A preliminary version of this paper was read at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting at San Diego, California, on November 20, 1970. Social anthropological field research in India was undertaken in 1967–68. Field research and writing were supported by a Faculty Research Fellowship of the American Institute of Indian Studies, a National Science Foundation grant, and a Wenner-Gren Foundation postdoctoral fellowship. The author is grateful to Prof. Robert S. Merrill of the University of Rochester for suggestions about revising a draft of this paper.

¹ The term munshi is of Arabic origin. Platts gives the following definitions: author, prose composer, writer, scribe, secretary, amannuensis, tutor, teacher, language master; a title of respect, (Platts, John T., A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English [Reprint of 1884 edn.; London: Oxford University Press, 1960], p. 1077)Google Scholar. Between the 16th and 19th centuries in India, the munshi's position was generally much more prestigious than it is nowadays. The term often denoted not a humble clerk but a civil servant of some importance, the influential private secretary of a Mughal nobleman, or a native language teacher employed by a colonial administrator or European missionary.

Sir Jadunath Sarkar says that the literary vanity of the 16th and 17th century munshis contributed unwittingly to Mughal historiography. These munshis often kept copies of letters they had drafted for their masters and later published them by allowing friends and admirers to read them and make further copies. Sometimes a volume of such letters would be prepared by a son or devoted friend after a munshi's death as a literary monument to his learning and mastery of style. According to Sarkar, the Muslim munshis of the Mughal administration “formed a brotherhood and lived on terms of the greatest intimacy and mutual aid, giving feasts and dances to each other. … In addition to the tie of service in the same department, they were also united in a brotherhood by their love of Sufi philosophy, which formed the common meeting ground for the Persian-cultured official classes of India in the 17th [and’ … 18th century. Their letter books often end with a collection of Sufistic verses of the munshi's own composition” (Sarkar, Mughal Administration [5th edn.; Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar and Sons Private Ltd., 1963], pp. 217–219). All of this contrasts with the occupational styles of the lowly and generally unsophisticated munshis discussed here.

In this paper, transliteration of Hindi-Urdu terms omits diacriticals and uses English plurals and possessives.

² Khare, R. S., “Home and Office: Some Trends of Modernization Among the Kanya-Kubja Brahmans,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. XIII, No. 2 (April 1971), pp. 196–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Khare, R. S., The Changing Brahmans: Associations and Elites among the Kanya-Kubjas of North India (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970).Google Scholar

³ Observations in the field and subsequent analysis of data have been influenced by the views of several scholars on status, role, and social network. In particular, while observing lawyers and munshis at the courts and in writing this paper, I have been helped by Robert Merton's argument that a social status should be viewed not as a diadic role but as an array of roles in which a status occupant is related to a diversity of others (“The Role-Set: Problems in Sociological Theory,” British Journal of Sociology, Vol. VIII, [1957], pp. 106–120). A comprehensive statement of this analytical framework, together with adequate indications of how the data in this paper relates to and modifies it, would greatly lengthen and complicate the essay and possibly be of interest only to social anthropologists. In my view, the ethnographic and comparative value of this paper is not impaired by omitting that discussion. I have, therefore, dealt only briefly, superficially and in general terms with the analytical framework here. I plan a separate and more detailed examination of this data in which that analtyical framework will be explicitly presented.

⁴ For a diagram of the judicial-executive hierarchy of presiding officers and some discussion of lawyer relationships with these officers, see Morrison, Charles, “Kinship in Professional Relations: A Study of North Indian District Lawyers,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. XIV, No. 1 (1972) (in press)Google Scholar. The discussion here is not intended to provide a complete account of all the offices found in the courts but only those with which munshis are usually involved.

⁵ Cf., Subrahmanyan, E. S., Treatise on the Advocates Act (Act 25 of 1961) (Allahabad: Law Publishers, 1965), pp. 35–49Google Scholar. See also, Schmitthener, Samuel, “A Sketch of the Development of the Legal Profession in India,” Law and Society Review, Vol. III, (1969), pp. 337–382.Google Scholar

⁶ Despite some similarities, the court reader (peshkar) is not equivalent to the magistrates' clerk in an English court of summary jurisdiction (e.g., petty sessions). The latter has much higher status, often being a solicitor (lawyer) himself, and he guides the bench in matters of procedure in a way unthinkable in a peshkar. The English magistrate, however, is often an honorary incumbent (i.e., not formally trained, not a stipendary); his Indian counterpart nowadays is almost invariably a civil servant with some legal training.

⁷ Subrahmanyan, p. 36.

