AbstractDistrict (pargana)-level land revenue administration in late-Mughal south Gujarat was run mostly by Hindu and Jain family firms which operated within a multilingual environment featuring Gujarati and Marathi as well as Persian. Similar arrangements continued under early East India Company control but, by the 1820s, the British had done away with land-revenue family firms and their contextual multilingualism, replacing them with directly-employed village accountants writing only in Gujarati. This article argues that pargana-level officials’ multilingualism and relative autonomy were not an 18th-century aberration but a key feature of Mughal administration, dislodged with difficulty by the British.

中文翻译：

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村庄里的波斯语，或者，Jamiat Rai 账簿的语言

摘要 莫卧儿南部古吉拉特邦的地区（帕尔加纳）级土地税收管理主要由印度教和耆那教家族企业经营，这些企业在以古吉拉特语、马拉地语和波斯语为特色的多语言环境中运营。在早期的东印度公司控制下，类似的安排仍在继续，但到 1820 年代，英国人已经废除了以土地收入为收入的家族企业及其背景多语制，取而代之的是直接雇用的仅用古吉拉特语写作的乡村会计师。本文认为，帕尔加纳级别官员的多语制和相对自主权并不是 18 世纪的失常现象，而是莫卧儿政府的一个关键特征，被英国人艰难地推翻了。