Landscapes and the Law
Landscapes and the Law
Environmental Politics, Regional Histories, and Contests over Nature
Gunnel Cederlöf
1
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ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-949974-8
ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-949974-8
ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-909927-6
ISBN-10 (eBook): 0-19-909927-8
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For Leif, Erik, and Gustav
Glossary
adivasi originalinhabitant/s amildar revenuecollector casbha, causba revenuevillage
circar, sarkar government cutcherry administrationoffice diku non-tribal,outsider
duffadar, kolkar IndianArmycavalryofficer,equalto sergeant fanam coin,mostlysilver hookumnamah instruction inam, inamdar grantoflandwithdiscountof revenue;inamdar,thegranteeofthe inam
jagir, jagirdar grantoflandtoanarmyofficer; jagirdar,thegranteeofthejagir jajmani asystemofmutualreciprocityand hierarchicaldependencebetween castes(jati)inaparticularlocation janmam, jenmi birth,hereditaryownership
jenmi, jenmikaran personholdinghereditaryrightsover landinMalabar
jenm-koodian personholdingaleaseonjenmiland kanam lease,mortgage,orusufructuary mortgage
kanakaran holderofaleaseormortgage kaniachi landcontrol,righttoland kararnamah agreement kumri (warg and sarkar kumri) shiftingcultivation,under landlordorgovernmentcontrol
menon villageaccountant mirasi, mirasidar customaryright,particularlytoland; customary,privilegedlandholder, kaniachidar
monigar lowest-levelgovernmentofficial, representingarevenuevillage mund, mudr Todasettlement munsif subordinatemagistrate nad, nadu territory,administrativegeographical unit
patta titledeedtolandonconditionofrent payment
pattadar landholder,holderofa patta peishkar, peshkar administrativeheadofarevenueoffice ryot cultivator
saraf (‘shroff’) money-changer sheristadar headclerk,accountant shola high-altitudestuntedevergreenforest, fromTamil: solai,thicket,grove,forest tahsildar low-rankingadministrativeexecutive officerintherevenuedepartmentofa district
taluk administrativesubdivisionofadistrict tharavadu household,landedmatrilineal householdinMalabar
zamindar landlord,holderofanestate
Preface to Second Edition
As is the nature of research, we set out guidelines and, once the work gathers speed, it takes off in unexpected ways, moved by evidence and conversation. The study that resulted in Landscapes and the Law began in this manner, with clear directions and with a goal on the horizon. As part of every-day research, new results triggered new questions, and the assumed goals were refined. A decade has now passed since the publication of the first edition. As with other texts, once your thoughts are put into print, the text takes on a life of its own in the eyes of the reader. Conversations begin already at the threshold when creative and critical reading open up new possibilities to better understand and develop ideas.
Some responses arrived a bit unsuspected, as on several occasions when I found the book on the shelves of anthropology, not history. Not that I minded. And, true, the study has been much influenced by anthropological works. Part of the history that is discussed, in fact, is about how ethnology and the origins to anthropological scholarship influenced the formation of nineteenth-century law. Discussions with my colleagues in anthropology were important for me in order to understand how something as deeply rooted in historical research as
land law and revenue history had depended on the searching eyes of ethnographers and ethnologists. But I doubt that such considerations made a librarian put this publication under the section of anthropology. Rather, it must have been the first edition’s cover photo of Mrs Narsam, dressed for a bow and arrow ceremony in her putkuli shawl that caused the classification. A lady looking‘tribal’ most likely referred the book to the sphere of culture rather than of history.
