1. During the war of 1780, the inhabitants of the village of Paruttipattu, in the present-day Saidapettai taluk, stayed in the fort at Poonamallee about twelve miles from Fort St. George. Others who remained there were betel growers from Uttiramerur (in the Jagir southwest of Madras), Vandavasi (in what was later called the North Arcot district), Narinaveram, and Kalahasti. Some of the villagers from Paruttipattu made an agreement to grow betel leaves there. As a result Paruttipattu became an important source for the betel leaf chewed in Madras. Dighton to Charles Oakley and Members of the Committee for Managing the Jaghire, 25 June 1785, JB, vol. 8, TNSA. Another important center was the village of Numbal. Charles Baker to BOR, 6 January 1798, MB, BORP, R. 286/3, IOL. [BACK]

2. Wilks, Historical Sketches, 2:2. [BACK]

3. This is what has been characterized as “military fiscalism” by David Washbrook in “Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c. 1720–1860,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (February 1988): 89. [BACK]

4. Comm. of Assigned Revenue to Governor in Council, 31 January 1785, BARP, vol. 8, TNSA. [BACK]

5. Comm. of Assigned Revenue to Governor Lord Macartney, 7 August 1783, BARP, vol. 4, TNSA. [BACK]

6. W. J. Wilson, History of the Madras Army (Madras: E. Keys at the Government Press, 1882), 1:100. [BACK]

7. Wilks, Historical Sketches, 2:22. [BACK]

8. Quoted in Love, Vestiges, 3:210. [BACK]

9. Mattison Mines and Vijayalakshmi Gourishankar, “Leadership and Individuality in South Asia: The Case of the South Indian Big Man,” Journal of Asian Studies 49, no. 4 (November 1990), 776. The Kamatci idol was carried off to the Udayarpalayam jungles in what was then the domain of the Raja of Tanjore many miles to the south. The image of Kamatci was made of gold, called the Bangaru Kamatci, and it is said that the Raja of Tanjore took possession of it. This image was then installed in the Bangaru Kamatci temple in Tanjore. [BACK]

10. Letter of John Baillie, a cadet in the Madras Army, to his father, 14 June 1784, HMS, vol. 223, IOL. An account of the battle was also published in Hickey’s Bengal Gazette, 23–30 September 1780. Quoted in Love, Vestiges, 3:200. [BACK]

11. C. S. Crole, The Chingleput, late Madras, District (Madras: Lawrence Asylum Press, 1879), 126. [BACK]

12. Cloth version shown in “Tigers Round the Throne” Exhibition in London, Zamana Gallery, August 1990. In 1991, in a video presentation by Granada Television called Empire! commentator John Keay transformed the British commander Sir Hector Munro into Thomas Munro, a later governor of Madras and a well-known figure in Britain. Empire! was concerned with showing that the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India helped not only to define its exact boundaries but also to “control” the subcontinent with a series of triangles that would imprison India. In Empire! scenes from Tipu’s mural of the battle of Pullalur were shown and John Keay argued that the battle of Pullalur (in which, he said, eight thousand men were either killed or lost) was a classic example of a battle in which there were no good maps. [BACK]

13. Proclamation of John Chamier, secretary to the government, 7 August 1790, BARP, vol. 1, TNSA. This had been done several times in the past without any effect, many times because the Company employees had presumed that their moneylending activities would not be abridged. Furthermore, in the 1770s, the money that Company servants lent to Indian tax farmers was essential to allow the Company to later extract its taxes from the Jagir. [BACK]

14. Wilson, Madras Army, 2:142. [BACK]

15. In 1749, the Company acquired St. Thome, which produced pagodas 6,346 a year in taxes; Poonamallee produced pagodas 35,000 a year; Trivendipuram (in the present-day South Arcot district) produced pagodas 26,250 a year; and a remission on the tribute or peshkash for Madras amounted to pagodas 1,200 a year. Gurney, “Debts,” 31. [BACK]

16. The grant appears to have been coerced from the Nawab. According to him, he had several encounters with Pigot, who was governor in 1763. “At first,” wrote the Nawab, “he asked me in very civil terms for a few villages, afterwards he wanted four parganahs [territorial subdivisions] and when I required the conditions under his hand he answered me in severe terms and demanded twice as much as he first asked for. I am not so weak a person as to grant the Jaghire which is the choicest part of my country to the Company without any conditions in my favour, while my debt to the Company and to individuals and a long arrears of pay to my sepoys etc. remains undischarged.” Nawab Muhammad Ali to Governor Du Pré, 26 November 1770, HMS, vol. 113, IOL. Dimensions of the Jagir are taken from “British Acquisitions in the Presidency of Fort St. George,” Madras Journal of Literature and Science, 1879, 121 [BACK]

