Abstract
This article looks at rhetorical devices employed by certain classes of claimants in applications for rationed commodities in wartime Delhi in the last decade of colonial rule. In the face of a war-driven colonial frenzy to regulate and constrict all essential and non-essential commodities, rhetoric in application-writing flourished. The covering letters accompanying application forms for rations resembled petitions in their appeals to sovereignty, their affinity to rhetorical parlance, the scope they extended to applicants to exploit colonial structures of bureaucratic authority and their role in shaping the formation of cultural subjectivities. This turn to rhetoric was equally implicit in colonial responses to requests for supplementary rations which were phrased in turgid and caustic prose that drew out the various rationalities of the war and colonial rule while taking cognizance of the encumbrances and cultural imperatives of the everyday. Rhetorical thrusts were not confined to the written requests accompanying the application form. The forms for rationed commodities like motor spirit, electricity, tyres and tubes were themselves peppered with persuasive graphic signs and artifacts that enacted certain relationships between the document and the rule, between intermediate and higher authorities, between applicants and rationed commodities.
The salience of bureaucratic documentation to colonial governance can hardly be overstated. It has been widely argued that documents conjured up ‘ethical competence to rule’, 1 security for good government’, 1 moral and political accountability. 1 At the same time, it was the ‘presumptive written truth’ of documents or the rhetorical basis they provided to legitimate bureaucratic control that both instituted and concealed their non-correspondence to or their departure from what they were legally supposed to represent. 1 If the legitimacy of documentation in terms of validating and interrogating colonial acts of government and governance was irrefutable in multiple narrative senses, there has been less sustained reflection on identification documents, application forms and their link to bureaucratic credibility and good government. One of the purported functions of official documents in the tradition of Kaghazi Raj or ‘government by paper’ as theorised by Martin Moir was to limit the sphere of discretionary rule where officials failed to report their actions, be they decisions, utterances in meetings or consultations in writing. 1 On the face of it, the need to scrutinise and review decisions and selections to ensure fair and transparent process lay in principle behind the genre of identification documents as well. However, just as the recent efflorescence of scholarship on documents has demonstrated the notoriously diverse discourse of bureaucracy they stem from, 1 the multiple narratives of identity documents too belie any singular reading of colonialism and its investment in writing and proof. This genre of official writing threw up documentary forms during the Second World War which were far from being legally settled in a Weberian sense. Identification documents were permeable to different kinds of bureaucratic rhetoric of transparency, of curbing corruption, of war, everyday necessity, imperial trade, local commerce and cultural context. This article is a meditation on the various rhetorical possibilities both within and of one such class of documents, namely rationing documents in India’s colonial capital, especially between 1940 and 1945.
The article looks at rhetorical devices employed by certain classes of claimants in applications for rationed commodities in wartime Delhi in the last decade of colonial rule. In the face of a war-driven colonial frenzy to regulate and constrict all essential and non-essential commodities, rhetoric in application-writing flourished. Though identification documents were not new to colonised subjects, 1 the 1940s were special both in the scale of documentation produced and the enumeration attempted, owing to the imposition of different models of rationing across urban centres and rural areas in India. Applications for rationing documents resembled petitions in their appeals to sovereignty, their affinity to rhetorical parlance, the scope they extended to applicants to exploit colonial structures of bureaucratic authority and their role in shaping the formation of cultural subjectivities. If petition-writing was highly evolved in Mughal India, it had sunk its teeth quite tenaciously into colonial rule in the nineteenth century. 1 Scholarship on petitions has reflected on the practices of formally addressing colonial authorities across wide cross-sections of lower castes, trading classes, middle classes and even tribal groups over matters of land appropriation, labour exploitation, inter-caste disputes, taxation and intrusive medical interventions. 1
This article explores, however, a peculiar form of sociality that emerged, the writing of petitions in the guise of applications. Far from fixing objective, rational ways to read application forms, colonial officials remained open to an interpretive approach in requesting rationed commodities by Indian and European claimants some of whom were officials themselves. Such an approach cut both ways in that the war entailed ever-complex ways of thinking about the everyday as well as who deserved wartime priority: this core of uncertainty sometimes worked to the advantage of applicants and at others to the convenience of the official. The turn to rhetoric was not merely present in these applications—colonial responses to requests for supplementary rations were phrased in turgid and caustic prose that drew out the various rationalities of the war and colonial rule while taking cognizance of cultural imperatives of the everyday. The smuggling of petition-like features into applications for commodities had tremendous implications for the materiality of the rationing document which became a staple in India post-independence. Rhetorical thrusts were not confined to the written requests accompanying the application form. The form itself was peppered with persuasive graphic signs and artifacts that enacted certain relationships between the document and the rule, between intermediate and higher authorities, between applicants and rationed commodities. As corruption was never a distant concern, micro-practices of sealing, attaching and detaching counterfoils, inserting serial numbers, issuing receipts were replete with narrative significance. This article remarks on the rhetorical potential of both the graphic signs within the formal application form and the petition-like expositions of the covering letters.
The Colonial Wartime Basis of Rationing
I take into consideration the rationing applications made in the provincial city and the colonial capital of Delhi for essential and non-essential commodities. This classification is something that I did not always find in various archives but one that I decided to go with anyway because the difference in approach to rationing classes of commodities like rice, cloth, wheat and sugar, and those like motor spirit, electricity, tyres and tubes was palpable in many senses. For one, the rationing of the latter preceded that of the former. In Delhi, the rationing of motor spirit, for instance, occurred in August 1941 while that of foodgrains occurred only as late as May 1944. Coupons and permits were sanctioned for motor spirit and tyres and tubes only if applicants fell under certain nomenclatures while ration cards were issued universally. Charcoal, coal, firewood and kerosene fell into gray areas of rationing. While commodities like coal and charcoal were made available informally, on food ration cards, their consumption had to be closely monitored because they were critically linked to the generation of electricity and alternative fuels for transport. The focus in this article is largely on non-essential commodities as these applications engendered elaborate written requests and voluminous correspondence on the ambiguous question of supplementary coupons. While these coupons were issued even in the case of essential commodities, they were not systematically made available. The issue of supplementary coupons for cloth and food was often undertaken subsequent to protests against stringent rationing. This was not the case with non-essential commodities where the measure of supplementary coupons had its genesis in the original formulation of various Rationing Orders. In other words, the provision for such coupons existed side by side with ordinary coupons in the legislation.
