Mahzar-namas in the Mughal and British empires: the uses of an Indo-Islamic legal form

 NANDINI CHATTERJEE   (University of Exeter  n.chatterjee@exeter.ac.uk  NOTE: This is the pre-edited version of the article. For the published version, see  Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58: 2 (2016), 379-406 )

(Acknowledgments: The basic research for this article was enabled by a grant from the International Placement  Scheme of the AHRC, UK. I warmly thank Christoph Werner and Paolo Sartori for their generous advice, and the six anonymous reviewers for their meticulous reading of the draft article.)

ABSTRACT  

This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama that was  widely used in India between the 17^th and 19^th centuries to narrate, represent and record  antecedents, entitlements and injuries, with a view to securing legal rights and redressing  legal wrongs. Although mahzars were a known documentary form in Islamic law, used by  qazis (Islamic judges) in many other parts of the world, in India they took a number of  distinctive forms. The specific form of Indian mahzar-namas that this article focusses on was,  broadly speaking, a legal document of testimony, narrated in the first person, in a form  standardised by predominantly non-Muslim scribes, endorsed in writing by members of the local community and/or the professional or social contacts of person(s) writing the document,  and notarised by the seal of a qazi. This specific legal form, however, formed part of a much  broader genre of declarative texts, which were also known as mahzars in India. By looking at  the legal mahzar-namas together with the other kinds of mahzars, and situating both in  relation to Indo-Islamic jurisprudential texts and Persian-language formularies, this article  points to a distinctive Indo-Islamic legal culture in contact with the wider Islamic and  Persianate worlds of jurisprudence and documentary culture but responsive to the unique socio-political formations of early modern India. In doing so, the article will reflect on the meanings of law, including Islamic law, for South Asians, and trace the evolution of that  understanding across the historical transition to colonialism.  

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION  

For Persian and Arabic words, I have used a system based on a modification of F. J.  Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary (London, 1892). I have avoided the  use of diacritics in general, except for the ‘ain. I have therefore not indicated the length of  vowels, nor used the hamza to indicate consecutive distinctly pronounced vowels. In case of  Arabic words commonly in use in Persian and Hindi/Urdu (such as qazi), my transliteration  reflects the South Asian pronunciation pattern. I have indicated the possessive izafa with –i and with –yi where it follows a vowel-ending. With certain very well-known names, such as  Abul Fazl, I have side-stepped accurate transcription in favour of the most widely used  orthography in English. When quoting from others’ works or reproducing book titles, I have  reproduced the transliteration system used by the scholars whose works I am citing. I have  used the English plural signifier s to pluralize Arabic, Persian and Hindi/Urdu words.  

_INTRODUCTION  

In the year 1684, when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir was reigning in  Shahjahanabad (Delhi) but engaged in what turned out to be an endless war with the rebel   Marathas in western India,¹ Purshottam Das, a petty landlord in central India (province   Malwa, district Dhar) recorded his family’s history and rights in writing in a type of  document called mahzar-nama. The headmanship (chaudhurai) and the police station  (chabutra-i kotwali) of Dhar had been in the family, he said, since the time of his grandfather,  Jayant Das. Jayant Das’s son, Mohan Das was a valiant man, who had protected the district,  and the crucial highway that passed through it, from the depredations of a neighbouring  landlord, gaining as reward, the deeds (sanads) of the defeated landlord’s district for his  lifetime. When Mohan Das died, the duties and perquisites of headmanship and police office  passed to his younger brother Chandar Bhan, who unfortunately suffered a burglary in which  the documents were lost. The offices and rights were bequeathed by Chandar Bhan to his  nephew, Purshottam Das, who astutely managed to secure a princely order (nishan)  confirming his office and emoluments (no doubt to replace the lost documents). All had been  well for nine years since that ratification, but now Purshottam Das appealed to all those who  had evidence about the fact that the elders (ancestors) of Kanwal Das and Tilok Chand (the  rival claimants) had never had control over the two offices, to render their gawahi  (testimony) in writing.²  

Clearly, what had brought Purshottam Das to hire Persian-writing scribes³ to record  his family’s history and entitlements, and seek collective endorsement in its support was the  presence of rival claimants to his offices and sources of income, which revealed him as a  local grandee co-opted into the revenue and administrative machinery of the Mughal state,  but constantly battling within local power dynamics in order to retain his official position The mahzar-nama through which Purshottam Das asserted his claims is one among  approximately a hundred such documents pertaining to this family from Malwa, and ranging  from the early seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, which in turn forms part of several  such sets of Persian-language “family papers” acquired by the National Archives of India and  preserved there as part of the several-thousands strong “Acquired Documents” series.⁴ Prolific and neglected documents of this kind indicate the possibility of expanding upon the  kind of local history of the Indian sub-continent’s largest and most centralised pre-colonial  state that has only begun to be written,⁵ and I am engaged in such a project in another  context. This article, however, invites the reader to reflect upon the extremely popular  documentary form in which Purshottam Das articulated his family’s history and his own  claims – the mahzar-nama – which gives us an opportunity to explore key aspects of the legal  culture of pre-colonial, mainly Mughal India, and trace the evolution of those features across  the temporal and political divide of Mughal decline and the rise of the colonialism in South  Asia.  

The Arabic word mahzar has a range of meanings related to presence, and can  indicate that which was present, made present, or represented. Mahzars (Arabic plural =  mahazir) were a known documentary form in Islamic law, recommended by fuqaha (jurists)  for the use of qazis (Islamic judges) to record their court proceedings (including evidence  presented and judgment given).⁶ While Indian Islamic jurists replicated and elaborated on  these recommendations (as we shall see below), extant Indian documents, such as the one  described above, point to other lives of this documentary form. Beginning with the “mis appellation” which involved the addition of the Persian suffix “-nama,”⁷ Indian mahzar  namas were distinctive for being narratives of entitlements, injuries and related claims,  articulated in the first person, penned by expert scribes who were generally not Muslims,  endorsed in writing by members of the local community and/or the professional or social  contacts of person(s) writing the document (in common with other Islamic legal deeds)⁸, and  for frequently extending to contexts beyond the qazi’s courtroom. As such, this documentary  form allows us to not only explore a mode of recording entitlements that has much to show us  about sociality, record-keeping and consciousness of rights and history in pre-colonial South  Asia, but because of the genre’s longevity, also allows us to trace the evolution of those  aspects of legal culture across the colonial divide. Equally, because of the genre’s  recognisably Islamic as well as Persianate provenance, and its clear regionalisation in and  within South Asia’s unique demographic and political context where Islamic states ruled for  several centuries over non-Islamic populations, it allows us to speak to the vibrant and vast  literature on Islamic law, which in recent years has definitely put to rest older Orientalist  notions of a fossilised legal system dominated by jurists incapable of responding to their  social context,⁹ but has nevertheless remained curiously negligent of one such very important  context – that of South Asia.¹⁰ 

This article also builds upon Sumit Guha’s valuable observations regarding the salient  but contested place of the past in pre-colonial South Asian conceptions of law and rights.  Guha’s observations were made in connection with a distinctive Marathi-language genre  called bakhar, which began life as legal testimony and evolved to become a genre of  historical narrative. ¹¹ The mahzar-nama had functions very similar to that described for the  bakhar by Guha (that of providing a legally cognisable account of past facts); and a  distinctive form of the mahzar was in fact deployed so frequently in the Marathi context that  Guha describes, that some scholars have made the error of thinking that as a legal form, it  belonged exclusively to the south of India.¹² Although the mahzar-nama did not acquire its  own literary avatar (as the bakhar did), its generic connection with the range of Persian language compositions designated nama points to an Indo-Persiante world peopled by those  professionals whose careers and achievements ranged from accountancy to legal drafting to  history-writing: the world of South Asian scribes.  

A relatively new interest in the social and cultural history of scribes and record keeping, especially in South Asia,¹³ has, since 2000, drawn historians to paying closer  attention to the millions of documents that such men wrote – documenting transactions,  recording extractions, and producing a highly stylised version of “truth,” coded in  professionally shared formulae. Historians working on other colonial contexts have drawn  attention to the consequences of the notary’s “alchemic” products, in which unique events (or  claims) were encoded in regularised textual expressions, representing what was not  necessarily true, but judiciable and legible to law (or the state),¹⁴ thereby of course generating  endless possibilities of forgery, fraud and oppression, and consequently, a negative social  image for themselves.¹⁵ Others, especially early modernists, have decided to examine the  documents themselves as “historical artifacts [sic.],” bearing traces of “competing truths,” the  careful recovery of which can offer access to social conflicts and clashing mentalités,  rescuing the pre-modern from a perception of harmonious homogeneity.¹⁶ Reflecting on the  linguistic turn, Paolo Sartori has recommended not abandoning the search for social facts in  the obsession with cultural artefacts, arguing instead that a “linguistically-informed  awareness of our sources’ textuality…allows [emphasis in text] us an insight into the close  textures of people’s lives.”¹⁷  

