Corrupt Traditions and Traditions of Corruption: Caste, Colonialism, and Corruption in Late Nineteenth-Century India

Abstract

This article examines the corruption scandal that exploded in 1889 with the apprehension of Arthur Crawford and the dismissal of several Mamlatdars in colonial western India. Using Ian Hacking's concept of “making up people” and the “looping effect,” this article demonstrates the instability of categories such as corruption and suggests that the everyday life of empire was undergirded by the colonial construction of deviancy to normalize the exceptionality of foreign rule. Additionally, the Crawford-Mamlatdar corruption scandal undercut the imperial ideology of the modernizing state. The corruption network revealed the simultaneity of imperial bureaucratic rationality along with the traditional patronage structures based on indigenous sexual and filial (caste) ties. It was precisely the British investigation that also revealed the reality of the homosocial empire and its privileging of caste recruitments. The Indian challenge to the case brought together rural and urban groups signalling the ascendance of a nationalistic solidarity. The Indians queried the imperial claims of moral superiority. At the same time, they acknowledged “native vulnerabilities” towards corruption, confirming the British stereotype of Indians as inherently corrupt. These selective claims, indicative of the emergence of upper caste, urban, and bourgeois notion of public virtue, signified the iterative nature of the “looping effect.”

Introduction

“The payments so made were, adjudged by the English standard of official morality, discreditable, but were not disgraceful if tested by Oriental ideas of propriety.”¹

The Bombay governor's 1889 letter to the secretary of India in London, Lord Cross, was a reference to the bribery of the Indian magistrates, the Mamlatdars. The letter was written in the wake of their dismissal by the Bombay court for bribing Arthur Travers Crawford (1835–1911), a high-profile bureaucrat. Lord Reay's letter described the distance between Britain and India as the difference between Indian “propriety” and English “morality.” “Propriety” conjured notions of decorum and rectitude steeped in cultures of chivalrous feudalism that contrasted with the bureaucratic modernity of the British in the nineteenth-century India. As officials of the Crown, Crawford and his corruption and the Mamlatdars and their bribery defied the optimistic posturing of the imperial administration and exposed the continuation of political atavism within the supposedly progressive colonial institutions. Lord Reay's words, therefore, testified both to the modernizing possibilities of the empire and its continued failure.

The case against Crawford unfolded over a period of two years, between 1888, with the first discovery of extensive corruption in his office, to his retirement in 1890. While the charges of corruption against Crawford gradually attenuated and eventually fell apart, the case against the Mamlatdars grew stronger. While the commission of enquiry found Crawford merely in a state of “extreme embarrassment,”² the Indian Mamlatdars were condemned as possessing “glaring character.”³ The progressive focus on the Mamlatdars as corrupt to the detriment of charges against Crawford revealed how racial ideologies conditioned notions of acceptable professional conduct. This attitude was aggressively articulated in the British Parliament and echoed in the press coverage of the time.⁴ The responses of the popular press and the English Parliament emblematized the British duplicitousness towards the corruption of their own officer. It signalled the displacement of the British “scandal” by Indian “corruption.”

However, it was not as if the Indians remained a silent spectator to the unfolding drama within the British governments in London and Bombay. The Indians sought to challenge and reject the views laid out by the British, not by arguing for universal moral equality—this was still a pre-Gandhian time—but by selectively confirming and rejecting the British claims. In defending the Mamlatdars, the Indian protestors mobilized an upper-caste, urban, and bourgeois notion of public virtue, which essentially acknowledged the colonial state as an apparatus of moral and affective control. Recognizing the significance of “personal character” to modern politics (in contrast to dynastic justifications for rule), the emergent nationalist response to the Mamlatdar controversy conceded the significance of the imperial state in determining codes of public ethics, paving the way for the twentieth-century debates on ethical political conduct in the Indian subcontinent.

In his pioneering work, Ian Hacking uses the phrase “making up people” that describes the cluster of formal and informal activities that “elaborately, often philanthropically, creates new ways for people to be.”⁵ Drawing from Foucauldian treatment of homosexuality and deviance, what is radical about Hacking's concept of “making up people” is that it presents the process of classifying people as inherently generative of the people themselves. While Hacking's classificatory process outlines the ways in which institutional and parainstitutional epistemologies condition human behaviour, he also warns us against thinking about the classificatory decisions as static. Using the concept of the “looping effect,” he describes the process of interaction that occurs between the classification and the people classified.⁶ Looping effect considers how individuals being classified “react to being classified and acted upon, either by confirming to the classification…or by reacting against it and resisting the classification.”⁷ This process of interaction between the classification and the humankind affected “creates a feedback loop that renders the kind a moving target.”⁸

This article finds Hacking's “making up people” and “looping effect” two generative frames for examining the ways in which the British investigated the Crawford-Mamlatdar corruption. Taking heed of Hacking's insistence on examining “the day-to-day basis” of institutional identity construction,⁹ this article interrogates the Crawford corruption scandal to demonstrate how the everyday life of empire was undergirded by the colonial construction of deviancy to normalize the exceptionality of empire and foreign rule. In other words, corruption, as “invented” in late nineteenth-century India, came to reflect not just a fiscal delinquency but moral, social, and cultural degeneracy that justified the institutional policies of the time. Focusing on pedigree (caste) and sexuality, the investigation revealed how corruption was being reconstituted differently for Crawford and the Mamlatdars.

