Khutput: Scandal, native politics and the impersonal state in colonial India

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Bombay Presidency in western India came to be embroiled in a corruption scandal called the ‘Khutput’ controversy. Rumours abounded that Indian ‘natives’ had been successful in ‘secretly obtaining the friendship of persons in power’ and had used this influence to subvert the state. Anxious to dispel these rumours, the Bombay Government sent out a circular to its top officials across the Presidency soliciting their views on whether this subversive friendship—Khutput—was real. This article draws on over 50 responses received to this circular to piece together an account of the political morality of the mid-nineteenth century Bombay state, derived from its key architects. I argue that Khutput was a brand of ‘native’ politics that was transactionally elaborated and customised to capitalise on the vulnerabilities of the new European mode of government. In response to the Bombay Government’s invitation to suggest measures to ‘eradicate this evil’ the officers recommended steps such as the institution of uniform procedures in the bureau, transparency, impartiality, office discipline and publicity—several of the very elements that, coincidentally, Weber would later aggregate under the term ‘bureaucracy’. Finally, this article offers an alternate genealogy of administrative law norms as originating within the executive, and intended as checks against an overreaching, corrupt judiciary.