Mahzar-namas in the Mughal and British Empires: The Uses of an Indo-Islamic Legal Form

Abstract

This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama that was widely used in India between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to narrate, represent, and record antecedents, entitlements, and injuries with a view to securing legal rights and redressing legal wrongs. Mahzars were a known documentary form in Islamic law and used by qazis (Islamic judges) in many other parts of the world, but in India they took a number of distinctive forms. The specific form of Indian mahzar-namas that I focus on here was, broadly speaking, a legal document of testimony, narrated in the first person, in a form standardized by predominantly non-Muslim scribes, endorsed in writing by the author’s fellow community members and/or professional or social contacts, and notarized by a qazi’s seal. This specific legal form was part of a much broader genre of declarative texts that were also known as mahzars in India. I examine the legal mahzar-namas together with the other kinds of mahzars, and situate them in relation to Indo-Islamic jurisprudential texts and Persian-language formularies. What emerges is a distinctive Indo-Islamic legal culture in contact with the wider Islamic and Persianate worlds of jurisprudence and documentary culture, but responsive to the unique socio-political formations of early modern India. I also reflect on the meanings of law, including Islamic law, for South Asians and trace the evolution of that understanding across the historical transition to colonialism.