Makhdūm Shaikh Jamāl Shams al-ʿĀrifīn Quddisa Sirru-hu
Wa lā taktumū al-shahādata wa man yaktumhā faʾinna-hu athimun qalbuhu
Zikrīst dar bayān īn ki ba tārīkh dahum shahr rajab al-murajjab 24 Julūs-i wālā mutābiq 1154 gūdhū maʿahu pasar-i khwud zunnārdār sākin-i qasba-yi pargana-yi Kol sarkār-i mazkūr muzāf ba sūba mustaqarr al-khilāfat Akbarābād az rāh-i sharārat wa khusūmat ba Shaikh Muhammad Wāhid wa Shaikh Amjad wa Shaikh Muhammad Mīr wa Shaikh Mīrū wa Mīr Fasīh al-Dīn waghaira farzandān-i ulwat al-sālikīn qadwat al-ʿārifīn hazrat khishthā bilā waswās andākht wa dushnāmhā-yi mughallaza bī-tahāshā dād wa ihānat-i sharʿ-i sharīf wa millat-i hanīf namūda wa dar bāb-i dīn-i islām sair tahqīr namūda. Har kas ki az sādāt-i ʿuzzām wa mashāiʾkh-i kirām wa quzzāt-i islām wa jumhūr-i anām bar rāstī-yi īn chunīn wa sadq-i īn maqāl khabarī wa itillāʿī dāshta bāshad bahisb-i Allah muhr wa gawāhī-yi khwud bar zail-i īn qartās sabt numāyand wa agar khwud niwishtan nadānand badīgarī ijāzat-i niwishtan dahand tā ʿinda allah maʾjūr wa ʿinda al-nās mashkūr gardad.
The Master, Shaikh Jamal, Sun of the Learned, may his secret be sanctified.
(Qurʾan 2:283): Do not suppress any evidence, for he who conceals evidence is sinful of heart.
It is reported that on the date of the 10th of the month of Rajab, in the 24th year of the exalted reign corresponding to 1154 [ah], Gudhu and his son, Brahmins, residents of the town in the subdistrict of Kol, the administration of which is appended to the province of the Abode of the Domain Akbarabad, threw brickbats without consideration and uttered vile slurs without restraint at Shaikh Muhammad Wahid and Shaikh Amjad and Shaikh Muhammad Mir and Shaikh Miru and Mir Fasih al-Din and the other descendants of his highness, traveller of the path of piety and the exemplar of the learned, by way of mischief and animosity. They roughly treated the noble law and the orthodox community, and roundly scorned the religion of Islam. Every one of the exalted Sayyids and the eminent Shaikhs and the Judges of Islam and the mass of the people are aware of the truth and veracity of this account therefore by the sufficiency of God place their seal and testimony at the bottom of this paper, and if they do not know how to write, they give permission to another to write, so that they will be recompensed by God and thanked by the populace.Footnote 1
Introduction
Sometime on 21 September 1741, a Brahman named Gudhu and his son took up some brickbats and flung them at a group of Muslim worthies in or near the town of Kol (present-day Aligarh).Footnote 2 This little act of violence sent a wave of disturbance rippling through the local community. The document, which is the subject of this study, is an artefact produced by that moment of disequilibrium. From the outset, it must be noted that the document reproduced above does not fall within the genre of ‘petition’ (ʿarzī, ʿarzdāsht); in technical terms it belongs to the class of documents called ‘testimony’ (istishhād-nāma, gawāhī-nāma). If other papers were produced around this minor incident, they have not yet surfaced. In the absence of any further evidence in the archives, how is the historian to make sense of this testimonial and its work in eighteenth-century Kol?
This article seeks to read the testimonial above as closely as possible in order to conceptualize the work of the petition in the late Mughal world. My plea, elaborated at length below, is that in the late Mughal milieu, rather than thinking of the presenting of the petition as an event, we are better served by conceiving of petitioning as a process, one that generated all manner of legal documentation. The process of petitioning, I will suggest, was both produced by, and in excess of, the administrative logic and ideology of the Mughal dynasty.Footnote 3 In the absence of a robust understanding of the precise legal role of documents that are part of the genre of the testimonial, such as the one under consideration here, I argue that they should be read not simply as a moment of ‘negotiation’ between subject and state, but as symptomatic markers of a popular practice of politics, which became increasingly evident across the Mughal realm in the early eighteenth century.
Before we examine the practice of petitioning in the politics of the locality, we must first turn to the legal order of the Mughal empire. While in many ways recognizable in the typology of the ‘Islamicate empire’, the workings of the Mughal legal system across the time and space of the empire have remained, at best, imperfectly understood.Footnote 4 M. B. Ahmad, one of the first scholars to treat the subject in a systematic fashion, was driven by explicitly presentist concerns in his efforts to reconstruct the workings of justice in ‘medieval India’ within the theoretical paradigm of Islamic law cast in the language of English legal scholarship.Footnote 5 Ahmad presented and analysed a series of ‘cases’ (which he had himself constituted) from the passing accounts of foreign travellers or Mughal chroniclers. This process inevitably led to infelicitous results, evident in ‘cases’ such as: ‘State v. potter’ that was constructed from an account in Manucci's Storia;Footnote 6 ‘State v. Sarmad’, from Jadunath Sarkar's account of the execution of the mystic by Aurangzeb; and even ‘State v. Empress Nur Jahan’, from the emperor Jahangir's memoirs. These yielded unhappy and demonstrably false conclusions: State v. Sarmad revealed that ‘No distinction was made between Hindus and Muslims in the matter of punishment.’Footnote 7 State v. Nur Jahan, on the other hand, was used to illustrate the fact that ‘[t]he law of Sharʿ applied to all, and the officers of state were treated like ordinary citizens for personal disputes’.Footnote 8
Much subsequent scholarship concentrated on the workings of the king's justice, to the relative detriment of the large numbers of legal documents that have been preserved in archives across South Asia and Europe.Footnote 9 In the recent past, the focus has shifted to questions of the theory and practice of Mughal jurisprudence, particularly during the reign of the emperor Aurangzeb (d. 1707).Footnote 10 Noteworthy in this regard is the scholarship of Farhat Hasan, which has shown that a principal means by which the Mughal state became enmeshed in local society was through practices of legal governance (sharīʿa), producing a resource that was accessed by Hindus and Muslims alike. Hasan identifies the office of the judge (qāzī) as a central institution which mediated relations within the locality, and between society and state more generally.Footnote 11 Nandini Chatterjee has visualized Mughal governance as ‘centered on a formal and not merely rhetorical commitment to the supremacy of Islam as a source of law, actuated through a permissively inclusive and widely dispersed legal culture’.Footnote 12 Nor were such practices of governance limited to the areas under the direct administration of Delhi; in Nandita Sahai's work we see that the language of Mughal administration and relations between state and community associations had become ubiquitous in Rajasthan during the eighteenth century.Footnote 13 Unfortunately in the Mughal case there do not appear to be extant equivalents for the richly detailed petition registers (sanad parwāna bahī) employed by scholars of Rajasthan. But, as we shall see, petitions from the Mughal empire broadly confirm Sahai's claim that in Rajasthan in a slightly later period ‘. . . the domain of justice was an arena of negotiation and contest, and as much as the former had an impact on politics, politics too shaped the outcome of the judicial process’ or, as Sumit Guha has recently argued for western India in the same period, ‘[t]he judicial process was transparently a political process’.Footnote 14
What was the work of a document such as the testimonial in this permissively inclusive legal culture which, by the eighteenth century, appears to have spread across much of the subcontinent? It is difficult to answer such a question in the domain of legal practice, given our poor understanding of the workings of the Mughal judicial apparatus. But if petitioning is visualized as a process, a testimonial such as the one with which we began this article should be seen as embodying a single iteration of the processes of political relations which cohered the locality and bound it to the centre. Read imaginatively, such documents can therefore illuminate the contours of an arena in which the creation and use of petitions was only one move of many in the dynamic of local politics. Petitions, and petitioning, should thus be seen not as markers of structured contact between a monolithic state and a sedimented locality, but as the tell-tale symptoms of an expanding popular politics in which local agents of state were also actors.
