4 Transactions: Recording Deals

Pirates, as Lauren Benton has shown us, could be as law-savvy as lawyers.1

Early modern oceans were violent places, but they were not lawless in the sense
of being empty of law. When they were done with their swashbuckling, or were
put in a tight corner, especially by the unsystematic reach of rising imperial
states, the most terrifying of pirates fished out their legal documents with which
they declared loyalty to specific sovereigns and the legality of their actions.
Even if a vital letter of marque, which could turn a pirate into a privateer with
a magical swish, failed to make its appearance in court, whether because it was
lost, or because it had never existed, pirates who had had the gall to capture
Mughal ships, threaten the trading status of the East India Company and chance
the wrath of both, still argued until the end that such papers existed, and all they
had done, had been done within the law.2
It was no different in the land-locked Mughal province of Malwa. There, in the
district of Dhar, the descendants of Jayanti Das had clearly built up an interlock-
ing resource base by clearing land, being headmen of villages, assisting the state
in tax-collection and maintaining order and receiving various grants of tax-free
lands in return. In their own view, the entitlements of the family and its individual
members derived from their military prowess and service, and imperial grants
and the reiteration thereof, which produced their very own ancient custom or
right (dastūr-i sābiq), specifically, to collect taxes.3 Being local strongmen
partially recruited by the Mughal military-administrative structure did not, how-
ever, stop them from constantly transacting with a variety of local actors, and
meticulously recording such transactions within a predictable range of legal
deeds.
These legal deeds, which include documents of sale and purchase, rent, mort-
gage, gift, debt, repayment and, more exotically – blood-money, open up for us
a world of commercial transactions, charitable activities and interpersonal

1
Benton, A Search for Sovereignty.
2
As William Kidd did, albeit unsuccessfully, when he was tried in the Old Bailey in 1701 in
connection with his capture of the ship Queddah Merchant. Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and
the War against the Pirates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
3
See Introduction and Chapter 2.

141

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 142 Transactions: Recording Deals

exchange of property and obligations. As we have already seen, the modernist

divisions of private and public, state and society are not particularly helpful in
analysing the location and functions of our heroes and their activities. It is also
important to relax the conceptual constraints of a term embedded in English law, in
which a deed implies a record of property transfer. In our case, we have a much
wider range of transactions recorded in the non-imperative documents of our
collection. These documents are therefore best considered as written and authenti-
cated record of transfers of entitlements and/or obligations, including, but not
limited to, those involving physical property or money.
As the record of transactions voluntarily entered into by individuals and
actors without direct pressure from or direct reference to the state, they offer us
a particularly fertile source-base from which to explore everyman’s engage-
ments with law in the Mughal empire. In scholarship on other Islamicate
contexts, legal deeds (typically of sale, purchase, endowment, gift, rent, mor-
tgage, debt, marriage and so on) have been used to construct the social history
of a region, or of a specific community, producing the ‘human side’ of broader
political and commercial histories.4 In a comparable fashion, such documents
in Mughal India have been used to excavate the local structures of power, the
workings of the local government structures and formation of wealthy religious
complexes, the last also serving to illustrate the complex patronage patterns of
Indo-Islamic kingship.5 In the Indian case, the status of such records as
historical sources remains distinctly secondary to royal and sub-royal orders
and chronicle histories, and several of the works listed in Footnote 4 are in the
nature of valuable source-books, rather than historical arguments.
Recent historiography, especially in the burgeoning and diverse field of
Islamic law, has added several new angles of enquiry that can be pursued
using legal deeds as sources. One approach that I find particularly useful is
the one suggested by Brinkley Messick, who, while exploring the textual
habitus in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Yemen, suggested that legal
documents stand in front of a world of transactions, and represent a reality
filtered and codified through legal principles and categories.6 This idea has
recently been applied by Fahad Bishara to the world of Indian Ocean

4
Nobuaki, Persian Documents; Shaul Shaked, ‘Early Persian Documents from Khorasan’,
Journal of Persianate Studies, 6 (2013), 153–62; Fatiha Loualich, ‘In the Regency of Algiers:
The Human Side of the Algerian Corso’, in Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood and Mohamed-Salah
Omri (eds.) Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s
Maritime Legacy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 69–96; Christoph Werner, An Iranian Town
in Transition: A Social and Economic History of the Elites of Tabriz, 1747–1848 (Wiesbaden:
Harrasowitz, 2000); Werner, Vaqf en Iran.
5
Goswamy and Grewal (eds.), The Mughals and the Jogis of Jakhbar; Grewal, In the By-Lanes of
History; Habib, ‘From Ariṭh to Rādhākund’; Horstmann, In Favour of Govinddevji.
6
Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 227.

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 Transactions: Recording Deals 143

commerce. Bishara’s work is centred on the instruments for recording obliga-

tions of debt, generically known as waraqa (paper), that merchants from all
around the ocean used in their transactions. Bishara showed both how the
scribes (kātibs) who penned these documents used recognisable formula that
codified the intensely diverse world of oceanic commerce within the recogni-
sable, and legally cognisable Islamic legal language of contracts.7
The terminology used in the documents cited by Bishara, Messick, Werner
and all scholars working on Islamic legal deeds is one that is instantly
recognisable far beyond their immediate provenance. That is because they
were written using a truly global vocabulary, whose key terms for describing
transactions, such as: sale (baiʿ), mortgage (rahn), lease (ijāra), gift (hiba); or
legal actions, such as: declaration/confession (iqrār), denial (inkār), witnes-
sing (shahada); or legal actors, such as: claimant (muddaʿ), respondent
(muddaʿ ʿalai-hi), deponent (mukhbir) were largely identical, whether the
documents were scribed in Morocco or Bengal. That similarity derived from
the connection of such legal deeds with a long-established genre, that of
Islamic legal formularies, known as shurūṭ or wathāiq. Works of shurūṭ were
first produced around the ninth century CE, and written by eminent Islamic
jurists, who, with the expansion of Islamic empires and the consequent
elaboration of administrative and adjudicative institutions, were concerned
to guide people on how to produce legally cognisable documents.8 Books of
shurūṭ, which dealt with the sort of ‘private contracts’ that we are dealing with
here, were often combined with books on maḥz̤ ars and sijills (Arabic plurals:
mahāz̤ ir va sijillāt̄ ), that is, documents recording adjudication proceedings in
qāz̤ ī’s courts. And both these kind of formularies often formed part of even
larger works: compendia on Islamic jurisprudence or fiqh.9 Given Islamic
law’s formal insistence on the superiority of oral testimony over documentary
evidence, there is an unresolved debate among scholars about the significance
of this prolific genre; older scholarship suggested a pragmatic but doctrinally
incoherent effort to associate doctrine with practice,10 whereas more recent
works suggest that the formulary literature was a logical outcome of the

7
Bishara, A Sea of Debt.
8
Jeanette Wakin, ed. and trans. The Function of Documents in Islamic Law: The Chapters on
Sales from Ṭaḥāwī’s Kitāb al-shurūṭ al-kabīr (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1972), 9–29; Wael Hallaq, ‘Model Shurūṭ Works and the Dialectic of Doctrine and Practice’,
Islamic Law and Society, 2: 2 (1995), 109–34.
9
For an introduction to fiqh, see Wael Hallaq, ‘From Fatwās to Furūʿ: Growth and Change in
Islamic Substantive Law’, Islamic Law and Society, 1, 1994, 29–65; for a more detailed
exposition, see his Sharīʿa : Theory, Practice, Transformations.
10
On this conflict, see N. J. Coulson, ‘Doctrine and Practice in Islamic Law: One Aspect of the
Problem’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 18: 2 (1956), 211–26;
N. J. Coulson, Conflicts and Tensions in Islamic Jurisprudence (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1969)

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 144 Transactions: Recording Deals

efforts of jurists and evidence of the alignment of jurisprudence with the

processes of adjudication.11
Bishara’s study of legal documents used in Indian Ocean commerce
shows that the conflict between doctrine and practice could arise from
several other sources. At the most superficial, this may be a matter of
form, for example, the need for an appropriate family name or nisba, which
could require a cosmetic re-coding of the names of the parties involved in
order to cater for non-Arab and non-Muslim protagonists. Thus the Gujarati
Bania merchant Ladha Damji would be called Ladha bin Damah Al-
Banyani in a document from nineteenth-century Zanzibar, which recorded
complex credit transactions. ‘To trace back the ancestry of’– nasaba – was
an active and meaningful verb for jurists who wrote Arabic-language
formularies, as well as scribes who actually penned these Indian Ocean
commercial documents.12
More seriously, Bishara’s documents reveal a host of legal fictions, used to
contain a huge range of property transactions within the doctrinally valid limits
of Islamic law. In fact, Bishara shows that while ‘jurists suspected that alliance
between commercial actors and kātibs, could potentially conceal illicit gains’,
they were powerless to stop just such transactions being recorded, because they
were simply too far away from the site of commercial activity and recording.
Many jurists ended up taking an actively permissive view towards legal
devices, such as the khiyār or ‘delayed’ sale, which could be suspected of
circumventing Islamic injunctions against usury.13 In their ‘creative thinking’,
such jurists used analogies to expansively interpret that doctrines of Islamic law
to fit current realities. Devices permitted through such analogical reasoning are
very similar to the ‘legal fictions’ of English law. These are not fabrications in
the lay sense but professionally shared and legitimate devices for representing
a reality that was particularly unwieldy, and which would otherwise not be
amenable to legal action.14 Law does indeed make a certain reality for its own
use; a reality that is not just fiction because it determines how people and things
are disposed of. The vocabulary of Islamic shurūṭ just made legal reality in
a certain form. It is rather sterile to be pushed by such discoveries into the
debate over the gap between doctrine and practice in Islamic law, for wider
scholarship reveals that law’s need, as well as ability to sublimate unique and

11
Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 82; see also Wakin,
Function of Documents, pp. 4–10; Hallaq argues against these formulations.
12
Bishara, A Sea of Debt, pp. 69–70.
13
Ibid., pp. 90–9; in doing so, Bishara took Patricia Risso’s suggestive proposition that a shared
understanding of Islamic commercial law undergirded Indian Ocean commerce much further.
Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995) pp. 104–6.
14
That is, until they fell prey to the reformist drives of nineteenth-century English law reformers.

