Kamaluddin's Case (1775)

Module I asks what went wrong between the Supreme Court at Calcutta and the Supreme Council, and why Parliament had to settle it in 1781. The answer begins here. The Regulating Act 1773 left four silences — what law the court was to apply, to whom, whether the Company in its revenue capacity was amenable, and whether Zamindars counted as its servants — and every collision that follows is one of those silences turning into a quarrel.

Kamaluddin is the first collision and the mildest, which is exactly what makes it useful. It lets you show the examiner that the conflict did not begin as a raid on the Company's revenue power. It began as a complaint about personal liberty and about officers departing from their own settled practice.

Kamaluddin was a farmer. The Revenue Authority at Calcutta committed him to prison for non-payment of revenue arrears. The Supreme Court released him.

The Supreme Council criticised the release and declared that the court had no power to deal with revenue cases.

The Supreme Court ordered the release of a man imprisoned by the revenue officers for arrears, and maintained that it had the right to direct release on bail in such a case.

Impey CJ defended the decision in a letter to the Court of Directors. His ground was narrow and practical: where arrests were made for non-payment of revenue, bail was usually granted, so in directing release on bail the court was not inventing a jurisdiction. It was protecting the subject from oppression and compelling the officers to follow the established customs and usages in revenue collections.

The method here is worth taking away, because it recurs in Saroop Chand's Case.

1. Separate the revenue demand from the treatment of the person. The court did not say the arrears were not due, and did not set aside the assessment.
2. Identify the practice of the officers themselves. Bail was the usual course on such an arrest.
3. Hold the officers to their own practice. A departure from established usage, resulting in imprisonment, is a matter of personal liberty and so within the court's reach.
4. Note what is therefore not being claimed: no power over revenue as a subject-matter is asserted.

The Council's answer refused that distinction. In its view any order touching a revenue arrest was an order in a revenue case, and revenue was closed to the court.

Use it to open any question on the conflict between the Supreme Court and the Supreme Council, because it supplies the chronology and the theme in one stroke: the court asserted a jurisdiction, the Council denied it, and the ground of denial was revenue.

Use it in a pair with Saroop Chand's Case. Both are habeas corpus matters about imprisonment for revenue arrears, and together they show the court using personal liberty as the doorway into revenue administration. Then set the pair against the Patna Case, which reaches the Company's judicial officers, and against Cossijurah's Case, which reaches the Governor-General himself. That is the ladder of escalation an examiner is looking for.

It disposes of the suggestion that the Supreme Court was from the outset attacking the Company's revenue administration as such.

What it does not decide: it does not decide whether the Company in its revenue capacity was subject to the court, nor whether Zamindars were servants of the Company. Those questions were left for the Patna and Cossijurah litigation. Nor did the decision survive: the Act of Settlement 1781 provided that the Supreme Court was not to have jurisdiction over revenue matters, which is the legislative answer to Kamaluddin and Saroop Chand together.