A necessarily widespread feature of language practice in the Persianate world
was the need for translation of speech and text, with a range of lexical and
semantic challenges involved taking meaning from one language to another.
This article focusses on legal translation, with its highly functional aims, by
following the career of ...
A necessarily widespread feature of language practice in the Persianate world
was the need for translation of speech and text, with a range of lexical and
semantic challenges involved taking meaning from one language to another.
This article focusses on legal translation, with its highly functional aims, by
following the career of a pair of Indo-Persian legal forms known as tamassuk
and fārigh-khaṭṭī, used for recording obligation and requital respectively.
Tracing their reincarnations from Persian into Marathi, Hindi and Bengali, this
article reveals several boundary-crossings: doctrinal, jurisdictional, political
and linguistic. In doing so, it explores the legal mindscapes in the early modern
Indo-Persian world, spilling from the late Mughal into the colonial, and shows
how multi-linguality functioned within specific parts of the Persianate
cosmopolis.