Introduction
On 11 October 1824, Charles Stewart, a retired major in the East India Company's army in India and professor of Oriental languages at the Company's training college at Haileybury, wrote to the Company's directors requesting support for the publication of a new textbook for teaching Persian, which remained the official administrative language in British India until 1835. The book would contain printed versions of original Persian documents drawn from the Company's administrative offices in India, with contemporary English translations and facsimiles, and explanations of the different forms of Persian handwriting. Stewart noted the practical difficulties that British students faced in making the transition from studying Persian literature at Haileybury in Hertfordshire to working with handwritten, bureaucratic documents in India: ‘as it frequently happens that a young man possessing a sufficient quantity of book learning, is much at a loss when he joins an office, from not having been accustomed to the forms of business’.Footnote 1
When Stewart's book of Original Persian Letters was eventually published in 1825, each chapter dealt with Persian texts relating to different ‘forms of business’. The first chapter consisted of petitions presented to the Company government by Indian subjects. The Persian term for these was ‘arzi, often rendered as ‘arzee’ in English. Of the nine petitions included, seven had been presented to the Calcutta Committee of Revenue in 1775, in the early period of the Company's government in Bengal, and two were more recent petitions to British district magistrates. The petitions were drawn up in a relatively standardized form, as short, direct forms of address, a single paragraph long, that began with the name of the petitioner and often included a deferential salutation, for example ‘hail, cherisher of the poor!’ (gharib parwar salamat). After this they recounted in brief terms some grievance and ended by requesting an action or order from the government. Among the several petitions presented to the Committee of Revenue in Calcutta were a complaint from the inhabitants of a certain village about a tyrannical schoolmaster (mulla) who had violently blocked access to a public road near his house and a complaint against Company soldiers who were plundering villages belonging to the petitioner.Footnote 2 Petitions usually ended with a formulaic flourish such as: ‘may the Sun of life and prosperity [aftab-i daulat wa iqbal] continue to shine’ or ‘the Company are masters of the country [malik-i mulk]; on this subject whatever they command. Finis.’Footnote 3
Stewart's collection of Persian documents offers a rare glimpse beneath the records of English ‘proceedings’ that constitute the bulk of the preserved archives of early British rule in India. That Stewart began his selection of documents with Persian-language petitions reflected the prominence of these documents in the everyday business of the Company's government.Footnote 4 Furthermore, subsequent chapters of Stewart's collection, though going under different headings, also contained numerous petitions or closely related genres of texts. For example, Chapter 2, titled ‘Proceedings of the Courts of Justice’, included several legal petitions (also termed ‘arzi) presented to the Company's ‘adalats or law courts.Footnote 5 Chapter 3, headed ‘Arizdashts or Letters from Inferiors’, explained that ‘the words Arzy and Arizdasht, were formerly synonymous’, but that the ‘former are now confined to Petitions, the latter to Letters’.Footnote 6 The examples of ‘arzdasht were generally longer and contained more elaborately courteous forms of address than the earlier official ‘arzis. For example, an ‘arzdasht from Anunteram, a Hindu munshi or scribe from Farrukhabad in Awadh, addressed Stewart as ‘the Captain of exalted virtues, and high dignity, the beneficent of the age’. The munshi represented that after serving one Colonel Ashe for three years, ‘for the past seven months I have been at home without employment’. Anunteram therefore asked Stewart to grant him ‘bounty and favor’, urging that such favours would be ‘the cause of your celebrity throughout the world’ and appended the formulaic coda that ‘to add more would exceed the limits of propriety’ (ziyada hadd-i adab).Footnote 7 Stewart's collection thus catalogued closely related genres of official and non-official modes of petitioning and letter-writing in early colonial India, and seemed to locate British rule in India within a longer genealogy of Persianate governance and adab (propriety or moral conduct) stretching back to the era of the great Mughals.Footnote 8
Stewart's textbook is a useful starting point for considering the uses and meanings of petitioning as a form of political conduct in the early decades of British rule in Bengal.Footnote 9 This article argues that the presentation and reception of written petitions became an important technology of colonial state-formation and a vehicle for the internal consolidation of British power.Footnote 10 As in other early modern contexts, the presentation of various kinds of written petitions to rulers and officials was an established feature of early modern South Asian states.Footnote 11 In Britain and its overseas colonies, collective and individual petitioning to the Crown, parliament, and other political and legal bodies was a frequent practice in public life.Footnote 12 Corporate bodies like the East India Company also fostered their own modes of petitioning, including for appointments within the service or appeals resulting from the decisions of the Company's different agencies.Footnote 13 Long before the Company's eighteenth-century conquests, Company officials were also embroiled in South Asian forms of petitioning, both as supplicants of Indian rulers and as receivers of petitions in their coastal settlements.Footnote 14 After the conquest of Bengal in the 1750s and 1760s, the East India Company's capital in Calcutta quickly became a magnet for Indian petitioners seeking patronage, favour, and the adjudication of disputes over all manner of requests, claims, and complaints. Petitions offered an occasion for the East Company's central authorities to enact and extend its emergent sovereignty, through receiving supplicants, intervening in local disputes, and pursuing local inquiries. Petitions from the districts were also an important way in which the Company informed itself about its vast new territories as well as a means for the Company's central authorities to keep tabs on district officials. By creating avenues for petitioners to receive redress, the Company consciously tried to appropriate forms of legitimacy from pre-colonial rulers, especially the erstwhile Mughal empire.
While the broad concept of a petition or ‘arzee’ formed a kind of bridge between South Asian subjects and British rulers, petitioning was also a fraught and highly contested political practice.Footnote 15 Charles Stewart's Persian textbook seemed to present Indian petitioning as a relatively orderly process, in which individual supplicants petitioned British officials and colonial agencies in a standardized and deferential manner with complaints or requests. At the same, however, Stewart's collection was premised on the great difficulties that British officials often had in simply reading and understanding Persian ‘arzis. Recent studies of early colonial rule in South India have suggested that Indian petitioning rapidly became a source of anxiety for British officials and an object of reform. Bhavani Raman's study of the British ‘document Raj’ in South India and Potukuchi Swarnalatha's essay on petitions from Indian weavers have both emphasized how colonial regulations tried to detach the process of petitioning from other forms of protest, including large public assemblies or threats of desertion or riot. They have shown how colonial authorities tried to redirect petitioning into a new colonial judiciary as an individualized, juridical form of address.Footnote 16 Similarly in Bengal, Indian petitioners were often viewed with deep suspicion by British authorities, especially when they engaged in collective forms of petitioning. While rival British factions in Calcutta occasionally mobilized Indian petitions to fight their own political battles, Company officials also worked to discourage more scandalous and politically contentious forms of petitioning, working to discipline the content and form of ‘arzis through new judicial regulations.
