Introduction
The humble petition has enjoyed wide currency since the seventeenth century when commoners in many empires began to address letters of grievance to superiors. In more recent research on petitioning in the United States, Peru, England, Russia, India, and China, the petition serves as evidence of self-formed collectives which laid the foundation for modern associative lifeFootnote 1 Two interrelated themes appear in this literature. First, that the petition was a claim upon government by collectives and, second, that petitions, although filtered by the language of the law and the hands of scribes, disclose a horizontal imagination necessary for the modern demos, representative democracy, and even the nation.Footnote 2
In Madras presidency, petitions frequently appeared during the East India Company's rule inspired by all manner of new associative life and technologies such as the printing press.Footnote 3 But the early colonial petition challenges the abiding idea of the petition as foundational to liberal representative democracy. Although by no means a new practice, writing petitions became an essential mode of political address in colonial India even as hearing and governing petitions would become central to the art of colonial rule. As petitions turned into objects of governance, this multi-vocal text became an enduring site for self-fashioning by colonial subjects. In this sense, the Madras petitions explored in this article disclose a trajectory of the appeal that is different from its conventional place in the social theory of political communication. Among other things, various meanings of law and justice cohered around the colonial petition. Petitions partake of shared conventions such as a stylized and stable notarial language, but nonetheless they register changes in ethical commitments that align with, but also exceed, the letter of the law. What follows is neither about the content of petitions nor does it outline a South Asian culture of petitioning. This article explores, rather, how the early colonial petition served as a vehicle for the idea of law as equity that was multifaceted and layered.Footnote 4
The appeal in equity proliferated in the British empire along with special equity courts that evoked notions of fairness and justice as attributes of sovereign mercy. A paternalist colonial government mobilized these meanings to invite appeals, but also sought to use petitions to solicit and individuate consenting subjects. But threaded along with these hierarchical notions of equity and the quest for consent were other tones. There was a tone of redress or compensation evocative of corporate shareholding rather than the idioms of liberal political representation. Petitions in colonial India also provided the means to reconsider and rewrite pasts, through which means writers reconceptualized their relationship to their addressees. Thus early colonial petitioning brings to the foreground two aspects of the petition that reworked and exceeded the idioms of law and are worthy of wider social theoretical engagement: its genealogies in the institutional history of the early modern corporation sustained by law as equity, and the recursive and heteroglossic nature of the very language of appeal that enabled this text-form to be an enduring site for fashioning the decolonizing self. But first I must unpack the social theory that limits petitioning to the history of liberal democracy.
Social theory of political communication and petitions
It used to be that historians would contrast popular mobilization with dull appellate procedure derived from nineteenth-century written constitutions. Histories of the Indian national movement, to give only one quick example, routinely contrasted popular mobilization of the early twentieth century, led by nationalists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mohandas Gandhi, against the lawyerly petitioning of their genteel nineteenth-century predecessors. The lettered appeal was a supplication, a type of liberal penmanship that deferred to colonial law and attracted little attention from those who saw the radical potential of the unlettered in autonomous forms of communicative action. In the early volumes of Subaltern Studies, peasants rebelled, burned records, voted with their feet, or took part in everyday acts of resistance. They appeared in front of the law almost exclusively as subjects of judicial investigation rather than as appellants.Footnote 5
At precisely the moment when historians of post-colonial India sought to map a history of popular politics autonomous from constitutionalism and, indeed, middle-class nationalism in South Asia, historical sociologists, disenchanted with revolutionary violence and largely working on European material, took up the petition. To them petitions provided a new archive for the communicative origins of democratic culture. Petitioning threaded together constitutions and the street, and hence social contract and the right to assembly, upon which representative democracy was founded. To the historical sociologists of democracy, the emergence of associative life indicated the acceptance of state intrusion and markets, and the need to act on a national scale to influence the state.Footnote 6
Historical sociologists shared the new left's preoccupation with the failure of revolutions,Footnote 7 but the most influential among them also rearticulated an older argument that constitutional reform in England was a response to popular petitions addressed to parliament.Footnote 8 Thus Charles Tilly, drawing on Peter Fraser, argues that in contexts like eighteenth-century England, where commoners had little access to the sovereign, the petition was the most accessible way to articulate a grievance against state centralization and was effectively redeployed by social movements.Footnote 9 In the end, the shift in historical sociology from revolutions to grievance collectives and constitutionalism owed more to Tocqueville than Marx. In this vein, David Zaret's study on England argues that petitioning prepared the ground for the emergence of the public sphere and was an essential aspect, along with print, of a (democratic) communicative apparatus associated with intensified commerce.Footnote 10 Political theorists too dusted off the petition, marshalling evidence that seventeenth-century sovereigns like Charles I took excessive petitioning to be akin to tumultuous rebellion and that petitions probably influenced the anti-absolutist Locke to argue that parliament and the law emanated from the sovereignty of the people rather than kings.Footnote 11
It is possible that the intensification of petitioning and the communication revolution in our own times triggered this new approach to petitioning. Since the 1970s the widening ambit of appeals has been hard to overlook in many regions of the world. Formal and informal appeals range from online petition websites to grievance collectives mobilized by groups who find themselves excluded by representative politics—Partha Chatterjee describes the latter as the politics of the governed.Footnote 12 At the same time, the ubiquity of petitioning and its long history outside Western Europe has also provoked new questions. Could the explosion of writ petitions and public interest litigation in India and China represent something more than a mimesis of representative politics theorized by historical sociologists of Western Europe? Could it be that petitions were, in fact, particularly potent forms of writing for those excluded from the world of representative democracy?