To make this argument, I examine the place of petitions in the Mughal administrative imagination, within the discursive significance of the dispensation of justice by the figure of the Mughal emperor. I then discuss a document of agreement (iqrār-nāma) that recounts the woeful tale of a tailor named Hira in order to explore the workings of petitioning as process. In light of this conception, I return to the testimony with which we began this article, reading it in the context of the voluminous writings of a certain Raji Muhammad, under whose seal the document was made. By locating the testimony in the context of the history and society of the town of Kol as it appeared to Raji Muhammad in the early eighteenth century, I offer a reconceptualization of the work of petitions in the politics of the locality in the Mughal empire of the early eighteenth century.
Petitions in the Mughal administrative imagination
It is significant that questions of petitioning are broadly absent from consideration in studies of the Mughal legal system, but are extensively described within the workings of Mughal government. In his magisterial study of the workings of the Mughal chancellery, Momin Mohiuddin describes all forms of communication between the emperor and his administrative apparatus as petitions. His definition of the genre of ʿarzdāsht is worth quoting at length:
This usually refers to a petition (i.e. letter) submitted to the Emperor by any person from a prince to a plebeian save those privileged ones who wrote maktūb . . . As a matter of fact, every letter whether private or official addressed to the emperor is termed as an ʿarz-dāsht, even if it tends to be a congratulatory letter or of condolence.Footnote 15
That Mohiuddin regards all manner of correspondence between hierarchical inferiors and superiors as petitions is neither an instance of mistranslation nor of confusion in terminology. In a state that represented itself as organized around the figure of an emperor who was an absolute source of power, all communication must necessarily take the form of either ‘petition’ or ‘command’. The fact that the terms for such internal bureaucratic correspondence (ʿarzdāsht, ʿarzī) include communications from the governed is indicative of the administrative orientation of the Mughal state, in which all manner of local disputes were smoothly resolved by the state's apparatus—at least in theory.
The administrative orientation of the Mughal state at the moment of its creation is most clearly enunciated in the Institutions of Akbar (Āʾīn-i Akbarī), a foundational text of imperial regulations. The Institutions has little to say about the judicial order. It claims that responding to complaints (dāw-barī, faryād-rasī) is the work of a ruler, but should be delegated to an enlightened person because they were beyond the capacities of just one man. In this unusually laconic account, the Institutions envisions the role of this person as mediating a dispute between two parties and offers some advice for dealing with oaths and testimonies. If a single person cannot suffice, the Institutions recommends two people should be appointed: one, who would investigate affairs, should be named a ‘judge’ (qāzī); the other, to enact orders, should be called an officer of justice (mīr ʿadl).Footnote 16 By contrast, the next description—that of the police officer (kotwāl)—presents a rather more exhaustive list of his duties. That these were not purely theoretical prescriptions is to be seen in a report from Aurangzeb's court, on 5 December 1669. A certain Shaikh Sulaiman represented to the emperor that he had previously been asked to appoint a judge for the city of Delhi and he had now chosen the qāzī Hasib Allah, ‘because he was a good judge’. The emperor ordered that he be granted the office, and a certain Daulat Muhammad was appointed as the corresponding superintendent of justice (daroghā-yi ʿadl) for the city.Footnote 17
While the acceptance and consideration of petitions might therefore be considered an implicit task for the judge, there is no conception of anything approaching popular sentiment within the formal bureaucratic-administrative framework of the Principles. A comparison with the Ottoman case is illustrative in this context. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Ottoman imperial establishment (Dīvan-i Humāyūn) reorganized its bureaucracy, moving from noting responses to petitions in ‘Registers of Important Affairs’ (Mühimme Defterleri) to establishing a new series of ‘Registers of Complaints’ (Şikayet Defterleri). James Baldwin speculates that this may have equally represented ‘a decision in the palace to pay greater attention to petitions’ and ‘the result of an increase in the number of petitions that were sent’.Footnote 18 If similar practices of bureaucratic streamlining and the management of dealing with petitions were enacted in the Mughal empire, their traces are not apparent: no equivalents of such registers from the Mughal court have yet surfaced, although by the eighteenth century officials had been appointed to manage petitions.Footnote 19 Much like their Ottoman counterparts, however, the Mughal empire's elites were steeped in an administrative ethos in which a central value was assigned to the dispensation of justice (insāf, ʿadl). Ethical treatises for administrators, many derived from the Nasirean Ethics (Akhlāq-i Nāsirī), emphasized the importance of imperial justice in producing and maintaining the proper order of the world.Footnote 20 Mughal emperors publicly represented themselves as deeply concerned with providing justice to all their subjects, especially the meekest.Footnote 21 A chronicler of Aurangzeb's reign describes the emperor's just disposition:
Out of his love for doing justice, every day, with open forehead and tender heart, he used to stand up two or three times, and grant justice to plaintiffs who used to find access in crowds without any obstruction to his court of justice . . . and if in pleading their suits, they used any bombast . . . or exaggeration . . . of language or wrong pronunciation (or wrong expression), he did not get all angry, and no lowering of anybody's dignity was ever seen on His Majesty's part. Many times his courtiers urged him to prevent (the plaintiffs) from displaying too much boldness (of speech). But he used to reply, ‘From hearing such words and the occurrence of such cases, the (sovereign's) character acquires an angelic patience.’Footnote 22
Encapsulating as it does the moment of contact between petitioner and ruler, this account reveals the ways in which the act of adjudication was central to the identity of the Mughal emperor. Again, there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that such representations were not merely empty rhetorical claims made to legitimize imperial authority: the same chronicler reports that on 27 January 1671, the emperor ordered that ‘complainants should not be excluded from the side of the window of darsan [presentation]: the harem officers were to draw up their petitions by means of ropes and show them to his majesty’.Footnote 23 From the mid-seventeenth century, news reports from imperial and provincial courts routinely mention the emperor or noblemen holding courts of justice (ʻadālat), sometimes as frequently as several times a week. On 7 December 1669, for instance, the same Shaikh Sulaiman who had recommended the appointment of a judge for the city of Delhi produced a ‘row of petitioners’ (qitār-i faryādiyān) at the imperial court and Aurangzeb ‘gave them justice’ (insāf kardand).Footnote 24 A document preserved at the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna offers some insight into what the product of the process of justice might have looked like: in response to a plea (istighāsa) from a district in the province of Bihar against the oppression and force (zor) of local officials, the emperor Muhammad Shah personally issued injunctions to cease this behaviour. In this instance, the entirety of the complaint is recounted in the text of the injunction, with the last few lines presenting the emperor's orders. While it is not clear whether these complainants had travelled to Delhi to make their case, it would seem likely that those who did complain to the emperor personally received a document produced by the chancellery that the petitioner might use to see justice enacted at home.Footnote 25
This process of ‘giving justice’ was not without its frictions. The ‘row of petitioners’ who appear passively in the terse news report had come voluntarily to the court. Indeed, the masses who approached the emperor took it as their right to be heard and to receive justice from him. Certainly, the petitioners who visited the imperial court did not maintain the same reverent disposition displayed by the nobility who surrounded the ruler. In contrast, ‘[h]is courtiers were instructed that when speaking or reading they should substitute some elegant word for every word that had any suspicion of being objectionable’.Footnote 26 Again, while imperial rhetoric emphasized the ease and facility with which the king's justice could be obtained by the weak, Aurangzeb's injunction against hindering complainants suggests that obtaining the king's justice was rarely an easy process.