17. Phillimore, author of the account of the survey of India, refers to a series of maps that were produced of the Baramahal. These maps of the area, which later became the Salem district, came into the possession of the British in 1792 as a part of the treaty with Tipu Sultan. They were made by John Mather, a man engaged by Captain Alexander Read. Philmore notes that the survey of the Baramahal “was the most thorough and complete survey of any district in India made since Barnard’s survey of the Madras jagir.” Historical Records of the Survey of India, collected by R. H. Phillimore (Dehra Dun: 1945) 1:114. [BACK]

18. Place to BOR, 27 March 1796, BORP, vol. 161, TNSA. [BACK]

19. Gurney, in his study of the Nawab of Arcot’s debts, said that Barnard put the income of the Jagir in 1762–66 at pagodas 275,372 a year, in addition to which the Nawab also issued a large number of individual land grants. Gurney, “Debts,” 52. [BACK]

20. President and Council and the Jaghire Committee to Collector, November 1784, CCR, vol. 441, 1784, TNSA. [BACK]

21. “The Committee have besides sufficient reason to be assured that this attack of the Kallans was occasioned by Col. Herron’s carrying away a large number of the religious images from Kovilkudi Pagoda [temple].” S. C. Hill, Yusuf Khan: The Rebel Commandant (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1914), 42n. [BACK]

22. Crole, Chingleput, 117. [BACK]

23. Governor to Lt. Joachim Lundt, Commanding at Chandragiri, 31 January 1785, ARL, vol. 13, TNSA. [BACK]

25. The word “tom” is an Indian word that seems to be an onomatopoeia, “not belonging to any language in particular.” Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson (1903; reprint, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), 929. [BACK]

26. The tamukku was used in Madras by municipal officials to communicate decisions and policy in the scavengers’ and street cleaners’ settlements until the 1940s. In this particular case, it was remarked that troops would be sent if necessary. Jaghire Committee to Resident in the Jaghire, 12 May 1786, CCR, vol. 441, 1784–86, TNSA. [BACK]

27. Richard Dighton to BOR, 16 February 1787, BORP, vol. 6, TNSA. [BACK]

28. Richard Dighton to the President and Committee for Managing the Jaghire Farms, 20 January 1785, Extract from the Madras Revenue Proceedings, HMS, vol. 259, IOL. [BACK]

29. Nattars were heads of the right subcastes such as the Tamil-speaking Tondaimandala vellalas. Right and left castes are terms applied to a series of caste groups in South India, and particularly in the Tamil area. In South Indian society, as in many other cultures, the left hand has many associations with impurity, while the right hand has many positive ideas associated with it. However, according to Arjun Appadurai, the use of “right” and “left” expresses not only a particular contrast or even opposition but also is a manifestation of “the unity of conflicting units.” This is the formal function of the idea of right and left castes. Arjun Appadurai, “Right and Left Hand Castes in South India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 11, nos. 2, 3 (June–September 1974): 221–22. At the risk of oversimplifying, we can say that though there are exceptions, right subcastes were mostly agrarian and left subcastes were artisan and other groups. As noted in the Introduction, moreover, right and left subcastes had different spatial orientations. Right subcastes were more rooted in a given locality and worshipped at local temples. Left subcastes worshipped at more distant and even regional temples. Right subcastes looked on the left subcastes as being ritually inferior. [BACK]

30. Richard Dighton to the President and Committee for Managing the Jaghire Farms, 20 January 1785, Extract from the Madras Revenue Proceedings, HMS, vol. 259, IOL. [BACK]

31. See Bernard Cohn, “Political Systems of Eighteenth Century India,” Anthropologist Among the Historians, 484. See also the comments in André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 190, 199, 206. [BACK]

32. Alexander Read to Board of Revenue, 31 March 1793, BORP, vol. 9, TNSA. [BACK]

33. Board of Revenue to Government of Madras, 13 April 1793, BORP, vol. 70, TNSA. [BACK]

34. Minute of C. N. White, 21 October 1793, BORP, vol. 81, TNSA. The benefits that were to be granted to the lower classes were only one way by which this great increase in tax revenues could be rationalized. [BACK]