Studies of petitions suggest that there is no simple fit between petitioning and representative democracy. Anuj Bhuwania argues for instance that public interest litigation, a type of special appeal that proliferated in post-Emergency India, was a manifestation of a crisis in representative institutions and redirected popular claims on the state through the courts.Footnote 13 Such views resonate with the arguments of scholars like David Gilmartin who suggests that the court rather than the assembly served as a model for a public in modern India.Footnote 14 He argues that popular (voting) sovereignty was tied to the ethos of disinterest and appeal forged by imperial law.Footnote 15 Similarly Ho-fung Hung maintains that contemporary protests in China associated with jingkong (appealing to the capital) evoke older protest cycles in Qing China. Peaceful protests followed state and market penetration but did not coincide with the spread of a social contract.Footnote 16 Indeed, Chinese protests were imbued with neo-Confucian orthodoxy and filial loyalty.Footnote 17 These views contradict Zaret's assertion that the intensification of commerce and the rise of representative democracy are correlated. There was also no fundamental historical shift from collective violence to collective assembly, as Tilly and other historical sociologists have argued. Protest forms in China were cyclical: petitions ebbed and flowed alongside more violent dissent against the state.Footnote 18
Hung attributes the filial tone of ‘Chinese style’ protest to the sovereignty that emerged under the Qing in which petitioners appealed to the imperial government in order to resist or negotiate with local government officials. In this way, the persistence of older styles of Chinese protest indicate the layered sovereignty of the state unacknowledged by the contemporary nation-state which dates back to China's imperial past.
While Gilmartin and Hung unearth new understandings of popular protest and imperial law, the many meanings of law and justice at play in petitions remain unspecified in their work. Because petitions straddle the literary and the legal, they carry with them polyvalent meanings of law. But rather than assume that these texts anticipate popular sovereignty or social contract, we should probe what makes petitions efficacious. The petition is more than a mere representation of the world. It is a quintessentially hierarchical form of address which, on the one hand, constrains what can be enunciated, but, on the other, forms a potent site in which to redraw terms of address. As we will see, the early colonial petition generated a new source of temporal authority, namely, a colonial government, by drawing on older languages and conventions. I would emphasize, however, that the temporal dimension of petitioning language brings into view not a simple ‘continuity’ with either an English or even a ‘pre-colonial’ past but with the iterability—its repetition—of writing and language. Thinking of writing petitions as iterative acts is to acknowledge the alteration and modification of that which is repeated and to open up the possibility of new contexts, new meanings, and self-making.Footnote 19
Petitions and reimagining politics
In Hind Swaraj, Mohandas Gandhi diagnosed law as a malady of modernity and a tool of colonial domination. Interestingly, he articulated his idea of self-rule and truth-force through conducting petitions. An inveterate petitioner, Gandhi observed that the great Indian social reformer Justice M. G. Ranade was insightful when he said that petitions were a means of educating people: ‘They give the latter an idea of their condition, and warn the rulers’, he wrote: that is, petitions are a form of political education. They give new meaning to daily life and made it actionable. In this sense, Gandhi sought to seize and remake the relationality in this deeply hierarchical mode of address. ‘A petition from an equal is a sign of courtesy; a petition from a slave is a symbol of his slavery. A petition backed by force is a petition from an equal and when he transmits his demand in the form of a petition, it testifies to his nobility.’Footnote 20 To make life actionable, the petition, Gandhi argued, had to be backed by force, in the sense that petitioners would withdraw their consent to be ruled in the name of a higher justice if their demands were not accepted. This Gandhi called ‘love-force’ or satyagraha. Gandhi thus reworked the petition as a deferential text that held an especial significance in colonial constitutional liberalism into a text that could be appropriated by a generative politics of anti-colonial dissent defined as a withdrawal of consent. In so doing, Gandhi brought into focus not only the petition as an artefact of law, but its efficacy as a type of relational address.Footnote 21 While popular cultures of appeal routinely addressed sovereigns both divine and temporal, Gandhi experimented with law to explore this other potential.Footnote 22
Gandhi was by no means unique in seizing upon the petition. From the late nineteenth century, notable Dalit intellectuals, activists, and writers in India mastered the petition to publicly outline the horrors of Untouchability and caste oppression in Hindu society. These petitions were a way to document the present and craft different pasts to make a new self that was distinct from a caste body. The counter histories articulated by these petitions mobilized traditions of social memory against caste and, indeed, memories of older petitions. Thus Iyothee Thass, writing in English and Tamil, and Dr Palpu, writing in Malayalam, among others, were not only prolific petition writers but they also reimagined literary writing and history.Footnote 23
A resonant example of the efficacy of petitioning is available in the writings of W. E. B. Dubois, the writer and scholar who helped established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. In 1946, Dubois urged the NAACP to send a petition to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights about the condition of African Americans. Offering to oversee its composition, Dubois said that the petition should be comprehensive, between 100 and 200 pages long; it should begin with a concise statement of grievances followed by a legal explanation of what action the Commission could undertake in terms of its Charter; each grievance should be carefully and factually documented and substantiated with historical examples; and the whole should be accompanied by a bibliography and an index.Footnote 24 A document of this sort was necessary, Dubois argued, because ‘other groups of people, the Indians of South Africa, the Jews of Palestine, the Indonesians and others are making similar petitions. I have on my desk a letter from Dr Ambedkar of the Untouchables [sic] of India, in which he intimates they may make an appeal. It would be, I am sure, an omission not easily to be explained if the NAACP did not make a petition and statement of this sort.’Footnote 25
Dubois was perfectly aware of the limited utility of lawyerly appeals to international forums but chose nonetheless to rework the form of the hierarchical appeal as a report and statement that would stand as testimony to the modern republic's historic marginalization of African Americans. When he was informed that the Human Rights Commission could not accept petitions under its Charter, he chose to redirect the NAACP petition to the United Nations General Assembly. Ultimately the United States blocked the petition, but what is interesting is that Dubois retained the sense of the efficacy of the petition as the principle communicative means by which the protest of African Americans could be connected to the waves of decolonization under way and enter the pages of world history.
