Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India

Assembling the Local

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE

Series Editors

Angus Burgin

Peter E. Gordon

Joel Isaac

Karuna Mantena

Samuel Moyn

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Camille Robcis

Sophia Rosenfeld

Assembling the Local

Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India

Upal Chakrabarti

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chakrabarti, Upal, author.

Title: Assembling the local : political economy and agrarian governance in British India / Upal Chakrabarti.

Other titles: Intellectual history of the modern age.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] |

Series: Intellectual history of the modern age | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020016824 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5273-6 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Agriculture—Economic aspects—India—History—19th century. | Land tenure—Political aspects—India—History—19th century. | Agriculture and state—India—History—19th century. | India—History—British occupation, 1765–1947. | India—Politics and government—1765–1947.

Classification: LCC HD2072 .C39 2021 | DDC 338.1/85409034—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016824

CONTENTS

Introduction. Universality as Difference

Chapter 1. Science, Method, and Indigeneity: Political Economy

Chapter 2. The Trace of the Local: Rent

Chapter 3. Temporal Geographies of Power: Property

Chapter 4. Grounding Governance: Village

Chapter 5. Disputes in the Locality: Peasants

Conclusion. Rewriting Production

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Universality as Difference

Model, Limit, and Difference

This book explores the problem of models and their limits over three interrelated sites in the first half of the nineteenth century: questions of landed property in a small area on the eastern coast of British India called Cuttack, debates over the method and categories of political economy in Britain, and practices of agrarian governance across different regions of British India. The category of the local featured recurrently in these three sites, signifying the limit of models. The local has been also similarly fashioned across a range of histories as an analytical tool to mark the limit, of models and frames. Interrogating the analytical constructions of this category in both the archives of the nineteenth century and more recent historiographic practice, I contend that it is more productive to read this limit as the model itself, rather than its outside.

In considering the model-limit problem, the book proposes a relation between political economy and liberal governance in the imperial world of the nineteenth century, different from the prevalent understandings of this relation in the histories of empire, liberalism, and agrarian South Asia. The use of the category of the local in the nineteenth-century sites examined here enables and directs us to trace the complexities of this relation—between political economy and governance—in the light of the model-limit problem. In each of these sites the local expressed a limit of, or difference from, a model. In the interregional debates over principles of agrarian governance in British India, models of revenue settlement were constantly scrutinized and revised as they failed to address local specificities. In Cuttack, long-ranging contests took place between different kinds of land controllers over the local peculiarities of proprietary rights in the area. In Britain the public sphere witnessed raging contentions on the method and categories of political economy, where the dominant model of Ricardian political economy was questioned for being inapplicable to the different local conditions of the world.

Generally, therefore, the local connoted difference from the universalizing claims of models. Specifically, it expressed differences in relations between forms of property and modes of sovereignty. In Cuttack, the local was mobilized by various kinds of native land controllers and colonial officials to highlight the differences in the proprietary forms of that place from other adjoining territories. At the same time, the category was repeatedly used across various levels of the imperial bureaucracy to argue that different regions in British India exhibited great differences in land tenures. In Britain over the same period, the debates that I refer to suggested that differences in property forms all over the world question the universal applicability of the method and categories of the prevalent and dominant framing of political economy. Differences in forms of property, in all these sites, were explained as effects of varying modes of sovereignty or political power existing in different places.

The book engages with both general and specific articulations of the local, weaving out of them, simultaneously, reflections on the problem of difference and a critical commentary on connections between political economy, agrarian property, and governance. It is evident that over the three sites examined in the book, through the expression of the local, the problem of political economy and governance became the same, namely, that of understanding and managing difference, in this case, of property-sovereignty relations. I make sense of this problem by setting up a conversation between the early and late works of Michel Foucault, namely, between his reading of political economy as a discursive formation of the modern episteme and his lectures on liberal governance. I suggest that the workings of the local can provide a critical analytical mediation in understanding how, as Foucault argues, the principle of self-limitation of power emerged as the concurrent rationality of political economy and governance over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This principle, as I demonstrate in greater detail later in this chapter, can be seen to manifest itself in the local, where difference was construed as constitutive of, and immanent to, universality.