The article first considers some of the venues and forms of petitioning in early modern South Asian states, before tracing the role of petitioning after the British conquest of Bengal, focusing especially on revenue offices and law courts in the Company's capital of Calcutta. Whereas the political history of the Company state is usually centred on the council chambers of the East India Company and on communications between British officials, the study of petitioning highlights the clamorous kachahris (public offices) of Bengal which coexisted uneasily with the rarefied sphere of the Company's ruling councils. The article moves on to consider petitioning as a theme in political debates on the character and future of British rule in Bengal. It analyses a well-known Persian history written by a member of the Mughal service elite in eastern India in the 1780s, showing how this text used earlier Mughal ideals of accessible justice for petitioners in order to critique East India Company rule as distant from, out of touch with, and indifferent to the welfare of Indian subjects. This Mughal-inflected conception of petitioning as an aspect of responsive rulership is then contrasted with the plans of Lord Cornwallis (governor-general from 1786–1793) for a revamped system of colonial judiciary. Cornwallis portrayed Indian practices of petitioning the central government in Calcutta as a pathological symptom of widespread misgovernment by a tax-hungry Company regime that had connived in the ‘despotic’ traditions of Indian states. His remedy was an expanded system of judicial review in the provinces, with a highly regulated system of judicial appeal to higher courts. Cornwallis's new regulations for civil justice in 1793 were explicitly designed to re-educate Indian petitioners and their agents (wakils) in the sanctioned forms of judicial address. Cornwallis's proposal for the extension of the Company's law courts was accompanied by a strong statement on the exclusive power of the governor-general and council to regulate the judiciary and the necessary exclusion of ‘native’ subjects from the realm of colonial policymaking and legislation. Thus, the figure of the Indian subject as petitioner became crucial to the ideological production of British imperial rule in India as a form of enlightened despotism, in which Indian subjects were encouraged to petition for legal rights on the basis of procedural rules laid down by British governors, but would be formally excluded from the realm of colonial high politics.Footnote 17
Petitioning and the colonial transition
The act of receiving petitions was a recognized marker of sovereignty and authority in early modern South Asia which also implied an obligation on the part of the ruler to do justice and to dispense patronage.Footnote 18 Practices of petitioning in Bengal, a province of the Mughal empire which became a semi-independent state under Mughal provincial governors or nawabs in the eighteenth century, were shaped by a long history of Mughal imperial state-building and the ‘Persianization’ of regional political culture.Footnote 19 Works of Mughal political theory portrayed the emperor as the sacred pivot of the social and political order, and also as the fountain of justice.Footnote 20 Mughal treatises on political ethics (akhlaq) stressed the importance of the ruler being attentive and accessible to subjects. In this tradition, the ruler was often seen as a kind of physician attending to the ‘complaints’ of society and thereby promoting balance and harmony.Footnote 21 Linda Darling recently highlighted the symbolic importance of petitioning within Timurid/Mughal conceptions of just kingship, relating this to Arabic and Persian traditions of the reciprocal duties binding rulers and subjects, encapsulated in the notion of the ‘circle of justice’: ‘there can be no government without men, No men without money, No money without cultivation [or, prosperity], And no cultivation [or, prosperity] without justice and good administration.’Footnote 22 Thus, the emperor Jahangir (1605–1627) emulated the ancient Persian ruler Anushirvan, famous as a paragon of justice, by building a gold chain with bells and attaching this to his royal apartments in Agra. Frustrated petitioners outside the palace were supposed to ring the chain to gain the emperor's attention. While the emphasis in Mughal chronicles was often on emperors meeting complainants face to face in public audience chambers, written petitions were also an important mode of making requests and expressing grievances. The French traveller Francois Bernier described crowds of petitioners in the emperor Aurangzeb's (1658–1707) court, holding petitions above their heads before being called forward by the emperor.Footnote 23
Similar practices of courtly petitioning extended into the numerous governorships and lordships of the far-flung Mughal realms and beyond. While disputed claims were often adjudicated within local community structures, including village or caste tribunals or corporate groups of merchants, petitions of appeal also travelled upwards to imperial officials, including local legal officers (daroghas, qazis, or kotwals) or district or provincial governors.Footnote 24 Nandita Sahai, in her study of artisans in eighteenth-century Marwar (Jodhpur) in Rajasthan, shows how presenting ‘arzis to local kachahris or to the central royal court had become an everyday aspect of state-formation through which claims to rights and favours were disputed and adjudicated. The growing prevalence of registers of petitions in regional states like Marwar is itself testimony to the growing bureaucratization and scribalization of state power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 25 Even after the collapse of centralized Mughal power, regional states continued to extend and deepen the reach of Mughal administrative forms in a process of ‘regional centralization’.Footnote 26 Some of the earliest Indo-Persian books published and translated by the British in Bengal were letter-writing and bureaucratic manuals, which contained various forms of letters, addresses, and petitions with the elaborate phrasing appropriate for different ranks of addressor and addressee.Footnote 27
European traders needed to learn the correct etiquette and language of Mughal styles of petitioning rulers to secure trading privileges from imperial authorities or to gain redress in particular disputes. Mughal farmans (orders) or sanads (title deeds) to European companies often included a summary of a prior petition as part of their texts.Footnote 28 During the early modern era, common Indo-Persian terms for petitions, such as iltimas and ‘arzi, entered the lexicon of British in India, corrupted into ‘estimauze’ or ‘urzee’, and were even used as verbs, as in the directions to a British agent in Balasore in 1690 that he ‘should urzdaast the Nabob’ (nawab or provincial governor).Footnote 29 Indian merchant communities from particular towns and regions also collectively petitioned Mughal governors and emperors to secure tax concessions or relief from other grievances.Footnote 30 Meanwhile, in European settlements and forts on the coasts of India, governors and councils commonly received collective petitions from Indian subjects. In 1762, for example, certain ‘blacks’ of Calcutta petitioned the English East India Company's council, complaining that they were compelled to serve as arbitrators in the Company's ‘court of Cutcherry’.Footnote 31 Indians also presented complaints to different forms of law courts established by Europeans in coastal towns. After 1726 in Calcutta, some wealthy Indian merchants also took the opportunity to appeal, from the local Mayor's Court, to higher courts of appeal, including the Privy Council, in London.Footnote 32
