TIRUPASUR: A VILLAGE LOST IN HISTORY AND MEMORY

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

THE GOOGLE IMAGE OF TIRUPASUR

The name "Tirupasur" has always hung arounf memory as long as I can remember. Except its presence as an initial, there was hardly any trace that the place has a rich history and is well worth recounting. The Kosatalaiyar River drains into the famous Poondi Reservoir, and its tributaried provide streamlets that carry water to the Puzhal Lake and the lands around the town were rich agricultural zone of medieval Tondaimandalam with Knchipuram as an important weaving and urban centre. Prehistric tools have been excavated in the area and the Poondi eservoir itself is seeded with a number of urn burials daing to the first three centuries AD. Traces of Black and Red ware abound and there is also evidence of iron smelting in the region right up to the end of the seventeenth century. The rich soil and tank fed irrigation meant that Tirupasur  was rich in culture,

The earliest reference to the place is found in the Third Tirumurai of  Appar, the celebrated Tiruppasur Tiruttangagam,hymn the Lord of the place is called, pasur meviya param sudar, the Divine Light of Pasur. The Vachisvaram Temple named in the hyman gives Tirupasur its status as a padal petrra sthalam. and is one of 16 important shrines of Tondai mandalam. In the hyman cited above,Tirupapasur Tirukuruntokai, Appar describes the Lord as the destroyer of Kala (Time),and the ne who danced with the snake, who begged for his food with the skull (Brahma's) in his hand. The inconographic representations of all these forms of Shiva are found in te temple all around the prakara walls and the antaralaya. Sambandar too has composed songs that are presevered in the tevaram. He calls the deity Pasurnatar and describes the temple as surrounded by groves. The lyrical beauty of the language and the deeply felt bhakti of the hymnist as David Shulman, the greatest living authority on Tamil Language and Literature says in his Tamil: A Biography, made religion deeply emotional and sensual. The Vachisvaram Temple was erected as a tirukarralai by Rajaraja I (985-1014) as part of his imperial project of identifying sites sacred to the Nayanmars and trnasforming them into spectacular stone monuments. The shikara of the temple is aspidal and this makes the temple very interesting as such aspidal structures are extremly rare.

There are 23 inscriptions on the walls of the temple covering nearly 200 years of Chola History from the time of Rajaraja I till Kulotunga I the Chola king from the Eastern Chalukyan line and a descendent of  Vimaladitya. As is the case with most temple inscriptions they record gifts given by kings, generals, queens and other important functionaries for the upkeep of the temple and for financing the cost of temple ritual. The inscriptions of the temple were copied in the late eighteenth century when Col. Colin Mackenzie visited Tirupasur,

The inscriptions offer a tantalizing glimpse into the medeival past of Tirupasur, Gifts of gold, jewels and money were showered on the temple. Vira Rajendra gave 10 kalunju of gold for fabricating a necklace for the deity. Another 10 kasu of gold was given for a lamp.THe King from the Chalukyan line, Kulotunga I gave a gift of 6 kalanju of gold for a necklace for the nachiyar or Amman. That Tiruppasur was a thriving town is evidnt from a Vijayanagara inscription f Arriyappa Dananayaka.

History is reconstructed on the basis of documets that have survived and if the right questions are asked the documents spew out the secrets long burried. Our approach to History differs from post modernist and post colonial  methodologies as we squarely reject the notion that History is a Discourse. It is a discipline that provides a glimpse of the Past even as it is feeling from our grasp.

Thus we find Tiruppasur vegetating in the teeth of time until the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A small mud fort was built here by the Kalingarayns but all treces have disappeared. The road to the North particularly the approach to Chittoor and Palemner, important strategic locations and the road to Vellore passed through Tirupasur making its location important. It may not be an exaggeration to say that when the French lost their brief hold over Tirupasur their dreams of an empire in India collapsed as they could not hold on to the supply routes from Pondicherry as Count de Lally invested Madras. Tiruppasur saw a lot happening around it during the Carnatic Awars of the Eighteenth century. When Sir Eyre Coote arched from Vellore and defeated Hyder Ali;s son, Tipu in a battle faught just outside of Tiruppasur the fate of the Mysore userper was sealed. In 1763 the Jagir of Chingleput was given to the East India Company by the Nawab of Arcot and the entire revenue of Tiruppasur and a number of villages in the Jagir was made over to the Company. This transfer of revenure was two years befor the Treaty of Allahabad was signed after the victory in the Battle of Buxar and we find Sir Hector Munro was the architect of the Company victory in the Battle of Tiruppasur. We can speculate on the ewealth of the region when we read from the Histoical records that Tiruppasur alone generated an annual revenue of 85,000 star pagodas.

