DESPACHO ADUANERO PARA PASAJEROS Objetivo

zamindars who do not actually exist as by giving it to the ryot, from whom the rent is derived." The issue, he

thought, was one o f the mode o f distributing remissions, and the zamindar, as "a kind o f contractor", could "remit

nothing to them [the raiyats] without loss to him self and he will therefore keep their rent as high as ever as long as

he can. The zamindar undertakes to pay every year exactly the same amount o f public revenue to relieve the

public servants from the fatique o f thinking about it, and to settle with the ryot in such a manner that Gov't shall never hear anything about them." (Extract o f letter from Munro to BOR, 15 August 1807; v .8866:120-28*). Munro grasped the structure o f the gaze in this remark; however, one must ask what sort o f beings did he imagine ■the telftildar, and all the "agents" o f the revenue department, would be?

THE KING 'S GAZE.

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integrative functions for peoples and spaces outside of old regime kingdoms. Ideally, the elimination of intermediaries of whatever ilk would effectuate a radical end to the very notion of "locality" as it has been set up here. Some form of mutant "citizenship" with no tax-farming would posit the cultivating raiyat as having an appointed position as his own "king's agent", so to speak. It is with this aspect of Munro's idealism that one can best assess the relation between Munro's self-concept in a 1782 letter to his mother - "I am a great Castle Builder" (in Stein 1989:13) - and the fact that he was the most strident opponent of the established political figures of the rural dry districts, the symbols of those spaces' autonomous formations, the "polegars." He ordered the wholesale destruction of their many palaiyams, or forts. In theory, he wanted a bigger and better Castle, while in practice he destroyed any diminutive version thereof, any bit of architecture which would detract from the glory of his Castle: from which could emanate an uninterrupted, unmediated, and effective King's gaze.

Munro was effectively an ardent reader of texts such as Kautilya's or Manu's or any which set out to instruct the King in Indian realpolitik. The raiyatwari system was in a sense a radical re-figuring of the entire tradition of State-liness in south India: both in its "solution" to the age-old plaguing problem (of agents, qua

intermediaries), and in its achievement of the un-mediated extension of the King's gaze. In another sense, it was the same aspiration as ever. Its apparent design was to be both, i.e., to make it work. Munro argued that all the local quasi-polities were spurious, monstrous aberrations due to the depredations of Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan. They had nothing to do with anything but local despotism and illegitimacy; indeed, the political construct of the locality was precisely the object of attack. In this sense, he was reading them as "evil ministers" of ex-Kings. He did not flinch at setting up his plea for the raiyatwari settlement in terms of pseudo-historical arguments to justify his cause as within the keeping of native traditions - i.e., the "real" ones. Hence he conceived of the polegars as ex-agents of ex-rulers, rather than as the figureheads, ever-shifting in their immanence, of a formation un-versed in the discourse of "oriental despotism." The irony is that, often with Munro's strategic acquiescence, many of these local powers were invested with zamindari rights under the Permanent Settlement, which initially covered up to 40% of what was becoming the Madras Presidency. This in fact turned them into agents for the King, de facto revenue farmers. The royally unincorporated territories of south India, which were the rising paradigm of political society, were suddenly "localities."

Previously they had not been, as they were not seen by blind Kings' gazes. With their own political structure, generally based on a much less stable agricultural base, and hence less able to tie servants to the land, or excessively dominate their constituent parts, the polegar territories were suddenly trapped on a map. In

consolidating its holdings, colonial rule made them localities on the spot, then rushed to protect the local big-men, as zamindars, luring them into the practices of backward glancing. In this way, it is ridiculous to argue that the colonial state did not "penetrate" much into the locality, as those defendants of the "limited Raj" seem to suppose.

The "locality" to which one can refer is constructed as the obverse of the territorial articulation of the King's gaze and its practical blindfolds. In constructing .localities, any kingly power, including the colonial one as a mutant form, effectively creates a zone of contradiction - the point of reversal of the royal discourse, a reversal which seems silent in its tonal slip from the optative to the descriptive, from the ideal to the dominating representation. Colonial rulers, just as kings before, lamented the imperfect implementation of their ideals, their "rules", but this seems largely to have served rhetorically as a further incitement to their imagined mandate(s). The classical version of Hindu Kingship warns constantly of the fickleness of (the sovereign) power's own agents; this seems appropriate if paradoxical. Colonial discourse's crucial innovation on this lies in the insistence that it is an obstinate social base that prevents the success of its rule; this functioned as a mandate throughout, particularly in the form developed especially for the days of high imperialism, when the constant chatter was about the incapacity in India for "self-government." This innovation separated the "social" from its vital spatiality; henceforth territory was to be unambiguously owned, and space was the expression and not the cause of a (revenue) map. 17 If untouchability often emerged from precisely such an operation of spatial

closure, here was the final solution. In this case, the foreign-ness of the colonial government is profound, for as stolid empiricists they only knew that "the fifth" existed, especially in the deltas, and as from another place, were in no position to understand, let alone speak, that optative enunciation which denied and prohibited

•'the fifth (varna)."

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1 ' The Durkheimian idea o f space as an expression fixed by the social (see note ) reached a hollow apogee in

the striated colonial revenue map. "Royal science only tolerates and appropriates perspective if it is static,

subjected to a central black hole divesting it o f its heuristic and ambulatory capacities" (Deleuze and Guattari