Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India

BHAVANI RAMAN is assistant professor of South Asian history at Princeton University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12     1  2  3  4  5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70327-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70329-9 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-70327-4 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-70329-0 (e-book)

Parts of chapters 1,3, and 4 of the present work have previously appeared in a different version as the following: "The Familial World of the Company Kacceri in Early Colonial Madras, 1780–1860," Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9, no. 2, 2008; "Tamil Munshis and Kacceri Tamil under the Company’s Document Raj in Early Nineteenth-Century Madras," in The Madras School of Orientalism, edited by Thomas Trautmann, 209–32 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009); and "Disciplining the Senses, Schooling the Mind: Early Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on Inhabiting Virtue from the Tamil Tinnai School," in Ethical Life in South Asia, edited by Anand Pandian and Daud Ali, 43–60 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). The author thanks the publishers for the permission to reprint these materials. A slightly different version of chapter 5 appeared as The Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colonial Madras, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 54, issue 02 (April 2012): 229–50. Copyright © 2012 Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raman, Bhavani

Document Raj : writing and scribes in early colonial south India / Bhavani Raman.

      pages ; cm. — (South Asia across the disciplines)

ISBN 978-0-226-70327-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-70329-9 (e-book) — ISBN 0-226-70327-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 0-226-70329-0 (e-book) 1. Scribes—India—Tamil Nadu—History—19th century. 2. Tamil language—Writing—History—19th century. 3. Documentation—India—Tamil Nadu—History—19th century. 4. Public administration—India—Tamil Nadu—History—19th century. 5. Accounting—India—Tamil Nadu—History—19th century. 6. Bureaucracy—India—Tamil Nadu—History—19th century. 7. East India Company—Records and correspondence—History—19th century. I. Title. II. Series: South Asia across the disciplines.

DS485.M28R317 2012

954′.82031—dc23

2012011879

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Document Raj

Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India

BHAVANI RAMAN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

South Asia Across the Disciplines

A series edited by Muzaffar Alam, Sheldon Pollock, and Gauri Viswanathan

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press.

Also in the series:

THE POWERFUL EPHEMERAL: EVERYDAY HEALING IN AN AMBIGUOUSLY ISLAMIC PLACE by Carla Bellamy (California)

EXTREME POETRY: THE SOUTH ASIAN MOVEMENT OF SIMULTANEOUS NARRATION by Yigal Bronner (Columbia)

CONJUGATIONS: MARRIAGE AND FORM IN NEW BOLLYWOOD CINEMA by Sangita Gopal (Chicago)

SECULARIZING ISLAMISTS?: JAMA’AT-E-ISLAMI AND JAMA’AT-UD-DA’WA IN URBAN PAKISTAN by Humeira Iqtidar (Chicago)

THE SOCIAL SPACE OF LANGUAGE: VERNACULAR CULTURE IN BRITISH COLONIAL PUNJAB by Farina Mir (California)

UNIFYING HINDUISM: PHILOSOPHY AND IDENTITY IN INDIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY by Andrew J. Nicholson (Columbia)

UNFINISHED GESTURES: DEVADASIS, MEMORY, AND MODERNITY IN SOUTH INDIA by Davesh Soneji (Chicago)

ISLAM TRANSLATED: LITERATURE, CONVERSION, AND THE ARABIC COSMOPOLIS OF SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA by Ronit Ricci (Chicago)

South Asia Across the Disciplines is a series devoted to publishing first books across a wide range of South Asian studies, including art, history, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences. Series authors all share the goal of opening up new archives and suggesting new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal.

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Note on Transliteration and Conventions

Introduction

PART I. Scribal Practice

CHAPTER 1. Cutcherry Scribes

CHAPTER 2. Scribal Skills

PART II. Writing and Pedagogy

CHAPTER 3. Cutcherry Tamil

CHAPTER 4. Schools and Writing

PART III. Document Raj

CHAPTER 5. Duplicity and Evidence

CHAPTER 6. Addressing the Raj

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

Preface

Paperwork in contemporary India, as elsewhere, is a ubiquitous fact of everyday life that appears to resist history. Indian red tape, more often than not, is associated with long stretches of time in crowded government offices and waiting for an official signature, which must often be bought with the services of a middleman. Indeed, India’s dissatisfaction with the trade in paper that defines its bureaucracy has now become a national passion of sorts. There are calls for stricter laws to hold bureaucrats more responsible to those they serve. Demands for greater transparency are heard from a range of political perspectives.

