Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India

210 Pages·2012·4.986 MB·English

by  Bhavani Raman

Title Pages
Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early
Colonial South India
Bhavani Raman
Print publication date: 2012
Print ISBN-13: 9780226703275
Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2013
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226703299.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Document Raj
(p.ii) South Asia Across the Disciplines
Document Raj
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
PLACEby Carla Bellamy (California)
EXTREME POETRY: THE SOUTH ASIAN MOVEMENT OF SIMULTANEOUS NARRATIONby Yigal
Bronner (Columbia)
CONJUGATIONS: MARRIAGE AND FORM IN NEW BOLLYWOOD CINEMAby Sangita Gopal
(Chicago)
SECULARIZING ISLAMISTS?: JAMA’AT-E-ISLAMI AND JAMA’AT-UD-DA’WA IN URBAN
PAKISTANby Humeira Iqtidar (Chicago)
THE SOCIAL SPACE OF LANGUAGE: VERNACULAR CULTURE IN BRITISH COLONIAL
PUNJABby Farina Mir (California)
UNIFYING HINDUISM: PHILOSOPHY AND IDENTITY IN INDIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORYby
Andrew J. Nicholson (Columbia)
UNFINISHED GESTURES: DEVADASIS, MEMORY, AND MODERNITY IN SOUTH INDIAby
Davesh Soneji (Chicago)
ISLAM TRANSLATED: LITERATURE, CONVERSION, AND THE ARABIC COSMOPOLIS OF
SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAby Ronit Ricci (Chicago)
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Title Pages
South Asia Across the Disciplines is a series devoted to publishing first 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
The University Of Chicago Press Chicago And London
(p.iv)
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
Nineteenth-
Century 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 5appeared
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
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Title Pages
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)
ISBN978-0-226-70327-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN978-0-226-70329-9 (e-
book) —
ISBN0-226-70327-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN0-226-70329-0 (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).
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Abbreviations
Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early
Colonial South India
Bhavani Raman
Print publication date: 2012
Print ISBN-13: 9780226703275
Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2013
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226703299.001.0001
(p.vii) Abbreviations
AHR
American Historical Review
APAC
Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection, British Library
BOR
Board of Revenue Consultations
CSSH
Comparative Studies in Society and History
EPW
Economic and Political Weekly
GOML
Government Oriental Manuscripts Library
IESHR
Indian Economic and Social History Review
JAS
Journal of Asian Studies
JESHO
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
MAS
Modern Asian Studies
SIH
Studies in History
TNSA
Tamil Nadu State Archives (Chennai)
(p.viii)
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Preface
Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early
Colonial South India
Bhavani Raman
Print publication date: 2012
Print ISBN-13: 9780226703275
Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2013
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226703299.001.0001
(p.ix) Preface
Paperwork 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 defines 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 first
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 (p.x) 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 affiliations. Middle-class Indian piety came to accrue from the gains of clerical
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Preface
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.
(p.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. Sounda-rapandian; 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 finish the book and to the University of Toronto’s South Asia
Program for institutional affiliation 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
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Preface
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 (p.xii) warmly
supported the publication of the book, and two anonymous reviewers provided valuable insights
for refining 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 Jokić, 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 infinite joy. His constant presence has made this
book possible.
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Note on Transliteration and Conventions
Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early
Colonial South India
Bhavani Raman
Print publication date: 2012
Print ISBN-13: 9780226703275
Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2013
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226703299.001.0001
(p.xiii) Note on Transliteration and Conventions
All Tamil/Persian terms in transliteration appear in italics and without diacritics in the first
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 first 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 first 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. (p.xiii)
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Introduction
Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early
Colonial South India
Bhavani Raman
Print publication date: 2012
Print ISBN-13: 9780226703275
Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2013
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226703299.001.0001
Introduction
Bhavani Raman
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226703299.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter discusses corruption and despotism in the British East India Company, particularly
the domination of arguments about paperwork and political rule. It presents observations by
philosopher Karl Marx on India and media theorist Cornelia Vismann's description on the
relationship between law and writing. It discusses the composition of a language manual
intended for Europeans learning the language of colonial command. It also looks at topics such
as framing paper rule, government by writing, perfect recordation and clerical modernity,
genealogies of cutcherry scribal practice, the company office or cutcherry, and investigative
modalities of the documentary state.
Keywords:   british east india company, karl marx, law and writing, british empire, colonial command, babu,
cutcherry scribal practice, documentary state
The 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 first 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 won-der,” 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
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Introduction
1857, the Crown took over the Company’s Indian territo-ries.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 (adālat). The Company’s bureau rule was the linchpin of empire.
(p.2) 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, files,
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 files and law determine each other, but the self-founding mythological
fiction of Western law derives from its claim to turn files from visible signs of power into the
underbelly of administration. From their moment of banishment into offices, files 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 ac-cumulate.6 Vismann traces this founding story about the relationship between law and
the file 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
finance 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 (p.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
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