1. Special Commission on Zamindari in the Jagire, 9 April 1802, BC, no. 2117, IOL. [BACK]

2. Public violence is illustrated in what are obviously somewhat hostile accounts of behavior among the group called the kallar in the southern part of the Tamil country. In these accounts, the kallars are called “colleries.” An account of 1817 says, “The women are inflexibly vindictive and furious on the least injury, even on suspicion, which prompts them to the most violent revenge without any regard to consequences. A horrible custom exists among the females of the Colleries when a quarrel or a discussion arises between them. The insulted woman brings her child to the house of the aggressor, and kills it at her door to avenge herself. Although her vengeance is attended with the most cruel barbarity, she immediately thereafter proceeds to a neighbouring village with all her goods etc. In this attempt she is opposed by her neighbours, which gives rise to clamour and outrage. The complaint is then carried to the head Amblacarar, who lays it before the elders of the village, and solicits their interference to terminate the quarrel. In the course of this investigation, if the husband finds that sufficient evidence has been brought against his wife, that she had given cause for provocation and aggression, then he proceeds unobserved by the assembly to his house, and brings one of his children, and in the presence of witness, kills his child at the door of the woman who had first killed her child at his. By this mode of proceeding he considers that he has saved himself much trouble and expense, which would have otherwise have devolved on him. This circumstance is soon brought to the notice of the tribunal, who proclaim that the offense committed is sufficiently avenged. But should this voluntary retribution of revenge not be executed by the convicted person, the tribunal is prorogued to a limited time, fifteen days generally. Before the expiration of that period one of the children of that convicted person must be killed. At the same time he is to bear all expenses for providing food, etc., for the assembly during those days.” Account of T. Turnbull (1817), quoted in Thurston, Tribes and Castes, 3:54–55. In the first Tamil novel Piratāpa Mutaliyār by Mayūram Vetanāyaka Piḷḷai (1879; reprint, Madras: Sakti Kariyālayam, 1957), the hero’s grandmother orders that when Piratapa, the hero, made a mistake in his lesson, the teacher should not beat Piratapa, his student, but should beat his own son, Kanakasabai. Should Kanakasabai not be not there when Piratapa made mistakes, the teacher should instead beat himself on the back (p. 6). [BACK]

3. An ūḻikāṟṟu is the “destructive wind that prevails at the end of the world.” Tamil Lexicon (Madras: University of Madras, 1982) 1:502; A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1954), 320–21. I would like to express my thanks to George Hart for useful discussions on this matter. [BACK]

4. Place, 1799 Report, para. 49. [BACK]

5. Place, 1799 Report, para. 66. [BACK]

6. Bundla Ramaswami Naidoo, Memoir of the Internal Revenue system of the Madras Presidency, Selections from the Records of the South Arcot District (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1908), no. 11:5. The preface is dated 1 January 1820. The document is filled with many such observations. Bundla Ramaswami Naidoo was “the most prominent nineteenth-century member” of the Madras Bandla family. Beri Timmana, one of the seventeenth-century members of that family, served as a chief merchant of the Company. The family belonged to the Perike or Perikaver weaving caste. Neild-Basu, “Dubashes,” 5. [BACK]

7. Letter from “Observer,” Madras Observer, 26 April 1792, quoted in Neild-Basu, “Madras,” 175. She also notes that the use of carriages by Indians was a significant change. In the 1770s and the 1780s, with the exception of the family of the Nawab of Arcot, only one carriage was kept by an Indian in all of Madras. Ibid., 176n. [BACK]

8. Place, 1799 Report, para. 53. [BACK]

9. Place, 1799 Report, para. 280. Place resigned from the Board of Revenue three years later because he felt that the collectors such as Alexander Read and Thomas Munro, both military appointees, received treatment not accorded to that of the civilian appointees in the revenue line. At that time, he also reported a “crisis” to be overcome. Part of his irritation concerned the fact that the special commission, competing with the Board of Revenue in setting the terms of what came to be called the Permanent Settlement, left the Mirasidars of the Jagir unprotected. Place’s Minute, 7 October 1802, BC, vol. 150, IOL. [BACK]

