Persian in the Villages, or, the Language of Jamiat Rai’s Account Books

Abstract

Abstract District (pargana)-level land revenue administration in late-Mughal south Gujarat was run mostly by Hindu and Jain family firms which operated within a multilingual environment featuring Gujarati and Marathi as well as Persian. Similar arrangements continued under early East India Company control but, by the 1820s, the British had done away with land-revenue family firms and their contextual multilingualism, replacing them with directly-employed village accountants writing only in Gujarati. This article argues that pargana-level officials’ multilingualism and relative autonomy were not an 18th-century aberration but a key feature of Mughal administration, dislodged with difficulty by the British.