¹ Messick, Brinkley, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 249CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Michael T. Clanchy's classic study of medieval English documentary practices similarly argues that a technological shift from memory to writing accompanied the routinization of royal charisma: From Memory to Written Record, England, 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993 [1979]), 67Google Scholar. For a recent departure from this perspective, see Clarke, Morgan, “Neo-Calligraphy: Religious Authority and Media Technology in Contemporary Shiite Islam,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, 2 (2010): 351–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Sheridan, Alan, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1977), 189–90Google Scholar.

³ Cohn, Bernard, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5Google Scholar; Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

⁴ Singha, Radhika, “Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject,” Studies in History (n.s.) 19, 1 (2003): 87–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in British India,” Studies in History 16, 2 (2000): 151–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On how colonial enterprise reconfigured modes of rule to encompass new contexts, see Smith, Richard Saumarez, “Rule-by-Records and Rule-by-Reports: Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law,” Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 19, 1 (1985): 153–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Scott, David, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (1995): 191–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A vast historiography on the colonial archive includes: Stoler, Ann, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Burton, Antoinette, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ For an account of the debates on colonial knowledge, see Wagoner, Phillip, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, 4 (2003): 783–814CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dirks, Nicholas, “Coda,” in Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

⁶ Smith, “Rule-by-Records.”

⁷ Singha, “Colonial Law,” 99.

⁸ Vismann, Cornelia, Files: Law and Media Technology, abridged and trans. by Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Kafka, Benjamin, “The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of Terror,” Representations 98 (2007): 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Vismann, Files; Hull, Matthew, “The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in an Islamabad Bureaucracy,” Language & Communication 23 (2003): 287–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Ruled by Records: The Expropriation of Land and the Misappropriation of Lists in Islamabad,” American Ethnologist 35, 4 (2003): 501–18Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Kalpagam, U., “Counterfeit Consciousness and the Joy of Abandonment,” Sarai Reader 7 (Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2007), 90–99Google Scholar; Tarlo, Emma, “Paper Truths: The Emergency and Slum Clearance through Forgotten Files,” in Fuller, Christopher John and Bénéï, Véronique, eds., The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000), 68–90Google Scholar; Ticktin, Miriam, “Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism,” American Ethnologists 33, 1 (2007): 33–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Das, Veena, “Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility,” in Das, Veena and Poole, Deborah, eds., Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press; Oxford: James Curry, 2004), 225–52Google Scholar, here at 227.

¹² Das, “Signature of the State,” 250.

¹³ Parliamentary Papers, 1852–53 (41), “Testimony of John Stuart Mill to a Select Committee of the House of Lords, 21 June 1852,” 301; Moir, Martin, “Kaghazi Raj: Notes on the Documentary Basis of Company Rule, 1783–1858,” Indo-British Review 21, 2 (1993): 185–93Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus, trans. and eds. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 992Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Ibid., 979.

¹⁶ Mongia, Radhika, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport.” Public Culture 11, 3 (1999): 527–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here at 545.

¹⁷ Stern, Philip, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ On the quotidian practice of exogenous rule, see Wilson, Jon, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave and McMillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mantena, Karuna, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ The Supreme Courts, established by royal charter in Calcutta in 1773 and in Madras in 1800, represented the crown and applied common law in addition to making decisions by equity. Each court had jurisdiction over all Europeans, and also the non-European residents of the presidency town and the territories of princes allied with the government. All other inhabitants were under the jurisdictions of Company-run adalat (adālat) courts that operated in the hinterlands (in the Madras hinterlands from 1802). The adalat court system had a tiered structure, and was presided over by judges assisted by Indian law officers. The system was headed by the criminal court (the Foujdaree Adalat) and civil court (Suddar Adalat), both based in Madras. Both applied regulations written by governors-in-council that provided for adjudication by personal law and customary usage.

