Petitioners from the ‘meanest cast’

The emergence of Madras as a colonial city by the late eighteenth century was accompanied by an increase in occupations that were quintessentially urban in character in spite of the continued importance of agricultural activities in the area.Footnote ⁵ For literate and semi-literate natives, this mainly included employment as scribes, clerks, and other kinds of functionaries in the Madras government. At the other end of the social spectrum, the period saw the proliferation of a very large number of petty trading, artisanal, and labouring enclaves that expanded with increased migration to the city.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, by the early nineteenth century, the diversity of urban occupations in Madras marked it as an unmistakably new social and economic space.

Thus, the rhetoric of commitment to the upholding of a traditional social order, which was central to the administrative discourse of the East India Company's government in Madras, was at odds with the fact that the city was substantially different from the agrarian hinterland. The persistent problem of public disorder that so bothered Company officials was quite clearly linked to its changing social geography as labouring communities settled in the city in unprecedented ways. There are at least two examples of Fort St George being directly responsible for the establishment of urban settlements that were frequent and persistent sites of discord. The first—the cantonment areas which housed groups of low caste and outcaste sepoys from different parts of the Tamil country—were scenes of frequent acrimony as a result of regional differences in notions of hierarchy and customary practices. The second significant case is the weaving and artisanal villages created and settled by the East India Company to meet its commercial needs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although these localities were established with careful deference to caste norms as far as their spatial layout was concerned, they were zones of recurring, even violent, tensions as colonial officials found that the cultural expertise of the literate elite who were consulted on the design of these areas did not correspond to the notions that were held by the residents themselves.Footnote ⁷

Thus, it was in a volatile and rapidly changing urban context that the inhabitants of Madras petitioned the government with complaints, claims, and demands of different kinds. Regardless of the social status of the petitioners, these petitions shared certain common characteristics. For one, petitioners had to conform to the language of submission and civility demanded of them by the state in order to be dealt with favourably.Footnote ⁸ Petitions also frequently invoked the rhetoric of custom or long-prevailing practice in order to make their claims, a point that will be discussed in detail later. The notion of custom made its appearance in these documents in two registers, one that harked back to a moral order that it was the duty of the state to uphold as well as in terms of the evidentiary protocols demanded by early colonial law. Most importantly, petitions were textual supplications to the state that articulated an understanding of the latter's authority in moral and political terms as well as that of petitioners’ identities. The explanation of the relationship between the two was central to the arguments and claims made by petitioners.

Urban petitions from non-elite inhabitants of the city were very frequently marked by two important features. They were characterized by the self-ascription of petitioners in terms of their occupational identities as labourers, servants, and artisans, even while these were not always separate from other affiliations such as caste and religion. Different labouring groups were not equally represented in the petition archive; for instance, historians have pointed to the overwhelmingly large numbers of petitions received from textile workers in different parts of colonial South India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These documents offer a wealth of detail about the organization and conditions of work in this sector and the impact of colonial rule on it.Footnote ⁹ While the archive is not quite as voluble about other kinds of labour, petitions do nevertheless provide us with some sense of the material conditions of communities that we would otherwise not have access to. In certain cases, they produce evidence of less well-known occupations that quite certainly would have been forgotten by history; a case in point is a petition from the ‘mint goldsmiths’ of Madras city, written in 1785, which described the nature of the profession at some length, including its hereditary character and the techniques used to strike and assay coins.Footnote ¹⁰

A second significant feature of these petitions is that they were usually collective, and not from individual petitioners. While petitioners would frequently sign or leave some kind of mark on the documents to register their assent to the arguments made in them, the petitions themselves would often be authored by ‘cast headmen’. Significantly, this was a term that was not derived from a pre-colonial or agrarian context. By the early eighteenth century, it referred to local notables who were identified and recognized by the Madras government as leaders of the occupational groups that provided labour and other services to the city.Footnote ¹¹

Like urban petitions in general, the subject matter of collective petitions from labouring groups were both products of, and contributed to, the conflicts and issues that made up the everyday life of the city. Many of these petitions were written in the course of the state's attempts to placate, mediate, and suppress disturbances between intransigent urban communities who clashed over matters that ranged from the control and use of urban land, to disputes over communal rights, to ceremonies and rituals, and the determination of their proper conduct. In the case of the latter, the petitions contain an incredible amount of almost bewildering ethnographic minutiae. Another arena, which left behind a formidable paper trail, were appeals to the state for relief from the excesses of rule, whether in the form of official usurpation of land or taxation.