Attracting the emperor's personal attention was thus an exceptional event: the more common and everyday possibilities of interaction between the state and its subjects over questions of justice were varied. Three broad forms are manifest in the news reports from the southern provinces from the mid-seventeenth century, which offer us rare insight into the local administration from the perspective of its intelligence apparatus. The state presented itself to the people it governed with many faces: one of these was of indifference. Thus, on 12 November 1662, it was reported from the fort at Udgir that a local Brahman named Dattaji, who was in the habit of frequently slandering people, had finally so enraged the cultivators and officials with his calumnies that they shaved the hair off his head, blackened his face, and paraded him around the town.Footnote 27 No further information is offered about the incident, so it seems safe to assume that this was the end of the matter, at least as far as the local administrator was concerned. The state's agents, however, were not idle bystanders in what were considered criminal affairs. In Aurangabad in 1661, for instance, it was reported that a copper seller's wife had committed suicide by taking opium. Her husband was arrested, but was let out on bail by a local administrator named Khush Khu.Footnote 28 In the same year in Daulatabad, we learn that a certain Muhammad Riza, a sergeant (yasāwal) in the governor's employ, saw his wife standing at the door of his house and killed her on suspicion of unchastity. For this act the governor imprisoned his sergeant in a dungeon.Footnote 29
The third possibility involved the people directly approaching the local authority for redress against a perceived injustice. This was the case in the matter of a slave who, on 23 June 1662, ran away from his master, the chief (muqaddam) of a village in the district of Aindapur, and took service with an oil-presser. The chief complained to the local judge (qāzī), who investigated the affair and restored the slave to his master.Footnote 30 This is the sort of classic dispute that the administrative state could manage quite easily: the making of a judgment according to sharīʿa, which provided straightforward recourse in such matters, thereby enacting a procedural justice that appears to have satisfied the slave owner (although nothing is heard about the slave). Yet the state's commitment to providing the procedural justice of the sharia was balanced by its conservative desire to maintain order and the status quo: a commitment, in other terms, to a distributive justice that was not always congruent with the dictates of the law. An example from Aurangabad in 1663 demonstrates this ambiguity: after the provincial governor (sūbadār) ordered the erection of a serai (inn) in or near the town square (chauk), some Jats protested against this decision and suggested alternative sites for the new building. The matter was referred to the appropriate bureaucrat in charge of construction and the administrator called for documentary evidence to back up their claims (sanad).Footnote 31
These examples, though comprising a very small sample, nevertheless reveal a rich variety of possible interactions between the state and its subjects, ranging from strategic silence to unwilling or forced action. In responding to popular demands, which were fraught with the possibility of challenge to their legitimacy, the agents of the state sought to assimilate the uncontrolled excess of protest into their own established documentary protocols of authority. In asking for sanads from the protestors, the administration of Aurangabad acknowledged the dissatisfaction of its subjects but reaffirmed the primacy of its own constitution and procedures—in other words, it asserted its hegemonic status over the society it ruled.
Hira's story
So far we have only seen the demands of the governed from the perspective of their rulers. Matters appear much less orderly and secure from the viewpoint of the humble supplicant, for whom the petition might be driven as much by desperation as the hope of restitution. In order to understand how the petition served as a technique through which a supplicant might find justice, we should visualize the petition not as an event—that is, a document that was the agent of a demand and the object of a response during a discrete, temporally bound interaction between ruler and ruled—but rather as a by-product of a dynamic and fluid process, in which many actors with varying affiliations to power might participate and from which varying outcomes might result over the course of many iterations. In thus removing the object of the petition itself from the centre of our historical vision, the field of local politics emerges into view, in which a claim to the state's authority now appears as only one of many possible moves. Though perhaps always the case, this appears to be particularly evident in the early eighteenth century, when the imperial court's power began to be increasingly contested by local elites. To make this point more sharply, let us turn to another stray document, produced in 1718/1719, which relates the story of a tailor named Hira.Footnote 32
The document under consideration belongs in form to the broad category of the document of agreement (iqrār-nāma), commonly employed to seal transactions of a financial nature between two or more parties.Footnote 33 It bears the marks of Kalyan, his wife Ganga, and their son Dev; since they were illiterate, Kalyan and Dev instead etched out an image of scissors in lieu of their name, a marker of their occupation as tailors; Kalyan's wife Ganga drew a swastika. In this document, Kalyan, Ganga, and Dev acknowledge the receipt of Rs 32 from the descendants of the deceased Rupa and promise to make no further claims of any sort on these individuals. As a prelude to this agreement, the document matter-of-factly reproduces, in the jargon of the courthouse, Hira's fate.
The son of the tailors Kalyan and Ganga, and brother to Dev, Hira lived in the town of Khargon in the district of Bijagadh of Malwa province, near the geographic centre of the Mughal empire. Hira took up service with Rupa, the headman (chaudharī) of the artisans of the town of Dhar, in the nearby district of Mandu. Rupa had been locked in conflict with a Rao Jasrup, who held an imperial military land grant (jāgīrdār) in the sub-district of Amjhaura, adjoining Mandu. The nature or causes of this conflict are not described, but Rupa took it upon himself to protest (istighāsat) against Jasrup's oppression (taʿaddī) in the ‘radiant presence’ of the emperor's person, situated in the faraway capital of the Abode of the Caliphate, Shahjahanabad (Delhi). Hira joined Rupa in what would have been a journey of many months to the capital, some 850 kilometres from Mandu. When, on reaching Delhi, Rupa petitioned ‘in the presence of the clerks of the exalted court’ (bahuzūr-mutasaddiyān-i darbār-i muʿallā), a cavalryman (ahadī) named Muhammad ʿAshiq brought his own case (muqaddama) against the oppressive Jasrup. At this point, by coincidence, Rupa died in Delhi. The cavalryman Muhammad ʿAshiq then accompanied Hira and Rupa's other dependents back to Dhar. Muhammad ʿAshiq and Hira confronted the oppressive Jasrup, and the cavalryman spent a month engaged in dispute with him. But when nothing came of these efforts, Muhammad ʿAshiq returned to Delhi, leaving Hira behind.