However, as the article will make it clear, this terminology itself was challenged and altered by the Indians. In showing corruption to be a problem originating from and promoted by colonialism, the Indians refuted the moral and symbolic implications of the term and confirmed what Muhammad Khalidi has called “self-defeating interactive kinds.”¹⁰ Following Hacking's recognition of how ‘‘interactive kinds’’ function, what is equally interesting to note about the Crawford case is that the challenge to and alteration of the category of the “corrupt” was heterogenous. In other words, the heterogenous responses of the Indians both confirmed and challenged the constituencies of imperial corruption, and in so doing, produced an iterative and provisional account of Hacking's looping effect.

The Mamlatdar corruption confirmed the late nineteenth-century “civilization in decline” characterization of India.¹¹ Premised on selective colonial experience, this disposition reflected the reassertion of imperial confidence after the devastating damage of the Mutiny of 1857.¹² Marking a significant break from the earlier evaluation of “native” corruption where the emphasis had been on correction and punishment, reform and amelioration, the Mamlatdar controversy revealed the shift towards pragmatic disinterestedness and functional distance towards the corrupt native officers.

Corruption Literature: An Overview

With its kaleidoscopic potential, corruption scandals in imperial scholarship have come to characterize various kinds of domestic and colonial transformations. Corruption, in the burgeoning literature on the British empire, is predominantly concerned with demonstrating the “violence and misgovernment” in the colonies, “helping to dispel the rosy glow of imperial nostalgia.”¹³ Nicholas Dirk's The Scandal of Empire contributed “to the long-standing debates about the impact of empire within Britain itself.”¹⁴ Similarly, Kirsten McKenzie's Scandal in the Colonies offers a scintillating assessment of how corruption scandals in the settler cities of Sydney and Cape Town allowed the Europeans “to compete for status.”¹⁵ Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford's Rage for Order continues the enquiry into corruption from the perspective of international legal reforms and examines the various responses corruption scandals produced in the metropole.¹⁶ For Benton and Ford, just as Dirks and Mackenzie, corruption scandals were a catalyst for imperial transformation in the nineteenth century.

Although this scholarship is indicative of the new directions in British imperial studies,¹⁷ the focus on British actors and metropolitan debates hides the entangled nature of imperial corruption. Corruption, after all, was a transaction involving two parties, and the focus on Britain as the exclusive theatre of imperial corruption obscures the racial and legal complexities that conditioned the origins and functioning of the empire.¹⁸ Further, in arguing for corruption as a form of disorder—pathological and provisional—scholars such as McKenzie, Benton, and Ford treat corruption scandals, to borrow sociologist Ari Adut's metaphor, as the tip of the iceberg alerting us to a larger phenomenon.¹⁹ Such scholarship is premised on presenting corruption as scandalous and exceptional, a rupture that normalizes the transactional colonial apparatus as well as obscures its violent, tyrannical origins.

In her provocative analysis of corruption in colonial and postcolonial discourses, Ruth Miller highlights how corruption enables the construction of exceptional, biopolitical space—a space beyond law—but a space in which rational, legal, and liberal structures must triumph ultimately. Corruption, according to Miller, is the site of biological and political disorder that can only be managed by the legal performance of civilized nations. The corrupt are often constructed as childish, monstrous, and diseased, whereby the fantasies of the legal state come in confrontation with the vulnerability of bodies.²⁰

Further, Miller offers a useful distinction between the terms scandal and corruption. The focus on scandal as “corruption revealed” assumes a coherent political “inside” and a disorderly corrupt “outside,”²¹ where scandal is a site for both the production and regulation of pathological exception. Moreover, with its emphasis on the act of revelation rather than the act itself, scandal assumes an active, vigilant civil society that is cognate with Western liberal democracies.²² In contrast, presenting corruption as the disorderly “external” is premised on the fundamental normalization of colonialism and “reinforces the imperial rhetoric of the liberal civilizing mission.”²³ The inside-outside of scandal and corruption, Miller contends, “restates and reinforces the idea that corruption is a solely colonial or postcolonial affair.”²⁴

Crawford-Mamlatdar corruption allowed the staging of different, often conflicting political ideologies in late nineteenth-century India, most of which was marked by a constant anxiety to produce and police different kinds of “inside” and “outside.” This article first examines Crawford's trial within the discourse of moral supremacy and racial justifications of colonial rule. Racial superiority, this section demonstrates, was enabled and confirmed by the simultaneous construction of a fallible but superior English masculinity and an epistemological turn away from the colonized Indians as living and active subjects. Within such a frame, Crawford's corruption was a tolerable disorder—mere “administrative failure”²⁵—for more energetic production of colonial superiority. In doing so, the article also advances Hacking's looping effect by suggesting that colonialism produced classificatory subjectivity not just through the colonized, but also through the colonizer.