While rationing was introduced in India as a wartime measure, it was also intended to address monsoon and crop failures in Madras Presidency, Bombay and Bengal, the sudden interruption in the imports from a regular supplier of rice and oil, Burma, which had come under Japanese occupation and a harsh famine in Bengal in the year 1943. 1 Rationing was needed to regulate prices just as much as it was needed to assure a steady supply of resources for the Army. The rationing of food, cloth, petrol and other articles were bolstered by the Defence of India Act, 1915 and ordinances passed in its name. Rationing was needed to regulate prices just as much as it was to assure a steady supply of resources for the Army. The Indian Army had to be fed and fed well at all costs as much as other priority sections like heavy manual workers, industrial labourers, mill, plantation and mine workers, and policemen. 1 By ignoring the economic crisis, authorities risked unnecessarily strengthening the Quit India movement which was disruptive of essential services such as the post, telegraph wires and railway lines. 1 Food rations in small quantities had to be distributed as widely as possible because a hungry population could participate enthusiastically in civil disobedience. 1 The provision of rations was cast in paternal terms of caring for the colony consisting of deficit provinces which needed more attention and surplus provinces who could be asked to export food when necessary. The Rationing Adviser to the Government of India, Kirby went so far as to say, ‘The government of India is in the position of a father of a family and the provinces are all the members in it’. 1
Three models of rationing were imposed across India under which colonial subjects were issued food ration cards entitling them to strictly state-controlled commodities in urban areas (statutory rationing), to state-provided rations which co-existed with private imports in rural areas (non-statutory rationing) and rations issued by private traders in licensed shops in rural and semi-urban areas. 1 All classes of urban residents were covered by food rationing. The rationing scheme was on occasion criticised for being thoughtlessly uniform as some classes like homeless persons would either have had to ‘starve or migrate to a place where rationing is not introduced’. 1 On the question of non-essential commodities like petrol and electricity, it was established early that casual consumption could result in dire shortages for war work. This was because industrial production of various commodities remained low throughout the war with imports being difficult to ship during the war to the Indian colony. Though in some parts of the country, money poured into the war effort as in the case of the Bengal War Purposes Fund, Punjab Provincial War Purposes Fund and the Mysore War Fund, the war could not be financed simply by loans from and taxes on the middle class or the affluent sections. 1 It was the money-printing business unabated by industrial production that financed the war or it was, in the words of V.K.R.V. Rao, inflation that financed the war economy. 1 Regulating middle class consumption of commodities was paramount in this context of unforthcoming and strained finances for the war.
Applying for Non-essential Rationed Commodities
Non-essential commodities like motor spirit, electricity, tyres and tubes were reserved for certain elite or diplomatic classes, government employees and owners of public transport vehicles in the city. These commodities were exclusive owing to the expense involved in purchasing diesel or petrol and maintaining cars, trucks, vans and installing electric connections. It was common for establishments like hostels, clubs and associations to own vehicles and pay for electric connections and less so for individuals unless they were European, bourgeois middle-class, high-ranking government employees or on a diplomatic mission. There were untiring efforts to manage the circulation of commodities in Delhi, which was a nerve-centre of war preparations and the diplomatic heart of India privy to the frequent comings and goings of colonial and foreign representatives.
Colonial authorities used applications for rationing documents (permits, coupons, ration cards) as ordering devices to preserve Delhi’s supplies for the war, manage scarcity and curtail consumption. There was no room for negotiation over applications for ordinary coupons, permits and ration cards which made available a regular quota of motor spirit, electricity, food and cloth supplies. It was the applications for the supplementary coupons that supplied the context for verbal agility, lengthy expositions of human predicaments and ideological validations. Applications for supplementary rations of non-essential commodities like electricity, motor spirit, tyres and tubes contained, apart from the form itself, a letter stating the case of the applicant (why she or he needed the commodity). While it is entirely possible that applicants used the services of writers or what Bhavani Raman terms the ‘scribal bazaar’ 1 to compose these letters, I did not come across evidence to this effect. But it is my guess that the applicants for this class of commodities, who were government employees, school principals, theatre group managers, contractors, engineers, club owners and hostel authorities, were lettered in the legalese of writing applications. Their rise to opportunity and stature in colonial conditions must have also involved a certain finesse with words that could now be put to fruitful effect.
The discretion in allocating coupons in non-essential commodities must be understood in terms of how power relations operated in late colonial Delhi. It was particularly interesting that the Chairman of the Delhi Improvement Trust, a body associated with the amelioration of housing was appointed the first Provincial Rationing Authority (PRA) and the Motor Registration Officer was made the first Area Rationing Authority (ARA) who occupied a rank lower than the PRA. So, positions of power in wartime Delhi were incestuous where various urban departments intersected and folded into each other. At the same time, jurisdictions were different for different rationing authorities. In matters of food and cloth rationing, discretion lay with the Controller of Rationing—a post created during the war—while final decisions in motor spirit rationing vested with the Chief Commissioner of Delhi. Though it was understood that authorities, government employees, visiting dignitaries and citizens must be treated alike, it was important to make tentative concessions and word rejections gently with princes, visiting Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) and diplomats. But for the most part, the PRA, who enjoyed wide-ranging powers, subject only to the Chief Commissioner of Delhi, scrutinised applications for this class of commodities—motor spirit, electricity, tyres and tubes—with personal attention, reprimanding, condoning and admonishing even the few applicants he deigned to entertain. Applications were sometimes addressed directly to the Chief Commissioner, citing unkind rejection by the PRA. This practice of applying to higher authorities while implicitly criticising intermediate officials has its resonances in histories of petition-writing where too it was common to exploit ‘fissures within ruling classes’. 1
While applicants behaved like petitioners and applications resembled petitions in their willingness to exploit bureaucratic differences, some subtle but very important distinctions must be made. It may be true that just as petitions underlined sometimes cloyingly, the subservience of petitioners and defendants, 1 applications for motor spirit or electricity too reinforced the sovereign authority of the colonial state in their exhortations for compassion and statements of loyalty. However, this could not be done in obsequious terms because war considerations left little room for colonial pride. So, while applicants tried to appeal to the sense of justice of a superior official by surreptitiously invoking his authority over his subordinates, they were rarely able to win through bureaucratic hierarchy. The second related point of difference was that though applicants, like petitioners tried to exploit fissures in the bureaucracy, they almost never succeeded because officials vied with each other to demonstrate caution in dispensing coupons. Fissures, if they existed, were not out in the open. The Chief Commissioner reserved a special measure of scepticism for those applications which cited unfair treatment by a subordinate official even while he fussed over the ones the PRA was inclined to grant.
