaf production.

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52. Kamil Zvelebil, “The Dimension of Orality in Tamil Literature,” in Language vs. Dialect: Linguistic and Literary Essays on Hindi, Tamil, and Sarnami, ed. Mariola Offrendi (New Delhi: Manohar, 1990). 53. Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Thomas Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 54. Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891– 1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). On the creation of modes of conceiving a regional past, see Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). On Telugu language materials, see Rama Mantena, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780– 1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 55. Messick, Calligraphic State, 1, 251–52. A large literature on regional print cultures and public spheres of South Asia includes Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Blackburn, Print, Folklore, and Nationalism; Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Anandita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India, 1858–1895 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007); Rochelle Pinto, Between Empires: Print and Politics in Goa (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); Sascha Ebeling, Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010); Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); A. R. Venkatachalapathy, The Province of the Book: Scribes, Scribblers, and Print (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2011). In Tamil, see Venkatachalapathy’s Muccanti Ilakkiyam (Chennai: Kalachuvadu Padippagam, 2004), and Na¯valum Va¯cippum: Oru Varala¯rrup Pa¯rvai (Nagarcoil: ˉˉ Kalachuvadu Padippagam, 2002). See also C. V. Damodara Pillai, Ta¯mo¯taram: Ira¯v paka¯tu¯r Ci. Vai. Ta¯mo¯tarampil..lai, avarkal. ta¯m patippitta nu¯lkal.ukku el utiya ˉ patippuraikal.in tokuppu (1971; Chennai: Kumaran, 2004); Mayilai S. Venkatasˉ wamy, Patto¯npata¯m Nu¯rra¯n..til Tamil Ilakkiyam Ki. Pi. 1800–1900 (Chidambaˉˉ ˉ ˉ ram: Meyyappan Tamilayvakam, 2001). 56. I draw on Messick, Calligraphic State, 1, 251–52. 57. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 132. Recent studies of voice include Charles Hirschkind

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notes to pages 14–15

The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); John Barnard Bate, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Amanda Wiedman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 58. Moir, “Kaghazi Raj”; Mary Poovey, “The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East Indiamen,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004): 183–203. 59. The Supreme Courts, established by royal charter in Calcutta in 1773 and in Madras in 1800, represented the Crown and applied common law in addition to decisions by equity. Each court had jurisdiction over all Europeans and the non-European residents of the Presidency town and the territory of princes in alliance with the government. Company-run adalat (ada¯lat) courts operated in the hinterlands (in the Madras hinterlands from 1802) and governed all other inhabitants. The adalat court system was a tiered structure, presided over by judges assisted by Indian law officers. The system was headed by the criminal court (the Faujdari Adalat) and civil court (Sadr Adalat), both based in Madras. Both ran on regulations written by governors-in-council, which provided for adjudication by personal law and customary usage. 60. Susan Neild-Basu, “The Dubashes of Madras,” MAS 18, no. 1 (1984): 1–31; Kanakalatha Mukund, The Trading World of the Tamil Merchant: The Evolution of Merchant Capitalism in the Coromandal (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1999). For a description of the dubashes in Madras aristocratic society in the late eighteenth century, see V. Raghavan, “Introduction to the Sarvade¯va¯vila¯sa¯,” Adyar Library Bulletin 22, nos. 1–2 (1958): 113–14. 61. W. K. Firminger, ed., Affairs of the East India Company (Being the Fifth Report from the Select Committee in the House of Commons 28 July, 1812) (1812; Delhi: Neeraj Publishing House, 1984): 1:194–95. On dubashi influence (especially Vellalar dubashes), see Eugene Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 53–59. 62. Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, 4–7. 63. Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 24–25. 64. Nilamani Mukherjee, The Ryotwari System in Madras, 1792–1827 (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962); Robert Frykenberg, ed., Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977); Robert Frykenberg, ed., Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of the Empire (Delhi: Oxford Univer-

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sity Press, 1989); and, most recently on Ellis (a prominent opponent of Munro’s system) in Trautmann, Languages and Nations. 65. Mukherjee, Ryotwari System in Madras, 13. 66. Ibid., 125–50. 67. I am grateful to Senthil Babu for discussion on this important point 68. S. Anandhi, Land to the Dalits: Panchami Land Struggle in Tamilnadu (Bangalore: Indian Social Institute, 2000), 11. 69. Karin Barber describes “tin-trunk” literacy as an orientation to written artifacts that emerged in colonial Africa when inhabitants began to maintain personal archives stored in tin trunks and other containers. Karin Barber, “Hidden Innovators in Africa,” in Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, ed. Karin Barber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Chapter One 1. Asiatick Society and Monthly Miscellany 27 (Jan.-June 1829): 341. 2. Robert Frykenberg, Guntur District, 1788–1848: A History of Local Infl uence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 3. Sudipta Kaviraj, “On the Crisis of Political Institutions in India,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 18, no. 2 (1984): 227. 4. Munro, Company soldier and governor of Madras, was the son of a Glasgow merchant and born in 1761. On his influence in Madras, see Stein, Thomas Munro. 5. “Minute by Thomas Munro, 31 December 1824,” Selection of Papers from the Records at the East India House (London: East Cox and Son, 1820–26), 3:602 (hereafter cited as Selection). 6. Thomas Metcalf presents a succinct overview of the discourse of corruption and distrust in Company circles as it was fi rst applied to European officers and then to their Indian employees. He observes that “a shared sense of complicity in the practices of despotism had to be borne by Indians alone.” Ideologies of the Raj, 24. 7. Patrimonialism is a system of social organization or government in which a male leader maintains authority through individuals with loyalty to him personally. Patrimonial systems enabled the circulation of capital through administrative rights—”offices” that could be bought, delegated, or inherited. See Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 8. Julia Adams offers a defi nition of the familial state as one that stresses “the ideal-type tie between paternal political rule and the multiple arrangements

212

notes to pages 27–30

among family heads that inhabit and shape the evolving political organizations and the economic flows they managed.” Adams, Familial State, 4. See essays in Indrani Chaterjee, ed., Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). 9. Basu, “Dubashes of Madras”; Mukund, Trading World of the Tamil Merchant. 10. V. Raghavan, “The Sarva-Deva-Vila¯sa,” Adyar Library Bulletin 21, pts. 3–4 (December 1957), and 22, pts. 1–2 (May 1958). 11. C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 61. 12. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 13. David Haliburton, The Trial of Avadaunum Paupiah Bramin, (Dubash to John Hollond, Esq; . . . and to His Brother E. John Hollond, Esq; . . . ) of Avadaunum Ramah Saumy, Bramin, . . . Sunkaraporam Vincatachillah Chitty, and Appeyingar Bramin; for a Conspiracy against David Haliburton, Esquire, a Senior Merchant in the Service of the East India Company, . . . To the Trial Is Prefi xed an Address to the Public by Mr. Haliburton (London: J. Murray, 1793). 14. Colvin R. de Silva, Ceylon under the British Occupation 1795–1833 (Colombo: Colombo Apothecaries’ Co., 1953), 1:204–9. 15. BOR Cons., 8 November 1792, vol. 63, no. 3, p. 4406 (Chennai: TNSA). 16. Eric Stokes, “Law and Government,” chap. 3 in English Utilitarians and India, 140–84. The acquisition of territorial rights ended profitability, and discord about patrimonialism created a divide in the Company, widening the confl ict between the metropolitan state and Company men. Until the Crown took over in the 1850s, the metropolitan state tried to dominate the Company, even as the Company, threatened by English private trade, extended its political umbrella in the colonies. See Adams, Familial State, 192. 17. The following sections are developed from a variety of sources and informed by cutcherry establishment lists sent to the Board of Revenue in Madras from the Tamil speaking areas of Madras Presidency between 1802 and 1850. 18. O’Hanlon and Minkowski, “What Makes People Who They Are?” 19. “Translation of the Srikarani Charitra,” Colin Mackenzie Papers, Mss. Eur. Mackenzie, (General) vol. 1, no. 31 (London: APAC, British Library). See also Crikaran.icarittiram (Chennai: GOML). 20. Tsukasa Mizushima, “The Mirasi System and Local Society in Precolonial South India,” in Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India, Japanese Perspectives, ed. Peter Robb, Kaoru Sugihara, and Haruka Yanagisawa (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1996). 21. I follow Frank Perlin, “The Invisible City”: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500–1900 (Aldershot: Variorum; Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1993), 36–39; Sumit Guha, “Civilisations, Markets and

notes to pages 31–33

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Services: Village Servants in India from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” IESHR 41, no. 1 (2004): 73–94. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam on the applicability of Perlin’s analysis of western India to South Indian developments in the seventeenth century in The Political Economy of Commerce, Southern India 1500–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 300. 22. Raghavan, Sarva-Deva-Vila¯sa., 70. 23. C. P. Brown, Disputations on Village Business Translated into English from the Originals in the Telugu Language (Madras: Christian Knowledge Society, 1855). 24. Ibid. 25. “Origins of the Village Accountants,” Walter Elliot Papers, Mss. Eur. D 46 (London: APAC, British Library). Walter Elliot’s paper recounts the different castes that held the position of the village accountant in what is now Andhra Desam. 26. Ibid. 27. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals.” 28. “Remarks on the Report of Lionel Place,” BOR Cons., 6 June 1796, vol. 157, no. 12, p. 5392 (Chennai: TNSA). Revenue farming, despite the high risks, intensified in the late eighteenth century, becoming an explosive arena of entrepreneurial activity. Institutionalized in the patakam system in Tanjavur, it was the key facilitator of the expansion of the English East India Company in the region. Madras District Records, 3 December 1816, vol. 1020 B, no. 558, pp. 1366–86 (Chennai: TNSA), indicates most Telugu Brahmans possessed land in the Madras hinterland, having probably migrated there when they began to work for the Arcot ruling family. 29. Mizushima, “Mirasi System,” 83. 30. Ibid., 107. Mizushima notes that revenue office farming and the acquisition of privilege manifested themselves in the uneven distribution of caste settlement, artisanal, and scribal expertise. 31. Pan.avit.utu¯tu, ed. R. Nirmaladevi (Chennai: International Institute of Tamil Studies, 1980). The vit.utu¯tu genre is generally acknowledged as a fourteenth- century Tamil poetic form that resembles the sande¯šam, or “message,” genre of love poetry in Sanskrit and in other Indian languages. 32. Verses 124–27 liken writing to a picture of eloquent speech, analogous to the devotee’s mind dreaming or visualizing the Saivite deity Murugan. Ibid. Verses 134–37 depict the clever villainy of kanakkans. 33. Farhat Hasan shows how entrenched office farming structured the Mughal administration in Surat. In the absence of kin, offices were parceled out to influential merchants or bought or sold and secured with a sanad document. Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, 1572–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 38. 34. “From Collector of Northern Jaghire to the BOR,” BOR Cons., 15 March 1792, vol. 55, no. 18, pp. 1042–43 (Chennai: TNSA).

214

notes to pages 33–34

35. For an account of the disputes over a clerkship in the Cuddapah district (now in Andhra Pradesh) between 1750–1800, see Brown, Disputations on Village Business. 36. Madras BOR Establishment lists, BOR Cons., 10 April 1817, vol. 751, nos. 34–35, pp. 4451–53; BOR Cons., 10 August 1841, vol. 1758, nos. 8–9, p. 9939 (Chennai: TNSA). 37. The famous Company surveyor Colonel Colin Mackenzie’s scribal establishment is a good example of a peripatetic office held together by postal runners and letters. Early regulations of 1802–3 lay a great emphasis on regular correspondence, report cycles, and so on. 38. “Letter from Thomas Munro to the Secretary Committee of Police describing ‘the Revenue establishment in the Ceded Districts, 1805–6,’” Public Sundries, vol. 122, no. 1264 (Chennai: TNSA). 39. There is some confusion in the literature regarding the jati appellation of these Brahmans and indeed of appellation such as “Row.” For the most part, Company establishment records erroneously differentiated between Brahmans by means of their linguistic affi liations. Thus many Deccani Brahmans were identified as “Maratha.” Robert Frykenberg has generally interpreted this to mean that they were all Deshastha Brahmans who had accompanied the Bhonsle dynasty to Tanjavur. Gijs Kruijtzer, based on research on the Golconda court, argues that Brahman courtier-scribes Madanna and Akkanna, at the Adil Shahi court, were polyglot. They were fluent in Telugu and familiar with Modi and Persian. Although the Presidency’s sheristadars generally included men from Deshastha families, not all writers of Modi were necessarily Deshastha. It is possible that, in addition to Telugu and Persian, the Niyogis wrote Modi. Thus the Company descriptor “Maratha Brahmans” probably describes Modi-writing scribes who may well have also included Niyogi Brahmans, migrants from Golconda who very quickly spread out as accountants and market superintendents. This would be in keeping with the arguments of Phillip Wagoner’s essay on Niyogi skills in the Arcot court and Kruijtzer’s essay. Tamil-writing kanakkuppillais, unless they were from the hinterland of Madras city/Arcot, rarely knew another language. The issue is interesting because it demonstrates the uneven distribution of scriptoral and linguistic expertise in the polyglot regimes of early modern South India. See Gijs Kruijtzer, “Maddanna, Akkanna and the Brahman Revolution: A Study of Mentality, Group Behavior and Personality in SeventeenthCentury India,” JESHO 45, no. 2 (2002): 231–67. 40. “Pen and Ink Sketches” of Native Life in Southern India, Being a Collection of Contributions to the “Madras Mail” and the “Madras Times” by a Native (Madras: Foster, 1880), 132. 41. David Rudner’s study of the Nattukottai Chettiar provides a useful overview of trading and fi nancial structures in the region in the nineteenth century and how these depended on ties of kinship. David Rudner, Caste and Capitalism

notes to pages 37–39

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in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 42. See Frykenberg’s chart 1 and chart 2 summarizing the district cutcherry’s place in the Company’s imperial chain of command. Frykenberg, Guntur District, 81–82. 43. A Madras Eurasian who accompanied orientalist and army officer Captain Henry Burney, for example, drew the early Company-sponsored maps of Burma in the 1820s. For a brief biography and a subcontinental overview of Eurasians, see Bayly, Empire and Information, 119–20; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993). 44. Madras District Records, 3 December 1816, vol. 1020 B, no. 558, pp. 1366– 86 (Chennai: TNSA). By the late 1820s, they were replaced by Vellalar or Brahman scribes who possibly trained in English informally or at Mission stations. See chapter 3 for a description of English training. 45. T. G. Clarke, The Anglo-Indians in Madras: The Fortunes of the AngloIndian Race Considered Retrospectively and Prospectively by One of Fifty Years of Knowledge and Experience, 2nd ed. (Madras: Higginbotham, 1878), 14. For a list of clerks employed in Company service, see Madras Almanac, 1839, which suggests that most of them were from exceedingly modest backgrounds. There was a fair bit of anxiety about Dalit Christian converts adopting “Western garb” and seeking work in Company offices. 46. In some districts of Madras, scribes included men with the appellation of Naik or Nayak. They were probably men who migrated in the fi fteenth century to the southernmost districts of the Tamil country, along with the Vijayanagara warlords and military chieftains or Telugu traders such as Baligas or Kavarais. 47. See “Letter from Collector in Northern Jaghire to the BOR,” BOR Cons., 17 January 1793, vol. 65, nos. 9–10, pp. 276–79 (Chennai: TNSA). He requests permission to employ “an equal number of Sumprettys and Cadjan Conicopolies with their gomashtas.” In all probability, these assistants were related to the kanakkans. 48. For an explicit documentation of such relations, see BOR Cons., 3 August 1854, vol. 2430, nos. 42–43, pp. 10410–12 (Chennai: TNSA). 49. “Pen and Ink Sketches,” 143. 50. Commissioners for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture at Madras (Madras: Fort St. George Gazette Press, 1855). 51. “Pen and Ink Sketches,” 145. 52. Ta¯cilta¯rkummi, palm-leaf ms. (Chennai: GOML). 53. A. R. Kulkarni describes them as head accountants of a region. A. R. Kulkarni, “Village Life in the Deccan in the 17th Century,” IESHR 4, no. 1 (1967): 38–52.

