1. To Fix the People to Their Respective Villages

The Transformation of the East India Company

Between the 1780 war fought by the English East India Company and Hyder Ali and the takeover of the Carnatic by the Company in 1801, many social practices and cultural repertoires came to be questioned. The negotiations and mediations arising from this questioning may be used as the first key epistemological moment. In part, the moment emerged from the new juridical dominance exercised by the British in South India. Even more important was the fact that Company employees transformed themselves from traders into bureaucrats. Moreover, the invasion and depredations of Hyder Ali’s army in the war of 1780 concentrated largely on the areas surrounding the town of Madras.

About seventy-five miles to the west of Madras lay Arcot and Vellore, the heart of the territory of the local prince, the Nawab of Arcot. In between lay the northern part of what the British called the Arcot province. Madras faced the Bay of Bengal but also occupied the edge of an agrarian area called the Jagir stretching to the north, south, and west of it. Between 1780 and 1782, Hyder Ali tried to denude the Jagir of its population. Aware that the Jagir was a source of food, fodder, labor, and even betel leaves for the inhabitants of Madras, Hyder burned villages and either killed or scattered their local populations to intimidate the British.^[1]

In the 1780 war, Hyder made a largely successful attempt to destroy the villages of the area within a radius of thirty to fifty-five miles from the seacoast. He also either destroyed or dispersed the population in this region.^[2] Even more important, in the parts of the Arcot area to the west and south of the Jagir, Hyder also sought to extract land taxes to support his military operations.^[3] During the early months of the war of 1780, almost all of Arcot province except for two or three forts fell into the hands of Hyder Ali.

Between 1780 and 1792, the Company was confronted with two wars, first with Hyder Ali and then with his son, Tipu Sultan. During this time, the Company supported another prince, Muhammad Ali, the Nawab of Arcot, who allowed some of his territories to be taxed by the Company to help pay for the wars with Hyder and Tipu. However, the interaction was important less for these military maneuvers than for the epistemic space that it offered to create knowledge about what was termed an “Oriental” or “Asiatic despot.”

In these and other activities, the goal was to formulate the idea that these Muslim princes were wanton, profligate, and inefficient. For instance, the Company employees alternately complained bitterly about “the barbarous policy of Hyder [that] had early stript…[the Arcot province] of its most useful inhabitants” and about Muhammad Ali’s tax collection charges, which consisted of “irregular sepoys, horsemen, sibandies [foot soldiers]…and those offices employed in the collection of the revenues [taxes].”^[4] Later, when the Company got access to the taxes of what was called the Carnatic—the coastal area to the east of the hills in the Tamil areas and part of the coastal Telugu area of South India—by displacing the tax collectors of Muhammad Ali, Company employees wrote that the area had been “disburthened of an intolerable weight.” The “intolerable weight” was, according to this assessment, just “sinecures under the government of the Nabob.”^[5] “Knowledge” in this context, however, was constructed as much as it was gathered. The process of construction was in turn shaped more by the purpose to which such knowledge would be put than by any “facts” discovered on the ground.

The construction of knowledge was shaped not only by the need to see local princes as unsatisfactory but also by the need to justify greater extractive policies by the Company itself. The Company had little direct information about this area and its villages and found itself in desperate financial straits as well. During the war of 1780, the English Company funded their army very poorly. Often the pay of the troops was eleven or twelve months in arrears. When they were paid, the soldiers were unable to change the currency in which they were paid (gold coins called “star pagodas”) without paying a huge discount to money changers. If the British authorities tried to force the money changers to give fair exchange for the gold coins, the changers simply left town.^[6] After the war, as arrears were paid off with promissory notes to soldiers and officers, considerable unhappiness resulted. At that time, the credit of the Company was so poor that officers could not raise any loans on the basis of the promissory notes issued by the Company without having 40 percent of their value discounted. Though this markdown was reduced to 30 percent in 1786 when the Madras Company authorities received funds from Bengal, money changers considered the discount quite moderate given the desperate state of the Company’s finances. The Company was therefore less financially and politically credible than were local rulers. To excavate the purposes to which these new constructions were put, we will briefly examine several events and the source materials they generated. They include a wide range of very different experiences—a battle, a revenue survey, idol protection, temple and agrarian conflicts—that nevertheless together underscore the ways in which knowledge was constructed.

The Battle of Pullalur and the Naturalization of the British on the Subcontinent

After the treaty of Paris in 1763, the only serious political threats to the British in the Madras area came from Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan. During the war of 1780, the prowess of Hyder Ali and his cavalry sometimes greatly intimidated the British. In no situation was this more apparent than during the battle of Pullalur, an area about ten miles north of Kanchipuram to the west of Madras. This battle was fought by a British force under the command of Colonel John Baillie against those of Hyder Ali and Tipu on 10 September 1780, shortly after the beginning of the war. Various mistakes made by the British commander-in-chief Sir Hector Munro and by Baillie himself resulted in the isolation of Baillie’s force. Hyder Ali and Tipu, aided by the French, soundly defeated Baillie’s forces: of the eighty-six officers in Baillie’s force who participated, thirty-six were killed or died of their wounds, thirty-four were wounded and taken prisoner, and sixteen were unwounded but taken prisoner.^[7]

Though the military encounter was brief, it had great consequences for the fortunes and self-esteem of the British at the time and long afterwards. Moreover, because the defeat placed in doubt the British ability to defend Madras, Hyder’s rout of Baillie greatly decreased British political and economic credibility. Writing in January 1781, the governor of Madras, Charles Smith, noted: “The consternation occasioned by this defeat, in which we lost the flower of our army, was universal. The inhabitants of the country and villages fled. The wealthiest merchants resident even at the Presidency [i.e., Madras town] sent away their [families]; and out of the vast number who have houses and property in the black town, not above one half of them remained.”^[8] Another indication of the way in which this battle affected local British fortunes is that in 1780 the authorities of the three temples in Kanchipuram or Kanchi (forty-five miles west of Madras)—Varadarajaswami (Vaishnava), Ekambarantha (Saiva), and Kamatciyamman—decided that they had to find ways to protect the idols from Hyder Ali’s armies. According to C. S. Crole, author of the Chingleput, late Madras, District (hereafter the Chingleput Manual), they took them away disguised as corpses.^[9]

Beyond these indicators of lack of confidence by both British and Indian observers, many other elements combined to construct the ideas connected with this battle. For instance, one of the participants in combat was a British cadet also by chance named Baillie. Cadet John Baillie wrote an account of the experience of the battle and his later imprisonment by Tipu and Hyder in Seringapatam on the tableland now called Karnataka. This account enjoyed some popularity as the cadet asked his father to correct his spelling and grammar mistakes and to circulate it to other people to read. This letter and many others like it spoke to a British audience in much the same way as had the Jesuit letters of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. They provided material to a particular community who sought to construct knowledge about this encounter as well as political behavior on the subcontinent.^[10]

Another important contributor to the construction of knowledge about the battle was C. S. Crole, writing in the 1870s. In his Chingleput Manual—Chingleput was the name for the area originally called the Jagir—Crole remarked that the village of Pullalur was

remarkable as the scene of the most grievous disaster which has yet befallen British arms in India. On the 10th September 1780, Colonel Baillie, who was marching from Madras to effect a junction with Sir Hector Munro at Conjeevaram [Kanchipuram], was here totally routed and his whole force either cut to pieces or captured by the united armies of Hyder Ali and his trees still bear unmistakable evidence of the fierceness of the cannonade.^[11]

Thus, marks on the trees ninety years after the battle near Pullalur could be used by Crole to argue that the ferociousness of Hyder’s cannon had been responsible for the British defeat. Crole’s account seeks also to indicate the extent to which the British had become part of the natural scenery of the area. He naturalized them to the area by picturing Colonel Baillie coming from Madras when in fact he was coming from the north. This reworking of events formed part of a creative activity.

We know that Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan collaborated in the creation of ideas about this battle. After the encounter, Tipu had a large mural of the scene commissioned for his palace in Seringapatam. He later feared that it might prompt the British to be vindictive, however, and ordered it whitewashed over in 1792 as British troops approached Seringapatam. It was restored by the British in the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, the process of creating knowledge about the battle of Pullalur has continued into our own day, as a painted cloth version of this scene was exhibited in London in 1990.^[12]

Mapping the Jagir as a Form of Self-Deception

Following the 1780 war (also known as the second Anglo-Mysore war), the employees of the Company were gradually converted into public servants. Shortly after the British surrendered the “assigned” areas to the Nawab, and after the Madras authorities received large sums of money from Bengal to pay off their commitments to the army, the Company issued orders on 17 July 1786 prohibiting army officers from engaging in any kind of monetary transaction and from interfering with tax matters in the Nawab’s territories.^[13] At the end of 1785, the Company Court of Directors in London also prohibited any members of the Madras council from engaging in mercantile activity. At the same moment, the Company raised the salaries of the governor, the commander-in-chief, and the members of the council.^[14] Therefore, despite the Company’s vulnerable financial position, its employees experienced a bureaucratic revolution that suddenly defined public life in a new way.

British possessions in the Carnatic in the 1780s consisted of the villages around the town of Madras, the town itself, the northern circars or territories on the Telugu coast to the north of Madras, and the agrarian area known as the Jagir. It is worth noting how this territory grew. In 1749, Muhammad Ali, a contender to the throne of Arcot, had granted Poonamallee, a part of the Jagir, to the Company.^[15] Poonamallee consisted of 330 square miles and contained 231 villages south and west of the town of Madras. Later in 1763, Muhammad Ali, who had by then achieved his position as Nawab through British armed support, gave the British the Jagir, an area consisting of more than two thousand villages and 2,284 square miles located north, south, and west of Madras.^[16]

Soon after the Jagir came into the hands of the British, a Company employee named Thomas Barnard surveyed it to indicate its total value as a tax-producing property. His survey, carried out with the help of Indian assistants, was considered at the time of its completion to be one of the finest pieces of mapping of any region in India.^[17] Without the help of Indian assistants, the entire project would have been impossible. The dialogic implications of a collaborative enterprise such as this survey are readily apparent. The outcome necessarily reflected not only Barnard’s assumptions about agrarian practices and even land tenure rights but also the very different ones possessed by his assistants, as well as those held by the inhabitants of the area surveyed.

That these views shifted becomes apparent when we see how the survey was judged in later years. The enormous dependence placed by Barnard on these assistants was later characterized by the Company’s collector of the Jagir, Lionel Place:

That Mr. Barnard should have been deceived in this [understanding of the correct distribution of shares of the harvest between the inhabitants and the state], and every other respect touching the interest of the inhabitants, can be no wonder, since unarmed with any authority, his references on the subject could only be to themselves [the villagers], who, unless there existed two opposite parties, [which was] sometimes the case, one of which could be prevailed upon to produce the authentic documents of the village, [the inhabitants] were always able to obscure the truth, from him. Even in those matters which seemed perfectly open to his enquiries he was misled.^[18]

Thus, this first survey and mapping exercise by the Company yielded what was viewed as a confusing picture, a confusion that became a part of the way in which the British interaction with others in this enterprise fitted them into the rural landscape. The bewilderment surrounding Baillie’s defeat, the description of it by Crole, and Barnard’s map give the impression of precision but in fact they all represented “confusions” and new knowledge. This new epistemic production emptied the old meanings about the British presence and naturalized the British anew in the Jagir. In the end, Barnard could not provide sufficient reliable information to enable an appraisal of the tax-producing potential of the area.^[19]

Temple Conflicts

When the British first took over direct control of the Jagir in January 1782, all but a few villages were uninhabited and their fields largely uncultivated. Without cultivation it was impossible to collect land taxes. In 1782, however, the last of the horsemen of Hyder Ali departed from the Jagir and, as the effects of the war began to fade, villagers returned gradually to the area. The confusion of the war and its aftermath also allowed many families to establish themselves in villages in more dominant positions than they had previously enjoyed.

As part of the strategy of establishing a hold on the region, the governor of Madras and the council agreed that, in addition to regulating the villages, the reestablishment and repair of religious centers would greatly contribute toward “restoring the country to its former flourishing state, by drawing together its dispersed inhabitants.”^[20] British attempts to protect the transport of temple images were at least partly a result of the feeling that temple images were critical to maintaining civil order. This attitude incorporated knowledge of a famous episode concerning an earlier attack by the Kallars on a British armed force when a Colonel Heron had taken the temple images of the Kallar from Kovilkudi in 1755.^[21] Thus, for the British the protection of temple images apparently became a way to establish political legitimacy.