35. According to an account presented in Love’s Vestiges of Old Madras, the British in 1779 expected to derive about pagodas 2,969,109 from all sources. Of that amount, the Nawab was responsible for pagodas 700,000 and the Raja of Tanjore for pagodas 400,000, while the taxes from the circars (which came into the hands of the British in 1767) provided pagodas 776,800. The combined revenues of the Jagir and Poonamallee (both rented out to the Nawab of Arcot himself) were pagodas 368,350. However, none of this was a product of a European officer dealing directly with the Company tax employees. Love, Vestiges, 3:142. [BACK]

36. G. R. Gleig, The Life of Major General Sir Thomas Munro, Bart. (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bently, 1831), 1:161–62; minute by Lionel Place on his resignation from the Special Commission, 7 October 1802, BC, F/4/150, IOL, complaining about the appointments of Thomas Munro, Alexander Read, and John Ravenshaw; and letter from Benjamin Roebuck to Paul Benfield, 3 March 1795, PL, vol. 41, TNSA. [BACK]

37. C. N. White, Minute 23 December 1793, BORP, vol. 88, TNSA. [BACK]

38. Minute of C. N. White, member of the Board of Revenue, 21 October 1793, BORP, vol. 81, TNSA. These reports were from John Clerk, the collector of the northern division on 31 August 1793, and from Walter Balfour, the collector of the southern division on 10 October 1793. [BACK]

39. C. N. White Minute, 23 December 1793, BORP, vol. 88, TNSA. The annual tax income from the Jagir in this period (1786–93), in round numbers, was (in pagodas):

1786–87	115,180
1787–88	176,534
1788–89	111,806
1789–90	162,617
1790–91	53,941
1791–92	141,182
1792–93	193,107
Average	136

40. F. G. Bailey, Stratagems and Spoils (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 1. [BACK]

41. Bailey, Stratagems, 172. [BACK]

42. BOR Minute on Badarnavisi, 30 June 1796, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA. In 1828–29, the total cultivated area was only 88,769 kanis (about 264,087 acres), whereas by 1850–51 it was 162,828 kanis (484,413 acres). A. Sarada Raju, Economic Conditions in the Madras Presidency, 1800–1850 (Madras: University of Madras Press, 1941), 64. In 1940, the proportion of wet cultivation to dry cultivation was 605,500 acres sown in wet and 332,600 sown in dry. “Statistical Atlas for the Decennium ending Fasli 1350 (1940–41): Chingleput,” in A Statistical Atlas of the Madras Province (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1949), 453. [BACK]

43. Benedicte Hjejle, “Slavery and agricultural bondage in south India in the nineteenth century,” The Scandinavian Economic History Review 15, nos. 1–2 (1967), 80. [BACK]

44. The early German Lutheran missionaries in Tranquebar in 1727 reported the baptism of a slave who had been beaten so badly by his master that he was about to die and had to be baptized right away. They said that he knew the Lord’s prayer in Portuguese and something more about Christianity. Der Königl. Dänischen Missionarien aus Ost-Indieneingesandter ausführlichen Berichten, Erster Theil, Vom ersten ausführlichen Bericht an bis zu dessen zwölfter Continuation mitgetheilet (Halle: Verlegung des Weysenhauses, 1735); Continuation 25 (26 October 1727). [BACK]

45. Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 41. [BACK]

46. William Adam, The Law and Custom of Slavery in British India (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, and Company, 1840), 177. [BACK]

47. Edgar Thurston, The Tribes and Castes of South India (Madras: Government Press, 1909), 7:380. [BACK]

48. Lionel Place called this period “years of mutual robbery” when all parties “preyed on each other.” Place, 1799 Report, para. 185. [BACK]

49. See the discussion in Susan Neild-Basu, “The Dubashes of Madras,” Modern Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (February 1984): 1–31. [BACK]

50. Neild-Basu, “Dubashes,” 11. [BACK]

51. Place, 1799 Report, para. 218. Place’s bête noire was a man named Kesava Mudaliar who “conducted frequent lavish festivities at the family-managed temple in his native Tottikkalai village.” Neild-Basu, “Dubashes,” 12. Walter Balfour, collector of the southern division of the Jagir in November 1791, wrote, “I only say ‘formed an opinion’ because no man (let his conceit be what it may) can possibly unravel or get to the bottom of the whole truth in any dispute between Black Men, more especially amongst those in the Jagheire, who from their vicinity to Madras are daily engaged in intrigues and litigations, which are fermented, and kept up to such a degree that a collector has a most difficult part to act.” Walter Balfour to BOR, 8 November 1791, BORP, vol. 51, TNSA. [BACK]