Transparency and accountability, however, are not new demands, and in themselves, they do not represent a particularly sufficient critique of bureaucratic power. Such demands, in fact, have a long history of triggering bureaucratic expansion when they have operated in isolation from the critique of the policing and evidentiary practices that make up bureaucratic order. Postcolonial India’s tryst with bureau rule has been an engagement with an administrative system first established for the efficient transfer of resources from the colony to those wielding imperial control. The forefather of today’s multinationals, the British East India Company, installed these structures when it came under parliamentary oversight in the late eighteenth century. Elite appropriation of these structures of resource transfer after independence ensured a devastating administrative continuity in two registers: everyday encounters with the state characterized by petty corruption, and the capacity of a few to accumulate resources in the production of a state-driven market economy. Corruption has not diminished with the deregulation of the market in recent times.

This book is an effort to understand how colonial rule fashioned the bureaucracy, in part, as a techno-fantasy in the subcontinent. It pays particular attention to how new dispositions to writing and paperwork emerged in the early nineteenth century by examining a range of practices consolidated by colonial bureaucratic order, such as the signature and the exercise of discretion, pedagogy conducive to clerical employment, and the expanded power of expertise. The government of writing was introduced to check the abuse of power and facilitate the spread of the market under colonial rule. In the process, official intervention to modify conduct and install new expectations of writing generated a textual habitus and an orientation to knowledge that rewrote the normative relationship between written recordkeeping and memory, and written and spoken declarations. Clerical employment formed the grounds of the colonial middle class and its caste affiliations. Middle-class Indian piety came to accrue from the gains of clerical office, while the office itself fundamentally shaped the new notion of productive work and the virtues of gainful employment in line with a market economy. These developments have shaped the field of social struggle in the last two centuries. The insidious articulation of corruption with this clerical modernity demands attention to the ways in which a modern bureaucratic order installed through writing shaped orientations to caste, pedagogy, dissent, and policing. The narrow history of administrative reforms has usually characterized the history of the bureaucracy in India. Developments in the early nineteenth century across a number of domains, however, remain crucial to understanding this bureaucratic modernity. Document Raj tells this story in the Tamil region of southern India.

This book could not have been written but for the generosity of several individuals and institutions. Professors K. N. Panikkar, Majid Siddiqui, Neeladari Bhattacharya, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya at the Center for Historical Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, were inspiring teachers. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, I was privileged to be supervised by an extraordinarily supportive dissertation committee, Professors Sumathi Ramaswamy, Thomas Trautmann, Frederick Cooper, and Kathryn Babayan. Many of the ideas of the book are the fruit of innumerable conversations with Sumathi and Tom, and I remain indebted to their insights. I am grateful to Professor S. Karunakaran at the University of Michigan and Dr. Pu. Subramanian at the Institute for Asian Studies (Chennai) for sharing their knowledge of Tamil linguistics and literature.

The primary research for this book was conducted in several archival institutions and libraries. In India, I would like to thank the staff and librarians of the Tamil Nadu State Archives (Chennai), especially Mr. Sivakumar, Mr. Ravi, Mr. Kannan, Mr. Suresh, Mr. Neelavannan, Mr. Krishnan, Mr. M. Namasivayam, and Dr. M. Sundaraj; the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library (Chennai), especially Dr. Soundarapandian; and the United Theological College Library (Bangalore). In the United Kingdom, I would like to thank the staff and librarians of the British Library’s Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection; the School of Oriental and African Studies (London); and the Library of the University of Birmingham. At the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mary Rader and Susan Goh; and at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, Elizabeth Bennett and Gary Haussmann provided crucial bibliographic assistance and went out of their way to trace uncatalogued printed materials. The Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the University of Michigan’s Graduate School and the Institute of Humanities, and Princeton’s University Committee of Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences provided funds for archival research and writing. I am grateful to the Department of History at Princeton for giving me generous periods of leave to finish the book and to the University of Toronto’s South Asia Program for institutional affiliation and library facilities while I was on sabbatical.

