by Jon Wilson
Burke’s championing of the principle of property allowed him to win the debate easily. Hastings’ arguments could too easily be characterized as a defence of tyranny. On the other hand, Burke offered an argument that connected to the British political class’s fear about the creeping power of central government, but also offered a principle able to ‘settle’ the Company’s relationship with India for good. Burke’s arguments were given practical life in two acts passed to regulate the East India Company’s government of its Indian territories, in 1784. Parliament’s India Acts were intended to restore order and put the Company’s rule on a secure footing. The first made the Governor-General a Crown appointment with absolute power and created a Board of Control, made up of ministers selected by Parliament, to monitor all the Company’s correspondence with India. The second mandated the Company to restore the rights of different classes of men who owned land, and settle ‘upon principles of moderation and justice, the permanent rule by which their respective tributes and services shall in future be paid’. The property of ‘divers, rajas, zemindars . . . and other native landholders’ was to act both as a bulwark against British avarice and a guarantee for the East India Company’s ability to collect revenue.16
The absolute and sacred power of government
The man sent to replace Warren Hastings as Governor-General and to put this new settlement into practice was Charles, Earl and then Marquess Cornwallis. Cornwallis was an aristocrat and a soldier, a stoical man ‘firm in his purposes’ and uncritical of his own thoughts. Like Burke, Cornwallis had Whiggish views about the need for a balance in which the power of kings was challenged by the rights of propertied social classes. But in practice he was used to being obeyed, and always able to project himself as a seat of authority and power. Cornwallis had been second in command of the British troops defeated by republicans in America. Cornwallis had surrendered British troops at Yorktown, yet he managed to avoid any blame for the collapse of Britain’s North American empire. His task in India was to ensure a similar defeat did not happen there.
Cornwallis arrived in Calcutta in November 1786 in the middle of a financial crisis. ‘The state of our finances is alarming, the difficulties are infinite,’ he wrote. ‘I feel that the whole may go to ruin in my hands.’ Cornwallis’s plan was to stop British corruption and stave off ruin by writing a new set of rules. Those rules, variously described by contemporaries as ‘the Cornwallis Code’, the ‘new system’ or the ‘permanent settlement’, were supposed to bind the fate of India’s landed elites to the destiny of the Company. The rights and revenues of landholders were fixed in perpetuity. So long as they paid revenue in regular instalments, the Company withdrew from any pretence that it could govern rural society. Property rights were to be secured by new courts of law and new revenue offices that spread out through district capitals scattered across the East India Company’s territories.
Edmund Burke had argued that the East India Company was ‘a Commonwealth without a people’ in which there were ‘no people to control, to watch, to balance against the power of office’. Burke’s aim had been to erect Indian property as the permanent counterbalance to the Company’s power. But as the Burkean principles articulated by Parliament cascaded out into official practice in India they created an abstract, limited and silent state, obsessed by nothing more than its own security, whose influence worked above all to make the conditions of local prosperity more insecure. For the authors of the new system, power lay not with the convivial conversation between governor, landholder and tenant, as Burke imagined, but with the distant and abstract force of regulation. George Barlow, Cornwallis’s closest colleague in Calcutta during these years, noted that the first aim of the new ‘arrangements’ was to ensure that ‘[t]he power of Government to make what Laws, or do what acts it may think proper must be held up to the people as absolute and sacred.’ Barlow and Cornwallis believed corruption would be cleansed from the East India Company’s official class by restricting the scope of individuals for local intervention and private deal-making. These were limitations not ‘very agreeable to Englishmen’ as Barlow noted, but necessary to ensure control was maintained over a distant empire. These restraints on the discretion of British officers consolidated the barrier of silence that separated Britons from Indian society. As historian D. H. A. Kolff puts it, ‘the great virtue of the dispensation now deployed in India consisted of its aloofness.’17
A thorough John Bull