The changing agrarian structure brought about by the advent of Company rule meant that new policies and agents were put into place. The Nawab and later the Company had to deal with an extremely recalcitrat group of landlords called mirasidars. The Tirupapsur Mirasdars were a fiesty lot. They refused to pay the enhanced revenue claims sought by th Collector of the Jagir, Lionel Price and were dispossessed of their rights. It is perhaps at this point in time that some of the mahrathi speaking Mirasdrs migrated to Madras to being a new lige under new set of condiditions that life and time imposed on them.

And that is a different story.

Police Brutality in Old Madras: The Torture Commission and what it revealed in1856

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

The notorious Head and Foot stock

Documents that reached the Commission

The recent insstance of police brutality in Tuthukodi, in which a father and son, Jebraj and Bennix were brutally tortured by the Tamil Nadu police leading to their death has rightly drawn widespread condemnation and the President ot the State Unit of the BJP rightly stated that such crimes cannot be tolerated. Coming as it did within days of the killing of George Flyod in USA which led to widespread loting and rioting in which around 20 Black lives were lost dd lead to a lot of questioning by the public. Is this the only case of Police brutality. No. Is this a unique case. No. Will such crimes be repeated. Yes. I am reminded of the classic line in the film Casablanca in which the Police Officer, Renault, on the orders of the Germans closes down the Cafe Rick's saying. "I am shocked, shocked that gambling in going on here" even as he pockets his daily bribe. Liberal posturing will not really help. And History shows that brutality is built into the very system.

Policing in Madras has its roots in the pre conquest era when vilages appointed talaiyari from the dominant caste to function as watch and ward of the village, urnattam. He ensured that there was no theft in his village as he had to compensate the victim in case of theft. After the East India Company took control it added its own flavour to this ancient office by appointing the peddanaik, to function as the head of a rudimentary police force with around 50 peons under him. His methods were crude as we know from the Vestiges of Old Madras. Beating, Mutilations, burning and Scarring were the general practices and since the Company Gowdown was under his charge the Governors generally turned a Nelson's eye to his many inquities. And these practices continued after the introduction of the Ryotwai settlement when the Police and Revenue functions were combined and the revenue officials at the local level like the shretidar, the amildar, the karnum were vested with power to collect the land tax or kisht.

Complaints about the use of torture to extract the land tax began reaching London, the headoffice of the East India Company and trouble was kicked up by two MPs from the House of Commons: Hon,ble Blackett and Hon.ble Donby Seymour. Though the Mutiny of 1857 had not broken out yet, Britain was going though a phase when it was wallowing in Moral Righteousness. Slavery had been abolished and the Bittons celebrated it as a gret moral achievement forgetting the fact that they practice Slave Trade and got rich by that trade for 300 years. Similarly these two Liberal MPs started a campaign in London, and the as now, Human Rights abuses, real or imagined made good copy. "Torture in Madras is universal, systematic and habitual" they thundered in the House of Commons forcing the Government of the day to institute what historians now call the Torture Commission which gave its Report in 1856 to Lord Harris,  the Governor of Madras Presidency. Donby Seymour was an earnest member f the India Reform Society, a whig outfit that beleived that British rule was necessay to uplift the benighted heathns to a state of tolerable civility.

The Composition of the Torture Commission was rather strange' It included J B Norton, the Correspondent of an influential English periodical published from Madras, the Atheneaum. He was a vigorous and animated critic of the Madras Government and Hon ble Seymour collected all the information about police excesses from him when he visited India.

The Chief Magistrate of Madras E F Elliot and H Stokes, a Civil Servant were the other two members. As per the termes of reference it was free to call records, investigate revenue and police records, call witness and take statements on oath and after 2 years they presented their findings in a Report of nearly 469 pages. Ufortunately this valuable piece of documentation exists only in the madras Archives. As theu themselves stated, the "records of every Court and public office was thrown opento them". The Commission did a superb job in documenting the various types of excesses that were committed by the police and Tamil nadu Police of today is in good company. Most of the complaints were based on cases heard by the Foujdari Adalat, the Criminal Court set up as part of the judicial reforms carried out by the Pitts India Bill.

Wide publicity was given about the Torture Commission and within a mere three months 1959 complaints were received by the Commission in Madras. Some were in the venacular language and Elliot was well versed in both Tamil and Telugu and so could provide ready translations of the petitions. The published Report has reproduced some of the petitions and it will be ectasy for the post colonial woke liberal subaltern "historian" to read them. Oppression, Torture, Racism, Indian Lives Dont Matter ect ect can all be read into that Report, But that would be disingenous as we cannot read our politics into the past. Though the Torture Commission was not a judicial commission empowered to punish or redress the complaint, it went about its job in a highly professional and unbiased manner.