It is important to note, however, that while many of these petitions are sources of valuable information about the worlds of labour at this time, they were not merely descriptive in nature. They articulated a sense of collective identity in social, moral, and political terms through representations of their relationship with the state in the form of the Madras government. This was particularly true for low caste and outcaste groups, where the declaration of their occupations in their communications with colonial officials was the all-important pivot on which their claims rested. Indeed, this is a striking feature in the small number of outcaste ‘Pariah’Footnote ¹² petitions that were sent to Fort St George in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries asking for government protection of their residential settlements (paracheris) which were being threatened by the state's attempts to regulate and codify the ownership of urban land.Footnote ¹³

In the urban context, outcaste labour included manual labourers like scavengers as well as the sanitation and construction workers employed by the Madras government. In addition, they were domestic servants who worked in the houses of Europeans resident in the city. Also crucial were the very large numbers of soldiers and other army servants who were stationed in the cantonment areas.Footnote ¹⁴ The value of this labour in the establishment and everyday functioning of the city, and indeed of the empire, was not lost on the petitioners. They described themselves in terms of abject marginality but deserving of special treatment and protection by the state because of the nature of their occupations. While petitioners may well have retained ties with the agrarian context from which many of them originally came, the world of agricultural labour is strikingly absent in these narratives. Instead, it was their status as urban workers that marked them worthy of the state's attention. In 1810, for instance, their relationship with the colonial army was cited as the reason for Fort St George to consider the application of a group of outcaste Pariahs who asked for protection from town development activities that threatened their paracheri. Here, the petitioners argued that they had not been compensated for the services they had rendered to the Company's army in South India in any way except with a prior resolution that the paracheri would remain undisturbed and protected, and which they now hoped would continue to be upheld by the Madras government:

Another petition from the late eighteenth century protested against the imposition of quit-rent on paracheri land. Once again, the marginality and powerlessness of the community is highlighted in this narrative, as is the lack of remuneration for their work. However, while they describe themselves as ‘menial’, it is clear the petitioners had a very clear sense of the worth of their labour. This petition is particularly interesting because the invocation of the importance of their occupations was accompanied by an exhaustive and fascinating list of jobs that were key to the maintenance of European homes in the city:

The petition is also remarkable because it contains details of domestic service, an issue that is seldom considered in discussions of the history of labour in colonial India.Footnote ¹⁷ It also highlights the place that outcaste servants had in the intimate spaces of European establishments—as cooks and wet nurses for instance—something that would have been impossible in a native, upper caste home.

If the paracheri petitions represent one set of communications by outcaste groups to the state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, another is to be found in the form of appeals to the Madras government by Christians, or more specifically Roman Catholics, who were affiliated to the churches that fell under the jurisdiction of either the Portuguese padroado or the French Capuchin mission in the city.Footnote ¹⁸ Although these appeals did not explicitly refer to the occupational identity of the writers, it is not a particular leap of the imagination to argue that these petitioners were Company employees who provided essential services to the city. One reason for this assumption is that both sets of petitions seem to have emanated from the paracheri settlements located in Madras. Thus, roughly a decade after the paracheri petitions mentioned above were written, low caste and outcaste Roman Catholic residents of these settlements complained about the running of their churches—in terms of ritual, prayer, and the nomination of church functionaries—by European church officials. There is every probability that these petitioners were also the authors or, at the very least, were associated with the writers of the paracheri petitions. One fascinating and long, drawn-out case from 1812 began with a petition from a group of ‘Christian Pariahs residing at St Thomas Mount’ who were affiliated with a well-known Portuguese church in the city. This group sent petitions to the Madras government protesting against the appointment of a particular headman by the European priest of their church, lamenting that they had been excommunicated for their recalcitrance. In its turn, the government would declare that the petitioners ‘were not guilty of any crime against morality or religion’ and that the excommunication be repealed. The text of the original petition made it clear that the petitioners were aware of the hierarchical structure of church authority and that their complaints were directed against not just their priest, but also the Bishop of Mylapore under whose jurisdiction the church fell. Clearly then, they were aware of, and adroitly took advantage of, the antagonism between the Catholic institutions in the city and the Protestant government in asking Fort St George to intervene in the case. It is noteworthy that the subject of contention was the nomination of a headman, important not just as a religious authority who could administer the sacraments, but as an economic and social broker between his community, the state, and society at large.Footnote ¹⁹

