Introduction
Indian observers of the East India Company's emerging political order in the late eighteenth century were, as is well known, struck by the inaccessibility of its officials to their Indian subjects. Both Indo-Muslim traditions of akhlāq and Sanskrit-influenced norms for nīti (political ethics) emphasized the duties of rulers, or those they deputized, to be vigilant in their watch over the condition of their subjects, to listen to their concerns, and to offer them regular opportunities to present their pleas for justice.Footnote 1 As the Company's Bengal government struggled to develop effective judicial systems, its own servants became sharply aware of the difficulty of balancing accessibility against the disorder that had the potential to overwhelm its courts unless petitioners could be channelled into a formal judicial system.Footnote 2 By the 1820s, and certainly in the mind of the first governor of Bombay Mountstuart Elphinstone, Bengal's judicial system had become a byword for paralysis, with its delays, ill-informed or inert judges, and the endless layers of intermediates interposed between petitioners and magistrates. He contrasted it with the situation in western India: ‘Here, every man above the rank of a Hircarrah sits down before us, and did before the Paishwa; even a common Ryot, if he had to stay any time, would sit down on the ground.’ With their deep local knowledge and familiar principles of procedure, traditional panchayat assemblies in particular ‘retained in a great degree the confidence of the people’.Footnote 3 He urged that the panchayat be retained as a local part of the Bombay government's own judicial system.Footnote 4
Elphinstone's characterization of the panchayat as the region's ‘traditional’ judicial forum was not quite accurate. It was in fact only from the 1720s that the panchayat came to occupy centre stage in the judicial institutions of the Maratha state. It appeared alongside older corporate bodies, operating under the sponsorship of leading local gentry, urban heads of guilds, and caste and village headmen. These older bodies were the gota (family or kin group), the dharmasabhā (assembly of pandits knowledgeable in matters of religious law), and the majālis, an often more substantial assembly that brought together representatives of many local communities with officials of the state.
Together, they constituted a remarkable landscape for the submission of petitions and the hearing of suits. Here, all justice started with a petition. Depending on their rank, their resources, and the significance of their suit, petitioners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries addressed themselves to a range of different sources of justice, from the royal courts of the Deccan sultanate states to the state officials in the localities empowered to hear suits, lordly patrons, and community tribunals of different kinds. Many petitioners were individuals, but they also often represented extended families, caste communities, village brotherhoods, and local religious corporations. Their suits were usually local in nature, concerning disputed rights to property or an office and its perquisites, and were heard initially before local communities of stakeholders, knowledgeable people, and local state officials. Many petitioners also pursued their causes far beyond the locality, seeking redress from political networks that ran to regional and sometimes subcontinental levels.
The petitions also contained a powerful ethical and political dimension. Part of this consisted in a fierce rhetoric of community, brotherhood, and personal witness in defence of local rights. There were ethical concerns too with proper procedure in paper record-keeping and the verification of documents. Petitioners, tribunals, and state authorities alike demonstrated an intense preoccupation with the documentary evidence needed to support claims and followed a set of clearly understood routines for their authentication. It is worth emphasizing that this petitionary culture was not the monopoly of Brahman and other literate elites. The examples explored here include Brahmans certainly, but also Sonar goldsmiths, Maratha village headmen, the village servants and cultivators of a single village, shepherds, and Mahar Dalit communities.
From the early eighteenth century, a new form of the panchayat came to supersede the older tribunals of gota, dharmasabhā, and majālis. A small panel of appointed members (pāñcas) heard the proceedings, which local corporate bodies had no right to attend. The proceedings often focused more heavily on testimony submitted to the panchayat in writing by witnesses who did not always attend in person. The written judgment of the panchayat gained its authority through endorsement by the state, rather than through the assembled will and witness of local corporate bodies. However, the very flows of documents came to connect petitioners, their audiences, and state officials in new ways, expanding a world of discussion and circulation of news now linked as much by the written as by the spoken word.
The petitions studied here differ from the collective ‘public’ petitions addressed to local or royal authority that we know about in early modern Europe. Petitioning in Europe developed within new forms of the public sphere, in which communication was facilitated by print, and public social action of every kind was shaped by the emerging institutions of ‘civil society’.Footnote 5 The later eighteenth century in particular saw the growth of newly assertive forms of popular political engagement, in which collective groups of petitioners and other associations strove to influence established political authority.Footnote 6 In recent years, the diversity of petitioning practices in Europe has also become apparent and, with it, understandings of what ‘civil society’ constituted in different settings. Petitions from individuals, as much as from associations, constituted an important part of the public sphere, and the unlettered as well as the literate sought to engage the state and their social superiors with their suits.Footnote 7
As scholars have increasingly come to appreciate that forms of ‘modernity’ emerged in many locales across early modern Eurasia, the exploration of ‘publics’ of different kinds in early modern contexts outside Europe has also flourished in recent years. This array of institutions and arenas between the state and the private sphere does not conform to the older ‘civil society’ model with which the European public sphere has been associated, although, as indicated above, that model has itself become more open and flexible.Footnote 8 Following this scholarship on Eurasian ‘early modernities’, I suggest in this article that the early modern Indian petitionary culture outlined above also reveals elements of a recognizable ‘public’.Footnote 9 The arenas within which petitions were heard and disputes arbitrated—heterogeneous assemblies of local notables, peasant brotherhoods, extended families, groups of office holders, and state officials—constituted a space between the official and the familial or private. Assembly hearings themselves were important public occasions, in which witnesses and locally knowledgeable people of every social rank spoke about what they knew and helped to lay down what became a form of common memory. The panchayat's heavier emphasis on written testimony extended this public. The flow of such documents linked local arenas and provided petitioners, their audiences, and state officials with a focus for discussion away from the site of the panchayat itself.
The petitionary culture explored here offers other perspectives also. What emerges is certainly something like the picture that Lauren Benton offers in her study of the judicial pluralities of early modern empires.Footnote 10 The elaborate documentary culture revealed here also complicates the now-familiar supposition that the coming of colonialism entailed a ‘documentary culture’ of a wholly new kind.Footnote 11 Acute concern with correctness in judicial procedure, propriety in the verification of evidence, and the ever-present danger of forged documents marked state and community institutions alike in pre-colonial western India. Lastly, the emergence of the panchayat suggests that it was not only the East India Company that struggled, often unsuccessfully, to narrow the channels through which suits, petitions, and complaints reached its courts and judges. So too did the Maratha state over the same decades, responding to some of the same pressures and subject to many of the same frustrations.
