Over the course of five months in 1716, Nayiniyappa was held in a cell alone and taken out only to be interrogated by Governor Hébert. It was likely in that very cell that Nayiniyappa died in August 1717 while serving a three-year prison sentence. His death, his sons alleged, was no accident but the work of Governor Hébert and his son, who “caused the death of our father in prison by misery, and perhaps by having him assassinated.”1 Three years after that grim death, the French king not only formally cleared Nayiniyappa’s name but also awarded the restitution of his confiscated wealth to his surviving family members for their suffering and losses and ordered Hébert to pay them reparations. How did Nayiniyappa and his allies engineer this reversal, from the solitary confinement to the metropolitan decision in their favor? The answer lies in a dense legal realm of maneuverings that unfolded over a wide swath of jurisdictions and geographies. Law, as it was applied in the Nayiniyappa Affair, was both an attempt to display French sovereignty and a site for the fractures in this sovereignty to be revealed in the form of colonial factionalism.
This chapter considers the Nayiniyappa Affair as a court case. Nayiniyappa’s trial, it argues, became the occasion for a broad debate about the place of local intermediaries in colonial rule. It could scarcely be otherwise at a time when the broker was at the center of discussions about local residents demanding too many religious freedoms and thereby revealing the limits of French sovereignty. The judicial agenda enacted the political aims of those who objected to Nayiniyappa’s power but also provided tools for his supporters. The trial, then, was not merely a demonstration of French power and sovereignty but as much an opportunity to engage in intra-French and intracommercial rivalries and factionalism.
The legal sphere was yet another stage on which missionaries and the traders-officials of the Compagnie des Indes could vie for influence. In a study of the legal system in seventeenth-century France, David Parker has argued that law provided an arena for local ruling elites to resolve their differences.2 In Pondichéry, a similar dynamic was in place, with a crucial difference. Given the relatively fluid division of influence and clout among commercial, missionary, and local agents, the legal system was open to manipulation by a surprisingly diverse host of characters. The consistently messy distribution of authority played out in legal terms, much as it did in the familial and linguistic realms described in the previous chapters. Conflicts between Nayiniyappa, the Jesuits, French traders, and Tamil workers and merchants had all taken place on numerous occasions since the broker’s rise to the position of chief intermediary. But these conflicts did not rise to the level of an “affair” until Nayiniyappa’s arrest and conviction in 1716.
In Nayiniyappa’s interrogations, sentencing, and subsequent appeals, all the involved actors made reference to metropolitan legal procedures. This reference to French procedure held different valence for different actors. Nayiniyappa’s French detractors sought to use French legal norms to move his local supporters to unfamiliar ground. Legal proceedings, unlike the commercial and linguistic strategies that structured business in the colony, unfolded in a manner in which adherence to French language and metropolitan precedents left local intermediaries like Nayiniyappa at a disadvantage. In this sense, it mattered little that the accusations against Nayiniyappa—tyranny and sedition—were left quite vague in the proceedings against him. In fact, the vagueness of the charges might well have been a legal and political strategy. The very act of putting Nayiniyappa on trial had more weight than the specific charges. Procedure also, however, served the interests of Nayiniyappa and his supporters, since it provided grounds for making claims about the rights due to an accused man. By making arguments about procedure gone wrong, Nayiniyappa and the interest groups that supported him utilized the system that had initially aligned against him. Nayiniyappa’s arrest and resulting legal procedure marked the beginning of a new kind of relationship with his French employers. No longer a respected and influential employee, he was an accused man, taken in and out of his prison cell at the will of his accusers. The courtier’s demands for proper procedure were a last-ditch effort to impose clarity. The appeals that followed Nayiniyappa’s conviction all turned on what had happened in those interrogations and the judicial process that accompanied them.
The judicial and legal proceedings of the Nayiniayppa Affair unfolded in four stages, which can be roughly categorized as conviction, appeals, reinvestigation, and demands for reparations.3 In the first stage, in 1716, Nayiniyappa was arrested, interrogated, convicted of tyranny and sedition, and sentenced to a three-year prison term and payment of a heavy fine, alongside other punishments. Second, the appeal stage saw the submission of detailed and lengthy documents, or requêtes. These were not technically speaking legal appeals, since they were not a part of the formal judicial process, but they nevertheless acted as appeals in that they sought to overturn and redress Nayiniyappa’s conviction. These lengthy texts were sent to the Superior Council in Pondichéry, to the king in France, and to the Council of the Marine by or on behalf of Nayiniyappa and his allies Tiruvangadan (Nayiniyappa’s brother-in-law) and Ramanada, his business associate. Both Tiruvangadan and Ramanada were arrested around the time of Nayiniyappa’s arrest, accused of being his accomplices. This appeal stage unfolded between 1716 and 1718. The third stage was the result of these appeals’ success and began with the king’s order in February of 1718 to reopen the case against Nayiniayppa and undertake a full investigation into the circumstances of his conviction.4 This stage, which occurred after Nayiniyappa’s death, involved deposing most of the original witnesses and collecting depositions from the interpreters involved in his interrogation, as well as statements from the French councillors who had served as judges and signed their name to Nayiniyappa’s conviction and sentence. This third reinvestigative stage concluded with the arrest of Governor Hébert, Nayiniyappa’s chief adversary, and with the decision by the Pondichéry Superior Council in 1719 to overturn Nayiniyappa’s conviction.5 Finally, the fourth stage involved the filing of claims in Paris by Nayiniyappa’s heirs and his allies Tiruvangadan and Ramanada, who all demanded that in addition to the restitution of their confiscated wealth, the disgraced Hébert pay them reparations for the damage he and his son had caused. These demands were met in 1720, when the king’s conseil d’état ordered that Nayiniyappa’s name be formally and publicly cleared and that Hébert pay Nayiniyappa’s family amends in the sum of twenty thousand livres.6 These four stages provided an opportunity for rival factions in French India to air their differences and grievances—especially those among competing trader-administrators who struggled over political positions in Pondichéry and among members of separate Catholic missionary orders, who jostled for influence in the colony’s governance. Law was a realm for working out these tense relationships.7
The legal debate surrounding the Nayiniyappa Affair posed thorny questions. What rights were due to a colonial, Indian subject like Nayiniyappa under French law? Did the safeguards of the mother country’s law apply to men like him? Who in the colony had the sovereign and judicial power to decide his fate? The affair demonstrates how the French in India used law to assert their sovereignty but at the same time reveals all the rifts in this sovereignty as a result of the colony’s intensely fractured institutions. The law—and debates over its proper application, procedure, and rights—was therefore also a place for sovereignty to be contested and revealed in its failings. Having law, in other words, did not necessarily mean having power.
Over the last decade or so, scholars have increasingly examined the ways in which legal encounters of various kinds have been central for both the making and unmaking of colonial regimes. Much of this work has found a central interlocutor in Lauren Benton’s work on colonial legal regimes and her argument that debates about legal jurisdiction in the colonial contexts are debates about sovereignty. That is, questions about who gets to make legal judgments, who is allowed legal agency, what rules determine how justice should be dispensed, and how those judgments would be enforced were inevitably questions about colonial authority or its absence.8 As one historian has put it, a history of colonial jurisdiction is a history of power.9 In French India, legal exchanges were indeed productive sites for debates about colonial sovereignty, as the Nayiniyappa Affair demonstrates, and colonial administrators seized on the law as a means to claim their authority. Such explicit claims making for French authority was especially necessary in India, where the company officials’ repeated conflicts with local inhabitants about the limits of religious freedom frequently called French control into question. Yet in the Nayiniyappa Affair it was legal procedure and not jurisdiction that was the most productive and contested aspect debated by all the participants. Nayiniyappa and his supporters questioned the validity and the integrity of the proceedings against him, not the jurisdictional claims made in the course of his case, and in doing so they called into question the authority of the French governor. French factionalism meant that the debate over procedure quickly escalated into a struggle over political authority.
