Amid the Covid-19 crisis, when the world is in lockdown and worrying news is streaming in, there was a little glimmer of joy as my book finally emerged into the world. In various forms, I have worked on materials that eventually made their way into the book for over eight years. But it was the ERC grant that eventually gave me the time and resources to complete this labour of love.
What a journey it has been. It began with learning Persian in Oxford with Mohammadjavad Ardalan, then training in Persian palaeography in JNU under the care of Prof. Chander Shekhar. My sources were dry, brief formulaic legal documents from the Mughal period (mainly seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), written mainly in Persian, some of which I found in the National Archives in Delhi, some later sent to me by the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah museum of Kuwait, and some by the actual descendants of my protagonists. From there on, it became an obsession, such that I, and members of my family, began mouthing the formulaic phrases of Indo-Persian legal documents, ‘The reason for saying all this is this, that I, Nandini, daughter of …, wife of …, resident of …, in full possession of my senses and with full free will, do hereby…’
The legal documents were tantalising fragments. They offered glimpses of people, their relationships, their anxieties and disputes, their aspirations and frustrations. What helped me piece that together into one long story was my method of dealing with a single family, a landed lineage headquartered in the district of Dhar, in central India, for over 400 years.
I became so familiar with the members of the family and the protagonists of this book – Purshottam Das, Hamir Chand, Muhammad Mustafa, Muhammad Asad, Puran -that I began to think of them as my friends and companions, each with their own eccentricities, side-stories, success and troubles. And although I had never been to Dhar, that old city, near Ujjain, became the most recognisable Indian city to my little son, just because he had heard so much about it over the years. And then I went to Dhar in 2016, and actually found the descendants of my protagonists, most importantly, my amazing friend, Amit Choudhary. To find out how that unfolded, you have to read the book!
Which, by the way, you can do, for free, here. It’s all open access, so please do download, read and distribute to friends, family and students!
I worked in the National Archives of India, New Delhi, 8-18 January, 2020. Besides dreadful pollution, which made wearing a medical grade mask essential when out and about, the city was also being rocked by protests by students, women and other activists, protesting against the Government of India’s newly passed laws proposing a National Population Register, National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act. Women and children had gathered in Shaheen Bagh, in a Muslim-majority locality, holding continuous peaceful protests 24/7 in an unprecedented political and cultural development. A great deal of debates in the media and public discourse was about the meaning of words – in religion, poetry and politics – creating a surreal situation where prime-time TV included discussions of the revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poem, Hum Dekhenge (We shall see), and the meaning of the Islamic credo, La Ilaha il-Allah (There is no God but God).
The Islamic creed inscribed in a 13th-century mosque in the Qutb complex, Delhi
My work also consisted of looking through multi-lingual material, but of a much more prosaic sort. My aim was to form an idea about one of the two largest surviving collections of documents directly produced by Mughal state institutions – the Inayat Jung collection. The background story, as provided S.R. Tirmizi, ex-director of NAI, is that these documents were retrieved and stored by an official in the Hyderabad state, and later acquired by Prof. Nurul Hasan for the National Archives of India. The collection consists of 160,000 individual documents, all related to the administration of the provinces of Bijapur and Golconda.
On random sampling, I found that all documents have a small purple Inayat Jung stamp. They are in boxes which have an average of 400 documents each. Every document is enclosed in an individual file, which has a short summary of the document on it, as well as the file number. There are 408 boxes in total, of which the greatest number is from emperor Muhammad Shah’s reign (1719-1748 CE).
A complete catalogue does not exist. There is an overview article by the archivist-historian Zakir Hussain, which I was able to read and copy. The archivists also revealed to me that they had managed to calendar around 50,000 of the documents, covering the entire reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. They had done so, by typing out the short summary on the cover of the individual files. This very useful work was soon to be published, but was not available at the current time.
The numbering system has been revised; currently, the numbering is thus:
The first part of the numbers is the serial order of the emperor eg. Aurangzeb = 1/ then regnal year/then month number (eg., Muharram =1)/serial number of document in that year/month.
Whichever values cannot be verified have been left as 00.
Box 1
This box contains what I was alerted to as a ‘pre-Aurangzeb’ bundle, said to be 1656 onwards. These files are numbered 00/1/-
00/1-2 (Old number: I/2/28)
Series: Madad-i-ma’ash (These are interpretive categorisations introduced by the archivist.)
17 Shawwal 30 Julus-i Shahjahan i.e. 1066 AH/29 July 1656 AD
Contents: Copy of Farman granting village Kasara of pargana Sanganmner to Khwaja Muhammad Sadiq as Madad-ima’ash. The revenue income of the said village was Rs 172/- in 1064 AH/1653-54 AD (bearing seal of Abd al-Khalil Khan Mufti Shara’ Muhammad dated 1110 AH
Actual document: Small A5 sized document with purple seal of IJ, written on both sides. The document starts with an extended word which is probably نقل.
Continues:
فرمان الاشان قبل از جلوس از قرار بتا () ذی قعده سنه ۳۰ آنکه در این ایام سعدت انجام نشان علیشان
…عنراناز مکمل لطف شرف صدور می یابد که موضع کاسادهمعمولهپرگنهسنگمنر که حاصل آن
در سال هزار هشت و چهارم از هجریت مقدسه مبلغ یکصد هفتاد و در روپیه …
Ends with the date. And then there are two notes to the effect that the nishan was written. A third note says:
یکموضع در و بیشت
There is a seal of a qazi visible, which bears the date 1110; which would still put the document at the end of the seventeenth century.