⁸ Morrison, Charles, “Social Organization at the District Courts: Colleague Relationships among Indian Lawyers,” Law and Society Review, Vol. III, Nos. 2 and 3 (Nov., 1968–Feb., 1969), (A Special Issue devoted to Lawyers in Developing Societies with Particular Reference to India), pp. 251–268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ See ibid., pp. 254–258, for a discussion of the zones of the court precincts in relation to the social organization of the bar. An anecdote by Leonard Woolf from his life as a magistrate in Ceylon at the beginning of the century shows how the multiplex business of an Asian law court can be exploited by the cunning. While hearing complicated evidence in one case, Woolf was (in the manner common among officers of his rank) also signing documents relating to other cases as these were handed to him by an assistant. With the assistant's cooperation, a confidence trickster had secreted an overdrawn check among the papers and Woolf absent-mindedly gave it official endorsement (Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904–1911 [London: Hogarth Press, 1961], pp. 128–131).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Sec Khare's account of drawing-room culture among Indian urban elites in The Changing Brahmins, pp. 137–146.

¹¹ Khare, R. S., “Indigenous Culture and Lawyer's Law in India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. XIV, No. I (1972) (in press).Google Scholar

¹² Mahajan, Mehr Chand, Looking Back: The Autobiography of Mehr Chand Mahajan, Former Chief Justice of India (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963), p. 31.Google Scholar

¹³ Cf., Morrison, “Social Organization at the District Courts.”

¹⁴ Cf., Mahajan, pp. 59–60; but see also Khare, “Indigenous Culture and Lawyer's Law …” for the view that personal esteem and social prestige are always supposed to suffer in a legal defeat, bureaucratic imponderables notwithstanding.

¹⁵ Cf., Silverberg, James, “Caste Ascribed Status Versus Caste-Irrelevant Roles,” Man in India, Vol. XXXIX (1959), pp. 148–162.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Cf., Rowe, Peter N., “Indian Lawyers and Political Modernization: Observations in Four District Towns,” Law and Society Review, Vol. III (1969), pp. 219–50.Google Scholar

¹⁷ For a deft account of the fleeting but hostile nature of lawyer-clerk relations, see E. M. Forster's tale, “The Suppliant” (a munshi “in whose salaam a thousand insults were implied”) in his essay “Adrift in India” (Forster, Abinger Harvest [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1936], pp. 315–318).

¹⁸ Mayer, Adrian C., Caste and Kinship in Central India: A Village and Its Region (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 69.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Morrison, “Kinship in Professional Relations. …”

²⁰ See ibid., for another sketch of the lawyer, Q.

²¹ Prof. Marc Galantcr has drawn my attention to a similar but much elaborated comparison between Indian prostitutes and vakils which lists sixteen points of “Similarity of Procedure between Vakils and Dancing Girls,” (M. S. Mani, The Pen Pictures of the Dancing Girl with a Side Light on the Legal Profession [Salem (Madras): Srinivasa Printing Works, 1926]).

²² Subrahmanyan, pp. 223–224.

²³ Most of this Act, but not Section 36, was repealed by the Advocates Act of 1961. For references to law reports of toutism proceedings, see Subrahmanyan, pp. 219–238.

²⁴ Minutes of bar associations that I studied in Haryana in 1968 went back 30 years or more and showed clearly that before Independence, the question of tout proscription was often a factor in factional maneuvering among district lawyers. Rivals accused one another of employing touts and attempted to get opponents' assistants proscribed under Section 36. Since the departure of the British, official concern with “the tout problem” has declined and this form of harassing competitors has ceased (although there is still much grumbling and malicious gossip about the uses of touts). In Subrahmanyan's 1965 commentary, no proceedings under Section 36 are reported after 1951.

²⁵ Justice Mack, Elmar E., Mainly Scripts and Touts (Madras: Higginbothams Ltd., 1955), pp. 9 and 11.Google Scholar

²⁶ See also the discussion of touts in Kidder, Robert (compiler), “Report of the Conference on the Comparative Study of the Legal Profession …,” Law and Society Review, Vol. III (1969), pp. 416–433.Google Scholar

²⁷ The English word “tout” is very commonly used. A divergence has occurred between contemporary British and Indian English usage. In the former, the term “tout” invariably refers to a race course tipster or a bookmaker's agent.

²⁸ See Khare, “Indigenous Culture and Lawyers Law.”

²⁹ Cf., ibid.; Khare's informants, talking about courts in Lucknow, told him of three concentric rings of “touts” stationed at (I) bus stations some miles from the city, (2) at the city boundary and (3) in the courts compound (the latter appear to include munshis). At each succeeding confrontation, the would-be litigant and his accompanying “sea-lawyer” are put under more pressure so that their defense strategy of non-commitment weakens and their patience begins to wear out. The system he describes appears to be a peculiarity of High Court centers (located in major regional cities or old provincial capitals). It is apparently rare at the small district headquarters where the majority of Indian courts are located and was not observed at Ambala.