CRIME, LAW AND STATE SOVEREIGNTY

In a comparative history of law in the colonial world, Lauren Benton described a global trajectory in which consolidating empires leveled early modern legal flexibility over the nineteenth century, and “formally plural legal orders were transformed into state-dominated legal orders.”Footnote ¹⁰ At the core of Benton's argument is the notion—cast as irony—that colonized individuals seeking to advance their own agendas in court contributed to the liquidation of legal pluralism and imperial consolidation. In a key example, litigants at East India Company courts in early colonial Bengal “helped to create a space for the colonial state.” Reifying the notion of colonizers' “special relationship to truth” by participating in these forums, subjects unwittingly precipitated colonial legal hegemony, culminating in increasingly aggressive British claims to paramountcy during the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹

For Benton, the ascent of state-ordered legal regimes elaborates the meteoric rise of consolidated sovereignty during the long nineteenth century. What was visible in late-eighteenth-century British India was manifest in Africa, Australia, and the Americas by the twentieth. In late-nineteenth-century Uruguay, she argues, Brazilian and imperial European claims to extraterritorial jurisdiction gave rise to the formalization and aggressive assertion of state law over alternative forums. “Constructing sovereignty” and asserting control over national territory, as in colonial settings, meant establishing and upholding state law against other authorities: “The challenge to the state was not so much repressing ‘lawlessness’ as controlling ‘other’ law—the legal authority of caudillos [local strongmen], other states' claims to extraterritoriality, and litigants' recourse to legal strategies that placed them outside state control.”Footnote ¹²

Benton's history describes similar processes constitutive of imperial consolidation and nation-state development. In both cases the state, viewed through the lens of the legal institution, became the sole sovereign entity in any given place. The victory of the centralized state with its consolidated and hierarchical legal order meant the loss of multiple forums that subjects could employ. As I will suggest in my conclusion, Benton's tidy trajectory, in which legal regimes are consolidated worldwide by 1900, is questionable if the scenario is viewed from any of a number of frontier cases, such as the one considered here. One of her central methodological insights, however, is useful in pushing further the analysis here.

The relationship between sovereignty and law in imperial contexts, as Benton points out, is often clearest when viewed in terms of the experience of subordinated people: “This process [transformation of “formally plural” into “state-dominated” legal orders] involved everywhere an extended historical moment in which the question of the legal standing of the most marginal people in the colonial order became symbolically central to the developing legal culture and the broader realignment of the political order.”Footnote ¹³ Corresponding to this dynamic, the regulation of marginal populations was a primary concern of the Raj throughout the nineteenth century. Colonial officials suggested that endemic banditry had a deleterious effect on settled peasants, and in doing so they presumed a fundamental difference between criminals and an ostensibly normative, law-abiding peasantry. This presumed relationship was invoked to justify cross-border policing in Hyderabad and other non-colonized regions of the subcontinent from the early part of the century. Bombay Presidency and Hyderabad State archives bear ample evidence of colonial attempts to encourage cooperation. In spite of, and partly due to, the multiplication of legal authorities in the area, resourceful subjects managed to manipulate the legal scenario on both sides of the Bombay-Hyderabad frontier.

The political context of the frontier zone was a product of the complex historical process of early modern state-building in South Asia and the steady but geographically uneven expansion of the British colonial state circa 1750–1850. Starting in the early eighteenth century with the political dissolution of the centralizing Mughal Empire, the subcontinent began an era of decentralization in which smaller, regional states proliferated. Wide-ranging social ties were central to the articulation of political authority.Footnote ¹⁴ Establishing the loyalty and security of subject populations, wielding authority over agrarian and commercial revenues, and patronage of specific sites of symbolic power and material accumulation were all constitutive elements of state-building and governance. These characteristics of South Asian state practice made borders between states fluid. The spread of British power entailed a distinctly territorialized geography of sovereignty, as reflected in the centrality of surveying and mapping projects to colonial governance.Footnote ¹⁵ Raj officials demarcated precise boundaries around their territories and sought to pacify fluid frontier zones.

Distinctions between conceptions of political sovereignty in South Asia were dramatized by the means and limits of colonial political expansion. The Raj expanded their domains by wresting power away from some established sovereigns by a combination of force and coerced negotiation. This process often involved entering into treaties with South Asian rulers and developing alibis to seize states and formally incorporate them into imperial territory. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Raj ruled the majority of the subcontinent, and the remainder was formally subject to sovereigns—derisively dubbed “native princes”—who maintained treaty relations with the British. The process of colonial seizure and formal incorporation of territories ceased in the wake of the 1857 uprising, and the map of sovereign power was essentially frozen in shape for the remainder of the colonial era. The remaining non-colonized polities were dubbed Princely States, and the larger and more powerful among them, such as Hyderabad, retained control over internal governance, despite constant colonial oversight, embodied in the figure of a high official posted in the state known as the “resident.” Hyderabad's autonomy entailed considerable internal political fragmentation, with numerous nobles, land grant holders, and state officials exercising police and judicial powers.Footnote ¹⁶

The broader, subcontinental (and empire-wide) condition of fragmented sovereignty during the colonial period provided the stage for a productive engagement between a British project and conception of territorialized sovereignty, and other notions of state practice.Footnote ¹⁷ The cases I present below from Hyderabad are suggestive of this encounter. Official intransigence with respect to colonial boundary-regulation, the enduring political importance of bonds of personal loyalty, insistence on the responsibility of the state to safeguard the livelihoods of the subject population—these features of Hyderabadi governance frame and underscore the story I will sketch here of frontier-dwellers' use of the resources of the frontier zone.

POLICING IMPERIAL BORDERS

Colonial officials employed ideas of civilizational hierarchy to justify extra-legal cross-border interventions. The Raj, functioning largely by coercion in directly ruled areas, was circumscribed by the formal sovereignty of Princely States. In this context, Hyderabad officials presented themselves as responsive to the same concerns as a colonial state increasingly vigilant about maintaining “law and order.” An early-twentieth-century Urdu narrative celebrated the advanced character of the Nizam's police force:

This section from a Hyderabad police chief's biography emphasizes the great prestige to be gained by assisting the Raj in combating dacoity. As the text put it, such work by officials put Hyderabad “onto par with British India” in terms of policing.

