Controlling documents, taming people, and appropriating skills

Ever since the EIC obtained the Diwani of Bengal in 1765, it had been struggling with gathering correct information about its revenue base. This struggle only intensified in the aftermath of the disastrous Bengal famine of 1769, though not so much out of moral concern than of the desire for fiscal recovery. This section will tell the story of how the EIC experimented with a variety of ways of controlling revenue administration in its pursuit for the ‘true’ knowledge about the rural economy of North India. By the 1830s, such experiments led the colonial state to mobilize the skilled scribal labour of the Indian officials in generating new documentation.

EIC administration in the three decades following the acquisition of the Diwani was marked by the intermediary roles that prominent revenue officials played between the state and the tax-paying villages. Most important to the British were certain provincial-level Indian officials called the sadr qanungo (principal registrars). At this early stage, besides an premature attempt to retrieve revenue documents directly from rural areas, the Company's tax collection mostly operated on the superficial basis of the sadr qanungo's documents that recorded past assessments.Footnote ¹⁴ The EIC was vexed by the fear that such dependence on the qanungo would enable these Indian officials to cheat the British at will. The Resident at Midnapur, for example, argued in 1772 that, while the qanungo possessed ‘a most perfect knowledge of the Province, and a very great influence over the zamindars’ that could have been of great value for the EIC, they kept this knowledge and influence for their own use, encroaching on the revenue due to the state treasury.Footnote ¹⁵

After the EIC territory rapidly expanded into the Gangetic plain (which soon formed the NWP) in the first few years of the nineteenth century, this problem of distrust became even more pressing. Here the British found themselves having to deal with administrative networks that were more diffused than those they had encountered in Bengal, consisting of primarily district and subdistrict qanungo as well as numerous village patwari (accountants). British officials generally believed that the patwari's documents, produced at the lowest level of administration, should have been most detailed and valuable. But at the same time, they could not help seeing these documents as almost intrinsically unreliable. As one British Collector put it:

Here, the power relation between the Indian officials and the local landholders was reversed while the discourse of unreliability remained in place: the qanungo were unreliable, as they wielded an unchecked influence over the landholders; the patwari were unreliable, as the landholders held an unchecked power over them.

The logical outcome of this kind of reasoning was that, as the British officials saw it, it was only a third party standing neutrally above both the Indian officials and the landholders, namely the colonial state, that was capable of remedying the wrongs. To transform itself into this ‘impartial’ third party, the colonial state went through a rather winding process of policy change. In Bengal, initially, Lord Cornwallis, the then Governor General of India, decided to abolish the office of qanungo after the Permanent Settlement was declared in 1793. The logic behind this outright abolition was that the settlement had effectively taken all the land-revenue documents from the qanungo and put them under the custody of the EIC.Footnote ¹⁷ In the following decades, however, this confidence was confronted by the reality of continuing administrative confusion. As Dirk Kolff has shown, British officials in the newly conquered Gangetic plain gradually started to cast doubt on Cornwallis's idea that the Permanent Settlement could preclude further detailed investigation.Footnote ¹⁸ New information was generated every day by administrative transactions such as the payment of rent and land transfer, which required not a dead body of documents, but continual documentation. As the British officials found themselves completely outnumbered in the vast and densely populated Gangetic plain to achieve this kind of documentation on their own, they reverted to the reliance on the qanungo and the patwari in the 1810s. But this time, instead of simply making use of the qanungo and patwari, the colonial government set out to transform them from loosely regulated intermediaries into closely supervised state bureaucrats or semi-bureaucrats. With elaborate new legal regulations, the British endowed themselves with formal power over the appointment, duties, salary, and punishment of the qanungo and the patwari.Footnote ¹⁹ Within this power hierarchy, the British now demanded from the local Indian officials not only the existing documents they possessed, but also their scribal labour.Footnote ²⁰

