The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India

Abstract

This article examines Persian-language orders—parwanas—issued by regimes that succeeded the Mughal Empire in South Asia, to European trading companies. Focussing in particular on the mid-eighteenth-century exchanges between the Nizam of Hyderabad; the Nawab of Arcot; and the French Compagnie des Indes, we see how Mughal-style parwanas, or sub-imperial orders, previously used to give instructions or to make or withdraw grants, were transformed into a form of political currency. They were now used to exchange military and fiscal resources between South Asian state-builders and militarised European corporations, and to secure political legitimacy for all within a putative Mughal imperium. Moreover, the legal fiction of Mughal sovereignty led to a grants race, such that rivals—European and South Asian—sought more and more parwanas, while also querying the legitimacy of authorities that issued them. The very fragility of the Mughal empire and the lability of the political landscape in eighteenth-century South Asia was thus generative of prolific Persian legal documentation, as well as its rewiring to novel uses. European empire-builders negotiated this legal landscape with only partial literacy, consequently fetishizing the material aspects and ceremonial accompaniments of Persian legal documents, and according them power beyond their immediate substance.

¹In the year 1164 Hijri or 1751 CE, Saʿadullah Khan Muzaffar Jung, the then-Nizam of Hyderabad, granted Divi, an island off the port town of Macchlipatan (Masulipatnam) as inaʿm (reward)² to Joseph François Dupleix, Governor-General for the French Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes) in India.³ The document, issued in the traditional Mughal form of a parwana or a non-imperial order,⁴ alerted the local landlords and officials to the grant, and instructed them to hand over the proceeds of the taxes collected in the area.⁵ Written in Persian, the parwana conformed very closely to Mughal conventions, with some variations: the terms used for local officials were those current in southern India (deshmukh, deshpande, desai) rather than in the core Mughal regions; no obligations were imposed on Dupleix, not even the conventional one of continued loyalty to regime; and there was no date in the final line of the document. The Nizam's large circular seal was fully conventional per Mughal Indian usage for nobles, with the issuer's name at the bottom, higher grades of authority visually arranged in line with socio-political hierarchy, topped therefore with the name of the incumbent Mughal emperor, Ahmad Shah (r. 1748–54 CE).⁶ There were clerical notes on the verso of the document, also in Persian, which read: “On 7th Safar, 1164 Hijri [which converts to January 5, 1751], a copy reached the diwan's office” (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Parwana issued to Joseph François Dupleix, 1751 CE.

Parwanas are among the most numerous of Mughal-era documents that have survived to the present day. As sub-imperial orders, they offer insight into the formation of power centers in noble households (who issued such orders) as well as locally ensconced lineages (who received them). Although generally an executive order to perform certain duties, in some cases, as in this one, a parwana could be a legal grant that conferred enforceable privileges.⁷ The granting of privileges was always a matter of negotiations within the Mughal political and administrative infrastructure. But by the eighteenth century, parwanas had become more akin to a currency expended by ambitious, would-be rulers to buy up political support necessary to forge a dynastic state. In this case, following the assassination of his uncle, Muzaffar Jung had been propelled to the throne of Hyderabad, one of the largest and most powerful “successor states” that rose up underneath the mantle of a declining Mughal empire.⁸ Anxious to draw upon French military support to prop up his fledgling rule, the new Nizam offered Dupleix and his chief officers a whole range of titles, ranks (mansabs), and land grants (jagirs) to ensure their continued participation in his regime.⁹ In the uncertain and fractured political landscape of eighteenth-century South Asia, the issuing and receipt of parwanas emerged as a transactional and performative field through which rulers could build alliances and claim legitimacy. Yet investment in this legal currency could prove a risky business, as companies tied themselves to the fortunes of their benefactors.

For scholars writing during the certainties of the Raj, the receipt of such Mughal grants by Europeans, and the associated deference toward Mughal legality were a source of mild bewilderment, even hilarity.¹⁰ In more recent times, however, historians of European trade in South Asia in the seventeenth century depict Europeans as both earnest and active participants in Mughal law.¹¹ Others explain European interest in such documents by showing how, with the growing political involvement of trading companies in the late eighteenth century, Mughal grants, and by extension, a putative “Mughal constitution,” could be used to block metropolitan scrutiny.¹² Our paper seeks to fill in the gap between these moments, and situates itself in a crucial period that witnessed the beginnings of European empire “by treaty” on the subcontinent.¹³

What we present are not treaties, which assumes the equivalence of signatories, but orders, in which all parties formally acknowledged a political hierarchy with the Mughal emperor at the apex. There was an element of make-believe at work here. In the mid-eighteenth century, the receipt of Mughal farmans or parwanas did not imply that European factors or South Asian dynastic state builders such as the Nizams of Hyderabad suddenly became loyal vassals and state functionaries of the emperor. Yet these documentary performances of vassalship were crucial for gaining access to the legitimizing stamp of Mughal authority, necessary for building political coalitions and staking a claim to revenues. Competing parties thus continued to invest in the formal structure of Mughal hierarchy, even as they sponsored upstarts and played at being king-makers themselves. In this fragmented political context, Mughal-style legal deeds were accumulated into legal arsenals, whose builders were constantly compelled to invest in shoring up the legitimacy of the issuing authority. We have called this process “parwana politics.”