Soon after the cavalryman left the scene, Hira was imprisoned by Jasrup and vanished into a dungeon. For three months, Hira's family pleaded with Jasrup to give them news of their son, but there was no word of whether Hira was alive or dead. Hira's family—Kalyan, Ganga, and Dev—now approached the family of their son's deceased employer. Rupa's sons—Bardaman, Dev Chand, Ratan ji, Gulab Chand, Nihal Chand, and Om Chand—approached Jasrup and sincerely protested Hira's innocence but Jasrup arrogantly refused to even respond to their queries, so that no one could determine whether Hira was dead or alive. Rupa's sons were helpless in the face of this intransigence and gave up trying to have Hira released. Hira's family then approached the garrison commander and fort keeper of Mandu, Marhamat Khan, and pleaded their case before his clerks. These clerks summoned the sons of the dead headman Rupa and asked them to offer the family the sum of Rs 32, the missing Hira's salary arrears, at the rate of Rs 4 a month. Kalyan, Ganga, and Dev accepted this offer and then, in writing, freed Rupa's family from any claim to either produce Hira or ask for his salary. ‘For this reason,’ concludes the document, ‘a statement terminating the suit for the producing of Hira, and a statement of receipt of his salary has been given, so that it may be of use in case of legal dispute (hujjat).’
Technically a statement of financial agreement between two families, the document reveals the broad contours of a local political struggle. On the one side stood Jasrup, an imperial servant with a military land grant (jāgīr) that required him to maintain a standing body of cavalry. Facing him were the artisans of the town of Dhar, assembled as a community under the leadership of Rupa. What the nature of the dispute between the two parties was we cannot say, but it is noteworthy Rupa did not approach the local judge or the garrison commander Marhamat Khan, who was admired for having ‘occupied himself in chastising rebels [near Mandu] . . . and acquired a name for gallantry’.Footnote 34 Instead he decided to embark on a journey to the faraway capital. Why did Rupa march all the way to Delhi? On the one hand, he may have felt that there was no justice to be had for him in the province: Jasrup may have been so tightly integrated within the local power structure that the governor was willing to overlook his ‘oppression’ of the artisans of Dhar. On the other hand, however, Rupa might have believed that a personal meeting with the emperor would grant him the justice he deserved, and that the risks and uncertainties of travel were truly counterbalanced by the possibility of success in Delhi. Rupa, in other words, shared the vision of kingship that the emperor Aurangzeb had enunciated in court: ‘The King of Kings—supreme is His wisdom—has made me ruler of the habitable globe; so that wherever oppression is practiced by anybody on another, the victim may hope that he will complain to me and thus secure justice’.Footnote 35
It is another matter that such visits, as we have repeatedly seen, would not always have resulted in personal meetings. The affairs of court were particularly unsettled during Rupa's sojourn in 1718 as the emperor Farrukh Siyar was struggling to prevent his overthrow at the hands of a section of his nobility.Footnote 36 Nevertheless, the notion that the headman Rupa met the cavalryman Muhammad ʿAshiq (who had his own axe to grind with Jasrup) by sheer coincidence in Delhi seems implausible. Rupa might have encountered Muhammad ʿAshiq through the local networks that structured the lives of sojourners in Delhi, but it seems more likely that they were already acquainted with one another. After Rupa's death and Muhammad ʿAshiq's fruitless return to Delhi, Jasrup vindictively flung Hira into a dungeon. This occasioned a further round of petitioning, this time by Hira's parents at the local garrison commander's court. It is significant that these local officials did not seek to bring the tyrannical notable Jasrup to account; instead, they settled the matter through the time-honoured scheme of ‘compromise’ between employer and employee. In doing so the local officials acknowledged the impossibility of securing justice for Hira or his parents, but they did seek to placate the aggrieved. It would seem that in making the agreement with Rupa's sons, Hira's parents had come to accept that their son had disappeared forever and that it was no use pursuing matters any further. Or had they? For just as the document of agreement contains a lengthy account of a past local struggle, so it is possible to imagine the continuation of the conflict into the future. Rupa's children may have wisely decided to discontinue the conflict with a powerful local notable, but Hira's parents might well have continued to seek justice for their son on their own accord.
Hira's tale is thus suggestive of a long-running political conflict in Dhar in which the community leader Rupa and his children, the poor tailors Hira and his parents, the local officer Rao Jasrup, the imperial cavalryman Muhammad ʿAshiq, the provincial governor Marhamat Khan, and even the distracted emperor Farrukh Siyar all had a role. Individual petitions were clearly only one part of a local political struggle that remains obscure—but one, crucially, conducted in excess of the administrative logic of the Mughal state: if the state had been able to release the unjustly and unlawfully imprisoned Hira from the clutches of its own representative in the locality, there would have been no need for the document that has allowed the reconstruction of our account. The document of agreement under study should therefore be seen to embody a hybrid temporal structure, bearing both the trace of a long-unfolding struggle and the singular moment of a transaction of money and abrogation of claims. And the agreement, which was explicitly generated to counteract further claims that always had the potential to be exercised at some future date, can be seen as seeking to delimit a time-horizon in the future. It is in this sense that our solitary document should be read as the product of a process of petitioning that emerged from local politics under conditions of imperial hegemony, a single frame from a film whose length or story we cannot know.
The crime in Kol
With these considerations in mind, we now turn to the document of testimony from Kol with which we began this article. The document comprises 14 lines in the chancellery (shikasta) script employed for scribal purposes. A phrase at the head of the document invokes the name of Shaikh Jamal; below it lies three seals: that of the judge (qāzī), the censor and prayer leader (muhtasib, khatīb) Raji Muhammad, and the jurisprudent (muftī). Then follows an invocation from the Quran (2:283): ‘Do not suppress any evidence, for he who conceals evidence is sinful of heart’. This invocation specifies the function of the document as a testimony generated in the process of petitioning. From this statement, attested by 24 seals and many more signatures, we see a community demanding action against Gudhu and his unnamed son for assaulting Muslims and scorning the religion of Islam.
