The Calligraphic Company StateFootnote ⁵

In the context of imperial expansion, contests over the execution and interpretation of legal documents constituted an important arena in which different modes of legal life “jockeyed” with one another for supremacy.Footnote ⁶ In some locations, such contests resulted in the complete disregard for existing systems of sovereignty and prevailing claims to property in exchange for European modes of laying claim to and establishing ownership.Footnote ⁷ In the case of western India at this time, such negotiations materialised in acts of terminological appropriation and rough approximation, bringing a diverse array of documentary forms under common rubrics comprehensible to Company officials. Legislation flattened entire aspects of indigenous legal life, erasing nuance through translation into European languages and overriding local difference through attempts to understand diffuse legal processes via orthodox interpretations.Footnote ⁸ Such activities privileged specific understandings of what constituted the “legal” and placed other practices outside the recognised legal order.Footnote ⁹ Matters pertaining to marriage and other “doctrinal” issues remained the qazi’s responsibility while associated processes of legal representation (i.e., vakālat and muḵẖtārī) became those of the state (Figure 1). Writings produced by intermediaries such as Aḥmad Ḥusain trace this transformation, indexing the terminological transformations that marked the pernicious process through which colonial rule constructed categories of religious life and law at a time when jurisdictions, domains, procedures, and modalities were yet unsettled.

Figure 1 Sample muḵẖtār-nāma from a late-nineteenth-century writing guide, showing the use of five-rupee stamp paper at the top. Courtesy of the British Library. © British Library Board (Asia, Pacific and Africa Printed Books and Serials, 14117.b.27(2), Reference MaulvīMaulvī Sayyid Bāqir ʿAlī, Majmūʿa-yi Kāg̱ẖaẕāt-i Kārravā’ī [Lucknow: Gulshan-i Muḥammadī Press, 1890], 51).

Scholarship from across the subcontinent has demonstrated that within the context of British expansion, intermediaries, interpreters, spies, scribes, translators, news-writers, and letter-carriers made vital contributions to the project of imperial knowledge production and domination.Footnote ¹⁰ What emerges from these studies is a common argument linking information orders and scribal practices with imperial expansion through the production, translation, interpretation, and possession of written records. Law was also central to this project such that “knowing the country,” to use C. A. Bayly’s expression, was synonymous with acquiring, analysing, and controlling the production of legal documents. While the historiography on colonial legal change is rife with studies of colonial efforts to translate and codify religious law, interest in the appropriation and transformation of existing documentary forms has received far less attention.Footnote ¹¹ The present study uses documents written and preserved by a family of qazis from Bharuch to explore this aspect of legal history and to trace the effects of legal categorisation on the articulation and documentary construction of socio-familial relations. Such records demonstrate the everyday materiality of law as it intersected with and confronted the ideologies of imperial translation projects.

As legal intermediaries, well versed in the authorial skills necessary to turn the vicissitudes of ordinary life into the language of legal writing, qazis held a position of privilege within this scramble for information. They were channels through which EIC directives could move and sluices capable of curtailing the flow of information.Footnote ¹² In their negotiations with the Company state, the qazis of Bharuch not only resisted wholesale appropriations and attempts to import entire categories of legal activity into the domain of the Company’s subordinate courts but also contributed to the process of translating local practices into forms more readily recognised by the state. Aḥmad Ḥusain and his colleagues brokered information exchanges between Company civil servants anxious to quell rural disorder and local individuals who sought protection in the law to safeguard their everyday transactions. Losing the right to oversee the diversity of documents formerly within their domain, while retaining the right to produce the documents Company officials considered properly “doctrinal” or religious at the end of these negotiations, marked not simply the qazis’ loss of status in the face of legal modernisation but more importantly the making of a legal category for the qazis’ now-identified “Muslim” clients—one that would have lasting effects on legal access and status in the decades to follow. The transition from a world of legal heterogeneity to one characterised by codified uniformity, however, took time, and the qazis of Bharuch played but one part in this transformation.Footnote ¹³

