Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:41:38.448Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Historical Gaps and Non-existent Sources: The Case of the Chaudrie Court in French India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2021

Danna Agmon
Danna Agmon*
Affiliation:
History Department and ASPECT, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article develops a typology of historical and archival gaps—physical, historiographical, and epistemological—to consider how non-existent sources are central to understanding colonial law and governance. It does so by examining the institutional and archival history of a court known as the Chaudrie in the French colony of Pondichéry in India in the eighteenth century, and integrating problems that are specific to the study of legal history—questions pertaining to jurisdiction, codification, evidence, and sovereignty—with issues all historians face regarding power and the making of archives. Under French rule, Pondichéry was home to multiple judicial institutions, administered by officials of the French East Indies Company. These included the Chaudrie court, which existed at least from 1700 to 1827 as a forum where French judges were meant to dispense justice according to local Tamil modes of dispute resolution. However, records of this court prior to 1766 have not survived. By drawing on both contemporaneous mentions of the Chaudrie and later accounts of its workings, this study centers missing or phantom sources, severed from the body of the archive by political, judicial, and bureaucratic decisions. It argues that the Chaudrie was a court where jurisdiction was decoupled from sovereignty, and this was the reason it did not generate a state-managed and preserved archive of court records for itself until the 1760s. The Chaudrie’s early history makes visible a relationship between law and its archive that is paralleled by approaches to colonial governance in early modern French Empire.

Keywords

FranceIndialawcolonialismempirearchivessovereigntyjurisdictionPondichéryChaudrie
Type
On Archival Lacunae and Genealogical Gaps
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 979 - 1006
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Acknowledgments: For their insightful suggestions, I thank the anonymous CSSH reviewers, and Nancy Christy, Kate Epstein, Bikrum Singh Gill, Julia Gossard, Daniel Hershenzon, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Meghan Roberts, Molly Warsh, LaDale Winling, Laurie Wood, Anya Zilberstein, the participants at the Research Triangle South Asia Seminar, the Early Modern Global History Seminar at Georgetown University, and the Historians Writing Group and the ASPECT seminar at Virginia Tech. I am particularly indebted to Sue Peabody for her generative comments.

References

1 This man’s identity is the cause of some scholarly debate. A local merchant referred to as “Soucourama” appears in the French sources in the first half of the eighteenth century. Catherine Manning believes the Soucurama in the French archive is a conflation of multiple people. The “Séchassalachetty Soucurama” who helped Peroumal was likely Sungu Seshachala Chetty, a relative of an important Madras merchant. Catherine Manning, Fortunes à Faire: The French in Asian Trade, 1719–48 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), 136–39.

2 Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France (henceforth ANOM), Indes, série M, Procès criminels, dossier 46 (henceforth Inde M/46.) The individual, unbound folios of this and other case dossiers in this archival collection are not paginated, although some sections are itemized, and many are dated. In citing these documents, in order to increase accessibility, I have numbered the loose folios in the order in which they appeared in the dossier when I consulted them and note that number in brackets at the end of each citation. That another scholar or archivist might have shifted the order of folios within the file since I consulted them, rendering these numbers useless, is an apt reminder of the fluid nature of the archive on which this essay reflects. In this instance, the citation is ANOM, Inde M/46, the deposition of Chesalachetty Soucourama, 18 July 1733, 89–91. Subsequent citations will follow this abbreviated format.

3 ANOM, Inde, M/46.

4 ANOM, Inde, M/46, item 19 [2].

5 Much of the older historiography on the Nawabs of Arcot relied on European, and especially English, company records, without problematizing this reliance. See for example Jim Phillips, “A Successor to the Moguls: The Nawab of the Carnatic and the East India Company, 1763–1785,” International History Review 7, 3 (1985): 364–89. On the need to utilize the Persian court chronicles, numismatic, and architectural sources in the historiography of Arcot, see H. Munavarjan and T. Shafeeque Ahmed, “Sources for the Study of Nawab Muhammad Aui Walajahi,” International Journal of Research in Applied, Natural and Social Sciences 4, 7 (2016): 25–30. For more on Arcot from local records, see Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 In the original, “suivant les usages et coutûmes du pays,” Bibliothèque nationale française, Manuscrits françaises 6231, folio 27.

