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Petitions and Local Politics in the Late Mughal Empire: The view from Kol, 1741

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2019

ABHISHEK KAICKER
ABHISHEK KAICKER*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley Email: kaicker@berkeley.edu
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Abstract

This article uses a 1741 testimonial document from Kol (present-day Aligarh) to explore the workings of petitions in the local politics of the late Mughal empire. I suggest that even solitary documents such as this can be read as artefacts of the continuing processes of local politics which operated in excess of the administrative logic of the Mughal state. After surveying the place of petitions in the Mughal apparatus of justice from an administrative perspective, I examine the story of a vanished artisan named Hira to demonstrate that even scattered documents from the Mughal archive can reveal traces of the larger political processes of which a petition might be a single example. In this light, I demonstrate how the testimonial at hand can illuminate the everyday workings of the social and political order of the locality, and its relationship with larger structures of ideology and state power in an era of political decentralization.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Special Issue 1: Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia , January 2019 , pp. 21 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Robert Travers and Rohit De for organizing the workshop that led to this article, and for their detailed comments and assistance. In addition, I thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as Shahid Amin, Hasan Siddiqui, and Adam Mestyan for their very helpful comments. All errors are mine alone.

References

1 National Archives of India, Oriental Records (hereafter NAI, OR), Ac. No. 1330. The translation of the verse from the Quran is by Ahmed Ali. I thank Muzaffar Alam for discussing this document with me.

2 In this article I refer to the town by its historic name. On the renaming of the town, see the discussion in Siddiqi, Jamal Muhammad, Aligarh District: A History Survey, from Ancient Times to 1803 A.D. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1981), pp. 21–26Google Scholar.

3 My thinking in this regard owes much to the approaches advocated in Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘The Mughal State—Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 29.3 (1992), pp. 291–321CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘Introduction’, in The Mughal State, 1526–1750, (eds) Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (New Delhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1–71Google Scholar.

4 But for a pioneering early effort in this regard see Śaran, Parmatma, The Provincial Government of the Mughals, 1526–1658 (Lahore: Kitabistan, 1941)Google Scholar Chapter 9.

5 In the 1978 preface to the revised edition of his book, Ahmad, by then a judge of the Lahore High Court, claimed that ‘If Quaid-i-Azam had been alive I have doubt some important changes in the legal codes introduced by Non-Muslim administration would have taken place in Pakistan . . . It was however left to the credit of General Ziaul Haq, President of Pakistan, to reintroduce the system which we believe was basically ordained in the Holy Qurān. Those who feel skeptical that the Islamic Judicial System, 1400 Years old, may not work, will now have the satisfaction to feel that there is a well-organized judicial system which insisted on real and speedy justice.’ Ahmad, Muhammad Basheer, Judicial System of the Mughal Empire. A Study in Outline of the Administration of Justice under the Mughal Emperors Based Mainly on Cases Decided by Muslim Courts in India (Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1978), pp. xiii–xivGoogle Scholar. Perhaps, most damagingly, Ahmad cited, but did not otherwise describe or analyse, a collection of Mughal legal documents which he called the ‘Baqiyat-i Salehat’, which he claimed were donated to the National Museum in Karachi. A scholar reports being unable to locate them in the Museum in the recent past: see Munir, Dr Muhammad, ‘The Administration of Justice in the Reign of Akbar and Awrangzeb: An Overview’, Journal of Social Sciences, 5.1 (2012), pp. 1–19Google Scholar (accessed online via academia.edu).

6 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘Further Thoughts on an Enigma: The Tortuous Life of Nicolò Manucci, 1638–c. 1720’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 45.1 (2008), pp. 35–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Devra, G. L., ‘Manucci's Comments on Indian Social Customs and Traditions: A Critical Study’, in La Conoscenza Dell'Asia e Dell'Africa in Italia Nei Secoli XVIII E XIX, (ed.) Marazzi, Ugo (Napoli: Istituto universitario orientale, 1984), Vol. I.I, pp. 351–71Google Scholar.

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14 Sahai, Nandita Prasad, ‘Crafts and Statecraft in Eighteenth Century Jodhpur’, Modern Asian Studies, 41.4 (2007), pp. 683–722CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 708); Guha, Sumit, ‘The Qazi, the Dharmadhikari and the Judge: Political Authority and Legal Diversity in Pre-Modern India’, in Law Addressing Diversity: Premodern Europe and India in Comparison (13th–18th Centuries), (eds) Ertl, Thomas and Kruijtzer, Gijs (Muenchen, Wien: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017), pp. 97–115Google Scholar (p. 114).

15 Mohiuddin, Momin, The Chancellery and Persian Epistolography under the Mughals, from Bábur to Sháh Jahán, 1526–1658; a Study on Insháʼ, Dár Al-Insháʼ, and Munshīs Based on Original Documents (Calcutta: Iran Society, 1971), p. 151Google Scholar.

