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The Salem Riots, 1882. Judiciary versus Executive in the Mediation of a Communal Dispute*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

R. Suntharalingam
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Extract

Studies on the origins of Hindu–Muslim riots in nineteenth-century India have rightly stressed the distinction between what Professor Norman Brown calls ‘the precipitating causes’ of conflict and the deepseated religio-cultural differences that have long kept these two communities apart. As Norman Brown says, the precipitating cause ‘might be a quarrel over ownership of a parcel of land and the right to erect a religious building on it, or the playing of music by a Hindu wedding procession as it passed a mosque where such a noise constituted sacrilege, or exaction of exorbitant rent or interest by a landlord or moneylender of one religious persuasion from a tenant or debtor of the other, or sacrifice of a cow by Muslims, or the clash of crowds when a Hindu and a Muslim festival coincided’.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , May 1969 , pp. 193 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969

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References

1 Norman Brown, W., The United States and India and Pakistan, Cambridge, Mass., 1963, p. 142.Google Scholar

2 Thurston, E., Castes and Tribes of Southern India, IV, Madras, 1909, pp. 198–200.Google Scholar

3 Blunt, W. S., India under Ripon: A private Diary, London, 1909, pp. 288–9.Google Scholar

4 Imperial Census of 1881. Operations and Results in the Presidency of Madras, I, Madras, 1883, p. 34.Google Scholar

5 Spate, O. H. K. and Learmonth, A. T. A., India and Pakistan, 3rd Edition, London 1967, p. 758.Google Scholar

6 Le Fanu, H., A Manual of the Salem District in the Presidency of Madras, II, Madras, 1883, pp. 29–36.Google Scholar

7 Madras Judicial Proceedings (herafter MJP), Vol. 402, 05 1874, no. 82, G.O., 9 May 1874.Google Scholar

8 Indian Decisions (New Series) Madras, II, (1882–1884), Madras, 1913, pp. 423–4.Google Scholar

9 Indian Decisions (New Series) Madras, I, (1876–1882), Madras, 1913, pp. 369–71.Google Scholar

10 MJP, Vol. 1967, 08 1882, no. 1032-A, G.O. 28 12 1880.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., Petition of Salem Muslims to Madras Government, 12 October 1881.

12 Ibid., G.O. 2 November 1881.

13 Ibid., Government of Madras to Government of India, 18 February 1882.

14 Ibid., Government of India to Government of Madras, 13 May 1882.

15 Madras Mail, 24 November 1876.Google Scholar

16 Parthasarathy, R. T., Dawn and Achievement of Indian Freedom, Salem, 1953, pp. 1–7.Google Scholar

17 Report of the Committee on Local Self-Government in Madras, 1882, Madras, 1883, p. 22.Google Scholar

18 MJP, Vol. 1967, August 1882, no. 987, Macleane to Government of Madras, 4 August 1882.Google Scholar

19 MJP, Vol. 1967, August 1882, no. 987, Macleane to Government of Madras, 4 August 1882.Google Scholar

20 Ibid.,

21 Ibid., Enclosure, C. M. Davies' report on Salem riots, 4 August 1882.

22 Indian Decisions (New Series) Madras, II, pp. 434–5.Google Scholar

23 MJP, Vol. 1967, August 1882, no. 1082, Macleane to Government of Madras, 21 August 1882.Google Scholar

24 Ibid.

25 Madras Times, 11 August 1882.Google Scholar

26 Madras Mail, 17 August 1882.Google Scholar

27 MJP, Vol. 1967, August 1882, no. 1106, C. J. T. Whitlock to Inspector General of Police, 19 August 1882.Google Scholar

28 MJP, Vol. 1967, August 1882, no. 1082. Macleane to Government of Madras, 21 August 1882.Google Scholar

29 Indian Decisions (New Series) Madras, II, p. 435.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., p. 436.

31 Macleane's diagnosis of the cause of the riots, as indeed his overall handling of the situation, was accepted in its entirety by his superiors in Madras. Governor M. E. Grant Duff in a demi-official letter to the Viceroy asserted that the riots of 16 August were ‘the result of a deeply-laid conspiracy in which many of our Hindu officials have been implicated’. The Madras authorities, convinced that the ‘rising spirit of religious intolerance and lawlessness’ in South India could only be checked by punishing the offenders ‘with the utmost rigour of the law’, demanded from the courts maximum sentences for those guilty of violence, dismissed peremptorily officials suspected of complicity or withholding information about the disturbance, and imposed a heavy levy on those villages which had participated in the riots to maintain a punitive police force in the district. The scale and severity of the punishment brought protests from certain sections of public opinion and subsequently, when some of the prosecution witnesses were convicted of giving false evidence, a concerted agitation was unleashed in Madras which ultimately led to the release of all prisoners in October 1884. These developments, which had important political implications for South India as a whole, are discussed in the author's unpublished dissertation, Politics and Change in the Madras Presidency, 1884–1894. A regional study of Indian Nationalism, University of London, 1966, Chapter III.Google Scholar