A History of Service to the State

Negotiations between the qazis of Bharuch and Company administrators spanned four generations of Aḥmad Ḥusain’s family and surfaced during several successive phases of Company policy (see Figure 2 below). The family’s documented interactions began in 1803 when, following its takeover of Bharuch, the Company acknowledged the claim to the office of qazi of Zain-ul-ʿĀbidīn, Aḥmad Ḥusain’s grandfather. During Zain-ul-ʿĀbidīn’s lifetime, the Company began the process of converting the qazi’s office from one supported by nominal fees and stipendiary entitlements (in the form of land grants, honorary shawls, and other perquisites) to one based in salaried employment. For Zain-ul-ʿĀbidīn, this change meant that upon the recommendation of Judge Charles George Prendergast, who believed the office deserved a higher salary owing to “the difficulty there at present appears to be in procuring Native Law Officers for Company courts possessing the necessary qualification[s],” the qazi began to receive a monthly salary of one hundred rupees, in addition to “the usual presents of a pair of Shawls” (valued at 100–120 rupees) on the occasion of the ʿĪd holidays.Footnote ¹⁴ Along with his salary, Zain-ul-ʿĀbidīn continued to collect fees for authenticating documents and performing marriage ceremonies while also working in the Company’s subordinate courts.Footnote ¹⁵

Figure 2 Line of succession for the office of the qazi in Bharuch. © Elizabeth Lhost.

When Zain-ul-ʿĀbidīn passed away in 1822, the position of qazi went to his son, Sayyid Murtaẓā.Footnote ¹⁶ Once in office, Sayyid Murtaẓā successfully extended his jurisdiction from the city to the surrounding district (pargana). After complaining about the harassment he faced “in the discharge of his duties . . . in the Purguna,” Sayyid Murtaẓā convinced the judicial commissioner then on circuit to grant him a new sanad (certificate of appointment) as “Kazee of the Town and Purgunnah of Broach,” to mark this extension.Footnote ¹⁷ When Sayyid Aḥmad Ḥusain then became qazi following his uncle’s death, he assumed jurisdiction over the expanded territory of the city and the district. As past experiences showed, petitioning the Company was a profitable method for affirming one’s status and authority.

The family further confirmed its hold on the qaziship at Bharuch when Aḥmad Ḥusain successfully passed the office to his son, Muḥammad Nūr-ud-dīn Ḥusain, in 1849. Although Company policy rejected the idea of hereditary appointments, the judicial department routinely found ways to make exceptions.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, when Aḥmad Ḥusain, long-time Company supporter and employee, wrote to announce his impending retirement and to request that the position proceed to his son, the government agreed, following a cursory consideration of the proposed candidate’s qualifications. Naturally, Nūr-ud-dīn was rightfully qualified for the office, “well versed in the Persian and Arabic languages,” and his family had been “well wishers of the Government long before the rule was established in [the] country.”Footnote ¹⁹ Once again, following a series of petitions, the family secured its position as an ally and important agent of law through expressions of utility and fidelity to the EIC.

Sayyid Aḥmad Ḥusain’s above-cited complaint against Judge Romer, however, drew upon more than the family’s reputation: it explicitly cited the economic losses he faced as a direct result of this most recent interference. As part of his complaint, Aḥmad Ḥusain claimed to earn upwards of seven hundred rupees annually for his work signing and sealing documents like vakālat- and muḵẖtār-nāmas.Footnote ²⁰ Certainly, given their professional status, the family was not destitute, but there is little evidence to support the particularities of his complaint. A government statement compiled in 1864 calculated the total annual income for the qazi of Bharuch at Rs. 786, the majority of which (Rs. 570) came from endowments and the remainder of which (Rs. 216) the qazi received in the form of tributary ḵẖilʿats (robes).Footnote ²¹ Receipt of this amount annually made the qazi of Bharuch one of the highest-paid functionaries in the Bombay Presidency, earning more than qazis in neighbouring towns, and demonstrating his symbolic—and administrative—importance for British rule.

In the eyes of Company officials, however, the qazi was a religious figure whose domain extended only to matters of a “doctrinal” nature, belonging to religious ritual and what would become the contents of Islamic personal law.Footnote ²² From this perspective, powers of attorney and other deeds of representation did not fall within his ambit and consequently belonged to the documentary purview of the growing Company state. Narrowing the qazi’s authority to the categories of religious personal law necessarily limited the application of his expertise to an artificially delimited range of legal transactions. Furthermore, what Company policy did not acknowledge was the extent to which vakālat-nāmas, muḵẖtār-nāmas, and other purportedly “secular” documents were embedded within the material practices of documenting and performing “religious” functions like overseeing marriages and divorces. That is, even in the context of religious practice, these transactions called upon a web of legal documentary forms, many of which Company officials felt belonged to the jurisdiction of their “secular” courts. In this regard, then, evidence from the records of the qazis of Bharuch demonstrate that EIC negotiations not only limited the types of transactions over which the qazi could exercise his authority but also recast those transactions within an Anglophone understanding of marriage and divorce, redefining how such transactions were negotiated and executed in documents the qazi had formerly produced with an eye toward other social, economic, and material concerns.Footnote ²³

