Document Raj: Scribes and writing under early colonial rule in Madras, 1771--1860

This dissertation examines the relationship between graphic culture and the making of a colonial regime by arguing that English East India Company rule in the early nineteenth century Tamil region was quintessentially a "Document Raj." The Company established its domination in this region of Madras Presidency through a new style of statecraft: a punitive rule of paper that reorganized the power of written documents and transformed extant scribal practices by generating a new textual habitus. Through an analysis of the micro-practices of document use, the dissertation demonstrates that although the "form" of documents under the Company regime derived from pre-existing document genres, Company rule re-wrote the normative relationship between written recordkeeping and memory, and written and spoken declarations. By studying the petty economy of documents that emerged during Company rule, it thus draws attention to the very creation of the documentary archive of the English East India Company in Madras.;The spatial milieu of the dissertation is the Company kacceri , or office. Here, new scribal practices were fashioned from older ones, producing the skeins of correspondence that linked the debates in metropolitan Britain to the Tamil hinterland. At the same time, these practices transformed the very meaning of what it meant to write and to posses documents in the Tamil region. Documents secured the kacceri's power to punish and discipline its subjects by yoking the technology of writing to new ways of securing oral testimonies, taking confessions, and defining authentic evidence. Because of the new value of documents, kacceri writers and scribes themselves derived power by brokering a traffic in documents, a "document bazaar.".;The dissertation consists of five chapters. Of these, the first three examine the refashioning of scribal practices and skills. These chapters demonstrate how Company rule transformed recordkeeping practices in the kacceri and shaped a new orientation to writing pedagogy. The last two chapters address the creation of the Company's Document Raj. Chapter IV considers how the Company secured the authenticity of documents by reorganizing the protocols of forgery and perjury. The final chapter examines the growing importance of the petition, both as mode of communication and as a new form of sociability in Madras. It investigates the manner in which a document bazaar sprang up through the explosion of document use and how petitioning practices redrew acceptable norms of civil address.