Crole in the Chingleput Manual had sought to connect the battle of Pullalur with the retrieval of the images by the Kanchipuram brahmans. He wrote:

It evidently took a long time to reestablish the confidence of the natives of the Jaghire in British ascendancy after Colonel Baillie’s defeat and Sir Hector Munro’s precipitate retreat from Conjeevaram, for we find that it was not till 1799, that is, after the taking of Seringapatam had finally extinguished Hyder’s hated dynasty that it was deemed prudent to bring back the sacred images from their exile.^[22]

Refurbishing temples and reintroducing temple worship thus required the protection of a strong and ascendant British presence. Accordingly, in 1785 the governor of Madras wrote to the commander of a Company detachment in Chandragiri that the brahmans of the “little” or Varadarajaswami (Vaishnava) temple in Kanchipuram were about to bring a number of idols from the sacred center of Tirupati to Kanchipuram. The governor of Madras, considering it appropriate that the temple brahmans be protected on their journey, requested a military guard.^[23] Like Barnard’s maps and Crole’s account of the battle of Pullalur, government protection of brahmans and idols became another way in which the British were inscribed and naturalized into the environment. The use of an armed detachment served as another active attempt to “understand” and to “fit in.” It helped to produce new knowledge. In a similar way in 1785, the Jaghire Committee of the Company in Madras wrote to the British superintendent of the Jagir (an individual later called the collector) that, since the main celebration of the Vaishnava Varadarajaswami temple in Kanchipuram was about to start, he should make every attempt to assist the brahmans so that it would proceed “with the usual pomp and ceremony.”^[24]

The construction of events surrounding establishment of British control over territory thus linked military prowess, local knowledge, and protection of the cultural expressions of civil society. That each of these aspects could be shaped by local actors as well as British ones suggests the complexity of the interaction necessary to produce knowledge of these events. Nor did the simple relocation of the images conclude British involvement. Indeed, as soon as Company employees became involved in the supervision of the temples of the Jagir, they discovered that many temple disputes had to be resolved. In the process, these disputes led both local individuals and British Company employees to argue that society was totally degenerate.

One of these conflicts, reported in 1786, took place between two Hindu groups associated with two major temples in Kanchi. The first of these brahman sects, the Smarthas, was associated with the larger of the two temples in the northeast part of Periya, or Big Kanchi. This temple was dedicated to Ekambaranatha or Lord Shiva. The other sect was Vaishnava and was associated with the temple in Chinna, or Little Kanchi, dedicated to the deity Varadarajaswami or Lord Vishnu. According to the British report, this dispute involved enmity between the “long [Vaishnava] and cross-marked [Smartha] Bramins” and concerned the rights connected to taking the patron deity in procession through the streets of Kanchi. The conflict related to a number of local issues that need not concern us here. For our purposes, we may merely note that the conflict that emerged from the interaction of local competitors and the new British authorities required the British to act on the basis of new knowledge, and in new ways. The Jaghire Committee decided to permit the procession of Varadarajaswami, the Vaishnava deity. To forestall any difficulties, however, the superintendent decided to advertise this decision by a drum known in Tamil as a “tamukku” (called a “tom tom” by the British).^[25] This followed a practice established by Tamil kings to announce state policy; it was adopted by the Company to communicate “a strict injunction to the Inhabitants to pay due respect and obedience to the orders of the Government.”^[26] Thus, even in the mode of communication used, the British interpretation of events was shaped in part by presumptions about local precedents and understandings.

Village Disputes

Many other disputes arose as well in the Jagir after the war of 1780, a fact reflected by the 1787 comment of Richard Dighton, superintendent of the Jagir, that the local population was unhappy about the delay in introducing a judicial system. Furthermore, he said, “their dispositions are so prone to litigation that disputes accumulate daily, which cannot but affect the state of the country.”^[27] Moreover, “the usurpation of property before and during the late war and a variety of other causes has given rise to so many disputes” that much land remained uncultivated. In particular, he pointed to a conflict between reḍḍis and agamuḍaiyār (two peasant castes, the first Telugu, the second Tamil) and brahmans over rights to a proprietary system called mirasi in the village of Sriperumbudur west of Madras. He continued, “Contested claims of this nature prevail in many villages in the Jaghire and are from the loss or suppression of former records in almost inextricable confusion to adjust their disputes between the natives, to enquire into the various tenures.” This dispute in Sriperumbudur “originated from religious jealousy which has been increased by the Agamoodies who being people of property, are desirous of decorating the Pagoda [temple]. This gives great offense to the Brahmans of the other sect.” As a result, the disputants deserted the village and no cultivation took place.^[28] He had tried, he said, to associate local individuals known as Nāạạārs with the Company judicial decisions over land in the Jagir.^[29] However, he found that many litigants appealed the decisions of the Nattars, doubtless because these individuals had formerly been “the instruments of oppression.” Moreover, Dighton noted that the disputes over property were so intricate that the Nattars complained that the pursuit of Company tasks did not allow them to attend to their own affairs. Then, said Dighton, he tried to use the arbitration process of the caste kaccēris or caste councils. He found this also to be impracticable “owing to the intrigues and jealousies subsisting among the members of each tribe respecting the privilege of being head of a tribe.” He found it very difficult to deal with disputes concerned with accounts, partnerships, and contested bargains. This was, he said, because “the party who was conscious of being in the wrong would never willingly submit the matter to arbitration which totally…destroyed the intent of arbitration.”^[30]

Social scientists would say that it was precisely these kinds of village and temple contestations that had formed the basis of the previous system. They could identify elements of a system in which no single group could dispense with any other group. In this structure, consensus and balance were realized through conflict; everyone knew that there were others who would enter the contest.^[31] Given the kind of knowledge being constituted in the late eighteenth century, however, this conflict was perceived by many local individuals as well as Company employees to be a recent, effete development. Taken together, the conflicts were seen as emerging from a degenerate society that needed reformation.

The Company as Tax Collector in the Jagir

In 1792, as a result of the concessions granted after the third Anglo-Mysore war with Tipu, the Company acquired among other territories the Baramahal, which later became the Salem district to the southwest of Madras. In 1801, the Company took over the remaining areas of the Carnatic not already in their hands because the Nawab of Arcot had been corresponding with Tipu Sultan, a Company enemy. Captain Alexander Read, an army officer, was appointed collector of the Baramahal shortly afterward. The sheer amount of money produced by Read’s tax collections in the Baramahal convinced the Madras Board of Revenue that the same strategy could be usefully followed in other areas of the Carnatic under their control, particularly the Jagir. Indeed, the data and money provided by Read and his assistants changed the entire nature of Company expectations of the taxation possibilities of the South Indian region. At the same time, his mode of operation and self-presentation changed British notions about their purpose and place in South India. What may we discern from Read’s revenue collection that illuminates this significant transformation?

Read, for the first time, did not use “tax farmers” as intermediaries. Instead, he dealt with Company tax employees who in turn worked with villagers without the mediation of a local rent farmer. Read also represented himself to the Board of Revenue as dealing openly with the individual cultivators in a fair way. In 1793, Read wrote:

My first object is the setting on foot the new [tax] settlements, on principles perfectly understood and approved of. My next is to give my sentiments fully on the proposed mode of administering justice in those Districts [of Baramahal]. Though the last is necessarily postponed, your Board [of revenue] may rely upon it that it is of no loss or prejudice to the inhabitants, my best endeavours being employed in partially hearing and redressing such complaints as are brought before me, for all my evenings are entirely dedicated to this very necessary function, and the open street is my place of audience that the meanest may not meet with any difficulty of access.^[32]

Read’s behavior suggests that he was adopting local behavior and presenting it as British policy. He was seeking to be personal and in this way was using a local formulation of accessibility to political authority to make his own British administration more understandable and useful. In this way, Read’s behavior was being transformed by the historical requirements of the time. We cannot construe this construction as either British or local. It was something new. We will see that accessibility to all elements of the population as self-presentation becomes an important theme not only for Place but also for Puckle, the head of the Madras Board of Revenue later in the nineteenth century, to legitimize revenue enhancement. Though the Company increasingly emphasized impersonal bureaucratic inaccessibility, in fact the tendency was to invoke local understandings of accessibility. The Company authorities in Madras also relied on this kind of tax collecting to protect the weak. Later, the Board of Revenue wrote, “We have frequently had the satisfaction to acknowledge the exertions of this gentleman [Read] and the realization of so considerable a [tax] revenue as Star Pagodas 441,308-10-3 1/8 will reflect additional credit on his management.”^[33] Referring to his work in another context, C. N. White, a member of the Madras Board of Revenue, said, “Nothing could be so desirable however to this Board, as to find others emulating his [Read’s] example in endeavouring to effect similar public benefits [i.e., bring in more taxes], and to render the condition of the lower classes more comfortable.”^[34]

Read produced the most substantial amount of tax revenue in any one assessment by a single British servant of the Company up to that time in the Madras area.^[35] Therefore, in their desperate financial state, the Company authorities raised the stakes on taxable capacities of all Company territory while at the same time invoking new moral requirements for behavior among its employees. Naturally, however, the impact of Read’s income-producing strategies electrified many of those individuals whose job it was to collect taxes. The news of the substantial tax revenues produced by Read from the Baramahal circulated among other members of what then was referred to as the “revenue line” of Company employees (until then recruited entirely from civilians). Those already in the Company’s revenue line resented Read’s success and were angered by the precedence being given to personnel from the army.^[36] Thus, the transformation to an aggressively extractive authority, legitimized by a self-presentation of upright administrative values to be used in the protection of its subjects, collided with existing tensions in the bureaucratic structure. The economic constraints faced by this bureaucracy, however, tilted the contest in favor of those who could extract more revenue.

Without any question, the main burden of these new moral and economic pressures fell on the Company employees working in the Jagir. The image of the Jagir was also transformed to fill this important new role, not least because it constituted one of the first sizable pieces of territory that had come into the hands of the Company. Charles White, a member of the Madras Board of Revenue in 1793, wrote that the Jagir before the war of 1780 contained more than two thousand villages. Some of these he considered to have been substantial and populous towns. Moreover, the Jagir possessed the “finest soil and climate and contains between three and four thousand tanks [artificial reservoirs] with many means of fertilization.”^[37] In this view, then, the Jagir represented a fertile paradise. Because it was near Madras and its population could also supply the needs of the city, it had a ready market for its produce. At the same time, he showed that up to 1793 no Company employee had produced any useful information on the population or productivity of the Jagir. White noted that recent reports from the collectors of the northern and southern divisions of the Jagir were the “first documents of the kind.” However, he felt that these reports were almost useless, not least because they had not utilized the material in Thomas Barnard’s survey of harvest share distribution throughout the Jagir.^[38] Indeed, he believed that “the necessity for this determination [of harvest-share distribution] is obvious as great irregularities have subsisted by reducing the circar [government] portion of the crop in some villages below the proper standard, where the renters [tax farmers] or revenue servants wished to favor particular inhabitants and by increasing it in other instances from motives of gain.” He called for creation of a register indicating the shares due to the state and the cultivator respectively. With this record, he wanted the Company to reduce the number of tax-free concessions awarded to village officers and other important villagers. Without these measures, tax revenues produced by the Jagir since 1786 had therefore naturally been disappointing. He showed that the average tax income during that period amounted to pagodas 136,332 a year, far below what it had produced in taxes in 1763, a generation earlier. White concluded that the Jagir’s “progressive improvement since the close of the second war with Hyder Ally [the war of 1780] from when a new era in the Jaghire may be said to have commenced, has not kept pace with what might have been expected.”^[39]

Yet recent reports from the collectors of the Jagir did not contain information regarding what land was occupied by cultivation, tanks, waterways, village sites, wasteland, and the like. The collectors had accepted figures taken uncritically from the reports of subordinates. White demonstrated, however, that these figures had been largely concocted. To remedy these mistakes, White called for much higher requirements to be imposed on Company employees to gather far more specific cultural and economic information. In particular, the Company needed information relating to control of the land; Darvall, one of the collectors of the Jagir (which had divided jurisdictions then), had called attention to the interminable quarrels regarding division of the shares of the crop at harvest. Company employees had to adjudicate these quarrels as well as to increase the revenue collection, and information was deemed essential for both functions.

The British made consistent efforts to understand the “taxable value” of the Jagir in the decade before 1793 but were totally unsuccessful in this endeavor. Part of the lack of success related to their methods and assumptions: they felt, both then and later, that they could discover the crucial information by means of precise economic methods. From this perspective, the lack of success could be attributed to the resistance by cultivators and other such persons as the Pāḷayakkārs (poligars) or “watchers” with whom the tax farmers dealt, who all prevented the Company from knowing the “true” taxable capacity of the Jagir. The “true” taxable capacity was, of course, a fictional amount in any case, with the amount collected representing ongoing (and always changing) negotiations between the state, its intermediaries, and local individuals. In the face of their inability to derive reliable figures, then, employees of the Company constructed the “taxable value” out of the Mughal normative tax accounts of the area as well as their own need for more money when the Company was in desperate financial difficulties. Both of these figures were totally fictional. Nevertheless, during the time of Collector Place between 1794 and 1798, the Company government became convinced for the first time that the Jagir could yield substantial taxes.

