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A COLLECTION OF SANADS OF MOGHUL EMPERORS.
473
and Shahjahanpûr, belonging to the pargana of Batala, or Padishahpor alias Kalankhurdpûr, belonging to Patihaibatpar, or with localities in Batala as the masjid-i-jámi'-i kalán the large jami-mosque' and the mahalla-i qazi Isma'a Muhammad
the quarter of judge Ism'ail Muhammad.' The sanads were written under the rule of the Emperors Babar, Jahangir, Shabjabån, Aurangzêb, Shah 'Alam, Farrukh Biyar, Muhammad Shah, Ahmad Shah, and Timûr Shah.
Among all the names of the persons on whom lands were conferred through these papers only a very few belong to important men. They are almost all small people, mostly women who scarcely would be found in the chronicles, not even the Shaikhs and Qazis that sometimes appear. No assignation of grounds to one person reaches a hundred big'has, an allowance that Badauni (vol. III, p. 205) states as too mean for a learned man, and in most cases the grants vary between 10 and 12 big'has or something more, except rare grants of 40, 60 or 70 to Shaikhs, or once to a wife of such a pious man. The big'ha is defined as a jarib-i shastgazi, i.e. 60 gaz long and by 60 broad;" if fractions of big'has occur we find bistoas, but no bisránsas. It was not customary, as appears from these sanads generally to execute a separate document for every single little allotment, but to take together several persons in one party. Sometimes an order extends even to several parties, the amounts of the property of individuals pot being specified in the text. But the statements, in question are given on the back, written in siyáqat-characters. Also, the individual members of each party are not enumerated in the text, but only one as a representative followed by the words wa ghairuhu, wa ghairuhá, or seldom wa jama'atuhu, with or without the added shuraka-i (for men and women), viz., sharikahá.i farmán. A farmán, e.g., generally concerns musammát Mauland Khatib wa ghairuhu, and after wards we learn that these others were Maulana Hamid, Maulana Ahmad, and Maulana Ya'qub; or it is about musammát Daulat Khátún wa ghairuhd, and on the back we find the other names Rahmat Khâtan, Bîbi Aima, Bibi Fatima, and Maryam Khatan, all written without diacritrical points and in very cursive characters, the representative person pointed at only by a mushár ilaihi. A farman of a first grant of lands naturally always prescribes the measurement and boundaries (paimtdan u chak bastan) of the new territory, & superfluous business if the grounds were already in the possession of somebody and if therefore the matter was only a re-investment. In this case in the beginning the date of the first grant is always mentioned. We seldom read that the donations took place at different times (batawárikh sanin-i mukhtalifa).
For a rent-free fee the Chagatai word saydrghál is only once used, diz., in the oldest sanad of Babar's time, and the Arabic aima seldom oocurs ; generally the Arabic-Persian madad-i-ma'ásh is used. If an owner has died it can be transferred to his heir, and so we find grounds that have been for some centuries in the possession of the same family. Likewise the heir succeeds to the testator in case of the latter undertaking at an advanced age the pilgrimage to Makka and Madina. Once the grant is renewed because one of two parties has died, the other being alive. In the new farmán therefore the dead person is replaced by his heirs and the lands are granted anew to those and the old surviving possessors, quite on the former conditions. A sanad of Shahjahan's reigo mentions
cr. Col. H. 8. Jarrett's note in hin translation of the 1x-i-Akbari, vol. II, p. 61, and the 10th chapter, p. 62. W learn from Baddunt (vol. II, p. 206) that the wary of a commander of twenty, lowest rank of an officer in the Moghul army, wm equivalent to the revenues of thousand big'has.
SP
