This happens for two interrelated reasons. The first is my previous work in the field of law and colonialism, particularly as it relates to religious identity and its co-formation with laws that have functioned through the attribution of denominational status. Footnote 42 When I learned of the endless potholes in the legal landscape of the British Empire and the ubiquitous colonial protagonists hopping over and around them, I was tempted to first understand what they were thinking as they hopped, footnote 43, and then I wondered how exactly people could have negotiated structurally comparable issues in the Mughal Empire. When I decided to go beyond the hypothesis of a colonial rupture and discover what exactly had changed, I discovered footnote 44 that there is a widespread awareness among scholars of Islamic law that the Indian continent, especially among the Mughals, offers a crucial case that deserves to be compared to the oft-studied Ottoman Empire. The study of Islamic law in Mughal India is plagued by the inability or unwillingness of scholars of Islamic law to use sources in Persian and the Indian language, and the very simplistic ideas of Islamic law maintained by historians of Mughal India who ignore most of the conclusions of the first group. Only by combining the ideas of the former and the capabilities of the latter can we prevent the reification of certain legal texts of the Mughal period, such as Al-Fatāwā Al-`Alamgīriya (Fatāwā-yi ͑Alamgīrī in Persian) of the late seventeenth century, and allow an adequate analysis of their content, especially what clearly testifies to the deep interest of Mughal jurists in the effects of confessional diversity. Seems. Footnote 45 During Akbar`s reign in 1600, the urban population of the Mughal Empire reached 17 million, or 15% of the empire`s total population. This was more than the total urban population in Europe at the time, and even a century later, in 1700, the urban population of England, Scotland and Wales did not exceed 13% of its total population,[131] while British India had an urban population of less than 13% of its total population in 1800 and 9% in 1881. a decline from the previous Mughal era. [135] In 1700, Mughal India had an urban population of 23 million, larger than the urban population of British India of 22.3 million in 1871.
[136] After the collapse of the Mughal Empire in the 18th century, the influence of the East India Company grew. During this period of legal, cultural and social change, Sharia law was “bureaucratized” by the British. [20] The Hastings Plan of 1772 established a hierarchy of colonial courts that applied generalized “native legal standards” to all Indian citizens regarding marriage, inheritance, religious affairs, and caste disputes. [21] English courts have ruled on Islamic legal issues for Muslims and the laws of the “Brahmanic Shasters” for Hindus in India. [21] The Hastings Plan was based on the idea that the indigenous legal practices of Indian Muslims and Hindus could be integrated into British legal procedures and judicial systems. As Michael Anderson notes, the assumption that a homogeneous set of rules could apply to all people who identified as Muslim violated “both Islamic theory and South Asian [legal] practice.” [21] The Islamic laws of the Anglo-Mohammedan era were formally textualized. W. H.
MacNaghten compiled his “Principles and Precedents of Muslim Law” in 1825, in which he attempted to distill more than 600 years of Islamic jurisprudence into a “uniform rule.” [21] The complex relationship between English common law and Islamic law in British India is clearly demonstrated in Abul Fata v. Russomoy [1894] of the Privy Council. The case was about whether a waqf (Islamic charitable foundation) was really a charitable foundation or whether it expanded the family it had created. Under the direction of English judges, the Privy Council ruled that the Waqf had expanded the family and that its foundation was not inherently charitable. Under English trust law, a charitable foundation could not (and still cannot) be established for purposes other than charity, which is contrary to the broader legal position of Hanafi jurisprudence. The ruling prohibited Muslim plaintiffs from using Sharia law for private matters. Anderson notes that the decision was symptomatic of a broader colonial assault on Islamic law enforcement; the Privy Council saw Sharia law as an obstacle to the growth of the British market economy in India. [21] The decision sparked massive disagreement among Muslims in India. Led by advocacy and pressure from Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the future founder of Pakistan, the Waqf Validation Act of 1913 was passed, which overturned the Privy Council`s decision. The law gave Muslims in India access to Sharia law and allowed them to establish charitable foundations that served charitable and personal purposes. [22] Jinnah`s central objective in passing the law was to restore Indian Muslims` access to Islamic law in India.
However, as Anderson notes, the form and purpose of Sharia law have been irrevocably shaped by British common law procedures. [23] The textualization and codification of Sharia law transformed it into something it had never been before: a fixed corpus of “immutable rules beyond the realm of interpretation and judicial discretion.” [23] During the last century of colonial rule, Sharia law had been completely transformed by the British administration. Although the Mughals are of Turko-Mongolian origin, their reign resulted in the revival and culmination of the Persian language on the Indian subcontinent. Literary patronage was accompanied by the institutionalization of Persian as an official and court language; As a result, Persian almost attained the status of a mother tongue for many residents of Mughal India. [157] [158] Muzaffar Alam argues that the Mughals deliberately used Persian as a vehicle for a comprehensive Indo-Persian political culture to unite their diverse empire. [159] Persian had a profound influence on the languages of South Asia; Such a language, now known as Urdu, developed at the end of the Mughal period in the imperial capital Delhi. It was used at the Mughal court from the reign of Shah Alam II, replacing Persian as the language of the Muslim elite. [160] [161] The core of the history of the negotiation of Mughal law takes place in the Malwa of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between the reigns of the last two “great” Mughal emperors – Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb Alamgir. There is a long narrow tail in this story, based on a thinner trail of documents that unevenly but surely establishes the family`s subsequent fate through major political upheavals, when first the Marathas and then the British took control of the region. Chapter 1 creates the setting. It deals with the political geography of Malwa as it developed from the late Middle Ages to the end of our history.
It describes the dramatic and diverse landscape in its relationship with the local nodes of military and royal power, especially those commonly known as Rajputs and especially Rāthoḍs. These include clans that merged into states and those that remained more fragmentary, but all of which were bound by a supra-regional conception of Rajput land. The arcs of military and commercial movements then impose themselves on this real and imaginary landscape, evoking an area defined by both anchorage and mobility. This is offered as an essay on the historical space in which the protagonists of this history created a field of operation and claim for themselves, negotiated with successive and straddling empires, wrested their rights from all and retained them.