In Chennai, Professor V. Arasu, V. Geetha, and the late Professor K. Sivathamby inspired many new questions about Tamil history, politics, and memory. M. Kannan at the French Institute at Pondicherry, and Pulavar Kannaiyan, Mailam, South Arcot, shared many insights on textuality and history. Julia Adams, Muzaffar Alam, Daud Ali, Darshan Ambalavanar, Shahid Amin, Barnard Bate, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sharad Chari, Prachi Deshpande, Geoff Eley, Sumit Guha, Dirk Hartog, William Jordan, Malavika Kasturi, Rama Mantena, Lisa Mitchell, Hannah Weiss Mueller, Anand Pandian, Prasannan Parathsarthi, Gyan Prakash, Radhika Singha, Philip Stern, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and A. R. Venkatachalapathy read portions or all of the manuscript, made key suggestions, and pointed to references that helped develop its ideas. I am grateful to Rosalind O’ Hanlon, Anand Pandian, Daud Ali, and Philip Stern for inviting me to present my work at workshops they organized on scribes, ethical life, education, and the East India Company respectively. T. David Brent and Priya Nelson at the University of Chicago Press warmly supported the publication of the book, and two anonymous reviewers provided valuable insights for refining its arguments. Lisa Nichols, Kristina Kyser, B. Nagalakshmi, and Lisa Wehrle have, at different stages of rewriting, provided greatly appreciated copyediting assistance.

This book could not have been written without friends. Senthil Babu’s questions, his love for beer, and the many pillion-ride discussions about books, kanakku, and futures fueled the ideas in this book. Kaushik Bhaumik, Ruchi Chaturvedi, Prachi Deshpande, V. Geetha, Chandan Gowda, Olivera Jokić, Emil Kerenji, Kamal Lodaya, Teena Purohit, Aruna Rathinam, Swati Shresth, Deborah Sutton, Samira Sheikh, and Lee Schlesinger have been a source of warmth and affection. At Princeton, I could not have asked for better companions than Arudra Burra, Vera Candiani, Mariana Candido, Janet Chen, Joshua Guild, Judy Laffan, Michael Laffan, Gyan Prakash, and Max Weiss. My students who took my graduate seminar pushed me with their questions as I worked on the manuscript. Girish Daswani, Naisargi Dave, Sudharshan Durayappah, Kajri Jain, Malavika Kasturi, William Nelson, Alejandro Paz, Srilata Raman, and Natalie Rothman made my short stays in Toronto feel more permanent.

My parents, Mohan and Uma Raman, have supported this project in too many ways to acknowledge. Along with Madhav, Vivek, Geetha, and Shankar, their care and their love for books have meant the world to me. I cannot imagine my efforts to research and write about the past without Aparna Balachandran. My best friend and worst critic, her journeys and insights have shaped my own. Finally, but not the least, I remain indebted to Francis Cody, whose work inspires me and whose gentle love brings me infinite joy. His constant presence has made this book possible.

Note on Transliteration and Conventions

All Tamil/Persian terms in transliteration appear in italics and without diacritics in the first instance—e.g., "kanakkuppillai, munshi, or tahsildar" but with possessives, munshi’s. I have indicated the correct transliteration in the Madras Lexicon style for Tamil and Library of Congress for Persian/Urdu in parentheses with italics the first time the word is used. Subsequent iterations are in Roman script without diacritics. Some terms for writing practices and text genres appear with diacritics and in italics in the first instance and then in italics. Conventional spellings are used for proper names for example, Mahalingam rather than Makalinkam. Book titles in Tamil appear in italics with diacritics.

For the sake of readability, proper names, caste and religious names, and place names appear in uppercase in plain text—e.g., Vellalar or Tanjavur. English official titles and functional titles are not capitalized except when they become part of a person’s name—e.g., collector, but Collector Harris. Official departments of Company administration are capitalized—e.g., Board of Revenue. Depending on context, Madras denotes the city of Madras (now Chennai) or Madras Presidency, the territorial administrative region directly ruled by the English East India Company in the early nineteenth century in South India. In footnote references to Company documents from the Tamil Nadu State Archives, Madras, I have referenced the location of the collection as Chennai.

References to archival sources from Company collections appear in a form for ready reference by series, date, volume, number, page, and location. Private papers and missionary sources appear in the convention used by the catalogues of the collection. I have used abbreviations for archival series and for journal names.