This article is similarly inspired by optimism for the alliance of cultural and social  history. Like Sartori, I believe that law has produced historical archives that bear the traces of  the motives and visions of “little people,” both users and agents of the law. The recovery of  such visions is essential to writing duly textured social as well as intellectual histories, in  relation to both the Mughal and British empires. In both cases, looking at the vast marginalia  of legal records, with due attention to their coded form, allows us to uncover the ordinary  people’s multiple expectations of law and legal process – and their own place within it.  Earlier works on law and colonialism in India found normative conflict arraigned along the  lines of colonial state/Indian society, and also the inevitable compromising of the ideological  claims of colonial law by the necessities of power on the one hand and the necessary alliances  with local Indian power-holders on the other.¹⁸ Even those who did not look upon colonial  law solely as the “state’s emissary”,¹⁹ only pointed to the ways in which relatively powerless  protagonists learnt to use and utilise the legal norms of the dominant.²⁰ More recently,  however, scholars have pointed to unquenched vitality of Indian, especially Indo-Islamic legal cultures, and some have been inspired by Lauren Benton’s concept of “jurispractice”²¹ 

to examine how such legal cultures may have shaped the responses of the many Indian  “experts” recruited by the colonial state to man the lower rungs of its judicial machinery. In  doing so, such scholars have suggested that these petty agents of colonial law not only  “jockeyed” and navigated the conflicting jurisdictions of imperial law, they also thought and  rationalised about it.²² The Indian mahzar-nama, as recorded testimony, documented by  expert scribes at the edges of the legal process, aimed principally but not exclusively at  influencing legal outcomes, and expressed in coded forms that derived from a complex  Islamic, Persianate and Indian heritage, literally allows us to hear what people expected of the  law, but lets us on to much more. It tells us who the Indian users of Islamic law were and  what they thought Islamic law consisted of; it points to the multiple textual and professional  vernacularisations of Islamic law; and it shines a light on the little experts who in copying out  Forms have been studied as cultural artefacts in recent projects focussed on Qajar Iran  and Russian-controlled Central Asia. ²³ In general, however, legal forms and formularies  have received only limited attention from scholars of Islamic law, and that, predictably,  within Arabic-language Muslim-majority contexts. Yet since the genre of formularies and the  forms of law clearly spilt far beyond, the mahzar-nama allows us to rethink the Islamic  “textual habitus”²⁴ and the multiple, interacting cultural traditions of evidence-gathering,  record-keeping, legal disputation and invocation of authority that these documents bear traces  of. In the Indian case, where most users were also frequently not Muslim, and where the  political structures did not remain Islamic, the form in which disputants (with the help of their  scribes) articulated their claims and complaints, and its marked similarities with, as well as  differences from, comparable forms in Iran and Central Asia, offers us the space to think  about the Indo-Islamic world, and its specific forms of cultural hybridisation.  

THE MAHZARS OF ISLAMIC JURISTS  

The vast and sophisticated documentary culture associated with practically every well developed Islamic legal system represents a creative tension within Islamic law, which,  according to the dominant line of juristic interpretation, frowns upon documents as a source  of evidence, preferring instead the oral testimony of parties and/or reliable witnesses. There is  an open debate as to whether or not the development of a significant body of literature  collectively known as shurut, or alternatively, wathaiq (formularies), penned by the jurists  themselves and frequently contained within works of fiqh (jurisprudence) represented a  pragmatic disjuncture between doctrine and practice countenanced by the jurists,²⁵ or,  whether in fact, this was another instance of Islamic jurists attempting and managing to align  jurisprudence with social needs and legal practice.²⁶  

Wakin, who was of the former view, nevertheless noted that apart from the more  fundamental contradiction regarding the acceptability of documentation or otherwise, writers  of classic works of shurut, being jurists themselves, were hyper-careful to propose legally  watertight formulae, and in doing so, they kept within the boundaries of opinion within their  own mazhab (religious school).²⁷ Hallaq further argues that as far as the scribing of actual  documents was concerned, this was undertaken by legally trained officials (not always the  qazi) present in court-room, called shurutis.²⁸ Ethnographic work conducted in the 1980s in  Morocco revealed that while professional, state-appointed scribes called ‘adl (Arabic plural  ‘udul), working under the supervision of the qazis, demonstrated flexibility and cultural  sensitivity, in their own view and of those using their services, everything was done “by the  book” – the book in question being an official formulary written by the most prominent legal  scholar of twentieth-century Morocco.²⁹ In the Indian case however, the professional, textual  and linguistic disjunction between the world of jurists and the world of scribes was far  greater; and in that creative space was produced artefacts such as the mahzar-nama – which  bore many distinctive features of Indo-Islamic legal culture.  

Before entering the world of Indian pensmen,³⁰ however, we need to consider further  the categories of legal documents conceived of by the jurists who wrote legal formularies,  with a view to placing the mahzars (and the Indian mahzar-namas) within them. It appears  from Wakin’s survey that Islamic legal documents were conceived of by jurists such as the  9^th-10^th century CE Egyptian Hanafi scholar Al-Tahawi (whose work she translated) as  falling into two broad categories, those pertaining to “private” contracts (such as marriage  and its consequences, wills, charitable endowments, sale etc.) – shurut (alternatively called  wathaiq); and those of public record – mahzars and sijills.³¹ Mahzars were supposed to be  the written record of proceedings in the qazi’s court, and sijills, the record of the qazi’s  judgments. Mahzars and sijills often merited a chapter on their own at the end of works (or  sections) on shurut – as was the case with Al-Tahawi’s work. A near contemporary Baghdadi  qazi, Muhammad b. Sama‘a, also composed a separate Kitab al-mahazir wa al-sijillat (Book   of Mahzars and Sijills); whereas another possibly contemporary Baghdadi qazi put it all  together in a Kitab al-mahazir wa al-sijillat wa al-wathaiq wa al-‘uqud.³²  

The largest compendium of Hanafi law ever produced in India, the imperially sponsored Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiri (alternatively also known as Fatawa-yi Hindiya), completed  in 1692, contains a very large section (“book”) on mahzars and sijills, as well as a separate  one on shurut.³³ A perusal of these sections allows us to re-capture the sense in which  eminent Islamic jurists, which this book’s Indian authors were, conceived of the mahzar and  its functions, especially vis-à-vis legal proceedings. Helpfully, they opened the section on  mahzars and sijills with a brief explanation of the purpose of these documents, with  injunctions on the best way to write them. With a heart-sinking recommendation of legal  prolixity, the section begins, “The principle behind mahzars and sijills is, that testimony be  stated in full and no satisfaction be taken in the abridged form.” Thus, it recommended, based  on a number of older authorities, that if it was just written in the sijill: “witnesses gave  evidence according to (in support of) the claim,” then such a sijill would not be approved of  or considered valid. Instead, the recommendation was that both mahzars and sijills should  record the names of the parties, the claims and counter-claims, the precise testimony  rendered, and the details of (any) property in dispute in minute, if repetitive detail, leaving  absolutely nothing to doubt. The authors of the Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiri further prescribed that  mahzars and sijills record that the correct procedural order (of declaration, response, seeking  evidence and so on) had been followed, and a strict formula of declaration had been  maintained, so that recorded testimony did not, in future, run the risk of being rejected due to  ikhtilaf, that is, difference of opinion among jurists, a key concern with shurut writers.³⁴  Each of these stipulations was followed by several examples, derived from juristic  authorities, regarding imperfect and perfect forms of recording testimony within court  proceedings.  

These two documentary forms were clearly intended to contain overlapping content: mahzars were meant to be the record of court proceedings, including claims, counter-claims  and testimony, and sijills, the record of the qazi’s judgment based on the former, and  containing full reiteration thereof. The several twinned examples over the next hundred pages  of the Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiri (a mahzar and a sijill for every type of claim) demonstrate the  overlapping but also distinct functions of the mahzars, compared to the sijills. For example,  with reference to a claim of outstanding debt, it is recommended that the mahzar begin with  the name of God, and then state: “In the court of justice in the city of Bukhara, there came in  front of qazi so-and-so (whose name, genealogy and titles be stated), who is appointed judge  among the people of Bukhara by such-and-such prince, on such-and-such date, month and  year…” This was to be followed by the names (including father’s name) and genealogies of  the plaintiff and defendant, followed by the claim. This could be followed by an iqrar (confession) by defendant of the veracity of the claim, or by an inkar (denial) in which case  witnesses would be produced by the plaintiff and the document would record their acceptance  and appointment by the qazi. After a curiously dramatic process of eliciting testimony from  these witnesses (more about which later), the mahzar would record their names, appearance,  genealogies and domiciles, the steps of the process by which testimony was elicited, verified  and recorded, and finally, the testimony itself.³⁵ The sijill on the same claim of debt would  contain exactly the same record up to this point, and then proceed to describe the procedure  by which the judge established the acceptability of the witnesses and their testimony.  Subsequently, the judge would invite the plaintiff to produce any documents, failing which,  he would deliver the judgment and record it in full in the sijill. The sijill would also record its  own incorporation in the court register and the date of that act, together with an attestation of  the qazi on the left hand side of the document that the sijill had been scribed (by the court  clerks) in accordance with his orders. The sijill, therefore, incorporated and transcended the  mahzar in the jurists’ description of Islamic documentary forms.  

The function of the classical Islamic form, the mahzar, appears to have been the  production of documentary record of claims and related testimony in legal disputes heard by  qazis, which may be used as evidence in the current dispute or in future disputes: a pragmatic  and juristically approved procedure for overcoming the difficulty of procuring verbal  testimony over distance and time. While possibly resting on a basic contradiction between the  doctrinal insistence on verbal testimony and the need for documentation, this documentary  form was nevertheless elaborated and refined by the jurists themselves, with the aim of  aligning other aspects of doctrine with court practice. Thus the seventeenth-century Indian  writers of the Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiri were concerned with instructing an audience that they  assumed to be composed of their peers, and working as qazis, on how to best record claims  and testimony produced in their court such that it was admissible as evidence in disputes  under their own consideration, or in future disputes heard by other jurists and/or judges.  These were instructions for producing notarised and judicable truth, a guide for legal experts  on how to apply their doctrinal knowledge to translate a specific dispute and related  statements into the standard, doctrinally approved forms of Islamic law. 

