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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2019
In recent years, petitioning cultures have attracted scholarly interest because they are seen as germane to the infrastructure of political communication and modern associative life. Using materials from early colonial Madras, this article discloses a trajectory of the appeal which is different from its conventional place in the social theory of political communication. Colonial petitions carried with them the idea of law as equity through which a paternalist government sought to shape a consenting subject, even as this sense of equity was layered by other meanings of justice. In this sense petitions reworked and exceeded the idioms of imperial law and justice. Thus two aspects of the colonial petition are the focus of this article: its genealogies in the institutional history of the early modern corporation that transmitted notions of law as equity, and the recursive and heteroglossic nature of the language of appeal that enabled this text-form to be an enduring site for refashioning terms of address.
Acknowledgements: I wish to warmly thank the participants in the petitions workshop for their insightful feedback and engagement with this piece. I am indebted to the workshop organizers Rohit De and Robert Travers, and the editor and the two anonymous reviewers of Modern Asian Studies for their incisive comments that greatly aided its revision.
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