Papers by Nandini Chatterjee
Legal Histories of the British Empire
Negotiating Mughal Law
Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chat... more Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders, Chatterjee offers a new history from below of the Mughal Empire, far from the glittering courts of the emperors and nobles, but still dramatic and filled with colourful personalities. From this perspective, we see war, violence, betrayal, enterprise, romance and disappointment, but we also see a quest for law, justice, rights and righteousness. A rare story of Islamic law in a predominantly non-Muslim society, this is also an exploration of the peripheral regions of the Maratha empire and a neglected princely state under British colonial rule. This title is also available as Open Access.
The Economic History Review, 2016
The Making of Indian Secularism, 2011
Indian Christians have played a rather significant historical role in invoking the search for uni... more Indian Christians have played a rather significant historical role in invoking the search for universal principles of governance in India, and nowhere was this role more publicly and persistently expressed as in the realm of law. It is also in the nature of history’s irony that this aspect of their history has been almost completely effaced. In 2001, a BJP-led government legislated amendments to Christian marriage law with what appeared unseemly haste and without adequate consultation to many Christian activists.305 Their complaints made hardly a ripple in the Indian press, where these appeared to be no more than the predictable whines of a ‘backward’ minority community and its traditionalist leaders, successfully overridden by the reforming state, supporting the ‘progressive’ sections of the community, particularly women leaders. This characteristic inattention, such that Muslim personal law continues to be perceived as the principal ‘problem’ in the context of family laws upheld by a secular state, has in itself been attributed by some Christian activists to the marginal position of Christians in India, such that the problems of Christian women have failed to garner the mainstream attention as have the alleged inequities suffered by Muslim women.306
The Making of Indian Secularism, 2011
In the previous three chapters, we have seen how Indian Christians negotiated a system of laws th... more In the previous three chapters, we have seen how Indian Christians negotiated a system of laws that, while hardly of their making nevertheless permitted them opportunity for manipulation, if in some cases more successfully than others. In many ways, the role of Indian Christians was similar to Indians of other descriptions who exerted effective pressure on the colonial government, by using the contradictory principles of individual freedom and community entitlement in debates over religious freedom. Christians were also affected by imperial lawmaking by becoming marked by a separate set of personal laws, in spite of their distinctive historical role of disrupting stable categories of classification and legal governance by their very presence. In spite of this, the quest for a universal law of civil relations, which became less and less of a government priority as the nineteenth century wore on, remained a legal and political demand for Christians because of the needs and possibilities of boundary-crossing that it afforded to a community conceived of as converts by British law-makers, the Indian public and Christian leadership itself. Ideological commitment arises out of specific social locations, for individuals as for collectives.
The Making of Indian Secularism, 2011
Although St Stephen’s College now officially claims to be a ‘religious foundation’, it is obvious... more Although St Stephen’s College now officially claims to be a ‘religious foundation’, it is obvious that minority educational institutions are ‘religious’ only in a very specific sense. They are religious institutions because they are claimed as such by people who define themselves with reference to a religious community and because certain constitutional and administrative provisions dealing with religion have been judicially interpreted to recognize this ‘religious’ claim as a valid one. In the previous chapter, we have seen how the language of religious rights, mingled with that of privacy and autonomy, facilitated claims both against state intervention and for state support. In this chapter, I will discuss another aspect of the same process: how the claim of religious autonomy was utilized by various parties interested in structuring and disciplining the community itself.
The Making of Indian Secularism, 2011
It is impossible not to notice that the two rival ‘outside’ participants in Indian nationalism, C... more It is impossible not to notice that the two rival ‘outside’ participants in Indian nationalism, Charles Andrews and Leonard Elmhirst, had to step out of the domain of Christian missions in order to take up their new mantles as servants of the Indian nation. Skill-sharing across a diverse, even conflicting spectrum of religious and political hues was indeed a reality, but the boundaries imposed by organized Christianity were equally substantive. These boundaries included those imposed by law: other scholars have pointed out how, in the twentieth-century, the British Government of India required missionaries to sign a pledge committing themselves to refrain from involvement in politics, especially subversive politics. The burden of this pledge was passed on to Indian employees of missions, restricting their ability to participate in nationalist politics,661 while they remained under the authority of the Christian missions. Both Andrews and Elmhirst did in fact remove themselves from the control of such authority, but their trajectories were exceptional. This chapter will discuss the structure of religious authority that constrained and shaped the opinions of most Christians in India in our period, both Indians, and others. In doing so, it will reopen the issues raised in Chapter 2, where we noted that Christian churches were part of a spectrum of religious institutions in India, which were all undergoing rapid reorganization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was suggested there that the specificity of Christian religious authority in this period was its expression as a racial hierarchy; it is to this distinctive experience of Christians that this chapter will return.