It is somewhat incongruous, however, that the treasurer of nearby Mysore would be referred to as a dacoit. Indeed, colonial officials invoked the designation “dacoit,” like “thug,” an earlier term for alleged hereditary criminals, to describe putatively lawless, economically marginal mobile groups.Footnote ¹⁹ Consolidating agricultural production and trade were vital aspects of the colonial project. Mobile groups not integrated into the sedentary agrarian world were tagged as criminals in colonial sociology. And dacoits were said to abound in Hyderabad.Footnote ²⁰ The colonial state addressed this threatening presence in their borderlands by extending the work of the Thagi and Dakaiti Department (henceforth T&DD) into the Princely States from the 1830s onward.Footnote ²¹ The T&DD was an agency whose “special jurisdiction” functioned in parallel to British Indian law, and served through the nineteenth century as a proxy for extending colonial police power across frontiers. In Hyderabad during the decades around the turn of the century, the British resident presided over a special tribunal for cases raised by the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the T&DD. Despite the systematic character of colonial legal encroachment, Raj borders with the Nizam's territories continued to be a flashpoint of criminal activity over the next several decades. As we shall see, Hyderabad's reluctance to surrender or prosecute state subjects identified or handed over by the T&DD limited the effectiveness of colonial extraterritorial policing.

The celebration of Nawab Akbar Jang Bahādur's capture of “a famous dacoit” belied the fact that dacoity policing was a major bone of contention between the Raj and the Nizam around the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, this incident was situated alongside accounts of the late kotwāl's life of accomplishments in Hyderabad and overseas.Footnote ²² Contributions to law and order on behalf of the Nizam and the empire were interwoven in the policeman's biography, implying that the methods and goals of both polities were broadly in confluence. However, extant evidence contradicts this portrayal of extraterritorial policing, and reveals instead much friction between the state apparatuses of Hyderabad and British India.

Frontier political relations were characterized by moments of limited collaboration amidst protracted Nizam-Raj disagreements. The legal scene was fragmented and pluralist around the frontier: splintered between different forums within Hyderabad, and between the Nizam's and the Raj's territory. This legal indeterminacy was in large part engendered by Hyderabad's strategic “failure” to consolidate state sovereignty, often through the tactic of interminable delays in following up on Raj requests. While the ambivalence of the frontier zone was also a resource for the Nizam's officials at the central and local levels, the fragmentary character of the Nizam's disciplinary institutions served to justify colonial cross-border interventions. Beneath the story of states and their claims to sovereignty, frontier conditions served as a vital political and social resource for people who ran afoul of the colonial legal regime, such as “hereditary criminals,” fugitives, sex workers, bootleggers, and carrying traders. Their lives were bound up with contestations between the two governments, and ongoing institutional unevenness. A tangled configuration of fragmented sovereignties framed the frontier, but states and their policies did not completely circumscribe developments there.

“VERY DIFFICULT TO OBTAIN ANY CLUE”: THE LIMITS OF COLLABORATION

Exchanges between Bombay and Hyderabad testify to colonial expectations of collaboration in frontier policing. The Raj often found Hyderabad a reluctant partner in this endeavor, and initiative for policing the frontier zone came largely from Bombay, whose police captured Hyderabad subjects under suspicion and provided Hyderabad with information on fugitives in Bombay. The Nizam's officials tended to respond only after long delays, and they rarely pursued colonial initiatives and requests, citing alleged lack of evidence or problems identifying fugitives. Frequently, suspects apprehended by Bombay and extradited to Hyderabad were released upon arrival.

In 1887, some unnamed subjects of the Nizam were captured and tried for dacoity in Ahmednagar (Bombay).Footnote ²³ However, since the crime in question was committed in Hyderabad territory, they were acquitted, “because the Court has no jurisdiction over Foreign subjects for an offense committed in Foreign territory.”Footnote ²⁴ In another case, colonial authorities demanded rapid extradition of ten accused persons, witnesses, and stolen property from a theft committed in the frontier district of Sholapur.Footnote ²⁵ Hyderabad complied with the demand after great delay, ostensibly because the suspects resided within the jurisdiction of a noble's estate that was under indirect Hyderabadi administration. The Nizam's criminal jurisdiction over state subjects, and delays related to internal legal pluralism, impeded the efficient exercise of colonial justice.

Bombay authorities were generally vigilant in capturing and extraditing Hyderabadi subjects on the British side of the frontier, ranging from jail-breakers to petty thieves to dacoits.Footnote ²⁶ Often in such instances Hyderabad was neither grateful for assistance nor prompt in responding. In 1900, the district magistrate of Sholapur offered to extradite Bali wald [son of] Gangu Mahar, for a theft committed in Lohara in Hyderabad's Osmanabad District.Footnote ²⁷ Hyderabad's Judicial Secretary M. Aziz Mirza requested further information, since it appeared to him “very difficult, in the absence of fuller details, to obtain any clue in the case.”Footnote ²⁸ The district magistrate replied the next month to clarify that “some clothes were found which he (the accused) admitted to have obtained by theft at Lakdeshwar Borgaon [in Lohara]. These clothes, he said, belonged to a chati (cloth merchant) of that place.”Footnote ²⁹ The following January, Mirza replied that an investigation had revealed, “no case of theft was committed in Boregaon in Lohara.”Footnote ³⁰ Numerous case files record similar communications from the British, with reminders to Hyderabad of extradition offers and, almost invariably, complaints regarding delays.

Tukaram Jiwaji's 1900 case illustrates coordination problems between colonial and princely officials. Jiwaji, a Kunbi (low-caste Maratha agriculturalist), was arrested at Khandesh (Bombay) for cattle theft in Aurangabad (Hyderabad).Footnote ³¹ Two complainants, Budhan and Gaupat, informed Bombay Police that he had stolen their cattle and fled across the border to sell them. Jiwaji was captured by Bombay officials and held pending transfer to Hyderabad for trial. During the six months before Hyderabad replied, Tukaram Jiwaji managed to escape and fled “to his native place in His Highness' [the Nizam's] territory.”Footnote ³² There, as in other places, irrespective of actual jurisdiction, Bombay did most of the frontier policing. Despite colonial expectations of rapid extradition or prosecution of suspects, cases frequently broke down after being passed to Hyderabad. From Bombay's perspective, the Nizam's claim to legal authority over his subjects and territories was an impediment to the smooth and efficient operation of colonial justice. In Jiwaji's case this caused a delay of several months but in others, such as that of Bali referred to earlier, trials never occurred at all.

