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Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia: Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2019

ROHIT DE  and
ROBERT TRAVERS
ROHIT DE
Affiliation:
Yale University Email: [email protected]
ROBERT TRAVERS
Affiliation:
Cornell University Email: [email protected]
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Extract

On 4 May 2014, as a tumultuous general election in India drew to a close, the Indian Express newspaper published a column by Tavleen Singh, with the headline ‘No more petitioners: no more petitioners’. The column went on to quote P. Chidambaran, the outgoing finance minister of the defeated Congress government, who diagnosed a historical shift in the mentality of the Indian electorate. ‘India has moved on,’ Chidambaran was reported as saying, ‘from a petitioner society to an aspirational one. Treating people as petitioners is a mistake . . . even the poor demand a better life and are no longer resigned to their fate.’ In India, the column argued, ‘poor people’ now had ‘middle class aspirations’, desiring ‘jobs and development’ rather than ‘charity’ and that this was a major reason for the success of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 elections. To be a ‘petitioner’, in this analysis, was to be ground down by poverty and resignation, and dependent on the ‘charity’ of others. It was a passing historical condition, a sign of underdevelopment that could be sloughed off by the sudden awakening across society of ‘middle class aspirations’.

Type
Introduction
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Special Issue 1: Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia , January 2019 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

We are grateful to the American Historical Association and the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge for hosting panels and workshops where these articles were first presented. We are particularly grateful to David Washbrook, Tim Harper, Fei-Hsien Wang, William O'Reilly, Joya Chatterji, David Gilmartin, Jon Wilson, Philip Stern, Doug Haynes, and Emma Rothschild for their comments and suggestions.

References

1 Tavleen Singh, ‘No More Petitioners; No More Petitioners’, Indian Express, 4 May 2014, http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/no-more-petitioners/, [accessed 16 October 2018]. We are grateful to Mathew Hull for pointing out this reference.

2 For a recent discussion, see Wright, Scott, ‘Epetitions’, in Coleman, Stephen and Freelon, Deen (eds), Handbook of Digital Politics, Elgar Publishing, Northampton, MA, 2015, pp. 136–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a study of how literacy activists in rural contemporary Tamil Nadu are training Dalit women to write and sign their own petitions to state officials, see Cody, Francis, ‘Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship: Petitions, Literacy Activism and the Performativity of Signature in Rural Tamil Nadu’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 24, 3, 2009, pp. 347–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cody's subtle account of the ‘partial felicity’ of the act of petitioning by marginalized subjects draws attention to the ‘limits of a governmental communicative reason that would conflate written subject and agent’, especially in a post-colonial context ‘where the construction of those citizens that would be represented is in fact a product of the very act of representation’. See also Cody, Francis, The Light of Knowledge. Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Siddiqi, Majid, The British Historical Context and Petitioning in Colonial India, with an Introduction by S. Inayat A. Zaidi, XXII Dr M. A. Ansari Memorial Lecture, Jamia Milia Islamia, Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2005Google Scholar.

4 Among numerous recent studies, see, for example, Sahai, Nandita, Politics of Patronage and Protest. The State, Society, and Artisans in Early Modern Rajasthan, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Swarnalatha, Potukuchi, ‘Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra’, in van Voss, Lex Heerma (ed.), Petitions in Social History, International Review of Social History Supplement 9, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 107–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raman, Bhavani, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gupta, Akhil, Red Tape. Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2015Google Scholar; Hull, Matthew, The Government of Paper. The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an influential earlier study which foregrounded petitions as a site for the emergence of urban public culture in colonial India, see Haynes, Douglas, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India. The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991Google Scholar.

5 For a useful survey of historical approaches to petitioning, see L. H. van Voss, ‘Introduction’, in van Voss (ed.), Petitions in Social History, pp. 1–10. For some other examples of recent historical work on petitioning from several different regions and periods, see Hung, Ho-Fung, Protest with Chinese Characteristics. Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid Qing Dynasty, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ben-Bassat, Yuval, Petitioning the Sultan. Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine, I. B. Tauris, London, 2014Google Scholar; Zaret, David, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000Google Scholar; De Costa, Ravi, ‘Identity, Authority and the Moral Worlds of Indigenous Petitions’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 48, 3, 2006, pp. 669–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pedersen, Susan, ‘Samoa on the World Stage: Petitioning and Peoples before the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 40, 2, August 2012, pp. 231–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carpenter, Daniel, ‘Recruitment by Petition: American Anti-Slavery, French Protestantism, English Suppression’, Perspectives on Politics, vol. 14, 3, September 2016, pp. 700–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brodie Waddell (ed.), Addressing Authority in Early Modern Europe. An Online Symposium on Petitions and Supplications in Early Modern Society (2016), https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/addressing-authority/, [accessed 16 October 2018].