7 A tribunal de Première instance replaced the Chaudrie, making the colonial set-up hew more closely to metropolitan arrangements. Jean-Claude Bonnan, Jugements de la tribunal de la Chaudrie de Pondichéry 1766–1817 (Pondicherry: Institut française de Pondichéry, Ecole française d’Extrême Orient, 2001), vol. 1, xvii.

8 Ibid.

9 Lauren Benton’s foundational scholarship on colonial legal regimes has elaborated the ability of jurisdictional claims to stand in for and advance sovereignty: Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). This study builds on this work by suggesting that an interrogation of law’s archive provides greater clarity on how the move toward the increasing hegemony of state law unfolded.

10 On the importance of the colonial Superior Councils in bringing about this shift in the later part of the eighteenth century, see Laurie M. Wood, Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). Wood argues that a “global judicial elite” emerged from a group of mostly military French families in the West Indies. This work importantly shifts the focus from the metropole to the colonies and “decenters Paris” in discussions of French law. The Chaudrie demonstrates that as this French legal elite was constituting itself, French legal actors had only limited capacity to shape local legal regimes. Legal culture was made by non-French actors even in sites of French sovereignty.

11 Marie Houllemare, “Procedures, Jurisdictions and Records: Building the French Empire in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 21, 2 (2020). Hollemare has also considered the preservation of these records and suggested that metropolitan aggregation of these documents or their copies was crucial to the creation of a sense of imperial control. Marie Houllemare, “Vers la centralisation des archives coloniales françaises au xviiie siècle: Destruction et—conservation des papiers judiciaires,” in Maria Pia Donato and Anne Saada, Rencontres, eds., Pratiques d’archives à l’époque moderne (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), 349–67.

12 Shaun McVeigh and Sundhya Pahuja, “Rival Jurisdictions: The Promise and Loss of Sovereignty,” in Charles Barbour and George Pavlich, eds., After Sovereignty: On the Question of Political Beginnings (New York: Routledge, 2009), 99–100. For legal scholars’ understanding of sovereignty more generally, see Dorsett, Shaunnagh and McVeigh, Shaun, Jurisdiction (New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Feldman, Ilana, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967 (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ann Stoler, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Arlette Farge wrote crucial early work in this vein. For an excellent overview of the scholarship constituting the archival turn, too vast to cite here, see Renisa Mawani, “Law’s Archive,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 8 (2012): 337–65. See also Burton, Antoinette, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).Google Scholar

15 Most influential for the development of my thinking on this topic has been Fuentes, Marisa J., Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Saidiya Hartman’s recent work demonstrates the power, beauty, and potential of narrative experimentation in light of archival constraints. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019). See also Mustakeem, Sowande M., Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peabody, Sue, Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, 1750–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, Jessica Marie, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2019).Google Scholar

16 On this, see Ginzburg, Carlo, “Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian,” Critical Inquiry 18, 1 (1991): 79–92 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ginzburg, Carlo, “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm,” Theory and Society 7, 3 (1979): 273–88.Google Scholar

17 On this process, see Chaudhuri, Nupur, Katz, Sherry J., and Perry, Mary Elizabeth, eds., Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).Google Scholar

18 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 82.

20 Scholarship on colonial Haiti has grown tremendously since the 1990s, in what can be seen as an explicit or implicit response to Trouillot’s call to end the “silencing” of the Haitian past. For an overview, see Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, “Beyond ‘The Black Jacobins’: Haitian Revolutionary Historiography Comes of Age,” Journal of Haitian Studies 23, 1 (2017): 4–34.

