A New Language of Rule: Alwar's Administrative Experiment, c. 1838–58
Keywords:
Indian Princely States, administrative reforms, nineteenth century, Alwar, Banni Singh, Aminullah Khan, diwan, British colonial conquest, agrarian taxation, civil courtsAbstract
Many rulers of newly formed Indian Princely States enacted substantial administrative reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century as they sought to reinforce their power and secure revenue in the wake of British colonial conquest. In one such case, the ruler of Alwar, Banni Singh, recruited Aminullah Khan, a former record-keeper in Delhi's colonial courts, to serve as diwan (chief minister) and undertake administrative reforms starting in 1838. These reforms focused on agrarian taxation, the civil courts, and the military, and included changes to the roles of local officials, methods of record-keeping, and the language of governance. The reforms were encoded in seven slim volumes of regulations and model forms, handwritten in Persian. Through a study of these regulations, I situate the reforms of Alwar's administration within Banni Singh's broader self-fashioning as a modern ruler in a Mughal mode and show how the reforms drew from both Mughal and colonial ideas of statecraft. The regulations represented a shift toward a legalistic conception of that state as seen in the ideals of good governance that they espoused, and they constructed contractual relationships among villagers, low-level officials in the districts, and the central state through the extensive bureaucratic procedures that they encoded.
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Quoted in Haynes, “Imperial Impact on Rajputana,” 448.
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“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3662, APRI. The stamp is dated 1279 AH and 1919 VS.
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Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest, 73.
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See for example the format of Regulations Passed by the Governor General in Council of Bengal: With an Index and Glossary: Vol. I. Containing the Regulations Passed in the Years 1793, 1794, and 1795 (London: J.L. Cox, 1828) and the preambles included in The Persian Reader, Or, Select Extracts from Various Persian Writers (Calcutta: School-Book Society, 1835), vol. III.
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Regulations Passed by the Governor General in Council of Bengal (London: J.L. Cox, 1828), I:103, 107 contain sample calendars for recording prisoners.
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H. Blochmann, ed., The Ain-i-Akbari by Abul-Fazl-i-‘Allami Edited in the Original Persian (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1872) I: 280–89; and Chatterjee, Negotiating Mughal Law, 121–24.
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Mayaram, Against History, Against State, 177–83.
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Janaki Nair describes a similar process of the move from tributary/gift-giving relations to bureaucracy and acceptance of the idea of “legal king instead of a divinely ordained one” (emphasis in the original) in Mysore between the 1830s and 1860s. Nair, Mysore Modern, 4, 10; for the ways that the EIC redefined sarkār, see Abbott, “Bringing the Sarkār Back In,” 134–35.
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Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest, 1–15.
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“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3660, 1–2; “Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3663, 1, APRI. Bhattacharya also sees the threat of peasant rebellion as one aspect informing the paternalistic colonial state's language of protection. Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest, 63.
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“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3659, 33–34; “Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3660, 23–24, APRI.
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“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3663, 1–2, APRI.
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“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3659, 5–6, APRI.
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Baden-Powell traces the history of the term lambardār to the 1819 Minute of Mackenzie Holt, in which it was used for the representative of a group of people who are represented by a single number in the collector's register for payment of revenue. The term broadened over time to encompass a variety of headmen. It found its first legal use in Regulation IX of 1824. Baden-Powell, B. H., The Land Systems of British India: Book III: The System of Village or Mahal Settlements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892)Google Scholar, II: 20, 23 fn 1, 285–88, 366. In Ajmer-Merwara, lambardārs were appointed as officials to replace patels.
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“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3659, 7–9, APRI.
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“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3659, 5, APRI.
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Arsattha Records Alwar, bundles 2 and 3 (VS 1782 and 1783), Jaipur State Records, Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner. Gupta, The Agrarian System, 317–18.
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Qānūngos in Alwar in the 1870s held revenue assessment records (mūżīnās) and appointment deeds from the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Powlett, Gazetteer of Ulwur, 129, 136, 154, 158–61.
65
“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3660, 9, APRI.
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“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3661, 1, 9, APRI.
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“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3659, 30, APRI.
68
Ibid., 30–31, APRI.
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Some regulations included explanations for the required uniformity: “Since by the reason of the decrease and increase of the width and length of papers sent [by] the tahsildars, total chaos arises in the arranging of papers of the register” Ibid., 31. Papers of the land survey were to all be written on standard sizes—either single or double leaves of paper—so that they could be bound and preserved in one volume. “Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3663, 16, APRI.
70
A note of obligation (tamassuk ) and declaration (iqrār-nāma ) from the lambardār regarding repayment was also required. “Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3659, 4, APRI.
71
Ibid., 25; “Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3663, 3, APRI.
72
“Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3659, 7–9, 20; “Dastur ul Amal,” MS 3663, page 5–6, 8, 13, APRI.
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Richards, Document Forms, 32–78.
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Mill, John Stuart, “Memorandum of the Improvements in the Administration of India during the Last Thirty Years (1858),” in Writings on India, ed. M., John Robson, Martin Moir, and Zawahir Moir (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 152–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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Powlett, Gazetteer of Ulwur, 47.
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Haynes, “The British Alteration,” 45–60.
