Choice, Identity, and Law Mallampalli, Chandra
Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India,
11/2011
Book Chapter
The Judicial Committee of London’s Privy Council was the final court of appeals for cases originating in the colonies. As such, it heard a wide range of cases arising from many cultural contexts. ...These encompassed the validity of laws passed within British colonies of settlement, issues of nationality and legal rights associated with persons of different races, the fulfilment of treaties, and civil matters pertaining to marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Deliberations of the Judicial Committee were held in the Council Chamber, a room located at the center of Westminster and overlooking Downing Street. Because of the many legal systems they had to interact with, the Committee required a vast collection of law books, digests, and law reports from various jurisdictions throughout the empire. Given the immense scope of its engagement, it is unclear what the Judicial Committee would bring to light in Charlotte’s case that had not already been considered in the Indian courts. Did Charlotte hope that London’s team would examine issues with greater rigor or fairness, or simply that an English court would be more biased toward the application of English law?The decree of the Sadr Adalat must have shattered whatever trust Charlotte and Daniel may have had in the Indian courts (Charles was by then deceased). In its adoption of Hindu law as the working framework for the case, it could not have contradicted the earlier decree of the Bellary District Court more. Incensed by the Sadr Adalat’s decree, Charlotte and Daniel directed their attorney, J. D. Mayne, to appeal their case to London’s Judicial Committee. In his letter of appeal, Mayne stated that the decree was wrong, among other things, in “stating that the parties were to be governed by the principles of Hindu law.”
The Path to Litigation Mallampalli, Chandra
Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India,
11/2011
Book Chapter
Ever since Matthew’s stroke in 1836, the Abrahams may be viewed as treading along a path to litigation. The family’s rise to economic and social prominence was rapid and unpredictable. Immediate ...demands of the business consumed them more than plans for the distant future. Matthew’s thriving and diverse portfolio – with investments in liquor, real estate, cotton, wax, saltpeter, and many other commodities – grew over three decades to be worth more than 300,000 rupees. Never had his father known such wealth, perhaps not even among those he had served as a dressing boy or mess butler. Neither had Charlotte’s side of the family enjoyed any degree of affluence. Amid the multiplication of stresses and perks that accompanied their entry into this new terrain, they devoted little thought to questions about succession. Whether from denial or inexperience, they were ill-prepared for Matthew’s demise.Who would succeed the Pedda Dora? Francis’s words, “there was no will,” signified a much larger void, and the steadily chilling relationship between Charlotte and Francis concerned more than a contest for authority between two personalities. Both reflect the family’s lack of any coherent script or story line about itself, which would allow the family to perpetuate its wealth and identity. Going to court compelled Charlotte and Francis to produce narratives that would break this silence, bring their complex family under one cultural rubric, and steer them under one head.
A Crisis of Trust Mallampalli, Chandra
Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India,
11/2011
Book Chapter
My troops, which are before you, are not greater in number than is customary. I have neither treasure nor provisions nor is my Fort prepared for war. ... I am the son of a brave soldier and therefore ...I am fond of military display.Ghulam Rasul Khan, the Nawab of KurnoolWhen we, i.e. M. Abraham, the third plaintiff and myself, were selling the Nawab’s arms, an Arab by the name of Khan Mahomed purchased a large number of guns, pistols and swords, and he prevailed upon M. Abraham to allow him to take these arms to Hyderabad and sell them there, promising to return with profits and the price.Testimony of Henry Vincent Platcher, District Munsif of BellaryDuring the early nineteenth century, Indian families underwent significant changes as they adjusted to rising British power. This was so not only for prominent families of Indian princes, but also for mercantile families such as the Abrahams, landholding zamindars, and high-caste Hindu households. Scholars have described a process of fragmentation that elite families experienced under colonial rule. Whereas previously, family life had integrated political, economic, and “household” affairs, colonial policies attempted to extricate Indian families from political and economic entanglements. The goal was to separate private family interests from a more rational “public” domain.A common thread that united the experiences of many Indian families was their burden to perpetuate their wealth and status according to new schemes of colonial governance. What factors determined whether a family would flourish or come apart under colonial rule? How would influential families secure relationships of trust between their own members and with colonial officials? Regarding such matters, perhaps no issue was more volatile than that of succession. Colonial policies defined the terms by which Indian families would designate an heir and secure their place under British sovereignty.
Conclusion Mallampalli, Chandra
Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India,
11/2011
Book Chapter
From abstract notions of identity mediated through colonial courts, this family history recovers the disorderliness of human experience. The inhabited worlds of Matthew, Charlotte, and their family ...expose the limits of identities introduced from the top down, even when litigants appropriate them for their own ends. The legacy of the Abrahams concerns the possibility of racial and cultural mixture among poor, marginalized people and the heightened vulnerability to identity closure as people acquire status and wealth. With remarkable candor, Abraham v. Abraham records both trajectories.Until the onset of their court case, the Abraham family consistently defied the imperial ordering of Indian society into distinct religious and cultural units. From their humble beginnings as paraiyars and poor East Indians, to their lives as an interracial family, and their fruitful years as Bellary entrepreneurs, their story reveals interwoven experiences lying beneath the identity choices they encountered in court. The family traversed a diverse social terrain, bridging European and indigenous social spaces. The court case left behind a detailed public record of their lives; but the same documents that reveal the family’s mixed heritage also reveal its adoption of enclosed identities, defined by checklists of cultural characteristics.