While food commodities were formally rationed in 1943, the rationing of motor spirit preceded this with the passing of the Motor Spirit Rationing Order in the year 1941 effective throughout British India. This Order rendered any acquisition or purchase or sale of motor spirit without relevant documents like special receipts, a license or coupons (ordinary, special and supplementary) illegal and punishable by law. The material properties and nomenclature of documents varied in correspondence to the hierarchical order of colonial subjects and the proximity of the applicant to imperial war work. Motor spirit, which was essential for aircraft, vehicles or machinery employed by the central government or a provincial government, was authorised only against special receipts. 1 Another class of vehicles was used for administrative purposes where central, provincial government and local authorities could not draw petrol without applying for special coupons valid for three months. Strangely enough, ambulances, travelling dispensaries and school buses were lumped together in this category. Stage carriages fell under a different nomenclature: owners of these vehicles had to fill out separate application forms to acquire petrol and against these, ordinary coupons which were valid usually for three months were issued. A form for ordinary coupons (though different) was also applicable for dealers or distributors engaged in the distribution and sale of motor vehicles. Meant as a concession to those who were already in possession of special or ordinary coupons but who needed more motor spirit to meet contingencies, supplementary coupons were issued, usually for a month—if the request was found to be bona fide and if it was deserving of consideration on grounds of war priority or compassion (see Figure 1). 1 It was these supplementary coupons that invited desperate applications and the applicant applied either because he had exhausted his coupons or because he anticipated contingencies which would require extra motor spirit.
The Motor Spirit Order set the tone, in a manner of speaking, for the rationing scheme of the late colonial regime in India. The Order urged rationing authorities to entertain applications only after exercising the greatest possible economy. 1 States and provinces often vied with each other to draw up an impressive report card of savings in the consumption of motor spirit. Sorted into various zones, provinces and states had to submit quarterly reports showing the provincial or state quota and the actual consumption in gallons. So heavy was the rationing across India’s provinces and states that taxi drivers clamoured for more petrol in Bombay and excessive regulation was feared to harm the health of Calcutta which was so prone to epidemics. 1 The Delhi administration was especially infused with a visceral enthusiasm to justify but more often, reject every claim, petty or significant. At one point, rationing authorities strove ambitiously to reduce consumption of petrol in Delhi from 4 ½ gallons to 3–3 ¾ gallons in two and a half months. 1 Delhi authorities were highly sensitive to charges of immoderation and often protested against even the slightest imputation of arbitrariness by producing lengthy explanations. 1 One such explanation the rationing authorities gave was that Delhi’s heavy fuel consumption was partially owing to its liberal policy vis-à-vis sales tax which it did not levy unlike neighbouring provinces like Punjab and United Provinces, thus encouraging inter-state vehicles to stop at Delhi to buy petrol. 1 The PRA or the next in command, the ARA, granted every coupon after utmost vigilance, having cautioned the applicant against future extravagance or whim. One newspaper reports the drastic change in the visual landscape of Delhi’s roads no more than four days after motor spirit rationing was introduced where push-bikes, tongas and motorcycles took the place of motorcars and buses. Judges and provincial authorities were reported to be using these new modes of transport. 1
Authorities interrogated the applicant to see if he was applying for the basic minimum and if he had explored alternative avenues like the use of animal transport and the rearranging of routes to reduce consumption. 1 In inquiring into each applicant’s case, Delhi rationing authorities simply assumed that it was not possible to grant all applications even when the basic requirements of eligibility were in place. They also sternly reminded applicants that what they considered average or ordinary consumption in peacetime was necessarily extravagant and luxurious in prevalent circumstances. On many occasions, the rationing authorities made it clear that even a native dignitary, a European official or a member of Indian royalty would not be bestowed with favour on a point of status alone. In fact, the PRA once expressed his inability to issue rations to visiting ruling princes who did not get coupons from their states. In addition, if the state was not officially listed as one with which Delhi could have a reciprocal arrangement of motor spirit, the rationing authorities were further disinclined to indulge royal dignitaries. 1 If royal status was no obvious candidate for generosity in coupons, administrative rank did not cut much ice either. Such was the frenzy of securing motor spirit that even the application of Sir Theodore Gregory, the Chairman of the Foodgrains Policy Committee and one of the architects of the scheme of food rationing in India, was not favoured with eager acquiescence when he once made a request. On the question of civilian consumption of motor spirit, the position was vacillating between curbing and permitting it. The fear of an uproar over a complete ban on civilian supplies clashed with the precious necessity to sate the voracious military appetite for motor spirit during the war. Though civilian provision of motor spirit was suspended sporadically, the Delhi administration decided that a complete freeze on the sale of petrol coupons as well as tyres for civilian consumption should be avoided. 1 Among the many factors preventing authorities from banning civilian claims entirely was the uneasy colonial admission that civilians comprised ‘the majority of taxpayers’. 1
Commodities like electricity and tyres and tubes were similarly guarded by ever-vigilant rationing authorities with a jealous eye. Here too, the burden of performance weighed heavily on the shoulders of applicants who were asked to prove that they had exhausted other options like kerosene lamps and ice coolers (in lieu of electricity-run lights and refrigerators) and re-treadable tyres. If authorities did not cite war priority as grounds for rejection in matters of electricity rationing, they informed the claimant instead that his application could not be entertained because a certain power plant was under repair. 1 All permissions, when granted, were qualified by a stipulation of the quantum of electric supply. Sometimes, this became the basis for considering a documentary request in the first place—if an application contained a war-related representation, it was indulged if the request involved an electric connection of only a minimum load. The directive to turn off lights was stressed for extraneous reasons as well, namely, to comply with Air Raid Protection (ARP) rules that necessitated enforced black-outs as a precaution against enemy attacks in the night.