52. Richard Dighton to Charles Oakley, 6 December 1785, JR, TNSA. [BACK]

53. Lionel Place, 1795 Report, para. 20, in BORP, 25 January 1796, vol. 142. [BACK]

54. Bailey, Stratagems, 172. [BACK]

55. In 1791, John Clerk had pointed to the same set of strategies. He said that under a system of what was called amani tax collection (as opposed to a village settlement), in which the state had to collect the tax from each individual cultivator rather than (as in a village tax collection system) through a few head people, “it is impossible for one person to be guarded against the artifices, which all descriptions of the inhabitants find it in their interest to adopt in order to defraud the circar [the state].” John Clerk to BOR, 14 May 1791, BORP, vol. 46, TNSA. [BACK]

56. Place, 1799 Report, para. 179. The previous section was based on paragraphs 174–79. [BACK]

57. Committee of Revenue to the President and Council, July 1775, Appendix to a letter of John Turin to the Committee of Assigned Revenue, 31 March 1784, JR, vol. 3, TNSA. [BACK]

58. Charles Oakley to Governor and President of Council, 17 December 1785, and John Chamier, Secretary to the President and Council, to Oakley, 24 December 1785, JR, vol. 5, TNSA. [BACK]

59. John Clerk to William C. Jackson, Secretary to Military Department, 26 December 1791, BORP, vol. 40, TNSA. The matter of the “desertion” of the cultivators or their Pannaiyals (bonded laborers) was, naturally, of central importance. In May of that same year, when the horsemen of Tipu Sultan entered the Jagir, Clerk reported that “the crops have suffered very materially in several of the districts, by the enemy’s horse, and by our own army, and the whole of the northern division of the Jaghire sustained a heavy loss in consequence of the entire desertion of the inhabitants, at a period when their presence was particularly necessary to cut and gather in the crop.” John Clerk to BOR, 14 May 1791, BORP, vol. 46, TNSA. Walter Balfour, the collector of what was then referred to as the southern division of the Jagir reported that in early 1791, “The paddy fields presented every appearance of a rich and fruitful harvest and had the reapers not fled from the fields on account of the alarms it was generally supposed the crop would have been equal to the produce of [the revenue year] 1199 [1790–91]. The Board must be well aware the very reverse of this took place and before the reapers returned to the fields more than three fourths of the paddy was totally dried up and otherwise destroyed by the grazing and marauding of horses, cattle etc.” Balfour also asked for authorization to recruit a group of armed retainers “as the only mode of preventing a total desertion of the ryots from the paddy fields.” He said that if he were to attempt to leave Kovalam—on the coast south of Madras—“every inhabitant in this town and Tripalore would instantly desert their homes.”

Seeking to illustrate how villagers would take advantage of any kind of armed invasion into the area to settle old scores or to deprive the tax collector of what he wanted, Balfour continued, “Those very memorialists who petitioned the Board absolutely stole from the Renter [of Salivakkam] between three and four thousand Calams of paddy which after a good deal of trouble on my part they openly confessed they had taken a part of but that they believed the looties had plundered the rest. Nay they absolutely paid back to the renter the amount or value of what they confessed to have taken and to show with what a vindictive spirit of revenge they were activated, and as if they only hated the man to injure him more deeply. They instantly repaired to Madras with a ready pen’d petition of which every third line is a falsehood. The other circumstance, which I alluded to, is the extreme modesty of the petitioners, who insist in their settlement with the renter that he shall pay their shares in money valuing the grain at the market price of the day. But the Board must be perfectly aware the Renter has nothing to do with this, but has only to pay them a certain quantity of grain agreeably to Mamool.…When the weather is a little settled I shall send for the meerassydars and other village servants together with the renter, and petitioners, and endeavour if possible to find out the real state of the cultivation for Phasely [Fasli] 1200” Walter Balfour to BOR, 8 November 1791, BORP, vol. 51, TNSA. [BACK]

