Introduction
If it is difficult to imagine everyday communication in our world today without couriers, in eighteenth-century India and the Middle East, it was inconceivable.Footnote 1 Delivering letters to far-off places before the arrival of the steam engine and the electrical telegraph has never been an easy task, even at the best of times. But according to the current prevailing wisdom, travelling long distances in India and the Middle East in the eighteenth century was especially arduous for couriers. The root cause for the additional barriers was insecurity. Much of this region was buffeted in the course of the century by a series of military conflicts and political upheavals. These were closely tied to ongoing social and economic changes that redirected power and wealth to the provinces and frontier areas to the detriment of the old imperial heartlands. The conspicuous outcome of these developments was fragmentation and reconfiguration as the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires were hollowed out or replaced by a host of successor regimes.Footnote 2
Yet, despite the purported scope and intensity of these structural changes, residents continued to correspond regularly, merchants and pilgrims still embarked on journeys lasting a year or more, and regional trade in luxury and bulk goods remained a crucial part of quotidian economic life. These facts gesture towards the existence of a robust and efficient system of communication and transport. Unfortunately, however, our evidence for this is patchy. With the notable exception of sectors in which the central government or Europeans had a stake, the historical literature does not shed much light on the region's premodern informational fabric. What we have at present are isolated clusters of studies of varying quality and detail that explore select portions of this fabric. For the case of India, there are several, rather idealised, accounts of state-sponsored postal systems in mediaeval and early modern times;Footnote 3 some innovative recent work that examines the juncture between sovereign control, vernacular knowledge and social communication in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;Footnote 4 and a few good papers on the akhbārnavīs and munshī, institutions that played a major role in gathering and communicating intelligence.Footnote 5 There is little published literature on comparable topics for early modern Iran, Iraq and Arabia. Though the situation is somewhat better for the Arab and Ottoman territories of the Mediterranean world.Footnote 6 These studies are complemented by a sizeable corpus of work on the physical infrastructure that undergirded long-distance communication in pre-modern times.Footnote 7
In view of the state of the literature, the present paper aims to strengthen both our conceptual and empirical grasp on this critical facet of daily life in early modern India and the Middle East. It delineates the social and material basis of private communication in the eighteenth century, stressing particularly the role of intermediaries and couriers.Footnote 8 At its core lies a detailed case-study of the Aiyangar pattamars, a group of specialist couriers who lived and worked in southern India, through which we gain penetrating insights into one of the two principal modes of private conveyance in the region. These insights not only enhance our knowledge of Asia's past, they also have a manifest bearing on the perennial debates concerning the relationship between state and society in eighteenth-century India and the Middle East, and the role of indigenous groups in an era of remarkable European expansion.
Success in achieving these goals depends very much on the accessibility and nature of the extant sources. While these are highly uneven in their coverage, efforts have been made to ensure the sources tapped in this paper are diverse in terms of genre, language, authorship and physical provenance.Footnote 9 Collectively, they detail the activities of merchants, bankers, clerks and agents drawn from a broad range of communities—Gujarati Shiites, Armenians from Iraq, Luso-Indians, Hindu and Jain banias, Malabari Jews and Brahmins, European private traders and the merchant-officials of the East India Companies. These individuals were all involved in making possible the circulation of men, ideas, objects and knowledge within the region in the early modern period. Though the historical record is far more forthcoming about their activities as intermediaries than as couriers, we do have a few sources that tell us a great deal about the latter in specific contexts.Footnote 10 The extended case-study in this paper is based on one such source. This is a small collection of correspondence exchanged in the 1760s and 1770s between the headmen of the Aiyangar pattamars of southern India and their French employers and clients in Mahe and Pondicherry.Footnote 11 What makes this collection of particular note is that the letters were written by the headmen themselves. Thus, they document in their own words their thoughts and feelings in the context of their everyday working lives. It is rare to be privy to information of such intimacy for any group from the region before the nineteenth century.
The paper opens with a stylised account of the logistics of dispatching, transporting and delivering packages of low weight and high value in early modern India and the Middle East. There follows an analysis of the terms that were used to refer to couriers by local residents at the time. This philological interlude gives us a general sense of contemporary views on the arena of activities of which couriers were a part. Many of the points raised in the preceding two sections come into play once again in the third which examines the structure and activities of a group of Aiyangar pattamars in eighteenth-century southern India. The conclusion discusses the findings of this paper in the broad context of communication in early modern Asia, before linking them up to the ongoing debates on the relationship of the region's indigenous scribal and mercantile groups to the state and to the signal political developments of the era.
I
The system for delivering packages over long distances in early modern India and the Middle East depended on individuals who performed two distinct roles: couriers, responsible for manually transporting the packages entrusted to them; and intermediaries, who generally resided at settlements of spiritual, commercial or political significance that lay at the juncture of several land- and sea-routes. Unlike couriers, intermediaries were usually associated with an array of functions. The most important, for the purposes of postal communication, was to monitor the progress of the courier and his charge. Beyond this, the intermediary bore the main responsibility for redirecting the package on to the next stage of its journey, perhaps with another courier, or for keeping it in his possession while awaiting further instructions.
