A trial in transition: Courts, merchants and identities in western India, circa 1800

Abstract

In December 1800, the city of Surat witnessed an important trial involving its leading citizen, Shri Krishna Arjunji Nathji Tarwadi, who was charged with the murder of a manservant on his premises. The trial lasted in the Sessions Courts of the English East India Company for about a month, generating strong emotions among the parties involved, until it petered out with the English Company officials deferring to traditional notions and prescriptions of penitence, punishment and customaty sanction, and with Tarwadi being acquitted of the murder charge. The trial in many ways represented a critical episode in the Anglo-Bania chapter of Surat's history and brought into sharp focus the interactive processes of British- Indian relationships in the period of transition and its implications for both the constitution of merchant identities in western India as well as the self-perception of the English Company, and the profile and presence it wanted to maintain in the region. The present article is an attempt to draw out the ramifications of the Anglo-Bania partnership in Surat as it entered its final stage, and to focus on its changing nature under the aegis of a legal system that was not quite in place at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By focusing on the Surat trial of 1800, a dramatic site where notions of justice confronted issues of caste prerogative and the more mundane considerations of material advantage, my article teases out the com plexities of negotiation between Indian merchants and the English East India Company during a period of transition.