“He has no rights here!”— Emotions and Petitions in early modern Bengal.

Abstract

In the late eighteenth century, brothers Govindaram and Krishnachandra Sharma petitioned their caste elder, complaining that a fellow Brahmin had forged a document to usurp their jajmani rights and torment them. Expressing their duḥkha (lament), the Sharma brothers pleaded for an investigation and justice. The Persianate genre of petitions, ʻarẓ was a common form of documentation in early modern South Asia. From the lowest levels of society, petitions could travel upward through the judicial hierarchy, sometimes reaching the Emperor himself. In early modern Bengal, these documents were increasingly used not only to resolve disputes over property and customary rights but also to frame affective pleas in the pursuit of honor. These legal transactions operated within a novel legal imaginaire—a world where paper records gradually adhered to the everyday intersubjective spaces of verbal and non-verbal social communication within the Mughal Empire. But what did it mean for the Sharma brothers to put duḥkha on paper while eliciting justice? While legal historians of premodern South Asia have examined the social histories of law, especially its intersections with locality, caste, and gender, they often depict legal actors as pragmatic manipulators of Mughal law, devoid of affect. Building on scholarship on law and emotions in early modern Europe (Zemon Davis, Smail), my paper interrogates how emotions shaped legal praxis at moments of crisis and conflict in early modern South Asia.