Custom, law and John Company in Kumaon

Abstract

The meeting of Indian custom and law with the emergent formal legal, revenue and administrative practice of the British East India Company has long been a central subject of South Asian historical studies. Overwhelmingly, this vast corpus of scholarship has been centred on and contextualized by the experience and conditions of the Indian heartlands. This thesis takes the study of the meeting of local custom with the Company’s formal governmental practices out of the Indian heartlands up into the peripheral Himalayan region of Kumaon. Kumaon is the little patch of the Himalaya tucked up where today India, Nepal and Tibet all meet in a tangle of green hills, plunging valleys and icy peaks to the northeast of Delhi. The contrast of the region’s mountainous landscape to the awesome flatness of the adjacent North Indian plains could not be more extreme. Within Kumaon’s very different landscape, the population had remained light and widely scattered, a monetized economy based on specialization of production focused on urban centres had only emerged to a limited degree, and the people had persisted with and developed cultural practices that were distant and distinct from the orthodoxies of India’s heartland. Crucially, the Indo-Islamic empires of the plains had never been able to conquer and hold territory in these hills and, as a consequence, the region had had no experience with the legal, revenue and administrative practices of the Mughal empire. The British East India Company invaded and held Kumaon in 1815. Here they found a matrix of economic, political and cultural conditions very different from everything they knew from the plains below. Aware that its regulations—the embodiment of its formal governmental practices—were a palimpsest written on the pre-existing conditions of the plains and the vestiges of late-Mughal machinery of government, the Company chose not to impose its regulations in Kumaon. Rather, Kumaon would be an Extra-Regulation province where much of the everyday practices of government were in the hands of the local Commissioner. Within this space beyond the regulations, the meeting of local custom and the Company’s formal governmental practices took on a trajectory that was distant and distinct to the trajectory of the meeting on the plains. This thesis brings to light the early years of Kumaon's meeting with the practices of the British India Company in the period 1815 to 1843.