ENGLISH ADMINISTRATION IN SOUTH ASIA

The Planar English Text against the Feudal Languages — Letters, Petitions, Courts and Files

Written with help from Claude AI,
based on the writings of
VED from VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS

VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS

Aaradhana, Deverkovil 673508

India

www.victoria.org.in

admn@victoria.org.in

victoriainstitutions.com

admn@victoriainstitutions.com

Telegram: https://t.me/VICTORIA_INSTITUTIONS

Printed versions of all books are available here.

All books in webpage versions are available here.

Contents

• A Word to the Reader

• Chapter 1 — Two Kinds of Language: Feudal and Planar

• Chapter 2 — The Official Letter Going Upward

• Chapter 3 — Orders Coming Down: Letters, Memoranda and “By Order”

• Chapter 4 — The Demi-Official Letter between Officers

• Chapter 5 — The Public Writes to Government

• Chapter 6 — Government Writes to the Public: the Same “Sir” for All

• Chapter 7 — From Persian to English: Act XXIX of 1837 and the Vernacular Record

• Chapter 8 — The Court: Plaints, Numbered Paragraphs and Verification

• Chapter 9 — Gown, Bands and Wig: the Dress of the Office

• Chapter 10 — Lord Curzon and the Endless File

• Chapter 11 — What the English Text Gave South Asia

• Sources

A WORD TO THE READER

This book describes how the British administration of India wrote. It looks at the letters that went up and down the government offices, the demi-official notes that passed between officers, the petitions the public sent in, the replies they received, the plaints filed in the courts, and the files that moved from table to table. Together these made up a single written system, and that system was in English.

The book has one argument running through it. South Asian languages such as Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi and the rest carry ranked forms of address: one word for you when speaking down to a person, another when speaking to an equal, and a third when speaking up to a superior. VED from VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS has called these feudal languages. English, which has a single you, he has called a planar language. This book holds that the English text of the British-Indian administration brought something new into South Asia: an official voice that did not, in its own words, rank people as high and low. The chapters that follow show how that voice was built.

About the specimens. Each chapter gives one or more specimen documents laid out in the forms of the period. They are illustrations, not copies of real papers. The names of persons in them are invented, and any likeness to a real officer or citizen of the time is accidental. The offices, the titles, the forms of address and the closing formulas are those in actual use. Where real letters by real persons are quoted, they are named as such, their words are their own, and the source is given. Where a well-known person is named only to show how he would have been addressed, the book says so and puts no words in his mouth. The sources of all facts of law and history are listed at the end of the book.

CHAPTER 1

TWO KINDS OF LANGUAGE: FEUDAL AND PLANAR

Every language gives its speakers a set of words for speaking to one another and about one another. In English the set is small and flat. The labourer and the landlord are both you when spoken to, and both he when spoken of. A man may be called Sir by a shop assistant and may call a stranger Sir in return, and the word means the same in both directions.

The languages of South Asia are built differently. In Malayalam, a person may be addressed as Nee, as Ningal, or as Thaangal (or by a title such as Saar). Nee is used downward: to a child, to a servant, to a person held to be lower. Ningal is a middle form. Thaangal and the titles are used upward. When a person is spoken about, the same ladder appears: Avan and Aval for he and she when the person is placed low, Adheham and Avar when the person is placed high. A man may be called Eda to his face by someone who places him low. Hindi has its own ladder of Tu, Tum and Aap, and the other languages of the subcontinent have theirs.

VED's writings call these feudal languages, because the words themselves carry the rank of the speaker and of the person spoken to. Choosing the form of you is choosing a place for the other person on a ladder. A wrong choice is an insult; the right choice confirms who stands above whom. English, by contrast, he calls a planar language: everyone stands on one plane in the words of address, whatever their wealth, office or birth.

