Space, Language, and Internalized Contestation in the Revenue Administration of North India

This paper argues that while the revenue service of the late East India Company and early Crown period in India represented a form of bureaucratic centralization, as a set of spatial, linguistic, and administrative practices, imbedded within itself were also nearly emergent “traces” of older forms of dislocation, disputation, and reliance upon Indian intermediary forms.  Here I will primarily examine a specialized subset of technical dictionaries – known as ‘kutcherry dictionaries’ – dedicated to recording and translating Indian terminology related to the collection of taxation revenue in northern India.  I seek here to first contextualize the production of these highly specialized vocabulary lists within a wider culture of administrative regularization in the nineteenth century, which also includes the writing of bureaucratic procedure manuals and the construction of formalized administrative spaces of revenue collection and arbitration.  But principally this paper presents a counter-reading of the self-presentation of bureaucratic centralization, through an in-depth analysis of the kutcherry dictionary of Patrick Carnegy, published in 1853.  I argue that Carnegy’s vocabulary list not only highlighted the inadequacy of translation in the complex administration of land revenue, but that it also should be understood as intrinsically a recordation of the practices of negotiation and disputation with the Company’s attempts to impose its revenue demands.