Profiling a City through Regional Sources: A Study of the Khatapatras (sale deeds) of Medieval Ahmadabad

Traditionally, urban studies related to medieval Indian cities have relied heavily on Persian sources wherein features, now identified as ‘urban’ were taken for granted. Therefore such urban studies remained inadequate in its analysis of the urban dynamics of medieval Indian cities. It is only in the last four or five decades that urban historians have attempted to go beyond and use a combination of Persian, European (including both official documents and travelogues) and regional sources to bring out the dynamics of the processes of urbanisation in medieval Indian cities. Ahmadabad was one of the leading metropolitan cities of Mughal India. Apart from being a manufacturing center of enormous proportions, it was also the provincial headquarter of Gujarat province (subah) of the Mughals. This added to the multi-functionality of the city and also accounted for its survival in the midst of 18thcentury political crisis. The economic buoyancy of the city in the 17th century has been highlighted in several contemporary sources. The Khatapatras (sale deeds), dealing with sale-purchase of houses, shops and land in the streets and suburbs of Ahmadabad pertaining to the period 16th -18th centuries, provides us important information related to political, social and economic condition of the city and its suburbs. Based on an analysis of some of these khatapatras (published and unpublished), the present study is an attempt to sketch the political, social, economic and cultural profile of the city during the 17th and 18th centuries.