Abstract
There has recently been a resurgence of interest on the part of historians in the phenomenon known as ‘piracy’, a misleading term as it amalgamates many different strands and layers in terms of spatiality as well as temporality. Particularly confusing is the frequent tendency to conflate piracy with privateering, a form of maritime enterprise that was regulated by states. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, privateers received lettres de course from royal authorities, which made their predatory activities legitimate. Things started to change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when there was a clash between older and newer notions of rights, as Britain sought to impose a uniform ‘law of the sea’ everywhere by mustering its enormously enhanced naval strength. In the Indian Ocean, the major threat to the British came from French privateering activities, which reached their apex in 1802–05 with the Surcouf brothers but ended after the British conquest of the islands of Réunion and île de France (Mauritius) in 1810. The East India Company (EIC), as a newly established territorial power, was however confronted with a different menace represented by the existence, in the periphery of its domain, of petty local sovereigns, who condoned or even directly organized predatory maritime activities. This was particularly the case on the littoral of western India, which Lakshmi Subramanian, well known as a historian of the area in the period of the transition to colonialism, has chosen as the focus of her study on piracy, a work which is at once engaging and problematic. Engaging because she has mustered an impressive array of sources drawn from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century colonial archive, including the little-used Walker of Bowland Papers at the National Library of Scotland, and has managed to skilfully produce a coherent narrative centred around the ways in which the EIC tried to impose a measure of (colonial) order upon the fractious world of the northern part of the western Indian littoral, the area of Kathiawar, Cutch and Sindh, known in Company parlance as the ‘Northward’, where entire coastal communities derived their livelihood from an economy of maritime predation. Problematic, because Subramanian tends ultimately to impose upon her rich empirical material a framework of interpretation in terms of ‘subaltern resistance’, which appears to me a bit of a straightjacket and is not always supported by the evidence she has gathered.
The first three chapters of the book focus on the colonial project of the EIC and show, through a close analysis of a lot of official and non-official correspondence, how difficult it was for the Company officials in the region to reconcile their empirical ethnographic observations with the avowed aim of the superior authorities in Bombay, Calcutta and London of ‘normalizing’ a region in which sovereignty over maritime spaces was not regulated by any ‘law of the sea’. It was basically a reflection of the rapports de forces between different small land-based powers, which treated the sea as a resource to supplement their meagre land-based revenues. Predation at sea was a way of life for various coastal communities that did not perceive their actions in the kind of binary framework of legality/illegality in which the Company saw them. Subramanian draws a picture of some of these communities, but the limitations of the colonial archive, for which there is no apparent substitute, make the exercise perilous, as the historian finds herself torn between reading the colonial sources along (as advocated by Ann Laura Stoler) and against the grain (as recommended by Ranajit Guha). Colonial officials’ perceptions of these littoral societies of the ‘Northward’, which had remained outside the ambit of Company rule, were informed by a tendency to essentialize the so-called ‘pirates’ as born predators, while ignoring the economic compulsions which led men, in a region characterized by poor agricultural prospects, to seek their subsistence through predation at sea. There was however a degree of disagreement amongst them. Some Company officials advocated a measure of compromise with so-called ‘piratical’ entities, thinking that they could actually be transformed into participants of the colonial order and instrumentalized in the service of attempts by the Company to exercise political control over the area and to recruit there the manpower it needed for its Bombay dockyards. Others were in favour of a policy of outright coercion through the use of the Bombay Marine, which was not however a sufficiently formidable force to inspire terror in the minds and hearts of experienced seamen, who knew how to exploit the difficult terrain, with its multiplicity of creeks and inlets, to their advantage. As a result, in the period between 1790 and 1805, the Gordian knot was never really cut. This is nicely summarized in the title of Chapter 2, ‘The Company at sea’, the pun serving to underline the anxieties felt by the custodians of the new colonial order in the face of a reality not amenable to their clear-cut categories. In a telling conclusion to the chapter, Subramanian writes, ‘The Company’s efforts to articulate an uncompromising stand on a military solution were thus undermined by local complexities, the scarcity of resources, the challenges of working in a difficult topography and the dispersed and nested aspect of predation and its politics in the region’ (p. 102). This led after 1805 to an attempt to forge closer links with some of these littoral polities, in which a major role was played by the resident of Baroda, Colonel Walker of Bowland.
