Language Policy and Omlah Corruption in Colonial Central India

This article explores the interactions between a class of legal-linguistic intermediaries known as omlahs, the British Raj, and a Central Indian tribal community, the Gonds, in nineteenth-century British India. Omlahs, as this article shows, emerged as powerful cultural-legal brokers in the nineteenth century through practices of revenue-farming, through liaising with British judges, and by impeding processes by which Gonds were to be settled and their oral custom turned into textualised law. The East India Company and later the Raj sought to settle Gonds into agricultural tracts throughout the nineteenth century, however, efforts to reform or eliminate omlahs all but failed. In surveying these processes, this article examines broader strategies of administrative control and fiscal management, showing how officials like Robert Cust developed linguistic surveys and vernacular education programmes to circumvent intermediary corruption. Omlahs were central to both tribal settlement and legal administration in Central India. British officials increasingly accused them of corruption. This article argues that these fiscal concerns made language a key tool of administrative efficiency rather than cultural policy.