Definition
A court of justice in British India. The term is a corrupted anglicization of the Arabic-derived word *adalat*, meaning justice or equity, and was used in the administrative and legal vocabulary of colonial British India to designate formal judicial tribunals. The two principal forms encountered in historical sources are:
1. Dewanny Adawlut — the civil court of justice, having jurisdiction over property, contract, and related civil matters.
2. Foujdarry Adawlut — the criminal court of justice, having jurisdiction over criminal offenses.
The term does not describe a single unified court but rather a class of courts operating under the colonial administrative structure. Its usage is essentially confined to the period of East India Company governance and early British Crown administration of India.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A court of justice.
Historical common usage: Not recorded in Webster's 1913.
The Wiktionary definition is accurate but stripped of all context. In practice, *adawlut* was never a generic English word for any court of justice — it was a term of art specific to the colonial Indian judicial system. A researcher encountering it in a general English source should not assume it applies beyond that context.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Dewanny Adawlut: The civil division. Dewanny (also spelled Diwani) derives from the Persian term for civil revenue administration. These courts handled disputes over land, inheritance, debt, and commerce among the civilian population.
Foujdarry Adawlut: The criminal division. Foujdarry (also spelled Faujdari) derives from a term relating to military or police authority. These courts exercised criminal jurisdiction, including over serious offenses.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational marker, not a living legal concept. Researchers will encounter *adawlut* almost exclusively in two contexts: (1) historical legal materials concerning British colonial administration of India, particularly from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and (2) treatises and legal dictionaries of that era that catalogued Anglo-Indian administrative vocabulary.
The key trap is assuming that sources using *adawlut* follow consistent spelling. Colonial-era documents anglicized Indian administrative terms erratically. Variant spellings — *adalat*, *adaulat*, *adawlet*, *adawlut* — appear interchangeably across different authors, publishers, and time periods. A corpus search on any single spelling will miss a significant portion of the relevant material. Researchers should run searches on the root *adalat* and its major variants simultaneously.
The civil/criminal distinction encoded in the Dewanny/Foujdarry prefixes matters for understanding jurisdiction in historical disputes. A case involving land revenue would appear in Dewanny records; a criminal prosecution would appear in Foujdarry records. Conflating the two when tracing a historical proceeding will send the researcher to the wrong court records entirely.
The term also marks a specific institutional period. After the Indian High Courts Act 1861, the Company-era court structure was substantially reorganized, and the terminology shifted. *Adawlut* as an active institutional label belongs primarily to the pre-1861 period, though it may appear in later sources as a historical reference.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary reproduce identical text, crediting Wharton (Francis Wharton's *Law Lexicon*, a standard Anglo-American reference of the nineteenth century) as the source. This consistency across editions suggests the term was carried forward without independent updating — Black's is transmitting Wharton, not independently researching Indian court practice.
Neither edition contextualizes the term beyond the bare identification of civil and criminal courts, and neither flags the spelling instability or the post-1861 institutional reorganization. Historical dictionaries treat this as a stable, if exotic, vocabulary item. They do not signal that the courts themselves evolved significantly over the colonial period, nor that the Dewanny and Foujdarry systems had complex relationships with Mughal administrative precedents on one side and English common law influence on the other.
Researchers relying solely on Black's will have a starting point but should not treat it as a complete account of how these courts functioned.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no application in any current jurisdiction. It is historically specific to British colonial India and should be treated as a term of legal history rather than operative law. Modern Indian legal terminology does not use *adawlut* as an institutional designation.