To think that petitioning compelled these important interventions simply because liberal constitutionalism had made petitioning absolutely ubiquitous would be to take a limited view of their actions. Gandhi and Dubois called up a much wider understanding of address within which they placed the petition. For instance, the practice of forceful petitioning, which Gandhi glossed as ‘love-force’, resonates remarkably with many petitions submitted to the East India Company in Madras in the course of the eighteenth century by labourers, artisans, and merchants who routinely threatened to withdraw their labour or desert town if their demands were not met. Sometimes leading merchants would pay clients to leave the city.Footnote 26 The threat of mass withdrawal struck at the heart of a colonial corporation seeking to expand its settlement and attract subjects. The tone of address used by these petitions was not that of representation or social contract but instead of a transaction that resonated broadly in the eighteenth century in South India, derived from the idea of labour and hierarchical reciprocity. In this sense, the petition was a form of action rather than an act that sought political representation in a legislative assembly favoured by liberalism. For example, in 1805 the magistrate of Ganjam received a letter from a petty raja, Chandramani Deo, through his scribe/agent. The letter complained about his mistreatment—apparently, he was debarred from the sight of European officials. Following various offers of renegotiation, the raja ended his message by threatening that he would renounce the world: ‘if the Company will not show me favor, I shall turn like a sunnyasi [sic, ascetic] and go away where I can’.Footnote 27 Some years later, the Madras government received a petition forwarded by a Collector from a scribe who was refusing to eat and was writing letters to correspondents all over the district until his petition was forwarded.Footnote 28 These older forms of the petition suggest that the withdrawal of consent did not emanate from the social contract but articulated a kind of reciprocal redress tinged with renunciation. The act of grievance was more than a complaint, it called up a greater jurisdiction against the authority of the temporal sovereign. These undertones were certainly available and used by Gandhi in his explorations of power at the limit of colonial law. But to what end did Gandhi seek to direct such ideas?
Gandhi and Dubois probed the petition's potential at a historical moment when assemblies were proscribed and the appeal was the only means by which individuated consent was solicited and cultivated by the colonial authority. We might do well to relate Gandhi's ideas of the petition as a decolonizing technique to make a new self with a sense of a collective decolonization, the latter deemed impossible by colonial government. Equally, petitioning, I should emphasize, was not just undertaken by those seeking liberation from European colonization. Dalit petitioning was prolific precisely because the imagination of public assembly and occupying of public space, which liberalism accepted in theory, offered a sharp rupture from conventions of caste-based public life. Petition writing by Dr Palpu, notes Udaya Kumar, expressed a selfhood that sought to revoice and reimagine the obligations of the addressee.Footnote 29
The language of civil address
The English East India Company actively sought petitioners in Madras as a way to affirm its claim that it was a legitimate sovereign and a means by which higher levels of officialdom could hear complaints about its local agents and employees. But the nurturing of petitioning for the purposes of legitimacy and surveillance was also accompanied by the desire to restyle petitioning as a written mode of lawful, civil speech that could articulate grievance within the frame of consent.
As in other Company territories in the Indian subcontinent, the Madras government had no problem in attracting petitioners, but it found that their excessive tone undermined the tone of respectable rule. Officials described their offices (cutcherries) as raucous bazaars filled with crowds of eager and unruly petitioners. A satirical piece on the cutcherry set in Ratnagiri, Bombay presidency, observed that offices were crowded with supplicants, loiterers, and rogues, and set with tables like the common tables of mercantile clerks from which orders were delivered on magisterial and revenue affairs, and in these spaces ‘all is public, no one can be prevented from petitioning’.Footnote 30
The eagerness to petition and complain was also glossed in official correspondence as somehow excessive and useless. Officials found that people assembled quickly and arrived en masse to complain when they went out to conduct revenue settlement in the hinterlands of Madras. A senior official advised a new Collector that the lower classes were of a ‘litigious disposition’ and, given a chance, they were ‘apt to complain about most things and in useless contention’.Footnote 31 The litigiousness attributed to petitioners was not that of a love for legal jousting but a sort of excessive conduct that was almost lawless.