The Tyre Rationing Order, 1944, classified applicants into fleet-owners (those owning a fleet of cars), stockists (who stocked tyres for trade or business), suppliers (manufacturers or re-treaders) and persons owning vehicles for daily transport. 1 All these classes of applicants were required to submit returns in a form of declaration giving details of the tyres, including the spares, in the cars they owned to the Area Rationing authorities. Along with these returns, such applicants were also to produce their registration certificates so that authorities could make appropriate entries on these certificates corresponding to the serial number assigned by the tyre manufacturer. 1 Noting down these serial numbers was the most laborious work for rationing staff as often the wheels had to be taken off the vehicles to examine the tyre number. Staff had to be trained to do this, paid additionally as removing and fitting each wheel needed 15 to 30 minutes. This perhaps is only one illustration among a thousand others that speaks of the labour and time that documents appropriated. Often the time in preparing a document translated into a vicious circle of marking commodities of consumption, scrambling for official representations, enlisting labour and chasing ID paper. When a supplier or stockist, fleet-owner or anybody else applied for a permit to purchase, acquire or replace new, old or re-treaded/re-treadable tyres, he entered the bureaucratic maze of procedural detail, documentary checks and paper protocol. 1
The narrative of apparent bureaucratic fairness and universal parsimony in colonial rationing was heavily contested. Delhi’s rationing authorities had to respond to charges of arbitrariness not simply from the Government of India but also from consuming publics who pointed out irregularities in electricity supply 1 and the priority that was given in sanctioning rationing documents to visiting MLAs and central government employees. The rationing of commodities like charcoal, coal and firewood was informally enforced because the import and related availability of these items as well as the railway wagons to transport them were not dependable. However, the regulation of these commodities was vital because of the close relationship of coal supply to electricity generation as pointed out by the Delhi provincial administration in advertisements to ‘Save Electricity’ that it repeatedly put out in newspapers. This being the case, the serious charge of pampering visiting MLAs in Delhi by granting them permits for soft coke, firewood, charcoal, coal and sugar was one that rationing authorities had to answer to. 1 While these representatives also complained about having to stay in unheated rooms in Delhi’s ebbing winter, it is unclear if they were also sanctioned temporary electric connections. Similarly, central government employees were reported to be receiving one-fifth rations of the available coal supplies which was ‘two to three times of what they are entitled to on a population basis’. 1 These privileges have to be juxtaposed with the treatment of dhobis (washermen), 2000 of whom went on a strike because they were not given enough starch and coal owing to which they had to use their own food ration cards to get the requisite supply. 1 If provincial authorities kept up the refrain that priority sections had to be entertained before anyone else, supplementary food coupons even to the heavy manual labourers were made available only after much public griping and comparisons with Bombay quotas for these classes. 1
The Rhetorical Model of the Application
In the middle years of the Second World War, rationing officials of the Delhi administration responded to an application for motor spirit
1
with barely-concealed impatience. The applicant in question, Sir Syed Sultan Ahmad, an official of good standing in the government, had asked for supplementary motor spirit coupons to compensate for those he had used up in ferrying the body of his private secretary from Delhi to Lucknow. In his application, Sultan Ahmad gestured at the paternal sense of loss he experienced thereby justifying his decision to hire a lorry to take the body all the way to Lucknow. The Chief Commissioner, Askwith, sanctioned the coupons but added bitterly,
...you will allow me to say that I do not think that the use made of the coupons previously issued to you was justified. Every transport vehicle has its own allotment of motor spirit, and if a lorry was to be used at all for the journey to Lucknow, the owner should have been made to use his own coupons. But apart from the question of procedure, I do not think it is a reasonable proposition that in present conditions, motor spirit should be used for such a purpose. After all, there are burial grounds in Delhi and any of us who may happen to die during the war must surely be content to be buried here, even though our families may lie elsewhere. You may have been upset at the time, but I think you will agree with the consideration on principle.
1
Syed Sultan Ahmad’s application for motor spirit was one among many representations that rationing officials were loath to indulge during the colonial war effort. This application, like many other applications for one or the other rationed commodity, appealed to the colonial official’s conscience and compassion, both of which were under great duress during the war. To the rationing official in wartime Delhi, Sultan Ahmad was not alone in experiencing an upheaval—he was enacting the most basic emotions of the human condition, namely, grief, yet one that he should have gauged carefully in the fraught and imposing context of the war. Whether the claim was for electricity, cement, motor spirit or tyres and tubes, all rationed commodities in Delhi during the war, the colonial rationing official steeled himself against the emotionally charged entreaties of the everyday implicit in the petition-like applications of native and European residents and visitors. At the same time, the British Indian state, keen to be responsive to its colonised population, not desiring them to starve, rebel or disrupt the war effort, sanctioned food and cloth to as wide a cross-section as possible.
Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie Zemon Davis both comment on the ‘rhetorical dimension’ of documents and texts where legal performances of speaking the truth invariably involve narrative skills of story-telling. 1 In the words of Annelise Riles, it is possible to ‘treat realism as a rhetorical stance, a matter of presentation rather than simple fact’. 1 In the context of late colonialism, the applications for rationed commodities invoked affects of kinship through rhetorical devices. Some of these applications were written by officials in some other department to rationing officials—even government functionaries and colonial representatives had to employ written forms of oratory to justify their claims. Among other things, the rationalities of rule (civilising mission, moral reform, imperial trade), personal accounts of conjugal or filial obligation, conceptions of what constituted ‘war priority’ work found expression in the rhetorical model of the application.
Requests indexing the political ethic of compassion were made in connection with electricity and motor spirit applications. The urgent tone of the relative of the dying or the ailing patient was conspicuous in the representations accompanying these application forms too. While permanent connections were not allowed for domestic purposes by the Labour Department, applications for renewal were sought on the plea of compassion to allow for the comfort of a sick person. This request for a residential connection seems to have been granted on the condition that consumption should not exceed 12 watts. 1 A government employee, Kishore Lal, sought such a connection for his wife attaching a few reports and certificates attested by medical authorities bolstering his claim. Not all medical cases were regarded with a conciliatory eye. An application from R.R. Bhatia working for New India Colour Company imploring authorities for a permanent connection on grounds of his wife’s deteriorating health was turned down.