By making the local foundational to the universality of the discourse of political economy as governance, this book attempts to release the category of its predominant analytical use—in a range of historical works on empire, liberalism, and agrarian South Asia—as something outside the universal. In most of these works the local is presented as a form of social reality, which by being located at a geographical distance from the center, seems to be necessarily capable of producing a space different from the universal. Its geographically bounded condition is taken to imply its natural mark of difference from the boundless expanse of the universal. The book attempts to reconceptualize the local, refusing to perceive it as equivalent to a locality, or a geographical particular, typically understood as signifying radical alterity by both the historical context and the historiography I examine here. The archival sites I bring together demonstrate that the local, as a problem of difference, was absolutely central to the structuring of the universal, or the making of political economy as governance in nineteenth-century British India. Although the local was posited in these sites as something outside the universal, I argue that instead of merely existing as such an outside, it functioned as the key category in the making of the universal itself. Therefore, the inside-outside opposition was an effect of the way the local was presented in this discourse. I probe this presentation in the book, to understand how difference constituted universality. At the same time, I argue that a range of historical works uncritically adopted this construction of the local as an outside, using it pervasively to explain connections between imperialism, liberal abstractions, and the shaping of agrarian societies in British India.

To displace the geographical foundationalism in these historiographic uses of the local, I do not argue that the local is already and always implicated in other more expansive spaces, like the regional, the national, the metropolitan, the imperial, and the global. Such an argument cannot fundamentally unyoke analysis from its geographical foundation. Contrarily, I argue, the local can be rethought as an abstract machine, producing spatial formations, which involve, but are not constitutive of, fixed geographical locales. This machine is assembled by releasing the local from its functioning in terms of the hardened binary of inside-outside, across the archival and historiographic sites mentioned earlier.¹ I understand the machine as an immanent capacity to open up, which can also become a conceptual model for all those rigidified territorialities that open the way for other transformational operations.² What this book presents through this opening is not only a movement of perpetual displacement but also a capacity to effect transformations of meanings in practices.

It is with this philosophical imperative that I construct the local, from within its multifarious deployments in a range of practices. Examined in different chapters, these practices are epistemological debates over scientific methodology and categories of political economy in nineteenth-century Britain, contentions between officials at various levels of the imperial bureaucracy over principles of agrarian governance, practices of agrarian governance in several localities of British India, along with Cuttack, and a variety of strategies by landholders of different kinds in Cuttack negotiating the rationalities of rule. The local was mobilized variously, by these practices, as difference constitutive of universality. In each of these sets of practices, therefore, it operated simultaneously as a critique and a model of universality. In the process, it became a transformative potential, opening up old universals, only to propose new closures.³

The practices examined in this book do not make a space where connections are simply established geographically, either as authoritarian flows from the metropole or as rebellious counter flows from the colony. This is also not a space in between, that of the empire. The book does not have the intention to argue, as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler do, that Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself.⁴ Histories inspired by this methodological move, despite establishing the dynamic space of imperial circuits as the object of analysis going beyond the metropole-colony division, remain analytically tied to geographical foundations.⁵ As a result, the imperial often falls back upon different kinds of movements between the clearly segregated geographical spaces of the metropole and the colony.⁶ It displays none of the dynamism that might be expected of what Cooper and Stoler identify as an imperial space, generated by contestations at various levels of a network of practices in the unified analytical field of the metropole-colony. Most important, these histories do not unchain space from physical geographies.

Moving away from such physical-geographical spatial organizations, this book makes sense of the local differently. I show how the spatial meaning of this category—generated from within the practices studied—served as an engagement with the problem of universality, and as its critique. From this point, I build the local up as a conceptual space, which had the capacity to transform old meanings and build new ones. I further demonstrate that all of this, across the diversity of the practices considered here, developed with reference to an astounding variety of physical geographies. The local, however, had a far more complex relationship with these locales than merely being their geographical expression.⁷ The geographical was an effect of this machine. But before dwelling further on the nature of this machine, let us turn to the practices themselves and to the locales they were entangled with.

