Dust, Ink, and Intrigue: Unlocking the Secrets of a Rajasthan Princely State Collection

Archivist assistant Sweta Dutta gives us a captivating glimpse into one of the Lilly Library’s archival collections!

Imagine holding a piece of paper that a king once touched. On it, in a looping, hurried hand, someone has scrawled a financial request. Beside it, a thumbprint pressed into the margin signs off the mark of someone who could not write but still needed to be heard. Now imagine thousands of such documents, spanning nearly two centuries, whispering in Persian, Marwari, Gujarati—the bureaucratic shorthand of a vanishing world. That is exactly what awaits researchers in the Rajasthan Princely State mss.

The collection spans the mid-1700s to the 1940s, covering the full arc of Rajasthan’s princely states from their Mughal-influenced administrative peak through the upheavals of British colonialism and into the twilight years before Indian independence. The documents are gloriously, stubbornly varied, ranging from petitions, correspondence, ledgers, memos, receipts, and administrative lists, and covering subjects from tax collection and soldiers’ salaries to news dispatches from distant cities. Place names like Jaipur, Karauli, Tonk, Uniara, and Bharatpur anchor the collection geographically, painting a picture of a deeply interconnected network of courts and kingdoms across Rajasthan.

The documents arrive in multiple languages like Persian, Marwari, Urdu, Gujarati and are written in scripts ranging from the slanted, flowing shikaste favored by Persian administrative writers to the Western Nagari variant used in Rajasthani legal and commercial contexts. Many documents are multilingual, with some appearing to be translations of the same content into different scripts, and others blending languages within a single page.

The handwriting in some documents reflects the penmanship of confident, practiced scribes while others betray the tentative strokes of someone only partially literate. Even within a single document, the address and the body are often written by two different hands, a small detail that speaks volumes about how administrative work was divided and delegated in these courts. 

Three different calendars—Vikrami, Gregorian, and Hijri—appear across the collection, a reminder that Rajasthan in this period existed at a crossroads of cosmopolitan empires and distinct traditions. The earliest Gregorian dates appear in the 1810s, well before the formal beginning of the British colonial period in 1858, reflecting the East India Company’s early entanglements with kingdoms like Karauli.

Among the most exciting discoveries in the collection are its bahīs. They are manuscript record books with deep roots in the administrative and social life of Rajasthan and Gujarat. In Gujarat, these books are called vahīs, but local pronunciation in Rajasthan softened the word into bahī. Traditionally, these books served as genealogical records, accounting ledgers, or general registers. Daily rhythms like purchases of household staples were carefully logged and preserved in ink.

The bahīs in this collection do all of this and more. Some are financial and administrative records. Others read like daily logs of kings and their concubines, intimate glimpses into the zenānā, the women’s quarters of royal households. Although women, whether royal or common, are notoriously absent from official historical records, by the 19^th century, the empire’s obsessive bureaucratic snare caught a glimpse of their lives, and they remained etched in the complicated web of documentation. 

One document stands out with particular poignancy: a rare, vivid “First Information Report” (FIR) or deposition from late 19th-century colonial India where the witness is a 15-year-old girl, Nānki. It is a detailed eyewitness account of a homicide where Nānki describes the brutal murder of Kulba, a man she had recently befriended, by two men, Laiq and Kina.

Not all the treasures are somber. The collection contains a rare marriage certificate issued in 1948 by the Walterkrit Hitkarini Sabhā, a colonial reform organization established in Jaipur (1888–1889) by Colonel C.K.M Walter, the British political agent to the governor General of Rajputana. The institution aimed to rein in extravagant marriage and funeral spending among the Rajput ruling class, promote education, and set minimum marriageable ages for girls. That a marriage certificate issued by this reform body survived into this collection is a small miracle— one that sits precisely at the intersection of tradition and colonial-era social engineering, a paper artifact of a society negotiating change. 

And then there are thumbprints! Dozens of petitions in the collection— ṭāvedār kī arzī —bear nisānīs along their margins, thumbprints pressed there by petitioners who could not sign their names, but who still needed to stake their claim, register their presence, make themselves legible to power.

Among the administrative lists, names surface like Kalurāmā, Lachman, Kīsanlāl, Giradhārjī, Chunīlāljī, Pūjārījī. These individuals who would otherwise be entirely lost to history are held now in a collection at a library, waiting to be found. 

Note: Boxes 1-7 of the Rajasthan Princely State mss. are minimally processed. Advance permission is required for access; use the Lilly Library’s contact form to request permission. The remainder of the collection is closed until processing.

About the Author:

Sweta Dutta is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Indiana University, where her research focuses on Islamic literatures in South Asia. Her work centers on manuscript traditions produced by Bengali poets in the premodern period. A native speaker of Bengali and Hindi, she has developed substantial proficiency in Persian, Sanskrit, and Urdu, and brings a particular enthusiasm for translation to her scholarship. When not in close combat with 200-year-old calligraphy, she finds solace in swimming — the one activity where no one can ask her to translate anything.