LAUSR

Abstract This article uses a 1741 testimonial document from Kol (present-day Aligarh) to explore the workings of petitions in the local politics of the late Mughal empire. I suggest that even solitary documents such as this can be read as artefacts of the continuing processes of local politics which operated in excess of the administrative logic of the Mughal state. After surveying the place of petitions in the Mughal apparatus of justice from an administrative perspective, I examine the story of a vanished artisan named Hira to demonstrate that even scattered documents from the Mughal archive can reveal traces of the larger political processes of which a petition might be a single example. In this light, I demonstrate how the testimonial at hand can illuminate the everyday workings of the social and political order of the locality, and its relationship with larger structures of ideology and state power in an era of political decentralization.