Manufacturing Village Identity and Its Village: The View From Nineteenth-Century Andhra

Abstract

Upon inquiring into a boundary dispute between Tooringi and the Dutch-owned village of Jagannaikpuram, Leveston G. K. Murray asked generally of inhabitants ‘how far they supposed their ground extended’. But on that day in April 1795, and to Murray's dismay, he ‘received no other answer than that they did not know’. L. G. K. Murray and Mr Topander, both East India Company officials based in Masulipatam on the Teluga-speaking Andhra Coast of Southeast India, then tried a different approach, and showed those gathered a ‘Gentoo Paper’ containing a Dutch account of the nature of the boundary between the two villages. The consensus among the Telugu-speaking onlookers, in fact, was that the document was in order. No one proposed any problems with its authenticity to those Company officers.