We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2019
Bombay, the hub of Britain's Indian Ocean empire, hosted a ceaseless flow of humanity: sailors and lawyers, street performers and royal refugees. When fate set obstacles in their way, the residents of this teeming metropolis petitioned colonial officials, looking on them as patriarchal providers of last resort. These petitions, which this article terms ‘personal pleas’, adeptly braided different, often contradictory, idioms of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial governance, from stylized imitations of traditional authority to bureaucratic proceduralism. Their functional contribution to Raj governance, however, remains a puzzle since the vast majority of petitions were rejected. For the British, the steady flow of rejections threatened to unmask the disjuncture between the expectations and realities of Raj paternalism. As a result, colonial officials viewed personal pleas with a mixture of ridicule and concern. Yet, while unsettling for officials, personal pleas rarely spurred the collective politics associated with anti-colonial resistance. Thus, where other articles in this special issue focus on petitioning's functional contributions to the consolidation of state bureaucracies and the formation of new publics, this article traces the genre's more emotive dimensions. Even as they failed to consolidate colonial discipline or resistance, personal pleas provided a vehicle for the airing of the lived contradictions and tensions of empire. They allowed rulers and subjects alike to fantasize about the possibility of a more benevolent order, and to vent their frustration when those fantasies crumbled in the face of imperial indifference.
1 ‘Curiosity File’ of Petitions, Poems and Addresses Presented to the Prince and Princess of Wales, British Library [hereafter BL], Mss Eur F143/47.
2 Ibid.
3 On patrimonial bureaucracy, see Blake, S. P., ‘The Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire of the Mughals’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, 1979, pp. 77–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Darling, L. T., ‘“Do Justice, Do Justice, for that is Paradise”: Middle Eastern Advice for Indian Muslim Rulers’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 22, no. 1, December 2002, p. 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Raman, B., Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2012, p. 166CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Appadurai, A., ‘Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India’, in Language and the Politics of Emotion, Lutz, Catherine A. and Abu-Lughod, Lila (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 92–112Google Scholar.
6 Raman, Document Raj, p. 190. For additional work on petitioning during the early colonial period, see Swarnalatha, P., ‘Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra’, in Petitions in Social History, International Review of Social History Supplement 9, van Voss, L. H. (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 107–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abraham, S., ‘Formal Writing, Questionnaires and Petitions: Colonial Governance and Law in Early British Malabar, 1792–1810’, Indian Historical Review, vol. 40, no. 2, 2013, pp. 285–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rupakheti, S., ‘Reconsidering State-Society Relations in South Asia: A Himalayan Case Study’, Himalaya, vol. 35, no. 2, 2016, pp. 73–86Google Scholar.
7 Siddiqi, M., The British Historical Context and Petitioning in Colonial India, with an Introduction by S. Inayat A. Zaidi, XXII Dr M. A. Ansari Memorial Lecture, Jamia Milia Islamia, Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2005, p. 17Google Scholar.
8 Haynes, D. E., Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991Google Scholar.
9 On the reinvention of certain forms of ‘traditional’ authority in nineteenth-century India, see Cohn, B. S., ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in The Invention of Tradition, Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 165–210Google Scholar. On the realignment of British imperial ideology, see Mantena, K., Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Copland, I., The British Raj and the Indian Princes: Paramountcy in Western India, 1858–1930, Sangam Books, London, 1982Google Scholar; Ramusack, B. N., The Indian Princes and Their States, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004Google Scholar; and Rai, M., Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004Google Scholar.
11 Guha, S., Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 183Google Scholar.
12 On the Court of Wards, see Yang, A. A., ‘An Institutional Shelter: The Court of Wards in Late Nineteenth-Century Bihar’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1979, pp. 247–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cohen, B. B., Kingship and Colonialism in India's Deccan: 1850–1948, Palgrave, New York, 2007, pp. 101–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 For another example of the use of petitioning by members of a princely family, see Stephens, J., ‘An Uncertain Inheritance: The Imperial Travels of Legal Migrants, from British India to Ottoman Iraq’, Law and History Review, vol. 32, no. 4, November 2014, pp. 749–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Wright, A., Baboo English as ’Tis Writ: Being Curiosities of Indian Journalism, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1891, p. 80Google Scholar. Also cited in Raman, Document Raj, p. 162.
15 This combination of servility and subversiveness is reminiscent of Homi Bhabha's observations on ‘sly civility’: see Bhabha, H. K., The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 132–44Google Scholar.