Within the sphere of communication, intermediaries and couriers may be differentiated in terms of their relationship to the sender of the package.Footnote 12 On this basis, there were two classes of intermediaries. On the one hand, there were those for whom there was no barrier in principle to achieving social or economic parity with the sender. In this case, both intermediary and sender occupied transient positions on a spectrum, enabling them to act as intermediaries for each other without any fear of compromising their social standing. On the other hand, there were permanent employees and agents whose relationship with the sender was marked by an insurmountable asymmetry in terms of authority and rank. Equitable reciprocity was not possible in this situation. Similarly, among couriers were those who could aspire to the same status as the sender, and those who were separated by an unbridgeable gap. There was, in addition, a third class of courier with no counterpart among intermediaries. These were commissionaires engaged to deliver packages in return for a payment that covered their fees and expenses. The distinctive feature of this third class was that the sender and courier were normally strangers in a non-hierarchical association, grounded in convenience, the expectation of monetary gain, and the prospect of ongoing collaboration.Footnote 13
It was not easy for a would-be courier acting on his own to gain a foothold in this occupation. Senders and forwarding intermediaries generally had established couriers that served them perfectly well. And in situations where a need did arise for a courier, the choice was largely determined by prior attitudes towards risk and the degree of familiarity with the service on offer. This conservatism heavily favoured incumbents. Despite this, there were entrepreneurial individuals, mostly foreigners, who persisted in trying to capture some of this business. At a time when advertising in public fora was uncommon, such entrepreneurs made themselves known to potential clients through conversations, referrals and personal letters.Footnote 14 In return for delivering the package to a destination on their proposed itinerary, they were paid a fee, which was a welcome, though relatively minor, addition to their overall income. Departing friends, family members or associates also undertook to deliver such packages.Footnote 15 As this was usually deemed a personal favour, they expected no more than the extra costs that it might entail.
Once the mode of transport had been selected, the package was handed over to the courier with any special instructions to aid its delivery. If there were instructions for the intermediary, these might be given orally to the courier to be passed on to him or put down on paper and delivered to him together with the package.Footnote 16 Muḥammad Adīb, for example, stranded in Cochin in 1748, opted to send written instructions. These were to help his correspondents in Hugli ensure that his colleague's letter—enclosed with his own—got to its intended recipient. ‘By all means [at your disposal]’, he wrote, ‘deliver the letter of the kirānī Sayyid Thanā˓ Allāh to his home (khānah). Either hand it to Shaykh Bāb Allāh or give [it] to Shaykh Dīn Muḥammad Jīyu. By all means delivery [it]. His [Sayyid Thanā˒ Allāh's] son's name is Sayyid Gharīb Allāh. [The name of the] place [where he lives] is Gharībah, next to the house (havīlī) of Ḥājī Hidāyat Allāh.’Footnote 17
Information on postage costs in eighteenth-century India and the Middle East is not easy to find.Footnote 18 Nevertheless, records show that, if their contents merited it, residents were quite willing to spend large sums on sending letters. Manakji Limji and Ramseth Ganbaseth, Gujarati merchants who freighted a ship in 1766 on a venture from Bengal to Jidda, impressed upon their supercargoes the importance of sending them as soon as possible the current local market prices for Bengal and Surat goods. Such was their need for this ‘intelligence’, they were prepared to spend anything up to Rs. 100.Footnote 19 Though Manakji and Ramseth gave their supercargoes the freedom to choose whatever route and method they considered best, their preference was for the letter to be carried by express courier to their broker Narotum in Masqat.Footnote 20 In anticipation of this, they gave Narotum warning of the package's impending arrival, directing him ‘to forward it safely to us [in Bengal] with all possible speed’, by way of Sind and northern India. The supercargoes were not to worry if the expense on this latter stretch of the journey amounted to ‘twenty or thirty rupees’.Footnote 21
This example allows us to place upper limits on what merchants were willing to pay for dispatching an important letter from Jidda to Bengal. In particular, it seems that the cost of shipping a letter across the Arabian Sea between southern Arabia and the western coast of India in the 1760s was a significant fraction of Rs. 20. It is possible that this was the case for much of this century. In 1777, for example, a pair of Gujarati merchant-brokers in Mocha, Yemen's chief port, advocated paying a similar amount. Wanting their French principal in western India to send them his recent news by the quickest means, they suggested that, if a French vessel was not available, he use instead one of the Malabari ships that sailed regularly between Mocha and India's west coast, even at the cost of ‘5 or 6 rupees’.Footnote 22
These accounts suggest that, when packages were conveyed on a commission basis, the sender or intermediary who employed the courier had the main responsibility for paying him.Footnote 23 In situations where the recipient shouldered part of this cost, the usual arrangement was for the courier to be given some of his fees by the sender, the remainder supplied by the recipient once the package was safely in his hands.Footnote 24 For specialist couriers and for intermediaries in permanent employment, payment usually took the form of a wage. This was on top of any expenses incurred in making the delivery. Agents, for whom dealing with their principal's correspondence was merely one of their several duties, could also be paid wages and expenses. Alternatively, the sums due to them would be noted in their principal's current account and settled at the end of the financial cycle. As already mentioned, couriers who were close associates, personal friends or kinsmen seldom received direct payments, save perhaps expenses. The unstated rationale for this was the expectation of future reciprocity.
A courier setting off on his journey, say, from Basra to Aleppo had available to him two kinds of travel options. General modes of conveyance, commonly merchant ships and caravans, carried a wide variety of items between many different places for any client who could afford the charges. Specialised modes of conveyance, in contrast, were confined to the transport of correspondence, gems, bullion and other high-value items of low weight, normally within a specified ‘cultural domain’.Footnote 25 These latter were patronised by a select clientele, who usually took care of their upkeep and costs. Until the turn of the nineteenth century and the arrival of scheduled mail services, specialised modes of conveyance did not extend across large bodies of water or continents; their scope tended to be provincial or local. Furthermore, neither of the two modes operated according to a fixed timetable with predetermined prices. As a result, the terms of most deliveries were negotiated individually.
