Hindu City and Just Empire: Banaras and India in Ali Ibrahim Khan's legal imagination

Abstract

This article examines the career and ideas of a late Mughal administrator, a Shi'a Muslim called Ali Ibrahim Khan, who was appointed magistrate of the north Indian city of Banaras after its conquest by the East India Company in 1781, and remained in that position until his death in 1792. Engaging with recent research on legal pluralism on the one hand, and on legal and cultural intermediaries on the other, this paper examines the imagination of imperial, religious and legal spaces by this prolific historian, poet and legal ethnographer, an under-studied protagonist of the process of transition to colonialism in India. Using a range of Persian-language manuscript sources in addition to archival and published material in Urdu and English, the article reveals the principles of Ali Ibrahim Khan's pragmatic but principled efforts to reconcile recognisably Islamic legal principles and procedures with the demands of the emerging colonial situation, and his systematic reference to locality and custom in order to do so. © 2014 Nandini Chatterjee and The Johns Hopkins University PressReluctantly presiding over a trial in Banaras in 1781, Ali Ibrahim Khan, the Britishappointed magistrate of that recently conquered city, observed the procedures of a "trial by ordeal among the Hindus." Ali Ibrahim Khan's detailed observations, which we can deem one of the earliest works of legal ethnography produced by an Indian, were accompanied by a typology of such ordeals, apparently gleaned from the Brahmin pandits attached to his court, and an appendix containing relevant extracts from a dharmasastric text, the Yajñavalka Smriti. The result was an article in the first issue of the Asiatick Review, that epitome of scholarly and official Orientalism in India. 1 We might well have taken the events at Ali Ibrahim Khan's court, and the resulting journal article, to be symptomatic of a distinctively colonial and modern method of dealing with cultural, religious and legal diversity, in which Indian society was taken to be composed of distinct and mutually exclusive religious collectives, each possessing a complete set of laws which had to inevitably apply to all its members but no others. 2 We may also have taken this Muslim judge's account as especially convincing evidence of the vitality and persistence of Brahminical knowledge and legal traditions, and indeed, of their formal incorporation within the legal structures of precolonial India. 3 However, this paper comes to a somewhat different conclusion, by considering not only the legal practices reported, but also the opinions expressed by the key protagonist-the judge himself. Ali Ibrahim Khan noted that he had allowed the ordeal to be undertaken only after failing to convince the parties and his own advisory pandits (Brahmin scholar-experts) that such procedures, while appropriate in the realms of Hindu kings, were unsuitable within the territories of the Company. While clearly curious about the eventual proceedings, and surprised by the outcome (whereby a man held a red-hot iron ...

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

“…In doing so, I have suggested that these petty agents not only "jockeyed" and navigated the conflicting jurisdictions of imperial law, but also thought clearly and rationally about how to reconcile them. 23 The Indian mahzar-namas were recorded testimony documented by expert scribes at the edges of the legal process, and aimed principally but not exclusively at influencing legal outcomes. They were expressed in coded forms that derived from a complex Islamic, Persianate, and Indian heritage.…”