Mrs Narsam herself has lived through the consequences of such racialized perceptions, where just the glance on a person labelled her not only as belonging to a‘tribe’ but also assumed her life to be somehow timeless or not quite part of the history of India. Countless tourists have taken her picture to keep as a memory of their experience of ancient culture and authentic nature when they have visited the Ooty botanical garden in the Nilgiri Hills. The nature surrounding her home and settlement has been the object of onlookers’ projections across two centuries. From the first arrival of Europeans onwards, romantic and aesthetic values have placed her community on par with animals,grazed hillocks,and groves as if they were of the same matter and quality. Sometimes such views have benefitted the community but mostly they have been to their disadvantage. Simultaneously and in contrast to romanticist ideas, the Nilgiri natures have also been defined in line with utilitarian thought. To privilege usage for the sake of the public as defined by a government has dominated over knowing land from the meanings ascribed to it by people living there. Market-oriented assessments of land have mostly valued nature as a material resource. This has worked to detach people from the land. Yet it was not a simple trajectory of events that resulted in this dislocation of rights from land. The half century encompassing the early formation of legal rights in land in the Nilgiri Hills turned out to be much more complicated.
When I made the first sketches of my project, I naively thought that I would find a clear case of overpowering conquest. I was pretty sure I would discover a native population facing the force of colonial subjugation, represented by armed bureaucrats of the British East India Company. Without much deliberation, they would have mowed down any opposition. Guns, revenues, and resource exploitation would have combined to rob defenceless local people of their livelihoods and their land.
Arriving in the Nilgiris at 2,000 metres above sea level from the agrarian highlands of the Coimbatore district in Tamil Nadu where I worked in the 1990s, I soon realized that I had moved away from the historian’s craft to the academic realms of the anthropologist. A fairly short geographical distance had taken me far from the assumed caste-structured and economically hierarchical society of old state formations—an old fiefdom of historians. I was now in an area described as tribal and, therefore, as anthropological territory.
My expectation of finding sharp, binary conflicts between colonial power and colonized subjects was founded in dominant discourses among historians at the time. It also corresponded to everyday realities that were reflected in my political involvements,from those I gained from schoolmates arriving as refugees from Latin American dictatorships to those in the anti-apartheid movement and in the critical debates on the demands for structural adjustment programmes for vulnerable African economies. These political experiences matched theoretical debates on dependency theory, subaltern studies, and history from below, schools of thought which contributed a necessary and critical rereading of the colonial pasts. Seen from outside European and Western perspectives and experiences, the histories of Asia, Africa, and Latin America changed the entire equation for research into the history of the last 200–300 years. I was inspired by the brilliant works of Ramachandra Guha, Ranajit Guha, and James C. Scott, and was convinced I would find yet another case of expediently violent formation of British rule.1
Occasionally it happened that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Those who emphasized the complexities of Indian society and its integration with colonial rule were at times ridiculed for being soft on Empire. Certain ideologically founded narratives of domination and subordination tended to ignore native agency and,therefore,by default,make Indians, not least those at the lower end of socio-economic scales, appear passive and incapable. In their criticism of nationalist historiography,
1 Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford, 1983); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
scholars in the early subaltern studies collective described an autonomous domain of subaltern consciousness, where there was agency but little room for divergence. Reflecting on a disappearing‘subaltern’ in subaltern studies, in 2001 Sumit Sarkar argued that a colonial cultural domain that is stripped of complexities and variations ‘faces an indigenous domain eroded of internal tensions and conflicts … the colonized subject is taken to have been literally constituted by colonialism alone’. Seen in a longer perspective, the debates of the 1990s around the positions of historians within subaltern studies helped me to find more nuanced views on the mechanisms of the formation and consolidation of colonial rule and the relationship between the colonial and the colonized subject.2
IntheNilgiris,therewerealsocomplicatedpasts,precedingaEuropean presence, in which conflicts were played out. Dominant social groups, different communities, and royalty fought over space, revenues, social control, and loyalties. Apparently, here the formation of British rule had not come into place by brute force alone, but by mediation, negotiation, multiple transactions, and, at times, the most unexpected alliances. The consolidation of colonial government had come about slowly, as a powerful and densely woven texture. Its force did not seem to hinge on the presence of an unstoppable and powerful colossus.There was an everyday underbelly to its formation,which was challenging to understand.If I was to comprehend the ways in which the Nilgiris came under British rule, I needed to explore these everyday mechanisms of its formation.
I was occasionally reminded that this was south India. South India was often said to be different; but different from what? What was the norm against which the south was measured?