Collaborative Activities to Produce a Past for the Subcontinent

During the 1780s and the early 1790s, British employees of the Company had made no attempt to understand village culture in the Madras region. However, with the cession of the Baramahal, Malabar, and Dindigul in 1792, everything altered. For the first time on the subcontinent, the Company expected British officers to go personally to the villages of each area over which they had tax responsibility to assume direct charge of this activity. In this process, they also had to seek to control an agrarian population in a more direct political way than through the medium of an indigenous tax farmer. Often, in the process, these officers began to look on the local population as subjects of an increasingly unified government. They also had to form some kind of evaluative understanding of local agrarian culture. British officers who approached the society of the subcontinent with some vigor and who sought to “understand” brought to Madras certain assumptions about society and economy that were percolating through educated society in Britain at that time. This perspective constituted the basis of colonial domination.

One of the most important individuals who helped shape an understanding of the Jagir in the 1790s was Lionel Place. Central to the ideas that he brought to India were free trade notions derived from Adam Smith and attitudes toward religion based, it appears, on the assumptions of David Hume. When Place assessed Tamil society, many of these ideas came into play. However, in the productive process then ensuing no direct relationship existed between ideas brought from England and those articulated by Place. Instead, Place and others like him immediately framed their concepts in ways that built on ideas already presumed or contested in the local environment. It is important that the ideas of Place and his colleagues not be characterized as “western” nor the ideas available locally “indigenous.” Both sets of assumptions were bound up so intimately with each other as to make it impossible to locate authorship. British officers and local individuals operated as part of one epistemic field.

Not least of the implications behind this caution is the fact that we must not essentialize the intellectual positions occupied by a myriad of British and local actors. Beyond individual differences of temperament, outlook, and function, we discover differences in the institutional viewpoints of the Board of Revenue, the governor in council, and others. Similarly, we do not want to essentialize the contributions made to this project even by the group of Mirasidars (who differed in their relationships to British officers), let alone by other local actors such as the Dubashes or the paṟaiyārs. Authorship is so diffused as to be unlocatable. What we can uncover, however, is that each of the participants involved occupied a different subject position in different contexts. Moreover, whatever the intention of specific contributions made to the dialogue, the result was used, changed, and manipulated by the person or group to whom it had been directed. This chapter tries to examine various events to show how this process worked.

One mental orientation that Place and other British actors brought with them rested in messianic and millennial ideas. As Place and his fellows appraised society, they perceived that society was in decay and assumed that a purer, more admirable society had existed in the distant past. More precisely, they envisioned their work as contributing to a cleansed society, one that bore many similarities with the society they perceived to have existed in the English past. Indeed, the only way they could relate to Tamil society was to deal with a constructed past Tamil society. This essentialized, unchanging Tamil past took on a meaning that was more important than all the “previous pasts” of Tamil society. Similarly, the only way by which the Tamils—and an increasing number of local individuals perceived things in this way—could relate to the British colonial state was by a consideration of their own constructed past in the heteroglot and interactive terms that were being generated by this cultural negotiation. This obtained not only for the millennial vision of Place but also for a wide variety of cultural definitions and institutions explored during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in South India. The work of Colonel Colin Mackenzie, for instance, depended on both the field work and the assumptions of his local non-European assistants, who collected thousands of oral histories and “wrote” or “translated” them into a form that was understandable, attractive, or acceptable both to the local individuals who provided these materials and to Mackenzie or other British officers of the Company. The interactive process differed only as to time and place and not as to goal. Therefore, the Tamil past and the past constructed for all of the southern part of the subcontinent assumed a political, psychic, and economic importance for members of the society that it previously had not had. This deforming and naturalizing process went on in an unseen way. Crucial definitions of the society and changes it had undergone, like those created for Tamil society, resulted from collaborative projects that involved both local actors from the area and British officials.

Let us now consider a particular set of interactions between the British, local land controllers, tenants, and the paraiyar (a caste name) or palli (a caste name) Paṇṇaiyāḷs, bonded laborers known in British historiography as “agrestic slaves.” These interactions may help to suggest some of the larger dialogic processes we have identified, and will convey the complex nature of this multiauthored construction of the past.

The Nature of the "Mirasidar Insurrection" of 1795-96

The “site” of these activities was what the local records referred to as an “insurrection.” This protest on the part of the land controllers of the Jagir was both a ritual and a political attempt by the land controllers and their Pannaiyals to resist British intervention in order to remain undisturbed in their activities. The “insurrection” began in October and November 1795 as an unwillingness by the land controllers located to the west of Fort St. George to accept Place’s new tax assessments. In November of that year, some of these land controllers, accompanied by their bonded and daily laborers from this Poonamallee area, began to desert the Jagir for the territory of the Nawab of Arcot further to the west. In the same month, a destructive cyclonic storm dumped large amounts of rain on the area and broke many tanks and artificial reservoirs. In April and May 1796 the desertion intensified, spreading to other areas, particularly to the Karanguli area southwest of Madras. During this time, Collector Place made desperate attempts to get the Mirasidars and their bonded and daily laborers to return, first by distraining their movable property (cattle, grain, and the like) and then by banishing those Mirasidars who would not come back. In an effort to dominate and control the process of interaction, Place chose as his principle mechanism of coercion the threat of taking away the hereditary right of these “insurrectionary” Mirasidars to a share of the village product and granting it to more “loyal” occupancy tenants. A critical element was the action taken by the debt-bonded and daily laborers (mostly paraiyar or untouchable) whose flight and demands for more rice from the harvest grain-heap drew the intense scrutiny of the government.

Place’s attention was caught partly because the paraiyar were, and could be, used to employ violence against Company employees and other Europeans by their mirasidar masters. Indeed, some of these paraiyar Pannaiyals and Paḍiyāḷs—laborers who worked for paḍis (“measures” of about 100 cubic inches each) of rice or payment in kind—were imprisoned by the Company because they were considered to have been ringleaders in fomenting the flight of the paraiyars from the Jagir. Between September and November, in the growing season of 1796, the Mirasidars of the Poonamallee area had surreptitiously let water out of the irrigation tanks and intentionally did not use the water so that there would be no crops to tax. Even beyond the explicit resistance of flight and noncultivation, part of the action of this “insurrection” involved the ways in which the Mirasidars and their agents helped to set Place and his superiors at odds. This strategy began when they induced Place’s own tax-gathering staff not to inform him of their manipulation of irrigation practices to ensure that crops would not be grown.

Amorality as Strategy, Amorality as Decay

As noted in the Introduction, a critical element in the cultural definition of moral decay among the villages around Madras was that deception and immorality permeated local society. Both British Company employees, particularly Place, and local individuals pointed to this behavior as a product of cultural decline. Though these perceptions suggested also that “corruption” permeated not only “low” village society but “high” politics as well, and that the one side helped perpetuate the other, they still appeared to be in desperate need of reformation. The model provided to guide this reformation was the “golden age” past.

A modern social science rendition of this problem has been formulated by F. G. Bailey in Stratagems and Spoils and other writings. Rather than seeing amoral behavior as either part of a decadent culture or reprehensible, Bailey characterizes these “deceptive” activities as ways to ideologically order the life of politics and hence to survive. He looks on these rules as pragmatic dictates that govern political activity, pointing out that though politics is serious (in that it involves people’s lives and valuable resources) it can most productively be seen as a game. Any game, he suggests, is ordered by a commonly accepted set of rules. Among these presumptions is the fact that competitors should be evenly matched so that the weaker player will have some chance of winning. Moreover, any kind of behavior that would totally eliminate the opponent—so that the game would never be played again—is forbidden.^[40] Unlike normative rules, the rules Bailey suggests operate in political contests that present prizes to win. Therefore, he argues, participants in these contests follow a strategy that allows moral rules to apply only to the contestant’s family relations or his core following. Outside that core and set of family relations, it is quite acceptable to use amoral tactics and deception to win.^[41]

As we will see in the account that follows, the “amoral tactics and deception”—that is, the game Bailey ascribes to a legitimate, productive, and pragmatic peasant strategy—was looked on by Place as simply a sign of moral decline. It seems likely that for Place social and political relations did not constitute a game. Thus, while Bailey’s general social science characterization can explain an outsider’s view of village relations both in the present and the past, it is less useful in understanding the meanings that were attributed to it in this specific historical situation by all the participants. We must see the processes by which society came to be analyzed and described as resulting from a profound change of ideas based on new historical requirements. In the interactive construction of knowledge that developed, these contemporary “amoral and corrupt” behaviors were regarded as not part of the ancient past and, therefore, as not legitimate; they could not serve as a useful model for shaping future society. We will see in this chapter and in Chapter 2 that these and other gestures were used as part of a general project to construct knowledge not only about the past of the cultural area around Madras and, in a way, for the subcontinent generally but also to some extent to construct knowledge about Britain as well. Therefore, Bailey’s ideas, though useful as a modern social scientific explanation, do not take into account this dynamic kind of dialogic activity whose main goal was to construct the past as a way to prefigure the future.

Dominant agrarian groups in late eighteenth-century South India thus were perceived by Company employees as observing these “deceptive” and “amoral” rules. When the Company took over the Jagir, the employees of the Company were confronted for many years by a sustained and effective opposition to their attempt to control the activities and gather the taxes of the 2,241 villages in the area. This behavior not only thwarted the straightforward project undertaken by Place and others but also insisted on an active role in the process being assigned to local actors.

Land and Society; Mirasidars and Dubashes

Then, as now, the area of the Jagir was dotted by more than three thousand artificial reservoirs called tanks—some quite large—built to catch rainwater. Rain in this part of the subcontinent fell mostly between September and December, and the main rice crop was harvested between January and March. In 1796, the total arable land of the Jagir was divided between that considered to be irrigable (nañcai) or wet (212,155 kanis or about 636,465 acres) and that which was considered to be unirrigable (puñcai) or dry (129,631 kanis or about 388,893 acres); only 70,718 kanis (about 212,154 acres) or 37.1 percent of the nañcai or wet paddy land was actually being cultivated at the time. Likewise, at that time only 28,806 kanis (about 89,418 acres), or 22.22 percent of the dry, unirrigable dry or puñcai land was being cultivated.^[42]

Rice cultivation demanded irrigation and intensive labor. In this area, dominant groups—those who belonged to the higher status groups in the caste system—would not touch the plough and did not do the actual cultivation themselves. Evidence from the late eighteenth century as well as more recent information gathered by anthropologists and others suggests that two of the most important groups of dominant subcastes, or jātis, in this area were brahmans—some of whom had been given grants by kings around the sacred center of Kanchipuram forty-five miles west of Madras town—and Koṇḍaikaạại vēḷḷāḷas. Called the kāṇiyāạci system in Tamil documents and parlance, in the 1790s the system of dividing the crop into shares was known as the mirāsi system. Though the mirāsi system differed from area to area in the coastal Tamil region, the basic premise was that the harvest of the fields in the village was divided into a series of shares. Persons who possessed one or a part of a share were called Mirāsidars because they had what was termed a mirās. In the Jagir, assessments of the land tax by the state were made with the Mirasidars of each village collectively (in a village settlement) for what was called the mēlvāram (the state share) of the village agrarian product. In the pre-British system, mirasi land in the Tondai country (a sociocultural region in the north of the Tamil-speaking area) seems to have largely circulated among members of the coparcenary group in each village. “Circulated” means that there was no particular piece of land associated with any particular individual or family; instead, land was redistributed either every year or every few years. A later commentator, F. W. Ellis, tried to show in 1814 that it was possible to alienate the rights to mirasi land; he succeeded in calling the mirasi system a form of real property. This seemed more convincing by the last decade of the eighteenth century, because the custom of redistributing the land operated with less force by that time.

Both brahman and Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidars enjoyed the hereditary right to a share of the produce of the land and the work of their bonded laborers or Pannaiyals. The dominant groups in this relationship were called Kāṇiyāạcikkārars or Mirasidars (a later Arabic and Urdu term taken into Tamil). According to this evidence, Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidars usually had Pannaiyals from the paraiyar caste while brahman Mirasidars had Pannaiyals who were pallis. Pallis as a caste group were located above the untouchability line in status and were later self-ascribed as vanikula kshatriyas. In fact some pallis had managed to become Mirasidars themselves.^[43] The term “Pannaiyal” applied to laborers who, as individuals, were permanently tied to the land or to specific Mirasidars by debt bondage. Mirasidars could and did use violence to force Pannaiyals to do what they wanted them to do: evidence from the earlier period makes it clear that violence was used both in agrarian and domestic slavery.^[44] As we will see, though debt bondage and the Pannaiyal system ended in the 1940s, even as late as the 1970s paraiyar laborers in Chingleput district were quite conscious of the landlords to whom they were connected. At the same time, because the labor of the Pannaiyals had become valuable, they could no longer be abused.