The Making of Indian Secularism, 2011
In recent years, education in Britain as well as India has been in the news over issues of religi... more In recent years, education in Britain as well as India has been in the news over issues of religious policy. The British debates arose in connection with a minor clause in the Education Act of 2002,80 which in popular discourse appeared to open the gates to novel entities known as ‘faith schools’, one that opponents felt would exacerbate the ongoing fragmentation of British society along religious and racial lines. The faith schools would potentially be organized by non-traditional (read non-Christian) educational agencies, with substantially greater financial support from the state in order to make such enterprises reality. In addition to the nature of management, such schools, actual or proposed, are to be distinguished by their admission policies (the use of faith-based criteria to rank applications for places) and by the nature of faith education they may provide.81
The Making of Indian Secularism, 2011
I began this book by proposing that there are a number of gaps in the scholarly as well as popula... more I began this book by proposing that there are a number of gaps in the scholarly as well as popular narratives about religion and secularism in modern India, gaps which have become so entrenched that nobody in the recent furore over St Stephen’s and its ‘Christianization’ appeared to notice any irony in the very fact that demands of rigorously secular policy could be comprehensibly made with regard to an institution which started off, at least officially, as an instrument of Christian evangelization. With due respect to the present Principal of St Stephen’s, Revd Valson Thampu, one of the principal architects of the recent college policy, such widely held expectations cannot be explained purely in terms of majoritarian elitist hypocrisy, although convenient amnesia is of course part of the politics of creating any tradition, including secularist traditions. What is interesting to me, in the context of the present study, is the process by which certain stories come to be told about certain institutions, stories noticeably different from those told by those who created such institutions in the first place. In connection with St Stephen’s College, we have seen how such narrative transformations were intimately connected to internal policy changes within a Christian missionary-created college which morphed to fit the expectations of a new nation, and how, in so far as St Stephen’s is still an evolving institution, there continue to be conflicting narratives about its past and future.
The Making of Indian Secularism, 2011
When I began the research that led to this book, I spent some time visiting the office of the Cat... more When I began the research that led to this book, I spent some time visiting the office of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India on Baba Kharak Singh Marg, New Delhi. After receiving me and my inept queries with a great deal of grace and kindness, Fr. X, whose name is not important in this context, probed gently about the extent of my theological knowledge. For a start, he suggested that I explain to him the difference between Christian and Hindu ideas about incarnation. Since I failed to provide a satisfactory response, he wondered aloud how I could be trusted to understand the inspiration behind the public and political stands taken by Christians in India.
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2014
Social History of Medicine, 2008
In a novel written in 1958, the Bengali literary critic Pramathanath Bishi suggested that there w... more In a novel written in 1958, the Bengali literary critic Pramathanath Bishi suggested that there was a meeting of the medieval and modern ages in late eighteenth-century Bengal in the persons of the British Baptist missionary William Carey and his Bengali munshi, Ramram ...
The American Historical Review, 2012
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license. A necessaril... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license. 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 in 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 forms of boundary-crossing: 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 multilingualism functioned within specific parts of the Persianate cosmopolis.
