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In eighteenth-century South Asia, 'political' vakils are familiar to us principally as diplomats, active in the inter-state negotiations of the period. They were unlike their predecessors, the īlchī and hejib of earlier centuries, who were associated with the service of courts and states. Maratha political vakils, like others, worked rather more as the mobile agents of individual rulers. Their activities extended far beyond the diplomatic arena. Since revenue rights were central to many inter-state negotiations, vakils often oversaw arrangements for local-level revenue collection. Frequently acting on behalf of several employers, they also had key roles in the remittance of cash, to meet the costs of their own establishments, to participate in the gift economy of the court, to pay the costs of local mercenaries, and to make down-payments for revenue farms on behalf of their employers. Drawing on support of their own extended families, for whom vakil service was often a profession that extended over several generations and regions, many political vakils combined mobility with deep connections to local economies and societies, sharing some characteristics of the 'portfolio capitalism' of the eighteenth century. What distinguished them, though, was their access to subcontinent-wide networks of political intelligence, and their expertise in the 'soft skills' of negotiation and persuasion, which further enabled them to exploit local social networks and political institutions. Colonial reforms of the late eighteenth century broke this flexible and entrepreneurial service role apart, dissipating it within the lower levels of colonial bureaucracy. The old figure of the political vakil disappeared, to be replaced by the semi-professional 'native pleader' in courts of law, and by 'munshi' assistants and translators to the Residents of the princely states within the uncovenanted civil service.

AbstractBritish observers of the nineteenth-century panchayat were convinced that it represented a judicial forum of great antiquity, in which petitioners were able to gain local and direct access to justice. They contrasted the panchayat favourably with the delays and frustrations that beset the eighteenth-century East India Company's attempts to channel all petitions through its own courts. This article examines the history of the pre-colonial panchayat in western India and its early modern predecessors. During the early modern centuries, a diverse array of state-level and local corporate bodies made up the landscape for the submission of petitions and the hearing of suits. Although many suits were local in nature, the process of hearing and adjudication itself gave these judicial spaces a significant 'public' dimension, and their forms of argumentation frequently invoked general principles of justice and moral order. From the early eighteenth century, the new form of the panchayat came to supersede these older corporate bodies and to reshape the forms of public that gathered around them. The Maratha state, based in Pune, sought firmer control over revenue and justice. State officials promoted the panchayat as a new type of judicial arena, weakening the local corporate institutions and tying them more closely to the Pune court.

AbstractDavid Washbrook's influential early work on South India set the terms for much subsequent debate about caste, with its exploration of the key role of the colonial state in shaping caste ideologies and institutions. Over subsequent decades, historians and anthropologists have come increasingly to emphasise the 'colonial construction' of caste and its enduring legacies in post-colonial India. Yet there were also significant continuities linking the forms of colonial caste with much earlier regional histories of conflict and debate, whose legacies can be traced into the late colonial period. In particular, the juxtaposition between Brahman and non-Brahman itself was anticipated in a tradition of conservative social commentary that emerged in the Deccan Sultanate state of Ahmadnagar, and came to circulate widely through Banaras and western India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This tradition of commentary acquired new salience during the nineteenth century. It entered the colonial archive as an authoritative source of knowledge, and also provoked early 'non-Brahman' intellectuals into a fresh engagement with its conservative social vision. In their attempts to rebut this vision, these intellectuals displayed a detailed knowledge of its social history and a deep familiarity with the judicial decisions through which it had been upheld in earlier centuries.

Often migrants into western India as servants of the Bahmani kings and Deccan Sultanate states, Maratha kāyasthas were newcomers into local societies whose Brahmin communities had hitherto commanded more exclusive possession of scribal and literate skills. From the mid-fifteenth century, periodic but intense disputes developed over kāyastha entitlement to the rituals of the twice-born. The issue was debated along the intellectual networks linking the Maratha country with pandit assemblies in Banaras. The survival of K atriyas in the modern age of the Kaliyuga was a question of critical significance to these pandit intellectuals, dividing Brahmins in the Maratha regions from some of their fellow pandits in Banaras, and shaping their wider conception of the nature of the social order in their own times. Maratha Brahmins developed some of their most important arguments about these questions in the context of the early debates about kāyasthas. Both in their own guru lineages and within the pandit assemblies of Banaras, kāyasthas found able defenders of their entitlements, even as they entrenched themselves locally as a land and office-holding elite. These tensions came together during the royal consecration in 1674 of the Maratha warrior leader Sivaji. The conflict of these years cast a long shadow, helping to set the terms of debate about the nature of the social order through into the colonial period and after.

AbstractMaratha Brahman families migrated to Banaras in increasing numbers from the early sixteenth century. They dominated the intellectual life of the city and established an important presence at the Mughal and other north Indian courts. They retained close links with Brahmans back in the Maratha regions, where pressures of social change and competition for rural resources led to acrimonious disputes concerning ritual entitlement and precedence in the rural social order. Parties on either side appealed to Banaras for resolution of the disputes, raising serious questions about the nature of Brahman community and identity. Banaras pandit communities struggled to contain these disputes, even as the symbols of their own authority came under attack from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. By the early eighteenth century, the emergence of the Maratha state created new models of Brahman authority and community, and new patterns for the resolution of such disputes.

AbstractCultivation of the bodily skills required in cavalry warfare was a prominent theme in India's pre-colonial societies. Demand for these expertises enabled fighting specialists to develop an India-wide network of patronage and employment. Wrestling and its associated exercises became the indispensable accompaniment to military preparation in the early modern period. Appreciation of the wide social diffusion of these expertises also allows for a better understanding of colonial demilitarization, the displacement of important cultures of the body, as well as the loss of mobility and honorable employment. La formation aux arts de la guerre montée fut une caractéristique dominante important dans les sociétés précoloniales de l'Inde. Grâce à la demande de ces techniques de combat leurs spécialistes surent se créer un réseau de patronage et d'emploi à travers l'Inde. Pendant la période prémoderne les préparatifs de guerre exigèrent toujours l'apprentissage de la lutte à mains nues et des arts de combat associés. En se rendant compte de l'ampleur de la diffusion des ces arts martiaux à travers la société on comprend mieux que la démilitarisation coloniale emmena la déchéance des arts martiaux, ainsi que la perte de mobilité des lutteurs et la possibilité de trouver un emploi honorable.

AbstractThis essay explores some of the ways in which gender identity and norms for manhood were important in the political and religious discourses of Mughal north India. A concern with the meanings of manhood ran through these discourses and their antecedents in the wider world of medieval Perso-Islamic political culture, constructing important and enduring links between kingship, norms for statecraft, imperial service and ideal manhood. The essay examines in detail the ways in which one high imperial servant in the early seventeenth century inherited, developed and reflected on these themes, and related them to his own personal experience. These definitions of elite manliness began to change in the later seventeenth century, and their connection with imperial service began to fracture, with the emergence of more complexly stratified urban societies in north India, and the development of an increasingly ebullient and cosmopolitan ethos of gentlemanly connoisseurship and consumption. The essay examines some of the normative literature associated with these shifts, and suggests that one of their consequences may have been to intensify the strains in Mughal service morale associated with the last decades of the seventeenth century.