Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires

"I chose it because before this book came out, people thought of law in precolonial India in terms of normative, codified texts, such as the Shari‘a or the Dharmashastras , Hindu law. By contrast, Chatterjee’s book examines how law actually operated at the village level. Nobody had done that before. Her method was to go out and discover a family in central India that had collected and preserved legal documents extending from the late 1500s down to the early 20th century. These people were by no means elite members of the Mughal nobility, but rather rural entrepreneurs who over the centuries had been landlords, clerks, businessmen, judges, even warlords who raised and recruited small armies. This is a book of microhistory . Chatterjee’s book is important for another reason. For decades, historians of India have lamented the fact that we don’t have any central archive of Mughal records—unlike, say, the Ottoman Empire, with its neatly organized archives carefully preserved in Istanbul. Successive foreign invasions and internal chaos in 18th century Delhi left the country without a sustained and centralized documentary record. But Chatterjee argues that there is an archive, and that archive is to be found in the villages. And the reason villagers over many generations kept legal documents in their possession was that these records could support their claims of all sorts—to revenue, to their own rights, and to other people’s obligations. Families had a strong motive to preserve documents in their possession. “Like many multicultural empires, the Mughals were a many-splendoured thing” The book also reconsiders the idea of local taxation as traditionally understood. From the manuals and chronicles patronized by the central government, the Mughals might appear as an almighty Leviathan state, extracting resources from a passive, rural peasantry. But the documents that Chatterjee studied reveal something very different. From the villagers’ perspective, these documents served as vehicles by which they could, among other things, gain entitlements. They reveal how villagers interacted with Mughal authorities, how they ‘worked the system’ in order to get ahead in the Mughal world. The villagers’ understanding of both taxation and law, as Chatterjee presents it, is very different from what many historians have been led to believe, which is of vast legal or revenue systems that were simply imposed from above. It’s an important book, and it came out just last year."