2 Gyan Prakash, 'Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World. Perspectives from Indian Historiography', Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 2 (1990); 'Can the "Subaltern" Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook', Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (1992); Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, 'After Orientalism. Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World', , Comparative Studies in Society and History 34,no.1 (1992); Sumit Sarkar,'The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies', in Reading Subaltern Studies. Critical History, Contested Meaning, and the Globalisation of South Asia, ed. David Ludden (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 408; Gyan Prakash, 'Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography', Social Text, no. 31/32 (1992).
The question brought me to Bengal and the expanding Bengal Presidency. The region was far away from the southern hill ranges of the Western Ghats. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the issues at stake turned these two presidencies into quarrelling neighbours. As David Washbrook and others have often pointed out, the Madras administration habitually ended up on a collision course with its Bengal counterpart.3 If we are to understand the history of one, we also need to understand the other. These new enquiries gave rise to the study Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790–1840. 4
To me, the two studies are intimately related. The social, legal, and environmental history of the Nilgiris was my reference point when I ventured into the pasts of what are today North-East India, Burma, and Bangladesh. But I realize that the relationship between the two studies may not be as obvious to others as it is to me. The two regions are seldom seen in the same framework, except when discussed in the most general sense of British imperial conquest or in vague notions of a ‘colonial discourse’. Readers who are interested in either north or south India may not necessarily search for literature outside their preferred regional limits.
The differences between the two presidencies seem obvious. The regions are geographically far apart. Climate, topography, ecology, polity, culture, socio-economic and political contexts, and historical trajectories all differ. Comparing the limited space of the Nilgiri Hills and the large expanse of the old North-Eastern Frontier that extended from the Brahmaputra towards Burma is no easy undertaking. The divergence of scale is dramatic.
Yet these geographically distant regions shared a common political feature—the influence of the British East India Company, which expanded its operations extensively across the Indian subcontinent from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In the south, troops under British and Hyderabadi banners fought those led by French and
3 David A. Washbrook,‘South India 1770–1840. The Colonial Transition’, Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 487–89.
4 Gunnel Cederlöf, Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790–1840. Climate, Commerce, Polity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Mysore officers. We know these battles as the four Anglo-Mysore wars, from 1767 to 1799. They paved the way for British sovereign rule in the south. The Nilgiri Hills were part of the gain.
Parallel to these events, in Bengal (at the north-eastern extreme of the British territories) the officers who combined commercial and administrative trades in the EIC strove to determine what territories came with the Mughal diwani grant of 1765. EIC troops, cartographers, bureaucrats, and surveyors battled with physical realities to demarcate the limits of territories that they aimed to bring under sovereign control. War with Burma in 1824–6 became a major push for British control of the North-Eastern Frontier. There were kingdoms and small polities here too that became part of the EIC’s gain. In both the south and the north-east, imperial logics can be seen in everyday chores and, conversely, the diversity of micro-histories can help us explore the macro-historical logic.
The growing British Empire was a market of opportunity for seasoned merchants and socially mobile young fortune-seeking men from across Europe. Many failed, but some prospered, and some of that group became both wealthy and powerful. We can see this in the south, for example, in the case of John Sullivan, the collector of Coimbatore district of which the Nilgiris were a part, who secured absolute property in land corresponding in extent to a large estate. Or in that of Robert Lindsay, the collector of Sylhet district, who became one of the wealthiest men of his time from trading in limestone and in the cowry currency. This was also a time when the Company was seriously questioned for overstepping the limits of a mercantile corporation. It was eventually crippled by the amended Charter Act of 1833.
The tug of war between, on the one hand, the corporation and its merchants and, on the other, the monarchy and the British parliament characterized many conflicts within the bureaucracy. Observing their struggle helps us to explain priorities and decisions in the two presidencies, including at the level of daily routine. Cooperation between the bureaucracies of the corporation and the British state was not without friction, nor did the interests of individual merchants always fall in line with those of the Company. As bureaucracies function by regulations, the law was a major arena for such disputes. Law was applied wherever soldiers and administrators marched. And there
was hardly a case brought before a judge in which the quality and the interpretation of acts and regulations went unquestioned. Every law has a prehistory. There is a reason why it is regarded as necessary at a particular point in time. More often than not, it is established to mediate in disputes. Once it is passed, a post-event history begins, when the correct interpretation of the law is debated, in both the courtroom and the public square. As a rule, EIC officers used legal arguments to prove the legitimacy of conquest. Legal procedure had to be followed, even in the smallest matters.