Contextualizing Cuttack

I will begin by noting the reasons behind choosing Cuttack as one of these locales in relation to which these practices making the local are studied in this book. Cuttack was the nineteenth division of the Bengal Presidency, which the East India Company’s government occupied in 1803, defeating its erstwhile Maratha rulers. The conquest of Cuttack was crucial to a geographic consolidation of Company rule. Cuttack occupied an area along the eastern coast of British India that began beyond the borders of the Midnapore district of the Bengal Presidency and continued up to the districts of Ganjam and Koraput, which were part of the Madras Presidency. Evidently, Cuttack was the missing link in the possibility of a continuous territorial consolidation of the Company’s government. On top of that, being ruled by a strong regional force, the Marathas, from their headquarters in Nagpur, the area of Cuttack remained a potential gateway for threatening incursions of the Marathas into Company territory. This was reason enough for the governor-general, Lord Wellesley, to propose to the raja of Nagpur the establishment of a British subsidiary force in the raja’s territories. Given its strategic location, it can be assumed that a total military control of this territory was necessary for the government. Predictably, therefore, as the raja of Nagpur refused to permit the posting of Company soldiers in his territory, British troops marched in and conquered the area of Cuttack. In December 1803, as the Treaty of Deogaon was being concluded with Raghuji Bhonsle—the raja of Nagpur and the Maratha chief—Cuttack came under Company rule.

The Company’s government divided Cuttack into two administrative areas—the Mughalbandi and the Garhjat. Mughalbandi was governed by company regulations, while the Garhjat was marked as a princely domain. The Mughalbandi was composed of three districts: Balasore, Cuttack, and Puri. In 1804, the annual revenue of the Mughalbandi was estimated at Rs. 11,78,000. As an entire division within the Bengal Presidency, in terms of its revenue-yielding capacity, Cuttack was a tiny dot on the Company’s financial map. As this book bears out, however, in the organization of its agrarian territory, Cuttack received a distinct kind of governmental attention. Right from the beginning it was perceived as an anomalous zone. In spite of being a part of the Bengal Presidency, a permanent zemindary settlement—the mode of revenue administration prevalent in the greater part of this presidency—was never introduced in Cuttack. During the initial years, settlements spanning brief periods, like one, three, or five years, were made with zemindars, or big landlords. Very soon, in the aftermath of an insurrection, known as the Paik rebellion (1817), changes were introduced in the nature of land settlement in certain parts of the division. More significant shifts took place in the agrarian life of the territory over the years 1837–45 when an extensive survey and settlement operation was launched in Cuttack, which fixed rents, classified proprietary titles to lands, and, more generally, carefully defined the agrarian social as an economy of roles, capacities, and relations. Soon after the completion of this settlement, the division witnessed a plethora of disputes over property in land, which reshaped, yet again, the sinews of agrarian power in the district.

What brings these practices of governance and self- identification of agrarian groups in a particular place, like Cuttack, within the fold of this book is their critical implications in the making of the local there, and elsewhere. This is because throughout the first half of the nineteenth century an intense debate went on at various levels of the imperial bureaucracy regarding the local specificities of agrarian conditions in different regions of British India. Cuttack, like other locales, was centrally implicated in this conversation. In fact, it is in the light of this debate that the Bengal Code, or the regulations pertaining primarily to revenue administration in the areas of Bengal Presidency acquired earlier by the Company, was perceived as inapplicable to Cuttack.⁸ Accordingly, the so-called Permanent Settlement signed in 1793 was never extended to this division of the Bengal Presidency. A brief historiographic digression is in order here. The major works of South Asian agrarian history focusing on Bengal have very little to say about Cuttack. These histories have defined Bengal only in terms of its permanently settled areas, thereby excluding those vast tracts within it which were temporarily settled. Consequently, their conclusions about Bengal’s agrarian development have been skewed.⁹