Local rights and corporate bodies in early modern western India
The institutions of gota, dharmasabhā, and majālis were part of western India's pre-Mughal history of local corporate institutions.Footnote 12 Unlike Bengal, where most written records of landed rights date back to the Mughal period at the earliest, the Marathi-speaking regions had a much earlier and continuous recorded history of rural settlement, cultivation, and lands gifted by local states in return for service of different kinds. As elsewhere in peninsular India, the village headman (patil or mokadam) took a leading role in opening up land for cultivation, and the hereditary cultivator's right of mirās or vatan derived from family participation in such early pioneering. Rights to the offices of the kulkarni (accountant) and the joshi (priest) could likewise constitute a village mirās. At the interface between these communities and the local state lay the key office of deshmukh (‘mouth of the country’). The deshmukh was himself usually also a patil. He had the additional responsibility for maintaining cultivation and the flow of state revenues, and for oversight of local justice and security. These responsibilities carried considerable benefits in terms of land, services, and rewards in kind, which were often dispersed through the many villages over which the deshmukh had charge.Footnote 13
The fourteenth-century consolidation of the Bahmani sultanate in western India, and its successor in the states of the Deccan sultanate, incorporated rather than replaced the layer of conservative Brahman accountants and administrators who had served the earlier Yadava kingdom. With literate skills, religious prestige, and access to cash, these long-settled Brahman families accumulated many kinds of connected rights. Their presence also contributed to the region's well-developed culture of written records for rights—in stone, copper plate, and, with increasing frequency from the thirteenth century, on paper.Footnote 14
These rights were granted and defended within different corporate bodies. The oldest, dating back to the first millennium, was the gota, from the Sanskrit gotra (exogamous kin group). Looked on as a brotherhood or family unit, a gota was the collective body of all those who held the same kinds of local proprietary rights. These might have been holders of permanent mirās rights, either in land or in hereditary village service offices. Gotas were not just local village bodies—there were also gotas of the qasbā (town) and of the pargaṇā (the largest administrative unit). Members of the same caste community also constituted a gota. Gotas met to hear complaints and disputes, inspected documents, interviewed witnesses, and determined fair outcomes. The gota had a close relationship with the state, often taking its decisions to state authorities for enforcement. This early corporate form was taken up by the bureaucracy of the Bahmani kingdom and then the Deccan sultanate states, and persisted into the eighteenth century.Footnote 15
When property rights of any kind were at issue, however, state officials—the local havildar, qazi, and amin—were present, while rulers themselves might demand to hear the most important cases. Such assemblies were referred to as majālis (‘assembly’). They included members of the relevant gota as well as state officials, Muslim clerics, Brahman scholars and priests, deshmukhs, village headmen, and holders of local mirāsī rights. The meetings were held in public, often at a local fort or district headquarters, and were conducted in Marathi. Witnesses at all social levels, and from all sides in a dispute, were called, and documents, their contents, and their seals were inspected. Where the property in question was substantial, the majālis might be attended by many dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people, many of them village patils and kulkarnis holding mirās rights, who wished to ensure that the rights of people like themselves were respected and that the majālis conducted its proceedings in the proper manner. Disputes were not the only occasion for the holding of a majālis. Uncontested sales or transfers of property were held before a majālis and a mahzar document was issued to confirm them. Requests for the issuing of new documents of right often required the authority of a majālis. At the end of the proceedings, dissatisfied parties could ask to have their case heard by a majālis in a different place or one with wider regional representation where there might be less risk of bias in favour of one of the parties. In the case of both the gota and the majālis, dissatisfied complainants could also offer proof in the form of divine revelation through an ordeal, thereby offering dramatic bodily demonstration of their truthfulness.
They could also petition for a hearing at a dharmasabhā under the authority of a dharmādhikārī (a hereditary office commanding substantial local influence and perquisites). Religious questions actually covered a wide range of possible disputes, since many proprietary rights flowed from particular religious claims. Like the gota, the dharmasabhā often worked hand in hand with the majālis, operating as a court of appeal for discontented suitors as well as the first forum for hearing matters of religious dispute.Footnote 16 Suitors therefore had many avenues through which to seek redress and, as we shall see, one arena often served as a court of appeal for another within this system.
Elaborate bureaucratic routines marked these arenas. A wide range of Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Marathi terms described their operations, reflecting the prominent role of Muslim state officials in the judicial and revenue affairs of the Maratha countryside.Footnote 17 A respectful request for intervention (vinanti karṇe) or representation (vidhit karṇe) marked the start of the process. Petitioners made their request to one of the range of people with the authority to institute an enquiry: the havāldār responsible for hearing complaints at the level of the pargaṇā (district headquarters), the officers of the local taraf (administrative sub-division), or the mukaddam (the headman of the village). These people might then instigate a mansubī (investigation or arbitration). Parties were asked to submit a written statement (takrīr or kariṇā). If any of the parties decided that they wished to have their case heard before a majālis from a different place, they would have to submit a thalpatra. A government messenger might take a talabrokhā (written summons) to witnesses (sākṣīmozā or shāhidī). The messenger would expect to levy a fee (masālā) for his services. Parties to a dispute would have to submit a muchalkā (a written bond of agreement), under penalty, to the majālis to abide by its decision. To do so, they might need a zāmīn (a bondsman) who was prepared to put up surety in the case. The taking of evidence would include purśīs (the interrogation of witnesses) and perhaps sadi (a written or oral statement given in evidence). The majālis would note the contents (majamūn or mazkūr) of the documents submitted to it and might decide that they were authentic (bajinnas) or false (layini). The majālis would issue a mahzar to the successful party, but state officials might also confirm this with a jayapatra registered in the state records. The successful litigant would pay a sum of money (harkī) to the majālis to signify his satisfaction with the outcome. The vanquished party had to issue a yejitpatra (a statement in writing admitting his failure).Footnote 18
Ordeals of different kinds also had their own intricate procedures and terminology. They were usually conducted publicly before the local temple to Siva. A day or two in advance of the ordeal, the hands of the plaintiff were washed, inspected, and bandages applied with seals. A bhālpatra (‘forehead letter’) recording the purpose of the ordeal was placed on his forehead. He then walked over seven concentric circles drawn in front of the temple, with the defending party walking behind him, ‘making a shadow’ (sāvali karṇe). The plaintiff then recited the purpose of the ordeal written on the bhālpatra. His hands were freed and in front of the assembly he plunged them into a pot of boiling oil and ghee to recover a piece of metal (a ravā) from it. His hands were then bandaged under seal, again for two days, then opened before the majālis. Unmarked hands signified truthfulness, marked hands pointed to falsehood and guilt.Footnote 19
The business of the dharmasabhā was likewise conducted through a series of well-understood bureaucratic procedures. Applicants often started with a petition, known as a dośapatra. Taken down by the scribe to the assembly, it confessed transgressions and asked for suitable penance to take place at an appropriately sacred place. Once the penance had been performed, the dharmasabhā of that place issued a śuddhipatra (‘letter of purification’), which the suitor carried back home, and with it sought readmission to the village or caste community. The caste gota often issued a gotapata patra to confirm his social rehabilitation.Footnote 20
Witness to rights in the mahzar
The key outcome of a successful petition, therefore, was a paper mahzar, correctly recorded and attested by the members of the majālis assembly.Footnote 21 In form, a mahzar was written by a scribe on pieces of handmade paper, six to eight inches wide, glued together to form a roll that might extend to several feet, depending on the length of the various testimonies to be incorporated and the numbers of witnesses whose names were to be added. Each join was stamped on the rear side with seals to guard against later fraudulent alterations. At the end it was signed or marked by those in attendance, although the process of taking signatures sometimes continued for several days after the meeting.Footnote 22 While state officials would retain a copy for the state records, the mahzar itself was given to the party whose rights it thereby confirmed. Thus constituted, it was a complex social artefact of great value, a tangible embodiment of the common rights of all who had witnessed and signed it with mark or signature. It was usually stored in a sealed bamboo tube or stone pot, to guard against house fires and damage from insects or water.Footnote 23
Mahzars followed a standard form. They stated the date and place of the majālis and names of the state officials in attendance. There followed the names of the principals present, their place of origin, their office, and sometimes their age, as evidence of their worth as witnesses. The main text was usually presented as an address to the petitioner: that he had come to the huzoor and made the following representation. The next part of the narrative reproduced what the petitioner had said, which might include histories of earlier cases and judgments relevant to the case in hand. The testimony of different witnesses followed, sometimes in great detail, sometimes very briefly. The mahzar concluded with the consensus reached and the judgment given. A protracted dispute might generate a mahzar judgment containing many histories within its narrative, covering several generations and lengths of paper roll.
Although state officials were present, the authority of the majālis derived from its character as an assembly of local holders of rights and people with local experience and knowledge. The term mahzar itself comes from the Arabic huzoor (‘present’). The personal testimony of knowledgeable witnesses, questioning of parties to the case, and direct inspection of documents were central to its proceedings. There was another close link with local holders of rights. They were entitled to attend the majālis and to put seal, sign, or signature to the mahzar recording its decisions. Holders of different kinds of rights had their own signs which might be used instead of a signature: the patil, mokadam, or village head put his mark as a plough, the potter as a wheel, the carpenter a chisel, the merchant a pair of balances, and so on.Footnote 24 These practices reflected the fact that a mahzar was given not by state officials or by royal authority, but by the assembled community of rights-holders attending the majālis itself, signifying their assent.