The Life of a Local Qazi

Company records provide ample evidence about the nature and substance of the qazis’ complaints against new policies but provide little information about their day-to-day work. Such considerations require additional sources. Fortunately, relevant sources for the qazis of Bharuch exist in the form of manuscripts, loose documents, and registers previously belonging to the family, including an important manuscript titled A Manual for Qazis and Muftis, which was compiled toward the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁴ Now held in the Oriental Records section of the National Archives of India, the manuscript comprises fifty-six pages of Persian-language text with interlinear glosses, translations, and brief explanations. The work provides little instruction for a local qazi looking to establish his practice in a particular locale but offers instead an overview of the documents qazis would author and authenticate.

Documents included within the compilation speak to the breadth of the qazis’ notarial practices, but the English title affixed to the manuscript is misleading. The so-called manual includes no discussion of the qazi’s roles or responsibilities, nor does it describe proper methods for maintaining records, performing public services, or training for the office, as one might expect from a work belonging to the adab al-qāḍī (manners and etiquette of qazis) genre.Footnote ²⁵ Instead, the text provides only copies of legal documents, collected almost entirely from popular works of munshāt in circulation at the time.Footnote ²⁶ Close reading shows that entire sections of the text are copied from common works of inshāʾ, including chapters six and seven of Harkaran Dās Kanbōh’s Inshaʾ-yi Harkaran, which relate to legal agreements (qabālajāt-i sharʿī).Footnote ²⁷ Nonetheless, the simple act of copying provides insights into the author’s own perception of the office. The selection of certain documents demonstrates the compiler’s interest in some legal forms over others, while the reference to well-known works of inshāʾ place him within the wider world of Mughal intellectual life and Indo-Persian literary culture more broadly. Furthermore, the fact that only certain legal documents from these works of inshāʾ made their way into the Bharuch Manual underscores the connection between the selected documents and the qazi’s daily life. More a commonplace book than a rule-bound manual, the Bharuch Manual stands as a miscellaneous collection of everyday document forms gathered into a single text for ease of regular reference, offering a detailed snapshot of legal documentary culture in late-eighteenth-century Gujarat.Footnote ²⁸

Interlinear notes and marginal glosses further underscore the text’s aims and hint at the compiler’s need to rely upon such devices to understand and interpret the technicalities of the documents he produced.Footnote ²⁹ For instance, the compiler glosses terms like intifāʿ (profit, benefit) as fāʼida (profit, gain), marks nafs (soul, spirit, self) as ẕāt (essence, substance, self), and explains the title of a sample iʿtāq nāma (deed of manumission) using the more common term āzād (freedom, emancipation). In sum, these explanatory notes point to a preference for Persian expressions over their more legalistic Arabic equivalents and highlights the text’s didactic application.Footnote ³⁰ In this way, the Bharuch Manual showcases the qazi’s day-to-day activities as notary and illustrates the importance he placed on the accurate transcription and interpretation of legal documents.Footnote ³¹ Further enquiry into the linguistic register of Persian prevailing at the time could, perhaps, situate the text more accurately within the local Bharuch milieu, but even without extensive lexicographic analysis, the text’s interlinear notes clarify the work’s purpose as an instrument of instruction and accessible aide-mémoire.

Orthographic variation also draws attention to the text’s geographic origins and its local relevance. For example, the text’s only sample fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī (a deed of release found in the qazis’ registers discussed below) appears in the section of the Manual copied from the Inshāʾ-yi Harkaran under the heading “pāra-ḵẖat̤t̤ī.”Footnote ³² The divergent spelling here could reflect a conscious decision to replace the Arabic word fārig̱ẖ (void, vacant) with the Persian pāra (as in, pāra-pāra kardan, to tear to pieces, to nullify), but a more likely explanation lies in the nature of the local Gujarati script. In Gujarati, the aspirated pha and the fricative fa are represented with the same character, rather than with two distinct characters, as in Persian. From the cover pages of the qazis’ later registers containing fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤īs, this explanation becomes even more probable. These headings identify the registers’ contents with the word phārēg, written in the Gujarati script, rather than with the term fārig̱ẖ, written in the Perso-Arabic script. The fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī (or pāra-ḵẖat̤t̤ī) is only one of several document drafts replicated in the Bharuch Manual but the orthographic shift noted here—as well as in the document’s conversion from a generic form of debt release to one of divorce noted in the registers analysed below—illustrates one of the ways terminological adjustments marked larger changes in the construction and redefinition of legal categories at this time.