French colonies in the early modern period all dispensed some version of French law to their subjects.10 Legal issues pertaining to slavery in colonial contexts in the eighteenth century have been the topic of a rich vein of scholarship, especially in the Atlantic world.11 Nayiniyappa’s legal travails, however, differed in important ways from those of slaves, as he retained some of his power, even under arrest, and his position as a legal subject was never called into question. The case is therefore an especially fruitful example of the relationship between metropolitan and colonial law. Significantly, Nayiniyappa was able to successfully appeal his conviction in the metropole. This unusual outcome was the result of his special position in the colony prior to his arrest, as one of its most influential and powerful residents, French or Tamil. Nayiniyappa was not a subordinate subject; in significant ways, prior to his arrest he was the patron and French traders were his clients. He was a rich and well-connected member of a local elite, and his French employers had long depended on him and his connections. The effort to impose a subordinate status on him through his arrest attempted to rewrite the terms of the relationship. But Nayiniyappa’s legal claims making drew on his local influence and metropolitan connections to make his views heard and inscribed. He successfully demanded that the procedural integrity of the colonial legal system include him.
The larger point here is not that the system was especially fair but rather that Nayiniyappa’s interactions with French law clearly reveal the contested contours of authority in French India. More broadly, the “legal pluralism” that has engaged legal historians’ attention did not simply mean the coexistence of so-called customary law and metropolitan law.12 Nayiniyappa and his peers meaningfully engaged with metropolitan legal systems and their colonial iterations. These engagements did not necessarily affirm the power of the colonial regime. Nayiniyappa’s many days at court demonstrate that procedural debates could raise the issue of the legitimacy of French authority over colonial subjects.
Legal diversity was a feature of life in metropolitan France during the Old Regime—a diversity that drew the ire of one famous advocate of legal reform, Voltaire, when he remarked with typical pithiness that “a man traveling in this country changes laws almost as often as he changes horses.”13 Yet even as France itself was a bewildering jumble of legal codes, jurisdictions, and jurisprudence, the colonial context, theoretically at least, presented a relatively unified approach to the law. Pondichéry had two courts of law—the Superior (or Sovereign) Council and the Chaudrie. In this, the colonial arena presented a clearer structure than the jurisdictional jumble in France. Where the French metropole had courts upon courts—“seigneurial courts, church courts, commercial courts, courts for admiralty law and excise tax, courts for royal forests and waterways, courts for salt depots and the constabulary”14—Pondichéry’s two-tiered system was a model of simplicity.15
The court in which Nayiniyappa’s fate was decided, the Superior or Sovereign Council, served as French India’s highest legal institution.16 It was also its governing body, making and carrying out the colony’s administrative work. This legal-administrative-financial-political institution was created shortly after the French took back control of the colony from the Dutch at the very end of the seventeenth century. Lettres patentes, signed in Versailles by King Louis XIV in February of 1701, established the council.17 It would operate under the decree’s guidelines until a series of judicial reforms took place in 1776. It supplanted a similar institution established by royal edict in January 1667 in Surat on the west coast of India, where the Compagnie des Indes had focused its activities prior to its establishment in Pondichéry. Louis XIV’s 1701 decree began with a promise, premised on a commitment to the growth of the French project in India and explicitly linking the commercial Compagnie des Indes to the king’s juridical responsibility to his subjects: “The Royal Company of the East Indies having considerably enlarged its establishment [in India] . . . we are obliged to provide the means to dispense justice to our subjects.”18
The decision to create this new judicial body was set against the specific needs of the company in India, but it was also part of a much broader imperial and global effort to weave French law and punishment in a more integrated fashion into the structures of colonial administration. Sovereign councils existed in New France and in the Caribbean colonies, as well as in the metropolitan provinces, most of them created in the seventeenth century and the very beginning of the eighteenth century. The creation of these judicial bodies in the colonies was an orchestrated and global effort, with sovereign or superior councils created in 1663–1664 in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and New France, in St. Domingue in 1685 (then reinstituted in 1701), and in Pondichéry in 1701. Most of them remained in place in one form or another until the revolutionary legal reforms of 1790. While French imperial legal institutions were conceived in a relatively uniform manner, sharing both structural features and codes by which to administer justice, it should not be surprising that the reality was not nearly as cohesive as the plan.
The charter of the Pondichéry council decreed that it would hear both civil and criminal cases and that justice would be available to all, regardless of their “rank, condition or country” (although, as we will see below, a different legal institution, the Chaudrie, heard civil cases involving only Indians). The royal edict of 1701 named the founding members of the council, choosing among Pondichéry’s high-ranked traders to sit on it. The fact that the specific staffing of the Sovereign Council was determined in France rather than decided locally is an indication of the importance ascribed to and bestowed on this colonial institution. Of the seven original appointees to Pondichéry’s Sovereign Council, two would come to have a central role in the judgment of Nayiniyappa in 1716: Flacourt as one of the judges who convicted him and La Prévostière as Governor Hébert’s replacement. The traders who served on the council in Pondichéry were not trained legal professionals. In the first half of the eighteenth century, few colonies had many residents with formal legal training, and other colonial superior councils largely depended on employees of the trading companies and respected members of local French society without legal experience to act as judges, although there were exceptions to this general rule.19
The Superior Council was meant to dispense justice according to codes and rules imported from France. French colonies in the eighteenth century relied on one code for civil proceedings, the Coutume de Paris.20 For criminal cases, they followed the procedures compiled in the Criminal Ordinance of 1670. This ordinance was an explicit Colbert-era attempt at codification and a wholesale reform of the rules of legal criminal proceedings. It was adopted in all of France’s colonies, though unevenly applied.21 As we shall see, Nayiniyappa and his allies understood the ways in which the case against him did not adhere to the rules of the 1670 ordinance, and they used this fact expertly in crafting their appeals against the conviction. Compared with its British competitors in India, France, through its reliance on the Coutume de Paris and the Ordinance of 1670, was able to impose greater legal cohesion on its colonies, at least in theory.22
Pondichéry’s Sovereign Council was clearly part of the French legal system, one of a network of provincial and colonial institutions, with ties to the royal court in Versailles and Parisian legal courts and expertise. It was also part of a network of courts in maritime Asia, in Gujarat, Basra, Batavia, Bombay and Pegu, a network that, as Gagan Sood has compellingly argued, lay outside the sovereign purview and was utilized by merchants in the Indian Ocean world to resolve their disputes in the most relevant and convenient forum. Sovereign courts such as those run by the Portuguese, the British, and the French were in fact part of this same legal network, drawing as much on accepted legal practices of maritime Asia as on codes imported from Europe.23 The fact that Pondichéry’s council heard cases involving Christians, Muslims, and Hindus and merchants settled in Madras, Canton, and Siam and that it admitted evidence in an array of languages indicates that it indeed served as such a resource for a regional group of actors who were not subjects of the French king but instead drew on the council as an available tool for the resolution of mostly civil disputes.