The aborting of the Permanent Settlement, or the Bengal model of revenue settlement in Bengal itself, was spurred by a general critical disposition within Company governance toward itself. This strategy of self-critique was, in turn, an expression of the problem—epistemological and political—that universality posed for governance. The category of the local was mobilized to make sense of and resolve this problem. The local, as I understand it in this book, did not give up on universality but refigured the way in which it had appeared as a problem. This is why, I argue, histories ignorant of the non–Permanent Settlement areas of Bengal betray not only a gap in the knowledge of agrarian conditions of a locality; they also demonstrate a blindness toward the very nature of the epistemological project that shaped governmental rationality during this period. This book suggests to the earlier historical works that nothing in Bengal or within the foundations of governance was permanently settled.

Instead, practices of governance in Cuttack were aimed at assembling the local as difference. In the process, there emerged a gamut of strategies of different kinds of agrarian groups, who tried to make sense of their location in conversation with the rationality of these practices. Inside and outside Cuttack, therefore, this book follows lines and circulations of the local that were spun around a variety of localities, about specificities of agrarian conditions in British India. I locate Cuttack as various congealed moments in this interconnected field of motion, only to point toward their continuous decomposition and recomposition. Interestingly, the idea that Cuttack was not only one of the innumerable localities in British India but stood for something much greater than itself came out in several official enunciations. Perhaps their pinnacle was reached when this obscure locale found an exclusive mention in John Stuart Mill’s Memorandum of the Improvements in the Administration of India During the Last Thirty Years presented in 1858 to the British Parliament.

Mill argued that Cuttack represented the best system of settlement, because it combined the specific respective advantages of different models of settlement. That is why, he further noted, it should serve as the leading model for agrarian governance. He proposed its extension to other recently conquered territories of the Company.¹⁰ Settlements, as I discuss later in detail, primarily involved making sense of the varying forms of property in land in different regions of British India and, thereby, instituting a framework for their governance. Accordingly, from the time of the earliest of such settlements, namely, the Permanent Settlement of Bengal of 1793, till the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, the greatest task faced by the East India Company’s government was that of understanding and managing property in land in India. In appreciating the model of settlement adopted in Cuttack, Mill was, therefore, actually indicating that it represented the ideal form of government of the regional differences in property in India.

Mill’s declaration was deeply embedded in a long and complex debate over property that animated an astounding range of levels and regions of governance in British India over this period. The question of specificity was formulated, and answered, albeit temporarily, by these discursive practices of governance. This book explores how governmental rationality engaged with the problem of universality versus difference, in comprehending specific forms of property in land in British India. Cuttack appeared as one of the seminal lines in this field of engagement, which, in turn, generated other lines traversing a great variety of categories and geographies in British India and beyond. What brought these lines together was the problem of universality-difference, fashioned as the category of the local; its operations were also visible in other analytical spaces, like the interface of science and political economy in contemporary Britain. Empirically speaking, J. S. Mill was important for both these spaces—debates over property in Cuttack and British India, and debates over categories and methods in science and political economy in Britain. For a preliminary understanding of these entanglements, let us now turn to an outline of the chapters of the book.

Transformations

The first chapter introduces the local with an examination of a range of debates over the methodology of political economy in early nineteenth-century Britain. To appreciate the significance of this material, it will be useful to briefly revisit the seminal scholarly assessments of the relations between political economy and empire in early nineteenth-century Britain. It is widely accepted that in this period the theoretical field of political economy in Britain was predominantly defined in terms of David Ricardo’s system. Historians have, however, qualified the extent of the intellectual authority of Ricardian principles within political economy circles. Ricardian principles were critiqued within political economy from different perspectives.¹¹ Such critical qualifications are, however, absent in the histories of empire and British India. Here, since Eric Stokes’s pioneering work, which compellingly demonstrated how the rising tide of utilitarian ideals in Britain played a defining role in shaping different aspects of governance in nineteenth-century British India, the singularity of the authority of Ricardo’s doctrines have been almost taken for granted in the historiography, especially in making sense of the Company’s land revenue policy.¹²