The language of petitions preoccupied officials. To many Company men, petitioning language, disparagingly referred to as ‘Babu-English’, was fleshly, ornate, and excessive rather than civil and sincere. It exceeded the bounds of civil behaviour and resisted the administrative hierarchy that heard and administered a sincere grievance. They thought petitions mocked the principles of equity. By the late nineteenth century, such observations on uncivil and unruly petitions were commonplace in journalistic writings. The lower-class Indian was described as someone who would quickly avail himself of the bazaar scribe and compose a moving appeal to a superior and, observed one such author, ‘as often [as] not the petition furnishes material for the merriment in the family circle of its recipient’.Footnote 32
More than illustrating cultural incommensurability between those who instantiated the ethos of contract against cultures of hierarchy, the Company's reformist gaze is better read as mobilizing cultural difference through language ideology. Rather than cultural mistranslation elaborated by, say, writers like Bernard Cohn,Footnote 33 it is Webb Keane's insight that anthropological difference was innate to Protestant language ideologies that is apposite here.Footnote 34 Keane observed that Protestants saw in infelicitous speech signs of the fetish that they attributed to paganism and Catholicism; in turn, they privileged speech as a mode of self-transformation. Keane notes that Protestant missionaries thought of language in very materialist terms; they articulated ideas of inauthenticity and insincerity as material qualities expressed in terms of the fleshly or ornate and associated these with non-Protestant speech. Fleshly language expressed a lack of interiority and true human agentive action. The expectation of civil address elaborated by liberals like John Stuart Mill, which the colonial petitioner invariably failed to meet, drew deeply on the Protestant ideology of felicitous speech and the sense that language was the means through which self-transformation could be undertaken.
Difference was mobilized in the official discussions of petitions to seek a specific form of consent to rule. As good Protestants, Company officials felt it was necessary and possible to bring about self-transformation of political subjectivity through the petition and create a proper consenting subject. But this consenting subject, while able to articulate opinions and limit the excesses of abuse if schooled in the language of civil discourse, was unlike the subject who could form a civil society and participate in self-governance. As Homi Bhabha observes, the notion of civility elaborated under colonialism was sly; it did not stem from the direct consent of the colonized to Lockean property or their assent to Hobbesian law but from a pressing and indirect imperial demand for a form of public-spirited discussion: aural, communal, and reasonable—which was deemed absent.Footnote 35 The solicitation of ‘Indian opinion’ certainly created a vibrant world of newsprint, tracts, and petitions over the course of the nineteenth century.Footnote 36 But Bhabha's observations, when considered along with the Protestant underpinnings of sincerity that animated official attitudes, suggest this civil address was cultivated outside the norms of popular will or social contract.Footnote 37 It was directed from and towards a paternalist power, distinct from royal sovereignty and the demos.
In the subcontinent's kingly courts, the practice of petitioning directed the economy of the (common) gaze to the king's body. Under the norms of kingship, commoners viewed sovereigns as semi-divine presences through practices of darshan (viewing by a devotee) during which texts were sung as praise and supplication. Mughal emperors like Jalaludin Akbar and Jahangir, drawing on earlier Persian practices of the Delhi sultans, expected their petitioners to submit bodily and performatively to seek favour by dissolving the self into the emperor's body.Footnote 38 The Mughal painter too elaborated this form of self-submission in a visual economy that directed the gaze of the viewer through the petitioner to the emperor himself.Footnote 39 These Persianate practices were well known in the early modern courts of the Deccan and southern India. Grants engraved on copper (paṭṭayam) that were bestowed to headmen and chieftains by Nayaka kings were venerated and displayed, along with other objects of office such as a carpet (kampaḷam), a spittoon, a vase for sprinkling water, and a pair of sandals.Footnote 40 Many of these grants were enjoyed by corporate bodies of caste-men and carefully preserved by headman and chiefly lineages. By the end of seventeenth century, these practices had already registered important changes. Petitioning took on the impress of the growing autonomy of both intermediate bodies and localities away from Mughal centres, as outlined by Farhat Hasan.Footnote 41 This subtle shift in meaning is indicated in Srinivasakavi's eighteenth-century Sanskrit poem composed in Pondicherry, an enclave port of the French East India Company in South India, about the Dubashi broker and translator Ananda Ranga Pillai. The poem Ānandaraṅga Vijayacampuḥ describes a Mughal royal order (farmān) arriving in a silver palanquin in French Pondicherry in a Persianate style: fanned with flywhisks, received with ritual salutes (salāms) and by a convivial gathering in which betel leaf and perfumes were served.Footnote 42 Although the idea of petitioning the king directly and receiving a mark of favour was a part of everyday conduct, increasingly, rather than the display of the royal body, it was the document itself and its ceremonial reception that indexed sovereign presence, not unlike the reception of the khutba and khilat that had extended the caliphate and Dar al Islam centuries earlier to the sultanates of Asia and Africa.Footnote 43 All along the Coromandel, inhabitants invariably appealed to councils, even as they petitioned the highest authority. These practices gave prominence to writing and receiving documents across jurisdictions before the establishment of Company courts.Footnote 44 The Company's reformist gaze soon targeted these forms of exchange as it sought to establish equity along the lines of administrative power.