The new system meant a new generation of supposedly more virtuous Company officers, men such as Benjamin Branfill, were dispersed throughout the rural districts of India to put the new rules into practice. In the districts British work and settlement grew in places distant from existing Indian networks of power. A few collectorates, like Rajahmundry, were in old but declining Mughal centres of administration. Some, like Burdwan in Bengal, were in Mughal towns where prominent local lords had built their house and offices over the previous century. More commonly, though, the British created their district capitals in places where the East India Company already had a military or commercial presence, but was distant from what they saw as the aggravation of Indian politics. In Barisal, in south-eastern Bengal, the Collector decided to move his office to a different town to get away from the influence of local power-brokers twenty miles away. At Bankura, they built around an old Company army camp. In every district capital, the Company’s houses and offices were some distance from existing settlements, on cheap, open land where British buildings could sprawl into rural surroundings. In the ancient city of Benares, the British built their settlement two miles outside the old town. ‘The crowded streets of an Asiatic town possess few attractions for Europeans,’ one British observer stated in explanation as to why the British had ‘insulated themselves in their own grounds’. Each of these new settlements consisting of a cluster of one-storey brick buildings, the collectorate’s offices, or kachchari, a treasury, a record room, a court, a few official residences, and perhaps also a cemetery and an ugly, army-built church.18
Life for the British in these small outposts of imperial power was very different from life in India’s big cities. In the fortified port cities of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, British behaviour was animated by a strong sense of racial distinction and social hierarchy, but a cosmopolitan existence grew up in which Europeans and Indians traded and sometimes socialized together. In the capital cities of Indian states like Delhi, Hyderabad or Gwalior, British officers could integrate themselves into the local political hierarchy if they chose to. It was in the country’s big Indian-ruled cities that the familiar imperial image of British life in early colonial India, with its white Mughals, its gossip, scandal and occasional moments of Anglo-Indian dialogue and even romance, could be a reality. But during the early nineteenth century most East India Company officers were collectors and judges stationed in small district towns, living with their wives and young children in tiny communities with three or four other European officers. In these scattered enclaves of British power Company servants transported the psychology of estrangement their predecessors had developed in the early days of the Company to new sites, trying to assert their embattled, isolated sense of power amidst an Indian population they did not trust and could barely communicate with.
Britons in the countryside tried to protect themselves from the rest of Indian society with their servants, their architecture, their domestic habits and procedures of office life. The East India Vade Mecum, an 1810 guide to British life in India, listed thirty-nine different kinds of domestic servant each officer needed to have. In his Company work, each judge or Collector had between thirty and fifty Indian officials working for him, ranging from senior accountants, translators and record-keepers to guards. British residences physically separated Europeans from the world beyond. The district officer’s bungalow usually consisted of a square of nine rooms, surrounded by a veranda and enclosed green space, fusing the form of the Indian village hut and Palladian English villa into a style of architecture
which provided a constant flow of air to remove supposedly bad Indian odours, and to defend the British against Indian sociability. Indian light was blocked out by Venetian blinds. Of course, absolute separation was impossible to maintain in practice. The Company’s activities created new forms of Indian commercial life on their doorstep, for example the kerani, or clerk’s bazaar, which opened in many Indian towns next to the Company’s offices. Collectors and judges were heavily reliant on their Indian subordinates to do their job. But officers constantly struggled to assert their power over commercial connections and Indian staff while still trying to lead a quiet life, defending themselves through separation against what they saw as the incomprehensible disorder of Indian society. Boredom was staved off by solitary pursuits, by working on Company paperwork into the night, by reading Latin and Greek classics, gardening, inspecting local flora and fauna. Collecting insects and cataloguing plants were particularly popular pastimes.19
Perhaps most importantly, officials expressed their sense of isolation in letters home. Later in his career, Mountstuart Elphinestone developed a public reputation for having good relations with Indians. Writing to his mother from the British station in Benares in the late 1790s, however, he offered no sense of connection with Indian society. His official duties, ‘trifling criminal cases such as beating, abusive language, petty thefts’, were banal. ‘I only wish’, he wrote, ‘the time of my stay was out when I should return to England and never again be obliged to leave it.’20
