Abstract

The essay revisits ideas of legal pluralism, of subaltern resistance and of alternative geographies that imperial policies and local resistance produced especially in a maritime region such as the northwestern Indian littoral. The essay draws on the more recent and valuable interventions by Lauren Benton and Patricia Risso but in its focus and formulation argues for a politics of resistance, and for the articulation of multiple skeins in the emerging anti-piracy discourse of the colonial state. This was in part due to the blurred and fuzzy boundaries between piracy and privateering in the context of the Atlantic, which had their particular resonance in the Indian Ocean, and in part to the sensibilities and experiences of local officers like Alexander Walker and James McMurdo, whose appreciation of local realities was far removed from the universalizing rhetoric and prescriptions of universal law. On the other hand, the acts of predation too were complex and did not conform to a homogenous standard or prototype—there were instances of men working as maritime mercenaries, as debt collectors and as independent actors taking to the sea and attacking ships as a spontaneous act of will, and not necessarily jostling for legal space or engaging in legal parleys as Benton suggests. This is not to argue that Indian piracy was about cultural resistance and that Indian pirates did not see themselves as privateers unlike their European counterparts, but merely to complicate any easy story-telling, especially given the ambiguities in the European legal discourse on the sea, especially on the Indian Ocean, and the nature of the colonial archive that is being used to recuperate the voice of the marginalized seafarer.

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