From the technological standpoint, general modes were able to use a greater number and range of routes—the types of ship and caravan they had in service were larger and more robust and offered more security.Footnote 26 When economic factors are taken into account, however, specialised modes enjoyed more flexibility in their choice of routes, albeit over shorter distances. By their very nature, general modes were constrained by the need to maintain positive cash flow and avoid a financial loss. Thus, as a route's turnover and profitability were the prime considerations, they were effectively confined to popular routes already well-established due to trade or pilgrimage. Specialised modes, which operated on more modest scales, were limited to routes on land and along the coast. The conveyances available to them were of the humbler sort: travelling alone on foot, in small convoys or on small vessels (known as ‘dhoneys’ off the coast of southern India).Footnote 27 But as cost was frequently of lower priority than security and speed, specialised modes had, in practice, more latitude in selecting the route to follow. At the same time, the differences between these two modes should not be exaggerated. In both cases, the choice of the type of courier, the physical conveyance and the route was ultimately a function of the same basic factors: the mode's availability, cost and the (potential) gains from increasing returns to scale, together with the minimum levels of secrecy, reliability and speed required by the sender and recipient.
II
Whatever their mode of conveyance, there were a number of terms used to refer to couriers in the principal languages of early modern India and the Middle East. The most common appear to have been qāṣid, sā˓in, harkārah, payk and pattamar (and their cognates). These terms are rooted in one or more of the region's principal languages and, though all were in widespread use, some had greater currency in certain linguistic arenas than in others.Footnote 28 Where the sources are wanting, an analysis of the vernacular repertoire tapped by those familiar with couriers can be invaluable. In particular, we stand to gain insights (that would otherwise not be possible) into general attitudes regarding couriers and their role in everyday communication.Footnote 29
The term with the most expansive reach linguistically—and, thus, physically—was qāṣid. Arabic in origin,Footnote 30 it formed part of the early modern Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Persian and Hindi lexicon.Footnote 31 In all four languages, it meant ‘(foot-) messenger, courier, express, postman, letter-carrier’.Footnote 32 But in Arabic and Persian specifically, qāṣid had the additional meanings of ‘ambassador’, ‘delegate’ or, more broadly, ‘traveller’.Footnote 33 Alongside qāṣid, Arabic had a second common term in sā˓in.Footnote 34 This referred to a ‘messenger, courier, postman, runner’.Footnote 35 Though similar in meaning to qāṣid, its use was more circumscribed, restricted largely to Arabic speakers.
In areas influenced by Indo-Persian culture, especially Iran and northern and central India, the term harkārah was commonplace. A compound term made up of two Persian words meaning ‘each, every’ (har) and ‘work, affair’ (kār), it was found in both early modern Persian and Hindi and was invoked in several different contexts.Footnote 36 At its most general, it referred to a factotum, or servant, employed to carry out errands outside the home or office for his master. Particularly in India, harkārah could also be an attendant upon men of rank. In these two senses, there is no obvious bound upon the kind of work expected of such individuals. The harkārah's function is more clearly elaborated in its other senses. The most common of these were a ‘running footman’, ‘messenger’, ‘courier’, or ‘peon’, which overlapped with its more specialised meanings of a ‘spy’ or ‘emissary’.
Another widespread Indo-Persian term was payk. With variants found in Sanskrit, Persian and Hindi, it occupied two distinct semantic ranges.Footnote 37 In one, it had the meanings of a ‘footman’, ‘foot-soldier’, ‘armed attendant’, ‘inferior police’ or ‘revenue officer’, ‘guard’, ‘watchman’. This stresses the payk's role as a guardian of, or enforcer for, a sovereign body. The other range of meanings included a ‘messenger’, ‘carrier’, ‘harbinger’. Here, the focus is on the payk's role in communication and transport.
The last in this list of terms is ‘pattamar’.Footnote 38 Though its etymological origins are obscure, it appears to be a composite of words from one or more Indic languages. In the early modern period, it was frequently invoked in two different senses. Especially in southern and western India, a pattamar meant a ‘foot-messenger, running footman’ or, more generally, a ‘courier’. In its other sense, it originally referred to an ‘Indian dispatch boat’. With the passage of time, however, the word ended up denoting a fast-sailing, lateen-rigged vessel with up to three masts. This change paralleled the increasing popularity of such vessels in the coastal trade of western India from the eighteenth century.
This sketch of the etymology of the words commonly used to refer to couriers by the residents of early modern India and the Middle East raises several interesting points. While their meanings are wide in scope, the terms all embody, albeit in differing proportions, three main ideas: mobility, information-gathering and menial service. These basic associations suggest that those for whom such terms were part of their daily lexicon did not think of couriers solely as servants, employed merely to undertake the physical transport of their packages. They also understood couriers as figures central to the provision of intelligence and mediation in the mercantile and political spheres. It appears that popular views on circulation and exchange were intimately tied to popular views on knowledge and diplomacy. This vernacular mindset coincided with realities on the ground, which lie at the focus of the following account of a group of specialist couriers.
III
In this section, the world of couriers and intermediaries is thrown into sharp relief by studying in detail a particular branch of the Aiyangar community of southern India. By examining how this branch—known colloquially as ‘pattamars’—organised, managed and executed the delivery of small packages in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, light is shed on the dynamic links between major elements of southern India's informational fabric. The documents on which this case-study is based give details on the pattamars’ activities and views, and provide insights into the structure of the larger community of which they were a part. We learn about the social and material infrastructure that made it possible to deliver mail at the time. But this is not all. We also learn about a host of complementary informational services that the community's headmen provided for their employers and clients. These facets of communication in southern India will be considered towards the end of this case-study.