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 Transactions: Recording Deals 145

eccentric social reality into legally cognisable records, universally involves

creativity as well as distortion.15
The question for us really is what form that creativity takes in specific
contexts, and why. Asking that question allows us to approach legal deeds as
cultural artefacts, in the sense of being products of a specific institutional,
doctrinal, textual and scribal milieu. In early modern Islamic empires, such as
that of the Mughals, such milieux were inevitably multi-confessional and
multi-lingual with distinct regional dispensations of those pluralities. In char-
acterising legal documents produced by and for this family of landholders in
Malwa, we need to use a number of nominative categories, such as Islamicate,
Persianate, Mughal and Indic, and do so while reflecting on the accuracy and
explanatory value of each. As we shall see, despite the recognisable legal
vocabulary, many of the Persian documents produced by this family had no
exact counterpart in Arabic-language shurūṭs. Instead, they were most directly
modelled on Indo-Persianate formularies called munshāts, which were a prose
genre whose contents owed at least as much to the chancellery practices of
Persianate empires, as to the doctrines of Arabic-writing jurists.16
But we shall not retreat into dealing with legal documents as pure texts, and
instead attempt to reconstruct (through what is bound to be fragmentary
evidence), the social locus in which they were produced. I am working with
the idea that understanding the legal and formulary culture from which these
documents were derived, is necessary for understanding how and why people
represented themselves and their interests in a certain way.17 Properly viewed,
these legal deeds are fragments of a historical mirror which offers us inevitably
distorted glimpses of the lives they record. They are episodic and in a particular
fashion.18 Just as archives of criminal justice record instances of deviation and/
or dispute over what is good and what is not, and are thereby useful if letting us
discover what people thought was normative,19 these legal deeds record smal-
ler moments – of engagement, disengagement and dispute over the terms of the
making of such social and economic relations.

15
Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010); Kathryn Burns, ‘Notaries, Truth, and Consequences’, American
Historical Review, 110 (2005): 350–79; Chatterjee, ‘Maḥz̤ ar-nāmas in the Mughal and British
Empires.
16
And thus here I differ from Paolo Sartori regarding the sources of such legal formulae; Sartori,
‘Colonial Lgislation Meets Sharı̄ ʿa’, 43–60, note 56.
17
Paolo Sartori, ‘Introduction: On the Social in Central Asian History: Notes in the Margins of
Legal Records’, in P. Sartori, ed., Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia
(19th–Early 20th Century) (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1–22.
18
E. P. Thompson’s well-known formulation: ‘History is made up of episodes’ in his ‘The
Peculiarities of the English’, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York and
London: Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. 275.
19
Christopher Brooks and Michael Lobban (eds.), Communities and Courts in Britain, 1150–1900
(London: Hambledon, 1997).

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 146 Transactions: Recording Deals

The specific transactional moments that these legal deeds record peg out the
matrices of the social and commercial life of people captured therein, such as
this family of landholders–tax officials–strongmen. Quite like the Indian Ocean
mercantile documents discussed by Bishara, these documents from Malwa also
map onto the recognisable terminology and formulae of Islamic law, but they
also relate to their geographic and social location. Consequently, while the
collection of papers related to families of merchants from the port cites Surat
and Khamabayat are replete with deeds of sale, purchase and rent agreements,
the contract most often entered into by members of this family of landholders-
cum-officials-cum-strongmen was in fact that of revenue farming, or ijāra,
which we have discussed in Chapter 3. In this chapter, we shall deal with the
other kinds of property transaction evidenced in this collection, such as gift-
giving, loan-taking and repayment, which involved less direct engagement
with mechanisms of the state. However, such debts were sometimes secured
on projected revenue collections, closing the circle of taxation and transactions
and revealing the fluid boundary between state action and social exchanges at
the lowest, that is, village level in Mughal India. Following the trajectory of
such circles allows us to think carefully about the category of law, and the place
of the state within it.
Legal deeds also happen to be the only sub-set within this collection where
one is able to catch a glimpse of women in what might otherwise appear to be
a highly militarised world swarming with macho men. Gifts and transfers
effected and recorded by such women alert us to the mutual enmeshing of
statecraft, property-holding and kinship. However, this is not harem politics
writ small; women of this family who executed such legal deeds did so within
a shared world structured by tax, rent and Islamic legal categories, as much as
marriage and reproduction. Moreover, it so happens that women of the
Purshottam Das family appear not as appendages to transactions negotiated
to men, but as agents in their own rights, with surprisingly loud and clear voices
of their own.
When people transacted among themselves, as opposed to receiving the fruits of
grace of the great and mighty, they liked to do so in a way that would make the
transaction binding and secure in law. But they also liked to make an additional
effort to make sure that they understood what they were signing. We have seen
how the Mughal’s contractual approach to tax-collection lent itself to a vibrant
multi-linguality in the associated contracts – the qaul qarār paṭṭa-yi ijāra that
collectively formed the kāghaz-i khām, the lowest level of rental records in
Mughal India. People’s various and variable facility in multiple languages also
made itself felt in legal deeds, typically through marginal comments, attestations
and seals and validation symbols in a variety of languages and scripts. And so
these documents offer us not only a substantive corpus of non-literary evidence for
studying the history of development of languages in India, but also offer us a rare

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 Gifts – and Curses 147

opportunity for reconstructing the social context of multi-linguality in early

modern India, with an eye on those little experts, the scribes, who have drawn
so much attention from scholars in recent times, and among whose ranks our
qānūngōs may have belonged. When such men (and women) wanted something
written down, what would it be?

Gifts – and Curses

Unsurprisingly, it was most frequently about money or property changing
hands. This could include transfers within the extended family, including its
female members, which indicates a high level of formal individuation of titles,
as well as the perceived need to legally record alterations, even within the
affective and kinship matrix. Gifts are a favourite with anthropologists for their
ostensibly non-transactional format, which epitomises the creation, iteration
and modification of what purports to be extra-economic relationships. Islamic
jurists, on the other hand, always classified them together with other transac-
tions of property such as sale and pawn, naming it ‘hiba’ and prescribing
elaborate rules for completing such a transaction validly, and recording it
securely. In the one document in our collection that records the making of
a gift by a female member of the this extended family, we are offered
a tantalising glimpse of its kinship and property dynamics, and also a rather
striking picture of how Islamic legal terminology and forms circulated and
combined with other forms and means of validating such transactions on paper.
In 1690, the thirty-third year of Emperor Aurangzeb’s reign, a woman called
Puran gifted eight villages, a garden and two houses to Narsingh Das and
Gambhir Chand, the sons of Purshottam Das.20 She called herself the ‘legally
wedded wife (mankūḥa)’ of Gharib Das, son of Dinkar Das, son of Jayanti (?)
Das and uncle of Purshottam Das. In her own words, Puran made over these
properties, which had been in her sole title (patta bilā sharkat) to her cousins-in
-law of her own accord (ba-raz̤ āmandī-yi khūd), considering them her children
(ba-jā-yi farzand dānishte). This assumption of generational superiority and
generosity came with some conditions attached, for she noted that the bene-
ficiaries had ‘performed the duties of children (khidmat-i farzand-i ba-jā
āwarde)’. Given their dutifulness, whatever that may have consisted of, she
gave them a ‘rational deed (sanad nāṭiq)’ (i.e. created in the legally necessary
state of rationality), warning off anybody who may make claims on these
properties in future.
The cryptic contents of this gift deed suggest that there was rather a lot going
on in the background. How did this woman come to acquire sole title or paṭṭās
of eight villages, and what did those titles consist of in terms of her

20
NAI 2733/29 (1690).

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 148 Transactions: Recording Deals

entitlements? The inventory beneath the main text of the document grouped the
villages into muqadammī and dāmī – which, as we have seen before, pertained
to the rights of chaudhrīs (alternatively, muqaddams) to collect a share of the
peasant’s produce, as a putative salary for their work for the revenue machinery
of the Mughals. We know already that while in theory chaudhrīs were state
officials, they were also co-opted village headmen, their positions normally
inheritable, although subject to ratification, and occasional alteration, within
the family, by the jāgirdārs, with whom negotiations were constant, and tense.
Puran was likely to have been childless, or at least son-less, and perhaps her
husband and father-in-law had died. If so, then despite inheriting the paṭṭās of
their chaudhrāīs, she may have been constrained by her gender and unable to
undertake the full range of zamīndārī duties, especially the occasional military
and policing services. There were of course a small number of notable women
zamīndārs; some were encountered by the British in late eighteenth-century
Bengal,21 but by then the need to provide military duties had disappeared;
strong-arm men could do the rest. It was probably harder to manage that in late
seventeenth-century Malwa. If she had, in fact, become isolated through
a combination of unfortunate life-cycle events, Puran may not have made the
transfer entirely of her own free will, but document still made a note of mutual
obligations. We do not know what exactly the ‘duties of children’ were, but she
may have negotiated for a maintenance. In any case, as a result of this transfer,
villages located further north, in what would later become the princely state of
Sitamau, came into possession of the main and most successful line of the
family.
Puran’s deed of gift, of which we only have a copy, is a striking example of
both the penetration of law into the interstices of rural society and family life in
Mughal Malwa and a record of the variety of influences that went into shaping
the language and valences of that law. The original deed had been sealed by
‘shariʿat panāh qāz̤ ī Muhammad Muhsin’ and bore two dates – the regnal year,
as well as the Faslī year, that is, the solar Hijri year invented by Akbar and used
in all revenue-related documentation. The lunar Hijri year was absent, as was
the word ‘hiba’ itself, but the document reproduced the necessary Islamic legal
formulae for making valid gifts, such as noting the absence of co-sharers, and
the presence of free will. The donor, Puran, referred to herself as ‘mankūḥa’,
specifically using the Islamic legal term nikāḥ for marriage, in place of possible
alternatives: the more generic jauza in Arabic or zan in Persian. No doubt she
chose ‘mankūḥa’ to record her unassailable legal status, and hence unquestion-
able right to the paṭṭās she had inherited. But in the end, she stepped beyond

21
For example Rani Rashmoni; later women zamīndārs were essentially regents for minor male
heirs. See Sonia Nishat Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1896–1939
(Leiden: Brill, 1996), p. 15.