216

notes to pages 39–47

54. “Letter to the Board, regarding the deshpandiah in Ellore,” BOR Cons., 11 November 1799, vol. 239, no. 16, pp. 9063–64 (Chennai: TNSA). 55. BOR Cons., 17 December 1813, vol. 627, no. 23, pp. 13039–41 (Chennai: TNSA). 56. Ibid. 57. BOR Cons., 20 January 1803, vol. 337, no. 48, p. 654 (Chennai: TNSA). 58. Collectors often entered testimonials into the establishment lists. Candidates often took copies and presented them to potential employees. 59. Ta¯cilta¯rkummi (Chennai: GOML). 60. The poem was copied by a scribe near Palani, for his landlord patron, Palanisami Gounder. (Gounder: caste of landlords in the central drylands of South India.) It is probably this context of composition that allows us to view so clearly the tahsildar’s avarice for a post and the Company officer’s foolish love of flattery. 61. BOR Cons., 17 December 1813, vol. 627, no. 23, pp. 13037–39 (Chennai: TNSA). 62. “Revenue Letter to Fort St. George regarding the abuses and settlement of Coimbatore dated 31 October, 1821,” in Selection, 3:489. 63. Ibid. Up to 1846, 80 cash = 1 fanam, 42, 44, or 45 fanams = 1 star pagoda, 1 star pagoda under the rupee system was = 3.5 rupees. Charles S. Crole, The Chingleput, Late Madras District: A Manual (Madras: Asylum Press, 1879), 59. 64. “Revenue Letter,” in Selection, 3:489. 65. “Minute by Thomas Munro Addressed to the BOR Dated 23 November 1821, Extract Fort St. George Revenue Consultations, 30 November 1821,” in Selection, 3:591–94. 66. In the fi rst decade of the nineteenth century, collectors would often lash their employees in public, but this practice was replaced by Regulation IX, 1822, which dealt with embezzlers more procedurally. The Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George in force at the end of 1847 to which are added the Acts of the Government of India in force in that Presidency, ed. Richard Clarke (London: J. & H. Cox, 1848), 434–41. 67. “Revenue Letter,” in Selection, 3:490. 68. Thomas Munro advocated this reform when he recommended the need for constant communication in the board’s office with “intelligent native Revenue servants.” “Extract Revenue Letter from Fort St. George dated 21 June 1822 on Native establishment for the BOR,” in Selection, 3:586. 69. “Report of the Collector of Chingleput,” BOR Cons., 3 August 1854, vol. 2430, nos. 42–43, pp. 10410–12 (Chennai: TNSA). Also see Suntharalingam, Politics and Nationalist Awakening, 18–19. 70. Suntharalingam has shown how these men were part of a broader commercial elite of Telugu Komatis, Chetty, and Naidus. These latter trading groups es-

notes to pages 47–49

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tablished agency houses or fi rms to compete with European business in exportimport and retail trade. Suntharalingam, Politics and Nationalist Awakening, 30. 71. These are general rather than uniform trends, which should be taken along with some strong regional differences. Thus cutcherry in Madras city were dominated by Brahmans who did not know Modi, for example, and Tirunelveli cutcherry also employed a substantial number of local Vellalars. 72. S. Arasaratnam, “Trade and Political Dominion in South India, 1750– 1790: Changing British-Indian Relationships,” MAS 13, no. 1 (1979): 31–32. 73. Madras District Records, 3 December 1816, volume 1020 B, no. 558, pp. 1366–86. Jaganatha Pillai’s mobility was probably typical in the Madras cutcherry because of its proximity to the Chingleput hinterland and its commercial networks. The Madras cutcherry employed several Vellalar “maistries” or foremen who had knowledge of land that came from family training and who served the Company as land appraisers. 74. “Letter from the Collector of the Tinnevelly to the BOR,” BOR Cons., 27 April 1812, vol. 569, no. 48, pp. 4219, 4236 (Chennai: TNSA). 75. Ibid., 4217–18. 76. “From Mr. Clerk, Collector of Northern Jaghire to the Board of Revenue regarding the Jaghire Conicopolies,” BOR Cons., 15 March 1792, vol. 55, nos. 18–19, p. 1041 (Chennai: TNSA). 77. Madras District Records, 3 December 1816, vol. 1020 B, no. 558, pp. 1366– 86 (Chennai: TNSA). 78. A. Sivasubramanian, “Kan.akkan Val.akkarkal.,” in At.ittal. Makkal. Varaˉ la¯ru (Chennai: Makkal Veliyidu, n.d.), 82–112. ˉ 79. Hereditary recruitment for the post was fi nally abolished as recently as 1980. 80. The list of the “Barrabaloty” village servants included the washer man and goldsmith, indicating the conceptual struggle over what constituted “administration” in a locality. Mackenzie Papers, Eur. Ms. Gen., vol. 46, no. 14, pp. 235–36 (London: APAC, British Library). These early colonial lists, as we know from Nicholas Dirk’s work on the Mackenzie archive privileged the tabulation of productive resources—especially land and abstracted caste from productive relations. Dirks observes that, as a result, the colonial archive created a new evidentiary base for the social order of South India. The new taxonomy generated a conceptual grid of caste order that centered around ritual status that, in practice, were organized along multiple vectors, of which ritual status was one among many and often regularly contested in the ancient regime. Dirks, Castes of Mind, 107–24. On jajmani as misconception of the grain heap, see Christopher Fuller, “Misconceiving the Grain Heap: A Critique of the Concept of the Indian Jajmani System,” in Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. J. Parry and M. Bloch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

218

notes to pages 49–55

81. H. D. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, vol. 3 (1913; New York: AMS Press [1968]). 82. “Court of Directors’ Judicial letter to Madras, 29 April 1814,” in Selection, 2:244. 83. A Loyal Kurnam [pseud.], A Brief History of the Village Offi cers, Their Origin, Their Emoluments, Their Usefulness, and Their Importance in the Administrative Machinery of the Country and Their Treatment by the Government of Madras (Madras: G. Natesan, 1904). 84. BOR Cons., 4 September 1828, vol. 1157, no. 17, pp. 8365–66 (Chennai: TNSA). 85. Ibid., p. 8368–69. 86. Ibid., p. 8369–70

Chapter Two 1. BOR Cons., 29 September 1817, vol. 768, no. 31, p. 11390 (Chennai: TNSA). 2. A. Sivasubramanian, “Kan.akkan Val.akkarkal.,” in At.ittal. Makkal. Varala¯ru ˉ ˉ (Chennai: Makkal Veliyidu, n.d.); C. D. Maclean, ed., Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency (1885; rpt., Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1982). 3. David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformation of Colonial Knowledge,” in Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism, 253. 4. Stephen Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth- Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 5. U. Kalpagam, “Colonialism, Rational Calculations, and the Idea of the ‘Economy,’” EPW 32, no. 4 (1997): PE2–12. “Forced commerce” perpetuated monopolistic practice and the enforced integration of local production into a global market society. 6. Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, tran. John and Anne C. Tedeschi, 96–125 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 7. For the convergence between historical methods and the law of evidence in the nineteenth century, see Heather MacNeil, Trusting Records: Legal, Historical, and Diplomatic Perspectives (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). 8. Cohn, Colonialism, 16. 9. Talboys Wheeler, the fi rst curator of the Madras Record Office, preserved two volumes of miscellaneous revenue petitions from natives that had been translated into English as curiosities. Originals of the “country correspondence” between princes and the Company were destroyed once copied. J. Tal-

notes to pages 55–56

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boys Wheeler, Handbook to the Madras Records Being a Report on the Public Records Preserved in the Madras Government Offi ce Previous to 1834 (Madras: Higginbotham, 1861), 83–84, 13. On the Mackenzie Collection, see Nicholas Dirks, “Colonial Histories and Native Informants: Biography of an Archive,” in Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism. 10. Kathryn Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences,” AHR 110 (2005): 350–79. 11. Company maintained elaborate registers for “cowle” grants, for example, from 1725 to 1823, and registers of grants from 1774 to 1811, as well as Madras quit rent rolls from 1791 to 1802. Wheeler, Handbook. Registration of sale deeds was made compulsory only by the Registration Act of 1866. For more, see below. 12. See J. S. Grewal, In the By-lanes of History: Some Persian Documents from a Punjab Town (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1975), for a study of Persian documents from Batala Punjab from the Bhandari Collection preserved in the Punjab State Archives. Indian language materials collected under the “Poona Daftar” by the Company’s Inam Commission illustrates the elaborate recordkeeping of Marathas. The Poona daftar contained 34,972 bundles known as ruma¯ls in Marathi (Modi), but also some in Gujarati and Persian and English. See V. D. Divekar, “Survey of Material in Marathi on the Economic and Social History of India,” IESHR 15, no. 1 (1978): 81–117. 13. Indira Vishwanathan Peterson notes that 850 bundles of daily records in Marathi are preserved in Tanjavur (and discarded from the Madras collection). See Indira Vishwanathan Peterson, “The Cabinet of King Serfoji of Tanjore: A European Collection in Early Nineteenth Century India,” Journal of the History of Collections 11, no. 1 (1999): 90n42. This author saw bundles similar to the Poona ruma¯ls that await systematic study and cataloguing. For a useful study of Modi documentary forms, see Elisabeth Strandberg, trans. and ed., The Modi Documents from Tanjavur in Danish Collections (Weisbaden: F. Steiner, 1983). In western India, preserving and locating Maratha documents became central to regional nationalist projects. See Deshpande, Creative Pasts, for the use of Modi documents in modern recuperations of Maratha history. 14. Peterson, “Cabinet of King Serfoji,” 81. 15. J. H. Nelson, The Madura Country: A Manual Compiled by Order of the Government pt. 4 (Madras: Asylum Press, 1868), 2 (hereafter cited as Madura Manual). 16. The outcomes of colonial knowledge were appropriated by a range of different social actors. As a number of studies have shown, ideas about the ancient village republics and Islamic misrule had a conceptual life that would outlast Company rule. A number of these researches were essential for the rise of disciplines like statistics, mapping, pedagogical experiments in Euro-America, and comparative philology. Official narratives about race and caste formation would

220

notes to pages 57–58

shape caste movements and ideologies of emancipation in the late nineteenth century. South India’s regional nationalist projects would draw on the high esteem given to sedentarized agriculture and the autonomous roots of South Indian Dravidian languages. 17. Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism,” 261. 18. Kalpagam, “Colonialism,“ 6. 19. Tamil Lexicon (Madras: University of Madras, 1936). 20. The embodied habituation elaborated below should be not be confused with recent “emic” analyses of historical narratives (in, for example, Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time) that extrapolate historicity as expressive of a cultural system from the Boasian theory of linguistic cognition. This extrapolation of Boasian linguistics to cultural wholes can be attributed to Kenneth Lee Pike who, in the 1950s, coined “emic” and “etic” as contrasting orientations to culture. See Kenneth L. Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, Janua Linguarum,eries maior, 24 (The Hague: Mouton, 1967 [second rev. ed.]). To Pike, the emic approach is valid only for one language (qua one culture) at a time, and it describes a pattern in reference to articulation of its parts, rather than an attempt to describe them in reference to a general classification derived in advance of the study of that particular culture. 21. David Ludden, “Caste Society and Units of Production in Early Modern South India,” in Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, ed. Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 118. 22. Frank Perlin, The Invisible City: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500–1900 (Aldershot, UK: Variorum; Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1993). 23. Peterson, “Between Print and Performance.” On other polyglot texts, see Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time. 24. Eur. Mss., Mackenzie General, vol. 46, pp. 235–47 (London: APAC, British Library). 25. Trautmann, Languages and Nations. 26. Zvelebil, “Dimension of Orality in Tamil Literature.” See also A. R. Venkatachalapathy, “Reading Practices and Modes of Reading in Colonial Tamil Nadu,” SIH 10, no. 2 (1994): 273–90; Christopher Fuller, “Orality, Literacy and Memorization: Priestly Education in Contemporary South India,” MAS 35, no. 1 (2001): 1–35. On aural transmission’s imbrication with written text, see Vasudha Narayanan, “Exegesis and Interpretation,” in The Vernacular Veda: Revelation, Recitation and Ritual (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Tamil’s long-standing classical grammatical traditions belonged to an oral-literary world. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, A Poem at the Right Moment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

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27. Momin Mohiuddin, The Chancellery and Persian Epistolography under the Mughals, from Bábur to Sháh Jahán, 1526–1658: A Study on Inshá, Dár al-Inshá, and Munshı¯ s Based on Original Documents (Calcutta: Iran Society, 1971); Pushpa Prasad, ed., Lekhapaddhati: Documents of State and Everyday Life from Ancient and Early Medieval Gujarat, 9th to 15th Centuries (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); Sumit Guha, “Serving the Barbarian to Preserve the Dharma: The Ideology and Training of a Clerical Elite in Penisnular India, c.1300–1800,” IESHR 47, no. 4 (2010): 497–525. 28. This correlates with how corporate assemblies mediated the application of Dharmasastra law in medieval South India. See Donald Davis, “Intermediate Realms of Law: Corporate Groups and Rulers in Medieval India,” JESHO 48, no. 1 (2005): 92–117. 29. F. W. Ellis, “Replies to Seventeen Questions,” in Three Treatises on Mirasi Right, ed. C. P. Brown (Madras: Christian Knowledge Press, 1852), 17. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 71n9. 32. Ibid., 91. 33. Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); V. T. Gune, The Judicial System of the Marathas: A Detailed Study of the Judicial Institutions in Maharashtra, from 1600–1818 A.D., Based on Original Decisions Called Mahzars, Nivadpatras, and Offi cial Orders (Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, 1953). 34. Ellis, “Replies to Seventeen Questions,” 74n3. 35. Barahmahal Records, sec. 17, “Justice.” 36. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals.” Philip Wagoner’s research on the establishment of epigraphy by Company Orientalists with Niyogi specialists implies that it was only with the development of the practices of epigraphy that records could, in a sense, speak for themselves as historical sources, without kanakkan attestation. 37. See Velcheru Narayana Rao, “Print and Prose: Pandits, Karanams, and the East India Company in the Making of Modern Telugu,” in India’s Literary History, ed. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 148. Rao suggests that when officers of the East India Company began to learn Telugu for purposes of daily governance in the northern districts of Madras Presidency, because it was widely spoken there, they began to produce grammars and dictionaries from two quite opposing sources: the world of the literary prose and the prose of village accountants (karanam). 38. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals.” 39. Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics, 131–37. 40. Alam and Subrahmanyam, “Making of a Munshi.” 41. This trajectory was in keeping with the role of marriage alliances in trans-