The colonial desire for reliable knowledge about revenue, however, remained unsatisfied. As the Settlement Officer of Kanpur later recalled, many British officials started to suspect during this period that even if the local Indian officials were loyal, they might not know the correct information about the land in the first place.Footnote ²¹ In this respect, the settlement of the NWP since 1833 (the settlement referred to at the beginning of this article) stood as yet another turning point in the changing history of colonial revenue knowledge-making. This settlement required the British officials as well as their Indian subordinates to trace the ultimate source of knowledge—that is, the land itself—and prepare documents on the basis of a direct engagement with the land in the form of what is later known as the ‘revenue survey’.Footnote ²²

Requiring documentation to be based on survey brought new challenges. At first glance, these challenges appeared to be technical in nature. According to the official plan of the survey, the basic unit of land measurement was the ‘field’, which was defined as a single piece of land occupied by one cultivator under one title.Footnote ²³ The numbers of such fields in the Gangetic plain were so great that the government considered it too costly to hire British professional surveyors to measure all these fields with the European survey technique of triangulation.Footnote ²⁴ The government was thus compelled to make use of Indian survey methods developed in precolonial times known as the khusrah (khasra) survey.Footnote ²⁵ While differing in practice from place to place, the khasra survey essentially consisted of measuring land with a rod or a rope (jarib) and calculating areas using basic geometry.Footnote ²⁶ This means that, from a technical perspective, the khasra survey required less training and less investment in equipment than triangulation. The Indians who were capable of conducting this type of survey were accordingly much more easily available at a minimal wage. The cost of the khasra survey was thus much lower.Footnote ²⁷ But the simplicity of the khasra survey also made the British worry about its accuracy. The government therefore came up with the plan in which European technology set the standard for Indian skills. When a village was surveyed, its outer boundaries would be mapped by the so-called ‘Professional Survey’ using basic triangulation. The minute divisions of the fields lying inside the village, on the other hand, would be measured by the khasra survey. If the total area of the village calculated from adding up the area of individual pieces of fields differed from the area yielded by triangulation by more than 5 per cent, then the khasra survey of this village would be considered inaccurate and need to be redone.Footnote ²⁸

Figure 1.

Specimen of a khasra field map. Source: Smyth and Thuillier, A Manual of Surveying for India, 2nd ed. (London, 1855).

Figure 2.

Two specimens of the use of triangulation in a topographical survey. Source: Smyth and Thuillier, A Manual of Surveying for India, 2nd ed. (London, 1855).

This attempt to accommodate the khasra survey, as Bhattacharya has pointed out, was to be fiercely attacked by later British surveyors as an irredeemable compromise of scientific precision and thus the origin of administrative confusion.Footnote ²⁹ But this accusation should be understood as an effort of the new generation of colonial techno-bureaucrats in establishing their authority by distancing themselves from and concealing their indebtedness to the NWP settlement.Footnote ³⁰ For the colonial government in the 1830s, the problem was less about technology itself than about its institutional context. While previously British and Indian revenue officials were sufficient for the paperwork of documentation, now the need to measure the land pushed the government to bring in new types of skilled personnel: the British professional surveyors and the Indian khasra surveyors. But the incorporation of these two groups into the existing structure of colonial revenue administration was not a straightforward issue. No matter whether it was the khasra survey or the Professional Survey, the measuring of the land was not primarily meant for cartographical purposes, but was essentially intended to assist the British revenue officials to form a settlement—that is, to determine land occupancy and to calculate the amount of revenue that the land could yield.Footnote ³¹ To achieve this goal, the survey conducted by the surveyors and the settlement works carried out by the revenue officials were supposed to be closely integrated. The British professional surveyors, the Indian khasra surveyors, and the revenue officials, however, formed each of their own different institutional bodies. The British surveyors constituted a loosely identifiable branch of the colonial bureaucracy under the Surveyor General in Calcutta, distinct from the commanding hierarchy of the revenue department of the EIC. As we shall see later, these two branches of the government had different objectives in the revenue survey.Footnote ³² The case of the Indian khasra surveyors was even more complicated. These indigenous surveyors were often collectively named by the British as the amin (literally deputies). These amin were never formally incorporated into any colonial survey department because the British surveyors did not consider the khasra survey to be qualified as a kind of science.Footnote ³³ The revenue department of the EIC, on the other hand, did try to make more regular use of the amin.Footnote ³⁴ But unlike the qanungo and the patwari whose office was traditionally well defined, a separate, distinct indigenous office of surveyor did not really exist. The word amin in colonial usage was in fact an umbrella term that denoted a diverse range of local service providers who were customarily called upon to measure the land when such a need arose.Footnote ³⁵ Due to the diversity of the amin, the early attempt of the Board of Revenue to formalize the office ended up with no result. In sum, the institutional connections between the three groups of personnel involved in the 1833 settlement were weak. The essential challenge that the revenue survey brought about thus did not lie in the grafting of European technologies onto Indian skills, but in the coordination of different institutional groups.