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 Credit and Obligation 149

mere formulae, and had it recorded, ‘If [anybody] makes a claim [on this
property], I will seize their skirt on the day of judgement (Wa agar daʿva
nūmāyad, roz-i qayāmat dāmangīr-i-ū shavam)!’
Curses, and their more passive form, imprecatory prayers (asking God to
punish someone), have been studied as legal devices in various ancient Middle
Eastern contexts.22 These uses are very similar to instances from Mughal and
pre-Mughal India, in which curses are included in stone inscriptions recording
the dedication of property, to support resthouses for travellers, for example, and
intended to protect against encroachment. Islamic jurisprudence provided for
specific procedures for using curses in legal disputes.23 But nothing we learn
from that scholarship can fully prepare us for this evocative curse, recorded by
a Hindu widow in a zamīndār family, as a guarantee for a legal transaction.

Credit and Obligation

Despite their diverse resource base, people like Purshottam Das and his family
were sometimes desperately short of money. As we have seen, the rates of
taxation were variable year-to-year and subject to negotiation on various bases,
despite Malwa being a z̤ ābtī or regulation province in which clear rates of
taxation, based on a systematic survey were supposed to be the norm. Such
negotiation was reliant on a series of exchanges up and down a social and
official ladder, all of them involving coercion. Although actors at the middle to
lower end of the scale, such as Purshottam Das as his family, were not passive
recipients of either coercion or magnanimity, occasionally the balance of
negotiation tipped against them. We have seen in Chapter 3 how Purshottam
Das was able to benefit from the discomfiture of his peers; when another
chaudhrī-cum-qānūngō failed to deliver the taxes as promised, he had to
abscond in order to escape the wrath of the jāgīrdār, and Purshottam Das was
able to buy up that qānūngōī. At other times, however, the Purshottam Das clan
suffered from a lack of liquidity themselves. The surviving documents record-
ing their debts and repayments offer us some insights into the sources of rural
credit supply, the other key social actors that this family dealt with, and also the
tangling of taxation and credit at the base of the structure of the Mughal empire.
Mohan Das, the state-approved vigilante who brought down a fearsome
landlord-turned-highwayman, ran short of money at some point in his career,
and was obliged to look for a loan. Either because they were all short of money,
or because theirs was really a family enterprise which required collective
acceptance of liability, Mohan Das, together with his brothers, Chandar Bhan
22
H. G. L. Peel, The Vengeance of God (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 236–8; K. van der Toorn, Sin and
Sanction in Israel and Mesopotamia: a Comparative Study (Assen/Maastricht, 1985), pp. 45 ff.
23
Guy Bochor, God in the Courtroom: the Transformation of Courtroom Oath and Perjury
between Islamic and Franco-Egyptian Law (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 129–35.

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 150 Transactions: Recording Deals

and Dinkar Das, approached a man called Nayak Khandha, said to be of the
‘banjāra’ caste. We do not really know how much Mohan Das was compelled
to borrow, but it was a hefty amount, and possibly one that built up through
several loans on separate occasions. Despite establishing the family and its
resource base, Mohan Das and his brothers did not manage to pay off his debt,
whether because they remained cash-strapped, or because they did not feel
adequately pressured to prioritise repayment. In any case, in 1660, a couple of
years after Aurangzeb made himself emperor, Mohan Das’s son, chaudhrī
Purshottam Das, decided to repay the outstanding amounts, to the brother of
Nayak Khandha, called Nayak Sundar, and to his sons, Haridas and Ramdas.
The document called fārigh-khaṭṭī in which this transaction was recorded noted
that all dues were cleared except a remaining bond (tamassuk) for twenty-five
rupees.24
Purshottam Das, who begun contracting for revenue with Mughal tax offi-
cials at least in the 1620s, was an elderly man by this time. He was also quite
wealthy by rural standards. But even a substantial rural magnate such as this
became periodically strapped for cash. Nayak (headman) Khandha, from
whom Purshottam Das’s father Mohan Das had taken a significant loan,
belonged to that ubiquitous group of pastoralist-traders called banjāras
whose mobile histories lay intertwined with the martial histories of groups
associated with the great north-western desert, such as the Rajputs.25 In the
nineteenth century, the mobility and amphibiousness of groups such as the
banjāras came to be legally associated with criminality by the colonial state
keen on a pacified, immobilised agrarian population.26
In the Mughal empire, however, such men performed the essential service of
moving grain across long distances, provisioning urban centres as well as
armies. For this reason, no doubt, we see a very clear dastak (passport), issued
under the seal of a servant of the jāgirdār Nawazish Khan, to Nayak Singha and
other banjāras, assuring them that they may purchase grain without the need to
pay pīshkash or other taxes.27 One can only imagine how such a document may

24
NAI 2668/4 (1660).
25
Habib, ‘Mercant Communities’, p. 373–4, quoting Zia Barani, Tarīkh-i Firūz Shāhī (ed.)
Saiyid Ahmad Khan (Calcutta: Bibliotheca Indica, 1862), pp. 305–7; and a dōhā of the mystic
poet, Kabir; Henry M. Elliot, Memoirs on the History, Folklore and Distribution of the Races of
the Northwestern Provinces of India (ed.) J. Beames (2 vols., London: Hertford, 1869), Vol. I, p.
56; and R. V. Russell and Hira Lal, Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India (Delhi
reprint, 1975), II, 188.
26
Radhika Singha, ‘Providential’ Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal
Innovation’, Modern Asian Studies, 27: 1 (1993), 83–146; the suspicion of early nineteenth-
century commentators, such as William Sleeman, persisted into the twentieth. Thus Russell and
Lal, Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces, Vol. IV, p. 561: ‘it seems probable that many of
the Thugs were originally Banjaras’.
27
LNS MS 235 (n1) DAI, dated 1 Ramzan 1073 (1663).

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 Credit and Obligation 151

have been preserved carefully by the leader of a caravan, who almost certainly
would not have been able to read it, but knew to display it at checkpoints.
It is not clear why this dastak should have made its way into our family’s
archive, but it may have been because the family had long-standing financial
entanglements with the banjāras. In any case, the dastak is additional evidence
of the ability of these itinerant and usually illiterate traders to negotiate Persian-
language legal documentation and its associated judicial processes.
When recovering their brother and father’s money, for example, Nayak
Sundar, Haridas and Ramdas would have appeared in front of the district
qāz̤ ī, a certain Sheikh Ilyas, who affixed his seal to the document, and wrote:
‘sealed with the confession/declaration (ʿitrāf) of Nayak Sundar’. Others
would have turned up to complete the transaction, for the document was
witnessed and signed by recognisable associates of the family – Parasram
and Parmanand, qānūngōs of Dhar; Madhav Das and Girdhar Das, possibly
also kinsmen; and also a certain Daud Khan and Shaikh Hussain. These last two
may have been men whom the qāz̤ ī considered respectable and dependable as
witnesses; Shaikh Hussain may even have been his own relative. And thus
people of at least three social circles – upper caste Hindu landlord and tax
officials, the illiterate itinerant merchants and Muslim ʿulamā – all converged
in the court of the qāz̤ ī to record a small economic episode, that of the return of
a loaned amount, thus leaving a paper trail of the pattern of their mutual
relationship. Such episodes and their institutional location (the qāz̤ ī’s office)
serve to substantiate a key point of this book: the deep imbrication of Persianate
and Islamic legal forms into the economic and social fabric of Mughal India,
encompassing people of social groups who did not write or read in Persian (or
indeed, in any language), but believed in its authenticating capacity.
Further loans, their repayment and the recording of such transactions, caught
other social groups and actors within the net of historical records generated and
preserved by Purshottam Das’s family. Substantial and multigenerational loans
were raised by Purshottam Das’s sons, Narsingh Das and Gambhir Chand, this
time from a certain Ganesh Sahu and his associate, Kale Afghan.28 We may
speculate that in moving on from itinerant traders, the banjāras, to the sources
of their capital, higher status Hindu bania29 and Afghan moneylenders, the
family revealed its own rise in social status in two generations. Kale Afghan is
rather more elusive; he may have been part of the small community of migra-
tory traders visible all over India even in the nineteenth century and immorta-
lised by the Bengali poet and novelist Rabindranath Thakur in Kabuliwala, or
he may have been of the many soldiering families Malwa, dabbling in some
28
NAI 2668/22 (1710)
29
‘Sahu’ being the Hindi term, recorded in use between the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, to
indicate big bankers, typically of bania caste. Habib, ‘Merchant Communities’, pp. 375, 379,
382, 390.

