This chapter focuses on the change in the law known as the equity of redemption, which took form in the late seventeenth century, and made the title to mortgaged land more secure through the provision that rents could be sequestered to pay off a loan after the due date, to avoid the title to the property reverting to the lender. This legal change led to a rapid expansion of mortgaging and associated conveyancing. It also demonstrates how interest-bearing loans, based on the security of property, became a source of both income and, more importantly, stable abstract value that could be used to increase the money supply by underpinning the creation of local notes and bills. Mortgage income could also smooth credit flows by providing capital when outgoings were greater than incomings. In the past this would have triggered the need to litigate to increase income, but now money could be borrowed. This chapter will also examine savings held in the form of bonds.

This chapter deals with documents recording a variety of inter-personal dealings that reveal that transactional ambit of the protagonists, including sale and purchase, loans, gifts, and payment of blood-money. Structured as recognizably pan-Islamic documentary forms and sealed by the Islamic judge (qazi), these documents offer an opportunity for learning further details about the social life of the protagonists, especially the women among them, and their relations with their social equals or subordinates. This leads to a discussion about the percolation of Islamic legal forms and procedures in this pre-dominantly non-Muslim context. The documents in the collection are connected to models provided by Persian-language formularies known as munshats, showing how standardization amd popularization of legal forms may have been achieved through such non-religious manuals that formed training materials for Indo-Persian scribes, or munshis.