To make sure that this coordination would work smoothly, Lord Bentinck, the then Governor General of India, called a conference in January 1833 that brought together the British revenue officials and the professional surveyors to discuss the manners in which the upcoming settlement should be conducted.Footnote ³⁶ The issue of whether the revenue or the survey branch of the government should superintend the khasra survey was particularly debated during the conference. In earlier experiments, the amin used to form a temporary establishment under the British revenue officials because field survey was closely connected to settlement works such as the settling of boundary disputes and the assessment of land.Footnote ³⁷ The British surveyors, however, considered everything related to measurement as their job. They managed to persuade Lord Bentinck during the conference to entrust the responsibility of directing the khasra survey to them.Footnote ³⁸ In the course of the revenue survey after 1833, the amin thus worked as contract labourers under the British surveyors.Footnote ³⁹ It was then decided that the survey and the settlement should be integrated through a streamlined procedure of cooperation between the revenue officials and the surveyors.Footnote ⁴⁰ As the British surveyors saw it, such reallocation of tasks allows the revenue survey to proceed in a more efficient manner than when the Professional Survey and the khasra survey as were controlled by different governmental bodies.Footnote ⁴¹

Redefining skills and remodelling subjects

Our story so far resembles James Scott's classical narrative that high modernist state projects aim to gather information about the society so as to make it liable for easier resource management.Footnote ⁴² But colonialism, as is common knowledge now, means more than the imposition of an external system of social control. It is also built on a regime of the internal discipline of subjecthood. Colonial education has served as a primary example of this disciplining dimension of British rule in India. Recent works by Parimala Rao and Jana Tschurenev among others are pushing our understanding of education beyond high colonial ideology and towards the on-the-ground experience of learning in small towns and villages.Footnote ⁴³ These studies nonetheless concentrate on education itself and have not paid enough attention to the intimate links that were being drawn between education, revenue, and law—links that transformed each of these three sites of colonial power relationships.Footnote ⁴⁴ This section thus discusses how the first colonial scheme of mass rural education grew out of the logic of the revenue settlement of the NWP and became entangled with a discourse about an ideal ‘legal subject’ that was predicated on the knowledge about property rights.

British colonial officials had long been debating about how the general Indian mass should be educated and the purpose of their education.Footnote ⁴⁵ For Lord Moira, the petty schoolmasters of existing indigenous village schools should be the first resort of the government because they offered the most basic and necessary education in reading, writing, and arithmetic to the great majority of the people. Any attempt towards higher levels of instruction and even evangelization would have to wait until the people were ‘enlightened’ by these basic forms of knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁶ Others like Holt Mackenzie and Lord Auckland, however, adhered to the contrary. For them, the Indian peasants were still so poor that they would not be interested in education beyond the necessity of life.Footnote ⁴⁷ The British should therefore start with educating the upper and middle classes by setting up universities and schools in urban centres and then try to extend their efforts to smaller towns and villages.Footnote ⁴⁸