Further down the line, I found several bi-lingual documents:
Box 100VIII 4/151-450
VIII/4/151
Series: Diwani
Date: 10 Zulqada 20 Julus of Muhammad Shah
Contents:Siyaha of Mahsul-Mahal-i NargadiBalda Hyderabad under the supervision of Zulqadr Khan Rs. 3/15/9 from Muslims viz: Khudai
(Bears seals of Zulqadr Khan, Dakhniram and Jaskarandas)
Also in Marathi
Document: Two sided A5 but most writing in front. Very little text – a top cluser, then two lines, the another line and a cluster with details, then two Persian seals of an official who mentions the emperor. 2.5 lines of Marathi (in Modi) on the left margin. Some Modi used in the clusters that offer particulars.
Only very brief notes on reverse.
Several documents appear to be part of a short series, such that the same transaction, involving the same protagonists and the same officials is repeated over several years.
I have requested digital copying of some of these documents, and look forward to returning to read more.
Overall, I feel that this collection complicates my increasing suspicion that the centralised Mughal archives may have never existed; document storage being the function of significant landed families and their households. This collection, however, points to processes of documentation and record-storage by Mughal government agencies, at least at the provincial level, and has pushed me to think harder about how and why people create and kept records in Mughal South Asia.
Whether you are searching for a new, but inexpensive toy, kitchen utensil, bed sheet, bangle, or jute bag, a Punekar might direct you to Tulshibaug Market. Located to the south of Shaniwar Wada, the former residence of the Peshwas, in the heart of Pune’s old city centre, Tulshibaug is bustling and often downright crowded. But if you duck through a short blue entranceway into a narrow lane roughly opposite the Mahatma Phule Mandai, you will find a strikingly quiet courtyard lined with shops selling bronze devotional statuary in every size imaginable. At the centre of this courtyard is the Tulshibaug Ram Mandir. Along with a spacious wooden forecourt, this temple features a beautifully carved stone spire that is one of the only elements of the overall space visible from the outer marketplace.
Rumal no. 4 from the Tulshibaugwale collection at BISM
While it is well-known that the wealthy Brahman landlord Naro Appaji Khire “Tulshibaugwale” financed the Tulshibaug Ram Mandir after his lucrative appointment as the subahdar of the province of Pune, the temple’s role within the context of the city’s donative and commercial activities remains to be studied. Fortunately, the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal contains many bundles of documents pertaining to the affairs of the Tulshibaugwale family. When I visited BISM this past November to follow up on previous trips made by the Lawforms team, I photographed documents from several rumals pertaining to the financial administration of the Ram temple. In addition, the collection contains revenue accounts and legal documents from villages supporting the temple as well as lists of expenditures for the Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti festivals. The family’s control over properties in both Pune city and nearby villages is a useful reminder of how the development of urban markets and related shrines and temple complexes in eighteenth-century Maharashtra was not disconnected from the rural economy.
Another collection housed at BISM speaks to a set of related questions: how was a marketplace legally constituted in pre-colonial western India? What forms of legal documentation recorded rights to sell goods within an urban market? How did such rights shape local governance more broadly? It is with these questions in mind that I have been reviewing documents from the collection of the deshmukhs of Solapur, a process that I began in February and March 2019. Acquired by the historian G.H. Khare in 1952-3, these documents belonged to a household of Lingayat merchants who held village- and district-level headman rights under the Adil Shahi sultans. Hence the leading member of this household in the second half of the seventeenth century was various referred to as Hiroji Desai, Hiroji Deshmukh, Hiroji Patel, or some combination therein; however, his sons and many other parties to these documents bore the title of sethi. They actively established, managed, and settled disputes regarding shops (dukan) within the qasba of Solapur by means of bilingual Perso-Marathi deeds, decisions, and testimonials featuring numerous fascinating formal elements, ranging from the seals of qazis and nobility to the symbols of witnesses from the diverse communities of Solapur and the surrounding area. Further identification and study of these documents – by Khare’s estimate, there should be more than 2000 – will allow scholars to better understand the role of legal practice and legal documentation in pre-colonial market governance.
Finally, I spent the remainder of my time in Pune at the Pune Puralekhagar, looking for additional context regarding the position and activities of Sayyid Usman, the Persian scribe employed by the Inam Commission of Bombay in the 1850s and early 1860s. Back in February, I obtained many examples of the Persian copies of Adil Shahi and Mughal farmans produced by this munshi, but these documents alone said little about the institutional context within which he worked. Perhaps the greatest challenge posed to anyone interested in the Inam Commission is that the majority of its records are not open to researchers, per the general policy of the Pune Puralekhagar. With the assistance of Lawforms collaborator Dr. Prachi Deshpande (CSSSC, Kolkata), I was able to secure limited access to English-language rumals containing information about the organization and remuneration of Commission staff, including Sayyid Usman. I hope to write about the twists and turns of his quest to date a mysterious farman and the place of pre-colonial Persian writing in the Commission’s broader re-configuration of the purpose and meaning of documentation. Given the extraordinary research potential of the Commission’s records for many different topics – the Commission investigated thousands of individual property claims in Maharashtra – it is my hope that ongoing dialogue between archivists and researchers will lead to expanded access in the future.
“That particular day in the year 1800, the city of Lahore seemed livelier than usual. It was not just the regular merriment of the bazaars, or the street performers; there was decided joyousness in the air. Cannons that had fallen to disuse were being repaired. The ironsmiths and carpenters in the city had no time to rest. Someone had injected new vigour into the city and it was felt by one and all. The city was ready to witness its days of glory now that Ranjit Singh was their new ruler”.
This extract is from Zafarnama -i- Ranjit Singh, composed by Diwan Amarnath (born 1822 CE), which is a rather unique documentation on the rule of Ranjit Singh from 1800-1837. The book was written in Persian and later edited by Sitaram Kohli in 1928. In all, there are forty-one chapters. I am the first scholar to translate this work into Urdu.
