Indian paper was made by bathing cotton pulp in water, trapping it on bamboo frames to make sheets, then drying them out in the sun. Other processes, like burnishing the paper, dying it or even adding gold flecks (as with item 19), denoted more expensive paper. This collection has papers of various sizes, ranging from very long to rather small. Many are not written on verso. A letter was then enclosed in an envelope (lifāfā) where a prayer that the letter reach its destination was written, along with the recipient’s name and the date and location of its being sent. The name of the sender was indicated on the other side either with a seal impression (in ink or wax) or in writing: ‘fidavī Da′im Bayg’ is written on Item 19.
It is hard to tell whether the brothers themselves wrote the letters or had a scribe write them. Certainly knowing Persian was indicative of being from a higher class background; for those who did not know Persian, scribes were used to render petitions and requests in the appropriate Indo-Persian style, known for its ornate and somewhat circuitous language.
The letters in the Persian collection are typical of late Mughal Indo-Persian correspondence, known for its distinctive style that English commentators dismissed as hyperbolic or excessively ornate. The convention was usually to have the writer self-deprecate while aggrandizing the addressee. Literary flourishes, such as the use of synonyms in conjunction with each other, were common.
There is no punctuation (‘and’ often, but not always, marks a transition between ideas). Its orthographic conventions are typical of written Persian before ‘half spaces’ became commonly used in typewritten Persian in Iran: prefixes like ‘bih’ and ‘mī’ are attached to the words they precede, as are ‘īn’ and ‘ān,’ for example.
Arabic is sometimes used, for example in the formula dām iqbāl-hu (may his shadow be long) after a name such as Ducarel’s, or when expressing that God ensure that a letter reach its destination, as with Item 33.
Non-Persian sounds in Indic and English words are transcribed in much the same way as modern Urdu, for example the retroflex ‘t̤’ in the English word ‘mist̤ar’ or t̤irnī (attorney). The Urdu ‘do chashmi he’ used to denote aspiration in Indic words is not present, being introduced later: ‘bhā’ī’ for example is spelled بہای. Writers seem to favor spelling the terminal letter ‘ye’ as ے rather than ی for Indic words, although orthography of Indic words is not always consistent; the same word (e.g. Debi Singh) may be spelled differently within the same letter.
One challenge of translating the letters is the presence of specialist Mughal Persian vocabulary to do with land and governance. Sometimes we have been unable to figure out exactly what a word indicates (e.g. alā′īqah, which sometimes seems to donate dependents, sometimes land, and sometimes a deed). However, many of the words were definable based on a combination of the the 1874 Glossary of Vernacular Judicial and Revenue Terms and Francis Joseph Steingass’s Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary of 1892.
The letters are in shikastah, a script which evolved out of the nastaliq typically used for Persian manuscripts in India from about the mid-sixteenth century. Initially used in the Ottoman chancery, shikastah was occasionally used for calligraphy but much more frequently was associated with bureaucratic and correspondence contexts. No longer employed, it is now notoriously difficult for readers accustomed to naskh and nastaliq due to its distinctive features. Shikastah is distinguished by its tendency to connect letters that in other Perso-Arabic scripts do not connect to each other. It also employs shorthand or logographs for words or letter clusters which appear frequently in Persian (e.g. ‘rā,’ do, kih). These features simultaneously enabled faster transcription and made the script harder for outsiders to decipher, making it well-suited to administration and correspondence. It is relatively rare for calligraphy or manuscripts to be rendered in shikastah.
Epistolary Persian of this era had a great suspicion of proper names and pronouns for both addressee and writer: writers never use ‘I’ or ‘we’ but rather refer to themselves in the third person as the servant (fidavī); likewise, ‘you’ is avoided at all costs, with Sharaf un-Nisa’s brothers referring to G. G. Ducarel and Sharaf un-Nisa together as ‘those lords’ (‘ān khudā′īgān’). Titles and epithets are often given with names, or preferred over them. The letters use Naib Nizam of Dhaka Reza Khan’s title, Muzaffar Jang (victorious in war), rather than his name. Company administrators also used such titles: Robert Clive and Hastings both had ‘jang’ titles (two of Clive’s suffixes were Saif Jang or Sabit Jang; Hastings had the suffix Jaladat Jang ")1; Ducarel is addressed in the letters as ‘asad jang’ (lion of war).