This link between occupational identity and that of religion was made particularly explicit in the case of the low caste Christian boatmen of the fishing village of Rayapuram in Madras city. The residents of Rayapuram were employed by the Madras government as boatmen, responsible for bringing goods ashore from ships because of the lack of an adequate harbour. Over the years, the boatmen of Rayapuram had financed the building of a church in their village that functioned under the aegis of the Capuchin mission. Not surprisingly, members of the congregation expressed themselves strongly to the Madras government and called for its arbitration when they became displeased with the behaviour of the Capuchin officials of the church. One of the longest, most drawn-out, and dramatic of these encounters took place in 1806, when the Rayapuram boatmen sent a detailed petition to Fort St George contesting the appointment of the French friar Father Lambart as priest to the church. In the petition, they claimed that Lambart was ‘rude and ill-behaved’ and they demanded a priest who could speak Tamil and who was of their caste.Footnote ²⁰ The assertions that mark these cases, made through the colonial petition, were not merely quibbles about administration. They described the contours of a subaltern, Christian community identity that was at odds with the beliefs and practices of the Christianity prescribed by Europeans.Footnote ²¹ Implicitly or explicitly, the petitioners’ positions as urban workers imparted knowledge of colonial legality and a sense of self-worth that allowed for this kind of articulation.

How does one account for the spate of petitioning by urban labouring groups in the first half of the nineteenth century in the city of Madras? Is the phenomenon an indication of the flexibility of the early colonial legal regime and proof of the existence of a ‘listening state’? It is worth noting that the relatively tentative, anxious character of the early colonial legal order, which was marked, as Radhika Singha has pointed out, by ‘retreats and accommodations’, went hand in hand with developments that would anticipate the legal system of high colonialism in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²² Thus, by the early nineteenth century, features of early colonial law, which included the end of substantive legal pluralism and increasing bureaucratization and centralization of rule, which would have important implications for the governance of cities like Madras, were set in place.

There is a tendency to overlook the fact that the colonial city of Madras had an earlier avatar in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a global hub of commerce which attracted a heterogeneous multiracial population from around the world.Footnote ²³ The Company envisioned this space as a mercantile one, the success of which was dependent on working with local elites who represented the interests of their constituencies. Company officials dramatically offered proof of their investment in this kind of collaboration through institutions like the Madras Corporation, which included among its members influential native merchants and instruments like the petition that ostensibly paid heed to the opinions of prominent members of society.

However, as Philip Stern has recently noted in the case of early colonial Bombay, while petitioning appears to suggest the existence of forms of civil society, the latter did not limit state power—instead it worked along with the colonial government to establish the state's juridical authority and affirm its sovereignty.Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, in terms of everyday administration, what was manifested was a capacious, pragmatic understanding of administration by the Madras government that saw the significance of their interaction with the colonized primarily in terms of the city's mercantile elite, but involved the leaders of different labouring groups in the city in the business of quotidian rule. As we have seen earlier, the latter were designated headmen and were actively consulted on matters regarding the introduction of new taxes, for instance, or the settlement of disputes between urban communities.Footnote ²⁵