The Commission was not without humour. At one place, writing about the Nattanmakkaran-s, the Commission observed that they carry the instruments of torture as "insignia of their office" and they go on to document the various kinds of torture routinely practiced by the police in the mid nineteenth Century adras Presidency and we can say that with the advent of Democracy nothing has changed except the person involeved. Sir Thomas Munro who introduced the Ryotwari Settlement was aware that many "irregularities are used". The Fort St George authorities chose to ignore the compalints as their masters i London were only interested in the Revenue.

Torture was routinely aplied to extract revenuse, the Land tax and the corrupt local official,with impunity could use torture to extract bribes as well. The commission found that "personal violence (is) practiced by the native revene official and police officials throughout the Presidency. Of the ABC Districts or Ceded Districts--Ananthapur, Bellary and Cuddapah--the last provided the maximum number of complaints. But we cannot infer that things were better in the other two districts. In Bellary,the entire local administration and police was in the hands of Deshasta Marattas who perhaps managed their areas with less gratuitous violence. As a policy measure the Commission recommended the separation of Revenue and Police functions. What were the tortures used that were documented by the Commission. I give a few examples:

Raghava Ayyangar complained that kittee was applied on his thighs and fingers till bood started oozing. This was a thumb screw appied to delicate parts of the body.

Thambi Mudali from Arcot a ryot was tortured by making him stand in the hot sun for several hours with a huge stone on his back. This was the most common form of torture,

Venkaiah another ryot was flogged till his back was red with blood and the "switches" frayed.

Venkata Chella Raju and his son were tortured for a bribe of Rs 10. The father died as a result of his torture.

Sabhapathi Pillai complained that his heads and legs were died together and he was made to stand in the hot sun

Nallandi Naik, his wife and son were arrested on suspicion of being "thieves" as they belonged to a nomadic community. They were tied to a tamrind tree and beaten till the woman died of her injuries.

The Report makes depressing reading. But read we must as it provides insight into the mind of the Englisg elite of the time. Interestingly the official English attidude is clear. These uncivilized practices were handed down from the "less civilized government" the preceded us and like a true born liberal conclude that "under s (meaning the civilized whites) torture is steadily declining in "extent and severity"/

THE MADRAS ARMY IN REVOLT: THE 1809 REVOLT AND ITS SUPPRESSION PART III

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

PART III

The "collective memorial"signed by the 28 Officers was in direct violation of Company rules of business and ought to have been ignored. But the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Hay Macdowall who was smarting under the humiliation of being excluded from the "Cabinet" of the Madras Governor, the Council decided to act on the Petition thereby triggering a chain of events that brought the Company rule alomost to an ignomious end. Unfortunately none of the Indian states or rulers had the sagacity to take advantge of the situation and Wellsly's Subsidiary Alliance held fast. Col. John Munro was acting in his official capacity on directions from Sir John Craddock when he prepared the Report on the Tent Contract. Ignoring this fact, General Macdowall ordered the arrest of Munro and had him goaled pending Court Martial. High handed and arbitray, the hapless Officer had no alternative but to petition the Govenor about the injustice done to him. Sir George Barlow ordered his release and forced the reluctant Commande in Chief to release Col Munro from confinement. 

The release of Col Munro infuriated the Officers,particularly the 28 Commanding Officers who had signed the demand for Col Munro be Court Martialed. Given the composition of the Presidency Army, Sir George Barlow hit on the right strategy to bring the malcontents to heel. He sent out feelers to the Native Troops both Infantry and Cavalry requesting them to support the Government and in this he was remarkable successful. Had the Native troops decided to follow the example of their fellow soldiers in Vellore, set just three years back, the entire edifice would have crumbled. And he used the King' Army to shore up his defences. As a measure of abundant caution, Sir George Barlow decided to move his Office/Headquarters from the Fort to the Choultry Plain and he set up Camp in the place where the Guindy Race Course now stands and the troops quartered at St. Thomas Mount were brought in to defend the outer perimeter. The news trickling in from the other Cantonments was disconcerting: Masulipattinam, Hyderabad, Travancore and Jalna were caught in the the grip of what appeared to all observers, a Mutiny. The Officers who spear headed the Mutiny did not relent.

An organization called "correspondence committee" was set up to co ordinate the entire efforts f all the mutinous officers and they drew up a Memorial that they planned to submit directly to Lord Minto, the Governor General, detailing their grievances and practically suggesting that Sir George Barlow be "recalled". The Madras Governor, like all good statesmen had an extremley well oiled espionage network and he somehow managed to get a copy of the Memorial even before it had been sent to the Governor General. Now he decided to strike. It cannot be dnied that had Barlow dithered in his response, the Military wing of the Company would have superceded the Civilian and Sir George Barlow rose to high office from the ranks of the Bengal Civil Service. He ordered the dismissal of 14 Officers who were asked to separate themselves from their regiment and take residence on the coast anywhere from Sadras to Nagapattinam. Lord Minto did not intervene and allowed Sir George Barlow a free hand. The troops fom what in now Sri Lanka were recalled and they had gone there to intervene in the Kandyan War.

