The Company and the Problem of Sovereignty on the Coast: Insights from a History Scholar’s Recent Publication

Saanika is a PhD Scholar in the department of History at Ashoka University, and her doctoral project investigates the idea of sovereignty through the lens of the English East India Company and its entanglements with the local political actors on the south Konkan coast. As a part of her ongoing scholarly research work, Saanika’s article was selected for publication in the special issue of the Coastal Studies and Society Journal called “Coastal Imaginaries”.

The Issue explores how coastlines and waterfronts have been diversely perceived and represented to reflect certain social anxieties and cultural values. It stems from an understanding of the coast as a liminal space where boundaries of all kinds were negotiated and contested.

Saanika’s article speaks to both the themes of anxiety and liminality through a study of the English East India Company’s pursuit of sovereignty at Bankot in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It also queries the issues of power and social control by studying the Company’s engagement with both the Marathas and the inhabitants of Bankot, underlining the divide between the Company’s perception of control and the reality on the ground.

She approaches the body politic of the Company through its on-ground praxis, moving away from generalised and homogenous understandings of the Company by focusing on how regional contingencies made Company rule diverse across the subcontinent. The research also shifts the political focus away from the inland to the coast, where she studies how sovereignty was internally carved through interactions.

Bankot, located south of Bombay, was acquired by the Company in 1756 through an Anglo-Maratha naval agreement. While a singular dot on the western rim of the Indian subcontinent, Saanika sees Bankot as representative of various other settlements on the south Konkan coast, which were all cast in a state of political liminality and fluidity at this time. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a large number of Asian and European factions had emerged along the coastline, leaving coastal borders ill-defined and contested. Competition over maritime and coastal control was hence a crucial feature of the eighteenth-century western coast, and in turn, Bankot. The growth of these factions also meant a rise in employment opportunities that, in turn, made the coast more mobile. This proved a double-edged sword for the Company as it allowed more revenue-makers to enter its settlements, but also raised novel problems about control.

Saanika’s research for the article relies on archival material from the Maharashtra State Archives, including diaries and correspondence of the Resident at Bankot. These sources reveal how the Company’s imagination of sovereignty centred on an anxiety about the Maratha state’s power in the region, which could hinder its dual aims of acquiring revenue and increasing inhabitants.

The research work highlights that to become the uncontested sovereign, the Company had to define the limits of its territory, negotiate dues with other political entities, control the flow of revenue from agriculture and trade, check incursions from land and sea, and assert its authority over subjects. All of these goals were obstructed by the Marathas using a mix of petty diplomatic and violent tactics; the Company in turn responded with the political use of military power, a feature of fitna, choosing to keep threats in check over direct military confrontation. The study finds that the English often emulated political practices that were already found in the subcontinent.

The research article specifically studies the English East India Company’s operational anxieties in dealing with the settlement of Bankot. The author argues that borders were fluid, which provoked fears about regulations and sovereignty in the minds of those who managed the Company. As the space was politically contested, the Company was anxious to promote its own distinct idea of subjecthood to maintain political and economic control over the region. Moreover, the Company’s imagined sovereignty often clashed with the political discontent present in the coastal region, largely owing to the fluidity characterising both boundaries and subjecthood.

Concluding on her findings, Saanika says, “I see the coast not as a passive geographical landscape but as a dynamic space that was actively shaped by human imagination, cultural encounters and contested power dynamics. I hence assert the need for studying the coast as a pertinent political frontier for eighteenth-century transformations.” She highlights that more scholarly attention is required on these very localised aspects of coastal relationships, which in turn defined the colonialism of later years.