The early phase of the formation of British rule in the south Indian mountain ranges is also a display of some of environmental history’s key questions. We could say it was a peaceful colonial conquest. No guns were fired. Yet by the force of bureaucracy and courts, people’s rights in nature were dramatically remade across time. In the Nilgiris, the grazing of land diminished, shifting cultivation became increasingly permanent, and plantations began to turn hillsides into monoculture units. It was all argued to be ‘in accordance with law’, and laws last long. Once in place, they are not easily done away with. This makes law appear neutral to the shifts of time. Yet, at every turn of events, codes and regulations were reinterpreted and adjusted to the specific situation in which they were to be applied. In the Nilgiris, a social system of reciprocity and hierarchy was first replaced by claims to absolute property and ancient aboriginal right, soon to be overruled by the weaker ‘occupational’ right, usufruct and‘compensation for loss of privilege’—all arguments claimed to be solidly legal while simultaneously based on race theory. Across no more than a generation, the legal framework that regulated people’s access to nature, their control over grazing grounds, forests and groves, had changed in the law code while its implementation took longer. Such legal elaboration adds a dimension to what is meant by‘conquest’.
These disputes are now almost 200 years old, but some of the arguments resound in the recent decades’ battles for rights in Indian forest and hill tracts, and in the conflicts and claims for indigenous people’s rights. Such long-term legacies make it particularly important to understand the details of conflicts when the foundational laws of legal rights in nature and, specifically, land were laid down. In the Nilgiris, nature
was made the location for projections and ascriptions of people’s identities, histories, and rights to access and control the land. The privilege of interpreting the meaning of the legal principles for the rights that were vested in the land was soon removed from the communities in the hills to the officers who came to investigate their claims. It may seem as if people’s voices disappeared from the documents. But for us who read the officers’ reports and letters, to a large extent, the explanations and counter-arguments facing them still remain in their notes. People objected in many different ways. Their voices are seldom found in the summary high-level reports which are easily accessible, but in the day to day communications on the ground. Therefore, as a cure to the malady of allowing vested interest to determine historical narratives stands the patient work in archives and the critical reading of texts that allow for a multitude of often contradictory voices to speak.
The Nilgiri conflicts were not unique. There was a global shift for reformulating and regulating human–nature relations. As in the Nilgiri Hills, the negotiated process of making law worked to dislocate particular rights from nature. The European officers in the Nilgiris, driven by particularistic interests and with the force of government, thus enforced a slow violence by means of law. They targeted rights in nature to wrench land out of people’s hands. Partly as a consequence of such processual changes, legal frameworks shaped a polity, in south as well as in north-east India. We could say that the everyday practices and administrative procedures that were subsequently turned into regulations and formalized in legal jurisdiction provided the form and glue of polity. There were particular reasons for why these legal foundations came into being, and why they took the form they did. But in the rear-view mirror, those reasons may seem narrow and even insignificant. The lawmakers may never have had such conclusive consequences in mind as the shaping of a polity. Yet if we follow the trail of such regulations across decades, we may see how what was once a practical solution to an immediate problem became a cornerstone of the larger structure of Empire. Through the microcosm of the Nilgiri Hills we may better understand the global transformations that shaped the moulds of laws for rights in nature.
Gunnel Cederlöf Lundbacken, January 2019
References
Cederlöf, Gunnel. Bonds Lost. Subordination, Conflict, and Mobilisation in Rural South India, C. 1900–1970. New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1997.
. Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790–1840. Climate, Commerce, Polity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Guha, Ramachandra. The Unquiet Woods. Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford, 1983.
O’Hanlon, Rosalind, and David Washbrook. ‘After Orientalism. Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (1992): 141–67.