222

notes to pages 60–62

fer of the office of karanam within families. See Brown, Disputations on Village Business, for an account of a family of Brahmins scribes holding clerkship office. The Company produced a survey of kin relations in cutcherry employment for some districts in the 1850s. “Letter from the Collector of Chingleput,” BOR Cons., 3 August 1854, vol. 2430, nos. 42–43, pp. 10410–12 (Chennai: TNSA). 42. For notarial expertise in Ibb, Yemen, see Messick, Calligraphic State, 227. 43. Ellis, “Replies to Seventeen Questions,” 89. Ellis notes in the Three Treatises that written conveyances, routinely written and signed by the kanakkan in the Tamil region, were deemed genuine only if they bore the date derived by the solar computation of auspicious time from the almanac. 44. Senthil Babu’s ongoing research on Tamil mathematical practices suggests that Tamimathematical texts placed a great deal of emphasis on the conversion of units. D. Senthil Babu, “Memory and Mathematics in the Tamil Tin.n.ai Schools of South India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” International Journal for the History of Mathematics Education 2, no. 1 (2007): 15–37. 45. See Perlin, Invisible City, 43, for comparative arguments for western India. As several scholars have attested, precolonial administrations deployed sophisticated techniques of measurement and enumeration. For a survey of this literature in South India, see James Heitzman and S. Rajagopal, “Urban Geography and Land Measurement in the Twelfth Century: The Case of Kanchipuram,” IESHR 41, no. 3 (2004): 237–68. 46. Brown, Disputations on Village Business. 47. Grain merchants, for instance, employed measurers who worked in groups supervised by maistries (master workmen) and learned their trade of enumeration and estimation through habitual practice. “Petition from certain grain merchants, measuring men and their maistries,” Public Cons., 4 January 1825, volume 526, nos. 32, 33, pp. 109–30 (Chennai: TNSA). Beginning with the claim, “ourselves and our ancestors have been employed in measuring all sorts of grain,” the petition argues about the consequences of Company’s intervention in standardizing grain measures in Madras. 48. Witold Kula, Measures and Men, trans. Richard Szeter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 98–99. 49. Shifts in common-placing occurred when memorization came to be regarded as an obsolete practice of pedants and as an inhibitor of judgment. Although improving memory continued to be important to pedagogy, and writing was advocated as a technique for enhancing the memory of the learner, philosophers like Locke proposed an intimate connection between common-placing, mental order, and memory enhancement in the pursuit of self-knowledge that marked an interest in information retrieval rather than recall from memory. On the anxieties and euphoria that accompanied Lockean common-placing, see Lucia Dacome, “Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self

notes to pages 63–64

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in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no. 4 (2004): 603–25; Richard Yeo, “Notebooks as Memory Aids: Precepts and Practices in Early Modern England,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 115–36. 50. BOR Misc., Chingleput (Jaghir), Survey Accounts, vols. 50–73, 89 (Chennai: TNSA). For the Tamil documents, see M. D. Srinivas, T. G. Paramasivam, and T. Pushkala, Thiruporur and Vadakkuppattu: Eighteenth Century Locality Accounts (Chennai: Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai, 2001). 51. On the importance of genealogical lists for South India, see Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time; and for their importance to Colin Mackenzie’s survey efforts, see Dirks, Castes of Mind, 88–89. 52. Thus, for example, the Madura Manual notes that prior to the Company ulcudi cultivators were assessed at full assessment, Villay Varsi cultivators— Brahmins, Vellalas, Mudalis, Muslims and Yerwadis—at half that rate, and Pudukudis at half rates for three years. Nelson, Madura Manual, 90. On grain produce calculations, see Srinivas, Paramasivam, and Pushkala, Thiruporur and Vadakkuppattu, 16. 53. Srinivas, Paramasivam, and Pushkala, Thiruporur and Vadakkuppattu, 14–21. I should note in passing that these forms closely resemble the “canishoomari” accounts. Norbert Peabody suggests these accounts became the basis of census enumeration in the nineteen the century under colonial rule. See Norbert Peabody, “Cent, Sense Census: Human Inventories in Late Pre-colonial and Early Colonial India,” CSSH 43, no. 4 (2001): 819–50.” Nicholas Dirks suggests that “canishoomari” accounts were a mix of caste and occupation categories and not always organized unitarily along standardized hierarchical groupings. See Dirks, Castes of Mind, 117–21. 54. The Board of Revenue routinely summoned “head” kanakkuppillais to obtain evidence when adjudicating disputes. For more examples, see Barahmahal Records, sec. 17, “Justice” (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1907); Brown, Disputations on Village Business. 55. “Account of Pulicat,” in Ton..taiman..tala varala¯rukal., ed. Soundarapandian ˉ (Chennai: GOML, 1997), 146–96. 56. Ibid. For an overview of the issue of kaifiyats as mnemo-literary-historical texts, see Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, 22. On “historical” genres in western India, see Sumit Guha on bakhar texts in Marathi, “Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400–1900,” AHR 109, no. 4 (2004): 1084–1103”; Deshpande, Creative Pasts. 57. On the kaifiyat’s historicity in Telugu, see Mantena, Origins of Modern Historiography. 58. “Account of Pulicat,” 156. 59. Srinivas et al. note that summaries could include vı¯ .t.tu-vayanam-e¯.t u, ˉ household summaries that computed the number of households of every com-

224

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munity in the locality. There could be an empirical discrepancy between the detailed accounts and the summaries. Srinivas, Paramasivam, and Pushkala, Thiruporur and Vadakkuppattu, 19. 60. “Account of Pulicat,” 154. 61. Ton..taiman..tala varala¯rukal., 51–56. ˉ 62. “From the Advocate General: Report of the Proceeding in the suit instituted in the Supreme Court by the East India Company against Mr. Sherson,” BOR Cons., 21 June 1814, vol. 420, no. 20, p. 3350 (Chennai: TNSA). 63. “Translation of a Malabar answer given by Casava Pillai and Conda Pillai Village Conicopolies of Streeperumbadur, to the question put to them by the Board of Revenue,” BOR Cons., 2 November 1786, vol. 4, no. 7, pp. 1359–60 (Chennai: TNSA). This testimony, incidentally, contradicted the testimony of another pair of kanakkuppillais who clearly did not favor the Agamudiyar. Kanakkuppillai testimony was not incontrovertible. What I emphasize here is that the mode of making a testimony relied greatly on the kanakkuppillai’s claim to recall authoritatively. 64. “From the Advocate General: Report of the Proceeding in the suit instituted in the Supreme Court by the East India Company against Mr. Sherson,” BOR Cons., 21 June 1814, vol. 420, no. 20, p. 3350 (Chennai: TNSA). Jayaram Chetty’s Memorandum also refers to this practice in Papers relating to the Revision of the Village Accounts of the Madras Presidency (Madras: Church of Scotland Mission Press, 1855). 65. “From the Advocate General: Report of the Proceeding in the suit instituted in the Supreme Court by the East India Company against Mr. Sherson,” BOR Cons., 21 June 1814, vol. 420, no. 20, p. 3350 (Chennai: TNSA). 66. Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency, 88–95. 67. Ibid. 68. Ellis, “Replies to Seventeen Questions,” 5. 69. Selection of Papers from the Records at the East India House (London: East Cox and Son, 1820–26), 1:802 (hereafter cited as Selection). 70. BOR Cons., 27 January 1803, vol. 337, no. 11, p. 928 (Chennai: TNSA). 71. For a study of how these embodied skills were parleyed into colonial measurement techniques, see Kapil Raj, “When Human Travellers Become Instruments.” 72. Selection, 1:718. 73. Ibid., 730–31. The reliance on habituated skills was not restricted to the kanakkuppillai employees. Casi Chettiar’s caste men, who used to run the tobacco business in the area, were of course perfectly acquainted with all the details. 74. The black books, called kadithas, were made of cloth stiffened with a thick coat of a black mineral substance and folded into pages like an accordion. They were usually written on with white slate chalk in Modi script. In the Karna-

notes to pages 69–74

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taka area, although the script was Modi, the language used was Kannada. Neelamber Hatti and James Heiman, The State and Local Revenue Administration in South Indian History: Yelandur Kaditas and the Role of Village Accountants and Village Headmen, Lund Papers in Economic History No. 33 (Lund, Sweden: Department of Economic History, Lund University, 1993). 75. Incidentally, the tinakkurippu genre was the basis of the kuripu-charit¯ tiram (daily memo), maintained by merchants like Ananda Ranga Pillai. These were logbooks. 76. Selection, 1:770, 1:739 suggests that Naranappah used yadasths. 77. Logbooks, as I see them, are journal entries recording something in process; a memorandum is a document of recall. Both genres can include lists. 78. U. Kalpagam, “Cartography in Colonial India,” EPW 30, no. 30 (1995): PE 87–98. 79. BOR Cons., 24 August 1807, vol. 450, no. 21, pp. 6401–6502 (Chennai: TNSA). 80. Ibid., 6402. When Munro began his survey, he noted that the four gomashtas undertaking the survey were the only persons in the ceded districts who understood land measurement and had to train others. Alexander Read, for example, collected a polyglot list of accounting terms used at different levels. “The Mode of keeping Accounts and observing other transactions in the Payanghat or Carnatic,” Mackenzie General Volume 46, pp. 235–47 (London: British Library, APAC). 81. BOR Misc., Chingleput (Jaghir), Teerva and Tarapadi Accounts, “Accounts for the Jaghire for f. 1202–1204 (1792–1794, A D),” vols. 75–88 (Chennai: TNSA). 82. Deshpande, “Scripting the Cultural History.” 83. “Instructions for Peymash or Survey in North Arcot,” BOR Misc., Chingleput (Jaghir), vol. 74 (Chennai: TNSA), para. 3. 84. Nelson, Madura Manual, 41. 85. Jayaram Chetty’s Memorandum, Papers Relating to the Revision of the Village Accounts of the Madras Presidency (Madras: Church of Scotland Mission Press, 1855). 86. Mukherjee, Ryotwari System in Madras, 198–214, 359. 87. Ibid., 145. 88. In regions where, for instance, inams, or large tracts of tax-free land existed—say in regions like Madurai—poligar chieftains regularly connived with kanakkans to classify land as “inam.” “Revenue History of the Madura Collectorate,” chap. 1, pt. 4 in Nelson, Madura Manual, 18. 89. “Revenue Administration,” chap. 2, pt. 5, in Nelson, Madura Manual, 19. 90. Mukherjee, Ryotwari System in Madras, 234; A. Sivasubramanian, “Kan. akkan Val.akkarkal.,” 82–112. ˉ 91. Officials believed that registration created numerous problems of perjury

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and forgery. See “Regulation of 1843, Act I, Preamble” and “Regulation of 1843, Act XIX,” in Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 682, 704–5. In Britain, registration of titles was voluntary under the Land Registry Act in Britain of 1862, and considered a failure. The Land Transfer Act of 1897 fi rst applied the principle of compulsory registration. See C. J. Sweeny and J. A. Simpson, “The Ordnance Survey and Land Registration,” Geographical Journal 133, no. 1 (1967): 10–18. 92. Alexander Ross, a Company officer, was an advocate of this reform. He wanted the Company to set up a school in a seminary style to train native revenue officers. See A. N. Basu ed., Indian Education in Parliamentary Papers, Part I (1832) (Bombay: Asia Publication House, 1952), 31–32. 93. Papers Relating to the Revision of the Village Accounts, 30. 94. Ibid.

Chapter Three 1. G. U. Pope, A Handbook of the Tamil Language: Tamil Handbook (1855; Delhi: Asian Educational Services 2006), iii. 2. Julia Maitland, Letters from Madras During the Years 1838–1839 by a Lady (London: John Murray, 1846), 23. 3. Bernard Cohn, “The Language of Command and the Command of Language,” in Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. 4. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Madras Department of Public Instruction examined school students in English and the “vernacular” for dictation, composition, grammar, and translation. Students in the lowest standard had to read correctly from a book not previously studied—that is, sight-read (obviously to prevent rote learning). They had to transcribe in legible handwriting and write from dictation. See A Description of the Actual State of Education in the Madras Presidency on the 31 March 1882 (Madras: Fort St. George Press, 1882), 191–203. 5. Rao, “Print and Prose.” 6. Cohn, “Language of Command,” 31. In South India by 1812, Company recruits were encouraged to acquire a command over the “country” languages as soon as they arrived in Madras. The Madras government made a case for the futility of Persian on the grounds that few South Indians were familiar with it. Instead, it began to emphasize South Indian languages for revenue and judicial work, along with English, while retaining Hindustani in the military. The Fort St. George College represents the institutionalization of these initiatives. 7. BOR Cons., 13 August 1812, vol. 580, no. 34, p. 9316 (Chennai: TNSA). 8. BOR Cons., 12 March 1829, vol. 1183, no. 48, pp. 2596–12 (Chennai: TNSA).

notes to pages 84–87

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9. Messick, Calligraphic State, 251–52. For a detailed explanation of this point, see ibid., 265–66n7. 10. The regulation establishing “record rooms” in every district was instituted in 1802. Regulation XXIII, 1802, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 91–92. The formal building of a record room in permanent buildings in different districts came a few years later. 11. BOR Cons., 13 August 1812, vol. 580, no. 34, pp. 9307–32 (Chennai: TNSA). 12. Ibid. 13. As Majid Siddiqui has observed, in contrast to the demolition of secrecy laws in Britain in the late eighteenth century, the Company regime pursued no such activity in India. See Majid Siddiqui’s reading of David Zaret’s study of British petitioning in Majid Siddiqui, The British Historical Context and Petitioning in Colonial India (22nd Dr. M. A. Ansari Memorial Lecture) (New Delhi: Jamia Milia Islamia, 2005). 14. Trautmann, Languages and Nations, 122–24. 15. Public Sundries, 30 April 1827, vol. 145, no. 94 (Chennai: TNSA). 16. Trautmann, Languages and Nations; Cohn, “Language of Command,” 52. 17. Trautmann, Languages and Nations, 178. 18. Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics. 19. Ibid. 20. Trautmann, Languages and Nations, 178, 192. The Calcutta College was run in a similar “seminary” style, but the Pondicherry Jesuit seminary probably cast a more decisive influence because the revenue establishment records suggest that several graduates from the seminary eventually found jobs as writers and translators in the offices of Fort St. George. The Jesuit seminary style was the complex product of exchanges between the fathers and various early modern pedagogic systems such as Ottoman and Chinese from the sixteenth century. The Jesuits had long studied Tamil grammar in South India from the seventeenth century. See Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 21. Blackburn, Print, Folklore, and Nationalism; A. R. Venkatachalapathy, “‘Grammar, the Frame of Language’: Tamil Pandits at the College of Fort St. George,” in The Madras School of Orientalism, ed. Thomas Trautmann (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 113–25. 22. A. Muthusami Pillai, “Life and Writings of Father Beschi,” Madras Journal of Literature and Science, no. 11 (1840): 250–300. 23. Trautmann, Languages and Nations, 104–5, 135, 204. 24. Ibid., 135. 25. Public Cons., 14 January 1834, no. 24, p. 176 (Chennai: TNSA); Venkatachalapathy, “‘Grammar,’” 122.

