Notables and Pressure-Group Politics

A final civic identity potentially open to the city's notability was as representatives of public opinion. The idiom of pressure-group politics offered to local leaders a means of making their concerns and the concerns of their followings felt in imperial circles. While they usually lacked formal schooling in English, the notables quickly acquired an ability to couch their arguments for justice in a form meaningful to the district and provincial officers. But the elite of Surat engaged in public meetings and public associations only warily, always trying to avoid a confrontational posture that might lead them to be cast as dangerous and seditious men. Thus, even as the magnates opposed certain colonial policies, they struggled to maintain a posture of deference and humility.

An example of the delicacy with which the idiom of public politics was balanced against the need to maintain ties of dependency upon government officials comes from a movement against the license tax, which had been imposed on all local businesses in 1878. For local merchants, this tax was an especially objectionable measure because it required them to supply detailed information about their firms' operations, thus potentially violating the secrecy upon which their reputations were based. After the provincial government sanctioned the measure, there was a quick response from the business community. The Nagarsheth and the Mahajan Sheth—men recognized as the chief headmen of the Hindu-Jains—issued a notice calling for a public meeting to draft a petition to protest the measure. The two sheth s insisted that provincial authorities had erred in levying the tax without consulting the people and that the measure would impose a great strain on the "poor" traders of the city at a time of great inflation. In effect they translated the community's concerns with abru into the terms of extraparliamentary justice, calling upon British assumptions that there should be no taxation without representation and that the merchants' poverty should militate against an increase in their payments. At the public meeting, the leading merchants decided that the city's shopkeepers should close their stores in protest. Key figures among the Parsis and Bohras lent their support to the resolution.

When the collector asked many of these same figures to attempt to induce the business community to reopen its shops, however, they stated their agreement with this request and stated that the shops

would be opened shortly. Nonetheless, the shops did not reopen. The struggle soon took a violent turn. A riot broke out in outlying neighborhoods, in which European officers and several Indian policemen were attacked. Uncertain of their best course, the leading merchants continued to take an ambivalent position. To use the words of the district magistrate, they "either held aloof, or made professions of assistance but did nothing and urgently pressed that the enactment in question might be allowed to remain a dead letter pending a reference to Government." The great sheth s clearly were reluctant to cut themselves off from their community by supporting government measures wholeheartedly, but they were also hesitant to sacrifice their ties with the government by defiantly acting as advocates of the people. They made use of the idiom of public politics for a brief period but refrained from pushing this idiom as far as it might go. Gradually they withdrew their backing from the movement, and the effort collapsed.^[82]

Involvement of the notables in organizations that criticized government policy on a regular basis was limited. The formation of voluntary associations claiming to represent the people was largely the work of English-educated professionals, not the local magnates. In 1896 Frederick Lely reported that the notability's participation in the Indian National Congress was negligible. Leading Muslims were as "staunch to the cause of order as if they were Englishmen," he claimed, and "all the Hindus of weight, without, so far as I know, any exception, resolutely hold aloof from political agitation."^[83] The absence of the natural leaders in local voluntary associations allowed British officials to dismiss these institutions as weak and nonrepresentative. Discussing a petition of the Praja Hit Vardhak Sabha (Society for the Advancement of the People's Welfare), the assistant collector remarked that the organization "does not seem to rank among its members any very influential persons."^[84] Notable reluctance to associate with public associations weakened as these organizations gained stature during the first decade of the twentieth century, but their participation remained confined to associations that had won a certain respectability in imperial circles. After 1906, the Surat District Association, a local branch of the Indian National Congress, included among its membership a number of Hindu and Jain sheth s such as Naginchand Jhaverchand and Ishwardas Jagjivandas Store. Even so, these merchants remained in the background, providing financial support but rarely becoming conspicuous in any public agitation.

A form of a collective assembly called a public meeting did become an aspect of notable political activity during the second half of the nineteenth century. But most of these meetings were not gatherings of irate citizens against their government; rather they were solemn rituals

closely controlled by their elite organizers to avoid the potential for disloyal expression. Often the purpose of the meeting was to convey congratulations or grief at some event of imperial significance or to express mild dissatisfaction with some specific policy. The head of the Modi family, as head of the Parsis; the Nawab of Surat or the head of the Edrus family, as representative of the Muslims; and the Nagarsheth or the Mahajan Sheth, as leaders of the Hindu-Jains, called meetings by affixing their signatures to a printed announcement. When Nawab Mir Muzaffar Hussein Khan was so presumptuous as to call a meeting on his own in 1893, Hindus and Parsis complained that he had insulted their communities by violating customary practice.^[85] For the most part, Surat's magnates drew on the language of constitutional justice to a limited extent and in a manner compatible with their desire to maintain stable links with their rulers and their statuses as natural leaders. The notables did little to generate a public autonomous of the state and willing to offer regular criticisms of colonial policy.

