Reinterpreting Colonial Moment
Rohan D’Souza
D
The Colonial and the Colonised
Cederlof threads reflexive and tactile e thnography with the formal archive to twine strands, hitherto kept unrelated, in environmental politics, British colonialism, law, regional histories and marginal communities. The resultant weave is a provocation that reinterprets the colonial moment in India, central to which is the attempt to reveal the colonial project as not only containing disparate and conflicting trajectories, but that the (re)actions of the colonised were similarly a fflicted with internal dissention and riven in crosspurposes. Thus, according to Cederlof, any meaningful grasp of events in this period would require attention to processes of synthesis and combination that were, in
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Landscapes and the Law: Environmental Politics, Regional Histories and Contests over Nature by Gunnel Cederlof (New Delhi: Permanent Black), 2008; pp xvi + 300, Rs 695.
turn, assembled from a variety of elements drawn from both domains – the colonial and the colonised. The B ritish East India Company (EIC), in effect, did not simply foist itself as a completed and internally consistent entity, but rather enforced its presence by drawing upon local logics and as responses to contingencies on the ground. In other words, the colonial “order” was assembled by meshing specific local social, cultural and p olitical properties with broader mercantile interests and imperatives.
Informed by this refreshing analytic departure, Landscapes and the Law begins by exploring the early EIC experiences in the Nilgiris, a region that sits like a fat knot in south India. Made up of a collection of hills, slopes, escarpments and plateaus, the Nilgiris encompasses a spectrum of distinct ecological zones. While montane grassland and shola forests clothe the valleys above 1,800 metres, thick evergreen forests predominate in the low-lying areas before gradually giving way to scrub forests. It is while bringing these distinct ecologies, from the late 18th century onwards, under the singular authority of the EIC that the latter stumbled upon the Toda pastoralists, Badaga shifting cultivators and Kota artisans. For Cederlof, this m oment of encounter, however, should not be accepted as a “taken-for-granted assumption” in which the point of impact is studied as a dramatic collision between a defining British appearance against an isolated region, peopled by unique and specific social organisations. Instead, the arrival of the EIC in the Nilgiris opens up several as yet unresolved questions:
(a) periodicity in writings on regional
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h istory, (b) demarcations of time and space in historical analyses, and (c) how temporality bridges the pre-colonial- colonial d ivide. Put differently, Landscapes and the Law explores the colonial experience in
south Asia as made up of strings of entanglements and mutually shaping arrangements; not simply a straightforward confrontation between two dissimilar and contrasting political economies.
Immemorial Rights of Todas
The first two chapters of the book – on rights in nature and narratives on the Toda – in fact, set the pace for the abovementioned conceptual shift. Here, Cederlof incisively suggests that any meaningful attempt at understanding the pre-colonial Nilgiris landscape or recovering the voices of the Toda from 19th century documents will first require a calibrated loosening of notions. For a start, it is pointed out that given the thin numbers of the local inhabitants in Nilgiris, the EIC was not faced with any challenge involving violent or overwhelming military campaigns for conquest. Colonial efforts were occupied instead by tasks that acquired a nagging contestable and often times contradictory tone, which involved, in the main, crafting legal principles for property, evolving measures for modern institution-building and establishing procedures for sovereign rule.
Cederlof runs us here through a gamut of personalities such as John Sullivan – “the father of early modern Nilgiris” – who in the 1820s began to “settle” British authority in the region. Sullivan’s actions, however, were complicated by the fact that while he did enclose lands for the EIC and for his own private estate, in time, he became a vociferous advocate for limiting European expansion into Toda lands, as, in his opinion, the latter possessed “immemorial rights” (pp 113-14). In a sense, Sullivan’s seemingly opposed positions a ctually echoed two levels of complications that had begun to unsettle colonial presence and ideologies in the region. For one, the local EIC administration began to get anxious over the possibility of a vast number of European and non-British settlers acquiring permanent property in the N ilgiris. The prospect of having to deal
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with a large number of landlords, it was concluded, could lead to the weakening of the company’s ability to exercise unquestioned sovereignty. Put differently, permanent ownership in land could trample over the company’s claims for absolute rule.