THE MAHZARS OF KINGS, SAINTS AND TOWNSMEN  

Kings and saints, as we know, often used terms related to Islamic law, but gave them new  meanings that transcended jurisprudence.³⁶ From the twelfth century onwards, Muslim kings  of Delhi and their subordinates and/or rebels found various occasions for soliciting the  opinions of jurists (‘ulama) on the righteousness of various cultural and religious practices,  and indeed on their own status, through collective declarations also known as mahzars. In  some cases, these declarations were scribed to form physical documents or other textual  artefacts such as inscriptions on stone pillars. While such declarations shared little in terms of  the procedures and formulae associated with the mahzars of Islamic jurists, discussed above,  they shared their deliberative, declarative and public nature, and aimed at a similarly  authoritative statement of facts and rights, even if literally writ much larger than the typical  legal document.  

Scholars studying the Turkish and Afghan dynasties that ruled northern India between  the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, which have collectively come to be known as the Delhi  Sultanate, have pointed to Persian-language discourses (malfuzats) and other literary sources  which record the summoning of multiple mahzars by the slave-turned-Sultan Shams al-din  Iltutmish (ruled 1211-1236) and his successors, whether to examine the personal and/or  political uprightness of particular Sufi saints, or the acceptability of certain Sufi ecstatic  practices (specifically, the sama‘). These gatherings appear to have consisted of jurists  (‘ulama) and Sufi teachers (mushaikh) as well as nobles, and took place in various locations,  including the city’s Friday mosque. The most eminent saints were said to have been  exonerated by their peers and adored by the righteous king, while others deemed treacherous  were executed on the spot.³⁷  

In contrast to these hagiographic accounts which have left no documentary traces, we  have an (in)-famous document reported and purportedly reproduced by ‘Abd al-Qadir  Badauni, famously acerbic courtier of the third and most politically innovative Mughal  emperor, Jalal al-din Muhammad Akbar (ruled 1542-1605). In his secret account of the many  un-Islamic improprieties committed by this emperor, Badauni mentioned how in the year  1579 CE Akbar engineered the production of a document whereby the ‘ulama at his court  handed to the king the ultimate right to make decisions when they themselves failed to come  to a conclusion. Presented by Shaikh Mubarak, the father of Akbar’s friend, biographer and  courtier Abul Fazl, this document has been seen as an attempt by Akbar to usurp and  transcend the authority of jurists, and wrongly referred to as the “Infallibility Decree.”³⁸ In  fact, the document was not a decree, in which case it would be called a farman. Badauni, who  one suspects would know the difference, called it a mahzar. In it, the self-described principal  ‘ulama of Akbar’s court declared that given that Hindustan had become a land of peace, and  many learned men from ‘arab and ‘ajam (non-Arab lands) had immigrated there, on the basis  of Quranic injunctions to obey the ruler, verified hadith that required the same, and their own  reasoning, they had decided that the status of the king was higher in the eyes of God than that  of the mujtahids (those qualified to debate on Islamic law). That, and given that Akbar was a  just and wise king, if the mujtahids were unable to agree on a religious question, whichever  opinion the king chose for the benefit of the nation would be binding on all of them. They  also declared that the king was entitled to make new rules, provided these were in line with  the Quran and in the interests of the nation.³⁹  

The mahzar followed close on the heels of the execution of a foul-mouthed Brahmin  on the orders of the chief Qazi, ‘Abd al-Nabi, despite Akbar’s disapproval of such a course of  action. The jury may be still out on whether the incident represented a logical stage in the  development of Akbar’s tolerant religious policy, in which he tried to release himself from  the stranglehold of inflexible ‘ulama,⁴⁰ or a failed last-ditch attempt to placate the ‘ulama and  claim legitimacy on the basis of, not despite, Islam.⁴¹ The use of the mahzar form as well as  its precise contents points more readily to the second explanation – and it is unsurprising that  as Akbar’s transcendental ideology of royal absolutism evolved further, this document, in  which the king’s rights and privileges were declared by jurists according to Islamic law, was  found inadequate.  

In contrast to these somewhat apocryphal stories, in which the rights of kings and  saints were declared by adoring or arm-twisted subordinates, we have more concrete  assertion of both royal privilege and collective endorsement from the same period, recorded  in a stone inscription in a village called Hukeri in north Karnataka in southern India.  According to the text of this inscription, self-described as a mahzar and written in two  languages (Persian and Marathi) on two separate stones both in the year 1583 CE, it was  recorded that the mahajanan (great people, including the qazi) and balutian (village  functionaries) of the qasba (town) of Hukeri gave in writing that they [emphasis mine] had  given a certain portion of land for the upkeep of a water-storage tank and a guesthouse, both  erected by a certain Mansur Khan, a local officer, who worked for the fief-holder of the  region, in turn affiliated to the south Indian state of Bijapur.⁴² In studying this grant by a local  noble endorsed by a huge range of local stakeholders, including the qazi and salar (possibly  garrison commander), but also village and provincial record-keepers (kulkarnis), village  headmen (patels) and the heads of various artisanal castes such as gardeners, blacksmiths,  tailors and astrologers, Sumit Guha has pointed to the uniquely assertive and resilient caste  structures that worked as civil institutions, holding centralising state power at bay in a way  that he speculates was impossible in northern India.⁴³  

The power of the local community and its inter-mingling with Islamic state  institutions in the Marathi⁴⁴-speaking and -writing south-western parts of India also left traces  of itself in another prolific documentary form also known as mahzar which bore surprising  resemblances with the jurists’ mahzar, a resemblance all the more striking when we pay  attention to the institutions which issued them. The earliest Marathi mahzar that I have learnt  of is from the year 1333 CE (Saka 1255), and it is a grant of share in land taxes (sardeshmukhi) rather than the adjudication of a dispute as such. This mahzar, in the same  vein as the one from Hukeri, declared: “As per the application made by Dadaji son of Reuji  Hande Deshmukh of Junnar district (pargana), Sayaji, son of Gomaji Kadu, has been  allocated the sardeshmukhi of eighty-four villages of Chakan district.” The grant was made  by a thirty-six-strong assembly (majlis) of which thirty-five were military officials (lashkari  huddedar) and one, a village headman (deshmukh); alternatively, twelve out of thirty-six  were Hindus. In terms of its form, a Persian summary of the matter was followed by a date,  and a detailed list of the members of the majlis that acted as the authoritative body. This was  followed by details of the matter in question, and the final decision. Apart from the summary  in Persian at the top of the document, the entire document was written in heavily Persian 

infused Marathi, in the scribal Modi script. Endorsements were arranged on the right and  bottom margins, and strikingly, signatories (in this case, the members of majlis) added  professional symbols, such as sword, scimitar, measuring scales.⁴⁵  

The form of the majlis as well as that of its chosen form of documenting its decision –  the local version of the mahzar – proved persistent in the Marathi-speaking regions, although  the composition of the majlis evolved over the next four centuries, surviving the transition  from the reign of Adilshahi (Bijapuri) Sultanate to the Maratha empire created by Shivaji  through rebellion against both Bijapur and the Mughals. Compared to the very early form we  have just seen, later iterations of the majlis included a greater variety of officials, including  the local qazi (this part collectively called the diwan) and many more non-official caste and  community leaders (collectively called the got);⁴⁶ the signatories of the 1583 mahzar from  Hukeri reflecting this “mature” form. Similarly constituted bodies also adjudicated disputes,  as noted in the letter written by the nyayadhish (the head judge of the Maratha empire) in  1698, confirming the decision taken by a got after considering the written accounts (karina)  of two priests competing over the entitlement to officiate at a holy site. The decision was  referred to as a mahzar. ⁴⁷ 

The Marathi mahzars, which could record executive orders, but also adjudicative  decisions, thus lay within a more widely used spectrum of declarative forms, which appeared  in northern India from at least the thirteenth century. The uses of such declarative mahzars ranged from jurists making a public evaluation and declaration about the rights of kings, to  townsmen swearing to uphold a grant of land made for a charitable purpose. In this  connection, it appears that there emerged a specific tradition of collective declaration of right  by conjoint state functionaries and community leaders, which may have derived from, or  resonated with, older practices of collective deliberation and decision-making. The name  mahzar, on the other hand, connected this documentary form and practice with the history  and trajectory of the expansion of Islamic (that is, Delhi-Sultanate-derived) state forms in the  western and southern parts of India.  

Ironically, mahzar writing survived and flourished under the self-consciously  Brahmanical Maratha Empire of the seventeenth century. Gune, the scholar who studied them  most meticulously, suggested that Marathi adjudicative mahzars, in particular, were very  similar to the legal form called mahzar in the Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiri – if leaning somewhat in  the direction of sijills. Gune suggested that in including endorsements, the Marathi mahzars were distinct from Islamic mahzars and instead indebted for to jayapatras (literally, letters of  victory, in effect, royal decisions) recommended by Sanskrit (therefore Brahmanical Hindu)  dharmashastras and their commentaries.⁴⁸ This may or may not have been the case (and it is  beyond my linguistic ability to evaluate the possibility), but endorsements in the form of  witness clauses were an integral part of many other Islamic documentary forms, especially  those recording inter-personal exchanges of value and obligations (legal deeds).⁴⁹ 

Endorsements modelled on such witness clauses, but undirected by a legal functionary or  institution, distinguished the north Indian (Hindustani) form of the mahzar – and suggested  that the recording of judiciable truth may here have become part of the documentary culture  of inter-personal transactions, stepping beyond the authority, not only of the qazi, but of any  stable corporate entity such as the majlis.  