60. Ibid. [BACK]

61. BOR to Governor in Council, 15 May 1796, BORP, vol. 156, TNSA. [BACK]

62. One marakkal (or “marakkalam”) was twenty-seven or twenty-eight pounds. Therefore, three marakkāls would be between about eighty-one and eighty-four pounds. One kalam was equal to twelve marakkals or approximately 336 pounds. [BACK]

63. Hjejle, “Slavery,” 81. [BACK]

64. Place, 1799 Report, para. 136. [BACK]

65. BOR Minute on Place’s 1795 Report, 24 March 1796, BORP, vol. 151, TNSA. [BACK]

66. John Turin to Committee on Assigned Revenues, 31 March 1784, JR, vol. 3, TNSA. [BACK]

67. “Petition of Head Tenants,” 25 July 1783, JR, vol. 2, TNSA. Even later, in 1807, after the zamindari settlement was introduced into the area the Company officers were confronted by requests that the Chembrambakkam tank near Poonamallee be repaired. One collector named Cazalet wrote that “the zamindaris watered by the tank have been assessed in proportion to the benefits calculated to be derived from the same and government receiving the marahs [merais] have engaged to keep this valuable reservoir in due repair the Zamindar of Colatore [southwest of the tank] one of the principal landholders under this tank has frequently stated the necessity of more being done than the repair now submitted.” Cazelet to BOR, 22 April 1807, BC, no. 7177, IOL. [BACK]

68. The Mayor’s Court was originally established by the charter of 1687 and could try all civil or criminal cases and punish offenders by imposing fines, imprisonment, or even corporal punishment. Love, Vestiges, 1:499. [BACK]

69. Charles Oakley to the Governor in Council, 6 January 1786, JR, vol. 6, TNSA. [BACK]

70. A pagoda was worth about rupees 3.5. Dighton to Oakley, 21 January 1786, JR, vol. 2, TNSA. [BACK]

71. “Amani” meant “the collection of the revenue direct from the cultivators by the officers of Government on the removal or suspension of an intermediate claimant.” H. H. Wilson, Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms (1855; reprint Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), 21. [BACK]

72. Oakley to Dighton, 14 December 1785, JR, vol. 5, TNSA. Evalappa Mudali was also deprived of 40 kanis (52.8 acres) of maniyam land or land on which there was no tax. [BACK]

73. Dighton to Oakley, 15 November 1785, JR, vol. 5, TNSA. [BACK]

74. Dighton to Oakley, 26 November 1785, JR, vol. 5, TNSA. [BACK]

75. Dighton to Oakley, 15 November 1785, JR, vol. 5, TNSA. [BACK]

76. Ibid. [BACK]

77. Oakley to Dighton, 8 November 1785, JR, vol. 5, TNSA. [BACK]

78. Neild-Basu has shown that these strategies continued to be followed in the nineteenth century. In 1818, the superintendent of police in Madras said, “[The principal leaders of the right subcastes] seldom actually commit riots themselves, but are always those who incite the Pariars [paraiyar Pannaiyals or bonded laborers], over whom their influence is very great.” Superintendent of Police to Head Assistant Magistrate, Chingleput, 21 June 1818, Public Consultations, 30 June 1818, TNSA, quoted in Susan Neild-Basu, “Madras: The Growth of a Colonial City, 1780–1840” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1977), 211–12 The paraiyar Pannaiyals also “resisted with vehemence” any attempts by the British or by their own caste rivals to diminish the prestige of their traditional right subcaste leader. Neild-Basu, “Madras,” 217. [BACK]

79. Oakley to Governor and President in Council, 20 December 1785, JR, vol. 5, TNSA. [BACK]

80. BOR Minute on Place’s 1795 Report, 24 March 1796, BORP, vol. 151, TNSA. [BACK]

81. Charles Princep, Record of Services of the Honourable East India Company’s Civil Servants in the Madras Presidency from 1741 to 1858 (London: Trubners Co., 1885), 115. [BACK]

