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Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate world. Focusing on the karārnāmā or agreement, this paper explores how a repertoire of Marathi and Persian documentary genres, binding formulae, and graphic procedures enabled legal, commercial, and diplomatic transactions in eighteenth-century western India. The exchange of written agreements facilitated interstate relations as well as profit-sharing contractual arrangements between individuals. Despite their centrality to interactions between European and South Asian polities, these instruments met with limited success in establishing rights to property under the legal regime of the East India Company-state and instead acquired new functions in colonial revenue administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kaulnāmā s were ubiquitous in early modern Marathi bureaucratic documentation. They were issued as deeds of assurance offering protection and confirming various rights, especially during warfare or invasion. Such documents were issued at different levels of the administrative hierarchy in the Adilshahi and Maratha administrations to prevent flight from troubled areas, extend cultivation, and encourage commerce. They also recorded grants of waste land to cultivators on graduated rates of taxation, or to merchants for developing market towns. This paper historicizes the kaulnāmā form from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, exploring the kinds of transactions of power, sovereignty and property it was part of. Through this focus on the trajectory of particular documentary forms, it reflects on the nature of the Persianate within Marathi bureaucratic practices, and the history of the Marathi language more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]