10. S. Arasaratnam, “Trade and Political Dominion in South India, 1750–90: Changing British-Indian Relationships,” Modern Asian Studies 13, no. 1 (February 1979): 24. [BACK]

11. Love, Vestiges, 3:402. [BACK]

12. Arasaratnam, “Trade and Political Dominion,” 25. [BACK]

13. Minutes of Council, 7 December 1781, July–December 1781, PP, 240/53, quoted in Arasaratnam, “Trade and Political Dominion,” 24–25. [BACK]

14. Minute of C. N. White, 28 March 1793, BORP, vol. 27, TNSA. [BACK]

15. Minute of C. N. White, 15 March 1793, BORP, vol. 27, TNSA. [BACK]

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

17. Place, 1795 Report, para. 25. [BACK]

18. Quoted in Love, Vestiges, 3:485. [BACK]

19. Committee of Police to Governor in Council 8 July 1786, PP, TNSA, quoted in Neild-Basu, “Madras,” 146. [BACK]

20. GOM to BOR, 24 February 1798, BC, no. 2109, IOL. [BACK]

21. See Crole, Chingleput, 66. “The presidency town close by [Madras] is at the bottom of the backwards nature of the district which is called the ‘most backward in the whole Presidency.’ The chief land owners, some holding government appointments, live in Madras, either wholly, or in great part, and the district is thus deprived of a capital of its own. Living there is costly, and expensive tastes are formed, for the gratification of which the farm or estate is rack rented, and the expenditure for its improvement, or even for its maintenance, curtailed. Little interest in good farming is shown by the rich and well to do, and the cultivation…is not advancing because it is left in the hands of the ignorant.” Later Crole argued, “The effect of [neglect] is disastrous for the land is generally too inferior to stand bad farming without resenting the neglect.” Crole also remarked against the carrying off of what were called by the British “brattis” (Tamil “viraạạikaḷ”)—dried cakes of cow dung used for fuel. Ibid. [BACK]

22. Hastings to Lord Mansfield, 25 August 1774, G. R. Gleig, Life of Warren Hastings 1:401, quoted in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 3. [BACK]

23. Peter Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 42. [BACK]

24. George M. Foster, “Colonial Administration in Northern Rhodesia in 1962,” Human Organization 46, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 367. I am grateful to Elizabeth Colson for bringing this article to my attention. [BACK]

25. F. W. Ellis, “Lectures on Hindu Law,” Mss Eur. D. 31, Erskine Collection, IOL. I am indebted to Dharampal for leading me to this source. [BACK]

26. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1 of The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 104. [BACK]

27. Fox, Gandhian Utopia, 93–95. [BACK]

28. See the account in Mattison Mines, The Merchant-Warriors: Textiles, Trade and Territory in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 70. [BACK]

29. See the account of the dispute over mirasi rights and the right to build in the village between the reddis and agamudaiyars in Viravorum, near Manimangalam, about sixteen miles southwest of Madras, in 1785. Eugene F. Irschick, “Peasant Survival Strategies and Rehearsals for Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century South India,” Peasant Studies 9, no. 4 (Summer 1982), 218–19. Many other instances emerged in the 1780s. [BACK]

30. Irschick, “Peasant Survival Strategies,” 237–38. [BACK]

31. Place to BOR, 28 January 1796, BC, no. 940, IOL; Place to BOR, 28 June 1796, BC, vol. 36, IOL. [BACK]

32. Place to BOR, 28 June 1796, BC, vol. 36, IOL. [BACK]

33. In the Jagir, the site of the village itself and that of the village temple was called the nattam. The Mirasidars believed that they could only build their houses in the nattam and nowhere else. Minute of the Board of Revenue, 5 January 1818, BOR, Misc., vol. 257A, TNSA. [BACK]

34. Place, 1799 Report, quoted in Select Committee on the East India Company: The Fifth Report on the Affairs of the East India Company (reprint, Madras: J. Higgenbotham, 1866), 2:43 (hereafter Fifth Report). [BACK]