82. BOR Minute on Place’s 1795 Report, 24 March 1796, BORP, vol. 151, TNSA. [BACK]

83. Ibid. [BACK]

84. Place to BOR, 26 November 1795, BORP, vol. 140, TNSA. [BACK]

85. Ibid. [BACK]

86. Ibid. [BACK]

87. In Wilson’s Glossary, “badar-nawīsi” (a Persian term) was defined as a “writing off of items of an account which are objectionable or excessive,” 43. One of the main objections of the Poonamallee Petition had been that Place was seeking to tax the Mirasidars on a part of their areas (called koḷḷais) adjoining the more immediate enclosures (called pulakkadai) next to their houses. A pulakkadai is defined by Wilson as “a small portion of ground or a yard adjoining a dwelling held rent free by a mirasidar, used as a kitchen garden, or one for vegetables requiring a richer soil, as tobacco, sugar, turmerick—it is not transferable except with the entire Mirasi property and rights,” 422. The kollai was defined in the same source as “dry soil, high ground not capable of artificial irrigation; a backyard, or, rather, an inclosed piece of ground belonging to one of the proprietors of a village, whether or not contiguous to his dwelling,” 293. Place proposed to tax the kollais and said that the mirasidars were claiming them as badarnavisi or charges to be written off. [BACK]

88. All the details of the Poonamallee Petition are from Translation of a Petition from Poonamallee inhabitants to the Board of Revenue, 23 November 1795, BORP, vol. 139A, TNSA. [BACK]

89. Place was specifically reprimanded by his superiors for having been too severe in having Aiyakutti, the Amil of Shamier Sultan, and Venkatarayan flogged at Numbal near Madras. Venkatarayan was given forty stripes of the cane and Aiyakutti thirty stripes. This was shortly before he decided to resign. BOR to Place, 13 September 1798, BC, no. 2110, IOL. See chap. 2. [BACK]

90. The way that Place employed pieces of carved granite that were obviously parts of temples can be well seen in the stone work of the Madurantakam tank, the earth portion of which burst most recently in December 1985. [BACK]

91. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of Place’s dispute with the sons of a well-known Armenian merchant who called himself Shamier Sultan over the shelter of some robbers in a village named Numbal. Numbal had originally been made an inam or gift to Kheir ul Nejsa Begam by the Nawab in 1763. Petition of Chateput Ponniappah, 13 February 1784, JB, vol. 3, TNSA. Numbal was an important village in the present-day Saidapet taluk. After the war of 1780, it became an important center for the production of betel leaves for export to Madras. Charles Baker to BOR, 6 January 1798, MB, BORP, R. 286/3, IOL. [BACK]

92. Place to BOR, 2 December 1795, BORP, vol. 140, TNSA; BOR Minute, 2 December 1795, BORP, vol. 140A, TNSA. [BACK]

93. In its Minute, the Board referred to its letter to Place indicating its desire for extending individual property in the villages “and consequently of securing the improvement and prosperity of the country—but they [the Board] never entertained the most distant idea that this could be effected by coercion or by rendering property less secure.” The Board also had no authority to threaten Mirasidars with the “forfeiture of their meerassees if they did not agree to the rent [tax].” Board’s Minute, 7 December 1795, BORP, vol. 140A, TNSA. [BACK]

94. Ibid. [BACK]

95. Place to BOR, 5 December 1795, BORP, vol. 140, TNSA. [BACK]

96. Place to BOR, 27 March 1796, BORP, vol. 161, TNSA. [BACK]

97. Ibid. [BACK]

98. Place to BOR, 25 July 1797, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA. [BACK]

99. Governor in Council, 8 January 1796, BORP, vol. 142, TNSA. [BACK]

100. Ibid. [BACK]

101. Ibid. [BACK]

102. Place to BOR, 26 February 1794, BORP, vol. 147, TNSA. [BACK]

103. Place to BOR, 1 March 1796, BORP, vol. 149, TNSA. [BACK]

104. Michael Moffatt, An Untouchable Community in South India: Structure and Consensus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 213–14. [BACK]

105. Dirks, in his account of Pudukkottai, says that “in most cases [paraiyar] marriages take place between karais [lineages] inside single villages. This suggests the limited nature of the natu as a territorial unit except in so far as it creates an identity between the untouchables and the natu of the dominant caste lineage or village under which they serve.” Paraiyar natus are the same as the natus of the dominant castes. Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 273–74 [BACK]

106. Place to BOR, 29 March 1796, BORP, vol. 151, TNSA. If we were to transcribe these names into more modern spelling, they would be called Pettiya Totti, Puntamalli Kutti, Mangadu Kamban, and Pammal Kanniyan. [BACK]

107. Ibid. [BACK]

108. Place to BOR, 13 December 1795, BORP, vol. 153, TNSA. [BACK]

109. Moore to Darvall, 28 February 1794, BORP, vol. 143, TNSA. [BACK]

110. Hodgson to Place, 12 January 1795, BORP, vol. 143, TNSA. One of the gramani men was severely wounded in the head; another had his leg broken. [BACK]

