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.