The text begins with a disclaimer by the author who was the key noble and the pay master in the court and wrote this account on the Maharajah’s wish. He specifically mentions that his work is not a chronological documentation. He adds that Munshi Sohan Lal’s work has already covered the history of Punjab in an impartial, matter of fact style. He admits that the book is deeply subjective, yet calls it an honest attempt to provide a different perspective on the Maharaja’s administration. The author’s conundrum to balance his bias and historical objectivity is always on the forefront. While evaluating the source, we are repeatedly reminded that the language is ornate, there is very generous use of metaphors, and it contains blatant favouritisms. In fact, at several places the accounts begin to resemble a hagiography. However, I would argue, it is also a remarkable asset for understanding key economic activities of Ranjit Singh’s Khalsa regime up to 1837.
Between 1801 to 1837 the Khalsa kingdom under went under massive economic reforms. Geo-political boundaries shifted and population became increasingly multicultural. Naturally, new economic policies had to consider all the variables and influxes. The Zafarnama was indeed a courtly account written in praise of the ruler, but it is important to remember that it is free from any Eurocentric bias, and it is a distinctive style of presenting historical narratives.
Amarnath clearly mentions that Maharajah Ranjit Singh favoured the diwani system. This involved attacking nearby kingdoms but often not directly annexing them. Instead, he collected regular tributes and maintained figurative supremacy over them. This system of indirect rule was his first step for accumulating resources for his treasury. The text provides all the details of financial transactions he made with other rulers and even mentions the ways the king spent the money. All his early investments were towards improving the army.
By 1808, Maharajah Ranjit Singh realized his ongoing system of accounting needed a massive overhaul. He had started making important changes in the revenue office, and in 1809 he appointed Diwan Bhavani Das as his chief accountant. It was under him that the position of accountant became extremely powerful, and the king enabled him to make major financial decisions. Some of the decisions included costs involved in wars, details of gifts and tributes (Amarnath lauds the king’s proclivity for maintaining records of even the smallest of transactions, and mentions a case where he didn’t let a gift of Rs.10 go unaccounted).
There is no definite indication of Ranjit Singh’s welfare policies but the Zafarnama mentions several instances of famine relief. He also talks of outbreaks of smallpox and cholera, where the king sent aid to help the people.
Huge chunks of the book are dedicated to detailed description of luxury commodities. During the wedding of Ranjit Singh’s son Khadak Singh and later, at the birth of his grandson Nau Nihal Singh, we find comprehensive descriptions of indulgence and splurging. One has to bear in mind, that Amarnath tends to go overboard while describing these items. Despite the exaggeration, he mentions specific items that clearly shows a larger global trading network. From Italian basil wine to Ferghana valley horses, luxury trade clearly played a major role in shaping the economy of the kingdom.
From 1817-1820 there are numerous administrative appointments and attempts to formulate new commercial laws. One of the drawbacks of Zafarnama is lack of a chronological arrangement, so, these chapters discuss attacks on Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar simultaneously and the expenses involved in these attacks. Amarnath even provides details of artillery expense, costs involved in maintaining elephants and other military expenditures. This information is unfortunately enmeshed with details of tributes and gifts; as a result, it becomes difficult to comprehend specific details about the financial laws.
Acquiring precious gemstones and gold was another cornerstone of Ranjit Singh’s economy. Amarnath insists that the king is aware of how gemstones provide economic stability even if the currency was devalued. Naturally, his acquiring the Kohinoor diamond from Shah Shuja forms a significant part of the book. There are several other mentions where the king shows preference for precious metals and stones over money, and considers them as essential building blocks of the royal treasury.
Several passages also document his gift exchanges with the British and with some rulers from the Middle East. We are continuously reminded of the money he is pouring into the army, and his attempts to emulate European army. He even included two Europeans (Ventura and Allard) in his army to strengthen it.
This work has been guided by Dr. Nandini Chatterjee and facilitated by the ERC-funded project, Forms of Law, which is based in the College of Humanities, University of Exeter, United Kingdom. It was undertaken during my stay in the UK from 16 July to 31 August, 2019.
My next plan is to elaborate on all the economic dimensions that I have briefly outlined above and to produce an academic article for a peer-reviewed journal. I will also plan to produce an English translation of Zafarnama, which would greatly help future international scholars to work on the subject. Finally, I will initiate work on cataloguing and translating the enormous collection of Persian records generated by the Khalsa regime, which are currently held at the Punjab State Archives, Lahore. In doing so, I hope to contribute important research data and findings to the Lawforms project, which is studying forms of documentation in the Persian-writing world.
In 2019, Nandini Chatterjee, Elizabeth Thelen and Dominic Vendell began the text encoding work that will result in the online publication of a selection of early modern Persianate legal texts. As Digital Humanities Lead on this project, I am enabling this work through training the editorial team in text encoding, developing the editorial guidelines and encoding schema that we will follow, and creating the resulting online edition, which will allow users to browse and search these fascinating documents, in original and translated formats where possible. We are using TEI XML, which stands for the Text Encoding Initiative, and is the recognised standard for publishing digital editions in the Humanities today.
Text encoding is a way of making a document both human and machine-readable: it is the fundamental processing of a text that will lead to eventual publication, but it also enables scholars to delve deep into the meaning of a document, forcing them to identify elements of theme and structure that would otherwise remain implicit. Text encoding is a great way to close read a text. In due course, we will publish a small resource of a selection of these complex, multifaceted texts, to share them with the wider world and encourage their use in both research and teaching.
This is exciting and challenging work, particularly since I do not read any of the multiple languages seen in these texts. This means that a close working relationship with those doing the encoding is essential, and we have already had several productive half-day workshops to tease out the intricacies of these texts. As well as eventual publication online, we will also share our methods of encoding these complexities, so that others can build on our work in the future.