This classificatory universality has been widely interpreted as the mark of British imperial consolidation and expansion.²⁶ Such interpretations have engineered a mythology of an internally coherent, stable, and homogenous British empire in India. Ranajit Guha pioneered an enduring challenge to this historiography by arguing how the British experience in India was characterized by an “indefinite and pervasive anxiety about being lost in empire.”²⁷ Advancing Guha's arguments from the perspective of the emergent Indian public sphere, Tanika Sarkar has argued that the late nineteenth-century colonial India was marked by a “crucial indeterminacy of all meaning rather than fixed, explicit, confident certainties.”²⁸

Together, this scholarship indicates that colonizer-colonized relations were not necessarily homogenous (top down and bottom up) or static. Ostensibly masquerading as masculine supremacy, the imperial mentality was internally riven by anxieties, vacillation, and ambiguities. Hacking's “loop” allows us to recognize the complexity of relations not just between the colonizers and the colonized, but also within the colonizers and the colonized themselves. In paying attention to these internal complexities, this study eschews reciprocal constructions of the British Empire and offers an account of what Hacking has called the heterogenous “cycle of changes,” i.e., processes of social and epistemological transformation that do not follow linear and causal directions.²⁹

The second section demonstrates how the differential treatment of the Mamlatdars was premised on presenting their corruption as the result of their ambiguous relations and continued connections with “archaic” institutions such as caste. Such attitudes denied Mamlatdars any moral complexity and reinforced their supposed infantile transparency. Conceived in terms of either lack of masculine professionalism or excessive connections with primitive institutions such as caste, the Mamlatdars were placed within the discourse of “child” and “savage” that justified the need for the continual vigilance. As Ann Stoler remarks, “Both the representations were constructs of a civilizing, custodial mission and a theory of degeneracy whose bourgeois prescriptions would turn on the contrast and equation between the two.”³⁰ More importantly, this section will demonstrate the responses of the Indians to the Mamlatdar debate. The Indian responses, far from being homogenous, critiqued the imperial descriptions even as they partially acknowledged some of the conditions of such classifications.

The Escaping Harlequin

Arthur Crawford first came to India in 1853 as an assistant collector in the Bombay Presidency. With more than thirty-three years of active service, Crawford's career witnessed a significant leap when he was appointed as the first municipal commissioner of Bombay in 1865. A famous market named after him testifies to his popularity to this day. He was popularly called Crayfad Sahab by the local Marathis and he had purportedly learnt the language of the region.³¹ On 16 August 1888, he was embarrassingly apprehended as a tramp in Bombay. Crawford's arrest was sensational. He was tried by a commission comprising three judges from outside the Presidency. This enquiry commenced on 23 October 1888, and after nearly two months and sixty-seven public sittings, concluded that Crawford was not guilty of the thirty-two charges of extortion, corruption, and bribery, except for procuring loans beyond his repayment capacities.

It was not as if the British had not known about his systemic and protracted corruption. In his confidential report to the Government of India, John Nugent, the secretary to government of Bombay, traced Crawford's corruption to 1870s when, as the municipal of Bombay, he had acquired compromising loans from local businesses, especially from the rich Parsi merchants. However, the question then arises: If Crawford's corruption was already so well known, why was he not penalized by the commission and the imperial government? Further, despite being “discovered” in clearly compromising circumstances, how was Crawford's verdict justified by the commission?

Quite ironically, one of the first and the most critical of the documents that addressed these questions is the Bombay government's report on his corruption. Unlike most bureaucratic reports, Ommanney's investigation of Crawford was itself assembled as a detective story, sensational and active, alluding to the masculine aesthetics of the ICS (Imperial Civil Services) world, a world that Crawford excelled in, if only erringly. Following in the steps of a cheap nineteenth-century detective novel, Ommanney's blow-by-blow narrative from the beginning was about presenting himself as central to the investigation. This narcissism was reflected in the peripheral positions Mamlatdars occupied in the report. Although the initial steps towards securing an enquiry was made by two retired Indian Mamlatdars, Bhimbhai Kriparam and K. B. Pendse, who had assiduously put a file on Crawford's discrepancies, it was Ommanney who, prompted by his English honour and zeal, “felt the need” to take up the formal enquiry.³²

In contrast to his personal zeal in prosecuting Crawford, the “natives,” Ommanney contended, lacked similar enthusiasm to offer evidence and were naturally averse to legal proceduralism.³³ However, this was not true. Crawford's systemic bribery was widely known amongst the Indians. The editorial of 15 July 1883 in the Marathi daily Poona Vaibhav hinted at the existence of rampant corruption “from the lowest officer in the public service to the highest.”³⁴ The discrepancy between the government in Bombay and “native” information was apparent in the utter disregard of the editorial. This apathy was a result of divergent historical conjunction that after the 1857 Mutiny, encouraged a segregated and remote relationship with the colonized. The discrepancies in the British knowledge of the “natives”—for example, the Kelkar editorials—were widely symptomatic of the characteristic late nineteenth-century imperial disregard for a dynamic and evolving colonial world.

If for the Indians Crawford was, as Poona Vaibhav hinted, “like a king,”³⁵ for Ommanney, the European indifference to Crawford's continued corruption was a result of his “seductive manners.”³⁶ The Bombay government referred to Crawford's “fine presence, his charm of manner, his energy, force of character, and capacity for affairs.”³⁷ Similarly, an anonymous pamphlet entitled “A Breach of Faith in the Queen's Name” claimed that Crawford's “presence was courtly. He was genial, a good diner-out, and a favourite in Service. He was said to be a man whom latitude should be allowed; latitude was allowed.”³⁸ Variously termed as “manly,” “striking,” “popular,” and “seductive” during the investigations, Crawford combined pedigree with charms of imperial “manliness,” traits that were effective in controlling the potential disorders of the post-1857 world. The invocation of Crawford's personal life confirmed his racial superiority, the membership to which, as Ann Stoler has confirmed in the context of colonial Java, impinged much more on domestic decisions and lifestyles than public conduct.³⁹

Showing Crawford as a morally complex modern man, in charge of several critical affairs, helped make his corruption look more explainable. This was most apparent when the report discussed the details of Crawford's loans. The commission constructed the image of Crawford's corruption as essentially a matter of fiscal mismanagement that he was aware of and ready to atone for.⁴⁰ Thus, “Mr. Crawford was in a state of extreme embarrassment,” with regards to his financial situation.⁴¹ Circumstantial and provisional, Crawford's corruption, like Milton's Satan, was deplorable but understandable.