Ricardian political economy, Stokes argues, made its way to the agrarian affairs of British India through James Mill, Ricardo’s close friend and reputed scholar-administrator. Mill made Ricardian thought, particularly its conceptualization of rent, the basis of property governance and land tax in British India.¹³ Most important, since land was the biggest source of revenue for the Company, it is through agrarian governance, that the authoritarian, universalizing, reforming impulse of Western liberal principles, in its utilitarian avatar, made its most forceful mark on an indigenous society.¹⁴

In contrast to this interventionist liberalism, Stokes notes, there emerged a preservationist tradition, the ‘Romantic’ generation in British Indian history. This tradition approached Indian/indigenous society with a sentiment with which Wordsworth and the Romantics invested the noble peasant…. They brought to the Indian problem Burke’s notion of history.¹⁵ Stokes’s characterization of the philosophical basis of governance—not only agrarian but in general—in nineteenth-century British India in terms of a division between the utilitarians/liberals and the romantics/conservatives has been repeated later, even in its critique.¹⁶ Lynn Zastoupil, for example, points to the absence in Stokes’s work of any consideration of John Stuart Mill’s entanglement with British India. He fills this gap by providing a rich discussion of the influence the younger Mill exerted in formulating policies in various areas of governance in British India.¹⁷ In narrating this involvement, Zastoupil understands the philosophical outlook of J. S. Mill as composed of a mixture of the course of his intellectual development as a thinker, and that of his experience at India House as an administrator. Accordingly, he interprets Mill’s philosophy as a reinterpretation of the senior Mill’s abstract authoritarian universalism in the light of an appreciation of historical and cultural specificities. This reworking, Zastoupil argues, emerged out of the simultaneous impact on Mill of the romantic sensibilities of his time and the ideas of the empire of opinion group of British Indian administrators, who espoused a Burkean sensitivity toward indigenous life.¹⁸

It is important to note that Zastoupil’s empire of opinion group refers to exactly those administrators who, in Stokes’s work, were categorized as the Romantic generation. Although he insists that Mill’s enunciations not only reflected engagements with varied strands of metropolitan thought but were also shaped by the imperial experience of administration through the ideas of the empire of opinion group, in reading these latter ideas in turn as Burkean and Whiggish articulations, Zastoupil ends up rewriting the imperial mind of J. S. Mill as a metropolitan one. In an attempt to explain Mill’s philosophy in terms of an imperial intercourse, he ends up reproducing Stokes’s analytical framework. Within this framework, formations of South Asian societies are understood as being directly caused by dominant metropolitan currents of thought. This is a diffusionist model resting on a series of binaries, like metropole-colony, Western theory–indigenous reality, abstract utilitarian universalism-concrete romantic particularism, inside-outside, and many others.

Keeping in mind these historiographical trends, this book suggests a different way of thinking about the very epistemological conditions of possibility for a relation between political economy in Britain and governmental rationality in early nineteenth-century British India. The first chapter shows that Ricardian ideas—which these diffusionist histories identify as the dominant articulation of metropolitan thought influencing governance in South Asia—were themselves questioned in Britain in debates over the method and categories of political economy. These debates revolved around the problem of universality-difference. The way this problem was posed and resolved, I argue, opened up grounds for the recasting of political economy as governance. It is these relations—universality-difference and political economy–governance—which were made in and through the category of the local. The local unified disparate sites—Cuttack, British India, and Britain—not through diffusionist hierarchies but as simultaneous and intersecting lines of force in an apparatus.

Political economy in Britain over the first half of the nineteenth century got involved with the question of methodology in relation to a broader intellectual movement aimed at rethinking the epistemological basis of scientific knowledge. This movement claimed that an inductive methodology must be followed in building up knowledge in all forms of sciences. It was spearheaded by William Whewell, a meta-commentator of science, based at Cambridge. Whewell along with John Herschel, Charles Babbage, and Richard Jones formed a group that tried to programmatically develop an inductive methodology as the epistemological ground of all branches of science. Individually, these men were scholars working in different fields of the natural sciences, other than Jones, whose interests were in political economy.¹⁹ Whewell was a polymath who wrote on diverse fields, like mathematics, geology, architecture, political economy, and moral philosophy, among others. But above everything, he was what can be described in retrospective terms as the first philosopher of science.²⁰ He attempted a systematic epistemological redefinition of the sciences, based on a championing of the inductive method. This was programmatically spelt out in his twin publications, which complemented each other, History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History.