Prakash, Gyan. ‘Can the “Subaltern” Ride? A Reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (1992): 168–84.
. 'Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography'. Social Text, no. 31/32 (1992): 8–19.
. 'Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World. Perspectives from Indian Historiography'. Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 2 (1990): 383–408.
Sarkar, Sumit. 'The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies'. In Reading Subaltern Studies. Critical History, Contested Meaning, and the Globalisation of South Asia, edited by David Ludden, 400–29. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001.
Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Washbrook, David A. ‘South India 1770–1840. The Colonial Transition’. Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 479–516.
Preface to First Edition
Books written over longish periods of time tend to take an unexpected course,sometimes achieving analytic depth as time passes. What began nearly ten years ago as a set of fairly straightforward questions about conflicts over land and natural resources in the Nilgiri Hills of South India, in a project titled ‘Claims and Rights’, soon asked other questions. An initial assumption which mainly derived from the results of earlier studies—for my part presented in the volume Bonds Lost. Subordination, Conflict and Mobilisation in Rural South India c. 1900–1970 (New Delhi: 1997)—namely, that people at the losing end of society were not merely passive, helpless victims of some social juggernaut but possessed agency enough to influence their immediate situations—helped to break down the stereotyped dichotomies of dominant and subordinate, ruler and ruled.
In most detailed historical accounts, the complexities of everyday life surface. Many of the questions emerging in the present study have also arisen from the array of arguments and rhetoric that were voiced in escalating land disputes within the Nilgiris. In the early nineteenth century, when the British East India Company was conquering new territory, a wide variety of interests materialized and made claims on nature.
However, when particular rights were claimed, it was not just a matter of ‘money talking’; historical narratives, competing legal principles, evolutionary theory, political visions, ethnology, and race were also invoked as legitimate grounds for claims on nature. A variety of contradictory claims on and appropriations of land and natural resources thus competed for legal justification.Accordingly, the process of making law came into focus as much as the actual implementation of law.
In my search for a broader environmental history of law that simultaneously encompasses the social, economic, political, and ideological aspects of legal conflicts over nature, I have benefited immensely from numerous discussions with scholars in different fields. For most of the time, Beppe Karlsson has remained my closest colleague and discussion partner. Our joint project and his research in north-east India have been constant sources of inspiration. As we moved office within Uppsala University together with our project—from the Seminar for Development Studies (earlier hosted by the Department of Government and subsequently by the Collegium for Development Studies) via years of fellowships at research institutes in Sweden and abroad, spending the last five years back in Uppsala in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology—my thinking has been much influenced and enriched by different approaches to these questions in the various disciplines concerned. Throughout these years I have been in close contact with fellow researchers in the Department of History at Uppsala University, and it seems only appropriate that I concluded this historical study as a research fellow in that department.
As a fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) I had the privilege of developing the initial outlines of this work in the most inspiring research environment. I am grateful for the formal and informal conversations I was able to have with the other fellows in the spring of 2000, and would particularly like to thank Björn Wittrock, Barbro Klein, Göran Therborn, and Heléne Andersson, who formed the heart of SCAS. During a one-year fellowship at Oxford University, affiliated with Queen Elizabeth House, I benefited from discussions in the context of the many and diverse seminars, lectures, and social gatherings associated with that university. David Washbrook, Barbara Harriss-White, Judith Heyer, and Karen Middleton, in their different ways, formed my own and my family’s closest network of colleagues and
friends. The warmth of their friendship remains an inextricable part of my life and work. During my many visits to the British Library, Hanna Hodacs and Mary Hilson generously opened their home to this vagabond from Oxford.
Alongside this work, my research collaboration also developed on the theme of nation, nationalisms, and appropriations of nature for the sake of identity, interests, and rights. In this parallel project over a four-year period with K. Sivaramakrishnan, which resulted in Ecological Nationalisms. Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia (Delhi 2005 and Seattle 2006), I benefited immensely from our discussions, Shivi’s many thoughtful comments, and his friendship.
