This talk will take a close look at a multi-generational legal dispute within a Mughal zamindari family that raged from the late seventeenth into the early eighteenth century. As regimes fell and rose, members of this landed family fumed at each other, and tried to use legal courts as well as other paraphernalia of the state to say who they were, and what was due to them, but not others. Framed around religious identity and rights of inheritance, the documents related to this dispute open up a world of religious, class and kinship boundaries, but also one of slippages, subversions and possibly even love. While tracing the stories of the men, and at least one woman, who left traces of their lives in scrappy Persian documents that once formed part of a household archive, the paper will comment on Islamic and Mughal law, archiving in South Asia, and the importance of family history.

Nandini is a historian of South Asia with expertise in the early modern (Mughal) and colonial (British-dominated) periods. My work is on the everyday practices of law under empires, and I am particularly interested in functional uses of language, especially languages written in Arabic-derived scripts, such as Persian and Urdu. I am committed to public history and am engaged with research and reinterpretation of colonial heritage in Britain, especially through digital media.