What can we say about the language of the petitions and the mahzars within which they were incorporated? As seen above, they drew on an amalgam of Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Marathi terms, their authors careful to use the correct Persian terms wherever rights were bound up with revenue arrangements. The language reflected the fact that petitioners did not always see themselves as humbly approaching a remote state authority. Certainly, a petitioner might submit a deferential arjī (the Persian term for a humble request), as when cultivators of Saswad near Pune made a plea to the chief revenue officer for abatement of the revenues due because of failed rains and widespread dearth.Footnote 25 Sometimes petitioners used the equivalent Marathi term ‘vinanti karṇe’ to make a respectful request. More often, however, the Marathi term used was the more neutral ‘vidhit karṇe’. It meant simply that a suit was put forward or represented, and its matter-of-fact tone may have reflected the fact that petitioners felt that they were appealing to a corporate body of their own social equals, at least in the kinds of rights that they held.
Petitions also emphasized the continuity of rights possessed ‘from generation to generation’ (piḍī dar piḍī) or ‘from children to their children’ (lekarāce lekarī). Rights were described in direct rather than impersonal terms: they were not ‘held’ or ‘enjoyed’, but rather ‘eaten’ (khāṇe). Some standard phrases stressed the comprehensiveness of attendance at the majālis: samasta deśaka (‘all of the headmen of the villages’), samasta gota (‘the whole gota’), samasta bāp-bhau va mirāsīdar kunbi (‘all brothers of the same father and mirāsīdar cultivators’), samasta peṭha (‘the whole town’), samākul pānḍhrī va bārābalute (‘the whole village community and the village officers’). A strong ethical and ideological dimension thus marked the language of these corporate bodies. They emphasized the principle that legitimate rights should be enjoyed continuously down the generations of families who held them. Prominence was given to mirāsī-bhau (the brotherhood of those who possessed the same hereditary village rights). Above all, the language used affirmed the inclusiveness of these corporate bodies and the unanimity of their sentiment and action.
Testimony, rhetoric, and record: the majālis as a public space
Through their linked social networks and arenas for meeting and hearing suits, together the majālis, gota, and dharmasabhā contained a significant public dimension. This appears at three different levels. First, through their recognized procedures for receiving ‘representations’, assembling all of the key local parties in a single place, hearing direct personal testimony, sometimes witnessing ordeals, and affirming consent through the many individuals who signed or marked the mahzar, the majālis and other bodies created an occasion which remained in the collective memory.
Let us look, for example, at a majālis that met on 1 September 1636 to hear the petition of the Brahman Padhye family. The family claimed the offices of dharmādhikārī and priest to some 75 villages in the Konkan province of Sangamesvara. These were key offices and their legitimate possession was a matter of deep local interest. They had been the subject of a long-running dispute, dating back to 1600 or earlier, involving another local family of priests, the Purohits.Footnote 26 In 1636, the challenges to their offices seem to have been revived by another priestly family, the Joshis, who may have been connected to the earlier case. Perhaps because of this background, the Padhyes approached the state officials at Muzaffarabad directly with their petition. The majālis to hear it was held before some 36 people, including the havildar, qazi and other Muslim officials, deshmukhs, patils, kulkarnis, the shroff, and a significant number of nāyakavaḍī, and mahars (other menial village servants acting as district revenue sepoys).Footnote 27 After listing those in attendance, the mahzar began its narrative with the Padhyes’ ‘representation’:
We have possessed the mirāsī rights to dharmādhikārī and josī from generation to generation. But then Krishna Joshi of Sangamesvara went to the Huzoor, gave false information, and made a complaint about our mirās. They produced a document of grant from Humayun. But we are ancient mirāsīdārs from the time of the Hindu kings, and we have copper plates from that time at our house to show our possession, and can bring it before you to confirm this.Footnote 28
The Padhyes duly produced their copper plates. The assembly decided that the copper plates confirmed their continuing rights and dismissed the Joshi family's case:
The mirās of dharmādhikārī and josī belongs to them, and they have enjoyed it from one generation to the next. According to the copper plate, the mirās belongs to the Upadhyes, and Krishna Joshi has no possession in it. This is the mahzar, just as it is signed, at the fort of Rajgad.Footnote 29
Perhaps as a consequence of these challenges, the Padhyes were careful over subsequent decades to confirm their rights. In 1659 they asked for replacement papers for those destroyed in a house fire. In 1662, with the extension of Sivaji's control over the Konkan, they requested fresh documents, and did so again in 1709 at the accession of the raja Shahu II.Footnote 30 The same dispute was to emerge and the same documents demanded, in a particularly dramatic form, a century later. The documents—bearing the marks or signatures of key witnesses present—had a public life beyond the moment of the judgment they recorded: their production was required in later hearings, at other places, where the information they contained had a bearing on the matters in hand.
In most cases, however, the gota and majālis worked together to investigate the truth of competing claims and the histories on which they were based. The dhangar shepherd communities of the Maharashtra's Konkan littoral did not possess the privileges of priestly office enjoyed by Brahman Padhye and Purohit families above. Nonetheless, senior state officials convened a majālis to hear an important dispute within the community. In 1697, brothers of the Gotara and Savalakar families put forward competing claims to seniority in the headship of the village of Peth Dhangar in Maharashtra's Konkan littoral and its accompanying honours and perquisites. The narrative of the whole case, stretching back more than two generations, was contained in the final mahzar of the majālis assembled at the nearby town of Chiplun. The Gotara brothers had made a complaint to the local havildar, who asked the local gota to take initial statements from the two parties. The Gotaras stated that a moneylender had forced their father to move away from their Konkan village to live up in the Deccan: and in their absence, the Savalakar family had moved in to usurp their historic rights. The Savalakars countered by listing six generations of their forebears who had enjoyed rights of seniority in the village. They asserted that the Gotaras were in fact relative newcomers to the village, notwithstanding their attempts to institute cases against them from their new home up in the Deccan: ‘We have been here from the very first, and carry on in the same way. But now Bakoji and Manaji Gotara have raised this case against us, and gone around to several places asking for investigations against us.’Footnote 31
The gota heard these statements and testimony from a number of local people, ‘and brought old men before it as witnesses’.Footnote 32 Most of these men, whose names and ages are given in the document, testified that the Gotaras were unknown in the village. However, the strongest testimony for the Savalakars was provided by the local Brahman priests. They brought with them their letters of right to tax-free lands granted to them in 1740–1741 by the peshwa Nanasaheb, following his visit to a local shrine. There, listed as leading witnesses, were members of the Savalakar family. The gota concluded that this proved beyond doubt that they were the senior family at the time: ‘The father of the Savalakars issued the grant of lands to the priests of that place. His name, Sirsoji, is on the letter. Whoever took part in issuing such a letter could not have done so without seniority.’Footnote 33
As a last throw, the Gotara brothers asked for the case to be decided by the ordeal of ravā described above. Bakoji Gotara offered to undergo it. When the gota met on 25 April 1697, many local leaders and officials gathered to witness the dramatic moment when his hands were unwrapped, including the subhedar, the havildar, the heads of the Brahman dharmasabhā, and other senior officers as well as ‘the people, soldiers, village heads and gentlemen of the district’.Footnote 34 On inspection, Bakoji's hands were found to be burned. The Gotaras lost their case and the Savalakars were confirmed in their rights. The mahzar to that effect was issued by a majālis held three weeks later on 16 May 1697 at Chiplun. It was attended by some 75 named witnesses, including senior state officials, village heads, Brahmans of the local dharmasabhā, the local non-Brahman priests, senior merchants, hereditary artisans, and menial village servants.Footnote 35 The judgment was thus addressed to widely dispersed communities of caste, village brotherhood, extended family, and office-holders of different kinds, all with an interest in the decision.
Ethics of brotherhood, ethics of procedure
The second way in which the petitions and the meetings where they were considered constituted a kind of public occasion lay in their frequent invocation of the ethic of brotherhood. Petitions frequently referred to mirāsī brotherhood (mirāsī-bhau), along with the brotherhood of those born of the same father (bāp-bhau). Part of this ethic lay in a rhetoric of mutual solidarity and support for one another's rights, and a concern that the nature of rights and the means by which rights were created should be properly understood. The other part lay in mutual respect for proper documentary procedures through which oral testimony was translated into tangible judgments, complete with seals and signatures. These dimensions of the majālis meant that such assemblies were never just about individual outcomes. Rather, they affirmed general principles about rights and procedures, of interest to all who held similar entitlements.