I may not have worked with these languages before, but I am an early modernist, and so I’m attuned to the peculiarities of manuscripts and archival study. As a Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Exeter, I’ve been involved in multiple digital editions, including for example a teaching resource on Early Modern Court Depositions. Prior to joining Exeter’s DH Lab in 2017, I was the Encoding Fellow for Early Modern English Drama at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and before that, Digital Project Manager for Early Modern Letters Online. My own research interests include the practical and theoretical concerns of the Digital Humanities; textual scholarship and digital publication; and early modern archives and epistolary culture, especially in a diplomatic and governmental context, which is the subject of my forthcoming book (Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture, Routledge, 2021). As someone who enjoys the process of translating between textual artefact and digital object, I look forward to learning more about these fascinating texts.
This past February and March 2019, I embarked on a whirlwind research tour across western and central India, visiting archives in Pune, Mumbai, Kolhapur, Sitamau, Indore, and Dhule. My objectives were threefold: to identify and describe any collections with substantial Persian-language content; to collect or catalogue legal documents from both Persian- and Marathi-language collections; and to build relationships with archival staff and private collectors towards further research and collaboration with Lawforms project. As is typical in archival exploration, previously attested corpuses of material did not always reveal themselves, while other exciting documents and traces of documents came to light, thanks to the help of many friends who I made along the way.
Entryway of Peshwa Daftar in Pune on 125th Anniversary
After a brief excursion in Bikaner, Rajasthan for the “Documents and Archives” workshop, I made one of several trips to Pune to work in the Pune Puralekhagar – a branch of the Maharashtra State Archives (MAS) better known as the Peshwa Daftar – and the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal (BISM). Though much of the Persian material that had once been held at the Peshwa Daftar is now either published, untraceable or housed at the Aurangabad branch of MAS, I happened upon a bundle in the Karnatak Jamav section containing the transcriptions, translations, and marginalia of Persian scribes employed by the Inam Commission of Bombay. Active in the 1850s and 1860s, the Commission amassed local records as part of its broader inquiry into the status of rent-free grants of land revenue. The rumal in question may offer a glimpse into the methods and operations of the Commission’s Persian daftarkhana across the palimpsest of different political and linguistic orders. Equally rich was the panoply of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Marathi and Perso-Marathi legal documents that I explored at BISM, where Persian classes are now being held semi-regularly for students, researchers and interested members of the public.
Searching for relevant material at the main branch of MAS in Mumbai proved to be somewhat more challenging. The staff and I were not able to find several Persian-language collections; however, the daftar of the Mane family of Mhaswad yielded many nineteenth-century bonds (katbā), testimonies (jabānī), and acknowledgements of debt (karja-rokhā) written on stamp paper priced from two annas to two rupees and eight annas. Knowing about the existence of such variety is useful from the point of view of understanding how landed families recorded the rights of their members, employees, and associates as well as to think through the effects of changing materials and practices of documentation. I plan in future trips to continue inquiring about MAS’ ongoing efforts to identify and organize their Persian holdings.
I came to learn about a promising new venture at the Shahu Research Centre at Shivaji University in the southern Maratha capital of Kolhapur. The Centre is the repository of the late historian and University vice-chancellor Appasaheb Pawar’s personal collection, containing some 30-40 bundles of Modi documents. As the archivist Devika Patil explained to me, the Centre plans to publish a descriptive catalogue of these documents, which I found to be very beautifully preserved in new, high-quality cloth with individual tags for each document. I also gathered several interesting items at the MAS branch at Kolhapur such as a 1740 karārnama featuring the handwriting of the raja Sambhaji II.
My next stop was an archive that I had long hoped to visit: Shri
Library of Shri Natnagar Shodh Samsthan in Sitamau
Natnagar Shodh Samsthan (SNSS) in Sitamau. While making the journey from Indore to Sitamau via Ujjain, I was fortunate enough to have the company and guidance of Amit Choudhary, an Indore resident who has many connections to Mughal and Maratha history in Malwa. Together, we explored the grounds of the majestic former residence of the Sitamau royal family, who helped establish the SNSS with the eminent historian Raghubir Singh. Under the supervision of the current director Dr. Manohar Sinha Ranawat, SNSS is very actively amassing records on the history of Malwa in Persian, Marathi, and Hindi, in addition to its well-known collection of manuscripts and transcripts. Among the most intriguing discoveries that I made during my week in Sitamau was an early twentieth-century Hindi administrative manual titled Daftarnāmā. Based on communication with my colleague Elizabeth Thelen, it is likely that several similarly named Hindi manuals of accounting and administration were extant in the same period. The Lawforms project will collectively examine the question of manuals and formularies across the Persianate world in our upcoming July workshop.
Before proceeding to my final destination in Dhule, I paused in Indore to pay a visit to the Zamindar family, the descendants of Rao Nandlal Mandloi, who had long ruled the Kampel-Indore area before agreeing to cooperate with the Marathas in the early eighteenth century. The Zamindars have done an incredible job in not only preserving their rāolā in the old city of Indore along with the family palanquin, ensign, and various other historic objects, but also in organizing and cataloguing their archive of Persian, Marathi, and Hindi documents.
Staff of SSVM and myself flanking murti of Samartha Ramdas
Finally, I spent several productive days at Shri Samartha Vagdevata Mandir (SSVM) in the growing town of Dhule in northern Maharashtra. In addition to being a prominent temple and museum dedicated to the seventeenth-century Maharashtrian saint-poet Ramdas, SSVM holds approximately 1800-1900 manuscripts furnished by followers of the Ramdasi sampradāya. I devoted my efforts to working through several manuscripts, letter-books, accounts, and stray documents related to the Satara Chitnis scribal household, which is the subject of my dissertation research and a forthcoming publication. Without the patient assistance of Sharad Kuber and the other staff members at SSVM, I would have been unable to locate these materials, some of which were housed off-site.