The proximity of multiple sovereign territories to one another, and the ease of crossing borders to flee the reach of the law (or to bring rustled cattle to market), created leeway for subjects of either state whose livelihoods involved crime. If Tukaram Jiwaji could cross the border to delay his imprisonment, established figures in the rural scene, such as the cattle-owners Budhan and Gaupat, could direct complaints to multiple police forces and increase chances of regaining property and punishing offenders. Frontier legal pluralism provided structures that enabled some subjects to outwit the law and others to call it into play. Hyderabad-Bombay collaboration was hindered by both the flexibility of the legal situation and impediments such as Hyderabadi delays or refusals to prosecute. This institutional situation enabled a high capacity for lawlessness, which Hyderabad's staunch claims to legal sovereignty exacerbated.

INTERESTS OF JUSTICE VERSUS THE PROTECTION OF SOVEREIGNTY

In May 1869, three Banjara women, all Hyderabad subjects, were taken into custody in British Bombay on the charge of stealing cattle. They were held for eight months and British officials neither brought them to trial nor addressed the Nizam's government, to whose jurisdiction the women belonged.Footnote ³³ When one woman became “very ill and in a dying state” the others managed to get a petition to Hyderabad requesting that action be taken. The incident precipitated a lengthy correspondence between the two governments in which Hyderabad railed against lengthy imprisonments without trial of subjects “arrested at the instances of Authorities in the British Government”Footnote ³⁴: “British Authorities in many instances cause the apprehensions of persons and take no notice of them afterwards for lengthened periods, and the cost of their subsistence falls upon His Highness' Government while these unfortunate wretches after suffering prolonged imprisonment, in some instances die.”Footnote ³⁵ Hyderabad insisted that detaining prisoners on suspicion cease immediately, and that if state subjects were imprisoned, “the requisite evidence of criminality from the British Authorities” be immediately forwarded to the Nizam's minister.Footnote ³⁶ While they objected to state funds being spent on prisoners languishing in British Indian jails, Hyderabad officials underscored colonial mistreatment of the Nizam's subjects as a significant problem. Hyderabad's concern to protect their legal sovereignty provided the context for such exchanges and was decisive in the making of the frontier scene.

In Benton's account, extraterritoriality in Uruguay and elsewhere was seen “as an attack on state sovereignty,” and such jurisdictions were opposed. In Uruguay, “exclusive control of the administration of justice in the country was a condition of sovereignty.” Footnote ³⁷ For the Nizam the stakes were high, and he continually reasserted his legal sovereignty against colonial encroachment. Frontier problems were an empire-wide concern for the British, who dealt with intra-imperial flight from jurisdiction across the Indian Ocean region and beyond. The protection of state sovereignty was a key factor that shaped the legal landscape and, in turn, the social world, on the frontier and across imperial space. The high politics of law in the late British Empire demonstrate the ongoing fragmentation of sovereignty and colonial attempts to address it.

Debates over the applicability of the 1881 Fugitive Offenders Act (FOA) to Princely States simmered well into the twentieth century. They reveal the systemic jurisdictional complexity of Greater British India, from Southeast Asia to East Africa.Footnote ³⁸ The FOA stipulated provisions for the transfer of fugitives between different portions of the Empire “in the interests of justice.”Footnote ³⁹ Consolidating police and judicial institutions across Greater British India was a central imperative of colonial officials throughout the nineteenth century and through to the empire's end, and Hyderabad's frontier policy in particular was a constant concern.

In Benton's formulation, the end of the nineteenth century signaled the victory of state sovereignty in empires (British, French, Ottoman) and fledgling nation-states (Uruguay). The evidence from South Asia suggests, however, that colonial and formally sovereign polities possessed different degrees of influence and autonomy.Footnote ⁴⁰ Subordinated states like Hyderabad, despite British paramountcy, exercised legal authority and discretion. As one exchange over the constitution of the T&DD in Hyderabad State suggested, the Nizam's jurisdiction could be overstepped in certain instances by negotiation: “It may be assumed that the British authorities would apply for extradition [of Hyderabadi dacoits captured in British territory], and the Hyderabad Government, though undoubtedly chary of surrendering Hyderabad subjects, have agreed to surrender them if the interests of justice so require.”Footnote ⁴¹

Notwithstanding colonial expectations, the Nizam retained sovereignty over Hyderabadi subjects, even if colonial persuasion or coercion could occasionally wrest it away. Nonetheless, the power to mete out justice was jealously guarded and remained a primary condition of sovereignty in Hyderabad well into the twentieth century. The complex legal architecture of South Asia during the height of British colonial dominance suggests a more heterogeneous scene than Benton's picture of victorious colonial state sovereignty and legal consolidation.Footnote ⁴² Although imperial hierarchies sought to subjugate alternative law forums, subordinated yet sovereign states fragmented the political terrain of greater British India. Such cases were not merely exceptions but rather served to unsettle the entire imagined edifice of imperial “law and order.” Colonial attempts to force the hand of Princely States and other polities on extradition policy continued into the twentieth century, with only limited success. We cannot take the end of the nineteenth century as the moment when imperial or national entities eclipsed all other legal forms in their ascent to state sovereignty.