Introduction

The early 1850s saw an acrimonious metropolitan debate over the fate of the British East India Company. As on previous occasions, debate had erupted over the renewal of the Royal Charter that allowed the Company to rule over its Indian territories. This time, however, the usual dissensions about Company corruption and despotism were dominated by arguments about paperwork and political rule. Karl Marx, writing in the New York Herald Tribune on the issue, observed that for the first time the British Parliament had raised the irregular question about India: Who among us is the actual governing power over that foreign people of 156 millions of souls?¹ Marx observed that the real governors of India were not those vested with political authority—that is to say, the British Parliament or the Court of Directors of the Company—but those who were the Company’s clerks in Leadenhall, the creatures of the desk and the creatures of favour. When the Company’s factories grew into an empire and commodities were replaced by shiploads of correspondence, the Leadenhall clerks had continued on in their system. The directors and the board became their dependants, "transforming the Indian Government into one immense writing machine."² No wonder, he marveled, that there exists no government by which so much is written and so little done.³ A few years after Marx wrote this newspaper piece, parliamentary oversight gave way to direct rule. Following the Revolt of 1857, the Crown took over the Company’s Indian territories.⁴ A wave of administrative reform quickly followed, but the Company’s most durable legacy remained its bureaucratic forms: its revenue offices or the cutcherry (Anglo-Indian: office of administration) and the courtroom, the adalat (adālat). The Company’s bureau rule was the linchpin of empire.

This book is about how the British East India Company assembled its administrative offices or its lettered city in the Tamil-speaking hinterlands of its South Indian colony, Madras Presidency.⁵ I call this lettered city of writing and protocols document raj. Writing, files, scribes, and clerks are not the mere technological bases of the modern state and its rule of law. As this book shows, the very protocols of law that underwrote the modern state are constituted in the micropractices of writing.

The media theorist Cornelia Vismann describes the relationship between law and writing well when she observes that files and law determine each other, but the self-founding mythological fiction of Western law derives from its claim to turn files from visible signs of power into the underbelly of administration. From their moment of banishment into offices, files execute and administer, while law transcends and becomes abstract. Files then serve law and become, eventually, objects of regulation, accessible only through law and by law from archives where they accumulate.⁶ Vismann traces this founding story about the relationship between law and the file to a Roman imperial exemplar. This book is about its historical constitution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in early colonial India.

From the late eighteenth century, the Company instituted a government of writing under parliamentary pressure to perpetuate the mastery of the Indian subcontinent for the metropole’s finance and manufacturing empires. From the 1830s, the Company lost its monopoly over the India trade and thereafter administered its territories in trust for the British government. By the 1850s, at the moment of its dismantling, the Company’s bureaucracy had not only expanded in size, but its European civil servants had come to provide a template for Victorian notions of bureaucracy and Englishness, especially the idea that bureaucratic work was a moral vocation, suffused with neutrality, honor, and integrity.⁷ To study the Company’s civil rule is thus to study a set of practices and orientations to written accountability that shaped the framework of public administration in the British Empire. This book studies the political, linguistic, and pedagogic connotations of written accountability by attending to its colonial career.

The Company’s bureaucratic state coincided with a time when the conceptual term bureaucracy acquired currency as a powerful organizational form of office holding, expertise, corporate management, and rule-based government. Continuous writing in these years became the idealized solution to the problem of managing trust and reliability across distance. The idea that writing could ensure political accountability and limit the abuse of power by making actions transparent and legible has since fueled the moral steam engines of the bureaucratic state. Such an orientation to writing might be termed papereality, or the exclusive reliance on official written documents to represent the world.⁸ Papereality subsumes reason under the technical procedure of standardized control. It is, in part, an empirical description of bureaucratic logic and in part, a reflection of the bureaucracy as it exists in its own view.⁹ Papereality makes invisible the artifice of writing. The self-evidence with which writing is associated with legibility and storage, it seems to me, warrants scrutiny.