It was truly a pleasure to work in both new and familiar archives across the Marathi zone. In the future, I look forward to pursuing some of the research avenues that I have sketched here as part of Lawforms’ ongoing investigation of legal and linguistic interactions in the Persianate world.
Lawforms Workshop 2019: Manuals, Stylebooks, and Formularies for Persianate Legal Documents
8-10 July 2019, Hotel Du Vin and Bistro, Magdalen Street, Exeter EX2 4HY
We are preparing for our upcoming workshop; here is the draft programme. This is a project team-centred event, but we have space for a few more people; if you can read Persian, and would like to read manuals for fun, do get in touch! N.Chatterjee@exeter.ac.uk
Working Programme; will continue to be updated
Day 1 – Monday, 8 July 2019
9:00-10:30 am – Epistolary models and the concept of inshā’
Introductory discussion of aims of workshop
Further discussion of readings on inshā’and related manuals and formularies genres (Paul, Mitchell, Flatt, Horstmann, Deshpande)
10:30-11:00 am– Tea and coffee break
11:00 am-12:30 pm– Modelling Persianate legal documents I
Discussion of selections from inshā’ from Iran or Central Asia (TBD)
12:30-2:00 pm– Lunch at conference venue
2:00-3:30 pm –Modelling Persianate legal documents II
Discussion of selections from Manāẓir al-Inshā’, ed. Ma’dankan, pp. 185-7, 192-3, 219
3:30-4:00 pm– Tea and coffee break
4:00-5:30 pm– Modelling Persianate legal documents III
Discussion of selections from Inshā’-yi Harkaran, ed. Balfour, pp. 162-75
6:30-8:30 pm– Conference-sponsored dinner at local restaurant
Day 2 – Tuesday, 9 July 2019
9:00-10:30 am– Numeracy and accounting
Discussion of selections from Khulāṣat al-Siyāq
10:30-11:00 am– Tea and coffee break
11:00 am-12:30 pm– Hybrid manuals I
Discussion of selections from Mughal dastūr al-ʿamal (BL or Richards?)
12:30-2:00 pm– Lunch at conference venue
2:00-3:30 pm– Hybrid manuals II
Discussion of selections from Alwar colonial dastūr al-ʿamal from APRI
3:30-4:00 pm– Tea and coffee break
4:00-5:30 pm– Indic-language manuals
Presentation on Marathi manuals by Dominic Vendell, Lawforms Project
Presentation on Rajasthani/Hindi manuals by Elizabeth Thelen, Lawforms Project
6:30-8:30 pm– Conference-sponsored dinner at local restaurant
Day 3 – Wednesday, 10 July 2019
10:30 am-12:30 pm– Grammars and dictionaries
Discussion of RAS Tod 173 (Persian facetious dictionary) and Thanjavur Marathi grammar led by Lawforms team
12:30-2:00 pm– Lunch at conference venue
2:00-3:30 pm– Group discussion of workshop insights and future goals
3:30-4:00 pm– Tea and coffee break
4:00-5:30 pm– Further project-related conversation and planning
Nandini Chatterjee; Elizabeth Thelen; Dominic Vendell
Nandini Chatterjee reports:
In this week, Elizabeth Thelen, Dominic Vendell and I worked together in London – mainly at the British Library and the Royal Asiatic Society’s library – with the aim of surveying and analysing Indo-Persianate manuals across multiple genres. The idea was to work towards a project workshop on manuals that we are planning to hold in 2020, and thus we were aiming to actively think about which kinds of texts may have served to regularise and standardise the various forms of documents that we have been studying. Given the scope and aims of the project, we also decided to work collaboratively and comparatively, checking for textual genres that may have been shared across language boundaries – specifically, Persian, Marathi and Rajasthani.
In order to step into the vast field of Indo-Persian manuals, we used the very comprehensive list of ‘Administrative and accountancy manuals, statistical tables, etc.’ offered as appendix to Irfan Habib’s Agrarian System of Mughal India, edn. 3, pp. 470-71. I knew from my prior research of certain well-known inshā’texts, that, although conceived of as models of exemplary prose writing, including diplomatic correspondence, at least from the seventeenth century, many Indo-Persian inshā’writers included sections on legal deeds. Here is an example of a model deed of sale from the Inshā’-yi Harkaran, composed in Harkaran Das Kamboh of Multan. It was among the first Persian texts to be translated by the British in India, for its obvious functional value.
A model sale-deed from the Insha-yi Harkaran, ed. and translated F. Balfour
Elizabeth Thelen reports:
One question for me going into this research week in London was whether the British Library collections held much Rajasthani material beyond poetry and Jain scriptures. My initial catalogue searches had turned up little material. A conversation with the North Indian languages curator confirmed my suspicion that while there may well be Rajasthani printed books and additional Rajasthani manuscripts beyond the small number listed in Blumhardt’s catalogue of Gujarati and Rajasthani manuscripts, these additional works are catalogued together with Hindi materials because for much of the period of cataloguing, Rajasthani was not considered separate from Hindi. Finding such works will take a careful combing of the catalogues of Hindi materials, a task which was beyond the scope of this week.
However, I did come across works in Hindi and Urdu (Hindustani) as well as India Office Records from the nineteenth century that provide context for our central research aims around legal documents, manuals and archives. Such materials include didactic tales about a king’s justice, script charts, a list of the sorts of bahīs (registers) used by merchants, copies of hundis (bills of exchange), and discussions of how Francis Wilder, appointed as Superintendent to manage the affairs of Ajmer in 1818 established revenue collection and law courts in Ajmer.