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

36. This discussion of Place’s policies toward the temples in the Jagir is based on Place, 1799 Report, paras. 450–61. [BACK]

37. Place, 1799 Report, para. 452. [BACK]

38. Visitors to the large Madurantakam tank in the southern part of what is today the Chengalpattu MGR district can attest to the strategies that Place employed in constructing the dam for that tank. See also the complaints of the Mirasidars who composed the Poonamallee Petition that Place forced villagers to use bricks and stones taken from temples to repair the Chembirambakkam tank just west of Poonamallee, in “Translation of a Petition from Poonamallee inhabitants to the Board of Revenue,” 23 November 1795, BORP, vol. 139A, TNSA. There is much evidence to show that the Company employees often used stones and bricks from temples to make fortifications during the defense of Madras against the French in the late 1740s. [BACK]

39. Place to BOR, 27 March 1796, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA. [BACK]

40. See the account of the estimation of the population of Varanasi as a dialogic activity to create the notion of size. Bernard S. Cohn, “The Census and Objectification in South Asia,” in Anthropologist Among the Historians, 234. [BACK]

41. These religious beliefs and practices were not referred to as Hinduism at this time. The expression “Hinduism” is a product of a wide-ranging construction about religious behaviors in South Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [BACK]

42. Place, 1799 Report, para. 458. [BACK]

43. Place, 1799 Report, para. 460. [BACK]

44. Place to BOR, 15 May 1795, BORP, vol. 128, TNSA. It was typical at that time to have an office that was simply a thatched house. This was still true for the municipal office in Madurai in the 1970s. [BACK]

45. Place, 1799 Report. [BACK]

46. The context of the agreement itself was significant: “We will never enter our cultivation under false names, in order to take more than our proper Warum [share of the crop]—also we will not enter in the account Mauniams [tax-free lands], for which there are no Heirs, nor for Pagodas [temples] where there are no Ceremonies going on. But we will exert ourselves to the utmost in order to restore such ceremonies as have been stopped, so that we may pray to God to make us happy and prosperous in our village.” Place to BOR, 10 November 1796, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA. [BACK]

47. Place to Colonel David Baird, Officer commanding at Walajabad, 8 May 1797, MB, BORP, R. 285, vol. 63, IOL. [BACK]

48. Greenway to BOR, 17 July 1801, BC, no. 2113, IOL. In 1801, the festival began on 24 May. Of this figure, the preparation of the prasadam—the sweetmeat that is ceremonially offered to the deity and then redistributed to the devotees after it has been ceremonially eaten by the god or goddess—was only one of the costs (it used nineteen kalams of rice and almost thirty-five pollams of gingelly or sesame oil). Other important costs included fireworks costing pagodas 34, gold ornaments for the deity costing pagodas 14, and flowers costing pagodas 10. By far the most expensive items were the presents to the dancing girls, which cost pagodas 111, one third of the total third-day’s ceremony costs. [BACK]

49. Quoted in John William Kaye, Christianity in India: An historical narrative (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1859), 380. [BACK]

50. Ibid. [BACK]

51. “India and its Evangelization: a lecture delivered by Dr. Duff to the Young Men’s Christian Association” (Exeter Hall, December 1850), quoted in ibid., 380. [BACK]

52. Love, Vestiges, 1:72. [BACK]

53. During the wars between the French and the British from 1744 to 1760, these forts (Chingleput, Tiruppaccur, and Karanguli, among others) became some of the important reckoning points in placing the military actions of the English, the French, and their allies. Even afterward, in 1783, when the French were aiding Hyder Ali and later Tipu Sultan, the same ideas applied. For instance, Bussy, the French commander, and one of the few French military men who had had formal military training, said that he had certain news that the march of the British army on Cuddalore placed it between Chingleput and Karanguli, awaiting the appearance of Admiral Hughes at Madras. Bussy to Suffren, 2 May 1783, Feuilles Volantes no. 595, Fond Inde, Archives d’outre mer, Aix-en-Provence. [BACK]