Bhatia’s own compassion was mirrored in his plea for the officials’ solicitude. He wrote,
Your humble petitioner’s wife has been suffering from respiratory trouble for the last two or three years and at the special advice of the medical officers under whose treatment she has remained from time to time, your humble petitioner underwent a huge expense and built a house in Jawahar Nagar Subzimandi.…your humble petitioner has again got his wife examined by the Additional Civil Surgeon Delhi and he is again of the opinion that your humble petitioner’s wife should not live in a house lit with oil lamps as the fumes will be harmful. It should not be out of the place for your petitioner to mention here that he has undergone a very enormous expense to provide his wife with a suitable living abode and if she has to quit these premises for want of an electric connection, it will be almost impossible for your petitioner to find her suitable accommodation elsewhere, and the consequences must therefore be serious so far as her life is concerned.
1
Bhatia refers to himself as petitioner instead of applicant, calling attention to the regime’s propensity to treat applications for the rationed commodity as appeals to a less formalised and legalised order of bureaucratic consideration. Bhatia produced along with his application form and request a rash of medical certificates attested by the Civil Surgeon and Chief Medical Officer of the province showing his wife to suffer from kerosene fumes making out thereby a case for electric lighting. 1 While an extended connection was sanctioned ‘on compassionate grounds’, the Chief Commissioner categorically denied a permanent connection saying that this would open the door to an endless stream of applications. It is noteworthy that this letter backing the application form was written using the Company letterhead even though the request was for domestic, non-commercial purposes signifying the applicant’s recognition of the legal force of documentary conventions and by extension, his enhanced status on office paper.
A plea for compassion could not be an irrationally stated one. Emotions represented evaluative and ethical judgments 1 and so, a person invoking compassion or giving vent to feelings of rage was not intrinsically being irrational. The request for an application on grounds of compassion was however a rational one not simply in content but in form too. In other words, the applicant sought to conform to rational-legal standards such as medical certificates, employment certificates and recommendation letters as he recognised the validity of his claim within the documents regime. A ‘documentary regime of verification’ in the modern sense involves the crystallisation of identity through an evolving set of documentary procedures which are rationalised and systematised over time. 1 But such a regime also presumes that state functions and bureaucratic transactions are embedded in technologies of writing where documents bear the seal of legitimate and legible sovereign force.
Kishorelal and Bhatia recognised that behind the certificate or a representation of identity, there were pre-existing traditions of verifying claims through written evidence. In this tradition, the production of certain documents dispelled all official mistrust or suspicion about the validity, the authenticity or the truthful basis of a claim. While the medical certificate conformed to these rationales, it was a document unlike others. It enjoyed a referential significance that was tied to the opinion of an expert outside the realm of government. Though it was a piece of paper sealed and sanctioned by a medical expert outside the government, it was nevertheless recognised by the government. While its production within a bureaucratic context was part of procedure, its creation was not, as it was the product of networks of mutual understanding and trust between doctor and patient. The medical certificate was a document that settled identity, affirmed the plea of the patient, ascertained the fact of illness beyond reasonable doubt and gave a name to the medical condition and physical liability of the patient. It determined the cause of illness, corroborated the diagnosis and pitted the voice of the expert against lay opinion or the official voice in crucial criminal and legal suits. 1
In determining eligibility and entitlement in official categories of compassion, the medical certificate stood out as an irrefutable document marking the body of the person for empowerment. The medical certificate may be exposed to scepticism about the veracity of the claim to illness implicit within, whether it was a product of a hand-shake between the mercenary doctor and the malingering welfare claimant. But in this context of wartime rationing, this document’s rationality and supreme claim to consideration was measured not against its claim to truthfulness but in terms of a superior bureaucratic rationality. It would appear that the war superimposed on the bureaucratic frame an authority to deny and constrict and the colonial rationing document—which may very well be considered the prototype of ration cards post-independence—stood in for a regime that balanced compassion and objectivity with a bureaucratic passion for thrift. If this is one explanation of why the veracity of claims in medical certificates was irrelevant, one must also take into consideration the customary practice of bureaucracies to brush aside arguments about the truth or falsity of documents when bureaucratic actors are merely interested in achieving certain outcomes. 1
The ‘Interpretive Community’ of the Document
Applications citing ‘dire need’ on grounds of war work were somewhat different in tone and entreaty from applications invoking the government’s compassion in private matters. An applicant invoking ‘dire need’ in the context of war work suggested that the denial of electricity or motor spirit coupons (to a group of individuals or an institution) could seriously compromise or slow down the war effort while an applicant citing personal need argued that his case was urgent even though it may impede the war endeavour. Applicants in the former category gestured at the immense load of war work they were labouring under, arguing that an official deprivation of motor spirit would constitute an egregious and grievous lapse in facilitating the quick completion of a war-related project. One application gestured at the loss that would be incurred by the government in not sanctioning electricity to an institution well known for its war efforts in educating government employees. This application, written by the Honorary Secretary, Government of India Press Youngsters Institution in New Delhi, reads,
This institution is finding great difficulties owing to not having electricity. The aims and objects of our Institution and the sphere of the usefulness of its activities are very well known to the Government. We would like to submit that this is a public institution run for the benefit and welfare of the employees of the Govt. of India Press. We are running an adult education Centre, a Library, reading room, stores, Civic Guards Club, National War Front, war efforts work, etc., all of which you will agree are of great service to the employees of the Govt. This institution is very well known for its war efforts….You will kindly see for yourself that some of our activities, e.g., Adult Education, etc., will have to come down to a dead stop, if the use of electric light is denied to us.
