Local Politics and Regional Confrontations

Chapter five looks in detail at the conflicts between two Toda settlements and the British Madras Presidency government. These conflicts deepened in the late 1830s and lasted until the early 1840s; they were to form the basis for the first regulation of land grants and Toda rights in the Nilgiri Hills. The chapter focuses particularly on how the British administration tried to create a rule by record-of-rights, while negotiating forcefully, though not always successfully, in pursuit of their intension of establishing sovereign rule. In the process, the chapter shows, the bureaucracy itself became both a tool of power and an arena for contesting principles relating to rights, not only in land in its material sense, but in nature for both the material and non-material values attached to it. It further makes clear how integrated people appear to have been into a state’s or a large bureaucracy’s way of functioning. The chapter explains how seeing law as shaped historically and in situ—reflecting the interaction of people and environments in the colonies rather than being imposed from a distant European metropole—means to take new approaches to grounded and emplaced histories of the global phenomena of colonialism.