Whewell’s inductivism entered political economy through Richard Jones. Jones critiqued Ricardo’s system, pointing out that it was not grounded in inductive reasoning. Along with Whewell, he argued that Ricardian categories were based on deductive and, hence, false generalizations. Together, they declared that the manner in which Ricardo defined the chief constituent categories of his system made them inapplicable to, even meaningless for, the vast majority of the peoples living in different nations of the world. This is when, I argue in this chapter, the local became a category internal to, and constitutive of, political-economic reason. The debate sparked by this critique of Ricardianism was then taken up in the writings of several other political economists, like Thomas Malthus, J. R. McCulloch, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill. This chapter tracks this debate as it was conducted in terms of a series of substitutable conceptual oppositions, like inductive-deductive, hypothesis-observation, theory-practice, and abstract-concrete. This episte-mological battle was carried out in a string of essays published in reputable contemporary British periodicals as well as in the more well-known texts of these authors.

This epistemological conflict was most sharply articulated in a series of debates over the definition of the category of rent. In responding to Jones’s charge that Ricardo’s definition of rent was not able to explain the lifeworlds of the greater part of the world’s populations, defenders of Ricardo’s system, like McCulloch and James Mill, brought out their own detailed examinations of the conditions of collective life of populations in non-Western parts of the world. Their representations invariably took India as an empirical ground and became an analysis of the relation between political structures and property relations of the country. This analytical direction assumed a more comprehensive form when Jones published An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on the Sources of Taxation.²¹ The book proposed a rewriting of political economy in the light of the indigenous conditions of different nations in the world. Jones argued that meanings of the chief categories of political economy, like rents, wages, and profits, were determined by the variety of conditions under which production and distribution take place all over the world. He emphasized that agricultural production, or the very act of laboring on land, was always and already grounded in multifarious frameworks of the distribution of produce. These conditions of distribution, in turn, were historical outcomes of complex and multilayered entanglements between property and political power. Jones elucidated his perspective by highlighting the various kinds of rents prevalent in different nations. From Western European nations to Russia to Central Asian lands to China to India, he explained these rents as reflections of relations of power, shaped by relations between varying modes of political sovereignty and forms of proprietorship, existent in different nations.²²

This is how, I argue in this chapter, these debates effected a general reconfiguration of the epistemological object of political economy. Political economy became invested in understanding differences in the sovereignty-property complex of nations. The local stood for this transformed object of knowledge of political economy. The local was not simply nationally varying specific formation(s) of sovereignty-property relations. It was a framework for making sense of the problem of universality-difference. It acted as a tool with which the universal could be reassembled in and as difference.

Of course, this difference was organized as a hierarchy. In the debate over the meaning of political-economic categories, the form of sovereignty-property linkage existent in Europe, which provided the basis for Ricardo’s definition of rent, was considered ideal in many cases. Accordingly, the form of such linkages visible in other nations was perceived as an inferior one. But across a range of positions, self-identifying as Ricardian and anti-Ricardian, this hierarchization was put under suspension. In this moment of an epistemological shift, difference was more important than hierarchy. The local emerged, therefore, as the conceptual possibility of making difference the new epistemological object for political economy.

The chapter also argues that difference was fundamental to the Whewellian program of inductivism. Whewell’s induction, I suggest, was not simply about replacing theory with facts or putting observation ahead of hypothesis in building knowledge. Taking a close look at how Whewell uses these terms, and more technical ones like colligation and superinducement, in his writings, I contend that his proposed method had grand ambitions of universalization. The method’s emphasis on observed particulars, or facts, was already