Who was Gudhu and what was his crime? The document describes him in the standard language of the bureaucracy as a ‘thread-wearer’, resident in the administrative urban seat of the district of Kol which is included in the metropolitan province of Akbarabad. Gudhu and his son are accused of throwing brickbats (khishthā) without restraint at Shaikh Muhammad Wahid, Shaikh Amjad, Shaikh Muhammad Mir, Shaikh Midhu, Mir Fasih al-Din, ‘and others’, all of whom are descendants (‘sons’) of Shaikh Jamal. They are also accused of having used ‘vile slurs without restraint’ against these individuals. In addition, they also scorned the ‘noble law’ and the ‘exalted’ community of Muslims. In fact, they roundly mocked the religion of Islam itself. Why did Gudhu and his son act in this manner? The document does not tell us anything of their reasons, suggesting that in the mind of the author, the criminals’ motivations were irrelevant to the actual crime committed. Therefore, the document enjoins all those who have knowledge of the affair to affirm the facts.
Who produced this document? No authorship is evident, but the ornate central seal of Raji Muhammad marks his imprimatur. An important local notable, he was also the author of the News of Grace (akhbār al-jamāl), a hagiographical compendium devoted to recounting the lives of the saintly figures of the Sufic orders, all with a view to establishing the spiritual charisma of Shaikh Jamal, whose grave was the most venerated site in Kol and from whom he was himself descended. Shaikh Jamal's grave was central to the configuration of power in Kol in the early eighteenth century. It was in Shaikh Jamal's name that the document of testimony was invoked, and whose name appears not only as the worthy ancestor of the assaulted Muslims mentioned in the text, but also as a forefather on the seals of both the censor Raji Muhammad and the jurisprudent.
Shaikh Jamal
But who was Shaikh Jamal? A late nineteenth-century colonial gazetteer Edward Atkinson esteemed him lightly, noting that the tomb of ‘Shāh Jamāl, Shams-ul-Arifin’ was ‘the most venerated by natives’ among a ‘curious group of tombs’ near the town. While the building was ‘insignificant’, the graves around the tomb had headstones ‘of considerable antiquity’, many bearing Arabic inscriptions. Atkinson reported that Shah Jamal was thought to be a ‘Tātār Darvesh’ and ‘one of the original invaders’ of Kol. He thought that ‘it is possible that Shāh Jamāl and his disciples were spies of the Ghorian invader, as fakīrs have been both before and since his time’. He also related that many of the tombs in the region were furnished with pious endowments, ‘but owing to mismanagement and extravagance and subdivision of property the khādims [servitors] have fallen into poverty and the tombs are now in very bad repair’.Footnote 37
While the tomb of Shaikh Jamal may have lost its lustre under colonial rule, it had occupied a much more important place in the network of piety and social power in the region during the Mughal era. According to Raji Muhammad, Shaikh Jamal was the grandson of Nizam al-Din Abu al-Muʾaiyid, who accompanied the Sufi Nur al-Din to Delhi, when the latter was dispatched there from Ghazni by the famed Shaikh Shihab al-Din of the Suhrawardi Sufi order (d. 1191).Footnote 38 Raji Muhammad tells us that according to ‘popular custom’ (ʿurf-i ʿawāmm) Abu al-Muʾaiyid was remembered as having blessed Qutb al-Din Aibak's forceful conquest of the stronghold of Kol.Footnote 39 But, according to Raji Muhammad, it was the radiance of his grandson Shaikh Jamal Shams al-ʿArifin (‘The Sun of the Learned’) that truly illuminated the town and its environs in the heartland of the Two Rivers (doāb).
Despite his lengthy title, Shaikh Jamal could hardly compare in wattage to the great Chishti sufis, whose grand sepulchres in Delhi were the object of imperial veneration.Footnote 40 In fact, even the days of his birth and death were unknown: Raji Muhammad painstakingly established the rough dates of his life by researching a variety of biographical texts and chronicles.Footnote 41 Nevertheless, Raji Muhammad took pains to dwell on the holy man's spiritual puissance, claiming that he had been recognized as having reached the state of ‘peerless accomplishment’ (fardāniyat)—he was thereby able to bask in Shaikh Jamal's reflected glory.Footnote 42 As examples of this prowess, Raji Muhammad related anecdotes (of unstated origin) which described Shaikh Jamal giving advice on orthopraxy to spiritual beings, bringing a charitable trader back to life from the bier (‘because he had not yet settled his accounts’), and, most notably, transporting himself to prevent a trader's ship from capsizing in a distant sea even as he was ministered to by the local barber in landlocked Kol.Footnote 43
As the most important individual buried in Kol, Shaikh Jamal thus anchored the history of the town within the broader narrative of the conquest which formally established the dominion of Islam in India. It is therefore no surprise that his name appears again and again in the document, in its text, and in the seals of the most powerful men who claimed his lineage. Applied to a testimony, which, in a moment of conflict, is couched in the language of Islam versus infidelity, what the seals do not reveal is Shaikh Jamal's popularity among the region's Hindu population. Raji Muhammad repeatedly describes Shaikh Jamal's popularity as widespread among the residents of the region of the Two Rivers, both Hindus and Muslims, elites and commoners. He relates the pilgrimages to the tomb with evident satisfaction: Shaikh Jamal had died and been buried in Delhi, but when ‘the cry of love of the homeland was heard from his grave’ in the city, his body was transported back to Kol. While Muslims celebrated his death-anniversary (ʿurs) on the ninth of Rabiʿ al-Awwal, Hindus came to his grave for three Tuesdays around the day of his reburial in the month of Asara in the Hindu calendar. This was a calendrical appropriation of the charismatic Shaikh into a local system of belief that Raji Muhammad did not bother to explain, but to which he had no objections. He noted with pride how ‘both communities of Hindus and Muslims select the day and date and month of the death-anniversary according to their own dispositions and beliefs’, and how the event was celebrated with all the joy associated with a festival, when both high and low brought offerings according to their station.Footnote 44
Raji Muhammad
His descent from Shah Jamal was a key feature of Raji Muhammad's identity as the scion of a leading local family which regarded itself as powerful, landed, literate, and pious. The eldest of the three sons of Shaikh Yar Muhammad, Raji Muhammad was born on 9 October 1687. Of his father he says only that he received a land grant of 259 bigha-s and five biswa-s of land due to the favour of the imperial artillery commander Haidar Quli Khan. His youngest brother retired to a pious life in Ajmer, while his second brother was an indigo farmer. Raji Muhammad was educated for the first 12 years of his life in Kol; thereafter he began to make short journeys to nearby cities and small towns, ranging across the northern half of the empire, studying with individuals and receiving diplomas of qualification in various disciplines. Specializing in Hanafi jurisprudence, he read the classic Sharh-i Wiqāya, which marked the culmination of his studies.Footnote 45 In 1712, at the age of 25, Raji Muhammad was married and had proceeded to Lahore in search of imperial service. His patron, the son of Punjab's governor, assured him of appointment as the censor and prayer reader (muhtasib, khatīb) of his hometown once his examination thesis (imtihān-nāma) had received the seal of approval of Judge ʿAbd al-Hamid Khan Gujarati. The coup against the emperor Jahandar Shah and the ascension of Farrukh Siyar caused our author to proceed instead to Delhi and seek the job from the office of the chief almoner (sadr al-sudūr). But Delhi was in the throes of a severe famine and the administration was in disarray: the promised job did not materialize and our author's expenses mounted. In dire straits, Raji Muhammad pleaded for the intercession of his ancestor Shaikh Jamal. One night the Shaikh appeared and promised that the next morning the chief almoner would grant him the post. Raji Muhammad's thesis was certified for a second time by the seal of Fidwiyat Khan and he was at last able to move to Kol with his family to take up his office.Footnote 46
