Indian Petitions as a Literature of Complaint in Early Colonial Bengal

Historians of the early colonial period have recently highlighted how South Asian subjects critiqued British rule in a variety of literary genres, including plays, poetry and history, often drawing on Indo-Persianate conceptions of political ethics (akhlaq). This paper reads Indian petitions presented to British rulers in late eighteenth century Bengal as a genre of complaint literature, illuminating conceptions of ethical rulership derived from late Mughal politics. Presenting petitions (or arzees) in Persian or other South Asian languages was a ubiquitous practice of ruler-ship in pre-colonial India, which was both carried over, and also gradually transformed, under colonial rule. East India Company officials in the British capital of Calcutta were often shocked by the sheer number and “clamor” of petitioners who crowded outside the houses of elite officials or government offices. The Company translated numerous petitions from socially diverse complainants, and recorded them as a vital source for information about local Indian society. Yet while Indian petitions were usually couched in a language of deference, they also critiqued Company rule as violating norms of political justice established under the rule of the Mughals and the provincial nawabs of Bengal. Indian petitioners couched their defense of particular rights within an ethic of reciprocal and consultative ruler-ship, critiquing the forms as well as the substance of the Company’s rule. The paper also suggests how the language of Indian petitions gradually changed over the first decades of Company rule under pressure of colonial constraints. As increasing numbers of petitioners switched to English rather than Persian or Bengali, they also moved away from arguments drawn from pre-colonial history and ethics, hewing more closely to the new bureaucratic logic of the Company’s growing body of written regulations.