In this mix there was also a group of individuals called Padiyals from both the paraiyar and palli castes who were hired agricultural laborers. Padiyals were an important part of the intensive cultivation system and received wages in kind.^[45] Padiyals usually made an agreement for their labor with Mirasidars annually at the start of the cultivation and tax year, in the middle of July. Though Padiyals did not occupy a position of debt bondage much, evidence suggests that relations between Mirasidars and Padiyals were not good. Generally speaking, Pannaiyals and Padiyals were referred to by eighteenth-century Company documents as “farm laborers” or “farm servants.” By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, Pannaiyals particularly came to be referred to as “slaves.”^[46] As we will see in Chapter 4, British and Indian reformers became concerned with the condition of these Pannaiyals, whom they too called slaves. If we anticipate these discussions a bit, we may say that the “emancipation” of these Pannaiyals simply took the right to use violence against these debt-bonded laborers away from the Mirasidars and gave it to the state.

Relations between the Mirasidar patrons and the Padiyals and Pannaiyals thus constituted one of the most important vertical relationships in the Jagir; these relationships were based in the village. However, Mirasidars also had social and marriage networks that stretched to many parts of the Jagir and to Madras town. For instance, some of the Kondaikatti vellalas had been employed as government servants under the Nawab of Arcot.^[47] During the time when the Nawab leased the Jagir from the Company (1763–82) and during the early years after the Company took it over, many Kondaikatti vellalas gained privileges to cultivate land at a reduced land tax or at no tax at all.^[48] These rights were called māṉiyams and surottiriyams (Tamil “curōttiriyam”), iṉāms, and the like. One of the main conflicts between the Company and these Mirasidars concerned the resumption by the Company of these privileges, many of which the Company officials believed had been usurped illegally. Even when legally held, these tax privileges were viewed by the Company as part of a general process by which Mirasidars and Palayakkars, who had been employed to “police” or “watch” villages under the pre-British system, defrauded the Company of substantial amounts of money. Indeed, Poonamallee, one of the areas under Company control from 1749 onward, formed a base for the growth of power of many Kondaikatti vellala families. Poonamallee had been granted to the Company by the Nawab in 1749; named for a village called P;amuntamalli, located about fourteen miles from St. George in Madras, the Poonamallee territory was characterized by the presence of many Kondaikattis who had established themselves through these “usurped” privileges.

As important as the village-based vertical ties of the Mirasidars were the horizontal relationships developed between the Mirasidars and their literate kin, called Dubashes, who lived in Madras. A Dubash was a person who knew two languages; generally, the term was employed by the British in Madras to refer to a group of individuals who knew English and Tamil or Telugu.^[49] Usually Dubashes acted as agents or brokers either for individuals or as employees of the British and other European Companies. Even today, modern companies in Madras that have origins in the eighteenth century have a senior official called a Dubash, a vestige of this practice. Most of the Dubashes in late eighteenth-century Madras were Telugu brahmans or Telugu perikavārs, Tamil kaṇṇakappiḷḷais, Tamil yādhavas, or Tamil Kondaikatti vellalas.^[50] Many of these Kondaikatti vellala Dubashes were connected by kinship to Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidars in the Poonamallee and other rural areas of the Jagir. In contemporary documents, these Kondaikattis were knownas Mudalis—later lengthened to “Mudaliyār”—a term that literally meant a person of first rank. However, in the view of many of the Company officers, the term “Mudali” carried a pejorative meaning. Mudalis were despised by the British because they were considered both essential actors and great threats to individual British and Company operations. Place said that almost every domestic servant down to the lowest menial employed by a European gentleman could be included in the network of connections deployed by these Dubashes. According to him, the Mudalis were able to use their contacts and knowledge of Europeans to retain “every inhabitant [in their own villages] in complete subjection.”^[51]

Thus, it is in regard to this nexus of relationships previously established by Mirasidars that a new, interactive process of reconstituting the past was brought to bear. The dialogic process that emerged at this crucial point in time had no single prize to be won at the end of the negotiations. Indeed, the process itself was the game, and the result of the negotiations at any point shaped the next phase of interaction. As noted, it was not only the nature of local players and the past that was altered by the dialogue; the conceptualization of British society at home as well as in a colonial context was also subject to naturalization and reconstruction.

Mirasidar and Pannaiyal Survival Strategies

To understand the nature of the contest between the Company and, respectively, the rural Mirasidars and their urban Dubash connections, we must look at the way in which these relations developed in the 1780s. When the British first took over the Jagir directly in January 1782, all but a few villages were uninhabited and their fields largely uncultivated because of the invasion of Hyder Ali and his horsemen. Without cultivation, it was impossible to collect land taxes. During 1782, villagers gradually returned to their homes in the Jagir. Because the confusion and aftermath of the war allowed families to establish themselves in new, dominant positions, disputes often arose. In the village of Viravorum near Manimangalam (sixteen miles southwest of Madras town), for instance, a dispute arose between two peasant communities, the agamudaiyars and the reddis. According to the agamudaiyars, the Mirasidar rights of the reddis had been sold during the war against Hyder Ali. After the war, the agamudaiyars were unwilling to allow the reddis to rebuild their houses in the village. Richard Dighton investigated the matter, believing that the reddis should be allowed to rebuild their houses as before and to cultivate their fields. Dighton sent a Company servant to enforce the Company’s order, but this inferior servant was beaten almost to death by the agamudaiyars, who were joined by their fellows from a village twenty-five miles to the northwest. Indeed, in this period agents of the Company often had great difficulty in imposing control over the Jagir. Dighton concluded that in the future it would be necessary for a band of armed sepoys to execute the Company’s orders.^[52]

Besides the confusion brought on by the war with Hyder Ali and the opportunity seized by some peasants to improve their status, postwar circumstances benefited other villagers, such as artisans who found employment in the Company military establishments. This seems to represent a newfound freedom; before the chaos brought on by the war, artisans, it was said, had not been allowed to leave their villages. Even in the middle of the 1790s, Place found that artisans who had mirasis or hereditary rights to the product of land in villages were unwilling to return to their villages to perform needed services.^[53] This confusion contributed to the new rules for the interaction forged in this period.

For the British employees of the Company, as for both the Mirasidars and their Pannaiyals and Padiyals, the land revenue or state share of the grain was one of several valuable resources located in the rural environment. When the land tax was collected between February and June of every year (in several installments called “kists”), and after several deductions had been made for the Padiyals and Pannaiyals and other sums had been subtracted for the upkeep of the village, the grain pile was divided into the cultivator’s share (kuạivāram) and the state share (melvaram). We can discern how Bailey’s “game” came to be played by the Mirasidars and the government if we look first at an account of the way the Nawab of Arcot collected the land taxes before the British took over the Jagir.

Under the Nawab of Arcot, according to Lionel Place, the cultivator was given an agreement (“cowle,” or Tamil “kavul” from the Arabic) at the beginning of the agricultural year in August or September to assure him of getting a share of the crops. When the harvest was underway, an estimate (“dowle,” or Tamil “tavul”) was made of the state share of the grain on the ground. Prices for this grain were also fixed by the head inhabitants of a village and the revenue officer of the state called the Amildar. According to Place’s account, the head villagers received a favorable tax assessment and the cultivators, who had less land, paid proportionately more. At this point, the amildar was given a gratuity by the head villagers.

Then, both the amildar and the head villagers waited at the revenue office (Tamil “kacceri”) of the Nawab, where the estimate was examined by the Nawab’s manager and other revenue servants. The manager and the head revenue servants of the Nawab would then be influenced in their decision by promise of a present (called a darbār karccu). On the recommendation of the manager, “since the Nabob [Nawab] could not investigate it himself,” the Nawab confirmed it. The Nawab suspected collusion between the head villagers, the amildar, and his own revenue staff to depress the amount agreed on. As a result, to get closer to the “actual” revenue capacity, the Nawab would then tell his manager that in return for agreeing to the assessment he expected a handsome gift (or nazzar) in return. The Nawab’s sons also added their own demands.

Cultivators were cajoled and coerced into accepting the estimate. Otherwise, the grain stayed on the ground and losses were incurred by everybody. Because of all these demands from officials and from the Nawab, a heavy balance usually lay against the cultivator’s (i.e., the Mirasidar’s) name; this demand “absorbs what he set aside for subsistence.” The cultivator was therefore confronted by two options—either to be satisfied with the small amount he got out of his land or to desert it altogether. From this point of view, the cultivator or the Mirasidar (called a cultivator even though he did not touch the plough) was someone to exploit. This description by Place seems fairly straightforward and reliable, insofar as it describes actions taken by the players. But what did Place make of these actions, and what motivations did he attribute to the actors?

As Bailey would say, in all peasant environments only close relatives of a peasant are within a moral core. All outsiders must be manipulated to enable one to survive, and Amildars and other officers of the state fell in the “outsider” category.^[54] According to this model of behavior, Mirasidars felt no compunction about deceiving outsiders to protect themselves. From Place’s perspective, however, the cultivator may be seen as one who “devises as many deceptions on the Circar [the state] as are put in practice against himself.” A Mirasidar would combine with the village recordkeeper (Tamil “kanakappillai”) to alter the accounts. He would also hide part of the crops he had cultivated. He combined with the other agents of the state—the tarafdars and the peons—to plunder the heaps of grain on the ground.^[55] “Throughout,” said Place, “is collusion.” Here we can see that though the process seemed rational and pragmatic to the Mirasidars and other local individuals holding both high and low positions, Place looked on it as a form of moral decay because it did not conform to his idea of civil society. From Place’s interpretation, therefore, though it appeared that the entire surplus of a village had been taken up to pay the state share or melvaram, the state assumed that the cultivator had managed to set aside enough for himself and his family to live on.

According to Place, in a system such as this a cultivator or Mirasidar was forced to set up pretensions that would provide enough protection to offset the purposely exorbitant demands made by the state. A Mirasidar and his local Padiyals and Pannaiyals were also forced to conceal their wealth in a limited good environment; otherwise, this wealth would draw too much attention. “Theft and fraud therefore he was driven to resort to as his only means of existence.”^[56] It was natural, as Bailey would say, that when the Company took over the Jagir the villagers would seek to employ many of the same tactics, continuing the game simply to survive. In the face of these strategies, the effort to characterize society as “morally decayed” was important as a way by which the newly “honest” British bureaucratic moral ideas of the public sphere could be openly delineated and the future of the local society formulated.

In the 1780s, then, British employees of the Company were certainly not in any stronger position to collect the taxes from the Jagir than they had been before. This resulted from both the economic condition of the area and the ability of cultivators to resist Company pressures. In 1775, one report of the area spoke of the great vulnerability under which villagers operated. Poor people “have [so] long been used to the hand of oppression that few have an idea of such a mode of redress [to any higher court or authority].” These people were always afraid that the person called the “renter [a tax farmer] or some principal Nautwars [Nattars or heads of right subcastes, such as the Kondaikatti vellalas, controllers of nāḍus]…may not with impunity deprive them of their property.”^[57] When a local Tamil employee of the Company abused and maltreated villagers near Chingleput, about thirty miles southeast of Madras town, the Company was quite willing to dismiss him.^[58] However, when the Company itself started to demand services in a way that was increasingly unacceptable to local Tamil moral ideas, villagers had few alternatives but to employ what many British perceived as “disloyal” and “dishonest” stratagems simply to exist. In 1791, John Clerk, collector of what then constituted the northern division of the Jagir, had been asked by the military department to provide horsekeepers and grasscutters for the Company’s cavalry. Clerk dutifully “impressed several men raiyar for this service.” He found that they were unwilling to serve in the cavalry camp:

Such is their aversion to go to camp that a general insurrection among the ryots [cultivators, but Clerk here means paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals] has taken place who declare they will immediately abandon cultivation if any one of them are [sic] taken from their villages. Having experienced the consequence of a revolt among the lower class of inhabitants on a former occasion, I have every reason to believe, if coercive measures are continued the ryots [Pannaiyals and Padiyals] will totally desert the cultivation whereby the Revenue will be entirely lost.^[59]

Clerk noted that these men he had impressed for work as horsekeepers and grasscutters were confined “in their own areas” since his own armed peons were unable to oppose the “mob of parriars raiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals] assembled to prevent them from being taken away.”^[60] Thus, Pannaiyals and Padiyals, acting on the orders of their Mirasidar master (who would lose the labor of the men), sought to impose their will on the Company’s directive by hitting them where it hurt the most—by threatening to desert the land so that there would be neither crops nor taxes to collect.

