Introduction: Historiographical perspectives
This paper builds on the insight provided by Sir V S Naipaul in his Loss of Eldorado: A Colonial History. A novelist, and a Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, V S Naipaul dredged the colonial archives to uncover and chronicles the history of Trinidad from 1595 when the island was “discovered” by Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan adventurer and the seizure of the island from Spain in 1797 which paved the way for the island’s integration into the British Empire. The two moments when history touched the Island, as Naipaul states was when it was discovered and later when the English seized it thereby transforming Trinidad from a precarious lair for the pirates of the Caribbean to a plantation economy founded on the cultivation and export of sugar, rum, molasses and the like. The presence of slavery in the island and the widespread use of slave labor in the plantation economies of the Americas linked the political economy of the Caribbean island to a global economy based on the exchange of West Indian sugar for Tea and Porcelain from China and of course it also provided the financial muscle for the export of cotton from India.
In this paper we analyze the life and career of William Fullarton (1754-1808). V S Naipaul in the book cited above has documented in great detail one episode in the life of Fullarton in Trinidad. When appointed First Commissioner by Lord Hobart to administer Trinidad in 1803, Fullarton brought with him years of experienced soldiering in the southern part of the then Madras Presidency. He was actively involved in carrying out the policy of pacifying the Marava territories of Tinnevelly and his campaign against the Palaiyakarar of Pachalamkurrichi, the famous Kattabomman is well known to historians of Southern India. In Trinidad, William Fullarton earned some credit for himself and of course, incurred the enduring hostility of the white slave owning population by making mild attempts at reforming the horrors of plantation slavery. V S Naipaul has drawn attention to the campaign launched by William Fullarton to bring his own Second Commissioner Thomas Picton to justice for having severely tortured a slave mullato girl, Louisa Calderon Of course, this particular episode has evoked considerable attention as it provides all the ingredients for a truly rich banquet for a post-colonial auto de Faye: A slave girl of vulnerable circumstances, a powerful white slave owner and politically connected planter, a fairly well documented body of legal and forensic evidence for a thick description of the erotic of torture, and one must add that the Foucouldian brew of gendered violence, orientalist constructions of power and the theatre of sexual violence staged on the body of a non-white, marginalized complete with contemporary woodcut illustrations are all there in good measure.
Historiography of the early empire is essentially characterized by two distinct trends. On the one hand we have the early imperial historians whose work is marked by a large degree of triumphalism, a celebration as it were of the glories of imperial rule. Niall Ferguson in his recent work has shown a marked sympathy for this approach to history as he believes that imperial rule hastened the development of societies though he does not negate the human costs involved in such development. The nationalist historians have had to use the past to inscribe their nations into the tableaux of modernity and they do this by ascribing a spurious nationalism or proto-nationalism to the political and military encounters between the early trading companies and the resistance that was encountered. Ascription of a political agency to the spiral of rural and agrarian revolts resulted in a historiography in which the Manichean distinction between the “evil imperialist” and the “good native” became the template for the kind of history the heady days of nationalism demanded and which in post colonial times served to legitimize the nation state. The Oxford History of the British Empire barely acknowledges the structures and processes within which the events unfolded. The reason for this situation is not difficult to fathom: the documentary basis on which historians rely is still the same records of the European trading companies, letters of soldiers and administrators, memoirs and travel narratives, all of which come with a preconfigured version of the events they purport to describe.
Historians have moved away from the triumphal mode of representing the creation of empire which was the narrative trope of imperial history associated with J B Seeley. Decolonization brought in its wake another kind of historiography; a retrospective validation of national identities. The Oxford History of the British Empire already alluded to while avoiding the excesses of post colonialism frames the histories of what was the British Empire strictly within the geographical horizons and limits of the national entities that were spawned by the end of the imperial era after World War II. One consequence of this method has been the neglect the role of individuals, personalities, ideas and the intellectual and cultural cross currents as personalities as divers as missionaries, sailors, soldiers, merchants and administrators circulated in the vast expanse that was opened up in the late eighteenth century. Thus, the person who we are analyzing in this paper, William Fullarton brought to Trinidad the experience he had gained in the Coromandel and hence a profitable way of looking at the past would be to situate the individual biography within the larger context of global and world history. The biographical method has been used by some historians notably Maya Jasonoff and Linda Cooley. Both the historians concern themselves with the self-fashioning of individual identity by participating in military campaigns or through the experience of captivity. This approach studies the images, symbols and ideologies found in the personal narratives of soldiers, seamen, adventurers and their ilk but hard historical realities are skirted. The post-colonial strategies of “reading the past” associated with Edward Said does not really help liberate historiography from the racial myths and stereotypes that are embedded in the texts. Further by foregrounding the privileged position of the interpreter, Said and his post-colonial cohorts return historiography back to the paradox of power, the very trope from which post-colonial theory wants to discard or negate. Hence a new point of departure is needed and a new perspective is called for which help in the reconstruction of the complex pattern of interaction between the early participants in the micro universe of empire building and the social, cultural and intellectual universe in which they lived and played out their lives.