1
Many of these letters tried to smuggle in the rhetorical counterfactual of what the government would do in the absence of their institution and the invaluable services they provided. On the one hand, such questions were pitched at a quotidian level where the everyday competence of public institutions exacted a certain infrastructural rigor provided by a commodity like electricity. On the other, the everyday gathered around itself a new vitality when cast in the mould of the war. Colonial authorities responded to these applications through multiple ‘reading strategies’ 1 where interpretations of the rationing document would often privilege bureaucratic cognition over legislative norms. The ‘interpretive community’ 1 in the sense that Skaria uses it, was founded on the ability to reproduce domination through the varying and episodic interpretations of texts under different circumstances often to the effect of exclusion. In the case of rationing documents, textual domination did not translate into conditions of extreme disenfranchisement or violence as contracts, maps and lists were demonstrably capable of vis-à-vis the subjugation of tribal, forest-residing groups or ryots. 1 Here, the implications of interpretive latitude around the rationing document were much less terrible. The various rationing authorities, who together constituted this interpretive community, retained a severe stance towards granting coupons through broadly stated refrains of overstretched resources, failure on the applicant’s part to explore alternative avenues and more generally, charges of profligate use of coupons and fraud.
The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) demanded a power connection for their refrigerator for cooling arrangements showing that they were entertaining servicemen and that unless the government provided for refrigeration, their institution and, by implication, the empire would suffer the charge of poor colonial health standards. 1 A moving theatre company requested electric supply for a prolonged period stating their contribution to the propaganda campaign against the Japanese invasion. Their application, supported by the form and a recommendation demonstrating that their production and free shows of the anti-Japanese play named Hindustani Sipahi—Japan ki bhool (Indian soldier—Japan’s mistake) where donations went into the war fund, entitled them, as powerful propagandist servants of the colonial state in wartime, to an extended power connection. 1
Yet another application citing dire need was written by the Executive Engineer on behalf of the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) requesting rationing authorities to sanction motor spirit coupons for transporting coal dust to brick kilns in connection with war work citing the limited time at hand to finish the project of construction, part of wartime building operations for officials in the Lodi Road neighbourhood. The PRA and the Chief Commissioner were sceptical of the claim owing to the seeming aversion of the CPWD to use animal-drawn transport or charcoal gas-run vehicles and the relative proximity of the work site from the place of transportation. 1 On another application for granting petrol rations to the North West Frontier Propaganda Van, rationing officials had to acquiesce and give in to demands owing to the Van’s role in the dissemination of war propaganda material in connection with the military campaign against Japan. 1 These applications had at their heart the rhetoric of internal government; the language of legal entitlement and wartime authority in these ration applications was of one piece with the vocabulary of power embodying colonial policies to ration India and control its economy to suit imperial purpose. These applications featured the colonial state directing its gaze inwards in order to reconcile superficially conflicting rationales of authority, namely, the rationale to save resources needed to conduct the war and to nourish men and machines required to conduct the war.
Some applications hinted that the colonial civilising mission in India would be compromised unless demands of the kind the claimant made were met. For instance, a School Principal implored the issue of motor spirit supplementary coupons for school buses to pick up children from across the province and warned that a refusal would seriously jeopardise the fulfilment of the lofty ideal of the education of the European and the native subject. The Principal of New Delhi Church School and the Chaplain of New Delhi, J.D. Tytler wrote,
During this past winter the number of children attending the school has increased considerably, due largely to the increased population of Delhi and New Delhi. Owing to the inadequacy of the ration allowed the school was forcibly closed one day last week because the supply of coupons had run out. The Authority, after repeated requests, verbal and otherwise, allowed a supplementary ration for this month, but his last letter makes it quite clear that he has no intention of raising our quota….Furthermore, I am at a loss to understand what would more greatly ‘constitute a just cause for any increase in the motor spirit ration sanctioned’ than ‘the fact that the number of children attending school’ has ‘increased considerably’. Many parents, through frequent transfers and other wartime conditions, have for some time found it most difficult to give their children adequate education, and it has been a real pleasure to me to be able to supply their need to some extent…Although the school has been open for only three years we presented five pupils last winter for the Cambridge Examinations, and will be presenting at least seven this year. I do not think it is asking too much that, in supplying an essential service for the next generation in this country, we should have at our disposal whatever facility is essential, including, for Delhi certainly, adequate transport.
1
This letter sent along with the application form was an appeal to the Chief Commissioner to take a sympathetic view of the irrefutably ‘just cause’ of keeping the school open. Implicit was a plea to the higher authority to see the injustice in the rash decision of the PRA to deny the request to increase the supplementary coupons. The tone of the application was at the same time practical, and demonstrative of the romance of the colonial project of education: the Principal made out the practical case (an increase in school children) for imperial consideration. However, neither the highest rationing authority, namely the Chief Commissioner, nor the PRA was touched by the lofty reasoning contained in his multiple letters. They only chided this and other Principals for taking in more children than they could handle, in terms of transport, and for not being bold or original in exploring other avenues of transporting children. 1
The ‘Emotional Economy’ of Colonial Rationing Documents
The archive of rationing documents boiled with the intensity of colonial officials’ caustic instructions, nasty asides and verbal jousts with claimants and colleagues. The institutionalised mandate for compassion clashed with veritable indignation when the official encountered lazy spending in the application. The ‘emotional economy’ 1 of the rationing document was also indexed in some of the applicants’ charged defence of intimacy to the wartime effort, where the question, ‘if not me, then whom?’ was left hanging in the air. In many senses, this intimacy was antithetical to the kind of ‘hierarchical intimacy’ 1 turning on ‘ritual address to a divine sovereign’ 1 evidenced in petitions of the nineteenth century. The letters requesting supplementary rations neither featured an appeal to paternal indulgence nor were they marked by religious undertones of civility and obsequiousness. 1
As I already discussed, though applicants tried to reverse unfavourable decisions by appeals to higher authorities, they had to do so very delicately. They could not hope to win by playing higher and lower officials against each other as all authorities were engaged in competition to be war-conscious. Their only chance was to word their requests in terms of proximity to war work or insuperable personal exigencies. And applicants for non-essential commodities, who were European or Western-educated, gainfully employed Indians, knew that an overly deferential frame of address would immediately alienate a chain of authorities who scoured every application for incriminating reasons for rejection, which in this case would be an insincere, nepotistic bid to win favour. Therefore, intimacy was fashioned with the official in a temporal sense through the object that was dearest to him, namely, winning the war or alternatively that which he could not ignore, namely, the exigent circumstances of extreme illness and impending death.