With the beginnings of territorial rule at the end of the eighteenth century, the colonial vision of the city as a shared space came to a gradual end, which saw the disassociation of urban communities from governance. The quotidian running of the city was now based on a colonial archive of precedents, rather than consultation with native subjects. While indigenous tribunals and councils of different kinds still functioned, their adoption of the evidentiary norms that governed colonial legality meant that they were effectively defanged.Footnote ²⁶ Outcaste groups living in the city, who constituted the least privileged sections of Madras society, were doubly disempowered by these developments. They were regarded increasingly as squatters by both the Madras government and society at large, who claimed that they were undeserving of the tax exemptions that were granted to them in perpetuity in the earlier part of the century. As we have noted earlier, as urban land became saleable in the 1770s, the period inaugurated a series of ‘town development’ efforts to facilitate the suburbanization of the city, a process that required the removal and clearance of the residential localities of the ‘Pariahs of Madras’.Footnote ²⁷ It is thus in the context of the physical and ideological marginalization of outcaste groups from urban space by the Madras government that the paracheri petitions were written. Company records also speak of the fear of trouble-making Pariahs who were regarded as violent and capable of being incited to rebellion, particularly in the wake of several uprisings in the city in the late eighteenth century. This resulted in a concerted effort on the part of Company officials to monitor these communities and their numbers in the city.Footnote ²⁸

The emergence of a more sharply defined legal system by the beginning of the nineteenth century also had important consequences for labouring petitioners. Previously, labouring groups had a repertoire of methods of protest, including ‘traditional’ ones like the refusal to work and desertion which were accepted as legitimate methods of protest by the colonial state. The withdrawal of low caste and outcaste labour in order to negotiate with the Madras government had been a frequent feature of urban disputes in the early eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁹ However, by this time, the only course of action that was available and legally cognizable was the petition; it was therefore representative of a shrinking space for dissent rather a sign of a flexible, accommodating legal system.Footnote ³⁰

Fiction in the archives

Recent scholarship on the documentary state in South Asia has illuminated the workings of paper-based bureaucracies in the constitution and maintenance of modern state power and its impact on the everyday lives of the governed.Footnote ³¹ Work of this kind points to an understanding of the colonial petition more as an instrument of rule than as an embodiment of public opinion and symbolic of a dialogic relationship between state and society. Thus, for instance, in her discussion on petitions in early Company Madras, Bhavani Raman has drawn our attention to the layers of mediation—by scribes, copyists, translators, and clerks—involved in their production.Footnote ³² Their language, format, and style were constrained by what colonial authorities considered seemly, legitimate, and admissible.Footnote ³³ Indeed, it was the protocols established by the state that delineated the latter's legal and juridical authority, and articulated its position as a sovereign power. The historian's access to these petitions is also a heavily mediated one—by the early nineteenth century, most petitions from Madras appear in the archive as translated fragments embedded in the administrative narratives of the state.Footnote ³⁴

It is clear therefore that historians need to be wary of the seductions of reading the direct speech of the colonized in documents like the petition as representative of the unfiltered consciousness of the colonial legal subject. At the same time, it is important to note the differences that mark the various genres of texts in the colonial legal archive, as well as the different historical junctures in which they were produced. For instance, without generalizing too much, it is probably fair to say that courtroom testimonies bore the imprint of the state more than texts like petitions. Courtroom pronouncements were extraordinary ones that took place in the designated physical spaces of the law and addressed particular legal situations.Footnote ³⁵ On the other hand, documents like petitions often belonged to the realm of the quotidian and were not always explicitly legal documents, even while their language was imbued with the expectations of the law. Arguably, therefore, petition writers were frequently in positions where they could craft their narratives with a greater degree of autonomy. Further, the colonial petition changed substantially over time, reflecting the nature of the legal regime at specific historical moments. As we have seen, the centralizing tendencies of colonial law had begun to manifest themselves by the early nineteenth century; however, the fact that legal categories were still relatively uncodified and polyvalent meant that they could be appropriated by their users in creative ways.