21 As Mike Davis has demonstrated, natural disasters are themselves, more often than not, at least man-shaped if not man-made; Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001).

22 Included were the originals of the many volumes of the diary of the commercial broker Ananda Ranga Pillai, a painstaking account of his daily life over roughly thirty years. Only a portion of the Tamil text survives, in copies Edouard Ariel transcribed in the nineteenth century that are held today at the BNF in Paris. Today historians draw on the English translation undertaken by British Orientalists and Tamil scholars from Madras in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ananda Ranga Pillai, The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Dubash to Joseph François Dupleix, Knight of the Order of St. Michael, and Governor of Pondichery. A Record of Matters Political, Historical, Social, and Personal, from 1736 to 1761, 12 vols. (Madras: Printed by the Superintendent Government Press, 1904).

23 This account focuses on documents written on paper, as in the French tradition. The history of Tamil documents written on palm leaves, some of which can still be found today in the collections of ANOM in Aix-en-Provence, is a crucial parallel one. On scribal practices in the Tamil region, see Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). More generally, a fascinating discussion of how places create an archive through the interplay between material traces and historical consciousness is William J. Turkel, The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008).

24 ANOM, Fonds ministériels, Correspondance à l’arrivée, sous-série c2.

25 The term is borrowed from Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C Perdue, Imperial Formations (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007).

26 Danna Agmon, A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 5.

27 The reference here is to the (very) short story “On Exactitude in Science,” written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1946, in his Collected Fictions, Andrew Hurley, trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 325.

28 Leslie M. Harris, “Imperfect Archives and the Historical Imagination,” Public Historian 36, 1 (2014): 77–80.

29 This latter hypothesis is presented in Bonnan, Jugements, vol. 1, xii.

30 This is being remedied by work being currently carried out by Gauri Parashar and Anna Dönecke.

31 A review of this literature is in Matthew S. Hull, “Documents and Bureaucracy,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 1 (2012): 251–67.

32 Ibid., 253. Webb Keane has referred to this process as “undoing the sign’s withdrawal from its worlds”; “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” LAC Language and Communication 23, 3–4 (2003): 409–25, 411.

33 Matthew Hull has argued that documents and their makers constitute these artifacts as “invisible,” in Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 12.

34 Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 2.

35 Hull, “Documents and Bureaucracy,” 253. On how bureaucracy enables the state to enter the lives of ordinary men and women, often in a violent fashion, see Gupta, Akhil, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).Google Scholar

36 Mawani, “Law’s Archive.”

37 Historians of law, especially in colonial contexts, have detailed the creation of legal archives. Burns, Kathryn, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010);Google Scholar Premo, Bianca, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rama, Ángel, The Lettered City (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

38 On paperwork’s importance in the formation of the law, see Ben Kafka, “Paperwork: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 12, 1 (2009): 344–45. Kafka draws on the insights of Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Bruno Latour, La fabrique du droit: Une ethnographie du Conseil d’Etat (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2004). For a recent discussion of legal documents that were appropriated and transformed in the colonial context of British rule in Western India in order to unearth “the everyday materiality of law,” see Lhost, Elizabeth, “Writing Law at the Edge of Empire: Evidence from the Qazis of Bharuch (1799–1864),” Itinerario 42, 2 (2018): 256–78, 259.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Das, Veena, “The 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 for Advanced Research Press, 2004), 227.Google Scholar

40 Responding to the challenge of illegibility, Bhavani Raman has suggested that the verification or forgery of documents became arenas where colonial governments could make impossible claims of “perfect recordation”; “The Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colonial Madras,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 2 (2012): 229–50, 231.

41 Das, “Signature of the State,” 227.

42 Central to the scholarship on sovereignty and jurisdiction in colonial legal history is Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge; New York: Camebridge University Press, 2009). Work that complicates the relationship between sovereignty and jurisdiction nevertheless tends to posits that “the two have always been intertwined.” Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 2.