Crawford's faux trial illuminates to us several intersecting ideologies that shaped the British imperial interests at the turn of the century. The “manly” Crawford epitomized an almost perfect mix of pedigree and social modernity that serviced the need for racial distinction critical to the assertion of administrative, scientific superiority of the English.⁴² The judgment of his innocence was therefore not so much a reflection of his moral character but a projection of a political program where different kinds of racial justifications for British colonialism were realized. Crawford's corruption was reconstructed as lack of fiscal diligence, a character flaw that could be rationally and schematically reformed. Through a narrative of an extravagant, slightly pompous, but essentially good-hearted man, the enquiry presented his corruption within the discourse of masculinity and vigilance that could be understood, even admired.

The Intimate Ambiguity

On 13 July 1888, Hanumantrao, the principal agent and assistant to Crawford, was arrested in Pune even as Crawford was still the revenue commissioner of the Central Division of the Bombay Presidency. The two charges on Hanumantrao were about taking bribes from several Mamlatdars in the Central Division to appoint and transfer them via his “influence” over Crawford.

From the very beginning of Hanumantrao's trial, it was apparent that his association with Crawford confounded British accusations of financial complicity. For example, the lawyers prosecuting Hanumantrao could not find any reasons behind his working for Crawford. Further, it was equally apparent that Hanumantrao did not derive any direct pecuniary gain from Crawford. In fact, Crawford had taken loans from Hanumantrao as well.⁴³ However, the ambiguity of Hanumantrao's financial relationship with Crawford was crucial in constructing the “intimacy” he enjoyed with Crawford. This blurring of the personal and the public was indicative of “how a relationship between the domestic and that of the state shaped colonial cultures.”⁴⁴ In their examination of the various Mamlatdars, the trial became a description of the “unprecedented access” of Hanumantrao to Crawford.⁴⁵ It is ironic that the more the British investigators insisted on establishing a transactional connection between Crawford and him, the more they discovered the extent of administrative proximity the two enjoyed.

Cutting through the Manichean antipodes of the colonizer and the colonized, the domestic and the public, Durba Ghosh in a recent essay situates colonial relations within the counterintuitive frame of friendship.⁴⁶ However, in studying such relations through the distinctive frame of colonial terrorism, Ghosh remains confined to the essentially provisional and exceptional nature of such relations. Nevertheless, Ghosh's reflections on the connections between social deviance and masculine friendships help us recognize in Crawford-Hanumantrao's relationship something more than a transactional and antagonistic hierarchy between the colonizers and the colonized. According to Baines, the assistant to Ommanney, Hanumantrao's meteoric rise could be attributed to the “personal liking for the man” Crawford had developed.⁴⁷ Similarly, several of the testimonies underscored the intimate knowledge Hanumantrao had of Crawford's bungalow. Hanumantrao himself admitted to Crawford not having ever objected “to my being anytime I liked at his house.”⁴⁸

That this relationship was quickly translated into access to and control over official documents highlights not just the centrality of documents in formulating and disciplining colonial relationships—a point echoed by several historians, Bhavani Raman and Hayden Bellenoit to name only two—but also the essentially personal and improvisational character of this documentary apparatus.⁴⁹ Despite the British attempts to control colonial relations within an administrative economy of records and archives, the human mediation of these documents through the protocols of bureaucratic drafting, noting, and filing created a surplus of meanings to the documents and shaped the investigation as well. The fetishization of documents in determining Crawford-Hanumantrao's relationship also confirms Miller's analysis of how corruption served to discipline sexual boundaries into identifiable, contained, and transparent documentary economy.

Thus, throughout the investigation Hanumantrao's proximity to Crawford was established through his access to official papers. For example, Baines highlighted the “reliable” relationship between Hanumantrao and Crawford and pointed out how in a matter of three years, from Hanumantrao's first encounter with Crawford in 1883 to 1886, Hanumantrao had “practically the power to inspect the whole of Commissioner's records.”⁵⁰ Further, the testimonies themselves persistently referred to the sequence of the transmission of the documents, the different levels of notations (public and secret), the place of accessing the documents (office or home), and finally the people who were involved in this documentary economy. Hanumantrao also confessed to how Crawford's blind trust in him often translated into his being able to take the official documents to his own house, something that was reflective of his intimacy.⁵¹ Attesting to the documentary intimacy between Crawford and Hanumantrao, another note suggested how Hanumantrao once helped clean up a document that Crawford had casually left his shaving materials on.⁵²

Nevertheless, Hanumantrao's ambiguity consolidated the broader claims of the prosecution that the Mamlatdars and the Indians were driven by emotions and, therefore, not guided by rational professionalism. If Crawford's “manliness” was mobilized to defend him as a slightly flawed but representative of his vicarious Britishness, the Mamlatdars were constantly shown to be guided by emotional suppositions of fear and cowardliness. Even the official grounds of indemnity provided to the Mamlatdars were steeped in framing them within the discourse of emotions. In deciding on which Mamlatdars could be indemnified and which were to be penalized, the Bombay government's dispatch dated 3 May 1889 divided the Mamlatdars into two categories. The first were those who “practically volunteered the payment of bribes to secure their own objects.” The second set of Mamlatdars, the more numerous ones, included “those who only paid under extreme pressure […] as they feared their health, or who gave money in despair […] or […] believed, the blasting of their official careers.”⁵³