C. H. Alexandrowicz's depiction of an earlier period is useful for framing the multifarious character of high colonial sovereignty. In pre-1800 international law, the “Family of Nations” was not the European and Christian configuration it was to become—Ceylon, Burma, Siam, and the Marathas stood “to a considerable extent on a footing of equality” with Portugal, the Netherlands, and England.Footnote ⁴³ Alexandrowicz concluded his study of the foundations of international law with the eighteenth century, since the beginning of the nineteenth brought the contraction of the law of nations: “European egocentricity left the Sovereigns of the East Indies, which had largely contributed to the prosperity of the European economy, outside the confines of ‘civilization’ and international law shrank to regional dimensions though it still carried the label of universality.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Had Alexandrowicz extended his timeframe, he might have noted the continuing tension between recognition of formal princely sovereignty and the fact of brute colonial power.Footnote ⁴⁵ This fragmentary global framework produced frontier zones that allowed people at many levels of society to wield power within, across, and between, and not necessarily contained by, state sovereignties. On frontiers that were never fully consolidated, multiple legalities and temporalities jostled one another. Ensembles of overlapping institutions provided access to state power for those able to navigate complex legal terrain.

YELLAMMA'S FLIGHT: FRONTIER AS FIELD OF POSSIBILITY

If the frontier was a transitional space crosscut by multiple jurisdictions, it was also a destination for flight from patriarchal legal and social structures in Bombay Presidency. This is not to say there were no patriarchal institutions in Hyderabad territory,Footnote ⁴⁶ but rather that the jurisdictional externality and physical distancing achieved by border crossing opened up a field of possibilities.

This was particularly so for women marginalized within the domestic world of the Bombay Deccan. In one 1886 case, which I will consider in detail, colonial authorities demanded the arrest and extradition of a woman accused of kidnapping a child bride in Bombay and absconding with her to Hyderabad territory. Nagapa, a resident of Sholapur, petitioned the Bombay police, demanding action to recover his wife and her possessions and punish her abductor. The district magistrate communicated the situation to the Hyderabad resident: “In about January last a woman named Narsa Saji, who was living near Nagapa's house at Sholapur, enticed away his wife by name of Yelama [Yellamma] about 11 years old out of the keeping of her lawful guardian [Nagapa] and carried her with property consisting of ornaments of the values of Rs 33-8-0 to a village Kongale [Kodangal] in the Gulbarga District in H. H. the Nizam's territory and thereby committed the offences of theft and kidnapping punishable under Sections 379 and 366 of the Indian Penal Code.” Whether her departure was voluntary or not, Yellamma figured into the case as her ornaments did: as property. The district magistrate went on to suggest that they had a sound prima facie case against Narsa Saji, a British subject, and prevailed upon the resident to put the wheels of justice in motion in Hyderabad so that Saji might be apprehended and sent to Sholapur for trial.Footnote ⁴⁷

Throughout the nineteenth century, in colonial and metropolitan locations, the role of the law in enforcing wives' obligations to their husbands was hotly debated. This was particularly controversial in South Asia in the decades leading up to the incident in question. The 1884 Rukhmabai case in Bombay, which reified the role of wives as property of their husbands, would have served as an important legal precedent here.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yellamma's young age would have made the case also relevant to another, contemporaneous controversy in Bombay: the region's conservative Marathi Brahman elites staunchly opposed attempts to raise the marriage age for females in British India, and the related 1891 Age of Consent Act.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Yellamma's case, Bombay officials, under pressure to defend patriarchal prerogatives, acted at the behest of her husband Nagapa to see that she was returned and that Narsa Saji felt the full force of the law.Footnote ⁵⁰ The colonial legal system was stacked against Narsa from the start, but other elements of the case made her position still more difficult.

The abstract of evidence consisted of a number of brief testimonies from various parties, some of whom had significant stakes in the case:

The testimony reveals the social and physical proximity of each of the testifying males—the first four resided in the same locality, including a father (Sayana) and his two sons (Sayana Jr. and Chinaya), and the latter two were brothers of the missing child wife. More striking still is that all of the statements, many of which were identical, referred to Narsa as a “public woman.” This would have been the Victorian English equivalent of “whore” (raṇḍī) or “courtesan” (baījī, tawā'if) in the vernacular depositions (not preserved in the record). While the deposed did not attach a clear stigma to Narsa's profession—indeed, she resided in the house of the first four—clearly all of them thought it highly relevant. I shall consider the potential meanings of Narsa Saji's occupation below.

Raj officials sent a request for cooperation and an abstract of evidence, and six months later Hyderabad replied that arrests had been made. The Nizam's judiciary, however, released the detainees, based on “difficulty in identifying the accused, who, it is said, seems to have no connection with the information furnished by you, and has, therefore, been released on bail.”Footnote ⁵² As in other cases, communication and policing across borders were hindered by delays and requests for additional information from Hyderabad. A subsequent communication by the district magistrate of Sholapur, who had sent a police constable on Narsa's trail, clarified the situation: “Narsa Saji was arrested by the Tahsildar of Kalinjal [Kodangal, Gulbarga District, Hyderabad]; she had with her the wife of the complainant who has been kidnapped; both these persons were identified by the complainant and a Police Constable who has visited the place on purpose. Narsa Saji was then released on bail by the said Tahsildar. It will thus be seen that there is no difficulty in identifying the accused. I therefore request that you will be good enough to issue order for her surrender together with the girl kidnapped and the property stolen.”Footnote ⁵³ Despite being identified in Hyderabad by the husband Nagapa and the British Indian police, Narsa Saji and her “captive” Yellamma remained at large in Hyderabad State, sheltered from the long arm of the Raj's law.

The women remained at large owing in part to the obstinacy of the Hyderabad police and judiciary. Evidently, the word of a Bombay constable was insufficient to convince the Nizam's officials to extradite Narsa Saji and repatriate Yellamma and her property. The case file ends with a note from colonial official M. S. Wadia consisting of a timeline of what he called “a really bad case.” Wadia noted with clear frustration, “More than 14 months delay has therefore taken place in the case which seems very simple and in which only one accused person is concerned.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Records of the case do not reveal if Yellamma was ever returned to her husband, or what became of the kidnapper with whom she shared “great intimacy.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The subjectivity of a figure such as Yellamma, whose voice is absent in these materials, is impossible to definitively reconstruct. She is mentioned only after her passage into Hyderabad occasioned official communication across borders and legal systems. The archive speaks clearly in the voice of the colonial state, certain segments of Sholapur society, and more indirectly the machinery of state in Hyderabad. What this archival fragment does indicate are the alternative social worlds made possible by the proximity of the frontier, which divided the Raj's judicial regime from the externality of Hyderabad. The intervening space of the frontier zone presented a field of possibility for Narsa Saji and Yellamma, and the remainder of this section will elaborate on what this may have meant.