43 Belmessous, Saliha, ed., Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Premo, Enlightenment on Trial. See also Yannakakis, Yanna, “Beyond Jurisdictions: Native Agency in the Making of Colonial Legal Cultures. A Review Essay,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, 4 (2015): 1070–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 Benton, Lauren A. and Ross, Richard Jeffrey, eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York: NYU Press, 2013);Google Scholar Kruijtzer, Gijs and Ertl, Thomas, Law Addressing Diversity: Premodern Europe and India in Comparison (13th–18th Centuries) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donlan, Seán Patrick and Heirbaut, Dirk, eds., The Laws’ Many Bodies: Studies in Legal Hybridity and Jurisdictional Complexity, c1600–1900 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 Bishara, Fahad Ahmad, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharafi, Mitra, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947, repr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Sood, Gagan D. S., “Sovereign Justice in Precolonial Maritime Asia: The Case of the Mayor’s Court of Bombay, 1726–1798,” Itinerario 37, 2 (2013): 46–72;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Stephens, Julia, Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia, repr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Kolsky, Elizabeth, “Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India,” Law and History Review 23, 3 (2005): 631–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Chatterjee, Nandini and Subramanian, Lakshmi, “Law and the Spaces of Empire: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15, 1 (2014).Google Scholar

48 On legal diversity in Western India, see Sumit Guha, “The Qazi, the Dharmadhikari, and the Judge: Political Authority and Legal Diversity in Pre-Modern India,” in Gijs Kruijtzer and Thomas Ertl, eds., Law Addressing Diversity: Premodern Europe and India in Comparison (13th–18th Centuries) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016); Hasan, Farhat, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572–1730 (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006).Google Scholar

49 David Washbrook, “Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 15, 3 (1981): 649–721. In a later work, Washbrook revised his analysis on the process of “traditionalizing,” noting the role of indigenous agents in this process: “Economic Depression and the Making of ‘Traditional’ Society in Colonial India 1820–1855,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 3 (1993): 237–63. This revision is noted in Niels Brimnes, “Beyond Colonial Law: Indigenous Litigation and the Contestation of Property in the Mayor’s Court in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras,” Modern Asian Studies 37, 3 (2003): 513–50, 517.

50 Nicholas B. Dirks, “From Little King to Landlord: Property, Law, and the Gift under the Madras Permanent Settlement,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, 2 (1986): 307–33. Brimnes reviews this debate, in “Beyond Colonial Law.”

51 Guha, “Qazi,” 97.

52 Brimnes, “Beyond Colonial Law,” 518.

53 Benton and Ross, Legal Pluralism, 4.

54 This disciplinary divide is demonstrated by a comparison of Donlan and Heirbaut, The Laws’ Many Bodies, exemplifying legal scholars’ approach, and Kruijtzer and Ertl, Law Addressing Diversity as an example of that of humanists and social scientists.

55 As Alain Wijffels points out, the existence of written legal codes in France should not mislead us into believing there was a cohesive legal realm directed by these codes: “Ancien Régime France: Legal Particularism under the Absolute Monarchy,” in Seán Patrick Donlan and Dirk Heirbaut, eds., The Laws’ Many Bodies: Studies in Legal Hybridity and Jurisdictional Complexity, c1600–1900 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015), 107.

56 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 208. There is also an interesting parallel between this strand of anthropological work and critiques of so-called “gap studies,” in which legal scholars in the 1960s and 1970s, working from an assumption of law’s rationality, attempted to identify “gaps” between laws on the books and law in practice. Jon B. Gould and Scott Barclay, “Mind the Gap: The Place of Gap Studies in Sociolegal Scholarship,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 8, 1 (2012): 323–35.