54. “Historical account of the government of Chingleput Rajah,” translated from the Marathi into English in the early nineteenth century, in Mackenzie (General), vol. 9, IOL. [BACK]

56. Place to BOR, 11 January 1798, BC, no. 2109, IOL. In fact, Place focused his activity on relatively few of the total number of Palayakkars. He apparently also took away the “watching rights” in some of the villages belonging to Palayakkars with whom he was friendly, such as Rayalu Nayak. The Palayakkars from whom he took away privileges were Maddikayala Teppalraj, Kuppum Venkatachala Nayak, Damerla Venkatapati Nayak, Strirama Singama Nayak, Rayalu Nayak, Vadamaraja Tanappa Nayak, Rangappa Nayak, Anapambattu Harikrishna Raj, Nakka Venaktarama Nayak, Adavi, Venaktapati Raj, Kulur Venkata Raj, Itambi Subburoya Pillai (the only Tamil of the group), Mul Raj, and Madupakam Ramachandra Nayak. The total monetary amount that Place took away was pagodas 16,324-9-70 out of a total of pagodas 47,774-6-22. In terms of numbers of villages, Place took away privileges or benefits for “watching rights” in seventy-seven villages out of a total of 1,286. Greenway to Special Commission, 30 October 1801, SCPSP, vol. 3, IOL. [BACK]

57. Place to BOR, 6 April 1795, BORP, vol. 128, TNSA. [BACK]

58. Thomas Munro, writing as principal collector in the Ceded Districts, 10 April 1810, quoted in the Report of the Committee on Police, PCP, vol. 4, IOL. [BACK]

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

60. Place to BOR, 29 July 1798, BC, no. 2110, IOL. [BACK]

61. John and Nuzur Jacob Shamier to Governor Harris, 7 April 1798, BC, no. 2110, IOL. The letter cadjan or a strip of palmyra palm leaf (Tamil “olai”) was placed in a holder made for the purpose, the style at the time. [BACK]

62. See Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. Thompson, Cal Winslow, eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 45–47. Place was castigated by the Board of Revenue for being unnecessarily severe in imposing these floggings. BOR to Place, 13 September 1798, BC, no. 2110, IOL. [BACK]

63. BOR to Place, 13 September 1798, BC, no. 2110, IOL. [BACK]

64. Woolf and Sewell to BOR, 16 December 1795, BC, no. 855, IOL. [BACK]

65. Place to BOR, 10 September 1798, BC, no. 2109, IOL. [BACK]

66. Greenway to Special Commission, 30 October 1801, SCPSP, vol. 3, IOL. [BACK]

67. Crole, Chingleput, 171–72. [BACK]

68. Place, 1795 Report, para. 86. [BACK]

69. Crole, Chingleput, 178–79. [BACK]

70. Place to Committee of Police, 4 May 1798, BC, no. 2109, IOL. [BACK]

71. Place to Committee of Police, 4 May 1798, BC, no. 2109, IOL. [BACK]

72. This formulation of society, the individual, and the sacred is derived from Durkheim and Goffman’s definition of the “individual’s personality…as one apportionment of the collective mana.” Erving Goffman, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” in Interaction Ritual (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 47. Durkheim had also written that “the human personality is a sacred thing; one dare not violate it nor infringe its bounds, while at the same time the greatest good is in communion with others.” Emile Durkheim, “The Determination of Moral Facts,” 37, quoted in Goffman, “Deference and Demeanor,” 73. [BACK]

73. Dirks is directing his points to Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 71, and Carol Breckenridge, “From protector to litigant—changing relations between Hindu temples and the Raja of Ramnad,” in Burton Stein, ed., South Indian Temples (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978); Dirks, Hollow Crown, 287–89. [BACK]

74. Ibid., 290. [BACK]

75. Mines and Gourishankar, “Leadership and Individuality,” 765. [BACK]

76. Mines and Gourishankar, “Leadership and Individuality,” 765. See also Stanley Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). [BACK]