Rural Relations: Mirasidars, Pannaiyals, Padiyals, Renters, and Courts

Company attempts to get at the land taxes of the Jagir could only be successful if its own lower-paid revenue employees were pulled into its project along with others possessing the influence and land power bases in the villages. The roster of these local authors of the project is large, including such figures as Nattars (caste headmen), tax farmers, and their renters. Perhaps the most important lower tax employee used by the Company was the Amildar. In addition, among the villagers themselves was a village resident whom the Company officials sought to make an employee of the state—the Nattar, head of a righthand subcaste group such as the Kondaikatti vellalas. In 1796, the Company hoped that Nattars would be useful “to assist Government in the settlement [tax assessment] and realization of the Revenue from the villages”—a feeling that continued for the next half century. At the same time, however, it noted that “this Class of people [has]…assumed so pernicious and corrupt an influence over the ryots [Mirasidars].”^[61] In the early 1780s, therefore, Nattars were considered a “necessary evil” by Company officers. They seemed indispensable because they assisted in collecting the land revenue from rural areas; before the British arrival, they were paid for their services by grants of land that carried little or no tax liability. Company officers repeatedly found that Nattars used this land—and particularly the people who worked on it—as a political base to blunt the force of the Company’s initiatives in local areas. Nattars in the Jagir were important Mirasidars who naturally sought to enhance their own local position any way they could.

Like all Mirasidars, Nattars also had Padiyals and Pannaiyals, important in this context because of the claim they exercised over a portion of the harvest. If the Nattar or Mirasidar was a Kondaikatti vellala, his Pannaiyals and Padiyals would be paraiyars. Pannaiyals and Padiyals were rewarded in two ways for their agricultural work. Even before the grain on the threshing floor was divided between the state share (melvaram) and the cultivator’s share (kutivaram), several deductions were made, including one for these paraiyar Padiyals and Pannaiyals. Known variously as tuṇạu (remnant) or kalavāsam (Tamil “kaḷavācam”), the contribution for Pannaiyals and Padiyals was claimed as customary (“māāmūl,” an Arabic term taken over into Tamil through Persian and later Urdu). Between two and three marakkāls (depending on the village) of grain for every ten kalams of grain beaten out on the threshing floor were taken; this amounted to between 1.6 and 2.6 percent of the threshed crop.^[62] In fact, the Mirasidar usually gave extra amounts to his Padiyals and Pannaiyals during the year because the amounts given on the threshing floor as kalavasam or tuntu were insufficient.^[63]

However, anything that was “customary” could be manipulated according to need. In the mid-1790s, it was noted that the word “mamul” meant “custom” unbroken by any kind of innovation but could also mean “law” or “rule.” Ultimately, it was believed that it could be looked on as “mere usage” or “prevailing habit,” and that was conceived by the British to mean “generally but not universally adopted and which gains assent only if convenient.”^[64] In other words, they realized that “past usage” or mamul (and the past in general) was a malleable commodity that could be changed to serve contemporary, historically contingent requirements. In many confrontations between Company servants and local villagers, the villagers invoked what was mamul as a way to legitimate their claims, although some Company officers discounted the validity of the term. Company land tax and other policy came to be based on what was “past usage.” This standard in the eyes of Company officials was more “likely to produce an equitable division than any general regulation formed without a possibility of embracing so many local considerations,” which in turn would greatly simplify the way in which fees were deducted.^[65] Locally powerful Mirasidars and their Pannaiyals and Padiyals recognized the susceptibility of Company officers to the claim of customary usage and manipulated the concept for their own purposes. The same goal operated in relations between the Pannaiyals and Padiyals on the one hand and the Mirasidars themselves on the other.

Other groups with local interests were those involved in tax revenue relationships. From early in the 1780s, the Company gave the Jagir out in segments to individuals called renters who contracted to farm the land tax of the area. Renters were expected to deposit a certain amount of money as security against future payments for the tax they collected. These men also were expected to provide money for short-term taccavi (Tamil “takāvi”) loans (money advances) to villagers and to spend a certain amount of money every year in repairing the tanks, reservoirs, and waterways in their area. However, renters never repaired the tanks or waterways and gave only minimal short-term loans to the cultivators. Though many of the renters in the early years appear to have been former dependents of the Company, many more had formed close connections with the Mirasidars, from whom the Company officers had much difficulty extracting the land tax. Relative to our concerns, these renters nevertheless were important to the British because they also attracted cultivators to the land—tenants or Payirkkāris—who functioned as additional authors of the land revenue-based social and political values being created. One of the Company’s goals in the 1780s was to extend the cultivation in the Jagir because of the dislocation caused by war between 1780 and 1784. Renters were therefore used to invite tenants to take over plots of land. In local terminology, these occupancy tenants were called Payirkkaris. However, Mirasidars looked on these men and their families as strangers and newcomers whose claims to a hereditary portion of the product of the soil were stoutly rebuffed because of their attempts to claim status as Mirasidars. Indeed, the antagonism between the Mirasidars and the Payirkkaris became a central aspect of rural relations in the Jagir area for the next century and a half.

Whatever the origin of Payirkkaris, Mirasidars believed that all such outsiders, and particularly agents of the state, were to be manipulated in whatever way possible. Mirasidars first wanted to protect any privileges they had acquired as a result of the confusion that occurred in many areas between 1763 and 1782. Such privileges included the grants of land to them as Nattars on a reduced-tax basis. Not only did Nattar status thus liberate them from paying the state’s portion of what was produced but it also gave them power over those who worked the lands. At the same time, Mirasidars sought to shift to Company officers the task of repairing tanks and waterways so that the land tax would not be increased by the tax farmers. In 1784, Company officials had already recommended that the tanks in the Jagir be repaired.^[66] Two important villagers in the Poonamallee area—Mangadu Oppa Mudali and Evalappa Mudali, both Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidars—used that knowledge to manipulate the Company into assuming responsibility for tank repair. They argued that they were unable to do anything themselves but also asked the Company not to demand too high a land revenue on this account.^[67] Thus, Mirasidars understood and used the vulnerabilities of the Company in negotiations regarding a task that should have been undertaken by the Mirasidars themselves (because a specific sum that was part of the village product, the ēri mērai, or tank fee, already went to them earmarked for the repair of the tank).

Mirasidars also manipulated the coercive mechanism of the state to harass their opponents, particularly in the Poonamallee area. Perhaps the most outstanding example of this was by the local Mirasidars of the Mayor’s Court in Madras town, who beat down unsuspecting victims.^[68] Because the area over which the court’s jurisdiction held sway was poorly defined, Mirasidars and their urban connections used this ambivalence to harass opponents in the Poonamallee area and to increase their hold on that area.^[69] Indeed, many individuals were able to manipulate agents of the state because they could anticipate their movements by information received through confidential contacts with the Company’s servants in the Madras bureaucracy. On one occasion, Richard Dighton, who was in charge of the Jagir in January 1786, had been told to take over the revenue collection of several areas. Collection had been previously contracted by tax farmers, who were now unable to make their payments to the Company. However, though Dighton instructed Company Tahsildars (tax collectors) to take tax authority over the areas as soon as they received his instructions from Madras, the renters had knowledge of the takeover even before Dighton himself had received word. He reported that the renter of Manimangalam, south of Poonamallee, had by some means come to know about the appointment of the Company Tahsildars. As a result, even before the Company Tahsildar arrived to take charge from the renter, the renter had already sent away a sum of pagodas 60 that he had collected just the previous day so that the Company could not repossess it.^[70]

Still another device used to undercut the authority of the Company government in a village was to submit a petition to superior authorities in Madras about a Company official or his representatives in the Jagir. For instance, on one occasion in December 1785, a senior official in Madras received a petition from the “Inhabitants of Poonamallee.” The petition, composed by Evalappa Mudali, attempted to reduce the credibility of De Souza, a wealthy man and former employee of the Company who served as renter or tax farmer of Poonamallee. Evalappa Mudali had the surottiriyam (called “shotrum” in the records) or the right to rent the pēạạai (market area) of Poonamallee at a reduced tax and submitted the petition specifically to prevent De Souza from introducing new Payirkkaris into the area. Charles Oakley, who received the petition for the board of revenue in Madras, concluded that it contained no legitimate grievance. However, he decided to give the right to rent the pettai of Poonamallee on amāni to De Souza, who could then collect the taxes directly from the shopkeepers and other taxpayers, deduct the surottiriyam rent, and pay the surplus to Evalappa Mudali.^[71] In this way, Evalappa Mudali would “receive the produce of the privilege he has usually enjoyed, without that influence or authority [over laborers and village officials] by which he has occasioned so much mischief.”^[72] All the local residents and cultivators in Poonamallee were instructed as well to deal directly with the Company’s representative in the Jagir instead of sending petitions over his head to Fort St. George in Madras. In a similar move, Evalappa Mudali had disarmed Dighton by blaming the paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals for defrauding the state, claiming that they were “taking away without measuring that part of the paddy [unhusked rice] that remains under the heap on the spot where it is beat out, a practice very prejudicial to Government since it allows fraud that is very difficult to prevent and which fraud Eevalappah Moodelly was active in pointing out.”^[73] Here, as in many other situations in this period, the Mirasidars tried to convince Company officers that the paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals had independent responsibility for activities that would undercut the power of state agents. It is clear from the evidence, however, that the paraiyars followed the orders of their Mirasidar masters in these actions.

Whatever the case, Mirasidars used the sensibilities, structures, and vulnerabilities of the Company to mislead officials and to feed its fears about its vulnerability in being deceived and defrauded by those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Though the British occupied the dominant role and sought to exploit the environment, they were subject to survival strategies that cut away at the power of the state. Moreover, in the aggregate, these activities, whether undertaken by local individuals or by British employees of the Company, helped to construct a knowledge of the Jagir that characterized local society as being in a state of great moral decay and in need of regeneration. As we will see, these mechanisms proved particularly valuable in inducing Company employees to believe that the paraiyars could engage in violence or other activities without reference to their masters. Here again, the use of violence (and therefore control) moved out of the hands of the state, as illustrated by a major disturbance that occurred in late 1785. It incorporated all these techniques that well illustrate the goals of local land-controlling interests as well as their use of Pannaiyals and Padiyals to further their aims.

The 1785 "Paraiyar Insurrection"

Richard Dighton in late 1785 had sought to do two things. First, he tried to impose the will of the Company government on the Poonamallee area by taking over the privileges of some of the Nattars, arguing that these had been “unjustly usurped from Government.” He also confirmed some existing Nattars as instruments of the Company in the area. It was customary when implementing policy for an administrator to send a crier and a drummer whose purpose it was to publicize government orders to important villages; Dighton employed criers and drummers after he had confirmed the Nattars of Poonamallee to tell all those concerned that they were to come to him with any grievance and not to the Nattars. Shortly afterward, the Nattar Mudali and other head villagers in Poonamallee, some of whose privileges Dighton had taken away, “fabricated” a grievance petition and turned to other aggressive measures to undercut Dighton.^[74]

Called an “insurrection” in the records, this agrarian disturbance consisted in leaders such as Evalappa Mudali withdrawing Pannaiyals and Padiyals from cultivation in November 1785 (the middle of the growing season) and gathering those Pannaiyals and Padiyals together. Once collected, these laborers threatened violence against Company officers. Mirasidar Evalappa Mudali had up to that time been able to control the lower Company employees (who were local individuals) in the area. Indeed, in his efforts to monopolize the vegetable oil trade, on one occasion Evalappa Mudali’s own employees had beaten some Company sepoys sent from the nearby cantonment to buy cooking oil. Another locally important Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidar, Mangadu Oppa Mudali (as his name suggests, originally from the nearby village of Mangadu), had written letters to several villagers about the proposed disturbance.^[75] These men chose the middle of the growing season to withdraw their Pannaiyals and Padiyals from cultivation, “when their whole attention is so immediately necessary,” to create the maximum effect on Company officers who feared the losses to state tax revenues.^[76] As soon as Dighton discovered these activities, he went to Poonamallee to imprison the leaders. In this he was backed by the authority of Charles Oakley, a senior official in the Company who told Dighton that “every attempt to compel Government into a compliance with just or unjust desires at the expense of the Revenue must be positively forbid and discouraged.”^[77]

When Dighton got to Poonamallee, he found the paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals gathered in one place, intent on a grievance of their own that did not appear to relate to that directly mounted by the Mirasidars. None of them, they said, would “work unless they are allowed the Parrah Callus raiyar kalavasam] as usual.” As suggested earlier, however, their masters had told these Pannaiyals and Padiyals to collect together as a way to demand that they be allowed a portion of the grain heap without any kind of measurement.^[78] The result was not so much a challenge by agricultural laborers as an attempt to establish local dominance over the Company by the Mirasidars through the threat of violence and the loss of control that the Pannaiyals and Padiyals represented. Dighton was deeply concerned. The leaders of this disturbance (including also Muttu Kumarappa Mudali and Ambattur Vira Perumal from nearby villages) had all left town. Dighton even feared for his life and the safety of his office at Chetput outside Madras. Oakley the next day requested from the governor a company of sepoys under a “prudent” officer for protection against possible attack by the paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals.^[79] Both at this time and later, then, British officers were greatly intimidated by the Mirasidar control of Pannaiyals and Padiyals. Nevertheless, the separate interests of these laborers had also played a part in the confrontation in such a way that we may recognize the latter as authors of the resulting meaning constructed about the function of the event.