FROM MAHZAR TO MAHZAR-NAMA: THE MUGHAL AVATAR OF AN ISLAMIC  DOCUMENTARY FORM  

Mughal mahzars, or to specify our legal documentary “type”: mahzar-namas, were, unlike  the jurists’ mahzars, but also unlike the Marathi ones, essentially legal documents of  testimony. They too possessed a unique form of their own, which incorporated features  shared with Persian and Central Asian documentary forms but also unique formulae, and  distinctive linguistic and scribal features. They too were used for a wider range of functions  than the mere recording of testimony in connection with specific legal disputes; these  functions connected them to a broader Indo-Islamic world in which collective declarations of  right connected law inseparably with politics, and the adjudicative role of the qazi with the  assertive role of the community.  

Among the distinctive features of the Mughal mahzar-nama was the form of the  document itself, beginning with the opening formula. Whereas the jurists of the Fatawa-yi  ‘Alamgiri recommended beginning a mahzar with a simple invocation of the name of God,  Mughal mahzar-namas usually began with Sura 2: 283 from the Quran: “La takatamu al 

shahada wa man yaktumuha fa innahu athimun qalbuhu” (“Conceal not evidence; for  whoever conceals it, His heart is tainted with sin”; Yusuf Ali’s translation). This stringent  exhortation to observe the Islamic obligation of rendering testimony⁵⁰ was then followed by  this demand stated by the plaintiff in Persian, in the first person: “sawal mi kunam/kunim wa  gawahi mi khwaham/khwahim” (I/We ask, and want evidence). Another formula for  beginning a Mughal mahzar-nama was bais-i tahrir-i in sutur anke, manke … (The reason for  writing these notes is that, I, who …) Note that in either case, it was the affected party or  claimant who ostensibly sought the supporting testimonials, not the qazi.  

            This was indeed how members of a family of eminent Muslim legal scholars,  contemporary to Sheikh Nizam and the compilers of the Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiri, began their  own mahzar-nama, which they wrote in 1692 CE. The family produced an eminent lineage of  Sunni ‘ulama, who would go on to establish the famous seminary of Firangi Mahal in  Lucknow, and create a distinct syllabus of study known as the Dars-i Nizamiyya.⁵¹ Like  many such scholars, this family held and enjoyed a grant of tax-free land from the Mughal  emperor, known as madad-i ma‘ash, and as in many such cases, they suffered from the  jealousy of local landlords or zamindars.⁵² In the middle of the day, on 19 May 1692, when  the head of the family, the Maulavi Qutb al-din, was busy as usual in teaching students and  casual visitors, a bunch of armed men surrounded the house, dug under the walls, and  attacked the Maulavi as well as his students and guests. The Maulavi died of seven slashes of  a sword, a spear wound and a gunshot. So did two students from another centre of learning,  Sandila, who happened to have come there for their graduation. Thereafter, the men  proceeded to burn the valuable library, which included many books written by the Maulavi himself, molested women of the family, and made off with the Maulavi’s corpse, his  youngest son, and the head of one of the killed men. Eventually, worthies of the assailants’  village intervened, had the boy released, the head buried and a mutilated corpse returned for a  decent burial.  

            All this was narrated by the mahzar-nama itself, which began, as the distinct form  required, with the Quranic verse prohibiting the concealment of testimony, and with the  sentence “We ask and we want testimony, we the sitam rasidgan (those who have been  oppressed): Muhammad Said and Nizam al-din Ahmad and Muhammad Reza, sons of  Maulavi Shaikh Qutb al-din, residents of qasba Sehali, sarkar Lucknow subah Awadh…”  They appealed for this testimony to the “Qazis of Islam and benevolent shaikhs (scholars or  mystics) and members of the public, big and the small, of these regions (to whom) this matter   is known and evident.” The text then proceeded to describe the spirituality, knowledge and  achievements of the murdered scholar, the events of the day, and the damages and harm  suffered, including the contents of the scholar’s destroyed library. The document itself asked  for nothing in particular – except evidence that the claims were true, that an injury had been  suffered. We do know however that the Firangi Mahal mahzar-nama was effective – it was  presented to the emperor ‘Alamgir himself, who compensated the family with the grant of  house and property in Lucknow. ⁵³

        This document, then, served more as a record of wrongs suffered and an implicit  petition to royal authority rather than as documentation of evidence in support of a specific  legal dispute in a qazi’s court. It was testimony, of course, and it was also testimony that was  authenticated by the marginal endorsements that physically framed the central narrative. In  fact, matters grew really lively at these margins of the document. As with all other writers of  mahzar-namas, the ‘ulama of Firangi Mahal depended, for the success of their appeal, on the  gathering of short endorsements, complete with seals and signatures of such signatories.  These endorsements in the top, right and bottom margins could be as short as “bayan sahih  ast” (the account is true) or gawah shud (it is witnessed) or longer summaries of the events  and entitlements by the signatories. In the Firangi Mahal mahzar-nama, there were  approximately seventy-five such signed endorsements on the margins, attested with almost as  many seals. At least three of the signatories were qazis but neither in terms of size nor in  terms of their placement on the document were their endorsements given any precedence  over those of the others who also clamoured to assert the truthfulness of the claims stated in  the central narrative.  

This and other Mughal mahzar-namas were comparable, but did not entirely replicate,  other forms of recorded testimony from the wider Persianate world. In early nineteenth century Bukhara, for example, Persian-language mahzars were in evidence, but these were  bills of plaint, scribed by jurists on behalf of the plaintiffs, addressed to the rulers, and  seeking the restitution of specific rights or recompense for specific injuries. They did not  include any marginal attestations.⁵⁴ From later, Russian-controlled times, we have  shahadatnamas from Bukhara, which were documents recording testimony rendered by  witnesses who came to a specific courtroom and testified to past transactions for which the  original documents could not be found, most commonly the creation of a waqf, or pious  endowment. Although produced under Russian procedural pressure, which required a  document for a waqf to be upheld, shahadatnamas are said to conform to older Islamic legal  models from the region.⁵⁵ If so, Central Asian forms of testimony do not seem to have ever  admitted of marginal endorsements by non-jurists. They appear to be far more cut and dried –  people came to court to attest to the facts of a certain matter, which were evaluated and  validated by a qazi, who recorded the statements and added his notarial seal – creating a legal  instrument of probative value.  

From Qajar Iran (nineteenth century), on the other hand, we have a form of document  called ishtishhadnama, which is closer in form, appearance (and possibly function) to the Indian mahzar-namas.⁵⁶ Ishtishhad means “seeking of evidence”; for example, evidence was  formally sought and recorded in a representative document scribed in 1893/4 by the  inhabitants of the town of Zanjan in north-western Iran, in which they recorded the  plundering of waqf property by the horsemen of a certain ‘Ali Bayg. Like the Indian mahzar namas, this Iranian document involved the recording the testimony of those afflicted (in this  case, by a certain wrongdoing), without the immediate, or at least obvious context of a court  proceeding. Also, the testimony so recorded lacked the tone of finality rendered by a single  authoritative validation by a qazi. Instead, it was endorsed by multiple short statements to the  effect that the testimony recorded was true. All these statements bore small seals of private  individuals, and were scribed around the margins of the document.⁵⁷ At face-value at least,  this document, like the Indian mahzar-namas, appeared to be a collective effort to assert the  truth of a matter, rather than the final word on the subject. Unlike the Indian mahzar-namas,  however, the Iranian document made no effort to validate itself with reference to the Quran,  and included no Quranic formula of exhortation to render testimony. This Indian addition is even more striking when we consider that the vast majority of those authoring the Indian  mahzar-namas would not have been Muslims.  

Mughal mahzar-namas did one more thing, which renders them absolutely unique  even among the comparable genres of documents from the Persianate world. They exhibited,  nay flaunted, that aspect of Indian socio-cultural life which strikes most outsiders as  remarkable – a vibrant multi-linguality. While the central body of the text was written in  Persian, and in some cases, some endorsements in rougher cursive Persian (as in the Firangi  Mahal mahzar-nama), in many other mahzar-namas, witnesses endorsed the testimony with  brief comments and signatures in a variety of Indian languages and scripts, depending on the  background of the signatories in question. It was also usual for people to jointly sign and seal  a common bit of endorsement, and those thus grouping themselves, often signed in the same  language and script. In many cases, people also added their valued symbols for  authentication. While I have not found one on a mahzar-nama, other legal documents with  collective endorsements even within the Purshottam Das “family papers” bear the Hindu  symbol of swastika.⁵⁸ 

To return to the jurists for a moment, the Indian authors of Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiri,  despite their tendency of referring to Bukhara as the model city in which their qazi sat, did  reflect their awareness of the special conditions produced by India’s linguistic diversity and  the disjuncture between oral and written cultures, which they correctly envisaged as being  matter of course in Indian courts. Thus they said that once witnesses had been produced by  the plaintiff, the qazi should have their testimony written down on a piece of paper in precise  Persian formulae. This would then be read back to them by officials of the court, who were  also required to point to the precise parties and documents when these were mentioned in the  testimony. The witnesses were then required to state that they did indeed agree to testify as  had been written down and read out to them, from beginning to the end, and sign their names  in the appropriate places.⁵⁹ The incorporation of such multi-lingual dramatic interludes in the  court proceedings, and the recognition of the necessary interface between documentation and  verbal utterance clearly reflected the jurists’ recognition and expectation that litigants would  not be literate (or even orally fluent) in the language of jurisprudence (Arabic) but of  administration (for Mughal India, this being Persian).  

In actual mahzar-namas produced in Mughal India, the disjuncture and associations of  language went much further beyond a bi-lingual jurisprudential-administrative/Arabic Persian divide. While the eminent imperial jurists did not deign to recognize the fact, most  litigants in Mughal India were unlikely to be adequately fluent even in Persian. And thus the  multi-lingual and multi-scribal endorsements on the margins of the Indian mahzar-namas,  demonstrate that working qazis in the Mughal empire were fully willing to accept  endorsements to testimony in multiple Indian languages, and to accommodate multi-valent  symbols of value, ranging from Quranic verses to swastikas. Indeed, as we have seen families  of eminent jurists themselves turned to this unique Mughal form rather than any form  recommended by their professional peers when they needed to record their sufferings and  seek redress.  