This rhetoric appeared not only in cases of disputed property, but also in documents of sale, which required the imprimatur of a majālis to confirm their authenticity. In 1670, the mirāsīdārs of Tadali village in Junnar province decided to sell the mirās offices of kulkarni and joshi (village accountant and priest). This was not in any sense a petition. It was rather a public declaration by village rights-holders of their collective purpose in a matter of key importance to them, which required comprehensive public witness and affirmation. They gathered in a majālis and described their proceedings in a mahzar mirāsī patra. The document opened: ‘On Friday the eighth day of the light half of Mārgeśvara in the śake year of 1592. The hāzīr majālis of Tadali village, Takali, in taraf Rajangaon, pargana Junnar. In the temple of Śri, in the absence of the Huzoor’. It then named some 25 individuals from different villages—patils, kulkarnis, priests, and village servants—in attendance. In a few cases their ages were listed as well, perhaps as an indication of their depth of local knowledge: two men, one a Chamar, gave their ages as 80 years old. But the gathering seems to have been much larger, the list indicating ‘and the whole village’ next to some of the village names. On this important occasion absences were listed too: it was recorded that ‘Rayaji Adhau Mokadam was not present’.
The mahzar was addressed to the purchasers of the office, Nilo Sondev and Abaji Sondev:
Sivaji bin Jait patil and Manaji bin Vevoji Bhose Mokadam, of Tadale village, Takali, taraf Rajangaon, pargana Junnar, and all brothers who share the same father [bāp-bhau], the twelve village servants, the mirāsīdār kunbis, write this document of mirās. Kumaji was our mirāsīdār Kulkarni and Joshi. But his lineage died out. So we villagers appointed a deputy who carried on the work of the Kulkarni. We village people ourselves calculated the auspicious times for marriages. Then we all came together and decided that we would sell the Kulkarni and Joshi offices and make you our brother in mirās. So we came to you in Rayri. Of our own will, we sell to you the Kulkarni and Joshi offices of Tadali village and the house that goes with them, and we give the mirās to you. May you and your children's children enjoy it [lit. ‘eat it’] in happiness. With the seal of the Deshmukh and the signature of the Deshpande, we make you our brother in mirās [mirās-bhau]. If any mirāsīdār comes in the way of your possession of these offices, we the headmen, the twelve village servants, all we brothers who share the same father, and the mirāsīdār kunbis will prevent them. You will be free from interference.
Here we see very much the invocation of ‘the whole community’ as seller of the rights and guarantor of their future security. The mahzar then listed the land, gardens, and goods in kind attached to the offices, and stipulated the price of the sale at 150 honas. It concluded: ‘. . . and if we turn out to be false, then may the goddess bring down destruction on us’. There was no state official at this meeting, as its opening explicitly mentioned: the document, with its narrative, its witnesses, signatures and seals—and perhaps the all-seeing eye of the goddess—were the guarantees.Footnote 36
The office of priest and its perquisites in kind often occasioned disputes. Brothers of priestly families frequently disagreed about the practical division of proceeds from a shared office. Priestly rights usually included the entitlement to perform domestic rituals for all Hindus in a village, whether their priestly services were wanted or not. A family's attempt to engage the services of a new priest often signalled an attempt to improve its caste standing and the ritual dignities it might claim. Sonar goldsmiths belonged to the wider community of early modern India's elite artisan castes—prestigious builders of temples and sculptors of figures of the gods to goldsmiths, gem-workers, engravers, painters—with a history of asserting twice born and sometimes Brahman status for themselves.Footnote 37 A series of letters and petitions in Nasik in the 1640s suggests that western India's Sonars were developing their own such claims. A leading member of the community, Jakhoji Sonar, had evidently engaged the services of his own priest, one Sivabhaṭ Ksemakalyani. This brought him into conflict with the powerful dharmādhikārī family of the town, who claimed the rights to all such services. In May 1646, the dharmādhikārīs protested to local state officials that Sivabhaṭ had carried out the ceremonies and endeavoured to collect the perquisites, on the grounds that the family had employed him to do so.
A majālis was convened, with the qazi and the amin, as well as the deshmukh, the deshpande, the patil, merchants, and shetias. The assembly heard that Sivabhaṭ had disregarded an earlier judgment made against him and his resentment had caused him to come to blows with one of the dharmādhikārī brothers. The assembly's judgment cut through the argument about what it was that created priestly rights. ‘Sonars, or other Hindus, may have their own maintained people in their households. But the fact of being maintained does not create one single right.’ The judgment notwithstanding, Sonars continued to try choose their own priests. In 1649 the Nasik dharmādhikārīs approached local state officials to complain that another Sonar family was endeavouring to place marriage ceremonies in the hands of its own employed priest.Footnote 38
This rhetoric of brotherhood was still alive and flourishing in the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1746, two mirāsī families in the village of Saswad near Pune, quarrelled over the honours on public occasions that were associated with the offices of kulkarni and joshi. Brothers from the Brahman Panse family complained to their fellow villagers that their fathers had observed the proper order of seniority quite harmoniously. Just recently, however, there had been disagreement and litigation. ‘We do not know the meaning of this. You and we are brothers in our rights, and we should behave in the same way that our fathers did.’Footnote 39
The majālis and regional networks
The third sense in which the proceedings of these assemblies incorporated a public dimension lay in the sheer numbers recorded to have attended many of them, and the range of different locations at which petitioners might ask for their cases to be considered. Perlin notes that there may have been a peak in the frequency of large majālis meetings in the Deccan.Footnote 40 Regional assemblies with many dozens, and in some cases hundreds, in attendance, seem to have met most often during the troubled middle and later decades of the seventeenth century as the Maratha warrior leader Sivaji fought to carve out his own domain. In 1649, for example, 77 named people or individuals identified by their role attended the majālis at which the powerful Jedhe Deshmukh family divided their rights between their five sons.Footnote 41 In 1652, 72 people assembled to resolve arguments over shares in the kulkarni office of Khanapur and the surrounding villages.Footnote 42 In 1675, 238 people met to resolve a dispute over the patil’s office in the Pali village of Karad pargana.Footnote 43 In 1688, 185 people attended a meeting about the deshkulkarni and kulkarni offices of Wai province.Footnote 44 In 1725, 80 people attended a meeting about transferring ownership of the patil’s office in the villages of the Maval region.Footnote 45 Large assemblies to confirm rights were to be expected, as prolonged warfare eroded the power of established families, created opportunities for ambitious new leaders, or simply resulted in the destruction of documents which families then strove to replace. But Perlin suggests that these may also have been occasions when family heads could concert their alliances as political circumstances shifted, calculate their fortunes under different leaders, affirm old loyalties, or seek out new allies.Footnote 46
It is difficult to know how far this might have been the case at a large majālis held at Saswad near Pune in May 1657. It met to hear a dispute over the honours and perquisites that came with the headship of the local Mahar caste community. The gathering does, though, demonstrate how a single case could be contested in a dramatic fashion through a number of different forums and draw in a wide range of personnel who constituted a local public for the case. That the rights of Dalit Mahars were given such attention should not surprise us, since the role was an important one in village life and the perquisites substantial. The Mahar brothers Nagnak bin Kernak and Tukanak bin Dadnak Ranbise claimed exclusive ancestral rights to the hooves and heads of dead cattle, the wheat cakes placed in the fire of the Holi festival, the dress of honour due to the Mahar caste headman, the office of naik (guard) at the local police station, and the right to play music before the houses of the village on festival occasions. Their opponent Mahadnak Sabala claimed that his own ancestors had always enjoyed a share in those honours and perquisites.