The reformist gaze of the Madras government is nicely illustrated by an incident that caused a minor flutter in official circles. In 1813 the Board discovered, to their consternation, that a group of respectable inhabitants from Madras had presented a petition directly to the governor-general of India Lord Minto, the Earl of Moira, and that the tone of this petition violated the expected tenor of politeness. A furious governor ordered the superintendent of police to send for the petitioners and ‘point out to them the extreme impropriety of their conduct in having availed themselves of the accidental presence of the Governor General’.Footnote 45 The superintendent was urged to impress on them that the government alone was competent to redress their grievance and, while the governor-in-council would consider ‘with indulgence’ complaints founded in fact and duly submitted, he would never fail to be displeased by insolently framed petitions like the one before him.Footnote 46
The Madras governor's authority derived its legitimacy from procedure (uniform regulations) and, as a head, he was empowered to consider a proper complaint with ‘indulgence’. What was different about the Company's ideology was that the petitioner was not expected to approach the sovereign, but to sincerely address a delegated official who headed a committee and who could hear these remonstrations with indulgence or mercy. This was a specific corporate-bureaucratic institutional form for hearing complaints. The appeal in early colonial India brokered the relationship between the early modern corporation and colonial rule.
Equity and the colonial petition
As a corporation, the East India Company derived its jurisdiction over India by a Royal Charter, initially from the Crown and then increasingly from the Crown-in-Parliament. Marx would write wryly in the mid-nineteenth century that this delegated power would raise the question of who exactly ruled India—the people of Britain or the Crown? But a key facet of the corporation form was that the delegation of authority—through the idea of the Company as a legal person—created a form of self-governance headed by a committee and led by an executive head. Alongside the Charter, the power to hear appeals delegated sovereign authority to corporations.Footnote 47
As a form of delegated authority, the appeal carried with it the meaning of law as equity in the Company's jurisdiction. In courts of equity the appeal derived from ecclesiastical law by which a higher tribunal could rehear grievances and ‘re-decide’ law. Equity courts formulated a more flexible understanding of justice derived from righteousness and conscience tempered by mercy rather than by reason.Footnote 48 It was through this idea of the appeal in equity that imperial jurisdictions were elaborated outside the common law jurisdictions and spread by delegation in Company regions.Footnote 49 The promise of equity held out by the re-examination of particulars enabled the ecclesiastical appeal to shed its ‘popish’ past and become widely prevalent in these institutions. The appeal in equity did not construe the act of ‘rehearing’ as sovereign exception to law but as a form of justice, necessarily flexible to control the decisions of inferior tribunals.
To be sure, the life of appeals in equity diverged in different regions as appeals travelled in different imperial domains. American Puritans took up the appeal in equity to bring man's imperfect laws in line with God's perfect laws. Mary Bilder notes that the appeal in Puritan America served the purpose of limiting government by evoking a divine authority greater than temporal power.Footnote 50 On the other hand, the Privy Council, an equity court, became the apex British imperial court for hearing appeals from the Indian empire from the latter half of the nineteenth century after the dissolution of the East India Company. The Council's appeal in equity served to incorporate colonial legal forums under Crown rule. Outside the British imperial context, the appeal was also widely used in the service of absolutism under Hapsburg emperor Joseph II, as Derek Beals shows.Footnote 51
The trajectory of the appeal in early colonial India was distinct from its trajectory in America or under the Hapsburgs. Administrative and legal institutions in early colonial Company rule were oriented towards acquiring specific immunities from sovereign oversight and allowing certain forms of appeal to be directed to the Crown. Early colonial petitions added to the sense that the Crown's justice was a limit on the Company's power. Raja Ram Mohan Roy elaborated this idea in Bengal as he developed his political ideas through petitioning campaigns in the early nineteenth century. In a petition composed to the King-in-Council in 1828, Roy observed that the British government in India did not possess absolute power but was subject to oversight. It was a government that was used to being examined, investigated, and negatively judged by the King's Bench, the Supreme Court.Footnote 52 And so the colonial appeal in equity, which culminated in the final appeal to the Supreme Court, can be distinguished from the appeal's meaning in Puritan America and the ‘ancient constitution’ that underwrote the individual and collective right to petition in Britain.
The Company shaped a bureaucracy of letters in India that resulted in an ever-expanding rule of committees and commissions. This burgeoning bureaucracy was colonial in its logic because it sought to shore up the natural law of petitions as a norm, even as it undermined petitioners being capable of reason. The Madras petitions committee presented its work as a response to excessive and impertinent petitions. Its report noted that something had to be done to protect the natural right to petition from abuse.Footnote 53 However great the perfections of the regulations and correct the transaction of public business, more had to be done to prevent any inconvenience to public service and prejudice to the petitioners.Footnote 54
In addition to administering petitions within the norms of equity, the Committee's comments make it clear that its intention was to reform petition-related conduct. The right to appeal was potentially available to all subjects but redress was only available to those who subjected themselves to proper procedure. The Committee's formulation suggests a fidelity to process and principles of regulation that need to be further conceptually clarified. To be clear, the institution that upheld the natural right to petition was committed to rule by regulation (as against the rule of persons or the rule of law). This idea of regulation mitigated by mercy and indulgence carried with it a meaning of law in equity and derived from Protestant ideologies of conscience and toleration.Footnote 55 In this sense the norms of equity unfolding in Madras were of a piece with the Protestant language of ideologies of civility and sincerity that I outlined earlier. This is one reason why assessing the sincerity of the colonial petitioner by means of petitioning language became so important to the Company's bureaucratic procedure.