The argument that ‘affective knowledge’ 1 lay at the heart of political rationality was also borne out by the treatment of applications on par with petitions in the sense that they too brooked information about popular sentiments. 1 If petitions revealed festering grievances and suppressed anger of ordinary and affluent subjects in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in colonial metropolises and colonies, applications—which were documents signalling a different genre of materiality 1 —also bubbled with resentment. In order to claim additional food and cloth rations for festivals, weddings and funerals, a concession that was furiously debated by the colonial government in various provinces and states, Indians had to procure applications for supplementary rations which they could naturally obtain only if they possessed a ration card.
Almost every religious community in Delhi was mutinous against the colonial government at some point during the war for not allaying their fears vis-à-vis their religious expectations in this time of austerity. The President of the Provincial Majlis Ittihad Millat for instance urged the Viceroy of Delhi to give Muslims supplementary rations during Ramzan as Muslims needed sugar for making syrup with ice which they drank when they broke the fast. 1 So did the President of the Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee in the year 1943 on behalf of the Delhi Sikh Sangats—he expressed the agitation of the Sikh community over the refusal of the rationing authorities to grant additional rations on the sacred occasion of the martyrdom celebration of Guru Teg Bahadur. 1 The weekly magazine Diwan of the Sikhs warned of violent protests if supplementary quantities of rationing articles, possibly wheat, were not made available for the langar, which they argued, was ‘an absolutely essential right’ of the Sikhs. 1
It is however not clear whether these exhortations took the form of covering letters to application forms or petitions to the government as they were reported rather than documented in the form that they appeared, in the National Archives of India (NAI) files. Emotionally charged applications were probably common with regard to cloth rationing where communities were given the option of applying for extra cloth in the instance especially of funerals. The cloth ration permit was perhaps an exception among documents in a crucial sense—it was the only document that allotted rations to dead persons. 1 The creation of applications for supplementary coupons for essential commodities like cloth and food was designed for special classes like soldiers and heavy manual labourers. However, colonial authorities could scarcely afford to ignore the mass upsurge of religious fervour which touches everyday cultural life at a crucial imperial juncture. Festivals, weddings and funerals as well as embassy functions and private parties hosted by officials were allowed under regulated conditions of the various wartime Guest Control Orders and the Special Articles (Restriction of Acquisition) Orders. Honouring ‘structures of sentiment’ 1 attached to everyday life as well as imperial dignity—which could be compromised if diplomatic functions were forbidden—were imperatives underlying the different categories of applications.
Colonial officials in Delhi were loath to entertain missionary applications as they were fearful of opening the floodgates to applicants from other communities. Evangelical Christian leaders were not entertained as evidenced in the treatment of the motor spirit application of the Delhi Chaplain’s request for additional rations. Rationing authorities in Delhi believed that by sanctioning this request, they would be vulnerable to other communities which also demanded concessions for attendance at places of religious worship. The Muslim leader, Khwaja Hasan Nizami, for instance, sought rations for his community for purposes of travel to the mosque. The Secretary to Chief Commissioner wrote that entertaining the Christian community would be tantamount to opening the Pandora’s Box of religious demands for motor spirit. 1
The Discursive Field of the Application Form
If applications excelled in a dizzying rhetoric of empire, war and cultural nationalism, the application process embodied narratives of bureaucracy that set trapdoors through which applicants could easily fall. In this sense, it is important to trace the bureaucratic registers of truth in the formal application form and how these are related to subjective acts of description. The applicant could not possibly know in what light his own assertion of certain truths made him appear. Within the form of the application, there was a strong likelihood of an interpretive misfit between what the claimant thought was a specific aspect of proof and the bureaucratic reading of his representation as a whole. Such a reading secreted selective information, highlighted certain details and suppressed others for purposes of determining eligibility.
Let us, for the purposes of this discussion, take the application form for tyre rationing. The claimant had to submit a lengthy application complete with all the columns that made him open to scrutiny on various fronts—whether his use for the vehicle was urgent (as cited in the essential purpose of the vehicle), his legal credentials (if he owned a document representing his identity), his adherence to legal channels of ownership (whether his vehicle was registered or not), his compliance to the current wartime regulations (whether he drew petrol rations through the right channels). He had to mention the basic and supplementary coupons he was drawing and he had to prove his status as a worthy applicant for a certain class of rations (by providing a statement of his profession, business, occupation and business address). 1 If these were details that at once corroborated the status of an applicant as a respectable law-abiding subject and responsible motor vehicle user in colonial Delhi, they also established his eligibility to receive tyres, a scarce commodity during the war. A hoarder or a tax evader, for instance, was neither a good colonial subject in normal conditions nor was he worthy of ration supplies during the war. 1
Documents attested not simply to the identity of the holder, but also to his criteria of eligibility and his status as a citizen of colonial India. Ironically enough, an applicant found that in satisfying criteria establishing him as a respectable candidate for everyday consumption, he often convinced the rationing official that there was nothing special about his case that entitled him to supplementary coupons of petrol or tyre permits during the war. An applicant who desired a permit for a new tyre or tyres was required to surrender unserviceable tyre or tyres while those who applied for re-treaded tyres had to surrender used re-treadable tyres as emphasised by the Controller of Rationing. 1 In setting down this rule, rationing authorities were of the firm conviction that all tyres were re-treadable and re-usable. Advertisements were placed in newspapers advising applicants to first apply for permits to re-tread old tyres (see Figure 2). And barring a few heavy transport vehicle owners, every applicant should be able to surrender re-treadable tyres: if he was not capable of doing this, his application for a permit opened the case for re-consideration of his registration. Was he worthy of owning a vehicle if he could not keep his tyres in good shape? An application thus rendered the owner vulnerable where he least suspected it.
On the face of it, it would appear that the formal application form for ‘a new supply or additions to connected load and/or maximum demand’ of electricity (see Figure 3) privileged those who could assert power and status. The column asking for the nature of service or the use to which the electric connection was sought to be put lists three options, namely residential, industrial or public building. When read along with the internal correspondence as well as the Tyre Rationing Order, it would certainly appear that the prejudice against occupants of residential buildings was ingrained in the form. The field listed in the table of the form, asking for details of the industry to be served, functioned to remind the applicant that the rationing regime of non-essential commodities was weighted in favour of those who were contributing palpably to the colonial edifice. While the war itself was not indexed in the form, the question of what industry was served was probably intended to satisfy the colonial evaluating authority about the adequacy of the application to the war effort. In its use of terms like ‘sanction’, ‘shifts’, ‘industry’, ‘load maturing’ and ‘registered address’, this form taken as a whole fulfilled the marginalisation of the name and the personal identity of the claimant. The use of the word ‘consumer’ in this form rather than claimant or holder as used in other application forms only reinforced the relative irrelevance of the applying subject.