The focus on the emotional character of the Mamlatdars naturalized the lack of rational discipline and self-control that, as Srirupa Prasad has outlined in her analysis, was the basis of imperialism's “massive undertakings in hygiene and bodily management.”⁵⁴ The affective constitution of Mamlatdars through the vocabulary of fear, insecurity, and desperation allowed the British to mute the moral complexities of Mamlatdars into transparent categories of the “oppressed” and “degraded.” This process of framing the Mamlatdars consolidated the imperial narratives of native infantilism and effeminacy that dominated the late nineteenth-century studies of colonialism.⁵⁵ Such vocabulary also simultaneously bolstered the claims of enlightened moral patronage that masqueraded as pedagogical reprogramming of the natives.

The Caste Connections

The framing of the Mamlatdars within the discourse of infant/savage also augmented the British presentation of Mamlatdars in terms of “herd mentality.” Thus, the judges observed, even as public officers, the Mamlatdars were more interested in strengthening their “primeval” connections of caste and blood. Notwithstanding the contributions of the Mamlatdars to the entire case, Ommanney repeatedly stressed the difficulty in securing testimonies because the “natives” always acted in concert.⁵⁶

Ommanney's blame of the Indian castes for their apathy towards Crawford's corruption was seconded and supported by the Bombay government. The most indicting statement of caste and ethnicity as the source of the Mamlatdars’ corruption came from the key prosecutor, Raymond West. He opined:

The peculiar character of the Brahman officials, astute, timid, ambitious, and yet unenterprising, appears to have allied itself with the energetic and dominating personality of the Commissioner in the establishment of an almost universal moral collapse, in which courage and a high sense of honour having been stifled, corruption was accepted as a factor of the system as an ordinary and necessary incident of everyday official life.⁵⁷

For West, the idea that caste connections and filial ties advanced certain physical and moral dispositions were associated with the broader anthropological amplifications of differences in character that the British administrators such as John Malcolm (1769–1833) had earlier described. Malcolm, the key Scottish general in the British conquest of the Marathas, had reminded his peers that “native” corruption involved physical comportment and appearance.⁵⁸

The emphasis on the emotional, the bodily, and the caste provenance of the Mamlatdars was also a response to the debates unfolding in the British Parliament. The 1889 witnessed a spirited debate and revision of what was called as the Public Bodies Corrupt Act. Originally conceived in 1839 in the wake of the scandal involving “illicit” loans supplied to Jamaican slave holders, the 1889 act itself was a conservative response to what the British saw as the perils of imperial plutocracy. In highlighting the various caste affiliations of the Mamlatdars, the British were also trying to map and reproduce caste as a corporate and economic structure. Much in keeping with the time, as Nicholas Dirks and David Washbrook have highlighted, the late nineteenth-century imperialists were grappling with systematizing caste and identifying it as a form of economic organization.⁵⁹ Caste as a decrepit guild echoed the conservative imperialist mindset that was eager to identify caste as an ancient form of corporate alliance in need for an “appropriate” revival. For the progressive imperialists, which witnessed a resurgence with William Gladstone as the prime minister (1886–92), caste was equally to be blamed for the “native” corruption but was now to be reformed to modern standards of professionalism. Thus, in its 22 July 1888 issue, Reynold's Newspaper, a radical newspaper from Britain, observed sympathetically that Crawford's scandal was a result of the complexities of imperial relations and that the indigenous institutions needed greater attention from the imperial powers.⁶⁰

The reality of British imperial recruitments, however, was very different from the furious liberal champions of imperial reform. Caste-based recruitments to colonial administration, especially for the Mamlatdars, were widely prevalent. Unlike the military recruitments that maintained a “dilution” system of not hiring from a single caste or race—a commonplace practice in the colonial army after 1857⁶¹—the subordinate civil administration was defined by criteria that privileged caste associations. Termed as “provincial recruitment,” the admission to lower colonial administration was entirely discretionary, based on the connections of the magistrates with the local communities.⁶² Some basic qualifications such as an educational degree (undergraduate BA or BSc degree) from a university, knowledge of the vernaculars, and a simple competition (“pass examination varied to the department”⁶³) apart, the recruitments and career advancement of the uncovenanted services followed on-the-job apprentice model where the district magistrate would recommend candidates of “proven merit and ability.”⁶⁴

Such a direct correlation between “merit” and educational attainment meant most recruitments were still based on caste and family recommendations which were the basis of precolonial administration. Addressing the issue of uncovenanted services, Raymond West, the judge of the Bombay High Court and a member of the Public Service Commission, responded to the question of recruiting from the erstwhile caste groups in the following words, “If not, where must we look for representatives from these classes […]? In the Bombay Presidency, we do obtain for the public service Natives of the same classes as the Native rulers employed.”⁶⁵ Thus, out of the 5,836 total uncovenanted positions held by Indians in the Southern Division of the Presidency (five districts) since the introduction of competitive examination in 1866–7, a massive 5,033 were occupied by the Brahmans until 1885–6.⁶⁶

