Imperial Inheritances

Abstract

This essay examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inheritance laws in India in order to analyse the intersections between state power, heteronormative reproductivity and colonial structures of race. In particular, I focus on the case of Troup et al. v. East India Company, which involves the estate of Begum Sumroo, one of the wealthiest women in colonial India. I explore the ways in which the normativization of western notions of inheritance, allied with reproductive heterosexuality, worked to undergird the racialized expansion of Empire. I argue that, by law, inheritance and gain came to be reinforced as heteronormative (in its definition, procreative) and patriarchal virtues under colonial rule. Begum Sumroo's place within this legal scheme poses serious challenges to the logic of colonial inheritance. I use the Begum's case to expose the mechanisms through which, in order for colonial rule to take effect, sexual normativity was heightened to secure the goals of territorial expansion, thus yoking the notion of private property to various controls over bodily and sexual privacy. I read the Sumroo case as an instance of counter-colonial juridical claims to inheritance and possession that in their violent suppressions reveal the brutality of British power and the illogic – racial and sexual – of early colonial governance.

• Begum Sumroo
• colonial expansion
• heteronormative reproductivity
• inheritance law
• kinship

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to David Lloyd, Warren Montag, Jean Wyatt, Mrinalini Chakravorty and Jeff Atteberry for their careful readings and suggestions. Most especially, Robert Young's thoughtful editorial comments have greatly enriched this essay. Finally, I would like to dedicate this essay to Annavarapu Sreeramulu, whose extensive collection of colonial casebooks provided the inspiration for my work here.

Notes

¹ Spivak frames her description of the power accorded to reproductive heteronormativity within the biological terms of life and death. As she notes, the biological stakes of the issue play out not only in the distribution of rights to properly reproductive subjects, but also in the recognition of those rights by others. I would add that the founding violence occurs not only in the distribution of rights themselves, but also in the privileging of public recognition in the deployment of those rights.

² Of course, this dynamic extends into the contemporary era, for example, in the issue of queer politics. For an illuminating discussion, see Butler (2002).

³ Chatterjee (1989) is an iconic text along these lines, as are many of the other essays in Recasting Women. For a more extended treatment, see Stoler (2002).

⁴ For a detailed history of the Begum, see Firminger (1907).

⁵ For a detailed record of the East India Company's dealings with the Begum, see Sutherland (1873: 349–59).

⁶ The Begum, during her lifetime, submitted a will declaring her wish to deed her property to Dyce Sombre upon her death. The British government raised no objection to the transfer until after the Begum's death, at which point they nullified her will (Moore 1860: 106).

⁷ Stoler (1989) elaborates on the state's effort to introduce Victorian morality into the scene of what it saw as the debauchery of colonial sexual practices.

⁸ Of course, the work of Foucault and Agamben provides a sort of ‘genealogy’ for my project here.

⁹ Dalhousie's Doctrine reflects the English aversion to recognizing adoption in property law. McAuliff (1986: 659) notes: ‘The English common law knew no such phenomenon as adoption because the English concept of the family was based exclusively on marriage and blood ties … Over the centuries, even though England had changed from a landholding to a mercantile and industrial society, the emphasis on land remained. Property law thus crowded out family law, and no provision at all was made for adoption.’ To secure ideological dominance, the English sought to instil in the colonies the supremacy of the normative family.

¹⁰ Of course, the goals of the colonial state are not to promote the authority of native patriarchy because the power of colonial authority accrues precisely by undermining and dismantling the local power structures with which it must compete. The same logic does not necessarily hold in the metropole, where I think the relationship between the state and patriarchal privilege is much more difficult to disentangle. In a different context, Sen (2002) examines the uses that domesticity served in the construction of the colonial project.

¹¹ Arondekar (2005) is an excellent illumination of the point I am trying to make here, specifically in terms of the problem of locating queerness in the colonial archives.

¹² Spivak (1985) makes a similar point about reading the absences in historical records.

¹³ This is not to say that each of these cultural/racial/religious positions did not have internally coherent structures of normativity, but rather that none had reached hegemonic stature across the subcontinent.

¹⁴ Guha (1999) famously argues the connection between speculation, rumour and the circulation of subaltern dissent in India around the revolt of 1857. Guha's argument is resonant here because the ‘uncontrollable’ aspects of rumours about insurgency allowed for rebels, elite nationalists and British colonialists alike to construct narratives suitable to their position. The Begum's person is similarly invented in order to serve as alibi for various ideological positions – those represented by British women and the patriarchal colonial apparatus, as well as the Indian attempt to subvert these.

¹⁵ See, for example, Spivak (1988), Sen (2002) and Singha (1998).

¹⁶ Sharpe (1993) has most strikingly analysed the construction of English femininity in the service of Empire. She makes the claim that British femininity was figured during the imperial years to emphasize normative models domesticity and chastity in order to justify the civilizing and protectionist claims of colonialism that cast the colony as a threat to the English angel of the hearth. Sharpe illustrates how such narratives circulated in England and were internalized by colonial actors especially at times of crisis such as the 1857 Rebellion.

¹⁷ While some contemporary biographies attempt to resolve the confusion surrounding the details of the Begum's life, I am choosing instead to allow the ambiguity to resonate, insofar as it draws attention to the fallibility and inadequacy of the archive. For a more complete history, see Fisher (2004).

¹⁸ Fisher (2004) provides an excellent overview of the various uses to which the Begum put her different kinship-like alliances. While Fisher provides a sense of the strategic uses of provisional kinship formations, my goal here is to examine the intersection of political strategies, their biological circumscriptions and their affective visibility.

¹⁹ The case from which the precedent derives is that of Rajah Chetpal Singh v. Sheo Gholam Singh, decided in the Sudder Dewanny Adawlut at Agra on 30 August 1848.

²⁰ See Anderson (1991) for a seminal discussion of nationalism as an imagined form of social belonging based on notions of sovereignty as at once expansive, horizontally linking otherwise unequal segments of a population, and limited in terms of being territorially confined.

²¹ Harris's (1993) discussion of race and property is relevant. It bears repeating that the founding principle of property is the fundamental right to privacy, which implies a corresponding right to exclude. For Harris, whiteness functions as property insofar as it is valued, socially and economically, and it is exclusive.