By the end of this episode, the essential grounds of dispute had been clearly drawn and the respective roles to be played by the antagonists clearly laid out. Company officials sought to cut away at Mirasidar juridical power. Mirasidars sought to establish themselves as the rightful local leaders by demonstrating their juridical power through their control of their Pannaiyals and Padiyals. For their part, Payirkkaris looked on these struggles and interactions as opportunities to strengthen their own position, though the paraiyar and palli Pannaiyals and Padiyals were tied to or had agreements with given Mirasidars. These important local leaders could get the same Pannaiyals and Padiyals to also threaten the use of violence even against Company officers unless “customary” practices were followed.

It is apparent that the “rules of the game” were largely known by both the British and the local population. Still, the “game” remained intimidating to the British, even though they dominated the area politically. This resulted from the fact that in this “game” the state often exercised less control than the British would have liked. Company officers realized that they were more dependent on the Mirasidars, Padiyals, and Pannaiyals than they wanted to be. This tension formed the basis of much production of meaning in this area. All the rules, of course, resulted from interaction between previous rulers and both Mirasidars and the laborers; these rules changed almost daily because of new requirements. If we accept Bailey’s perspective, Place’s account of the techniques employed by Mirasidars and others under the Nawab of Arcot indicates that a moral complementarity existed between all the parties to the tax gathering process, whether this was “amoral” or not.

Naturally, therefore, most of the actions of the players in the “game” were largely predictable since the players had trained each other over a long period of time. Not only were the actions of the players anticipated, but each contestant had prepared himself (most of these players were men) psychically for the outcome as well. This mental preparation, however, continued to be subject to new ambivalences. For the Company, the land tax was essential for its operation, burdened as it was by the debts of war in 1780 and the diminution in income from trade. In this context, it was essential for the Mirasidars to collude to maintain the game. From their perspective, Company resources were essential to the Mirasidars to repair tanks and the channels leading to them so long as the tax demand was not increased. Finally, as in any environment in which wet irrigation is dominant, local Pannaiyals and Padiyals were essential as the source of the intensive labor associated with rice cultivation.

Company Frustrations and Resulting New Tax Schemes

The main point of contention between the Company and the Mirasidars, however, was over the division of the respective shares of the harvest for the cultivator and the state. As we have seen, Richard Dighton had great difficulty trying to collect the state share in 1785. Although he had promulgated an order that each village in the Jagir should have an account of the distribution between the state and the cultivator’s shares, it was never put into effect. The following year, Dighton sought to establish a new division of shares, but this again prompted many complaints. Besides the fact that the order did not take into account local usage, it also imposed too heavy a burden on the paraiyar Talaiyāris or village watchmen. Nor did it extend any incentive to return to arti sans who had left their villages for employment both in Madras town and the military cantonments where their skills yielded good income. Though attempts were made to rectify these alleged shortcomings, ultimately the only places where the new government standard for the division of shares was accepted were villages where it was more favorable to the Mirasidar than the local mamul or “customary” shares had been. Renters found it more advantageous to stick to the old system because doing so avoided disputes with villagers and the necessity to use coercion to enforce this new distribution scheme. Finally, in 1790 the new allocation of shares, or vāram scheme, was annulled and the previous mamul system officially reimposed.

Some Board of Revenue members protested this strongly, feeling that the complaints represented purely the arguments of “the richer inhabitants to the great detriment of the Company’s tax revenue.” Roger Darvall, collector of what was then the southern division of the Jagir, reported that the mamul system, now reimposed for share division, was deleterious both to the Company’s tax income and to the peace of the area. In 1792, a decision was made to fall back on the division of shares reported in the earliest survey of the Jagir conducted by Company officer Colonel Thomas Barnard in the 1770s (described above). With this adoption of Barnard’s survey in 1792, the Company collectors in the Jagir were told to gather information to establish a “permanent equitable standard of division.”^[80] Then, once again, this abortive effort to expand the revenue base foundered on three interrelated aspects of the changing conditions. First, even the construction of new knowledge about the Jagir came up for grabs; no consensus emerged among the British officers about the extent of benefits likely to accrue to the Company under the various share schemes. Second, the physical force and other coercive measures necessary to impose the state’s revenue demands on the area far exceeded the Company’s capacity. And third, the contestatory nature of the negotiations did not create a real winner among the British, Mirasidars, and other local interests. The no-win game continued, and the dialogue shifted to other issues and grounds.

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.

Manipulating Company Values and Institutions

Perhaps, then, the most unusual characteristic of the Mirasidars and their agents who were Company employees was that they understood and used both the structure and goals of the Company to their own advantage. They manipulated the very values of the Company to foil any attempt to impose a stiffer tax settlement on them, realizing that any person against whom a petition was written would have to deal with the charges in it. This understanding made it essential for the Mirasidars to go to Place’s superiors, the Board of Revenue. Moreover, when they looked for grievances to put forward, they couched these in terms and values articulated by the Company itself. For instance, collectors and other Company officers were expected to pay for all supplies requested in their tours through the district. Collectors were also subjected to many other informal moral constraints by the Board. A petition, if it was going to be effective against a Company officer, thus had to invoke the apparent values that the British themselves honored and contain charges that would be almost impossible to deal with. In this interaction, the Mirasidars not only helped to change what the British seemed to have meant by anticipating their response but also shaped the outcome so that those values were neither European nor local and “indigenous.”

If what came to be called the Poonamallee Petition had these things as goals, it succeeded beyond possibly even the expectations of its formulators. In it Place was criticized not only for violating many customary arrangements but for having flogged villagers to get his way. In the famous sacred Vaishnava center of Tirumalisai, the petition claimed, Place had demanded that the inhabitants provide him with food, firewood, and fodder free of charge. The petitioners also claimed that Place had forced villagers in the settlements around the large Chembrambakkam irrigation tank to use bricks and stones taken from temples to repair the embankments of the tank. He then divided the cost of repairing these embankments (rupees 4,000) among the villages who benefited from the repair. As a result, the tax on these villages was necessarily doubled to recoup the costs of repairing the tank. When villagers refused to agree to the tax rates proposed, Place (said the petitioners) told the Mirasidars to sign a document indicating the forfeiture of their mirasi rights. Perhaps the greatest grievance cited against Place was that he decided to eliminate one category of deduction that favored the Mirasidars called badarnavīsi, particularly in Tirumalisai village. He himself described these deductions as “suppressions of the produce of lands, defalcations, and excisions from the Government dues, traced by examination into the state of cultivation, and by a wanton coincidence in the several circumstances connected with it, termed…Budernavees, a compound Persian word conveying precisely the above signification.”^[87] Place included in these miscellaneous deductions what the petitioners characterized as backyards or puḻakkaḍais, where they grew their chilies, other spices, and fruit trees. Finally, the petitioners argued that tank fees (eri merais), which were usually collected as part of the taxation system, should be augmented to pay for the repair of the tanks instead of Place’s practice of repairing the tanks and then foisting a higher assessment on the village benefiting from the repair. Mirasidars should also not be forced to allow Payirkkaris to begin cultivation in a village and claim a share of the produce. Rather, the Mirasidars should be allowed to accept these Payirkkaris or tenants only if they wished to.^[88]

How problematic were these attacks on Place’s behavior? It is quite true that Place used corporal punishment such as flogging on many occasions.^[89] Place also used everything he could lay his hands on to repair the Chembrambakkam tank or reservoir.^[90] He certainly sought to intimidate Mirasidars by trying to force them to sign a document forfeiting the mirasi rights if they would not agree to his demands. More important than these specifics, however, was the fact that Place appears to have sought to impose his will in a style that was far more vigorous than any of his predecessors.^[91] This was the main reason why the petition was submitted.

And how successful was the petitioner’s strategy? When Place was confronted with the grievances, he said that he had “anticipated in great part the information thereby required” in the letter that he had already written to the Board. He accordingly requested a personal interview with the Board to clear up the grievances detailed in the petition, but this was denied.^[92] One of the reasons why the Board treated Place’s request for an interview so coolly was because Place had noted that he was forcing Mirasidars to forfeit their mirasi rights (conceived of by the Board as private property) if they did not accept his tax assessment of the village.^[93] In this instance, the Board of Revenue shared the horror felt by the Mirasidars. Consequently, Place was told that “in the present constitution of the [Company’s] service the Inhabitants can have no security unless the Collector afford an early answer when called upon for explanations to complaints of grievance appealed to the Board of Revenue.”^[94] Place, obviously irritated with the Board’s decision, wondered whether it was possible for a Collector to “stem the torrent of Interest, intrigue and opposition that they [the Dubashes and Mirasidars] are capable of letting loose unless he is upheld by the strenuous and uniform support of superior authority.” He felt that in demanding a great variety of specific information in answer to the Poonamallee Petition, “the combination of Dubashes…will have gained their principal object. They will not only have prolonged the settlement [tax assessment] but will have successfully resisted the authority of your Collector.”^[95]

Describing the "Amoral" Dubash and the "Wise" British

Government to Create a New Civil SocietyIf the Poonamallee Petition had set the collector against the Mirasidar petitioners, it had also set the Board of Revenue against Place. Moreover, when the Board denied an interview to Place, it became pitted against its own superiors, the Governor in Council. In the view of the Governor in Council, if the Company did not have at its disposal rewards and punishments, it would not have any revenue and would therefore not survive. If Place were to effect any new reform, he had to have the juridical power to grant the mirasi right to whoever would accept his tax assessment. It was, in their view, essential that Place be able to dominate those Mirasidars who were seeking to subvert the state’s new tax system.

We may see, therefore, the way in which Place characterized the “artifice and cunning of the Dubashes of Madras” as “restless and insatiable,” as just another attempt to create a series of absolute, monologic, normative, and utopian values.^[96] Dubashes had “been in the constant habit of perverting the wise and human principles of the British Government to answer their own insidious ends.” In a letter of March 1796, Place said that he felt that the Palayakkars of Ponneri should be punished for the humiliations that they had imposed on him. At the same time, he sought the assistance of the government in punishing certain individuals whom he called the “artful, designing, and culpable part of the inhabitants.” He said, for instance, “To create an interest in the pretended hardships of the inhabitants of Poonamallee, they [the Dubashes] have represented them [the hardships] of that species the most abhorrent to the lenient and just character of the British Government.”^[97] On another occasion, Place argued that the Board of Revenue, “still and with superadded reason, strengthened with their voice of approbation” the “animosity which these successful endeavours [by Place had] occasioned.” In this the Board was “aided by the insidious practices and circumventive arts of the whole Dubash Influence of Madras.”^[98]

Much of the social description that both Place and local individuals produced, therefore, was an attempt not necessarily to describe what they saw but rather to state what they wanted or needed to see in order to perform historical tasks. The “amorality” of village society, like that of the “insidious Dubashi culture,” was another social space, an intellectual niche in which both British and local commentators were able to find what they hoped to find: a decayed society without morals. In all these cases, the primary goal was not only to carry out a tax assessment of the Jagir but also to monologically essentialize utopian and normative “standards” and to typify what was chaotic and what needed transformation and renewal. Here, Place momentarily sought to impose his “standards,” to speak authoritatively and monologically. The Jagir was merely an epistemological site, an intellectual laboratory at which to produce “truth” for a future civil society.