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 152 Transactions: Recording Deals

moneylending on the side. In case we needed confirmation that such inter-

community commercial ventures worked admirably, Kale had indeed made
a good investment. Like the banjāras, the bania moneylenders kept meticulous
intergenerational accounts, but this time in writing, noting all giving and taking
(dād sitād) in their account books (bahī va afrād-i ḥisāb). After Ganesh Sahu’s
death, his son Sangram took charge of the business, and having checked
through all accounts and deducted all receipts, recovered the remaining
money from Narsingh Das’s brother Hamir Chand, and the latter’s son, Nihal
Chand, who were clearly deemed liable for the financial obligations of their
relative. Sangram honestly handed over Kale Afghan’s share to his son,
Muhammad Jafar. The transaction was once again recorded in the court of
the qāz̤ ī in the year 1711, by which time the era of the great Mughals was
finished and Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir’s son Bahadur Shah was in the
fourth year of his short reign. The qāz̤ ī in Dhar was a man called Muhammad
Mustafa, who would notarise many important documents for the family during
his tenure. On this occasion, details of the repayment were written down, and
the document sealed by the qāz̤ ī, who superscribed a note: ‘A valid declaration
(iqrār muʿatabar) was made by Musamma Muhammaad Jaʿfar, the declarant
(muqīr)’. Once again, the qāz̤ ī’s court and Persianate legal documentation
netted diverse social groups, reinforcing and recording their mutual economic
and social relationships in black and white.
There is much that of course remains unclear from these records. With the
loans taken from the banjāras and the bania-Afghan partners, we cannot tell
what the loaned amount was, neither can we tell whether the lenders took some
kind of security,30 or were confident enough about their ability to recover their
loan through community knowledge and the qāz̤ ī’s authority. As we know,
Hamir Chand had once been taken to court by his younger brother Narsingh
Das over disputes related to inheritance.31 We do not also know whether, in
discharging his (presumably dead) elder brother’s loan, he, together with his
son, was acting as Hindu coparceners, as required a by dharmaśāstric norms
that would become law under the colonial government in the late eighteenth
century,32 or whether they were merely acting out of sense of family honour.
What we can see is that the people undertaking such transactions looked upon
the local qāz̤ ī’s court and his notarisation services as useful, if not necessarily
exclusive, tools for securing their interests.
In 1721, the same qāz̤ ī, Muhammad Mustafa, recorded a more complex
transaction between Hamir Chand chaudhrī and another man, possibly
a noble called Mir Muhib Allah, referred to in the document by the hyperbolic
30
For example, through the mortgaging of certain properties, for which we have a instance studied
by Habib, in ‘Aspects of Agrarian Relations and Economy’.
31
NAI 2703/29 (1684), discussed in Chapter 2.
32
Wilson, The Domination of Strangers, pp. 75–103; Derrett, ‘The Administration of Hindu Law’.

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 Tamassuks and Fārigh-Khaṭṭīs: Law and Taxation 153

title ‘Refuge of happiness (saʿādat panāh)’.33 In this self-described tamassuk,

Hamir Chand recorded taking 2,240 rupees in loan, and took the cash from the
[account of the] villages listed beneath (tankhwāh az mazkūr ba mawazīʿ-yi zīl
mī namūdam). He promised to return the money within the year 1128 AH/1726
CE, after gathering the harvest. The villages in question were the ʿināmī village
of Dhamanda, and the dāmī village of Ahu; Hamir Chand was therefore
securing this loan against the tax-collecting rights that were important sources
of the family’s income.

Tamassuks and Fārigh-Khaṭṭīs: Law and Taxation

As we have seen, when taking loans from various people, members of
Purshottam Das’s family created tamassuks. While all documents in the collec-
tion relating to debt and repayment mention them, there are two surviving
tamassuks in this collection. These show this was a documentary form based on
the recording of an iqrār or ‘confession’. The document which recorded
chaudhrī Hamir Chand taking a loan from a certain aristocrat called Mir
Muhib Allah, for example, contained a short superscription above the seal of
the qāz̤ ī, which said ‘iqrār ʿaindī’ (I have a confession; or There is a confession
chez moi).
The standard translation of iqrār as ‘confession’ creates certain semantic
difficulties with those not cognisant of the vocabulary of Islamic legal studies.
Iqrārs may indeed be acknowledgements of guilt, but unlike this more
restricted modern English connotation, iqrār relates to a broader range of
meanings. Iqrār is a key category in the Islamic law of evidence: it is
a unilateral declaration made by a person, which creates a binding legal
obligation. Although subject to various conditions of validity, classical jurists
considered iqrārs to be of the highest evidentiary value, and ‘binding in
itself’ (mūjib bi-nafsihi). Thus, an iqrār did not have to be put down in writing,
let alone authenticated through notarisation in order to be valid. In practice,
however, jurists recommended a documentary form which recorded to the iqrār
using the correct terminology which would also be attested to (not notarised) by
a legal expert, acting in this case as a reliable witness.34 An iqrār did not have to
be about a loan or a property transaction, or about guilt; it was simply a legally
valid declaration that could be made in any of these contexts, but an endless
number of others, too. There are innumerable iqrār documents available in
various collections from around the Islamic world.

33
NAI, 2668/20 (1726?)
34
Christian H. O. Müller, ‘Acknowledgement’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edition (eds.), Kate
Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas and Everett Rowson. Brill Online, 2015.
11 July 2015, http://0-www.brillonline.nl.lib.exeter.ac.uk/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/ac
knowledgement-COM_0166

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 154 Transactions: Recording Deals

As it happens, Hamir Chand’s iqrār was recorded in a very specific

documentary form, called a tamassuk, which derived more directly from
Indo-Persian revenue administration practices, and only indirectly from
Islamic jurisprudence. As such, while the fact of Hamir Chand’s acknowl-
edgement, that he had taken a certain amount of money on loan, had taken
possession of the cash and was committing himself to repay it within a given
period of time, was recorded, together with the details of his name and
genealogy as well as the name of the beneficiary, as a standard iqrār should,
its vocabulary did not fully correspond with the forms recommended by the
jurists, or with iqrār documents specifically acknowledging debts from other
parts of the Islamicate world, especially from earlier periods. Thus Arabic-
language iqrār documents, whether from the twelfth century and stored in the
Cairo Genizah, or from the fourteenth century and stored in the Haram al-
Sharif in Jerusalem, all began with the Bismillah (In the name of God . . .) and
continued ‘aqara/aqarat X bin/bint Y’ (X son of/daughter of Y declared’.35
They invariably had witness clauses, such as, in the Cairo documents ‘ʿaind
shahud hadha al-kitāb’ (in the presence of witnesses to this writing) or
‘shahīd ʿala al-X ba-dhalika’ (witness on X with regard to this), in the
Jerusalem documents.
Hamir Chand’s tamassuk on the other hand, said much more directly, and in
the first person:
Manke Hamir Chand chaudhrī-yi pargana Dhar Sarkar Mandu muz̤ āf ba-sūba Malwa
am, mublagh dō hazār rūpiye . . . az nazd-i saʿādat panāh Mir Muhib Allah ba-ṭariq-i
qarz girafte, dar qabz wa taṣarruf-i khūd āwardam.

I, who am Hamir Chand, chaudhrī of pargana Dhar Sarkar Mandu sūba Malwa,
having taken 2,240 Rupees, of which the half would be 1120 Rupees, from the
refuge of goodness Mir Muhib Allah, in the manner of loan, have brought it into
my possession.
He then continued to explain how he would return the money within the year,
and said at the end:
Īn chand kalme ba-ṭariq-i tamassuk nawishte dādam, ke s̱ anī al-hal sanad bāshad.
I give these few words in writing in the manner of a tamassuk, so that it can be/act as
a document in the future.

There were no witness clauses to the document. We do have a superscription

‘aqara ʿaindī’ (I have an iqrār) written by the qāz̤ ī together with his seal above

35
Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents, Documents 35–47, pp. 208–38; Huda Lutfi,
‘A Study of Six Fourteenth Century Iqrārs from Al-Quds Relating to Muslim Women’, Journal
of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 26: 3 (1983), pp. 246–94.

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 Tamassuks and Fārigh-Khaṭṭīs: Law and Taxation 155

the body of the text.36 Hamir Chand’s name was written in the document in
Hindi on the right-hand margin.37
Thus the legal specialist, the qāz̤ ī, was certainly part of the process of
creating a legal deed recording a debt, affixing his seal to the document as
also noting that it was an iqrār; the India form omitted the typical opening
formula in which the qāz̤ ī or another suitable notary recorded that the parties
had made a declaration. Instead, these documents proceeded straight to
a declaration in the first person. To spell this out, whereas the standard
Islamic legal formula read, ‘He declared that, I . . . ’, Indian documents ran, ‘I
declare that . . . ’ It is tempting to speculate whether this abbreviation of the
formula, omitting the framing voice of the qāz̤ ī, indicates a difference in
procedure, personnel and location in terms of the drafting of legal deeds in
India. Were such documents of debts written by people themselves, or more
likely, by hired scribes, the archetypical munshīs, rather than legally trained
qāz̤ īs? Was the document presented to the qāz̤ ī post-preparation, thus somewhat
defeating the original purpose of the iqrār, which was to record a direct
declaration in the presence of respectable witnesses, ideally the qāz̤ ī himself?
Such a conclusion is difficult to arrive at based on these documents alone, and
awaits the discovery of an adequate text describing the procedure for drafting
such everyday legal deeds.
Whatever the social and institutional reasons for this deviation in form, we
can explore the wider context of the word tamassuk, with which these docu-
ments of debt identified themselves. And thus we find ourselves back in the
realm of the Mughal tax-collection juggernaut, for this was a term shared with
revenue administration. A documentary form called tamassuk-i z̤ āminī was
used in the Khālṣa or treasury department to record security bonds given by
‘workmen’, and state loans.38 It was probably used by Purshottam Das to
record his bond, underwriting other chaudhrī’s commitments, which we have
discussed in Chapter 3.
This was an interplay between taxation, administration and law, mediated
through a Persianate culture of which chancellery procedure was an essential
part. Thus it was particularly apt that Hamir Chand’s loan was sourced from the
taxes of the villages which he himself was charged to collect. Call it
a government loan authorised by the jāgīrdār, call it cooking the books plain
and simple – in pargana Dhar taxation and credit were inseparable parts of
essential cash flows, and hence recorded in a shared documentary form.
This interplay between revenue and credit or taxation and transaction, and
consequently between Islamic legal forms and Persianate chancellery

36
This is similar to the inscription on the Haram 108 document, cited in Lutfi, ‘A Study’, pp. 267–8.
37
NAI 2668/20.
38
Jadunath Sarkar, Mughal Administration (Patna: Patna University, 1920), pp. 63–4.

