Abstract
This book is, among other things, an extraordinarily detailed history of the early phase of colonial rule in North India. It focuses mainly on the present-day districts of Bulandshahr, Meerut, Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, and Dehradun and Haridwar in Uttarakhand. Most of this area (barring Dehradun) came under the control of the East India Company in 1803 following the Company’s successful military campaigns against Daulat Rao Sindia during the Second Anglo-Maratha War. As the Company penetrated the countryside in the Ganga–Jamuna Doab it searched for collaborators among local elites who would help stabilise its regime. For their part, these elites pursued complex strategies that combined collaboration with resistance, at times intensely violent, leaving colonial administrators bewildered. To add to the confusion, the regulations put in place by Cornwallis in 1793 (the Cornwallis Code) sought to reduce the role of the executive machinery in the districts to a minimum.
The Code was based on the assumption that good governance could be ensured by constituting an efficient judicial system. This was in keeping with the professed objective of the Company to establish a government based upon the rule of law, thereby seeking legitimacy for its exercise of power. This was particularly necessary at this juncture in order to draw a veil over the murky history of the British conquest of eastern India. It may be recalled that the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings was still in progress when the regulations were drafted. The Code, Kolff argues in his comprehensive scrutiny of the 1793 regulations, was based upon the understanding that the colonial executive could be sanitised by leaving routine matters of administration to local potentates. This hands-off policy would minimise the possibilities of Company officials at the district level getting involved in local affairs or using their influence for personal aggrandisement. Moreover, a small section of Indian society, mainly the landed elite in the countryside and qasbas, would in this manner be inducted into the apparatus of the colonial state. The Cornwallis Code, or ‘the Indian Magna Charta of the title of the book’ (p. 16), remained officially sacrosanct till the end of the 1820s by which time it had become obvious that that a hands-off policy for the executive could not guarantee a stable colonial regime. District officials would have to undertake the ‘dirty’ business of routine local administration themselves rather than leaving the work to Indians.
Policing and maintenance of law and order, as envisaged by the Code, were left to landed elites, especially in rural areas and qasbas. This implied that till the 1830s, magistrates had little to do. The lazier among them preferred to leave most matters to local thanadars and their underlings. This was the case with William Gorton, magistrate of Meerut (Merath) from 1815 to 1821. Meerut was then the principal administrative centre of the Company’s territories in the Upper Doab. Gorton’s very literal interpretation of the Code’s emphasis on a hands-off approach allowed ‘a secret criminal economy’ to flourish in the area. There was indeed a judicial mechanism which promised to deliver justice, but it had to be set in motion by those who had been wronged. The executive would, meanwhile, remain aloof. Some space for manoeuvre was thus available to local potentates and functionaries who had wielded power under earlier regimes (Najibuddaula or the Sindias). It was the proactive magistrates who were regarded as a bigger problem. From the point of view of Calcutta, these officials were violating the principles underlying the Code, while for ijaradars, taluqdars, zamindars, kotwals and thanadars their meddlesome ways disrupted the new equations that had been worked out after 1803 for sharing power at the local level. Not surprisingly, Gorton’s successor Francis Smith managed to antagonise almost the entire police establishment and influential landholders in the district due to his vigorous campaign against the party of Khairam Shah Khan, the formidable kotwal of Meerut. His measures were soon disowned by his superiors who censured him for having ‘betrayed “a very extraordinary ignorance of the regulations”’ (p. 318). By 1823, he was definitely out of favour. Smith would be reinstated by the end of the decade when many of the features of the Code were done away with, and at the time of his retirement in 1840 was among the top police officials in the Company’s government.
What is curious is the indulgence shown towards the extremely irregular methods employed by William Blaquiere in the first decade of the nineteenth century for controlling crime in the vicinity of Calcutta. Blaquiere was not a covenanted officer though he seems to have been more powerful than the superior civil servants. He had a large network of informers at his disposal which was used by him to apprehend serious offenders. This was against the backdrop of the spurt in incidents of dacoity in Bengal in 1808. Widespread banditry in the province was a result of the dislocation caused by the Company’s revenue policies. Under the circumstances, the colonial state was willing to tacitly sanction the use of unorthodox methods by Blaquiere throughout Lower Bengal. Officials who criticised these methods were quickly silenced. This by itself was an admission of the inadequacies of the Code. The Company’s Magna Charta had to be ignored if it came in the way of colonial consolidation.