It was common practice for merchant houses, state institutions and wealthy individuals based in southern India to employ or commission specialised couriers. These pattamars were used mainly for delivering their correspondence within this area. Many (if not most) of these pattamars were Aiyangars, a community whose roots lie in Tamil Nadu.Footnote 39 They journeyed frequently between the towns and ports of the peninsula, from Valapattanam on the Malabar to Chennai on the Coromandel.Footnote 40 They constituted a major channel of communication between many of the leading figures in the kingdoms and petty states of the time, which included Nair officials and the kings of Cochin and Coimbatore. Despite its politically fragmented nature, the pattamars treated southern India as a single cultural domain. This was an area of which they had intimate experience and personalised knowledge. And within this area, the existing infrastructure and prior arrangements with the relevant ‘big men’ and power-brokers allowed them to travel quickly and in security. Pattamars were essential for those who had a large network of correspondents and placed a premium on reliable and swift communication, but who did not want, or were unable, to operate their own stable of couriers. They were, however, of little use for delivering packages to places outside their cultural domain. Those needing such a service were forced to look to other types of courier and means of conveyance, which tended to be less institutionalised and more dependent upon affective ties.
Each major settlement in southern India was home to a group or community that exercised a monopoly over the overland and coastal transport of small packages within its cultural domain. These specialist couriers were usually members of the same caste or extended family and, even if much of their lives were spent elsewhere due to the dictates of their work, they were always considered residents of their country of origin and subjects of its ruler. In southern India in the eighteenth century, the Aiyangars, a community of Tamil Brahmins, were well-known as a source of pattamars.Footnote 41 Communities of this type seem to have been defined primarily by jāti and residence, and only their members had ready access to work as pattamars.Footnote 42
While there is insufficient evidence to specify precisely how each community sustained its local monopoly, we know in broad terms the strategies used to deter outsiders from becoming pattamars, which, in turn, helped preserve the community's inner cohesion. The world-view that framed early modern Indian society sanctioned the dominance of particular occupations by named and endogamous social groups. Usually called jātis within the Hindu tradition, these groups embraced a characteristic style of life within a ritualised and hierarchical system. Though this social cosmology was never static, its internal boundaries were well entrenched, publicly demarcated and actively policed. Blurring or transcending these boundaries was a slow, charged and uncertain process. Thus, an outsider attempting to gain employment as a pattamar would ordinarily have been viewed a deviant and very likely ostracised by his kinsmen and local society.
Such cultural and social barriers were reinforced by strict controls on access to the specialist knowledge, facilities and personal ties that enabled pattamars to deliver packages to their destination efficiently, safely and without being compromised. By denying would-be interlopers access to this social and physical capital, incumbents enjoyed an overwhelming advantage over others who might wish to offer a comparable service. They also benefited from the structural uncertainties of pre-modern times, which encouraged a conservative outlook. Actively seeking to manage and, if possible, lower risks, those who needed specialist couriers naturally favoured pattamars belonging to communities with recognised expertise in the field.
Each group of pattamars was organised hierarchically. At the top were ‘chefs’ (or headmen),Footnote 43 who belonged to the same close-knit group as the pattamars. These headmen conducted their affairs either from their permanent residence, usually in their community's home settlement, or on the move, often while accompanying their pattamars doing their rounds. Thus, Venkatachalam and Tirumalai, the headmen of the pattamars employed by the French authorities in Pondicherry in the 1770s, organised affairs so that one would remain in Pondicherry and the other would travel with his pattamars ‘when necessary’ (au besoin).Footnote 44 In terms of age, social rank and function, headmen were quite distinct from pattamars. They tended to be relatively advanced in years. Venkatachalam is a case in point. Though he began his working life as a pattamar in the 1720s, it was not until many years later that he became a headman, most probably in his forties or fifties.Footnote 45 This promotion would have been marked by a drastic change in his rights, duties and privileges. Whereas pattamars had the immediate responsibility for ensuring the package actually reached its destination, it was the headmen who dealt with the logistics, making arrangements for their pick-up, transport and delivery. But the headmen's work did not stop there. Many also undertook for their principals a wide range of additional services relating to intelligence, diplomacy and commerce.Footnote 46
Pattamars were either permanently attached to a single individual or organisation, or engaged on the basis of short-term commissions.Footnote 47 This is exemplified by the French authorities in India, who, in constant need of secure and reliable channels of communicating for official business, maintained a retinue of pattamars. Twenty-six of them were dedicated to carrying ‘correspondence between Pondicherry and Mahe’ until the mid-1770s, when an official audit concluded that this number was ‘far too many and [that they were too] expensive [to maintain] given the circumstances’. As a result, they were reduced to twelve, with ‘four for Pondicherry and eight for Mahe’.Footnote 48 Pattamars in such circumstances could remain in the service of a single employer for many years, even decades. Venkatachalam was one of the Compagnie des Indes’ most loyal employees. He started working for it in the 1720s as an ordinary pattamar. By the late 1760s, having transported for his employer ‘ten to twenty thousand letters by land’, he had become a headman of the Pondicherry pattamars and even counted several French officials among his friends.Footnote 49
Though the primary loyalty of pattamars in salaried service was to their employer, there were slack periods during which there was insufficient work to go around. At such times, they often sought one-off clients, with or without their employer's consent. This, however, brought them into direct competition with other pattamars who earned their living principally by serving customers on demand. It appears to have been normal to find constellations of such ‘free’ pattamars in each settlement of any consequence. This allowed organisations which depended upon specialist couriers and yet, like the French,Footnote 50 were mindful of their cost, to be strategic in their use of pattamars. As a general rule, they employed a sufficient number of pattamars to meet their average requirements; at times of exceptional need, this number would be augmented by drawing on the available pool of unattached pattamars. Based on this reasoning, French officials in Mahe in the mid-1770s were told by their superiors that, if they required ‘for urgent dispatches’ (pour quelques expéditions pressantes) more than the eight pattamars which had been assigned to them, they were to let them know and appropriate steps would be taken to ease their situation.Footnote 51 Organisations thus made efficient use of their serving pattamars and kept their labour costs down to manageable levels. At the same time, this policy did entail additional costs. There was a heightened risk that the package would be compromised by pattamars with whom the employer was unfamiliar. This concern was partially assuaged by their headmen, who acted as their bondsmen. Furthermore, this strategy was predicated on a buyer's labour market. But such a market could not be guaranteed. There were occasions, especially at times of high general demand, when there were too few dependable pattamars available for short-term hire. The potential costs, be it the surcharge or those due to disruption to communication, could be very high indeed. Many organisations, however, judged that these were sufficiently rare to be acceptable; for them, the higher associated potential costs were more than adequately compensated by the long-term gains promised by their employment policy.