The mahzar judgment in the case described the dispute. It went first to the Mahar caste gota, which was unable to reach a resolution. A majālis then heard the case and reprimanded the two parties for their quarrelsomeness. Unsatisfied, Mahadnak took his suit to the great Maratha military commander Netaji Palkar, then in charge of the nearby Purandhar fort. Netaji summoned the two brothers to Purandhar and kept them there for a month while the claims were investigated. Confined in the fort, the parties agreed to an ordeal. Mahadnak not only proposed to take the ravā ordeal, but offered to pay a fine of 150 tankas if he failed it. His opponents affirmed that they were willing to subject themselves in the same way: ‘Nagnak bin Kernak and Tukanak bin Dadnak said they agreed to Mahadnak's offer. All of them were willing to take the ravā ordeal.’Footnote 47 An instruction from the fort then went back to the village, ordering the ordeal to take place, ‘because without the ordeal, there can be no decision in the case’.Footnote 48 No sooner had the state officials issued the instruction than the two brothers retracted, offering instead to take the role of defendant in the ritual, following Mahadnak in ‘making a shadow’ as he walked over the circles drawn in front of the temple before taking up the ravā in his hands. This was agreed and a large majālis of some 54 individually named witnesses gathered to watch the unwrapping of Mahadnak's hands, after the drama of failed negotiations and last-minute changes to the planned ordeal. They included the heads of all of the village's artisan and service castes, leading merchants and moneylenders, as well as provincial-level state officials.Footnote 49
It was not only their size and positioning within a wider social network that enabled the majālis to serve as a kind of public arena. Unsatisfied petitioners could submit a thalpatra, asking to be heard before the majālis of another place. Even more striking because of the range of locations it brought together is the 1611 case from the Marathi-speaking regions of Bijapur state which has been described by Richard Eaton. The family of a village headman in Satara district quarrelled with the servants of a Sufi shrine in the village over entitlements to shrine offerings. There were murders on both sides, the headman was killed, and his office passed to his son. Eventually, a local Muslim merchant petitioned the region's deputy governor at the district headquarters in Karad, to whom he was related by marriage. He asked him to take action against the headman's family. The deputy governor did so, fining the son heavily and transferring the office to the merchant. The son eventually died and his son took up the cause. He made a direct approach to the Bijapur court, asking for the headship to be returned to his family. After further manoeuvring on both sides, the case was referred to a majālis back in Karad, which ruled that the headship should indeed be returned. At this, however, the Muslim merchant complained of local bias and asked that the case be heard again, this time by a dharmasabhā (an assembly of religious scholars) and not in Karad, but in Paithan, some 200 miles distant, where the assembly enjoyed an ancient reputation for its experience and fairness. This was agreed, but his petition here was no more successful. As a last throw, the merchant's family challenged their opponents to an ordeal. Interestingly, the pandits in this case felt that there was no need to seek divine forms of proof. They replied: ‘When there are witnesses and documents in the case, why should we hand out an ordeal?’Footnote 50
For seventeenth-century petitioners, therefore, the majālis, gota, and dharmasabhā offered well-understood local public spaces, with their own carefully guarded procedures. In them, local knowledge and oral testimony came together with a highly developed documentary culture. The narratives of the mahzar at once offered histories of the particular rights in question, affirmed general principles as to the basis of those rights, and articulated an idealized ethic of solidarity binding together those who held them. Yet in no sense did the majālis offer an exclusive route to justice nor one insulated from wider sets of social relations. Petitioners could apply to a plurality of authorities. Relations outside the majālis could be mobilized to try to affect its proceedings or inducements offered to key officials in the hope of evading the scrutiny of gota members and mirāsīdārs. These features sometimes made it difficult for petitioners to gain finality in their suits. On the other hand, a degree of inconclusiveness may have made for better local social cohesion, as this avoided the permanent alienation of dissatisfied parties, who could hope for redress in later generations.
Towards the panchayat: justice as a procedure of state
As elsewhere in the subcontinent, the growth of stronger regional successor states from the late seventeenth century on slowly cut into these local autonomies. In western India, this process began from the mid-century, with Sivaji's drive to restrict the administrative and tax-related powers of regional and village headmen, and to reward loyal servants with cash grants rather than permanent alienations of land.Footnote 51 Maratha defeats at the hands of Mughal forces after Sivaji's death, and the 20 years of Maratha civil war that followed, reversed these efforts at state-building. However, the emergence from 1714 of the ambitious Bhat family from the Konkan as ministers to the Maratha kings at their Satara court inaugurated a new drive to exert tighter control over the administrative and revenue-gathering structures of a Maratha state that now had major North Indian military ambitions. It was in this context that we see, from the early decades of the eighteenth century, a move towards the smaller body of the ‘panchayat’ (originally ‘council of five’), usually composed of between three and 15 members or pāñcas, convened ad hoc for each case.Footnote 52
In some respects, the panchayat continued the older practices of the majālis. Suitors still approached state officials or senior men of the village or caste to ask for the arbitration of a panchayat. Its mechanisms for summoning witnesses and examining testimony continued the practice of the majālis. Like the mahzar, its document of decree contained the original petition, the evidence given by witnesses, a listing of documents presented, and the eventual judgment. Like the majālis, panchayats met in a wide range of venues. Those that went before the most senior judges in Pune assembled in a variety of central venues. Some of their business was conducted in the halls of the peshwa's palace at Shanavarwada, some in or near local temples, and some in the homes of senior judges themselves.Footnote 53 Panchayats held in the localities met under the direction and at the convenience of senior community leaders appointed to conduct them.
However, there were also very significant differences, which had a critical bearing on the panchayat's potential as the focus for a local public. The panel of pāñcas was made up of the petitioners’ nominees on each side, usually friends or knowledgeable community seniors. Members of the wider gota and local mirāsīdārs had no automatic right to attend. Where the petitioners could not agree on the membership, local state officials selected the pāñcas and were themselves an essential part of the proceedings. The panchayat received much more of its evidence in the form of written testimony, often sent by witnesses from a considerable distance. In his own early account of the panchayat, Elphinstone noted that ‘accounts and other written evidence were called for after examination of the parties, and likewise oral evidence when written failed; but a great preference was given to the evidence of written documents’. As we shall see, much of the investigative work of the panchayat was done by correspondence, and witnesses were questioned on the statements they had submitted or on those provided by others not present.
What was missing here was the majālis’ broad community attendance, as of right, by local caste and community heads, and local people who themselves held rights of the kind under discussion, including the entitlement to assent to, with individual sign or signature, the verdict of the assembly. Without this broader attendance in person, the proceedings of the panchayat developed a different quality, with a more business like judicial focus on the succession of documents and witnesses brought before it. As we shall see below, its document of judgment reflected this difference. It still contained the same essential elements as the mahzar; however, its character as the record of a drama, in which witnesses and audience were all present at the same occasion, was subtly weakened. The judgment of the panchayat was presented rather as a seamless narrative of witnesses questioned and documents scrutinized.
The material documentary form of this judgment also differed. The panchayat's detailed written record, taken down by village officers, was termed a sārāṁśa (‘essence of the judgement’). Its accuracy was certified by the recording village officers, not by the authority of the individual pāñcas, who were not usually named in the sārāṁśa. Like the mahzar, a copy of the sārāṁśa was retained in the district revenue office or, in important cases, in the archives of the Pune court. However, it was only when the sārāṁśa was recast as an official decree—a nivāḍapatra (‘letter of decision’) with royal seal and endorsements by the state officials responsible for levying fees and fines—that it became an instrument of executive authority. The nivāḍapatra was thus essentially the sārāṁśa, but now issued as a document of state. The deliberations of gathered mirāsīdārs and heads of villages standing as witness to a local decision no longer gave it its authority, but rather these forms of state affirmation.Footnote 54
A variety of pressures shaped the move towards the panchayat. The form of the majālis itself seems to have declined in prestige. The signatories to a ‘letter of purpose’ (niścayapatra), written in June 1726, observed something of this process. The letter concerned affairs within the Pathane Prabhu community in the important port towns of Cheul and Revdanda to the south of Bombay. The letter seems to have been more of a signed appeal about affairs within the community intended for circulation, rather than part of a formal judicial procedure. The signatories lamented the decline in recent years of mutual respect within the community, and particularly the attitude of its younger members, to established legal procedures: ‘They have no regard any more for senior people in the community. Even the prestige of the majālis has disappeared.’Footnote 55 It is possible that this perception of declining importance may have been connected with the diminishing status under Maratha rule of the qazi and other Muslim state officials who had earlier supervised the majālis and now found their role contracted to one of supervising the religious and judicial needs of local Muslim communities only.Footnote 56 The creation from the early eighteenth century of new cadres of Brahman regional heads and revenue collectors vested with judicial responsibilities and accountable directly to Shahu's powerful peshwa ministers may also have drawn authority away from the majālis.Footnote 57 There is also evidence of a new consciousness of the authority of pāñcas themselves, both as defenders of correct judicial procedure, but also, in some cases, as usurpers of older rights whose authority was uncertain.