²⁰ “Memorandum from the Madras Board of Revenue to the Madras Judicial Department,” Judicial Consultations, 21 July 1857, Government Order No. 854, no. 52, Chennai: Tamil Nadu State Archives [henceforth TNSA].

²¹ Schneider, Wendie, “‘Enfeebling the Arm of Justice’: Perjury and Prevarication in British India,” in Dubber, Markus Dirk and Farmer, Lindsay, eds., Modern Histories of Crime and Punishment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 299–328Google Scholar.

²² Kolsky, Elizabeth, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. The codification of evidence, Kolsky notes, was motivated by the official concern to control violence perpetuated by unofficial whites, but distributed evidentiary burdens unevenly along race and gender lines.

²³ “Memorandum from the Madras Board of Revenue to the Madras Judicial Department,” Judicial Consultations, 21 July 1857, Government Order No. 854, no. 52, TNSA.

²⁴ McGowan, Randall, “From Pillory to Gallows: The Punishment of Forgery in the Age of the Financial Revolution,” Past and Present 165 (1995): 107–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ McGowan, Randall, “Knowing the Hand: Forgery and the Proof of Writing in Eighteenth-Century England,” Historical Reflections 24, 3 (1998): 385–414Google Scholar.

²⁶ Langbein, John H., “Shaping the English Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources,” University of Chicago Law Review 50 (1983): 1–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Historical Foundations of the Law of Evidence: A View from the Ryder Sources, Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship Series, paper 551 (1996): 1168–202; also at: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/551 (accessed 25 Jan. 2012); and Twinning, W. L., Rethinking Evidence: Exploratory Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ McGowan, Randall, “Managing the Gallows: The Bank of England and the Death Penalty, 1797–1821,” Law and History Review 25, 2 (2007): 241–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Handler, Philip, “Forgery and the End of the ‘Bloody Code’ in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 48, 3 (2005): 683–702CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “The Limits of Discretion: Forgery and the Jury at the Old Bailey, 1818–1821,” in Cairns, John W. and McLeod, Grant, eds., The Dearest Birth-Right of the People of England: The Jury in the History of the Common Law (Oxford and Portland: Hart Publishing, 2002), 155–72Google Scholar.

²⁸ Schneider, “Enfeebling the Arm of Justice.”

²⁹ Thomas Munro, governor of Madras from 1820 to 1826, was the architect of the direct settlement with small cultivators called ryotwari, which he developed in opposition to Bengal's revenue officials, who favored large landed proprietors as agents of agricultural improvement.

³⁰ Jain, Mahabir Prashad, Outlines of Legal History (n.p.: N. M. Tripathim, 1976), 42Google Scholar.

³¹ “Trial of Lakshmana Rao, Captain Graham's Peshkar for Sundry Charges Preferred against Him by the Inhabitants of the Barahmahal by Order of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Read, Superintendent,” Barahmahal Records (1907), 138Google Scholar.

³² In Board of Revenue [henceforth BOR] Consultations, 2 Nov. 1786, vol. 4, no. 7, pp. 1342–73, TNSA, we find references to the board summoning a village kaṇakkuppiḷḷai to obtain evidence in a land dispute between Brahmans and Agambadiyars. On the Company undermining mediators, see Mukund, Kankalatha, The Trading World of the Tamil Merchant: The Evolution of Merchant Capitalism in the Coromandal (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1999), 150–52Google Scholar; and Brimnes, Niels, Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Right and Left Hand Castes in Colonial South India (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

³³ “Note on Justice in the District,” Records of the Chingleput District, vol. 441, 12 July 1784, pp. 30–32; BOR Consultations, 5 Mar. 1787, vol. 6, no. 16–17, pp. 250–57, TNSA. Eugene Irschick's study of the settlement of Chingleput shows that notables nāṭṭār were, until 1790, important in adjudicating issues of inheritance: Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar. “Letter to the Board Regarding Civil Justice in Chingleput, BOR Consultations, 1 Mar. 1790, vol. 34, no. 19, pp. 666–69, TNSA.