The great strength of Kolff’s study lies in the close attention it pays to local histories and careers of district-level British officials as well as of petty functionaries recruited from among the Company’s subjects. He devotes an entire chapter to the administration of Frederick Shore in Dehradun during the 1820s. Frederick (1799–1837), incidentally, was the second son of Cornwallis’s successor, John Shore (governor-general, 1793–97). Dehradun had been acquired relatively recently following the Nepal War. Frederick Shore paid little attention to the 1793 regulations, justifying his own idiosyncratic ‘system’ in terms of the peculiarities of the Dun valley. The Dun was rather different from the tracts lying to the south of the valley in so far as it had limited possibilities for a settled agrarian economy; was sparsely populated; and was in an impoverished condition. For this reason (and also perhaps due to his family connection) the Calcutta authorities let him have his way.
Shore appears to have been genuinely interested in ‘improving’ the area by creating a basic infrastructure to tame this frontier zone. His focus on controlling crime led him to expend considerable energy on the project for building a jail in Dehradun in which prisoners would be treated in a somewhat humane manner: ‘It seems fair to say that Shore’s convicts were better off than those in the prisons of the plains’ (p. 362). Significantly, he employed a qualified hakim to attend to ailing prisoners, having little faith in the abilities of ‘native doctors’ who were little more than compounders. Shore, unlike most of his contemporaries, did not hold indigenous medical knowledge in contempt, declaring that a
hakim’s practice ‘was derived from the same source as our own, and is in many cases similar, in cases superior, and I am convinced that, if prejudice did not prevent Englishmen from supposing that anything could be learnt from a native by consulting these men, a very great many … excellent medicines might be found among the common herbs of India of which we are at present ignorant’. (pp. 363–64)
Shore would become increasingly critical of the disdain that British officials had for the people over whom they ruled.
The construction of roads was central to Shore’s ‘improvement’ programme. For this purpose he extensively used convict labour—the jail served essentially as a labour camp. Using convict labour on public works projects was not unusual at this time. The endeavours in the Dun were distinctive only in the close connection between incarceration and the creation of a reservoir of captive labour for public works in a situation where labour was not easily available. Shore’s interests were wide-ranging. These included the construction of a well in the kachehri compound, itself requiring good engineering skills given the nature of the soil. The well had an ingenuous water-lifting device designed by him.
Of course, the character of the colonial state was not determined by the individual propensities of its personnel. Its penetration of the Doab countryside was marked by ruthlessness and violence. The improvisation resorted to by district-level officials was a response to ground realities and to that extent the Code as a written document had little relevance. Kolff’s path-breaking study of the military labour market of North India, Naukar, Rajput & Sepoy (1990), had examined the implications that the presence a well-armed peasantry had for the Company’s recruitment policies. This peasantry, armed to the teeth as it was, necessitated the use of armed force on a massive scale during the course of the Company’s territorial expansion. Simultaneously, local potentates had to be either made collaborators of the new regime, or else crushed forcefully if they resisted colonial intrusion. The traditional Gujar chiefs of Bulandshahr, for instance, did not submit meekly. And at Kunja, near Saharanpur, the followers of Kallu, who was aligned with the Gujar taluqdar Bijay Singh, put up such stiff resistance in 1824 that a contingent of Gurkha troops had to be brought in to destroy their stronghold.
It could not have been otherwise. When the Landhaura riyasat (now in Uttarakhand; the afterlife of the dispute about its inheritance figures in Partha Chatterjee’s A Princely Impostor) was dismembered immediately after the death of its Gujar chief Raja Ram Dayal Singh (1813), the total revenue demand of villages of the erstwhile riyasat was increased fivefold, that is, one lakh rupees to five lakh rupees. This was the general trend. Further, in the Saharanpur countryside a powerful clique comprising the revenue farmer Sheikh Kallan, the judge and magistrate of Saharanpur Rivers Grindall, the sheristadar of Grindall’s court Dhokal Singh and the wealthy mahajan of Shamli Lala Lakshman Das attempted to appropriate the bulk of the villages of the estate.
In other words, the Company’s policies created a desperate situation wherein that section of local elites which was excluded from any share in power under the new dispensation sought to preserve some of its residual influence by exploring various options and turning to violence if all else failed. In turn, the district officials of the Company had to fine-tune their responses, disregarding the written word. The colonial regime was after all discriminatory and unjust. The Code notwithstanding, its assertion of paramountcy produced what Radhika Singha has referred to as ‘a despotism of law’. Through his narrative of ‘stories about particular people and particular places’, Kolff helps us to understand better how all this came about.