II
William Fullarton: A Brief Biography
Historians working on the early history of the East India Company in southern India have tended to be insensitive to the fact that the Act of Union, 1707, put an end to the Stuart dynasty and Scotland was brought into the political ambit of a greater England or Britain. It may be said that the expansion of England into an empire began with the conquest of Ireland in 1677 by Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector. Irish and Scottish men belonging to the lesser gentry, eager for social and economic advancement sought employment overseas, and thus the East India Company became the favored destination. It is not an accident that the most notable figures in the early conquest of Southern India were Scots such as Sir Thomas Munro, Grant Duff, Mark Wilks and Elphistone.
William Fullarton was born on January 12th 1754. Though his identity personal and social remained resolutely Scottish, Fullarton was of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh which formed an important center of the Scottish Enlightenment along with Aberdeen and Glasgow. He may have had Jacobite sympathies and Fullarton’s writings display a keen awareness of issues that stem from the political and intellectual agenda of the Scottish Enlightenment. It may be argued that the scathing attack launched by Fullarton on the administrative and political policies of the East India Company and his campaign against the savage ill treatment of African slaves in the sugar plantations of Trinidad stemmed from the understanding that oppression was the result of executive and judicial powers being concentrated in the hands of the same individual or institution. In his book, A View of English Interests in India, Fullarton was vehement in his condemnation of the rapacity and corruption of the Company and its administration in India, particularly in the southern region. In Madras Presidency the arrest, deposition and subsequent death in prison of the Governor George Pigot was a striking example of the Company style of governance. In Trinidad, Fullarton opposed the regime of cruel and violent floggings and mutilations that the plantation slaves had to endure. Here again Fullarton was motivated by a vague sense of revulsion at the treatment meted out to the slaves. V S Naipaul frames the conflict between Thomas Picton and William Fullarton on the Louisa Calderon controversy which became a cause celebre in Georgian England as a personality conflict thereby ignoring the larger historical and ideological questions that invariably arise in such debates.
After his early education at the University of Edinburgh, Fullarton set off on a tour of Europe with a short visit to Malta. In 1775, his fluency in French secured him the first of many official positions. He became principal secretary to Lord Stormont at the British Embassy in Paris. In 1780 he drew up ambitious plans for an invasion of Mexico, an overseas venture that sought to seize Mexico from Spain. On his own initiative, Fullarton raised a battalion of infantrymen, perhaps from among his own tenants as, Otto Trevalyn humorously put it. He goes on to suggest that this display of patriotism brought Fullarton a rank in the British Army and he arrived in Madras in 1782 a Lt. Colonel. He took part in the war against Hyder Ali and Tippu Sultan and campaigned extensively in Tinevelly region against the palaiyakaras. In 1783 he was designated by Lord Macartney, the Governor of Fort St George, the Commander of the Southern Army, a title that he displayed very prominently on the title page of his book.
Col William Fullarton participated in several campaigns against Mysore kingdom and the warrior chieftains of the Tinnevelly region. Records of the East India Company contain references to armed conflict between the forces of the Company and the remnants of the Vijayanagara political order who surfaced in the eighteenth century as palaiyakarars or polygars. The Madras Army was largely drawn from the peasantry from the dry region of Peninsular India. In the Tinnevelly region the forces had to content with groups of Colleries or Kallars who formed the mainstay of the armed “peons” of the polygars. The historical process by which the palaiyakarars emerged as superior holders of agrarian and political rights is documented in the genealogical records collected by Colin Mackenzie. The Telugu warrior chieftains asserted their hegemony in the turbulent decades after the collapse of the Nayaka kingdom of Madurai in the early eighteenth century, and they declared themselves the inheritors of the sovereignty of the Madurai nayakdom. The host of petty chieftains and principalities which were distributed between three distinct ethnic groups (1) the Maravar (2) the Kallar and (3) the Kamballattar formed a dynamic social and political space in which contests for agrarian and socio-political space were formulated in the language of rights representing privileged land holding. Thus the breakup of the nayaka domain set the stage for conflicting visions of state, polity, property and legitimacy between contending forces.