While the covenanted services, as Sukanya Banerjee notes,⁶⁷ became the centre of the elite Indians’ demands for greater inclusion in the administration, it was the uncovenanted services where much of the provincial politics of caste, region, and class was fought. With the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 supposedly “opening” the Imperial Civil Services to “native” competition, there was a greater neglect of the subordinate recruitments. The Public Service Commission of 1886–7 was ostensibly convened to address the complaints of Indians for more inclusivity in the civil services. However, the commission, in its purported desire to introduce a less bureaucratic recruitment process, literally mandated the local British civilian to make subordinate appointments through a series of supposedly more inclusive measures. One of the most crucial of these measures was the inclusion of “the ‘right sort’ of native civilian not only to social and educational backgrounds, but also to provincial and religious backgrounds.”⁶⁸ Mrinalini Sinha argues that the division of “native” recruitment on sectarian lines combined with its complete arbitration by the district magistrate had precisely the impact of securing “British domination of top administrative positions on a firmer footing.”⁶⁹ Further, such fragmentation of “native” recruitment also strengthened the view of Provincial Services as inferior and vulnerable to corruption, an especially crucial point for Crawford, whose principle indictment was on the grounds of rampant appointments, transfers, and promotions of Indians.

However, the Indian contestations for greater inclusion in the uncovenanted services were reflective of a political consciousness that did not derive validation from confirming to the imperial binary of inferior natives and superior colonizers.⁷⁰ It sought legitimacy from an intersection of regional, class, and caste identities, thereby upending the neat imperial and elite divisions of the colonizer and the colonized. For example, the Eurasian and domiciled European memorialists in their 1885 petition claimed greater concession for being included in the uncovenanted services on grounds of being “an essentially poor community” and being unable to give their sons any university education.⁷¹ Unlike those of their European and Eurasian counterparts, the more forceful petitions from the non-Brahmans of Belgaum and the Lingayat Education Association of Dharwar demanded attention to their grievances as a matter of right and not on the basis of any governmental benevolence because they (the non-Brahmans) were “the majority of the tax-payers.”⁷² In fact, they utilized imperial arguments for efficiency and equality to argue for expanding the uncovenanted services. The Brahman dominance of the government positions, the Belgaum petition stated, meant that the administration often kept other communities in the dark, leading to greater wastage of financial and human resources.⁷³

These petitions compelled the Public Service Commission to acknowledge the skewed representations within the colonial services. In his evidence to the Public Service Commission, Charles Turner, the principal of Elphinstone College, acknowledged how the system of “open competition” and recruitments to the uncovenanted services had led to grievances from other Indians.⁷⁴ S. Crothwaite, another British officer, similarly argued how the Brahmans benefited from the current system of recruitment because it was based on “private patronage.”⁷⁵

In challenging the homogenous construction of uncovenanted services, the non-Brahman petitioners were also bringing to fore the tensions that undergirded the trial. On one hand, while the British implied that the Mamlatdar's corruption was a result of their caste, the Indian petitioners demonstrated that the preponderance of Brahmans in the Revenue and Judicial services was a consequence of the colonial policies of recruitment.⁷⁶ Thus, while these non-Brahman detractors of the colonial policies utilized the language of colonial parity —the Belgaum petition invoked the Queen's 1857 proclamation on equality of all subjects of the Empire⁷⁷—they also mobilized this language in terms set by the colonial bureaucracy. Using colonial ethnographic surveys, these petitioners used caste and economic statistics as a tool to show the inequality of colonialism itself, thereby demonstrating the inherent instability of “making up people.” If Hackings study aims to show “how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications,”⁷⁸ the petitioners’ mobilization of caste to make greater claims for inclusion resisted the imperial appropriation of caste and demonstrated its essential intersectionality with other forms of identity such as class and race.

Corruption of Tradition or Tradition of Corruption: The “Native” Responses

If the British defence of Crawford was premised on exonerating the principles of moral and racial superiority, the Indian protestors had a less homogenous response. Lead by the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (hereafter Sabha), the defenders of the Mamlatdars both confirmed and challenged the colonial interpretations of native corruption. On one hand, some Sabha members, following imperial prescriptions, agreed that the Mamlatdars had been weak and therefore prone to exploitation. On the other hand, some Sabha members also highlighted how colonialism itself was duplicitous and steeped in corruption. This subtle difference in response also signalled the difference in the internalization of the charges of corruption and an example of what Hacking has termed as “dynamic nominalism.”⁷⁹ The dynamic constitution of “native” subjectivity was reflected in the heterogenous responses of Indians to the Crawford scandal. If Hacking's “making up people” involves determining “the space of possibilities for personhood,”⁸⁰ then the heterogenous responses of Indians signalled the different ways in which the Indians were claiming that space.

In a series of public meetings held at Poona, Satara, Sholapore, Nasik, Dhulia, and Ahmednagar, Indians articulated their “anger” against the imperial inconsistency against the Mamlatdars. In its issue of 26 April 1890, the more aggressive Bengali daily Arunodaya published an article entitled “We Are Beasts without Horns.” Excoriating the “native” society for abandoning the Mamlatdars to the “unreliable tyrannies of the English,” the newspaper went on to comment on the dismissal of the Mamlatdars in the following words: “Is such a thing possible in a free country like Japan, China, France, Germany, England, or America? […] Is not every English statesman, who under the power acquired by legislative enactments is benefitting England at the cost of India? These men plunder us because we let them do so.”⁸¹

Arunodaya's bitter editorial signalled the already shifting boundaries between the colonized Indians and their imperial lords. In the age when Bankim Chandra's Ananda Matha (1882) had already inaugurated a violent and polemical rhetoric around the colonial legitimacy to rule, Arunodaya not just highlighted the need for equivalence with the “free countries” but also imagined Mamlatdars as morally weak, inhibiting the progress of a unified India in contrast to the “free countries.”