The second judicial institution in Pondichéry was the Chaudrie, a court that was in place from the late seventeenth century until its dismantling in 1827. In the Chaudrie, French judges were meant to dispense justice according to local modes of dispute resolution. The French traders who heard the mostly civil disputes in this forum relied on local interpreters to hear the cases and then ruled according to what they understood to be local custom.24 As Jean-Claude Bonnan has noted, the Chaudrie was neither a French import nor an indigenous institution but rather an amalgamation of the two, with the French taking over authority of an already existing institution, one whose exact contours are unknown. Court records from the Chaudrie prior to 1766 have not survived, making it difficult to determine its practices and jurisdiction in the early decades of the eighteenth century.
In the later French empire in North Africa, it was common practice for Muslim courts of law to be folded into the French colonial state.25 While this was not quite so common in the so-called First Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Pondichéry’s Chaudrie is not the only example of attempts to incorporate indigenous modes of dispute resolution into a formalized, French judicial institution, though it might be the most explicit instance. Even if other colonies did not have the explicit two-tiered system of French and “local” law as in the Sovereign Council and the Chaudrie, French and indigenous forms of justice did meld together in other colonies. Such judicial “middle ground,” as Richard White has termed it, was created in the North American Great Lakes region known as the pays d’en haut.26 In New France, historiography that has considered French and Amerindian exchanges has shown how officials in Montreal also tried to incorporate Indian modes of dispute resolution27 and has highlighted the “normative flexibility” of these legal exchanges in recognition of the agency of the hundreds of Amerindians that appeared before the Québec courts up to 1760.28 In maritime Asia it was only with the political transformations of the nineteenth century that European practices and conceptions of law made serious inroads; prior to that period, despite European presence, law continued to develop “along what were essentially indigenous lines.”29 The British example is instructive for South Asia, since it was only in the nineteenth century that the panchayat, or village council, was incorporated into the British colonial legal system.30
Since the Chaudrie did not hear Nayiniyappa’s case, the “native” court played a marginal though not insignificant role in the Nayiniyappa Affair. Nayiniayppa had spent time as an interpreter in the Chaudrie prior to his appointment to the post of chief commercial broker; this role may have influenced the language and arguments he employed in his appeals. Second, part of Nayiniyappa’s punishment was fifty lashes of the chabouc (a kind of whip), to be publicly given in the grand bazaar. Given that the Chaudrie was located in the bazaar, the decision to whip Nayiniyappa there emphasized that this punishment had the force of law. Most local inhabitants would have had no occasion to ever visit the chambers of the Sovereign Council, where Nayiniyappa’s punishment was decided. But the Chaudrie was a jurisdiction to which they were likely to be subject. By whipping Nayiniyappa in the home of the Chaudrie, the council was sharing—after the fact—the jurisdiction over Nayiniayppa with this companion legal venue and making his punishment more exemplary.
The first part of the judicial process against Nayiniyappa, following his arrest, entailed the collection of witness testimonies against him and the interrogation of the broker himself. Both Nayiniyappa and the several dozen witnesses who provided evidence in the case described this process as rife with procedural error and collectively argued that they had not been allowed to adequately inscribe their voices in the judicial archive.
Following Nayiniyappa’s arrest in 1716, Governor Hébert interrogated him on seven different occasions, beginning one month after his arrest. There are two records of these interrogations in the archives: transcripts recorded by the council’s secretary and the description of these interrogations reproduced in Nayiniyappa’s 1717 appeal.31 Both accounts are of course highly mediated. The actual exchanges between Nayiniyappa and Hébert were polylingual, in Tamil, Portuguese, and French, while the archival record has all been transposed into French. The text presents the exchanges between Hébert and Nayiniyappa in the form of a dialogue between the two men, suggesting they were the sole actors in the drama that unfolded in the council’s chambers, although the interpreter, Manuel, and the secretary taking the notes, Le Roux, were also present and active. The appeals in which Nayiniyappa and others recounted these same interrogations are of course mediated by the intention of the narrator—to contest the charges against the broker. While neither version offers an unassailable account of exactly what transpired in the room, together they provide a view of the ways in which legal forms inflected Nayiniyappa’s experience at court.
The transcript recounts lengthy questions on Hébert’s part and terse responses on Nayiniyappa’s. Hébert’s questions were almost uniformly replete with people’s names, place names, and information about the movements and actions of local people. Nayiniyappa’s response was almost always recorded as a terse “He said yes” or “He said no.” Occasionally the transcript recounted that the broker said he knew nothing about a topic. This discursive imbalance in the recorded text of the interrogation raises a question that lingers over all court records and many other sources about their ability to reflect the exchanges they describe. The legal historian Brian Owensby, in his investigation into colonial court records in Mexico, has suggested that the lacunae in colonial court records can be as revealing as the existing text.32 Even if the inscription does not reflect the actual exchanges, the inscribed format is itself revealing: in Nayiniyappa’s interrogation, the archival record lets Hébert do all the talking.
Both records—the official transcription of the interrogations and the description of them in Nayiniyappa’s appeal—agree that Nayiniyappa repeatedly denied all charge of wrongdoing. The format of the interrogation allowed him to submit information not solicited from him, and the transcript dutifully recorded this information. For example, he volunteered the information that when the town’s residents came to consult with him about their threat of abandoning the town in 1715, he had apprised Governor Dulivier of the threat.33 In sharing this information, unsolicited, Nayiniyappa used the interrogation as an opportunity to present evidence germane to his defense.
The transcript does reveal Nayiniyappa’s efforts to take exception to the implicit assumption of guilt within some of Governor Hébert’s questions. For example, the transcript of the sixth interrogation includes the question “Interrogated why had he [Nayiniyappa] abused the authority bestowed on him by his office, and carried out many injustices against the people of Pondichéry?” Here a statement was posed as a question but rhetorically functioned as a performative accusation and declaration of guilt. Nayiniyappa’s brief response, as recorded, did not seek to answer the question but disputed its very premise: “He said he did not do so.”34
The appeals describing Nayiniyappa’s interrogation included a running commentary on the questions asked of the broker and expanded on his responses. For example, an account of one of his denials of wrongdoing noted in approval that he “could not have responded any better.” In another instance, the appeal’s authors complained that no witnesses for wrongdoing were produced but then ironically added, “This is how truth and innocence express themselves.”35 This running commentary on the interrogative text reproduced in the appeals stood in stark contrast to the official record of the investigation, in which Hébert’s long questions carried the bulk of the narrative drive, with Nayiniyappa allowed only brief denials or affirmations.
Nayiniyappa asked for legal counsel in early 1716, soon after his arrest. As in other colonial locales early in the eighteenth century, lawyers were not allowed to practice in Pondichéry.36 In Saint-Domingue, for example, lawyers were banned until 1737, a ban resulting from a general view of lawyers as being the source of judicial trickery and legal strife.37 Even in the French metropole, lawyers were allowed to practice only in civil matters. Nayiniyappa was not asking for a lawyer per se but for a counselor, someone who would provide legal advice as the case was unfolding. This person could have helped in drafting written arguments for submission before the council or just consulted with Nayiniyappa in person outside the council’s chambers.38 If anyone was ever in need of legal counsel, wrote Nayiniyappa’s sons, it was their father. The reasons for his need, they argued, were numerous: “He was a foreigner [to the French system], he knew nothing of your laws, the accusations were interspersed with a large number of facts that merited discussion, the accusers were for the most part his enemies, and Sieur Hébert was at the same time a judge and an interested party.”39 An adviser, the sons wrote, would have helped Nayiniyappa navigate this difficult situation.
