The Familial World of the Company’s kacceri in Early Colonial Madras

The English East India Company’s offices or kacceris (Anglo-Indian: Cutcherry, Kahcherri) are widely acknowledged as the nerve centers of the British Empire in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century but their micro-practices have been remarkably understudied. Studies of colonial administration stress the continuity of pre-colonial administrative practices in the Company kacceri and present it as a place where lower-level Indian officials and servants severely subverted and compromised the intentions of colonial policy and reform.¹ Robert Frykenberg’s pioneering study on South India’s Guntur district, for example, conceived of imperial integration through colonial revenue and judicial policy. According to Frykenberg, imperial integration was restricted to the elevated realm of juridical law because corrupt and venal rural magnates and local elite continued to dominate the everyday practice of statecraft by continuing earlier practices.² Since then, scholarship on colonial knowledge has underscored the role of the objectifying practices of documentation in the exercise of colonial power while vigorously debating the contributions of subordinate agents, especially scribal specialists, language teachers, and translators (and their important pre-colonial antecedents) to the production of the forms of knowledge that underwrote technologies of dominance. These debates on colonial knowledge have yielded a rich harvest of studies on service specialists, but they have also often overlooked the locus of much of that knowledge production: the colonial bureau, the “office” or kacceri.³ In a way, then, studies of colonial knowledge forms and colonial administration have underscored the role of elite mediators in the exercise of colonial power but neglected to investigate the social form of the kacceri of the early colonial state in South India.

The Company kacceri was a site of everyday struggles over sovereignty in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The exigencies of colonial conquest created an urgent and self-perpetuating crisis of trust between Company administrators and their local subordinates while enabling select subordinate officers to accrue a great deal of influence over the agrarian order of Madras Presidency. The crises of trust greatly determined kacceri culture because it often resulted in officials describing their subordinates as venal, nepotistic and hence, corrupt. Scholarly accounts tend to take these descriptions of nepotism to represent evidence of Indian exceptionalism or primordial casteism. ⁴ In contrast, kin and family ties—“the networks of nepotism”—that bound the kacceri cadre into factional clusters contain some clues that can help frame the patrimonial character of work in the kacceri. This paper suggests that the idiom of family, social and kinship networks, in the constitution of the kacceri is integral to any understanding of the exercise of colonial power. Kacceri history, then, is not just intertwined with the histories of the social groups who compose the administration, in itself a sparsely researched topic, but this history can illustrate how the Company kacceri reworked rather than merely continued to foster existing idioms of lordship and devotion. Company masters secured the loyalty of their subordinates by greatly intensifying hierarchical ties while simultaneously buttressing the power of their subordinates over inhabitants in new ways.

Family, Kin and the Kacceri

How did everyday familial practices of patrimony constitute the early colonial bureaucracy? Scholars drawing on feminist theory have used the category of the family as a tool of social history, even as they have recovered its heuristic and material constitution through the discourse and practice of colonial law in South Asia.⁵ But even if the material and ideological restructuring of kin relations by colonial law is widely acknowledged, the importance of kinship to state making in South Asian historiography has been restricted to the pre-colonial period. Historians of the state have for long seen the familial as pre-capitalist/pre-modern, replaced by a rule bound colonial bureaucracy. For this reason, familial or kin relations in the early colonial Company office are understood as a survival of an earlier era that resisted reform.

Recent scholarship fundamentally questions these assumptions. In addition to recent attention in South Asian historiography, familial practices have begun to receive attention as crucial to the political expansion of European trading companies...