William Fullarton had a distinguished career even after he left India. As a Member of Parliament for Ayrshire, he spoke in the debates on India and was an active protagonist along with Edmund Burke for the impeachment of Warren Hastings. An ardent and enthusiastic supporter of Lord North, Fullarton called for the impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey, the Chief Justice of India whose judgment in the Nanda Kumar case sealed his fate. Though not as eloquent a speaker like Burke, Fullarton spoke out against the excesses of the Comapany. In 1798 he published An Account of the County of Ayr with Observations on the Means of Improvement. In 1802 Col William Fullarton was appointed First Commissioner in Trinidad, a position in which he had to share power with Thomas Picton, the Governor appointed by Ralph Abercrombie who was responsible for seizing the island from Spain. Samuel Hood was the Third Commissioner. This ill defined Commission, two of whose members were deeply involved in the plantation economy with extensive West Indian sugar interests, was riven with contradictions—a disaster waiting to unfold.
Thomas Picton the erstwhile Governor of Trinidad has a curious place in history. His heroic death on the battlefield of Waterloo in 1815 made his the highest ranking officer to be killed in the battle. However, the relationship between Picton and Fullarton through the two years form 1801 to 1803 remained tense culminating in charges being brought against Picton that he was directly involved in the torture and physical abuse of Louisa Calerdon. Picton defended himself saying that the laws of Spain sanctioned the torture of slaves, a legal quibble that did not find resonance in the courts. However the fact that the expansion into and conquest of new territories created legal and judicial ambiguities in which different conceptions of legality and legal structures clashed and collided with each other. The Trinidad over which Fullarton was sent to administer was a violent slave owning society in which 94% of the population consisted of enslaved Africans who were made to work in the sugar plantations. Control over the servile population was maintained by a brutal regime of floggings and mutilations, which were sanctioned by law and colonial custom. The military remained the instrument through which the enslaved population was kept under check. William Fullarton was not an abolitionist, though the campaign for abolition of slave trade had begun and Edmund Burke himself was a firm abolitionist. The very first official action by William Fullarton was to issue a proclamation forbidding harsh and brutal treatment of slaves. The white slave owning planters felt that any relaxation in the regime of brutal violence would be interpreted as weakness and an encouragement for rebellion. In 1834 the Tacky’s Rebellion was put down in the most severe manner. Thomas Picton was the first to protest against the weakening of the the planter’s corporeal power over the slaves. As the military force reported directly to Thomas Picton, the First Commissioner found himself stymied right from the start.
William Fullarton himself was no stranger to military indiscipline. He was appointed the Commander of the Southern Army that was detailed to put an end to the insurrection of the palaiyakakars in the deep south. His determined campaign against Panjalankurrichi resulted in Kattaboman abandoning the fort leaving behind a treasure of 46,000 star pagodas. As Fullarton recorded,“the breach was covered with dead bodies, and the place contained a large assortment of guns, powder, shot, arms and other military stores”. His next target was the palaikakarar of Sivagiri, an ally of Kattabomman. The chieftain took refuge in the mountain redoubt (the Kombi) and Fullarton succeeded in capturing what he himself termed “a wonderful recess”. After capturing Sivigiri, Fullarton secured the submission of the palaiyakarars of Madurai, from where he proceeded to Palghatcherry which was being besieged by the forces of the Mysore kingdom. The capture of Palgatcherry resulted in a capture of 50,000 star pagodas and this sum of money was distributed amongst the troops who were in arrears of pay for nearly 12 months.
It was during the campaign against Palgatcherry that Fullarton had a major disagreement with Lord Macartney who wanted the Colonel to abandon the fortress of Satyamangalam and hand over all the fortresses seized from the Mysore Kingdom back to Tippu Sultan as per the terms of the recently concluded peace treaty. Fullarton demurred as he felt that giving up the strategic forts located on the borders of the Mysore kingdom would jeopardize the security of the Baramahal region. Fullarton withdrew only after written instructions were received from Fort Saint George. Military historians point out that this was a major instance of disagreement between the civil and military leadership. His return march resulted in the capture of Palani and Virupatchi. In the treaty between the East India Company and Tippu Sultan signed on March 11th 1784 all territories seized from Mysore were given up except Dindigul and Cannanore which was handed over to Bombay Presidency.
The relationship between the English troops seconded to the army of the East India Company and its own regular recruits has always been uneasy and in 1809 it erupted into mutiny that was suppressed with considerable effort. In Trinidad, Thomas Picton was loathe yielding command to William Fullarton and as the personal relationship between the two cracked up; letters flew fast and thick to London complaining about the lack of cooperation from the Second Commissioner. On May 23rd 1803, Fullarton wrote to the colonial office complaining that Picton was using his troops to “subvert the government”. He went on to say that the Second Commissioner had instructed his troops not to “assist Civil Power” without the “specific order” from him. Fullarton went on to complain that the troops were being used by General Picton “for torturing, hanging, shooting and burning men without trial”. The justification for Fullerton’s written complaint against Picton can be seen in the exquisite tautology which he invoked in the same document: It is fully established that no illegal order can be legally obeyed. One may say that in the creation of the empire such conflicts that skirted the grey areas between the legal and the illegal, between lawful authority and unlawful usurpation, and between personal choice and institutional force were present in ample measure. In the new kind of history that we are attempting herein, history is seen both in its contingent as well as its structural aspects.