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notes to pages 87–91

26. Sascha Ebeling, “The College of Fort St. George and Tamil Philology” in Trautmann, Madras School of Orientalism, 233–62. 27. For an accessible overview, see Stuart Blackburn, Print, Folklore, and Nationalism. 28. Venkatachalapathy, “‘Grammar,’” 119. 29. Mitchell, Language, Emotion and Politics, 128. 30. Ibid. 31. Rao, “Print and Prose.” 32. The Charter Act of 1813 is conventionally used as a historical source to explain the English East India Company’s “secular,” purely commercial orientations prior to Anglican activity. See Andrew Porter, “Religion and Empire: British Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 20 (1993): 370–90; Andrew Porter, “Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery and Humanitarianism,” in Oxford History of the British Empire: Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 3:198–221. While scholars have been sensitive to the contradictions that arose from the Company’s public “neutrality” and the mission-sympathetic private opinions, the Company’s long-standing Protestant inclinations have been emphasized by Stern, Company- State. The East India Company did not oppose Protestantism but rather the Anglican disruption of the status quo of castes in India. Balachandran, “Christ and Pariah.” 33. Founded in 1799, the CMS counted William Wilberforce, John Venn, and Charles Simeon among its founders. The SPG took over the SPCK in 1826, and until the mid-nineteenth century, there was a standoff between the SPCK/ SPG and the new missionaries of the CMS in the Tamil country. The Claphamites, mostly wealthy Anglicans, sought to inculcate Christian morals among the poor and in the colony through religious instruction. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, they began to play a vocal role in the shaping of British Imperial culture by espousing the abolition of slavery. The CMS began to foster a closer relationship with some officers of the East India Company, setting up several schools and agitating against slavery. 34. Stokes, English Utilitarians and India; Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). 35. Dennis Hudson, Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706–1835 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000). 36. Ibid. Portuguese—actually, pidgin Portuguese—was widely spoken in the coastal trading enclaves from the sixteenth century. 37. In their grammar of the Tamil language, two of Ziegenbalg’s successors note that the pronunciation and syllables of Tamil were better expressed in Portuguese than in English. See Johann Philipp Fabricius and Christian Breithaupt, A Grammar for Learning the Principles of the Malabar Language Properly

notes to pages 91–94

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Called Tamul or the Tamulian Language by the English Missionaries of Madras (2nd ed. 1789; rpt. Menston, England: Scholar Press, 1972). 38. Ibid., 2. 39. Tiruppazhkadalnathan kavirayar, Rhenius’s assistant of fourteen years at the time of the publication of the Grammar of the Tamil Language, was trained as a pulavar and was the chief disciple of Muthukumaraswamy Othuvar, who in turn studied with Swaminatha Thamibiran, the religious and administrative head of the Thiruvadurai monastery. See C. T. Rhenius, introduction to Grammar of the Tamil Language (Madras: Church Mission Press, 1836). 40. Ibid. 41. Regulations of the Mayavaram Seminary, C I 2/O 36/78 (Birmingham University, UK: CMS Archive). 42. U. V. Swaminatha Iyer’s autobiography suggests that Tamil grammar was taught only to students who had proven themselves. Swaminatha Iyer, The Story of My Life—En Carittiram, 2 vols., trans. Kamil V. Zvelebil, ed. M. Shanmugam Pillai and A. Thasarathan (Madras: Institute of Asian Studies, 1990). 43. This text was published in 1838 as Tirumaturaic centamil t te¯cikarun ˉ Tairiyana¯ta Cuva¯mikal.uma¯kiya Vı¯ rama¯munivar tiruva¯ymalarntarul.icceyta ˉ vaintilakkan.at Tonnu¯l vil.akkam (Chennai, 1838). ˉˉ 44. Regulations of the Mayavaram Seminary, C I 2/O 36/78 (Birmingham University, UK: CMS Archive). 45. Velcheru Narayana Rao makes a similar argument for Telugu in Rao, “Print and Prose,” 146–66. 46. C. T. Rhenius, An Essay on the Principles of Translating the Holy Scriptures with Critical Remarks on Various Passages Particularly in Reference to the Tamul Language (Nagercoil: Church Mission Press, 1827). Vedanayaka Sastriar, who identified himself much more closely with the Lutheran Pietism, countered it in several written responses. Aparna Balachandran, “Sastriar and His Discourse on Caste” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, San Francisco, March 2006). See also Hudson, Protestant Origins in India, chaps. 8, 9. 47. V. Gnanasikhamani, The Conversion Story of a Great Tamil Poet and His Family (Chennai: Bible Literature Service, 1977), 13. 48. See Ananda Ranga Pillai’s diaries in Tamil for a sampling of commercial-bazaar-style Tamil. By no means an official register, the diaries’ language contains many loan words from Hindustani, Persian, Telugu, and Portuguese. Ananda Ranga Pillai, Aˉnantarankap Pil..lai Na¯.tkurippu, multiple vols. (Puduˉ cherry: Puduvai Kalai Panpattu Turai, Puduvai Aracu, 1998). 49. Andrew A. Robertson, Compilation of Papers in the Tamil Language, Including Several on Public Business, to Which Is Added a Glossary in Tamil and English, of Many Words Used Chiefly in the Business of the Courts and Public Cutcherries (Madras: Thorpe, 1839). I should note that by then the College’s

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teaching activities had shrunk. G. U. Pope’s textbook contains sections on Tamil varieties used in business and official documents. G. U. Pope, Handbook of the Tamil Language: A Tamil Prose Reader (1860; rpt., New Delhi: Asian Education Services, 1982). 50. Robertson, Compilation of Papers. 51. For a classic exposition of these Hindustani manuals, see Cohn, “Command of Language,” 36–45. The Tamil equivalent was published, interestingly enough, by a new style Tamil teacher, P. Singarabalaventhiram Pil.l.ai, Tamil Vade-Mecum. 52. Robertson, Compilation of Papers. 53. The same manual was simultaneously published in Tamil as Oru pattirattirat..tu: Tamil ppa¯s.aiyil atika¯rato¯ran.aima¯tirikaiyut.pat.a, a ramanaialuvalˉ ˉ ˉ kal.il mukkiyama¯valan˙kukirapalamol ikal.ukku oru akara¯tiyum ce¯rkkappat..tu, Cenˉ ˉ ˉ ˉ ˉ napat..tan.attukkira¯n.iuttiyo¯kastarkal.il Anriyu. Ro¯part.can turaiavarkal.a¯laccirapaˉ ˉ ˉˉ ˉ tippikkappat..tatu. This text went into several reprints over the course of the nineteenth century, well after the East India Company handed over Madras Presidency to the English Crown. 54. Pope, “Preface to the First Edition,” in Tamil Handbook. 55. Pope’s Tamil Prose Reader contains several specimens of cutcherry Tamil that date to the 1860s. 56. Pope, “Preface to the fi rst edition,” in Tamil Handbook. 57. Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics. 58. Hephzibah Israel, “Cutcherry Tamil vs. Pure Tamil: Contesting Language Use in the Translated Bible in the Early Nineteenth-Century Protestant Tamil Community,” in The Postcolonial Bible Reader, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). Israel gives a detailed analysis of the objections to the Rhenius translations. Interestingly, she notes that the critics equated Christian Tamil with cutcherry Tamil. 59. Dennis Hudson defi nes it as “slang” used in everyday administrative speech—the language used by soldiers and pariahs and in offices. Hudson, Protestant Origins in India, 146. 60. Israel, “Cutcherry Tamil.” I am also grateful for this reference to Balachandran, “Sastri and His Discourse on Caste.” See Israel for detailed analysis of critical texts such as Pututtiruttalin Kukural (“Noise of New Corrections”) and Pututirutalin Co¯tanai (“Tribulations of the New Corrections”). 61. Dennis Hudson argues that one of Sastriar’s concerns was that the frequent translations created confusion among the congregations because most people had been taught to recite texts from memory rather than from books. Hudson, Protestant Origins in India, 147. 62. Judicial Cons., 20 March 1807, vol. 23, p. 789 (Chennai: TNSA). 63. “From the Secretary to the Board of the College and for Public Instruc-

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tion,” Public Cons., 16 February 1827, vol. 547, no. 6, pp. 702–21 (Chennai: TNSA). 64. The collectorate schools taught English, science, and law, and the tahsildari schools were supposed to teach language skills and arithmetic. 65. Robert E. Frykenberg, “Modern Education in South India, 1784–1854: Its Roots and Its Role as a Vehicle of Integration under Company Raj,” AHR 91, no. 1 (1986): 43. 66. “From the Secretary to the Board of the College and for Public Instruction,” Public Cons., 16 February 1827, vol. 547, no. 6, pp. 702–05 (Chennai: TNSA). 67. The moffusil schools were shut down in 1836. Although more information on collectorate teachers is required, it is possible that the teachers of the collectorate schools were reemployed in the cutcherry system once the scheme was abolished. 68. Public Cons., 16 February 1827, vol. 547, no. 6, p. 702 (Chennai: TNSA). 69. “Letter from the Secretary of the College,” Public Cons., 16 February 1827, vol. 547, no. 6, pp. 702–21 (Chennai: TNSA). 70. Thomas Munro, “On the Danger of a Free Press in India, 12 April, 1822,” in Major-General Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras; Selections from His Minutes and Other Offi cial Writings, ed. Alexander Arbuthnot (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 2:287–88. See also Frykenberg, “Modern Education in South India,” 44. 71. Public Cons., 16 February 1827, vol. 547, no. 6. p. 702 (Chennai: TNSA). 72. Ibid., 702–21. 73. Tirunelveli District Collectorate Records, vol. 4726, pp. 177–193. 74. Ibid. 75. Public Cons., 24 May 1836, vol. 651, no. 3, p. 2106 (Chennai: TNSA). 76. Ibid., 2112.

Chapter Four 1. “A. D. Campbell’s Report on the State of Education in Bellary, Board of Revenue, 17 August, 1823,” in Papers Relating to Public Instruction, Comprising a Memorandum of the Proceedings of the Madras Government in the Department of Public Instruction, with an appendix, containing all the more important papers recorded on the subject. Compiled by Alexander J. Arbuthnot, app. E (Madras: Fort St. George Gazette Press, 1855). 2. The mnemonic arts—that is, the study and development of systems for assisting and improving the memory—have remained the provenance of a small group of historians of early modern Europe interested in the origins of Enlight-

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enment Science. These scholars have investigated the acrimonious debate that raged about mnemonic techniques in early modern Europe and studied written texts that objectify mnemonic techniques in order to plot the ways in which the arts of memory profoundly influenced modern philosophy—the Baconian “machine” of logic or Leibniz’s “universal character”—even as they were marginalized by the eighteenth century. See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, trans. and intro. Stephen Clucas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). On Islamic schooling, see Dale F. Eickelman, “The Art of Memory: Islamic Knowledge and Its Social Reproduction,” CSSH 20, no. 4 (1978): 485–516. 3. D. F. Mackenzie, “The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy and Print in Early New Zealand,” in Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 195. 4. Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Seth’s interest lies in recuperating mnemonics as a site of indigenous difference, but my own interest is in the redefinition of memory and the reorganization of textual skills. 5. Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics. 6. Mitchell views the printing press as a technology that substantially devalued memory as a form of storage. Ibid., 143–44. My argument emphasizes how memory skills were redefi ned as retention in the early nineteenth century such that a number of its epistemic capacities were completely occluded. 7. See Sumathi Ramaswamy on the importance of poetry to Tamil nationalist discourse. By the late nineteenth century, the subordination of poetry to prose within the regimes of colonial modernity meant that it emerged as a site of resistance to dominant ideologies. Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue, 84. 8. In English, see Venkatachalapathy, “Reading Practices.” See also his Na¯valum Va¯cippum: Oru Varala¯rr up Pa¯rvai (Nagarcoil: Kalachuvadu Padipˉˉ pagam, 2002). Keith Thomas argues that in early modern England, literacy implied the knowledge of texts rather than the ability to read and write. Keith Thomas, “The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. G. Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Chalapathy himself draws on Roger Chartier’s insight that printing “should not be credited with intellectual and psychological changes that were really the result of a new method of reading.” 9. Carruthers, Book of Memory. See Jonathan Parry, “The Brahmanical Tradition and the Technology of the Intellect,” in Reason and Morality, ed. Joanna Overing (London: Routledge, 1985). 10. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Madras Department of Public Instruction examined school students in English and the “vernacular” for

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dictation, composition, grammar, and translation. Students in the lowest standard had to read correctly from a book not previously studied—that is, read at sight (obviously to prevent rote learning). They had to transcribe in legible handwriting and write from dictation. See Description of the Actual State of Education, 191–203. 11. See P. Radhakrishnan, “Caste Discrimination in the Indian Indigenous Education, Nature and Extent of Education in Early Nineteenth Century British India” (Madras Institute of Development Studies Working Paper 63, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, 1986); Paromesh Acharya, “Indigenous Education and Brahmanical Hegemony in Bengal,” in The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia, ed. Nigel Crook (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Kazi Shahidullah, “The Purpose and Impact of Government Policy on Pathsala gurimashays,” in Crook, Transmission of Knowledge; Sivalingaraja and Saraswathi Sivalingaraja, Patton˙pata¯m Nu¯r ra¯n..til Ya¯ l ppa¯n.ttu Tamilkkalvi (Chenˉˉ ˉ ˉ nai: Kumaran, 2000); D. Senthil Babu, “Memory and Mathematics in the Tamil Tin.n.ai Schools of South India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” International Journal for the History of Mathematics Education 2, no. 1 (2007): 15–37; Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics. For a discussion of the training of Persian munshi apprentices, see Alam and Subrahmanyam, “Making of a Munshi.” 12. Radhakrishnan, “Caste Discrimination.” 13. In Pirata¯pa¯ Mutaliya¯r Carittiram, the protagonist Pratapa, the son of a landed family, refuses to go to school to learn to read and write because the family employed scribes. See Vedanayakam Pillai, Pirata¯pa Mutaliya¯r Carittiram (1879; rpt., Madras: Vanavil Press, 1984). Also the evidence from the 1882 education commission suggests that boys of the Reddy caste of landlords did not attend school. See Madras Provincial Committee, Education Commission, Report by the Madras Provincial Committee: With Evidence Taken before the Committee, and Memorials Addressed to the Education Commission (Calcutta: Government Press, 1884). 14. The following account of verandah schools is culled from these sources: “Campbell’s Report”; Mackenzie Papers, Eur. Mss., Misc., vol. 131, no. 3 (London: APAC, British Library); Vennelacunty Soob Row, The Life of Vennelacunty Soob Row, Translator and Interpreter of the Late Sudr Court, Madras from 1815–1829 as Written by Himself Published for the Information of His Relatives and Friends by his Son, V. Venkata Gopal Row (Madras: C. Foster, 1873); U. V. Ca¯mina¯taiyar, En Carittiram (Chennai: Maka¯ma¯kopa¯ttiya¯ya T. a¯kt.ar U. Ve¯. ˉ Ca¯mina¯taiyar Nu¯l Nilaiyam, 1982). See also an English translation of this text, Swaminatha Iyer, Story of My Life; Charles Gover, Survey of Education in Madras (Madras: Government of Madras, 1871); Sivalingaraja and Saraswathi Sivalingaraja, Patton˙pata¯m Nu¯rra¯n..til. ˉˉ 15. The tinnai style also resonated in orthodox sectarian pedagogical prac-