Both for single commissions and permanent service, pattamars were not engaged directly but through their headmen. Thus, a French official in Mahe, in sudden need of pattamars, turned to one of their headmen to help him out, requesting that he ‘send me half dozen of them, all faithful people’.Footnote 52 This highlights the role of headmen as labour brokers for their community. But this was merely one of several roles that they performed in this arena. In their other roles, they acted as their pattamars’ foremen, as their advocates when accused of a misdemeanour, and as mediators between them and their employers and clients. At other times, the behaviour of headmen was similar to entrepreneurial chief executives of a corporation whose stakeholders—especially its shareholders and workers—were predominantly members of their own community. There will always be uncertainty over how best to designate headmen because of gaps in our knowledge regarding their community and the specifics of the relationship between them and their pattamars. Nevertheless, even at this stage of research, we can be in no doubt that headmen were the central linchpin in the arena of postal communication within their cultural domain.
Once the decision had been taken to deliver the package using a pattamar, the sender and the headman would negotiate the terms of the agreement. The sender would then notify the recipient, provide details such as the pattamar's name, the route he was to follow and his expected date of arrival, to help identify and authenticate the pattamar on arrival.Footnote 53 The packages he was to carry would typically be made up of letters,Footnote 54 medicine,Footnote 55 moneyFootnote 56 or seasonal fruits.Footnote 57 His headmen determined the route he would follow and the physical means of conveyance (essentially a choice between walking on roads or sailing on the dhoneysFootnote 58 or corvettesFootnote 59 that hugged the coastline). The headman was also responsible for arranging provisions and accommodation for the pattamar during his journey. The specifics of all this depended, of course, on the best available news about security in the territories through which the pattamar would be travelling. It appears that the sender (whose personal knowledge of the pattamars’ cultural domain was often threadbare) had no influence over such matters, save in negotiating and agreeing to the overall cost of the venture, the bulk of which went towards paying the pattamars. Those in permanent service received income from two sources: wages and the expenses incurred in making the delivery. Pattamars who worked the Pondicherry-Mahe route in the 1770s, for example, could expect in the region of Rs. 5 for their expenses per single trip.Footnote 60 This was paid either when picking up the package or on its successful delivery. Similarly, payment to pattamars, hired for a single commission which included fees and expenses, was made either before they set offFootnote 61 or at the end of their journey.Footnote 62 Unfortunately, the documents do not tell us how this income was distributed among the pattamars, their headmen and other members of their community.
After the pattamar had set off on his journey, a prime duty of the headman was to keep the sender informed about the pattamar's current location and the state of the package in his care. This was a relatively simple task if, like Venkatachalam in the 1760s,Footnote 63 the headman accompanied his pattamars on their journey. Otherwise, he kept abreast of their progress through regular messages sent by the pattamars themselves, his agents who met them en route, or his fellow headmen travelling in their company.Footnote 64 Thus, Venkatachalam acquitted himself of this duty in 1766 by telling the sender that ‘the pattamars who left Mahe with me were dispatched to Pondicherry the same day . . . we reached Calicut. As soon as I arrived at this place, I delivered a letter to the king of Coimbatore’.Footnote 65 This shows that, in the absence of unexpected difficulties, the updates provided by the headman typically commented on the whereabouts of the pattamar and his package. These were occasionally supplemented by brief remarks on the journey to date and plans for its next stage. Upon delivery of the package, the sender generally received written confirmation which named the recipient and stated the delivery date.