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 156 Transactions: Recording Deals

procedure, was even stronger in the documentary form that complemented the
tamassuk – the fārigh-khaṭṭī. Fārigh is an Arabic word, which means ‘empty;’
in Persian and Urdu, the meaning shifts slightly, to imply ‘free’ (of obligations,
work, etc.). Thus, the term fārigh-khaṭṭī, which is a specifically Indian innova-
tion, can be translated as the writing/record of freeing. The functions of such
documents demonstrated that these were deeds of quittance, or written release
from some specific obligation, on the fulfilment of the obligation, or its
removal.39 British officials writing in the nineteenth century noted that such
quittance documents were issued by zamīndārs to peasants at the end of the
revenue year, to record that all dues had been paid. They also noted who would
scribe such a document – the village revenue record keeper or patwārī, who
might charge a specific fee called fārigh khatāna for this service.40
The fārigh-khaṭṭīs in the Purshottam Das family collection served a wider
range of functions, also related to the emptying of claims. When in 1660,
Purshottam Das, together with his uncles Chandar Bhan and Dinkar Das, repaid
the banjāra traders for the loan his father had taken, he used a fārigh-khaṭṭī to
record this transaction. When, in 1690, his son Hamir Chand did the same for
his brothers, he too used a fārigh-khaṭṭī. Fārigh-khaṭṭīs were thus the necessary
documentary complement to tamassuks – one inscribed obligations, and the
other released them.
Such obligations were not limited to loans. In 1735, we find an elderly Hamir
Chand, accompanied by his son, Nihal Chand, using a fārigh-khaṭṭī again, this
time to record the fulfilment of his obligations towards his own servants.41
A man called Jagannath, self-described son-in-law of Anandi and Bhagirath
Dhangar, declared that he had two documents in his possession, both inherited
from his now-dead in-laws. One of these was a tamassuk of debt, and the other,
a patta-yi naukrī (employment deed) which promised the fairly impressive sum
of Rs. 8 per month. It is impossible to tell what work this naukrī really entailed;
dhangars were listed by nineteenth-century British ethnographers as shep-
herds, many of whom had been amalgamated into the generic central and
western Indian agricultural caste called kunbī.42 Given the sum of money
involved, and term naukrī itself – Bhagirath may have been among the retainer
that a chaudhrī such as Hamir Chand would be expected to recruit in consider-
able numbers. Given that this was now the early eighteenth century, these men
would be even more in the nature of private militias than before; Mughal claims
of military service having become ineffective and non-existent. What is rather

39
Despite the similarity in name, and the occasional use by certain nineteenth-century British
lexicographers, a fārigh-khaṭṭī is not a ‘quit-claim deed’, which, in English law, is a deed used to
transfer title to property without checks on the status of the property, unlike ordinary
conveyancing.
40
Elliot, Memoirs, p. 147 41 NAI 2668/27 (1735).
42
Russell and Lal, Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Vol. II, p. 480.

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 Tamassuks and Fārigh-Khaṭṭīs: Law and Taxation 157

more noticeable in Jagannath’s claim and the documents he furnished, is the

specific reference to his mother-in-law, Anandi. This woman appears to have
been named in the tamassuk as one of the two creditors, and even been one of
those named on the paṭṭā of naukrī. Whether we have here an eighteenth-
century bandit queen, or a woman who kept the family finances and papers well
under control, her son-in-law must have impressed the zamīndārs rather less,
and that must have been why he needed to press a legal claim rather than
continue in the position that his paṭṭā clearly allowed him to inherit.
In any case, either Hamir Chand did not need any more men, or Jagannath
was an unsuitable candidate, or this family of employees, who had started
advancing loans to the bosses, had become a bit too big for their boots and
needed shaking off. Clearly Jagannath was too strong to be brushed aside, so
a certain Hira Chand and Shaikh Ghulam Muhammad, the kotwāl of qasba
Dhar, had to be appointed arbitrators to the dispute (Hira Chand va Shaikh
Ghulam Muhammad, kotwāl-i qasba Dhar, ba s̱ ālisī īn muqaddama
pardākhte). Jagannath was given hundred rupees to clear all dues. At this
point, this slippery character revealed that he had actually lost the vital paṭṭā
of naukrī, but he was made to declare that if it turned up later, or indeed, if any
more tamassuks surfaced, these would be void and not worth considering (bāṭil
wa na-masmuʿ); and he said: ‘after this, there does not remain with me any
claim on Hamir Chand chaudhrī and Nihal Chand, nor any claim or quarrel’.
This time, the local qāz̤ ī43 was not called to grace the proceedings. Someone
summarised the whole matter in formulaic Persian in a brief three-line note on
the bottom of the right-hand margin – ‘Bana bar ān in chand kalme ba ṭariq-i
fārigh-khaṭṭī lā-dāʿva-yi nawishte dāde shud (On this basis a fārigh-khaṭṭī
[and] no-claims was written)’; Jagannath’s name, and some other matters
were written in three lines of obscure Nagri, next to which a small Persian
seal, reading ‘Jagannath’ was affixed twice. The main difference with earlier
fārigh-khaṭṭīs was the presence of two other brief marginal notes which appears
to be in Moḍi, or the ‘twisted’ Marathi script. The largest and most official
looking seal in the document, positioned where the most authoritative seal in
a document would usually, be, that is, above the main body of text, was square
in shape. I have not been able to read the text in Nagri in this seal, but it begins
with ‘Śrī . . .’. It is impossible not to see these features as symptomatic of the
fracturing of Mughal administration and the rapid encroachment of Maratha
warlords. If so, this is rather rapid institutional change, and evidence of creation
of an alternative dispute resolution and recording machinery, for the Persian
marginal note in the document puts the date at 2 Muharram, RY 17. If the
reference is to Muhammad Shah’s reign, this would make the year 1734,44 and

43
We know that there was one in office, from the seal on the document NAI 2668/25 (1732).
44
The conversion by the NAI cataloguer is wrong.

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 158 Transactions: Recording Deals

Malwa would be officially ceded to the Peshwa by the Mughal emperor only in
1738.45 It was not regime change that caused the absence of the qāz̤ ī and the use
of arbitrators; this had happened in disputes resolved and recorded in the family
archive even in the mid-seventeenth-century. For example, in 1658, on the
bidding of the jāgīrdār, Purshottam Das and Paras Ram had arbitrated and
resolved a boundary dispute between two villages; the document recording the
resolution only had notes in the Nagri script on the margins, two plough
symbols and a small, Persian seal of an unidentified officer. Now, however,
there was a document that looked official and bore an official seal, only in
a different script and bearing different pieties. This seal was very similar
in appearance to those on later documents in the collection, written entirely
in Nagri and referring to the raising of soldiers by Maratha ‘mōkāsadārs’.46
The form of the document, however, remained the same; it was still a classic
iqrār or binding declaration, narrating the facts, claims and resolution, self-
nominated as fārigh-khaṭṭī in the Indo-Persian style.
The fārigh-khaṭṭī had an extended life, and lived well into the twentieth
century. Within this collection, the most recent fārigh-khaṭṭī dates itself from
1195/1776.47 In this document, a certain Anwar Beg and Syed Azam noted that
they had made a claim on the mango trees in the garden of Sahib Rai, but after
a resolution in court, they were relinquishing the claims. By this time, Dhar was
well-established as a Maratha state under a branch of the Puwar dynasty.
Regime change thus did not necessarily indicate a complete change in the
forms of documents used to record disputes and resolutions. This should give
us pause and encourage us to think more closely about the content of ‘law’
across regimes.

Transacting Lives
The qāz̤ ī’s court in the city of Dhar remained important for the pressing of
various claims, well into the 1730s. These claims and their resolution con-
tinued to be recorded through the fārigh-khaṭṭīs, but the nature of some of
these transactions makes it important to remind ourselves of the expanded
meaning of ‘legal deed’ with which this chapter is working. We have seen
how debt and obligation melted into taxation; in this section we shall discuss
two documents which recorded exchanges over human lives, and their
assessed money value.
The events recorded in these two documents, both of them iqrārs, and both
sealed by Qāz̤ ī Muhammad Mustafa, appear to have taken place sometime

45
Amar Farooqui, Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the Politics of
Opium, 1790–1843 (Lanham: Lexington, 2005), pp. 34–70.
46
P Das 1750 Hin NCD (Private+Author). 47 P Das 1785 NCD.

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 Transacting Lives 159

between 1703 and 1709.48 In what appears to be the earlier document, a man
called Kalyan, the son of Nathu, turned up at the qāz̤ ī’s court, together with his
son Dalu and his wife Ganga. They identified themselves as of the qaum of
khyāṭī, tailors. They were not exactly local, since they described themselves as
inhabitants of the town of Kharkun, in sarkār Bijagarh.49 They had come to
complain about the disappearance of a Kalyan’s son, Hira, during a major quest
in which he had been accompanying Rupa chaudhrī of the town of Dhar, in the
capacity of Rupa’s servant. Hira had gone with Rupa to Shahjahanabad (Delhi)
to lodge a petition (mustaghas̱ a) against the oppression of the jāgīrdār of
pargana Amjhera – Rao Jasrup.
Now this Rāthoḍ Rajput noble50 was not an easy man to deal with. Although
an elite soldier (ahdī)51 called Muhammad Ashiq was despatched from Delhi,
and he accompanied Hira to Rao Jasrup’s court, despite days of arguing,
nothing was achieved. In fact, as soon as the soldier gave up and left, Jasrup
imprisoned Hira. For three months, his family received no news of whether he
was alive or dead. Desperate, they lodged a claim against Bardman, Dev
Chand, Ratan Chand, Kalyan Chand, Nihal Chand and Aman Chand – sons
of Rupa, who appears to have died by this time. In their claim, the claimants
demanded that Hira be found, and to their credit, their employer’s sons made
a great deal of effort to find the missing man. The proud and oppressive Rao
Jasrup did not even deign to respond to such queries, and the search had to be
eventually called off.
Hira’s old father, son and wife now took their appeal to Nawab Marhamat
Khan, the faujdār of sarkar Mandu. The faujdār decided that it was pointless to
pick a quarrel with the Rāthoḍ jāgīrdār, and instead summoned the sons of
Rupa chaudhrī. Having made his investigations, he decided that the equivalent
of eight month’s salary for Hira, which amounted to 32 rupees, would be an
adequate compensation for the loss suffered by his family. The poor people
must have felt that this was the best outcome they could hope for under the
circumstances, and so, the money being handed over to them, they made
a declaration (iqrār) in writing, that they had no further claims, and that if,
due to quarrelsomeness or naughtiness they made any demands related to Hira