This is starkly observed in the response of one applicant, who, in the field marked name, chose to instead enter his designation as Chairman of a Committee (see Figure 3). The fields spelling out questions like load enjoyed as on a certain date, additional sanction subsequent to a certain date, the amount in terms of kilowatts of electricity applied for were there to help the rationing authority assess the discretion of the applicant’s spending as well as to determine the prudence of granting an application request given the electric power available under any given plant. It is also noteworthy that these fields were common: those ‘consumers’ who applied in their capacity of service in industrial or public buildings were clubbed together with their residential counterparts. The constraints of available load, whether the demand was for a temporary connection or a permanent one, the fragility of power plants overtaxed by war work were imposing on all applicants as reflected in the common nature of the fields. In other words, the various fields conveyed that even applications by occupants of public buildings, public servants contributing to the war effort and dignitaries would be entertained subject to certain conditions.
Rudimentarily, micro-practices like seals, stamps, signatures, dates, counterfoils, serial numbers may be regarded as bureaucratic fetishes that serve to entrench Weberian norms of attestation, attribution and organisation. But a close examination of their use in the colonial rationing regime shows them up as rhetorical utterances of documents within the ‘graphic genre’. 1 Hull writes that bureaucrats strive through their employment of procedures and artifacts to ritually remove traces of individual authorship and to discursively locate individual actions within an impersonal and thoroughly rationalised corporate order. 1 Another dimension that scholars point out is the evidentiary value of a revenue instrument which is at the same time a graphic artifact like stamp paper. One such scholar writes of the disciplinary effects of protocols like signing, dating and using purchased stamp paper which was deemed necessary to deter excessive petitioning, to establish the identity of the petitioner and to bind the petitioner to the veracity of her or his claims. 1 The sheer ubiquity and the ritual reproduction of graphic artifacts thus served more than to merely foreground the authority of the issuing bureaucratic rulers.
Following these scholars, I would like to show that these artifacts, taken separately and collectively, tried to elaborately and narratively enact the legal materiality of handling corruption. The various artifactual practices like registration numbers, coupon books, certificates and counterfoils were instituted to remind the applicant, the issuing bureaucratic authority, the clerk, the dealer and the vendor that they were engaged in legitimate transactions and to socialise them into the appropriate context of using them. The various graphic artifacts and signs of the colonial wartime regime were garrulous about the elaborate protocols that they imposed and the bureaucratic attempts to tie commodities to documents and documents to persons. The paper regime of wartime rationing was boastful as it performed the minute marking of the commodity where even something as unremarkable as a tyre was linked to a person and a document. Each tyre was identified, (usable or re-treadable) correlated to its owner, whether a stockist, a fleet-owner or a civilian customer and marked within the document by its serial number. The relation of permits, licenses and coupons to documentary protocols and applicants was intricate in that certification of the vehicle, authentication of ownership and attestation of status of applicant attached themselves to a sub-sect of the commodity such as re-treadable tyres and stage carriages.
Equally importantly, different nomenclatures of the document such as ordinary coupons, special coupons, special receipts, gathered around well-classified sets of applicants such as central government and provincial government employees, stage carriage owners, dealers, fleet-owners and stockists. Colonial authorities sought to check corruption by instituting safeguards circumscribing the movement and standardising the issue of documents. It was forbidden to supply petrol except at the legally ordained points of supply and against the surrender of receipts or coupons attached to coupon or receipt books. 1 This was to ensure that the claimant had not obtained these coupons or receipts in black or through fraudulent means. Legal practice of curbing corruption involved marking various objects, the commodity, rationed items and at other times, the document. Tyres were marked, cloth was stamped, vehicles were issued registration numbers and applications bearing tyre numbers were clipped, sealed and counterfoiled. Identification documents were not valid unless they bore the counter-signature of the appropriate authority like the Provincial Rationing Authority or the Director of Civil Aviation.
Things, if marked intricately, securely fastened themselves to persons and functions and steadfastly spoke the truth about the legality of a transaction and the identity of those executing the transaction. Underlying these marking practices was an endeavour to fashion a discourse of legality where objects were made distinct through the knowledge (serial numbers, signatures, etc.) inscribed in them and where objects and persons were correlated through a repetitive narrative process of identification, verification and authentication. Such narrative rituals may have been all the more expedient and self-reinforcing in the face of misappropriation and negligence in handling a bewildering plethora of multi-striped applications, rationed commodities and paper. 1 In Delhi, there were plenty of instances of black marketing in petrol coupons. A range of actors like military lorry drivers, shopkeepers, servants in the Chinese Commissioner’s office, Public Works Department overseers and clerks were found culpable of crimes in rationing documents. 1
Conclusion
When the application for the rationed commodity resembled a petition, it had very significant implications for the materiality of law and the bureaucratic frame of colonial power. If colonial discretion spawned various rhetorical possibilities of the document, the documents generated during this period necessitated specialised forms of rhetoric. Owing to the interpretive community of the document, there was no saying what aspect of the application form became privileged over the other. A good applicant for motor spirit was also required to be a good motor vehicle user and a systematic tax payer. So though applicants attempted to sway authorities, they often had no control over the light in which their assertions would be read. This article also raises questions of coloniser–colonised intimacy, cultural upsurges and colonial accountability to the affective lives of their subjects, as they feature in modes of address and the genre of supplementary rationing documents. It is important to distinguish various documentary claims of intimacy and the separate colonial discourses surrounding them such as colonial war priorities, compassion underlying legal-political rationality and living community norms. And finally, I tried to show how counterfoils, receipts and other graphic artifacts attached to the document were contrived to discipline various actors, wily middlemen, complicit officials and rationed subjects into comprehending the legal liability of their transactions. The micro-narratives of documents thus yield many insights on empire, bureaucratic discretion and its challenges, and the production of enumerated subjectivity during critical imperial encounters like the Second World War.