This complex process, in which those who had no inherent commitment to the Mughal regime scrambled for parwanas and farmans, and constantly duplicated, embellished, and diffused the documents themselves, poses a challenge in terms of locating a suitable heuristic vocabulary. Many existing frameworks for analyzing the documentary practices and foundations of statehood are drawn from a context where the colonial or postcolonial state exercised a much more effective monopoly on authentication.¹⁴ Our study, and indeed several others in this volume, present a very different world, in which “things were not what they appeared to be at first sight.”¹⁵ In such a context, the notion of currency centers our focus on the representative value of the documents and the fluctuations therein, their transmission, circulation, exchange for services, and the dependence of their value on the legitimacy of the issuing authority. Mughal documents were not just like currency, they were a legal and political currency in the context that this article describes.

It is worth noting here that despite our use of the term “parwana politics,” the Mughal documents considered in this article comprise not only of parwanas but also other documentary genres. The most important of these were orders from the Mughal emperor, designated farmans, which were issued and received as political players followed the trail of authority back to the source. By focusing on parwanas; however, we aim to foreground the dynamic rise of centers of courtly power away from Delhi, as erstwhile Mughal nobles forged their own states. Focusing on southern India allows us to resist the teleological pressures of the better-known story of the English East India Company's conquest of Bengal, the “British bridgehead.”¹⁶ In order to recover this setting, we make use of both European and Indian sources, including the famous “diary” of Ananda Ranga Pillai.¹⁷ Ananda Ranga was the courtier, or agent of the French Company in Pondicherry, and his diary offers a unique vantage point on the ceremonial accompaniment of parwana politics, sometimes undercutting French accounts.

By reading the Persian materials fully and in relation to their long-standing usage in South Asia, we also attempt to uncover the complex meanings of materials like the Divi parwana. In this we are in sympathy with efforts to write cultural histories of the East India Company in various locales,¹⁸ and with the scholarship on European-Ottoman relations that the former are modeled on.¹⁹ This article specifically studies the negotiation of non-European legal systems by European individuals and corporations. It does so with full attention to the pre-colonial traditions of Persian-language documentation and law in South Asia, while recognizing that “Mughal law” was itself an intensely contested entity in eighteenth-century southern India.

Persianate Hyderabad and Arcot

Hyderabad, one of the largest and most stable “successor states” of eighteenth-century South Asia, was essentially a polity of peninsular India, or the Deccan.²⁰ It was also part of a vast cultural zone—the “Persianate world”—that stretched from Burma to Bosnia. Within this area, the prestige and use of the Persian language created an arena of shared literary knowledge, ethical orientation, and cosmopolitan standards of behavior.²¹ Specifically referring to the Deccan Sultanates, predecessors of the Hyderabad state between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, Emma Flatt has pointed to comportment, friendship, trade, writing, magic, medicine, and war as key areas for the efflorescence of those shared principles.²²

As Flatt demonstrates, writing was a core element of this courtly culture. The success of communication within and between persons and regimes depended not just on the substantive information conveyed by a written document, but also on its rhetorical appropriateness, visual appearance, and process of delivery. In order to acquire the requisite aesthetic-ethical training, aspirants in the system naturally took to studying transregional as well as locally produced insha or epistolaries, with model letters and documents, which advised them on how to stay in good form.²³

In such a context, imperial orders (farmans) were active instruments of politics, not just letters communicating information or orders. The elaborate ceremonial that surrounded the despatch and receipt of these talismanic documents created spaces for negotiations over power, hierarchy, and legitimacy. To take one example, in 1603 CE, a Mughal envoy called Asad Beg Qazwini was sent to Bijapur, a Deccan Sultanate, to secure the latter's subordination without overt military action. Qazwini's arsenal consisted of a number of aggressive diplomatic moves, key among which was the delivery of a farman, receipt of which would entail accepting the overlordship of the Mughal emperor. Predictably, the Bijapuris responded with elaborate passive aggression including months of opulent and obstructive hospitality. The actual farman delivery ceremony was marred by the Bijapuri king failing to observe the necessary rituals, as the Mughals saw it: the document was not received by the king alone, necessary obeisances were omitted, and the Bijapuri king even turned away mid-way through reading the farman to complain in the local language (Marathi) to his Hindu Brahmin minister.²⁴

In the Persianate political culture of South Asia, the power of written documents derived not only from their written content, but also from their material aspects, including the paper they were written on, the arrangement of text on the page, validating symbols, and marks such as stamp impressions. In fact, in a context where significant users of such documents were people unable to read them; for example, European company employees, such material aspects became additionally relevant to creating the impression of legality. Moreover, the valence of Mughal and other Indo-Persian legal documents was elaborated within a structured and semantically loaded matrix of ceremonial performances. As we have seen in the Mughal–Bijapuri encounter, the meanings of those ceremonies, words, and artefacts were shared to the extent that they were comprehended by all parties, but which still remained up for grabs in contests of political legitimacy.