Until the middle of the nineteenth century British officers rarely travelled beyond the towns where their offices were placed. British power was supposed to cascade out and down from the British officer in his district capital through a series of local Indian police and revenue offices into India’s villages and petty principalities. But with no travel and no scrutiny, this system of authority only existed ‘on paper’, as the officer appointed to the newly created post of Police Commissioner in Bihar complained in 1839. The commissioner noted that he was only the second ‘European officer of the Government’ to visit the ‘interior’ of the district since 1793.21
When British officers did travel it was an unpleasant intrusion into the solipsistic routine of office work and domestic life. Julia and James Thomas were an unusually engaged and sociable couple, dining in the houses of Indian merchants in Madras, to the surprise of their compatriots. In 1836 Thomas was appointed judge to Rajahmundry, the town where Benjamin Branfill had been posted, and enjoyed the ‘sweet country air’, the occasional company of travelling British officers (‘no troublesome company, yet always enough to prevent us from feeling lonely’), and the ‘amusement’ of short visits from the area’s landholders. Unusually, they set up a school for local boys, and Julia learnt some Telegu verbs. But their desire to retreat to and stay in safe, comfortable and monolithically English spaces was typical of British officers throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The Thomases built a home in Rajahmundry around their English objects and obsessions, gardening, reading, entomology and constant letter writing to Britain. When he was invited to pay a visit to Rajahmundry’s most prominent landholder-king, James Thomas needed to be persuaded by his more gregarious wife to accept. ‘We should be “more quiet and comfortable at home”,’ the judge said. ‘Such a thorough John Bull!’ Julia complained.
In her letters home, Julia wrote up the trip as a stressful few days away from the quiet of life at their collectorate ‘home’. On tour through the Raja’s estate, the British couple constantly tried to find comfort amidst the ‘heat, din and glare’ of ‘Hindoo hospitality’, with its ‘stinking torches’, ‘nautch’ dances and ‘crowds of spectators’. James Thomas was the most powerful government figure for hundreds of miles, yet he insisted on closing the door of his palanquin as they toured, only peeping at the people he ruled through shutters. His host needed to ‘beg that [James] would do him the favour to keep it all open’, to ‘show himself to the multitude’ and make visible his authority. British officials’ instincts were to hide their power behind closed doors, making it less vulnerable but also less effective. The couple brought their books, their tea things and their drawing materials on the thirty-hour journey from their bungalow at Rajahmundry. At the end of each day they escaped to a room that ‘looked as quiet and comfortable as at home’. The Thomases’ Rajahmundry home didn’t last long. Julia returned to England in December 1839 when their three-year-old daughter became seriously ill. James himself died the following year.22
In this new order, the Company officers’ home and office in the district capital were fixed points surrounded by the constant movement of people and things. Landholders, peasants and merchants arrived with petitions asking for a job, or for the government’s help in some dispute. British officers developed tactics to limit their exposure, only taking petitions during very short fixed hours, or pretending not to be at home. Officials were more friendly to travelling Europeans, whether civil servants or army staff. Julia Thomas noted the ‘relays of stranger-company’ her husband accommodated at their house in Rajahmundry, imagining their compound was an island of peace and order for Europeans travelling through a hostile and alien countryside. Most of all, though, the district office was a fixed point in the ceaseless flow of paperwork which kept the East India Company’s administration going.23
The new system Cornwallis created replaced the movement of people with the circulation of paper. Travel and negotiation were supposed to be unnecessary because the government imagined ‘all rights had been reduced to writing’, as Cornwallis put it. The flow of paper was designed to give anxious officials in Madras or Calcutta the security that came from knowing what was going on in the districts. But it moved decision-making away from public view, making Indians anxious that decisions were being made over which they had no say. The hidden nature of British power, in contrast to the public display of authority under the Mughals, made many Indians extremely nervous. The Raja of Nadia was so concerned things were happening behind closed doors that he paid a Bengali clerk in the Collector’s office to tell him what was written in letters exchanged between the district capital and Calcutta.