Remembering Family Mallampalli, Chandra
Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India,
11/2011
Book Chapter
I knew the late Matthew Abraham ... I recollect Matthew Abraham’s first coming as a writer. He then wore the Native dress. Matthew Abraham was living in a thatched house in Cowl Bazaar when I first ...became acquainted with him.– Deposition of Plaintiff’s forty-second witness, January 5 and 6, 1858. Geengar Venkapa, son of Venkapa, caste Geengar, Vishnoo religion, aged sixty years, Carpenter by trade, and residing at BellaryFamily life often is associated with what is private, idiosyncratic, and unlearned. Family members hold a unique capacity either to support or aggravate each other because they know each other in ways that outsiders do not. Forms of parental discipline, patterns of alcohol addiction, the jewelry or clothing worn by one’s mother, whether a younger sibling is bullied or coddled, or the roles that adults and children play at mealtimes are rarely learned from normative texts or defined by state regulations, but are experiences that vary from household to household. When family practices, however, are subject to judicial scrutiny as were those of the Abrahams, much of this interiority is compromised. Personal forms of knowledge are turned over to the courts, enmeshed with legal categories and idiom, and refashioned by the competing interests of litigants.Retrieving a family history from the wide spectrum of witnesses deposed in Abraham v. Abraham is the primary aim of this chapter. Having described Bellary as a complex cultural frontier that was reshaped by colonialism, I now wish to situate both sides of the Abraham family within Bellary’s social landscape. To access their past, we must put the information submitted in court to different uses than what lawyers or judges had originally intended. Details concerning the dress, lifestyle, dwellings, or occupations of the Abrahams or other witnesses must be released from the case’s structuring binary of English versus Hindu law. Only then can we appreciate the rich social tapestry revealed in the testimonies. In setting aside this binary, we resist a tendency in historiography to privilege the priorities of state institutions or nations – in this case, the priorities of the judiciary in classifying people according to religion. “A critical historiography,” Ranajit Guha observes, consists of “bending closer to the ground in order to pick up the traces of a subaltern life in its passage through time.” For our purposes, this entails gleaning information from oral testimonies, which may or may not have been material to the outcome of the case, but which nevertheless helps us reconstruct the society of early colonial Bellary.
The inheritance of family property in South India often triggered disputes that
resulted in extensive litigation. At stake were not merely the passing of ancestral
property, but also the passing of ...social and religious identity. Within British
India, disputes over inheritance were complicated by the fact that there was no
universal law of inheritance, no lex loci, but many laws, defined by the unique
customs of various communities. Where would Christians fall within this arena
of legal and cultural pluralism? This chapter describes how the Madras judiciary
had originally recognized the diverse and highly indigenous cultural practices of
“Native Christians,” but later grouped them together with Europeans under a
single law of inheritance, the Indian Succession Act (X of 1865). By enforcing
the Succession Act, the judiciary isolated many Christian families from their
caste customs and further reified them as a “foreign” community.
CONCLUSION Mallampalli, Chandra
Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India, 1863-1937,
2004
Book Chapter
Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, Christians of the Madras
Presidency – both Catholic and Protestant, elite and non-elite – grew increasingly isolated from evolving notions of a Hindu ...society and nation. The
prevailing tendency of existing scholarship has been to attribute this isolation to
essential features of the Christian religion or to Western cultural values of
foreign missionaries. This study has explored how Brahminical or Sanskritic
assumptions of the British Raj were most instrumental in pushing Christians to
the margins of the Indian polity. An official knowledge about Christians was
constructed around the image of the apostate convert’s severance from the
Hindu family. This official knowledge, derived from the colonial period,
continues to define the plight of India’s Christians to this day.
Court cases dealing with the validity of a “Christian marriage,” as with cases
involving inheritance, illustrate the role of the Indian judiciary in defining religious boundaries. Efforts to define a ...valid “Christian marriage” were
complicated by the fact that Christians participated in multiple sets of social
relationships, crossing lines of caste, vocation and church affiliation. Village
Christians often married members of their own caste, who were not necessarily
Christian. How would courts assess the validity of such “mixed marriages,”
involving only one Christian partner?1 The Madras High Court’s decisions in
such cases further isolated Christians from the customs and usages of “Hindu
caste society.” By constructing a Christian community around a single law of
marriage for Christians within all of British India, the courts bifurcated
“Hindu” and “Christian” identities.
INTRODUCTION Mallampalli, Chandra
Christians and Public Life in Colonial South India, 1863-1937,
2004
Book Chapter
In recent years, India’s Christian minority has come under violent attack by
organizations pushing for an officially Hindu nation. In addition to raising
questions about nationalism, these attacks ...have sparked debates over the ethics
and politics of religious conversion. What is lacking in today’s conversion
debate, however, is a sense of how India’s colonial past has formed the identity
categories and viewpoints that all sides take for granted. Conversion, of course,
involves a change of religious allegiance. But how did courts of law ever come
to distinguish a “Native Christian community” from the rest of “Hindu
society?” As simple a matter as this may seem, it often required painstaking
interpretation of beliefs, customs and laws of various communities.
Furthermore, how did different varieties and classes of Christians adopt, resist
or reshape both imperial and nationalist perceptions of their identity? Such
questions point to a rich but largely ignored history of Indian Christian engagement with public life, a history that weighs heavily upon current debates over
conversion and religious boundaries.