6 Taneja, Anand Vivek, ‘Jinneaology. Everyday Life and Islamic Theology in Post-partition Delhi’, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 3, 3, 2015, pp. 139–65, p. 160CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Taneja, A. V., Jinneaology. Time, Islam and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2017Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., p. 142.

8 Similarly, studies of the Kumaoni shrine to Golu Dev, worshipped as a god of justice, evidence growing number of petitioners asking for mannats (pledges to make an offering if a request is granted) on pieces of notarized stamp paper, bringing together folk belief and modern legal practice. The petitions, made by private individuals, must be displayed in public, mimicking the structure of a state court. See Malik, Aditya, ‘The Darbar of Golu Dev’, in Basu, Helen and Sax, William S. (eds), The Law of Possession: Religion, Healing and the Secular State, Oxford University Press, New York, 2015, pp. 193–230Google Scholar; Agarwal, C. M., Golu Devta: The God of Justice in the Kumaon Himalayas, Shree Almora Book Depot, Almora, 1992Google Scholar.

9 Lex Heerma van Voss offers this useful general definition of petitions as ‘demands for favour, or for the redressing of an injustice, directed to some established authority’. van Voss, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.

10 Gupta, Red Tape, p. 167.

11 For a longer discussion of different early modern terminologies of petitioning, see especially Abhishek Kaicker's and Rosalind O'Hanlon's articles in this special issue.

12 For discussions of petitioning in British and Anglophone politics in the early modern period, see Knights, Mark, ‘Participation and Representation before Democracy: Petitions and Addresses in Premodern Britain’, in Shapiro, Ian, Stokes, Susan C., Wood, Elisabeth Jean and Kirshner, Alexander S. (eds), Political Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009Google Scholar. See also Pearsall, Sarah, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008, pp. 97–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 For a discussion of practices of petitioning in the Islamic world, as connected to the ‘classical Islamic institution’ of the mazalim court, see Bussat, Ben, Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine, I. B. Tauris, London, 2014, pp. 20–44Google Scholar. Bussat particularly emphasizes the ‘global phenomenon’ of petitioning as a demand to the ruler for ‘extra-judicial’ forms of redress, arguing that ‘surprisingly similar patterns of submitting petitions exist in places far removed from each other on the globe’. Ibid., p. 21.

14 The ‘impurity’ of diction in eighteenth-century Bengali language petitions, which included numerous words derived from Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, became an object of critique for British officials producing Bengali grammars. See Ogborn, Miles, Indian Ink. Script, Print and the Making of the English East India Company, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 244–46Google Scholar.

15 For the role of petitions in managing the ‘polyglot, cosmopolitan world’ of subjects in late seventeenth-century Bombay under East India Company rule, see Stern, Philip J., ‘Power, Petitions, and the “Povo” in Early English Bombay’, in Balachandran, Aparna, Pant, Rashmi and Raman, Bhavani (eds), Iterations of Law: Legal Histories from India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2017, pp. 186–209Google Scholar. For the notion of ‘bridges’ that mediated early modern encounters between different ‘courtly cultures’ in the early modern era, see Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Courtly Encounters. Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015, p. 30Google Scholar. For an important, recent essay exploring ‘common practices in many different kinds of political communities between 1400 and 1800 that helped to structure relations across polities’, see Benton, Lauren and Clulow, Adam, ‘Legal Encounters and the Origins of Global Law’, in Bentley, Jerry H., Subrahmanyam, Sanjay and Wiesner Hanks, Merry E. (eds), The Cambridge World History. Volume 6: The Construction of a Global World 1400–1800 CE. Part 2, Patterns of Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015, pp. 80–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 For George Boucher or Bowcher's numerous conflicts in the 1680s with East India Company authorities, who regarded him as an ‘interloper’, see Stern, Philip J., The Company-State. Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 2011, p. 45, 51, 65–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Hamilton, Alexander, A New Account of the East Indies, being the observations and remarks of Captain Alexander Hamilton, who spent his time there between 1688 and 1723, Edinburgh, 1727, Vol. 1, pp. 196–98Google Scholar.

18 According to the famous nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian dictionary, Hobson-Jobson, in the entry for ‘Doai, Dwye’, ‘Every Englishman in Upper India has often been saluted by the calls of “Dohāi khudāvand kī! Dohāi Mahārāj! Dohāi Kompanī Bahādur!” Justice, my Lord! Justice, O King, Justice, O Company’. Yule and Burnell disputed the derivation of dohai or duhai from a Persian sense of ‘two times, alas’, instead tracing it to a Sanskrit root, droha, meaning ‘injury’ or ‘wrong’. They point out that Ibn Batuta, in his fourteenth-century travel account, reported Indian creditors crying out ‘Darōhai’ in the presence of rulers to shame debtors. They also note that in some nineteenth-century princely states a false cry of dohai was regarded as a serious offence; see Yule, Henry, Burnell, A. C., and Crooke, William, Hobson-Jobson. A Dictionary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, John Murray, London, 1903, p. 321Google Scholar.