Sholapur Maratha and British colonial moral and legal codes defined Yellamma's liberation as state-initiated return (as property) to her socially mandated position as child bride of Nagapa. There are other discourses of liberation that Yellamma's flight, and possible initiation as sex worker under the tutelage of Narsa Saji, could be seen to enact. What it meant to be a “public woman” in South Asia changed considerably during the colonial period. The erudite social value ascribed to the tawā'if (courtesan) in South Asian Islamicate culture was at loggerheads with the view implied by paradigms of regulation and prohibition of “immoral activity.”Footnote ⁵⁶ There was no evident initiative by Hyderabad officials to safeguard the livelihoods of prostitutes, but the productivity of the frontier zone provided conditions for Narsa Saji's successful “abduction” of Yellamma. If one of Yellamma's possible social worlds was as a child bride, beholden to her husband and invested in the patriarchal social expectations that characterized much of South Asia, another would have been the life of a “public woman.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Veena Talwar Oldenburg has argued that, for many women, taking up the occupation of a tawā'if was a path to liberation from oppressive social structures: “It would be no exaggeration to say that their ‘life-style’ is resistance to rather than a perpetuation of patriarchal values.”Footnote ⁵⁸ She further claimed that stories about women entering the profession via abduction were largely fabrications traceable to the stigmatization of prostitution in British Indian and Urdu literature, discourse, and social practice. Oldenburg contends that sex work in South Asia signified a novel form of womanhood offering liberation from the oppressions of community, gender roles, and class.

Other factors suggest that the specter of sex work in the depositions masked what may have seemed an even greater threat to Bombay Deccan patriarchal structures: Narsa Saji and Yellamma's possible status as devadāsīs. Referred to in colonial sources as “dancing girls” or temple prostitutes, devadāsīs are females dedicated to a temple and its deity, who forsake human marriage. The devadāsī status of the characters in this case is implied by the name of the abducted child wife, since Yellamma is the name of the patron deity at whose temple devadāsīs are dedicated and also a common name for initiates.Footnote ⁵⁹

Distinctive features of the institution made devadāsīs a prime target of colonial and Brahminical reform movements.Footnote ⁶⁰ Legislation placed increasing pressure on the institution in British India, starting with the 1860 de-recognition of devadāsī social institutions and continuing with the criminalization of the community from 1880 onward.Footnote ⁶¹ According to the British Indian courts' codified version of Hindu Law, devadāsīs, unlike most women in patriarchal caste Hindu society, had the right to adopt children, own property, and inherit matrilineally.Footnote ⁶² The common mode of initiation—adoption of girls—provided continuity to women without female offspring, but also made devadāsīs particularly susceptible to colonial legislation. A clause in the 1861 Indian Penal Code banning “procurement” of minors for prostitution was frequently used to prosecute devadāsīs who adopted females.Footnote ⁶³ In applying this law, officials invoked the rhetoric of “enticement into prostitution” to describe devadāsī adoptions, and this appears in testimonies about Narsa Saji and Yellamma.Footnote ⁶⁴ The language of the 1861 law allowed judges to apply criminal penalties in ambiguous situations, and strengthened the tools patriarchal society and the state used against devadāsīs.Footnote ⁶⁵

The legal and social offensive in British India against devadāsīs put women who sought to maintain control of property and adopt female heirs in a difficult situation. To carry out adoptions, they often crossed borders beyond Raj jurisdiction into Princely States and other non-British territories such as French Pondicherry.Footnote ⁶⁶ This, along with the fact that the anti-devadāsī movement in Hyderabad remained relatively weak into the twentieth century, suggests that flight to the Nizam's territory would have provided refuge to Narsa Saji and her young protégé if they chose to live as devadāsīs.Footnote ⁶⁷

As scholars of colonialism and nationalism have pointed out, South Asian women tended to be cast as instrumental objects rather than active subjects of liberation and improvement.Footnote ⁶⁸ The history of devadāsī legislation proves no exception: a confluence of interests between colonial officials and upper-caste patriarchies, and a tendency to value textual precept over practice, helped normalize regimes of sexuality and marriage, patrilineal inheritance, and male property ownership.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the process, devadāsīs were stripped of property rights and “reduced to the status of proletarianised sex workers.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In a process spanning much of the nineteenth century, devadāsīs were disempowered and pushed to the margins of British Indian society, the latter quite literally since they fled to frontier zones and utilized them as resources to continue their livelihoods.

Available sources provide little sense of the perspectives of either longtime devadāsīs or recent inductees. In British India, “there was no instance of a court examining whether a minor had acted as a ‘free agent’ in consenting to dedication as a temple dancing girl.”Footnote ⁷¹ The case at hand bears out this point; both the depositions and the initial case description by the district magistrate, quoted above, describe Narsa's “enticement” of her intimate friend Yellamma rather than specifying coercion. The word choice would have been deliberate, and the depositions were likely pruned in the process of translation and compilation to assure an effective prosecution.

While scholarship on devadāsīs and courtesans suggest that these practices could provide women relief from patriarchal structures in British India, I do not mean to imply that Yellamma's departure to Gulbarga with Narsa necessarily represented freedom from the bondage of domesticity. We have no clear evidence detailing their experiences after crossing the frontier. Patriarchal colonial and upper-caste Hindu discourses constructed Yellamma's necessary return to her husband as liberation. Her potential participation in sex work or devadāsī initiation could just as well be cast as liberation from other, perhaps more profound forms of oppression.Footnote ⁷² Throughout all of this, young Yellamma—whether figured as bride-property, prostitute-criminal, or devadāsī-victim—is rendered instrumental by colonial officials seeking to uphold justice, her kinfolk attempting to recover her, and perhaps by Narsa Saji seeking to induct her into a different livelihood.

