Dominic Vendell | Columbia University (original) (raw)

Uploads

Publications by Dominic Vendell

Law and History Review

This essay examines the role of Indian-language documentation in the production of legality in co... more This essay examines the role of Indian-language documentation in the production of legality in colonial western India, focusing on the workings of the Bombay Inam Commission (1852-1863). It situates legal validation of claims to tax-free land revenue within the broader process of securing, organizing, classifying, and registering Marathi- and Persian-language documents. Combating the effects of rain, dirt, and pests on old state records often sold as “waste paper,” the Inam Commission deployed material interventions to secure a legal archive for verifying individual claims to property. While such evidence weighed heavily in the evaluation of the testimony and corroborating documents of an individual claimant’s case-file, questions of writing also shaped the legal reasoning of the Commission. Inquiries about any given document’s conformity to or deviation from conventional style figured prominently in judgments about its authenticity. The scribe Sayyid Usman’s investigation in 1856 o...

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient

Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate... more Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate world. Focusing on the karārnāmā or agreement, this paper explores how a repertoire of Marathi and Persian documentary genres, binding formulae, and graphic procedures enabled legal, commercial, and diplomatic transactions in eighteenth-century western India. The exchange of written agreements facilitated interstate relations as well as profit-sharing contractual arrangements between individuals. Despite their centrality to interactions between European and South Asian polities, these instruments met with limited success in establishing rights to property under the legal regime of the East India Company-state and instead acquired new functions in colonial revenue administration.

The Indian Economic & Social History Review

Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of powe... more Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of powerful courtly patrons. The rapid expansion of emerging regional states in the eighteenth century created new opportunities to apply these skills to administration, land-holding, and politics. This article examines the changing professional identity of the Kayastha scribal household in eighteenth-century western India. I focus on the ascendancy of the Chitnis household of Satara in the context of the growth and diversification of Kayastha employment under the Maratha sovereign Shahu Bhonsle (1682–1749). By consolidating portfolios of titles, appointments, and rights to property, ambitious scribes and secretaries, as epitomised by the career of Govind Khanderao Chitnis (d. 1785), were able to pursue riskier and more lucrative political assignments and form networks of kinsmen and associates across Maratha governments. Yet greater scrutiny and competition for state largesse, not least from w...

This dissertation investigates the vocation of politics in the Maratha Empire from the release an... more This dissertation investigates the vocation of politics in the Maratha Empire from the release and restoration of Chhatrapati Shahu Bhonsle in 1708 to the British East India Company's final victory against the Marathas in 1818. Founded in the mid-seventeenth century by the ambitious general and first Chhatrapati Shivaji Bhonsle, the Maratha Empire encompassed a decentralized web of allied governments stretching from the western Deccan into far-flung parts of the Indian subcontinent. While the Company's pejorative moniker of "confederacy" has cast a long shadow over historical understanding of the politics of the Maratha state, this dissertation argues that the ascendancy of scribal-bureaucratic networks and their practices of communication enabled Maratha governments to foster a modern diplomatic framework of deliberation, adjudication, and collaboration. The creation of a flexible language and practice of communication transcending linguistic, cultural, religious, and political divisions was the signal achievement of the scribal-bureaucratic networks that increasingly came to dominate politics and government in the eighteenth-century Maratha Empire. Through a case study of individuals and households of the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu sub-caste, this dissertation demonstrates that both non-Brahman and Brahman officials skilled in the arts of verbal and written communication rose from the lower ranks of the Maratha bureaucracy to the highest circles of political decision-making. They not only advanced their socioeconomic claims to wealth, title, and property, but also shaped government agendas, resolved disputes, and forged alliances through the dialogic exchange of oaths, treaties, objects, and sentimental words. Moreover, scribal-bureaucrats drew on this mode of communication to build strategic multilateral coalitions and to pen novel reflections on the meaning and purpose of politics once the dominance of the British East India Company was impossible to ignore. Communicative politics comes into [...]

Investigations of radical political thought and action have been a major preoccupation in the fie... more Investigations of radical political thought and action have been a major preoccupation in the field of modern South Asian history for the past several decades. The organizing question of these scholarly debates has been how and to what extent an insurgent consciousness may be produced out of the variegated conditions of domination and subordination of capitalist modernity in the non-West. The educator and social reformer Jotirao Phule encountered similar issues in his efforts to transform lower-caste consciousness in late nineteenth-century colonial Maharashtra. Phule is remembered for his establishment of several schools for lower-caste children as well as for his founding of the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873; however, Vendell’s essay primarily addresses Phule’s intellectual contributions around the problem of subaltern consciousness in three major texts: Gulamgiri (1873), Shetkaryacha Asud (1882), and Sarvajanik Satya Dharmapustak (1891). This essay argues that Phule’s project is best understood as an attempt to produce new strategies for observing, apprehending, and making judgments about the phenomenal and social world by interrogating inherited forms of knowledge. He suggested that a critical account of the ways in which fabricated symbolic devices produce a dramatic loss of one’s grasp on the given world was a necessary precondition for the inculcation of satyashodh (truth seeking), which named a deliberate practice of inquisitive self-making without determinate end. Satyashodh was an innovative practice of mind, though one that encountered limits when it entered the field of right conduct, which had been shaped most powerfully for Phule by the example of Protestant Christianity. His long struggle to elaborate a strategy for transforming the world by transforming oneself represents a powerful example of insurgent thought within the global history of slavery and emancipation in the British imperial world.