Changing priorities at the centre may also have contributed to the panchayat's eclipse of the majālis. Its multiple sites for appeal, and sometimes indefinitely deferred conclusions, may have become increasingly uncongenial to the Maratha state, given its need for reliable revenue streams and a stable regime of property rights. In addition, some outside the peshwa state's elite circle of banking and military families did not wholly accept either its displacement of the Maratha royal family nor the peshwa's own family as impeccable Brahmans.Footnote 58 The death of the Maratha raja Shahu II in 1749 and the transfer of effective power from Satara to the peshwa's court at Pune were therefore accompanied by fresh attempts to bring judicial processes more directly under the control of what eventually emerged at the ‘huzoor panchayat’ (‘panchayat of the state’). It was based at the Pune court, with a standing staff of scribes and record keepers to assist in its work. However, the shift was to be a slow and partial one, with the panchayat emerging within the framework of, and alongside, the older bodies.
The panchayat and its ‘publics’
What, then, can the documentary form and narratives of the panchayat tell us about its effect on the public dimensions of petitioning identified above? The panchayat convened in June 1723 to hear a case relating to the important Gijare family of Brahmans offers some insights. It is worth looking at this case in some detail to get a sense of the tenor of its proceedings. The nivāḍapatra (letter of decision) represented these as an unbroken narrative stream, as the pāñcas examined one submitted document after another, with brief reported intermissions for the questioning of witnesses.
Two branches of the family were involved. Sadashivbhat Gijare complained that Narayanbhat and Gopalbhat Gijare had denied him his rightful enjoyment of the perquisites attached to the role of priests to the astrologer and accountant families serving five villages in the district of Karhad. The case was complex because there were many Gijare brothers and branches of the family were scattered across the towns and villages of the district. The business of the panchayat opened with the presentation of the written statements of each party. Sadashiv affirmed that he, Narayan, and Gopal shared a common ancestor in Ramesvara, to whom the rights in question had originally belonged. From Ramesvara's three sons had descended the present three branches of the family, who currently lived in Wai, Karhad, and Dushere respectively. Sadashiv himself belonged to the Wai branch of the family and claimed that this link entitled him to a portion of the rights in question. However, his forebears had given the original documents of rights to other family members for safekeeping during a visit to Banaras and now the documents could not be traced. In their own written statement, Narayan and Gopal, who belonged to the Karhad branch of the family, asked Sadashiv to produce evidence to support his claim.Footnote 59
The pāñcas then questioned both parties in person and also asked Sadashiv to produce copies of the papers and witnesses to his claims. A further written statement from Sadashiv followed, stating that copies of the papers had been given to two relatives, Moresvara and Pilambha, now deceased. The panchayat asked Babdev, the son of Moresvara, to submit a katba (a sworn written statement), which formed the next item examined by the pāñcas. The statement confirmed that his late father did have papers, ‘but I do not have copies of those papers, or of papers from his hands’.Footnote 60 The panchayat then questioned Narayan and Gopal about their claims and specified the papers from that side of the family that they wished to examine. Further statements from witnesses in favour of Sadashiv arrived, but the witnesses themselves did not appear. The pāñcas asked for and received additional written statements from descendants of other sons of Ramesvara, the original ancestor. One statement contained a family tree showing the three sons of Ramesvara and their descendants, which affirmed that Sadashiv did not share this ancestry. Another descendant Visvanath reported that he had gone to Wai to consult his grandmother Kasibai about the family tree, and she had known that there were branches of the family in Wai, Karhad, and Mahuli, but ‘the infirmity of age’ made it difficult to confirm the connection between them.Footnote 61
Further written testimony followed from different branches of the family, some of whom were called in for questioning. Sadashiv's relatives supplied written evidence, one affirming that he had seen family papers that looked like astrologers’ charts, rolled up in a bundle; another that he thought he had seen his late father's handwriting on some papers, but did not see them closely enough to read what they said. The narrative of the nivāḍapatra continued. ‘Questioned, one said. “I do not know anything at all. The handwriting is not ours, and I do not remember anything”. The second gave witness that “Papers were given, but I do not know what they were, because I did not see them”.’Footnote 62 Asked for his written testimony, the revenue officer of the region sent the pāñcas further documents relevant to the case, but suggested that a meeting of the caste gota be called to determine the question of descent. The parties to the case duly submitted written confirmation that they were content with the place nominated for the gota. The nivāḍapatra gave no details of the gota’s proceedings, but reproduced the family tree that its members agreed to be correct. This showed the relation between the Karad, Wai, and Dushere branches of the family descended from Ramesvara, to which Sadashiv's line was not connected. In further questioning, the pāñcas declared that it was doubtful that Sadashiv's witnesses could really have recognized copies of the lost documents from a distance and again ordered him to supply documentary proofs of his claims.
When he failed to do so, the nivāḍapatra narrated the verdict of the pāñcas. They declared Sadashiv's claims to be unfounded. The real descendants of Ramesvara had denied that he was any brother of theirs. Such papers as he had produced were forgeries. The witnesses he had produced ‘said in front of you, that they did not know anything’.Footnote 63 The pāñcas ordered him therefore to produce a letter acknowledging his defeat. The nivāḍapatra recorded that Sadashiv had promised to come back that evening to write the letter.
However, Sadashiv clearly had one last throw. The nivāḍapatra’s narrative continued. Instead of coming back to write his letter, Sadashiv had journeyed instead to see the senior judge at the Satara court and persuaded him to ask the pāñcas to transfer the case to a different venue for a further hearing. Their reply reflected their sense of their independence of the state and their commitment to proper judicial process:
We are not officials of the Diwan. He has not taken proper statements from the parties or agreements to abide by the verdict. We ourselves do not have any vested interest in the case. We asked both parties to the dispute whether they would accept the verdict in this place of our meeting, or whether they wanted the dispute heard in a different place. Both parties told the panchayat very sincerely that they accepted the place appointed, and gave us a written undertaking that they would abide by the verdict given here.
Sadashiv's last throw having failed, the pāñcas once more returned their verdict in favour of the brothers Narayan and Gopal. The nivāḍapatra was issued back at the Satara court, in the presence of some 26 district, town, and village level officers. Interestingly, this meeting, which validated the proceedings of the panchayat, referred to itself as a majālis, perhaps still reflecting something of the prestige of that body.Footnote 64
What kind of a public can we see gathered round the panchayat in this example? With its greater reliance on written evidence, succession of witnesses, and detachment from local communities of rights-holders, the panchayat lost something of the capacity of the majālis to affirm a collective oral memory through a single meeting. The Brahman caste gota remained an active presence in this institutional landscape, convened when the pāñcas found themselves unable to ascertain the relationships between widely dispersed branches of the family. Yet its role was advisory, a guide to the panchayat rather than a source of authority in its own right. The nivāḍapatra, while valuable for the judgment it conveyed and its marks of royal approval, was no longer a material expression of the consent of local communities of rights-holders, a tangible fragment of the public they represented. With its audience restricted to a panel of pāñcas questioning a succession of witnesses, the panchayat also did not seem to prompt witnesses into general rhetoric about the moral norms of brotherhood. If any were so prompted, fewer people heard them and their remarks did not appear in the smooth narrative flow of the nivāḍapatra. This document did contain an affirmation of the moral standing of the panchayat, but it lay in the declaration of the pāñcas themselves, in which they constituted themselves very much as the principal defenders of community rights and proper procedure.