JURISPRUDENCE OR BELLES-LETTRES? MAHZAR-NAMAS IN MUNSHATS

If Mughal mahzar-namas were a regionally and historically specific development of the  Islamic documentary form of mahzar, and one so popular that even a family of eminent  jurists opted for it, where indeed was the model? For it is worth noting of course that however  exuberant a Mughal mahzar-nama, it conformed to a standardized form, and in doing so,  pointed to a body of legal formularies, although clearly distinct from those contained within  the books of fiqh (jurisprudence), such as the Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiri. Such formularies did  exist, and they were produced by and for a different social and professional class – consisting  of professional scribes or munshis, who were not legal experts but (at their best) linguistic  and literary stalwarts, offering an ideal of belles-lettres that many cultivated men in Mughal  India aspired to. Both their professional and confessional status (munshis were often, and in  fact, classically, not Muslims) pointed to the historical transition of an Islamic device into the  social world of multi-religious Mughal India.  

        Some of the most exciting recent works in Mughal history has been on the education,  cultural world and political visions of the professional secretarial class – the oft-denounced  but ubiquitous munshis.⁶⁰ The art of the munshi was contained in two genres of texts, the first  being munshats and the second, siyaq-namas (or khulasat al-siyaq).⁶¹ Siyaq is a Persian form  of accountancy using special codes, but munshats were a more complex genre, consisting of  model prose compositions generically designated insha. Insha is a hard category to translate –  although commonly translated as letters, or epistolary compositions – the appellation also  applied to prose writing of various kinds, ranging from essays on the beauties of spring to  model legal forms, the latter being our concern in this article.⁶²  

        One of the earliest writers of exemplary munshats in India was none less than the  most celebrated Indo-Persian poet of all time, Amir Khusrau Dehlavi.⁶³ This thirteenth century Sufi poet and courtier of Sultan ‘Ala al-din Khalji, composed, among many other  works, the A‘jaz-i Khusravi [Miracle of Khusrau], a work in five (risalas) parts, of which  Risala II, Khat (sub-section) I consisted of “imitations (models) of orders, letters of judges,  Shaikhs, Saiyids…” This did not really contain any legal formulae, only impossibly long  letters of appointment for judges, and petitions of the oppressed to, against, or in support of  judges. Concerned as this work was with demonstrating the usage of complex figures of  speech, typical of the sabk-i Hindi (literally: Indian style of Persian writing),⁶⁴ several in a  single hypothetical document, this work was unlikely to have served as a functional  formulary.⁶⁵ Working almost a century later, Mahmud Gawan (1411-1481), the Persian  courtier of the Bahmani sultans of Bidar (in north Karnataka),⁶⁶ compiled his own munshat –  the Riyaz al-insha – which has been accorded greater recognition (than Khusrau’s work) as  marking the beginning of the munshat form of writing in India. Despite his role as the wakil-i  sultanat (chief minister) of the Bahmanis, Gawan’s work did not include legal forms.⁶⁷ Neither did the work of India’s most celebrated munshi ever, Akbar’s courtier Abul Fazl –  whose tome contained mainly diplomatic missives.⁶⁸ 

        In contrast, north Indian munshats produced from the seventeenth century onwards began  to contain a section of legal forms as a matter of routine. The Munshat-i Namakin, compiled  by Saiyid Abu al-Qasim, alias “Namakin” (d. 1609/10), an imperial employee, contained,  alongside forms for diplomatic letters, royal orders, petitions, and prescriptions, forms for   qibale or legal documents.⁶⁹ Another work, the Insha-yi Harkaran was composed around  1625, by his younger contemporary, Harkaran Das Kambuh, said to be the first known Hindu  whose munshat was copied as a model by later writers.⁷⁰ This book contained an entire  section on khatut wa qibala-yi shari‘a (rendered “Of writing the contracts of law” by the first  British translator). The book had seven sections:  

I. Princes write [letters to] princes 

II. Of the issuing out of farmans (royal orders)  

III. Of the drawing out of parwanas (non-royal orders, frequently for appointment to  office)  

IV. Of writing ‘arzdashts (petitions)  

V. Of letters which the sons of fortune write to one another  

VI. Of writing the contracts of law 

VII. Of writing dastaks (orders) and sarnamas (headers)  

The sixth and seventh sections, which are of our concern here, included, alongside model  legal forms for sale, mortgage, manumission (of slaves), security bonds, court orders, service  certificates, passports and court orders, and a self-described mahzar-nama, wrongly  translated by Balfour as “summons.”⁷¹ This model mahzar-nama did not contain the Quranic  verse, but otherwise ran quite like the documents we have discussed so far. It began, “This  the injured/afflicted slave (I), Abu al-Khair, son of ‘Abd al-Rahim Quraishi, does ask and  request evidence with regard to this …” It then narrated the injury sustained: that a certain  Ghiyas had illegally usurped a garden that belonged to the writer of the mahzar-nama, killed  the latter’s elder brother and threatened him with murder, until the poor Abu al-Khair had to  flee with his life. The mahzar-nama ended with the standard appeal from Abu al-Khair, “All  those that may have information about this matter may ‘and Allah (for God’s sake) write their  testimony or permit it to be written, so that az sawab bi bahra nabashad (that they may not  be deprived of the good fortune of [acquiring] due reward).”  

Another model mahzar-nama occurs in a mixed-genre eighteenth-century text, written  by a disgruntled government official in Delhi called Shakir Khan, who not only complained  through his history (tarikh) about the political and social decline he thought he saw, but  recommended curative principles of statecraft. The Tarikh-i Shakir Khan-i also contains a  massive appendix of legal documents (qibala-yi shari‘a) and orders (parwanejat) of  appointment to service and so on.⁷² This contains a long model document, which began “The  declaration of a mahzar: that since the ayat-i karim (the noble verse) [says], Conceal not  evidence; for whoever conceals it, His heart is tainted with sin, and concealing of testimony  is for this reason forbidden.” Then the imaginary author of this mahzar-nama, a man called  Muhammad Javed, narrated how he frequently travelled abroad and so had let a certain  Afghan, who had been looking desperately for a place to live in together with his wife and  children, stay in his house. However, on returning from his trip, Muhammad Javed asked for  his house back and found the said Afghan refusing to vacate the property. And so the fictitious Muhammad Javed appealed to all, the great and small, of the Qasba (town) of  Bilgram, to endorse the truth of what he had described, requesting them to sign their names  below the document, so that they may be rewarded God and thanked by men (‘and Allah  majur wa ‘and al-nash mashkur).”.  

Thus in the hands of Persian-literate scribes, the most exalted of whom were full  participants of the Perso-Islamicate courtly culture crowned by the Mughals, the legal form of  recording testimony called mahzar took a historically distinct shape. Drawing experience  from the world of diplomacy and administration rather than jurisprudence, these men created  a documentary form for recording claims and injuries by myriad legally untrained  individuals, for purposes of legal action, but not limited to it. The form was used by the  ‘ulama of Firangi for petitioning, not disputation, and by Purshottam Das of Malwa to  notarise his entitlements, especially in the presence of rival claimants and in the absence of  adequate title deeds. But what is clear is that this hybrid legal form which sought testimony in  the voice of the protagonists, and with direct reference to the Book of Books, was the one that  even jurists turned to, when it came to real-life trouble in Mughal north India.  

LAYERED EMPIRES: MAHZARS IN THE WAKE OF THE MUGHALS

         As the Mughal empire went into steep decline in the early eighteenth century and a number of  military-political aspirants to imperial status jostled to replace them in various parts of the  Indian subcontinent, the mahzar-nama acquired a further lease of life. Among these novel  political formations which embraced the legal and administrative forms of Mughal rule were  the multiple Sikh warlord-led misls which, by the late eighteenth century, had replaced  Mughal administration in the province of Punjab. Central imperial rule had fragmented  through a combination of peasant rebellion, badly-handled sectarian conflict, economically hamstrung administration as well as foreign invasion.⁷³ At the eastern edge of the Mughal  empire, there was of course another major political presence – that of the English East India  Company, who between 1757 and 1765 had managed to practically conquer the province of  Bengal and were edging westwards. As this government of joint stock company-turned-rulers  also appropriated the forms and personnel of the vanquished Mughal and post-Mughal  regional governments,⁷⁴ mahzar-namas continued to remain meaningful and, it appears,  useful to the legal actors of north India, the erstwhile Mughal Hindustan. In this section, we  shall briefly consider three mahzar-namas, produced between the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth century. Each of these documents exhibit striking continuities and developments,  both in form and purpose, of this unique Indo-Islamic legal form.  

Our first document is from Batala, a considerable town and the headquarters of a district since the sixteenth century, with its own qazi at least since that time. In the 1770s, the  town and area were ruled by a Sikh misl (political group) associated by marriage with Ranjit  Singh, who would eventually unite the warring misls into a Sikh empire in the early  nineteenth century.⁷⁵ Our document called itself a tazkara (literally: mention), and the earliest  of the five variously dated seals affixed on it is that of a certain Qazi Muhammadi, dated  1187 AH (1773 CE). There was another seal by a certain Muhammad Shah (office  unspecified) for 1194 AH/1780CE and a third one of an officer who was neither Muslim nor  Sikh, called Sewak Ram, dated 1840 Samvat (1785CE).⁷⁶ There were two other seals with  Sikh invocations (akal sahai) from the 1870s.  