This matters for the history of government. An administration that writes in a feudal language must decide, in every letter and every order, where each person stands. An administration that writes in English is spared that decision by the language itself. The British administration of India did, of course, recognise rank. It had a Warrant of Precedence, titles, honours and a careful order of seating at public functions. But when it came to the words of address in its written work, it used the same few English forms up and down the ladder, as the following chapters show.

CHAPTER 2

THE OFFICIAL LETTER GOING UPWARD

The basic unit of the system was the official letter. A Collector writing to the Board of Revenue, a Board writing to the Secretary to Government, a Secretary writing to the Government of India: all used the same frame.

The parts of an official letter

• The number. Each letter carried an office number and the year, so that it could be registered, found and answered by reference. A reply would begin with words such as “With reference to your letter No. 512, dated the 4th instant …”.

• The From and To blocks. The writer and the receiver were named by their offices. The receiver was usually addressed simply as The Secretary to Government or The Collector of Malabar. The letter was a letter between offices, not between two men.

• The salutation “Sir,”. One word, the same for every officer of every rank.

• Numbered paragraphs. After the first, each paragraph was numbered, so that later letters and orders could refer to “paragraph 3 of your letter” without doubt.

• The closing. “I have the honour to be, Sir, Your most obedient servant,” set out on separate lines, followed by the signature and the office.

The closing formula looks humble, and it was meant to be courteous. But the same words were used by a junior officer writing to a senior one and, in a shorter form, by a senior officer writing to a junior one. They expressed the courtesy of the office, not the rank of the man.

Specimen 1. A Collector reports to Government (names invented)

Notice what is absent. There is no praise of the Secretary, no reference to his greatness, no word that places the Collector beneath him beyond the conventional “I beg to state”. The facts are in numbered order. The Board could act on paragraph 2 alone, and any clerk years later could find the letter by its number.

A real example of the numbering may be seen in the India Office Records: letter No. 347 from the Secretary to the Government of India, dated 29 April 1865, conveying the thanks of the Government of India to Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis Pelly for the information he had gathered on an expedition. The number and the office of the writer are what the record is filed and found under, then and now.

CHAPTER 3

ORDERS COMING DOWN: LETTERS, MEMORANDA AND “BY ORDER”

Orders going down the line used the same frame, turned the other way. The opening phrase most often used was “I am directed to …”: “I am directed by His Excellency the Governor in Council to inform you …”. The Secretary who signed the letter did not speak for himself; he spoke for the Government, and said so in the first line.

For shorter matters, offices used the memorandum. A memorandum had no salutation and no closing courtesies. It began with its number and subject, stated the order or the request in plain sentences, and ended with the signature and office of the officer issuing it. Endorsements, by which one office passed a paper on to another with a line of instruction, were shorter still.

Where a letter was signed for the Government by a junior officer of the Secretariat, it was often marked “By order”, showing that the authority behind it was the Government and not the clerk or assistant who signed.

Specimen 2. Government replies to a Collector (names invented)

The senior officer still addresses the junior as Sir, still signs as his obedient servant, and still refers to his letter by number and date. The superior is not permitted, by the form, to speak down to the subordinate in the words of address. In a feudal language, the same order could hardly be written without the words themselves showing who was above and who was below.

CHAPTER 4

THE DEMI-OFFICIAL LETTER BETWEEN OFFICERS

Beside the official letter there grew up the demi-official letter, usually written D.O. It was a letter between officers, written in a personal form, about public business. It was used when an officer wanted another's personal attention, wanted to sound him out before opening official correspondence, or wanted to settle a point quickly without the full machinery of a numbered letter.

The D.O. letter differed from the official letter in the following ways:

• It opened “My dear Ashdown,” or “Dear Mr. Ashdown,” instead of “Sir,”.

• It closed “Yours sincerely,” instead of the formula of the obedient servant.

• The name and office of the person addressed were usually written at the foot of the letter, on the left, below the signature.

• It stood outside the main correspondence. Office instructions, such as those of the Persian Gulf Residency in the 1940s, advised that official letters should avoid referring to demi-official correspondence as far as possible, so that the official record could stand on its own.

