Seeking to Reduce Dubash Power: The Appointment of Place

In late 1794, the Board of Revenue decided to make an all-out attempt to reduce the power of the Jagir Mirasidars and their Madras Dubash connections. They appointed a person of exceptional vigor and knowledge to undertake this job: Lionel Place had been what was called a “writer” in the Company’s service in 1783 but rose rapidly to a position of importance within the Company’s bureaucracy in Madras. Before his appointment as collector of the Jagir in November 1794, he made a name for himself as accountant to the Board of Revenue.^[81] It was assumed at the time of his appointment as collector that he would encounter some difficulty in the course of his attempts to impose a new tax system on the Mirasidars of the Jagir.

In October 1795, Place submitted his first report on his activities. Concerned with three areas of the Jagir—Karanguli to the south, Kanchipuram to the west, and Tirupaccur to the northeast—the report covered some 898 out of a total of 2,241 villages in the Jagir. Place found that in each of the three areas Mirasidars and their urban connections had been able to retain what he considered to be a disproportionate share of the product of their villages, well beyond the amount allotted to them by share division considered locally appropriate. Place said that the process of keeping this surplus out of the hands of the Company was done by either concealing the sale price of the grain payment (selling the grain for a higher price than that reported) or by “defalcation” (using various devices such as false accounts to prevent the Company government or circar from getting its full share). In Tirupaccur, Mirasidars had kept back 24 percent more than was “their share,” in Karanguli it was almost 60 percent, and in Kanchipuram it was almost 49 percent.^[82]

In submitting his report, Place also sought support from the Board of Revenue for his work. Though the Board was impressed with the tremendous scope of the reform and the fact that the taxes from the Jagir for the previous year exceeded the levels reached in 1772–77, “when the country was in its most flourishing state,” it urged him to proceed with caution. This was to “prevent the measures adopted from being stamped with further apparent instability.” Much of the Board’s reaction probably resulted from the fact that though it sought a higher tax revenue from the Jagir, its primary goal was political stability. For instance, Place had indicated the necessity to regulate and tax the pilgrim traffic to the temples at Tiruvallur and what was then called Peddapalayam in order to acquire the funds needed to repair the temples. The Board concluded that “an adherence to those rules and maxims that prevailed in the well-regulated periods of the Hindu government cannot but be…satisfactory to the native and most conducive to the British dominion in India.”^[83] If there was one goal that could unify the Board, the Company, and many local individuals at this time it was the effort to construct a “well-regulated Hindu past” to solve contemporary problems. To continue their presence, however, the British depended on a large number of local inhabitants, a fact conclusively demonstrated by Place’s later experience in the Jagir. This interdependence grew considerably over the next century and helped to restrain the behavior of everyone involved.

On the basis of his report, Place was permitted to conclude agreements with Mirasidars in the Jagir over proposed land taxes. However, on 26 November 1795, Place wrote to the Board of Revenue that, though he appeared to have made progress in making assessments with villages in Tirupaccur and Poonamallee parganas or subdivisions, he found a sudden unwillingness among the Mirasidars to agree to the proposed tax. In several villages Place cited as examples, he had taken care to offer tax agreements that were either the same as the previous year’s or even below them. In his investigations, however, Place found that in each of these villages, where lands were largely in the hands of several Mirasidars who had connections with Dubashes in Madras town, the Mirasidars would not agree to Place’s new tax rates; these Mirasidars opposing his attempts included Mangadu Oppa Mudali and several others who had also opposed Richard Dighton in 1785.

Confronted by this opposition to his plans, Place informed the Mirasidars that if they continued their unwillingness to agree to the tax assessments on their villages, they would have to relinquish their mirāsi (the hereditary right of the product of the village) in favor of somebody who would. Place had concluded that when he “found such opposition and intrigue thrown in…[his] way,” he had little alternative but to abandon further attempts to make tax agreements with the villages in the Poonamallee area.^[84] Indeed, although he had sought in some desperation assistance from the Nattars of the area in making tax agreements with the villages, he found “so manifest and determined a particularity to their own villages” that he decided to take over even their privileges on granted lands that had lower taxes.

Once again, the Mirasidars and other land controllers sought to reduce the authority of a Company official by submitting a petition over his head to the Board of Revenue. On 25 November 1795, one of Place’s informants told him that such a petition had been submitted to the Board criticizing his policies. On the following day, Place decided to write to the Board about his own discoveries regarding the obstructions to his work.

Perhaps Place’s major complaint against the leading Mirasidars and their Madras connections was that they effectively supplanted any outside authority. They achieved this, he wrote, through their connections with Dubashes in Madras. A Dubash, said Place, made dependents

consider him their sanctuary in all difficulties, makes them his instruments in all dark plots and intrigues and as they acquire the habit of flying to his protection or for his advice, whenever a superior authority threatens to affect their mutual interest. [These interests form] an invariable opposition to every measure that has at any time been proposed by Government.^[85]

He found Mirasidars willing to have false accounts prepared with fictitious entries for cultivators, “not merely in the names of persons residing in other parts of the Carnatic, but [even] of a man who has been dead these twenty years.” Moreover, many of the leading Mirasidars whom Place encountered in the Poonamallee area in late 1795 were convinced that his superiors would never agree to Place’s use of the forfeiture of mirasi rights as a penalty for not agreeing to his tax proposals. These Mirasidars told him that if the Board of Revenue were to agree to it, “the sacrifice would be but temporary since they [the Mirasidars] have on former occasions found a day of retribution will come and therefore that present resistance with whatever consequences they may be threatened will in the end not only recover their meerassee but everlastingly ensure by the precedent it will afford, their own villages.”^[86] Mirasidars also realized that if everything else failed they could simply desert their villages with their Pannaiyals and Padiyals. What is important is that they were aware of the Company’s tremendous susceptibility to threats of political disruption and the withholding of taxes by flight.