19 See the discussion of petitioning in the Mughal court in Kaicker’s article in this special issue; and for princes hearing petitions during hunting expeditions, see Faruqui, Munis D., The Princes of the Mughal Empire 1504–1719, University of California, Berkeley, 2015, p. 119Google Scholar.

20 For a study emphasizing the work of petitioning as a form of ‘trans-imperial’ politics in the early modern Mediterranean, see Rothman, Natalie, Brokering Empire. Trans-imperial Subjects Between Venice and Istanbul, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2012Google Scholar.

21 In an influential essay on pre-colonial South Asian and Southeast Asian polities, Michael Adas coined the term ‘contest state’ for political systems in which central powers made expansive claims to sovereignty that were ‘severely restricted in practice’. In such a fluid system, he argued, peasants used petitions to high powers to manoeuvre between different strata of contending lordships. Adas, Michael, ‘From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial South East Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 23, 2, 1981, pp. 217–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a study of artisan petitions that draws on Adas’s model of a ‘contest state’, see Sahai, Politics of Patronage and Protest. For a recent study of merchant petitions from early colonial western India, see Subramanian, Lakshmi, The Sovereign and the Prince. Ordering Maritime Subjects in India's Western Littoral, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016, especially pp. 61–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Knights, ‘Participation and representation’, pp. 41–42; De Costa, ‘Identity and authority’, pp. 671–72.

23 Zastoupil, Lynn, Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010, pp. 62–65, 101–05, 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties. Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012Google Scholar. For Indians travelling to Britain as political agents and petitioners in the nineteenth century, see Fisher, Michael H., Counterflows to Colonialism. Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600–1857, Permanent Black, Delhi, 2004, especially pp. 82–100 and 243–98Google Scholar.

24 Stanhope, Leicester, Sketch of the History and Influence of the Press in British India, London, 1823, pp. 4–5Google Scholar. Stanhope also praised the Marquis of Hastings (governor-general from 1813–23) for ‘adopting the practice of the ancient sovereigns, by receiving in his walks and rides the petitions of the meanest natives’. Ibid. p. 2.

25 Siddiqi, The British Historical Context, pp. 30–37.

26 De, Rohit, ‘Rebellion, Dacoity, and Equality: The Emergence of the Constitutional Field in Postcolonial India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 34, 2, 2014, pp. 260–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gould, William, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India: Society and State 1930s–1960s, Routledge, Basingstoke, 2011Google Scholar.

27 See, for instance, ‘Open Letter by Retired Senior Bureaucrats Demanding that the Prime Minister Take Action against Hate Crimes’, 16 April 2018, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/full-text-of-open-letter-from-retired-civil-servants-to-pm-modi-on-unnao-kathua-rape-cases/article23553651.ece, [accessed 17 October 2018]. ‘Open Letter by Academics and Scholars Criticising Inaction on the Kathua and Unnao Rape Cases’, 21 April 2018, https://thewire.in/gender/over-600-academics-scholars-write-to-pm-on-kathua-unnao-rapes, [accessed 17 October 2018].

28 Baser, Bahar, Akgönül, Samim and Öztürk, Ahmet Erdi, ‘“Academics for Peace” in Turkey: A Case of Criminalising Dissent and Critical Thought via Counterterrorism Policy’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 10, 2, 2017, pp. 274–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Fuller, C. J. and Bénéi, Veronique (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, Hurst, London, 2001Google Scholar; Sherman, Taylor, Gould, William and Ansari, Sarah (eds), From Subjects to Citizens. Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970, Cambridge University Press, Delhi, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 See, for example, the evocative case of rural Dalit women petitioning the district Collector in contemporary Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu. Francis Cody described how the women hoped to ‘make an affective claim’ on the Collector ‘through eye contact’, though when they arrived at the Collector's office he had already left for the day. Cody writes: ‘Any governmental claims to rationalized and disenchanted Weberian bureaucracy remain particularly vexed in this context, because the collector does in fact sit in the erstwhile king's seat, in his palace. In fact, he collects petitions in the old darbar hall where the king of Pudukkottai would have met with the court and those who had come to plead before royalty.’ Cody, ‘Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship’, pp. 368–69.

31 For another recent collection, which is also centrally concerned with petitioning as an aspect of modern legal regimes, see Balachandran, Pant and Raman (eds), Iterations of Law.

32 For the concept of ‘petition-like’, see Sriraman, Tarangini, ‘A Petition-Like Application: Rhetoric and Rationing Documents in Wartime Delhi, 1941–45’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 51, 3, 2014, pp. 353–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.