Though petitioning came in many forms, and was embedded in different languages of power and norms of comportment, written petitions also mediated relations between culturally diverse and mobile subjects and rulers in early modern South Asia.Footnote 33 After the East India Company's military conquest of Bengal in the 1750s and 1760s, petitioning by Indian subjects on a range of subjects, but especially about land rights and taxation, became an important mechanism through which the East India Company became enmeshed in regional and local politics. In a revealing vignette from his Persian history of the rise of British power, Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i, a member of the Mughal provincial elite in the province of Bihar who had lived through the Company's conquest, described his own efforts to instruct British officials on the proper manner of receiving petitions. When Company servant George Vansittart was appointed in 1773 to replace the previous Hindu governor of Bihar, Maharaja Shitab Rai, Ghulam Husain mentioned to Vansittart that the maharaja was accustomed to sitting ‘from one-half of each day down to one-third of each night in hearing petitions [mustami‘-i multamasat], and in giving decisions’. Vansittart apparently replied that ‘being not accustomed [mu‘tad], like Shytab Ray, to sit in public amongst hundreds of people, nor to listen to complaints, and to determine causes, he could not believe that he would be able to comprehend one half of them, but that had any business with government might apply to him privately’. According to Ghulam Husain, Vansittart was ‘a man of quick apprehension’ and ‘constantly dispatched a great deal of business’.Footnote 34
Another contemporary treatise by a Mughal high administrator similarly emphasized attentiveness to petitions of complaint as a crucial feature of just rulership. Muhammad Reza Khan, who served as deputy governor of Bengal under the East India Company between 1765 and 1772, wrote a treatise on the revenues of Bengal in 1775, again to instruct British officials. He noted that one of the first duties of a ruler was ‘immediately to hear and decide all Complaints’, especially because ‘as most of the people of this country are poor and needy, if they have not redress they despond, and sit down with broken hearts under their oppression’.Footnote 35 Echoing Indo-Persian traditions of ethical rulership, Reza Khan emphasized that ‘justice is the principal thing to be attended to: the welfare of the Country depending entirely upon the due distribution of it’. To this end, according to this treatise, the nawabs and their high officials had presided over two main courts of justice in their capital of Murshidabad, hearing appeals from other district agencies. One was mainly for criminal cases where decisions were made on the expert interpreters of Muslim law books (qazis and muftis). The other court was attached to the chief revenue office (the khalisa sharifa or ‘khalsaw’ in the English translation), where ‘all Disputes about Lands, Debts, and quarrels were Decided, and the decrees were inforced by the President of the Court’.Footnote 36
In 1772, acting on orders from Company directors in London to ‘stand forth’ as diwan (or chief Mughal revenue collector) of Bengal, Governor-general Warren Hastings moved many of the central offices of the nawab’s government to the Company's headquarters in Calcutta. The Company, at this stage, often sought to appropriate rather than overturn earlier Mughal and nawabi forms of rule as it tried to exert greater control over the business of tax collection in the provinces. Warren Hastings understood the responsibilities of the Company as Mughal diwan to include not just tax collection but also the administration of civil justice. (Criminal justice was delegated to officials of the ruling nawab in Murshidabad, acting as the Mughal nazim, although Hastings also tried to supervise this aspect of government.) Meanwhile, Hastings professed his aim to administer justice in Bengal according to his conception of Mughal precedent, establishing diwani (civil) and faujdari (criminal) ‘adalats (law courts) in the provinces, from which appeal could run in civil cases to the sadr or central diwani ‘adalat composed of members of the Company's ruling council in Calcutta.Footnote 37 British Collectors in the districts were ordered to ‘at all time be ready to receive the petitions of the injured’. Official regulations required them to place a box ‘at the door of the Cutcherry, in which the complainants may lodge their petitions at any time or hour they please’. In order that petitioners could expect free access to government, unhampered by the machinations of officials, the Collector was instructed to keep the key to the petition box in his own possession. Each court day he should ‘have such Arzees as he may find in it, read immediately in his presence, by the Arzbeggy of the Cutcherry’.Footnote 38 This reference to the‘arzbegi (a Mughal officer for receiving ‘arzis) shows how Company regulations echoed Mughal imperial ideals of accessible justice and were meant to build on existing practices of receiving petitions in the districts.
The Company's ruling council, which after 1774 consisted of five British officials, including the governor-general, met to conduct their business in a closed council chamber. There was thus no direct equivalent in Calcutta of the public audience chamber (diwan-i ‘am) in the royal courts (darbars) of Mughal capital cities. But crowds of Indian petitioners nonetheless sought out Hastings and other members of the Company's ruling council to present petitions in person, often on the streets of Calcutta. General John Clavering, after taking up his position on the Supreme Council in Calcutta in 1774, wrote to his brother in England that complainants ‘flocked round our palanqueens every time we went out, with numberless petitions’, some in English and some in ‘country languages’.Footnote 39 Those in English he conveyed to the council and those in Indian languages, to another Company servant employed as his interpreter. A few years later, in June 1777, General Clavering told the council that
the number of petitioners clamouring in the streets for redress of their complaints is become a nuisance that requires the interposition of the board, either to provide the means of redressing their complaints, or at least preventing their insulting the members as they come to the council. I have been attacked today by a mob of people so very outrageous that it was impossible for me to extricate myself from them without violence.