Law and History Review

This essay examines the role of Indian-language documentation in the production of legality in co... more This essay examines the role of Indian-language documentation in the production of legality in colonial western India, focusing on the workings of the Bombay Inam Commission (1852-1863). It situates legal validation of claims to tax-free land revenue within the broader process of securing, organizing, classifying, and registering Marathi- and Persian-language documents. Combating the effects of rain, dirt, and pests on old state records often sold as “waste paper,” the Inam Commission deployed material interventions to secure a legal archive for verifying individual claims to property. While such evidence weighed heavily in the evaluation of the testimony and corroborating documents of an individual claimant’s case-file, questions of writing also shaped the legal reasoning of the Commission. Inquiries about any given document’s conformity to or deviation from conventional style figured prominently in judgments about its authenticity. The scribe Sayyid Usman’s investigation in 1856 o...

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient

Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate... more Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate world. Focusing on the karārnāmā or agreement, this paper explores how a repertoire of Marathi and Persian documentary genres, binding formulae, and graphic procedures enabled legal, commercial, and diplomatic transactions in eighteenth-century western India. The exchange of written agreements facilitated interstate relations as well as profit-sharing contractual arrangements between individuals. Despite their centrality to interactions between European and South Asian polities, these instruments met with limited success in establishing rights to property under the legal regime of the East India Company-state and instead acquired new functions in colonial revenue administration.

The Indian Economic & Social History Review

Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of powe... more Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of powerful courtly patrons. The rapid expansion of emerging regional states in the eighteenth century created new opportunities to apply these skills to administration, land-holding, and politics. This article examines the changing professional identity of the Kayastha scribal household in eighteenth-century western India. I focus on the ascendancy of the Chitnis household of Satara in the context of the growth and diversification of Kayastha employment under the Maratha sovereign Shahu Bhonsle (1682–1749). By consolidating portfolios of titles, appointments, and rights to property, ambitious scribes and secretaries, as epitomised by the career of Govind Khanderao Chitnis (d. 1785), were able to pursue riskier and more lucrative political assignments and form networks of kinsmen and associates across Maratha governments. Yet greater scrutiny and competition for state largesse, not least from w...

This dissertation investigates the vocation of politics in the Maratha Empire from the release an... more This dissertation investigates the vocation of politics in the Maratha Empire from the release and restoration of Chhatrapati Shahu Bhonsle in 1708 to the British East India Company's final victory against the Marathas in 1818. Founded in the mid-seventeenth century by the ambitious general and first Chhatrapati Shivaji Bhonsle, the Maratha Empire encompassed a decentralized web of allied governments stretching from the western Deccan into far-flung parts of the Indian subcontinent. While the Company's pejorative moniker of "confederacy" has cast a long shadow over historical understanding of the politics of the Maratha state, this dissertation argues that the ascendancy of scribal-bureaucratic networks and their practices of communication enabled Maratha governments to foster a modern diplomatic framework of deliberation, adjudication, and collaboration. The creation of a flexible language and practice of communication transcending linguistic, cultural, religious, and political divisions was the signal achievement of the scribal-bureaucratic networks that increasingly came to dominate politics and government in the eighteenth-century Maratha Empire. Through a case study of individuals and households of the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu sub-caste, this dissertation demonstrates that both non-Brahman and Brahman officials skilled in the arts of verbal and written communication rose from the lower ranks of the Maratha bureaucracy to the highest circles of political decision-making. They not only advanced their socioeconomic claims to wealth, title, and property, but also shaped government agendas, resolved disputes, and forged alliances through the dialogic exchange of oaths, treaties, objects, and sentimental words. Moreover, scribal-bureaucrats drew on this mode of communication to build strategic multilateral coalitions and to pen novel reflections on the meaning and purpose of politics once the dominance of the British East India Company was impossible to ignore. Communicative politics comes into [...]

Investigations of radical political thought and action have been a major preoccupation in the fie... more Investigations of radical political thought and action have been a major preoccupation in the field of modern South Asian history for the past several decades. The organizing question of these scholarly debates has been how and to what extent an insurgent consciousness may be produced out of the variegated conditions of domination and subordination of capitalist modernity in the non-West. The educator and social reformer Jotirao Phule encountered similar issues in his efforts to transform lower-caste consciousness in late nineteenth-century colonial Maharashtra. Phule is remembered for his establishment of several schools for lower-caste children as well as for his founding of the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873; however, Vendell’s essay primarily addresses Phule’s intellectual contributions around the problem of subaltern consciousness in three major texts: Gulamgiri (1873), Shetkaryacha Asud (1882), and Sarvajanik Satya Dharmapustak (1891). This essay argues that Phule’s project is best understood as an attempt to produce new strategies for observing, apprehending, and making judgments about the phenomenal and social world by interrogating inherited forms of knowledge. He suggested that a critical account of the ways in which fabricated symbolic devices produce a dramatic loss of one’s grasp on the given world was a necessary precondition for the inculcation of satyashodh (truth seeking), which named a deliberate practice of inquisitive self-making without determinate end. Satyashodh was an innovative practice of mind, though one that encountered limits when it entered the field of right conduct, which had been shaped most powerfully for Phule by the example of Protestant Christianity. His long struggle to elaborate a strategy for transforming the world by transforming oneself represents a powerful example of insurgent thought within the global history of slavery and emancipation in the British imperial world.