Clerks occupied an ambiguous position in the colonial middle class and left almost no writing of their own, except when a disciplinary charge forced them to explain themselves. This essay reads one such case from the Kozhikode Regional Archives to ask what a colonial clerk’s dismissal file can, and cannot, tell us about his life.
Sreejith K
In September 1941, the District Collector of Malabar ordered an inquiry into the “woeful state of affairs” at the Ponnani taluk office.1 The Sub-Collector was directed to examine the process registers and records, frame definite charges against those responsible, hold an enquiry, and submit his findings. It was crisis-time for the British government in India. The Second World War had reached the country’s borders even as colonial authority was steadily loosening its grip under the advance of the national movement; there was little appetite in Delhi or in Malabar for anything that looked like inefficiency, still less insubordination. The Collector’s letter set in motion a chain of proceedings that would shape the fortunes of the entire taluk-office staff at Ponnani. Most weathered the storm with minor setbacks: a censure here, a stopped increment there. One clerk, K.A. Padmanabha Ayyar, though, identified as chiefly responsible for the office’s disarray, was dismissed outright, the harshest penalty the colonial bureaucracy could impose on its own. His case offers a rare window into what it meant to work at the bottom of that bureaucracy in empire’s final years.
A Subalternity of Position
Government employment carried prestige and security, and recruitment–despite formal rules–remained persistently informal well into the twentieth century;2 the bound files of the period are thick with petitions asking that some excess of age or absence of qualification be overlooked, such as one from Edakkara Achuthan, who cited his “respectable” Thiyya family and his service as a water-carrier in Mesopotamia during the war to support his application for a peon’s post.3
Clerks themselves were far from a uniform group. Some rose, over long careers, into well-paid, feted positions: the 1939 History of Services traces one officer’s rise from junior clerk in 1922 to retire as Revenue Divisional Officer in 1938, an M.B.E. to his name.4 Far more numerous were clerks earning far less; a head clerk at the Nadapuram District Munsif Court drew just Rs. 40 a month in 1887, a figure that saw almost no improvement across the following half-century.5 Ayyar himself drew a substantive salary of only Rs. 50 before his suspension cut it further still.6 It was against this modest, precarious backdrop that his particular story unfolded.
Born into an agraharam in Palghat, Ayyar likely carried some of the social privilege of his Brahmin background into the offices where he worked; his was not the outright humiliation visited on the Thiyya clerk Churayi Kanaran, whose Nair superiors at Ponnani gave him nothing but a mattress to sit on while he worked as Head Munshi.7 But caste privilege did not translate into easier labour. By his own account, the office wore him down physically and mentally, and home was his only refuge, a refuge whose delayed return would eventually trigger his downfall.8
Scholars have described Tamil Brahmins as the very “anti-thesis” of the subaltern, a description that holds where Brahmins traditionally wielded power.9 But transplanted into a taluk office, near the bottom of its hierarchy, bound to deadlines and paid a pittance, Ayyar’s position looks different. “Subalternity”, on this account, is not a fixed attribute of caste or class but a condition produced by one’s place within an institutional hierarchy. The same man who commanded deference at home could be, within office walls, simply another cog ground down by what Sumit Sarkar calls the sudden imposition of clock time on India’s traditional literate classes,10 a discipline E.P. Thompson identified as one of the great psychic costs of industrial-capitalist labour rhythms more broadly.11
The Offence and the Defence
In those days, most careers in government service ended uneventfully. A minority ended through clearly defined causes, chief among them criminal conviction. E.P. Krishna Ayyar, Head Clerk at the taluk rationing office in Perinthalmanna, was convicted in 1945 of overcharging ration-shop dealers and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. Even after his sentence was reduced on appeal, he was dismissed and permanently debarred from government employment.12 Padmanabha Ayyar’s case was murkier: no crime, only charges of inefficiency and disobedience.
Fortunately for future researchers, colonial administrative reform had imposed some procedural discipline on itself. An 1888 order meant to curb the arbitrary dismissal of Indian subordinates by individual British officers required that every dismissal charge, defence, and decision be reduced to writing.13 Intended to hold punitive officers accountable, this rule has had the incidental effect of preserving, in dusty files, a paper trail through which such otherwise undocumented lives can still be heard. It is this trail that lets us follow, in some detail, what happened to the career of Ayyar.
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Ayyar’s troubles began in August 1941, when chronic asthma and cough sent him on long leave.14 His Ayurvedic doctor’s certificate, unsurprisingly, was rejected given colonial officialdom’s habitual distrust of indigenous medicine, leading to an order that he appear before a medical board instead. When he failed to report by the appointed date, he was suspended for disobedience and unauthorised absence, and transferred to Tellicherry.