³⁴ Merchants, brokers, and translators close to Company traders frequently led multi-caste mahānāṭu assemblies that included low-caste headmen. In response to a request from the police superintendent of Madras, the local police office produced a register that listed respectable inhabitants of the city indicating that this body of men also petitioned the Company regularly. These patterns were also found in French and Danish ports in the Coromandel. See Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, 43, 148, 250.

³⁵ On the temporal powers of assemblies for South India, see Davis, Donald, “Intermediate Realms of Law: Corporate Groups and Rulers in Medieval India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 48, 1 (2005): 92–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the notarial powers of the Islamic judge, the Qazi, see Grewal, J. S., In the By-Lanes of History: Some Persian Documents from a Punjab Town (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals,” 802.

³⁷ Counterfeiting coins and writing forgeries appear as crimes in many manuals of statecraft in Sanskrit and Persian. A farmān (royal letter) in Amir Khusrau's I‘jāz-i Khusravī, a fourteenth-century text of Persian letters, commands the prince not to be defrauded by writers and accountants and warns him to be careful about those scribes whose “inverted script” disrupted the affairs of Muslims. Askari, Syed Hasan, “Material of Historical Interest in I‘jāz-i Khusravī,” in Medieval India-A Miscellany, vol. I (Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1969), 9Google Scholar.

³⁸ Derrett, J. Duncan M., “Nandakumar's Forgery,” in Essays in Classical and Modern Hindu Law, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 232Google Scholar.

³⁹ In the eighteenth century, forgery and perjury were prosecuted in the Madras town; see Jain, Outlines, 20. We have no evidence, however, that the regulation of forgery and perjury was at this time a systematic means of monopolizing and tightening attestation practice or introducing new norms of written credibility in Madras.

⁴⁰ Anonymous, A Short Narrative of the Circumstances Attending to the Late Trials in the Supreme Court of Judicature at Madras for Forgery, Perjury and Conspiracy to Cheat with Some Comments on the Unjustifiable Allusion Made to Them in the Recent Official Pamphlet in Defense of the Madras Government (London: Printed for J. Ridgway, 1810)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ On scandal and empire, see Dirks, Nicholas, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² BOR Consultations, 14 Dec. 1813, vol. 627, nos. 52–53, pp. 12922–42, TNSA.

⁴³ “A Regulation to Provide More Effectually for the Punishment of Perjury, Subornation of Perjury, and Forgery,” Regulation VI, 1811, The Regulations of the Government of Fort St. George, in Force at the End of 1847 to which are Added the Acts of the Government of India in Force in that Presidency, Clarke, Richard, ed. (London: J. & H. Cox, 1848), 235–37Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Stamp regulations represented an empire-wide move to stabilize authentic documents. In Madras, the stamp regulations did not preclude the admission of unstamped documents. See Regulation VIII, 1808, Regulation XIII, 1816, Regulations of the Government, 204–6; 326–39. Also see numerous modifications to stamp regulations in ibid., 876–77.

⁴⁶ On the destruction of pāḷaiyakkārar sovereignty, see Rajayyan, K., Rise and Fall of the Poligars of Tamilnadu (Madras: University of Madras, 1974)Google Scholar; Yang, Anand, “Bandits and Kings: Moral Authority and Resistance in Early Colonial India,” Journal of Asian Studies 66, 4 (2007): 881–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ The 1809 disputes between Dalit and the Lingayat Panchalar caste groups mark this shift. A Company-appointed commission adjudicated them. The multi-caste assembly members were summoned to give evidence as “heads of caste” and instructed to broker agreements under Company direction and supervision. On the police committee system in force in the settlement, see Ahuja, Ravi, “Labour Unsettled: Mobility and Protest in the Madras Region, 1750–1800,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 35, 4 (1998): 381–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Fraenkel, Béatrice, La Signature: Genèse d'un Signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Mohiuddin, Momin, The Chancellery and Persian Epistolography under the Mughals, from Bábur to Sháh Jahán, 1526–1658: A Study on Insháʼ, Dár al-Insháʼ, and Munshís, based on Original Documents (Calcutta: Iran Society, 1971)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Kavi, Śrīnivāsa (and Raghavan, V.), Ānandaraṅga vijayacampuḥ (Teppakkulam, Tiruchirapalli: Palaniyappa Brothers, 1948)Google Scholar. Persian Inshā manuals describe a similar set of ritual conventions for receiving royal documents.