111. This dispute continued on until 1808 when it was decided that Place’s decision had been illegal and that the vellalas were the legitimate Mirasidars. However, by that time the Gramanis had sold all the land in Tondiarpet. “Even the residential site of the mirasidars and village artisans, which had been situated on a central spot on the main road to Tiruvuttriyur, no longer existed, for the Shanars [or Gramanis] had destroyed all its former buildings.” Though the Kondaikatti vellalas, who had now regained the title of Mirasidar, tried to get the courts to challenge the deeds of sale granted to the Gramanis, they would not do so. Neild-Basu, “Madras” 102. [BACK]

112. Stephen Allen Barnett, “The structural position of a south Indian caste: the kondaikatti vellala-s in Tamil Nadu,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1970), 92. [BACK]

113. Place to BOR, 29 March 1796, BORP, vol. 151, TNSA. [BACK]

114. This was the western part of Blacktown originally inhabited both by local people and Europeans; it lost its fashionability as a place for European dwellings in the early part of the eighteenth century. With the exception of a few streets in its southeast portion, it was designated the living area of the right subcastes by Thomas Pitt in 1707. The other part of late eighteenth-century Blacktown was Muthialpet, which after 1799 came to have an important European presence along the beach as well as on that street which was called the Esplanade. Neild-Basu, “Madras,” 179; Love, Vestiges, 2:472 and 3:162. [BACK]

115. Although these particular paraiyar Pannaiyals were not imprisoned by the British, eight others, who could not have been involved without the assent and encouragement of their Kondaikatti vellala masters, were put into irons to work on “public works” in the Jagir. These eight paraiyar Pannaiyals were to be employed until the arrival of the threshing season. They were Padavatan of Kovur, Sooren of Kovur, Padavatan of Kunnatur, Coraven of Kunnatur, Auniyam of Mangadu, Ninan of Mangadu, Ninan of Palantandalam, and Sadien of Pakkam. Palantandalam, Kunnatur, and Mangadu are villages near the Chembrambakkam tank. I cannot identify Pakkam. BOR to Place, 14 July 1796, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA. [BACK]

116. I am grateful to Stuart Blackburn for this and many other suggestions. [BACK]

117. Declaration of Periya Tambi, Mastry of the Great Paracheri and by Ranjan (an employee of the Company) to the Board of Revenue, 22 April 1796, BORP, vol. 153, TNSA. [BACK]

118. Declaration of Uttakartan Maistry of Periyamedu in Madras on 21 April 1796, to the Board of Revenue, BORP, vol. 153, TNSA. In an apparent reply to the letter of these three untouchable subcaste leaders in Madras, the Karanguli untouchables are supposed to have written, “Agreeable to your orders that we should repair to Madras for protection we are assembling together. If you will intercede with the Gentleman [Place] on our behalf when we arrive, and defray our expenses, send your answer by the bearer and we will accordingly come.” [BACK]

119. Place, 1799 Report, para. 280. [BACK]

120. Ibid., para. 244. [BACK]

121. Ibid., para. 280. In 1799, at the time he submitted his report on his activities, he prided himself on the fact that he had demonstrated that the Jagir would yield a tax revenue of pagodas 400,000 and that it had been established on a “footing of increasing and durable prosperity.” Place to Governor, 11 June 1799, BC, no. 2111, IOL. Moreover, he conceded that when he came to the Jagir to carry out the village settlement—an assessment with the head inhabitants of more than two thousand villages—it “produced violent commotions, which required every exertion to quell.” Nevertheless, he believed that his successor, John Hodgson, by contrast, was able to carry out the tax assessment “without a struggle and this too, under the prevalence of a drought unexampled in the memory of Man”; the implication was that only Place’s actions enabled Hodgson’s success. Place to Governor, 12 June 1799, BC, no. 2111, IOL. Now, he felt, a collector would no “longer [be] distracted by overawing the cabals of intrigue, or quelling the disturbances of contending factions, but have full leisure to prosecute the suggestions on [their] own terms, for the improvement and happiness of his charge.” Place to Governor, 11 June 1799, BC, no. 2111, IOL. This, of course, was a period of gradual institutionalization or reaggregation involving the process of setting both the terms of the relationship between the Mirasidars and the collector and the exact words that the collector and his seniors would use about this relationship. See also Lionel Place’s Minute, 7 October 1802, BC, F/4/150, IOL. [BACK]