Nayiniyappa described himself as “a man of this land’s countryside” and claimed that he was not familiar with the intricacies of French law.40 He stated that he did not understand “the language or the law.”41 The problem he identified was not simply a linguistic misunderstanding created by the use of Portuguese but a misunderstanding of code, of the legal jargon and conventions to which he was made subject. In an appeal Nayiniyappa sent to the king after his conviction, he described a legal counselor as a man who could provide “language for the mute, eyes for the blind. This [request for counsel] was again refused, with the same barbarity. [Nayiniyappa] did not know the laws, and asked for someone who knew them.”42 He claimed to have been shocked when this request was denied: “He thought that they could not refuse him counsel, who would know the language, who would instruct him in the formalities of the law, and who could help him prove his innocence.”43 The appeal called Hébert’s denial of the request “contrary to all justice.” As a matter of law, Nayiniyappa’s request was well within his rights, since the Criminal Ordinance of 1670 provided this right to external counsel to the accused.44 Nevertheless, Nayiniyappa claimed, Governor Hébert, his son and the Christian interpreter Manuel, “all flew into a terrible rage” upon hearing this request.45 Their response to Nayiniyappa’s demand for expert legal advice was a violent one: “The general and his son silenced him, cursed him, spit in his face.”46
Nayiniyappa argued that by being denied legal counsel, he was robbed of the opportunity to understand and participate in the proceedings. As an intermediary he was likely especially cognizant of one’s limited ability to represent oneself without an expert go-between. He suggested that a similar denial of comprehension and representation had taken place during the collection of witness testimony against him, and many of the witnesses appear to have agreed with him. Nayiniyappa’s appeals repeatedly assailed the veracity of the witnesses, but he railed even more against the procedural irregularities the testimonies occasioned. The large parade of local witnesses served a central role both in Nayiniyappa’s conviction and in his appeals.
Before Nayiniyappa himself was ever questioned, Governor Hébert took witness depositions from twenty-five Indian witnesses, with Manuel acting as interpreter.47 Given that Nayiniyappa did not admit wrongdoing, these testimonies, attesting to his tyrannical behavior and abuse of the locals under his authority, as well as accusations of financial wrongdoing and his involvement in organizing the local workers’ mass exodus of 1715, were crucial to his conviction. Following the witness testimony, according to French legal procedure, the witnesses were brought again before Hébert. Their testimony was read back to them through the services of an interpreter, and they swore to the truth of the testimony, in a process known as recollement.48
Witnesses who had testified against Nayiniyappa were requestioned two years later, following the Crown’s 1718 order to open an investigation into Nayiniyappa’s conviction. Many of them claimed that they had signed their depositions without knowing their contents. Nayiniyappa’s sons wrote in their appeal that “every single witness stated that his testimony had not been explained or read to him . . . that when someone made some resistance or refused to sign, he was threatened . . . if something was written in their presence, they did not know what it was . . . and when the witnesses or Nanyapa asked that something be read or explained to them, this was refused.”49 Nay iniyappa used the very fact that the group of witnesses against him was large and diverse to make the case that their testimonies could not be trusted. The men who testified against him, he argued, were “insignificant and poor men” and didn’t know the facts of the case. He argued that the division of local society into castes meant they didn’t even know him. They knew only their own castes and the caste chiefs who gave them their orders.50 This argument seems far-fetched—all accounts, including Nayiniyappa’s own, make it clear that the broker was an important personage in the colony’s daily life, and local shopkeepers like the men in question would have known him by reputation if not personally.
The French criminal legal code also required these witnesses to confront Nayiniyappa. This process aimed to allow the accused a chance to defend himself vis-à-vis each accusation, and the witnesses were made to claim ownership of the charge made. This procedure was routinely performed in cases heard before the Sovereign Council and regularly granted to Tamil as well as French defendants. The 1717 appeal’s account of one of interrogations records that when the French governor asked Nayiniyappa if he had paid the “mutinous residents” in the worker rebellion that took place in 1715, the broker “loudly denied it, and demanded that witnesses to this fact be brought before him. No witnesses.”51 The only time witnesses were brought before Nayiniyappa, according to his appeals, was during his seventh and last interrogation. But even then they were not allowed to speak to him directly, as the law called for—instead, the appeal alleged, they “spoke very quietly with the judge,” thereby keeping secret what should have been shared.52
Conflicts over judgment of the affair reveal that debates over rights and justice were key to the negotiation of authority between French colonists, missionaries, and local go-betweens like Nayiniyappa. Much like Nayiniyappa and the witnesses, the French judges who convicted him later pointed to irregularities in the judicial process and claimed to be victims of irregular procedure.
The judges who decided Nayiniyappa’s case were members of the colony’s Sovereign Council and therefore were Pondichéry’s most senior judicial and administrative officials. They were all later excluded from serving on the 1718 commission that examined Nayiniyappa’s conviction.53 In addition to Hébert, four other councillors served as judges in the Nayiniyappa Affair: Flacourt, Lorme, Legou, and La Morandière, the man responsible for producing Nayiniyappa’s later appeal to the king (his role is discussed below). Hébert’s son also attended the deliberations, but, with his low rank, he could not technically serve on the council. When these men were questioned in inquests in December 1718 and January 1719, in the course of the reinvestigation of the affair, all four stated that they had favored a much milder punishment for Nayiniyappa than the one carried out.
One of the judges said that when the time came to decide Nayiniyappa’s punishment, Hébert told them that the broker was an evil man and took out of his pocket a piece of paper on which the suggested sentence was written: hanging, strangulation, enslavement of his children, and confiscation of all his goods.54 When all the other judges objected to this harsh sentence, Hébert pulled out another preinscribed piece of paper, saying, “Gentlemen, since this sentence doesn’t suit you, here is another one.” This paper detailed a milder sentence of imprisonment, whipping, the payment of amends, and banishment of Nayiniyappa’s children from the colony, which all but one of the judges accepted.55 This sentence would ultimately be carried out. Multiple accounts concur that one judge, Lorme, loudly objected, and his own testimony stated that he acquiesced only after saying, “You gentlemen are apparently of this opinion, but it is not my own.”56 La Prévostière, who acted as the king’s attorney (procureur général) in the case, suggested a fine be the only penalty, and all four judges later said they would also have favored a fine as the sole punishment.57 Hébert’s preparation of two alternative sentences suggests he anticipated resistance from the other judges and perhaps used the extreme punishment to make them more inclined to agree to the second one. It remained to the judges to set the fine. Hébert, according to one judge’s account, proposed a massive fine of 8,888 gold pagodas without providing any accounts to justify the number.58
Before Hébert and the other judges settled on Nayiniyappa’s punishment, the Jesuits in town also tried to impact Nayiniyappa’s sentencing. The struggle between Hébert and his fellow judges and the involvement of the missionaries in the question of the severity of Nayiniyappa’s sentence suggests how violence was measured, debated, and negotiated in the context of colonial officialdom. A petition submitted to the council by the Jesuit missionaries in Pondichéry, Madurai, and the Carnatic mission and penned by the Jesuit superior Father Bouchet eight days before the procureur général made his sentencing suggestion supported and perhaps motivated the severe punishment.59 The Jesuits argued that Nayiniyappa had caused great harm to their mission and acted as the “Restorer and Protector” of idolatry in the colony.60 His crimes, in the Jesuits’ eyes, were long-standing. They accused Nayiniyappa of previously “conserving the abominable pagoda of Lingam,” referring here to the Vedapuri Ishwaran Temple in Pondichéry, which the Jesuits had repeatedly attempted to shutter or tear down in the first decades of the century. In addition, the Jesuits argued that Nayiniyappa had undermined their efforts to convert Indians and over many years had “rendered useless the work of the missionaries in the backcountry.”61 The letter framed Nayiniyappa’s punishment as a preemptive and protective measure, not simply a matter of retribution: “There is not a single person in Pondichéry who doesn’t think that Nainiapa wants to take vengeance on the missionaries, whom he considers the authors of his misfortunes, and he will make every effort to harm the [Christian] religion if he is granted his liberty,” Bouchet argued. He also asked that the council keep secret the Jesuits’ request to hold Nayiniyappa in prison.62 Here the Jesuits revealed that they feared Nayiniyappa’s wrath and that of his allies, even as he was imprisoned. Without quite admitting their own role in his persecution, they suggested the broker might believe they had aided his enemies. This fear was further acknowledged by their next request: that Nayiniyappa and other gentiles (non-Christians) in town never be told that the Jesuits had made this petition to keep him imprisoned.
