COMPANY RULE
Famously, the East India Company itself was founded on the first monopoly charter granted as royal prerogative by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600. Over the next two and a half centuries, the initial mercantile nature of the Company’s activities in India transformed through grants to collect land revenue, in the creation of fortifications for the protection of its physical assets and in the warfare and plunder it executed towards such ends.
It thereby also expanded its sphere of governmental activity by turns claiming legitimacy to do so as well as endeavouring to disguise the sovereign authority it exercised when at other times that proved more convenient.[7] All the while, the Company in India was repeatedly subject to the questioning of its exclusive rights relating to its activities, a concern mediated at times by the desire to exact loans and tax revenue by the British Parliament when settler colonies in North America grew more restive and other European powers attempted to establish competing outposts in the subcontinent.[8]Successive Kings’ Charters were the mechanism for enabling the Company to implant zones of governmental activity in three administrative zones, termed Presidencies. These were Madras, Calcutta and Bombay. The early charters recognised a governor responsible for laying out the law in the form of company regulations through each of these Presidencies. Jurisdictionally, the Presidencies were further divided into presidency towns and the mofussil. The mofussilwas considered to be the administrative hinterland, constituted of village communities and agrarian social relations. Where king’s courts and company courts administered a mostly uniform law in presidency towns, the systems of law in the mofussil were more locally varied, consisting of an admixture of ‘Hindu and Muslim personal law, Islamic criminal law, and Company Regulations’.[9]
Instances of native rebellion as well as company indebtedness attracted a keen public eye to the Company’s workings back in Britain, and led Parliament to pass Acts to regulate the Company itself.
In 1774 this resulted in the establishment of the office of a GovernorGeneral, of a Supreme Court at Bengal and the establishment of a council of governmental appointees to advise the Governor-General. The first Governor-General, Warren Hastings, established the apparatus for a permanent civil service as well as a standing army that would be inclusive of large numbers of Indians. Hastings himself would be later impeached and tried in Parliament on the charges of corruption, bribery, high crime and misdemeanours.[10] [11]Land was the primary basis of wealth in this early colonial configuration, and land revenue management tended to dictate systems of rule across the Presidencies.11 The last of the Kings’ Charters to the Company was issued in 1833 and it radically altered the legislative and administrative landscape. An all-India Legislative Council was created, with general and wide powers of law-making, which supplanted the independent legislative powers of the three Presidencies. Additionally, the town and mofussil distinction was abolished. These and other alterations gave rise to questioning of the form and administration of law for all of British India. To this end, successive law reform commissions made up of prominent British lawyers tried to arrive at a system of laws that would accommodate British interests as well as streamline systems of justice.
The proceedings of the law reform commissions show a recurrent grappling with the question of codification and with issues of making and enforcing uniform laws between local and English subjects in the subcontinent. Codification itself seemed to imply the equalisation of laws for all, even though it had its grander claims built into a structure of enlightened and benevolent governance. The Company acted in limited ways upon the counsel of the more reform-minded of its advisors. It prohibited the Hindu practice of widow immolation or sati in 1829, and in 1832 it stopped the application of ‘Mohammadan criminal law’ as a rule to all persons.[12]
As a predominantly commercial entity, the Company ultimately did not venture too far in the direction of social reformism, but rather sought certainty of rule in territories within its possession.
To this end, extensive anthropological studies were undertaken to understand the essential character of segments of the population, and their relative usefulness, or threat, to colonial administration was clearly outlined. This resulted in the designation of specific clans and families as being local rulers and thus assigned pamindariljagirdari (land-owner, revenue collector) status. Also, other groups, often spuriously on the basis of their nomadic or non-sedentary modes of organisation, were classed as criminal tribes and placed under surveillance, with their movements restricted and confined.[13]Religious communities were assumed to be internally coherent in their desire to ‘rigidly and ritualistically follow their own law in all matters of social custom, religious duty, and commercial transaction’.[14] In reality, however, it required great effort to forge this coherence. The mode of doing so tended in the direction of codifying religiously mandated law so as to render it applicable through a hierarchical court system that relied upon precedential reasoning. What ensued was the selective compilation of religious sources in order to forge both Anglo- Hindu and Anglo-Mohammadan law.[15]
III.