Governor-general Warren Hastings also stated that he could scarce ‘quit my house’ without being assailed ‘by clamourous petitioners in the public streets’, even though he made a ‘strict rule’ not to attend to them.Footnote 40
In fact, the Company government had previously (in 1773) issued a ‘public advertizement’ ‘that no Petitions or Complaints, which relate to matters properly cognizable in the Moffussull Adawluts [district courts] will be received’ in Calcutta, and had ‘declared that if any persons shall abandon their Houses, and tumultuously assemble in the Streets of Calcutta, under pretense of making their Complaints to the Governor’, ‘they shall be punished and sent to their own homes’.Footnote 41 Nonetheless, petitioners were extremely persistent in their attempts to gain personal access to members of the ruling council, especially if they felt ignored or badly treated by the Company's governing agencies. In November 1779, council member Philip Francis had his palanqueen ‘violently stopped and assaulted by a man’. The man was then seized and asked to explain his ‘extraordinary behavior’. Apparently this man, a ta‘alluqdar (landholder) from Sandvip in east Bengal, had come to complain against alleged oppression by a Calcutta merchant. Under investigation in council, he claimed ‘that he has during five years endeavoured in vain to procure redress of his Complaints, and worn out with so long Delays, says he knows not what he does’.Footnote 42
Many of the petitioners who came to Calcutta—some, like the Sandvip ta‘alluqdar, from relatively distant parts of Bengal—would have been directed to the office of the ‘Superintendent of the Khalsa Records’. What the British called the ‘khalsa’, or ‘treasury’, was the Calcutta version of the Mughal institution of the khalisa sharifa, a main central office of revenue collection.Footnote 43 According to Muhammad Reza Khan, as we have seen, this had also been a central office for hearing and deciding disputes about taxation and land rights under the rule of the nawabs. Hastings had the khalsa records, as well as many old officials and record keepers, moved to Calcutta from Murshidabad in 1772 as part of his assertion of Company sovereignty.Footnote 44 The khalsa comprised a sprawling set of offices housed in the old Fort William in central Calcutta. It included a main ‘public cutcherry’ and distinct branches containing different categories of tax records. A British official was appointed superintendent of the khalsa, under the supervision of the governor and council, with the job of maintaining volumes of his proceedings in English. These proceedings described the superintendent presiding over the daily business of revenue administration, including managing government sales of salt and opium. He also received petitions and held inquiries in ‘public cutcherry’, assisted by numerous ‘native officers of the khalsa’, headed by the rai raiyan (the highest-ranking Indian official) and two qanungos (or registrars of the revenue records), as well as numerous deputies and accountants.Footnote 45 These Indian officers also assisted the governor-general and council when it sat as the chief civil court or sadr diwani ‘adalat or revenue board.
As well as being a clearing house for petitions passed on by the governor-general and other council members, the khalsa quickly became a focal point for Indian petitioning in Calcutta. Many of the landed elite of Bengal—zamindars and ta‘alluqdars charged with paying land taxes to the government—maintained agents or wakils who attended the khalsa regularly in order to present petitions or respond to charges or demands made against their employers. The volumes of khalsa proceedings from the 1770s and 1780s portray a frequently ‘clamourous’ scene of claims-making, mainly concerning taxation, land rights, debts, and other ‘revenue’ matters, including numerous petitions about alleged injustices committed by governing authorities in the districts. Sometimes the superintendent translated petitions into his own records or held proceedings to investigate complaints in Calcutta and wrote reports to the governor-general and council.Footnote 46 More often, especially in cases of petitions from beyond Calcutta, he referred the petitions to the British district Collectors or to the six British ‘provincial councils’ established in major towns across Bengal and Bihar after 1773. For example, the superintendent wrote to Alexander Higginson, chief of the provincial council in Burdwan district in September 1777, concerning a petition presented at the khalsa by a wakil of a certain Muslim inhabitant of Burdwan. The petition sought the right to appeal against a decision of a Burdwan ‘adalat or law court. The superintendent had referred the petition to Higginson to hear the appeal, but the petitioner had ‘long since returned to the Khalsa where he incessantly and loudly continues to prefer his Complaints’. The superintendent urged Higginson to hear the case again, noting that it was ‘not however very probable that a Man would so long and so incessantly persist in an uninterrupted attendance at the Presidency’, where expenses were so high, ‘were he in his own mind fully satisfied that he had no good Right to what he sues for’.Footnote 47
The tendency of petitioners to appeal to Calcutta over the heads of local agencies of government was a source of frequent tension between the superintendent and other Company officials stationed in the districts of Bengal. In January 1773, William Lushington, the Collector of Hughli district, wrote to the superintendent about the ‘exaggerated Representation’ of a petitioner in his appeal against a decision of the Hughli ‘adalat, suggesting that this kind of deceit was ‘much to the apprehended from the disposition of the Natives’.Footnote 48 This kind of ethnic stereotyping, accusing natives of litigiousness and cunning, was often a defensive tactic by British officials worried about the effects of Indian complaints on their own reputations. In a letter to the khalsa superintendent, Lushington, for example, expressed his ‘warm resentment’ about how the khalsa's recording of petitions would ‘tend to fill the publick record with false Testimonies of the Conduct of the Company's servants’.Footnote 49 Lushington was also suspicious of the role of Calcutta wakils or agents in fomenting disputes: ‘it is the Business of Vakeels,’ he wrote to the khalsa, ‘(and of men who subsist only by the disturbances they create) to embroil matters as much as possible to ensure themselves the means of living’.Footnote 50
While many petitions in the khalsa were from individuals, complainants also came in groups to complain collectively about alleged injustices. In May 1777, for example, 32 inhabitants from the recently conquered kingdom of Tripura in eastern Bengal presented a petition to Governor-general Warren Hastings alleging oppressions against one Mr Campbell, who had been appointed by the Company as ‘sezawal’ or overseer of the revenue collections in Tripura. These petitioners, who were referred to the khalsa for further inquiries, claimed that Campbell had unfairly raised tax assessments, and ‘has beaten us on account of the Revenue, and has not attended to our Complaints’.Footnote 51 Informed of this, Campbell expressed his surprise and annoyance in a letter to the khalsa, dismissing the complainants as not ‘any of the real Ryots’ (ra‘iyats, subjects or peasants) but ‘some inferior Chowdries or intermediate Collectors’ who had conspired to mislead the raja of Tripura about the true state of their resources: they were therefore ‘interested Men’.Footnote 52 After interviewing several of the petitioners, and corresponding with Campbell and the local raja, the superintendent concluded that the real goal of the petitioners, and indeed of the raja himself, was the removal of Campbell from their domain ‘as no English gentleman has hitherto resided in this District with a Controul over the Collections’. He further reported that the raja's wakils had been constantly complaining ever since Campbell's arrival in the region, and that one of these, Bulram, ‘has been delivering petitions for this purpose to different Members of the Administration which have at times been reported to the Superintendant’. The superintendent also noted the ‘indecent and violent Behaviour’ of the Tripura wakils: ‘they seeming determined to effect by noise and clamour what they found themselves unable to establish by Proof’.Footnote 53
Petitioning could, then, provide an occasion for expressing anger and dissent at the Company's policies and for bringing local political disputes to the attention of central government. But the Tripura petitioning campaign also suggests the centripetal dynamics of petitioning from the provinces, and the way in which receiving petitions in Calcutta was an important mechanism for the consolidation of sovereignty in the new political capital. Ironically, petitions that demanded greater local autonomy and the removal of the ‘English gentleman’ also addressed the British governor-general in Calcutta as the huzur (or ‘presence’, a Persian term denoting a royal court or centre of government) and a dispenser of justice. Petitioning, then, even as it gave vent to resistance and protest, also reinscribed the Company government as the new fulcrum of sovereign power.