For these reasons, therefore, I argue that while petition narratives in this period in Madras were shaped by the framework of early colonial law, they are also records of the colonial subject's engagement with, and understanding of, legality. While they enunciated the supplicatory language demanded of them by the state, this cannot be explained away as ventriloquism alone. The diversity of petition narratives in early colonial Madras is an indication of the inventiveness of petition writers that reflected divergent world views.

Following Natalie Zemon Davis, I argue that the ‘fictive’ elements in early colonial petitions provide us with insights into the life-worlds of petitioners as filtered through their engagement with the law. Looking at remission letters written by supplicants to the king of France in the sixteenth century, Davis describes how people from different sections of society crafted and shaped narratives in order to receive a royal pardon.Footnote ³⁶ There was no doubt about the guilt of these writers, but they had to prove that there were mitigating circumstances that meant they were worthy of pardon. The narrative strategies used by peasants, women, nobles, and others constituted what Davis refers to as ‘fiction’ as the authors told stories that incorporated ideas from popular culture, understandings of legality, and notions of morality. While these tales could be wickedly funny, sly, and moving, they do not represent the untrammelled creative energies of their authors. They were, in some senses, both limited and enabled by prevailing moral and cultural mores, by the requirements of the law, and by the literary universe inhabited by Frenchmen of the time. Further, these supplicants were not the only writers of these texts; a large number of notaries acted as intermediaries between the seekers of pardon and their letters. In spite of these layers of mediation, however, Davis insists on the original letter writers being the ‘primary authors’ of these texts, arguing that at some fundamental level, the essential fictive element of these tales was ultimately attributable to them.

I suggest that it is possible to locate this understanding of the ‘fictive’ in the invocation of custom—also referred to as mamul or sallabad—that was common in petitions from early colonial Madras.Footnote ³⁷ The rhetoric of custom was central to the East India Company's legal regime in South India, which staked its claims to legitimacy as the ruler of the land through repeated articulations of its commitment to upholding age-old practice.Footnote ³⁸ In their appeals to the state, regardless of the issue, petition writers attempted to prove that their claims had the sanction of past practice, unbroken until the present moment of rupture. The assumption that underlined this argument was the fact that the morality of customary practice accounted for its long existence and, in turn, its long-standing character made it righteous in nature. The burden on petition writers therefore was to convincingly describe an ideal past where the custom they wished the state to legitimize and uphold was common practice. Invariably, these descriptions were articulations of the historical imagination of different social groups rather than empirical truth. I understand the ‘fictive’ in these texts, as Davis does, not as fraud, but as the narrativization of moral truth by petitioners. In the following section, I use petitions from two opposite ends of the social spectrum to demonstrate the ways in which urban petitioners in early colonial Madras city creatively appropriated the law to articulate notions of varying and distinct selfhood.

A familiar, recurring phrase that was used in petitions to draw attention to the long history of a practice was ‘time immemorial’ or variants thereof. Petitions from elites, for instance, frequently argued that the authority of past practices which they claimed for themselves was derived from ancient sacred texts or that they were common practice well before English rule, both of which were assumed to prove the moral and historical validity of their pronouncements. These arguments were common in upper caste petitions throughout Madras presidency, and were particularly explicit in cases where upper caste petitioners clashed directly with those they considered socially inferior to themselves. Thus, petitions that complained to the East India Company about the banning of low caste labour to perform menial tasks at temple festivals or about runaway slaves invariably underlined the need for the state to uphold the societal status quo in order to rule successfully. The acceptance of the sovereign authority of the East India Company as masters of the land was the hallmark of petitions of this sort, but their tone was often that of slyness, irony, or even threat, which appears to suggest that their supplication was mere ritual. A particularly evocative petition from Tirunelveli in 1827 speaks of the ire of upper landlords faced with a ban on the pulling of temple chariots by outcaste agricultural workers. Warning of the consequences of this action by colonial authorities, they pointed out that the success of the state depended on its support of this custom. Thus they declared that:

The invocation of a moral past upheld by scripture was a frequent feature of upper caste petitions in Madras city as well, particularly in cases that involved controversies regarding the ceremonial or ritual claims of petitioners. A petition written by a Brahman sect engaged in a battle with a rival group over the version of rituals to be conducted at the city's famous Triplicane temple is a typical example of this kind. The petitioners stated that religious law authorized their claims and that it was the divinely ordained duty of the state to uphold those laws. The petition once again makes a narrative move that is characteristic of those from elite groups. It played on the anxieties of the Madras government by suggesting that its legitimacy as ruler could only be assured through righteous behaviour as described by the petitioners:

At the same time, however, petitioners were aware that the success of their claims could not be based on their persuasive abilities alone and they became increasingly dependent on the production of evidence demanded by the changing colonial legal regime. These norms included written evidence as well as the backing of precedent in order to prove the truth of the narratives of past practice put forward by petitioners. Thus, narratives seeking to persuade the Madras government to resolve cases in their favour would adroitly weave together homilies on the righteousness of the claims of petitioners with information about past decisions made by colonial administrators, sometimes accompanied by documentary evidence.Footnote ⁴¹ The level of detail about these precedents and the paper trail associated with them was impressive and is an indication of the general awareness of the evidentiary demands of colonial law. There are numerous examples of collective petitions that wove together an invocation of an idealized past with a discussion of administrative precedents that strengthened their cases. In 1790, for instance, a petition from the merchant leaders of the left-hand caste collectivity complained about a passageway across the Madras Esplanade being monopolized by members of the right-hand caste, as well as about the latter using insignia to which they were not entitled:

In this telling narrative, the petition writers first located the customary usages which they wished the state to protect in a harmonious past, marked by mutual understanding and respect between the East India Company and themselves. Indeed, the petition manages to convey the one-sidedness of this early relationship as it was the East India Company which required the assistance of the petitioners rather than the other way around. Reference is then made to a past conflict with the right-hand collectivity that was sorted out successfully through the arbitration of a Company administrator, who is mentioned by name. Thus, the petition argued that the flouting by their opponents of what they considered appropriate behavior was improper on two levels. First, because it disrupted societal peace and the well-being of all and, second, because it disregarded a settlement that had been made at a particular moment in the past by a state functionary. This intertwining of the legal and moral is nicely summed up in the Hobson-Jobson glossary of Anglo Indian terms:

Unsurprisingly, the pasts narrated by outcaste petitions about their own communities were far removed from those in upper caste petitions and did not seek to legitimize their claims either through Brahmanical texts or references to a time before the Company's presence in the region. The fashioning of alternative pasts by outcaste intellectuals, social reformers, and leaders was of course not uncommon in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A common theme was an explanation of the present-day status of outcaste communities through a history of Brahmanical usurpation for which redress was sought. For instance, Jyotirao Phule in Maharashtra described Maratha history as the tale of the subordination of indigenous warrior groups by Aryan invaders.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the Tamil context, Pandit Iyothee Dass provided the Tamil Dalits with a Buddhist past that he demonstrated by revealing Buddhist elements in Hindu culture that were destroyed by Brahman invaders.Footnote ⁴⁵ And as Udaya Kumar has recently pointed out, a lost Buddhist past was once again the theme of Dr Palpu's writings on behalf of the Ezhava community in Kerala.Footnote ⁴⁶

The inversion of social hierarchy by referring to the loss of social status in the distant past is an important feature of a great deal of folklore in the Tamil country. Indeed, popular culture is full of tales of such inversions. For instance, the nineteenth-century ethnographer Edgar Thurston pointed out that in rural areas the paracheris—which were the source of much urban discord and conflict—were treated as spaces of great sacrality. It was said that if a Brahman entered this space he would be kicked out, water mixed with cow dung would be thrown on him, and he might even be beaten with slippers.Footnote ⁴⁷ Significantly, however, Pariah petitions represent a departure from historical narratives of lost social status. Petition writers did not utilize this repertoire of mythology to put forward their claims to the state. Instead they argued that it was their service to the East India Company as urban workers, domestic servants, and sepoys that entitled them—as marginalized and exploited people who could not expect support from elsewhere—to protection from the government. What we see are self-descriptions that emphasize the status of the petitioners as belonging to the ‘meanest cast’, one that was inextricably entwined with the career of the East India Company in India. All history was East India Company history; allusions to a ‘time immemorial’ refer to the time of the Company in India.