There were other legacies at play. Different internal judicial norms had developed within the Company's bureaucracy and were elaborated for specific persons and actions. These shaped a multiple sense of equity.Footnote 56 Equity was sustained by an idea of justice as redress that was conceptually distinct from the rule of law (in front of which all humans were deemed equal). In South India, such a notion of appeal began to be increasingly apparent in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 57 Petitioners took on this language of equity to seek redress. For example, the working poor in colonial port towns made claims based on their indispensability in the name of convention and faith.Footnote 58 One such petition was sent to the judge and magistrate of Nagapattinam in 1807 by a group of 136 Catholics seeking redress against a caste Hindu assault by calling for ‘that justice which the British Government holds forth to all its subjects who behave with respect and submit to its authority’.Footnote 59 The petition went on to defend their actions in terms of conventional conduct but it also demanded that the Company secure remuneration as compensation from the head of the caste, a Chettiar trader.Footnote 60 It is clear that the meaning of Company law as equity was layered with a sense that redress was a kind of transaction. In Madras, as the Catholic petitioners made clear, appealing to the Company's equitable justice for redress was only possible if petitioners performed respectability.
Several instances from the archives of petitioning indicate that respectable behaviour was systematically cultivated through paperwork, thus severing petitioning from broader practices of expressing dissent and collective bargaining. Petitioning was a means by which the government sought to individuate conduct. A Collector in Chingleput was advised to hear petitioners individually and not permit a number of people to leave their work in search of redress. The inhabitants, he was warned, commonly sought ‘justice by number’.Footnote 61 Here the impetus to separate the collective sound of assembly carried via the medium of the written petition is palpable. The Company's frameworks of equity could accommodate the demand for remedy if these were appropriately made and individually, rather than collectively, proffered. The supplicant could not assemble spontaneously but had to write down his complaint and seek redress. This was the enduring framework of civility that turned petitioning into a sort of politics of the respectable against which the anti-colonial politics of the twentieth century, exemplified by Gandhi, had to pitch itself.
Equity, redress, and assembly
The Company's hostility to popular and spontaneous assembly is indicated by its antagonism to a range of intermediate councils that were based on caste and occupation, and which routinely heard disputes and grievances in early modern South India. The most prominent example of such councils is the contestation between large, multi-caste groupings, called the left-hand and the right-hand castes. Intermediate councils that wielded juridical powers autonomously of the sovereign's jurisdiction governed these formations. In addition to hearing appeals, councils also had testimonial and attestatory authority, and provided different types of dispute resolutions. They were unlike courts presided over by the qazi or monastic heads as they were corporate entities.Footnote 62 Committees of respectable inhabitants witnessed documents, produced authoritative summaries of evidence, and visited crime scenes.Footnote 63 Large assemblies (mahānātu) and notables resolved large-scale, multi-caste disputes. In eighteenth-century Company port towns, merchants and dubashes (private brokers and language translators) who were close to Company traders frequently led mahanatu assemblies, often with the Company's support. These juridical forums offered redress that, while based on convention, could be ethically aligned with different traditions of jurisprudence.Footnote 64 A key facet of intermediate councils was that their jurisdictions could appear regionally focused but, because they worked through self-affiliation, they could operate translocally and in a deterritorialized manner through vectors of caste and kinship. In many ways these juridical councils were imbricated in the world of assemblies.Footnote 65
Over a period of time, the Company sought to sever its legal worlds from these intermediate councils by means of the appeal. The Company encouraged the appeal, but it also issued its own regulations to maintain public peace and order, and required that all collective meetings required the permission of the superintendent of police. Public assembly in the ports, whether made up of employees or private merchants, traders, or common inhabitants had first to be sanctioned and permitted by the sheriff. The subjects discussed in the meeting also had to be approved. ‘We have full confidence that it wont preclude our inhabitants from expressing their sentiments whenever proper subjects are submitted for their deliberation’ [emphasis added].Footnote 66
These ideas were not turned into statutory regulations. The police issued orders on assembly as and when they were required. Unpermitted gatherings began to be termed ‘a riotous assembly’ as the nineteenth century wore on. In response, petitioners often took to foregrounding their religious affiliations to navigate colonial regulation. They also mobilized ideas of equity. Upper-caste petitioners routinely sought to protect their privileged access to resources and space from the working castes by claiming that their caste conventions were a key aspect of their religious faith.Footnote 67 Petitions to access space by low-caste litigants articulated their oppression and injury caused to the body and person, and remonstrated with the Company that it was neglecting the pastoral care of its subjects. They usually carefully proffered these efforts to seek redress within the framework of equity, and ended letters by appealing to ‘the characteristic humanity and justice of your Excellency in Council’ and the Company's ‘equitable administration’.Footnote 68 These petitions suggest that within the Company's revenue and judicial jurisdictions, faith—something that the equity traditions were capable of recognizing even in avowedly secular contexts—could be mobilized to express remonstrance.