Pannaiyal and Padiyal Protest Strategies as a Way to

Exploit British Fear of Paraiyar ViolenceNot only did the Dubashes and their rural connections blunt the reforming and rationalizing edge of the Company, but they actively participated in the construction of knowledge about both the presumedly decayed present and the more pristine past of the Jagir. At the same time, they used the linguistic and cultural ignorance and confusion of British collectors to their own advantage, working with substantial amounts of confidential information available through their dependents. This access gave them a “complete knowledge” not only of the “practical part of the business of our Government, but of the principles from whence it flowed.”^[99] That is, day-to-day activities rested in the control of individuals who did not share the goals of the British; but these same individuals understood, and could manipulate, the presumptions informing these activities. It was therefore natural that if Place sought to reduce what he called the “evils” perpetrated by the Dubashes and Mirasidars, he would logically be opposed by a “combination” of these men. These “abuses” and the “real taxable nature” of the Jagir had been effectively concealed from the “knowledge of the Government.” It was also not possible to prove Place’s assertions of the “abuses” very easily. If they could be proved, they could be identified and eliminated. After all, if an individual was to investigate all the complaints raised by the Dubashes, “there is no constitution or body, nor steadiness of mind that will be equal to the task of making such a [tax] settlement as the Company under the information acquired by the indefatigable exertions of Mr. Place have a right to expect.”^[100]

Of great interest in this interchange is the illustration of the juridical weakness of colonial governments, whether in India or elsewhere. It suggests the inability of any colonial government, though politically dominant, to be in control of the areas over which it claims sovereignty. Place’s attempt to impose a tax assessment on the Jagir represented the first major confrontation between a bureaucratizing Company and a patrimonial Mirasidar-Dubash connection. On the one hand, the Board of Revenue decided to invoke the normative rules and constructed knowledge associated with the newly emerging civil service. On the other hand, the Governor in Council believed that if the Company was to achieve its immediate goal of making a tax assessment of the Jagir, it would have to give Place the right to assume something that he could not prove. They had to believe that behind the disturbance in the Poonamallee pargana were individuals who could manipulate both the day-to-day functioning of the Company’s government and its presumptions in order to consistently subvert the state.

In their Minute condemning the denial of an interview to Place, the Governor in Council in Madras said that “the ultimate resource against the oppression of a zamindar [superior land controller] is the depopulation of his estate.” No government could engage in activities that would force cultivators to leave the land.^[101] Within two months of the Governor in Council’s deliberation, however, Place had to report that the Pannaiyals and Padiyals of several villages in the Poonamallee area were unwilling to harvest the crops. Once again, in 1796 as in 1785, they threatened to desert the villages altogether unless Place and the other subordinate tax officers of the state gave them a larger portion of the kalavasam (their portion of the grain heap at harvest time). Place was greatly concerned about the delay in harvesting the crop and sought to prevent their desertion by requesting authority to issue a proclamation penalizing those who deserted their villages.^[102] Ultimately, he issued a proclamation that was not confirmed by his superiors that required the return of the Mirasidars “on pain of otherwise forfeiting their village right [mirasi] to others who may be willing to cultivate the ground.”

Though he tried to forbid desertion through a proclamation using drummers and criers, paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals nonetheless became very strident in their demands. They demanded more than the two marakkals of unhusked rice or paddy for every ten kalams of rice, or 1.66 percent of the total, to which they had previously been entitled. They attempted to expand their shares by various techniques; for example, Place noted:

There are mamool [customary] places for beating out the grain in every village but owing to a general disregard of all the prescribed rules of Revenue management, the Pariars

raiyars] either will not be confined to them or reject the regulation that these spots should be previously cleared of grass that is purposely allowed to grow in order that the greater quantity of grain may be concealed under it.^[103]

Whenever they had done this in the past, the total deduction for kalavasam rose as high as 10 or 12 percent of the crop and caused a substantial reduction in the state’s share.

Mirasidars and their Dubash connections clearly understood how vulnerable was the Company in the Jagir. They also understood how to use British understandings and perceptions of local society to their own advantage. Among the most important aspects of this knowledge was awareness by British administrators that local Tamil society was organized by vertical lines of patronage as well as by horizontal lines of kinship. According to the Company view, local kin connections were powerful. Company employees also believed that all subcaste kin connections, whether for the Kondaikatti vellalas, the paraiyars, the pallis, or any other, were broad, extending across the entire Jagir and beyond. This was not the case. The only thing that we can say is that, though vellala spatial orientations were narrow, they appear to have been somewhat wider than those of the paraiyar, which were even more constrained.^[104] However, the British were not aware of this and assumed, for instance, that it was quite possible for a paraiyar subcaste head in Madras to issue an order to paraiyar castemates in the Poonamallee area or in Karanguli, about forty miles to the south, to gather the paraiyar to the city. Thus, although these paraiyar subcaste heads had much shallower bases of jurisdiction, communication, and power than the British knew, Mirasidars and Dubashes played on the fears and presuppositions of the British and deliberately employed techniques to intimidate them.^[105] These interactions and vulnerabilities all formed part of the mechanism for constructing “truth.”

Place quickly discovered that the paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals were being told by their Mirasidar masters to threaten desertion and violence. Initially, Place’s source was a group of paraiyars going to join other Pannaiyals and Padiyals in the Poonamallee area; they said that they had been told to “revolt by the principal paraiyas of the [Poonamallee] district named Petiah Toty, Poonamallee Cooty, and Mangaudoo Combon, and Pummel Cunnyan.”^[106] These are recognizable paraiyar names and Pammal and Mangadu are both villages in the immediate Poonamallee area. However, when Place and his assistants sought to locate these men by posting rewards for their capture, he said that he realized that they had left the area altogether. A Talaivar or head of a paraiyar subcaste group in the village of Sirukulattur, on the border of the Chembrambakkam tank in the Poonamallee area, said that “unless persuaded and allowed by their master [a Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidar] the Pariars would never have thought to assemble in the manner that they did.”^[107] There was no question but that economic and social relationships between Mirasidar and Pannaiyal and Padiyal provided the important ingredients in the “insurrection.” This was not a paraiyar rebellion per se.

In support of his contention, Place submitted several documents to the Board of Revenue. One of these was a cadjan—a letter written, as was the custom in those days, on a palm leaf or ōlai inserted in a special case—from a Kondaikatti vellala temple official in the sacred center of Tiruvallur (located fifteen miles to the northwest of Poonamallee). The cadjan, addressed to his gomasta (Tamil “kumasta” or “agent”) who managed a village for him in the Poonamallee area, said among other things:

It has been beaten [by drummers] through the whole place [by the Company] directing the inhabitants not to assist the Pariars and is meant only to prevent the Pariars from crowding together and [not] with any other view. Nevertheless the Pariars have assembled everywhere. I think in a few days his taudoo [Telugu “tāḍu”] will be entirely cut off. He will be displeased. Do not however publish this. The Company’s peons have been placed over him to press for payment. When asked what was the meaning of the reference to his tadu being cut off, the gomasta said that tadu was the Telugu word for that device tied to the neck of a bride by a bridegroom. When a woman lost her husband it was taken off. He also pointed out that “it was also used to signify the loss of employment and reputation.” It was in this sense that Place construed the letter—that everyone expected Place to be dismissed from his position because of the paraiyar disturbance.

At almost the same time, his difficult position was reflected in his inability to get the Palayakkars or “watchers” even to come to an interview at his office. Place, in his attempts to deal with these men, had made trips to Madras with his own local informants. On one of these trips, Place saw a Palayakkar from the Ponneri pargana—a subdivision of the Jagir to the north of the city—whose fees for “watching” villages Place had already confiscated. When he saw this Palayakkar named Maddikayala Teppalraj with eleven kāvali villages “to watch or police” and other income of pagodas 2,029 a year, Place said that he “commanded him to attend at my cutcheree [office] on pain of forfeiting his office, but he paid no regard to me.” Place also discovered the spot in Blacktown where a number of the Palayakkars gathered. There, again, he told these Palayakkars to come to his office, “but in the most aggravating manner they disregarded my authority and peremptorily said they would not attend.” Place concluded his comment by saying:

If an example were sought for the licentiousness and violation of order and regularity that so commonly break out among the subordinate gradation of natives of this country whenever that authority to which they owe obedience suffers any temporary diminution of power or whenever it may seem to be threatened with extinction, it is afforded in the conduct of these and other Poligars.^[108]

We may see that the ambivalent position in which Place found himself on this and many other occasions provided another productive environment in which to construct ideas about authority, including that of an “Asiatic despot.”

Of equal interest was another cadjan letter found later to have been forged. It was signed by several individuals called “Uttakartan Mastry, son of Kolukaren Mastry, Tondava Mastry, [and] Velliam Mastry to their relations or Caste people in the Carangooly [Karanguli] district.” The message ran: “On receipt of this cadjan [letter] you must repair to Madras. If you neglect doing so your punishment will be the disgrace of having dung thrown upon your faces [i.e., to be made outcasts] and your cast dishonored. Come to Vundra Mangalam and send an answer to this letter [as to] how we are to act.”

This letter was a purported call from individuals, two of whom were later identified as having been dead for at least a year, believed to be the Talaivars or paraiyar caste leaders in Madras town to their caste fellows in the Karanguli area, located forty miles southeast of Madras. As we will see later, a second letter was written not by a paraiyar but by someone connected to the upper-caste Mirasidars in the Poonamallee area. Its intention was also to frighten and intimidate the British by confronting them with a summons by supposed Talaivars of Madras town paraiyars to other paraiyars in Karanguli using the threat of outcasting and kin connections as their tools.

In this strategy, the instigators played on the reconstruction of the past in which Company officers utilized a few instances of small-scale physical attacks to demonstrate the violent nature of South Indian society, for British officers were terrified above all of the violence that they feared the paraiyars would employ to attain their ends. Only nine months before Place was appointed as collector of the Jagir, there had been a dispute over a piece of land in what is now Tondiarpet, north of the Fort St. George area of Madras town. Disputants to the land included some Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidars and some Gramani or Shanar tenants, whose traditional occupation involved collecting the sap of the toddy palm to be converted into an intoxicating drink called toddy (an occupation called “toddy tapping”). An Englishman named Moore had purchased a part of the land from these Gramani tenants. When he enclosed it, he said that three Kondaikatti vellalas “ordered the aiyar] rabble to pursue and beat me.…At last they surrounded and seized me behind my back. Then they cut me with Bamboos and bruised me unmercifully.”^[109] Similarly, in January 1795, three months after Place had been named collector of the Jagir, the same Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidars made their paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals attack some Gramani tenants at the time of the Pongal festival.^[110] This action emerged from a dispute between the Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidars and the Gramani uḷkuḍi Payirkkudis, tenants whose roots as occupants went back to the 1770s. The attack by the vellalas served to counteract the decision of Place to allow the Gramani tenants who had fixity of tenure to actually sell lands in Tondiarpet without the permission of the vellalas, who had originally leased the land to the gramanis.^[111] These and other experiences were well known to Company officials. Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidars both then and more recently have confidently used their paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals to exhibit violence in harassing other dominant castes and all outsiders.^[112]

New Conceptions of Loyalty out of Dependence on the British

The description of the facility of certain Mirasidars to manipulate British preconceptions and fears should not be taken as an indication that the British were outmaneuvered in this contest. That they could uncover information about the Mirasidars with which to combat their machinations, however, suggests other important local actors who also contributed to the project shaped by this dialogic process. As in any political situation in which the state is dependent on locally important patrons, the Company’s regime in the Jagir required allies. One such supporter, a Kondaikatti vellala Mirasidar named Varadappa Mudali from Sirukulattur on the Chembrambakkam tank near Poonamallee, wanted to cultivate Place. Varadappa Mudali wrote to Place, “We are very poor and rely on the Gentleman’s favor and protection. Some Malabars [Tamils] for the sake of their own advantage have excited the ignorant Pariars to commit disturbances, thereby bringing the whole disgrace upon the [Kondaikatti vellala] cast in the eyes of the Gentleman.” Besides providing a list of all the other Mirasidars who were behind the disturbance in the Poonamallee region, Varadappa Mudali’s paraiyar Pannaiyal named Rajan said, “As I belonged to Varadappah Moodelly [the other Mirasidars] never informed me [what they were doing].…My Mudaliar cautioned me that if I reposed confidence in the gentleman [Place] and obtained his favor we should live happily.…This is my declaration and I expect the gentleman’s favor.”^[113]

When Company officers tried to ascertain if paraiyar Talaivars or leaders had issued a call to other paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals in Karanguli, the structure of the “insurrection” became much clearer. First, some lower servants of the Company went to see a paraiyar Talaivar named Periya Tambi. He lived in the “great paraiyar cheri” at the northern end of Pedda Nayyakenpet at Madras.^[114] Called the Tottakaran Mestri, Periya Tambi was shown the letter supposed to have been written by Uttakartan, Tandava Mestri, and Velliam Mestri. Place reported that Periya Tambi said that he “found it [the letter] so clogged with compliments I was disgusted. We who gain our livelihood by cleaning gentlemen’s shoes, can we pen such a letter? No. If the Company saw it they would put fetters on our hands and feet and transport us to Bencoolen [a British “factory” or warehouse settlement on the western coast of Sumatra in Southeast Asia, known as a penal colony].”^[115] Periya Tambi was furious that the paraiyar leaders in Madras were being held responsible for the “insurrection” by upper-caste leaders. It is also possible that Periya Tambi invoked the idea of the illiterate and lowly paraiyars to take the pressure off his immediate community.^[116] He told one of the men who accompanied the subordinate Company employee who bore the letter that he should “admonish” the paraiyar of Karanguli “not to raise such disturbances in the district.”^[117] Uttakartan Mestri of Periyamedu, the third supposed author of the call to the Karanguli paraiyar, said that the letter was a complete forgery and used as proof of this the fact that two of the supposed authors (Tandava Mestri and Velliyam Mestri) had both been dead for more than a year.^[118] Thus, in the investigative process, additional information and allies emerged. The production of meaning continued.