This continued to be the case in the eighteenth century, with the decline of the power but not the prestige of the Mughal empire. In 1713, Nizam ul-Mulk Asaf Jah, one of the highest nobles of the Mughal court, was appointed viceroy of the enormous Deccan province, formed out of the conquest of the Sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, in 1686–87, and further victories against the Marathas in the 1690s.²⁵ From the 1720s onward, Nizam ul-Mulk moved toward consolidating substantive provincial autonomy through his own appointments. and dealt with local powers, old and emerging. The substance of the resultant Hyderabad state thus lay in the social and political relationships Nizam al-Mulk was able to establish with locally significant groups: southern Indian warrior clans, Maratha Brahmin, Kayastha, and Shiʿa administrators.²⁶ External powers most significant to Hyderabad were the federated and expansive Maratha empire, led by the Peshwa,²⁷ the kingdom of Mysore, and the European trading companies. In reality, the internal–external dichotomy is hard to sustain in a political arrangement where so many of the state functions were outsourced even across stringently assertive political boundaries. The kingdom of Arcot, key to our story, was an archetype of such entities that were both internal and external to the Hyderabad state.²⁸

This unwieldy coalition was held together under the capacious but increasingly flimsy banner of Mughal suzerainty. In terms of norms and self-presentation, Hyderabadi political culture retained a deep external reverence for the Emperor, whose farmans (orders) were received in extravagant ceremony. A specific tent known as a farmanbari was erected for this purpose, in which Nizam ul-Mulk would symbolically hold the document above his head in submission.²⁹ As with the Bijapuri reception, such rituals were not divorced from the cut and thrust of politics. For Salabat Jung, a successor of Nizam ul-Mulk who came to the throne in dubious circumstances examined at length below, the number of ceremonial receptions of farmans appeared to proliferate in inverse proportion to his grip on power. Some of these documents appear to have been genuine, secured by judicious gifts to imperial courtiers; however, on other occasions even his own allies doubted the authenticity of his farmans.³⁰ According to one, admittedly hostile account, in 1752 Salabat Jung feared his supporters would abandon him in favor of his brother and dynastic rival. In order to keep them on board, on the receipt of a regular letter from a Delhi courtier he “caus'd a Phirmaund Tent [farmanbari] to be fix'd and within which he went with the usual Pomp and gave it out that the Mogul's Phirmaunds were sent him.”³¹

Of all the political players at the Hyderabadi court, the Nawabi state of Arcot is the most important to our purposes. Another Mughal successor state, its dynastic history was closely entangled with Hyderabad, although it always remained rather in the shadow of its Deccani cousin. Culturally and geographically, Arcot's core was further south, in the Tamil-speaking coastal areas (see Figure 2). Established by Afghan nobles in Mughal service in the early eighteenth century, the ruling dynasty changed to a family of long-Indianized Arab immigrants who came to be known as the Nawaiyat (descendants of the Prophet).³² In the 1720s, when the Nizam al-Mulk was building up the Hyderabad state and its region of power, he formally appointed Saʿadatullah Khan, the first Nawaiyat nawab, as the faujdar (military governor) of the newly formed Mughal province of Carnatic (of which Arcot was a part).³³ This “appointment” was a transparently political move aimed at establishing the subordination of Arcot to Hyderabad, using the terminology and instruments of Mughal administration. The precise status of Arcot in relation to Hyderabad was a continuous source of dispute in subsequent years; Arcot's struggles for autonomy turning them into “rebel” dependants of overlords who were “rebels” themselves.”³⁴

Figure 2. Map Illustrating South India in the Eighteenth Century.

Source: Charles Joppen, Historical Atlas of India (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1907), http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00maplinks/colonial/joppenlate1700s/joppenlate1700s.html#carnatic; accessed 04/08/2022.

One important difference between Arcot and Hyderabad was the array of coastal forts controlled by European trading companies that dotted the coastline of the former polity. While Hyderabad was orientated around the inland courtly centers of the Deccan Plateau, for the Arcot Nawabs, the European presence presented both challenges and opportunities for consolidation.³⁵ These commercial centers brought in trade and provided a secure source of revenue, but the military force wielded by trading companies could also prove a destabilizing factor, as Arcot became a theater of European war during the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48). Eventually, the Nawabs became ever more embroiled with the British, most infamously through the extensive debts acquired in the second half of the eighteenth century.³⁶

Arcot's relatively lower rank in the Deccani political hierarchy did not prevent their meddling with the dynastic politics of Hyderabad. In fact, Arcot dynasts, allied with the French, competed to determine the appointment of their own overlords at Hyderabad. The intricate entanglement of regimes such as Hyderabad, Arcot, and the Maratha empire with European Companies and the hectic factioneering underlying dynastic succession used to be seen as signs of the political frailty of the Indian successor regimes, prescient of their ultimate subjugation by Europeans. In reality, it was precisely through such mutual intervention that all these regimes—European and South Asian—constituted themselves.