16 Another common category of petition found in these files, but which is not discussed here, were requests for clemency. For a brief discussion of this genre, see Anderson, C., Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012, pp. 190–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 There is a large historiography on the development of more abstracted and distant forms of governance in colonial India. For pioneering formulations of this argument, see Cohn, B., ‘The Census, Social Structure, and Objectification in South Asia’, in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1987, pp. 224–54Google Scholar; and Bayly, C. A., Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996Google Scholar. For a more recent discussion of social distance in relation to tactics of colonial governance, see Wilson, J. E., The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India, p. 128.
19 ‘Special Report of the Special Committee on Public Petitions’, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1904 [234], p. 3.
20 Stoler, A. L., Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009, p. 2Google Scholar; and Kafka, B., The Demon of Writing: Power and Failures of Paperwork, Zone Books, New York, 2012, pp. 9–18Google Scholar.
21 The prevalence of women among the authors of the personal pleas may have intensified these fantasies, tapping into what Gayati Spivak has described as the white men's fantasy that they were rescuing brown women from brown men. Spivak, G., ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds), University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1988, pp. 296–7Google Scholar.
22 For the centrality of Bombay in the context of Britain's Indian Ocean empire, see Metcalf, T. R., Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008Google Scholar; and Green, N., Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 The combined population of these princely states accounted for seven million people, compared with 16 and a half million people who came under the direct jurisdiction of the government of Bombay. Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes, pp. 1–3.
24 Metcalf, Imperial Connections, p. 6.
25 On the longer history of the Janjira state, see Oka, R. C. and Kusimba, C. M., ‘Siddi as Mercenary or as African Success Story on the West Coast of India’, in India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanism, Hawley, J. C. (ed.), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2008, pp. 203–29Google Scholar.
26 J. McLeod, ‘Marriage and Identity among the Sidis of Janjira and Sachin’, in ibid., p. 261. Lambert-Hurley, S., Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal, Routledge, London, 2007, p. 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Nazli Rafiya to Queen Mary, 10 May 1932, BL, India Office Records and Private Papers [hereafter IOR] /R/1/1/2237, p. 54.
28 Ibid., pp. 55–6.
29 Cover letter from Cornelia Sorabji to the Government of Bombay, 5 February 1927, BL, Mss Eur F165/144, p. 2; Memorial from Nazli Begam to the Secretary of State of India, n.d., BL, IOR/R/1/1/2407.
30 Mossman, M. J., The First Women Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Gender, Law and the Legal Professions, Hart Publishers, Oxford, 2006, pp. 191–238Google Scholar.
31 Letter from Cornelia Sorabji to Elena Rathbone (later Lady Richmond), 15 January 1930, BL, Mss Eur F165/45. Quoted in Sorabji, R., Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji, Reformer, Lawyer and Champion of Women's Rights in India, Tauris, I. B., London, 2010, pp. 363–4Google Scholar.
32 Notes, n.d., BL, IOR/R/1/1/2237, p. 39.
33 Letter from Marie Willingdon to Nazli, 5 April 1932, BL, IOR/R/1/1/2237, p. 35.
34 On collective petitioning as a medium for forming new publics in colonial India, see Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India, and Prashant Kidambi's article in this special issue.
35 Enclosed with petition from Nazli to the Viceroy, forwarded to the Government of India, 8 January 1932, BL, IOR/R/1/1/2237. The enclosing of letters of support with petitions echoes contemporary practices that Mathew Hull has observed in government offices in Lahore. Hull, M., Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010, pp. 80–111Google Scholar.
36 Letter from Muhammad Iqbal to Secretary to the Viceroy, 17 April 1933, BL, IOR/R/1/1/2407; Letter from Shaukat Ali to the Begam of Janjira, 27 April 1932, BL, IOR/R/1/1/2237, p. 45.
37 Nazli Rafiya to Queen Mary, 10 May 1932, BL, IOR/R/1/1/2237, p. 54.
38 Letter from Nazli to E. C. Mieville (Private Secretary to the Viceroy), 13 May 1932, BL, IOR/R/1/1/2237, p. 27.
39 On the relevance of notions of imperial chivalry to the workings of the Anglo-Indian judiciary during the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, see Sharafi, M., ‘The Semi-Autonomous Judge in Colonial India: Chivalric Imperialism Meets Anglo-Islamic Dower and Divorce Law’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 46, 2009, pp. 57–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
40 Nazli Rafiya to Queen Mary, 10 May 1932, BL, IOR/R/1/1/2237, p. 53.
41 Ibid., note attached to p. 67.
42 Deccan States Agency to Political Secretary, Government of India, 22 August 1934, BL, IOR/R/1/1/2496.
43 Request for Interview with Viceroy's Wife, 2 March 1945, BL, IOR/R/1/1/4257.
44 The Humble Petition of Mahomed Jaffer bin Bulloo Tokum Mahumadan Inhabitant of Bombay to Governor of Bombay, 29 December 1883, Maharashtra State Archives [hereafter MSA]/Judicial 1884/vol. 91/no. 119; The Humble Petition of Piaree Jehan the Grand Mother of one Begum Jehan Since Deceased and Vagir Jehan now in London of Bombay to Commissioner of Police, Bombay, 11 November 1895, MSA/Judicial 1897/vol. 184/no. 944. Most of the volumes of petitions preserved in the Judicial Department in the Maharashtra State Archives do not include page numbers; in these cases reference is to the file number.