⁵¹ See Dumont, Louis, A South Indian Subcaste: Social Organization and Religion of the Pramalai Kallar, Moffatt, M., Morton, L., and Morton, A., trans. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), plate 17Google Scholar.

⁵² Official paper documents in the households of Maratha chiefs in the Deccan were authenticated by seals and lexical phrases written by specific office-bearers who had to write in their own hand. At least one account of signature practices, collected circa 1811, says that it was relatively late before the rajah began to sign in his own hand. See “A Statement of the Different Forms and Signatures Required to Authenticate Public Documents,” Madras Journal of Literature and Science 12 (New Series) (Dec. 1861): 225Google Scholar.

⁵³ Records of the Tanjavur District, 6 Sept. 1809, vol. 3420, pp. 59–61, TNSA.

⁵⁴ “Remarks by Mr. Jackson on Letter Received through Vencataswamy Nayaka,” BOR Consultations, 19 Oct. 1797, vol. 187, no. 32, pp. 6602–14, TNSA; Glossary of the Madras Presidency, C. D. Maclean, ed. (Repr. Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1982 [1893]). See also M. N. Srinivas on village arbitration in twentieth-century Mysore, regarding the continued use of muchalikas: “A Caste Dispute among the Washermen of Mysore,” Eastern Anthropologist 7, 3 & 4 (1954): 148–68Google Scholar; repr. in Srinivas, M. N., Collected Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 100–21Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ “Remarks by Mr. Jackson on letter received through Vencataswamy Nayaka,” BOR Cons., 19 Oct. 1797, vol. 187, no. 33, pp. 6602–14, TNSA, here 6604.

⁵⁶ “From F. W. Ellis, Collector of Madras to the Board of Revenue,” BOR Consultations, 14 Dec. 1813, vol. 627, nos. 52–53, pp. 12931–34, TNSA.

⁵⁷ “Improper Use of Collector Garrow's Facsimile,” Coimbatore District Records, 27 June 1816, vol. 584, TNSA.

⁵⁸ “Letter from I. Hepburn, Tanjavur Collector to the Madras Board of Revenue,” 12 Sept. 1816, Records of the Tanjavur District, vol. 3279, pp. 54–61, TNSA.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ “Letter from I. Hepburn, Tanjavur Collector to the Madras Board of Revenue,” 30 July 1817, Records of the Tanjavur District, vol. 3281, p. 21, TNSA.

⁶¹ Sen, Sudipta, The Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 31Google Scholar.

⁶² See Dumont, South Indian Subcaste, “Appendix: The Headman's Charter.” When the Company took over South India and inhabitants began to flood them with claims about their privileges, the Company's concern in preserving these privileges as hereditary rights led it to reorient these documents to be “gift deeds” of status and inheritance, at the expense of their renewable character.

⁶³ Fisch, Jörg, Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs: The British Transformation of the Bengal Criminal Law, 1769–1817 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag; 1983)Google Scholar; Singha, Radhika, Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Kugle, Scott, “Framed, Blamed, and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 35, 2 (2001): 257–313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ “Modifications to Mahomedan Criminal Law,” Regulations of the Government, 837–38Google Scholar; Schneider, “Enfeebling the Arm of Justice,” 313, 319. Schneider observes that the Bengal administrators remained more attached than did Madras officials to the idea of administering Islamic law.

