Recently, we have been thinking quite a bit about time. The most immediate reason was the end of British Summer time on 25th October. In this age of online meetings, this led to a flurry of exchanges with colleagues located in various parts of the world about the ‘real’ time when we wanted to meet up in video conferences. Proposing GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), which had seemed like a safe, if somewhat Anglocentric strategy, led to increased confusion as colleagues based in Europe pointed out that GMT was not the same as UK time. (Technically, only winter time in the UK is GMT; summer time in UK is GMT+1; we ‘spring forward’, i.e. move clock ahead by an hour in spring, and ‘fall back’ i.e. set clocks back an hour in fall.)
The effect of all of this was to make us feel more open-minded towards what used to seem like the endless complications with dates and eras in our documents!
Mughals and other Indo-Islamic rulers were famous for being deeply concerned with time – calendars were an assertion of sovereignty as much as a practical tool for ensuring the timely supply of resources. Jahangir’s famous portrait as ‘Time Lord’ (Dr Who fans, the Mughals got in here first, sorry) is a striking record of this concern. However, the familiarity of ordinary officials and subjects with certain ways of recording time meant that conquests of territories often led to the addition, rather than complete replacement of calendars in use. As a result, a huge variety of calendars are used in our Indo-Persian documents. Incidentally, many of these calendars, and the difficulties of intercalation, are discussed by Abul Fazl in a long section in the Ain-i Akbari. A variety of resources are required in order to convert these to the Gregorian calendar.
The calendar that is easiest to convert to Gregorian is the Islamic lunar calendar – the Hijri-Qamri calendar. Calculation begins from the day of the Prophet’s flight to Medina in 622 CE. There are 12 lunar (rather than solar) months, which requires a complex formula to convert to the solar. For our project website and database, we have used the converter on the Iran Chamber Society website.
In some documents, especially those concerned with revenue administration, we see the Fasli, or Ilahi calendar, which is a solar calendar, instituted by the Mughal emperor Akbar. Adding 590/1 to the Fasli year gives us the Gregorian year. The Fasli calendar was extended to the south of the country with the gradual annexation of Deccan Sultanates by the Mughals; it was continued in use by the Hyderabad state. Incidentally, the traditional Bengali calendar is the Fasli calendar.
Many Mughal documents combine the Islamic months with a regnal or ‘julus’ year. Converting this to a Gregorian year requires, firstly, identifying the emperor whose reign is referred to. This is possible when the document bears the imperial seal, or the seal of an imperial Mughal official who declares allegiance to a named emperor. Regnal years begin in the Islamic month of coronation of the named emperor – actual or assumed; for example, emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir’s regnal year is taken to begin in the month of Ramzan 1658 CE, although he was crowned twice. In an updated version of this blog post, we are going to offer a Mughal Julus-Gregorian converter.
Mughal documents also frequently use the old Indic/Hindu calendar Vikram Samvat. Attributed to the mythic king Vikramaditya of Ujjain, years from the solar Samvat calendar are converted to the Gregorian by subtracting 57. The complication with the Samvat calendar is that it uses lunar months, and different parts of the country begin the year at different months.
One calendar that occurs only in combination with others is the Turkish duodenary calendar, which is a twelve-year cycle, each year named after a specific animal or bird. This calendar is usually seen in use in documents that are land grants, or tax contracts.
Among the several distinct calendar used by the Persian and Marathi documents from the south and southwestern parts of India is the Shuhur calendar. Named after the Arabic word for “month,” it was customary for each digit of a Suhur year to be written using Arabic words. While its exact origins are unclear, they appear to be linked to the introduction of Islamic Sultanate rule to the Deccan in the fourteenth century. It is converted by adding 599 or 600, depending on the month. Additionally, the Maratha founder Chhatrapati Shivaji Bhonsle promulgated his own regnal year, known as Rajyabhishek, with his coronation in 1674. Although there are research manuals called jantris that offer tables of conversion between Shuhur and other southern Indian calendars (Brishaspati, Saka, and Rajyabhishek) and Gregorian calendars, for the benefit of fellow researchers, we are developing a calculation tool, which we shall upload here.
Happy days!