16 Mubarak, Abu al-Fazl ibn, Āʼīn-i Akbarī, (ed.) Khān, Sayyid Ahmad (Aligarh: Sir Sayyid Academy, 1851), p. 226Google Scholar.

17 Anonymous, ‘Akhbārāt of the Reign of Aurangzeb and Bahadur Shah (Transcripts)’, undated, fol. 137a–b, National Library of India, Jadunath Sarkar Collection #36.

18 Baldwin, James E., ‘Petitioning the Sultan in Ottoman Egypt’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 75.03 (2012), pp. 499–524CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 503).

19 Thus, for instance, the death of the imperial ‘administrator of petitioners’ (Darogha-i Mustaghīsān) in 1733/1734 is noted in an eighteenth-century account of death dates. See Muhammad, Mirza, Tārīkh-i Muhammadī: jild-i 2, hissah-i 6, 1101–61 H., (ed.) Khan Arshi, Imtiyaz Ali (Aligarh: AMU, 1973), p. 86Google Scholar.

20 Alam, Muzaffar, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)Google Scholar, Chapter 2, especially pp. 54–69.

21 Thus the emperor Jahangir's claim to have ordered a ‘chain of justice’ (with 60 bells) to be fastened between the imperial tower in the fort at Agra and the river beneath its ramparts. Jahangir, Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī, or, Memoirs of Jahāngīr from the First to the Twelfth Year of his Reign, (eds) Alexander Rogers and Henry Beveridge (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909), p. 7. See also Darling, Linda T., ‘“Do Justice, Do Justice, for that is Paradise”: Middle Eastern Advice for Indian Muslim Rulers’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 22.1 (2002), pp. 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Mustaʿidd Khan, Muhammad Saqi, Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī, (trans.) Sarkar, Jadunath (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1947), p. 314Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., p. 60.

24 Anonymous, ‘Akhbārāt of the Reign of Aurangzeb and Bahadur Shah’, fol. 138b.

25 Anonymous, ‘Assorted Farmans and Legal Documents’, sec. 84, Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library, Patna.

26 Mustaʿidd Khan, Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī, p. 314.

27 Khan, Yusuf Husain, Selected Waqai of the Deccan, 1660–1671 A.D. (Hyderabad: Central Records Office, Hyderabad Govt., 1953), p. 109Google Scholar.

28 Ibid., p. 33.

29 Ibid., p. 41.

30 Ibid., p. 63.

31 Ibid., p. 35.

32 NAI, OR, Acc. No. 2668/23.

33 In this way it bears a family resemblance to the many documents of financial transaction examined in Grewal, In the By-Lanes of History.

34 See the entry on ‘Marhamat Khan Bahadur Ghaznafar Jang’, in Shah Nawaz Khan, Maʾāsir al-Umarāʾ, (ed.) Baini Prasad, 2 vols (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1952), Vol. 2, p. 59.

35 Khan, Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī, p. 206. Undertaking such a lengthy journey to seek redress at the imperial court was not unheard of: the poet and bureaucrat ʿAbd al-Jalil Bigrami, for instance, first travelled to the emperor Aurangzeb's court in 1692 as part of a delegation seeking restitution against the depredations of a well-connected local notable against another. See Azad Bilgrami, Mir Ghulam, Maʾāsir al-Kirām, 2 vols (Hyderabad, Agra: Kutubkhana-yi Asafiya, 1910), Vol. I, p. 260Google Scholar.

36 For details, see William Irvine and Jadunath Sarkar, Later Mughals, 2 vols (Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar and Sons, 1921), Vol. I, Chapter 4; Chandra, Satish, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707–1740, 4th edn (New Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, Chapter V.

37 Atkinson, Edward, Descriptive and Historical Account of the Aligarh District (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces Government Press, 1875), pp. 518–19Google Scholar. For a current-day account of the tomb, see Galonnier, Juliette, ‘Aligarh: Sir Syed Nagar and Shah Jamal. Contrasted Tales of a Muslim City’, in Muslims in Indian Cities, (eds) Jaffrelot, Christophe and Gayer, Laurent (Noida, UP: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2013), pp. 129–58Google Scholar.

38 Muhammad, Raji, Akhbār al-Jamāl, (ed.) Safavi, Azarmi Dukht (Noida, UP: Alpha Art, 2015), pp. 7–9Google Scholar.

39 Ibid., p. 257.

40 In this way he appears much more similar to the distinctly provincial sufi of the type discussed in Digby, Simon, ‘Anecdotes of a Provincial Sufi of the Dehlī Sultanate, Khwāja Gurg of Kara’, Iran, 32 (1994), pp. 99–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Muhammad, Akhbār al-Jamāl, p. 261.

42 Ibid., pp. 262, 263.

43 Ibid., pp. 264–65.

44 Ibid., pp. 266–67.

45 Ibid., pp. 297, 303–04. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Sharh-i Wiqāya had become the standard jurisprudential text in the subcontinent's institutions of Islamic education. Zaki, Muhammad, Muslim Society in Northern India during the 15th and First Half of the 16th Century (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Co., 1996), p. 53Google Scholar.