This was the case in an ideal scenario. But life was seldom so predictable and unforeseen developments often disrupted the delivery of packages. On being informed of a delay, the headmen would generally relay the news to the sender. But this was not always done at once. In 1777, the headman Lakshman learnt that several of his pattamars had had the packages in their care plundered while on their way from Pondicherry to Mahe. Not wanting their recipients to find out about this loss, the pattamars, on reaching Mahe, chose not to tell them that they were coming from Pondicherry. They evidently believed that they would be held responsible for this and consequently punished. As Lakshman explained afterwards to their employers, it had been ‘fear which prevented them from admitting this’.Footnote 66
This example shows that theft was a major reason for packages failing to reach their destination. Losses also resulted from carelessness on the part of the pattamars. But a more common problem faced by pattamars was for their packages to be seized and opened by local officials, sometimes for reasons of personal gain, sometimes at the behest of their superiors. If this threat was recognised early enough, the approved course of action was for the pattamars to hide the packages in a secure place, to be retrieved at a later date when it was safe to do so.Footnote 67 Packages were lost on occasion because the pattamar died while en route. This could happen because of natural causes. But fatal accidents or even murder were not unknown. Indeed, this was the tragic fate of a small group of pattamars who left Pondicherry for Mahe in 1767. Four months after their departure, one of their headman wrote to the governor of Mahe: ‘We have learnt that they have still not arrived at your place; [nor] have those people yet returned here. If they had been able, they would not have failed to appear at your place or here.’Footnote 68 So much time had elapsed since they had last heard from them that they now believed ‘they are dead.’Footnote 69 The consensus was that they had been killed in the Malabar area by Ḥaydar ˓Alī Khān, ‘one year after the outbreak of war’.Footnote 70 He noted that, when the headmen used to make this journey themselves ‘a long time ago, no such bad luck [ever] happened to us’.Footnote 71 Since then, however, the ‘ongoing wars’ had increased the dangers.Footnote 72 ‘It is with great difficulty that, in these times of conflict, pattamars travel to you. This is why I ask you to show them compassion’.Footnote 73
In the event of such unexpected difficulties, it was in the employer's own interest to help the headmen overcome them if he was in a position to do so. Of course, the more valuable the package, the more likely it was that assistance would be forthcoming. Bernard Picot de la Motte, the official French representative on the Malabar coast, had considerable experience in handling such matters. On 15 April 1777, two pattamars, on the way to Pondicherry from Mahim, were detained at a place called Anjallão and the letters they were carrying for the French authorities were confiscated on the orders of the local Nair officials. When news of this reached the French agent at Calicut, he issued an appeal for help to Picot de la Motte. Stressing the ‘great friendship that the nawab [Ḥaydar ˓Alī Khān] has with our king [Louis XVI]’ (grande amizade que o Snör Nababo tem com nosso Rei), the agent urged him to use his influence to recover the letters. These, so he claimed, ‘are of importance’ to the French ‘nation’. He suggested that Picot de la Motte might help by nominating ‘a trustworthy person’ (hua pessoa de confiança) to accompany the two Brahmin mediators that had already been dispatched to parley with the Nairs on their behalf.Footnote 74
Such aid was only possible in territories where the pattamar's employer or client exercised a measure of authority. Elsewhere, the headman alone was responsible for the secure and timely delivery of the packages entrusted to his pattamars. If there were unanticipated delays, he was the one expected to take the necessary steps to mitigate them. In cases of packages being seized or concealed, the headman would use his experience and personal ties to those wielding influence locally in order to retrieve them swiftly and then either get them delivered to their intended recipients or have them returned safely to their senders. When the French governor of Mahe learnt in October 1767 that the pattamar he was awaiting from Pondicherry ‘had failed in [his] duty and hidden the letters’ in his charge, he ordered their headman ‘to recover the stray packets . . . and inform me about the fate of these letters’.Footnote 75 The headman, who had already received news of this mishap, replied that the pattamar in question ‘had taken care to hide [the packets] under a rock when, along the way, he fell into the hands of the Nairs.’ By taking this action, the pattamar ‘had thus saved these two packets’. The headman assured his employer that ‘he will not fail to return these packets to you’.Footnote 76 As there is no further mention of this affair in succeeding letters, it may be surmised that the headman was indeed able to keep his word. Much the same situation arose a decade later about which we have more details. The headman Lakshman, on a mission to Alanghat in 1777 to find several packages that had been stolen while in transit the previous year, visited Cavalpai Nair, an influential landlord and local official. After having ‘told him the story of the theft of the packet of letters that took place in his country’, Cavalpai agreed to help. He drew up an order which authorised his agent to arrest and interrogate ‘two or three people whom we suspected’ were responsible for this crime.Footnote 77 Despite carrying out detailed investigations over the weeks that followed, progress towards recovering the packet proved glacial. In his final letter on the subject, though still hoping for ‘some clarifications (éclaircissements) within three or four days’, the headman consoled himself by the thought that, if success did ultimately elude them, it would not have been through ‘lack of diligence and in order to save our pains’.Footnote 78
The last of the common reasons given for packages getting waylaid was that the route to be followed by the pattamars had been rendered impassable due to insecurity. Efforts would initially be directed towards finding an alternative. Where this was not feasible, headmen would then seek to negotiate a safe passage with local rulers or employ sipāhs, or guards, to accompany their pattamars and protect them. After Lakshman had met Cavalpai Nair in 1777 to discuss the theft of his pattamars’ packages and the security situation in his territories, he informed his principal: ‘it appears to me that when our people come here, they will let them pass without any encumbrance’.Footnote 79 This, however, had no bearing on the state of the roads elsewhere. In fact, due to the ‘many obstacles’ remaining on the main road from Alanghat to Mahe, he had recently stopped two of his pattamars from continuing with their journey until a secure convoy could be arranged for them.Footnote 80
From the employer's perspective, once the package was safely in the pattamar's hands, the main concerns were that the information relayed by the headman be accurate and relevant, and that the package be delivered on time without being compromised.Footnote 81 Enforcing this was a tricky balancing act because the employers knew that they were ultimately dependent on the goodwill of the headmen and their community. In other words, they were not fungible. Employers, who tended to view the claims of the headmen with a degree of scepticism that sometimes bordered on paranoia,Footnote 82 possessed several powerful inducements in their armoury. If they were sensible and judicious in their use, they were usually able to rely on their pattamars. The most obvious—and bluntest—penalty that they could impose was to withhold payment for services rendered. This might be coupled to threats of collective dismissal from the organisation's service or a refusal to use or recommend them in future.Footnote 83 Such threats were taken seriously by pattamars and headmen because theirs was a lucrative occupation that they were loath to endanger. Hence, it was common for a headman to profess his loyalty to his employers, assuring him he ‘may be convinced that I will never fail in my duty’.Footnote 84 Employers, in turn, were quick to capitalise on this, reminding headmen that ‘it is in your interest to show your attachment to the service of the Compagnie [des Indes]’.Footnote 85 Indeed, at times, employers treated their headmen and pattamars as if they were on indefinite probation, each new commission being another test of their loyalty.Footnote 86 These penalties, threats and warnings were complemented and buttressed by contingent promises of future rewards. For as long as headmen remained faithful, a principal was happy to avow he would ‘do everything in order to favour’ themFootnote 87: he might provide assurances of continuing employment, ‘protection’Footnote 88 and ‘support’;Footnote 89 he might undertake to give his superiors a glowing account of their services; and he might offer to refer them to his personal friends and associates, dangling before them the prospect of extra income. Finally, wherever possible employers tapped alternative sources of information to double-check the veracity of what they were being told by the headmen. These were commonly friends, agents or partners who happened to be present at settlements through which the pattamar was passing. The information they provided was usually in the form of a brief statement, often nestling inside a letter dealing principally with other subjects, giving the date of the pattamar's arrival or departure, to which were sometimes added remarks on the items in his possession and his itinerary.