My endeavor draws on recent studies of paper and signature that have shown how writing offers new strategies of subversion and new ways of understanding the articulation of law in the same moment that it is normatively associated with procedure.¹⁰ Files are variables that control the formalization and differentiation of the law.¹¹ Far from fixing, codifying, and stabilizing or reconciling the contradictions of rule, acts of filing, listing, and registering generate domains for all manner of transactions at the margins of the documentary state.¹² Attention to such infelicitous documentary practice that is derived from writing’s iterable qualities has shown that the illegibility of written documents endemic in bureaucratic states instantiates a peculiar paradox. When the state, Veena Das argues, institutes forms of governance through technologies of writing, it simultaneously institutes the possibility of forgery, imitation, and the mimetic performances of its power.¹³ For Das, the realm of illegibility or the gap between the rule and its performance in the margins of the everyday reveals how the state is reincarnated in the life of communities by simultaneously manifesting itself as the bearer of rules and as a spectral presence rendered visible in documents.¹⁴ Drawing on these insights, I explore how the cutcherry’s micro-practices of writing reordered the production of juridical truth and interlocked the rule of paper with a subtle but devastating discretionary authority. I have not attempted to emulate the detailed concern with the interpretative latitude that accompanies archival taxonomies and the disregard and anxiety that animate paperwork. These concerns have preoccupied those scholars whose work has preceded my foray into the colonial archive and its documents.¹⁵ The story of the Company’s lettered city that follows is also not about how colonial officers abstracted legal categories from everyday administration to constitute state mandated space, though these are crucial ideas.¹⁶ Instead, I focus on issues such as the hierarchies and protocols of knowledge, linguistic transactions, and problems of attestation. These issues adumbrate the textual habitus produced by the force of colonial rule.¹⁷ In this book, I consider how writing is integral to changing relations of production and not just an inanimate means of representing changes happening in other domains.¹⁸ The world I sketch is the world of the subordinate clerk, and through it, the subterranean spaces of documentary transactions that surrounded the cutcherry. And so to the colony, Madras Presidency, and a story composed in Tamil about a clerical encounter.

The Cutcherry’s Lettered City

In 1859, a year after the Crown regained control of India, a Tamil munshi (teacher) named P. Singarabalaventhiram Pillai composed a language manual for Europeans learning the language of colonial command. The manual, among other things, included stories in Tamil for reading practice. In one story, Ponnambalam, a Tirunelveli cultivator, responded to his friend’s inquiries by recounting his recent troubles with local government officials in the cutcherry:

When I went on business to give a petition (arici taricimā)¹⁹ in Tenkasi, there I saw wealthy men lounging like a herd of cattle and dubashes (tupāṣi, official translators and information brokers) who had arrived on palanquins. As I was telling them all about my troubles, all the injustices occurring in our village, a writer (oru laiṭṭaraiyā)²⁰ took pity on me and asked me what the situation was now.

My lord [I replied], for about 10 measures (caṅkili) of land, my aged father mortgaged his ancestral wealth to pay for a lease deed (paṭṭā) and, in his impoverished state, ate only rice gruel. He suffered even more losses, but didn’t speak back to the Government. At such a time, the village accountant (kirāma kaṇakkuppiḷḷai) and his assistant came from the subdistrict officer’s establishment to collect tax (kist); they harassed him further by revaluating the land and issued a new lease deed. Unable to pay, now he was completely ruined and humiliated. Seeing the blind (kaṇteriyāta), illiterate (paṭippilātap paṭṭikkāṭu)²¹ poor threatened, taxed, and driven off the land like this, I couldn’t stand it. I went to that building across the bridge (pālattukkaṭuta vaḻavilirukira tarcimārai kaṇṭu) and said, All of you responsible for this cruelty are disgraceful! The creep village accountant narrowed his eyes and told his assistant to capture me. I shouted, Let’s see you touch me! No chance! But the bastard grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and took me to the tahsildar and told him false stories against me. That stupid ass of a tahsildar screamed at me, Don’t talk to government officials like that! Then he beat me up and threw me out. I was not going to take this lying down, so I went to another official and complained, This is your fault and your duty to protect me. He said, "You are speaking to the district officer (sheristadar)." Wearing a new white cloth (vēṣṭi), he wrote a detailed petition (arici taricimā) and told me to come to the collector’s office. I am sick of beating my breast trying to get out of this useless mess. I should leave all this and run away to Madras (paṭṭiṉam) or to some foreign country (cīmai), where I can haul loads like a coolie and drink myself into oblivion.²²

Ponnambalam’s diminishing ability to find justice and to have his story deemed credible is expressed in the word he uses for the office building, tarcimārai, which literally means a room for submission or a place to deposit. It is a quintessential cutcherry Tamil word, a language variety associated with the colonial office and made up of Persian, Hindustani, Tamil, Telugu, and English loan words. For Ponnambalam to enter the cutcherry was to enter a distinct spatial and discursive form by submitting a petition. Hierarchy and a self-contained appearance preserved the lettered city’s mystery. It had impenetrable protocols of conduct, filled with upper-caste clerks, modes of interaction, and ways of speech—that was, above all, saturated with writing. In Ponnambalam’s tale, law appears as the threat of imprisonment precisely at the moment of a documentary transaction. It offers a new point of entry into old questions about colonial modernity associated with the figure of the Indian clerk.

