Abstract
Abstract District (pargana)-level land revenue administration in late-Mughal south Gujarat was run mostly by Hindu and Jain family firms which operated within a multilingual environment featuring Gujarati and Marathi as well as Persian. Similar arrangements continued under early East India Company control but, by the 1820s, the British had done away with land-revenue family firms and their contextual multilingualism, replacing them with directly-employed village accountants writing only in Gujarati. This article argues that pargana-level officials’ multilingualism and relative autonomy were not an 18th-century aberration but a key feature of Mughal administration, dislodged with difficulty by the British.
Highlights
In 1773, a couple of months after the British captured the cotton-rich district of Bharuch in south Gujarat, an emissary named James Morley sat down with via free access
After two years of negotiations and an expensive seaborne campaign, Morley’s superiors in Surat and Bombay were anxious to know what they could expect to squeeze from their new possession, but, lacking local knowledge and languages, the British were entirely dependent on resident experts such as Jamiat Rai and Lallubhai to help them assess and collect the revenue
It was the British who were ignorant of revenue management; the erstwhile Mughal authorities had been wringing their hands for decades as district-level officials became increasingly autonomous and powerful on the one hand and, on the other, more secretive about what they knew
Summary
A significant part of theorizing on precolonial land revenue has been based on normative or prescriptive texts. There are several reasons why historians have relied primarily on such sources. Via free access emperor Akbar had “in his wise statesmanship and benevolence of rule carefully examined the subject and abolished all arbitrary taxation, disapproving that these oppressions should become established by custom.” Another reason is that texts of practice are hard to come by, probably by design, because they formed a critical part of the knowledge capital of land revenue family firms such as those of Jamiat Rai and Lallubhai. By claiming direct access to revenue records to establish an imperial system of rights and privileges, it might be argued that Company officials were not putting in place a nascent British empire Rather, they were restoring the benevolent Mughal imperium as imagined in Persian by Abu’l Fazl.. Charge on purchasing Hay, but for some years past the Pragannahs were obliged to supply the nabob with as much of the article as he wanted for his Horses & ca exclusive of paying the above mentd sum of money
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