Indeed, the attempt to summon the central government over the heads of local officials and landlords was a constant theme in Indian petitioning at the khalsa. In October 1776, for example, a group of peasants from the northern Bengal district of Rajshahi reported that officials of the local zamindar had violently oppressed them. When they had previously complained to the Company council at Murshidabad they had been referred back to the zamindar who, they claimed, had merely punished them and their families for making complaints. ‘You are the Rulers of the Country,’ the translated petition to the Company's ruling council read, ‘and it belongs to you to determine on this occasion.’ Like many petitions, this one also emphasized the reciprocity of relations between loyal subjects and just rulers: ‘having thus obtained Justice we will ever employ ourselves in offering up Vows for your Prosperity’.Footnote 54 In this case, however, several of the Rajshahi petitioners later retracted their signatures on the petition, claiming to have received ‘money for their Expences’ from political rivals of the zamindar who ‘collected together some of us Bramins, and agreed to give each of us three Rupees that we might all write in giving a Petition to the council’. They further told the superintendent that ‘there are very few Rajshahy Riots in Calcutta, and that the greatest Part of the People collected together by the Complainants are hired in Calcutta’.Footnote 55 This story of an apparently cooked-up petition suggests the complex infrastructure that grew up around the practice of presenting written petitions. Petitioning created a demand for petition writers and for agents or wakils with the requisite language skills and political access as well as, on occasion, for plausible-looking complainants.Footnote 56
Indian petitioning also became implicated in the intense factionalism that marked the high politics of early colonial Calcutta. Frequent wars with Indian states and other European powers, combined with the major Bengal famine of 1769–1770, had destabilized the Company's attenuated system of global financing, fomenting fierce disputes in London between cliques of Company directors and shareholders, and between the Company and the British government.Footnote 57 Factionalism among Company servants in Bengal was pervasive and closely linked to the byzantine system of preferment and patronage for lucrative offices. Squabbles within British political parties also intersected with entrenched rivalries in Bengal's political elite to produce a fast-changing picture of shifting alliances between leading British and Indian politicians. Indian petitioning became an important weapon in these disputes, as rival groups tried to mobilize evidence of scandal or misgovernment against their rivals or to link their own policy ideas with supposed currents of Indian opinion in Bengal.Footnote 58
This kind of politically charged scandalmongering was especially evident after 1774, when Governor-general Warren Hastings was faced with a hostile majority of three new council members appointed by the British parliament to reform the East India Company's agencies in Bengal. Indian petitioners tried to take advantage of these splits in the ruling elite to get their complaints heard. For example, in 1775 among the crowds of petitioners that surrounded General Clavering, the leader of the majority party on the council, were a party of salt-boilers or ‘molungees’ from the nearby 24 Parganas district, trying to bring complaints for violence and oppression against their employer, one Captain Weller. Weller was an associate of Clavering's great rival, Governor-general Warren Hastings. The salt-boilers alleged that Weller had tried to prevent their complaints by having them ‘chained and sent down to the salt works again and compelled to work by Seapoys being put over them’.Footnote 59 Clavering and his allies did not simply wait for petitioners to come to them, but actively sought them out. One of their key supporters, Joseph Fowke, worked with an influential Indian high official, Nandakumar, to procure petitions alleging bribe-taking or oppression by Governor-general Hastings and his allies. This led Hastings to bring a charge of conspiracy against Fowke and Nandakumar in the Calcutta Supreme Court when evidence was produced that the defendants had composed ‘arzis on behalf of petitioners and forced unwilling complainants to present them to government.Footnote 60
Petitions of complaint were also a useful weapon in the intense institutional rivalries between different agencies of the fledgling colonial state. In 1774, a new Crown-appointed Supreme Court, made up of four British judges independent of the Company service, arrived in Calcutta to exercise a broad and uncertain legal jurisdiction over the British community in Calcutta and over their Indian employees in Bengal. The judges rapidly became embroiled in a series of jurisdictional battles with Company authorities and they encouraged Indians to petition the Supreme Court as a way of generating business for their new court and evidence of wrongdoing by the Company.Footnote 61 Once again, the business of petition-mongering was a high stakes and often violent business. In 1777 Chief Justice Elijah Impey set up a ‘new office for receiving and examining Petitions from the natives & for prosecuting suits of the poor gratis’. But soon after this he reported back to England ‘a melancholy accident occasioned by the new institution’. The diwan of William Chambers, Persian translator to the court, had apparently been ‘very diligent in assisting the petitioners’ and had also refused many offers of bribes from litigants. But the diwan had been ‘found murdered in his Bed by a man who had a few days before offered him his service to play on a Sittar’. Given that none of the valuables of the murdered man was taken, Impey surmised that the assassin had been hired by a person who might have suffered from ongoing investigations of complaints.Footnote 62
It was not long before the surge of petitioning in Calcutta also began to feed back into British politics, as rival groups in Bengal tried to mobilize political support in London. Some wealthy inhabitants of South Asia were able to pursue claims against Company officials in England.Footnote 63 For example, several Armenian merchants from Bengal presented evidence to parliamentary committees in the early 1770s complaining against their imprisonment without charge on the Company's orders.Footnote 64 As the high political conflicts in Calcutta intensified in the 1770s, rival factions in India increasingly procured large-scale petitions from groups of Indian subjects in an effort to gain leverage in British domestic politics. In 1777 Warren Hastings warned his friends that Persian ‘memorials’ critical of him were being written in the old capital, Murshidabad, by supporters of the dismissed deputy governor Muhammad Reza Khan. According to Hastings’ information, these documents, styled mahzar-namas (an Indo-Islamic genre meaning broadly ‘representation’ or ‘testimonial’), complained of the lack of employment for high-ranking Indian officials under the English government. Several of them had apparently been sent back to London to bolster support for Hastings’ critics.Footnote 65
Company officials also procured collective petitions or addresses from Indian subjects in their campaign to beat back the extensive jurisdiction claimed by the royal judges of the Calcutta Supreme Court. Several of these Indian petitions were included in pamphlets, published in London, designed to prove the deep unpopularity of the Supreme Court among Indian inhabitants. For example, in a ‘Persian Petition from the native Inhabitants of the Subah Azeemabad [Patna] to the King’, the ‘poor distressed inhabitants’ appealed directly to King George III as ‘the most sacred king, the shadow of the Almighty’, posing the rhetorical question: ‘from a physician how long can you conceal your pain?’. The ‘native inhabitants’ hoped that the petition would not be rejected from the ‘chamber of audience’ of the English king. They gave ‘a full explanation of all the bad innovations of this Court of Judicature’—the Supreme Court—including its replacing of local Indian law and custom with the alien rules of English law, the high costs of its proceedings, and the way it had been used by ‘the mean, and for knaves, and those of no credit’ to upset the established social hierarchy.Footnote 66
In publishing this Indian petition, the British authors of the pamphlet felt the need to reconcile the apparently determined protests of the ‘native inhabitants’ with conventional British stereotypes of Indians as slavishly devoid of political will or agency. Thus the deferential rhetoric of a petition by Indian revenue farmers that they would rather desert the British provinces than submit any longer to an alien law was described as further proof of the ‘servile and abject state of the natives of these provinces’ and ‘the timidity with which they at last make, any complaints against the usurpations of power’.Footnote 67 Yet, as both Bhavani Raman and Jon Wilson have recently emphasized, early modern South Asian petitions to political authorities often combined a deferential tone with threats of other forms of protest, especially desertion of the ruler's territories.Footnote 68 It is also very striking, in this context, that the petition from Patna to the English king did not in fact confine itself to the workings of Supreme Court, but also made critical comments on the government of the East India Company more generally. On the one hand, the Patna petitioners professed ‘satisfaction and happiness’ that the Company had chosen to preserve indigenous ‘customs and usages’, for example by employing Indian law officers in Company courts. On the other hand, they noted other ill-effects of the Company's conquests: ‘on account of the want of employment from the loss of our services and offices, and the deprivation of the means of subsistence, we were affected with poverty and hunger, with narrow circumstances and distress’.Footnote 69 This petition, although mobilized in London by British inhabitants of Calcutta for their own ends, is therefore also an interesting example of Indian elites appealing over the head of the Company, though apparently with its consent, to the British king.