122. BOR to Governor in Council, 15 May 1796, BORP, vol. 156, TNSA. [BACK]

123. Place to BOR, 16 July 1796, BORP, vol. 161, TNSA. [BACK]

124. Ibid. [BACK]

125. Ibid. [BACK]

126. Place was particularly incensed with Appa Mudali because he was “exciting opposition” against Place’s efforts to make tax assessments with the villages that were watered by the Chembirambakkam tank, close to the village of Poonamallee. Ibid. [BACK]

127. Ibid. [BACK]

128. Ibid. [BACK]

129. Ibid. [BACK]

130. Ibid. [BACK]

131. Ibid. [BACK]

132. Governor in Council to BOR, 4 June 1796, BORP, vol. 157, TNSA. [BACK]

133. Place, 1799 Report, paras. 281, 286, 299. The final count on the number of individuals who left their villages (presumably all men, not counting Pannaiyals) was 293 Mirasidars from these subdivisions of the district. They were divided up as follows:

• 93 men from 83 villages in Karanguli pargana.
• 38 men from 14 villages in Kanchi pargana.
• 73 men from 24 villages in Uttiramerur.
• 88 men from 25 villages in Kavantandalam.

134. Although, according to Place, everybody on his list had actually deserted, some of these were replaced by others for a wide variety of reasons not ultimately having anything to do with the “insurrection.” For instance, an appraisal of the list indicates that only forty-four of the Mirasidars were actually removed by Place for having deserted. These included the five “ringleaders”—Mudu Venkatapati Reddi, Agastiyappa Mudali, Kollapa Nayak, Muttu Mudali, and Ramaswami Mudali—as well as Venkatachari, Vadaman, Muttuman, Sastri Narayana Mudali, Chakrapa Mudali, Muttu Mudali, Rangappa Mudali, Tirumala Srinivasa Iyengar, Appa Srinivasa Iyengar, Venkatachala Giramani, Varadapa Giramani, Marumuttu Nayak, Pudunakadu Mudali, Arumuttu Mudali, and Swami Mudali. None of the Mirasidars listed above came from Poonamallee pargana. There were, in addition, twenty-four Mirasidars who “gave up their mirasi when I began to rent the Purganah, and the conduct of the inhabitants at large having never yet been decided on, no other meeraseedars have been appointed.” These Mirasidars (all from Poonamallee pargana but not among the “ringleaders”) were Subbaiyya and Venkataiyya from Kilmanampetu; Vida Mudali from Cokkanallur; Viraswami and Aiya Mudali, Chengalroy Mudali, and Anna Mudali from Ariyanallur; Venkatachalam, Muttiyappan, Vira Perumal, and Ramaswami from Koranjeri; Venkatanarayan Pillai, Venkatachala Pillai, Ranga Pillai, Muttu Pillai, Lakshminarayan Pillai, Mallaya Pillai, and Kanaka Pillai from Pidikalakuppam and Varadarajapuram; Bankar Rao, Narayan Raj, and Kumara Pillai from Putadlum(?) and Puttakaram(?), Saidapettai Taluk; and Muttu, Nainappa, and Chinna Muttu from Netunjeri. Though these persons were deprived of their mirasi rights, no persons had been given them by Place at this time. Place to BOR, 4 November 1796, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA. [BACK]

135. BOR to Governor in Council, 21 November 1796, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA. [BACK]

136. The “volunteers” included Suburayudu, Ramanujachari, Venkachala Mudali, Viraswami, Venkata Nayak, and Rayaliya. The two earlier ones were Hari Pantulu and Venkata Rao. [BACK]

137. The missing Mirasidar was Ramachandra Pantulu; the other five were Karta Mudali, Surya Narayan Mudali, another Karta Mudali, Muttu Mudali, Vira Pillai, and Lakshmana Mudali. [BACK]

138. His name was Mritunjay Sastri. All of these materials are drawn from Place to BOR, 4 November 1796, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA. [BACK]

139. The one group of brahmans who had originally protested against Place’s behavior was from the village of Tirumalisai. [BACK]

140. The numbers of Mirasidars who deserted are drawn from Place to BOR, 2 July 1796, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA; BOR Minute of 14 July 1796, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA. [BACK]