This was markedly different from the narratives of more socially privileged petition writers who would often allude to a past before Company rule that needed to be emulated. For instance, the 1790 petition from left-hand merchants that I referred to earlier began with the assertion that ‘our ancestors were by them called from the Interior parts of the country’ thus suggesting that they had enjoyed considerable social status wherever they had resided prior to coming to Madras, and that the move itself had taken place because the English had sought out their help. It is important to note here that I do not wish to suggest that allusions to a privileged relationship with the East India Company or affirmation of its ultimate authority to arbitrate in these disputes were completely absent from these petitions. However, their arguments had narrative space for the articulation of an understanding of normative social and moral orders whose legitimacy came from other places and times, from religion and culture. In this case, the acknowledgement of a prior existence allowed the city to be evoked as a new space that required effective and wise governance precisely because it was the place of innovation where social groups had to learn to live together in a new context. In contrast, as we have previously noted, the 1810 paracheri petition did not make any allusions to the agrarian context or to the experience of agrestic servitude. The city had always existed in this imagination, as had the relationship with the state since ‘ancient time’:

Like other petitions, this text also displayed a keen awareness that the moral argument had to be combined with evidence that was legally acceptable to the Madras government.

Here, the petitioners made careful note of the previous office bearers at Fort St George who had shown fairness and kindness towards them and whose decisions needed to be upheld. After the initial profession of a timeless relationship with the Company-state, the narrative then takes on a much more legal tone, where the invocation of the past conforms to certain verifiable evidentiary norms. Indeed, the recurrence of the generic phrase ‘passed a minute’ in these texts points to an absolute awareness that any argument made by the petitioners needed the sanction of a recorded order by government. This immersion in a legal written culture in the absence of actual literacy suggests the appearance of a ‘literate mentality’ among subaltern communities of Madras city, a keen awareness of the legal and political power of documentation and writing.Footnote ⁵⁰

Petitions and the public

By the late nineteenth century, vibrant vernacular public spheres had emerged in different parts of colonial India.Footnote ⁵¹ Madras city was no exception; by the 1830s and 1840s it had become the centre of a print-based literary culture initially driven by the activities of proselytizing Protestant missionaries. This elicited a series of responses from the local populace who increasingly began to own printing presses and to edit and publish newspapers and journals in Tamil and even English.Footnote ⁵² This development was accompanied by the mobilization of communities on the basis of caste and/or religion who defined themselves in terms of concerns that transcended the purely local. Among other factors, like the emergence of an enumerative state that ruled through codified social categories, this phenomenon was also linked to the representational character of institutions of colonial law such as the courtroom and the petition.Footnote ⁵³

By the mid-nineteenth century, the dissemination of print had removed a shroud of ‘secrecy’ from political communications between the state and its subjects.Footnote ⁵⁴ Formal petitions or writings, which adopted the form of the petition, made frequent appearances in the written material that was widely produced and distributed in this period. By the 1840s, for instance, the influential Madras Native Association had sent a series of petitions to London complaining about the administration at Fort St George on matters like taxation, the land revenue system, and the rights of landowners. In 1859, the famous Hindu Memorial, with thousands of signatories, protesting against government support for Christianity and missionaries, was addressed to the secretary of state in London.Footnote ⁵⁵ The 1830s and 1840s would also witness the circulation of writings by intellectuals like Vedanayagam Sastriar, the Christian poet of Tanjavur, whose prose used the characteristic supplicatory form of the petition in ironic ways to expound on the character of Tamil Christianity.Footnote ⁵⁶