46 Muhammad, Akhbār al-Jamāl, pp. 303–05.

47 Ibid., pp. 306–07, 313.

48 For details, see Siddiqi, Aligarh District, pp. 107–36.

49 Muhammad, Akhbār al-Jamāl, p. 314.

50 See, for instance, the case of the judge, also appointed censor and market reporter in Awadh in 1680, in Husain Jafri, Saiyid Zaheer, ‘Tension and Conflict in the Agrarian Society of Awadh during the 17th Century—A Study of the Revenue Grantees’, in Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 51st Session (Delhi: Indian History Congress, 1991), pp. 354–61Google Scholar (pp. 357–58).

51 The censor's toothlessness was proverbial, expressed in two pithy idioms recorded in an eighteenth-century dictionary: ‘What work has the Muhtasib inside the house?’ and ‘The Muhtasib's in the market’. Anand Ram Mukhlis, Mir'at-ul Istelah of Anand Ram Mukhlis, (eds) Chander Shekhar, Hamidreza Ghelichkhani and Houman Yousefdahi, 2 vols (New Delhi: National Mission for Manuscripts, Dilli Kitab Ghar, 2013), Vol. II, pp. 227, 299; Zameeruddin Siddiqi, Muhammad, ‘The Muhtasib under Aurangzeb’, Medieval India Quarterly, 5 (1963), pp. 113–19Google Scholar.

52 For a general discussion in the broader Islamic context, see Jones, Linda G., The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 On the pervasiveness of this feature in late Mughal pious life, see Khanna, Meenakshi, ‘The Visionaries of a Tarīqa: The Uwaysī Sufis of Shāhjahānābād’, in Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies, (eds) Felek, Özgen and Knysh, Alexander D. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), pp. 274–96Google Scholar. More broadly, see Digby, Simon, Sufis and Soldiers in Awrangzeb's Deccan: Malfúzát-i Naqshbandiyya (New Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

54 Muhammad, Akhbār al-Jamāl, pp. 327–28.

55 Ibid., pp. 293, 295.

56 Siddiqi, Zameeruddin, ‘The Institution of Qazi under the Mughals’, in Medieval India: A Miscellany, (ed.) Centre of Advanced Study, Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University, 4 vols (London: Asia Publishing House, 1969), Vol. I, pp. 240–59Google Scholar (p. 250).

57 Grewal, In the By-Lanes of History, pp. 7–9.

58 According to the author, ‘[i]n the selection of suitable candidates for appointment to the office of Qazi, considerations of high learning [,] integrity and otherwise suitability were probably subjected to the hereditary claims of the famous families of the Qazis’: Siddiqi, ‘The Institution of Qazi’, Vol. I, p. 250. Speaking of the office of local headman (chaudharī), the colonial gazetteer Edward Atkinson ruefully noted ‘it is not easy to say how these men come to enjoy the office. In some cases it is admittedly hereditary. In others it seems to depend on a kind of scramble; the man with the most vigour and audacity being recognized as chaudhri, to the exclusion perhaps of the last chaudhri's heir’: Atkinson, Descriptive and Historical Account, p. 401. Though Raji Muhammad does not acknowledge this, his own employment tribulations (see below) were probably due to the machinations of a competitor. On relations between administrative officers, judges, and local elites, see particularly Siddiqi, Noman Ahmad, ‘Pulls and Pressures on the Faujdar under the Mughals’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 29 (1967), pp. 243–55Google Scholar.

59 Muhammad, Akhbār al-Jamāl, p. 319.

60 Ibid., p. 318.

61 Ibid., p. 296.

62 Ibid., pp. 314–15; Talbot, Cynthia, The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 42–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jackson, Peter, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, Chapters 1–2.

63 Muhammad, Akhbār al-Jamāl, pp. 314–16; Atkinson, Descriptive and Historical Account, p. 489.

64 Muhammad, Akhbār al-Jamāl, p. 327.

65 As in the case of Shaikh Barat [?] Allah and Muhammad Raza: ibid., pp. 283, 290.

66 Ibid., p. 291.

67 Ibid., pp. 318–19.

68 Ibid., p. 272.

69 Ibid., p. 318.

70 Ibid., p. 320.

71 Ibid., p. 318.

72 Ibid., pp. 13–20 (p. 11). See also Muzaffar Alam, ‘Strategy and Imagination in a Mughal Sufi Story of Creation’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49.2 (2012), pp. 151–95.

73 Ibid., p. 312.

74 Ibid., p. 321.

75 Siddiqi, Aligarh District, Chapter VII. Despite ‘its proximity to Delhi’ which, according to Atkinson, had led to ‘much Muslim colonization and conversion’ in the region, the colonial census of Aligarh district in 1865 revealed a population of 822,473 Hindus and 103,065 ‘Musalmans & others’, a ratio of 7.9 to 1. Atkinson, Descriptive and Historical Account, pp. 389, 404.