For the Indians, the idea that the Mamlatdars were to be prosecuted despite the assurances of the government was not merely reflective of the implosion of the British civilizing mission. It was also a moment that clarified and enabled their moral subjectivities that confirmed their progressiveness in comparison to other Indians. Thus, the Sabha's first iconic meetings about the Mamlatdars opened with the searching question from its chairman, R. B. Krishnaji Nulkar. He demanded to know, “How was it possible for a single European to involve scores, nay hundreds, of Natives into the meshes of his nefarious designs?” Nulkar pointed out that it was the generic weaknesses in the Indian character— “our own moral defects”—that had allowed the British corruption to become so pervasive.⁸² Just as Arunodaya's editors had connected British tyranny with Indian lack of self-rule, Nulkar's speech also framed Crawford's corruption in terms of the defect and deficiency in the Mamlatdars. Although such a framing granted Indian Mamlatdars moral agency, it captured them within the essentialist and dichotomous logic of rational/irrational, complete/deficient.

This was not surprising. The colonial Deccan had recently experienced massive food riots due to severe famine and economic depression (1875–85). The role of Mamlatdars, the crucial link between the British revenue establishment and the native agriculture, had been called into question for their close identification with the British officers. To the predominantly urbanized media and the Sabha political campaigners, the corrupt Mamlatdars of the Southern Division (the poorest among all the districts of Bombay Presidency) also epitomized rural backwardness. Thus, several speeches in the Sabha meetings emphasized the country backgrounds of these officers and reflected on their obsequiousness and subordination to the British.⁸³ This language of moral hierarchy in the vernacular sphere was very different from the language of moral parity demanded by the same campaigners from their imperial masters.

In his essay entitled, “Degeneracy, Criminal Behaviour, and Looping,” Hacking calls attention to how the term degeneracy is “not a purely descriptive term […] but has moral implications.”⁸⁴ For Hacking, such terms carry forward the “connection between inheritance and social deviance.” Often elastic, these terms are also organized on the notion of historical teleology. Thus, when the British were highlighting the persistence of caste as an indication of Mamlatdars’ corruption, Sabha's diagnosis of Indian deficit reflected the progressive internalization of the imperial ideology. Sabha speeches such as Nulkar's emphasized the lack of character among the rural Indians in standing up to their imperial oppressors.

However, not all Indians agreed with the view that they were essentially weak and feeble. If the British empire was once a site of moral rejuvenation, it could also corrupt. This was the essence of Gopal Krishna Gokhale's fierce speech. The iconic Marathi nationalist deftly rebutted the framing of Indians in terms of deficiency. Gokhale began his speech with a challenge: For a decade or so the Anglo-Indian officials in the government had heard about Crawford's corrupt regime. It was surprising, Gokhale remarked sarcastically that “the Indian public servants who found themselves perched on the precipice of certain ruin […] still had the courage and scruples to be the first to assemble a carefully documented file on Crawford's misdeeds and take it to the government.”⁸⁵ Refuting the charge of weakness, Gokhale reframed the Mamlatdars as whistleblowers. This was a turning point in the debates on defending the Mamlatdars.

While Gokhale's speech argued for moral equality between the British and the Indians, this claim for equality was also decidedly framed within a middle-class bourgeois discourse. Indu-Prakash, a Marathi newspaper of the time, articulated the defence of the Mamlatdars as also a matter of “tarnished” image of the educated class. The editor of the newspaper remarked how the British betrayal had left “the educated class”—those who had loyally served the British as “interpreters”— with no option but to protest.⁸⁶ This statement revealed the discrepancies between the imperial universalist view of itself and the way Indians saw them as a remote power. Simultaneously, it was also indicative of the elite constructions of the nascent solidarity movement in India.

In her analysis of the specificities of the emergence of Sabha, Gail Omvedt has highlighted the inconsistencies that conditioned its beginnings. She remarks on the hypocrisy of elite organizations such as the Sabha and the Bombay Association. On one hand the “nationalists” demanded a greater share in the empire. On the other hand, they also wanted to “maintain their position against the masses within the Indian ‘caste-class’ hierarchy.”⁸⁷ Thus, the idea that the Mamlatdars should be defended on grounds of them having served in the imperial bureaucracy was derived from the entitlement that the predominantly Brahman activists had enjoyed due to English education.