77. Ibid., 766. In addition to the work of Dirks, they refer to that of C. J. Fuller, Servants of the Goddess: The Priests of a South Indian Temple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 46, in which he says that temple honors “are presented to particular persons, precisely to single them out.” [BACK]

78. Ibid. The citation is to Dirks, Hollow Crown, 261. [BACK]

79. Stephen Mennell, Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-Image (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 79. See also Norbert Elias, Power and Civility, vol. 2 of The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 107. I want to acknowledge many helpful discussions on these issues with Cecilia Van Hollen and particularly the insights that I have derived from her unpublished paper, “The Role of the Civil Society in Orientalist and Anti-Colonial Discourses: Women as Model Citizens” (Berkeley, 1991). [BACK]

80. In the struggle that developed between Place and the Board of Revenue on the one hand and the Mirasidars and Place on the other, the entire definition of the mirasi system came into question because (as was explained by the Board of Revenue twenty years later in 1818) Place “removed the Meerasidars from some of the finest villages, and conferred the meerassy of them…on the Pycarries [Payirkkaris or tenants], or even on strangers.” Minute of the Board of Revenue, 5 January 1818, BOR Misc., vol. 257A, TNSA. [BACK]

81. Place to BOR, 27 March 1796, included with the minute of the BOR on Badarnavisi, 30 June 1796, BORP, vol. 160, TNSA. [BACK]

82. Place to Board of Revenue, 25 July 1797, BORP, vol. 161, TNSA. The Board of Revenue wrote, “The consideration of the very great labour which is discoverable in the whole of the Collector’s proceedings, and of the successful reform which he has introduced by the realization of a very large revenue, convinces us that a donation of this kind granted to his principal confidential servants will be a judicial reward of positive merit.” Govt. to BOR, 3 June 1797, BORP, vol. 179, TNSA; see also BOR Minute, 31 July 1797, BORP, vol. 182, TNSA. [BACK]

83. Place to BOR, 3 May 1797, BORP, vol. 177, TNSA. [BACK]

84. Mines and Gourishankar, “Leadership and Individuality,” 770. [BACK]

85. Quoted in Mines and Gourishankar, “Leadership and Individuality,” 764n. [BACK]

86. Place to BOR, 10 November 1796, BORP, vol. 168, TNSA. [BACK]

87. Place, 1795 Report, para. 180. The following discussion of Madurantakam and Uttiramerur is based on this account in Place’s report. [BACK]

88. Place to the Board of Revenue, 27 March 1796, included with the Board’s note on Badarnavisi, 30 June 1796, BORP, vol. 160, TNSA. [BACK]

89. The Nawab also reported other encounters with Pigot in 1763. Nawab Muhammad Ali to Governor Du Pré, 26 November 1770, HMS, vol. 113, IOL. [BACK]

90. Place, 1795 Report, para. 180. [BACK]

91. Crole, Chingleput, 32. [BACK]

92. Toṇạaimāṉ cakkiravartti carittiram [History of Tondaiman Cakkiravartti], Mackenzie MSS R 8350, MOML; Nerumpūr kurumpar kōạạai kaipītu [Narrative account of the Kurumbar fort at Nerumbur], Mackenzie MSS R. 7754, MOML; Kurumpar carittiram [History of the Kurumbar], Mackenzie MSS R. 8189, MOML, translated into English in the early nineteenth century in another version in Mackenzie MSS Class 2, no. 21, IOL. [BACK]

93. Extract of letter from the secretary to government in the Revenue Department to the president and members of the Board of Revenue, 2 August 1814. F. W. Ellis, Replies to seventeen questions proposed by the Government of Fort St. George relative to Mirasi Right with two appendices elucidatory of the subject (Madras: Government Gazette Office, 1818), v. [BACK]

94. Ibid. [BACK]

95. F. W. Ellis, Appendix [to the] replies to the questions respecting meerasi Right (hereafter Appendix), 1814, BOR, Misc., vol. 233, TNSA. The following discussion of Ellis’s work is based primarily on this document. [BACK]