The Royal Asiatic Society was a more obvious stop in my quest for Rajasthani materials. It is home to the Tod Collection, 170 manuscripts, mostly collected by Lt. Col. James Tod, an East India Company servant who was the Political Agent based in Udaipur from 1818-1822 and wrote The Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. Several manuscripts within the collection relate to administration and law, including two composite volumes of transcribed documents and inscriptions (RAS Tod 145; RAS Tod 170); a text offering a listing of administrative positions (RAS Tod 126); and a manual of letter-writing (RAS Tod 98). Although the latter is largely Sanskrit, the terminology in some sections suggests a borrowing from Persian.
I also consulted a composite Persian manuscript at the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS Persian 173). I first was drawn to this text when I noticed that Irfan Habib lists it in the bibliography of The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556-1707alongside dastūr al-ʿamals. He notes that it contains a revenue table with detailed statistics for the subaof Ajmer. The manuscript does contain these revenue tables, with details of the collection from the various parganas and mahals of subaAjmer. But the bulk of the manuscript contains transcriptions of ʿarzdashts and various letters from the period 1067-1069 AH (1656-1659 CE), during the War of Succession between Aurangzeb and his brothers (which Habib also notes under his heading of ‘Epistolary Collections’). Most of the correspondence involves Mirza Raja Jai Singh, the ruler of Amber and an important Mughal noble, writing to members of the imperial family, including Aurangzeb, Dara Shikoh, and Muhammad Akbar. The manuscript also contains a brief facetious dictionary and some short selections of anecdotes. Although the exact provenance of this text is unclear, the central presence of content connected to places and people in Rajasthan suggests that it may have been copied or acquired in Rajasthan.
Dominic Vendell reports:
At the outset of our research week in London, I was uncertain about the existence of any materials resembling manuals or formularies in the Marathi Manuscripts section of the British Library. While browsing through Blumhardt’s catalogues, however, I noticed an entry for a “Mahratta Grammar” holding “specimens of letters and commercial correspondence.” This manuscript (shelfmark: Mss Marathi D11)upon examination disclosed fascinating examples of receipts (rasīd), bonds (daskat), agreements (karār-nāmā), memoranda (yādī), and personal and diplomatic correspondence. Mainly written in English and Marathi in the Modi script, it includes a lexicon of administrative terms in English, Marathi, and Persian with some words clearly drawn from Tamil, and many of the examples appear to have been produced in and around the court of the raja of Thanjavur. What do we know about the authorship of this “Mahratta Grammar”? Preliminary research suggests that the East India Company servant James Michael, prior to teaching at Haileybury from roughly 1832 until his death in 1837, hired a Brahman in Thanjavur in 1830 to compose the manuscript, which in turn became a source for his nephew James Ballantyne’s A Grammar of the Mahratta Language(1839).
Though an extraordinary artifact with a particular location in the history of EIC linguistic pedagogy, the eclectic contents of the 1830 Marathi grammar also anticipate the later nineteenth-century production of lekhanapaddhatī(also known as lekhapaddhatī), which may be roughly translated as “system of writing.”My survey of the BL’s printed Marathi collection turned up several titles, such as Samsārachopaḍī(1863), Vāchanamālā(1867), and Moḍī Vāchanasārā(1877), containing rules of composition and examples of Modi documentation and correspondence. Perhaps most intriguingly, several examples in the lekhanapaddhatīsection of the Samsārachopaḍī, written by Vishnu Vasudev Godbole and published by Krishna Shastri Gurjar, are identical to those given by Munshi Ganpatrao Satarkar in his Hemādrīkṛta Lekhanakalpataru(1853). Satarkar’s text (for a much richer discussion, see Prachi Deshpande’s 2015 article in Āpale Vaṅmāya Vṛitta) nostalgically claims origins in the bygone 13thcentury Yadava kingdom, yet at the same time, its circulation, copying and re-publication suggests how the art of formal Modi writing, despite having a diminished role in law, politics, and administration, continued to hold popular interest.
Another avenue of investigation led me to the Persian genre of inshā’, and particularly to the works of the Bahmani minister Mahmud Gawan (1411-82). His Riyāz̤ al-Inshā’collects his correspondence with widely scattered scholars, Sufis, and litterateurs, but it is his manual on inshā’, the Manāẓir al-Inshā’(shelfmark: Mss Add 22706), that may hold more clues for understanding standards of formal writing in the early modern Deccan. In the section of the Manāẓiron the divisions (aqsām), foundations (arkān), and conditions (sharā’iṭ) of epistolary composition, Gawan builds a typology of written objects based on the statuses of senders and recipients. For example, if the sender is of a higher station than the recipient, and also happens to be a pādshāh, then the written object ought to be called a manshūr-nāma, a fatḥ-nāma, or a farmān; however, if the sender is a minister or a noble, then it ought to be called a mis̤āl. As with the lekhanapaddhatītexts, social status shapes rules of composition. But Gawan also suggests that the rules for certain written objects, particularly those of confederation (ahd-nāma), congratulation (tahni’at-nāma), and condolence(taʿziyat-nāma), are more flexible. In future research, I hope to consider this admission of flexibility in the case of the ahd-nāmain particular alongside the proliferation of diplomatic documentation in the eighteenth century as well as to compare Gawan’s prescriptions with actual documents, such as Adil Shahi farmāns that my colleague Nandini collected at BISM.
Director, Lal Bahadur Shastri Center for Indian Culture (ICCR),Embassy of India, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
During my work at the Telengana Government Oriental Manuscripts library (old Asafia library)in Hyderabad, I came across this interesting report of a legal dispute within the waqai‘ Ajmer (official newsletters from the administrative division of Ajmer), from emperor Aurangzeb’s period of rule. The specific report is dated the month of Jamādi al-ākhir, twenty-first sāl-i julūs (1676 CE).