Linguistic resources of address: cutcherry Tamil
The appeal in equity and its political theological resonances allowed for a deterritorialized meaning of law to emerge. Appellants anchored their claims in faith as Catholics or as appellants to the Crown, as did Ram Mohan Roy, so as to invite an external limit upon the Company government. What is interesting here is that petitioners evoked a variety of higher authorities, rather different from jingkong (appealing to the capital) observed by Hung in Qing China and from the traditions of English law. This is because the relationship between the temporal authority and theological faith articulated in the Company's transmission of the petition in equity was also layered by other normative worlds. Here we see that in addition to the tones of redress, the appeal drew on Persianate forms of governance. In Madras these meanings accrued to the petition not directly through Islamic law or Persian language but through a variety of the Tamil language—cutcherry Tamil—made available by the scribes who composed petitions. The language and the labour of scribes also contributed in no small part to making Company petitioning a sort of inhabitable conduct that could be paid for and mobilized, making it efficacious among petitioners.Footnote 69
The early colonial petition expanded the reach of Persianate idioms and words even as the Madras government sought to remake petitioning through the ideas of equity. This apparent contradiction confirms Roger Chartier's study of grievances in revolutionary France. Chartier observes, with a fine sense of irony, that the language of secular enlightenment was not just imbued with religious intensity, but its revolutionary possibility was triggered by means of cahiers de doléances, grievances that were compiled by the three estates in 1789 at the behest of Louis XVI.Footnote 70 The cahiers, notes Chartier, were discussed in the assemblies leading to the General Assembly of May 1789 and allowed for the language of law to knit together the local with the translocal imaginary of the national. The language of the cahier carried the impress of the notaries, the juristic men of the robe, who modelled them on exemplary grievance letters. Chartier notes that in effect the cahiers did not carry the language of enlightenment (which, in any case, reached very few) but the language of grievance of the very regime deposed by the revolution. Through the concrete grievances about taxes, waste, and corruption elaborated by the cahiers, the juridical culture of the notaries was able to express hopes of reform and provided a catechism for a new order.
In light of Chartier's observations about how notarial language could allow the language of law to generate new registers of meaning, we can see how Company petitions could cohere and amplify a language of equity by drawing on and expanding Persianate and other South Indian registers of grievance. Model petitions in Persian and Sanskrit letter-writing manuals suggest that writing petitions to superiors was an essential component of the epistolary arts and courtly decorum, in addition to the civil legal process in the qazi’s court, certainly by the sixteenth century. In this notarial world arzdashts (‘arẓdāsht), or supplications, were integral to the documentary legacy of Persianate administration and included different types of letters relating to matters of statecraft that were submitted by the servants of the state to their superior officials and nobles. In the eighteenth century this form of appeal was submitted to kings. Thus in Tanjavur, if dissatisfied with the chief judge's decrees, supplicants appealed to the Maratha ruler Pratap Singh.Footnote 71 The appeals sought grace, not unlike chits of supplication that festoon temples and mosques with their pleas for favour. Other than arzis (or arzees) and arzsdashts (terms of Persian origin that were commonly used over much of the subcontinent), petitioners in Madras used the words ‘maṉu’ or ‘viṇṇappam’ to refer to their letters to the Company, evoking the ‘viṇṇappakkāran’, who, in the temple, bore the unique duty to sing sacred hymns in the presence of the deity.Footnote 72 The term ‘viṇṇappakkāran’, traced to late ninth-century Pallava inscriptions, imbued petitioning with the sentiment and tone of a sacred presentation to a higher authority. Indeed, stone inscriptions in temples frequently recorded important decrees and collective claims. Colonial petitions called up all these meanings by means of cutcherry Tamil, the language used to write supplications.Footnote 73 ‘Maṉu’, ‘viṇṇappam’, and ‘arzi’ were commonly used in Madras to refer to petitions presented to the Company. The linguistic resources of cutcherry Tamil articulated a deeply supplicatory form of address to the world of the revenue and judicial offices of the Company. But additionally, this supplicatory tone took on the impress of the language of intimate bargaining of the bazaar. Here petitions to the Company invited redress, often couched in terms of compensation or settlement through the performance of injury. This latter tone was often glossed in official readings as an exaggerated claim:
Every other petition is drawn upon a manner calculated to execute impressions that the party complaining is seriously aggrieved. The public record contains abundant evidence of the propensity of the natives to exaggerate and misrepresent. Whatever be the native propensity, sometimes the truth and falsehood of their assertion can be ascertained only by a reference to the subordinate authorities.Footnote 74
Another way in which the transactive nature of the appeal appears is in the satirical descriptions of petitions that tried to gloss this tone in terms of the inability of the petitioner to distinguish between divine power and temporal authority. Hence the piece set in Ratnagiri referred to earlier in this article described a series of petitions being read out in a crowded room, including one from ‘a poor old cultivator begging for the sirkar's hokum [sic] [command] to drive the devil out of a well’ and ‘from an old Mahratta—calling the magistrate Vishnu's avatar, and the petitioner's god—requesting a situation for his young son as a peon, stating that Vishnu, in the magistrate's own shape, had appeared to him and desired him to make this request’.Footnote 75 The account conjures up the ideal sincere petitioner that supplicants in the cutcherry are deemed to be incapable of performing. But as examples of infelicitous expression, the observer's eye sketches for us a tone of intimate transaction rather than the distance that emerged from the bazaari production of the petition.