Petitioning in political theory
While Indian petitioning was an important everyday mechanism of colonial state-formation in Bengal, it also became a significant theme in contemporary political theorizing about the character of British rule in India. This section compares two very different texts from early colonial Bengal—one a Persian history by an Indian scholar-administrator and the other a Minute on civil justice by a British governor-general, in which the figure of the Indian petitioner was given a prominent role in the wider conceptualization of state power.
Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i composed his major history of eighteenth-century India—the Siyar al-muta’akhkhirin (or Review of Modern Times)—in 1781–1782, writing not only as a literate observer, well-versed in the ethical precepts of Indo-Persian historical writing (tarikh) and advice literature on political ethics (akhlaq), but also as an active participant in early colonial politics. He was born in 1727 in Delhi into a Shi‘i family, minor members of the Mughal nobility who had relocated to Patna in Bihar when he was five years old. He was related on his mother's side to Alivardi Khan, the ruling nawab of Bengal from 1740–1756, and the family thrived under the rule of the nawabs, holding administrative positions and becoming wealthy property holders. Ghulam Husain suffered chequered political fortunes during the numerous wars and political upheavals that accompanied the British conquests in the 1750s and 1760s, but eventually allied himself with the Company and retained his father's landed estates at Husainabad in southern Bihar.Footnote 70
Ghulam Husain himself became a petitioner of the Company who travelled to Calcutta to present his grievances. In the early 1770s, he had become a financial guarantor for one of the large zamindars of Bihar—the raja of Siris and Kutumba (or ‘Serris Kotomba’)—and when the zamindar fell behind in his revenue payments to the government, the Company called on Ghulam Husain to pay the balances. He suffered heavy losses and was forced to take a job as a munshi (writer and diplomatic agent) for a British army officer, a Colonel Goddard.Footnote 71 In 1778, Ghulam Husain came down to Calcutta with Goddard and presented a petition to Governor-general Warren Hastings. The petition was then passed on to the superintendent of the khalsa records and translated into the khalsa proceedings. In the petition, Ghulam Husain claimed that he was owed the large sum of Rs 60,000 by the zamindar and ‘was put to the greatest Distress to maintain myself and my family’. He had not only been forced to sell many of his ‘private effects’, but had mortgaged the revenue of his altamgha (landed estate) to his creditors. By a ‘verbal representation of the Petitioner, who attended in person at the khalsa’, Ghulam Husain also told how he had been confined by the Patna council for his revenue balances and was only released after selling family jewels and going further into debt to the merchants (mahajans).Footnote 72 Although the superintendent wrote to the Patna council representing the case as one of ‘great hardship’, Ghulam Husain's petition seems to have achieved only limited results.Footnote 73 He eventually reached a compromise with the zamindar and agreed to be paid a smaller portion of his original demand, but was still trying to recover this money in 1791.Footnote 74
Written while these disputes were still carrying on, Ghulam Husain's history, which was addressed to a British as well as an Indian audience, included an extended treatise on how the British were failing either to understand or to live up to the virtuous traditions of Mughal imperial government.Footnote 75 The British did not conduct business in public audience chambers like the former rulers, but in their own houses, so that petitioners needed first to placate and gain the favour of their household servants. This meant that ‘gentlemen of high descent and great pretensions’ were frequently ‘left in the anti-chamber, ranged against the wall like so many by-standers of no account’.Footnote 76 Because many British officials ‘could not understand the language of their subjects’, they viewed Indian petitioners ‘like a number of pictures set up against a wall’ (majlis-i taswir, or an assembly of portraits).Footnote 77 The system of conciliar government created further difficulties for petitioners, who needed therefore to solicit several different officials and were often subject to the vagaries of factional splits among councillors.Footnote 78 Moreover, according to Ghulam Husain, the British were often fearful or disdainful of noisy crowds of Indian petitioners and in general remained hidden behind closed doors.Footnote 79
As a point of comparison with the remote system of Company government, Ghulam Husain drew on long-standing themes in Indo-Persian political ethics to emphasize the importance of rulers being accessible to address the grievances of subjects. He described how twice a week Mughal emperors and provincial governors would sit in public together with other leading officials in a public darbar so that ‘any one might present his petition himself’.Footnote 80 This enabled rulers to become well-informed about the state of the country while giving their subjects the opportunity to have their grievances heard. Ghulam Husain praised Maharaja Shitab Rai, who had served as governor of Patna under Company rule from 1765–1772, as a recent exemplar of Mughal-style accessible rulership. According to Ghulam Husain, Shitab Rai
comprehended at once, and at the very first outset, the intent of everyone's supplication [iltimas]; and he used to grant it with a deal of condescension, if he had it in his power, and the subject deserved it; or else, he would offer a handsome excuse, in a condoling language, so that no petitioner ever went away from his presence, dissatisfied or discontented.