It was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, another iconic leader defending the Mamlatdars, who questioned the view of Mamlatdars as essentially corrupt, and in the process challenged the very grounds of colonial government. Tilak began his speech by going over the technicalities of the promise made by Ommanney and the Bombay government to the Mamlatdars. Tilak then proceeded to demolish the most vociferous critic of the Mamlatdars, Justice Jardine. Challenging his contention that the British statute of Edward VI was applicable to India as well, Tilak opined that this was the government of India and that the office of Mamlatdarship could not reasonably be included in this English statute. Highlighting the specificity of the Mamlatdars, Tilak's speech was directed at carving Indian governance as distinctive from its imperial metropole. It was also directed at the false equivalence created by the British between the empire and its colonies where the principle of legal equality was applicable only unidirectionally. The duality of the imperial government stood in contrast to the Mamlatdars’ undivided “character,” so Tilak declared.⁸⁸

Demanding a separate and distinctive treatment of Mamlatdars from the metropole, both Gokhale and Tilak advocated not only for administrative parity but also legal specificity. However, they claimed ownership over the British administration precisely in terms that had been provided by the colonial government. Moreover, in defending the Mamlatdars based on their personality traits— “courage,” “will,” “scruples,” “honest,” etc.—they were acknowledging and contributing to the ethnographic vocabularies of the colonial state. The use of this vocabulary was also indicative of their participation in and confirmation of the significance of an identifiable and individualized “character” (or its lack thereof) to the colonial government. Thus, these defenders confirmed as well as challenged the category of the colonized by acknowledging the fact of the colonial government as well as its distinctiveness from its imperial provenance. Such a claim is reminiscent of what Hacking has called as “the benign example of looping effect: the classified people enhance and adjust what is true of them.”⁸⁹

The Mamlatdar-Crawford controversy serves as a prism to understand the various intellectual positions towards empire and corruption. The question of who was corrupt and what were the sources of their corruption dramatized the divergences between the conservative and liberal notions of empire and corruption that could not be segregated along racial lines. One set of protagonists recognized “native” corruption to be the result of indigenous traditions and customs, such as caste and family structure. The other group of characters identified the Mamlatdars as victims of the supposedly modernizing institutions of colonialism. These positions were indicative of the complex trajectories of imperial relations, where empire stood for both modernity and regression at the same time. To recognize corruption as originating from indigenous religious and social institutions (caste and rural conformism) was to present Indian society as beyond the pale of rational transformation. In contrast to the conservative proposition, the liberal imperial subjects as well as their British counterparts identified corruption as a product of colonial administration. In doing so, they recognized the possibility of reform and legal regulation, but only on terms dictated by imperial rationality.

Both these attitudes indicated what Thomas Metcalf has called as the “ideology of the late Victorian Raj.”⁹⁰ The selective construction of similarity and difference was the key to the creation of hierarchies that justified imperial governance.⁹¹ Hierarchies justified colonial rule. More crucially, they also manufactured and stabilized a stadial and teleological notion of progress where the Crawford-Mamlatdar controversy solicited visions of continued Indian medievalism. At the same time, the fact of continued Indian corruption also confirmed the failure of modern rational reformism that had characterized the early Company and Crown administration.

Both these views failed to recognize the complex moral agency and subjectivities of the Mamlatdars themselves. The imperial prosecutors as well as the defenders of the Mamlatdars assumed them to possess a coherent moral clarity and consistent conscience. These perspectives were premised on a fantastical moral high ground that revealed imperial insensitivity and rejection of the view that moral decisions were often messy. This “moral blindness,” to borrow Mark Button's term,⁹² misrecognized the Mamlatdars as autonomous and separate individuals, even as this characterization directly contradicted the persistent view of them as bound by ethical boundaries of race, ethnic, and caste identities. Moreover, both the defenders of the Mamlatdars as well as Crawford clarified and amplified the significance of “character” to governance.

Conclusion

Situating corruption within the evolving notions of masculinity, race, and caste this article examines corruption beyond the commonplace state-centric discourse. Corruption, as this article shows, is co-constituted by the legal and the biological. It existed in the ambiguous daily interactions between Crawford and Hanumantrao, the “masculine” public and the “feminized” private, the persistent segregation of which was central to the administrative and militaristic establishment of the empire. The legal discourse of corruption was an attempt to reorder the intimate patronage surplus into disciplined and documented categories of the colonizer and the colonized, the rulers and their subjects. In other words, colonialism apprehended Crawford-Hanumantrao's ambiguous intimacy only by labelling it as corrupt. Thus, the article challenges the masculine constructions of nineteenth-century imperialism and instead demonstrates the everyday conjunctions between the sexual, the racial, and the legal in producing regimes of imperial power. But above all, these conjunctions demonstrate the essentially messy, provisional, and itinerant nature of British control in India, what Hacking would describe as “moving targets.”⁹³

At the same time, narratives around the Mamlatdar-Crawford corruption reveal the attempts by the British to control the reality of colonial administration. The essential inadequacies of the colonial project were re-presented as personal fallacies and eccentricities, acceptable aberrations of a modernizing world. However, the Indians were consistently cast as caught within atavistic traditions and mores that could only be redeemed via their subscription to imperial bureaucratic modernity.

Shepherded through these discourses, the Indian response to the Crawford-Mamlatdar issue crystallized the emergence of a consciousness that was premised on their simultaneous conformity and rejection of the British narratives of Indian corruption. This selective engagement with colonial authority also enabled a skewed moral vision that continues to define itself through Western ideals even as it remains blind to the challenges within. In examining the variety of indigenous responses to the Crawford controversy, this article also highlights the mutations of “looping effect.” In positioning the Mamlatdars as essentially backward and rural, these responses emblematized the emergence of heterogenous looping effects internal to the indigenous groups, where “making up people” was not determined by straightforward application of imperial classificatory categories. By sometimes disguising it as individual deviance and sometimes as culture and tradition, the Mamlatdar-Crawford corruption, rather than provoking change, in fact obscured the need for change in the long term.