ARTICLE XX.-A Farmdn of Emperor Jehangir Inf Avour of Two Par Sees

ARTICLE XX.-A Farmdn of Emperor Jehangir infavour of two Parsees of the Dordi family of Naosari, with other cognate Documents of the M ogu.l times. BY SHAM~UL-ULM:A Da. JIVAN"JI .J.\MSHEDJI MODI. Read 22nd March 1920, I. INTRODUGrlON. I had the pleasure of placing for inspection before this Bo. ciety two Persian farmt1ns of Emperor Akbar, when I ~ before it, on 16th December 1901, my paper on ''The Pa.rsees at the Court of Akbar and Dastur Meherji Rana."1 I beg to submit to-day for inspectiOn another farmc1n, given by Akbar's son .Jehii.ngir in 1618 to two Parsis, Mulla JB.miisp and Mulla Hoshang of Naosari. One of these two, Mull&. JamB.sp was an ancestor -ninth in ascent-of the late Mr. Dadabhai Nowroji. Like the two farmans of Akbar, this farman also illustrates some of the Ayina or institutes of the Mogul times on the subject of jdgira, land revenue, &c., described by Abul Fazl, the Sir William Hunter of Akbar's Court, in hie .Ayin-i-Akbari, the Imperial Gazetteer of the times. My first paper seems to have drawn the attention of some scholars in Europe, among whom I was glad to find persons like the la.t.e l\fr. Vincent Smith1, Mr. Bev eridge3, Mr. Irvine, all of the distinguished Civil Service of India, and M. Bonet Maury of France. 4 It were the seals of Akbe.r given in the photo litho fac-simile in the appendix of the paper, that drew the special attention of the late Mr. Irvine in 1909. He wrote to me, asking for good photographs of such I Jolll'D&l B. B. &. A. 8. Vol. XXI, 611·24f>. 1 In b1a. "A.llbar, tbe Great Moirul," Kr. v. Slllltb •rau of my paper, a• "the neellent and convincing treat11e, and of the /anrt4n1 an other documentl publlehed therein, aa " prevtoualy anpubllabed docu1Dent1 la both test and tramlat.lon " (p. 186 n). Ia bid bibliography, be umea the paper a1 oae" deserving 1eparate 1Deatlon u belDs " !ally docut0ented dl~wialon of th~ relat.lon1 of Akbar with the Paneea" (p. 478). • In bis article on Akbar In the Encyclopll!dla of Relilllon and Etble1 (Vol. I p. 278), ~r. Beveridge refera hi• readero to IDY above article In our Journal for coaaultat.lon. • In his pllper, f'ntltled " Le R~llglon d' Akbar dana 1e1 rapportl avec l'hlallll8ir et le ParalslD," read before the International Congreea of the History of B.elltllom at Basal In 1904, Mon. Boae~ Maury tbu refen to tbl1 paper: "Mon. Modi a d1t0ontr1 a l'alde de Jl""4m de la cbancellerle d' Akbar, de cbantl populalret et d' une aoU. d'Anq1ldll du Perron qae ce furent de1 Paneea de Gujarat et 0011 pas ceuJ: reat6e1 ea Pene, qui faftnt •a rapport avec le grand MOIJU) (Verbaadlangen de1 II Internatlonalen Ko~ far A111e111&lne Rell1Pona11e1cblcbte In Ba1&l, 30 Aqmt bit!! Sept. 190!'>. p. 294.) A FARM!N OF EMPEROR JEHANGIB. seals on other documents of the Mogul Emperorn. I am glad that I attended to Mr. Irvine's request. Not only did I send him large photographs of the seals of Akbar's two Jarmans, but I also sent him with my letter of 18th Feb. ruary 1910, a photo of the seal of Jehangir's Jarman which forms the subject of my present paper. At my request, the owner of the Jarman the late Mr. Byramji Khur~he<lji Dordi of Naoeari, got the whole Jarman photographed and then photo·lithoed. I am glad that I got that done, because, had the photo not been taken at the · time, much of the heip in now deciphering the Jarman would have been lost. I present for inspection the photo-litho, as taken about IO years ago for Mr. Irvine, and the photo as taken recently about a year ago, at the instance of Dr. Jehangir Byramji Dordi, F.R.C.S., the youngest son of the late owner of the Jarman. I am very sorry to find, that a very sad mistake has been commit ted, in getting the Jarmdn patehed up and stuck on the two sides of a glass plate as you see it before you. Good many words have been lost in the work of patching which has· been done canleuly. My above paper bas been referred to in a judgment in a cue of some importance to the Parsec community, wherein I had to give evidence. One of the presiding judges, the Hon'ble Mr. (now Sir) Justice Beaman, therein animadverted a good deal on the paper. When the appreciation of the above learn ed scholars, who bad read my paper carefully and leisurely, has given me