scholarly journals Transacting Business through/for Others in Early Colonial Western India: The Text, Context, and Meaning of a Mukhtār-nāma of 1821

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 640-659
Author(s):  
Ghulam A. Nadri
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Western India ◽  
Power Of Attorney ◽  
Business Transactions ◽  
Legal Instrument ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Text Context ◽  
Commercial Disputes

Abstract In the Persianate world, a mukhtār-nāma (deed of representation or a power of attorney) was a legal instrument that enabled people to transact business through a representative or agent (mukhtār or wakīl). This is a study of one such document written in Surat in 1821. It analyses the document for its socio-cultural, legal, and commercial significance as well as to explore the transition in the adjudication of commercial disputes and civil cases from Mughal to East India Company courts. It shows that there was a strong tradition of documenting business transactions in early modern South Asia and that such practices have continued into the colonial and postcolonial periods.

scholarly journals Transacting Politics in the Maratha Empire: An Agreement between Friends, 1795

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 826-863
Author(s):  
Dominic Vendell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Profit Sharing ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Western India ◽  
Legal Regime ◽  
Interstate Relations ◽  
Contractual Arrangements ◽  
Revenue Administration

Abstract Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate world. Focusing on the karārnāmā or agreement, this paper explores how a repertoire of Marathi and Persian documentary genres, binding formulae, and graphic procedures enabled legal, commercial, and diplomatic transactions in eighteenth-century western India. The exchange of written agreements facilitated interstate relations as well as profit-sharing contractual arrangements between individuals. Despite their centrality to interactions between European and South Asian polities, these instruments met with limited success in establishing rights to property under the legal regime of the East India Company-state and instead acquired new functions in colonial revenue administration.

The scribal household in flux: Pathways of Kayastha service in eighteenth-century Western India

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-566
Author(s):  
Dominic Vendell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Western India ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Early Modern South Asia

Scribes in early modern South Asia relied on their skill in writing to secure the support of powerful courtly patrons. The rapid expansion of emerging regional states in the eighteenth century created new opportunities to apply these skills to administration, land-holding, and politics. This article examines the changing professional identity of the Kayastha scribal household in eighteenth-century western India. I focus on the ascendancy of the Chitnis household of Satara in the context of the growth and diversification of Kayastha employment under the Maratha sovereign Shahu Bhonsle (1682–1749). By consolidating portfolios of titles, appointments, and rights to property, ambitious scribes and secretaries, as epitomised by the career of Govind Khanderao Chitnis (d. 1785), were able to pursue riskier and more lucrative political assignments and form networks of kinsmen and associates across Maratha governments. Yet greater scrutiny and competition for state largesse, not least from within the Chitnis household itself, forced members of later generations to adopt creative and sometimes risky strategies to defend their claims to property. This article explores how the profound dislocations of political transformation in eighteenth-century South Asia enabled distinctive modes of individual and collective self-fashioning amongst skilled, upwardly mobile groups.

“In that One the Ālif is Missing”: Eunuchs and the Politics of Masculinity in Early Colonial North India

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-116
Author(s):  
Nicholas Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Successor State ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Bodily Difference

AbstractAlthough ostensibly gendered as men and frequently maintaining independent, patriarchal households, enslaved eunuchs (khwājasarās) in pre- and early colonial regimes in South Asia were often mocked for their supposed effeminacy, bodily difference, and pretensions to normative masculinity. In the Mughal successor state of Awadh (1722-1856), such mockery grew more pronounced in the wake of growing financial demands from the British East India Company and attempts by eunuchs to alienate property with wills and testamentary bequests. Through examples of verbal derision directed at eunuchs, this essay shows that not only did ideas of normative masculinity serve as a vehicle for Awadh’s rulers to defend their sovereign authority from colonial encroachment, but that notions of normative manhood continued to inform eunuchs’ own self-perception into the nineteenth century.

Property and Its Rule (in Late Indo-Islamicate and Early Colonial) South Asia: What’s in a Name?

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 920-975
Author(s):  
Faisal Chaudhry
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Western Concept ◽  
History Of ◽  
Land Systems ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Vexed Question

AbstractThis article sets out a framework for understanding two key issues in the history of early modern and modern South Asia. First, it addresses the vexed question of the generalizability of the “Western” concept of property to Indo-Islamicate land systems. Rather than beginning from the idea of ‘Islamic property law/relations’ it proposes that we reconstruct concepts relating to the control of the earth’s material substrate in terms of four modes of idiomizing land in the Islamicate tradition. In light of how the latter reconstruction suggests that (Indo-)Islamicate modes of idiomization focused on the produce of land more than land itself, the article then turns to a second issue. This concerns the similarities and differences between the deontic cultures of rights and responsibilities that characterized early modern polities (both in Mughal India and England) and nineteenth-century ones (like metropolitan Britain’s and that emerging from the East India Company’s so-called rule of property in the subcontinent).

Ecology and Imperium: State Formation in Early Colonial Bengal c. 1765–1800

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Baijayanti Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
State Formation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Remote Areas ◽  
Tribal Communities ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Outlying Regions ◽  
Power And Authority

This article looks at the process of state formation in Bengal in the second half of the eighteenth century when the English East India Company emerged as the paramount authority in the province. The article argues that compared with the previous regime of the Nazims who were content in exercising a loose sovereignty over the outlying regions of Bengal, the Company showed greater initiative in conquering and pacifying the remote areas of the province. In terms of its ecology, the province of Bengal could be divided into three distinct zones: the plains, the hills and the delta. The process of state formation varied in these three distinct eco-zones. While it was easy for the Company to establish its control over the Bengal plains, it became increasingly difficult for them to establish their power and authority in the hill forests (home to autonomous tribal communities who resented and resisted British interference) and in the deltaic tracts where the maze of rivers provided safe refuge and a means of escape to the Magh pirates and every other state fugitive. This article is an account of the Company’s struggles to establish its supremacy in Bengal, but it also looks at the resistance offered by autonomous tribal groups to retain and preserve their independence. Finally, this article attempts to link ecology with the process of state formation in early colonial Bengal.

What is military labour? War, logistics, and the Mughals in early modern South Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 096834452091861
Author(s):  
Pratyay Nath
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
Early Modern South Asia

The category of ‘military labour’ has traditionally been used to designate ‘combat labour’ – the labour of soldiers. Focusing on the case of early modern South Asia, the present essay argues that this equivalence is misplaced and that it is a product of a distorted view of war defined primarily in terms of combat. The essay discusses the roles played by the logistical workforce of Mughal armies in conducting military campaigns and facilitating imperial expansion. It calls for broadening the category of ‘military labour’ to include all types of labour rendered consciously towards the fulfilment of military objectives.

The Languages of Petitioning in Early Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Levels

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.

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