Contrary to Mackenzie and Lord Auckland's prediction, however, the few government schools established in the major cities of the NWP sank into a dismal condition by the early 1840s. G. Clerk, the then Lieutenant Governor of the NWP, argued in 1843 that this failure was not due to any innate backwardness or lack of interest in the pursuit of knowledge on the part of the Indians as Mackenzie believed. Rather, it was due to the fact that ‘they [the Indians] would not resort to a school which was not in unison with their feelings … the Government means should, if possible, co-operate with the existing establishment, so that the interest of the community should be retained, and their feelings carried along with the Govt. undertaking’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Clerk did not specify what he meant by the ‘feelings’ of the Indians. But, since he hoped that the government schools could train teachers in ‘our science and the English language’ and send them to the village school to educate the villagers, it seems that indigenous village schools regained their prominence for Clerk mainly as a convenient channel of transmitting European knowledge to the Indian rural population in a top-down manner.Footnote ⁵⁰

Clerk's successor, James Thomason (Lieutenant Governor of the NWP, 1843–53), inherited Clerk's idea that colonial education should utilize existing institutions that aligned with the interests and feelings of the educated. But what distinguishes Thomason from earlier colonial writers including Clerk is the ways in which he conceived these interests and feelings. Thomason's previous appointment as the settlement officer of Gorakhpur, one of the earliest settled districts of the NWP, gave him the opportunity to witness how in some places the patwari took on the responsibility of teaching elementary literacy to the children in their own villages.Footnote ⁵¹ Probably inspired by these local practices of instruction, Thomason proposed an educational scheme that, instead of drawing a hierarchical connection between rural education and higher levels of European learning, was designed to be complementary to the revenue settlement of the NWP.

For Thomason, the purposes of connecting education with the settlement were twofold. First, this kind of education was an extension of the various measures of ensuring accurate revenue documentation discussed earlier in this article. Thomason argued that the reliability of the revenue documents produced during the settlement was compromised by the technical incompetence of the local Indian officials. According to him, many village patwari could not keep records ‘intelligibly’.Footnote ⁵² They thus needed to be (re)educated in their own administrative skills. This purported defect might not indicate real incompetence of the patwari, but was more likely the result of the prevalent use of several cursive scripts in vernacular administrative traditions that could appear confusing for a British official, most of whom learned the vernaculars through neatly printed textbooks.Footnote ⁵³ But no matter what the case was, the point here is that Thomason was determined to level the different practices of record-keeping with a universal standard of intelligibility that would not block the British officials from accessing the records.

Second, and more profoundly for Thomason, the purpose of establishing accurate revenue documentation was not only the smooth collection of tax, but also the welfare of the Indian rural population:

This argument marked the transformation of the revenue documents from mere administrative papers into legal evidence. Administrative papers were the means by which the state protected its fiscal interest against the purported corruption of the Indian officials. Such papers became legal evidence when they were used by the villagers to defend their own rights in land in potential disputes among themselves or with the state. But since most of the villagers (including many landholders) were illiterate, Thomason believed that they were unable to read and check the revenue documents that were proofs of their property rights. This left space for the few literate scribes, landholders, and moneylenders to forge documents for their own illicit interests.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thomason thus contended that the ordinary villagers also needed to learn the skills of reading, basic arithmetic, record-keeping, and land measurement through their own vernacular languages.Footnote ⁵⁶ This was the kind of education that the panegyric newspaper article cited at the beginning of in this article was referring to.

At first sight, educating the villagers still only provided another layer of external check on the accuracy of revenue documentation: as the villagers could now read the documents themselves, they could do the work of ‘double-checking’ before the documents were handed over to the government. A closer look, however, suggests a deeper concern at work. For the British, bringing the villagers into the making of revenue knowledge required quite different measures to be taken as compared to the earlier bureaucratization of the Indian officials. The latter group appeared to the British to be actively desiring employment. But the ordinary peasants, as the British saw them, did not desire to defend their own rights. Many colonial commentators claimed that Indian peasants either lacked the notion of property rights or were too oppressed to let their natural inclination towards private property grow before the British came. The legal consciousness of cherishing one's own property rights or indeed the idea of property rights itself was something that first needed to be cultivated among the Indian villagers.Footnote ⁵⁷ Rural education was thus not merely about improving the information basis of the fiscal administration of the state, but was also about the making of a new colonial legal subjecthood.