For less grand personalities, men’s names may be mentioned in the third person with an honorific (usually ‘bahādur ṣāḥib’, ‘brave sir’). However, women’s names are never given: Sharaf un-Nisa is identified as ‘sister ṣāḥibah,’ their mother as ‘mother ṣāḥibah’ (the feminized form of ṣāḥib). Honorifics differed depending on audience: in a letter to Sharaf un-Nisa, Dā′īm Beg refers to his brothers as ṣāḥib-i qiblah, a title used by/for Indian Muslim scholars, and his mother as ṣāḥibah-i qiblah. He also calls them bhā′ī, an Indic word meaning brother; yet when writing to G.G. Ducarel in Item 25 the brothers are ‘barādar-i ʿazīz’, Persian ‘dear brother’.
The collection has several typical examples of late Mughal seals, which usually had the owner’s name or names and a Hijri date (though since owners did not always update their seal every year, this information only really provides a postdate for the letter). Seals were often read bottom to top, but names could appear in any order in the interests of space or to elevate an important word (like Muḥammad) as a gesture of respect.
In the seals we have, part of the title seems to be panāh or shelter, famously used as an honorific for Mughal emperors ‘jahān-panāh’ or ‘ʿālam panāh,’ i.e. ‘shelter of the world’. These titles claim the shelter of light or stars. While ‘panāh’ was part of titles that occasionally denoted a specific occupation (e.g. Shari’at Panah – Refuge of Law) these seem more generic: Dā′īm Beg uses ‘nūr panāh’ (refuge of light).
Several letters include examples of the siyāq numeral system (also known as raqam), which represents numbers as stylized logographs based on the Arabic words for the numbers, rather than using Arabic numerals. A useful guide is here; we also used the table found in Charles Stewart’s 1825 Original Persian letters, and other documents, with fac-similes (plate 7). Originally used for accounting documents in the Ottoman context, the system was used by Indian merchants, landowners and bureaucratic officials. It was particularly favored for documents that laid out their information in tables, like receipts. The strongest example of this is the receipt of the land revenues of the 24 parganas around Calcutta. Within the letters, writers often prefer to write out full amounts n Persian (e.g. ‘yik hazar do etc etc. in one letter and add the Arabic numerals over the written amount. Sometimes amounts, or allusions to amounts, seem to be accompanied by what looks like an oversized tashdid symbol over them.
The letter collection demonstrates the number of different calendar systems in use in late eighteenth-century Bengal. Different calendars had different uses, and a new calendar appearing tended to be added to the existing set rather than displacing any already in use.
The Hijri calendar: the Islamic lunar calendar, which begins with the Prophet’s move to Medina in 622 CE. Online websites convert the dates to Gregorian; we have used this one. The brothers seem to have used hijri dates on their seals.
The Bengali calendar: A solar calendar in use in Bengal, which begins in 593/594 CE. We have used this converter. to find corresponding Gregorian dates. One item seems to indicate Bengali months with logographs but we could not decipher the full date.
The Gregorian calendar: One envelope uses the Gregorian system starting from 0 CE, referring to it as ‘inglīsī’, using a word for ‘English’ more common in Iran than India, which tends to use ‘angrayzi’.
Regnal years: It was common in Mughal times to use the regnal year of different monarchs. One envelopeis partly in Hijri (24th of the month of Safar) but uses regnal year 27 of George III (= 1787 CE).
1:Abdul Majed Khan's The Transition in Bengal, 1756-1775 (Cambridge UP 1969), p. xii-xiii.