Meaning “red seal,” the term al-tamgha as a descriptor within the lexicon of Islamicate revenue practice dates back to at least the twelfth century. In the subcontinent, the granting of ʿinām-i altamgha first became evident during Jahangir’s time and grew more common during the subsequent reign of Shahjahan (1628-1658). Generally used for the purposes of conveying rights to agrarian surplus to imperial subordinates alongside full or partial exemption from revenue payments back to the central treasury, from the distance of colonial-era retrospection altamgha grants increasingly came to be seen as descending hereditarily within the assignee’s family lineage and thus being subject to escheat only when there was no heir to speak of. (They were generally “null and void” already in 1793 by Regulation XXXVII of the Bengal Code.” )
Notwithstanding the reasons there may be for uncertainty around the exact origin or prevalence of al-tamgha grants, such conveyances were put front and centre early on in Madras when the Supreme Court of the Presidency clashed with Munro over the alienation of a jāgīr worth 64 thousand chakrams to one Muhammad Assim Khan, the diwān of Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, the Nawab of Arcot and ally of the Company. The grant initially having been made in 1783, it was confirmed in July 1789 by deed, with all requisite proclamations about its hereditability and divisibility among Assim Khan’s descendants. However, soon after the nawab Ali Khan Wallajah’s death in 1795, the Company moved to “resume” the nawab’s grant to his diwān, the first of several further rounds of reversal and re-reversal of its stance over the next several years. Two years later – after the Company’s initial attempt at resumption – in 1797 it reinstated the grant. However, shortly thereafter, upon further consolidating control over much of the Carnatic peninsula, it opted to attempt resumption a second time, now citing the need “for investigation on a change of Government, according to the usage of the country on such occasions” as justification.
Yet the drama did not end here. With the second attempt at resumption still pending, in 1801 Assim Khan died, and though the diwān’s will made no mention of the grant, before Ali Khan Wallajah’s own earlier death in 1795, Assim Khan had made a written request to the Company officials seeking assurance that his gift would remain intact. By official Minute dated May 1802, his request for assurance was seemingly accepted, with the Company affirming its previous resolutions favouring the restoration of all home country (waṭan) jāgīrs.
As a result, after Assim Khan’s death in 1801 the Company again reinstated the ʿinām, with all associated revenues from the territories of the underlying jāgīr – save for certain customs and other fees connected to the mineral estate – redirected toward the diwān’s eldest son, Kalam-ullah.
With the lion’s share of the remaining estate also passing to Kalam-ullah by the terms of his father’s will, Assim Khan’s other sons immediately moved to have the will set aside, arguing that their father was mentally incompetent at the time of its making. While at this first stage of suit, the will withstood challenge, Kalam-ullah’s brothers did prove victorious in establishing that Assim Khan’s personal property was to be apportioned according to the shares specified under Islamic fiqh-based formulas for inheritance. Emboldened, the brothers then pressed on, further bringing suit against Kalam-ullah and the Company jointly. In the second round of litigation,n the aim was to compel an accounting of the jāgīr’s revenues and to demand their re-apportionment among all of Assim Khan’s children, here again on the basis of fiqh-based inheritance shares.
Over the Company’s objection, the Supreme Court declared it a “directly interested” party in the suit and again handed victory to Kalam-ullah’s brothers. The Court’s sweeping opinion built on the key claim that Assim Khan’s original ʿinām constituted a form of ‘property.’ Consequently, the Court reasoned, not only should the grant have never been resumed in the first place but when the Company reversed that decision, as property, it should have descended according to the same natives ‘laws’ of Islamic inheritance that governed the distribution of Assim Khan’s larger estate. In keeping with this logic, the Supreme Court appointed the collector for the district in which the lands funding the jāgīr were situated to function as the interim receiver for the associated revenues.
Under this arrangement, the money deriving from the produce of the jāgīr lands was to be re-apportioned among each of the late diwān’s children according to their appropriate fiqh-based share, rather than alone to Kalam-ullah, who, in any case, had by then effectively abandoned his role as manager of the jāgīr, leaving mounting arrears in his wake. While the Madras government “acceded” to the course of action the Court ordered – “for no other reason but that of its being the only one by which discussion with the Supreme Court could be obviated” – for his own part, Munro could not let “so extraordinary a decision pass without” comment.
It was thus in response that in February 1822 he authored his lengthy “Minute on Altamgha Inams,” offering a wide-ranging critique of the Supreme Court’s decision, which he saw as a threat to the foundation of the Company’s administrative order. While Munro’s objection was partly due to the feeling that the Supreme Court had encroached on the domain of politics by converting a matter of “State policy” into a “question…of private right between two brothers,” his more fundamental concern lay elsewhere – with the very idea that the ʿinām should be counted a form of property. Accordingly, Munro highlighted the Court’s sequence of assertions about the non-resumable nature of the grant and its attendant suggestion that the jāgīr was held as an inviolable legal right. Similarly alarming to Munro was the fact that in order to reach this conclusion the Court seemed to be claiming that the origins of such a property right extended all the way back to the parvāna through which the Nawab Ali Khan Wallajah initially issued the ʿinām to Assim Khan in 1789.
According to Munro, the Court simply lacked the authority to negate the government’s resumption of a grant that constituted only a non-propertied entitlement. To support his position, he summoned the by-then-familiar distinction between property (in land’s rent) and a mere claim to public revenue. However, in contrast to those who advanced such a distinction in the context of the debate on revenue settlement in Bengal, Munro’s principal aim was not so much to categorically deny the status of property to the state’s claim on perfectly fungible rental value. Instead, his main aim was to deny such status to those forms of private entitlement to the monetizable value of land’s produce that could not be given substantive definition primarily as duties of the type the Company was really concerned with rendering administrable.
Excerpted with permission from South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought: Toward a Historical Ontology of the Law, Faisal Chaudhry, Oxford University Press.