As a collection, the Bharuch Manual reveals the diversity of documentary forms and legal matters that constituted the qazi’s professional activities around the turn of the nineteenth century. Altogether, the text contains draft copies of nearly fifty documents, encompassing numerous kinds of agreements and arrangements, from documents for buying and selling houses (baiʿ nāma-yi ḥawīlī), gardens (tamassuk-i firūḵẖt-i bāg̱ẖ), and slave girls (ḵẖat̤-i ḵẖarīd-i kanīzak); to papers for renting and leasing property (qabāla-yi rahn-i ḥawīlī; ḵẖat̤-i kirāya-yi ḥawīlī); to deeds for establishing heirs and dividing inheritances (qasm nāma; wirās̤at nāma); to certificates for manumitting slaves (iʿtāq nāma; āzād nāma-yi g̱ẖulām) and recording animal casualties (saqt̤ī-nāma-yi asp). In addition to commercial documents acknowledging and dissolving financial agreements (e.g., tamassuk-i dain maʿ ẓāminī; ḵẖat̤-i muẓārabat; pāra ḵẖat̤t̤ī wa lā dʿawá), the manual also includes deeds of marriage (nikāḥ nāma) and divorce (t̤alāq nāma).Footnote ³³ In short, the contents cover a range of social, economic, and material relations that surpass the narrow definition of “doctrinal” ascribed to the qazi’s office in Company discourse and make it clear that the qazi signed and authorised multiple types of transactions in his everyday course of affairs.Footnote ³⁴

Local Notarial Practice

Before the qazis of Bharuch began to maintain registers as servants of the EIC under the directives of Regulation XXVI of 1827, they dealt in individual documents.Footnote ³⁵ The family’s extant collection includes a dozen specimen from 1670 to 1816 CE (1080–1231 AH).Footnote ³⁶ The majority of these documents are deeds of sale for single-storey houses and small parcels of land, but together, the documents provide useful information about social relations, property ownership, and legal activities in and around the city of Bharuch. They include references to property held under security bonds (tamassuk) certified by the qazi (ba-muhr-i īn ḵẖādim-i sharʿ-i sharīf); to the acknowledgement of rights of inheritance involved in the sale of different parcels; to the existence of joint ownership, incorporation (mushārakat), or the lack thereof in some cases; and to representation before the qazi personally (aṣālatāñ) or through an agent (vakālatāñ). Furthermore, although the documents cover a range of years from Aurangzeb’s reign (r. 1658–1707) to the early colonial period (e.g., 1231 AH/1816 CE), they exhibit many features in common.

As was customary, the documents bear the seal of the qazi (see Figure 3), or, as in one example, that of the mufti.Footnote ³⁷ Some also include private seals among the attestations, though most witnesses simply signed the deed. Persian is the primary language, but attestations appear in several scripts (Perso-Arabic, Gujarati, Modi, and Devanagari), highlighting the heterographic, if not heteroglossic, context of their production. While witness attestations crowd the main text—often filling the entire right-hand margin with a dozen or more statements—the main contracting parties often mark their assent with a simple “sign” (ʿalāmāt) or decorative object (e.g., a flower), rather than with a signature. The signatures and “signs” also indicate varying levels of literacy among the contracting parties, suggesting that legal documentation was not the exclusive domain of literate merchant communities but that agriculturalists and artisans also participated.Footnote ³⁸

Figure 3 Sale deed from the family archives of the qazis of Bharuch, with the seal of the qazi at the top, and attestations along the right-hand margin. 19 Muḥarram 1195 AH (15 January 1781 CE). Courtesy of the National Archives of India (Miscellaneous Manuscripts Microfilmed at Bharuch, Acc. No. 851, Sr. No. 45).