The case does, however, bring into view the field of possibilities that the proximity of colonial and princely territory offered British subjects such as Narsa and Yellamma. The nascent state system Raj officials sought to consolidate ordered social worlds just as it produced pressures for flight and geographies of alterity. In the frontier zone, the reach and applicability of various canons of law and modes of social practice were indeterminate. This flexibility was a potential resource for those who could cross the frontier, perhaps to participate in alternative regimes of labor and sexuality.Footnote ⁷³ If legal ambivalence allowed some, like Yellamma and Narsa, to avoid colonial law, the proximity of jurisdictions also provided opportunities for rural people to invoke state power for their own purposes.

BEYOND STATE SOVEREIGNTY: INFORMERS AND THIEVES IN RURAL SOCIETY

The year 1888 saw a proliferation of requests for remission of sentence from Hyderabad subjects imprisoned for dacoity in the notorious British Indian prison of Yerawada in Pune, nearly a hundred miles from the Hyderabad frontier. These materials—English translations of vernacular letters addressed to Bombay officials—reveal extensive extraterritorial T&DD activity in late-nineteenth-century Hyderabad. Colonial policing was based on a treaty that required the Nizam to surrender suspects in “the interests of justice.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The petitions document contestations within marginal Hyderabadi social groups, and state tactics that employed denizens of the frontier zone.

The 1887 remission request of Bhika Jamal and Sultan Dewa illuminates the workings of the Hyderabad T&DD. The petitioners claim can be summarized as follows: The actions of the resident were unjust. They were innocent of the charges. Two gurundas (“approvers,” or informants), Rupchand and Balram, fabricated evidence. The gurundas were members of the same [Multani] caste as the petitioners, and themselves convicted of dacoity and sentenced to transportation for life and/or imprisonment. In exchange for their freedom, the gurundas turned witness for the T&DD, and caused the wrongful conviction of their fellow community members.Footnote ⁷⁵ Jamal and Dewa concluded their indictment of the corrupt system with what was an important structural element in remission requests: appeal to superior British justice: “Our belief is that no oppression is exercised under British rule in connection with the administration of justice. We do not know, however, whether any special laws besides those in force in British India are made for the use of the Hyderabad Residency. We pray that your Excellency-in-Council will be pleased to call for all the papers in our case, to ascertain whether there was any other evidence against us besides the statement of the Gurundas and whether any stolen property was found with us, and to remit the sentence which we, innocent persons, have been unjustly undergoing.” These petitioners overestimated Bombay's willingness to regulate extraterritorial Raj jurisdiction in Hyderabad, and officials declined to intervene in their case, but the source nonetheless documents savvy frontier-dwellers navigating a plural legal terrain.Footnote ⁷⁶

Another petition from the same era provides further detail on the social conditions marginal people negotiated. In April 1888, three Hyderabadis in Yerawada Central Jail (Sekh Gutki, Sekh Lal, and Sekh Chand) requested remission of sentence. The petitioners implied corruption on the part of the Residency and the approvers who had offered evidence, caustically inquiring as to whether the colonial government had ordered the Thagi Department at Hyderabad “to act independently of the law and purely on the statements of Gurundas irrespective of any other evidence.” They described their circumstances: “We are Multanis by caste. We used to support ourselves by traveling from place to place and dealing in wood. Rupchand and Balram [the same informants named in Jamal and Dewa's petition], two men belonging to our caste had been convicted and sentenced for some offence committed by them. To benefit themselves they accepted places of Gurundas. They falsely mention the names of poor people in connection with any dacoities that may have been committed, admitting at the same time that they were their own accomplices in those dacoities.”Footnote ⁷⁷

These gurundas, the same pair involved in the previous case, were apparently quite busy incriminating members of their caste. As itinerants, Multanis fit neatly colonial sociology's profile of dacoits by dint of their mobility and lack of integration into the settled agrarian economy.Footnote ⁷⁸ The machineries of colonial justice criminalized these marginal populations, and the imprisonment of members of any given community tended, through the institution of the gurunda, to produce cycles of incrimination.Footnote ⁷⁹

The T&DD penetrated deep into Hyderabad rural society and its victims employed a variety of tactics to gain the upper hand.Footnote ⁸⁰ Another 1888 petition, from Kamiya Valad Tuliya, says that he served the Nizam's government as a watchman, and was convicted based on gurunda testimony despite the intervention of the village kulkarnī (rural accounting officer).Footnote ⁸¹ Even low-level state employees were not exempted from dacoity persecution. Kamiya claimed he did not know his accuser, but other dacoity cases reveal gurundas taking revenge on rivals. Ravya valad Balya Mang claimed he was imprisoned in Nanded District with his fellow villagers Chinya, Pochu, and Garibya (all Kaikadis), and subsequently: “A quarrel took place between these persons and myself in connection with our work, and they bore a grudge against me for this. On [Pochu's] going to Hyderabad he became gurunda (approver) and at a time when there were only ten months wanting to complete the period of my sentence, he to take revenge upon me came to the jail and on the expiry of the period of my sentence arrested me and took me to Hyderabad.”Footnote ⁸²

The position of gurunda was an important resource for criminalized members of frontier society. Not only could they exchange information for commutation of sentences, but they could also settle grudges with fellow villagers by initiating dacoity persecutions. Ravya, a Mang, and Pochu, a Kaikadi, were members of castes on the margins of Hyderabadi rural society.Footnote ⁸³ It was Ravya's misfortune that his offer “to produce [criminal] evidence of my fellow villagers” came only after Pochu had fingered him as a dacoit.Footnote ⁸⁴

Like Rupchand and Balram Multani, Pochu Kaikadi was prolific in his informant work. According to another petition, Chandu valad Arjuna Kaikadi was arrested by Pochu, tried over the course of a year, found innocent, and released. Some time later he was arrested again by Pochu for the same crime, found guilty after a two-year-long trial and sentenced to ten years rigorous imprisonment at Yerawada.Footnote ⁸⁵ Chandu questioned the veracity of the gurunda's testimony and the legality of trying him for the same case twice, since double jeopardy was illegal in British Indian law. Operating as a parallel legal order, T&DD in Hyderabad functioned by providing institutional shelter for state illegality. This means of splintering colonial sovereignty subjected marginal frontier figures to arbitrary and corrupt colonial judicial practices. But it also allowed members of rural society, as gurundas, to enact the colonial state's extraterritorial sovereignty. They did so by manipulating the very instruments of governmentality that criminalized them in the first place: social identification of depressed or mobile castes and tribes.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, the power that approvers had to carry out vendettas by informing on their enemies was not without its costs.

