How to Make Law One’s Own: Poetry, Property, and Vernacular Legal Culture in Early Modern Bengal (c.1650-1800)

Abstract

Drawing upon a multilingual archive of Persian farmāns and parvānas, Bangla legal papers (ārajs, rājīnāmās), Sanskrit Sufi hagiographies, and vernacular narrative poems (maṅgalkābyas), How to Make Law One’s Own reconstructs the emergence of a vernacular legal culture in early modern Bengal, where Islamic law and Mughal imperial authority intersected with preexisting oral-performative legal and literary traditions, generating localized archives of law and expressive literature in entangled contexts. In a region where early modern archives of formal adjudication are limited, and against narratives that depict the Mughal state as merely accommodating Bengal’s plural legal landscape, this dissertation analyzes the positions taken by a range of actors—zamīndārs, poets, shrine custodians, and scribes—who actively appropriated Mughal legal documentary instruments and concepts of Islamic law. My dissertation argues that these managerial elites, through their legal and literary practices, performed intermediary labor in vernacularizing Islamic law and Mughal authority into locally recognized vocabularies of entitlement, property, and justice, producing new texts and vocabularies of rights, property, and authority that reshaped early modern Bengal’s legal, sociopolitical, and literary worlds.