45 From Adavya Vallad Beherya Mahar to Governor in Council, Railway Dept. Bombay, 12 October 1887, MSA/Judicial 1887/vol. 103/no. 1337, pp. 387–9, 409.
46 From Ahmed Yar walad yar Mahomed Khan to Governor of Bombay, 10 August 1886, MSA/Judicial 1886/vol. 73/no. 1234.
47 Pir Alli Muzzfershah to the Governor of Bombay, 11 December 1896, MSA/Judicial 1896/vol. 169/no. 1979, p. 77.
48 For other examples of petitions from railway employees, see Bear, L., Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self, Columbia University Press, New York, 2007, pp. 108–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 To the Governor of Bombay [from Gaja Manugiri, widow], 26 May 1883, MSA/Judicial 1883/vol. 114/no. 63.
50 The Humble Petition of Mahomed Jaffer bin Bulloo Tokum.
51 P. J. Fonseca to Secretary to Government, Marine Department, Bombay, 18 May 1904, MSA/Marine 1904/vol. 84/no. 31, p. 59.
52 The Humble Petition of Chandha Ayah to Governor of Bombay, 23 December 1895, MSA/Judicial 1896/vol. 161/no. 1104, p. 342.
53 The Humble Petition of Heerabai to Governor of Bombay, 21 January 1880, MSA/Judicial 1880/vol. 111/no. 375.
54 Petition Rules, Financial Department, 27 January 1885, MSA/Judicial 1886/vol. 71/no. 346. For another example, preserved in the Aden records, but issued from Bombay, see Memorial Rules—Petition Rules, General Department, Bombay Castle, 18 February 1905, BL, IOR/R/20/A/2519.
55 Ram Rao to the Governor in Council, Bombay, 20 April 1877, MSA/Revenue 1878/vol. 1010/no. 109.
56 Raman, Document Raj, p. 176.
57 Second Presidency Magistrate, Mazagaon Magistrate's Court, to Secretary to Government, Judicial Department, 7 March 1895, MSA/Judicial 1895/vol. 175/no. 1060, p. 240.
58 Chief Presidency Magistrate to Secretary to Government, Judicial Department, Bombay, 11 November 1891, MSA/Judicial 1892/vol. 161/no. 408, pp. 351–2.
59 On the workings of this schedule of fees, in addition to the two files cited above, see also MSA/Judicial 1893/vol. 155/no. 154.
60 Petitions and Memorials, Suggestion by Mr. N. D. Marathe of Belgaum, MSA/General 1923/no. 3482.
61 The Humble Petition of Krishnabai widow of Balla Gopalla Scindhe of Nassik to the Acting Governor of Bombay, 29 August 1907, MSA/Judicial 1907/vol. 164/no. 1575, pp. 35–6.
62 This cycle of jurisdictional overflow and containment suggests the limits of processes of jurisdictional formalization that legal historians often associate with the nineteenth century. On these processes of formalization, see Benton, L., Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History; 1400–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002Google Scholar. Since the publication of this seminal work, Benton has also been influential in charting zones of exception and the persistence of ambiguity and overlap in global legal geographies. See, in particular, Benton, L., A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010Google Scholar; and Benton, L. and Ford, L., Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
63 Washbrook, D. A., ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, 1981, p. 653CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
64 Jonathan Saha, in his work on everyday governance in Burma, also emphasizes how discretion and corruption were crucial components of state practice. Saha, J., Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c. 1900, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
65 The Humble Petition of Heerabai.
66 Various petitions from Antoni Garbi to the Governor of Bombay, March 1860 to September 1861, MSA/Marine 1860/vol. 272/no. 216.
67 Cody, F., The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2013, p. 189CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 Tagore, R., The Post Office, D. Mukerjea (trans.), Macmillan, London, 1914, pp. 83Google Scholar, 85.
69 Plotz, J., ‘Tagore in the Warsaw Ghetto: Janusz Korczak's Post Office’, in Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition, Hogan, P. C. and Pandit, L. (eds), Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, 2003, pp. 250–63Google Scholar.