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tice. The style of teaching through call-and-repeat resembles what Christopher Fuller’s ethnographic research on Saivite Agamic priestly learning documents glosses as cantai and tiruvai. Fuller, “Orality, Literacy and Memorization.” ˉ 16. Sivalingaraja and Saraswathi Sivalingaraja, Patton˙pata¯m Nu¯rra¯n..til. ˉˉ 17. Mackenzie Papers, Misc., vol. 131, no 3. (London: APAC, British Library). 18. Carruthers, Book of Memory. 19. Senthil Babu, “Memory and Mathematics.” 20. Gover, Survey of Education, 45. 21. Mackenzie Papers, Misc., vol. 131, no. 3 (London: APAC, British Library). 22. Campbell’s report notes that nikan..tu and other useful books were uncommon in the schools he surveyed in Bellary. Bellary probably had more Telugu speakers than Tamil speakers, and we should keep in mind that there were strong regional differences in tinnai curricula. 23. Soob Row, Life of Vennelacunty Soob Row, 65. 24. Gregory James, Colporul. (Madras: Cre-A Mozhi Trust, 2005), 64. 25. “Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am,” in Palaja¯tikam-Vikat.am: Mara¯.t.tiyar ka¯la na¯.taka nakaic cuvaik ka¯.tcita tokuppu, ed. Devanayakam (Tanjavur: Tanjavur Saraswati Mahal Publication no. 246, 1986), 1–7. 26. Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue, 82–85. 27. Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 176. 28. For an example of this, see an account of the famous scholar Minakshisundaram Pillai’s memory in Venkatachalapathy, “Reading Practices.” 29. “Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am.” The broader significance of this cultural production for the Maratha state and for Tanjavur society in the eighteenth century has received recent scholarly attention, especially by Indira Peterson, on the prominence of folk genres and theater in Maratha courtly society in Tanjavur. Peterson, “Between Print and Performance.” 30. “Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am,” 2–3. 31. For more on the Tanjavur education system in the nineteenth century see Frykenberg, “Modern Education in South India.” 32. “Pal..liku¯.tam Vikat.am,” 3. 33. Ibid., 4. 34. Note that the problem is about the calculation of the share of the grain on the threshing floor, a common activity following the grain harvest. The state’s share of the harvest was also calculated at that time. 35. Daniel Jeyaraj, Genealogy of South Indian Deities, An English Translation of Ziegenbalg’s Original German Manuscript with a textual analysis and glossary (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 22–25. 36. Ibid., 24. 37. Frykenberg, “Modern Education in South India,” 41.

notes to pages 122–126

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38. The tinnai monitor was called cat..ta¯mpil..lai. 39. The traffic between missionary activity in the colony and metropole that transferred “innovative” pedagogic practices back to western Europe and then on to America was fi rst established at the turn of the nineteenth century. It was to remain a salient connection right through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a remarkable case study of the colonial origins of the “object lesson” in the mid-nineteenth century, see Parna Sengupta, “An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedagogy,” CSSH 45, no. 1 (2003): 96–121. 40. Martin, Short History, 10–11. 41. Public Cons., 27 September 1811, vol. 385, p. 5097 (Chennai: TNSA). 42. “Letter from Missionary Barenbruck reporting on the Native Department of the Madras 1822 dated 14 November 1838,” CI 2 O36/72 (Birmingham, UK: Birmingham University CMS Archive). 43. On dictation and missionary techniques, see Mayilai S. Venkataswamy, Patton˙pata¯m Nu¯rra¯n..til Tamil Ilakkiyam Ki. Pi. 1800–1900 (Chidambaram: ˉˉ ˉ Meyyappan Tamilayvakam, 2001). 44. By the nineteenth century, in England, the word “catechist” denoted a non-European local teacher or priest in a mission church in the colony. 45. Beschi’s catechist was called Gowrimuthu Pillai. See Muthusami Pillai, “Life and Writings of Father Beschi,” 265. The Jesuits recruited Indian assistants, whom they termed pant.a¯rams and ve¯tiyars. “Pant.a¯ram” is a word that commonly refers to a non-Brahman Saivite devotee or monk, and “ve¯tiyars” is used to describe Brahmans who read aloud the authoritative sacred book, so the Jesuit adoption of these titles to refer to their mediators suggests that they saw their Indian assistants as ascetic transmitters of theological practice. 46. Constantine Beschi (1680–1747), a contemporary of Ziegenbalg and writer of two important Tamil grammars, also composed the Ve¯tiyarol ukkam, a long ˉ text to instruct catechists. The print history of this text is hard to reconstruct. We know that that handwritten copies circulated widely in Protestant circles, See E. Hoole, Madras, Mysore, and the South of India; or a Personal Narrative of a Mission to Those Countries from 1820–1827 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844), 42. The earliest print edition that I found dates to 1844: Ve¯tiyarol ukkam, or, Instructions to Catechists in Twenty Chapters with ˉ an Appendix of Eight Chapters (Madras: American Mission Press, 1844). In the Ve¯tiyarol ukkam, Beschi is preoccupied with ensuring the piety and discipline of ˉ his catechists, who were not required to be able to write. 47. These techniques were formulated by the Lutherans and were subsequently modified and developed by the CMS mission in its seminaries. 48. Claudius Buchanan, Letter from Tanjavur, India, 1 Sept. 1806, Connecticut Religious Tract Society 25 (New Haven, CT: Sidney Press, 1809). 49. Soob Row, Life of Vennelacunty Soob Row, 68–69. Like many of his relatives from Nellore and Ongole—through connection with whom he entered the

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scribal service as an assistant to the paymaster—he eventually worked his way into the Company judicial service, where he served variously as a translator, English writer, legal advisor, and fi nally, district munsiff or Indian judge. Like other Niyogis, Subba Rao could write multiple scripts and copy documents easily from one script to another. He was also trained in orthography, grammar, and logic. From his autobiography we learn that his education began in a verandah school, but his professional training as a scribe came from his kin. He served as an apprentice to an uncle employed in the colonial office, and, watching him, Subba Rao learned the languages and writing skills that ultimately got him his job. 50. Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics, 127. 51. Ibid., 134. 52. Soob Row, Life of Vennelacunty Soob Row, 68–69. 53. “Court of Directors Dispatch,” Public Cons., 21 November 1834, vol. 627, no. 48, pp. 4719–25 (Chennai: TNSA). 54. Public Cons., 28 November 1837, vol. 675, nos. 62–63, pp. 6571–74 (Chennai: TNSA). I thank D. Senthil Babu for this reference. 55. Tandavaraya Mudaliyar’s Ilakkan.a vina¯vit.ai was reprinted by the comˉ mercial printing press Chennai Kalvi Sangam in 1828. 56. Stuart Blackburn suggests that an earlier grammar, Subaraya Mudaliar’s Tamil vil.akkam (1811 and 1817), written in English and Tamil, was published ˉ outside the College by commercial press for European patrons. Blackburn notes that subscriptions from men including Tamil notables, rajas, and zamindars financed the book, and it received a seal of approval from Tamil pandits. Blackburn, Print, Folklore, and Nationalism, 82–87. 57. Ibid., 98, 135, 191–94. 58. Swaminatha Iyer, En Carittiram. ˉ 59. C. D. Maclean, ed., Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency (1885; rpt., Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1982), 1:550n3. 60. Munro, “On the Danger of a Free Press,” 287–88 (emphasis added). 61. “Campbell’s Report,” app. E. 62. Ibid. (emphasis added). 63. Blackburn, Print, Folklore, and Nationalism. Jonathan Parry suggests the verse forms lent themselves to memorization whereas the prose involved reading for meaning, implying that turning verse into prose was intervention in pedagogy. See Parry, “Brahmanical Tradition.” 64. General list of books published by Madras Schoolbook Society, Papers of the Madras Schoolbook Society (Bangalore: United Theological College Archive). Mr. Harkness’s report on “Measures adopted for the education of the People,” Public Cons., 16 February 1827, vol. 547, no. 6, p. 702 (Chennai: TNSA). 65. Papers of Rev. Barenbruck, CI 2/O91/8; Papers of Rev. Elious, CI 2/ O36/72 (Birmingham, UK: Birmingham University CMS Archive).

notes to pages 131–139

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66. C. Ramakrishna Sastri, The Gentleman’s Letter Writer, Containing Useful Letters and Petitions (Madras: Vepery Mission Press, 1844); Ramakrishna (Madras: Vepery Mission Press, 1843). 67. Moodeliar, “Title Page,” Polite Letter Writer. 68. Vishwanathan, Masks of Conquest. 69. “Letter from Missionary Barenbruck reporting on the Native Department of the Madras 1822 dated 14 November 1838,” CI 2/O36/72 (Birmingham, UK: Birmingham University CMS Archive). 70. Frykenberg, “Modern Education in South India.”

Chapter Five 1. “Memorandum from the Madras Board of Revenue to the Madras Judicial Department,” Judicial Cons., 21 July 1857, Government Order No. 854, no. 52 (Chennai: TNSA). 2. Wendie Schneider, “‘Enfeebling the Arm of Justice’: Perjury and Prevarication in British India,” in Modern Histories of Crime and Punishment, ed. Markus Dirk Dubber and Lindsay Farmer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 41. 3. Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The codification of evidence, Kolsky notes, was motored by the official concern with controlling violence perpetuated by unofficial whites, but it distributed evidentiary burdens unevenly along race and gender lines. 4. “Madras Board of Revenue to the Madras Judicial Department.” 5. Randall McGowan, “From Pillory to Gallows: The Punishment of Forgery in the Age of the Financial Revolution,” Past and Present 165 (November 1995): 107–40. 6. Randall McGowan, “Knowing the Hand: Forgery and the Proof of Writing in Eighteenth Century England,” Historical Refl ections 24, no. 3 (1998): 385–414. 7. J. H. Langbein, “Historical Foundations of the Law of Evidence: A View from the Ryder Sources,” Columbia Law Review 5 (1996): 1168–1202; J. H. Langbein, “Shaping the English Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources,” University of Chicago Law Review 50 (1983): 1–136; W. L. Twinning, Rethinking Evidence: Exploratory Essays 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2006). 8. Randall McGowan, “Managing the Gallows: The Bank of England and the Death Penalty, 1797–1821,” Law and History Review 25, no. 2 (2007): 241–82; Philip Handler, “Forgery and the End of the ‘Bloody Code’ in Early NineteenthCentury England,” Historical Journal 48, no. 3 (2005): 683–702; “The Limits of Discretion: Forgery and the Jury at the Old Bailey, 1818–1821,” in The Dearest

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notes to pages 139–141

Birth-Right of the People of England: The Jury in the History of the Common Law, eds. John W. Cairns and Grant McLeod (Oxford: Hart, 2002). 9. Schneider, “‘Enfeebling the Arm of Justice.’” 10. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. and trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 992. 11. Ibid., 979. 12. Radhika Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” Public Culture 11, no. 3 (1999): 545. 13. I borrow this phrase from U. Kalpagam. See Kalpagam, “Counterfeit Consciousness,” 92. 14. M. P. Jain, Outlines of Indian Legal and Constitutional History (New Delhi: LexisNexis Butterworths Wadhwa Nagpur, 2009), 42. 15. “Trial of Lakshmana Rao, Captain Graham’s Peshkar for sundry charges preferred against him by the Inhabitants of the Barahmahal by order of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Read, Superintendent,” Barahmahal Records, 138. 16. In BOR Cons., 2 November 1786, vol. 4, no. 7, pp. 1342–73 (Chennai: TNSA), we see references that the board summoned the kanakkuppillai to obtain evidence on a land dispute between Brahmans and Agamudiyars. On the Company undermining mediators, see Mukund, Trading World, 150–52; Niels Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, Right and Left Hand Castes in Colonial South India (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1999). 17. “Note on Justice in the District,” Records of the Chingleput District, vol. 441, 12 July 1784, pp. 30–32; BOR Cons., 5 March 1787, vol. 6, nos. 16– 17, pp. 250–57 (Chennai: TNSA). Eugene Irschick’s study of the settlement of Chingleput shows big men (na¯tta¯r) were important in adjudicating issues of inheritance until 1790. See Irschick, Dialogue and History; “Collector’s Letter to the Board Regarding Civil Justice in Chingleput,” BOR Cons., 1 March 1790, vol. 34, no. 19. pp. 666–69 (Chennai: TNSA). 18. S. C. Banerji, Principles of Hindu Jurisprudence (New Delhi: Sharada, 1996), 111–12. Fraud in this case meant lexical transgression. Documents that conformed with usage in the area and with proper sequence of sense and word order would be considered valid, even if written in the dialect of the place of the person concerned. Documents not in one’s own handwriting were valid only if attested by witnesses. 19. Merchants, brokers, and translators close to Company traders frequently led multicaste assemblies that included Dalit headmen. In response to the police superintendent of Madras, the local police office produced a register, a list of respectable inhabitants of the city. Public Cons., 26 October 1813, vol. 412, p. 5781 (Chennai: TNSA). From this document, it is clear that this body of men also petitioned the Company regularly. These patterns were found in French and Dan-

notes to pages 141–142

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ish ports in the Coromandel. See Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, 43, 148, 250. 20. Barahmahal Records, sec. 17, pp. 169–77. See in particular the kaifiyat deposited in 1798 by the kanakkuppillai. Ibid., 176. But in the Company’s judicial records, I have found the Company courts taking testimonies from nomadic Koravar women and deeming them kaifiyats, suggesting that the genre was being widely used. 21. Kaifiyat (Tamil: kaipı¯ tu) is not glossed in Fabricius’s Dictionary nor in contemporary dictionaries such as the CreA. However, the Tamil lexicon describes the kaipı¯ tu as a statement, report, detailed account, particulars. In addition, in Maclean’s Glossary it is glossed as a “testimony.” 22. Momin Mohiuddin, The Chancellery and Persian Epistolography under the Mughals, from Bábur to Sháh Jahán, 1526–1658: A Study on Inshá, Dár al-Inshá, and Munshı¯ s Based on Original Documents (Calcutta: Iran Society, 1971), 95, 108, 110. Mah.z.ar, glossed as “appearance,” was a statement of the claim and contained the defense and witness depositions. It was attested by the council and delivered to the party who won the case. Radhika Singha describes the mah.z.arna¯ma¯ as a public attestation, attested by persons to be cognizant of a case. Singha, Despotism of Law, xxvii. Similarly, from Wilson’s Glossary of Company Judicial and Revenue Terms, we see that in peninsular India, the mah.z.ar was a public attestation by persons professing to be cognizant of the case and submitted with their signature or marks to the court. In South India, by the late nineteenth century, it was a term current in the Northern Circars and considered a written agreement given jointly by cultivators to the Company for the performance of any duty. 23. See Gune, Judicial System of the Marathas, for an account of oaths for different castes. 24. BOR Cons., 14 December 1813, vol. 627, nos. 52–53, pp. 12922–42 (Chennai: TNSA). 25. On the temporal powers of assemblies for South India, see Davis, “Intermediate Realms of Law.” On the notarial powers of the Islamic judge (Qa¯z.¯ı), see Grewal, In the By-Lanes of History. 26. Ritu Birla has shown that the colonial state was equivocal about bill of exchange (hundi) transactions, and she reads the official measures to manage these transactions as a form of market governance that rendered practices like the hundi culturally subordinate by deeming them as “vernacular.” See Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 65–66. 27. Counterfeit coins and forged writing appear as crimes in many manuals of statecraft in Sanskrit and Persian. A royal patent (farma¯ n) in the fourteenth-century text of Persian epistolography, I’ja¯z-i Khusravı¯, commands the prince not to be defrauded by writers and accountants and warns him to be care-