Theories of Evolution
The second level of complications concerned the conceptual strains that had set in with regard to the manner in which the EIC had sought to link landscapes, races and the ideas on civilisation with theories of evolution. In fact, the colonial perception of the Nilgiris and its inhabitants, as Cederlof shows, was a remarkable admixture of notions put together by ethnographic works (Henry Harness and James Hough carried out in the 1820s and 1830s), anthropological studies (W H R Rivers 1906), empirically compiled gazetteers by colonial officials and surveys that were, in turn, clouded by agendas for ascertaining revenue claims, land settlements and property rights. In a word, such images and representations of the Nilgiris tended to produce a double vision: on the one hand, a romantic notion of the Todas as a variant of the noble savage “drowsing in the meadows and idly chasing buffaloes” alongside an entrepreneurial Badaga tilling the soil in a landscape that was “pregnant” with “European pasts”, much alike to the Alps and Scottish highlands.
On the other, these idyllic and wilderness impressions were overlain with “transformative visions” of the British, signalled by ideas of progress and improvements in which the climates of the higher altitudes were assumed to offer two salubrious environs for sanatoriums and growing European crops. The Nilgiris and its inhabitants were, in effect, mapped and grasped by the colonialists through a “contestations of visions and life-worlds”.
Having thus sketched the varied contents that made up EIC and British imaginations on the Nilgiris and its peoples, Cederlof then goes on to, in Chapter three, wrestle with the mire of tensions that shaped colonial law and its codification in the region. What emerges from a rich and colourful discussion is the “negotiated” nature of the colonial legal regime. European expansion in the colonies was inevitably sought to be premised on a legal
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s tatus. Conquests, violence and pacification, in other words, needed sovereignty to be secured through by legitimacy p rovided by rationality and law. Establishing sovereign rule over conquered territories, in fact, drew upon three possibilities:
(a) indigenous populations could be persuaded to submit to European overlordship, (b) rights could be purchased from local inhabitants, or (c) it could be established that there were no permanent claims over the acquired territories. For the Nilgiris, however, the EIC soon found itself twisted over racial conceptions in the quest to define the sovereign basis of rule in the region. The camp who saw themselves as proponents for aboriginal rights and native customs argued that the Toda’s aboriginality entitled them to lordship and absolute ownership rights in the land. For the Madras government, on the other hand, the Nilgiris were to be harnessed for “the public good”, and therefore, the Todas were subordinate and subject to company rule. According to Cederlof, these “conflicts within the EIC combined with pressure from people in the Nilgiris to shape legal codes for the r egion”. Consequently, the entire legal terrain must be seen as being inscribed and reinscribed not by the abstractions of i mpervious legal principles, but one saturated by evolving understandings of local cultures, ethnographies, racial theories, perceptions about landscapes, climates and ecologies of place.
Land, People, Local Politics
The subsequent two chapters – perceptions of land and people and local politics and regional confrontations – explore, in considerable detail, the intricate manner in which ethnographic encounters and popular responses to bureaucratic procedures acted upon the colonial legal sphere. In particular, Cederlof is truly compelling in pointing out how the ethnological treatment of the Nilgiris inhabitants was continuously refracted through colonial scientific, governmental and revenue-related interests. In several ways, such colonial categories strove to “fix” the inhabitants of the Nilgiris in specific “times” and “places” by eliding the particularities of their histories and, their unique social and cultural trajectories. Time was sought to be made linear and
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place a historical constant in order to merge people and practices with legal codes.