The troops at Srirangapattinam, Travancore, Hyderabad and Masulipattinam were under the command of the most notorious of the rign leaders and Col. Arthur St. Leger is perhaps the most notorious. It wouls be an over simplification to say that he organized the whole revolt as he was not in India when musch of the planning took place. Howeve, he is certainly an early incarnation of the rotten breed of "petition writers" who in today.s India can be easily recognized as RTI activists r Trade Union Leaders. Clearly, this Officer who had won a resounding victory over Velu Thambi and his Nair hordes in Travancore, was the author of the Memorial to Lord Minto. All the ring leadrs including Col. Leger were suspended. And this action only turned the glowing embers into a huge flame.

Sir George Barlow was a seasoned administrator who had spent long years of service in India in the Administrative side of the Company. He felt tha an attempt at negotiations will help buy time and so sent Sir John Malcolm to masulipattinam where the new Comandant Col Innes was almost a prisoner of the mutinous officers. At the ame time he despatched Barry Close from Poona where he was the Residnt to Secondrabad. In Srirangapattinam the Mutiny took a very serious turn and in the skirmishes nearly 1000 native troops were kiled and only a handful of Europeans. Col. John Bell had by some expedient bought the support of the Native Troops. The 25th Dragoons were sent to intecept them after they had loted the Treasury and more than 500 lives were lost.

Finally the Government decided to compel all the Officeres o sign a Declaration of Loyalty which brought the crisis to a halt even as the Movement lost steam because its leadership had been suspended. The cause of all this, General Hay Macdowall soon met his nemesis. The ship, an Indiaman. Jane Dundas, was lost at sea off the coast of Africa, near the Cape of Good Hope.

The Revolt of 1809 like the Vellore Mutiny of  1806 represnted a major crisis and Sir George Barlow rose to the challenge.

THE MADRAS ARMY IN REVOLT: THE 1809 REVOLT AND ITS SUPPRESSION PART II

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Sir George Barlow and General Hay Macdowall

The Revolt of 1809 is a neglected episode in the history of India and since the Governor Sir George Barlow did not write either his memoirs nor commission an "authorised" biography, he has been represented only by his opponents in their writing. Chief amon whom was the famous Soldier Historian Sir John Malcolm who wrote a book in 1822 excoriating the Governor for the way in which he handled the Revolt. In truth however, Sir John Malcolm was sent by the Governor to negotiate with the rebellious Officers in Masulipattinam but failed miserably yo carry out his brief. Years later he penned his Observations on the Disturbance in the Madras Army in which he shifts the blame on the shoulders of Sir George Barlow. However the events of 1809 were far more complex than a mere clash between a vengeful Governor and a petulant Commander in Chief of the Madras Army, General Hay Macdowall,

There was trouble brewing in the Madras Army for at least a decade before the Revolt following the recoganization of the Company Forces in 1796. We have already alluded to earlier of some of the main grievances: (1) Equality of Pay between Bengal and Madras Armies (2) Continuance of the Tent Contract and (3) disparity in Command postings between Kings'Army and the Company Regiments. In normal circumstances these issues my have been resolved. But a series of miss steps involving the Governor and his Commander in Chief triggered what was essentially a conflict of supremacy between the Civilian Administration and the Military. Sir John Craddock who was the immediate predecessor of General Macdowall had instructed, Col John Munro to investigate the "Tent Contract" and offer suggestions. Acting on the directions of his superior, Col John Munro submitted a Report in which he recommended the abolition of the Tent Contract. The Report was a Confidential one and was marked only to the Commander in Chief. Perhaps the Madras Army too suffered from the same malaise of the Ministry of Defence under the Congress Regime. Interested parties would find the contents of official files before they were seen by the superiors and action taken. Munro wrote in his Report: "the grant of the same allowances in peace and war placed the interests and duties of commanding officers at variance with each other". What he stated so baldly was true and it was widelt known that the superior officers were taking a cut from the contracts handed down to native suppliers, perhaps for a consideration. The direct imputation of dishonesty added fuel to an already enraged Officer Corps. Within days this Repor was leaked. Any surprises here. None at all and a strrm of protest started brewing.

Twenty eight Officers of the Company, excluding the Kings' Officers signed a "collective memorial" demanding Col John Munro be tried before a Court Martial for impugning the "honour of the Officers"

Continued in Part III