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ful about those scribes whose “inverted script” disrupted the affairs of Muslims. Syed Hasan Askari, “Material of Historical Interest in I’ja¯z-i Khusravı¯,” in Medieval India—A Miscellany (Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1969), 1:9. 28. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals,” 802. 29. Ibid., 806 (emphasis added). 30. Y. Subbarayalu, Palm-Leaf Records of the Tiruchirappalli District (Tanjavur: Tamil University, Tanjavur, 1991), xiii. In contemporary Tamil Nadu, the thumb impression used by those who cannot write is sometimes called reka, which in Hindustani means “line,” resonating with the Tamil word kı¯ ral, meaning “scratch.” I thank Francis Cody for this information. 31. Subbarayalu, Palm-Leaf Records, 51. 32. This deed dates to the 1850s and, I should note, does not bear the signature or the name of a kanakkuppillai. It is difficult to speculate why this might be the case, but it suggests both the singular importance of performing signature and the power of the landlord over the bondsman that continued after the formal abolition of slavery in the British Empire. 33. See Grewal, In the By-Lanes of History; Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India (London: Macmillan, 2003); Gune, Judicial System of the Marathas. 34. From Banerji’s account, it appears that documents in one’s own handwriting without witnesses were valid unless written by fraud or compulsion. Documents not in one’s own handwriting were valid only if attested by witnesses. See Banerji, Principles of Hindu Jurisprudence, 2:111–12. 35. J. D. M. Derrett, “Nandakumar’s Forgery,” in Essays in Classical and Modern Hindu Law (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 2:232. 36. In the eighteenth century, forgery and perjury were prosecuted in the Madras town. See Jain, Outlines, 20; Love, Vestiges of Early Madras, 2:173. We have no evidence, however, that the regulation of forgery and perjury was, at this time, a systematic way to monopolize and tighten attestation practice and introduce new norms of written credibility in Madras. 37. A Short Narrative of the Circumstances Attending to the Late Trials in the Supreme Court of Judicature at Madras for Forgery, Perjury and Conspiracy to Cheat with Some Comments on the Unjustifi able Allusion Made to Them in the Recent Offi cial Pamphlet in Defense of the Madras Government (London: J. Ridgway, 1810) (emphasis added). 38. BOR Cons., 14 December 1813, vol. 627, nos. 52–53, pp. 12922–42 (Chennai: TNSA). 39. “A Regulation to Provide more effectually for the Punishment of Perjury, Subornation of Perjury, and Forgery,” Regulation VI, 1811, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 235–37. 40. Ibid. 41. Stamp regulations represented an empire-wide move to stabilize and au-

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thenticate documents. In Madras, the stamp regulations did not preclude the admission of unstamped documents. See Regulation VIII, 1808, Regulation XIII, 1816, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 204–6; 326–39. Also see numerous modifications to stamp regulations in Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 876–77. 42. On the destruction of warrior chief (pa¯.laiyakka¯rar) sovereignty, see K. Rajayyan, Rise and Fall of the Poligars of Tamilnadu (Madras: University of Madras, 1974); Anand Yang, “Bandits and Kings: Moral Authority and Resistance in Early Colonial India,” JAS 66, no. 4 (2007): 881–96. 43. The 1809 disputes between Dalit Paraiyars and the Lingayat Panchalars mark this shift. A Company-appointed commission adjudicated these disputes. The multicaste assembly members were summoned to give evidence as “heads of caste” and instructed to broker agreements under Company direction and supervision. On the police committee system in force in the settlement, see Ravi Ahuja, “Labour Unsettled: Mobility and Protest in the Madras Region, 1750– 1800,” IESHR 35, no. 4 (1998): 381–404. 44. Sumit Guha, “Speaking Historically”; Deshpande, Creative Pasts; Mantena, Origins of Modern Historiography. 45. For example, the Co¯l aman..tala Varala¯rukal. (“The Histories of Cholamanˉ ˉ dalam”), described as local literary histories of South Indian towns and settlements, contain several documents called kaifiyat. These narratives were collected by Mackenzie’s Niyogi Brahmans from “respectable inhabitants” in the Tamil region. See Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time. 46. Béatrice Fraenkel, La Signature: Genèse d’un Signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 47. Mohiuddin, Chancellery and Persian Epistolography. 48. V. Raghavan, Aˉnandaran˙gavijayacampuh. S´rı¯ niva¯sa Kaviviracita¯ (Tiruchirappalli: Palanippa Brothers, 1948). Persian Insha¯’ manuals describe a similar set of ritual conventions for receiving royal documents. 49. See Louis Dumont, South Indian Subcaste: Social Organization and Religion of the Pramalai Kallar, trans. M. Moffatt, and A. Morton; rev. L. Dumont and A. Stern; ed. Michael Moffatt (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), photographic plate 17. 50. Official paper documents in the households of Maratha chiefs in the Deccan were authenticated by seals and lexical phrases written by specific office bearers who had to write in their own hand. At least one account of signature practices collected probably around 1811 notes that the rajah began to sign in his own hand relatively late. See “A Statement of the Different Forms and Signatures Required to Authenticate Public Documents,” Madras Journal of Literature and Science, n.s., no. 12 (December 1861): 225.

242

notes to pages 148–152

51. Records of the Tanjavur District, 6 September 1809, vol. 3420, pp. 59–61 (Chennai: TNSA). 52. “Remarks by Mr. Jackson on Letter Received through Vencataswamy Nayaka,” BOR Cons., 19 October 1797, vol. 187, no. 32, pp. 6602–14 (Chennai: TNSA); C. D. Maclean, ed., Glossary of the Madras Presidency (1893; rpt., Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1982). See also M. N. Srinivas on village arbitration in twentieth-century Mysore on the continued use of muchalikas. M. N. Srinivas, “A Caste Dispute among the Washermen of Mysore,” Eastern Anthropologist 7, nos. 3 and 4 (1954): 148–68, reprinted in M. N. Srinivas, Collected Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 100–121. 53. “Remarks by Mr. Jackson,” p. 6604. 54. “From F. W. Ellis, Collector of Madras to the Board of Revenue,” BOR Cons., 14 December 1813, vol. 627, nos. 52–53, pp. 12931–33 (Chennai: TNSA) (emphasis added). 55. “Improper Use of Collector Garrow’s Facsimile,” Coimbatore District Records, 27 June 1816, vol. 584 (Chennai: TNSA). 56. “Letter from I. Hepburn, Tanjavur Collector to the Madras Board of Revenue,” 12 September 1816, Records of the Tanjavur District, vol. 3279, pp. 54–61 (Chennai: TNSA). 57. Ibid. 58. 30 July 1817, Records of the Tanjavur District, vol. 3281, p. 21 (Chennai: TNSA). 59. Sudipta Sen, The Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 31. 60. The Company’s adalat courts were courts of equity and were not formally compelled to follow English law. 61. This formula was applied in many British colonies, especially in Africa, which facilitated colonial accommodations of custom. Michael Anderson, “Islamic Law and Colonial Encounter in British India,” in Institutions and Ideologies: A SOAS South Asia Reader, ed. David Arnold and Peter Robb (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1993), 169. 62. Jörg Fisch, Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs: The British Transformation of the Bengal Criminal Law 1769–1817 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983); Singha, Despotism of Law; Scott Kugle, “Framed, Blamed, and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia,” MAS 35, no. 2 (2001): 257–313. 63. See the many modifications to Mahomedan Criminal Law in Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 837–38; Schneider, “Enfeebling,” 313, 319. Schneider observes that the Bengal administrators remained more attached to the idea of administering Islamic law than Madras officials. 64. Maitland, Letters from Madras, 82.

notes to pages 153–157

243

65. On how revenue collection dominated concerns of law, see Douglas Peers, “Torture, the Police and the Colonial State in Madras Presidency, 1816–1855,” Criminal Justice History 12 (1991): 29–56. 66. Cited in T. H. Beaglehole, Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras, 1792–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 109. 67. “Board of Revenue to Government of Madras,” Revenue Cons., 22 March 1816, vol. 218, no. 1, pp. 2361–62 (Chennai: TNSA). 68. Beaglehole, Thomas Munro. 69. For an account of how the 1816 regulations enhanced the police powers of specific subordinate offices, see Douglas M. Peers. “Torture, the Police, and the Colonial State in the Madras Presidency, 1816–55,” Criminal Justice History 12 (1991): 29–56. 70. Regulation IV, 1821, x, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 416 (emphasis added). 71. Ibid. 72. Regulation IV, 1816, x, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 254–55. 73. Many circular orders were issued on subject. The Circular Orders of the Court of Foujdaree Udalut, from 1803 up to 30th June 1834 (Madras: Church Mission Press, 1835). 74. Regulation III, 1826, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 454–55. 75. Singha, Despotism, pp. 304–7. See also Peers, “Torture, the Police and the Colonial State.” 76. Singha, Despotism of Law; Sir Alexander Arbuthnot, ed., Major- General Sir Thomas Munro, Selections from His Minutes and Other Offi cial Writings (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 2:47–47. See Anupama Rao, “Problems of Violence, States of Terror,” EPW 36, 43 (2001): 4125–33. 77. The regulations introducing jury trials simultaneously empowered judges to dispense with writing down depositions and to rely on their notes of the evidence. 78. A Native Revenue Offi cer, On Bribery as Practiced in the Revenue Administration of the Madras Presidency (Madras: Hindu Press, 1858), 25. 79. Ibid., 24. 80. Eventually the Company had to accommodate the refusals to take oaths. In 1840, it changed its laws to permit individuals to take an “affi rmation” rather than an “oath.” Regulation V, 1840, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 614. 81. A number of regulations were issued concerning the summoning of witnesses. In 1816, special powers were given to Indian judges like the district munsiff to force witnesses to attend court and give evidence. See Regulation VI, 1816,

244

notes to pages 158–161

xxviii and xxix, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 272–73. In 1841, new rules were introduced to take the evidence of “absent witnesses.” Regulation VII, 1841, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 621–24. 82. Judicial Cons., 21 July 1857, Government Order No. 854, no. 52 (Chennai: TNSA). 83. Ibid. 84. I borrow this phrase from U. Kalpagam. See Kalpagam, “Counterfeit Consciousness,” 92. 85. Singha observes instances of stamped paper use in intimate transactions among commercial and literate groups. Singha, “Colonial Law,” 89. Rosalind O’Hanlon writes that the anti-caste radical Jotiba Phule critiqued the practice of Brahmans mediating and manipulating transactions around petitions and deeds in western India. O’Hanlon, Caste, Confl ict and Ideology, 211–12. In the early twentieth century, western Indian historians concerned with demarcating original manuscripts sometimes published them with legal affidavits attesting their authenticity. See Prachi Deshpande, “The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive, Lakshmi Bai, Jhansi and 1857,” JAS 67, no. 3 (2008): 874. 86. de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life.

Chapter Six 1. A growing body of literature on petitioning in colonial South Asia includes Siddiqui, British Historical Context; Sumit Guha, “Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Deccan, 1500–1800,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 2 (2004): 23–31; P. Swaranalatha, “Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisansal Protests in Colonial Andhra,” in “Petitions in Social History,” ed. Lex Heerma Van Voss, supplement, International Review of Social History 46, supp. no. 9 (December 2001): 107–30; Nira Wickramsinghe, “La Petition Coloniale: Objet de Contrôle, Object de Dissidence,” Identity, Culture and Politics: An Afro-Asian Dialogue 7, no. 1 (2006): 1–16; Balachandran, “Christ and Pariah.” 2. Arnold Wright, “Petitions and Begging Letters,” in Baboo English as ’tis Writ: Being Curiosities of Indian Journalism (London: T. F. Unwin, 1891), 78–79. 3. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). 4. Lauren Benton, “Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State,” CSSH 41, no. 3 (2000): 563–88; Balachandran, “Christ and Pariah.” See also Hannah Weiss Muller on the legal

notes to pages 162–166

245

discourse of subjecthood in the British Empire in the eighteenth century, “Empire of Subjects”; Fraas, “‘They Have Travailed into a Wrong Latitude.’” 5. Arnold Wright, “Petitions and Begging Letters,” in Baboo English. 6. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 94. 7. On the Company’s “Amsterdam liberty” and Protestant toleration, see Stern, Company-State, 102–18. As he observes, toleration did not mean acceptance but a capacity to bear difference. 8. Bilder, “Salamanders and Sons of God.” 9. Ibid., 58–60. 10. Ibid., 56. 11. Fraas, “‘They Have Travailed into a Wrong Latitude.’” 12. Askari, “Material of Historical Interest,” 13. Ka¯ghaz¯ı n ja¯ma were paper ˉ robes worn by supplicants to attract the attention of the passersby associated with cries of the oppressed. 13. “Tanjavur Commissioner’s Report,” 1799, Revenue Misc. 183 (A), para. 48 (Chennai: TNSA). 14. Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, 145. 15. On hierarchical intimacy of supplication, see Appadurai, “Topographies of the Self,” 92–112. Appadurai uses the work on Bhakti discourse by Lawrence Babb. See L. A. Babb, Redemptive Encounters: Three Modern Styles in the Hindu Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). On praise and oratory, see Bate, Tamil Oratory. 16. Surendra Nath Sen, ed., Sanskrit Documents: Being Sanskrit Letters and Other Documents Preserved in the Oriental Collection at the National Archives of India (Allahabad: Ganganatha Jha Research Institute, 1951). 17. See Pope, Tamil Prose Reader; Tamil Lexicon, 3664. R. Champaklakshmi describes the ritual singing of hymns by temple functionaries, called patikam pa¯tuva¯r. The inscriptional term for these ritual singers of divine praise is patikam vin.n.appam ceiva¯r. See R. Champaklakshmi, “The Patikam Pa¯t.uva¯r: Ritual Singing as a Means of Communication in Early Medieval South India,” SIH 10, no. 2 (1994): 199–215. 18. In postcolonial India, petitioning has been allocated to a weekly grievance day. See Francis Cody, “Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship: Petitions, Literacy Activism, and the Performativity of Signature in Rural Tamil India,” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 3 (2009): 347–80. 19. I draw here on Webb Keane, “From Fetishism to Sincerity: On Agency, the Speaking Subject and Their Historicity in the Context of Religious Conversion,” CSSH 39, no. 4 (1997): 680; Pollock, Language of the Gods; Bate, Tamil Oratory. 20. Richard Scherl, “Speaking with Mariya¯tai: A Linguistic and Cultural Analysis of Markers of Plurality in Tamil” (PhD, University of Chicago, 1996).