48
NAI 2668/23 has two seals, one clearly 1115 (1703) and the qāz̤ ī’s seal possibly 1116 (1704); the
other document, NAI 2703/42 has three seals: the clearly backdated 1100 (1689), 1113 (1701)
and the qāz̤ ī’s seal 1121 (1709).
49
William Irvine, Later Mughals (ed.) Jadunath Sarkar, Reprint (New Delhi: Oriental Books
Reprint Corporation, 1971), pp. 161–2.
50
Mehrangarh Museum Trust, ‘Rathore Dynasty Tree’, http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb
.ancestry.com/~princelystates/states/r/rathore.html.
51
Aḥdīs (literally: sole, alone) were elite gentlemen soldiers directly recruited by the imperial
government, often forming the personal guard of the emperor. See Irvine, The Army of the
Indian Moghuls, pp. 43–4; and I. H. Qureshi, ‘The Army of the Great Mughals’, Pakistan
Historical Society, 6: 1 (1958), 34–54 at 37–8.

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 160 Transactions: Recording Deals

in future, such claims would be void and non-cognisable. Somebody called

Muhammad Hussain, who had a proper Persian seal, witnessed the document,
as did five others, writing in the Nagri script. One of these was chaudhrī Hamir
Chand of pargana Dhar, and the other qānūngō Jaswant Rao, also of Dhar. The
claimants did not write their names, and instead drew symbols – Hira’s mother,
Ganga, drew a shaky swastika, while his father and brother drew symbols that
looked like large scissors – which corresponds rather neatly with their stated
profession of barbers. All these symbols were superscribed with their names, in
the Persian script. The qāz̤ ī superscribed a little note on the document, sum-
marising the case – that Kalyan and others had recorded their relinquishing
their claims (lā-daʿva) on Rupa’s heirs, and the fact of their having taken
possession (qabz̤ al-waṣūl) [of the compensatory sum]. Then he sealed it, and
that was that.
These were troubled times in Malwa. From 1681, Mughal and Maratha
armies had been criss-crossing the province, and from as early as the 1690s,
Maratha war bands had begun raiding Malwa in search of tribute.52 Then
Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir died in 1707, leading to a vicious succession
battle between his sons and grandsons. Before Prince Mua‘zzam emerged
victorious as Bahadur Shah, several armies followed the obligatory path
through Malwa, on their way towards the imperial capital, testing the loyalties
of mansabdārs posted in the region but also all measures of zamīndārs
ensconced in the regions they traversed. An entrenched clan of middle-sized
Rajput zamīndārs, big enough to have acquired a jāgīr, possibly on privileged
non-transferable terms, made the Rāthōḍs of Amjhera a difficult entity to
handle for imperial Mughal officials – whether a commando despatched from
Delhi, or the local faujdār, or the qāz̤ ī. Under such circumstances, one can see
why the faujdār would propose a settlement in cash, and why indeed, the bereft
family would accept it.53
This family was not the only one to have been affected by Rao Jasrup’s manner
of dealing with the servants of troublesome but weaker rivals, for in 1709 (1121
A.H.), Qāz̤ ī Muhammad Mustafa recorded yet another iqrār, this time of five
women.54 These distressed women included Nanho, daughter of a learned man –
a certain Shaikh Pesar Muhammad, but more importantly, the widow of a man
called Daulat Khan. She came to the qāz̤ ī with her daughters – Nur Bibi, Taj Bibi,

52
Irvine, Later Mughals, p. 164; also see Chapter 7.
53
Discussing cases of homicide decided in the Benares magistrate’s and later Resident’s court,
during the earliest years of British supremacy in the late eighteenth century, Radhika Singha
discusses several such instances of acceptance of ‘blood-money’, especially by impoverished
kin, for whom the money made a more positive difference than the execution of the murderer
would. Of course, in this case, there was no possibility of the murderer being punished in any
way, let alone executed. Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early
Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
54
NAI 2703/42 (1709 – by date on seal).

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 Transacting Lives 161

Chand Bibi and Hayati, and described her family as weavers (qaum-i mū’min
safīd bāf)55 and residents of the town of Dhar. It turned out that Bardman and the
other sons of Rupa chaudhrī, had hired Daulat Khan to go to Jasrup in pargana
Amjhera and get news about the missing Hira. Rao Jasrup predictably impri-
soned the scout. After some time, his family learnt that he had died in Jasrup’s
prison. The family, as heirs (wārisūn) of Daulat Khan demanded of Bardman that
he produce the man he had hired, and since (naturally) Bardman failed to do so,
having no other option (lā-chār), the claimants declared their situation in the
court of this very qāz̤ ī.
Hearing their complaint, Qāz̤ ī Muhammad Mustafa had felt it necessary to
seek a legal opinion (riwāyat), and sent for one from the muftī of the city
(balda) of Ujjain. Whatever the riwāyat, a set of arbitrators were appointed,
through whose mediation it was decided that fifty-five rupees would be an
adequate compensation. Bardman and his kinsmen paid the sum so decided,
and the women of Daulat Khan’s family declared that they had no further
claims on the successors of Rupa. They did so in a document that self-described
itself as a lā-daʿva and sulḥ-nāma. Three men who could read Persian wit-
nessed the document – of these Lutfullah Suhrawardi and Sabir Muhammad
also added seals, Muhammad Baqir did not. Hamir Chand chaudhrī witnessed
it in the Nagri script. The women plaintiffs drew what looks like leaf-symbols,
their names were written in Persian above these marks. And of course, the qāz̤ ī
Muhammad Mustafa added his summary as superscription, and sealed the
document.
Social groups abound in this brief episode of violence and law. We have
encountered a violent Rajput Rāthoḍ sub-clan, an imperial crack-soldier,
a frustrated imperial faujdār, a qāz̤ ī who had performed the Haj, and poor people
of tailor and weaver castes who hired themselves out on dangerous missions.
What about their employers? Here we have some confusing angles – Rupa
chaudhrī appears only in these two documents, but Bardman is also named as
a chaudhrī who engaged to collect and pay the revenue of village Bhaghdi, in
pargana Dhar.56 It is quite likely therefore, that the employers of Hira and Daulat
Khan were indeed descendants of Purshottam Das, or of another line of the
family. However, the declarants in both documents said that Rupa chaudhrī was
of the qaum of ahl-i hirfa.57 This latter term normally referred to artisans; it could
perhaps be an awkward reference to their Kāyasth status. We do not have any
clear indication of the caste status of this family of zamīndārs; an associate or

55
Muzaffar Alam, ‘The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the formation of the Akbari Dispensation’,
in Richard Eaton, David Gilmartin, Munis Faruqui and Sunil Kumar (eds.), Expanding
Frontiers in South Asian and World History: Essays in Honour of John F. Richards
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 124–63 at 127.
56
NAI 2703/43 (1726)
57
John Shakespear, A Dictionary of Hindustani and English (1834), p. 179.

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 162 Transactions: Recording Deals

kinsman is referred to in one document as a Brahmin (zunnardār), and two

later documents, purporting to be copies of farmāns, designate them Kāyasth
Nigam. They were clearly powerful players in a local economy of violence
and order.

Munshāts and Munshīs

As we have seen, the specific kind of legal deeds that survive from the activities
of the Purshottam Das family are documents of tamassuk (obligation), fārigh-
khaṭṭī (quittance/no-claims deed) and hiba-nāma (gift deed). All of these con-
form in structure and composition to documentary forms that were well known
and widely used, not only in Mughal India, but until much later, well within the
colonial period. The standardised format of these documents point to manuals
of legal writing, or legal formularies, which scribes in Mughal India, quite like
scribes in many other parts of the world,58 would have used in their day-to-day
work. In these tremendously unexciting manuals, however, lies an unexplored
domain of cultural interaction and creativity, which we can explore to uncover
the language in which ordinary people in Mughal India knew to express their
entitlements and obligations. If farmāns and parvānas expressed the ideology
of dynastic royal power, these scrappy documents of petty transactions bear
evidence for what villagers in Malwa thought of their rights. They also tell us
much about the language in which they expressed those entitlements and
obligations, and conversely, about the multiple sources – linguistic and dis-
ciplinary – from which the languages of India developed specific functional
forms, in this case, that of law.
As in all other contexts, legal deeds from Mughal India, recording the
transfer of property rights, are extremely formulaic. They make repeated use
of predictable phrases, which are specific to the kinds of documents in question.
The formulae are also shared, although with uneven overlaps across the Islamic
and Persianate world. Thus, any documentary form recording a certain amount
of cash being transferred or promised, stated the amount being transacted first
in full, and then halved, in order to securely clarify the amount being transacted,
for the same reason that the value of a cheque in the present day is written both
in words and in numbers. The actual transfer of property or cash was always
recorded in such documents with a declaration of possession, such that, for
example, a person borrowing money always states that amount in question ‘ . . .
ba-ṭariq-i qarz̤ dar qabz̤ wa tasarruf-i khūd āwardam (I brought the [money]
into my possession, in the manner of a debt)’. Following a full description of
the transaction, the document closed with a phrase that revealed its own type:

58
For example, The Formularies of Angers and Marculf: Two Merovingian Legal Handbooks
(translated) Alice Rio (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).