The Compagnie Française as a Player in Parwana Politics

From 1701, Pondicherry (see Figure 2) had served as the principal base in South Asia for the French Compagnie des Indes, and as the headquarters of the Company's governor general.³⁷ The port town provided a fortified vantage point from which the French had regarded the rise of the Arcot Nawabs with a wary eye, yet despite periodic grumbles over financial exactions, Nawabi sovereignty was formally recognized through yearly tributary gifts, in exchange for which trade was generally left to flow unimpeded.³⁸ While French power should not be overstated, the expansion of commerce in the 1730s and increased bullion shipments from Europe afforded Governor General Pierre Benoît Dumas (1735–41) a newfound credit that was put to a more ambitious expansionist agenda.³⁹ This was characterized by a deepening involvement with the Nawabi state, as the French bestowed expensive gifts on key Arcot courtiers in order to gain privileges such as a parwana conferring the right to mint rupees (1736) or help in acquiring new colonies such as Karaikal (1739).⁴⁰ A marker of this increasingly close relationship came in 1740 with the devastating Maratha invasion of the province. Many of the Arcot nobility took refuge at Pondicherry, and the Nawab rewarded Governor Dumas for his help with parwanas for several villages, the revenues of which he secured as his personal property.

It was under his successor, Joseph-François Dupleix (1742–54), that French expansion reached its short-lived apogee. Dupleix has long been presented as a kind of far-sighted imperial visionary, motivated by nothing less than a precocious idea of territorial empire along the lines of the later British Raj.⁴¹ While historians have admirably deconstructed the ideological dimensions of this mythical status, a more convincing explanatory framework for his actions has yet to materialize.⁴² Taking a more critical eye to his correspondence, however, we can detect a central preoccupation with acquiring Mughal legal documentation.

This was a long-standing goal of European trading companies operating in India, which undertook diplomatic missions in order to secure commercial and territorial privileges in law.⁴³ For instance, Dutch and British companies had both obtained lengthy farmans from Delhi through the lavish embassies of Josua Ketelaar (1711–13) and John Surman (1715–17) respectively.⁴⁴ And in Dumas, Dupleix had an even closer model of how the acquisition of parwanas could lead to professional and personal success.⁴⁵ Dupleix's metropolitan correspondents kept him apprised of how Dumas had “shown off” his Arcot parwana conferring the right to mint rupees on his return to Paris in 1741, where he had been appointed a director of the Company.⁴⁶ The parwana was an enormous public triumph for Dumas, and was specifically mentioned as a reason for his ennoblement.⁴⁷ Parwana politics could thus resonate even in metropolitan France, where Mughal prestige had long been admired and even emulated.⁴⁸

Public service was not the only reason for his success, however, as Dumas also returned to France fabulously wealthy. Here too, parwanas had helped pave the way, through the village revenues granted by the Nawab of Arcot. Moreover, Dupleix had direct insight into how his predecessor acquired his wealth, since Dumas entrusted him to oversee the villages as they were in the vicinity of Pondicherry.⁴⁹ Much like Robert Clive's later jagir, the revenues of these fiefs were used to fund his meteoric social ascension, with the purchase of venal offices and an advantageous marriage for his brother.⁵⁰ Dumas provided a concrete example of how the pursuit of parwanas could prove a winning formula for both professional advancement and private enrichment.

An opportunity for Dupleix to participate in local politics emerged with the dynastic struggles precipitated by the death of the venerable Nizam ul-Mulk Asaf Jah I in 1748. As we have seen, the formation of Hyderabadi and Arcot regimes had long been marked by significant interdependence, and their respective dynastic struggles were interwoven in complex ways. The fallout of the Maratha invasion in 1740 resulted in the end of the Nawaiyat dynasty and the installation of a new regime. However, in 1749, a prominent Nawaiyat general named Chanda Sahib returned to the Carnatic after a long spell of captivity among the Marathas.⁵¹ An ambitious and politically adroit figure, he represented a serious contender for the throne of Arcot. Yet Chanda Sahib himself appears to have staked his claim through the union he formed with Muzaffar Jung, the young grandson of the recently deceased Nizam. As Chanda Sahib made a bid for the throne of Arcot, so Muzaffar Jung claimed to be rightful Nizam of Hyderabad, in place of his uncle Nasir Jung.

The forging of this new coalition was achieved in part through performative documentary displays rooted in Mughal cultures of legality. In June 1749, Muzaffar Jung supposedly received a farman from the Mughal Emperor for the subadari (governorship) of the Deccan and a dress of honor, and promptly invested Chanda Sahib with the (lower-ranked) government of the Carnatic.⁵² In a demonstration of how receivers of grants worked to establish the authority of the grant-givers, Chanda Sahib's son gave strict instructions that Muzaffar Jung's letters and gifts should be received at French Pondicherry “with the same pomp and grandeur with which [Dupleix] used to receive the Nizam's presents.”⁵³ Muzaffar Jung's apparent elevation to the Deccan subadari, and the French recognition of such, thus gave Chanda Sahib a legitimizing Mughal imprimatur.⁵⁴ Documentary ceremonial was even embellished in an attempt to bring onside local qilaʿdars, or commanders of fortresses. Where Nizam ul-Mulk confirmed their offices with parwanas issued “on small sheets of paper which were sent by messengers without being put into envelopes,” a more elaborate enclosure was used to “show respect to them and magnify their greatness.”⁵⁵

Over the short term this multisided coalition met with success. Anwaruddin Khan, the sitting Nawab of Arcot was defeated and killed in 1749. Nasir Jung of Hyderabad responded the following year by marching a large army into the Carnatic. However, he did not risk attacking Pondicherry and was subsequently betrayed by his disaffected Afghan allies. As we saw at the start of this article, his death led to the installation of Muzaffar Jung as Nizam at Pondicherry in January 1751, with the issuance of parwanas for various territories and commercial privileges. In exchange, Dupleix agreed to send Charles Joseph Patissier de Bussy at the head of a military contingent of French and Sepoy troops to escort Muzaffar Jung back to the Deccan. Thus, in every instance, claimants of the Hyderabad and Arcot thrones sought to legitimize themselves both by acquiring and issuing Persian grants; recognition of the validity of such grants serving as proxy treaties that drew the various political actors together and enmeshed them in a common matrix that depended on Mughal law.

