Grass in their Mouths: The Upper Doab of India under the Company's Magna Charta, 1793-1830

663 Pages·2010·5.09 MB·English

by  Dirk H.A. Kolff

Grass in their Mouths: The Upper Doab of
India under the Company’s Magna Charta,
1793–1830
Brill’s Indological Library
Edited by
Johannes Bronkhorst
In co-operation with
Richard Gombrich, Oskar von Hinüber,
Katsumi Mimaki, Arvind Sharma
VOLUME 33
Grass in their Mouths:
The Upper Doab of India under
the Company’s Magna Charta,
1793–1830
By
Dirk H.A. Kolff
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2010
Cover Illustration: The gate of Lakshman Das’ ‘house’ in Chhapar, October 2009.
Photo by author.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kolff, D.H.A., 1938–
Grass in their mouths : the Upper Doab of India under the Company’s Magna
Charta, 1793–1830 / by Dirk H.A. Kolff.
p. cm. — (Brill’s Indological library ; 33)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-18502-9 (hbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Ganges-Yamuna Doab Region
(India)—Colonial influence. 2. Ganges-Yamuna Doab Region (India)—Politics and
government. 3. Colonial administrators—India—Ganges-Yamuna Doab Region—
History. 4. East India Company—History. 5. East India Company—Charters—
History. 6. Civil service—India—Bengal—History. 7. Bengal (India)—Colonial
influence. 8. Bengal (India)—Politics and government. 9. Great Britain—Colonies—
Administration—History. 10. India—Politics and government—1765–1947. I. Title.
II. Series.
DS485.G254K65 2010
954’.2—dc22
2010026465
ISSN 0925-2916
ISBN 978 90 04 18502 9
Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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For Annemarie

CONTENTS
Preface ................................................................................................. ix
List of Illustrations and Maps ......................................................... xi
List of Abbreviations ......................................................................... xiii
Introduction ................................................................................... 1
Chapter One The Cornwallis system and the Colonial
Executive ......................................................................................... 19
A charter for India ........................................................................ 20
Indian agents in matters of police .............................................. 36
The Benares system and its failure ............................................. 44
Looking for a police chain of command ................................... 68
Intelligence and the goyanda issue ............................................. 92
The limits of reform ...................................................................... 110
The Magna Charta on the defence and in decay ..................... 121
Chapter Two The Gujars of the Upper Doab ............................ 135
Sharing the village of Chhalera ................................................... 140
A well-wisher of the sarkār ......................................................... 168
The prelude to Dasahra 1824 ...................................................... 183
Kunja, a Company ‘work of slaughter’ ...................................... 209
Contrasts: Shore versus Graham, Chodiala versus Kunja ...... 224
Chapter Three A change of system in Merath .......................... 237
Opening up the police and the village ....................................... 238
The pursuit of Lakshmi at Merath ............................................. 249
Enter Francis Curwen Smith ....................................................... 268
Under canvas and out of touch with Calcutta ......................... 290
A betrayer of the constitution ..................................................... 302
The issue of physical inhumanity ............................................... 323
Chapter Four Beyond Rules and Regulations: Dehra Dun
under Frederick Shore .................................................................. 343
The civil servant as civil engineer ............................................... 349
viii contents
Indian agency: tourism and the labour market ....................... 385
Indian agency: reclamation and village development ................. 405
Ruling alone ......................................................................................... 418
Colonial experiments with truth .................................................... 428
Chapter Five How the Landhaura riyāsat was dissected ......... 451
The consolidation of an agrarian business venture ................. 453
Khādar versus bangar ................................................................... 471
Ram Dayal Singh’s riyāsat ........................................................... 477
The way the Landhaura cookie crumbled ................................. 490
To settle or to farm ....................................................................... 506
Chapter Six Lawlessness and legal plunder in Saharanpur ..... 529
Sheikh Kallan’s take-over bid ...................................................... 539
Rani Dhan Kaur’s counter-offensive .......................................... 552
The district contested .................................................................... 571
Open confrontation ...................................................................... 591
The unbroken backbone of just rule .......................................... 602
Conclusion .......................................................................................... 613
Glossary ............................................................................................... 631
Bibliography ........................................................................................ 635
Index .................................................................................................... 641
PREFACE
One impulse to embark on the present study of an aspect of India’s
early colonial history was my desire to look for, get to know, and bring
to the centre of attention a greater number of those who were sub-
jected to foreign rule during its initial phase. I wondered about the
degrees of passivity or initiative that characterised their reactions to
the new British régime and about the relative impact on their lives of
the decisions of the colonial district officers, the East India Company’s
government at Calcutta, and the London authorities.
Another impulse, I must admit, was a more serendipitous curios-
ity that was activated by my chancing upon the extraordinary papers
of Frederick Shore kept in the British Library in London. As Shore
served in the 1820s in Bulandshahr and Dehra Dun, this soon led me
to the other districts of the Upper Doab, the region between the riv-
ers Yamuna and Ganga to the east and northeast of Delhi, then the
frontier of colonial rule. Though aware of the need to limit myself geo-
graphically, it became clear that the administrative dilemmas fought
over in the Upper Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, which included
the Upper Doab, could often be understood only against the back-
ground of the crises of rule as they confronted the British in Benares
and Calcutta in the pre-1830 period.
Going in this way from one set of Company records to another or,
I should perhaps say, from one controversy about how to adminis-
ter a district to another, I was struck, first, by the centrality in these
controversies of the self-definition, the group identity, of the Bengal
civil service in this period and, second, by how the legitimacy of this
self-image was grounded on the constitutional code of 1793, the long-
lasting legacy of Lord Cornwallis to the government of Bengal.
Whether this dual motivation, the one to try and do justice to as
many as possible of the Indian agents of the history of Hindustan
under early colonial rule and to explore the story of their strategies and
choices, the other to demonstrate the limited nature of the impact of a
colonial civil service that didn’t owe its character to a consideration of
local needs, has led to a balanced study, is not for me to judge. But it
is clear that there is still much to discover about the local experience
of colonialism during the period. Though decisions taken in London