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 Munshāts and Munshīs 163

‘ . . . īn chand qalme ba ṭariq-e [whatever is the documentary form] nawishte

dādam ke s̱ ānī al-ḥāl sanad bāshad (I give these few words in writing in the
manner of . . . so that later on, they can act as a legal deed)’.59
This was indeed the language of rights, and as we know, rights are always
coded affairs. On the one hand, this was the language of lawyers, and as
a specialist jargon, it bore all the marks of a specialist vocabulary, which included
exclusiveness, opacity to outsiders or non-specialists, and specific functional
value.60 Lawyers, alongside merchants and criminals, are among social groups
frequently associated with the production and utilisation of highly developed
jargons, whose impenetrability always produced in outsiders the suspicion of
meaninglessness and fraud. Jargons are also frequently associated with linguistic
creativity (or eclecticism and bowdlerisation, depending on one’s taste), and
specifically, with multiple linguistic sources. This was certainly the case with
legal deeds produced in Mughal India, with their multiple sources of vocabulary
and phraseology – which ranged from Islamic jurisprudence and Arabic termi-
nology to Indo-Persianate governance to vernacular-medium corporate assertion.
Legal deeds were a site par excellence for the proliferation of heteroglossia, in
which the boundaries between vocabularies and grammars moved along a fluid
spectrum of registers, rather than in neatly compartmentalised boxes.61
Indian books of fiqh contained very large sections of legal formularies or
shurūṭ, the most outstanding example of this being the imperially sponsored
Fatāwá-yi ʿAlamgīrī, commissioned by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb
Alamgir, which was completed by a team of Islamic jurisprudents or fuqāha,
led by a scholar from Burhanpur.62 The FA included a large Book of Shurūṭ
(Kitāb al-shurūṭ),63 which included models and instructions for writing, among
other things, deeds of marriage, divorce, manumission, sale, pre-emption,
lease, endowment, mortgage, and significantly for us, gifts and declarations.
There was no specific document recommended for the recording of debts.
Shurūṭ were not, however, the only source of models for legal deeds written in
Mughal India. While scholars working on other contexts have discovered works
of jurisprudence specifically addressing local evidentiary and documentation
needs, and have thus indeed revealed the bridge between Islamic jurisprudence

59
For example, in NAI 2668/20, which we shall discuss.
60
Peter Burke and Roy Porter, Languages and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of
Language (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
61
For a very useful discussion of heteroglossia in connection with Urdu, see Javed Majeed, ‘The
Jargon of Indostan’: An Exploration of Jargon in Urdu and East India Company English’, in
Ibid., pp. xxxx.
62
Mouez Khalfaoui, ‘Al-Fatawa Al-ʿAlamgiriyya (al-Hindiyya)’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam,
3rd Edition, Part 3 (Leiden: E.J. Brill), pp. 120–2.
63
Sheikh Nizam and others, Fatāwá-yi ‘Alamgiri, translated to Urdu by Maulana Saiyid Amir Ali
(Lahore: Maktaba Rahmaniya, n.d.), Vol. X, pp. 9–124; the ‘Book’ or section on shurūṭ runs pp.
125–298.

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 164 Transactions: Recording Deals

and Islamic legal documentation, in India, this mediation was more complex.
Here, Islamic kingdoms and empires reigned over a persistent majority of non-
Muslim people for eight hundred years and were particularly united in their use
of (legally untrained) non-Muslim scribes, or munshīs, whose religious, social
and educational make-up utterly distinguished them from the ulama, or Islamic
jurists. These men were trained in Persian literary forms, including history and
diplomatic correspondence, at the upper end of the scale, and account-keeping
and revenue-management, often in a combination of (more) local vernaculars
and esoteric accountants’ scripts, at the lower end.64 The stalwarts of this pan-
imperial scribal class produced books of model prose, munshāt, a word derived
from inshā or prose-writing. From the seventeenth century onwards, munshāts
produced in Mughal India began to contain a section on legal forms, which was
designated qibālejāt-i sharīʿa or legal deeds.
My current understanding is that the legal sub-sections of munshāts happened
to precede the first shurūṭ written in India, that is, the relevant section in the
imperially sponsored Fatāwá-yi ‘Alamgiri, by about eighty years. Despite its
early origins, munshāt as an Indo-Persian literary genre, really came into its own
under the Mughals. Manuscripts of only three Persian-language munshāts com-
posed in India before the Mughal period have survived; the ʿIjāz-i Khusrawī of
the famous poet Amir Khusraw Dehlwi, the Inshā-yi Mahru, and the Riyāz al-
Inshā of Mahmud Gawan.65 Of these, the first two were courtiers of the Khalji
and Tughlaq sultans of Delhi in the fourteenth century, and Gawan (1411–81)
was the Persian courtier of the Bahmani sultans of Bidar in north Karnataka.66
None of these contain any legal formulae; they were essentially epistolaries, that
is, formularies of letters, mainly diplomatic and royal but also those of qāz̤ īs and
Shaikhs, and in Mahru’s case, a delightful sprinkling of admonitory letters to his
son, who was clearly not keeping up with his peers in his commitment to his
studies. It was only with the Mughals that learning to write legal deeds became an
essential qualification for munshīs.

Writing in Law
It is now time to take the magnifying glass even closer to our documents, and
take a look, not only at their use of multiple languages and scripts, but also the

64
Alam and Subrahmanyam, ‘The Making of a Munshi’, 61–72; Rosalind O’Hanlon and
David Washbrook (eds.), Special issue on Munshis, Pandits and Record-Keepers: Scribal
Communities and Historical Change in India, IESHR, 47: 4 (2010): 441–615. For lower-level
scribes, who wrote, for example, in Marathi in the Modi script, or even lower, in Tamil, and not
on expensive paper, but on palm leaf, see Raman, Document Raj.
65
I. A. Zilli, ‘Development of inshā literature to the end of Akbar’s reign’, in Muzaffar Alam;
Francoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye; Marc Gaborieau (eds.), The Making of Indo-Persian Culture:
Indian and French Studies (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000), pp. 309–49.
66
Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan.

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 Writing in Law 165

patterns of that co-deployment. In general, our documents are outstanding

examples of that phenomenon which was the bane of language activists of all
hues in mid-nineteenth century India. This was the ‘impure’ written language(s)
of offices and courts, which failed to live up to the literary standards of re-
discovered classical literatures, sported notoriously ‘mixed’ vocabularies
abounding in administrative Persian, and were written in a variety of scripts
and hands that came to be increasingly condemned as illegible and susceptible to
various forms of corruption. It is now time to look beyond that historical
indictment, not only to historicise and analyse that modern politics of language,
and to understand the modes of early modern language use on its own terms.
Why did people write legal documents in more than one language and script?
Further on to the mechanisms and sociology of multi-lingualism: did the same
hand write both sections; and in what order were they written?
In South Asian studies, these questions have primarily been essayed from the
point of view of literary studies. In other contexts, historians have attempted to
explain them on the basis of function – related to the requirements of distinct
jurisdictions, and to the movement of people between them. Such propositions
have been strongly Mediterranean-focussed, and predominantly with reference
to the experiences of Jewish individuals, pulled between the claims of Islamic
state courts and unofficial but demanding tribunals of their own communities.67
On the other hand, studies of a recently discovered documentary cache from
twelfth-century Bamiyan, in present-day Afghanistan, point to more complex
linguistic features in documents evidencing Jewish communities’ formal and
informal interactions with Islamic law. The Bamiyan documents, for example,
appear to be a family archive (quite like our own), and consist of legal
documents such as iqrārs, but also personal letters, and are all written in
Judaeo-Persian, which means Persian written in the Hebrew script. What
makes this inter-graphia (to coin a term) even more interesting is that the
writers of such letters and documents also combined these scripts, often within
the same sentence and the same word! The very plausible rationale for such
digraphia that scholars working on these documents have proposed is entirely
pragmatic – lack of space at the end of a line and the suitability of the letter from
one script rather than another, for example.68
It is with these exciting possibilities, which suggest poly-lingual practice,
with variable but necessarily combined dexterity in a number of scripts and
languages, that I wish to take a closer look at patterns of language and script
use, within the archive of the family of Hindu landlords whose story we are

67
Jessica Marglin, Across the Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University
Press, 2016); Marglin echoes Khan’s introductory comments in Arabic Legal and
Administrative Documents.
68
Haim, ‘An Early Judeo-Persian Letter’, Vol. 26, 103–19; example of such digraphia in line 6 and
13, verso of the document presented, p. 105.

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 166 Transactions: Recording Deals

pursuing in this book. In this connection, I also propose that, in order to

understand the deployment of languages and scripts, we need to understand
the different kinds of documents present in the collection, and map linguistic
usage onto a context-sensitive formal-cum-functional typology. By formal,
I mean the self-nominated form of document: Mughal Persian documents
typically named themselves with a formulaic sentence, usually in the first or
final lines of the documents. By functional, I mean the substantive directive,
petitionary or transactional purpose of the document. In this case, since we
already know about the protagonists very well, we do not just have to speculate
on the mutual relationships of parties and their interests and aims; we can work
from fairly full information about them, and from that starting point we can
begin to tell what kinds of language-script use featured in which kinds of
documents. This is a provisional typology proposed in order to systematically
organise the documents in this family’s collection.
The number of documents that demonstrate any form of bilingualism (two
languages) and/or digraphia (two scripts) within the collection is limited; 37 out
of 195 documents bear such features, that is, around 18 per cent. Moreover, the
linguistic and graphic diversity is clearly distributed towards the right-hand
side of this typology, with contracts and transactional documents and testimo-
nial records showing a combination of Rajasthani-Hindi and archaic Nagri
script, and in some of the later material, Marathi and Modi script.

