Personal Review of the Pune Daftar, Pune, India

Personal Review of the Pune Daftar, Pune, India.

The archive centers on thousands and thousands of documents of the Maratha state captured when the British took Pune in 1817. Many were from the mansion of the Peshwa, head of the state. A few of these documents date from the seventeenth century, but the vast majority are from the eighteenth century. The geographic coverage centers on Maharashtra, but extensive papers are found wherever the Peshwa collected taxes - Central India, Rajashthan, even into the Ganges valley. Most of these papers are tax collection documents, but there are also many, many letters, treaties, and letters of appointment. During the colonial period, the documents were closed to research and only used in court cases involving land held by the elite families of Maharashtra and various princes. The result was a rather thorough reshuffling of the papers from the administrative categories of the Marathas. In the last hundred years, many papers have been added to the collection; these include original local documents from smaller Maratha administrative centers and some family papers. There is also a great deal of material in English from the colonial period concerned with Maharashtra, especially land disputes and the depositions from several commissions. I have not worked on any of the English language materials.

The Marathi documents are all in a scribal script known as Modi. Very few native readers of Marathi now know Modi well if at all. With a good working knowledge of Devanagri, it should not take more than a month to get to a slow reading of Modi, At the archives, there are no facilities for providing scholars with this training, but I have some old writing books for schoolchildren which I used and would xerox for anyone who wants to go to this archive. To work on the letters and court cases, thorough Marathi is essential, but to work on the tax records (as I have done), much less vocabulary is required and much of it is Persian-based (probably more than 50% now that I think about it). There are some other problems with working on these tax records. Perhaps fifty words were regularly contracted to a single initial letter followed by two vertical lines. I have worked up a dictionary of these words and would happily share it. The papers have been shuffled and now are sorted by "collection" and by place. The indexes are large bound volumes which often give little more than the origin of the papers and a place name. So, probably the best research strategy is to focus on a certain geographic area and be familiar with the place names and geography before arriving at the archives. Otherwise, the place can be overwhelming; there are more than 10,000 large bundles of these Modi documents.

The facilities at the Pune Archives are fair. It is an old stone building (1880 or so) built especially to house the collection. No air conditioning - more like birds flying in and out on a regular basis. Still, there are solid old desks and a scholar is assigned a seat and you can leave papers and documents from one day to the next. You will likely be one of a handful of people working there. I was often alone. There are some useful books on open stacks in the reading room - Wilson's Glossary, Molesworth's Marathi-English dictionary, and a pamphlet describing the holdings.

Hours were relaxed; things started about 10:30 am and by 3:30pm everyone was ready to call it a day. I found the staff quite helpful in bringing bundles. They usually showed up in about 20 minutes, except if I happened to make a request close to the beginning of tea break or lunch. It helped a lot that I bought tea for the whole staff once every couple of weeks. It was money well spent. Being a government archives, the place closed for any and all holidays. There are no restrictions on using pen. The documents vary greatly in condition. Many are intact and perfectly readable; others have been eaten by insects and are unusable. The paper is good and the carbon ink remains unfaded even after 200 years. As the older generation who knew Modi has died off, I think it unlikely that you will find a research assistant or even a copyist. There are no photocopying facilities, though they did not object to my photographing documents. On the whole, it was more efficient to extract data there than to copy for later use.

The extraordinarily rich detail of the daily life portrayed in these documents - down to individual fields and crops - is the attraction of the archive for social and economic historians. There are difficulties, but I would encourage others to try it.