If these elements of a local and face-to-face public were weakened, however, the very documentary emphasis of the panchayat drew local communities into a wider network of communication composed of flows of documents. Documents themselves emerged out of meetings and conversations as witnesses constructed their testimony. State officials, witnesses, and widely dispersed family members were linked as they sought to reconstruct local histories, speculated about the role of different parties in the case, and heard news about the panchayat's proceedings. Indeed, the sheer proliferation of written evidence called for itself seems surprising, given that the complainant Sadashiv appears to have had a relatively weak case. Echoing the older practice of the majālis, it may be that the very exhaustiveness of such enquiries was intended to help reconcile unsuccessful litigants to their defeat.
Other cases from these decades illustrate a similar blending of old and new forms. In October 1733, Keroji and Mankoji, representing two branches of a Maratha patil family with shares in the headship of Sirsophal village near Satara, sought a hearing. At issue was the relative seniority of three brothers of the family from which the disputants were descended and the associated rights and perquisites. The Satara court ordered an investigation. The gota of the village took the leading role, examining the family trees and ordering the two parties to wash themselves in the water of the temple well and then state truthfully which brother was senior. Mankoji failed to follow the instructions, saying that his claims dated back to shares established early in the life of the village, before the lifetime of any witness still living. Pressed for the ancient mahzar that would substantiate his claim, he produced papers that were then formally scrutinized by a majālis, but one led by senior men who were referred to as pāñcas. Led by the pāñcas, the majālis determined that the seals and signatures on the document were falsified or absent. It lacked the proper Persian signature and seal of the Muslim state official of the time and the names of the witnesses were incorrectly recorded.
Interestingly, both the pāñcas and Mankoji seem to have been sensitive to the more narrowly based authority of the assembly. Recording that Mankoji's document was forged, the pāñcas pointed out to Mankoji that the pānḍhari (the ‘whole village community’) had also given testimony to the effect that Mankoji's family was the junior descendant. Mankoji himself then seems to have challenged the authority of the pāñcas. ‘At this, Mankoji said, “So you will follow what these five people say?”. The pāñcas said to him, “The pānḍhari and the brothers have enough weight between them. Keroji's house is senior, and Mankoji's is junior”.’ The narrative of the case, contained in the final judgment, described how the pāñcas had made their report to the Satara court and that a vatanpatra (a document of right to the village office) was duly issued in favour of Keroji.Footnote 65
Even as the new form of the panchayat became routinized in local practice, other pressures worked against the attempt to focus judicial decisions on a smaller group of community leaders. The spread of Maratha power into central and northern India meant that there were more, not fewer, authorities to whom discontented litigants could turn. Greater dependence on documentary testimony meant increased risk of forgery. The nivāḍapatra of a panchayat held in June 1765, four years after the Marathas’ disastrous defeat at the battle of Panipat outside Delhi, recorded a dispute between the Brahman Garge and Mule families. With its references to ‘bundles’ of accompanying documentary evidence, it reveals the extent to which this particular panchayat depended on written evidence sent in to it. At the same time, the channels through which written flows of information about these and other Maratha rights now spanned the subcontinent, connecting powerful families, state officials, and local village communities. When influence across long-distance networks counted, elite families such as these naturally enjoyed an advantage.
The nivāḍapatra recorded that brothers of the Brahman Mule family had come to the Pune court and complained that the Garge family was attempting to usurp their rights as priests and dharmādhikārīs in the village of Tasgaon outside Pune. Sadashivrao Bhau, nephew of the peshwa, had heard the case and decided in favour of the Mules. But the Garges disregarded the verdict, gave out false information about the judgment, and forcibly assumed control of the Mules’ offices. So, the nivāḍapatra continued, voiced in the narrative of the Mules:
We went to see the Bhausaheb in Hindustan. We told him that Garge had given out false information about the judgement he had earlier given (bundle 2) and seized our property. So the Bhausaheb gave us a letter for Nana Saheb peshwa, saying that in the judgement given, Garge had put forward a false case. He gave us a written affirmation that the Mules should be allowed to resume their property, and we came back to Pune. Then Nana Saheb peshwa died. But the Swami saw the letters and issued instructions to the revenue officers and the villagers that Garge had been found false and should be made to release the property, and the Mules allowed to resume their rights. So then Garge approached Mahadji Shinde and made a complaint to him, and also demanded a fee of 200 rupees from the village Patil (bundle 3). The villagers said that the Mules would have to pay this fee. Then Garge took us before Mahadji Shinde, and demanded with menaces that we should give him our letters from the Sarkar. Then an order from the Sarkar went to Shinde's Dewan to say that Garge had no case, and the fee the Mules had paid should be returned to them.Footnote 66
At this point, the Mule's narrative continued, Garge resorted to another tactic. ‘He wrote out a document admitting his defeat. He said, I will make a copy of the papers and give it to you. Then he took our papers to make copies of them, but instead of returning them, he tore them all up.’Footnote 67 The Mules pointed out another difficulty: ‘In his impudence, Garge would not write a letter admitting defeat. An order can be issued to him, but it is not possible to punish a Brahman.’Footnote 68 Eventually, as in the Gijare case, the pāñcas retreated to the older methods of taking witness evidence. Officials summoned the villagers and asked them, under oath, who their hereditary priest really was. The villagers testified that the office belonged to the Mule family and wrote out a document to confirm the fact. With this confirmed, the nivāḍapatra concluded with a brief declaration in favour of the Mule family.Footnote 69
The complex history of the Padhye family, described earlier in this article, further reveals the publics that now gathered around the panchayat, connected by documentary flows as well as by reported news—here of sensational events connected with the panchayat's proceedings. With the coming of the peshwa government, the Joshis once more raised their challenge to the Padhyes’ rights, but now, perhaps, with greater hope, since they were family relations of the peshwas. We have two accounts of what happened: one in a nivāḍapatra that was the outcome of a panchayat of 1763 and another in a later Padhye family history. According to the lengthy narrative of the nivāḍapatra, the peshwa Madhavrao Ballal convened a panchayat at the Pune court itself. The panchayat asked the Padhye family for documentary evidence of their claim. Disputing the panchayat's competence, the head of the family Kashi Padhye refused to attend or to produce their documents, asserting ‘You have no capacity to give a just judgement in this matter.’
The panchayat met anyway. Fourteen people—a combination of state officials and holders of mirāsī rights—attested in favour of the Joshis, who seem to have had two star witnesses. One was a goldsmith, Ramshet Sonar, who described how Kashi Padhye had taken him to his home back in the Konkan:
He told me he wanted me to engrave a copper plate. I said to him, I am a poor man, I can't do something like that. Padhye said, don't be afraid. Our copper plate is very old, and it has worn out. I just want to make a new copy. So saying, he brought a new copper plate three hands long and one hand span wide and gave it to me. Then, in a private place, he would write four or five lines neatly in ink on the copper plate, and I would engrave it. After 10 or 15 days, three letters in all had been written and engraved in this way.
Seals were added by the goldsmith, and he was rewarded for his work with gifts of cloth. Another witness, Bal Joshi, testified that ‘Kashi Padhye asked me if I would calculate what day of the week did the third day of the dark half of Vaiśākh month fall on in the śake year of 106. I did the calculation, and told him. This was about 20 years ago.’ The panchayat decided that Kashi Padhye had forged his documents. The Joshis were entered in the Pune records as the rightful owners.Footnote 70
But the family history presents a further narrative, which demonstrates the flow of reported news that accompanied the movement of documents. After Kashi Padhye's refusal to appear, state officials arrived at the Padhye home in the Konkan. They found a servant, Govind, and demanded the family's copper plate and paper documents. Govind protested that he did not know where they were. He had heard that some were destroyed during local warfare on the coast some years before and others were sent back to Pune. The peshwa's men took him out into the forest and beat him, then imprisoned him in nearby Torna fort. News of his maltreatment reached the Padhye brothers in Pune. At this point, the peshwa was in camp on his way to Aurangabad. The brothers pursued him and staged a fast at the door to his tent. The peshwa released the servant, but still demanded the documents. The brothers retorted ‘You have already committed violence at our house in pursuit of these documents. If we bring them to the court, you will seize them from us.’Footnote 71 The peshwa disregarded their complaints and went ahead with the panchayat that transferred the Padhye's rights to the Joshi family. The end was dramatic. The elder brother Anant went back to the Konkan and set fire to the family home. He brought some of the ashes back with him to Pune, where he accosted the peshwa out riding in his palanquin. He threw the ashes into the palanquin with the words ‘You have brought ruin on our house, and in the same way will your whole lineage be destroyed.’Footnote 72 As a renunciate from his new base in the shrine town of Pandharpur, Anant and his successors remained persistent opponents of the peshwa's family, drawing a wide local following and finding support from the powerful Shinde family.