246

notes to pages 166–170

21. T. H. G. Besant, ed., The Persian & Urdu Letter-Writer: With an English Translation and Vocabulary, comp. and trans. T. H. G. Besant, with the assistance of Namat Khan, Munshi Akbarabadi, 2nd ed. (Calcutta: Ostell and LePage, 1845). See also Charles Stewart, Original Persian Letters, and Other Documents, with Fac-similes (London: W. Nicols, 1825). 22. Besant, Persian & Urdu Letter-Writer. 23. Pope, Tamil Prose Reader, 18. 24. Chingleput Collectorate Records, 19 March 1784, vol. 441, pp. 1–9 (Chennai: TNSA). 25. In the initial years of rule, the Company, like local kings, rented out the right to collect specific taxes to local potentates. Tax farming was done by auction, and the tax farmer, or “renter,” would earn a portion of the collection as commission. For a sociological analysis of the renters, see Neild-Basu, “Dubashes of Madras”; Mukund, Trading World. C. A. Bayly and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India,” IESHR 25, no. 4 (1988): 401–24, is a useful overview of the renter economy, but positions the renter as an instance of institutional continuity between the precolonial and the colonial, rather than a figure whose role was disassembled around 1800. The renter economy was succeeded by an extractive revenue regime in the early nineteenth century. 26. Tsukasa Mizushima, Nattar and the Socio-economic Change in South India in the 18th–19th Centuries (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 1986) (emphasis added). 27. Chingleput Collectorate Records, 20 March 1784, vol. 441 (Chennai: TNSA). 28. BOR Cons., 19 May 1788, vol. 18, nos. 10–13, and 19 June 1788, vol. 19, nos. 3–4, (Chennai: TNSA). 29. Public Cons., 13 October 1813, vol. 412, p. 5790 (Chennai: TNSA). 30. BOR Cons., 25 September 1788, vol. 21, no. 12, p. 2431 (Chennai: TNSA); “Circular Letter to Collectors from the Board of Revenue,” BOR Cons., 1 March 1790, vol. 34, no. 27, p. 684 (Chennai: TNSA). 31. Stamp Act, Regulation VIII, 1808, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 204–6. 32. “Letters from Chief and Council of Masulipatnam,” BOR Cons., 1 April 1790, vol. 35, no. 10, p. 946 (Chennai: TNSA). 33. “Circular Letter to Collectors from the Board of Revenue,” BOR Cons., 1 March 1790, vol. 34, no. 27, p. 684 (Chennai: TNSA). 34. BOR Cons., 19 November 1812, vol. 597, nos. 40–41, pp. 15062–66 (Chennai: TNSA). 35. Ibid. Such a state of relentless petitioning continued right through the Company period.

notes to pages 171–177

247

36. Public Cons., 15 November 1814, vol. 424, pp. 5343–44. 37. Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (New York: Verso, 1984). 38. Public Cons., 13 November 1815, vol. 426, pp. 200–29 (Chennai: TNSA). 39. BOR Cons., 7 April 1800, vol. 248, nos. 35–36, pp. 2972–98 (Chennai: TNSA). The text reads, “Mr. Charles Harris Collector of Tiruvadi, Mannargoody, and Putticottah and of Nagore and Nagapattinam hereby addresses himself to all ‘Mutusuddies, Carbars, Amildars, Subnaveesses and Conicopolies, writers, hircarrahs, armed peons and Mavilliars’ doing duty under him in the head and district Cutcherry, renters, ‘Puttuckdars, Poligars, Cavilgars, to their ajeebs, cultivators, Mirasdars, Majumdars, Shortiumdars, merchants, artificer’ inhabitants of the district.” 40. Ibid., 2982–83. 41. Ibid., 2984–85 (emphasis added). 42. “Letter from William Bentinck,” BOR Cons., 27 November 1804, vol. 393, nos. 8–9, p. 8584 (Chennai: TNSA). 43. Ibid., 8586. 44. Ibid., “Reply from Mr. Harris,” 8635. 45. Ibid., 8646. 46. Ibid., 8647. 47. Trautmann, Languages and Nations. 48. “Letter from the Board of Examiners,” Public Cons., 6 March 1855, vol. 940, no. 51 (Chennai: TNSA). 49. Public Cons., 13 November 1814, vol. 424, pp. 5343–44 (Chennai: TNSA). 50. BOR Cons., 8 February 1813, vol. 602, no. 92, p. 1767 (Chennai: TNSA). 51. For an example of the schedule, refer to Diary and Consultation Book 1755, Records of Fort St. George (Madras: Government Press, 1907), 320–22. 52. Stamp Act, Regulation VIII, 1808, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 204–6. 53. See overview of stamp duty regulation in the C. D. Maclean’s Madras Manual of Administration, vol. 1. 54. Ibid. 55. In England, evading stamp duty was penalized more severely. The duty itself was lighter in India than in England, and the penalty for the evasion of stamp duty was a fi ne that was ten times the value of the duty. Authentic documents had to be written on stamp paper. “Extract from the Proceedings of the Sudr Adawlat, dated 20 April 1837,” BOR Cons, 18 September 1837, vol. 1574, no. 6, p. 1115 (Chennai: TNSA). Regulations were introduced to allow the Board of Revenue to accept unstamped petitions. Regulation II, 1825, v, Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, 449. 56. BOR Cons., 21 March 1816, vol. 711, nos. 41–42, p. 2655 (Chennai: TNSA). 57. Ravi Ahuja, “Expropriating the Poor: Urban Land Control and Colonial

248

notes to pages 177–183

Administration in Late Eighteenth Century Madras City,” SIH 17, no. 1 (2001): 81–99. 58. The 1825 regulation withdrawing stamped petitions illustrates the Company’s dependence on petitions and the inability of its officials to control petitioning, but it should not be read as a failure to reformulate petitioning practices. 59. See Michael Fisher, “The East India Company’s Suppression of the Native Dak,” IESHR 31, no. 3 (1994): 311–48. 60. Public Cons., 8 August 1834, vol. 623, no. 25, pp. 2833–52 (Chennai: TNSA). 61. “Deposition of Shakaralingam, Son of Hircarrah of Madurai and New Resident of Triplicane,” Public Cons., 8 August 1834, vol. 624, no. 25, pp. 2833–52 (Chennai: TNSA). 62. “The Deposition of Raghavadoo, of Mylapore, a Peon,” Public Cons., 8 August 1834, vol. 624, no. 25, pp. 2833–52 (Chennai: TNSA). 63. “Presentation of Petitions,” BOR Cons., 29 May 1837, vol. 1559, nos. 9–10, pp. 5962 (Chennai: TNSA). 64. “Letter from Collector of Madurai to Board of Revenue, Madras, dated 20 March 1833,” BOR Cons., 4 April 1833, vol. 1359, no. 58, pp. 3350–51 (Chennai: TNSA). 65. Public Cons., 27 April 1854, vol. 923, nos. 48–49, p. 2237 (Chennai: TNSA). 66. See Ravi Ahuja, “Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras c. 1750–1800,” MAS 36, no. 4 (2002): 793–826; Balachandran, “Christ and the Pariah.” 67. David Washbrook, “Economic Depression and the Making of Traditional Society in Colonial India 1820–1855,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6, no. 3 (1993): 237–63; David Washbrook, “South India 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition,” in “Colonial Transition, 1780–1840,” special issue, MAS, 38, no. 3 (2004): 479–516. 68. See Mukund, Trading World; Ahuja, “Expropriating the Poor”; Ahuja, “Labour Relations”; Irschick, Dialogue and History. For North India, see Sandria Frietag Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 69. “Letter to the Magistracy at Ganjam, Copy and Translation from the Vencatachellum Gomastah of Vizeanagar,” Judicial Cons., 7 June 1805, vol. 11, pp. 1116–37 (Chennai: TNSA). 70. Ibid., 1135. 71. Ahuja, “Labor Relations.” 72. “Letter from F. W. Ellis to the Board of Revenue,” BOR Cons., 24 December 1812, vol. 597, no. 68, pp. 16653–55 (Chennai: TNSA). 73. Over the early modern period, the town had become an important node

notes to pages 183–190

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in the South Indian rice trade to Myanmar, Jaffna, and Malaya; and its bustling market was run by a mix of social groups: missionaries, Europeans, freed slaves, seaman, and merchants of a variety of religious sects and denominations, all of whom lived off the sea and its commerce. Its geoeconomic strengths had made it a favored political acquisition for European trading companies. By 1800, it had already changed hands three times from the Portuguese to the Dutch and fi nally to the English. 74. By the 1880s, the sanad was used by the Company exclusively to grant proprietary rights to zamindars. See Maclean, Madras Manual of Administration. The defi nition of the sanad offered by the A’in-i-Akbari had a very wide application, signifying a confi rmation and verification of a previous order of land grant, appointment, and any privilege or immunity accorded to the recipient. These documents were issued in response by the plea of the grantee or the report of the local officials. Mohiuddin, Chancellery and Persian Epistolography, 86–87. 75. See Balachandran, “Christ and Pariah.” 76. “Petition from the Christian Inhabitants of Nagapattinam dated 7 Feb 1807,” Judicial Cons., 20 March 1807, vol. 23, p. 753 (Chennai: TNSA). 77. “Letter from Sobers, the Commanding Officer from Nagapattinam to Judge and Magistrate of Mannargoody, dated 21 Feb 1807,” Judicial Cons., 20 March 1807, vol. 23, p. 754 (Chennai: TNSA). 78. See Ahuja, “Expropriating the Poor”; Ahuja, “Labour Unsettled”; Ravi Ahuja, “The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras,” International Review of Social History 44, no. 2 (1999): 159–95, which suggests that claims made in terms of labor or long-term occupation were not favorably received. 79. For an extensive discussion, see Balachandran, “Christ and the Pariah”; “Petition from Pariahs, 21 September 1832,” Public Cons., 5 October 1832, vol. 604, nos. 29–30, pp. 3023–25 (Chennai: TNSA). 80. Agambadiar are closely connected by kin to Kallar and Maravar groups and in most accounts held the village ka¯val (policeman) post. They traced their past to armed retainership and armed servants who served landlords, royalty, and temples in the medieval period. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, they became cultivators and small farmers in large numbers. 81. “From the Collector of Dindigul and Madura to the Board of Revenue,” BOR. Cons., 4 December 1820, vol. 872, nos. 35–36, pp. 10366–97 (Chennai: TNSA). 82. As before, newly cleared land in the early nineteenth century was commonly cultivated with the labor of marginal groups who, depending on the area, could be Adivasi or agrestic dependents like the Paraiyars or Pallars. 83. BOR Cons., 4 December 1820, nos. 35–36, vol. 872, pp. 10366–97 (Chennai: TNSA). 84. Ibid.

250

notes to pages 190–200

85. Ryotwari assessment initially took away the rights of inheritance (mirasi) to rent subsidies and favored the pykari, whose cultivating rights were protected from the landlord so long as he paid Company tax. This created a huge number of land disputes between mirasdars, traditionally upper-caste groups, and their pykari tenants. From around 1818, when Ryotwari were reintroduced, the Company made special efforts to guard against any infraction of the landed inheritance of a settlement’s residents—ulkudis, mirasdars—from the pykaris. Mukherjee, Ryotwari System, 332–34. 86. Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

Conclusion 1. Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Commonsense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Wilson, Domination of Strangers. 2. Partha Chatterjee and Raziuddin Aquil, eds., Introduction to History in the Vernacular (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008), 3–11. 3. Ibid. 4. Vismann, Files. 5. Slavery was legally abolished in the British Empire in 1833. Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). 6.The Madras Torture Commission Report created a huge storm in Britain in 1855. In Madras, the report generated an extraordinary burst of petitioning, writing, and testifying from inhabitants, usually petty land cultivators. For an overview of the commission’s role in interrupting the liberal discourse of colonial rule, see Anupama Rao, “Problems of Violence.” On the police powers of the Madras government, see Peers, “Torture.” 7. Peers, “Torture.”

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Index Aiyar, Mahalinga, 86 Aiyar, Vishakaperumal, 86, 128 alterity, cultural and racial, 7, 49, 66, 137, 156, 206n32; and corruption, 25–26, 28; and John Stuart Mill, 10; and Thomas Munro, 25–26. See also Bhabha, Homi Anglo-vernacular language regime. See College of Fort St. George; cutcherry Tamil; grammar; schools anti-Brahman critique, 7 Arcot: debts, 178; forgery scandal, 143, 144–45; hinterland, 32; kingdom, 11, 31, 34, 47, 60, 213; North, 75; records, 56; South, petitions, 170 Asiatic Society and Monthly Miscellany, 24 archive/archiving, 2, 14, 19, 54. See also recordkeeping attestation, 4, 8, 14; and the authority of kanakkan/scribes, 63–66, 58–60, 140– 41, 221n36; and the bureaucratic state, 138–39; and caste hierarchy, 141–42, 144, 156; discerning forgery, 60, 142– 43, 238n18; evidentiary paradigm of testimonial, 66, 141; instability of, and duplicity, 149–51, 158–59; oaths, 140, 157; fees for, 176; official anxiety over, 57, 74–76, 137–38; and petitions, 165, 239n22; text genres and practices of, 62–65, 140–44; regulation and reshaping of attestation, 144–49, 185–86, 198, 240n36, 244n85; signature practices, 142–44, 147; Vismann on law and, 197. See also forgery; perjury; scribal practices; scribal skills

Baligas, 37, 215 Bell, Alexander, 122–23 Bengal Presidency, 9; attestation, 144, 150; munshis, 85; and Permanent Settlement, 39, 70; prohibiting money lending by government employees in, 40; reforms, 14–15 Bentinck, William, 173–74 Beschi, Constantine Joseph, 87, 90, 92, 97– 98, 235n45, 235n46; Tonnuˉl Vil. akkam, 91. See also Jesuits Bhabha, Homi, 10–11, 163 Bombay Presidency: anti-caste movements, 7; cutcherry, 23–24 British East India Company, 1; and corporate sovereignty, 8–9; and its legal powers as a franchise, 9; and war fi nance, 9. See also British Parliament; charter British Parliament: renewal of Company charter, 1, 89; and written accountability, 2, 10–11, 15, 75, 76, 158, 193 bureaucracy, 2–3; colonial, 17, 24, 139; and discretion, 157; of letters, 56, 138, 171; official skepticism of impersonal, 15. See also discretion Burke, Edmund, 170, 178 Campbell, Alexander: on education, 106– 7, 132; on printed textbooks, 129–39 caste: and attestation, 142, 144, 156; and bureaucratic modernity, 17, 24–25; and computation, 113; and critique of Brahmans, 50–51; and cutcherry Tamil, 81, 83, 99–100; disputes, 141, 146; and edu-

