Surveys, Settlements and Registers: Drawing Land into a “Racial” Regime

Surveys, Settlements and Registers: Drawing Land into a “Racial” Regime of Property in Colonial Bangalore

When the East India Company introduced the idea of permanent settlement in eighteenth-century Bengal, theoretical concepts of property ownership in England were brought to the Indian sub-continent as the fundamental principle of colonial governance and, with it, the inviolability of private property. Looking at how land was to be governed in territories that were subordinated to colonial power, this talk looks to the Princely State of Mysore in South India. It examines the techniques by which land was surveyed and how these surveys accompanied juridical mechanisms of property, derived from other parts of the sub-continent, which were brought to Mysore. While these were part of the introduction of universal market practices directed at revenue farming, they altered the organisation of private property and social structures across South Asia.

The talk focuses on how the state’s capital, Bangalore, was surveyed and drawn as a city for the first time in 1881. It pays attention to the newly introduced Revenue and Survey Office which directed settlements and surveys of land. Through looking at reading manuals produced by the Office against the first maps of Bangalore, the lecture shows how a city was made into a bounded object with insides and outsides and how modern conceptions of caste and property developed in conjunction with each other. In the argument that follows, it shows how the colonial bureaucracy’s registers that accompanied these surveys and settlements, created a “racial regime” where upper castes not only monopolised juridical mechanisms, but their caste also became an analogue of property.

Image caption: James Ross, Survey map of Bangalore and the surrounding areas, 1800. Collection British Library / Digital image courtesy of Wikimedia

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