This political and legal relationships thus formed transcended individual relations between the actors themselves. Hardly a month after having gained the throne of Hyderabad, Muzaffar Jung was killed by the same Afghan nawabs who had betrayed his uncle. The French helped engineer the enthronement of Salabat Jung, Nasir Jung's brother, as the new Nizam. Key to the French decision was Raja Raghunath Das, the Brahman diwan, a clear master of parwana politics. As one French witness described, “he [Raghunath Das] took from his pocket a pile of papers and made us see that Salabat Jung not only confirmed all the concessions that Muzaffar Jung had given [. . .] but even increased them considerably on the side of Mazulipatnam.”⁵⁶ These were not only offered to the French Company, but also included “private” grants of village revenues made out to Dupleix and his wife (although no such private–public distinction existed in Mughal grants).⁵⁷ These appear to have been paper promises, which one can judge from the fact that the pair were quick to “sacrifice” their property titles to the Company once it became apparent that their revenues had been extensively overvalued.⁵⁸ The stakes in parwana politics were much higher than individual estates, substantial though those could be.

Parwanas to Farmans: Going to the Source

Matters refused to settle down in Arcot. Despite Chanda Sahib's initial success, Anwaruddin Khan's son, Muhammad Ali, continued to hold a fortified seat of power at Trichinopoly,⁵⁹ and sought out the support of the British. Predictably, Dupleix sought to handle this challenge to Chanda Sahib's legitimacy in Arcot by soliciting fresh parwanas from Salabat Jung. As he wrote to Bussy, “the delay to the letter of the new Nawab and of the parwanas interrupts affairs, and all those that were ready to be concluded are suspended.”⁶⁰ These were anticipated with a feverish anxiety, as the governor worried about “plunderers” on the roads, and insisted the parwanas be sent in duplicate with an armed guard.

The material dimensions of the legal documents themselves were an increasing preoccupation for the French governor. He instructed his lieutenant to ensure that copies of parwanas did “not resemble rags of papers” and were properly stamped with the seal of the Qazi (Islamic judge).⁶¹ He was particularly taken by Bussy's description of a large imperial farman obtained by Salabat Jung in September 1751, writing that he was “extremely desirous to have this document to show in Europe to make them see that there is magnificence in this land. It is necessary that everything that is written in gold [in the original] must also be [in the copy] and on parchment of the same size as the original.”⁶² Indeed, Dupleix imagined the stream of legal grants as an important means of persuading his superiors in France of the success of operations, pointing to the gifts that accompanied them, as well as “the style and the form” of these documents as proof of the renown that his actions had won for the French Company.⁶³

In the Carnatic, however, Dupleix's accumulation of parwanas failed to evict Muhammad Ali from Arcot, since the latter had adopted his own legal strategy. To his British allies, Muhammad Ali attempted to prove his rightful claim to Arcot by sending them his own parwanas previously obtained from the deceased ruler of Hyderabad, Nasir Jung.⁶⁴ But Muhammad Ali also upped the stakes by deciding to go for the source. He urged the British to forward his letters to the Mughal Emperor and also to another of Nizam ul-Mulk's sons, Ghazi-ud-Din Khan Feroze Jung II at Delhi, via ships through Bengal. As he explained, “these letters come herewith to you & I desire you'll forward them in Bags to Bengal as soon as possible by sea to be delivered to the Nabob there who will transmit them to court & send us Answers and Phirmaunds [farmans].”⁶⁵ This alternative legal avenue relied on the backing of Ghazi-ud-Din Khan, Salabat Jung's dynastic rival, who upon the news of the death of Nasir Jung had been made subahdar of the Deccan at Delhi.⁶⁶ Muhammad Ali calculated, apparently correctly, that Delhi's preferred candidate would back him over Chanda Sahib, who was associated with the rival Muzaffar Jung faction.