FIGURE 1. Anon., Prisoner before a court (ca. 1850). Gouache mica, Trichinopoly style. © British Library Board, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections, Add.Or.2453.

Framing Paper Rule

The story of the colonial clerk or babu is intimately braided with the historical problem of how a small group of Europeans established everyday control over a vast colony with the assistance of native subordinates. It is thus that the collaborating babu, the infamously complicit Indian clerk, serves as an iconic metonym for a split modern subjectivity birthed by colonial ledgers, the English language, and European-style schools. The complex terrain of this split clerical modernity has invited innumerable genealogies. The most interesting was proposed by Sumit Sarkar who has shown how new temporalities and modes of ambiguously gendered self-fashioning were triggered by burgeoning desk drudgery.²³ Along with European ideas, the petty life of salaried employment provided the frame for the social reform and self-improvement that was the distinguishing mark of the colonial middle classes in the long nineteenth century. More recently, the ethical preoccupations of early modern scribes of Persianate and Maratha polities, called munshis, have attracted the attention of scholars interested in writing new intellectual histories of the subcontinent.²⁴ The research for this book has taken a different direction. Clerical modernity invites us to look back, as we will, to the years before the institution of the colonial office. This book however, is not a study of the longue durée origins of middling groups that identifies their employment in the colonial office as a sign of historical continuity between the precolonial and the colonial. It is, rather, a delineation of a textual habitus produced by the interrelation of scribal power and bureaucratic discretion under early colonial rule.²⁵ This scribal habitus fashioned in the early nineteenth century, embodied in gesture, in writing materials, and in instruments of torture, reveals a complex terrain of modern temporal power for our consideration. The publicists of anti-Brahman social movements in South and West India, in Madras and Bombay Presidencies, were among the earliest to reveal the operation of clerical power between brute force and due process in ways that summoned up centuries of epistemic and ritual hegemony within the framework of British rule in figures like the cutcherry Brahman.²⁶ It is this understanding of the scribal habitus that informs my analysis of the Company’s government by writing.

Attending to the scribal habitus suggests several points of departure from the debates on the collaborative role of native intermediaries. These debates, triggered by the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, ranged widely from the role of native assistants in producing the taxonomies of modern colonialism to the colonial genealogies of the culture-concept. At their core, they have turned around whether nominally subordinate agents substantively ran the colonial show or whether colonial interpellation meant the violent imposition of cultural difference as the very frame of governance and modernity. The former position taken by Christopher Bayly in Empire and Information depicts the early colonial state form as ill-informed but paper obsessed and beset by information panics.²⁷ A seam of scholarship, following the work of Bernard Cohn, has countered Bayly’s vision of official anxiety by underscoring how the investigative modalities of colonial rule enabled the targeting of populations along lines of racial and ethnic difference for all manner of differentiated projects that we associate with colonial governance.²⁸ Several studies have since argued that the anthropological imperative of liberalism in its colonial career produced, in full measure, the iron cage of cultural alterity, even if knowledge was produced with the aid of native assistants.²⁹

The debates about the collaborative role of colonial intermediaries were motored by the critique of the epistemological underpinnings of the historical and anthropological study of non-European regions.³⁰ The discussion, in other words, coincided with a call to think the metropole and the colony together.³¹ More recently, however, a new historiographic turn has proceeded to reappropriate the colonial intermediary. A resurgent interest in information brokerage has placed the intermediary at the center of value production in the making of scientific knowledge and empire.³² Such a view presents European scientific knowledge as exchange-driven and ecumenical by erasing the shadow of violence and inserting in its place an eager exploration of the stimulation of learning and knowledge offered by global interconnections.³³ This is not the place to consider how the present dilemmas of globalization and market-driven knowledge produce entire historiographic efforts to retain the narrative of discovery through the trope of intercultural collaboration. But it is important to underscore that this new interconnected historical narrative uses the collaborating intermediary to assert the embodied competence and capricious transmission through which science and commerce proceed, often at the cost of critiquing the modern relationship of expertise and power. So this book is, in part, an effort to engage the colonial knowledge debates through a consideration of scribal expertise.

Many of the scribes described in this book were men, generally upper caste and educated, whose competence with languages and numbers, and whose capacity to extract obedience, was invaluable