This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The rule of law and emergency in colonial India The conflict between the King’s Court and the government in Bombay in the 1820s Inagaki, Haruki Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). 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Sep. 2021 The rule of law and emergency in colonial India: The conflict between the King’s Court and the government in Bombay in the 1820s Haruki Inagaki Doctor of Philosophy 2016 King’s College London 1 Abstract This thesis argues that the jurisdictional conflicts between the King’s Court and the government in Bombay in the 1820s led to the construction of a more despotic political structure of colonial India, in which the government retained the power of political intervention in judicial affairs in cases of emergency. The background was the political, economic and social crisis in the newly acquired territories in the Bombay presidency in the mid-1820s. The main concern of the government was the raids of the ‘wild tribes’ in the hills and their alliance with the princes in the plains. The government tried to deal with it by a form of indirect rule relying on Indian chiefs and aristocrats and implemented conciliation policies, among which their exemption from the Company’s judiciary was the most important. But the King’s Court obstructed this policy by issuing warrants and writs to the chiefs, which weakened their authority and respectability in local society. In addition, by overturning the decisions of the Company’s Court and trying and punishing governors and other officials, the King’s Court endangered the Company’s sovereignty in the mofussil. The government believed that the unitary judicial structure should be devised in India and the King’s Court should be subordinated to the government. This tension exploded in a case of habeas corpus in 1828. The King’s Court’s jurisdiction was disputed in Bombay, Calcutta, and London. As the result, the British parliament established a legislative council in India in the Company’s new charter in 1834, by which the King’s Court was subjugated to the governor general’s legislative authority. I contend that the driving force of the making of British despotism in early nineteenth -century India was Indian use of the King’s Court and the government’s anxiety of sovereignty in the aftermath of the conquest. 2 Table of contents Abstract 2 Table of contents 3 List of tables 4 Acknowledgement 5 Introduction 7 Chapter 1: Police and the King’s Court in Bombay city 46 Chapter 2: Indian merchants and civil trials of war and emergency 77 Chapter 3: Summons, writ, and revenue defaulters 107 Chapter 4: Law, raids, and shared sovereignty 141 Chapter 5: Sardars, princes and indirect rule 179 Chapter 6: Habeas corpus, ‘state policy’, and native aristocracy 218 Chapter 7: Legislative council—Bombay, Calcutta, London— 254 Conclusion 290 Bibliography 312 3 List of Tables Number of cases filed in the King’s Court 1840–2 31–2 Number of barristers and attorneys 1825–32 35 Number of civil cases filed in the Company’s Court 1825–9 111 Suits in the Dharwar adalat, the Southern Maratha Country 1819–22 140 Number of criminal cases in the Company’s Court 1825–8 159–60 Cases disposed by the Agent and the Deputy Agent for Sirdars 1828–32 177–8 4 Acknowledgement First I would like to thank the Japan Student Services Organisation for its general financial support, which made my study in the UK possible. I also thank King’s College London’s small grants for research student programme and the Royal Historical Society’s travel grant scheme for enabling me to do research in India. I would like to thank librarians, archivists and staffs of the Asian and African Studies reading room, the British Library, London, in which the major part of this study was conducted. Their efficiency and kindness greatly facilitated my study. I would also thank the staffs of the Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai, where some of the crucial information was found. Their warmth was the best memory of my first visit to India. I could not write this thesis without help, advice, and kindness of many people. I would like to thank them all here. First and foremost, I would like to thank my first supervisor Dr Jon Wilson. His guidance was more than essential for starting, continuing, and finishing this project. His comments were always full of inspiration and motivated me to read further sources and make better arguments. He was always patient to listen to my vague ideas and respected them. His moral support for my life in the UK was also essential, and I learned a lot from him how to be a good father as well as a good researcher. I cannot thank him enough. There were also lots of scholars who gave me valuable comments. My second supervisor Professor Arthur Burns’s help was indispensable for exploring themes in British history relevant for my thesis. My upgrading meeting in my second year with Professor Richard Drayton and Dr Katherine Schofield was a very informative and encouraging one. Meetings with Dr 5 Amrita Shodhan, Dr Gagan Sood, and Dr Robert Travers were crucial in broadening the scope of my study. Comments to my paper read in the 8th Anglo-Japanese conference of historians, particularly those by Professor Patrick O’Brien, were valuable in rethinking my ideas in wider perspective. I thank them all. I also thank Professor Joanna Innes and Professor Julian Hoppit, who gave me advice how to do research and write a thesis in the UK with kindness and encouragement. I would also like to express my gratitude to my supervisors in Japan, Dr Sugiko Nishikawa and Professor Kazuhiko Kondo. They were always of great support in providing me timely advice and constant encouragement, which were vital for me to keep myself motivated to contribute to the global academia. Dr Hiroki Shin provided me academic and moral support at every stage of writing this thesis, without which I could not continue and finish my study. I thank him for everything he has done for me. I also thank my fellow PhD students in the UK, US, India, and Japan. Especially, Takaki Nishiyama’s criticism always forced me to rethink my arguments, which was invaluable. I thank Shizuo Katakura, who very much facilitated my research trip to Mumbai. I also thank many Japanese friends and teachers who spent time with me in conversation at the British Library during their research in London. To my family: Yasushi, Yumiko, Yuka, Yoshie and Nobuaki Inagaki, thank you for your endless support for my pursuit of an academic career. To my wife Akiko, thank you for your understanding, sympathy, help, and love. To my daughter Saki, thank you for always making me smile. 6 Introduction I. Theme, historiography, and argument The British empire in India might have been destroyed by lawyers. The government officials of the East India Company talked about the possibility for many years. They feared that the chieftains in the hills and mountains and the landed nobility in the plains had rallied around the Supreme Court, commonly called the King’s Court (as it was established by a separate royal charter), and gone into the revolt. To attest their fear, the court even threatened to enlist the military’s help to enforce its orders, which was supported by many Indians in cities and the countryside. The court of law might have succeeded the Company as the next sovereign of the Indian subcontinent. The crisis reached a climax in a legal case in Bombay in 1828. The Supreme Court of Bombay issued a writ of habeas corpus to a nobleman of the former Maratha empire. This was an outright subversion of the government’s policy of conciliating ‘the natives of rank’. The government interfered and ordered the court to stop its proceedings. The result was an open collision between the two British authorities lasting for more than two years, which generated a sense of crisis among the government officials. John Malcolm, the governor of Bombay at that time, thought that the empire was on the brink of collapse: Our physical power in this country (as European nation) is nothing. We stand solely upon that of opinion and above all that which attached to a belief of our complete union amongst ourselves & our consequent means of prompt combination to crush any opposition of unsupported princes 7 on divided tribes & nations.