274 caste (continued) cation, 60, 87, 106, 110–11, 130, 132–33; hardening of, in the cutcherry, 38, 46, 48; in household survey, 64; and land disputes, 16, 183–87, 187–90; and land documents, 59; and missionaries, 90, 130; and scribes, 6, 8, 28, 29–31 Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), 27 charter: and delegated authority, 164; granted to the Company, 1, 10, 200; establishing the Supreme Courts, 210n59; and missionaries, 89, 228n32 Chingelput, 31, 32, 46, 47, 64, 217n73, 238n17; petitions, 167, 168, 177; recordkeeping in, 83, 84; survey by Barnard, 63, 70 Church Missionary Society (CMS), 228n33; and grammar skills, 82, 90– 91, 126; seminary at Mayavaram, 92; written language, 100, 123. See also missionaries clerical prose. See cutcherry Tamil clerks, 2, 6; of Arcot, 31; as cutcherry Brahmans, 7; market of, 107, 122; as mediators of petitions, 162. See scribes Cohn, Bernard, 7, 83 Coimbatore: corruption in, 43–45, 68; petitions, 177; scribes from, in Tirunelveli, 51 colonial knowledge/power, 7–8, 53–54, 82, 83, 88, 104, 194, 199, 206n30, 219n16. See also intermediaries; orientalists; survey College of Fort St. George (Madras College), 85–88, 175, 226n6; legacy of, 96; and munshis, 94; and munshi teacher training, 102–3, 229n49; and printed textbooks, 128–29, 130; and seminary style of Jesuits, 86–89, 227n20. See also Ellis, Francis Whyte Cornwallis, Lord Charles, 166; administrative reforms of, 14–15, 152 corruption: allegations of, as tactic, 42; in Coimbatore, 43–44, 68–69; and East India Company, 1, 10, 14–15, 17– 18; racial and cultural alterity, 25–28; reform of corrupt scribes, 45. See also information brokerage; informers; umedwar Crikaran. icarittiram, 33

index cutcherry, 1, 3; and caste, 24–25, 46–50; as center of local influence, 24–25; Company cutcherry organization, 14–15; cutcherry Brahmans, 7, 50–51; and petitioning, 4–6, 23–24, 45–46, 51; recruitment and information brokerage, 38–43; reforms, 45; spatial and scribal organization of, 33–34, 37–38. See also Cornwallis, Lord Charles; corruption; cutcherry Tamil; informers; patrimony; recordkeeping; Ryotwari settlement; scribes; writing cutcherry scribes: apprenticeship, 37; district, 34–36; linguistic and social composition of, 37; recordkeeping functions of, 37 cutcherry Tamil, 6, 83–84, 93–94, 104–5; and College of Fort St. George, 93–96, 100; disparagement of, 81–82, 96–100, 229–30n49, 230n58; and munshis, 93– 96, 99–101; petitions in, 162; printed manual of, 94–96, 131 Dalits, 38, 49, 87, 142, 143, 179, 183, 187, 238n19, 241n43 Das, Veena, signature, 3 Desikar, Chidambara, 128 Dindigul, 41, 56 diplomatics, 197 discretion: bureaucratic, 3, 7, 11; and corruption, 17–18; and documentary practice, 17–18, 54, 139, 147; and law, 139, 140, 151–53; and petty officials, 45, 73, 158; and policing, 153–56, 158 dubashes, 4; as arbitrators, 141, 167; as colonial intermediaries, 14, 26–27; and private contracting, 28; as revenue farmers, 14, 27, 167, 246n25 document bazaar, 17; the making of the, 176–78; and mediation, 178–82 Ellis, Francis Whyte, 58–59, 76; and College of Fort St. George, 85; on documents, 67, 76, 186; on knowledge and patrimony, 48; and philology, 86–87; on signature, 149 Eurasians, 37, 47 fi les, 2, 3, 139, 197, 198 forgery, and counterfeit, 138–39, 144–46

Index Foucault, Michel, 204n18 Francke, August, 89, 90, 121 grammar: knowledge of, and language learning, 85–88; and a new secretarial culture, 100–101; printed textbooks of Tamil, 128–30; and schooling, 101–5. See also missionaries; seminary style; tinnai schools Ginzburg, Carlo, 54 Guntur, 32, 158; Frykenberg on, 157 Gutala, 39 Ilakkan. a curukkam, 128 Ilakkan. a vinaˉvit. ai, 128 information brokerage, 38–43; and blackmail, 42 informers, 17, 38–39, 40, 44, 46, 174, 193; and petitions, 44–45, 46, 139, 181. See also umedwar intermediaries: as collaborators, 7–8, 14, 24, 26, 53–54, 124, 194; and petitioning, 178–82. See also dubashes; scribes Jesuits, 12, 89; authored grammars, 91, 97– 98; orientation to written communication, 90, 125; seminary style, 86, 124, 227n20. See also Beschi, Constantine Joseph kanakkan. See kanakkuppillai; scribal practices kanakkuppillai (accountant-scribes): and attestation powers, 63–66, 58–60, 140– 41, 221n36; circulation and upward mobility, 48; in the district offices, 37; distrust of, 66–68; evidentiary paradigm of, documents, 62–66; mediation, 48, 65–66, 72–74; office farming in Chingleput, 32–33; patrimony, 48–49; in South India, 11–14; village office, 38. See also scribal practices; scribal skills; scribes karanam, 12, 38, 194, 208n46, 231n37, 221–22n41. See also kanakkuppillai; scribes karan. aparamparai, 62 karunikar, 30, 32 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 25

275 knowledge/power. See colonial knowledge/ power Kondavid, 32 law: adalat courts, 1, 73, 143, 151, 210n59, 242n60; court structure, 210n59; and evidentiary practice, 151; Mayor’s Court in Madras, 27; and stamp duty, 145–46, 169, 176–78; Supreme Court, 144, 145, 151; and writing, 2, 3, 195–201. See also attestation; Vismann, Cornelia lettered city, the cutcherry as, 2, 194 Mackenzie, Colin, 29, 55, 60, 63, 76, 108, 113, 141, 214n37, 241n45; and archival taxonomy, 217n80, 218–19n9, 223n51 Madras Presidency, 2, 4, 7; reforms of, distinct from Bengal reforms, 15 Madras school system, 122–23 Madras Schoolbook Society, 128, 130 Madurai, 29, 30, 56, 72, 187–90, 225n88; petition, 180 Madura Manual, 56 Marx, Karl, 1, 203n9 Masulipatnam, 53, 170 Mayor’s Court. See law Mill, John Stuart, 10 missionaries, Christian, 50; and caste, 50–51, 90, 130, 178; critique of learning, 106; on cutcherry Tamil, 81, 99; expansion in South India of, 89–91; and grammar, 82, 90–93, 97–98; and munshis, 89, 92–93; and new secretarial skills, 100, 123–26; pedagogical interventions of, 89, 91–92, 121–23, 132–34; and printed schoolbooks, 130. See also seminary style mnemonics: arts of memory, 231–32n2; as bodily technique, 60, 115–16; and computation, 61–62; critique of, 106–9, 117–21; and devotion, 116; and mission schools, 123, 125; and scribal skills, 61, 87, 197; testimonial attestation, 64–65, 76; in tinnai schools, 110, 112–15, 133; and writing, 14, 59–60, 109, 132. See also tinnai schools; writing Modi, scribal script, 12, 37, 224–25n74; abolished as linguistic medium of records, 75; in the Company cutcherry, 75, 77, 83–84; hostility to, 50–51; and

276 Modi, scribal script (continued) revenue records, 46, 70, 219n12; transfer and iterations of records into, 65, 67, 71, 73, 84; writing scribes, 71, 214n39 Money Messenger (Pan. avit. utuˉtu), 32 Mudaliyar, Tandavaraya, 86, 128, 236n55 Munro, Thomas: administrative reforms, 15; on corruption, 25; and education, 102–3; on informers, 178; misuse of Munro’s signature, 149–51; and paperwork, 139; on the printing press, 129; reforms of subordinate offices, 48; on Ryotwari, 15 munshi: and the College of Fort St. George, 85–86; disparagement of the, 81–82; as language teacher of Tamil, 4; and a new secretarial culture, 100–101; Persian munshi, 6; as teacher of Persian, 85. See also cutcherry Tamil; missionaries; scribes Mysore, 31, 69, 70, 242n51 Nellore, 32, 235n49 New York Herald Tribune, 1 Niyogis, 31–32, 34, 60, 101, 114, 141, 142, 214n39 Ongole, 32, 126, 235n49 orientalists: and the new secretarial culture, 100; and philology, 12, 76, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88; and print, 127; reframing of genres and source criticism, 146, 221n36. See also Ellis, Francis Whyte Palavaˉrkaˉ.tu kapıˉ tu, 63–64 ˉ ˉ patrimony: and caste in scribal office, 49– 50; deepening of, 62 pedagogy. See Madras school system; schools; seminary style; tinnai schools perjury, 18, 158; and discretion, 156; and duplicity, 137–39; prevarication, 155; regulation of, 144–45, 152 Perlin, Frank, 30 Persian, 11–12, 37, 85, 86, 103, 175, 229n48. See munshi Persianate: administration, 33, 43, 70, 83; forms, 12, 16, 31, 58, 59, 72, 141, 148, 162, 165–66, 183, 197

index petitioners, 164; and self-ascription, 186–87 petitions: as bureaucratic technology, 167– 72; and caste, 183–87, 187–90; and the disciplining of conduct, 163, 169, 182– 87; and divine sovereignty, 163, 165–67; and document bazaar, 176–82; and ecclesiastical appeals, 164; and inducing direct address, 172–76; and informers, 17, 44, 45, 46, 139, 181; Persianate, 165; and the problem of direct address and sincerity, 161–63, 165, 163, 172, 190–91; submission of, 4–6, 23–24, 162 Pirataˉpa Mutaliyaˉr Carittiram, 30 Pillai, Chokkanatha, 30 Pillai, Muthusami, 86, 235n45 Pillai, P. Singarabalaventhiram, 4 Pillai, Vedanayakam, 30 Pluetschau, Henrich, 90 Pondicherry, 12, 27, 86, 91, 147, 227n20 Pope, G. U., 81, 97, 100. See also Church Missionary Society (CMS); missionaries pymaish. See survey Ramnad, 32, 148 Rao, Velcheru Narayana, 60, 82–83, 88–89, 220n26, 221n37, 229n45 recordkeeping: authenticity of documents, 84; disarray, 56; distrust of extant, 68– 75; evidentiary paradigm of kanakkuppillai records, 62–66; and land survey (pymaish), 15–17, 70–74; polyglot and the Anglo-vernacular, 83–85; and practices of archiving, 55–57, 85; reform of, 75; and veracity, 54. See also cutcherry Tamil; kanakkuppillai; Ryotwari settlement registration, 55, 74, 137, 176, 197, 219n11, 225–26n91 Revolt of 1857, 1 Rhenius, C. T., 91, 92, 99. See also grammar Ricci, Matteo, Jesuit priest, 120 Robertson, A., manual of cutcherry Tamil, 93–96, 100 Ross, 102 Ryotwari settlement: and Munro, 15; and scribal office, 40. See also survey

Index Salem, 49 Sarva-Deva-Vilaˉsa, 31 Sastriar, Vedanayaka, 99 schools: and Anglo-vernacular pedagogy, 101–5; and caste, 132–34; printed textbooks, 128–31. See also tinnai schools scribal practices, 11–14, 58–59; of polyglot transmission, 65, 83–84. See also attestation; scribal skills scribal skills: critique of scribal apprenticeship, 107, 126–28; as familial skill transmitted through apprenticeship, 60–61; discerning forgery, 59–60; of kanakkuppillais, 53–62; official distrust of, 66–68. See also attestation; mnemonics; scribal practices scribes: early modern scribal culture, 6, 11– 14, 29–31, 194; in early modern South India, 11–14; entitlements of, 30; as Persian munshis, 6; regional distribution of, 31; scribal office as familial asset, 29–31, 60; venal office and office farming, 30, 32–33; and vernacular historicality, 194–95. See also cutcherry; cutcherry Tamil; kanakkuppillai; Rao, Velcheru Narayana; scribal skills seminary style, 82; and Church Missionary Society, 91–92; and grammar learning, 87–89, 91–92; and Jesuits, 91; and a new secretarial culture, 100–101; and schooling, 101–5. See also College of Fort St. George Shankariah, B., 59 Smith, Richard S., 195–96 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 89–90. See also missionaries Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), 89–90. See also missionaries survey: Barnard, in Chingleput, 63, 70; cadastral, 74, 75; and distrust of kanakkuppillais, 57, 61; Eurasians in, 37, 123; household, 55, 64; kanakkuppillais in, 48; and law courts, 94; Mackenzie’s, 214n37; pymaish, 16, 70–74; Read’s, in Barahmahal, 49; and registration, 74; Ryotwar, 69, 70–74, 225n80. See also recordkeeping; registration, Ryotwari settlement

277 tahsildars, 38; enhanced discretionary powers of, 45; and policing, 153–58; Taˉciltaˉrkummi, 41 Tamil munshi. See munshi Tarangampadi (Tranquebar), 89, 90, 124 Tanjavur (Tanjore), 32, 34, 90, 99, 117, 118, 119, 150, 124, 125, 143, 147, 149, 150, 159, 165, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 187, 213n28, 214n39, 219n13 Telugu, 11–12, 37, 58, 60, 82–83, 86, 95, 103, 106, 110, 114, 129, 141, 175, 221n37, 229n45, 234n22 textual habitus: and devotion, 116; Messick on, 84; and missionaries, 123–26; and new secretarial culture, 100–101; and scribes, 7, 60; and tinnai or verandah schools, 112–15 Tevar, Raghunatha, 32 tinnai schools (verandah schools), 60, 105; and caste, 110–12; critique of, 106– 7, 117–21, 126–28; and cultivation of memory, 107–9; pedagogical style of, 112–15 Tiruchirapalli (Trichinopoly), 90 Tirunelveli (Tinnevelly), 14, 39, 42, 47, 50, 51, 90, 103, 175 Tonnuˉl Vil. akkam, 91 Travancore, 32 umedwar, 8, 37, 40. See also information brokerage; informers; venal office Vellalar, 32, 37, 47, 122, 215n44; Tondaimandala, 31, 32 venal office: as family asset, 31; and office farming, 32; and patrimonialism, 26– 28; reform of, 39–40. See also corruption; scribes Venkatachalapathy, A. R., 109 Vismann, Cornelia, 2, 197 Weber, Max, 139–40 writing: and alterity, 10–11; and apprenticeship, 107; and archiving, 194; as artifice, 3, 66; as bodily practice, 60; continuous writing a solution to problems of trust and reliability, 2, 193; and corruption, 17–18; and discretion, 17–18; distrust of, 68–69; and duplicity, 138;

index

278 writing (continued) and elementary schooling, 107, 131– 32; and government, 8–9; and grammar, 101–5; and mediation, 65–66; and mnemonics, 60–61, 112–16; and office recruitment, 41; and papereality, 3; as perfect recordation, 10; and policing, 139; and political accountability,

3; reform of writing materials, 74–76; risk of, 53–54; as technology of legibility and storage, 3; and veracity, 54. See also attestation; law writing machine, 1 Ziegenbalg, Bartholomew, 90