The immediate cost was financial. Reduced to a quarter of his pay as subsistence allowance, Ayyar wrote that he was “made to live on nothing,” and that if his “enforced holidays” continued indefinitely he would rather be permitted to take up private employment than remain suspended without limit.15 He had to maintain himself in a Tellicherry lodge while also supporting his family in Ponnani, and his repeated requests for a transfer advance went unanswered.
Neither the British Collector and Sub-Collector, nor the tahsildar K.P. Govindan Nair, showed any inclination to leniency. Govindan Nair accused Ayyar of feigning illness to cover for his own inefficiency and lethargy.16 Charged over delayed files and unmaintained registers,17 Ayyar finally mounted an eloquent defence of his own competence. He explained that he had been moved from the fair-copying seat, where there had been no complaint against him, to a punishing new post for which his years as a typist had left him ill-suited; that the workload there was, by his own account and that of other clerks, unmanageable even after long nights at the desk; and that the chronic cough and fever it brought on had, in turn, put his work further into arrears, through no real fault of his own. To punish him for this, he wrote, would be “a monumental injustice done to a hardworking subordinate.”18
That Ayyar could write so eloquently in his own defence says something about the peculiar hold English exercised on the clerical imagination. Since most of what clerks wrote officially was dictated to them by their superiors, they rarely had occasion to display real command of the language, except, ironically, in precisely these moments of crisis, when a show-cause notice forced them to compose something genuinely their own. The authorities were unmoved. The Sub-Collector’s final report noted that Ayyar had already been punished for bad work in 1933, 1934, 1939, and twice in 1940; at just forty, not an elderly man near retirement, he was “simply a nuisance to the head of any office to which he is posted,” and must be removed. 19
Unlike Chekhov’s timid clerks,20 Ayyar fought back with real persistence, despite having no employees’ association behind him. He raised technical objections, pointing out that his Ayurvedic certificate had been accepted without question on earlier occasions, and that the tahsildar had no authority to order him before a medical board in the first place; and as dismissal grew certain, he pleaded instead to be allowed to retire on medical grounds, reminding the authorities of his loyalty.21 The plea, aimed less at vindication than at salvaging a pension, was refused. A subsequent office letter noted with bureaucratic indifference that his replacement had reported for duty.22 More than a year after his last recorded lapse, Ayyar’s career in government service ended for good.
Everyday Resistance, or Simply Exhaustion?
What, exactly, went wrong for Ayyar? Not, evidently, a lack of training. Structured instruction and printed Clerk’s Manuals had circulated since at least 1889,23 and Ayyar would have had comparable opportunities to master his duties.
This raises the question of whether his conduct, the slow work, missing files, illness of uncertain sincerity, amounts to what James Scott calls an everyday form of resistance: quiet foot-dragging and evasion that Scott locates among subordinate groups well beyond the peasantry he originally studied.24 Ayyar’s case fits only imperfectly. Scott’s peasants acted with some sense of shared grievance and purpose; nothing in the Ponnani record suggests Ayyar saw himself as anything but an individual defending his own position. The complete absence of any clerks’ association at Ponnani was not incidental: the constant threat of pay cuts, stalled promotions, suspensions, and dismissals made open resistance all but unthinkable, precluding the kind of associational life that might have given individual grievances a collective voice.
What remains, then, is a narrower and more ambiguous category: not quite resistance, but the ordinary, largely involuntary friction of an overworked man straining against a system unwilling to accommodate his limits. Read generously, this is resistance of a kind; read sceptically, it is simply what exhaustion looks like from the vantage point of an unsympathetic officialdom. The archive itself cannot adjudicate between these readings, and neither should we. By 1941, a service record stretching back to 1933 had run its course, and the authorities chose to close Ayyar’s file for good, an ending that fits either story equally well: that of a man ground down by illness and overwork, or of one who had, in his own quiet way, simply had enough.
The archive falls silent on him thereafter. He left behind no writing beyond these disciplinary submissions, and no one else thought him worth recording. He may have joined the Palakkad Iyer diaspora in Bombay, settling into the familiar world of Matunga. Or, more plausibly, he returned to his agraharam in Palghat, by then ringed with commercial institutes offering men like him an alternative livelihood, one perhaps less governed by the tyranny of the clock than the office at Ponnani had been. We cannot know. Men and women like Padmanabha Ayyar enter the historical record only through their transgressions; once the state has settled its account with them, they return, almost without exception, to the anonymity from which the archive briefly, and reluctantly, rescued them.
About the author: Dr Sreejith K is an Assistant Professor in History at Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Government College, Kolkata.
Note: This essay is adapted and substantially rewritten from the academic article previously published in Mainstream, Vol. 61, No. 52, December 23 & 30, 2023.