Punishing Nayiniyappa became a means of protecting the Jesuits’ own safety and position in Pondichéry and beyond. Historians of the colonial world have argued that violence against colonial subjects, such as the punishment that the council inflicted on Nayiniyappa, was an integral part of the rule of law rather than an aberration opposed to it.63 The Jesuits’ petition never to release Nayiniyappa from his prison reveals that the amount of violence meted out was in direct proportion to the importance and position of colonial actors. That is, the powerful required a larger measure of violence so as to balance the ledger of authority.
Precedent would have backed the more moderate punishment all the other judges except Hébert and the king’s attorney had in mind. The most serious accusation against Nayiniyappa was sedition, premised on the notion that he had brought about the mass exodus of Indian inhabitants in 1715. Yet when the merchant Nalachetty was convicted in 1704 of having “seduced the inhabitants of this city to go live elsewhere,” he paid amends of only twelve pagodas and received a warning that if it happened again, he would be punished more severely.64 While the greater investment of trust the company had put in Nayiniyappa might have supported a slightly harsher punishment, the difference was extreme. Nayiniyappa’s similar alleged crime brought upon him punishment in many orders of magnitude greater: the prison term, public whipping, huge fine, and perpetual banishment from the town.
The severity of this punishment testified to the threat the broker posed. After all, he could simply have been dismissed, even made to leave Pondichéry. Instead, he was stripped of all his wealth and was flogged at the most public locale in the city, the main bazaar. As his brutal public punishment demonstrates, Nayiniyappa’s very success as a broker made him a viable threat and thus necessitated his complete destruction. The public aspect of the punishment was a crucial feature of it, at least according to the account provided by Nayiniyappa’s sons. When Hébert and his son threatened Nayiniyappa in the course of his interrogation, it was this feature of his humiliation that they highlighted, by taunting him thus: “Where are your supporters now, your patrons who will save you from the whipping we will give you tomorrow, after we bring you in shackles in front of everyone, to the middle of the market?”65 Of course we cannot know if this exchange took place as the sons reported it, but it was their father’s public annihilation that the sons protested. The fact that the whipping took place in the Tamil section of town also meant that the audience witnessing Nayiniyappa’s punishment would have been composed of both his peers and his former subordinates, thereby making his humiliation and mortification all the more complete.
In the course of deciding his punishment, the judges had Nayiniyappa brought before them. Hébert briefly questioned the prisoner “on three or four matters,” as one of the appeals stated.66 Before the judges, Nayiniyappa again denied any wrongdoing. On this occasion, the same day on which final judgment was rendered, La Morandière remembered that Nayiniyappa turned away from Hébert to face the silent judges directly, saying, “‘Messieurs, I have never stolen from the company, nor done it any harm.” The judge recalled that Hébert fils responded, using the familiar second person tu : “You are a thief, we know you well.”67
The judge Flacourt admitted that he signed the severe judgment only because “seeing the others sign, he signed out of fear of causing problems for himself with Hébert.”68 La Morandière and Lorme similarly claimed that they went with the majority in part because they feared retribution. Yet the official text of Nayiniyappa’s sentencing revealed none of the judges’ debates about the severity of the punishment. Only the subsequent inquest revealed these had occurred.69 Although the transcript of the interrogations provides no confession by Nayiniyappa, the sentencing document claims that he confessed under questioning.70
Like several Tamil witnesses, French members of the Superior Council claimed that Hébert and his allies had intimidated, manipulated, and coerced them, even though these were some of the most powerful and influential men in the colony. One of Nayiniyappa’s appeals refers to these claims when it condemns Hébert as a “perverse and bad judge.”71 Hébert’s means of compelling the compliance of each of the judges was to address each of them separately, asking for their opinion in a low voice.72 Two judges said he actually whispered in their ears.73 While this does not directly explain why they did not speak more loudly in response, it makes clear that Hébert had the power to manipulate the judges, even as they claimed to be united against him. Whisper and conquer. Even in a room shared by French-speaking men, comprehension could be muddied, and a whisper served the same goal as an unfamiliar language. Not knowing that they in fact were in agreement with one another, or so they at least claimed after the fact, the judges were more easily intimidated into complying with Hébert’s wishes.
The 1720 appeal by Nayiniyappa’s sons emphasized Hébert’s manipulation in addition to many other procedural violations, stating that the governor “fooled all the judges, by persuading them that the sentence they had signed was passed by a majority.”74 Further, Hébert had “abused the credulity of the judges . . . and made them sign a judgment contrary to their opinion,” thereby positioning them as victims as much as Nayiniyappa.75 The appeal absolved the judges and Nayiniyappa alike and positioned Hébert as the true culprit.
In fact, most of the other judges and the procureur général had preexisting conflicts with Hébert, explaining perhaps why they so quickly turned against him once an inquiry into the Nayiniyappa Affair began. In 1711 Hébert had ordered the removal of Flacourt from his position as chief of the French outpost in Bengal. On the very same day he described La Prévostière, who was procureur général during the affair, as one who “reveals the secrets of the Company and has risen up against his superior, by spreading various calumnies about him in all the homes in Pondichéry.”76 Hébert would later claim that La Prévostière had maligned him during the affair because of this enmity and claimed, “Everyone in Pondichéry knows that [La Prévostière] is my sworn enemy.”77
The decision to convict Nayiniyappa gave rise to a struggle over this conviction between various factions in the colony’s commercial and religious institutions. As the battle lines were drawn for and against him, the affair became the ground for missionaries and traders with incommensurable interests to articulate their view about the direction in which the colony should head. This conflict was expressed either in the appeals that agitated for Nayiniyappa’s exoneration on the one hand or in letters that reiterated his guilt on the other.