We can discern how the British envisioned this subjecthood from the textbooks that they prescribed for the village schools. Thomason had a series of four manuals prepared in Urdu with the intention of making them the standard textbooks for the training of the local officials and villagers throughout the NWP.Footnote ⁵⁸ These manuals, penned by Ram Sharan Das (often spelt as Ram Surrun Doss), the then Deputy Collector of Delhi, dealt with Perso-Urdu alphabet, basic arithmetic, the patwari's duties, and land measurement.Footnote ⁵⁹ We know little about Ram Sharan Das's life. But we do know that the Indians occupying the post of Deputy Collector were often selected from local revenue officials, though usually the higher-ranked tahsildar (head of an administrative subdivision) rather than the pettier qanungo or patwari. It is thus highly probable that, in his past career, Ram Sharan Das had himself practised the kinds of skills that he wrote about in the manuals. In this sense, these manuals exemplify an effort to make administrative skills teachable by transcribing them from the embodied practices of the local officials into abstracted, redistributable texts. Thomason also claimed that these manuals were written in close conformity with existing administrative practices.Footnote ⁶⁰ But this claim should be understood in line with Thomason's larger concern over Indian incentives. Learning a lesson from the failure of earlier state-initiated schools, Thomason took care to warn the British district officials that they should not force the establishment of village schools, but should provide stimulus to the villagers themselves in pursuing education and aid them in selecting and sustaining schoolmasters.Footnote ⁶¹ The use of Indian administrative skills condemned by latter British surveyors, as we have noted earlier in this article, thus was no longer merely the result of administrative pragmatism. Instead, teaching Indian knowledge, as opposed to Clerk's plan of transmitting European knowledge, now became a way of encouraging the villagers to actively and voluntarily participate in their own ‘empowerment’.

When the skills were transcribed from practice to print, however, they were not reproduced intact, but rather went through a process of redefinition by the colonial authority. The first aspect of this redefinition is standardization. The first volume of his four manuals, Acchar abhyas (The Practice of Alphabet), for example, teaches how to write the Perso-Urdu script in a neat form of nastaliq. This calligraphic style was rarely used for official record-keeping (especially at the lower levels) in the Indo-Persian world in the early modern period but later, during the heyday of nationalism, became the standard way of writing and printing in modern Urdu across a variety of genres.Footnote ⁶² Acchar abhyas thus represents a critical moment of transition in this history of nastaliq. In this manual, Ram Sharan Das discussed how to write clear nastaliq for governmental paperwork. In doing so, he (or rather his British patron) set up this particular form of nastaliq as the new standard for official writing while paying no regard to the different cursive scripts actually in use in different places.Footnote ⁶³ Similarly, while Indian units of measurement such as bisva and bigha often differed from region to region, another of Ram Sharan Das's manuals, Map-tol (Measurement and Weight), gave a set of standardized units of length and made them convertible to the English inch and foot.Footnote ⁶⁴

Second, and more importantly, these manuals revealed how the standardization of skills was buttressed by the bureaucratic power hierarchy that the British had been trying to establish between themselves and the local Indian officials since the early nineteenth century. The manual Patwari ki kitab (The Book of the Patwari) most vividly illustrates this point. At first glance, the book appears to be filled with rather terse descriptions and samples of the types of records that a patwari must keep. But, on several occasions, Ram Sharan Das reminded his readers that all these seemingly ‘neutral’ technicalities were meant to work towards a specific end—that is, the orders of the colonial government:

Whether Ram Sharan Das was really fully committed to such prescriptions that he wrote under British supervision was another question. The point here is that when he started to write for Thomason, Ram Sharan Das was already deeply embedded in the colonial bureaucratic power hierarchy, as he held the highest position that an Indian could attain in the revenue department at that time. No matter whether he wrote Patwari ki kitab as a guide to strategies of ‘career success’ for his Indian colleagues or simply to satisfy his British employers, he was structurally positioned to prescribe obedience.

