5 - A Jagirdar’s Lament

Summary

Sayyid Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i (b. 1727) is best known as the author of the most comprehensive Persian history of eighteenth century India – the Siyar-ul-muta’akhkhirin. This chapter situates Ghulam Husain’s well-known history in the context his much less well-known political career as a late Mughal official and landholder (jagirdar). It argues that this history, sometimes read as a precociously ‘anti-colonial’ text, also constituted a kind of petition of appeal, a form of legal self-representation, designed both to defend Ghulam Husain’s family landholdings (jagirs) in Bihar as a form of hereditary property, and more broadly to persuade the East India Company government to restore the once-great Mughal system of intizam, or proper order, including Mughal practices of responsive and consultative rulership.Ghulam Husain’s history gives a petitioner’s-eye view of the Company state, showing how state-oriented late Mughal elites turned to the Company government after the destruction of the nawabi regime in an effort to secure their rights and status – drawing on the historical memory and documentary record of Mughal practices of legal entitlement.