Another of the headmen's key responsibilities was to keep their pattamars in order. If the employer or client demanded punishment because of an alleged misdemeanour, it would be the headmen who meted it out on his behalf. But this required their acquiescence. In response to complaints that his pattamars had failed to deliver the packages entrusted to them by the promised date, Venkatachalam told his French employers in 1767 that, having ‘assembled all the Brahmin pattamars of the Compagnie [des Indes] . . ., we rebuked some of them and dismissed some from the service. . . . If from now on the pattamars do not obey you, we will discipline them as soon as you inform me of it by writing’.Footnote 90 This is not to suggest, however, headmen were merely unquestioning subalterns; if they felt circumstances warranted it, they would put up a spirited defence of their pattamars in the face of the accusations levelled against them. On another occasion in 1767, Venkatachalam rebutted his French employer's criticism by explaining that the pattamar had been forced to hide his packets en route in order to prevent them being seized by the Nair officials, an outcome that would have been far worse for the French.Footnote 91 For this reason, he urged him ‘to have the goodness to forgive [the pattamar] this mistake’.Footnote 92 This was the headman playing the role of advocate.
Backed up by their store of knowledge and experience, and the many ties cultivated during long years of working as pattamars in their youth, headmen undertook a suite of related services for their principals beyond postal communication. These bolstered their position as influential power-brokers and valued intermediaries within their cultural domain. Venkatachalam, for example, in addition to his duties towards his pattamars, acted variously as his principals’ emissary, spy and mediator in the courts and estates of the fragmented polities of eighteenth-century southern India. He ranged across this shifting conjuncture of roles with practised ease. Venkatachalam knew this part of the world intimately, having criss-crossed it for decades in his youth as a pattamar. Over time, he had developed friendships and strategic relationships with many of its officials, landlords, merchants, bankers and rulers. These headmen were rightly viewed as experts on this arena—their cultural domain—enjoying direct access to the men of rank and means who could get things done within it. This made headmen especially attractive to arriviste merchant-officials who sought to gain commercial and political influence.
The relation of the Compagnie des Indes to its headmen in southern India exemplifies many of these points. Venkatachalam, for example, a long-serving employee, agent and roving ambassador for the Compagnie, played an important role in arranging credit and loans for it, and in mediating between it and its principal suppliers. Indeed, he claimed to have ‘suffered’ personally in order to advance the Compagnie's financial and trading interests.Footnote 93 Consider the situation in the mid-1760s. At the time, he was heavily involved in organising the official French trade in pepper in the Malabar area. Acting on behalf of the Compagnie, he negotiated an agreement for the purchase of Rs. 10,000 worth of pepper from the king of Coimbatore.Footnote 94 In keeping with this, the king sent the French governor in Mahe a bill of exchange for Rs. 10,000 with his agent, Chandra Chetty. On receipt of this bill, its face-value was to be handed over to him. Once the money was safely in the king's treasury, the pepper would then be shipped to Mahe in two instalments, with Chandra Chetty to receive a commission of Rs. 2 for each candy, a standard weight, successfully delivered.Footnote 95 The Compagnie also valued Venkatachalam's advice on the commercial or political strategy it ought to pursue. This is why in 1766, in light of the fact that ‘the English have advanced Rs. 50,000 for the trade in rice and coconuts’, he could tell his French principals quite openly that ‘if we are [only] prepared to give Rs. 10,000, [then] there is no advantage for us to act in this way.’Footnote 96 Finally, in situations where information was deemed too sensitive to be written down or where a grandee had to be given special treatment, officials of the Compagnie would employ trusted headmen as their personal emissaries and charge them to transmit their message orally. Lakshman was on occasion engaged in this role. He gestured to this when he confirmed to his employer in 1777 that, after having delivered the letter to the king of Cochin, ‘I . . . told him all that it was necessary to tell him’.Footnote 97
Conclusion
India and the Middle East in the eighteenth century were spanned by an extensive and dense network of land- and sea-routes. These were used by an array of couriers and intermediaries acting in concert to deliver mail efficiently and reliably. The service they provided was essential for sustaining personal, business and official relations, and for organising and managing activities from afar. Perhaps, surprisingly, the record suggests that the state had almost no presence in this arena—it stepped in only when obligated to ensure the security of person and property within its domains. Otherwise, the actors in this arena were left alone to play out the cluster of roles allocated to them by tradition and by their peers, employers and clients. Importantly, these roles, and their associated institutions and practices, clearly injected enough redundancy and flexibility into the fabric of long distance communication to enable it to withstand the political uncertainties experienced throughout the region during the eighteenth century.