An imperial farman confirming Ghazi-ud-Din Khan as Nizam arrived at Trichinopoly at the end of March 1751.⁶⁷ With this was also a letter from Ghazi-ud-Din Khan instructing Muhammad Ali to “act as a Phosadar [faujdar] in the Carnatick country.”⁶⁸ As was the case with his rivals, Muhammad Ali treated the arrival of an imperial farman as an occasion of great importance, and further evidence for this can be found in the Tuzak-i-Walajahi, a chronicle composed much later in his reign. Upon receiving these documents, Muhammad Ali held a splendid darbar (court) where, in the wonderful metaphor of the chronicler, he “strung the pearls of the clear and polished contents of the farman on the thread of the hearing of everyone.”⁶⁹ The farmans were accompanied with great ritual and ceremony, aimed to publicly communicate the honor they bestowed. Muhammad Ali thus explained to the British how he “ordered a Phirmaund Tent to be fix'd in which [he] receiv'd the Phirmaund &ca with great Respect & Honour, played upon the Musick Noubet [naubat or drum], order'd guns to be fir'd & return'd thousands of Thanks to the Almighty.”⁷⁰

These documents were also quickly put to use in external negotiations. In April 1751, Dupleix had obtained a kaul, or grant of safe passage, from Salabat Jung, to be offered to Muhammad Ali in exchange for yielding Trichinopoly to Chanda Sahib. However, Muhammad Ali refused to accept it. Instead, he disputed Salabat Jung's authority by presenting copies of the imperial farman appointing Ghazi-ud-Din Khan subahdar of the Deccan and a parwana from the latter for the government of the Carnatic.⁷¹ The French governor retorted by questioning the validity of these documents, writing to Muhammad Ali that “the collection of parwanas which you parade will only lead to persuading everyone that you are not and will never be submitted to the orders of your superiors.”⁷² Going by hints offered by Ananada Ranga Pillai, however, it appears that this viewpoint was not shared by other local powers, as Ghazi-ud-Din Khan's parwana was referenced in drawing Thanjavur and Mysore forces to Muhammad Ali's side.⁷³

The French response to Muhammad Ali's brazen parwana game was to join him at the higher level, that is, in seeking orders from the source of authority: the Mughal emperor. As Dupleix wrote to Bussy in July 1751, “it is also the time to think of obtaining from the Great Mughal the farman of which we have need. This affair merits all your attention [. . .] because these documents will assure us our possessions, our jagirs, our dignities, putting a seal on your mission which will then be accomplished.”⁷⁴ Although plans were made for their own embassy to Delhi,⁷⁵ the French had to rely upon a Hyderabadi intermediary, the crafty old Raghunath Das. But such a master of parwana politics was hard to handle, and Dupleix mistrusted the minister, claiming that “this man, clever as a weasel, thinks that it's a means of engaging me to always leave our troops around him [keeping] us always in the hope of these farmans until all his affairs and those of his master [are] settled by our presence.”⁷⁶ An increasingly bitter stream of French denigration against their Indian intermediaries and allies marked the beginning of an enduring colonial stereotype.⁷⁷ However, Dupleix's frustration also reveals an all too real sense of dependency on such figures to navigate courtly settings.

In this respect, we might also signal the role of Salabat Jung himself, who was more usually written off as a helpless puppet of the French. In fact, he clearly identified their priorities in securing a Mughal farman, and shrewdly positioned himself as the best route to imperial favor. He therefore carefully stage-managed the courtly reception of his own Mughal farmans and correspondence, making sure the relevant French observers were present. One officer described the public reception of a farman along with a “most tender letter” from the emperor, at which the Nizam was “possessed with joy.”⁷⁸ After this Salabat Jung made assurances to the Frenchman that their own farman could not be long in coming. The message was unmistakable: the French should keep their troops with him if they wished to achieve Mughal legitimacy through their own legal grants.

As the French waited for Mughal confirmation, the political situation in the South rapidly deteriorated. By the summer of 1752, Muhammad Ali's Mysorean and Thanjavuri allies successfully broke the French siege of Trichinopoly, and, even more disastrously, captured and executed Chanda Sahib.⁷⁹ It was with supreme irony that a much-anticipated imperial farman arrived at Pondicherry shortly after this catastrophe. Ananda Ranga Pillai recorded that Dupleix took great care to spruce up its entry into the town, ordering the addition of various gifts, music, and stately procession.⁸⁰ Yet even a sympathetic French observer was sceptical about the ceremonial reception of the farman, claiming that “many people [assumed] that it was a comedy on the part of M. Dupleix, and no more than smoke and mirrors.”⁸¹ This elaborate panoply may have served to compensate for the rather lackluster text of the farman itself. From extant translations, the Mughal Emperor Ahmad Shah offered a brief and vague endorsement of French friendship with Salabat Jung, without providing any details whatsoever about the concessions made by the latter.⁸² Dupleix was left to boast about the quality of the paper, claiming that “the Muhammadans [sic] are astonished that paper used only in writing to persons of equal rank should have been used in writing to me.”⁸³ Yet its inadequacy was clearly recognized, as he insisted that Bussy stay the course at Hyderabad and continue to work toward acquiring a “detailed and confirmative farman of all that we possess” from Delhi.⁸⁴ Despite investing a great deal in parwana politics, the French were unable to translate their provincial influence into the kind of far-ranging farman such as those secured by the Dutch in 1713 or the British in 1717.