While Nayiniyappa was not allowed to consult with anyone during his interrogation, multiple Frenchmen assisted him in the writing and distribution of his appeals after his conviction. None were trained legal professionals, but they were powerful traders employed by the company. Nayiniyappa’s first appeal, dated 1716 and translated into French from Portuguese, gave only a few details of the interrogations. Father Tessier, the MEP missionary in Pondichéry, may have assisted Nayiniyappa in the translation from Portuguese. The missionary’s letter dated August 1716 complained about Nayiniyappa’s treatment by the Héberts and noted that “M. de Sault [a Parisian agent who assisted in the distribution of Nayiniyappa’s appeal] has all the necessary documents in hand”; it suggests at least that Tessier actively supported the broker.78
It was Nayiniyappa’s subsequent appeals that most benefited from the help of French company employees. His most important French ally was a French trader named Nicolas François Le Noutre de La Morandière. He was one of the judges who convicted Nayiniyappa and subsequently was a coauthor of several of the appeals submitted in the affair, by both Nayiniyappa and his partners Tiruvangadan and Ramanada. La Morandière’s position surely gave him a privileged view into the proceedings that had led to the conviction and therefore helped him collaborate on the text of the appeals. La Morandière did not initially acknowledge the collaboration, but in a letter Hébert sent to the directors in Paris on January 14, 1719, he blamed La Morandière for his involvement, and La Morandière himself acknowledged it in a letter written just ten days later to the directors.79
La Morandière wrote that he had immersed himself in the task of submitting appeals and requests on behalf of Indians who had been harmed by Governor Hébert. “For almost five months,” he wrote, “I had to devote myself to the Indians’ affairs, always busy with writing requests for people who had been crushed by M. Hébert and were asking for recompense from [the Compagnie des Indes].”80 He explained that he was driven to act on behalf of the oppressed Indians because of the Héberts’ “tyrannical oppressions” and “insatiable avarice” and the extent to which their wrongdoing was harmful to the rule of the French company. Writing the appeals, he added, was a way to shed light on the true culprit—Hébert—thereby protecting the interests of the company, which would otherwise be held responsible. As a result of his efforts as the author of these appeals, he argued, “the Indians received justice and remain here content, calm is reestablished in the city, and all is returned to the same order which always reigned under previous governments.”81 La Morandière’s description of a previous calm and order was clearly revisionist—Pondichéry had been in a state of one kind of political turmoil or another since the French returned to it in 1699. Yet in his account, the dispensation of justice to local inhabitants in the Nayiniyappa Affair was a means to return to a lost utopia of accepted French rule, even if such utopia was always a mirage.
La Morandière had served as company bookkeeper at the rank of sousmarchand, but just on the cusp of the Nayiniyappa affair, the Superior Council accepted his request for a promotion to the rank of merchant and appointed him a councillor. It was in this role that he would serve as a judge in Nayiniyappa’s case—signing on to a verdict he would later renounce. But this promotion was short-lived. In the margin of the very same decree that recounted the swearing in of La Morandière to the council, the following undated comment appeared, describing the reversal of the appointment: “Since the reception [into the council] of the said La Morandière, his conduct has appeared so opposed to the interests of the company . . . and we have received several complaints. We have removed the said La Morandière from the position of merchant and councillor, and in addition have barred him from taking on any other role.”82 Hébert likely penned the comment, as he signed the decree. The removal it describes took place on September 15, 1716, while Nayiniyappa was in the process of appealing his conviction. The conduct “so opposed to the interests of the company” was almost certainly La Morandière’s support of Nayiniyappa.
In two letters sent to Paris, penned in January 1719, La Morandière’s described the principles that guided him in writing complaints on behalf of Nayiniyappa and his family and associates, revealing in the process his sophisticated understanding of the law.83 He understood his role in the appeals as providing proper legal representation previously denied. He stated that he “conformed to the styles of advocates who composed requests in France to present before the king,” mindful of the consequences and the importance of the truth. He also critiqued earlier versions of the appeals, arguing that they had “been composed based on a badly done translation of manifestos in Portuguese that the Indians had sent to France.”84 In an appeal sent by the sons, with La Morandière’s help, in 1718, they described the earlier texts submitted by Nayiniyappa as sorely lacking because of the circumstances of their composition. Those appeals had been “composed while he was ill, and in haste in his prison cell.”85
Far from renouncing his role in rendering the judgment against Nayiniyappa, La Morandière highlighted his involvement in the affair and his qualifications as someone who knew the events the appeal described in greater depth than any other advocate might. Taking on the role of improving the overly simple appeals first filed against Hébert, explained La Morandière, was a matter of both justice and duty.86 He wrote that his rewriting of the appeals entailed a significant transformation of the texts, since the first appeal Nayiniyappa submitted in 1716 to the Compagnie des Indes and the king “did not express more than a tenth of the things” relevant to his case.87
La Morandière described how he had revised the initial appeal presented by Tiruvangadan, Nayiniyappa’s business associate and relative, who was also arrested. Tiruvangadan’s first appeal, written without La Morandière’s help, simply mentioned that Hébert the younger owed Tiruvangadan 1,022 pagodas, the local gold coin. “But my [text] added a fact,” explained La Morandière, “which this Malabar and almost all of Pondichéry did not know.” This added fact was the claim that Hébert père had approached the Jesuit Father Turpin and secretly conspired with him to arrest Tiruvangadan for being a bad Christian who had assisted in a “procession of a demon and adoration of idols.” This was done, explained La Morandière, to cover up the fact that Hébert the younger owed Tiruvangadan money and disregarded the fact that the Indian was not, and never had been, a Christian.88 La Morandière found a record of these secret exchanges between the Jesuit and Governor Hébert by going through the records of the council’s proceedings, exploiting his privileged access to company records. The Indian claimants would never have had knowledge of these alleged machinations to blacken Tiruvangadan’s reputation, since the contrived charge against him was never actually brought forward.89
La Morandière also claimed to have strengthened the legal appeal of Ramanada, Nayiniyappa’s business associate who was arrested alongside him. Ramanada’s first appeal, explained La Morandière, had ascribed all the blame for his arrest to the Jesuits. It argued that the Fathers of the Society were angry because Ramanada served as an informant on local religious practice to the Jesuits rival, the MEP missionary Father Tessier. The information provided by Ramanada was in turn used in the course of the ongoing Malabar Rites controversy, a struggle between Jesuits in the East and the church hierarchy in Rome, regarding the Jesuit practice of accommodating local cultural practices among their converts. The Jesuits’ local missionary rivals, the Capuchins and the representative of the MEP, opposed the use of the Malabar Rites, claiming that such accommodation diluted Christianity and made for bad converts. In the context of the Nayiniyappa Affair, the Malabar Rites controversy underlay much of the hostility between the Jesuits and other missionary groups in the Tamil region.90
But it was a mistake, suggested La Morandière, to situate Ramanada’s arrest only in the context of his involvement in the Malabar Rites controversy, as an informant for the MEP missionary. Instead, La Morandière’s text offered a fuller account of the agendas driving Ramanada’s persecution. He argued that Hébert exhibited a “veritable passion” against Ramanada, which originated with Ramanada and Nayiniyappa’s involvement in bringing an end to a scheme to raise taxes that would have been extremely profitable to Hébert. This fact, wrote La Morandière, reflected badly on Hébert. Since he was seeking vengeance, his actions against the Indians were a “real crime.”91 La Morandière’s change to the appeal, which added all this background information, transformed it from a matter of religious squabbling between two Catholic missionary groups to an issue of political and commercial malfeasance.
While Nayiniyappa, Tiruvangadan, and Ramanada had ongoing professional and commercial relations with the French, they could not match La Morandière’s insider status and his access to the official and sometimes secret record of the colonial government’s doings. Because of this access, his legal appeals were more densely evidentiary than anything they could have presented themselves. For example, the 1717 appeal he coauthored incorporated the record of the seven interrogations of Nayiniyappa and used it to make the case that the interrogators had coerced and intimidated Nayiniyappa.
