Custom, Law and John Company in Kumaon
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Custom, law and John Company in Kumaon. The meeting of local custom with the emergent formal governmental practices of the British East India Company in the Himalayan region of Kumaon, 1815–1843. Mark Gordon Jones, November 2018. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University. © Copyright by Mark G. Jones, 2018. All Rights Reserved. This thesis is an original work entirely written by the author. It has a word count of 89,374 with title, abstract, acknowledgements, footnotes, tables, glossary, bibliography and appendices excluded. Mark Jones The text of this thesis is set in Garamond 13 and uses the spelling system of the Oxford English Dictionary, January 2018 Update found at www.oed.com. Anglo-Indian and Kumaoni words not found in the OED or where the common spelling in Kumaon is at a great distance from that of the OED are italicized. To assist the reader, a glossary of many of these words including some found in the OED is provided following the main thesis text. References are set in Garamond 10 in a format compliant with the Chicago Manual of Style 16 notes and bibliography system found at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org ii Acknowledgements Many people and institutions have contributed to the research and skills development embodied in this thesis. The first of these that I would like to acknowledge is the Chair of my supervisory panel Dr Meera Ashar who has provided warm, positive encouragement, calmed my panic attacks, occasionally called a spade a spade but, most importantly, constantly challenged me to chart my own way forward. Major contributions have also been made by Professor Robert Cribb (ANU) who joined my panel in an hour of need, as well as Professors John Powers (Deakin) and Brij Lal (UQ) who had the good sense to move on when that was the only viable option. It would also be remiss of me not to mention Jo Bushby the HDR coordinator at the School of Culture, History and Culture who has given her all for the slightly dysfunctional, global orphans who constitute the HDR cohort. This ragtag bunch, along with a few others from the College of Arts and Social Science, have contributed much to the journey, both intellectually through the many reading, writing and discussion groups as well as just being fun people to be around. Amongst these, Adam Croft, Ros Hewett, Dario Di Rosa, Patrick McCartney, Nonie Tuxen, Jesse Buck, Isabella Burger, Bryce Kositz, Wei Wen (Wilbert) Wong and Rory McCleod deserve special mention. Quite why they took this strange old man into their fold escapes me, but it has been a privilege to share their brilliant young lives. I believe it is also appropriate to acknowledge the vast medical team that has made this new turn in my later life possible. Benefiting from their good humour, genuine concern and dedicated professionalism has been a remarkable experience. There have been far too many to name, but I cannot let the moment pass without thanking my transplant physician, Professor Anthony Schwarer, and the teams at both Ward 7 East at the Alfred Hospital and Heidelberg House at the Austin Hospital. I am just so lucky to be an Australian. iii Above all though, I must thank my dear sister Merryn whose loving gift of her bone marrow has given me a second chance at life. I hope I haven’t disappointed her with what I have done with the opportunity. Third party copyediting statement Third party editorial advice has been provided by Dr Barbara Nelson. This included checking accuracy of grammar, punctuation and spelling, as well as clarity of expression in compliance with ANU Policy on Editing of Research Theses by Professional Editors, 2.1. Dr Nelson is a scholar of Sanskrit and South Asian Studies. Funding statement The research and production of this thesis was supported by a scholarship provided by the Australian Government Research Training Program. A number of other generous grants were provided by the South Asian Research Institute of the Australian National University and the South Asian Studies Association of Australia. iv Abstract The meeting of Indian custom and law with the emergent formal legal, revenue and administrative practice of the British East India Company has long been a central subject of South Asian historical studies. Overwhelmingly, this vast corpus of scholarship has been centred on and contextualized by the experience and conditions of the Indian heartlands. This thesis takes the study of the meeting of local custom with the Company’s formal governmental practices out of the Indian heartlands up into the peripheral Himalayan region of Kumaon. Kumaon is the little patch of the Himalaya tucked up where today India, Nepal and Tibet all meet in a tangle of green hills, plunging valleys and icy peaks to the northeast of Delhi. The contrast of the region’s mountainous landscape to the awesome flatness of the adjacent North Indian plains could not be more extreme. Within Kumaon’s very different landscape, the population had remained light and widely scattered, a monetized economy based on specialization of production focused on urban centres had only emerged to a limited degree, and the people had persisted with and developed cultural practices that were distant and distinct from the orthodoxies of India’s heartland. Crucially, the Indo-Islamic empires of the plains had never been able to conquer and hold territory in these hills and, as a consequence, the region had had no experience with the legal, revenue and administrative practices of the Mughal empire. The British East India Company invaded and held Kumaon in 1815. Here they found a matrix of economic, political and cultural conditions very different from everything they knew from the plains below. Aware that its regulations—the embodiment of its formal governmental practices—were a palimpsest written on the pre-existing conditions of the plains and the vestiges of late-Mughal machinery of government, the Company chose not to impose its regulations in Kumaon. Rather, Kumaon would be an Extra-Regulation province where much of the everyday practices of government were in the hands v of the local Commissioner. Within this space beyond the regulations, the meeting of local custom and the Company’s formal governmental practices took on a trajectory that was distant and distinct to the trajectory of the meeting on the plains. This thesis brings to light the early years of Kumaon’s meeting with the practices of the British India Company in the period 1815 to 1843. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1, Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 The clash of empires ....................................................................................................... 2 Distant and distinct ......................................................................................................... 8 The Extra-Regulation Order ........................................................................................ 29 Chapter 2, Literature review, sources and structure ..................................................... 41 Moving on to ‘wild, remote, or peculiar districts or provinces’ .............................. 56 Sources ............................................................................................................................ 59 Thesis structure ............................................................................................................. 69 Chapter 3, Coolie and grain ............................................................................................. 73 Begar ............................................................................................................................... 74 Grain ............................................................................................................................. 100 Chapter 4, Revenue and real property .......................................................................... 113 Models from the plains ............................................................................................... 114 A revenue system for the Pahar ................................................................................ 118 Traill and the development of the Kumaon model ................................................ 124 The settlements............................................................................................................ 137 Property rights ............................................................................................................. 144 Chapter 5, Criminal Justice ............................................................................................ 151 Nature’s children ......................................................................................................... 152 Initial encounter and outcomes ................................................................................. 155 Police reports ............................................................................................................... 167 Policing ......................................................................................................................... 173 Punishment .................................................................................................................. 177 Chapter 6, Civil justice .................................................................................................... 183 Formal basis for civil law ..........................................................................................