This document forms part of yet another collection of “family papers”, this time  pertaining to the well-known Bhandaris, a family of Khatris – a range of caste groups that  had prospered in the eighteenth century as scribes and administrators (and due to consequent  capital and connections, as merchants) due to Mughal efforts at socially specific recruitment  to combat rebellion in the region.⁷⁷ Successful under several regimes, including (eventually)  the British, the Bhandari family built up significant urban and rural estates and in the 1690s,  an early member of this family, Sujan Rai Bhandari, wrote a very important history of the  region.⁷⁸ According to our tazkara document, a certain Nanak Baksh, son of Karan Chand,  Khatri, alias Nayyar, resident of Bulharwal, the suburb of the qasba (town) of Batala,  narrated that a Rai Singh Sundar, had pawned a haveli (large house) with him for 2,950  rupees. The transaction proved to be a fraught one, because Sundar disputed it, but Nayyar  managed to prove it in the court of Khalsa Jiu (the local Sikh governor) by producing the  pawn document (rahn-nama), which bore the attestations of some of the local residents.  Unluckily for Nayyar, that crucial rahn-nama document had been lost, and he now feared that  the former owners may attempt to re-open their claims afresh. In order to pre-empt that,  Nayyar wrote, as one might expect: “Nanak Baksh …asks (sawal mi kunad) and wants a  declaration of his situation (wa ishtehar-i hal-i khud mi khawad)…” which he then proceeded  to describe. In the end, he requested “whoever was aware of the true position and the veracity  of this [his] statement, that they may add their shahadat (testimony) to this tazkara, for God’s  sake (hisb Allah) so that they may be rewarded God and thanked by men (‘and Allah majur  wa ‘and al-nash mashkur).” The document acquired around 85 attestations, of which eighteen  were in Persian, and the rest in Landa and Gurmukhi scripts. Only one of the fifteen  signatories in Persian was a Muslim man called Shaikh Rashid. As we have seen, the  document was topped by the seal of Qazi Muhammadi, who used the standard epithet for  himself – khadim-i shari‘a, but clearly, other official seals were considered necessary over  the years. ⁷⁹ 

This document was certainly different in some important ways from those we have  seen before. For example, it called itself a tazkara; it did not begin with the standard Quranic  verse exhorting the rendering of testimony, but that omission was possible even in Mughal  times, as Purshottam Das of Malwa had similarly left this out. On the other hand, it began and  ended with the standard appeals for testimony, and conformed almost exactly to the model  offered by the near-contemporary formulary of Shakir Khan. The first-person voice of the  narrative, the nature and purpose of the claims (effort at creating evidence when crucial  documents were lost or ineffective) and the style of collective endorsements by the associates  of the protagonist, all this was in line with Mughal mahzar-namas, as was the role of the qazi,  that is, as only one among several validating authorities.

Given the story presented in this paper, it may be unsurprising that the Mughal form of the mahzar-nama found many uses within a post-Mughal north Indian political context.  What ought to be equally unsurprising, given the well-known layering of the Mughal and  British empires, is comparable continuity several years into the advent of British colonialism  in northern India. As we shall see with the last two mahzar-namas in this paper, the  distinctively hybrid features of the mahzar-nama – Islamicate and Persianate, located  between law and politics, state and community – fully emerged during this period when  people looked for cultural resources to express their sense of right and wrong in a  bewilderingly new world.  

he first of these mahzar-namas was produced around 1784, that is, around the same  time as the first tazkara from the Punjab. It was produced in connection with a legal event  that most historians of the British empire know of – the impeachment trial of Warren  Hastings. Peter Marshall’s classic on this trial mentioned a letter of support that was  produced in Sanskrit, by the pandits of Banaras, on the instigation of Warren Hastings’s  protégé in that recently-conquered city – a Shi‘a Muslim bureaucrat turned judge, called Ali  Ibrahim Khan.⁸⁰ Ali Ibrahim Khan did indeed produce that letter of support for his old patron,  but the impending trial no doubt also made him anxious about the security of his own  position – and he took the opportunity to collect endorsements for himself. Thus was produced an extraordinary document – perhaps the largest mahzar-nama in India. 27 feet  long, this is a truly exuberant document, in which Ali Ibrahim Khan described, first in  Persian, and then a highly Persianized but also highly localized Hindi written in Nagri  complete with the Hindu invocation “Sri Ganeshai namah”, his main achievements as  magistrate of Benares. He ended by appealing to all commoners and gentle-folk (wazi‘ wa  sharif) to seal and sign the document, of their own free will, “az ru-yi iman wa dharam”  

(based on/for the sake of faith and righteousness – using the explicitly Hindu word dharam).  

 

And in doing so, the professional and social connections of this extremely well-connected  man wrote in Persian, Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil and Bengali – some using terse legal language  (“the account is true”), others a gently pious language of goodwill (“God keep Mr. Hastings  and the Company well that he has appointed such a judge for Benares”) and some a mythic  language of just kingship that saw the qualities of the kings of the Brahminical Golden Age  (Satyayug) in Ali Ibrahim Khan.⁸¹  

Ali Ibrahim Khan’s mahzar-nama was the product of a period of political and cultural  transition, in response to political and legal events that were both local and global. This was  the response of a man trained in the Mughal administrative tradition, but deeply sensitive to  the altered political situation, who was attempting to negotiate a new legal landscape with  familiar resources, and especially one which, as we know, worked best for those with wide  and supportive social networks. How well Ali Ibrahim Khan’s carefully garnered evidence  would have fared in an imperial/colonial tribunal, we do not know, since this document was  never produced in a court; but there is no reason to be optimistic, because we do know of  Burke’s assertion that the “florid testimonials” from Indians demonstrated Hastings’ tyranny  rather than popularity.⁸² 

The other colonial-era mahzar-nama was produced in 1857, under conditions of what  we can call “suspended colonialism.” It was scribed in the Mughal capital of Delhi, where for  a period of just less than five months, British control was overthrown by rebelling Indian  soldiers, who forced the aged Mughal emperor to take on the mantle of kingship.⁸³ Surviving  records from these months show an active culture of litigation, centred around the hybrid  tribunal that was set up in the Red Fort.⁸⁴ Prostitutes complained of unpaid dues, brothers-in law complained of fugitive sisters-in-law, and soldiers bickered over the ownership of  swords. Testimony was recorded, agreements signed, and judgments delivered.⁸⁵ Meanwhile,  the regime tried keeping various elements together, among other things, by declaring a prohibition on cow-slaughter, no doubt as an effort to mobilise the Hindu soldiers. This led to  the butchers of the city being left in the lurch, and certain Hafiz ‘Abd al-Rahman being  arrested together with them on suspicion of cow-killing. The poor soul managed to put  together a mahzar-nama even from inside prison – in which he claimed that he was not of the  community of butcher, but merely a man who had taken up the making of kababs because  livelihoods were hard to come by.⁸⁶ 

While the format of this document is exactly the same as the other Mughal mahzar namas that we have discussed, including the Quranic verse and the opening and closing  formulae, this mahzar-nama was in Urdu, but a heavily Persianized Urdu with Persian  grammatical forms (such as the adjective following the noun) and non-Persian Hindustani  words where the Arabic word is still used in legal documents today (such that the author  called himself ‘beta-yi Panna Shah’ rather than ‘walad-i Panna Shah’ or even the “bin [ibn]  Panna Shah”).⁸⁷ The document was also very poorly scribed – possibly pointing to the  difficulty of procuring a skilled professional scribe under the circumstances, and (if that is  true) the social percolation of knowledge of, and acceptance of this documentary form for  legal purposes. However, the understanding that such a document, duly completed with  endorsements, formed acceptable legal evidence, was shared by the appellant and the court he  appealed to, for unusually, we also have the petition which the mahzar-nama accompanied,  transcribed with the order that ‘Abd al-Rahman should be released.⁸⁸  

CONCLUSION  

From Purshottam Das to ‘Abd al-Rahman, mahzar-namas offered a legally effective  instrument for a range of protagonists in Mughal India to represent their claims of  entitlements and injuries, and do so with their eyes not only on law and legal processes, but  also on power, politics and social ties. Homonymous with a classical Islamic documentary  form, the mahzar, which was approved of by leading Islamic jurists of India and elsewhere,  Indian mahzar-namas were distinctly hybridized, in both form and function, along a number  of trajectories. While the dominant south-western Indian form developed the declarative and  collective features of mahzars, for which they were favoured by kings and saints, this  development happened within a complex and evolving context in which Islamic states gave  way to ideologically Brahmanical regimes overlaying powerful rural community structures.  Ironically, the closest real-life application of the jurists’ model of mahzar was in the multi sectarian community-centred courts of the Maratha empire, within which the Islamic qazi was only one of many sources of authority.  

In Mughal north India, on the other hand, the mahzars took on another form,  designated mahzar-nama in line with allied forms of legal documentation across the  Persianate world, mainly Iran and Central Asia. Like other forms of collective testimony,  such as ishtishhad-nama documents from Qajar Iran, Indian mahzar-namas included the  visually striking feature of multiple endorsements by associates and supporters of the person  articulating his/her claims, a feature that revealed the protagonists as pro-active legal actors  capable of mobilizing their social and professional networks and co-opting the qazi’s  authority so that his seal could notarize truths that could then move beyond the jurisdiction of  his court. Unlike the mahzars from the Maratha country, such endorsement appears to have  been drawn from situationally mobilized social networks, rather than stable corporate groups;  a finding that should encourage us to reflect upon surprising levels of individuation but also  capacity for purposive collective action present in the legal and social worlds of Mughal  India. Such active mobilization of local social forces inevitably implied a much more vibrant  engagement between orality and literacy in the Indian mahzar-namas, than is visible is any  other comparable Persianate legal documentary form. The complexity of the Indian interface  between orality and literacy was magnified by multi-lingual, multi-denominational and  assertive legal actors, who brought to the mahzar-namas not only their own languages and  scripts, but also different symbols of value derived from multiple religious and status  positions. 