Frontier society in Hyderabad responded to gurunda activity by drawing lines between good and bad neighbors. Pilu valad Raghu Mahar described his case in a petition:

If turning gurunda allowed the accused to empower themselves using the frontier's political resources, this act came at a certain social price: as Sidu Dhangar found, his status as a colonial informer rendered him unwelcome in Hyderabadi rural society. It is unclear from the record whether his banishment from the village and access to its liquor ceased after he incriminated Pilu, but it is likely that the gurunda stigma remained.

As the above examples demonstrate, gurundas used their powers to imprison marginal rural people (often of their own castes), agriculturalists, and even state employees.Footnote ⁸⁸ Those who became representatives of extraterritorial colonial sovereignty were in response ostracized in the rural social world of Hyderabad. For all parties—from petitioners in Yerawada who cast aspersions on informers and the T&DD to gurundas themselves—and for frontier society at large, the legal pluralism of the borderlands was a vital resource for negotiating the circumstances in which they found themselves.

BANDITRY, SOCIETY, AND STATECRAFT

The Hyderabad-Bombay frontier's jurisdictional complexity reveals the lasting incompleteness of colonial attempts to consolidate legal sovereignty. Frontier developments elaborate the productive relationship between political authority and crime and lawlessness in modern South Asia. Following Eric Hobsbawm's work on “social banditry,” historians have attempted to understand how putative criminals fit into rural societies. Hobsbawm's argument ran as follows:

He further specified that these brigands and the visions of liberation they gave to peasants embodied the last gasp of a precapitalist agrarian world in which extant modes of social ordering (kinship, tribal loyalties) were rapidly disintegrating. Social bandits—or “primitive rebels” as he called them elsewhere—belonged to the realm of the pre-political and were nostalgic figures upon whom peasants projected political desires.Footnote ⁹⁰

In contesting the teleological language that framed Hobsbawm's presentation, critics have questioned the liberatory implications he ascribed to social banditry. Anton Blok argued that brigandage in peasant societies advanced agendas of nobles and officials by keeping peasants docile.Footnote ⁹¹ Assessing banditry in nineteenth-century Egypt, Nathan Brown argued, “The idea of a crisis of banditry was a powerful tool, though not one that peasants could use.” Rather, “Banditry as a national problem was invented as a political weapon by Egypt's rulers as a part of the process of creating a stronger, centralized state apparatus and as an effort to keep that apparatus out of British hands.”Footnote ⁹² Contrary to the Egyptian state's intentions in making banditry policing an autonomous institutional domain outside the purview of the encroaching British, the perceived epidemic of brigandage precipitated colonial conquest. For Brown, banditry in this context was not a practice supported by the rural masses, but rather part of the tripartite plague visited upon the Egyptian peasantry of “bandits, rulers, and occupiers.”Footnote ⁹³

All of these accounts share the presumption that banditry, or criminality in general, was a domain related to, but analytically distinct from, stable categories of peasantry, nobility, and state. Hobsbawm, Blok, and Brown strove to clarify the relationship between the idea and practice of lawlessness and other discrete domains.Footnote ⁹⁴ Evidence from the Hyderabad-Bombay frontier suggests, however, that criminality—whether figured as dacoity, simple theft, kidnapping, or otherwise—was deeply intertwined with frontier peasant society. Rather than categorically distinguishing bandits from peasants, evidence here suggests that lawlessness was a constituent feature of rural society. What the Raj treated as criminality was in fact coterminous with the everyday life and livelihoods of many marginal people in the frontier zone.

Lawlessness was not only an integral aspect of peasant society, but also bore a close relationship with political sovereignty. The connection between, first, raiding, crime, and what appeared as anti-state insurgency, and second, the process of state building, has been elaborated in scholarship on politics in early modern South Asia. Stewart Gordon's work on eighteenth-century central Malwa argued that the raiding which later colonial commentators criminalized as “thugee” was an effective strategy to mobilize the popular support and resources necessary to establishing political authority. In his estimation, banditry and state-formation occupied the same continuum.Footnote ⁹⁵

If raiding was a path to political authority in South Asia, particularly in the Deccan and central India, just before the rise of the Raj, then an imperative of the expansive colonial state was to shut down these avenues to power. This was an essential stage in the British move to liquidate competition and seize political authority. The early stages of the campaign against Thagi and Dakaiti during the first half of the nineteenth century can be seen in this light.Footnote ⁹⁶ In the century's second half, the Raj began to represent their consolidation of authority by framing British paramountcy within a doctrine of suzerainty, an integrative political language that carved out domains of power for Princely States within a hierarchy of sovereign polities. This image both masked and fed jurisdictional tensions. Colonial state sovereignty was consistently undercut by alternative legalities of Princely States such as Hyderabad, amidst territories that comprised British India. Lauren Benton's argument suggests an untrammeled rise of unitary state sovereignty through the global consolidation of legal regimes by the end of the nineteenth century. In South Asia, however, contradictions posed by the Princely States and other sovereign polities, or anomalous zones, reveal a contingent trajectory in which flexible and multifarious legal arrangements were incorporated into high-colonial political geography.

FRAGMENTED SOVEREIGNTIES, UNRULY STATES

C. H. Alexandrowicz and Lauren Benton both detailed legal arrangements prior to the nineteenth century where legal authority was not yet concentrated in European hands. Benton describes the simultaneous presence of multiple legalities in any given place, before the rise of state sovereignties linked to clearly demarcated territories by 1900.Footnote ⁹⁷ Alexandrowicz's complementary argument emphasizes the multifarious character of political sovereignty before the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁸ Both histories end with the consolidation of European colonialism and the consequent end of legal and political sovereignty for non-European states and subjects. The scenario I have described here is difficult to fit into such a teleology.