The role that power played in the redefinition of skills becomes most obvious if we compare Ram Sharan Das's manuals with similar administrative manuals that the British obtained from their intermediaries–informants in Bengal in the late eighteenth century. A certain Udaicand, for example, wrote a manual in Persian on revenue administration entitled Dastur al-‘amal (The Rule of Practice), which was copied for the British official Richard Johnson in Calcutta in 1788. The style and the contents of the text as well as the title itself recalled an established genre of composition in the high Indo-Persian scribal traditions that date back to the medieval period:

For Udaicand, the technique of administrative record-keeping meant an ‘art of administration’ (hunar-i umurat) rather than the petty skills of paperwork described by Ram Sharan Das.Footnote ⁶⁷ The very language that Udaicand used was accordingly the embellished literary Persian as opposed to Ram Sharan Das's extremely terse Urdu. Being the son of a Kayasth (a well-known scribal caste) family of Bengal, Udaicand saw himself as a proud heir of this sophisticated scribal culture.Footnote ⁶⁸ The EIC administration at this time could not seriously contend with this kind of self-fashioning. It is only the consolidation of the institutional power hierarchy between the local Indian officials and their British superiors later in the nineteenth century that formed the precondition for the modification of indigenous administrative skills and the redefinition of the Indian officials’ cultural status.

Reading Ram Sharan Das alongside Udaicand illustrates how Thomason and his followers envisioned the ideal colonial subjects. Such subjects should cherish their property rights and know how to defend these rights. What undergirded these external modes of conduct was a particular type of consciousness: the colonial subjects should internalize the idea that both the rights and the defence of rights ultimately derived from the power of their British masters. They were indeed ‘subjects’ in the double sense of the word: both the subject that acts as an agent and the subject that is submissive to another actor. They should obey the colonial state by knowing and making use of the state's legislation. This notion of the enlightened but obedient Indian subjects was the major ideological pillar that upheld the ostentatious claim of the longevity of the legacy of the revenue settlement cited at the beginning of this article.

The (un)making of the colonial legal subjects

The elaborate system of revenue knowledge production and rural education of the 1850s produced mixed results. While the British did obtain more detailed revenue accounts, historians have argued that such accounts only amounted to a distorted representation of rural Indian society.Footnote ⁶⁹ This section will show that the possibility of such distortion haunted many contemporary British observers. As we shall see, if the British put accurate revenue knowledge at the foundation of their ambition of fostering a new colonial subjecthood, then the unreliability of such knowledge would understandably shake the whole edifice of colonial ideology.

Distortion happened starting from the very first steps of the settlement, namely the measurement and classification of the land. The land was not an ‘objective’ space waiting to be surveyed. It was rather part of the local social and physical landscape, the surveying of which required a combination of skills beyond measurement. In Budaun, for example, the river that flowed through the district often changed its course, revealing its bed and inundating cultivated land. Adapting to the caprice of the river, the villagers had to negotiate continuously among themselves to transform the changing course of the river into land boundaries.Footnote ⁷⁰ Boundaries that did not overlap with salient topographic features were even harder to locate, since they were often simply collectively acknowledged by the villagers.Footnote ⁷¹ In addition, because different types of land such as ‘cultivated’ and ‘culturable’ were assessed differently, the surveyors were required to first classify the land they measured and then calculate the area of each type of land separately.Footnote ⁷² To apply the skills of measurement effectively, one thus also had to make use of the skills of a local revenue official—that is, the skills of identifying shifting land occupancy and the types of land usage.

The bureaucratic infrastructure of the revenue survey, however, proved to be inefficient and even counter-effective in facilitating this combination of skills. According to the decision of Bentinck's 1833 conference, the Collectors were supposed to summon the local Indian revenue officials to mark out the village boundaries before the surveyors were to proceed.Footnote ⁷³ But, as mentioned earlier, the revenue officials and the surveyors were two separate bureaucratic bodies. They were not always able to coordinate seamlessly as they wanted to.Footnote ⁷⁴ Without the close supervision of the revenue officials, both the British surveyors and the Indian amin, neither of whom were experts on the issue of land usage, often classified the land according to their own discretion, disregarding the locally and temporally varying physical conditions such as precipitation.Footnote ⁷⁵