All was well for some years, until he committed ‘abominable acts’ (aʿmāl-i shanīʿa), at which Shaikh Jamal appeared before him, his face red with rage, and said, ‘I'm transferring you!’ Having already been warned of this disaster in a dream by the great Sufi ʿAbd al-Qadir Jilani (d. 1166), Raji Muhammad was not surprised to learn that he had been dismissed from his positions in Kol. He went on to spend the next 12 years of his life in Delhi. What he did for a living he does not say: though he mingled with the city's mystics and mendicants, gentlemen and poets, his heart's desires remained unfulfilled. So he produced Hindi encomiums on the virtues of ʿAbd al-Qadir Jilani in 1728 and recited them until heavenly disfavour had dissolved and his administrative posts in Kol were returned to him in in 1731. Raji Muhammad tarried in Delhi for a few more years because of his pleasurable intercourse with the city's elites, particularly that of his friend Gulab Chand, the financier (sāhūkār). Now another mystical vision, this time of the image of the Prophet Muhammad, threw our author into a state of turmoil. So, in accordance with the (spurious) tradition of the Prophet to the effect that ‘Love of the Homeland is part of the Faith’, Raji Muhammad and his aged father returned to Kol in October 1735.Footnote 47 Soon thereafter he began work on his News of Grace. We do not know whether he survived to witness the chaos and turbulence that engulfed the region after 1749.Footnote 48 But Raji Muhammad's conception of himself in the fifth decade of his life succinctly sums up his place in the late Mughal political order:
Muhtasib-i Kol am wa ham nirkh-nawīs
Ham khatīb o nasl-i aʿyān-i raʾis
Lik az aʿmāl-i khud sharminda am
Banda am sharminda am tā zinda am
I'm Kol's censor and also its market-reporter
Also the prayer-leader, and of aristocratic lineage
But I'm ashamed of my actions
I'm a slave, ashamed so long as I'm alive.Footnote 49
Despite his self-deprecation, Raji Muhammad saw himself as part of an ancient and venerated lineage, which held the respectable offices of the town's censor (muhtasib) and its prayer leader (khatīb). As the censor he was, in principle, responsible for ‘enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong’, suppressing un-Islamic practices such as drinking, gambling, prostitution, or the celebration of infidel festivals. In practice, the office of the censor (instituted in 1661 by Aurangzeb) seems to have been rapidly defanged of whatever authority it ever enjoyed, for its suppressive powers were already included in the roles of other officials. The censor of the eighteenth century was primarily responsible for regulating markets, checking weights and measures, and ensuring that streets and paths were free of encroachments. The office of market reporter, which apparently frequently overlapped with that of the censor, further required its holder to report the prices of food grains and other commodities to the imperial court.Footnote 50 In all these tasks, the censor had no armed retinue of his own and was completely dependent on the assistance of the local police officer (kotwāl) or garrison commander (faujdār).Footnote 51 As the prayer leader, Raji Muhammad likewise occupied a position that had more symbolic power than real.Footnote 52 His duties here would only have involved leading the community prayers, particularly during festivals. On Fridays, at the beginning of the congregational prayer, he was expected to recite the proclamation (khutba), which listed the ruler's attributes as a proper Islamic king, and ask the congregation to pray for his health.
As a religiously inclined and educated member of the elite, Raji Muhammad's thoughts turned naturally towards the divine. This orientation is evident not only in the labour of love that was his book, but also in his frequent dreams of irascible guides and awe-inspiring intercessors like Shaikh Jamal and ʿAbd al-Qadir Jilani.Footnote 53 What, then, were the actions that would have caused shame to such a pious member of the elite? One category would certainly have involved the politicking in which Raji Muhammad had been forced to engage all his life. Though he had cultivated elite patrons, his grasp on his job was frequently tenuous; as is clear from our author's account, his 12-year sojourn in Delhi was occasioned by the loss of his positions to an unnamed rival. It is this participation in the profane world that was routinely denounced by piously minded Mughal elites even as they ceaselessly sought to protect and extend their own perquisites. This is a contrast evident in Raji Muhammad's book, in which he heaps scorn on himself and regrets his shame even as he lauds the properly quietist disposition of the truly pious.Footnote 54
Judge and jurist
The state's presence in Kol was represented by the three large seals which adorn the document of testimony. The central and most ornate seal, as we have seen, was that of Raji Muhammad, bearing his titles of office. To its right is the imprint of the jurist (muftī), inscribed with the legend ‘Jalal al-Din, jurisprudent of the firm law, descendant of Hazrat Shaikh Jamal, the Sun of the Learned’. Indeed, Jalal al-Din finds brief mention in Raji Muhammad's account as a member of a major agnatic lineage descending from the revered Shah Jamal.Footnote 55 The left-hand seal, bearing the inscription ‘Qazi Sayyid Mazhar Khan, son of Sayyid Azhar Khan, servant of the law of the merciful prophet’, is more mysterious, for no judge by that name appears in Raji Muhammad's otherwise-exhaustive account of his hometown's worthies. What could explain this glaring absence?
Though his positions were respectable enough, Raji Muhammad's scholarly training would have qualified him for a judgeship of the town of Kol, a position that would have further consolidated power within his lineage.Footnote 56 The office of judge was prized enough to be passed down through families.Footnote 57 The one person Raji Muhammad found worthy of mention in the smallest of the surrounding towns (qasba-s) was almost invariably the occupier of a hereditary judgeship. Such offices were also coveted enough to be the objects of sharp competition in Raji Muhammad's era, often leading to friction within the community.Footnote 58 While there was an expectation that administrative positions would be passed down through families, the office of the town's judge seemed to have been frequently reassigned in Kol. The ‘most respectable’ Muhammad Amir, for instance, was the descendant of a judge who had come to the town in the early seventeenth century. ʿAbd al-Qawi is listed as the descendant of Qazi Abu Talib, who had been sent to serve as the judge in the reign of Aurangzeb, in the second half of the seventeenth century.Footnote 59 Whether they held the judgeship, or for how long, is unclear: Raji Muhammad simply related that the ‘hereditary judgeship’ of Kol had passed among the descendants of Qazi Qutb al-Din Kashani, ‘although it did not have responsibility for the judgeship at present’. In fact, no one from the family had held the title of qazi for three generations and Raji Muhammad provided a long genealogy for Nur Mustafa, the present-day scion of this deposed lineage.Footnote 60 Elsewhere we learn that a distant cousin, Shaikh Faiz Allah, had been appointed to the deputy-judgeship of Kol only five months before the writing of the text, in 1738–1739.Footnote 61 However, the judge Sayyid Mazhar Khan's seal appears to bear the regnal year 21, indicating the same dates of 1738–1739.
