Title
During the effective rule of the Mughal empire, the dewan served as the chief revenue officer of a province.
Later, when most vassal states gained various degrees of self-determination, the finance — and/or chief minister and leader of many princely states (especially Muslim, but also many Hindu, including Baroda, Hyderabad, kot Fateh khan state, Mysore, Kochi, Travancore — referred as Dalawa until 1811) became known as a dewan.
Exceptionally, a ruler was himself titled Dewan or Nawab notably
- in Jaso (Jassu) and in Bandhora (which was split from it circa 1750)
- in Khilchipur till 1873, then Rai Bahadur
- in Attock, where Gheba Khan, having married the foster sister of Mughal Emperor Akbar and was granted the hereditary title of Diwan in 1551 for his services in command of the force that took Attock from the Afghans, till the dynasty was promoted in 1910 to the rank of Nawab, with the full style Zubdat ul-Mulk Diwan Mahakhan, Sardar ul-Mulk and latter Nawab of kot
- in Junagadh, where Shah Nawaz Bhutto was the prime-minister of the former princley state.
Nowadays, the title is used amongst certain upper-middle-class families in the South Asia; several landlords in villages and provinces across the subcontinent have names prefixed with this title. The title, in its variant form "Dewan", is especially common amongst Muslim land-owners in Bengal and the Punjab.
Read more about this topic: Dewan
Famous quotes containing the word title:
“That title of respect
Which the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)
“A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)