Even in the Deccan, the French position grew more tenuous. Bussy's influence at the Hyderabad darbar could not prevent a parwana in the name of Salabat Jung being issued that recognized Muhammad Ali as Nawab of Arcot. This infuriated Dupleix, who wondered whether his enemies at court had “counterfeited the chop [seal] of the nawab.”⁸⁵ The governor was especially piqued when the Raja of Thanjavur wrote to ask which of Salabat Jung's orders he was supposed to follow: those given to him by Muhammad Ali or by the French?⁸⁶ Nonetheless, Dupleix kept up a great faith in the stream of documents from Hyderabad to help resolve affairs in Arcot. The beleaguered governor sought out fresh parwanas for Murtaza Ali Khan, the powerful Nawaiyat qilaʿdar of Vellore. Anxious to retain a kingmaker role, Dupleix wrote in code to Bussy that he should “make it so that in the parwana [. . .] it is said that it is only under my orders that he must govern, and even that he is only my naib [deputy].”⁸⁷ This more creative engagement with Mughal legal forms failed to mask the depreciating value of Hyderabadi legal currency, as Murtaza Ali Khan refused to participate in the plan, and instead began dealing with the British.⁸⁸

The Sadras Conference of 1754 or “What is the Constitution of the Government of this Country?”

By the end of 1753, with a conclusive military outcome to the armed struggle over Arcot looking ever more unlikely, Dupleix agreed to talks with the British at the suggestion of Thomas Saunders, the governor of Madras. Sadras, a town under neutral Dutch control between Pondicherry and Madras, was chosen as the site for the conference or committee where the respective deputies would meet.⁸⁹ While neither side appeared to have much faith in negotiating their way out of the crisis, the event nonetheless proved a notable occasion for airing arguments about the political status of Arcot, and the legal basis to various claims.⁹⁰ The meeting was as much a chance for representatives of both companies to posture to metropolitan authorities as it was for resolving conflict. Company authorities in both Paris and London were increasingly alarmed at the spiraling costs of war in the Carnatic, which, given that the two home nations were at peace, risked diplomatic embarrassment.⁹¹ In fact, the talks came too late to save Dupleix, as by this point his dismissal had already been decided upon in France.⁹² Nonetheless, the negotiations point to the wider issues around claims of sovereignty and legitimacy that would continue to structure politics in Arcot and Hyderabad long after Dupleix's departure.

The principal sticking point for the Sadras conference was the British demand that Muhammad Ali be recognized as Nawab of Arcot. This was Saunders's precondition for any further discussion, yet Dupleix was unwilling to submit to a figure he regarded as a “slave” of the British and reliant on their financial support.⁹³ The problem for the French, however, was the absence of any other serious candidate who could be put forward.⁹⁴ While Dupleix did not go so far as to stand forth as nawab himself, his deputies did present the parwana of Muzaffar Jung who appointed him “commander of all the territories in his dependencies from the river Krisnah to the sea.” With this and other “authentick pieces,” the French deputies evoked “the right of the French nation to take part in the affairs of the Carnateck [Arcot], and to make proposals concerning the said country.”⁹⁵ This had indeed been confirmed by Salabat Jung in a parwana that described Dupleix as “governor.”⁹⁶ It was, however, in contrast to the British who presented themselves as representatives of Muhammad Ali, claiming that they “acted from the beginning only as allies of the Circar [government].”⁹⁷ Where the British thus adopted a more conservative position, as loyal allies of the Nawab, the French claimed a more expansive right to act as effective rulers of Arcot.

To support this assertion, the French deployed the formidable legal arsenal that they had assembled since the death of Nasir Jung. Père François-Louis Lavaur, the Jesuit superior who led the French delegation, had been entrusted with the documents, including the imperial farman and various Hyderabadi parwanas.⁹⁸ These documents were presented to the British deputies for inspection, with Muttukrishna, a dubash (translator) in the service of the British Company, sent from Madras to serve as translator.⁹⁹ While only able to take preliminary copies of the documents, Muttukrishna immediately detected a problem with the wax seal of the imperial farman, which was dated AH 1133, (1720/21) some 30 years off from the claimed date. It appears that the British already suspected that something might be amiss, as Saunders had earlier instructed his deputies to “demand of the French deputies the dates of the several saneds (P. sanad, document) [. . .] from these depends the confuting them.”¹⁰⁰

Upon this revelation, the French withdrew their grants, and insisted that they would only allow further perusal if the British presented them with legal title for Muhammad Ali's claim to the nawabship. Dupleix later claimed that the error on the seal was only on the copy, while the original at Pondicherry had the date AH 1163. His deputies blamed the “writers at Delhi” for using the seal of the emperor's predecessor on the copy.¹⁰¹ Privately, however, the British deputies had a very different explanation, namely that “Mr Dupleix's friend at the court of Delhi has deceived him.”¹⁰² Whatever the case, it was a diplomatic coup for the British, who wasted no time in writing to the Raja of Thanjavur that “upon examining the Sanad we find it a Cheat and dated twenty Year ago.”¹⁰³

It was one thing for the British to scrutinize French parwanas, but another for them to build their own case. Their deputies had not brought any legal grants with them to Sadras, despite supporting Muhammad Ali's legitimacy with “arguments founded on Nazirzing's [Nasir Jung's] Phirmaunds, confirmed by Gauzedey Cawn [Ghazi ud-Din Khan, and even by the Mogul.”¹⁰⁴ The official British explanation for this was that since the British were merely his allies, these documents should remain in his possession at Trichinopoly. However, after the French demanded to see the parwanas, Saunders had written privately to Muhammad Ali as a matter of urgency, asking him to “send Copys of them attested by the Caudee (Qazi ) as soon as possible.”¹⁰⁵ These documents were only sent after the conference had ended, but apparently included “sanads” or parwanas from Nasir Jung, Ghazi-ud-Din Khan, and Salabat Jung, as well as a farman from the emperor.¹⁰⁶ As we have seen, Muhammad Ali had also recognized the necessity of compiling his own legal arsenal in asserting his right to the rulership of the Carnatic. Needless to say, the French cast doubt on the validity of these documents.