More than any other set of texts, the circulation of the East India Company’s regulations was designed to give security to the British regime. Bengal’s new code was enacted by the Governor-General’s Council in thirty-eight regulations, printed on folio paper and sent out to officers throughout eastern India on 1 May 1793. Other areas used the Bengal code as a model, so similar volumes were sent to officers in the south and west of India over the following decades. The regulations claimed to provide a stable, fixed set of meanings which could be executed with no negotiation by district officials, regardless of the particular place or people they were applied to. Soon after these rules were passed, a thirty-ninth regulation was enacted which insisted that from then onwards, ‘the same designations and terms were to be applied to the same descriptions of persons and things’ in the English regulation, and that ‘the same uniformity’ used when they were translated into Bengali or Persian. But paper on its own offered very little guidance to the way officials were supposed to act in practice. The regulations created only an illusion of security, often merely disconnecting officers from the political circumstances that called upon them to make decisions in the first place. When they needed to act, the civil officers posted by the East India Company to British-ruled India during the first half of the nineteenth century were puzzled, diffident and usually anxious.
The two most important officers stationed throughout the districts of eastern India were the judge and the revenue collector.24 The purpose of the Company’s new law courts was to secure ‘the preservation to the people of their own laws’, and ‘the security of their person and property’. Property cases were supposed to be determined by Hindu and Muslim legal traditions, and criminal cases governed by a modified version of Muslim law that Mughal officials had used. But British officers had no experience, rules or guidance for deciding what the relevant law
was, or how property rights were defined. In practice even translations of Indian texts were too complicated to be used by officers who understood little about South Asia’s traditions of jurisprudence and did not have the time or inclination to delve into details. More often, judges simply handed judicial decision-making over to Indian law officers, issuing their verdicts if they understood them, castigating them for inconstancy or corruption if they did not.25
Before British rule, disputes between Indians had been adjudicated in noisy courts where rulers heard the complaints of their subjects and everyone was entitled to voice their opinion. By contrast, the East India Company’s new system of justice was supposed to be silent. Instead of long sessions cross-examining witnesses, subordinate officers were sent to ask questions of litigants and witnesses, and then British officers made decisions after scanning through the translations of their reports. As Ghulam Hussein Khan, a critic of the Company’s effort to rule through writing, noted in the 1780s, the British hated ‘appearing in public audiences, and whenever they come at all, it is to betray their extreme uneasiness, impatience, and anger, on seeing themselves surrounded by crowds, on hearing their complaints, and clamours’. Often, judges tried to avoid making decisions themselves, passing the entire case over to Indian law officers for a verdict. As Rammohan Roy, a former Indian Company officer, put it, each judge became so ‘disheartened at seeing before him a file of causes which he can hardly hope to overtake’, the Company’s judicial officials were ‘induced to transfer a great part of this business to his native officers’.26 With their attempt to impose silence and their effort to make decisions behind closed doors, British judges seemed to betray the principles that guaranteed the virtue of Indian public life.27
In Calcutta and Madras there were a few moments when the court’s attempt to wash its hands of decision-making sparked a major public debate. In 1793, a dispute arose about who was entitled to the profits from a temple icon in the city of Dhaka, two rival groups of holy men claiming the image of a Hindu deity. It ended up being ‘taken up by almost all the Hindoos of the City, and parties were so violently inclined’. The Dhaka court’s Hindu law officer gave a report ‘so unsatisfactory as to perplex the business more than ever’. When the case ended up at Calcutta the judge forsook these elaborate arguments and decided with the most pragmatic consideration, declaring the land belonged to the side likely to commit the worst violence.28 In 1816, the prominent journalist and newspaper editor Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay tried to claim that property given by his father to a younger brother in fact belonged to him. The Hindu law experts in the Company’s highest court in Bengal disagreed about the proper verdict again, so the judges called on pandits in other courts and colleges in Calcutta to give their opinion. The result was a major debate in the city’s press and meeting halls. With no interest in taking part in the debate themselves, the British judges simply executed the view of the college pandits with no comment, and Bhabanicharan ended up gaining control of the land.29