Far from becoming respectable spaces of civil conduct, the Company's law courts and revenue offices proliferated as both incarnations of justice and vice, as centres where redress could be sought, and a bazaar where transactions could be made, documents produced, deals brokered and fixed. A document bazaar had, in fact, sprung up outside cutcherries in order to satisfy the demands of a regime that privileged written representation as the most acceptable form of communication. Key to the petition were scribes who were not the men of the robe described in Chartier's study but petty workers, often out-of-work former cutcherry employees, job seekers, servants, butlers, and mistresses with access to European officials.Footnote 76 Petitions from this time routinely demanded compensation. In contrast to the eighteenth century, when it was possible to threaten collective withdrawal of the kind evoked many years later by Gandhi, early colonial petitions increasingly took on a transactive tone of redress and evoked the religious identity of petitioners. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the petition and an individual signature on the petition often took on a representative function for a collective community, as we see in writings of Palpu.Footnote 77 Petitions became vehicles for rethinking history in public by means of offering empirical and provable pasts.Footnote 78
Conclusion
Petitions possess literary and fictive qualities. They are produced by structures of constraint and they emerge from an exchange ‘among several people about events, points of law, and chancellery style’.Footnote 79 In this sense, the language, form, and conventions of Madras petitions elude the diagnostic eye that seeks evidence of the cultural continuity of pre-colonial forms or social contract. In contrast to scholars who privilege the petition as a type of political communication that laid the foundation for liberal democracy grounded in social contract, this article explores the colonial career of petitions to open up the multifaceted texture of address and the relationship of petitions to ideas of equity and sovereignty.
In the early nineteenth century the East India Company elaborated the appeal in equity as a way to solicit consent and legitimate its presence. The appeal in equity was derived not as a facsimile of appealing to the king or parliament, but was an appeal that addressed a superior, specifically a committee of superiors. In this sense Company petitioning was woven into the delegation of authority and allows us to understand the grip of hierarchical colonial power.
The petition's role in shaping equity traditions also bears consideration. Mithi Mukherjee argues that the debates about Company rule over India, which raged around the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the Company's first governor-general, crystallized imperial sovereignty in Britain and its colonies.Footnote 80 From that time, she argues, imperial justice as equity and liberty provided a discursive framework for the British empire and, eventually, anti-colonial representational politics. In this context imperial sovereignty emerged as an irresoluble dynamic between colonial authority and imperial justice. The former was the disenchanted territorially bounded power articulated by maps, census, and proliferating categories of law; the latter was a deterritorialized and detached claim to rule derived from a sense of justice that originated from the natural law of justice and equity. Mukherjee notes that Edmund Burke articulated these ideas when denouncing the arbitrary powers of the Company. Burke declared, ‘there is but one law for all, namely the law that governs all law, the laws of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice and equity—the Law of nature and of nations’.Footnote 81 Burke's invocation of the law of humanity, argues Mukherjee, in fact fashioned an imperial discourse in which empire was the manifestation of a deterritorial imperial justice that functioned above English national law. Imperial justice expressed through the vocabulary of equity was a claim to impartiality and disinterest. Mukherjee terms this a ‘discourse of impartiality’ that was transmitted via the Crown-in-Parliament and the House of Lords down to the Indian constitution and the Supreme Court.Footnote 82
Aspects of early colonial petitioning bear out Mukherjee's argument that equity served as the basis of imperial justice, but they also depart from her conclusions. The discourse of equity justice was a potent form of law for an imperial power searching for terms of transcendence. The right to hear petitions was also the delegation of sovereignty that underwrote the Company's power in India. In this sense, law as equity made the appeal compelling and a resource by which the Company could solicit consent, demand civil and sincere behaviour, and consolidate its authority. It is also the case that the Company's efforts to shape the petition as a mode for constituting a new subject made the form widely available through the medium of cutcherry or ‘office’ Tamil, a language variety deeply indebted to Persian genres and vocabulary. Cutcherry Tamil, a bureaucratic language taken up by the bazaar and the lower echelons of the colonial bureaucracy, allowed the language of natural justice and equity to acquire meaning and resonance in everyday worlds. But it did so by imbuing the petition with inflections of Persianate deference, South Indian hierarchical address, and tones of redress and bazaari transaction. Early colonial petitions thus reoriented English equity traditions. All of this must surely have contributed to the voluminous petitioning that made the Company so uneasy and censorious about ‘litigious natives’. But could such articulations of equity justice bind subjects to law? Could it serve as the basis for popular sovereignty? Here it is important to recall that imperial law—even as equity—requires other forms of transcendence to sustain sovereignty and, in many ways, the colonial state's foundation in law remained incomplete. What is clear, however, is that law as equity created a political arena in which subjects could limit arbitrary power by invoking their natural right to petition—but only by demonstrating their faith and fealty to the state.