Unlike British officials, Shitab Rai did not disdain ‘the demands endlessly crowding upon him; but would attend to every one with a regard always proportioned to the petitioner's rank, never chiding or reprimanding anyone’.Footnote 81 Ghulam Husain's treatise explicitly encouraged the Company government to establish a similar pattern of weekly public audiences by the governor or other high officials, so as to inform themselves about political affairs (mu‘amalat) and regulations (zawabit), and also to attend to the concerns of the poor and oppressed (istima‘-i ahwal-i ghuraba wa sitamdidagan).Footnote 82
Ghulam Husain's treatise also drew on his knowledge of British politics to press his case for a more accessible and consultative form of government in Bengal. In a remarkable passage, he described how the padshah or king in Britain, although ‘absolute in his commands’ (nafiz-ul-amr), could not give the Company ‘an order, without the advice and consent of his Council’ (arbab-i kunsil-i khud) ‘and that of the nation’ (kunsil-i vilayat). Thus, Ghulam Husain gave a brief account of the two houses or kunsils of the British parliament, one consisting of nobles (umara) and the other comprising ‘persons, which the principal inhabitants of every city and town of that land have chosen among themselves’.Footnote 83 Ghulam Husain described this practice as very conducive to good order (intizam), but also as ‘ajabi (which has the sense of wonderful, and also something rare and surprising, a marvel).Footnote 84 This suggests that he saw no direct analogy to parliamentary governance within South Asian political practice.
Yet Ghulam Husain's text, so centrally concerned with interactions between rulers and subjects, at least encouraged comparison between British parliamentary governance and Mughal forms of consultative, responsive rulership. In this regard it is perhaps significant that he described how the members of the English ‘council of the kingdom’ (members of parliament) were granted powers of agency (wakalat) by their communities—linking them through this term with the agents (or wakils) who presented complaints on behalf of petitioners in India.Footnote 85 Ghulam Husain also expressly contrasted practices of parliamentary consultation in Britain with the remote and high-handed system of Company governance in India. He described how Company officials in Bengal wrote down administrative rules in books based merely on what they had heard from a few Indian scribes and accountants employed in the government revenue offices, without properly seeking out knowledgeable and experienced people to enquire about the rationale behind these rules (bara-yi chi kar muqarrar gashta). Rather, because the British had an aversion (nafur) to the society of Indians, the ‘gates of communication’ (abwab-i musahabat) were closed between rulers and subjects, and the British remained largely ignorant of the affairs and views of their Indian subjects.Footnote 86
Thus, Ghulam Husain's history made a pitch for a greater role for Indian elites, especially Mughal scholar-aristocrats like himself, in advising the East India Company and shaping the emergent institutions of British rule on the basis of Mughal precedent. By contrast, Lord Cornwallis, the governor-general from 1786–1793, charged with comprehensively reforming the government of Bengal after the war-torn and scandal-ridden governorship of Warren Hastings, professed to think ‘every native of Hindustan (I verily believe) corrupt’ and worked to strengthen the control of British Company servants over the government of Bengal.Footnote 87 Cornwallis's high-handed imperial paternalism was premised on the idea that South Asian states, including the Mughal empire, were characterized by despotic misrule: ‘the Natives,’ he wrote, ‘have been accustomed to despotic rule from time immemorial, and are well acquainted with the miseries of their own tryannic administrations’.Footnote 88 Whereas Ghulam Husain's treatise had looked back to Mughal-era practices of supplicating rulers in public darbar, Cornwallis wanted to redirect what he saw as unruly and inefficient practices of Indian petitioning into the newly regulated spaces of a revamped colonial judiciary.
This concern with re-educating petitioners comes through most clearly in a long Minute on civil justice dated 11 February 1793.Footnote 89 On the previous day, Cornwallis had confirmed his famous ‘permanent settlement’ of the Bengal land tax, by which the British government promised to fix the state's land-tax demand on Bengal in perpetuity, treating zamindars or landlords as hereditary proprietors of landed estates.Footnote 90 The Minute of 11 February sought nothing less than to ‘endeavour to establish a constitution for the country that will protect private property’.Footnote 91 It proposed a more comprehensive system of civil and criminal law courts in the districts of Bengal, staffed by British judges, with decrees appealable first to three provincial courts, and then to the governor-general and council acting as a chief civil and criminal court of appeal.Footnote 92 Crucially, Cornwallis's new system envisaged an expanded sphere for the judicial review of the government's actions: British tax collectors and their Indian subordinates would now be liable for prosecution in Company law courts for breaches of government regulations to ‘prevent in future the tyranny and oppression which has been so frequently exercised throughout the country by the native officers employed in the Collections, and compel the Collectors to adhere closely to the Regulations’.Footnote 93
Cornwallis's Minute argued that the numerous Indian petitioners who crowded into the capital city of Calcutta were a pathological symptom of the ‘erroneous system’ previously adopted by the Company government, which had created insufficient judicial avenues for redressing grievances. The Company, Cornwallis suggested, driven by a quest for higher revenues, had connived in the despotic practices of Indian states, granting district tax collectors large powers not only over tax collections but also in adjudicating complaints against government officials. In effect, Collectors had become judges in their own causes and frightened ra‘iyats (peasants) had learned to ‘look upon him [the Collector] as a party against them from whom they can expect no redress’. Local officials and revenue farmers had also been protected from judicial prosecution and the government had too often ‘shut its eyes to what passed in the Collection of the Revenues’.Footnote 94 This accounted for ‘whole provinces silently submitting for years to oppression, and for the maladministration of collectors having never reached the ear of government until despair getting the better of the terrors of power, the people flock to the presidency to impeach their oppressor’.Footnote 95 Taxpayers’ only redress in effect was in ‘the uncertain and inefficient one of petitioning the Board of Revenue or the Supreme Government’.Footnote 96 Yet such petitions, Cornwallis wrote, had tended merely to result in long, drawn-out, and ‘tedious’ enquiries, hampered by the pervasive local influence of Collectors as the government's main source of local information. Thus, although the Company government in Calcutta had been ‘ever ready to receive complaints of maladministration preferred against the Collectors’, in practice it had often been powerless to prevent or effectively to punish acts of corruption.Footnote 97
Cornwallis's new regulations for civil justice were concerned not only with the venues of Indian ‘complaints’, which redirected Indian petitioners into local law courts (‘adalats), but also with changing the forms of Indian petitions of complaint. A fascinating passage of his Minute detailed the perceived deficits of wakils who acted as the agents of Indian claimants in the Company's revenue kachahris and ‘adalats. Cornwallis's main dealings with wakils had been through his reviewing of cases for appeal in the sadr diwani ‘adalat or chief civil court. He argued that the ‘voluminous and irregular’ records of this court were often attributable to the ‘ignorance’ of Indian wakils. ‘Their pleadings are generally diffuse,’ he wrote, ‘and often irrelevant’ and they ‘are totally unacquainted with the manner of examining witnesses so as to draw forth the truth’. Wakils were chosen, Cornwallis suggested, from among the ‘personal servants’ of landed families rather than from a cadre of sanctioned legal experts and lacked a strong knowledge of the law—and not just Hindu and Muslim law but also British regulations. Cornwallis added that ‘the persons who practice as Vakeels are [in] general of low character. They have no reputation to lose by misconduct, and are often bribed by the opposite party to betray the cause of their constituent.’Footnote 98
