Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss bi-lingual (Persian and Hindi/Bengali/others) legal documents from 17th-19th century India, in order to explore a specific area of language use (legal documentation) and translation practices therein.

Paper long abstract:

A pet hatred of language activists of all hues in mid-19th century India was the "impure" written language(s) of offices and courts, which failed to live up to the literary standards of re-discovered classical literatures, sported notoriously "mixed" vocabularies abounding in administrative Persian, and were written in a variety of scripts and hands that came to be increasingly condemned as illegible and susceptible to various forms of corruption. This paper will look beyond that historical indictment and will examine the material on its own terms. Despite what we know about the adoption of Persian for administrative purposes in late-16th century Mughal India, my recent research on Indo-Persian legal documents from the 17th century onwards (including a variety of deeds, associated administrative orders and records of adjudication) has revealed to me a world of legal documentation rife with bi- and multi-lingualism. This paper will discuss a sample of such documents in which Persian is combined with other South Asian languages (mainly Hindi, but also Bengali and possibly another) commenting on the possible purposes of such language use. It will then move on to considering some features of the much-maligned vocabularies of the languages used in these documents, reflecting on key terms, formulae and concepts considered equivalent and/or complementary in the two relevant languages. This will lead on to some tentative conclusions about the process and agents of legal and linguistic standardization and evolution from early modern to early colonial India.