The final dénouement was in the charge that Thomas Picton had Louisa Calerdon tortured. This sensational charge compelled the government of the day to try Thomas Picton and the trial was as much in the London courts as it was a trial in the media. Public opinion was polarized between the advocates of the innocence of Picton and those who believed that the honour of the realm has been outraged by his actions. The sensational trial ended in the acquittal of Thomas Picton. The Louisa Calerdon episode highlights the fact that there were serious difficulties in conceptualizing “empire” as a legal entity.
III
Sovereignty, Rule of Law and Violence
The advent of the East India Company in peninsular India and its dramatic transformation into a sovereign power with widespread territorial reach and interests has been a subject of endless research and interpretation. The impeachment of Warren Hastings is symptomatic of the unease in ruling class of England of a trading corporation which derived its authority from a royal charter, arrogating to itself the symbols and dignity of a sovereign entity. Nicholas Dirks, in his Scandal of Empire has placed the entire sequence of events leading to the hegemony of the Company as a montage of violence, scandal and oppression:
What was supposed to have been a trading company with
an eastern monopoly vested by Parliament had become a rogue
state: waging war, administering justice, minting coin and
collecting revenue over Indian territory.
The East India Company certainly did not see itself as a “rogue state”.
Of course it did exercise a bundle of rights associated with sovereignty. Edmund Burke, the relentless crusader against the Company, warned that the East India Company run on public credit drawn from the moneyed and propertied classes, was behaving with reckless arrogance against the “natives”. William Fullarton too was critical of the manner in which a “private merchant” grew into a powerful sovereign with armed might under its direct command. The debates in the House of Commons on the legal status of the East India Company involved differing perceptions of what constituted sovereignty—people’s sovereignty represented by Parliament or the Crown.
The vibrant internal debates within the ruling circles of the East India Company, a circle which was deeply implicated in the politics of late eighteenth century England, as Lucy Sutherland demonstrated more than fifty years ago, has not been adequately analyzed by historians. The soldiers, administrators, even merchants wrote of their experiences in India and there seems there was a steady market for journals and books written by India hands. William Fullerton’s personal narrative entitled A View of English Interests in India which was published in 1797 is a reflection on his military experiences in which he also provided a critique of the functioning of the Company administration in India after the Regulating Act of 1773.
Fullarton’s narrative covers the period from 1782 to 1784 when the southern region came under the Board of Assigned Revenue under the supervision of Irwin. Since revenue collection was based on a presumed transfer of sovereignty, the question of the legal and judicially enforceable right of revenue became relevant. The conquest of India by the Company was predicated upon statecraft combined with superior military and organizational skill, and this aspect has been widely commented upon in the historiography. However, less salience has been placed on the refrain commonly found in early records that the Company’s rights in India, particularly its revenue rights, were acquired through legal treaties with the Mughal emperor or his surrogate such as the Nizam or the Nawab of Carnatic. Questions of sovereignty and the Company’s political stance towards Indian states caught between rival powers arose in the context of Tanjavur. Setting aside the deposition of the Raja of Tanjavur, the Maratha price Tullaji, the Board of Control showed a rare sensitivity to the sovereignty of Indian rulers. Indeed even when the Peace Treaty of Paris in 1763, the sovereignty of the Nawab of Carnatic was recognized, causing considerable unease in Fort St. George. William Fullarton observed:
The nawab and all other native princes were perplexed.
They had been taught that in the Company was vested
the supreme authority of England, as far as respected India-
that no other power had any other right of interference
there. Now they were told, the Company is nothing more
than a private body of merchants, without consequence or
consideration.
This apparent paradox between the politic0-military hegemony of the East India Company and its slender legal and judicial legitimacy made Fort Saint George craft policies which aimed at vigorous and, at times, spectacular reaffirmations of the sovereign claims of the Company. Fullarton justified the Company’s sovereign claims over the Raja of Tanjavur by stating that the Raja had “not exercised the right of coining pagodas, and of late has paid his tribute in fannams”. The real motive behind the interest of the Company lay in securing the cash rich kingdom of Tanjavur and use its revenue to settle the debts accumulated by the Carnatic Nawab. And again it was the same interest that brought the Nawab and the Company together in the southern region when the peshkush or tribute was assigned to the Company by the Nawab in 1781.
George Pigot, the Governor of Madras, by following the policyof restoration of the Raja of Tanjavur as proposed by the Board of Control, unwittingly opened the tangled web of financial claims, revenue charges,sovereign taxation.
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