During my periods of fieldwork in the Nilgiri Hills I had the privilege of collaborating with C.R. Sathyanarayanan, who at the time was working for the Anthropological Survey of India in Mysore. His long experience of anthropological and ethnographic research in the region made him a knowledgeable co-traveller and colleague. I would also like to express my gratitude for the hospitality and generous sharing of their life experience by people in the Toda settlements of Kandelmund, Manjakalmund, Marlimund, Kengodumund, Malcodmund, Minicmund, Karikadumund, Ankurthkulimund, Nedimund, and Tapkodumund. Ms Vasamalli, Mr Pothili, Mr Peter Raj, and Mr Rajan patiently guided us to many new contacts. Dr Ayyavoo kindly informed us about the work of the Sheep Breeding Research Station at Sandynallah.
For discussions, comments, and all manner of assistance because of which this book has improved through its various drafts to its final shape, I am grateful to Maria Ågren, David Arnold, Arun Bandopadhyay, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Stuart Blackburn, Judith Brown, B.B. Chaudhury, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Max Edling, Sverker Finnström, Claude Garcia, John Hall, Paul Hockings, Martha McLaren, Jeanette Neeson, Ulrika Persson-Fischier, Ric Sims, Tanka Subba, Rolf Torstendahl, and David Washbrook. I am also grateful to Deborah Sutton for our many fruitful discussions, which resulted in a joint article wherein we were able to combine our fields of competence in Nilgiri nineteenth century history. Mahesh Rangarajan, K. Sivaramakrishnan, and Heather Goodall have taken the trouble to read and comment on the whole manuscript or major portions of it. Their detailed comments
and our subsequent discussions have guided me immensely in clarifying my major arguments and making this volume more cohesive.
I have benefited from comments on texts presented at seminars at the Department of History and the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University; at St Antony’s College and Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University; and at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. Important insights were gained from presentations at conferences organized by Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi in 2002, by the University of Calcutta’s Department of History in 2003 and 2005, and by the Centre for World Environmental History at Sussex University in 2005, as well as at two larger meetings: the South Asia Conference at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 2001, and the 17th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies in Heidelberg in 2002. Three articles were published on the basis of the papers presented at these seminars and meetings, and the arguments pursued in them have formed the backbone of three of the chapters exhaustively rewritten in this volume. These articles are ‘The Agency of the Colonial Subject. Claims and Rights in Forestlands in Early Nineteenth-Century Nilgiris’, Studies in History 2 (2005), also published as a longer version in People of the Jangal. Reformulating Identities and Adaptations in Crisis, edited by Marine Carrin and Harald Tambs-Lyche (Delhi: Manohar, 2008); ‘Narratives of Rights. Codifying People and Land in Early Nineteenth-Century Nilgiris’, Environment and History 8 (2002); and ‘The Toda Tiger. Debates on Custom, Utility and Rights in Nature, South India 1820–1843’, in Ecological Nationalisms. Nature, Livelihoods and Identities in South Asia, edited by Gunnel Cederlöf and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005, and Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).
I am grateful to the staff at the British Library and the India Office Records; the Bodleian Library and the Indian Institute at Oxford University; the University of Birmingham Library, Special Collections; the Tamil Nadu Archives; and the Nilgiri Library in Ootacamund. I have also benefited from my visits to the well-equipped library of the Department of Social Analysis at the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary, Madurai, and from discussions with scholars connected with the department. I would like to thank Markku Pyykönen for producing the excellent maps in this volume and Martin Naylor for his careful
editing of the language in a way that often forced me to rethink and clarify both wordings and arguments in the text. I am grateful to my editor Rukun Advani for his support and generous guidance through the process of publication.
None of this would have been possible without financial support. I am deeply grateful for the research grants that have been made available by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, the Research Council for Developing Countries at SIDA (the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency), the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN), and the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSFR).
During these years, as always, I have shared this part of my life, too, with those closest to me: my husband Leif and our sons Erik and Gustav. On our joint travels and in our shared concern for the issues at stake, I have always found encouragement and rest in their love and support.
Gunnel Cederlöf Lundbacken, July 2007