Cornwallis's new regulations therefore instructed British judges to appoint a certain number of ‘authorized Vakeels, or native pleaders’. He explicitly aimed to create a new cadre of state-sanctioned native lawyers, by analogy the ‘professional pleaders’ of British courts. While Cornwallis acknowledged the ‘abuses and inconveniences’ and the high costs associated with professional lawyers, he argued that these were ‘far overbalanced by the benefits arising from these professional establishments’. ‘Weak indeed,’ he went on, ‘must be the administration of Justice in a Country where there are no such Establishments.’ Deploying a developmentalist conception of civilization, Cornwallis declared it was the practice in ‘every country in which any considerable advances have been made towards good Government to make the study of the Law a profession and to allow the professors to plead in the Courts of Justice’.Footnote 99
Thus, an important segment of the new judicial regulations was meant to transform these apparently ad hoc wakils into more professionalized lawyers. Litigants would be represented by pleaders who would be vetted for their ‘respectable character’ by British judges and given deeds of appointment. Their fees would also be fixed and regulated by the courts and they would be liable for dismissal for taking excessive or illegal fees or for ‘promoting and encouraging litigious suits’ and for ‘gross behavior’. Preference would be given to wakils who had received some legal training, for example in the government-sponsored Muslim college in Calcutta or the Hindu college in Benares.Footnote 100 Cornwallis hoped that wakils would thus become agents of a new kind of colonial pedagogy, retraining litigants in the processes and forms of the colonial law courts. ‘They would disseminate amongst the people a knowledge of the many important Regulations which have been enacted since our establishment in this Country’ and keep their petitions and pleadings within the sanctioned bounds of the regulations. Further, well-trained lawyers would ‘inform the judges by their pleadings, but also be a great check upon their conduct’ and would put a ‘stop to all the ministerial abuses which are daily practiced by the ministerial officers of the court’. By these means, Cornwallis hoped, ‘the doors of the Council Chamber would no longer be crowded with petitioners for justice’.Footnote 101
Lord Cornwallis may have shared with Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i a sense that justice had been ill-served under the Company government of Bengal and that Indian petitions and complaints had been often disregarded, but the emphasis in their ideas for improving British rule in Bengal were quite different. Whereas Ghulam Husain had pushed for a greater voice for experienced Mughal administrators, and Mughal practices of accessible rulership, in the shaping institutions of government, Cornwallis was explicit that British-made regulations, drawing on what he saw as the advanced principles of British justice, would improve on the despotic inheritance of Mughal rule. Addressing concerns that his ‘ideas of justice were incompatible with our political situation in this country’ and that ‘as the people become rich, they will feel their power, and combine to subvert our government’, Cornwallis highlighted the absolutist core of the British Indian constitution in the ‘entire and uncontrolled’ power of the governor-general in council to make regulations. ‘Although we hope to render our subjects the happiest people in India,’ he wrote, ‘I should by no means propose to admit the Natives to any participation in framing regulations.’ The ‘Supreme Government [must] always possess the means of safety within itself’.Footnote 102 Indians would therefore be allowed to sue for legal rights only on terms established by a British rule of conquest. The extension of avenues of legal redress for Indians was therefore explicitly conjoined to their exclusion from the realm of imperial legislation. Indian petitioners were being enjoined to retreat from the ‘doors of the council chamber’, so that British rulers could exercise their ‘entire and uncontrolled’ power in a suitably Olympian style.
Conclusions
Lord Cornwallis's attempt to replace what he regarded as the confused and uncertain practices of Indian petitioning with a revamped and professionalized system of judiciary represented only one more staging post in the long, drawn-out encounters and contests over the future shape of colonial rule in Bengal.Footnote 103 This article has argued that petitioning was both an everyday technology of colonial state-formation in eighteenth-century Bengal, through which sovereignty and subjecthood were enacted and contested, and also became a site for theoretical debates about the justice, political virtue, and the legitimacy of Company rule. Receiving petitions from Indian subjects was an important mechanism through which the East India Company extended its authority and, at the same time, became enmeshed in late Mughal practices of governance. Long-term processes of Mughal state-formation in Bengal had generated a vibrant culture of claims-making in which a diverse array of subjects sought protection and patronage from imperial authorities. Following the Company's conquest of Bengal, centripetal practices of petitioning contributed to the consolidation of Calcutta as a new political capital. At the same time, the volume and ‘clamour’ of petitioners was often viewed as politically threatening by Company officials, and the British desire to manage and discipline Indian ‘complaints’ was an important stimulus for the making of new administrative regulations. Meanwhile, South Asian intellectuals like Ghulam Husain Khan highlighted the petitionary culture of Mughal governance to instruct new British rulers on norms of justice and responsive rulership derived from Indo-Persian political culture. Petitioning in eighteenth-century Bengal was thus an everyday practice freighted with deep political significance.
The large number of different kinds of petitions in the records of the early colonial government is currently an underutilized resource for historians of the colonial transition. Further attention to the changing languages and idioms of petitioning can help to illuminate the dynamic petitionary culture that had grown up within early modern South Asian states, and also show how colonial conquests began to impact on the venues and styles of petitioning and therefore change everyday conceptions of political and legal subjecthood.Footnote 104 Moreover, the history of petitioning in early colonial India challenges historians to think more about the diverse political legacy of early modern state-formation in South Asia, not only in terms of military government, political economy, and revenue extraction, but also concerning practices of claims-making and public argument.Footnote 105 South Asian subjects of British rule would not easily be disciplined into deferential legal subjects of the colonial judicial state, as Cornwallis might have hoped. Petitioning would remain an important vehicle through which Indian subjects continued to address British rulers, at times reinforcing—and also at times challenging—colonial conceptions of political and legal authority. And though practices of Indian petitioning would be substantially reshaped by colonial regulations and by British norms and practices of political and legal address, it is worth considering to what extent earlier, pre-colonial styles and forms of petitioning continued to resonate within modern South Asian politics.