Acting as an advocate for the Indians involved in the Nayiniyappa Affair put La Morandière in a very awkward position, as he himself acknowledged, since he had to “lift his pen against many men about whom it was not my place to complain.”92 While he could count Hébert an enemy, complaining about him implicated the directors in Paris, who had appointed Hébert, and this was politically dangerous. The trader noted “that the requests of an advocate are not orders [arrêts], and these requests are not always granted to the parties for whom he pleads.” He wrote that it was difficult but necessary to his sense of justice to write “against people whom one venerates, and whom it is a pleasure to serve”—that is, the directors.93
La Morandière’s advocacy was wide-ranging and was likely driven in some measure by his conflicts with Governor Hébert and a desire to see a change in the colony’s leadership. In addition to his appeals on behalf of Nayiniyappa, Tiruvangadan, and Ramanada, he was responsible for crafting some on behalf of a scribe imprisoned for refusing to provide false testimony against Nayiniyappa, a merchant wrongly treated by the council, and a local Christian who had been mistreated by the Jesuits, all of whom he claimed were victims unfairly swept up in the Nayiniyappa Affair.94
La Morandière was not the only Frenchman who took an active role in advocating for the Indians. Shortly after Nayiniyappa’s conviction in May of 1716, the French trader Cuperly also wrote impassioned letters to France on Nayiniyappa’s behalf.95 Cuperly was a member of Pondichéry’s French elite, as the nephew through marriage of the colony’s venerated first governor, François Martin. Like many of Nayiniyappa’s advocates, Cuperly centered his complaints around procedural issues, claiming Hébert had taken on too many different positions in the course of the affair. Referring to Manuel’s connections with the Jesuits—“the son of the Jesuits’ catechist, Naniyapa’s cruelest enemy”—he claimed that the translator had interpreted according to his intentions and not according to justice.96 He likewise argued that Hébert had suborned the witnesses, who were exacting retribution for past wrongs, and he decried the council’s failure to allow Nayiniyappa to face his accusers. Ironically he described the prosecution as “this beautiful procedure.”97 The final French trader who might have participated in the preparation of the appeals was Hébert’s rival, Dulivier, the man who preceded him as governor and was displaced by Hébert’s return to India. Hébert accused him of agitating on the convicted Indians’ behalf.98 Indeed, Dulivier sent the Marine Council a lengthy complaint about Hébert’s misdeeds and mistreatment of Nayiniyappa, Tiruvangadan, and Ramanada.99
Missionaries in Pondichéry also used the legal arena to act out their rivalries and conflicts, both with the French colonial state and with one another. After all, as Dale Van Kley has noted of the Old Regime, “religious matters are only metaphysically distinguishable from constitutional and jurisdictional ones during this entire period.”100 Several French missionaries in India joined the appeal effort in the Nayiniyappa Affair. Even as the Jesuits were writing petitions asking that Nayiniyappa be severely punished, the head of the Missions étrangères mission in Pondichéry was writing letters to France vigorously defending him. Nayiniyappa’s fate became a new battleground in the ongoing strife and power struggle between the Jesuits and the other missionaries in town. Father Tessier, who headed the MEP outpost in Pondichéry, wrote to his superiors in Paris the summer after Nayiniyappa’s conviction. In his first letter, he described Hébert and his son as being “the instruments of the Jesuits’ vengeance.”101 He argued that the persecution of Nayiniyappa was to be abhorred not only because of the price paid by the man itself but because a reputation for injustice harmed the colony as a whole: “Pondichéry has truly come to be viewed with horror by all the nations, and no one wants to come here,” he warned. Any appeal to the Héberts for justice would be pointless, he wrote, since “nothing restrains them, neither justice, nor conscience, nor honor, nor religion.”102
The judicial record shows that missionaries regularly and actively participated in the colony’s legal arena. Not only did they make regular appearances before Pondichéry’s court, they also made an effort to shape and direct legal proceedings. In some cases this reflected an interest in local law: Father Bouchet, who was the Jesuit superior in Pondichéry at the time of the Nayiniyappa Affair, had himself authored a text on local practices of dispute resolution in 1714.103 In the course of the Nayiniyappa Affair, the Jesuits attempted to shape legal proceeding more directly, although they tried to conceal their interference. That they played a role in the collection of witness testimonies (as chapter 2 explained) and in the sentencing of Nayiniyappa—a process in which they had no official capacity whatsoever—demonstrates the extent to which they were embedded in the processes of colonial rule and judicial action.
The French missionaries in India held a complicated position with respect to judicial authority. French missionaries in Pondichéry fell under the ecclesiastic authority of the bishop of Mylapore, who was appointed by and acted under the auspices of the Portuguese Padroado in India.104 Yet the French Jesuits arrived in the East as emissaries of the French king and therefore acted by his authority, not that of the Padroado, and the Pondichéry Superior Council had judicial authority over them in secular matters. Both Capuchin missionaries and the MEP procurateur also fell under the authority of the French king in his role as the head of the Gallican Church. Pope Gregory XV had also tried to exert authority over missionaries abroad when in 1622 he created the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), which sought to centralize the oversight of missionary work. French missionaries in South India thus occupied a special position and had to maneuver between rival lay and religious institutions invested in their mission. Disagreements among missionaries about strategies of conversion in the colonial mission field only rendered this politically fraught negotiation more complex.
While during the Nayiniyappa Affair the Jesuits took on a prosecutorial role, a much more common involvement for missionaries of all orders in French India occurred when they appeared before the Superior Council as claimants or defendants. Missionaries came before the Superior Council for various reasons, usually involving property or financial disputes of the kind brought before the council by many of the colony’s residents. Occasionally missionaries’ appearances in the judicial records were more clearly a result of their religious position and were evidence of rupture or discord, as in the repeated discussion of the struggle over the Malabar Rites controversy, which largely played out in the religious arena with papal bulls and missionary missives but occasionally came before the secular court of Pondichéry.105 The involvement of the council in this struggle between the Capuchins and the Jesuits about the incorporation of local cultural practices into the lives of Christian converts also suggests the intermingling of the political, religious, and legal domains in the colony.
This intermingling had lately brought the council into conflict with the Vatican. As part of the Vatican’s attempts to settle the Malabar and Chinese Rites Controversy, a papal legate, Thomas Maillard de Tournon, patriarch of Antioch, was sent to the East. Pondichéry was his first port of call. The council warned that before making any pronouncements that might be “prejudicial to the laws of His Majesty or his subjects,” Tournon must present them to the council of Pondichéry and the procureur général for authorization and modification “for the benefit of the public and the maintenance of the state’s laws and practices.”106 Tournon’s failure to comply with this order when he published in 1704 a declaration against the practice of accommodation led the council to declare that apostolic visitors seeking entry to French India and the Indian Ocean island colonies must have the express permission of the French king. They also renewed their demand to review any decisions and pronouncements such papal visitors might make.107 Such conflicts between papal authority and the French Crown had, of course, a long metropolitan history, culminating in the creation of the Gallican Church headed by the French king in 1682. The council’s already tenuous hold on authority in the colonial context only sharpened these struggles. Given the Compagnie des Indes’s repeated difficulties in asserting its sovereignty over non-Christian subjects, who threatened to pick up and leave whenever their religious liberties were compromised, the council perceived the dicta to abandon the Malabar rites and the disregard of council directives as a threat to the colony’s viability.
On occasion, the Catholic missionaries themselves brought their doctrinal conflicts into the chambers of the Superior Council for resolution—or at least an airing out. In February 1712, four years before Nayiniyappa’s arrest, the Jesuit superior Father Bouchet approached the council with a grievance about declarations that Capuchins and their supporters in India had made. His grievance hinged on the issue of legal jurisdiction. A Capuchin missionary had accused one of the Jesuits of an infraction against the papal ban on the Malabar Rites. The Capuchin brought the complaint before a religious tribunal headed by the bishop of San Thomé. The Capuchin had bolstered his case with the testimony of multiple Indians “before the secular judges of this city”—that is, the Superior Council.108 The borders between religious and secular jurisdiction were porous.