57 For a discussion of backstreaming, and an example of its uses in an early modern French colonial context, see Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

58 In a discussion of women as subjects of historical writing, Antoinette Burton writes, “The histories that have resulted from ‘researching around’… remain fragmentary, elusive, and unsatisfactory in the best possible sense.” “‘Small Stories’ and the Promise of New Narratives,” in Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds., Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), x. Her point that such work cannot adequately be described as “recovery” or as “triumph” guides this research.

59 Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1994); J. Duncan M. Derrett, Religion, Law and the State in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Donald R. Davis, “Intermediate Realms of Law: Corporate Groups and Rulers in Medieval India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 48, 1 (2005): 92–117.

60 On arbitration in France, see Jeremy Hayhoe, “L’arbitre, intermédiaire de justice en Bourgone vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in Claire Dolan, ed., Entre justice et justiciables: les auxiliaires de la justice du Moyen Âge au XXe siècle (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005). Using the example of Burgundy in the late eighteenth century, Hayhoe demonstrates that arbitration was not an extrajudicial strategy, but was fully integrated into the Ancien Régime’s judicial system. See also Zoë A. Schneider, The King’s Bench: Bailiwick Magistrates and Local Governance in Normandy, 1670–1740 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008).

61 The Hobson-Jobson Anglo-Indian Glossary’s entry for “Choultry” defines it as “Peculiar to S. India, and of doubtful etymology; … A hall, a shed, or a simple loggia, used by travelers as a resting-place, and also intended for the transaction of public business. A building of this kind seems to have formed the early courthouse. Henry Yule, A. C. Burnell, and Kate Teltscher, Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 211. On the word’s etymology, see also Bonnan, Jugements, vol. 1, ix–x. In the context of European colonies in India, the linkage of the term to judicial use seems well-established.

62 T. Chenthamarai Selvi, “Choultries in the Madras Presidency with Special Reference to Tirunelveli District,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 64 (2003): 1390–99.

63 On the Madras Choultry, see Radhika Seshan, Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast: Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Delhi: Primus Books, 2012); Mattison Mines, “Courts of Law and Styles of Self in Eighteenth-Century Madras: From Hybrid to Colonial Self,” Modern Asian Studies 35, 1 (2001): 33–74; Brimnes, “Beyond Colonial Law.”

64 Cited in Seshan, Trade and Politics, 92.

65 Bonnan, Jugements, vol. 1, viii. On indigenous responses to the introduction of English law in Madras in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Kanakalatha Mukund, The View from Below : Indigenous Society, Temples, and the Early Colonial State in Tamilnadu, 1700–1835 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005), ch. 3.

66 Gnanou Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry; Paris: Bibliothèque publique; Librairie E. Leroux, 1935), supplement to vol. 8, 120–21.

67 Joy Varkey, “Administering Justice: The Choultry Court in the French Settlement of Pondicherry,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 75 (2014): 505–10, 506.

68 Jean Deloche, Le vieux Pondichéry (1673–1824): revisité dʼaprès les plans anciens (Pondichéry: Institut français de Pondichéry; Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2005), fig. 5.

69 The 1702 map is by Le Fer, and can be seen in ibid., fig. 10. The 1766 map, by Bourcet, is reproduced in ibid., fig. 27. It is held at ANOM, Dépot des fortifications des colonies, Indes, 33 B 154. The 1766 map was drawn up in the context of rebuilding the town after the English siege of 1761 and its return to French control in 1765.

70 ANOM FM C2/66 f. 9 verso.

71 Bonnan, Jugements, vol. 1, 3.

72 Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil, supplement to vol. 8, 35.

73 Procès-verbaux des délibérations du Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry (Pondichéry: Société de l’Histoire de l’Inde Française, 1913), vol. 1, 129.

74 Ibid., vol. 2, 205.

75 Marcel Thomas, Le Conseil Supérieur de Pondichéry, 1702–1820: Essai Sur Les Institutions Judiciaires de l’Inde Française (Paris: l’auteur, 1953), 104–5.