Such legally produced categories, however, collided against the material rhythms and social worlds of the Toda, Badaga and Kota. In particular, much political friction was generated over the initial EIC’s quest to sustain agrarian expansion in the region with the settlement of Indo-British agriculturalists through the idea of absolute ownership in land. Cederlof here reveals these tensions by providing a finegrained analysis of the fate of Venkata Soobayen, who, as a lower level administrative functionary, sought to expropriate lands from the Todas. By 1832, Soobayen, however, was not only discharged from office, but even expected to “repay double what he had exacted from the Toda”. The Soobayen incident, as Cederlof explains, was, in fact, indicative of how the Todas engaged with the challenge of the loss of their lands and livelihoods. For one, the Todas proceeded to adopt a range of forms for confrontation:
…petitions, depositions, refusal to appear for questioning, delaying investigations by absence, refusal to accept payment (or compensation) for loss of land, denying the validity of earlier agreements, filing court cases… (p 195).
Such stratagems were further suppor ted by the Todas creating “cross-cutting alliances” not only with the likes of the raja of Nelliyalam (Malabar), but with l ocal colonial officials as well. In consequence, protracted disputes over legal principles – E uropean ownership of land in perpetuity
– ended up clashing against larger issues of sovereignty and rule. That is, the colonial authorities soon realised that granting land in perpetuity to Euro pean colonisers could tantamount to increasing the power of the landlord vis-à-vis the c olonial administration in the region.
Colonial Legal Codification
The Soobayen fallout and several other abrasive incidents acted to shape the subsequent passing of the regulations of 1843 titled, “Rights of the Todawars and Rules for Grants of Rights on the Neilgherries”; in which, Toda rights, local practices and a ccess to grazing were sought to be imbricated in the broader thrust on property and settlement in the Nilgiris. Colonial
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l egal codification, hence, according to Cederlof, was assembled at the intersection of “‘how conflicts within the EIC combined with pressure from people in the Nilgiris”. Consequently, Landscapes and the Law asserts that legal regimes, especially for the Nilgiris, involved colonial lawmaking as a process rather than as the dry enactment of principles and rules i ndependent of historical or experiential contexts. Negotiations on the ground in active friction and collision against local contingencies, in other words, helped set the drafts for colonial legal codes.
From the above sweep of detail and conceptual reconsideration, Cederlof suggests a persuasive outline for the writing of an “environmental history of law”. A ccordingly, one would need to unravel the weight of the colonial presence in terms of the number of agencies and agents who worked to establish their presence in the Nilgiris. Here, the reference is to the EIC’s Madras government, the Court of Directors and the British Parliament
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through the intermediary of the Board of Control. Their differing perceptions and colliding stratagems often required them to draw upon and sometimes even align with different local elements. In other words, it is crucial to understand the role of multiple layers of authority and internal divisions within the Company in order to grasp the varied ways in which law was sought to be formulated. Second, Cederlof is, perhaps, correct in also suggesting that there is a need to rethink the idea of geography and the environment. Instead of perceiving neat divisions between the hills and plains or region and locality, one should explore the interconnectedness of social environments and political geographies. Notably, the manner in which the Todas and the Badagas had, for long, cultivated and crafted equations (trade and otherwise) with neighbouring rajas in the Malabar and in places such as Wynad. Even the local EIC officials were compelled to formulate their strategies in the Nilgiris by regularly having to match their wits
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-with and against administrative resources stationed at Madras. Lastly, Cederlof convincingly argues that much of the legal codification exercises such as rights and custom, as they played out in the Nilgiris, substantially drew upon colonial ideologies about nature, landscapes and races. Relating the environment to processes of law-making, therefore, offers a crucial context for capturing both their interrelatedness and the manner in which these two elements were mutually constituted.
Landscapes and the Law is a significant contribution by offering a fresh and innovative paradigm for understanding the c olonial project in south Asia. The black box on the early modern colonial period is now flipped open to reveal power and agency as a kaleidoscope of possibilities rather than a static picture set in sepiatainted monochrome.
Rohan D’Souza (rohanxdsouza@gmail) is with the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
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