96. Letter of 17 April 1814 from the Government of Madras to the Board of Revenue in Ellis, Appendix, v. [BACK]

97. Ellis even computed what he believed to be “vellala villages,” “brahman villages,” and “other caste villages.” That is, he said that, of the area described by Place (the Jagir, the center of the Tondai country), there were 680 villages in which vellalas were Mirasidars, 256 in which the brahmans were Mirasidars, and 346 in which other castes were Mirasidars. [BACK]

98. The Chingleput district came later to be called the Chengelpattu district. At one time it was called the Chengai Anna district because “Chengai” is a shortened form for Chengelpattu. A former chief minister of Tamil Nadu, C. N. Annadurai (d. 1969) whose nickname was “Aṇṇa” or “elder brother,” was born in Kanchipuram, the headquarters of the district. [BACK]

99. Stuart Blackburn, Inside the Drama-House: The Rama Story as Shadow Puppet Play in Kerala, ch. 1 (forthcoming). It is not without interest that the performers of the Kambaramayanam call themselves simply Mudaliyars, not Sengunthars, a strategy that hides their ethnic origins. [BACK]

100. In Tamil, two kinds of Payirkkaris or tenants could be identified. The Ulkkudis had lived in a village for a considerable time; they could not be dispossessed and had the right of hereditary succession but did not have the right to mortgage or sell the land so long as they paid the stipulated rent to the Mirasidar. The second type, the Parakkudis, were migratory or nonresident tenants who had no proprietary rights. They could simply cultivate lands in the village for a stipulated term at will. Wilson, Glossary, 401, 531. [BACK]

101. Francis Ellis, “Account of a Discovery of a Modern Imitation of the Vedas, With Remarks on the Genuine Works,” Asiatic Researches or Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal for Enquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia, 14 (1822): 1–59. Ellis says on p. 57 that Nobili, “who was looked upon by the Jesuits as the chief apostle of the Indians after Francois Xavier took incredible pains to acquire a knowledge of the religion, customs, and language of Madura, sufficient for the purposes of his ministry. But this was not all: for to stop the mouths of his opposers and particularly of those who treated his character of brachman as an imposture, he produced an old dirty parchment in which he had forged, in the ancient Indian characters a deed, shewing that the Brachmans of Rome were of much older date than those of India and that the Jesuits of Rome descended, in a direct line from the God BRAHMA. Nay, Father Jouvence a learned Jesuit, tells us, in the history of his order, something yet more remarkable; even that ROBERT DE NOBILI, when the authenticity of his smoky parchment was called in question by some Indian unbelievers, declared, upon oath, before the assembly of the Brachmans of Madura, that he (NOBILI) derived really and truly his origin from the god BRAH’MA. Is it not astonishing that this Reverend Father would acknowledge, is it not monstrous that he should applaud as a piece of pious ingenuity this detestable instance of perjury and fraud?” [BACK]

102. Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1917), 6:694. [BACK]

103. See “Mayilapūr kantapparācan caritam,” [History of Kandapparajan of Mylapur], Mackenzie MSS R. 8141, MOML. [BACK]

104. Place, 1799 Report, para. 59. “Mudali” is the shortened form of “Mudaliyar,” the surname of all Tondaimandala vellalas. [BACK]

105. In 1786, the Board of Revenue was presented with a petition by some “Kondakutty Vellarahs” from Kuvam and Mappedu in what is today the Tiruvallur taluk, saying that “in very old times this country being a wilderness, Tondamon the famous monarch, after whose name this part of the world still goes viz. Tondamandalam, sending for the inhabitants from the kingdom of Sera [Chola] promised them that if they would cut down the woods, turn them into fields and cultivate the country each at his disposal, and give him one sixth part of the product, he would let them have the remaining 5 parts and the rights of settling and mortgaging their property of lands and thus they having brought about the business, such rights were accordingly conferred upon them. Many centuries after the days of the said monarch, the different rulers of the country being of cruel disposition curtailed the inhabitants’ shares and put in practice many injustice[s] over them yet none of them ever think of so encroaching upon the usurping the inhabitants with their inheritance.…[The petitioners continued that the Nawab,] tho’ capable of doing any injustice over the inhabitants at his disposal, yet he being bound by the cord of justice, was obliged to take grounds he lately wanted from the inheritors of Chennappa Naicker’s Coopam not by violence but by their general consents and by paying them money for it.” The petition was an attempt to head off the takeover of property by the Company after the war of 1780 in the villages of Kottur, Mappedu, and Kuvum in order to regrant the land to a group of Christians under a Jesuit missionary named Padre Manente, who was part of the Mission du Carnate. [BACK]