Located both prior to, and on the fringes of, this print public, however, the ‘public-ness’ of labouring petitions is less apparent At the same time, it is entirely possible that the processes of drafting, and garnering support for, these texts might have spurred the mobilization of communities of petitioners beyond the immediate concerns of the petition. The examples of the outcaste petitions referred to earlier seem to corroborate the emergence of these kinds of solidarities, albeit in fleeting ways. As we have seen, the emphasis on the value of their identity as urban labourers was central to the negotiations of outcaste petitioners with the Madras government. At the same time, these petitions also articulated a sense of community in terms of an existence as an oppressed caste that exceeded their occupations. In their descriptions of marginality, they invoked an understanding of themselves in terms of the suffering of a larger community that went beyond their immediate demands. This sense was heightened by the fact that they defined themselves as ‘Pariahs’ in these texts, while a century earlier they would have used designations that drew from their occupations. What is also noticeable is a move away from older caste groupings—the right-hand and left-hand collectivities—to individuated castes that are more recognizable to the modern observer. In the early eighteenth century, upper caste headmen would speak and act on behalf of ‘inferior’ members of their groups; a century later outcaste headmen made direct representations to the state on behalf of the interests of their caste members.Footnote ⁵⁷

A striking example of an expression of translocal solidarity among the ‘Pariahs of Madras’ is the uprising of 1795 in which outcaste agricultural workers in the adjacent area of Chingleput (the Jaghire) deserted their duties in protest against the imposition of a new tax assessment by the then Collector, Lionel Place. At the beginning of the investigation conducted by the state, Place was convinced that the event had taken place because of the collision between mirasidar landlords in Chingleput and their educated, cosmopolitan relatives in the city who worked as dubashes or translators to the Madras government. However, evidence was unearthed that appeared to suggest that the abandonment of land as a form of protest was not due to the instigation of upper caste landlords alone. A trail of secret ‘cadjan’ or palm leaf letters discovered in the course of petitions and counter-petitions by various protagonists in the incident pointed to the fact that the residents of the paracheris in Madras had supported and encouraged their disaffected ‘rural’ brethren to revolt in this way.Footnote ⁵⁸

In her work on the impact of British colonialism on South Indian institutions and the formation of political communities in the nineteenth century, Pamela Price makes a useful distinction between ‘acting in public’ and ‘forming a public’. Price argues that to ‘act in public’ is to assume a representational manner in relation to power, status, and authority over concerns that are local and particular to a social group; to ‘form a public’ refers to the political and social mobilization of communities over issues, shared identity, and values that extend beyond the immediate locality. Price argues that the latter phenomenon was linked to the representational culture of colonial law that had become all-pervasive by the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁹ Certainly, the case of the Chingleput Uprising seems to suggest that the legal terrain of the early colonial state allowed outcaste groups to ‘form’ publics which articulated notions of community that transcended their immediate locale at a time before the large-scale advent of a culture of print and associations. While it would be premature to argue for the emergence of modern political communities among these groups in Madras city in this early period, both quotidian petition narratives as well as moments of heightened crisis like the Chingleput Uprising point to the growing articulation of solidarity imagined in terms of an oppressed caste that possessed an incipient language of entitlement and rights.

In discussing the applicability of the Habermasian public sphere debate to South Asia, historians have argued that non-elite publics in colonial India did not emerge on the basis of rationalized, print-based debate alone, but through popular religiosity expressed in the form of public processions and the staging of ritual and devotional activities that would allow for the creation of indigenous platforms for the articulation of opinions and protest.Footnote ⁶⁰ While this perspective is an important corrective to the overwhelming focus on the bourgeois public, it is perhaps too stark in the line it draws between the elite and non-elite, one based on writing and rational debate, the other founded on a world of ritual and ceremony. A focus on petition writing among subaltern communities enables us to transcend this dichotomy, throwing light on the relationship between law, writing, and community formation among non-literate groups in a pre-print world.