The Bharuch collection reflects a period of transition, from the symbolic elegance of imperial decrees to the pragmatic functionalism of Company practice.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, the qazis of Bharuch (and their demands to retain the right to author and authenticate all manner of legal documents, including the aforementioned vakālat- and muḵẖtār-nāmas) challenged the Company’s documentary hegemony and brought to light the pressing need to declare certain types of documents and deeds the explicit purview of Company scribes and employees. Removing the authority to authenticate “secular” contracts from the legal domain of the qazi’s religious or “doctrinal” work was one step toward the redefinition of Islamic law in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ Eighteenth-century specimens from the family’s collection underscore the transition that took place in the nineteenth century as new documentary regimes modified the qazi’s work and altered his notarial position.Footnote ⁴¹ The transition from flexible, personal documentation to abstract, tabular notation found in registers not only recast the qazi’s day-to-day responsibilities in line with those of Company accountants and administrative minions but also reshaped the very definition of what it meant to contract a marriage—not in terms of what was permissible or possible according to fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) but in terms of European notions of marriage, divorce, and other domestic contracts. Registers produced by the qazis of Bharuch illustrate the way novel registration procedures reduced complex, heterogeneous legal agreements to blunt transactional instruments.

From Document to Register

The introduction of tabular registers in the first decades of the nineteenth century changed the process of performing and documenting transactions with respect to form and content in two important ways. First, the register converted flexible narratives into rigid fill-in-the-blank forms. Second, the registers converted speaking subjects into recorded objects. Thus, with the shift from document to register, from private deed to (more) public record, the nature of these transactions also changed.Footnote ⁴² To demonstrate this point clearly, this section surveys a pair of registers containing fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤īs, or deeds of separation and release, as they moved from open-ended transcriptions of private, contractual agreements to tabular records with prescribed contents.Footnote ⁴³ While on the one hand these registers demonstrate prevailing differences between prescriptive formulae and the diversity of local practices, on the other hand they map directly onto the imperial project of separating, categorising, and manipulating categories of legal expression. Evidence from these registers thus points to the ways in which documentary practices shaped the construction of legal identities and the regulation of social practices in the city of Bharuch and throughout British India.

Normative manuals classify the fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī as a deed acknowledging the repayment of a debt and releasing the debtor. Contemporary law reports and dictionaries confirm this widespread usage and point to the deed’s utility in a variety of contexts, from maritime commercial debts to agricultural revenue collection to forms of divorce practised by non-Muslim groups.Footnote ⁴⁴ As a legal deed, then, the fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī straddled what would become the colonial categories of personal-religious and civil contract law. Entries recorded in the qazis’ two registers (see Figures 4 and 5) further evince this transformation from the form’s use as an umbrella term covering many types of nullification to one of increasing specificity, referring only to “divorce.” This semantic shift points to the larger effects of administrative efforts to fix legal terms generally and in the context of the fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī specifically, to move away from more capacious ideas of debt release to more rigid understandings of marital separation.Footnote ⁴⁵ The registers map these changes directly and materially, but to understand this transformation it is first necessary to consider the scope of the fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī as a legal form.

Fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤īs recorded in the registers from Bharuch mirror those found in normative texts: “I, who am so-and-so (falān), son of so-and-so, born of so-and-so, state and legally affirm that I release so-and-so from any obligation to me.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The difference between the qazi’s limited use of the term and the fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī’s more capacious definition is that in Bharuch, the contractual bind between the two parties is one of marital debt and obligation. Rather than mentioning an “account” (ḥisāb) or “property” (māl), as normative models might imply, the document now refers to “marital relations” (ʿalāqa-yi zaujīyat) and to the “bond of marriage” (qaid-i nikāḥ). Though it is tempting to read these documents simply as evidence of the qazi’s turn to family affairs, such a reading misses the legal-contractual nature of marriage in Islam and privileges instead the sacral, Christian definition of marriage. Indeed, the documents themselves retain the language of contracts and mutually constituted obligations and expectations reflective of the form’s other uses and the qazi’s wider sphere of legal practice. That is, in its earlier iterations, the fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī resisted easy classification and was not constrained to religious or “doctrinal” matters, as Company policy soon began to dictate.Footnote ⁴⁷ Replicating normative models, then, entries in the register appear as follows:

I, who am named Shaiḵẖ Mīr Muḥammad, son of Kālū, of the weaver community [qaum], … residing at Bharuch, state and legally affirm to this effect that I release one Zainab, daughter of Khaisā Bhāʾī, who is my lawfully wedded wife [zauj-i mankūḥa-yi man ast] from the confines of marriage after which there will not be, nor will remain, any marital connection between myself and the aforementioned Zainab.Footnote ⁴⁸

Figure 4 Fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī from the collection of the qazis of Bharuch, with witness signatures below, and the qazi’s certification at the bottom of the page. 4 Jumādī as̤-s̤ānī 1259 AH (3 July 1843 CE). Courtesy of the National Archives of India (Miscellaneous Manuscripts Microfilmed at Bharuch, Acc. No. 851, Sr. No. 41, Entry 3).