In this respect, Thomason's rural education, which encompassed the skills of both revenue administration and land measurement, showed some promising signs. In Aligarh, the government hired a certain Abdool Kadur (Abdul Qadir) in 1853 to teach the local patwari land measurement. The British commended Abdul Qadir for being ‘industrious and capable’. The patwari he taught, however, were found to be deficient in ‘practical knowledge’ because Abdul Qadir had not asked them to ‘apply their acquired rules to actual fields’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Many patwari nevertheless did gradually became adept at surveying as they practised more. Combining the skills of measurement, their original expertise in revenue administration, and their intimate acquaintance with the local landscape, the patwari trained in this way helped to enhance the quality of the khasra survey in many places.Footnote ⁷⁷

What colonial rural education failed to achieve was its larger goal of transforming this limited ‘success’ into the basis of an obedient legal subjecthood. As we have seen in the previous section of this article, British officials represented by Thomason envisioned the ideal colonial subjects as people who would obey the colonial state by cherishing property rights: they should obey not out of the fear for coercive power, as under the ‘despotic’ regimes of the Mughals, but out of an appreciation of the ‘benefits’ of the revenue policies of the colonial state. In reality, Indian villagers were quick at taking advantage of the expanding colonial regime of documentation in addressing proprietary disputes among themselves. It was, of course, not the British who taught them to do so. Recent studies on documentary practices in early modern South Asia have clearly demonstrated that both the states and the ordinary people had long been engaged in producing, preserving, and utilizing written evidence, although these documentary cultures did not always map onto their European counterparts.Footnote ⁷⁸ But what is important as well as ironic here is that even the British district officials themselves did not always celebrate these indigenous efforts of protecting ‘property rights’ as signs of the achievement of rural education, as they should have done if they truly bought into the official ideology. Instead, as the villagers flooded both the mofussil courts (lower-level courts established outside urban centres and presided by Indian judges) and the district courts, many British officials came to realize that the kind of legal consciousness that they purportedly wished to nurture would quickly obscure even the limited improvement of accuracy in revenue administration.

A large number of village legal cases from the 1850s demonstrate this point clearly.Footnote ⁷⁹ In a case from Allahabad, for example, a group of cultivators charged with arrears of rent claimed, as did the mofussil judge, that the patwari of their villages always produced partial testimony because he was the ‘sworn ally’ of the plaintiff, a landholder in the village.Footnote ⁸⁰ In Mainpuri, the defendant in a land dispute accused the patwari of falsifying documents in collusion with the plaintiff, a tenant of the defendant, who was the patwari's brother.Footnote ⁸¹ In Gorakhpur, a landholder brought up a case in which she accused the patwari of her village for furnishing false evidence in favour of the defendant, a cultivator charged with arrears of rent. The defendant replied that the plaintiff made this accusation because, since her previous attempt to oust the patwari had failed, she was now trying to take her revenge.Footnote ⁸² The list goes on.Footnote ⁸³ Our evidence here, mediated by the colonial reports, does not always allow us to inquire into any actual ‘collusion’ that was going on. But what is worth noticing is that all the measures that the British had taken for insuring accurate revenue knowledge-making, from bureaucratization to the revenue survey, did not change things in any dramatic way for the colonial government as compared with the situation four decades ago: discourses of collusion and forgery still featured prominently in the accusations against the local Indian officials. There were nevertheless two major differences. First, now it was not only the British but the villagers themselves who were using this language of collusion to charge against each other. Second, while the British only spoke of the collusion between the local officials and the landholders, in the actual legal cases, those accused of collusion included both the landholders and their tenants.

One is tempted to see these cases as signs of the ordinary villagers’ ‘appropriating’ the colonial discourse for their own use. But again, the idea of the tie between the local Indian officials and their patrons, kins, and allies was not a colonial ‘invention’ that the British taught to their Indian subjects. It is only because the villagers understood the existing local worlds of social relationship constituted by, among other things, acknowledged forms of service exchange, kinship, and shifting rivalries and alliances at particular points of time that all these forms of relationship could become hotly contested points in the colonial law courts. For the villagers, these contested relationships were parts of the everyday reality that they had to deal with and mattered no less, if not far more, than the orders of a foreign Collector who lived miles away. In other words, despite the colonial efforts to make the villagers identify themselves solely with the state, the local population was still invested in both the local and the ultra-local networks of power. For the Indian officials in particular, this meant that, while they did begin to serve the British as (semi)bureaucrats, sometimes quite effectively, they simultaneously retained the incentives as well as the capacity to revert back to the local worlds and subvert the interest of the colonial state.