76 Deloche, Le vieux Pondichéry, 62.

77 Thomas, Conseil Supérieur, 106.

78 Pillai, Private Diary, vol. 1, 101. Here we learn that employment in the court bestowed other official duties, such as the dissemination of official information.

79 Upon the occasion of the appointment of a new accountant to the court, in 1742, Ananda Ranga Pillai named all four serving in the role. They were Azhaga Pillai, Appatambi, Wandiwash Ranga Pillai, and Muruga Pillai. Ibid., 188.

80 ANOM FM F3/239, folio 45.

81 ANOM, Inde M/25.

82 In a very similar dynamic, the French colonial government tried and failed for several decades to limit the public practice of Hindu religion in the streets of Pondichéry, with metronomic swings between decrees banning such practices, and quick reversals of these decrees in the face of labor strikes by weavers. See Danna Agmon, “Striking Pondichéry: Religious Disputes and French Authority in an Indian Colony of the Ancien Régime,” French Historical Studies 37, 3 (2014): 437–67.

83 Cited in Thomas, Conseil Supérieur, 104.

84 The letter, containing instructions to Bellcombe and Chevreau, is held at ANOM FM A/20, folios 57–81. The issues with Chaudrie judges are mentioned on folio 64. On the role of violence in enabling, maintaining, and bolstering colonial rule in India, see Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law, repr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

85 Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil, supplement to vol. 8, 24.

86 Procès-verbaux, vol. 1, 117.

87 On the preservation work of French India’s archive, see Danna Agmon, “Failure on Display: The Meaning of Eighteenth-Century French India in Twentieth-Century Colonial Administration and Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 91 (2019): 1–35.

88 Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil, supplement to vol. 8, 6–12.

89 On European company courts as a site for the negotiation of merchants’ relationship with each other and with the colonial state, using an example from Surat, see Lakshmi Subramanian, “A Trial in Transition: Courts, Merchants and Identities in Western India, circa 1800,” Indian Economic & Social History Review 41, 3 (2016): 269–92.

90 Diagou, Arrêts du Conseil, supplement to vol. 8, 12.

91 ANOM, Inde, M/46, [78–79].

92 ANOM, Inde, M/46 testimony of 18 July 1733 [81, 84, 90].

93 ANOM, Inde, M/46, testimony of 19 July 1733 [99].

94 Ibid., [102–4].

95 ANOM, Inde, M/46, item 6 [46–69].

96 Minattur, Joseph, Justice in Pondicherry (1701–1968) (Bombay: N. M. Tripathi Private Ltd., 1973), 145–46Google Scholar. On the village councils, or panchayats, which filled judicial roles in precolonial and colonial India, see K. Gnanambal, Religious Institutions and Caste Panchayats in South India (Calcutta: Government of India, Anthropological Survey of India, 1976); Galanter, Marc and Baxi, Upendra, “Panchayat Justice: An Indian Experiment in Legal Access,” in Galanter, Marc and Dhavan, Rajeev, eds., Law and Society in Modern India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Jaffe, James Alan, Ironies of Colonial Governance: Law, Custom and Justice in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Jaffe notes, the term panchayat has indeterminant meaning and has been used to identify a dizzying array of institutions, including “village councils, municipal councils, conciliation boards, arbitration boards, judicial panels of judicial assessors, juries, committees, representative assemblies, and democratic governing bodies”; Ironies, 2. Jaffe locates the nineteenth century as the period in which panchayatrs became central to British legal imaginary of India, but it was already playing this role in Pondichéry in the eighteenth century. On caste heads’ and wealthy merchants’ role in the governance of colonial cities in South India, see Mukund, View from Below; Niels Brimnes, Constructing the Colonial Encounter: Right and Left Hand Castes in Early Colonial South India (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999); Neild-Basu, Susan, “The Dubashes of Madras,” Modern Asian Studies 18, 1 (1984): 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The scholarship on interpreters in colonial contexts is too vast to survey here; for a discussion, see Agmon, Colonial Affair, 73–92.