In a world of splintered and often functionally overlapping sovereignties such as that of South Asia in the colonial period (and much of the world circa 1900), the putatively early modern global legal order, with all of the resources it offered to subjects, was never completely liquidated. Bombay territory may have been under a cohesive colonial legal regime, while the Raj penetrated Hyderabad through extraterritorial illegalities. But the frontier provided access to jurisdictional difference and spatial distance from the colonial state's disciplinary apparatuses. As Yellamma's alternative roles as child bride, sex worker, or devadāsī suggest, these political and social resources were not necessarily liberating. Nevertheless, the frontier zone was productive of possibilities, different in degree if not in kind from those available in spaces firmly within British Indian terrain.Footnote ⁹⁹

The legal environment of the Hyderabad-Bombay frontier was distinct from the early modern scenario in two decisive ways. First, early modern legal pluralism often occurred in the same places at the same time. In the modern context, multiple legal orders were in close proximity with some overlap, but jurisdictional maps theoretically corresponded to clear territorial demarcations. Second, the modern period witnessed increasingly systemic attempts by dominant states, such as the Raj, to regulate social worlds by means of disciplinary apparatuses such as policing and surveillance. This point is borne out by colonial forays into Hyderabad—a foreign territory—in the form of cross-border policing, often relying on local informers, and extraterritorial jurisdictional arrangements such as the T&DD. Even as the Raj refined its techniques for transgressing frontiers, subjects practiced creative and effective tactics to manipulate the contradictions of colonial sovereignty and stay one step ahead of the law.

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This essay began with the late-1880s confrontation between Daji the notorious Bhil and the Bombay frontier police official R. H. Vincent. It is to Daji that I now return by way of conclusion. In a letter of April 1887, Vincent summarized Daji's history, starting with his rise to notoriety in 1883 and continuing with his flight across the border into Bombay, and his apprehension the next year by colonial police in Ahmednagar (Bombay). Daji escaped, but was caught by a joint Raj-Nizam task force in Gangapur (Aurangabad District, Hyderabad). However, “He again escaped from custody some months afterwards and … several [Bombay] Detectives were deputed to search for him and one of them found him, dressed in the uniform of the Nizam's Police, near the village of Holkar [Rahuri Taluka, Ahmednagar District, Bombay Presidency]. The detective was unarmed and Daji Bhil perceiving this agreed to quietly accompany the Police officer but suddenly drew a sword, which he had hidden behind him, rushed at the Head Constable and made good his escape.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In addition to border-hopping, then, Daji masqueraded as a member of the Nizam's Police to outwit the joint task force. This tactic not only endowed him with the cloak of officialdom but also provided him a ready excuse for carrying a weapon.

After making good his escape, Daji went on the commit more crimes in Ahmednagar, and was once more captured by British Indian police who intended to pass him to the Nizam's authorities for trial. While still in Vincent's custody, he agreed to give evidence on previous crimes, and implied a familiarity and allegiance with a Bombay police Patil. Evidence of this was never provided, however, since without a guarantee of pardon Daji “would never come to the point.” Lacking a sound case to pass over to Hyderabad police, a regretful Vincent was compelled to set Daji free. In classic outlaw fashion, the notorious Bhil assured the police officer that he would “soon hear from him again.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Bombay returned to Daji Malhari's case in 1889, and officials criticized Hyderabad for the “inadequacy of [his] punishment.”Footnote ¹⁰² Apparently, after all of Bombay's efforts in apprehending Daji and the many crimes he allegedly committed, the Hyderabad judiciary sentenced him to a mere three-months imprisonment.Footnote ¹⁰³ According to the police docket on the matter, the only possible solution was to press Hyderabad officials to mete out stricter punishment.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The docket also diagnosed the root problem: “The position is quite clear! The Bhil is in league with the officials. He gets caught when a large reward is offered and he gets off to recommence his tricks.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Jurisdiction over such figures—“now on this, now on that side of the frontier”—lay with the state of whom they were subjects; in Daji's case, Hyderabad.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ And if Daji and his ilk could continue their activities and avoid significant legal consequences, this was in part a result of their ability to forge allegiances with police officials in Bombay, and no doubt some in Hyderabad. This was not a simple matter of corruption—the multiple sovereignties clustered around the frontier splintered the reach and availability of state power.

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As I have suggested, it was the proximity of multiple legal regimes that made possible the putatively illegal livelihoods of the “notorious Bhil” Daji Malhari, the “public woman” and kidnapper Narsa Saji, the cattle rustler Tukaram Jiwaji, various gurundas, and countless others. Near the frontier, Raj officials (Bombay, Central Provinces, T&DD), the Nizam's Police, and internal Hyderabadi authorities all exercised jurisdictions over different subjects in different places. Cross-border policing and judicial collaboration functioned to a degree, but were severely circumscribed by logistical matters. Moreover, the Nizam's claim to sovereignty over his own subjects made collaborations uneasy. All of these factors undermined the efficiency of colonial attempts to pacify the Hyderabad border.

In varied historical settings in South Asia and elsewhere, subjects manipulated the powerfully substantiated authority of colonial courts. In colonial Sri Lanka, as John Rogers has shown, British courts never functioned according to design, and through them subjects were able to summon state power to serve their needs. Indigenous legal cultures wherein subjects made instrumental use of colonial institutions underscored courts' lack of popular moral authority.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ On the Hyderabad-Bombay frontier, as in much of Greater British India, instrumental use of courts was supplemented by the resource of judicial difference across space. Both provided avenues for subjects within the enormous penumbra of empire to carry out livelihoods inimical to colonial visions. Hyderabad, and state officials such as Kotwāl Nawab Akbar Jang Bahādur, clearly did not condone such livelihoods. Indeed, the Nizam's statist imperatives, together with colonial expectations, impelled Hyderabad to affect the appearance of emulating the British in identifying and stamping out “crime.” However, persistent institutional underdevelopment in the frontier zone enabled the ways of life of Daji and others. Although conditions of lawlessness and sheltering of fugitives there were not a product of state design, Hyderabad's attempts to retain judicial and police sovereignty over subjects produced friction and played a major role in maintaining the situation. It is impossible to say with certainty how Daji the notorious Bhil obtained the Nizam's Police uniform he wore on the day colonial officials tried to arrest him, but it is not inappropriate that he clad himself in a symbol of Hyderabadi sovereignty.