A little over ten years ago, I came across something that looked like a cipher in the notebooks of Justice John Hyde, a judge (1774-1796) on India’s first Supreme Court. I didn’t know what it was but I had a sense it was important. It was all around Hicky’s trials. Even though I couldn’t read it, it seemed clear to me that it wasn’t just for routine notes.
Hyde was hiding something. But what was it?
After scouring the internet for any one who could decipher it (scholars of early-modern shorthand are a very, very small bunch), I messaged Carol Siri Johnson, a professor at NJIT. Little did I expect that she would take an interest or have time available, but after many years of hard work she would be the first person to decipher it in full. Last week we finally published our findings.
The shorthand turned out to be Hyde’s secret thoughts about his fellow Supreme Court judges accepting bribes and kickbacks from the East India Company’s Governor General, Warren Hastings in return for not ruling against the Company in legal suits.
This project is one of the few times in history when we can peer behind the curtain and see what people in the past were really thinking.
Hyde was a careful judge. While his fellow judges might borrow his notebooks to consult trial records, he likely didn’t want them to see what he was really thinking. It was important to both keep his thoughts secret and keep a written record. Shorthand was the perfect tool.
Hyde recorded that the acceptance of bribes would make his fellow judges dependent on Governor General Hastings and Company, and unable to issue verdicts against them. The Supreme Court had been a thorn in the side of the Company, issuing habeas corpus and other orders to prevent certain extrajudicial means to collect taxation. When the Chief Justice, Elijah Impey, accepted an offer to make a Company controlled court system, the Sadr Diwani Adalat, that would supplant the Supreme Court, Hyde wrote in shorthand:
[Oct 23, 1780]
“Before we went into Court today Sir Elijah Impey, told me at my House, that since he saw me last Thursday he had received notice of his appointment to be judge of the Sadr Diwani Adalat: he said further “and I have accepted it.” Impey said also “I think I might prevent that interference with the court which might happen if it was in other hands: I shall send all cases to the court that properly belong to it”: I said “I understand it was only a court of appeal”: Impey answered “no I understand it is also a court of general jurisdiction in cases above a set sum”: I said nothing to Impey implying approval nor disapproval but turned the discourse to [other] news.
“I do greatly disapprove of it because I think it must nearly render Impey dependent on the Governor General and Council and consequently partial to their wishes in . . . almost every cause of value that is brought into the court; and because the very appearance of it bends his opinion in many important questions; the extent of jurisdiction to be granted to him may well compromise the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal: and how is it to be expected that he should decide against that authority.”
“I think it a vast degradation of him to accept of such an office in the service of the Governor General and Council or of the Company and on the appointment to be held at the will and pleasure of the Governor General and Council [this is] a direct breach of the Act 13 G. 3rd [the Regulating Act of 1773] which prohibits his taking presents or any other emolument than the salary . . . the only excuse I know for his accepting an employment is inconsistent with the duty of his office and so degrading is that he has six children to provide for and is never able to save much out his salary of 8000 pounds a year; but this I think a very mean and poor excuse.”
Hyde also echoed some of the allegations against Impey from Hicky’s Bengal Gazette. Hicky accused Impey of taking a cut of the “Poolbundy” project to build river dikes (Bengal is a flat, low lying land like the Netherlands, making this work critical). In one of Hicky’s trials, Impey denied having any profit from this project. According to Hyde, this surprised many of Impey’s friends. Hyde wrote:
“Sir Robert Chambers said in this conversation what he had several times before talked to me in other conversations, That some of Sir Elijah Impey’s best friends who know most of his affairs were shocked and astonished when they heard he had so solemnly denied in his summing up to the jury in one of Hicky’s causes that he had any profit from the Poolbundy contract.”
Allegations like these would eventually lead to both Impey and Hastings’ impeachment in front of Parliament.
Unlike Hicky, Hyde kept his thoughts locked up in shorthand so that no one else could read them for 240 years. His shorthand gives us an inside look at internal dissent at the highest levels of British rule in India. The late 18th century was a time where ideals of life and liberty began to change governance in English speaking societies from patronage to systemized rule of law. Hyde reflected this new mode of thinking, and aspired to maintain the Supreme Court’s independence.
“I will take nothing from the Governor and Council nor from the Company,” Hyde wrote.
Carol Siri Johnson and Andrew Otis (2024). Deciphered Shorthand in Justice Hyde’s Supreme Court Notebooks, Calcutta, India, 1780–1782. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2024; 25 (1). https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2024.a928068.