The ways in which the British officials dealt with these disputes illustrate the inability of the district-level colonial bureaucracy to transform the complicated local social relationships in favour of government interest. The British district judges, in making their decision regarding the appeal cases from the mofussil courts, generally would not conduct any field investigation. Rather, they mainly relied either on certain abstract rules of logical deduction such as ‘written accounts are superior to oral evidence’ or on the examination of existing records to determine whether the arguments provided by the plaintiffs, the defendants, and the Indian judges were to be trusted.Footnote ⁸⁴ Confined in their offices in the urban centres, the British officials sometimes even ran into conflict among themselves when dealing with the ceaseless petitions filed by the local population. This is clearly exemplified by the case of Ghazipur. When unfavourable charges were brought to him against certain patwari in the late 1840s, the Collector believed the accusers in most cases. His superior, the Commissioner of the Benares Division, however, tended to find these accusations doubtful. Similar to the British district judges, both the Collector and the Commissioner here made their judgement simply on the basis of comparing the petitions submitted by the different parties involved.Footnote ⁸⁵ This divergence of opinions suggested that, even if many British officials boasted how they traversed rural North India themselves during the 1833 settlement, they were unable to continue to do so in order to familiarize themselves with the changing local social worlds after the settlement concluded.Footnote ⁸⁶ Without a sustainable close contact between the government and the localities, the Settlement Officer of Agra warned that the patwari in the future would not be able to keep the village revenue documents up to date in the correct form.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Settlement Officer of Mainpuri also expressed the fear that the lapse of time would destroy the utility of the revenue documents and nullify the achievement of the settlement.Footnote ⁸⁸

Not only did Thomason's rural education fail to create an obedient subjecthood; it did not always appear relevant to the villagers and sometimes even incited their suspicion. This is partly due to the fact that the skills Thomason wanted to redefine had their well-established positions in the local social worlds. Certain kinds of skills were often closely bound with particular roles played by particular local social groups. The above-cited case of Abdul Qadir, who was hired to teach the patwari a new skill, was still rare during this period. In more cases, oppositions arose when British officials attempted to disrupt the original connection between skills and social groups. For example, while Thomason and his supporters believed that the neat Urdu script should be adopted as the standard for record-keeping in order to ensure universal intelligibility, H. S. Reid, the then Visitor General of Schools of the NWP, reported in 1852 that, in places where the kaithi script was commonly used, the patwari were unwilling to switch to Urdu.Footnote ⁸⁹ Many from the merchant families were also reported to want their children to simply learn how to sign their names in mahajani and had little interest in other scripts.Footnote ⁹⁰ Even more tellingly, C. C. Fink, in his report on education in Agra, related that a patwari asked him what the village accountants should do if the government taught the landholders to read and write and keep their own accounts.Footnote ⁹¹ The grand vision of rural education never looked the same from the rural perspective.

To point out the difficulties that the colonial state experienced in accessing the local worlds of social relationships is not to recall the stereotype of an enclosed Indian ‘village community’. The very fact that the local Indian officials simultaneously set their foot in two worlds of power defies this notion. What I wish to emphasize is simply the significance of the local scenarios in shaping larger power dynamics. From the standpoint of the colonial state, local social relationships were sources of ‘corruption’. Bureaucratization and education were essentially means that the British adopted to uproot the Indians from these relationships and enlist them into the colonial network of knowledge-making. But if the local social worlds continued to matter so much for the people living in the localities, if the colonial state could not even ostensibly displace the ties between these social worlds and a couple of hundreds of local officials, it is only expectable that the state would fail to transform the subjecthood of the entire rural population. In the end, the ideal colonial subject remained a mere ideal.