In this, it is reported that a parvāna(sub-imperial order) was issued under the the seal of siyādat panāh Iftekhar Khan, seeking a full inquiry by the Aqzī al-Quzzāt (اقضی القضاه; unusual term, possibly seniormost judge) in the matter of an appeal by a resident of the city of Ajmer called Ganga Ram. Ganga Ram complained that his son-in law Bhagwan, a bronze vessel worker, had been whipped badly and killed by a certain Muhammad Alam son of Muhammad Arif Amin in Dindwana qasba (town) for not obeying his undue orders to make bronze vessels. Bhagwan’s wife, the daughter of Ganga Ram, who wanted to burn herself with her murdered husband was stopped from burning and kept forcibly in Muhammad Alam’s house. According to the above, office of siyādat panāh Iftekhar Khan has sought the immediate presence of Muhammad Alam along with the daughter of the plaintiff. Decision will be taken after the matter becomes clear after due inquiry.
Fahad Bishara, in conversation with Nandini Chatterjee
In October 2018, I visited the beautiful University of Virginia at Charlottesville, to discuss the project and its activities with one of the key team members, the upcoming star of legal history, Prof. Fahad Bishara. HIs first book, A Sea of Debt, is deservedly making waves! Notes from our conversations were written up by Fahad, in his inimitable style.
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How do we take scattered and disconnected pieces of paper and make broader claims from them? Over the course of our discussion this morning, we discussed two broad but inter-related themes that could structure our thinking moving forward: first, the idea of legal consciousness, and second reflections on the fragment and the archive. In thinking about legal consciousness (over coffee at Grit Café, as one does) we were primarily interested in a framework that would allow us to take bits of paper and use them to “move up the chain” of nested legal genres, rather than down the chain (in the vein of Hallaq and Messick) – or, more accurately, to use those pieces of paper to shed light on the very shape of the nesting itself. We thought about how the approach of starting with manuals and moving down to workaday forms of writing felt restrictive, in that it presumed the existence of a coherent silo of nested texts – which is of course not untrue, but doesn’t allow for the possibility of a more variegated juridical landscape in which legal discourses, texts, and practices bleed into one another, and forms of legal consciousness that can accommodate for that bleeding rather than forms that restrict themselves to strictly defined constellations of texts.
A necessary component of this inclination, we thought, was a meditation on how to read these scattered/disconnected papers (“fragments”) within the context of the collections we find them in (“the archive”) so as to get a more textured sense of how they relate to other types of writings. A critical caveat, though, is that one has to account for the ways in which these archives are curated and re-curated multiple times over the course of their lifetimes so as to push us towards particular narratives, and thus simultaneously opening up and restricting the possibilities of what we might say about them. We also have to account for the ways in which we, as scholars, assemble our archives for the purpose of thinking about a set of issues – and, by extension, creating a coherent narrative out of the jumbled mess of paper that we encounter more generally (Fahad’s writing on “the dhow’s archive” is one example of this). We asked ourselves how we might relate this to the subaltern history project of “rejecting the narrative,” in which they use episodes to write microhistories that aim to challenge the nation (but perhaps never do).
Finally, we ended by reflecting on notions of public and private in the documentation. How do the archives we encounter hold up the stories that people tell about themselves through fragments (as opposed to kings, for instance, who leave much fuller accounts of themselves)? And how are these documents themselves straddling both the realms of the public and private? “Public” bureaucratic documents can sometimes house “private” information in ways that surprise us (notarial records are particularly good examples of this) and even what we might assume to be undeniably “private” records – for example, letters – are sometimes created for expressively public purposes.
Attending the July 2018 conference on Forms of Law in the Early Modern Persianate World, 17th-19th centuries was a unique opportunity for me to delve into the politics behind the form and production of the Persianate official documents. Scholars presenting their research works on less-explored aspects of Persianate documents in a posh Book of Exeter themed hotel where walls, carpets and chandelier in the central lobby celebrated the famous document inspired me to physically recreate medieval farmāns.
My motive behind recreating farmānswas to understand the mindset of those who were producing such documents during the medieval period. Needless to say, for medieval official documents, form seems to be dictated by the purpose of the documents and agenda of its producers. My earliest understanding was simple; that the more politically significant a document, the more ornate and decorated it should be. Complexity of the content should also correlate with the purpose and consumers. The more localized a document is the plainer it should appear. For instance, the local revenue records in various regional languages that were presented in the conference were generally intonate, organized and legible, making clear statements of authentic financial interactions. I juxtapose these documents with beautifully calligraphed royal farmāns (imperial decrees). My hypothesis about the politics behind form of documents proved wrong when I started looking at the inconsistencies in the appearance of the farmāns.
First, there is a stylistic difference between the farmāns produced in Persian, Indian and Ottoman empires. Broadly speaking, the farmāns from Qajar Persia are very elegant, gold painted and look like calligraphic masterpieces, the Mughal farmāns with two royal seals imprinted on the top, written with simple ink on paper from Akbar to Shah Alam’s period are very plain yet graceful and Ottoman farmāns with illuminated tughras are neither as simple as the Mughal farmāns nor are very decorated like the Qajar farmāns.
Qajar farmān
Mughal farmān
Ottoman farmān
There are inconsistencies in how the farmāns look within each of these cultures as well. For instance, some Persian farmāns are plain and some Mughal ones are decorated with gold. I am still unsure why certain farmāns were kept very simple while others were embellished. I would like to observe that farmāns might have had sub-categories according to their purposes and this might explain why certain farmāns appeared in a certain format.
