Paper, Performance, and the State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India By Farhat Hasan.

Hasan reads the poems as a 'picture of an inept state, one in which the king and his officials are reckless and indifferent and there is a total breakdown of law and order' (p. 75). Hasan notes that although two witnesses were required for property deeds, documents often bear a much larger, and quite heterogeneous, list of witnesses. [Extracted from the article]