It appears likely that the form of the Mughal mahzar-nama came to be standardized  through an interaction of Islamic legal forms and concepts, Indian administrative and  adjudicative practice, and the attentions of Persian-writing scribes and litterateurs. Thus  hybridized, the mahzar-nama acquired a distinctively Indo-Islamic form, which included  strikingly direct appeals to Quranic authority when seeking and recording testimony, appeals  which, even they were not so intended by the contemporaries, presaged the “modernist” religious revolution whereby eventually jurists and law came to be bypassed with reference to  direct access to scriptures and personal piety.

Whatever our protagonists thought of the judges, they did tell us what they thought of  themselves and their dues. It appears from these documents that in identifying their rights,  Indians valued the past, not in a collective homogenous sense, but through an intensely  personal trajectory of time. The narrative form of the mahzar-nama depicted a past that was  violated or threatened, and which they sought to restore. However, antiquity alone did not  establish entitlement. Mahzar-namas inevitably asserted and expanded upon the spiritual,  professional and personal achievements of the author – the death of a learned man was an  injury because the world lost his learning, his piety and his precious library; lost documents  had to be recreated because they recorded offices gained or money earned by the protagonists  themselves or their illustrious immediate ancestors; a good judge and administrator could ask  all those who had experienced his excellent professional conduct, to testify to that fact in  good conscience.  

Derived from Islamic jurisprudence, kin to comparable documents in Perso-Islamicate  contexts, but distinctively regionalized in the Indian subcontinent, mahzar-namas offer a  fragmentary but kaleidoscopic insight into the meanings of law in the Indian subcontinent, from under Mughal rule to colonialism. They offer to take law beyond its undeserved image  as the “state’s emissary” and instead allow us to decode some everyday notions of rights and  wrongs in early modern South Asia through the articulate assertions of ordinary litigants,  disregarding, for a while, the claim of imperial regimes to be the ultimate and exclusive  referee of legal truth and reminding us, that after all, law is about the aspiration for justice. 

Reference

1.         The Mughals (Persian mis-appellation of “Mongol”) were a Turko-Mongol dynasty of Central Asian origin,  that established its rule in north India in 1526. Mughal                       power declined rapidly after the sixth emperor  Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, although officially they remained sovereigns of India until 1857. For an introduction, see J.F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For a   history of the Marathas, see Stewart Gordon, The Marathas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

2.         Persian document no. 2703/62. National Archives of India, Delhi.

3.         Given the social background of the protagonist, it is unlikely that he could write Persian himself. In other  documents pertaining to the family, he signed his name in the margin in the Nagri character.

4.         While not described as such, a close reading of the catalogue descriptions of the 5-6,000 documents in this  collection reveals that a large proportion must have been the collections of specific families. The National  Archives of India does not provide any information about the process of acquisition nor verification of these  documents. But other sub-sets from the Acquired Documents series, such as the “Cambay documents” have  been used with confidence by other scholars, for example Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India:  Power Relations in Western India, 1572-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). I have also been  able to trace a complementary set of documents pertaining to this family in the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah,  Kuwait, which contains mainly “higher-status” documents such as parwanas, which bear seals of officials and  notes on the reverse that correspond to Mughal chancellery procedure. 

5.         Hasan, State and Locality; Gommans has made very similar points regarding patterns of Mughal military  recruitment. Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and the Highroads to Empire, 1500-1700 (London: Routledge, 2002).

6.         The Function of Documents in Islamic Law: the Chapters on Sales from Ṭaḥāwī's Kitāb al-shurūṭ al-kabīr, ed.  and trans. Jeanette Wakin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972), pp. 9-29.

7.         The word is a typical Indo-Persian modification, involving a redundant suffix. The Persian suffix “nama” –  otherwise denotes a wide variety of written prose forms, including history, biography, legal documents, and  letters. Moreover, the addition of this redundant suffix was unsystematic: while Purshottam Das’s document  self-described itself as naql-i mahzar, similar documents from the same period and the neighbouring province of Khandesh were self-described as mahzar-nama. For an example of the latter, see M. Ziauddin Ahmad  ed. Mughal Archives: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Documents pertaining to the Reign of Shah Jahan (1652- 1658) vol. I (Hyderabad: A.P. State Archives 1977), pp.325-27. Also, several (but again, not all) of the  formularies on which these documents were based called the form of such documents mahzar-nama. Thus far, I  have not been able to discover a perfectly consistent pattern – but it does appear that declarative documents of  the southern and western Indian type (see below) were called mahzars, whereas evidentiary instruments of the  kind the Purshottam Das used were most often called mahzar-namas. As such, I have retained “mahzar-nama”  to nominate the legal documentary form this article is concerned with, given its evident association with Indo Persian chancellery culture, and its grouping in formularies with legal deeds, such as bai‘-nama (sale deed),  rahn-nama (pawn/mortgage deed), nikah-nama (marriage contract) and so on.

8.         Witness clauses were a common feature in Islamic legal deeds, which recorded inter-personal property  transactions such as sale, pawning, etc. See Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the  Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). There are several such  Persian-language legal deeds among the documents of Purshottam Das’s family.

9.         Within the vast literature on Islamic law, some classics that have inspired this work are: Wael Hallaq, “Was  the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 16: 1 (1984): 3-41; Wael Hallaq,  “From Fatwas to Furu‘: Growth and Change in Islamic Substantive Law,” Islamic Law and Society, 1 (February  1994): 17-56; Wael Hallaq, Shari‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University  Press, 2009); Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic  Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 

10.       In general, scholarly interest in Islamic law in South Asia has been limited to accounts of its experience under  colonial rule. Most scholars agree that colonialism rendered shari‘a into a fossilised and caricatured version of  itself. Scott A. Kugle, “Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial Asia,” Modern Asian Studies, 35: 2 (2001): 257-313; Gregory Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments and Society in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Michael Anderson, “Islamic Law and  the Colonial Encounter in British India,” in David Arnold and Peter Robb (eds) Institutions and Ideologies: A  South Asia Reader (Richmond: Routledge Curzon, 1993), pp. 165-185. Even Wael Hallaq has very little to add  about Islamic law in South Asia beyond the narrative of colonial distortion. Hallaq, Shari ‘a, pp. 371-395; in  contrast, scholars have pointed to the intellectual richness and effective activism that scholars of Islamic law,  both traditional and modern, remained capable of, well into the twentieth century. Alan Günther, “Syed  Mahmud and the Transformation of Muslim Law in British India,” Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, McGill  University, 2006; Rohit De, “Mumtaz Bibi’s Broken Heart: The Many Lives of the Dissolution of Muslim  Marriages Act,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 46: 1 (2009): 105-130, Barbara Metcalf,  Deoband: Islamic Revival in British India, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982);  Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton  University Press, 2002). South Asian historiography on pre-colonial Islamic law remains curiously reticent.  Scholars have instead focussed on alternative codes of righteousness that scholars deem to have rendered  shari‘a an “ambiguous” entity in India. Katherine Ewing, ed., Sharī‘a and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 

11.       Sumit Guha, “Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400- 1900,” The American Historical Review, 109: 4 (2004): 1084-1103.

12.       A.A. Kaderi, “A Mahdar from Hukeri in Karnataka,” Epigraphica Indica: Arabic and Persian Supplement  (Delhi: Archaeological Survey, 1972): 51-77 at 56-57.

13.       Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Making of a Munshi,” Comparative Studies of South Asia,  Africa and the Middle East, 24: 2 (2004): 61-72; Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook (eds) Special issue  on Munshis, Pandits and Record-Keepers: Scribal Communities and Historical Change in India, Indian  Economic and Social History Review, 47: 4 (2010): 441-615.

14.       Kathryn Burns, “Notaries, Truth and Consequences,” The American Historical Review, 110: 2 (2005): 350- 379. 

15.       Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2012).

16.       Burns, “Notaries, Truth and Consequences"; Paolo Sartori, “Authorized Lies: Colonial Agency and Legal  Hybrids in Tashkent, c. 1881-1893,” Journal of the Economic and Social history of the Orient, 55 (2012): 688- 717. Note that these methodological aims are very similar to that expressed by Guha, “Speaking Historically.”

17.       Paolo Sartori, “Introduction: On the Social in Central Asian History: Notes in the Margins of Legal Records,”  in Sartori ed. Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia (19th-Early 20th Century) (Leiden: Brill,  2013), pp. 1-22.

18.       Singha, A Despotism of Law; David Washbrook, "Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India", Modern  Asian Studies 15: 3 (1981): 649-721.

19.       As Ranajit Guha did in “Chandra’s Death,” in Subaltern Studies V, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford  University Press, 1987), pp. 134–65.

20.       Shahid Amin, “Approver’s Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case of Chauri Chaura,”in Ibid., pp. 166-202. 

21.       Lauren Benton, “Introduction” to Special Forum on Law and Empire in Global Perspective, American  Historical Review, 1092-1100. 

22.       Nandini Chatterjee, “Hindu City and Just Empire: Banaras and India in Ali Ibrahim Khan's legal  imagination,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 15: 1 (2014), online only.

23.       Christoph Werner, An Iranian Town in Transition: A Social and Economic History of the Elites of Tabriz,  1747-1848 (Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz, 2000); works by Sartori, cited above.

24.       Brinkley Messick’s formulation in his The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim  Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 251.

25.       This being the view of Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), p. 82; also  Wakin, Function of Documents, pp. 4-10.