The language of public politics, however, was not the only alien idiom with which pressure could be placed upon the rulers; notables also launched claims to political justice within colonial discourse, appealing to the promises of the Raj that it would work to preserve the traditional customs of the Indians. Often they directly invoked the principles of Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1858, which had guaranteed that the British would "refrain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of our subjects" and had confirmed that "due regard" would be paid "to the ancient rights, usages, and customs of India."^[86] Invoking these guarantees served to defend elite concerns about not putting deferential relationships with the overlords at risk. In 1891, for instance, a meeting of the Hindu Mahajan contested the passage of the Age of Consent Bill by the Imperial Legislative Council by insisting that the government uphold its own ideals of religious tolerance. This bill clearly had produced strong feelings among the city's merchants. Some suggested that a doctor's examination might be needed to determine whether a girl was old enough to be married, thus endangering family honor. The mahajan "humbly" urged the viceroy to reconsider the measure, claiming that the bill violated religious sentiments and ancient customs protected by Victoria's proclamation. After acknowledging the "blessings" that had been bestowed on a "weak" people by their beneficent government, the petitioners spelled out the harm to the community traditions that would result if the measure remained law, though they also argued that the people, not the government, were the rightful arbiter of what religious customs they would follow.^[87] Three years later leaders of the Parsi Panchayat invoked similar claims to justice when they called upon the government to extend flood protective works to

include an agiyari (Parsi temple) at the edge of the city. If flood protection were not provided, they complained, "no earthly compensation would avail to restore the wounded feelings of the Parsi community. . .. Such desecration of an old standing place of worship is calculated to hurt seriously the religious feelings of not only the Parsis of Surat but of all Indians in general."^[88] In both cases the notables hoped to induce government to reconsider a position by defining the issue as one of religion and "custom." In each instance, a local leader questioned a government policy, but he couched these criticisms within a deferential conception of ruler-subject relations. Indeed, by suggesting that the policy violated avowed British values, he effectively confirmed imperial principle.

Members of the Mughal gentry likewise began to assert claims to special government attention as leaders of a religious community during this same period. The Muslim leadership went further than notables in other communities by organizing pressure groups such as the Anjuman-e-Islam and the Mohamedan Union to represent its concerns. While claiming to speak for the Muslims of the city as a whole, these two organizations were quite narrow in their composition. The affairs of the Anjuman-e-Islam were dominated totally by a few gentry families and by a Muslim sheth who had made a fortune in Mauritius, Haji Ibrahim Turava. The head of the Edrus family enjoyed the position of president of the Anjuman hereditarily, the head of the Bakza family the secretaryship. The Mohamedan Union, organized mainly to promote education for Muslims, had an identical membership, though the district collector served as its president.^[89] Members made little attempt to draw in the larger Muslim population of the city. A critic with the Gujarat Mitra once snidely referred to the Anjuman as a "few officebearing aristocrats who care to know very little about what takes place outside the four walls of the palaces in which they dwell," and suggested that one of their gatherings "was, in fact, a drawing-room meeting . . . consisting of the President, a couple of secretaries, and a few friends who had been invited to smoke a hookah for the evening."^[90] Though these comments no doubt reflected personal resentment of the political influence of the Anjuman's leaders, they also contained some element of truth. Muslim associational politics had not extended beyond the handful of Surti families who claimed descent from the old rulers of India. When there were no pressing issues affecting this gentry's status, the Muslim organizations fell into extended periods of inactivity.

The gentry employed the Anjuman as a forum for sending deputations to government and for drawing up occasional addresses and petitions. Though submissive in tone, their memorials developed distinc-

tively Muslim claims to imperial favor. An address given in 1890 to Lord Harris, governor of Bombay, assured the dignitary that "we stand second to none in our loyalty and devotion to the British crown." It made a case for the "backwardness" of the city's Muslims, suggesting that some of the old nobility were now "on the verge of ruin" and that the Muslims' state was "deplorable and pitiful". It pleaded for British support for Muslim education and for more Muslim nominations to the municipal and provincial councils. Clearly the petitioners framed their own claims to justice in part through reference to the Britishers' self-perception as guardians of the weak and impoverished communities.^[91]

All these appeals, like the merchant petitions to the East India Company a century earlier, were both deferential and demanding. Sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, each set of petitioners acknowledged their subordination and dependence as a legitimate state of affairs, but each insisted that the Raj, by virtue of the "magnanimous" principles that entitled it to rule over the subcontinent, had special obligations to its subjects it could not fail to honor. In each case as well, appeals for justice went hand in hand with the process of defining self. Through attempts to defend their concerns by invoking religious principle, notable petitioners reinforced their images as natural leaders. They insisted that their concerns expressed the interests of a whole religious community and that they were the only authoritative spokespersons for that community. Such attempts to gain the ear of high-level administrators contributed to the consolidation of their identities as "representative men" whom the overlords could not afford to ignore.