Negotiating Mughal Law
This book is the first micro-history written in the context of studies of the Mughal Empire. Usin... more This book is the first micro-history written in the context of studies of the Mughal Empire. Using nearly two hundred Persian-language legal and administrative documents and a significant amount of Hindi-, Marathi-and Englishlanguage material, it has told the story of the activities and achievements of one landed family across several generations, from the late sixteenth until the twentieth century. That story traversed several regimesfrom remembered connections with pre-Mughal Rajput kingdoms and central Indian sultanates, to the Mughals, then the Marathas, then a minor princely state under the control of the British Empire in India. The central protagonists in the story encountered emperors, princes, nobles, bandits, itinerant merchants, servant-retainers and courtesans. This book has presented the political and social history that emerges from those encounters as a narrative, the story of that family. This is a story that they had themselves worked to produce, through documentation, archiving and excision. The history thus produced and the process of research involved in putting it together forces us, for reasons I shall elaborate, to contend with the relationship of history to memory, especially memories that are significant to individuals and families, and the obligations, both empirical and ethical, that history and the historian owe to such personally significant memories. In the remaining portion of this book, I will discuss that relationship and my growing understanding of it. I will also offer a description of a process by which the seemingly meaningless fragments of Mughal and Maratha records may be reconstituted as archives that are capable of revealing stories such as this one, about individuals and lineages located in larger political and social structures. And thereby, I argue that, as the best micro-historians have done, we may also achieve better understanding of those broader structures themselves. Micro-history is in many ways a misnomer. It is not about small events, limited places, fewer people and either insignificant or untenable conclusions. It is instead, as I understand it, a certain attitude towards the subject matter, an attitude that shapes the research process. A great deal of theoretical discussion about micro-history is about the representativeness or typicality of its subject matter, and hence conclusions. If the best micro-histories begin with atypical
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
The collecti... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but also the associated languages of Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi and Rajasthani, the articles collectively enrich the idea of the Persianate, delineating its specific dispensations within regional contexts, and also its boundaries and limitations. This is also a contribution to the study of Persographia, in this case Persianate rather than just Persian writing. The articles study specific language combinations, lexical elements and usages that came to be deployed in different areas and the legal cultures they provide evidence for.
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2021
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
A necessaril... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
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 in 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 forms of boundary-crossing: 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 multilingualism functioned within specific parts of the Persianate cosmopolis.
The English Historical Review
BOOK REVIEWS irony (well cultivated by great writers, such as Andrei Platonov and Mikhail Zoshche... more BOOK REVIEWS irony (well cultivated by great writers, such as Andrei Platonov and Mikhail Zoshchenko). Even if listeners and readers could not understand many of the words, the message about the new rules of the road clearly came through. Official oratory transcribed in print was the primary vehicle for the message, and Lovell provides an informative account of the antecedents of the politically empowered spoken word.
This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama that was widely us... more This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama that was widely used in India between the 17 th and 19 th centuries to narrate, represent and record antecedents, entitlements and injuries, with a view to securing legal rights and redressing legal wrongs. Although mahzars were a known documentary form in Islamic law, used by qazis (Islamic judges) in many other parts of the world, in India they took a number of distinctive forms. The specific form of Indian mahzar-namas that this article focusses on was, broadly speaking, a legal document of testimony, narrated in the first person, in a form standardised by predominantly non-Muslim scribes, endorsed in writing by members of the local community and/or the professional or social contacts of person(s) writing the document, and notarised by the seal of a qazi. This specific legal form, however, formed part of a much broader genre of declarative texts, which were also known as mahzars in India. By looking at the legal mahzar-namas together with the other kinds of mahzars, and situating both in relation to Indo-Islamic jurisprudential texts and Persian-language formularies, this article points to 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. In doing so, the article will 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.
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Papers by Nandini Chatterjee
The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but also the associated languages of Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi and Rajasthani, the articles collectively enrich the idea of the Persianate, delineating its specific dispensations within regional contexts, and also its boundaries and limitations. This is also a contribution to the study of Persographia, in this case Persianate rather than just Persian writing. The articles study specific language combinations, lexical elements and usages that came to be deployed in different areas and the legal cultures they provide evidence for.
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 in 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 forms of boundary-crossing: 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 multilingualism functioned within specific parts of the Persianate cosmopolis.
The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but also the associated languages of Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi and Rajasthani, the articles collectively enrich the idea of the Persianate, delineating its specific dispensations within regional contexts, and also its boundaries and limitations. This is also a contribution to the study of Persographia, in this case Persianate rather than just Persian writing. The articles study specific language combinations, lexical elements and usages that came to be deployed in different areas and the legal cultures they provide evidence for.
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 in 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 forms of boundary-crossing: 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 multilingualism functioned within specific parts of the Persianate cosmopolis.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/negotiating-mughal-law/3C8631AFC67A29A671AD5C3206B035CC#fndtn-contents
Based on a completely reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents, Nandini Chatterjee provides a unique micro-history of a family of landlords in Malwa, central India, who flourished in the region from at least the sixteenth until the twentieth century. By exploring their daily interactions with imperial elites as well as villagers and marauders, Chatterjee offers a new history from below of the Mughal Empire, far from the glittering courts of the emperors and nobles, but still dramatic and filled with colourful personalities. From this perspective, we see war, violence, betrayal, enterprise, romance and disappointment, but we also see a quest for law, justice, rights and righteousness. A rare story of Islamic law in a predominantly non-Muslim society, this is also an exploration of the peripheral regions of the Maratha empire and a neglected princely state under British colonial rule.