Definition
In Hindu law, a treasury or storehouse. The term refers to a depository of goods or funds, used in the administrative and legal context of the Indian subcontinent, particularly under the frameworks of Hindu legal tradition and, later, British colonial governance in India.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in materials touching on Anglo-Indian law — the body of doctrine developed by British colonial courts as they engaged with preexisting Hindu and Mughal legal institutions. Terms like malconna appear in revenue administration records, estate and property proceedings, and colonial-era judicial opinions from Indian tribunals, rather than in the mainstream common law tradition. A researcher working in 19th-century British-Indian legal materials should treat malconna as a term of local administrative significance, likely appearing in the context of disputes over revenue collection, government storehouses, or the custody of goods held in official depositories. It will not appear in English domestic case law or American legal sources. If the term surfaces in a document, it is a strong indicator that the source originates from or directly concerns the Indian subcontinent under British administration.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary and its Second Edition define malconna consistently and briefly: a treasury or storehouse in Hindu law. The entries are nearly identical, with only minor typographical variation between editions — notably, the Second Edition contains what appears to be a printing artifact ("Hindu Jaw" rather than "Hindu law"), confirming these entries were set with minimal editorial revision between editions. Neither edition elaborates on the term's scope, its role in legal proceedings, or its relationship to specific bodies of Hindu or colonial statute. The brevity reflects the peripheral status of Anglo-Indian terminology in American legal dictionaries of that era, where such terms were catalogued for reference rather than substantive treatment. No other shelf sources in the Law Mind corpus expand meaningfully on this term.
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