106. Place, 1799 Report, paras. 62–63, 65. [BACK]

107. BOR minute, 25 January 1796, BORP, vol. 149, TNSA. [BACK]

108. Regarding population movements inspired by trade concerns, see D. H. A. Kolff, “Sannyasi Trader-Soldiers,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 8, no. 2 (June 1971): 211–18; C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 142–43.

For an account of flight in the face of war, see the description of the coming of the Maratha Bargirs into Bengal by Ganga Ram, The Maharashta Purana: An Eighteenth-Century Bengali Historical Text, trans. and ed. Edward Dimock and P. C. Gupta (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1965), 26–28

For an account of flight during the Bengal famine of 1769–70, see W. W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal (reprint, Calcutta: Indian Studies, 1965), 25

Regarding migrations motivated by work opportunities, see Brian Murton, “Key People in the Countryside: Decisionmakers in Interior Tamilnadu in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 10, no. 2 (June 1973): 177 [BACK]

109. Ellis to BOR, 20 April 1817, MCR, vol. 1021, TNSA. [BACK]

110. Ellis, Collector of Madras, to BOR, 25 June 1817, MCR, vol. 1022, TNSA. [BACK]

111. Ibid. [BACK]

112. Crole says that after the collapse of the Permanent Settlement, which began almost as soon as it was implemented in 1802 and continued until it was formally abolished in 1818, taxation in the area was “followed by the intermittent efforts of 15 or 20 officers [collectors] to make a survey and ryotwar settlement of the district which gradually reverted to Government, as one zemindar after another became insolvent.” Crole, Chingleput, 273. Though the Permanent Settlement was introduced into the Chingleput district in 1802, the ryotwari system was introduced into two areas of the district, Kanchipuram and Madurantakam, in the very next year. In 1817, the ryotwari system was introduced into the Manimangalam casba in 1817 and 1818 and at the same time Ellis introduced the ryotwari system into the village of Vayalur (in the present-day Kanchipuram taluk). [BACK]

113. Secretary of Revenue Dept. to the President and members of BOR, 2 August 1814, in C. P. Brown, ed., Three treatises on Mirasi Right…with the remarks made by the Hon’ble the Court of Directors (Madras: D. P. L. C. Connor, 1852), 1. [BACK]

114. A. D. Campbell, secretary to the Chief Secretary, 17 April 1817, MCR, vol. 1021, TNSA. Campbell was already a Telugu scholar and one of a large number of Campbell family members involved with India (including the governor of Madras in the 1780s), as well as the future author of a Telugu grammar and dictionary prepared for the use of students in Madras College. He also served as a secretary in the Revenue Department of government. [BACK]

115. BOR to Ellis, 18 September 1817, MCR, vol. 1022, TNSA. Ellis’s letter was dated 30 May 1816. [BACK]

116. Extract of Revenue Letter to Fort St. George, 2 January 1822, in Brown, Three treatises, 155. [BACK]

117. Minute by Sir Thomas Munro, Madras, 31 December 1824, in Brown, Three treatises. [BACK]

118. Graham to Alexander Read, 22 October 1794, Records of Fort St. George: The Baramahal Records, Management (Section 1; Madras, 1907), 223, quoted in Murton, “Key People,” 177. [BACK]

119. Wilson, Glossary, 524. [BACK]

120. B. H. Baden-Powell, The Land Systems of British India (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1892), 3:123–24n. [BACK]

121. Ibid., 124. [BACK]

122. Ibid., 122. [BACK]