Table 4.1 Typology of documents in the Purshottam Das archive

Documents related
Orders Petitions Tax contracts Interpersonal transactions to adjudication
Farmān Iltimās Qaul qarār-i Hiba-nāma (gift deed) Sanad recording
(only pattā-yi ijāra qāz̤ ī’s decision
copies)
Nishān ʿArzdāsht Muchalka Tamassuk (deed Maḥz̤ ar-nāma
acknowledging a debt or
other obligation)
Parvāna Qabuliyat Fārigh-khaṭṭī (deed of
emptying of obligations)
Dastak Iqrār or iqrār-nāma
(generic – binding
declaration)
Khaṭ/Kharīṭa Nikāḥ-nāma (deed of
marriage – for Muslims;
naturally absent in our
collection)
Rāz̤ ī-nāma (deed of
agreement – of any kind)

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 Originals, Summaries, and Copies 167

However, such bilingualism and digraphia was of various types. The clearest
full-blown type is the co-situation of two languages in the same document,
scribed in two distinct scripts, and located in vertical sections – the Persian/
Perso-Arabic above, the Hindi/Nagri beneath. This is almost unfailingly the
case with documents that call themselves qaul qarār, a kind of tax contract.
Although ‘tax contract’ is an odd term to use today, it made full sense in
a context where revenues were a matter of negotiation, usually between
individual village headmen and a jāgīrdār.
When we examine the first qaul in our collection, dated 1626, we see that it is
both bilingual and bi-scribal. Although the content of two parts of the text is
nearly identical – with very large proportion of Persian words in the lower
Hindi section, including the use of the same calendar, there are slight differ-
ences. Short phrases, including ‘sahī hamārā qaul bolē hai’ (a true declaration
has been made) which does give us autonomous Hindi verb-form, together with
pronouns and particles, provide the essential template for distinguishing
between languages. Also, there is at least one distinct formulaic phrase at the
end, ‘bidi’, which signifies an order, which one also sees in the parvānas issued
from the Kacchwaha chancellery with relation to the temples at Mathura.69
When talking of grants scribed by Rajput chancelleries, however, it is worth
considering the documents whereby grants were made to the Mathura temple
by mansabdārs-jāgīrdārs of the Kacchwaha house over two centuries.
Strikingly, and unlike most other parvānas, these documents were bilingual
and bi-scribal – the Persian on the left and the Rajasthani on the right. The fact
that the two languages are here vertically arranged (rather than one beneath the
other) makes a striking visual point about the equivalence of languages. Also,
the Rajasthani portion, written in Nagri script is much more linguistically
autonomous than the Hindi-Nagri portion in the Dhar qaul qarār we just
discussed. Thus we can begin to speculate that in some of the noble households,
distinct chancellery styles began to develop, which, in certain classes of docu-
ments, especially those expressing royalty (so, parvānas), made space for the
growth of linguistically distinct documentation styles.

Originals, Summaries, and Copies

The second way in which multilinguality worked is through ‘translated copies’.
This phrase may appear to be an oxymoron, but this is because of a series of
presumptions in our mind with regards to originality, which we implicitly
contrast with reproduction on the one hand and transformation of any kind on
the other. Situated as we are now in a world of mass reproduction through print
and the infinite reproductive as well as transformative capacity of digital media,

69
Horstmann, In Favour of Govinddevji.

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 168 Transactions: Recording Deals

we fetishise the original artefact. We imagine a unique hand producing the

original, all subsequent copies and versions being reductions of the essence of
that original. There may also be an implicit chronology in this vision – which
valorises and grades all such inevitably deviant versions by antiquity – the
older the copy or version, the closer it is assumed to be to the essence of the
original. We even transfer some of this fetish value to early short-run print
editions of culturally significant books, such as Shakespeare’s Folio, for
example.
In the manuscript world, however, written artefacts were ranked differently,
with reference to factors other than faithfulness to the original or antiquity.
Based on scholarship related to literary production in the Persianate world, in
particular, it appears that texts were valued for the quality their re-worked
contents – the debates about the relative value of Nizami’s khamsa versus Amir
Khusrau’s appear to be quintessentially modern, for example, and there is no
indication that the creative changes introduced by Khusrau were seen by his
contemporary audiences as edgy or violative in the way that Shakespeare
purists sometimes do.
Translators in that cosmopolitan world should be seen as retellers, and of
a piece with Khusrau. Then, as now, their attempt was to make sense to their
intended audience, but they appear to have been less restrained by concerns
about fidelity to the words and concepts of their source text, and more
concerned about the effect they wished to produce. In that process, it may
be perceived as perfectly valid to summarise the less interesting portions of
a text, and expand upon the parts more relevant to the aims of the author/re-
teller. It may also be seen as valid to replace key terms with others, and situate
the latter within a conceptual genealogy extrinsic to the text; for instance,
when Sanskrit religious texts are translated into Persian by Sufis in order to
provide yet another model of conceptualising and accessing the divine.
A striking example of this is the Persian Gītā of Abd al-Rahman Chisti,
a Sufi who died in 1683 CE.70
In addition, translation is a rather different exercise when the audience can be
assumed to know some elements of all the languages involved. Where present-
day authors, especially those dealing with diasporas, sprinkle their texts with
untranslated words from a source culture/language in order to evoke alterity
and exoticism or authenticity (with tangled politics associated with each
approach), Persian writers in India retained words from Indic languages,
usually transcribing them in the Perso-Arabic script, for more functional

70
Roderic Vassie, ‘Persian Interpretations of the Bhagavadgīta in the Mughal Period: With special
reference to the Sufi version of Abd al-Rahman Chisti’. Unpublished PhD Thesis, SOAS,
London, 1988; Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst, ‘A Muslim Bhagavad Gita: ‘Abd al-Rahman
Chisti’s interpretative translation and its implications’, Journal of South Asian Religious
History, 1 (2015), pp. 1–29.

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 The Marginal Languages 169

reasons. Accuracy with names (of plants, animals, their products, physical
conditions, persons and places) was a concern that the writers of medical and
legal texts shared. They may also have shared concern about the accurate
identification of doctrines and procedures through the precise use of technical
terms.
In Chapter 2, we have also seen a grant made by a very low-ranking imperial
noble, a Rajput called Jujhar Singh, to the same family of zamīndārs. While
visually, this might appear monolingual, in fact, it attests to its origin in multi-
lingual practice, because the first line says: parvāna ba-mazmūn Hindavī ba-
muhr-i Rao Jūjhar Singh (parvāna of Hindi content under the seal of Rao
Jujhar Singh).71 It appears that in this case, translation, particularly to Persian,
was not seen as a diminution of authenticity of an authoritative document; it
may have even captured its essence better than the Hindi original.

The Marginal Languages

The third mode of marginality is through marginal notes, symbols and signa-
tures. Non-Persian attestations are most frequent in transactional documents (of
sale, taking and repaying of debts and so on), and also testimonial documents
related to disputes. Here, parties as well as other witnesses had their names
written on the right-hand and bottom margins of the document, following the
formulaic declaration ‘gawāh shud’ or ‘sākshī’, both meaning witness(ed) in
Persian and Hindi, respectively. It is striking, in this case, that such attestations
appeared to reveal a preference for the script one’s name is written in; Hindus,
including members of our family, seemed to prefer Nagri.
Others, who could not read or write at all, had their consent indicated with
graphic symbols, following another set-phrase ʿalāmat-i dastkhaṭ’ (sign of the
hand). In the choice of symbols, we see a wonderful array of significant images,
comprehensibly aligned with castes/professions – Rajputs (including members
of our family, who thought of themselves as military entities) preferred the
kaṭār (the stab-dagger, later associated with Rajput identity), whereas a family
of barbers chose scissors.
Together, this mode of multilingualism should encourage us to think beyond
the clearly inadequate equation of language and religious identity, but also the
notion of a centrally directed Mughal language policy, whereby Hindi is
discarded once and for all by imperial decision, and inevitably in Akbar’s
court, leaving Persian to trickle down to the corners of the empire. Just as
English never managed to erase the astonishing diversity of Indian languages
and scripts, nor resist the grammatical, lexical and phonetic incursions that
made it an Indian language, Persian and the Perso-Arabic script too, were

71
See Chapter 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108623391.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 170 Transactions: Recording Deals

situated in a complex and creative interplay with other languages and scripts.
Legal documents offer us a large corpus of material to study that interplay
systematically; this chapter has made some effort to begin that work.
In order to go further, however, we also need to discard the imperial court–
centric fantasy of the Mughal empire, and understand the significance of not just
princely, but aristocratic households. We also need to re-examine the ‘idiomatic’
translations of technical terms using early modern English vocabulary, which
have obscured rather than illuminated Mughal practice. ‘Chancellery’ is one of
those unfortunate words; the sole book on Mughal documentation practices,
while based on the survey of a large number of manuals and documents, is
plagued by the notion of a stationary central imperial chancellery, which ignores
the persistently peripatetic nature of the Mughal court. Moreover, the vast
majority of orders would have been issued not by the emperor, but by the
jāgīrdār-mansabdārs, implying both multiple sites of document production,
but also, potentially, variable documentation and archiving practices. In fact,
the linguistic differences between parvānas in different private collections even
suggest gharānas of documentation,72 with language use tied to the household
tradition of great (and small) nobles.

Conclusion
This chapter, which focussed on the documents recording transactions between
members of the family and their kin, associates and rivals, was intended to take
the story into the intimate and everyday crevices in which law flowed in
Mughal India. Here too, as with orders and tax records, ‘law’ and ‘legal
documents’ emerged from a combination of authoritative sources in which
the royal and the legal were inseparable. Counter-intuitively, or perhaps not, it
is at this intimate and everyday level that the Islamic identity of that law
becomes most obvious, with several documents revealing the percolation of
pan-Islamic legal forms into the Indian countryside.
This is also the level at which we see the most complex interplay of
languages and scripts. It as if in the permissive court of the qāz̤ ī and the
voluntary transactions between individuals, the overwhelming grandeur of
classical Persian and the Perso-Arabic script eased up, permitting, on the one
hand, the use of Hindi, Marathi and Indic scripts, but also Arabic. All these
languages and scripts intertwined, produced a visually and phonetically lin-
guistic sphere within which law was articulated in the lives of this family of
Hindu zamīndārs from Mughal Malwa.

72
I am grateful to Syed Akbar Hyder for suggesting this to me.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108623391.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press