97 In a review of Bonnan’s publication of Chaudrie sources, Ludo Rocher has referred to an attempt by French officials to create a compendium of Indian law on 28 November 1735, citing this as an effort that far predates Warren Hasting’s effort to do the same in 1772 as part of the “Plan for the administration of justice” in British India. However, Rocher is mistaken; the French Council’s decree calling for this project actually dates to 25 November 1835. Ludo Rocher, review of Review of Jugements du tribunal de la Chaudrie de Pondichéry, 1766–1817, by Jean-Claude Bonnan, Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, 1 (2002): 185.

98 Julie Marquet, “Droit, coutumes et justice coloniale: Les affaires de caste dans les Établissements français de l’Inde, 1816–1870,” PhD diss., Université Paris Diderot, 2018.

99 Francois Nicolas Laude, Manuel de droit indou et de législation civile et criminelle applicable dans les Établissements français de l’Inde (Pondichéry: E.-V. Géruzet, imprimeur, 1856).

100 On the British efforts at codification for use in court, see Guha, “Qazi,” 111; and Kolsky, “Codification.” Examples of French legal codification projects in this period are Pierre-François-Régis Dessalles and Bernard Vonglis, Les annales du Conseil souverain de la Martinique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1786); Le Code Noir, ou, Recueil des réglemens rendus jusqu’à présent concernant le gouvernement, l’administration de la justice, la police, la discipline & le commerce des négres dans les colonies françoises, et les conseils & compagnies établis à ce sujet (Paris: Chez L. F. Prault., 1788); Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique et politique de la partie espagnole de l’isle Saint-Domingue, avec des observations générales sur le climat, la population, les productions … de cette colonie (Philadelphie: Imprimé & fe trouve chez l'auteur, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1796); Auguste de La Barre de Nanteuil, Législation de l’île Bourbon: répertoire raisonné des lois, ordonnances … en vigueur dans cette colonie (Paris: Impr. de J.-B. Gros, 1844). My thanks to Sue Peabody for bringing much of this work to my attention.

101 Quoted in Thomas, Conseil Supérieur, 104.

102 On the commercial ideology of maintaining the status quo, see Agmon, Colonial Affair.

103 ANOM, FM C2/66 folios 9v–10.

104 Louis XIV, Déclarations du Roy: l’une, portant établissement d’une Compagnie pour le commerce des Indes Orientales … Registrées en la Cour de Parlement le 1er septembre 1664, en la Chambre des Comptes le 11 dudit mois et an, et en la Cour des Aydes le 22 ensuivant, 1664, sec. XXIII, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8620873r (last accessed 22 Apr. 2021).

105 On arbitration in the English court in Bombay, see Leonard Hodges, “Between Litigation and Arbitration: Administering Legal Pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Bombay,” Itinerario 42, 3 (2018): 490–515. I have also found reliance on local arbitration, carried out by commercial brokers, to be important in criminal cases heard in Pondichéry by the Superior Council, the ostensibly French legal forum in the town.

106 Bonnan, Jugements, vol. 1, 4–5. I thank Timothy Lubin for bringing this case to my attention.

107 Ibid., 20–21.

108 Ibid., 29–30.

109 Conversations with Anya Zilberstein clarified this point.

110 My thinking on the connection between phantom sources and phantom limbs was influenced by Oliver Sacks’ writing on phantom limbs, in A Leg to Stand On (New York: Touchstone, 1998); and Hallucinations (Waterville: Vintage, 2013).

111 Erna Otten and Oliver Sacks, “Phantom Limbs,” exchange in New York Review of Books, 30 Jan. 1992, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1992/01/30/phantom-limbs/ (last accessed 22 Apr. 2021).

112 Johnson, Wicked Flesh, 134–35.

113 Hull, “Documents and Bureaucracy,” 260.