Imperial Orders: Farman, Parwana, and Sanad in Mughal Administration
The Mughal empire produced a vast and well-organized body of written orders, and the system of imperial correspondence was of the early modern world. The orders were the formal means by which the emperor’s will was communicated to the officers of the empire, and the careful distinction between the different types of order, the farman, the parwana, the sanad, and the hukm, was a central feature of Mughal administrative practice. The present page treats the types of imperial orders, the language in which they were composed, the format and the tughra, the seals used to authenticate them, the distribution system, the relationship with subordinate officials, and the symbolic significance of the documents. The broader administrative framework is surveyed in the Mughal administration overview, and the office responsible for the writing of the orders is examined in the Mughal bureaucracy page.
The Types of Imperial Orders
The Mughal state produced four principal types of written order, distinguished by their content, their issuer, and the formality of their preparation. The farman was the highest form, a direct order of the emperor to a high official, a province, or a body of officials. The farman was written on paper or, in the most formal cases, on cloth or silk, and was sealed with the imperial seal and authenticated by the tughra or calligraphic flourish of the chief secretary. The farman was used for the most important decisions: appointments to high office, grants of revenue, declarations of policy, sentences in capital cases, and orders to provincial governors on matters of major consequence.
The parwana was a subordinate order, issued by a high official, generally the diwan or the mir bakhshi, in the name of the emperor and conveying the emperor’s instructions to a lower officer. The parwana was written on paper, sealed with the seal of the issuing officer, and conveyed the substance of the emperor’s decision in a more detailed and procedural form than the farman. The parwana was the working instrument of the imperial administration, and the great majority of the orders that travelled the dak chowki were parwanas rather than firmans.
The sanad was a certificate of appointment, a confirmation of rank, a grant of revenue, or a similar formal document. The sanad was issued under the imperial seal and signed by the mir saman or the mir bakhshi and was used to convey the formal title, the rank, the jagir assignment, or the grant of revenue to the recipient. The sanad was the document on which the mansabdar’s commission rested, and the loss of a sanad was a serious matter requiring re-issue.
The hukm was a more informal instruction, generally a short written order issued in routine circumstances, frequently by the emperor personally and conveyed by a qasid or messenger. The hukm was used for the day-to-day business of the palace, the garden, the hunt, the kitchen, and the household, and the great majority of the surviving hukms are household orders.
The Language: Persian
The language of all Mughal imperial orders was Persian, the official language of the court, the bureaucracy, and the higher culture of the empire. Persian had been the official language of the Delhi Sultanate and of the Timurid and Turko-Afghan empires that preceded the Mughals, and the Mughals, as self-conscious heirs of Timur, made Persian the working language of the state. The Ain-i-Akbari of Abu’l Fazl, the principal text of Mughal administration, is written in a highly developed Persian prose.
The use of Persian was not, however, exclusive. The Mughal state issued orders in Sanskrit, in the various regional languages, and in Arabic in certain contexts, and the parwanas issued to the village officers were frequently written in the local language with a Persian preamble, and the qanungo’s records were often kept in the local language alongside the Persian register. The farman itself, however, was invariably in Persian, and the use of Persian was one of the markers of the imperial reach.
The Format and the Tughra
The format of the farman was elaborate. The document was generally written on paper, the more important documents on cloth or silk, and the text was arranged in a series of formulae: the bismillah or invocation, the tughra or calligraphic flourish of the chief secretary, the address to the recipient, the recital of titles of the emperor, the substance of the order, the date, and the seal. The tughra was the principal visual marker of the document, and the tughra of the Mughal chief secretary, the mir saman, was a stylized calligraphic signature that was reproduced on every farman of consequence.
The recital of titles of the emperor was a substantial literary form in itself. The Mughal emperor was addressed by a chain of honorifics, drawn from the Timurid, Sasanian, and Islamic traditions, and the recital could extend over several lines. The titles of Akbar, for example, included Shahanshah, the king of kings, Khalifa of the age, Zill-i-Allah or shadow of God, Sultan of the lands, and many more.
The Seals
The seals used to authenticate Mughal imperial orders formed a graded hierarchy corresponding to the grade of the document. At the top was the imperial seal, the muhr-i-humayun, used on the farman and the most important sanads. The imperial seal was a substantial disc, generally of gold or silver, engraved with the name and titles of the emperor in Arabic or Persian script, and was affixed to the document in a lump of wax. The imperial seal was in the custody of the mir saman, and the impression of the seal was a critical moment in the production of the document.
Below the imperial seal in the hierarchy were the seals of the great officers. The seal of the wazir was affixed to the parwana issued in the name of the diwan, the seal of the mir bakhshi to the parwana issued in the name of the military administration, the seal of the sadr-us-sudur to the parwana issued in the name of the religious administration, and the seal of the qazi-ul-quzat to the parwana issued in the name of the judicial system. The seals of the subordinate officers, the faujdar, the kotwal, the qazi, the amil, and the qanungo, were used on the routine orders of the local administration. The falsification of a seal was a serious criminal offence.
The Distribution System
The orders were distributed by the dak chowki or imperial postal system, the chain of post-houses and runners treated in the Mughal bureaucracy page. The farman or parwana was prepared in the daftar-i-insha or secretariat in the palace, sealed and authenticated, and then entrusted to a qasid or runner for transmission. The transmission was carried out with speed and ceremony: the courier was accompanied, in the case of the most important firmans, by a small escort, and the dak chowki runners carried the document from one post-house to the next, day and night, until it reached the recipient.
The recipient of the farman or parwana was required to acknowledge receipt, generally by sending a written acknowledgment, the arzi or petition of thanks, back to the issuer. The acknowledgment was preserved in the kitab khana or central archive, and the cycle of farman and arzi constituted the formal documentary record of the imperial will.
The Symbolic Significance
The imperial orders were not merely administrative instruments. They were symbols of the imperial authority, and the farman in particular was treated as a quasi-sacred document. The text of the farman was recited in the durbar on certain occasions, the farman was preserved in the kitab khana as a permanent record, and the farman of a deceased emperor was revered as a relic. The farman of Akbar granting the mansabdari rank to a Hindu noble, the farman of Jahangir granting a privilege to a Christian mission, the farman of Shah Jahan confirming a revenue grant, the farman of Aurangzeb ordering a campaign, all carried an authority that went beyond their practical content.
The British, when they took over the administration of India, treated the farman as the formal document of state and continued to issue orders in the same form, in Persian, for several decades, and the ceremonial of the farman survived in the Mughal successor states and in the British Indian courts well into the nineteenth century.
Sources
- S.A. Khan, The Khalisa Land and the Crown Servants under Akbar (1980).
- I.H. Qureshi, The Administration of the Mughal Empire (1966), on firmans and parwanahs.