Father Bouchet claimed that the Indian’s testimony against the Jesuits was false. He demanded the court bring before the court one of the false witnesses: “Ramanaden, Malabar of this city and agent of the premier courtier of the Royal Company.”109 This was the very same Ramanada who was Nayiniyappa’s close business associate and later was arrested alongside Nayiniyappa. Bouchet blamed Nayiniyappa for Ramanada’s damaging testimony against the Jesuits. He claimed that “the ascendance in this town of this first courtier of the company, who through his office is the head of the Malabars,” made him all too powerful. Bouchet argued that accusing the Jesuits of wrongdoing harmed the neophyte Christians in the colony more broadly and that the council must protect them from such injustice.110 The council decreed that Bouchet and the other Jesuits should present all the documents and accusations they wished to press against Ramanada and his associates—again, a reference to Nayiniyappa.111 Several years before Nayiniyappa was arrested, then, he and the Jesuits were already in conflict before the colony’s court.
Another incident just prior to Nayiniyappa’s arrest likewise demonstrated the missionaries’ consciousness of the council’s authority over their reputation. When the Superior Council convened on November 4, 1715, it discussed a request by the Capuchin missionaries in the town for certificates of good behavior—documents attesting to the fact that they had “never caused nor created any scandal during the time that they had served the chapel of this fort and as missionaries under the auspices of the company.”112 The Capuchins, in explaining the need for this certificate, cited various “calumnies” brought in France against them. While they did not specifically name the Jesuits, the ongoing enmity between the two orders in French India meant they were most likely the unnamed defamers. The council considered the request and acquiesced by providing a document declaring that the Capuchins had “never caused any scandal or provided a bad example” and that on the contrary, they had always led exemplary and pious lives.113
The Jesuits also had some experience appearing as defendants before the Pondichéry court prior to the Nayiniyappa Affair. In 1707, the procureur général filed suit against the Jesuits, in a land dispute between the company and the missionaries.114 A lengthy exchange between the superior of the Jesuits, Father Tachard, and the procureur général ensued, with decrees and responses flying back and forth.115 The council ordered that trees the Jesuits had planted—a mark of property ownership—be razed to the ground.116 Clearly, this was an acrimonious legal encounter. On occasion the Jesuits also appeared before the council in a powerful position, as in the 1720 discussion of the loans the missionaries had extended to the perpetually cash-strapped company.117 Overall, the judicial records of the first few decades of the eighteenth century reveal that missionaries both drew on the council for legal support and were at times willing subjects of its jurisdiction. During the Nayiniyappa Affair, the Jesuits’ explicit intervention in matters of law was an attempt to insert themselves into the highest reaches of the colony’s governance.
Following a lengthy and detailed investigation, in the course of which officials in both India and France considered and debated Nayiniyappa’s multiple appeals, the council overturned his conviction in Pondichéry on January 20, 1719.118 Nayiniyappa had by that point been dead for two years. The presiding procureur général, Pierre Dumas, signed the decision, which referenced multiple inquiries and inquests into the original interrogations and conviction. Dumas stated, “I conclude that the case made against Nayiniyappa by sieur Hébert is declared void, as is the judgment that was the outcome of this case.” The decision called for the restitution of all profits from the sale of Nayiniyappa’s goods to his heirs, the exact details of which were to be determined in France by the king’s council.119
News that Nayiniyappa’s name had been cleared spread quickly in the Tamil region. A letter written shortly thereafter by Nayiniyappa’s advocate La Morandière to the directors in Paris described a town in a celebratory mood:
The government had scarcely been in the hands of M. La Prévostière when a large number of Indians who had left for Moorish lands in order to put themselves out of reach of the violence of M. Hébert, returned to Pondichéry. They already knew of the order it had pleased his Majesty to give in favor of Nainappa, Tiruvangadan, and Ramanada, and they assumed, with reason, that his Majesty’s justice would similarly be offered to them as to the three Indians who had the happy experience of bringing their complaints before his Majesty’s tribunal.120
Indeed, the governor who replaced Hébert, La Prévostière, warmly received the returning residents. French officials even entertained the idea of some jubilant fanfare—a ceremony, a shooting of the cannons, perhaps making the king’s order known to the sound of trumpets—but Governor La Prévostière judged that such celebrations would alienate Frenchmen who had served alongside Hébert, many of whom were still filling important roles in the colony.121 In the end, after all the battles, the hundreds of pages of testimonies, appeals and deliberations, and much unlike the very public punishment Nayiniyappa had endured, his exoneration was a quiet affair.
The Nayiniyappa Affair unfurled almost entirely in one legal forum, French India’s highest court, and was then appealed through the proper metropolitan channels. The broker and his allies immersed themselves in the legal system, with its metropolitan contours, and in so doing successfully adapted, adopted, and co-opted that very system. The forums were not multiple, but the legal strategies were quite varied: appeals in India and in France, formal appeals by the convicted men (Nayiniyappa, Tiruvangadan, and Ramanada), informal letters of support by both traders and missionaries, and evidentiary documents sent across the seas. Yet as Nayiniyappa and his allies engaged the legal system, in their success was enfolded an implicit critique of French colonial implementation of the legal system.
If Nayiniyappa’s interrogation and conviction reflected the legal nature of imperial authority, his and his supporters’ ultimately successful appeals demonstrate that the colonial state was porous, open to manipulation, and had multiple and sometimes contradictory nodes of decision making. Colonial legal institutions were, to a great extent, recently congealed resources and practices rather than established institutions. Both French and Tamil actors performed power and authority through arguments about proper procedure. Claims of ignorance and lack of knowledge, as much as those of knowledge and experience, could form the basis for these performances, as both Nayiniyappa and his judges demonstrated. At a time of instability in a young colony, where friction about which kinds of order, authority, and morality were going to prevail, various actors made claims for proper procedure in an attempt to determine what such order would actually entail. Both sides won, and both sides lost, with the tools and procedures of the judicial arena. Ultimately, though, the decision was made not in terms of the law. The verdict was overturned because the law allowed the economic and political interests at play to be expressed.
An account of the legal aspects of the Nayiniyappa Affair reveals that colonial subjects demanded legal cohesion from their position in the colonies, thereby revealing the tensions of imperial rule. Law in French India provided indigenous and European actors alike an opportunity to participate in a global endeavor on which local agendas bestowed meaning. Colonial subjects like Nayiniyappa could simultaneously expose the lack of cohesion in the French legal system and make a claim for equality under the same law. The affair’s evolution exemplifies the heterogeneity and friction of the moment of legal encounter in overseas France.
The Nayiniyappa Affair reminds us that even though judicial institutions were an arm of the colonial state, we should not assume that the decisions made in these institutions always and inevitably favored the agenda of that state, since indigenous actors were able “to utilize the judiciary to achieve their own ends,” as Niels Brimnes has argued.122 The legal aspects of the Nayiniyappa Affair also show the extent to which missionaries in Pondichéry were involved at every level of decision making in the colony, even in arenas, like the judicial one, in which they ostensibly had no role. The Jesuits, who pushed for Nayiniyappa’s arrest and subsequent punishment, and the MEP missionaries who advocated for his rehabilitation all moved with ease in the legal realm.
In his account of France of the Old Regime, Alexis de Tocqueville noted, “The practice of the law courts had entered in many ways into the pattern of French life. Thus the courts were largely responsible for the notion that every matter of public or private interest was subject to debate and every decision could be appealed from; as also for the opinion that such affairs should be conducted in public and certain formalities observed.”123 The Nayiniyappa Affair shows the extent to which France’s colonies were equally entangled in a legal regime that, while capable of being used for personal or institutional gain and manipulated by individual actors through intimidation and persuasion, was also open to appeal.