some pleasure, I beg to admit, that the criticism of the Hon'ble Judge, the result of his ha.sty and careless reading, has given me some pain. A literary man has no right to com plain against a.ny fair criticism of his views, but he bas every ngbt to complain against the language in which that criticism is couched, and more especially when the position of the critic at the time of his criticism places the victim of his criticism in a position whence be cannot reply. As the paper in ques tion was read from the platform of this learned Society, I humbly beg to take this opportunity, when I read a paper on another Jarmdn, similar to that referred to in the previous paper, to protest against the language of that criticism, wherein motives were sought to be attributed when none existf'd. Had the cri ticism been made out of the Court, I knew how best to reply to it. But, I had to be silent. Even now, I do not want to enter into any details of the criticism ; I think, that if the learned judge would read the wholf' of my paper carefully without any prejudice, and especially what led me to write it, I think, he would revise his criticism or at lf'l\st its 11\ngul\gc. •21 The point of diAputc thm Wl\A not. at all of covrrsion. hut waA. as to w)lo in6uencc<l. Abkar in hi::1 new eclectic religion. The point of dispute was not, ru:i t.lw judge erroneously thought,- 1md thhi Rerves as an instance of hill very hasty superficial reading-whether the Naosari Parsees influenced Akbar or the Bombay Pa.rsecR, but whethC'r the Naosari Parsees influenced him or tho ParsC'l's of PPrsia. Bombay had not then even passed into the hands of the British and its Parsee population then, if any, may not haVl' bcl'n even a dozen. Then, the next question of dispute waA this :-Among the Christians, who are said to have influencecl Akbar in his Ila.hi or Divine Faith, there were fathers like Rodolph Aquaviva, Antony l\lonserrat, and Francis Herric. Among the Jains who influenced him were gurus like Hirvijaya Suri, Vijyasena Suri and Bhamuchandra Upl1dhaya. AmClng the Hindus, there wa!'i a large number who often attendC'd his Court. Now, as to the Parsl'es, the point of dispute was, whether it was Dastur Meherji Rana of Ne.osari or Dastur Ardeshir of Persia. I said, it was Meherji Rana., and out of about 177 pages of my paper, about 85, i.e., nearly half, have been devoted to the presentation of two far mdns and other documenb1. Again, as I have hinted in the paper, I had undertaken the Rtudy of the paper at the instance of a frirnd in FranC'c. In spit!.' of all these facts, the judge said : Mr. Modi '· writes an elaborate treatise, or one might say almost a book, to prove that the priests of Naosari are fairly entitled to the credit of having converted the emperor Akbar." Now, there is not a. sigle sentence in the whole of my paper, wherein I have Mtatcd, that I believed that Akbar was converted to Zoroastrianism. On the othrr hand, what I clearly stated was, that, as )Jc put on the visiblo symbols of the religions of the Christians and Hindus, eithn out of temporary real affection for those religions, or only out of dissimulation, or for the sake of curiosity, he may have put on, even for a short time, the visible signs of Parseeism. If any sure and certain proof of what I say is wanwd, it iR supplied by the report of the experts' committee ref prrcd to in the case and which was framed by me after the p11pcr waH read. There, Akbar's case has not at all lwf'n mPntioned as a case of conversion. Had I taken it to he a cas(' of con version, I would ha,·e mentioned it in my report. I beg to repeat, that I do not like to protest so much against the criticism as against its-I maybe pardoned to say undignified and improper language, imputing motives to my paper, written long before the case, when I bad no idea, that any particular communal quei:ition of the kirid would crop up. 2 ~ * 422 A FARMAN 01" EMPEROR ,Jli:HAN!ltR. Now, coming to th~ subject of the paper, I propose to deal besides the farmdn itself, which forms the principal part of my sobject, with tho following documents which relate to the land, whole or in part, given to the two Parsis by Emperor Jehangir. I. A chak-namek, referring to the whole of the land.

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