All this suggests that some internecine convulsions had recently led to the appointment of Sayyid Mazhar Khan to the position even though he was not a descendant of Shaikh Jamal. Whether he had just arrived in town or belonged to one of Kol's established but lesser families is unknown: what is certain is that Raji Muhammad had not considered the new judge worthy of notice, perhaps because he himself had coveted the office. Whatever tensions may have existed between Raji Muhammad and Sayyid Mazhar Khan, they are not in evidence in the testimony: at the moment of crisis, on paper the community of Islam appeared cohesive and united.
The structure of power in eighteenth-century Kol
In this regard the testimony points to the importance of unpacking the long-standing arrangements of power in Kol which shaped the dynamics of the conflict under consideration. If Raji Muhammad were one's tour guide in Kol in 1738, he might have begun the tour at the tower in the fort at the heart of the town. Its builder Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud had apparently intended a grand structure, rivalling the Qutb Minar in Delhi. Though the tower had only progressed to the second stage before it was abandoned at the king's death in 1229, it nevertheless afforded pleasing vistas 25 kilometres in every direction. From the tower, on a clear day, one could see the gardens and mango orchards that surrounded the town on all four sides. Beyond these lay lush farmland, with blue patches of fields of flowering indigo, and little settlements dotting the perfectly flat green plain. The fort was the centre of the town which had spread all around it. By 1738, after many decades of general quiet in the heartland, its once-mighty defences had fallen into disrepair.
For Raji Muhammad the fort still remained a potent marker of historical memory. It was a site of victory, where the triumphant armies of Islam had conquered and subjugated the region's idol-worshipping inhabitants. As a native son, the author proudly remarked on how the conquest of the fort of Kol, once counted among the most impregnable of Hindustan's forts, had been mentioned in Hasan Nizami's epic Crown of Glories (Tāj al-Maʾāsir, circa 1217) and he mentioned the fine horses captured at its fall.Footnote 62 As we have already noted, Raji Muhammad attributed the victory to the grace (barakat) of Nizam al-Din Abu al-Muʿaiyid, the grandfather of Shaikh Jamal. In Raji Muhammad's day, the fort remained inhabited by the descendants of the Sufi, who had occupied the previous fort keeper's mansion after the conquest. Another symbol of the formal domination of Islam was the town's congregational mosque, which had reputedly been built atop a demolished temple in the reign of Muʿizz al-Din Muhammad (d. 1206). As the town's prayer leader, Raji Muhammad was intimately familiar with the mosque's history: he offered a detailed account of its cycles of disrepair and reconstruction in the reigns that followed, reproducing an inscription (which is still partly extant) from the reign of Muhammad bin Tughluq (d. 1351). The mosque had been in poor shape until as recently as 1728, when it was repaired by the provincial governor Sabit Khan at the not-inconsiderable cost of Rs 185,000!Footnote 63 A final marker of the fort's status as a bastion of the Islamic order were the graves of the martyrs that lay within it. While three persons denominated martyrs were buried in the nearby countryside, the town of Kol boasted 11 such hallowed resting places, of which five were in the fort proper. It also contained the place where Shaikh Jamal had been born and lived, and which, consequently, was a popular place of pilgrimage.Footnote 64
The fort was also the home of Kol's most established families, and in the town of the early eighteenth century, family was everything. Raji Muhammad's disavowal of the importance of family distinctions (since ‘all of God's slaves are all descendants of one mother and father, who are Adam and Eve’) rings patently hollow, following on, as it does, from his 31-verse poem establishing his descent from the Prophet's companion Abu Ubaidah Jarrah (d. 639). Broadly divided between the ‘worthy’ or ‘estimable’ (sharīf, muʿtabar) and the nameless, society in Kol was patterned by lineages of descent, which were subdivided into many small communities. The first to be listed by Raji Muhammad, not surprisingly, were the 400-odd descendants of Shaikh Jamal himself, some of whom lived in the fort. Shaikh Jamal's charisma endowed even distant relatives with a sense of common identity, for Raji Muhammad sometimes describes remote cousins as ‘my brothers’.Footnote 65 These descendants were established in their privilege in the dispensation of Sikandar Lodi (d. 1517), who redistributed the land around Kol among the town's administrators and inhabitants.Footnote 66
Other worthies in town included Sayyids, descendants of the Prophet, whose families had been established in Kol for centuries. Mir Qutb al-Din, who lived in the fort, was a scion of the respected Husaini Sayyid lineage. Sayyid Lutf Allah and Sayyid Munawwar were notable among the town's 20 Rasuldar Sayyids who lived outside the fort (Raji Muhammad would not have counted women). The community of the Bani Israil, numbering some 40 souls, had lived within the fort since the reign of the pre-Mughal ruler Bahlul Lodi (d. 1489): among them Raji Muhammad singled out Gul Muhammad for his sharp intelligence. Ikram al-Din Khan and ʿAbd al-Ghafur belonged to a community of ten people who were descendants of the storied Sufi Baba Farid Ganj-i Shakar (d. 1266) whose families had lived in the fort since the reign of the emperor Humayun (d. 1556). Muhammad Amir, whose Faruqi ancestor had come to Kol in the reign of the emperor Akbar (d. 1605), ‘must be recognized as most respectable’, thought Raji Muhammad; likewise, Shaikh Mangan and Nur Muhammad were to be considered honourable Ansari shaikhs, even though their family had only lived in the fort ‘for some time’.Footnote 67
In the document of testimony, the complainants rhetorically evoked an Islamic sovereignty and marshalled this complex local order into conforming with a precise social hierarchy. At its top sat the Sayyids, privileged by their descent from the prophets. Then were named the Shaikhs, of lesser stature but still with a claim to venerable ancestry and laudable piety. The ‘judges of Islam’ were mentioned next, perhaps reflecting the author's sense that judges constituted a hereditary social group. Finally, at the bottom of the heap lay the common people: those whom, from the perspective of the author and other social elites, had no claim to virtue save perhaps the bare fact of being Muslims.
The web of distant relatives and respected lineages corralled into these four categories is more complexly articulated around the body of the text in a profusion of seals and signatures (bearing the phrase ‘it is testified’, gawāh shud) which border the text on two sides. Many of the names of the respectable folk of the town appear as attestations on the document of testimony. A cursory examination suggests that the seals belonged to local notables, or at least to people learned and important enough to need to affix their marks to paper, however infrequently the occasion arose. The Shaikh Amjad and Shaikh Muhammad Mir who are listed as victims in the testimony, for instance, may be the Kol-residing descendants of Shaikh Jamal through Shaikh Babu.Footnote 68 Mir Qutb al-Din and his father Mir Bhuray of the Husaini lineage mentioned above affixed their seal to the testimonial.Footnote 69 The seal of Gul Muhammad, whom Raji Muhammad had described as a ‘quick-witted person of learning’, is probably that of the Bani Israil community.Footnote 70 Beneath his name appear the marks of two other members of the Bani Israil, ʿAbd al-Malik and ʿAbd al-Khaliq, their signatures rather than seals perhaps indicating their more modest status. Among the signatories, Nur Mustafa may be the one who belonged to a venerable family which had been deprived of its historic occupancy of the town's judgeship.Footnote 71 Then follow the signatures of still more humble folk; many signatures appear to be in the same hand, perhaps representing the unlettered individuals on whose behalf the scribe was supposed to sign. In addition, one discerns the signatures of the headmen (chaudharī) Pali [?] and Muhammad Khan.