Before the emergence at the turn of the nineteenth century of scheduled, fixed-price postal services, this paper has argued that the choice for most residents of India and the Middle East was between two modes of private conveyance: specialised and general. In both, commissions had to be negotiated individually.Footnote 98 As we have seen, the packages were often entrusted for delivery to individuals personally acquainted with the sender and the recipient. This could be for reasons of cost—this option was usually the least expensive, if not the quickest—or because the package's final destination lay outside the normal zone of operations of the locally available specialist couriers. The casual couriers—kinsmen, friends or colleagues—commonly travelled on general modes of transport, such as caravans and ocean-going vessels, and their itineraries were not restricted to any one cultural domain. In contrast, specialist couriers, such as the Aiyangar pattamars studied in this paper, seldom ventured beyond the frontiers of the domain with which they had cultural familiarity. Within their domain, however, they performed a valuable service for which there were few, if any, alternatives.
The image that comes to mind from the perspective of casual couriers and their general modes of conveyance is of a constellation of brightly shining and distinct ports, towns and cities, linked together by an intricate web of routes over land and sea in an otherwise dark background. From the perspective of specialist couriers and their specialised modes of conveyance, this image is overlain by a diaphanous patchwork of interleaving cultural domains. Each of these domains were characterised by well-defined indigenous groups or corporations that were experts in the transport and delivery of packages within their boundaries. Their role in postal communication was part of a wider involvement in the informational fabric of their domain. This feature was known—and appreciated—by sojourners and locals alike and, as we have seen, was reflected in the everyday terms that they used to refer to them.
Specialist couriers were a prominent and, arguably, the largest subset of these groups and corporations. Typically the employers and clients of these couriers were wealthy, powerful or well-connected,Footnote 99 government officials, major private traders, the European chartered trading companies and larger family firms and merchant houses. As illustrated by the case of the Aiyangar pattamars of southern India, these specialist couriers and their managers belonged to autonomous or wholly independent associations, usually defined by residence and kinship. In exchange for expenses, wages and fees, these groups ensured the secure and timely delivery of packages within their cultural domain. They were presided over by headmen who determined whether or not to accept a commission or to enter members of their community into the permanent service of an employer. These headmen were respected and honoured for their knowledge and experience. They were often well-off and enjoyed high social status. They oversaw and protected their charges and constituted the principal link between them and their employers and clients. And, as entrepreneurs, they had substantial interests in arenas beyond the provision of postal services, embracing intelligence, diplomacy and trade.
This consideration of the region's informational fabric enhances our knowledge and understanding of crucial aspects of quotidian life in India and the Middle East during this era. The findings of this paper also have a bearing on a set of broader issues that lie at the heart of several major and longstanding debates which continue to agitate the field. These debates pivot on: the appropriate characterisation of relations between state and society in the region's polities before colonisation; the degree of mutuality or asymmetry in early modern dealings between foreigners (especially Europeans) and indigenous social groups central to key sectors of the political economy; and on the nature of the transition to colonialism or informal empire (notably in India and the western half of the Ottoman empire) from the end of the eighteenth century.
Perhaps the most remarkable finding with respect to these debates is the near or total absence of state involvement in an arena of daily life critical for the well-being of the region's political economy. This suggests that sovereignty in eighteenth-century India and the Middle East was exercised in a laissez-faire manner—states of the region interfered only in those sectors of the economy and society that were necessary for ensuring the territorial and political integrity of their dominions and the flow of revenue into their coffers. Even in sectors of low priority where states wished to maintain a presence, they tended to operate through entrepreneurial, semi-official surrogates or intermediaries. Elsewhere, the state either chose not to intervene at all or was successfully kept at arms-length by its subject communities and neighbourhood corporations. A telling example is provided by this paper's account of the organisation and management of postal communication within the region, which, on the basis of the documents examined, was largely a private affair in the eighteenth century.Footnote 100
The case-study of the Aiyangar pattamars reinforces the idea of laissez-faire states. It also has more general lessons for our current ideas on the region's political economy: many of its core practices and institutions—here, specialised modes of conveyance and specialist couriers—were the preserve of communities with deep roots in a particular locality or domain. In modern parlance such groups had an oligopoly over specified activities or occupations. At the same time, it must be stressed that, while these groups were best known for having the specialist knowledge and skills appropriate to the sectors they dominated, this was not a rigid designation. Subject to cultural and social bounds that still allowed for a fair degree of latitude, members of these communities, notably the headmen, embraced an entrepreneurial outlook; they invariably embraced new opportunities that came their way to generate additional income, extend their authority or raise their status. It would thus be appropriate to gloss them as ‘entrepreneurial specialists’.Footnote 101 As long as this remained the basic pattern underpinning cosmopolitan life in the polities of the region, the choice of outsiders—and, indeed, most locals—was limited to a relatively small number of indigenous groups for accessing informational services requiring vernacular knowledge. And so, due to the lack of any realistic alternatives, it makes little sense to think of relations between these groups and foreigners in terms of competition or market forces.Footnote 102 Rather, outside the command sectors, the cardinal attributes of these polities appear to have been a complementary division of labour enforced culturally and socially by willing participants.
This translates into a conception of India and the Middle East in the eighteenth century that diverges in significant respects from what is currently the standard view.Footnote 103 In the conception developed here, the region hosted an array of stable polities that were equal to the diverse needs of their residents. This stability was predicated on these residents supporting, in particular, the corporatist structure of their polity. Notwithstanding the upheavals that caused the region's political map to be refashioned, this support was forthcoming through to the end of the eighteenth century. At that point, however, the situation changed. The administrative consolidation of the rapidly expanding European empires in Asia—at the vanguard of which were the British and the Russians—heralded a fundamental transformation in the political economy of the territories that fell under their sway. This inaugurated a very different notion of how society and the economy ought to be structured and of the relationship of these spheres to the state. The consequence would ultimately be a sharp break with many of the practices and institutions that had hitherto dominated everyday life in the region's early modern past.