Demi-official letters were part of the ordinary working of the Government of India at the highest levels. The private papers of Sir Lewis Pelly, now among the India Office Records, hold a letter of 3 August 1873 from Charles Aitchison, Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, at Simla, answering a demi-official letter Pelly had sent him. In September 1874 Pelly, then Agent to the Governor-General in Rajputana, circulated to all the Political Agents under him an extract from a demi-official letter of 17 September 1872 written by Captain Evelyn Baring, the Viceroy's private secretary, on how applications for promotion should be submitted. A demi-official letter could thus carry the Viceroy's wishes to a whole service without becoming a formal order.

By the custom of the D.O. letter, a secretary writing in this way to John Hewett, who served in the Home Department of the Government of India in the 1890s, would simply have begun “My dear Hewett,” and ended “Yours sincerely”. The form was the same whether the writer stood above Hewett or below him.

The same habits survive in Indian government offices today, which still use D.O. letters in this form.

Specimen 3. A demi-official letter (names invented)

Here too the planar character of English is plain. The D.O. letter is warmer than the official letter, but its warmth is the same in both directions. A junior officer might write “Dear Mr. Marsham” where a senior wrote “My dear Ashdown”, but neither is forced, by the grammar of the language, to place the other on a rung.

CHAPTER 5

THE PUBLIC WRITES TO GOVERNMENT

Any subject of the Crown in India could write to the Government. Educated people in the towns did so in English; others sent petitions in their own languages, which were translated in the offices (see Chapter 7).

Styles of the highest offices

• The Viceroy and Governor-General and the Governors of the Presidencies were styled His Excellency. A letter to the Viceroy, who was usually a peer, opened “My Lord,” and might close “Your Excellency’s most obedient servant”.

• A Lieutenant-Governor was styled His Honour.

• Members of the councils and the judges of the High Courts were styled The Honourable.

• Knights and holders of the orders of chivalry carried their letters after the name, as in Sir … , K.C.S.I.

These are titles of office. They belonged to the post and passed to the next holder of it. A letter to a Governor was a letter to the Governor's office, and when he left India the style went with the office, not with the man.

Sir Antony MacDonnell, for example, Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh from 1895 to 1901, was addressed on the cover as His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor; when he left office, the style passed to his successor and not with him. A petitioner such as Surendranath Banerjee, writing to the Viceroy, would open with “My Lord” and close as “Your Excellency’s most obedient servant”, exactly as the humblest English-writing petitioner in the country would have done.

Specimen 4. A citizen writes to the Governor (names invented)

The petitioner writes in the same frame as the officers: numbered paragraphs, a stated request, a closing formula. His deference is in the fixed words of the form, the same for every petitioner; it is not measured out according to who he is.

Two real letters to the head of the Government

Two famous letters show how the English form gave an Indian writer a direct and equal voice before the head of the Government.

On 11 December 1823 Raja Rammohun Roy wrote to the Governor-General in Council about the Government's plan to found a new Sanskrit school in Calcutta, urging that the money be spent instead on teaching the sciences of Europe in English. The letter is addressed “To His Excellency the Right Honorable Lord Amherst, Governor General in Council” and opens “My Lord”. Its first sentence is courteous: the natives of India, it says, are humbly reluctant to press their views on the Government, but “there are circumstances when silence would be carrying this respectful feeling to culpable excess.” It then argues its case plainly, point by point, against the Government's own decision, and ends by asking only that the Governor-General “excuse the liberty I have taken in thus expressing my sentiments to your Lordship.” A private gentleman of Calcutta disagrees with the Government, in writing, to its head, and the form of the letter allows it.

On 30 May 1919, after the shootings at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Rabindranath Tagore wrote from 6, Dwarakanath Tagore Lane, Calcutta, to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, giving up the knighthood conferred on him in 1915. The letter opens simply “Your Excellency,” and closes “Yours faithfully, Rabindranath Tagore”. By then even a letter of protest to the Viceroy needed no more ceremony than a letter between any two English-writing men. Whatever one thinks of the events that provoked it, the letter itself is an example of the planar voice this book describes: a subject speaking to the Viceroy in the same words of address he might use to anyone.