After the conference I attended a lecture in SOAS, London by the famous Urdu writer and poet Javed Akhtar. It was a rare privilege to listen to Javed Akhtar reciting his famous satirical poem “Naya Hukm-nāma” or the new ordinance. This poem is a parody of the content of royal farmāns. It has six parts of which the first three parts explain the ambition of the powerful to control all, the remaining three parts elaborate how this control is beyond human agency. The tone of the new ordinance is callous, the demands are idiosyncratic and the issuer of the new ordinance seems to be an eccentric megalomaniac. This poem was the most suitable content for my artwork.
I have painted the Naya Hukm-nāma in two farmān formats. The first format is a 3×2 feet on canvas artwork in paint medium. This artwork has two parts. The central colorful core and the golden margins (hāshiya). The title of the poem is the title of my painting i.e. Naya Hukm-nāma. The colorful core of the painting has gilded words including sach, sachchāī (truth), barabarī, musāwāt (equality), izhār (expression), āzādī (freedom), haq(right), ʿadl (justice) and khūdī (self- respect), the civic values that have become impracticable ideals in non-representational governments. These boldly inscribed clichés look imposed and artificial in an otherwise harmonious document. These clichés are regular rhetoric of every regime. Contrary to the title of the Naya Hukm-nāma (new ordinance) there is nothing new in the apparent hukm-nāma. The newness of the ordinance is written in the margins (hāshiyas) in an almost invisible and hardly legible hand writing. The hāshiyas contain first three parts of the hukm-nāma. The painting also has a golden stamp of Sarkar (the one with authority) on the bottom of the document.
Seal – detail
āzādī; izhār and sachchāī
The second farmān is gold on paper with simple calligraphy in acrylic paint with a royal seal on the top.
This year, August 2017-August 2018, had been incalculably prolific, firstly, to work on one hundred thousand Persian documents of Khalsa Darbar record of Sikh rule in Punjab, 1799-1849, placed at the Punjab Archives Lahore and, secondly, to work with Dr Nandini Chatterjee in UK as part of her Law Forms project to explore the Darbar Record and related English, Hindi, Urdu, Shahmukhi, and Gurumukhi documents. Khalsa Darbar Record is about the economic management of Sikh era 1801-1849, and was catalogued in English by Prof Sita Ram Kohli and two volumes were published in 1919 and 1927 respectively. I, first scholar after Sita Ram, have consulted this material and exploited the new dimensions regarding the economic history of Sikh era. Primarily, the record is consisted with the following subject matter, 1) daftar fauj, relating to army 2) mal,relating to the general revenues, 3) toshakhana,relating to royal wardrobe and Maharajas’ Privy Purse and 4) jagirat, relating to thejagirsaccounts.
Receipt written by Ratan Singh ‘Kamidan’ or commander for funds received; courtesy Punjab State Archives, Lahore
جون سے اگست، 2018 کے مہینے برطانیہ میں لاء فارمز منصوبے کی ناظم ڈاکٹرنندنی کے ساتھ منصوبے سے منسلک سرگرمیوں میں گزرے۔ ان میں سب سے اہم سرگرمی، خالصہ دربار ریکارڈ اور دیگر فارسی مسودات کا لفظی ترجمہ کرنے کے بعد ان قلمی نسخوں سےحاصل شدہ مواد سے متعلق کتب اور مقالات کا تجزیہ کرنا رہی۔اس سلسلے کی تمام نشستوں میں، منصوبے کے پوسٹ ڈاکٹر یٹ عالم جناب ڈو مینیک وینڈل اور عملے کے رکن مہر بود خانی زادے نے ماہرانہ علمی معاونت کی۔ مسودات کے گرو پروفیسر چندر شیکھر نے علیحدہ نشست میں فارسی اعداد کی مختلف اقسام کو سمجھایا۔
Work in the Punjab State Archives, Lahore
مورخہ 13 اور 14 جولائی، 2018 کو مرکیور ساؤتھ گیٹ ہوٹل، Exeterمیں منعقدہ ورکشاپ بعنوان”فارسی دنیا میں لین دین اور دستاویزات” میرے لئے حیرت انگیز طور پر معلوماتی اس لئے تھی کیونکہ عالمی شہرت یافتہ علماء نے فارسی اور اس سے متعلقہ علاقائی زبانوں میں قانونی اور کاروباری طریقوں پر سیر بحث مقالات پیش کئے۔ان علماء نے انفرادی ملاقاتوں میں”19ویں صدی کے پنجاب میں سکھ سلطنت کا اقتصادی قانون بزریعہ فارسی مواد” کے موضوع پر میری نہایت موثر راہنمائی فرمائی۔
سکھ سلطنت پر زیادہ مواد فارسی جاری شکستہ میں ہے اور اس کا ایک بڑا حصہ سرکار انگلسیہ اور سرکار خالصہ کے مابین خط وکتابت اور معاہدوں پر مشتمل ہے جسے سمجھنے کے لیے انتہائی محنت، مہارت اور وسیع معلومات کی ضرورت ہوتی ہے۔ چنانچہ اس حوالے سے برٹش لائبریری لندن میں موجود کثیر التعداد بنیادی اور ثانوی انگریزی مواد حاصل کرنے کے ساتھ ہی اس کا تفصیلی مطالعہ کرنے کا موقع ملا اور یوں اس مہم میں سب سے زیادہ وقت بیتانے کی حقدار برٹش لائبریری ٹھہر ی۔ آ خری دنوں میں دربار مہاراجہ رنجیت سنگھ کے پندرہ نادر فارسی مسودات کا بڑی تگ ودو کے بعد ملنا، برٹش لائبریری کی طرف سے کسی تحفہ سے کم نہ تھا۔
I have no hesitation to dedicate this trip and these lines to Dr Nandini Chatterjee for pointing out the research gaps in my work and effectively suggesting which are now the theoretical bases of my research work and surely will come out, after the completion, as significant exertion to contribute in.