Figure 5 Tabular fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī-t̤alāq-nāma from the collection of the qazis of Bharuch. 22 Ẕī al-ḥijja 1265 (7 November 1849). Courtesy of the National Archives of India (Miscellaneous Manuscripts Microfilmed at Bharuch, Acc. No. 851, Sr. No. 42, Entry 9).

Given that Islamic law considers marriage a form of civil contract—a fact British civil servants struggled to comprehend well into the nineteenth century—the text translated above is not unexpected.Footnote ⁴⁹ What is important to note, however, is the qazi’s instrumentality in establishing and nullifying these marital relationships through the application of this generic legal form. Though most of the fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤īs recorded in these registers refer to divorce by mutual consent (for which there is no exchange of money or property) and reflect obligations and indebtedness rooted in the bonds of marriage, the register records other modes of separation as well. The document also requires the presence of—and gives voice to—both parties involved. After the husband’s opening statement, then, the entries also record the second party’s statement, acknowledging the wife’s presence and recording her testimony:

After both parties have spoken, the entry concludes with a statement confirming the terms of the release:

The parties then sign the entry—here Mīr Muḥammad signs in Perso-Arabic script while Zainab writes her name in Gujarati—and the witnesses affix their signatures (or signs). In this example, the four witness add their names in the Gujarati script, and the separation is complete.Footnote ⁵²

In the context of a highly mobile, mercantile population, access to documentation for legal separation can be as important as documentation for legal obligation. Thus, the deed of divorce by mutual consent should not be misread as an attempt to limit the woman’s access to economic or social capital. Rather, the deed’s easy execution and implicit acknowledgement of mutual debt and obligation reflect the legal subject-hood of both parties. Furthermore, the registers containing such fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤īs acknowledge the qazi’s central role in providing access to legal documentation for the purposes of creating, and in this case, terminating relationships. Despite the qazi’s centrality for documenting and authenticating the dissolution of such relationships, the pressures of bureaucratic record-keeping, already visible across these two registers of fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤īs (Sr. Nos. 41 and 42), compounded his transformation from non-religious notary to Islamic officiant.

In the second notebook, the fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī becomes a “fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī t̤alāqnāma” (deed of separation and divorce), bringing the multiple possibilities of separation (fārig̱ẖ) under the singular heading of t̤alāq (divorce) and making the heterogeneous possibility of the fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī compliant with EIC understandings of religious personal law under the heading “divorce.”Footnote ⁵³ With this change, the tabular layout also modified the composition of the legal agreements it recorded. Narrative statements allowed for individual variation and specification, but the tabular formats preferred by Company officials made the completion of an entry the only evidence of its legality. That is, where narrative statements embedded legal power within the complex of written statements, witness testimonies, and the qazi’s authority, register entries by contrast relied on the page’s filled-in spaces alone (see Figure 5). As such, the transition from narrative statement to tabular layout not only excised from his domain the flexible elements that allowed the qazi of Bharuch to interact with Gujarat’s diverse population but also turned the written contract imbued with legal authority into a register entry now dependent upon British interpretations of doctrinal practice. On paper, the qazi had become a religious figure solely assigned to handle the “doctrinal” affairs of the Muslim community.

Despite their efforts to negotiate with the Company, the qazis of Bharuch were unable to retain control over the range of legal deeds and documents they previously authorised, but at the same time, by asserting their rights to maintain limited records, the qazis’ transformation indexed the establishment of new legal categories—public and private, commercial and personal, secular and doctrinal—with categorically British valences. In so doing, the transformation of the fārig̱ẖḵẖat̤t̤ī from a deed of nullification and separation into a deed of divorce reflected a new interpretation for the qazi’s work in Bharuch and produced a quintessentially communal interpretation of his records. Rather than marking a steady progression from status to contract, the reconfiguration of the qazi’s work in nineteenth-century Bharuch instead marked a turn from written contract to religious-legal status.Footnote ⁵⁴