⁶⁵ Maitland, Julia, Letters from Madras during the Years 1836–39 (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1846), 82Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Regarding how revenue collection dominated concerns of law, see Peers, Douglas M. “Torture, the Police, and the Colonial State in the Madras Presidency, 1816–1855,” Criminal Justice History 12 (1991): 29–56Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Cited in Beaglehole, T. H., Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras, 1792–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 109Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Board of Revenue to Government of Madras, Revenue Consultations, 22 Mar. 1816, vol. 218, no. 1, pp. 2361–62, TNSA.

⁶⁹ Beaglehole, Thomas Munro.

⁷⁰ For an excellent account of how the 1816 regulations enhanced the police powers of specific subordinate offices, see Peers, “Torture.”

⁷¹ Regulation IV, 1821, x, Regulations of the Government, 416.

⁷² Regulation IV, 1816, x, Regulations of the Government, 254–55.

⁷³ Many circular orders were issued on the subject. The Circular Orders of the Court of Foujdaree Udalut, from 1803 up to 30th June 1834 (Madras: Church Mission Press, 1835)Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ Regulation III, 1826, Regulations of the Government, 454–55.

⁷⁵ Singha, Despotism, 304–7. See also Peers, “Torture.”

⁷⁶ SirArbuthnot, Alexander, Major-General Sir Thomas Munro: Selections from His Minutes and other Official Writings, vol. II (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 47Google Scholar. See Rao, Anupama, “Problems of Violence, States of Terror,” Economic and Political Weekly of India 36, 43 (2001): 4125–33Google Scholar; and Bhuwania, Anuj, “‘Very Wicked Children’—‘Indian Torture’ and the Madras Torture Commission Report of 1855,” Sur Journal on Human Rights 6, 10, (2009): 7–27Google Scholar; also at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1567401 (accessed 25 Jan. 2012).

⁷⁷ The regulations introducing jury trials simultaneously empowered judges to dispense with writing down depositions and rely on their notes of the evidence. Regulation X, 1827, ii, Regulations of the Government, 474.

⁷⁸ A Native Revenue Officer, on Bribery as Practiced in the Revenue Administration of the Madras Presidency (Madras: Hindu Press, 1858), 25Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 24.

⁸⁰ Eventually, the Company had to accommodate the refusals to take oaths. In 1840, it changed its laws to permit individuals to take an “affirmation” rather than an “oath.” Regulation V, 1840, Regulations of the Government, 614.

⁸¹ There were many regulations issued on the summoning of witnesses. In 1816, special powers were given to Indian judges, like the district munsiff, to force witnesses to attend court and give evidence. See Regulation VI, 1816, xxviii and xxix, Regulations of the Government, 272–73. In 1841, new rules were introduced to take the evidence of “absent witnesses”: Regulation VII, 1841, Regulations of the Government, 621–24.

⁸² I borrow this phrase from Kalpagam, U., “Counterfeit Consciousness and the Joy of Abandonment,” Sarai Reader 7 (Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2007), 92Google Scholar.

⁸³ Singha tells of instances of stamped paper used in intimate transactions among commercial and literate groups, in “Colonial Law,” 89. Rosalind O'Hanlon writes that the anti-caste radical Jotiba Phule critiqued the practice of Brahmans mediating and manipulating transactions around petitions and deeds in western India, in Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 211–12Google Scholar. In the early twentieth century, western Indian historians concerned with demarcating original manuscripts sometimes published them with legal affidavits attesting that they possessed that status. See Deshpande, Prachi, “The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive: Lakshmi Bai, Jhansi and 1857,” Journal of Asian Studies 67, 3 (2008): 855–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here at 874.

⁸⁴ Bayly used the term “information panic” to refer to the ad hoc realm of information crises that marked the early nineteenth century, in Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.