CHAPTER 6

GOVERNMENT WRITES TO THE PUBLIC: THE SAME “SIR” FOR ALL

When the Government wrote back, the person addressed was named in the ordinary English way. A gentleman of position was written to as Esquire (K. Raman Menon, Esq.). A holder of an Indian title was given it: Rai Bahadur, Rao Bahadur, Khan Bahadur, Dewan Bahadur. Others were written to as Mr., with their calling and town added for identification.

What is remarkable is what did not change. Whether the letter went to a Maharaja's minister, a titled landholder or a small trader, the salutation was “Sir,” and the signature was that of the Government's obedient servant. The forms of the courtesy were the same for all.

Specimen 5. Government replies to a trader (names invented)

The answer is a refusal, and it is brief. But consider how the same reply might have been worded in a feudal language: the official placed high, the trader placed low, the very pronouns showing it. In English the trader is Sir, and a Secretary to Government signs himself the trader's obedient servant. A reason is given. The trader is told plainly where he stands and why. This is what this book means by the planar voice of the administration.

CHAPTER 7

FROM PERSIAN TO ENGLISH: ACT XXIX OF 1837 AND THE VERNACULAR RECORD

When the English East India Company took over the government of Bengal and the other provinces, it inherited Persian as the language of the courts and the revenue offices, as the Mughal government had used it. Persian was the language of a small learned class, and the ordinary litigant could not read the record of his own case.

Act XXIX of 1837 changed this. It empowered the Governor-General in Council to dispense with any regulation requiring the use of Persian in judicial or revenue proceedings, and to prescribe any other language and script in its place. In practice Persian was displaced: the vernacular languages came into the district courts and offices (in the North-Western Provinces, Urdu in the Persian script; in Bengal, the local vernaculars), while English rose steadily as the language of the higher courts and the higher administration through the following decades.

Words that stayed

Persian and Arabic words did not disappear. Many were so firmly fixed in the work of the courts and revenue offices that they stayed on inside English and vernacular records, much as Latin phrases stayed on in English law. Some of them are still in daily use in India:

• Zilla (district), taluk or tehsil (sub-district), tahsildar (the officer of a taluk).

• Diwani (civil) and faujdari (criminal), as in the old Sadar Diwani Adalat, the chief civil court of the Company's provinces.

• Muddai (plaintiff) and muddaalaih (defendant), arzi-dawa (plaint) and jirah (cross-examination), in courts that worked in Urdu.

• Vakalatnama (the paper appointing a pleader), gumasta (clerk or agent).

Official orders tried more than once to purge this vocabulary from official writing, without much effect.

What translation did to the ladder

Wherever papers in the vernacular had to be read by officers who worked in English, they were translated or abstracted into English. This is where, in the view of this book, the planar character of English did its quiet work.

Take a statement recorded in Malayalam. The village official recording it might refer to a landlord as Adheham and to a labourer as Avan; a witness might report that a man was called Eda. A petition in the vernacular might open with long passages of praise for the officer addressed. When such a paper was put into English, the ladder had nowhere to go. Adheham and Avan both became he. The insulting Eda could be reported only as words spoken, not as a rank. The passages of praise shrank to a sentence such as “The petitioner states that …”. The English record set the labourer and the landlord side by side, in the same words, because English has no other way of writing about them.

The same thing happened, and on a larger scale, in North India. After 1837 the lower courts of the North-Western Provinces worked in Urdu, and the record there carried the Hindi-Urdu ladder. A person placed low was addressed as Tu, an equal or a familiar as Tum, and a person placed high as Aap, or as Huzoor and Sarkar. Even the verb changed with rank: woh aaya (he came) of a man placed low, woh aaye, in the respectful plural, of a man placed high. When such statements and petitions were put into English for the higher courts and the senior officers, Tu, Tum and Aap could only become you, and both forms of the verb could only become he came. Huzoor survived, if at all, as a quoted word.

