Transacting Politics in the Maratha Empire: An Agreement between Friends, 1795

Dominic Vendell

doi:10.1163/15685209-12341554

Abstract

Abstract Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate world. Focusing on the karārnāmā or agreement, this paper explores how a repertoire of Marathi and Persian documentary genres, binding formulae, and graphic procedures enabled legal, commercial, and diplomatic transactions in eighteenth-century western India. The exchange of written agreements facilitated interstate relations as well as profit-sharing contractual arrangements between individuals. Despite their centrality to interactions between European and South Asian polities, these instruments met with limited success in establishing rights to property under the legal regime of the East India Company-state and instead acquired new functions in colonial revenue administration.

Highlights

Amidst a maelstrom of high-stakes negotiations, two secretaries and a merchant in late eighteenth-century Pune in western India decided to put a via free access professional partnership into writing
Focusing on the karārnāmā or agreement, this paper explores how a repertoire of Marathi and Persian documentary genres, binding formulae, and graphic procedures enabled legal, commercial, and diplomatic transactions in eighteenthcentury western India
What was the primary function of the documentary genre of karārnāmā? How did the genre’s core concept of karār adapt to different kinds of legal, administrative, and political transactions? To what extent did these various usages sustain the political culture of the Maratha Empire and its connections with the broader “Persianate bazaar” described in the introduction to this volume?

Summary

Introduction

Amidst a maelstrom of high-stakes negotiations, two secretaries and a merchant in late eighteenth-century Pune in western India decided to put a via free access professional partnership into writing. Nandini Chatterjee’s charting of the evolution of the maḥżar-nāma across multiple languages and political regimes exemplifies the benefits of this approach.4 Such inquiries are especially germane to recent attempts to chart a “new diplomatic history” more attentive to the ways in which social, symbolic, aesthetic, and material concerns shaped the traditional elements of diplomacy.. While diplomatic history itself has tended to focus on exchanges within and across the borders of Western Christendom, recent works on Islamicate chancery practice under the Mamluks, Bahmanis, Safavids, and others have demonstrated that widely shared practices and protocols of letter-writing undergirded the formation of interlocking commercial, intellectual, and diplomatic networks.. Indian diplomats too developed sophisticated assessments of their European counterparts.9 Their intelligence-gathering, as Rosalind O’Hanlon has recently explored with respect to the Maratha wakīl, massaged the extensive networks of credit and capital to which European traders and diplomatic representatives sought access.. The primary interest of this scholarship has been the process whereby European trading companies organized both lavish royal embassies and more modest missions, engaged the norms and protocols of courtly etiquette, and acquired limited commercial privileges and legal protection. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the burgeoning British East India Company-state began to more systematically penetrate local systems of information-gathering and diplomatic brokerage, enabling the gradual formation of a set of restrictive subsidiary alliances with Indian states. But Indian diplomats too developed sophisticated assessments of their European counterparts. their intelligence-gathering, as Rosalind O’Hanlon has recently explored with respect to the Maratha wakīl, massaged the extensive networks of credit and capital to which European traders and diplomatic representatives sought access. While we have a better understanding of the infrastructure of South Asian diplomacy, it is still largely accurate that “the sphere of politics itself

Objectives

Conclusion