Indian Petitioning and the Making of the British Empire in South Asia, 1765-1800

FAIN: FT-61726-14

Thomas Robert Travers
Cornell University (Ithaca, NY 14850-2820)

My study examines the large literature of ‘complaints’ produced by Indian subjects during the first half century of British colonial rule in eastern India, c. 1765-1800. By studying Indian petitions preserved in the British East India Company’s records, together with treatises produced in Persian (the language of political elites in Mughal India), I examine how Indian subjects became entangled within a modern colonial rule of law, and also how they critiqued this regime by drawing on Indo-Islamicate theories of consultative rulership. Situating my study within an emerging global and comparative history of early modern political thought, I also explore moments of cross-fertilization within colonial encounters, showing how authors in Persian and English often sought to ‘bridge cultures’ by highlighting points of overlap between European and Indo-Islamicate notions of political justice.

Associated Products

‘Indian petitioning and colonial state-formation in eighteenth-century Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies 53, 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 89-122. (Article)
Title: ‘Indian petitioning and colonial state-formation in eighteenth-century Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies 53, 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 89-122.
Author: Robert Travers
Abstract: This article explores the role of Indian petitioning in the process of consolidating British power after the East India Company's military conquest of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. The presentation of written petitions (often termed ‘arzi in Persian) was a pervasive form of state-subject interaction in early modern South Asia that carried over, in modified forms, into the colonial era. The article examines the varied uses of petitioning as a technology of colonial state-formation that worked to establish the East India Company's headquarters in Calcutta as the political capital of Bengal and the Company as a sovereign source of authority and justice. It also shows how petitioning became a site of anxiety for both colonial rulers and Indian subjects, as British officials struggled to respond to a mass of Indian ‘complaints’ and to satisfy the expectations and norms of justice expressed by petitioners. It suggests that British rulers tried to defuse the perceived political threat of Indian petitioning by redirecting petitioners into the newly regulated spaces of an emergent colonial judiciary.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/indian-petitioning-and-colonial-stateformation-in-eighteenthcentury-bengal/A8FF43B352AEAAAE4612027B17DBE8D6
Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Modern Asian Studies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British India 17965-1793 (Book)
Title: Empires of Complaints: Mughal Law and the Making of British India 17965-1793
Author: Robert Travers
Abstract: This book is forthcoming from CUP, and I will send a copy and add an abstract when it comes up later this year
Year: 2022
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781009123389.
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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