Disputes over the authenticity of Mughal documents can be understood as part of an incipient wider argument about the “constitution” of the Mughal empire. During the Sadras conference, British and French actors both evoked what they labeled as either the Mughal “constitution” or the “fundamental laws of the country.”¹⁰⁷ Such terms reflected early modern imaginings of the legal underpinnings of European states, where notions such as the “ancient constitution” of England or the “lois fondamentales” of France proved an enduring ideological battleground over the legal limits to monarchical power.¹⁰⁸ As Linda Colley has recently argued, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a renewed attention to such constitutions as written texts, spurred on by new forms of global warfare such as that rapidly escalating in South India.¹⁰⁹ In this case, we see the process of abstraction whereby the lawfulness of Mughal documents was projected back to posit a constitution that might underlie and validate their legality.

Constitutional abstractions, however, could not paper over the question of who was the legitimate source of such authority. Here, rebellion against such legitimate authority was a key argument. As Saunders sarcastically put it: “let M. Dupleix produce a saned from the Great Mogul or Nazirzing for destroying the legal governor of the province and fomenting a rebellion.”¹¹⁰ In a passage clearly aimed at Europe, Saunders continued that “his and our superiors must plainly be convinced that he has acted in open violence to the fundamental laws of the country in rebelling against Nabob Anaverdey Cawn [Anwaruddin Khan], the legal governor of the province.”¹¹¹ The French, in return, labelled Muhammad Ali a rebel for resisting the orders of Salabat Jung, and stressed the murder and dismemberment of Chanda Sahib, “the legitimate Nawab of the country” in Dupleix's words.¹¹² This was a vocabulary shared with Mughal chroniclers, for instance the chronicle glorifying the reign of Muhammad Ali constantly presented the French as rebels, suggesting a commonality in rhetorical strategies.¹¹³

The Sadras conference heralded novel arguments among Europeans about the nature of Mughal sovereignty, imbuing them with a newfound political urgency. Perhaps its most potent intellectual legacy was the concept of a Mughal constitution, something given a much fuller treatment by Warren Hastings in Bengal in the following decades.¹¹⁴ Yet these arguments also pointed to longer-term shifts in the post-Mughal settlement. By the 1760s, British “treaties” worked, among other things, to break the political hierarchy between Hyderabad and Arcot, cutting the legal circuit and atomizing individual Indian states,¹¹⁵ creating the necessary preconditions for a British imperial world order.

The Swan Song of Mughal Law: Eighteenth-Century South Asia

The eighteenth century in South Asia was long seen as a lawless period, one that was between empires and hence devoid of secure legal regimes. In fact, just like the pirate-filled oceans of the early modern world that Lauren Benton wrote about,¹¹⁶ eighteenth-century India was awash with law, and specifically Mughal law. In this mania for Mughal grants, we can retrieve a form of “lawfare,” not just between colonizers and colonized, but also in this case between and among European corporations and Indian successor regimes that utilized the materials of the Indo-Persian legal world, but turned them to novel purposes. Our arguments in this article are threefold. First, we have pointed to a startling but neglected feature of eighteenth-century politics in South Asia: that it was conducted by European corporations in particular, in legal terms. In doing so, we have shown that Mughal orders (imperial farmans as well as regional parwanas), once instruments of executive orders or property grants, were transformed into a widely used form of political currency. Political players of all stripes used them to validate their own political positions and those of their formal inferiors/superiors. As a result, Mughal sub-imperial orders or parwanas, always a capacious form, morphed further from orders and deeds into implicit treaties. Second, because the validity of any legal right within this system depended on the authority of the order-giver, participants were drawn deeper and deeper into a system generative of more and more orders. The surfeit of such documents, we have argued, derived from the nested and mutually constitutive nature of political regimes. With political status in flux and open to deals, there arose a frenetic trade in Mughal documents, each party seeking to out-legalize the other. A corollary of that process was the disproportionate investment in the material aspects of the documents. Since most European users of these documents often had limited or no literacy in Persian, the quality of the paper, the seals, and various other graphic components acquired disproportionate importance in establishing legal claims. Third, the formal political hierarchies established by such orders were often the expression of multi-directional patronage relationships such that purported vassals strove to shore up chosen overlords. In such a context, parwanas (and farmans) served to cement a range of rights and were used to buy alliances. Parwanas were currency, and not just in a metaphorical sense; these documentary records of rights served as valuable media of transaction in the political sphere.

And thus Mughal law received a fresh lease on life in eighteenth-century India. Mughal orders spewed forth as tangled regimes scrambled for legitimacy. The fluid and contested field of parwana politics only ended once the British Empire broke up these nested political circuits, imposing a formalized system of Princely States under its pseudo-Oriental umbrella: the Raj.