The "Insurrection" as a Utopian Arena

In March and April 1796, as the investigations concerning the authorship of the former “paraiyar letter” were being undertaken, another major shift occurred in the relationship between Place and the Poonamallee villagers. On or about 21 March 1796, Place decided that the desertion of the villages in the Poonamallee area forced him to resort to a more dramatic expedient. “This was,” said Place in his 1799 report, “at any rate a crisis which a variety of circumstances concurred to establish, as that upon which the possibility of introducing a better system of management into the Jaghir was to depend.”^[119] Whenever he tried to impose his will on the land controllers in the local environment, the strategies of Mirasidars and their Pannaiyals and Padiyals stymied Place:

The common practice with the inhabitants on these occasions was to resist both [the state and the collector] by collecting and using their servants [paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals], traversing the country in large bodies, and putting an entire stop to the cultivation and the harvest, until such control was withdrawn, and their demands arising out of it, however unreasonable they might be, are satisfied.^[120]

“If by one strenuous effort,” he believed, “I could liberate the population of the Jaghire from the shackles of Dubash dominion, and restore it to something like its former happy state,” he felt that his efforts would have been worthwhile.^[121] Like the “amoral” villagers, these Dubashes were simply a representation of the fallen condition of contemporary local culture. At the same time, the contestation became an opportunity to recreate the society.

As a result, Place tried to use what little coercive power he had at his disposal to bring back the Mirasidars, Pannaiyals, and Padiyals of Poonamallee. Contrary to the instructions of the Board of Revenue—who had given him permission to issue a proclamation offering more generous terms to those who had deserted—Place issued one that warned them even more severely. Place’s proclamation banished a group of eight “head people” from the district, threatening to take away their grain and other movable property as well as their mirasi rights if they did not return to their villages within five days.^[122] Place contended that he had issued the proclamation because the desertion of the Mirasidars had happened so suddenly as to have precluded any “general intercourse, so as to have united them in the pursuit of an uniform object,” or to have understood the effect of their “temerity.” He felt therefore that he could coerce them by “at once exposing the utmost evil that would befall them, to awaken the minds of the inferior classes to a comparison between what they sought, and what they relinquished and thereby to detach them from the guidance of eight individuals, who had to my certain knowledge agitated and occasioned the desertion.”^[123] His main goal was to detach a segment of the local population, invoking loyalty to the Company government. He felt that his presuppositions had been correct, for the villagers immediately began to return. This enabled him to make tax settlements with more than 250 villages. These particular villages were among the poorest villages in the entire Jagir; they had suffered most from a cyclonic storm in November 1795 at almost the same time that the Poonamallee Petition was submitted. They therefore had the best reason to leave, he said, “yet they voluntarily came to my cutcheree [office], entered into engagements of rent without the smallest deviation from the principle with which I had set out, and have paid so much of their rent as to owe but an immaterial balance.”^[124] By contrast Place noted that the Mirasidars who remained away came from perhaps the most productive villages of the entire Jagir and had already benefited by “getting their tanks and watercourses put into the most compleat and substantial repair [by the Company].” He contended that “these villages are what the leading men in this desertion have marked out for themselves, and upon their own terms, into which they would compel Government by instigating the inferior ryots [paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals] to withdraw, and by threatening desolation of the lands, [if] their purpose be not attained.”^[125] Place believed that one central way the Company could create loyalty was by appointing individuals to the position of Nattar. This enabled the Company to benefit from these individuals’ ability to manipulate the village environment in favor of the Company’s interest. However, he pointed to one Appa Mudali, an important Nattar of the Poonamallee area, whose “influence was successfully used beyond the reach of the Collector and it was therefore that I strenuously solicited his dismission from the office of Nauttawars [Nattars].”^[126] In Poonamallee, of all places, where the control of the Nattars had been taken over by the Dubashes, Nattars loyal to the Company were essential.

Place believed that faithful Nattars were critically important to the operation of the Company’s tax collecting mechanism in the Jagir. A Nattar could resolve disputes, provide relief to individuals in the village when the public taxes increased, and relieve the anxieties and fears of those around them about anything that was new or “intended as an improvement.” But, he said,

If this influence is not in the hands of the Nauttawars, it will always [lie in the hands] of the most artful and designing men of the Purgunnah [territorial subdivision] and I would ask if it is not better that it should be with those who are attached to the circar, than with those who have every motive to detach themselves from it; indeed whose only benefit is derived from superceding and counteracting it.^[127]

Where Nattars did not exist, the population was under the control of individuals who had assumed “unlimited power over them in so much that without a reason being given, they received sudden instructions to fly from the authority of the Circar, till the object of their leaders whatever it may be is attained” and they “dared not disobey.”^[128]

Place cited most recent experience to show that it was quite possible to use those who were dependent on the Company as a way to maintain peace and conclude tax settlements. In Karanguli, south of Madras, for example, the headman was considered to be too attached to Place himself to be consulted when the plot to desert was put together. In the night, the headman’s dependents came to the headman to say that the “inhabitants” of the various territorial subdivisions “had received orders instantly to desert from the Jaghire” and asked whether they should do so as well. Place said that to this the headman “replied in the negative; that they could have no reason for doing so, and must remain obedient to the circar’s [i.e., Company’s] orders. They did so; every village in that magan [paganah or territorial subdivision] was rented out the next morning without the least murmur and objection and all the rent has been since paid.”^[129] As a result, he proposed giving a parwana or order that required the Nattar always to be watchful and inform himself about everything that was going on in the area. A Nattar would also be told to “conciliate the minds of the inhabitants to the circar, prevent all improper combinations…and inculcate obedience and make them understand the happiness that they enjoy under the protection and justice of the Company’s Government.” Finally, the Nattars would be informed that they themselves should always be “obedient to the circar” and carry out all the requirements of the job.^[130] The central problem with which Place and the Company were concerned was how to keep those in the countryside loyal and collect taxes in the years ahead.

Not surprisingly, Place’s position in the Company’s structure was seriously weakened as a result of this episode. He felt that, since his suggestions for solving the problem had not been taken seriously by the Board in the past, he had few options but to pursue the matter in the way he did. As a result, he simply noted in his diary that he had issued the proclamation “for the information of the Board when they think proper to pursue it.”^[131] On this occasion, when the matter was brought to their attention, both the Board of Revenue and its superiors the Governor in Council felt “constrained to rescue the people from the apprehension of a power [of banishment and confiscation] which cannot be vested in any Collector.” Place was warned that unless he reformed he would be liable to dismissal from the service.^[132] Here, Place had again assumed for himself a constructed authoritarian role of “Asiatic despot” who could outlaw people by fiat. The “insurrection” offered an appropriate opportunity to do so.

Analyzing the "Insurrection"

In September, October, and November 1796, Place felt that his own tax employees had deceived him. They had, he said, prevented him from discovering the fact that some of the same Mirasidars, living in villages around the large Chembrambakkam tank that he had repaired, had purposely not taken advantage of the early rains that year. Many of these people had also deserted their villages. In the months that followed, Place concluded tax assessments with many villages. Nevertheless, in many large areas of the Jagir such as Karanguli to the south and in both Uttiramerur and Kanchipuram to the west, a number of cultivators left their villages.^[133]

Because Place had the support of the governor of Madras, he was able by November 1796, with the consent of his superiors, the Governor in Council, to carry out his threat of taking away the mirasis of those individuals if they did not return to their villages. When he reported the results of his actions in November 1796, he said that of the ninety-six Mirasidars who had been originally deprived of their mirasi right twenty-three had been reinstated, and that a total of seventy-three Mirasidars who were unwilling to return were deprived of their hereditary mirasi rights and replaced by others who were amenable to Place’s tax demands.

Place’s account located the initial desertions in the Poonamallee area in November 1795, where twenty-four Mirasidars later lost their mirasi. Then in April and May 1796, after the growing season was over, Mirasidars and their servants left from the Salivakkam pargana, a subdivision south of Madras (where one Mirasidar lost his mirasi), Kanchi to the west of Madras (where four lost their mirasis), and Karanguli to the south of Madras (where twenty-six lost their mirasis).^[134] Although some of the original protesters in the Poonamallee Petition came from Tirumalisai village, none of the Mirasidars of that particular village lost their mirasis.^[135] Of the 122 Mirasidars who deserted, only twenty-four lost their mirasis in early November 1795, whereas ninety-eight left between 12 April and 30 May 1796 after the harvest had been taken. In addition, there was a group of individuals who abandoned their mirasi rights “voluntarily” when Place sought to make a tax assessment on the area, as well as two who gave up the mirasi a year and a half earlier.^[136] Moreover, one Mirasidar could not be found and five were deprived of their mirasi rights because the mirasi was “not justly theirs.”^[137] Finally, one Mirasidar was removed simply because he “always resides in Madras, and declaring that he could not attend to the cultivation consented that the meerassee should be transferred to these people [indicated by Place in his letter].”^[138]

It is hard to identify the subcastes to which the main body of Mirasidars who were deprived of their mirasis belonged, except that they were apparently not brahmans. Of the group of twenty-four who left the Poonamallee pargana in November 1796, only four had Tondaimandala or Kondaikatti vellala surnames, while eight of them had as a surname “Pillai,” which could refer to members of the karṇam subcaste or to yadavas or even to pallis, later to be called vanikula kshatriyas. The twelve remaining had names that were undistinguished except that they were not brahman.^[139]

Finally, on the basis of the figures of Mirasidars who deserted the Jagir, the numbers seem relatively small. According to Place’s count, only 293 Mirasidars left the Jagir before July 1796, ninety-four of whom came from eighty-three villages in the Karanguli subdivision south of Madras. Of these ninety-four individuals, thirty-four came from only five villages and an average of only one Mirasidar deserted from each of the remaining seventy-eight villages. In addition, a total of thirty-eight Mirasidars had deserted from fourteen villages in Kanchi pargana or subdivision, seventy-three from twenty-four villages in Uttiramerur subdivision, and eighty-eight Mirasidars from twenty-five villages in Kavantandalam subdivision. All of these Mirasidars were men. In addition, many of the Pannaiyals and Padiyals left as well; women were associated with this group. It is hard to estimate the numbers of Pannaiyals and Padiyals who left the Jagir in late 1795 and early 1796. However, it seems likely that about ten Pannaiyals and Padiyals and their wives deserted for every Mirasidar; this would put the total number of Pannaiyals and Padiyals who deserted at six thousand, for a total desertion from the Jagir of about sixty-two hundred people in 1795–96.

Although all the villages Place associated with the “ringleaders” of the “insurrection” cannot be identified, those that can be identified all lie in a circumscribed area five to ten miles south of the village (later a town) of Madurantakam south of Madras. Among those individuals whom Place chose to call “ringleaders” there seems to have been no “caste connection” except for three Tondaimandala vellalas, one Telugu reddi and another “Nāyak,” who was probably a palli or a Telugu balija naiḍu.

However, though the total numbers of Mirasidars were relatively small, they constituted an intimidating group to the Company. In quite serious financial straits, the Company desperately needed people to cultivate the fields of the Jagir and the tax revenues such cultivation generated. The desertion also occurred at the very point when Place and the Company were straining every nerve to attract back the population that had left the Jagir at the time of the 1780 war—a fact of which the Mirasidars were well aware.^[140]

This insurrection became part of the folklore of the Jagir (what later came to be called the Chingleput district). For many years, whether among British or local commentators, the problems and “truth” that the interaction had raised formed part of the discussions concerning the area. These ideas were inscribed in both the records and the behaviors of British officers and local Mirasidars, Payirkkaris, Padiyals, and Pannaiyals. As we will see in the chapter that follows, Place not only had ideas about local culture but also sought to offer a model of how a Tamil “king” should behave. His behavior was answered and complemented by much activity by other local individuals whose understandings of what they were doing was thereby altered. These “local” and “subaltern” voices were active in the reconstruction of the society. It is to a consideration of that dynamic that we now turn.

Notes