26.       Wael Hallaq, “Model Shurūṭ Works and the Dialectic of Doctrine and Practice,” Islamic Law and Society, 2: 2  (1995): 109-134. 

27.       On mazhabs, see Christopher Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th-10th centuries C.E.  (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 

28.       Hallaq, “Model Shurūṭ Works,” 115.

29.       Leon Buskens, “Tales According to the Book: Professional Witnesses (`udul) as Cultural Brokers in  Morocco,” in Baudoin Dupret, Barbara Baskens, Annelies Moors (eds) Narratives of Truth in Islamic  Law (London: Tauris, 2008), pp. 143-160.

30.       On “pensmen” see Hayden Bellenoit, “Between Qanungos and Clerks: The Cultural and Service Worlds of  Hindusan’s Pensmen, c. 1750-1850,” Modern Asian Studies, 48: 4 (2014): 872-910. 

31.       Or mahazir and sijillat in the Arabic pluralized form. It is worth noting here that the concepts of private and  public, that Wakin uses, may not be fully relevant before the formalisation of Ottoman archival practices,  although there is also debate about the novelty of Ottoman record-keeping. Wael B. Hallaq, “The "qāḍī's dīwān  (sijill)" before the Ottomans,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 61: 3 (1998): 415-436.

32.       Wakin, p. 10-29. 

33.       Sheikh Nizam and others, Fatawa-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 shurut runs pp. 125-298.

34.       Ibid., pp. 9-11; on ikhtilaf, see Wakin, Function of Documents, pp. 32-34 ; Hallaq, pp. 129-131.

35.       Sheikh Nizam and others, Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiri, p. 11.

36.       Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200-1800 (London: Hurst & Co., 2004).

37.       Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Salatin-i Dihli ke mazhabi rujhanat (Delhi: Idarat-i Adabiyat-i Dilli, 1981), pp. 121- 122; 209; 315-16.

38.       The first historian to name it a such was Vincent Smith; for perhaps the earliest criticism, and the argument  that it was essentially a political response to external competition and internal threats, see F.W. Buckler, “A  New Interpretation of Akbar's "Infallibility" Decree of 1579,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great  Britain and Ireland, 4 (1924): 591-608.

39.       ‘Abd al-Qadir Badauni, Muntakhab ut-tawarikh (ed.) W.N. Lees and Ahmad Ali (Calcutta: Bibliotheca  Indica, 1865), pp. 171-172.

40.       S.A.A. Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbar’s Reign (2nd edition, Delhi:  Manohar, 1975), pp. 141-174

41.       Iqtidar Alam Khan, “The Nobility under Akbar and the Development of his Religious Policy,” Journal of the  Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1/2 (1968): 29-36.

42.       Kaderi, “A Mahdar from Hukeri.” A very similar collective grant was recorded in a mahzar scribed in 1724 in  Ahmedabad; Z.A. Desai, “Mahzar – An Important Source for Administrative History,” The Indian Historical  Review, 25: 1 (1998), 16-28. Being based on a sample of the declarative type only, Desai’s attempt at a typology  was inadequate.

43.       Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Leiden: Brill. 2013), pp. 66- 67. 

44.       And possibly also Gujarati; see Desai, “Mahzar.”

45.       V.T. Gune, The Judicial System of the Marathas (Poona: Deccan College, 1953), pp. 141-142.

46.       Ibid., pp. 135-6; Gune analysed 161 mahzars from between 1300-1800; and a further 210 documents from  1650-1800, including several mahzars. 

47.       Ibid., p. 274.

48.       Ibid., pp. 76-80.

49.       See footnote 8.

50.       On the Islamic legal obligation of testifying, except in cases involving fixed punishments (hadd), see James  Baldwin, “Prostitution, Islamic Law and Ottoman Societies,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the  Orient, 55: 1(2012): 117-152; Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice  from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 12-19. 

51.       Francis Robinson, The 'Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic culture in South Asia (London: Hurst, 2001). I  am grateful to Prof. Robinson for providing me with a copy of the Firangi Mahall mahzar-nama. A blurred  facsimile and transcription of the text is available in Muhammad Reza Ansari Firangi Mahali, Bani-yi dars-i nizami: Ustad al-Hind Mulla Nizam ud-din Muhammad Firangi Mahali (Lucknow: U.P. Urdu Academy, 1973),   pp. 21-34.

52.       On the conflict between local landlords and grant-holding scholars, see Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire  in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707-48 (Delhi: OUP, 1986), pp. 117-122.

53.       Robinson, The ‘Ulama of Farangi Mahall¸ p. 106.

54.       I am grateful to Paolo Sartori showing me samples of such documents.

55.       Paolo Sartori, “Colonial legislation meets sharī ‘ a: Muslims’ land rights in Russian Turkestan,” Central Asian  Survey, 29: 1 (2010), 43-60, especially footnote 29; Phillip Reichmuth, “‘Lost in the Revolution’: Bukharan  Waqf and Testimony Documents from the Early Soviet Period,” Die Welt Des Islams, 50 (2010): 362-396.

56.       In fact, documents called ishtishhadnamas occur in Indian collections, too, especially of the nineteenth  century; the possibility of a renewed and later stage of mutual remains open to further research.

57.       “Testimony from Zanjan and Khamsah,” 1893/94, http://www.asnad.org/en/document/667/ [last accessed 18  July 2015]. I am indebted to Christoph Werner for pointing me to this document.

58.       For example in the Hiba-nama or gift-deed made out by Musammat (Madam) Goran, Persian document no.  2738/8, NAI.

59.       Sheikh Nizam and others, Fatawa-yi ‘Alamgiri, X, p. 11.

60.       See note 13. 

61.       For example, Anon., Khulasat al-siyaq, Add. 6588, British Library.

62.       Riazul Islam, A Calendar of Documents on Indo-Persian Relations (Tehran: Iranian Culture Foundation,  1979–1982), 1:1–37.

63.       Sunil Sharma, Amir Khusraw: the Poet of Sufis and Sultans (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005).

64.       S.R. Faruqui, “Stranger in the City: the Poetics of Sabk-i Hindi,” Annual of Urdu Studies, 19 (2004): 1-59.

65.       Amir Khusrau Dehlavi, A‘jaz-e Khusravi (Lucknow: Nawal Kishore, n.d.), Risala II, Khat I [no page  numbers]. 

66.       Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press, 2005), pp. 59-77.

67.       One of the manuscripts of this work is Add. 1739, British Library, London.

68.       Mukatabat-i Allami (Insha-yi Abul Fazl): the Letters of the Emperor Akbar in English Translation (New  Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1998).

69.       Ishtiaq Ahmad Zilli, The Mughal State and Culture 1556-1598: selected letters and documents from  Munshaat-i-Namakin (New Delhi: Manohar, 2007), Chapter 7, pp. 331-70. 

70.       Muzaffar Alam, “The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics,” Modern Asian Studies, 32: 2 (1998),  317-349 at 327.

71.       Insha-yi Harkaran Add. 26,140 British Library; translated as The Forms of Herkern, by Francis Balfour  (Calcutta: publisher not known, 1781), pp. 184-187.

72.       Tarikh-i Shakir Khani, Add. MSS 6585, British Library, ff. 122a-155a. The mahzar-nama within this section  is reproduced in Ibn Hasan, The Central Structure of the Mughal Empire: and its Practical Working up to the  Year 1657 (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 367.

73.       Alam, The Crisis of Empire, pp. 175-203; J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (Cambridge: Cambridge  University Press, 1998), pp. 82-98.

74.       For some key discussions of this process of appropriation, see Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information:  Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University  Press, 1998); Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: the British in Bengal  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

75.       J.S. Grewal, In the By-Lanes of History: Some Persian Documents from a Punjab Town (Simla: Indian  Institute of Advanced Study, 1975), pp. 4-5.

76.       Vikram Samvat; one of the two main pre-Islamic Indian eras, the other being Saka.

77.       Alam, The Crisis of Empire, pp. 169-175.

78.       Sujan Rai Bhandari, Khulasatu-t-tawarikh (ed.) M. Zafar Hasan (Delhi: J& Sons Press, 1918).

79.       J.S. Grewal, In the By-Lanes of History: Some Persian Documents from a Punjab Town (Simla: Indian  Institute of Advanced Study, 1975), pp. 299-302.

80.       Peter Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); for a fuller  discussion of Ali Ibrahim Khan’s life and legal ideas, see Chatterjee, “Hindu City and Just Empire.”

81.       “Certificate of the Inhabitants of Benares in Support of Ali Ibrahim Khan’,” Add. 29,217 (a), British Library.

82.       Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: the Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton  University Press, 2005), p. 67

83.       There is a vast historiography of the 1857 mutiny of soldiers and coincident civil rebellion in northern and  central India. The book that records the events of Delhi most closely is William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal:  the Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).

84.       On this tribunal, see Iqbal Husain, “The Rebel Administration of Delhi,” in Shireen Moosvi (ed.) Facets of  the Great Revolt: 1857 (Delhi: Tulika 2008), pp. 23-38. 

85.       Translations of many of these records are in Mahmood Farooqui, Besieged: Voices from Delhi (Delhi:  Penguin, 2010).

86.       Mahzar-nama of Hafiz Abdur Rahman signed by several citizens of Delhi, Mutiny Papers, NAI, Coll 103- 131.

87.       Thus revealing the diglossia, or unstable movement along a spectrum of registers, that characterised the  relationship between Urdu and Persian well into the nineteenth century. Javed Majeed, ‘“The Jargon of  Indostan”: An Exploration of Jargon in Urdu and East India Company English’ in Peter Burke (ed.) Languages  and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 182-205. 88 Farooqui, Besieged, pp. 161-162.