This was not, so far as the sources show, a rule written down for the purpose. It followed from the nature of the English language. That is precisely the point VED's writings make: the levelling is in the language itself.

CHAPTER 8

THE COURT: PLAINTS, NUMBERED PARAGRAPHS AND VERIFICATION

The courts worked through written pleadings, and the Codes of Civil Procedure laid down their form. Under the Code of 1908 (Act V of 1908), Order VI says that a pleading shall contain “a statement in a concise form of the material facts” on which the party relies, and not the evidence by which they are to be proved. It goes on:

“Every pleading shall, when necessary, be divided into paragraphs, numbered consecutively, each allegation being, so far as is convenient, contained in a separate paragraph.”

Every pleading was to be verified at the foot by the party, who had to say, “by reference to the numbered paragraphs of the pleading”, which statements he made from his own knowledge and which on information he believed to be true, and had to sign the verification with the date and place.

The effect was to strip a dispute down to its facts. A plaint could not be a speech, a complaint against the other party's family, or an appeal to the judge's mercy. It was a numbered list of facts and a statement of what was claimed, sworn to by the person who brought it.

Specimen 6. A plaint (names invented)

Both parties are named in the same way: name, father's name, age, calling and residence. Neither is placed above the other by the words of the plaint. Before the court, as in the letters of the offices, the English form gave the same standing to both.

CHAPTER 9

GOWN, BANDS AND WIG: THE DRESS OF THE OFFICE

The High Courts of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were set up in 1862 under the Indian High Courts Act of 1861, and they followed English practice in court dress: the black gown and white bands, and, for the judges, the wig, with robes of scarlet for ceremonial occasions. The custom has not entirely gone. The Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court still appears in a red robe and wig on ceremonial days, and wore them at his swearing-in in January 2026.

Court dress, like the forms of the letters, belongs to the office and not to the person. The judge in his robes is not appearing as a man of a particular family or community; he is appearing as the court. The black gown worn by advocates makes the same point at the bar. In a society where dress and address alike announced a person's rank by birth, a uniform of office that set aside the man and showed only the function was a sharp change.

CHAPTER 10

LORD CURZON AND THE ENDLESS FILE

A written administration has its own illness: too much writing. By the end of the nineteenth century, files in the Government of India passed from office to office, gathering note upon note as each clerk and officer recorded his views before passing them on. Matters that could have been settled by two officers in a few minutes took weeks.

Lord Curzon, who became Viceroy in January 1899, took this up within months. In a minute dated 24 May 1899 he wrote of “the excessive noting and writing which are the characteristics of that system” and of delays caused by its “complicated chain of reference and annotation”. An earlier attempt at reform, in 1894 and 1895, had produced orders limiting office notes; Curzon judged that it had done “no more than tinker instead of reforming the system”, and that the orders were not being kept. He asked the members of his Council and the secretaries for their views, with a view to new rules for all departments.

The aim of these efforts was the same as the aim of the letter forms: shorter notes, facts set out plainly, and decisions reached by the officers responsible rather than buried under commentary. The English administrative style at its best was brief, numbered, factual and impersonal; Curzon's complaint was that the machine had drifted from that ideal.

CHAPTER 11

WHAT THE ENGLISH TEXT GAVE SOUTH ASIA

Seen together, the forms described in this book show an administration that ran on paper and in English, and that wrote to every person in the same few words of courtesy. This book holds that this was among the most important things that English rule brought into South Asia. In summary:

• One form of address for all. The trader and the Maharaja's minister were both Sir. In the official text, no one was Nee, Eda or Avan.

• The office, not the man. Letters were written from office to office. Titles belonged to posts and passed with them. Judges and pleaders wore the dress of their office.