Chapter 3 focuses on the latter’s intervention, as he embarked on an ambitious ethnographic project aimed at a better understanding of these societies in the hope of enrolling some of the so-called ‘pirates’ and their sponsors as auxiliaries of the colonial project. The focus of Walker’s attentions was a set of petty rulers of Cutch known as the Okha sardars, who had proved recently to be a nuisance to British shipping. In 1807, Walker sent an agent, one Sundarjee Shivjee, himself a former ‘pirate’, on a mission to convince them to ‘renounce piracy’ and to restitute property confiscated from merchants. He had in mind some treaty arrangement, but he first tried to gain a better understanding of the genealogy of ‘piracy’ in the area which could serve that purpose. He proved more perceptive than most of his colleagues in being able in particular to distinguish between ‘piracy’ and forms of privateering organized by the local rulers. By 1809, through the signing of a series of treaties with local sovereigns, Walker seemed on his way to achieve the ‘pacification’ of the littoral, which had been the ultimate goal of the EIC. But then things came crashing down, as a new spate of fairly spontaneous piratical attacks developed in Cutch in 1809–10, leading the Company to rely increasingly on force rather than diplomacy to achieve its goal of suppressing piracy.
Chapter 4 looks at this new phase; noting that by 1816 ‘piracy assumed especially striking dimensions but without following a clear trajectory’ (p. 159).Subramanian then deploys new conceptual tools to interpret the phenomenon, in particular the notion of ‘maritime radicalism’, which she borrows from a spate of recent writings by maritime historians. She claims that ‘pirates…were disposed to flout authority, even that of their immediate bosses and sponsors, and to take to the sea, thereby demonstrating a spontaneity and militant rebelliousness that commanded its own political register’ (p. 186). Piracy would have thus evolved from being a predatory activity condoned by local big men to being a manifestation of rebelliousness on the part of smaller fry. In spite of Subramanian’s attempt to read forms of subaltern political consciousness in some testimonies of ‘pirates’ included in the colonial archive, to me the nature of that political consciousness remains elusive. In particular, the link to the ‘global’ maritime radicalism seems tenuous at best, a coincidence rather than an actual connection. Subramanian herself is well aware that she is on treacherous ground there. She concedes, perhaps a bit rhetorically, that ‘[t]here is no reason to frame predation in terms of anti-Company resistance’, but adds, ‘nor indeed to look at it as entirely ad hoc and random action’ (p. 189). She proposes to look at pirate intentionality rather than consciousness, which would allow ‘to look at piracy as a very distinct mode of subaltern action and practice’ (ibid.). She then engages in some rather far-fetched speculation about the possibility of a link between the surge of piracy in Cutch and the French revolutionary wars for which there is not a shred of empirical evidence. She then somewhat retreats by recognizing that there are no easy answers to the questions raised by her material but returns to the theme of resistance at the end of the chapter. On the whole, I find this chapter to be characterized by a certain degree of confusion, which makes it the least convincing in the book.
Chapter 5 introduces a more systematic methodological discussion about the ways to read a fragmented colonial archive, which could have been better placed at the beginning of the book. There is an interesting attempt at situating colonial discourse within a kind of longue durée view of the history of Gujarat. Subramanian underlines a degree of complicity between the colonial narrative and a certain kind of regional elite discourse that tends to put Rajputs at the centre of things while overlooking the role of other Muslim and low-caste groups, who were an integral and essential part of littoral society.
A short Epilogue seeks to reframe the problem of piracy within the framework of ‘littoral society’, a notion first suggested by Michael Pearson, that Subramanian finds has not been worked upon much. She suggests it could help link the history of the coastal areas of Gujarat to more global questions regarding the relationship of state and society such as have been raised in a different context by James Scott and Wilhelm Van Schendel in advancing the idea of ‘Zoomia’, a kind of interstitial space where state authority was never fully established.
To sum up, we have a rich historical essay here, which throws a new light on little-studied aspects of early Indian colonial history, and links them with broader themes regarding the attempts by colonial powers to control maritime spaces and the kind of resistance these attempts met with on the part of local coastal societies. By overemphasizing the trope of subaltern resistance without much empirical evidence to sustain it, Subramanian is however in danger of seeing the substantial heuristic gains of her work overlooked.