A New Language of Rule: Alwar’s Administrative Experiment, c. 1838-58

This is the author accepted manuscript.Although treaties with the East India Company often guaranteed autonomy in the internal affairs of Princely States to the states’ rulers, in practice, many rulers of princely states undertook extensive administrative reforms in dialogue with colonial notions of rule. In one such case, the ruler of Alwar, Banni Singh, recruited Aminullah Khan, a former record keeper in Delhi’s colonial courts, to serve as diwan (chief minister) and undertake significant administrative reforms in 1838. These reforms focused on agrarian taxation, the civil courts, and military and included changes to record-keeping and the language of governance encoded in seven volumes of regulations. Through a study of these regulations, this article situates the reforms of Alwar’s administration within Banni Singh’s broader self-fashioning as a modern ruler in a Mughal mode and shows how the reforms drew on both Mughal and colonial ideas of statecraft. The regulations represented a shift towards a legalistic conception of that state as seen in the ideals of good governance they espoused, and they drew villagers and low-level officials into a contractual relationship with the central state through the extensive bureaucratic procedures they encodedEuropean Research Council (ERC)Lawforms projec