The document of testimony explicitly casts the conflict in sectarian terms, an assault by upstart ‘Hindus’ on the ‘community’ of Muslims and, in fact, on Islam as a whole. But, as we have seen, Raji Muhammad's views of Hindus and Hinduism were complex. One the one hand, he gloried in his place in Kol and in the town's past, which was one of the conquest of unbelief by the true faith. In his book Raji Muhammad engaged in complex polemics against the Hindu myths of creation, as he described prelapsarian history, but such disputation was based on a serious engagement with (rather than dismissal of) ‘Hindu books’ (pothīhā-yi hunūd), including the Mahabharata, the ‘Acharang’, Bhagwati Sutra, Kalpa Sutra, and others.Footnote 72 Hindus, in general, were largely absent from the News of Grace: of his time in Delhi, he mentioned only Rai Khwush Hal Chand and Kirat Singh as Hindus among Delhi's notables (his own fast friend Gulab Chand did not receive such honourable mention).Footnote 73 Only a stray passage in the News of Grace offers a glimpse into his view of Hindu local notables in Kol:
The local office of accounts (qānūngo’ī) of the sub-district of Kol is divided among two groups of [the scribal caste of] Kayasths, both of which live outside the fort. One are the Saksenas, of whom are known Jaisukh et al, sons of Ajit Mal. Second, the manthar sahar [Mathur Sahariya?], who are the descendants of Rai Pujan. But among them, these days all the four sons of Kesho Ram are working with the garrison-commander (faujdār) and local landholders (zamīndār-hā), and are utterly honorable and worthy folk. Of them Hulas Ram is among the humane and generous (ahl-i murūwat wa sakhā); Sahib Ram is extremely truthful; Zorawar Singh is of the chivalrous and brave, and Bhupat Singh follows the path of accountancy. All four brothers are to among the distinguished of the era. Shiv Prasad, Khaman and Chaman et al, who are their relatives, are young gentlemen, and obedient and submissive to the sepulchre of Hazrat Makhdum Shah Jamal. . .Footnote 74
Such sentiments reflect the cozy arrangements of power in Kol, in which locally dominant groups were integrated across sectarian lines. And while Kol itself might have been a bastion of Islam, the surrounding district was dominated by landholders (zamindars) of whom only a small number were Muslim.Footnote 75
How then should we judge the testimonial's claim that Gudhu and his son had not only hurled brickbats at the powers-that-be, but also vented their spleen against the ‘community’ of Muslims, the law, and even the religion of Islam itself? If such words were uttered, they might imply that Aligarh in the 1740s suffered from a deep and painful religious polarization. Equally, it might be that in matters of everyday conflict, the language of insult was normally marked by hyperbole and excess. Perhaps the accusers seized on the use of such language as a means of clawing out a little more favour in a court of law. In fact, we must even consider the possibility that no such event occurred and that the powerful people of the locality vengefully implicated innocent folk who had dared oppose them in some obscure way.
The entire structure and visual arrangement of the document is designed to most forcefully bely such an interpretation. The strength and persuasiveness of this testimony emerges from the many seals which adorn it—both the florid embellishments of the three large seals at the head of the document and the many more humble impressions of signet rings which enclose the words that lie between them testify to the veracity of the claims. But if the testimonial represents a straightforward truth about a moment of conflict, as all the seals and signatures plead us to accept, we must then also acknowledge that it was produced in a moment of defeat for the ‘community’ of Muslims as they represented themselves. Had the complainants possessed the social power they believed they should enjoy, there would have been no need for such tedious litigation; the state would have intervened directly and the emperor's servants would have restored the recalcitrant Hindus to the place of formal legal subordinacy to which they belonged. That no such thing happened and the complainants had to draw up this testimony is a sign not of strength, but of the precariousness of the ‘community’ of Muslims in Kol in 1741.
Conclusion
What happened as the people of Kol applied their seals and signatures to the document of testimony? To apply a seal to a document was a commonly accepted marker of individual affirmation and legal responsibility in the bureaucratic culture of the Mughal empire; seals and signatures of testimony plentifully adorn everyday notarial documents such as bills of sale or transfers of property. Through the application of the seal of a judicial authority, a piece of paper was transformed into a document, an object of legal transaction. Our document of testimony too conformed to the ordinary protocols of legality, but the multiplicity of impressions convey the sense of a collective enterprise. In affixing their seals and inscribing their signatures, the people of Kol came together as Muslims, seeking redress for a crime they now claimed had been committed against their community, the law, and the religion of Islam. But this was the contingent activation of a particular identity to generate solidarity in a moment of local conflict: the ‘community’ of Muslims represented a rare and brief coalescence of a particular formation which was generally superseded by the complex social hierarchy that determined everyday life in Kol.
While the smaller seals which surround the testimony represent individuals, the three large seals above represented offices of state: judge, jurist, censor, and prayer leader. Through these seals, the document of testimony acquired a legal weight and a claim to the resources of the state. Yet the seals of Raji Muhammad and the jurist also bore the name of Shaikh Jamal, whose grave anchored the region in its history and linked it to the sacred. Raji Muhammad's seal thus encapsulated his dual identity as a censor appointed by Delhi and as the scion of a respected local lineage. His power to corral all the signatures derived from this dual authority, although it is easy to imagine that at least some of the illiterate signed this document because of their own desire to claim and participate in the formally privileged ‘community’ of Muslims.
Raji Muhammad's dual identity should also alert us to the inadequacy of visualizing such encounters as moments of static interaction between state and subject. Rather, we should see Raji Muhammad as occupying a relatively privileged position of interface between a local web of power and the translocal network of imperial control. In choosing to employ the language of insult to community, law, and religion, Raji Muhammad sought to invoke resources far greater than those that were available to the local disputants, while at the same time asserting a vision of local order that privileged his own self and lineage. Such invocations and mobilizations for justice, directed towards the state in its own language of authority, gave the empire a tangible existence beyond the imagination of its literate ideologues at court. In the twilight of empire, the testimonial adorned with Raji Muhammad's seal can be seen as a desperate, and perhaps futile, attempt to buttress a local order that had begun to crumble as Delhi's capacity to intervene in the locality waned. Conversely, the testimonial might mark the tenacity of the imperial ideal even after Nadir Shah's humiliating defeat of the Mughal king, serving to symbolize the robustness and vitality of a practice of local politics, one that was forged in excess of the logic of Mughal governmentality and would go on to long outlive it.