By the 1790s, the form of the panchayat had become very much the centrepiece in the judicial administration of the Maratha state. Its position emerges clearly in a Marathi report, written sometime after 1795, contained in the judicial records of the Pune court. There is no indication as to the author. However, the report offers a remarkable survey of the Maratha judicial apparatus between 1774 and 1795. These were the years when the Brahman statesman Nana Phadnis led the administration, and its chief officer of justice was the formidable Ramshastri Prabhune.Footnote 73 The report described the authority vested in officials at different levels of the regional administration empowered to hear petitions about mirās rights and to issue decrees with official seals. It laid out procedures for receiving suits, summoning the parties, receiving testimony, scrutinizing documents, issuing judgments, handing down punishments of different kinds, keeping records, and maintaining a staff of knowledgeable officials. It described the central role of the Pune panchayat in these processes:
Sometimes a senior judge of the court would himself sit in on hearings. Once all enquiries were completed, and written agreements to abide by the decision were taken from all the parties, the pāñcas and the senior judge would sit. Once the parties had given all the testimony they wished, the pāñcas would come to a determination they considered just, and they would issue their sārāṁśa. The judge did not sit alone to dispense justice.Footnote 74
This Marathi report proved remarkably influential. By 1819, Elphinstone had assumed the governorship of Bombay. One of the subordinates commissioned to gather information about Maratha judicial institutions was N. J. Lumsden, who submitted his report ‘Some account of the manner in which justice was administered in the Poona State during the ascendancy of Nana Furnavees’ on 24 January 1819.Footnote 75 Comparison of the two texts reveals that Lumsden based his account very largely on the Marathi document, which may itself have been written in answer to Lumsden's enquiries. Lumsden's account provided much of the basis for Elphinstone's own description of the panchayat's working within the territories of the peshwa.Footnote 76
As Jaffe has demonstrated, Lumsden was one of a group of Collectors and political agents whom Elphinstone tasked with gathering information on the workings of the panchayat in the Maratha country.Footnote 77 These officers consulted three different pandits with experience of the panchayat. They were named in the officers’ reports as Raggopunt Tuttee, Ramesshur, and Nucca Ram Pandit, and they provided a range of different answers to Elphinstone's questions.Footnote 78 Like the author of the Marathi report that Lumsden used, these pandits also emphasized the central role of the Pune state and its officials in the workings of the panchayat, but also the difficulties the officials sometimes encountered in controlling its deliberations. Asked how members of the panchayat were selected, Raggopunt explained that they were selected by the government, but ‘liable to be challenged by the parties’. In cases of disputes over debt, Ramesshur described how frustrated creditors sometimes took the law into their own hands when panchayats were ‘too stubborn to be guided’ in their proceedings.Footnote 79
Some of the limitations in the more centralized form of the panchayat may even have been reflected in popular usage of the term. The young linguist and army officer James Molesworth, who began to compile the first Marathi dictionary in 1818, gave its conventional meaning as an assembly of arbitration or the deliberations of such an assembly. However, he also provided some of its popular usages. Panchayat was used freely to denote ‘a state of exigency or of bewilderment or of difficulty in general’, ‘blabbing abroad or making to be publicly talked about’, and ‘vain or needless discussing or objecting’.Footnote 80
Conclusion
It seems clear, then, that petitionary cultures in pre-colonial India have much to offer social and political history. Here, the deep penetration of paper use and allied bureaucratic conventions created a set of linked small publics. They developed in the space between the official and the familial, and gathered around the corporate bodies described in this article. The petitioners who came before them shared a deep concern with rights, a rhetoric about the brotherhood of rights-holders, acute sensitivity to the importance of procedure, and sharp awareness of the field of social relations through which all avenues to justice ran. The emergence in the eighteenth century of the panchayat weakened the broad community base of these corporate bodies and made the authority of their judgments contingent on ratification by the state. However, the panchayat did not snuff out these local publics. Rather, its greater focus on written testimony connected them to the wider social networks through which such documents flowed as they were constructed for judicial use, their contents shared as reported news between families, fellow villagers, other witnesses, and state officials. Reflecting the greatly expanded horizons of the peshwa state, such social networks could extend well beyond its boundaries, to Maratha domains in the north and Maratha armies as they campaigned there.
In the state of our current knowledge, it is difficult to know how far the changing shape of petitionary ‘publics’ identified here occurred in other polities across the subcontinent. The Maratha country was certainly not alone in developing the rich ecology of local corporate institutions and judicial procedures described here.Footnote 81 However, further research is needed to ascertain how far their petitionary cultures reveal elements of a recognizable ‘public’. Particular exigencies of the peshwa state may have shaped the panchayat and its ‘publics’. As the peshwa government sought to concentrate authority in the Pune court and its cadres of administrative servants, the panchayat may have seemed a natural development. At the same time, the emergence of alternative sources of Maratha power in central and northern India lengthened the lines of communication along which judicial documents flowed and expanded the ‘publics’ that could gather around a particular petition.
In the early nineteenth-century systems that Mountstuart Elphinstone observed, the panchayat was still very much a part of the broader judicial structure, although petitioners with influence and resources could still find multiple arenas and sources of authority to which they could appeal.
In his prescriptions for the future, he argued that,
Our principal instrument must continue to be the Punchayet, and that must continue to be exempt from all new forms, interference and regulation on our part. Such forms would throw over this well-known institution that mystery which enables litigious people to employ ‘Courts of Justice’ as engines of intimidation against their neighbours, and which renders necessary a class of lawyers, who among the Natives are the great fomenters of disputes.Footnote 82
He was successful in this argument for retaining the panchayat as the most local level of justice in the new administrative order of the Bombay government. The Elphinstone Code of 1827 created a three-tiered judicial system, composed of a Sadar Adalat, a Zillah Adalat, and ‘Native Commissioners of Justice’, to oversee what Elphinstone hoped would be a continuing panchayat system of an informal kind. However, this attempt at preservation proved difficult to implement. As James Jaffe has described, officials within Elphinstone's government sought to reform and regulate the operation of the panchayat system throughout during the 1820s, limiting its remit to small and local civil disputes, introducing penalties for delay, and routinizing its proceedings to make them more ‘efficient’. As a consequence, fewer and fewer litigants chose to take their disputes to a panchayat, preferring instead to present them to British courts with their greater emphasis on the summary enforcement of decisions.Footnote 83 As the peshwas themselves had found, the creation of higher levels of authority in a formal court judiciary meant that authority leaked away from these local structures, by offering dissatisfied petitioners alternative and higher levels of appeal. By mid-century, the form of the panchayat had so dwindled in significance that the Indian Law Commission, reporting in 1856 on the future development of colonial India's judiciary, declared that outside the three presidency towns, India had in effect no functioning civil law at all, beyond the ‘special laws of their own’ that Hindus and Muslims respectively were deemed to possess.Footnote 84 The spaces for petition opened up in the newly codified judicial landscape of the 1860s had their own new protocols; in them success relied not so much on the ability to appeal to local solidarities, but more on the mastery of the technical language of colonial law. The panchayat itself, meanwhile, also acquired its own new future. Successive generations of colonial sociologists and nationalist intellectuals, from Henry Maine to Gandhi, reimagined and appropriated it to inform their own visions of India's ancient traditions of local self-government.Footnote 85