• A record that could be checked. Numbered letters and numbered paragraphs made every decision traceable. A reply had to say what it was replying to.

• Facts before feelings. Pleadings were reduced to material facts, verified by the party; petitions were reduced to what was asked and why.

• A door for the ordinary person. Any subject could petition the Government and receive a written answer, in the same form as any other.

• The people's languages in the lower courts. Act XXIX of 1837 moved the record of the lower courts out of Persian, which few could read, and into the vernaculars; English, in which every party is written of in the same words, became the language of the higher courts.

VED's writings argue that feudal languages hold people in place on a ladder of words, and that English sets them on one level. The written machinery of British India, whatever else may be said of it, was one of the first places in South Asia where a planar language was used to govern. The many reform laws of the same period, catalogued in this library's companion volume Laws of British India, may be read alongside this book.

SUMMARY: FORMS OF ADDRESS IN BRITISH-INDIAN CORRESPONDENCE

SOURCES

The facts of law and history in this book were checked against the following. The specimen documents are illustrations written for this book; the names in them are invented.

• U. Chandra, “Emergence of English and Urdu as Court Language” (Allahabad High Court) — Act XXIX of 1837 and its effects: https://www.allahabadhighcourt.in/event/EmergenceEnglishUrduCourtLanguageUChandra.html

• “Reordering languages: Persian and the colonial state in India, c.1820–1873” (University of Bristol research record): https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/reordering-languages-persian-and-the-colonial-state-in-india-c182/

• “Clean chit, taluka, zilla: how Persian lingers on in India’s legal and revenue language” (Scroll.in): https://scroll.in/article/1040685/clean-chit-taluka-zilla-how-persian-lingers-on-in-indias-legal-and-revenue-language

• Lord Curzon’s minute of 24 May 1899 on noting and inter-departmental references (extract, vLex): https://vlex.in/vid/reforms-in-the-system-874314234

• Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, Order VI (Pleadings generally): https://www.advocatekhoj.com/library/bareacts/codeofcivilprocedure/orderVI.php

• India Office Records, Qatar Digital Library: Extract of letter No. 347 from the Secretary to the Government of India to Lieutenant-Colonel Pelly, 29 April 1865 (Mss Eur F126/13): https://www.qdl.qa/archive/81055/vdc_100023550598.0x000018

• India Office Records, Qatar Digital Library: Letter from Charles Umpherston Aitchison, Simla, to Lewis Pelly, 3 August 1873 (Mss Eur F126/71): https://www.qdl.qa/archive/81055/vdc_100024102935.0x000017

• India Office Records, Qatar Digital Library: Note by Lewis Pelly, Jodhpur, 15 September 1874, enclosing a demi-official letter from Captain Evelyn Baring (Mss Eur F126/70): https://www.qdl.qa/archive/81055/vdc_100023902057.0x00006e

• Rammohun Roy, letter to Lord Amherst, 11 December 1823 (text as printed in The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 1906): https://advocatetanmoy.com/ram-mohan-roys-letter-to-lord-amherst-in-connection-with-english-education-1823/

• Rabindranath Tagore, letter to Lord Chelmsford, 30 May 1919: https://overmanfoundation.org/rabindranath-tagores-letter-announcing-the-renunciation-of-his-knighthood/

• Office Routine notes, Persian Gulf Residency, on demi-official letters and memoranda (Qatar Digital Library, India Office Records): https://qdl.qa/archive/81055/vdc_100026334948.0x000024

• “Remnants of colonialism: Why Calcutta High Court Chief Justices still wear wigs” (Bar and Bench): https://www.barandbench.com/news/remnants-of-colonialism-why-calcutta-high-court-chief-justices-still-wear-wigs

• VED, An Introduction to Feudal Languages (Victoria Institutions); see also VED’s March of the Evil Empires! English versus the Feudal Languages and An Impressionistic History of the South Asian Subcontinent: Feudal Languages: https://www.victoriainstitutions.com/books/read.php?book=hmal1

THE END